For three hundred and thirty years, from Henry II's accession in 1154 to Richard III's death at Bosworth in 1485, one family held the English crown. The Plantagenets begin with Henry II (1133-1189) and Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204), a marriage that built an empire from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees and then tore itself apart: Eleanor backed the 1173 revolt of her sons and Henry kept her confined for sixteen years. Their four surviving sons - Henry the Young King, Richard the Lionheart, Geoffrey of Brittany and John - form the family's first and most quarrelsome generation.
The line narrows before it explodes. Richard died without legitimate issue at Chalus in 1199; John seized the throne over his nephew Arthur of Brittany, who vanished in captivity in 1203. From John and Isabella of Angouleme descend Henry III, Edward I 'Longshanks' and Edward II, deposed in 1327 by his own queen, Isabella of France. Eleanor of Castile enters the tree as Edward I's devoted wife, not as their descendant. Edward II's son Edward III (1312-1377) is the hinge of the whole diagram. With Philippa of Hainault he fathered the branches that would fight the Wars of the Roses: the Black Prince, Lionel of Antwerp, John of Gaunt of Lancaster and Edmund of Langley of York.
The Black Prince's son Richard II was deposed in 1399 by his cousin Henry IV, Gaunt's son - the usurpation that made every later claim arguable. Lancaster ran through Henry V, victor of Agincourt, to the fragile Henry VI, whose collapses left Margaret of Anjou to fight for their son Edward of Westminster, killed at Tewkesbury in 1471. York's claim came through Anne Mortimer, descendant of Lionel, who married Richard of Conisburgh; their son Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville produced Edward IV, George of Clarence and Richard III. Warwick the Kingmaker turned on Edward, Clarence was executed in 1478, and Edward's sons - the Princes in the Tower - disappeared in 1483.
The tree closes by merging. Gaunt's legitimised Beaufort children were barred from the throne, yet it was through them that Henry VII inherited his claim, by his mother Margaret Beaufort's descent from Gaunt via John Beaufort. His Tudor name came from Owen Tudor and Catherine of Valois, whose presumed marriage produced his father Edmund Tudor. Bosworth in 1485 and his marriage to Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter, folded both roses into the Tudor line. This genogram follows the standard descent recorded in the chronicles and modern dynastic scholarship - and it still matters because almost every English monarch since, and Shakespeare's entire history cycle, is drawn from these branches.
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