Daniel's Debut as British Historian

Daniel asked an unexpected question tonight:

"So Daddy, in the red and white rose fight, were we on the red side or the white side?"

Yes, Daniel was asking which faction was our own in the Wars of the Roses...

There was an oblique reference to the Wars of the Roses in one of C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles novels - one of the girls says that some complicated situation makes the Wars of the Roses seem simple by contrast. We came across this reference perhaps six months ago - maybe more - and Daniel retained it and assimilated it in the interim.

I explained that we don't really have a proverbial horse in the race, when it comes to the Wars of the Roses, because they were in England and we're Americans - of course it's really a family feud, per se - and it all happened over five hundred years ago.

But Daniel wasn't convinced that we have no tribal or emotional investment in this most famous of conflicts. So I conceded that some people read history and take sides after the fact.

So he went on to ask: "Which side do we want to win - like is there good guys or bad guys? " Good guys and bad buys only entered official "adult" political parlance in the Golden Age of George W. Bush, but I didn't point that out.

Then he wanted to know if maybe the Red Roses were the girls and the White Roses were the boys, or vice versa. This idea was discounted. Then he wanted to know if any girls were in the fights; I told him that boys did all the fighting back then...

Moving from gender to age: " Was everybody who fighted grownups - and were they younger than you?" I explained that yes - grownups fight these wars, but they don't normally let old fogies like me anywhere near the battlefield...

Of course, the Wars of the Roses are right up Daniel's alley: kings seizing the throne, Renaissance-fair-genre warriors on horses, presumably in armor, assassinations, battles, betrayals, beheadings... I went to Wikipedia to see if I could make any sense out of this portion of English history - of course I couldn't but that's another story - but Daniel absorbed a few Fun Facts in the interim, and then went on to ask whether all of the feudal combatants died in the battles. I told him that most of them probably did not die on the battlefield, so then he reached for a precise estimate as to how many Lancastrians and Yorkists went missing in action:

"How many do you think died - ten?"

Finally, someone manages to approach this period of history with solid, manageable figures...

(November 16, 2011)