The Wars of the Roses, (1455–85), in English history, the series of dynastic

civil wars whose violence and civil strife preceded the strong government of
the Tudors. Fought between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English
throne, the wars were named many years afterward from the supposed badges of
the contending parties: the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster.

Competing Claims to the Throne and the Beginning of Civil War

Both houses claimed the throne through descent from the sons of Edward III.
Since the Lancastrians had occupied the throne from 1399, the Yorkists might
never have pressed a claim but for the near anarchy prevailing in the mid-15th
century. After the death of Henry V in 1422 the country was subject to the long
and factious minority of Henry VI (August 1422–November 1437), during which
the English kingdom was managed by the king’s council, a predominantly
aristocratic body. That arrangement, which probably did not accord with Henry
V’s last wishes, was not maintained without difficulty. Like Richard II before
him, Henry VI had powerful relatives eager to grasp after power and to place
themselves at the head of factions in the state. The council soon became their
battleground.

Great magnates with private armies dominated the countryside. Lawlessness was
rife and taxation burdensome. Henry later proved to be feckless and
simpleminded, subject to spells of madness, and dominated by his ambitious
queen, Margaret of Anjou, whose party had allowed the English position in
France to deteriorate.

Between 1450 and 1460 Richard, 3rd duke of York, had become the head of a
great baronial league, of which the foremost members were his kinsmen, the
Nevilles, the Mowbrays, and the Bourchiers. Among his principal lieutenants was
his nephew Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick, a powerful man in his own right,
who had hundreds of adherents among the gentry scattered over 20 counties. In
1453, when Henry lapsed into insanity, a powerful baronial clique, backed by
Warwick, installed York, as protector of the realm. When Henry recovered in
1455, he reestablished the authority of Margaret’s party, forcing York to take up
arms for self-protection. The first battle of the wars, at St. Albans (May 22, 1455),
resulted in a Yorkist victory and four years of uneasy truce.
A new phase of the civil war began in 1459 when York, goaded by the queen’s
undisguised preparations to attack him, rebelled for the last time. The Yorkists
were successful at Blore Heath (September 23) but were scattered after a skirmish
at Ludford Bridge (October 12). York fled to Ireland, and the Lancastrians, in a
packed parliament at Coventry (November 1459), obtained a judicial
condemnation of their opponents and executed those on whom they could lay
hands.

From then on, the struggle was bitter. Both parties laid aside their scruples and
struck down their opponents without mercy. The coldblooded and calculated
ferocity that now entered English political life certainly owed something to the
political ideas of the Italian Renaissance, but, arguably, it was also in part
a legacy of the lawless habits acquired by the nobility during the Hundred Years’
War.

In France Warwick regrouped the Yorkist forces and returned to England in June
1460, decisively defeating the Lancastrian forces at Northampton (July 10). York
tried to claim the throne but settled for the right to succeed upon the death of
Henry. That effectively disinherited Henry’s son, Prince Edward, and caused
Queen Margaret to continue her opposition.

Gathering forces in northern England, the Lancastrians surprised and killed York
at Wakefield in December and then marched south toward London, defeating
Warwick on the way at the Second Battle of St. Albans (February 17, 1461).
Meanwhile, York’s eldest son and heir, Edward, had defeated a Lancastrian force
at Mortimer’s Cross (February 2) and marched to relieve London, arriving before
Margaret on February 26. The young duke of York was proclaimed King Edward
IV at Westminster on March 4. Then Edward, with the remainder of Warwick’s
forces, pursued Margaret north to Towton. There, in the bloodiest battle of the
war, the Yorkists won a complete victory. Henry, Margaret, and their son fled
to Scotland. The first phase of the fighting was over, except for the reduction of a
few pockets of Lancastrian resistance.
Edward IV, portrait by an unknown artist; in the National Portrait Gallery,
London.

The next round of the wars arose out of disputes within the Yorkist ranks.
Warwick, the statesman of the group, was the true architect of the Yorkist triumph.
Until 1464 he was the real ruler of the kingdom. He ruthlessly put down the
survivors of the Lancastrians who, under the influence of Margaret and with
French help, kept the war going in the north and in Wales. The wholesale
executions that followed the battle of Hexham (May1464) practically destroyed
what was left of the Lancastrian party, and the work seemed complete when, a
year later, Henry VI was captured and put in the Tower of London.

Yet Edward IV was not prepared to submit indefinitely to Warwick’s tutelage,

The open breach between the king and the earl came in 1467. Edward dismissed
Warwick’s brother, George Neville, the chancellor; repudiated a treaty with Louis
XI that the earl had just negotiated; and concluded an alliance with Burgundy
against which Warwick had always protested. Warwick then began to organize
opposition to the king. He was behind the armed protest of the gentry and
commons of Yorkshire that was called the rising of Robin of Redesdale (April
1469).

A few weeks later, having raised a force at Calais and married his daughter Isabel
without permission to Edward’s rebellious brother, George Plantagenet, duke of
Clarence, Warwick landed in Kent. The royal army was defeated in July
at Edgecote (near Banbury), and the king himself became the earl’s prisoner,
while the queen’s father and brother, together with a number of their friends, were
executed at his command.

By March 1470, however, Edward had regained his control, forcing Warwick and
Clarence to flee to France, where they allied themselves with Louis XI and
(probably at Louis’s instigation) came to terms with their former enemy Margaret.
Returning to England (September 1470), they deposed Edward and restored the
crown to Henry VI, and for six months Warwick ruled as Henry’s lieutenant.
Edward fled to the Netherlands with his followers.

The Triumph of Edward IV

Warwick’s power was insecure, however, for the Lancastrians found it difficult
to trust one who had so lately been their scourge, while many of the earl’s Yorkist
followers found the change more than they could bear. There was thus little real
opposition to Edward, who, having secured Burgundian aid, returned from
Flushing to land at Ravenspur (March 1471) in a manner reminiscent of Henry
IV. His forces met those of Warwick on April 14 in the Battle of Barnet, in which
Edward proved more intelligent than Warwick, regained the loyalty of the duke
of Clarence, and decisively defeated Warwick, who was slain in the battle. On the
same day, Margaret and her son, who had hitherto refused to return from France,
landed at Weymouth. Hearing the news of Barnet, she marched west, trying to
reach the safety of Wales, but Edward won the race to the Severn. In the Battle of
Tewkesbury (May 4) Margaret was captured, her forces destroyed, and her son
killed. Shortly afterward Henry VI was murdered in the Tower of London.
Edward’s throne was secure for the rest of his life (he died in 1483).
In 1483 Edward’s brother Richard III, overriding the claims of his nephew, the
young Edward V, alienated many Yorkists, who then turned to the last hope of
the Lancastrians, Henry Tudor (later Henry VII). With the help of the French and
of Yorkist defectors, Henry defeated and killed Richard at Bosworth
Field on August 22, 1485, bringing the wars to a close. By his marriage to Edward
IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York in 1486, Henry united the Yorkist and
Lancastrian claims. Henry defeated a Yorkist rising supporting the
pretender Lambert Simnel on June 16, 1487, a date which some historians prefer
over the traditional 1485 for the termination of the wars.

Battle of Bosworth Field