The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors

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Even when men came to blows, as Beaufort and Humphrey did in 1424, the violence was quickly stopped and the protagonists reprimanded. The end of the last “white rose” would have brought stability to the Tudor monarchy had it not been for the religious squabbles that became a large part of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century.

Her death had more to do with her Plantagenet blood and the fact that she was the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, than with any crime she committed.

Now, celebrated historian Dan Jones describes how the longest reigning British royal family tore itself apart until it was finally replaced by the Tudors. We navigate through several of the key battles during this era, even ones that many not know a lot about. Committed to the Tudor perspective that the conflicts have their origins in the downfall of Richard II? Richard II, having been deposed by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, was murdered in prison during the early days of 1400. Although I felt the author is sympathetic to reasons Richard usurped the throne of his nephew, Edward V.

The princes likely were murdered by Richard, though not by himself, someone closest to him -as they began to be seen less and less to quote from contemporary sources after the summer of ’83 until they disappeared altogether in the autumn of that year. The deal Henry Tudor made with the Edwardian loyalists was that in the event of victory, they would back him as king, and he would marry Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York.Henry VI’s mental problems have left England in a state of instability, which, of course, led to civil war.

The baby king was watched over by two charismatic and extremely ‘royal’ uncles, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The first duke died in 1447, but his heir, the young Henry Holland, was even more closely tied to York’s family: he was married to York’s daughter Anne, and had been in York’s custody when he was a minor. But it does provide a cohesive overview that is essential for anyone looking to study either king in greater depth. It was a powerful and easily grasped story that, by Shakespeare’s day, had already been in circulation for 100 years. But like Henry V, Edward dies young, leaving a child – his twelve-year old son Edward V – as his heir.There is a “Parliament of Devils”, a “Bloody Meadow”, a “Red Gutter” and even a “Love Day”: Henry’s bizarre attempt to reconcile Beauforts and Percys with York and the Nevilles by having them process, arm in arm, through the streets of London. Interesting that Jones is firmly on the "guilty" side of the Richard III debate, though I do wish he'd shared some of the opposing views. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again.

They don’t think of the Wars of the Roses, the bloody, brutal conflict that preceded the Tudor Dynasty. The toddler tantrum that the one year-old king threw on his way to his first parliament in 1423 (only curbed by a sojourn in Staines) was a rare expression of royal will. But, I still struggle to endorse the theory that it has come down to us as a dynastic struggle solely because that’s the way the Tudors wanted to spin it. When Neville defeated a royal army at Northampton, Henry VI was forced to disinherit Prince Edward and appoint York and his descendants to the royal succession. On the jacket of The Hollow Crown, the Tudor rose is portrayed as a grim, five-pointed disc of steel, like a ninja star.While Edward was accustomed to fighting on foot, Warwick was said by one chronicler to prefer to run with his men into battle before mounting on horseback, “and if he found victory inclined to his side, he charged boldly among them; if otherwise he took care of himself in time and provided for his escape. I knew the basic details of the nobility during the Wars of the Roses, but I wanted to understand the complicated historical situation even more than I already did, which led me to reading this book over the span of a week.