[1399 - 1485] The Late Middle Ages: The Wars of the Roses

It began, as so many of England’s troubles did, with a crown. In the year 1399, King Richard II, a man who believed his right to rule came directly from God, was deposed and likely murdered by his ambitious cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who became King Henry IV. This act, this tearing of the crown from one man’s head to place upon another’s, planted a poisonous seed in the soil of the English nobility. It would take half a century to germinate, but when it flowered, it bloomed into a bloody, thirty-year civil war we now call the Wars of the Roses. For a time, the new dynasty—the House of Lancaster—seemed secure. Henry V, son of the usurper, was everything a medieval king was supposed to be: a pious warrior, a brilliant commander. His legendary victory against the French at Agincourt in 1415 galvanised the nation. But heroes die, and Henry V’s death in 1422 left the throne to his son, Henry VI, a nine-month-old infant. Herein lay the problem. Henry VI grew not into a warrior, but a gentle, deeply pious man who was utterly unsuited to the brutal politics of his age. He was prone to long periods of mental collapse, falling into catatonic stupors where he recognised no one, not even his own fiercely protective wife, Margaret of Anjou. A king who could not rule created a vacuum, and England’s powerful nobles, men who were effectively kings in their own domains, rushed to fill it. These were not humble lords. Men like Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, were astonishingly wealthy, with vast estates and private armies of retainers clad in their lord's livery. Warwick’s personal income at times dwarfed even the King’s. This was the era of the “overmighty subject,” and the mightiest of them all, with a stronger claim to the throne than the Lancastrian king himself, was Richard, Duke of York. His sigil was the white rose. He looked at the weak, crumbling government of Henry VI—whose family symbol was the red rose—and saw not just chaos, but opportunity. The first blood was spilled in 1455 on the cobbled streets of St Albans. It wasn’t a huge battle by the standards of the day, perhaps only 300 casualties, but its impact was seismic. York’s men attacked the King’s retinue. The fighting was personal, brutal. Men in full plate armour, the pinnacle of medieval technology, weighing upwards of 50 pounds, hacked at each other with pollaxes and swords in a chaotic melee. When the fighting stopped, some of the King’s closest allies were dead, and the King himself was found sitting silently in a tanner’s shop, wounded and bewildered. The war had begun. For the next three decades, the crown of England became a deadly prize, passed back and forth in a storm of battles, betrayals, and executions. Life for the common person, the farmer in his wattle-and-daub hut or the merchant in the timber-framed houses of London, became a lottery. While the wars were not a constant, kingdom-wide conflict—often they were short, sharp campaigns between noble factions—the breakdown of law and order was terrifying. A local dispute with a powerful neighbour could suddenly escalate into a private war, with no king strong enough to stop it. The Yorkists gained the upper hand under Richard’s charismatic and formidable son, Edward. Standing an impressive 6 feet 4 inches, Edward was a brilliant military commander. In 1461, he crushed the Lancastrian army at the Battle of Towton in a blinding snowstorm. It was the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, with an estimated 28,000 men killed in a single day—a horrifying 1% of the entire English population. Edward was crowned King Edward IV, and Henry VI was eventually captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London. But the kingmaker who helped Edward to the throne, the Earl of Warwick, was a fickle friend. Feeling slighted by the new king, Warwick did the unthinkable: he switched sides. He fled to France, made an alliance with his old enemy Margaret of Anjou, and invaded England in 1470. Edward IV was forced to flee, and the bewildered Henry VI was fetched from his cell, cleaned up, and placed back on the throne. This "Readeption" was short-lived. Edward IV returned with an army the following year, killing Warwick at the Battle of Barnet and annihilating the remaining Lancastrian forces at Tewkesbury, where Henry VI’s only son was killed. Within days, Henry VI himself died in the Tower, almost certainly murdered. The House of York seemed to have won, decisively and absolutely. For twelve years, England had peace under Edward IV. But the seed of instability, planted in 1399, had one last, bitter fruit to bear. When Edward died suddenly in 1483, his heir was his 12-year-old son, Edward V. The boy’s protector was his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Richard, a loyal and proven commander under his brother Edward, took the young king and his brother to the Tower of London—then a royal residence as well as a prison. What happened next is a mystery that still haunts English history. Richard declared the boys illegitimate. He then took the throne for himself as King Richard III. The two young princes were never seen again. Did Richard murder his own nephews to secure the throne? The suspicion alone was enough to shatter the Yorkist cause. Across the English Channel, a final claimant was waiting. Henry Tudor, a Welsh nobleman with a thin, almost laughable, claim to the throne through an illegitimate Lancastrian line, became the figurehead for all of Richard’s enemies. In 1485, he landed in Wales with a small force of French mercenaries and English exiles. At Bosworth Field, Richard III, seeing his lines begin to crumble due to betrayals, made a desperate, final charge directly at Henry Tudor. It was a bold gamble, the stuff of legend, but it failed. The king was surrounded, pulled from his horse, and hacked to death. The White Rose was trampled into the mud. Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII on the battlefield. To heal the fractured kingdom, he made a brilliant political move: he married Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s daughter, physically uniting the warring houses. He created a new symbol, the Tudor Rose, which combined the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York. The Middle Ages were over. A new dynasty, the Tudors, was born, built upon the bones of a generation of English nobility.