Actually, the Lancastrians never adopted the Red Rose as their symbol, it having been used first by Henry Tudor (Richmond) in 1485. This was the dynastic struggle between the house of York and the house of Lancaster. Since constant reference to earlier events in the conflict are found in Richard III, readers should review the story of the Wars of the Roses, which lasted for thirty years and in which some eighty princes of the blood, many members of the nobility, and at least 100,000 commoners were slain.
Moreover, the chronicle histories which provided materials for Shakespeare's play were written with a Tudor bias, presenting and interpreting character and event from the point of view accepted as orthodox in sixteenth-century England. As has been now well established, Shakespeare's generation viewed history as a mirror in which could be read lessons important to ruler and subject alike. Particularly because throughout the sixteenth century England had reason to fear civil strife as well as foreign invasion, Elizabethans continued to manifest a keen interest in the historical events of the preceding century. On the throne of England when the dramatist wrote sat the granddaughter of Richmond, the first of the Tudors, who, it was firmly believed, was the godly savior of an England long torn by dissension and civil war.
That war, a prolonged, intermittent conflict between the two noble houses of Lancaster and York which began in 1455, was closer to Shakespeare and his generation than are the Napoleonic wars to the present generation. Shakespeare's Richard III covers events in the latter years of the Wars of the Roses - that is, from the attainder and execution of George, Duke of Clarence, in 1478, to the defeat of Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.
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