Roses
WARS OF THE, a disastrous dynastic struggle which desolated England during the 15th century, from the first battle of St. Albans (1455) to that of Bosworth (1485). It was so-called because the two factions into which the country was divided upheld the two several claims to the throne of the Houses of York and Lancaster, whose badges were the white and the red rose respectively. The Lancastrian claim to the crown came through John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III., created Duke of Lancaster in 1362, having married three years before the heiress of Henry, Duke of Lancaster. On John of Gaunt's death King Richard II. seized his lands, whereupon his son Bolingbroke, then in exile, returned to assert his rights, and, finding his cause exceedingly popular, was emboldened to claim the crown, which was granted him by the Parliament after the deposition of his cousin Richard II. After the House of Lancaster had thus possessed the throne for three reigns (Henry IV., V., VI.), Richard, Duke of York, during the weakness of the last reign, began to advance, at first somewhat covertly, his claim to the throne. He was the son of Richard, Earl of Cambridge, ROSES by Anne, sister of Edmund Mortimer, the last Earl of March, and he was thus the nearest actual heir to Edward III. through his second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence.
The reigning family had become unpopular from its loss of France and its clericalism, but its strength was great in the N., where the power of the Percies that of the Nevilles.
The Yorkist strength lay chiefly in the mercantile population of the southern counties. The effect of the war was the almost complete destruction of the old nobility, the weakening of the power of the Church, and an enormous increase in the power of the great advance of the commercial classes crown, together together with the and the large towns, destined a few generations later to measure strength with the crown itself.
In 1454 Richard was appointed protector of the realm during Henry's insanity, and on his recovery soon after took up arms against his rival Somhim at the first battle of St. Albans (1455). A second period St.
Albans (1455). A second period of insanity again gave him the protectorship, but the king recovered in 1456. His weak attempts at reconciliation proved failures, and in 1460 the Yorkist earls of Salisbury, Warwick, and March defeated and captured the King at N (1460).
Northampton The lords now decided to grant the reversion of the crown to York, , passing over Prince Edward. The queen refused assent and fled to Scotland, returning only after the death of York at Wakefield (Dec. 30, 1460); but York's son Edward quickly gained a ward quickly gained a victory at Mortimer's Cross (1461) though Warwick was defeated by the queen's main body in the second battle of St. Alban's (1461). But to young Edward, and in June he was crowned at Westminster after the great victory of Towton (1461).
Next year Queen Margaret again appeared in the N. but in 1464 her forces were utterly routed by Warwick's brother, Montague, at Hedgeley Moor and Hexham. The estrangement of Warwick and his alliance with Queen Margaret's party drove Edward IV. from England and stored Henry VI. But Edward returned in the spring of 1471, defeated (and slew) Warwick at Barnet, and the queen at murder of Prince Edward after the battle, and the convenient death of Henry VI. in the Tower, cleared away his two chief dangers and left him to reign in peace. The accession of Henry VII. after the death of Richard III. on Bosworth field (1485), his marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV. (1486), and the blending of the red and white rose in the Tudor badge, marked the termination of the Wars of the Roses, ROSEWATER though the reign of Henry, whose own title was not good, was from time to time the pretentions of Yorkist impostors. in Egypt, on the old Bolbitic arm of the