"Wars of the Roses" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in English literature. During the fifteenth century few books were written in England. One reason for this was that in England it was a time of foreign and of civil war. The century opened in war with Wales, it continued in war with France. Then for thirty years the wars of the Roses laid desolate the land. They ended at length in 1485 with Bosworth field, by ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... time to spare will find many other records of this kind in the Beauchamp Tower, the oldest of all being the name of "Thomas Talbot 1462" (89), supposed to have been concerned in the Wars of the Roses. Emerging again upon Tower Green we see ...
— Authorised Guide to the Tower of London • W. J. Loftie
... Philippa his wife. In a line below are the names of those four of his sons whose descendants figure in English history. It was among the descendants of these sons that the celebrated wars between the houses of York and Lancaster, called the wars of the roses, arose. ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... to the small hamlet of Towton, where on the lonely heath was fought the Battle of Towton Field, one of the most bloody battles recorded in English history. This great and decisive battle was fought in the Wars of the Roses, between the rival Houses of York and Lancaster, for the possession of the English Crown—a rivalry which began in the reign of Henry VI and terminated with the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It has been computed that during the thirty years ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... tenth bay was the Chantry of Bishop Kempe (1450-1489). It was the finest in the cathedral, built by Royal licence. He did much for the beautifying of the cathedral, and rebuilt Paul's Cross, as we have said already. He seems to have kept clear of the fierce struggles of the Wars of the Roses, for he saw rival kings in succession ostentatiously worshipping in St. Paul's, and did not lose the friendship of any of them. So far as one can judge, he honestly felt that he was not called upon to become a partisan of any, ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... exactly a baronial hall of the first magnitude, was nevertheless a very fine old house. It had been somewhat shorn of its pristine glories during the Wars of the Roses. One out of its original two quadrangles had then been laid in ruins, and had never been rebuilt. But the old inner quadrangle still remained standing, and made an ample and commodious dwelling house for the family of the Chadgroves who inhabited it; whilst the ground which had once been ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... battle ever fought on British ground, with the exceptions of Hastings and Bannockburn,—and greater even than Hastings, if numbers are allowed to count,—was that of Towton, the chief action in the Wars of the Roses; and its decision was due to the effect of the weather on the defeated army. It was fought on the 29th of March, 1461, which was the Palm-Sunday of that year. Edward, Earl of March, eldest son of the Duke of York, having made himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... as those at Avranches, Pau, &c., are kept up. It varies, of course, every year, and in each place every year; but when we were last at Avranches, 'society' was the watchword, we might almost say the war cry; and we had to declare our colours as if we lived in the days of the Wars of the Roses. ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... the Wars of the Roses began with the first battle of St. Albans (May 23rd), fought to the east of the town. In this the White Rose party were victorious; the King was taken prisoner and lodged for the night in the Abbey. The victorious army plundered the town, but the Abbot by sending out plenty ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... from six to seven, and was supposed to be a period of strenuous mental application. That evening, however, Cynthia made little progress with her Latin exercise or the Wars of the Roses. Her Form mates, looking up in the intervals of conning their textbooks, noted her sitting with idle pen, gazing raptly into space or glancing anxiously at the clock. Though she had not confided the details of her secret, her companions felt that something was going to happen. Romance was ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... withdrawal of land from cultivation which took place in the fourteenth century was due to the scarcity of labor caused by the Black Death. In the fifteenth century population was reduced by the Wars of the Roses; and throughout the period under consideration, agriculture had to meet the competition of the growing town industries for labor. Is it not possible that these influences caused an exorbitant rise in wages which would alone account for the ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... perishable individuality of the units. On the other hand, the more anonymous and unpersonal the unit is, the more fit is he to step into the place of another, and so to insure to the group uninterrupted self-maintenance. This was the enormous advantage through which during the Wars of the Roses the Commons repulsed the previously superior power of the upper house. A battle that destroyed half the nobility of the country took also from the House of Lords one-half its force, because this is attached to the personalities. The House ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of the edifice, had been greatly retarded during the wars of the Roses; but it was fortunately completed, before, the doctrine of the Cinquecentists—who saw no beauty save in the revived dogmas of Vitruvius—had so far gained ground, as to make obsolete and unfashionable, the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... Protectorate.—The restoration of Henry was in reality the restoration of Somerset. In 1455 York, fearing destruction, took arms against his rival. A battle was fought at St. Albans, in which Somerset was defeated and slain. This was the first battle in the wars known as the Wars of the Roses, because a red rose was the badge of the House of Lancaster, to which Henry belonged, and a white rose the badge of the House of York. After the victory York accompanied the king to London. Though the bulk of the nobility was against him, he had on his side the powerful family of the Nevills, ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... visit was to Lord and Lady Charles Percy at Guy's Cliff, in Warwickshire, a pretty picturesque place of historical and romantic memory. The society was pleasant, and I was taken to Kenilworth and Warwick Castle, on the banks of the Avon, a noble place, still bearing marks of the Wars of the Roses. I never saw such magnificent oak-trees as those on the Leigh ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... against our Tower! It is a Biblia Pauperum, an illustrated English History comprising the Romans, King Alfred, William the Conqueror, and the Wars of the Roses. I was fourteen years old when England found its completion at the battle of Bosworth, and the thirty years' War of the Roses came to an end with the marriage ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... sounded soft in the churchyard. It was simply the sense of England—a sort of apprehended revelation of his country. The dim annals of the place were sensibly, heavily in the air—foundations bafflingly early, a great monastic life, wars of the Roses, with battles and blood in the streets, and then the long quietude of the respectable centuries, all corn-fields and magistrates and vicars—and these things were connected with an emotion that arose from the green country, the rich ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... had been very savage in their revenges out in that wild part of England, shut away from the civilisation of the time by moor and mountain. Ralph knew, too, that though they were better then than in the early days of the Wars of the Roses, they were still brutal enough, and that he would gain the applause and respect of his men by giving them the order. But Mark Eden had not drawn his sword to begin cutting and thrusting; and instead of leaving the lad to hang till he fell, he, Ralph Darley, had, ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... the poetry of the fifteenth century is worthy of a different fate from that which has befallen it. Possibly the Wars of the Roses may in some measure account for the barrenness of the time; but I do not think they will explain it. In the midst of the commotions of the seventeenth century we find Milton, the only English poet of whom we are yet sure as worthy ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... shorter account of the time in his "Historia Anglorum" (from the Conquest to 1253). He is the last of the great chroniclers of his house; for the chronicles of Rishanger, his successor at St. Albans, and of the obscurer annalists who worked on at that Abbey till the Wars of the Roses are little save scant and lifeless jottings of events which become more and more local as time goes on. The annals of the abbeys of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton, which have been published in the "Annales Monastici" ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... England continued to be in a state of political unrest. There were wars and risings both abroad and at home, for besides the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) and the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) there were wars with the Welsh and the Scots, as well as disorders made by powerful, intriguing barons. The barons and great landowners took advantage of the weak royal rule to increase their own power. Parliament, ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... ways—though he liked to make a grand show, and dress all his court in cloth of gold and silver, and the very horses in velvet housings, whenever there was any state occasion. Nobody greatly cared for him; but the whole country was so worn out with the troubles of the Wars of the Roses, that there was no desire to interfere with him; and people only grumbled, and said he did not treat his gentle, beautiful wife Elizabeth as he ought to do, but was jealous of her being a king's daughter. There was one person who did hate him most ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... arises from some quarrel with your government—which, being foreign, he takes for granted must be insupportable—he would but consider you as he would a Saxon who fled from the iron hand of William the Conqueror, or a Lancastrian expelled by the Yorkists in our Wars of the Roses." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... its importance to its situation on the famous northward road; Watling Street runs through it. Owing to its proximity to London, it was the scene of two battles in its High Street during the Wars of the Roses. ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... the owner in the dignities of an English gentleman, and to portion off the daughters, provided that the superfluous sons shifted for themselves, as Richard had hitherto done. The house had been ruined in the time of the Wars of the Roses, and rebuilt in the later fashion, with a friendly-looking front, containing two large windows, and a porch projecting between them. The hall reached to the top of the house, and had a waggon ceiling, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... garden, I can understand how those high mad lords at the end of the Middle Ages, just before their swords clashed, caught at roses for their instinctive emblems of empire and rivalry. For to me any such garden is full of the wars of the roses. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton |
