CHAPTER 18
Ifound the first clue to the mystery of the rose in Shakespeare’s play King Henry VI Part 1 . He sets one of his early scenes in the play in the gardens of the Temple in London. The Temple, which today houses the offices of many law firms, had originally been the English headquarters of the Order of the Knights Templar. After the Templars were disbanded in 1306, the Temple’s lands were confiscated and given to the Knights Hospitallers. During the Middle Ages, the Temple Gardens were used for jousting, but, no doubt, there were also areas reserved for growing roses.
In the scene, a group of nobles pluck roses from a rambling brier. Richard Plantagenet – later to inherit his uncle’s title of Duke of York – and the Earl of Warwick pluck white roses; their rivals, the Earls of Somerset and Suffolk (supporters of Henry VI), pick red ones. These roses then become the badges of the opposing factions: white for York and red for Lancaster.
The white Rose of York, the ‘Rose of the Field’, is actually Rosa alba, the common briar rose. These unspectacular, single roses are native and grow wild throughout most of Britain in the hedgerows surrounding fields, where they produce a rich harvest of hips. The deep, red Rose of Lancaster is Rosa gallica officinalis. This is a cultivar that was very popular in the Middle Ages both because of its rich colouring and strong perfume, which is retained by the petals even when dried. As the name suggests, Rosa gallica was widely grown in Gaul (Gallica). However, while the device of picking roses in the Temple Gardens works well in the play as a means of defining early on which nobles are taking which side, it has no factual basis. In actuality, the symbolism of the roses is much more complex than this, and the wearing of white and red roses as badges came rather later than this scene would suppose and for different reasons.
So what is the truth about the roses? Well, Shakespeare’s choice of the Temple Gardens was no accident. The growing of ornamental roses in England was almost certainly introduced at the time of the crusades. At the time, the experts at rose-growing were the Arabs, particularly those from Damascus, where the so-called Damascene roses originate from. The Arabs used to grow roses not just for ornament, but also to extract the wonderful perfume known throughout the East as ‘attar of roses’. This is still used to this day in the manufacturing of Turkish Delight, a jelly-like sweetmeat that probably has its origins in Persia. The crusader states were not always at war with their neighbours, and for quite a long time the Kingdom of Jerusalem was at peace with Damascus. It was probably during this period that the Damascenes taught the Franks techniques of rose growing that would be familiar to gardeners today. In particular, they showed them how to graft the buds of tender varieties of roses onto more vigorous, wild briars.
What does all this rose cultivation have to do with the story of the Wars of the Roses? Well, I found the answer to this (and much more besides) when studying a highly illustrated and very beautiful scroll dating from the time of the Yorkist king Edward IV. This scroll, which was probably published for his accession in 1461, is now housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia in the USA. Very generously, the curators of the Museum have placed images, plus a full explanation of the scroll on the Internet. It can be viewed on their website at: http://www.freelibrary.org/medieval/edward.htm
The scroll’s purpose was essentially royal propaganda: an open display of ancestry that would trump the claims of Edward’s Lancastrian rival, Henry VI, whose grandfather, Henry IV, had deposed his cousin, Richard II, in 1399 and usurped the throne of England for himself. As we have seen, both Richard II and Henry IV were grandsons of Edward III, but the former was descended from his eldest son, Edward, known as the Black Prince, while the latter was the son of Edward III’s third, surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.
As Richard had no children and died in 1400, things might have sorted themselves out were it not that Edward III’s second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, had a daughter, Philippa. She married Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, and their granddaughter, Anne, married into the Yorkist line. This mattered because, not only were the descendants of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the theoretical heirs of Richard II, but he himself had declared them as such in Parliament. As is to be expected, the scroll shows clearly how Edward IV and his Yorkist line descended from Lionel of Antwerp. The Philadelphia scroll (and others like it) was therefore a major weapon in the propaganda war that was waged parallel to the blood-and-guts war to decide who was the legitimate King of England.
Needless to say, rose symbolism comes into all this complex genealogy. The rambling rose from the Temple Gardens, with all its suckers and its myriad branches is, of course, a symbol for the family tree of the royal house of Britain. The rosa gallica, the beautiful red rose that was adopted by the House of Lancaster, represents the ‘grafting’ of the Norman-French line to the stock of the ancient House of Anglo-Saxon England. This grafting began when the Throne of England was seized by William the Conqueror and King Harold II Godwinson was killed in the Battle of Hastings. The grafting proper was fully implemented by the marriage of William’s third son, Henry I, to Princess Mathilda of Scotland. Through her mother, she was herself descended from Alfred the Great and was, therefore, connected directly to the briar stock of England.
As Edward IV, like Henry VI, was a descendant of Henry I and also of the later French House of Plantagenet, in theory he could also have adopted the red Rosa gallica as his badge. He didn’t do this for a very good reason. He had a further trump up his sleeve: one that he plays with daring force in the Philadelphia Roll.
Ann Mortimer, who was Edward’s grandmother (the mother of his father, Richard Duke of York), was the granddaughter of Roger Mortimer and Philippa Plantagenet. The Mortimers were an extremely powerful family and at times close to the Royal Family. Titled Earls of March, their seat was Wigmore Castle. It lies in the northeast of the county of Hereford and is therefore on the border or ‘Marches’ of Wales. It was near here, at Mortimer’s Cross, that on 2nd of February 1461 Prince Edward of York (soon to become Edward IV) won his first great victory over the Lancastrians. Legend has it that at dawn, just before the commencement of battle, a sun dog appeared in the sky. This is a rare phenomenon, giving the appearance of three suns in a row, the two outer ‘suns’ being refractive images of the central one. Edward took the appearance of three suns as a good omen, believing that it implied the Holy Trinity was on his side. After the battle he adopted the radiant sun as a personal emblem, and consequently, this symbol, as well as the white rose of York, is to be seen in many places on the Philadelphia Roll. This is why Shakespeare’s playRichard III begins with the sentence:
‘Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York [ie Edward IV];
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house [York]
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.’
Edward’s and Richard’s maternal ancestors, the Mortimers, had been next-door neighbours of Llewellyn the Great, Prince of Wales. He was a remarkable man who not only established himself as the paramount chief in Wales, but was also deeply involved in English politics. Indeed, as an ally of Simon de Montfort, he was present at the Battle of Lewes (1264), which established the principle of elective Parliaments in England. Llewellyn’s relationship with the Mortimers was volatile, but, in 1230, he made an alliance with Ralph de Mortimer who thereupon married Llewellyn’s daughter Gwladys dda (Claudia the good). This meant that since Llewellyn claimed to be descended from the original kings of Britain, ie the Brutus lineage, the subsequent Mortimers, descended from this marriage, could claim the same thing. Consequently, Edward IV was able to further legitimize himself as the true King of Britain by virtue of pre-Saxon royal blood that descended from time immemorial.
This is also shown on the Philadelphia Roll, where the Brutus lineage is highlighted. In addition, Edward is depicted on horseback, with his horse decked out in a marvellous surcoat. This coat bears his arms, but at the centre of these is placed the attributed shield of Brutus himself: three gold crowns on a blue background. Clearly, the Brutus lineage was central to Edward’s claim on the throne.
It was for this reason, or so I believe, that Edward IV chose the briar, ‘rose-of-the-field’, as his other main emblem. As any gardener knows, cultivated roses have a tendency to send out suckers from the root stock. The white rose of York therefore symbolizes a flower from the old root stock of Britain: the authentic line of British royalty onto which not only the Plantagenet Dynasty but also the earlier Saxon line of Alfred the Great was grafted. For, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth (and a plethora of other historical documents), the Brutus dynasty predated even the invasion of the Romans.
Descent from Llewellyn was Edward’s trump card, but the Welsh themselves also featured prominently in the Wars of the Roses. Edward IV’s chief opponents at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross were Owen Tudor (grandfather of the later Henry VII) and his younger son Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke. The latter escaped, but his father, who as the husband of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of France, was stepfather to Edward’s rival, Henry VI, was captured. In retaliation to the butchery of his own father, Richard Duke of York, following his defeat at the earlier Battle of Barnet, had Owen Tudor beheaded. His head was placed on a spike in the marketplace at Hereford, and it is said that a madwoman combed his hair, washed his face and set candles round it.
Not all the Welsh were on the side of the Lancastrians – the Yorkists too had their supporters. Prominent among these were two brothers, Sir William and Sir Richard Herbert, whose family home was Raglan Castle (near Monmouth), with prominent members of the family buried at St Mary’s church in Abergavenny. Suspecting that I might find further clues to my quest for the real secret of the Welsh rosy-crosses, I decided it was time I paid this church a visit.