| Date | Event | | 2/2/1461 |  On 2nd February 1461, a Yorkist force, under Edward the Earl of March (soon to be Edward IV), defeated a Welsh Lancastrian force at the Battle of Mortimer's Cross. This battle followed the Yorkists’ heavy defeat at Wakefield (Sandal Castle) five weeks before and preceded Edward’s March to Pontefract later that month resulting in the climactic slaughter at Towton. |
| 3/2/1452 | On 3rd February 1452, Richard, Duke of York (lord of Sandal Castle), wrote from Ludlow to the citizens of Shrewsbury enlisting help in detaining the Duke of Somerset: ‘It is well known unto you….whilst the kingdom’s sovereign lord stood possessed of his lordship in the realm of France and duchy of Normandy; and what derogation, loss of merchandise, lesion of honour and villainy, is…reported generally unto the English nation, for loss of the same…..through the envy, malice and untruth of the Duke of Somerset…who ever prevails and rules about the king’s person.’ |
| 7/2/1460 | On 7th February 1460, Richard, Duke of York, lord of Sandal, and still Lieutenant of Ireland despite his fleeing from the Battle of Ludford Bridge the previous October, summoned a Parliament to meet at Drogheda, in a session which lasted until 21st July. York had retained the support of the country’s Parliament including the influential Fitzgerald family; James Fitzgerald, 6th Earl of Desmond having been godfather to York’s son George in 1449. During York’s rule, the Irish Parliament declared itself legally independent from England, effectively making York King of Ireland. |
| 9/2/1455 | On 9th February 1455, Richard Duke of York - whose northern stronghold was Sandal castle - was stripped of his Protectorate by the now recovered Henry VI. He was also stripped of the Captaincy of Calais which was again awarded to Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset. York’s ally, Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, was also removed from his position as Chancellor. |
| 9/2/1456 | On 9th February 1456, Richard, Duke of York, lord of Sandal Castle, and Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, arrived for the next Parliamentary session at Westminster appearing with large armed retinues as if in anticipation of arrest by their opponents. |
| 10/2/1441 | Richard Duke of York's (lord of Sandal Castle) son, Henry, was born at Hatfield, on Friday 10th Feb 1441. |
| 11/2/1451 | On 11th February 1451, Henry VI dissolved parliament, had Thomas Young (Richard, Duke of York’s - lord of Sandal Castle- parliamentary champion, who had suggested York be Henry’s heir) sent to the Tower and confirmed York as Lieutenant-General of Ireland for the remaining seven years of his term. Henry clung to the hope that York would return to Irish exile as soon as possible. |
| 11/2/1456 | On 11th February 1456, John Bocking, a servant of wealthy Norfolk knight, Sir John Fastolf, wrote to his master regarding the second protectorate of Richard, Duke of York, lord of Sandal Castle. York had attempted to impose a controversial financial retrenchment (act of resumption) on the royal household in order to bring its finances under control. Bocking commented: The resumption, men trust, shall forth, if my lord of York’s first power of protectorship stand, and else not……The queen is a great and strong laboured woman, for she spares no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion of her power.’ Queen Margaret, thwarted in her bid to assume the regency during her husband’s illness, was, nevertheless, doing all she could to oppose York. |
| 15/2/1442 | On 15th February 1442, as his first contingent of soldiers hired from England for six months headed home having completed their service, Richard, Duke of York, lord of Sandal, and Lieutenant-General of Normandy, sent John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, to London for more men and money. |
| 16/2/1452 | On 16th February 1452, Henry VI and the Duke of Somerset left London to block Richard, Duke of York’s (lord of Sandal Castle) path to the city from Ludlow. York was heading to the capital with a force several thousands strong in order to remove Somerset as Henry’s chief adviser. Henry’s accompanying fifteen other nobles included: the dukes of Buckingham, Exeter and York’s old ally, Norfolk. |
| 16/2/1472 | On 16th February 1472, Edward IV, his queen, Elizabeth, and his brothers, George, and Richard (lord of Sandal), rowed up the Thames to the royal manor of Sheen to attend a ‘pardon’, a ceremony granting papal indulgences. Edward intended to use the occasion to sort out the increasingly bitter dispute between his brothers concerning Richard’s proposal to marry George’s sister-in-law, Anne Neville. As Sir John Paston noted: ‘Men say… (the brothers) had gone not in all charity.’ |
| 17/2/1461 |  As news spread of the destruction brought about by the Lancastrian army on its march south, the Earl of Warwick, unsure if the Lancastrians would soon appear, left London with a Yorkist army and King Henry VI in tow. Warwick set up a defensive perimeter around St Albans and on 17th February engaged with the Lancastrian army. In the Second Battle of St Albans the Yorkists were routed. Warwick and many of the Yorkist commanders managed to escape but, in the confusion, left behind Henry VI who was found under a tree. Two Yorkist knights who were charged with guarding the king had stayed with Henry VI and were captured and ordered to be beheaded by Henry's seven year old son, Edward. |
| 17/2/1472 | On 17th February 1472, Sir John Paston II reported to his brother concerning the impending marriage of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, lord of Sandal, to Anne Neville. Richard’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence, was particularly anxious regarding his sister-in-law’s marriage as, under law, he was his wife Isabel’s co-heir. George and Isabel had taken the widowed Anne into their care (charge) and, as the Crowland Chronicle stated: ‘…had the girl hidden away so that his brother would not know where she was, since he feared a division of the inheritance…The Duke of Gloucester, however, was so much the more astute, that having discovered the girl dressed as a kitchen-maid in London, he had her moved into sanctuary at St Martin’s.’ |
| 20/2/1436 | On 20th February 1436, Richard, Duke of York, lord of Sandal, belatedly signed his contract with the council to serve with 500 men-at-arms and 2500 archers in France for a year as Lieutenant-General of Normandy. He was not appointed full governor as he had desired and hence had no authority over Duke Humphrey of Gloucester at Calais. Supposedly, he was to receive £30,000 (over £23 million in today’s money) per annum. |
| 21/2/1460 | On 21st February 1460, Richard, Duke of York, lord of Sandal, and Lieutenant of Ireland, formally confirmed his sixteen-years-old son, Edmund, Earl of Rutland, as Chancellor of Ireland ‘to exercise the office in person or by his sufficient deputy for whom he is willing to answer, taking yearly the accustomed fees, wages and rewards, profits and commodities, due and accustomed to that office of old.’ |
| 22/2/1452 | On 22nd February 1452, Richard, Duke of York’s (lord of Sandal Castle) forces were close to those of Henry VI near Northampton. York had been marching upon London in order to remove the Duke of Somerset (and other ‘traitors') as Henry’s chief adviser. York refused to disband his army and moved towards Kent aiming to rouse the same rebels who had demanded much the same of Henry in 1450. Having the gates of London barred to him, York, the Earl of Devon and Lord Cobham were confronted by Henry’s vastly superior forces at Dartford. |
| 25/2/1425 | On 25th February 1425, the title of Duke of York was restored, having been stripped because of Richard of Cambridge’s treason and execution in 1415. Richard, Earl of Cambridge (father of Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York and lord of Sandal Castle) was the second eldest son of Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York. When his elder and childless brother, Edward, 2nd Duke of York, was killed at the Battle of Agincourt, young Richard Plantagenet later inherited the title, with the attainder on his gaining all of the dukedom’s rights and lands lifted as he reached adulthood. |
| 25/2/1447 | On 25th February 1447, Richard, Duke of York (lord of Sandal Castle), accepted, from Henry VI, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester’s estate of Great Wratting, Suffolk, two days after his ally’s questionable death. York was not the only noble whose compliance was ‘bought’ with generous grants from Gloucester’s estates. |
| 25/2/1456 | On 25th February 1456, Richard, Duke of York, was sent an emphatic and strongly worded letter to his castle at Sandal : ‘We on the 25th February in our said parliament, with the advice and assent of the lords spiritual and temporal being in the same parliament, have discharged you from the responsibility or charge and name of Lord Protector and Defender. We order you not to intervene at all in any further responsibility or charge and name of the protector and defender of our aforesaid kingdom of England and our principle councillor and name of the aforesaid. For we wish you to be completely discharged of the responsibility or charge and name of the aforesaid.’ Albeit discharged of ‘kingly’ powers, York was expected to deal with a new crisis in the realm: Scotland’s James II‘s incursion into Cumbria. James did reportedly offer to help York in his claim to the English throne. This pattern of expecting York to meet a crisis in government and then being side-lined was one he was unable to break. |
| 26/2/1461 |  On 26th February 1461, after the Lancastrians' victory at the Second Battle St Albans their army marched on the capital but, with their notorious reputation now common knowledge, Londoners closed the city gates. Rather than trying to take the capital by force, the Lancastrian army turned north to regroup and plan its next course of action. It now began to march north to the city of York. The Earl of Warwick now convinced Richard Duke of York's son, Edward, to proclaim himself king; the Duke of York was dead and under the Act of Accord, Edward, his heir, could claim the throne on Henry VI's death. Albeit Henry was still (presumably) alive, Edward, Warwick and their supporters claimed the throne by virtue of Henry VI and his followers breaching the agreement by causing 'unrest, inward war and trouble, unright wiseness, and the shedding and effusion of innocent blood'. The Yorkists called on the citizens of London to accept Edward as king and save them from the 'dissolute' Lancastrians. Edward was now acknowledged (at least in London) as Edward IV, King of England. These events would lead in the following weeks to the climactic battles at Ferrybridge and Towton where the future of the crown would be decided. |
| 27/2/1452 | On the 27th February 1452, Richard Duke of York, owner of Sandal Castle, arrived at Dartford with an army of 23,000 men, ahead of a meeting with King Henry VI who had marched down from the Midlands with an army of approximately the same size. Henry was always nervous of Richard's intentions, but he was always looking to protect his own favourite, Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset. Henry sent a delegation to Richard - which, interestingly, included, Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and his son, Richard, Earl of Warwick who would both fight with York against the king in forthcoming years - to ascertain what were York's demands. York's ‘demand’ was, simply, the removal of Somerset from the king's side and his arrest. York was told that Henry had agreed and would arrest Somerset; on which news, Richard disbanded his army on March 1st. This probably goes a long way to emphasising that, at this stage, Richard had no intention of seizing the throne as there would have been no reason for him to take this course of action. |
| 29/2/1452 | On 29th February 1452, Richard, Duke of York, lord of Sandal Castle, crossed the River Thames to Dartford. Having been refused entry to London, Richard was now pursued by Henry VI’s Royalist army commanded by Lord Bonville and the Duke of Buckingham. The loss of France, York’s intense rivalry with the king’s adviser, the Duke of Somerset, Richard’s stance on (as he saw it) an inefficient, unwieldy and corrupt Government and his lack of a meaningful governmental role had placed him as the leader of the ‘loyal opposition’. |
On 2nd February 1461, a Yorkist force, under Edward the Earl of March (soon to be Edward IV), defeated a Welsh Lancastrian force at the Battle of Mortimer's Cross. This battle followed the Yorkists’ heavy defeat at Wakefield (Sandal Castle) five weeks before and preceded Edward’s March to Pontefract later that month resulting in the climactic slaughter at Towton.
As news spread of the destruction brought about by the Lancastrian army on its march south, the Earl of Warwick, unsure if the Lancastrians would soon appear, left London with a Yorkist army and King Henry VI in tow. Warwick set up a defensive perimeter around St Albans and on 17th February engaged with the Lancastrian army. In the Second Battle of St Albans the Yorkists were routed. Warwick and many of the Yorkist commanders managed to escape but, in the confusion, left behind Henry VI who was found under a tree. Two Yorkist knights who were charged with guarding the king had stayed with Henry VI and were captured and ordered to be beheaded by Henry's seven year old son, Edward.
On 26th February 1461, after the Lancastrians' victory at the Second Battle St Albans their army marched on the capital but, with their notorious reputation now common knowledge, Londoners closed the city gates. Rather than trying to take the capital by force, the Lancastrian army turned north to regroup and plan its next course of action. It now began to march north to the city of York. The Earl of Warwick now convinced Richard Duke of York's son, Edward, to proclaim himself king; the Duke of York was dead and under the Act of Accord, Edward, his heir, could claim the throne on Henry VI's death. Albeit Henry was still (presumably) alive, Edward, Warwick and their supporters claimed the throne by virtue of Henry VI and his followers breaching the agreement by causing 'unrest, inward war and trouble, unright wiseness, and the shedding and effusion of innocent blood'. The Yorkists called on the citizens of London to accept Edward as king and save them from the 'dissolute' Lancastrians. Edward was now acknowledged (at least in London) as Edward IV, King of England. These events would lead in the following weeks to the climactic battles at Ferrybridge and Towton where the future of the crown would be decided.