King Edward IV

1442 – 1483 · Generation XX · King of England (r. 1461–1483) · House of Plantagenet

Edward IV, the first Yorkist king of England, was born at Rouen in Normandy on 28 April 1442, while his father Richard, Duke of York, was governing what remained of English France. His mother was Cecily Neville. Both parents descended from Edward III, and as Henry VI’s rule collapsed into faction and his mind into periodic breakdown, York’s claim to the throne became a live question. Known as Earl of March in his youth, Edward was fighting beside the Yorkist lords by his teens. In July 1460 he commanded a division at Northampton, where Henry VI was captured, and later that year Parliament recognised York as Henry’s heir.

Everything changed on 30 December 1460, when York and Edward’s brother Edmund were killed after defeat at Wakefield. At eighteen Edward became head of the Yorkist cause. On 2 February 1461 he defeated a Lancastrian army at Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire, where a parhelion, three suns in the sky, appeared before the battle. He adopted the “sun in splendour” as his emblem. After Warwick lost the second battle of St Albans, the two men joined forces in London, where Edward was proclaimed king on 4 March. Later that month, on 29 March, he won at Towton in Yorkshire, fought in a snowstorm and probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. Henry, Margaret and their son fled to Scotland, and Edward was crowned on 28 June 1461. Contemporaries such as Philippe de Commines describe a good-looking, easy-mannered and vigorous young man, and at about 6 feet 4 inches he was unusually tall. He dressed to make the contrast with frail Henry VI as sharp as possible.

For his first years on the throne he depended on his cousin Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, later called “the Kingmaker,” who stamped out the last Lancastrian strongholds in the far north and directed England’s diplomacy. Edward broke that dependence in the most personal way. On 1 May 1464 he secretly married Elizabeth Woodville, a widow of modest rank whose first husband had died fighting for Lancaster, while Warwick was negotiating a French match for him. When the marriage became known that autumn, Warwick was humiliated, and the favours Edward heaped on the queen’s many relatives built up a rival faction at court. Edward then chose alliance with Burgundy over Warwick’s French policy, marrying his sister Margaret to Duke Charles the Bold in 1468.

Warwick turned against him, drawing in Edward’s brother George, Duke of Clarence. In 1469 the king was briefly held captive after a royal army was beaten at Edgecote. In September 1470 Warwick, now allied with Margaret of Anjou and backed by Louis XI, landed in England to restore Henry VI, and Edward barely escaped to the Low Countries with his youngest brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester. He came back in March 1471, landing in Yorkshire with Burgundian support, and moved with remarkable speed. Warwick was defeated and killed at Barnet on 14 April, and on 4 May Edward crushed Margaret’s army at Tewkesbury, where her son Edward, Prince of Wales, died. Later that month Henry VI died in the Tower, and it is generally assumed that he was killed on Edward’s orders.

The second reign was steadier and harder. In 1475 Edward invaded France with a large army, but when his Burgundian ally proved unready he accepted terms from Louis XI at Picquigny, 75,000 crowns at once and a yearly pension of 50,000. The treaty is seen as the formal end of the Hundred Years’ War. Edward managed the royal finances closely, dealt in wool as a merchant in his own right and drew on crown lands and customs to free himself from reliance on parliamentary taxation. He sat in judgement in person, set up a council in the Welsh Marches under his young heir and made commercial treaties with Burgundy, France and the Hanseatic League. He rebuilt St George’s Chapel at Windsor, collected illuminated Flemish manuscripts that survive in the British Library, and befriended the printer William Caxton. Yet he had grown more suspicious, and in February 1478 he had Clarence executed in the Tower.

Edward’s health declined in his last years, and his physicians put this down partly to overeating. He fell ill at Easter 1483 and died on 9 April, aged forty, of a cause still unknown. He was buried at Windsor. A codicil to his will named Gloucester protector for his twelve-year-old son, Edward V, who was never crowned. Richard had the marriage to Elizabeth Woodville declared invalid on the ground of an earlier pre-contract with Lady Eleanor Talbot, took the throne himself, and Edward’s two sons disappeared in the Tower. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, later married Henry VII and joined the houses of York and Lancaster.

Place in the family

• King Edward IV was a grandfather of King Henry VIII.
• King Edward IV was the elder of 2 children of Richard of York and Cecily Neville recorded in this archive.
• The archive records 119 of his descendants, across 20 generations.

Images

• The marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, as imagined in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Jean de Wavrin’s Anciennes chroniques d’Angleterre. (Unknown illuminator, public domain)
• A gold rose noble of Edward IV, a coin struck from 1464, in the Bode-Museum, Berlin. (Daderot, public domain)
• Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, presents a copy of his translation of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, the text Caxton printed in 1477, to Edward IV, with the queen and the young Prince Edward beside him (c. 1480). (Unknown illuminator, public domain)
• Dacre’s Cross near Towton, North Yorkshire, which commemorates the battle of 1461 that confirmed Edward on the throne. (Chemical Engineer, public domain)

One of 26 people of House of Plantagenet (1126–1485) in this archive. The longest-reigning English house, counting its Angevin beginning and the rival Lancaster and York branches that fought the Wars of the Roses.

Line of descent: King William I The Conqueror → King Henry I → Matilda the Empress → King Henry II → King John → King Henry III → King Edward I Longshanks → King Edward II → King Edward III → Edmund of Langley → Richard of Conisburgh → Richard of York → King Edward IV.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

• Richard of York (1411 – 1460)
• Cecily Neville (1415 – 1495)

Siblings

• King Richard III (1452 – 1485)

Partners

• Married Elizabeth Woodville (1437 – 1492) in 1464 — 2 children together

Children

• Elizabeth of York (1466 – 1503)
• King Edward V (1470 – 1483)

Life

• 1442 — Born
• 1461 — Edward, son of Richard of York, is declared king by the Earl of Warwick following the Yorkist victory at the Battle of Towton.
• 1464 — Married Elizabeth Woodville
• 1464 — Edward marries Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of a commoner, offending Warwick.
• 1469 — Warwick falls out with Edward IV, and defeats him at Edgecote. They are later reconciled but Warwick is banished. He makes peace with Margaret, returns to England with an army, and Edward flees to Flanders. Henry VI is restored to the throne.
• 1471 — Edward returns to England from Flanders and defeats and kills Warwick at the Battle of Barnet.
• 1471 — Margaret is defeated at the Battle of Tewkesbury and the Lancastrian heir, Prince Edward, is killed. Soon after, Henry VI is murdered in the Tower of London.
• 1474 — Edward grants privileges to the Hanseatic League of North German trading cities to conduct trade in England.
• 1478 — Edward falls out with his brother George, Duke of Clarence, who is then murdered in the Tower, supposedly in a butt of malmsey wine.
• 1483 — Died
• 1483 — Death of Edward.

Sources

1. Edward IV · Wikipedia
2. Edward IV (king of England) · Encyclopaedia Britannica
3. Edward IV (r. 1461–1470 and 1471–1483) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)