12. The Kingmaker Who Supercharged the Plantagenet Family Feud
The exiled Henry Bolingbroke did not stay in exile for long. He returned a few months after his banishment, raised a rebellion, and proceeded to defeat and depose his cousin. King Richard II was captured and quietly murdered. Bolingbroke had himself crowned as King Henry IV and founded the Lancastrian branch of the House of Plantagenet. The Lancastrians ruled England until the crown was disputed by the Yorkists – a Plantagenet branch descended from John of Gaunt’s younger brother Edmund, Duke of York – in the Wars of the Roses.
A key figure in the Wars of the Roses was Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick (1428 – 1471). Neville, the son of the powerful 5th Earl of Salisbury, also named Richard Neville, was a powerful nobleman in his own right. He demonstrated that he was a capable military commander during the intra-familial feud that erupted between the Yorkist and Lancastrian branches of the House of Plantagenet. He began the conflict on the Yorkist side, but then switched his support to the Lancastrians, and his role in the dethronement and enthronement of two kings got him nicknamed “The Kingmaker“.