The Wars of the Roses garden

Audio guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: The Wars of the Roses Garden

South of the Kitchen Garden on the west wall of the Hellems building is the Wars of the Roses Garden. You have twelve of the history plays that I, Will Shakespeare, wrote and we have enacted. These plays were much in fashion, for their deeds and persons were well known to the playgoers, with a place in their minds much like the place of Pearl Harbor in yours.

Remember that our Queen Elizabeth came to the throne only after the death of her older sister, Mary, a Papist -- you would say, a Roman Catholic -- whose mother came from Spain. Then courtiers like Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake hazarded their lives as pirates all over the seas for our Virgin Queen. They defeated the Spanish Armada about the time I first scame to London. They brought England from a poor country wary of invasion to a mighty power of the sea, with ships trading at ports throughout the world.

Our Queen Elizabeth was a Tudor. Before the Tudors came the Wars of Roses, which lasted from 1455 to 1485: thirty years of civil wars between two houses of royal blood, Lancaster and York. Their allies and followers wore roses as badges to declare where their loyalty was pledged.

The House of York took as its badge a white rose naturalized throughout England. In England it came to be a climbing plant, often twining itself on orchard trees. In Colorado it can grow to eleven feet.

The emblem of the House of Lancaster was the well-known red rose. Not only the House but also its rose had connections in France; its Latin name is “rosa gallica”: French rose. This rose is a hardy shrub that grows four feet tall with true red blossoms among the grey-green leaves. A common name for it is Apothecary rose, for its many uses not only in medicines but also in balms and perfumes. The dried flowers were prized for their scent even today. “Rose leaves”, we called them; you add spices and call it potpourri.

The roses of Lancaster and York, and the other roses of my time, bloomed but once a year, in the spring, and then grew their fruit, their hips, which sailors ate to hold off scurvy, while householders took them for preserving fruit and making medicinal tinctures, and brewers put them in their beer and ale. Since those days, growers of roses have bred new kinds with larger flowers and longer blooming seasons. David Austin roses, bred in England beginning in the 1960s, are like old roses in their shape and scent, but they can bloom several times in a single season. The York and Lancaster roses in our garden bloom in June, and then in September and October the white rose displays a gorgeous spectacle of huge, red hips.

In a garden scene in Henry VI, Part I, I begin the Wars of Roses by having the House of Lancaster and the House of York choose their roses as a challenge to one another. Richard Plantagenet, later created Duke of York, declares:

Let him that is a true-born gentleman
And stands upon the honour of his birth,
If he suppose that I have pleaded truth,
From off this brier pluck a white rose with me.

The Earl of Somerset of the house of Lancaster replies:

Let him that is no coward and no flatterer
But dare maintain the party of the truth,
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.

The wars began then and did not end until Henry of Tudor, the heir of the Lancaster, married the oldest surviving child of the York king: Elizabeth of York, the daughter of the late Edward III. He ascended the throne as King Henry VII, determined to end the civil strife. To support the cause, he took the highly politic step of selecting a new rose: Rosa damascena “Versicolor”, it’s called, as an emblem of the alliance of the two houses: a singular plant which puts forth blossoms of white, and of red, and of red and white streaks, all on the same wood. It gained fame first as the York and the Lancaster rose, then as the Tudor Rose, or the Rosa Mundi: rose of the world. You can see two of these plants in the south end of this garden. It remains the flower emblem of England even today. I thought it fitting to end the Wars of Roses plays with this rose. Henry Tudor declares at the end of the play Richard III:

We will unite the white rose and the red.

Henry VII and Elizabeth of York were the grandparents of our Queen Elizabeth. Our good Queen delighted in gardens. Her courtiers vied with one another, embellishing their houses with gardens in hopes of entertaining her there. Almost every summer of her forty-five-year reign, the Queen went on a “progress” to another part of her realm, traveling with all 1500 members of her court (and 400 baggage wagons and 2,400 animals). A visitation from the Queen was certainly a great honor, but it came at a great cost. It is said that she frequented the manors of her adversaries with especial aim of diminishing their coffers and lessening the chances of rebellion, which were very costly.

It was not only roses that were emblems of the minds of those wore them. Flowers had a language all to themselves; an old language it was. I used this language a deal in my poem Venus and Adonis, and in my sonnets. I one sonnet I say:

The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair;
A third, nor red nor white, had stol’n of both....

Roses speak everywhere of beauty and love, both blushing and pale of face, while violets bring modesty to mind. In my play about King Henry V, in the night before the great battle of Agincourt, the king walks among his troops unknown to them, and tells them:

I think the king is but a man, as I
am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me: the
element shows to him that it doth of me; all his
senses have but human conditions:
...wherein he sees reason of fear, as we
do, his fears of doubt be of the same relish
as ours are.

While the Tudor rose was the emblem of her house, our Queen’s personal emblem was the eglantine: the briar rose. In these days you might call it her logo. There is eglantine in the faery queen’s bower in Midsummer Night’s Dream, along with the heady musk rose. The gardeners have planted both of these in the Midsummer Night’s Dream garden for you to see.

In that garden you can also see the broom plant which provided the broom wherewith Puck comes “to sweep the dust behind the door” at the end of the play. This plant too touches the Wars of Roses: both York and Lancaster descended from the Plantagenet line, whose very name means “broom plant”.