It is a very different Wars of the Roses that Professor Watts explains. He takes for granted the events, which he certainly knows very well, and deploys some telling examples, such as the battle of Nibley Green (1470), and demonstrates what the rival roses symbolized throughout. He states forthrightly, but without supporting evidence, that Bishop Stillington wrote the Annales attributed in William of Worcester, that John Vale assembled his book for Sir Thomas Cook and that Archbishop Cato despatched Dominic Mancino to England to record the usurpation of Richard III. Watts concerns himself in these essays principally with the ‘big ideas’. He rejects as misleading both the traditional narratives and traditional sources. The Wars are set in comparative contexts – unsurprisingly, they are categorized as a civil war; across many centuries, before and after; and in their European settings. He draws on numerous theories and interesting parallels applicable to other such conflicts, in contemporary Europe, Japan and even Guinea Bissau, none particularly convincing, and never conclusive. He discounts much of the contemporary narratives because they were modelled on the Roman histories of Caesar, Sallust, Suetonius and Tacitus, which he knows much better than most of today's historians. ‘These Roman references can seem rather incidental, even decorative, and so have been assessed by most historians’ (p. 40), but they should (he argues) be taken much more seriously. Although reminiscent of such classics, however, Sir Thomas More's portrait of Richard III and The Arrivall of Edward IV were nevertheless faithful contemporary histories. Watts antedates by several generations the influence of the Latin classics and the transition to the Tudor economy. He also rejects most of the detailed research on the Wars, the crowning achievements of the post-war McFarlane school of historians. He attempts to tell the story outside in rather than inside out, making the English Wars into one theatre of a wider European history dominated by the centralizing Valois monarchy, but ultimately he rejects this reordering of events. He wonders what weight should be assigned to the international and transnational ‘against the priority historically given to their national and local aspects’ (pp. 167–8). Starting like most modern historians with the many-sided crisis of 1450, Watts sympathizes with the beguiling argument ‘that the Wars arouse out of the adverse economic circumstances in which they began’ (p. 129). In this scenario, the focus by historians in the failures of Henry VI, Edward IV and Warwick the Kingmaker ‘seems myopic’ (p. 132). Indeed, it was collapse of royal revenues made the magnates overmightier than the crown. In 1450, the customs no longer funded the royal household or defence, and even after 1470, they covered only normal peacetime expenditure. Yet, Watts finds economic explanations insufficient. ‘On the whole’, however, he writes, ‘it is hard not to feel that it was the civil wars that underlay the fiscal difficulties of the period, rather than the other way around’ (p. 141). Actually, Watts recycles the well-worn interpretation of the 1450s coined by Yorkist propagandists. Whilst seldom engaging with the detail and more frequently presuming or alluding, he boldly states that the earls of Shrewsbury ‘changed sides multiple times’ (p. 94); that Louis XI and Warwick were already considering a rapprochement with the Lancastrians in 1467; that Henry Tudor was a Lancastrian pretender during Edward IV's Second Reign and at the start of Buckingham's Rebellion in 1483; that Lous XI fomented the Scottish war in 1480–83 and that it was Richard Duke of Gloucester's ambitions in Scotland that impelled him to the protectorate and thence to his usurpation, none of which are demonstrably correct. Watts attributes the beginning of the Wars to the collapse of authority and incompetence of Henry VI that allowed and fostered divisions that Edward IV, Richard III, and even Henry VII failed to overcome: ‘The Readeption had shown how easily rulers could be dislodged in the circumstances of division that first arose in the 1450s’ (p. 20). Division, feuds, dynastic rivalries and bastard feudalism were symptoms of this deeper malaise. Authority, once lost, was difficult to restore: ‘The political system faced problems that it could not resolve’ (p. 205). The inadequate solution offered from 1450 was to stop unnecessary taxation (really very light) and to resume royal grants, which were less lucrative than the reformers supposed; to defend the realm; to replace a succession of evil councillors with good counsel; to reform corrupt officials; and to encourage trade and foster the commonweal. Repeatedly reformers found these unattainable. This crisis of authority ceased only in 1509 with the accession of a young and vigorous king Henry VIII who, however, left much to Thomas Wolsey. The New Monarchy was obliged ‘to live of its own’ without ambition and without taxation until 1640, although briefly re-endowed by the dissolution of the monasteries. Watts's synthesis is seductive, bold, sweeping and ground-breaking. Certainly, it is a corrective to all past accounts and an essential read, but it is not in the last resort convincing. More engagement with what actually happened is still required. His essays are lucid, engaging and accessible to all, informal and even conversational, reasoned and argumentative, and only occasionally abstract and obscured by unfamiliar words. A short book, only 210 pages long, including copious footnotes is complemented by two appendices of the principal personalities (dramatis personae) and a chronology of the Wars, and by a comprehensive printed bibliography that will be of lasting value. This book is also very affordable.
Michael Hicks (Fri,) studied this question.