Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, 6th Earl of Stafford, KG of Stafford Castle in Staffordshire, was an English nobleman and a military commander in the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses. Through his mother he had royal descent from King Edward III, his great-grandfather, and from his father, he inherited, at an early age, the earldom of Stafford. He joined the English campaign in France with King Henry V in 1420 and following Henry V’s death two years later he became a councillor for the new king, the nine-month-old Henry VI. He fought for the King in the First Battle of St Albans when civil war began in 1455, and
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Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, 6th Earl of Stafford, KG of Stafford Castle in Staffordshire, was an English nobleman and a military commander in the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses. Through his mother he had royal descent from King Edward III, his great-grandfather, and from his father, he inherited, at an early age, the earldom of Stafford. He joined the English campaign in France with King Henry V in 1420 and following Henry V’s death two years later he became a councillor for the new king, the nine-month-old Henry VI. Stafford acted as a peacemaker during the partisan, factional politics of the 1430s, when Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, vied with Cardinal Beaufort for political supremacy. He fought for the King in the First Battle of St Albans when civil war began in 1455, and was killed when the rebels attacked the royal army at Northampton. Stafford spent most of his final years attempting to mediate between the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions, the latter by now headed by Henry’s wife, Margaret of Anjou. His eldest son had died of plague two years earlier and the Buckingham dukedom descended to Stafford’s five-year-old grandson, Henry, a ward of the King until he came of age in 1473. As his mother could not, by law, be guardian, Humphrey became a royal guardian, under the guardianship of Henry IV’s queen, Joan of Navarre. Although Stafford received a reduced inheritance, as historian Carol Rawcliffe has put it, “fortunes were still to be made in the French wars\ Stafford assumed the profession of arms” He was knighted on 22 April 1420 during the 1420 campaign and was asked by the royal corpse to return to England with his royal corpse the following year.
On 31 August 1422, while campaigning, Henry V died and Stafford was present at his death and joined the entourage that returned to England. Stafford was killed and the King was again taken prisoner in the ensuing struggle, and the next year he was taken prisoner by the Yorkists and died at the Battle of Northampton, where he was killed in 1428. Stafford’s eldest son, Edmund Stafford, was killed fighting for Henry IV against the rebel Henry Hotspur at theBattle of Shrewsbury in 1403. On 21 July 1403, when he was less than a year old, his father was killed. Humphrey become 6th Baron Stafford and with the earls came a large estate with land in more than a dozen counties. Through her previous marriage to Edmund’s older brother, Thomas, she accumulated two dowries, each comprising a third of the Stafford estates. For some time he feuded violently with Sir Thomas Malory in the Midlands. Partly due to a feud with a leading Yorkist—Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick—Stafford eventually declared for King Henry and drove York into exile.
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