Rose War

The Wars of the Roses is presented as a prolonged contest between the houses of York and Lancaster that undermines the claim that hereditary succession preserves peace. Thomas Paine recounts its shifting fortunes and seventy-year span as evidence that a hereditary crown can turn disputes over personal and dynastic claims into sustained civil conflict.

Background and Political Argument

Paine introduces the conflict while challenging the defense of hereditary succession as a safeguard against civil war. He cites England’s record since the Norman Conquest: thirty kings and two minors had reigned, yet the country had experienced eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions, including the Glorious Revolution. In his account, succession did not avert disorder; it helped undermine the very peace it was supposed to provide.

The conflict between York and Lancaster supplies his most extended example. Rather than treating dynastic succession as a stable principle that settles who should rule, Paine emphasizes that rival hereditary claims made the crown a focus of repeated contest. The episode thus turns an abstract argument about political institutions into a historical test: a system that promises continuity had, in this case, accompanied decades of upheaval.

Course and Reversals

Paine describes twelve pitched battles between Henry and Edward, in addition to skirmishes and sieges. Neither side’s position proved secure. Henry was twice Edward’s prisoner, while Edward also fell into Henry’s hands; political fortune could reverse even the apparent victor’s position.

The reversals extended from captivity to the throne and beyond. Henry was brought in triumph from prison to a palace, while Edward was forced to flee from his palace to a foreign land. The change did not last: Henry was later driven from the throne, and Edward recalled to succeed him. Paine adds that Parliament followed whichever side was strongest, presenting political alignment as responsive to shifting power rather than as a settled defense of legitimate succession.

Duration and Resolution

The contest began during the reign of Henry VI and was not fully extinguished until the reign of Henry VII, when the two families were united. Paine gives its duration as sixty-seven years, from 1422 to 1489. Its eventual dynastic union ended the contest in the account, but only after succession had been associated with a long sequence of battles, reversals, and changes of rule.

The duration is central to Paine’s rebuttal: the war was not a brief interruption in an otherwise peaceful hereditary order. He uses its persistence to show how rival claims could keep conflict alive across reigns, making the promise of continuity ring hollow.

Significance in the Argument

Paine’s account is selective and argumentative rather than a neutral chronicle. He foregrounds the number of battles, the capture and return of the rival rulers, Parliament’s changing allegiance, and the eventual union of the families because these details demonstrate the instability he attributes to hereditary monarchy. The sequence makes the succession question appear not as a settled answer to political rivalry but as a cause and framework for it.

The Wars of the Roses therefore anchors a wider warning: monarchy and hereditary succession, Paine argues, have brought countries into bloodshed rather than reliably protected them from it. The episode’s ending in dynastic union does not erase the conflict’s long course; in his reasoning, it confirms that peace came only after generations of instability had run their course.