compose the distractions of the republic, Doria entered into the service of Francis I. of France. He still, however, preserved that spirit of independence, so natural to a sailor and a republican. When the French attempted to render Savona, long the object of jealousy to Genoa, its rival in trade, Doria remonstrated against the measure in a high tone; which bold action, represented by the malice of his courtiers in the most odious light, irritated Francis to that degree, that he ordered his admiral Barbasieux to sail to Genoa, then in the hands of the French troops, to arrest Doria, and to seize his galleys. This rash order Doria got timely hints of, retired with all his galleys to a place of safety; and while his resentment was thus raised, he closed with the offers of the emperor Charles V., returned his commission, with the collar of St. Michael, to Francis, and hoisted the imperial colours. To deliver the country, weary alike of the French and Imperial yoke, from the dominion of foreigners, was now Doria's highest ambition; and the favourable moment offered. Genoa was afflicted with the pestilence, the French garrison was greatly reduced, and ill paid; and the inhabitants were disposed to second his views. He sailed to the harbour with thirteen galleys, landed fifty men, and made himself master of the gates and the palace with very little resistance. The French governor with his feeble garrison retired to the citadel, but was quickly forced to capitulate; when the people ran together, and levelled the citadel with the ground. It was now in Doria's power to have rendered himself the sovereign of his country; but with a magnanimity of which there are few examples, he assembled the people in the court before the palace, disclaimed all pre-eminence, and recommended to them to settle the form of government they chose to establish. The people, animated by his spirit, forgot their factions, and fixed that form of government which subsisted till the revolution in 1797, with little variation. This event happened in 1528. Doria lived to a great age, respected and beloved as a private citizen, and is still celebrated among his countrymen, by the most honourable of all appellations, "The father of his country, and the restorer of its liberty."

BRITAIN.

HENRY VI., king of England, was born at Windsor in 1421, and was not nine months old at the death of his father Henry V. The kingdom was placed under the protectorship of his uncle the duke of Bedford, and the care of the prince was committed to Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. His grandfather Charles, king of France, died soon after, and the duke of Orleans, encouraged by the minority of Henry, assumed the title of king, by the name of Charles VII. This renewed the

war; the English were at first successful, and Henry was crowned at Paris. The raising the siege of Orleans by Joan of Arc, gave a new turn to affairs, and the English interest rapidly declined. In 1443, a truce was made with France, which was followed by the king's marriage with Margaret of Anjou, daughter of Regnier, titular king of Sicily, Naples, and Jerusalem, but actually without a single province. Instead of obtaining a dowry, the king agreed to renounce the province of Maine in France. The queen, however, possessed a treasure in her extraordinary accomplishments of body and mind, and her masculine spirit was well fitted to compensate the weakness of her husband. The death of the duke of Bedford was a fatal blow to the cause of Henry; and to add to his misfortunes, the York party in England increased in strength, and involved the country in civil war. They adopted the white rose as their badge of distinction, and the Lancastrians, the red. After various contests the king was defeated and taken prisoner. He was treated with great respect; for the weakness and innocence of his character had impressed every one, friends and enemies, with an idea of the sanctity of his person. The queen had now full scope for showing herself, and carried on the war with spirit, and for a time with success. At length it was agreed by parliament, who undertook to adjust the claims of the contending parties, that Henry should enjoy the crown during his life, and that the duke of York should be his successor. While this negociation was going on, the queen assembled an army in the north, a battle ensued at Wakefield, and the duke of York was slain. He left a son,

Edward, who restored the cause of the family, and by his success obtained the crown by popular acclamation. The people being assembled in St. John's fields, the earl of Warwick asked if they would have Edward or Henry for their king? The general cry was, for "A York;" the young duke being present, they elected him king, by the name of Edward IV., and conducted him with great ceremony to the palace where king Henry used to lodge, when within the walls of the city. This was in the month of March 1461, and it may be accounted the termination of Henry's disastrous reign. He was, however, still the sport of fortune, being again recognized, and again imprisoned; at length he died in 1471, in the Tower of London, but whether by a violent or natural death, is not known. Henry was gentle, pious, and well intentioned, but too weak ever to act for himself. It is to his praise that the most splendid establishment in England for classical learning, Eton Col lege,

Where grateful science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade,

reveres him as its founder. To him, likewise, King's College, Cambridge, owes its original foundation.

MARGARET OF ANJOU, queen consort of England, was daughter of Regnier, titular king of Sicily, Naples, and Jerusalem, descended from the counts of Anjou, brother of Charles V., of France. Brought up in the petty court of a king without a single province, her natural strength of mind was not enfeebled by early indulgence, and she was distinguished as the most accomplished young princess of her time, when she was fixed upon by cardinal Beaufort, and his party, for wife to Henry VI., of England. The match took place through the negociation of the earl of Suffolk in 1443, and Margaret came over to share with a weak prince a throne disquieted by rancorous and contending factions. She naturally threw herself into that party which had been the means of her elevation; and when the destruction of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was effected by their machinations, she was generally suspected of being privy to his murder. The surrender of the province of Maine to Charles, the queen's uncle, in consequence of a secret article in the marriage treaty, aggravated the odium under which Margaret, and her favourite Suffolk, laboured; and the sacrifice of that nobleman, which followed, is represented by the writers of the time, as having cost her more tears than are usually shed on the loss of a political ally. In 1454, while the national discontents were rising to a crisis, she was delivered of a son. She was soon after called upon to exert all the vigour of her character, in resisting the Yorkists, who had defeated the royal army at St. Alban's. Though Henry was taken prisoner, she raised troops, and defended the royal cause with so much spirit, that she was able to restore her husband to a nominal sovereignty, and effect a favourable compromise. The war, however, was renewed in 1459, and at the battle of Northampton in the following year, the Lancastrians were totally routed, and Henry was again taken prisoner. Margaret, with her infant son, first fled to Durham, and then into Scotland; whence returning to the north of England, she engaged the nobles of that part in her cause, and collected a powerful army. With this she met the duke of York at Wakefield, December, 1460, and totally defeated him. The duke was killed in the battle, and his head, by the orders of Margaret, was severed from the body, and placed on the gates of York, crowned in derision with a paper diadem. His youngest son, Rutland, was killed in cold blood by the furious Clifford; several prisoners of distinction were put to death, and an example was thus given of the cruelties which marked the progress of this civil war. In 1461, the queen totally defeated the earl of Warwick, partisan of Edward, son of the duke of York, at the second battle of St. Alban's, in which she recovered the

person of the king, now a passive agent in the hands of friends and foes. She displayed her sanguinary and revengeful disposition, by ordering the lord Bouville to be executed, to whose care Henry had been entrusted by the Yorkists, and who was promised pardon by the impotent king. The approach of Edward with a superior force, obliged her again to retreat to the north, and that prince was elevated to the throne by the Londoners, and the lords of his party; an event which seemed fatal to the hopes of the Lancastrians.

Margaret's influence, and the licentiousness in which her troops were indulged, increased the Lancastrian army to sixty thousand men. It was met at Towton, in Yorkshire, by Edward and Warwick, at the head of forty thousand men, and a battle was fought March 1461, which was the bloodiest of these destructive wars. The Lancastrians were totally routed, and Margaret and Henry, who had remained at York during the action, hastily retreated into Scotland. After soliciting with little success the government of that country to aid her cause, she went over to France for the same purpose: and by offering to deliver Calais to the French king, should Henry be restored to the crown, she obtained a succour of two thousand men-at-arms, with which she re-landed in Scotland. Joined by a band of freebooters, and some friends of her party, she made an incursion into the north of England, and proceeded to Hexham. She was there encountered by a force under lord Montacute, who routed, and totally dispersed her troops. The unfortunate queen fled with her son into a forest, where she was descried by a band of robbers, who stripped her of her jewels, and treated her with great indignity. Escaping from their hands, while they were quarrelling about the booty, she penetrated into the depth of the forest, and wandered about, spent with fatigue and terror. At length, seeing a man approach with a drawn sword in his hand, she summoned up resolution to bring her fate to a decision. Advancing to meet him, "Here, friend," said she, "I commit to your protection, the son of your king." Struck with the nobleness of her manner, and charmed with the confidence reposed in him, the man, though a robber, devoted himself to her service, and after having concealed them for some time in the woods, conducted them in safety to the sea coast, whence they escaped into Flanders. Margaret went to her father's court, where she lived several years in retirement, while her husband was imprisoned in the Tower of London. At length, in 1470, the arrival of the earl of Warwick in France, after he had rebelled against Edward, produced an alliance between him and the exiled queen, which again roused her to activity. It was agreed that Warwick should endeavour to restore the house of Lancaster, and that prince Edward, the son of Henry and Margaret, should marry

his daughter Anne, which alliance took place in France. Warwick landed in England, and soon effected that extraordinary revolution, by which Edward was obliged to quit his kingdom, and fly to Flanders. Margaret in the mean time was preparing to second his efforts; but on the very day on which she landed at Weymouth, with a small body of French troops, the battle of Barnet, April 14, 1471, terminated the life of Warwick, and the hopes of the confederacy. On receiving the fatal news, Margaret took refuge with her son in the sanctuary of Beaulieu, in Hampshire, with a design to get back to France, but being encouraged by the junction of some Lancastrian nobles, she advanced with a continually increasing army to Tewkesbury. There she was encountered by the victorious Edward, who totally defeated the queen's party, and took her and her son prisoners, the latter of whom they cruelly put to death. Margaret was confined in the Tower, where her husband perished about the same time. Lewis XI. afterwards ransomed her, and she retired to France, where she died in 1482, after a life, chequered with more change of fortune, and embittered by more calamities than can be easily paralleled in the history of crowned females. Her talents and unsubdued spirit excited general admiration; while her sanguinary and ferocious disposition, and the preference she gave to the interests of her native country, rendered her an object of abhorrence to the greater part of the English nation. Shakespeare, whose historical plays are the echo of popular report and opinion, paints her as a very fury, destitute of all the tenderness and modesty of her sex.

JOHN TIPTOFT, earl of Worcester, was a native of Everton, in Cambridgeshire, and received his education at Balliol college, Oxford. He was the son of lord Tiptoft and Powys; and was created earl of Worcester, on being appointed deputy of Ireland by Henry VI. Afterwards Edward IV. made him knight of the garter, constable of the Tower, and lord treasurer. He visited Rome, for the purpose of inspecting the Vatican, and delivered a Latin oration before Pius II., which drew tears from the eyes of that pope. After this he proceeded on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and on his return, presented some manuscripts of great value to duke Humphrey's library, at Oxford. Tiptoft was accused of cruelty in his administration of Ireland, particularly towards two infant sons of the earl of Desmond, and was condemned and beheaded at the Tower in 1470. This earl was the patron of Caxton, who printed his translation of "Cicero de Amicitia ;" and other works.

WILLIAM OF WAYNFLETE, a statesman, and also a prelate, was the son of Richard Patten, or Barbour, of WaynHlete, in Lincolnshire. He was educated at Winchester school, and afterwards at Oxford. About the year 1429, he became master of the school where he had been educated. Henry VI.