When Henry recovered (1455), he released Somerset and restored him to office.  Richard protested, and raising an army in the north, marched toward London.  He met the royalist forces at St. Albans; a battle ensued, and Somerset was slain.

During the next thirty years the war raged with more or less fury between the parties of the Red Rose (Lancaster) and the White Rose (York).  The first maintained that Parliament had the right to choose whatever king it saw fit, as in Henry IV’s case (S279); the second insisted that the succession should be determined by strict hereditary descent, as represented in the claim of Richard.[2]

[2] See Genealogical Table, p. 161.

But beneath the surface the contest was not for principle, but for place and spoils.  The great nobles, who during the French wars (S288) had pillaged abroad, now pillaged each other; and as England was neither big enough nor rich enough to satisfy the greed of all of them, the struggle gradually became a war of mutual extermination.

It was, to a certain extent, a sectional war.  Eastern England, then the wealthiest and most progressive part of the country, had strongly supported Wycliffe in his reforms (S254).  It now espoused the side of Richard, Duke of York, who was believed to be friendly to religious liberty, while the western counties fought for the cause of Lancaster and the Church.

302.  The First Battles (1455-1460).

We have already seen (S301) that the first blood was shed at St. Albans (1455), where the Yorkists, after half an hour’s fighting, gained a complete victory.  A similar result followed at Bloreheath, Staffordshire (1459).  In a third battle, at Northampton, the Yorkists were again successful (1460).  Henry was taken prisoner, and Queen Margaret fled with the young Prince Edward to Scotland.  Richard now demanded the crown. (See map facing p. 172.)

Henry answered with unexpected spirit:  “My father was King, his father also was King.  I have worn the crown forty years from my cradle; you have all sworn fealty to me as your sovereign, and your fathers did the like to my fathers.  How, then, can my claim be disputed?” After a long controversy, a compromise was effected.  Henry agreed that if he were left in peaceable possession of the throne during his life, Richard or his heirs should succeed him.

303.  Battles of Wakefield and Towton (1460-1461).

But Queen Margaret refused to see her son, Prince Edward, thus tamely set aside.  She raised an army and attacked the Yorkists.  Richard, Duke of York, whose forces were inferior to hers, had entrenched himself in Sandal Castle near Wakefield, Yorkshire.  Day after day Margaret went up under the walls and dared him to come out.

At length, stung by her taunts, the Duke sallied from his strongold, and the battle of Wakefield was fought (1460).  Margaret was victorious.  Richard was slain, and the Queen, in mockery of his claims to sovereignty, cut off his head, decked it with a paper crown, and set it up over the chief gate of the city of York.  Fortune now changed.  The next year (1461) the Lacastrians were defeated with great slaughter at Towton, Yorkshire.  The light spring snow was crimsoned with the blood of thirty thousand slain, and the way strewn with corpses for ten miles up to the walls of York.