The new-made Queen came of the old family of Wydvil, Widville, or Woodville, as it is variously spelled, settled at Grafton certainly three hundred years before. They now rose at once into favour, and her father, already Baron, was then created Earl Rivers. It was, however, a bloody and fatal alliance. Securing the allegiance of the family to the Yorkists, its firstfruits were the capture and execution of her father and brother at the obscure battle on Danesmoor, when the King’s adherents were defeated by a rabble insurrection out of the north. Taken to Northampton, Earl Rivers and his son, Sir John Woodville, were beheaded August 12th, 1469. Edward IV. died early in 1483. His Queen survived him, with two sons and five daughters. The eldest, Edward, now become Edward V., was but twelve years of age, and he and his brother, Richard, Duke of York, were under the guardianship of their maternal uncle, the second Earl Rivers. The news of his father’s death brought the young King, with an escort of two thousand horse, from Ludlow Castle towards London. That was the proudest moment in the history of the Woodvilles. Disliked and feared as they had been for nearly twenty years, of family aggrandisement they had now secured supreme power. But they reckoned without the sinister figure of Richard of Gloucester, the late King’s brother, at that moment hasting southward from warring with the Scots. The hurried journeys of both parties toward London read like moves in some bloody game of chess. Richard of Gloucester, reaching York, had been the first to swear allegiance to his nephew. That done, he continued southward, receiving as he went tidings of popular discontent with the Woodville faction. The news strengthened him in the design, already forming in his mind, of seizing the Crown for himself. He reached Northampton simultaneously with the arrival of the young King at Stony Stratford, sixteen miles away. The next day saw him here, professing loyalty on bended knee, and at the same time dismissing the King’s attendants and disarming his escort. It was a clever and a daring move, that, if bungled in the doing, might have led to another battle, to be counted among the many fought on English soil. Everything was now in the usurper’s hands. The boy-King, in tears, and virtually a prisoner, was taken by him to Northampton, and thence to London, where all might yet have been well had public opinion disapproved of what had already been done. But the past insolence and selfishness of the Woodvilles had earned them a bitter hatred.