- Story of past open to interpretation
- Carefully edited and deceitful version of events
- Not just a version of what happened – more a tapestry of different stories woven together by whoever was in power at the time
- Wars of the Roses was invented by the Tudors to justify their power
- Immortalised by Shakespeare – darkest chapter in English history
- Lancaster and York locked in battle for the crown of England – kings deposed, innocent children murdered, cousin fought against cousin
- 1485 Richard III slain and Henry Tudor took the throne
- Henry VII’s victory hailed the ending of the Medieval period
- Line between fact and fiction often gets blurred
- 1455 Stubbins in Lancashire scene of a legendary battle in the Wars of the Roses beginning with volleys of arrows but ran out of ammunition
- Lancastrians pelted the Yorkists with black pudding – local legend
- Yorkists pelted the Lancastrians with Yorkshire puddings – local legend
- Wars of the Roses in national memory
- History books – rivalry between Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose) – bloody rivalry largely a creation of the Tudors
- 1461 bloodshed real in the middle of a snowstorm at Towton
- Lancastrians started out well but tide turned against them, chased by the Yorkists down the slope to a river and so a massacre began
- Blood stained the snow red, so location became known as the bloody meadow
- Shakespeare portrayed the battle as a bloody Armageddon – represented a country torn apart by war, nothing as bad in our history
- Somme 19,000 British soldiers killed on the first day, Towton 28,000 killed
- 20 years ago Bradford University revealed barbarity of fighting with remains of 43 men killed at Towton
- Head forced down into the spine, poleaxes – exceptional even for the Wars of the Roses
- Skirmishes, but real battles only around 8 in 30 years
- Not ravaged by all-out war – later myth
- Out of 32 years of wars, fighting on lasted a total of 13 weeks
- Story told by the winning side, the history the Tudors wanted us to remember
- Battle of Bosworth 1485 ended the War
- Henry VII emerged as a courageous leader saving the country from the villainous Richard III, emerged as good vs. evil
- Battle mythologised, hard to sort fact from fiction
- Location of battle been changed in the last decade due to chance finds
- Richard III goes into battle wearing a crown, symbol of what’s at stake, enemies admitted he fought courageously getting within a sword’s length of Tudor
- “My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse”
- Richard III killed by a blow to the head
- Richard’s crown discovered in a hawthorn bush and Tudor crowned with it on the battlefield
- This is the story we know because it’s the one Tudor wanted us to remember
- Decisive victory on the battlefield
- Tudor’s enemies still believed he was a usurper and need to legitimise his reign – recorded his version of events
- Henry VII claimed his reign started on 21 August 1485, Battle of Bosworth on 22 August, Henry claimed he was king even before the battle, taking what was rightfully his
- Success didn’t lie in victory on the battlefield but in the way the history would be written
- 18 January 1486 Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV
- New chapter in nation’s history – needed to tell the right story
- One of the most important marriages in history uniting Lancaster and York to heal the nation, once bitter rivals
- Glossed over the inconvenient fact that he had no right to the throne
- Divert attention away from his less-than-royal lineage
- Henry VII’s link to the throne comes from his grandmother Katherine of Valois, with a “dodgy” claim to the throne
- De la Pole family plotting against the Tudors
- Elizabeth of York was the daughter of a king
- Marriage an extraordinary act of reconciliation – propaganda campaign
- Yorkist Edward IV won the throne by defeating his opponent
- Red rose had nothing to do with the house of Lancaster at the time of the wars
- Henry VII adopted the red rose as the symbol of the house of Lancaster, in order to combine it with the white rose and create the Tudor rose
- Tudor rose became symbol of new Tudor dynasty – Henry VII revised history
- Henry VII made king’s college chapel in Cambridge site of Tudor propaganda, began by Henry VI initially but finished by Henry VII
- 1508 Henry VII gave the chapel a cash injection then died the following year
- Greyhound symbol of Margaret Beaufort, dragon highlighting welsh descent, crowned Tudor roses everywhere
- Still talking about it so hugely successful
- Emerging Tudor tale – Henry VII was a conquering hero
- John Rous wrote a history of the wars and about Richard III’s birth – talons, long hair, in the womb for 2 years, hunchbacked
- This is the beginning of the vilification of Richard III, accusations of murders of Henry VI, Edward V and Richard Duke of York as well as Anne Neville
- Malicious, wrathful, envious, “lump of foul deformity” = Richard III
- Telling the truth was less likely to happen if it didn’t suit the reigning monarch
- Rous had previously written in praise of Richard III
- Depicted as Renaissance prince rather than deformed figure of Shakespeare’s plays
- Rous was writing to gain the favour of the people who he was working for
- When Henry VII died Henry VIII made the story his own and kept the Tudor rose symbol, but no question over his right to rule as over his father’s
- Battle of Bosworth – Henry VII defeated Richard III and established Yeomen of the Guard, worried about his own safety
- Henry VIII increased their number from 300 to 600
- Also introduced the scarlet uniform still worn today, though modern version
- Tudor rose still features on the uniform today, along with the thistle of Scotland from 1603 and the shamrock of Ireland from the act of union
- Under Henry VIII Tudor rose went from being the symbol of a marriage to an emblem for the whole nation
- Tudor rose was on the queen’s coronation gown, Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding dress and on the 20p coin
- By the middle of the 16th century almost everyone with first-hand knowledge of the wars had died but the story lived on
- Elizabeth at her coronation wearing all the trappings of majesty
- Coronation a bit touch and go as Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne Boleyn
- Marriage declared null and void so could be argued Elizabeth was illegitimate – hard to find a bishop willing to anoint her
- Elizabeth’s coronation robe was covered in Tudor roses
- Elizabeth herself treated as living embodiment of the Tudor rose
- Elizabeth failed to produce an heir – haunted her subjects with repeat of Wars of the Roses, history repeating itself with rival claimants fighting over the throne
- Wars of the Roses had all the ingredients for drama under Shakespeare
- Henry VI Part 1 was the first of Shakespeare’s plays covering the wars and it was a hit
- One of the plays best known scenes has the nobles plucking a red (Somerset) or a white (York) rose to show which side they were on
- This scene turned messy reality into a straightforward struggle – didn’t really happen but Shakespeare’s version is so powerful that it remains with us
- Shakespeare is one of the first writers to write history plays
- Henry VI parts 2 and 3 are written first, and then part 1 and all are hits
- You don’t have to stick to the facts, you can do what you want with it
- Shakespeare uses bits and pieces from history, uses chronicles like Holinshed to show the victory of the Tudors
- Inspired by Chronicles written at the time – e.g. deformity of Richard III
- See things that could be done better
- Tale torn apart by rival factions struck a chord – Henry VIII and Break with Rome
- Fear of religious wars when Elizabeth dies worse than Wars of the Roses
- Richard Burbage an Elizabethan actor got a message from a lady when he was playing Richard III wanting to see him, but wanted him in character as Richard III
- Liked the cruelty and charisma of Shakespeare’s character
- Since 1886 45 different productions of Richard III in Stratford
- 1984 production of Richard III Antony Sher played Richard as a spider with a hump
- Most portrayals of Richard III by Shakespeare have some kind of physical disability – humped back, withered arm or bad leg
- Believed that outward appearance reflected the inner self
- Princes in the Tower and Richard III, classic example
- Claimed that Richard III had the princes murdered in the Tower to take the throne himself
- In 1619 Sir George Buck heard that the bones of the Princes might still be in the Tower – found bones turned out to be those of an ape escaped from the Tower menagerie
- John Webb decades later reported a sealed room containing human bones, but these bones were too young to be those of the princes
- 1674 while excavating at the Tower a wooden chest was found with the bones of two boys, said to be those of the princes
- Charles II ordered the bones buried at Westminster Abbey
- A marble funeral urn was commissioned and the inscription says that Richard III killed them
- The Stuarts took the Tudor tale as fact and set it in stone
- Victorian vision of Medieval England shaped by Sir Walter Scott – Wars of the Roses represented the Middle Ages gone wrong
- Scott set only 1 of his 20 novels in this period – ‘Anne of Geierstein’
- Scott thought the Wars of the Roses had too much brutality and not enough chivalry to be a bestseller
- However, Scott did give the Wars of the Roses their name, the first time it was called the wars of the red and white roses
- Victorians interested in Middle Ages as a whole but saw 15th century as being corrupted
- Bishop William Stubbs – an influential figure in the study of history
- Victorian historians quite happy to pass judgement – willing to call things “evil”
- Whig history = view of history as progress, onward march up to the Wars of the Roses then it slips backwards again
- 1066 and All That – spoof of confident Victorian historians, Wars of the Roses the fault of the “bad barons”
- No account of the Wars of the Roses could have the staying power of Shakespeare
- 20th century Richard III moved to the screen played by Laurence Olivier “now is the winter of our discontent”
- Everyone else who played Richard III would be measured against Olivier
- Ian McKellen played Richard III as Hitler, but made no connection to 15th century events
- Richard III became the biggest baddie in history and the Wars of the Roses symbolised the nation’s darkest hour
- 1924 Richard III Society was founded turning opinions of Richard on their head
- Culmination of Richard’s rehabilitation came in 2012 when his remains were discovered under a car park in Leicester
- Richard III did have a curvature of the spine, but didn’t shake Ricardians convictions that Richard wasn’t evil
- Ricardians see Henry VII as the true villain who overthrew Richard III
- 2013 Henry Tudor Society was founded
- With Richard III’s reputation going up, Henry VII’s is going down
- Need to find hero and villain of the Wars of the Roses – still strong
- 2015 Richard III was laid to rest in Leicester Cathedral
- History isn’t just a collection of facts but a collection of stories which reveal as much about their authors as they do about their subjects
Tudor Blogger 
I am not sure where you’re getting your information, but good topic. I needs to spend some time learning more or understanding more. Thanks for wonderful info I was looking for this information for my mission.
LikeLike