The Family of Richard III

The Wars of the Roses were quarrels within the Plantagenet family. They were about family trees – the capacity of family relationships both to unite and to divide – and notoriously about the slaughter of cousins, in laws, brothers, and nephews. The house of York, the dynasty of Richard, Duke of York (the future Richard III), won the first war.

The 1460s are about the explosion of Edward IV’s family – his brothers (Richard III and George, Duke of Clarence), his wife and in laws, and his own offspring – and ends in a trial of strength between them. The painful choices are illustrated by George, Duke of Clarence, who measured his own interests against those of his brother and his dynasty, reaching contradictory conclusions. The 1470s are about a second explosion of the house of York, its division into separate nuclear families competing against each other, about the kings preferences, and in 1483 a sudden violent resolution. Richard III claimed to be his brother’s heir. The Yorkist establishment refused and shared in Richard’s destruction.

Henry VII, a Yorkist in law, fathered the real heirs to the house of York. Henry VII is ancestor of the houses of Tudor, Stuart, Hanover and Windsor. He helped his wife’s sisters and niece to marry, spreading more widely the Yorkist blood that the true heir Henry VIII found so threatening. Both Henry VII and Henry VIII tried to cut out their dangerous Yorkist heirs but failed. Many thousands of descendants of Richard, Duke of York, survive, some more interested in their lineage than others, and this book concludes with an analysis of Richard's DNA and his 'family' as it exists today.