Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/91

] but the Act of Richard, containing the grossest scandals on the family of Elizabeth, was ordered to be burnt; and any one possessing copies of that Act was ordered to deliver them in to the chancellor before Easter, to be destroyed, under penalty of fine and imprisonment. The mother of Elizabeth, the queen-dowager, was also by Act of Parliament restored to her title, but not to her dower.

But this excess of caution and this nicely-balanced policy had not been carried through without alarming all parties, and greatly disgusting that of York. The whole nation looked to the union of the houses by the marriage of Henry and Elizabeth as the only means of putting an end to the civil wars which had so long rent the nation. But when Henry was seen thus carefully barricading himself, as it were, on the throne without proceeding to that union, there grew great uneasiness, and this was much heightened by the king demanding "the punishment of those who had offended his royal majesty." This was a piece of assumption which astonished his very friends. How, it was asked, could any one offend his majesty before he was admitted to majesty? Those who fought under Henry VI. against Edward IV., and under Edward against Henry VI., fought against a king, and were liable to a charge of high treason in case they failed; but Henry of Richmond was no king, he was a mere pretender when the followers of Richard III. fought against him; and, therefore, they could offend no majesty, and commit no treason. Yet Henry proceeded on this ground to pass attainders on Richard III., the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Surrey, the Lords Lovel, Zouch, and Ferrers, Sir Walter and Sir James Harrington, Sir William Berkeley, Sir Humphrey Stafford, Catesby, and twenty other gentlemen who had fought against him at Bosworth.

By this means Henry put himself in possession of the vast estates of these attainted noblemen and gentlemen, and filled his coffers, a thing which he never neglected. But this did not prevent him seeking supplies from Parliament, and they granted him during life the duty of tonnage and poundage. Besides the possession of estates by attainder, he passed an act of resumption of all crown lands which had been alienated since the thirty-fourth of Henry VI.; and as these were chiefly in the hands of the Yorkist party, he thus placed all the holders of them at his mercy, and could eject or leave them in possession according as they conducted themselves. All this being done, he issued a general pardon to those followers of Richard III. who should come in before a certain day, and take the oath of allegiance. This he did, however, as an especial act of royal grace by proclamation, not allowing the Parliament to advise him, or to participate with him in the favour. Many of the late adherents of Richard accordingly left their sanctuaries and hiding-places, and submitted to the new king. In one or two instances, Henry's resentment overcame his honour; though the Earl of Surrey, the son of the Duke of Norfolk, who had so stanchly supported Richard at Bosworth, came in, he was excepted from the general pardon, and sent to the Tower. Others, as Bishop Stillington, of Bath, who had written Richard's artful proclamations, were at first thrown into prison, and severely treated; but they soon found means, by their humble and courtier-like crawling, to make their peace with the king; and this bishop, Sir John Tyrrel, the murderer of the princes in the Tower, and other like characters, wore soon found to be active agents and emissaries of the court.

Still Henry, though now securely seated on the throne, evinced no haste to fulfil his pledge of placing Elizabeth of York upon it. With his cunning, prudential temperament, he was at the same time sensitively resentful, and could not forget or forgive the long course of ill-treatment which he had suffered from the house of York. His banishment, his youth spent in foreign courts and under foreign dependence and surveillance; the attempts of Edward IV. to get him into his hands, when a dungeon, and probably secret murder, or a public one, on some trumped-up pretence, would have been his fate, still lived and rankled in his memory. He could not forget that the queen-dowager, after having plighted Elizabeth to him, had submitted to the dictation of the monster Richard III., who had murdered her two sons, and usurped their throne, had gone again to his court, had consented to his marriage with Elizabeth, had put herself and her other daughters wholly into his power, and had written to her son, the Marquis of Dorset, at Paris, to withdraw from Henry and abandon his pretensions. He could not forget that Elizabeth herself, however justly or unjustly, had been declared to have favoured Richard, and expressed impatience at the lingering remains of his wife's life, which kept her from the throne.

Modern historians have endeavoured to prove that much of the dislike of Henry to his wife, and still more to her mother, was unfounded; but the historians of the time are unanimous in their assertion of it, and nothing is more certain than Henry's lasting hatred of the whole Yorkist party—of his pleasure in mortifying and depressing the members of it—and his harsh treatment of the queen-dowager, if not of the queen. It was not, therefore, till the feeling of the public became strongly manifested at his neglect of the princess, and till the Commons presented him a petition praying him "to take to wife the Princess Elizabeth, which marriage they hoped God would bless with a progeny of the race of kings;" and till the Lords, spiritual and temporal, had testified their participation in this wish, by rising simultaneously and bowing as it was uttered, that Henry consented to the celebration of the marriage.

But even in this late and ungracious compliance, Henry took care to have his own personal claims to the crown reiterated, and made independent of those of the proposed queen. For this purpose he was not satisfied with the dispensation which had been granted by the Pope's legate, on account of the relationship of the parties, but he applied to Pope Innocent VIII. himself, and he took care to have the Pope's bull so worded that it should render Henry the sole arbiter of the crown, and his acceptance of Elizabeth a royal favour. This papal act presumed to sanction and confirm the act of settlement passed by the British Parliament; and declaimed, in stronger language than Henry in his own person had dared to use, that the crown of England belonged to Henry by right of war, by notorious and indisputable hereditary succession (which was, in fact, a most notorious falsehood), by the wish and election of all the prelates, nobles, and commons of the