Tudor rose
A double rose, red outside and white within: the badge of the Tudor kings. It joins the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York, the badges of the two houses in the Wars of the Roses.
Meaning
The Tudor rose is the heraldic rose doubled, an outer row of red petals round an inner row of white. Henry VII, the first Tudor king, married Elizabeth of York in 1486, joining the houses of Lancaster and York, whose emblems were the red and the white rose; the V&A calls the official Tudor rose “a combined white and red flower”. Fox-Davies notes that under the Tudors the heraldic rose often has two rows of petals, both because the cultivated rose was becoming familiar and because of the attempt to join the rival emblems. The rose, with the thistle and the shamrock, is still a plant badge of the United Kingdom, often shown beneath the royal arms.
Origin and history
The two badges came first. The Yorkists bore a white rose, the Lancastrians a red one, and in Oswald Barron’s words “We still call those wars that blotted out the old baronage the Wars of the Roses.” Edward IV of York used the “rose-en-soleil”, which Fox-Davies explains as two badges joined, the blazing sun of York and the white rose. Henry VII used the crowned red rose of Lancaster as his own badge, and the windows of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge show his badges and his queen’s, the crowned red rose and the crowned white rose, in separate panels.
Who first joined the two into one flower is told differently. The V&A’s record of a Lancaster rose panel says Henry VIII combined them, red outer petals and white inner, into the single Tudor rose. Fox-Davies dates the doubled rose to the Tudor sovereigns generally, and records an old legend that when Henry VII came to the throne someone produced a real rose of red and white to match the heraldic one.
The heraldic rose
Fox-Davies insisted that the “conventional” heraldic rose is an exact copy of the wild rose of the hedgerow. When its seeds and the small green sepals between the petals are shown in their natural colours it is blazoned “barbed and seeded proper”.
Red rose and white
The roses’ older meanings, in the flower dictionaries of the nineteenth century, are on the red rose and white rose pages. In heraldry the joined badges lived on in the herald named Richmond, whose badge, Fox-Davies records, is the red rose of Lancaster joined with the white rose of York, under the royal crown.
Where you’ll see it
The V&A has a crowned red rose of Lancaster in stained glass of about 1540, said to have come from Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, most likely once paired with a crowned white rose of York. The Tudor dragon, the other great Tudor badge, is on the Red dragon of Wales page.
Read next
- Next in HeraldryCrown and coronetsA crown or coronet above a shield shows rank. The royal crown has arches, an orb and a cross; the coronets of British peers are told apart by the strawberry leaves and silver balls, or pearls, on their rims.
- The red rose in the flower dictionaries, apart from its Lancastrian badge.Red roseIn the nineteenth-century flower dictionaries the rose meant love, or beauty. Charlotte de La Tour's French original of 1819 gave "beauty"; the English and American books that followed her mostly gave "love".
See also
Red dragon of Wales, White rose, Coat of arms, Family crest, Tinctures (heraldic colours), Ordinaries.
Sources
- Panel: the Red Rose of Lancaster, Collections record O7830: stained glass, England, about 1540, Victoria and Albert Museum, summary, object details and gallery label
- A Complete Guide to Heraldry, Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, 1909 (Project Gutenberg ebook 41617), T. C. & E. C. Jack, via Project Gutenberg, Chapter XVIII, The Rose, pp. 268–270; Chapter XXIX, Badges; Chapter III, The Heralds and Officers of Arms: badges of the heralds
- Heraldry (1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 13, article by Oswald Barron, Encyclopædia Britannica, via Wikisource, Badges
- Coats of Arms, Royal Residences, Art and History (Internet Archive copy, 4 October 2026), The Royal Family (royal.uk), article text
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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