the field, made fiercely up to him, and calling him "Traitor!" cleft his skull with his battle-axe.' The men under Wenlock's banner, panic-stricken at the fate of their leader, fled. The prince of Wales had no experience as a general, and his personal courage was unavailing to redeem the fortunes of the day." When queen Margaret, who was an agonized spectator of the discomfiture of her troops, saw that the day was going against her, she could with difficulty be withheld from rushing into the mélée; but at length, exhausted by the violence of her feelings, she was carried in a state of insensibility to her chariot by her faithful attendants, and was thus conveyed through the gates of Tewkesbury-park to a small religious house hard by, where her equally unfortunate daughter-in-law, Anne of Warwick, the countess of Devonshire, and lady Katherine Vaux, had already taken refuge. According to Fleetwood's Chronicle, she remained there till Tuesday, May 7th, three days after the battle. Other writers affirm that she was captured on the same day which saw the hopes of Lancaster crushed, with her "gallant springing young Plantagenet," on the bloody field of Tewkesbury.

The generally received historical tradition of the manner of the prince of Wales's death has been contested, because two contemporary chroniclers, Warkworth and Fleetwood, have stated that he was slain in the field, calling on his brother-inlaw Clarence for help. In the field he probably was slain,that part of the plain of Tewkesbury which, in memory of that foul and most revolting murder, is still called "the bloody field." Sir Richard Crofts, to whom the princely novice had surrendered, tempted by the proclamation "that whoever should bring Edward (called prince) to the king, should receive one hundred pounds a-year for life, and the prince's life be spared," "nothing

Wenlock had, by his frequent changes of party, given too much cause to the Lancastrians to distrust him. George Chastellain speaks of him as the most double-minded of men, the most perjured of traitors.

The Lancastrians were unacquainted with the ground, and when the king's Bery charge drove Somerset's men down the short, sudden hill into the low meadow where the Avon and Severn meet, both being at that time swollen with the recent rains above their banks, the foremost horsemen were pushed by those who followed close behind into the deep waters, and, weighed down by their heavy armour, perished miserably, more being drowned than slain by the sword.

mistrusting," says Hall, "the king's promise, brought forth his prisoner, being a goodly well-featured young gentleman, of almost feminine beauty." King Edward, struck with the

noble presence of the youth, after he had well considered him demanded, "How he durst so presumptuously enter his realms, with banners displayed against him?"-"To recover my father's crown and mine own inheritance," was the bold but rash reply of the fettered lionceau of Plantagenet. Edward basely struck the gallant stripling in the face with his gauntlet, which was the signal for his pitiless attendants to dispatch him with their daggers.

The following day, queen Margaret's retreat was made known to king Edward as he was on his way to Worcester, and he was assured that she should be at his command. She was brought to him at Coventry, May 11th, by her old enemy sir William Stanley, by whom, it is said, the first news of the mas sacre of her beloved son was revealed to the bereaved mother, in a manner that was calculated to aggravate the bitterness of this dreadful blow. Margaret, in the first transports of mater nal agony, invoked the most terrible maledictions on the head of the ruthless Edward and his posterity, which Stanley was inhuman enough to repeat to his royal master, together with all the frantic expressions she had used against him during their journey. Edward was at first so much exasperated, that he thought of putting her to death; but no Plantagenet ever shed the blood of a woman, and he contented himself by forcing her to grace his triumphant progress towards the metropolis. The youthful widow of her murdered son, Anne of Warwick, who had in one little fortnight been bereaved of her father, her uncle, her young gallant husband, and the name of princess of Wales, some say was another of the mournful attendants on this abhorrent pageant.

On the 22nd of May, being the eve of the Ascension, Margaret and her unfortunate daughter-in-law entered London together in the train of the haughty victor, and it is said by the romantic French biographer of Margaret,' that they travelled in the same chariot; but even if it were so, they were separated

1 Prevost.

immediately on their arrival. Margaret was incarcerated in one of the most dismal of the prison lodgings in that gloomy fortress where her royal husband was already immured,-that husband to whom she was now so near, after long years of separation, and yet was to behold no more. The same night that Margaret of Anjou was brought as a captive to the Tower of London, she was made a widow. "That night, between eleven and twelve of the clock," writes the chronicler in Leland, "was king Henry, being prisoner in the Tower, put to death, the duke of Gloucester and divers of his men being in the Tower that night."-" May God give him time for repentance, whoever he was, who laid his sacrilegious hands on the Lord's anointed," adds the continuator of the Chronicles of Croyland. Tradition points out an octagonal room in the Wakefield tower as the scene of the midnight murder of Henry VI. It was there that he had, for five years, eaten the bread of affliction during his lonely captivity, from 1465. A few learned manuscripts and devotional books, a bird that was the companion of his solitude, his relics, and the occasional visits of one or two learned monks who were permitted to administer to his spiritual wants, were all the solaces he received in his captivity.

1

King Edward and the duke of Gloucester, as if apprehensive of some outburst of popular indignation, left London early in the same morning that the tragic pageant of exposing the

A contemporary historian of the highest authority. The popular historical tradition of Henry VI.'s murder, like that of his son, has been a matter of great purte among modern writers, on the ground of Fleetwood's assertion that "on news of the utter ruin of his party, the death of his son, and the capture of çen Margaret, he took it in such ire, despite, and indignation, that of pure disessure and melancholy he died, 23rd of May." Mr. Halliwell, in his learned troduction and notes to the Warkworth Chronicle, and Dr. Lingard, in his *tes on the reign of Henry VI., have most ably refuted the objections of those Erters who, on the most shadowy reasons, attempt to controvert every murder with which Edward IV. and Richard III. sought to establish their blood-bought thes. That the death of Henry was predetermined by king Edward, even in uncertain of the event of the battle of Barnet, may be gathered from letter to Clarence, "to keep king Henry out of sanctuary."-Leland, Coll. ii.

It is a curious fact, that the weapon said to have been employed in the petration of this disputed murder was preserved, and long regarded in the tegtbourhood of Reading as a relic. "The warden of Caversham," wrote John London, the well-known agent of Henry VIII. in pillaging the religious houses, "was accustomed to show many pretie relics, among which was the holy dagger that killed king Henry.”

corpse of their royal victim to public view was to take place,' -an exhibition that was a matter of political expediency, to prevent any further attempts for his deliverance. The day after the Ascension the last Lancastrian king was "borne barefaced on the bier," surrounded by more glaives and bills than torches, through Cheapside to St. Paul's, that every man might see him; "and there the silent witness of the blood, that welled from his fresh wounds upon the pavement, gave an indubitable token i of the manner of his death." The same awful circumstance occurred when they brought him to Blackfriars, and this is recorded by four contemporary authorities, in quaint but powerful language. Very brief was the interval between the death and funeral of holy Henry. In the evening his bloody hearse was placed in a lighted barge, guarded by soldiers from Calais; "and so, without singing or saying," says the chronicler, "conveyed up the dark waters of the Thames at midnight to his silent interment at Chertsey-abbey, where it was long pretended that miracles were performed at his tomb."

Whether the widowed Margaret was, from her doleful lodg ings in the Tower, a spectator of the removal of the remains of her hapless lord is not recorded, but her extreme anxiety to possess them may be gathered from a curious document among the MSS. in the royal archives at Paris. Just before the melancholy period of her last utter desolation, death had been busy in the paternal house of Margaret of Anjou: her brother, John of Calabria, his young promising heir, and her sister's husband, Ferry of Vaudemonte, and her natural sister, Blanche of Anjou, all died within a few weeks of each other. King René had not recovered from the stupor of despair in which he had been plunged by these repeated bereavements, when he received the intelligence of the direful calamities that had befallen his unhappy daughter Margaret, and for her sufferings he shed those tears which he had been unable to weep for his own. Under the influence of these feelings, he wrote the following touching letter to Margaret, which she received in the midst 1 Warkworth Chronicle, p. 21.

MS. London Chron.

Bibl. Cotton., Vitell. A xvi. fol. 133.

3 Warkworth p. 21. Habington. Fabyan. Croyland Chron.

Ibid.

of her agonies for the death of her husband and son: "My child, may God help thee with his counsels! for rarely is the aid of man tendered in such reverse of fortune. When you can spare a thought from your own sufferings, think of mine; they are great, my daughter, yet would I console thee."

The imprisonment of queen Margaret was at first very rigorous, but it was, after a time, ameliorated through the compassionate influence of Edward's queen, Elizabeth Woodville, who retained a grateful remembrance of the benefits she had formerly received from her royal mistress. There was, too, a family connexion between queen Elizabeth and Margaret of Anjou, whose uncle, Charles of Anjou, duke of Maine, had married the aunt of the former. The captive queen was first removed to Windsor, and afterwards to Wallingford, where she seems to have been under the charge of the noble castellaine, Alice Chaucer, duchess-dowager of Suffolk, her old favourite; at least such we think is the inference to be drawn from this observation in one of the Paston letters, dated July the 8th, 1471: "And as for queen Margaret, I understand that she is removed from Windsor to Wallingford, nigh to Ewelm, my lady Suffolk's place in Oxfordshire." Five marks weekly was the sum allotted by Edward IV. for the mainte nance of the unfortunate Margaret, during her imprisonment in Wallingford-castle. Her tender-hearted father, king René, was unwearied in his exertions for her emancipation, which was at length accomplished at the sacrifice of his inheritance of Provence, which he ceded to Louis XI. at Lyons, in 1475, for half its value, that he might deliver his beloved child from captivity. Yolante and her son murmured a little at this loss, but they appear, nevertheless, fond of Margaret.

The agreement between Edward IV. and Louis XI. for the

1 Vie de Roi René, by Villeneuve.

Shakspeare, in his tragedy of Richard III., makes grand poetic use of the euracter of the captive Lancastrian queen, when he represents her roaming at large through the palaces of her foes, like an ill-omened sibyl or domestic fiend, Strancing woe and desolation to the princes of the line of York, invoking the tration of Heaven on the progeny of those who had made her childless, and eralting with frenzied joy in the calamities of the widowed Elizabeth Woodville, wim she is made to call, "Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my greatness!” Bet Margaret's broken heart had ceased to vibrate to the agonizing pangs of reHe sobrance and regret before the death of her great enemy, Edward IV.