EDWARD IV (1442–1483), king of England, was the son of Richard, duke of York, by his wife Cecily Nevill, daughter of the first Earl of Westmorland. His father was descended from Edward III by both parents, being the lineal representative both of Lionel, duke of Clarence, Edward's third son, and of Edmund, duke of York, his fifth. The rival house of Lancaster, on the other hand, were descended from John of Gaunt, the fourth son; but Lionel, duke of Clarence, though an elder brother, left no male issue, and his great-grandson, Edmund Mortimer, was a mere infant when Henry IV usurped the throne. Nor does it appear that in after years this Edmund himself showed any disposition to vindicate his right; but early in the reign of Henry V a conspiracy was formed in his behalf by his cousin Richard, earl of Cambridge, who had married his sister and was himself the son of the before-mentioned Edmund, duke of York. The plot was detected just before Henry V crossed the sea, in his first invasion of France; the Earl of Cambridge confessed and was beheaded, and nothing was heard for upwards of forty years of any further attempt to challenge the right of the house of Lancaster.
Richard duke of York, the father of Edward IV, was the son of this Richard, earl of Cambridge, by his wife, Anne Mortimer. Cecily, the wife of Richard, duke of York, bore him no less than eight sons and four daughters within the space of sixteen years, of whom the eldest was Anne, afterwards Duchess of Exeter, born at Fotheringay in 1439. Then came Henry, who did not live long, and then Edward, afterwards Edward IV, born at Rouen, as we are minutely told, at two o clock in the morning of Monday, 28 April 1442. As 28 April in that year was a Saturday, not a Monday, there is some error. At the age of twelve, when bearing the title of the Earl of March, he and his brother Edmund, called Earl of Rutland, who was a year his junior, wrote two joint letters to their father from Ludlow, the first dated Saturday in Easter week, the second on 3 June. In the first they thank hm for 'our green gowns now sent unto us to our great comfort; beseeching your good lordship to remember our porteux [i.e. breviary], and that we might have some fine bonnets sent unto us by the next sure messenger, for necessity so requireth.' In the other, taking note of a paternal admonition, to attend specially to our learning in our young age that should cause us to grow to honour and worship in our old age,' they assure their father that they have been diligent in their studies ever since coming to Ludlow (Ellis Letters, 1st ser. i. 9; Paston Letters, new ed. vol. i. Introd. p. cxi).
This was in the year before the first actual outbreak of the civil war, which is considered to have begun with the battle of St. Albans. But at the very commencement of the year it was expected that the boy Edward would leave his studies and come up to London with his father, at the head of a separate company of armed men. Next year, by one account, he actually accompanied his father to the battle of St. Albans, or at least towards the council summoned to meet at Leicester just before (Three Fifteenth-century Chronicies, pp. 151 -2). But it seems clear that he was not in the battle, of which one rather minute report has come down to us; and if he went as far as Leicester, he probably returned to Ludlow. At all events, we hear nothing more of him till four years later (12 Oct. 1459), when there was a great muster of the Duke of York's adherents at that very place, the duke himself at their head. But when the king's army lay encamped opposite the Yorkists, the latter were deserted by a large body under Sir Andrew Trollope, and found it impossible to maintain the fight. The Duke of York and his second son Rutland fled first to Wales and then to Ireland, while Edward, his eldest, along with the Earls of
