Britain's Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy (33 page)

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Authors: Alison Weir

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Royalty, #History, #General, #Historical, #Reference, #Genealogy & Heraldry, #Non Fiction

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Edward III also had the following
illegitimate issue
:
By Alice Perrers (1348?–1400), wife of William de Windsor:
1  John de Southeray or Surrey (
c
.1364/5–after 1383:1384?); knighted 1377; he married Matilda, called a sister of Lord Henry Percy.
2  Joan; she married Robert Skerne of Kingston-upon-Thames, and perhaps had issue.
3  Joan or Jane; she married Richard Northland.
Perhaps by an unknown mother:
4  Nicholas Lytlington (?), Abbot of Westminster (
d.
1386). He did not claim to be the King’s son, and was probably a member of the Despenser family.
EDWARD III
He died on 21 June, 1377, at Sheen Palace, Surrey, of a stroke, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
He was succeeded by his grandson Richard.
Richard II
F
ATHER
:
Edward, Prince of Wales
(under
Edward III
,
see here
).
M
OTHER
:
Joan of Kent
(under
Edward III
,
see here
).
S
IBLINGS
: (under
Edward III
,
see here
).
RICHARD II
He was born on
c.
6 January, 1367 (or 1366?), at Bordeaux, Gascony, France. He was created Prince of Wales, Earl of Cornwall and Earl of Chester on 20 November, 1376, and made a Knight of the Garter on 23 April, 1377. He succeeded his grandfather Edward III as King of England on 22 June, 1377, and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 16 July, 1377.
Richard II was deposed on 19 August, 1399, by Henry of Bolingbroke, who usurped the throne as Henry IV when Richard formally abdicated on 29 September, 1399.
Richard II married firstly
, on 14, 20 or 22 January, 1382, at St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster:
Anne
She was the daughter of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, by Elizabeth, daughter of Bogislaw V, Duke of Pomerania. Anne of Bohemia, as she was known, was born on 11 May, 1366, at Prague, Bohemia. She was crowned on 22 January, 1382, at Westminster Abbey, and was made a Lady of the Garter that same year. She died on 7 June, 1394, at Sheen Palace, Surrey, of the plague, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. There was no issue of the marriage.
Richard II married secondly
, probably on 4 (less probably, 1) November, 1396, at St Nicholas’ Church, Calais, France:
Isabella
She was the daughter of Charles VI, King of France, by Isabella, daughter of Stephen II, Duke of Bavaria-Ingolstadt. Her sister Katherine later married Henry V. Isabella was born on 9 November, 1389, at the Palace of the Louvre in Paris. She was made a Lady of the
Garter in 1396, and was crowned on 5, 7 or 8 January, 1397, at Westminster Abbey. After the death of Richard II, she married secondly Charles of Valois, Duke of Orleans (1394–1465), on 29 June, 1406, at Compiégne, France, and had issue:
1  Joan (1409–1432); she married John II, Duke of Alençon (1409–1476), and had issue.
Isabella died on 13 September, 1409, at the Château of Blois, France, in childbirth, and was buried in St Laumer’s Abbey, Blois. Her remains were later removed to the Church of the Celestines, Paris. There was no issue of her marriage to Richard due to her extreme youth.
Richard II is said to have had the following
illegitimate issue
:, but this is unlikely on chronological grounds:
1  Richard Maudelyn.
RICHARD II
He was probably murdered by being starved to death early in February, 1400, whilst being held prisoner in Pontefract Castle, Yorkshire; he was certainly dead by 17 February. He was buried in King’s Langley Church, Herts., but was removed to Westminster Abbey in 1413.
He was succeeded by his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Later Plantagenets: The Houses of Lancaster and York
The prolific Edward III sired eight sons, four of whom grew to maturity and had sons of their own. The eldest was the Prince of Wales, that Edward known to history as the Black Prince, who was the father of Richard II. Richard, although his entitlement to the throne was without dispute, was nevertheless a weak and unstable ruler. This led to his deposition by Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399, Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the throne, and Richard’s own probable murder the following year.
Bolingbroke, henceforth known as Henry IV, was the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, third surviving son of Edward III. In 1399, when Bolingbroke staged his successful coup, the rightful heir to the throne of England was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March and Ulster, a child of nearly eight. Edmund was the great-grandson of Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III. Lionel’s only child had been a daughter, Philippa, who was Edmund’s grandmother, but in England there was no Salic Law to prevent the crown passing by way of inheritance to or through a female, and there is no doubt that Edmund had a better claim to the throne than Bolingbroke. However, Edmund was a child and Bolingbroke a grown man and a proven soldier: England needed a firm ruler, and so the claim of Edmund Mortimer was set aside while the House of Lancaster usurped the throne. Edmund died in 1425, and his claim to the throne was inherited by his surviving sister Anne’s child, Richard, Duke of York. It was he who first used the surname Plantagenet.
For half a century, the House of Lancaster ruled England under Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI. Henry V executed Richard, Earl of Cambridge, who was the husband of Anne Mortimer and the son of
Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, fourth surviving son of Edward III; Richard of Cambridge had plotted to overthrow the fifth Henry, but his treason was discovered and he was eliminated on the eve of the campaign that would see the English victorious at Agincourt. Henry V died young, and the House of Lancaster came to grief under his son Henry VI, who was fitted rather for the clerical life than for kingship. Henry VI married the energetic and passionate Margaret of Anjou, but the marriage was childless for eight years. Then, in 1453, the queen produced a son whilst her husband was suffering one of his periodic fits of insanity, which Margaret’s enemies interpreted as an admission that the Queen had foisted a bastard upon the royal line. Nevertheless, the infant was created Prince of Wales the following year. However, it was Henry VI’s ineptitude as a ruler, rather than the rumours about his son’s paternity, that precipitated the dynastic struggle that later came to be known as the Wars of the Roses, after the emblems of the two warring factions: the red rose of Lancaster, and the white rose of York.
York deeply resented the court party headed by the Queen, and promoted himself as the champion of good government; only later did he assert his superior claim to the throne. Thirty years of intermittent strife followed the outbreak of hostilities in 1455. Early battles in the conflict were indecisive. Then, in 1460, York was killed at the Battle of Wakefield, and his cause taken up by his son, Edward, Earl of March, who won a decisive victory at Towton the following Spring. This led to him being accepted as King of England and crowned at Westminster Abbey. Henry VI went into hiding, but was later taken into custody and imprisoned in the Tower.
Edward IV was a strong king, but he made the fatal mistake of making a very unpopular marriage to a commoner called Elizabeth Wydville, who brought instead of a dowry a host of rapacious relatives, eager for lands, honours and wealth. This marriage alienated the great Earl of Warwick, known as ‘the kingmaker’, who had been Edward’s staunchest supporter. Warwick allied himself with Margaret of Anjou and brought about the ‘readeption’ of Henry VI, while Edward fled to the Low Countries. But he soon returned with an army, to march for the final time upon his enemies. Warwick was killed at the Battle of Barnet in April, 1471, and Margaret’s Lancastrian forces routed in the bloody Battle of Tewkesbury in May.
On 21 May, Henry VI died in mysterious circumstances in the Tower of London. At last, the House of York was securely established upon the throne.
Edward IV died in 1483, worn out prematurely by the pleasures of the table and the bedchamber, leaving as his heir Edward V, a boy of twelve. The government of the realm was placed in the capable yet treacherous hands of Edward IV’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. After securing the persons of Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, in the Tower of London, and eliminating his enemies one by one, Gloucester had it announced, on the basis of questionable evidence, that his brother’s marriage to Elizabeth Wydville had been bigamous, and that their children were therefore bastards and unfit to inherit the throne. As a result, the crown was offered to Gloucester, who was crowned King Richard III in July, 1483. Edward V and his brother, the ‘Princes in the Tower’, were never seen alive again, and controversy has raged ever since as to their fate. The evidence strongly suggests that they were murdered on the orders of Richard III, although this has often been disputed.
Richard III did not long enjoy his crown. His son died in 1484, and his wife in 1485. His heir was his sister’s son, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. Yet England was never destined to have a King John II. For although the great families who were descended from Edward III and had a strong claim to the throne of England had either died out or been barred from the succession by Act of Attainder, there yet remained in exile in France a scion of the Beauforts, who were the issue of John of Gaunt by his mistress (and later wife) Katherine Swynford. After their parents’ marriage in 1396, the Beauforts were declared legitimate by a Statute of Richard II, but Henry IV added an amendment barring them from the throne, which was of dubious legality. This minor technicality did not, however, deter the ‘unknown Welshman’ called Henry Tudor, who in 1485 invaded England with a foreign army, defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, and had himself crowned on the battlefield as King Henry VII with the circlet that had fallen from the head of the last Plantagenet King of England and rolled under a hawthorn bush near to where Richard fell, hacked to death in the midst of the fray.

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