III. EDWARD V. AND RICHARD III…

III. EDWARD V. AND RICHARD III

Edward V. Proclaimed--The Two Parties of the Queen and of Gloucester--Struggle in the Council--Gloucester's Plans--The Earl Rivers and his Friends imprisoned--Gloucester secures the King and conducts him to London--Indignities to the young King--Execution of Lord Hastings--A Base Sermon at St. Paul's Cross--Gloucester pronounces the two young Princes illegitimate--The Farce at the Guildhall--Gloucester seizes the Crown--Richard crowned in London and again at York--Buckingham revolts against him--Murder of the Two Princes--Henry of Richmond--Failure of Buckingham's Rising--Buckingham beheaded--Richard's Title confirmed by Parliament--Queen Dowager and her Daughters quit the Sanctuary--Death of Richard's Son and Heir--Proposes to marry his Niece, Elizabeth of York--Richmond lands at Milford Haven--His Progress--The Troubles of Richard--The Battle of Bosworth--The Fallen Tyrant--End of the Wars of the Roses.

By the death of Edward IV. England was destined once more to witness all the inconveniences which attend the minority of a king. Edward V. was a boy of only thirteen. His mother and her family had made themselves many enemies and few friends by their undisguised ambition and cupidity. The Greys and Woodvilles had been lifted above the heads of the greatest members of the aristocracy, enriched with the estates, and clothed with the honours of ancient houses. They had been posted round the throne as if to keep aloof all other candidates for favour and promotion. At the time of the death of Edward IV., Richard of Gloucester was in the North, attending to his duties as commander against the army in the Scottish marches. He immediately commenced his proceedings with that consummate and hypocritical art of which he was a first-rate master. He at once put his retinue into deep mourning, and marched to York attended by 600 knights and esquires. There he ordered the obsequies of the departed king to be performed with all solemnity in the cathedral. He then summoned the nobility and gentry of the country to take the oath of allegiance to his nephew, Edward V., and he led the way by first taking it himself. He wrote to the queen-mother to condole with her on her loss, and to assure her of his zealous support of the rights of his beloved nephew. He expressed his ardent desire for the close friendship of the queen, of Earl Rivers, her brother, and of all her family. He announced his intention of proceeding towards London to attend the coronation, and if Elizabeth had not already known the man, she might have congratulated herself on the enjoyment of so affectionate a brother-in-law, and so brave and faithful a guardian of her son.

But there is every reason to believe that the same messenger who carried these letters of condolence and professed friendship to the queen, carried others of a different tone to a hostile section of her council. The Lords Howard, Hastings, and Stanley, though personal friends of the late king, and Hastings, the chosen confidant and associate of his pleasures, were at heart bitter enemies of the queen's family. It was only the authority of Edward which had maintained peace between them, and now they showed an undisguised hostility to them at the council-board. The Earl Rivers, the queen's brother, and the Marquis of Dorset, her son by her former marriage, occupied the chief seats at that board, and Edward was no stranger to their real sentiments. This knowledge had led him, on perceiving his health failing, to bring these rivals together, and to state to them how much it concerned his son's peace and security that they should forget all past causes of difference, and unite for that loyal purpose. This they promised, but only with the tongue. No sooner was the king dead, than all the old animosity and jealousy showed themselves in aggravated form.

Elizabeth now proposed that the young king should be brought up to town in order to be crowned, and that he should be attended by a strong body of soldiery for the safety of his person. At this, Hastings, who, in common with three-fourths of the nobility, was jealous of the design of the queen and her party to make themselves masters of the government during the king's minority, no longer concealed his real feelings. Edward had been kept on the borders of Wales, where the power of the Mortimers and the Yorkists lay. It was believed that the object was to give a preponderance to the royal family through the Welsh and the borderers; and now to march up to London, attended by a Welsh army, appeared a direct attempt to control the capital by these means. Hastings, therefore, warmly demanded--"What need of an army? Who were the enemies they had to dread? Was it the king's own uncle, Gloucester? Was it Lord Stanley, or himself? Was this force meant by the Woodvilles to put an end to all liberty in the council and the government, and thus to break the very union the king, on his death-bed, had pledged them to?" Hastings concluded his speech by hotly declaring that if the king was brought to London by an army, he would quit the council and the kingdom.

Deterred by this open opposition, Elizabeth yielded, and reduced the proposed guard to 2,000 cavalry. But she did it with deep and too well-founded anxiety. She had had too much opportunity of studying the character of Gloucester to trust him, and the event very soon justified her conviction. Secret messages had, during this interval, been passing between Gloucester and Hastings and the Duke of Buckingham, a weak man, descended from Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III. No doubt he had instructed them to defeat any measures of the Woodville family, which could leave the king in their hands. The moment was accurately calculated; and, accordingly, when the Lords Rivers and Grey, on their way to London with the young king, arrived at Stony Stratford, they found Gloucester had already reached Northampton, only ten miles from them. Gloucester had increased his forces on the way to a formidable body, and he was there joined by the Duke of Buckingham with 500 horse. The Lords Rivers and Grey, on learning the presence of Gloucester at Northampton, immediately rode over to him to welcome him in the king's name, and to consult with him on the plan of their united entrance into London. Gloucester received them with all the marks of that friendship which he had written to avow. They were invited to dine and spend the night, the Dukes of Gloucester and Buckingham promising to ride with them in the morning to pay their respects to the king. Morning appeared, and Gloucester and Buckingham set out with them in the best of humours. They rode in pleasant converse till, arriving at the entrance of Stony Stratford, Gloucester suddenly accused Rivers and Grey of having estranged the affections of the king from him. They denied the charge with as much vehemence as astonishment; but they were immediately arrested and conducted to the rear. Gloucester and Buckingham rode on to the king, where the two dukes humbly on their knees professed their loyalty and attachment. This they proceeded to make manifest by arresting also the king's faithful servants, Sir Thomas Vaughan and Sir Richard Hawse. In spite of the poor young king's entreaties, he led him away with him to Northampton, his relatives and friends, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, and Hawse, following in the rear as prisoners. These prisoners of State were sent off by Gloucester, under a strong guard, to his castle of Pontefract--that blood-stained fortress, the very entrance to which, in bondage, was equivalent to a death-warrant.

At midnight following the very day of these transactions, being the 1st of May, the appalling tidings reached the court that Gloucester, followed by a large army, had seized the king, and sent prisoners the queen's brother and son no one knew whither. Struck with consternation, and deeply rueing her weakness in giving up her own plans of caution, the queen, hastily seizing her younger son by the hand, and followed by her daughters, rushed from the palace of Westminster to the Sanctuary, which had protected her before; but not against a person so base and deadly in his ruthless ambition as this her brother-in-law of Gloucester. She knew the man, and she dreaded everything. Her eldest son, Dorset, who was Keeper of the Tower, in his turn weakly abandoned that important stronghold, and also fled to the Sanctuary. Rotherham, the Archbishop of York and Chancellor of the realm, hastening thither, found the queen seated on the rushes with which the floors at that time were strewn, an image of abandonment and woe.

Meanwhile, London was thrown into the utmost dismay and confusion. Many of the nobles and citizens flew to arms, and some flocked to the queen at Westminster, and others to Lord Hastings in London. Hastings continued to assure them that there was no cause of alarm; that Gloucester was a true man; and he was most likely the more ready to believe this himself from his own dislike of the queen's family.

On the 4th of May Gloucester conducted his royal captive into the capital. At Hornsey Park, the lord mayor and corporation, in scarlet, met the royal procession, followed by 400 citizens, all in violet. The Duke of Gloucester, habited, like his followers, in mourning, rode into the city before the king, with his cap in hand, bowing low to the people, and pointing out to their notice the king, who rode in a mantle of purple velvet. Edward V. was first conducted to Ely Place, to the bishop's palace; but he was soon removed to the Tower, on the motion of the Duke of Buckingham, on pretence that it was the proper place in which to await his coronation. That ceremony Elizabeth and her council had ordered to take place this very day, but the crafty Gloucester prevented that by not arriving in time. He took up his quarters in Crosby Place, Bishopsgate, where one part of the council constantly sat, while another, but lesser portion of it, assembled with Lord Hastings and others in the Tower. The day of the coronation was then fixed for the 22nd of June, leaving an interval of nearly seven weeks in which the schemes of Gloucester might be perfected. The first object of this man had been to impress the queen and her party with his friendly disposition, till he had secured their persons; this being, in a great measure, effected, the next was to persuade the public of his loyalty to his nephew. For this purpose he conducted him with such state into the capital, and so assiduously pointed him out as their king to the people. To have openly proclaimed his designs upon the crown would have united all parties against him. He averted that by his calling on all men to swear fealty to his nephew, and by first swearing it himself. Having now procured full possession of the king's person, the next step was to secure that of his younger brother, without which his plans would all be vain. He was surrendered by the queen, and also placed in the Tower.

The victims were secured. Gloucester had feigned himself a kind relation till he had got them into prison; now he yearned to put forth his claws and devour them. But for this it required that the public should be duly prepared. His followers, and especially his imbecile tool, Buckingham, busily spread through town and country reports of the most terrible plots on the part of the queen and her friends to destroy Gloucester, Buckingham, and other great lords, in order that she and her family might have the king, and through him, the whole government, in their power. They exhibited quantities of arms, which they declared the queen's party had secreted in order to destroy Gloucester and the other patriotic lords, as they pleased to represent them. This did not fail to produce its effect on the people without, and it was promptly followed up by a picture of treason in the very council.

Lord Stanley, who was sincerely attached to Edward IV.'s family, had often expressed his suspicions of what was going on at Crosby Hall; but Hastings had replied, that he had a trusty agent there who informed him of all that passed. But Hastings, who had been completely duped by Gloucester, had been unconsciously playing into his hands, till his own turn came. While he imagined that Richard was punishing the assumption of the queen and her relations, the latter was preparing the bloody acts of one of the most daring dramas of historic crime ever acted before the world. Richard, no doubt, had thought Hastings ready to go the whole way with him. At this crisis, however, he became aware that he was an honest though misguided man, who would stand staunchly by his young sovereign, and must therefore be removed. The tyrant was now beginning to feel secure of his object, and prepared to seize it at whatever cost of crime and infamy. Accordingly, on the 13th of June, says Sir Thomas More, he came into the council about nine in the morning, "in a very merry humour. After a little talking with them, he said to the Bishop of Ely, 'My lord, you have very good strawberries in your garden in Holborn: I request you let us have a mess of them.' 'Gladly, my lord,' quoth he; 'would to God I had some better things as ready to your pleasure as that!' and then, with all haste, he sent his servant for a mess of strawberries. The protector set the lords fast in communing, and thereupon praying them to spare him a little while, departed thence, and, soon after one hour, between ten and eleven, he returned into the chamber amongst them all, changed, with a wonderful sour, angry countenance, knitting his brows, frowning and fretting, gnawing on his lips, and so sat him down in his place. Soon after he asked, 'What those persons deserved who had compassed and imagined his destruction.' Lord Hastings answered that they deserved death, whoever they might be; and then Richard affirmed that they were that sorceress, his brother's wife (meaning the queen), with others with her; 'and,' said the protector, 'we shall see in what wise that sorceress, and that other witch of her councils, Shore's wife, with their affinity, have by their sorcery and witchcraft wasted my body.' So saying, he plucked up his doublet sleeve to his elbow upon his left arm, where the arm appeared to be withered and small, as it was never other." He then included Hastings in the charge. The unfortunate man was hurried out by the armed ruffians of the tyrant, and scarcely allowing him time to confess to the first priest that came to hand, they made use of a log which accidentally lay on the green at the door of the chapel, and beheaded him at once. Lord Stanley, the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of Ely, were kept close prisoners in the Tower. Shortly afterwards the queen's brother and son, Earl Rivers and Lord Grey, were executed at Pontefract.

The united troops of Gloucester and Buckingham, to the amount of 20,000, now held the metropolis in subjection; the terror of the protector's deeds enchained it still more. On the following Sunday, June 22nd, the day which had been fixed for the coronation, instead of that ceremony taking place, a priest was found base enough--tyrants never fail of such tools--to ascend St. Paul's Cross, and preach from this text, from the Book of Wisdom, "Bastard slips shall not strike deep root."

This despicable man was one Dr. Shaw, brother of the Lord Mayor. He drew a broad picture of the licentious life of Edward IV., and asserted that his mode of destroying such ladies as he found unwilling to incur dishonour was to promise them marriage, and occasionally to go through a mock or real ceremony with them. He declared that Edward had thus, in the commencement of his reign, really contracted a marriage with the Lady Eleanor Butler, the widow of Lord Butler, of Sudeley, and daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury; that he afterwards contracted a private and illegal marriage with Elizabeth Woodville, which, however it might be real and legal in other respects, was altogether invalid and impossible, from the fact that Edward was already married to Lady Butler. Hence he contended that Elizabeth Woodville, though acknowledged by Parliament, was, in reality, nothing more than a concubine; that she and the king had been living in open and scandalous adultery; and that, of consequence, the whole of their children were illegitimate, and the sons incapable of wearing the crown.

But the preacher went further. Determined to destroy the claims of the young Edward V. to the crown, he boldly asserted not only his illegitimacy, but that of his father, Edward IV. This could only be done at the expense of the honour of the proud Cicely, Duchess of York, the mother of Gloucester, as well as of Edward. But the man who was wading his way to the throne through the blood of his own nephews, and of the best men in the country, was not likely to be stopped by the honour of his mother. The son of Clarence was living, and in case of the deaths of Edward's sons had a prior right to Gloucester. That right was at present in abeyance, through Clarence's attainder, but would revive on reversion of the attainder, and the possibility of this must be destroyed.

The preacher, therefore, stoutly maintained that both Edward IV. and Clarence were the children of other men, not of the late Duke of York; that it was notorious, and that their striking likeness to their reputed fathers fully confirmed it. Gloucester, he contended, was alone the son of the Duke of York; and this vile prostitutor of the pulpit exclaimed, "Behold this excellent prince, the express image of his noble father--the genuine descendant of the house of York; bearing no less in the virtues of his mind than in the features of his countenance the character of the gallant Richard!" At this moment Gloucester, by concert, was to have passed, as if accidentally, through the audience to his place, and the preacher exclaimed, "Behold the man entitled to your allegiance! He must deliver you from the dominion of all intruders!--he alone can restore the lost glory and honour of the nation!"

Here it was expected that the people would cry out "Long live King Richard!" but they stared at one another in amazement, and the more so that Gloucester did not appear at the nick of time, but after the preacher's apostrophe was concluded; so that, when Gloucester did appear, he was obliged to repeat his lesson, which threw such an air of ridicule upon the whole, that Gloucester could not conceal his chagrin, and the preacher--perceiving that the odium of the attempt, as it had failed, would fall upon him--stole away home, and, it is said, never again recovered his standing. Gloucester, of course, would be the first to fling him by as a worthless tool, and he received that reward of public contempt which it would be better for the world if it always measured out to such vile subserviency.

But Gloucester was now fully prepared to complete his necessary amount of crime for the attainment of the throne, and was not to be daunted by one failure. The preacher, having broken the ice, he renewed his attempt in another quarter--the council chamber of the city. The Lord Mayor--as great a sycophant as his brother the preacher--lent himself, as he had probably done before, to the scheme. On the next Tuesday, the 24th of June, the Duke of Buckingham appeared upon the hustings at Guildhall, and harangued the citizens. He called upon them to recollect the dissolute life of the late king; his frequent violation of the sanctity of their homes; the seduction of most respectable ladies; the extent of his extortions of their money under the name of benevolences. In fact, he repeated, in another form, the whole sermon of Shaw, and went through the whole story of the marriage of Lady Butler, by the king, previous to that with Lady Grey, of which he assured them Stillington, Bishop of Bath, was a witness. Stillington, however, was never called to give such evidence. He then asked whether they would have the illegitimate progeny of such a man to rule over them. He assured them that he would never submit to the rule of a bastard, and that both the aristocracy and the people of the northern counties had sworn the same. But there, he observed, was the Duke of Gloucester, a man calculated to rescue England from such a stigma, and from all its losses--a man valiant, wise, patriotic, and of true blood, the genuine descendant of the great Edward III. On this the servants of Buckingham and Gloucester incited some of the meanest apprentices to cry out, and there was a feeble voice raised of "God save King Richard!" That was enough. Buckingham returned the people thanks for their hearty assent, and invited them to attend him the next morning to the duke's residence of Baynard's Castle, near Blackfriars Bridge, to tender him the crown. After a show of refusal Gloucester accepted it.

Thus ended this scene, which Hume calls a ridiculous farce, but which was, in fact, a most diabolical one, to be followed by as revolting a tragedy. The next day this monster in human form went to Westminster in state. There he entered the great hall, and seated himself on the marble seat, with Lord Howard, afterwards Duke of Norfolk, on his right hand, and the Duke of Suffolk on his left. He stated to the persons present that he chose to commence his reign in that place, because the administration of justice was the first duty of a king. Every one who heard this must have felt that if there were any justice in him he could not be there. It is clear that the spirit of the nation was with the poor boy Edward, but there was no man who dared to lift up his voice for him. The axe of Gloucester had already lopped off heads enough to render the others dumb, and London was invested by his myrmidons. He was already a dictator, and could do for a while what he pleased. He proclaimed an amnesty to all offenders against him up to that hour, and he then proceeded to St. Paul's, to return thanks to God. Thus, on the 26th of June, 1483, successful villainy sat enthroned in the heart of London.

On the 6th of July, not a fortnight after his acceptance of the crown at Baynard's Castle Richard was crowned with all splendour. The terror of the blood-stained despot was all-potent, and was evidenced in the fact that few of the peers or peeresses ventured to absent themselves. With consummate tact Richard, the Yorkist usurper, appointed the heads of the Lancastrian line to bear the most prominent part in the ceremony, next to royalty itself. Buckingham bore his train, and the Countess of Richmond bore that of his queen. Both these persons were descendants of John of Gaunt, and the countess was the wife of that Lord Stanley who had been wounded at the very council board by Richard's ruffian guards, at the time of the seizure of Hastings. There can be little doubt but that it was the intention of Gloucester to have thus got rid, as by accident, of that respectable and powerful nobleman, who had great influence in the north; but having failed in that, he now made a merit of liberating him and his fellows, the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Ely, from the Tower. On Stanley he conferred the stewardship of the household, and soon after made him Constable of England. Probably, it not only entered the mind of Richard that it would be politic to secure the favour of a nobleman so much esteemed in Cheshire and Lancashire, but that, by ingratiating himself with the Countess of Richmond, the wife of Stanley, and the mother of the young Earl of Richmond, who, during the reign of Edward IV., had been a cause of anxiety, as a probable aspirant to the throne, he might succeed in beguiling Richmond into his hands; and this is the more probable because he was, at the very time, negotiating some private matters with the Duke of Brittany, at whose court Richmond was.

Besides the promotion of Stanley, the Lord Howard was made Earl Marshal and Duke of Norfolk, his son was created Earl of Surrey, Lord Lovel was made a viscount, and many others of the nobility now received higher rank. The vast wealth which Edward IV. had left he distributed lavishly amongst those who had done his work, and those whom he sought to win over. The troops who had come from the north, and were seen with wonder and ridicule by the Londoners from their mean and dirty appearance, and called a rascal rabble, but who were ready at a word to do desperate things, he amply rewarded, and sent home again, as soon as the coronation was over.

This great display over, Richard called no Parliament, but merely assembled the nobility before their returning to their respective counties, and enjoined them to maintain the peace there, and to assist his officers in putting down all offenders and disturbers. But he did not satisfy himself with injunctions. He set out to make a wide circuit through his kingdom, in order to awe all malcontents by his presence. He proceeded by slow journeys to Oxford, Woodstock, Gloucester, and Worcester. At Warwick he was joined by the queen; and as she was the daughter of the late Earl of Warwick, she might be considered as presiding in her ancestral home; and there, therefore, a considerable court was held for the space of a week, the Spanish ambassadors and members of the English nobility coming there. Thence the royal pair advanced by Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, and Pontefract to York. The inhabitants of that stronghold of Lancastrian feeling had been warned to receive the king "with every mark of joy;" and to conciliate the northern population, Richard sent for the royal wardrobe from London, and once more repeated the coronation in York, as if to intimate that he scarcely felt himself sovereign till he had their sanction and homage.

But after all the crimes perpetrated by Richard, the public had been terrified into silence, not into approval. No sooner was the south relieved from his presence than it at once recovered breath and language. As if the oppression of a nightmare were withdrawn, people began to utter their true feelings. Some were for marching in thousands upon the Tower, and forcibly liberating the innocent victims; others suggested that it were wise to enable the daughters of Edward to escape to the Continent, so that Richard should never be free from the fear of legitimate claimants to the crown. All the foreign potentates had shrunk from entering into alliance with so blood-stained a character, and would be ready to cherish these princesses as a means of annoying or controlling him.

But Richard had thought of all these things long before the public, and had taken such measures to prevent them as would soon make the ears of all England tingle at their discovery. On attempting to communicate with Elizabeth and her daughters in the sanctuary, they found that asylum invested by a strong body of soldiers under one John Nesfield, and that there was no approaching the royal family. The only alternative was to endeavour to liberate the young princes.

For this purpose private meetings were held in nearly all the counties of the south and west. The nobility and gentry bound themselves by oath to take arms and unite for the restoration of Edward V. In the midst of these movements the agitators were agreeably astonished to find themselves in possession of a most unexpected and powerful ally. This was no other than the Duke of Buckingham, the man who had so unscrupulously taken the lead in putting down all who were formidable obstacles to Richard's plans, and in bringing London to declare for him. The circumstances which produced this marvellous change have rather been guessed at than ever satisfactorily known.

Buckingham was descended from Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, sixth son of Edward III. His claims to the throne were far superior to those of the Earl of Richmond, who was of an exactly parallel descent from John of Gaunt, but with a flaw of illegitimacy through that prince's connection with Catherine Swynford. Buckingham not only stood higher amongst the princes of the Lancastrian blood than Richmond, but he was married to the sister of Queen Elizabeth, and was thus closely connected with the imprisoned prince. Yet he had at once supported the most unscrupulous of the Yorkists, and helped more than any other man to dethrone his near relative. If this were strange, his sudden conversion was stranger. For his signal services to Richard he had received signal rewards. The Earl of Gloucester, Buckingham's ancestor, had married one of the daughters and co-heiresses of Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford. Their property, on the Yorkist family ascending the throne, had been seized by it. Buckingham had probably made it his bargain for what he was to do for Richard, that these estates should be restored to him. They were, accordingly, restored, and beyond that he was made Constable of England, Justiciary of Wales, and many other honours were heaped upon him. Why, then, this sudden revolt? The real causes were most likely those which have ever separated successful villains--distrust of each other, and the desire of the principal to be rid of his too knowing and, therefore, dangerous accessory. Buckingham was the confidant in many and terrible State secrets. He knew why Hastings was suddenly hurried to his death, and all the dark work by which the true prince had been thrust down to a dungeon, and the false one set up.

He resolved, therefore, to reinstate Edward V.; and circular letters were addressed to all those chiefs who were likely to unite in the enterprise. In Kent, Essex, Sussex, Berkshire, Hants, Wilts, and Devonshire, preparations were made for the purpose; and Buckingham was about to move forward to put himself at their head, when the confederates were thunderstruck with the news that the king and his brother had been already murdered in the Tower.

The account which has been generally followed of this horrid event, is that of Sir Thomas More. According to the learned chancellor, Richard, while making his holiday progress through the country, was plotting the death of the young princes in the Tower. From Gloucester he despatched one of his pages to Sir Robert Brackenbury, the Governor of the Tower, commanding him to get them quietly made away with. Sir Robert refused the office of assassin. Richard, however, from Warwick sent Sir James Tyrell, with orders to command the Tower for one night. This Tyrell had been vice-Constable under Edward IV., and always employed by him to execute illegal commissions, like Tristan, the tool of Louis XI. Tradition holds that the Portcullis Tower was the one in which the young princes were confined, and it is stated that they were under the constant surveillance of four keepers, and waited on by a fellow called Black Will, or Will Slaughter.

The murderer Richard is said to have roused Tyrell from his bed at midnight, and sent him off; and Brackenbury, though he would not stain his own hands with innocent blood, had to give the keys by the king's command to the man who would. "Then," says Sir Thomas More, "Sir James Tyrell desired that the princes should be murdered in bed, to the execution whereof he appropriated Miles Forest, one of their keepers, a fellow flesh-bred in murder, and to him he joined one John Dighton, his own horse-keeper, a big, broad, square knave. The young king had certainly a clear apprehension of his fate, for he was heard sighingly to say, 'I would mine uncle would let me have my life, though he taketh my crown.' After which time the prince never tied his points nor anything attended to himself, but with that young babe his brother, lingered in thought and heaviness, till the traitorous deed delivered them from their wretchedness.

"All their other attendants being removed from them, and the harmless children in bed, these men came into their chamber, and suddenly lapping them in the clothes, smothered and stifled them till thoroughly dead. Then laying out their bodies on the bed, they fetched Sir James to see them, who caused the murderers to bury them at the stairfoot, deep in the ground under a heap of stones. Then rode Sir James in great haste to King Richard, and showed him the manner of the murder, who gave him great thanks, but allowed not their bodies in so vile a corner, but would have them buried in consecrated ground. Sir Robert Brackenbury's priest then took them up, and where he buried them was never known, for he died shortly afterwards. But when the news was brought to the unfortunate mother, yet being in sanctuary, that her two sons were murdered, it struck to her heart like the sharp dart of death; she was so suddenly amazed that she swooned and fell to the ground, and there lay in great agony, yet like to a dead corpse."

This dismal news, however, probably did not reach the unhappy queen till some time after the perpetration of the murder, for the tyrant kept the deed close till it suited his purpose to disclose it.

The whole of this circumstantial account has been called in question by some modern historians, on the plea that the history of Richard was written by men after his death, who invented half the crimes and repulsive features of Richard to please the court of Henry VII. But perhaps two more highly credible historians could not be found than Sir Thomas More and the continuator of the Croyland Chronicle, the latter of whom wrote immediately after the death of Richard; and every circumstance known confirms their accounts. We shall see that the younger of these princes was supposed to reappear in the reign of Henry VII. as Perkin Warbeck. But, unfortunately for this story, the bodies of the two murdered children were discovered buried in one coffin or box. This occurred so late as 1674, when workmen were digging down the stairs which led from the king's lodgings to the chapel in the Tower, where, about ten feet deep, they came upon this chest containing the bones of two youths "proportionable to the ages of the two brothers; namely, about thirteen and eleven years."

What is more, all those said to be concerned in this diabolical deed were afterwards specially patronised by Richard. Greene, the messenger, was made receiver of the lordships of the Isle of Wight and Porchester Castle; Tyrell and Brackenbury received numerous grants of lucrative offices, money, and lands, as may be seen in Strype's notes to Bucke's history, in Kennet. Dighton, one of the murderers, was made bailiff for life of the manor of Aiton, in Staffordshire; and Forest dying in possession of a lucrative post in Bernard Castle, his widow and son received an annuity of five marks. Still, further, Sir Thomas More says, "Very truth it is, and well known, that at such times as Sir James Tyrell was in the Tower for treason against King Henry VII., both Dighton and him were examined, and confessed the murder in manner above written." Henry, in consequence, sought for the bodies, but at that time they could not be found, the chaplain, the depositary of the secret, being dead.

When, in addition to this, it shall be seen that Richard was anxious to marry Elizabeth of York, the sister of these young princes, and to prevent Richmond from marrying her, nothing can be more conclusive of the death of the boys as described--for, otherwise, the issue of Elizabeth could not succeed rightfully to the throne. Moreover, Richard is himself stated to have allowed the fact of the murder to come out, in order to crush the rising of Buckingham and his confederates in their behalf. Under all these circumstances, we conceive no event of history stands more strongly authenticated.

It is said to have been in the midst of the gaieties of the coronation at York that Richard received the news of Buckingham's movement, and of the confederation of the southern counties. The circumstances were so alarming that, notwithstanding the execration which he was conscious such an avowal would bring down upon him, he permitted the account of the princes' death to be published. One universal burst of horror, both from friend and foe, went through the kingdom; and from that hour, instead of saving him, the knowledge of that cruel deed repelled all hearts from him.

For the moment, the nobles, marching forward to rescue the young king, were taken aback: the tyrant had anticipated them; the king they would restore had perished. But the astute Bishop of Ely reminded them that there was Henry of Richmond, descended from John of Gaunt, who might marry Elizabeth of York, and thus, uniting the two rival houses, put an end to the divisions of the nation. This uniting all parties would annihilate the murderer. The idea was seized upon with avidity. Reginald Bray, the steward to the Countess of Richmond, was instructed to open the project to her, who immediately embraced it in favour of her son. Dr. Lewis, a Welsh physician, who attended the queen-dowager in the sanctuary, was made the bearer of the scheme to her. Elizabeth was well prepared by the wrongs heaped upon her, the murder of her brother and her three sons, and her own confinement and degradation, to forget her opposition to the house of Lancaster. She fully agreed to the project, on the condition of Richmond swearing to marry her daughter Elizabeth on his arriving in England. She even borrowed a sum of money and sent it to him, to aid his enterprise. A messenger was despatched to Henry in Brittany to inform him of the agreement, and to hasten his arrival, the 18th of October being fixed for the general rising in his favour.

But it was not to be supposed that all these arrangements could escape the suspicious vigilance of Richard. He proceeded from York to Lincolnshire as if he were only attending to the ordinary affairs of the kingdom. But on the 11th of October--a week before the day appointed for the rising of the confederates--he summoned all his adherents to meet him at Leicester. Four days afterwards he proclaimed Buckingham a traitor, and set a reward of £1,000, or of £100 a year in land, on his head. For those of the Marquis of Dorset and of the two bishops he offered 1,000 marks, or 100 marks a year in land each; and for the head of any hostile knight half that sum. He sent at the same time to London for the great seal to authenticate these and similar acts.

On the day fixed, the rising, notwithstanding, took place. The Marquis of Dorset proclaimed Henry VII. at Exeter; the Bishop Of Salisbury proclaimed him in that city; the men of Kent at Maidstone; those of Berkshire at Newbury, and the Duke of Buckingham raised his standard at Brecon. Few revolutions ever opened with more favourable auspices. But untoward events made wholly abortive this well-planned popular attempt. The Duke of Richmond set sail from St. Malo on the 12th of October for England, with a fleet of forty sail, carrying 5,000 men; but tempestuous weather prevented him from reaching the coast of Devonshire till the dispersion of his unfortunate allies. He therefore put back. In the meantime Richard had joined his army at Leicester, and issued a proclamation which reads nowadays like the ravings of a madman.

To draw off the followers of the confederates, while he offered rewards for the heads of their leaders, he granted free pardons to all who would abandon them. And the elements at this moment fought for Richard. Buckingham set out on his march to unite his forces to those of the other leaders, but there fell such heavy and continuous rains during the whole of his march from Brecon through the Forest of Dean to the Severn, that the bridges were carried away, and all the fords rendered impassable. Such rains and floods had not been known in the memory of man; and the inundation of the Severn was long after remembered as Buckingham's Flood.

The Welsh, struck with a superstitious dread from this circumstance, and pressed by famine, dispersed, and Buckingham turned back to Weobly, the seat of Lord Ferrers. The news of Buckingham's failure confounded all the other confederates, and every man made the best of his way towards a place of safety. Merton, Dorset, Courtenay the Bishop of Exeter, and others, escaped to Flanders and Brittany. Weobly was closely watched, on one side by Sir Humphrey Stafford, and on the other by the clan of the Vaughans, who were promised the plunder of Brecon if they secured the duke. Buckingham, in disguise, escaped from Weobly, and hid himself near Shrewsbury, in the hut of a fellow of the name of Bannister, an old servant of the duke's family. This wretch, to secure the reward, betrayed his master to John Mitton, the sheriff of Shropshire, who conducted him to Richard at Salisbury, who ordered his head to be instantly struck off in the market-place. Amongst others who shared the same fate, Richard had the satisfaction of thus silencing a witty rhymester, William Collingbourne, who had dared to say that,

"The rat, the cat, and Lovel the dog, Ruled all England under the hog."

That is, Ratcliffe, Catesby, and Lord Lovel; the hog being in allusion to Richard's crest, the boar.

Richard, thus relieved, marched into Devonshire, where he put to death, amongst others, Sir Thomas St. Leger, a knight who had married the Duchess of Exeter, his own sister. He then traversed the southern counties in triumph, and, arriving in London, he ventured to do what hitherto he had not dared, that is, call a Parliament. This assembly, prostrate at the feet of the prosperous despot, did whatever he proposed. They pronounced him "the undoubted king of England, as well by right of consanguinity and inheritance, as by lawful election, consecration, and coronation;" and they entailed the crown on his issue; the Lords, spiritual and temporal, binding themselves to uphold the succession of his son, the Prince of Wales. They attainted his enemies by wholesale, and beyond all precedent. One duke, one marquis, three earls, three bishops, with a whole host of knights and gentlemen, were thus deprived of honour, title, and estate; and their lands, forfeited to the Crown, were bestowed by Richard liberally on his northern adherents, who were thus planted in the south to act as spies on the southern nobles and gentry. The Countess of Richmond, though attainted, was permitted to hold her estates for life, or rather, they were thus conceded for that term to her husband, Lord Stanley, to bind him to the usurper.

To avenge himself on the queen-dowager for her acceptance of the proposal to bring over Henry of Richmond and unite him to her daughter, Richard now deprived her and her daughters of all title, property, and honour. He treated them, not as the legitimate wife and children of Edward IV., but as what he had before proclaimed them. He had ordered the late murdered king to be called officially "Edward the bastard, lately called Edward V." The queen-dowager was styled "Elizabeth, late wife of Sir John Gray," and her daughters were treated and addressed as simple gentlewomen.

But the design of placing Henry of Richmond on the throne, Richard knew well, though for the moment defeated, was not abandoned. At the last festival of Christmas Henry had met the English exiles, to the number of 500, at Rhedon, in Brittany, and had there sworn to marry Elizabeth of York as soon as he should subdue the usurper; and thereupon the exiles had unanimously sworn to support him as their sovereign. Henry was, as we have observed, descended on the father's side merely from Owen Tudor, a yeoman of the royal guard, and Catherine, the widow of Henry V. On the mother's side he was descended from Edward III. through John of Gaunt, but from an illegitimate branch. The bar of illegitimacy, though legally removed, would always have operated against his claim to the crown; but, independent of this, there were still various princes and princesses of Spain and Portugal, descendants of John of Gaunt, whose titles to the English crown were much superior to his. Yet, from his very infancy, there seems to have been a singular feeling that one day he would mount the throne of this kingdom. Henry VI. is said to have laid his hand on his head as a child, and declared that one day the crown would sit there. Edward IV. had evinced a perpetual fear of him, and had not only bargained for his secure detention at the court of Brittany, but on one occasion he had bribed the Duke of Brittany to give him up on the pretence of his intending to marry him to his eldest daughter--that daughter, in fact, he was destined eventually to marry. The duke, however, at the last moment, feeling a strong misgiving, had followed Henry to St. Malo, and there stopped him from embarking. Richard, on succeeding to the throne, had tried to purchase the surrender of Henry from the Duke of Brittany. In short, Henry assured the historian, Comines, that from the age of five years he had either been a captive or a fugitive. With this long traditionary presentiment that he was to reign in England attached to him, his marriage to Elizabeth of York would at once obviate all scruples as to his complete title. He would come in on the strength of her title, as William of Orange afterwards did on that of his queen, Mary Stuart.

As the prospect of this event became more imminent--as Richard felt more deeply that the heart of the nation was not with him, but that all men were looking to this alliance as the hope of better times, he set himself to defeat it. Though he had so lately robbed, degraded, and insulted Queen Elizabeth and her family--though he had murdered her children and usurped their throne, he now suddenly turned round, and fawned on them. He began to smile most kindly on Elizabeth, and wished her to quit the sanctuary and come to court--a court dyed in the blood of her sons and brothers. He made her the most flattering promises; and, when they failed to draw her forth, he followed them by the most deadly threats. Elizabeth Woodville had never been found insensible to prospects of advantage for herself and family; but to put herself into the power of so lawless a butcher, and to unite her daughter with the son of the murderer of her children, was by no means reconcilable to her feelings. She stood out stoutly; but fear of worse consequences at length compelled her to succumb, and a private contract was concluded. Richard, in the presence of a number of the nobles and prelates, as well as of the Lord Mayor and aldermen, swore that the lives of Elizabeth and her daughters should be safe; that the mother should receive an annuity of 700 marks for life, and each of the daughters lands to the value of 200 marks on their marriage, which should be to none but gentlemen.

When this bitter draught was swallowed, she had to endure another not the less sorrowful--that was, to appear at the court of the usurper, and behold him sitting in the seat of her murdered son, and receiving that homage which was his right. But this strange patron now smiled sunnily upon her. She and her daughters were received with every mark of distinction, and especially Elizabeth, the eldest, whom he was intending to pluck from the hopes of Richmond, by wedding her to his own son. But these views were suddenly destroyed by the death of this, Richard's only legitimate, son. He died at Middleham, where Richard was often residing, but was then with his queen absent at Nottingham. His death, which took place about the 9th of April, had something so remarkable about it, that Rous, the family chronicler, calls it "an unhappy death." Both Richard and his queen were so overwhelmed by this unexpected blow, that the continuator of the Croyland Chronicle says that they almost went mad.

It was indeed a fatal stroke. The son on whom Richard had built the hopes of his family's succession, and for whom he killed his nephews, was now gone, and he was left without an heir, and without any prospect of one. It might be supposed that this event would raise the confidence of the Richmond party; and Richard, appearing to entertain the same idea, conceived the design of securing Richmond, and, no doubt, dealing with him as effectually as he had done with all others who stood in his way. For this purpose he opened secret communications with Francis, Duke of Brittany. That prince, who had been so long the generous protector of Richmond, was now in a feeble and failing state of health, and his minister, Peter Landois, administered his affairs pretty much at his own will. The interest of Landois was purchased by heavy sums, and he agreed to deliver Richmond into the hands of Richard. But the sagacious Morton, Bishop of Ely, gave him timely warning, and Richmond fled for his life. He reached France with only five attendants, and went at once to the French court at Angers, where he was cordially received by the sister of Charles VIII., then acting as regent. He accompanied the French court to Paris, where he again repeated his oath to marry Elizabeth of York, in case of deposing the tyrant, and he was immediately hailed by the students of Paris as King of England. He was promised assistance by the princess regent for his enterprise, and while these things were proceeding, Francis of Brittany, who had recovered his health, and was made acquainted with the villainy of Landois, sent a messenger to offer him aid in his design.

Thus Richard had driven his enemy into a more safe and formidable position, instead of capturing him, and he taxed his subtle genius to thwart this dangerous rival by other means. To prepare for any serious attack from France, he put an end to a miserable state of plunder and reprisal betwixt Scotland and his subjects. He concluded an armistice with James of Scotland; and having since his son's death nominated John Earl of Lincoln the son of his sister the Duchess of Suffolk heir to the crown, he now contracted Anne de la Pole, the sister of the young earl, to the eldest son of the King of Scotland.

But Richard had designs more profound than this. He determined, as he could not marry Elizabeth of York to his son, he would snatch her from Richmond by wedding her himself. True, he had already a wife; but monarchs have frequently shown how soon such an obstacle to a fresh alliance can be removed. Richard now held a magnificent court at Westminster. There was a constant succession of balls, feastings, and gaieties. In the midst of these no one was so conspicuous as Elizabeth of York; and what very soon excited the attention and the speculations of the court, she always appeared in precisely the same dress as the queen.

The poor queen, Anne of Warwick, who began with hating Richard most cordially, and even disguised herself as a cookmaid to escape him, since the death of her son, had never recovered from her melancholy and depression. Probably, knowing the real character of her ruthless Bluebeard, she foresaw what must take place, and was too weary of life to care to retain it. Though she penetrated the designs of the king, these never influenced her in her conduct to Elizabeth, to whom she was kind as became an aunt. And now she fell ill, and Richard is said to have assured Elizabeth that the queen would "die in February," and that she should succeed her.

Anne of Warwick, the last queen of the Plantagenet line, did not die in February, but she did not survive through March. Yet that event did not in any degree contribute to Richard's marriage with Elizabeth. Whether we are to suppose with Sir Thomas More, and others, that Elizabeth herself manifested a steady repugnance to so abhorrent a union, or whether Richard deemed her in greater security there, he sent her under close guard to the castle of Sheriff-Hutton, in Yorkshire, and no sooner did he permit it to be whispered that such a marriage was probable, than the rumour was received with universal horror. No persons were more resolutely opposed to it than Ratcliffe and Catesby, Richard's great confidants in his crimes. They naturally dreaded the idea of Elizabeth, the sister of the murdered princes and the representative of a family on which they had heaped such injuries, becoming queen, and in a position to wreak her vengeance upon them. But they also saw, quite as clearly, the ruin which the king would certainly bring down upon himself by such a measure, in which they must also be inevitably involved.

The instinct of self-preservation in these men led them to remind the king that a marriage with his own niece would be regarded as incestuous, would be reprobated by the clergy, and abhorred by the people; that there was a general persuasion abroad that he had poisoned his wife, and this union would convert that persuasion into absolute conviction; that the men of the northern counties, on whom he chiefly depended, and who adhered to him, more than for any other cause, through their attachment to the late queen, as the daughter of the great Earl of Warwick, would be totally lost, and nothing but ruin could await him.

This strong and undisguised feeling, displayed thus both in public and private, drove Richard from this design. Just before Easter, he called a meeting of the city authorities in the great hall of St John's, Clerkenwell, and there declared that he had no such intention as that of marrying his niece, and that the report was "false and scandalous in a high degree." He also sent a letter to the citizens of York, dated the 11th of April, contradicting such slanderous tales, and commanding them to apprehend and punish all who should be found guilty of propagating them.

But the time was fast drawing near which must decide whether Richard or Henry of Richmond should wear the crown. Richard was informed by his agents on the Continent that Charles of France had permitted the Earl of Richmond to raise an army in that country. They amounted to 3,000 men, consisting of English refugees and Norman adventurers. Richard pretended to be delighted at the news, as confident that now he should speedily annihilate his enemy. He was, however, so impoverished by his lavish gifts and grants to secure the faith of his adherents, that he was unprovided with the means of maintaining an army; neither had he a fleet to intercept that of Henry. He dared not call a Parliament to ask for supplies, for he had expended those granted by the only one he had called. In that Parliament, to cast odium upon the memory of his brother Edward, he had called on his subjects to remember his tyranny in extorting benevolences; yet now he resorted to the very same thing; and the people, in ridicule of his pretended denunciation of benevolences, called them malevolences. By these arbitrary exactions he destroyed the last trace of adhesion to his Government. On all sides he felt coldness--on all sides he saw defection. The brave old Earl of Oxford, John De Vere, who had been a prisoner twelve years in the prison of Ham, in Picardy, was set at liberty by Sir James Blount, the governor of the castle, and they fled together to Henry. Sir John Fortescue, the Porter of Calais, followed their example, and numbers of young English gentlemen, students of the University of Paris, flocked to his standard. The same process was going on in England. Several sheriffs of counties abandoned their charge, and hastened over to France; and numerous parties put off from time to time from the coast. But no nobleman occasioned, however, so much anxiety as Lord Stanley. His connection with Richmond, having married his mother, made Richard always suspicious. He had lavished favours upon him to attach him, and had made him steward of the household to retain him under his eye. Stanley had always appeared sincere in his service, but it was a sincerity that Richard could not comprehend. This nobleman now demanded permission to visit his estates in Cheshire and Lancashire, to raise forces for the king; but Richard so little trusted him that he detained his son, Lord Strange, as a hostage for his fidelity. We have already seen that Stanley had long secretly pledged himself to Elizabeth of York in her cause, and only waited the proper occasion to go over.

On the 1st of August, 1485, Henry of Richmond set sail from Harfleur, with the united fleet of France and Brittany, and an army of 3,000 men, on that memorable expedition which was to terminate the fatal wars of the Roses, and introduce into England a new dynasty, and a new era of civilisation. On the seventh of that month he landed at Milford Haven. He himself and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, went on shore at a place called Dale, while his army was disembarking. The Welsh accosted the old earl with this significant welcome on his setting foot on his native shore, "Welcome! for thou hast taken good care of thy nephew!"

Having refreshed his forces, Henry marched on through Haverfordwest and Pembroke to Cardigan. Everywhere he was received with manifest delight; but his forces did not increase till he reached Cardigan, where Richard Griffith and Richard Thomas, two Welsh gentlemen, joined his standard with their friends. His old friend Sir Walter Herbert, who had been expressly sent by Richard into that quarter with Rice ap Thomas to raise the country in his behalf, though he did not join him, suffered him to pass unmolested. Rice ap Thomas, on receiving a promise of the Government of Wales, went over at once to Henry. When the army reached Newport Sir Gilbert Talbot, with a decision of character in keeping with the account of him by Brereton, came at the head of the tenantry of his nephew, the Earl of Shrewsbury, 2,000 in number, and there, too, he was followed by Sir John Savage. The invading force now amounted to more than 6,000 men.

Henry crossed the Severn at Shrewsbury. Richard now advanced to Leicester, whence he issued despatches to all his subjects to join him on the instant, accompanied by the most deadly menaces against all defaulters. The Duke of Norfolk was there with the levies of the eastern counties; the Earl of Northumberland with those from the north; Lord Lovel commanded those from London; and Brackenbury those from Hampshire. Stanley alone held aloof, and sent word, in reply to Richard's summons, that he was ill in bed with the sweating sickness. Richard received this ominous message with the utmost rage; and, as he had vowed that, on the first symptom of disaffection on his part, he would cut off the head of Lord Strange, his son, Strange made an instant attempt at flight. He was brought back, and frankly confessed that he and his uncle, Sir William Stanley, chamberlain of North Wales, had agreed to join the invaders; but protested that his father knew nothing of their intention, but was loyal, and his forces were already on the way to the royal camp. Richard compelled him to write to his father, bidding him come up at once, or that his son was a dead man.

On the 21st of August Richard rode forward from Leicester, and encamped about two miles from Bosworth. He was mounted in the march on a magnificent white courser, and clad in the same rich suit of burnished steel which he wore at his victorious field of Tewkesbury. On his helmet blazed a regal crown, which he had displayed there since he took up his headquarters at Nottingham. His countenance is represented as stern and frowning; his manner haughty, and as if putting on an air of bravado, rather than of calm confidence; for, though his troops amounted to 30,000, and his cavalry was the finest in Europe, he well knew that there was secret and wide-spread disaffection under all that martial show. Were his followers true to him, the little army of Richmond would be shivered in the first shock, and trodden under foot. But, perhaps, not a man except the Duke of Norfolk was really stanch in his devotion; and that night Norfolk's followers found pinned upon his tent this ominous couplet:--

"Jocky of Norfolk, be not too bold, For Dickon thy master is bought and sold."

That night Henry, who had reached Tamworth, marched to Atherstone. His army did not amount to half that of Richard: yet all were earnest in the cause, and the number of men of rank and character in it gave it a very imposing air in the eyes of the soldiers. On the contrary, Richard's soldiers, if we are to believe "Twelve Strange Prophecies"--still in the British Museum--had been discouraged, not only by the warning to John, or--as he was familiarly called--Jocky of Norfolk, but by the following singular incident. As the king rode out of Leicester by the south gate, at the head of his cavalry, a blind old man, well known as a superannuated wheelwright, sat begging at the foot of the bridge. In reply to the remarks of the soldiers as to the weather, the old man cried out just as the king was at hand--"If the moon change again to-day, which has changed once in the course of nature, King Richard will lose life and crown." This was supposed to allude to Lord Percy, whose crest was a crescent, and of whose faith Richard was sorely in doubt. When Richard passed, his foot struck against a low post placed to defend the corner of the bridge, and the beggar said, "His head will strike there as he returns at night."

The night before the battle, Henry of Richmond had a secret meeting near Atherstone with Lord Stanley, who assured him of his adherence, but showed him how impossible it was that he could join him till Richard was engaged in arraying the battle, or his son's life would immediately be sacrificed. Stanley had 5,000 men, and engaged to appear for Richard till the moment for battle, when his defection would do Henry the most signal service.

On the evening of the 21st of August, the two armies lay encamped near the little town of Bosworth, opposite to each other. Richard is represented by the chroniclers as passing that night in the most agonising state of restlessness and uncertainty. The deeply-rooted disaffection of his troops destroyed his confidence, though his 30,000 were only opposed by Richmond's 6,000. He went through the camp examining secretly the state of his outposts, and finding at one of them a sentinel asleep, he stabbed him to the heart, saying, "I find him asleep, and I leave him so." His own slumbers are said to have been broken, and the chroniclers express his state by saying he "was most terribly pulled and haled by devils."

But other agents than those thus troubling the tyrant's mind were active throughout the camp. Many of his soldiers stole away to Richmond, and probably some of these left the warning to Jocky of Norfolk. These desertions produced dismay in Richard's ranks, and confidence in those of his rival.

When morning broke, Richmond's little army was discovered already drawn up. The van, consisting of archers, was led by the Earl of Oxford; the right wing by Sir Gilbert Talbot; the left by Sir John Savage. In the main body Henry posted himself, accompanied by the Earl of Pembroke. Richard confronted the foe with his numerous lines, taking his place also in the main body, opposite to Richmond, but giving the command of the van to the Duke of Norfolk. Lord Stanley took his station on one wing, and Sir William on the other, so that, thus disposed, they could flank either their own side or the opposed one. The battle was begun by the archers of both armies, and soon became furious. No sooner was this the case, than the Stanleys, seizing the critical moment, wheeling round, joined the enemy, and fell on Richard's flanks. This masterly manoeuvre struck dismay through the lines of Richard; the men who stood their ground appeared to fight without heart, and to be ready to fly. Richard, who saw this, and beheld the Duke of Northumberland, sitting at the head of his division, and never striking a single stroke, became transported with fury. His only hope appeared to be to make a desperate assault on Henry's van, and, if possible, to reach and kill him on the spot. With this object he made three furious charges of cavalry; and, at the third, but not before he had seen his chief companion, the Duke of Norfolk, slain, he broke into the midst of Henry's main body, and, catching sight of him, dashed forward, crying frantically, "Treason! treason! treason!" He killed Sir William Brandon, Henry's standard-bearer, with his own hand; struck Sir John Cheyney from his horse; and, springing forward on Henry, aimed a desperate blow at him; but Sir William Stanley, breaking in at that moment, surrounded Richard with his brave followers, who bore him to the ground by their numbers, and slew him, as he continued to fight with a bravery as heroic as his political career had been--in the words of Hume--"dishonourable for his multiplied and detestable enormities." The blood of Richard tinged a small brook which ran where he fell, and the people are said to this day never to drink of its water.

The body of the fallen tyrant was speedily stripped of his valuable armour and ornaments, and the soldier who laid hands upon the crown hid it in a hawthorn bush. But strict quest being made after it, it was soon discovered and carried to Lord Stanley, who placed it upon the head of Henry, and the victor was immediately saluted by the general acclamations of the army with "Long live King Henry!" and they sang Te Deum, in grand chorus, on the bloody heath of Bosworth. From the poetical circumstance of the hawthorn bush, the Tudors assumed as their device a crown in a bush of fruited hawthorn. Lord Strange, the son of Lord Stanley, being deserted by his guards, as soon as the defeat was known, made his way to the field, and joined his father and the king at the close of the battle.

King Henry VII. advanced from the decisive field of Bosworth, at the head of his victorious troops, to Leicester, which he entered with the same royal state that Richard had quitted it. The statements of the numbers who fell on this field vary from 1,000 to 4,000, but of the leaders, the Duke of Norfolk, and Lord Ferrars of Chartley, Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Sir Robert Percy, and Sir Robert Brackenbury, fell with the king. On the side of Henry fell no leaders of note.

Henry used his victory mildly; he shed no blood of the vanquished, except that of the notorious Catesby, and two persons of the name of Brecher, who were probably men of like character and crimes. Thus, in one day, the world was relieved of the presence of Richard and of his two base commissioners of murder, Catesby and Ratcliffe.

Richard's naked body, covered with mud and gore, was, according to the local traditions of Leicester, flung carelessly across a horse, and thus carried into that town; his head, say these historic memories, striking against the very post which the blind beggar had said it should, and the rude populace following it with shouts of mockery. The corpse was begged by the nuns of the Grey Friars, to whom Richard had been a benefactor, and was decently interred in their church.

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IV. THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

The Study of Latin and Greek--Invention of Printing--Caxton--New Schools and Colleges--Architecture, Military, Ecclesiastical, and Domestic--Sculpture, Painting, and Gilding--The Art of War--Commerce and Shipping--Coinage.

It might be very reasonably supposed that during a century spent almost entirely in war, and during the second half of it in the most rancorous intestine strife, there could not be much national progress. There is no doubt but that the population was greatly decreased. It was calculated that at the beginning of the century the population of England and Wales amounted to about 2,700,000. At the end of it, it is supposed that there were not 2,500,000.

In these depopulating wars, there can be no question that, besides the actual destruction of so many men, there must have been terrible sufferings inflicted, and an immense interruption of all those peaceful transactions by which nations become wealthy and powerful.

During this century, two events of the highest importance to art and learning took place--the introduction of the knowledge of Greek and the invention of printing.

If the knowledge of Greek had not entirely died out in western Europe, it had nearly so till this century. The crusades, leading the Christians of western Europe to the east, had opened up an acquaintance betwixt the people of the Greek empire and those of the West. The destruction of that empire in this century drove a number of learned men into Italy, where they taught their language and literature. Amongst these were Theodore Gaza, Cardinal Bessarion, George of Trebizond, Demetrius Chalcondyles, John Argyropulus, and Johannes Lascaris. Before that time some knowledge of the Greek philosophy had reached us through the Arabians, but till the fourteenth century very little of the literature of Greece was known in the western nations, not even the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" of Homer. In Italy Petrarch and Boccaccio learned the language and studied the writings of Greece, and an enthusiasm for Greek literature spread over all Europe. Grocyn studied it in Italy in 1488, under Chalcondyles, and came and taught it in England.

At the same moment that Greek began to be studied, Latin in Europe was in the lowest and most degraded state. Though it still continued the language of divines, lawyers, philosophers, historians, and even poets, it had lost almost every trace of its original idiom and elegance. Latin words were used, but in the English order, and where words were wanting, they Anglicised them.

But that wonderful art which was destined to chase this darkness like a new sun was already on its way from Germany to this country. The Chinese had printed from engraved wooden blocks for many centuries, when the same idea suggested itself to a citizen of Haarlem, named Laurent Janszoon Coster. Coster, who was keeper of the cathedral, first cut his letters in wood, then made separate wooden letters, and employed them in printing books by tying them together with strings. From wood he proceeded to cut his letters in metal, and finally to cast them in the present fashion. Coster concealed his secret with great care, and was anxious to transmit it to his children; but in this he was disappointed, for at his death one of his assistants, John Gensfleisch, the Gutenberger, went off to Mayence, carrying with him movable types of Coster's casting.

That is the Dutch story, but the Germans insist on Gutenberg being the originator of printing. They contend that Coster's were only the wooden blocks which had long been in use for the printing of playing cards, and manuals of devotion. They even insinuate that all that the Dutch claim had probably been brought from China by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, who had seen the paper-money thus printed there in letters of vermilion, and that Holland had no share in the invention at all. But we know that the Germans have a vast capacity for claiming. It is notorious that all the earliest block-printing, the Bibliæ Pauperum, the Bibles of the Poor, the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, with its fifty pictures, and other block works, were all done in the Low Countries in the century we are reviewing.

Taking a broad view, however, it is certain that Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer, were the men who first printed any known works in movable types, and from Mayence, in 1445, diffused very soon the knowledge of the present art of printing over the whole world. The first work which they are supposed to have printed was the Bible, an edition of the Latin Vulgate, known by the name of the Mazarin Bible, of which various copies remain, though without date or printer's name.

Printing was introduced into England in 1474, according to all the chief authorities of or near that time, by William Caxton. Caxton was a native of the weald of Kent. He served his apprenticeship to a mercer of London, and left England in 1441 to transact business in the Low Countries. There he was greatly regarded by Margaret, the Duchess of Burgundy, Edward IV.'s sister, who retained him as long as she could at her court. Caxton was now upwards of fifty years of age, but his inquisitive and active temperament led him to learn, amongst other things, the whole art of printing from one Colard Manson. He saw its immense importance, and he translated Raoul le Feure's "Recueil des Histoires de Troye," and printed it in folio. This great work he says himself that he began in Bruges, and finished in Cologne in 1471. The first work which he printed in England was the "Game and Playe of Chesse," which was published in 1475. From this time till 1490, or till nearly the date of his death in 1491 or 1492, a period of sixteen years, the list of the works which Caxton passed through his press is quite wonderful. Thomas Milling, the Abbot of Westminster, was his most zealous patron; and at Westminster, in the Almonry, he commenced his business. Earl Rivers, brother to the queen of Edward IV., another of his friends and patrons, translated the "Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers" for his nephew, the Prince of Wales, and introduced Caxton, when it was printed, to present it to the king and royal family.

But while Caxton was thus busy he saw others around him also as hard at work with their presses: Theodore Rood, John Lettow, William Machelina, and Wynkyn de Worde, foreigners, and Thomas Hunt, an Englishman. A schoolmaster of St. Albans set up a press there, and several books were printed at Oxford in 1478, and to the end of the century. There is no direct evidence of any work being printed in Scotland during this century, though such may have been the case, and all traces of the fact obliterated in the almost universal destruction of the cathedral and conventual libraries at the Reformation. James III. was known to collect the most superb specimens of typography, and Dr. Henry mentions seeing a magnificent edition of "Speculum Moralitatis," which had been in that king's possession, and contained his autograph.

Not less meritorious benefactors of their country, next to the writers and printers of books, were those who collected them into libraries, and the most munificent patron and encourager of learning in this manner was the unfortunate Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. He gave to the University of Oxford a library of 600 volumes in 1440, valued at £1,000. Some of these very volumes yet remain in different collections. Duke Humphrey not only bought books, but he employed men of science and learning to translate and transcribe. He kept celebrated writers from France and Italy, as well as Englishmen, to translate from the Greek and other languages; and is said to have written himself on astronomy, a scheme of astronomical calculations under his name still remaining in the library of Gresham College. The great Duke of Bedford, likewise, when master of Paris, purchased and sent to this country the royal library, containing 853 volumes, valued at 2,223 livres.

The schools and colleges founded during this century were the following:--Lincoln College, Oxford, founded in 1427, by Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, and completed by Thomas Scott, of Rotherham, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1475. All Souls' College, Oxford, was founded by Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1437. He expended upon its erection £4,545, and procured considerable revenues for it out of lands of the alien priories dissolved just before that time. Magdalene College, Oxford, was founded by William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, in 1458, and soon became one of the richest colleges in Europe. King's College, Cambridge, was founded by Henry VI. in 1441. Queens' College, Cambridge, was founded by Margaret of Anjou, in 1448; and Catherine Hall, Cambridge, was founded by Robert Woodlark, third provost of King's College, in 1473.

Besides these, Henry VI. founded Eton College, and Thomas Hokenorton, Abbot of Osney, founded the schools in Oxford, in 1439. Before that time the professors of several sciences in both universities read their lectures in private houses, at very inconvenient distances from each other. To remedy this inconvenience, schools were erected in both universities at this period. Hokenorton's schools comprehended the teaching of divinity, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, music, logic, rhetoric, and grammar. They required liberal aid from other benefactors, and they found these in the noble Humphrey of Gloucester, and the two brothers Kemp, the one Archbishop of York and the other Bishop of London. They were completed in 1480, including Duke Humphrey's noble library, the nucleus of the present Bodleian, which was refounded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1597. The quadrangle, containing the schools of Cambridge, was completed in 1475.

Up to this period Scotland had possessed no university whatever, and its youth had been obliged to travel to foreign universities for their education. But now the University of St. Andrews was founded in 1410, and obtained a charter in 1411 from Bishop Wardlaw, which was confirmed by the Pope in 1412, and by James I. in 1431. The great need of such an institution was soon evidenced by the university becoming famous. In 1456 Kennedy, the successor of Wardlaw, founded the College of St. Salvator in that city; and in 1450 William Turnbull, the Bishop of Glasgow, founded the University of that city; and in the same year was founded the college or faculty of arts in Glasgow, King James II. taking both college and university under his especial patronage and protection. This college received a handsome endowment from James, Lord Hamilton, and his lady, Euphemia, Countess of Douglas, in 1459.

The castles erected during this period are few. The wars of the Roses brought the force of cannon and gunpowder against the massive erections of the barons of past ages, and many a terrible stronghold was demolished. But there was, from the beginning of these wars, little leisure for repairing, or for building new castles. The proprietors, for the most part, were killed or reduced to ruin, and the workmen shared the same fate, so that labour became too scarce and dear for such great undertakings. Scotland was affected by similar circumstances.

The castles of this period bear unmistakable traces of the Perpendicular style, which was prevalent in the ecclesiastical architecture of the age. That portion of Windsor built by William of Wykeham, though much altered, retains some marked and good features of this age. The exterior of Tattershall Castle, in Lincolnshire, remains nearly unaltered. All the castles of this time blend more or less of the domestic character, and tended towards that style which prevailed in the next century under the name of Tudor. Another great change in the castellated architecture of this period was the use of brick in their construction. Bricks, though introduced into Britain by the Romans, had gone almost out of use till the reign of Richard II.; now they were in such favour that the castles of Tattershall, Hurstmonceux, and Caistor were built chiefly of them, as Thornbury Castle was in the next century. Hurstmonceux, in Sussex, was erected in 1448 on the plan of Porchester Castle. It was a stupendous building, of which the ruins now remain, forming a regular parallelogram of 180 feet square, flanked by seventeen octagon towers, and with a fine machicolated gateway forming the keep. Tattershall, in Lincolnshire, built in 1455, is erected in the style of the ancient keep, a huge square tower with polygonal turrets at the angles. Caistor, in Norfolk, erected about 1450, was remarkable for two very large circular brick towers at the northern angle, one of which remains.

But the castles and the mansions of this period possessed frequently so many features and qualities in common, that some of them are actual hybrids, the uniting links of the two kinds of houses. They had alike towers, battlements, and moats, and the chief apartments looked into the interior quadrangle as the safest. Oxburgh Hall, in Norfolk, is one of this mixed class. Though called a hall, it is moated, and has a massive gateway of a remarkable altitude. Raglan Castle, built in the reign of Edward IV., has more of the true castellated style; Warwick and Windsor, more of the union of the two styles. At the same time such castles as had their gateways battered down, and rebuilt at this period, present in them all the older characteristics of castellated buildings. Such is the gateway of Carisbrooke Castle, built in the reign of Edward IV., and the west gate of Canterbury, built towards the close of the fourteenth century, which retain the stem old circular towers, lighted only by mere loopholes and oeillets.

The style of ecclesiastical architecture prevailing through this century, and to the middle of the next, is that called the Perpendicular. It appears to have commenced about 1377, or at the commencement of the reign of Richard II., just twenty years prior to this century, and it terminated at the Reformation, in the reign of Henry VIII. The Reformation was anything but a reformation in architecture. That great convulsion broke up the period of a thousand years, during which, from the first introduction of Christianity into this island, this peculiar character of architecture, often called Gothic, but more properly Christian, had been progressing and perfecting itself. The Western princes and prelates, evidently copying the Grecian in their columns, but adding curves and ornaments unknown to the Greeks, and introducing principles of pliancy, and of long and lofty aisles, from the suggestions of the forests, in which they were accustomed to wander, and the linden groves which they planted, originated a new school of architecture, in many particulars far exceeding that of the classic nations. No church took up and perpetuated this noble Christian architecture more cordially and more inspiredly than the Catholic. Over the whole of Europe, wherever the Roman Church prevailed, it erected its churches and monasteries in a spirit of unrivalled grandeur and beauty. In architecture, in music, and in painting, it acquitted itself royally towards the public, however it might fail in spirit, in doctrine, or in discipline. The remains of painted windows, to say nothing of the productions of such men as Raphael, Michael Angelo, Guido, and a host of others, who drew their inspiration from the devotions of that church, are sufficient to excite our highest admiration; and the sublime anthems which resounded through their august and poetical temples, through what are called "the Dark Ages," were well calculated to enchain the imagination of minds not deeply reflective or profoundly informed.

In every country we find, moreover, a different style in all these arts--music, painting, and architecture; demonstrating the exuberance of genius turned into these channels during long centuries, when all others, except warfare, seemed closed. England had its distinctive style in these matters, and in architecture this Perpendicular style was the last. During its later period it considerably deteriorated, and with the Reformation it went out. In England sufficient power and property were left to the Anglican Church to enable it to preserve the majority of its churches, and many of its conventual buildings: in Scotland the destruction was more terrible. There public opinion took a great leap from Catholicism to the simplicity and sternness of the school of John Knox; and in consequence of his celebrated sermon at Perth, in which he told his congregation that to effectually drive away the rooks they must pull out their nests, almost every convent and cathedral, except that of Glasgow, was reduced to a ruin.

Of the Perpendicular style we have many churches throughout the country, and still more into which it has been more or less introduced into those of earlier date in repairs and restorations. Every county, and almost every parish, can show us specimens of this style, if it be only in a window, a porch, or a buttress. Rickman is of opinion that half the windows in English edifices over the kingdom are of this style. Whilst our neighbours on the Continent were indulging themselves in the flamboyant style, and loading their churches with the most exuberant ornament, as in the splendid cathedrals of Normandy and Brittany, our ancestors were enamoured of this new and more chaste style. There are writers who regard the perpendicular lines of this style as an evidence of a decline in the art. We cannot agree with that opinion. The straight, continuous mullions of the Perpendicular are--combined with the rich and abundant ornaments of other portions of the buildings, as the spandrils enriched with shields, the finely-wrought and soaring canopies, and crocketed finials, the canopied buttresses, the groined roofs and fan-tracery of ceilings--a pleasure to the eye, when chastely and richly designed.

The windows of this style at once catch the observation of the spectator. The mullions, running through from bottom to top, give you, instead of the flowing tracery of the Decorated style, a simple and somewhat stiff heading; but the stiffness is in most instances relieved by the heading of each individual section being cuspated, and the upper portions of the window presenting frequent variations, as in the grand western window of Winchester Cathedral. Some of these windows, with their cinquefoils and quatrefoils, approach even to the Decorative. Amongst the finest windows of this kind are those of St. George's, Windsor, of four lights; the clerestory windows of Henry the Seventh's Chapel, of five. The east window of York Cathedral is of superb proportions. The window of the Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick, is extremely rich and peculiar in its character. Those of the Abbey Church of Bath have the mullions alternating, by the perpendicular line being continued from the centre of each arch beneath it.

The mullions in this style are crossed at right angles by transoms, converting the whole window into a series of panels; for panelling in the Perpendicular style is one of its chief characteristics, being carried out on walls, doors, and, in many cases, even roofs and ceilings. Take away the arched head of a window, and you convert it at once into an Elizabethan one.

Every portion of a Perpendicular building has its essential characteristics: its piers, its buttresses, its niches, its roofs, porches, battlements, and ornaments, which we cannot enumerate here. They must be studied for themselves. We can only point out one or two prominent examples.

Many of the buildings of this style are adorned with flying buttresses, which are often pierced, and rich in tracery, as those of Henry VII.'s Chapel. The projection of the buttresses in King's College Chapel, Cambridge, is so great that chapels are built between them. Many of these buttresses are very rich with statuary niches and wrought canopies. Pinnacles are used profusely in this style; but in St. George's, Windsor, and the Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick, the buttresses run up, and finish square.

Panelling, as we have said, is one of the most striking features of the Perpendicular style. This is carried to such an extent in most of the richly-ornamented buildings, that it covers walls, windows, roofs; for the doors and windows are only pierced panels. St. George's, Windsor, is a fine example of this; but still finer is Henry VII.'s Chapel, which, within and without, is almost covered with panelling. King's College Chapel, Cambridge, is another remarkable example, which is all panelled, except the floor. The roof of this chapel is one of the richest specimens of the fan-tracery in the kingdom. Amongst the most graceful ornaments of this style are the angels introduced into cornices, and as supporters of shields and corbels for roof-beams, rich foliated crockets, and flowers exquisitely worked, conspicuous amongst them being the Tudor flower.

Some of the finest steeples in the country belong to this style. First and foremost stands the unrivalled open-work tower of St. Nicholas, Newcastle-on-Tyne. This forms a splendid crown in the air, composed of four flying buttresses, springing from the base of octagonal turrets, and bearing at their intersection an elegant lantern, crowned with a spire. From this have been copied that of St. Giles's, Edinburgh, that of the church of Linlithgow, and the college tower of Aberdeen. Boston, Derby, Taunton, Doncaster, Coventry, York, and Canterbury boast noble steeples of this style.

The arches of the Perpendicular are various; but none are so common as the flat, four-centred arch. This in doors, and in windows also, is generally enclosed by a square plane of decoration, appearing as a frame, and this mostly surmounted by a dripstone; the spandrels formed betwixt the arch and frame being generally filled by armorial shields, or ornamental tracery. In some doorways there is an excess of ornament. The Decorative style in this country, or the florid abroad, has nothing richer. Every part is covered with canopy-work, flowers, heraldic emblems, and emblazoned shields. Such is the doorway of King's College Chapel, Cambridge; and such are the chapels of Henry V. and Henry VII. at Westminster.

The groined roofs of the Perpendicular style are noble, and often profusely ornamented. The intersections of the ribs of these groined roofs are often shields richly emblazoned in their proper colours. The vaulted roof of the cloisters of Canterbury Cathedral is studded with above 800 shields, of kings and other benefactors; and the whole presents a perfect blaze of splendour. Some of these groined roofs are adorned with a ramification of ribs, running out in a fan-shape, circumscribed by a quarter or half-circle rib, the intervals filled up with ornament. The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral present, perhaps, the first specimen of the fan-tracery roof; and after that King's College Chapel, Cambridge, Henry VII.'s Chapel, and the Abbey Church at Bath. The Red Mount Chapel, at Lynn, in Norfolk, is a unique and very beautiful specimen of the Perpendicular, not only having a richly ornamental roof of this kind, but though much injured by time, displaying in every part of it design and workmanship equally exquisite. Henry VII.'s Chapel and the Divinity School at Oxford have pendants which come down as low as the springing line of the fans.

A simpler roof, but quaint and impressive in its appearance, is the open one--that is, open to the roof framing. Here, as all is bare to the eye, the whole framework of beams and rafters has been constructed for effect. The wood-work forms arches, pendants, and pierced panels of various form and ornament. Such are the roofs of Westminster Hall, Crosby Hall (just removed), Eltham Palace, the College of Christ Church, Oxford, and many an old baronial hall and church throughout the country.

Specimens of this style of architecture in whole or in part will meet the reader in every part of England, Wales, and Scotland; and it should be remembered that it is an especial and exclusively English style, no other country possessing it. In Scotland Melrose Abbey and Roslin Chapel present fine specimens of the Perpendicular, the latter one displaying some singular variations, the work of foreign artists.

When we descend from the military castle to more domestic architecture, we find the large houses of the gentry, or nobility, though totally incapable of resisting cannon, yet frequently battlemented, flanked with turrets, and surrounded by the flooded moat. The large houses of this period were generally built round one or two quadrangles. These buildings often possessed much variety of exterior detail: a great arched gateway with the armorial escutcheon above it; projections, recesses, tall chimneys, flanking buttresses, handsome oriel windows, and pointed gables, terminated by some animal belonging to the emblazonry of the family. They were commonly adorned with fanes, in the form of the military banner of the chief, duly emblazoned in proper colours. Within, the great hall, with its open groined roof, the kitchen, and the buttery, cut the principal figure. At the upper end of the hall was the daïs or raised part, on which stood the table of the lord and his immediate family or particular guests; and below the great salt-cellar sat the remainder of the establishment. At the lower end was commonly a music gallery. The fire was still frequently in the centre of the hall, and there was a hole in the roof to permit the smoke to escape, as at Penshurst, where the front of the music gallery is true Perpendicular. In other houses there were large open fireplaces, the mantelpieces of which were frequently richly carved with the armorial shields of the family.

The floors were still strewn with fresh rushes instead of a carpet, and the walls were hung with arras, which clothed them, and at the same time kept out cold draughts. Plaster ceilings were yet unknown. The greater portion of these houses, however, was required for the sleeping apartments of the numerous retainers.

In the humbler halls, granges, and farmhouses, the same plan of building round a quadrangle was mostly adhered to, and a large number of such houses were of framed timber, with ornamental gables and porches, and displaying much carving. Great Chatfield manor-house in Wiltshire, Harlaxton in Lincolnshire, Helmingham Hall, Norfolk, Moreton Hall in Cheshire, and probably some of the framed timber houses of Lancashire, as the Hall-in-the-Wood, Smithell's, Speke Hall, &c., in whole or in part, date from this period. Ockwells, in Berkshire, is another of the fine old timber houses of this century.

In the towns the houses were also chiefly of wood. The streets were extremely narrow, and the upper storeys of the houses projected over the lower ones, so that you might almost shake hands out of the third or fourth storey windows. This was the cause of such frequent fires as occurred in London. Many of the small houses in these narrow streets were adorned with abundance of carving. The houses or inns of the great barons, prelates, and abbots were extensive, and surrounded inner courts. Here, during Parliament, and on other grand occasions, the owners came with their vast retinues. We are told that the Duke of York lodged with 400 men in Baynard's Castle, in 1457. The Earl of Warwick had his house in Warwick Lane, still called after it, where he could lodge 800 men. At another house of his called the Herber, meaning an inn, the Earl of Salisbury, his father, lodged with 500 men. Still more extensive must have been the abodes of the Earls of Exeter and Northumberland, who occasionally brought retinues of from 800 to 1,500 men. The sites of these great houses are yet known, and bear the names of their ancient owners, but the buildings themselves have long vanished. The great houses of Scotland still kept up the show of feudal strength and capability of defence. The peels, or Border towers, yet bear evidence of the necessity of stout fortification in those times. We may form some idea of the devastation made amongst private dwellings in the Wars of the Roses, from the statement of John Rous, the Warwick antiquary, who says that no fewer than sixty villages, some of them large and populous, with churches and manor-houses, had been destroyed within twelve miles of that town. From all that we can learn, the common people of this age were but indifferently lodged, and the mansions of the great were more stately than comfortable.

Though such extensive destruction of the statuary which adorned both the exterior and interior of our churches took place at the Reformation, sufficient yet remains to warrant us in the belief that the fifteenth surpassed every prior century in its sculpture. The very opposition which the Wycliffites had raised to the worship and even existence of images, seems to have stimulated the Church only the more to put forth its strength in this direction. Sculptors, both foreign and English, therefore received the highest encouragement, and were in the fullest employ. The few statues which yet remain in niches, on the outside of our cathedrals, especially those on the west end of the Cathedral of Wells, though probably not the best work of the artists, are decided proofs of their ability. The effigies of knights and ladies extended on their altar tombs received grave damage, with the rest of the ecclesiastical art, from the misguided zeal of the reformers, yet many such remain of undoubted beauty, and the chantries, which were in this century erected over the tombs of great prelates, are of the most exquisite design and workmanship. Such are those in Winchester Cathedral of Bishops Wykeham, Beaufort, and Waynflete. The shrine of Bishop Beaufort, in particular, is a mass of Portland stone, carved like the finest ivory, and is a most gorgeous specimen of a tomb of the Perpendicular period. Henry V.'s chantry, in Westminster Abbey, is the only one erected in this period to royalty, and it is a monument of high honour to the age.

The names of some of the artists of this era are preserved. Thomas Colyn, Thomas Holewell, and Thomas Poppehowe, executed, carried over, and erected in Nantes, in 1408, the alabaster tomb of the Duke of Brittany. Of the five artists who executed the celebrated tomb of Richard, Earl of Warwick, in the Beauchamp Chapel, four were English, and the fifth was a Dutch goldsmith. Besides the great image of the earl, there were thirty-two images on this monument. These were all cast by William Austin, a founder of London, clearly a great genius, on the finest latten (brass), and gilded by Bartholomew Lambespring the Dutch goldsmith. The monument and the superb chapel in which it stands cost £2,481 4s. 7d., equivalent to £24,800 now.

Most of the monumental brasses which abound in our churches were the work of this period. There are some of much older date, but, during this century they were multiplied everywhere, and afforded great scope for the talents of founders, engravers, and enamellers.

In painting, the age does not appear to have equally excelled. There was, unquestionably, abundance of religious pictures on the walls of our churches, and the images themselves were painted and gilt; but there do not seem to have existed artists who had a true conception of the sublimity of their pursuit. The painting of such works was undertaken by the job, by painters and stainers. John Prudde, glazier in Westminster, undertook to "import from beyond seas glass of the finest colours, blue, yellow red, purple, sanguine, and violet," and with it glaze the windows of the Beauchamp Chapel. Brentwood, a stainer of London, was to paint the west wall of the chapel "with all manner of devices and imagery;" and Christian Coliburne, painter, of London, was to "paint the images in the finest oil colours." The great Earl of Warwick bargained with his tailor to paint the scenes of his embassy to France, for which he was to receive £1 8s. 6d. The "Dance of Death," so common on the Continent in churches and churchyards, made also so famous by Holbein, was copied from the cloister of the Innocents in Paris, and painted on the walls of the cloister of St. Paul's. It was a specimen of the portrait painting of the age, for it contained the portraits of actual persons, in different ranks of life, in their proper dresses. The portraits of our kings, queens, and celebrated characters, done at this time, are of inferior merit.

Gilding was in great request, not only for ornamenting churches and their monuments, but for domestic use, the precious metals being very scarce, and therefore copper and brass articles were commonly silvered or gilt. But it was in the illumination of manuscripts that the artistic genius of the time was, more than almost in any other department, displayed. The colours used are deemed inferior in splendour to those of the fourteenth century, but the illuminations are superior in drawing and power of expression. The terror depicted in the faces of the Earl of Warwick's sailors in expectation of shipwreck, and the grief in those who witnessed his death, are evidences of the hand of a master. Many of the portraits of the leading characters of the age are to be found in these illuminations; and they afford us the most lively views of the persons and dresses of our ancestors of that day--their arms, ships, houses, furniture, manners, and employments. But the art of printing was already in existence, and before it the beautiful art of illumination fell and died out.

The deadly arts of destruction were more practised during this century than all others. First the English turned their arms against the French, and then against each other, and though many of their armies were hastily raised, and therefore ill-disciplined, they not only showed their accustomed bravery, but many advances were made in the manner of raising, forming, paying, and disciplining troops, as well as in the modes of attacking fortifications and towns. Henry V. was a consummate master in this, his favourite art, and was, perhaps, the first of our kings who introduced a scheme of superior discipline, teaching his troops to march in straight lines at proper distances, with a steady, measured pace; to advance, attack, halt, or fall back without breaking, or getting into confusion. This, combined with his mode of employing his archers, which we have described in the account of his battles, gave him an invincible superiority over his enemies.

As the feudal system decayed, the kings of England no longer depended on their barons appearing in the field with their vassals, but they bargained with different leaders to furnish men at stated prices, which, as we have shown, were high. It was only in cases of rebellion and intestine struggle that they summoned all their military tenants to raise the people in mass, and the same summonses were issued to the archbishops, bishops, and all the principal clergy, to arm all their followers, lay and clerical, and march to the royal standard.

The pictures of battles and sieges at this period give us an odd medley of bows and arrows, crossbows, spears, cannon, and hand-guns. The old weapons were not left off, because the new ones were too imperfect and too difficult of locomotion to supersede them. The cannons, though often of immense bore and weight, throwing balls of from one to five hundredweight, were, for the most part, without carriages, and therefore difficult and tardy in their operations. The Scots were the first to anticipate the modern gun-carriage, by what they called their "carts of war," which carried two guns each, while many of the guns of the English required fifty horses to drag them. They had, however, smaller guns; as culverins, serpentines, basilisks, fowlers, scorpions, &c. The culverins were a species of hand-gun in general, fired from a rest, or from the shoulder. The Swiss had 10,000 culverins at the famous battle of Morat. These hand-guns are said to have been first brought into England by Edward IV. on his return from Flanders in 1471. Ships were also supplied with small guns.

The trade of England continued to flourish and extend itself through this century, in spite of the obstacles and ruinous effects of almost perpetual war. Our kings, however warlike they might be, were yet very sensible of the advantages of commerce, and during this century made numerous treaties in its favour. At the same time, it is curious that, even when two countries were at war, such was the spirit of trade, that the merchants went on trading whenever they could, just as if there was no war at all. This was the case, especially between England and Flanders. Our monarchs were already ambitious of reigning supreme masters of the seas, and this doctrine was as jealously urged upon them by the nation. In a rhyming pamphlet, written about 1433, and to be found in Hakluyt (Vol. I., p. 167), the writer says, that "if the English keep the seas, especially the main seas, they will compell all the world to be at peace with them, and to court their friendship."

Henry IV., though harassed by the difficulties of a usurped crown, strenuously set himself to promote commerce, and to put an end to the continual depredations committed upon each other by the English and the merchants of the Hanse Towns, as well as those of Prussia and Livonia, subject to the grand master of the Teutonic order of knights.

Henry V. was as victorious at sea as on land; and by his fleet, under his brother, the great Duke of Bedford, in 1416, and again in 1417, the Earl of Huntingdon being his admiral, swept the seas of the united fleets of France and Genoa, and made himself complete master of the ocean during his time. This ascendency was lost under the disastrous reign of Henry VI., but was regained by Edward IV., a monarch who, notwithstanding his voluptuous character, was fully alive to the vast benefits accruing to a nation from foreign trade, and thought it no dishonour to be, if not a merchant-prince, a prince-merchant. He had ships of his own, and in time of peace he did not suffer them to remain useless in harbour, but freighted them with goods on his own account, and grew rich by traffic.

Notwithstanding all this, the nation was not yet much more enlightened as to the real principles of trade than it was in the previous century. The same absurd restrictions were in force against foreign merchants. Such foreign merchants were required to lay out all the money received for goods imported in English merchandise. No gold or silver coin, plate or bullion, was, on any account, to be carried out of the kingdom. Banks were now established in most countries, and bills of exchange had been in use since the thirteenth century--so that these remedied, to a large extent, this evil; but it is clear that where the exports of a country exceeded its imports, the balance must be remitted in cash; and the commercial men were clever enough to evade all the laws of this kind. No fact was so notorious as that the coinage of England abounded in all the countries to which she traded.

Besides the prohibition of carrying out any English coin or even bullion, foreign merchants were to sell all the goods they brought within three months, but they were not to sell any of them to other merchant strangers, and when they arrived in any English town they were assigned to particular hosts, and were to lodge nowhere else. Yet, under all these obstacles, our commerce grew, and our merchants extended their voyages to ports and countries which they had not hitherto frequented. In 1413 they fitted out ships in the port of London for Morocco, having a cargo of wool and other merchandise valued at £24,000, or £240,000 of our money. This raised the ire of the Genoese, who seized these precious ships; but Henry IV. soon made ample reprisals by granting to his subjects letters of marque to seize the ships and goods of the Genoese wherever they could be found. And so well did the English kings follow this up, that we find them in Richard III.'s reign not only successfully competing with the Genoese, but obtaining a footing in Italy itself, and establishing a consul at Pisa. Consuls, or, as they were then called, governors, of the English traders abroad, were also employed during this period in Germany, Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Flanders.

Wool, woollens, tin, hides, and corn, were still our chief exports. Slaves, says the historian, were no longer an article of commerce; but the conveyance of pilgrims to foreign shrines was a source of great emolument to merchants. A curious pamphlet of the middle of this century, called "The Prologue of English Policy," gives us a complete view of our imports:--The commodities of Spain were figs, raisins, wines, oils, soap, dates, liquorice, wax, iron, wool, wadmote, goatfell, redfell, saffron, and quicksilver--a valuable importation. Those of Portugal were very much the same. Brittany sent wine, salt, crest-cloth or linen, and canvas; Germany, Scandinavia, and Flanders, iron, steel, copper, osmond, bowstaves, boards, wax, corn, pitch, tar, flax, hemp, felting, thread, fustian, buckram, canvas, and wool-cards; Genoa, gold, cloth of gold, silk, cotton, oil, black pepper, rockalum, and wood; Venice, Florence, and other Italian states, all kinds of spices and grocery wares, sweet wines, sugar, dates.

The age abounded with great merchants. The Medici of Florence; Jacques le Coeur, the greatest merchant that France ever produced, who had more wealth and trade than all the other merchants of that country together, and who supplied Charles VII. with money by which he recovered his country from the English. In our own country John Norbury, John Hende, and Richard Whittington, were the leading merchants of London, the last of whom was so far from a poor boy making his fortune by a cat that he was the son of Sir William Whittington, knight. In Bristol also flourished at this time William Cannynge, who was five times mayor of that city, and who had, for some cause not explained, 2,470 tons of shipping taken from him at once by Edward IV., including one ship of 400 tons, one of 500, and one of 900. The name of this Cannynge is familiar to readers of Chatterton's ingenious Rowley poems.

Of the ships and shipping of the age we need not say more than that, with all the characteristics of the past age, there was an attempt to build larger vessels in rivalry of the Genoese. John Taverner, of Hull, had a royal licence granted him in 1449, conferring on him great privileges and exemptions as a merchant, for building one as large as a Venetian carrack, one of their first-class ships, or even larger. And Bishop Kennedy, of St. Andrews, was as much celebrated for building a ship of unusual size, called the Bishop's Berge, as for building and endowing a college.

In Scotland the state of the shipping interest was much the same as in England. James I. displayed enlightened views of trade. He made various laws to ascertain the rate of duty on all exports and imports, to secure the effects of any traders dying abroad, and permitted his subjects to trade in foreign ships when they had no vessels of their own. In both countries great care was taken to protect and promote their fisheries.

The coin of those times in England was chiefly of gold and silver. The gold coin consisted of nobles, half-nobles, and quarter-nobles, originally equivalent to guineas (the exact value of a noble in Henry IV.'s reign was 21s. 1-1/2d.), half-guineas, and quarter-guineas, or dollars of 5s. 3d. The silver coins were groats, half-groats, and pennies. But it must be remembered that all these coins were of ten times the intrinsic value of our present money; so that the labourer who in the fifteenth century received 1-1/2d. per day, received as much as fifteen pence of the present money. But the great historical fact regarding the money of this age was its continual adulteration, and consequent depreciation.

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V. THE REIGN OF HENRY VII

Henry's Defective Title--Imprisonment of the Earl of Warwick--The King's Title to the Throne--His Marriage--Lovel's Rising--Lambert Simnel--Henry's prompt Action--Failure of the Rebellion--The Queen's Coronation--The Act of Maintenance--Henry's Ingratitude to the Duke of Brittany--Discontent in England--Expedition to France and its Results--Henry's Second Invasion--Treaty of Étaples--Perkin Warbeck--His Adventures in Ireland, France, and Burgundy--Henry's Measures--Descent on Kent--Warbeck in Scotland--Invasion of England--The Cornish Rising--Warbeck quits Scotland--He lands in Cornwall--Failure of the Rebellion--Imprisonment of Warbeck and his subsequent Execution--European Affairs--Marriages of Henry's Daughter and Son--Betrothal of Catherine and Prince Henry--Henry's Matrimonial Schemes--Royal Exactions--A Lucky Capture--Henry proposes for Joanna--His Death.

Though Henry Tudor had conquered Richard III. on the field of Bosworth, he had no title whatever to the crown of England, except such as the people, by their own free choice, should give him. He was descended, it is true, from Edward III., through John of Gaunt, but from the offspring of not only an illicit, but an adulterous connection. When the natural children of John of Gaunt, therefore, were legitimatised by Act of Parliament, that Act expressly declared them incapable of inheriting the crown. Still more, the true hereditary claim lay in the house of York; and had that line been totally extinct, and had the bar against his line not existed, the royal house of Portugal at least had a superior title in point of descent from John of Gaunt. Further still, he stood attainted as a traitor by Act of Parliament, and could not, therefore, assert a Parliamentary right. Yet, as we have said, for years public expectation, overlooking the claims of all others of both the contending lines, had turned towards him, as the individual destined by Providence to put an end to the sanguinary broils of York and Lancaster, and unite them in peace.

The only son of the late Duke of Clarence, who, next to the children of Edward IV., was the heir apparent of the line of York, had been confined by his uncle, Richard III., in the castle of Sheriff Hutton, in Yorkshire. Richard had at first treated this poor boy with kindness; he had created him Earl of Warwick, the title of his illustrious grandfather, the king-maker. On the death of his own son, he had at first proposed to nominate him his heir; but, fearing that he might be too dangerous a competitor, he had omitted that favour, and conferred it on the Earl of Lincoln, John de la Pole, the son of his sister the Duchess of Suffolk, and therefore nephew both of himself and Edward IV. Henry, the very first day after the battle of Bosworth, despatched Sir Robert Willoughby to take the young earl from Sheriff Hutton, and convey him to the Tower of London. Henry then put himself at the head of his victorious troops, and commenced his march towards the capital. Everywhere he was received, not as a conqueror, but a deliverer.

He arrived safely at Kennington, and after dining with Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, he proceeded with a splendid attendance of lords, both spiritual and temporal, towards the city. The nobles, imitating the absurd custom of France, rode two together on one horse, to show how completely the rival parties had amalgamated, and in this ridiculous style they passed through the city to the Tower, where Henry for the present took up his residence. On the 30th of October he was crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he immediately appointed a body-guard of fifty archers to attend upon him. This was an indication of distrust in his subjects or of the state of a conqueror, which astonished and dismayed the public; but Henry assured them that it was merely the state which, on the Continent, was now deemed essential to a king.

The Parliament assembled on the 7th of November, to settle the new order of things. Before proceeding to business they found themselves in a great dilemma. No less than 107 of the members were persons attainted during the last two reigns, and were therefore disqualified for acting. They were the most zealous partisans of the house of Lancaster, and immediate application was made to the judges for their decision on this new and singular case. They came to the conclusion that the attainted members could not take their seats till their attainders were reversed, and a bill was passed by the remaining members accordingly.

When Henry met his duly qualified Parliament, he informed them that "he had come to the throne by just title of inheritance, and by the sure judgment of God, who had given him the victory over his enemies in the field." In this declaration he was careful, while he asserted what was not true, to avoid what would alarm the pride and the fears of the nation. He had no just title of inheritance, as we have shown, and he dared not use the words "right of conquest," for such right was held to imply a lapse of all the lands in the nation to the Crown, since they had been held of the prince who had been conquered. Lest he had, even in speaking of victory, gone too far, he immediately added, that "every man should continue to enjoy his rights and hereditaments, except such persons as in the present Parliament should be punished for their offences against his royal majesty."

Another claim to the crown, which Henry was still more careful to ignore, though it was one on which he secretly placed confidence, was the right of Elizabeth of York, whom he had pledged himself to marry, and who was the undoubted owner of the throne. But as Henry would not owe his throne to his people, so he would not owe it to his wife. He therefore used every means to establish his own title to the throne before he in any way alluded to hers, or took any steps towards fulfilling his pledge of marriage. He renewed that pledge, indeed, on arriving in London, to satisfy the York party; but he proceeded to have his claims to the throne acknowledged by Parliament without any reference to hers. If he had mentioned the right of Elizabeth of York, his extreme caution suggested that he would be held to possess the throne, not by his own claims, but by hers, an idea which equally offended his pride, and alarmed him for the security of the succession in his offspring. Should Elizabeth die without children, in that case the right would die with her; and any issue of his by another marriage might be accounted intruders in the succession, and they might be removed for the next heirs of Edward IV. If she should die childless, and even before him, even his own retention of the throne might be disputed. All these points the mind of Henry saw clearly; and in a moment, and as if no such person as Elizabeth existed, and as if no pledge to marry her had helped him to his success, he procured an Act of Parliament, which provided that "the inheritance of the crown should be, rest, remain, and abide in the most royal person of the then sovereign lord, King Henry VII., and the heirs of his body lawfully coming, perpetually with the grace of God so to endure, and in none other."

But this excess of caution and this nicely balanced policy had not been carried through without alarming all parties, and greatly disgusting that of York. The whole country looked to the union of the houses by the marriage of Henry and Elizabeth as the only means of putting an end to the civil wars which had so long rent the nation. Still Henry, though now securely seated on the throne, evinced no haste to fulfil his pledge of placing Elizabeth of York upon it. It was not, therefore, till the feeling of the public became strongly manifested at his neglect of the princess, and till the Commons presented him a petition praying him "to take to wife the Princess Elizabeth, which marriage they hoped God would bless with a progeny of the race of kings;" and till the Lords, spiritual and temporal, had testified their participation in this wish, by rising simultaneously and bowing as it was uttered, that Henry consented to the celebration of the marriage.

The marriage took place on the 18th of January, 1486, and the rejoicings in London, Westminster, and other cities were of the most lively kind. They were heartfelt, for now all parties concluded that there was hope of peace and comfort. They were far more ardent than at the king's accession or coronation, and the mean-souled monarch saw it with sullen displeasure, for it seemed to imply that though he had taken such pains to place foremost his right to the throne, the people recognised, spontaneously, the superior title of the house of York, and that of his beautiful, and by him superciliously treated wife. Lord Bacon, who is the great historian of this period, and who may be supposed to be sufficiently informed, does not hesitate to add that the manifest affection of the people for the queen produced in him towards her additional coldness and dislike.

Henry, before dismissing his Parliament, conferred favours and promotions on many of his friends. The two persons, however, whose counsels and administrative services he chiefly valued, were Bishops Morton and Fox, the latter of whom he raised to the see of Exeter. They had shared in all his adversities, and were now admitted to participate in his high fortune. Morton was, on the death of Bourchier, made Primate of England; and Fox was entrusted with the Privy Seal, and successively made Bishop of Bath and Wells, Durham, and finally, Winchester. These two able prelates were Henry's ministers and constant advisers. "He loved," says the historian of the time, "to have a convenient number of right grave and wise priests to be of his council; because," adds Bacon, "having rich bishoprics to bestow, it was easy to reward their services."

Having dismissed his Parliament, and left all in order, Henry set out on a progress through the kingdom. The people of the northern counties had been the most devoted to Richard, and he sought, by spending some time amongst them, to remove their prejudices and attach them to his interests. He had advanced as far as Lincoln, and was there keeping his Easter, on the 2nd day of April, when he learned that Lord Lovel, formerly chamberlain to Richard, with Humphrey and Thomas Stafford, had left the sanctuary at Colchester, and were gone with dangerous intentions, no man knew whither. The news did not seem to give him much concern, and he proceeded towards York. At Nottingham, more pressing and alarming intelligence reached him, that Lord Lovel was advancing towards York with 4,000 men, and that the two Staffords were besieging Worcester with another army.

At Nottingham, Henry received an embassy from the King of the Scots; and despatching his uncle, the Duke of Bedford, with about 3,000 men in pursuit of Lord Lovel, on the 6th of April he quitted Northampton in the same direction. At Pontefract he was met, on the 17th, by the news that Lovel had passed him on the road, had raised a force in the neighbourhood of Ripon and Middleham, and was preparing to surprise him on his entrance into York. Henry's courage did not fail him; he was now surrounded by most of the northern and southern nobility, who had brought up considerable forces. But the man who always trusted more to his shrewd knowledge of human nature than to arms, now hit on a means of dispersing the insurgent army without a blow. He sent on his uncle, Jasper of Bedford, to offer a free pardon to all who would desert Lovel's standard, and the whole host dispersed as by magic. It was, in fact, the magic of the right incentive applied at the right moment. Lovel, who was as much affected by the proclamation of pardon as his followers--for it instantly struck him with the fear of universal desertion--fled at once to the house of his friend, Sir Thomas Broughton, in Lancashire; and, after lying concealed there some days, contrived to escape to the court of the Duchess of Burgundy, in Flanders. Some of his followers, as it would seem, in defiance of the king's offer of pardon, were seized and executed by the Earl of Northumberland.

On the 30th of September the queen was prematurely delivered of a son, who, however, was pronounced a strong and healthy child, and was christened by the name of Arthur, after Prince Arthur of the ancient Britons, from whom Henry pretended to derive his descent. But the birth of an heir-apparent tried too severely the temper of the numerous malcontents who still existed. Though Henry had put himself to much trouble, and to some cost, to win over the people of the northern counties, his conduct in general had not been such as to conciliate the enemies of the Lancastrian line.

However, the Yorkist party, though roused to disturb the quiet of the king, prepared their measures of annoyance with a lack of acumen which was more likely to irritate than overturn. Perhaps they did not want to dethrone him, because that would overturn also the head, and most popular representative of their own party--Elizabeth; especially as she was now the mother of a legitimate prince, capable of uniting all interests. Perhaps they wished rather to show the cold and unforgiving monarch that he was more at their mercy than he supposed, and that they could embitter, if they did not proceed to terminate, his reign. Such, in fact, whether this was their purpose or not, were the character and tendency of the plots and impostures which, for so many years, kept Henry in disquiet and anxiety.

The first attempt was to bring forward a youth as the Earl of Warwick, the son of Clarence, whom Henry was keeping confined in the Tower. So little depth was there in this plot, that at first it was evidently the plan to bring the impostor forward as the Duke of York, the younger of the two princes supposed to be murdered in the Tower. It was given out that though his elder brother had been murdered, the younger had been allowed to escape. Had this story been adhered to, and well acted, it might have raised a most formidable rebellion; but, for some unknown reason, it was as speedily abandoned as adopted, and the Earl of Warwick pitched upon as the preferable impersonation. Nothing, however, could be more absurd, for the true earl being really alive, Henry could at any moment bring him forward.

Towards the close of the year 1486, there appeared at the castle of Dublin a priest of Oxford named Richard Simon, attended by a boy of about fifteen years of age. The boy was of a peculiarly handsome and interesting appearance; and Simon, who was a total stranger in Ireland, presented him to the lord-deputy, the Earl of Kildare, as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, who, he represented, had fortunately escaped from his dungeon in the Tower of London, and had come to throw himself under the protection of the earl and his friends. Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, was a zealous Yorkist; his brother was chancellor, and almost all the bishops and officers in the Irish Government had been appointed by Edward IV. or Richard. It is most likely that the lord-deputy and the party were already cognisant of the whole scheme of this agitation; for it is neither likely that Simon the priest should have originated so daring and arduous an enterprise as that of presenting a new claimant for the throne in opposition to the astute and determined Henry Tudor, nor that he should have so particularly singled out Ireland as the opening ground of his operations, and the lord-deputy as his patron and coadjutor. What sufficiently proved this was, that simultaneously the Earl of Lincoln, of whom we have lately made mention, son to the eldest sister of the two late kings, had disappeared from England and gone over to his aunt Margaret, Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy, Henry's most inveterate enemy. This satisfied the king that the plot which showed itself in Ireland was produced in England, and was fomented by the Yorkist party at large. It was soon found that Simon had been diligently instructing the young pretender, whose name was Lambert Simnel, before he produced him in public, in all the arcana of the character he had to support.

The loyalty of the lord-deputy had been already questionable. Henry had sent him a summons to attend in London, but he evaded that by a petition from the spiritual and temporal peers of Ireland, stating strongly the absolute necessity of his presence there. No sooner did Simon present his protégé to Kildare, than that nobleman received him without any apparent reluctance to put faith in his story.

When Henry received this news, he hastened to do what he ought to have done long before. He took the Earl of Warwick out of the Tower, conducted him publicly to St. Paul's, so that all might see him, and all who desired it were allowed to approach him, and converse with him. The nobility and gentry were personally introduced to him, and the king then took him with him to Sheen, where he held his court, and gave familiar access to all those who had seen or known him before. By this politic act he completely satisfied the people of England, who laughed at the impostor in Ireland; but the Irish, on the contrary, declared that Henry's Warwick was the impostor, and theirs the real one. To consult on the best measures for defeating this plot, Henry called a great council at Sheen; but at its breaking up, the public were thrown into still greater surprise and perplexity by the king, who, instead of offering to crown the queen, seized her mother, the queen-dowager, confiscated her property, and consigned her to the custody of the monks of Bermondsey. The reason assigned was, that the queen-dowager, in the last reign, had promised her daughter to Henry, and then put her into the hands of Richard. Such a reason, if really put forward, was a simple absurdity, because since then Elizabeth Woodville had been living at court as the queen-mother, in all public honour. The real cause was presumably connected with the business in hand--the Simnel conspiracy. This is the opinion of Lord Bacon, who, living a hundred years later, nevertheless had access to sources of information not available to the modern student, though his authority may easily be overrated. Speaking of Simon, he says:--"It cannot be but that some great person, that knew particularly and familiarly Edward Plantagenet, had a hand in the business, from whom the priest might take his aim. That which is most probable out of the preceding and subsequent acts is, that it was the queen-dowager from whom this action had the principal source and motion; for certain it is that she was a busy, negotiating woman, and in her withdrawing-chamber had the fortunate conspiracy for the king against Richard III. been hatched, which the king knew, and remembered, perhaps, but too well; and was at this time extremely discontented with the king, thinking her daughter--as the king handled the matter--not advanced but depressed; and none could hold the book so well to prompt and instruct this stage play as she could."

But the most formidable and unwearied enemy of Henry VII. was Margaret, the Dowager-Duchess of Burgundy. As the sister of Edward IV. and of Richard, no circumstance could induce her to tolerate Henry Tudor, in her eyes a low-born man, who had thrust the Yorkist line from the throne. To her Lord Lovel had fled, and to her also fled the Earl of Lincoln. To her the Irish party sent emissaries for aid; and she despatched 2,000 veteran German troops, under a brave and experienced general, Martin Schwarz, accompanied by the Earl of Lincoln.

The moment that Henry Tudor learned the flight of the Earl of Lincoln, he set out on a progress through the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk, in which the chief interest of the earl lay. He was at Kenilworth when news was brought him that the Earl of Lincoln and Lord Lovel had landed with the pretended Edward VI., supported by Martin Schwarz and his German legion, at the pile of Foudray, an old keep in the southern extremity of Furness. Henry advanced by Coventry and Leicester to Nottingham; Lincoln had already approached Newark. The royal army advancing to oppose the whole force lost its way between Nottingham and Newark, and there was such confusion in consequence, and such rumours of the enemy being upon them, that numbers deserted. But five guides were procured from Ratcliff-on-Trent, and soon afterwards the vanguard of Henry's army, led by the Earl of Oxford, encountered the forces of Lincoln at Stoke, a village near Newark. The battle lasted for three hours, and was obstinately contested. The veteran Germans, under Schwarz, fought till they were exterminated almost to a man. The Irish displayed not the less valour; but, being only armed with darts and skeans--for the English settlers had adopted the arms of the natives--were no match for the royal cavalry. The whole of the troops of the insurgents, expecting no mercy if they were taken, seemed prepared to perish rather than to yield. Four thousand of the insurgents and 2,000 of the king's best troops are said to have fallen in this desperate engagement; but nearly all the leaders of the rebel army, the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Thomas Broughton, the brave Schwarz, and the Lords Thomas and Maurice Fitzgerald, having fallen, the victory on Henry's part became complete.

The pretender Lambert Simnel and the priest Simon were captured by Sir Robert Bellingham, one of the king's esquires; but nothing was seen of Lord Lovel. He was believed to have escaped, but no traces of him were discoverable; many thought that he had perished in attempting to swim his horse across the Trent. But nearly two centuries afterwards a subterranean chamber was discovered accidentally by some workmen at Minster Lovel, in Oxfordshire, the ancient seat of his family. In this chamber was seated a skeleton in a chair, with its head resting on a table; and this was supposed to be the remains of this same Lord Lovel, who had reached his house, and secreted himself in this apartment, where he had perished by some unknown cause.

After the battle, Henry travelled northward to ascertain that all was secure in the tract through which the insurgents had passed, and to punish such as had aided the rebels, and those who just before the battle had spread the rumour of his defeat. The royal punishments did not consist in putting his enemies to death, but in fining them severely, for Henry Tudor much preferred making a profit of a man to killing him. The late insurrection had taught him that if he did not wish for a repetition of it, he must concede something to the Yorkist party, and must pay some respect to the queen. Accordingly, on the 25th of November, 1487, Elizabeth was crowned with much state at Westminster.

Having thus made this amende to public opinion, Henry, instead of giving Simnel consequence by putting him to death, or making a State prisoner of him in the Tower, turned him into his kitchen as a scullion, thus showing his contempt of him. "He would not take his life," says Lord Bacon, "taking him but as an image of wax that others had tempered and moulded;" and considering that if he was made a continual spectacle, he would be "a kind of remedy against the like enchantments of people in time to come." The priest Simon he shut up in a secret prison, saying he was but a tool, and did not know the depths of the plot. He even professed to regret the death of the Earl of Lincoln, who, had his life been spared, he said, "might have revealed to him the bottom of his danger." In his peculiar way he threw much mystery over the matter, for mystery was one of his greatest pleasures.

Having settled these matters, which he did on his own authority, Henry summoned a Parliament to grant him supplies, and to increase those supplies by bill of attainder against all those who had been engaged in the late conspiracy. To prevent similar risings, he demanded that the law should be rigorously put in force against the practice of maintenance. This maintenance was the association of numbers of persons under a particular chief or nobleman, whose badge or livery they wore, and to whom they were bound by oath to support him in his private quarrels against other noblemen. But the instrument was too convenient not to be turned on occasion against the Crown, whenever rich chiefs took up the opposite party, and by this means it was that such numbers of troops could be brought at the shortest notice into the field against the monarch. Various laws had been passed on this subject, and heavy penalties decreed; but now it was ordained that, instead of calling such offenders before the royal council, as had been the custom, a particular Court should be established for the purpose. The chancellor, the treasurer, the keeper of the privy seal, or two of them, one bishop, one lay peer, and the judges of the King's Bench and Common Pleas, were empowered to summon all such persons before them, and to punish the guilty just as if they had been convicted by ordinary course of law. This was the origin of what came to be called the Court of the Star Chamber, from the walls or ceiling of the room where it met being decorated with stars.

The affairs on the Continent were now in a state which demanded the most serious attention, but which were by no means likely to be settled to the honour of the country by a monarch of the penurious character of Henry VII. If ever a monarch was bound by gratitude to succour another prince, it was Henry VII. He had been protected in Brittany from all the attempts of the Yorkist monarch for years. The Duke Francis, who had been his host and friend during his long exile, was now growing old. He appears never to have been of a very vigorous mind, and now mind and body were failing together. He had two daughters, and the hope of securing the patrimony of the eldest, Anne, drew the attention of many suitors, the chief of whom were Maximilian, King of the Romans; the Duke of Orleans, the first prince of the blood in France; and the Count D'Albret, a powerful chieftain, at the foot of the Pyrenees. But hostile alike to all these wooers was Charles VIII. of France, who, though he was under engagement to marry the daughter of Maximilian, and therefore apparently debarred from the hand of Anne of Brittany, was resolved, if possible, to secure her territory. In this dilemma, Francis sent repeated importunate entreaties to Henry to come to his rescue. France, at the same time, sent to him, praying him to be neutral, alleging that Charles was only seeking to drive his revolted subjects out of Brittany. Henry was bound by honour to give prompt succour to his old friend; he had received from Parliament two-fifteenths for the purpose, and was urged by it to send efficient aid to prevent France from seizing this important province. But Henry could not find it in his heart to spend the money in active service; he proposed to mediate between the parties. This suited the views of France exactly, because while Henry was negotiating they could continue to press on their victories. The poor Duke Francis was compelled to submit to a treaty, in August, at Verger, by which he surrendered to the French all the territory they had conquered, and was bound never again to call in assistance from England or any other country, nor to marry either of his daughters without the consent of the King of France. Having signed this humiliating treaty, the duke died of a broken heart, on the 7th of September, 1488, only three weeks afterwards.

The people of England received these tidings with undisguised indignation. Twice had they voted large sums to enable their ungrateful and pusillanimous king to aid his old benefactor and the ally of England; twice had he put the money in his coffers, and sold the honour of the country and the fortunes of the unfortunate ally to the French, wholly insensible to honour or shame. But whilst the public were foaming in wrath over this despicable conduct, the indefatigable French were pressing on. Anne, the young orphan duchess, was a mere child of only twelve years of age. Around her were contending rivals and their adherents. But all this time the French were seizing town after town. The news of this awoke such a fermentation in England, and Henry was upbraided in such vehement terms for thus, as the sovereign of a great people, sacrificing the honour of the nation, and permitting the helpless orphan of his benefactor to become the prey of France, that he was compelled to rouse himself. He determined to send ambassadors to Maximilian, to his son, the Archduke Philip, to the Kings of Spain and Portugal, inviting them to act in concert with him for the repression of French ambition. Having taken this magnanimous, and, if it had really been intended to follow it up vigorously, most admirable step, Henry called a Parliament, and demanded more money to carry on the war.

The pretences of this huckstering king were now become too transparent to deceive any one. All the money hitherto voted for a war that never took place was still in Henry's coffers. The people thought that he ought first to bring out that before he asked for more. Parliament, therefore, made strong opposition, and finally reduced his demand of £100,000 to £75,000. But, when they had voted, the indignant people refused to pay it, considering that the selfish monarch had their cash already in hand. Great disturbances arose in the endeavour to enforce the collection of the tax. This manifested itself especially in the north, where Henry had used such endeavours to soothe and win the inhabitants.

The Earl of Northumberland directed the collection to be enforced, accompanying the command with such menaces as he deemed necessary to procure obedience. But these had a contrary effect. The people flew to arms, and, turning their vengeance first against the earl, as the rigorous instrument of an imperious monarch, they stormed his house and put him to death. They then declared war against the tyrant, as they termed Henry, himself. Their leader was a fiery fellow of the common order, named John à Chambre, but, as they assumed a formidable aspect, Sir John Egremont, one of the Yorkist faction, put himself at their head. Henry lost no time in despatching Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, who soon suppressed the insurrection, and hanged John à Chambre and some of his accomplices. Sir John Egremont escaped to Flanders to the Duchess of Burgundy.

Henry now sent over to Brittany a body of 6,000 men under Lord Willoughby de Broke; but he limited their service to six months, which was, in fact, to render them nearly useless, especially when they had instructions not to fight, and he would not even afford that aid until he had exacted from the poor orphan girl, the young duchess, the surrender of her two best sea-ports in security of payment. He moreover compelled the duchess to bind herself by the like oath to him as she had taken to the French king, not to marry without his consent. Before the end of the year Anne found herself invested by the French army in Rennes; and rather than fall a helpless and humiliated captive into the hands of Charles, she consented to marry him, having not a single soul left to stand by her in her resolute opposition. She was married to Charles on the 13th of December, 1491, at Rennes, was crowned in the abbey church of St. Denis, and made her entrance into Paris amid the acclamations of a vast multitude, who regarded this event as one of the most auspicious which had ever happened to France.

The rage of Maximilian may be imagined. He had lost Brittany, his daughter had lost the throne of France, and he was duped and insulted in the most egregious manner before all Europe. He made his complaints ring far and wide, but they were only echoed by the laughter of his enemies, and he proceeded to vow revenge by the assistance of Spain and England.

Henry was now bent, according to all appearance, on war. He was too clear-sighted not to perceive the immense advantage France had obtained over him in securing Brittany, and how the political foresight and sagacity on which he prided himself had suffered from the paltry promptings of his avarice. He therefore put on a most belligerent attitude. He summoned a Parliament at Westminster, and addressed it in the most heroic strain. He commented on the insolence of France, elated with the success of her late perfidy, and on--what he no doubt felt more deeply than anything else--her refusal to pay what he called the tribute agreed by Louis XI. to be paid to Edward IV., and hitherto continued to himself. Two-fifteenths were at once granted him, and the nobility were on fire with the anticipation of realising all the glories and the plunder of the past ages.

He availed himself of the paroxysm of the moment, not only to gather in and garner the two-fifteenths newly granted, but the remains of the benevolence voted last session. Whilst the fresh tax fell on the nation generally, this fell on the monied and commercial capitalists. London alone furnished £10,000 of it or £100,000 of our money. The wily old archbishop, Morton, instructed the commissioners to employ this dilemma, which was called "Morton's fork." They were to urge upon people who lived in a modest and careful way, that they must be rich in consequence of their parsimony; on those who indulged in expensive abodes and styles of living, that they must be opulent, because they had so much to expend. To afford ample time for harvesting these riches, Henry found perpetual causes for delaying his expedition. The nobles were already crowding to his standard with their vassals, and impatient to set out, but Henry had always some plausible excuse for lingering. At one time it was the unsafe state of Scotland, and four months were occupied in negotiating an extension of the truce; then it was the necessity of contracting for fresh levies of troops. These troops, however, were ready in June and July, but still they were not allowed to move. "The truth was," says Bacon, "that though the king showed great forwardness for a war, not only to his Parliament and Court, but to his Privy Council, except the two bishops (Fox and Morton), and a few more, yet, nevertheless, in his secret intentions, he had no purpose to go through with any war upon France. But the truth was, that he did but traffic with that war to make money."

At length, in the beginning of October, 1492, he landed at Calais, with a fine army of 25,000 foot, and 1,600 horse, which he gave in command to the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Oxford. This was a force capable of striking an alarming blow, but the whole affair was a sham. In fact, Henry had entered into a treaty of peace before he had set out, and the only difficulty now was how to get out of the war without incurring too much resentment at home. To guard against this, the odium of the abortive expedient must be carefully removed from himself to other parties. The machinery for this was already prepared. His ambassadors appeared in the camp at Boulogne, informing them that their visit to his previous ally Maximilian had been useless; he was incapable of joining him. These were followed by others from Spain, bringing the intelligence that Ferdinand had concluded a peace with France, Roussillon and Cerdagne being ceded to him by Charles. But with Henry's fine army, and the defenceless state of France, the defection of these allies, from whom little or nothing had been expected, would have scarcely cost him a thought had he been a Henry V. As it was, after all his boasts, it was not even for him to propose an abandonment of the enterprise, and therefore, the Marquis of Dorset and twenty-three other persons of distinction were employed to present to him a request that he would also make a peace with France. They urged, as they were instructed for this purpose, the defection of these allies, the approach of winter, the difficulty of obtaining supplies at Calais at that season, and the obstinacy of the siege of Boulogne. All these were circumstances that had been foreseen from the first, and treated with indifference, as they deserved to be; but now Henry affected to listen to the desires of his army, and sent off the Bishop of Exeter and the Lord Daubeney to confer with the Marshal de Cordes, who had been sent as plenipotentiary on the part of Charles to Étaples. They soon returned, bringing the rough draft of a treaty, by which peace and amity were to be maintained betwixt the two sovereigns during their lives, and a year afterwards. Even this Henry affected to decline, and only consented to give way at the earnest entreaty of his already-mentioned four-and-twenty officers.

After having thus assumed all this pretence to exonerate himself from censure, Henry signed a peace on the following terms:--Charles was to retain Brittany for ever, and he was to pay Henry 620,000 crowns in gold for the money advanced by Henry on account of Brittany and his present expenses, and 125,000 crowns in gold as arrears of the pension paid to Edward IV. by Louis XI. He was also to continue this pension of 25,000 crowns to Henry and his heirs. The whole amount which Henry sacked was 745,000 crowns, equal to £400,000 of our present money. The members of his council, who openly acted the part of petitioners of this peace, are said not only to have been instructed by Henry to perform this obnoxious duty, but to have been gained by the bribes of the French king, who was anxious to make short work of it, that he might proceed on an expedition which he had set his mind upon against Naples. They went about declaring that it was the most glorious peace that any king of England ever made with France, and that if Henry's subjects presumed to censure it, they were ready to take the blame upon themselves.

Having used these precautions to ward off the reproaches of his subjects, Henry ratified the peace on the 6th of November, and led back his army to England. There, though he had the money safely in his chests, the disappointment and indignation of the people were extreme, and tended to diminish his sordid satisfaction. The people protested that he had been trading on the honour of the nation, and had sold its interests and reputation for his own vile gain, and his enemies did not neglect to avail themselves of his unpopularity. During the past year, a young man had landed in Cork, of a singularly fascinating exterior and insinuating address. He represented himself to be no other than the Duke of York, the younger of the two princes who were supposed to have been murdered in the Tower. He was a fine young man, apparently exactly of the age of the Duke of York, and bearing a striking likeness to Edward IV. "Such a mercurial," says Bacon, "as the like hath seldom been known; and he had such a crafty and bewitching fashion, both to move pity and induce belief, as was like a kind of fascination or enchantment." What would appear to have been the real story of this remarkable pretender, so far as we can gather from the records of the time, is this:--

Margaret, the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy, having played off Lambert Simnel, devised this scheme, or was supplied with it by the Yorkist refugees at her Court, who had immediate and constant communion with the heads of the York faction in England. A young man was industriously sought after who should well represent the Duke of York, though she knew him to be dead. Such a youth was found in the son, or reputed son, of one John Osbeck, or Warbeck, a renegade Jew of Tournay. This Warbeck had lived and carried on business in the time of Edward IV., and had dealings with the king, who was so free with him that the Jew prevailed on him to become godfather to his child, who was called Peter, and whose name became converted into the diminutive Peterkin or Perkin. Others assert that Warbeck's wife had been amongst the numerous favourites of Edward, and that this Perkin was really his son--whence the striking resemblance, the cleverness and liveliness of his character. Warbeck had returned to Flanders, and there, in course of time, his son had attracted the attention of the Yorkist conspirators as the very youth, in all respects, for their purpose. He was introduced to the duchess, who found him already familiar with the whole story of Edward's Court from the past affairs and position there of his parents.

The scheme being now matured and the chief actor ready, they only waited for the true moment for his appearance. That came in the prospect of Henry being involved in war with France. As soon as this seemed inevitable, the pretended Duke of York landed in Ireland. The York faction was still strong in that country, and, despite the failure of the former pretender, Simnel, the Irish were ready, to a certain extent, to embrace another claimant of Henry's crown. He landed at Cork, where the mayor and others of that city received him as the true Richard Plantagenet, as, no doubt, they had previously agreed to do. Many of the credulous people flocked after him, but the more prudent stood aloof. He wrote to the Earls of Desmond and Kildare, inviting them to join his standard, but those powerful noblemen kept a cautious distance. Kildare had been disgraced by Henry for his reception of Simnel, and dreaded his more deadly vengeance in case of a second failure. But Warbeck, undismayed, spread everywhere the exciting story of his escape from the cruelty of his uncle Richard, and was gradually making an impression on the imaginative mind of Ireland, when a summons came to a new scene.

Charles VIII. of France was now menaced by Henry with invasion. He knew the man too well to doubt the real object of his menace, and the power of money to avert it, but it was of consequence to reduce the bribe as much as possible; and every instrument which promised to assist in effecting that was most valuable. Such an instrument was this self-styled Duke of York, who had suddenly appeared in Ireland. The watchful Duchess of Burgundy is said to have adroitly turned Charles's attention to this mysterious individual through the agency of one Frion, a man who had been a Secretary of Henry, but who had been won over by his enemies. Charles caught at the idea; an invitation was instantly despatched to Perkin Warbeck to hasten to the French Court, where he was "to hear of something to his advantage," and he was received by the king as the undoubted Duke of York and true monarch of England. Perkin's person, talents, and address, being worthy of a real prince, won him the admiration of all who approached him; and not only the Court and capital, but the whole of France, soon rang with praise of the accomplishments, the adventures, and the unmerited misfortunes of this last of the Plantagenets. The king settled upon him a princely income; a magnificent abode was assigned him, and a body-guard befitting a royal personage was conferred upon him, of which the Lord of Concressault was made captain.

The news of this cordial reception of the reputed Duke of York by the French Court flew to England, and Sir George Neville, Sir John Taylor, and above a hundred gentlemen hastened to Paris, and offered to him their devoted services. This decided and rapidly-growing demonstration had the effect which Charles contemplated. Henry was greatly alarmed, and hastened to close the negotiations for peace. These once signed, the puppet had done its work in France. Henry made earnest demands to have Warbeck handed over to him, but Charles, who, no doubt, was bound by agreement with the Duchess of Burgundy to refuse any such surrender, declared that to do so would be contrary to his honour; but he gave the pretender a hint to quit the kingdom, and he retired to the Court of Burgundy.

The duchess now heaped on Perkin all the marks of affection and the honours which she would have deemed due to her own nephew. She ordered every one to give him the homage belonging to a real king; she appointed him a guard of thirty halberdiers, and styled him the "White Rose of England." On all occasions her conduct towards him was that of an affectionate aunt, who regarded him as the head of her family, and the heir of the brightest crown in Europe.

It is not to be supposed that the tempest which was gathering around Henry had escaped his attention. On the contrary, he was aware of all that was passing, and with the caution and concealment of his character, he was at work to counteract the operations of his enemies. The first object with him was to convince the public that the real Duke of York had perished at the same time as his brother, Edward V. Nothing, he concluded, would be so effectual for this purpose as the evidence of those who had always been held to be concerned in the death of the young princes. Of five implicated, according to universal belief, two only now survived, namely, Sir James Tyrell--who had taken the place of Sir Robert Brackenbury, Lieutenant of the Tower, during the night of the murder--and John Dighton, one of the actual assassins. These two were secured and interrogated, and their evidence was precisely that which we have stated when relating the murder of the princes. The bodies, therefore, were sought for, but as the chaplain was dead who was supposed to have witnessed their removal, according to the order of Richard III., they could not then be found and produced. The testimony of Tyrell and Dighton, however, was published and circulated as widely as possible, and these two miscreants, after their full and frank avowal of the perpetration of this diabolical murder, were, to the disgrace of the king and of public justice, again allowed to go free. Everyone, however, must perceive at once how important it was to Henry that the real witnesses of that murder should exist, and be forthcoming to confound any one pretending to be either of these princes.

Henry next applied to the Archduke Philip, the son of Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy, and now sovereign of the Netherlands in his own right, to deliver up to him the impostor, Warbeck, who, he contended, was entertained in his dominions contrary to the existing treaties, and the amity betwixt the two sovereigns. But Margaret had the influence to render his application abortive. Philip professed to have every desire to oblige his great ally, Henry of England, but he pleaded that Margaret was sole ruler in her own states, and, though he might advise her in this matter, he could not control her. Henry resented the polite evasion by stopping all commercial intercourse between England and the Low Countries, by banishing all Flemings from his dominions, and recalling his own subjects from Flanders; and Philip retaliated by issuing similar edicts.

In 1494, several Yorkist lords were arrested and executed, but there remained a conspirator far higher than any who had yet been unveiled--a conspirator where it was least expected, in the immediate vicinity of the throne, and in the person who more than all others, perhaps, had contributed to place Henry upon it. His name stood in the secret list of traitors furnished by spies, but he had been left for a more striking and dramatic discovery, for a dénouement calculated to produce the most startling and profound impression.

After the festivities of Christmas the king took up his residence in the Tower, where he held his council on the 7th of January, 1495. If there was one man more distinguished than another by the royal favour in that august circle, he was Stanley, Lord Chamberlain. Sir William Stanley had burst upon Richard III. at Bosworth Field, at the critical moment, slain his standard-bearer, and, by his followers, killed the tyrant. His brother, Lord Stanley, had put the crown of the fallen monarch on Henry's head. For this he had been created Earl of Derby, and had been allowed to ally himself to the throne by the marriage of Henry's mother, the Countess of Richmond. Sir William had been made Lord Chamberlain, and both brothers had been glutted, as it were, with the wealth and estates of proscribed families. There were no men--not even Fox and Morton--who were supposed to stand so high, not merely in the favour, but in the friendship of Henry. He was suddenly arrested at the council chamber and executed, his vast wealth passing to the Crown.

The fall of Stanley was a paralysing blow to the partisans of Warbeck. They saw that even that great nobleman, while apparently living in the very centre and blaze of royal favour, had been surrounded by spies who watched all his actions, heard his most secret communications, and carried them all to the king. No man who was in any degree implicated felt himself safe. Henry's cautious and severe temper, while it made him hated, made him proportionately feared. Assured by the success which had attended all his measures, Henry every day displayed more and more the grasping avarice of his disposition, and accusations and heavy fines fell thickly around. He fined Sir William Capel, Alderman of London, for some offence, £2,743; and, though he failed to secure the whole, he obtained £1,615. Encouraged by this, he repeated the like attempts; and, while he depressed the nobility, he especially countenanced unprincipled lawyers, as the ready tools of his rapacity. Whilst this conduct, however, kept alive the rancour of many influential people, it rendered the common people passive; for they escaped the oppressions of many petty tyrants, who were kept in check by the one great one. Warbeck's party, therefore, was much disabled. It was now three years since he made his appearance, but, with the exception of his brief visit to Ireland, he had attempted nothing in Henry's dominions. But the Flemings, who were smarting under the restrictions put upon their trade with England, began to murmur loudly, and the Archduke Philip to remonstrate warmly with Margaret on account of the countenance given to the English insurgents.

Under these circumstances it was necessary for Warbeck and his adherents to make an effort of some kind. Taking advantage, therefore, of the absence of Henry on a visit to his mother at Latham House, in Lancashire, Warbeck and a few hundred followers made a descent in July on the coast of Kent, near Deal. It was hoped that Henry's severity would have made numbers ready to join them. The people, indeed, assembled under the guidance of some gentlemen of property, and, professing to favour Warbeck, invited him to come on shore. But he, or those about him, observing that the forces collected had nothing of that tumultuous impetuosity about them which usually characterises insurgents in earnest, kept aloof, and the men of Kent perceiving that they could not draw Warbeck into the snare, fell on his followers already on land, and, besides killing many of them, took 169 prisoners. The rest managed to get on board again, and Warbeck, seeing what sort of a reception England gave him, sailed back with all speed to Flanders. The prisoners were tied together like teams of cattle, and driven to London, where they were all condemned and executed to a man, in various places, some at London and Wapping, some on the coasts of Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Norfolk, where they were gibbeted, as a warning to any fresh adventurers who might appear on those shores.

Flanders was now become no durable place of sojourn for Perkin and his party. The Flemings would no longer submit to the interruption of their trade; and the archduke entered into a treaty with Henry, which contained a stipulation that Philip should restrain the Duchess Margaret from harbouring any of the king's enemies, and that the two princes should expel from their territories all the enemies of each other. This treaty was ratified on the 24th of February, 1496, and thereupon Warbeck betook himself to Ireland. But there he found a sensible change had taken place since his former visit. The king had sent over Sir Edward Poynings as lord-deputy, who had taken such measures that the people were much satisfied. On landing at Cork, therefore, the Irish refused to recognise their late idol, and from Cork he sailed away to Scotland. There a new and surprising turn of fortune awaited him. For a long time his interest had been on the decline. In Flanders the public had grown weary of him; in England they had endeavoured to entrap him; from Ireland they had repulsed him. He is said to have presented letters of recommendation from Charles VIII. of France, and from his great patroness the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy; and James IV. of Scotland received him with open arms.

James IV. of Scotland was a brave, generous, and patriotic monarch. When Henry offered him his daughter Margaret, he, therefore, unceremoniously rejected the offer. The disposition which Henry was said to have shown to encourage his subjects, during the truce, to molest the Scottish merchantmen at the very mouth of the Forth, was highly resented by James, who supported his admiral--Wood of Largo--in severely chastising the pirates, and did not fail to warn Henry that such practices must not be repeated. The dislike which James entertained for the insidious character of Henry--who began that system of bribing the nobles around the throne of Scotland which was never discontinued so long as a Tudor reigned, and which ended in the destruction of Mary, Queen of Scots--was violently aggravated by a base attempt of Henry in 1490. This was no other than a scheme to seize and carry off James to England, which failed ignominiously.

In this temper of the Scottish King, nothing could come more opportunely than such a person as Perkin Warbeck. James had, from the first moment of mounting his throne, been careful to strengthen his alliances with the whole European continent. With France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Flanders, his intercourse, both official and mercantile, was active and constant. Of course, James was kept in full information of all that was agitating England. With the Duchess of Burgundy, the inveterate enemy of Henry, it is clearly provable that James was in secret correspondence only five months after his accession. In 1488, even, there were busy messengers and heralds passing to and fro betwixt Flanders, Ireland, and Scotland.

From these circumstances, which are attested by the "Treasurer's Accounts," and other records of Scotland, it is manifest that James was intimately informed of everything which could be known about Warbeck. There could be no mistake made by James in his reception of that personage, when, in November, 1495, he presented himself at the palace of Stirling. Whatever James did he did with his eyes wide open and his mind fully made up. Yet from the very first he received him apparently with the most undoubting faith as to his being the true Plantagenet.

Warbeck was welcomed into Scotland with much state and rejoicing as the veritable Duke of York. James addressed him as "cousin," and celebrated tournaments and other courtly gaieties in his honour. The reputed prince, by his noble appearance, the simple dignity of his manners, and the romance of his story and supposed misfortunes, everywhere excited the highest admiration. James made a grand progress with him through his dominions, and beheld him wherever he appeared produce the most favourable impression. If James did not himself really believe Warbeck to be the Duke of York before he came to Scotland, his conduct during his abode there seems to have convinced him of it. At no time was he known to express a doubt of it, and on all occasions he spoke and acted as if morally certain of it. Nothing could be more convincing than his giving him to wife one of the most beautiful and high-born women of Scotland, Lady Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, and grand-daughter of James I. James now mustered his forces for the grand expedition which he hoped would drive Henry from the throne of England, and establish there the son of Edward IV., in the person of Warbeck.

Meantime, Henry VII. was diligently at work at his favourite plans of bribing and undermining. He had an active agent in Lord Bothwell, whom James had weakly forgiven for his numerous conspiracies. By his means Henry had won over the king's brothers, the Duke of Ross, the Earl of Buchan, and the Bishop of Moray. These traitors engaged to do everything in their power to defeat the expedition. The Duke of Ross promised to put himself under the protection of the King of England the moment his brother crossed the borders. Nor did the plot stop there. Again there was a scheme to seize James at night in his tent, suggested by Henry, and entered into by Bothwell, Buchan, and Wyat, an English emissary. This disgraceful plot was defeated by the vigilance of the royal guard, but not the less actively did the paid spies of Henry Tudor, including some of the most powerful barons in Scotland, labour to defeat the success of the enterprise. They accompanied the army only with the hope of betraying it, while their efforts were essentially aided by the remonstrances of more honest counsellors, who doubted the wisdom of the expedition, and did all they could to dissuade James from it.

Burning with resentment at the base and insidious attempts of Henry to disturb the security of his government, and to seize upon his person, and coveting the glory of restoring the last noble scion of a great race to the throne of his ancestors, James was deaf alike to warnings of secret treason or more public danger. He made his last muster of his forces at Ellam Kirk, near the English border and, proclaiming war on Henry, marched forward. Warbeck, as Richard Duke of York, at the same time issued a proclamation calling upon all true Englishmen to assemble beneath the banner of the true inheritor of the crown. He denounced Henry Tudor as a usurper, and as the murderer of Sir William Stanley, Sir Simon Montfort, and others of the ancient nobility; he charged him with having invaded the liberties and the franchises of both Church and people; and with having plundered the subjects by heavy and illegal impositions. He pledged himself to remedy all these abuses; to restore and defend the rights and privileges of the Church, the nobles, the corporations, and the commerce and manufactures of the country. He related the dangers through which he had passed since his escape from the Tower to this moment, and he set a price of a thousand pounds in money, and land to the value of a hundred marks per annum, for the capture or destruction of Henry Tudor.

But however judiciously the proclamation was drawn up, James was confounded as he advanced to see that it produced not the slightest effect. In vain had it been protested in the proclamation that James came only as the friend of the rightful King of England; that he sought no advantage to himself--though he had really bargained for the restoration of Berwick, and was to be paid 1,000 marks for the expenses of the war--and that he would retire the moment a sufficient English force appeared in the field. No such force was likely to present itself. If Warbeck had met with no success when supported by Englishmen, it was not to be expected when followed by an army of the hereditary foes of the kingdom--Scots and French, backed by Germans, Flemings, and other foreigners.

When James saw that, instead of being welcomed as deliverers, they were avoided, and that the expedition was altogether hopeless, he gave way to his wrath, and began to plunder the country, or to permit his troops to do it. Warbeck remonstrated against the devastations committed on the English with all the ardour of a true prince, declaring that he would rather lose the throne than gain it by the sufferings of his people. But James replied that his cousin of York was too considerate of the welfare of a nation that hesitated to acknowledge him either as king or subject. All this time the diligent Bothwell was duly informing Henry of the state of the Scottish camp, and of everything said and done in it. He now assured him that the Scottish army would soon beat a retreat, for that the inhabitants, in expectation of the visit, had driven off all their cattle, and removed their stores; so that the army was on the point of starvation. This was soon verified. The Scots, finding no supporters, about the end of the year retreated into their own country.

The invasion from Scotland afforded Henry another pretext for raising more money. He summoned a Parliament in the February of 1497, to which he uttered bitter complaints of the inroad and devastations of the Scots; of the troubles created by the impostor, and the manifold insults to the crown and nation. All this was now apparently blown over; but Parliament gratified the king by voting £120,000, together with two-fifteenths. Happy in the prospect of such supplies, Henry recked little of Warbeck or the Scots; but the tax roused the especial wrath of the Cornish people, who, knowing that the king only wanted to add their money to his already immense and useless hoards, wanted to know what they had to do with inroads of the Scots, who were never likely to come near them, and who had retired of themselves without so much as waiting for the sight of an army. This excitement of the brave and industrious, but hard-living Cornish men was fanned into a flame by Michael Joseph, a farrier of Bodmin, and one Thomas Flammock, an attorney, who assured the people that the tax was totally illegal, though voted by Parliament; for that the northern counties were bound by the tenures of their estates to defend that frontier; and that if they submitted to the avarice of Henry and his ministers there would be no end to it.

Flammock told them that they must deliver the king a petition, seconded by such numbers as to give it authority; but at the same time he assured them that to procure the concurrence of the rest of the kingdom they must conduct themselves with all order, and refrain from committing any injuries to person or property, demonstrating that they had only the public good in view. Armed with bills, bows, axes, and other country weapons that they could command, they marched into Devonshire 16,000 strong, and called on the people to accompany them, and demand the heads of Archbishop Morton and Sir Reginald Bray, who were declared to be the advisers of the obnoxious impost. At Taunton they made an example of an insolent and overbearing commissioner of the tax of the name of Perin. At Wells they were joined by Lord Audley, a man of an ancient family, but said to be of a vain and ambitious character.

Proud of having a nobleman at their head, they marched through Salisbury and Winchester into Surrey, and thence to Kent, the people of which, Flammock told them, had in all ages been noted for their independence and patriotism, and were sure to join them. They pitched their camp on Blackheath, near Eltham, but not a man joined them. The people of Kent had their causes of complaint; but they had lately shown what was their spirit by repelling Perkin Warbeck, and they were too enlightened to join in the expedition.

Henry had now received the new levies raised to oppose any further motion of the Scots, and he sent them forward to attack and disperse the rebels. He always regarded Saturday as his fortunate day; therefore, on Saturday, the 22nd of June, 1497, he gave the order for the attack. He divided his forces into three divisions. The first, under Lord Daubeney, pushed forward to attack the insurgents in front; the second, under the Earl of Oxford, was to take a compass, and assail them in the rear; and the king himself took post with the third division in St. George's Fields, to secure the city. To throw the insurgents off their guard, he had given out that he should not take the field for some days; and to give probability to this notion, he did not send out his advanced forces till the latter part of the day. Lord Daubeney beat an advanced guard of the rebels from Deptford Bridge, and before the main body was prepared to receive him, he charged them with fury. Though they were brave men, and 16,000 strong, thus taken at advantage, and naturally ill-disciplined, ill-armed, and destitute of cavalry and artillery, they were soon broken and compelled to fly. Two thousand of them were slain, and 1,500 made prisoners. The prisoners Henry gave up to the captors, who allowed them to ransom themselves for a few shillings each.

Lord Audley, Flammock, and Joseph only were executed. The peer was beheaded, the commoners were hanged; and Joseph seemed to glory in the distinction, saying he should figure in history. Henry on this occasion displayed great clemency, which some have ascribed to his desire to make a good impression on the Cornish people; others for joy that Lord Daubeney had escaped, for at one time he was surrounded by the enemy but was soon rescued. But the most probable reason was that assigned by Lord Bacon:--"That the harmless behaviour of this people that came from the west of England to the east, without mischief almost, or spoil of the country, did somewhat mollify him, and move him to compassion; or, lastly, that he made a great difference between people that did rebel upon wantonness, and them that did rebel upon want."

James of Scotland seized on the opportunity created by the Cornish insurrection to make a fresh inroad into England. He laid siege to the castle of Norham, and plundered the country round. Henry despatched the Earl of Surrey, with an army of 20,000 men, to drive back the Scots, and punish them by carrying the war of devastation into their country. As Surrey advanced, James retired, and Surrey, following him across the Tweed, took and demolished the little castle of Ayton, ravaged the borders, and returned to Berwick. These useless and worse than useless raids, with no hope of permanent advantage on either side, but only of mischief to the unoffending inhabitants on both, were worthy only of the most savage and unenlightened times. The spies of Henry, however, soon informed him that James was really sick of the war, and he repeated the offer made before of the hand of his daughter Margaret. This he made through the Spanish ambassador, Don Pedro d'Ayala, who came forward as a friendly mediator, thus sparing both kings the humiliation of making the first move. D'Ayala found James quite disposed for peace, but in a somewhat cavalier humour as to the terms. By the advice of D'Ayala, commissioners were appointed to meet at Ayton, where, under the management of Fox, Bishop of Durham, on the part of England, a truce was agreed upon to last for the lives of the two kings, and a year after the death of the longer liver. Though agreed upon, this important truce was not ratified for some years afterwards.

Meantime, James privately admonished Warbeck to quit the kingdom, as he could no longer assist him, and his presence would only tend to endanger the truce. Warbeck is said to have received this intimation with much true dignity and good feeling. He thanked the king for the great effort he had made on his account, for all the honours and favours that he had conferred upon him, and for which he declared he should ever remain deeply grateful. A vessel was prepared for his departure at Ayr, and every comfort was provided for his accommodation which James could have offered to the true prince. His beautiful and accomplished wife would not be left behind--a proof that she was really attached to him, whatever she might think of his pretensions. She quitted rank, fortune, a high position in the Scottish Court, to embrace with him a homeless life and a dark prospect. Flanders was closed to Perkin by the fresh league betwixt that country and England. Ireland was a more than dubious resort, yet thither he turned his prow, and landed at Cork on the 30th of July, 1497, with about 100 followers. The attempt to rouse again the enthusiasm of Ireland was vain; but at this juncture the last gleam of Warbeck's waning fortune seemed to fall upon him.

The Cornish rebels, let off so easily by Henry, had returned to their own county, proclaiming by the way that the king had not dared to put them to death because the whole of his subjects were in the same state of discontent. The people of Cornwall and Devon, reassured by this, again took up arms against the commissioners, who were still collecting the tax with great severity, and, it is said, despatched a message to Warbeck to come over and head them. On the 7th of September, 1497, he accordingly landed at Whitsand Bay, with four or five small barques, and his 100 fighting men. Being joined by 3,000 of the insurgents at Bodmin, he issued a proclamation similar to his former one. Bodmin was the native place of Michael Joseph, their great orator and leader, and the people there were burning to revenge his death. Warbeck set out on his march towards Devonshire, and thousands of those who had lost friends and relations in the bloody battle of Blackheath joined him on the way. He sent his wife to Mount St. Michael for security, and directing his course towards Exeter, he invested that city on the 17th of September with a rude, wild force of about 10,000 men. He announced himself as Richard IV. of England, and called on the inhabitants to surrender; but, having sent notification of his approach to King Henry, they determined to defend themselves, if needful, till succour arrived.

Warbeck had no artillery or engines of any kind to carry on a siege, he therefore attempted to break down the gates. At the one he was repulsed with considerable loss, the other he managed to burn down, but the citizens availed themselves of the fire, feeding it as it failed, till they had dug a deep trench behind the flames. When, the next morning, Warbeck returned to force a passage by that gate, the citizens received him with such spirit that they slew 200 of his men, and daunted the rest. Assistance was now also flowing in from the country to the city, and Warbeck was in danger of being attacked both in front and rear. Seeing this, he demanded a suspension of hostilities, and, depressed by this failure, his Devonshire followers began rapidly to fall away, and steal home as quickly as they could. His Cornish adherents, however, more intrepid, encouraged him to persevere, and vowed that they would perish in his cause. In this state of desperation the pretender marched on towards Taunton, where he arrived on the 20th of September. The country people on their way, smarting under the infliction of the hated tax, wished them success, but did not attempt to help them.

At Taunton, instead of any encouragement, they met the vanguard of the royal army, under the command of Lord Daubeney, the lord chamberlain, and Lord Broke, the steward of the household. The Duke of Buckingham was just behind with a second division, and Henry was declared to be following with a still larger force. The brave Cornish men, scarcely clothed, and still worse armed, shrank not a moment from the hopeless combat. They vowed to perish to a man in behalf of their newly-adopted king, and Warbeck, with an air as if he would lead them into battle in the morning, rode along their lines encouraging them, and made all ready for the attack.

But Warbeck, who had never shown any want of courage, perceived the utter madness of contending with his undisciplined followers against such overwhelming odds, and in the night he mounted a fleet steed and rode off. In the morning the Cornish men, seeing themselves without a leader, submitted to the king, and, with the exception of a few of the ringleaders, they were dismissed and returned homewards as best they might. Meanwhile, Lord Daubeney despatched 500 horsemen in pursuit of Warbeck, to prevent, if possible, his entrance into sanctuary; but the fugitive succeeded in reaching the monastery of Beaulieu, in the New Forest.

Henry sent a number of horsemen, in all haste, to St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, to obtain possession of the Lady Catherine Gordon, the wife of Warbeck. This they easily accomplished, and brought her to the king, on entering whose presence she blushed and burst into tears. Henry received her kindly--touched, for once in his life, with tenderness, by beauty in distress; or, probably, bearing in mind that the lady was the near kinswoman of the King of Scots, with whom he was desirous to stand well. He sent her to the queen, by whom she was most cordially received, and in whose court she remained attached to her service. She was still called the White Rose of Scotland, on account of her beauty. Lady Gordon was afterwards, it appears, three times married, but lies buried by the side of her second husband, Sir Matthew Cradock, in Swansea church.

Henry proceeded to Exeter, where he had the ringleaders of the Cornish insurrection brought in procession before him, with halters round their necks. Some of them he hanged, the rest he pardoned; but he, at the same time, appointed commissioners to proceed into the country through which Perkin had passed, and to fine all such people of property as had furnished him with aid or refreshment. They did not confine their scrutiny to those who had assisted Perkin in his march, but extended it to all who had relieved the famishing fugitives; "so that," says Bacon, "their severity did much obscure the king's mercy in sparing of blood, with the bleeding of so much treasure." They extorted altogether £10,000.

The next business was to get Warbeck out of his sanctuary and into the hands of the king. Beaulieu was surrounded by an armed force, and all attempts at escape made impossible. Some of Henry's council urged him to omit all ceremony, and take the pretender from the sanctuary by force; but this he declined, preferring to lure him thence by fair promises. After hesitating for some time, Warbeck at length threw himself upon the king's mercy. Henry then set out to London with his captive in his train. Warbeck rode in the king's suite through the city, along Cheapside, Cornhill, and to the Tower, and thence to Westminster. As the king had promised him his life, he kept his word. He was repeatedly examined by the Privy Council, but it seems as if something had transpired there which Henry deemed better concealed, for a profound silence was preserved on the subject of these disclosures. So far from even being degraded, like Lambert Simnel, to some menial occupation, Warbeck was suffered to enjoy a certain degree of liberty, and was treated as a gentleman. The probability is, that the king satisfied himself that this mysterious personage was in reality a son of Edward IV., by the handsome Jewess, Catherine de Faro, his birth being in Flanders, and agreeing exactly with the time of Edward's exile there. This might account for his admirable support of the character of a prince, for his confidence in his assertion of it for so many years, and the power he had of winning the strong attachment of persons of the highest rank and education. If this were true, he was, moreover, the queen's brother, though an illegitimate one, and might win the interest of herself and sisters by his resemblance in person, and in spirit and ambition, to her father.

But however this might be, he was too dangerous a person to be allowed to get loose again. He lived at Court under a strict surveillance, and he grew so weary of it, that he contrived to make his escape on the 8th of June, 1498. The alarm was instantly given; numbers of persons were out in pursuit of him; every road by which he might escape to sea was vigilantly beset, and the unhappy man, finding himself pressed on all sides, surrendered himself to the Prior of Sheen, near Richmond. The prior exercised the right of sanctuary possessed by the house, and refused to give him up to the king, except under pledge that his life should be spared. Henry agreed, but he confirmed the public opinion, which, excited by the mystery of the Court, fully believed Warbeck a son of Edward's, by now endeavouring to degrade him, and to fix upon him the old story. For this purpose he compelled him to sit in the stocks two whole days, on the 14th of June at Westminster Hall, and on the 15th in Cheapside, and there to read aloud to the people a confession made up of the account of him published in Henry's former proclamation, but with some very contradictory additions. This confession was then printed and circulated amongst the people, but failed entirely to satisfy any one. When this bitter purgatory had been passed through, the bitterest conceivable to a man of Warbeck's character, pretensions, and superior mind, he was committed to the Tower.

Warbeck had not been long in the Tower when there was an attempt to liberate the Earl of Warwick, who was still in confinement there; and it failed only through the conspirators not having properly informed themselves of the real quarter in which he was kept. Soon after that a fresh plot was set on foot for the same object. In this the King of France was said to be concerned. It was said that he had declared his regret for ever having countenanced the usurpation of Henry Tudor, and that he offered money, ships, and even troops, to the friends of Warwick to enable them to release him, and place him on the throne. The Yorkist malcontents were once more active. They wrote to the retainers of the late Duke of Clarence, the father of Warwick, and to Lady Warwick, to come forward and see justice done to the oppressed prince; and an invitation was sent from the Court of France to a distinguished leader of the house of York to go over to that country and assume the command of the expedition. This also failing, a report was then spread of the death of the Earl of Warwick: then it was said that he had escaped, and a person of the name of Ralph Wulford, or Wilford, the son of a shoemaker in Sussex, was taught by one Patrick, an Augustinian friar, to personate the earl.

Whether the Yorkists were determined to give Henry no repose, but to haunt and harass him with a perpetual succession of impostors, or whether Henry himself planned this latter improbable scheme as a pretext for getting rid of the Earl of Warwick altogether, seems never to have been satisfactorily cleared up. All that is known is, that Wulford and the friar were speedily arrested, whereupon Wulford was put to death, and the friar consigned to prison for life.

Scarcely had this blown over, when it was reported that Warbeck and Warwick had endeavoured to escape from the Tower together. Warbeck must have been allowed to have free access to Warwick after he was sent to the Tower--a circumstance not likely to have been permitted by the cautious and vigilant Henry VII. had he not had some ulterior purpose in it. Once together, however, Warbeck won the favour of the simple and inexperienced Warwick, who was as ignorant of the world as a child, having passed nearly all his life in prison. Warbeck, however, exercised the same fascination over the highest and most intelligent persons whenever he had access to them. To the Tower he carried his active spirit of intrigue and adventure, and we soon find him in the enjoyment, for so dangerous a character, of extraordinary liberty and range in that State prison. He had not only completely won over the Earl of Warwick, but their keepers, Strangways, Astwood, Long Roger, and Blewet. These men engaged to murder their master, Sir John Digby, the Governor of the Tower, to get possession of the keys, and to conduct Warbeck and Warwick to the Yorkist partisans, by whom Warbeck was to be proclaimed King Richard IV., and Warwick to be restored to his titles and estates.

This plot, it is said, was discovered in time; and this was another circumstance which caused the public to suspect that the whole thing had been of the contriving, or, at least, of the permission of Henry, to rid him of these troublesome aspirants. The two offenders were immediately confined in separate cells. The servants of the Governor were brought to trial, and Blewet and Astwood were condemned and hanged. On the 16th of November, Warbeck was arraigned in Westminster Hall for sundry acts of high treason, since as a foreigner he had come into these kingdoms. They were, in fact, the attempts on the crown which we have related. He was condemned and hanged at Tyburn on the 23rd of November, 1499. On the scaffold his confession was read, and he declared it, on the word of a dying man, to be wholly true. Such was the end of this extraordinary adventurer. Bacon describes his enterprise as "one of the largest plays of the kind that hath been in memory; and might, perhaps, have had another end if he had not met with a king both wise, stout, and fortunate."

On the 21st of November, the Earl of Warwick was brought to trial before the peers, though he had been attainted from his birth, and had never taken his oath and seat as a peer of the realm. The charge against him was his conspiracy with Warbeck to dethrone the king. The poor youth pleaded guilty, either as weary of a life which had been but one long injury and wrong, in consequence of his birth, or because he was destitute, from his perpetual confinement, of the activity of mind to comprehend his situation. Probably he imagined that if he confessed himself guilty, he would be pardoned, and sent back to his cell. But Henry had no such intention. The Earl of Oxford, as Lord Steward, pronounced judgment, and three days afterwards he was beheaded on Tower Hill. Thus perished the last legitimate descendant of the Plantagenets who could alarm the fears of Henry Tudor.

A few months after these tragic events, a plague broke out in London, which the people considered as a direct judgment from Heaven for such wicked bloodshed. Henry got out of town, but not feeling himself safe, after several changes of residence, he went over to Calais, and whilst there he had an interview with the Archduke Philip of Burgundy. Henry invited the archduke to take up his quarters in Calais, but it is a proof of the distrust which even his own allies entertained of the politic Henry, that the archduke declined putting himself into his power, and agreed to meet him at St. Pierre, near that city. What the archduke was particularly anxious to see Henry for, was to excite his jealousy of France, and secure his co-operation in counteracting its ambition.

Charles VIII. of France, an ambitious youth, had made a grand expedition into Italy to seize on the two Sicilies, having contrived to make out a claim upon them, which, though empty in itself, was good enough for an excuse for conquest. He had passed over the Alps with an army of upwards of 30,000 men. At first all gave way before him, but an extensive league was soon formed against the French encroachment, including Ferdinand of Spain, Maximilian, the King of the Romans, the father of Philip, the Duke of Milan, and the Doge of Venice. Charles, who had led a most dissipated life, died suddenly in 1498 at the castle of Amboise, and the Duke of Orleans succeeded as Louis XII. Louis was as fully bent as Charles had been on prosecuting the conquest of Naples and Sicily, and in 1499 marched with a fresh army into the south of Italy.

It was to secure Henry's assistance in the league against the aggression of France, which alarmed all Europe, that Philip used his most eloquent persuasives, but the only persuasives with Henry were moneys, and these Louis had already extended. He renewed the peace of Étaples, paid up the arrears of Henry's pension, and secured the interest of the Pope, with whom Henry was desirous to stand well, by paying him 20,000 ducats for a dispensation enabling him to divorce his wife, and marry Anne of Brittany, the widow of Charles VIII., and an old flame of his. He had also made over the Valentinois, in Dauphiné, with a pension of 20,000 livres, to the Pope's son, the vile Cæsar Borgia. The Pope, moreover, was coquetting with Henry, inviting him, by an express nuncio, to join a league for an imaginary crusade to the Holy Land, which Henry was ready to do for the cession of some real ports in Italy as places for the retreat and security of his fleet in those seas.

It was not likely that Philip of Burgundy would make much progress with Henry, except so far as he could serve him by keeping certain matters, well known at the Courts of Burgundy and Flanders, concerning the real history of Perkin Warbeck, secret; and his anxiety on this head more and more convinced people that Warbeck had been something more than the son of a Jew.

Henry VII. having succeeded in ridding himself of all the pretenders to his crown, now set himself to complete the marriages of his children, and to make money with redoubled ardour. Negotiations had been going on with James of Scotland for the marriage of Henry's eldest daughter, Margaret. In 1496 James, who had previously declined the match, now in communication with Fox, Bishop of Durham, offered to enter into that contract. Henry gladly assented, and, when some of his council suggested that in case of the failure of the male line in England, a Scottish prince, born of this marriage, would become the heir, and England a mere appendage of Scotland, "No," replied Henry, "Scotland will become an appendage of England, for the smaller must follow the larger kingdom." And, no doubt, this idea had from the first actuated the calculating mind of the Tudor. On the 29th of January, 1502, the parties were solemnly affianced in the queen's chamber, the Earl of Bothwell having come to London as proxy for James. Margaret, at the time of this affiancing, was but just turned twelve years of age, and it was agreed that she should remain twenty months longer under the roof of her parents. Accordingly, it was not till the 8th of July, 1503, that she set out on her journey to Scotland.

Simultaneously had been proceeding the negotiations with the Spanish Court for the marriage between Henry's eldest son, Arthur, and Catherine, the daughter of Ferdinand, King of Aragon. The negotiations for this marriage had commenced so early as 1489, when the young prince was not yet three years old, and Catherine but four. In 1496 a further step was taken; and Ferdinand then promised to give the princess a portion of 200,000 crowns, and Henry engaged that his son should endow her with one-third of his present income, and the same of the income of the Crown, if he should live to be king. It was stipulated that so soon as Prince Arthur reached his twelfth year, a dispensation should be obtained to empower him to make the contract; and, accordingly, the marriage was performed by proxy, the Spanish ambassador assuming this part, in the chapel of the prince's manor of Bewdley. These two children, who were at this period, the one ten, and the other eleven years of age, were educated in the highest possible degree by their respective parents; and at the time of their actual marriage, in 1501, when Arthur was fifteen, and Catherine nearly sixteen, they were perhaps the two most learned persons of their years in the two kingdoms of Spain and England. The festivities over, Arthur retired to his castle of Ludlow with his bride, and there kept a Court modelled on that of the king. Great hopes and auguries were drawn from this marriage, and wonderful futures to them and their descendants were promised them by the astrologers. But little more than five months sufficed to falsify all the earthly predictions; for the young prince fell suddenly ill and died. Various reasons for his death are assigned by different authorities. Some assert that he died of consumption; others declare that he was perfectly sound and robust, and that he died of some epidemic--the sweating sickness, or, as the Spanish historian says, the plague. Great sickness of some kind was prevailing in the neighbourhood, so that at Worcester the funeral, according to the Spanish herald, was but thinly attended. Prince Arthur died on the 2nd of April, 1502. He was a prince of great promise, and the beauty of his person, the sweetness of his manner, and his brilliant accomplishments, won him universal favour, which was equally shared by his young bride.

The death of Arthur was a shock to the political arrangements, as well as to the affections of the royal parties on both sides. Ferdinand was anxious to retain a close alliance with England, as a counterpoise to the ascendency of France. He therefore proposed to Henry that Catherine should be affianced to Henry Duke of York, Prince Arthur's younger brother. This was a very legitimate project according to the Jewish law, but not so much in accordance with the practice of the Christian world. Henry VII. appeared to hesitate--it may safely be surmised with no intention of allowing the young princess, and her dowry of 200,000 crowns, to escape him; but rather, it may be supposed, with a design to exact something more. To hasten his decision, however, the Spanish monarch announced as the alternative that Catherine must be at once restored to her parents, with half of the marriage portion already paid. This had immediate effect on the deliberations of Henry. He showed himself ready to assent, if there were an additional incentive in the shape of another sum. Ferdinand and Isabella were firm. They declared themselves ready to pay the remaining 100,000 crowns on the contract of the marriage, which should take effect two months after the receipt of a dispensation from the Pope. Henry tried every art to extort a larger sum, and it was not till June, 1503, that this proposition was finally accepted. The solemnisation of the marriage was to take place on the young Prince Henry completing his fourteenth year. But the difficulties were not yet over. The two monarchs continued, like two skilful players, to try every move which might delay the payment of the money, or compel it with an augmentation. In this state the matter remained till 1504, when Henry and Catherine, on the 25th of June, were betrothed, but still not married, at the house of the Bishop of Salisbury, in Fleet Street.

Scarcely had the eyes of Elizabeth of York closed (she died in 1503), at the early age of thirty-seven, than Henry was on the look-out for another wife, for it was another opportunity of making a profit. His eyes glanced over the courts and courtly dames of Europe; and the lady who struck him as the most attractive in the world was the widow of the late King of Naples--for the deceased monarch had bequeathed her an immense property. Her ducats were charms that told on the gold-loving heart of Henry most ravishingly. He posted off three private gentlemen, well skilled in such delicate inquiries, to Naples, to learn from real sources whether all was safe as to this grand dowry. Poor Catherine was even made to play a part in this notable scheme of courtship, by furnishing the emissaries with a letter to her relative, the queen-dowager. The gentlemen reported in the most glowing terms the charms of the queen-dowager's person, the sweetness of her disposition, and the brilliant endowments of her mind, but they were obliged to add that, though the lady's fortune was in justice as large as fame reported it, the present king refused to carry out the will by which it was conferred. This one unlucky fact at once blotted out all the rest, and Henry, giving not another thought to the dowager-queen of Naples, turned his attention to the dowager-duchess of Savoy, who was also reported to be rich.

While Henry, however, was traversing Europe with the design of adding to his ever-growing hoards, he was equally diligent at home in prosecuting every art by which he could add another mark to his heap. He sought out and kept in his pay clever and unprincipled lawyers to search the old statute-books for laws grown obsolete, but which had never been formally repealed; and he had another set of spies in correspondence with them, who went to and fro throughout the whole kingdom to mark out all such persons of property as had transgressed these slumbering laws. Such a state of things could never have been tolerated in any former reign; but the wars of the Roses had cut off all the chief nobility, and the House of Commons, terrified by the summary proceedings against offenders, had become utterly cowed, and trembled at the mere word of this imperious monarch. Never, therefore, was the English people at any time so completely prostrated beneath the talons of a royal vampire as at this period. The rich merchants of London found themselves accused of malpractices in the discharge of their civic offices, and were subjected to the same process of squeezing in Henry's universal press.

To drain the coffers of the landed aristocracy, Henry's agents brought up against them all the old obsolete feudal charges of wardships, aids, liveries, premier seizins, and scutages. Their estates had long been held under a different tenure, obtained from former monarchs. No matter: all those marked out for legal bleeding were brought into the private inquisition of the king's commissioners, and compelled to pay whatever was demanded, or to suffer worse inconveniences. Even his own friends were not exempted from the ever-watchful eyes and schemes of this money-making king. The law which he had enacted against the practice of "maintenance" was a prolific source of emolument. A striking example of this species of royal sharp practice was given in the case of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. This nobleman having entertained the king on one occasion for several days magnificently at his castle of Henningham, to do the utmost honour to him at his departure, summoned all his friends and retainers, arrayed in all their livery coats and cognisances, and ranged them in two rows leading from the reception rooms to the royal carriage. Henry's eye was instantly struck with this prodigious display of wealth and of men, and his mind as suddenly leapt to a felicitous conclusion. There was money to be made out of it. The king said: "By my faith, my lord, I thank you for your good cheer, but I may not endure to have my laws thus broken in my sight: my attorney must speak to you." The earl was prosecuted for thus seeking to flatter the vanity of his master, and compelled to gratify Henry's avarice by a fine of 15,000 marks.

Whilst the king himself set so notable an example of extortion, we may be sure that his commissioners, spies, and tools of all sorts were not slack in this abominable business of ferreting out and putting through the cruel torture of their secret courts, the unhappy subjects of every corner of the kingdom who had any substance to prey upon. "The king," says Bacon, "had gotten for his purpose, or beyond his purpose, two instruments, Empson and Dudley, whom the people esteemed as his horse-leeches and shearers: bold men, and careless of fame, and that took toll of their master's grist. Dudley was of a good family, eloquent, and one that could put hateful business into good language. But Empson, that was the son of a sieve-maker, triumphed always upon the deed done, putting off all other respects whatsoever."

The tempestuous weather of January, 1506, which brought to others the disastrous news of vessels wrecked and lives lost, brought to Henry VII. tidings of a most exciting and elating kind. It was no other than that amongst the foreign vessels driven into the port of Weymouth, were some containing the Archduke Philip of Flanders and his wife Joanna, the elder sister of Catherine of Aragon, his daughter-in-law, and daughter of his friend and ally Ferdinand of Spain. The Archduke Philip knew his man; and at their meeting near Calais, in 1500, though he attempted to hold Henry's stirrup, and heaped upon him the titles of his father and protector, he took good care to keep out of his clutches; nothing would induce him to enter the city. But now circumstances were greatly changed; and the archduke and his wife Joanna would be a much more valuable prize. The mother of Joanna, the Queen Isabella of Spain, was dead, and Joanna was, in her own right, Queen of Castile, and Philip, by hers, king. There was a number of things, any one of which Henry would have been only too happy to extort from Philip.

The prince soon found himself received with much magnificence at the castle of Windsor; but he was not suffered to remain long without feeling that he was in the hands of a man who would have his full advantage out of him. The insatiable old miser went to work and propounded his demands, and there was nothing for it but for Philip to comply, if he ever meant to see Spain. First, Henry informed him that he was intending to marry, and that Philip's sister, the dowager-duchess of Savoy, was the woman of his choice. He demanded with her the sum of 300,000 crowns, of which 100,000 should be paid in August--it was already the 10th of March--and the remainder in six years by equal instalments. Besides this, Margaret, the duchess, was in the annual receipt of two dowries; one as the widow of John, Prince of Spain, and the other as widow of Philibert, Duke of Savoy, for she had been twice married already. This income Henry stipulated should be settled upon himself, and the princess was to receive instead an income as queen of England. That meant that Henry would have an income certain, and give her one most uncertain, for at this very time Catherine, the widow of his son Arthur, and betrothed bride of his son Henry, was kept by him in a condition of the most shameful destitution.

Philip consented--for what could he do?--and that point settled, Henry informed Philip that he had also a son, whom he, Henry, proposed to marry to his youngest daughter, Mary. This must have been a still more bitter draught for the poor Spanish monarch than the former. Henry had already made this very proposal, and it had been at once rejected. This son of Philip, the future celebrated Emperor Charles V., was now a child of six years of age, and the little Princess Mary was just three! Philip, however much he might inwardly rebel, and however differently he had planned the destiny of his son, was in the miser's vice, and the thing was done.

Soon there came about fresh complications. Philip of Flanders, or, as he was oftener called, Philip the Fair of Austria, was but an invalid when he set out on his unlucky voyage to Spain. His detention in England during the three most trying months of its trying climate, January, February, and March, added to the vexation of the engagement forced upon him by the relentless Henry, is said to have completely broken his constitution; he sank and died in about six months. No sooner did King Henry hear this news, than, throwing aside all further thoughts of the Duchess of Savoy, he applied for the hand of Joanna, the widow of Philip. With Joanna, Queen of Castile, married to himself, and Charles, her son, the heir of all Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria, married to his daughter Mary, what visions of greatness and empire must have swum before the keen eyes of Henry, and excited his intense passion of acquisitiveness! Ferdinand returned for answer, that the proposal would have been well pleasing to him, but that Queen Joanna, from violent grief for the loss of her husband, was become permanently insane. This answer, which would have been all-sufficient for most men, was treated as a mere trifle by Henry, who replied that he knew the queen, having seen her in England; that her derangement of mind was not the effect of grief, but of the harsh treatment of Philip; that she would soon be all right, and that he was quite ready to marry her. Ferdinand reiterated the certainty of the lady's fixed madness, and Henry rejoined that if he was not allowed to marry her, the king's other daughter, Catherine, should never marry his son.

There is no doubt that, could Henry have secured the hand of Joanna--"the Mad Queen," as she came to be called--he would have broken off the contract between Henry, his son, and Catherine, and kept her and her dower in England nevertheless. But the marriage of Henry VII. with Joanna being an impossibility, Ferdinand promised to send the remaining half of Catherine's dower by instalments, and Henry consented that the marriage of the two young people should take place as soon as the money was paid. Catherine, whose letters to her father had, for the most part, been intercepted and detained by Henry, at length gave up her opposition also to the wedding, declaring, in one of these letters, that it was better for her to marry the prince than remain in the woful condition of destitution and dependence in which her father-in-law kept her. The remainder of the dower, however, was never paid up during Henry's time, and therefore the marriage did not take place till after his death.

In the midst of his grasping, his hoarding, and his scheming, the king's end was drawing on, though he was far from an old man. The gout had long visited him with its periodical attacks. He was liable, during the cold and variable weather of spring, to complaints of the chest, which assumed the appearance of consumption, and occasionally reduced him very low. When the sickness was strong upon him he ordered Empson and Dudley to cease their villainies; as he got worse he commanded them even to make restitution to those whom they had pillaged and imprisoned; but as he grew better again, he instructed them that it was only necessary to recompense such as had not been dealt with according to the regular forms of law--so that as these vultures generally tore their victims in a legal fashion, and as they themselves were made the judges of the necessary restitution, very little was done. Henry VII. died at his palace of Richmond on the 21st of April, 1509, in the fifty-fourth year of his age and the twenty-fourth of his reign.

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