mentions her in his "History of the World," as a prodigy; adding, "that all the noblemen and gentry of Munster could witness to the truth of what he relates of her." Lord Bacon informs us, that she had three times a set of new teeth; but whether she was furnished with these by nature, or was obliged to have recourse to the skill of a dentist, this noble author has not declared.

JOHN BOURCHIER, lord Bermais, grandson and heir of a lord of the same name, was created a knight of the Bath at the marriage of the duke of York, second son of Edward IV., and was first known by quelling an insurrection in Cornwall and Devonshire, raised by Michael Joseph, a blacksmith, in 1495, which recommended him to the favour of Henry VII. He was captain of the pioneers at the siege of Therounne, under Henry VIII., by whom he was made chancellor of the exchequer for life, lieutenant of Calais and Marches, appointed to conduct the lady Mary the king's sister into France on her marriage with Louis XII., and had the extraordinary good fortune to continue in favour with that fickle tyrant for 18 years. He died at Calais in 1532, aged 63. He translated Froissart's Chronicle; printed in 1513, by Richard Pison, the 5th on the list of English printers. His other works were a whimsical medley of translations, from French, Spanish, and Italian novels; viz. The life of Sir Authur, an Armorican knight; the famous exploits of Sir Hugh Bourdeaux; Marcus Aurelius; and the castle of love. He wrote also a book of the duties of the inhabitants of Calais; and a comedy entitled "Ite in Vineam," which is mentioned in none of our catalogues of English plays. Wood says it was usually acted at Calais after vespers.

EDWARD V., king of England, son of Edward IV., was only in the thirteenth year of his age, when he succeeded his father in 1483. His uncle, the duke of Gloucester, the regent, after arresting and executing Edward's maternal uncle and half-brother, Rivers and Gray, proceeded to bastardize the late king's progeny, and assumed the crown. The young

king, who, with his brother Richard, was lodged in the Tower, remained a short time an obstacle to his unprincipled ambition. Two months after his accession, he and his brother, while sleeping together, were smothered by ruffians, and buried at the foot of the stairs of their apartment. The bodies were supposed to be found in the reign of Charles II., who caused them to be interred in a marble monument.

RICHARD III., king of England, born in 1450, was the youngest son of Richard, duke of York. On the accession of his brother, Edward IV., he was created duke of Gloucester, and during the vicissitudes in the early part of Edward's reign, he adhered most closely to him, and served him with courage and fidelity. He is said to have had a hard in the slaughter

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of Edward, prince of Wales, after the battle of Tewkesbury, and to have been the author, if not the real perpetrator of the murder of Henry VI. in the Tower, but the ferocity of his disposition was in him united with deep policy and dissimulation. He married, about the year 1473, Anne, the widow of the prince of Wales, already mentioned, who was daughter of Neville, the great earl of Warwick. His elder brother, Clarence, had married the other daughter, and a violent dissention took place among them, on account of the division of the perty. Richard, who found Clarence an obstacle to his views of aggrandizement, combined with the adversaries of that unfortunate prince in accusations which proved his destruction. On the death of Edward in 1483 the duke of Gloucester was appointed the protector of the kingdom. He immediately caused his nephew, the young Edward V., to be proclaimed king, and took an oath of fealty to him. There were at this time two great factions in the nation, of which the leaders were the duke of Buckingham and lord Hastings. Both these courted the duke of Gloucester, who pretended a steady friendship for each when apart, while he was persuing schemes of the blackest ambition. His first object was to get rid of those who were connected with the young king by blood; and after spending an evening in company with Rivers, Gray, and Sir Thomas Vaughan, he caused them to be arrested the next morning; and committed to Pomfret castle, at the same time dismissing all the king's attendants and servants. He shortly after caused the prisoners at Pomfret to be put to death without the form of trial; and on the very day of their execution, at a council held in the Tower, a cry of treason was raised by his order, on which a party of armed men entered, who seized the archbishop of York, the bishop of Ely, lord Stanley, and lord Hastings, of whom the three first were committed to custody, while Hastings was led to immediate death. After this, his next step was to establish, without evidence, the illegitimacy of Edward's children, to make way for his own claims on the throne. This he did by attacking the chastity of his own mother, who, he said, had been true to her husband only in the case of himself, and that even to Edward and Clarence there were different fathers. These pleas were zealously advocated by his adherents, and among others by Dr. Shaw, brother to the lord mayor of London, who dwelt upon them with much eloquence, in a sermon which he preached at St. Paul's Cross. The duke of Buckingham afterwards, in a speech before the corporation and citizens of London, enlarged upon the title and virtues of the protector, and then put the question to his audience, whether they chose the duke of Gloucester for their king? On their silence he repeated the question with more importunity, and at length a few voices cried

out "God save king Richard." This was construed into a public declaration in his favour, and Buckingham, with the lord mayor, repaired to the protector with a tender of the crown. He first affected alarm and suspicion, and then pretended loyalty to his nephew, and unwillingness to take such a burden upon himself. At length he accepted the offer, and Richard was proclaimed king on the 27th of June 1483. The deposed king and his brother were never more heard of; they were probably murdered in the Tower.

Richard was now extremely liberal towards those who had been instrumental in the change, and took other methods to court popularity. He made a progress with a splendid retinue through several of the towns, and at York was a second time crowned, on which occasion he created his only son prince of Wales. He soon began to display all the qualities of a most cruel tyrant, which so disgusted the whole nation, that designs were formed to hurl him from the throne. A conspiracy was excited against him, in favour of Henry, earl of Richmond, which he discovered and quelled. The failure appeared to seat the king more firmly on the throne, and he took advantage of his situation by calling a parliament, in which many good laws were passed, the progeny of Edward IV. was bastardized, and the crown settled on himself and posterity. The death of his son, soon after, was a severe stroke to him in the midst of his prosperity, which was followed by that of his wife; the last was imputed, but without any evidence, to the effects of poison. To prevent a projected marriage between Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of his brother Edward, and the earl of Richmond, Richard determined to marry her himself. As this union would have been extremely detrimental to the earl's interest, he hastened his preparations for another expedition to England, and in August, 1485, landed an army at Milford-haven. Richard, informed of the advance of his rival, took the field and met him, with an army of, 15,000 men, at Bosworth, in Leicestershire. The battle was fought on the 23rd of August; in which the king, finding his situation desperate, rushed against his competitor, slew his standard bearer, and was upon the point of encountering the earl himself, when he was himself slain. The body of Richard was found in the field, stripped naked, and carried across a horse to Leicester, where he was interred in the Grey-friars' church-yard. Thus fell this hated tyrant, after having possessed the throne about two years and two months. The historians, says Hume, who favoured Richard, maintain, that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it, and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown; but this is a poor apology, when it is confessed, that he was ready to commit the most horrid crimes that appeared to him necessary for

that purpose; and it is certain, that all his courage and capacity, qualities in which he really seems not to have been deficient, would never have made compensation to the people for the danger of the precedent, and for the contagious example of vice and murder, exalted upon the throne. In person, Richard has been represented as of a small stature, deformed, and of a forbidding aspect, but it is probable that the detestation of his character has aggravated his bodily defects. His memory lives in popular tradition, as that of the most odious tyrant that ever filled the English throne.

MARGARET BEAUFORT, countess of Richmond and Derby, was born in 1441, and was the only daughter and heiress of John Beaufort duke of Somerset, grandson of John of Gaunt. She was married to Edmund earl of Richmond, and the fruit of this union was one son, afterwards Henry VII., king of England. After the death of her first husband, she married Sir John Stafford, second son to Henry duke of Buckingham, and, on his death, Thomas lord Stanley, afterwards earl of Derby; by the two last husbands she had no issue. She readily ceded to her son such right as she possessed to the crown; and employed her life in works of charity and piety, among which she fortunately gave a distinguished place to the encouragement of learning. In 1502 she founded two perpetual lectures in divinity at the two universities, still existing under the name of Margaret professorships. At Cambridge she also endowed a perpetual public preacher, whose duty should be to preach six sermons a year at certain specified churches; and she founded a perpetual chantry at Winborneminster in Dorsetshire, for a teacher of grammar. But her noblest foundations were the colleges of Christ and St. John in Cambridge, the former in 1505, and the latter in 1508. It is with justice that Gray, in his Ode on the installation of the duke of Grafton as chancellor of Cambridge, has made this lady a principal figure on his poetical canvas;

Foremost, and leaning from her golden cloud,

The venerable Margaret see!

"Welcome, my noble son," she cries aloud;
"To this, thy kindred train and me;
"Pleas'd in thy lineaments we trace

"A Tudor's fire, a Beaufort's grace."

These truly laudable instances of her munificence, and her private charities, are more to her real honour, than her austerities and superstitious devotions, and the vow of chastity she made some years before her death, after burying her three husbands. Margaret died at the age of sixty-eight, in June, 1509, and was interred in the chapel of her son, Henry VII., in Westminster Abbey. A translation from the French of two VOL. IV.

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devotional pieces is attributed to her, and also some rules and orders for the precedence and attire of noble ladies at funerals. Bishop Fisher, her confessor, says, "She possessed almost all things that were commendable in a woman, either in mind or body." Her life, from the turbulence of the times, and the vicissitude of her son's fortunes, must have been subject to great disquiet, which, however, she is said to have supported with singular fortitude.

HENRY VII., first of the race of Tudors, born in 1457, was son of Edmund earl of Richmond, and grandson of Owen Tudor and Catherine of France, the widow of Henry V. His mother was the only child of John, duke of Somerset, grandson of John of Gaunt. He was thus the representative of the Somerset branch of the royal house of Lancaster. During the usurpation and tyranny of Richard III., the people looked to the earl of Richmond, as a young prince who might restore legal government in England, and a match was projected between him and Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV., which would unite the two houses of York and Lancaster. Richard discovered the plan, and determined to defeat it, by marrying the lady himself, and applied to the court of Rome for a dispensation for that purpose, she being his own niece. Richmond, finding that there was no time to lose, landed at Milford Haven, at the head of two thousand troops, and was immediately joined by many persons of rank and consequence, in that part of the country, by whose influence and example he soon found himself at the head of six thousand men. Richard met him in Bosworth field, with an army double that number, but victory decided for the earl; the king was slain, and the conqueror was hailed on the field of battle, by the title of Henry VII. Parliament was soon assembled, who recognized his right, and he was crowned previously to his marriage with Elizabeth, the heiress of the house of York; though the nation was extremely desirous of this alliance, as uniting the claims of the two rival houses, and precluding farther civil wars. He was married in the following year; but lest people should suppose, that he claimed the crown solely upon the strength of this alliance, he deferred the coronation of his queen for some time, by which he wished the priority of his own claim to be understood. He chose for his confidential servants Morton and Fox, two clergymen, from whom he probably expected more obsequiousness than from the nobility of the realm. Discontents soon arose, and while he was on a journey into the north, an insurrection took place, which was soon suppressed, but a more serious disturbance, almost immediately succeeding the other, was excited by a priest, who procured Lambert Simnel, a youth of fifteen, son of a baker, to personate the earl of Warwick, son of the duke of Clarence,