ROSES

CHAPTER I

THE ROSE, THE FLOWER OF ENGLAND

"You violets that first appeare,

By your pure purple mantles known,
Like the proud virgins of the yeare,
As if the spring were all your owne;
What are you when the Rose is blown?"

-SIR HENRY WOTTON.

YES, what are violets, and not violets only but all other flowers "when the Rose is blown"? Rightly has the rose been taken as the symbolic flower of England. What flower more popular? What flower has a longer season? Bear in mind the rose is not an exotic; the original species being all included between the 70th and 20th degrees of northern latitude. Half the known species come from Asia; from the Russian empire and countries adjacent, from Persia, Northern India, China, and Japan. Europe, it is stated, has twenty-five species, of which five-sixths exist between the 50th and 40th

degrees of latitude. Great Britain claims sixteen, Denmark seven, so that in the United Kingdom and in the country of our beloved Queen the rose of nature is quite at home.

How glorious in June are the country lanes of

England; grand arching sprays of Rosa canina are found everywhere, bearing flowers of the palest pink to deeper red according in part to the nature of the soil in which the plant is growing. And there is the arvensis of the woodlands, spinosissima of the moors, and rubiginosa, better known as sweet-brier, or, as our Essex children call it, "Sweet Maria," some of the best known wild roses of England with which Flora decks our way.

As the emblem of youth the rose was dedicated to Aurora; of love and beauty to Venus. It was given by Cupid as a bribe to Harpocrates, the god of Silence, from whence originated the custom among northern nations-the rose countries-of suspending a rose from the ceiling at meetings where secrecy was enjoined and matters discussed sub rosa and doubtless it thus found a place in our early national councils. Roses were employed by Roman emperors as a means of conferring honours on their most famous generals, granting them permission thereby to add a rose to the ornaments of their shields. Vestiges of this may still be seen in some armorial bearings.

At the present time the rose is used by his Holiness the Pope when desiring to confer special recognition on a sovereign, church, sanctuary, or country. "The Golden Rose," as it is called, used to be a single flower, but it now comprises several flowers and leaves of pure gold, with a principal flower at the top; the flower an emblem of the mortality of the body, the metal the immortality of the soul. The first instance on record of this gift is when, in 1366, Urban V. presented it to Joanna of Navarre. It was conferred on Henry VIII.

of England in his young days, before he came under evil influence, for the book he wrote in defence of the sacraments. Mary I. was another recipient.

"Somewhere about the year 1277," says M. Opoix, an old French authority on the rose, "a son of the King of England, Count Egmond, who had taken the title of Comte de Champagne, was sent by the King of France to Provins, with troops, to avenge the murder of the mayor of the city, who had been assassinated in some tumult. He remained at Provins for a considerable period, and on his return to England took for his device the red rose of Provins, which Thibault, Comte de Brie, had brought from Syria, on his return from a crusade some years before." This Egmond was Edmund Langley, second son of Henry III. of England, and first Earl of Lancaster. Here we have the origin of the badge of the House of Lancaster, adopted long before the Wars of the Roses. It is not certain whether the rose in question was R. gallica, sometimes called "Rosier de Provins," or R. damascena, the wild rose of Damascus, for both were cultivated at Provins.

As to the rose known as "York and Lancaster," of which we shall have more to say later, Nicholas Monardi, a writer of the early seventeenth century, in his monograph on the roses of Persia, shows that it was known in England in 1575, and describes the flowers as "inter album et rubrum medium colorem sortiuntur." We recognise it under this description; it is moreover possible to find on a bush flowers wholly deep pink and wholly white, and Shakespeare may therefore have some ground for the following incident:—