Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/88

74 . The destruction of high principle and kindly affection amongst the higher classes spread to the lower. We have seen that voluptuousness, epicurism, and perjury were every-day sins. The people were superstitious; running after pilgrimages, saints, fastings, and flagellations; whilst they had so abandoned the very heart of Christianity—love of God and love of neighbour, that they began to burn God's children and their own brothers for opinion.

Swearing was become so English a characteristic that Englishmen had already acquired the epithet of "God-dammees;" and Joan of Arc told the Earls of Warwick and Stafford that they would never conquer France, though they had 100,000 more God-dammees with them. There was a spirit of ferocity awoke in the people by their long familiarity with blood and violence which even infected the women, who, many of them, took up arms, and were as fierce as the men. The women of Wales acquired an infamous celebrity for their horrid mutilations of the soldiers of Lord Mortimer; and Rymer says that, at the siege of Sens, there were many gentlewomen, both French and English, who had long fought in the field, but now also lying in arms at sieges. Sir John Fortescue, chief justice of the King's Bench, writes that there were more men hanged for robbery in England in one year than in France or Scotland in seven; and the ignorance and luxurious effeminacy of the clergy deprived the people of much chance of improvement from that quarter. Perhaps no period of our history, with much military fame and general vigour of character, presents us with so little that is elevated in moral character, or attractive in its social features. 



Henry Tudor had conquered Richard III. on the field of Bosworth, and released the country of a tyrant, he had no title whatever to the crown of England, except such as the people, by their own free choice, should give him. He was descended, it is true, from Edward III., through John of Gaunt, but from the offspring of not only an illicit, but an adulterous connection. When the natural children of John of Gaunt, therefore, were legitimatised by Act of Parliament, that Act expressly declared them incapable of inheriting the crown. Still more, the true hereditary claim lay in the house of York; and had that line been totally extinct, and had the bar against his line not existed, there were several persons of the line of Lancaster living, whose title was infinitely before his own. Farther still, he stood attainted as a traitor by Act of Parliament, and could not, therefore, assert a Parliamentary right. Yet, as we have said, for years public expectation, overlooking the claims of all others of both the contending lines, had turned towards him, as the individual destined by Providence to put an end to the sanguinary broils of York and Lancaster, and unite them in peace. It seemed a silent but overruling expression of the will of God, that Henry Tudor, the grandson of a mere yeoman of the guard, should, like David the shepherd boy, come forward in due time to establish a new line and a better state of things; and Henry himself, on the field of Bosworth, received the acclamations of the army, and the imposition of the fallen crown of Richard, as if they occurred quite in the natural order of affairs.

The quiet, gentlemanly, and prudent conduct of Henry Tudor during his youth and exile had, no doubt, had much to do with the leaning of public opinion towards him. He appeared just the man to avoid farther quarrels, and to rule the realm in peace. And, probably, had he remained in the uneventful and circumscribed rank of a nobleman, he might have maintained the character of a good sort of man—very prudent, very prosperous, and therefore deemed very wise and good. The world is always ready to heap all kinds of praises on your cold, cautious, and therefore undoubtedly highly respectable character; but when a man is elevated out of the mass of society, and placed on the artificial and be-worshipped pedestal of kingship, his temptations become too powerful even for the most consummate prudence; the flatteries of courtiers teach him that for him neither human nor divine laws are binding; the beguiling doctrine of expedience soon triumphs over the more welcome whispers of conscience; and the prudent, respectable man soon develops into the tyrant and the murderer. Through all the career of Henry VII. we scarcely see a single gleam of anything like generosity or nobility of mind, and his very first act as a sovereign showed that his prudence was wholly oblivious of justice, and was not likely to wear the mere gilding of kindliness.

The only son of the late Duke of Clarence, who, next to the children of Edward IV., was the heir-apparent of the line of York, had been confined by his uncle, Richard III., in the castle of Sheriff Hutton, in Yorkshire. Richard had at first treated this poor boy with kindness; he had created him Earl of Warwick, the title of his illustrious grandfather, the king-maker. On the death of his own son, he had at first proposed to nominate him his heir; but, fearing that he might be too dangerous a competitor, he had omitted that favour, and conferred it on the Earl of Lincoln, John de la Pole, the son of his sister the Duchess of Suffolk, and therefore nephew both of himself and Edward IV. He then carefully confined the unhappy youth, who now fell into the hands of as relentless, if not as reckless, a tyrant. He was still only fifteen years of age; he had been cut off in his joyous boyhood from all the freedom and pleasures of that age by his dangerous proximity to royalty; and that fatal gift of a princely birth was destined to make him a miserable captive for life, his mind totally neglected, and his death a bloody one, accelerated by the same cause. Henry, the very first day after the battle of Bosworth, dispatched Sir Robert Willoughby to take the young earl from Sheriff Hutton and convey him to the Tower of London. 