Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/348

328 and its head Richard earl of Warwick. After a series of almost unintelligible intrigues and insurrections, Edward was in 1470 driven out of the kingdom by an union between Warwick and the king’s own brother, George duke of Clarence. Henry VI. was now taken from prison and again declared king. The crown was settled by parliament on him and his son, with remainder to Clarence. But in the next year Edward came back ; Clarence again changed sides, and the crown was secured to Edward by the fights of Barnet and Tewkesbury. At Tewkesbury Edward the son of Henry was killed; the death—we may feel sure that it was the murder—of Henry himself followed. The legitimate male line of Lancaster was now extinct ; no descendant of any one of the sons of Henry IV. survived. There were foreign princes descended from John of Gaunt in the female line, and among them the famous Charles duke of Burgundy, who seems, among the other objects of his ambition, to have sometimes dreamed of the English crown for himself. Such claims were not likely to meet with any support in England ; and Edward, by a stroke of real policy, won Charles to his side by the hand of his sister Margaret, and found shelter at his brother-in-law’s court during his exile. In England the hopes of the Lancastrian party now turned in a new direction, to legitimated descend- ants of John of Gaunt of the house of Somerset. That house also was extinct in the male line; its representative was Margaret, countess of Richmond. Her young son, Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, was now, in the lack of any better claimant, looked on as the heir of Lancaster. It is needless to say that no genealogical subtlety could be held to give him any share in the royalty which the choice of the nation had conferred on the line of Henry IV. But something of the sentiment of royal descent might be held to have come to Henry in a strange way through his father’s mother. She was no other than Katharine of France, the widow of Henry V., who married a Welshman named Owen Tudor, in whose descendants the crown of England passed, by a strange genealogical accident, to the ancient stock of Britain. For the remaining twelve years of his life Edward IV. reigned without any important disturbance at home. But the members of the house of York had already begun to turn one against another. The validity of Edward’s marriage, and therefore the legitimacy of his children, was doubtful. Clarence was in any case the next in succession after them, while, by the statute passed during Henry’s second reign, he had a claim, before Edward himself. In 1478 this dangerous brother was condemned in parliament on a vague charge of treason ; and he presently died, though not by any public execution. The latter years of Edward IV. were taken up chiefly with foreign policy and foreign war, both of which were on rather a small scale. A Scot- tish war from 1480 to 1482 is remarkable for the recovery of Berwick. In continental politics Edward was specially busy. His policy took largely the form of planning foreign marriages for his children, none of which were carried into effect. Even before he was driven out in 1470, he was trying to form alliances against France, especially with Charles of Burgundy. But, though Charles sheltered Ed ward in his exile, he gave him no real support when in 1475 he actually began an invasion of France. Edward, as well as Charles, was outwitted by Lewis XI. The king and his counsellors went home, without glory or conquest, but with large bribes of French money. The death of Edward in 1483 again, nominally at least, gave the crown to a minor, Edward, the eldest son of the late king. The suspicions which had been vaguely raised against John of Gaunt during the minority of Richard II. became realities in the case of the ambitious uncle of Edward V. This was Richard duke of Gloucester, the youngest son of Richard duke of York, who was declared protector of the young king. His protectorate was marked by the illegal slaughter of several of the lords of the party of the queen mother. Presently Richard’s own adherents claimed the crown for him. The claim was based on the alleged invalidity of Edward IV.’s marriage. Some ventured on the more improbable scandal that neither Edward nor Clarence was really a son of Duke Richard, and that Richard of Gloucester was his only real representative. A more decent argument was found in the attainder of George of Clarence, which, it was held, shut out his children from the succession. An irregular kind of election, which however professed to be made by the estates of the realm, called on Richard to assume the crown. He was crowned instead of his nephew ; and there can be little doubt that both Edward and his brother Richard duke of York were made away with, like Arthur in earlier days, at the bidding of their uncle. The ancient custom of England would have spared all these crimes. Richard, who had in other respects many of the qualities of a good ruler, would doubtless have been chosen on the death of his brother. As it was, his crown was at once threatened by Henry of Richmond, who now passed for the representative of the house of Lancas- ter. The aim of his party was to marry him to Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV., who now represented the more regular succession of the house of York. Richmond was in banishment in Britanny. The first attempts of himself and his partisans were crushed. At this stage of our history everything turns on marriages and genealogies. The deaths of Richard’s queen Anne Neville and his son Edward open a new stage in the tale. John earl of Lincoln, the son of the king’s sister Elizabeth duchess of Suffolk, was now declared the presumptive heir. But Richard now designed a marriage with his own niece Elizabeth, to which she and her mother seem to have consented. This plan hastened the schemes of Richmond. He landed, raised an army, and, helped by the treachery of the Stanleys and Percies, he overthrew Richard at Bosworth, August 22, 1485. Henry was crowned, and a parliament settled the crown on him and the heirs of his body, and none other. The new king clearly wished that his claims should be in no way dependent on his intended marriage with Elizabeth. Parliament, on the other hand, was clearly unwilling to give its formal sanction either to a right of conquest or to Henry’s strange hereditary claim. Henry, in short, reigned by a parliamentary title, by an election which followed his coronation. In the next year however he carried out his promise of marrying Elizabeth; and, before the end of the year 1486, the birth of his eldest son, who, as the son of the first British king of England, received the name of Arthur, seemed to put the succession on a sure ground. We are apt to look on Henry VII. as the founder of a dynasty, and on his reign as marking the beginning of a new æra. Both views are true; but they must not be allowed to put out of sight the fact that, till quite the end of his reign, his throne was as insecure as that of any of his predecessors. The civil wars were not yet ended; in foreign lands Henry was looked on as a mere adventurer, who had won the crown by the chances of one battle, and who was likely to lose what he had won by the chances of another. Hence he was, like Edward IV. in the same case, specially anxious to establish his position among foreign princes. To obtain, as he did at last, an infanta for his son, even to give his daughter to the king of Scots, were in his view important objects of policy. But those objects were not attained till after he had strengthened his position at home by successfully withstanding more than one enemy. The revolts against Henry began early. Before the birth of his son, he had to crush the first insurrection of Lord Lovell. The next year enemies arose against him in 