king’s troops, made a triumphant entry into London and held
the city for two days. He seized and beheaded Lord Saye, the
treasurer, and several other unpopular persons, and might have
continued his dictatorship for some time if the Kentish mob
that followed him had not fallen to general pillage and arson.
This led to the same results that had been seen in Tyler’s day.
The propertied classes in London took arms to suppress anarchy,
and beat the insurgents out of the city. Cade, striving to keep
up the rising outside the walls, was killed in a skirmish a month
later, and his bands dispersed.
But the troubles of England were only just beginning; the protest against the misgovernment of Somerset and the rest of the confidants of the king and queen was now taken up by a more important personage than the adventurer Cade. Richard, duke of York, the heir Richard, duke of York, heads the opposition. to the claims of the house of Mortimer—his mother was the sister of the last earl of March—now placed himself at the head of the opposition. He had plausible grounds for doing so; though he had distinguished himself in the French wars, and was, since the death of Humphrey of Gloucester, the first prince of the blood royal, he had been ignored and flouted by the king’s ministers, who had sent him into a kind of honourable banishment as lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and had forbidden him to re-enter the realm. When, in defiance of this mandate, he came home and announced his intention of impeaching Somerset, he took the first step which was to lead to the Wars of the Roses.
Yet he was a cautious and in the main a well-intentioned prince, and the extreme moderation of his original demands seems to prove that he did not at first aim at the crown. He merely required that Somerset and his friends should be dismissed from office and made to answer for their misgovernment. Though he backed his demands by armed demonstration—twice calling out his friends and retainers to support his policy—he carefully refrained for five long years from actual violence. Indeed in 1452 he consented to abandon his protests, and to lend his aid to the other party for a great national object, the recovery of Guienne. For in the previous year Charles VII. had dealt with Bordeaux and Bayonne as he had already dealt with Normandy, and had met with no better resistance while completing the conquest. Six months’ experience of French rule, however, had revealed to the Bordelais how much they had lost when they surrendered. Their old loyalty to the house of Plantagenet burst once more into flame; they rose in arms and called for aid to England. For a moment the quarrel of York and Somerset was suspended, and the last English army that crossed the seas during the Hundred Years’ War landed in Guienne, joined the insurgents, and for a time swept all before it. But there seemed to be a curse on whatever Henry VI. and Somerset took in hand. On the 17th of July 1453 the veteran earl of Shrewsbury and the greater part of his Anglo-Gascon host were Battle of Castillon. Loss of Guienne. cut to pieces at the hard-fought battle of Castillon. Bordeaux, though left to defend itself, held out for eighty days after Talbot’s defeat and death, and then made its final submission to the French. The long struggle was over, and England now retained nothing of her old transmarine possessions save Calais and the Channel Islands. The ambition of Henry V. had finally cost her the long-loyal Guienne, as well as all the ephemeral conquests of his own sword.
The last crowning disaster of the administration of the favourites of Henry VI. put an end to the chance that a way out of domestic strife might be found in the vigorous prosecution of the French war. For the next twenty years the battles of England were to be fought on her own soil, and between her own sons. It was a righteous punishment for her interference in the unnatural strife of Orleanists and Burgundians that the struggle between York and Lancaster was to be as bitter and as bloody as that between the two French factions.
V. The Wars of the Roses (1453–1497)
The Wars of the Roses have been ascribed to many different causes by different historians. To some their origin is mainly constitutional. Henry VI., it is argued, had broken the tacit compact which the house of Lancaster had made with the nation; instead of committing the administration of the realm Origin of the Wars of the Roses. to ministers chosen for him by, or at least approved by, his parliament, he persisted in retaining in office persons like Suffolk and Somerset, who had forfeited the confidence of the people by their many failures in war and diplomacy, and were suspected of something worse than incapacity. They might not be so personally odious as the favourites of Edward II. or of Henry III., but they were even more dangerous to the state, because they were not foreign adventurers but great English peers. In spite of the warnings given by the assault on Suffolk in 1450, by Jack Cade’s insurrection, and by the first armed demonstrations of Richard of York in 1450 and 1452, the king persisted in keeping his friends in office, and they had to be removed by the familiar and forcible methods that had been applied in earlier ages by the lords ordainers or the lords appellant. Undoubtedly there is much truth in this view of the situation; if Henry VI., or perhaps we should rather say, if his queen Margaret of Anjou, had been content to accept ministries in which the friends of Richard of York were fairly represented, it is probable that he might have died a king, and have transmitted his crown to his natural heir. But this explanation of the Wars of the Roses is not complete; it accounts for their outbreak, but not for their long continuance.
According to another school the real key to the problem is
simply the question of the succession to the crown. If the
wedlock of Henry VI. and Margaret of Anjou had
been fruitful during the first few years after their
marriage, no one would have raised the question of a
Claims of the duke of York to the crown.
change of dynasty. But when they remained childless
for seven years, and strong suspicion arose that there was a
project on foot to declare the Beauforts heirs to the throne,
the claim of Richard of York, as the representative of the houses
of Clarence and March, was raised by those who viewed the
possible accession of the incapable and unpopular Somerset with
terror and dislike. When once the claims of York had been
displayed and stated by his imprudent partisan, Thomas Yonge,
in the parliament of 1451, there was no possibility of hiding the
fact that in the strict legitimate line of succession he had a better
claim than the reigning king. He disavowed any pretensions
to the crown for nine years; it was only in 1460 that he set forth
his title with his own mouth. But his friends and followers were
not so discreet; hence when a son was at last born to Henry
and Margaret, in 1453, the succession question was already
in the air and could no longer be ignored. If the claim of
Birth of Edward, prince of Wales.
Queen Margaret.
York was superior to that of Lancaster in the eyes of a considerable
part of the nation, it was no longer possible to
consider the problem solved by the birth of a direct
heir to the actual occupant of the throne. Though
Duke Richard behaved in the most correct fashion,
acknowledged the infant Edward as prince of Wales, and made
no attempt to assert dynastic claims during his two regencies
in 1454 and 1455–1456, yet the queen and her partisans already
looked upon him as a pretender to the throne. It is this fact
which accounts for the growing bitterness of the Yorkist and
Lancastrian parties during the last years of Henry VI.
Margaret believed herself to be defending the rights
of her son against a would-be usurper. Duke Richard,
on the other hand, considered himself as wrongfully oppressed,
and excluded from his legitimate position as a prince of the blood
and a chief councillor of the crown. Nor can there be any
doubt that the queen took every opportunity of showing her
suspicion of him, and deliberately kept him and his friends from
sharing in the administration of the realm. This might have
been more tolerable if the Lancastrian party had shown any
governing power; but both while Somerset was their leader,
down to his death in the first battle of St Albans, and while in
1456–1459 Exeter, Wiltshire, Shrewsbury and Beaumont were
the queen’s trusted agents, the condition of England was deplorable.
As a contemporary chronicler wrote, “the realm was
out of all good governance—as it has been many days before:
