The barons backed Richard of York to rule as the incapacitated king’s regent. In August 1453, however, Henry seemed to lose his tenuous grip on reality. Now, seeing his opportunity, he confronted the king’s forces at Blackheath, but a truce was reached that postponed an outbreak of war for the time being.
Endowed with vast estates though usually in debt, York was embittered by the government’s failure to repay 30,000 pounds sterling that he had spent in France. Richard, Duke of York, descended from the disinherited line of the Plantagenets, had to be recalled from Ireland to help deal with this state of near anarchy. In 1450 popular unrest exploded in Kent as rioters, led by Jack Cade, plundered their way to London and the government crumbled. A predatory and fractious regency council ruled on Henry’s behalf until 1436, by which time the war in France degenerated from an English triumph to a doomed rear-guard action.ĭisloyalties and private feuds pervaded England at that time, as the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk openly warred against each other, Devon fought Wiltshire, and the Percies clashed with the Nevilles. His son, Henry VI, was a pious, decent man who was prone to spells of mental instability, ill-suited to the rigors of campaign or the intrigues of a succession of opportunistic court favorites. The usurper’s son, Henry V, was a ruthless, dynamic ruler who won undying fame at Agincourt in 1415 and had the French crown all but within his grasp when he suddenly succumbed to dysentery in 1422. The seeds of the discord that William Shakespeare would later give its romantic if inaccurate name, the Wars of the Roses, could be traced to the overthrow in 1402 of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster and self-proclaimed King Henry IV. The echoes of that gunfire proved to be an overture for a series of troubles that would plunge England into internecine strife for the next 30 years.
Times had changed since English archers had routed the French at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt - now belching cannons and French professionals swept the English invaders from the field. Wars of the Roses: Battle of Towton Closeīy the somnolent banks of the Dordogne on a hot day in July 1453, England’s septuagenarian paladin, John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, his son and several thousand soldiers died at Castillon in the last battle of the Hundred Years’ War.
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