The poor are always with us….

Last night I caught a few minutes of a TV series dedicated to ‘the haves’ of our nation –  Made in Chelsea. It chronicles the lives and loves of a group of affluent young people in the West London – about and around Belgravia, the King’s Road and Knightsbridge and their adventures in the wider world of city breaks and endless parties, lunches and vacations.

Their preoccupations are singular and self obsessed. It is easy to laugh at them and then do as they habitually do pass on to something more amusing without a further thought. It is easy just to laugh at the show for is it not just a foolish Media foolish confection accurately reflecting nothing more or less than the shallow vacuity of our consumerist society?  Is that the moral response?

Moral – humbug say you – gilded youth is surely often hedonistic and those youths fortunate by birth to have lives gilded with real gold will only tend to be more hedonistic than the rest. They will spend money as freely as they spend time and striking an absolute moral pose about this fact of life only draws attention to one’s own personal foibles and failings – the word hypocrite trips too easily off the tongue. We fear the word moral as we fear being termed hypocrites.

Made in Chelsea is a TV show about London a city where I have lived most of my adult life. In this same city as Alexandra “Binky” Felstead or Mark-Francis Vandelli  there are 2.2 million other Londoners living in relative poverty – that is they live on less than half the average national income. Half national income is roughly £12,000 per annum. That is roughly twice the number as when I first came to live here in 1976.

Nor has relative poverty increased in isolation. For example 39% of those living in the private rented sector in London are categorised as living in relative poverty and that is because more people now live in the rented sector because of the shortage of social or public housing. There are 11 thousand families living in temporary accommodation – many of them outside the boroughs where they registered housing need and where they work. Fourteen million UK citizens live in or around that income level and many are in constant danger of real material deprivation.

One million of our fellow citizens have used a food bank in the last 12 months. Therefore, one million families in the UK have some direct experience of what we term poverty. Government statistics tell us one and five children live in what is termed absolute poverty in the UK.  Absolute poverty is defined as lack of sufficient resources to meet basic needs. There are around 12 thousand homeless in London at any one time and half of these live on the streets.

Those made in Chelsea might say – sad but true – or what has that to do with me?  Or they might excuse themselves by saying God helps those who help themselves – as if the Almighty is just another material acquisition like a pair of Gucci shoes or a Chanel handbag to which those who have are entitled.  These are of the legion of polite fictions we regularly employ to save ourselves from the inconvenience of thinking too hard about the realities of others lives beyond those of our immediate and charmed circle of acquaintance. The poor are with us and we need not trouble ourselves about it much more than giving the occasional nod via an occasional donation to this or that charity.

We claim the unfortunate for ourselves so we can feel we care and then we quietly look the other way. I’m no better than anyone but I am more and more uncomfortable with my pose. In the context of an entry I made on Facebook yesterday about food banks – Made in Chelsea last night made me feel ashamed. I still feel ashamed. We cast the net of blame about us as if we might catch the conscience of a king. Sometimes we do not need to wait upon royal prerogative – we can do something ourselves. The things in question may be small – trivial – hardly noticed – but they will accumulate to make a difference. One of those things is to vote; another is to vote with conscience rather than just as self-interest directs.

We too easily forget in our relative privilege that Poverty is usually blameless and usually the accident of birth or misfortune. Many of those living in poverty have physical or learning disabilities; or low educational attainment; or they suffer from serious recurrent mental health issues. Their poverty is often inter-generational and often leads to social exclusion and as a consequence they suffer discrimination on almost every level – from accessing state benefits or education or housing to basic legal aid. They will often fall further into social exclusion – fall foul of the criminal law – or acquire addictions. They will as often as not present to us as unsympathetic. Poverty is a state into which they are born. There they remain a lifetime – not in the bucolic idyll of obscurity etched out in Grey’s Elegy but in the blind hopelessness that accrues to them because they are poor and because they are disadvantaged. We who are not poor console ourselves with the notion that it is possible for everyone to enjoy our relative success. That is of course untrue – for history may be littered with memorials to the the blessed few that made it through to the top but the other 99% died as they were born – in want.

We are all bi-polar if only in a philosophical sense. We experience life within the narrows of our mind and body but oddly we conceptualise our life principally in the terms of others – or at the very least in terms of things outside our being even if only within our easy grasp. Sometimes as apparently with those starring in Made in Chelsea the acquisition of things in easy grasp becomes a way of life; for others less fortunate things in easy grasp are things to take from those who have. They both share the common delusion that the things – and their possession – will somehow make for happiness and contentment. Most often they only lead to a hunger for more and more and like all human appetites when fed it will need more to satisfy the craving.

At the best this conceptualised experience of life  can lead us towards each other and to the moments of our greatest fulfillment. For simplicity’s sake we might call this love. Love of our fellow man is part and parcel of how we imagine our own humanity. We garnered this wisdom early on in our short time on this planet. About the same time we were studying the stars at night we were studying each other. From the one we understood something of the motion of planets and the geometry of their movement opened a new world here on earth –  as well as making the heavens somehow predictable. At the time when we were writing these observations down we were also wrting down philosophical ideas often in the form of memorable aphorisms. One of them – love thy neighbour as thyself – aptly summarises the bipolar philosophical condition of our existence. Although often associated as uniquely Christian the injunction first appears in the Bible in Leviticus.  We can therefore be pretty sure its provenance is older.

The idea of loving your neighbour challenges us simply because we only really experience the world directly through and from our own perspective and within the limitations of our bodies and of our minds. Moreover – it has always been the stranger to whom this injunction has been applied – friends and family did not count when this principle was coined – indeed in Leviticus the usage ‘foreigner’  is the one most commonly appearing in translation. It is a call to consciousness of others’ needs that speaks directly to our own experience – for in a strange – perhaps in a counter-intuitive way – ancient mankind had observed the greatest collective security was to gained by considering the needs of others as if they were our own. The idea has constantly recurred in philosophy and in religions everywhere.

I had no notion on going to sleep that Made in Chelsea had made such an impression on me. When I woke this morning at about half four – I felt impelled to write. In so doing I probably have made a fool of myself. I do not do this for myself or because I feel superior or because I judge others and least because I am better than anyone. I write this because I feel it needs to be said. We easily forget the many chances life affords us and i have been afforded for whatever reason more chances than many. I want to give others – most especially those whom I regard as the least deserving – that same chance to look back on their life and feel as I do when I look back on mine.

A rough Guide to the Wars of the Roses –

Part II –  a culture of claim & counter-claim.

Edward III: sire of princes & father of the Royal Dukes

In addition to the Black Prince, Edward (of Woodstock) Prince of Wales, Edward III had four other sons: Lionel (of Antwerp); John (of Ghent/Gaunt); Edmund (of Langley); and Thomas (of Woodstock). In line with his elevated notions of royal blood Edward III broke with precedent and, following the French custom and as his sons came of age or married, he created them Royal Dukes rather than mere Earls.

The Plantagenet family now literally lorded it over the rest of the nobility. Additionally these royal dukes had significant royal lands bestowed upon them – often landholdings located in the more distant reaches of the kingdom which had been largely in crown hands since the Norman confiscations – or as a consequence of successful waging of war – the far west of England – the north of England and along the Marches of Wales and within Wales. These royal dukes were also useful in providing marriageable sons into ancient noble houses like the Neville, Percy and Mortimer. They then were a natural focal point for crown-led local government and for regional administration organised in informal royal councils in Wales; in the North of England and all along its debatable Scots border; and in Devon and Cornwall.

A suitably heroic Victorian impression of the Black Prince….

So it was that the younger brothers of Edward Prince of Wales were all made dukes – Lionel (of Antwerp) was created Duke of Clarence; John of Gaunt (i.e. Ghent) was created Duke of Lancaster; Edmund of Langley was created Duke of York. Edward III’s youngest son, Thomas (of Woodstock) – was as yet unmarried when his father died in 1377. On his accession Richard II continued his grandfather’s tradition by making his Uncle Thomas, the Duke of Gloucester. It turned out there was little gratitude in noble preferment. Gloucester of all the king’s paternal ducal uncles harboured a truly royal ambition.

These ducal titles have since been employed and reemployed for the same purpose of elevating in title Princes of the Blood above the nobility. It is therefore to Edward III that we owe the tradition of royal dukes and royal duchies.

Richard II & the family rivalry begins:

Richard II was only 10 on his accession in 1377.

If previous Plantagenet minorities were a mixed bag at least both Henry III and Edward III  had survived the storms of faction to reign supreme. From those precedents Richard II could reasonably have hoped to survive his own minority even if it was to be one marked by the predations of his relatives. As matters turned out his minority rather was marked by regal authority mature for its years; and his majority by an equally immature imperious grandiosity.

All successful kingship rests heavily on the temperament of the king. In husbanding this vital quality the Plantagenet kings had owned a long if patchy history. King John had lost most of his family’s personal Angevin Empire leaving him England alone and he almost lost his English throne as well before timely death saved matters for his baby son, Henry III. Richard II’s great grandfather Edward II had lost not only his better judgement in affairs of the heart but he also lost his throne to his wife and his life itself at he hands her scheming lover Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March.

Richard II’s accession in 1377 was therefore met with some trepidation. Initially  it fell to Richard II’s uncles to provide him with sound support and wise advice. As by this time both Edward the Black Prince and Lionel, Duke of Clarence had gone to their graves that duty of care of the young king fell largely to Edward’s third son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; and his fourth son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York and the youngest, Thomas of Woodstock whom Richard as aforementioned had made Duke of Gloucester for his coronation.

As Richard was now sole heir of the Black Prince his marriage was the only means of continuing the senior Plantagenet line. His marriage to Anne of Bohemia was a personal success but from it, it was quickly apparent there was to be no heir apparent. The reason almost certainly rested with Anne rather than Richard but the failure to make legitimate issue created issues that would play out in bouts of repeated political unrest.

The second line to the throne descended via Lionel, Duke of Clarence. It was similarly perilous since Lionel had only one surviving child before his death – Phillipa of Clarence. She had married the 3rd Earl of March, Edmund Mortimer and she and March together had two sons – Roger Mortimer and Edmund Mortimer.

Whilst Richard II had no children these two Brothers Mortimer were nearest in line to the succession and in 1486 – his own marriage being without issue – Richard II informally named the elder cousin, Roger Mortimer to be his heir presumptive. Given that matrilineal descent from Empress Matilda had established the succession of the first Plantagenet king, Henry II, there was nothing out of the way in Richard II’s nomination of his cousin.

The family tree that led to a family at war with itself…

However, prudence was not always to be the hallmark of Richard II’s reign – like that of his great grandfather, Edward II – his reign was strewn with incident and adversity. When he was still only 13 he faced the most serious challenge to the post conquest English monarchy – in the form of a popular insurrection known as the Peasants’ Revolt. In 1381 it almost ended in a political disaster and also almost ended the Plantagenet dynasty. The rebellion had been stirred over the imposition of a Poll Tax to pay for continued wars in France. It was not his wise uncles on the royal council – led by John of Gaunt – but the inexperienced king himself who rode to the rescue of the monarchy and nobility. By his bold action he saved his throne and after Watt Tyler was butchered in a melee it was the king’s cry to the milling peasantry –  ‘I am your captain follow me’ –  that saved the day.

Afterwards there were recriminations and tensions in the court. The king was wary of his family. That wariness was reinforced by repeated military failures in France which also inevitably brought about a cooling of relations between uncles and royal nephew. John of Gaunt withdrew first from the king’s Council and then from the kingdom – ostensibly to pursue his claim to the throne of Portugal.  Richard did not turn to his other uncles – York and Gloucester – but instead promoted his own men – primarily the de la Poles and the de Vere Earl of Oxford and his powerful regional affinity. The latter became a particular royal favourite and like all  medieval royal favourites de Vere became particularly detested. Richard ignored the clamour of the royal dukes and made his upstart friend Duke of Ireland. The upstart was now an equal; that was intolerable. The royal dukes were then cast aside from the royal council – that was not to be borne with.

Minor squabbles and major disagreements

The dukes and their sons –  led by Thomas (of Woodstock) whom Richard II had made Duke of Gloucester and Gaunt’s eldest son Henry (of Bolingbroke) –  were determined not to be so lightly set-aside by the king still nominally but a minor. They used their position to appeal matters in Parliament and thereby they hoped to force the king to set aside his new advisers. As a result of their appeal the royal and noble opposition became known collectively as the Lords Appellant. The lords however did not play straight with the king. As Richard II ‘s happy marriage to Anne of Bohemia had produced no children the Duke of Gloucester’s agents in Parliament – with their own axes to grind because of refused patronage – loudly whispered that there was something unnatural in the king’s relationship with de Vere. The accusation deliberately brought to mind the conduct of Edward II and thus caught light and spread like wild fire. Richard showed a regal disdain which although understandable was unhelpful to his cause.

The king, resentful,  parried and resisted but gradually he was forced to make concessions to the lords appellant whilst he secretly appealed to de Vere for assistance. The king’s ploy forced a confrontation and the so-called ‘lords appellant’ ambushed the king’s favourite de Vere at Radcot Bridge near Oxford. De Vere was heavily defeated and he and the de la Pole fled the country. Richard II’s victorious uncle, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester now forced the king to purge his chamber of his favourite chamber-knights and even forced the king to give up his old tutor Sir Simon de Burley. Gloucester then ensured – despite appeals form all sides including from his brother the Duke of York  – that they were all executed. Richard II was powerless to resist his uncle’s pretensions and bore the insult with an even countenance. Behind the shallow mask of manners there was another hidden – the face of revenge.

Restored to their monopoly of advice on council and at court the royal dukes gradually relented and everything returned to a sort of normal. Richard II, however, was biding his time. He never forgave Uncle Gloucester and he was now also as wary of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke – John of Gaunt’s eldest son – who had led the army which defeated de Vere at Radcot Bridge.

Thoughtfully, Richard recalled his senior uncle, John of Gaunt, from Spain. The old duke of Lancaster came back in a triumph and managed both the young king and the lords appellant and managed to restrain his own son from further confrontation with the king: family relations were mended and patched.  Richard II gradually asserted his own policy priorities over those of Gaunt – remaking English policy in France by seeking peace – and on the death of his first wife he cemented that policy by marrying the young French Princess Isabella. She, however, at the age of 7 was too young for child bearing.

Meanwhile, turning his attention to Ireland where rebellions had partly created the opportunity for the lords appellant to strike at his king’s friends through Parliament, Richard II raised an army 8000 strong of which he took personal command. He went on campaign in Ireland and quickly won a string of striking successes and his success raised his reputation back home in England.

Empowered, Richard suddenly struck down the unsuspecting appellant lords – arresting three of them whilst he had his Uncle Gloucester detained in Calais where he had him murdered. That murder of his own uncle in retrospect might be considered the moment when the so-called Wars of the Roses truly began. Richard also executed Arundel and Warwick and then set about breaking up their noble affinities in the localities – this time buying new friends on the way like the de Mowbray whom Richard cannily made up to duke of Norfolk. By this means he enhanced royal revenues and for the first time in his reign looked very much in control of politics. Old John of Gaunt and his son sided with Richard and as a reward Richard also made Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke Duke of Hereford in his own right.

Later, a row flared up between Bolingbroke, newly created duke of Hereford and the newly created duke of Norfolk which Parliament declared had to be settled by single combat. The king over-ruled and banished both Norfolk and Henry – the former for life and the latter for ten years. Bolingbroke fled to France but the French king wanted no war with England and was not minded to do more than offer his English royal cousin much more than royal hospitality.

Heartbroken by his son’s sudden disgrace, the tottering colossus that was John of Gaunt stood with the king but the old man had not much time left on earth. He died in 1399.

Richard II then took a fatal decision – to disinherit Henry Bolingbroke. He extended Bolingbroke’s banishment to life and effectively annexed the duchy of Lancaster to the crown.

The Duchy of Lancaster:

The House of Lancaster as a cadet branch of the Plantagenet line had origins much further back than the reign of Edward III. Originally Henry III’s second son , Edmund “Crouchback” (Crossed Back i.e. a crusader knight) was made Earl of Leicester; and later Earl of Lancaster. He was endowed with very considerable lands in the north and midlands. Edmund’s son Thomas played a prominent part in the reign of Edward II for which he was richly rewarded adding Ferrers Earldom of Derby and the Earldom of Lincoln to the family honours. He fell out with his royal cousin’s (Edward II) lover Piers Gaveston and after the disastrous defeat of Edward II at Bannockburn Thomas became England’s virtual governor. His success was short-lived and when Edward II reasserted his control of the government he had Thomas was executed in 1322.

Thomas had no heir so titles and lands had passed to his younger brother Henry who became third Earl of Lancaster. It was his son, Henry of Grosmont (born in Grosmont castle) who famously served in the renewed wars with France and was credited with saving the life of the Black Prince and thus became a favourite at the court of Edward III. Edward III created him successively, first Earl of Salisbury and then first Duke of Lancaster. Most unusually, Edward III made the entire county into a Palatinate. (Palatinates are princely fiefdoms independent of the crown. They were common in Europe – particularly in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. In England there were only three palatinates: the County of Durham (an ecclesiastical palatinate, belonging to the prince-bishop of Durham); the earldom of Chester (a crown palatinate); and the duchy of Lancaster.)

Henry, first Duke of Lancaster as it happened had no male heir and his only daughter Blanche of Lancaster was his heiress. Blanche married to Edward III’s third son, John of Gaunt (Ghent). On her father’s death Edward III created Blanche’s husband John of Gaunt, first Duke of Lancaster in the second creation. By then John of Gaunt was already Duke of Aquitaine and one of England’s richest nobles. He now inherited all the lands of Blanche and the royal palatinate remained part of his new royal duchy. By this marriage, therefore, the duke of Lancaster had considerably greater status than the other royal dukes.

The later dynastic claims of the House of Lancaster united Plantagenet descent both from cadet branch of Henry III with direct descent from Edward III’s third son, John of Gaunt.

John of Gaunt added a further footnote to this lineage of Lancaster in the form of bastard children. After the death of his first wife Blanche in 1469 Gaunt began an affair with Katherine Swynford – one of her privy chamber women. They had four children  – all given the family name Beaufort – John – later Duke of Somerset; Henry, later Cardinal and Bishop of Winchester; Thomas, later Duke of Exeter; Joan, later Countess of Westmoreland. After the death of his second wife in 1396, Gaunt married Katherine Swynford making her Duchess of Lancaster. Richard II – who had a soft spot both for Katherine and her children – made all their children legitimate by Act of Parliament – although the act itself provided the Beaufort could make no claim to the succession. At that time of course the House of Lancaster was replete with legitimate male claimants. The Beaufort were destined by fate to play a greater part in the future history of Lancaster.

The decision of Richard II to disinherit his cousin Bolingbroke was, therefore, more than simply a family affair. It struck at all the nobility. Henry Bolingbroke returned to England with an army ostensibly to reclaim his lands. He landed whilst Richard was in Ireland – on a mission to avenge the murder of his nominated heir Roger Mortimer who had been killed in a skirmish at Kells in County Meath. Whilst Richard was away Henry Bolingbroke easily won over his nervous fellow peers. Richard II returned and was quickly defeated and officially resigned his crown to Bolingbroke –  who was crowned Henry IV. Richard was murdered by agents of the new king.

Shortly thereafter Henry’s claim was tested by Richard’s legal heir the son of Roger Mortimer, Edmund, whose uncle, also confusingly an Edmund, at one stage was involved in a plot with Owen Glen-dower to remove the Lancastrian King Henry IV and divide the English kingdom into three parts – between himself and the two Mortimer branches of the Plantagenet line.

Henry IV held the Mortimer family in the Tower and other paces around London since they all possessed a senior claim over his own to the throne. Henry IV’s reign was marked by repeated challenges to the House of Lancaster as Henry IV tried to establish himself and his son firmly in the succession. Henry IV died in 1413 and shortly thereafter his son, Henry V renewed the war with France and reunited the nobility in a campaign that ended in the shock of a total and overwhelming English victory at Agincourt.  There were few English dead but amongst the few was Edmund Mortimer. It seemed at least the sun once again smiled on Plantagenet and the House of Lancaster now was secure as houses.

A rough guide to the wars of the Roses –

Burying King Richard III

Laying to rest the earthly remains of Richard III seems to have dug up a lot of a-historical nonsense long buried by good historical research. In the best of traditions the pantomime image of the hunchbacked Richard III has turned out not to be that far from the physical reality. Richard was indeed a hunchback. We have been breathlessly told this certainty would change history. Unsurprisingly, it has done no such thing. What the blizzard of Media interest did reveal was the depth of the shallows of common knowledge about England’s history.

King Richard III remains have been was re-interred in Leicester Cathedral with what passes these days for pomp, circumstance and – as the late Kenny Everett might have said –  “and all in the best possible taste”.  A royal duke; a royal countess; a Cardinal Archbishop; and, even the Archbishop of Canterbury were present to make history before our eyes. There was a a phalanx of Media historians as learned outriders. Revelations were promised. The circus has left Leicester. Gone and as easily forgotten as these events deservedly may be they have left me wondering whether anyone was really any the wiser from all the juggling of names and dates and all the clowning about in period costume.

As I’ve vociferously  complained about the silly things that have been said on Channel 4 and elsewhere I have asked myself could I do any better?

Best beloved, you must decide that for yourselves – here’s my Rough Guide to those pesky Wars of the Roses and the Plantagenet – of whom Richard III was only the last rose of the House of York’s once glorious summer.

Part I: The Wars and the Roses:

The wars in question are more a series of military engagements fought by various cadre of various branches of a single royal family or dynasty –  Plantagenet  – in the last decade of the fourteenth century and again the middle decades of the fifteenth century. They are taken to have ended in Bosworth Field in 1485 and with the death of Richard III and the accession of the first Tudor – Henry VII.

However, as there was no formal beginning to these so-called wars it should be no surprise that their ending was as similarly informal. The end date of 1485 was only formally noted from the lofty retrospect afforded from the theatrical stage in the 1590’s as set by William Shakespeare. By then another sun was setting on the last of another dynasty  – one that had made it largely because of the Wars of the Roses – the Tudors – for by the 1590’s the last Tudor, Elizabeth I, short of hair and long on make-up was long beyond child-bearing. Elizabeth was already making way for the progeny of her longtime rival Mary, Queen of Scots. That is another history….back to the Roses….

As these Wars of the Roses were largely bitter fruits of family feuding in that sense they partly and genuinely resemble the TV series Game of Thrones which took its inspiration from them.

The roses in question are red and white: the red rose is for Lancaster and the white rose is for York. These badges still survive in their respective county emblems to this day. The roses came to represent two cadet branches of the one family – the Plantagenet – for these wars were nothing if not an entirely family affair.

Their choice of roses of two colours as a badge of their conflict went back to a law case and subsequently to a confrontation in Temple Garden between the litigants. Its dull prose are poetically repainted in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part I: Act II, scene iv which itself symbolically portrays this occasion as the origin both of of the Wars and of the Roses. Richard Plantagenet (the figure on the left) who eventually became the Duke of York; Lord Protector and legal heir apparent to Henry VI, plucked a white rose as the emblem of his family branch, York; and his adversary, John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset (the figure on the right), picked a red rose as the badge of the other branch, Lancaster.

In Shakespeare’s play their followers then choose sides by plucking a red or white rose. This dramatic conceit works brilliantly on stage but is clouds a darker dynastic reality – the conflict reignited in Temple Gardens had its origin in an earlier act of regicide, when the son of the Duke of Lancaster (John of Gaunt’s eldest son) known as Henry Bolingbroke after the castle where he had been born, first had pushed aside Richard II; and then later almost certainly had the king murdered. Henry Bolingbroke succeeded Richard II in 1399 as Henry IV – and he was the first king of the House of Lancaster. His claim was always questionable and had always left many awkward questions of legitimacy unanswered. These questions were decisively but deceptively answered by Henry IV’s son, Henry V, in his victory at Agincourt but they resurfaced after Henry V’s untimely death in the political tensions during long minority of Henry VI.

The Royal Houses of Lancaster and York were therefore both branches of family Plantagenet. They respectively each took their names from the royal duchies of the two principals in this bloody struggle for the throne. Edward III had originally bestowed these titles on his younger sons. This is why they are described as the cadet branches of the same royal house or royal family. They are the junior lines to to the senior established line of succession just as today Prince Andrew and Prince Edward are the juniors to the senior line of their elder brother, Prince Charles. Similarly, Edward III’s eldest son (another Edward) was eldest son and heir to his father. He was nicknamed ‘the Black Prince’ because in battle he wore a black ostrich plume in his helmet. He had taken ostrich feathers or plumes to be part of his coat of arms as Prince of Wales (and heir apparent) when his father created the order of the Knights of the Garter and made his son the premier garter knight. To this day ostrich plumes have remained part of the regalia of any Prince of Wales.

Family Plantagenet

The family name ‘Plantagenet’ like the family name ‘Windsor’ was not originally a family or surname. It was a nickname. It not until the mid-fifteenth century that it was actually adopted as a family name – and then – and initially – only by one of the two principal protagonists: Richard, (3rd) Duke of York. Before then children of the Plantagenet royal dynasty were generally named after the place of their birth: for example – Edward of Woodstock (Prince of Wales – the Black Prince); Lionel of Antwerp; John of Ghent (i.e. Gaunt). Women heiresses by contrast often took the name of their noble house – Eleanor of Aquitaine; Blanche of Lancaster.

By the time the Yorkist branch adopted the family name Plantagenet in 1450 the struggle between Plantagenet royal cousins and their kindred already had been underway on and off for almost sixty years.

Plantagenet the Name

Plantegenest (Plante Genest) had been a 12th-century nickname of Geoffrey, Count of Anjou who commonly wore the flower on his hat or coat. Count Geoffrey married (Empress) Matilda who was the only child of the last Norman King of England, Henry I, who was himself the fourth son of the William the Conqueror (William I).

Count Geoffrey was Matilda’s second husband. Matilda’s first marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V had been childless. Hers was a title therefore above all titles and her children by Geoffrey bore the nickname ‘FitzEmpress’ (son of the Empress). Their eldest, Henry FitzEmpress, had another nickname Curtmantel (short coat) from the cut of his coat. However, generally, he is simply known as Henry II of England.

In addition to England and Normandy from his mother Henry II inherited Anjou, Touraine and Maine from his father Geoffrey; and shortly thereafter he acquired by marriage the lands of the duchy of  Aquitaine by marrying its heiress, Eleanor, Duke of Aquitaine in her own right and sometime Queen of France.  Altogether these lands in England and France – to which Henry II in due course added parts of Ireland, Brittany, the Vexin and parts of Southern France –  comprised the Angevin Empire.

Therefore, Henry II (1154-1189) is England’s first Plantagenet king.

The Plantagenet Dynasty:

The Plantagenet kings are commonly taken to compose four different houses or dynasties in history’s book: The Angevin; The Plantagenet; The House of Lancaster; The House of York.

Henry II & Eleanor of Aquitaine; foreground Richard I. In the same abbey at Fontevraud are buried the hearts both of King John and his son Henry III.

1. The House of Angevin: the Angevin kings are Henry II – and his sons, King Richard I (the Lionhearted) and King John. After the death of Henry II Kings Richard and John embarked on high risk, high tax polices which duly lost the family of most of its French possessions and as Henry II’s Empire collapsed, the barons became ever resentful of royal demands on their incomes. The stand off between crown and nobility was nominally settled by Magna Carta but even after making all these concessions King John struggled to hold on to the English throne. His sudden death accidentally secured the realm for his infant son, Henry III.

2. The House of  Plantagenet: this is the main line of the succession of English kings which runs from King John’s baby son and heir Henry III (1216-72); to Edward I (1272- 1307); to Edward II (1307- deposed Feb 1327 d. Sept. 1327 ); and gloriously to Edward III (1327 -1377); and finally to his grandson Richard II (1377- deposed 1399 d.1400).

3. The House of Lancaster: there are as we have seen three kings of the House of Lancaster: Henry IV ( Henry (of) Bolingbroke 1399-1413); Henry V (1413-1422) and famously the victor of Agincourt and King of France; and his son by Katherine of France, Henry VI (1422 -1461) (1470-1471 – imprisoned in the Tower d.1471).These three kings are the central figures in the Shakespeare history plays named for them and they played a very important part in shaping the political imagination of England’s governing class from Tudor times onward.

4. The House of York: there are three kings of the House of York: Edward IV; Edward V; Richard III. These too feature prominently in Shakespeare’s history – mainly in Henry VI Parts II & III and naturally enough in King Richard III, famously (over)played by Lawrence Olivier on film.

The Rival Claims:

The House of Lancaster and the House of York were as aforementioned both cadet branches of the main Plantagenet line of succession. The dynasty as can be seen from above already had had its troubles from time to time – with King John and then more notoriously with Edward II. However, everything had seemed to come good and heaven smiled on the monarchy of Edward III.

Edward III in his long reign re-made the Plantagenet dynasty afresh. he gave it a distinctly English image. Edward III was shrewd in marriage and politics: cautioned as he was by his father’s homosexual foibles; tutored as he was by his father’s failures; and later schooled as he was under the the presumptions of his mother’s lover – Roger Mortimer, Earl of March – the very man supposed to have arranged his father’s (Edward II) death with the infamous red hot poker, Edward III understood the rules of the game of thrones better than any of his family.

Edward III set aside tutelage of his mother and her upstart lover and despite his mother’s plea “fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer” Edward had gentle Mortimer ignominiously hanged at Tyburn. Edward III was not a prince to be sentimental about old family friends and ties of blood.

Edward III made a sound marriage to Phillipa of Hainault. His wars with France regained territories long lost to the Plantagenet dynasty. But Edward III reconquered those lost lands in France as King of England. This was an English Empire not an Angevin Empire restored. The wars he thus initiated became known as ‘The Hundred Years War’. The booty and the lands in France made the English nobility rich and by this means Edward III kept them engaged in his foreign enterprises – much as Louis XIV was later to do in France. It also gave the king a free hand to do as he wished in England.

By his marriage to Phillipa of Hainault Edward had a string of children most of whom unusually survived to adulthood. His eldest son, “the Black Prince” Edward, Prince of Wales became the principal agent of the dynasty’s political project in France. His chivalrous image as a knight of the garter; as the hero of Crecy, Poitier and Reims; disguised the fact he was something of a brutal thug. In France “the Black Prince” fought a string of military campaigns as notable for their violent savagery and as their strategic brilliance. He married his cousin Joan of Kent – herself a direct descendant of Edward I – by whom he had two sons Edward of Angoulême and Richard of Bordeaux. All then seemed set fair when the young Edward of Angoulême died suddenly in 1375. As so often in royal history, one dynastic tragedy was followed by another.

By 1375 the Black Prince himself had long been plagued by what may have been recurrent bouts of amoebic dysentery acquired on campaign in Portugal. The Black Prince died in 1376. He was buried in Canterbury Cathedral. His effigy and tomb have become an archetype for his age. Then in 1377 Black Prince’s father Edward III as suddenly quickly followed his eldest son to the grave.

Suddenly the dynasty was left in the insecure hands of the ten year old Richard of Bordeaux. He succeeded his grandfather Edward III in 1377 as Richard II. By culture and education and outlook the boy-king was a product of Edward’s new monarchy. Unfortunately the boy-king Richard II combined the lofty royal condescension of Edward III’s kingship with another less desirable Plantagenet character trait – he had that same strong stubborn streak the Plantagenet kings manifested most often in their overbearing irrational affections – blind loyalty to flawed friends and irrational hatred of supposed enemies.

The family tree that led to a family at war with itself…