EP 01 - What Wars? What Roses?

What Wars? What Roses?

- Episode 01-

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13 March 2024

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NEW SERIES What Wars? What Roses?

[pic] Henry VII invented the Tudor Rose

The Wars of the Roses lasted 4 months not 85 years

The traditional story goes that the murder of Richard II in 1400 sparked nearly a century of bloodshed, mayhem and civil war. Allegedly Richard, aged 33, had been on hunger strike in Pontefract Castle since his arrest the year before. He was more likely murdered on the orders of the man who would seize his throne, Henry IV.

Henry’s IV’s family, the Dukes of Lancaster (with, we’re told, the red rose as their emblem) were locked in a struggle for power with Richard II’s family, the Dukes of York (with the white). The Wars of the Roses.

It ended, goes the old story, 85 years later, on 22 August 1485, when another Red Rose Lancastrian Henry, Henry Tudor, killed another White Rose Yorkist Richard, Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth.

[photo] badge of Richard III's boar, found at Bosworth Battlefield

Henry Tudor married Elizabeth (daughter of the previous White Rose Yorkist Edward IV, older brother of the dead King Richard III) and made himself Henry VII. And he promptly invented the Tudor Rose – a red outer layer of petals with a white inner one – and declared the Wars of the Roses over and done with.

[photo] Edward IV's sun with streamers emblem on a Continental imitation of a coin, Royal Mint

The thing is that the Wars of the Roses – Lancastrians fighting Yorkists pure and simple - only lasted 4 months, not 86 years as Henry VII’s propaganda told it. Historian SB Chrimes points out that even the roses are an invention.

[photo] detail of Wilton Diptych with Richard II's chained, white hart emblem

In the 1450s Richard Duke of York’s banner had been a FALCON not a white rose. The Lancastrian Henry VI – king in the 1450s - preferred a DEER to a red rose, very like the Yorkist Richard II’s WHITE HART. Yorkist Edward IV usually used a SUN WITH STREAMERS. Lancastrian Richard III fought under a WHITE BOAR (Lady Anne in Shakespeare’s monologue calls him a ‘hedgehog’) and Henry Tudor usually fought under a RED DRAGON or, well, a DUN COW [mythical beast slain by the House of Warwick]. Most of the time the Lancastrians used the symbol of a DOUBLE S, though nobody is now quite sure why.

[illustration] Beheading of Suffolk, May 1450, London's Radical Histories (they used a sword not an axe)

'Welcome Traitor' - said in a Devonshire accent

15^th century popular royal biographies have recently sprung to life. As we found with our series Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot, and our work on Anne Boleyn, too many authors of ‘history books’ take popular mythical stories as fact. This is illustrated in minutiae by the facts surrounding the murder of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, Henry VI’s right-hand man in 1450.

In February 1450 Parliament openly complained about ‘murders, manslaughters, rapes, robberies, riots, affrays and other inconveniences greater than before.’ Henry VI was mentally unwell and not fit to govern. Everyone said so. The break down in law and order was blamed on a small clique around his French queen, Margaret of Anjou.

Rather than blame the king to his face, Parliament put the King (or Queen's) advisor, the Duke of Suffolk on trial. Henry eventually, reluctantly agreed to exile him abroad. The duke was relieved. He’d expected to be beheaded. But he had heard a prophecy that, if he could only avoid being sent to the Tower, he’d get away with his life.

His boat, however, only got as far as Dover before it was intercepted by a local ship. ‘Welcome traitor,’ said the crew as they hauled Suffolk aboard. He showed them a letter of safe passage to France from Henry VI but they waved it away. ‘They did not know the said king. But they knew well the crown of England’. The 'community' or common people were the only crown they recognized.

Then they held their own trial and found Suffolk guilty of treason. They put him in the ship’s rowing boat and cut off his head. With a rusty sword. It took them six attempts. Then they seized his velvet doublet and woollen cloak and left his body on the beach, his head on a pole. The name of the ship that had intercepted the duke? It was called the Nicholas of the Tower.

A great story and you can undertand why it crops up in so many books on this period. What we do not know is who captained the ship Nicholas of the Tower, or indeed who if anyone had directed the ship to intercept the Duke in the first place, and who was responsible for the duke’s trial and execution in spite of a letter of safe-passage from the king.

Popular historian Alison Weir in her 1995 book Lancaster and York: the Wars of the Roses repeats the myth that that the Nicholas of the Tower is ‘part of the royal fleet, her master being Robert Wennington, ship owner of Dartmouth.’ And yet an academic paper by Roger Virgoe of East Anglia University in 1965, analysing the original indictment in Latin of the men accused of the murder of the Duke of Suffolk, shows this not to be the case.

#92 'Welcome Traitor!' - Ep 1 What Wars? What Roses?

'the community of the realm was the crown' - the people not the person of the king

[pic] Jack Cade, a Robin Hood type character, led a rebellion in 1450 - detail of mural of The History of the Old Kent Road

Do many popular historians take too much on trust?

Virgoe says 'There is NO EVIDENCE that Wennington was connected with the murder' and goes on to explain why - see below.

Weir will have based her story on one of the following. We list them most recent first:
JC Wedgwood in his 1936 entry for Wennington the History of Parliament: biographies 1936
CL Kingsford’s 1911 entry in the Dictionary of National Biography; and/or his 1923 Ford Lectures
JH Ramsay’s 1892 book Lancaster and York: a century of English history (AD 1339-1485)
They were all proven wrong in 1965 by Virgoe.

He gives us more on how they got THE WRONG SHIP. 'The Nicholas was not the balinger [small ship] of that name built by Henry V and sold to Darmouth merchants in 1423. It was not, indeed a royal ship. It was originally a Bristol ship and references in the Patent Rolls show that in 1435-6 it was owned by some Bristol merchants… By the latter part of the 1450 it was engaged in piratical activities in the Channel…'

'Whoever formally owned the ship it seems probably that by April 1450 its crew was completely out of control… and AFFECTED BY FEELINGS OF DISGUST with the failure of the French wars, hostility to the “traitors” in the government and contempt for the weakness of the Crown that were shared by so many, at least in the south-east of the country, and were to be the main themes of Cade’s revolt two months later.’

Ramsay in 1892 is the first we know of to name Robert Wennington as the captain. Virgoe tells us that Ramsay must have found the reference to the name 'Robert' at the end of the account of the murder in the so-called ‘Annals of William Worcester’ and 'decided this must be ‘Wennington, who a year earlier, as naval commander in the Channel, had seized the Bay Fleet.'

'This idea was taken up by Kingsford, though with some caution, in his two accounts of Suffolk’s death, and much more enthusiastically by Wedgwood in his biography of Wennington in the History of Parliament.’

[poster] George RR Martin has made no secret that his A Song of Ice and Fire series (aka Game of Thrones) is based loosely on The Wars of the Roses

[pic] Many blamed Henry VI's French queen, Margaret of Anjou for the public unrest. Detail from a prayer-roll made for her ca 1445. Her Arms are shown quartered with those of England. Jesus College, Oxford

'Such astonishing words to be put into the mouths of fifteenth-century sailors'

Virgoe continues: ‘Kingsford’s remark that the murderer was “no doubt an unscrupulous person, one who would have readily undertaken a commission from anyone who could have paid his price” is, of course based on no evidence whatsoever.’

Now we all make mistakes. We're waiting for listeners to point out ours. But Kingsford was on the staff of the Dictionary of National Biography and his obituary in The Times concluded: "To all his work he brought the scholarship of the true researcher, and by his patient ingenuity and insight he added materially to the sum of historical knowledge.’

It doesn't matter, except to the Wennington family (!) but it shows what we're up against.

The most interesting part of Virgoe's paper on the indictment [Ancient Indictments of the King’s bench 29 Henry VI: K.B. 9/47 no 13] is the reply said to have been given by the shipmen when Suffolk showed them his safe conduct from the King.

'They apparently asserted that “they did not know the said king, but they well knew the crown of England, saying that the aforesaid crown was the community of the said realm and that the community of the realm was the crown of that realm.’

'These are such astonishing words to be put into the mouths of fifteenth-century sailors that
they should probably be accepted as an accurate reflection of what was said, though no doubt distorted by memory and translation.’

Virgoe thinks these verbatim reports could have come from Suffolk’s servants who were spared or the man arrested the following year - Richard Lenard, one of the men indicted.

Virgoe concludes: ‘No similar words or sentiments are to be found in the any other indictments for treason of this period. The contention that the crown of England symbolizes the community of the realm and that the king's claim to it is not absolute shows that even among the common people it was becoming quite possible to distinguish between the crown and the person of the king.’

We're pleased to say that Wennington is no longer in the Dictionary of National Biography. More recent authors have realised they have too little information.

We don’t have time for original research but we're grateful to those who do and we try to find these historians in our research for the History Café.

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