Wars of the Roses Trivia
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49 free Wars of the Roses trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Wars of the Roses trivia for history students, Shakespeare fans, Game of Thrones readers who know where George R. R. Martin got his ideas, and anyone who has visited Bosworth or Tewkesbury. The quiz explains where the name came from (Walter Scott, via Shakespeare's rose-picking scene), why the wars started - Henry VI's breakdown, bastard feudalism, the rival Plantagenet lines - and how they ran from the First Battle of St Albans in 1455 through Wakefield, Mortimer's Cross and the three suns, Towton on Palm Sunday, Edward IV's secret marriage, Warwick's betrayal, Barnet in the fog and Tewkesbury. It then covers the last act: Clarence's fall, Edward V's 78-day reign, the Princes in the Tower, Richard III's charge at Bosworth, Henry VII's marriage to Elizabeth of York and the Tudor rose, Lambert Simnel and Stoke Field, and the discovery of Richard's skeleton under a Leicester car park in 2012. Roughly a third of the questions are easy and the rest reward people who know their Nevilles from their Woodvilles. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which fantasy television series took its feuding noble houses from the Wars of the Roses?
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones. George R. R. Martin, who wrote the novels behind the show, turned the rival houses of Lancaster and York into his warring Lannisters and Starks.
Q 02England's final defeat in which war came two years before the Wars of the Roses?
Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War ended in defeat at Castillon in 1453. Henry VI suffered a mental collapse weeks later, and the nobles' struggle to rule in his place turned into civil war.
Q 03Which novelist's 1829 book Anne of Geierstein brought the name 'Wars of the Roses' into common use?
Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott's label stuck more than 300 years after the fighting ended, even though Lancaster's red rose was hardly used as a badge until the wars were almost over.
Q 04Which famous English school did Henry VI, king from infancy, found in 1440?
Eton College
Eton College. Henry set it up to house and teach 70 poor boys free of charge, then founded King's College, Cambridge, a year later for them to move on to.
Q 05What term, coined in 1885, describes the system of paid retinues that let late-medieval magnates defy the crown?
Bastard feudalism
Bastard feudalism. The crown itself fed the system by raising its armies for France under paid contracts; when those wars ended, the lords could use their armed retainers for their own ends at home.
Q 06Where was the 1455 clash in which York captured Henry VI, regarded as the opening of the wars?
St Albans
St Albans. The fighting ran through the town's narrow streets, where York's great rival Somerset was killed, leaving the king in York's hands.
Q 07At which battle in December 1460 was Richard, Duke of York, killed?
Wakefield
Wakefield. The victors displayed his head on Micklegate Bar in the city of York wearing a mock crown, a jibe at the throne he had claimed that autumn.
Q 08Which sky effect made three suns appear before Edward's 1461 victory at Mortimer's Cross?
A sun dog
A sun dog, known to science as a parhelion, sets a bright mock sun on either side of the real one. Edward declared the eerie sight a sign that God favoured him, and went on to win.
Q 09Which 1461 Palm Sunday snowstorm battle is called 'the largest and bloodiest on English soil'?
Towton
Towton. Victory in the blizzard won the crown for the teenage Edward IV, while the deposed Henry VI fled north to Scotland with his queen and son.
Q 10Whom did Edward IV marry in 1464 against the advice of the Earl of Warwick?
Elizabeth Woodville
Elizabeth Woodville was the widow of a Lancastrian knight, and Edward wed her in secret. Warwick found out months later, while he was still arranging a French royal bride for the king.
Q 11By what nickname is Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, known?
The Kingmaker
The Kingmaker helped put Edward IV on the throne in 1461, then fell out with him and restored the deposed Henry VI in 1470, only to die in battle six months later.
Q 12Which of Edward IV's brothers married Warwick's daughter Isabel and joined the earl's rebellion against the king?
George, Duke of Clarence
George, Duke of Clarence, later made his peace with Edward, plotted again and was put to death in the Tower in 1478, drowned in a butt of malmsey wine if the rumour of the time is true.
Q 13To where did Edward IV flee in 1470 when Warwick invaded and put Henry VI back on the throne?
Flanders
Q 21Richard III's skeleton, found in 2012, showed which spinal condition behind the hunchback of Tudor legend?
Scoliosis
Scoliosis. The sideways curve set in during his teens and cost him some height, but the bones showed no trace of the withered arm that Shakespeare gave him.
Q 22Where did Charles II rebury two small skeletons dug up at the Tower in 1674, taken to be the princes?
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey. The bones were sealed in a white marble urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and nobody has yet proved that they belong to the two boys.
Q 23In Shakespeare's Richard III, what does the king offer his kingdom for at Bosworth?
A horse
Flanders belonged to his brother-in-law, the Duke of Burgundy. Edward sailed back from there in March 1471 and had retaken his crown within a few weeks.
Q 14At which battle on Easter Day 1471 was the Earl of Warwick killed?
Barnet
Barnet. Warwick was cut down as he tried to get away, and Edward had the body put on show at St Paul's Cathedral so that nobody could claim the earl was still alive.
Q 15What made Lancastrian troops mistake an ally's star badge for Edward IV's sun and attack their own side in 1471?
Thick fog
Thick fog. The Earl of Oxford's men, coming back from a chase, were shot at by their own army; each group thought the other had changed sides, the cry of treason spread and the line broke.
Q 16At which battle in May 1471 was Henry VI's only son, the Lancastrian heir, killed?
Tewkesbury
Tewkesbury. Edward of Westminster was 17 when he died in the rout; his mother the queen was captured days later, and within three weeks his father was dead in the Tower.
Q 17How was Henry VI's death in the Tower of London officially explained?
Great melancholy
Great melancholy was the story put out by Edward IV's court. Few have ever believed it: Henry is widely thought to have been murdered on Edward's orders.
Q 18Which French-born queen led the Lancastrian cause while her husband Henry VI was unfit to rule?
Margaret of Anjou
Margaret of Anjou took charge whenever her husband's mind failed and fought on for their son's inheritance. Captured in 1471, she was ransomed four years later and died in France.
Q 19Which great church did Edward IV begin rebuilding in 1475 and choose for his own tomb?
St George's Chapel
St George's Chapel, at Windsor Castle. The body of Henry VI, the rival he had deposed, was moved there a year after Edward's burial, so the two enemy kings now lie in the same church.
Q 20Which boy-king reigned for just eleven weeks in 1483 before his uncle took the throne as Richard III?
Edward V
Edward V was never crowned. That June he was declared illegitimate, and he and his younger brother were last seen inside the Tower of London.
A horse. Shakespeare's king shouts 'my kingdom for a horse', and the real Richard did lose his mount in boggy ground, fighting on foot until he was cut down.
Q 24Which noble family's forces were the 'wildcard' at Bosworth, ultimately turning against Richard III?
The Stanleys
The Stanleys kept their private army out of the fight until Richard charged at Henry Tudor, then closed in on the king. Lord Stanley, the head of the family, was Henry's stepfather.
Q 25Under what banner did Henry Tudor's forces fight at Bosworth?
A red dragon
A red dragon on white and green was the standard of Cadwaladr, a legendary British king whom Henry's family claimed as an ancestor. The beast later held up one side of the Tudor royal arms.
Q 26What was Richard III's personal device, used by his army at Bosworth?
A white boar
A white boar. His modern defenders took the badge as their own: the Richard III Society, which campaigns to clear his name, began in 1924 as the Fellowship of the White Boar.
Q 27Whom did Henry VII marry in January 1486 to unite the two houses?
Elizabeth of York
Elizabeth of York was Edward IV's eldest daughter, so the couple's children carried both bloodlines. Their second son grew up to be Henry VIII.
Q 28Which battle in June 1487 is considered the last of the Wars of the Roses?
Stoke Field
Stoke Field. Two years after Bosworth the Earl of Lincoln led German mercenaries and Irish troops in a last Yorkist bid for the crown, and Henry VII's army destroyed them.
Q 29What job did Henry VII give the boy pretender Lambert Simnel after pardoning him?
Spit-turner in the royal kitchen
Spit-turner in the royal kitchen. Henry treated the boy, crowned 'King Edward VI' in Dublin only weeks before, as the tool of grown conspirators, and chose to humble him instead of hanging him.
Q 30In which city was Richard III's skeleton discovered under a car park in 2012?
Leicester
Leicester. DNA from a living descendant of his sister proved that the bones were Richard's, and in 2015 he was reburied in the city's cathedral.