Monarchies are now rare in the world, numbering around 20 in a system of almost 200 independent states. But for hundreds of years monarchy was the way that politics worked in most countries. And monarchy meant power was in the hands of a family – a dynasty – and hence politics was family politics. It was not elections that shaped political life, but the births, marriages and deaths of the ruling family. This added further unpredictability to the unpredictable business of ruling.

Between 1154 and 1485, a period of 331 years, England was ruled by one family. Every king during that time was a descendant in the male line of a French count, Geoffrey of Anjou, whose badge, the broom plant – planta genista in Latin – is the origin of their name: the Plantagenets.

The Plantagenet dynasty had its origin in the Loire valley, and the first two Plantagenet kings of England, Henry II and Richard the Lionheart, spent much more time in France than in England. This French connection continued throughout the Middle Ages. The body of Henry III lies in Westminster Abbey, but he commanded that after his death his heart should be interred in the Plantagenet family mausoleum of Fontevrault in the Loire valley. Richard II was sometimes called ‘Richard of Bordeaux’ from the place of his birth, while Edward IV was born in Rouen.

Despite these ties with France, the Plantagenets are England’s longest-reigning dynasty. It was their births, marriages and deaths that shaped the political history of England and much of France. They provide a perfect example of what dynastic rule meant.

Most Plantagenets, like most people in the Middle Ages, died before their 10th birthday. Those who survived – who are the ones we know something about – might live a fair bit longer. The average age at death of the Plantagenet kings was 45. The unlucky ones, like Edward V, one of the ‘princes in the Tower’, did not make it to their 13th birthday. The longest survivor, Edward I, died at the age of 68.

Sudden and unexpected deaths, either through violence, like that of Richard I, or from disease, like that of Henry V, could transform the political world overnight. From both these deaths the eventual outcome was the expulsion of the Plantagenets from most of their French possessions.

But long-lived kings presented problems too. Heirs might get impatient and fractious, while the so-called dotage of Edward III (when the king was in his 60s, a relatively youthful age) created serious problems, which affected English politics and undermined the Plantagenet war effort in France. Kings were meant to have sons, but not too many. Given the high rate of infant mortality, it was best if they produced numerous children. Edward III and his queen, Philippa, had at least 12 children; nine of these survived infancy, and five of the nine were boys. This ensured that the dynasty would continue in the male line, but it also stored up trouble for the future, with many royal descendants ready to make claims if given a chance.

But kings without sons were vulnerable – get rid of them, and there would be no heirs to fight back and pursue revenge. When Henry Bolingbroke usurped the throne from Richard II, he faced opposition, criticism and, sometimes, rebellion, but Richard had no son to fan the flames. In contrast, when Henry VI was removed by Edward IV in 1461, there was a son, and Edward’s regime was not truly secure until the killing of that son 10 years later. A son or two was the safe formula for a medieval king.

• Read more about the Wars of the Roses 

These sons became active early. Henry II, the first Plantagenet king, started as the son of a French count, but by the time he was 20, he had fought and married his way to become one of the most powerful rulers in Europe. This early start was not unusual. This was a world in which teenagers could rule. Henry’s son Richard became Duke of Aquitaine, ruling a third of France, aged 14. Edward III took control of the government, killing his mother’s lover and sending her into permanent house arrest, when he was 18. His son, the Black Prince, won his spurs at the battle of Crécy, aged 16. Richard II confronted and won-over a crowd of armed rebels when he was 14.

But, if youthful kings and princes could certainly exercise powers of command effectively, the accession of an infant was a dangerous moment. At this juncture, learned men would quote the line from Ecclesiastes 10, 16: “Woe to the land where a child is king!” Unlike earlier periods, when an adult male was the preferred successor, the rules of succession that applied in the Plantagenet centuries took no account of the age of the heir. Henry III came to the throne aged nine, Richard II aged 10, poor Edward V at the age of 12. This meant regencies, rival factions, decisions about (and by) queen-mothers, and, of course, endless negotiations about future brides.

For a dynasty to survive, it had to reproduce. And by the 11th century, in most parts of western Europe, this meant marriage as defined by the church. Earlier, more casual arrangements had been replaced or marginalised. William the Conqueror’s alternative nickname was William the Bastard, but during the Plantagenet centuries illegitimacy was taken seriously as a bar to succession. None of the numerous illegitimate children of the Plantagenets raised a claim. When Richard III decided to take the throne from his nephews, he thought it necessary to undertake an elaborate process to declare them illegitimate. Even if no one believed his arguments, he felt it a case he had to make: if the princes were not of legitimate birth, they could not be kings.

• Read more | Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower?

An unusual example of illegitimate children rising high is provided by the offspring of John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford, though they needed the backing of both pope and king to be declared legitimate. Katherine was the daughter of one of the knights of Hainault who had come to England with Philippa of Hainault, queen of Edward III. Katherine had married an English knight but had also been recognised as Gaunt’s mistress.

The high-born ladies of the royal dynasty were not amused when John of Gaunt and Katherine subsequently got married. “We will not go anywhere she is,” they said. “It would be a disgrace if this duchess, who is low born and was his mistress for a long time when he was married, should have precedence over us. Our hearts would break with grief, and with good reason.” But the ladies were ignored. The children of Gaunt and Katherine were given the aristocratic-sounding surname Beaufort; they and their descendants were to be one of the most important political families in England for the next century. And Margaret Beaufort, Katherine’s great-granddaughter, was the mother of the first of the Tudors, Henry VII.

However, most ruling families used formal marriages as an essential part of their strategy and hence they became  a never-ending subject of debate, discussion and disagreement. Marriage was indeed one of the preoccupations of this dynastic world. There were always marriage negotiations going on, many leading nowhere. Sometimes this even involved babies being committed to future brides or bridegrooms. Henry ‘the Young King’, son of Henry II, was married at the age of five to the even younger daughter of the king of France. Contemporaries noted with some disapproval this marriage of “little children still wailing in the cradle”, but it brought Henry II the important border territory of the Vexin as the baby princess’s dowry.

Marriages at this social level were about power and property, especially the forging of links with other ruling dynasties. For the first three centuries of Plantagenet rule, the queens of England were all foreign, the majority of them French, indicating the central place of France in the Plantagenet world. Indeed, between 1066 and 1464, no English king married an English woman.

One of the jobs of queens was to produce children, especially sons. Because men are capable of fathering children longer than women are capable of bearing them, it was not uncommon for kings to remarry after the death of a queen. Edward I produced 16 children with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile. He then had three more when he was in his 60s with his young bride, Margaret of France.

Queens were also meant to be mediators, softening the harsh masculine power of their husbands. A famous example is Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, pleading for the life of the burghers of Calais, six men from the French town whom Edward had ordered to be hanged. A less well-known example of the same queen’s intercession occurred early in Edward’s reign, when the wooden stands set up for Philippa and her ladies to watch a tournament collapsed. No one was badly hurt, but the carpenters would have suffered if she had not pleaded for mercy with her husband.

And queens were often fierce champions of the rights of their sons. The Plantagenet dynasty owed its crown to the determined and persistent efforts of Matilda, daughter of Henry I, who never gave up the fight until her son, the future Henry II, was recognised as heir to the English throne. She was never queen, but she kept the title ‘empress’ from her first marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, and she lived for 13 years after Henry’s accession with her status as the king’s mother.

In the last decades of Plantagenet rule, it was Margaret of Anjou, queen of the disabled Henry VI, who led the struggle for the rights of their son, Edward, Prince of Wales. She was described as “a great and strong laboured woman”. At the low point of their cause, Margaret lobbied persistently for French support, and even agreed to an alliance with the Earl of Warwick, a former chief enemy who had fallen out with the Yorkist side. But the apparent triumph of 1470, when Warwick put Henry VI back on the throne, was followed by the crushing defeat of 1471, the deaths of Warwick, Edward Prince of Wales and Henry VI. Margaret was a prisoner but, with the death of her son, no longer had a cause for which to fight.

For the sons who did not succeed to the throne, some kind of provision had to be made. And it could be spectacular. In several cases, the younger sons of the Plantagenet dynasty aimed at crowns for themselves: John, son of Henry II, was meant to be king of Ireland and was sent a peacock crown – although he had to settle for ‘Lord of Ireland’ instead, a title the kings of England bore down to the time of the Tudors, when it was upgraded to ‘King of Ireland’.

On the podcast | Robert Bartlett explores how medieval royal families sought to retain their grip on the throne:

Edmund, son of Henry III, was, famously, proposed as king of Sicily, although the only result of this scheme was an explosion of resentment among the English baronage and the civil war of 1264–65. John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, claimed and fought for the crown of Castile. The only one actually to establish himself on a distant throne, however, was Richard of Cornwall, the younger brother of Henry III, who became ‘King of the Romans’ – which meant Holy Roman Emperor elect – and was crowned in Charlemagne’s old capital of Aachen.

Dynasticism was characterised by ambitions that extended far beyond the boundaries of states. Dynasties looked out for their family interests, not for those of a nation or people (insofar as these can be said to have ‘interests’). And the horizons of the Plantagenet dynasty extended well beyond England and France. Richard the Lionheart conquered Cyprus, establishing what was to be the most long-lived of the Crusader states, and Edward I was knighted not in Westminster or Windsor, but in Burgos, on the occasion of his marriage to Eleanor of Castile.

Edward named one of his sons Alfonso, and this child was for many years his heir apparent. If Alfonso had not died at the age of 10, Edward I might have been succeeded by Alfonso I and English naming patterns could have been different to this day, with Alfonso as normal a name as Edward.

In a dynastic world, everything hung on the thread of a vulnerable human life. This life might be wiped away by illness at any time. Or it could be unbalanced, as in the case of Henry VI, whose mental illness came upon him in the summer of 1453. It is sometimes thought that Henry’s madness can be traced to his maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France, but they had very different forms of illness. Charles had remarkable fantasies, such as the belief that he was made of glass and so might break, but Henry simply slumped into a stupor, failing to register even the birth of his only son.

Sudden sickness and madness were part of the uncertainty about the succession – a recurrent anxiety in the dynastic world. Naturally, people sought out methods to diminish that uncertainty and to have guidance for the future. Some of these methods were dangerous, as Eleanor Cobham found out. Eleanor had married Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, brother of Henry V, in 1428. She had been his mistress for some years, and once he had his first marriage annulled, she was able to become his wife. After the death of his older brother, Humphrey was next in line for the throne. If Henry VI died, Humphrey would be king and Eleanor queen.

Eleanor was perhaps unwise. She consulted two astrologers to see whether the young king would live and obtained potions from a wise woman to help her conceive – she could be the mother of kings. The astrologers – both of them respectable and learned men – told the duchess that Henry VI would suffer a life-threatening illness in the summer of 1441.

The events of that summer were in fact very different. Duke Humphrey had his enemies, as well as his ambitions, and they saw their chance when they heard that his wife had been dabbling in magic and getting predictions of the king’s illness or death. In July 1441 Eleanor was arrested and tried on charges of necromancy. She admitted that, in order to help her become pregnant, she had obtained potions from ‘a wise woman’ – a phrase that her accusers would interpret without a doubt as ‘a witch’. She was forced to repent her errors. One of Eleanor’s astrologers died in the Tower of London, the other was hanged, drawn and quartered. The ‘wise woman’ she had consulted was burned alive. Eleanor herself had to do penance, walking barefoot to the church, was divorced from Duke Humphrey and spent the remaining 11 years of her life a prisoner in remote and windy castles. She was never the mother of kings.

But another permanent threat was simple physical violence in this complex, brutal world. In the medieval period there were 58 male descendants of Count Geoffrey of Anjou (excluding those who died as babies). Of these, 23 died through violence – 16 of them (almost three-quarters) in the 15th century, the last century of Plantagenet rule.

This century clearly belongs to what the great medievalist Maitland called “the centuries of blood”, after an earlier period when the upper classes had been relatively less bloodthirsty in their feuds. And this bloodletting marked the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, as Henry Tudor picked up the bloody crown at Bosworth field. But it was certainly not the end of dynastic politics.

Robert Bartlett is Wardlaw professor of medieval history at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton UP, December 2012)

This article was first published in the December 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine

In Westminster Abbey, the tomb of Henry V is hard to miss. Towering above the mosaic-encrusted tomb of St Edward the Confessor and his royal successors, for centuries Henry’s final resting place was topped by a shield, helm and warhorse’s saddle. All are symbols of the martial glory of a man many still consider to be the best English king of the Middle Ages.

Meanwhile, in the Lady Chapel behind, tucked away and noticed by almost no one, is a small wooden pew-end representing Henry V’s successor, and only child, Henry VI. Can anything more aptly demonstrate the reputations of this father and son? Henry V loomed over his offspring from the grave, and in his father’s shadow Henry VI grew up stunted, emotionally and politically.

• Read more | Henry V’s reputation: 5 facts you might not know about the king’s softer side

On the 600th anniversary of his death, Henry V’s triumphs are still rehearsed in productions of the eponymous Shakespeare play. His appears to be the ultimate underdog success story. Eldest son of a Lancastrian usurper, Henry V united England to claim the French throne, overcame substantial odds to win the battle of Agincourt in 1415, and was rewarded at the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, where he was named heir to the French kingdom and married Princess Catherine of Valois. Revered as “the flower in his time of Christian chivalry”, he died on campaign, aged 35 in 1422, leaving a nine-month-old son who shortly after was proclaimed King Henry VI, of England and France.

Henry VI’s life also gained Shakespeare’s attention, but in the three plays bearing his name he is an insubstantial figure with few lines, completely overshadowed by more dynamic characters, chief among them his queen, Margaret of Anjou. Where Henry V’s reign is a litany of triumphs, his son’s reads like a top trumps of failure: he lost the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, was twice imprisoned by his Yorkist rivals and died, almost certainly murdered, in the Tower of London shortly after his only child had been hacked to death in battle.

But if we peer beyond the lustre of the father and misfortune of the son, a more complicated image emerges: there is much to praise in the character and priorities of Henry VI, and a good deal reprehensible in the actions of Henry V. Most damningly of all, many of the failings of Henry VI can be traced back to his father. Although Henry VI reaped a bitter harvest for his people, it was Henry V who sowed the seed.

• Read more | Why is Henry V’s portrait in profile?

Lover and fighter

The defining difference between Henrys V and VI can be summed up in a single word: warfare. Henry V was first and foremost a soldier, witness to military campaigns from the time he was 11 and left with a disfiguring scar when struck in the face by an arrow in his first battle, aged 16. The primary focus of his energies was gaining the French throne by military force.

Henry VI, by contrast, was an out and out pacifist. In the cause of peace, he chose his queen, sacrificed bellicose advisers and surrendered vital bargaining chips to the French. Although Henry VI was willing to don armour and ride to battle, he never once raised his sword against an enemy, and his first experience of military violence came in his 34th year, when he watched impotently as his leading supporters were butchered in the streets of St Albans.

Henry V’s military activity provided common experience and a focus for loyalty with his peers and subjects. It made them, to quote Shakespeare, a “band of brothers”, winning Henry fame and his subjects glory.

• Read more | A wayward prince? King Henry V’s misspent youth

Henry VI was trained for warfare by a military veteran and kitted out with weapons and armour as a child. He even rode a courser (warhorse) from the age of three. Yet the only time he visited France was for his coronation as a 10-year-old. Military leadership was always deputised to a noble kinsman.

Why, then, did the son not become a formidable military leader in the mould of the father? After all, the Hundred Years’ War was far from over. The answer is a question of nature but also, importantly, of nurture. Henry V was extraordinarily fortunate in his upbringing, and in many ways his formative years and ultimate monarchical successes mirror those of Henry VI’s Yorkist rival and successor, Edward IV. Both Henry V and Edward hailed from families with many sons. This meant they were expendable, and therefore benefited from being allowed to witness lordship and warfare first hand.

By contrast, Henry VI was an only child in the utterly unprecedented position of governing two realms, as a baby. His life was so precious that it could not be endangered by proximity to war. Henry VI’s insecurity was exacerbated by biological factors beyond his control: despite marrying and producing illegitimate children, none of his Lancastrian uncles had legitimate offspring, which meant that until 1447 his closest heir was the 50-something Duke of Gloucester, and after that, his distant cousin Richard, Duke of York. If Henry died fighting in France, as his father had done, the Lancastrian line would die with him.

Nonetheless, if Henry VI had really wished to lead an army, he could have done so. The teenage king Henry VIII insisted on riding to war early in his reign, despite lacking brothers or an heir. Indeed, more than once in the reign of Henry VI, preparations were made for him to cross the Channel in force before royal command was delegated elsewhere, and when the Lancastrian throne was threatened by internal rivals it would have greatly bolstered Henry’s cause if he had personally fought alongside his men.

Henry V knew the power that the presence of the king in the field could hold. At Agincourt, the French noblemen were numerous but their king, Charles VI, was too mentally unwell to attend. By contrast, Henry V was, according to a contemporary English chronicler, “the first to charge the enemy… giving his men in his own person brave examples of daring as he scattered the enemy ranks with his ready axe”.

• Read more | Henry V’s greatest victory (and it wasn’t Agincourt)

Henry V’s dominant leadership was a major factor in English victory, but there was a dark side to warfare that never sat well with the pious Henry VI. He never forgot that his father’s “glorious” French wars had unleashed suffering on both sides of the Channel. Indeed, by modern standards some of Henry V’s military choices rank as atrocities. After Agincourt, he ordered that prisoners of war be murdered.

And it was not merely enemy combatants who suffered. Innocent women and children were starved to death during Henry V’s five-month siege of Rouen in 1418 and 1419. Even his direct contemporaries found some of the king’s actions excessive. An English eyewitness at Rouen described with pity: “A child of two years or three going about to beg its bread, [as] father and mother both were dead… And women holding in their arms dead children… and the children sucking in their pap within a dead woman’s lap.”

• Read more | Henry V: the cruel king

Two years after Agincourt, another (anonymous) Englishman commemorated Henry’s victory in ambiguous terms: “Our England, therefore, has reason to rejoice and reason to grieve. Reason to rejoice [in] the victory gained and the deliverance of her men, reason to grieve for the suffering and destruction wrought in the deaths of Christians.”

This was the true face of medieval war, and it was a reality that Henry VI could not stomach. In this, he was far from alone. By the time his father died, the English were sick of conflict, being already 85 years into the Hundred Years’ War. It was increasingly difficult to extract taxes to pay for military campaigns from a parliament that felt the war offered little advantage to Englishmen. The sheer scale of the bloodshed was starting to be questioned.

By 1439 it was claimed that more men had died in the century of warfare than were alive now in both kingdoms. As a member of Henry VI’s council (or the king himself) observed: “So much Christian blood shed that it is [both] a sorrow and a horror to think or hear it.”

In 1440, aged 18, Henry VI marked his accession to adult rule – which had been slowly proceeding since 1437 – with two statements of intent. He founded Eton College and shortly thereafter another at Cambridge, becoming the first king to create his own educational establishments. And he took the first step towards peace with France, defying his father’s last wishes by freeing the French prisoner of war, Charles, Duke of Orléans. Orléans had been pulled from a pile of corpses on the battlefield at Agincourt 25 years earlier – and his release had been expressly forbidden by Henry V. Flouting the late king’s will yet further, Henry VI suggested to one of his negotiators with France that in return for an alliance, he would surrender the French crown.

Henry’s peace policy was so audacious that it divided public opinion and alienated his closest advisors. His uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, declared it was “the greatest sign of infamy that ever fell to [the king]… or to [his] noble progenitors”, and that he “would rather die” than accept it. Henry VI was at pains to emphasise that his new peace policy was the natural continuation of his ancestors’ wars. They, too, had ultimately negotiated peace – Henry V’s Treaty at Troyes was a case in point. But his subjects were not appeased. And worse was to follow.

Ceding territory

Henry VI was right that a grand gesture was required to end the Hundred Years’ War – but his judgment was poor on exactly what that gesture should be. Having freed Orléans, he then married the impoverished French noblewoman Margaret of Anjou to please her uncle, Charles VII of France, and ceded the hard-won territory of Maine in the process. He lost control of his disgruntled garrisons in France, giving the wily Charles VII justification for military vengeance. The result, ultimately, was the loss of all Henry’s French territories, including some that had been held by the kings of England for centuries.

This was one of several instances in which Henry’s good intentions, but poor judgment, proved his undoing. He was honest to a fault, politically naïve, generous in the extreme. In a king, such virtues became vices. He failed to match his rivals for guile and was horrified by what he considered their treachery in abandoning alliances with England.

In his own realm, Henry rewarded servants and overlooked wrongdoing in his supporters. When asked for favour, he invariably showed it, without considering the consequences. In the most notorious instance of his absent-minded liberality, he gave the same West Country title to two men at once, inciting a decades-long civil war. His constant desire was to avoid conflict. Where he had a choice between something right but difficult, or wrong but easy, he always chose the latter.

On the podcast | Lauren Johnson discusses the life and reign of Henry VI, whose decades on the throne coincided with the disaster of the Wars of the Roses:

The cause of this character fault is to be found in his childhood. It had taken an extraordinary collective effort by the ruling elite of England to ensure Henry V’s son inherited England peacefully. There had been boy kings before – the last, Richard II, was crowned at the age of 10 half a century earlier. But there had never been a baby king of England. While who should rule was never in question, how they should rule was, and the resulting factionalism dividing Henry’s council was to blight his childhood.

Henry VI had a superfluity of uncles and mentors, each with their own ideal of government. His great uncle, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Henry Beaufort, led a band of noblemen and bishops who favoured a royal council; his eldest uncle John, Duke of Bedford, sought to rule France and act as protector over a council in England; and his youngest surviving uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, craved the regency of England solely for himself.

• Read more | The miraculous afterlife of Henry VI

These were powerful men, the wealthiest and most influential of the realm, and reconciling their conflicting demands would have been challenging for an adult king. It proved insurmountable for Henry. Time and again during his childhood he was called upon to witness public peace-making between his uncles, only for cohesion to collapse in private. Bedford was often abroad fighting Henry’s wars, leaving Cardinal Beaufort and the Duke of Gloucester to scrap things out between them: in parliament, palaces and even the streets of London, where tensions once escalated to such an extent that armed men faced off across London Bridge.

Gloucester was the first to realise that Henry’s essentially pliable nature made him susceptible to coercion, and tried to motivate his nephew into assuming power early so he could rule through him. This led to a bewildering face-off between king and council, where the adolescent monarch was told, with all possible respect, that he simply wasn’t up to the job of ruling yet.

The encounter compounded the sensitive Henry’s mistrust of his own judgment, encouraging his instinct to delegate authority to one leading courtier after another: first Gloucester, then the generally despised Duke of Suffolk, the unfortunate Duke of Somerset under whom France was lost, and eventually his queen, Margaret of Anjou.

The fatal flaw

But Henry V must share some of the blame for the problems of his son’s reign. In 1422, as he lay dying in France, physically wasted by camp sickness but still mentally acute, Henry V added codicils to his will that dictated how his successor should fight the French war. Those deathbed directions held his successor hostage for 20 years, leaving no room for his son and his advisors to manoeuvre, even as circumstances changed beyond the late king’s foresight.

Had Henry V lived, he almost certainly would have adapted his policy, as Henry VI was forced to do. But leaving no latitude in his directions, Henry V effectively stymied Lancastrian government. Henry V’s decision to lead his armies in person at the sickness-ravaged siege of Meaux was also disastrous to his regime. It directly caused his death, and left his infant son without kingly example or paternal protection.

This proved to be Henry VI’s fatal flaw. Because he never met his father – who departed to France during Queen Catherine’s pregnancy – Henry VI never witnessed kingship in action. He never even saw true leadership first hand, since those ruling on his behalf took pains to defer to him in public. His exempla were biblical figures and historical kings, but he never learned how to temper the ideals of kingship with the realpolitik of medieval rule.

• Read more | The miracle of Henry VI: how the weak medieval king became a ‘saint’

If Henry V had lived to have more sons, and to offer an example to his heir, things could have been different. He would have been beset by the same troubles as his son. Charles VII would have raised an army against him. Continental intrigues and English infighting would have bedevilled attempts at peace. The English treasury would have been drained to breaking point. Henry V was lucky, then, to die at the height of his powers, ensuring his lasting fame.

Had Henry VI died in spring 1453, when his wife was pregnant, French lands being reclaimed, talk of a fresh invasion led by the king himself on the wind, and parliament pliable, we would remember him considerably more kindly. Instead, he died a prisoner of Edward IV, aged 49, shabby and bearded, teeth ground down by years of anxiety, having lost almost everyone he cared about – most of them violently. As William Shakespeare recognised, Henry V’s life story is a glorious history because of how it ended, just as Henry VI’s life was a tragedy.

Lauren Johnson is a historian and writer. Her books include Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI (Head of Zeus, 2019)

This episode tells the story of the most dynamic and energetic dynasty in British royal history.  At the height of their power, the Plantagenets commanded a vast empire that stretched from the Scottish border almost to the Mediterranean. For much of the period, England waged costly wars with France and Scotland, with mighty warrior kings such as Henry V achieving celebrated victories. But his successor plunged England into the Wars of the Roses – one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of the monarchy, during which the crown changed hands no fewer than six times. It culminated in the controversy of Richard III and the Princes in the Tower.

Tracy Borman is a best-selling author and historian, specialising in the Tudor period. Dr Borman has presented a number of history programmes for Channel 5. She is a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine and gives talks on her books across the country and abroad. She works part-time as joint chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces and as chief executive of the Heritage Education Trust.

Why did Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward IV appal so many people?

When, in the autumn of 1464, Edward IV informed his councillors that he had made a secret marriage, his choice of bride – Elizabeth Woodville – went against all the conventions of his day. Kings were supposed to marry in order to cement a foreign alliance – Elizabeth would be the first English queen since the Norman Conquest. Kings were also supposed to marry fellow royalty – Elizabeth was the daughter of a mere knight.

The secrecy of the ceremony was another problem. In the years ahead, the first parliament of Edward IV’s brother, Richard III, would denounce this as an “ungracious pretensed marriage”, having taken place “secretly, without Edition of Banns, in a private chamber, a profane place”.

Worse still, in an age when many people believed a king’s bride should be a virgin, Elizabeth was a widow. If that wasn’t bad enough, her first husband had been killed in the Wars of the Roses fighting for the Lancastrians against Edward IV’s Yorkists. And she was even five years older than Edward – though, as the king pointed out, with two young sons by her first marriage, she had at least proved her fertility.

More seriously, it was later alleged that Edward had no right to marry Elizabeth at all, having been earlier secretly precontracted to someone else. The charge was raised in 1483, after Edward’s death, when Richard of Gloucester signalled his intention to take the throne as Richard III on the grounds that Edward’s sons – Richard’s nephews – were illegitimate. One Bishop Stillington was said to have declared that he had earlier married Edward to Eleanor Butler (née Talbot), daughter to the Earl of Shrewsbury.

The evidence for Stillington’s accusation is, at best, circumstantial – Eleanor was dead by 1483, so no one could ask her, and the earlier marriage hadn’t been an issue in 1464. But for it to be raised at all shows that the marriage was, indeed, hugely controversial.

Did she marry for love – and, if so, why was that so shocking?

It wasn’t only Elizabeth’s lowly background and colourful past that proved so shocking to England’s court, it was also the fact that she and Edward may have married for love. For a king to choose his wife for love or lust – for “blind affection”, as the Italian historian Polydore Vergil would put it at the beginning of the 16th century – was so odd as to amount almost to an indecency. So much so that it would later be alleged that Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta, had used witchcraft to bring the two together.

But is it true that Edward and Elizabeth genuinely loved one another? Popular early versions of their first meeting certainly suggest so. Several describe a lustful king trying to force himself on a virtuous lady, who refuses to live with him “unchastely”. One tale even has Elizabeth defending herself with a dagger; another has Edward holding a knife to her throat. But all the tales end happily. The king was so struck by the lady’s virtue that he married her, in secret.

• Read more: Marrying for love: Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville

And yet it’s possible that cold political calculation had some influence in Edward’s decision to marry Elizabeth. The king may have seen some propaganda value in an alliance with a woman with connections to the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses, and even in choosing an English bride. Edward’s choice of Elizabeth may also have signalled his growing independence from the powerful magnate Warwick the Kingmaker (who had alternative marriage plans for Edward). And it wasn’t as if Edward was marrying a peasant – though Elizabeth’s father was a mere knight, her mother sprang from the royal line of Luxembourg.

For all that, there’s no reason to doubt that this was a match made chiefly on the grounds of personal attraction. In fact, it was perhaps the first such in English royal history – but not the last. It could be argued that it was with Elizabeth Woodville that the notion of marriage for love as a viable option entered the chronicles of British royalty. Following her lead, all of Elizabeth’s royal grandchildren – Henry VIII, Margaret Tudor and Mary Tudor – displayed a belief in their right to personal happiness; a belief that marriage and love should not be wholly different matters; a belief which, in May 2018, we witnessed once more in the wedding of Meghan Markle to Prince Harry.

• An ultimate guide to the Tudors

Did she exploit her power to enrich her cronies?

Of all the charges levelled at Elizabeth down the centuries, the one that she unreasonably enriched her whole extensive family has arguably proved the most damaging.

The way the Woodvilles and their connections hoovered up positions and advantageous marriages was certainly remarkable. (One of Elizabeth’s brothers, aged around 20, was married to the Duchess of Norfolk, in her sixties.) A Milanese envoy reported that the Woodvilles “had the entire government of this realm”. But Elizabeth was only doing what any contemporary would have done, and it is debatable how much of the Woodville advancement was really implemented on the queen’s initiative. In an age when kin was key, Edward himself may have used these marriages and gifts of offices to strengthen his own power base.

And on a broader point, what can we say of Elizabeth’s role as queen consort? Clearly not everyone in the English court was enamoured of Edward’s choice of wife, but the king himself certainly thought highly of his queen’s abilities. So much so that, when he crossed the English Channel to lead an invasion of France in 1475, he left his small son, Edward, as ‘Keeper of the Realm’, and that son in Elizabeth’s charge. The will he made then names her the first of 10 executors: “Our said dearest wife in whom we have most singularly put our trust.”

Yet despite being loaded with such great responsibilities, Elizabeth was not a political animal. There is no evidence of her having exercised overt political influence – and, having witnessed the influential role that Margaret of Anjou played during her husband, Henry VI’s fraught reign, many of Elizabeth’s contemporaries would have regarded this as a good thing.

Away from the political arena, Elizabeth seems to have had a lot going for her as a queen. She was beautiful, a patroness of arts and industry, and a gracious presence at ceremonies. For example, in 1472, she entertained the visiting Flemish courtier Lord Gruuthuse to a great banquet with dancing in her own chamber, and was noted as having ordered the resplendent cloth of gold hangings for his bed.

Above all she was fruitful, presenting Edward with 10 children, most of whom survived the perils of infancy. In other words, for as long as her husband was alive, Elizabeth seemed the model of what a late-medieval queen was supposed to be.

• Read more | How to be a medieval queen

Could Elizabeth have saved her sons from Richard III?

When in April 1483 Edward IV suddenly died, he left the throne to his 12-year-old son, another Edward, who was being raised in Ludlow, Shropshire under the tutelage of Elizabeth’s talented brother Anthony Woodville. Elizabeth’s first instinct may have been conciliatory – one contemporary chronicler described how she “most beneficently tried to extinguish every spark of murmuring and disturbance” as the crown was passed to her son. But this wasn’t enough to allay the fears of some people – notably Richard of Gloucester – that the boy would grow up wholly under Woodville influence. When Richard intercepted Edward and Anthony Woodville on the journey to London, Elizabeth immediately fled with her other children and her belongings into the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey.

In June, Richard wrote to York for men to assist him “against the queen, her bloody adherents and affinity” who he claimed were trying to murder him. But he had not yet declared any intention of seizing the throne for himself; and it was on this basis that Elizabeth was persuaded – or coerced – into allowing her younger son, Richard, to be taken away from her to join his brother in the Tower of London.

Immediately afterwards, the elder Richard’s adherents started spreading stories that the marriage of Edward and Elizabeth was invalidated by the former king’s precontract to Eleanor Butler. Their sons were thus declared illegitimate, and as the summer wore on the boys disappeared from view, their fate one of the most debated mysteries of British history.

Listen: In the opening episode of our exclusive eight-part podcast series on the Princes in the Tower, we explore how the mystery of their disappearance has captivated people for centuries – and still provokes fierce debate…

When did she learn that the princes in the Tower were dead?

In that summer of 1483 Elizabeth, still in sanctuary, entered into a conspiracy with an unlikely ally: Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry Tudor, who since the death of Henry VI had been the Lancastrian claimant to the English throne. A marriage was agreed between Elizabeth’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, and Margaret’s son, Henry, and both ladies would raise their supporters against Richard.

• Read more: Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower?

It is often said that Elizabeth Woodville’s actions showed she believed her sons were dead. Why else would she support a plan to promote Henry Tudor? Polydore Vergil, a few decades on, dramatically described how she heard of their murder, and “with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring, she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair”.

But it is unclear whether the rebellion initially planned to place Henry Tudor on the throne, or whether that came only after rumours of the princes’ death began to spread. Edward IV himself had discussed the possibility of marrying his daughter to Henry, and thus bringing the Lancastrian heir safely into the fold. Either way, the rebellion failed, and in January 1484 Elizabeth Woodville was stripped of her queenly status and income.

Two months later, “dame Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England” was persuaded to leave sanctuary and allow her elder daughters to go to their uncle Richard’s court. It has been argued she would never have done so unless she had by now come to believe Richard was innocent of her sons’ deaths – or even that they had not died at all. Elizabeth disappears from the records for the rest of Richard’s reign, which paves the way for one theory that the younger of her sons, at least, survived and was given into her charge, in an obscure part of the country.

But it is equally possible that she was enough of a pragmatist simply to realise that some sort of life had to be made for her surviving daughters, whatever had happened to her sons. They could not remain in sanctuary indefinitely.

• Watch | HistoryExtra Masterclass – Queens Consort with Tracy Borman

Did she support a revolt against Henry VII?

Yes – and no. After Henry seized the English crown from Richard III – and brought the Wars of the Roses to an end – he fulfilled his promise to marry Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth of York. He also restored his new mother-in-law to her rank as queen dowager, giving her a grant for life of six manors in Essex and an annual income of £102. When Elizabeth of York gave birth to a son, the infant’s godmother, Elizabeth Woodville, carried the little prince to the high altar at the christening.

• Read more about the battle of Bosworth

But less than a year into the new reign, Elizabeth had already begun negotiating a lease on a manor within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. Her position at court might well have been difficult given the pre-eminence of that other dowager figure, Margaret Beaufort, ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’.

Soon Elizabeth would, willingly or otherwise, find her plans changing again. In February 1487 all the lands granted to her were taken away from her – albeit only to be given to her daughter. She was given a small annuity and, abruptly, took up residence in Bermondsey Abbey.

Elizabeth may herself have chosen this retirement, but the timing is suggestive, coming hard on the heels of a threat to Henry VII’s throne. In 1487, Lambert Simnel was made the figurehead of a Yorkist uprising against Henry and at first claimed (though he later changed his story) to be the younger of the princes in the Tower. There may have been some fear that a discontented Elizabeth – resentful that Henry seemed determined to keep his wife, Elizabeth’s daughter, in the background – might lend a rebel her support.

Certainly Elizabeth’s life ahead lay mostly in the convent, with only a very few recorded appearances at court, and her death on 8 June 1492 was followed by a humble and almost shabby funeral with (as a herald noted) “nothing done solemnly”.

This article was first published in the May 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine

Not so long ago, everyone would have agreed that the turning point of this period was 1485 when Henry VII won the crown at the battle of Bosworth and the Tudor dynasty began. This used to be seen as the point when the modern history of England began, as the struggle between Yorkist and Lancastrian factions in the Wars of the Roses came to a close. More recently, however, historians have been noting the similarities between the rule of the Yorkists (the dynasty that controlled the country from the accession of Edward IV in 1461, to the death of Richard III in 1485) and of Henry VII (reigned 1485–1509). It has become clear that the economic, social, religious and cultural history of England from the mid-15th to the early 16th centuries shows considerable continuity. There is thus a good case for the date that has increasingly become the starting-point for the new periodisation: 1461, when the Yorkists came to the throne.

However, there was initially no certainty about the survival of the new dynasty and, since the century ended with a Tudor rather than a Yorkist on the throne, to take 1461 as the key year would be paradoxical. The choice of 1483 answers the objections to both 1485 and 1461. By 1483, the Yorkist dynasty was firmly established and apparently secure and yet in that year the seeds of its destruction two years later were sown. What happened in 1485 was the almost inevitable result of Richard III’s usurpation in 1483.

In 1461, Edward of York defeated the forces of the Lancastrian Henry VI and became Edward IV. He had the support of only a small number of the nobility and almost none of the major nobles, apart from the Nevilles, the greatest of whom was Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, “the Kingmaker”. Indeed, it was not until 1471 that Edward could truly count himself king. This was after he had been briefly replaced by Henry VI, in a French-backed rebellion instigated by Warwick, in which Edward’s own brother, the Duke of Clarence, participated. Henry VI, his son Edward of Lancaster, and Warwick all died in this rebellion, giving Edward a clean slate.

So effective was Edward’s rule in what is known as his second reign that, by 1483, his ability to impose his will on the country was possibly greater than that of any king since Edward I (died 1307). At its heart were two, interlinked, forces: a closely-knit nobility, among whom his ultra-loyal youngest brother, Richard of Gloucester, the greatest power in the north, was the most prominent, and a powerful household and affinity, led by Lord Hastings, Edward’s oldest and truest political ally. The royal finances and internal order had been restored after the downward spiral of both under Henry VI, and Edward was far too secure for foreign powers to try to intervene in English affairs. Indeed, in his second reign, he was pardoning and restoring some of the exiled Lancastrians and, towards the end of the reign, Henry Tudor, long exiled in France, was considering relinquishing his claim as the heir of Lancaster and returning to England. The succession seemed secure with Edward’s two healthy sons.

Too young to be king

Then, on 9 April, Edward died unexpectedly, shortly before his 41st birthday. The age of his heir, Edward V, made it difficult to set up a stable minority government. At 12 he was too young to rule but too close to the age when he might begin to do so. Even so, all would be well as long as the three centres of power could work together. These were the Woodvilles, Edward V’s mother’s family, who controlled the king’s person; Hastings, linchpin of the royal household and political connection; and Gloucester, with his great territorial power.

The young king was at Ludlow and, as his Woodville relatives were bringing him to London for his coronation, they were met at Stony Stratford by Richard of Gloucester and his new ally, the duke of Buckingham. There, on 30 April, Edward was forcefully removed from his entourage, and some of the Woodvilles arrested and later executed. Nevertheless, Gloucester continued to work with Hastings, whose control of the royal household gave him enormous power around the king and in the localities, and to prepare for the coronation. But on 13 June Hastings was seized and executed. Gloucester, who had thus removed the opposition first of Edward V’s family and then of the Yorkist political and military establishment, took the throne on 26 June. Richard III, as he now was, justified his usurpation by the need for continuity. However, he had done the hitherto unthinkable, in deposing a king who had not just done no wrong but had not been in a position to do anything at all, and who had succeeded a successful king.

Richard’s immediate problem was that he was heavily reliant on his closest accomplices, notably Buckingham, and could only keep their support by bribing them with grants. In October Buckingham, having decided Richard was not giving him enough, rebelled. But the core of the rebellion was the Yorkist household. This had originally acquiesced, probably partly taken by surprise and partly in the hope of saving the princes, but, by October, there had been time to resolve to resist Richard and it was probably known by then that the princes were dead.

Rebellion was therefore raised in the name of Henry Tudor and, almost overnight, the man who had given up hope of pursuing his claim to the throne became the Yorkist claimant; to enhance his appeal, he promised to marry Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth, if he became king. The rebellion failed and thus a number of Yorkists left England, followed by others as Richard III’s short reign progressed.

• Read more: Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower?

The hated northern interlopers

In late 1483, as his support outside the north dwindled, Richard had to embark on his policy of “planting” his northern supporters throughout the midlands and the south, using lands and offices confiscated from Yorkists. These northern interlopers not only earned him a lot of resentment but also stretched his resources of reliable manpower. In a vicious circle, as Richard’s support diminished, so he became less viable as a king and more people deserted. By the time of Henry Tudor’s invasion and the battle of Bosworth in 1485, this disbelief and disaffection had spread across much of England, even into Richard’s northern stronghold.

Richard might possibly still have won at Bosworth, but Henry was only in a position to defeat him because of what had happened between 1483 and 1485. Moreover, the unease in Richard’s forces, and late betrayal by some of his supposed allies, both of which contributed to his defeat, are also directly attributable to the diminution of belief in his kingship whose roots lay in the way he had taken the throne in 1483. If Bosworth was a Lancastrian victory, it was even more the restoration of the Yorkist establishment.

Why Richard acted can never be known but, since he had shown no previous signs of uncontrollable ambition, it is probable that he was impelled more by panic: seizing the king because he feared that the Woodvilles would take apart his vast estate, much of it built on dubious land transactions, and then, once he had attacked them, fearing a Woodville revanche when Edward came of age.

Perhaps also, having always been the perfect underling to his brother, he found the responsibility of being on his own too much for him. The timing and unexpectedness of Edward IV’s death, the vacuum created by the sudden loss of his wide-ranging and very personal authority, and Richard’s acute failure of judgement, combined to open the way for the first Tudor to become king, something that seemed wildly improbable up to that moment.

And with the Tudors came many things that might not have been otherwise. There was rule that was in many ways no more effective than Edward’s but much more obviously disciplinarian towards landowners, especially the nobility. There were implications for Britain. Wales, the Tudors’ own country of origin, was already very much integrated and pacified, and Edward IV had increased the pace of this process. But Scotland remained, and was to remain, a troublesome land for England, and it was the marriage of Henry VII’s daughter, Margaret, to the king of Scotland that was to lead to the eventual union of the two crowns under James I. Ireland had been much neglected by late medieval kings, who had France, Scotland and sometimes their own survival more in mind, and Henry VII was to initiate the more aggressive tactics that his successors followed, not necessarily with beneficial results.

Above all, if there had been no Henry VIII, would there have been the break from Rome and everything else that followed?

Key years: Other important events in the second half of the 15th century

1450 – The Crisis over the Loss of Normandy. France had the upper hand in the Hundred Years’ War in the mid-15th century. The loss of Normandy as an English possession in 1449 caused an acute political crisis. In February an unruly parliament impeached Henry VI’s chief minister. Through 1450 there was extended and widespread unrest among the lower classes aimed at the government. This became outright revolt in July, with Cade’s Rebellion, centred on Kent, when the rebels took control of London for several days.

1453 – The End of the Hundred Years War. On 17 July the English defeat at the Battle of Castillon put an end to centuries-old English rule in Aquitaine and to the last vestiges of English rule in France, apart from Calais and a small enclave around it. This was the effective end of the Hundred Years’ War. It was hearing the news of this defeat in August that allegedly caused Henry VI to lose his reason for nearly
18 months.

1455 – The Beginning of the Wars of the Roses. The first Battle of St Albans on 22 May was the start of the Wars of the Roses. Royal forces confronted the army of the Duke of York in what was little more than a skirmish. The Yorkist victory gave the duke control of Henry VI, who, though recovered from madness, was now only a figurehead king, and enabled York to direct government until he lost power to the queen, Margaret of Anjou, in mid-1456.

1461 – The Accession of Edward IV. York, having returned from exile to claim the throne in 1460, had been defeated and killed by royalist forces at the battle of Wakefield. His son Edward took up his father’s cause, defeated the Lancastrians at Mortimer’s Cross in Wales, entered London and on 4 March proclaimed himself king, making good his claim by a great victory on 29 March over the Lancastrians at the battle of Towton in Yorkshire.

1470 – The brief return of Henry VI. Warwick and Clarence (Edward IV’s own brother), having fled to France after an abortive rebellion, and there made peace with Margaret of Anjou and her son, Prince Edward, returned, restoring Henry VI to the throne in October. Edward IV escaped but returned in March 1471, reclaiming his throne. Warwick was killed at Barnet in April, and invading Lancastrian forces defeated at Tewkesbury in May and Prince Edward killed. Edward IV ordered Henry VI’s murder.

1478 – The Death of Clarence. Clarence had deserted Warwick on Edward’s return from exile and been pardoned but remained troublesome. In 1471–4 he quarrelled with Gloucester over the Warwick inheritance. He was a destabilising influence in the regions where he was most powerful and there were rumours of treason. In 1478 he was condemned in parliament and subsequently killed in the Tower, allegedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. His destruction indicates Edward’s dominance and ruthlessness at this time.

1482 – Recovery of Berwick. This key frontier town had been surrendered to the Scots in early 1461, in the last throes of Henry VI’s rule. Anglo-Scottish relations were largely peaceable under Edward IV, once Scotland gave up supporting Lancastrians in exile. However, in 1482, encouraged by a disaffected Scottish noble, the Duke of Albany, an expedition to Scotland was launched under Gloucester. It achieved little, but did retake Berwick.

1485 – The battle of Bosworth. With French subvention and the support of Yorkist exiles, Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven in Wales in August. He travelled through the midlands, gathering support. Richard III’s forces, mustered at Nottingham, met Henry’s at Market Bosworth near Leicester on 22 August. Some of Richard’s greatest noble supporters failed to fight for him. Launching a brave, or foolhardy, attack on Henry’s centre, Richard was killed, leaving the victorious Henry to claim the throne.

1495 – Poynings’ Law. Support in Ireland for the Yorkist pretender, Perkin Warbeck, and feuding among the Irish lords led Henry VII to intensify his rule there. In 1494 he sent a close servant, Sir Edward Poynings, to restore order and allegiance. A number of acts concerning the government of Ireland were passed in the Irish parliament of 1494-5, including “Poynings’ Law”, which severely curtailed the independence of the Irish parliament from interference by the English king and council.

More turning points in British history

Read next: 1534: Henry VIII declares his ’empire’

Go back: 1415: The battle of Agincourt

This article was first published in the January 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine

She occupies a unique place in British history: the subject of great scandal and notoriety, who was denigrated as “a famous adulteress” and an “abominable enchantress”, she was the mistress and friend of a royal prince for a quarter of a century, their affair having begun soon after he married a desirable young bride. Years later, after his wife had died and he married her, controversy and criticism surrounded their union, for she was thought to be far below him in status, morally unacceptable and highly unsuitable in many respects. Before long, however, her personal qualities won her acceptance and respect.

It would be understandable to think this sounds like Camilla, Charles and Diana. Instead, it is the story of a fascinating woman who lived more than 600 years ago, the ancestress of our present monarch, and a lady who has been so neglected by historians that no one has ever, until now, written a proper biography of her. She is known to us largely through the pages of a popular romantic novel.

That woman was Katherine Swynford, and she was one of the most important female figures of the late 14th century. Her partner in adultery, and later husband, was John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, fourth son of Edward III and one of the most powerful and celebrated figures of late medieval England.

The details of Katherine’s eventful story are surrounded in mystery, or obscured by time. Nearly everything about her is controversial: her ancestry, the important dates in her life, the number of children she bore, her character, what she looked like, and – above all – her relationship with her princely lover. In approaching her story, the historian is continually weighing up a balance of probabilities and possibilities, yet from the fragmented information – even the lives of queens were not well-documented in this period – some credible inferences may be drawn, and some surprising conclusions.

Katherine Swynford was born around 1350, the daughter of Paon de Roet, a knight of Hainault (now part of Belgium). Her mother’s name is unknown, but she may have been a connection of the House of Avesnes, the ruling family of Hainault. Paon de Roet came to England in the train of Philippa of Hainault when she married Edward III in 1328, and in the mid-1350s, his two younger daughters, Katherine and Philippa, were fortuitously placed in the household of the kindly queen, their countrywoman.

• Read more | How did Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, become one of medieval England’s best-loved queens?

It may have been in 1360, when she was just 10, when Katherine was transferred to the household of Blanche of Lancaster, the young wife of John of Gaunt, to help in the nursery. She quickly won the respect and affection of her employer, with whom she was to remain for eight years, proving herself pious, intelligent, capable and good with children.

Around 1362, when she was 12 – the youngest age at which the church permitted wives to cohabit with husbands – Katherine was married to John of Gaunt’s retainer, the impecunious Sir Hugh Swynford. She found herself mistress of the poverty-stricken Kettlethorpe Hall in Lincolnshire, which must have come as a stark contrast to the splendours of the Lancastrian palace of the Savoy in London or the great castles of Leicester, Hertford and Kenilworth. But Katherine showed her mettle, immersing herself so enthusiastically in the life of the manor that for decades afterwards she would be known as the Lady of Kettlethorpe.

Following her marriage, she divided her time between her husband’s estates and the Lancastrian court, while bearing a son, Thomas, and two, possibly three, daughters to one of whom the duke and duchess of Lancaster stood as sponsors.

Katherine’s younger sister Philippa had married one of the king’s esquires, Geoffrey Chaucer, who would later gain renown as a poet and author of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer appears to have already earned the friendship and admiration of John of Gaunt, and his career at court was boosted by his sister-in-law’s connections with the duke. One of Chaucer’s earliest poems was the beautiful elegy he wrote for the duchess Blanche, who died in childbirth in 1368, and it bears testimony to the overwhelming grief of her husband.

A destitute widow to dynastic matriarch

Katherine herself was widowed in 1371, when Sir Hugh died on campaign with the duke in France. John of Gaunt had just remarried for political reasons, his bride being Constance of Castile, through whom he was to claim the crown of Castile. Although she was young and beautiful, the marriage never had a chance to succeed.

For it would appear that when Katherine, a destitute widow, appealed to the duke, her overlord, for help, he succumbed to her allure and made her his mistress, probably in the spring of 1372. The course of their affair is charted to a degree by a series of grants in registers, although the registers are incomplete so they do not provide us with a full picture. There is a pattern to these grants that suggests the birth-dates of the four children Katherine is known to have borne the duke during the course of their affair.

They were all surnamed Beaufort, after a French lordship John had once held, and from them were descended the Royal Houses of York, Tudor, Stuart and every British sovereign since 1461. For this alone, Katherine is of key dynastic importance in the history of the British monarchy.

Although the lovers were discreet to begin with, by 1378, John was openly parading Katherine as his mistress, and provoking criticism from scandalised monastic chroniclers, who accused her of being a witch and a whore.

At court, however, and certainly in Lincoln, where Katherine was popular with the cathedral clergy, the affair was probably accepted and condoned. The duchess Constance was more preoccupied with regaining her kingdom than trying to dislodge her love rival, and Katherine’s undoubted tact and personal qualities ensured that there was never any open rivalry between them.

Listen: Historian, author and podcaster Helen Carr charts the eventful life of the 14th-century prince, John of Gaunt, on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:

Indeed, Katherine was popular with the duke’s children by Blanche (she was governess to his two daughters), and she worked with John to bring some cohesion to a domestic ménage that could easily have been highly dysfunctional. She helped to bind Lancastrians, Swynfords, Beauforts and Chaucers into a harmonious family group, which in itself is testimony to Katherine’s warmth and generosity of character.

For all that he clearly loved Katherine, John, who apparently had a healthy sexual appetite, does not seem to have been faithful to her. They were often apart for long periods, and by his own later admission, he had many fleeting sexual encounters with women in his wife’s household. Katherine may not have known about these at the time.

Initially, the affair lasted for nine years. Then came the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the destruction of the Palace of the Savoy, a virulent attack on John, whose head the rebels demanded. It left him profoundly shaken and guilt-ridden, and he publicly renounced Katherine and separated from her, a decision in which she seems to have concurred.

For the next few years, Katherine lived mainly at Kettlethorpe or in Lincoln, where she leased a fine house near the cathedral. The duke was reconciled to Constance and thereafter concentrated his energies on claiming her kingdom. He remained in touch with Katherine, though, and she helped him financially with his military expedition to Spain, a venture that would ultimately end in failure – the crown he had so long sought eluding him at the last moment.

• Read more | John of Gaunt: The man who would be king

John finally returned to England in 1389, and two years later we find a record of Katherine stabling 12 horses in his household. Bound already by their shared interests in their growing family, it would appear, from this and other evidence, that they had resumed their former intimacy.

In 1394, Constance died and after John had obtained a dispensation and completed a period of service as duke of Aquitaine, he returned to England and married Katherine. The wedding took place in January 1396 in Lincoln Cathedral.

A controversial marriage

Their marriage provoked far more scandal than their affair, for it was unheard of for a prince to marry his mistress, and many aristocrats felt that he had married far beneath him. The great ladies of the realm refused to acknowledge Katherine, who was now, for the brief period before Richard II remarried later that year, the first lady in the land. But gradually, by her tactful and dignified behaviour, she won them round. It was to her care and guidance that the king’s young bride, the six-year-old Isabella of Valois, would be entrusted.

• Read more | Sex in the Middle Ages: have attitudes really changed?

Early in 1397, parliament legitimated the Beauforts, elevating them to the status of princes of the blood royal. This was certainly one of the reasons why John of Gaunt had married Katherine, but it is abundantly clear that their marriage was also made for love, for there is plenty of evidence for this in the duke’s financial settlements on her, and in his will, in which he left her, among other things, the beds in which they had slept together.

The remaining years of their marriage were overshadowed by political tensions and John’s failing health. In 1398, the king’s tyrannical and cruel exiling of the duke’s beloved heir, Henry of Bolingbroke, led to John’s final decline. He retired with Katherine to Leicester Castle, where he died in February 1399. There is some evidence that he had been suffering from a venereal disease, the result of his earlier promiscuity, although this is not conclusive.

After his funeral, Katherine again retired to Lincoln, where she leased another substantial house in the cathedral close. She was generously treated by Richard II, notwithstanding his seizure of the Lancastrian estates, and by his successor, John’s heir, now Henry IV, who, after he had deposed Richard and usurped the throne in 1399, referred to Katherine as “the King’s mother” in official documents.

During the final years of her life, she is not recorded at court and appears to have remained in Lincoln, living quietly. Her Beaufort children were carving out glittering public careers for themselves, which must have delighted her, but the lack of evidence about her own life suggests that she was either immersed in grief or suffering declining health.

Katherine died in May 1403 and was buried in Lincoln Cathedral, where her daughter Joan Beaufort was later laid to rest beside her in a chantry chapel that still partly exists today.

Popular perceptions of Katherine either cast her as a romantic heroine or as the witch and whore of the chroniclers’ fevered imaginations. Yes, hers is primarily a love story, but there was clearly far more depth to her than the romantic image would suggest. To have held the interest of John of Gaunt for so long, to have interacted socially in the cultivated circles in which he moved, and to have served as governess to the Lancastrian princesses all required intelligence, erudition and sophistication.

The enduring affection of her family connections stands testament to her warmth, charm and good diplomatic skills. Although we have no true likeness to go on – there may be a hitherto-unsuspected vivid image in a chronicle – Katherine Swynford was undoubtedly beautiful. Her story is one of triumph and pain, and it ends most poignantly. In telling it, I am fulfilling the dream of decades.

Alison Weir is a historian and bestselling author. Among her historical biographies is Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and his Scandalous Duchess (Vintage, 2007). Her latest books are Katheryn Howard, The Tainted Queen (Headline, 2020), the fifth instalment in her Six Tudor Queens series, and Queens of the Crusades (Vintage, 2020)

This article was first published in the September 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine 

The events of the middle and late 15th century were, we have always been told, driven by men. It was a story of the battlefields on which kings, dukes and earls fought for control of the country during the Wars of the Roses; a great dynastic confrontation that saw the houses of York and Lancaster battle for control of the English crown from 1455–85.

This assumption of male dominance is as automatic as the one that saw Margaret Beaufort ignore her own claim to the throne in favour of her son, Henry Tudor, or as the heiress Anne Neville being passed between Lancaster and York as though she were as insentient as any other piece of property.

Yet the actions of the women forged during the Wars of the Roses would, ultimately, prove to matter as much as the battlefields. Referred to as that “great and strong-laboured woman” by Sir John Bocking in 1456, Margaret of Anjou, with her determination to hold onto the reins of power, played a vital part in pushing England into civil war. It was two other women, Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville, who brokered the marriage that sealed the peace deal. From Henry VI’s wife to Henry VII’s mother, it was women who acted as midwives to the Tudor dynasty.

The women behind the so-called Wars of the Roses were playing a game of thrones. The business of their lives was power; their sons and husbands the currency. The passion and pain of the lives echo through William Shakespeare’s history plays – and yet, those plays apart, most of us know very little about their extraordinary stories.

This is due, in part, to the patchy nature of the source material. The sources for this particular period are “notoriously intractable”, as JR Lander, an expert on the Wars of the Roses, put it – and more so for women who fought on no battlefields and passed no laws. The detailed records – and the aristocratic letters you find even from the days of Henry VIII less than 50 years later – are largely absent.

What’s more, the years that saw the disappearance of the princes in the Tower of London hold more than their fair share of insoluble mysteries and popular history has traditionally preferred to deal in certainties. But it is worth persevering and trying to unlock these women’s stories. The more you look at their actions, their alliances and at the connections between them, the more you start to see an alternative engine of history.

The she-wolf: Margaret of Anjou (1430-83)

Wife of Henry VI 

When Margaret of Anjou was brought to England in 1445, to wed the Lancastrian king Henry VI, she was widely regarded as little more than a pawn in a marriage contract designed to cement a truce in the long war with France. Within a matter of years, her single-mindedness would prove a major catalyst in sparking the Wars of the Roses. In fact, such was Margaret’s impact upon her adopted nation that, a century or so after her death, Shakespeare immortalised her as a “she-wolf”, with a “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide”.

Despite Shakespeare’s verdict, it’s possible that Margaret would never have figured so prominently in the political arena if events had not forced her hand. In 1454 the queen (who was, to contemporaries, “a manly woman, using to rule and not be ruled”) made a bill of five articles – “whereof the first is that she desires to have the whole rule of the land”, or so one correspondent said.

By then, just as she gave birth to Edward, their only son, her husband fell into a catatonic stupor. Margaret was desperate to prevent power falling entirely into the hands of Henry’s cousin the Duke of York and his party, who she saw as dangerous rivals to royal authority.

As rivalry turned to armed conflict, the queen, as a woman, could only act through deputies. (Though 30 years before, legend had it, her grandmother Yolande of Aragon, a powerful protector to Joan of Arc, had donned silver armour and led her own troops against the English.) But time and again, reports would speak of Margaret’s Lancastrian forces – rather than of her husband’s – and at the second battle of St Albans in 1461 one reporter, the Milanese Prospero di Camulio, seems to suggest that she was in the fray. “The Earl of Warwick decided to quit the field, and… pushed through right into Albano [St Albans], where the queen was with 30,000 men.”

The chronicler Gregory wrote that in the midst of the battle, “King Harry went to his queen and forsook all his lords, and trust better to her party than to his own…” An anecdotal report of a speech once credited to Margaret is as heroic in its own way as Elizabeth I’s at Tilbury. “I have often broken [the English] battle line,” she told her men. “I have mowed down ranks far more stubborn than theirs are now. You who once followed a peasant girl [Joan of Arc] now follow a queen… I will either conquer or be conquered with you.”

After Richard of York’s heir, Edward IV, captured Henry VI’s crown in 1460, Margaret by no means ceased campaigning. The next decade saw her tirelessly touting for support around the continent and in Scotland, where she won help from another prominent woman, Mary of Guelders, ruling as regent for her infant son James. Indeed, it would be Margaret’s unlikely alliance with a former Yorkist, the powerful Earl of Warwick, the ‘Kingmaker’, (cemented by a marriage between her son and his daughter Anne Neville) that led to Henry VI’s brief reinstatement in 1470. But the following spring, the deaths of her husband and son at Yorkist hands left Margaret no pieces to play on the political stage and she died in France impoverished and embittered.

The Rose of Raby: Cecily Neville (1415–95)

Mother of Edward IV and Richard III

Born the beautiful ‘Rose of Raby’, daughter of the powerful Earl of Westmorland, Cecily Neville was 15 years older than Margaret of Anjou, and already long married to Richard, Duke of York when Margaret, her sometime friend and rival, became queen.

Ironically, it was the death of Cecily’s husband (and her second son) at the battle of Wakefield, a decisive Lancastrian victory fought in 1460, that gave her a political role. Only three months later, her eldest son took the throne as Edward IV and, in the early days of his reign, it was said of her that she, “holds the king at her pleasure”, to rule as she wished. Perhaps that perception did not last long; certainly it did not survive Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville – but it is Cecily’s subsequent role that has been a matter of most debate among historians.

Where, firstly, did she stand over the dissent between Edward IV and his younger brother Clarence? The dispute led ultimately to Clarence’s execution – allegedly drowned in a butt of malmsey – in 1478. Even more importantly, what was her view of her son Richard’s seizure of the throne and dispossession of her grandsons after King Edward’s death in 1483?

How did she react to suspicions that Richard had murdered them in the Tower?

One theory – that of historian Michael K Jones – suggests that Cecily supported Clarence’s claim that his elder brother (Edward IV) was illegitimate, and that he himself was the rightful heir. She may even have been the guiding spirit behind Richard III’s coup. It would be at her house that the meetings that prepared his takeover were planned.

Evidence is, however, somewhat scanty. It is possible that Cecily took a large step away from the spotlight in the years following Clarence’s death. She was, after all, already in her sixties, which was old, by the standards of the day.

It would have been quite understandable if she were simply as punch drunk as any other old fighter, keeping herself out of the fray.

Cecily is perhaps the best example of the comparatively poor biographical legacy of the last Plantagenet women. Though her long life was beset by conflicts as shocking as can ever have rent any family, we cannot, rather frustratingly, be sure where her own strongest allegiance lay.

The tragic lady: Anne Neville (1456–85)

Wife of Richard III

Born the daughter of the powerful Earl of Warwick, Anne Neville was first married off by her father, the ‘Kingmaker’, to the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, to cement an alliance with Margaret of Anjou, hitherto Warwick’s bitter enemy.

After both the prince and Warwick himself were killed in a crushing Yorkist defeat of the Lancastrians at the 1471 battle of Barnet, Anne (the great niece of Cecily Neville) passed into the hands of the Duke of Clarence. He, according to one contemporary chronicler, tried to keep her hidden, disguised as a kitchen maid, for fear her fortune should fall into his brother Richard’s clutches. Clarence failed and in 1483, after a decade of largely obscure married life, Anne was crowned as Richard III’s queen.

Within two years she was dead amid rumours Richard had caused her demise either through poison or psychological warfare; a figure as tragic, if less scandalous, as Shakespeare imagined her in his Lady Anne (Richard III).

The commoner queen: Elizabeth Woodville (c1437–92)

Wife of Edward IV, mother of the princes in the Tower

When Elizabeth Woodville was wed in secret to the young Yorkist king, Edward IV, in 1464, she became the first English woman to be crowned queen consort since the Norman Conquest. She is said to have demanded marriage as the price of her virtue, just as Anne Boleyn would do to Elizabeth’s grandson, Henry VIII.

The daughter of a minor peer (though her mother came from a royal European house), Elizabeth was the widow of a Lancastrian knight, with two children already to her name. The idea of a king making a love match with a commoner was itself controversial, and no less anger was aroused by the sudden rise to prominence of the whole Woodville family. Elizabeth Woodville has often been dismissed as a woman of almost unparalleled shallowness, yet the plots of her later years may tell a more complicated story.

After her husband died in 1483, news that Richard, Duke of Gloucester (Richard III) had taken possession of her young son, Edward V, sent Elizabeth flying into sanctuary. Her behaviour in the following months has been extensively canvassed. Her decision to allow her younger son to join his brother in the Tower, where the boys disappeared from public view, and the fact that she allowed her daughters to leave sanctuary and go to dance at their uncle’s court – the court of the man who may have murdered their brothers – has been scrutinised.

Probably she felt she had no other options, but generations of historians have struggled to explain a pragmatism that seems to verge on sheer insensibility. One theory goes so far as to suggest that at least the younger of the princes in the Tower may have been alive and secretly released into her care.

There was something else going on here. The 16th-century Italian historian Polydore Vergil relates how, only weeks into Richard III’s reign, Elizabeth gave her consent to a joint conspiracy suggested by the Lancastrian heiress Margaret Beaufort and relayed to the dowager queen in sanctuary by Margaret’s physician, the Welshman Lewis Caerleon. Vergil reports that Elizabeth promised Margaret that she would recruit all of Edward IV’s friends if Henry Tudor would be sworn to take Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth of York in marriage as soon as he had the crown. Although the 1483 rebellions failed to topple Richard from his throne, this was the deal that would ultimately produce the Tudor dynasty.

The fiery plotter: Margaret ‘of Burgundy’ (1446–1503)

Sister of Edward IV and Richard III

Youngest daughter of Cecily Neville, sister to Edward IV and Richard III, Margaret’s childless marriage to Charles, Duke of Burgundy never deterred her from intervening in the affairs of her native country.

Once a mediator between her warring brothers Edward and Clarence, it was after Henry VII assumed the throne that Margaret plotted most actively as chief promoter of the pretender to Henry VII’s throne Perkin Warbeck, as well as of his predecessor Lambert Simnel.

With more than a touch of the misogyny displayed by most contemporary commentators, Vergil claimed Margaret, driven by “insatiable hatred and fiery wrath”, continually sought Henry’s destruction – “so ungovernable is a woman’s nature especially when she is under the influence of envy”.

The unifier: Elizabeth of York (1466–1503)

Daughter of Edward IV & Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Henry VII, mother of Henry VIII

As the new Henry VII strove to confirm his rule after victory at Bosworth and bring unity to the country, his own fragile claim to the throne from his mother’s Lancastrian blood was immeasurably strengthened by marriage to the Yorkist heiress.

There seems to have been no thought, in the world of practical politics, that Elizabeth of York might actually take the throne herself. A century on, Francis Bacon would nonetheless report that Henry feared he might be seen as ruling only though Elizabeth’s right, and being “but a king at courtesy”. Perhaps that is why she seems to have been sidelined by her cannier husband into anonymous domesticity and a string of pregnancies, the last of which caused her death in 1503. “The queen is beloved because she is powerless”, one ambassador reported, damningly.

But once again there is a question mark – a hint of something stranger and stronger behind the placid facade. The 17th-century antiquary George Buck claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth herself early in 1485, expressing her burning desire to marry her uncle Richard III, and her fear that his queen – that same Anne Neville who had once been married to a Lancastrian prince – “would never die”. There are many question marks over Buck’s alleged discovery of the letter, but there were indeed rumours that Richard wanted to marry his niece. He was forced to go into London and deny them publicly.

Whatever doubts may have remained, Elizabeth’s marriage to Henry VII seems to have been broadly happy. The union certainly fulfilled the main, dynastic imperative, producing the prince who would become Henry VIII.

Looking back to the sometimes turbulent lives of medieval queens it might almost be argued that a quieter and more predominantly domestic model for the consort’s role was on the way. Except, of course, that Elizabeth of York was grandmother to two queens (Mary and Elizabeth) who did assume the throne in their own right; and that, too, is her legacy.

The ambitious Tudor: Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509)

Mother of Henry VII

Margaret Beaufort was England’s wealthiest heiress when, at the age of 12, she was married to Edmund Tudor, who was a comparatively humble Welshman.

Margaret was something of a dark horse throughout the years of Yorkist power yet, crucially, she was – through her descent from John of Gaunt – a vital carrier of the Lancastrian bloodline.

She was still only 13 and already a widow when she gave birth to her son Henry, Edmund having died of the plague. The experience possibly damaged her slight physique, since her two subsequent marriages produced no more children and, later in life, she would take a vow of celibacy.  This meant that all her ambitions centred on Henry.

Yet in 1471 she felt compelled, for safety, to send him into exile in Brittany. She would see her son again only 14 years later and in the most dramatic of circumstances.

In the summer of 1485, Henry Tudor landed with a small invasion force on the Welsh coast. He launched a campaign to take King Richard III’s throne, urged on by a flow of money and messengers from his mother. The fact that Margaret was able to offer her son any support at all was, in itself, quite an impressive achievement. She was then being kept under genteel house arrest on the Lancashire estates of her third husband, Lord Stanley – the penalty for her part in plotting with Elizabeth Woodville to launch that earlier rising against Richard.

But just how much influence was Margaret able to exercise on Stanley? It’s a question that historians have been pondering over for years. The Stanleys’ last-minute decision to send their forces to support Henry helped win the day for the Lancastrians and secure Richard III’s demise.

Margaret would be quick to claim the power and position she felt was owed to her once Henry had assumed the throne. ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’, as she came to be known, in some ways overshadowed her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth of York, maintaining Henry’s authority in the Midlands, laying down the rules for the ceremonies of court and exercising to the full her own powers of patronage.

Outliving her own son by a few months, she survived to play an active role in shepherding her grandson into power – a final coup for the woman who, above all others, did the most to usher in the Tudor century.

Sarah Gristwood is the author of Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (Harper Press, September 2012)

This article was first published in the September 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine 

Ask most people what they know about Richard III and they will tell you he ruthlessly murdered his way to the throne that he coveted. Similarly, many accounts of the Wars of the Roses depict his father, Richard, Duke of York as the man whose ambition for the crown sparked civil war. Both father and son died in battle following acts now viewed as rash: the duke in December 1460 after sallying out at Wakefield before his reinforcements had arrived, and Richard III in August 1485 after a thundering cavalry charge at Bosworth. These are just two of the many parallels between the lives and experiences of this father and son that I was struck by while researching my biography of Richard Plantagenet.

Both men acted as protector of the realm: the duke twice during Henry VI’s illnesses and his son following King Edward IV’s death because the king’s son, Edward V, was a minor. Neither man was to be thanked for his efforts, which arguably raises questions about their ability to govern. The duke’s protectorates drew praise for his even-handedness and willingness to tackle long-standing problems, but both were cut short by the return to politics of Henry VI; the reforms were swiftly undone and Richard’s intentions were eyed with suspicion by the court, members of whom were largely disadvantaged by the changes.

Similarly, as Richard III’s protectorate morphed into a rule that lasted just two years it offered tantalising hints of a reforming intention that was left unrealised. It also shows a willingness to legislate in favour of the common man against the interests of the nobility that can be traced back to his time as Duke of Gloucester.

The enduring reputation of this father and son are similarly unsympathetic, and both ignore the true story of their lives. Richard, Duke of York served as Henry VI’s lieutenant in France on two occasions and then in Ireland. He performed both roles solidly, though unspectacularly. It was perhaps a measure of the state of the English kingdom in France that the best available outcome was mediocrity that avoided abject failure. The 1450s were spent trying to avoid the confrontations that became the Wars of the Roses, largely caused and fuelled by Lancastrian paranoia and infighting into which Richard was drawn.

In a striking parallel, Richard III spent more than a decade being unswervingly loyal to his brother, Edward IV. Without his younger brother, Edward might have found regaining and retaining his crown far more difficult. He may also never have tamed a north attached to the Neville faction deprived by Edward of its leading light, the ‘kingmaker’ Earl of Warwick. The Neville family and the Percy Earls of Northumberland were the two dominant and often feuding factions in the far north of England, given a long leash by their distance from the centre of power in London. Warwick had been instrumental in Edward IV acquiring his crown, but after a series of sleights (that may well have been deliberate) Warwick rebelled, joining the Lancastrian side and placing Henry VI back on his throne for six months.

Richard joined his brother in exile in Burgundy and later returned with him to win back the crown. At the battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471, Edward and Richard faced their cousin Warwick, defeating him in a conflict that cost Warwick his life. Richard then married Anne Neville, one of Warwick’s two daughters (the other daughter, Isabel, was already married to Edward and Richard’s brother George, Duke of Clarence) and was given the northern portion of Warwick’s inheritance. This kept a Neville presence in the region, thus drawing the sting from the body of a potentially unsettled faction.

Richard would spend much of his time over the next decade or so preventing Scottish border raids and championing the economic needs of York and the wider region, thus ensuring that he would be remembered as perhaps the greatest friend the north ever had.

Richard displayed a strong sense of duty and commitment to justice, frequently involving himself in legal disputes and defying the laws of feudalism. In 1472, Katherine Williamson of Howden (near York) appealed to parliament for the murderers of her husband to be prosecuted. Their father, who aided and harboured them, had sought to evade justice by entering Richard’s service, but as soon Richard learned of what the man had done he ordered his arrest, defying the accepted protocols of protecting members of a lord’s affinity.

Having earned his brother’s trust, Richard was appointed lord protector on the king’s death in April 1483. In the aftermath of Edward’s death several Woodville relatives of his queen [Elizabeth Woodville] were arrested and executed by Richard, as was the dead king’s best friend, Lord Hastings. Edward’s sons were declared illegitimate and Richard was asked to take the throne by a delegation of London’s dignitaries. These dramatic events saw Richard’s long-earned reputation as a pillar of Edwardian Yorkist government largely forgotten, and it was later lost forever in the mud of Bosworth Field.

Likewise, during the 1450s Richard, Duke of York twice served as protector of the realm (from 1453–54 and 1455–56) to general acclaim, but his track record counted for little once open war arrived in 1459. Indeed, he has traditionally been blamed as the driving force behind the Wars of the Roses, motivated by greed and ambition to pursue the crown for himself.

I would instead argue that he was more a casualty of an increasingly paranoid, faction-led government losing control of its country. The House of Lancaster imploded in the late 1440s, climaxing with the arrest of the king’s last surviving uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1447. Humphrey died in prison a few days later amid suspicion he was murdered, but it is clear that Henry had been caused to believe his uncle was plotting against him. The shockwaves of this collapse were the real root of the Wars of the Roses and Humphrey had identified Richard, Duke of York with his cause, dragging him into the escalating troubles and drawing the king’s suspicion.

The lasting reputation of the Duke and his son also serve very similar political ends. York is remembered as a ruthlessly ambitious man so that he can be blamed for the Wars of the Roses. He had to be the bad guy so that Henry VI (who Henry VII tried to have canonised) could be the good guy wronged by an evil subject.

Richard III, too, had to be consigned to the darkest pages of history so that Henry VII could be the man who liberated England from a tyrant. York was no ambitious grasper and Richard III wasn’t a tyrant by any measure. It is perhaps no accident that William Shakespeare conflated father and son to have his Richard III, as Duke of Gloucester, kill the Duke of Somerset at the First Battle of St Albans in 1455 – even though, in reality, Gloucester was only aged two-and-a-half at the time.

Few historical figures have been used as a morality tale and political warning like Richard, Duke of York and his son Richard III. Neither now lie where they were originally buried and both have struggled to shrug off the damning reputation that has tarnished their legacies. Being a king, Richard III has attracted far more attention than his father, with attempts both to confirm his evil reputation and to reassess it more positively. A generation before, his father was fighting similar battles and had suffered a comparable fate.

When researching Richard Plantagenet, I found a complex man: a surprisingly unwilling rebel and a man dedicated to his family in a way seen in few other medieval noblemen. Indeed, there is very little sign of the man history remembers in the facts of his life. I hope that my biography will place Richard, Duke of York firmly in the context of the world in which he lived and demonstrate that myth can so often overtake fact.

Matthew Lewis is the author of Richard, Duke of York: King by Right (Amberley Publishing, 2016)

This article was first published by HistoryExtra in 2016

Never before had England seen a conflict that split the nation so dramatically than during the mid to late 15th century, when two dynastic houses clashed in the Wars of the Roses. The weak rule and eventual incapacitation of King Henry VI had allowed his rivals to step up and claim the throne, launching a series of wars still remembered as one of the bloodiest chapters in England’s history.

York and Lancaster – two branches of the royal house of Plantagenet, which had ruled since 1154 – tore the country apart for more than three decades. Kings were ousted and killed, dynasties begun and ripped down, and countless slaughtered in the name of the red and white roses. Yet from the chaos and turmoil emerged a new dynasty: the Tudors.

• Read more: The Wars of the Roses

The November 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed features an essential guide to the Wars of the Roses, charting the conflict from its beginnings through to the horrific battles, stunning betrayals and gruesome murders.

We’ve also put together a Wars of the Roses poster, full of fascinating facts, that you can download for free and print at home.

The poster will print on four separate sheets of A4 or A3 paper, which you can then tape together and put on your wall as an ultimate guide to this turbulent period of English history.

Click here to download your free Wars of the Roses poster

The November 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed is on sale from 30 September.

The dynasty ruled England and much of France during the medieval period – monarchs included Henry II, Henry III, Edward II and the boy king Richard II – and their hatred, revenge, jealousy and ambition transformed history.

Here, writing for History Extra, historian Dan Jones reveals five things you probably didn’t know about the Plantagenets…

As the French-sounding name suggests, the Plantagenet dynasty originated across the channel, and both in blood and outlook they were decidedly continental. At various times Plantagenet princes ruled – or claimed to rule – Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Aquitaine, Brittany, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Castile, Sicily and France.

In the 15th century Henry VI was actually crowned king of the French in Paris. The family maintained close links with the Holy Land through the crusades. This was a truly international project. Only after 200 years did English become the official language of law and parliament, and even by the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, most sophisticated courtiers still spoke and corresponded in French.

Despite this, however, the Plantagenets laid down the foundations of England’s laws, borders, language, public architecture and national mythology.

Even before the bigotry of the Reformation descended, this was still a very violent age: Henry II’s great quarrel with Thomas Becket ended with the archbishop chopped down by four knights and his brains scooped out on the floor of a cathedral; the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 saw another archbishop beheaded in the street, and when Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, lost the battle of Evesham in 1265, he was hacked to pieces and his genitals were stuck in his mouth.

Edward II’s reign dissolved into an orgy of slaughter that ended with the king being forced from the throne and murdered, while his close ally Hugh Despenser the Younger was hanged, drawn and quartered in front of the queen, who feasted while she watched the bloodthirsty show.

We may associate the unmanned deployment of death from above with 21st-century US special forces, but drone warfare has a far longer history than that. During the 13th century there was a spate of devastating clashes between kings and their barons – the worst being a long-running feud between Henry III and de Montfort. In the course of all this, records show that the sheriff of Essex plotted to attack London using cockerels who would have firebombs attached to their feet.

There were a few basic flaws with this plan: cockerels cannot fly for very long distances, and feathers are somewhat flammable. So in the end there was no cockerel-led blitz. But it was an enterprising use of military technology, which is worth applauding for sheer chutzpah if nothing else.

Not until Richard II’s reign, anyway. The usual forms of address for a king for much of the Plantagenet era were ‘your highness’ and ‘your Grace’. Richard, however, had a grander and more elaborate vision of kingship than many of his predecessors, and he introduced the terms ‘your majesty’ and ‘your high majesty’ to the court vocabulary.

During his later reign, there are vivid accounts of the king sitting in splendor on his throne after dinner and glaring around the room at his assembled courtiers. Whomever his gaze rested upon was to fall to their knees in humble appreciation of his royal awesomeness.

Eventually this wore rather thin, and in 1399 Richard was deposed by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who took the throne as Henry IV and abruptly ended the unbroken succession of Plantagenet kings that had continued since the 12th century.

Well, most of us, anyway. According to calculations made by Ian Mortimer in his biography of Edward III, somewhere between 80 and 95 per cent of the living English-descended population of England shares some ancestry with the Plantagenet kings of the 14th century and before. In other words, there’s a pretty good chance that you are, on some level, a Plantagenet.

This is not, I should say, a mandate to start slaughtering archbishops; hanging, drawing and quartering your enemies or sticking your wife in a dungeon. But it’s pretty cool, all the same.

• Read next: The Plantagenet royal dynasty – England’s ultimate family drama