MIGHTY CASTLE HARLECH SURRENDERED TO
YORKIST FORCES ON THAT FATEFUL DAY IN AUGUST 1468, AFTER A GOOD 7-YEAR RUN.
The Harcourt memorial features a very rare statue of a
Yorkist knight in full English armour, which was completed in 1465.
Thus the final revised version of Hardyng's chronicle, circulated as
Yorkist propaganda, could have had a seminal influence on Morte Darthur.
In 1457 it was also he who drove through a thoroughgoing (but ill-fated) reconciliation with the
Yorkists in the form of the 'Loveday' held at St Paul's Cathedral in 1458, a formal peacemaking between the victors of the First Battle of St Albans of May 1455 and the heirs of their victims.
I was delighted to read of the tradition that
Yorkist leaders killed at the 1487 battle of Stoke were buried with green willow staves driven through their hearts and that the Countess of Salisbury wore a little barrel charm on a bracelet in memory of her father, the Duke of Clarence, who was drowned in a vat of Malmsey wine
Lancastrian troops decided to call a Parliament for Coventry, planning to ambush and seize all of their
Yorkist enemies when they arrived," explained English Heritage manager Andrea Fox.
To make any sense of events, she must also discuss at some length the Lancastrians, the
Yorkist rivals in what is now known as the War of the Roses.
Edward IV's real achievement was not to re-establish the
Yorkist dynasty (it was replaced by 1585) but to be the first king to 'harness the combined influences of alchemical medicine, myths and prophecies to weld together a nation'.
Barbara Harris' aristocratic wives in
Yorkist and Early Tudor England assisted their husbands as guardians, agents, and executors, and Gunda Barth-Scalmani's peasant, artisan, and bourgeois wives in Salzburg were involved in joint decision making over marital property.
The 62-year-old "history buff" said walking past the
Yorkist king's remains had seemed "unreal".
Leaders of both sides had decreed "no quarter" and more than 20,000 died - around 1% of England's adult male population at the time - as Henry VI's Lancastrian forces were crushed and the throne claimed by
Yorkist Edward IV.
The miraculous vision of three suns in the sky, which appeared to Edward IV before his victory over the Lancastrians at Mortimer's Cross in February 1461, was used by the king both as an instant sign of favour from God and as an enduring device symbolising his approval of the
Yorkist cause in a heraldic emblem.
