Abstract
Even historians of the highest calibre put their reputations on the line when they choose to investigate the causes of wars, as A. J. P. Taylor proved so dramatically in 1961 with the launch of his controversial Origins of the Second World War. Lesser practitioners need entertain fewer qualms. Nevertheless, the task is always awesome, particularly when, as with the Wars of the Roses, there is no agreement even on the date the wars commenced. 1399 long enjoyed favour as their true beginning: both Lancastrian and Yorkist partisans were wont to find the seeds of conflict in the upheavals of that year; Tudor writers, too, felt powerfully drawn to 1399 as the commencement of almost a century of domestic turmoil; and, in 1888, William Denton could still confidently declare that ‘the deposition and murder of Richard II and the usurpation of Henry of Lancaster led to the struggle between two branches of the royal family, which is known as the War [sic] of the Roses’.1 In the twentieth century, however, 1399 has largely been abandoned and, instead, historians have offered a variety of dates between 1450 and 1459.
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Notes and References
W. Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century (1888), p. 114.
C. A. J. Armstrong, ‘Politics and the Battle of St Albans, 1455’, BIHR, XXXIII (1960), 7.
A. Goodman, The Wars of the Roses (1981), p. 8.
J. Stevenson (ed.), Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France, II (R S, 1864), p. 770.
A. J. Pollard, The Wars of the Roses (1988), p. 19.
B. Wilkinson, Constitutional History of England in the Fifteenth Century (1964), p. 50 (for the Neville judgements and Jean de Waurin);
EHD, 281–2 (for the English Chronicle); B. P. Wolffe, Henry VI (1981), p. 19 (for Whetehamstede’s Register).
EHD, 269–70 (York’s 1452 manifesto); J. Gairdner (ed.), The Paston Letters, 6 vols (1904), II, pp. 290–2 (Norfolk’s 1453 petition); Wilkinson, Constitutional History, 134–6 (1460 manifesto); Polydore Vergil, 93.
EHD, 526 (Fortescue), 281–2 (English Chronicle); Wilkinson, Constitutional History, 134–6 (1460 manifesto).
Ibid., 82–6 (Cade’s manifesto), 50 (Gascoigne), 131 (Whetehamstede’s Register); EHD, 282 (English Chronicle).
EHD, 274–5 (Hardyng’s Chronicle and English Chronicle); Wilkinson, Constitutional History, 134–6 (1460 manifesto); C. Plummer (ed.), The Governance of England (Oxford, 1885), pp. 128–9 (Fortescue); Gairdner, Paston Letters, I, 103–4 (York’s 1452 accusations), II, 290–2 (Norfolk’s 1453 petition); Polydore Vergil, 87, 94.
J. R. Lander, The Wars of the Roses (1965), pp. 63–4 (allegations against Oldhall); Wilkinson, Constitutional History, pp. 114 (Annates on Young), 128 (Chancery memorandum), 131 (Whetehamstede’s Register); EHD, 269–70 (York’s 1452 manifesto), 264, 282 (English Chronicle on Cade and Margaret of Anjou).
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D. Hume, The History of England (1834), III, pp. 307–8; Plummer, Governance, pp. 15–16;
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K. B. McFarlane, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, Raleigh Lecture on History, Proceedings of the British Academy, L (1964),
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R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (2nd edn, Gloucester, 1986), especially pp. 27–8.
M. Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages (1973), especially pp. 449–51;
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S.J. Payling, ‘The Ampthill Dispute: a Study in Aristocratic Lawlessness and the Breakdown of Lancastrian Government’, EHR, CIV (1989), 881–907.
P. R. Coss, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revised’, PP, CXXV (1988), 27–64;
M. Hicks, ‘Bastard Feudalism: Society and Politics in Fifteenth-Century England’, Richard III and his Rivals: Magnates and their Motives in the Wars of the Roses (1991), pp. 1–40;
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Keen, Later Middle Ages, 451; C. Ross, The Wars of the Roses (1976), especially pp. 37–42;
Pollard, Wars, 65; Storey, Lancaster, X; see also Storey’s ‘Bastard Feudalism Revisited’, Bulletin of the Manorial Society of Great Britain, III (1983), 7–15.
Keen, Later Middle Ages, 454–6; Wolffe, Henry VI, especially 133–4.
M. K. Jones, ‘Somerset, York and the Wars of the Roses’, EHR, XIV (1989), 285–307.
J. R. Lander, ‘Introduction: aspects of fifteenth-century studies’, in Crown and Nobility 1450–1509 (1976), p. 19; Pollard, Wars, 55–6;
G. L. Harriss, ‘Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England’, PP, CXXXVIII (1993), 40.
M. Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems 1460–1571 (1973), p. 15;
R. A. Griffiths, ‘The Sense of Dynasty in the Reign of Henry VI’, in C. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (Gloucester, 1979), pp. 13–36; Pollard, Wars, 45, 65–6.
Wolffe, Henry VI, 25–83; R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI (1981), pp. 11–228.
Lander, Wars, 39–41; see also R. Lovatt, ‘A Collector of Apocryphal Anecdotes: John Blacman Revisited’, in A.J. Pollard (ed.), Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History (1984), pp. 172–97.
Polydore Vergil, 70; J. W. McKenna, ‘Piety and Propaganda: the Cult of Henry VI’, in B. Rowland (ed.), Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of R. H Robbins (Kent, Ohio, 1974), pp. 72–88.
B. P. Wolffe, ‘The Personal Rule of Henry VI’, in S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross and R. A. Griffiths (eds), Fifteenth-century England 1399–1509 (Manchester, 1972), pp. 29–48, and Wolffe, Henry VI, 19.
Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 11–228.
Wilkinson, Constitutional History, 82–6; see also I. M. W. Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford, 1991).
Storey, Lancaster, 34–5 (remarks of 1442, 1447 and 1450 on Henry VI); J. Blackman, Henry the Sixth (Cambridge, 1919), p. 38;
A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, II, c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (1982), p. 384 (Whetehamstede’s Register).
Patricia-Anne Lee, ‘Reflections of Power: Margaret of Anjou and the Dark Side of Queenship’, Renaissance Quarterly, XXXIX (1986), 183–217; EHD, 272–3 (newsletter of January 1454).
C. Rawcliffe, ‘Richard Duke of York, the King’s “obeisant liegeman”: a New Source for the Protectorates of 1454 and 1455’, HR, LX (1987), 232–9.
A.J. Pollard, ‘Percies, Nevilles and the Wars of the Roses’, History Today, XLIII (September 1993), 42–8.
T. B. Pugh, ‘Richard, Duke of York, and the Rebellion of Henry Holand, Duke of Exeter, in May 1454’, HR, LXIII (1990), 248–64 (especially 261, for John Benet’s Chronicle on York’s 1st Protectorate);
R. A. Griffiths, ‘The King’s Council and the First Protectorate of the Duke of York, 1450–1454’, EHR, XCIX (1984), 67–82, reprinted in King and Country, 305–20.
Storey, Lancaster, p. 159.
K. R. Dockray, ‘Japan and England in the Fifteenth Century: The Onin War and the Wars of the Roses’, in Ross, Patronage, Pedigree and Power, 143–70 (especially p. 151, for similar sentiments on the origins of the Wars of the Roses).
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© 1995 Keith Dockray
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Dockray, K. (1995). The Origins of the Wars of the Roses. In: Pollard, A.J. (eds) The Wars of the Roses. Problems in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24130-9_4
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