Plantagenet Family Tree - The House of Plantagenet from Henry II to Richard III

Henry II was King of England from 1154 to 1189 and the first monarch of the House of Plantagenet. Born at Le Mans in 1133 to Geoffrey V of Anjou and Empress Matilda, he inherited Anjou and Normandy, gained Aquitaine through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, and took the English crown two years later, ruling lands that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. He rebuilt royal government after the civil war called the Anarchy, and his legal reforms, among them itinerant justices and sworn juries, laid the foundations of English common law. His reign was marked by his quarrel with Archbishop Thomas Becket and by rebellions led by his own sons. He died at Chinon in 1189 and was succeeded by Richard I.

Richard I, known as Richard the Lionheart, was King of England from 1189 to 1199 and one of the leading commanders of the Third Crusade. Born at Oxford in 1157, a son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, he was brought up in his mother's duchy of Aquitaine and became its duke, rebelling against his father more than once before succeeding him. He spent almost his entire reign abroad, campaigning in the Holy Land against Saladin, where he took Acre and Jaffa but never recovered Jerusalem. Returning overland, he was held for a vast ransom in Germany while England was governed by his officials and his mother. He died in the Limousin in 1199 and was succeeded by his brother John.

Henry III was King of England from 1216 to 1272, one of the longest reigns in English history. The son of King John and Isabella of Angoulême, he was born at Winchester in 1207 and crowned at the age of nine while much of the country was still in rebel hands, ruling through regents until 1234. A devout and artistically minded king, he rebuilt Westminster Abbey in the Gothic style as a shrine for Edward the Confessor and as the burial church of his dynasty. His reliance on foreign relatives and his costly foreign schemes provoked the baronial reform movement of 1258 and the Second Barons' War, in which Simon de Montfort briefly controlled the government before being defeated by the king's son, the future Edward I.

Edward I, called Longshanks, was King of England from 1272 to 1307. Born at Westminster in 1239, the eldest son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, he defeated Simon de Montfort at Evesham in 1265 and was away on crusade when he succeeded his father. As king he issued a great series of statutes that reshaped English land law and justice, summoned the Model Parliament of 1295, and completed the conquest of Wales, ringing it with castles such as Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech. His later years were consumed by war in Scotland against William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. He married Eleanor of Castile, whose death in 1290 he marked with the Eleanor crosses, and died at Burgh by Sands in 1307.

Edward II was King of England from 1307 to 1327. Born at Caernarfon in 1284, the son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, he was the first English heir to hold the title Prince of Wales. His reign was dominated by conflict with his barons over his reliance on favourites, above all Piers Gaveston and later Hugh Despenser the Younger, and by military failure in Scotland, where Robert the Bruce destroyed an English army at Bannockburn in 1314. In 1326 his wife Isabella of France and the exiled baron Roger Mortimer invaded England, and in January 1327 Edward became the first English king to be deposed by parliament, in favour of his teenage son Edward III. He died later that year at Berkeley Castle.

Edward III was King of England from 1327 to 1377, one of the longest and most celebrated reigns of the Middle Ages. Born at Windsor in 1312 to Edward II and Isabella of France, he came to the throne as a boy after his father's deposition and took power into his own hands in 1330. Claiming the French crown through his mother, he opened the Hundred Years' War, winning at Sluys in 1340 and Crécy in 1346 and taking Calais, while his eldest son, the Black Prince, triumphed at Poitiers. He founded the Order of the Garter in 1348 and presided over the arrival of the Black Death and the steady growth of parliament. His many sons, and the rivalry of their descendants, shaped English politics for a century.

Edward of Woodstock, known to later ages as the Black Prince, was the eldest son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault and the most admired English soldier of his age. Born in 1330, he was created Prince of Wales in 1343 and commanded a division at Crécy in 1346 at the age of sixteen. Ten years later at Poitiers he captured John II of France, and from 1362 he ruled the principality of Aquitaine for his father. His later campaign in Castile drained his resources and his health, and he returned to England in 1371. He married his cousin Joan of Kent and died in 1376, a year before his father, so the crown passed instead to his young son Richard II.

Henry IV was King of England from 1399 to 1413 and the first monarch of the house of Lancaster. Born at Bolingbroke Castle in 1367, the son of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, he was one of the Lords Appellant who curbed Richard II in 1388 and was later exiled, his inheritance seized. He returned in 1399, deposed his cousin Richard and was accepted as king by parliament. His reign was spent defending that title against the revolt of Owain Glyndwr in Wales, the Percy risings in the north and repeated conspiracies, and against a persistent shortage of money. He was the first king since the Norman Conquest whose first language was English. He died at Westminster in 1413.

Henry V was King of England from 1413 to 1422 and the most successful English commander of the Hundred Years' War. Born at Monmouth in 1386, the son of Henry IV and Mary de Bohun, he fought at Shrewsbury as a teenager and governed Wales during the Glyndwr revolt. As king he renewed the war in France, taking Harfleur and winning an overwhelming victory at Agincourt in 1415 against a far larger army, then systematically conquering Normandy. The Treaty of Troyes in 1420 recognised him as heir to the French throne and gave him Catherine of Valois in marriage. He died at Vincennes in 1422, aged thirty-five, leaving a son not yet a year old as king.

Henry VI was King of England from 1422 to 1461 and again briefly from 1470 to 1471, and the only English king also crowned king of France. Born at Windsor in 1421, the son of Henry V and Catherine of Valois, he succeeded before his first birthday, and the realm was governed by his uncles for sixteen years. Pious, bookish and averse to war, he presided over the loss of nearly all Lancastrian France by 1453 and over a court so divided that Richard, Duke of York, twice took power as protector. The quarrel became the Wars of the Roses. He founded Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, and died in the Tower of London in 1471.

Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, was the leading English magnate of the mid-fifteenth century and the father of Edward IV and Richard III. Born in 1411, he combined descent from Edward III's fourth son, Edmund of Langley, with the senior Mortimer claim inherited from his mother, Anne Mortimer, and he was the first of the family to use Plantagenet as an actual surname. He served as lieutenant of France and of Ireland and returned to England to demand reform of Henry VI's government, twice governing as Lord Protector during the king's incapacity. Excluded by the court party around Margaret of Anjou, he took up arms, and in 1460 was recognised as heir to the throne. He was killed at the battle of Wakefield that December.