THE WARS OF THE ROSES

1420 marks the high-water mark of English influence on the continent of Europe. The famous battle of Agincourt in 1415 had been one of those relatively few mediæval battles (Hastings, Bannockburn, Bouvines, Tannenberg) that had been utterly decisive, with large numbers of the French nobility killed. It took the English king Henry V a few more years of campaigning; but in the Treaty of Troyes, he was recognised as regent and heir to the French throne, a position he cemented by marrying the daughter of the French king Charles VI. Since Charles was old, often ill, and suffered from bouts of insanity, it would not be long before Henry ruled both England and France.

One of the great "what if?"s of history. Because against all expectations, Henry died of dysentery at the age of 35 in 1422, some two months before Charles. True, he left an infant son Henry, who was legally entitled to inherit his father's claims. However, royal infants were always a problem in those times, especially when Charles had an adult son, the Dauphin, who unsurprisingly thought that he ought to inherit the throne and who could rally French support. Backed by the messianic Joan of Arc, the French soon started nibbling away at English territorial positions in northern France. Within 30 years, the only English possession left on French soil was the port of Calais and an enclave around it.

English nobles used to strutting their stuff abroad were annoyed at their loss of lands, titles and prestige. A strong English king could probably have kept them in hand. But the problem of the royal infant grew up to become the problem of the royal king, since Henry VI had inherited his grandfather's tendency to ill health and periodic insanity. The stage was set for 30 years of civil war, as those nobles who supported the royal house of Lancaster battled against those who supported the house of York, the most powerful dukedom.

Might was important in the Middle Ages, but so too was legitimacy. A man might be strong enough to become king, but he also had to have some sort of right, and here the respective rights of York and Lancaster become complicated. Go back from the fifteenth to the fourteenth century, and King Edward III had seven sons, two of whom died in infancy. The line of the first survivor ended in Richard II, who was pushed from the throne and murdered by Henry IV (Henry V's father), originally the Duke of Lancaster, the line of the third. The Duke of York's line was the fourth son, and so should have been subordinate under the rules of primogeniture. However, the line of the second son (the Earl of March) ended in a girl, who eventually married the Duke of York. So the slightly abstruse question became whether York could leapfrog Lancaster in the hierarchy by taking over the rights of March, which he had acquired through his marriage.

A similar question had resulted in the Hundred Years' War between England and France, of which Agincourt was a part. Now the battles were on English soil. They went one way and then the other before Henry Tudor won at Bosworth Field in 1485 and founded a new dynasty, the Tudors. All that remained were the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster, which are still sported today at cricket matches between the two counties.

Walter Blotscher