Troops commanded by Richard, Duke of York, resoundingly defeated a Lancastrian royal army commanded by the Duke of Somerset, who was killed in the fighting. The first battle of the civil war occurred on at St Albans In the end their rivalry was only settled through blood and battle. This was the rivalry between Richard, 3rd Duke of York and Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset. York deemed Somerset responsible for the recent military failures in France.īoth nobles made several attempts to destroy each other as they vied for supremacy.

Thanks to the military successes of his father, Henry V, Henry VI held vast swathes of France and was the only King of England to be crowned King of France and England.Ĭat Jarman ventures out into ancient Selwood Forest in Wiltshire with art historian Amy Jeffs. When Henry VI came to power he was in an incredible position… In the 1450s, the leader of this family was Richard of York his followers would come to be known as the Yorkists. On the one side there were the descendants of Henry IV – known as the Lancastrians – and on the other the heirs of Richard II. This created two competing lines of the Plantagenet family, both of which thought they had the rightful claim. That year Richard II was deposed by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke who would go on to be the Henry IV. The seeds of war were sown as far back as 1399 The wars ended when Richard III, the last Yorkist king, was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 by Henry Tudor – founder of the house of Tudor. Fought between the rival Plantagenet houses of Lancaster and York, the wars are notorious for their many moments of treachery and for the sheer amount of blood they spilled on English soil. The Wars of the Roses were a series of bloody battles for the throne of England that took place between 14.

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