Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > The Wars of the Roses > Status Update

'While it is true that, for most of the time, the Wars caused little suffering to most of the people, as Anthony Goodman pointer out, the indirect financial effect may have been of greater significance than the apparent lack of physical destruction. Soldiers had to be pid; town watches had to be mounted; farmers downed sickles and went off to war even at harvest time.'

'Henry was weak, vacillating, feckless and profligate. At all times he seems to have been like putty in the hands of those nearest to him: a man who always agreed with the last to have spoken with him, he created confusion by contradictory policy decisions and duplicated grants. He seems to have been fundamentally uninterested in the business of ruling and decision making'

'Edward III created an upper nobility, many of whose members became part of the royal family, all of whom were companions in arms and to whom he was less an overlord, more a first among equals. In his own heyday he was brilliantly successful, but later his policy proved damaging to the Crown. The cumulative effect was to surrender elements of judicial, financial, territorial and military power to magnates'

'The events we have recounted had three separate but overlapping characteristics: that of dynastic struggle; that of factional conflict between 'ins' and 'outs'; and that of a series of private vendettas.'

'the wars of 1459-64 and 1469-71 were two stages of the same struggle: the wars of Lancaster and York. On the other hand the wars of 1483-87 were separate in cause, and different in issue: they were wars between York and Tudor. The story and analysis of the Wars of the Roses which follows is thus founded on the interpretation that there were in essence two wars: the first ending in 1471, the second beginning in 1483'

'The fundamental cause, he [McFarlane] argued, lay not in the degeneration or overweening might of the nobility but on the contrary on the undermighty shoulders of Henry VI and the feebleness of central government. Lords and gentry tried to avoid committing themselves, putting a higher premium on survival than loyalty to one house or another, or indeed one magnate or another.'

'He [Charles Plummer] traced the origin of the evil, which he christened bastard feudalism, back to the days of Edward III and asserted that it reached its greatest height during the Lancastrian period. Backed by bands of armed men, the great lords corrupted and perverted the law, overawed parliament and Crown, and prosecuted their own private wars without restraint.'

'As understood in the later-sixteenth century, the Wars of the Roses encompassed 86 years of English history: what happened between the summer of 1399 and the summer of 1485. The key event was the deposition of a lawful king. The consequences were a divine punishment on not just the royal family, but also the whole of England.'

'The twentieth century, especially the last third, had witnessed a major revision of received ideas about the Wars of the Roses. The 30 years 1455-85, it has been argued, were neither years of constant civil strife nor years of uncontrolled anarchy. In terms of open warfare, it has often been repeated, there were no more than 12 or 13 weeks of actual fighting in the whole 30 years.'