Knights in Battle at Conisbrough Castle, Doncaster

[ Medieval Encampment ] [ Knights in Battle ]

Wars of the Roses

Its the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487) at Conisbrough, and there were a series of civil wars fought over the throne of England between adherents of the House of Lancaster and the House of York. Both houses were branches of the Plantagenet royal house, tracing their descent from King Edward III.

Although the roses were occasionally used as symbols during the wars themselves, most of the participants wore badges associated with their immediate feudal lords or protectors. The unofficial system of livery and maintenance, by which powerful nobles would offer protection to followers who would sport their colours and badges (livery) was one of the effects of the breakdown of royal authority which preceded and partly caused the wars. For example, Henry's forces at Bosworth fought under the banner of a red dragon, while the Yorkist army used the symbol of a white boar.

The Wars were fought largely by the landed aristocracy and armies of feudal retainers. Support for each house largely depended upon dynastic marriages with the nobility, feudal titles, and tenures. It is sometimes difficult to follow the shifts of power and allegiance as nobles acquired or lost titles through marriage, confiscation or attainture. For example, the Lancastrian patriarch John of Gaunt's first title was Earl of Richmond, the same title which Henry VII later held, whilst the Yorkist patriarch Edmund of Langley's first title was Earl of Cambridge.

The restoration of Edward IV in 1471 is sometimes seen as marking the end of the Wars of the Roses. Peace was restored for the remainder of Edward's reign, but when he died suddenly in 1483, political and dynastic turmoil erupted again. Under Edward IV, frictions had developed between the Queen's Woodville relatives (Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers and Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset) and others who resented the Woodvilles' new-found status at court and saw them as power-hungry upstarts and parvenus. At the time of Edward's premature death, his heir, Edward V, was only 12 years old. The Woodvilles were in a position to influence the young king's future government, since Edward V had been brought up under the stewardship of Earl Rivers in Ludlow. This was too much for many of the anti-Woodville faction to stomach, and in the struggle for the protectorship of the young king and control of the council, Edward's brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who had been named by Edward IV on his deathbed as Protector of England, came to be de facto leader of the anti-Woodville faction.

Richard III

With the help of William Hastings and Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, Gloucester captured the young king from the Woodvilles at Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire. Thereafter Edward V was kept under Gloucester's custody in the Tower of London, where he was later joined by his younger brother, the 9-year-old Richard, Duke of York. Having secured the boys, Richard then alleged that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been illegal, and that the two boys were therefore illegitimate. Parliament agreed and enacted the Titulus Regius, which officially named Gloucester as King Richard III. The two imprisoned boys, known as the "Princes in the Tower", disappeared and were possibly murdered; by whom and under whose orders remains one of the most controversial subjects in English history.

Since Richard was the finest general on the Yorkist side, many accepted him as a ruler better able to keep the Yorkists in power than a boy who would have had to rule through a committee of regents. Lancastrian hopes, on the other hand, now centred on Henry Tudor, whose father, Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, had been a half-brother of Henry VI. However, Henry's claim to the throne was through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of Edward III, derived from John Beaufort, a grandson of Edward III's as the son of John of Gaunt (illegitimate at birth though later legitimated on the marriage of his parents).