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

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Richard Duke of York believed he was more entitled to the privilege and positions bestowed on Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou’s favorites (de la Pole and Beaufort) and that he could do a better job than them, unfortunately his good intentions were lost when he became mad with power and believed that the only way he could rescue England from perdition was by declaring himself king (a bad move which even his closest associates thought was ridiculous); after her partially got what he wanted, Margaret (a formidable woman whose appearance in the book is tremendous, a well educated, and capable leader who had the great example of both her grandmother and mother taking positions of power during her father’s absence or imprisonment, and likewise she wanted to do the same with the same good intentions for her husband’s House) turned the tables on him by defending her only son’s right to inherit his father’s crown and her forces slew him and in his in laws. It was this part of the war that had been the most overtly ‘dynastic’, and it is no surprise that historians writing in the mid-16th century viewed the 15th century through that lens. 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. Following on from Dan Jones’s bestselling The Plantagenets, The Hollow Crown is a vivid and engrossing history of these turbulent times.

I’ll find friends to wear my bleeding roses,” cries Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, in Harey the vjth.But Henry VI had been a failing king, and Richard III had fatally underestimated the loyalty Edward IV’s memory inspired. This made him useful to the angry Yorkists, and earned him just enough support from exiled Edwardians to make invasion possible.

I knew of them and their history, but I had never connected it to the power struggles created during the Wars of the Roses. In 1478, Edward IV, fed up with the treachery of his brother George, Duke of Clarence, had him drowned, so the story goes, in a butt of malmsey wine. So many battles, so many traitors and double crossings, so many kings, so many Salisburys, Gloucesters, Somersets… even with a notebook it’s a struggle to keep up.

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