Wars of the Roses

• 1. Introduction

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  The Wars of the Roses began on the 22nd of May 1455, when Richard, Duke of York led an army of between three thousand and seven thousand soldiers south to intercept a royal convoy at the town of St Albans. The battle that followed lasted only a short time and killed fewer than a hundred and sixty men. Yet among those dead were some of the most powerful figures in England: the Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland, and the Baron de Clifford. A king was found hiding in a local tanner's shop, abandoned by his own courtiers.

  What followed was three decades of civil war so convulsive that they erased an entire royal dynasty and planted the seeds of a new one. How did England arrive at this moment? Who were the men and women who fought, switched sides, and died for control of a single throne? And why did a conflict known for decades simply as the Civil Wars eventually acquire the romantic name it carries today?

• 2. A Name and Its Roses

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  "Wars of the Roses" is not what anyone called this conflict while it was happening. During the fighting, it was known simply as the Civil Wars. That plain label remained in use for centuries until a novelist changed everything in 1829, when Sir Walter Scott published Anne of Geierstein and borrowed a scene from William Shakespeare's play Henry VI, Part 1, in which noblemen in the gardens of the Temple Church pluck red or white roses to declare their allegiances. Scott's coinage caught on, and by the early nineteenth century the modern name had entered common use.

  Shakespeare's scene, though vivid, was not historically precise in its symbolism. The Yorkist white rose was used as a badge from early in the conflict, but the red rose of Lancaster only appeared after Henry Tudor's victory at Bosworth Field in 1485 - after the heaviest fighting was done. Before that, combatants wore the livery badges of their immediate lord, not the roses of dynastic legend. At Bosworth itself, Henry Tudor's forces fought under a red dragon, while Richard III's army used the device of a white boar. After Henry's subsequent marriage to Elizabeth of York, the two roses were fused into the Tudor rose as a deliberate symbol of reconciliation.

  The roses belonged to the House of Plantagenet, whose two rival branches - Lancaster and York - each traced their claims through the sons of King Edward III. The names of the houses came from their titles, but those titles were largely disconnected from the actual cities of York and Lancaster; the lands of the Duchy of Lancaster lay primarily in Gloucestershire, North Wales, and Cheshire, while the York estates stretched across England and Wales, with many concentrated in the Welsh Marches.

• 3. The Inheritance of Instability

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  Edward III, who ruled England from 1327 to 1377, built the conditions for disaster by creating powerful duchies for his five surviving sons. Cornwall came first, in 1337, for the eldest son Edward the Black Prince. Then came Clarence for Lionel and Lancaster for John of Gaunt in 1362. Edmund of Langley became Duke of York and Thomas of Woodstock became Duke of Gloucester in 1385, during the reign of Edward's grandson Richard II. These titles were unprecedented; no English monarch before Edward III had ever granted a dukedom to a subject.

  What each dukedom provided was financial independence from the crown - an income that allowed its holder to recruit and maintain a private military force called an affinity. Historian Charles Plummer coined the term "bastard feudalism" in 1885 to describe the system these affinities created. The old feudal levy, in which vassals owed service based on land tenure, had gradually been replaced by a system of cash payment, where lords bought the loyalty of retainers who in turn owed their positions to their patron rather than to the king. These networks could grow enormous: an affinity often included far more men than the lord personally knew, because its members also supported one another.

  The succession after Edward III's death in 1377 was itself a source of tension. His two eldest sons had predeceased him - the Black Prince died in 1376, Lionel of Clarence in 1368. His grandson Richard inherited as a ten-year-old. Under the laws of primogeniture, if Richard died childless, the legal heir was technically the Mortimer family, descendants of Lionel through the female line. But a decree Edward III issued in 1376 had tried to limit succession to the male line, which would have placed John of Gaunt ahead of Lionel's descendants. That legal contradiction would poison English politics for generations.

• 4. Henry VI and the Collapse of Royal Authority

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  Henry VI was formally crowned king at age seven on the 6th of November 1429, partly in response to the coronation of the French Dauphin as Charles VII at Reims on the 17th of July that same year. He had inherited not just a throne but an ongoing war with France - and a royal temperament entirely unsuited to prosecuting it.

  Contemporaries described Henry as deeply averse to violence, more interested in religion and learning than in governance or military command. He displayed symptoms of mental illness that may have been inherited from his maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France, who suffered his own severe breakdown. Henry's pliability made him a tool for competing factions at court. William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, emerged as the dominant figure in the royal household, engineering a peace settlement with France that required England to surrender the strategically valuable territories of Maine and Anjou. The clauses were kept secret from the English public, who would have rejected them. Suffolk was eventually arrested, impeached, exiled by Henry's intervention, and then intercepted at sea and executed on the 2nd of May 1450.

  The English defeat at Formigny on the 15th of April 1450 opened the door to France's reconquest of Normandy. Then on the 17th of July 1453, the catastrophic English loss at Castillon ended the Hundred Years' War entirely, surrendering every English possession in France except the Pale of Calais. Henry appears to have suffered a complete mental collapse around this time; he failed to recognise his newborn son, and when Cardinal John Kemp, the Lord Chancellor, died on the 22nd of March 1454, Henry could not be induced to name a successor. Government ground to a halt. Richard of York was appointed Lord Protector on the 27th of March 1454, imprisoned Somerset, and installed his brother-in-law Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, as Chancellor. The arrangement lasted until Henry unexpectedly recovered his faculties in 1455, reversed every one of York's measures, and released Somerset.

• 5. Warwick and the Art of Kingmaking

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  Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, was the wealthiest and most powerful magnate in England at the peak of his influence. He had inherited the lands and titles of both his parents and held command of Calais, the strategically critical port that also housed England's largest standing army. His capacity to shape who sat on the throne earned him the retrospective title of "Kingmaker."

  Warwick's relationship with the Yorkist cause was always personal and conditional. He backed Edward IV's claim in 1461 and was rewarded with extraordinary patronage: the offices of High Admiral of England and Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster, among several others. But when Edward secretly married Elizabeth Woodville on the 1st of May 1464 - four months before Warwick discovered the news in October of that year - the alliance began to fracture. Warwick had been conducting marriage negotiations with France on Edward's behalf, believing the king was available. The revelation humiliated him publicly and politically.

  Warwick's response was to reach for the instrument he knew best: armed force. He allied with Edward's disaffected brother George, Duke of Clarence, and on the 26th of July 1469, his forces defeated a royal army at Edgcote. Edward's father-in-law Lord Rivers and his brother-in-law Sir John Woodville were captured and killed. Edward himself was taken captive and held at Middleham Castle. When it became clear that neither Warwick nor Clarence had sufficient popular support to govern in Edward's place, Edward was released.

  Warwick's final gamble was the most dramatic reversal in the conflict. Louis XI of France arranged a reconciliation between Warwick and his bitter rival Margaret of Anjou, and on the 13th of September 1470, Warwick launched an invasion at Dartmouth and Plymouth. Edward was caught between Warwick's forces and those of Warwick's brother, the Marquess of Montagu, and fled to Flanders on the 2nd of October with his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and several hundred retainers. Henry VI was restored to the throne in what became known as the Readeption. The restored reign lasted less than six months. Edward landed back in Yorkshire on the 14th of March 1471, persuaded Clarence to defect, and on the 14th of April at Barnet, fog and the fatal resemblance between Edward's heraldic sun and the Earl of Oxford's star caused Warwick's men to attack their own allies. Warwick was killed during the rout.

• 6. Richard III and the Princes

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  Edward IV died on the 9th of April 1483, leaving a twelve-year-old heir and a court full of competing ambitions. He had named his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as Lord Protector. Richard moved quickly. On the 30th of April 1483, he intercepted the young Edward V's escort at Northampton and had the king's maternal relatives - Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers; Richard Grey; and Thomas Vaughan - arrested and sent north. The king was installed in the Tower of London on the 19th of May.

  A clergyman, probably Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, then supplied Richard with a legal argument: Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because Edward had previously contracted a union with Eleanor Butler. If true, Edward V and his siblings were illegitimate. An assembly of lords and commoners endorsed this argument on the 25th of June. Richard was crowned on the 6th of July 1483. Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan had already been beheaded that same month. The Lord Chamberlain William Hastings, whose loyalty to Edward and continued presence would have complicated Richard's path, was accused of treason and executed without trial on the 13th of June.

  Edward V and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York - known to history as the Princes in the Tower - were not seen in public after August 1483. The question of what happened to them was never definitively answered. Richard's seizure of power triggered two significant rebellions; the first, in October 1483, was led by his former ally Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Richard was born on the 2nd of October 1452 and died at Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August 1485, the last English king to fall in battle, and the last of the Plantagenet line.

• 7. Bosworth and the Tudor Settlement

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  Henry Tudor's claim to the English throne was, by strict dynastic logic, fragile. He descended from Edward III through Lady Margaret Beaufort and the Lancastrian line, but the Beauforts had been explicitly excluded from the succession by Henry IV. Henry himself had spent years in exile in France, a veteran of the Lancastrian cause without a kingdom.

  In August 1485, Henry and his uncle Jasper Tudor landed in southern Wales with a contingent of French troops and marched through Pembrokeshire, gathering soldiers as they went. They met Richard's army near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. The battle was decided in part by the decision of key lords to hold back or switch sides. Richard was killed. Henry VII ascended the throne and then, in a move designed to end the dynastic quarrel by absorption rather than conquest, married Elizabeth of York - Edward IV's eldest daughter and heir - uniting the rival claims in a single household and producing the symbol of the Tudor rose.

  The wars formally concluded in 1487 with Henry VII's defeat of the remaining Yorkist opposition at Stoke Field. The Lancaster male line had effectively ended in 1471 with the death of Edward of Westminster at Tewkesbury and the subsequent death of Henry VI in the Tower of London. The Tudor dynasty that inherited would rule England until 1603. Margaret of Anjou, who had fought more tenaciously than almost anyone for the Lancastrian cause, was ransomed by Louis XI of France in 1475 and died on the 25th of August 1482, three years before the battle that ended the conflict she had spent her adult life trying to win.