Richard de la Pole

Richard de la Pole (* around 1480 , † February 24, 1525 ) was the last significant member of the de la Pole family and the last aspirant of the House of York to the English throne.

Life

He was the son of John de la Pole and Elizabeth of York . His two older brothers, John, Earl of Lincoln , and Edmund, Earl of Suffolk , had always insisted on their right to the crown despite the hopeless circumstances after the Battle of Bosworth .

John had joined the rebel Lambert Simnel in 1487 and fell at the Battle of Stoke .

His second oldest brother, Edmund, tried to find an ally in the German king and later Emperor Maximilian I for his hopeless attempt to gain the English throne. King Henry VII of England no longer watched these attempts at overthrow in 1504 and recognized Edmund from his remaining title as Earl of Suffolk. Then he signed a contract with the emperor, which assured him not to support any more English rebels. Since he could no longer expect any support from the Kaiser, Edmund turned to Aachen , where he left a large mountain of debt.

Richard then looked for him there, who had had to leave the family property that the family had lost with the earliest dignity. Edmund left his younger brother in Aachen as guarantor for his debts and probably went to Belgium. The creditors threatened Richard to hand him over to England, where the de la Poles were now a familia non grata, but he escaped and found exile in Buda with King Ladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary .

In 1506 Edmund was finally captured in Namur and delivered to Henry VII. In 1509 Henry VIII succeeded his father, but neither pardoned Edmund nor his brother. Thereupon Richard Ludwig XII joined. from France, who started a war with England in 1512 and officially supported de la Pole's demands for the English throne. Because of this threat, Heinrich dropped all mercy for the de la Poles and finally had Edmund beheaded in 1513.

Richard, on the other hand, was one of the commanders of the French army and carried the long-revoked title of Earl of Suffolk after Edmund's death. In 1514 it looked for a moment as if the long-cherished dreams of the de la Poles were about to come true: Richard led 12,000 mercenaries to defend Brittany and prepare an invasion of England. This dream, however, ended with peace with England, which was followed by Richard's expulsion from France.

He then went to Metz in Lorraine, where he had a domicile built in La Haute Pierre. Although he was now without any political power, Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey still viewed him as a great threat and had him spied on by the German-Dutch composer Pierre Alamire, among others . He negotiated several times with Francis I and John Stewart, 2nd Duke of Albany , the Scottish regent, about an invasion of England, which was never to take place.

Richard de la Pole died while fighting with Francis I at the Battle of Pavia as the leader of the Black Gang against the army of Charles V. With him the two hundred year power of the de la Poles came to an end.

literature

• J. Gairdner (ed.): Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III. and Henry VII. 1861.
• John Burke: The Royal Families of England, Scotland, and Wales, with their Descendants, Sovereigns and Subjects. London 1851, vol. 2, family trees CLXIX and CCI.
• Sir Bernard Burke: Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited, and Extinct Peerages of the British Empire. London 1883, p. 441.
• Douglas Richardson: Plantagenet Ancestry. Baltimore 2004, p. 690.
• Douglas Richardson: Magna Carta Ancestry. Baltimore 2005, pp. 268-9.