The Wars of the Roses: Misconceptions

The Wars of the Roses—the posthumous name of the dynastic struggle between the Houses of Lancaster and York—has been dramatized and immortalized to the point of becoming fable itself. Though mainstream images of the Wars resemble George Martin’s Game of Thrones, in reality it was much more like The Hatfields & McCoys (albeit with a lot more death and a score of rolling heads). This multi-generational family feud lasted three decades, from 1455 to 1485, but it wasn’t (as is often pictured) a period of unrelenting warfare: historians have calculated that actual campaign time during the Wars comes to around a mere 430 days (just over a thirtieth of that thirty-year period).

The Wars of the Roses can be divided into three phases of conflict: (1) 1455-1464, (2) 1469-1471, and (3) 1483-1487. At the dawn of the Wars, the Lancasters sat on the throne in Henry VI, and they had been on the throne since 1399. When the Lancastrian Henry V died in 1422, the throne passed to his infant son Henry VI. While Henry V conquered much of France, Henry VI lost it. Much of the blame for this rests not on the young king but on his aristocratic council. The Council became a battlefield between relatives and friends vying for power. As the Hundred Years War came to a close, great nobles who had amassed vast amounts of wealth fighting in France returned home with their private armies. Lawlessness was rife in the countryside and taxation fell heavily on the urban centers. Henry VI came into his majority, but he was incapable of ruling, devastated by bouts of mental illness. His shrewd and brilliant French wife, Margaret of Anjou, controlled him and led the Council with Francophile allies. Much of England's population loathed her, even denounced her as a traitor, since she was French-born and the collapse of English possessions in France happened after her arrival in England. As the Lancastrians were losing France and popularity, between 1450 and 1460 Richard, the 3rd Duke of York, schemed his way into becoming the titular head of a powerful baronial league. His kinsmen—the Nevilles, the Mowbrays, and the Bourchiers—stood at his side. York’s right-hand man, Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick, had hundreds of supporters scattered over twenty counties. When Henry VI lapsed into insanity in 1453, York’s baronial league maneuvered to have him named Protector of the Realm. When the king recovered his wits in 1455, he reestablished his wife’s party and forced York to take up arms. York’s ambitions for the inept Lancastrian throne erupted into violence on 22 May 1455 at the First Battle of St. Albans. This would be the first major bloodshed in a three-decade dynastic struggle. But, alas, we are getting ahead of ourselves.

The Wars of the Roses is littered with misconceptions, not least because history is written by the victors (a metaphor that, in this case, works quite literally). Early 15th century chroniclers, lyricists, and historians rewrote the dynastic struggle in such a way that it would bring glory to the struggle’s ‘Last Man Standing,’ Henry Tudor (who ascended the throne as Henry VII). Modern historians believe that Tudor propagandists stretched the truth of the dynastic struggle, turning it into three decades of chaos and bloodletting, to bolster the Tudor Dynasty’s relative peace and prosperity. Thus misconceptions of the Wars began less than a generation after the events, and they’ve continued down to the present day. A few examples will suffice:

First, thanks to William Shakespeare’s misguided (albeit excellent) Henry VI, we have been conditioned to think of the York and Lancashire parties as being united behind opposing roses: the white rose for York and the red rose for Lancaster. However, historian Thomas Penn notes that ‘[the] ‘Lancastrian’ red rose was an emblem that barely existed before Henry VII. Lancastrian kings used the rose sporadically, but when they did it was often gold rather than red; Henry VI, the king who presided over the country’s descent into civil war, preferred his badge of the antelope… For the best part of a quarter-century, from 1461 to 1485, there was only one royal rose, and it was white: the badge of Edward IV. The [opposing] roses were actually created after the war by Henry VII.’ Henry VII’s royal bade was that of a white rose engulfed by a red rose; by propagating the idea that the York rose was white and the Lancastrian rose red, he made it so that his royal badge symbolized a ‘unification’ of the two warring houses. The term ‘Wars of the Roses’ was coined by David Hume as recent as 1762; he based the name off Shakespeare’s (erroneous) badges in Henry VI.

Second, though the Wars have been portrayed as a ‘civil war,’ they were much more a dynastic struggle between two cadet branches of the House of Plantagenet. Those who fought in the Wars were the aristocratic families of York and Lancashire, along with their noble allies, retainers, and supporters. Civil wars generally have political undertones, wherein one side wishes to see political changes made; these Wars, however, lacked such characteristics, as both the Yorkists and Lancasters wished to preserve the nation and its current government. Both hoped to seize the throne or to at least gain control of the king’s Council.

Third, because this was a dynastic struggle rather than a civil war, England’s general population remained untouched. The Yorkist and Lancastrian rivals fielded armies comprised of aristocratic followers and their supporters. There was no conscription, no ‘levee en masse,’ only volunteer soldiers aligning with the House that best guarded their interests and served their advancement. Most soldiers fought not for the ideals of their respective leaders but for the hope of gaining power, money, and influence. Both sides took extra pains to make sure that non-combatants weren’t harmed in the conflict; after all, whichever House came out on top would need the support of the people to rule. Philip dy Commynes, a diplomat in the courts of Burgundy and France and called by some historians ‘the first truly modern writer,’ wrote of the Wars of the Roses: “It is the custom of the English that, once they have gained a battle, they do no more killing, especially killing of common people; for each side seeks to please the commons… King Edward told me that in all the battles he had won, the moment he came to victory he mounted a horse and shouted that the commons were to be spared and the nobles slain. And of the latter, few or none escaped… England enjoyed this peculiar mercy above all other kingdoms, that neither the country nor the people, nor the houses were wasted, destroyed or demolished; but the calamities and misfortunes of war fell only upon the soldiers, and especially upon the nobility.”

A fourth misconception is that the English nobility was devastated by the end of the Wars. This simply isn't the case. It is true that the upper-tier nobles suffered badly: of the sixteen families of dukes and earls that existed at the tail end of Henry VI's reign, only two remained fully intact at the end of the struggle (though the others were beaten and bloodied, most of the old nobility survived by way of heirs filling the vacuums left by slain family leaders). Historians have estimated that the rate of ‘family extinction' at the time was around 25 percent, much less than fable and folklore would have us believe. The Wars cost 105,000 lives in a country of three million, but this was only about 3.5% of the population (a minuscule ratio when compared to the three million lives lost in the preceding Hundred Years War (which averaged nearly 776,000 deaths every three decades).

Fifth, it is often assumed that the Yorkist and Lancastrian alliance system with nobles was cut-and-dry; but allegiances in noble families was constantly shifting as people switched sides or intermarried. Interestingly enough, the Yorkists drew most of their support from the Midlands, while the Lancastrians were predominant in Yorkshire! This is because York and Lancaster were dynastic titles that had little to do with geography.