Shakespeare’s War of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses is the story of the long, repetitive, and destructive civil war for the English crown by the members of two distinct factions in the English royal family called the Plantaganets, who had ruled for over two hundred years. Strictly speaking, the Wars of the Roses applies only to the bear conclusion of the civil war, but it is commonly used to describe the entire internal clash.

 

The war had its origins in a quarrel between Richard II and his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, as a result of which Richard II was murdered and Henry became Henry IV. Richard's murder brought about civil war, which continued until Henry IV's son was crowned Henry V and restored a short interval of glorious military victory in France and peace at home.

 

With Henry V meeting an early grave, the war to rule England resumed. Henry's son, Henry VI, who led the branch of the family called the Lancastrians, of the red rose was challenged by the Yorkist branch of the family, of the white rose. Dominance of the war changed for a number of years, until the Yorkists prevailed, and Edward IV came to be King Edward IV. Upon the death of Edward, due to his illness, his brother Richard became King Richard III.

 

The Lancastrian cause meanwhile was taken up by a distant relative of the royal family, Henry Tudor who claims to be of Lancastrian descent. He invaded England and defeated the Yorkist forces at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, thus ending the dynasty of the Plantaganets and initiating the Tudor royal family as King Henry VII. Henry VII was the father of Henry VIII and thus the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth.

 

Although the process may be vastly confusing, the Battle of Bosworth Field is often used as a convenient date to mark the start of the Renaissance in England, in as much as it initiates the first distinctly Renaissance royal family in England, the Tudors, who take over from the famous medieval royal family, the Plantaganets, who took the two symbols of the Lancaster and the York to create what is now known as the Tudor rose, the traditional floral heraldic symbol of England.