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The Wars of the Roses A. J. POLLARD

Third Edition

British History in Perspective General Editor: Jeremy Black Toby Barnard The Kingdom of Ireland, 1641–1760 Eugenio Biagini Gladstone D. G. Boyce The Irish Question and British Politics, 1868–1996 (2nd edn) Keith M. Brown Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603–1715 A. D. Carr Medieval Wales Gregory Claeys The French Revolution Debate in Britain Eveline Cruickshanks The Glorious Revolution Anne Curry The Hundred Years War (2nd edn) John Derry Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt and Liverpool (rev. edn) Susan Doran England and Europe in the Sixteenth Century Seán Duffy Ireland in the Middle Ages Ian Gentles Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution David Gladstone The Twentieth-Century Welfare State Brian Golding Conquest and Colonisation: The Normans in Britain, 1066–1100 (2nd edn) Sean Greenwood Britain and the Cold War, 1945–91 Steven Gunn Early Tudor Government, 1485–1558 Richard Harding The Evolution of the Sailing Navy 1509–1815 David Harkness Ireland in the Twentieth Century: Divided Island Ann Hughes The Causes of the English Civil War (2nd edn) Kathryn Hurlock Britain, Ireland and the Crusades, c.1000–1300 I.G.C. Hutchison Scottish Politics in the Twentieth Century Ronald Hutton The British Republic, 1649–1660 (2nd edn) Kevin Jeffreys The Labour Party since 1945 T. A. Jenkins Disraeli and Victorian Conservatism T. A. Jenkins Sir Robert Peel J. Gwynfor Jones Early Modern Wales, c.1525–1640 H. S. Jones Victorian Political Thought D. E. Kennedy The English Revolution, 1642–1649 Christine Kinealy The Great Irish Famine David Loades The Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1545–1565 Diarmaid MacCulloch Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (2nd edn) John F. McCaffrey Scotland in the Nineteenth Century W. David McIntyre British Decolonisation, 1946–1997 continued overleaf

A. P. Martinich Thomas Hobbes Roger Middleton The British Economy since 1945 W. M. Ormrod Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450 Richie Ovendale Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century Ian Packer Lloyd George Keith Perry British Politics and the American Revolution Murray G. H. Pittock Jacobitism Murray G. H. Pittock Scottish Nationality A. J. Pollard The Wars of the Roses (3rd edn) David Powell British Politics and the Labour Question, 1868–1990 David Powell The Edwardian Crisis: Britain, 1901–1914 Richard Rex Henry VIII and the English Reformation (2nd edn) Matthew Roberts Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–1914 David Scott Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 G. R. Searle The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929 (2nd edn) John Stuart Shaw The Political History of Eighteenth-Century Scotland George Southcombe & Grant Tapsell Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1600–1714 W. M. Spellman John Locke William Stafford John Stuart Mill Robert Stewart Party and Politics 1830–1852 Alan Sykes The Radical Right in Britain Bruce Webster Medieval Scotland Ann Williams Kingship and Government in Pre-Conquest England Ian S. Wood Churchill John W. Young Britain and European Unity, 1945–99 (2nd edn) Michael B. Young Charles I Paul Ziegler Palmerston Please note that a sister series, Social History in Perspective, is available covering the key topics in social and cultural history.

British History in Perspective Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71356–7 hardcover Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–69331–0 paperback You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS, UK

The Wars of the Roses Third Edition A. J. POLLARD

© A. J. Pollard 1988, 2001, 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition 1988 Second edition 2001 Third edition 2013 Published by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN: 978–0-230–36851–4 hardback ISBN: 978–0-230–36852–1 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1 22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13 Printed and bound in China

For Richard and Lucy, Edward and Jessie

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Contents

Preface to the Third Edition

viii

Preface to Second Edition

x

Preface to the First Edition

xi

Maps and Tables

xii

Introduction 1 The Wars in History 2 The Course of the Wars 3 The Character of the Wars 4 The Causes of the Wars 5 The Impact of the Wars 6 The Aftermath of the Wars 7 The European Context of the Wars Conclusion

1 7 23 42 60 88 107 119 131

Notes

136

Select Bibliography

160

Glossary

168

Index

171

vii

Preface to Third Edition

In the twelve years since the text of this work was last revised, knowledge has expanded, interpretation has continued to change and understanding has developed. In particular, it now strikes me that when this book was first written, the shadow of K.B. McFarlane still loomed large; now it has faded. In 1988, much of the discussion was in effect a commentary on his legacy. In this revision I find I have reduced the scale of reference back to his pioneering work in the middle of the twentieth century. New themes and topics have come forward which are reflected in the changes. In particular, I have added a major discussion of popular politics and the public realm, reflecting a wealth of scholarship since the beginning of this century. This has led to a further structural alteration, there being a new chapter on the character of the Wars. Moreover, the chapter on the impact has been expanded by the addition of a discussion of women and the Wars. If anything the tempo of publication on the subject has quickened during the last decade, particularly in respect of popular works which focus on the battles, campaigns and personalities of kings. As a whole these tend to draw on and recycle established knowledge. But there has also been a steady stream of new research on and interpretation of individual reigns, on noblemen, towns, counties and regions. I have endeavoured to incorporate as much of this new work as I can. To some extent recent debate has led to greater uncertainty, especially in respect of the personalities and motivation of the principal actors. That said, the work remains an introduction to the topic which offers a personal approach while seeking to guide the reader through the maze of interpretation and debate. I would like to thank the

viii



Preface to Third Edition

ix

anonymous readers who enthusiastically encouraged the preparation of this new edition and the staff of Macmillan Palgrave, especially Felicity Noble, Sonya Barker, Jenni Burnell and Alec McAulay in steering it through to publication. Castelnau Montratier August 2012

Preface to the Second Edition

I have taken the opportunity to revise this work, which was completed over a dozen years ago, to correct errors which I have detected (or had drawn to my attention), to recast the structure, to take note of the considerable body of important work which has been published in the meantime, and to encompass alternative perceptions and interpretations which have since been advanced. While my views have been modified in the light of new scholarship, the work remains essentially as it was first conceived as a guide to the reader through what is a complex and, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, still controversial topic. In preparing the revisions I would like to thank the staff at the publishers and, in particular, Robin Nixon for rescuing me from the entanglement of rogue electronic technology. Eryholme February 2000

x

Preface to the First Edition

This work is a discussion of what seem to me to be the important and distinctive characteristics of the Wars of the Roses. It is founded upon and reflects the work of many scholars and has had the advantage of many hours of discussion with friends and colleagues too numerous to name. On some issues it agrees with them, on others it disagrees. Any strengths it possesses owes much to them, the weaknesses are all my own. I would however like to record a special debt to the late Charles Ross, whose book under the same title will for long remain the best introductory work on the subject. And I would like to thank Jill Wren for her patient assistance in preparing the typescript for publication. Taunton September, 1987

xi

Maps and Tables BERWICK

Norham R. Tweed Hedgeley Moor SCOTLAND (1464) Hexham (1464)

CARLISLE

Bamburgh Dunstanburgh Alnwick Warkworth

NEWCASTLE

DURHAM

Raby Middleham Sheriff Hutton

Towton (1461) Wakefield (1460)

Denbigh Harlech

Blore Heath (1459)

Bosworth (1485)

rn

Losecoat (1470)

Caister

Northampton (1460) Edgecote St Albans Tewkesbury (1469) (1455, 1461) (1471) Barnet

R. Seve

MILFORD HAVEN

Stoke (1487)

NOTTINGHAM

Ludford (1459) Mortimer’s Cross (1461)

YORK R. Trent

Hornby

(1471) Nibley Green (1470)

LONDON

DOVER

CALAIS

FRANCE

Battles

TOWNS

Castles

Map 1  England and Wales during the Wars of the Roses

xii



xiii

Maps and tables

Royal Franchises in England and Wales

PERCY DACRE PERCY Newcastle

G

Bishopric of NEVILLE (E. of Wtld) Durham

E OK ST EY Neville

NEVILLE (Ld of Fauconberg)

GR CLIFFORD FitzHugh

M

OW

KING BR (D. of Lanc.) AY NEVILLE PERCY CLIFFORD KING (D. of L.) York

LLE

AF ST

NE TI LA ER PA ST TY CA UN LAN CO F O

VI NE PERCY

King (D. of Lanc.) EY

GR

ELL MW CRO TINGS HAS T ON M U A BE

ROOS KING (D. of Lanc.) MOWBRAY RD FORD GREY FFO STAFHASTINGS STA

FITZALAN T TALBO

BEAUMO

MOWBRAY

NT

LE

EY R EA U

FO

RT

G

TALBOT CROMWELL STAFFORD Nottingham

ES LL WE

COUNTY PALATINE OF CHESTER

PO

YORK TALBOT BRAY MOW LAN ZA FIT

OS RO RD FO

Kingston on Hull

YORK

LA

PERCY

KIN

KING (D. of Lan c.)

Carlisle

DE

B

MO WB RA D YORK Y OR F F T LE n F .) STA NE PO RAY O La KING A f T YORK L VI Warwick o P DE OWB OL D. TI P Worcester G( YORK M N I A K Orford YORK NE DE L RD STAFFORD ) LOVELL Ipswic VI G FO h IN anc. L F K YORK LE A L AY NE ch VERE Vere Harwi T . f R S .o VI KING (D OWB Colchester LL BUTLER Oxford VERE (D.of Lanc.) M E STAFFORD G STAFFORD KING Vere KIN NEVILLE (D. of. Corn.) VI NE

D

AY

BR

OW

FORD

London

HUNGER

T OR

GE

RF

OR

LL

E

M

MOW

E LL

TUDOR

BRAY

E

KING (D. of La nc

)

GREY

STAFFORD

c.

YORK

HU N

RT FO AU

BE

F KING AU BE nc.) STAFFORDST Canterbury (D. of La AF POLE LA DE MOWBRAY FO R FO RD KING ER G E KING LL VI N NE (D. of Lanc.) Winchester AY HU (D. of Lanc.) TEN F Y R IT A N U ZAL AN CO ONVILLE COURTE FITZALAN B RT Y KING (D. of Lanc.) TENA AUFO R E U B BEA CO

AY

BR

OW

M

n.) or COURTENAY

fC

NG

KI

.o (D

UFO

RT

BEAUFORT

uth

mo

Ply

Map 2  Principal Estates of the Peerage and the Crown c. 1461. (Based, with acknowledgement, on Map 5 in E. F. Jacob, FifteenthCentury England, Oxford, 1961)

xiv

EDWARD III

Edward, Prince of Wales

Lionel, Duke of Clarence

Edmund, Blanche of Lancaster (1) = John, Duke of LANCASTER = (2) Katherine Swinford Duke of York

Philippa = Edmund, Earl of March

Thomas, Duke of Gloucester

Richard, Anne = Edward, Edward, Earl of Duke of York Earl of Cambridge Stafford (d. 1415) HENRY V Henry, Roger, Richard, Humphrey, Edmund, John, Earl of March Earl of Somerset Duke of York Duke of Buckingham Duke of Somerset Duke of Somerset (see left) (d. 1460) (d. 1455) HENRY VI Edmund Anne = Richard, Earl (d. 1444) (d. 1471) of Cambridge (d. 1425) Henry, Margaret = Edmund TUDOR, Henry, Edmund, (d. 1415) Earl of Richmond Duke of Somerset Duke of Somerset Earl of Stafford (1) = Anne Neville Richard Edward, (d. 1464) (d. 1458) (d. 1458) (d. 1471) Duke of York Prince of Wales (d. 1460) (d. 1471) HENRY VII Henry, (see left) Duke of Buckingham (d. 1483) RICHARD III (2) = Anne Neville George, EDWARD IV = Elizabeth (d. 1485) (d. 1483) Woodville Duke of Clarence (d. 1478) RICHARD II

Richard Duke of York (d. 1483?)

Elizabeth = HENRY VII Edward, of York Earl of Warwick (d. 1499)

John BEAUFORT, Earl of Somerset

Edward (d. 1484)

HENRY VIII

Table 1  The Houses of Lancaster, York and Beaufort

Joan (see Table 2)

Maps and tables

EDWARD V (d. 1483?)

HENRY IV



Margaret Stafford (1) = Ralph, 1st Earl of Westmorland (d. 1425) = (2) Joan Beaufort (of Middleham)

(of Raby)

Richard, Earl of Salisbury (d.1460)

William, George, Lord Fauconberg Lord Latimer (d. 1463) (d. 1469)

Robert, Edward, Bishop of Durham Lord Abergavenny (d. 1457) (d. 1476)

Cecily – Richard of York

Ralph, John, Thomas 2nd Earl Lord Neville (d. c.1461) (d. 1484) (d. 1461)

John (d. 1450)

Humphrey (d. 1469)

Charles (d. 1469)

Richard, Earl of Warwick (The Kingmaker) (d 1471)

Isabel = George, Duke of Clarence

Thomas (d. 1460)

John, Lord Montagu, Earl of Northumberland (d. 1471)

Anne = (1) Edward, Prince of Wales (2) RICHARD III

George, Archbishop of York (d. 1476)

George, Duke of Bedford (d. 1483)

EDWARD IV

RICHARD III

Maps and tables

John (d.1423)

Ralph, Lord Neville 3rd Earl (d. 1498)

Table 2  The Nevilles

xv

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Introduction

The phrase ‘The Wars of the Roses’ is one of those historical terms, like ‘The Agricultural Revolution’ or ‘The Glorious Revolution’, which some historians would like to see thrown in the dustbin, but which nevertheless survives if only as a matter of convenience and common currency. By tradition, the Wars of the Roses signify a period of total anarchy brought on by a dynastic conflict which divided England before the coming of the Tudors. Whether they are considered to have started in 1399 (as was originally the case) or in 1455 (as has been the case for the last 100 years), in common discourse they serve as a type for the worst possible civil strife and discord that has ever occurred in England and which must never be allowed to occur again. For this reason, they have never quite lost their topicality. Politicians are wont to invoke the spectre of the Wars and commentators to draw contemporary analogies. Thus, the last months of the Callaghan government of 1976–79, which were plagued by a series of very visible industrial disputes, were tagged ‘The Winter of Discontent’ by public figures anxious to conjure up an image of the utter chaos from which the kingdom was rescued. What more effective way was there than to draw upon the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III, which refer directly to a phase of the Wars of the Roses in these terms? Over a decade later, in July 2000, the Conservative MP John Redwood described a Wars of the Roses being fought in the Labour cabinet over the issue of joining the European currency. Though some might have thought that this might have been more appropriately applied to his own side, the implication of anarchy at the centre was clear to all. And even more recently a ‘ferocious “war (sic) of the roses” over

1

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THE WARS OF THE ROSES

the leadership of the far right British National Party’ was reported by the BBC in the spring of 2011. It is not just politicians and political commentators who retain a traditional and fixed idea of the Wars of the Roses. In 1977 the Sunday Times carried a review by Bernard Levin of Terry Hands’ spectacular production of the three parts of Henry VI for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In his opening remarks, Levin ruminated on the likelihood that when Shakespeare was born, there were old people still living in Stratford who were alive before Bosworth. The Wars of the Roses were thus not merely history: ‘the air still resounded with the cries of the wounded and dying, and the earth was soaked with their blood’. For this reason, Levin suggested, ‘it is hardly to be wondered at that the horror of ambition, faction and anarchy, with which he (Shakespeare) grew up, never left him’.1 It is perhaps understandable that in 1977, Bernard Levin was not in touch with recent thought about the Wars of the Roses (or Shakespeare for that matter). In 1986 it was possible for one Shakespearean scholar writing on the playwright’s perception of politics and history to remark, in passing and without any apparent awareness of a different perspective, on the ‘chaos of the Wars of the Roses’.2 This is a notion taken without question by Norman Davies in his history of Britain (1999), where he writes, with sublime indifference to twentieth-century scholarship, that ‘From 1455 to 1485, the Wars of the Roses between the rival proponents of Lancaster and York reduced England to chaos.’ This unawareness of modern scholarship in more popular general accounts of English history continues. Simon Jenkins, for example, has recently asserted that the wars were only ‘a crude struggle for power’ and reiterated another old misconception, that the wars wiped out the nobility. Neil McGregor, in a radio talk about the relevance of Shakespeare’s history plays to late-sixteenth-century politics referred on 19 April 2012 to the Wars of the Roses as ‘decades of bloody infighting that ravaged the country’.3 In many circles, academic as well as literary and political, the Sellar and Yeatman vision of the Wars of the Roses as the revival of the ‘Feudal amenities of Sackage, Carnage, and Wreckage’ remains the norm.4 This work is an attempt to draw together and summarize as succinctly as possible the results of some six decades of scholarship on the Wars of the Roses since the mid-twentieth century that have substantially revised this view. While the work gives considerable attention to what one might call the sociology of civil war, it neither



Introduction

3

tells the story of campaigns, nor tries to reconstruct the course of battles, contemporary accounts of which are sketchy, ill-informed and unreliable. There has been a surge of popular interest in military history in the first decade of the twenty-first century., driven forward by a general obsession with accounts of fighting and violence.5 The most significant advance in knowledge has been achieved through battlefield archaeology, especially through surveys and excavations of two sites: Towton and Bosworth.6 Besides fixing, definitively the precise site of Bosworth, these have yielded important insights into the use of field artillery. The Earl of Warwick, who inherited a considerable train of ordnance as captain of Calais, brought guns and gunners over with him to campaign in 1460–61, though to no beneficial effect at the second battle of St Albans. He clearly valued artillery, for he left his train at Bristol when he fled the realm in the spring of 1471, and recovered it on his return in the autumn.7 Other than the greater use of field guns to supplement archers, little as yet has led to a major reappraisal of how battles were fought – usually a confused melée of thud and blunder. In this traditional warfare Edward IV was a precocious master. His direct no-nonsense approach, getting at the enemy as soon as possible, inspiring his men by example in the thick of it, ‘manly, vigorously and valiantly’, carried the day in all the battles in which he fought. Warwick, on the other hand, was perhaps more thoughtful, though his tactics at the second battle of St Albans went badly awry. He was criticized after his death for remaining on horseback, at the rear of his men, so that he could escape more easily if defeated. Leaving aside the deliberate slur of cowardice in contrast with Edward IV, and while acknowledging the suggestion of a more cautious approach than his nemesis, it might be that he was an early practitioner of a modern approach to generalship in the field. Henry VII, who did not himself fight in either of the battles in which he commanded his troops, might have adopted the same approach of directing from a vantage point. There are indications, too, in these last battles at Bosworth and Stoke, that mercenaries brought in from France, the Netherlands and Germany introduced new tactics and displayed a level of discipline unfamiliar to native soldiers.8 The focus is not warfare but the politics of the era known as the Wars of the Roses. The work is both an examination of what the phrase itself has meant (and still means) as a summing up of one particular phase in English history, and a discussion of what

4

THE WARS OF THE ROSES

happened, why and with what consequences in the later fifteenth century. In concentrating on the political theme, the work follows K.B. McFarlane’s adaptation of Clausewitz’s dictum that civil war is ‘the continuation of politics by other means’.9 Chapter 2 offers a summary narrative, but if more detail is wanted the reader has a wide choice of modern textbooks and monographs to which to turn. The narrative here serves as a basis for the further discussion of the causes, character, scale, aftermath and context of the Wars. As a study in political history, this work does not take up in detail a discussion of the age as a whole. To some this might seem a grave imbalance. One of the paradoxes of the age of the Wars of the Roses is that it was also, despite the characteristic dismissal of one nineteenth-century historian, an age which indeed witnessed significant ‘progress in the arts of peace’.10 The last three decades of the fifteenth century, after a period of deep recession, were years of economic development and growing per capita prosperity for many men and women, especially in south-eastern and south-western England. These same decades were the years when the ‘New Learning’ began to take root in England and the first humanist grammar school, Magdalen College School, Oxford, was founded. It was also in this era that Caxton, then Oxford University, and others, set up their printing presses. It was an age, in fact, of expanding educational opportunity and growing literacy, whether in the new intellectual fashion or, more commonly, in the traditional mould. Furthermore there was widespread growth in practical literacy in the vernacular for day-to-day communication. It was perhaps also an age of intensifying personal religious devotion and piety; an era in which lay men and women in growing numbers began to demand more of the institutions of the Church than they ultimately could supply. It was also, in the midst of political conflict, the age of rebuilding in the perpendicular style of East Anglian naves and Somerset bell towers. Those naves and towers were put up largely by parishioners, whose activities were reflected in the accounts of their church wardens in both town and country. Their fund raising, including the cakes and ale whose decease Sir Toby Belch later bemoaned in Twelfth Night, tapped the wealth of prospering yeomen, husbandmen and artisans. From the perspective of most of the parish notables, most of the time the Wars were indeed a distant thunder. There is as great a danger of romanticizing ‘Merrie England’ as there is of demonizing the Wars of the Roses. Nevertheless, it remains an abiding contradiction of



Introduction

5

the later decades of the fifteenth century that it was as much an age of economic improvement, social amelioration and cultural vigour, especially for ‘the middling sorts’, as it was of political uncertainty and physical danger for their betters. The structure of society and underlying social trends were barely touched by periodic civil war in the second half of the fifteenth century, the whole history of which the Wars of the Roses are only a part.11 If not encompassing a complete history of the realm, this work does attempt to place the experience of civil war in England in the later fifteenth century in a wider European context. Most recent comment has tended to emphasize the fact that in comparison with the experience of neighbouring European kingdoms England suffered little from the ravages of civil war. What has tended to be overlooked is the basic fact that there was a common experience of such civil war. Approaches to the Wars of the Roses have tended to be excessively Anglocentric. The normal perspective is that of the place of the Wars in the march of English history and, more recently, the unfolding of English historiography. But England in the later fifteenth century was also part of both the British Isles and of a European community. While England dominated Britain, and the English already felt themselves to be the divinely ordained rulers of the islands, Scotland and, in practice, a significant part of Ireland were independent. Scotland was a separate European kingdom. The wider European context impinges on England in two ways. First of all, the rulers of England were caught in a complex network of international relations. In the continual game of international politics and diplomacy, the internal affairs of neighbouring kingdoms were as significant to rival powers as the external posturing. Thus all rulers, of England as well as of France, Scotland, the Burgundian inheritance, or the Spanish kingdoms, intervened in the affairs of the others. Intrigue and plotting, and occasional open military intervention, were part and parcel of the constant attempts to destabilize and exploit the weaknesses of rivals. The civil wars of England, France, Scotland, Burgundy, or Spain, were all at critical times intensified and extended by foreign intervention. In an important sense, the Wars of the Roses were a part of an interlinked chain of European civil wars. Secondly, England and her neighbouring kingdoms were all, by the very nature of their political structures and the cultural values of their élites, prone to civil war. Central governments in all European kingdoms

6

THE WARS OF THE ROSES

and states were fundamentally weak and lacking in coercive power. All depended on the willing obedience and cooperation of a highly volatile and independent nobility. Moreover, the nobility of Europe was educated in the school of chivalry, which elevated the making of war to the highest secular ideal. Civil war in northern Europe was, therefore, generally less exceptional, and thus considered less shocking, in the fifteenth century than it is in twenty-first century Europe.

Chapter 1: The Wars in History

The twentieth century, especially the last third, witnessed a major revision of received ideas about the Wars of the Roses. The 30 years 1455–85, it has been argued, were neither years of constant civil strife nor years of uncontrolled anarchy. In terms of open warfare, it has often been repeated, there were no more than 12 or 13 weeks of actual fighting in the whole 30 years. And this fighting was restricted to the narrow world of the political élite, most of whose members were either indifferent to the outcome or shamelessly opportunistic. A handful of isolated battles, armed clashes, murders and executions, we are told, had little impact on the day-to-day life of the kingdom. These inconveniences were not caused by dynastic dispute: the question of the throne only arose as a consequence of political rivalry. There were no roses, red for Lancaster or white for York, deployed as badges by rival parties. Even the phrase ‘Wars of the Roses’, we are assured, was not thought of until invented by Sir Walter Scott.1 In short, the Wars of the Roses is a myth. In its extreme manifestation this was the argument advanced by the late S.B. Chrimes in a recorded discussion with Professor R.L. Storey. The roses, he stated, had nothing to do with it and there were not, ‘in any meaningful sense’, any wars. The only admissible use of the phrase, he conceded, was if it were restricted to the first three months of 1461.2 The Wars of the Roses, it would seem, have been talked out of existence. Apart from the fact that it would probably be impossible to remove the phrase from our language, there are, however, compelling historiographical grounds as well as sound historical reasons for retaining it. To start with the roses. While it may be strictly true to say that the exact phrase ‘the Wars of the Roses’ was not employed until

7

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THE WARS OF THE ROSES

the early nineteenth century, as Dr Aston pointed out in 1971, the concept it encapsulates of the warring roses has a very long history stretching back through Hume’s ‘wars of the two roses’ (1761) and Sir John Oglander’s ‘the quarrel of the warring roses’ (1646) to the fifteenth century itself.3 Badges (as has frequently been observed) were adopted individually by late-medieval noblemen and women. A great family, especially a royal family, collected several, reflecting its own lineage and agglomeration of titles from different ancestors. An individual might even use several badges reflecting different claims, associations and objectives. Henry VII deployed not only the Tudor Rose itself, but also the portcullis (from his mother), the red dragon of Cadwallader (from his father’s line) and, fleetingly, a dun cow for his earldom of Richmond. Thus the house of Lancaster had a red rose in its vast collection  – used more by fourteenth-century earls and dukes. While the favourite badge of the last Lancastrian, Henry VI, was an antelope, there is a likelihood that the red rose became an emblem of the Beauforts, also descended from the dukes of Lancaster. Similarly, the white rose is to be found in Yorkist use (inherited from the Mortimer earls of March), but the badge of Richard of York was a falcon and fetterlock, the badge of his son Edward IV a sun with streamers, of George, Duke of Clarence, a black bull and of Richard III a white boar. It seems that Elizabeth of York herself took up the white rose as her personal badge; and plausible that Henry VII on coming to the throne in 1485 adopted the old, Lancastrian/Beaufort red rose of his mother for the very ease with which it could be deployed for propaganda effect. The roses quickly became significant because of their immediate employment by Henry VII. The evidence is unambiguous. In April 1486 the new king made his first, critical, progress to the north of England. So as to ensure that maximum advantage was taken of his entry into York, the region’s capital, he sent ahead instructions as to how he should be received. A series of pageants and displays were to be mounted. The very first, at Micklegate Bar, through which he was to enter, was to represent a heaven ‘of great joy and angelical harmony’ and under it ‘a world desolate full of trees and flowers’, in which was to be contrived (mechanically) ‘a royal, rich, red rose conveyed by a vice, unto which rose shall appear another rich white rose, unto whom all the flowers shall lout (bow) and evidently give sovereignty, showing the rose to be principal of all flowers, and there upon shall come from a cloud a crown covering the roses’. Thus was



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the Tudor badge of the rose and crown to be created before the very eyes of the citizens of York.4 The message was clear and unambiguous. At approximately the same time, at the abbey of Crowland, further south, a senior civil servant was putting the finishing touches to his account of the history of the Yorkist dynasty. He added some exhortatory verses, including the following lines, which he helpfully told his readers employed the banner and badges of the victor, the vanquished and the sons of Edward IV, whose cause was avenged: In the year 1485 on the 22nd day of August the tusks of the boar were blunted and the red rose, the avenger of the white, shines upon us.5 If the author is to be believed, the roses were respectively the badges of Henry VII and the children of Edward IV, and their symbolism was clearly understood by contemporaries. The imagery and idea thus propagated became firmly established in the received wisdom of what the victorious and ultimately successful Henry VII had achieved. Thus in 1561 Sir Thomas Smith, speaking for the realm, urged Elizabeth I to marry so that she could perpetuate ‘the race of the mixed rose, which brought again the amicable peace long exiled from among my children by the striving of the two roses’. And later in the same pamphlet he added more colourfully, ‘those two blades of Lyonel and John of Gaunt never rested pursuing th’one th’other, till the red rose was almost razed out, and the white made all bloody’.6 The idea of the warring roses, if not the specific phrase, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, undoubtedly had contemporary origins and was elaborated within two or three generations as part of an all-embracing interpretation of the past. That interpretation was also spelt out as early as 1486. The preamble to the papal bull of dispensation permitting the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, the text of which was composed by the king’s servants, read as follows: Our Holy Father, the Pope Innocent VIII, understanding of the long and grievous variance, contentions and debates that hath been in the Realm of England between the house of Lancaster on the one party and the house of York on the other party, willing all such divisions following to be put apart, by the counsel and consent of his college of cardinals approveth, confirmeth and establisheth

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the matrimony and conjunction made between our sovereign King Henry VII, of the house of Lancaster, of that one party and the noble Princess Elizabeth of the house of York of that other with all their issue lawfully born between the same. The bull was published and orders issued for it to be read from every pulpit.7 But Henry VII was not the first usurping king to suggest that his accession would end ‘the long and grievous variance’. Richard III in his parliamentary declaration of his title emphasized more luridly that during the reign of his brother Edward IV: no man was sure of his life, land, nor livelihood, nor of his wife, daughter, nor servant, every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled. And besides this, what discords, inward battles, effusion of Christian men’s blood, and namely by the destruction of the noble blood of this land, was had and committed within the same, it is evident and notorious through all this realm, unto the great sorrow and heaviness of all true Englishmen.8 Richard III was, in fact, borrowing the language used by Edward IV, which he had used 22 years earlier to blacken his predecessor: this realm of England therefore hath suffered the charge of intolerable persecution, punishment and tribulation, whereof the like hath not been seen or heard in any other Christian realm by any memory or record, unrest, inward war and trouble, unrighteousness, shedding and effusion of innocent blood, abuse of the laws, partiality, riot, extortion, murder, rape and vicious living, have been the guiders and leaders of the noble realm of England.9 Moreover, Edward IV, invoking the propaganda lately employed by his father, stated for the first time the idea that this anarchy resulted from Henry IV’s heinous crime ‘against God’s law, man’s liegance and oath of fidelity’ of deposing Richard II. The idea of the Wars of the Roses as a period of anarchy consequent upon the deposition of Richard II indeed had its roots in contemporary propaganda: Yorkist, not Tudor, propaganda. Henry VII took it over and added the particular detail of the red and white roses as symbols of Lancaster and York.



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What began as the crude propaganda of successive usurping kings was absorbed and elaborated by later generations so that by the mid-sixteenth century it had been transformed into a persuasive and sophisticated historical explanation of the past. It was taken up and developed by the early-Tudor historian Polydore Vergil in his English History; made more accessible in Hall’s Union of the Houses of Lancaster and York, a mid-century celebration of the success of the Tudor dynasty; employed with a flourish by Sir Thomas Smith and completed in Shakespeare’s great cycle of history plays. By 1600 there could have been scarcely anyone in England who did not know about the Wars of the Roses. As understood in the later sixteenth century, the Wars of the Roses encompassed 86 years of English history: what happened between the summer of 1399 and the summer of 1485. The key event was the deposition of a lawful king. The consequences were a divine punishment on not just the royal family, but also the whole of England. Hall, in his preface, drew a clear distinction between normal division caused by faction and controversy, which he admitted unfortunately still existed, and the unnatural dynastic division between Lancaster and York which had infested England: a division the consequence of which, he claimed, ‘my wit cannot comprehend nor my tongue declare neither yet my pen fully set forth’.10 This indescribable hell on earth had, by God’s Grace, been set aside by the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York and, he wrote, stood ‘suspended and appalled’ in the person of Henry VIII. Sir Thomas Smith was more willing to attempt a description of hell. ‘By reason of titles’, he stressed, ‘this poor realm had never long rest.’ The curse destroyed the royal family. ‘And when this fell upon the head’, he asked, ‘how sped the body think you? ... Blood pursued blood and ensued blood till all the realm was brought to great confusion ... England in the latter end of King Henry VI was almost a very chaos ... .’11 In Smith’s colourful account we can recognize some of his sources: rolls of parliament and early Tudor enclosure acts, as well as the first histories. More significantly, we should note how everything known about the fifteenth century – its economic difficulties as well as its political instability  – has been subsumed under the one controlling idea of chaos. This was the scenario taken up by Shakespeare. If one were to sit through all eight plays of the history cycle from Richard II to Richard III, one would be periodically reminded that the theme and unity of the whole were the working out of divine retribution for the crime

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of deposing Richard II. The idea is there in the Bishop of Carlisle’s prediction in Richard II; in Henry V’s prayer before Agincourt; and finally in Richmond’s prayer of thanksgiving at the end of Richard III. But there is more to Shakespeare’s cycle than a restatement of the conventional late-sixteenth-century interpretation of English history before 1485. There is a sense that the audience witnesses political behaviour common to all ages. It is both England then and England now. Implicit in the text is Hall’s observation that all other divisions still flourish. In addition to a warning to contemporaries not to rebel against Elizabeth I, there may also be a debate about whether it is better to suffer tyranny or take the consequences of overthrowing it. Moreover, on another plane the plays can be seen as a nostalgic lament for a lost paradise – a golden age associated with the era of Edward III, when all was well in the political world.12 By Shakespeare’s day the idea of the Wars of the Roses had passed beyond mere propaganda: it was a perception of English history accepted as the truth, on the basis of which it was possible to offer contemporary political debate and comment. A second influence entered English historiography in the sixteenth century: the Renaissance. Humanism was influential in two ways. It enhanced the status of history as a branch of literature. At first this meant classical, especially Roman, history. But following the pioneering work of Polydore Vergil and Sir Thomas More in the early decades of the sixteenth century, there was a conscious effort to develop a native history, a history of England written not in Latin, but in the vernacular. Secondly, the perception of English history before 1500 was coloured by the humanist outlook on learning. To the humanist there were only two ages worth considering: the ancient and the modern, in which good letters had been revived. Between the two lay the long, benighted Middle Ages. In extending this perception to England, humanists identified the accession of Henry VII in 1485 as the turning point. Soon it was taken for granted that England before 1485 was medieval and barbarous. The idea dovetailed neatly with the idea of the Wars of the Roses. Thus the Wars were not only the anarchy from which Henry VII had rescued a suffering kingdom, but also the final death throes of the Dark Ages; an idea caught beautifully in the nineteenth century by Bishop Stubbs: ‘it was “as the morning spread upon the mountain”, darkest before dawn’.13 The later evolution of the historical interpretation of the fifteenth century is inseparable from the development of history as an



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academic discipline. Until the late nineteenth century, the received wisdom, a marriage of Tudor propaganda and humanist prejudice, was irresistible. Admittedly, an idiosyncratic unorthodoxy developed which took a provocatively favourable view of Richard III. Sir George Buck in the early seventeenth century, Horace Walpole in the late eighteenth century and Caroline Halsted in the early nineteenth sought to reverse Henry VII’s and Shakespeare’s image. But this owed more to the personal temperaments of the authors than to a fundamental reappraisal of the subject.14 The cumulative effect of the quickening antiquarian interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the development of modern historical research in the nineteenth – the exploration and publication of government archives, legal records and private papers of the era  – was to tend to confirm the received wisdom. The Paston Letters, first readily available in Fenn’s edition (1787–1823), later supplemented by the publication of Smyth’s Lives of the Berkeleys (1883–85) provided plenty of evidence of skulduggery in fifteenth-century East Anglia and Gloucestershire. Sir Harry Nicolas’s six-volume Proceedings of the Privy Council in 1836 and the steady stream of publication by the Deputy Keeper of Public Records, the Rolls series and the Camden Society brought more and more contemporary evidence to light which appeared to confirm all that was previously known. The records of King’s Bench, more prolific for the fifteenth century than earlier, provided (and still provide) a further rich seam of evidence of lawlessness and disorder. The landscape revealed to the greatest of the first generation of modern historians of medieval England, Bishop William Stubbs, was anything but sublime. In the third volume of his Constitutional History, first published in 1878, confident in ‘the power of good’ to triumph in ‘the progress of this world’, he concluded: The most enthusiastic admirer of medieval life must grant that all that was good and great in it was languishing even to death; and the firmest believer in progress must admit that as yet there were few signs of returning health. The sun of the Plantagenets went down in clouds and thick darkness: the coming of the Tudors gave as yet no promise of light.15 Charles Plummer in his sketch of the Lancastrian and Yorkist period, which introduced his edition of Sir John Fortescue’s The Governance

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of England (1885), especially emphasized ‘the overgrown power and insubordination of the nobles’, the utter lawlessness of the aristocracy, as a canker of the times. He traced the origin of the evil, which he christened bastard feudalism, back to the days of Edward III and asserted that it reached its greatest height during the Lancastrian period. Backed by bands of armed men, the great lords corrupted and perverted the law, overawed parliament and Crown, and prosecuted their own private wars without restraint. Ultimately, the anarchy so created overwhelmed the realm.16 But it was William Denton, Fellow of Worcester College, who in 1888 delivered the most scathing denunciation of the fifteenth century and the Wars of the Roses. His account reads like a modernization of Sir Thomas Smith’s sketch three centuries earlier. From the deposition of Richard II, the house of Lancaster and York turned on one another. Not only did they destroy each other, ‘the baronage of England was almost extirpated’. ‘The slaughter of the people was greater than in any former war on English soil’, but ‘want, exposure and disease carried off more than the most murderous weapons of war’. The commerce of England was almost destroyed; hamlets and villages disappeared, all the towns, save London, were well-nigh ruined: and this ruin was but a type of a deeper ruin ... . The standard of morality could not well have been lower than it was at the end of the fifteenth century. Lust, cruelty and dishonesty were paraded before the eyes of the people.17 The principal cause lay not in a crime against God, but in the degeneracy of an ill-educated and corrupt baronage. Indeed, in one splendid passage Denton went so far as to suggest that the moral degeneration was matched by physical deterioration (‘low in stature and feeble in frame’) induced by the practice of teenage sexual intercourse (at 14 or earlier).18 Altogether, the late-medieval baronage suffered from a most shocking want of muscular Christianity. It was, however, during the nineteenth century that the application of the term ‘Wars of the Roses’ was narrowed to the 30 years between 1455 and 1485. While the fifteenth century as a whole was shameful, the Wars of the Roses came to describe the nadir only. The new usage was summed up by the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘a name given to a series of civil wars in England during the reign



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of Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III ... matched by a ferocity and brutality which are practically unknown in the history of English wars before and since.’19 Thus the backsliding era of the Wars of the Roses received short-shrift at the hands of eminent Victorians convinced of the progressive virtues of their own age. Dissenting voices were, however, already being raised. In 1874, before Stubbs published his Constitutional History, J.R. Green in his controversial Short History of the English People, while acknowledging that ‘there are few periods in our annals from which we turn with such weariness and disgust as from the Wars of the Roses’, suggested that the savage and brutal strife was limited to great lords and their retainers. ‘For the most part the trading and agricultural classes stood wholly apart.’ While the baronage was dashing itself to pieces in battle after battle, the country at large enjoyed a general tranquillity.20 His brief observations were followed up ten years later by Thorold Rogers, whose study of wages and prices led him to declare that the agricultural class ‘must have had only a transient and languid interest in the faction fight which was going on around them’ and, far from being impoverished, enjoyed a golden age of comparative prosperity.21 These views were taken further a generation later by C.L. Kingsford, whose seminal Ford Lectures of 1923, Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth Century England, were the first attempt to counter the prejudice of succeeding generations and to draw attention to the promising features of fifteenth-century life. Drawing particularly on the Stonor letters and papers and the legal records in which he had immersed himself, he argued that the disruptive effect of the Wars of the Roses had been exaggerated and that neither civil disorder nor civil war necessarily affected the lives of the county gentry any more than it did ordinary men and women.22 The revisionist torch was passed to K. B. McFarlane who, in the year in which Kingsford’s Ford Lectures were published, took his Final Schools at Oxford. Over a lifetime, McFarlane gradually and painstakingly refined his views on the fifteenth-century nobility: in effect a continuing commentary on Plummer. In essence his argument was that the later Middle Ages were not uniquely or structurally corrupt or lawless. ‘Bastard Feudalism’ had its roots long before Edward III and continued to flourish long after the death of Henry VII. It was no more than a form of the clientage and patronage which had oiled the wheels of society throughout England’s pre-industrialized history.23 McFarlane did not publish directly on the subject of the Wars of

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the Roses until the year before his death. But through his teaching, he inspired a generation of scholars to question received interpretations more thoroughly and explore more deeply the sources of fifteenth-century history. The result was that after 1960 there was an explosion of new writings on the Wars. McFarlane himself was characteristically cautious, suggesting that the scale and impact of the Wars were limited and that the onset of ‘real warfare’ was agonizingly slow because desired by no-one. The fundamental cause, he argued, lay not in the degeneration or overweening might of the nobility but on the contrary on the undermighty shoulders of Henry VI and the feebleness of central government. Lords and gentry tried to avoid committing themselves, putting a higher premium on survival than loyalty to one house or another, or indeed one magnate or another. Few noble lines were exterminated by the Wars: if there were any lasting effect it was that the baronage was demoralized by three decades of political upheaval and uncertainty.24 McFarlane’s views were in part echoed by J.R. Lander, who also published a work on the Wars of the Roses in 1965. In a later summary of his views which appeared in 1976, Lander concluded that the Wars of the Roses were very limited in scale and effect; that there was little devastation, little looting, few sieges; and that the Wars had only the most temporary effects on trade, and little on agriculture.25 In the same year, Charles Ross stressed the same points. The Wars had little impact on society: England in the later-fifteenth century was in fact the home of a rich, varied and vigorous civilization. To study it is to remain largely unaware that it was a product of an age of political violence, which did nothing to hinder its steady development.26 The same theme was taken up and emphasized even more by John Gillingham, who stressed in 1981 that England in the age of the Wars of the Roses was ‘a society organized for peace’ and ‘the most peaceful country in Europe’.27 All that was wanting was S.B. Chrimes’s declaration that the Wars of the Roses never took place at all. Those who have wished to reverse the Victorian view of later-fifteenth-century society have not had it all their own way. Lander and Ross themselves both stressed the high level of violence which was endemic in late-medieval society. And although Ross conceded that the Wars might have made matters worse, it was only



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in the work of R.L. Storey on their origins (endorsed by M.H. Keen in 1973) that a causal connection between aristocratic violence, lawlessness and the Wars was sustained.28 Following Storey, D.M. Loades in 1974 re-emphasized the chaos of factional quarrels among ‘noble bandits’, whose innumerable savage affrays justifiably led contemporaries to consider the 1450s and 1460s as a period of unprecedented disorder.29 And Anthony Goodman, in The Wars of the Roses (1981), pictured the Wars as a long series of calamities, warning that the dearth of evidence concerning disruption and destruction should not necessarily be taken to mean that they did not occur.30 Nevertheless a consensus had been reached on several issues. Whether the phrase ‘the Wars of the Roses’ is considered to be strictly appropriate or not, it is accepted that it describes three or four decades of political instability and periodic open civil war in the second half of the fifteenth century. Secondly, it is accepted that one cannot describe the combatants as being irrevocably divided into two parties called Lancastrians and Yorkists; allegiances and alliances were considerably too fluid to enable one to allocate individual lords and gentlemen to one or other side throughout the period. Thirdly, none but the most fervent admirer of the Tudors would argue that the later fifteenth century was an era of moral delinquency or a time to be unsympathetically pitied. Fourthly, discussion of the Wars of the Roses is now concentrated on interpreting political history, not on the moral or physical condition of society at large or its economic, ecclesiastical or cultural history. And finally, although narrower points of definition are debated as to precisely when the Wars should be said to have begun or ended, none would now argue that 1485 marked a clear break between one era and another, let alone ‘The End of the Middle Ages’. On the whole, the years 1450–1530 are perceived to have a unity. If ‘modern’ England is to be said to have a beginning at any particular time then that time is more likely to have been during the 1530s. If the 80 years before the break with Rome is to have any particular overall characteristic, it lies in that overworked phrase ‘an age of transition’. Even so, debate continues about other aspects of the subject, if only because of the quality of the evidence available to the historian. There can be no doubt that our detailed knowledge of this era is immeasurably greater than it was a century ago. While reconsideration of the concept of the Wars of the Roses is relatively recent, detailed historical research since 1900 has added greatly to the sheer quantity

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of information available. A line of monumental political studies, from Cora Scofield’s Edward IV (1924) to R.A. Griffiths’ The Reign of King Henry VI (1981), stand witness to generations of painstaking search through the public records. The development of prosopographical studies, most particularly by J.C. Wedgwood and J.S. Roskell in the field of parliamentary history, has since the 1930s brought forward, and continues to reveal, more and more detail concerning the lives and careers of individual protagonists.31 Since 1960 the dramatic expansion of British higher education and the realization that the fifteenth century offered a relatively unworked field has quickened the pace of this research. Although in 1976 J.R. Lander drew attention to the enormous quantities of neglected archives  – both government records and private papers, which were still awaiting students willing to plough through them – an unprecedented number of researchers both before and since have been at work. At first, in the postwar years, research concentrated on administrative, financial and constitutional topics. Then it turned to the as-yet untapped private collections, many newly deposited in county record offices, to study baronial families and, latterly, the gentry and county societies. The Beauforts, Bourgchiers, Courtenays, Greys of Ruthin, Howards, Mowbrays, Percys, Staffords, Stanleys, Tudors and Talbots all found their historian. Individual counties, including Cumbria, Derbyshire, Devon, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Suffolk and Warwickshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire have all been the subject of doctoral theses, or substantial monographs. Groups of counties, or regions, such as the central south-west or the north-east, have been similarly analysed. Not only has the quantity of available information become ever larger, but also the manner in which it is to be interpreted has become a matter of intense debate. One result of the focus on local and regional studies has been a sharper awareness of provincial differences and the need for even greater care in making generalizations. A re-evaluation has taken place of the complex interrelationship between the localities and the centre, the country and the court in the fifteenth century and the implications for our understanding of political history. The question has arisen, for example, of the extent to which provincial leadership should be seen to lie solely with the lords through their affinities and connections, or to be shared with the gentry through their county communities.32 Moreover the scope of enquiry has been extended socially downwards to explore the



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involvement of the common people in town and country as active participants in politics, not only in revolt but as part of the wider political nation. The Wars of the Roses had wider implications for the social order as well as for provincial and local societies.33 However, one issue above all came to dominate debate at the end of the twentieth century: the extent to which ideology and principles played a part in the Wars of the Roses. After 1950, writing on the political history of the fifteenth century was dominated by McFarlane’s focus on clientage and patronage. The stress was structural and functional, emphasizing politics as the pursuit of power, the exercise of influence and the mutual scratching of backs. In this, ideals and principles played little part. The fifteenth century, like the eighteenth, was devoid of ideological conflict; politics involved little other than the clash of self-interests. The pendulum began to swing back in the 1990s. Too much emphasis, it was argued, had been paid to patronage; the time had come to give fuller recognition to the role of ideology and principles. Politicians thought and acted within a clearly established constitutional framework. Professor Carpenter proposed that a new approach to power and government, which she dubbed ‘the new constitutional history’, was required. The extended crisis of the second half of the fifteenth century could only be properly understood within a new conception of how the body politic functioned, in particular the rule of law in society. She and others stressed that issues such as the effectiveness of law enforcement, or the Crown’s capacity to serve the common weal, or the legitimacy of the ruling dynasty were of political significance, not necessarily because politicians were motivated by altruism and conscience, although some might have been, but because there was a body of shared constitutional ideas to which politicians appealed and which provided the validating language of political action. This is not to suggest high-mindedness, but that the common stock of political ideas and assumptions influenced the actions of the political élite during the Wars of the Roses, especially in the 1450s and 1460s.34 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians of the wars had adopted a more nuanced perception of the motivation and behaviour of the leading participants than mere self-interest. Yet the extent to which politicians were influenced and guided by principle remains difficult to discern, not only because it is always tricky to see where conviction ends and material consideration begins, but also because the evidence, as it always has been, is incomplete

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and unreliable. For a start some narrative accounts (chronicles) are poorly informed, especially if they were written some distance in time and place from the events they describe. They are all, to a lesser or greater degree, biased. Historians have to be particularly alert to the partisanship, direct and indirect, of the main narrative accounts written under the influence of a victorious regime. This is well established for the dominant story of the career and reign of Richard III, almost all of which, including the one strictly contemporary account of his accession to the throne, were written down by his enemies or authors influenced by them. This is true, too, of the standard narratives of the last years of Henry VI, mostly written or adjusted after 1461 in the light of Yorkist characterization of his reign and the new regime’s justification of its actions. The propaganda was made even more pernicious by a strand of conventional misogynism directed against his unfortunate queen, Margaret of Anjou. Historians have tended to follow their lead in accounts of the end of the House of Lancaster rather than the counter-propaganda of Lancastrian court circles in 1459–60, which roundly blamed the insubordination and insatiable ambition of York and his supporters for the crisis. Both are loaded. Other accounts are revealed to contain material derived from the camp of one side or the other. Thus, both the London chronicle known as Bale’s Chronicle and the Burgundian Waurin’s chronicle have passages, ‘leaks’ as it were, which clearly derive from associates of Warwick the Kingmaker and give his version of events.35 Many narratives are also self-consciously literary in their form and style, shaping comment and detail in the light of classical, chivalric or biblical typologies. The manner in which More shaped his characterization of Edward IV on Augustus Caesar is well known: less well appreciated is that contemporary ‘spin doctors’ did so as well. Polydore Vergil, used Suetonius’s characterization of Vespasian as a statesman who rescued Rome from chaos as his model for Henry VII. The Crowland Chronicler, whoever he was, coloured his account with unacknowledged biblical and classical allusion. The London citizen who wrote ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’ knew his chivalric romance well enough to model his account of Sir Andrew Trollope’s feat of arms during the second battle of St Albans on the standard trope of the doughty warrior standing his ground and cutting down all comers. William Worcestre, in explaining that the loss of Normandy in 1450 resulted from the failure of financial provision, drew heavily if indirectly on Vegitius’s De Re Militari. Events were explained, actions



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described and motives attributed in the light of the common treasury of received stories and ideas. Contemporary narrative and other accounts have to be approached with extreme caution.36 The records of government, private individuals and corporations (mostly legal and financial documents) have the advantage of normally being politically neutral and free of literary artifice (other than those designed for public consumption), but they yield mainly trivial information which is only cumulatively of value, and they are exceptionally fragmented and frustratingly incomplete. Matters are made worse by the fact that many private collections dry up in the mid-fifteenth century. In J.R. Lander’s memorable words; ‘In reality the political history of the period is a web of shreds and tatters, patched up from meagre chronicles and from a few collections of letters in which exaggerated gossip and wild rumours have been, all too often, confused with facts’.37 Whatever individual researchers may unearth from record sources, it is likely that the Wars of the Roses will remain one of the more inadequately documented and controversial topics of English political history. Typical, and a matter for immediate consideration, is the failure to agree on how many Wars of the Roses there were, when each one started, when each ended and what distinguished one from another. Although Goodman characterized them as merely a series of upheavals between 1452 and 1497, most recent historians have opted for three wars of varying lengths. McFarlane suggested 1450–64, 1464–71, 1483–87; Gillingham concluded 1455–64, 1469–71, 1483–87; Ross gave 1460–64, 1469–71, 1483–87; and most recently Hicks, 1459–61, 1469–71, 1483–1525. But Ross also pointed out that in terms of dynastic struggle between Lancaster and York, there were only two wars, which ended in 1471, and Hicks not only acknowledged that his second war might be but a second phase of his first, but also conceded that he could not be certain when the third actually ended.38 This line is taken a step further here. Although there were indeed two distinct periods of open warfare with a lull between 1464 and 1469, the issues involved and the fundamental causes remained essentially the same between 1459 and 1471. In short, the wars of 1459–64 and 1469–71 were two stages of the same struggle: the wars of Lancaster and York. On the other hand the wars of 1483–87 and thereafter were separate in cause, different in issue, and mutated into sporadic uprisings and plots: they were wars between York and Tudor. The story and analysis of the Wars of the Roses which follows is thus founded on the

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interpretation that there were in essence two wars: the first ending in 1471, the second beginning in 1483. It will be noted, too, that recent historians have dated the outbreak of the first of these two wars variously between 1450 and 1460: there is no longer a consensus concerning 1455. In this study 1459 is taken as the beginning of the first Wars of the Roses. While it is certainly the case that the first battle of St Albans in 1455 was a major civil disturbance, it was an isolated clash, part of a long prelude to the sustained conflict which broke out four years later. Specifying when the Wars ended is also problematic. The last invasion of England in the name of a Yorkist pretender, Perkin Warbeck, was in 1497. But there were Yorkist plots, rumours of plots and fears of plots for several decades after that. In truth, the Wars of the Roses fizzled out.

Chapter 2: The Course of the Wars

Prelude to the Wars, 1450–59 In 1450 England’s king was Henry VI, a young man in his late twenties.1 He was the son of the famous warrior Henry V, a father he had not known for he came to the throne when he was nine months old. He had no memory of being other than king. He had been cosseted and nurtured to step into his father’s martial shoes. He had inherited two kingdoms, being crowned King of England in 1429 and King of France in 1431. From the age of 16 in 1437, he had begun to play an active part in the affairs of the kingdom. By 1439 his minority was at an end. It had been a surprisingly harmonious minority: rifts, conflicts and factional rivalry had, of course, occurred, but the leading councillors and nobles, inspired by their dedication to the memory of Henry V whom they had served, had been as one in their determination to hand on to his young heir his inheritance in both kingdoms. Henry VI was, however, almost the complete opposite of his father. Where Henry V had been the paragon of chivalry, Henry VI eschewed the field of battle. In 1440 when all seemed propitious for him to lead his subjects to war in defence of his father’s conquests, he turned instead to the foundation of Eton College.2 The war in France was henceforth left to his leading subjects. In England he appeared to be content to leave the management of affairs to what was eventually perceived to be an unscrupulous court faction. After ten years of personal rule, before his thirtieth birthday, Henry was faced with the greatest political crisis since the reign of Richard II. Following years of indecision and duplicity, Normandy was lost to France with

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scarcely a blow given, in one of the most ignominious campaigns ever conducted by an English army (1449–50). At the height of the crisis, parliamentary anger and popular rebellion shook Henry’s regime to its foundations. His principal adviser, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, was impeached, sent into exile, intercepted and murdered. The year 1450 provided the opportunity for Richard of York, Henry’s greatest subject and heir presumptive (for although Henry had married Margaret of Anjou in 1445 he still had no children), to bid for political power. York had been excluded in the previous decade. Removed from the command in Normandy, in 1447 he had been sent off as lieutenant of Ireland. Untainted by the failure of recent policy, he returned to England determined to establish himself as the king’s chief minister. He found, however, that the king had turned to none other than Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, the last and discredited governor of Normandy. Try as he might, York and his allies could not impose themselves on the king. In 1452, having spent a period in voluntary internal exile in his marcher Welsh lordships, York raised an army and sought to force his way into office. At Dartford his army was outfaced by the forces of the court. York submitted and he was allowed to return once more to self-imposed exile. After York’s defeat at Dartford, Somerset and his friends were able to tighten their grip on power and provide more effective government. Henry VI himself appeared to play a more active role in affairs. Whether it was the initiative of the king himself, or the advice of his new minister, he took a personal interest in the suppression of popular rebellion and began to show himself more to his subjects. When in 1452, in answer to an appeal from a group of dissident Gascons, the veteran Earl of Shrewsbury was able to recover Bordeaux and much of Gascony (Gascony had been overrun by the French in 1451), he was able to rally considerable support for his regime. By the summer of 1453 it was beginning to look as though Henry VI’s reign was set on a new and more steady course. In August 1453 two, possibly connected, events occurred which decisively changed the situation. First, Henry heard that Shrewsbury had been defeated and killed at Castillon; secondly, a few days later, he collapsed into a state of what was possibly catatonic schizophrenia: total mental withdrawal from the world. For 15 months or more Henry did not, could not, or would not communicate with a single living soul (later it was to be imagined that he was communicating



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exclusively with God). This sudden, unexpected event, for Henry had never previously shown signs of mental instability whatever other shortcomings he may have had, threw the political world into new turmoil. After several months of uncertainty, and with no sign of recovery, in March 1454 a protectorate was established. Henry’s condition was comparable to childhood and the precedent for a minority was to place the government of the kingdom into the hands of a protector and council. Precedent also determined that the protector should be the senior adult male member of the royal family: in 1454 this was Richard of York. And so, in circumstances entirely unpredictable and after four years of apparent failure, York achieved his ambition and more. York’s position as protector was strengthened by the recruitment of powerful new allies: the Nevilles father and son, who were the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick. But the Nevilles had become embroiled in a private war in Yorkshire with the Earl of Northumberland and the price of their support was the protector’s backing, given under the guise of royal pacification, in securing a victory over their rival. Warwick, too, was in dispute with the Duke of Somerset in south Wales. While York presented himself as peacemaker, his regime was highly partisan. His own enemy, Somerset, found himself not only dismissed, but also committed to the Tower to await trial for treason. In the midst of this Queen Margaret gave birth to a son, Edward. York was no longer heir presumptive and had measurably less cause in future to claim that he should be high in the king’s council. The process of polarization which took place in 1454 was only hastened by the king’s recovery early in 1455. Soon Somerset was released. If not before, now he found that he had a powerful ally in the person of Queen Margaret, whose son’s interests had to be defended. York and the Nevilles withdrew from court. In May, rival armies met at St Albans. In a brief skirmish which took place in the king’s presence, Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Clifford were hacked to death. The king was escorted back to Westminster with his old advisers. Whether because he had been wounded or because he suffered a second mental collapse, Henry once more became incapacitated and the protectorate was restored. But a new and deadly element had now been introduced. Blood had been shed. What had been rivalry for place had been transformed into feud. The new Duke of Somerset sought revenge for the death of his father, Edmund; the new Earl of Northumberland sought

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revenge for the death of his. York was removed from his second protectorate early in 1456, although he continued to act as chief minister for several months. But in the autumn of the same year, his friends were removed from office and replaced by men more welcome to the king and queen. The evidence is just too sparse to be able to determine confidently who now took the lead at court. As a result the late 1450s are perhaps the most obscure decade in the whole of the fifteenth century. The king may by now have been little more than a figurehead. His health would seem to have been permanently damaged. And although there is no evidence of a return to his condition of 1453–54, there can be little doubt that eventually, though precisely when is hard to determine, he became incapable of attending to business. It is conventionally considered that the queen emerged as the de facto leader of the Yorkists’ enemies in 1456, but doubt has now been cast on this assumption. The received notion of a malign prominence owes much to later Yorkist propaganda.3 For two years there was an uneasy truce. York and his friends were not totally excluded. A group of peers, under the Duke of Buckingham, may have sought to find some means of reconciliation. The new councillors may have acted at the king’s behest, or the queen, acting in a traditional role as peacemaker, may have taken the initiative in an effort to restore harmony. In March 1458 a grandiose ‘Loveday’ (ritual reconciliation) was staged, at which the sons of the victims of St Albans and the victors publicly made reconciliation and agreed terms of restitution. It proved to be an empty charade, but the effort made, and the king’s own shadowy role in the proceedings, suggest that as yet the point of no return had not been reached. It would seem that the principals were only too conscious of the potential dangers, and were desperately seeking to avert a revival of overt conflict which would only be more catastrophic. That moment came one step nearer in the autumn of 1458. A brawl broke out at court from which the Earl of Warwick had to fight his way clear. There may even have been an attempted assassination. He promptly withdrew to Calais, of which he was captain and where he had the backing of a strong garrison. Immediately following, the chief officers of state were changed again and men more closely associated with the queen took over.4 During 1459 the Crown, perhaps now on the initiative of the queen, began to take steps to deal with York and the Nevilles once and for all. Plans were laid to condemn the Yorkists for treason at a council meeting in the summer, and preparations



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were begun to enforce such a decision by arms. The Yorkist lords knowing fully what was in store, themselves took up arms. While the court gathered its strength in the midlands, based at Coventry, the Yorkist lords planned to gather at Worcester in September. Warwick came over from Calais, while Salisbury marched down from north Yorkshire. Salisbury was intercepted by royal troops at Blore Heath in Staffordshire, but was able to defeat the army led by Lord Audley and press on, if somewhat reduced in numbers, to the rendezvous. At Worcester the three lords not only declared their continuing loyalty to the king, but also their determination to rid him of his evil ministers. Pressed by a superior royal army, they retreated to Ludlow and there, before the town at Ludford, drew up the army for battle. But on the night of 12/13 October, knowing that they were heavily outnumbered and discovering desertion by key elements of the Calais garrison which had accompanied Warwick, the lords decamped and fled; York making his way to Ireland, Warwick and Salisbury to Calais. The First Wars, 1459–71 If one were to pick any moment when open civil war began, it would be the campaign of 1459.5 It came after several years of political deterioration and several months of military preparation. It was intended by both sides to be a decisive test of strength, in which no mercy was to be shown to the losers. The battle lines had been clearly drawn. As yet the objective was still domination of the court and removal of all rivals. The court enjoyed overwhelming numerical support among the English nobility and gentry. All but a handful of the peerage rallied to the Crown. The appeal of loyalty to the king was still strong. York and his allies were too easily cast in the role of malcontents. But the Yorkist lords, though heavily outnumbered, had compensatory material and military strength. They were three of the richest and most powerful magnates. Not only could York tap the resources of his Welsh marcher lordships, but Warwick commanded the Calais garrison and had built up a formidable naval power in the Channel, while Salisbury could draw on the military experience and strength of the far north. Militarily the two sides were not as ill-matched as a roll call of peers would suggest. In October 1459 the Yorkists were proscribed. At a pliant parliament called to meet at Coventry (in Yorkist mythology the Parliament

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of Devils), York and his followers were found guilty of treason by attainder and their lands forfeited and occupied by royal officers, or distributed to loyal supporters. They had no other option left but force to reverse these acts. For the time being they were safe in Dublin and Calais. But the Court lost no time in trying to recover Calais. The Duke of Somerset was appointed captain and early in 1460 began a siege of the town. Its defence was under the direction of Salisbury’s brother, William, Lord Fauconberg, an immensely experienced veteran of the Hundred Years’ War. Warwick was able to slip out of Calais, sail to Dublin and there coordinate invasion plans with the duke. After his return in June, the Calais lords launched an invasion of south-eastern England. Marching via London, where a royal garrison was left bottled up in the Tower, Warwick and the Earl of March (York’s eldest son and the future Edward IV) came up against the king’s army at Northampton. There, thanks to the timely switch to the Yorkist side by Lord Grey of Ruthin, the royal army was defeated and its leaders  – the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Beaumont – killed, while the king fell into Yorkist hands. Returning in triumph to London the lords installed themselves in office and at court, and sent out writs summoning a parliament to Westminster in October, the principal intended business being the reversal of the attainders passed in 1459. York himself delayed, or was delayed, in returning to England. When he did land, he immediately caused a stir by displaying the royal banner and marching up to London in the manner of king. Timing his arrival to coincide with the gathering of parliament, he strode purposefully into Westminster Hall and laid his hand on the throne. Thus for the first time did York declare his dynastic ambition. His act was not met by acclaim. According to one or two reports, it even surprised his closest associates. There is reason to doubt this, especially as far as the Earl of Warwick is concerned. Whatever the truth of this, not even this parliament, called when the Yorkists were fully in control, would accede to the deposition of Henry VI.6 Ultimately, a quite unworkable compromise was patched up: Henry was to keep the throne for his lifetime; York was declared his heir in place of his 7-year-old son. It was one thing to pass such an act; it was quite another to enforce it. Queen Margaret, with her son, was at large, gathering troops in the west country, Wales and the north even before the November ‘Accord’ was reached. They now had even greater cause to reverse the



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decision of Northampton. York and his followers, too, faced an urgent need to suppress her and to recover control of their estates. Thus after parliament went down, York and Salisbury set out in strength for the north, there to confront the queen. They reached Sandal, York’s castle near Wakefield, but on the last day of the year were caught foraging. York and his son, the Earl of Rutland, were killed on the field; Salisbury shortly after. Among the victorious Lancastrian leaders were the Duke of Somerset and the Earl of Northumberland. St Albans had been avenged. The Earl of March, now Duke of York, in the meantime had set off to Wales to attempt to gain control there. On 2 February 1461, at Mortimer’s Cross, he defeated the Earl of Pembroke and secured that front. However, Queen Margaret was already pushing south with an army whose size and reported lack of discipline spread terror as it approached. On 17 February, at St Albans, it met and defeated Warwick who had marched out from London to face it. With Henry VI back in her hands, the capital now lay at the queen’s mercy. But she failed to press home her advantage. As she hesitated, she heard that March, having met with the fleeing Warwick, was now on his way up to challenge her. Faced with this new threat the queen withdrew, leaving March to enter London unopposed on 27 February. Five days later, declaring that Henry VI had forfeited his right by failing to honour the November Accord, Edward IV took possession of the throne. Barely hesitating to raise reinforcements, Edward IV set out in pursuit of the queen’s army that had retreated north. Catching up with the Lancastrians in southern Yorkshire, the decisive engagement, which had been threatened since October 1459, finally took place on the field of Towton. After a long and bloody battle, Edward IV emerged victorious. Henry VI, Queen Margaret and Prince Edward, who had been behind the lines in York, escaped to Scotland. Edward IV returned in triumph to London to be crowned. Henry VI’s reign may well have come to an end, but civil war was not over. Lancastrians held strongholds in the far north of England and Wales. Their king and his heir were still at large. Edward IV could not feel completely secure on the throne until all pockets of Lancastrian resistance were crushed and his Lancastrian rivals killed. It was to take him ten years and considerable upheaval to achieve both these ends. Relying on Scottish and French support, Queen Margaret was at first hopeful of an early comeback. Several Lancastrian plots were unearthed in the first years of the reign; disturbances occurred

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in several parts of the kingdom; and there were frequent invasion scares in southern England. In Wales the castle of Harlech was garrisoned by Lancastrians until 1468. Far more dangerously, operating from a safe refuge north of the border, Lancastrians were for three years after 1461 a constant threat to Northumberland. The castles of Alnwick, Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh became the focal point of a long-drawn out battle for control. Twice Warwick and his brother John, Lord Montagu, took these castles (September 1461, December 1462). Twice the Lancastrians retook them (October 1462, March/ May 1463). It was not until the spring and early summer of 1464 that Lancastrian threats to the far north were finally crushed. Following two victories won by Lord Montagu at Hedgeley Moor and Hexham, the Northumbrian castles were for a third and final time reduced. During all this time Henry VI and Prince Edward remained safely out of Edward’s clutches. Henry VI seems to have divided his time between Scotland and Northumberland. Prince Edward was taken to France in 1463. After the final suppression of Northumberland, Henry VI roamed as an exile in northern England, sheltered by loyal servants. In July 1465 he was tracked down and captured. Lodged in the Tower, his life was spared because it would have been both pointless and counterproductive to have killed him. Killing Henry would only have passed the Lancastrian torch to Prince Edward in France; and such a needless death would have been a propaganda gift to his enemies. Henry thus languished a prisoner in the Tower. After 1465 Edward could perhaps have begun to look forward to more secure and relaxed times. However the clouds of war began to blow up again from another direction. In May 1464, while ostensibly marching north to pacify Northumberland, Edward IV secretly married Elizabeth Woodville at Stony Stratford. The marriage, undertaken at a time when Warwick was in good faith conducting negotiations with France for the king’s hand, naturally piqued the earl. But he put on a good face and publicly showed no opposition. The king’s marriage was bound, however, to have wider implications, particularly as the new queen came from a prolific English family, had been married before, and had several Lancastrian connections. Regardless of the question of etiquette involved in the king’s marriage to a widow of not quite the right birth, it set up political repercussions. Historians have been divided as to the extent to which the Woodvilles, as the queen’s relations and friends are conveniently called, were inordinately favoured. They may not have received excessive grants of land,



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but in one respect, by cornering the upper reaches of the marriage market, they had an important bearing on future developments.7 Moreover the queen, any queen, was likely to set up a separate and alternative political focal point. It may not have been entirely against Edward’s will that a group, known afterwards as the New Yorkists, focusing on the queen’s father, Earl Rivers, and Lord Herbert, the new Earl of Pembroke, emerged at court to counterbalance the enormous power and influence of the Nevilles. Whatever the precise cause, and it may be no more than a working-out of an inevitable rift between a king determined to be the master of his own house and a kingmaker naturally reluctant to see his prominent position whittled away, relationships between Warwick and his king began to cool and worsen. The turning point was almost certainly a difference over the policy to be adopted towards France and the Netherlands, where the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy were intense rivals. Warwick had come to favour a pro-French line; the king, supported by the queen’s father (his countess was of the house of Luxembourg in the Netherlands) and her friends, came to prefer a Burgundian alliance. In 1468 Edward completed an agreement for the marriage of his sister Margaret with Charles the Bold, the new Duke of Burgundy. Insult was added to injury by the manner in which he allowed the earl to conduct futile negotiations for an alternative match while the Burgundian alliance was also being pursued. Although Warwick still came occasionally to court, by the end of 1468 his hostility to the queen’s family and his estrangement from the king were being noticed. Towards the end of 1468 serious Lancastrian plots were uncovered. There was, moreover, growing popular discontent. In these circumstances the breach between Edward IV and Warwick burst into open conflict in the summer of 1469. Over the next two years, 1469–71, there was re-enacted the same pattern of events as had occurred in the 1450s. A disgruntled mighty subject at first tried to force himself back into influence at court and then, failing that, sought to depose the king. The action moved more rapidly and more bewilderingly, partly because the understudies of the 1450s were now the leading players; partly because both principals had been on the stage before; and partly because the alternative king was waiting in the wings. Warwick laid his plans well. In July 1469 he slipped across to Calais to celebrate the marriage of his elder daughter, Isabel, to the king’s 20-year-old brother, George, Duke of Clarence. This marriage had earlier been vetoed by the king

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who, nevertheless, by his backing of ambitious Woodville marriages, had virtually left the earl no alternative for befitting husbands for his two daughters and heiresses other than members of the royal family. Clarence, who was to prove himself an ambitious but weak, vacillating and untrustworthy man, had clearly been suborned by the earl. The Calais marriage was in effect a declaration of opposition. At the same time, the latest of a series of northern risings led by ‘Robin of Redesdale’ revealed itself to be a rising of Warwick’s substantial northern affinity under the leadership of a member of the Conyers family, stalwart and long-serving retainers of the Nevilles. Their force marched south and, having united with Warwick and Clarence, came up against a royal army at Edgecote near Banbury. At this engagement, largely due to dissension in their ranks, the king’s men were overwhelmed, and afterwards Earl Rivers and the Earls of Pembroke and Devon were executed. Three days later Warwick took the king prisoner. For two months at the most Warwick sought to rule in the king’s name, keeping the king himself under arrest first in Warwick, then at Middleham in north Yorkshire. But a Lancastrian rising by Warwick’s kinsman, Sir Humphrey Neville, which threatened Warwick as much as the king, could only be suppressed if the king were at large. Consequently, early in September he was released. Like York before him, Warwick had discovered that it was impossible to rule through a captive king, especially a king in the prime of life. Edward IV seems for the time being neither to have had the strength nor the inclination to seek retribution against Warwick and his brother. They were welcomed at court, although the king began to take steps to guard against a repetition. When six months later Warwick and Clarence rose again, Edward IV was ready to take swift and decisive action. The earl and duke took advantage of a feud in Lincolnshire to foster a new rising in March 1470. But the king moved promptly and dispersed the rebel force at the ironically named Losecoat Field near Stamford. No sooner had this been accomplished than he heard news that Warwick was raising north Yorkshire and Clarence the west country in a plan to put Clarence himself on the throne. Pressing north, and in strength, Edward secured Yorkshire before turning south in pursuit of Warwick and Clarence, who fled to Devon and took ship at Dartmouth for France. Warwick was totally discredited. There now followed the most dramatic volte-face in the whole history of these wars. In France Warwick was induced on 22 July to



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perform a solemn and public reconciliation with Queen Margaret, which was sealed by a marriage the following month between his younger daughter Anne and Prince Edward. Thus, once more, Warwick became a loyal servant of the house of Lancaster, committed to the restoration of Henry VI. No time was lost mounting, with French help, an invasion of England. Edward IV took full precautions for coastal defence, but Warwick outmanoeuvred him by calling upon his northern retainers to rise once more. In August Edward had no choice but to march north to crush this, the third rebellion of northerners against him in twelve months. He knew all too well how dangerous such a movement could be if left unchecked. The rebellion melted away in front of him and the leaders submitted. But they had done their work. While Edward was still in Yorkshire, Warwick landed in the west country. Learning that many English nobles had declared for Warwick in the name of Henry VI, and discovering that Warwick’s brother Montagu had also gone over, Edward, with only his household and a remnant of loyal noblemen with him, realized that he had been outmanoeuvred and isolated. Now himself taking flight, he found ships at King’s Lynn and escaped to the Netherlands and the protection of his brother-in-law Charles, Duke of Burgundy. Thus on 3 October 1470 Henry VI was restored to the throne, the Readeption as contemporary legal documents put it. A broken 50-year-old, he could only have been a caretaker monarch until his son, by all accounts a young man of his grandfather’s chivalric mettle, was ready to take his place. The return of the queen and the prince was, however, fatefully delayed both by the queen’s excessive caution and, latterly, adverse winds. When the Lancastrian party did finally land in England in April, it was too late. The wheel of fortune had turned once more. For Edward IV, aided by Burgundy who was faced by a Franco–Lancastrian alliance, had already returned to recover his kingdom. Edward IV’s recovery of the throne in March–May 1471 was a remarkable feat of arms, achieved, as his own official and chivalrically inspired account willingly admitted, against all the odds. He landed at Ravenspur in Holderness accompanied by only a few men  – his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Anthony Woodville, the new Earl Rivers and William, Lord Hastings, included. Claiming, as Henry IV had before him, that he was returning solely to recover his duchy, he was admitted reluctantly to the city of York. He moved west to his lordship of Wakefield where he had hoped to raise troops, but found

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little enthusiasm. Yet he was able to leave Yorkshire unmolested, partly because of the studied neutrality of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, whom a year earlier he had restored, and partly because of the inability of Lord Montagu to raise troops to resist him. In the midlands he received much-needed support from followers of Lord Hastings. Pressing on towards Coventry, he sought an engagement with the Earl of Warwick. The decisive moment occurred when his brother George, Duke of Clarence, at the head of a force raised in the south-west, threw in his lot with Edward. The Yorkists, unable to force Warwick into battle, then marched up to London, which opened its gates. Warwick had followed and, finally, the two armies came to blows in thick fog at Barnet on Easter Sunday, 14 April. In a more than usually confused battle Edward was victorious: Warwick and Montagu lay dead on the field. There was, however, no time for the victor to rest, for Edward received news of the landing at Weymouth of Queen Margaret, Prince Edward and an army. The Lancastrians, having heard of Warwick’s defeat, sought to reach the comparative safety of Wales. But Edward, after a forced march, intercepted them at Tewkesbury before they could cross the Severn. And there on 4 May the Lancastrians, too, were defeated; the Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Devon and, most significantly, Prince Edward being killed either in the field or shortly afterwards. Secondary risings in the north and Kent having been suppressed, Edward was able to return in triumph to London on 21 May. On the self same night Henry VI was put to death, almost certainly on the orders of Edward IV himself. Edward IV had recovered his throne through a combination of his own boldness and decisiveness, his enemies’ indecision and a generous slice of luck. The first wars ended on the night that Henry VI was murdered. Since the moment Richard of York publicly advanced his claim to the throne in the autumn of 1460, there had been two rival dynasties claiming to rule England. There had been open warfare from 1459 to 1464, if only sporadically after Towton in March 1461. It had resurfaced again in 1469. Throughout the first reign of Edward IV, while Prince Edward remained at large in France, the potential for renewed dynastic conflict, realized in 1470, had always existed. Only after his death, and in its wake, that of the unfortunate Henry VI, was this threat removed. It took the Yorkists ten and a half years to destroy the Lancastrian dynasty.



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The Second Wars, 1483–87 After 1471 Edward IV was secure on the throne. By all reasonable prediction the Wars of the Roses, the wars between Lancaster and York, should have been over. Yet they were not. In 1483, on the death of Edward IV, England was plunged once more into turmoil. There had been few indications that this would be the case. Admittedly, it had taken Edward IV two more years fully to suppress all opposition. In 1473 there were landings in both the south-west and north-east by diehard Lancastrians, but thereafter there were no further signs of Lancastrian resistance or rebellion. Nor is this surprising. After the death of the childless Prince Edward, the only remaining claimants to the Lancastrian title were either distant geographically, in the person of King John II of Portugal, or feeble dynastically (through the female Beaufort line), in the person of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Only a tiny rump of diehards, including the Earl of Oxford, Lord Clifford, and the Courtenay claimant to the earldom of Devon besides Henry Tudor’s uncle Jasper, Earl of Pembroke, clung to his remote chance of succession. Mainstream opinion concluded that rightly or wrongly, the Yorkist dynasty was established. Many old Lancastrians who had opted for exile with Queen Margaret or stood out in rebellion in the 1460s now returned to England and royal service, prominent among them being John Morton, who became Bishop of Ely, Sir John Fortescue, the eminent lawyer, and Sir Richard Tunstall. Edward IV did not totally dismiss the threat of Tudor as a pretender in exile in Brittany. From time to time, in a somewhat desultory manner, he sought to persuade the Duke of Brittany to hand him over. By 1482, moreover, there were signs that through the good offices of his mother, Margaret Beaufort, now married to Thomas, Lord Stanley, Richmond was ready to reconcile himself with the Yorkist regime.8 After 1471 Edward IV ruled with firmness and authority, if not high-handedly. Until 1475 he was preoccupied with forming a triple alliance with Brittany and Burgundy in order to mount an invasion of France. It is not clear whether he was inspired to emulate the feats of Henry V or was more pragmatically motivated by a desire to unite a divided realm against a common foe: to make outward war to secure inward peace. After the invasion ended ingloriously, but profitably, at Picquigny, where Louis XI bought Edward off, the king seems to have had no further ambition save to enjoy his state. The only major event to ruffle the calm was the arrest, trial and death of the incorrigible

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Duke of Clarence in 1477–78. Clarence may well not have been guilty of treason, but after 1470 he had never again been fully trusted by his brother, and by his folly brought his judicial murder upon himself. From 1478, the king appeared to be presiding over a harmonious court and country. In his last years a moderately successful war with Scotland was offset by a débâcle in foreign policy, which left him isolated and without the French pension that had been paid since 1475. When he died after a short illness at the early age of 42, the talking point was whether England would be drawn once more into a continental war. Within three months of Edward IV’s death, the kingdom had once more been thrown into confusion. The applecart was upset not by an exiled pretender, but by a member of the king’s own family – Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Gloucester was a man who had won universal respect for his probity and loyalty to his brother, as well as his piety, courage and chivalric zeal. His qualities stood out in stark contrast to his fickle and untrustworthy brother Clarence. Nor was his high reputation entirely without foundation. Having assumed the mantle of the Earl of Warwick in northern England (he married his younger daughter Anne, widowed by the death of Prince Edward), he had with considerable skill both secured the loyalty of the region to the regime and brought a measure of good government and local concord which had not been known for two decades. The last person anyone expected to be a threat to the peaceful succession of the 12-year-old Edward V was his paternal uncle Richard. Events on Edward IV’s death were to show that the harmony within the Yorkist court was more apparent than real. Resentments and feuds ran beneath the surface that only the king’s imposing presence had been able to contain. Lord Hastings and the queen’s son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset were rivals. A tense atmosphere quickly formed as the major politicians manoeuvred for initial advantage during the new king’s minority. The queen may have sought to establish herself as regent. If so, this was promptly stopped by the majority of the council, which preferred to follow constitutional precedent and to accept Richard of Gloucester as Protector. His office of Protector would only have lasted until the king was crowned; as the king was 12 this could take place immediately. Thereafter, the Duke could have expected to preside over the council until the king, like Henry VI, could begin to exercise his own authority when he reached his sixteenth birthday in November 1487. While coming up to London



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three weeks after Edward IV’s death, however, and before a council could formally agree to his role, the duke took matters into his own hands. At Stony Stratford at dawn on 30 April, with the assistance of a new-found ally, Henry, Duke of Buckingham, he arrested Earl Rivers, Sir Richard Grey, the queen’s younger son by her first marriage, and Thomas Vaughan, the chamberlain of the new king’s household, and took forcible possession of the young king’s person. By this coup d’état Gloucester secured the protectorate and, more to the point, possession of the person of the king; but he also made an implacable enemy out of Earl Rivers and set himself on a course which, if not already intended, led inexorably to taking the throne for himself.9 First reactions to this coup revealed that the queen immediately feared that the lives of herself and her younger son were in danger, for she hurriedly retreated to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Gloucester was duly made Protector and set in motion the arrangements for the coronation and the calling of the new king’s first parliament. Neither event was to take place. In a frantic two weeks in the middle of June, Gloucester seized and executed without trial William, Lord Hastings, who had until that moment publicly supported him; ordered the execution of Earl Rivers and his associates; arrested Lord Stanley and the two most influential clerical councillors, John Morton, Bishop of Ely and Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York; browbeat the queen mother to surrender herself and her younger son from sanctuary; cancelled the parliament; and on 22 June formally claimed the throne for himself on the grounds of the bastardy of Edward V and his brother.10 There was no resistance. ‘Elected’ by a body of London citizens and would-be members of parliament who had already come up to Westminster, he took the throne on 26 June. On 6 July, in solemn state, he was crowned. It was, with the element of surprise on his side, comparatively easy for Richard III to take the throne. It was more difficult to hold. By his act he had split the Yorkist establishment in two. He had powerful and committed support in the north (which included the northern Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland) and the Duke of Buckingham on his side. He won over John, Lord Howard (by granting him his claim to the duchy of Norfolk), his nephew John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln and heir to the duchy of Suffolk, and several lesser Yorkist peers. His base of support was not too narrow. But against him were ranged all those who had leant towards the Woodvilles and most of Edward IV’s ex-household men. Although taken off-guard in June,

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these men regrouped and in late September raised most of the southern counties with the objective of restoring Edward V. The rising probably sealed the deposed king’s fate (if he were still alive), for it quickly became clear to the rebels that he and his brother were dead. In their place, they turned to the exiled Henry Tudor, who overnight found his prospects transformed. Henry sailed to England; but arrived to find the rising crushed and turned back to Brittany. Henry, Duke of Buckingham, in an almost inexplicable volte-face, threw in his lot with the rebels, was quickly captured and summarily executed. He had been liberally rewarded by Richard III and could hardly complain that he had been cold-shouldered. He might simply have misjudged the situation and believed he was joining the winning side. He might even have imagined that he had an opportunity to make himself king, for he, too, had a claim through his great grandmother, the daughter of Edward III’s youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock. Buckingham’s early defection was a shattering blow to Richard’s confidence, probably more disheartening than the risings of disgruntled members of his brother’s disbanded household and friends of the Woodvilles, which he may well have expected. After October 1483 Richard had fewer supporters on whom he could rely. Lord Stanley, because of his wife’s proven complicity in the risings of the autumn of 1483, and despite his publicly displayed loyalty during the crisis, could not be fully trusted. The king fell back more overtly on the support of his trusted ducal following, predominantly northern in character, many of whom were given rewards and key offices in the dissident south. This no doubt solved a short-term problem of security, but the evident unpopularity of his ‘plantation’ only exacerbated his longer-term standing. A steady trickle of defections continued to his enemies abroad. Henry Tudor presented himself as a rallying point for old Yorkists by his solemn oath to marry Edward IV’s eldest surviving child, Princess Elizabeth, and rule jointly with her (the second part he did not fulfil). Richard III’s morale was further damaged by the death of his only son, the newly created Prince of Wales, in the spring of 1484. At the same time, he had to take the unusual step of issuing public statements reiterating his title to the throne and ordering the local authorities to quash false rumours about it. Richard wisely tried to rebuild his bridges with the Queen Dowager, Elizabeth Woodville, and won a minor victory when she finally agreed to leave sanctuary and, with her daughters, join the Court. Early in 1485, however, after the death of



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his queen, rumours quickly spread that he poisoned her. A growing desperation is indicated by his plan to marry Elizabeth of York himself, a scheme which would no doubt have scotched Henry Tudor. But this foundered on the rock of the intransigence of his principal councillors, especially William Catesby and Sir Richard Ratcliffe, who well knew that such a marriage would have been accompanied by a general Woodville restoration, and a loss of their own privileged position and hold on forfeited lands. The king was forced to take the unprecedented and humiliating step of publicly announcing at the Guildhall in London that there was no truth in the rumour that he was intending to marry his niece. Richard’s problems might have been eased if a plot to seize Richmond in Brittany had succeeded. But in the autumn of 1484 Richmond escaped to France, where he found his plans for organizing an invasion of England given full support. By the summer of 1485 active preparations for war were under way, Early in August, with 3000 French troops, Richmond set sail. Landing at Milford Haven on 7 August, he took a roundabout route through Wales and, gathering support as he marched, finally on 22 August came face to face with the king near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire. The king himself might well have welcomed the opportunity to deal a final blow to the alliance of excluded Yorkists and diehard Lancastrians who opposed him. A decisive victory could well have established him securely on the throne and enabled him to make a fresh start. What precisely decided the battle in Richmond’s favour is not entirely clear. He was outnumbered on the field, but had the support of Lord Stanley and his brother William at the critical moment. Yet the king was anticipating this treachery. It is possible that Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who commanded one unit of the royal army, refused to engage; or, alternatively, the forces might have been so arrayed that it was impossible for him to join the fray. In the event, an impetuous charge by Richard at his rival’s standard in the hope of deciding the issue quickly gave the opportunity for his enemies to close in for the kill. When the battle was over, Henry Tudor had emerged the improbable victor and the wearer of the crown. As with his predecessors, it took Henry VII a long time to secure his throne. Although he presented himself as the unifier and healer of old wounds, there were many who refused to accept the change of regime. Ricardian sympathy was strong in the north and there were others, more intransingent than the northerners, who refused

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to accept Henry VII and plotted, with the tireless backing of Edward IV’s sister, Margaret of York, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, for the restoration of a Yorkist monarchy, There was a rising in the spring of 1486, which quickly fizzled out, but several of those involved preferred to take to the Cumbrian fells before submitting in the autumn. A more serious challenge came in 1487 behind the name of the impostor Lambert Simnel, who claimed to be Edward, Earl of Warwick, the son of George, Duke of Clarence, held by the king in the Tower. This rising, which again received substantial support in north-east England, was crushed on the field of Stoke, near Newark in Nottinghamshire. More trouble occurred in the north in 1489, when the Earl of Northumberland was killed in a tax riot, partly it was said because he was blamed for betraying Richard III.11 Three years later another impostor emerged, Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be the younger of the two princes who had disappeared in 1483. Supported by Margaret of York, and exploited by the Scots, the would-be Richard IV remained on the scene, a thorn in Henry VII’s side, for several years. In 1495 he attempted a landing in the south-east, and when repelled made his way first to Ireland and then to Scotland. There he received the support of James IV, who, in 1496, backed a tentative invasion of northern England which signally failed to receive local support. Henry retaliated in strength, but a planned attack on Scotland in 1497 was halted by a rebellion in the west country, which came perilously close to success before the rebels were dispersed at Blackheath. Warbeck meanwhile was packed off to Cornwall where he, and a small party, vainly tried to rally the west countrymen. He was eventually captured in Somerset. He was at first treated leniently by the king, who had exposed him as an imposter. But in 1499, having been incarcerated in the Tower, a plot for him to escape along with the Earl of Warwick, and for them to join a rebellion in Suffolk, was unearthed. This sealed both their fates. Found guilty of treason they were both executed.12 Even then, Henry faced further intrigue and plots in the name of the house of York. In 1501 Edmund, Earl of Suffolk, Edward IV’s nephew tried, to start a rebellion, but fled abroad where he was sheltered by the Emperor Maximilian. He returned to England, and imprisonment in 1506. He was executed by Henry VIII in 1513. However, his younger brother Richard remained abroad, protected by foreign powers, eventually France, who used him as a pawn in international relations. Thus were the flickering hopes of the remnant of



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the house of York kept alive until the childless Richard met his death in the service of France on the field of Pavia in 1525.13 It is easy in hindsight for historians to dismiss these impostors and intrigues as trivial, but Henry VII himself, and after him Henry VIII, did not. They knew only too well how a twist of fortune could turn an apparently hopeless cause into a triumphal victory. Throughout his reign Henry VII felt himself insecure on the throne. To some extent this was self-induced. He was intensely suspicious and distrustful, perhaps as a result of his experience as an exile before 1485. He controlled his court and household by the principle of divide and rule. He particularly distrusted those whose service he was constrained to accept, because they had switched sides in 1485. Thus it has been suggested that the defections of Sir William Stanley and Lord Fitzwalter in 1492 were self-fulfilling prophecies, brought about by his own treatment of them. Spies were everywhere. After 1495 he retreated into an inner sanctum of his privy chamber from which he ruled through servants in whom he had absolute trust. Moreover the death of his queen and his first and third sons in quick succession in 1501–3, left only an 11-year-old boy to carry the hopes of his dynasty. As his own health deteriorated after 1503, and he was more than once thought close to death, the uncanny resemblance to the circumstances that brought him to throne were plain for all to see. The underlying paranoia of his regime largely explains the tyranny of its final years. The house of Tudor appeared little more established on the throne towards the end of Henry’s reign than at its beginning.14 Ultimately, it was to become apparent that Henry VII had indeed succeeded in restoring dynastic stability, and even monarchical authority. This was not obvious until after the unchallenged succession of Henry VIII, fortuitously on the eve of his eighteenth birthday. Even that was not left to chance by his father’s councillors.15 The indefinable quality of general credibility and natural acceptance as the unquestioned dynasty  – achieved by Henry V after Agincourt and by Edward IV after Tewkesbury  – came slowly to the Tudors. If in retrospect the battle of Bosworth, confirmed by the result at Stoke, came to be seen as decisive, to contemporaries it had seemed that the Wars of the Roses had taken considerably longer to come to an end. Thus they left their mark as much on the house of Tudor as they did on the houses of Lancaster and York.

Chapter 3: The Character of the Wars

Dynasty, Faction and Vendetta The events we have recounted had three separate but overlapping characteristics: that of dynastic struggle; that of factional conflict between ‘ins’ and ‘outs’; and that of a series of private vendettas. The term ‘Wars of the Roses’ is explicitly dynastic. Interpreted dynastically there were but two wars: Lancaster against York and York against Tudor. In an important sense, the second was also a war within the house of York between, on the one hand Richard of Gloucester, Edward IV’s male heirs, real and feigned, his childless sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy and the sons of his sister, Elizabeth, Countess of Suffolk, and, on the other hand Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York and her children. As the champion of the rights of Elizabeth of York, Henry VII was an adopted Yorkist. The support he received from ex-household men of Edward IV and Edward V was, in practice, more important in his campaign to win and to hold the throne than his diehard Lancastrian following. Yet he was also the self-proclaimed residual heir and standard bearer of the house of Lancaster. This dual characteristic of Henry VII’s political position was well understood by the Crowland Continuator, who wrote in 1486 that ‘the tusks of the boar had been blunted and the red rose, the avenger of the white, shines upon us’ (my emphasis). For this well-placed writer it was not a question of the red rose overcoming the white: on the contrary, the red took common cause with the white against the boar (Richard III).1 One cannot go to the extent of suggesting that these second wars were fought merely between York and York: Henry VII was nobody’s tool. Thus they were

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wars between York and the new dynasty, Tudor, which profited from the internal dissension of its rival. None of the Wars of the Roses was solely dynastic. Contained within them and in all cases leading up to them was the more commonplace strife between ‘ins’ and ‘outs’; between a court faction in power and a rival, excluded faction. The first wars arose out of such conflict between a Beaufort–Angevin court faction and an excluded Yorkist faction. The attempts of Richard, Duke of York, until March 1452 to profit from the débâcle of 1449–50 by forcing himself upon a reluctant king as his natural adviser did not lead to civil war. The king held fast, Somerset succeeded to the position of trust held by Suffolk and York was excluded. Civil war only came after the king’s mental breakdown and York’s first protectorate. Having once tasted power in 1454, York was naturally unwilling to relinquish it. Thus, the first battle of St Albans was a preliminary round of open fighting for dominance at court, which was renewed in 1459 when Queen Margaret took steps to remove York and his friends once and for all. The campaigning and fighting that occurred between September 1459 and July 1460 were concentrated on the issue of who would control the court, the king and the government. The question of the throne itself arose as a last resort for York and his friends, who had come to realize that they would never be secure or able perpetually to rule in the name of a captive Henry VI. Precisely the same development occurred in 1469–70, although more rapidly. Warwick was the excluded magnate who went to war to enforce his services on Edward IV. Within six months, he was plotting to depose Edward and place Clarence on the throne. Within 18 months, he had succeeded in restoring Henry VI. The events of 1483–87 similarly have the characteristic of ‘ins’ vs ‘outs’. It cannot be argued that Richard of Gloucester was an excluded politician in the last month of Edward IV’s reign. Any magnate who has a county palatine created for him, as Gloucester had in Cumberland in January 1483, must, on the contrary, be considered highly favoured. In Gloucester’s mind in April 1483, there may have been fear of future exclusion, but he was not at the time excluded. On the other hand, Gloucester’s constant companion and seconder in the revolution was an excluded politician. Henry, Duke of Buckingham, had been pointedly left out of Edward IV’s charmed circle. For him Richard III’s usurpation was, if nothing else, the means to royal favour, high office and power. Moreover, Richard III’s acts dispossessed many,

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not only members of the Woodville family and associates of Lord Hastings, but also the greater part of Edward IV’s household. For them Bosworth offered the opportunity of returning to office and influence. There is no need to labour the point that civil wars are extensions of factional politics. There was, however, a third element involved in the Wars of the Roses which gave them a particularly sharp edge: the matter of vendetta. Disputes over property and local domination were frequent in late-medieval society. It was one of the responsibilities of royal government to stifle and settle such disputes that erupted between the more powerful subjects so as to prevent lawlessness and disorder getting out of hand. The England of Henry VI was riven by many such disputes, as for instance between Moleyns and Paston in East Anglia, or Talbot and Berkeley in Gloucestershire. Quarrels between gentry families, for example the Blounts and Longfords in Derbyshire, or within them, such as the branches of the Mountfords in Warwickshire, became entangled through the networks of clientage and patronage in the conflicts between lords and helped escalate the level of conflict. In 1469–71, when Edward IV’s regime collapsed, several of these were fought out as private wars separate from the main conflict between the king and Warwick. The Duke of Norfolk besieged John Paston in Caister Castle, Harrington and Stanley fought over Hornby in Lancashire and Lord Berkeley defeated and killed his rival Viscount Lisle on Nibley Green in Gloucestershire.2 In these, and many other conflicts, a disputed inheritance often lay at the heart of the quarrel. In others, local lords competed for domination. Such was the conflict between Bonville and Courtenay in Devon and Percy and Neville in the north. In the 1450s several disputes were allowed to develop out of control. And in a society in which the code of honour was still strong, and the use of violence to defend it validated, once rivalry had led to the taking of arms, and the taking of arms to the shedding of blood, dispute ran into feud. Pursued during the Wars, and ultimately subsumed in them, was a series of personal vendettas. The prosecution of these feuds introduced an element of animosity and ruthlessness that from time to time superseded all else. The dominant feud was that between the houses of Beaufort and York, both branches of the royal house. York’s resentment, and bitter condemnation in 1450, of Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, stemmed not so much from thwarted ambition, let alone concern



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for the common good, but from personal animosity generated in their rivalry for command in France. From 1450 onwards Beaufort and York pursued each other with a venom which reached its denouement at St Albans, when Somerset was hacked down by men serving in York’s cause. Thereafter, Somerset’s heir, Henry, the new duke, was bent on a revenge achieved at Wakefield on 30 December 1460, disposing not only of York, but also his second son, the 17-year-old Edmund, Earl of Rutland. Somerset himself escaped the carnage of Towton three months later, and continued the fight against Edward IV from Northumberland until the end of 1462. But then, in a dramatic and much publicized act of reconciliation in 1463, Somerset was pardoned, restored and taken into high favour by the king. Nevertheless, despite all Edward IV’s efforts, Somerset deserted him again at the first opportunity in December of the same year. Taken at Hexham in April 1465, he was immediately executed. Edward IV’s generosity to Somerset has tended to puzzle historians. It need not. It was both an act of policy and an act of personal magnanimity by the king, intended to end the blood feud between the two families. Edward thereby forwent his right of revenge for the deaths of his father and brother. Blood brotherhood, as symbolized by the duke being given the honour of sharing the king’s bedchamber, was to replace blood feud. The king’s subsequent bitter condemnation of Somerset’s new betrayal as being ‘against nature of gentleness and all humanity’ reveals that honour as much as policy was at stake. Somerset himself may have been motivated in part by undying loyalty to Henry VI, but he probably also found that he could not that easily forgive and forget the wrongs done to his family by the house of York.3 He paid the price. And so did his brother and heir, Edmund, at Tewkesbury in 1471. For 20 years Beaufort and York pursued each other until the male line of Beaufort was obliterated. After 1471 the torch was only kept alight by Margaret, Countess of Richmond, the great niece of the last Edmund. The feud with the house of Beaufort was not the only one to trouble the house of York. In 1463 Edward IV found the twelfth Earl of Oxford and his eldest son guilty of treason and executed them. The earl had probably been guilty only of misprision: failure to inform on his son. The eldest surviving son, John, who was not involved, dedicated the next 23 years to avenging them. He rose with Warwick in 1469, continued to oppose Edward IV from exile after 1471, was subsequently imprisoned in Calais, and finally threw in his

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lot with Henry VII. A gifted military commander, he led the vanguard at Bosworth and Stoke. Not so much a diehard Lancastrian, he was a man driven by a thirst for revenge and the need to satisfy family honour.4 There were other blood feuds dividing the political nation in mid-fifteenth-century England. Neville and Percy, too, were at each other’s throats. The Neville–Percy feud arose out of competition for dominance in the north, but became more bitter and personal because of a dispute over the future of the manor of Wressle in the East Riding. In 1453 a private war broke out between the two families. This private war continued on the field of St Albans in 1455, which was as much a part of the Neville–Percy conflict as a confrontation between York and Beaufort. At St Albans, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland was killed: five years later his younger son, Thomas, Lord Egremont, fell at Northampton. Egremont’s brother, the third earl, inherited an obligation to seek the revenge of two deaths. This was achieved after Wakefield, when Salisbury was taken and executed, and his younger son Thomas killed in the battle. Three months later, Northumberland himself and a younger brother, Richard, were cut down by the avenging Neville brothers, Warwick and Montagu, at Towton. In 1464 yet another brother of the dead earl, Ralph, was killed at Hedgeley Moor. A third blood feud was settled in 1460–61; that between Lord Bonville and the Earl of Devon. Blood did indeed pursue blood.5 Such feuds even extended into families, for Neville was divided against Neville. Ralph Neville, first Earl of Westmorland, had partitioned his inheritance between families by his two countesses, the junior branch, whose mother was a Beaufort, taking the lion’s share. The senior branch, the Earls of Westmorland, were understandably reluctant to accept this disinheritance, which virtually left them with estates only in the county palatine of Durham. In 1459 they took the side of Beaufort and Percy against York and their half-brothers. The second Earl of Westmorland himself was incapacitated, the initiative falling on the shoulders of his brothers, John, Lord Neville, who fought at Wakefield and had a hand in the death of the Earl of Salisbury, and Thomas of Brancepeth. John, in his turn, fell at Towton. The mantle ultimately fell on the shoulders of Thomas’s son, Sir Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth, the Earl’s nephew, who maintained a running battle, virtually single handed, against Warwick and Edward IV until he was taken and executed in 1469.6



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The Wars of the Roses thus fractured the conventional political nation in several ways. But there was an added dimension to the first wars: their extension to the population at large. Revolt, Popular Politics and the Public Sphere Violence, as we have seen, was never far from the surface in the fifteenth century: it was part of the code of chivalry by which the upper classes lived and, if right were on one’s side or honour were at stake, deemed acceptable. At the highest level, a just cause condoned violent rebellion. Richard of York seems to have convinced himself that repeatedly taking arms against his sovereign was justified by his belief that he had the right to high office. Naturally those who committed acts of violence tended to claim that right was indeed on their side. Local disputes were all too readily settled by manslaughter, examples of which are legion. Warwick the Kingmaker never thought twice about summarily executing those whom he believed had deserted or betrayed him.7 What was sauce for the aristocratic gander was also sauce for the common goose. In July 1460 Thomas, Lord Scales, who had held the Tower for the court, was murdered by the Thames watermen because he had turned its guns on the city (and after he had been spared by his fellow peers). One source reports that ‘the common people of the country who loved him not’ seized Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, from Pontefract castle and murdered him after he had been taken alive at Wakefield. In 1469 Humphrey Stafford of Southwick, Earl of Devon, in flight after his defeat at Edgecote was recognized and murdered by a mob at Bridgwater.8 Conventionally such well reported incidents are perceived as sporadic outbreaks of latent class hostility, similar to the murder of unpopular ministers during popular upheavals. Cade’s Revolt was represented by most contemporaries and near-contemporaries as mindless fury, wanton destruction and an orgy of looting. The author of Gregory’s Chronicle, who witnessed what happened in London at first hand, described the mob as a multitude of riff-raff, half besides their wits. Modern historians, even if more sympathetic to those in revolt, have tended to see such outbursts in a similar vein. The people were unenfranchised, and excluded. In the last resort, if virtual representation through their betters failed, they had no other way of

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making their views known than by acts of resistance. Such revolts as convulsed south-eastern England in 1450 (or in 1381) were a safety valve through which repressed tensions and the pent-up frustrations of ordinary men and women could be released. Thus, the dominant view of popular politics in the later Middle Ages is of the indirect exercise of power and influence through acts of resistance and insurrection. The model is of social conflict rather than inclusion. Just about the only context in which the voice of the people was heard was in complaint, some of which was recorded by their betters and circulated in warning to governments to take heed, and when the people themselves shouted in angry protest from the streets. The long-established perception is that the people were outside the political system and could only influence it indirectly, or by confrontation ranging from large-scale rebellion to innumerable acts of local insubordination. A long tradition of such popular protest has been detected with its roots in the thirteenth century. Popular politics, in this tradition, was the politics of protest.9 However, such social protest was not, as contemporaries usually chose to represent it, mindless. The violence of the mob was often, as with their betters, the extension of politics by other means. Politics in mid-fifteenth-century England was not restricted to the crown, the peerage, the gentry, the senior clergy and great merchants. Social groups below these ruling elites participated regularly and normally in the politics of the realm. Lesser gentlemen, yeomen, husbandmen, artisans, shopkeepers and local traders, many of independent means and enjoying a reasonably comfortable standard of living, were tax payers, electors to parliament (the 40 shilling freeholder in the shires), in many cases in small boroughs MPs, and local government functionaries. They were the natural leaders of parish and small-town communities, articulating and representing the views of their neighbours. They and their fellow villagers or townsmen were well (or sometimes ill) informed by circulating hand-bills and rumour. They discussed political affairs. The common voice was picked up and noted by those in power, and sometimes those who held forth in public, especially public houses, were prosecuted for subversive speech. Both governments and their opponents went to great lengths to communicate their messages to the common people. The voice of the people mattered.10 The protestors in 1450 saw themselves as part of the political community, deploying constitutional procedures. They represented themselves as petitioners to the Crown seeking the redress of wrongs



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and the reform of the common weal. Two contemporaries, more understanding of the nature of the protest in 1450, recognized this. One recounted that the protestors declared that they were assembled to redress and reform the wrongs that were done in the realm, and to withstand the malice of those that were destroyers of the common profit. The petitions they drew up were, he added, rightful and reasonable and he recorded that a copy was sent to the parliament then meeting in Westminster. The demands and actions were modelled on the precedents set by dissident nobles in the past rebelling in the cause of reform. The petitions drawn up then, and recycled over the next two decades, reveal coherent ends, an understanding of the working of the constitution and a clear perception of the public good. They protested violently in arms, but the rebels of 1450 had no doubt that they had a stake in the realm and a role to play in politics.11 In mid-fifteenth-century England there was no clear distinction between violent and peaceful protest, as the Duke of York was to demonstrate several times. The mediocres (or ‘middling sorts’ to use a later term) who bore the burden of local government and were prominent in political protest, also led their communities for military service. Through the office of constable they called out the militia of arrayed men, armed, armoured and trained for the defence of the realm. All males between the ages of 14 and 60 were required to possess arms and armour, practise with their weapons and attend musters for inspection. Archery butts were maintained for such practice. Established to defend the kingdom, the system was also deployed in civil war and by local communities in rebellion. By long-standing tradition the right to bear arms was perceived as conferring a political voice. Cade’s revolt was mobilized and organized through this system. The demonstrators believed that redress of wrongs and the reform of the common weal by force, in particular the removal of false traitors, was legitimately a defence of the realm. For the ‘true commons’ (both loyal and real) as for the nobility, petitioning in arms for the public good was a legitimate political act.12 Informing the routine popular engagement in politics at the local level, there lay a sense of a public realm, the res publica as it was expressed in Latin The notion of the public, John Watts has pointed out, permeated political discourse in the mid-fifteenth century and shaped the conduct and nature of politics. One account of Cade’s revolt stated that the protestors represented themselves as the king’s

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true liegemen petitioning in arms as ‘public petitioners for public justice’. The Crown and governments acted in the name of the public good (or common weal) and were alert to and responsive to the pressure that it put on them. Moreover by mid-fifteenth century the vernacular had become the language of public political discourse. Politics could not be conducted solely in the private spheres of the ruling elites.13 Richard of York, though he carefully distanced himself from Cade, who appealed to him to take the lead in his protest, nevertheless promoted himself as a reformer with a deep concern for the common weal. He appears in 1450 to have approved the ends, but not the means. By the end of the decade he had changed his tune. On one level espousing the cause of reform was pragmatic politics; what he lacked in committed noble support, he sought to make up in the weight of popular opinion brought at first indirectly to bear. However, as civil war approached in the late 1450s, he exploited popular grievances more directly, and to good effect. In 1459–60 the Yorkist lords appealed to the people of Kent and the neighbouring counties, who had been disillusioned with Lancastrian government since the late 1440s. Their grievances helped give the Yorkists popular support, and their insistence that they were acting for the common good leant much needed credibility to their claim to be pursuing more than factional ends. Similarly, in 1469 Warwick and Clarence turned popular disappointment at Edward IV’s failure to restore ‘good governance’ to their own account.14 The Crown felt obliged in 1459 to counter the Yorkist claims to be acting in the common good. It did so during the Coventry parliament that October in a document known as the Somnium Vigilantis, but, tellingly, written in English for wider circulation. It addressed six claims attributed to them, focussing on the right to use force to reform the realm. Even if the common good of the realm had in any way been neglected, the document asserted, no subject had authority to act independently of the Crown. Only the sovereign could ensure that the realm was governed according to the common good and not for private profit. York and his allies had but pretended reformation as a cover for the pursuit of their own ends. It is a full-blooded restatement of the absolute powers of the Crown. But in rebutting Yorkist claims that they could act independently in the name of the common weal, the Crown implicitly acknowledged the existence of an alternative perception that the roots of sovereignty lay in the community of the realm as a whole.15



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York, a cautious and conventional aristocrat, may not have grasped the implications of his stance. The Earl of Warwick almost certainly did. It was he, independently of York, who took up Cade’s petition in 1459, stressing when he landed that year in Kent, ‘the tender love he bore under to common weal and prosperity of the realm and secondly to the king’s estate’. To place the king’s estate in 1459 second to the common weal was revolutionary in its implications. He and his followers, he declared, were to go to the king’s presence as true subjects and liegemen, lovers of the said common weal, to petition him to reform his government. It did not turn out well for him and the Yorkists on that occasion. But ten months later when he landed once more in Kent he called out the militia, the commons in arms. A London chronicler sympathetic to him described how he arrived in London on 2 July 1460 with 500 horsemen and a host of footmen of the counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey. They were permitted to pass through the city on their way to confront the king at Northampton This was in effect the force raised by Cade ten years earlier, reassembled with aristocratic leadership. The earl’s reported command on the eve of battle to spare the commons should probably be seen in the light of the composition of his own army as well as his declared love of the common weal.16 The same process of calling out the arrayed men was followed in the spring of 1471 by the bastard of Fauconberg, in the last forlorn rally by Warwick’s devoted following. Two contemporaries described how he raised up all Kent. One, John Warkworth, simply described this force as a host of good men (men of worth), well harnessed. The other, the author of the ‘official’ account of Edward IV’s recovery of his throne, was at pains to point out that there was considerable compulsion in the raising of this host, for many harnessed able men who were unwilling to serve in person were forced to lend their harness to others. If this author is to be believed, by 1471 the men of Kent were becoming less willing to rise. But nevertheless there is a clear line of continuity between 1450 and 1471 of the commons of the south-east, especially of Kent, taking direct action in the name of the common good, at first without aristocratic leadership but then under the banner of the earl of Warwick and his supporters.17 Professor Hicks has argued that the commons only took up arms during the Wars of the Roses when they found a dissident lord or two to lead them. They provided in mid-fifteenth century a pool of discontent to be aroused and directed in national politics by skilful

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demagogues  – by which he had Warwick the Kingmaker principally in mind.18 The conventional view of Warwick is that he was a rabble-rouser. It is the case that throughout his career after 1458 he courted popular opinion. His exploits in the Channel between 1458 and 1460 made him a hero in Kent and the south-east. In his pomp under Edward IV he kept open household, shamelessly buying popularity by his open-handed largesse. He no doubt exploited popular revolt to advance his own political interests, as the Crown asserted in 1459 and commentators repeated after his fall in 1471.19 But, as we have seen, the commons, especially of south-eastern England, did not need to be directed by Warwick the Kingmaker to political ends. They were already fully engaged in the public sphere and well understood the workings of the political system. They welcomed the leadership of such a man as Warwick, who made the success of any insurrection and the achievement of their aims more likely, just as Warwick knew that their backing would aid in the pursuit of his own ambitions. But in following the course he did he validated the notion that politics extended beyond the narrow confines of the ruling elites. He recognized and engaged with the alternative perception of the root of authority in the realm. This is apparent at the beginning of March 1461. When Edward IV and Warwick returned to London after the battles of St Albans and Mortimer’s Cross, their ‘host’ camped in St John’s Fields outside Aldersgate. There, no doubt orchestrated by Warwick, the rank and file of the army was asked if they would have Henry VI deposed and Edward of March as their king; to which they responded ‘aye’. Their captains then took their answer to the earl at his lodgings in the city. Thus a popular ‘election’ was staged as part of the process whereby Edward IV took the crown. The wording of the author of Bale’s Chronicle, a source close to Warwick’s circle, is perhaps significant: it was, he wrote, ‘demanded of the people gathered in the host’: the people in arms were asked as a representative assembly to exercise their traditional right to give voice and their formal acclamation was used to help confer legitimacy on Edward IV’s usurpation of the throne. At this critical stage of his career, and it was only when he was in opposition, the Kingmaker endorsed the role of the people in politics.20 The commons played a lesser part in the second wars. Warwick’s removal from the scene in 1471 was no doubt welcomed among the ruling elites, who feared where populism might lead. Thereafter, the absolute authority of the crown as the sole guarantor of the common



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weal was relentlessly stressed. Warwick was represented as the most important of those idols of the multitude to whom the fickle masses had once turned and whom Edward IV had suppressed. When the king died in 1483 leaving a minority, the Chancellor, Bishop John Russell, in a planned address to the opening of Edward V’s first parliament harked back to before 1471. Remembering the events of just a decade or two earlier, he warned the lords to show unity and not to appeal to the people, for he said, ‘The people must stond a forr and not pass the lymittes ... it suffiseth the people to recyve with due obeisance the prince’s commandements.’21 Richard III subsequently presented himself as a monarch with great concern for the common weal, possibly out of genuine commitment, but firmly endorsing his chancellor’s sentiments. The commons should know their place. He was certainly no Warwick.22 It may be that, as the economy picked up after 1470 and prosperity returned, the commons had less about which to complain. Nevertheless, the people continued to have their say in disturbances and tax rebellions. In 1489 Yorkshiremen rose against the imposition of a tax, during which the Earl of Northumberland was killed. According to one report it was because the commons believed he had betrayed Richard III. The rising of the commons in the west country in 1497 came perilously close to bringing Henry VII down. It was not possible to shut the door completely on popular engagement in politics. Public petitioning en masse grew, if anything, in frequency. The demonstrations against the Amicable Grant in 1525 and, on a larger scale, the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 continued the tradition, but with the all important difference that the leaders eschewed violence.23 In the mid-fifteenth century there had been no such inhibition. Popular participation had been an integral element of the first Wars that came to an end in 1471 and the place of politics in the public sphere, never entirely suppressed thereafter, had been forcibly asserted. Regional Dimensions The intensity of popular engagement in the south-east of England reminds us that the Wars had a significant regional dimension. Welsh troops, for instance, played a prominent role in 1461 when Edward IV raised the marches. The battle of Edgecote in 1469 was largely a fight

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between Welsh and northern levies; Henry VII drew upon Welshmen in 1485; and he was opposed by Irish kerns, reinforced by northern Englishmen, in 1487. The Cornish came close to toppling Henry VII in 1497. Northern levies were called out frequently. The men of Richmondshire, in particular, where the Nevilles dominated from Middleham, accompanied Salisbury to Blore Heath and Ludford in 1459 and were active under the Earl of Warwick in the Northumbrian campaigns of 1461–64. In 1469 they turned out again under the leadership of Robin of Redesdale and were in arms subsequently in March 1470, August 1470 and April 1471.24 It was perhaps easy for the Nevilles and the Percies and their local allies to call up the northern counties because the men of the north were more accustomed to fighting against the Scots. The northern earls enjoyed the services of the garrisons in Carlisle and Berwick. In time of Anglo-Scottish war, these garrisons were augmented by large retinues called out by the retainers of the wardens. Thus in 1448, when war was imminent, Sir Walter Strickland was retained for life by Salisbury. To defend the border, Strickland could muster 290 armed tenants (billmen and bowmen, half of them mounted) drawn from seven manors. In the same war Henry, Lord FitzHugh, rode to Scotland with his tenants of Mickleton in Teesdale (and others, no doubt) who were subsequently rewarded for their service.25 Sheriffs of Yorkshire were accustomed to raising levies to assist in the defence of the marches; the towns of York and Beverley regularly provided contingents; the priory of Durham occasionally sent a company of its ‘lay servants’ (tenants); and even the Archbishop of York on occasion raised a troop of armed clergy.26 The Bishop of Durham, by virtue of his regality, had a more permanent obligation to assist in the defence of the border, not only by raising his own levies, but also through his permanent garrison at Norham on Tweed which, in time of war in 1482, was established at 30 men.27 There was therefore a considerable reservoir of experienced manpower in the northern counties which could be tapped by the rival magnate families, the Nevilles and Percys. One commentator reported that men from the far north played a decisive role in the first battle of St Albans.28 In 1460–61 it was a largely northern army which Margaret of Anjou led from victory at Wakefield, to St Albans and, finally, defeat at Towton in 1461. In 1469–70, as we have seen, Warwick made full use of his northern forces in his rebellion against Edward IV. On Edward IV’s return in 1471, however, the north



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was partially neutralized by the king’s restoration of the Earl of Northumberland and his favour to Bishop Booth of Durham in 1470. Finally, in 1483 Richard of Gloucester turned to the north to raise an army to guarantee his usurpation of the throne, while, at Bosworth, a northern division under Northumberland played a crucial if shadowy role in the outcome.29 On one occasion an army from the north caused panic in the southern counties. This was the army brought down to London by Queen Margaret in the first two months of 1461. It was not just an army of northerners: it contained large contingents recruited in the west country which had marched north to join the king in December 1460 and also a Scots battalion contributed by the regent, Mary of Guelders. But its bulk was of followers and tenants of the northern lords loyal to the house of Lancaster. As it marched south, report spread before it, no doubt exaggerated, of the swathe of looting and destruction it was bringing in its wake.30 The fear it created, deliberately fanned by the Yorkist government in Westminster at the time, was to have a profound effect on public opinion and attitudes towards the north. Several chroniclers emphasized the malice and perniciousness of the northerners in 1461. Warwick himself, albeit one who in his time relied heavily on his own northern connections, used the fear of northern rapacity in his propaganda in February 1461. As early as January 1461, the rumour was spreading in Norfolk that the people of the north had been appointed to rob and pillage. After Towton, the political verse, The Rose of Rouen, presented Edward IV as the saviour of the south from the northerners who had threatened to occupy it. Even as late as 1489, Henry VII took up the same theme in his proclamation against the rebels of north Yorkshire whom he painted as intending to ‘rob, despoil and destroy’ all the south parts of the realm and to bring its people into captivity.31 It is hard to tell whether this is mere hysteria cleverly exploited for propaganda purposes, or whether it reveals a truth about north–south divisions. K.B. McFarlane was confident that the Wars had no regional dimension; ‘these were neither wars between north and south nor between the lowland south-east and the dark corners of the north and west.’32 In the sense that England was not permanently divided into regional armed camps, one cannot disagree. But the northern counties provided a considerable number of the combatants. And while it is undoubtedly true that before 1461 the Wars were as much

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a civil war between the northern earls as between York and the Lancastrian court, after Edward IV came to the throne, trouble and disaffection came more exclusively from the north. Warwick used his northern support to harry Edward IV in 1469 and 1470. And Richard III was even more dependent on the same region. This dependence became transparent when, in the aftermath of the widespread rebellion in the southern counties in October 1483 and so as to secure his tottering regime, he planted many of his northern supporters in the south. It might have seemed that the fear of 20 years earlier had been realized. Moreover, after Richard III’s fall in 1485 it was indeed the northernmost counties which put up the only sustained resistance to Henry VII.33 To this extent the kingdom became polarized. The polarization is reflected in early Tudor writings about Richard III and the north. Even in 1486 the Crowland chronicler could see the north as the source of every evil, and Polydore Vergil described the northerners as savage and more eager than others for upheaval.34 Not without foundation, the idea became fixed that Richard III was a northern king who had subdued the south. Thus although one might seriously doubt that the first of the Wars were in any meaningful way a conflict between north and south, it would seem that the last wars, the wars of 1483–87, were more nearly so. If the Wars introduced a degree of regional polarization within England, what role did the other British regions and territories under the dominion of the kings of England, Wales and Ireland, the Channel Islands and Calais play? Wales was more fully integrated into the kingdom of England than Ireland. It was ruled in the far west by the King of England as Prince of Wales, and in the eastern parts by marcher lords. There were a number of English colonists, especially in the towns, and the Welsh themselves were subject to penal laws introduced in the wake of Owain Glyn Dŵr’s rebellion at the beginning of the century. As the century had progressed, however, the Welsh squirearchy had become anglicized and, slowly but perceptibly, had become more absorbed into the English ruling élite; a trend encapsulated by the change of name of the family of Yorkist retainers from Ap Thomas to Herbert. The Wars did not in Wales lead to a revival of separatism or nationalism. Henry Tudor may have made a special appeal to his own Welsh roots after 1485 by adopting the dragon of Cadwallader as one of his emblems, but the Wars in the principality and marches amounted to little more than an extension of the struggle for control between English factions. That struggle began in



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the 1450s, especially after the birth of the Prince of Wales in 1453, between the prince’s mother, Queen Margaret, and her associates, notably Henry VII’s father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and after his premature death, his brother Jasper, Earl of Pembroke, on the one hand, and the lieutenants of the Duke of York, Devereux and Herbert, on the other. The latter, especially William Herbert, ennobled as Earl of Pembroke by Edward IV, held sway after 1461. In the 1470s, after the death of Herbert, Edward IV resorted to rule of the principality and supervision of the marches through a council based at Ludlow acting in the Prince’s name. This experiment came to an end with his own death. Henry VII’s victory represented the victory of his family in the struggle for Wales, and he was represented there, until his death in 1495, by his veteran uncle, Jasper. But Henry also mobilized the Welsh squirearchy, from whose ranks his dynasty had sprung, to buttress his rule, most notably Rhys ap Thomas, who built up a considerable hold on South Wales. Thus, in Wales, the Wars did not significantly disrupt the post-Glyn Dŵr settlement, or diverge from the English pattern of politics.35 In Ireland, matters took a different course. The more distant English lordship, separated by the Irish Sea, was far more difficult for the Crown to control. By mid-fifteenth century, direct English rule had been reduced to what became recognized as the Pale in the immediate vicinity of Dublin. Beyond those bounds, royal authority was exercised either indirectly through the great Anglo-Irish families, the Earls of Ormond, Desmond and Kildare, or not at all in the more remote districts where the Gaelic clans were, in all but name, independent. Richard of York, Lieutenant of Ireland in the 1450s, cultivated the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare and Desmond as counterweights to the Lancastrian James Butler, Earl of Ormond and Wiltshire. York flirted fleetingly in 1460 with conceding a greater degree of autonomy to the Anglo-Irish community, but Edward IV’s victory put a stop to any developments along this line. The Butlers were destroyed in an extension of the civil war in Ireland in 1461–3. Thereafter, Kildare emerged as Edward’s deputy and the de facto ruler of the lordship. After 1485, although Henry VII was anxious to continue the arrangement, the Earl opted to exploit the new king’s weakness to his own advantage by backing the Simnel and Warbeck conspiracies. In effect, he attempted a unilateral assumption of home rule in rebellion against the king. For a while the control of the English Crown over Ireland was threatened, until – in the aftermath

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of Warbeck’s failure – Henry, through his energetic deputy Sir Edward Poynings, was able to reassert his authority and re-establish – under a chastened Kildare – the traditional relationship with the Anglo-Irish establishment.36 There were three other outposts of the English dominions: Man, the Channel Islands and Calais. The Isle of Man, though claimed by the Scots, was a lordship in the possession of the Stanley family and its participation in the Wars was determined by the allegiance of its lords. The Channel Islands and Calais were historically part of the kingdom of France, though the islands had been in English hands considerably longer, since the Norman Conquest. Control of both was important to combatants. Guernsey and Jersey were bailiwicks of the duchy of Normandy, were French-speaking, retained close contacts with Normandy as they lay within the diocese of Coutances, and enjoyed significant privileges. In 1449 Warwick the Kingmaker inherited the lordship of the islands, and appointed his servant John Nanfan as governor. They remained in his control after 1459, and were a useful refuge in 1460, as well as being valuable naval bases. However in 1461–2 first Jersey and then Guernsey were captured by Pierre de Brézé, seneschal of Normandy and remained in French hands until 1468 when they were recovered by Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales. They were not restored to Warwick. Nevertheless he recovered them in 1470. After his fall, Edward IV kept them in royal hands, appointed Edward Brampton as his governor and Richard Harliston as captain of the garrisons. Henry Tudor seems to have won support for his cause there after 1483 and control passed smoothly to him, though both Brampton and Harliston rebelled, when he became king.37 Calais was a company town, dominated by the Staplers, a syndicate of London merchants. With its pale, it constituted an enclave in northern France strategically placed bordering both Flanders, under the control of the dukes of Burgundy, and Picardy. It was a vital base through which wool exports were shipped to France, armies could be transported to the continent and diplomats enter Europe. There was a large garrison and its captain was also the king’s lieutenant, with powers as its governor. Its control in time of civil war was vital. Warwick the Kingmaker was appointed captain in 1456, replacing Edmund Duke of Somerset, and held it until his death in 1471. It took time for him to secure control, and the loyalty of the garrison was at first doubtful. One of the few successes, from a factional point of



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view, of York’s second protectorate was to negotiate a settlement with the company which wrote off a mountain of debt and renewed the arrangement by which the garrison was paid directly by the company in lieu of customs duties. Warwick’s developing close relationship with the city of London, whose vested interest in Calais was huge, and the Cinque Ports, through which communications with Calais were maintained, were subsequently of crucial importance in 1459–61 and again in 1469–71. While it took time to secure the loyalty of the garrison (a section deserted him in 1459), after his death Calais held out the longest in his cause. Thereafter Edward IV made sure that he could rely absolutely on Calais, appointing William, Lord Hastings as his lieutenant. Richard III never quite won its loyalty: at the end of 1484 a section of the garrison absconded along with their prisoner, the Earl of Oxford, to Henry Tudor. Henry VII himself was able, through his captain Lord Daubeny, to ensure that there was no repetition. Calais, with its wider military implications, close ties with Kent and integral relationship with the city of London, had a unique significance.38 While there were distinctive regional dimensions to the Wars of the Roses within the wider English realm, only in Ireland did they come close to threatening disintegration. The Wars in all the regions and dominions of the English crown were characterized by the same overlapping elements. They encompassed vendetta, factional conflict, dynastic dispute (from which they take their name), and wider popular engagement. They were also, for the wider political nation, about the common weal, or public good, and entailed at one point dispute about the ultimate location of authority in the realm. At the period of most intensive conflict, during 1460–61, all these elements were entwined. The events and battles of these years were occasions in which personal scores were settled, in which the control of government was decided, the role of the commons was tested, all corners of the realm were embroiled and, ultimately at Towton, the question of the ruling dynasty was determined.

Chapter 4: The Causes of the Wars

There were several interlocking reasons for the outbreak of civil war in 1459. The precise weight to be given to each and the balance to be struck between them has, and will remain, a matter of controversy. Dynastic cause, the original idea that England fell into civil strife ‘by reason of titles’, has tended to receive short shrift at the hands of modern historians, but should not be dismissed out of hand. Arguments that the Wars were caused either by economic and financial crisis in the ranks of the nobility, or by defeat in the Hundred Years’ War have also tended to be unfashionable in recent years. Debate at the end of the twentieth century largely focused on whether the Wars resulted from a long-term shift in the balance of political power between the Crown and greater subject, with a resultant increase in disorder and lawlessness, or whether they were largely the consequence of the shortcomings of Henry VI as king. These various factors can be perceived as long-term causes, rooted deeply in the development and structure of English society in the later Middle Ages; short-term causes arising from more recent experience; and immediate causes which led directly to civil war. The long-term developments may have made the Wars possible; the shortterm, likely; and the immediate, unavoidable. In the long term the impact of ‘bastard feudalism’ and possible changes in the balance of power between Crown and subject might be significant; in the short term, economic and financial pressures on English landholders, the consequences of defeat in the Hundred Years’ War and the question of dynastic legitimacy are likely to be most relevant; and for the immediate, the clash of personalities and the characters of Henry VI, his Queen and his principal subjects in the 1450s are central. These

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considerations apply specifically to the causes of the first wars. Most discussions tend to assume that they can by extension be applied also to the second. This is not necessarily so. The second wars, which broke out 12 years after the first ended, may not have been linked to the same short-term, or even longer term causes. With this in mind, the causes of the second wars will be considered separately at the end of this chapter. Long-Term Causes of the First Wars The argument that bastard feudalism was the fundamental cause of the Wars of the Roses is second only to dynastic legitimacy in antiquity. Its development is particularly associated with Charles Plummer and William Denton in the late nineteenth century. In the mid-fifteenth century, the argument ran, the government of England was paralysed by the overgrown power and insubordination of the nobles, especially overmighty subjects who were able to pursue their own private quarrels without let or hindrance. The origin of this evil was supposed to lie in the development of bastard feudalism in the reign of Edward III. After 1399 the government was ‘controlled, if not directed’, by half a dozen of these mighty peers. The wars resulted from the collapse of central control and were in effect a repetition on a large scale of those private wars which distracted almost every country.1 The Victorian view was forcibly restated by Professor Storey in 1965. ‘The civil wars were the outcome of this collapse of law and order’ linked with the development of bastard feudalism, ‘a retrograde step’, which ‘threatened to destroy the constitutional and legal progress achieved since the twelfth century’. From the mid-fourteenth century, ‘the parasitic hold of “bastard feudalism” on royal justice grew stronger’. Lords, especially overmighty subjects, took the law into their own hands on behalf of their retainers. Under Henry VI ‘“bastard feudalism” developed without restraint’. All the conflicts, both locally and at court, ultimately coalesced into one conflagration: ‘the Wars of the Roses were thus the outcome of an escalation of private feuds.’2 An explanation of the outbreak of civil war in 1459 and the collapse of the Lancastrian regime which lays emphasis on a deep-rooted malaise in society, contains two elements: the first, the long-term shift in prestige, authority and power between king and greater subjects

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dating from the reign of Edward III; and the second, the central and malign role of bastard feudalism in this deterioration. It would be as well to consider the two separately. It has generally been accepted that under Edward I (d. 1307) the English monarchy reached the zenith of its medieval power: under him, the centralizing tendencies of a century and a half reached a peak. By enforcing royal justice on all subjects and by establishing an effective central administrative machine, the kings of England had achieved a degree of authority within their realm found in few other kingdoms. In England there were no great appanages such as the duchies of Brittany, Burgundy, or even Aquitaine, in which the rulers were themselves petty princes able to defy the king. Whereas France in the fourteenth century had to some extent the characteristic of a confederacy of princes under one head, England was unified. The Principality of Wales as the appanage of the heir to the throne was, in effect, annexed to the Crown. The county palatine of Durham under a bishop’s rule was thereby amenable to royal control. While it would be wrong not to acknowledge the existence of many local liberties and privileges, it is nevertheless the case that for a medieval kingdom, England by the fourteenth century was remarkably centralized. Her manageable size helped, but it was also the result of conscious policy. The centralizing drive of English kings had been resisted by their subjects. In the early fourteenth century it became established that kings could not amend law without the consent of subjects represented in the new institution of parliament. Thus there developed a significant legal brake on the regality or absolute power of the sovereign. Financially, too, the Crown was relatively poorly endowed. During the fourteenth century it became established practice that the consent of parliament was necessary before taxes could be raised. The Crown did not command the resources in land to free itself from these restraints. Moreover the king, partly as a consequence of his lack of endowments, had no ultimate coercive power: he did not hold a monopoly of military force. Indeed, he depended on his greater subjects to provide arms and armies when needed for defence of the realm. In the last resort, therefore, kings depended on consent. It was both necessary and desirable for a king to rule with and through his greater subjects, who effectively controlled the localities. Thus, while administratively England was relatively centralized, politically harmony and civil order depended on cooperation between king and greater subject.



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The strenuous and, for a time, successful efforts of Edward I to enhance his control over his kingdom ultimately led to conflict, which intensified and worsened under his son Edward II. The first 40 years of the fourteenth century were marked by this strife between Crown and baronage. After 1340 Edward III effected a remarkable transformation. This was achieved by leading his barons into victorious war against France, reinforced by the promotion of a cult of chivalry with himself at its head. Beyond this, the character and significance of Edward’s policy has been much debated. One argument is that Edward only secured the support for his wars by making a series of significant concessions to the nobility. These included modification of the treason laws to reduce the levying of private war to mere felony; relaxation of the enforcement of central royal justice on the provinces and the development in its place of delegated administration of justice through Commissions of the Peace which were, from the start, dominated by the local landed élites; and allowing tenants-in-chief to gain more absolute control of their lands through the development of entailment and enfeoffments to use – in effect, a partial abandonment of feudal rights. The status and prestige of the king’s greater subjects were also enhanced by the development of the hereditary peerage defined by membership of the House of Lords, the creation of new titles, such as duke, and the marriage of his own children into the ranks of the upper peerage. Finally, so as to raise effective armies, he encouraged his greater subjects and companions in arms to recruit their own permanent military retinues.3 Edward III created an upper nobility, many of whose members became part of the royal family, all of whom were companions in arms and to whom he was less an overlord, more a first among equals. In his own heyday he was brilliantly successful, but later his policy proved damaging to the Crown. The cumulative effect, the argument runs, was to surrender elements of judicial, financial, territorial and military power to magnates, some of whom were also of the blood royal and therefore enjoyed a further enhanced status. These mighty, potentially overmighty, subjects came to represent a threat to the Crown. The counter-argument is that Edward had no intention of bartering away his sovereignty. He was engaged in a fruitful and constructive partnership with his landed subjects which, far from weakening the Crown, strengthened it. An enhanced upper nobility and a wider royal family were themselves potential sources of strength to a king.

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But landed society itself was widening, especially as the gentry grew in numbers and significance. The scope of the state was growing and royal intervention in economic and social affairs expanding. The Crown had to bring the nobility and gentry into government in the provinces more fully because there was much more to govern. If the state appeared to become less centralized after 1340, it was because the scope of the partnership between Crown and subject in the government of the kingdom expanded. Edward III did not enfeeble the monarchy so as to go to war; he updated it to meet new demands.4 Ultimately in late medieval politics, the argument continues, the power and authority of the Crown depended on the character of the king and his personal relationships with his greater subjects. The political world was small, familial and claustrophobic. The institutions of the constitution, administration and the law were, in the last resort, only as strong as the forcefulness of the monarch. A hereditary monarchy placed a special burden on the personal qualities of the man born to be king. Successful kings like Edward III and Henry V showed what was possible; reigns like those of Richard II or Henry VI revealed what could go wrong if a man unsuited to the task inherited the throne. As K.B. McFarlane observed, ‘only an undermighty ruler had anything to fear from overmighty subjects’.5 Yet there is an important sense in which kings after Edward III might have found the task of kingship more demanding. Whether one sees the changes ushered in by Edward III as an extension of government which, in effect, strengthened the monarchy, or one sees them as a series of concessions to win support for war against France, the result was the same: the importance of the personal qualities of the king increased and the pressure on his skills of management were intensified. Secondly, it is arguable that the late medieval dominions grew to such a size and complexity by the early fifteenth century that they were becoming more difficult to rule effectively with the resources, human and material, available to the Crown.6 Thirdly, Edward III was a hard act to follow. Richard II endeavoured to reverse his changes and return to a more autocratic rule, which led him into conflict with powerful lords who wished to retain Edward’s more participatory kingship, and eventually to his deposition. Henry IV, as a usurper and the heir to the alternative tradition, was, either by choice or necessity (in more difficult circumstances), a king more after the manner of his grandfather. Henry V, briefly, seemed to be able to be both an aloofly



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autocratic king in the way of Richard II and an inspirational leader of his subjects on the model of Edward III. Henry VI inherited differing perceptions of kingship as well as a more complex polity derived from the legacy of the fourteenth century, which made the government of his kingdom more challenging. What role did bastard feudalism play in this? The argument is that by allowing the formation of armed followings, the development of the indentured retinue created the means by which mighty subjects could take the law into their own hands and subvert the Crown. There is no doubt that as a means of supplying troops to fight his wars, the practice of recruiting followers by indentured retainers became widespread during the reign of Edward III. It was continued under Henry V and Henry VI. But bastard feudalism and indentured retainers have to be put in perspective. The very phrase, as invented by Charles Plummer, implied with its sense of illegitimacy and debasement that earlier feudalism had been legitimate and honourable. There is, however, no a priori reason for holding that relationships between lord and vassal in earlier times were any more stable, or that the feudal lords were any less threatening to monarchs than bastard feudal lords. Indeed, in one respect bastard feudalism might be thought to be more sophisticated. The substitution of a money fee for land as the means for binding man to lord gave the lord greater flexibility and ease of control. It was easier to stop a fee than to reoccupy a manor. Secondly, as argued in the next chapter, the practice of retaining by indenture did not create large private armies. Indeed, K.B. McFarlane was at pains, especially in his later work, to point out that retaining was as much for peace as for war: lawyers and estate administrators were retained as frequently as soldiers; and local gentry were expected to give counsel, attend household festivals and to support their lords at great occasions of state as much as they were to don armour and to do battle. Thirdly, there has been a tendency to exaggerate the significance of indentured retaining. The formal contract of service was but one element involved in the construction of an affinity surrounding a great lord. There were many others attached to and attracted to a lord in addition to those formally retained or granted annuities. These ‘well-willers’, like more formally retained knights and esquires, were anxious to secure his patronage by doing good service in return for good lordship.7 The affinity of a great lord (his household, indentured retinue and well-willers) was the organization through which the social,

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administrative and political life of his country operated, as well as being the means by which the lord himself sought to impress upon the king his own indispensability. Much of the lawlessness associated with retaining, in fact, resulted not from the practice itself, but from the illegal temporary raising of gangs and the distribution of badges and liveries to men hired by the day to assault an enemy or attack his property. Such was the case at Bakewell, Derbyshire on 23 February 1468 when John Talbot, third Earl of Shrewsbury, distributed his badge  – a white dog  – to nineteen or more local lads, recruited to attack Lord Grey of nearby Codnor.8 This abuse was the target of the series of laws against retaining which were passed from 1390. Contemporaries well understood the dangers involved in unlimited and casual retaining: the law sought to restrict it to a privilege enjoyed by peers, allowing, other than household servants or lawyers, only the retaining of knights and esquires for life. The laws may not always have been effectively enforced, but laxity was a result of the inability or unwillingness of the Crown to prosecute and not directly the consequence of retaining itself. An affinity in fifteenth-century England worked in much the same way as a connection in eighteenth-century England. In other words, it was the particular form of a general system of patronage and clientage that was intrinsic to a patriarchal society. For this reason it could also act as a force for stability. It was in the interest of lords to keep their own followings in order and to deal with conflicts that arose between their retainers. Thus in 1465 John Paston and Sir Gilbert Debenham, in dispute over possession of a manor, threatened force against each other. The Duke of Norfolk promptly stepped in because, as John Paston III observed, if allowed to go unchecked, the matter would have been of great disworship to him ‘considering how he taketh us both for his men and so we be known well enough’. The two were called to Framlingham and the Duke patched up a settlement. Similar examples of the fourth Earl of Northumberland setting his own retinue in order are revealed in the Plumpton correspondence.9 Indeed, it was not only retainers and well-willers who submitted themselves to the arbitration of lords. The expense of litigation being as it was, in all districts of England men were accustomed to having their differences resolved by the good offices of their local magnate.10 In this respect, as has often been observed, bastard feudalism could act as an influence for order and stability.11



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It is, nevertheless, true that on some occasions and in some parts of England, bastard feudalism could intensify instability and disorder. This might occur, as happened in Devon and Warwickshire in the 1440s and 1450s, when a once great affinity (those of the Courtenays and the Beauchamps) fragmented.12 Or it might happen, as it did in Yorkshire in the 1450s, when two powerful magnates competed for domination of a district.13 The most quoted example of the multiple fee-taking which has been taken to be the hallmark of inherent instability, that of Sir Humphrey Stafford of Grafton (fees worth £71 a year from eight different lords), comes from Warwickshire. Another example cited by K.B. McFarlane, that of Sir James Strangways of West Harlsey in Yorkshire, does not stand up to close scrutiny; for although Strangways did indeed take many fees and allow himself ‘a commodious escape route’, the fees were not paid by competing lords and when it came to a choice, he remained steadfastly loyal to his Neville lords.14 In fact, the retainers of both Neville and Percy, despite the upheavals in their fortunes, revealed themselves to be remarkably steadfast and loyal over several generations. Bastard feudalism was, in essence, neutral. It could be a force for stability or for instability; it could be a vehicle of disorder and corruption or for order and legality. It very much depended on the local circumstances, on the personality of the lord and, above all, the power and authority of the monarch. A commanding and inspiring monarch, such as Henry V, could coordinate and channel the energies of lords and their affinities into directions which were not self-destructive. A feeble and ineffective king like Henry VI stood by hopelessly as lords and their affinities turned on one another. But his failure, no more than his father’s success, was not the consequence of bastard feudalism as such. It was the consequence of political timidity. Bastard feudalism, the form in which late medieval patronage and clientage operated, was not a particular cause of civil war in the mid-fifteenth century. More important than the development of bastard feudalism itself were the broader changes in political society within which it fitted, which made it more critically important that the Crown and its mightier subjects were able to work together harmoniously. Such harmony was not impossible to achieve as the reign of both Henry V and, later, the second reign of Edward IV were both fleetingly to reveal. One may conclude, however, that it became more difficult to achieve and placed a heavier demand on the personal

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aptitude of the king. To this extent longer term socio-political causes had a part to play in the Wars of the Roses. Short-Term Causes of the First Wars Economic change taking place in England after 1350 may have added to the difficulties facing the Crown. The question of economic causes of the Wars of the Roses has been almost as hotly disputed as the socio-political roots. Until the twentieth century, the observable economic recession of the fifteenth century tended to be seen as a consequence and not a cause of the general malaise affecting English society. It was the late Sir Michael Postan who, in 1939, suggested that agricultural depression hit landlords hardest and surmised that dwindling revenues contributed to the ‘political gangsterdom’ of the age. It is clear from the passage that Postan had private feuding in mind. But in 1954 Ross and Pugh extended the analysis to suggest that financial crisis prompted lords to compete more desperately for the patronage of the Crown in the form of grants of land, offices and pensions. ‘The Wars of the Roses were fought, it would seem, not because magnates could afford to hire armies of retainers to fight their battles, but rather because they could no longer afford to pay them.’15 In response McFarlane argued that although there may have been a general contraction in baronial wealth because certain prominent lords enjoyed the revenues of several combined inheritances, they were considerably wealthier than their fathers. Falling rents did not necessarily mean a poorer family: more manors compensated for lower yields. Thus he concluded that for the leading participants, financial difficulty was not a consideration.16 McFarlane was undoubtedly correct concerning the enhanced personal wealth of York, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. But the conclusion is arguably not true of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who had difficulty recovering all his estates after the forfeiture of 1408; and certainly not of Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, who enjoyed a pitifully small landed estate. Moreover, three magnates  – York, Warwick and Buckingham  – all held extensive estates in the Welsh marches. In Wales, English landlords faced what was, in effect, a land war: a general refusal to pay feudal dues and fines that had



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once provided a lucrative source of revenue. This boycott was more political than economic in genesis, but it had a similarly damaging impact on finances.17 Furthermore, even in respect of revenue from land, magnates such as York, Buckingham and Warwick were well aware that their predecessors had once enjoyed higher revenue from individual estates and were themselves experiencing, even in their own lifetime, a continuing fall in landed income. They may, as McFarlane stressed, have increased pressure on their administrators to produce more;18 but this did not necessarily preclude the parallel pursuit of compensation from royal favour. Furthermore, there was a major economic slump in the mid-fifteenth century. This slump had two overlapping stages, the first, beginning in the late 1430s, being agrarian in origin, the second, coming to the fore in the late 1440s, being commercial. It was intensified by an acute shortage of money in circulation. Agricultural producers everywhere, artisans, cloth workers and retailers especially in the cloth-producing areas of the south and more commercially developed south-east of the kingdom, as well as London, were profoundly affected. There was widespread economic distress lasting well into the 1460s. This distress, which affected all sectors of the commons, especially those of the middling sorts, who had particularly seen their standards of living rise in the earlier decades of the fifteenth century only to fall again, fuelled hostility to the king’s government, which was accused of failing to rule for the common good. Recession underpinned popular agitation and support for disaffected noblemen, not just in 1450, but in 1459–60, 1469–70 and in isolated pockets throughout the two decades.19 The slump was an important factor in the assertiveness of the commons in the first wars. But recession also had consequences for landlords. In northern England, in particular, landed revenues were reduced by approximately 10 per cent following the agrarian crisis of 1438–40, and it can be shown that some landlords were still suffering from the effects of this in the 1450s. There is no reason to doubt that these adverse circumstances affected Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, intensifying the rivalry between them which burst into the open in the early 1450s. Indeed, the immediate cause of open fighting was a dispute over the possession of Wressle, part of the old Percy inheritance, which Salisbury was attempting to acquire for one of his younger sons.20 In the 1450s royal favour was of critical material importance to all magnates.

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Economic and financial difficulties also affected the Crown. During Richard II’s reign, regular royal revenue was approximately £120,000 per annum. By the last five years of Henry VI’s reign, it had fallen by possibly as much as two-thirds to approximately £40,000. These are very approximate numbers based on exchequer figures. The sum for the last years of Henry VI is particularly unreliable, since by then much royal income was by-passing the exchequer. Although the actual total of revenue being received is impossible to calculate, it is nevertheless clear that in the 1450s royal finances were in chaos, the king’s credit was negligible and the Crown was virtually bankrupt. There were several causes of this, and much of the responsibility can be laid at the king’s door. But his own indifference and profligacy were not the sole cause. During the first half of the century the Crown suffered a serious loss of revenue at source, both in the yield of crown lands (a problem shared with its greater subjects) and, especially after 1440, in the returns from customs and subsidies. This latter was of critical importance for the Crown was the victim of the trade depression which it could not control.21 The collapse of royal finances under Henry VI had profound implications both for his ability to assert his authority over his subjects and for his capacity to satisfy their intensifying demands on him. But equally important, the underlying economic trend and its financial implications for the Crown would have made it more difficult for any king to cope whatever his personal abilities. By the middle of the fifteenth century the exercise of royal rule was not only more demanding, but was also considerably more poorly funded than it had been 100 years earlier. One of the causes of the bankruptcy of the Lancastrian dynasty in the 1450s was the burden of war. Lacking necessary resources of its own, fighting an unsuccessful war which failed to pay for itself, being able to call only upon restricted and limited levels of taxation from its subjects, saddled with mounting debts and increasingly unable to raise new loans, the Crown was the principal financial loser in the later stages of the war in France. Defeat in Normandy in 1450 and Gascony in 1453, leaving only Calais in English hands, is another possible cause of the outbreak of civil war. After all, it is often observed that failure in foreign war is a cause of domestic disturbance. As with other aspects of this subject, recent historical opinion has been divided. Some, like McFarlane, have played down the impact of defeat in war on domestic politics; others, notably Keen, have given it a decisive weight.22



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The whole question of war and society in fifteenth-century England is highly germane. Developing the statement made in 1474 by the chancellor in parliament that ‘justice, peace and prosperity hath continued anywhile in this land in any king’s days but in such as hath made war outward’, Professor Richmond has argued that it was the ending of war in France itself (whether in defeat or victory is immaterial) which opened the flood gates of civil war.23 The chancellor’s statement of 1474 was to an extent demonstrably true. England was without doubt internally more peaceful between 1415 and 1450 because many unruly elements, high-born as well as low, were able to exercise their martial talents at the expense of the French. But a wider issue is also raised. War, not peace, it is argued, was the natural pursuit of the fifteenth-century nobleman. A gentleman was educated to find virtue and nobility in the vocation of war, not in the arts of peace. Chivalry, the idealization of warfare as the highest goal in a layman’s life, was a powerful cultural force.24 It needed an outlet. Henry V’s generation had had ample opportunity to demonstrate its prowess. The survivors of this generation, such as John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, Sir John Fastolf and Sir William Oldhall, were ageing veterans passing the way of all flesh in the 1450s. Certainly, there was a vocal body of opinion, articulated by Fastolf’s secretary, William Worcester, who argued for a continuation of war against the French to rekindle the embers of dying chivalry and thereby restore social harmony.25 But for whom exactly did Worcester speak? For no-one, bar a small group of passé ultra-conservatives, is one answer. Even during the early years of Henry VI’s reign his government had difficulty persuading gentlemen actually to serve in France. The interests of the great majority of English landed society were shifting from military to civilian pursuits. As Worcester himself recognized, his age was the age of the gentleman bureaucrat seeking advancement not through profession of arms, but the professions of law and accountancy. The entertainment, literature and outward display of the later fifteenth-century gentleman may still have been ostensibly chivalric in form and style, but his actual life interests were increasingly civilian.26 There can be little doubt that there were men of both kinds in the 1450s. For lack of conclusive evidence we cannot tell which formed the majority. There may have been a regional difference. In England north of the Trent, where the Scottish menace was perceived as

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ever present, the values of chivalry may have been more tenaciously maintained than in more southerly counties. But men trained in the school of chivalry, from north or south, were more likely to settle their differences by violent means. To this extent at least, the absence of outward war may have helped create the climate in which a resort to arms to settle political differences was more likely. More specifically, it is clear that defeat in France did not itself lead immediately to the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses. By far the most traumatic shock for the realm as a whole, if not for Henry VI himself, was suffered after the loss of Normandy in 1450. This was not only because Normandy was nearer, because many Englishmen had vested interests in its continuing possession, or because in English hands it had been a shield protecting the Channel and securing the seas; it was also because Normandy was the conquest of Henry V and its loss most directly pointed out the contrast between father and son. The loss of Normandy, coupled with economic recession, led to the most serious crisis, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, that had shaken the Crown since 1381. It brought down Suffolk’s ministry and led to popular revolt. It triggered Cade’s Revolt, focused on Kent, Surrey and Sussex in June 1450, which for a while left the government of the realm paralysed. But the crown recovered. By 1452 Henry VI’s reign seemed to be on a surer footing than before. The loss of Gascony in 1453 caused no equivalent upheaval. By 1455, it would seem, the realm as a whole had accepted defeat. Though its repercussions were still felt, the rebellion of 1450 was not part of the civil wars that were to follow at the end of the decade Yet if defeat in France was not a direct cause of the outbreak of sustained civil war in 1459, it is possible that, like the recession, it had an indirect material and political impact which later contributed to the Wars. It can no longer be argued that the loss of Normandy brought home ‘thousands of household retainers, with nothing to do but brawl and bully’.27 Most of these veterans were discharged and, being penniless and homeless, their plight tended to excite the pity rather than the fear of contemporaries.28 The circumstances of their captains is harder to assess, for it is not at all clear whether these men returned from the wars impoverished or enriched. McFarlane argued consistently that the captains, unless they were exceptionally unlucky, were able to continue to profit from the wars until the bitter end.29 But, while it is true that some prominent commanders were able to send home their profit for investment in England well before the



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tide turned and others were still taking substantial profit from land, office and loot in the 1440s, the numerous cases of the less fortunate should not be overlooked. Sir Thomas Dring, for example, who first served under Henry V, was captured and ransomed no fewer than six times, the last occasion being at Formigny in 1450. Dring might have joined Sir Robert James, who had been taken four times and then lost all his goods when Bayeux fell in 1450, as one of the 26 alms knights of St George’s, Windsor (the last resting place of distressed chivalry). At a more prominent level the veteran peers Lord Fauconberg and Lord Scales, who were field commanders, were both captured and ransomed in 1449–50. Scales had previously lost all his treasure when his fortress of Granville fell to the French in 1442.30 For those still serving in the field in 1449–50 the defeat was an unmitigated disaster. But even for those who might have escaped with their fortunes intact, by McFarlane’s logic, the loss of what had proved to be a lucrative source of profit is likely to have been resented. In other words, whether the wars in France had proved in particular cases to have been profitable or ruinous, the government’s failure to hold Normandy was potentially a source of grievance. Furthermore, certain magnates came out of the war being owed substantial sums of money by the Crown for their wages. The Dukes of Buckingham and York and the Earl of Shrewsbury all presented large bills to the Crown and, as creditors have throughout the ages, accepted partial settlement from their bankrupted debtor. It was not just arrears of wages for France that were outstanding. The Earls of Salisbury and Northumberland and Lord Fauconberg had continual difficulty seeking payment for their Scottish border garrisons.31 These royal debts intensified the need for these magnates, on behalf of themselves, their friends and their dependants, to be close to the king so as to receive preferential treatment at the exchequer and to maintain at least a chance of securing payment of even the negotiated reduced sums. Thus military debts added another reason to depressed land revenues for certain magnates to be more anxious for access to the court. It is not to be thought that these magnates themselves were facing bankruptcy: their capital reserves were untouched. Yet the finances of several were in a state of some confusion and many faced a ‘cash-flow’ crisis. Crown debts underwrote their own credit. Favour was thus of crucial significance in keeping them afloat. The loss of Normandy had a bearing on the events of the 1450s in a more directly political way. It was over Normandy that the two royal

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dukes, Richard of York and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, fell out. The rift occurred partly because Somerset was preferred for the post of lieutenant-governor in 1447 and partly because York lost substantial French possessions as a result of Somerset’s negligence. From York’s point of view, it was not just a question of pique that he had been overlooked in 1447. He had a personal appanage in Normandy and, as the previous governor, an established affinity based in the province. The loss of his appanage, while he was himself prevented by his sojourn in Ireland from defending it in person, and without Somerset lifting a finger on his behalf, added insult to injury. When York returned to England in the summer of 1450, he was a man with a score to settle.32 York was not without support. There were others who had lost out to Somerset and his friends. In the last years of Lancastrian Normandy, the duchy, like England itself, had divided into factions. One group, prominent among whom were the Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Hoo and Lord Scales, had entered Somerset’s circle and found no difficulty in sustaining their favour at court after 1450. Others, of whom Sir William Oldhall, Sir Edmund Mulso and Sir Henry Retford might be cited, remained York’s men and shared exclusion with him after 1450.33 Rivalry and conflict set up in Normandy in the last few years of Lancastrian rule was brought back to England after its fall. There may have been an element of retrospective self-righteousness in York’s stance towards the loss of Normandy, but Somerset’s alleged responsibility remained a potent source of propaganda for York and his friends which they steadfastly kept alive throughout the 1450s. York clothed himself in the robe of the lost leader who would have saved the French possessions had he been given the chance; as late as 1459 and 1460 he was still harking back to the negligence of the court earlier in the decade. How much impact this propaganda had is another matter. Dr Keen has suggested that the humiliation suffered by Henry VI and the dent to national pride were an important reason for the collapse of the credibility of the Lancastrian regime.34 It is to be suspected, however, that after 1455, the shame and dishonour was felt only by that part of the political nation still committed to the chivalric ethic and that, as propaganda, York’s case only had a wider appeal to the people of Kent and neighbouring south-eastern counties, now vulnerable, as they discovered, to renewed French raids. Even if it was no more than this (for in the last resort it is not possible to gauge how deeply humiliation in France cut into the soul of the realm), the loss



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of Normandy and Gascony was clearly yet another factor contributing to the collapse of Lancastrian prestige. As the credibility of Henry VI’s government came under attack from so many quarters and his capacity to satisfy the demands of his subjects became increasingly doubted, so the question of his right to the throne came to be raised. The idea that the dynastic issue was unimportant, at least until openly proclaimed by York in 1460, has tended to find wide support among modern historians. However, the originary flaw in the Lancastrian title was never fully overcome. There remained a residual fear that, despite Henry V’s victories, the dynasty’s legitimacy could still be questioned. Henry VI and his advisers proved to be remarkably sensitive about his dynastic position while he had no heir apparent to the throne. As his regime tottered, and his mental health collapsed, after 1454 the notion gained ground that these afflictions were divine punishments for his grandfather’s crime.35 It is arguable, too, that the hostility shown to York between 1447 and 1453, when he was heir presumptive, was given an extra edge by the knowledge that he could, as heir to Mortimer as well as to Edmund of Langley, mount a plausible alternative claim. This might account for the harsh treatment meted out to York’s councillor, Thomas Young, when he proposed in parliament in May 1451 that York should be formally recognized as heir. York himself might have feared that his arch-rival, the Duke of Somerset, would seek to reverse the act of parliament which debarred the Beauforts from the throne. If York himself at this time had no apparent intentions on the throne, it seems that Henry and his closest advisers did not entirely discount that possibility. What went on in York’s mind we cannot tell. Mr Pugh confidently asserted that he ‘had long regarded himself as rightful king of England’. York did, however, have a long-standing family grievance against the house of Lancaster. His father had been shabbily treated by Henry IV and Henry V, had plotted to overthrow Henry V in 1415 in favour of a Mortimer candidate and had paid the price. York was four when his father was executed. After the death of his uncle Edward, Duke of York, at Agincourt and of his uncle Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, ten years later, he inherited both vast estates and the residual claim of the Mortimers, in whose name plots had been laid until 1415.36 To anyone with a keen sense of dynasty, as Henry VI apparently had, York was likely to appear to be a potential threat. After the birth of

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Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1453, Queen Margaret acquired a more direct interest in politics. By the end of the decade, and before York advanced his claim, it became apparent that the actions of the Crown were determined as much by a desire to preserve the young prince’s inheritance as by a need to prop up the king’s crumbling regime. York may have harboured hopes of advancement before November 1460: politically as important were the royal fears and suspicions, whether well grounded or not, that he aimed that far. In the event, such fears became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Immediate Causes of the First Wars Discussion of the immediate causes of the Wars of the Roses focuses on the personality and mental health of Henry VI. All authority was invested in the king; indeed the theory ran that the kingdom was inseparable from the king. He held absolute authority, though it was expected that a wise king would seek counsel and follow the procedures of the law. Versions of advice books, known as Mirrors for Princes, were prepared for the infant king as he approached his majority in the late 1430s. The effective government of the realm depended, as Dr Watts has stressed, on the capacity of the king to assert his will and exercise his absolute royal authority wisely. Thus, all theory aside, everything hung on what kind of man a monarch was. Unfortunately, Henry VI was perhaps the most unfitted to rule of all the kings of England since the Norman Conquest.37 He was weak, vacillating, feckless and profligate. At all times he seems to have been like putty in the hands of those nearest to him: a man who always agreed with the last to have spoken with him, he created confusion by contradictory policy decisions and duplicated grants. He seems to have been fundamentally uninterested in the business of ruling and decision making; happy to grant away lands and annuities to all who importuned him, he was equally generous with pardons to those who offended him or broke his laws. After he came of age in 1437 he quickly fell into the hands of a faction, led ultimately by the Duke of Suffolk, who monopolized the court and dominated its proceedings. After Suffolk fell, a reconstituted faction under the leadership of Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, took over. The extent to which Henry had a mind of his own has been disputed. Dr Watts has argued that he lacked any capacity whatsoever to assert



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his will. Thus, after he came of age, policy was initiated and carried out in his name by those about his person, without his own personal initiative. Royal authority, by default, remained in commission as if the king had not reached his majority. The king’s will was exercised entirely by others acting on his behalf. In McFarlane’s words, second childhood followed the first without the usual interval. It is, however, impossible to be certain on this point. Policy was always declared and enacted in the king’s name. Many documents expressed the king’s will; the extent to which decisions were really his, even if taken on the expression of his vague wish, cannot, by the nature of the evidence, be determined. The expression of the king’s will may always have been a pretence constructed by those about him, but it may equally have been sometimes the articulation of what the king wanted. This problem is most apparent in the question of the war with France. The king did not want to fight and declined to defend his kingdom of France personally : a choice not likely to be appreciated in chivalric circles and the veterans who served under his father. From 1439 efforts were made to find a lasting peace. It has been argued, ingeniously but unconvincingly, that Henry’s avoidance of war and the search for peace, even the foundation of Eton College in 1440, had nothing to do with him personally, but were policies adopted by those standing in for him and wishing to create the appearance of effective kingship.38 More probably, the young king desired the ends, and wished his councillors to pursue them, but he himself lacked the capacity and tenacity to see them through. His initiative and personal impact might be discerned in the disastrous decision in 1446 to surrender Maine without a quid pro quo, perhaps to please his new queen. From time to time in the early 1450s he possibly asserted himself, but to little lasting effect in attempts to restore social harmony at home. A more likely reading of the king’s personality is that he did have a will of his own, did make his own decisions, however wrong-headed, feebly and fitfully asserted, and that it was this that made effective government so difficult. Perhaps it would have been better for his kingdom had Henry been a complete pawn in the hands of his advisers, but his own independent interventions seem to have made matters worse – and almost impossible for those on whom he relied. It has even been suggested that Henry possessed a mean and vindictive streak, revealed particularly in his treatment of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1447.39 But again, in a political world where all is done

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in the king’s name regardless of whether he had knowledge of it, we cannot be certain the king himself was responsible. The vindictiveness is as likely to have been that of his favourites as his. One thing is certain, however, until 1453 Henry was not a simpleton. He was simply incompetent. Perhaps the key to Henry’s personality lies, as has been argued, in his distinctive combination of piety and learning. Our picture of Henry as a person is coloured by the account given by his chaplain, John Blacman, who deliberately painted a picture of a man of Christian virtues, especially the virtues associated with the lay piety of the fifteenth century. Significant details in his biographical reminiscences can be independently validated and suggest that Henry was indeed more concerned with the next world than this; that he did prefer to dress and live simply; and that he was not only chaste, but also extremely prudish. In Blacman’s account Henry is presented as a paradigm of contemporary lay piety. This is distorting but not untruthful. Thus his public vices  – his indiscriminate largesse, his reluctance to enforce the law and his erratic attitude to public affairs – are presented as private virtues. Indeed, it is possible that the purpose of the Collectarium (Blacman’s biography) is to show that a higher virtue lay in being a bad king: he became a ‘fool of God’. Such holy folly explains both the aura of sanctity that surrounds him and the political disasters that accompanied him.40 Blacman’s account is problematic because it draws no distinction between the Henry before 1453, who was sane but incompetent, and the Henry after that date, who, while sane, seems to have been mentally incapacitated as well as increasingly withdrawn from active involvement in the affairs of his kingdom. The year 1453 was a decisive watershed in the king’s life and reign. There was a world of difference between a king who was incompetent and a king who was a simpleton. Until 1453 there was no apparent threat to his throne. After 1453, although long in gestation, this was ever more likely. It is only after 1453 that private feuding and wars in the provinces grew to alarming proportions; it is only after 1453 that faction at court ran out of control; and it is only after 1453 that the government of the kingdom was reduced to being little more than the government of the victorious faction and its supporters. Why war actually broke out in 1459 is disputed. An established view is that Queen Margaret, who had in effect begun to rule in the king’s name in the autumn of 1458, was, by then, finally in a position to attempt to destroy York and his friends once and for all. According



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to this mainstream interpretation, Queen Margaret emerged in 1456 as the head of the Beaufort/court faction with this intent. The infant Prince of Wales, the heir to the throne, was in her charge. His patrimony and her dower lands provided the base from which she built up her own independent power in his name. The she-wolf of France, as her enemies dubbed her, would stop at nothing to protect her son. But this characterization has been doubted, largely on the grounds that it relies too much on subsequent Yorkist justifications of their actions.41 There is no doubt that before Henry’s mental collapse and the birth of her son, she played the role of conventional queen. It is possible that circumstances thereafter led her, behind the scenes, to have been more assertive in her efforts to counteract Yorkist threats, but as yet neither acted other than as the king’s wife nor openly pursued the destruction of the Yorkists. Alternatively, informally and still in accordance with a queen’s traditional role, she may have sought to play the part of peacemaker and reconciliator. It was perhaps she who took the initiative in brokering the Loveday award in March 1458. Professor Hicks has gone as far as to suggest that from 1456 it was still the king who ruled, and tried by compromise and appeasement to restore harmonious relationships; and that his queen, despite later accusations, played no part in politics whatsoever. The conundrum will probably never be resolved to every historian’s satisfaction. However, one thing is clear: after the defeat at Northampton in July 1460 and the capture of the king, followed by the disinheritance of Prince Edward in November, she undoubtedly exercised the open and public leadership of the Lancastrian cause.42 The alternative is to blame York It is equally difficult to grasp his motivation. Throughout the 1450s he presented himself as a reformer, claiming that as the king’s closest and wealthiest adult subject, he had a duty, even a right, to be at the heart of affairs and that were he accorded his proper place, he would ensure that the realm was governed for the common good. This may or may not have been a sincere expression of intent. Some have taken him at his word; others have concluded that the Duke’s reformist platform was but a cloak for resentment against his exclusion from office, his desire for nothing less than full control of the government, or even long-held ambition for the throne itself. This was certainly the burden of Lancastrian propaganda in 1459–60. In this view, it was his unappeasable ambition that drove the kingdom to civil war. He was able to commit treason with impunity, however, because of Henry VI’s

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weak grip on the realities of power. His claim that if necessary the king should be forced to rule more effectively for the common good under his guidance, reveals not only the uncertainty and confusion into which the kingdom was falling as a result of Henry VI’s incompetence, but also the fact that debate about how the kingdom should be governed was on the political agenda in the 1450s.43 At the heart of the debate about the causes of the first Wars of the Roses lies the question of Henry VI’s capacity to rule. For McFarlane, his ‘inanity’ was all: if a king were undermighty, he wrote, ‘his personal lack of fitness was the cause, not the weakness of his office and his resources’.44 For Storey, the weakness of the office was the fundamental cause, for others a contributory factor. For Hicks, he was always capable of ruling, apart from his one period of insanity, but was incompetent. It is likely however, that the king never fully recovered his health after 1453 and was never again able to attend fully to business. While Henry was mentally well though incompetent, factional strife developed, but dynastic civil war was far off. The wars occurred in the circumstances created by Henry’s mental condition. The English political system could not cope with a king who was neither totally insane nor really in good mental health. This, ultimately, is the key to Henry VI’s lack of personal fitness to rule in the last years of his reign. Besides this, because of the usurpation of the throne in 1399, the office was weaker in mid-fifteenth-century England and, as a result of the burden of war and economic slump, the resources available to the Crown were diminished. Bearing in mind, too, that as a result of developments and changes dating from Edward III’s reign, the task of ruling had become more complex, the circumstances of the mid-fifteenth century would have put pressure on any king. This is not to say that it would have been impossible to have been a successful monarch in the 1450s: the point is that it was more difficult and greater ability was demanded. Whether we emphasize the office or the person, it was undoubtedly lack of royal authority, lack of effective government, and lack of firm control from the centre which allowed private feuds and wars to grow unchecked and the kingdom to collapse into civil war. The paralysis at the centre enabled feuding to grow without restraint rather than the feuding inflict the paralysis on the centre. The Crown was unable to impose order. This is revealed most clearly by reference forward to the events of 1469–70, when Edward IV was temporarily unable to



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enforce his authority on the kingdom. At exactly those times when incapacitated by the opposition of Warwick and Clarence, private feuds flared up again and subjects took the law into their own hands. In September 1469 the Duke of Norfolk laid siege to John Paston in Caister castle; in March 1470 a pitched battle took place between Lord Berkeley and Lord Lisle at Nibley Green in Gloucestershire; and later in the year, during the Readeption, Lord Stanley laid siege to the Harringtons in Hornby castle in Lancashire.45 In 1469–70 private wars broke out after the collapse of royal government: they did not precede and create it. In the mid-fifteenth century many circumstances combined to undermine the authority of the Crown  – growing economic and financial pressures, material loss and humiliation in France, the lurking doubt concerning Henry VI’s title. They made civil war more likely. In the last resort, it was Henry’s incapacity and incompetence after 1453 that tipped the balance. In the end, to use a metaphor much favoured at the time, the ship of state was without a captain and, while the crew fell at each other’s throats, she drifted onto the rocks. The Causes of the Second Wars At the beginning of 1483 Englishmen and women could have been forgiven for thinking that the era of civil war and dynastic strife was over. Edward IV had apparently secured himself on the throne, he had two sons to provide for the future, and he seemed to enjoy the support of a closely knit, harmonious group of courtiers and councillors. The kingdom was prospering once more, the commons apparently more content and the crown determined to close the door on any popular pretentions to have a say in the government of the realm. As court circles saw it, those idols of the multitude towards whom the fickle commons had once turned had been destroyed. Yet within six months, with a speed, and from a quarter, totally unexpected, this apparent stability was shattered. Even though its character was this time more of a broken sequence of murders, executions, armed insurrections and battles than of continuous, all-out war, once more England was plunged into an era of civil war. Whereas the wars of 1459–71 had arisen from a complex collapse of royal authority in which the incompetence of the king was a critical

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factor, the wars of 1483–87 followed a period of effective, authoritative kingship. Edward IV had without doubt begun the process of restoring the authority and strength of the Crown which had slipped in the years before his accession. He had not attempted any profound institutional change. Several of the conflicts, rivalries and tensions created between 1450 and 1471 lingered on. But he had taken steps to improve the financial position of the Crown and had benefited from a quickening of European trade and a rise in the income from customs. The Crown under Edward was financially stronger than under Henry VI. His landed subjects, too, were beginning to benefit from a recovery in rents and agricultural incomes. Edward had avoided major foreign entanglement, and thus heavy taxation. More importantly, by his general bearing, by his accustomed bonhomie and by his occasional ruthlessness (as in the destruction of his brother Clarence), he had stamped his personality on his kingdom. In his latter years he had nothing to fear from mighty subjects. What, then, went wrong after Edward IVs early and sudden demise on 9 April 1483? Why did his son Edward V, aged 12 at the time, not survive to take over the rule of the kingdom some four or five years later? Although conventionally we are encouraged to consider that it is woeful for a land to be ruled by a child, in fact the precedents were hopeful. Richard II had inherited the kingdom at ten and had been unmolested. Henry VI was only nine months old on accession, but the political nation, if in disagreement over many matters, remained united on the point that nothing should prevent him entering his inheritance in both England and France. But Edward V was deposed within three months of his accession and before his coronation; and his deposition launched a new phase of civil war. One modern school of thought, first advanced by J.R. Lander in 1956, is to find no fault with Edward IV. During his second reign Edward achieved all that a late medieval king could have been expected to achieve. Behind the playboy facade lay a king with an iron will and fixity of purpose. He was a man who knew his kingdom and his leading subjects in the provinces well. Over them, he exercised a firm authority in his later years. Working through and with the full participation of his leading subjects in the government of the realm, he brought the collaborative art demanded of late-medieval kingship to perfection. All in all, he was the greatest of medieval kings. The renewal of civil war was not his fault; the blame lies entirely with his brother, Richard of Gloucester.46



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Yet others, building on Dr Morgan’s influential essay on the Yorkist polity, have emphasized the superficiality of Edward IV’s achievement. His kingship, even after 1471, relied too heavily on too small a group of trusted kinsmen and friends who were given substantial regional autonomy: Rivers in Wales and the marches; Gloucester in the far north and north-east; Stanley in Lancashire and Cheshire; Hastings in the north Midlands; the Marquis of Dorset in the south-west (after 1477).47 This approach worked well while he was alive, held together as it was by the king’s control over his court, and a revived chivalric ethos. But beneath the surface, it is suggested, there were simmering jealousies and resentments which burst out the moment he was dead and which in their wake, destroyed Edward V and plunged the kingdom once more into civil war. It is no doubt true that Edward’s regime contained within it the seeds of potential conflict. The magnates were able to consolidate their local power in the king’s name, none more effectively so than his brother, Richard of Gloucester, in the north. Some benefits followed. In the north the old divisions between Percy and Neville, Neville and Neville were healed. The northern peerage and gentry became united behind the leadership of one very capable man. The quality of justice was improved and disorder quelled.48 On the other hand, by 1483 Gloucester, like Rivers in Wales and the marches, had amassed a considerable strength which could be used against the Crown as well as for it. Moreover, there were certain figures excluded and denied by the king, especially Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who found his ambitions in Wales and the midlands thwarted by Rivers and Hastings.49 But it was not inevitable that these mighty subjects would turn on each other when Edward died. In fact, the evidence for jealousies between them before the king’s death is limited. There was little love lost between Dorset and Hastings because of rivalry over the captaincy of Calais (and possibly the favours of Mistress Shore). There is no evidence of conflict between Rivers and Gloucester: indeed, they seem happily to have collaborated up to the king’s death.50 There may have been a coolness between Queen Elizabeth Woodville and Gloucester, but this is by no means certain. Moreover, even if the conflicts of April 1483, when Gloucester secured his role as Protector of the Realm, can be interpreted as the product of previously hidden tensions, it by no means follows that they should have led to the remarkable development of deposing the king. In no previous, or indeed later,

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minority where such rivalries also emerged did they so develop that the young king himself was deposed. What happened in 1483 was unique and not to be explained solely by the fact that Edward IV had allowed his principal supporters to become too powerful. Their power could have been employed, and the dead king had no doubt expected them to be employed, for the protection of his son and the preservation of his inheritance until the day he could enter it. Edward IV’s failure to renew the Hundred Years’ War in 1475 has also been put forward as the reason why his greater subjects turned on each other in 1483. Had there been outward war, there would have been no revival of inward war. Only a war in France could have finally removed the danger of renewal of the Wars of the Roses by uniting all Englishmen in common cause.51 It is an attractive thesis. But it assumes that all Englishmen were indeed at one in desiring a revival of chivalric virtues; it assumes a second Agincourt and not a second Castillon; and it overlooks the contrasting diplomatic circumstances in 1415 and 1475. Only a successful resumption of war against France would have achieved the desired objective: unsuccessful war would have had the opposite effect. And Edward’s judgement in 1475 that the time was not ripe was probably sound. Henry VII was later to show that it was possible to establish a secure regime without foreign entanglement. Moreover, when Edward IV died, there was a foreign war in progress. While it is true that the war launched by Edward IV against Scotland in 1480 did not develop into a war on the scale of the early-fourteenth-century War of Independence, this was not for want of trying. Edward IV revived the English claim of sovereignty over Scotland, found a pliant alternative candidate for the throne, and launched a full-scale invasion. In 1482 Richard of Gloucester recovered Berwick, for those living north of the Trent no trivial achievement. In January 1483 Gloucester was said to be intending a major assault on south-west Scotland in the coming season. In other words, when Edward IV died, England was engaged in outward war and the potential did exist for the political nation to find unity in facing a foreign foe. The reason why this was insufficient to prevent inward strife lay elsewhere. A powerful lobby has long maintained that Edward V was reluctantly, but rightly prevented from becoming king because of the shocking revelation of his illegitimacy. The renewal of civil war, by implication, thus resulted from the refusal of some to accept the truth. The truth or falsity of Richard III’s claim that Edward V and his brother were



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bastards will never be known. The most rigorous examination of the case has revealed that it was thoroughly and skilfully put together, but tellingly concedes that ‘the pre-contract story is plausible but not proved’.52 This is the point. The accusation that Edward IV had been betrothed to Eleanor Butler before he married Elizabeth Woodville, thus making his children by her illegitimate, was not put to the verdict of a freely and properly convened ecclesiastical court. For this reason, balanced judgement must remain, as most historians agree, that the claim was but a colour for an act of usurpation. Had Richard III been the deeply troubled, honourable and honest man we are asked to believe him to be, he would surely either have followed the course of a properly constituted investigation, or, if the political circumstances precluded that, gone ahead with the coronation and made a subsequent parliamentary declaration of legitimacy. If parliament was competent to declare Edward V illegitimate, it was equally competent to declare him legitimate; as, indeed, a subsequent parliament declared Elizabeth I legitimate. The truth of the matter is that Richard III did not want Edward V to be legitimate because he did not want him to remain king. This leads us, therefore, to the only possible explanation of what happened in 1483: that Richard, Duke of Gloucester, for whatever reason, determined to take the opportunity of his nephew’s minority to seize the throne for himself. The second Wars of the Roses have but one ultimate explanation: they resulted from the action of one particular man. Considerable attention has been focused on Richard III’s personality and the possible reasons for his behaviour in 1483; probably rightly so, for what he did was both surprising and shocking. All surviving early accounts of his usurpation of the throne paint him as a hypocrite and a dissembler.53 This contemporary and lasting image of duplicity is significant because it derives from the fact that no-one expected Richard of Gloucester, of all people, to raise his hand against his nephews. When his brother died, he enjoyed an enviably high reputation as a man of honour and probity: a man to whom the protection of the young king could be fully entrusted. This, events soon showed, was a tragically mistaken appraisal of Richard. It explains both why he could take the throne so easily and also why, after the event, he was portrayed as having deliberately deceived the world while he plotted to achieve this end. Bearing in mind this understandable reaction of those who had been so wrong in their

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judgement of Richard of Gloucester, we need not now interpret his motives and action in the same manner. But we will never fully understand why Richard III took such a step, fatal both to himself and to many of his contemporaries. It could have been naked ambition; an ambition perhaps only awakened after his brother’s unexpected death. It could have been a calculated political step of attempted self-preservation. It is often surmised that he knew that he could not hope to retain the same influence at the court of Edward V as he had at the court of Edward IV and that he was ‘getting his retaliation in first’ – before he was excluded and before the king was crowned. Professor Hicks’ examination of the title by which Richard held his estates, and ultimately upon which his power and influence stood, has shown that it was dangerously flawed and vulnerable to any loss of influence or revival in the fortunes of the male heirs of Warwick the Kingmaker. The future held many unknown risks. Indeed, the timing of his decision to take the throne may have been determined by the largely unremarked upon death of George Neville, lately Duke of Bedford, on 4 May 1483; a young man upon whose continued life Richard’s hereditary title to his estates depended.54 The usurpation may even have been ill-considered, hasty and impulsive. As has also been pointed out, there is much about Richard III’s career which suggests that, far from being the Machiavellian schemer, he lacked any sound sense of political judgement. In which case, his usurpation stemmed not from unbridled lust for power, but from a tragic lack of forethought.55 Either way, Richard’s action both destroyed himself and his dynasty. If he did take the throne for his own self-preservation, he failed lamentably in that objective. Richard’s actions created horror as well as surprise. During the course of the Wars of the Roses, the perception of what was considered acceptable political behaviour had changed. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, left a trail of executed or murdered rivals who had not been given the benefit of even a show trial. Edward IV had at least given his brother Clarence that. Richard of Gloucester’s summary executions of Hastings, Rivers and Grey may not have been entirely unprecedented; although it has to be said that Warwick had dealt with his rivals after battle, not after lulling them into a false sense of security. But what quite clearly went beyond all bounds of conventional political morality in the late fifteenth century was Gloucester’s treatment of his nephews: innocent children as it was frequently reiterated. Richard III went one step further than was



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tolerated by even his own violent age. The destruction of innocent children was beyond the limit of acceptable political behaviour.56 It does not matter that we do not know the precise fate of the Princes in the Tower. It was widely believed before the end of 1483 that they had met their deaths; political realignment took place specifically on that assumption. Richard III was held responsible by his contemporaries not just for the deposition of a rightful child king, but also for his and his brother’s subsequent deaths. This condemnation made it all the harder, although not impossible, for him to succeed. There is no call for virulent hostility to Richard III today, any more than there should be for excessive idolatry. Richard III’s career was more of a tragedy than a melodrama in which he played the villainous uncle or virtuous hero. He was, there is no reason to doubt, a man of ability, highly respected for his conventional virtues by his contemporaries.57 Precisely what motivated him in 1483, we will never understand. What he did, for whatever reason, reopened the wounds which his brother had apparently healed and destroyed his own life and reputation. ‘Had he suffered the children to have prospered’, the author of the Great Chronicle of London wrote, ‘he should have been honourably lauded over all; whereas now his fame is darkened and dishonoured as far as he was known.’58 It is no doubt true that Richard III would not have usurped the throne and reopened the Wars had not the power and prestige of the monarchy already been weakened by the earlier wars in which he had been involved and by the earlier usurpation by his brother. In this sense, what happened in 1483–87 is undoubtedly linked to what happened in 1459–71 and follows from its deeper, longer term causes. But beyond that, the circumstances and immediate causes were different. The first wars came as the culmination of a slowly deteriorating situation in which various social, economic and political strains put increasing pressure on royal government. These stresses were likely to have led to difficulty in the 1450s for any monarch; under Henry VI they led to civil war and deposition. The second wars came suddenly and surprisingly after a period of recovery and effective kingship which seemed to have set England on the road to renewed stability. The immediate cause lay less in the incapacity of a king but more in the ambition of a subject. The first wars were the final outcome of a long drawn out and painful collapse of royal authority: the second wars interrupted the process of recovery.

Chapter 5: The Impact of the Wars

The Scale of Fighting and Involvement Sir Thomas Smith pictured an England in the later fifteenth century in which the country was running with blood and almost half the population killed. Reaction against such exaggeration has led twentieth-century historians to play down the length of the Wars, the level of involvement even in the highest ranks of society, and the extent of disruption. Certainly, there was a tendency for contemporaries and early historians to dramatize the impact of the Wars. But it is possible to go too far in the direction of minimizing the scale. They were not insignificant. In 1965 J.R. Lander, following W.H. Dunham, confidently asserted that ‘during the Wars of the Roses the total period of active campaigning between the first battle of St Albans and the battle of Stoke amounted to little more than twelve or thirteen weeks in thirty-two years.’1 Lander was rightly taken to task by Anthony Goodman in 1981, who offered his own revised calculation of ‘the minimum number of mostly continuous days on which one or more major forces were in arms’ of 61 weeks.2 But even this might be an underestimate. It does, of course, depend on what one means by ‘active campaigning’ and ‘major forces in arms’. There were several other periods not included in Professor Goodman’s calculation when, by anyone’s definition, troops were on the move. One ought to add the Lancastrian siege of Yorkist-held Calais between October 1460 and June 1461, and the associated cross-Channel raiding. One can also count campaigning in Wales between September 1461 and May 1462, and again in 1468, as well as the Northumbrian war of March

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1463 to June 1464, which saw the battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham and the final reduction of the castles. Finally, one might also include Edward IV’s abortive march north in August 1470 to suppress FitzHugh’s rising as a period when at least one major force was in arms. It may be that much of this campaigning was taking place on the periphery of the kingdom – Calais and Northumberland – but it was not insignificant. If these campaigns are included, the minimum period of military activity is extended to well over two years. One may wonder, however, whether a state of war is correctly defined merely by the number of days in which forces were actively campaigning. England was at war with France continuously from 1415 to 1444, but it is not certain that military activity took place on every single day of that 30-year period. There is surely a similar sense in which English and Welsh men were in arms against each other continuously from October 1459 at least until the first reduction of the Northumbrian castles in September 1461, and arguably, if one includes the campaigning in Wales, until the second reduction of the Northumbrian castles at Christmas 1462. Throughout this three-year period, there was a state of open, if not continuously active, war. Similarly, between March 1470 and May 1471 there was arguably a state of continuous war. Finally, before leaving the question of the length of time Englishmen were in arms against each other, a distinction needs to be drawn between the two wars. It is indeed the case that the wars of 1483–87 are characterized by only sporadic and short-lived campaigns. On the other hand, between October 1459 and May 1471 English and Welsh men were in arms, in readiness for war, one against another, or actually campaigning during at least five of eleven and a half years. The first wars were considerably more extensive and long-drawn-out than most recent historians have been willing to concede. A second question related to the length of campaigning is the size of the armies. As Professor Ross pointed out, there was in the later fifteenth century a propensity to exaggerate the size of the armies that came together to give battle.3 The numbers fluctuated widely. At St Albans in 1455, there were probably no more than 3000 on the Yorkist side, 2000 on the royalist. At Towton, on the other hand, numbers reached their peak. The figure given by the heralds of 28,000 dead is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but there is common agreement that the conflict, a running battle of three engagements, was fought by large numbers and was particularly bloody. Archaeological evidence

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from the excavation of grave pits has revealed that it was hard fought with little quarter given on either side. The Lancastrian forces may have been as large as 25,000; the Yorkists, apparently slightly outnumbered, perhaps mustered 20,000 men. No other battle even approached this in terms of numbers engaged. At Barnet, Tewkesbury, Bosworth, and Stoke, armies are unlikely to have been much larger than 10,000 and could have been smaller.4 The precise numbers involved in the various battles will never be known. A more important question is the extent to which the peerage, the political leaders of the realm, was involved in the struggles. This has been a matter of dispute. Most of the peerage were caught up in the Towton campaign: hence the large numbers on the battlefield. However, following K.B. McFarlane’s observation that a surprising number of the heads of the great landed families opted to lie low, T.B. Pugh and J.R. Lander argued that after 1461, the majority of the baronage distanced themselves from the dynastic struggle and that, as a whole, the peerage became remarkably indifferent to its outcome. In Lander’s calculations, whereas approximately 80 per cent of the peers were involved in the fighting in 1460–61, in 1469–71 and 1483–87 the proportion never rose above two-thirds and was frequently as low as one sixth.5 Charles Ross, however, calculated that at least 70 per cent were engaged in 1469–71, and, latterly, that there was a similarly high rate of involvement in the battle of Bosworth.6 The issue of peerage participation in the wars after 1461 is important for any assessment of their impact on society. For if, indeed, the majority did hold aloof, leaving the issue to be settled by a handful of magnates and members of the rival royal families, it follows that fewer retained gentry and, by extension, fewer rank and file were drawn in. The fewer the peers involved, the more the wars were divorced from the day-to-day lives of the majority of the men and women of England. In seeking to resolve the issue, several general points need to be clarified. First, account has to be taken of peers who could not have been involved because they were children or otherwise incapacitated. A participating ratio has to be of the adult, sane and free peers, not of the total number of living barons. Secondly, Pugh and Lander seem to imply that if we do not have cast-iron evidence that a peer was engaged in a particular battle or insurrection, then we can deduce that he was indifferent or aloof. This can be doubted on two grounds. One is that our information about who actually fought at a particular battle is not always complete: chroniclers often only noted



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the names of the dead or the most prominent of the peers. The other is that failure to be at a battle does not necessarily mean aloofness or indifference. Not knowing whether a particular peer fought is not the same as knowing that he was indifferent. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to gauge the extent of involvement. As McFarlane pointed out, few rushed headlong into war. There was much to lose. Every battle, every turn of the wheel of fortune, demanded a careful calculation of advantage. It is not surprising therefore that at every stage, many were trimmers by conviction or necessity. The two notorious trimmers in 1469–71 were the young John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and the older, more experienced Thomas, Lord Stanley. They acted with a circumspection that bordered on deceitfulness, consistently holding back from final commitment to either side, and always keeping on good terms with the winners. One might admire their political dexterity or disapprove of their moral flexibility, but aloof and indifferent they were not. Trimming required as much involvement as fighting. Our problems largely derive from not knowing. Thus five Yorkist peers (the Earl of Essex and Lords Audley, Dinham, Dudley and Ferrers) are not named as being present at any engagement in 1469–71. They did enter London in triumph with Edward IV on 21 May 1471, but they could have joined him only after the fighting was done. That they were caught up in the politics of these years is shown by their removal from all commissions during the Readeption.7 There is, therefore, a strong presumption that they were known to be favourable towards Edward IV. Two others, Lords Greystoke and Lumley, are similarly never named, but they were very much involved in Warwick’s northern affinity. If they did not join him and fight at Barnet, it could be that they were stranded in the north, cut off by Henry Percy, the newly restored Earl of Northumberland, who by sitting still was judged to have done Edward IV singularly good service. In Northumberland’s case, neutrality was specifically noted to be effective aid to Edward IV. Applying the above considerations to the behaviour of the peerage in 1469–71, what do we find? There were approximately 60 peers: approximately, because there are one or two problems of definition. Is Edward, Prince of Wales to be accounted one of the peers? Of this 60, no fewer than 12 (one fifth) were minors, insane or otherwise unavailable (including the fugitive Henry Clifford). Of the remainder, 30 were engaged in one or more battles or risings.

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Two others, Shrewsbury and Stanley, openly hovered around the action. One, Thomas Talbot, Lord Lisle, was killed in an entirely private affair. Fourteen or 15 remain of whom we have no information, including the seven (Essex, Audley, Dudley, Dinham, Ferrers, Greystoke and Lumley) referred to above. Whatever else this reveals, it does not point to collective indifference or aloofness. The same consideration can be applied to Bosworth, from which, it has been suggested, most of the barons absented themselves while less than a quarter fought for Richard III. J.R. Lander found that only four were with Henry Tudor. Subsequently, Colin Richmond suggested that only six fought for Richard III and that at least three-quarters of the peerage avoided the field. While Charles Ross was at first willing to go along with these low estimates, in his Richard III, placing controversial reliance on the Ballad of Bosworth Field, he suggested that no less than 20 peers fought for Richard III.8 Whether that many did turn out, horsed and harnessed, is impossible to determine. Four were certainly on active service elsewhere: Lords Audley and Dinham; Francis, Viscount Lovell, and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, in Calais, southern England and Wales. From subsequent behaviour, one can safely deduce that the Earl of Lincoln as well as Lords Scrope of Bolton and Masham were there in spirit if not in body. The Earl of Shrewsbury, a minor, might or might not have been in the king’s custody; his uncle, Sir Gilbert Talbot, however, commanded one wing of Henry Tudor’s army. Committed against the king were Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke; the Earl of Oxford; the Marquis of Dorset, Edward Woodville, the new Earl Rivers; Edward Courtenay soon to be created Earl of Devon; and, as the event proved, Lord Stanley. One bedevilling complication in any calculation is that many persons, even if willing and able, may not have had time to reach the field. A particular problem exists with the Earl of Northumberland’s contingent, raised hurriedly in the north, which might have been expected to include the Earl of Westmorland, Lords FitzHugh, Greystoke, Dacre and Lumley, as well as the Scropes. Most, if not all, seem not to have fought. They may not have had time to arrive; or, alternatively, they may have been present but not engaged.9 Again, failure to engage might have resulted from a deliberate holding back or from being left stranded by the course of the battle. These questions will never be answered. For this reason, it is not possible to give a certain answer to the question of who fought for Richard. But failure to fight was not the same as indifference. Similarly, it is not



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possible to say whether or not a number of lords deserted Richard. What is clear is that a majority of the active adult peerage had a stake in the outcome of the trial of strength between Richard III and Henry Tudor in 1485. There is no firm ground for supposing that the majority held aloof. Where the peers led, the gentry followed. They could not entirely escape involvement. For the very reason that they were not the political leaders, one would not expect as great a proportion of the gentry to be involved. It is even more difficult to identify and impossible to quantify their participation. Occasional lists of casualties and knighting, or the record of attainders, help, but others are rarely named, and many who ended up on the losing side were pardoned or simply allowed to return home untroubled. There is a strong presumption, for instance, that several of the gentry of north Yorkshire and Cumbria followed Warwick in rebellion in 1469–71 and perhaps fought with him at Barnet. But none of his followers were attainted, and, after 1470, none were required to take out pardons. The reason almost certainly was that Richard, Duke of Gloucester, quickly took over Warwick’s northern estates, his men and their protection. Warwick himself was not attainted; and neither were his followers. K.B. McFarlane also argued that although lords retained the service of knights and esquires with the intention that they should follow them in war, in practice they were singularly reluctant to do so. Of course, client gentry had the loophole of their allegiance to a crowned king which was almost always written into a contract. On many occasions individual gentlemen made a hard-headed calculation of their personal interest, especially when they faced conflicting loyalties.10 This is particularly apparent in the case of Henry Vernon of Haddon, who found himself importuned in March 1471 by George, Duke of Clarence, and by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, both seeking his support. In the event, he resolved his dilemma by staying at home.11 But, as the well-documented histories of the Pastons and Plumptons show, many gentry were not unwilling to follow their lords. This is particularly true of northern England, where the Nevilles and Percies enjoyed the support of loyal and long-serving gentry families. A recent study has confirmed that only a relatively small number of gentry were prepared to take up arms. Local circumstances could be influential, but for the most part those who were deeply involved were the most intimate servants of the houses of Lancaster or York and the

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other prominent magnates such as the Earl of Warwick. The majority chose not to become embroiled, concerned more with protecting their inheritances and standing. And by 1471 only a dwindling band of loyalists among the gentry were prepared to risk all for the house of Lancaster at Barnet and in particular Tewkesbury.12 The senior clergy were more independent than the gentry. Most bishops owed their appointments to royal favour, but during civil war those who were politically employed (and not all bishops were political creatures) tended to be trimmers. One might have expected individual bishops sometimes to put themselves forward as peacemakers, but they rarely did. On the other hand only a minority became openly partisan. In 1459–61 Thomas Bourgchier of Canterbury, William Grey of Ely and George Neville of Exeter were committed Yorkists. In 1470–71 George Neville, now of York, took his brother’s part. In 1483 John Morton of Ely, Lionel Woodville of Salisbury and Peter Courtenay of Exeter resisted Richard III. For all these men, with the exception of Morton of aristocratic blood, family loyalties were probably overriding. Morton fled to Rome where he lobbied on Henry Tudor’s behalf. His reward was high office after 1485 and a cardinalate. More typical were Robert Stillington of Bath and Wells who provided the justification for the deposition of Edward V, Thomas Langton of St David’s, and John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln and Edward IV’s last Keeper of the Privy Seal, who stayed on to become Richard III’s chancellor.13 Only in Durham, where the bishop held extensive temporal authority in the palatinate, did the incumbent have no choice but to play a political role. Lawrence Booth (1457–76) is something of an enigma. He was Queen Margaret’s confessor before being promoted and came to Durham to curtail the Neville influence, which had been built up in the palatinate during the pontificate of his predecessor, Robert Neville. One might have expected Booth to be a stalwart Lancastrian after 1461. Indeed, his temporalities were confiscated (and therefore his political power removed) for 15 months in 1462–64. But subsequently, he stood firm for Edward IV during the Readeption and was rewarded with the chancellorship in 1472–74 and promotion to York in 1476. The key to his career, both his disfavour in 1462–64 and favour after 1471, lies almost certainly in a bitter feud with Warwick the Kingmaker and not in a dynastic preference. Booth’s successor, William Dudley, was a Yorkist servant who wholeheartedly supported Richard III’s usurpation. Unfortunately for the



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king, he died in November 1483. He was succeeded by John Shirwood (1483–91), who spent most of his pontificate in Rome leaving his king a more direct voice in the government of the palatinate. Thus, of the bishops of Durham, only Booth became fully caught up in political conflict.14 Overall, what is remarkable about the Church during the Wars of the Roses is its passivity and indifference. There was little response from within the ranks of the clerical intelligentsia to the questions of political theory raised by the Wars. The Papacy endeavoured to remain neutral, even though Pius II’s nuncio to England in 1459–61, Francesco Coppini, threw in his lot with the Yorkists and gave them unauthorized papal blessing. It neither threw its weight behind one house or the other, nor sought, with any consistency of purpose, to reconcile the differences. The episcopacy, while individuals suffered little for their occasional forays into partisan politics, similarly, either as individuals or collectively, made only occasional half-hearted efforts to act as peacemakers. For the bishops in general, one suspects, priority was given to maintaining the corporate spirit and solidarity of the English Church in the face of an unstable and unpredictable political world.15 In general the larger towns, as incorporated bodies, also endeavoured to remain neutral and to support the reigning monarch. They had a powerful incentive in the shape of their charters which could be revoked if they offended the Crown. London veered towards the Yorkists in the later 1450s, partly as a consequence of the scale of loans prominent citizens put up especially to pay the Calais garrison under Warwick. In August 1460 he seems to have been granted a ‘joyous welcome’, a formal triumph of the kind normally reserved for victorious monarchs. But in 1470–71, the city turned its back on him, probably because of his treaty with France and the implications for the commercial interests of his former supporters. Bristol, it has been argued, was another city in which a dominant group of citizens backed first Richard of York, and then Warwick. On flight in the spring of 1470 he left his artillery train there, which he was able to recover on his return in the autumn. The city of York was more circumspect until it enthusiastically backed Richard III, whose death, the council reported, was a great loss. After 1485 its loyalties were divided, as some were reluctant to accept the new regime. Coventry, on the other hand, part of the patrimony of the Prince of Wales, proved in the late 1450s and during the Readeption to be a stalwart

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of the house of Lancaster. Perhaps Exeter, which its most recent historian has characterized as deliberately avoiding partisanship, was typical of most corporations.16 The Raising of Armies Troops for civil wars were raised in four principal ways: by deploying the professional soldiers retained for garrison service by the Crown; by calling out household servants and indentured retainers; by raising the tenantry; and by calling out the militia. Probably fewest troops were provided by professional soldiers. When the first wars began there were still a number of veterans from the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War to call upon. Some prominent captains, such as William Neville, Lord Fauconberg (d. 1463), or Thomas Lord Scales (d. 1460), both experienced generals, as well as captains such as Sir Andrew Ogarde and Sir William Oldhall, played a prominent role. Andrew Trollope, who had risen through the ranks in the later stages of the French war to a senior post at Calais, was described by one commentator as ‘the great captain and virtual war leader’ of Margaret of Anjou’s army from the north in 1461. How many discharged rank and file found their way into rival armies in 1459–61 is impossible to tell. By the time of the second wars their place had been more than filled by foreign mercenaries, both those who accompanied Henry Tudor in 1485 (French) and who fought for the rebels at Stoke (German).17 The garrisons of Carlisle, Berwick (but not between 1461 and 1482 when it was in Scottish hands) and Calais provided from time to time a small core of serving professional English soldiers. At Carlisle there were barely more than 75 in peace and 150 in war; at Berwick twice that. There is no direct evidence that these soldiers were actually called out by the wardens. They may have remained at their posts in case the Scots took advantage of their absence. The Calais garrison, which was considerably larger, with a total establishment of some 800 men, did become involved. Warwick brought a large contingent of the garrison with him to Ludford in 1459. This contingent, under its captain, Andrew Trollope, deserted to the king and served under his command until its defeat at Towton. Despite the desertion of so many of its garrison, Calais was a lifeline to the Yorkists in the winter of 1459–60, and withstood attack from a Lancastrian force. Ten years



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later, the loyalties of the garrison were significant. In the spring of 1470 Warwick was turned away. But in the following year, some of the soldiers joined the Bastard of Fauconberg’s rising in Kent. Even in 1483, Lord Hastings’ threat to call out the garrison helped him carry the day at the crucial council meetings immediately following the death of Edward IV.18 Calais was also important as a naval base. Sea power, exercised by Warwick the Kingmaker between 1458 and 1461, and then later, on his behalf, by the Bastard of Fauconberg in 1470–71, had a decisive effect on the course of the Wars. Warwick’s control of the Channel, at first used to prey on neutral shipping to support his garrison in Calais, enabled him to communicate with York in Dublin, defeat attempts to take Calais in 1459–60, and to mount a successful invasion in the summer of 1460. It was because he controlled the channel that in 1471, Fauconberg was able to mount what was, in effect, a sea-borne assault on London, even after Warwick himself had been overthrown.19 Of the sources of troops on land and sea, household men and retainers were not much greater in number. This might seem surprising since it has been asserted since the sixteenth century that the late medieval baronage maintained huge households. In Utopia, Thomas More put into the mouth of Raphael Hythlodaeus an opinion in existence in the reign of Henry VII that noblemen carried around with them huge crowds of idle attendants ‘wont in sword and buckler to look down with a swaggering face on the whole neighbourhood’. Taken up in the nineteenth century, More’s deliberately ambivalent remark led Stubbs to conclude that the baron ‘could, if he wished to pay for it, support a vast household of men armed and liveried as servants’. And J.R. Green added that the lords’ power lay in the hosts of disorderly retainers who swarmed around their houses, ready to furnish a force in case of revolt. Even as recently as 1965, it has been remarked that baronial retinues reached ‘the proportions of small armies’ and that greater peers engaged ‘considerable numbers of men’.20 Closer inspection reveals, however, that, on the contrary, the manpower thus available to fifteenth-century lords was small. It is difficult to discern the actual size of a noble household, let alone the number of armed men maintained in it. In fact, the household fluctuated in size. At any one time it would include all manner of people who had just dropped in to pay respects or to take advantage

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of open house. Thus numbers of meals served is a poor guide. Moreover, many household servants were not regularly in attendance or permanently in residence. The Black Book of Edward IV laid down the approved sizes of household establishments: a duke was entitled to 240; an earl, 140; a baron, 40; a knight banneret, 24; and a knight bachelor, 16.21 Whether men honoured these quotas is impossible to tell. It is known that in 1468 George, Duke of Clarence, supported 299 persons. Successive Dukes of Buckingham kept households of 200–400 between 1440 and 1520. The smaller permanent household, the domicelli, of these men is more difficult to gauge. Buckingham’s residential staff of yeomen, grooms and pages seems to have numbered 90. These were mainly domestic servants, including musicians and chaplains. His itinerant, ‘riding’ retinue numbered 56 in the year 1439–40. In 1511–12 the fifth Earl of Northumberland budgeted for 86 resident personnel out of a total household establishment of 166, of which 55 formed his riding company.22 Numbers fluctuated, especially when the lord took to the road, which was frequent. In 1483, according to a surviving household book, John Howard, newly created Duke of Norfolk, kept a permanent household of approximately 64 persons. Of these some 20 accompanied him on pilgrimage from his residence at Stoke by Nayland in Suffolk to Walsingham between 16 and 26 August. On 2 September a larger company of 54 went up to London with him, but for a brief visit on 13 September to his estates at Reigate and Horsham, Howard took only 20 companions.23 How many of these men were professional soldiers forming an armed bodyguard is equally hard to say. In the royal household of 500 there was provision for an establishment of 24 yeomen of the Crown, but probably, in practice, 60 or more veteran archers formed the royal bodyguard. In September 1483, Norfolk was accompanied to London by 19 yeomen who may, or may not, have formed his bodyguard.24 The evidence is slight, but what there is clearly does not suggest hordes of armed men swarming around the baronial households. In time of emergency or on special occasion the lords could, and did, call up their indentured retainers to supplement their households. The maximum number of knights and esquires retained by any lord seems to have been 90; for example the 90 retained by Lord Hastings after 1471.25 In the 1440s Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham (d. 1460), made arrangements for over 80 client gentry to serve him, although only 23 were retained by formal contract. Rarely do contracts



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specify the number of men that a retainer was to provide ‘in time of peace as well as war, horsed and harnessed’ at the lord’s command. Buckingham was unusually precise in some of his contracts; in these the numbers required from knights and esquires varied between three and six companions per retainer. On this basis, Buckingham’s formal contracts of retainers were likely only to produce him some 120 men ready for war: hardly a vast army.26 Some idea of a retinue at full strength, on this occasion ostensibly for peace not war, is provided by the report given by John Bottoner to Sir John Fastolf in January 1458 that Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, descended on London for his reconciliation with the Earl of Northumberland accompanied by ‘400 horse in his company, eighty knights and esquires’; a cryptic report which suggests a body composed of his riding household, and 80 retainers and their men.27 If this interpretation is correct, it, too, suggests only approximately five men in the company of each retainer. This was a retinue at a strength worthy of comment gathered together for a special but politically dangerous occasion, when London was alarmed at the number of armed men descending on it. When it came to war, the participating lords called out their retainers; and were joined by as many as were willing to go. But even at their fullest strength (which was rarely the case), the armed retainers could provide only a nucleus of a lord’s company. What they lacked in numbers they made up for in effectiveness. According to the author of Gregory’s Chronicle, who showed a particular interest in matters military, the second battle of St Albans was decided by the ‘household men and fee’d men’. He was less impressed by the rest of the victorious army, ‘for the most part of the Northern men fled away’. While described by him as from the north, they may in fact have included recruits from the west country who had rallied to the queen’s cause in the autumn of 1460. She had written then, he reported, to her friends there calling on them to join her as hastily as they could, bringing their tenants ‘as strong in their harness as men of war’. The same author tells the story of how on the morrow of Blore Heath in 1459, Sir John Dawn’s son, hearing of his father’s death, promptly raised his tenants and shortly after ambushed Sir John and Sir Thomas Neville (two sons of the Earl of Salisbury) and Sir Thomas Harrington near Tarporley. They seemed to have been more disciplined.28 Most of the rank and file in armies were the tenants of the lords who participated. In March 1471 Henry Vernon was ordered by Clarence

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to see that all his and the Duke’s own tenants and servants were ready upon an hour’s notice to serve him. At the same time, the Earl of Shrewsbury sent warnings to the bailiffs of his Shropshire manors to have his tenants stand by. Most clearly documented of all is the case of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, who agreed to establish a militia of 1000 men to serve the king when needed. A muster of February 1484 reveals that he managed to recruit only 800, of which 500 were tenants drawn from 44 manors. A further 180 were promised by 43 named individuals, some of whom can be identified as household men. This was presumably the body of men called out to serve under him at Bosworth.29 These tenants, were expected to be ‘strong in their harness’, that is to say properly armoured and armed in the manner of arrayed men. As we have seen, the Yorkist Lords arrayed the men of south-eastern counties in 1460 who fought at Northampton and the bastard of Fauconberg arrayed those of Kent again in 1471. The numbers could have been significant. Warwick was reported to have had 60,000 footmen from Kent, Surrey and Sussex in his host, clearly a massive exaggeration, but suggesting a good response. There were other occasions when contemporaries noted the calling out of the militia: for instance by Edward IV as Earl of March in Wales in early 1461. Commissions of Array were issued several times by the Crown to resist rebellious lords, and at times when the crown itself was at stake (1460–61, 1470–71) both sides did so. But since the lords and their principal retainers were the commissioners it is difficult to determine how many turned out as tenants and how many as arrayed men. This was particularly so in the Towton campaign, when most of the country was mobilized. The array was unwilling to leave its own county, and was specifically designed for defence of the borders against a foreign enemy. Thus levies from Kent repelled a French raid on Sandwich in 1457 and levies from the northern counties, turned out to fight against the Scots in 1461 (in Durham), 1462, 1481 and 1482. But they also defended the coasts against invasions by exiles and pretenders. Arrayed men mustered in 1468 in North Wales against Jasper Tudor, in 1473 in Cornwall and East Anglia against the Earl of Oxford, and later against Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. Their effectiveness again might be questioned. Although they carried the day at Northampton, in a skirmish at Dunstable on the day before the second battle of St Albans, Margaret of Anjou’s men brushed aside



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the Bedfordshire levies, who were led by a butcher as their chief captain.30 Another source of manpower lay in the town bands. Contingents were raised at one time or another in most towns, usually at the expense of the town itself. Bristol supplied 60 men to Edward, Earl of March in February 1461, and these, or soldiers of another contingent, probably fought at Towton. Exeter supplied contingents ranging from 20 to 30 men on at least eight occasions between 1459 and 1487, invariably to support the reigning monarch. Salisbury in the spring of 1471 dithered in the face of demands from both Lancastrians and Yorkists until finally committing its band of men to Edward IV on the eve of Tewkesbury. London is known only to have supplied troops formally in 1460. York after 1471 was more confident in its support of Richard III. In June 1483 it answered an appeal by Richard, still Duke of Gloucester, to provide a contingent of as many defensibly arrayed men as they could to help him resist the queen mother (Elizabeth Woodville) who, he alleged, intended to destroy him. They possibly sent 120 men to join the Earl of Northumberland, the number they had supplied a year earlier to fight the Scots. But two years later the mayor had to write to Richard III to find out whether he wanted them to send troops to fight Henry Tudor.31 Town bands and county militias played their part. But one suspects that most of the soldiers were raised not by the system of array but by direct recruitment as tenants by their lords. Professional soldiers and the indentured retainers of the peers, the mounted men at arms, were far fewer in number but greatly superior in effectiveness. In all, however, campaigning in the Wars of the Roses was more extensive and directly involved considerably greater numbers of men than was envisaged by revisionists in the mid-twentieth century. As yet we have only considered men. What about the impact of the Wars on women? Women and the Wars Late-medieval women are no longer completely hidden from historians.32 However, in an intensely patriarchal society they were largely excluded from the public sphere. Women were subject to men; a daughter to a father, a wife to a husband. Any ‘ungoverned’ woman was treated with grave suspicion. In certain clearly

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delineated circumstances those with property could enjoy a degree of independence. Thus a widow could take a vow of chastity, thereby declaring herself unavailable for remarriage and able to manage her own life. Nuns, who also espoused chastity, were able to manage their own affairs, but only under the licence and supervision of men. Less frequently a wealthy aristocrat or bourgeois could acquire the status of a ‘femme sole’, that gave her the legal rights of a man. Such status was granted by Henry VII to his mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond. Even lower down the social scale women are occasionally found occupying manorial office, but only in exceptional circumstances. A woman’s role was strictly gendered. Thus women, on the whole, did not go to war. There may have been some who donned men’s clothing and marched off with the men. But no Joan of Arcs caught the attention of chroniclers or scandalized churchmen during the Wars of the Roses. One can be more confident that ordinary women followed armies, sometimes as prostitutes. Others may well have been found after battle searching among the casualties as well as caring for the wounded when they had struggled home. These were gendered roles. Women may also have acted in other ways as spies or messengers, as they did in continental wars.33 Aristocratic women were occasionally prominent in intrigue. The Countess of Richmond was at the centre of plots on Henry Tudor’s behalf in 1483–5, as was Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy against him after 1485. In the autumn of 1483 the countess was a principal conspirator in the abortive risings against Richard III and engaged in secret negotiations with Queen Elizabeth for a marriage between her son and Elizabeth of York. Over the winter of 1470–1 Edward IV in exile called upon his mother and sisters (the Duchesses of Suffolk and Exeter in England, as well as the Duchess of Burgundy) to act as mediators between him and Clarence, ‘by covert means and ways’. Their messengers were their household chaplains. However, mediation was the pre-eminent female role. When Margaret of Anjou was encamped near St Albans threatening to march on London, which the citizens feared would have dire consequences, the common council persuaded the Duchesses of Buckingham and Bedford and Lady Scales, two of them widows of recent Lancastrian casualties and one the wife of one of the queen’s captains, to plead with her not to allow pillage of the city. In the event the queen’s army withdrew.34 Aristocratic women were not only conspirators and mediators: some were also drawn into national politics. We have seen how Queen



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Margaret became a deeply controversial figure, by 1460 at the latest as a political player in her own right. Queen Elizabeth Woodville was also accused of unwanted political dabbling, especially for the benefit of her family, first by Warwick the Kingmaker and later by Richard of Gloucester. While Edward IV lived, however, she was a model queen, providing many children, accepting her husband’s serial adultery, and fulfilling the role of helper, intercessor and benefactor that was expected of her. Only after Richard of Gloucester’s first coup was she drawn reluctantly into politics, in which she proved to be hopelessly out of her depth. Queens Anne and Elizabeth of York, were entirely conventional, though Anne Neville was queen for such a short period that very little is known of her. The two queen mothers, Cecily, Duchess of York and Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, not withstanding that they were carefully represented as devout widows, were both active politically behind the scenes. Margaret Beaufort in particular was a formidable power behind the throne of Henry VII, whom she outlived by two months.35 There were other strong women whose lives intersected with the Wars, whether in pursuing their own claims to property, managing their husbands’ affairs while they were campaigning or at court, or as widows exercising important local influence. Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk, Elizabeth Talbot, Duchess of Norfolk, her mother Margaret Beauchamp, Countess of Shrewsbury and Margaret Paston stand out. Were there other surviving sources as rich as the Paston Letters we would know as much of many others, as well as those of more humble origin.36 Women were also victims, especially of Edward IV and his brothers. At the highest level, the character assassination of first Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford and then her daughter Queen Elizabeth Woodville by accusations of witchcraft was pursued by Warwick the Kingmaker and then Richard of Gloucester. Ankarette Twynho, a ladyin-waiting of Isabel, Duchess of Clarence, the Kingmaker’s daughter, was accused by the Duke of poisoning her mistress in 1476. She was tried in what would now be called a kangaroo court on the duke’s orders, found guilty and hanged. Wives of attainted peers, if they had no property of their own, such as Margaret Neville, Countess of Oxford, were reduced to penury. Other women were targeted for their property. The widowed Elizabeth, Countess of Oxford, mother in law of Margaret Neville, whose son was in exile, was bullied by Richard of Gloucester into surrendering her estates to him in 1473. At the same time Anne Beauchamp, the widow of Warwick the Kingmaker who

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suffered ‘great tribulation for her lord’s sake’, was stripped of her inheritance by act of parliament so that Edward IV’s brothers could have them in the names of their wives, her daughters.37 These are but the most prominent cases of women suffering as a result of the upheavals. Many more ordinary women were likely to be the direct victims of war. Richard III laid it on thick in his enrolled claim to the throne when he asserted that in the recent wars ‘no man was sure of his life, land nor livelihood, nor of his wife, daughter nor servant, every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled’.38 It is unlikely, however, that cases of rape were significantly more frequent than the massacre of civilians, of which there are no reliable reports. War Damage and Disruption It was characteristic of the age that a man’s property included not only his land and livelihood, but also his wife, daughter and servant. What material loss was actually caused by the Wars? Queen Margaret’s march south in the late winter of 1460–61 is the nearest to sustained looting and pillaging of the civilian population throughout their course. Rumours of her soldiers’ rampage spread rapidly and was repeated by contemporary chroniclers. The author of the second continuation of the Crowland Chronicle, whose abbey lay close to the route, wrote hysterically 25 years later about the destruction spread over a 30-mile front by this swarm of locusts. In the fourth decade of the sixteenth century John Leland, who had visited Stamford, recorded that much of the town had been burnt to the ground by this army and had been completely rebuilt. However, a recent examination of strictly contemporary evidence has concluded that although there was some looting, relatively little damage was done to the fabric of the town.39 Compared with the horrors brought by war to France in the first half of the fifteenth century, England escaped lightly. Philippe de Commynes, a man of affairs knowledgeable about his world, wrote in his memoirs in the 1490s that ‘in my opinion, out of all the countries which I have personally known England is the one where public affairs are best conducted and regulated with least damage to the people.’40 K.B. McFarlane drew attention to the fact that even during the period of most intense military activity and social disruption, June



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1460–March 1461, William Worcester could ride freely about England winding up the estate of his master Sir John Fastolf.41 What new castle building was undertaken, as at Kirby Muxloe by Lord Hastings, was for residential use, not defence. Armies were rarely kept in the field for months on end, and towns and castles were not usually besieged for very good cause: lack of resources. It was extremely costly to keep an army on campaign. For this reason more than any other, it was imperative for commanders to seek a quick decision. No-one could afford to dig in and fight a war of territorial attrition. Castles, in particular, besides being vulnerable to artillery, were extremely expensive to maintain, man and provision. In so far as many town walls began to collapse, they did so for the same reason: the high cost of maintenance in an age of general difficulty in borough finances.42 However, one should not play down too much a lack of physical destruction and economic disruption. An army on the move, both horses and men, needed feeding: supplies were requisitioned and crops destroyed as they passed. In the winter of 1462–3 Lancastrians holding out in the castles of Bamburgh, Alnwick and Dunstanburgh were besieged by an army under Warwick the Kingmaker for four weeks. The campaign necessitated a sophisticated supply chain for the besieging forces based in Newcastle. Carlisle was besieged briefly in 1461; Lancastrians in the Tower of London turned their guns on the City and caused damage to property in 1460. The City was again attacked in 1471 by the Bastard of Fauconberg, causing ‘moche harme and hurte’ before his men were beaten off. Not surprisingly the City did its best to prevent the entry of troops, only allowing the passage of Warwick’s host in 1460 after it had received guarantees of good conduct. Hull refused entry to Edward IV in 1471; York only admitted him after lengthy negotiations.43 While it is true that, for most of the time, the Wars caused little suffering to most of the people, the indirect disruption and cost may have been of greater significance than the apparent lack of physical destruction. The cost to towns was not insignificant. Soldiers had to be paid; loans were judiciously made to rival forces; town walls were repaired; watches had to be mounted in times of crisis.44 In the countryside, labour was disrupted. When the militia was called out, butchers closed their stalls, weavers abandoned their looms and farmers downed sickles even at harvest time. Landlords suffered from loss of rents. In 1463–64 neither Bishop nor Prior of Durham received much revenue from their estates in Northumberland because the

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county was in the hands of the king’s rebels. There were, no doubt, others who at other times, and in other places, found the collection of revenues disrupted. Moreover, the prior was probably not alone in finding himself unable to recover a loan made to Queen Margaret in 1461. His bishop, too, bore the cost of reinforcing the castle and gate on Durham Palace Green when the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland passed through the city on their way to a gathering of Lancastrian troops at Pontefract in 1460.45 The comparative freedom of England from the worst horrors of war that could be suffered in late medieval Europe, should not lead to the conclusion that the Wars had no disruptive effect. Arguably, Commynes’ comment says more about other kingdoms than about England. In the scale of fighting, the extent to which they involved and divided Englishmen and women, and in their domestic repercussions, the Wars of the Roses had a greater impact than some recent commentators have been willing to recognize. Perhaps there has been a tendency to play them down because of a failure to distinguish clearly enough between the scale and character of the different Wars themselves. The first Wars, the Wars between Lancaster and York of 1459 to 1471, were by any reckoning major civil wars: they included the longest continuous period of civil war in English history between the reign of King Stephen in the twelfth-century and the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. They may not have caused as much physical destruction and loss of life as full-scale international war in fifteenth- century Europe, and they may have been less totally disruptive of English society than the civil wars of the seventeenth century. But they were a major breakdown of normal political life: in one way or another, they involved the greater part of the political nation and the whole of the English realm. Moreover, as a result of usurpation and dynastic conflict, both Wars significantly weakened the standing of the English monarchy. The throne changed hands violently five times in less than 25 years. By 1484 the English had earned the unenviable reputation abroad of being killers of kings. The major legacy of the Wars was the damage they had inflicted on royal authority. The major task of reconstruction was the restoration of that authority.

Chapter 6: The Aftermath of the Wars

Survival and Remembrance Just as nineteenth-century historians, following sixteenth-century writers, saw the Wars of the Roses in terms of uncontrolled anarchy, so also they painted a dramatic picture of their consequences. In short, during the Wars the old feudal baronage dashed itself to pieces and out of them emerged a ‘New Monarchy’, despotic in character, founded on the support of the landed and commercial middle classes.1 Little of this account has stood the test of modern scholarship. It is clear now that the old feudal baronage did not commit collective suicide; no middle class emerged to take its place; and although royal authority recovered and was enhanced, few would now describe early Tudor monarchy as ‘new’. Just as the Wars themselves were not so dire, so also the changes they wrought were not so sweeping. The idea that the ancient nobility of the land was destroyed has early antecedents and was a tale that grew in the telling. Thomas More in his History of King Richard III remarked that so great was the bloodshed that scarcely half of the ancient noble blood of the realm remained. His contemporary, William Tyndale, was prepared to go so far as to assert that only one-sixteenth remained: ‘their own sword hath eaten them up’. Towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, Sir Thomas Craig drew attention to the destruction of the royal house by making use of ‘a Scripture phrase’: ‘there was not one left to piss against the wall.’2 Craig was broadly correct about the royal blood of Edward III. Eventually, and as much as a consequence of the relentless pursuit of rivals by Henry VII and Henry VIII as of the accident of war, all the remaining blood royal was concentrated in the

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veins of the Tudors and Stuarts. But the other ancient noble families did not destroy themselves. K.B. McFarlane convincingly demonstrated that throughout the late Middle Ages, there was a natural rate of attrition in the ranks of the peerage at an average of 25 per cent per quarter-century, and a constant replenishing by new families. In fact, between 1450 and 1500 the failure rate was slightly lower than average. Thirty-eight noble families outside the royal family failed in the male line in this half-century, 12 by violent means. But of that 12, seven were already doomed in the male line; that is the man killed had no male children and no likelihood of fathering them. Thus Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, had only two girls. When he died, his Countess was 46 and she lived for a further 21 years. On the other hand, innumerable sons of Percy were killed, yet the family was fertile enough to survive. The one ancient family destroyed in the direct male line was, he argued, that of Courtenay and even that survived in a collateral branch.3 Indeed, the same is true of the Nevilles, for although the kingmaker himself had only two daughters, a part of his inheritance was entailed and should have descended to his cousin, Richard Neville, Lord Latimer. If in the end only a handful at most of noble families were extinguished by the Wars, the wealth and power of some were severely curtailed by attainder and forfeiture. The Hungerford family, for instance, was ruined and was not able to recover financially until the 1530s.4 Many families suffered attainder and forfeiture and, although reversal was frequent (64 per cent of all those attainted between 1453 and 1504, as much as 84 per cent of the peerage, were ultimately restored), the delays and costs involved in recovering lands in the meantime granted elsewhere meant that many compounded with the beneficiaries and accepted only partial recovery. Although the penalties of defeat and proscription were ultimately lifted on all but a handful of noble families, the permanent loss was greater than the mere fact of restoration suggests. In this respect several lords suffered a diminution of wealth and power.5 More important than actual loss of lands and income was the political leverage which attainder and forfeiture gave a king. Not only could the hope of restoration provide an effective incentive for good service (as it did with Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, after 1485), but also the fear of loss of confiscated estates could similarly ensure continued loyalty from a beneficiary. Henry VII proved himself particularly adept at exploiting the power this gave him over both his



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erstwhile opponents and his own supporters. Thus the old nobility was not wiped out by the wars: it emerged chastened and constrained, but unbowed.6 The wars were certainly not forgotten. The most conspicuous reminders were the chapels which were established and religious institutions endowed in memory of the fallen. There were memorial chapels founded at Towton and Barnet. Endowments were made to Dadlington church in honour of those who lost their lives on the nearby field of Bosworth, The chapel on the bridge at Wakefield still stands. Marker stones and crosses sustained the memory on other battlefields, including Hedgeley Moor and Blore Heath; and an old tree, Battle Oak, was reputed to mark the site of Mortimer’s Cross. Richard III, as Duke of Gloucester, endowed Queens’ College Cambridge in memory of servants who died at his side at Barnet. His father was honoured with a grand reburial at Fotheringhay, the mausoleum of the house of York, in 1476. Richard went one step further in making amends for the death of Henry VI, for which he was in part responsible, by transferring his body to St George’s Chapel at Windsor where he hoped to harness the growing cult of the martyred monarch to his cause. Henry VII in his turn sought to have his Lancastrian predecessor canonized.7 The deeds of prominent participants were also recorded in verse and stone. The role of the Stanley family in putting Henry VII on the throne were celebrated in ‘The Song of the Lady Bessiye’, also known as ‘The Ballad of Bosworth Field’. The Earl of Oxford’s triumph on that field was depicted for posterity in a gilded stone frieze at Castle Hedingham, now at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire. Obituaries engraved on some tombs reminded the living of the deeds of the dead, recounting their service in the wars. Sometimes memory was selective, as in the case of Sir Marmaduke Constable of Flamborough, whose executors discreetly overlooked his service to Richard III. On the other hand the inscription on the tomb of Thomas Howard, second Duke of Norfolk, who died in 1524, proudly proclaims his service to Edward IV and Richard III, especially at Bosworth. His loyalty to his monarch was stressed. The themes of prowess and loyalty were key factors here. The importance of loyalty emerges in a remarkable anecdote recorded by Henry Parker, Lord Morley in his old age. He had served as a young man in the household of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond. He remembered how she praised another servant, Ralph Bigod a former member of Richard

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III’s household, for objecting to any criticism of his former lord as a shining example of loyalty.8 This memory was recalled during the reign of Mary I, by which time many of the religious memorials of prayers for the dead had been swept away. The memories of the Wars were fading, soon only to be the tales of aged grandparents about particular places and events which passed in to local folk and family lore.9 For the nobility times had certainly passed on. But in the immediate aftermath the political lessons of recent history were uppermost in men’s minds. It is possible that after 1485 there was a change in mood; that, especially after the shocks of Richard III’s usurpation, they became politically more circumspect. It is undeniable, however, that after 1485 nobles became more cautious because they were subjected to a more ruthless and effective deployment of royal authority. The Recovery of Royal Authority The recovery of royal authority has been credited not just to Henry VII but, additionally, to Edward IV, who after 1471 supposedly laid the foundations of a New Monarchy. Much depends on what is meant by a new monarchy. If by this phrase one merely understands that kings were obeyed, then certainly Edward IV in his latter years meets the requirement. But this still begs the question as to whether Edward’s approach and means were novel or, indeed, whether they were farsighted in terms of a perceived objective of establishing royal authority on a new, stronger and more permanent basis. This is to be doubted. Indeed, one assessment of Edward is that he perfected the ‘medieval’, or old style, of monarchy.10 At the heart of the idea of a new monarchy is an emphasis on administration. It is the development of household government, of regional and specialist councils, and of chamber finance which gives it its special characteristic. The key lies in the royal household, for Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII preferred to act directly through their household officers and servants, especially their secretaries and treasurers of the household, rather than through the established departments of state, chancery and treasury, which had lost importance under Henry VI and during the earlier wars. There is little doubt that such an approach gave more direct and effective control. Since the restoration of royal solvency was a necessary precondition of effective



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government, the system of chamber finance developed by Edward IV and perfected by Henry VII was of major significance. The king, as Sir John Fortescue pointed out, needed to be considerably more wealthy than any of his subjects. Chamber finance, by cutting down on bureaucracy and by giving more direct and immediate control to the king, was one means by which this was achieved.11 However, the importance and significance of the administrative practices adopted by Edward IV and his successors can be exaggerated and misunderstood. Not everything was brought into the household. Chancery and exchequer continued to shoulder a share of the administrative burden. Secondly, although revenues increased dramatically  – to £60,000 per annum at the end of Edward IV’s reign, reaching £110,000 after 1500 – not all of the increase was the product of administrative zeal. Some from customs and excise was the result of expanding international trade. The royal demesne was extended by the acquisition of new estates – especially those of York and Warwick – by usurpation, by resumption and by forfeiture. While Edward IV tended to grant out the royal demesne for political patronage rather than retain it for financial gain, Henry VII kept most of the land in hand. Moreover, between 1471 and 1509 there was a general rise in rents as a result of a resurgent demand for land. Thus the income from Crown land quadrupled, from £10,000 per annum at the end of Edward IV’s reign to over £40,000 per annum at the end of Henry’s, more as a result of a change of policy and changing economic circumstance than as a consequence of administrative organization.12 But perhaps the most important reason for Henry’s spectacular financial success was the avoidance of costly foreign adventures. Edward IV avoided war after 1471 more by mischance than judgement. Henry VII initially followed a foreign policy which threatened or take him to war against France until 1492 and did embroil him in war against Scotland in 1497. Thereafter, he carefully kept clear of foreign entanglements. Peace abroad allowed financial entrenchment at home. As Henry VIII was rapidly to discover, the revenues available to the Crown had become quite inadequate for the support of a sustained war on the continent of Europe in the early sixteenth century. Furthermore, the development of household administration was neither novel nor necessarily a step forward. A tendency towards bringing administration back into the household can be traced back to the reign of Richard II.13 Then attempts to bypass the offices of state before 1386 and after 1396 aroused fierce opposition. It is one of the

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ironies of history that what Richard II attempted in his reign has been roundly condemned, while the Yorkist revival of the same has been widely praised. No doubt the circumstances were different, but, clearly, household government was not entirely new. Indeed, household government was essentially factional in genesis. It is arguable that it was reintroduced by a desperate Lancastrian government in the late 1450s.14 Chamber finance began as the expedient of victorious factions. Even after 1471, Edward IV’s regime retained some of this quality, for the royal household was the organized body of the king’s servants and friends. To fall back on a partisan household in time of civil war no doubt made eminent political sense, but, in truth, it was a retreat from the more public bureaucratic style of government practised by earlier kings in more settled times.15 In fact, in the last resort, the primary significance of household government was political, not administrative. And it is in this political dimension that Henry VII differed most markedly from Edward IV. Edward IV’s household was dominated by his kinsmen and close friends, all great lords. His rule in the country was, to a large degree, exercised by them, assisted by his knights and esquires of the body. Edward IV established a regime founded on regional authority delegated to his most trusted lieutenants. In the far north and the north-east he relied on his brother, Richard of Gloucester; in Lancashire and Cheshire on Thomas, Lord Stanley; in the north midlands on Lord Hastings; in Wales and the marches on Earl Rivers; and in the west midlands and south-west on his brother, George of Clarence until 1477, and thereafter Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset. The south-east was more directly under the sway of himself and lesser household men. These magnates and their powerful affinities were allowed a large degree of autonomy. Supervision of the local administration of justice was left largely to them: the king’s concern was ‘to make things hold still’. Like Charles II two centuries later, his priority was to avoid going on his travels again. Thus security took precedence over all else. This meant that the administration of justice locally tended to be partial. Where his deputy chose, as did Richard of Gloucester in the north, to attempt to provide impartial rule, the effect was beneficial and the regime popular. The frequency with which disputes were referred to, and settled by, baronial councils such as Gloucester’s reflects the extent to which the king allowed his men to take over. Only when incompetence, naked self-interest or



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quarrelling within the ranks of his household threatened to disrupt the peace did the king step in.16 Far from attacking the power of his greater subjects at its root, Edward IV sought to channel it towards his own advantage. His style of kingship has been perceived as an expression of his brilliance as monarch, of his innate understanding of how the late medieval political system worked, and of his ability to re-establish effective cooperation and partnership with his greater subjects. Alternatively, it has been characterized as an expression of his weakness, the consequence of his dependence on a small, but powerful section of the political élite and of his failure to rise above factional origins. In either case there was little novelty. The regime was essentially backward-looking, its antecedents feudal, its inspiration chivalric and its cultural connotations Arthurian. It was the antithesis of a new monarchy.17 Henry VII followed a different path. To an extent, he had no choice. Unlike Edward IV or Richard III, he did not come to the throne at the head of a powerful indigenous affinity. He led an ill-matched coalition of surviving Lancastrians and excluded Edwardian Yorkists. He was the adopted head of the remnant of Edward IV’s household, not its long-established leader. However, because they were exiled and proscribed, restoration for many of his supporters was ample reward. Thus Edward Courtenay, the new Earl of Devon, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, and Edward Woodville, the new Earl Rivers, did not have to be rewarded beyond the recovery of their titles, estates and local eminence. Moreover, Henry had no royal family to satisfy other than his childless uncle, Jasper. What was in one respect a weakness, Henry made a strength, for he deliberately turned his back on the creation of new mighty subjects. His treatment of the Marquis of Dorset, his queen’s half-brother is revealing. Dorset, like his mother Elizabeth Woodville, had sought to make his peace with Richard III in 1484. For this reason, Henry never trusted him. He was put into prison in 1487 during Lambert Simnel’s rising and in 1492, Dorset entered into a humiliating contract with the king whereby he agreed to find sureties and remain loyal in exchange for a royal pardon and admission to the king’s favour. He was made to transfer all his lands bar two manors to trustees, who were to hold them for the king, and to find a recognizance of £10,000.18 By such means, potentially unreliable and mighty subjects were reduced to impotence.

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Henry did not exclude or neglect his peers. Lord Stanley, promoted to Earl of Derby, and the king’s step-father, enjoyed a special role in the north-west in the early years of the reign. The Earl of Oxford, whose loyalty to Henry was unshakeable, held sway over East Anglia in a way reminiscent of Edward IV’s polity. All continued to play an important ceremonial role, and two-thirds are known to have attended the royal council. But the king allowed their numbers to dwindle by 30 per cent and kept them constantly under pressure whether it was through bonds and recognizances, the promise (or threat) of restoration, the strict licensing of retaining or the enforcement of the Crown’s feudal rights. Breaches of the laws against retaining, which the king tightened to give himself more effective control, were ruthlessly punished. Thus the Earl of Devon as well as Lord Abergavenny were fined heavily and placed under substantial recognizances for flouting the laws.19 Similarly, the king exploited to the full his feudal rights over tenants-in-chief. In the mid-1490s a series of commissions were set up to uncover concealments. When lords failed to follow the correct procedures, they were promptly fined. Katherine, Dowager Duchess of Buckingham, was fined for remarrying without the king’s licence in 1496 and her son Edward, the Duke himself, for entering his inheritance in 1498 without licence and before he was 21. The Duke subsequently claimed that these had cost him over £7000. Henry, fifth Earl of Northumberland, was fined £10,000 in 1505 for abducting an heiress: that is claiming as his own ward the heiress of Sir John Hastings of Fenwick, whom the king asserted was his own as tenant-in-chief.20 The peers, particularly the magnates, were as vulnerable, perhaps more vulnerable, than lesser landowners to Henry’s heavy lordship. While Henry used every means at his disposal to reduce the pretensions of mighty subjects, he also did his utmost to build up his own power. The restoration of royal finances was a key element in this. The king recognized the truth of Fortescue’s analysis that the secret of recovering royal authority lay in making himself richer than his subjects. This was one reason why, unlike Edward IV, he retained possession of the Crown lands. But there was another reason. Land was the basis of local power. By keeping royal estates in hand and administering them locally through his own household servants, Henry maintained a direct presence throughout his kingdom.21 This factor was perhaps most significant in the north of England, where Henry VI and Edward IV had enjoyed very little direct control.



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In so far as Richard III had drawn his strength from the north, and the most sustained opposition to Henry in his early years came from that region, it was imperative that he should secure control. By inheriting Richard III’s personal estate in the region, as well as recovering his earldom of Richmond, he had the advantage over Edward IV of a substantial landed presence in the North Riding of Yorkshire and County Durham. He could have restored either Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, or Richard Neville, Lord Latimer, to the one-time Neville estates held by Richard III. Characteristically, he chose to keep them. He had succeeded by conquest to the position of the mightiest northern subject of the preceding 30 years and had no intention of relinquishing that advantage. The old Neville and duchy of Lancaster lordships were the foundation of a royal presence in the north which had been absent before 1483. Although Henry did not at first continue with Richard III’s expedient of a council in the north, he did draw, like his predecessor, on the resources and manpower of those estates. But he also brought in his own household servants  – men like Sir William Tyler, Sir Richard Cholmondley and Richard Fox, Bishop of Durham (1494–1501)  – to act as his agents. Neither could he, nor did he wish to dispense with the services of the local peerage – notably the Earl of Northumberland. Nevertheless, he made it clear to both Northumberland and the Earl of Westmorland, both imprisoned for a brief while after Bosworth, that they were his servants, not his masters. After the fortuitous death of Northumberland in 1489, the Earl of Surrey, partially restored and totally dependent on the king, was sent north as his unofficial lieutenant. Only in 1501, after Fox and Surrey were recalled to the court, was a council in the north reconstituted under the presidency of Thomas Savage, Archbishop of York. Whether acting through his household servants, peers or senior clergy, Henry enforced his own personal authority on the north.22 In this respect, he continued what Richard III had instituted. But in the north-east of England, on the basis of his own landed estate, he effected a major change of policy and removed one of the primary causes of political instability.23 Central supervision of government and a constant watch on all his subjects were the hallmarks of Henry’s reign. Whether personally or through council, the king kept his finger on the pulse and let little pass unnoticed. Thus, to take a routine example, in 1499 the king himself examined the indentures of Sir Richard Cholmondley

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and Sir Thomas Darcy as border commissioners, and, as Richard Fox (Keeper of the Privy Seal, responsible for completing them) reported, ‘at the sight thereof hath found divers and many things therein that he hath caused to be amended’.24 The king maintained a direct oversight over everyday matters of government. He also kept a keen watch on his own servants. His chamberlain, Lord Daubeney was fined for embezzlement of the Calais garrison wages and removed from the captaincy. Sir Richard Empson was not able to slip through an appointment to office for life, but saw the king amend the grant to ‘during pleasure’.25 As Mr Davies expressed it, Henry employed ‘a nicely judged lack of generosity in dealing with his supporters’.26 Everyone, friend and foe alike, felt the force of Henry’s rule. At the heart of Henry’s government lay the systematic exploitation of bonds and recognizances to control his nobles and servants. This was a process whereby the subject entered into a written obligation to perform a duty or ensure good behaviour with a penalty clause, in the form of a debt to be paid in the event of non-compliance. It became a useful source of income as fines were racked up for the slightest transgressions, but the system’s primary purpose was to bind Englishmen to the new regime. Exploited from the very beginning of the reign to ensure loyalty from potential rebels, especially in Richard III’s heartland, bonds and recognizances were soon used in almost every government transaction and especially to ensure the proper performance of royal offices such as sheriffs or constables of castles.27 Henry VII was not as ruthless, consistent or as continuously successful as this brief account implies. His method of divide and rule created crises and tensions in some parts of the kingdom and stored up trouble for his successor in others.28 But by ceaseless vigilance and unrelenting pressure on all his subjects, great and small, he made himself respected, feared and obeyed. His policy represented a major departure from the policy of Edward IV. However, it goes too far to suggest that he had no understanding of the English political system, that he nearly threw away a strong position created by Edward IV and, by riding roughshod over the interests and expectations of the ruling élites, nearly wrecked the monarchy.29 For one, he had a team of very capable and knowledgeable councillors in his service, who conducted the day-to-day business of government under his supervision. They, in effect, instituted Fortescue’s ‘new foundation’. By the end of the reign conciliar government was fully established. A new kind of



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interventionist and supervisory kingship was established.30 Secondly, while Henry was a hard and despotic master, he faced an uphill struggle to impose his personal authority on a kingdom to which he had a weak title and in which there was little personal attachment to him. Thirdly, as has been recently proposed, it may be that the novelty of his kingship, influenced by French practice, lay in a different political morality which openly accepted intrigue and double-dealing as normal: the kind of politics later dissected by Machiavelli. If the king wished to rule in the French fashion, as the Spanish ambassador Pedro Ayala commented, it was the style of politics not of government that he had in mind.31 The monarchy which emerged was different from the monarchy of Edward IV, but it was not necessarily worse. One needs to be careful not to overemphasize, for good or ill, the novelty of Henry VII’s kingship. For the most part, his policies and practices had been tried before. Richard II had attempted to revert to household government. Henry V had used similar devices to assert his authority over his mighty subjects. Henry VII followed, with more lasting success, in the footsteps of earlier kings. In so far as Henry VII, ruling a more self-contained realm, asserted his power over mighty subjects, controlled the abuses of retaining, intervened more directly in the localities and reimposed his feudal rights, he began to reverse some of the steps of Edward III which had brought subjects more fully into partnership with the Crown and had made successful kingship more dependent on the personal qualities of the monarch. But England at the end of his reign was not socially or constitutionally a different kingdom from England in the middle of the fourteenth century. And there was no certainty that the direction he had taken would be maintained after he died. The joyous accession of Henry VIII demonstrated, paradoxically, that Henry VII had successfully established a new dynasty, even though the political nation was relieved to be rid of its founder. The new king’s early acts harking back to the style of Edward III suggested that his mode of kingship would be short-lived. On coming to the throne, Henry VIII instituted an aristocratic revival and immediately re-embarked on a traditional foreign policy of aggression towards France. In his first years Henry VIII revealed all the characteristics of an old-style English king secure on his throne. His confidence and behaviour may have demonstrated that the Wars of the Roses were effectively over, but they did not suggest that England had taken on a new course. That Henry VII’s style of kingship subsequently became

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the hallmark of sixteenth-century monarchy was due to the underlying continuity of conciliar service and the willingness of his son to leave the details of government in the hands of a succession of able ministers committed to extending the reach of royal administration. These men, especially Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, took English monarchy further down the road which led eventually to the separation of the king’s rule from the king’s person. Their influence, and the impact of the Break with Rome later in Henry VIII’s reign, wrenched the kingdom into a new and unfamiliar world in which the Wars of the Roses faded into the past.

Chapter 7: The European Context of the Wars

International Relations The Wars of the Roses were part of a common north-western European phenomenon of internal political conflict and civil war in the second half of the fifteenth century. The kingdoms of the Atlantic seaboard were all part of an interlocking cultural, commercial and political network, which meant that what happened in one had important repercussions for the others. Thus events in England were watched closely on the continent, and vice versa. Spies and embassies reported continually on what was happening in each other’s affairs. Rulers in one country plotted endlessly to foment trouble to their own advantage in another. England’s weakness provided opportunities for her neighbours to profit at her expense. At the same time, English rulers sought to exploit divisions within neighbouring countries for their own advantage and looked abroad for alliances to strengthen their hands in their own internal rivalries. International relations were extremely volatile. The civil wars which engulfed England, France, Scotland, the Netherlands and Spain were all at critical moments intensified by foreign intervention; they were part of an interlinked chain of civil wars in north-western Europe.1 At the beginning of the Wars, England’s affairs were most closely bound up with the affairs of her nearest neighbours – France, Scotland and the duchy of Burgundy, which incorporated the Netherlands, so vital for her commercial interests. Relationships with the Hanseatic League, a confederation of north German and Scandinavian trading cities, were also of significance because of commercial competition in the Baltic and English piracy in the Channel against the Hanseatic

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fleet, which passed annually to and from the Bay of Biscay. After the English lost the commercial war with the League, settled by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1474, relationships with the Hanse were less important.2 But following the accession of Isabella to Castile in that same year, and her husband Ferdinand to Aragon five years later, a new European power emerged which had an increasingly important impact on English affairs. There was relatively little foreign intervention in the wars of 1459–61. The involvement of the Papacy, through the intrigues of Francesco Coppini, Pius II’s legate, on behalf of the Yorkists, and probably in the interests of the duchy of Milan, had little long-term significance.3 Before his death in 1460, James II of Scotland made the biggest impact. Vainly seeking to put together an international alliance against England, he still went ahead with his own attacks on England in 1455 and 1456. Rebuffed by the Duke of York in 1456, James agreed to a truce in 1457. But in July 1460, taking advantage of the civil war, he laid siege to Roxburgh, and, although he was accidentally killed when a cannon exploded, the castle was captured. Queen Margaret’s plight after Towton gave the regent Mary of Guelders the opportunity for an even greater coup. On 25 April the queen surrendered Berwick in exchange for Scottish aid. For the next three years, Lancastrian resistance in Northumberland was sustained by Scottish assistance. In June 1461 Scots as well as Lancastrians attacked Carlisle, which Margaret had ceded as well. Edward’s response was to ally himself with Scottish dissidents until, in 1462, he concluded a truce with the regent. A year later, however, in June 1463, a large-scale Scottish attack in concert with the Lancastrians was launched and Norham was besieged. Edward IV planned a full-scale counterattack, for which he was voted a subsidy by parliament. In the event, no major military operation was launched. Indeed, a new truce was agreed in December which effectively ended this phase of Anglo-Scottish hostilities.4 The Scots, however, could be well pleased; they had retaken Roxburgh and Berwick, thus immeasurably strengthening their grip on the border, and had successfully sustained three years of opposition to Edward IV. Charles VII of France and Philip the Good of Burgundy were less willing than James II of Scotland to take advantage of English divisions at the end of Henry VI’s reign. While the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick had engaged in dubiously loyal discussions with the king and duke in the late 1450s, the French and Burgundians only became



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drawn into English affairs after Edward IV became king. In 1462, after the accession of Louis XI, Queen Margaret set off to France to seek his support. This was promised in a treaty of alliance sealed at Tours in June. But little that was tangible came of it, and in the following October Louis XI agreed a truce with Edward IV. From 1463 Margaret and her son Edward maintained a Lancastrian court in exile, but their prospects became increasingly bleaker until Warwick fell out with Edward IV. Of decisive significance for later developments was the marriage alliance made in 1468 between Edward IV and Charles the Bold, the new and belligerent Duke of Burgundy. During the 1460s relationships between Louis XI and his greatest subjects, especially the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, worsened. The marriage of Margaret of York to Charles the Bold, along with an Anglo-Breton treaty, marked the return of traditional alliance patterns in northern Europe. Nothing came of the triple alliance of 1468 as an anti-French coalition, but it was clear that the lines had been drawn. Thus in 1468 Louis XI supported Lancastrian plots in England, particularly in the form of sponsoring a landing in Wales by Jasper Tudor.5 The wars of 1470 and 1471 were in part a manifestation of these diplomatic developments. As early as 1466, there were rumours circulating in France that Louis XI was seeking to suborn Warwick. The Earl, who used his position as Captain of Calais to maintain independent lines of communication with France and Burgundy throughout the 1460s, had to clear his name of involvement in the 1468 plotting. The contacts were already in place when he turned in 1470 to a Louis XI more than eager to effect a reconciliation between him and Queen Margaret. The initial success of the invasion of 1470 and the Readeption of Henry VI not only reopened the dynastic civil war in England, but also heralded a European war. Since 1465 Louis had been smarting at the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of the League of the Public Weal, especially the surrender of the Somme towns to the duchy of Burgundy. Part of the price of his support was English agreement to a military alliance against Charles of Burgundy. In February 1471, Warwick honoured his commitment by declaring war on Burgundy. The immediate effect of the declaration of war was to stimulate a hitherto hesitant Charles the Bold into instant backing of an expedition to England under the exiled Edward IV, for which he provided 36 ships and a few hundred men. Edward also secured the support of the Hanseatic League, since 1468 at war with England under Warwick’s inspiration, the price of which were the concessions

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he subsequently made to them. Thus the Readeption was achieved by means of the King of France and the restoration of Edward IV by licence of the Duke of Burgundy and the Hanseatic League. The fighting in England in 1471 was an extension of the conflict being fought between the rival princes of France. Between the summer of 1470 and the spring of 1471, the Wars of the Roses were part of a wider European war, in which, it could be said, Louis XI, as well as the house of Lancaster, was defeated on the fields of Barnet and Tewkesbury.6 After 1471, when Edward IV was at last firmly established on the throne, there was less reason for foreign powers to hope to profit from English divisions. Indeed, by taking the initiative and mounting an invasion of France in 1475, Edward IV forced Louis XI back on the defensive. Moreover, by the end of the reign, having fought a successful war against Scotland, which in 1482 saw the recovery of Berwick so shamefully surrendered in 1461, Edward IV was in a strong position to dictate terms to his northern neighbours.7 All was changed by Richard III’s usurpation. Although Richard III was able to maintain pressure on the Scots and secure a favourable truce in 1484, he was faced by continental neighbours once more in a volatile state. France was passing through a minority, in which rival factions were jockeying for power. The new Habsburg regime in the Burgundian territories was faced by unrest and rebellion; and the duchy of Brittany, where Henry Tudor was in exile, was divided between pro- and anti -French factions. It was Henry Tudor’s good fortune that when he escaped from Brittany to France in October 1484, he was welcomed by a group anxious to promote his cause. While official backing was withdrawn at the eleventh hour, Henry was still able to recruit mercenaries and a fleet in Normandy with which he launched his invasion of England in August 1485. He was particularly fortunate that disbanded troops who had recently returned from campaigning in the Netherlands were at his disposal. Had he arrived in France any earlier, or delayed leaving any longer, he might not have found support forthcoming. While, subsequently, the French would claim, and Henry VII strenuously deny, that they had made him King of England, the circumstances in France in the summer of 1485 had made his expedition possible. As a result, France gained a four-year respite from English hostility.8 What was sauce for the goose in 1485 was sauce for the gander thereafter. In 1487 Lambert Simnel was backed by German mercenaries paid for by Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, who gave



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whatever backing she could to successive Yorkist pretenders to the English throne. Perkin Warbeck was initially taken up by Charles VIII of France, who dropped him as part of the terms of the treaty of Etaples with Henry VII in 1492. He had more success with both Scottish and Burgundian support, until 1497 being a significant thorn in Henry VII’s side. Thus the Wars were not only sustained, but also extended by the intervention of foreign powers. The nature and impact of foreign intervention in the Wars of the Roses changed over the years. At first, in the wars of 1459–64, it was marginal; in 1469–71 it became central as the wars were subsumed in a wider European conflict. After 1483 the wars were almost entirely sustained by foreign intervention and became almost completely absorbed in the complex game of international politics. This was, however, never a one-way process. In the early 1470s, Edward IV sought to capitalize on the animosity between Louis XI and Charles the Bold for England’s gain. Between 1479 and 1484 Edward IV and Richard III, for instance, played on the quarrel between James III of Scotland and his brother, Alexander, Duke of Albany, to advance the English cause north of the borders. And Henry VII, in a long tradition, sought to exploit factional rivalries within the duchy of Brittany to his advantage. English kings were able to take advantage of disputes within Scotland and France because those kingdoms, too, were wracked by civil war. England’s Neighbours As we have seen, Philippe de Commynes commented that England, of all the countries he knew, was the best governed and most peaceful.9 We cannot now judge whether he was right, but extended periods of internal strife, in some kingdoms involving dynastic as well as factional struggle, were characteristic not only of England, but also of Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Aragon and Castile. All these kingdoms were prone to similar strains, and everywhere the maintenance of domestic peace was precarious because it depended on the capacity of an individual hereditary monarch personally to hold together a fragmented and decentralized polity with severely limited resources, negligible armed force and skeletal bureaucracies at his disposal. The Wars of the Roses were not a uniquely English phenomenon: ‘inward war’ was the common experience of the kingdoms of Western Europe

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in the later fifteenth century. The Wars need to be seen in this wider contemporary context. For England’s closest neighbour, Scotland, the fifteenth century has long been a byword for conflict, murder and civil war. Recently, however, as with England, the interpretation of its fifteenth-century history has been substantially revised.10 Scotland was a tiny kingdom. Its population of some 400,000 was but a sixth of that of England, and minute compared with France. In a polity in which the royal revenues rarely surpassed £8000 per annum, and in which the king had to rely utterly on the willing cooperation of his greater subjects for the administration of justice and the defence of the realm, it was intensely critical that the king enjoyed good relationships with them. The earls, lords and lairds of Scotland enjoyed a degree of local autonomy not found south of the border. In many ways the king presided over a federation. When one also bears in mind that in the fifteenth century every king came to the throne as a child and that there were more than 40 years of minority or conciliar rule, it is not surprising that successive kings found it difficult to assert their authority. Two met violent deaths at the hands of their own subjects: James I was assassinated in 1437 and James III killed in battle in 1488. Yet successive Stewart kings – James I, James II and James III – were in their different ways effective rulers. While all faced plots and rebellions – especially James II in dealing with the Douglases in 1450–55, James III in coping with his disgruntled brother the Duke of Albany in 1479–84 and, finally, in the baronial revolt which led to his death at Sauchieburn – never did the whole kingdom slide into sustained civil war. James III’s career and reign have been likened to that of Richard III; but, in many ways, that unfortunate king was more like Richard II. Moreover, although two kings were killed (James I and James III), both were succeeded without challenge by their heirs.11 For all its weaknesses, the Scottish monarchy, indeed, the kingdom as a whole, had a greater resilience than England. If a comparison in Scottish medieval history is to be drawn with the English Wars of the Roses, it lies in the civil war between Bruce and Balliol in the first half of the fourteenth century, which was overtaken by English intervention. Indeed, it has been plausibly suggested that the memory of the Wars of Independence acted as a powerful restraint on Scottish kings and nobles of the fifteenth century, who were only too conscious of the advantage the English might take of their own internal divisions.12 Thus between 1479 and 1484, English attempts to take advantage of



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the quarrels of James III and Albany within the royal family consistently failed because on every occasion, intervention led to a healing of the breach in the interest of the greater good of the kingdom. In many ways, the kingdom of France was like the kingdom of Scotland, only on a grander scale. It, too, was fragmented and decentralized. The king exercised direct control over only a small part of his vast kingdom. Most of it was ruled by appanaged princes who enjoyed considerable legal, financial and military autonomy. These included not only the duchies of Aquitaine (until 1453), Brittany (until 1491) and Burgundy (the duchy itself until 1477), but also others, such as Anjou, Bourbon, Orleans and Navarre. As in Scotland the effective enforcement of royal authority depended to a large extent on the mystique of kingship and personal competence.13 But, perhaps because the kingdom was so much larger and the great subjects so much more powerful, France was more prone to civil war. France’s misfortunes during the fifteenth century, so much greater than either England or Scotland, stemmed to a considerable degree from the madness of Charles VI who, after 30 years of insanity, died in 1422. Rivalry for control of the kingdom between factions headed by the Dukes of Burgundy, on the one hand, and the Dukes of Armagnac and Orleans, on the other, led in 1410 to intermittent civil war which lasted until 1435. This internal strife was compounded by the intervention of Henry V of England. On one level, Henry V acted as a French subject, for he was Duke of Aquitaine and in 1417–19 successfully recovered possession of the duchy of Normandy. But Henry V also revived the Plantagenet claim to the throne of France and was adopted as heir in 1420, while his son was crowned king in 1431. Henry V transformed a civil war into a dynastic conflict, for he was, from 1420, the candidate of the Burgundian faction, which fought with fluctuating enthusiasm for his cause for 15 years. From a French point of view, the wars of 1420–35 were a struggle between rival parties for the throne itself. Only after the rapprochement between Burgundy and the Valois king, Charles VII, did the struggle unequivocally take on the character of a war to rid the kingdom of the English.14 After the final expulsion of the English from Normandy in 1450 and Aquitaine in 1453, the problem of Burgundy still remained. Although the conglomerate of duchies, counties and lordships held by the Valois Duke of Burgundy in the Netherlands and eastern France have been described as a state, they never acquired the

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coherence, autonomy or status of a separate kingdom. In the last resort, the Duke of Burgundy was a subject of the King of France in Flanders, Artois, Picardy and the duchy of Burgundy, as well as of the Empire in the county of Burgundy and his other dominions. The ambition of the Dukes of Burgundy, especially Charles the Bold, effective ruler from 1464 to 1477, ensured the periodic revival of civil war in France. In 1465 Louis XI faced an alliance of dissident princes, led by Charles, calling themselves the League of the Public Weal. The climax of several months of civil war was the bloody battle of Montlhéry, which left Burgundy with the advantage. On this occasion, Edward IV was too weak to be able to intervene to English advantage. Fighting between Louis XI and Charles the Bold was renewed in 1470, 1472 and 1475. Edward IV’s attempt to exploit the continuing enmity by the construction of a grand alliance and invasion in 1475 foundered when Charles privately came to terms with Louis. It was not until after the Duke’s death in January 1477 that Louis launched an all-out assault on his French territories. The duchy of Burgundy was rapidly overrun and subsequently retained. All-out war between Louis and Maximilian of Austria, the regent of the Burgundian inheritance, relieved by two truces in 1478–79 and 1480–81, lasted until a treaty of peace was agreed in December 1482 by which Artois, as well as the duchy of Burgundy, was to be ceded to France.15 Paradoxically, it was in this period that England could have secured a significant advantage, but did not. The opportunity for the King of England’s brother to become Duke of Burgundy by marrying Charles’s daughter and heiress was passed up because Edward IV would not trust George of Clarence with the resources of the duchy at his disposal. Four years later the new Duke, Maximilian, was begging for an alliance against Louis XI, which Edward turned down because he judged his pension from the French king to be more valuable After the death of Louis XI in 1483, during the minority of Charles VIII, matters were compounded by renewed factional conflict at court between the regent, Anne of Beaujeu (the king’s aunt), and Louis, Duke of Orleans (the heir presumptive), and by the crisis of the Breton succession. The government of Anne of Beaujeu faced conspiracies and rebellions of dissident lords, inspired by Louis of Orleans until he was taken prisoner at the battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier in 1488. The objective of the government in Brittany was to integrate the duchy more fully into the kingdom either by force or by marriage treaty. It faced determined opposition from



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a powerful group of Breton nobles. The Breton war, which began in 1487 and continued, with a brief interlude in the latter months of 1488, until 1491, coalesced with the Orleanist and Burgundian conflict. Maximilian of Austria revoked the treaty of Arras and joined Breton and other enemies of Anne of Beaujeu in 1487, 1488 and 1490–91. At the same time, Maximilian himself faced revolt from the cities of Flanders, being for a time held captive by the Brugeois in 1488, and the French government intervened in Flanders to sustain and support the rebels. Henry VII, seeing his own opportunity, twice intervened in Brittany, once ‘off the record’, but on neither occasion to any effect. Civil strife was as severe in France in the 1480s as in any other western European kingdom in the second half of the fifteenth century. It was ended in 1491 when Charles VIII restored Orleans to favour and, later in the year, married Anne of Brittany. In 1493 the Burgundian war was brought to a similar end by the treaty of Senlis, in which Artois and other lordships were restored to Burgundy on the condition that the young Duke Philip do homage. Thus in the early 1490s a period of French civil war was brought to an end only on the eve of, and to prepare the ground for, Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy.16 In Spain matters were similarly unsettled.17 Spain comprised three kingdoms: Aragon, Castile and Portugal, two of which (Aragon and Castile) later united to form the kingdom of Spain. Both Aragon and Castile were torn by civil war in the second half of the fifteenth century. Aragon, based on Catalan commercial wealth, was a leading Mediterranean power. But between 1462 and 1472, it was reduced to impotence by civil war which culminated in the siege of Barcelona. The war combined elements of a popular revolt and a conflict between the old contractual traditions of Catalonia and a new drive towards absolutism introduced by King Juan II. In neighbouring Castile, a kingdom recently carved out of the reconquest of central Spain from the Moors, absolute authority was already well established. Nevertheless, this kingdom, too, was plunged into civil war between 1460 and 1480. Castile was a huge territory, in which the power of the monarchy depended on alliances with the quasi-independent descendants of the conquistadores, who had extended powers wider than any other of the western European aristocracies in the later fourteenth century. More markedly than has ever been claimed for England, the civil wars in later fifteenth-century Castile were an escalation of violent feuds between these truly overmighty subjects.

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Yet the first civil war (1464–74) also resulted from the incompetence of the king, Enrico IV (d. 1474), called the impotent because of the later slur that he could not possibly have fathered his daughter Juana. Enrico was, in some respects, not unlike Henry VI of England and under his slack rule factional rivalry slid into open war. In 1465 his enemies deposed him in effigy and attempted, unsuccessfully, to replace him with his child brother, Alfonso (d. 1468). When Enrico died in 1474 he left a disputed succession between his only surviving daughter, Juana, and his half-sister, Isabella, who had already married Ferdinand, the new King of Aragon. Between 1475 and 1477, they fought and defeated the supporters of Juana to secure control of Castile and fought off Portuguese intervention. By 1480 Isabella and Ferdinand were triumphant. The history of the civil wars in Castile is further reminiscent of the Wars of the Roses in the manner in which, subsequently, Isabella, the victor, was presented as the saviour of her kingdom; the one who had rescued it from anarchy. Moreover, in order to justify her disputed succession, the reputation of the unfortunate Enrico IV was blackened to much the same effect as was Richard III blackened by Henry VII.18 As in England, however, it is debatable whether the civil wars were as destructive or the previous kings as disastrous as the victor claimed. The fact is that the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, went on to achieve the expulsion of the Moors from Granada, the unification of their kingdoms and the conquest of the Americas. It was in their ‘Golden Age’ that the foundations of Spain’s future greatness were laid. Their later success, like the Tudors, vindicated their dubious rise to power. The late medieval monarchies of Europe were fundamentally fragile and prone to civil disorder. Political stability and harmony depended ultimately on the personal capacity of individual kings. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the western kingdoms all endured upheaval and civil war as a result of disputed, ineffective or overbearing rule, all exacerbated by foreign intervention. The Wars of the Roses were part of a common north-western European experience before a general revival of monarchical authority which took place at the end of the century. The disorder and political instability suffered by England were comparable with the instability suffered by neighbouring kingdoms. This fact did not escape Philippe de Commynes who, after giving a brief account of the Wars of the Roses, commented that God sets up enemies for princes who forget



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whence their fortunes come, as ‘you have seen and see every day in England, Burgundy and other places’.19 This era in European history has conventionally been seen as the climax of an age of crisis and decline: the death throes of the Middle Ages before the emergence of the modern state. On the contrary, it has been suggested by Dr Watts, it was part of a longer transition in the growth of medieval polities that stretches back over a century and a half. It was an era which witnessed both the extension of the reach of monarchical government and the expansion of shared notions of communities of the realm within their kingdoms. By 1450 a group of fixed, self-contained, clearly delineated polities had emerged in western Europe which were then engulfed by prolonged civil wars. These civil wars gave vent to the internal tensions and stresses created by these changes. They had common causes, common forms and common outcomes in England, France and the Spanish kingdoms. Public dissatisfaction was vocal, leading magnates were discontented and the crowns failed at first to respond effectively. But out of conflict emerged strengthened kingdoms, in which their monarchs exercised more exclusive power and authority as well as a rule grounded on the expectation that they would promote the well-being of their subjects. These crises completed the process whereby these stable, more clearly bounded regnal polities came into being over the later Middle Ages. Civil disorder was thus not the end-game in a long period of late-medieval decline and decay, but the working-out and resolution of tensions arising from the growth and clearer delineation of the western European monarchies as they developed new structures. The Wars of the Roses have for some time been seen as the climax of a much wider late-medieval trend in European politics which led to the self-destruction of the feudal order. This hypothesis breaks decisively away from nineteenth-century perceptions of nation-state formation in their wake and as a consequence of the Renaissance, which have long dominated modern historiography. In so doing, it offers an interpretation which further challenges the conventional and still influential division between medieval and modern ages at the end of the fifteenth century, and in England in particular at the end of the Wars of the Roses.20 The era of internal disorder came rapidly to an end in the 1490s. Nowhere was this the result of fundamental social changes. Internally, the change is related to the emergence of effective and energetic rulers, nowhere more so than in the case of the ‘Catholic Monarchs’

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in Spain. But the change is also closely linked to the transformation of the military and diplomatic map of Europe. In both France and Spain significant steps were taken towards the reunification of the kingdoms after 1480. In 1482 France recovered the duchy of Burgundy from the Habsburg dukes; in 1491 Brittany was absorbed. In Spain the conquest of Granada, the last Moorish sultanate, was completed in 1492. These developments were the prelude to the shift of the focal point of international conflict to the Mediterranean. France had long enjoyed claims to the duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples. In 1494, having made peace with England and Burgundy, Charles VIII launched his invasion of Italy to make good his Angevin claim to the throne of Naples. This was a direct challenge to Aragonese interests; in 1496 an Aragonese counterattack recovered Naples for the ruling dynasty. From thenceforth Italy was, for two generations, the focus of European international politics. The rulers of France and Spain brought a new degree of internal order as they focused the energies of their greater subjects on the wars between them and developed the mechanisms and agencies to prosecute them. England, on the periphery, although wooed by both sides, did not command the resources in modern warfare to be more than a bit-player, and until the middle of the sixteenth century, the rivalries between the northwestern powers of Europe were played out in Italy rather than within their own kingdoms. In these circumstances, the era of late-fifteenthcentury civil strife in north-western Europe came to an end.

Conclusion

A central feature of this study has been the thesis that there were two Wars of the Roses of contrasting characters: the wars between Lancaster and York of 1459–71 and the wars between York and Tudor of 1483–87. The second of these wars were much as recent historians have described the Wars as a whole: a sporadic succession of executions, rebellions and occasional battles. The first, however, involved two separate phases of sustained fighting and complete disruption of normal political life. By any reckoning, in terms of the scale, length and degree of involvement of the political nation, they were major civil wars. In so far as it is possible to trace deep-rooted causes relating to developments in government and society stretching back for a century, these lay in the broader changes in society which increased the expectations of monarchy. The significance of these changes as long-term causes will remain controversial. It was not bastard feudalism and the retaining of baronial armies as such which led inevitably to the Wars of the Roses. Bastard feudalism was but a form of the customary working of patronage in a patriarchal society. It did not spawn hordes of retainers with nothing to do but brawl and fight each other. The question facing historians remains whether the Crown brought its subjects into a constructive partnership in the later Middle Ages as a response to the expansion of the demands placed upon it, or whether, in order to win support for its ambitions in France, it conceded authority and power. Yet, it has been argued above, the consequence was in an important sense the same: the pressure on the personal aptitude of individual kings was increased. An inadequate king was more likely to face subjects whose might overshadowed him. By the mid-fifteenth century what was, anyway,

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always a precarious balance difficult to maintain had been made even more reliant on the personal qualities of the ruler himself. This was not itself enough to cause the breakdown of civil order. Matters were aggravated by economic depression, financial stress and defeat abroad. Civil war ultimately occurred because of the utter unfitness of Henry VI to rule. A competent king would have faced difficulties after 1450: a physically and mentally weak king was overwhelmed. While not creating the ‘very chaos’ pictured by Sir Thomas Smith, the first wars were the most serious civil wars to afflict England between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. The second wars were less socially disruptive. But the rapid changes of regime between 1483 and 1485 may have more seriously weakened the authority of the Crown than the events of 1459–71. It was then, too, that polarization between north and south briefly threatened to become a deeper regional division within the realm. Yet paradoxically, while the authority of individual monarchs was undermined by the rapidity with which the throne changed hands, the prestige of monarchy itself was enhanced. The message that it was only through their legitimate and effective monarchy that the troubles afflicting the kingdom could be overcome was hammered home by successive usurpers. Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII all emphasized the legitimacy of their titles, proclaiming that the abominable disorders which had been associated with their predecessors were the consequence of their illegitimacy. Moreover, in the face of popular, and in the case of Warwick the Kingmaker, noble rebellion in the cause of reform, the view was articulated that only a monarch to which all gave unquestioning obedience could guarantee the common good. The acceptance of this ideology greatly assisted the early Tudors, especially Henry VIII, whose legitimacy as the ultimate successor of Richard II few questioned. Nevertheless, both in terms of past English experience and in terms of contemporary European conditions, these wars were unexceptional in their character. The kingdoms of the west were generally prone to such conflict and instability. Civil war was a more frequent experience of late-medieval than of modern European societies. The sequence of rebellions, threats of deposition and deposition itself in England between 1386 and 1406, especially after 1399, was almost as tumultuous and disruptive as the events between 1450 and 1471. Indeed, one might wonder whether the Wars of the Roses have taken on such a distinctive and dramatic image in English history because,



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whatever their scale, they proved to be the last of such characteristic medieval civil upheavals. It is tempting to think that civil wars of their kind ceased because the monarchy became more powerful, more centralized and more institutionalized, and thereby less dependent on the personal qualities of a particular king. It is tempting, but probably wrong. However much it may be debated whether Henry VII or Thomas Cromwell was the architect of a distinctive Tudor government, the power of the kings of England nevertheless still remained rudimentary, fragile and ultimately dependent on the assent and cooperation of their subjects. The Tudors were skilled at adapting and improving the existing machinery. Tudor administrators made the established system of mixed monarchy work. However, as the events of the seventeenth century were to show, it was still possible for the system to break down. Perhaps the crucial change in the sixteenth century lay not in what was achieved by, but in what was expected of, royal government. The Wars of the Roses had revealed that politics in the mid-fifteenth century was a public matter. The people, especially the better sort with a modest stake in society, saw themselves as part of the political community and did not hesitate to demand better government for the common good. The call for the crown to act for the common good was endorsed by Warwick the Kingmaker; it became part of the Yorkist platform in 1459–61. While there was a reaction against such direct popular involvement after 1471, all subsequent kings took action and justified policies in terms of the common weal. Through the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI concern for the public good became a central feature of debate and policy. Under Edward VI Warwick the Kingmaker was celebrated in some quarters as a man who lived and died for the commonweal. And from time to time the crown was reminded in pamphlets, by petitioning, through mass protests and in armed rebellion that it needed to take note of the popular will. Thus the assertion, taken for granted in the twenty-first century, that politics are a matter of the public sphere can be traced at least back to the Wars of the Roses. If this claim was denied in government circles and strenuously suppressed at times thereafter, it became an irresistible force after the Reformation. Europeans at the beginning of the twenty-first century expect that civil society should be ordered and law-abiding. A degree of disorder and lawlessness was tolerated in the late fifteenth century that modern western society finds totally unacceptable. It is anachronistic

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to expect our ancestors 500 years ago to share the same expectations as us. Nevertheless, it is arguable that during the sixteenth century subjects, as well as kings, came to desire a more ordered, more centrally controlled and more stable political society. In the light of rising expectations of civil order, what had happened in the later fifteenth century came to be viewed with increasing distaste. The sixteenth-century myth of the Wars of the Roses drew its lasting strength not from the persuasiveness of royal propaganda, but from a more fundamental change of public attitude. There was a genuine fear in Elizabethan England that the kind of civil war experienced before 1487 could happen again. The fear related not so much to what really had happened then as to what was believed could occur now, 100 years later. It existed because Elizabethans accepted that the Crown had an overriding duty to maintain order, dispense impartial justice and secure internal peace against all disrupters great as well as small. It may have been given extra edge by the knowledge that France and the Netherlands were torn apart by fresh wars with religion at their heart. And it took on new force as Elizabeth approached the end of her long reign without an heir apparent. Herein lies the force of Edward Hall’s claim that while all other division and discord flourished, the root cause of disunity, conflict over the source of political authority, had been removed. Dynastic division itself may not have been the fundamental cause, but the idea of the warring roses neatly symbolized the reinforced opinion that there was a divinely ordained supremacy and indivisibility to monarchy, one source of supreme authority in the state, which was not to be challenged. Thus while the Wars of the Roses themselves were not literally the revival of ‘sackage, carnage and wreckage’, the fact that they were portrayed as such as the consequence of dispute over possession of the throne is historically as important. The scale of disobedience, rebellion and anarchy associated with and signified by the idea of the Wars of the Roses was no longer to be tolerated. In political and historical discourse they came, by the end of the sixteenth century, to represent an unacceptable degree of political disorder associated with rebellion against the sanctity of monarchy. As such they also represented a hope and desire for the future. Over the centuries, and long after the monarchy ceased to be the real focus of power, but yet remained the symbol of a united, sovereign state, the Wars of the Roses, as they were perceived in the later sixteenth century, have continued to stand as a shorthand for what, for any era,



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is an unacceptable level of disobedience and disorder; hence their enduring fascination as the typology of anarchy in England’s past. The changing perceptions and expectations about how politics should be conducted and ordered explains why the late fifteenth century continued to be painted in such lurid colours until the twentieth century and, in some quarters, still is. It is in the realm of political attitudes rather than of political behaviour that the Wars of the Roses remain a turning point in English history. In so far as the Crown has come to represent the sovereign state, the absorption of the idea that conflict over possession of the Crown led to anarchy marks a stage in the development of the notion of the omnipotent state. One might also trace back to this invention of the idea of the Wars of the Roses the beginning both of that modern British belief that the state should possess the monopoly of force and of the attitude which deplores the pursuit of any political end by violence. The long-term significance of the Wars of the Roses lies not in what they were in their time, but in what they came to represent, and continue to represent, to the living. In this respect, paradoxically, the continuing misconception as a period of chaos, of a crude struggle for power, and of decades of bloody infighting remains entirely valid.

Notes

Introduction 1. The Sunday Times, 17 July 1977. 2. R.H. Wells, Shakespeare, Politics and the State (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 7. 3. N. Davies, The Isles: A History of Britain (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 437–8; Simon Jenkins, A Short History of England (Profile Books, 2011, pp. 113–114; BBC Radio 4, ‘Shakespeare’s Restless World’ available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01g637c/features/transcript (accessed 8 November 2012). 4. W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1975), p. 54. 5. The best overviews remain A. Goodman, The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452–97 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); idem, The Wars of the Roses: The Soldiers’ Experience (Stroud: Tempus, 2005) and C.D. Ross, The Wars of the Roses (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), esp. ch. 4. John Sadler, Towton: the Battle of Palm Sunday Field (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2011); idem, The Red Rose and the White (Harlow, Longman, 2010), and Andrew Boardman, The Bloodiest Battle (Stroud: Sutton, 2nd edn 2009) are among several recent works concentrating on the military perspective. 6. Glenn Foard and Richard K. Morris, Fields of Conflict (Council for British Archaeology, York, 2011), esp. pp. 81–95 on Barnet, Towton and Bosworth. For Towton see also Tim Sutherland, ‘Killing Time: Challenging Perceptions of Three Medieval Conflicts  – Ferrybridge, Dintingdale and Towton’, Journal of Battlefield Archaeology, 5 (2009), pp. 1–25, drawing upon the work of the Towton Battlefield Archaeological Survey; and for Bosworth Glenn Foard and Anne Curry, Bosworth

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1485: a Battlefield Rediscovered (forthcoming, Oxford: Oxbow), which has resolved the question of where exactly the battle took place. 7. D. Grummitt, ‘The Defence of Calais and the Development of Gunpowder Weaponry in England in the Fifteenth Century’, War in History, 4.3 (2000), pp. 254–72; A.J. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker (London; Continuum, 2007), pp. 180–1. 8. The Arrivall of Edward IV, p. 20; David Santiuste, Edward IV and the Wars of the Roses (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2010), pp. 38–9, 117–20, 125–37; Pollard, Warwick, p. 180; Michael K. Jones, Bosworth 1485: the Psychology of a Battle (Stroud: Tempus, 2002), pp. 162–7. 9. K.B. McFarlane, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, in England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), p. 238. 10. W. Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century (London: George Bell, 1888), p. 287. 11. There is a substantial body of modern scholarship on the economic, social, cultural and religious history of late-fifteenth-century England to which full reference cannot be made here, but see A.J. Pollard, Late-Medieval England, 1399–1509 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp.  169–232 and references therein for works published before the end of the twentieth century. A.J. Pollard, Imagining Robin Hood (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004) sets the early written texts of the outlaw stories in the context of a late-fifteenth-century ‘Merrie England’ largely untouched by civil wars and alarums. P.M. Kendall, The Yorkist Age still provides a vivid revision of the received wisdom, as does R.F.H. Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition: English Society in the Late Middle Ages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970). The seminal work of revision was C.L. Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth Century England (Oxford, 1925).

1  The Wars in History 1. For these views, see especially J.R. Lander, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, in Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), pp. 61–3; McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, in England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), pp. 229, 239; S.B. Chrimes, Lancastrians, Yorkists and Henry VII (London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1966), p. xii. 2. W. Lamont (ed.), The Tudors and Stuarts (London: Sussex Books, 1976), pp. 14–15. 3. M.E. Aston, ‘Richard II and the Wars of the Roses’, in F.R.H. Du Boulay and C.M. Barron (eds), The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack (London: Athlone, 1971), p. 283; Chrimes, Lancastrians, p. xii, note 1.

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4. A. Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. 1 (Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 98, 1939), p. 156. 5. N. Pronay and J. Cox (eds), The Crowland Chronicle Continuations: 1459–1486 (Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1986), pp. 184–5. 6. Aston, ‘Richard II and the Wars of the Roses’, pp. 282–4. 7. S. Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 18–19. 8. Rotuli Parliamentorum, vol. VI, p. 241. 9. Ibid., vol. V, p. 464. 10. E. Hall, The Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), fo. 1. 11. Aston, ‘Richard II and the Wars of the Roses’, pp. 282–3. 12. R.H. Wells, Shakespeare, Politics and the State (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 91–115; John Wilders, The Lost Garden (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 125–51. 13. W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, vol. III, 5th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), p. 632. 14. Sir George Buck, The History of King Richard the Third (1619), A.N. Kincaid (ed.), (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979); H. Walpole, Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III (London, 1768; reprinted with introduction by P.W. Hammond, Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987); C.A. Halsted, Richard III as Duke of Gloucester and King of England, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1844). 15. Stubbs, Constitutional History, vol. III, p. 632. 16. Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of England, Charles Plummer, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885), pp. 1–30. 17. W. Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century (London: George Bell, 1888), pp. 115, 118, 119. 18. Ibid., pp. 260–1. 19. Aston, ‘Richard II and the Wars of the Roses’, p. 285. 20. J.R. Green, A Short History of the English People, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1916), pp. 288–90. 21. J.E.T. Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Sonnenschein, 1886), pp. 240–2, 326, 334. 22. C.L. Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), pp. 48, 63–9. 23. See G.L. Harriss, ‘Introduction’, in McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), esp. p. xix. 24. McFarlane, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, in ibid., pp. 231–61. 25. Lander, Crown and Nobility, p. 56. 26. C.D. Ross, The Wars of the Roses (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), p. 176. 27. John Gillingham, The Wars of the Roses: Peace and Conflict in Fifteenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld, 1981), pp. 14, 15.



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28. R.L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1966), pp. 8–28; M.H. Keen, England in the Late Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1973), pp. 449–51. 29. D.M. Loades, Politics and the Nation, 1450–1660 (Brighton: Harvester, 1974), pp. 11, 100–2. 30. Goodman, The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, pp. 3, 218–20. 31. J.C. Wedgwood, History of Parliament: Biographies of the Members of the Commons House, 1439–1509 (London: HMSO, 1936); J.S. Roskell, The Commons and Their Speakers in English Parliaments, 1376–1523 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965). Wedgwood’s history is soon to be superseded by a new study of parliament in the fifteenth century edited by L.S. Clark. 32. M.C. Carpenter, ‘Gentry and Community in Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), pp. 340–80, and The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c.1437–1509 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 47–66; G.L. Harriss, ‘Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late-Medieval England’, Past and Present, 138 (1993), pp. 28–57, and ‘The Dimensions of Politics’, in R.H. Britnell and A.J. Pollard (eds), The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late-Medieval Politics and Society (Stroud: Sutton, 1995), pp. 1–20. 33. As for instance in Michael Hicks, English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century(Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), pp. 85–91; and David Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 156–64. 34. M.C. Carpenter, ‘Political and Constitutional History: Before and After McFarlane’, in Britnell and Pollard, McFarlane Legacy, pp. 175–206, and Wars of the Roses, pp. 21–6, 41–4; M.A. Hicks, ‘Idealism in Late-Medieval Politics’, in idem, Richard III and his Rivals: Magnates and their Motives in the Wars of the Roses (London: Hambledon Press), 1991), pp. 41–60; R.E. Horrox, ‘Personalities and Politics’, in A.J. Pollard (ed.), The Wars of the Roses (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 89–109; E. Powell, ‘After “After McFarlane”: The Poverty of Patronage and the Case for Constitutional History’, in D.J. Clayton et al. (eds), Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Late-Medieval History (Stroud: Sutton, 1994); J.L. Watts, ‘Polemic and Politics in the 1450s’, in M. Kekewich et al., The Politics of Fifteenth Century England: John Vale’s Book (Stroud: Sutton, 1995), pp. 3–42; idem, ‘Ideas, Principles and Politics’, in A.J. Pollard (ed.), The Wars of the Roses, pp. 110–33, and R.A. Griffiths The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Ernest Benn, 1981), pp. 1–12, 34; Michael Hicks, The Wars of the Roses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 121–3, 125–6. 35. An English Chronicle, 1377–1461, ed. William Marx (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), pp. lxxxix–ciii; Helen Maurer, ‘De-Legitimizing Lancaster: the Yorkist use of Gendered Propaganda during the Wars of

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the Roses’, in Douglas L. Biggs and others, Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 169–87; A.J. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 4–6; L. Visser-Fuchs, ‘Warwick by Himself’, Publication du Centre Européen d’études Bourgignonnes (XIVe–XVIes, 41 (2001). 36. Jonathan Hughes, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), pp. 259–61; Alison Hanham, ‘The Mysterious Affair at Crowland Abbey’, The Ricardian, 18 (2008), pp. 16–18; The Historical Collections of a London Citizen, ed. J. Gairdner (Camden, new series, xvii, 1876), pp. 214, 216; Catherine Nall, ‘Perceptions of Financial Mismanagement and the English Diagnosis of Defeat’, in The Fifteenth Century, 7 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), pp. 119–36; A.J. Pollard, ‘Dominic Mancini’s Narrative of the Events of 1483’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, xxxviii (1994), pp. 152–63, reprinted in idem, The Worlds of Richard III (Stroud: Tempus, 2001), pp. 33–44. 37. Lander, Crown and Nobility, p. 94. For an introduction to the record sources, see M.A. Hicks, ‘The Sources’, in Pollard (ed.), Wars of the Roses, pp. 20–40 38. Goodman, Wars of the Roses, pp. 5, 8; McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, p. 240; Gillingham, Wars of the Roses, p. 254; Ross, Wars of the Roses, p. 93; Hicks, Wars of the Roses, pp 4–6.

2  The Course of the Wars 1. Unless otherwise noted, reference for this section of the narrative should be made to the following: R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Ernest Benn, 1981); Part 3, ‘The Approach of Civil War, 1453–1461’, J.L. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Helen E. Maurer, Margaret of Anjou; Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003); P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 1411–1460 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); M.A. Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): and idem, The Wars of the Roses (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 2. This point is stressed in A.J. Pollard, ‘The Last of the Lancastrians’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1983), p. 204. 3. See below, pp. 7–9. 4. Griffiths (Henry VI, pp. 772–808) dates Queen Margaret’s capture of complete control of the court from November 1458; Maurer (Margaret of Anjou, p. 127) suggests that the queen was influential behind the scenes from 1456, but ‘did not emerge as the acknowledged and avowed leader of a genuine Lancastrian party ‘until after the battle of Northampton in



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1460. Hicks (Wars of the Roses) argues that she had little influence at all until that date; Helen Castor, She-Wolves (London: faber and faber, 2010), pp. 353–62 concurs with Maurer. 5. In addition to the works cited in note 1, for these years see C.L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward IV, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1923), which provides the greater detail; C.D. Ross, Edward IV (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974; reissued New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Hannes Kleineke, Edward IV (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009) and A.J. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame (London: Continuum, 2007). 6. R.A. Griffiths, ‘The Sense of Dynasty in the Reign of Henry VI’, in C.D. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979), pp. 30–1; M.K. Jones, ‘Edward IV, the Earl of Warwick and the Yorkist Claim to the Throne’, Historical Research, 70 (1997), pp. 342–352. 7. J.R. Lander, ‘Marriage and Politics in the Fifteenth Century’, in Crown and Nobility, pp. 94–126, argued that the Woodvilles were not excessively rewarded. M.A. Hicks, ‘The Changing Role of the Wydevilles in Yorkist Politics to 1483’, in Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power, pp. 60–73, concluded that their influence and gains were excessive. 8. R.A. Griffiths and R.S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985), p. 85. 9. For the reign of Richard III see in particular C.D. Ross, Richard III (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981; reissued New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); R.E. Horrox, Richard III: A Study of Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); A.J. Pollard, Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (Stroud: Sutton, 1991); M.A. Hicks, Richard III: The Man behind the Myth (1991); J. Gillingham (ed.), Richard III: A Medieval Kingship (London: Collins and Brown, 1993); and David Hipshon, Richard III (Abingdon, Routledge, 2011). For the reign of Henry VII, see S.B. Chrimes, Henry VII (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972); Sean Cunningham, Henry VII (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); and Mark R Horowitz (ed.), ‘Who Was Henry VII?’, Historical Research, 82: 217 (2009), passim. 10. R.H. Helmholz, ‘The Sons of Edward IV: a Canonical Assessment of the Claim that they were Illegitimate’, in Peter Hammond (ed.), Loyalty, Lordship and Law (Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1986), pp.  91–103 established the skill with which the case was presented, whilst acknowledging that it was never tried in a court of law. Most historians have concluded that the claim was unfounded. However, Michael K Jones, Bosworth 148: the Psychology of a Battle (Stroud: Tempus, 2002) pp. 65–71 has proposed that Edward IV himself was illegitimate, and J. Ashdown-Hill, Eleanor the Secret Queen (Stroud: History Press, 2009) has argued that the king really was married to Eleanor Butler.

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11. M.J. Bennett, Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1987); A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 367–96; Sean Cunningham, ‘Henry VII and Rebellion in North-Eastern England, 1485–1492’, Northern History, 32 (1996), pp. 42–74. 12. Ian Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, 1491–1499 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994) and Anne Wroe, Perkin: A Story of Deception (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). 13. Sean Cunningham, ‘The Last Yorkist Rebellion? Henry VII and the earl of Suffolk, 1499–1501’, in L. Visser-Fuchs (ed.), Richard III and East Anglia (London: Richard III Society, 2010), pp. 69–89; idem, Henry VII, 186–92; James Ross, ‘Sedition and the King “Beyond the Sea”, 1504–08’, The Ricardian, 21 (2011), pp. 47–59. 14. David Grummitt, ‘Household, Politics and Political Morality in the Reign of Henry VII’, Historical Research, 82:217 (2009), pp. 393–402; Thomas Penn, Winter King: the Dawn of Tudor England (London: Allen lane, 2011) offers a vivid account of the last years of Henry’s reign from the perspective of the court. Sir Thomas More wrote a thinly disguised criticism of Henry’s tyranny in Utopia, ed. and trans. Edward Surtz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 43–7. 15. S.J. Gunn, ‘The Accession of Henry VII’, Historical Research, 64 (1991), pp. 278–88.

3  The Character of the Wars 1. N. Pronay and J. Cox (eds), The Crowland Chronicle Continuations, 1459–1486 (Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1986), pp. 184–5. 2. Helen Castor, ‘“Walter Blount was gone to serve Traytours”’, The Sack of Elvaston and the Politics of the North Midlands in 1454’, Midland History, 19 (1994), pp. 21–39; R.A. Griffiths, ‘The hazards of civil war: the Mountford family and the “Wars of the Roses”’, Midland History, 5 (1980), pp. 1–19; Colin Richmond, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Fastolf’s Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 196–210; Helen Castor, Blood and Roses: The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century (London: faber and faber, 2004), pp., 194–212; ; M.K. Jones, ‘Richard III and the Stanleys’, in Rosemary Horrox (ed.), Richard III and the North (Hull : Centre for Regional and Local History, 1986), pp. 37–8; Peter Fleming and Michael Wood, Gloucestershire’s Forgotten Battle: Nibley Green 1470 (Stroud: Tempus, 2003). 3. For the suggestion that Somerset’s loyalty to Henry VI was the key to his behaviour, see M.A. Hicks, ‘Edward IV and Lancastrian Loyalism in the North’, Northern History, 20 (1984), pp. 23–37, esp. p. 29.



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4. James Ross, John de Vere, Thirteenth Earl of Oxford (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), pp. 48–86. 5. R.A. Griffiths, ‘Local Rivalries and National Politics: the Percies, the Nevilles and the duke of Exeter, 1452–1455’, Speculum, 43 (1968), pp. 589–632; A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 245–88; idem, Warwick the Kingmaker; Politics, Power and Fame (London: Continuum, 2007), pp.  52–4; R.L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1966), pp. 84–92, 118–19,165–76; M. Cherry, ‘The Struggle for mid-fifteenth century Devonshire’, in R.A. Griffiths (ed.), Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in later Medieval England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1981), pp. 123–44. 6. Pollard, North-Eastern England, pp. 292–306; Warwick the Kingmaker, p. 66. 7. P.C. Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 1–74; Claire Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), passim; Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 173–4. 8. R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI (London: Benn, 1981), pp. 863, 870; C.D. Ross, Edward IV (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 132. 9. Jane Whittle and S.H. Rigby, ‘England, Popular Politics and Social Conflict’, in S.H. Rigby (ed.), A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 65–78; Christopher Dyer and others (eds), Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages, (Past and Present Supplement, no. 2, 2007), pp. 182–248, especially the essays by Zvi Razi and Jane Whittle; David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 206–92; W. Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford, 2007). 10. G.L. Harriss, ‘The Dimensions of Politics’, in R.H. Britnell and A.J. Pollard (eds), The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Later Medieval Politics and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), p. 14; I.M.W. Harvey, ‘Was there Popular Politics in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Britnell and Pollard, McFarlane Legacy, pp. 155–74;. C.C. Dyer, ‘Taxation and Communities in Late-Medieval England’, in R.H. Britnell and John Hatcher (eds), Progress and Problems in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 168–90; idem, ‘The Political Life of the Fifteenth-Century English Village’, in L.S. Clark and M.C. Carpenter (eds), The Fifteenth Century, IV : Political Culture in Late-Medieval Britain, (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), pp. 135–58; R. Goheen, ‘Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England’, American History Review, 96 (1991), pp. 43–62; R.W. Hoyle, ‘Petitioning in Popular Politics in early-Sixteenth-Century England’,

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Historical Research, 75 (2002), pp. 365–389; Michael Hicks, English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century(Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), pp. 85–91; Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, p. 254; idem, ‘The People, Politics and the Constitution in the Fifteenth Century’ in Richard W. Kaeuper (ed.), Law, Justice and Governance: New Views of Medieval English Constitutionalism (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 11. I.M.W. Harvey, Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. p. 189; An English Chronicle, 1377–1461, ed. William Marx (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), p. 68, Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, p. 156. 12. Montgomery Bohna, ‘Armed Force and Civic Legitimacy in Jack Cade’s Revolt, 1450’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), pp. 572–6, 581–2. My gloss is different. Anthony Goodman, The Wars of the Roses: the Soldiers’ Experience (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), pp. 91–2, 115–25; Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 156–7. 13. Thomas Gascoigne, Loci et Libro Veritatum, ed. J.E.T. Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1881), p. 189; J.L. Watts, ‘The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics’, in Clark and Carpenter, The Fifteenth Century 4, pp. 159–80; idem, ‘Public or Plebs: The Changing meaning of “The Commons”, 1381–1549’, in Huw Pryce and John Watts, Power and Identity in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 242–60; idem, ‘Politics, War and Public Life’, in Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (eds), Gothic: Art for England, 1400–1547 (London: V&A, 2003), pp. 35–6. 14. Hicks, English Political Culture, pp. 198–203. 15. J.P. Gilson, ‘A Defence of the Proscription of the Yorkists in 1459’, English Historical Review, 31 (1911), pp. 515, 518–20; J.L. Watts, ‘Ideas, Principles and Politics’, in A.J. Pollard (ed.), The Wars of the Roses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 128–9; Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 159–60. 16. Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 177–9; 191–210; Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 157–9. 17. C.F. Richmond, ‘Fauconberg’s Rising of May 1471’, English Historical Review, 35 (1970), pp. 673–92: Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 157–8. 18. Hicks, Wars of the Roses, p. 264; idem, Warwick the Kingmaker, p. 313. 19. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 148–52; 158–61. 20. ‘Bales’ Chronicle’, in R. Flenley (ed.), Six Town Chronicles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), p. 161; Goodman, Soldiers’ Experience, p. 191. 21. S.B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 173; Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 3, 147–8, 168–9. 22. A.J. Pollard, Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1991), pp. 154–7; Hicks, English Political Culture, pp. 200–1.



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23. M.A. Hicks, ‘The Yorkshire Rebellion of 1486 Reconsidered’, Northern History, 22 (1986), pp 39–62. Ian Arthurson, ‘The Rising of 1497’, in J. Rosenthal and C.F. Richmond (eds), People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987), pp. 1–18; Hoyle, ‘Petitioning in Popular Politics’; E. Shagan, ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Public Sphere’, in Peter Lake and Stephen Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 31–58. 24. A.J. Pollard, ‘The Richmondshire Community of Gentry during the Wars of the Roses’, in C.D. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979), pp. 37–42. 25. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, History of Westmorland and Cumberland (London: Strachan and Cadell, 1777), pp. 96–7; Durham Record Office, D/St 34/ 27–28 Henry VI. 26. TNA, E 28/79/65, 159/238; York City Records, vol. I, pp. 34–6, 39–42, 54, 57–64; Durham, Dean and Chapter, Bursar’s Accounts, 1480–81, 1482–83; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the MSS of Beverley (HMSO, 1901), pp. 107–8, 116–17, 133–4; J. Raine (ed.), The Priory of Hexham, vol. 1 (Surtees Society, 44, 1864), pp. vii–viii. 27. TNA, Durh 3/55/8. 28. J. Gairdner (ed.), Paston Letters 1422–1509, vol. III (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), p. 30. 29. See above, pp. 32, 39. 30. C.L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward IV, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1923), vol. 1, pp. 135–6. 31. A.J. Pollard, ‘North, South and Richard III’, The Ricardian, 5, 74 (1981), pp. 384–9; R. Steele, Tudor and Stuart Proclamations, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), no. 19. 32. McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, p. 241. For further discussion, see H.M. Jewell, The North/South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); A.J. Pollard, ‘The Characteristics of the Fifteenth-century North’, in J.C. Appleby and P. Dalton (eds), Government, Religion and Society in Northern England, 1000–1700 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 131–43; and Andy King, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Borders and the Perception of “the North” in Fifteenth-century England’, Northern History, 49.1 (2012), pp. 37–50. 33. A.J. Pollard, ‘The Tyranny of Richard III’, Journal of Medieval History, 3 (1971), pp. 158–63. 34. Pronay and Cox, Crowland Chronicle, p. 191; D. Hay (ed.), The ‘Anglica Historia’ of Polydore Vergil (Camden Series, 1950), p. 11. 35. R.A. Griffiths and R.S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Gloucester: Sutton, 1985), pp. 47–73; R.A. Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas and his Family (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993); G. Williams,

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Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales, c.1415–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 185–242. 36. S.G. Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603 (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 11–97; A. Cosgrove, (ed.), A New History of Ireland, vol. III, Medieval Ireland, 1196–1534 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 557–69, 591–619, 638–47. 37. Tim Thornton, The Channel Islands, 1370–1640 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), pp. 35–63; see also idem, ‘The Fifteenth Century’, in A New History of the Isle of Man, vol 4, The Early Modern Period (forthcoming, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). 38. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 128–43; David Grummitt, ‘William, Lord Hastings and the Defence of Calais, 1471–83’, in Tim Thornton, ed., Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), pp. 151–67; Ross, John de Vere, pp. 83–4.

4  The Causes of the Wars 1. Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of England, Charles Plummer (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885), pp. 14–15; W. Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century (London: George Bell, 1888), pp. 273–4. 2. R.L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1966), pp. 9, 10, 14, 16, 27. 3. M. Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272–1377 (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 165–244; M.H. Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1973), pp. 143–65; R.W. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 62, 132, 181, 383–90; J.R. Lander, The Limitations of the English Monarchy in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). 4. J.B. Gillingham, ‘Crisis or Continuity? The Structure of Royal Authority in England, 1369–1422’, in R. Schneider (ed.), Das spatmittelalterliche konigtum im europsaischen vergleeich (Sigmaren: Thorbecke, 1987), pp. 59–80; G.L. Harriss, ‘Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late-Medieval England’, Past and Present, 138 (1993); A. Musson and W.M. Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Law, Politics and Society in the Fourteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1999), esp. pp. 42–74; W.M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England, 1327–1377 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); and J.L. Waugh, England in the Reign of Edward III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 233–4. 5. K.B. McFarlane, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, in England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), p. 238.



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6. R.A. Griffiths, ‘The Provinces and Dominions in the Age of the Wars of the Roses’, in D. Michalove and A.C. Reeves (eds), Estrangement, Enterprise and Education in Fifteenth-century England (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. 1–26. 7. K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. x–xviii. See also P.R. Coss, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revisited’, Past and Present, 125 (1989), pp. 27–64; M.A. Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London: Longman, 1995); and R.E. Horrox, ‘Service’, in eadem, Fifteenth-century Attitudes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 61–78. 8. The National Archives, KB 9/13/23. 9. N. Davis (ed.), Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 530; T. Stapleton (ed.), The Plumpton Correspondence (London: Camden Society, 1839), pp. 45, 72–3. 10. For discussion of arbitration, see M.C. Carpenter, ‘Law, Justice and Landowners in Late Medieval England’, Law and History Review, 1 (1983), pp. 205–37; M.A. Hicks, ‘Restraint, Mediation and Private Justice: George, Duke of Clarence as “Good Lord”‘, Journal of Legal History, 4 (1983), pp. 56–71; E. Powell, ‘Arbitration and the Law in England in the Later Middle Ages’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 33 (1983), pp. 49–67; C. Rawcliffe, ‘The Great Lord as Peacemaker’, in J.A. Guy and H.G. Beale (eds), Law and Social Change in British History (Royal Historical Society Study in History, 40, 1984); and I. Rowney, ‘Arbitration in Gentry Disputes in the Later Middle Ages’, History, 67 (1982), pp. 367–76. 11. See especially W.H. Dunham, Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 1461–1483 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science, 1955), pp. 7–14. 12. Carpenter, ‘Law, Justice and Landowners’, pp. 205–37, and ‘The Duke of Clarence and the Midlands’, Midland History, 11 (1986), pp. 23–48; M. Cherry, ‘The Courtenay Earls of Devon: The Foundation and Disintegration of a Late-Medieval Aristocratic Affinity’, Southern History, 1 (1979), pp. 71–97, and ‘The Struggle for Power in Mid-Fifteenth Century Devonshire’, in R.A. Griffiths (ed.), Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later-Medieval England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1981), pp. 123–44; and M.A. Hicks, ‘Between Majorities: The Beauchamp Interregnum, 1439–49’, Historical Research, 72 (1999), pp. 27–43. 13. R.A. Griffiths, ‘Local Rivalries and National Politics: The Percies, the Nevilles and the Duke of Exeter, 1452–55’, Speculum, 43: 4 (1968), pp. 589–632. 14. McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, pp. 250–1, and Nobility, pp. 108–9. 15. M.M. Postan, ‘The Fifteenth Century’, in Essays in Medieval Agriculture and Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 48; T.B. Pugh and C.D. Ross, ‘The English Baronage and the Income Tax of 1436’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 20 (1953), pp. 1–2.

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16. McFarlane, Nobility, pp. 177–86; A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 132–3. 17. T.B. Pugh, The Marcher Lordships of South Wales, 1415–1536 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1963), pp. 36–43, 143–8; J.T. Rosenthal, ‘The Estates and Finances of Richard, Duke of York (1411–60)’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 2 (1965), pp. 122–46; C.D. Ross, ‘The Estates and Finances of Richard, Duke of York’, Welsh History Review, III (1966–67), pp. 299–302. 18. McFarlane, Nobility, pp. 186, 213–27. 19. R.H. Britnell, ‘The Economic Context’, in A.J. Pollard (ed.), The Wars of the Roses (London: Macmillan, 1995),pp. 41–64; J.N. Hare, ‘Growth and Recession in the Fifteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 52 (1999), pp. 1–26; J.A. Hatcher, ‘The Great Slump of the Mid-Fifteenth Century’, in R.H. Britnell and J.A. Hatcher (eds), Progress and Problems in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.  237–72; A.J. Pollard, ‘The Northern Economy and the Agrarian Crisis of 1438–40’, Northern History, 25 (1989), pp. 88–105; Michael Hicks, The Wars of the Roses (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 49–55. 20. R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Ernest Benn, 1981), pp. 582–3; Pollard, North-Eastern England, pp. 245–65. 21. B.P. Wolffe, The Royal Demesne in English History (London: George Allen, 1971), pp. 76–123; Griffiths, Henry VI, pp. 376–401, 785–9; Britnell, ‘Economic Context’, pp. 58–64. 22. McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, pp. 239–40; Keen, Later Middle Ages, pp. 456, 513. 23. C.F. Richmond, ‘1485 and All That’, in P.W. Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Lordship, Loyalty and Law (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), pp. 186–8. 24. M.H. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 143–78, 238–53. 25. A B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960), pp. 144–53. 26. J.R. Lander, Government and Community: England, 1450–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), p. 160; A. Goodman, ‘Responses to Requests in Yorkshire for Military Service under Henry V’, Northern History, 17 (1981), pp. 240–52; D.A.L. Morgan, ‘The Individual Style of the English Gentleman’, in Michael Jones (ed.), Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Later Medieval Europe (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), pp. 15–35. 27. A.R. Myers, England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1952), p. 140. 28. McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, p. 240; B.P. Wolffe, Henry VI (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981), pp. 211–12.



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29. K.B. McFarlane, ‘The War, the Economy and Social Change’ and ‘The Investment of Sir John Fastolf’s Profits of War’, in England in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 139–50, 175–98; and Nobility, pp. 19–40. 30. C.T. Allmand and C.A.J. Armstrong (eds), English Suits before the Parlement of Paris, 1420–36, (Camden Society, 4th series, 26, 1982), pp.  291–2; Calendar of Patent Rolls; 1446–52, p. 470; A.J. Pollard, John Talbot and the War in France, 1427–1453 (Royal Historical Society Study in History, 35, 1983), p. 120. 31. Pollard, John Talbot, pp. 109–11; Griffiths, Henry VI, pp. 404–6; Pollard, North-Eastern England, 151–2. 32. Storey, House of Lancaster, p. 73; M.K. Jones, ‘Somerset, York and the Wars of the Roses’, English Historical Review, 104 (1989), pp. 285–307. 33. Griffiths, Henry VI, pp. 669–74. 34. Keen, Later Middle Ages, pp. 456, 513. 35. Griffiths, ‘The Sense of Dynasty’, pp. 23–5; A. Gross, The Dissolution of the Lancastrian Kingship (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1996), pp. 35–8; P. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 98–100. 36. T.B. Pugh, ‘The Southampton Plot of 1415’, in R.A. Griffiths and J.W. Sherborne (eds), Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), pp. 69–76. See also M.J. Bennett, ‘Edward III, Entail and the Succession to the Crown, 1367–1471’, English Historical Review, 113 (1998), pp. 580–609. 37. See Griffiths, Henry VI, esp. pp. 240–53; and J.L. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 16–38 for royal authority and 103–11 for the king’s personality. 38. Watts, Henry VI, pp. 167–71. Watts’s view of the king’s personality is followed by C. Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c.1437–1509 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 87–90, 114–15. Hicks, Wars of the Roses, pp. 75–82 reasserts that Henry did have a mind of his own. 39. Wolffe, Henry VI, pp. 125–32. Anne Curry has also recently suggested in an unpublished lecture that his actions in 1447 were tyrannical. 40. Roger Lovatt, ‘A Collector of Apocryphal Anecdotes: John Blacman Revisited’, in A.J. Pollard (ed.), Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984), pp. 172–97. 41. Griffiths, Henry VI, pp. 776–7; Wolffe, Henry VI, pp. 182–3, 303. 42. D. Dunn, ‘Margaret of Anjou: Queen Consort of Henry VI’, in R.E. Archer (ed.), Crown, Government and People in the Fifteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton, 1995), pp. 107–44; J.L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 160–7; Helen E. Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), pp. 127–74; Hicks, Wars of the

150

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Roses, pp. 123–36; Helen Castor, She-Wolves (London; faber and faber, 2010), pp. 321–404. 43. P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 1411–1460 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 78 ff; Hicks, Wars of the Roses, pp. 82–92, 134–6; Watts, ‘Polemics and Politics’, esp. pp. 5–6; and ‘Ideas and Principles’, pp. 110–33. See also above, pp. 49–51. 44. McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, p. 239, endorsed now by Watts and Carpenter (see above, n. 38). 45. C.D. Ross, Edward IV (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974; (reissued New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 134, 406–7. 46. J.R. Lander, ‘Edward IV: The Modern Legend and a Revision’, History, 41 (1956), pp. 38–52, himself following J.R. Green, History of the English People, vol. 2 (1878), pp. 27–8, and the tradition inaugurated by the Crowland Continuator; Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, pp. 182–205. 47. D.A.L. Morgan, ‘The King’s Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 23 (1973), pp. 1–25. 48. Pollard, North-Eastern England, pp. 316–41; C.D. Ross, Richard III (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981; reissued New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 44–62; Rosemary Horrox (ed.), Richard III and the North (University of Hull, Studies in Regional and Local History, 6, 1986), passim, and idem, Richard III, pp. 27–88. But note also the dissenting voice of Hicks, Richard III, pp. 50–68. 49. C. Rawcliffe, The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, 1394–1521 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 28–9. 50. D.E. Lowe, ‘Patronage and Politics: Edward IV, the Wydevilles and the Council of the Prince of Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 29 (1981), pp. 270–3; C.E. Moreton, ‘A Local Dispute and the Politics of 1483’, The Ricardian, 107 (1989). 51. Richmond, ‘1485 and All That’, pp. 186–91. 52. R.H. Helmholtz (1986), ‘The Sons of Edward IV: A Canonical Assessment of the Claim that they were Illegitimate’, in Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Lordship, Loyalty and Law, p. 92. 53. This is the theme of Dominic Mancini’s, De Occupatione, written before the end of 1483. See C.A.J. Armstrong (ed.), The Usurpation of Richard III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1969). 54. M.A. Hicks, Richard III as Duke of Gloucester: A Study in Character (York: Borthwick Paper, no. 70, 1986). 55. Charles T. Wood, ‘Richard III, William, Lord Hastings and Friday the Thirteenth’, in Griffiths and Sherborne (eds), Kings and Nobles, pp. 155–68. 56. Lorraine C. Attreed, ‘From Pearl Maiden to Tower Princes’, Journal of Medieval History, 9 (1983), pp. 52–5. 57. Pollard, Richard III, pp. 182–210; Anne F. Sutton, ‘A Curious Searcher for our Weal Public’, in Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Lordship, Loyalty



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and Law, pp. 58–90. But Hicks, Richard III, pp. 60–8, doubts his honour; and Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, p. 204 questions his ability. 58. A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley (eds), The Great Chronicle of London (London: privately pub. 1938), p. 238.

5  The Impact of the Wars 1. J.R. Lander, Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), p. 62; W.H. Dunham, Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 1461–1483 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science, 1955), pp. 24–5. 2. A. Goodman, The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452–97 (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 227–8. 3. C.D. Ross, The Wars of the Roses (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), pp. 135–6. 4. Ibid., pp. 138–40; Tim Sutherland, ‘Killing Time: Challenging the Common Perceptions of Three Medieval Conflicts  – Ferrybridge, Dintingdale and Towton’, Journal of Conflict Archaeology, 5 (2009), pp. 1–25. 5. K.B. McFarlane, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, in England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), p. 244; T.B. Pugh, ‘The Magnates, Knights and the Gentry’, in S.B. Chrimes et al. (eds), Fifteenth-century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 110; Lander, Crown and Nobility, p. 24, and Government and Community: England, 1450– 1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1950), pp. 278, 326. 6. Ross, Wars of the Roses, p. 144, and Richard III (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981; reissued New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 157–69. 7. C.D. Ross, Edward IV (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974; reissued New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 157. 8. Pugh, ‘The Magnates’, p. 114; Lander, Crown and Nobility, p. 25; C.F. Richmond, ‘1485 and All That’, in P.W. Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Lordship, Loyalty and Law (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), p. 173; Ross, Richard III, pp. 158–62, 235–7. 9. Ross, Richard III, pp. 212–26, Richmond, ‘1485 and All That’, p. 174. 10. McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, pp. 248–54. 11. Ibid., p. 254; M.A. Hicks, False, Fleeting Perjur’d Clarence: George Duke of Clarence, 1449–78 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1980), pp. 183–4, 243. Hicks states that Vernon did not turn out. 12. Malcolm Mercer, The Medieval Gentry: Power, Leadership and Choice during the Wars of the Roses (London: Continuum, 2010), esp. pp. 125–31; idem, ‘The Strength of Lancastrian Loyalism during the Readeption’, Journal of Military History, 5 (2007), pp. 84–97.

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13. Ross, Edward IV, pp. 318–22; Richard III, p. 133; C.S.L. Davies, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See and the Accession of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, 102 (1987), pp. 2–30. 14. R.L. Storey, ‘The North of England’, in Chrimes et al. (eds), Fifteenth-century England, pp. 138–42; A.J. Pollard, ‘St Cuthbert and the Hog: Richard III and the County Palatine of Durham, 1471–85’, in R.A. Griffiths and J.W. Sherborne (eds), Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), pp. 114–23. 15. R.G. Davies, ‘The Church and the Wars of the Roses’, in A.J. Pollard (ed.), The Wars of the Roses (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 134–61; C.S.L. Davies, ‘Bishop Morton, the Holy See, and the Accession of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, 102: 1 (1987), pp. 24–5. 16. C.M. Barron, ‘London and the Crown, 1451–61’, in J.R.L. Highfield and R. Jeffs (eds), The Crown and Local Communities in England and France in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1981), pp. 88–109; J.L. Bolton, ‘The City and the Crown’, The London Journal,12 (1986), pp. 11–24; A.J. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 150–2; Peter Fleming, ‘Politics and the Provincial Town, Bristol, 1451–71’, in Keith Dockray and Peter Fleming (eds), People, Places and Perspectives (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005), 79–114; Hannes Kleineke, ‘Exeter in the Wars of the Roses’, in Linda Clark (ed.), The Fifteenth Century 7 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), pp. 152–6; David Palliser, Richard III and York’, in Rosemary Horrox (ed.), Richard III and the North (Hull: Centre for Regional and Local History, 1986), pp. 51–81; J.L. Laynesmith, ‘Constructing Queenship at Coventry’, in Linda Clark (ed.), The Fifteenth Century 3 (Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2002), pp. 137–47; Helen Maurer, Margaret of Anjou (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), pp. 139–42; Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 102–5, and Lorraine C. Attreed, The King’s Towns: Identity and Survival in Late Medieval English Boroughs (New York: Peter Lang, 1981) passim. 17. Anthony Goodman, The Wars of the Roses: the Soldiers’ Experience (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), pp. 91–5, 112–15. 18. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, 128–43; Grummitt, ‘Lord Hastings and the Defence of Calais’, pp. 164–5. 19. M.A. Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 143–8, 174–5; C.F. Richmond, ‘The Earl of Warwick, Domination of the Channel and the Naval Dimension to the Wars of the Roses, 1456–1460’, Southern History, 20/21 (1998–99), pp. 1–7; Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 131–3, 177–8. 20. Thomas More, Utopia, Complete Works, vol. 4, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 63; W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, vol. III, 5th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), p. 559; J.R. Green, A Short History of the English People, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan,



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1916), p. 302; R.L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1966), p. 9. 21. A.R. Myers (ed.), The Household of Edward IV (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), p. 90 ff. 22. Hicks, Clarence, p. 185; C. Rawcliffe, The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, 1394–1521 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 68–9; T. Percy, The Northumberland Household Book (London: privately published, 1777), pp. 45, 157. 23. J.P. Collier (ed.), Household Books of John Duke of Norfolk (London: Roxburghe Club, 1844), pp. 445–53; C.M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 8–21. 24. A.R. Myers (ed.), The Household of Edward IV (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), p. 116; Collier, Household Books, pp. 453–5; Anne Crawford, Yorkist Lord: John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, c.1425–1485 (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 156–60. 25. Dunham, Lord Hastings, pp. 27–9; M.A. Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 43–8. 26. Rawcliffe, Staffords, pp. 73–4; A. Compton Reeves, ‘Some of Humphrey Stafford’s Military Indentures’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 16 (1972), pp. 80–7. 27. N. Davis (ed.), Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 532. 28. J. Gairdner (ed.), The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London (Camden Society, 1876), pp. 204, 209–10, 212. 29. Hicks, Clarence, p. 183; Shropshire Record Office, Bridgwater Papers, 87, Receiver’s Account for 1470–1; Collier, Household Books, pp. 480–93: A. Crawford, Yorkist Lord: John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, c. 1425–1485 (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 130. 30. Goodman, Soldiers’ Experience, pp. 115–25; Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 156–8; Gairdner, Historical Collections, pp. 212–13. 31. Fleming, ‘Politics and the Provincial Town’, p. 89; Kleineke, ‘Exeter in the Wars of the Roses’, pp. 148–9; Ross, Wars of the Roses, pp. 147–8: York House Books, 1461–1490, ed. Lorraine C. Attreed (Stroud: Alan Sutton for the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1991), pp. 703, 713–14. An excellent account of the involvement of and impact on towns is to be found in David Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 148–55. 32. For recent general introductions see Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women: a Social History of Women in England, 450–1500 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995) and Jennifer Ward, Women in England in the Middle Ages (London: Continuum, 2006). 33. Goodman, Soldiers’ Experience, pp. 140–51; Anne Curry, ‘Soldiers’ Wives in the Hundred Years’ War’, in Peter Coss and Christopher Tyreman

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(eds), Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009), p. 205. 34. Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) esp. pp. 62–5; Ian Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, 1491–1499 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994), Christine Weightman, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, 1446–1503 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1989); R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI (London: Benn, 1981), pp 873–4; Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV, ed. J. Bruce (Camden Society, 1838), p. 10. 35. see above pp. 37–9, 79, 83–4; Anne F Sutton and L. Visser Fuchs, ‘A Most Benevolent Queen?’, The Ricardian, 10 (1995), pp. 214–45: A.J. Pollard, ‘Elizabeth Woodville and Her Historians’, in Douglas Biggs and others (eds), Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 115–58; Joanna Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445–1503 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 220–65; M.A. Hicks, Anne Neville, Queen to Richard III (Stroud: Tempus, 2006); C.T. Wood, ‘The First Two Queens Elizabeth’, in L.O. Fradenberg (ed.), Women and Sovereignty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 121–31. 36. Rowena Archer, ‘Chaucer, Alice, duchess of Suffolk’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 11. eds. H.C. G.Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: University Press, 2004), pp. 246–7; Helen Castor, Blood and Roses: the Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century (London: faber and faber, 2004), pp. 247–9, 259–61; Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 205–9; A.J. Pollard, ‘The Family of Talbot in the Fifteenth Century’ (unpublished University of Bristol PhD Thesis, 1968), pp. 39–50; idem, Warwick the Kingmaker, pp. 17–18. 37. Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, ‘Benevolent Queen’, pp. 218–20; Laynesmith, Last Medieval Queens, pp. 177, 214–15; Pollard, ‘Elizabeth Woodville’, pp. 154–6; M.A. Hicks, False, Fleeting Perjur’d Clarence (Gloucester: Alan Sutton,1986), pp. 138–9; idem, ‘The Last Days of the Countess of Oxford’, English Historical Review, 102 (1988), pp. 297–316; idem, ‘Descent, Partition and Extinction: the “Warwick Inheritance”’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 52 (1979), pp 120–22; James Ross, John de Vere, Thirteenth Earl of Oxford, 1442–1513 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer (2011), pp. 78–81; Alexandra Sinclair (ed.), The Beauchamp Pageant (Donington: Richard III and Yorkish History Trust, 2003), pp. 19–21; 38. See above, p. 10. 39. Alan Rogers, ‘Stamford in the Wars of the Roses’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 53 (2009), pp. 88–97, 105–6.



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40. Philippe de Commynes, Memoirs: The Reign of Louis XI, 1461–83, trans. Michael Jones (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 345. 41. McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, p. 242. 42. Lander, Crown and Nobility, pp. 62–4. 43. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker, 179–80; Goodman, Soldiers’ Experience, 165–71; Arrivall, 7, 36–7. 44. Kleineke, ‘Exeter’, 145–52. 45. Goodman, Wars of the Roses, 218–20; Durham, Church Commission, 189875, 189817. See also R.H. Britnell, ‘The Economic Context’, in Pollard (ed.), Wars of the Roses, pp. 46–7.

6  The Aftermath of the Wars 1. J.R. Green, A Short History of the English People, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1916), pp. 289–92; A.F. Pollard, Factors in Modern History, 3rd edn (London: Constable, 1932), pp. 32–51. For late twentieth-century discussion of the topic, see A.E. Goodman, The New Monarchy: England, 1471–1534 (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1988); and S.J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 1485–1558 (London: Macmillan Press, 1995). 2. M.E. Aston, ‘Richard II and the Wars of the Roses’, in F.R.H. Du Boulay and C.M. Barron (eds), The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack (London: Athlone, 1971), pp. 290–1. 3. K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 142–67, 172–6. 4. M.A. Hicks, ‘Counting the Cost of War: The Moleyns Ransom and the Hungerford Land Sales, 1453–87’, Southern History, 8 (1986), p. 28. 5. J.R. Lander, ‘Attainder and Forfeiture, 1453–1509’, in Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), pp. 127–58; M.A. Hicks, ‘Attainder, Resumption and Coercion, 1461–1529’, Parliamentary History, 3 (1984), pp. 15–31. 6. K.B. McFarlane, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, in England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), pp. 260–1. 7. Anthony Goodman, The Wars of the Roses: The Soldiers’ Experience (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), pp. 213–4; Glenn Foard and Richard K. Morris, Fields of Conflict (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2012), pp. 12–16, 84; Colin Richmond, ‘The Battle of Bosworth’, History Today, 25 (August 1985); Peter J. Foss, The Field of Redemore: the Battle of Bosworth, 1485 (Leeds: Rosalba Press, 1990), pp. 23–4; C.D. Ross, ‘Some “Servants and Lovers” of Richard III in his Youth’, The Ricardian, 4 (55) (1976), pp. 2–4; Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, The Reburial of Richard Duke of York, 21–30 July 1476 (Richard III Society, 1996); B.P. Wolffe, Henry VI (1981), pp. 352–8.

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8. Goodman, Soldiers’ Experience, pp. 220–3; Michael K. Jones and Malcolm Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 179–2. 9. Goodman, Soldiers’ Experience, pp. 203–10, 224–33. 10. C. Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c.1437–1509 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 205. 11. B.P. Wolffe, The Royal Demesne in English History (London: George Allen, 1971), pp. 158–79; C.D. Ross, Edward IV (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974; reissued New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 371–87; S.B. Chrimes, Lancastrians, Yorkists and Henry VII (London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1966), part II passim, and pp. 194–218; B.P. Wolffe, Yorkist and Early Tudor Government, 1461–1509, (London: Historical Association, 1966); D. Grummitt, ‘Henry VII, Chamber Finance and the “New Monarchy”’, Historical Research, 72 (1999), pp. 229–43. 12. Wolffe, Royal Demesne, pp. 143–225; Alexander Grant, Henry VII: The Importance of His Reign in English History (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 42–5. 13. J.S. Roskell, The Impeachment of Michael de La Pole, Earl of Suffolk in 1386 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 30–5. 14. R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Ernest Benn, 1981), pp. 825–6. 15. For these points, see G.L. Harriss, ‘Medieval Government and Statecraft’, Past and Present, 25 (1963), pp. 8–38; and D. Starkey, ‘The Age of the Household: Politics, Society and the Arts, c.1350–1550’, in S. Medcalf (ed.), The Later Middle Ages: The Context of English Literature (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 227–89. 16. D.A.L. Morgan, ‘The King’s Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 23 (1973), pp. 1–25; Ross, Edward IV, pp. 388–413. 17. See above, pp. 81–4. 18. Grant, Henry VII, p. 19.See also Sean Cunningham, Henry VII (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp 173–93 for this and the following paragraph. 19. James Ross, John de Vere, Thirteenth Earl of Oxford, 1442–1513 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), pp. 150–75.He also argues that the colourful story later told by Sir Francis Bacon that the Earl was fined for illegal retaining is, sadly, apocryphal (pp. 141–2). 20. Chrimes, Henry VII, pp. 208–12; C. Rawcliffe, The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, 1394–1521 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 36; M.E. Condon, ‘Ruling Elites in the Reign of Henry VII’, in C. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979), p. 119. 21. Grant, Henry VII, pp. 28–31; Cunningham, Henry VII, pp. 131–45. 22. Condon, ‘Ruling Elites’, pp. 116–19.



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23. A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 367–88. 24. J. Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, vol. II (HMSO, Rolls series, 1863), p. 84. 25. Condon, ‘Ruling Elites’, pp. 121, 129. 26. C.S.L. Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism, 1450–1558 (London: Hart Davis, 1976), p. 104. 27. Mark R. Horowitz, ‘Policy and Prosecution in the Reign of Henry VII’, Historical Research, 82:217 (2009), pp. 412–58; Sean Cunningham, ‘Henry VII and Rebellion in North-East England, 1485–92: Bonds of Allegiance and the Establishment of Tudor Authority’, Northern History, 32 (1996), pp. 42–74; idem, ‘Loyalty, and the Usurper: Recognizances, the Council and Allegiance under Henry VII’, Historical Research, 82:217 (2009), pp. 459–481; idem, Henry VII, pp. 215–23 28. M.C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1399 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 560–92; S.J. Ellis, ‘A Border Baron and the Tudor State: The Rise and Fall of Lord Dacre of the North’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 253–72; H. Summerson, Medieval Carlisle (Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, extra series, 25, 1993), vol.2, pp. 466–76. 29. Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, pp. 219–51; and ‘Henry VII and the English Polity’ in B. Thompson (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995), pp. 11–30. 30. Grummitt, ‘Henry VII, ‘Chamber Finance’; J.L. Watts, ‘“A New Ffundation of is Crowne”: Monarchy in the Age of Henry VII’, in Thompson, Reign of Henry VII, pp. 31–53. 31. Grant, Henry VII, pp. 46–50; Gunn, Early Tudor Government, pp. 49, 81–3, 102–8; Cunningham, Henry VII, 194–200; David Grummitt, ‘Household, Politics and Political Morality in the Reign of Henry VII’, Historical Research, 82: 217 (2009), pp. 393–402.

7  The European Context of the Wars 1. C.S.L. Davies, ‘The Wars of the Roses in European Context’, in A.J. Pollard (ed.), The Wars of the Roses (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 162–85 is a useful survey. 2. T.H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 1157–1611 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 200–17. 3. R.G. Davies, ‘Church and the Wars of the Roses’, pp. 157–9; M.M. Harvey, England, Rome and the Papacy, 1417–1464 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 193–206.

158

Notes

4. R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Ernest Benn, 1981), pp. 811–14; C. Ross, Edward IV (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974; reissued New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 45–6, 49–50, 53–7. 5. Griffiths, Henry VI, pp. 886–90; Ross, Edward IV, pp. 104–14. 6. Griffiths, Henry VI, pp. 890–1; Ross, Edward IV, pp. 146–7, 158–60: J.R. Lander, ‘The Hundred Years’ War and Edward IV’s 1475 Campaign in France’, in Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), pp. 227–8. 7. Ross, Edward IV, pp. 288–90. 8. A.V. Antonovics, ‘Henry VII, King of England, By the Grace of Charles VIII of France’, in R.A. Griffiths and J.W. Sherborne (eds), Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986). 9. Philippe de Commynes, Memoirs, p. 345. 10. For Scotland, see J. Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); A. Grant, Independence and Nationhood: Scotland 1306–1469 (London: Edward Arnold, 1984); N. McDougall, James III (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982); C. McGladdery, James II (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990); R. Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1974); and J. Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (London: Edward Arnold, 1974).For a valuable corrective to the trend towards playing down the instability of fifteenth-century Scotland, see M. Brown, ‘Scotland Tamed? Kings and Magnates in Late-Medieval Scotland: A Review of Recent Work’, The Innes Review, 45 (1994), pp. 120–46. 11. N. McDougall, ‘Richard III and James III: Contemporary Monarchs and Contemporary Mythologies’, in P.W. Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Lordship, Loyalty and Law (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), pp. 148–71. 12. Grant, Independence and Nationhood, p. 199. 13. The standard introduction in English to late-medieval French Society is P.S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (London: Macmillan, 1968). 14. The only available general history of France in English for the fifteenth century is D. Potter, A History of France c.1460–1560 (London: Macmillan, 1995); but see also C.T. Allmand (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol.vii, c.1415–c.1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 392–430. Detailed studies in English to which reference should be made include: R. Vaughan, John the Fearless: The Growth of Burgundian Power (London: Longman, 1966), and Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy (London: Longman, 1970); G. Small, George Chastelain and the Shaping of Valois Burgundy (London: Royal Historical Society; Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer Press, 1997); M.G.A. Vale, Charles VII (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974); C.T. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 1415–50 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).



Notes

159

15. See P.M. Kendall, Louis XI (London: Allen Unwin, 1971); Vaughan, Philip the Good; idem, Charles the Bold (London: Longman, 1973) and Valois Burgundy (London: Alan Lane, 1975). 16. The best available account is J.C. Bridge, A History of France from the death of Louis XI, vol.1, Reign of Charles VIII, Regency of Anne of Beaujeu, 1483–1493 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). For the Netherlands, see C.A.J. Armstrong, ‘The Burgundian Netherlands, 1477–1521’, New Cambridge Modern History, vol.1 (1967), pp. 224–42, and W. Blockmans and W. Prevenier, The Promised Lands: The Low Countries Under Burgundian Rule, 1369–1530, trans. E. Fackelman and ed. E. Peters (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 17. This paragraph is based on J.N. Hilgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250–1576, vol. II, 1410–1516, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 271–97, 317–41, 351–63. See also J. Edwards, The Monarchies of Ferdinand and Isabella (Oxford: Blackwells, for the Historical Association, 1996); G. Redworth, Government and Society in Late-medieval Spain (Oxford: Blackwells, for the Historical Association, 1993); and Allmand (ed.), New Cambridge Medieval History, pp. 588–644. 18. Hilgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, pp. 318–22, 342–7. 19. Commynes, Memoirs, p. 90. 20. John Watts, The Making of Politics: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), at pp. 3–13, 19–23, 279–82, 339–52, 376–93, 421–5. See also the discussion of other European monarchies, principalities and polities in the same era, pp. 353–75.

Select Bibliography

This bibliography is designed to provide an introductory guide to secondary works relevant to the Wars of the Roses, especially those that are historiographically significant and illustrate trends in scholarship since the mid-twentieth century. Additionally, for works on Scotland, France and Spain, the reader should see the references to Chapter 6, notes 10, 13, 14, 16, 17 inclusive. For new works on battles, see Introduction, note 5; for works on popular politics, new to this edition, see Chapter 3, notes 9,10, 13; for works on towns see Chapter 4 note 16; and for women, also new to this edition, Chapter 4, notes 32–37. For the proceedings of the annual conference of fifteenth-century historians see The Fifteenth Century, volumes I–XI, ed. Linda Clark and others (2000–2012). For a comprehensive listing of all works, the reader should consult the online Bibliography of British and Irish History. Armstrong, C.A.J., ‘Politics and the Battle of St Albans, 1455’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 33 (1960), pp. 1–72 – the battle dissected. Arthurson, I., The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, 1491–1499 (Stroud: Sutton, 1994) – a detailed anatomy of Warbeck’s career and one of the best accounts of the last decade of the century. Aston, M.E., ‘Richard II and the Wars of the Roses’, in C.M. Barron and F.R.H. Du Boulay (eds), The Reign of Richard II (London: Athlone Press, 1971), pp. 280–317 – contains the best discussion of the elaboration of the idea of the Wars of the Roses in the sixteenth century. Britnell, R.H., The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) – a good introduction to the economic context. Cameron, A., ‘The Giving of Livery and Retaining in Henry VII’s Reign’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 18 (1974), pp. 17–35 – a perceptive reconsideration of Henry VII’s policy towards bastard feudalism.

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161

Carpenter, M.C., ‘Law, Justice and Landowners in Late Medieval England’, Law and History Review, 1 (1983), pp. 205–37; and Carpenter, M.C., ‘The Duke of Clarence and the Midlands: A Study in the Interplay of Local and National politics’, Midland History, 11 (1986), pp. 23–48 – two articles, drawing on the author’s doctoral thesis on Warwickshire in the fifteenth century, which illuminate local rivalries in the Midlands. Carpenter, M.C., Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge University Press, 1992) – the most comprehensive of the county studies. Carpenter, M.C., The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c.1437–1509 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) – a lively and provocative account of the period. Castor, Helen, Blood and Roses: the Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century (London: faber and faber, 2004) – a highly readable account of the family’s history in the broader political context Cherry, M., ‘The Struggle for Power in Mid-Fifteenth-century Devonshire’, in R.A. Griffiths (ed.), Patronage, the Crown and Provinces in Later Medieval England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1981), pp. 123–44 – the most recent consideration of the Bonville–Courtenay feud in the west country. Chrimes, S.B., Henry VII (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972) – the standard modern study, strong on government. Chrimes, S.B., Lancastrians, Yorkists and Henry VII (London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1966) – one of the first surveys to dispense with the idea of the Wars of the Roses. Condon, M.E., ‘Ruling Elites in the Reign of Henry VII’, in Charles Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979), pp. 109–42 – an excellent analysis of Henry VII’s regime. Crawford, Anne, Yorkist Lord: John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, c.1425–1485 (London: Continuum, 2010) – a modern study of a key figure. Cunningham, Sean, Henry VII (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007) – a good introduction to the reign, which emphasises the political dimension and incorporating up-to-date research Curry, A.E., The Hundred Years’ War (London: Macmillan, 1993) – a good introduction, especially to the diplomatic angle. Denton, W., England in the Fifteenth Century (London: George Bell, 1888)  – the most extreme expression of the nineteenth-century gloss to traditional views. Dunham, W.H., Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 1461–83 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science, 39, 1955) – a pioneering study of a bastard feudal retinue, many conclusions of which have since been modified. Dyer, C.C., Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) – the authoritative account of the topic.

162

Select BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ellis, S., Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603 (Harlow: Longman, 1998) – the best introduction to Ireland during the Wars. Gillingham, J., The Wars of the Roses: Peace and Conflict in Fifteenth-century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981)  – a full narrative account, a particular feature being its emphasis on the peaceful nature of fifteenth-century England: the opposite pole to Denton. Goodman, A.E., The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452–97 (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1981)  – a companion to Gillingham which concentrates on military aspects and views the wars as being more disruptive. Goodman, A.E., The Wars of the Roses: The Soldiers’ Experience (Stroud: Tempus, 2005) – a follow up from the perspective of the common soldier. Grant, A., Henry VII: The Importance of His Reign in English History (London: Methuen, 1985) – a good short introduction to the subject, now superseded by Cunningham. Green, J.R., A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan, 3rd edn, 1918) – the inventor of ‘New Monarchy’. Griffiths, R.A., The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Ernest Benn, 1981) supersedes all else on the political history of the 1450s, especially the years 1455–61. Griffiths, R.A., ‘Local Rivalries and National Politics: the Percies, Nevilles and the Duke of Exeter, 1452–1455’, Speculum, 43 (1968), pp. 589–632 – a comprehensive account of the private war in Yorkshire. Griffiths, R.A., and R.S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985) – indispensable for Henry VII before he became king. Gunn, S.J., Early Tudor Government, 1485–1558 (London: Macmillan Press) – an excellent discussion of ‘New Monarchy’, equally relevant for the Yorkists. Harriss, G.L., ‘Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 138 (1993)  – an important essay on late medieval developments. Hicks, M.A., ‘Dynastic Change and Northern Society: The Career of the Fourth Earl of Northumberland, 1470–89’, Northern History, 14 (1978) – the standard account of the man accused of betraying Richard III at Bosworth. Hicks, M.A., ‘The Changing Role of the Wydevilles in Yorkist Politics to 1483’, in C.D. Ross (ed.) Patronage, Pedigree and Power – the malignity of the Woodvilles restated. Hicks, M.A., False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence: George, Duke of Clarence 1449–1478 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1980) – Clarence’s career sensitively considered. Hicks, M.A., Richard III as Duke of Gloucester: A Study in Character (Borthwick Papers, 70, University of York, 1986)  – a controversial assessment of the character, but new light on the political circumstances in 1483. Hicks, M.A., Bastard Feudalism (Harlow: Longman Press, 1995) – an indispensable introduction to the topic in its wider historical setting.



Select BIBLIOGRAPHY

163

Hicks, M.A., Warwick the Kingmaker (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1998)  – a full analysis of the Kingmaker’s career. Hicks, M.A., English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002) – a wide ranging discussion of the broad political scene Hicks, M.A., The Wars of the Roses (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) – an up-to-date narrative with some controversial interpretations Hipshon, David, Richard III (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011)  – a well-balanced account of the life and reign Horowitz, Mark R. (ed.), ‘Who Was Henry VII?’, Historical Research, 82.217 (2009) – a collection of essays providing detailed analysis of the reign based on the latest research Horrox, R.E. (ed.), Richard III and the North (Hull: Studies in Regional and Local History, 6, 1986) – a useful collection of essays exploring the northern dimension to Richard III. Horrox, R.E., Richard III: A Study of Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) – an excellent analysis of the politics of the reign. Horrox, R.E. (ed.), Fifteenth-century Attitudes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) – a collection of essays providing an accessible introduction to English society during the Wars. Johnson, P.A., Duke Richard of York, 1411–1460 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) – a thorough study of the Duke’s political career. Jones, M.K., ‘Richard III and the Stanleys’, in R.E. Horrox (ed.) Richard III and the North – the best of a clutch of assessments of the most successful political family of the Wars of the Roses. Jones, M.K. and M.G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) – a fine study of a remarkable woman, bringing out her political role. Jones, M.K., Bosworth 1485; the Psychology of a Battle (Stroud: Tempus, 2002) – a controversial account of the Yorkists, Richard III and the battle. Kaeuper, R.W., War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) – a contested interpretation of monarchy under stress as a result of war in the period. Keen, M.H., England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1977) – still the best available textbook. Kekewich, M., et al., The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John Vale’s Book (Stroud: Suttons for the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1995): a collection of texts dealing with 1450–71, with useful introductory essays. Kingsford, C.L., ‘Social Life and the Wars of the Roses’, in Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth-century England (Oxford, 1925), pp. 48–77 – the seminal launch of revisionism. Kleineke, Hannes, Edward IV (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009) – a useful introduction to the reign, steering a middle course between critics and admirers of the king.

164

Select BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lamont, W., (ed.), The Tudors and Stuarts (London: Sussex Books, 1976)  – contains the ultimate word on abolishing the Wars of the Roses. Lander, J.R., Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1976) – a collection of the essays of one of the most influential of modern writers. See especially ‘The Wars of the Roses’, ‘Marriage and Politics’, ‘Attainder and Forfeiture’ and ‘Bonds, Coercion and Fear’. Lander, J.R., Government and Community: England 1450–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1980) – a summation of a life’s work, which tends to overrate Edward IV. Laynesmith, J.L., The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445–1503 (Oxford, University Press, 2004)  – an authoritative study of both what it was to be queen and of the particular queens during the Wars of the Roses. Lovatt, R., ‘A collector of Apocryphal Anecdotes: John Blacman Revisited’, in A.J. Pollard (ed.), Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval History (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984), pp. 172–97 – a convincing justification of Blacman’s portrait of Henry VI. McFarlane, K.B., The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) – the authoritative account of the subject, and essential for any consideration of the political é lite. McFarlane, K.B., England in the Fifteenth Century, G.L. Harriss (ed.) (London: Hambledon Press, 1981)  – a collection of essays including ‘Bastard Feudalism’ and ‘The Wars of the Roses’ which are essential starting points for modern interpretations; and an introduction which not only charts McFarlane’s intellectual pilgrimage, but also offers a perceptive analysis of the state of the art then. Mercer, Malcolm, The Medieval Gentry: Power, Leadership and Choice during the Wars of the Roses (London: Continuum, 2010) – a thoughtful examination of why the gentry did, and for the most part did not, take sides. Morgan, D.A.L., ‘The King’s Affinity in the Policy of Yorkist England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 23 (1973), pp. 1–25 – an influential analysis of the Yorkist regime, which underlies most subsequent contrasts with Henry VII. Ormrod, W.M., Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450 (London: Macmillan Press, 1995) – a study of the political structures of late medieval England. Payling, S.J., Political Society in Lancastrian England: The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) – a fine exemplar of the county study. Pollard, A.J., ‘The Tyranny of Richard III’, Journal of Medieval History, 3 (1977), pp. 147–66 – emphasizes the regional character of Richard III’s reign. Pollard, A.J., ‘The Richmondshire Community of Gentry during the Wars of the Roses’, in C.D. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979), pp. 37–59; and



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165

Pollard, A.J., ‘St Cuthbert and the Hog: Richard III and the County Palatine of Durham’, in R.A. Griffiths and J.W. Sherborne (eds), Kings and Nobles in Later Medieval England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), pp. 109–29 – two more local studies. Pollard, A.J., North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses: War, Politics and Lay Society, 1450–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) – the focus on a region. Pollard, A.J., (ed.), The Wars of the Roses (London: Macmillan Press, 1995) – a collection of essays in the Problems in Focus series. Pollard, A.J., Warwick the Kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame (London: Continuum, 2007) – a more sympathetic approach to the earl than many. Powell, E., ‘After, “After McFarlane”: The Poverty of Patronage and the Case for Constitutional History’, in D. Clayton et al.(eds), Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval History (Stroud: Sutton, 1994)  – the paper which launched the debate about patronage and principle. Pugh, T.B., ‘The Magnates, Knights and Gentry’, in S.B. Chrimes et al. (eds), Fifteenth-Century England, 1399–1509: Studies in Politics and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972) pp. 86–128 – a valuable analysis of the social structure of the political nation. Rawcliffe, C., The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, 1394–1521 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)  – an excellent baronial case study. Richmond, C.F., ‘The Nobility and the Wars of the Roses, 1459–61’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 21 (1977) – a detailed analysis of noble participation in the first stage of the wars. Richmond, C.F., John Hopton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) – a fascinating study of one man whom the wars passed by, made all the more intriguing by the later discovery that he became blind. Richmond, C.F., ‘1485 and All That, or What was going on at the Battle of Bosworth’, in P.W. Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Loyalty, Lordship and Law (Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1986), pp. 172–202  – provocative discussion of Bosworth and more. Richmond, C.F., The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Fastolf’s Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Endings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) – a trilogy providing an intricate dissection of the lives of the East Anglian family. Ross, C.D., Edward IV (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974) – the standard modern study of the reign. Ross, C.D., The Wars of the Roses: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976) – an excellent short introduction, splendidly illustrated. Ross, C.D., Richard III (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981)  – the first of several modern studies, skilfully summing up the product of modern scholarship to 1980.

166

Select BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ross, James, John de Vere, Thirteenth Earl of Oxford (Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2010) – a convincing account of the life and career of one of Henry VII’s most important supporters. Rowney, I., ‘Government and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century: Staffordshire, 1439–59’, Midland History, 8 (1983), pp. 49–69; and Rowney, I., ‘The Hastings Affinity in Staffordshire and the Honour of Tutbury’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57 (1984) – two further examples of local studies. Rowse, A.L., Bosworth Field and the Wars of the Roses (London: Macmillan, 1966) – the last flowering of the Tudor version of fifteenth-century history. Scofield, C.L., The Life and Reign of Edward IV, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1923) – still the most detailed narrative available. Storey, R.L., The End of the House of Lancaster (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1966) – despite its title, mainly a detailed account of politics 1450–56 and important for its controversial explanation of the wars. Storey, R.L., ‘Lincolnshire and the Wars of the Roses’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 14 (1970), pp. 64–82 – more local feuding. Stubbs, W., The Constitutional History of England, vol.III, 5th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897) – the standard Victorian interpretation of the fifteenth century. Sweetingburgh, Sheila (ed.), Late Medieval Kent, 1220–1540 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010) – essays by Grummitt and Mercer on the county in the fifteenth century, pp.235–71 Thornton, Tim, The Channel Islands, 1370–1640 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012) – the first full study of a largely neglected subject. Watts, J.L., ‘Ideas, Principles and Politics’, in A.J. Pollard, (ed.) Wars of the Roses (London: Macmillan Press, 1995) – an amplification of the theme of principled politics. Watts, J.L., Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) – a thorough study of the reign in the context of contemporary expectations of kingship which reinstated the king as a nonentity. Watts, J.L., ‘The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics’, in L.S. Clark and M.C. Carpenter, The Fifteenth Century 4: Political Culture in Late-Medieval Britain (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004) – one of several specialist essays establishing the wider scope of politics in the era of the Wars of the Roses. Watts, J.L., The Making of Politics: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge, 2009)  – a stimulating re-interpretation of the trends and developments of western Europe, including the British Isles, in the later Middle Ages, Wolffe, B.P., Yorkist and Early Tudor Government, 1461–1509 (London: Historical Association, 1966) – a clear, brief introduction to the subject.



Select BIBLIOGRAPHY

167

Wolffe, B.P., The Royal Demesne in English History (London: George Allen, 1971) – contains the best study of chamber finance. Wolffe, B.P., Henry VI (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981) – a lively if controversial view of Henry VI’s personality. Wood, C.T., ‘Richard III, William Lord Hastings and Friday the Thirteenth’, in R.A. Griffiths and R.S. Sherborne (eds), Kings and Nobles (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985), pp. 155–68 – the ‘cock-up theory’ of history applied to Richard III. Wright, S.M., The Derbyshire Gentry in the Fifteenth Century (Derbyshire Record Society, 8, 1983) – a county study representative of recent research.

Glossary

affinity the following of a lord. annuity a grant of an annual payment for life, or for a number of years, made by a lord to a retainer. appanage the landed estate of a royal prince, often accompanied by extensive legal privileges. attainder the parliamentary act of attainting (corrupting the blood) whereby a person guilty of treason loses all civil rights including the right to inherit or hold property. banneret a knight entitled to bear a banner; of higher status than a bachelor, a young or junior knight. bond a binding agreement; see recognizance. Chamber the financial office of the royal household; thus chamber finance, the system of managing royal finances from the chamber rather than the Exchequer. Chancery the chief executive and secretarial office of the Crown, housed at Westminster. demesne the estate and lands held by the owner himself; hence Royal Demesne, the Crown lands. enfeoffment to use a kind of trust in which land is held by trustees on behalf of its owner, often to escape the effect of wardship. Exchequer the chief financial office of state, housed at Westminster. felony a serious crime. heir apparent the declared heir to the throne, normally the king’s eldest son.

168



Glossary

169

heir presumptive the presumed heir in the event of the king dying without an Heir apparent. indenture a form of contract between two parties in which each kept a half cut along an indented line; hence Indentured retainer, one who is retained in service by means of such a contract. livery the distinctive clothing (a uniform) bestowed by a lord on his Retainer. march, marches border, borders; hence marcher lordships (in Wales) in which lords enjoyed royal privileges and had exclusive jurisdiction. palatinate territory under the rule of a count palatine, who enjoyed royal privileges and exclusive jurisdiction in it. Readeption literally the reattainment (of the throne by Henry VI in 1470). recognizance a sum of money pledged as surety by a bond for the future performance of an act or the avoidance of an offence, which is forfeited if the act is not performed or the offence is committed. retainer one who is attached in the service of a lord by annuity or indenture. tenant-in-chief one who holds land directly from the king, as distinct from a lesser lord. vassal one who holds land from a lord on condition of allegiance. wardship control and use of the lands of a tenant who is a minor and guardianship of the infant heir (including the right to arrange marriage) until that heir has attained his or her majority.

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Index

Agincourt, battle of, 112, 41, 75, 84 Albany, Alexander, duke of, 123, 125 Alfonso, king of Castile, 128 Alnwick, 30, 105 Americas, the, 128 Amicable Grant, the, 53 Anjou, 125 see also Margaret Aquitaine, 62, 125 see also Gascony Aragon, 127–8, 30 Armagnac, Bernard, duke of, 125 armies composition and raising of, 96–101 size of, 89–90 Arras, treaty of (1482), 127 arrayed men, 49, 100–101 artillery, 3, 95, 105 Artois, 127 attainder, 28, 93, 108 Audley, James (Touchet), lord, 27, 91–2 badges, 7–9, 66 Bale’s Chronicle, 20, 52 Bamburgh, 30, 105 Barnet, battle of, 34, 90–1, 93–4, 109, 122, 136 bastard feudalism, 14–16, 60–2, 65–7, 131 see also indentured retainers

Beauchamp Anne, countess of Warwick, 103 family of, 67 Margaret, countess of Shrewsbury, 103 Beaufort Edmund, duke of Somerset (d.1455), 24–5, 28, 43–5, 58, 68, 74–6 Edmund, duke of Somerset (d. 1471), 34 family of, 8, 18, 35, 43–6, 75, 79 Henry, duke of Somerset, 34 Margaret, countess of Richmond, 35, 45, 102–3, 109 Beaujeu, Anne of, 126 Beaumont, Henry, lord, 28 Bedford duchess of, see Jacquetta duke of, see under Neville Belch, Sir Toby, 4 Berwick, 54, 84, 96, 120, 122 Beverley, 54 Bigod, Ralph, 109–10 Blacman, John, 78 blood feud, 44–6 see also vendetta Blore Heath, battle of, 27, 54, 99, 109 Bonville family of, 44 William, lord, 46

171

172

Index

Booth, Lawrence, bishop of Durham and archbishop of York, 55, 94–5 Bordeaux, 24 Bosworth, battle of, 2–3, 39, 41, 44, 46, 55, 90, 92, 100, 109, 115, 136, 162 Bourbon, duchy of, 125 Bourgchier family of, 1 Henry, earl of Essex, 91 Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, 94 Brampton, Edward, 58 Bridgwater, 47 Bristol, 3, 101, 95 Brittany, 35, 38–9, 62, 121–3, 125, 126–7, 130 Anne of, 127 Buck, Sir George, 13 Burgundy Charles, duke of, 31, 33, 35, 121–2, 26 duchy of, 5, 58, 62, 121, 125–7, 129–30 Margaret, duchess of, 40, 42, 102, 121–2 Butler Eleanor, 85, 141 family of, 57 James, earl of Wiltshire and Ormond, 57 Cade, Jack, 47, 48–51, 72 Caister, 44, 81 Calais, 3, 26, 27–8, 31–2, 45, 56, 58–9, 70, 83, 88–9, 92, 95–7, 116, 121 Callaghan, James, 1 Cambridge, Queens’ College, 109 Carlisle, 54, 96, 105, 120 Merks, Thomas, bishop of, 12 Castile, 127–8 Castillon, battle of, 24, 84

Castle Hedingham (Essex), 109 Catalonia, 127–8 Catesby, Sir William, 39 Caxton, William, 4 Charles II, king of England, 112 Charles VI, king of France, 125 Charles VII, king of France, 120, 125 Charles VIII, king of France, 123, 127 chivalry, 6, 23, 47, 63, 71–3 chamber finance, 110–11, 114 Chaucer, Alice, countess of Suffolk, see under de la Pole Cholmondley, Sir Richard, 115 Chrimes, S.B., 7–16 Clarence, George, duke of, 8, 31–2, 34, 36, 40, 43, 50, 81–2, 86, 93, 98–9, 102, 112, 126 clergy involvement in Wars, 94–5 Clifford Henry, lord, 35, 91 Thomas, lord, 25 Codnor, lord, see Grey commons, the, 48–53 Commynes, Philippe de, 104, 106, 123, 128 Constable, Sir Marmaduke, 109 Coppini, Francesco, 95, 120 Cornwall, 40, 100, 54 Courtenay Edward, earl of Devon, 35, 46, 92, 113–14 family of, 44, 67, 108 Peter, bishop of Exeter, 94 Thomas, earl of, 34 Coventry, 27, 34, 50, 93 Craig, Sir Thomas, 107 Cromwell, Thomas, 118, 133 Crowland abbey of, 9 chronicle of, 20, 42, 56, 104 Cumberland, 43 Cumbria, 18, 40, 93



Index

Dacre, Thomas, lord, 92 Dadlington, 109 Darcy, Sir Thomas, 116 Dartford, 24 Daubeny, Giles, lord, 59 Davies, C.S.L., 116 Davies, Norman, 2 Dawne, Sir John, 99 de la Pole Alice, duchess of, 103 Edmund, duke of Suffolk, 40 Elizabeth, duchess of Suffolk, 42, 102 John, earl of Lincoln, 37 William, duke of Suffolk, 24, 43, 72, 76 de Vere John, 12th earl, 45 John, 13th earl of Oxford, 35, 59, 92, 100, 109, 113–14 Debenham, Sir Gilbert, 66 Denton, William, 14 Desmond, earl of, 57 Devereux, Sir Walter, Lord Ferrers, 57, 91–2 Devon, 18, 32, 44, 67 earl of, see Courtenay, Stafford Dinham, John, lord, 91–2 Dorset, earl of, see Grey Dublin, 28, 57, 97 Dudley John (Sutton), lord, 91–2 William, bishop of Durham, 34, 106 Dunham, W.H., 88 Dunstanburgh, 30, 105 Durham, 106 bishops of, see Booth, Dudley, Fox, Neville, Shirwood county palatine of, 46, 54, 62, 94–5, 100, 115 priory, 54, 105 dynastic dispute and the Wars, 7–12, 42–4, 75–6

173

East Anglia, 4, 13, 44, 100, 114 see also Norfolk, Suffolk economic impact of Wars, 104–6 Edgecote, battle of, 32, 47, 53 Edward I, 62–3 Edward II, 63 Edward III, 12, 14–15, 38, 61–5, 80, 107, 117 Edward IV, 3, 15, 20, 29–38, 40–6, 50–9, 67, 80, 85–6, 89, 91, 94, 97–8, 100–5, 109, 120, 121–3, 126, 132, 137 badge of, 8–10 as earl of March, 28–9 kingship of, 81–4, 110–13, 116–17 Edward V, 36–8, 42, 53, 82–6, 94, 133 Edward of Lancaster, prince of Wales, 25, 28, 30, 33–4, 36 Edward of Middleham, prince of Wales, 38 Elizabeth I, 9, 12, 85, 107, 134 Elizabeth of York, queen of England, 9–11, 38–9, 42, 103 Empson, Sir Richard, 116 Enrico IV, king of Castile, 128 Essex, earl of, see Bourghier Etaples, treaty of, 123 Eton, 23, 77 Exeter, 96, 101 bishops of, see Courtenay, Neville factional conflict and Wars, 43–4 Fastolf, Sir John, 71, 99, 105 Ferdinand, king of Aragon, 128 finances, royal, 69–77, 73, 114 see also chamber finance Fitzgerald, Thomas, earl of Kildare, 57–8, 83–4 FitzHugh, Henry, lord, 54, 89, 92 Fitzwalter, John (Ratcliffe), lord, 41 Flanders, 58, 126–7 Formigny, battle of, 73

174

Index

Fortescue, Sir John, 17, 35, 111, 114, 116 Fox, Richard, bishop of Durham, 115–16 France, 3, 5, 23, 30–2, 34–5, 39–41, 45, 58, 62–4, 70–4, 77, 79, 81–2, 84, 89, 95, 104, 111, 117, 119, 122–7, 129–31, 134 kings of, see Charles, Louis Gascony, 24, 70, 72, 75 see also Aquitaine gentry involvement in Wars, 93–4 Gillingham, John, 16, 21 Gloucester Humphrey, duke of, 77 Thomas, duke of, 38 Richard, duke of, see under Richard III Gloucestershire, 13, 44, 81 Glyn Dŵr, Owain, 56–7 Goodman, A, E., 17, 21, 88 Granada, 128, 130 Green, J.R., 15, 44, 97 Gregory’s Chronicle, 22, 47, 99 Grey Edmund, lord of Ruthin, 28 family of Ruthin, 18 Henry, lord of Codnor, 66 Thomas, marquess of Dorset, 36, 83, 92, 112–13 Sir Richard, 37, 86 Greystoke, Ralph, lord, 91–2 Griffiths, R.A., 18 Guernsey, 58 Hall, Edward, 11–12, 134 Halsted, Caroline, 13 Hampshire, 18 Hands, Terry, 2 Hanseatic League, 119, 121–2 Harlech, 30 Harrington

family of, 44, 81 Sir Thomas, 99 Hastings Sir John of Fenwick, 114 William, lord, 33–4, 36–7, 44, 59, 83, 86, 97–8, 105, 112 Henry IV, 10, 33, 64, 75 Henry V, 12, 23, 41, 64–5, 67, 71–3, 75, 117, 125 Henry VI, 8, 15–16, 20, 23–9, 36, 43–5, 52, 60–1, 67, 70–2, 74–5, 82, 87, 109, 110, 114, 120–1, 128 badge of, 8 kingship of, 76–8, 80–, 132 readeption of, 33–4, 91, 94, 121–2 Henry VII, 3, 9–12, 13, 15, 20, 40–6, 53, 54–7, 84, 97, 102–3, 108–10, 121–3, 127–8 badge of, 8 as earl of Richmond, 35, 38–9, 56, 58–9, 92–4, 96, 101–2, 122, 132–3; kingship of, 110–17 Henry VIII, 11, 40–1, 103, 111, 117–18, 132–3 Herbert family of, 56 William, lord, earl of Pembroke, 31–2, 57, 92 Hexham, battle of, 30, 45, 84 Hicks, M.A., 51, 79–80, 86 Hoo, Thomas, lord, 74 Hornby Castle (Lancs), 44, 81 households, 33, 37–8, 41–2, 44, 52, 65–6, 72, 96–100, 102, 109, 110–15, 117 Howard Elizabeth, countess of Oxford, 103 John, lord, duke of Norfolk, 37, 98, 100 Thomas, duke of Norfolk, 108–09; family of, 18 Humanism, 12; see also Renaissance



Index

Hume, David, 8 Hundred Years War, the, 28, 60, 70–2, 84, 96 Hungerford family of, 108 Robert, Lord Moleyns, 44 indentured retainers, 15, 32–3, 54, 56, 61, 65–8, 72, 96, 101, 131 see also bastard feudalism Innocent VIII, Pope, 9 Ireland, 5, 24, 27, 40, 56–7, 59, 74 Isabella, queen of Castile, 128 Italy, 127, 130 Jacquetta of Luxemburg, duchess of Bedford, 102–3 James I, king of Scots, 124 James II, king of Scots, 120, 124 James III, king of Scots, 123–5 James IV, king of Scots, 40 James, Sir Robert, 73 Jenkins, Simon, 2 Jersey, 58 Joan of Arc, 102 John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, 9 Juan II, king of Aragon, 127 Juana of Castile, 128 Keen, M.H., 17, 70, 74 Kent, 18, 34, 50–2, 72, 74, 97, 100 Kildare, earl of, see Fitzgerald kings of England, see Edward, Henry, Richard, Charles Kingsford, C.L., 15 Lancaster, house of, 2, 7–11, 14, 17, 21, 35, 41–2, 97, 106, 131 see also John of Gaunt Lander, J.R., 16, 18, 1, 82, 88, 90, 92 Levin, Bernard, 2 Lincoln, earl of, see under de la Pole

175

Lincolnshire, 18, 32 Loades,D.M., 17 London, 20, 28–9, 34, 36–7, 39, 47, 51–2, 55, 58–9, 69, 87, 95, 97–9, 101–2, 105 Losecoat Field, 32 Louis XI, king of France, 35, 121–3; 126 Louis XII, king of France, see under Orleans Loveday Award, 26 Ludford, 27, 54, 96 Ludlow, 27, 57 Lumley, George, lord, 91–2 Maine, 77 Man, Isle of, 58 Margaret of Anjou, queen of England, 20, 24, 28–9, 31, 33–5, 43, 54–5, 76, 78–9, 94, 96, 100, 102–4, 106, 1120–1, 140 Mary I, 110 Mary of Guelders, queen of Scots, 120 McFarlane, K.B., viii, 4, 15–16, 19, 21, 55, 64–5, 67–70, 72–3, 77, 80, 90, 91, 93, 104, 108 McGregor, Neil, 2 Maximilian of Austria, 126 Merrie England, 4 Middleham, 32, 54 Milan, 130 Milford Haven, 39 monarchy, 87, 106, 124, 118, 124 see also new monarchy and under Henry VI, Edward IV, Henry VII Montlhéry, battle of, 126 More, Sir Thomas, 12, 97, 107 Morgan, D.A.L., 107 Mortimer’s Cross, battle of, 29 Morton, John, bishop of Ely and archbishop of Canterbury, 35, 37, 94

176

Index

Mowbray Elizabeth, duchess of, see under Talbot family of, 18 John, duke of Norfolk, 44, 66, 81 Mulso, Sir Edmund, 74 Naples, 130 Navarre, 125 Netherlands, the, 3, 31, 33, 119, 122–3, 125, 134 Neville Anne, queen of England, see under Anne Anne, duchess of Buckingham, 102 Cecily, duchess of York, see under York Edward, Lord Abergavenny, 114 family of, 25–6, 31–2, 44, 46, 54, 67, 83, 93–4, 108, 115 George, duke of Bedford, 86 George, bishop of Exeter and archbishop of York, 94 Sir Humphrey, 32, 46 Isabel, duchess of Clarence, 31, 103 John, lord, of Raby, 46 John, Lord Montagu, earl of Northumberland, 30, 33, 46, 99 Ralph, 1st earl of Westmorland, 46 Ralph, 2nd earl of Westmorland, 46, 37, 115 Ralph, 3rd earl, 92, 115 Richard, Lord Latimer, 108, 115 Richard, earl of Salisbury, 25, 27–9, 46–7, 54, 69, 73, 99 Richard, earl of Warwick, 3, 20, 25–34, 36, 44–47, 50–56, 58–9, 68–9, 81, 86, 91, 93–7, 100, 103, 105, 108, 111, 120–1, 132–3; Sir Thomas of Brancepeth, 46 Thomas, bastard of Fauconberg, 51, 97, 100, 105 Sir Thomas, of Middleham, 69, 99

Margaret, countess of Oxford, 103 William, Lord Fauconberg, 28, 73, 96 new monarchy, 106–18 Nicolas, Sir Harry, 13 nobility, consequences for, 11–12, 107–9 see also peerage Norfolk, 18, 55, see also East Anglia duke of, see under Howard, Mowbray Norham, 54, 1120 Normandy, 20, 23–4, 58, 70, 72–5, 122, 125 Northampton, battle of, 29, 46, 51, 79, 100 northern England, 18, 27, 30, 32–40, 44, 446, 54–6, 69, 71–2, 83–4, 89, 91–2 96, 99–100, 112, 114–15, 132 Northumberland, 30, 45, 89, 105, 120 earl of, see under Neville, Percy Nottinghamshire, 18 Oglander, Sir John, 8 Oldhall, William, 71, 74, 96 Orleans, 125; Louis, duke of, 126–7 Ormond, earl of, see Butler, James Oxford, countess of, see under Howard, Neville, earl of, see de Vere; university, 4, 15; Magdalen College School, 3 Papacy, the, 95, 120 see also, Innocent VIII, Pius II Parker, Henry, Lord Morley, 109 Parliament, 11, 14, 37, 48, 53, 62, 85 (1450) 24, 49, 72 (1451) 75; (1459) 27, 50 (1460) 28–9 (1472–5) 71, 104, 120 (1484) 85



Index

Paston family of, 13, 44, 93, 103 Sir John, 66 John III, 44, 66, 81 Margaret, 103 patronage, 15, 19, 44, 65–8, 111, 131 peerage and Wars, 90–93 see also nobility Pembroke, earls of, see under Herbert, Tudor Percy family of, 18, 44, 46, 54, 64, 67, 83, 108 Henry, 2nd earl, 46, 68–9, 25, 73 Henry, 3rd earl, 25, 29, 46, 99, 106 Henry, 4th earl, 34, 39, 91, 37, 40, 53, 55, 62, 92, 99, 115 Henry, 5th earl, 98, 114 Sir Ralph, 46 Sir Richard, 46, Thomas, Lord Egremont, 46, Picquigny, treaty of, 35 Pilgrimage of Grace, the, 53 Pius II, Pope, 95, 120 Plummer, Charles, 13, 15, 61, 65 Plumpton, family of, 66, 93 Pole, see de la Pole political ideology, 19, 49–53, 132 Pontefract, 47, 106 popular participation in Wars, 47–53 Portugal, 1127 Postan, Sir Michael, 68 Poynings, Sir Edward, 58 Princes in the Tower, see Edward V and under York, Richard of Shrewsbury propaganda, 8–13, 20, 26, 30, 55, 74, 79, 134 public realm, the, 49–51 Pugh, T.B., 68, 75, 90 Queens of England, see Anne, Elizabeth, Margaret, Mary

177

raising of armies, 96–101 Ratcliffe Sir Richard, 39 John, see Fitzwalter Ravenspur, 33 Recession, 4, 68–72 Redwood, John, 1 regional dimensions of Wars, 53–9 Renaissance, the, 12, 129; see also humanism Retford, Sir Henry, 74 Richard II, 10–12, 14, 23, 64–5, 70, 82, 111–12, 117, 132 Richard III, 8, 10–13, 15, 20, 59, 92, 101, 102, 104, 109, 115–16, 122–4, 109, 121–3, 124, 126, 128, 132 as duke of Gloucester, 33, 36–7, 42–3, 55, 82–6, 93, 101, 103, 109, 112 usurpation of the throne, 37–8, 38–40, 53, 56, 84–7 Richmond, C.F., 71, 92 earldom of, 12, 35, 39; see also Tudor Margaret, countess of, see under Beaufort Richmondshire, 54 Rogers, J.T., 15, 18 Ross, C.D., 21, 68, 89–90, 92, 16 Rotherham, Thomas, archbishop of York, 37 royal authority, recovery of, 110–18, 132–5 Russell, John, bishop of Lincoln, 53, 94 Ruthin, lord, see Grey Rutland, Edmund, duke of, see under York Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, battle of, 126 Salisbury, 101 earl of, see under Neville

178

Index

Sandal, 29 Sauchieburn, battle of, 1124 Savage, Thomas, archbishop of York, 115 Scales Ismania, Lady, 102 Thomas, Lord, 47, 58, 73–4, 96 Scofield, C.L., 18 Scotland, 5, 29–30, 36, 40, 54, 84, 111, 119–20, 122–5 kings of Scots, see James Scott, Sir Walter, 7 Scrope John, lord of Bolton, 92 John, lord of Masham, 92 Senlis, treaty of, 127 Shakespeare, William, 1–2, 11–13 Shirwood, John, bishop of Durham, 95 Shore, Mistress Jane, 83 Simnel, Lambert, 40, 57, 100, 113, 122 Smith, Sir Thomas, 9, 11, 14, 88, 132 Somerset, 4, 40 dukes of, see Beaufort Spain, 5, 119, 127–8, 130 St Albans first battle of, 22, 25–6, 29, 43, 45–6, 54, 68, 89 second battle of, 3, 20, 29, 53, 54, 99–100, 102 Stafford Anne, duchess of Buckingham, 102 Edward, duke of Buckingham, 114 family of, 98 Henry, duke of Buckingham, 26, 28, 68–9, 73, 98–9 Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, 28, 68–9, 73, 98–9 Sir Humphrey of Grafton, 67 Sir Humphrey of Southwick, earl of Devon, 32, 47

Katherine, dowager duchess of Buckingham, 114 Staffordshire, 18 Stanley family of, 18, 44, 58, 83, 109 Thomas, lord, 35, 37–9, 81, 91–2, 112, 114 Sir William, 41 Stoke by Nayland (Suffolk), 98 Stoke, battle of, 3, 41, 46, 88, 90, 96 Stonor, family of, 15 Strangways, Sir James, 67 Strickland, Sir Walter, 54 Stubbs, William, 112–13, 15, 97 Suffolk, 18, 40 duke of, see under de la Pole see also East Anglia Talbot family of, 18, 44 Eleanor, see Butler Elizabeth, duchess of Norfolk, 193 Sir Gilbert, 92 George, 4th earl of Shrewsbury, 92 John, 1st earl, 24, 71, 73–4 John, 2nd earl, 28 John, 3rd earl, 66, 91, 92, 100 Thomas, Lord Lisle, 92; Tewkesbury, battle of, 34, 41, 45, 90, 94, 107, 122 Thomas, Rhys ap, 57 Towton, battle of, 3, 29, 34, 45, 46, 54–5, 59, 89–90, 96, 100–01, 109, 120, 136, Trollope, Sir Andrew, 20, 96 Tudor Edmund, earl of Richmond, 57 Henry, see under Henry VII Jasper, earl of Pembroke, 35, 92, 100, 113, 121 Tunstall, Sir Richard, 35 Twynho, Ankarette, 103 Tyler, Sir William, 115



Index

Utrecht, treaty of, 120 Vaughan, Sir Thomas, 37 vendetta, 42, 44–6, 59 Vergil, Polydore, 11–12, 20, 56 Vere, see de Vere Vernon, Sir Henry, 93, 99 Wakefield, battle of, 29, 33, 45–7, 54, 109 Wales, 25, 28–30, 34, 39, 56–7, 68, 83, 88–9, 92, 100, 112, 121; princes of, see Edward of Lancaster, Edward of Middleham Walpole, Horace, 13 Warbeck, Perkin, 57–8, 100, 123 Wars of the Roses arrayed men and, 49, 100–101 blood feud and, 44–6; see also vendetta clergy involvement in, 94–5 composition of armies during, 96–101 consequences for the nobility, 11–12, 107–9 dynastic dispute and, 7–12, 42–4, 75–6 economic impact of, 104–6 and England’s neighbours, 123–130 factional conflict and, 43–4 first wars (1459–71), 27–35, gentry involvement in, 93–4 historiography of, 1–19 immediate causes of, 76–81 intensity of, 1–2, 7, 9–12, 14–17 international relations and, 119–23 long-term causes of, 61–8 number of wars, 21–2 peerage and, 90–93

179

prelude to, 23–7 popular participation in, 47–53 raising of armies, 96–101 recovery of royal authority from, 110–18, 132–5 regional dimensions of, 53–9 remembrance of, 109–10 scale of fighting, 88–9 second wars (1483–87), 35–41, 81–7 short-term causes of, 68–76 size of armies in, 89–90 sources for, 17–21 towns and, 95–6, 101, 105; see also individual towns women and, 101–4 Warwick, 32 Anne, countess of, see under Beauchamp Edward, earl of, 40 Richard, earl of, ‘the Kingmaker’, see under Neville Warwickshire, 18, 67 Watts, J.L., 49, 76, 129 Wedgwood, J.C., 18, 52, 109 Westminster, 25, 28, 37, 45, 49, 55 abbey of, 37 Weymouth, 34 Windsor, St George’s Chapel, 73, 109 women and Wars, 101–4 Woodville Anthony, Lord Scales and Earl Rivers, 33, 37, 58, 83, 86, 112 Elizabeth, see under Elizabeth, queen of England Richard, Earl Rivers, 31–3 Edward, Earl Rivers, 92, 113 family of, 30, 32, 37–9, 44 Worcester, 27 William, 71, 105 Wressle (Yorks), 46, 69

180

Index

York, 8–9, 33, 54, 95, 101, 105 archbishops of, see Booth, Neville Rotherham, Savage Cecily, duchess of, 103 Edmund, duke of Rutland, 29, 45 Edward, duke of (d.1415), 75 Elizabeth of, see, Elizabeth, queen of England house of, 2, 7–11, 14, 17, 21–2, 35, 40–3, 45–6, 93, 106, 109, 111, 131

Margaret of, see under Burgundy Richard, duke of, 8, 20, 24–9, 32, 34, 43–6, 47, 49–51, 56–7, 59, 68–9; 73–6, 78–9, 95, 97, 120 Richard of Shrewsbury, duke of, 37–8, 40 Yorkshire, 18, 25, 27, 29, 32–4, 53–5, 67, 93, 115 Young, Thomas, 75

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