Grace Plantagenet

Grace Plantagenet was an illegitimate daughter of Edward IV of England and a member of the extended House of York. Very little secure information about her survives, but she is recorded in connection with the Yorkist royal household and is traditionally identified among the attendants who participated in the funeral ceremonies of Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s widow.

Very little is known about Grace’s life. Her attendance on the funeral barge of Edward IV’s widow establishes a connection to the Yorkist royal household, but surviving evidence does not provide a reliable birth date, mother, marriage or later career. Her obscurity illustrates how incompletely the lives of royal illegitimate daughters were recorded when they did not make major dynastic marriages.

In Anne Easter Smith’s The King’s Grace, Grace Plantagenet, an obscure illegitimate daughter of Edward IV, enters the household of the widowed Elizabeth Woodville after the Yorkist defeat at Bosworth.