All this modern politcal crap has worn me out. I thought I would tell a tale of times when politics were a lot more personal and the game was played for keeps. I would also like to explore how these earlier contests survive in modern memory, literature, and media.
The Wars of the Roses conventionally dated to run from 1455 to 1485, but this is not really an accurate picture. There was not 30 years of continuous war, but rather intermittent campaigns, sometimes 10 years or more apart. Also, this struggle had its roots much earlier than 1455, to Edward III (reigned 1327 -1377). Edward had five sons grow up to adulthood, and each became a Duke, a title previously unknown in England. Most important for this sketch were, in birth order, Edward "the Black Prince", Duke of Cornwall, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Edmund of Langley, Duke of York.
Edward the Black Prince died in 1376, leaving his sole surviving legitimate son Richard (reigned 1377-1399) as heir to the throne.
Consequently, when Edward III died in 1377, the kingship skipped a generation to his grandson, Richard, then only 10 years old. John of Gaunt (so named because he was born in Gaunt, the English name for Ghent, then in Flanders, now in Belgium) was his uncle and the most powerful man in the kingdom during the minority of Richard II. John was the third son of Edward III. Also surviving Edward was his fourth son, Edmund of York. The titles of these two men, Lancaster and York, eventually became the names of the later factions struggling for the crown of England
Richard proved to be a not very good king, as he was despotic and in one fatal case he banished his first cousin, Henry Brolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt and then tried to seize his estates to pay all the debts he had run up.
It is this situation which Shakespeare dramatizes in Richard II by having John of Gaunt give one of the greatest patriotic speeches ever written:
This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,—
For Christian service and true chivalry,—
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son:
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas'd out,—I die pronouncing it,—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah! would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death.
Richard II then went to Ireland to suppress one of the perpetual rebellions that was going on there, which gave Henry Brolingbroke the opportunity to return from abroad, ostensibly only to reclaim the lands taken from him by Richard. One thing led to another, and Richard ended up deserted by his followers and in prison, where he abdicated the throne. This series of events is called the Usurption of Bolingbroke. Shakespeare gives Richard magnificient lines of despair:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills;
And yet not so—for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's.
And nothing can we can our own but death,
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd,
Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antick sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?
Richard Burton recites these lines here. I am not sure I agree about the pacing of the delivery, but hey, what do I know?
Henry Boliingbroke then became king, as Henry IV, and shortly after this Richard died in prison, it is thought he was starved to death on Henry's orders.
Bolingbroke, as the son of the Edward III's third son, found it convenient to ignore the claim to the throne held by Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, a descendent of Edward III's second eldest son, Lionel of Antwerp. This was called the "Mortimer" claim; Bolingbroke's excuse for not respecting the Mortimer claim was that it ran through the female line, even though this had never been thought to bar a claim to the throne, and indeed the distant ancestor of all of these people Henry II (of Death in the Cathedral fame) had come to the through the claim of his mother. Perhaps more conveniently for Bolingbroke, Mortimer was only seven years old at the time of the usurpation, and incapable of asserting his own claim.
As he grew order, Mortimer always supported Henry IV (Bolingbroke). This did not prevent a number of rebellions intended to supplant Henry IV with Mortimer, whose sisterAnne, married Richard of Conisburgh, 3rd Earl of Cambridge the junior son of Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York, who in turn was the fourth son Edward III. Perhaps best known of these was the rebellion, dramatized in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, of Henry Hotspur Percy and the Welsh lord Owain Glyndŵr (of whom there is a King in the mountain legend).
This moved Conisburgh very close to the throne, especially when to him and Ann was born a son, Richard Plantagenet, who was as consequently descended from Edward III through both his mother and his father, and who also stood to inherit the Mortimer claim should Edmund Mortimer die childless.
All of this would have been quite obvious both to Conisburgh and everyone else at the time. When Henry IV (Bolingbroke) died. and his son Henry of Monmouth, known in Shakespeare as Prince Hal, became king. (Prince Hal's misadventures with Falstaff form the plot of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV as well as the Van Sant film My Own Private Idaho.
Conisburgh, perhaps banking on Hal's reputation as non-serious person, conceived what became known as the Southampton Plot to depose Henry V and make his brother-in-law Edmund Mortimer king.
Mortimer learned of the plot. Mortimer probably suspected that Conisbergh also intended to get rid of him just as soon as Henry Monmouth was deposed, and with the recent example of Richard II before him, he was in no way willing to be a party to a coup that might make him King but only for a short while. That Conisbergh's son Richard Plantagenet would be Mortimer's heir should the plot succeed would not have been lost on Mortimer.
Consequently, Mortimer informed Henry Monmouth, now reigning as Henry V, who had the plotters executed. This was shown in Kevin Branagh's 1989 filim Henry V where the King hands the three conspirators what they believe to be commissions of rank:
Then, Richard Earl of Cambridge, there is yours;
There yours, Lord Scroop of Masham; and, sir knight,
Grey of Northumberland, this same is yours.
Read them, and know I know your worthiness.
My Lord of Westmoreland, and uncle Exeter,
We will aboard to-night.—Why, how now, gentlemen!
What see you in those papers that you lose
So much complexion?—Look ye, how they change!
Their cheeks are paper.—Why, what read you there,
That have so cowarded and chas'd your blood
Out of appearance?
Henry Monmouth of course went on to France where he achieve victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt, where Conisbergh's older brother Edward Norwich was killed. Norwich was the highest ranking Englishman to die in the battle. This left the young child Richard Plantagenet as heir to enormous estates, and possibly one of the richest individuals in England. (Although Plantagenet's father Conisbergh had been attainted, that is, had forfeited all his estates to the crown, Henry V permitted the child to inherit the estates of his slain uncle).
Medieval monarchs had to personally lead in battle, and in this respect Henry V (Monmouth) was the ideal monarch. He conquered vast parts of France, and when in 1420 it came time to make peace with the French, part of the treaty was that Henry would marry the Catherine Valois daughter of the French king Charles VI (reigned 1388-1422), called the Beloved (French: le Bien-Aimé) and the Mad (French: le Fol or le Fou). On the death of Charles VI, who was 19 years older than Henry, and an old man for the Middle Ages, Henry Monmouth would be crowned as King of France. In 1989 version of Henry V, Emma Thompson and Charles VI was played by the veteran English actor Paul Scofield. Shakespeare gives Charles dread lines, which Scofield spoke so well in the film:
Think we King Harry strong;
And, Princes, look you strongly arm to meet him.
The kindred of him hath been flesh'd upon us;
And he is bred out of that bloody strain
That haunted us in our familiar paths.
Witness our too much memorable shame
When Cressy battle fatally was struck,
And all our princes captiv'd by the hand
Of that black name, Edward, Black Prince of Wales;
Whiles that his mountain sire, on mountain standing,
Up in the air, crown'd with the golden sun,
Saw his heroical seed, and smil'd to see him,
Mangle the work of nature and deface
The patterns that by God and by French fathers
Had twenty years been made. This is a stem
Of that victorious stock; and let us fear
The native mightiness and fate of him.
So long as Henry Monmouth was triumphant, everyone forgot about the Mortimer claim held by the young Richard Plantagenet; Henry's victories were interpreted as God's sign of favor. But Henry did not live long to enjoy his glory, dying of a horrible illness in 1422 at the age of 35. He left as his heir his son by Catherine Valois, Henry of Windsor (reigned as Henry VI 1422-1460; 1470-1471), then just 9 months old, who, on the death of Catherine's father two months later, was duly crowned in Paris as King of France.
In the middle ages the most dreaded form of government was that of a king who was a minor. Nobles contested for the regency, and foreign powers sought to take advantage of the weaknesses of a regency government. England was essentially in a state of permanent war in and with France during the entire period of Henry's minority. Gradually English power failed, and the situation was not made any better when, in 1445, as part of a peace initiative, the Duke of Suffolk, William de la Pole (b.1396 d.1450), who was essentially acting as Henry's prime minister, arranged to have him marry Margaret of Anjou (b.1430 d.1482). Normally royal brides were expected in those days to bring with them a dowry, perhaps a duchy or even a kingdom. In the case of the marriage to Margaret, the reverse was true; the English gave up two French provinces, Anjou and Maine.
Another principal English nobleman commanding forces in France was the now grown Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, the same child whose father (Conisburgh) had been executed on the order of KIng Henry V (Monmouth). By the late 1440s, all Henry Monmouth's brothers had died. (He had no sisters surviving to adulthood). This left York separated from the throne of England by just one life, that of the reigning king, Henry Windsor. Unlike his uncle and his mother, York was fully in a position to assert his claim as he was possibly the wealthiest and certainly the most powerful noble in the country.
From 1447 to 1450, the English position in France faded away rapidly, and de facto prime minister Suffolk was assigned the blame by York and others. Following a palace coup in 1450, Suffolk tried to flee England, but his ship was overtaken, and he was removed from the vessel and famously beheaded in an open boat.
This left York by far most powerful man in the country in the early 1450s. Henry Windsor, while technically of course the reigning king was passionate about books and religion, but not about war, was clearly in secondary position. This was made all the worse for the fact that Queen Margaret had born the King no child even after seven years of marriage. In 1453 Margaret was finally pregnant, but at the same time Henry VI (Windsor) suffered what appears to have been a prolonged catatonic fit.
In part 2, I will continue with York's rise to the highest level of power, the birth of the King's heir, the King's partial recovery, the alignment of the forces on each side, and the opening battles. I will also explore the rise of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, possibly the most ambitious man ever in all of English history, who famously became known as the Kingmaker.