Civil wars are all the rage among political scientists. They have been the main type of conflict since the end of the Cold War, and scholars who once focused on interstate wars are now much more interested in ‘new wars’, among which forms of civil war and state disintegration are prime features.¹ These ‘new wars’ are complex and prolonged, often ‘asymmetric’ in the sense that formal armies are opposed by militias and guerrillas, who play by different rules. They combine multiple actors and many ingredients – in the words of Mary Kaldor: ‘state and non-state, public and private, external and internal, economic and political, and even war and peace’.² To pre-modern historians, as Kaldor acknowledges, such conflicts look far from new – this is exactly what wars in our period are like – though ‘new wars’ also arise from new technologies, globalised trade patterns and new sources of value, like drugs and diamonds.³ But no-one would deny that civil wars have a long history, and political scientists and historians are increasingly approaching them comparatively. Twenty years ago, Stathis Kalyvas drew on a wide range of early-modern and modern conflicts to establish a sense of the dynamics common to civil wars.⁴ More recently, David Armitage has written sensitively about the Roman framing of the concept of civil war, and the way in which that framing inflected later conflicts that were seen in those terms.⁵ And in the last few years, Hans Jacob Orning and Jón Viđar Sigurđsson have led a project comparing the political struggles in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scandinavia with those in modern Afghanistan, Bissau and elsewhere.⁶ Among historical cases, England’s seventeenth-century ‘civil war’, seen for a time as a ‘revolution’ and now more commonly as a ‘war of three kingdoms’, typically features in these comparative initiatives, but the Wars of the Roses, that long, and supposedly sterile sequence of conflicts around the throne in the second half of the fifteenth century, do not. One of the aims of this book is to change that.

There is no question that the Wars of the Roses should be considered a civil war. Political scientists have found it difficult to arrive at a single definition of the concept, and disagree over whether or not the government must be a participant, but most approaches to civil war presuppose challenges to a ruling authority from organised groups of its subjects, together with a mixture of public claims and both publicly avowed and private-interest motivations, as well as central and local conflicts and external interference.⁷ Among the historians, Armitage argues that Roman civil war required the participation of citizens – that is, people with a stake in the governance of the polity. He adds that it must occur within a single political community (however much it overlapped its edges); and that it must involve at least two parties.⁸ Orning and Sigurđsson opt for a loose and broad definition, featuring ‘sustained and large-scale conflict’ which is primarily internal to a given polity; but, for the purposes of their comparison, they prefer to exclude places where there are well-developed states, and to focus on places where kinship groups and other social networks are fairly fluid.⁹ Alan Cromartie, looking at the seventeenth-century conflict, focuses on the exposure of ambiguities and hybridities in a system which had seemed uniform: for him, these fault-lines were the relationship between the king and the law, on the one hand, and the relationship between the royally directed church and true religion on the other.¹⁰

The Wars of the Roses, featuring a series of uprisings, coups and battles, in which three kings were deposed and murdered, while the authority of royal government was repeatedly challenged and armed factions rose and fell, clearly meet the terms of these definitions. As in Cromartie’s model, the conflict pitched different elements of the political system against each other, in this case prising apart the interpersonal networks and public institutions through which the realm was normally governed and, by placing the king’s own title to rule in question, radically undermining the effectiveness of a succession of rulers. And just as in Armitage’s Roman case, part of the horror attached to civil war was a sense that the normal authority of the state had been subverted and neutralised: fifteenth-century England had well-developed institutions of government, and contemporaries were alarmed and upset by their apparent failure. In many ways, indeed, they were more alarmed and upset than the actual level of violence and political breakdown warranted. It has been famously estimated that the Wars of the Roses involved only a year or so of active campaigning, perhaps less, and it is clear that the law and local government continued to function through almost all of the conflict.¹¹ But it would not do to minimise the Wars. For fifty or sixty years, no ruler, with the possible exception of Edward IV for a short spell in the 1470s, could be confident of holding on to the throne and bequeathing it to a son; there were at least twelve battles, in which nobles died and the rule of the realm was placed in question, spread across more than forty years; and the English political order that emerged from war in the early sixteenth century was rather different from the one that had entered it in the mid-fifteenth.

It may be surprising, then, that the Wars of the Roses have not been treated comparatively, at least across time.¹² One possible reason is the well-established belief that the Wars were simply meaningless struggles between great feudatories: that, in the words of the nineteenth-century historian J. A. Froude, they ‘involved no principle and led to no result’.¹³ This would mark them out from the seventeenth-century civil wars, in which various features of modern England were hammered out, and even from such medieval conflicts as the twelfth-century ‘anarchy’ of Stephen’s reign, the struggles against King John and the Barons’ War of the mid-thirteenth century, which are believed to have led respectively to the creation of the common law, Magna Carta and the development of a bicameral, representative parliament. But, as we shall see below, the Wars of the Roses were full of issues of principle; they began with demands for political and governmental reform, and these demands influenced both the formation and the behaviour of the key parties; they raised questions about how best the realm should be governed, and how the authority to govern was best assured. Nor were they devoid of result. England began the Wars as a high-tax country, engaged in frequent warfare and territorial assertion in France, with a nobility of hereditary landowners whose wealth, power and connections were essential to both military enterprise and local rule. By the end of the Wars, it was a low-tax country, excluded from France, more focused on the British Isles and the Atlantic, mainly at peace with its neighbours, and ruled primarily by royal officers – some of them noble, certainly, but their possessions more directly supervised by the crown. This was the so-called ‘new monarchy’, disliked by liberal Victorians, but recognised by them as the product of the mid-century conflict. Its birth-pangs in an era of civil war help to explain the contradictions that were so painfully exposed in the 1640s; and whatever the Reformation owed to the new heresies of the sixteenth century, it also found its roots in the reform programme of the Wars of the Roses.¹⁴

So it is hard to argue that comparativists have ignored the Wars because they were unprincipled and unimportant. Two other reasons may have more to recommend them. First, the narrative of the Wars of the Roses is long, tangled and rebarbative. Historians take different views of the length of the Wars, and especially whether or not to include the reign of Henry VII. Some talk of three wars, with fighting concentrated in the years around 1460, 1470 and 1485; others of two wars, between ‘Lancaster’ and ‘York’, and ‘York’ and ‘Tudor’; still others of a single conflict.¹⁵ The politics of the period were messy and complicated, and full of unexpected turns of fortune; groups seeming to have the upper hand in politics went on to lose on the battlefield; winners on the battlefield struggled against uprisings and plots. The source material is fragmented, yet suggestive, especially later in the Wars, when the disappearance of Edward IV’s sons, and the emergence of young men claiming to be them, has spawned a rich and imaginative literature. Historians have pored over the details of the Wars with care and learning, and almost every episode, network and relationship has been carefully reconstructed – we now know a huge amount about what happened and why, particularly at the interpersonal and local levels of causation. But for all their utility, these approaches have a particularising effect, making it harder to generalise across the period of the Wars, let alone to open up this sequence of conflicts for comparison. Almost all the books on the Wars of the Roses centre on the course of events: Tony Pollard’s collection of thematic essays is perhaps the most striking exception, and it is now twenty years old.¹⁶ Of course, the narrative matters – that things happened one way and not another is the first rule of history – but we do not need to centre our treatments on that narrative, especially when a lot of what happened seems to arise from structures and dynamics, which might be a more fruitful topic to discuss.¹⁷ Although a brief narrative of the Wars appears later in this introduction as an aid to readers who are not specialists, this book will generally take a different tack. Events are like weather, and this book is about climate.

A second factor that may have made the Wars of the Roses less amenable to comparison is the priority that historians have typically given to establishing and debating their causes, rather than acknowledging the structures and processes that allowed division to continue. There are certainly exceptions here, and a central treatment like Christine Carpenter’s, which locates the civil wars in the structures of rule, both local and national, explains both their outbreak and their continuation, though there is room for disagreement over the weighting of individual factors, on the one hand, and systemic ones, on the other.¹⁸ One reason for historians’ concern with causes has been the need to rescue the later medieval period from the assumption that its political arrangements were fundamentally flawed, but that need feels much less pressing today, when we recognise that almost any political order needs to be understood in its own terms, and when we have an appropriately rounded and balanced reading of the fifteenth century in particular. I have written about the causes of the Wars myself, and I have a bit more to say about them below, but I have come to feel that the fact of political division and insecurity is the really important thing to grasp about the conflict because it so profoundly determined the options available to the participants.¹⁹ While that shift of emphasis leaves us with plenty of things to explain – How did division and insecurity become ingrained? When and why did they cease to dominate? – it immediately renders the Wars more comparable to other conflicts in which these things are endemic.

In the chapters below, we shall be less concerned with the storyline of the Wars and with their causes, and more concerned with some of their contexts and dynamics. Before we begin, however, it will be necessary to say something about the nature of English political society and government in this period, and also to provide a short account of the events of the Wars, treated here as beginning in about 1450 and ending in 1509. The English kingdom was administratively advanced by the fifteenth century, possessing the co-ordinated and standardised institutions of government which we might associate with the notion of a state – courts of justice and a common law, administered in the king’s name by a mixture of professional officers and commissioners; a tax system, which applied to most of society and produced extraordinary taxes for defence (‘fifteenths and tenths’) as well as indirect taxes on wool and other goods, paid regularly into royal coffers; a parliament, representing lords, shires and towns, in which laws were made, taxes voted and petitions heard.²⁰ While this state was headed by an independent, sovereign king, it had a strongly representative ethos – government was understood to be for the common weal of the people – and this principle was sustained by a host of representative practices: petitioning, counsel, elections, and the tendency of groups of ‘commons’ to gather in towns, villages and parishes, to defend and promote public interests (at least as these were defined by the ‘trustworthy men’ who typically dominated these activities).²¹

The king derived his capacity to rule partly from the performance of political services – notably the provision of authority and leadership, including good decision-making and what the fifteenth-century poet George Ashby called ‘active policy’ – but his power also rested on inherited right, as the descendant, ideally the direct descendant, of the previous king.²² The advantage of hereditary kingship was that it promised to deliver a series of rulers whose right to rule was beyond question, so the leading politicians of later medieval England normally preferred to uphold the rule of children and babies, as they did in 1377 and 1422, over brothers or other collateral relatives of the dead king, whose claims to rule might be contested or could lead to dynastic competition. But the royal line could fail, or threaten to fail, and coups, such as the overthrow of Richard II in 1399, opened up the possibility of alternative claims. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Lancastrian claim, which arose from the usurpation of Henry IV, was universally accepted, but failure on the part of his grandson to rule with the necessary mixture of receptiveness and authority was likely to produce challenges, just as similar failures had prompted resistance to Richard II. Kings built up authority naturally through the competent fulfilment of their political role, and by the associated rituals and performances of authority and counsel-taking; more tangibly, they drew on the willing support of the leading figures in the realm, both secular and ecclesiastical, and on an extensive entourage of officers, servants and attendants, funded by incomes which they substantially controlled. To a point, they were protected by the dynamics of their office – the interest everyone had in getting on with the person whose job it was to rule the realm – but they were also protected by the laws and customs of treason, which forbade subjects to confront the king’s banner in arms, or to plot his death or downfall. But although the law of treason had been defined in statute in 1352, the concept was more elastic: those who gave the king bad advice or were judged to have wasted his assets might also be accused of treason; equally, those who rose up against him might succeed in passing off their actions as counsel, their assembly in arms justified by claims of self-defence. If the king, for reasons of political pragmatism, agreed to restrictions on his authority – the dismissal of counsellors, the imposition of councils, or regents or protectors – uprisings might be less obviously treasonable. In these ways, then, a king who aroused criticism from his subjects might forfeit the authority that was normally attached to his office, and plunge the political system into disarray.

The realm of England was a political unit, with its own laws, institutions and political culture, but its king ruled over Wales and parts of Ireland, as well as Calais, Man and the Channel Islands. He also claimed the overlordship of Scotland, but was normally prepared to limit himself to defending the border, and entertaining Scottish exiles and dissidents. He also had claims in France, including two titles to its throne, one via Edward III and the other acquired in the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, which had led to Henry VI’s coronation in Paris in 1431. In 1450, that king lost Normandy, and in 1453 Gascony, but the crown retained interests and contacts in the kingdom, especially in Burgundy and Brittany, and there was every chance it would return to vindicate its claims at some point in the second half of the century. It is important to remember that, while England was the engine room of the Plantagenet crown, and supplied the bulk of its financial resources and military infrastructure, the king was also a player on a wider stage, and could often recruit forces and activate support across many parts of the British Isles and sometimes the near continent. Although the Wars of the Roses are often considered as an English conflict, like most civil wars, they involved ‘external’ participation too – just how much is the theme of Chapter 5.

English political society was highly stratified, even though the kingdom was also conceived as a community, in which every member had a part to play and a stake in the common weal.²³ And it was shot through with networks and other political groupings and solidarities – counties, towns, villages, guilds, parishes, churches – any of which might provide means of contact and collaboration for their members, even if the more prominent among them typically held leading roles. At the top of society were the fifty or sixty baronial families, the secular nobility, headed by half a dozen dukes and around fifteen earls; the richest of these drew annual incomes of several thousand pounds and held lands in multiple counties. These lords typically served in the king’s wars and held military commands; they also had a measure of ‘rule’, as it was called, in one or more regions where they held land, influencing local justice, in part through followings or ‘affinities’ of lesser aristocrats – knights, esquires and ‘gentlemen’ – linked to them by indentures, fees or office-holding, or by looser ties of anticipated service and protection. These lesser landowners, comprising upwards of 6,000 families, are known to historians as the gentry, and they made up the bulk of county society, owning the majority of the secular land in any given county, and dominating the king’s local offices – sheriff, justices of the peace, MP and so on; they headed the local grand jury and held local commissions of all kinds. At the beginning of our period, most of them were linked to local lords and often held offices on their estates; but some were linked to the crown, as household knights, or as office-holders in the duchy of Lancaster, which was a private possession of the crown from 1399 onwards, and as royal lands grew, and for other reasons, more and more gentlemen were attached to the king in some way, while their ties to the lords weakened.

Alongside the secular aristocracy were the lords of the church, the twenty-one bishops of England and Wales, headed by the archbishops of Canterbury and York (with Canterbury the ‘primate’), and the abbots of the greater monasteries. Most of the bishops were royal officers and agents, though they were also mindful of their responsibility to ‘holy church’, and sought to uphold the liberties of that church, including against the king. They too had estates and followings in the counties and in the towns where their cathedrals and palaces were sited, but their participation in local aristocratic politics was generally modest. Below these prelates, there was a rich network of ecclesiastical institutions, comprising monks, nuns and friars, archdeacons and rectors, collectively managing large amounts of land, often with the help of lay partners. The rest of society was made up of ‘the commons’, a very wide group, stretching from rich merchants and lawyers with prominent roles in the governance of towns and cities, through traders and producers of all kinds, to yeoman-farmers, who leased agricultural holdings for profit, to stipendiary priests, and down to labourers in agriculture and industry (notably cloth production), and the poor and sick, who depended on charity. Members of the commons also held royal offices – as jurors, tax collectors, constables and militia-men, town councillors and so on. These roles could bring a capacity to organise politically, and the many risings and demonstrations of ‘the commons’ in this period were enabled by the rich administrative infrastructure, as well as a culture of rumour, gossip and mass communication. In all, then, there was an extensive political society, linked to an extensive government, which through its laws, courts and taxes provided political services and made political demands: the civil wars could not but affect the entire structure, and pressures for reform and redress were felt at every level.

The beginning of the Wars lay in the political crisis which engulfed England during and after the parliament of 1449–50.²⁴ The war in France had begun again in the summer of 1449 after a five-year truce, and the heavily indebted government thus needed to call a parliament and ask for taxation. MPs, anxious about popular disorder and rising crime, were in no mood to grant taxes to a king who appeared to have run up debts of £382,000 and they instead set out to impeach his chief minister, the duke of Suffolk, whom they regarded as the head of a clique of court-based traitors who had helped themselves to royal assets and made deals with England’s enemies. They also demanded that the king resume the lands and rights he had given out and use his own resources rather than burdening his subjects. They were foiled in both initiatives: Suffolk was allowed to resign and escape into exile (though he was murdered by shipmen off Dover), while the resumption was largely thwarted by large numbers of exemptions. In the spring of 1450, as Normandy fell to the French, uprisings spread through the south-east of England, echoing the critique of the commons in parliament and, in the case of Jack Cade’s rising in Kent, calling for justice on the traitors and political reform, to be led by the duke of York, the greatest magnate in the realm, and the inheritor of two potential claims to the throne, one of them potentially stronger than the Lancastrian claim. A few months later, York returned from Ireland, where he had been the king’s lieutenant, and endorsed the commons’ complaints, demanding that the king take action against the traitors and offering his own services in the cause of justice and reform.

York dominated the ensuing parliament of 1450–1, obtaining the imprisonment of the duke of Somerset, who had presided over the defeat in Normandy, and supporting a new act of resumption and a bill to remove various people from the king’s side; an agent of his also tried to get him recognised as the king’s heir, though this initiative led to the dissolution of the parliament. By this time, the revolts in the south-east had been suppressed, the duke of Somerset was back in control of the government, and the rump of the Suffolk regime had been restored. York attempted to return to power in 1452, by bringing an army to confront the king at Dartford, in Kent, but was persuaded to submit rather than fight (see Map 1 for this and other confrontations). In the summer of the following year, as news arrived of the loss of English Gascony at the battle of Castillon, Henry VI lapsed into insanity and Somerset’s regime collapsed, as open warfare threatened to break out between the two greatest families of the north, the Nevilles and the Percies. At this moment, rather remarkably, Queen Margaret gave birth to a longed-for male heir, Edward, promising a future for the house of Lancaster and, during the winter of 1453–4, a deal was struck in which the duke of York, now backed by the Neville earls of Salisbury and Warwick, returned to power, as protector on behalf of the young prince.

Over the next year, York reformed the royal household, suppressed the troubles in Yorkshire, pressed for the trial of Somerset and tried to gain control of Calais. When the king recovered his health, at Christmas 1454, the duke’s opponents, who may now have included the queen, secured an end to the protectorate, and York and the Neville earls, ejected from power, confronted the king and many other lords in arms at St Albans in May 1455. After an attempt at negotiations, fighting broke out – led, it was said, by the earl of Warwick – and the first actual battle of the Wars of the Roses was won by the Yorkists, with Somerset, the Percy earl of Northumberland and Lord Clifford killed in the mêlée, while the king was wounded in the face by an arrow. York and the Nevilles continued to insist on their loyalty to Henry VI, and another parliament was summoned, at which a second protectorate was established and power vested in a council, as the king was said to be unable to rule in person. Once again, York pushed for resumption and this time secured Calais for the earl of Warwick; once again, his opponents around the king were able to eject him from power by the spring of 1456, and three years of cold war followed, in which the queen built up an effective Lancastrian party to protect the claims of Prince Edward, while York and the Nevilles pondered their options and began to enlist support from the duke of Burgundy and other potential opponents of the French king. In 1459, York, Warwick and Salisbury launched an attempted coup, still calling for reform and action against traitors, but they fled the battlefield at Ludford Bridge rather than fight the much larger army that turned out for the king and prince. The Yorkist lords were duly attainted as traitors themselves at the ensuing parliament at Coventry, but – with nothing to lose – they gathered support for a further attempt in the summer of 1460.

By now, it had probably been agreed that York would claim the throne, but the posture of loyalist reform adopted by York’s eldest son, Edward, earl of March, and the Neville earls when they landed in Kent earned them the backing of a papal legate, Francesco Coppini, as well as Lancastrian support in London and the south-east and, when they captured the king at the battle of Northampton in July, this posture was confirmed. When York returned and claimed the throne in the autumn of 1460, the rest of the Yorkists thus forced a compromise in the Act of Accord: Henry VI would remain king, though there would be another regency; Edward of Lancaster would forfeit his title; and York and his sons would be the king’s next heirs. The duke went north to fight Queen Margaret and her supporters, who had got away from Northampton, and was killed, with his second son, at the battle of Wakefield in December 1460. The queen’s army continued south, defeating Warwick at a second battle at St Albans and rescuing the king, though she could not regain London. At this point, with the Accord in tatters, the remaining Yorkists agreed to support Edward of March in claiming the throne. Fresh from a victory at Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire, where his army was amazed and impressed by a portent of three suns in the sky, Edward IV began his reign on 4 March 1461. He immediately sought a confrontation with the Lancastrians and fought them in a large and bloody battle at Towton a few weeks later. Edward’s army was victorious, and many Lancastrian lords were killed, but Henry VI, Queen Margaret and Prince Edward survived and fled into Scotland.

The jockeying of the 1450s reflects the personal weakness of Henry VI, a notoriously pliable king who was at times (or perhaps continually) inert after 1453: those who wished to improve the quality of government to address public complaints had to deal with this essential problem, and the divisions and challenges which it entailed. From 1461, however, conditions were different. On the one hand, there was a young, energetic and apparently competent king who expected to be master in his own kingdom; on the other hand, he was a usurper, facing a number of exiles and foreign enemies, some pockets of resistance, and a host of domestic political and governmental challenges, including the need to create a new aristocratic elite, to tackle a shortage of money and to address demands for reform. Edward IV set about the tasks before him with alacrity, redistributing the confiscated lands of Lancastrians to build up a new nobility, comprising his father’s allies, the Nevilles – Warwick, Montagu and (before his death in 1463) Fauconberg; his own younger brothers, George and Richard, made dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, respectively; and new men promoted from the Yorkist gentry, Sir William Herbert, Sir William Hastings and Sir Humphrey Stafford of Southwick. While Warwick and Montagu led the recapture of northern castles from the Lancastrians, extinguishing resistance in Northumberland by 1464, Edward raised armies, managed an ambitious programme of diplomacy, and attempted to build bridges with former Lancastrians, such as the duke of Somerset. While the last of these initiatives failed, the king had secured truces with France and Scotland by 1463 and gained control of Henry VI (though not his son) by 1465. In 1464, he married a Lancastrian widow, Elizabeth Woodville, related to the Burgundian house of Luxemburg on her mother’s side, and set about the task of producing an heir.

In the mid-1460s, Edward’s position looked promising, but in 1469, he would be temporarily imprisoned by Warwick; and then, for about six months, between the autumn of 1470 and the spring of 1471, he was temporarily dislodged from the throne in the ‘Readeption’ of Henry VI. What caused these reversals of fortune? One factor was the rise of the queen’s relatives and the newer Yorkist lords at the expense of Warwick in particular: their policy, of alliance with Burgundy and a hard-to-finance war with France, had won the king’s support by 1467–8 when his sister, Margaret, was married to the new duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold. Warwick, who seems to have favoured peace with France, resented this, and was clearly at odds with the king during the winter of that year, though the two men patched things up for a while thereafter. At the same time, Lancastrian plotting continued, and Queen Margaret and Prince Edward, the latter growing into a healthy young man, began to get more tangible support from Louis XI, king of France. Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth, meanwhile, produced only daughters (his first son was born during his absence in Holland in November 1470), so the Yorkist succession appeared insecure. Third, there seems to have been a high level of public complaint – over taxation, trade dislocation and price fluctuations, as well as some particular instances of disorder and judicial bias. In the summer of 1469, Warwick married his daughter to the young duke of Clarence against the king’s wishes and lent support to an uprising of the commons of Yorkshire under a captain called ‘Robin of Redesdale’. A Neville army confronted a hastily assembled force of Edward’s supporters at Edgcote in Oxfordshire, and defeated it, capturing the king shortly after and prompting the judicial murders of his allies: Herbert, Stafford and the queen’s father, Lord Rivers. Warwick and Clarence proposed to summon a parliament, at which reforms would be initiated, and perhaps Edward would have been pushed to resign the crown in favour of his brother, but the king’s imprisonment produced a wave of disorder and Warwick was forced to release him in September in order to put down a Lancastrian rising in Yorkshire under Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth. An uneasy truce prevailed for the next six months, but it was clear that Edward no longer trusted Warwick and Clarence, nor they him, and when a rising blew up in Lincolnshire in the spring of 1470, the king announced that these two lords were behind it. They fled to France and formed an alliance with Louis XI, Queen Margaret and Prince Edward, before returning to England in the autumn of 1470, carried in French ships and claiming to support Henry VI. Edward IV struggled to raise troops against them and, hearing that Warwick’s brother, Marquess Montagu, had defected to the rebels with a large force of northerners, fled to the Burgundian Low Countries, with Hastings, Gloucester and a small entourage. A week later, Henry VI was released from the Tower of London and his Readeption began, with Warwick as his lieutenant.

The new regime struck a broadly conciliatory tone, aiming to secure the loyalty of as many as possible of those who had supported Edward IV, while restoring the former king and his heir and reintegrating a small number of Lancastrian exiles. While Edward IV and his key allies were attainted, Clarence was granted the duchy of York, and Queen Elizabeth and her children, including the new-born Prince Edward, were allowed to remain in sanctuary in Westminster. Hamstrung by the alliance with France, which was unpopular in London, and short of money, Warwick waited for the crossing of Queen Margaret and Edward of Lancaster, but this was delayed until April 1471, while the queen waited for assurances that Warwick was loyal and in control and was then held up by bad weather. In the meantime, the duke of Burgundy, fearing Anglo-French attack, allowed Edward IV to return to England. The Yorkist king landed in Yorkshire in March 1471, and steadily won back support, in a manner that suggests that positive backing for the Readeption was limited. In early April, he persuaded Clarence to switch sides, and soon after took London, imprisoning Henry VI, who appears to have been murdered shortly afterwards. King Edward went on to defeat Warwick and Montagu at the battle of Barnet on Easter Sunday, 14 April 1471, and then to confront Queen Margaret, Edward of Lancaster and a large force drawn from the south-west and Wales at Tewkesbury in early May, where he was again victorious. The Lancastrian Prince Edward and a number of his leading supporters were killed, some in battle and some by execution; and then, following the suppression of an ill-timed pro-Neville uprising by the Bastard of Fauconberg, backed by some Kent commoners and troops from Calais, Edward IV was able to re-enter his capital on 21 May 1471.

The Readeption had shown how easily rulers could be dislodged in the circumstances of division that first arose in the 1450s, particularly when these divisions were sustained by the dynamics of usurpation and the involvement of foreign powers. In many ways, it prefigured the situation of Henry VII’s reign, though the balance of power and fortune then favoured the king, so the politics of the 1480s, 1490s and 1500s played out differently. In the meantime, though, Edward IV had destroyed the Lancastrian royal family and the Neville interest, and was able to build a more effective Yorkist establishment than he had in his first reign, including two male heirs, Edward, born in 1470, and Richard, born in 1473. The king was now able to rule in a more normal way, maintaining order across his realm and pursuing war in France in 1475, and in Scotland in 1482, while moving towards a marriage alliance with Brittany. But although Edward had the upper hand, threats persisted, and the Wars of the Roses had not been laid to rest. For one thing, Lancastrian plots continued – a pretender had emerged in the shape of Henry Tudor, son of Henry VI’s half-brother Edmund Tudor and Lady Margaret Beaufort, who was herself a direct descendant of John of Gaunt, albeit via an illegitimate line. Tudor was safely at the court of the duke of Brittany, while early in the decade, the French-backed Lancastrian earl of Oxford harried the coasts and landed in the south-west in 1473, though he was eventually forced to surrender. Another source of tension was that the rulers of Brittany and Burgundy continued to look for English support against the king of France, and the peace which Edward maintained with Louis XI after the 1475 expedition left them anxious and dangerously exposed. Meanwhile, there were tensions between the king’s brothers, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who was Edward’s trusted lieutenant in the north and acquired the bulk of the Neville inheritance, and George, duke of Clarence, whom Edward tried to reintegrate, but who remained in an uneasy position after the events of 1469–70 and was judicially murdered following an obscure scandal in 1478. Finally, the king’s eagerness to endow his sons with estates and supporters may have alienated some of those who were excluded from this programme, notably John Lord Howard and Viscount Berkeley, whose claims to the duchy of Norfolk were suppressed in favour of Prince Richard, and the young duke of Buckingham, who was excluded from any influence in Wales in favour of Prince Edward and the Woodvilles. None of these difficulties significantly disturbed Edward IV’s authority while he lived, but when he died at the age of 40 in April 1483, with two boys for heirs, the potential for instability was quickly realised.

The events of 1483 are probably the most notorious and contested of the Wars. The dead king’s remaining brother, Richard of Gloucester, seized control of Prince Edward at Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire at the end of April and arrested the young king’s uncle, Earl Rivers, and other members of his entourage. He assumed control of the government, as Lord Protector, and persuaded the dowager queen, who had fled to sanctuary, to hand over Prince Richard, who joined his elder brother in the Tower of London, where they were kept ostensibly for their own protection. A few weeks later, he turned on the dead king’s chamberlain, William Lord Hastings, who was executed outside the council chamber on 13 June. Soon after, with the help of the duke of Buckingham, Richard was offered the throne on the grounds that Edward IV had been contracted to marry another woman when he married Elizabeth Woodville, so the two princes were illegitimate. No-one resisted this coup immediately and Richard III was duly crowned. During the following summer, attempts were made to rescue the princes, who were probably killed soon after, and a full-blown uprising of the servants and allies of Edward IV and the Woodvilles across much of England and Wales broke out in October. So extensive was this rising that the duke of Buckingham decided to throw in his lot with the rebels, and so did Henry Tudor, who may have been its intended beneficiary. In the event, Richard successfully scotched the rebellion, capturing and executing Buckingham, while Tudor escaped back to Brittany, to be joined by various agents of Edward IV and the Woodvilles who persuaded him to promise to marry the former king’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, in December. Over the ensuing year, Richard struggled to retain control: he redistributed the lands of the 1483 rebels, but this created tension across the realm, and his son and heir died in April 1484, to be followed by his wife in March 1485. Under these circumstances, Henry Tudor’s prospects brightened, and – even though he was forced to flee Brittany for France – he was able to land in Wales in August 1485, raising troops there and confronting Richard near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire later in the month. At this famous battle, while the magnates hedged their bets and the king put up a heroic defence, the pretender was victorious with the aid of his Stanley relatives. Richard was killed, and Henry VII marched on London for his coronation.

Bosworth has sometimes been treated as the end of the Wars of the Roses, but it is plain that the kinds of politics experienced in the previous few decades continued, right up to the 1500s, and there were even further battles, at Stoke in 1487, and at Blackheath in 1497. Henry VII was regarded as the heir of Lancaster and, through his agreement to marry Elizabeth of York, the leader of the non-Ricardian Yorkists, but – despite the useful backing of the papacy – he had no real title to the throne beyond possession, and faced most of the usual problems of a usurper. He did not have to deal with kingmakers, it is true – most of those who had made him king were mostly either loyal (Lady Margaret and her husband Thomas Stanley, earl of Derby; Henry’s uncle, Jasper Tudor; the earl of Oxford) or soon out of the picture (Northumberland, killed by rebels in 1489) – but he did face dynastic opposition and popular challenge. There were Ricardian risings against Henry as early as 1485, but the first really serious outbreak came in 1487, when a boy apparently claiming to be Edward, earl of Warwick, son of the duke of Clarence, emerged in Dublin and was promptly crowned by the party of the lieutenant there, the powerful earl of Kildare.²⁵ This ‘Edward’, known to history as Lambert Simnel, was also backed by John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, who himself had a potential Yorkist claim, and by Margaret of York and her son-in-law, Maximilian, regent of the Low Countries, who sought English support against France, and feared that Henry would be a French stooge. The king was able to raise a large army to counter this challenge, and defeated the rebels at Stoke, in Nottinghamshire.

After this, Henry moved to tighten control, with bonds and judicial reforms, though he also made treaties with Brittany, Spain and the Low Countries and began to intervene in northern France. A mixture of political and fiscal grievances prompted an uprising in Yorkshire in 1489, while the anti-French policy of 1489–92 led to a decade of difficulty after a figure known as Perkin Warbeck or ‘Richard, duke of York’, the younger of the princes in the Tower, emerged in France in 1491, before gaining recognition from Duchess Margaret, and receiving backing from, successively, Irish, Burgundian and Scottish opponents of the king. Even though Henry had two male heirs by the early 1490s, ‘Warbeck’/‘Richard’ was a difficult opponent, who even gained support from key figures in the royal household in 1495, accentuating the king’s distrustfulness. Through diplomatic and military threats, Henry gradually succeeded in detaching the pretender from his international supporters, and when he finally landed in 1497, he was quite easily captured and imprisoned – though a much bigger popular rebellion broke out in the south-west shortly after, and was only defeated on the outskirts of London in a pitched battle. The king went on to execute both ‘Warbeck’/ ‘Richard’ and the young earl of Warwick following an escape attempt in 1499, but this was not the end of his troubles. Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk and a descendant of the house of York, fled to the court of Maximilian in the same year, and – after a brief return – fled again in 1501. Only by chance did he fall into Henry’s hands in 1506, and Maximilian’s acquiescence was bought in the meantime by several hundred thousand pounds of ‘loans’ which the emperor would never repay. Henry’s last years were exceptionally difficult: the ruling circle narrowed after the plots of 1495; the prince of Wales and his brother Edmund died in 1502 and 1500 respectively; and the queen followed them to the grave in 1503. From this point, Henry VII, who was increasingly worn out and ill, had only one male heir – Prince Henry, born in 1491 – and his intensifying search for security and money seems to have alienated many of his leading subjects. In the event, however, he clung on until 1509, and Henry VIII’s accession was both uncontested and universally welcomed. Although the new king remained concerned about the possibility of further civil war, the patterns of the previous sixty years were decisively broken, and the Wars of the Roses were finally at an end.

In the pages that follow, the Wars are considered in the round, and through four lenses, three of them based on lectures I gave at Trinity College Dublin in 2022 as the ‘James Lydon Lectures in Medieval History and Culture’. Chapter 2 focuses on discourse and policy – the public debate over governmental reform in the name of the common weal, and the responses of the regimes of the era; it thus foregrounds the moral and ideological claims of participants in the Wars, and reminds us that these conflicts had a meaningful public context and ushered in important changes to the system of rule. Chapter 3 centres on the atmosphere of division and its political consequences. Drawing on some of the ideas in today’s political science, it considers the dynamics of fifteenth-century civil war, emphasising that even the leading participants were caught in a systemic struggle which, as individuals, they could not control. Although it deals briefly with some of the structural causes of the Wars, the chapter is more interested in the reasons why the conflict was so difficult to escape from; how a civil war of this kind corroded the very structures through which resolution might arise. Chapter 4 takes a different tack, and considers the relationship between the civil wars and the economy. The fifteenth century has often been seen as a key period of economic crisis and structural change or ‘transition’, and this chapter considers to what extent and in what ways the civil wars reflected these developments. Finally, Chapter 5 locates the Wars in the wider geopolitical context of the British Isles and north-western Europe, exploring the balance of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ dynamics in the generation of civil conflict. A conclusion follows, as well as some aids to the reader: brief biographical details of the participants named in the text and a chronology. There are also a couple of maps and a family tree before this Introduction. But I have left the opening chapter of the book, which is based on the opening lecture of the Lydon series, until last. Chapter 1 discusses the ways we have traditionally understood the Wars of the Roses, and approaches the question of narrative in a slightly different sense – as interpretation. In particular, it traces the roots of the familiar image of the Wars as a sequence of conflicts generated by the ambitions, jealousies and plots of overmighty subjects. Exposing those roots to daylight, it proposes that we should think about the conflict in the quite different ways that are opened up in the succeeding chapters.