Elizabeth Woodville

Elizabeth Woodville is recalled as the mother who joined her daughter, Elizabeth of York, in pronouncing a curse against the line they believed responsible for the loss of Elizabeth’s brothers. Though absent from the scenes in which the curse is disclosed, her remembered words and actions make her a powerful presence in the novel’s account of Yorkist grief and Tudor dynastic anxiety.

Identity and Narrative Image

Margaret Pole’s early recollection frames Elizabeth Woodville through the hostile language of political memory: she remembers the Warwick children as having been snatched from the witchy grip of the White Queen. This is not a neutral portrait or an account of Elizabeth Woodville’s life; it is Margaret’s retrospective view of a dangerous Yorkist past, shaped by the family’s fall from power and the threat attached to its name.

The novel later gives that threatening image a more specific source. When Elizabeth of York tells Margaret about the curse, Margaret immediately suspects her mother, calling her the witch Elizabeth in her own thoughts. That label conveys Margaret’s fear and her interpretation of the family’s history, rather than establishing supernatural power as fact.

The Curse and Its Target

Elizabeth of York discloses that her mother spoke the curse with her. They addressed the river and the goddess they believed had founded their family, asking for the death of the son of the person responsible for taking their boy before he could become a man or king. They also called for that son’s own descendant to die, so that the later death would confirm the curse and answer the loss of their child.

The curse is presented as an act of bereavement and retaliation. Its premise is that the York women had lost a boy who, in their view, had been born to be both a man and a king. Elizabeth Woodville’s role is not merely to have passed on her daughter’s anger: Elizabeth of York admits that she spoke the curse herself alongside her mother, and accepts a share of responsibility for it.

The Curse’s Later Meaning

The confession changes the meaning of the curse for Margaret. She warns Elizabeth of York that, if the York women’s accusation is true, the curse would fall first on the responsible man’s son and then on his grandson. Elizabeth fears that her own son, Prince Arthur, could be caught in that sequence. The curse therefore turns an old act of vengeance into a present danger within the family that now rules.

Margaret also fears that its consequences could reach beyond one child and end the Tudor line, leaving no male heirs. Elizabeth Woodville’s remembered curse thus connects two generations of maternal grief with the novel’s recurring anxiety over succession. Its force lies not in a confirmed supernatural outcome, but in the fear it sustains: the possibility that the violence inflicted on one royal family will return through the heirs of another.