For most of the second half of the fifteenth century, England tore itself apart. The crown changed hands again and again, kings were murdered, princes vanished, and the great noble families of the land hacked at one another across muddy battlefields with a ferocity that shocked even a violent age. Later writers, with a poet’s eye for a symbol, named this long dynastic war after the badges of the two rival houses: the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York. We call it the Wars of the Roses, and out of its wreckage rose one of the most famous dynasties in English history — the Tudors.

The trouble began, as these things often do, with a weak king and too many ambitious men around him. Henry VI was gentle, pious and almost entirely unsuited to rule; he suffered bouts of mental collapse during which he recognised no one, and even at his best he was easily led. Into the vacuum stepped the powerful Duke of York, who had a strong claim to the throne in his own right and little patience for the chaos of Henry’s government. What started as a struggle for control of a feeble king slowly hardened into a struggle for the crown itself.

The fighting that followed was sporadic but savage. Battles like Towton, fought in a snowstorm in 1461, were among the bloodiest ever waged on English soil, with thousands of men cut down in a single day. The two sides traded victories and defeats for decades. Henry VI was deposed, restored, and deposed again before finally dying — almost certainly murdered — in the Tower of London. The Yorkist Edward IV seized the throne and held it, by and large, until his early death in 1483, and that is when the story curdles into one of England’s great unsolved mysteries.

Edward IV left two young sons, the elder of whom should have become Edward V. Instead their uncle, Richard of Gloucester, had the boys declared illegitimate, took the crown himself as Richard III, and lodged his nephews in the Tower. The two princes were never seen again. Whether Richard murdered them, whether someone else did, or whether one or both somehow survived, has been argued about for more than five hundred years. What is certain is that the disappearance stained Richard’s reputation and gave his enemies a powerful weapon.

That enemy turned out to be a relatively obscure exile named Henry Tudor. His claim to the throne was, frankly, thin — it ran through an illegitimate line and depended on a great deal of everyone else being dead — but in the chaos of the times a thin claim and a sharp sword could be enough. Backed by French money and disaffected English nobles, Henry landed in Wales in 1485 and marched to meet Richard III at Bosworth Field.

Bosworth was the hinge on which English history turned. Richard, by most accounts, fought bravely, even recklessly, charging straight at Henry in a bid to end the battle with a single stroke. He failed. Betrayed by allies who switched sides at the crucial moment, the last Plantagenet king was cut down and killed, the only English monarch to die in battle since 1066. The crown, so the legend goes, was found in a thornbush and placed on Henry Tudor’s head right there on the field. He was now Henry VII.

Henry VII was no romantic hero, and that was precisely what England needed. He was cautious, suspicious of his nobles, obsessed with money and meticulous record-keeping, and utterly determined never to let the bloodletting start again. He married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, deliberately uniting the rival houses and creating a new emblem — the Tudor rose, red and white combined — to symbolise the healing of the breach. It was clever propaganda, and like the best propaganda it was rooted in a real achievement.

He spent his reign quietly crushing pretenders, filling the treasury, and clipping the wings of the over-mighty barons whose private armies had made the wars possible in the first place. By the time he died in 1509, he handed his son a stable throne, a full treasury and a kingdom exhausted by civil war and grateful for peace. That son was Henry VIII — and what he did with his inheritance would shake England to its foundations. We’ll turn to him, and to the religious revolution he unleashed, in the next part of this series.