Succession to the British throne branch of the royal house of Lancaster, the House of Beaufort, assumed the English crown as Henry VII, after defeating Richard III, who was killed at the battle of Bosworth when leading a charge against Henry's standard. Richard was the last king of the House of York, and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. Henry declared himself king retroactively from 21 August 1485, the day before his victory over Richard at Bosworth Field, and caused Richard's "Titulus Regius" to be repealed and expunged from the Rolls of Parliament. After Henry's coronation in London in October that year, his first parliament,
The King Must Die and prophecy. He inspires sudden bursts of insight. Mother Dia: Gaia, goddess of fertility and the earth, worshiped most by the Eleusinians and Cretans. Several of the societies in the book practice the sacrifice of kings. The Minyans of Eleusis have a custom of sacrificing their king to Mother Dia each year. In Theseus's seventeenth year, he fights King Kerkyon according to custom, and kills him. When Theseus hesitates, the Eleusinian queen tells him, "The king must die." This is different from the tradition in Theseus' own city of Troizen, and other Hellene kingdoms, where it is the choice of