Put simply, it all began because Edward III had too many sons. Had his brood been a smaller one, it would not have expanded as it did into a family with so many ambitious men of noble blood, when there was so very little of England to go around. To be sure, innumerable factors led to the Wars of the Roses, and many were of more importance, but, of necessity, the story must always begin with Edward and Philippa's prolific procreation.
Their eldest son was Edward, the Black Prince, hero of Crecy & Poitiers, who was a reckoning military force but who died at a young age, probably of stomach cancer. Richard of Bordeaux, his heir, succeeded to the throne upon the death of Edward III. Thankfully there was no further issue to this line, because�?.
The second son, Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, predeceased his father and brother and had only a daughter, Philippa. She wed Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March; their son Roger had a daughter, Anne; Anne married Richard, Earl of Cambridge, a cousin as we shall soon see; their son was Richard, Duke of York; who married Cecily Neville, who was descended from Edward and Philippa on the distaff Beaufort side as we shall also see; their children, of which there were legion, included Edward IV and Richard III�?.
Which brings us to the third son, John of Gaunt, where it REALLY gets complicated!
John was married three times. By his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, we have Henry IV, he who began the internecine strife by deposing cousin Richard II and assuming the throne; Henry IV’s marriage to Mary de Bohun produced warrior king Henry V; Henry V’s marriage to Katherine de Valois produced Henry VI, whose incompetence and bouts of mental illness reopened the family conflict; and Henry VI was married to Marguerite d’Anjou, warrior queen, mother to Edward, Prince of Wales, who was killed at Tewkesbury, leaving the House of Lancaster sans legitimate heirs�?.which would not be a problem, as we shall see�?
John’s second wife, Constance of Castile, gave him a claim to the Spanish throne. As a result, a daughter of his first marriage, Philippa, would marry into the royal house of Portugal and disappear for our purposes here, which is good, as the tale of John’s third wife needs the space!
Her name was Katherine Swynford, and her sister Philippa was the wife of Geoffrey Chaucer; Katherine, a widow with two young daughters, first became John’s mistress. Their four children, Henry, John, Thomas, and Joan, were styled Beaufort due to their illegitimacy and barred from the succession to the throne, which in the end didn’t matter, as we shall see�?.John and Katherine married after the procreative fact and lived happily ever after. John Beaufort & his son Edmund would support his great-nephew Henry and be killed in the wars for their efforts; Joan would go on to marry Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, and give birth to Cecily Neville, who would wed Richard, Duke of York�?.oh, the inbreeding! John's daughter Margaret would marry Edmund Tudor, illegitimate son of Katherine of Valois and Owen Tudor�?.oh, the forking of this tree�?.and managed at age thirteen to give birth to the future Henry VII before her husband expired�?.so besides being just a plain old bastard, Henry VII’s family tree flourished under the bar sinister as well.
On to son four, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York. He married the sister of John’s second wife Constance, Isabella of Castile; their son Edward fathered the aforementioned Richard, Earl of Cambridge; who fathered Richard, Duke of York; who fathered Edward IV and Richard III; so we see that the Yorkists had a damn fine double claim going here, with not a bastard in the lot.
Finally, the usually truculent youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, who felt he did not receive the power and recognition due him as a prince of the blood royal; as one contemporary said of him, “…he is a man of choleric temper and militant tastes whose misfortune it is to have been born too late…�?He married Eleanor de Bohun, sister to nephew Henry IV’s wife, purely because the damsels Bohun were great heiresses and Thomas was not about to let that ripe plum slip through his fingers. While their son Humphrey thankfully died without issue, their much-married daughter Anne is the mother of all Staffords and Bourchiers. Thomas meddled in politics and spearheaded the Merciless Parliament against nephew Richard II, getting himself detained in the stronghold of Calais and never emerging to see the light of day again.
We are not even going to discuss Isabella, Joan, Mary, and Margaret, Edward and Philippa’s daughters! No major Wars of the Roses players emerged from their collective loins.
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