These three queens – Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth of York – operated as economic players in a world where their gender and marital status would ordinarily render them legally invisible. They were able to benefit from the possession and availability of economic resources, and they used them to assert their power, authority and influence in the economic arena of queenship. Moreover, they did so against a backdrop of conflict and political upheaval that effected changes in the dynastic bloodlines of the monarchy. The circumstances of the periods during which each individual became queen were not the same and neither were their backgrounds and loyalties. All these factors form a part of the framework for this study and, in the process of completing it, several themes encapsulating the discussions have emerged: change, continuity, gender and power/agency.

Changes related to the queens’ economic resources can be perceived in various ways. As in the fourteenth century, later fifteenth-century queens could be given a wide variety of different grants and their dower grants still formed the basis of their economic resources. The main types available to them remained, as for the queens of the previous century, the traditional entitlement of queen's gold, non-landed grants and landed resources. What changed was the monetary importance and measurable benefits of these different types to each queen in this study. One of the major alterations was in the importance of landed versus non-landed resources, an obvious modification that occurred in the transition from Margaret of Anjou to her successors, the two queens Elizabeth. Like the fourteenth-century queens Eleanor of Provence and Eleanor of Castile, Margaret's most financially important resources were her non-landed grants, which were meant to contribute more than two-thirds of her dower revenues.