Stony Stratford, a hundred years ago “principally inhabited by lace-makers, with women and children at almost every door, industriously employed in this manufacture,” is now perhaps best known for the famous non sequitur associated with it. “You may well call it Stony Stratford,” said the tormented traveller, “I was never so bitten with fleas in my life!” It would be ill questing among the old inns of “Stony” to discover which of them could claim the doubtful honour of giving rise to that ancient jest. There are many inns—the “Cock,” the “Bull,” “George,” “White Swan,” and numerous others—but among them the “Cock” is easily first in size and architectural dignity. The explorer, entering the mile-long street of Stony Stratford at “Tram-end,” whence a hideous steam-tramcar plies to Wolverton, a mile and a half away, discovers no focus of interest in the long thoroughfare stretching out before him, excepting in the old red-brick frontage of the “Cock,” with its handsome wrought-iron sign and beautiful late seventeenth-century oak doorway, brought, according to tradition, from some old manor-house near Olney; or “Ony,” as they choose to call it in the neighbourhood. It was not always so undistinguished a street, for in it stood one of the twelve crosses erected to mark where the body of Queen Eleanor had rested on the way from Harby in Northants, to Westminster. It was wrecked, with others, in 1646.

Stony Stratford and its immediate neighbourhood are intimately concerned in the events leading up to the tragedy of young King Edward V. and his brother, murdered in the Tower of London, in 1483. Scarce three miles beyond the town, and distinctly seen from the Holyhead Road, there stands an ancient and historic house known as Potterspury Lodge, at the end of a long and majestic avenue of limes. This was at one time a hunting-lodge, and borders upon what is left of the sylvan glades of Whittlebury Forest, once a Royal Chase of the enormous extent of thirty-two square miles, but shrunken for centuries past into woodlands of not one quarter the original area. In times long gone by, the Forest began at the very end of Stony Stratford, and the timorous wayfarer plunged at once, after crossing the river Ouse, into its dim and tangled alleys of oaks and thick undergrowth.

It was when hunting in this wild resort of deer in the short January days of 1464, that Edward IV. met Elizabeth Woodville, not more than two hundred yards to the rear of the spot where the old hunting-lodge stands. The place of meeting is still marked by the ancient and gigantic tree known far and wide as the “Queen’s Oak,” a gnarled and hollowed giant, whose trunk measures thirty-one feet round and whose cavernous interior can, and constantly does in summer-time, seat a tea-party of three or four persons. It must have been a notable tree when, four hundred and forty years ago, Edward, a king peculiarly susceptible to female loveliness, found here the beautiful young widow of Sir John Grey of Groby, a knight who had been killed in the second battle of St. Albans, little more than two years before, on the Lancastrian side, and whose estates had since been confiscated by the Yorkists. The story tells that the beautiful and distressed lady, anxious to see the King and to obtain from him the restoration of her lands, was waiting at the oak when he rode by, and that, not recognising him, she asked where his Majesty could be found. The probabilities are, however, that she knew perfectly well to whom she spoke. Edward declared himself to be the one she sought, and, when she fell upon her knees, raised her up and escorted her to her home at Grafton. It is a historic instance of calculating ambition and of love at first sight. On May 1st, then, Edward was privately married to the fair stranger at Grafton, the only others present being her stepmother, the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, two gentlemen, and “a young man to help the priest sing.” Not until the Michaelmas following was the marriage disclosed.

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.

The young King’s maternal uncle and guardian had in the meanwhile been seized and hurried to Pontefract, where he was beheaded, no one raising a voice in protest. The King himself and his young brother, Richard, Duke of York, were in custody in the Tower, and it was not until Gloucester had been offered the Crown by his creatures, and had with feigned reluctance accepted it, that the nation woke up to an understanding of the crafty conspiracy in which it had taken a passive hand. It was then too late, and the horror with which the country soon learnt that the young King and his brother had been murdered in the Tower was without avail to overthrow the sanguinary hunchback who now ruled as Richard III.

Such was the tragedy that overwhelmed the ambition of the Woodvilles, springing from that May-day marriage of 1464. The Queen, sorrowing in the Sanctuary at Westminster, had seen her father, her two brothers, and her two sons cruelly put to death, as a direct consequence of that alliance. She retired, forlorn, to the seclusion of Bermondsey Abbey; seeing, it is true, a gleam of happiness in the overthrow of Richard two years later, and the marriage of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, to Henry VII., but dying broken and disappointed, leaving in her will to her daughters, “my blessing, for worldly goods I have none to bestow.”