The War of the Roses by Timothy Venning Page A

supporters were opposed to his claim to be rightful king, which had to be halted–and Henry’s deposition only followed the next round of the vendetta, when the Queen’s men attacked and killed York and other nobles at Wakefield in December 1460 but York’s son Edward (IV) successfully fought back. Edward IV’s disputed ‘election’ was then followed by victory on the battlefield of Towton, the elimination of more of Henry’s allies, and eventually the capture of Henry and the flight of Queen Margaret to France. Seemingly routed for good, Henry’s faction then had an unexpected stroke of luck as Edward quarrelled with his cousin and chief backer Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who killed his chief rivals and arrested the King in 1469, backed down from deposing him, but was driven out of England by Edward in 1470 and in retaliation invaded to restore Henry VI. The unlikely alliance of Warwick with Queen Margaret, the woman responsible for the deaths of his father and brother, was then overthrown by the returning Edward in March to May 1471–but Edward died aged forty in 1483 and his son Edward V was then deposed as a ‘bastard’ by his brother Richard (III). Richard, the most controversial monarch in English history, then faced the implacable hostility of many of his late brother’s loyalists, who lined up with a seemingly insignificant Beaufort scion (Henry Tudor) and other diehard ‘Lancastrians’ to overthrow him in August 1485.
    The Crown thus changed hands unexpectedly six times in 1461–85–and nearly did so again in a Yorkist invasion in 1487. Kings were deposed, murdered (or not), died in suspicious circumstances, or were killed in battle, the senior nobility were destroyed by deaths in battle and political executions, and high politics seemed dominated by unsavoury and violent blood-feuds. Not surprisingly, this era has provided a rich field for writers since the days of Shakespeare, and is still a favourite for romantic historical fiction (usually centred on Richard III) in modern times. Recent contributors have included Rosemary Hawley Jarman, Josephine Tey, Sharon Penman, and Philippa Gregory, and TV programmes include a ‘Trial of Richard III’ on Channel Four. Was he really a child-murdering psychopath, a self-preserving political strategist who went too far, or an honourable and misjudged figure ‘smeared’ by Tudor ‘spin-doctors’? The influence of fiction on the popular conception of the period indeed includes the very concept of a ‘War of the Roses’–not a contemporary term, but thought up by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Anne of Geierstein in 1829. The first serious historical novel about the period, Last of the Barons by Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1843, introduced the concept of ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’ and of Edward IV as a smooth-talking lecher (whose secret betrothal/ marriage c.1462 is still a topic of controversy).
    In reality, the idea of a ‘White Rose’ (York) and a ‘Red Rose’ (Lancaster) faction, which Shakespeare peddled in the 1590s, comes from the retrospective viewpoint of post-1485 chroniclers, who celebrated the marriage of Henry Tudor and Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth as uniting the two heraldic roses of their families. As the ‘Plantagenet’ surname was a propaganda invention of 1450s Yorkists who revived the personal sobriquet of Henry II’s father Geoffrey, so the notion of a self-proclaimed ‘Tudor’ dynasty is inaccurate–Henry VII usually called himself ‘Richmond’ after his earldom. But what is not at issue is that a remarkable degree of political instability–some of it self-generating–and changes of fortune saw control of power shift with the results of political alliances, chancy battles, kingly mental breakdown, and sudden royal deaths (natural or not). The issue arises –how easily could things have