The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors

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Not once has the Wars of the Roses come up, and I’m grateful to this book as well as my experience in Model United Nations for introducing such a topic. In 1487 John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln invaded England with the pretender Lambert Simnel (who claimed to be Edward IV’s nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick) and a gang of Swiss mercenaries. Henry VI’s mental problems have left England in a state of instability, which, of course, led to civil war. This made him useful to the angry Yorkists, and earned him just enough support from exiled Edwardians to make invasion possible. Thus had been created the red-and-white ‘Tudor rose’ that seemed to be painted everywhere, reminding the populace that the Tudors stood for unity, reconciliation, peace and the incontestable right to rule.

Jones’s material is thrilling, but it is quite a task to sift, select, structure and contextualise the information. The toddler tantrum that the one year-old king threw on his way to his first parliament in 1423 (only curbed by a sojourn in Staines) was a rare expression of royal will. Despite his victory over Richard III, Henry VII was acutely aware of the frailty of his bloodline and terrified of a Yorkist revival. Deemed mentally unstable, and definitely not fit to rule, as he grew older, this led to a power vacuum in the English monarchy over who actually needs to be in charge.

The pathetic detail of Margaret Plantagenet dying at the hands of the blundering axeman, while wearing new shoes, is typical of Jones’s ability to get under the skin of the reader to bring people and events alive.

I knew of them and their history, but I had never connected it to the power struggles created during the Wars of the Roses. The double rose created a number of false assumptions: that Henry Tudor was on a par, in terms of royal blood, with the white-rose Yorkists; that his marriage to Elizabeth of York put an end to the violence that had engulfed England in the second half of the 15th century; and that the “Wars of the Roses” (a 19th-century term) was simply a blood feud between two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty. But with Henry VIII’s Reformation the dynastic rivalries of the Wars of the Roses came to be replaced with religious divisions.

He wrote and presented the popular Netflix series “Secrets of Great British Castles” and has an exclusive deal with Sony Pictures Television to produce and develop historical TV series, including adaptations of his books. The baby king was watched over by two charismatic and extremely ‘royal’ uncles, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.

By then, the wars could be described properly as Yorkists versus Lancastrians, though allegiances were fluid. There is a “Parliament of Devils”, a “Bloody Meadow”, a “Red Gutter” and even a “Love Day”: Henry’s bizarre attempt to reconcile Beauforts and Percys with York and the Nevilles by having them process, arm in arm, through the streets of London.I'm pretty well-versed in Henry VIII and family, but have only held a very blurry picture of the wars preceding their reign until now.

Pope Pius II, watching England from afar, would later describe Henry in this phase of his life as “a man more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit, who left everything in his wife’s hands. While Edward was accustomed to fighting on foot, Warwick was said by one chronicler to prefer to run with his men into battle before mounting on horseback, “and if he found victory inclined to his side, he charged boldly among them; if otherwise he took care of himself in time and provided for his escape. Standing in a rose garden, he has plucked a red flower from a great bush that stands between him and his nemesis, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York. I played the historical role of William Neville in the House of Lancaster, one in which I was the mole.Such as how this modern view held of Richard largely stems from none other than his enemy Henry Tudor. On the jacket of The Hollow Crown, the Tudor rose is portrayed as a grim, five-pointed disc of steel, like a ninja star. Harey the vjth belonged to a new genre of ‘history’ plays, which depicted – or claimed to depict – England’s recent past. The first English monarch to be crowned both king of England and of France, Henry VI proved incapable of ruling either realm. What followed, it’s usually suggested, was 30 years of intermittent civil war in which York fought Lancaster, the crown changed hands and eventually the Tudors won at the battle of Bosworth.