Which Yorkist leader was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460?

Richard, Duke of York, was the leading Yorkist killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460.

Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, challenged the authority of the mentally troubled Lancastrian king Henry VI and became the central political figure of the Yorkist cause. At Wakefield, his forces confronted a larger Lancastrian army in Yorkshire. The Yorkists were defeated, and York was captured and then killed, probably after the fighting rather than in a conventional battlefield death.

His second son, Edmund, Earl of Rutland, and his ally Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, also died in the aftermath. Later accounts embellished the episode, including the famous story of York being crowned with paper and displayed at Micklegate Bar, but historians regard several details as uncertain.

This answer is easy to confuse with Richard III, who was York’s younger son and later became king. Edward IV, York’s eldest surviving son, succeeded where his father had failed and won the throne in 1461.