cleopatrasdaughter:make me choose: @kingwilliamvandqueencatherine: lancaster or yorkPrick not your f

cleopatrasdaughter:make me choose: @kingwilliamvandqueencatherine: lancaster or yorkPrick not your finger as you pluck it off,Lest bleeding you do paint the white rose red.And fall on my side so, against your will.— William Shakespeare, ‘Henry VI P1’The Royal House of Lancaster was descended from John of Gaunt, who married Blanche of Lancaster, heiress to the original Lancastrian family. Edward III married all his sons to wealthy English heiresses rather than following his predecessors’ practice of finding continental political marriages for royal princes. Henry of Grosmont, 1st Duke of Lancaster, had no male heir so Edward married his son John to Henry’s heiress daughter and John’s third cousin Blanche of Lancaster. This gave John the vast wealth of the House of Lancaster. Their son Henry usurped the throne in 1399, creating one of the factions in the Wars of the Roses. There was an intermittent dynastic struggle between the descendants of Edward III. In these wars, the term Lancastrian became a reference to members of the family and their supporters. The family provided England with three kings: Henry IV, who ruled from 1399 to 1413, Henry V (1413–1422), and Henry VI (1422–1461 and 1470–1471).The House became extinct in the male line upon the murder in the Tower of London of Henry VI, following the battlefield execution of his son Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, by supporters of the House of York in 1471. Lancastrian cognatic descent—from John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster’s daughter Phillipa—continued in the royal houses of Spain and Portugal while the Lancastrian political cause was maintained by Henry Tudor—a relatively unknown scion of the Beauforts—eventually leading to the establishment of the House of Tudor. The Lancastrians left a legacy through the patronage of the arts—most notably in founding Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge—but to historians’ chagrin their propaganda, and that of their Tudor successors, means that it is Shakespeare’s partly fictionalized history plays rather than medievalist scholarly research that has the greater influence on modern perceptions of the dynasty. -- source link

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