The de la Pole family rose from lowly origins as wool merchants of Hull to the highest echelons of late fifteenth-century society. The first step along this meteoric rise to power was one William de ...

John's mother died in 1394 when he was but five years old, in 1399 his father Henry of Bolingbroke, a grandson of Edward III, usurped the throne of his cousin Richard II and was crowned Henry IV. The ...

The eldest surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, daughter of Henry IV of France, the future Charles II was born on 29th May 1630, at St. James Palace, London, the second child of ...

On 26 July, Henrietta met her father, Charles I met his new daughter for the first time on 26th July. Before his arrival, the king had given instructions that the princess should be baptised following ...

Mary of Guise was born at Bar in France on 22 November 1515. She was the eldest of the twelve children of Claude of Lorraine, Duke of Guise and Antoinette of Bourbon, daughter of Francis, Count of ...

At the age of five, Richard was married to Anne Beauchamp, the sister of the Duke of Warwick, in 1434. On the death of the Duke of Warwick in 1446, the Earldom of Warwick and its vast estates were ...

The Picts were descendants of the Iron Age people of northern Scotland, believed to have originated in Iberia as hunter-gatherers, they moved through lower Britain and entered Scotland around 7000BC.

England's first Yorkist King, Edward IV, was the eldest surviving son of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York and Cecily Neville and was born on 22nd April, 1442 at Rouen, whilst the Duke was stationed ...

Henry seized England's crown on the death of his brother, William Rufus on 2 August 1100. He had been present on the hunting expedition in the New Forest which resulted in Rufus' death, either by ...

When Britain's last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne died in 1714, the crown of England passed by the 1701 Act of Settlement to the Stuart dynasty's German Protestant cousins, the House of Hanover, or ...

Often considered the greatest of the Plantagenets, Edward I was born on the evening of 17th June 1239, at Westminster Palace, the firstborn child of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. He was named ...

During the reign of his father Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder had taken an active role in his campaigns against the Vikings. On the great Alfred's death, the succession was disputed between Edward ...