Anne St Leger, Baroness de Ros it coincided with her mother's death. A greatly desirable bride since her birth, Anne was contracted to marry Lord Ferrers of Groby. He was the eldest son of Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset, who had been married to her older half-sister and whose mother was her aunt, King Edward IV's wife Elizabeth Woodville. Queen Elizabeth was determined to secure the Exeter inheritance for her descendants by her first marriage, and in 1483, St Leger was declared heiress to the entire estate of her father by an Act of Parliament. The arrangement, detrimental to the interests of the surviving descendants
Elizabeth Woodville to the throne with any degree of validity. To strengthen his claim and unite the two feuding noble houses, Elizabeth Woodville and Margaret Beaufort agreed that the latter's son should marry the former's eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, who upon the death of her brothers became the heiress of the House of York. Henry Tudor agreed to this plan and in December 1483 publicly swore an oath to that effect in the cathedral in Rennes, France. A month earlier, an uprising in his favour, led by Buckingham, had been crushed. Richard III's first Parliament of January 1484 stripped Elizabeth of