Monday, July 23, 2012

Blessed Margaret Pole's Brother

H/T to Tea at Trianon for this link. The Telegraph has a story about the last Plantagenet prince and Angers' bid for the British Crown Jewels:

Angers, in the Loire valley, was the capital of Anjou province and the geographical base of the Plantagenets, who ruled England from 1154 until 1485, providing some of the most celebrated monarchs in British history, including Richard the Lionheart and Henry V.

But when Edward Plantagenet, the Earl of Warwick, was executed for treason in the Tower of London in 1499, the house’s legitimate male line came to an end. “As redress for the execution of Edward, Angers today demands that the Crown Jewels of England be transferred to Angers,” reads a petition posted on the city’s official website.

Recalling 25-year-old Edward’s “unfair and horrible death” at the hands of henchmen working for Henry VII, England’s first Tudor king, the city believes it is owed an apology and 513 years’ worth of compensation.

According to this website:

EDWARD PLANTAGENET, EARL OF WARWICK, was the son of George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV. After the execution of his father in 1478, the young earl was kept in honourable confinement at the castle of Sheriff-Hutton in Yorkshire until Henry's accession to the throne in 1485, when the earl's Yorkist blood, and the strong claims it gave him to the crown of England, made it a very obvious necessity on the new king's part to have him placed in the more secure prison of the Tower of London. From this prison he never again emerged except on two occasions, viz., in 1487, when he was paraded through the principal streets of London to disprove the imposture of Lambert Simnel, and in 1499, when he was beheaded on a charge of being concerned with Perkin Warbeck, then also a prisoner in the Tower, in a conspiracy to get forcible possession of the Tower, and effect the overthrow of Henry's government.

The young Earl's close confinement, 14 years in the Tower of London, had left him unable to "tell a goose from a capon" according to Henry VII's latest biographer, Thomas Penn. He also recounts that the poor Earl was still confused at his trial in London's Guildhall, which Penn calls a farce. Henry VII had the records of the conspiracy locked up tightly and Warwick was beheaded on Tower Green, November 28, 1499. Perkin Warbeck was hung at Tyburn on November 23, 1499. Henry VII arranged the marriage of the last Plantagenet princess, Margaret, to a knight, making sure she was out of the way of the succession.

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