30 Aug. 1461, however, Count Ludovico Dallugo reported to the Duke of Milan that the earl had quitted Henry and tendered his allegiance to Edward IV. ‘I held several conversations,’ he wrote, ‘with this lord de Rivers about King Henry's cause, and he assured me that it was lost irremediably’ (ib. i. 111). Edward's secret marriage with Rivers's daughter Elizabeth on 1 May 1464 more than re-established his fortunes, and gave him a sweet revenge upon Warwick for the treatment he had received four years before. The Woodville influence soon became paramount at court, ‘to the exaltation of the queen and displeasure of the whole realm’ (Will. Worc. p. 785). Rivers was appointed treasurer on 4 March 1466, and on 25 May at Windsor he was made Earl Rivers. His numerous sons and daughters were married into the richest and noblest baronial families. John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester [q. v.], had to resign the position of high constable of England in favour of the king's father-in-law, who took up the staff on 24 Aug. 1467 (Fœdera, xi. 581). Warwick and the Neville clan, who found themselves ousted from the predominance at court they had enjoyed in the first years of the reign, became more and more estranged from the king and hostile to the Woodvilles. Overt hostilities began with the pillage of Rivers's Kentish estate by a mob of Warwick's partisans on New Year's day 1468 (Wavrin, ed. Dupont, iii. 192). But Warwick thought the movement here and the similar one in Yorkshire under Robin of Redesdale [q. v.] premature, and an interview between Rivers and Archbishop Neville at Nottingham ended in Warwick's visiting the king at Coventry towards the end of January (Will. Worc. p. 789). But the reconciliation was merely temporary, and the marriage of Clarence and Isabel Neville in July 1469 was followed by an open outbreak. The proclamation issued by Warwick and his friends laid most stress upon the king's estrangement of the ‘great lords of his blood’ for the Woodvilles and other ‘seducious persones’ (Warkworth, pp. 46–51). Rivers and others of the family were at that moment with the king, who was making a progress through the eastern counties; but when the news came in that the country was rising in the Neville interest they left him, or he thought it prudent to dismiss them (Wavrin, v. 580). After Edward's defeat at Edgecot (26 July), Rivers and his son Sir John Woodville were taken at Chepstow, conveyed to Kenilworth, and executed on 12 Aug. (Warkworth, pp. 7, 46; Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, p. 183; Wavrin, ed. Dupont, ii. 406; Report on the Dignity of a Peer, v. 398).
Rivers married Jacquetta, daughter of Peter de Luxemburg, count of St. Pol, by Marguerite, daughter of Francois de Baux, duke of Andria in the kingdom of Naples. She was the widow of John of Lancaster, duke of Bedford [q. v.], brother of Henry V, and she survived her second husband, dying on 30 May 1472. She bore Rivers fourteen or fifteen children, seven sons and seven or eight daughters. Five sons survived infancy: 1. Anthony, second Earl Rivers [q. v.] 2. John, who at twenty was married in January 1465 to a ‘juvencula’ of nearly eighty, Catherine Neville, dowager duchess of Norfolk, aunt of Warwick ‘the kingmaker.’ ‘Maritagium diabolicum’ comments William of Worcester (p. 783), and adds obscurely, ‘Vindicta Bernardi inter eosdem postea patuit’ (cf. Rot. Parl. v. 607). He was knighted at his sister's coronation two months later, and shared his father's fate in 1469. 3. Lionel, bishop of Salisbury [q. v.] 4. Sir Edward, erroneously called Lord Woodville in ‘Paston Letters’ (iii. 344). He commanded the Woodville fleet in 1483, and shared Henry of Richmond's exile in Brittany. In 1486–7 he joined in Spain the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella and fought in Granada against the Moors. In 1488 he greatly embarrassed Henry by taking over a small force to help the Bretons against the French, and fell in the battle of St. Aubin du Cormier on 28 July (ib.; Busch, i. 43; R. B. Merriman's Edward Woodville, Knight-Errant in Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc. 1904). 5. Richard, attainted in 1483, restored in 1485; he succeeded his brother Anthony as third and last Earl Rivers, and died without issue in 1491. Rivers's daughters were: 1. Elizabeth, who is separately noticed as Queen Elizabeth (1437?–1492). 2. Margaret (d. before 1491), who married (Oct. 1464) Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1524). 3. Anne (d. before 1491), who married, first (in 1466), William, viscount Bourchier, and, secondly (before 1481), George Grey, second earl of Kent (d. 1503). 4. Jacquetta, who married John, lord Strange of Knockin (d. 1477), and died before 1481. 5. Mary (d. in or before 1481), who married (1466) William Herbert, earl of Huntingdon [see under Herbert, Sir William, Earl of Pembroke, d. 1469]. 6. Catherine (b. about 1457), who married, first (1466), Henry Stafford, second duke of Buckingham [q. v.]; secondly, Jasper Tudor, duke of Bedford [q. v.], and, thirdly, Sir Richard Wingfield [q. v.] 7. A daughter who is said to have married Sir John Bromley (Dugdale, ii. 231). 8. William of Worcester (p. 785) mentions still another
