Hello, my name is Sean Cunningham and I’m one of the medieval record specialists at The National Archives.
Today we’re going to look at documents from the medieval government’s archive that relate to the Wars of the Roses. This was a period of civil war in the second half of the 15th century, roughly 1450 to 1500, when the right to rule England was disputed by nobles who shared royal ancestry. The name comes from the rose symbols that were used by rival claimants at various stages of the wars
A little bit before this conflict, in the mid 1430s, England under, the teenage King Henry VI, was one of Europe’s most powerful nations No one challenged his position, and the country expected him to follow in the footsteps of his father Henry V, who had reasserted English control over much of France by 1422, and this was part of a much larger conflict known as the Hundred Years War. But the English ruling family, called the Lancastrians, had seized the crown by force in 1399. And while things went well for England, their takeover of power was not questioned.
As Henry VI matured however, his weak leadership and rapid losses in the wars with France in the 1440s encouraged other lords to assert their own claim to be king, as a solution to England’s growing list of problems. England needed a leader.
King Henry’s cousin, Richard Plantagenet, the Duke of York, was an experienced politician, military commander and the senior noble in the realm. In March 1452, he campaigned to be named as Henry VI’s heir. In his frustration, even raising a force that confronted the king at Dartford in Kent. But York miscalculated the size of his support and was forced to back down and renewed his oath of loyalty to King Henry.
The situation soon changed quickly. In August 1453, England’s final military defeat in France caused King Henry to suffer a mental collapse. This incapacity lasted for 18 months, and opened the door for the Duke of York to renew his claim to power. In March 1454, York was appointed as England’s protector until the King recovered.
When King Henry did recover in January 1455, events moved rapidly once again. He began to reverse York’s decisions, a move that deepened the political hostility within England’s ruling elites. This rivalry set the scene for the events recorded in our first document.
Now, let’s take a look at our first document and work out what it’s all about. Well, it’s a report on the first battle of St. Albans, in May 1455, and it’s probably the first eyewitness account in English of a medieval battle. It’s handwritten in English and looks like a small pamphlet. It was probably attached to a private letter. It was written at the end of May 1455, but was not discovered until 1824 when it was found among the records stored in the Tower of London. And we know who produced it because of handwriting comparisons. It was probably Sir William Stonor. He was a steward, or land manager, of the Abbey of St. Albans and so was in the town, and he probably wrote this document himself as an eyewitness to the fighting.
The document explains how the Duke of York and his friends with up to 7,000 troops, intercepted the King at St. Albans as the royal court travelled towards London from Leicester. After a long standoff, as tensions rose, the King displayed the royal banner or battle flag in the hope of deterring violence. Opposing this banner by force within England could be seen as treason. The king told York and his army to depart, but York realized that his group would be arrested, possibly tried but most likely executed, and so he resolved to fight anyway to eliminate his enemies. The roads into the town were blocked, but Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, called the Kingmaker, broke through back gardens to reach the centre and attack the troops surrounding the King. Henry VI was wounded in the neck with an arrow, and the Duke of Buckingham in the face. Other lords were hunted down and killed in the street including the Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland, and Lord Clifford, just the people that York wanted to target. Fewer than 60 men died, and although King Henry agreed to speak to York, who proclaimed his loyalty, The killing set a pattern of violence and revenge that would last for over 40 years.
Turning to our second document reveals more about the issue at the root of the wars, who had the right to be king? It has the reference C 65/105, and it’s a roll of proceedings in parliament. The part we are interested in is the text of the petition from Richard Duke of York setting out his ancestry and claim to the throne, and the responses to it Parliament opened on Tuesday the 7th of October 1460 and the Duke’s claim was presented to the lords in Parliament on the 16th of October.
The document starts by showing that York was allowed to put his case in parliament but only the King could respond to such a petition. It then describes York’s royal ancestry back to the early 1200s and sets out the specific lines of descent from the sons of King Edward III that York felt gave him royal precedence over Henry VI and the Lancastrian family.
The King eventually received and discussed the petition with his Lord Chancellor and that officer was ordered to collect evidence to counter the Duke’s claim. The Duke of York and the other lords then debated the claims, and agreed that he did have the right to be king. York would become Henry VI heir, disinheriting the King’s young son, Prince Edward. And the text finishes with the words of agreement known as the act of accord made between the King and the Duke of York that explained how and why his claim should be allowed. York acknowledged that Henry should stay as king for his lifetime and vowed not to stir up further trouble to destabilize the rule of the country. But the crown should descend in York’s family after Henry died. And this was a monumental decision by the Lords, and its inclusion in the parliamentary record shows that it was seen as something of the highest importance to the country.
York’s achievement was spectacular, but it only hardened opposition to him in the Lancastrian royal family. Henry VI’s wife, Queen Margaret, would never agree to her son’s disinheritance. And it was the Queen who, from then, on led the political and military campaign against the Duke of York.
His death and that of one of his sons at the Battle of Wakefield on the 30th December all but erased this agreement for the succession of the crown. And it was York’s eldest son, Edward the Earl of March, who rescued his father’s cause when the act of accord was still in place, in the last of three big battles before the end of March 1461. Edward successfully defeated the Lancastrian leadership at Towton near Tadcaster in Yorkshire, and he became King Edward IV, and he looked to have secured the royal inheritance for which his father had worked so hard.
Our final document comes from a later period of the wars when more shocking political changes plunged the country back into conflict.
To fill in the gaps a little, for much of the 1460s, Edward IV fought hard to end any remnants of support for Henry VI.
Things looked to be going well, until his choice of the Lancastrian widow Elizabeth Woodville as his new queen upset plans for a marriage alliance with France and disappointed many of the king’s friends, as Edward gave roles to his wife’s family, his great ally Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick who we first saw back in May 1455 found himself frozen out.
Warwick amazingly allied with the fugitive Queen Margaret, the Lancastrians, and Edward’s eldest brother, George the Duke of Clarence, to bring Henry VI back as king in 1470. But the exiled King Edward gathered enough support to invade once more and recover the throne by force in the spring of 1471, a period during which Henry VI and his son Prince Edward both died.
The Yorkists looked secure, and the rest of the 1470s were relatively calm. King Edward’s younger brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester, inherited the power of the Neville family across northern England, and built a loyal following among the lords and people there.
But when King Edward unexpectedly died in April 1483, it was Gloucester who became protector for the dead king’s eldest son, the 12-year-old Prince Edward. But Gloucester soon acted with his allies to purge the power of Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s family and to arrest those who had a strong interest in seeing Prince Edward crowned quickly. The prince’s coronation was therefore postponed again and again and Gloucester swiftly took the crown as Richard III in June 1483. Prince Edward and his younger brother Richard, the princes in the tower, soon disappeared within the Tower of London.
Many southern lords and knights loyal to Edward IV and his son rebelled against Richard, as the Yorkist network split apart. It was in response to this uprising, which saw the first appearance of Henry Tudor as a royal candidate, that our final record was created.
The document is known as a warrant for the great seal. It’s a document sent from one part of government to another with the text needed to create a letter that would be sent out with the King’s great seal attached. That seal, the great seal, was the strongest form of royal authentication for a grant, instruction, or licence.
And this example is unusual because the king, Richard III, had intervened in the bureaucratic process to scribble his own words onto a document already prepared by one of his clerks. The difference between the clerk’s careful writing and the king’s rapid writing is interesting, not only because evidence of medieval royal handwriting is rare, but because it supplies an insight into the king’s direct thoughts and maybe his personality too.
And we know it’s got a specific date of the 12th October 1483 What it says exactly is that the king was travelling towards the north when news broke out in October 1483 of a rebellion by his former right-hand man the Duke of Buckingham.
Richard wrote to his Lord Chancellor in Westminster to ask for the great seal to be sent northwards to him in Lincoln. Now, Richard knew that the chancellor had been ill and so asks after his health and has sent a personal servant, a herald called Gloucester, to carry the seal back to Lincoln so that Richard could better organize the defeat of his rebels.
Richard’s own additions explain how the King hopes that his chancellor is well and possibly well enough to travel himself and deliver the news in person. But Richard assures his friend that he is ready to resist the malice of him “that had best cause to be true, the Duke of Buckingham, the most untrue creature living.”
In the end, Buckingham was captured and executed at Salisbury on the 1st of November without the chance to defend himself to the King, in person or even at a trial. In defeating this rebellion, Richard should have gone on to govern the country securely for many years. Yet he could not be entirely safe while Henry Tudor remained a figurehead for the Lancastrian cause by this stage.
Richard III welcomed the chance to defeat Tudor’s invading force when it actually landed in August 1485. But fortune took another unexpected turn and the King was killed on the battlefield at Bosworth on the 22nd of August, his death ushering in the Tudor period, as Henry Tudor became King Henry VII.