Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/22

8 to as in the case of Richard II. The body of the unfortunate king was conveyed on a bier, with the face exposed, from the Tower through Cheapside to St. Paul's. Four of the principal chroniclers of the day assert that the fresh blood from his wounds "welled upon the pavement," giving certain evidence of the manner of his death; and the same thing occurred when he was removed to Black Friars. To get rid of so unsatisfactory a proof of Henry's natural death, the body was the same day put into a barge with a guard of soldiers from Calais, and thus, says the Croyland chronicler, "without singing or saying, he was conveyed up the dark waters of the Thames at midnight, to his silent interment at Chertsey Abbey, where it was long pretended that miracles were performed at his tomb."

Henry's reputation for holiness during his life, and his tragical death, occasioned such a resort to his tomb, that Gloucester, in mounting the throne as Richard III., caused the remains of the poor king to be removed, it was said to Windsor. Afterwards, when Henry VII. wished to convey them to Westminster, they could not be found, having been carefully concealed from public attention.

Margaret, who was conveyed to the Tower the very night on which her husband was murdered there, was at first rigorously treated. There had been an attempt on the part of the Bastard of Falconberg, who was vice-admiral under Warwick, to liberate Henry, during the absence of Edward and Gloucester, at the battle of Tewkesbury. He landed at Blackwall with a body of marines, and, calling on the people of Essex and Kent to aid him, made two desperate attempts to penetrate to the Tower, burning Bishopsgate, but was repulsed, and on the approach of Edward, retreated. To prevent any similar attempt in favour of Margaret, she was successively removed to Windsor, and lastly to Wallingford. She remained a prisoner for five years, when at the entreaty of her father, King Roné, she was ransomed by Louis of France, and retired to the castle of Reculée, near Angers. She died at the château of Damprièrre, near Saumur, in 1482, in the fifty-first year of her age. No time is said to have brought resignation to her stormy and passionate nature. She continued the victim of griefs and regrets for her bereavements so intense, that, adding their force to that of the toils, excitements, and agonies that she had passed through, she was consumed by a loathsome leprosy, and from one of the most beautiful women in the world, became an object of appalling terror.

The Lancastrian party appeared now broken up for ever: those leaders who had not fallen, fled; and some of them lived till times were auspicious to them. We have noticed the death of the Duke of Exeter. He was married to the sister of Edward; but that lady, instead of obtaining his pardon, obtained a divorce from him, and married Sir Thomas St. Leger. The next year poor Exeter's body was found, as we have related, out at sea. Vere, Earl of Oxford, made his escape into France. He returned with a small fleet; surprised Mount St. Michael in Cornwall, but was compelled to surrender, and was afterwards confined twelve years in the castle of Hamme, in Picardy; while his wife, the sister of the great Warwick, supported herself by her needle. Oxford survived to fight for Henry VII. The Archbishop of York, the only remaining brother of Warwick, having very foolishly, in presence of the king's servants, displayed his wealth since the battle of Barnet, was plundered of all his plate and jewels, stripped of his bishopric, and shut up in prison, partly in England, and partly at Guisnes, till within a few years of his death. The Earl of Pembroke, and his nephew, the Earl of Richmond, escaped into Brittany, where Edward sent to demand their being given up to him. But the Duke of Brittany refused, and there remained the future Henry VII., waiting for the day which came at length, when he should avenge the house of Lancaster, and unite it and that of York for ever. Several of the other fugitive Lancastrians—amongst whom was Sir John Fortescue, who had been tutor to Edward, Prince of Wales, Margaret's son—humbly sued for pardon, and received it.

Thus was the long and sanguinary usurpation of the house of Lancaster apparently put down, and Edward, the representative of the house of York, sat on the throne with scarcely a visible competitor. There were some nearer, however, than he suspected. His two brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, were a couple of men as unprincipled as ever appeared on the face of history. Clarence was weak, but Gloucester was as cunning and daring as he was base. A more unlovable character no country has produced, spite of all the endeavours which have been made by Horace Walpole and other writers, to whitewash into something amiable this real blackamoor of nature. The crimes of murder which are attributed to him, both before and after his seizure of his nephew's throne, no sophistry can rid him of; the odium reeking upon him in his own day still clings to him in ours.

The two rapacious brothers came now, on the first return of peace, to quarrel at the very foot of the throne for the vast property of Warwick. Edward would fain have forgotten everything else in his pleasures. The blood upon his own hands gave him no concern; he was only anxious to devote his leisure hours to Jane Shore, the silversmith's wife, whom he had, like numbers of other ladies, seduced from her duty. But Clarence and Gloucester broke through his gaieties with their wranglings and mutual menaces. "The world seemeth queasy, here," says Sir John Fasten in his Letters; "for the most part that be about the king have sent for their harness, and it is said for certain that the Duke of Clarence maketh him big in that he can, showing as he would but deal with the Duke of Gloucester. But the king intendeth, in eschewing all inconvenience, to be as big as them both, and to be a stiffler between them. And some men think, that under this there should be some other thing intended; and some treason conspired, so what shall fall can I not tell."

The fact was, that Clarence having, as we have seen, married Isabella, the eldest daughter, was determined, if possible, to monopolise all the property of Warwick, as if the eldest daughter were sole heiress. But Gloucester, who was always on the look out for his own aggrandisement, now cast his eyes on Anne, the other daughter, who had been married to the Prince of Wales. Clarence, aware that he should have a daring and a lawless rival in Gloucester, in regard to the property, opposed the match with all his might. On this point they rose to high words and much heat. Clarence declared at length that Richard might marry Anne if he pleased, but that he