Plantagenet

All figures

• Eleanor of Aquitaine1122 – 1204
• Henry II1133 – 1189
• Richard I1157 – 1199
• John1166 – 1216
• Henry III1207 – 1272
• Edward I1239 – 1307
• Edward II1284 – 1327
• Edward III1312 – 1377
• Edward the Black Prince1330 – 1376
• John of Gaunt1340 – 1399
• Henry IV1367 – 1413
• Richard II1367 – 1400
• Henry V1386 – 1422
• Henry VI1421 – 1471
• Margaret of Anjou1430 – 1482
• Edward IV1442 – 1483
• Richard III1452 – 1485
• Elizabeth of York1466 – 1503
• Edward V1470 – 1483

Related events

• Marriage

  Marriage of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine

  1152

  Two months after Eleanor's annulment from Louis VII of France, she married Henry, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, in Poitiers on 18 May 1152. The match brought her vast duchy under Henry's control and, when he became king of England two years later, created the Angevin Empire — a French king's vassal who now controlled more of France than the king himself.

  Also involved: Capetian (Eleanor's first husband's house)

• Conflict

  Battle of Bouvines

  1214· this dynasty: defeated

  The decisive battle of medieval France. On 27 July 1214 Philip II Augustus crushed a coalition of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV, Count Ferdinand of Flanders, and the English under John, ending the Plantagenet attempt to recover the continental holdings John had lost a decade earlier. Bouvines confirmed France as the dominant power of Latin Europe and broke John's standing at home — the Magna Carta crisis followed within a year.

  Also involved: Capetian (victor)

• Event

  Magna Carta

  1215

  On 15 June 1215, in a meadow at Runnymede, John of England sealed the Great Charter under duress from an alliance of rebellious barons. The document compelled the king to respect certain feudal rights, established that no free man could be imprisoned without the lawful judgment of his peers, and bound the crown to the rule of law. John repudiated it within weeks and Pope Innocent III voided it; later kings reissued it, and it became the foundational text of English constitutional liberty.

• Conflict

  Battle of Crécy

  1346· this dynasty: victor

  On 26 August 1346, Edward III's English army of roughly twelve thousand destroyed a French force perhaps three times its size at Crécy in Ponthieu. The Welsh and English longbowmen broke wave after wave of French knightly charges; the sixteen-year-old Black Prince commanded the vanguard. The battle announced English military supremacy of the early Hundred Years' War and dethroned the heavily armored knight as Europe's dominant battlefield weapon.

  Also involved: Capetian (defeated (under Valois cadet branch))

• Conflict

  Battle of Agincourt

  1415· this dynasty: victor

  On 25 October 1415, Henry V's exhausted and outnumbered English army won the most lopsided victory of the Hundred Years' War. Trapped between the woods of Agincourt and the marshy Tramecourt valley, the heavily armored French knights bogged in mud while English longbow arrows fell among them at a thousand-volley-per-minute rate. Casualty estimates vary wildly but the French lost much of their nobility; the English lost perhaps a hundred dead.

  Also involved: Capetian (defeated (under Valois))

• Conflict

  Wars of the Roses

  1455 – 1487

  Thirty-two years of intermittent civil war between the Lancastrian and Yorkist branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, triggered by the recurring incapacity of Henry VI and the rival claim of Richard, Duke of York. The conflict produced six battles in the 1450s–1460s, the murderous reign of Edward IV, the disappearance of his sons in the Tower, and the final defeat of Richard III at Bosworth in 1485. Resolved by the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York the following year.

  Also involved: Tudor (ultimate beneficiary)

• Conflict

  Battle of Bosworth Field

  1485· this dynasty: destroyed

  On 22 August 1485, Henry Tudor's army of perhaps five thousand met Richard III's larger royal force on Ambion Hill in Leicestershire. The crucial defection of the Stanleys mid-battle, and Richard's reckless personal charge in an attempt to kill Henry himself, decided the outcome. Richard III became the last English king to die in battle; Henry VII was crowned on the field. The Plantagenet dynasty ended on the same hour the Tudor dynasty began.

  Also involved: Tudor (founded)

• Marriage

  Marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York

  1486· this dynasty: absorbed via Elizabeth

  On 18 January 1486 Henry Tudor married Elizabeth of York, eldest surviving daughter of Edward IV, in Westminster Abbey. The match fused the warring Lancastrian and Yorkist branches of the Plantagenet house, ending the Wars of the Roses by dynastic union rather than continued bloodshed. Their grandson Henry VIII would be the result; through their granddaughter Margaret, the union also transmitted the English crown to the Stuart line a century later.

  Also involved: Tudor

See also