Dan Snow's History Hit - 1. Wars of the Roses: England Divided

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

This is the first episode in a two-part series on the brutal, three-decade-long civil war that tore England in two. Today, we explore the complex allegiances, rivalries, and personalities that made it all happen before hearing about the first bloody battles between the houses of York and Lancaster.For this, we're joined by Matt Lewis, historian, author and host of our sister podcast, Gone Medieval.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. From the mid-1450s to the 1480s and even into the 1490s, the English elite tore themselves to pieces. Jukes and earls were battered and stabbed and beheaded and crushed and stampeded by their own fleeing men. Kings were made and unmade. The anointed sovereign became a chess piece, helpless, hapless, shuttled around between places of captivity. England was invaded again and again. Towns were sacked, cousins slew cousins, neighbours turned on each other. The mighty Plantagenet family that had ruled over England and at times actually great swathes of Western Europe since the 12th century

destroyed itself. The spawn of Edward III, the cadet branches which sprang from his lusty sons and daughters, fought as only a family can. Princes of the blood were hacked down on the battlefields. At the time and for the centuries following, they were known simply as the Civil Wars. It was Walter Scott in the 19th century who started calling them the Wars of the Roses. He was a romantic historical novelist and so he had an eye for these things

and the name caught on. The name derives, it is true, from, well, particularly the Yorkists, the descendants of the Dukes of York. They used the white rose from the York heraldic badge as a symbol. The House of Lancaster, which is the descendants of the Dukes of Lancaster, only came to use a red rose very late in the conflict, but thanks to Walter Scott, the name has stuck. This is the story of those civil wars. This is part one of a two-part series on the greatest family dispute in English

history. We're going to hear from Matt Lewis, part of the History Hit team, presenter of Gone Medieval. He's going to tell us all about how it began, how the first blood was spilt in St Albans, and how really that terrible event set in train a savage blood feud that eviscerated the English ruling elite. Episode two is coming up soon. It will start on what may well have been the bloodiest day ever on British soil, the Battle of Towton fought in 1461, and that episode will take us right the way to the end of the Wars of the Roses. It'll take us via the Battle of Bosworth, which saw a very unlikely sign of the House of Lancaster. Really, the house brought back from the point of extinction

and placed back on the throne of England. That last claimant was Henry Tudor. He still faced threats, but his Tudor dynasty would rule for a century and his direct descendants still sit on the throne of Britain today. So folks, this is the rather important story of the Wars of the Roses. Enjoy. Matt Lewis, thanks for coming on the pod. Thank you very much for having me, Dan.

The Plantagenet family had got problems stretching way back, right? They're always each other's throats. What is it about the Wars of the Roses that made it so, well, made it an extinction-level event for that family? I think it feels like the Plantagenets have been having digs at each other across the family divides for centuries by this point. But this is like the Super Bowl of family fallouts for the Plantagenets. This is where it's all going to be decided. It's been whittled down. The rules have been changed by

Henry IV kicking Richard II off the throne. All bets are off. Let's have a full-on scrap now and see who comes out the winner. Yeah, well, let me pick you up on that because it does go back. We got to, as ever with a history podcast, we have to keep going back further and further into the deep past. The Plantagenets have had a decent run. It was a close run thing at times. But from Henry II, you know, Richard, John, Henry, Edward, Edward, Edward, Richard. That's not a bad run in terms of English history, particularly English medieval history, right? So there have been times when that hold on the throne has been very uncertain indeed. French invasions, there's been little clashes between branch of the family. But where does it all go wrong with Richard II and his cousin Henry?

Because that's the basis of all this, isn't it? It is really. So the Plantagenet family have survived John. So they're pretty robust. Amazing. England survived John. Extraordinary. Exactly. Anyone that's got past that, you would think they would be indestructible for all of eternity. When we get to the end of the 14th century, we've had Edward III has kicked off the Hundred Years' War. His son, the Black Prince, alongside him has been this incredible chivalric figure, heroic in English history. And the Black Prince dies. Edward III dies a year later. So he's succeeded by a 10-year-old grandson who becomes Richard II. And Richard is kind of really cosseted. He's wrapped in cotton wool. He's not really given a good preparation for a kingship. His grandfather and his father have both been

fighting from an incredibly young age. Richard, because he has no brothers or anything like that, he is the only egg in that basket. So everyone is treating him with kid gloves. They really don't want to crack his shell. They don't want to put him in danger. But what that does is create this man eventually who has this weird concept of what it is to be king. He is this fragile but irreplaceable figure. He doesn't ever want to fight, but he wants everybody to do exactly what he says and respect him completely. And he's just almost disconnected from the world as a result of that upbringing. He's not been given the tools to rule effectively as a medieval

king. He's much like John in that he's deeply unpredictable. And medieval England can cope with a rubbish king. Rubbish kings are fine. Edward II is a bit rubbish. What you have to be is predictable. If you're predictably rubbish, that's great. But if everybody doesn't know from day to day what mood you're going to wake up in, what's going to be illegal today, who's your best friend and who's your enemy tomorrow, that worries everybody. And where Richard really falls over, Richard II, is when John of Gaunt dies, his uncle in 1399, the richest man in England, apart from the crown, owns all of these huge territories and lands across the Midlands

and the Northwest. His son at that point, Henry, is in exile. So Richard thinks, well, I'll just have that inheritance then. And then everybody who has anything to inherit is now suddenly thinking, hang on, the one certainty that we had under Richard was that father and son could inherit lands. You know, there would be this unbroken chain of succession. If Richard is messing with that, and if he's willing to do it to John of Gaunt and Henry, then surely he's willing to do it to anybody else. And I think that's what tips everybody over the edge into thinking, that's it, we've had enough. Henry comes back from exile. His own first cousin, he's nicked his inheritance. I mean, that's remarkable.

He has. I mean, you know, Richard's got no brothers to fight with, like normal Plantagenets, so he has to extend it out to a slightly wider family and start going after first cousins. So he's tried to take all of this into his own possession. Henry, in exile, as a result of a falling out with Richard earlier, comes back essentially to say that he wants to reclaim his inheritance,

but finds everybody saying, can't you just kick this guy off the throne? He's flipping awful. This is all falling apart. We need someone who will do the right thing. If you'll do the right thing, we'll back you to be king. And essentially the whole country sort of falls into line behind Henry. And Richard is utterly shocked and dismayed by all of this. It makes no sense to Richard that these people would not utterly worship the ground that he walks on, but he finds himself deposed, and then eventually dead at Pontefract Castle, either starved to death or through hunger strike because he's so disgusted at the way he's been treated. But Henry IV, the man who becomes Henry IV, his first cousin, son of John of Gaunt, grandson of Edward III, decent-ish claim,

you know, decent blood in his veins. He's got a load of sons, so it looks like the future of the dynasty is in decent shape. He's got one particular son, Henry V, who turns into one of the great warrior kings in English, if not European history. But then Henry V dies, and all hell breaks loose. It does. So Henry IV will always struggle against the way that he came to the crown. He was previously a crusader. He'd fought with the Teutonic Knights and all of those kinds of things. Has an incredible reputation,

but it all kind of falls apart and he struggles to fight off rebellions throughout his reign. Succeeded in 1413 by his oldest son, Henry V. He has three other sons who are all incredibly capable. They're some of the most capable politicians of this period. Henry V will reignite war with France,

I think partly as an effort to legitimate the Lancastrian claim to the throne, a willingness to go and unite everybody behind him as he goes to France, but also to put the Lancastrian right to the throne, to the ultimate test. Let's forge it in battle. God will decide whether I deserve this crown or not. And ultimately, Agincourt, that gamble will work for Henry. Yeah, so that's right. So it's, you know, let's not worry too much about how I came to the throne. One thing we can all agree on, let's go and fight in France. Let's play the old tunes. Let's go back to my grandfather's time, Edward III, and let's get this show back on the road. And then Henry V doesn't wash his

hands, does he, Matt, when he's in the siege works of some hellish castle in northern France. Gets dysentery, the absolute clown, just on the verge of success, on the verge of actually taking the French throne. And he dies. His body brought back to England. And who succeeds him? Yeah, I mean, if ever Henry V had had hand gel,

the medieval period could have been entirely different. Listeners to this podcast will know about my obsession with the sliding doors moment that would have seen us potentially living in one great Anglo-French state, stretching from Carlisle to Bordeaux and Marseille. So I will not raise that again on this podcast. People know my feelings about that, man. But let's continue. Fair enough. So Henry is succeeded by a nine-month-old baby, his only child as King Henry VI. And this baby inherits not only the throne of England, but also a claim to the throne of France that Henry has forged for himself. And in fact, the King of France, Charles VI, will die within weeks of Henry V. So this nine-month-old baby is now King of England and, at least on paper, King of France too. And he's recognised by part of France. And we get a very similar situation to what we had with Richard II.

This boy is brought up an only child, no brothers, no kind of security blanket around him if anything was to happen to him. So he is wrapped in cotton wool, completely ill-prepared for ruling. You'd think they'd learned some lessons from fairly recent history, but they definitely don't. And they produce Henry VI, who turns into a man far more interested in religious matters and education and stuff that we would think is laudable. But in a medieval king who is currently engaged in a war with France, not wanting to fight and not being interested in war is not really what the people are looking for. His mum goes off and marries some rando guy called Tudor. So perhaps more about that particular relationship. Yeah, I can't quite remember what happens at the end of

that, but something happens. But so yes, so we got this Henry VI. You're right, the more I read about poor Henry VI, he was rather scholarly, wasn't he? And kind of interested in good governance and building and schools and the religious life of England. And yet, in a world of thuggish military lunatics, he was destined, not least within his own family, he was not destined to make old bones as a king. And now here we are, after not actually that many minutes, we have arrived on the eve of the War of the Roses.

Why does it come to violence? What goes wrong in Henry VI's reign? You end up with two significant factions at Henry's court as he grows into a man. One is led by his great uncle, Henry Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester. And the other is led by Henry's paternal uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. So he's the youngest brother of Henry V. Cardinal Beaufort wants peace with France. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester wants war with France. He wants to deliver on his brother, Henry V's original aim and plan. So you have these two really polarised factions at court and Henry is utterly incapable of reconciling them. He doesn't have the ammunition in his locker to bring those two parties back together in any meaningful way. So this rift just persists and ends up growing. And I think there's a good case to be made for

beginning what we think of as the Wars of the Roses in 1447. What happens then is Henry summons Parliament to East Anglia. His uncle Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, arrives and is immediately placed under house arrest and told that he's being charged with treason for planning to take his nephew's throne. So Henry at this point seems to be concerned that his 56-year-old childless uncle is going to assassinate him and steal his throne. And there's no evidence that he was at all. Whether Henry was genuinely becoming increasingly paranoid at this point, which I think is possible, we know his mental health will begin to fall apart over the years that follow, or whether this was an excuse to get rid of someone who was championing

the war party when Henry had fallen in very much with the Peace Party, which fitted much more closely his view of the world, is unclear. But Humphrey is arrested, but will die before he ever makes it to trial. So suggestions that he suffered a stroke while in custody, lots of rumours immediately crop up that he'd been poisoned and murdered by Henry. I think possibly Cardinal Beaufort will see this as a victory for his party. He can laugh that he's finally won the war between the two factions at Henry's court, except that Cardinal Beaufort dies a few weeks later as well, so he doesn't get to enjoy it for very long if he does enjoy it. But I think what this moment does is Humphrey had been the focus for all kind of opposition to Henry's championing of the Peace Party.

In 1447, when he dies, his support almost immediately migrates to a guy called Richard, Duke of York. And it's really not clear that York wanted that. But Humphrey had for several years been associating York with his own exclusion from government and his own problems. He always put York at the top of the list of other people that he complained was being excluded. So all of that support immediately transfers to York. And you've now got a situation where what we might term as loyal opposition to Henry's policies has a new home for the first time ever outside the House of Lancaster. And let's just quickly confirm, the House of Lancaster, are those people descended, is the branch of the Plantagenets descended from John of Gaunt?

So John of Gaunt, third son of King Edward III, Duke of Lancaster, his descendants are known as the Lancastrians. So the ruling House of Lancaster is Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI. Right, we've now got the House of York entering the chat. So quickly run me through their genealogy. This is really complicated. It's fairly simple on one side and a bit more complicated on the other. So Richard, Duke of York, his father was a descendant of Edward III's fourth son, Edmund, Duke of York.

So a junior branch to the Lancastrian line, we have the Yorkist family going on there. That puts York fairly obviously behind the Lancastrians in the line of succession on his father's side. The trouble with that, the Yorkists can think, well, hang on, the Lancastrians were behind the line of succession when it came to getting rid of Richard II, so we're not sure there should be bleating about the correct precedence here. Yeah. And the issue that the Lancastrians will suffer from from 1399 is that you've now set a precedent that a rubbish king can be deposed and replaced by a cousin who's capable. That's really dangerous when you then have a rubbish Lancastrian king that everyone is looking at thinking, couldn't we just do the same again? But the big

problem with York's genealogy really comes from his mother's side. So his mother was a lady named Anne Mortimer. And the Mortimer family are an incredibly powerful family in the 14th century in particular. They are earls of March. They exist on the Welsh borders in that really kind of frontier land between England and Wales. One of her ancestors, Roger I Earl of March, is the man who famously helped depose Edward II at the early 14th century. As part of their rehabilitation with the royal family, one of the Mortimers will end up married to a granddaughter of Edward III. And this granddaughter is descended from Edward III's

second son, so Lionel, Duke of Clarence. So we've got the Black Prince takes us to Richard II and that line ends. We've then got Lionel, Duke of Clarence, who will be an ancestor of the Mortimers. We've then got the third son, Duke of Lancaster, Lancastrian Kings, fourth son, Duke of York and the Yorkist line. The trouble is, so the fourth and the second lines have now merged. They have. And so whilst that fourth line might be obviously behind the Lancastrian kings in the line of succession, when Henry IV came to the throne, there was a big question around who was

the real, legal, legitimate heir to Richard II. And Richard had fudged this for years. He'd been a master of making everybody think they could be his heir and also that nobody needed to be because he was never going to die. So the question of the Mortimer claim to the throne was significant throughout the 15th century. It falls in a female line, which the Lancastrians would be keen to say makes it illegitimate, except that the English claim to the throne of France was based entirely on dissenting the female line from Edward III's mother, Isabella of France. And there is no law in England to prevent succession through a female line. So there was this almost unspoken underlying tension throughout the 15th century about what the Mortimer claim was, how legitimate it was, and what would we do

if anyone ever stepped forward and tried to press it? Yeah, so Henry V, Henry VI are going, we the Lancastrians should be kings of France through our effectively great-grandma or something. By the way, you should not be kings of England because your claim runs through your grandma. So that is an intellectually challenging position to take. It is, and it's something that they struggle to reconcile. So you see, particularly the early government of Henry VI will execute a couple of Mortimers and they will be incredibly frightened because when you've got a nine month old baby on the throne and you've got adult Mortimers roaming around, the 5th Earl of March being the head of the family at that point, they suddenly start to think, what if one of these guys decides to come in and, you know,

just nudge this baby out the way? We could be in real trouble because although no one's legally tested the Mortimer claim to the throne, it sounds pretty good on paper. Right, so the nightmare of Edward III's fecundity. He's had too many successful offspring at this point and they're all being turned to each other. So you've now got Henry VI and you've got opposition grouping around this Duke of York, who's got royal blood in his veins. He's also got a very recent precedent of an absolutely rubbish king being turfed off the throne by a cousin. When does this start? Because what's interesting about the Wars of the Rose is it's a very gradual process. When do we start getting whispers about what might... It's not just opposition. It's not just jockeying for position at court, it is actually like, let's try and replace the current monarch. It is eventually that, but I

actually think that Richard, Duke of York, he's often, you know, flattened and squashed down into this two-dimensional figure who's just this salivating dog who is waiting for his opportunity to claim the throne of England. And I actually think he spends an awfully long time desperately trying not to take that step. He's served in France as Lieutenant General of France. So he's effectively ruled the English territories of France on Henry VI's behalf. In 1447, after Gloucester's death, he loses that post, but he's made Lieutenant of Ireland sort of as a little bit of compensation. Or to get him out of the way. But the Mortimers have connections to Ireland too.

So it's a prestigious office. But Richard, Duke of York, decides to take this post up in person. Quite often people will appoint deputies. He decides to take it up in person and go to Ireland. And I think there is an element there of him removing himself from that really tense situation where the Duke of Gloucester has fallen and died.

There's lots of worries about him now being the head of the opposition, his Mortimer heritage and all of that kind of thing. I think he takes the opportunity to absent himself and say, I'm going to get out of the way here because actually I don't want to be involved in all of this rubbish. But the wheels kind of come off that really quickly. In 1450, we get this popular Cade's Rebellion, which is a group of men from Kent and Essex who are essentially upset about the failures of the war in France, the problems that that's causing at home in financial terms. They assault London, so they end up holding London for several days and Jack Cade will use the name John Mortimer whilst in London. So immediately the Mortimer name is being dragged

into the light and people are looking across the sea to Ireland at York and thinking, is this you? Is this you doing this? Because the Mortimer name, that's you. And it's really not clear that York is involved, but there is definitely lots of suspicion, particularly at Henry's court, that York is being the puppet master from Ireland who is now testing the water of the Mortimer name during Cage Rebellion. Okay, so as we creep into the 1450s, things get even more tense. Tell me about that. So 1452, York will come back to England in the aftermath of Cage Rebellion saying that he's come to help to restore order and all of that kind of thing. Henry is thinking, hang on, are you coming to try and steal my throne? A bit like I

thought my Uncle Humphrey was trying to do. York is excluded from government, essentially. In 1452, he will gather a force and take them to Dartford, just to the south of London, in an effort to impose himself on Henry. Henry will send a delegation to ask for York's demands, and what he really asks for is the arrest of a man named the Duke of Somerset to Edmund Beaufort. And this guy is a personal rival to York and has been for a long time. So the early years of the Wars of the Roses become an intense personal rivalry between York and Somerset, really, rather than York and Henry. At Dartford, Henry agrees to arrest Somerset and to have him

tried for treason. York sends his army home, goes to the King and immediately finds that Somerset is actually standing at Henry's right side, completely free, not under arrest at all. And indeed it's York who is arrested, marched back to London in front of Henry's forces and forced to swear this huge oath at St. Paul's, massively embarrassing, that he will never raise an army against Henry again, that he will submit himself to the arbitration of earls and things who he would consider to be junior to him. So he's placed in a really embarrassing position

and pushed out into the political wilderness again after 1452. You listen to Dan Snow's history here. Matt Lewis and I talk about the Wars of the Rose. There's more coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Matt, these powerful nobles who are playing this Game of Thrones and trying to maneuver each other into the king's bad books

and get each other arraigned and arrested and everything. Is Henry VI to a certain extent unlucky? There's just lots of big characters around court at this time or if he had been able to first ever the third william the conqueror would he have just smacked these guys down we wouldn't be hearing about any of these people this is a problem of of a vacuum at the center it is to some extent and partly driven i think by henry the sixth's inability to get interested in war. So you think about the people you've listed there, William the Conqueror, Edward I, Edward III, they were able to unite a kingdom behind them by going on the front foot and attacking essentially foreign nations. So

there's promise of honour and booty and riches and glory and all of those kinds of things. And there is none of that available during Henry's reign. You've got a bunch of families who've done very well out of the hundred years war and got very rich. And you've also got a generation who feel like they've missed out on the opportunity because Henry VI won't pursue those wars. So now they feel like they've lost the opportunity to go and get not only glory, but also incredible amounts of wealth. And what you end up with is a generation of martial figures with nowhere to go but England and no one to fight with, but their next door neighbours. And so they all end up squabbling. And because Henry has no way

to unite them, he also lacks the ability to bang their heads together and deal with them in any way ruthlessly. I'm a big fan of Richard, Duke of York. I think he's a really interesting figure. I think if Henry VI had executed him at Dartford in 1452, that might have been the end of problems. But Henry's lack of ruthlessness, his unwillingness to deal with these problems, and his inability to reconcile faction will ultimately be what tears his country apart. That's such a depressing thought that medieval, and no doubt many other states, medieval European states, there was such martial energy within the elites

that unless they were directed outwards, it would almost inevitably turn inwards upon itself. I think that maybe explains quite a lot about how violent the world was. Tell me, so 1452, Duke of York survives. We're creeping towards the first battle of the Wars of the Roses. What happens there? So what happens in the run-up to what's known as the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, where many people will date the beginning of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of St Albans in May 1455, Henry VI is gathering a great council. So he's getting all the great

nobles of the land together. York has been excluded from authority for years by this point, but he's suddenly summoned to this great council. And this great council is being held in the East Midlands, in the Lancastrian heartlands. So I think York is looking at this and thinking, hang on, this smells a bit like 1447. This smells a bit like what happened to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. And I'm a little bit worried. So York gathers his allies, which by this point includes his in-laws, the Neville family, so the Earl of Salisbury, the Earl of Warwick, who will become famous as the kingmaker later on. And they gather a force of men and they begin to march towards London to intercept the king. And they're writing letters to Henry every day to say, this is where we are. This is why we're coming to see you. We just want to protest our loyalty,

but we're a little bit worried that if we turn up at this great council, we're going to be falling into a trap. They look and sound a bit like an army, do they? I mean, they've got men at arms, they've got knights. This is not a small group of elite. Absolutely. They are an army and York has promised that he will never raise an army without Henry's express permission. And so he's broken that oath that he made in 1452 by raising this force. The Yorkist lords, I think, would say that they were bringing those men for their own protection and self-defense, but that looks incredibly threatening if you're Henry, that some of your nobles who you don't get on with particularly well are turning up with a large force of armed men. So they eventually catch up with the King at St Albans. We get this period in the morning of the 22nd of May, a big parlay goes on, these

messages are exchanged backwards and forwards in and out of the town. York is asking again for the arrest of Somerset. Henry is sending back messages, which may or may not have come from Somerset rather than Henry, saying that Somerset is not going to be arrested and that anyone who stays in the field and fights against Henry will be hung, drawn and quartered as a traitor at the end. No one will be spared. If you stay and fight and you lose, you're going to die. Eventually, by midday, this will turn into a battle. So the Yorkists begin an assault on the gates of St Albans. They're not particularly getting very far. Warwick takes an army off around the side, finds a way to break into some gardens, gets into the town of St.

Albans, and then his longbowmen will begin to rain down arrows on the marketplace in St. Albans, where Henry himself, lots of his key nobles, and a chunk of his army are, who haven't even got their armor on because they're in the marketplace in the middle of a town and they're fine. They don't need their armour on. So Henry is wounded in the neck by an arrow. Humphrey, the Duke of Buckingham, is hit in the face by an arrow too. Lots of men are killed. There is kind of slaughter in the streets. The men who are protecting the gates are brought back by this kerfuffle in the town. And so then York and Salisbury are able to break in and we end up with this scene of what must have been chaotic bloodshed through the streets of St. Albans. Most medieval battles are fought out in a field. They're called the Battle of Bosworth Field

because field is the word for a battle. You fight them out in the open. So to fight one inside the cramped, narrow streets of a medieval town is pretty shocking and we get an account from the abbot of St Albans, Abbott Wheatomstead, who talks about walking around St Albans after the battle and he says here you saw a man with his brains dashed out, here one with a broken arm, another with his throat cut and a fourth with a pierced chest. So there's just blood and guts all over the cobblestones of St Albans. And also after this battle, you get one of my favourite quotes from the entire Wars of the Roses, when a chronicler from London named Gregory talks about James Butler, the Earl of Wiltshire, and the fact that

Butler runs away from almost every battle that he ever fought in. And Gregory says that he fought mainly with his heels, but he was frightened of losing his beauty. Who can blame him? Who can blame him? So a very weird medieval battle, Fort Wright and St Albans, the king himself wounded. You mentioned earlier that there was a sense that these letters, this exchange had been sort of hijacked. The king was hardly involved. Has the king by this stage really, really declined into pretty significant mental illness? So by this point, he's had one of his episodes. In 1453, his mental health will collapse completely. He will become catatonic. There's been efforts to kind of diagnose what it

is, but at this kind of distance, it's almost impossible. We have a list of the treatments that were tried to remedy the situation, but ultimately they need someone to take the reins of government and the Lords will turn to York to do that. So Margaret of Anjou, who is Henry VI's wife, his queen, will make a bid for effectively a regency. But the nobleman of England will instead choose Richard, Duke of York, to act as Lord Protector. So he is given control of England effectively while Henry is ill. But when Henry recovers shortly afterwards, he immediately dismisses York and sends him back to the political wilderness.

So you kind of have this situation where there is a group in England who think that actually York is pretty good. He did a good job in France. He did a good job in Ireland while he was there. He's proven himself. But that just makes him more of a threat to Henry. So as soon as Henry is better, he dismisses York out to the wilderness. And this rivalry between York and Somerset intensifies so that at St. Albans, Somerset will be killed. The Earl of

Northumberland, who is the deadly rival of the Neville family, who were York's allies by this point, the Earl of Northumberland will be killed during the battle too. So this is almost like a mafia hit going on in the streets of St Albans. This is less a battle about who has the right to be king and more about who has the right to advise Henry, and that is fought to the death in the streets of St Albans. The battlefield claims another Percy, another Earl of Northumberland. God, they didn't die in their beds, those lads. Okay, so we got after this battle, Richard, he's won him. He's out fought, literally. He's jockeyed the other, his rivals into, he's killed them. And so he ends up, yeah, the key advisor to the crown. Yeah, so Henry is, as I mentioned, he's wounded in the neck. York finds him in a tanner's shop receiving some treatment. And I think if York was desperate for

the throne at this point, then he has the perfect solution to slightly widen that wound in Henry's neck and say, oh dear, the king died in a horrible accident. What he actually does is fall on his knees, plead his loyalty to Henry, has Henry taken to St. Albans Abbey for better treatment, and then taken back to London. But it's very clear that now York and the Yorkist lords are in charge of government. York is reinstalled as protector, although there's no real signal that Henry is ill at this point. This is just York is de facto leader of the government now. Eventually, York will try to correct royal finances because they're in an absolute state. So just before all of this is

going on, there's been a report that says the crown owes what would be the equivalent today of hundreds of millions of pounds and has no way of repaying those debts. They've reached the point where they're struggling to get meat delivered to the royal kitchens because butchers know they won't get paid. So York tries to get a handle on royal finances and he puts before Parliament, he puts this act of resumption, which would effectively take back lots of the grants that Henry VI has been very freely handing out. Henry was famous for giving anything to anybody that asked for it. He famously gave the same office to two people in the same day because they both asked him for it. So you've got this kind of mad situation where patronage is completely out of hand.

York tries to rein that in with this act of resumption before Parliament. And the problem is all of the Lords in Parliament are the ones who have done quite well, thank you very much, out of Henry's open-handed generosity. So they freak out at the thought of this act of resumption and they recall Henry. So Henry comes back, York is dismissed again, off into the political wilderness. We're back to almost square one. We'll end up in 1458 with something that's known as the Love Day, when Henry will try to reconcile these two sides. Eventually, finally, he's going to make an effort to bring these two sides together, but he's not going to bang their heads together.

He's going to sit them down and ask them to talk nicely to each other. He comes up with this compromise in which essentially the Yorkists will take the blame for everything that happened at St. Albans. They'll pay some reparations to the Lancastrians. And then everyone processes through London to St. Paul's to hear mass, all holding hands with their enemies. So York is holding hands with Queen Margaret. Salisbury is holding hands with Somerset. Warwick is holding hands with Northumberland. I imagine some really sweaty, tight hand gripping going on there. You get the sense from the crowds and the comments and the chronicles at the time that everybody knows this is a fudge and a lie, apart from Henry,

who is glowing at the front of all of this with a big smile, thinking he's finally sorted all of his problems. Oh, poor Henry. It's just too sad. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We've got Matt Lewis on. We're talking Wars of the Roses. They go on and on. Don't go away. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans,

Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so tell me, how long does the Summer of

Love last for? Probably just the summer. Essentially, we then go back into this cold war in which the sides are sort of watching each other, waiting to see who's going to move first. Eventually, York will summon all of his forces to Ludlow, his stronghold on the Welsh marches, the Mortimer seat of power. He begins to gather all of his forces as the Earl of Salisbury is coming down from the north. He's encountered by an army that's been raised by Queen Margaret at the Battle of Bloor Heath in 1459. Salisbury wins that battle. He defeats the Queen's army and eventually arrives at Ludlow, although two of his sons are captured in that battle. So he's now got to worry about the fact that a couple of his sons are hostages to the Lancastrian cause that he's just defeated.

York will march out of Ludlow, heading for London. And I suspect what he's doing here is trying to repeat what he did at Dartford. Although having been once bitten, he's now twice shy. He's not going to just believe what Henry says and dismiss his army. But they only get as far as Worcester when news arrives of a huge Royal Army approaching with Henry at the front of it. And then usually for Henry, he's wearing his full armor. He's flying the royal banners. The king is coming. And so facing an army like that is slightly different to St. Albans. Henry is now riding in armor under the royal banner. You're very close to treason if you were to stand in front of that army.

So Warwick and his allies retreat back to Ludlow. They build some defences there. Henry's army arrives. There's a bit of a stalemate overnight. Part of the Calais garrison that have come over with Warwick, so they're in the Yorkist forces, they will defect to the Royal Army, probably taking details of the Yorkist defences and battle plans and whatever. And so during the night, York, his two oldest sons, Edward and Edmund, and Salisbury and Warwick will all flee from Ludlow. York and Edmund will go to Ireland. Edward, Salisbury and Warwick will go to Calais in France. And so then you get Ludlow is effectively looted the next day by the Lancastrian army as a punishment for its support of the Duke of York.

But the real turning point in terms of the Wars of the Roses, I think, is in the aftermath of what's remembered as the Battle of Ludford Bridge, but there's no battle really. Parliament sits and this session is remembered as the Parliament of Devils. So an act of attainder is passed against all of the Yorkist lords. They're proclaimed traitors, they're deprived of all of their lands and properties and effectively left with nothing to lose. And I think this is the moment that turns a dispute around who should advise Henry VI and how government should be led into a dynastic dispute because York is now in Ireland, the wounded animal with nothing left to lose, thinking, I have what many people might

consider a better claim to Henry's throne than he does. And me and my followers have now been declared traitors. We've got nowhere to go other than, well, if we're going to call us traitors, well, let's see. Let's see if we can do some treason. Exactly. And it's the ultimate downfall for a medieval nobleman in that he's left with nothing to hand to the next generation. He will be remembered as the man who utterly destroyed his family, which is worse than just dying. If you can die by hand on your dukedom, great. You've got nothing left to lose. You are in real trouble. And so the action will begin when Edward, Salisbury and Warwick invade England from Calais. They cross over the channel. So in 1460, Henry thinks he's probably dealt with it now. It's sad. It's now

open for the world to see, but he has disinherited his cousin. He's labelled him a traitor. He has dealt with it in a very robust way at this point. And they're all fugitives elsewhere in Calais and Ireland. Yeah. I mean, from Henry's point of view, he might've felt like he tried the love day. He tried to reconcile everybody. York had obviously not fallen into line with that, but now all of the rebels have been expelled from the country. And as you say, they're all in exile. He might've felt like, I tried the peaceful way. I've done it the military way. He's also surrounded by people who you might describe as the kind of the sons of St. Albans. So the Duke of Somerset's son, the new Duke is there. The Earl of Northumberland's son,

the new Earl is there. Lord Clifford was killedland's son, the new Earl, is there. Lord Clifford was killed at St Albans and his son is very close to Henry by this point. So he is still in the thrall of one faction. He hasn't kind of rid himself of the factionalism. He just feels like maybe one of those factions has won, the one that's closest to him. And that faction, as you say, they're now motivated by the fact their dads have been killed. I mean, this is now a blood feud. So how does this little band of exiles get themselves in a position to fight for the crown? There seems to have been a degree of communication. So Warwick, we know, will go to Ireland from Calais and meet the Duke of York. So there must've been some discussion about what was going to happen and what was going to be planned. Warwick goes back to Calais and then from Calais,

Edward, so York's oldest son, Salisbury and Warwick will cross the channel, invade the south of England. They get to London, they lay siege to the Tower of London. And during this period, we get Lord Scales, who is in command of the Tower of London, unleashing wildfire on the people of London. So Greek fire, we might call it. It's a substance, something like napalm, burns the skin and all of that kind of thing. And we've got the guy in charge of the Tower of London pouring this stuff over the walls onto the people of London. So real chaos in London in 1460.

Salisbury stays in London to oversee the siege of the Tower of London, which will eventually be successful. Edward and Warwick will head off north to try and confront the army of Henry VI, and they meet them at the Battle of Northampton in July 1460. Although it's July, it's summer, it's recorded as an incredibly wet day, it's muddy, we're told that some of the guns wouldn't fire because there was rain. And one wing of Henry's army is betrayed. So Lord Grey, who is in control of one of the wings, defects to the Yorkist side,

allows Edward's men and his army through the royal defences. And then there's carnage. The royal army is decimated. The Duke of Buckingham is killed. Henry is found sitting under a tree singing. He's been abandoned by everyone that was meant to look after him. And he's just been left there. So they take Henry, this pretty sad, hapless figure, take him into custody, take him back to London, and then they wait. And it takes several months for the Duke of York to then come

back from Ireland. But when he does come, he comes under a royal banner. He marches to London, he heads into Westminster Hall, walks the length of the hall up the raised dais and puts his hand on the empty cushion on the throne in what is clearly an overt expression of his intention now to claim the throne of England. So fascinating how this is just intensifying with every year and every letting of blood that goes past. It's fascinating. Yeah, but I would argue that by this point,

York has spent more than a decade desperately trying not to do this, and he has only taken this step when he's been deprived of everything and backed into a corner and left with, I think he would say, no real option. Okay, so we've got the Duke of York. In fact, he doesn't sort of put the crown on his head, does he? He just makes himself a little bit like Henry II with King Stephen. He makes it clear that he is Henry VI's heir. I think he wanted to become king immediately at this point, but we get this kind of almost comical moment where he puts his hand on the empty throne in Westminster Hall and there's complete tumbleweed. There is no rousing cheer of, yeah, this is exactly what we all want to happen.

Everyone kind of goes quiet and eventually someone will come forward and say, Richard, would you like to see the king? And he's like, no, no, no, no, I am the king. Bring Henry to see me. I'm the most important man now. So we get this really tense, uncertain situation. Parliament will sit and they will eventually agree what is known as the Act of Accord. And if medieval parliament rolls are ever funny, then the negotiations for the Act of Accord are when medieval parliament rolls get funny because everyone is passing around this hot potato of who has the best or the rightful claim to the throne of England. And you get the

constables saying, well, we can't decide, you'll have to ask the judges. And the judges saying, well, we can't decide, you'll have to ask the lords. And the lords saying, well, if the judges don't know, we don't know, you can't ask us. Essentially, then they're all sent home with a bit of homework to come up with objections to York's claim. They come back and present them to York and he's able to bat them all away and answer them all satisfactorily so that essentially no one can say that York's claim to the throne isn't better than Henry's but also there's no will to depose Henry at this time he's a rubbish king but unlike Richard II he hasn't been offensive he kind of hasn't done anything that's a problem in itself but he hasn't really upset everyone enough to want to depose him. So they come to this compromise by which Henry will rule for the rest

of his life. And then York and his family will be heirs to Henry and his throne. And like most compromises, this pleases absolutely nobody. Now York is 10 years older than Henry, so is maybe unlikely to ever see the crown. And also Henry at this point is married and has a son who is now being disinherited, who was born to be King of England and who his dad is now saying, forget about all of that. And the one person who was really not going to accept this is Queen Margaret. So what does Henry VI's wife, Margaret, far more martial than the husband, what does she do about this situation? She goes looking for support and she finds it in Scotland.

So Scotland has a minority ruler at the moment, a young king on the throne, his government being overseen by his mother. So Margaret, I think, is able to speak to her and their shared situation and their shared problems, perhaps. And essentially, she secures a Scottish army to help her assault England. This betrays part of the problem that Margaret always has with not understanding England, because if you want England on your side, one of the things you don't really want to do is go and get a load of marauding Scots and bring them across the border. And she has no money to pay them, so she's promising they're paying plunder as well. So you're bringing plundering Scottish armies into England to say that you're the right person to rule England. I think Margaret hasn't understood the mission here despite her time in England.

But York, who is now back in charge of government, heir to the throne of England, effectively Prince of Wales, raises an army with his second son, Edmund, and they march north. They stop at Wakefield, at Sandor Castle, and they wait for reinforcements which are being raised on the Welsh borders by York's oldest son, Edward. The Yorkist army then sallies out from Sandor Castle to face the Lancastrian army. And this is one of those moments where no one's quite sure why they do this. There's lots of talk of the violation of a Christmas truce by the Lancastrians, of hostages being taken by the Lancastrians. The most convincing source that I've seen is one called the English Chronicle, which says that essentially a local lord,

Baron Neville, turns up, promises to raise a load of men for York, who gives him a commission to go away and do it. He comes back with about 5,000 men. York thinks, right, I've got the numbers now, let's do this. As soon as they get outside the gates of the castle, Baron Neville turns his army on York and betrays him. And the Lancastrians then all pile in too. York is killed. Edmund is killed. Salisbury is captured and then dragged out of prison the next day and beheaded by a mob. And all three of their heads are stuck on Micklegate Bar, which is one of the medieval gates into York, which is still there. You can go and see Micklegate Bar. The heads aren't still there. They've been taken down, fortunately. And a paper crown is

reportedly pinned to York's head to mock his pretensions to be a king. And I think this is the moment when all of those sons of St Albans that we talked about earlier feel like they've got their revenge. But what they've actually done is created a whole new cycle with the sons of Wakefield, because you've got Edward, York's oldest son, and you've got Warwick, who is Salisbury's oldest son, both of whom are really not scared of a fight. And they now both want revenge for the fates of their fathers. So the Lancastrian army will continue south, heading for London. Warwick will intercept them at St Albans. So

there's a second battle of St Albans. And this time Warwick is defeated at St Albans. He's forced to flee. The Lancastrian army goes on towards London, but has refused entry and forced to retreat back away from London. In the meantime, Edward has fought a Tudor army, which is coming out of Wales, led by Jasper Tudor, the Earl of Pembroke, at the Battle of Mortimer's Cross, when we get this parhelion event in the sky where three suns are seen in the sky. And this is to do with the refraction of light off ice crystals that make it look like there's three suns in the sky for a moment. And Edward positions this as being the father, son, and the Holy Ghost watching over the Yorkist army. It's a great

propaganda moment. Some quick thinking. Yeah, a bit of quick thinking. Yeah, absolutely. And says, you know, this means God's on our side. He wins the battle and he eventually then will meet up with Warwick. They'll go to London. They'll be welcomed in London. And now everyone will start saying, why don't we just make Edward King? The Lancastrians have breached the act of accord by attacking the heir to the throne effectively. They proclaim Edward as King, but he refuses to undergo a coronation while Henry and a Lancastrian army are still out there somewhere in the field. So he's now considered Edward IV, but he won't have a coronation until he's defeated his enemy in battle. And how old is Edward at this point?

He's 18 years old. He's six foot four, an absolute beast of a man. He's someone who will go through the Wars of the Roses without ever losing a battle, which is something that very few people can say. He's an incredibly fearsome guy, but utterly lacking in experience in terms of politics. He relies heavily on his mother, Cecily Neville, the Duchess of York, who is an incredibly significant figure in the early years of his reign and all of his reign, to be perfectly honest. But she's at the centre of politics in his early reign in particular. He seems like just a lad. He's one of the rugby lads, maybe. You know, this big brute of a guy who's really not afraid to get involved in a fight, likes a drink,

likes a few women, likes a good time. But now he wants to go and fight Henry. And so you've got this extraordinary situation. In 1461, Henry VI has been rescued by his wife, effectively, and his followers from captivity. They've successfully killed their great rival, Richard of York, but they have in doing so created the next rival, which is his son, Edward, who is one of the great warriors of medieval history. So you've now got this situation, you've got a showdown between one of the quietest and most gentle kings in English history, And one of the toughest. It's going to be brutal one way or another. Well, everyone, thank you very much for listening to that,

the first episode of our Wars of the Roses podcast. This is the first of two episodes. Matt is back with me next time. Please tune in on Monday the 28th to hear part two. you