The War of the Roses

by Timothy Venning

  Was the escalation of the struggle in 1451–9 inevitable? And how and why did this confrontation differ from earlier power-struggles?

  The first resort to military intimidation had been by York (1451–2), though he had been excluded from political influence and been virtually banished to Ireland and he had the fate of Duke Humphrey hanging over him; he was also the first to start killing his senior foes in battle (1455). His resort to violence in the face of his foes blocking his power and controlling the King was in line with the actions of Thomas of Lancaster in 1322, Mortimer and the Queen in 1326, the ‘Appellants’ in 1387–8, and Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399–it was the continuation of the normal court struggles for power by other means when politics failed. What was new was the length of the dispute; the previous confrontations had quickly seen the excluded faction either defeated or victorious, and even in the more evenly-balanced political confrontation between Simon de Montfort and the ‘royalists’ around Henry III the long-term control of power was resolved within a year (1264–5). York was mostly to blame for the escalation of the dispute into bloodshed, given that violence had been avoided in 1451–2 by both sides drawing back from military confrontation in contrast with what happened at St Albans in 1455. But York’s forbearance in challenging the magnates around the King to battle in 1451–2 had not met a reciprocal restraint; arguably in 1455 he must have reckoned that he had no alternative but the permanent physical elimination of his foes (as resorted to by the victors in 1322, 1326, 1388, and 1399). De Montfort showed restraint in 1264, and ended up hacked to pieces on a battlefield.

  The nature of magnate and court politics also argued for a resort to drastic measures by an ‘excluded’ senior political figure. Given the nature of the political structure in the localities, most regions saw the evolution of ‘spheres of influence’ over land-grants and local office by rival magnate families–in some cases, expressed in physical confrontations between them at times of weak central control such as the 1450s and 1460s. (The Paston Letters give a good example of this in Norfolk, where the Dukes of Norfolk, the Mowbray dynasty, opposed the ‘upstart’ Pastons as heirs to Caister Castle.77) The outbreaks in the Welsh Marches in the mid-1450s were more normal, given the militarization of the area and the fierce loyalties of the inhabitants to long-term dynastic lords rather than to the Crown–the English king was historically and culturally an ‘alien’ foreign overlord to the Welsh tenantry anyway and most local Anglo-Norman barons had a hereditary claim on their loyalties.

  Similar outbreaks of lawlessness and open armed feuds had occurred at times of other weak royal government, in the 1220s (when the original ‘Robin Hood’ may have flourished?), the aftermath of the 1264–5 civil war, and the early and late 1320s. Ominously, it had commenced again in Henry VI’s reign well before 1450. The political ‘point’ here was that a strong king usually intervened to reverse this, as the new ruler Henry II did to illegal castles in 1155–7–or an heir did it for him, as Prince Edward did for Henry III in 1266–70. There was no such reassertion of non-partisan power by a vigorous king in the 1450s, although Henry VI and his court did visit Hereford in 1457 (with a suspiciously partisan commission of courtiers) after the Devereux/Herbert vs Tudor clashes.78 In an intensively competitive political world, loss of access to patronage and influence at court led to loss of confidence in a patron by his followers–he could not ‘deliver’ security and grants of land and office. If this continued, he could easily face desertion by his supporters; self-assertion was thus vital for his own interests. Thus York had to back up his local supporters in conflict with rival magnates such as Exeter, and each act of challenge to a ‘pro-court’ magnate backed by the King (or Queen) was easily interpreted as defiance and implicit rebellion. Many localities had their own feuding noble dynasts who each had a court patron and alignment in the 1450s, most notably the pro- Beaufort Percies and the pro-York Nevilles in the north. This conflict extended to their friends and relatives as proxies, like a mid–late twentieth century clash between two ‘Third World’ powers threatening to drag in the latter’s patrons, the USA and USSR. ‘Flare-ups’ causing escalation were thus a risk, as seen by the proxy disputes involving Percy and Neville allies in the north. Any settlement of grudges between the rival provincial dynasties by a ‘truce’, as endeavoured in 1456–8, would have required a mixture of compromise and goodwill by all sides to last; both would have had to refrain from provocation or from backing up their rival local allies too firmly. This goodwill and restraint was notably absent, and the Nevilles and Percies were already fighting as of August 1453 (before news of Henry’s incapacity would have arrived in Yorkshire and reassured them that the paralyzed government would not react). If goodwill was absent, order would have to be enforced by the King or his nominee, a reaction notably absent in government in the turbulent 1440s and 1450s. This failure to punish local armed conflict duly encouraged others to take their grudges into their own hands, arm their tenants, and attack their enemies. The bloodshed at St Albans in 1455 was a cause for retaliatory acts at the first opportunity by the heirs of the aggrieved Beaufort, Percy, and Clifford families. Warwick then made matters worse by more killings at Northampton in July 1460–though had the Queen and Lord Clifford secured their foes at Ludlow in 1459 a ‘Lancastrian’ massacre of the Yorkist leadership was possible before Warwick provided the Queen’s faction with such an excuse. All this made another outbreak of struggles for power very likely, with the absence of a strong executive figure in London to adjudicate and force a conclusion to disputes an added reason for pessimism.

  In 1267–70 Prince Edward (acting on behalf of the enfeebled Henry III) had enforced the terms of victory by one struggling faction, with some diplomatic concessions to de Montfort allies required by the strength of resistance after the battle of Evesham; in 1322–6 Edward II and the Despensers had temporarily won out but later been overthrown, as had the ‘Appellants’ after 1388. Mortimer and Isabella had lost personal control to Edward III in 1330 and some enemies had been rehabilitated, but the destruction of Edward II’s faction was not reversed; Henry IV had permanently won out in 1399 despite severe challenges. Stability and a firm sense of purpose at the centre of power was apparent on each of these occasions; there was no such stability backing compromise in 1456–8 or the permanent victory of one faction in 1455 or 1459. The absence on these occasions of a strong, legitimate, and unchallengeable executive authority was vital; ironically, if Henry VI had been permanently mentally incapable from 1453 the chances of a permanent settlement being enforced by a ‘royal substitute’ regent (York) would have been greater.

  Also, unlike in 1265–70 and 1326, the defeated faction of 1455 (the Beauforts) still possessed some residual power with the slaughtered court magnates’ heirs being in possession of lands and private retinues with a capacity to take revenge; the de Montforts had been destroyed in 1265–6 and the Despensers had been destroyed in 1326. The necessities of compromise had left Richard II’s ‘duketti’ and some allies with a degree of power in 1399, despite the destruction of Richard II’s ‘new men’ Bushy, Bagot, and Greene –and in 1400 and 1403–5 the defeated Ricardians had duly challenged Henry IV. By 1459 the Queen and her allies were duly seeking a similar political (and personal?) elimination of the Yorkist leadership.

  The Queen’s perceived enmity made the succession of her son Edward as Henry’s successor unacceptable to York and his supporters, making the danger of implacable factional feuds at court seem long term. In return, the rumours about his parentage (perceived to come from the Yorkists) and the violence York had shown in enforcing control of politics in 1455 would not make the Queen willing to see York as regent or as ‘guardian’ of her son as king. If Henry died, who would control political life until ‘Edward IV’s majority, c. 1469? (Henry VI, born December 1421, came of age in 1437.) Given recent precedents, the new King’s nearest male kin–i.e. York–had the prior claim to being his personal governor or Protector, as had Henry of Lancaster for Edward III in 1327,
John ‘of Gaunt’ for Richard II in 1377, and Duke Humphrey for Henry VI in 1422–but not to full power as regent. Margaret had every reason to fear York in either role, and he had reason to fear for his safety from his vengeful rivals if excluded from power. There was thus every prospect of a long-term vacancy of strong kingship under an enfeebled king and a young heir, and by 1459–60 a solution was being sought by York’s party in terms of the Prince’s exclusion from the throne–and later in 1460 by removing the King too. This drastic measure duly alienated assorted nobles who were prepared to back York against the court faction, as seen in the shocked reaction to his claim to the throne in 1460. It was the mixture of this prospect of long-term instability and the physical/political survival of part of the defeated factions in the confrontations of 1455 and 1459–60 that made the struggles for power after 1450 far less easy to resolve than those of earlier centuries.

  The deaths of York’s chief court foes at St Albans in May 1455 only transferred the enmity to their heirs who became close to the Queen. Equally, the weak control of the government–King or substitute–over defiant armed magnates meant a plethora of local clashes and the danger that if York seemed to be backing his local partisans against a court ally this could be interpreted as treason (as over his attitude to the Courtenay/Bonville clash of 1456).79 Nor could Margaret and her allies trust York’s headship of a regency Council if Henry died or became permanently incapacitated. Once the succession of Prince Edward could not be trusted to guarantee York’s position, the drastic step of removing him and his mother was inevitable. This, in turn, brought the danger of this controversial step adding to the number of magnates who would rally to the Queen and the Beauforts against a Yorkist ‘usurpation’. The resulting conflict would be resolved by force, and the physical survival of the rival contenders (even in exile) would lengthen the conflict–as York and his sons were able to restore their position after the 1459 debacle at Ludlow in 1460, and as Margaret and the Beauforts were able to challenge York in December 1460 and his son Edward IV in 1462-4 and 1470.

  (i) Ludlow 1459 and the deposition of Henry VI. A missed opportunity for the Queen to prevent further revolts?

  This emphasizes the importance of what did not happen at Ludlow in 1459, and the crucial fact that York was able to escape from encirclement. Unlike in 1455, the challenged court party had a large army–centred on the men the Queen had been raising in Cheshire–at its disposal, to add to the presence of the King to lead the army as a sign that resistance was treason (which had not worked in 1455). York had blocked the royal advance at Ludford, across the River Teme south of Ludlow, but then Andrew Trollope’s Calais troops had defected to the King. Only the narrow Teme bridge now protected Ludlow from assault on 13 October. In physical terms, the royal army could easily have sent troops round the mile or so of woodlands on the south-west bank of the River Teme from Ludford Bridge (the south entrance to the town) to the western bridge, by which York escaped, to block the latter. Were they unfamiliar with the layout of the town, did they fear ambush by York’s men in the thick woods, or did some ‘moderate’ leaders of the royal forces seek to avoid a bloodbath and thus let York escape?

  Certainly, when the town fell there was some killing by the royal troops, although Duchess Cecily and her younger children were spared and were not placed in permanent secure custody as hostages.80 Had York, his two elder sons, and their Neville ally Salisbury and his son Warwick been killed by Margaret’s men in a Wakefield-style slaughter at Ludlow in 1459 there would have been a chance of a long era of court supremacy as there would have been no major adult royal challenger at large in exile (as in 1326 and 1399). But, as seen in France over the killings of Louis of Orleans in 1407 and John of Burgundy in 1419, a blood-feud by the murdered dynast’s heirs was liable to make such drastic solutions temporary. The Percies had survived two shattering defeats and the deaths of their male leadership (‘Hotspur’ and Thomas, earl of Worcester, in 1403 and the Earl of Northumberland in 1405-8); the Nevilles would have survived the loss of Salisbury and Warwick, both of whom had a multitude of younger brothers and married sisters to plan revenge.

  It is one of the forgotten facts of the mid-fifteenth century dynastic conflicts that the large number of males in successive generations of the Neville and Percy families–each in need of lands, titles, and an heiress wife –made the chances of major conflict in the north far more likely. York’s brother-in-law Salisbury was the son of the second marriage of Earl Ralph (Neville) of Westmorland, and so in need of a landed base of his own with most of the ancestral Neville lands going to his elder half-brother. He had three younger brothers who acquired secular lordships (Bergavenny/ Abergavenny, Latimer, and Fauconberg) plus one who became Bishop of Salisbury. His son Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick by marriage, acquired a crucial claim on his wife’s ancestors’ Despenser lands in South Wales–also claimed by the Beauforts, which led to armed conflict in the mid-1450s. Richard Neville would not have been in this position to quarrel with the King’s Beaufort favourites had his wife’s brother Henry Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, not died childless in 1446, leaving her sole Beauchamp heiress. It is also notable that it was a younger son of the (Percy) Earl of Northumberland, Lord Egremont–also keen on carving out his own lands –who was the principal aggressor in the Percy vs Neville clashes of the mid-late 1450s, with Warwick’s younger brother Thomas as his principal foe. These local feuds were ‘side-shows’ to the tension at court, but the existence of rival claims to lands and of restless and acquisitive younger brothers of major peers added to the escalation of violence.

  (ii) York’s genealogical luck

  It was important that the position that York was in as heir to a childless King –and then rival to his son–was exacerbated by the near-extinction of the Lancastrian male line. Henry V’s next brother, Thomas, had married (Margaret Holland) but been killed in 1421 before he could have children. John, Duke of Bedford, had had none by either Anne of Burgundy or Jacquetta of St Pol–and the latter was to produce over a dozen children by her next husband, Sir Richard Woodville. Nor did Duke Humphrey have children by his wives, Duchess Jacqueline of Holland (a brief ‘political’ marriage to enable him to claim her lands) and the socially ‘inferior’ ex-lady-in-waiting Eleanor Cobham. Any male children of these marriages would have had precedence over York in the 1440s and 1450s, and a daughter would have posed a problem to his claims as he could not disavow her rights to the throne without putting at risk his own claims to inherit by female descent (from Edward III’s second surviving son Lionel, senior to the Lancastrian progenitor John ‘of Gaunt’).

  Had such a rival Lancastrian male heir existed, possibly born as early as c. 1420 (Thomas’ son), he would have had prior claim to the Protectorship during Henry’s illness in 1453. York would still have been in a strong political/military position as the spokesman of the ‘war party’ in France in the 1440s and arch-rival of the popularly loathed Suffolk, but not have been next heir male to Henry. He would have had to base any claim to the throne solely on the prior rights of the heir of Lionel of Clarence over the House of Lancaster, not on the bastardy of Prince Edward from 1453. This would have lost him even more support among the peers, adding to those who in real life objected to his claim in October 1460. A son of a brother of Henry V could still have been ‘bought off’ or excluded by a militarily more powerful rival, as Henry IV had enforced his right to the throne on the country in September 1399 despite Richard II naming the Mortimer claimant as his heir. But the superseded Lancastrian dynast, probably born between 1420 (Thomas’ son) and c. 1435–40 (Humphrey’s son by Eleanor), would have been as much of a threat to York as Edmund Mortimer was to Henry IV.

  (iii) The battle of Wakefield, 30 December 1460; if there had been no catastrophe how would it have affected the 1460s and 1470s?

  It should be remarked that York’s unexpected death on 30 December 1460 was entirely avoidable. Controlling most of the south of England, he was being defied in arms in Yorkshire by Somerset, E
xeter, and other magnates who had marched unopposed from their base in the south-west to link up with the Percies while the Queen collected a new army in Scotland. Somerset’s father and the late (Percy) Earl of Northumberland had died at York’s hands, as had the father of the energetic young northern magnate Lord Clifford–thus the principal ‘Lancastrian’ leaders could not be expected to accept or trust York as controller of the government. Clifford, as memorably portrayed by Shakespeare (based on Tudor chronicles with memories of contemporary accounts), was particularly implacable and ready for vengeance. Owen Tudor, Queen Catherine’s widower, and his second son, Jasper, were also resisting York in Wales–and Owen’s eldest son Edmund (father of Henry VII) had died in captivity in 1456 after capture by York’s allies in a struggle to control south-west Wales. Another round of warfare could be expected within months, and York’s attempt to make his ascendancy in London permanent by claiming the throne had met large-scale resistance from the peerage.

  Marching north early in December to defend his pillaged Yorkshire estates from the Lancastrians, York was based at his residence of Sandal Castle over Christmas 1460 while Somerset with a larger army was based nearby at Pontefract Castle awaiting the Queen. Some sort of a truce was negotiated, but Somerset returned to the offensive and harassed the Yorkists, possibly infiltrating his men into Sandal Castle to spread reassuring stories that his army was smaller than in reality. Lured out to respond to the provocations, York was ambushed outside Wakefield as two hidden Lancastrian ‘wings’ emerged from nearby woods to assist the relatively small force he was facing openly. He fell fighting; his second son, Edmund, and Salisbury’s younger son, Thomas, also fell (Edmund reputedly killed by Lord Clifford in cold blood) and Salisbury was captured and later beheaded.81 The Yorkist claim to the throne thus passed to York’s eldest son, Edward, currently raising their levies in the Welsh Marches, who first had to defeat the Tudors’ army and occupy London ahead of the Queen. On 3 March a group of Yorkist peers and prelates in London chose Edward as king, and he assumed the Crown by occupying the throne in Westminster Hall on the 4th.