Warwick, and the total destruction of her party, gave way to her grief, for the first time, in a torrent of tears; and yielding to her unhappy fate, took sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu, in Hampshire.

She had not been long in this melancholy abode before she found some few friends still waiting to assist her fallen fortunes. Tudor, earl of Pembroke, Courtney, earl of Devonshire, the lords Wenlock and St. John, with other men of rank, exhorted her still to hope for success, and offered to assist her to the last. She had now fought battles in almost every province in England; Tewkesbury-park was the last scene that terminated her attempts. The duke of Somerset headed her army; a man who had shared her dangers, and had ever been steady in her cause. He was valiant, generous, and polite; but rash and headstrong. When Edward first attacked him in his intrenchments, he repulsed him with such vigour, that the enemy retired with precipitation; upon which the duke, supposing them routed, pursued, and ordered lord Wenlock to support his charge. But unfortunately this lord disobeyed his orders; and Somerset's forces were soon overpowered by numbers. In this dreadful exigence, the duke, finding that all was over, became ungovernable in his rage; and beholding Wenlock inactive, and remaining in the very place where he had first drawn up his men, giving way to his fury, with his heavy battle-ax in both hands, he ran upon the coward, and with one blow dashed out his brains.

The queen and the prince were taken prisoners after the battle, and brought into the presence of Edward. The young prince appeared before the conqueror with undaunted majesty ; and being asked, in an insulting manner, how he dared to invade England without leave, more mindful of his high birth than of his ruined fortunes, he boldy replied, "I have entered the dominions of my father, to revenge his injuries, and redress my own." The barbarous Edward, enraged at his intrepidity, struck him on the mouth with his gauntlet; and this served as a signal for farther brutality; the dukes of Gloucester, Clarence, and others, like wild beasts, rushing 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.

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

While he was 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. The truth is, 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 had 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.

TH

EDWARD V.

'HE duke of Gloucester, who had been made protector of the realm, upon a pretence of guarding the persons 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 Tower, 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 arm, all shrivelled and decayed, he accused Jane Shore and her accomplices of having produced this deformity by 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 hand, 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 hurried 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 that 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 Lombard street, and continued to live with Edward, the most guiltless mistress in his abandoned court. It was 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.