How to Understand the Wars of the Roses

Despite the poetic name (which wasn’t even attached to this series of conflicts until over a hundred years later), the Wars of the Roses were every bit as violent, grubby, and ultimately pointless as any other of history’s endless battles for royal succession. These English wars started in 1455 as the culmination of a continuing feud between the House of Lancaster and the House of York (the emblem of the House of York included a white rose, and the emblem of the House of Lancaster included a red rose), and ended thirty years later with the accession of the Tudor King Henry VII. Here’s a quick history.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. The two houses had been feuding since 1399. In that year, Henry Bolingbroke (of the House of Lancaster) deposed his cousin, King Richard II (of the House of Plantagenet, to which the Yorks and Lancasters were both related). After a few years of shaky rule, Bolingbroke was succeeded by King Henry V, whose success in the Hundred Years’ War solidified Lancaster rule. However, Henry V’s successor, Henry VI, wasn’t nearly as popular, and his mental instability gave the House of York the opportunity it was seeking.
2. War broke out in 1455. The Battle of St. Alban’s, a few miles north of London, was the first engagement between Richard (the Duke of York) and the forces of King Henry VI. This battle helped solidify Richard’s status as the primary adviser to the ailing king, but hostilities flared again when Queen Margaret declared that her son Edward (of the House of Lancaster) should succeed to the throne, rather than the York, Richard. In 1460, a Yorkist army succeeded in capturing and imprisoning King Henry VI.
3. Queen Margaret launched a counterattack. With the king in captivity, the Queen amassed a large army in the north and marched south, defeating the Yorkist army in 1461 at the Second Battle of St. Alban’s. However, Edward, another nobleman from the House of York, marched east to confront the Lancastrian army. He won this battle decisively and had himself crowned as King Edward IV, ending York-Lancaster warfare for the next twenty-two years.
4. The war flared up again in 1483. After a relatively peaceful rule (interrupted in 1469 by a civil war with the Earl of Warwick, of neither Yorkist nor Lancastrian affiliation, in which the King was temporarily deposed), war erupted again upon Edward IV’s death. Since Edward’s son was only twelve years old, this opened the door for Edward’s brother Richard, who had himself crowned as Richard III. Shortly after, Richard III was deposed by Henry Tudor, whose father had been an illegitimate half brother of Henry VI. Perhaps tired of the constant bloodshed between Yorkists and Lancastrians, Henry subsumed both houses under a new one, the House of Tudor, which ruled England for the next hundred years.

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