not been aware that there was any difference of race in the British island."

The precise time when Katherine's love led her to espouse the Welsh soldier, it is impossible to ascertain; what priest married them, and in what holy place their hands were united, no document exists to prove; and strange it is, that Henry VII., with all his elaborate boast of royal descent, should not have left some intimation of the time and place of the marriage of Katherine and Owen.

Katherine's life of retirement enabled her to conceal her marriage for many years, and to give birth, without any very notorious scandal, to three sons successively. The eldest was born at the royal manor-house of Hadham; from the place of his birth he is called Edmund of Hadham. The second was Jasper of Hatfield, from another of the royal residences. The third, Owen, first saw the light at some inconvenient season, when Katherine was forced to appear at the royal palace of Westminster. The babe was carried at once into the monastery, where he was reared, and afterwards professed a monk.

While Katherine was devoting herself to conjugal affection and maternal duties, performed by stealth, her royal son was crowned, in his eighth year, king of England, at Westminster, with great pomp, in which his mother took no share.

A strong suspicion of the queen's connection with Tudor seems to have been first excited in the minds of Henry VI.'s guardians, towards the end of the summer of 1436; at which time Katherine either took refuge in the abbey of Bermondsey, or was sent there under some restraint.

The children, to whom queen Katherine had previously given birth in secret, were torn from her by the orders of the council, and consigned to the keeping of a sister of the earl of Suffolk. This cruelty perhaps hastened the death of the unfortunate queen. The pitying nuns who attended her declared she was a sincere penitent, and among all other small sins she expressed the deepest contrition for having disobeyed her royal husband Henry V., and perversely chosen the forbidden castle of Windsor as the birthplace of the heir of England.

To use the poor queen's own pathetic words, "the silent and fearful

conclusion of her long, grievous malady" took place on the 3d of January, 1437.

Katherine was buried with all the pomp usual to her high station. Her body was removed to the church of her patroness, St. Katherine, by the Tower, where it laid in state, February 18th, 1437: it then rested at St. Paul's, and was finally honorably buried in Our Lady's Chapel, at Westminster Abbey.