From 1455-1485, which two houses fought each other for possession of the English crown in the Wars of the Roses?

The English throne was the ultimate prize in a series of dynastic civil wars fought between two rival branches of the royal House of Plantagenet. The conflict ignited during the unstable reign of King Henry VI of the House of Lancaster, whose periods of mental illness created a power vacuum. This weakness emboldened Richard, Duke of York, to assert his own strong claim to the crown, plunging the kingdom into three decades of intermittent but brutal warfare.

The opposing sides are famously symbolized by their floral badges: the red rose for the Lancastrians and the white rose for the Yorkists. While these emblems were used to some extent, their popular association with the war was largely cemented in the following century, most notably by William Shakespeare. He dramatized the origin of the rivalry in his play *Henry VI*, where nobles choose their allegiance by plucking either a red or white rose from a temple garden.

The struggle concluded in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field, where the last Yorkist king, Richard III, was defeated and killed. The victor, Henry Tudor, a claimant with Lancastrian heritage, ascended the throne as Henry VII. To finally end the bloodshed and secure his dynasty, he married Elizabeth of York, daughter of the former Yorkist king Edward IV. This union of the two houses was symbolized by the creation of the new Tudor Rose, which combined the red and white roses into a single emblem of peace.