#imprisoned Edward IV - and were so demonstably unable to represent royal authority that they were forced to free him

[wonder-worker]

"The late medieval nobility were not always gleefully ganging up on the king. On the contrary, a lord with pretensions of dominance would find his severest critics among his fellow nobles, who seem on the whole to have considered an inept king infinitely preferable to a colleague wielding excessive power. The isolation of Richard of York in the 1450s can be paralleled in the fourteenth century by Thomas of Lancaster, whose assumption of dominance in opposition to Edward II was much disliked, in spite of the king's own unpopularity."

-Rosemary Horrox, "Personalities and Politics", The Wars of the Roses (Problems in Focus), edited by A.J Pollard