Rose (red and white)

,—by way of distinction between two factions, who deluged this country with blood through a series of above thirty years, in order to establish a permanence of tyranny on the throne. The house of York had for its badge a white rose; that of Lancaster a red one. They were both emulously revengeful, cruel, unjust, ambitious, and bloody-minded. As each in turn got the ascendant, the scaffold was the source of a constant and never-failing stream of blood; and there were alternate attainders in every noble family in the kingdom, which were as frequently reversed. The remote cause of all this bloodshed was Tyrant Henry IV. surnamed Bolingbroke, who deposed, and then murdered, Tyrant Richard II.