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Tolkien vs. Disney and Other Major Historic Feuds

Khalid Elhassan August 20, 2021 37 min

Richard Neville the Kingmaker, who supercharged the family feud between the York and Lancaster branches of the House of Plantagenet. Find a Grave

10. The Fall of the Yorkists and Restoration of the Lancastrians

The relationship between King Edward IV and his chief lieutenant Richard Neville, 16^th Earl of Warwick, soured when Edward impulsively married a commoner. That ruined years of painstaking negotiations by Warwick for a treaty between England and France, which would have been sealed by Edward’s marriage to a French princess. Things came to a head in 1470 when Warwick, aided by King Edward’s younger brother, George Plantagenet, 1^st Duke of Clarence – who had married Warwick’s daughter and thus became his son-in-law – deposed Edward.

The Yorkist king was forced to flee England, while the deposed Lancastrian King Henry VI was released from imprisonment, dusted off, and restored to the English throne. Warwick’s triumph was short-lived, however: Edward returned to England in 1471, and raised a counter rebellion. At a critical moment, Warwick was betrayed by his son-in-law George, Duke of Clarence, who had a change of heart and defected back to his brother Edward. The two sides met in the Battle of Barnet on April 14, 1471, in which the Lancastrians were defeated and the Kingmaker was killed.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.