"Wars of the Roses" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sir Rowland. When he was only six years old his father was killed in one of the battles of the Wars of the Roses. They were Lancastrians, and the Yorkists seized his estate, and Rowland was only saved from the fury of the conquering party by the devotion of his nurse. She managed to hide him in a secret place in the tower till there ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... that Tiverton suffered both in the Civil War of 1150 and also in the Wars of the Roses, and though there is little evidence to support this assertion, there can be no doubt that indirectly the town must have been disagreeably affected. For Baldwin de Redvers fortified his castle at Exeter, and it is very likely that retainers from ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... with very grand iron gates and stone gate-posts, and on the top of each a most dreadful bogy, all teeth, horns, and tail, which was the crest which Sir John's ancestors wore in the Wars of the Roses; and very prudent men they were to wear it, for all their enemies must have run for their lives at the very first ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... their fine old cathedral, where we saw the tomb of poor Edward II., and many more ancient. Several of the Saxon princes were buried in the original cathedral, and their monuments are preserved. Various of the ancient nobility, whose names and families were extinct from the Wars of the Roses, have here left their worldly honours and deposited their last remains. It was all interesting to see, though I will not detail it, for any "Gloucester guide" would beat me hollow at that work. Next they carried us to the jail, to show in how small a ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... and was widely believed, in view of the mystery surrounding the fate of the princes, to be truly the princely person he declared himself. However that be, his story is a highly romantic one, and forms a picturesque closing scene to the long drama of the Wars of the Roses. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... share in the Wars of the Roses, and Perkin Warbeck besieged Exeter in 1497, but unsuccessfully, like most other exploits of that unlucky adventurer. Fifty years later the West rose in arms against Henry VIII, in support of the "old religion," and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... profound tranquillity prevailed over England. The last embers of those factions by which, during his father's reign, the peace of the nation had been disturbed rather than endangered, were quenched by the vigilance and severity of that able monarch; during the wars of the Roses, the noblest blood in England had been poured out on the field or on the scaffold, and the wealth of the most opulent proprietors had been drained by confiscation. The parties of York and Lancaster were no more—the Episcopal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... The Three Parts of Henry VI, together with Richard the Third, constitute the history of the Wars of the Roses, in which the House of York fought the House of Lancaster through the best part of the fifteenth century, and lost the fight and the English crown in 1485, a hundred years before Shakespeare came to London. Although these plays have but slight appeal to us as readers, they must have been ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... acquaintance, we strolled along till we came to a spot called by the country people, "The Bloody Meadow," from being, like several other places in the neighbourhood, the scene of one of those terrible slaughters chronicled in the wars of the Roses. It was a sloping field, through the middle of which ran a little stream down to the meadow's end, where, fringed and hidden by a plantation of trees, the Avon flowed. Here, too, in all directions, ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... 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 which ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... chronological tables, written on the black-board and discussed with the class, will be of service in understanding certain periods, such as the Wars of the Roses, and in helping to form the time-sense of pupils. (See Chronological ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... historical element which had contributed so much to the popularity of Waverley. The press has since that time groaned with his imitators. We have had historical novels of all classes and grades. We have had served up in this form the Norman Conquest and the Wars of the Roses, the Gunpowder Plot and the Fire of London, Darnley and Richelieu—and almost at the same moment with Mr. Macaulay's appeared a professed romance of Mr. Ainsworth's on the same subject— James II. Nay, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... vassals over whom they bore sway, and whose homage they received like native and independent princes, appears to have nourished in their minds ideas of their own importance better suited to the period of the wars of the Roses than to the happier age of peace ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... a tankard make the treasure mine, I promising as extra to send a huge bundle of ancient indentures in place of the precious manuscript. Thus, in the way of Mackenzie's 'Man of Feeling,' we become fragmentary where we fear to be tedious; and so, in a good historic epoch, among the wars of the Roses, surrounded by friars and nuns, outlaws and border-riders, chivalrous knights and sturdy bowyers, consign I to the oblivescent firm of Capulet and Co. my happily ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... As the feudal nobility of the island had been engaged in one of those strange feuds which were as common in the middle ages as measles and small-pox, and as the greater part of the old landed proprietors had been killed during these so-called Wars of the Roses, it was quite easy for the Kings to increase their royal power. And by the end of the fifteenth century, England was a strongly centralised country, ruled by Henry VII of the House of Tudor, whose famous Court of Justice, ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... library. There, too, was the great hall up stairs, with pictures on each side of ancestors who went back to the days of the Plantagenets. There were effigies in armor of knights who had fought in the Crusades and in the Wars of the Roses; of cavaliers who had fought for King Charles; of gallant gentlemen who had followed their country's flag under the burning sun of India, over the sierras of Spain, and in the wilderness of America. And of all these she was ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... something which can only vaguely be called Tory about the Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a justifiable romance to the last and most remarkable figure of the fighting House of York, with whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Bacon, who was said to have concocted it himself, partly from the precepts of his master, partly from his own experiments, and it is thought he might have been living to this day, if he had not unluckily been killed in the Wars of the Roses; for you know no recipe for long life would be proof against an old English arrow, or a leaden bullet from ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of Henry VII. to the throne (1485) a new era opened in the history of England. The English nation, weakened by the Wars of the Roses and tired of a contest that possessed little interest for the masses, was not unwilling to submit itself without reserve to the guidance of a strong ruler provided he could guarantee peace both at home and abroad. Practically speaking, hitherto ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... borrow illustrations from classical mythology; he knows the Dynasties of ancient Egypt; and he is able to furnish, without reference to history, the exact date upon which King John signed Magna Charta, and the precise number of battles fought in the Wars of the Roses. ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... where the stone stairways are worn by so many generations of young feet, and where on the play-ground the old elms shadow turf where so many soldiers and statesmen have been trained to struggle in larger fields, there is nothing after all finer than the great hall. In every age since the wars of the Roses, it has buzzed with the boisterous life of the privileged boys of England, who have come up afterward by the hundred to be historic men. There are still the fireplaces with the monogram of Henry VI., the old stained glass, the superb wood carving, ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... his long reign of fifty years, carried the British flag over the fields of France, and won immortality at the battles of Crecy and Poictiers. Henry V. gained the victory of Agincourt, and won and wore the title of King of France. Then came the Wars of the Roses and the turbulent termination to a period of six centuries during which the English Monarchs had represented the military spirit of their times, and had led in the rough process of struggle and conquest out of which was growing the United Kingdom ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... to other nations, to say how much more we have to be proud of in our ancestors than they? Among our ancient monarchs, great crimes stand out as monstrous and strange. But their valor, and, according to their understanding, their benevolence, are constant. The Wars of the Roses, which are as a fearful crimson shadow on our land, represent the normal condition of other nations; while from the days of the Heptarchy downwards we have had examples given us, in all ranks, of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... that umbrageous tree under whose shade, as tradition says, Johnson and Goldsmith used to sit and converse. According to an engraving of 1671 there were formerly three trees; so that Shakespeare himself may have sat under them and meditated on the Wars of the Roses. The print shows a brick terrace faced with stone, with a flight of steps at the north. The old river wall of 1670 stood fifty or sixty yards farther north than the present; and when Paper Buildings were erected, part of this wall was ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... England," may imply that Sir Bertyne remained in France discharging the duties of his office, from the period of the Battle of Agincourt, where he {172} signally distinguished himself, until his services were again called for in the Wars of the Roses. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... 1886, the Executive Committee was increased to seven by the addition of Mrs. Besant and Frank Podmore, and in April Tract No. 4, "What Socialism Is," was approved for publication. It begins with a historical preface, touching on the Wars of the Roses, Tudor confiscation of land, the enclosure of commons, the Industrial Revolution, and so on. Surplus value and the tendency of wages to a minimum are mentioned, and the valuable work of Trade Unionism—sometimes regarded by Guild Socialists and others nowadays ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... spent his substance during the Wars of the Roses, and was finally brought to the block (30 Henry VI.,[63] 1452). His son Walter was restored by Edward IV., but he would probably be encumbered by debts and "waste"; at least, he had but small portions to leave to his family when he made his will[64] (31 ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... whole attention to the consolidation of his power in the British islands. For several years after the conclusion of peace on the Continent, England was harassed by bloody and confused struggles, known as the Wars of the Roses, between rival claimants to the throne, but at length, in 1485, Henry VII, the first of the Tudor dynasty, secured the crown and ushered in a new ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... 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 Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... much improved; the effect of the land sales in Henry VII.'s reign, when the moneyed classes purchased two-thirds of the estates of the nobility, and spent their amassed wealth in cultivating and improving the neglected lands. This factor—as well as the cessation of the Wars of the Roses—was beginning to work a lasting benefit to the poor, as the street cries of 1557 show, for, according to the register of the Stationers' Company that year, a licence was granted to John Wallye and Mrs. Toye ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... 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
... 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 of being named ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... book is divided are chosen on other grounds than those of the old handbooks, where the accession of a new king or a new dynasty is made a landmark; and a different proportion is observed in the space given to events or to prominent men. The Wars of the Roses are viewed as less important than the Peasants' Revolt; the scholars of the New Learning leave scant space for Lambert Simnels and Perkin Warbecks. Henry Pelham, one of the last prime ministers to owe his ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Wars of the Roses, Warkworth Castle saw many changes of fortune, as the tide of victory flowed this way and that. The Percies were all Lancastrians, though Sir Ralph Percy changed sides twice. The castle fell into the hands of the Yorkists, and the great Earl of Warwick, the "King-maker" ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... powerful nobles, who seized the power of England and turned it to self- destruction. Meanwhile all his foreign possessions were won back by the French under the magic leadership of Joan of Arc. Cade's Rebellion (1450) and the bloody Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) are names to show how the energy of England was violently destroying itself, like a great engine that has lost its balance wheel. The frightful reign of Richard III followed, which had, however, this redeeming quality, that it marked ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Barons' War of the reign of Henry III. the earl of Derby was active in stirring up feeling in the county against the king, and in 1266 assembled a considerable force, which was defeated by the king's party at Chesterfield. At the time of the Wars of the Roses discontent was rife in Derbyshire, and riots broke out in 1443, but the county did not lend active support to either party. On the outbreak of the Civil War of the 17th century, the county at first inclined to support the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... formerly ran from a secret chamber in the oak-panelled dining-room of Birtsmorton Court, Worcestershire, to a passage beneath the moat that surrounds the structure, and thence to an exit on the other side of the water. During the Wars of the Roses Sir John Oldcastle is said to have been concealed behind the secret panel; but now the romance is somewhat marred, for modern vandalism has converted the cupboard into a repository for provisions. The same indignity has taken place at ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... Queen regnant has, ex officio, committed treason against God: the Realm and Estates may have conspired with her, but her rule is unlawful. Naturally this skirl on the trumpet made Knox odious to Elizabeth, for to impeach her succession might cause a renewal of the wars of the Roses. Nothing less could have happened, if a large portion of the English people had believed in the Prophet of God, John Knox. He could predict vengeance on Mary Tudor, but could not see that, as Elizabeth would succeed, his Blast would bring ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... known as the Wars of the Roses brought the Plantagenet dynasty to a close, weeded out the older nobility, and cleared the way for a ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... hundreds of generations of sheep; but it had never known the plow. It was the same unbroken turf which our early British ancestors knew in these parts, and had remained unscathed by any such trifling happenings as the Roman invasion, the Fire of London, the Wars of the Roses, or the advent of Mr. Lloyd George. The very cave itself may easily have been older than Westminster Abbey; and if there is a lord in the land whose ancestral hall can boast a longer record of un-"restored" antiquity, he may fairly claim that his ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... The Wars of the Roses, to be sure, had left them under a cloud, shorn of the most of their wealth and a great part of their lands. Yet they kept themselves afloat (if this riot of metaphor may be pardoned) and their heads moderately high, until Sir William, the first Baronet, by developing certain tin mines ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... possessed two uncles, one on each side of the house. Their father's elder brother had been a man-at-arms, having preferred a stirring life to the Forest, and had fought in the last surges of the Wars of the Roses. Having become disabled and infirm, he had taken advantage of a corrody, or right of maintenance, as being of kin to a benefactor of Hyde Abbey at Winchester, to which Birkenholt some generations back had presented a few roods of land, in right of which, one descendant ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Introduction Britain under the Romans Britain under the Saxons Conversion of the Saxons to Christianity Danish Invasions; The Normans The Norman Conquest Separation of England and Normandy Amalgamation of Races English Conquests on the Continent Wars of the Roses Extinction of Villenage Beneficial Operation of the Roman Catholic Religion The early English Polity often misrepresented, and why? Nature of the Limited Monarchies of the Middle Ages Prerogatives of the early English Kings Limitations of the Prerogative Resistance an ordinary ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... marketing: Roger himself rarely stepped across his threshold, and had never been known to gossip. To marriage he never gave a thought: "time enough for that," he had decided, "when Steens became his, as some day it must;" for the estate ever since the first Stephen acquired it in the Wars of the Roses and gave it his name ('Steens' being but 'Stephen's' contracted) had been a freehold patrimony descending regularly from father to son or next heir. All in good time Roger Stephen would marry and install his wife in the manor-house. ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a great school of history. From the reign of Alfred to the end of the Wars of the Roses there is but one break in the contemporary records of our history, a break which came in the years that followed the outbreak of feudal lawlessness. In 1143 William of Malmesbury and Orderic ceased writing; in 1151 the historians who ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... differ—concerning the accuracy of "War and Peace" as a truthful narrative of events. But this is really a matter of no importance. Shakespeare is the greatest writer the world has ever seen; but he is not an authority on history; he is an authority on man. When we wish to study the Wars of the Roses, we do not turn to his pages, brilliant as they are. Despite all the geographical and historical research that Tolstoi imposed on himself as a preliminary to the writing of "War and Peace," he did not write the history of that ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... 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 ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... capable man, the duke of York. An effort was therefore made about 1450 by one party of the nobles to depose Henry VI in favor of the duke of York. A number of other nobles took the side of the king, and civil war broke out. After a series of miserable contests known as the "Wars of the Roses" the former party was successful, at least temporarily, and the duke of York became king in 1461 ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... of it than the old law gives us, which we have already quoted, concerning the dog who went mad to serve his private ends. In a few masterly pages he sketches for us the rotting and dying Church, which had recovered her power after the Wars of the Roses over an exhausted nation; but in form only, not in life. Wolsey, with whom he has fair and understanding sympathy, he sketches as the transition minister, 'loving England well, but loving Rome better,' who intends a reform of ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... was often perhaps something ideal. In the wars of the Roses it had turned into mere savage ferocity; and in forty years of carnage the fighting propensities had glutted themselves. A reaction followed, and in the early years of Henry VIII. the statutes were growing obsolete, and the "unlawful games" rising ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... 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. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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
... 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 between York ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... The Wars of the Roses had allowed the royal possessions to fall into a state of great disorder, so that the Duchy of Lancaster records belonging to the early years of the reign of Henry VII. contain many references to the necessity for vigorously checking infringements on the forest that had been taking place. ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... the time of Richard I. it was held for King John by Henry de Pomeroi, but in no part of the country was John greatly beloved, and on the return of Richard from captivity the garrison surrendered voluntarily, Pomeroi, it is said, committing suicide. During the Wars of the Roses some fugitives from the battle of Barnet gained admittance to the Mount in the disguise of pilgrims, and then, declaring themselves, held the castle against all comers. Doing his duty as sheriff of the Duchy, Sir John Arundell was killed in attacking them, and they resisted till ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... long period in question which prevented such talent as there was from assuming the particular form of literature. Fully to make out what this 'something' was may baffle us; but, when we remember that this was the period of the Civil Wars of the Roses, we have reason to believe that the dearth of pure literature may have been owing, in part, to the engrossing nature of the practical questions which then disturbed English society. . . . Accordingly, though printing was introduced ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... castle here, of which there are a few fragmentary remains, including the base of two round towers. In the course of its history it underwent many changes of ownership, finally passing into the hands of 1457, during the Wars of the Roses, by Lord Bonville, brother-in-law ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... and covetous in some 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
... resting-place of so many connected with our ancient history—the Holtes, the Erdingtons, the Devereux, the Ardens, the Harcourts, the Bracebridgss, Clodshalls, Bagots, &c. Here still may be seen the stone and alabaster effigies of lords and ladies who lived in the time of the Wars of the Roses, two showing by their dress that while one was Lancasterian, the other followed the fortunes of York. The tablets of the Holte' family, temp. Elizabeth and Charles, and the Devereux monument of the Jacobean era, are well preserved, while all around the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... born in the year 1509, was the grandson of Sir Edmund Bedingfeld, the favourite of three successive kings, Edward IV., Richard III., and Henry VII. This same Sir Edmund had served in the Wars of the Roses, and Edward IV., by letters patent of the twenty-second year of his reign, granted to him, "for his faithful service, licence to build towers, walls, and such other fortifications as he pleased in his manors of Oxburgh, together with a market there weekly, and ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... with the helmet." We then came 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 these ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Maulevrier, ought to welcome. Mr. Smithson, who claimed to be a lineal descendant of that Sir Michael Carrington, standard-bearer to Coeur de Lion in the Holy Land, whose descendants changed their name to Smith during the Wars of the Roses. Mr. Smithson bodily proclaimed himself a scion of this good old county family, and bore on his plate and his coach panels the elephant's head and the three demi-griffins of the Hertfordshire Smiths, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... down to the breast. Our Saxon ancestors wore forked beards. The Normans at the Conquest shaved not only the chin, but also the back of the head. But they soon began to grow very long beards. During the Wars of the Roses beards grew "small ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... wince. They would like to buttonhole the man in the street and explain to him, like the Ancient Mariner, all about David Cyssell, the founder of their line. David Cyssell, it seems, though he didn't quite catch the Norman Conquest and missed the Crusades, and was a little bit late for the Wars of the Roses, was nicely in time to get a place in the train of HENRY VIII., which was quite early enough for a young man who firmly intended to be an ancestor. When he died his last words were, "Rule England, my boys, but never never, never let the people call you 'Cessil,'" and his sons obeyed him ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... year, but Owen survived many romantic adventures. Twice he escaped from prison, twice he was recaptured. Once he took sanctuary in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, and various attempts to entrap him were made by enticing him to revels in a neighbouring tavern. Finally, on the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, he espoused the Lancastrian cause, and was beheaded by order of Edward IV. after the battle of Mortimer's Cross. Two sons, Edmund and Jasper, were born of this singular match between Queen and clerk of her wardrobe. Both enjoyed the favour of their ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... Magna Charta from King John, and afterwards by the revolt headed by Simon de Montfort in Henry III.'s reign; was carried on vigorously by Edward I., and finally successfully finished by Henry VII. after the long faction-fight of the Wars of the Roses had weakened the feudal lords so much that they could no longer assert ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris |
