The rose carried a distinct meaning of secrecy: a rose hung above a table meant that what was said beneath it was confidential, the origin of the Latin tag sub rosa, under the rose, still used for things spoken in confidence. In English history the white rose became a dynastic badge, the emblem of the House of York in the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses against the red rose of Lancaster, the two later combined in the Tudor rose, and it was afterward taken up as a Jacobite token. Layered onto a single pale flower, then, are purity and the Virgin, love and Venus, silence and confidence, and the fortunes of a royal house.
The flower's association with secrecy and the sacred met in stone in the great rose windows of Gothic cathedrals, circular stained-glass windows named for their petal-like tracery and often centred on an image of the Virgin, so that the architecture of a building could itself be read as an enormous rose. In the Victorian language of flowers a white rose sent alone meant I am worthy of you, or, in a starker reading, silence, an echo of the old sub rosa custom surviving into a wholly secular code of courtship, one more layer added to a flower already carrying purity, Mary, Venus and a royal house.