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 Finally, all the sober English leaders who still kept their heads began to send secret messages to a famous exiled gentleman, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who was descended through his mother from the House of Lancaster, begging him to come over from France and upset the tyrant. He was to marry, Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth, and thus to unite the Red and White Roses. Henry landed in South Wales with a very small army, which increased as he marched eastwards. He met King Richard, defeated and slew him at Bosworth in Leicestershire, 1485. Then he advanced to London and was received with joy and relief as King Henry VII.

Apart from the politics and wars of this dreary period there are one or two things to be noticed of much greater interest for us. Every age is only preparation for the next, and the seeds of many of the great ‘awakenings’ of the sixteenth century were sowed in the fifteenth.

First, of the religious awakening. We had long been accustomed to growl at the riches of the Church, but, till the end of Edward III’s reign, no one had questioned its spiritual powers. No one had doubted that priests could really pardon sin. Men hated the Pope, but no one had yet doubted that he was the ‘Head of the Church’ any more than they had doubted that every priest performed a miracle every time he consecrated the Holy Sacrament. Few had even questioned that by payment of money to Rome you could buy salvation. But the popes, when they got back to Rome, after the ‘Great Schism’ was ended in 1415, were little more than Italian bishops, mainly occupied with wars against their neighbours. No doubt their bark was still