An Alternative History of Britain : the War of the Roses

266 Pages·2013·1.65 MB·English

by  Venning

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Barnsley
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S70 2AS

Copyright © Timothy Venning 2013
9781783468959

The right of Timothy Venning to be identified as Author of this Work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.

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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One - Before 1453: Henry’s Degree of Culpability. Holy or
Incompetent?
Chapter Two - The Yorkist Reaction: From Control in 1453 to Deposition in
1461. Inevitable?
Chapter Three - The Yorkist Regime, 1461–83: Insecurity and Alternatives
Chapter Four - The Fatal Blow to an Otherwise Stable Yorkist Government:
The Early Death of Edward IV?
Chapter Five - The Fall of the House of York, 1483–5
Chapter Six - The Afterglow of the ‘Sun of York’, 1485–1525: A Possible
Yorkist Restoration?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
With thanks as usual to my editors at Pen and Sword–Phil Sidnell for his support
for the ‘Alternative History’ series and Ting Baker for her painstaking work on
the text.

Introduction
The final thirty years of the ‘Plantagenet’ dynasty–a surname for the family
incidentally invented by Richard, Duke of York and his supporters in the 1450s
to emphasize their superior dynastic lineage to their rivals–was an unprecedented
era of political instability in England. In previous centuries the smooth (or not)
transfer of power from each monarch to his son or brother, usually his own
choice as heir, had been broken only once when childless and autocratic 32-year-
old Richard II was overthrown in an invasion by his cousin Henry of
Bolingbroke (Henry IV) in 1399. Henry had claimed to be Richard’s rightful
heir, as son of the next-senior male offspring of Edward III to leave a male heir,
Edward’s third surviving son Duke John of Lancaster (John ‘of Gaunt’). But his
‘election’ by an assembly of nobles excluded the rights of Edmund Mortimer, the
grandson–daughter’s son–of Edward III’s second son, Duke Lionel of Clarence,
who was only a child at the time so his accession would have led to the
instability of a regency. Indeed, Edmund’s claim was not even tested at the
election; the ‘Salic Law’ theory that a woman could not inherit or transmit rights
to a throne did not apply in England. The feeling that Edmund had been cheated
by the illegal usurpation of Henry’s ‘Lancastrian’ line led to assorted plots and
rebellions in his name under Henry IV and later an attempt to murder Henry V,
but then these faded away as the Lancastrian throne became more secure and led
a successful war to pursue its rights to the throne of France (which ironically
relied on the legality of succession via a female line, namely via Edward III’s
mother, Isabella).
But the incapacity and misjudgements of the unwarlike and allegedly
unworldly Henry VI and his coterie of favourites led to renewed dynastic
challenges after the humiliating loss of France in 1450–3. As we shall see, this
was largely stimulated by the exclusion of powerful nobles from decision-
making at court and the fruits of office by Henry’s clique, led by the junior
Lancastrian line of Beaufort, and was thus politically opportunistic. Dynastic
luck and the shifting sands of politics resulted in the current heir of Edmund
Mortimer’s line, his sister Anne’s son Duke Richard of York, being the leader of
the politico-military ‘opposition’ to Henry VI’s disastrous governance in the