Much of our picture of the Wars of the Roses comes from Shakespeare's great chronicle plays, though these were written in Tudor-Jacobean times and he could not have afforded - nor would he have been allowed - to hold an impartial balance between the Houses of York and Lancaster. That he made Richard III the villain of the piece is undoubted, but he had basic material to work on, black on black; Richard, though he showed genuine ability and energy as a ruler, was basically a Bad Lot. In spite of recent attempts to reclaim his reputation from historical infamy, the balance of evidence goes to prove that he did, in fact, order the murder of the two sons of his late brother, Edward IV, in the Tower of London - probably in 1483, since they were seen for the last time that summer. The bodies dug up centuries later are almost certainly theirs, and the alleged confession implicating Richard made by Sir James Tyrell, before he went to the block for treason, is probably genuine (it is quoted at length by Thomas More, a servant of the Tudors but an honourable witness for the prosecution). The second volume outlines the careers of Henry VIII's children, all of whom ruled England for a time - Mary Tudor (much maligned), the short-lived Edward V, and finally Elizabeth the Great. The story of Henry's wives has been told many times but Alison Weir makes a lively tale of it without becoming simplistic or sentimental. Anne Boleyn, sometimes defended as a heroine, is shown as a ruthless court schemer while Katherine Parr, the last of the six, was a genuinely good woman who gave Henry some domestic peace in his final years. A useful supplement to this trilogy is The Wars of the Roses by Desmond Seward (Constable, £14.95 in UK) which deals with the small as well as the great and gives us vivid glimpses of what he was like then for ordinary people.
Disregarding the later abortive risings under the impostors Lambert Simnei and Perkin Warbeck, the bloody chronicle ended at Bosworth Field in 1495 when Richard III, deserted by half his army and refusing to take horse and flee, died in a press of his enemies, striking about him with his mace and shouting "Treason, treason!" So the last of the Plantagenet kings at least died fighting, which was always his favourite occupation in any case.