The Wars of the Roses

England came home from losing the Hundred Years' War with a mentally incapacitated king, a treasury in ruins, and a surplus of armed, unemployed nobles with private retinues and French campaign experience. Two branches of the royal family fought over the throne for thirty years. The nobility largely destroyed itself — by the end, most of the old great houses were extinct in the male line — and a distant claimant named Henry Tudor won at Bosworth and married the rival house. A weak king plus too many armed elites with nothing to do produced a generation of civil war, and the survivors accepted a strong monarchy because they were exhausted.