philippa gregory war of the roses series

As a symbol it had a long association with the Virgin Mary, who is sometimes called the “Mystical Rose of Heaven”. The simple five-petal design of the heraldic rose was inspired by the wild dog rose that grows in English hedgerows. The two men ask others to show their respective positions by picking a rose – red for Lancaster and white for York. Before then you have Shakespeare’s play Henry VI, part I, with the scene in which Richard, Duke of York, quarrels with the Lancastrian leader, Edmund, Duke of Somerset. More than a hundred years earlier it was referred to as “the quarrel of the two roses”. The historian David Hume was writing in 1762 of “the wars between the two roses”. On the other hand we do know the origins of the term, Wars of the Roses, are much older than the precise formulation of words Scott used. But we are not told who these contemporaries were who said it – “Hey, we are living during the Cousins’ War” – or where the term was written down. Alison Weir confirms that indeed, this is what “contemporaries” called it, adding that ‘the Wars of the Roses’ was the invention of Sir Walter Scott. Philippa Gregory tells us in her non-fiction book, The Women of the Cousins’ War that this was the term “used at the time”. This would be fine by me if it were not for the fact that Gregory, and popular historians such as Alison Weir, are now pushing the term the Cousins’ War as more ‘authentic’ than the Wars of the Roses we all remember. It will provide a massive boost to the sales of Philippa Gregory’s Cousins’ War series of novels. On Sunday the BBC drama The White Queen concluded in the United States.

Philippa gregory war of the roses series