England was already honeycombed with family feuds, now ready to burst out into open violence. If we examine the lists of the supporters of York and of Somerset, we find that to a very large extent the politics of the English magnates were personal, and not national. With York were linked a great group of peers who were allied to him by blood. The chief of them were the younger branch of the Nevilles, represented by the two Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, a father and son who had each made his fortune by marrying the heiress of a great earldom. The Nevilles of the elder line, represented by the head of the house, the Earl of Westmoreland, had always been at feud with their cousins of the younger stock, and, since they were strong Lancastrians, the younger branch would probably have favoured York in any case. But their adhesion to him was rendered certain by the fact that Duke Richard had married Salisbury's sister. Another sister of the earl's was wedded to the next greatest supporter of York, John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. He was a nephew of that Mowbray whom Henry IV. had beheaded in 1405, in company with Archbishop Scrope, and so had his private grudge against the house of Lancaster. Among the other chiefs of the Yorkist party we can trace in almost every instance an old feud or a family alliance which seems to have determined their policy. [Sidenote: =The Lancastrians.=] It was the same with the party that stood by the king and Somerset. It comprised, first of all, the houses which were allied in blood to the Lancastrian line--the king's cousins the Beauforts, the legitimized descendants of John of Gaunt, and his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor, Earls of Richmond and Pembroke.[27] After them came the Percies of Northumberland, the Westmoreland Nevilles, and the Staffords of Buckingham--the three houses which had been prominent in aiding the usurpation of Henry IV. The Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland were certainly confirmed in their loyalty to the king by their bitter quarrel with their kinsmen, the younger Nevilles, the strongest supporters of York. [Sidenote: =Character of the Wars of the Roses.=] But the "Wars of the Roses,"--as historians have chosen to name them, from the white rose which was the badge of York, and the red rose which was assumed long after as the emblem of Lancaster--were much more than a faction fight between two rival coteries of peers. At the first they were the attempt of the majority of the English nation to oust an unpopular minister from power by force of arms. There is no doubt that the greater part of England sided with York in this endeavour. The citizens and freeholders of London, Kent, the South, and the Midlands, where lay all the wealth and political energy of the nation, were strongly Yorkist. Henry, on the other hand, got his support from a group of great nobles who controlled the wild West and North, and the still wilder Wales.