alternatehistory.com

Life was never easy for the young Elizabeth and her often repeated moniker of “Lancastrian princess, Yorkist queen“ explain only a part of her sufferances: her father died four days after her birth, leaving her great estates and the rank of heiress presumptive to her still childless cousin Henry VI of England. If she had been allowed to live longer with her mother and stepfather (as Jacquetta, once widowed, followed quick her sister-in-law Catherine of France’s example, remarrying quite scandalously to a man of much lower birth) she would have surely be happier (still she was close to her mother, stepfather and half-siblings for all her life). When Richard, Duke of York and Lord Protector of the Realm was able to get custody of her (and then more-or-less forced the almost thirteen Elizabeth to marry his own eldest son, Edward, who was only seven) her life changed a lot and she resented a lot for that: oh, well her relationship with Edward would be best classified as complicated (at least for many years) for now, with Anne, already Duchess of Exeter and her main companion in the first years in the Yorks household (as her underage husband was under her father’s guardianship after the death of his own father in 1447), whose life mirrored so closely her own, she would always felt a strong kinship and solidarity, other than the friendship she has with both her and Elizabeth (Edward’s next sister and her namesake, who, while much younger, always followed around her elder sister and sister in-law). With her parents-in-law relationship were much more tense and with Cecily would never be warm (but Elizabeth would reach an understanding with her father-in-law in the last months of his life)...