England from Richard II to the Tudors
The late-medieval English monarchy is the story of a political order that came close to collapse between 1399 and 1485, and was then quietly rebuilt by a Welsh-born dynasty that understood how to combine force, law, and marriage politics. The three articles in this section trace that arc from three different angles: the deposition of Richard II at Westminster in September 1399 and what it revealed about the brittleness of late Plantagenet kingship; the long civil conflict of 1455–1485 fought out in the snow of Towton (1461), the blood of Tewkesbury (1471), and the fields of Bosworth (1485); and the Tudor settlement under Henry VII and Henry VIII, which re-founded royal authority on statute, council, and a new fiscal apparatus. Read together, they ask a single question that has shaped English historiography since Hall and Holinshed: was the Wars of the Roses a catastrophic breakdown, or a brutal but not unprecedented working-out of the long Plantagenet succession crisis?
A kingship in crisis: from Richard II to Henry VI
The English monarchy of the early fifteenth century carried an unusual burden. The kings of the long Hundred Years’ War — Edward III, the Black Prince, Richard II — had won in France a revenue and a chivalric prestige that had no English parallel, and had governed through a court culture centred on the Garter, the royal household, and a clique of personal retainers. Richard II’s attempt to rule on that basis without the consent of the greater lords ended at Flint in August 1399 and at the Abbey of Westminster in September, when he was forced to abdicate in favour of Henry of Lancaster. The article on Richard II and the fall of chivalric kingship follows that breakdown in detail, and explains why the deposed king’s failure has been read, since at least the eighteenth century, as the hinge between medieval and modern English governance.
The crisis of royal authority was not resolved by the change of dynasty. Henry V’s brief reign (1413–1422) restored the crown’s military standing at Agincourt, and Henry VI, crowned king of England in 1422 as an infant and king of France at Reims in 1429, inherited a fiscal and military apparatus that could not survive the loss of Normandy (1449–1450) and Bordeaux (1453). Gerald Harriss’s work on the fifteenth-century Commons, and A.J. Pollard’s later reframing of the same period, have shaped how the long minority and the king’s eventual mental collapse are read; the article on Richard II engages the same constitutional question — the relationship between the king’s personal rule and the council — for the earlier generation.
The Wars of the Roses, 1455–1485
The conflict that bears the rose-and-rose name was fought out in three bursts: the opening battles of St Albans (1455) and Blore Heath (1459); the Yorkist seizure of the crown in 1460–1461 and the slaughter at Towton, perhaps eight thousand dead in a single morning; and the Lancastrian readeption and Tewkesbury (1471) that destroyed the last credible male-line Lancastrian claim, leaving Richard III on the throne and Henry Tudor in exile. The article on The Wars of the Roses explained walks the reader through these episodes, with attention to the magnates’ affinities, the role of the Calais garrison under Warwick the Kingmaker, and the structural weakness of the Crown’s household finance.
Anthony Tuck, and more recently A.J. Pollard and John Given-Wilson, have pushed back on the older Whig reading — popularised by Tudor chroniclers and by Shakespeare’s histories — that the wars were a period of meaningless bloodletting. The newer reading, of which Nigel Saul is a measured representative, is that the wars reflected a real constitutional question about the council, the Great Seal, and the king’s right to choose his own ministers, and that the resolution in 1485 was therefore a constitutional settlement as well as a military one. Michael Hicks’s biographical work on Warwick has done as much as anything to shift that consensus. The Bosworth regime that followed would learn, painfully and deliberately, to govern without the great retinues that had made the war possible.
The Tudor settlement, 1485 and after
Henry VII’s reign (1485–1509) is the subject of the third article, The early Tudors and the end of medieval England. It treats a government that, as Steven Gunn and Sean Cunningham have argued in their revisionist work on the reign, looked old-fashioned in its instincts but strikingly modern in its instruments: the Council Learned in the Law (from 1487), the Court of Star Chamber, the bond-and-recognisance system, the subsidy rolls of 1487 and later, the Treaty of Medina del Campo with Spain (1489), and a fiscal apparatus that could, in extremis, raise sums out of all proportion to the kingdom’s nominal wealth. The judicial murder of Perkin Warbeck in 1499, the burial of the Yorkist claim in the same decade, and the betrothal of the infant Arthur to Catherine of Aragon are the points at which the new regime stopped being provisional and started being dynastic.
Henry VIII’s reign (1509–1547) closed the medieval period by an act that no one in 1485 had quite anticipated — the break with Rome in 1533–1534, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the creation of a royal supremacy over the English church. By the time Henry died the kingdom he governed, the parliament he bullied, the navy he built, and the church he had annexed were recognisably the institutions of early modern England, and unrecognisably those of the England of Henry VI. The English case, in other words, is not a story of continuous growth from Edward I to the Tudors; it is a story of failure, civil war, and reconstruction, in which the failure of the 1440s and 1450s made the reconstruction of the 1490s possible.
Articles in this section
- The Wars of the Roses explained
- Richard II and the fall of chivalric kingship
- The early Tudors and the end of medieval England