Late Middle Ages

The Wars of the Roses explained

The Wars of the Roses (1455–1485) were the longest and most destructive civil war of the Middle Ages in England. They opened at the First Battle of St Albans on 22 May 1455 and they closed, in any meaningful political sense, on the morning of 22 August 1485 at Bosworth Field. In the thirty years between those two days, four kings of the House of York came to the throne (Edward IV twice, Edward V for two months, and Richard III), one king of the House of Lancaster reigned twice (Henry VI in 1422–1461 and briefly in 1470–1471), and at least twelve pitched battles were fought, of which Towton (29 March 1461), Tewkesbury (4 May 1471), and Bosworth (22 August 1485) were the decisive. The conflict is also, in the most recent scholarship, an English adaptation of a European problem: the crisis of a “bastard feudal” nobility whose great affinities, paid by livery and maintenance, could be mobilised in factional war. To understand the Wars of the Roses is to read the late medieval English polity as it was actually lived: in shires, in the Council, in the king’s chamber, in the great private armies of the peers.

Dynastic origins: the two crowns

The dynastic question is the older and still indispensable starting point. The Lancastrian claim went back to 1399, when Henry Bolingbroke had been accepted as king on the deposition of Richard II, in preference to Edmund Mortimer, the young earl of March, who was Richard’s heir. Henry IV’s claim rested on a complicated combination of descent from Edward III through John of Gaunt and on parliamentary recognition. The Yorkist claim, formalised in the 1450s and 1460s, rested on descent from Edward III through Lionel of Antwerp, duke of Clarence: Edward IV’s grandmother, Anne de Mortimer, was the heir of Lionel’s line. The two claims were not equal in strictness of blood; both were descendants of Edward III through sons. The Lancastrian claim had the better parliamentary pedigree; the Yorkist claim had the better lineal title once the issue was reduced to blood alone. As A. J. Pollard put it in The Wars of the Roses (1988; 2nd ed. 2001), the problem was not that the Yorkist claim was unanswerable but that the Lancastrian was no longer sufficient.

Beneath the dynastic question was a structural one. The English polity in the 1440s and 1450s was in the grip of what Anthony Goodman and David Morgan, in a series of studies from the 1980s onwards, have called a “bastard feudal” aristocracy. The great territorial families — the Beauforts, the Nevills, the Percies, the Staffords, the Talbots — bound their followers to them by liveries, annuities, and the practice of “good lordship” that ran through the localities and the courts of law. The king’s writ no longer commanded the obedience it had once done. Henry V, who died on 31 August 1422 at the Château de Vincennes, had been able to override these affinities by sheer military success and a personal authority that the chronicles preserve; Henry VI, crowned at Westminster in November 1429 and at Paris in December 1431, was a man of unusual piety and limited political nerve, and he presided over a long series of French disasters that culminated in the loss of Normandy in 1449–1450 and Bordeaux in 1451.

The first phase, 1455–1464

The minority of the king and the loss of the French war set the stage. Richard, duke of York — the wealthiest of the English peers, descended from Edward III through both parents, and currently the king’s lieutenant in Ireland — returned from Ireland in 1449 and was appointed Protector of the realm in 1453 and 1454, after Henry had suffered a complete mental collapse at the end of August 1453. The birth of Henry’s son Edward on 13 October 1453 pushed York to one side. The new queen, Margaret of Anjou, was a woman of unusual political will, and her affinity was to be organised chiefly through Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and through the Beaufort inheritance that would eventually be the basis of Henry Tudor’s claim.

The First Battle of St Albans, 22 May 1455, was a small affair by the standards of the period: a few hundred casualties, the king wounded by an arrow, the duke of Somerset killed. The Yorkist victory did not yet amount to a revolution. The Yorkist lords — Richard of York, the earl of Salisbury, the earl of Warwick — were prepared to govern through the king. The situation changed in 1459 with the reverses of the Blore Heath (23 September 1459) and Ludford Bridge (12 October 1459), the flight of the Yorkists to Calais, and the reorganisation of the queen’s affinity. The battle of Northampton on 10 July 1460 was the turning-point; the king was captured, and the Yorkist lords entered London. The Act of Accord of 31 October 1460 disinherited the prince of Wales and recognised York as Henry’s heir. The duke was killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460, and his head, with a paper crown, was set up on the walls of York. The war became a war of destruction.

Towton, fought on 29 March 1461 in a snowstorm on a plateau west of the village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, is generally agreed to be the bloodiest battle of the Middle Ages in England. The chronicles exaggerate; the lower estimates place the casualties at 10,000 or so, with perhaps 5,000 of the king’s opponents killed in the rout that followed. Edward, the new earl of March, was proclaimed king on 4 March in London, and the coronation took place on 28 June at Westminster. The first reign of Edward IV had begun.

Readeption and the destruction of Lancaster, 1464–1471

The Yorkist victory of 1461 was not yet a settlement. Edward IV, born on 28 April 1442, was at twenty-two an experienced soldier but an insecure king, dependent on the great affinity of the earl of Warwick (“the Kingmaker”). His secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a Lancastrian widow, in the early summer of 1464, was the political mistake that split his party. Warwick had been negotiating a French match; the marriage was disclosed at Michaelmas 1464, and from that moment the “Warwick the Kingmaker” party began to break with the king. The years 1469–1470 brought the Lincolnshire rising, the defection of Warwick to the Lancastrian cause, the flight of the king to the Low Countries in October 1470, and the brief Readeption of Henry VI, proclaimed in London on 6 October 1470.

The Readeption lasted less than six months, and it failed. Edward landed at Ravenspur on 14 March 1471, fought the Battle of Barnet on 14 April (in which Warwick was killed), and the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471 (in which the prince of Wales, Edward of Westminster, was killed). Henry VI was murdered in the Tower on the night of 21 May. The work of the reign that followed was the consolidation of the Yorkist polity by a king who had learned a number of sharp lessons: the attainder of the great northern affinities, the use of the Council in the North, the discreet encouragement of a household affinity that would be the model for Henry VII’s later chamber government. The Bastard of Fauconberg’s rising of 1471, with its 4,000 men-at-arms and its march on London, was the last gasp of the Beauchamp–Warwick affinity. It was suppressed, and the king had a free hand in the shires.

The second reign of Edward, 1471–1483

The second reign of Edward IV is the period in which the Wars of the Roses look more like a constitutional problem. Edward, the most successful of the Yorkist kings, was also the most contradictory. He kept the vast Beaufort affinity of Margaret Beaufort on the margins; he relied on the queen’s Woodville relations for the bedchamber; he kept the great peers of the realm in line by a combination of parliament, attainder, and the much more discreet use of the king’s grace. Michael Hicks’s Edward IV (2010) and Anne Crawford’s work on the Yorkist kings are the indispensable modern studies. The king’s death on 9 April 1483, at the age of forty, was a constitutional catastrophe.

The crisis of 1483 is the most discussed episode of the period. Edward V, the twelve-year-old prince, was met on the road from Ludlow by his uncle Richard, duke of Gloucester, and the earl of Hastings, and was escorted to London. The coronation was set for 22 June. The Woodville attempt to rule through the king alone, in alliance with Anthony Woodville, earl Rivers, the young king’s maternal half-uncle, came to grief when Gloucester arrested the queen’s brother on 30 April and seized the king at Stony Stratford the same day. Hastings was executed on 13 June; the king’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was declared invalid; the marriage of Edward IV to Eleanor Talbot was held to have been the prior and lawful union, and the issue of the Woodville marriage was bastardised. The duke of Gloucester was crowned Richard III on 6 July; the young king and his brother were lodged in the Tower and disappeared before the autumn. The Crowland Chronicle, Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, and the Titulus Regius of 1484 preserve the political grammar of the usurpation; the Croyland Chronicle’s account of the events in 1483 is the most judicious near-contemporary source.

Bosworth and the Tudor settlement

Henry Tudor’s invasion began at Mill Bay on 7 August 1485 and ended, three weeks later, on the field to the south of Market Bosworth. The death of Richard III in the battle was the final political event of the civil war, and the coronation of Henry VII at Westminster on 30 October 1485 was the formal end of the long competition between the two houses. The act of attainder against Richard, the confirmation of the king’s title in parliament, and the long process of bond and recognisance by which the late Yorkist affinity was financially and politically bound to the new regime, are the substance of what A. J. Pollard has called the “Tudor Settlement”.

The settlement included the marriage of Henry to Elizabeth of York in January 1486, a careful union of the two houses. It included the treatment of Margaret Beaufort as a sort of fourth estate of the realm: she was, as we can see in the 1484 Royaumont will and in the more famous founding of Christ’s and St John’s Colleges, Cambridge, an unusual and important figure, and her son Henry VII understood her political value. The two great risings of the reign — the 1487 campaign of Lambert Simnel, defeated at Stoke Field on 16 June 1487, and the 1491–1497 imposture of Perkin Warbeck — were the price of the settlement. The civil wars of the 1470s and 1480s had killed or ruined many of the great Yorkist affinity leaders; the remaining ones were tied to the king by a financial recognisance whose extent can be reconstructed from the C 14 files of the Chancery.

Reading the Wars

Three generations of historians have read the Wars of the Roses in three ways. The first generation — James Gairdner, The Houses of Lancaster and York (1874, rev. 1901) — was constitutional and dynastic. The second generation — K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (1973), and his pupils Anthony Goodman and C. D. Ross — made bastard feudalism the central object. The third generation — A. J. Pollard, Michael Hicks, John Watts, and Christine Carpenter — has read the wars as a regional and constitutional problem in which the centralisation of the late medieval English state was the longer consequence, and in which the personalities of the great kings (Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV) were decisive in ways the older constitutional histories were reluctant to admit. The most useful single-volume introductions are now Pollard’s The Wars of the Roses (3rd ed., 2013) and Michael Hicks’s The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors (2010).

References and further reading

  • A. J. Pollard, The Wars of the Roses (London, 1988; 3rd ed., 2013).
  • Michael Hicks, The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors (New Haven, 2010).
  • Christine Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437–1509 (Cambridge, 1997).
  • A. J. Pollard, Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (Stroud, 1991).
  • Rosemary Horrox, Richard III: A Study of Service (Cambridge, 1989).