With Richard III's death, the Plantagenets gave way to a new order, a new age, and a new set of challenges. Before proceeding to The Tudors and the Politics of the Reformation, consider the following.
The Plantagenet monarchs of medieval England continue to capture historians' and history buffs' interest and imagination over a half-millennium after the last Plantagenet king died in battle in 1485. The intrigue, duplicity, and the brutal nature of life and death simultaneously spark our curiosity and repulse us. The raw power, the aristocratic elegance, the ruthless conduct of war, and the mare's nest of familial relationships confound us.
Plantagenet: The End of a Dynasty is the product of two years' focused study of the later decades of the dynasty, from Richard II's ascension in 1377 to Richard III's ascension in 1483 and ultimate demise in 1485.
The author views the Plantagenets through two lenses.
In an elite culture dominated by primogeniture, men held the reins of power (at the least, as the state's titular head). The royal vignettes focus on how the sovereign attained power or had power bestowed upon him. To what end did the ruler exercise power? What price did the leader of an emerging nation pay for his actions or inactions?
The second lens through which we assess the life and times of English royalty is their humanity. Family, society, and their patrician culture defined Plantagenet values and governed their behavior. In short, they were as human as any political leader in the twenty-first century. High birth did not protect the royals from fundamental human frailty. Nor does their status absolve them of their misdeeds in the exercise of power.
Indeed, the system of primogeniture was agnate, period. That is not to say women did not possess wealth or exercise power and influence. They did.
The monarchs did not exist in a vacuum. Several assumed the mantle of power as a child; their mothers, and later, their wives, played a vital role in their lives, sometimes in their reign. The royals wed women, conducted dalliances with women (and sometimes with other men), loved women, and their fates inexorably enmeshed with the women in their lives.
The timeless interplay of men and women speaks to the humanness of the age and provides a foundation upon which the twenty-first-century reader can relate to our distant heritage.
Before proceeding to The Past is Prelude, view the dynasty from a historical perspective.
The Plantagenet dynasty developed as a part of a 1200 year continuum of sixty-one English monarchs from Anglo Saxon Ecgherht (827-839) to the House of Windsor's Elizabeth II (1952-present).
The Plantagenets and the Angevin monarchs, before them, originated in France. The Angevin monarchs, Henry II (1154-1189), Richard I (1189-1199), and John (1199-1216), ruled a combined or personal realm comprising much of modern-day France, England, and Ireland.
Our account views Henry III, son of John, as the first Plantagenet monarch. He ascended to the English throne on 28 October 1216 at nine years old. At age twenty, Henry III declared his majority and assumed control of the realm in January 1227. He reigned until his death on 16 November 1272.
The Plantagenets (including the Angevin dynastic rulers and the Lancastrian and York cadet branches) ruled England for 358 years, from 1127 until 1485.
A distinctly Norman French dynasty thrived in England. Their legal language, Latin. They spoke French (or a Norman French dialect) in their daily lives and their conduct of business. In August 1427, Henry V became the first monarch to promote the vernacular Middle English as the language of governance. Henry used the language in his correspondence, the first to do so since the Norman invasion of 1066, 361 years earlier.
How did the Plantagenet past portend their undoing?
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