3 Elizabeth ( b.c.1464); she perhaps married Thomas Lumley. It is thought that Elizabeth Lucy was her mother.
By an unknown mother:
4 Grace (alive in 1492).
EDWARD IV
He died on 9 April, 1483, at the Palace of Westminster, and was buried in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.
He was succeeded by his son Edward.
Edward V
FATHER: Edward IV(
MOTHER: Elizabeth Wydville(under Edward IV,
SIBLINGS: (
EDWARD V
He was born on 2 November, 1470, in the Sanctuary, Westminster Abbey. He was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester on 25/26 June, 1471, and Duke of Cornwall on 17 July, 1471. He was made a Knight of the Garter on 15 May, 1475, and created Earl of March and Earl of Pembroke on 8 or 18 July, 1479. He succeeded his father as King of England on 9 April, 1483.
Edward V was deposed on 25 June, 1483, and declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament in 1484 (
Richard III
FATHER: Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York(
MOTHER: Cecily Neville(
SIBLINGS: (
RICHARD III
He was born on 2 October, 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle, Northants. He was created Duke of Gloucester on 1 November, 1461, and made a Knight of the Garter before 4 February, 1466. He acceded to the throne of England on 26 June, 1483, after the deposition of his nephew, Edward V, and was crowned on 6 July, 1483, in Westminster Abbey.
Richard III married, on 12 July, 1472, in Westminster Abbey or St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster:
Anne
She was the daughter of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, by Anne, daughter of Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and she was born on 11 June, 1456, at Warwick Castle. She married firstly Edward, Prince of Wales, son of Henry VI, probably on 13 December, 1470, at the Château of Amboise, France. She was crowned Queen Consort on 6 July, 1483, at Westminster Abbey. She died on 16 March, 1485, at the Palace of Westminster, probably of tuberculosis, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Issue of marriage:
1 Edward
He was born in Spring, 1476, at Middleham Castle, Yorkshire, and was created Earl of Salisbury on 15 February, 1478. He became Duke of Cornwall upon his father’s accession to the throne on 26 June, 1483, and was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester on 24 August, 1483, being invested as such on 8 September, 1483, at York Minster. He died on 9 April, 1484, at Middleham Castle, Yorkshire, and was perhaps buried in Sheriff Hutton Church, Yorkshire.
Richard III also had the following illegitimate issue:
By unknown mothers:
1 John of Gloucester, or of Pontefract, Captain of Calais ( c.1470–murdered? 1499?).
2 Richard Plantagenet of Eastwell, Kent (1469–1550).
3 Katherine; she married William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon (1455?–1491).
4 Stephen Hawes (?).
5 Unnamed child (?).
6 Unnamed child (?).
7 Unnamed child (?).
RICHARD III
He was killed on 22 August, 1485, defending his crown and his kingdom against the forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire. He was buried in the Collegiate Church of St Mary, Leicester. His grave was despoiled during the Reformation. Richard was the last Plantagenet King of England. He was succeeded by his distant cousin Henry Tudor.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Tudors
The Tudors came from bastard stock. Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, was a descendant of John Beaufort, the first of the natural children born to John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and his mistress, Katherine Swynford. Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, was the offspring of the liaison between Henry V’s widow, Katherine of France, and the Welsh squire, Owen Tudor. Possibly these two married in secret, but no proof of this has ever been discovered; in the 15th century, their children were looked upon as bastards, with all the handicaps that imposed upon inheritance. Not for them a Statute conferring legitimacy, as had been the good fortune of the Beaufort bastards of Katherine Swynford when her lover Gaunt at long last made her his wife. Yet even to this there was a sting in the tail: for while the Beauforts were recognised as legitimate by a Statute of Richard II, they were soon afterwards debarred by Henry IV from ever inheriting the throne.
Henry VII was the only child of his parents; his father died before his birth and his mother remarried (she had been but 13 years old at the time of his birth, and never bore another child). Henry was exiled from England by Edward IV, while still a child, and spent his youth in the courts of France and Brittany with his uncle and staunch supporter, Jaspar Tudor. Both were loyal to Henry VI and the House of Lancaster, and after the death of Henry VI and his son Edward, Henry Tudor was seen by many as the natural heir to the Lancastrian claim to the throne of England, despite his legal ineligibility to fulfil such a role. There were no other heirs of the blood of Lancaster. And it was the crown of England that Henry meant to have. On Christmas Day, 1483, in the Cathedral of Rennes in Brittany, he vowed to marry Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, and thus unite the red and white roses of Lancaster and York. Henry must have known at this date that Edward V and his brother were dead; Elizabeth had been declared a bastard, and if Henry was to claim the throne through marrying her, this could only be accomplished if her brothers had predeceased her. Two years later, in August, 1485, Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth and became King of England. In January, 1486, he kept his vow and married Elizabeth, who had been legitimated in his first Parliament; the slight delay between Henry’s accession and his marriage served only to emphasise that Henry’s crown was his by right of conquest and of descent (significantly, he dated his reign from the day before Bosworth), and not through union with Elizabeth of York.
Thus was founded the Tudor dynasty, a dynasty that, as if to compensate for its precarious claim to the throne, was to be the most splendid and successful of all the English Royal Houses. During the 118 years of Tudor rule, England emerged from the mediaeval world as a modern state, prosperous and proud of itself. It was, however, a revolutionary age and a brutal one. Henry VIII declared himself Head of the Church of England and severed for ever all links with the Church of Rome. Under Elizabeth, the Protestant Anglican Church became firmly established. Voyages of discovery were opening up the wider world and trade flourished. The old nobility found themselves being replaced by ‘new men’, who had risen through ability or wealth rather than noble lineage. Yet in this same age that witnessed the spread of the humanist ‘new learning’ and the flowering of the English Renaissance, thousands were executed for heresy or treason, often with appalling barbarity. There was no ‘niceness’ about the Tudor monarchs: they did what they saw as necessary thoroughly and ruthlessly, although by 1603, when Elizabeth I died, some of the power of government had devolved upon Parliament, so often consulted by successive Tudor monarchs to lend support and legality to revolutionary measures, and eventually insisting upon being consulted and giving approval as a right. The Tudors’ parliamentary legacy to their successors was no easy one, and would in time, given the ineptitude and obstinacy of Charles I, lead to civil war.