King Henry VI dies in the Tower of London

On the night of 21 May 1471, King Henry VI died inside the Tower of London, where he had been held captive. He was 49. His Yorkist rival, Edward IV, had just crushed the Lancastrian cause at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and re-entered London in triumph the very day before.

Edward’s court announced that the old king had died of “displeasure and melancholy” — grief, supposedly, at the loss of his only son in battle. Almost no one believed it. The timing was too convenient: with Henry dead, the direct Lancastrian line to the throne was extinguished.

Tradition holds he was stabbed at his prayers; when his tomb was opened in 1910, his skull was found broken.

Most historians now regard Henry’s death as a political murder ordered by Edward IV, a brutal full stop to the long dynastic struggle remembered as the Wars of the Roses. The pious, troubled king who had inherited the crown as a baby was buried first at Chertsey Abbey, then reburied at St George’s Chapel, Windsor.