The Wars of the Roses: A Near Complete Guide to the Families, Feuds and Fight for England's Crown

By Princess Charlotte (Medieval Warfare Expert)

Here is a family dispute that makes every argument about who gets to play with a certain toy first, or who gets to sit in the front seat. For thirty years, on and off, with occasional ceasefire, two branches of the same royal family fought each other for the throne of England. Nine major battles. Thousand upon thousand dead. Nobles executed on both sides. A king imprisoned. Princes murdered. Enough betrayal and unexpected reversals to fill several seasons of a prestige television drama.

It would make a Christmas episode of Eastenders look relatively tame in comparison!

It was called the Wars of the Roses.

And ended with a dynasty that would define England for over a century.

What Were the Wars of the Roses?

The Wars of the Roses were a series of civil wars fought between 1455 and 1487 for control of the English throne. The two sides were the House of Lancaster, whose symbol was a red rose, and the House of York, whose symbol was a white rose. Both were branches of the royal House of Plantagenet, descendants of King Edward III, which meant the entire conflict was, at its core, a family argument about who had the stronger claim to the throne.

The name is actually a Victorian invention, people at the time didn't call it that. But the roses were real symbols, and the name has stuck because it is vivid and considerably more poetic than "the extended Plantagenet succession crisis of the fifteenth century."

The conflict had its roots in the deposition of Richard II in 1399 by Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV and established the Lancastrian line. The Yorkist claim descended through a different branch, one that some argued was actually senior to the Lancastrian one. This dispute simmered for decades before finally erupting into open warfare. The trigger was a king who was not quite up to the job.

Henry VI and the Beginning

Henry VI inherited the throne at nine months old. He was, by most accounts, a deeply unsuitable king for deeply unsuitable times, gentle, pious, interested in education and entirely lacking the military instinct the fifteenth century demanded. He founded Eton College and King's College Cambridge, which are remarkable achievements.

He also periodically suffered complete mental collapse, during which he was unable to speak or govern. During one episode in 1453, he failed to respond to the birth of his own son for seventeen months.

Into the power vacuum stepped Richard, Duke of York, administratively capable, and increasingly unwilling to set aside his claim to the throne. The Lancastrian faction, led in practice by Henry's formidably capable wife Margaret of Anjou, saw the threat clearly.

The first battle was fought at St Albans in May 1455. It was short, sharp and decisive, a Yorkist victory that left several leading Lancastrian nobles dead in the streets.

The wars had begun.

The Key Players

Margaret of Anjou was the effective leader of the Lancastrian cause, a French princess who married Henry VI at fifteen and spent the next three decades fighting to preserve the throne with a determination and military intelligence that neither her husband nor son possessed. She is one of the most formidable figures in English medieval history and receives nowhere near enough attention.

Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (known as Warwick the Kingmaker) was the wealthiest nobleman in England, whose support was decisive for whichever side he backed. He initially supported the Yorkists, then switched sides and attempted to restore Henry VI.

Yet, his capacity for changing allegiance at critical moments made him simultaneously the most valuable and most dangerous ally in England.

Edward IV was the Yorkist king who won the throne, lost it, and won it back, charismatic, militarily gifted, and prone to personal decisions that gave his enemies their opportunities. Richard III is the most contested figure in the conflict, the younger brother who served Edward IV loyally before seizing the throne from his nephew, imprisoning the young king and his brother in the Tower of London, and ruling for two years before dying at Bosworth Field.

Whether he was Shakespeare's calculating villain or a capable ruler unfairly maligned by Tudor propaganda is a debate historians and the Richard III Society are still having with considerable enthusiasm.

The Key Battles

The Battle of Towton in March 1461 was fought in a snowstorm in Yorkshire and is considered the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. Edward IV's Yorkist forces defeated the Lancastrians decisively, and Henry VI fled to Scotland.

The Battle of Barnet in 1471 was fought in thick fog on Easter Sunday. Warwick the Kingmaker was killed in the confusion, part of the Lancastrian army mistook its own allies for enemies and attacked them, a catastrophic friendly fire incident that contributed to the defeat.

The Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 ended the Plantagenet dynasty and began the Tudor one. Richard III charged directly towards Henry Tudor's position in what appears to have been either a bold decisive stroke or a desperate gamble. He came close to reaching Henry before being cut off and killed, the last English king to die in battle. His horse was famously unavailable.

Who Won?

Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian with a somewhat tenuous claim to the throne who had spent most of his life in exile, won at Bosworth, became Henry VII, and founded the Tudor dynasty.

He then married Elizabeth of York (daughter of Edward IV and niece of Richard III - confused yet?) uniting the two houses and making further argument about which rose should sit on the throne redundant. The Tudor rose, combining red and white, was the visual symbol of this union and remains one of the most recognised heraldic images in English history.

Henry VII was cautious, financially careful and not given to grand gestures. But he was exactly what England needed after thirty years of civil war, a king who was very good at staying on the throne and very committed to ensuring nobody had a better claim to it than he did.

Thirty years of civil war. Nine major battles. Two royal houses. One exhausted country. And at the end of it, a cautious Welsh exile on the English throne, a red rose married to a white one, and an England ready to be governed by someone whose primary qualification was competence rather than bloodline.

The Wars of the Roses ended not with a great military triumph but with a political settlement, a recognition that the fighting had to stop and that the best way forward was to unite the two sides in a single dynasty.

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