Presenting...This is History: A Dynasty to Die For

called This is History. A Dynasty to Die for. Across the series, host Dan Jones tells the story of the Plantagenets, Britain's bloodiest dynasty. If you haven't heard of them, they're the family who's infighting and warmongering inspired George R. R. Martin, think Richard the Lionheart, the One Hundred Years War, Thomas Beckett,

and under Red Hot Pokers. They've just launched their tenth season, which tells the story of a brilliant young warrior king undone by his heart, the Shakespearean icon Richard I I, and the very unlikely rise of the mighty Tudor dynasty. If you want to listen ad free, This Is History our offering our Cautionary Club members a month's free trial of their Patreon look out for the giftlink. Here is the first episode of the new season, Enjoy.

just young, she's also physically tiny. The rooms she's lodged in at the castle have been comfortably set up for childbirth, the fires stoked, and the windows and doors sealed to prevent dangerous vapors from getting in. There's a full staff of female midwives and attendants on hand to help Margaret through her ordeal, but there's no ignoring the fact that her body and even her life are in real danger. Ah not that Margaret's panicking. She's a determined girl, and

she's putting on a brave face. Others may worry about her safety, but she's only concerned for one thing, her child. In the nine months that she's been carrying this baby, plague has been sweeping around Southwest Wales. It killed her husband, Edmund Tudor, striking him down last November at the age of twenty six. If plague gets into the birthing chamber, all Margaret's toil is going to be in vain. She

can't let that happen. Why not. Well, as well as the fierce maternal instinct that's alive in young Margaret, this baby will have royal blood in its veins. Margaret is a granddaughter of John of Gaunt, legendary prince of the Plantagenet dynasty. That means she's a member of the Lancastrian clan headed by the useless shambling King Henry the sixth.

The child's late father, Edmund Tudor, was also part of the royal family, So the child about to be born will join the small inner circle of the Lancastrian royal house, which is good because right now that family he can use a bit of freshening up as the pangs of childbirth grip Margaret's little body. All thoughts of family trees are forgotten. The women of the chamber gather round to

help her through a very long and difficult labour. When the baby is eventually delivered, it seems like a miracle. Margaret has suffered so much that she'll never have another child, but she's alive, and so is her son. There's some debate about what to call him that Margaret is in no doubt this boy is going to be named Henry, Henry Tudor. And though the circumstances of his birth are not very promising, a teenage widow for a mum, a remote Welsh coastal castle for a home, fate has decided

that he's destined for a very big future. Indeed, because outside these castle walls, the Plantagenet have entered the first spasms of a war that's going to burn the whole dynasty to the ground. Out of the ashes will rise a new family, the Tudors. And in this the explosive final season of our Plantagenet saga, We're going to follow the astonishing story of their rise to power. I'm Dan Jones and from Sony Music Entertainment. This is History Season ten of A Dynasty to Die for Episode one, A

New Hope. Whether you've been following this podcast since the beginning or you're just joining us for the first time today, I want to remind you of a golden rule of Plantagenet history. Anything can happen. In the three centuries we've covered. We've seen kings rise from total obscurity to absolute power, and we've seen rulers who seemed untouchable come hurtling down to earth with a splat. It pays to remember one of my favorite medieval chroniclers, quotes by good Old Gerald

of Wales back in the twelfth century. Gerald wrote, A sensible man ought to consider that fortune's favor is variable, and her wheel is ever turning. Although the merciful creator is long suffering and patient, he is likewise severe, executing punishment and vengeance upon the stubborn and wilful, and usually

begins to exact that punishment here on Earth. And yes, sure, I don't think we're going to squeeze that down to fit it on a slogan T shirt, but it seems to capture beautifully the topsy turviness of the Plantagenet cinematic universe. One minute, the world is eating out of your hand, the next it's sinking its fangs into your gluty eye, Maximi, Which brings us to where we left our story last season.

In season nine, we heard how England went from the triumphs of Henry the Fifth's reign to the nadir of Henry the sixth. After a promising start, the king went mad, the nobles went feral, and eventually, after much tussling and some truly savage battles, an eighteen year old giant called Edward, Earl of Mark slashed his way to the top. Edwards destroyed his enemies at the monstrous Battle of Tauton, crushing

a massive Lancastrian army seemingly from nowhere. He then took the throne as Edward the Fourth, becoming the first King of the House of York. If you're a newbie or want to recap, there's all that and more than two hundred other episodes available in our archive. To get them at free, sign up at Patreon dot com. Forward slash. This is history. The trouble is, it isn't easy at the top. So that's where we're going to pick up

our story. At the start of this episode well with Margaret Beaufort as she gave birth to Henry Tudor in fourteen fifty seven. Now, I promise we're going to come back to Margaret and baby Henry as this season goes on. But right now we're going to assed forward four and a half years to join Edward fourth. In the summer of fourteen sixty one, he's proven himself on the battlefield at Tauton, suggesting that God is down with his claim to kingship. In June, he's been crowned in London by

battle and now by coronation. England has a new king. But if Edward wants to hang on to his crown, he's going to have an almighty struggle. So to get our story going, let's get to know Edward. He was born in April fourteen forty two in Roume in Normandy, when his dad, Richard, Duke of York, was in charge of what was then an English ruled chunk of northern France. Richard fathered a big brood of children, and at the time of Edward's coronation he has three sisters and two brothers.

A lot more on them shortly in person, Edward's mighty impressive. He stands well over six feet tall, and as well as being a handy warrior, he's a handsome, charming young man. He's got the characteristic long plantagenet nose, piercing eyes, and a small mouth that seems to have a smile playing at its corners. He also has quite a fancy for the ladies. In fact, this guy sniffs out hot damsel like a wild hog rooting for acorns, a trait that will cause him quite a lot of trouble as time

goes by. But more of that in a moment.

that ever God spread that flower. Well, maybe that's laying it on a bit thick, but whichever way you look at it, Edward is an upgrade on Henry the sixth In the aftermath of Taunton. The old king is in exile in Scotland, and many people would agree that England has traded up. Those who would agree most strongly with that assessment are the people who helped Edward win his crown.

Chief among them is Edward's right hand man, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, thirty three years old in fourteen sixty one. Warwick has plenty of military experience and no shortage of ambition. He's been at Edward's side for several years, and he fancies himself with some justification as the power behind the throne York Is. Propaganda produced around the same time as The Rose of Roung calls Warwick the flower of manhood,

so clearly there's a general horticultural themur play. But more important than flower power are the lands and titles that Warwick accruise as a result of betting long on the House of York. After Edward's coronation, Warwick is showered with rewards. He already holds four, yes, four noble titles. On top of that, he gets renewed in his post as Captain of Calais. That's the English military garrison in northern France, which he made his stronghold during the wars in Henry

the sixth reign. And on top of that, he pockets a whole portfolio of new offices. Edward makes him Constable of Dover Castle and Warden of the Sink Ports. Those are the most important trading towns on England's southeast coast. Effectively, this means Warwick owns the whole English Channel, the key military and trade seaway with Europe. And that's just the beginning. He also is appointed as Warden of the North, meaning

he has oversight of the turbulent Scottish border. He's put in charge of the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of York. Those are the two huge private estates owned by the crown. Then there's a massive trunch of land confiscated from nobles who sided with Henry the six that Taunton, especially the Percy family, who are the long term opponents of Warwick's Neville family in northern England. The financial value of all this makes Warwick the richest non royal noble

of all time. The political heft puts him virtually on a par with the king. Foreign diplomats describe him as being the governor of all England. One French observer writes to the King of France that the English have put tour ruleus monsieur le wariq and another word, who is nimaev for Goudin. Obviously that's a joke. The French can be amusing sometimes, but like all good one liners, it's got a sharp sting of truth to it. Warwick is more than a decade older than Edward, and he's been

around the block. He reckons with some justification that if it wasn't for him, there would be no House of York. So if the world wants to see him as a second king, that suits Warwick down to the ground. But if Warwick is going to enjoy all the riches and the influence that being a kingmaker brings, then it's going to fall on him to make sure Edward stays secure in his crown. And it's not long before he has to do exactly that, because within two years of Edward's

coronation there's a serious assault on the kingdom. Royal spies find out that a plot is being hatched between renegade Lancastrians in England and foreign enemies outside. Pulling the strings is a person who's nursed more hatred towards the House of York than anyone else. The old Queen of England, Margaret of Anjou, an ill and tired sixty years old, shuffles towards the chopping block. An expectant crowd gathers around. They've all made it to Tower Hill, the area immediately

surrounding the Tower of London. It's London's top spot to go and see a lively show, assuming you're into public executions. In late February fourteen sixty two, it's John de Vere's turn. The Earl of Oxford has been around the political scene in England for decades. But it's a wonder the guy hasn't already died from a bad case of splinters in the backside, given how much of his life he's spent sitting on the fence. For most of the wars between

the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, Oxford avoided committing to either side. Then, with incredibly bad timing, just before the Battle of Tauton, he did pick a team, and unfortunately it was the wrong one. He went for Queen Margaret and King Henry, and that decision has now come back to haunt him. Oxford survived the accession of the new King, Edward the Fourth, but he forgot to update his settings to political reality.

Having chosen the Lancastrian side, he stuck with it and got himself caught up in a web of intrigue aimed at bringing down the new king. The plot that Oxford's god himself mixed up in has more moving parts than a swinger's party. The schemers include a hotch potch of exiled Lancastrian aristocrats. They're backed with varying degrees of seriousness by foreign royals, including the rulers of Scotland, France, Brittany, Aragon,

Portugal and Denmark. Putting it all together is Queen Margaret of Anjou, who's been shuttling between Scotland and the courts of Europe, trying to whip up support for a comeback for her and old King Henry. Yorkist propaganda accuses Margaret of wanting to destroy the realm, to pervert the royal succession and bring robbery and vengeance. She would say she's

just trying to get back. What's hers by right? Her plan is, or rather was, to launch a three pronged invasion, with armies hitting the Yorkist regime from Wales, Southern England and the North, while insurgents within the realm rose up to create civil disturbance, overwhelming the new king's capacity to resist only well self. Evidently the whole thing has unraveled loosely. Lips of sunk ships and key figures in England, like Oxford,

have been betrayed. Six days ago, Oxford's eldest son was divorced from his head on this very spot outside the Tower of London. Now it's the older man's turn. If anyone thinks there might be mercy given Oxford's obvious ill health, they're dead wrong. The old geezer is brought forward and offered any last words, then made to kneel down, and it's Cyanarus Sunshine. The wars of the Roses have claimed their latest noble head. As the axe comes down on Oxford,

the heat goes out of the wider plot. He was Party two, smelling failure. The foreign backers mostly lose interest, mostly but not totally. Queen Margaret trying to salvage something from them, keeps on lobbying foreign rulers to help her out. In the autumn of fourteen sixty two, she manages to scrape together enough donations and troops to take a few dozen ships and eight hundred mercenaries to northern England, where her men invade the coast of Northumbria and take control

of a few castles. This isn't enough to threaten to collapse Edward's rule completely, but it is still a bloody nuisance. So now is the moment that Edward's heavily rewarded right hand man, the Earl of Warwick, has to step up and show his worth. Across the winter of fourteen sixty two to sixty three, he works his way around the castles Margaret's men are holding and kicks the rebels out

of them. By March fourteen sixty three, he seems to have got the job done, and although he can't lay his hands on Queen Marle, Margaret herself or the feeble old Henry the sixth, he manages to split them up. When it becomes clear that their plot has fizzled out, Margaret high tails it to France, taking with her her nine year old son Will She ever see Old Henry again. Does she ever want to? She's got to have mixed

feelings about that one either way. This is very much Round one to King Edward and the Earl of Warwick, and they follow up Round one by taking round two and three. In the spring of fourteen sixty four, there's another attempt by renegade Lancastrian nobles to incite rebellion in the North. The instigator this time is one of Queen Margaret's closest allies, Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. He gets around five thousand men together and starts raising hell in

northern England. Once again, Edward and Warwick have to respond, and they do. They're already working hard through diplomatic channels to persuade the French and Scots to stop backing their enemies, and when it seems like diplomacy isn't getting the message through to the Lancastrians in England, they send an army out into the North. It's led by Warwick's brother John, another old school veteran of England's civil wars, which by

the looks of things, are still very much on. John Nevill wastes no time he runs the Lancastrian rebels to ground, engaging them in two battles known as the Battle of hedgeley Moor and the Battle of Hexham. At Hexham in May fourteen sixty four, John Nevills scores a crushing victory. He puts the Lancastrian army to flight and kills its leader, the Duke of Somerset. With that, the last embers of Lancastrian rebellion in the North of England are finally snuffed out.

Queen Margaret has no chance of rallying another insurgency anytime soon, and though King Henry is still a free man, the old Duffer isn't much of a threat to anyone on his own. It's taken three years, but by the summer of fourteen sixty four Edward and Warwick look like they've survived.

The Lancastrian threat has been reduced to Margaret of Anjou fuming with her son somewhere on the continent, Henry the sixth, who's a wall but not considered a very active threat, and some minor characters who don't seem very threatening to anyone, like the seven year old Henry Tudor, but he and his mother Margaret Beaufort have been placed under genteel house arrest with a loyal Yorkist family in South Wales, and honestly,

they don't seem like a big problem. So now Edward and Warwick can pour themselves a drink, take a deep breath, and start to think about plans for the rest of Edward's reign. When they do that, there seems to be one issue that matters above all others, securing the succession. They need to take a grip from the long term future of the family. For that, Edward needs to get married, make a sensible foreign alliance, and get to work on

producing some Yorkist princes and princesses. The last bit, at least, feels like a job he's up to, so Warick adds a new job to his ever lengthening resume as the King's right hand man and puppet master. He's now a matchmaker. It's time to find the Rose of Rouon, a hot piece of medieval marriage material to make into the first ever Yorkist queen. The ambassadors from Castile have been hanging around in the chamber in Westminster Palace for some time.

They've been waiting and waiting and waiting. Then England's charming young King Edward the Fourth bursts into the room. He seems a little lout of breath, and when he has time to sit and everyone has a drink in their hands, he explains that he's just dashed sixty miles from Cambridge to meet them. This being a king business, what a job you need to be everywhere all at once. But Edward's very glad the ambassador's waited because he's been told they have quite a proposal for him, which is right.

The ambassadors explain they've been sent to England to make Edward the offer of a wife, and not just any wife. The King of Castile is Enrique the fourth, and he wants to suggest that Edward marries his sister Isabella. That's not a bad offer. Castile is a major kingdom. Isabella is just approaching her thirteenth birthday. But as Margaret Beaufort could have told them, the medieval marriage market takes a remarkably liberal view of that sort of thing, and she

is assuredly a top rank European princess. Edward listens to the ambassador's proposal and then makes a big show of rewarding them for their generosity in even delivering this wonderful message. He gives them a free pass to bring some trading ships to England under his protection anytime in the next year, to trade as much wine as they like in exchange

for as much English produce as they can carry. It's a nice little sweetener, But then again it needs to be because actually, for all Edward's enthusiastic demeanor, he's already decided that he isn't going to take them up on this marriage offer. There are a few reasons. One is that there's something of a stain hanging over Isabella's family. Her brother, King Enrique, who's making the offer, is nicknamed

Enrique the Impotent. That's a direct reference to his own first marriage, which Enrique found himself unable to consummate despite years of trying. Enrique claims that someone had, I don't know how to phrase this politely, laid a curse on

his royal wiener. This was a special sort of curse that only affected his ability to get it on with his wife, and not with any number of mistresses and sex workers, several of whom were called to give evidence to that effect in a court case to annul his marriage Anyway, the ins and outs or not of that

episode don't need to concern us here. The fact is that marrying the sister of Enrique the Impotent doesn't fill Edward with much confidence, and more to the point, he has other irons in the fire, or rather his consilieri, the Earl of Warwick does. For the past three years, Warwick's been putting feelers out around Europe for potential wives for Edward, and there are a number of plausible candidates. The Duke of Burgundy has a sister, She's one possibility.

Then there's Mary of Guelders, the widow of James the Second of Scotland who's been sheltering Queen Margaret of Anjou and Henry the sixth. Mary of Guilders is older than Edward, and although there are many rumours about her exciting love life since she's been widowed, a Scottish alliance might not be the worst idea in the world, especially given Mary's current Lancastrian inclinations. Then there's France. Warwick has put a word in with the recently crowned French King Louis the Eleventh,

wondering if he has any daughters. Sou might make a suitable English queen. Since Louis's daughter is only three, He's nixed that idea, but he's offered up another option, his sister in law, Boner of Savoy, on the grounds of her name alone. Old Boner is the opposite of Enrique the impotent sister, and a French alliance has been a reliable route in international marriage diplomacy for generations, stretching all

the way back to Edward The First Stay. For more on Edward the First listen back to season four of A Dynasty to Die For, I'd start with episode four, a New Arthur. The point is Warwick has plenty of options, and if anything, the problem is choosing which of these eligible young European princesses is going to be the match most fitting for King Edward and the House of York. Now that their problems with the Lancastrians are starting to recede.

By the end of summer fourteen sixty four, Warwick is leaning towards a French match, and he's about to send a diplomatic delegation to the town of Saint Omer south of Calais to get serious about thrashing out details. It looks like Warwick's first big coup on the international stage is about to materialize, and all he needs is for Edward to sign off on it. The House of York will be properly up and running as a royal dynasty.

A meeting is fixed for September fourteen sixty four. There, Edward and Warwick can do the big reveal and tell the rest of the English nobility just which lucky lady is going to be England's new queen. But as the date for the public announcement approaches, Warwick starts to get a funny feeling that not everything is as it should be. For the first time, there seems to be a distance between what he's thinking and what the King is doing. Edward's not exactly leaving Warwick on red, but he's not

responding with the same gusto he used to. Is Warick imagining it or could the King really be getting cold feet? Either way, Warwick is right to be worried. What he doesn't know is that his protege, Edward, has indeed been up to something. It's a plan utterly of his own devising and so audacious that when he reveals what it is, it's worthy of its own reality TV show. What He's

done is well, I'll save that for next time. To find out just what Edward's got on his mind and what Warwick has now got on his political plate, stick around and listen to our next action packed episode of This Is History.