intrepidity, struck him on his mouth with his gauntlet; and this served as a signal for farther brutality: the dukes of Gloucester, Clarence, and others, like wild beasts, rushed on the unarmed youth at once, stabbed him to the heart with their daggers. To complete the tragedy, Henry himself, who had long been the passive spectator of all these horrors, was now thought unfit to live. The duke of Gloucester, afterwards Richard the Third, entering his chamber alone, murdered him in cold blood. Of all those that were taken, none were suffered to survive but Margaret herself. It was, perhaps, expected that she would be ransomed by the king of France; and in this they were not deceived, as that monarch paid the king of England fifty thousand crowns for her freedom. This extraordinary woman, after having sustained the cause of her husband in twelve battles; after having survived her friends, fortunes, and children, died a few years after in privacy in France, very miserable indeed; but with few other claims to our pity, except her courage and her distresses.

E

CHAP. XIX.

EDWARD IV.

A. D. 1464-1482.

DWARD being now freed from great enemies, turned his punishment to those of lesser note; so that the gibbets were hung with his adversaries, and their estates confiscated to his use.

While he was thus rendering himself terrible on the one hand, he was immersed in abandoned pleasures on the other. Nature, it seems, was not unfavourable to him in that respect; as he was universally allowed to be the most beautiful man of his time. His courtiers also seemed willing to encourage those debaucheries in which they had a share; and the clergy, as they themselves practised every kind of lewdness with impunity, were ever ready to lend absolution to all his failings. Enormous vices had been of late so common, that adultery was held as a very slight offence. Among the number of his mistresses was the wife of one Shore, a merchant in the city, a woman of exquisite beauty and good sense, but who had not virtue enough to resist the temptations of a beautiful man and a monarch.

Among his other cruelties, that to his brother the duke of Clarence is the most remarkable. The king hunting one day in the park of Thomas Burdet, a creature of the duke's,

killed a white buck, which was a great favourite of the owner. Burdet, vexed at the loss, broke into a passion, and wished the horns of the deer in the belly of the person who advised the king to that insult. For this trifling exclamation Burdet was tried for his life, and publicly executed at Tyburn. The duke of Clarence, upon the death of his friend, vented his grief in renewed reproaches against his brother, and exclaimed against the iniquity of the sentence. The king, highly offended with this liberty, or using that as a pretext against him, had him arraigned before the house of peers, and appeared in person as his accuser. In those times of confusion, every crime alledged by the prevailing party was fatal; the duke was found guilty; and being granted a choice of the manner in which he would die, he was privately drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower; a whimsical choice, and implying that he had an extraordinary passion for that liquor.

However, if this monarch's reign was tyrannical, it was but short; while he was employed in making preparations for a war with France, he was seized with a distemper, of which he expired in the forty-second year of his age, and, (counting from the death of the late king), in the twenty-third of his reign.

HE

CHAP. XX.

EDWARD V.

A. D. 1483..

i

the realm, upon a pretence of guarding the person of the late king's children from danger, conveyed them both to the Tower. Having thus secured them, his next step was to spread a report of their illegitimacy; and by pretended obstacles, to put off the day appointed for young Edward's coronation. His next aim was to dispatch lord Hastings, whom he knew to be warmly in the young king's interest.

Having summoned lord Hastings to a council in the Tow er, he entered the room knitting his brows, biting his lips, and shewing, by a frequent change of countenance, the signs of some inward perturbation. A silence ensued for some time; and the lords of the council looked upon each other, not without reason, expecting some horrid catastrophe. Laying bare his armi all shrivelled and decayed, he accused Jane Shore and her accomplices of having produced this deformity by

I

their sorceries; upon which Hastings cried, "If they have committed such a crime, they deserve punishment.” “If !" cried the protector, with a loud voice, “dost thou answer me with ifs? I tell thee that they have conspired my death; and that thou, traitor, art an accomplice in the crime." He then struck the table twice with his hands, and the room was instantly filled with armed men. "I arrest thee," continued he, turning to Hastings, "for high treason;" and at the same time gave him in charge to the soldiers, Hastings was obliged to make a short confession to the next priest that was at hand; the protector crying out by St. Paul, that he would not dine till he had seen his head taken off. He was accordingly hur ried out to the Little Green before the Tower chapel, and there beheaded on a log of wood that accidentally lay in the way.

Jane Shore, the late king's mistress, was the next who felt his indignation. This unfortunate woman was an enemy too humble to excite his jealousy; yet as he had accused her of witchcraft, of which all the world saw she was innocent, he thought proper to make her an example for those faults of which she was really guilty. Jane Shore had been formerly deluded from her husband, who was a goldsmith in Lombardstreet, and continued to live with Edward, the most guiltless mistress in his abandoned court. It is very probable, that the people were not displeased at seeing one again reduced to former meanness, who had for a while been raised above them, and enjoyed the smiles of a court. The charge against her was too notorious to be denied; she pleaded guilty, and was accordingly condemned to walk barefoot through the city, and to do penance in St. Paul's church in a white sheet, with a wax taper in her hand, before thousands of spectators. She lived above forty years after this sentence, and was reduced to the most extreme indigence.

The protector now began to throw off the mask, and to deny his pretended regard for the sons of the late king, thinking it high time to aspire at the throne more openly. He had previously gained over the duke of Buckingham, a man of talents and power, by bribes and promises of future favour. This nobleman, therefore, used all his arts to cajole the populace and citizens at St. Paul's cross, and construing their silence into consent, his followers cried, "Long live king Richard!" Soon after the mayor and aldermen waiting upon Richard with an offer of the crown, he accepted it with seeming reluctance.

CHAP. XXI.

RICHARD it.

A. D. 1483-1485.

NE crime ever draws on another; justice will revolt aginst fraud, and usurpation requires security. As soon therefore, as Richard was seated upon the throne, he sent the governor of the Tower orders to put the two young princes to death; but this brave man, whose name was Brackenbury, refused to be made the instrument of a tyrant's will; and submissively answered, that he knew not how to embrue his hands in innocent blood. A fit.instrument, however, was not long wanting; Sir James Tyrrel readily undertook the office, and Brackenbury was ordered to resign to him the keys for one night! Tyrrel choosing three associates, Slater, Deighton, and Forest, came in the night-time to the door of the chamber where the princes were lodged, and sending in the assassins, he bid them execute their commission, while he himself staid without. They found the young princes in bed and fallen into a sound sleep: after suffocating them with the bolster and pillows, they shewed their naked bodies to Tyr rel, who ordered them to be buried at the stair-foot, deep in the ground, under a heap of stones:

But while he thus endeavoured to establish his power, he found it threatened on a quarter where he least expected an attack. The duke of Buckingham, who had been instrumental in placing him on the throne, now took disgust at being refused some confiscated lands for which he solicited. He therefore levied a body of men in Wales, and advanced, by hasty marches, towards Gloucester, where he designed to cross the Severn. Just at that time the river was swoln to such a degree, that the country on both sides was deluged, and even the tops of some hills were covered with water. This inundation continued for ten days; during which Buckingham's army, composed of Welshmen, could neither pass the river, nor find subsistence on their own side; they were, therefore, obliged to disperse and return home, notwithstanding all the duke's efforts to prolong their stay. In this helpless situation the duke, after a short deliberation, took refuge at the house of one Banister, who had been his servant, and who had received repeated obligations from his family; but the wicked seldom find, as they seldom exert, friendship. Banister, unable to resist the temptation of a large reward that was set upon the duke's head, went and betrayed him to

the sheriff of Shropshire; who, surrounding the house with armed men, seized the duke, in the habit of a peasant, and conducted him to Salisbury; where he was instantly tried, condemned, and executed, according to the summary method practised in those ages.

Amidst the perplexity caused by many disagrecable occurrences, information came that the earl of Richmond was making preparations to land in England, and assert his claims to the crown. Richard, who knew not in what quarter he might expect the invader, had taken post at Nottingham, in the centre of the kingdom, and had given commissions to several of his creatures to oppose the enemy wherever he should land.

Some time after, however, the earl of Richmond, who was a descendant from John of Gaunt, by the female line, resolved to strike for the crown. He had been long obnoxious to the house of York, and had been obliged to quit the kingdom; but he now knowing how odious the king was, set out from Harfleur in Normandy, with a retinue of about two thousand persons; and after a voyage of six days arrived at Milfordhaven, in Wales, where he landed without opposition.

Upon news of this descent, Richard, who was possessed of courage and military conduct, his only virtues, instantly resolved to meet his antagonist, and decide their mutual pretensions by a battle. Richmond, on the other hand, being reinforced by Sir Thomas Bourchier, Sir Walter Hungerford, and others, to the number of about six thousand, boldly advanced with the same intention; and in a few days both armies drew near Bosworth-field, where the contest that had now for more than forty years filled the kingdom with civil commotions, and deluged its plains with blood, was determi→ ned by the death of Richard, who was slain in battle, while Richmond was saluted king by the title of Henry the Seventh.

CHAP. XXII.

H

HENRY VII.

A. D. 1485-1509.

ENRY's first care upon coming to the throne was, to marry the princess Elizabeth, daughter of Edward the Fourth; and thus he blended the interests of the houses of York and Lancaster, so that ever after they were incapable of distinction. A great part of the miseries of his predecessors proceeded from their poverty, which was mostly occasioned