The Wars of the Roses — Christine Carpenter

The Wars of the Roses
Christine Carpenter
293 pages including index
published in 1997

I’m not really that familiar with English history of the kings, queens and battles variety, neither having been taught it in school nor having had much interest in it during my own dabblings in history. So all I knew about the Wars of the Roses was that they were what got the Tudors their start. Most of my current historical interests lie in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, but that doesn’t mind I wouldn’t be interested in this particular period, if the right book comes along. Christine Carpenter’s The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437-1509 was that book.

Though this isn’t quite a history of the Wars of the Roses as such but rather, as the subtitle indicates, more of a look at how the politics and the constitution of England evolved during this period. Carpenter attempts to show how governance was supposed to work in the fifteenth century and how and why it went wrong, how it was put right again and what the effects of this restoration were. It’s in this context that Carpenter then discusses the wars themselves, having first build herself a firm theoretical foundation. This approach makes for some abstract and frankly dry reading at times, especially in the first chapters, with Carpenter even recommending that readers new to the period should start with chapter four.

I didn’t follow that advice however, so I got to struggle with the first chapter, an overview of the available sources on the Wars of the Roses and the historiography that has evolved around them. This is to bring the reader up to speed of how the thinking about the causes of the wars has shifted from the simplistic ideas about bad kingmanship as well as to show how understanding of these causes is still lacking. Carpenter follows this up with two chapters on how the governance of England worked during this period, the first chapter on kings, kingship and political society, the second on the nobility and gentry, and local governance. Together these three chapters from the heart of Carpenter’s thesis. The idea is that previous attempts to explain the wars had become too “privatised”, too focused on the personalities of the kings, their relationships to their noblemen, but had neglected the political structures, the body politic within which these relationships werew formed, what was and wasn’t expected of the monarch.

Which is why it is so important for Carpenter to get the realities of governance and politics in the fifteenth century right before she can even begin to examine the wars themselves. What she concludes and attempts to prove is that these wars ultimately arouse because of a vacuum at the heart of government, a crisis of kingship when Henry VI was incapable of ruling. Under the medieval political structure which England operated, the king was the person in which all power and legitamicy came together and came from. If that king went bad and alienated enough of the nobility and gentry he could be deposed, substituted with a more acceptable candidate. But if a king was just passive, like Henry VI, this consensus wasn’t there. Instead you had a small group of powerful nobles trying to work around the king’s limitations, but without his legitimacy; in the end this proved impossible not in the least because several of them had different ideas of what needed doing and who was to profit.

In the rest of the book Carpenter shows how the ideas she has worked out in the first three chapters influenced and guided the course of this crisis of legitimacy as it turned into a civil war, how the restoration of a proper king in Edward IV did a lot to restore the English political system, but still left seeds for the next conflict. It was the unfortunate accident of Edward’s death that made possible that conflict, which in the end led to the triumph of Henry Tudor and the final end of this crisis.

The Wars of the Roses at times is hard going, but worthwhile.