Henry recovers in 1455 and once again falls under the influence of those closest to him at court.

Directed by Henry's queen, the powerful and aggressive Margaret of Anjou, who emerges as the de facto leader of the Lancastrians, Richard is forced out of court.

Margaret builds up an alliance against Richard and conspires with other nobles to reduce his influence.

An increasingly thwarted Richard (who fears arrest for treason) finally resorts in 1455 to armed hostilities.

Richard leads a small force toward London and is met  on May 22, 1455, by Henry's forces at St. Albans, north of London.

The relatively small First Battle of St. Albans is the first open conflict of the civil war.

Richard's aim is ostensibly to remove "poor advisors" from King Henry's side.

The result is a Lancastrian defeat.

Several prominent Lancastrian leaders, including Somerset and Northumberland, are killed.

The Yorkists after the battle find Henry hiding in a local tanner's shop, abandoned by his advisors and servants, apparently having suffered another bout of mental illness. (He had also been slightly wounded in the neck by an arrow.)

York and his allies regain their position of influence.

With the king indisposed, York is again appointed Protector, and Margaret is shunted aside, charged with the king's care.

For a while, both sides seem shocked that an actual battle had been fought and do their best to reconcile their differences, but the problems that caused conflict soon reemerge, particularly the issue of whether Richard the Duke of York, or Henry and Margaret's infant son Edward, will succeed to the throne.

Margaret refuses to accept any solution that will disinherit her son, and it becomes clear that she will only tolerate the situation for as long as the Duke of York and his allies retain the military ascendancy.

Later in the year, the late Somerset’s twelve-year-old niece, Margaret Beaufort, will make a second marriage to Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond and half-brother to Henry VI.

The restoration of Edward IV in 1471 is sometimes seen as marking the end of the Wars of the Roses proper.

Peace is restored for the remainder of Edward's reign.

His youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Edward's lifelong companion and supporter, William Hastings, are generously rewarded for their loyalty, becoming effectively governors of the north and midlands respectively.

The reinstated king also restores his brother Clarence to royal favor.

As his father-in-law had died, Clarence becomes jure uxoris Earl of Warwick, but does not inherit the entire Warwick estate as his younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, marries Anne Neville, the widowed younger sister of Clarence's wife.

Clarence on March 25, 1472, is created 1st Earl of Warwick.

With the deaths of Somerset and his younger brother, the House of Beaufort, who are distant cousins of Henry VI and had a remote claim to succeed him, has been almost exterminated.

Only the female line of Somerset's uncle, the 1st Duke of Somerset, remains, represented by Lady Margaret Beaufort and her son Henry Tudor.

Henry escapes from Wales with Jasper Tudor, his paternal uncle, and remains in exile in Brittany for the remainder of Edward's reign.

The year after the Battle of Tewkesbury however, Lady Margaret marries Lord Stanley, one of King Edward's supporters, who will later turn against Edward's brother Richard of Gloucester when he becomes King as Richard III, and will be instrumental in putting Henry Tudor on the throne.

The marriage, by proxy, of Arthur Tudor with Catherine of Aragon had taken place place at Arthur's Tickenhill Manor in Bewdley, near Worcester; Arthur said to Roderigo de Puebla, who had acted as proxy for Catherine, that "he much rejoiced to contract the marriage because of his deep and sincere love for the Princess".

Arthur, referring to Catherine as "my dearest spouse", had written in a letter from October 1499:

"I cannot tell you what an earnest desire I feel to see your Highness, and how vexatious to me is this procrastination about your coming. Let [it] be hastened, [that] the love conceived between us and the wished-for joys may reap their proper fruit."

The young couple had exchanged letters in Latin until September 20, 1501, when Arthur, having attained the age of fifteen, was deemed old enough to be married.

Catherine had landed in England about two weeks later, on October 2, 1501, at Plymouth.

The next month, on November 4, 1501, the couple had met each other for the first time at Dogmersfield in Hampshire.

Arthur had written to Catherine's parents that he would be "a true and loving husband"; the couple soon discovered that they had mastered different pronunciations of Latin and so were unable to communicate.

Five days later, on November 9, 1501, Catherine arrived in London.

The marriage ceremony finally takes place on November 14, 1501, at Saint Paul's Cathedral; both Arthur and Catherine wear white satin.

The ceremony is conducted by Henry Deane, Archbishop of Canterbury, who is assisted by William Warham, Bishop of London.

Following the ceremony, Arthur and Catherine leave the Cathedral and head for Baynard's Castle, where they are entertained by "the best voiced children of the King's chapel, who sang right sweetly with quaint harmony".

What follows is a ceremonial laid down by Lady Margaret Beaufort: the bed is sprinkled with holy water, after which Catherine is led away from the wedding feast by her ladies-in-waiting.

She is undressed, veiled and "reverently" laid in bed, while Arthur, "in his shirt, with a gown cast about him", is escorted by his gentlemen into the bedchamber, while viols and tabors played.

The Bishop of London blesses the bed and prays for the marriage to be fruitful, after which the couple are left alone.

This is the only public bedding of a royal couple recorded in Britain in the sixteenth century.

The popular belief that Prince Arthur was sickly during his lifetime stems from a Victorian misunderstanding of a letter from 1502; on the contrary, there are no reports of Arthur being ill during his lifetime.

Arthur had grown up to be unusually tall for his age, and was considered handsome by the Spanish court: he has reddish hair, small eyes, a high-bridged nose and resembles his brother Henry, who is said to be "extremely handsome" by contemporaries.

After residing at Tickenhill Manor for a month, Arthur and Catherine had headed for the marches in Wales, where they have established their household at Ludlow Castle.

Arthur has been growing weaker since his wedding,and although Catherine had been reluctant to follow him, she had been ordered by Henry VII to join her husband.Arthur has found it easy to govern Wales, as the border had become quiet after many centuries of warfare.

Arthur and Catherine had been afflicted in March 1502, by an unknown illness.

Catherine recovers but Arthur dies on April 2, 1502 at Ludlow, six months short of his sixteenth birthday.

John Fisher was born in Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1469, the eldest son of Robert Fisher, a modestly prosperous merchant of Beverley, and Agnes, his wife.

One of four children, his father died when John was eight.

His mother had remarried and had five more children by her second husband, William White.

Fisher seems to have had close contacts with his extended family all his life.

Fisher's early education was probably received in the school attached to the collegiate church in his home town.

He had attended Beverley Grammar School, an old foundation claiming to date from the year 700.

In the present day, one of the houses at the school is named in Fisher's honor.

Fisher had studied at the University of Cambridge from 1484, where at Michaelhouse he had come under the influence of William Melton, a pastorally minded theologian open to the new current of reform in studies arising from the Renaissance.

Fisher had earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1487 and in 1491, proceeded to a Master of Arts degree.

Also in 1491 Fisher received a papal dispensation to enter the priesthood despite being under canonical age.

Ordained into the Catholic priesthood on December 17, 1491—the same year that he was elected a fellow of his college—he had also been made Vicar of Northallerton, Yorkshire.

He had resigned his benefice in 1494 to become proctor of the university and three years later was appointed master debator, about which date he had also become chaplain and confessor to Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of King Henry VII.

He became a doctor of sacred theology on July 5, 1501, and ten days later was elected Vice-Chancellor of the University.

Under Fisher's guidance, his patroness Lady Margaret had founded St John's and Christ's Colleges at Cambridge, and a Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity at each of the two universities at Oxford and Cambridge, Fisher himself becoming the first occupant of the Cambridge chair.

By Papal Bull dated October 14, 1504, Fisher is appointed the Bishop of Rochester at the personal insistence of Henry VII.

Rochester is at this time the poorest diocese in England and usually seen as a first step on an ecclesiastical career.

Nonetheless, Fisher will stay there, presumably by his own choice, for the remaining thirty-one years of his life.

At the same time, like any English bishop of his day, Fisher had certain state duties.

In particular, he maintains a passionate interest in the University of Cambridge.

He is in 1504 elected the university's chancellor.

Re-elected annually for ten years, Fisher will ultimately receive a lifetime appointment.

At this date he is also said to have acted as tutor to Prince Henry, afterwards King Henry VIII.

Henry VII, wanting to maintain the Spanish alliance, had therefore arranged a papal dispensation from Pope Julius II for Prince Henry to marry his brother's widow Catherine, a relationship that would have otherwise precluded marriage in the Roman Catholic Church.

Queen Elizabeth had died in childbirth in 1503, so King Henry had the dispensation also permit him to marry Catherine himself.

After obtaining the dispensation, Henry had had second thoughts about the marriage of his son and Catherine.

Catherine's mother Isabella I of Castile had died and Catherine's sister Joanna had succeeded her; Catherine is therefore daughter of only one reigning monarch and so less desirable as a spouse for Henry VII's heir-apparent.

The marriage will not take place during his lifetime.

Otherwise, at the time of his father's arranging of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the future Henry VIII was too young to contract the marriage according to Canon Law, and would be ineligible until age fourteen.

Henry has made halfhearted plans to remarry and beget more heirs, but these never come to anything.

He is in 1505 sufficiently interested in a potential marriage to Joan, the recently widowed Queen of Naples, that he sends ambassadors to Naples to report on the twenty-seven-year-old's physical suitability.

The wedding never takes place, and curiously the physical description Henry had sent with his ambassadors describing what he desires in a new wife matches the description of Elizabeth.

Records show the Tower of London was after 1503 never again used as a royal residence by Henry Tudor, and all royal births under Henry VIII will take place in palaces.

Henry VII had been shattered by the loss of Elizabeth, and her death had broken his heart.

During his lifetime he is often jeered by the nobility for his re-centralizing of power in London, and later the sixteenth century historian Francis Bacon will be ruthlessly critical of the methods by which he enforced tax law, but equally true is the fact that Henry Tudor is adamant about keeping detailed bookkeeping records of his personal finances: these and one account book detailing the expenses of his queen survive in the British National Archives.

Many of the entries in his account books show a man who spends generously on his wife and children, and not just on necessities: in spring 1491 he had spent a great amount of gold on his daughter Mary for a lute; the following year he spent money on a lion for Queen Elizabeth's menagerie.

Immediately after Elizabeth's death, Henry had become very sick and nearly died himself, and only allowed Margaret Beaufort, his mother, near him.

Henry VII dies at Richmond Palace on April 21, 1509, of tuberculosis and is buried at Westminster Abbey, next to his wife, Elizabeth, in the chapel he had commissioned.

His mother survives him; she will die two months later on June 29.

His second son succeeds him as Henry VIII.