Was He A Usurper? King Edward IV. Part IV.

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3rd Duke of York, Anne Mortimer, Battle of Agincourt, House of Lancaster, House of York, King Henry VIII of England, Richard of Cambridge, Richard Plantagenet, Wars of the Roses

Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York (September 21, 1411 – December 30, 1460), also named Richard Plantagenet, was a leading English magnate and claimant to the throne during the Wars of the Roses. He was a member of the ruling House of Plantagenet by virtue of being a direct male-line descendant of Edmund of Langley, King Edward III’s fourth surviving son.

Richard of York was born on September 22, 1411, the son of Richard, 3rd Earl of Cambridge (1385–1415), and his wife Anne Mortimer (1388–1411). Both his parents were descended from King Edward III of England (1312–1377): his father was son of Edmund, 1st Duke of York (founder of the House of York), fourth surviving son of Edward III, whereas his mother Anne Mortimer was a great-granddaughter of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Edward’s second son.

After the death in 1425 of Anne’s childless brother Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, this ancestry supplied her son Richard, of the House of York, with a claim to the English throne that was arguably superior to that of the reigning House of Lancaster, descended from John of Gaunt, the third son of Edward III.

Richard, 3rd Duke of York also inherited vast estates and served in various offices of state in Ireland, France and England, a country he ultimately governed as Lord Protector during the mental illness of King Henry VI.

Richard’s mother, Anne Mortimer, died during or shortly after his birth, and his father Richard, the Earl of Cambridge was beheaded in 1415 for his part in the Southampton Plot against the Lancastrian King Henry V.

Within a few months of his father’s death, Richard’s childless uncle, Edward, 2nd Duke of York, was slain at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and so Richard inherited Edward’s title and lands, becoming 3rd duke of York. The lesser title but greater estates of the Mortimer family, along with their claim to the throne, also descended to him on the death of his maternal uncle Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, in 1425.

Once Richard, 3rd Duke of York inherited the vast Mortimer estates, he also became the wealthiest and most powerful noble in England, second only to the King Henry VI himself. An account shows that York’s net income from Welsh and marcher lands alone was £3,430 (about £350,000 today) in the year 1443–44.

In 1450, the defeats and failures of the English royal government of the previous ten years boiled over into serious political unrest. In January Adam Moleyns, Lord Privy Seal and Bishop of Chichester, was lynched. In May the chief councillor of the king, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk, was murdered on his way into exile. The House of Commons demanded that the king take back many of the grants of land and money he had made to his favourites.

In June, Kent and Sussex rose in revolt. Led by Jack Cade (taking the name Mortimer), they took control of London and killed James Fiennes, 1st Baron Saye and Sele, the Lord High Treasurer of England. In August, the final towns held in Normandy fell to the French and refugees flooded back to England.

On September 7, Richard, 3rd Duke of York landed at Beaumaris, Anglesey. Evading an attempt by King Henry VI to intercept him, and gathering followers as he went, the Duke of York arrived in London on September 27. After an inconclusive (and possibly violent) meeting with the king, York continued to recruit, both in East Anglia and the west. The violence in London was such that Somerset, back in England after the collapse of English Normandy, was put in the Tower of London for his own safety.

York’s public stance was that of a reformer, demanding better government and the prosecution of the “traitors” who had lost northern France. Judging by his later actions, there may also have been a more hidden motive—the destruction of Somerset, who was soon released from the Tower. York’s men made several attacks on the properties and servants of the Duke of Somerset, who was to be the focus of attack in Parliament.

Was He A Usurper? King Edward IV of England. Part III.

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3rd Duke of York, 3rd Earl of Cambridge, Battle of Agincourt, Duke of Alençon, King Edward IV of England, Richard of Conisburgh, Richard Plantagenet

Before I move onto Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, I would like to finish telling the story of his father, Richard of Conisburgh, 3rd Earl of Cambridge, husband of Anne Mortimer

Southampton Plot

In the Parliament of 1414, Richard was created Earl of Cambridge, a title formerly held by his elder brother, Edward, 2nd Duke of York, who had earlier ceased to be Earl of Cambridge either by resignation or deprivation of the title.

Richard’s creation as Earl of Cambridge in 1414, however, brought with it no accompanying grant of lands, and according to Harriss, Cambridge was ‘the poorest of the earls’ who were to set out on Henry V’s invasion of France.

As a result, he lacked the resources to equip himself properly for the expedition. Perhaps partly for this reason, Cambridge conspired with Lord Scrope and Sir Thomas Grey to depose King Henry V and place his late wife Anne’s brother, Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, on the throne.

On July 31 Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March revealed the Southampton Plot to the king. Later, he served on the commission that condemned the Earl of Cambridge to death.

Although the Earl of Cambridge pleaded with the king for clemency, he received none and was beheaded on August 5, 1415 and buried in the chapel of God’s House at Southampton (now St. Julien’s Church, Southampton). The fleet set sail for France a few days later, on August 11, 1415.

Richard’s brother, Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York, himself was not implicated in the conspiracy, and he departed with the army for France. He was present at the Siege of Harfleur, where he made his will on August 17, 1415, then he commanded the van on the army’s march through northern France.

The 2nd Duke of York commanded the right wing at the Battle of Agincourt on October 25, 1415, during which he became the highest-ranking English casualty. According to some witnesses, he rushed forward to save King Henry V who had been assisting his younger brother, Humphrey of Gloucester, and had been assailed and wounded by the Jean, 2nd Duke of Alençon.

The Duke York’s intervention saved the King’s life but cost the duke his own. His death has been variously attributed to a head wound and to being ‘smouldered to death’ by ‘much heat and pressing’. York was buried in the Church of St Mary and All Saints, Fotheringhay, where he had earlier established a college for a master and twelve chaplains.

Legacy

Although the Cambridge’s title was forfeited, he was not attainted, and his four-year-old son Richard was his heir. After the Earl of Cambridge’s elder brother was slain at Agincourt, the Earl of Cambridge’s four-year-old son Richard Plantagenet eventually inherited his uncle’s titles and estates as well as his father’s.

In the parliament of 1461, King Edward IV had the sentence that had been passed his grandfather, Richard, Earl of Cambridge, annulled as ‘irregular and unlawful’.

November 24, 1394: Birth of Charles, Duke of Orléans

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Battle of Agincourt, Charles of Orléans, Duke of Burgundy, Henry V of England, Hundred Years War, Jean the Fearless, Louis I of Orléans, Marie of Cleves, Poem, Prisoner, Valentina Visconti

From the Emperor’s Desk: Yesterday I featured Louis I, Duke of Orléans On the anniversary of his murder. Today I am featuring his son, Charles, Duke of Orléans Orléans, on the anniversary of his birth.

Charles of Orléans (November 24, 1394 – January 5, 1465) was Duke of Orléans from 1407, following the murder of his father, Louis I, Duke of Orléans. He was also Duke of Valois, Count of Beaumont-sur-Oise and of Blois, Lord of Coucy, and the inheritor of Asti in Italy via his mother Valentina Visconti

He is now remembered as an accomplished medieval poet, owing to the more than five hundred extant poems he produced, written in both French and English, during his 25 years spent as a prisoner of war and after his return to France.

Accession

Charles was born in Paris, the son of Louis I, Duke of Orléans and Valentina Visconti, daughter of Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan and his first wife Isabelle of Valois, a daughter of King Jean II the Good of France by his first wife, Bonne of Bohemia.

Charles acceded to the Duchy of Orléans at the age of thirteen after his father had been assassinated on the orders of Jean the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. Charles was expected to carry on his father’s leadership against the Burgundians, a French faction which supported Jean the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy.

The latter was never punished for his role in Louis’ assassination, and Charles had to watch as his grief-stricken mother Valentina Visconti succumbed to illness not long afterwards. At her deathbed, Charles and the other boys of the family were made to swear the traditional oath of vengeance for their father’s murder.

During the early years of his reign as duke, the orphaned Charles was heavily influenced by the guidance of his father-in-law, Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac, for which reason Charles’ faction came to be known as the Armagnacs.

Imprisonment

After war with the Kingdom of England was renewed in 1415, Charles was one of the many French noblemen at the Battle of Agincourt on October 25, 1415. He was discovered unwounded but trapped under a pile of corpses. He was taken prisoner by the English, and spent the next twenty-four years as their hostage. After his capture, his entire library was moved by Yolande of Aragon to Saumur, to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

He was held at various locations, moved from one castle to another in England, including the Tower of London, and Pontefract Castle – the castle where England’s young King Richard II, cousin once removed of the then incumbent English King Henry V, had been imprisoned and died 15 years earlier at the age of 33.

The conditions of his confinement were not strict; he was allowed to live more or less in the manner to which he had become accustomed, like so many other captured nobles. However, he was not offered release in exchange for a ransom, since the English King Henry V had left instructions forbidding any release: Charles was the natural head of the Armagnac faction and in the line of succession to the French throne, and was therefore deemed too important to be returned to circulation.

Poetry

It was during these twenty-four years that Charles would write most of his poetry, including melancholy works which seem to be commenting on the captivity itself, such as En la forêt de longue attente.

The majority of his output consists of two books, one in French and the other in English, in the ballade and rondeau fixed forms. Though once controversial, it is now abundantly clear that Charles wrote the English poems which he left behind when he was released in 1440. Unfortunately, his acceptance in the English canon has been slow. A. E. B. Coldiron has argued that the problem relates to his “approach to the erotic, his use of puns, wordplay, and rhetorical devices, his formal complexity and experimentation, his stance or voice: all these place him well outside the fifteenth-century literary milieu in which he found himself in England.

One of his poems, Is she not passing fair?, was translated by Louisa Stuart Costello and set to music by Edward Elgar. Claude Debussy set three of his poems to music in his Trois Chansons de Charles d’Orléans, L.92, for unaccompanied mixed choir. Reynaldo Hahn set six of them : Les Fourriers d’été, Comment se peut-il faire ainsi, Un loyal cœur (Chansons et Madrigaux – 1907) ; Quand je fus pris au pavillon, Je me mets en votre mercy, Gardez le trait de la fenêtre (Rondels – 1899).

Freedom

Finally freed in 1440 by the efforts of his former enemies, Philippe the Good and Isabella of Portugal, the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy, he set foot on French soil again after 25 years, by now a middle aged man at 46 and “speaking better English than French,” according to the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed. Philippe the Good had made it a condition that the murder of Charles’ father Louis of Orleans by Philip’s own father, Jean the Fearless, would not be avenged (Jeann himself had been assassinated in 1419.)

Charles agreed to this condition prior to his release. Meeting the Duchess of Burgundy after disembarking, the gallant Charles said: “M’Lady, I make myself your prisoner.” At the celebration of his third marriage, with Marie of Cleves, he was created a Knight of the Golden Fleece. His subsequent return to Orléans was marked by a splendid celebration organised by the citizens.

He made an unsuccessful attempt to press his claims to Asti in Italy, before settling down as a celebrated patron of the arts. He died at Amboise in his 71st year.

Marriage and children

Charles married three times. His first wife Isabella of Valois (daughter of Charles VI of France and Isabeau of Bavaria, and widow of Richard II of England), whom he married in Compiègne in 1406, and died in childbirth. Their daughter, Joan married Jean II of Alençon in 1424 in Blois.

Afterwards, in 1410 he married Bonne of Armagnac, the daughter of Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac and his wife Bonne of Berry. Bonne died before he returned from captivity. The couple had no mutual children
.
On his return to France in 1440, Charles married Marie of Cleves in Saint-Omer (daughter of Adolph I, Duke of Cleves and Maria of Burgundy, Duchess of Cleves (1393 – 1466) who was the second child of Jean the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria, and an elder sister of Philippe the Good.

Maria of Burgundy became the second wife of Adolph, Count of Mark in May 1406. He was made the 1st Duke of Cleves in 1417. They were the grandparents of King Louis XII of France and the great-grandparents of Johann III, Duke of Cleves, father of Anne of Cleves, who was fourth Queen consort of Henry VIII of England. By their daughter, Catherine, they were ancestors of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Charles and Maria had three children:

Marie of Orléans (1457 – 1493). Married Jean of Foix in 1483.

Louis XII of France (1462–1515)

Anne of Orléans (1464–1491), Abbess of Fontevrault and Holy Cross Abbey Poitiers.

Titles of the British Monarch. Part II.

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Battle of Agincourt, Charles IV of France, Charles VI of France, coronation, Edward III of England, Henry VI of England, Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, Philippe VI of France, Reims Cathedral, Salic Law, Siege of Orléans, Titles of the British Monarch, Treaty of Troyes

Claims to the French Throne

When King Charles IV of France died on February 1, 1328 without a surviving male heir, it ended the direct line of the Capetian Dynasty which had ruled France since the election and accession of King Hughes Capét on July 3, 987 by the prelate of Reims.

King Charles VI of France

Twelve years prior to the death of Charles IV, a rule against succession by women, arguably derived from the Salic Law, had been recognised – with some dissent – as controlling succession to the French throne. The application of this rule barred Charles’s one-year-old daughter Mary, by Jeanne d’Évreux, from succeeding as the monarch, but Jeanne was also pregnant at the time of Charles’s death.

Since she might have given birth to a son, a regency was set up under the heir presumptive Philippe of Valois, son of Charles of Valois and a member of the House of Valois, the next most senior branch of the Capetian dynasty.

After two months, Jeanne gave birth to another daughter, Blanche, and thus Philippe became king and in May and was consecrated and crowned Philippe VI. Edward III of England argued, however, that although the Salic law should forbid inheritance by a woman, it did not forbid inheritance through a female line – under this argument, Edward III, son of Queen Isabella, wife of Edward II and daughter of Philippe IV, should have inherited the throne.

At first, King Edward III seemed to accept Philippe VI’s succession. However, in 1337 Edward III declared himself the rightful heir to the French throne. This started what became known as the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). Following some initial setbacks, this first phase of the war went exceptionally well for England; victories at Crécy and Poitiers led to the highly favourable Treaty of Brétigny, in which England made territorial gains, and Edward renounced his claim to the French throne.

Revival of the claims to France

By 1378, under King Charles V the Wise and the leadership of Bertrand du Guesclin, the French had reconquered most of the lands ceded to King Edward III in the Treaty of Brétigny (signed in 1360), leaving the English with only a few cities on the continent.

Arms of Henry VI of England.

In the following decades, the weakening of royal authority, combined with the devastation caused by the Black Death of 1347–1351 (with the loss of nearly half of the French population and between 20% and 33% of the English population) and the major economic crisis that followed, led to a period of civil unrest in both countries. These crises were resolved in England earlier than in France.

Lancastrian Phase of the Hundred Years War

The newly crowned Henry V of England seized the opportunity presented by the mental illness of Charles VI of France and the French civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians to revive the conflict.

In 1415 the army of Charles VI was crushed by the English at the Battle of Agincourt, which led to Charles’ signing of the Treaty of Troyes, which entirely disinherited his son, the Dauphin and future Charles VII, in favour of his future son-in-law Henry V of England. Henry was thus made regent and heir to the throne of France, and Charles VI married him to his daughter Catherine de Valois.

Henry V and Catherine de Valois had a son, Henry, born on December 6, 1421 at Windsor Castle. The young Henry succeeded to the throne as King Henry VI of England at the age of nine months on September 1, 1422, the day after his father’s death; he remains the youngest person ever to succeed to the English throne. On October 21, 1422, in accordance with the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, he became titular King of France upon the death of his grandfather King Charles VI of France. His mother, the 20-year-old Catherine of Valois, was viewed with considerable suspicion by English nobles as Charles VI’s daughter. Therefore she was prevented from playing a full role in her son’s upbringing.

However Charles VI’s own son, the disinherited Dauphin, was regarded as the true heir by the French. At the same time, a civil war raged in France between the Armagnacs (supporters of the House of Valois) and the Burgundian party (supporters of the House of Valois-Burgundy allied to the English).

With his court removed to Bourges, south of the Loire River, Charles VII was disparagingly called the “King of Bourges”, because the area around this city was one of the few remaining regions left to him. However, his political and military position improved dramatically with the emergence of Joan of Arc as a spiritual leader in France.

Joan of Arc and other charismatic figures led French troops to lift The Siege of Orléans in 1429 which announced the beginning of the end for English hopes of conquest.

With the local English troops dispersed, the people of Reims switched allegiance and opened their gates, which enabled the coronation of Charles VII in 1429 at Reims Cathedral.

In reaction to the coronation of Charles VII on July 17, 1429, at Reims Cathedral, Henry was soon crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey on November 6, 1429, aged 7. This was folowed by his own coronation as King of France at Notre-Dame de Paris on December 16, 1431, aged 10. He was the only English king to be crowned king in both England and France.

Despite the eventual capture of Joan of Arc by the Burgundians and her execution in 1431, a series of crushing French victories such as those at Patay in 1429, Formigny in 1450 and Castillon in 1453 concluded the Hundred Years War in favour of France and the Valois dynasty.

England permanently lost most of its continental possessions, with only the Pale of Calais remaining under its control on the continent, until it too was lost in the Siege of Calais in 1558.

Despite his brief reign in France, Henry VI of England is not recognized as a legitimate King of France.

The claim to the title of “King of France” was nonetheless not relinquished and was retained in pretense by the English/British monarchs until the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, by which time the French monarchy had been overthrown by the French Revolution.