Edmund of Langley

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.

John was King of England from 1199 to 1216, the youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Born at Oxford in 1166, he succeeded his brother Richard I and by 1204 had lost Normandy, Anjou and most of the family's continental lands to Philip II of France. Heavy taxation to fund attempts at their recovery, together with quarrels with the church and with his barons, provoked a rebellion that forced him to accept Magna Carta at Runnymede in June 1215, the charter that first set down in writing that the king was subject to law. War resumed almost at once, and he died at Newark in October 1216, leaving the throne to his nine-year-old son Henry III.

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.

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.

Richard II was King of England from 1377 to 1399, the son of Edward the Black Prince and Joan of Kent. Born at Bordeaux in 1367, he succeeded his grandfather Edward III at the age of ten and faced the Peasants' Revolt at fourteen, riding out to meet the rebels at Smithfield. His adult rule was marked by struggles with the Lords Appellant, who curbed his power in 1388, and by a later reassertion of royal authority that his opponents called tyranny. A notable patron of art and architecture, he rebuilt the roof of Westminster Hall. In 1399 he was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, who took the throne as Henry IV, and he died at Pontefract Castle early in 1400.

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.

John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, was an English commander in the closing stages of the Hundred Years' War and the father of Margaret Beaufort. Born in 1404, the son of John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, and a grandson of John of Gaunt, he was captured at the battle of Bauge in 1421 and spent some seventeen years as a prisoner in France. Ransomed at last, he was created Duke of Somerset in 1443 and given command of an expensive expedition to France that achieved little and cost him the king's favour. He died in 1444, leaving an only daughter, Margaret, then a year old, whose Beaufort descent supplied the Lancastrian element of the Tudor claim.

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.

Edward IV was King of England from 1461 to 1470 and again from 1471 to 1483, the first monarch of the house of York. Born at Rouen in 1442, the eldest surviving son of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, he took up his father's claim after the defeat at Wakefield and won the crown at the age of eighteen, confirming it with a crushing victory at Towton. His secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville in 1464 alienated his ally the Earl of Warwick, who drove him briefly into exile in 1470; he returned to win at Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471. His second reign brought financial recovery and relative peace. He died in 1483, leaving two young sons.