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The Century of Civil War
The 1400s
August 1399
(The Overthrow of Richard II)
to
August 1502
(The Death of Prince Arthur)

Early Threats to Henry IV
The Remainder of Henry IV’s Reign
Henry V, the War in France and the Battle of Agincourt
The Reign of Henry V
The Minority of Henry VI and Joan of Arc
The Reign of Henry VI and the End of the Hundred Years’ War
The War of the Roses
The Princes in the Tower
The Battle of Bosworth Field
The Early Reign of Henry Tudor
The Tudors and the Discovery of the New World

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Early Threats to Henry IV
Henry IV, the usurper to the direct Plantagenet line and the first of three
Lancastrian kings, had come to the throne through rebellion and insurrection,
and this was to set a dangerous precedent, breaking a tradition of
primogeniture that had been followed, by and large, since the arrival of the
Normans nearly 300 years before
...
This
assassination attempt, the Epiphany Rising, aimed to kill both the new king
and his four sons, who were all children, before restoring the imprisoned
Richard II to the throne and, when it failed, Henry IV rounded on the
Ricardian barons who had planned it with characteristic speed and venom
...
Quickly raising an army in London, he set off in the middle of
winter for the West in pursuit of all those who opposed him
...
This was a confession that Rutland made to his father, Edmund of
Langley, the first Duke of York
...
The Yorkist claim to the throne in the century of the War of the Roses
was to be traced through Edmund in the decades that followed while the
counter claims of the Lancastrians were to come through links to his elder
brother, John of Gaunt, the first Duke of Lancaster, and the father of the new
king
...

Local authorities loyal to the king captured most of the conspirators who had
escaped from Windsor when they tried to capture Cirencester in early
January and, by the end of the month, many had been executed
...

This secured the Lancastrian crown, for a short term at least, although this
might have been less obvious to Henry IV himself as he returned to London,
and this may well have been why he was persuaded to authorise the murder
of Richard II soon after
...
His unmarked body was then publicly displayed to try and
persuade the people of England that in fact murder had not taken place
although this, on the whole, seems not to have been believed
...

Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire had been the seat of John of Gaunt from whom
the new king had inherited a huge fortune
...
One of the main reasons that Henry IV won the crown in 1399 was
universal opposition to the absolutism of Richard II
...

In December 1400, the king was to welcome Emperor Manuel of the
Byzantine Empire on a state visit that was to last a month
...
This latter force was eventually to
take Constantinople a generation last in 1458, finally ending the Roman
Empire
...
Parliament had started life a century before as an
organ of and mouthpiece for the monarch and had originally been used as a

3

platform from which orders, laws and taxes could be issued
...
At the same time, institutions
and procedures surrounding the House of Commons were developing and
evolving, and its members, the knights from the shires and burgesses from
the towns, were becoming more and more jealous of the rights and privileges
that incrementally had been won for their assembly
...
These
men, represented often by their guilds, benefited enormously from the
development of the first banks and a revolution in private and public finance
...
New expeditions
were, as a result, sent out to make contact with merchants from the Ottomandominated Levant, and others, such as those sent out along the African coast
by kings such as Henry the Navigator of Portugal, were sent further afield
...

These changes within the English parliament began early in Henry IV’s reign
with an agreement that guaranteed the right to debate and dissent without
fear of arrest while the Commons also began to assert its right to collect taxes
...
However, the day-to-day running of the country still remained with
the king and his council, and this Henry IV packed with his relatives and
retainers
...


4

Henry IV needed parliamentary support in 1400 because the legitimacy of his
authority remained weak and he himself certainly did not expect the
Epiphany Rising of 1399 to be the last intrigue to endanger his crown
...
In fact, such intrigues were
only the start of a long series of internecine struggles that were to punctuate
the fifteenth century
...

The first attack on Henry IV’s crown had been foiled at Windsor in December
1399 but a far more substantial challenge was soon laid down less than a year
later when Wales rose up in a revolt that was to last until 1408
...
Glendower, who in September
1400 took the title Prince of Wales, was soon to use links with dissident antiLancastrian groups in both England and Scotland to help win control over
most of his country
...
The Percy family, who traced
royal lineage through links to Henry III, were at least as powerful as the new
king in the north of the country in the early years of his reign, and they had
been significant supporters in the battle for his crown
...

It was to be Hotspur who was to take the lead in this fight against the new
king and, as a result, set out south at the beginning of July 1403 in order to
join up with other anti-Lancastrian forces in the Welsh Marches
...
The latter was the heir presumptive to the
crown of Richard II with his claim coming through the old king’s second son,
the giant Lionel, the first Duke of Clarence
...

These two factions planned to overthrow the Lancastrians in league with the
Welsh with battle joined at Shrewsbury in July 1403
...
The battle, a victory for the Lancastrians,
resulted in the death of the young Percy, Hotspur, and forced the older one,
the Earl of Northumberland, who was not at the battle, to give up his castles
and soon move into exile
...

But Glendower was less easily beaten and the following year successfully
invaded southern Wales
...
His stand against Henry IV was
supported by alliances with both France as well as a renewed one with the
Percys, and this defiance was to continue until 1408 when Bolingbroke’s
authority was finally restored
...
Glendower, however, was never captured and spent the
rest of his life on the run, later refusing an amnesty from Henry V
...

Henry IV was nothing if not energetic and, soon after his victory at
Shrewsbury and his invasion of Wales, stormed into Scotland forcing a series
of decisive victories
...

A fortnight later, news arrived that his father had died and that he had
acceded to the throne as James I
...
James I eventually returned to Scotland in
1424 and set about reforming a country that had been torn apart by feud and
faction for a generation
...

Henry IV’s invasion of Scotland did not end threats to his throne from north
of the border, and renegade factions supported by the Percys, who from 1405
included the banished Earl of Northumberland himself, often supported
these
...
The
death of Northumberland at the battle finally saw off the various pacts and
alliances that had brought together the Welsh, the Scots, the Percys, Mortimer
and the French in the years after Richard II’s death
...
However, he
remained a hugely unpopular king and this was, at least in part, due to the
terrible condition of his skin, an ailment that he was to endure for the rest of
his life, as well as an unsightly tumour that grew under his nose
...


7

Archbishop Scrope was a pivotal figure in the Percys’ organisation of the
North against the king in the early years of his reign but he had disbanded
the forces under his control after the Battle of Shrewsbury and had given
himself up to the king
...
Henry IV’s popularity was also
affected by his second marriage, to Joan of Navarre, who it was widely
believed was a witch
...

As Henry IV’s health grew worse during the last years of his life, he
increasingly was forced to rely on his son, Henry of Monmouth, who from
1410 took over the day-to-day government of the nation
...

However, a spat between father and son in 1412 forced both the withdrawal
of Prince Henry from the king’s court and the resignation of Thomas
Beaufort, the king’s chancellor but also a close ally of the young prince
...
It seems likely that their
banishment was connected with a plot that looked to force the old king’s
abdication
...
This, though, was despite the efforts of Henry IV himself who,
despite his own huge personal wealth, had nearly bankrupted himself and
the country financing the campaigns that kept him on his throne
...
He had
suffered a series of strokes beforehand, and this final one took him away a
8

month before his forty-seventh birthday
...

Henry V, the War in France and the Battle of Agincourt
Despite his unpopularity, the tenuous legitimacy of his reign and the
subsequent civil war that was to dominate much of the rest of the century,
Henry Bolingbroke was succeeded by an eldest son who faced no major
insurrection or counter claim to his throne
...

One of the main reasons why Henry V, the second Lancastrian king, was
accepted so readily by the country at large was because of his commitment to
the cause of England that had been so singularly missing in the old king
...
Henry IV had been
the first king to take his coronation vows in English, and his son was to
follow his lead by becoming the first to write in English
...

But before Henry V could settle to the task that was to dominate his reign, he
was forced to deal with a minor insurrection at the beginning of 1414 that,
while never seriously threatening his grip on power, allowed him instead to
assert his control over his kingdom
...
The resurgence of the Lollards, with their belief in
the importance of the Bible, in a return to the simple life of the early Church
and in the denunciation of the imagery of the medieval church, had first been
dealt with by new king’s father at the beginning of his reign a decade before
but, by 1410, they had become increasingly returned to threaten the king’s
domain
...
In December
1417, however, he was hunted down and burnt at the stake
...
Later,
Shakespeare’s Falstaff character was to be based on Oldcastle
...
By and large, he now turned his back on the former and instead
concentrated on the soldiering that was to define his short reign
...
The other half he was to spend in
France where, as a soldier in the saddle, he campaigned for the return of land
lost over the previous half century
...
This had been restarted
by his grandfather, John of Gaunt, and by his great uncle, the Black Prince, in
1369 on behalf of their father, Edward III, and this had lasted until a treaty in
1389 had begun a period of relative peace
...

This move was popular both with the barons who would supply the
manpower for the war but also with the whole of the country who came
forward enthusiastically to pay for the loans and taxes that would finance it
...
Although the traditional foundation
date of the Royal Navy is usually placed in the sixteenth century, Henry V
had a very keen interest in naval affairs and through his short reign

10

specifically and directly aimed to protect the island he ruled by means of a
national navy
...
Richard of Conisburgh, the Earl of
Cambridge, led the Southampton Plot and acted on the behalf of the Yorkist
pretender, his brother-in-law, Edmund Mortimer, the fifth Earl of the March
...
As in the earlier Epiphany Rising at the beginning of his father’s reign,
this Yorkist bid for the throne was justified through the claim that Mortimer
was more closely related to Edward III, through his second son, Lionel, the
Duke of Clarence, than Henry V, whose claim came through John of Gaunt,
the old king’s third son
...
Mortimer probably knew little about
the plot to make him king, and may have even been instrumental in
disclosing the plans of the plotters
...
Later, he was sent to Ireland as the king’s representative and was to
die there in 1425
...

Henry V’s plan was to conquer and pacify northern France and then use this
as a bridgehead from where he could push further south
...
He was helped by civil war
in France itself that pitted the Duke of Orleans, who supported the king there,
against the Duke of Burgundy, who did not
...

So when Henry landed his army of some 2,500 knights and 7,000 archers, his
longbowmen, his plans were clear and precise, and he lost little time in

11

besieging the strategically important town of Harfleur
...

In the meantime, Henry V’s forces were ravaged by that third party of
medieval warfare, illness and disease, and by the time English army entered
Harfleur, his forces had been badly decimated by an outbreak of dysentery
...
So instead he gave
orders for a general march across Normandy towards English-held Calais,
100 miles or so away up the coast, with the English force, carrying with it
only a week’s store of rations, leaving Harfleur on 8 October 1415
...
However,
flooding was not the only reason Henry V did not cross as he was now
opposed by a major French army that forced him to march his increasingly
tired and ill soldiers southwards, along the western bank of the river, further
and further inland
...

So by the time Henry led his men into the little village of Agincourt on the
night of 24 October 1415, they had marched 250 miles in 17 days on rations
that were supposed to have lasted a week
...
And at Agincourt, Henry V
and his army were still 30 miles south of Calais and the safety of the English
fleet
...


12

Henry V, though, like the Black Prince before him, was famed for his
leadership and marshalling skills, and he quickly drew up a battle plan that
was to make best use of his limited forces that remained at his disposal
...
With the French close, confident and celebrating
their expected victory even before the break of dawn, Shakespeare has him
moving and conversing anonymously with his captains and troops as the
evening progresses
...

Two weeks of autumn rain had turned the rolling plough land in between
into a quagmire that was to have a huge effect on the French cavalry later in
the day
...
On both
English flanks, he had kept his well-disciplined longbowmen who now he
ordered to fire
...
The
weight of the French armour and the startled and injured horses, combined
with the wet ground that cut up from the start, played into the hands of the
English who were easily able to parry the next two waves of French attack
that came from the infantry
...
This
force greatly outnumbered that available to Henry V, and it provoked him to
issue the command, breaking the chivalric rules of the day, to kill French
prisoners who in the melee were threatening to break free and rejoin the
battle
...
Henry V was said to have lost as few
as 400 men
...
As a result,
subsequent campaigns were launched in the years that followed and these,
mainly focusing on Normandy, were only interrupted once when the king
returned to England in the autumn of 1417 to deal with a further Lollard
uprising, which led to the execution of his friend Oldcastle
...
This resulted in a huge shift in the balance of elite
north European noble society, with the French cause further hampered by the
temporary insanity of Charles VI, an affliction that had first visited him in the
1390s
...
This new Anglo-French accord was sealed by
the marriage of Henry V and Catherine of Valois, the French king’s youngest
daughter, a liaison that was soon to produce a son
...
After this, Catherine of Valois
quickly began an affair with Owen Tudor, a Welsh squire who she took into
her household, and this led in the late 1420s to their clandestine marriage that
defied an act of parliament issued by the royal Lancastrian elite who ruled on
behalf of her son, the infant king
...


14

In 1452, the eldest of these royal children, Edmund Tudor, was raised to the
title of the Earl of Richmond by his half-brother, Henry VI, but he was to die
of the plague in November 1456 while a captive of Yorkist elements at
Carmarthen Castle following the opening sorties of the War of the Roses
...
Henry’s mother,
Margaret Beaufort, the Countess of Richmond, had married Edmund in 1455,
and was just 13 years and 7 months old when she gave birth to the future
king of England
...

Henry V spent much of his time as king prosecuting war in France
...
At this time, Europe was just emerging from the Great Schism, a
split within the Church that had seen the election of rival popes
...
The
other remained in Rome and found support from, amongst others, the kings
of England and successive Holy Roman Emperors
...
Henry‘s efforts in France were certainly motivated by these events
and it also seems likely that Henry V viewed success in France as a
springboard for more important conquests in the Holy Land that might
reunite the Church
...

In February 1421, Henry V returned to England for the first time in three and
half years, with his teenage wife joining him on a royal progress around the
country
...
At the same time, the financial consequences of Henry’s war of

15

conquest were being felt both in England and in Plantagenet-held France with
many nobles coming to see war as counter to their own particular dynastic
needs
...
Henry V had initially promised that the
cost of the war would be borne by taxes raised in lands he held in France but
increasingly it became clear that this was not to be the case
...
However, this was all to matter very
little to Henry V himself who fell ill at Meaux with dysentery, dying before
the month was out
...
Henry V’s body, having been
eviscerated and boiled in aromatic preservatives beforehand, was taken back
across the English Channel before burial at Westminster Abbey
...

The Minority of Henry VI and Joan of Arc
The infant Henry VI was to be the only English king who was also crowned
as king of France, succeeding his grandfather, mad-King Charles VI, two
months later
...
The next youngest English monarch was
Edward VI who was 9 years old when he came to the throne in 1547
...

Henry V ordered in his will that England was to be run on his son’s behalf by
a Regency Council made up of senior members of the Lancaster clan led by
his brothers John, the first Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, the first Duke of
Gloucester
...
During the reign of

16

Elizabeth I at the end of the next century, this library was to be enlarged again
through the patronage of Thomas Bodley, with the Bodleian Library
becoming one of the world’s foremost academic archives
...
But his forces were never able to force a
breakthrough south of the Loire, with his armies never really threatening
southern positions taken up by the Dauphin
...

This, however, was all to change with the appearance of one of the most
remarkable warriors in the history of European warfare
...

These had come to tell her that her life’s mission was to free France from
English domination
...

After a series of private audiences, and interrogations, Joan persuaded the
Dauphin, as well as many commanders and church leaders at his court, that
she indeed had been visited from on high, and she was soon put in charge of
a large force sent to relieve the city of Orleans, the capital of the Loire region
and the key to English ambitions to push southwards
...
Partly as a
result of this, Joan was able to, within a week in May 1429, win a decisive
victory
...
This was where French kings were traditionally crowned and Joan

17

then persuaded Charles, the Dauphin, to repudiate the obligations that he
had agreed to in the Treaty of Troyes and accept the crown
...

Joan continued her campaign the following year, but delay and vacillation by
the newly crowned king and his commanders allowed the English and the
forces of their main French ally, the Duke of Burgundy, to rally and regroup
...
It was here that Joan was tried and convicted of heresy and witchcraft
...
Joan was retried and pardoned 20 years later by Charles VII, the king
who in 1431 had done so little to save the 19 year old despite all that she had
achieved in just 18 months to restore the position of his Valois house
...

The Reign of Henry VI and the End of the Hundred Years’ War
The intervention of Joan of Arc in the Hundred Years War was crucial in
shifting the balance of the war in favour of France, and this was confirmed at
the end of Henry VI’s minority when the Burgundy faction abandoned the
English cause and made peace with Charles VII
...
Henry VI made it clear immediately after
coming of age in 1437 that he wanted little to do with the war in France
although his commanders there were to hold out in Normandy until 1444
...
Gloucester was to retire from public
service and died in 1447
...
Cardinal Beaufort, who
led the anti-war faction favoured by the king, had served as the Lord
Chancellor under three kings, had helped Henry Bolingbroke secure the
throne for the House of Lancaster in 1399 and had been loyal to the future
Henry V in 1411 and 1412
...

In this new role as adviser to the king, it was Cardinal Beaufort who was to
lead negotiations that led to the Treaty of Tours in 1445 that ended the
Hundred Years War
...
It was to be Margaret of Anjou
who was soon to have such a major role in the destiny of the English throne
...
Indeed, the truce in general was not popular in England as it
gave away much of the land traditionally claimed by the crown, and it was
broken in 1449, two years after Beaufort’s death, when renegade English
forces attacked in Brittany
...
Finally, Gascony and the southern provinces of Aquitaine were lost
three years later
...
De la Pole, who had been
injured as a young man at the siege of Harfleur in 1415, had been a close ally

19

of Cardinal Beaufort and was to take over from him as the king’s, and the
new queen’s, most influential adviser after the latter’s death in 1447
...
However, his fall from grace was to be just as swift as his
meteoric rise when, in January 1450, after having been accused of being a
traitor by passing on state papers to the French, he was murdered on board a
ship carrying him across the English Channel to banishment to Calais
...
The war, in
essence, had been about who should rule western France, and this was a
victory that was decisively won by the Valois over their Plantagenet
adversaries
...

Long before these losses, it had become clear that the king possessed a
character and presence that was as different to his father as Edward II had
been to his
...
He was also to inherit the mental disturbances that had
afflicted his maternal grandfather, Charles VI
...
His achievements politically, therefore, were limited, and he is best
celebrated as the founder of Eton College and King's College, Cambridge,
which only accepted old Etonians until the eighteenth century, and for
introducing the rank of viscount, just below that of duke, to the peerage in
1440
...

The War of the Roses
The loss of ancestral land in France under the leadership of Henry VI was
seen in England as a major catastrophe, and it soon led to the outbreak of a
civil war that 30 years later saw the elevation of a dynasty of kings and

20

queens who were to rule England for a the next 120 years
...
This ultimately led to the push for empire in the Americas and in
India in the years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and this ultimately
led to the setting up, in December 1600 at the very end of the Virgin Queen’s
reign, of the hugely important East India Company
...
The Lancastrian line was led by the king who was the greatgrandson of John of Gaunt, the third son of Edward III and the first Duke of
Lancaster
...
He was the grandson of Edward
III's fourth son, Edmund of Langley, the first Duke of York, and he was also
the son of the Earl of Cambridge who Henry V had had executed in 1415 at
Southampton for his part in the intrigue on behalf of Mortimer
...
But the legitimacy of Richard’s Yorkist claim
was also backed up through his mother’s line
...

Richard’s Yorkist cause was also helped in the early 1450s by his position as
the Lord Protector of England during the king’s frequent bouts of insanity,
and he was hugely aided by his money and estates that made him, after the
king, the country’s richest magnate
...


21

The origins of the war itself can be traced to the early 1450s when a series of
arguments between these two viciously opposed factions within elite English
society, focusing on questions concerning Henry VI’s competence to run the
country, were played out
...
These men had for centuries built up huge private armies that were
important cogs within the machinery of government, especially in time of
war
...

If this was missing, as it was for instance during the reign of Stephen and
Edward VI, anarchy and civil war were likely to follow
...
This was a role that he was
happy to assume because he had found himself increasingly marginalised by
the king, who had chosen instead to rely on a clique dominated by his French
wife that, after the deaths of Cardinal Beaufort and the Duke of Suffolk, was
led by Edmund Beaufort, the second Duke of Somerset
...

The first flashpoint on the road to war broke out in London in the summer of
1452 when serious social and political unrest followed bad news from France
...
But he was to find the gates of the City of London
locked to him on his arrival, forcing him to march on towards Dartford in
Kent
...
This force was supported by Somerset, who had
been released from arrest on the insistence of the queen, with York himself
then, for a while, himself placed under house arrest in London
...
As with many spats in the
early years just pre-dating the War of the Roses, York had tried to use the
implied threat of his private power to solve a personal family dispute and,
when this failed, was content to take the oath of allegiance to Henry VI’s
crown
...
This may have been a form of schizophrenia, a condition
suffered by many of his French ancestors
...
At this time, the queen, too, was largely excluded from the political
process although she did maintain an army on her husband’s behalf and her
position was hugely strengthened by the birth of an heir, Edward of
Westminster, in October 1453
...

This tense stand off between the two increasingly polarised factions was to
continue for over a year until December 1454 when the king made a complete
recovery
...
This final episode on the internecine intrigues of the mid1450s perhaps made open warfare inevitable, and this was to break out soon
after in May 1455 at the Battle of St Albans in what is traditionally seen as the
official start date of the War of the Roses
...
This hugely
powerful family from the north was led by the Richard Neville, the fifth Earl
of Salisbury, who had been appointed Chancellor by York, his brother-in-law,
during the king’s illness, and by his son, another Richard Neville and the

23

sixteenth Earl of Warwick
...
Losses
on both sides at St Albans stirred deep and visceral animosities that were not
sated for another 30 years
...
Throughout this
period, the king to a large extent remained mentally incapacitated, and it was
increasingly marked by a psychological battle of wills between the Duke of
York and Margaret of Anjou
...
After the
agreement, the king, restored once again to good health, organised a
procession of reconciliation, the Love Day, for the two enemy factions who
had intrigued so intensely through his illness
...

The king’s best efforts, however, could not stop open hostility again breaking
out in the late summer of 1459 when a Neville army led by the Earl of
Salisbury left Yorkshire with the intention of linking up with other Yorkist
forces further west
...
However, the two had then fallen out soon after and this
was mainly due to the king’s preference for his bitterest rivals, the Percys
...


24

In response, Lancastrian forces under the command of Lord Audley were sent
to intercept this force with battle joined at Blore Heath in Staffordshire at the
end of September 1459
...
This allowed Salisbury to complete his journey
westwards and link up with his son, Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick
who had been so crucial in bringing about York’s win at St Albans four years
before
...

This united Yorkist force, however, was still only half the size of the
Lancastrian one that opposed it, and York was quick to make protestations of
loyalty to the king
...
Opposed by a Lancastrian army
so much larger than their own, and sensing an unwillingness within their
own ranks to fight an army led by the king himself, all three Yorkist leaders,
leaving their troops leaderless on the battlefield, fled before battle was joined
...
This was in July 1460 at the Battle of Northampton when a
joint Yorkist army routed the king’s forces under the leadership of the Duke
of Buckingham who, along with many other senior Lancastrian commanders,
was beheaded soon after
...

Henry VI and his queen had branded the Duke of York a traitor before the
Battle of Northampton, but the former now dramatically increased the
political tension by claiming, for the first time, the throne for himself
...
As a result, and
following pressure on York from Warwick, a negotiated settlement, ratified to
by parliament in the Act of Accord, was worked out that saw the king
keeping his crown but, at the same time, accepting Richard Plantagenet, the
third Duke of York, as his heir
...
As a result, she refused to
enter into negotiations with what she clearly saw as Yorkist usurpers and, in
December 1460, ordered her considerable army to march on the Earl of
Salisbury’s castle stronghold near Wakefield in Yorkshire
...
Their
severed heads were then placed upon spikes on the walls of nearby York with
a paper crown ironically placed upon that of the Duke of York, the would-be
usurper of the Henry VI’s Lancastrian crown
...
Indeed, the queen’s large Lancastrian army, with its
Scottish allies, remained in place throughout the winter of 1460-61, defeating
more Yorkist forces on its journey south, this time under the command of
Warwick, at the second Battle of St Albans in February 1461
...
However, this force
was never able to take London
...
As a result, the
two armies met at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross on 2 February 1461, with a
decisive Yorkist victory leading to yet another beheading, this time in the

26

marketplace of Hereford
...

The newly-freed Henry VI then showed the vacillation and dithering that
must have been so infuriating for his wife, and was beaten, as a result, in the
race to London by both Warwick, who had evaded capture at St Albans, and
by Edward, the new Duke of York
...
As a result, Edward IV, a giant of a man who
stood at 6’4” tall, nearly a foot taller than the average of the day, took the
throne, having just turned 18 years old, after a ceremony in London at the
beginning of March 1461
...
This
was soon to take place at Towton in Yorkshire, on the moors in a blizzard, on
Palm Sunday, 29 March 1461, when the two sides met in the decisive battle
that was to end the first phase of the war
...
Some 28,000 of
these men were to lose their lives on that cold day
...

The result of the battle was a decisive victory for the Yorkist usurper, Edward
IV, and it forced Henry VI, along with his wife and son, the determined
Margaret of Anjou and Edward of Westminster, the nine-year-old Prince of
Wales, to flee northwards where they were received in Scotland at the court
of James III
...

Gregarious and popular, the new king possessed many regal characteristics
so lacking in Henry VI
...

Edward IV had won the crown at Towton but was never safe on his throne
and increasingly came to rely on the support and counsel of the Earl of
Warwick
...
These were years that Edward IV, following Henry IV
before him at the beginning of the century, spent mopping up opposition that
still challenged his legitimacy and this, by and large, was completed by July
1465 when the old king, Henry VI, who had been hidden by Lancastrian
supporters in various locations in Scotland and northern England since the
Battle of Towton, was captured and taken to the Tower of London
...

Elizabeth was to be also the first English bride to an English king since the
Norman Conquest
...
The marriage certainly went against the wishes and aspirations of
the royal enforcer, the Earl of Warwick who, at 35 years old, was in the prime
of his life
...

So the spat over Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, and the
subsequent change in the king’s court in favour of the queen’s family, led to a
widening schism between these erstwhile allies that continued into the late
1460s with Warwick first withdrawing to his estates in Yorkshire before later
going into exile abroad
...
But the coup failed
when public opinion demanded the king’s release, with the two also coming
to blows the following March when Warwick lent his support to those
involved in the Lincolnshire Rising
...
Margaret had
moved back to France from Scotland in 1463, but was to spend the next 7
years commuting back and forth across the Channel in an attempt to bring
about her husband’s restoration
...

The culmination of this anti-Yorkist intrigue, organised by this considerable
triumvirate and supported by the French king who wanted to weaken his
Yorkist rival, was a surprise attack on London in the summer of 1470
...
Meanwhile in London, Henry VI
returned to the throne in October 1470, but increasingly came under the
influence of Warwick, a political set up that pleased neither the queen nor
Clarence
...

In March 1471, Edward IV returned from abroad and landed with an army
near Hull
...
But the Kingmaker was still able to raise a substantial
army of some 15,000 men, and this was to meet Edward IV’s considerably
smaller force at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471
...
Warwick, the Kingmaker, who
had backed both sides in the war, was killed when his horse was cut from
under him
...
Edward IV was quick to take up the challenge and sent
out a large army to intercept her
...
It was to be here that the two forces were to
meet, on 4 May 1471, three weeks after clashing at Barnet
...
This was to be the only time that an heir to the throne was to
die in battle
...
Queen Margaret was
captured after the battle and held captive until 1476 when she was allowed to
return to France
...
The Battle of
Tewkesbury and the regicide in the Tower that followed killed off the main
Lancastrian line and ended the second phase of the war
...
During this time, the new king, a debauched man who kept
plenty of mistresses, grew corpulent and was to die young at only 40 years
old
...
In this new system,
Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s brother and his closest confidante,
became virtual ruler of the north of the country after his marriage to Anne
Neville, the heiress to the Warwick fortune
...
He was
executed in 1478
...
But
various allies who had been assiduously cultivated over 4 years deserted him
at the last minute, forcing him to come to a quick agreement with the king of
France who also wanted to avoid war
...

But peace was to last for only a short time and the marriage binding the treaty
was never to take place
...
The
failure of Edward IV’s attempt to drive a wedge between the king of France
and rivals such as Burgundy who let him down so badly in 1475 meant that
arrangements made at Picquigny were never any more than a stopgap
...

Edward IV presided over a nation that, though massively troubled politically,
was not hugely affected economically by the 20 years of dynastic bickering
that made up the first two phases of the War of the Roses
...
Increasingly, in these first years of the Italian
Renaissance, a huge undertaking paid for by commerce and trade, merchants
and traders were to come to the fore in English national life with the
prosperity and commercial developments that this brought soon becoming a
central characteristic of the reigns of the Tudor kings and queens who
followed
...
A little earlier, this was certainly the
case for Dick Whittington who made his fortune in the City of London as a
mercer
...
This was also the time when beer, made with hops, as
opposed to ale, made with malt, became popular in England
...

His premises were in Westminster and it was there that, by the end of his life,
he had printed over a hundred books, including The Canterbury Tales by
Geoffrey Chaucer
...

Printing was also hugely important in bringing about the standardisation of
written English
...

Edward IV’s realm had been at peace with itself for over a decade and there
seemed no real danger to the Yorkist claim of his son, Prince Edward, the
Prince of Wales
...
But this threat had quickly passed
with the new king, having been crowned as Prince of Wales as an infant,
enjoying a peaceful childhood at Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches
...
However, the 29year-old Gloucester, who had fought loyally on his brother’s behalf to rest the

32

crown through the War of the Roses and who had come to dominate the
north of the country, clearly had other ideas and, within two months, had had
himself crowned king in his nephew’s stead
...
But that analysis may be unfair
on the new king who, in many ways, was doing no more than reacting to the
political realities of the day
...
But the previous 30 years had
shown the speed at which these dynastic considerations could change and
certainly this would be even more the case during times of uncertainty
...

He perhaps also judged that without his dead brother’s patronage, he would
be pushed aside by the Woodvilles who, after all, had always controlled the
household of the young Prince of Wales who was now king
...
Those Woodvilles
accompanying the young king to London were arrested, with their leader,
Anthony Woodville, the second Earl Rivers, the queen’s brother and the uncle
of the princes, quickly executed
...

Rivers was not a popular figure, and it seems that Gloucester’s action earned
him many supporters among the barons who feared the possibility of a
dictatorship under the Woodvilles if Earl Rivers had lived
...

But having planned and organised his second coup meticulously by making
sure that he had the support of the key members of the nobility, he declared
the young king was illegitimate on the grounds that Edward IV’s marriage to
Elizabeth Woodville was invalid
...
This ended the 86-day-long
reign of Edward V, the shortest ever of an English monarch
...
Two small skeletons were uncovered in the
Tower in the seventeenth century, and it seems likely that the boys perished
on the orders of their uncle, Shakespeare’s evil hunchback, in the autumn of
1483
...
Buckingham had been a staunch Lancastrian whose
father had died at the first Battle of St Albans, but he had been reconciled to
Edward IV and his Yorkist regime before being generously rewarded in the
1470s for his support of the king and Gloucester’s Yorkist regime
...
But when the coup failed and Buckingham was executed in
Salisbury in November 1483, many from this faction went into exile keen to
find a new pretender for the throne who could rest back their power and
influence for the Lancastrian cause
...
Margaret was barely a teenager when Henry was born at Pembroke
Castle in January 1457 and he had been raised in Wales before fleeing to

34

France in 1471
...

Richard III was well aware of the threat posed by Henry Tudor and through
1484 and into 1485 put pressure of the Duke of Brittany to hand over his
greatest rival
...
A woefully small force of around only around 2,000 men, many
of whom were French mercenaries, accompanied Henry Tudor
...

He would have been aware that he had a considerably larger army than
Henry Tudor, and that he could count among his supporters Henry Percy, the
third Earl of Northumberland, who was positioned on his left flank
...
Lord Stanley was a senior member of
his household, but one who he suspected of treachery because his wife was
Henry Tudor’s mother
...
However, Richard
III believed that taking Stanley’s young son hostage before the battle had
solved this problem
...
He had secretly
allied himself to his stepson and, at the crucial stage in the battle, ordered his
brother, Sir William Stanley, to turn on Richard III
...
Richard III
was unseated from his horse in the melee at Bosworth Field but fought on
bravely before dying on the battlefield, thus becoming the last English king to
die in battle
...
As a reward for his actions at Bosworth Field, Stanley was to
become the Earl of Derby
...
Richard was the eighteenth monarch to
reign since the Norman Conquest and was the tenth who had met a violent
death
...
The
remains of the king were finally reinterred in Leicester Cathedral in March
2015
...

The Early Reign of Henry VII
When Henry Tudor came to the throne after Bosworth Field in the summer of
1485, his principal aim was to secure his throne and his family’s new dynastic
position, and in this he was unwittingly helped not only by the death of
Richard III but also by the fact that most of the other major claimants to the
throne of England had also died during the previous three decades of war
...
Henry Tudor may have grown
up in Wales, and then France, on the fringes of elite society but his claim to
the throne of England in 1485 was as strong as any other after 30 years of civil
war
...
As a result, a new flag and a new livery that
combined the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York was
commissioned while the new king also had the Welsh dragon incorporated
into his coat of arms
...

The unifying marriage took place in January 1486 and, within the year, this
new dynastic union had produced a son and an heir to Henry VII’s new

36

Tudor dynasty
...
It was the third of these who was to have such an impact on
English history when he came to the throne himself as Henry VIII in 1509
...

Henry VII was successful, in part at least, because the birth of Prince Arthur
gave England a legitimate heir who could bring together the houses of York
and Lancaster
...
The first was Lambert Simnel who in
1487 was put forward by Yorkists as the Earl of Warwick, the nephew of
Richard III and the son of the Duke of Clarence, the royal brother who
Edward IV had executed in the 1470s
...
Lambert
Simnel was crowned in Dublin in May 1487 as Edward VI, with a force under
his nominal control invading from Ireland a month later
...
But Simnel himself was seen as a harmless dupe and was
taken into his household by Henry VII where he worked in the royal kitchens
for the rest of his long life
...

The next serious threat to Henry VII’s control of England came in the mid1490s and followed earlier rumblings that started in Yorkshire
...
His authenticity
was supported by a whole assortment of anti-Tudor statesmen that included
the Holy Roman Emperor
...

Following an earlier abortive attempt, Warbeck landed in Cornwall, near
Land’s End, with a force supplied by the Holy Roman Emperor, but was

37

captured in Dorset after his march on London from the West Country failed
to gain any momentum
...
At the same time, and for his
role in the Warbeck Plot, the 24-year-old Edward Plantagenet, the
seventeenth Earl of Warwick, the so-called last of the Plantagenets, were also
executed
...
The War of
the Roses had not in essence destroyed the agricultural, trading or urban base
of the country, with the war being essentially no more than a series of battles
for control between elite sections of English society
...
It was this
that Henry VII, a very powerful king after Bosworth Field, was determined to
change and this he skilfully did in order to protect himself and the new
dynasty that he founded
...
This culling of
these old families was continued under Henry VIII
...
Private armies were banned,
and positions and influence at court were taken and bestowed, often to gifted,
talented and aspiring members of the gentry, with great political precision
...
In this way, Henry VII created a new aristocracy
dependent upon his own Tudor patronage, ostracising many of the old

38

baronial families of Plantagenet England, and hugely increasing his own
financial independence and wealth as a result
...
This Tudor spy network
reached its zenith in the 1570s and 1580s during the reign of his
granddaughter, Elizabeth I, under the organisation of her great spymaster,
Francis Walsingham
...
The judiciary was
expanded, navigation acts increased commerce and trade, thus boosting
profits, taxes and money supply, and this, coupled with the new king’s
meticulous accounting, along with the organisation of the collection of the
money due to him, meant that he was to exercise a control over the
government and, most importantly, over the money of the nation that had not
been seen since Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots
...
Growth had been steady throughout the
fifteenth century, and this was soon to be given a boost that was to literally
revolutionise the world
...

In this regard, Henry VII was living in a period of the most enormous
geopolitical and commercial change that was to shift the gravitational centre
of commercial wealth and power from Istanbul and the eastern
Mediterranean to Europe’s north western Atlantic sea board, and England’s

39

ultimate success in managing this change was largely due to the strategic and
administrative changes made by the first Tudor king
...

The first of these voyages was launched by Christopher Columbus who had
become interested in finding a westward passage, across the Atlantic Ocean,
to the spice and silk riches of the east
...
Importantly, this meant that if Columbus was right, the taxes of
the increasingly powerful and bellicose Ottomans could be bypassed
...
This Ottoman growth had massively challenged the very
heart of Christian Europe and was the culmination of 200 years of
enlargement since their emergence in Anatolia during the time of the Mongol
invasions
...
Indeed, he only received final
permission to sail in her name when he threatened in the summer of 1492 to
move his search for funds to France
...
In fact, Columbus
had not arrived in Japan or Cathay, as he suspected, but had, in fact, reached
an island in the Caribbean that he called San Salvador
...
In the New Year, he set out for home reaching Portugal in March
1493
...
The major reason for this

40

welcome was the gold that Columbus brought back with him, a revelation
that within a century was to revolutionise the world economy, as well as and
England’s, and subsequently Britain’s, place in it
...
In 1492, he had
left on his first voyage with 3 ships
...

A third trip in 1498 took him to South America and the mouth of the Orinoco
River while a final journey between 1502-04 saw him visit Panama
...
These were
transported across the Atlantic to the new Spanish colony of Santo Domingo
on the island that Columbus had earlier called Hispaniola
...
English involvement in the Atlantic
slave trade began in the 1560s
...
By April 1498, he had visited various coastal trading
centres on Africa’s eastern seaboard and was the first European to visit
Mombasa
...
This first
hugely significant voyage opened up India, and later the Spice Islands of
south east Asia, to European colonial and commercial hegemony, with
Portugal establishing a trading ‘factory’ in India in 1502
...
But both were soon to be vigorously challenged
by Tudor England whose sailors and pirates quickly began harrying Spanish
and Portuguese galleons for the rich cargoes that they carried
...

This dramatic victory a century later saved England from invasion and was,
at least in part, due to the foresight of Henry VII who in the 1490s had keenly
watched the Voyages of Discovery launched from the Iberian peninsular
...
John Cabot, an Italian who was
awarded £10 for this first voyage along with an annual pension of £20, died
during his second voyage
...

England had always been a powerful nation and at times its kings had been
among the most important men in Europe
...
This was perhaps not fully understood by the prudent
Henry VII or by his Tudor son and grandchildren who followed him, but it
was in time to make England, and then Britain, the world’s first global
superpower
...
Peace with France had been negotiated in the Treaty of
Étaples in 1492, and a further piece in Henry VII’s diplomatic jigsaw fell into
place in November 1501 when the marriage of his heir, Prince Arthur, to
Catherine of Aragon tied England to Spain
...


43



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