Located just off the A1, in Northamptonshire, is the tiny village of Fotheringhay, of which the historian John Nicholls wrote that the town has “been distinguished beyond any other place in Britain, except the Capital, by the aggravated misfortunes of Royalty.”
The small town was once home to the lavish Fotheringhay Castle, the seat of power of the Dukes of York, the Yorkist line of the Plantagenet dynasty.
Fotheringhay Castle was the birthplace of King Richard III, the last English King to die in battle.
135 years after Richard’s birth, the castle became the site at which Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed, a year after she had been moved to the castle as part of her imprisonment on English soil.
The castle, which now stands as a pile of bricks on the site where the great hall was located, was built in the 12th century by Simon de Senlis I, the Earl of Northampton.
Possession later passed to Prince David of Scotland after he married Simon’s widow. The castle remained in the hands of the Scottish Princes until it was confiscated by King John of England in the 13th century.
Fotheringhay Castle was dismantled in the 1630s after it began to fall into ruin, and although some have claimed that James I and VI destroyed the castle because his mother was killed there, this is likely untrue.
Fotheringhay is also home to the Church of St Mary and All Saints, where visitors can find a mausoleum to leading members of the Yorkist dynasty.
Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, and his son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, both of whom died at the Battle of Wakefield, were re-interred here during the reign of Richard’s son King Edward IV.
Also laid to rest in Fotheringhay was the mother of Edward IV and Richard III, Cecilly Nevile, and Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York, who was killed at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
The Richard III Society marks the birthday of King Richard every year by placing white roses, the symbol of the House of York, in the church.
In modern times, Fotheringhay is far from the glory days of the Yorkist Kings, with the 2001 census finding that just 123 people lived in the village, which then reduced to 119 in the 2011 census