During the amazing fifteenth-century bloodbath of the Wars of the Roses, three kings, a Prince of Wales, and eight royal (or semi-royal) dukes died in battle, murder or sudden death, together with a third of the peerage and countless gentry. A government spokesman told the House of Commons in 1475 that 'none (of us) hath escaped' while in 1483 the Duke of Buckingham, soon to be beheaded, claimed that war was never 'in none earthly nation so deadly and so pestilent as when it happeneth among us ...nor so cruel and so deadly foughten'. This scholarly yet immensely readable book brings to life both the ruinous conflict and a vivid picture of an England of great beauty and cruelty.