Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses were a series of civil wars fought in England between 1455 and 1487 for control of the throne. They set two branches of the royal Plantagenet family against each other, the House of Lancaster and the House of York, together with their noble allies. The wars ended with the victory of Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII and founded the Tudor dynasty.

The Lancastrian king Henry VI came to the throne as a baby in 1422, the son of the victor of Agincourt. As an adult he proved a weak ruler, and from 1453 he suffered periods of mental collapse. In the same year the Hundred Years' War ended with the loss of nearly all English lands in France, damaging the crown's prestige. Great nobles with large private retinues competed for power at court. Richard, Duke of York, himself descended from Edward III, was twice made Protector during the king's illness but was pushed aside by the queen, Margaret of Anjou, and the Duke of Somerset.

Fighting began at the First Battle of St Albans in May 1455, where York's forces captured the king and killed Somerset. After several years of uneasy truce, war resumed in 1459. York claimed the crown and was recognised as Henry's heir, but he was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in December 1460. His eighteen-year-old son Edward, supported by the powerful Earl of Warwick, took London and was proclaimed king as Edward IV in March 1461. Weeks later he won a crushing victory at Towton, in Yorkshire, often described as the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil.

Edward's secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville in 1464 and his foreign policy alienated Warwick, who rebelled in 1469. Allied with Margaret of Anjou, Warwick forced Edward into exile in 1470 and briefly restored Henry VI. Edward returned the following spring with Burgundian help. He defeated and killed Warwick at Barnet in April 1471 and destroyed the Lancastrian army at Tewkesbury in May, where Henry's only son was killed. Henry VI died in the Tower of London shortly afterwards, probably murdered.

Edward IV ruled in relative peace until his death in April 1483. His twelve-year-old son, Edward V, was soon deposed by his uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who took the throne as Richard III after Edward IV's children were declared illegitimate. The young king and his brother, the "Princes in the Tower", disappeared, and their fate remains disputed. Discontent with Richard's seizure of power led many Yorkists to support Henry Tudor, an exiled Lancastrian claimant descended from Edward III through his mother, Margaret Beaufort.

Henry landed in Wales in August 1485 and, on 22 August, defeated and killed Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, helped by the late intervention of the Stanley family. As Henry VII he married Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's eldest daughter, uniting the two houses. A Yorkist rising was defeated at Stoke Field in June 1487, generally seen as the last battle of the wars, though pretenders troubled Henry for another decade.

The wars weakened several great noble families, and the Tudors, including Henry VII's son Henry VIII, built a stronger monarchy. The name Wars of the Roses, from the white rose badge of York and the red rose later promoted by the Tudors, became popular only in the nineteenth century. The conflict's popular image owes much to William Shakespeare's history plays, which drew on Tudor accounts hostile to Richard III.

Our 1400 map shows England under the early Lancastrian kings, and our 1492 map shows the Kingdom of England under Henry VII soon after the wars ended.