Rose White, Rose Red: The Real History of Requiem of the Rose King

These days, Shakespeare's history plays are not as well-known as his tragedies or comedies, and despite what First Folio title pages may say, any play with the name of an English monarch is firmly classed as a history play today. Henry V seems to have escaped this stigma somewhat, but that perhaps only makes it more surprising that shoujo manga creator Aya Kanno decided to base her series Requiem of the Rose King on two different history plays: Henry VI Part Three and Richard III. The series, which follows young Richard Plantagenet from childhood on, does play fast and loose with both history and Shakespeare at times, but it retains enough of the feel of both to make it interesting. In fact, Moto Hagio said that she believes Kanno's version to be more interesting than Shakespeare's, which is not only incredibly high praise, but also brings us back to that point about Shakespeare's histories not being particularly popular with modern audiences. But the fact of the matter is that the time period we know as the Wars of the Roses is one of history's more interesting power struggles (or family spats), and looking at how Kanno uses both the plays and recorded history as jumping-off points for her own work can make Requiem of the Rose King an even more fascinating story.

To start with, The Wars of the Roses, known at the time merely as “the civil war,” was a fight between two branches of what was at the time England's royal family, the Plantagenets. Originating in France, the family held the throne from the time of Henry II up until Richard III's death. (You may better know that particular Henry as the son of Matilda [Maud]—whose struggle for the throne against Stephan of Blois was known as the time “when Christ and his saints slept” for its brutality—and also as the husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine. He's also the guy who killed Thomas Becket.) The two houses (possibly both alike in dignity) were Lancaster and York, each represented by a different colored rose: red for Lancaster and white for York. At the time, Henry VI, representing Lancaster, was on the throne, and Richard, the Duke of York, wanted very much to remove him from it. And if you're up on your pop culture, those two names should sound very familiar; Mr. George R. R. Martin didn't leap very far when he gave us Lannisters and Starks with the same two colors.

Shakespeare covered the entirety of the wars across four plays, the three parts of Henry VI and the stand-alone Richard III. They're typically considered a set by scholars, and history suggests that Shakespeare used several contemporary sources to write them. Although Kanno mostly sticks with those four in her manga (and the currently airing anime adaptation), it's worth noting that she does import a character from Henry VI Part One: Joan of Arc.

The central figures of this story are almost all Plantagenets, with the main one being Richard, later Richard III. You probably know about him from the whole Princes in the Tower fiasco, wherein he was accused of murdering his two nephews, and the “fact” that he was an ugly hunchback with a withered arm. The latter accusation is likely only partially true—contemporary accounts indicate that he had one shoulder higher than the other and that was pretty much it, something that good tailoring would have been able to disguise. One of the most vehement condemnations of his appearance dates to six years after his death and may have been part of an attempt to legitimize Henry VII's rule. John Rous, who praised Richard during his reign, appears to have been instrumental in this, and of course Shakespeare's depiction of him in the plays has cemented the idea of him as a misshapen monster in popular imagination. (This could be linked to his personal symbol being the boar, which Henry's wife Margaret uses against him in the play, calling him “Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting hog” in act 1, scene iii. Kanno gives him an albino boar as a sort of mystical companion.) Contrary to both of these images, Kanno instead chooses to have her Richard be intersex, and while that wasn't based on a specific historical source but rather the idea of androgyny (according to our 2015 interview with her), it does work with fifteenth-century traveler Nicolas von Poppelau's eyewitness statement that he was “lean, with delicate arms and legs.” Nothing seems to have been able to erase the fact that Richard was a judicially sound king, however, with Francis Bacon remarking that Richard was “a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people.” This is something worth keeping an eye on in Requiem of the Rose King, because it could tie into Richard's relationships with Henry and Joan, while potentially contrasting him with his siblings and other royals and nobles.

Henry VI, who got three plays detailing his life and reign, perhaps fared better in history but not necessarily in life. (In death he was worshipped as an informal saint for a couple of centuries, linking him to the character of Joan in Kanno's series.) He inherited one war from his father, Henry V, (the Hundred Years War) and then was deposed in the Wars of the Roses, and while that may not make him the king most marked by armed conflict, it certainly didn't mean his life was an easy one. In fact, for one year he suffered from some sort of mental breakdown that rendered him catatonic, which is what allowed the House of York to get a solid foot in the door in the first place—Richard's father (also Richard) became the regent while Henry was unable to rule. (Shakespeare leaves out Henry's mental health struggles, possibly in an attempt to make him look “better.”) Although he was briefly restored to the throne during the war, Henry ended his life a prisoner in the Tower of London; some believe he was murdered by Richard. (Although there's no proof of that, an exhumation of his body in the early twentieth century revealed that he had suffered a violent death, so someone murdered him.) During his stay there, he wrote a poem that includes the lines “Kingdoms are but cares/State is devoid of stay, /Riches are ready snares, /And hasten to decay,” which seems to indicate that he was not a content ruler and also aligns with Kanno's first scenes of him as yearning to be a shepherd.

That his wife, Margaret, was a more enthusiastic monarch may have contributed to this, as she's sometimes seen as the spark that ignited the Wars of the Roses; in any event, she was instrumental in the entire affair, being the one who personally led the Lancasters. One of her contemporaries, the Duke of Suffolk, described her as having “valiant courage and [an] undaunted spirit,” while historian Edward Hall said that she excelled in everything, giving her the high praise (at the time) of being “more like to a man, than a woman,” which makes her sound like a model for Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare uses this to show Henry as weak in the face of his militant wife (also a bit Macbethian); Kanno is rather more sympathetic to Henry in her depiction. Unlike Richard, Henry's legacy does have a widely-recognized positive: he founded several universities that are still operating today and his final resting place has remained revered. (By contrast, Richard's body, as you may recall, was found underneath a parking lot in 2013.)

Although the Wars of the Roses was initially waged to put Richard, the Duke of York on the throne, he never did take it. Though his claim to the throne was, relatively speaking, fairly solid—he was related to Edward III on both sides of his family, as a great-grandson on his dad's side and a great-great-great-grandson on his mom's. (Yes, that says a lot about the marriage practices of Medieval England.) His marriage to Cecily Neville—who was said to have the same short temper and haughty demeanor that Kanno gives her—strengthened his ties to other members of the British nobility, and he held a variety of important jobs for the king, including taking charge of his French territories for a time. He started to think that maybe he could do a better job than Henry VI before he actually took over during Henry's breakdown, so it isn't that far a leap to his role in the civil war, especially since Henry had that one year period where he wasn't able to rule. Eventually, however, Richard was convinced to put his son Edward IV on the throne instead—and shortly thereafter Richard was killed in the Battle of Wakefield.

Edward IV, Richard III's oldest brother, wasn't crowned king until a few weeks after his father's death. Not everyone was thrilled with this, and his second brother George at one point deposed him and put Henry back on the throne. (George was apocryphally drowned in a wine barrel for his troubles.) That didn't last long, though, and by all accounts Edward's actual reign was fairly peaceful, much to Henry Tudor, later Henry VII's chagrin. That's not for lack of trying to go to war, though—Edward attempted a war with France that ended in the Treaty of Picquigny and an abortive attempt to put Alexander Stewart on the Scottish throne that ended in the English being packed back off to England. He also married “down”: his wife, Elizabeth Woodville, wasn't from the upper echelons of the nobility, which didn't make his political cronies happy. By all accounts Elizabeth—great-grandmother of Queen Elizabeth—was an intelligent and influential woman, so he may have known what he was doing. Sadly, history doesn't tend to think much of Edward IV, but given that he falls between Henry VI and Richard III in terms of full reigns (meaning not counting Edward V's abortive one), maybe there's something to be said for his relative anonymity.

Can you have a king without a kingmaker? Richard Neville, the sixteenth Earl of Warwick, would probably have said no. Mostly that's because he was known as one, having been instrumental in the crowning and removal of two kings, first deposing Henry VI to crown Edward IV, and later to reverse the process. He's in some ways history's ultimate schemer, and he's certainly been accused of playing up to whichever side looked better for him personally during the Wars of the Roses. (He also at one point tried to put George on the throne, which didn't work out.) He wasn't above using his family to further his goals, either—both his daughters Isabel and Anne were married to key players in the struggle, with Anne just missing the throne once while married to Edward, Prince of Wales and then attaining it when she married Edward's uncle Richard III. Since Richard and Anne knew each other in childhood, there's some speculation that they may have originally been betrothed before Warwick decided that marrying her to Henry's son was a better use of his political currency. When she was widowed, George and Richard both wanted control of her, the former by claiming her as his ward (he'd married her sister Isabel) and the latter wanting to marry her. Whether this is because of their past relationship or because of the titles and lands she inherited from her father (but couldn't use due to her gender) I will leave it up to your interpretation. In any event, after George and Isabel's deaths, Anne raised her niece and nephew, while mourning the death of her own son. She predeceased her husband, probably due to tuberculosis, but rumors of Richard being what they are, some believed he'd poisoned her so he could marry someone else.

Kanno mostly sticks to the cast of characters Shakespeare uses in Henry VI Part Three and Richard III, but she does make two notable deviations: Jane Shore and Joan of Arc. Jane Shore is an interesting choice because she's got a fairly large role in a different play about Richard written just before Shakespeare's, and while he doesn't specifically name her as a character in his history play, some productions add her in place of one of the anonymous ladies of the court. In history, her real name was Elizabeth (whether Jane was a middle name or a nickname is unclear), and she was Edward IV's longtime mistress. Richard resented her for reasons that aren't fully known—possibilities raised include her link to his brother Edward or her hiding someone from him—and he basically slut-shamed her by making her walk through London in her shift (underwear) holding a candle. (Yes, this may be the inspiration for the scene with the Shame Nun in Game of Thrones.) Most histories agree that Jane was very intelligent, which could have some bearing on Kanno having her be a witch—an accusation often leveled at learned or otherwise terrifying women. In the manga, Jane is adept in the use of love potions and is behind the scenes fomenting trouble between Edward and his brothers, thus demonstrating several more qualities that Medieval men would have found alarming, including political savvy and sexuality. There's something delightful in the fact that Jane, so mistreated by many of the men in history, outlived them all, dying at the ripe old age of 82.

Joan of Arc, however, is one of the most interesting characters in Kanno's version of the story. In Shakespeare's usage, she dies in Henry VI Part One, but not before the English have damned her as a witch several times over, beginning in Act I, Scene v: “Devil, or devil's dam, I'll conjure thee:/ Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch,/ And straightway give thy soul to him thou serv'st.” These remarks come based on her prowess in battle, and Joan fairly nicely refutes them, but we can see both the war and the words of the English wearing on her as the play goes on. By Act V, Scene iii, she's become the witch they accuse her of being, summoning forth “fiends” to help France win the day in a speech reminiscent of Prospero's about “drown[ing his] book” in The Tempest. Although Joan tries to save herself, she is condemned and killed, her last words in the play a curse upon England and Henry—and the Duke of York. If we consider that Kanno is sticking to Shakespeare's version of Joan, rather than the French, Catholic, or standard anime variants, her haunting of Richard takes on a much more ominous tone in Requiem of the Rose King, implying that it is Joan, through her curse on the House of Plantagenet, who has caused the Wars of the Roses.

You'll have to watch or read for yourself to fully decide.