The Wars of the Roses were a series of conflicts which were fought in England between 1455 and 1487 for control of the throne of England. They are known as the Wars of the Roses as the struggle centered on the House of Lancaster, headed by King Henry VI, the symbol of which was a red rose, and the House of York, the head of which was Richard, Duke of York, and then his son, Edward, who became King Edward IV. The Yorkist emblem was a white rose. The wars were brought about the psychological collapse, and subsequent mental incapacity of Henry VI in the early 1450s. Ironically they ended when Henry Tudor usurped the throne from Edward IV’s brother, King Richard III in 1485. It also had considerable implications in Ireland.[1]
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The wars of the roses chronology of events
Psychological collapse of Henry VI
The Wars of the Roses came about as a result of a crisis of kingship which arose during the very long reign of King Henry VI of England. Henry ascended to the throne in 1422 before he had even reached his first birthday owing to the premature death of his father, Henry V, the famed victor of the Battle of Agincourt. Because of Henry's age, England was governed by a regency government throughout much of the 1420s and 1430s. When he finally came of age and was old enough to govern himself in the 1440s Henry was discovered to be a poor king, timid, indecisive and averse to warfare at a time when England was both at war with France at the tail end of the Hundred Years' War and experiencing growing unrest caused by over-mighty feudal lords in England itself. Then, to compound matters, he suffered a series of psychological collapses in the 1450s.[2]
Involvement of the Duke of York
By 1455 it was clear that something needed to change and many of England’s lords and powerful political figures began to urge Richard, Duke of York, the Lord Lieutenant of the English lordship in Ireland and a cousin of the king, to try to seize control over the government. Yet Henry had his supporters too. His wife, the strong-willed and formidable Margaret of Anjou, was determined to maintain control of the crown so that her infant son, Prince Edward of Westminster, could one day succeed his father. As a result, civil war followed, known today as the Wars of the Roses owing to King Henry being the head of the House of Lancaster whose symbol was a red rose and Richard of York being the head of the Yorkists whose emblem was a white rose. The war was fought bitterly in the late 1450s by Richard and Henry’s factions. A decisive victory was won by the Yorkists at the Battle of Towton early in 1461. However, Richard, Duke of York, had died just a few weeks earlier and so his son and heir ascended as King Edward IV.[3]
The fleeing of the house of lancaster
This was not the end of the conflict. Henry, Margaret and many leading Lancastrian supporters fled from England at the end of the war in 1461 and spent the remainder of the decade building their support base back up. In 1470, with the aid of Richard Neville, sixteenth earl of Warwick, known as Warwick the Kingmaker to posterity, a powerful noble in the north of England, the Lancastrians were able to seize power again. However, this brief ‘redemption’ ended when Edward once again defeated the Lancastrians. This time he killed most of the House of Lancaster’s leading figures. He would rule unchallenged for the next twelve years before dying of natural causes.[4]
Tower of london imprisonment
The final episode in the Wars of the Roses came in the mid-1480s. Following Edward’s death his uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, became the Lord Protector for Edward’s heir, King Edward V, who was still a child at the time. However, Richard had his nephews thrown into the Tower of London and most likely had them killed there as they were never seen again in any confirmed setting. He then proclaimed himself as King Richard III. This usurpation of the throne did not go unchallenged and in 1485 Henry Tudor, a scion of a Welsh noble family with a very tenuous claim to the throne, arrived to England and defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Richard was killed during the fighting and Henry Tudor became king as King Henry VII, bringing the Wars of the Roses to an end. He did face some threats to his rule over the next decade or so as various pretenders arose claiming to be the deceased children of King Edward IV, the foremost being Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel, two figures who gathered support in Ireland before their causes were defeated by Henry.[5]
Extent of migration associated with the wars of the roses
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The Wars of the Roses led to some important but limited migration in Western Europe. This migration took place in the form of rival groups fled into exile in France or the Low Countries, as other factions periodically claimed power in England and Wales. In the course of the 1450s, 1460s, 1470s and 1480s various political factions fled from England as different groups seized control of the crown. As they did so hundreds of individuals ended up migrating either to Scotland or France and to regions like Flanders in the Low Countries where they often had support from amongst various powers in these regions who were interested in sowing instability in England.[6]
King Henry VII's consolidation of control
Although it is somewhat tangentially related, the Wars of the Roses impressed on King Henry VII the need to consolidate English control over Ireland, which had been used as a base of operations by both Warbeck and Simnel's supporters in the 1480s and 1490s. Ireland had been loosely under English dominion since the late twelfth century, but only a small portion of the country around Dublin and its hinterland was effectively ruled by England by the late fifteenth century. In order to prevent further threats like those posed by Warbeck and Simnel, Henry and his son, King Henry VIII, initiated a reform program designed to extend English rule in Ireland. From the 1550s onwards this led to a series of plantations and the gradual influx of English and Welsh colonists into the country. Hence, in an indirect manner the Wars of the Roses and the manner in which they exposed Ireland as the weak underbelly of the English state led to the Tudor conquest of Ireland and the migration of thousands of English and Welsh colonists there in the course of the sixteenth century.[7]
Demographic impact of the wars of the roses
The demographic impact of the Wars of the Roses was somewhat transient. While large cohorts of individuals left England and Wales in the entourages of the Lancastrians and the Yorkists during the 1450s, 1460s, 1470s and 1480s, much of this was temporary and these same people returned from France and the Low Countries to England and Wales once the wars came to an end or the time became political propitious to do so. More lasting was the oblique manner in which the wars impacted on English and Welsh settlement in Ireland, with tens of thousands of English and Welsh settlers living in Ireland by the early seventeenth century as a result of the Tudor conquest of the country.[8]
Explore more about the wars of the roses
- Finding Your Medieval Roots: Five Simple Tips at the MyHeritage blog
- Edward III king of England project dashboard on Geni.
- King Henry VII project dashboard on Geni
- Explore the Bosworth Family Name record collection at MyHeritage.
- Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York project dashboard on Geni.
References
- ↑ https://www.historytoday.com/archive/wars-roses-who-fought-and-why
- ↑ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/King-Henry-VI/
- ↑ https://the-past.com/feature/the-wars-of-the-roses/
- ↑ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Wars-of-the-Roses/
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/wars-of-the-roses
- ↑ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Wars-of-the-Roses/
- ↑ https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/troubledgeogs/chap2.htm
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/elizabeth_ireland_01.shtml