that he was engaged in the abortive attempt of his sister, Lady le Despenser, to carry off their young kinsmen, the Mortimers, from Windsor in February 1405 [see Mortimer, Edmund de, 1391–1425]. Lady le Despenser was not a woman of the highest character, and the plot for Henry's assassination at the previous Christmas, of which she accused York, may be open to doubt, but he confessed some of the charges brought against him (Annales Henrici IV, p. 398; Fœdera, viii. 386). He was arrested and sent to Pevensey Castle for safe keeping, while his estates were seized into the hands of the crown. After he had been seventeen weeks in prison he vainly petitioned for release on account of his ‘disease and heaviness;’ it was presently rumoured that he was dead, but on 7 Oct. the king ordered him to be brought to him (at Kenilworth?), and on 26 Nov. he was present at Lambeth at the marriage of the Earl of Arundel (ib. viii. 387; Wylie, ii. 48). His sequestrated estates were restored to him, and on 22 Dec. he was again made a privy councillor.
In November 1406 York once more became constable of the Tower, and subscribed the agreement under which Aberystwith Castle was surrendered just a year later, shortly after the Prince of Wales had earnestly vindicated the duke's loyalty in parliament (Rot. Parl. iii. 611; Fœdera, viii. 497). In 1409 he received orders to remain on his estates in the Welsh marches and repress the rebels (ib. viii. 588). Three years later Henry granted him Oakham for life, and he served under the Duke of Clarence in his expedition to France; he remained in Aquitaine after the death of Henry IV, pushing his claims as a son of Isabella of Castille to the disputed throne of Arragon (Ramsay, i. 167). On his return Henry V, in the second year of his reign, appointed him justice of South Wales and warden of the east marches towards Scotland, and had the parliamentary declaration in his favour of 1401 renewed (Rot. Parl. iv. 17); but it was finally decided that his rights in the Rutland estates had lapsed at his father's death. In 1415 he accompanied Henry to France, and commanded the right wing at Agincourt, where he was one of the few of the victors who perished, ‘smouldered to death,’ if we may accept Leland's authority (Itinerary, i. 4–5), by much heat and thronging (Gesta Henrici V, pp. 47, 50, 58; Le Fèvre, pp. 59–60). His body was taken back to England, and interred in the choir of Fotheringhay church, under a flat marble slab, with his image in brass. On Henry's return there was a public funeral in London on 1 Dec. to York and the rest of the fallen. At the dissolution of the monasteries the Duke of Northumberland pulled down the choir and exposed the body of York; Elizabeth ordered its reinterment and the erection of the present monument.
In his will, made during the siege of Harfleur in August 1415, York describes himself as ‘de tous pecheurs le plus mechant et coupable,’ directs that in all masses and prayers to be made for him there should be included Richard II and Henry IV, and devises a legacy of 20l. to Thomas Pleistede, in memory of the kindness he had shown him when confined at Pevensey (Nichols, Royal Wills, p. 217; Dugdale, ii. 157).
York married Philippa, second daughter and coheiress of John, lord Mohun of Dunster, Somerset, who had already been twice married, first to Walter, lord Fitzwalter (d. 1386), and, secondly, to Sir John Golafre of Langley, Oxon. (d. 1396). Her claims on the Dunster estates had drawn York into litigation under Henry IV (Archæological Journal, xxxvii. 164). She survived her third husband, by whom she had no issue; but her remarriage with Sir Walter (or Robert) Fitzwalter, which has passed from Dugdale into so many accounts, is a confusion with her first marriage. She died in 1431, and was buried in Westminster Abbey (Complete Peerage, iii. 370, v. 322; Wylie, ii. 48). York was succeeded in the title and his great estates by his nephew, Richard, duke of York (1412–1460) [q. v.], son of his younger brother Richard, earl of Cambridge. Though Henry IV was the nominal founder of the College of the Blessed Virgin Mary and All Saints in Fotheringhay church, York provided the endowment, and is designated co-founder in the charter granted by Henry on 18 Dec. 1411 (Dugdale, Monasticon, vi. 1411). It was founded for a master, twelve chaplains, eight clerks, and thirteen choristers. In consideration of the heavy expense it had entailed upon York, Henry V, before starting for France, empowered him to enfeoff Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, and others, with a large part of his estates as security for a loan (ib. p. 1413). But the reconstruction of the church does not seem to have been begun until 1434.
