In this sweeping history, Trevor Royle details one of the bloodiest episodes in British history. The prize was the crown of England, and the players were the rival houses of Lancaster and York. The dynastic quarrel threatened the collapse of the monarchy as a succession of weak rulers failed to deal with an overzealous aristocracy, plunging England into a series of violent encounters. The bloody battles and political intrigue between the rival heirs of King Edward III brought forth one of the most dynamic ruling families of England--the Tudors.

The Wars of the Roses (c. 1455-1487) are renowned as an infamously savage and tangled slice of English history. A bloody thirty-year struggle between the dynastic houses of Lancaster and York, they embraced localised vendetta (such as the bitter northern feud between the Percies and Nevilles) as well as the formal clash of royalist and rebel armies at St Albans, Ludford Bridge, Mortimer's Cross, Towton, Tewkesbury and finally Bosworth, when the usurping Yorkist king, Richard III, was crushed by Henry Tudor. Powerful personalities dominate the period: the charismatic and enigmatic Richard III, immortalized by Shakespeare; the slippery Warwick, the Kingmaker', who finally over-reached ambition to be cut down at the Battle of Barnet; and guileful women like Elizabeth Woodville and Margaret of Anjou, who for a time ruled the kingdom in her husband's stead. David Grummitt places the violent events of this complex time in the wider context of fifteenth-century kingship and the development of English political culture.Never losing sight of the traumatic impact of war on the lives of those who either fought in or were touched by battle, this captivating new history will make compelling reading for students of the late medieval period and Tudor England, as well as for general readers.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Vicious battles, powerful monarchs, and royal intrigue abound in this “gripping, complex, and sensational” (Hilary Mantel) true story of the War of the Roses—a struggle among three brothers, two of whom became kings, and the inspiration for Shakespeare’s renowned play, Richard III. In 15th-century England, two royal families, the House of York and the House of Lancaster, fought a bitter, decades-long civil war for the English throne. As their symbols were a red rose for Lancaster and a white rose for York, the conflict became known as the Wars of the Roses. During this time, the house of York came to dominate England. At its heart were three charismatic brothers—King Edward IV, and his two younger siblings George and Richard—who became the figureheads of a spectacular ruling dynasty. Together, they looked invincible. But with Edward’s ascendancy the brothers began to turn on one another, unleashing a catastrophic chain of rebellion, vendetta, fratricide, usurpation, and regicide. The brutal end came at Bosworth Field in 1485, with the death of the youngest, then Richard III, at the hands of a new usurper, Henry Tudor, later Henry VII, progenitor of the Tudor line of monarchs. Fascinating, dramatic, and filled with vivid historical detail, The Brothers York is a brilliant account of a conflict that fractured England for a generation. Riven by internal rivalries, jealousy, and infighting, the three York brothers failed to sustain their power and instead self-destructed. It is a rich and bloody tale as gripping as any historical fiction.

The classic, magnificent bestselling novel about Richard III, now in a special thirtieth anniversary edition with a new preface by the author In this triumphant combination of scholarship and storytelling, Sharon Kay Penman redeems Richard III—vilified as the bitter, twisted, scheming hunchback who murdered his nephews, the princes in the Tower—from his maligned place in history. Born into the treacherous courts of fifteenth-century England, in the midst of what history has called The War of the Roses, Richard was raised in the shadow of his charismatic brother, King Edward IV. Loyal to his friends and passionately in love with the one woman who was denied him, Richard emerges as a gifted man far more sinned against than sinning. With revisions throughout and a new author's preface discussing the astonishing discovery of Richard's remains five centuries after his death, Sharon Kay Penman's brilliant classic is more powerful and glorious than ever.

From the city of Calais, on the northern coast of France, one may look over the water on a clear day and see the white cliffs of Dover, in England. At this point the English Channel is only twenty-one miles wide. But this narrow water has dangerous currents, and often fierce winds sweep over it, so that small ships find it hard to cross. This rough Channel has more than once spoiled the plans of England's enemies, and the English people have many times thanked God for their protecting seas.