Warwick and Montagu were not, of course, the men for this kind of work. The chief person engaged in the inquiry, indeed, appears to have been Sir John Howard, a knight of Norfolk, whose family had, in the fourteenth century, been raised from obscurity by a successful lawyer, and, in the fifteenth, elevated somewhat higher by a marriage with the Mowbrays, about the time when the chief of that great house was under attainder and in exile. Howard, inspired, perhaps, by his Mowbray blood, cherished an ardent ambition to enroll his name among the old nobility of England; and, to get one inch nearer the gratification of his vanity, he appears to have undertaken any task, however undignified. Even on this occasion he was not by any means too nice for the duty to be performed; and he was careful to return an answer likely to please those who were most interested. Finding that the Woodvilles were rising in the world, he reported, to their satisfaction, that the people were well disposed in regard to the king's marriage. At the same time the aspiring knight was not forgetful of his own interests. He entreated the Woodvilles to obtain, for himself and his spouse, places in the new queen's household; and, by way of securing Elizabeth's favor, presented her with a palfrey, as a mark of his devotion to her service. What dependence was to be placed on the faith or honor of Sir John Howard, Elizabeth Woodville found twenty years later, when her hour of trial and tribulation came. And now Edward, whose fortunes half the royal damsels of Europe, among others Isabella of Castile, afterward the great Queen of Spain, were eager to share, resolved upon declaring his marriage to the world; and, with that purpose, he summoned a great council, to meet at the Abbey of Reading, in the autumn of 1464. Having there presented Elizabeth to the assembled peers as their queen, he ordered preparations to be made for her coronation in the ensuing spring. In the mean time, the king's marriage caused serious discontent. Warwick and Edward's brother, the young Duke of Clarence, in particular, expressed their displeasure; the barons murmured that no King of England, since the Conquest, had dared to marry his own subject; and ladies of high rank, like the Nevilles and De Veres, were, in no slight degree, indignant at having set over them one whom they had been accustomed to consider an inferior. At the same time, the multitude, far from regarding the marriage with the favor which Sir John Howard had led the Woodvilles to believe, raised the cry that the Duchess of Bedford was a witch, and that it was under the influence of the "forbidden spells" she practiced that the young king had taken the fatal step of espousing her daughter.