Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/48

34 Angers, where he was cordially received by the sister of Charles VIII., then acting as regent. He accompanied the French court to Paris, where he again repeated his oath to marry Elizabeth of York, in case of deposing the tyrant, and he was immediately hailed by the students of Paris as King of England. He was promised assistance by the princess regent for his enterprise, and while these things were proceeding, Francis of Brittany, who had recovered his health, and was made acquainted with the villany of Landois, sent a messenger to assure him of his disgust at the minister's conduct, and to offer him aid in his design.

Thus Richard had driven his enemy into a more safe and formidable position, instead of capturing him, and he taxed his subtle genius to thwart this dangerous rival by other means. To prepare for any serious attack from France, he put an end to a miserable state of plunder and reprisal betwixt Scotland and his subjects. He concluded an armistice with James of Scotland; and having, since his son's death, nominated John, Earl of Lincoln, the son of his sister—the Duchess of Suffolk—heir to the crown, he now contracted the sister of the young earl, Anne de la Pole, to the oldest son of the King of Scotland.

But Richard had designs more profound than this. He determined, as he could not marry Elizabeth of York to his son, he would snatch her from Richmond by wedding her himself. True, he had already a wife; but monarchs have frequently shown how soon such an obstacle to a fresh alliance can be removed. Richard now held a magnificent court at Westminster. There was a constant succession of balls, feastings, and gaieties. In the midst of these no one was so conspicuous as Elizabeth of York; and, what very soon excited the attention and the speculations of the court, she always appeared in precisely the same dress as the queen.

The poor queen, Anne of Warwick, who began with hating Richard most cordially, and even disguised herself as a cookmaid to escape him, since the death of her son had never recovered from her melancholy and depression. Probably, knowing the real character of her ruthless Bluebeard, she foresaw what must take place, and was too weary of life to care to retain it. Though she penetrated the designs of the king, these never influenced her in her conduct to Elizabeth, to whom she was kind as became an aunt. And now she fell ill, and Richard is said to have assured Elizabeth that the queen would "die in February," and that she should succeed her.

Most historians have been very severe upon Elizabeth and her mother for their conduct in this matter. They assert that the queen-dowager fell readily into the atrocious plan of marrying her daughter to the murderer of her sons, and thought only of seeing the throne again within the grasp of her family. But Miss Strickland, in her "Lives of the Queens of England," has justly remarked that all these calumnies against Elizabeth Wydville and her daughter rest on the authority of Sir George Bucke, who was the decided apologist of Richard III. It is true that the queen-dowager wrote a letter to her son, the Marquis of Dorset, and to all her partisans, desiring them to withdraw from the Earl of Richmond, and this Henry VII. never forgave; but we must recollect that both Elizabeth Wydyille and all her daughters were in the power of the tyrant, and that she had no alternative but to obey his commands or abide his unsparing vengeance. No woman had displayed a more eager desire to secure honour and rank for her family; but it is an insult to human nature to believe her a willing instrument in so revolting a scheme.

Bucke assures us that he saw a letter of Elizabeth of York in the cabinet of the Earl of Arundel, in which Elizabeth not only declares Richard "her joy and maker in this world, and that she was his in heart and thought," but adds that "the latter part of February is now past, and I think the queen will never die." Were this evidence producible, it must stamp Elizabeth as one of the most heartless young women who ever lived, a fit consort for the bloody Richard. But such letter, Miss Strickland remarks, has never been found, and, therefore, we must give Elizabeth the benefit of that fact. On the contrary, Humphrey Brereton, an officer of Lord Stanley's, has recorded in a metrical narrative, which bears all the air of truth, that he was employed by her to convey to Henry of Richmond in France, her firm assurances of attachment to him, accompanied by a betrothal ring, and that it was through her means that Lord Stanley secretly avowed himself Richmond's stanch adherent, as he proved himself at Bosworth.

Anne of Warwick, the last queen of the Plantagenet line, did not die in February, but she did not survive through March. Yet that event did not in any degree contribute to Richard's marriage with Elizabeth. Whether we are to suppose with Sir Thomas More, and others, that Elizabeth herself manifested a steady repugnance to so abhorrent a union, or whether Richard deemed her in greater security there, he sent her under close guard to the castle of Sheriff-Hutton, in Yorkshire, and no sooner did he permit it to be whispered abroad that such a marriage was probable, than the rumour was received with uuiversal horror. No persons were more resolutely opposed to it than Ratcliffe and Catesby, Richard's great confidants in his crimes. They naturally dreaded the idea of Elizabeth, the sister of the murdered princes, and the representative of a family on which they heaped such injuries, becoming queen, and in a position to wreak her vengeance upon them. But they also saw, quite as clearly, the ruin which the king would certainly bring down upon himself by such a measure, in which they must also be inevitably involved.

The instinct of self-preservation in these men led them to remind the king that a marriage with his own niece would be regarded as incestuous, would be reprobated by the clergy, and abhorred by the people; that there was a general persuasion abroad that he had poisoned his wife, and this union would convert that persuasion into absolute conviction; that the men of the northern counties, on whom he chiefly depended, and who adhered to him, more than for any other cause, through their attachment to the late queen, as the daughter of the great Earl of Warwick, would be totally lost, and nothing but ruin could await him.

This strong and undisguised feeling, displayed thus both in public and private, drove Richard from this design. Just before Easter, he called a meeting of the city authorities, in the great hall of St. John's, Clerkenwell, and there declared that he had no such intention as