Redirect html pages with wildcard

I’ve changed from html to WordPress and there are still many links on other people’s sites which point to my site and so the visitor gets a 404.

I’ve compiled a list (a long one) successfully redirecting these to the new pages with htaccess. However there are several hundred which I’d really rather just redirect, with a wild card, to the home page, since many of the old pages haven’t been recreated in the new site.

I’m trying something like:

RewriteRule ^*.html$ “http:\\www.website.com” [R=301,L]

but I can’t fathom the syntax. Can someone please take pity on me?

Thanks