	Copyright

Home
Lancaster and York
The Wars of the Roses; Part 1

The Wars of the Roses; Part 1

For the time the nation was too much occupied with the successes of the French war to care about events at home. Herein lay at once the strength and the weakness of Henry V as a statesman. He was a strong and popular king, coming, as it seemed, a gift from heaven at the hour of need. Yet his policy only postponed the evils of the time: it did not cure them. Henry looked backward, and not forward. He returned to the methods of Edward III, French war: the true cure lay in the methods afterwards employed by Henry VII. Henry V did not remedy the evils of feudalism; he only cloked them over. Instead of destroying the retainers and curbing the -nobles, he employed them against a foreign enemy. Employing them only meant increasing their dangerous fighting power. He neglected his opportunity, and Henry VI paid for the neglect. The father sowed the wind and the son reaped the whirlwind.

Until the appearance of the Maid of Orleans in 1428 the system of Henry V went on with scarcely a check: even till the French terms were foolishly rejected at Arras, and Burgundy fell away from the English alliance, the English cause was fairly prosperous. Then came eighteen years of disaster with the usual result. All political parties are ready to take credit: none will admit failure. The steady round of taxes and lost battles, and more taxes and more lost battles, speedily destroyed the reputation of the Government. Had Parliament been an effective body, the unsatisfactory ministers would have been ejected from power in a peaceable manner. But in the fifteenth century Parliament was not effective. It could complain querulously, but it could not act. The only way to overthrow those in power at the court was by intrigue, or, still worse, by rebellion.

For the first twenty-five years of his reign Henry VI was chiefly guided by his uncles, and his cousins the Beauforts. John, Duke of Bedford, was a wise and patriotic statesman, but the care of French affairs gave him no time to mend matters in England. This left the field clear to his brother, Gloucester - that "fair brother Humphrey" whom we have seen Henry V distrust. Gloucester was greedy and self-seeking, and involved himself in bitter quarrels with the Beauforts. This Beaufort family was descended from John of Gaunt's illegitimate marriage with Catharine Swinford. One of them, Henry Beaufort, became Bishop of Winchester and Cardinal: others held, in succession, the title of Earl, and afterwards Duke, of Somerset. All were Lancastrian, as, indeed, was Humphrey of Gloucester, but the two parties were bitterly hostile, struggling for power in the Council of Regency; so far, there was no serious Yorkist party to cause the Lancastrian factions to unite.

The Wars of the Roses; Part 1

Chronology