Following recent articles on the origins of the Wars of the Roses, Dr Simon Payling of our House of Commons 1461-1504 section explores the motivations of Richard, duke of York for asserting his claim to the throne in 1460…
It has become unfashionable to argue that the primary cause of the Wars of the Roses was the dynastic uncertainty occasioned by the deposition of Richard II in 1399. The most famous historian of fifteenth-century England, K.B. McFarlane, was characteristically emphatic: he wrote in 1964 that the ’dynastic issue was a side issue’. Modern judgments are somewhat less stark, but it is still conventional to see dynastic conflict as only slowly growing out of the political instability occasioned by Henry VI’s manifest unfitness to rule. On this argument, that unfitness pushed the alternative claimant to the throne, Richard, duke of York, to make his claim only after all other political solutions had failed.
The strength of this argument lies in the fact that the duke, politically active from the early 1430s, waited nearly thirty years before asserting his right to the Crown as the representative of the senior royal line (his descent from Edward III’s second son, Lionel of Clarence, was senior to that of Henry VI from the third, John of Gaunt, although it was weakened by two female descents). It is, however, worth positing an alternative explanation, namely that the duke delayed claiming the throne out of caution rather than reluctance; and that, to him, the denial of what he saw as the justice of his claim to the throne was a constant grievance that he was determined to redress. This interpretation gains psychological plausibility from his childhood experience. In 1415, when York was only four, his father, Richard, earl of Cambridge, was executed for supporting the Clarence claim, then represented by York’s uncle, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March.
After 1415, however, this claim, so significant a factor in the early years of Lancastrian rule, went into abeyance. York inherited it on his maternal uncle’s death in 1425, and, from his coming of age in 1432, he was seemingly content, as the earl of March had been, to serve the house of Lancaster, first in France and then in Ireland, until he discovered a conspiracy against him in 1450. Even then it took him another ten years to claim the throne. Here the general argument runs, he only did so because it was the only way he could find security against the increasingly-militant Lancastrian regime.
The alternative explanation – that York was calculating rather than reluctant – is, of course, difficult to test. One point, however, is clear. Whatever his motives, it is hard to see how he could, with any realistic hope of success, have openly asserted a claim to the throne before 1460. He must have been all too aware of how little support such a move would attract. Indeed, even when, after the victory of his Neville allies at the battle of Northampton in July of that year, he belatedly made his claim, he almost misjudged his moment. When he entered the palace of Westminster on 6 October, and informed the House of Lords of his determination to claim the Crown as his right, he was greeted not with adulation but with a mixture of hostility and puzzlement. Although he was able to secure a considerable concession, effectively the deposition of Henry VI’s son, Edward, prince of Wales, in favour of his own, Edward, earl of March, Henry VI was to remain King for life. Since he was some ten years older than Henry, it was probable that he himself would never be King.
In the absence of any direct evidence of York’s motives, it is worth placing his actions in the context of the changing dynastic situation. This provides an explanatory framework as compelling as the one that attributes to him disinterested rather than selfish motives. He may have moved into increasing opposition to the Lancastrian regime in the 1450s as a champion of good government, but that opposition also had a dynastic element. From the childless death of the King’s uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in 1447 York had every right to consider himself as heir-presumptive to the Crown, not through his descent in the female line from Clarence but in the male line from Clarence’s and Gaunt’s younger brother, Edmund, duke of York. Significantly, it was a position he felt he needed to defend. In May 1451 his councillor, Thomas Young, a prominent lawyer, petitioned Parliament for the formal recognition of that status. The rejection of that petition and his fear that the King’s favourite, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, a descendant of Gaunt, was to supplant him in the line of succession, served to intensify his opposition to Lancaster.
Soon thereafter, however, the political situation changed dramatically both for and against York’s interest. On the positive side, the King’s mental collapse in August 1453 offered him the opportunity to assume control of government; on the negative one, the birth of a son, Edward, to the King in the following October moved him a major step further from the Crown. Fortunately for him, his appointment as protector in the following March lessened this blow, at least in the short term, and it may have seemed to him that a complete and most unexpected victory was in his grasp. The King was so utterly prostrate that recovery seemed unlikely and York could look forward to a protectorate extending until his death or even to the majority of his son. Further, should that son succumb to the hazards of childhood mortality, he would have an ideal opportunity to take the Crown.
Developments, however, soon dashed these hopes. The King unexpectedly recovered in late 1454 and Somerset regained his influence. York and his Neville allies responded by resorting to arms and Somerset was killed at the battle of St. Albans in May 1455. York’s aggression at this juncture could be cited as evidence of his designs on the throne, yet he must have known that not even the Nevilles, then at least, would have supported his claim. Having to content himself with a second appointment as protector in November, his general lack of support was made clear in February 1456 when the Lords rejected his plan for a resumption of royal grants. Thereafter, the increasing militancy of the Lancastrian regime, now headed by Queen Margaret, desperate to maintain the inheritance of her son, placed him in the most vulnerable period of his career. By October 1460 his laying claim to the throne had become a matter of necessity.
These facts are open to more than one explanation. One sees York as a victim of circumstance, driven by fear and insecurity; the other, as ambitious and politically-calculating, determined to take the throne when a feasible opportunity arose. Scholarly opinion is decidedly in favour of the former, yet there are arguments in favour of the latter. Further, there is another sense in which the centrality of the dynastic dimension cannot be discounted. Even if York’s claim to the throne was not the primary driver of his actions, its mere existence profoundly shaped how those actions were perceived by his opponents. It distinguished him from earlier royal opponents, such as Thomas, earl of Lancaster, under Edward II, or Thomas, duke of Gloucester, under Richard II, who, although close kin to the King, had no claim to the throne. When York assumed the mantle of reform in 1450, as Lancaster and Gloucester had done before him, he implicitly challenged the King’s right to rule in a way they had not. Whatever his motives, York’s political actions cannot be separated from his claim to the Crown.
Read the rest of the series on the origins of the Wars of the Roses:
Simon Payling, The origins of the Wars of the Roses? The marriage of Richard of Conisbrough and Anner Mortimer and the union of the houses of York and Mortimer, History of Parliament (2025)
Simon Payling, An unwilling ‘pretender’: reassessing the unfortunate career of Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (1391-1425), History of Parliament (2026)
Simon Payling, Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, and the Southampton Plot of 1415: a false conviction of treason?, History of Parliament (2026)
S.J.P