Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/604

590. Suffolk does not appear to have been in any haste to return to England with the fair bride; for, though contracted in October, they remained in France all the winter, and only landed at Porchester on the 8th of April, 1445. Great ceremony had been made by the French court on Margaret's departure. The king himself, with a splendid retinue, accompanied her some miles on her way from the city, and separated from her in tears. Her father continued with her to Bar-le-Duc.

On the 22nd of April she was married in Titchfield Abbey to Henry; and on the 30th of May she was crowned with much splendour at Westminster, and very soon showed that she was prepared to exercise to the full her royal authority. The king, charmed with her beauty and address, resigned himself a willing creature into her hands. She formed an immediate and close intimacy with the Beaufort party; her constant counsellors were Somerset, Buckingham, and Suffolk. Suffolk appeared to the people much more the husband of Margaret than Hem-y. One of the first acts of the queen's party was to procure a repeal of the Act of Henry V., that no peace should be made with France without the consent of the three estates of Parliament. They obtained ample supplies, and from both Houses the most profuse thanks to Suffolk for his services in accomplishing this happy union.

The people meantime looked on with grumbling distrust. They told Gloucester that they knew he would have obtained them a better queen. But Gloucester saw that a power hostile to him was now in the ascendant. He had struggled against this match so long as it was of use. He had even represented to Henry during its progress that the Count of Armagnac was once more at liberty, and that nothing now prevented his marriage with his daughter, to whom he was, in fact, affianced. All those things had been duly communicated to Margaret by Gloucester's enemies, who surrounded her; and he was marked for the summary vengeance of that woman, whose soul concealed a fount of haughty passion, pride, and vindictiveness which was ere long to justify the expressive epithet, "the wolf of France," which Shakespeare bestowed upon her.

Probably Gloucester was became well aware of this, for he now carefully avoided any public opposition. He went so far as to join in Parliament in expressing approval of Suffolk's management of the marriage treaty; and he was one of the first to pay his respects to the queen on landing by meeting her at Blackheath with 500 men in livery, and conducting her to his palace at Greenwich, where a banquet awaited her. But the rival party, in conjunction with their new ally, the queen, who could never forgive Gloucester his endeavours to prevent her mounting the throne of England, did not abate their enmity any more on account of Gloucester's quiescence. The cardinal came forth again, and took the lead in the councils. He paid the most marked and flattering court to the queen. He was enormously wealthy, and the king was as notoriously poor. Beaufort supplied the needy court with money; and through the medium of the queen now held the most undisputed power over the king.

All things now concurred to favour a blow which should at once gratify the malice of the queen, the cardinal, and the whole party. By some means they contrived to infuse into the mind of Henry a suspicion of the loyalty of his uncle Gloucester. Probably they might extend to him the charges which they had made to tell so fatally already against his duchess, of a design to make away with the king and usurp the throne. Perhaps the repeated instances in which Gloucester had brought forward the Duke of York, in opposition to the cardinal's party, might be made the instrument of their vengeance. The Duke of York was the claimant of the throne in right of the Earl of Marche, a right superior to the usurped claim of the present line, and which he afterwards asserted. Whatever the cause, or the combination of causes, the destruction of Gloucester was determined. Henry summoned a Parliament to meet, not, as usual, at Westminster, but at Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, where the conspirators would be in the midst of the favourite's retainers. The measures which were adopted were ominous of some serious design. The knights of the shire were ordered to come in arms. The king was conveyed to the town under strong escort, and the men of Suffolk were placed in numerous bodies round the royal lodgings. All the avenues to the town were guarded during the night by pickets of soldiers.

The Duke of Gloucester, clearly suspecting no harm, went from his castle of Devizes to the opening of the Parliament, where everything was conducted with the usual form, and nothing took place at all calculated to excite suspicion. But the next day, the 11th of February, 1447, the Lord Beaumont, Constable of England, attended by the Duke of Buckingham, and several of the peers of Suffolk's party, arrested Gloucester, seizing, at the same time, all his attendants, and consigning them to different prisons. The Suffolk party now openly avowed that Gloucester had formed a scheme to kill the king, to usurp the throne, liberate his duchess, and make her queen. The story was too palpably improbable to receive the slightest credence; it was therefore dropped, and Gloucester remained seventeen days in prison, awaiting his trial.

When summoned, at length, to attend the council, he was found dead in his bed, to the great horror of the king, who was obviously unprepared for such a catastrophe. The body was exposed to the view of the Parliament and the people, to convince them that there had been no violence used. There were no marks of violence, indeed, upon it; but this had no weight with the people, who recollected that such had been the case in the mysteriously sudden deaths of Edward II., Richard II., and of the former unfortunate Duke of Gloucester, who had, under precisely similar circumstances, perished in the prison of Calais in Richard II.'s time. This case was the fac-simile of that; when the prisoner, before in perfect health, was called for by the king, he was found to be dead. Nothing, therefore, could convince the incensed people that their favourite had died naturally, and their undisguised suspicion fell on the cardinal, the queen, and Suffolk. One historian only of the time, Whethamstede, Abbot of St. Albans, has avowed his belief that the duke died from natural causes, and great weight has been given to his opinion, because he was attached to the duke, and loud in his abuse of his enemies. It is, however, but one opinion against a host; and all the circumstances tend to support the popular belief that Gloucester was murdered, though with great cunning and skill.