Part I: The Mad King
While the Wars of the Roses formally started in 1455 with a confrontation between Henry VI’s royalist forces and the Duke of York with his allies, seeds of conflict were already being sown in 1400, after the overthrow of Richard II, the tyrannical boy king who unleashed a reign of terror. Richard II was deposed by his Lancaster cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV of England. Henry broke the direct father-son succession of the Plantagenet dynasty, and although it would not pose an issue at the time, competing claims to the throne would rise up in the decades to come.
Fast forward to 1422, when Henry VI, the grandson of Henry Bolingbroke, became king of England, at just nine months old. Henry’s father (another Henry, Henry V) was a renowned leader who had beaten the French in numerous battles of the Hundred Years War. But Henry VI was nowhere near as competent. He would sometimes suffer mental breakdowns due to genes from his mother. Henry’s reign was thus dominated by the many nobles around him, including his queen, Margaret of Anjou.
Tensions started to rise when Richard, Duke of York, began to challenge Henry’s noble advisors due to their corruption and failures from the Hundred Years War. The war with France has been going disastrously for England. After a final blow to the English army in Gascony, Henry VI suddenly fell into a stupor. With Henry’s absence, the Duke of York seized his opportunity and took control of English government. York introduced some reforms and maintained relative stability while the king was absent.
Everything turns around when Henry wakes up, a year and a half later. York rallies up troops and meet’s Margaret’s men at St. Albans, where the first battle of the Wars of the Roses plays out. Somerset is killed, and York is reinstated as Protector. After a few hiccups with the Lancastrians, York marches to London under the arms of England, with a different aim: to take the throne. And he has a pretty strong claim, given that both York and Henry VI descended from the Plantagenet kings that came before them.
After winning the favor of Parliament in London, York heads north to where Queen Margaret and her son have fled. The last battle between the two play out at Wakefield. Despite all that York has achieved, he is killed in battle, and Margaret is victorious. But the war has only just started; York’s claim to the throne set about a dynastic dispute between the two noble houses in the many years to come.
Part II: Unstable Peace
The Duke of York is dead. Henry is on the throne, but not for long. In 1461, on the snowy fields of Towton, the Duke of York’s 18 year old son Edward defeats the forces of Queen Margaret. It was considered the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. Henry VI is captured, Margaret and her son flees to Scotland, and Edward is now King Edward IV of England. The throne is now in Yorkist hands. Immediately, Edward begins to sniff out enemies, and turn them into allies.
Edward creates a shaky peace in the country. And he has plenty of help - the Earl of Warwick, a loyal supporter of the late Duke of York, becomes Edward’s advisor. Warwick has been on the Yorkist side since the start of the war, and in the first years of Edward’s reign, been the closest ally. However, the two start to drift apart when they disagree on plans of Edward’s marriage. Warwick had negotiated a strategic marriage with a French princess, but when he came back from France, he finds out that Edward already married himself to a minor English noblewoman, Elizabeth Woodville. In 1465, Elizabeth Woodville is crowned Queen.
The young king’s move threatens to tear apart the feeble peace he has created. The nobles are unhappy with the Woodvilles’ sudden rise in social status, and Warwick is furious. And that was just the beginning of eventual rivalry between Warwick and Edward. Warwick engineers rebellions and allies himself with Edward’s enemies and almost succeeds in throwing Edward off the throne of England. Edward, who desires peace for the country above all else, forgives him, but Warwick now has no influence on Edward whatsoever. He has been sidelined.
As Edward allies England with the Burgundians and the Woodvilles, he not only alienates Warwick, but also destroys any hope of making peace with France. And France is exactly where Warwick finds allies. Margaret of Anjou had to flee Scotland after Edward made peace there, and has since been living in exile in France. After getting Margaret on his side, Warwick marches an army to meet Edward. Edward flees to Flanders, and Elizabeth Woodville seeks sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. With Edward gone, Warwick releases Henry VI, who has been locked in the Tower of London for all of Edward’s reign. The throne is now in Lancastrian hands once more.
In 1471, Edward marches to London with an army. He immediately locks Henry back in the Tower, reunites with his wife (who’s given birth to a son and heir), and heads north to face Warwick. At the Battle of Barnet, Warwick is killed by Edward’s men. At last, Edward secures his position as king once more, and stamps out potential challenges (after all, the medieval games of power never worked around forgiveness). Soon after Edward reclaims his throne, Henry VI dies (he was no doubt killed). Edward again sets up a temporary peace, but it all breaks to pieces after his death…
Part III: The Hunchback & The Princes
We probably know by now that peace during the Wars of the Roses, though it exists, never lasts long. The throne becomes vacant after the death of Edward IV. who spent his last days falling prey to gluttony. News of Edward’s death reaches his younger brother, Richard. Richard, who has always been loyal to Edward, aims to do exactly what the late king’s will spelled out for him, and for Edward’s son and heir (also named Edward). Edward IV’s will states that Richard will be Protector of the Realm until his son, young Edward, comes of age.
However, the Woodvilles gets in Richard’s way. They want young Edward (who is partly of Woodville descent) to be crowned immediately. Richard made it his goal to eliminate opposition to his position before Edward’s scheduled coronation. He finds Lord Rivers, a Woodville, accuses him of treason and arrests him. Richard then takes young Edward and his younger brother to the Tower, claiming to be sending them to London for their “protection”. In reality, Edward and his brother are basically imprisoned, and they will stay in the Tower for the rest of their lives.
Richard set himself on a collision course with the Woodvilles. Edward, who trusts the Woodvilles way more than Richard, will reverse everything Richard did once he becomes king, and very potentially threaten Richard's position (and life). Richard, then, only had one option open for him: to take the throne. And he feels the urgency to, as members of the council begin to suspect him of tyranny after he sentenced Lord Rivers to death. Richard declares the two princes in the Tower illegitimate due to their Woodville blood. And in June of 1483, Richard becomes Richard III, king of England.
But he would not reign for long. After taking the throne, Richard had to stamp out any challenges to his position, so the people of England wouldn’t have anyone to rally around should they rebel against him. And the challenges to the throne were the two princes in the Tower, Edward and his brother. Not long into Richard’s reign, no one saw the princes again. They simply disappeared, and their death remains a mystery to this day. There is not sufficient evidence to prove Richard guilty, but the context of the war points to him as the culprit.
Although the princes were gone, Richard’s throne was not secure. A minor noble family of distant Lancaster descent, the Tudors, had been hiding in exile in France. Margaret Beaufort, the matriarch of the family, had been pragmatically avoiding the violence in the war. During Richard’s reign, she sent her son Henry to invade England and take the throne, so they would no longer have to live constantly in danger. At the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, Richard’s and Henry’s armies face off. We all know how that ended… Richard is killed in battle, and Henry is crowned Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England. The bitter power struggle between York and Lancaster has finally come to a close.
Part IV: The Legacy of the Roses
Who was Henry Tudor? Before the battle at Bosworth, he was a minor noble of distant Lancaster descent. Basically, a nobody. No one knew about him, no one expected his rise to kingship, and no one anticipated him starting the most notorious dynasty in England. But in 1485 he did take England’s crown, and was now Henry VII. Henry’s claim to the throne was very weak, and his position could be challenged by other distant relatives. So what did he do? He turned the whole Wars of the Roses into a propaganda scheme to legitimize his position.
Henry’s marriage was a clear political statement (almost every royal marriage is). Henry married Elizabeth of York, the sister of the two disappeared Princes in the Tower. This was the baseline for the Tudor rose, which combined the alleged red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York. Henry wanted to show that he was the hero who ended the violence of the war, and who succeeded in unifying the two sides together, making him the rightful king of England. To drive the message home, Henry and his descendants displayed the Tudor rose in architecture, paintings, clothing, and books.
The most targeted individual amidst the Tudors’ propaganda scheme was Richard III, the king his army slayed in the Battle of Bosworth Field. Being a monarch deposed on the battlefield by an obscure noble family, Richard was victim to the propaganda dispersed by Tudor kings who came after him, as he was commonly portrayed as the wicked, hunchbacked king responsible for allegedly one of the darkest periods in English history. Granted he did make some decisive and controversial moves during his reign, but Richard’s seemingly haunting reputation is exaggerated.
The most famous English playwright, William Shakespeare, contributed to the legacy of the war greatly. Many of the plays Shakespeare wrote were for Queen Elizabeth I, a Tudor. Shakespeare’s plays on the WOTR include stories on Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III, all of which portray the wars as times of insane bloodlust, treachery, and violence. Shakespeare also incorporated the rose symbols very well into his writing, favoring the Tudor narrative. Plays shouldn’t serve as historical evidence in the first place, as they are made to entertain an audience, but Shakespeare’s popularity set the legacy of the wars in stone.
In fact, the dynastic conflicts of 15th century England weren’t even known as the “Wars of the Roses” until the 19th century. The name was first introduced in 1829 by Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, and it caught on. But it’s slightly misleading. The period of 1455-1845 seemed to have been thirty years of continuous warfare, but in reality, it was a series of sporadic battles. The whole “roses” scheme is also a piece of propaganda - the house of Lancaster did not adopt the red rose until after the war. So, what of the “Wars of the Roses”? While it was indeed like a real life “Game of Thrones”, it’s true history is something far more complex.