Elizabeth Woodville has been portrayed as an enchantress; as an unprincipled advancer of her family's fortunes and a plucky but pitiful queen in Shakespeare's histories. She has been alternatively championed and vilified by her contemporaries and five centuries of historians, dramatists and novelists, but what was she really like? Elizabeth Woodville's role in the conflicts and dynastic struggles of the Wars of the Roses makes her a figure of importance and an assessment of her true place in these struggles is overdue.