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THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER & YORK

The Plantagenets, described by Bacon as "a race much dipped in their own blood" finally destroyed themselves in the bloody dynastic struggle we know of as the Wars of the Roses. The later Plantagenets became divided into the Houses of Lancaster and York which descended through different sons of King Edward III. The Yorkist king Richard III was the last of his house, when he was killed in battle on Bosworth Field, to be displaced by the Tudors, it was the end of an era. The male line of the Plantagenets became extinct with the execution in 1499 of Edward, Earl of Warwick, the son of George, Duke of Clarence, in the reign of Henry VII, the first Tudor.