Fear, Hatred and Strategy during the Wars of the Roses

Abstract

This article examines the importance of emotions such as fear, enmity and hatred during the Wars of the Roses. Despite the large body of scholarship on the wars and extensive corpus of primary sources, historians have not looked at the Wars of the Roses from this perspective. This lacuna is unfortunate for two reasons. First, examining the role of emotions provides an additional insight into the wars that current discussions have viewed as tangential. Second, the Wars of the Roses provide a different way of viewing emotions in medieval warfare from studies of emotions in other wars. Discussions of emotions in medieval warfare tend to examine the experiences and mental worlds of individual combatants, the performative value of emotions in political conflict or the use of emotions in the memory of wars. In contrast, this article demonstrates that, during the Wars of the Roses, emotions had a real and tangible influence on the course and outcome of the wars, also influencing military strategy. This article highlights the potential of the late medieval English sources for revealing the use of emotions in war. It then examines three ways in which emotions shaped the wars: the personal enmities between successive dukes of Somerset and members of the House of York; regional hatreds between northerners and southerners; and finally collective hatred and blame directed towards individual councillors. Taken together, the material examined here provides new insights into the tangible effects that emotions had on the strategies of commanders and the politics a late medieval conflict. IOn 17 April 1471, three days after the battle of Barnet, Gerhard von Wesel, a well-informed merchant, wrote to Cologne from London describing those who returned with the victorious Edward IV in the following graphic terms:Those who went out with good horses and sound bodies brought home sorry nags and bandaged faces without noses etc. and wounded bodies, God have mercy on the miserable spectacle. 1 I would like to thank Dr Mathew Bennett, Professor Neil Murphy and the anonymous peer reviewer for their invaluable comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article. 1 The account is translated in Hannes Kleineke, 'Gerhard von Wesel's newsletter from England, 17