The War of the Roses by Timothy Venning

Introduction
    T he final thirty years of the ‘Plantagenet’ dynasty–a surname for the family incidentally invented by Richard, Duke of York and his supporters in the 1450s to emphasize their superior dynastic lineage to their rivals–was an unprecedented era of political instability in England. In previous centuries the smooth (or not) transfer of power from each monarch to his son or brother, usually his own choice as heir, had been broken only once when childless and autocratic 32-year-old Richard II was overthrown in an invasion by his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke (Henry IV) in 1399. Henry had claimed to be Richard’s rightful heir, as son of the next-senior male offspring of Edward III to leave a male heir, Edward’s third surviving son Duke John of Lancaster (John ‘of Gaunt’). But his ‘election’ by an assembly of nobles excluded the rights of Edmund Mortimer, the grandson–daughter’s son–of Edward III’s second son, Duke Lionel of Clarence, who was only a child at the time so his accession would have led to the instability of a regency. Indeed, Edmund’s claim was not even tested at the election; the ‘Salic Law’ theory that a woman could not inherit or transmit rights to a throne did not apply in England. The feeling that Edmund had been cheated by the illegal usurpation of Henry’s ‘Lancastrian’ line led to assorted plots and rebellions in his name under Henry IV and later an attempt to murder Henry V, but then these faded away as the Lancastrian throne became more secure and led a successful war to pursue its rights to the throne of France (which ironically relied on the legality of succession via a female line, namely via Edward III’s mother, Isabella).
    But the incapacity and misjudgements of the unwarlike and allegedly unworldly Henry VI and his coterie of favourites led to renewed dynastic challenges after the humiliating loss of France in 1450–3. As we shall see, this was largely stimulated by the exclusion of powerful nobles from decision-making at court and the fruits of office by Henry’s clique, led by the junior Lancastrian line of Beaufort, and was thus politically opportunistic. Dynastic luck and the shifting sands of politics resulted in the current heir of Edmund Mortimer’s line, his sister Anne’s son Duke Richard of York, being the leader of the politico-military ‘opposition’ to Henry VI’s disastrous governance in the 1440s and early 1450s, excluded from power and seemingly under threat of elimination like the King’s late uncle Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. Thus a mixture of ambition and self-preservation determined his struggle for influence with the King’s favourites in 1450–5, a political bid for power over an increasingly feeble and once catatonic King rather than a dynastic challenge, although his role as a potential heir also implied the latter. It was as much a case of ‘storming the closet’, as eighteenth-century politics called a bid by frustrated ‘opposition’ figures to force their admission to office (and perks) on a reluctant king, as a dynastic coup.
    The drastic way in which York secured this, on the battlefield at St Albans in 1455, and his choice to physically eliminate the King’s closest advisers in the process, then turned it into a vendetta between his ‘party’, led by his family and the Nevilles, and the King and Queen’s court faction led by the Beauforts and Percies. But York’s initial sights were set on the heirship to the King, in place of his infant son who was soon being claimed to be a bastard by the ‘Yorkists’, rather than a direct claim on the throne. The latter was only made after York and his allies had been driven into exile and stripped of their lands by the Queen’s faction in 1459, fought their way back to power in 1460, and seized the King. Even then most of his own