In April​ 1486, eight months after Richard III’s death at the Battle of Bosworth, the ‘Lancastrian’ Henry VII set out with all the usual pomp and pageantry on a progress through his new kingdom. Before visiting York, Richard’s northern stronghold, Henry sent instructions ahead telling the citizens how he was to be received. At Micklegate Bar, through which he would enter the city, a giant mechanical display was to be contrived, with a heaven full of angels above and an earth full of trees and flowers below, the centrepiece of which would be ‘a royal, rich, red rose … unto which rose shall appear another rich, white rose, unto whom all the flowers shall bow and evidently give sovereignty, showing the rose to be the principal of all flowers, and thereupon shall come from out of a cloud a crown, covering the roses’.

There are several earlier references, dating back at least to the early 14th century, to red and white roses being used occasionally as insignia by the families later associated with the Lancastrian and Yorkist causes, but it was not until Shakespeare picked up on the idea in Henry VI Part I (Act II, Scene iv) that it entered the popular imagination:

Somerset: Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer
But dare maintain the party of the truth
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.

Warwick: I love no colours; and without all colour
Of base insinuating flattery,
I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet.

It was another two hundred years before Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein, published in 1829, brought the idea of the ‘wars of the White and Red Roses’ into common usage. Since then it has become synonymous with the political turmoil which, between 1455 and 1485, saw four English kings deposed (one of them twice) and fifteen internecine ‘battles’ – some of them in reality just skirmishes – fought on English soil, from Dartford in Kent to Hexham in Northumberland to Mortimer’s Cross on the Welsh border.

There are those, of course, who would like to bin the label, but that is a vain hope. During the last quarter of the 20th century at least seven British historians published monographs entitled The Wars of the Roses, and scholars in the 21st century appear to be trying to keep pace. One explanation for this is that no one seems satisfied with the traditional interpretations of the conflict, with their focus on kings, dynasties, factions and ‘over-mighty subjects’. Instead (or as well), the focus has shifted to a search for context or ‘circumstances’ – political, constitutional, social and economic. Yet it is difficult to get away from the king-centred approach, because the one point around which every historian of the 15th century can unite is that Henry VI was an extraordinarily bad king. Not ‘bad’ in the sense of cruel or tyrannical, just hopeless. There were mitigating factors. Born in December 1421, he was just nine months old when he inherited the throne from a father, Henry V, who is often viewed as one of England’s most successful kings, and by the time his personal rule began in 1437, the war with France had turned decisively against the English, the Crown was bankrupt and the lords increasingly divided.

What was needed was clear and firm management; what Henry offered was an absence of management. Biographers write of his complete lack of will, his ‘utter incompetence’, even his ‘nothingness’. And then, in August 1453, shortly after receiving news of England’s apparently final expulsion from France (still commonly regarded as the end of the Hundred Years’ War), he sank for more than a year into a catatonic stupor and was wholly unable to govern. The squabble over the protectorate – should it be Henry’s ‘strong-laboured’ queen, Margaret of Anjou, or Edmund, duke of Somerset, or Richard, duke of York? – was controversially settled in York’s favour, but when the king recovered his senses at the end of 1454, Somerset and the queen removed him from power. Whether Henry was ever fully sentient again is unclear; it made little difference.

Given that the most widely accepted date for the start of the Wars of the Roses is 1455, it is unsurprising that the military defeats and collapse of active kingship in 1453-54 are often cited as causes of its outbreak. What is more difficult to demonstrate is that the ensuing power struggle polarised the nobility into Yorkist and Lancastrian factions and set the fault lines in England’s polity for the next thirty years. In many cases, allegiances were fluid. Can we even pigeonhole Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’ and George, duke of Clarence (Edward IV’s brother) as Yorkist when the consequence of their rebellion in 1469-70 was the restoration of Henry VI to the throne? Rather than one extended series of Wars of the Roses, it has become fashionable to divide England’s thirty years of instability into discrete struggles divided by longer periods of relative stability. First, the war of 1455-61 (or 1459-61), caused principally by Henry VI’s ineptitude, followed by the nine fretful but largely peaceful years of Edward IV’s first reign. Second, the war of 1469-71, which was more an internal Yorkist struggle caused by Warwick’s discontent and resulted in Henry VI’s ‘Readeption’, which lasted for six months until he was overthrown once more and murdered in the Tower. Third, after nearly twelve years of peaceful and largely effective rule during Edward IV’s second reign, the war of 1483-85 (or 1483-87), primarily again an internal Yorkist struggle, triggered by Richard III’s ambition (the most memorable victims of which were the Princes in the Tower), and which once again, quirkily, led to the throne being handed back to a Lancastrian claimant, Henry Tudor.

The question of dynastic principle has long bothered historians. The Yorkists (Richard, duke of York and his sons, Edward IV and Richard III) did have a valid claim to the throne, being descended from the third son of Edward III, whereas the Lancastrians (Henry IV, V and VI) were descended from Edward III’s fourth son. The complication was that whereas the Yorkist claim came through a female line, the Lancastrian kings were descended through a direct male line. Also problematic was that for forty years or so the Yorkist claim to the throne had remained, if not unremembered, then almost entirely unmentioned in public discourse. It re-emerged only in the 1450s, as the struggle to salvage the Crown from ignominy intensified. Shakespeare, following the Tudor historians of the 16th century, presented the matter differently. His history plays begin, quite deliberately, with Richard II: the original sin and real genesis of the Wars of the Roses was the usurpation of Richard’s throne in 1399 by the Duke of Lancaster (Henry IV), and not until the accession of Henry VII and his speedy marriage to Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, thereby unifying their bloodlines, was the breach healed. For the Tudors, the dates of the Wars of the Roses were 1399 to 1486.

For many years, the favourite academic approach to all this was through ‘bastard feudalism’, a term used to describe a socio-political system in which lords, instead of granting parcels of land to their dependants in return for service (the classic ‘feudal’ tenurial system), increasingly retained followers through grants of money, office or simply ‘good lordship’, which in effect meant benign patronage and a degree of legal protection. Characteristics of this system included the granting to dependants of livery (robes, hoods or just badges) in the lord’s colours and the practice of what was known as ‘maintenance’ in legal disputes (the use of threats or force to intimidate justices of the peace and/or jurors). The feudal bond, because rooted in the soil, should have meant a reasonably stable relationship, but the more slippery ‘bastard feudal’ bond facilitated a market in allegiance and hence the rapid recruitment of what were in effect private armies – it was these armies, so the argument goes, that fought the Wars of the Roses.

Several statutes restricting livery and maintenance were passed during the late 14th and 15th centuries (including by Edward IV) and hundreds of examples of the late medieval legal contracts known as ‘indentures of retainer’ survive, providing ample evidence of the creation of relationships between lords and dependants based on financial and/or patronal contracts, but it is quite another thing to suppose that they created an intrinsically less stable society or were a plausible cause of the Wars of the Roses. Bastard feudalism long predated the 1450s and there was no shortage of political upheaval in 12th and 13th-century ‘feudal’ England, amounting at times (the 1140s, 1215-16, 1261-65, 1321-22) to what could easily be categorised as civil war. In fact, indentures of retainer were more closely associated with a lord’s requirements in times of peace than during war, providing his office-holders, his household and his entourage and escort when he toured his lands or went to court.

Economic explanations for the wars have also been dismissed. To be sure, England (and Europe) after the Black Death presented landlords with new problems: the halving of the population, which resulted in rising wages, falling rents and a growing resistance to serfdom, was bound to require some adjustments. Yet adjust they did, not simply through repression (although there was certainly that, as the succession of draconian Statutes of Labourers passed between the 1350s and the 1440s attest), but also through changes in land management, such as the move from arable to less labour-intensive pastoral farming, or the leasing out of the demesne (directly farmed land).

It’s true that there was a severe depression in the agrarian economy during the middle decades of the 15th century, accompanied by a decline in the wool and cloth trades, England’s most profitable exports. In certain respects, it is hard not to see this as a contributory factor to the wars: partly because it created desperate financial problems for a government that was heavily dependent on taxes derived from the wool trade, thus deepening the fiscal crisis of the 1440s and 1450s; and partly because it stimulated popular violence of the sort typified by the Kentish rising of 1450 (Jack Cade’s Rebellion), which resulted in the lynching of several leading ministers and increased the aura of incompetence around the king and his advisers. At the same time, it is hard to see the wars as a direct consequence of economic factors, or of differing views over economic or financial policy, although it is worth noting that the London merchant class was generally Yorkist in sympathy, and that it was in part a result of their support that during his second reign (1471-83), Edward IV was so successful in restoring the solvency of the Crown.

A popular theory for a while was that the wars grew out of an escalation of private feuds – in other words, that the territorial or political rivalries of noble families in what they regarded as their spheres of influence (‘countries’, as they referred to them) proved impossible to contain and, when the Crown or its representatives tried to intervene, ended up mirroring and exacerbating rivalries at court. The most commonly cited examples are the long-running dispute in the North between the Percy family of Northumberland and the Neville family of Westmorland, and the open hostilities in the West Country between the Courtenays and the Bonvilles. The fact that Percy and Courtenay were fundamentally Lancastrian while Neville and Bonville were generally Yorkist obviously lends credibility to this idea, but what it really hinges on is the question of cause and effect. Rivalries between neighbouring great families were a fact of life. It was the king’s job to sort them out and if necessary to impose a settlement – at any rate to prevent any dispute from metastasising into the wider body politic. When he failed to do so, they sought support elsewhere, which fed into the growing rivalries at the centre. The escalation of private feuds in the 1450s was not so much the cause as the result of the king’s failure to fulfil his primary task: to dispense even-handed justice.

What of the gentry, that indeterminate class of several thousand lesser landholders – knights, esquires and gentlemen – on whose support both king and lords relied as office-holders, upholders and enforcers in the shires? Some historians have thought it crucial that both royal and noble rule, although presented as the exercise of public authority, in fact depended in almost every facet on private authority. How could it be otherwise in a kingdom with no police force or standing army? This was what made kingship so vital, as everyone at the time recognised, for without an acknowledged and effective public authority at the top, competing private interests would soon engulf the state. (Hence the seductive argument that the deposition of so many kings in late medieval England demonstrates not the weakness but the strength of the monarchy.) But when central direction faltered or was manifestly inequitable, as it was in the 1450s, it was increasingly up to the gentry, whose interests were inescapably narrower and more localised than those of the lords, to try to maintain order in the shires. In fact, local gentry families had been assuming greater authority in the shires for a century or more, establishing a monopoly of the chief offices (sheriff and justice of the peace) and an effective public voice through parliamentary representation, and were in a good position to assume more of the responsibility for local peacekeeping, with or without reference to their superiors. In this sense, the Wars of the Roses foreshadowed the Tudor polity, with its court-focused nobility, gentry more directly answerable to the Crown and monarchy raised to a new level of adulation.

That​ John Watts’s The Wars of the Roses: A Medieval Civil War is different from other books on the subject is clear from its subtitle. Watts’s intention is to tackle the wars diachronically, as an exercise in comparative history in which evidence from a civil war in, say, Guinea-Bissau or the Balkans is as likely as the propaganda of the English medieval combatants to provide insights into the way allegiances shift or alliances collapse in a state riven by internal armed conflict. One of Watts’s inspirations is Stathis Kalyvas’s The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006), which stresses the instability of associations between warlords and factions, a consequence of the effective privatisation of politics. This brings into question the whole problem of ‘factions’ (such as ‘Lancastrian’ and ‘Yorkist’) and whether it really makes sense to see the Wars of the Roses through such a lens. The idea of a simple struggle for the Crown between York and Lancaster has long been questioned but Watts is adept at teasing out the implications of this challenge. In particular, he notes that ‘while macro-historical accounts of civil war emphasise pre-existing allegiances, micro-historical accounts show that division was generated as part of the process of these conflicts.’

The essence of Watts’s argument – the book is based on the Lydon Lectures given at Trinity College Dublin – is that historians have too easily been seduced by the narrative artistry of contemporary chroniclers, whose approach was influenced by the Roman historians of the late Republic – Tacitus, Sallust, Suetonius, Cicero and Lucan. The chronicles are full of juicy examples of greed, ambition, covetousness, duplicity and the manipulation of ‘the people’ by scheming politicians. By relying too heavily on these accounts, Watts argues, modern historians have become accustomed to an overarching view of the wars as a litany of wanton cruelties in pursuit of base desires.

There is another kind of language which, although not ignored, has often been insufficiently noted as a result of the over-reliance on the chronicles: the language of reform and the ‘common weal’ or public good, which is found not only in reports of parliamentary proceedings or conciliar debates, but also in contemporary treatises, poems and letters. According to Watts, this is where the habitual deprecation of the wars as lacking in principle breaks down. There was in fact a constant airing of reformist ideas, not only financial reform (although money was often to the fore), but reform of the royal council and the resumption or extension of royal rights in order to restore the monarchy to a position from which it could exercise effective political leadership – which meant that it was the king who should be the chief reformer of his government. What’s more, this emphasis yielded results, first during Edward IV’s generally peaceful and low-tax second reign, and then, after the hiatus of 1483-85, under Henry VII.

Watts analyses the ‘atmosphere of division’ that pervaded the body politic during the wars, noting that individuals and families often changed sides, multiple times in some cases, with dynastic considerations seeming to play a negligible part in their decisions. Serial law-breakers failed to be punished by an ineffective monarchy, and the lords found it increasingly difficult to hold the middle ground, despite an evident desire to do so. This was not, Watts argues, unscrupulous scheming of the sort depicted by most of the chroniclers. Rather, the lords were driven by the ‘climatic’ sense of vulnerability and recrimination and the failure of successive well-meaning proposals for reform to find a way of protecting their private and familial interests: ‘Only those who were most indelibly associated with one side or the other faced clear choices, and there were very few of these.’ Fear was self-perpetuating, and only once its overriding cause – the political vacuum at the top – was removed, could the wars end. It was not until 1509, when the first Tudor king, Henry VII, was unquestioningly succeeded by the second, Henry VIII, that the country could really exhale.

The novelty of Watts’s argument is less evident in its formulation than in its application to his chosen subject. After all, 14th-century chroniclers also larded their texts with neo-Roman exempla: Thomas Walsingham, the great St Albans chronicler and classical scholar, portrays Edward III’s decline and Richard II’s rule in much the same human terms as his mid-15th century counterparts. The language of reform and the common good was established in England by the mid-15th century, not just in times of conflict but also in times of domestic peace, as the parliamentary and conciliar records of the time bear witness. Yet there is no doubt that this more sophisticated and rigorous questioning of the sources has nudged forward the debate about the Wars of the Roses. The comparative perspective is a useful one, and it should encourage historians of other periods – especially medievalists – to do something similar. But it seems unlikely to change the popular, ‘Shakespearean’ view. The wars have their time-honoured place in England’s history: the death throes of what Renaissance humanists effectively stigmatised as the ‘dark’ Middle Ages, the sanguinary but necessary purgative that ushered in a modern age of unified kingdoms and powerful monarchs leading eventually to the establishment of liberal democracy – or as Henry James put it, the ‘Wars of the Roses, with battles and blood in the streets, and then the long quietude of the respectable centuries, all cornfields and magistrates and vicars’. Well, not quite yet. There was a Reformation and another civil war to negotiate first.