Where history happened: the Wars of the Roses

History Extra

Bamburgh Castle. © Darren Turner | Dreamstime.com

During the second half of the 15th century, the people of England witnessed three regional revolts, 13 full-scale battles, ten coups d’etats, 15 invasions, five usurpations, five kings, seven reigns, and five changes of dynasty. Little wonder then that the Wars of the Roses – the name given to the exceptional period of instability that occurred between 1450 and 1500 – have long been regarded as one of the most compelling and, above all, confusing, periods of British history.
If there’s two facts that people know about the Wars of the Roses, it is that they pitched the Red Rose of the House of Lancaster against the White Rose of the House of York – and that they dragged on for a very long time, taking almost a century to peter out.
Fewer people will be aware that the conflict was sparked by a cataclysmic train of events in 1450 that saw England blighted by a massive slump, a government quite without credit, defeat abroad, a parliamentary revolt and a popular rebellion. It was an inability to resolve these issues over the following ten years that brought the Yorkists and Lancastrians to blows.
The Wars of the Roses are best conceived as three individual conflicts. The First War, from 1459–61, witnessed the Yorkist Edward IV (1461–83) overthrowing the Lancastrian Henry VI (1422–61). The Second War, from 1469–71, led to the restoration of Henry VI in 1470, but ended with Edward IV back on the throne in 1471.
The Third War, from 1483 until at least 1487, saw Edward IV’s son Edward V (1483) deposed by the new king’s uncle, Richard III (1483–5), who was himself defeated at Bosworth in 1485 by the first Tudor king, Henry VII (1485–1509). Enemies of the new Tudor dynasty continued to scheme until 1525 – though, in the eyes of the paranoic Henry VIII (1509–47), the threat remained until 1541.
The three principal wars consisted of lightning campaigns that were resolved quickly on the field of battle. Each of these battles bears a name, and we know roughly where they happened. Modern archaeological surveys have revealed scatterings of artefacts on the fields of Towton and Bosworth, but nothing much to see. There were very few sieges: London was threatened three times and the Tower of London taken twice. For long periods, 1461–69, 1471–83, and after 1485, most of the kingdom – all the south, Midlands, East Anglia and West Country – was at peace.
So how did the wars start? The clash between Henry VI and Richard Duke of York at Ludford Bridge in 1459 is sometimes cited as their opening act. Richard had long opposed the king but was routed at Ludford and died in 1460. However, his allies soon declared Henry – who had suffered mental illness – unfit to rule. In 1461 they replaced him with York’s son, Edward IV, and confined Henry to the Tower.
At first, Edward ruled through his elder cousin, Warwick (the Kingmaker), and then through a series of favourites. Prominent among them was William Herbert, the new ruler of Wales, whose power was soon seen as a threat to Warwick. In fact, it was largely to destroy Herbert that Warwick and Edward’s brother, Clarence, rebelled in 1469, deposing Edward and returning Henry to the throne.
But Edward wasn’t gone for long. He recovered his crown in 1471 – after destroying his enemies at Tewkesbury – and ruled for a further 12, relatively stable years. During this time, he moved between his palaces in the Thames Valley, settled on Windsor for his burial and embarked on the reconstruction of St George’s Chapel as the spiritual heart of the house of York.
He dispatched his eldest son, Edward Prince of Wales, to Ludlow Castle to govern Wales, and saw to it that his brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester, became lord of the north.
This period of peace was to come to an abrupt end on Edward’s death in 1483. The king’s son and successor, Edward V, was deposed and consigned to the Tower by the Duke of Gloucester, who was himself to meet a violent death as Richard III two years later.
Richard may not have reigned long but he did have time to transfer Henry VI’s body to St George’s Chapel in a symbolic act of reconciliation with the Lancastrian line. That wasn’t enough to stop the bloodshed. In 1485, at the battle of Bosworth, Richard was killed and Henry VII (nephew of Henry VI) became the first Tudor king.
Shakespeare and almost everybody since has hailed Henry VII as England’s saviour and celebrated the battle as the end of the Wars of the Roses. In doing so, however, they have merely been regurgitating Tudor propaganda, promulgated at once to deter resistance.
In reality, Henry had to contend with a host of plots and a succession of rivals – this despite the fact that he had married Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV. Their son, Henry VIII, was thus the heir of Lancaster and York, the red and the white rose.
Yet Henry VII decided not to join in death his father-in-law, Edward IV, and his uncle, Henry VI at Windsor, choosing instead to build a grand new Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey for himself. This splendidly florid structure proclaimed that the Wars of the Roses were over and that the new Tudor dynasty had arrived.

 

Where history happened

1) Ludlow Castle, Shropshire

The medieval history the Crowland Chronicle claims that the Wars of the Roses started with the rout of Ludford in 1459. Faced by Henry VI’s Lancastrian army, the Yorkists deserted their troops and fled abroad.
Ludlow Castle, near to Ludford, was the principal seat of Richard Duke of York. It was here that his elder sons, Edward (the future Edward IV) and Edmund, were brought up. When York fled, his duchess was arrested and the town was sacked.
Ludlow Castle was built by Richard’s Mortimer ancestors to contest the Welsh, and still towers above the river Teme. Wales was governed from here from 1473 in the name of Prince Edward, the future Edward V, by Henry VII’s son, Prince Arthur, and by the Council of Wales.
Ludlow’s walls, keep, chapel and apartments remain intact, but it is entirely roofless. What it also lacks now are the furnishings, hangings and other decorations that made a luxurious 15th-century palace out of a rugged fortress.
Tel: 01584 873355
www.ludlowcastle.com

_{Ludlow Castle. © Denis Kelly | Dreamstime.com}

2) Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland

The royal castle at Bamburgh rears up on a rocky outcrop over the North Sea and Holy Island. Built to defend the north against the Scots, Bamburgh was one of the Northumbrian castles that resisted the Yorkists after 1461.
Several times the castles of Alnwick, Bamburgh, Dunstanburgh and Warkworth were held against Edward IV, taken, and seized again by the Lancastrians. When the Earl of Warwick besieged the castle in 1464, his army was left starving, dispirited and sodden by the wintry Northumbrian rain.
After the Lancastrians’ final defeat at Hexham in 1462, Bamburgh fought on. The Yorkists bombarded it with their great guns and the garrison eventually surrendered. Its commander was excavated from the debris and suffered a traitor’s death at York. Only Harlech in north Wales held out.
Most of the buildings of Bamburgh Castle survive, albeit much restored. Visible for many miles around, this remains a glorious memorial both to the Scottish wars and to Northumbrian resistance to the Yorkists.
Tel: 01668 214515
www.bamburghcastle.com

3) Raglan Castle, Monmouthshire

Raglan Castle was the seat of William Herbert, the first Welshman to rise into the nobility after the English conquest of the country. He was the right-hand man in Wales both of Richard Duke of York and his son Edward IV. It was Herbert who captured Harlech Castle for the Yorkists and he was created Earl of Pembroke for his efforts.
The new earl made himself the greatest and richest man in Wales. Onto an existing castle, he added a prodigious tower that possessed every conceivable 15th-century mod con. However Herbert’s rise terrified the Earl of Warwick into rebellion in 1469 and, in the subsequent battle, Herbert was killed leading an army of Welshmen.
Herbert’s descendants occupied Raglan until it was slighted in the English Civil War. It now remains a splendid ruin. The great gatehouse still features impressive machicolations (through which objects could be thrown at attackers) and the great tower has large windows opening into what once was the most stately suite of rooms.
Tel: 01291 690228
www.cadw.wales.gov.uk

_{Raglan Castle, Monmouthshire. © Sandra Richardson | Dreamstime.com}

 

4) Gainsborough Old Hall, Lincolnshire

Gainsborough Old Hall was built by Sir Thomas Burgh, master of the horse to Edward IV. He made himself the greatest man in Lincolnshire during the eclipse of the local Lancastrian lords, Welles and Willoughby.
Yet the lords made their peace with Edward and were restored. They found Burgh in their way and late in 1469 they sacked his house at Gainsborough. When an angry Edward IV threatened vengeance, they rebelled in support of the Duke of Clarence. Defeated at Empingham in 1470, Lord Welles and his son were executed, leaving Burgh in charge as the king’s man in Lincolnshire.
Gainsborough Old Hall is the monument to his wealth, his eminence, and to civilian life at the heart of civil war. Certainly not defensible, it is a huge black-and-white, timber-framed house, now partly fronted with mellow red brick with a stone bay window and a tower.
Tel: 01684 850959
www.gainsborougholdhall.com

5) Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire

The Benedictine abbey of Tewkesbury, one of the greatest monasteries outside royal hands, was modernised by the Younger Despenser in the 1300s. Warwick the Kingmaker’s mother-in-law, Isabel Despenser, and son-in-law, Clarence, were both laid to rest here.
It was also at Tewkesbury, in 1471, that the Lancastrian army of Queen Margaret of Anjou was caught by Edward IV and decisively defeated in the fields overlooked by the abbey. Henry VI’s son, Prince Edward of Lancaster, was killed in the field or executed immediately afterwards.
The fleeing Lancastrians who took refuge in the abbey emerged when promised their lives, but were slaughtered nevertheless. Many of them were buried with the prince in the abbey church, which had to be reconsecrated.
Of the battle itself, there is little to see, but the abbey church, one of the greatest noble mausolea, was saved at the Reformation. It still contains a semi-circle of burial chapels and the marked graves, both of Prince Edward and Clarence.
Tel: 01455 290429
www.tewkesburyabbey.org.uk

_{Tewkesbury Abbey. © Chrisp543 | Dreamstime.com}

6) Middleham Castle, North Yorkshire

Middleham Castle mattered much more in the Wars of the Roses than its modest size suggests. It was originally built for a vassal of the Earl of Richmond at a time when the Scottish border was much closer than it is today. Gradually the lords of Middleham eclipsed those of Richmond and came to dominate the north.
In the 13th century, the castle came under the control of the Neville family.
Middleham was home to Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury – who took part in the battles of St Albans (1455) and Ludford (1459) – and his son, Warwick the Kingmaker.
Neville’s son-in-law, Richard Duke of Gloucester ruled the north from here before usurping the throne in 1483. Richard’s only son, Prince Edward, was born at Middleham. Although Henry VII confiscated the castle, he feared rebellions from this area in 1485–9 and probably later too.
The market town of Middleham has dwindled into a village and the parish church never became the college that Richard III planned. The ancient walls and keep remain as ruins, but Warwick of Gloucester’s 15th‑century additions – at least one storey of stately apartments and domestic buildings – have disappeared.
Tel: 01455 290429
www.middlehamonline.com

7) St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, Berkshire

St George’s Chapel has links with four kings who ruled and fought during the Wars of the Roses. Edward IV set out to build a splendid new chapel here both for the Order of Garter and for his own burial. He completed the east end, railed off the north chancel chapel for himself, and awarded some of his favourites – including his friend and brother-in-arms, William Lord Hastings – burial here too.
Edward died before it was all finished but Richard III made use of it as well, having the saintly Henry VI moved to Windsor. Henry VII’s financial genius, Reginald Bray, completed the works and Henry himself was originally intended to be buried here.
Located within the lower castle ward, St George’s is a masterpiece of late perpendicular architecture, distinguished especially by fan vaulting throughout, plus Tudor arches, and huge windows. The choir stalls feature the coats of arms of almost every knight of the Garter.
www.stgeorges-windsor.org

_{St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. © Emotionart | Dreamstime.com}

8) The Tower of London, London

William I’s great tower was built to overawe London and was the royal palace from which coronation processions progressed to Westminster. Three times during the Wars of the Roses it was besieged: by Jack Cade (leader of a popular revolt) in 1450; by the Yorkists in 1460; and by the Lancastrians under Thomas Neville (known as ‘the bastard of Fauconberg’) in 1471.
It was during the wars that the Tower acquired its sinister reputation. Henry VI perished here in 1471 – a fate shared by Clarence in 1478, Edward IV’s ally Lord Hastings (1483) and Clarence’s daughter, Margaret (in 1541).
The pretender to Henry VII’s throne Perkin Warbeck was also imprisoned here. Most famously, it was here that Richard III lodged his nephews, the two Princes in the Tower, and here surely that they perished, probably in 1483.
The Tower of London is a great concentric castle around the Norman keep fronting the river Thames. What we can see now was already there in the 15th century, and almost no buildings have been lost. Because it continued in use, however, the furnishings and decorations are of later eras.
Tel: 0844 482 7777
www.hrp.org.uk

9) Bosworth Field, Leicestershire

The battle of Bosworth, where Richard III was killed and Henry Tudor became King Henry VII, is traditionally hailed as the last act of the Wars of the Roses and the Middle Ages.
It was here in Leicestershire that Henry’s Franco-Scottish army, which had landed at Milford Haven in Wales, destroyed the forces of the ruling king. Probably both wanted the battle for fear that the enemy would grow stronger with time. The clash appears to have taken a decisive turn when Richard led an assault on Henry’s lines. The attackers were destroyed by troops under Sir William Stanley and the king’s fate sealed.
Yet the Wars of the Roses didn’t die with Richard – invasions, battles and executions continued for more than 60 years. The course of the battle and even its precise location is obscure. Fifteenth-century clashes leave little impression on the landscape, and for centuries historians mistakenly believed that the battle was fought at Ambion Hill.
In 2009, archaeological investigations identified numerous small finds that suggest it was fought between Dadlington, Shenton, Upton and Stoke Golding.
Tel: 01455 290429
www.bosworthbattlefield.com

10) Westminster Abbey, London

The great Benedictine abbey of Westminster beside the royal palace has been the setting for the coronations and burials of monarchs since Edward the Confessor. Henry VI, Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII were all crowned here, and Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth, took sanctuary within these walls in 1470-1 and 1483-4.
No space remained for royal burials, so Edward IV and Richard III rest elsewhere. However, Henry VII made room for himself by replacing the eastern chapel with his own great Lady Chapel. Within it he built his tomb: a mausoleum for his new Tudor dynasty separate from that of York.
The abbey church is a masterpiece of the Decorated style. The huge Henry VII Chapel develops the Perpendicular style into something distinctively Tudor, characterised by its strange pendant vaults and casement windows, unprecedented but also without sequence. The brazen effigies of Henry, his queen and mother by Torrigiano are almost the first English examples of the new Italian Renaissance art.

Tel: 020 7222 5152
www.westminster-abbey.org
Michael Hicks is professor of medieval history at the University of Winchester and author of The Wars of the Roses (Yale University Press).

In case you missed it... Treachery: what really brought down Richard III

History Extra

David Hipshon, whose book on the controversial Yorkist monarch is out now, has a new perspective on the reason for Richard’s death at the battle of Bosworth in 1485
This article was first published online in April 2010

On 22 August 1485, in marshy fields near the village of Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire, Richard III led the last charge of knights in English history. A circlet of gold around his helmet, his banners flying, he threw his destiny into the hands of the god of battles.
Among the astonished observers of this glittering panoply of horses and steel galloping towards them were Sir William Stanley and his brother Thomas, whose forces had hitherto taken no part in the action. Both watched intently as Richard swept across their front and headed towards Henry Tudor, bent only on eliminating his rival.
As the king battled his way through Henry’s bodyguard, killing his standard bearer with his own hand and coming within feet of Tudor himself, William Stanley made his move. Throwing his forces at the King’s back he betrayed him and had him hacked him down. Richard, fighting manfully and crying, “Treason! Treason!”, was butchered in the bloodstained mud of Bosworth Field by a man who was, ostensibly at least, there to support him.
Historians have been tempted to see Stanley’s treachery as merely the last act in the short and brutal drama that encompassed the reign of the most controversial king in English history. Most agree that Richard had murdered his two nephews in the Tower of London and that this heinous crime so shocked the realm, even in those medieval days, that his demise was all but assured. The reason he lost the battle of Bosworth, they say, was because he had sacrificed support through this illegal coup.
But hidden among the manuscripts in the duchy of Lancaster records in the National Archives, lies a story that provides an insight into the real reason why Thomas, Lord Stanley, and his brother William betrayed Richard at Bosworth during the Wars of the Roses. The records reveal that for more than 20 years before the battle, a struggle for power in the hills of Lancashire had lit a fuse which exploded at Bosworth.
Land grab
The Stanleys had spent most of the 15th century building up a powerful concentration of estates in west Lancashire, Cheshire and north Wales. As their power grew they came into conflict with gentry families in east Lancashire who resented their acquisitive and relentless encroachments into their lands.
One such family were the Harringtons of Hornby. Unlike their Stanley rivals the Harringtons sided with the Yorkists in the Wars of the Roses and remained staunchly loyal. Unfortunately, at the battle of Wakefield in 1460, disaster struck. The Duke of York was killed and with him Thomas Harrington and his son John.
The Stanleys managed, as ever, to miss the battle. They were very keen, however, to pick up the pieces of the Harrington inheritance and take their seat at Hornby, a magnificent castle that dominated the valley of the River Lune in Stanley country.
When John Harrington had been killed at Wakefield the only heirs he left behind were two small girls. They had the legal right to inherit the castle at Hornby, but this would pass to whomever they married. Stanley immediately sought to take them as his wards and to marry them as soon as possible to his only son and a nephew.
John Harrington’s brother James was equally determined to stop him. James argued that his brother had died before their father at Wakefield and so he himself, as the oldest surviving son, had become the heir, not John’s daughters. To make good his claim he took possession of the girls, and fortified Hornby against the Stanleys.
Unfortunately for Harrington, King Edward IV – striving to bring order to a country devastated by civil strife – simply could not afford to lose the support of a powerful regional magnate, and awarded the castle to Stanley.
However, this was by no means the end of the matter. James Harrington refused to budge and held on to Hornby, and his nieces, regardless. What’s more, the records show that friction between the two families escalated to alarming proportions during the 1460s.
In the archive of the letters patent and warrants, issued under the duchy of Lancaster seal, we can see the King struggling – and failing – to maintain order in the region. While James Harrington fortified his castle and dug his heels in, Stanley refused to allow his brother, Robert Harrington, to exercise the hereditary offices of bailiff in Blackburn and Amounderness, which he had acquired by marriage. Stanley falsely indicted the Harringtons, packed the juries and attempted to imprison them.
Revolt and rebellion
This virtual state of war became a real conflict in 1469, when, in a monumental fit of pique, the Earl of Warwick – the most powerful magnate in the land, with massive estates in Yorkshire, Wales and the Midlands – rebelled against his cousin Edward IV.
The revolt saw the former king, the hapless Henry VI, being dragged out of the Tower and put back on the throne. Stanley, who had married Warwick’s sister, Eleanor Neville, stood to gain by joining the rebellion.
There were now two kings in England – and Edward was facing a bitter battle to regain control. In an attempt to secure the northwest, he placed his hopes on his younger brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III.
This had immediate consequences for Stanley and Harrington, for Richard displaced the former as forester of Amounderness, Blackburn and Bowland, and appointed the latter as his deputy steward in the forest of Bowland, an extensive region to the south of Hornby. Even worse, from Stanley’s point of view, the castle of Hornby was in Amounderness, where Richard now had important legal rights.
During the rebellion Stanley tried to dislodge James once and for all by bringing a massive cannon called ‘Mile Ende’ from Bristol to blast the fortifications. The only clue we have as to why this failed is a warrant issued by Richard, dated 26 March 1470, and signed “at Hornby”.
It would appear that the 17-year-old Richard had taken sides and was helping James Harrington in his struggle against Stanley. This is hardly surprising as James’s father and brother had died with Richard’s father at Wakefield and the Harringtons were actively helping Edward get his throne back. In short, it seems that the Harringtons had a royal ally in Richard, who could challenge the hegemony of the Stanleys and help them resist his ambitions.
The Harringtons’ support for Edward was to prove of little immediate benefit when the King finally won his throne back after defeating and killing Warwick at the battle of Barnet and executing Henry VI.
Grateful he may have been, but the harsh realities of the situation forced Edward to appease the Stanleys because they could command more men than the Harringtons and, in a settlement of 1473, James Harrington was forced to surrender Hornby.
Richard ensured that he received the compensation of the nearby property of Farleton, and also land in west Yorkshire, but by the time Edward died in 1483 Stanley had still not handed over the lucrative and extensive rights that Robert Harrington claimed in Blackburn and Amounderness.
A family affair
One thing, however, had changed. The leading gentry families in the region had found a ‘good lord’ in Richard. He had been made chief steward of the duchy in the north in place of Warwick and used his power of appointment to foster members of the gentry and to check the power of Stanley.
Only royal power could do this and Richard, as trusted brother of the King, used it freely. The Dacres, Huddlestons, Pilkingtons, Ratcliffes and Parrs, all related by marriage to the Harringtons, had received offices in the region and saw Richard, not Stanley, as their lord.
When Richard took the throne he finally had the power to do something for James Harrington. The evidence shows that he planned to reopen the question of the Hornby inheritance.
This alone would have been anathema to Stanley but it was accompanied by an alarming series of appointments in the duchy of Lancaster. John Huddleston, a kinsman of the Harringtons, was made sheriff of Cumberland, steward of Penrith and warden of the west march. John Pilkington, brother-in-law of Robert Harrington, was steward of Rochdale and became Richard III’s chamberlain; Richard Ratcliffe, Robert Harrington’s wife’s uncle, was the King’s deputy in the west march and became sheriff of Westmorland. Stanley felt squeezed, his power threatened and his influence diminished.
With Richard at Bosworth were a close-knit group of gentry who served in the royal household: men like John Huddleston, Thomas Pilkington and Richard Ratcliffe. They were men whom Richard could trust, but they were also the very men who were instrumental in reducing Stanley’s power in the northwest.
By Richard’s side, possibly carrying his standard, was James Harrington. When Richard III sped past the Stanleys at Bosworth Field he presented them with an opportunity too tempting to refuse.
During the 1470s Richard had become the dominant power in the north as Edward’s lieutenant. He served his brother faithfully and built up a strong and stable following. The leading gentry families could serve royal authority without an intermediary. The losers in this new dispensation were the two northern magnates, Henry Percy and Thomas Stanley.
Richard challenged their power and at Bosworth they got their revenge. When Richard rode into battle, with Harrington by his side, loyalty, fidelity and trust rode with him. Like the golden crown on Richard’s head they came crashing down to earth.

Richard's chivalry: the gallant exploits that killed a king
The fateful charge of knights at Bosworth may have been a risky strategy but it chimed perfectly with Richard III’s concept of himself: the chivalric ‘good lord’ fighting his enemies with his faithful companions at his side.
Richard’s father, the Duke of York, who was adopted as a four year-old orphan by the great warrior-king Henry V, evinced an old-fashioned, almost archaic, concept of chivalry. He had been killed when Richard was only eight but had left a powerful impression on the young boy.
In 1476 Richard presided over a solemn ceremony, redolent with pageantry and symbolism, in the reburial of his father at the family seat at Fotheringhay. An endowment of four priests at Queen’s College Cambridge specified that they should pray “for the soule of the right high and mighty prince of blessed memorie Richard duke of Yorke”. Richard III believed that his father had died fighting to restore the realm to its former glory after years of corruption and ineptitude.
After his father’s death at the Battle of Wakefield, the family had been forced to flee to the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy, where an almost fantasy world of courtly etiquette and chivalric exploits was fostered.
The young Duke of Gloucester possessed a 12th-century romance of the perfect knight, Ipomedon, and in his copy he had written tant le disiree, “I have desired it so much”. The motto he used, loyaulte me lie, “loyalty binds me”, has that same sense of a craving for a lost idealism.
The Harringtons – like Richard, their lord – were to pay a heavy price for the failed horse charge at Bosworth and the Yorkists’ subsequent defeat.
After the battle, Stanley received possession of all the Harrington properties and became earl of Derby. His brother, the impetuous and treacherous William, betrayed a king once too often and was executed by Henry Tudor in 1495.
Henry himself set about dismantling the capacity of the magnates to raise their own troops and to wield their own power. Private armies were abolished and the Tudor monopoly of authority began. From henceforth this power could only be challenged by Parliament or by the rebellion of commoners.