The invention was a convenient symbol to represent the merging of the two houses in his marriage to Elizabeth and an end to decades of hostilities. It it is now recognized, however, that, while the white rose was indeed a major symbol of the York dynasty, the red rose was principally adopted by Henry Tudor (Henry VII) in 1485 (Jones).
The roses refer to the idea that the two warring houses were each represented by a heraldic badge of a rose – the Lancasters by a red rose and the Yorks by a white. Goodwin writes that the name ‘Wars of the Roses’ “goes back only to the early nineteenth century, when it seems to have been coined by the Romantic novelist, Sir Walter Scott, in Anne of Geierstein (1829)” (xix). While this period undoubtedly carried its share of bloodshed, however, both the level of conflict and the significance of the ‘Roses’ are often exaggerated.
The ‘Wars’ refer to the tangled sequence of claims, plots, rebellions, and battles that began in approximately 1455 and only concluded in 1487 after Henry VII, a heir of Lancaster, seized the throne and ensured an era of peace by marrying Elizabeth, an heiress to York. While many may be more familiar with the complex machinations of the Lannisters, Starks, and other houses of Westeros, however, it was historical dynasties of Lancaster and York that sat at the center of the Wars of the Roses.
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