In England from Wicliffe to Henry VIII - James Aitken Wylie

decimated the population.
The contest which opened in 1452 between the
White Rose of York and the Red Rose of
Lancaster, it is the province of the civil historian to
narrate. We notice it here only so far as it bears on
the history of Protestantism. The war was not
finished in less than thirty years; it was signalised
by twelve pitched battles; it is computed to have
cost the lives of eighty princes of the blood, and
almost entirely annihilated the ancient nobility of
England. The kingdom had seemed as a stricken
land ever since the De Hoeretico Comburendo law
was placed upon its statute-book, but the Wars of
the Roses filled up its cup of misery.
The rival hosts were inflamed with the
rancorous hate peculiar to civil conflicts, and
seldom have more sanguinary battles been fought
than those which now deluged the soil of England
with the blood of its own children. Sometimes the
House of York was victorious, and then the
Lancastrians were mercilessly slaughtered; at other
times it was the House of Lancaster that triumphed,
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