As English civil wars go it was protracted, enduring from the first clash at St Albans in May 1455 to the last pitched battle at Stoke Field, Nottinghamshire, in June 1487 – a period of 32 years. Fought between the rival royal houses of York and Lancaster (which both had pretensions based on descent from Edward III and his progeny), it was the ultimate crisis of governance and succession, brought about by the inadequacies of the Lancastrian incumbent Henry VI, who was pious, weak, and as far removed from a martial king as the 15th century strawberry referenced in Shakespeare’s Richard III (Act III, Scene 4).
The Wars featured two regime changes: first in 1461, when Henry VI was supplanted, not by the original Yorkist claimant Richard, Duke of York, who wore only a paper crown, but by his behemoth son Edward, Earl of March (Edward IV); and then in 1485, when Edward’s youngest brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester (Richard III), became the last English king to die in battle, consigning the brief Yorkist ascendancy to history. In between came the tsunami of 1471, when regime change was averted and Edward IV cut a swathe through Lancastrian ranks, with Henry VI, the Lancastrian heir Prince Edward, and the turncoat Warwick the Kingmaker among those whose lives were claimed.
For all the longevity of the Wars, the fighting itself was short and sharp, with long periods of relative peace. Ultimately, the victor was a less-considered Lancastrian, Henry Tudor, who was not as adept militarily as either Yorkist king, but who established a dynasty that survived when others had failed. Perhaps the key moment of the Wars did not take place on any battlefield but at Grafton, a quiet and unheralded spot in Northamptonshire, where the lascivious Edward IV had secretly wed Lancastrian widow Elizabeth Woodville, despite being pre-contracted to another. It was a marriage that alienated Warwick, offended Yorkists, and condemned its progeny, including the so-called ‘Princes in the Tower’, to accusations of bastardy.
