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Chester York

In October 1460 Richard asserted that the Mortimer claim to the throne was better than that of the House of Lancaster, and declared himself the true King of England. In December of the same year he was defeated and killed at Wakefield. His son, Edward, who became head of the House of York, was then eighteen years old. Richard of York had married a lady of the very powerful family of Neville, which held the earldoms of Warwick and Salisbury. The Nevilles therefore belonged to his side, and their enemies, the Percies, were Lancastrians.

Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, with the aid of young Edward of York, inflicted a crushing defeat on Henry's army at Towton in Yorkshire. Earlier in the same month (March 1461) Edward had been proclaimed king, he now became king in actual fact. Henry's queen, Margaret of Anjou, continued to hold out in Northumberland for some time; but by 1465 she had fled to France, and Henry was a prisoner in the Tower.

Edward was at this time scarcely more than a boy, not yet quite twenty, and his brilliant, powerful, and experienced uncle Warwick may well have expected to control affairs. He was destined to be undeceived. Edward had plans of his own. Meanwhile, however, there was much to be done. Margaret was still in the north, where fighting went on for some time, and peace had to be made with possible Lancastrian allies. Truces were arranged with Burgundy and with Scotland, and Warwick was negotiating a marriage by which he hoped to secure French friendship, when his plans were upset by Edward's anouncement that he was already married to Elizabeth Woodville, a lady by no means his equal in birth, and, moreover, of Lancastrian and Burgundian origin. The new Queen's family, a large one, was used to build up a power which might rival that of the Nevilles. Woodviiles were wedded to suitable heiresses, the friendship with Burgundy cemented by the marriage of Duke Charles to Edward's sister Margaret. Warwick then allied himself with the King's brother Clarence, who, against the King's will, married Warwick's daughter. There was first a northern insurrection and then a battle which resulted in the imprisonment of the King. Edward, however, knew how to wait. Before long the tables were turned. Warwick and Clarence fled to France, and we see a strange alliance between Warwick and his ancient enemy Margaret, the slayer of his father. This amazing combination succeeded for a short time. Edward fled abroad, the unhappy Henry was taken from the Tower and once more placed upon the throne, but before long Edward was back, helped by his Burgundian brother-in-law, marched to London, defeated and slew Warwick at Barnet, and, a few weeks later, defeated Margaret and slew her son at Tewkesbury.

The Wars of the Roses had come to their end. Edward's troubles had not. He still had to reckon with the treacherous and quarrelsome Clarence, who was disputing over the Neville inheritance with his brother Gloucester, the husband of Warwick's other daughter, and with the failure of the French expedition undertaken in part payment for Burgundian support. Clarence was arrested and executed; terms were made with France; for the remaining years of his reign Edward ruled the country with a strong hand. His early Parliaments had granted him an allowance, and thus helped him to dispense with the necessity for summoning their successors. He managed, as his Lancastrian predecessors had not, to " live of his own," partly with the help of the allowance made to him by the French King after the treaty of Pecquigny in 1475, partly by his own trading ventures, partly by forced contributions from his subjects. His character and career show a strange mixture of strength and weakness, of ability to rule, to fight, or to give way to self. indulgence and open vice. He is the man of the period, handsome, interested in art and literature, in beauty and good living, entering into the new developments of trade and commerce, a fine general, a remarkable organiser, and a ruler of ability. On the other hand, he lacked industry, he abandoned himself openly to pleasure of all kinds, and his early death is said to have been due in no small measure to his entire lack of self-control and his reckless self-indulgence.

His twelve-year-old son, born in the sanctuary of Westminster while Edward was in exile in France, was not destined to rule. Edward's brother, Richard of Gloucester, playing upon the general dislike and jealousy of the Woodvilles, had himself proclaimed Protector, proceeded to remove all those who were likely to he dangerous opponents, and before long occupied the throne. The two little princes, Edward V and his brother, soon disappeared; a conspiracy headed by Richard's late ally, Buckingham, together with some of the Woodvilles, led to an unsuccessful rebellion and to Buckingham's execution. The rebels had declared themselves upon the side of Henry of Richmond, the heir, through his Beaufort mother, of the Lancastrian claims to the throne, and a relation through his grandmother, that young widow of Henry V who had married Owen Tudor, of the house of Valois. He was clearly an opponent to be feared, and Richard worked hard to secure his own position, strengthening the navy, making an alliance with the Duke of Brittany, and driving Henry from Brittany to France. A truce, too, was made with Scotland, and Parliament seemed perfectly willing to grant Richard abundant means. But only a year after his accession the death of his Neville wife weakened his hold upon the Neville connection, and that of his only son left him without an heir. There were threats of invasion on all sides.

In the summer of 1485 Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven, and at Bosworth Richard fell, deserted by many of his own supporters. The crown for the sake of which he had slain his two young nephews had been his for only a brief two years two years of unceasing struggle, of murders and executions, of desperate efforts to secure a position won by violent and unscrupulous means.

For the greater part of a century English kings and English nobles had been fighting for the French and English crowns. What had been the life of the ordinary people, the men and women who were not kings and nobles, whose fortunes nevertheless depended in part upon the fate of York or Lancaster, upon the English attempts to gain the throne of France . Life cannot have been particularly comfortable in a country where lawless ex-soldiers, outlaws, and robbers wandered about, in which were fought ruthless civil wars and private wars between the armed bands of great nobles. It was still an England largely covered by forest and marsh, to outward appearance but little changed from the England of earlier centuries. The roads and bridges were possibly even worse than they had been in earlier days, for the heavy costs of the wars left but little money to spare for keeping roads and bridges in repair. Moving about the country must have been a most uncomfortable business, and often dangerous as well as uncomfortable. There were bad harvests and terribly hard winters, pestilence, and towards the end of the century the first appearance of that sweating sickness which was to play such havoc with English lives.

On the other hand, it seems true to say that the wars were to a great extent carried on by the nobles, by their paid retainers, and by semi-professional soldiers, and that the fighting did not affect ordinary life nearly as much as we, reading about it to-day, would expect. Most people lived stationary lives in the villages, not thinking of travelling, of doing anything very different from that which their fathers and grandfathers for many generations had done, The bad harvests affected them; so did the bad weather; but pestilence was largely an affair of the towns. The villagers still lived in what we should regard as one-roomed hovels, made of mud and timber .

There are fine parish churches dating from the fifteenth century all over England, but more especially in the wool-growing areas, and one of the things worth remembering is that during this period the art of brick. making, forgotten since Roman days, came back to England from Flanders, and that, with the aid of bricks, men who could not afford to build stone chimneys, but could use the new cheap material, could clear their houses of the smoke which otherwise must have been a constant accompaniment of daily life. Cottages no doubt often remained much as they had always been, but farmhouses began to have brick chimneys; all over the country there was an outburst of building, and castles gave way to. mansions. .There must have been a considerable amount of building in the growing towns, some of which remains for us to see and, although experts regard fifteenth-century architecture as inferior to that of the fourteenth century .

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