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

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This war rocked English pride, wrought havoc on royal finances and created personal feuds (but not dynastic rivalry) between men such as Richard, Duke of York, and Edmund, Duke of Somerset. Since this summer, I have watched all of his programs, which if you haven’t checked out, I strongly suggest that you do. It's not often that a book manages to be both scholarly and a page-turner, but Jones succeeds on both counts in this entertaining follow-up to his bestselling The Plantagenets.

Whatever his arguments for seizing the crown – almost uniformly specious – the new Yorkist king’s brutal power-grab and the dreadful fate met by the Princes in the Tower created a huge faction of implacable opponents who preferred to see anyone but Richard in charge. The deal Henry Tudor made with the Edwardian loyalists was that in the event of victory, they would back him as king, and he would marry Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York. This marked an end to this truly ‘dynastic’ phase of the Wars of the Roses: one side was comprehensively defeated, and the other had comprehensively won.

This phase came to an abrupt end in 1460 when York, having been defeated in battle at Ludford Bridge the previous year, realised he could now never be reconciled with the indignant queen, and assumed that his only hope for survival lay in escalating the argument. In the Hollow Crown the portraits of the leading women are as richly painted as those of the men, and even those who appear only briefly are memorable. The first duke died in 1447, but his heir, the young Henry Holland, was even more closely tied to York’s family: he was married to York’s daughter Anne, and had been in York’s custody when he was a minor.

Perkin Warbeck pretended to be Edward IV’s younger son, Prince Richard; he was sponsored by Edward IV’s sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, and raised an army that disrupted the whole of south-west England before he was captured in 1497. My introduction to the Wars of the Roses was when I was a senior in high school doing Model United Nations in a crisis committee. It wasn’t until his son, Henry VIII that the “White Rose” as the last de la Pole nicknamed himself, was squashed during the battle of Pavia when he fought alongside Francis I .Red and white to symbolize the union of both houses of Lancaster and York and the end of the bloodshed but the bloodshed was far from over. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.

In 1471 he killed Warwick at the battle of Barnet and Prince Edward at the battle of Tewkesbury, and had Henry VI murdered in the Tower of London. Interesting that Jones is firmly on the "guilty" side of the Richard III debate, though I do wish he'd shared some of the opposing views. Against the backdrop of weak kingship and disastrous military defeat in France, two rival branches of the Plantagenet dynasty – Lancaster and York – had gone to war for the throne, using red and white roses as emblems of their causes. The men and women who crossed London Bridge and scurried into the theatre from the dirty streets lined with brothels and bear pits had come to see Harey the vjth, performed by Lord Strange’s Men.Jones looks at how the English experience in France, the end of the 100 Years War, and the inability of Henry’s son, Henry VI, to be an effective ruler led to the conditions that gave rise to the civil war. At the first battle of St Albans on 22 May 1455, the king’s cousin, Richard of York, and his allies including Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick – the ‘Kingmaker’ – defeated forces led by Somerset. Cecily survives Margaret of Anjou’s wrath, only to see her husband killed after a later battle, and his head stuck on the gates of York, a paper crown fluttering on his bloodied hair in mockery of his former ambitions.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. This was not chiefly a dynastic conflict, though all protagonists had royal blood, but a tussle for political dominance.The following year his son Edward IV won the real thing at Towton, leaving an estimated 28,000 bodies on the field. highlights engaging details: that coronation rituals often bred head lice, and that Henry VI was shocked by, and abhorred, nakedness. And it is worth noting that, though the white rose was one of a number of badges used by York and his family, the ‘Lancastrian’ royal family never used the red rose as a symbol during the conflict.