Wars of the Roses

Too late to rescue the city of Paris in 1436, too cautious in 1441 to prosecute bold action against the French, too late in 1450 to play much role in the impeachment of Pole, when Richard did eventually act, in the summer of 1455 it was with excessive caution. At St Albans, in a battle fought between two more or less equal factions, he and his allies, headed by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, defeated a force in theory commanded by Henry VI, Somerset and the Percy affinity from Northumberland. Somerset was killed. Henry VI, deserted and wounded in the neck, was escorted by York to St Albans Abbey where York submitted on bended knee, being restored thereafter as the King’s protector.

The first battle which Henry VI had fought took place on English soil and was a defeat for the house of Lancaster. It resolved nothing save for the hatred between York and Somerset. Instead it set a dangerous precedent. Over the next thirty years, whenever a political faction considered its demands unsatisfied, trial by battle was the preferred method of solving the dispute. These wars, the so-called Wars of the Roses, in no way rivalled the wars earlier fought in France. There were to be no prolonged sieges, no great ravishing of the English countryside to compare with the horrors inflicted on northern France after 1340 or on Normandy from 1417. Instead, what ensued was a series of battles almost without a war: a curtain raiser at St Albans, followed by the first real act in 1459–61, a second act in 1469–71 and a violent but apparently final coda in 1483–5.

The battles themselves are poorly documented, for all that they and their sites have been pored over by military historians convinced that troop movements can be reconstructed, as if by magic, from a proper juggling with topography and the accounts that do survive. The overall outcome of each battle, by contrast, is not in doubt, the certainty here being supplied from the fact that virtually each encounter witnessed the death of a significant contingent of leaders or political players. These were literally killing fields, in which the chivalric games of joust and tournament turned into the most bitter sort of vendetta and blood feud. As each generation of players was carried dead from the pitch, another sprang up to take its place.

At St Albans in 1455, Somerset was killed. There followed a brief hiatus, with York’s protectorate undermined by the Queen and by resistance to any resumption of royal patronage distributed over the past twenty years. Inconclusive encounters at the battles of Blore Heath and Ludlow in 1459, led to York’s flight to Ireland, from where, like Harold Godwinson in the 1050s, he planned his return to power. At the Battle of Northampton in 1460, the King was once again taken prisoner by York’s ally, Warwick, and by the Earl of March, York’s eldest son. York himself returned from Ireland to be proclaimed protector and this time to be recognized as heir to the throne should Henry die. Still there was a reluctance to seize the throne itself, let alone to kill off Henry VI, in part perhaps because of compassion for Henry’s prolonged childhood, minority and present incapacity, in part out of a more hard-headed reluctance to undermine, once again, the very basis of public or royal authority. Theologians, from the twelfth century onwards, had sanctioned the killing of tyrants. They had said nothing about killing the feckless or the childlike. Six months after Northampton, on 30 December at Wakefield, near Sandal in Yorkshire, Richard of York himself rode out to death on the battlefield. His head was displayed on the walls of the city of York dressed in a paper crown: a macabre use for the new medium of print.

Wakefield did not end the Yorkist rebellion. At the second Battle of St Albans in February 1461, a Yorkist defeat, Henry VI was released from captivity, only to be forced to flee into exile in Scotland after 29 March when the Earl of March, Richard of York’s son, entered London, having defeated the western Lancastrian army at Mortimer’s Cross, and thence proceeded to Towton (outside York) where yet another Yorkist victory was inflicted on the Lancastrians.