Edward's own behavior caused a threat to his new-found stability by his clandestine marriage in 1464 to Elizabeth Woodville Lady Grey, the widow of Sir John Grey, son of Lord Ferrers of Groby, who had died at the second battle of St. Albans in 1461. The marriage to this mother of two sons was a match which brought neither fortune nor diplomatic advantage. It was even politically injurious, since it spurred the advanced plans for an alliance between Edward IV and the sister-in-law of Louis XI, King of France. The liaison began secretly, at the house of Elizabeth's father at Grafton, and a low-key coronation followed in May 1465. Some even claimed that the match was so unwise that it must have been the result of malign magic. During the crisis of 1470 Edward IV's mother-in-law Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Dowager Duchess of Bedford, was accused of having used a figurine, 'made like a man of arms', to cast an incantation on the king and lead him into the impolitic union.

Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (276)  

The Kalender of Shepherdes is of particular importance because it establishes the assimilation into popular culture, by commercial publishers for a mass audience, of the official educational programme of the Church. It was once again a commercial speculation, emphatically a lay book. The success of that assimilation is of course a moot point: many clergy would have been disturbed by the placing of theology cheek by jowl with popular astrology and prognostication. Yet the Kalender certainly found a readership which would have considered unpalatable many more sober didactic treatises, for it was a commonplace of the time, despite the efforts of the clergy and the torrents of paper discharged from the presses, that people were often resistant to catechesis. In 1510 Wynkyn de Worde published an amusing pamphlet in lively doggerel, illustrating this truism, "a lytell geste how the plowman lerned his pater noster".

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (84)

Gengoroh Tagame, My Brother's Husband: Volume 1 (50)

On the simplest level the molly houses offered a relatively safe way of making sexual contacts, far safer than engaging someone in conversation at a dissenting meeting-house, or at work or in the streets. But they also offered something more. Firstly, sexual contacts or not, you were no longer alone. And this meant more than friendship, although no doubt that was important; what it gave the individual was the support of an aggressive and resilient culture. 'They...swore they would massacre anybody that should betray them' was the response of one molly house to the possibility that they were indeed in danger. These were not idle words. When a molly house in Covent Garden was broken up in 1725, the crowded household, many of them in drag, met the raid with determined and violent resistance.

Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (96)