This is not, strictly speaking, a book about the Wars of the Roses. The theme of the book is much better summed up in the sub-title: ‘Politics and the constitution in England c. 1437–1509’. You will not find here the story of how the name ‘Wars of the Roses’ came to be applied to what happened in England between 1455 and 1485. Nor will you find an explicit discussion under the headings normally used in considering the causes of the Wars of the Roses: the dynastic problem, the financial problem, the effects of the French war, and so on. Though that does not mean that these issues will not be seriously addressed. What you will find is a broader account of how governance was supposed to work in fifteenth-century England and of how and why governance and politics went wrong in this century, how they were put right and what the effects were of both the crisis and its rectification. In the course of this account, the political events from the later 1430s will be recounted and explained.

As I shall show in the next chapter, it does not make much sense to look at the Wars in isolation because they have never been discussed without reference to what came before and after. Since the middle of the last century, they have always been used as a touchstone for the health of the late-medieval body politic, or polity (essentially what we would now call the state), and the search for their causes has almost invariably gone back to perceived weaknesses in kingship dating back to the previous century.