In Our Time - The Wars of the Roses

Episode Date: May 18, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Wars of the Roses which have been the scene for many a historical skirmish over the ages: The period in the fifteenth century when the House of Lancaster and the House of York were continually at odds is described by Shakespeare, in the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III as a time of enormous moral, military and political turmoil - the quintessential civil war; but twentieth century historians like K.B. Macfarlane argued the political instability is wildly overstated and there were no Wars of the Roses at all. Opposing this position are the many Tudor historians who like to claim that the Wars of the Roses represent the final breakdown of the feudal system and lead directly to the Tudor Era and the birth of the modern age.With Dr Helen Castor, Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; Professor Colin Richmond, Emeritus Professor of History, Keele University; Dr Steven Gunn is a Tudor historian and Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Merton College, Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Wars of the Roses have been the scene for many a historical skirmish over the ages. That's over new evidence, let alone the wars themselves.

The period in the 15th century when the House of Lancaster and the House of York seemed continually at odds is described by Shakespeare in three parts of Henry the 6 and Richard III as a time of enormous moral, military and political turmoil, the quintessential civil war. The 20th century historians, like K.B. McFarlane in the 30s and 40s, argued that the political instability was wildly overstated.

Opposing this position are the many Tudor historians who like to claim that the Wars of the Roses represent the final breakdown of the feudal system and lead directly to the Tudor era and the birth of the modern age. Received opinion is being challenged again. Dr. Helen Castor from Cambridge University is the latest revisionist to ruffle feathers in history departments up and down the country with new research on the Past and Letters,

the primary historical source on the period. She joins me now. Also with us is Professor Colin Richmond, Emeritus Professor of History at Keel University, and author-editor of the Paston Letters in the 15th century, and we're also joined by the Tudor historian, Dr. Stephen Gunn, fellow and tutor in modern history at Merton College, Oxford. Colin Richmond, let's try to establish a platform first.

The Wars of the Roses, we're talking about the middle of the 15th century, can you just give us brisk narrative outline? World of the Wars, yes. Well, you wouldn't expect historians to agree on even when they began, so that's a difficult one to start with, but I guess the fighting is really from 1455, which is the first Battle of St. Albans, and the first phase of these wars probably ends in 1461,

with Edward VIII, the new Edward VIII. victorious at the Battle of Tau. And then there's a third phase, sorry, a second phase to these wars, which opens in 1469, when Edward IV and his erstwhile support the Earl of Warwick fallout, and there's a complicated and complex series of towings

and froings, which include exile for Edward VIII, over the two years between 1469, 1471, and historians tend to think of that as the second of the wars. The third war, as we've come rather orthodoxly to call it, is the one that Richard the third initiates, if you like, when he usurps the throne in 1483.

And probably that phase is over in 1487, the Battle of Stoke in Lincolnshire. It's generally accepted that the roots, I mean the roots of everything go back and back and back and back and back and back. But a good starting point is the childhood of Henry the 6th. that this baby a few months old was King of England after this great hero warrior father. Right.

And he had to be looked after in every possible way, including his kingship had to be looked after. And in there, is it generally accepted from about, in the 1420s and 30s, in there are the seeds of the later distress and eruption? Yes. Well, I guess quite what the seeds are. I mean, apart from Henry,

six his incapacities as a king. Stephen Gunn, let's talk about Henry the Sixth a little more. We'll be talking about him a lot in the program. When he comes to the throne as a child, as really a child, baby, the Duke of Suffolk becomes very influential, becomes an influential first minister. Some people have described this as a period of the reign of terror,

the wicked, dreadful, greedy, grasping, tyrannical, Duke of Suffolk. Is it the way you see it? I think the problem is that Suffolk, like everybody, and in particular like everybody in the Middle Ages, has two sides to his career. He has a public side to his career in which he's acting as the King's chief minister, managing the King's authority, conducting foreign policy towards France and so on. And some people at the time, therefore, hold him responsible for key surrenders of English territory in France and for the marriage of Henry VI to Marguer de Vange,

who turns out not to be a very successful marriage alliance in terms of further English aims in France. But simultaneously he has his own private interests, defending his estates, building up his own wealth, backing his own political following in East Anglia. And some people at the time, notably the pastons onto whom will come later, are plainly put out by the way in which he does that.

So you have the Duke of Suffolk, though, We're going to come on to him again in a moment. We also have a factor which we haven't brought up yet. In 1450 massive defeats in France, humiliating for the English, leaving nobles here at each other's throats, blaming each other and so on. Can you again just fill out that a bit? So we're just getting a proper platform here. Well, the English position in France had been much strengthened, really, by Henry V.

He conquers systematically large areas of Normandy and occupies them. gives lands in Normandy to English nobleman. So he's setting up a much more comprehensive kind of English conquest in France than the more raiding strategy that Ebert III has followed earlier in the Hundred Years' War. What this means is that when the Hundred Years' War starts to run against the English, France is a country with much larger population. So it can...

Something like 15 million against 2 million is the... Something like 15 million against 2 million. So if the French can organise a proper tax system, which they do with regular taxation from the 1440s, and a standing army paid with that regular tax revenue, as they do from 1445, and impressive artillery forces, as they do to cut the way through the English fortifications, then the English are always liable to be in difficulties, particularly once their main ally in fighting on the continent,

the Duke of Burgundy, deserts them in 1435. So the war is a losing war from 1435 onwards, really, and it reaches its climax with the loss of Normandy in 1450, for which Suffolk is widely blamed, and the loss of Gascony, the last English territory in France apart from Calais in 1453. So if a national humiliation, we have nobles at each other's throats, we have a weak boy king. There's also these things even called bastard feudalism.

Is that what people in the country were experiencing? Well, the Victorians who first coined the term bastard feudalism would have blamed bastard feudalism as a form of social organisation for the kinds of disorder that were seen both in local society and then ultimately in national politics with the wars of the roses. The argument being that what they called bastard feudalism, they saw it as a debased form of a purer earlier kind of feudal relationship was a much freer market in which individuals could find any great patron

who would support them to back their own interests. Those great patrons would then pursue their own interests using the armed force supplied by those retainers, those followers, and that this was therefore a licence for jobbery corruption and disorder of the kind that appears to be evident at least at some stages of the Wars of the Roses and 15th century politics. Contrasted with a completely over-idealised elegant pyramid where feudalism served the purpose of everyone who, everyone knew their place and everyone was in his place and so on the broad base and the peasants and up and up owing allegiance and tenure

and obligations to the person above them. And I think for the Victorians, crucially, not so much about money because they were worried that bastard feudalism was a matter of people being paid to do things and seeking the person who would pay them best or look after their interests best. This is perhaps the only point at which our programme connects with our time,

which we're supposed to do. Things do repeat themselves, don't they? Right. Helen Castor, in your paper, you argue for the rehabilitation of the Duke of Suffolk. Yes. Largely what we've heard so far is that he was a wicked man and he lost France and he over-influenced a young king and he's the culprit.

Now you say that's not so. Yes, I do. And you have got a bad voice and so people are just going to have to bear with it. It's not your fault. Thank you. Yes, what I'm arguing is that Suffolk has been blamed for a great deal of the disorder

and the difficulties of the 1440s on two levels, as Stephen said earlier. At one level at the centre, as this malign influence with a kind of corrupt stranglehold over the government of the week, Henry the 6th, perhaps we should make the point that by the 1440s Henry was no longer abhor. He was in his 20s could have been expected to have been ruling as a fully independent adult, but clearly wasn't to whatever degree and for whatever reason, as Colin said earlier. So in part at the centre, and in part, as Stephen was saying earlier, through his corrupt affinity in the localities, these thuggish gangsters with this reign of terror over innocent members of the gentry in the localities. I would argue he needs to be rehabilitated at both levels. At the centre, really, I'm drawing on the very important recent research done by John Watts, who's shown that Suffolk actually was fulfilling a very complex set of political responsibilities. in government on behalf of a king who was completely failing to engage with the demands of his public role. At the localities, and here's where my research comes in,

what I've done is look at the supposed reign of terror that Suffolk and his men were carrying out in East Anglia where Suffolk was a major landholder and actually demonstrate that they weren't interlopers using their position at court to browbeat, the legitimate power structures within local society, but were themselves a legitimate part of that society. And as far as I can see, we're not responsible for abuses that were way out of line with the problems that were emerging more generally in local society in that decade.

Can you explain to us, though, what sort of influence Suffolk would have had on this boy in a sense it's all very well saying that obviously by the 40s he was 18, 20, he was a young man. But he'd been, since he was in swaddling clothes, he had been brought up by people who exercised power for him and exercised power over him, obviously. So what evidence do you have of suffix influence? Have you any evidence that was benign over this boy who became a king? Or what evidence do you have?

Really, the question that historians have had to concern themselves with is the extent to which Henry was actually seeking to take control of his government at all. There had been previous kings who'd had minorities who'd been in this position of being in tutelage of one kind or another. And yet when they reached their late teens, certainly their early 20s, were beginning to assert themselves and to assume or at least try to assume some control over policy. The difficulty in looking at Henry the 6th is really we have no clear sign at all that he's seeking to do that in any direct way. Suffolk then emerges as the figure who is directing policy in the king's name. But it doesn't appear to be a case of Suffolk shoving the king to one side and keeping him in the dark. It appears to be a case where this is a king who really doesn't express any will, any dissoning. decision-making capacity. Contemporary accounts of the king find little more to say about him than

that he's very pious, he listens a lot and doesn't really say very much. A French embassy that pitches up in 1445 describes their meetings with Henry really in terms of him smiling a great deal and making the odd exclamation in response to something they say, but really not engaging. Colin Richmond, do you accept this new view of the Duke of Suffolk that he is trying to to hold things together rather than to get his own way, that he is not as villainous, that he is understandable in terms of the weakness of Henry VI. No, I don't accept that, I think.

He's pretty villainous. There are no innocence in this whole political scenario, whether they're gentlemen or whether they're men's sensibility. They're all out to get what they can from being powerful within a political milieu. So we can't really talk about the guilty and the innocent, I think, in broad terms. But nevertheless, Suffolk is running the government, and he's a failure.

I mean, France is lost. Now, whether he's absolutely responsible for that, that is not quite the issue. He is running things when it is lost, and therefore he's held to be responsible by contemporaries. So I think that he's a bad politician in that he's an unsuccessful one. His role within East Anglia is, of course, much more complicated than that, but he does exercise there, I think, his central authority to the benefit of his followers and to his own benefit.

I think one of the things that Helen doesn't tell us too much about is the Duke of Suffolk's own seedy participation in local politics to his own advantage. Let's turn to local politics now, because one of the great authoritative documents for this period, which historians you three are very, you feel you are very lucky to have, are the Paston letters, which you've worked on very closely, Colin Richmond. These letters were and are? Well, the Pastons are a Norfolk family, and everybody wrote letters, but the survival of their letters in such quantities.

Well, fortuitous, I suppose, and I can't go into the history of why they've survived, but they have. They're, of course, important for all sorts of cultural and social reasons, but politically there's a good deal of comment on what we would call the ongoing political situation right the way through from the late or mid-1440s until the mid-1480s. So they do cover the whole period that we've described as the Wars of the Roses. Stephen Gunn. I think it's also important that it's the case that the past and letters give us very close insight

into how manoeuvres in local politics and disputes over land and legal disputes are carried on. So there are letters about how you get the right people to sit on a jury to reach the right decision, how you make sure that the sheriff doesn't deliver the writs that are meant to bring your opponents into court and so on. And therefore, people have read them as an indictment of the way in which royal government is administered at the local level. And for that reason, they become very important to a debate about what the standards of behavior in public life and in local politics and in the conduct of disputes are. But on the other hand, when you read them, actually not that many people get killed in the Pastern letters.

People are always being thrown out of houses or beaten up or whatever, but this doesn't suggest an anarchic society in the way that one might expect. Helen Castor, do you think the Passen letters have been too much has been read into them, too much significance into one, as Colin Richmond described, fortuitously surviving group of letters? Or do you think they've also been misread? I think in a sense it's more the latter than the former. these clearly are a hugely significant source and I don't think we can understate their significance.

The question is how are we going to use them? And I think the difficulty has been that they are such an engaging source, so unique when normally we only see the formal processes of government, that in a way we've been drawn so deeply into them, into seeing the world from the Paston's point of view, that we assume perhaps too readily that their experience is typical,

is representative of a generalised social experience, whereas in fact a lot of what happens to them is very, very particular to do with their particular circumstances. And we also need to remember that there are a whole number of things that the letters don't tell us about. So we've got to be careful about both reading between the lines and not assuming that silence means there's nothing more to be said. So how have we been, we, you historians generally,

in your opinion up to now, being misled by their interpretation of the Pastern letters. What have they taken from it which you think they ought not to have done? Well, for example, the general conclusion, which you mentioned a moment ago, that Suffolk was a villain at a local level and was the villain of the story from the Paston's point of view. What I would want to argue is,

if we look more closely at what the Pastons were actually experiencing in the 1440s, is that the villain from the Paston's point of view is not actually the Duke of Suffolk. It's a local man called John Hayden, who was closely connected with the Duke of Suffolk. The assumption has been that if the pastons are having a bad time at the hands of John Hayden, it's because Hayden is one part of Suffolk's machine of terror. I think if we look more closely at the letters, we actually see that Suffolk's relationship with that is a bit more complex, a bit more distant, and perhaps if I can quote

briefly from one letter, I can show you what I mean. Margaret Paston, the wife of the head of the family in the late 1440s, writes to her husband probably in 1449. And there's a sentence from that letter that is quoted virtually ubiquitously in accounts of this period. She says to him, sundry folks have said to me that they think verily, but if ye have my lord of Suffolk's good lordship. In other words, unless you have his good lordship. While the world is as it is, you can never live in peace without you have his good lordship.

That is quoted time and time again. Suffolk is the evil genius here, if you're not on his side, you're not going to get anywhere. What people don't quote is the sentence that follows that one. She goes on to say, therefore, I pray you with all my heart that ye will do your part to have his good lordship and his love in ease of all the matters that you have to do and in easing of my heart also. In other words, she doesn't see Suffolk as the cause of what's going wrong. She's saying, look, if we're going to get anywhere with this, we need his help. It may seem quite improbable that they will get that, given that John Hayden is his man. But Suffolk is not the one who's being blamed here.

I'd like, can we just say farewell to our brief little joust with the past and letters and move on to the kings and the wars of the roses themselves? Can I come to you, Stephen Gunn? Is there any sense, there used to be a very straightforward notion that Henry VI was a very weak, in a very weak position as a boy, and then he became an extremely unsuccessful young king, and then he had this massive breakdown, variously described as catatonia,

and all sorts of other words applied to him, but he stopped speaking and so and so forth. And in the end, the state was running pretty well before him for the warlike purpose. It was kind of a war machine we were running in this country as much as anything else it seems to me. But anyway, and he, because of his weakness, and a lot of France it all flared up.

Have you, is there anything that contradicts that? Well, I think what people are trying to ask now is what are the consequences of having a king who isn't so useless that you can completely ignore him, but is sufficiently useless that nobody really knows what he's doing and what he isn't doing. Helen Kastair, would you see the weakness of Henry the 6th position provoking the Duke of York into what became the first battle of the first phase of the Wars of the Roses? Certainly I think the incapacity of Henry the 6th is the key that we have to examine here.

I think in relation to the question of war that you were raising, the war machine that then in a sense turns in upon. itself. It isn't a completely stupid description of England at that time over those period long time, a hundred years or more, as a war machine? No, it isn't in that England is engaged in large scale and protracted war. The question is whether government at home can only function when it is directed outwards in war, or whether there is actually a solid structure of domestic government,

of which the war effort is then an active expression. And I think in looking at Henry the 6th reign, what we have to ask is not simply to say the war against France failed and therefore things imploded in England, but to ask why the war in France failed in quite the way it did at the time it did. There is no inevitability about the total. and utter defeat of English pretensions. Well, Stephen Gun, give a very good summary of it at the top of this programme, and they got better organised, they organised their taxes, they got their artillery in shape,

they've got ten times as many people as we have, and they got cracking. Absolutely. The French are resurgent, and clearly the English are going to have to work very hard to deal with that. However, the resurgence of the French coincides with the period in which English government is experiencing increasing difficulties because of the inertia at the top,

Henry VI's inability to make any decision. So, for example, in the 1440s, a truce is concluded in 1444, designed to win the English some breathing space and to protect their position. No real use is made of that from the English point of view so that by the time the end of the 1440s come, the terms of the truths are irrelevant because the French can simply override them. Now, that's not just to do with the superior organisation of the French by that point. It's also to do with the fact the English have not protected their position as, as well as they could have done given better organisation, better direction of policy at home. And Colin and Richard and Richard of York

wants to be closer, wants to be able to protect him, shunt it out of the court. He takes over, he comes back. But when he actually takes to the battlefield and declares that the common wheel needs to be looked after properly and he, as Henry VI's cousin, let's put it at that, or cousin-ish,

then that. He's the man to do it. Right. There's a great deal of hesitation on the party of the English-aristocracy about whether a non-anointed king, we're coming into the area of anointed kings and the divine writing, should be allowed to do this, isn't it? There's a great deal.

There is, yes. And that is a real hesitation. I mean, you seem to me, earlier you said, they're all cynically knocking the stuffing out of each other. We shouldn't give any other than time. Well, you implied it was fairly cynical. You shouldn't give any in the time a day. None of them.

Well, fair enough. It does spill over into what you say now. The business here is this a real hesitation that he is not an anointed king or is this a political hesitation that they don't really want him to have it? Well, they've got rid of anointed kings in the past, so it isn't just this anointed king business. I think they'd have no hesitation in getting rid of Henry the Sixth if he'd done something palpably against their own interests,

as Edward II and Richard the 2nd had. I mean, all that Henry the 6th seems to have done is to have found it eaten and kings, although even this is being taken away from him now by John Watts. So I think their hesitations are about how do you tackle, even to the extent of getting rid of,

a king who seems ostensibly, publicly, if you like, not to have done any wrong to the political or property or governing class. I think it's also the case that through the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, people who rebel against royal authority, both at the popular level like Jack Cades Rebels in 1450 and at aristocratic level, are very happy to play the evil ministers game.

In other words, they will always rather blame royal advisers who are misleading the king rather than the person of the king himself. And that's the pattern in Richard the 2nd's reign until the point where Richard himself gets deposed. It's the pattern in ever the second's reign before the point where Edward gets deposed. So it's very easy to blame Henry VI's evil ministers because it's very hard to pin any specific action

on Henry the 6th that you can blame him for. Therefore, I mean, what we haven't said about Suffolk yet is that he gets lynched in 1450, as does Bishop Mullins, who is a leading household bishop, as does Lord Say, who's another leading figure in the household, as do Kentish associates of Lord Say's political operations in Kent.

So there is quite, widespread public feeling as well as just aristocratic politicking against these people who are managing the king. The Duke of Suffolk is blamed for the loss of France and sailors dragging from his ship and chop of his head we're told with a rusty sword, several strokes and so on. Do you think that the place was ready to erupt, Helen Castor, this, Henry VI Catatonia and Richard was going for power and so on? And then we had a disruption. We had the civil wars. We had a lot of... battles, a lot of deaths and so on, and a new level of violence as well towards ordinary soldiers, which you said. Absolutely. I think it's very important to remember that these are very aggressive, ambitious,

competitive people, the late medieval nobility. But I think it's very important to remember that aggression, ambition, competition are not incompatible with an acceptance that a framework of rules, principles, processes, ideas needs to be in place as the field within which those ambitions can safely be pursued. Under normal circumstances, if the king is holding that in place, these people can simply get on with their ambitions. If you have a king who is not refereeing, if you like, who is not making sure that if people step out of line, they will be slapped down, then the nobility start having to examine the parameters of their own behaviour and try to cope with the conflicts that arise amongst their own number themselves, which is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.

Richmond, do you see this period the Wars of O'Roses as any sort of transition between a real shift in the way that we govern ourselves from then to the Tudors, Henry the 7th coming in? Do you see him as beginning, setting up a new stage of centralising, modernising, of a different order? No, probably. I don't think there's much modernisation, no.

I think the bureaucratic government that's been laid down within England, and, well, certainly in the previous century, is strong enough to carry English government through this difficult period. I don't think governmental or political change is of great moment, and the Wars of the Roses, I think, don't have that sort of impact upon structure. Do you, Stephen Gunn, do you think there's a big change here? I think there are significant changes, not as dramatic as,

people used to think they don't happen straight away in 1485 and you can't pin them all on Henry the 7th. But I think there are key changes in the institutionalisation of government control over the localities and over aristocratic politics. And the real measure of those is the fact that in the mid-16th century you can have ruled by a boy, Edward the 6th, by two Queen's regnant, and you haven't had an undisputed Queen Regnant in England ever before, Mary and Elizabeth. And the government machine continues to run aristocratic politics don't come out of hand and there's no civil war when there are wars of religion going on in France, the Netherlands and Scotland all around.

Well, thank you all very much, Helen Castor, Colin, and Stephen Gunn, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.