Tudor Rose - Origins

Origins

The red rose of the House of Lancaster

When Henry VII of England took the crown of England from Richard III in battle, he brought about the end of the Wars of the Roses between the House of Lancaster (whose badge was a red rose) and the House of York (whose badge was a white rose). His father was Edmund Tudor from the House of Richmond, and his mother was Margaret Beaufort from the House of Lancaster; he married Elizabeth of York to bring all factions together. In fact, Richard III fought under the banner of the boar, and Henry under the banner of the dragon of his native Wales. The white rose/red rose idea was a Tudor invention. The historian Thomas Penn writes:

The "Lancastrian" red rose was an emblem that barely existed before Henry VII. Lancastrian kings used the rose sporadically, but when they did it was often gold rather than red; Henry VI, the king who presided over the country's descent into civil war, preferred his badge of the antelope. Contemporaries certainly did not refer to the traumatic civil conflict of the 15th century as the "wars of the roses". For the best part of a quarter-century, from 1461 to 1485, there was only one royal rose, and it was white: the badge of Edward IV.

On his marriage, Henry VII adopted the Tudor rose badge conjoining the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster. The Tudor rose is occasionally seen divided in quarters (heraldically as "quartered") and vertically (in heraldic terms per pale) red and white. More often, the Tudor rose is depicted as a double rose, white over red and is always described, heraldically, as "proper".