The Wars Of The Roses

Mr Bruce Webster, Bruce Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135364434
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A problem-focused and clearly organized survey of the dynastic strife and crisis of medieval government in 15th century England.

CHAPTER ONE
The problem

The period from Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450 till the battle of Bosworth in 1485 has traditionally been labelled as that of the “Wars of the Roses”. This conflict was allegedly between the rival houses of Lancaster and York, the descendants respectively of two sons of Edward III: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, whose son, grandson and great-grandson ruled England as Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI from 1399 till 1461; and Edmund, Duke of York, whose remoter descendants reigned as Edward IV and Richard III from 1461, with a brief interlude in 1470–71 when Henry VI was restored, until Richard’s defeat at Bosworth in 1485. There is no good evidence that anyone at the time actually referred to “The Wars of the Roses”, though the Lancastrians did use a red rose as an emblem, and the Yorkists a white one; and Henry VII’s “Tudor Rose” displayed both colours as a symbol of restored unity. Nevertheless, however we try to escape from it, the concept of the Wars of the Roses continues to dominate our thinking about fifteenth-century England. This is hardly surprising, for the years from 1450 to 1485 experienced a degree of political instability unparalleled since the Norman Conquest. In these 35 years, the reigning king was deposed on five occasions; and one, Henry VI, contrived to be deposed twice! Temporary breakdowns of government had occurred at other periods, even outbreaks of civil war; and in the previous century two kings, Edward II and Richard II, had actually been deposed; but such a rapid series of dynastic upheavals seems unique to the midfifteenth century.

In the more than 500 years which have elapsed since the Wars of the Roses, the attitude of historians towards the period has changed remarkably. For the Tudors, the explanation of the conflicts was straightforward, and it is an explanation which has influenced all later thinking. It was set forth in Tudor histories, most fully in Edward Hall’s The Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1550), on which, largely, Raphael Holinshed based his Chronicles, first published in 1577. Holinshed’s Chronicles were in turn the immediate source for Shakespeare’s historical plays which eventually provided a continuous history of England from 1399 till 1485. Even to the present, it has proved very hard to escape from the influence of Shakespeare’s account.

For Shakespeare, as for Tudor historians in general, the divisions of the fifteenth century went back to 1399. In their version, the deposition of Richard II established a Lancastrian dynasty which had no true right to the throne. The Wars were the eventual judgement of heaven upon the usurpers; but true peace could not be restored till the two rival dynasties were brought together and the wound of 1399 healed in the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. This interpretation was rather elaborately set out by Edward Hall in the preface to his history, addressed to Edward VI, the young king on the throne when it was published:

This simple treatise which I have named the Union of the noble houses of Lancaster and York, conjoined together by the godly marriage of your most noble grandfather and your virtuous grandmother [Henry VII and Elizabeth of York], for as king Henry the fourth was the beginning and root of the great discord and division; so was that godly matrimony the final end of all dissensions, titles and debates (Hall 1550: Preface).

Shakespeare’s sequence of plays begins at the same point as Hall’s Union, with the troubles at the end of Richard II’s reign; and sets out the interpretation at both the start and the finish. Richard II already prophesies that his deposition will bring disasters on the country. [Richard is addressing Northumberland, who has come as messenger from Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster.]

For well we know no hand of blood and bone
Can grip the sacred handle of our sceptre
Unless he do profane, steal or usurp.
And though you think that all—as you have done—
Have torn their souls by turning them from us,
And we are barren and bereft of friends,
Yet know my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot,
That lift your vassal hands against my head
And threat the glory of my precious crown.

(Richard II, Act 3 Sc.3, 78–89)

The end of Richard III records the resolution of the conflict in the closing speech of Henry of Richmond, now after his victory and the death of King Richard at Bosworth, King Henry VII:

And then—as we have ta’en the sacrament—
[This refers to his earlier promise to marry Elizabeth of York]
We will unite the white rose and the red.
Smile, heaven, upon this fair conjunction,
That long have frowned upon their enmity.
What traitor hears me and says not “Amen”?
England hath long been mad, and scarred herself;
The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood;
The father rashly slaughtered his own son;
The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire;
All that divided York and Lancaster,
United in their dire division.
O now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together,
And let their heirs—God, if his will be so
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days.

(Richard III, Act 5 Sc.8, 18–34)

This picture, as we shall see, bore little resemblance to what actually happened, either in the fifteenth or the sixteenth century. The first was by neither so universally violent and disordered, nor the second so peaceful, as Shakespeare suggested. But it answered very directly to the needs of the Tudor governments and the aspirations of many of their people.

The truth was that the Tudor monarchy was by no means so secure or universally trusted and admired as it liked to claim, and power was maintained by a violence, which often, as under Henry VIII, bordered on terror. The dynasty was threatened by a multiplicity of plots, especially during the reign of Elizabeth; Mary Queen of Scots, while she lived, served as a focus for dissidents, and, even more seriously, as an invitation for foreign invasion. In this intermittently charged atmosphere, the fifteenth century and particularly the period of the Wars of the Roses, provided a horrific example of the dangers of disorder and overmighty subjects, to which the only antidote was loyalty to a strong and respected monarchy.

The lesson was underlined, for instance, in successive editions of the Mirror for magistrates from 1559 to 1587 (Campbell 1938). It was a collection of cautionary exempla in verse, starting with the career of “Robert Tresilian chiefe Justice of Englande” who was executed by the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 as one of the alleged evil advisers of Richard II, and continuing with a series of rebels, disturbers of the peace and good order, down to Richard III and beyond. Its object was to bring out the qualities of the evil politicians who threatened the order and stability of the realm and to warn magistrates, those in power and influence, against such conduct. All the exempla were designed to emphasize the awful consequences of disloyalty and personal ambition. The moral, the importance of submission to the crown as the only upholder of order in society, was repeated in many of the official proclamations of the day (see, for example, Campbell 1964:214– 18). The same reasoning may explain the fascination for the career of Richard III, a central figure in the Mirror for magistrates, and the subject of at least two other plays in the reign of Elizabeth, in addition to Shakespeare’s. Richard was the ultimate example of the dreadful results of a self-seeking ambition which pursued its own advancement, reckless of the welfare of the commonwealth and every moral principle. The Wars of the Roses exemplified some of the deepest fears of Tudor governments and their subjects. Hence their prominence in Tudor histories and literature.

Shakespeare reflected these worries very explicitly in the closing lines of Richmond’s speech at the end of Richard III, as imperceptibly the scene shifts forward from 1485 to the 1590s in which Shakespeare was writing:

Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce these bloody days again
And make poor England weep forth tears of blood.
Let them not live to taste this land’s increase,
That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace.
Now civil wounds are stopped; peace lives again.
That she may long live here, God say “Amen”.

(Richard III, Act 5 Sc.8, 35–41)

At the same time, the threat of foreign invasion, particularly on behalf of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, underlined the importance of loyalty to the crown. Elizabeth was not only the surety against internal disorder, but also the focus for a national defence of England against foreign dominance and Catholicism.

After 1603, the fifteenth century lost its topicality. The Stuart dynasty appeared secure, for a time at least, and the threat alike from over-mighty and ambitious nobles and of foreign invasion faded. When in the 1630s the dynasty did come under stress, the issues were very different. Opponents did indeed look to history, but in the conflicts of the 1630s and 40s, they turned to Magna Carta, the early history of parliament, and the Anglo-Saxon and Norman constitutions. The Wars of the Roses receded into the limbo of a history which had no particular relevance to contemporary struggles.

This is not to say that the Wars of the Roses were forgotten. The Tudor account had been intensely personal, a story of individual rampant barons culminating in the fiendish picture of Richard III. That was never to lose interest, and for three centuries, debate was to centre on the defence of Richard III from what some came to regard as the calumnies of the Tudors. George Buck in the seventeenth century (Buck 1646) and Horace Walpole in the eighteenth (Walpole 1768) both agreed that Richard was a capable king, traduced by Tudor propaganda. Buck claimed to produce some documentary evidence for his case, including a letter from Elizabeth of York suggesting that she was looking forward to the prospect of marrying Richard, a scheme which we know he entertained but was forced by his supporters to abandon. Unfortunately, the letter, if it ever existed, seems to be lost! Most of the arguments for Richard depended not on evidence, but on the claim that the monster of the Tudor account was impossible to believe in.

By the nineteenth century, historians were becoming more concerned with the documents, many of which had been made available by the antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The parliament rolls, the basis of any study of the workings of parliament, had been printed in the late eighteenth century. Before the end of the nineteenth century, many more records were to be published, at least in summary, in the series of calendars of public records which were then appearing. But in Victorian Britain when Parliament dominated the political scene, it was above all the history of parliament that interested historians. Bishop Stubbs’ great classic, the Constitutional history of England (Stubbs 1874— 78), was in its essentials a narrative of the growth of parliament and of its proceedings; and to that story the fifteenth century was a rather distressing appendage, a period when the hopeful developments of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were overtaken by what seemed a lapse into barbarism. Similarly, T.F. Tout’s fundamentally new exploration of the development of royal government in his Chapters in the administrative history of medieval England (Tout 1920–33) stopped in 1399. This gave the impression that development here too stopped during the fifteenth century, until progress was resumed in the seemingly new developments of the Tudors. Given the masses of documents that existed, Tout had taken the story much further than would have seemed possible for one person, even aided as he was by a few devoted researchers. It was some time before the history of administration was taken very far into the thickly documented fifteenth century.

Meanwhile, the argument about Richard III continued, and as the century advanced became more thoroughly based on the documents that were becoming available. Few, however, were con cerned to defend Richard. The most learned of students of the subject, James Gairdner, who was an experienced and excellent editor of documents, produced what remained till 1981 the best biography of Richard III, based on a masterly grasp of the sources (Gairdner 1898); but he, like many other historians, remained convinced that tradition provided the best guide to historical truth, and so adhered firmly to the Tudor line. Most authorities followed him. The only divergent voices of note were Caroline Halstead, whose biography of Richard III, published in 1844, went so far in the direction of adulation as to be hard to accept; and, at the end of the nineteenth century, Sir Clements Markham, a distinguished civil servant and geographer, who argued vehemently, and with a good deal of critical sense, that the sources for Richard III’s reign were too prejudiced and, as he thought, too deliberately distorted, to be relied on (Markham 1891). His arguments have been taken up by defenders of Richard in the various pro-Richard III societies that have grown up in the present century. However, in his efforts to exonerate Richard from what has always been seen as his greatest crime, Markham tried to fix on Henry VII the responsibility for the murder of Edward IV’s sons, the “princes in the Tower”. This is just possible, because we have no good evidence at all as to what really happened to them; but it is very hard to believe that they could have survived, completely without record, in the Tower of London or elsewhere, from 1483 till after Bosworth in 1485.

These arguments did not take our understanding of the fifteenth century much further. That had to wait for two developments: first the publication in 1925 of C. L. Kingsford’s Ford lectures on Prejudice and promise in fifteenth century England which were based on a dispassionate survey of the narrative sources for the fifteenth century by one who knew them very well; and then the lectures and writings of K. B. McFarlane who turned attention away from the cause célèbre towards a much wider understanding of the late medieval nobility, previously often regarded as the overmighty and violent villains of the story. McFarlane’s writings, and even more his teaching, over 35 years, created a quite new attitude to the fifteenth century. He sought to place the nobles in the context of their own time, and of the circumstances of their lives, especially their dependence on landed wealth, and on maintaining a following of retainers and tenants. These topics were quite extensively illustrated in the estate documents and other records of the time. McFarlane’s pupils, and others who came under his influence, went on to research the lesser landowning classes, the gentry of the fifteenth century. They proved often to be more independent, and more important for our understanding of the politics of the time than had appeared. Some of them, notably the Paston family in Norfolk, left collections of letters which give us a direct insight into their attitudes and concerns (for details on the Paston letters, see Further Reading); but many more have been the subject of the regional studies which are now essential to our understanding of what was going on.

Hence, the Wars of the Roses have come to be seen as an aspect of a landed society which needs to be studied in all its aspects. Only then can we hope to understand the problems of that society, and the causes of the breakdowns of order which occurred intermittently in the years between 1450 and the establishment of the Tudors after 1485.

There are, however, certain problems inherent in the sources which are available for this complex period. What were for long the most widely read and influential narratives, the Anglica Historia (English History) of Polydore Vergil (Vergil 1534) and the History of King Richard III by Thomas More (Sylvester 1963) were both written in the second decade of the sixteenth century, long after the battle of Bosworth in 1485 and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty. Vergil was an Italian cleric and humanist who came to England in 1502 and stayed here for most of the rest of his career. He presented a manuscript of his history to Henry VIII in 1513. It was a history of England from the earliest times, in Renaissance style, produced as an offering to the Tudor monarchy, in the hope of patronage. Even if his rewards were modest, he was apparently content, since he remained here through the upheavals of the English Reformation until he retired to his native Urbino in 1550. His history was a serious work of scholarship, based on the available sources, and showed considerable critical sense; but his account of the fifteenth century and of the Wars of the Roses in particular was inevitably written from a Tudor point of view. It was therefore unsympathetic to the Yorkists in general and particularly to Richard III. Thomas More’s history is a more complex work. Drafted around the same time as Vergil was writing, it was not printed till well after More’s death, and exists now in a number of different manuscript and printed versions (see Sylvester 1963). It was a vehement attack on Richard III and is the source of most of the routine Tudor and later denunciations of that king. Yet it also contains many details which have the air of being accurate reports of contemporary comments (More’s father was a prominent London citizen at the time of Richard’s usurpation and reign), though few of these details can be corroborated. More’s account is the ultimate source for much of Shakespeare’s picture of Richard III, and the source also of most subsequent hostile accounts of that king. It is also the principal target of those who wish to defend Richard III.

Much better sources for the whole period are the various continuations of the “Croyland Chronicle” (Riley, 1854; Pronay and Cox 1986; see also Gransden 1982:265–74). These are puzzling works. The “Croyland Chronicle” itself is a fifteenth-century forgery, apparently concocted to support some legal disputes in which the abbey was involved; but the forged text was then continued, first by a narrat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: The Problem
• Chapter 2: The Events: What Actually Happened?
• Chapter 3: The Social and Political Situation In the Fifteenth Century
• Chapter 4: The Problem of Authority In the Middle Ages
• Chapter 5: Failings of Government
• Epilogue: The Tudor Solution
• References
• Further Reading