Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/357

 position was strengthened by Henry VIII's will and acts of settlement. But Edward VI's will was set aside, and, although conflicting opinions did conflict, the crown descended in the natural and legal order to James I. There can, I think, be no doubt that Henry VII was legitimately Duke of Lancaster, if we suppose that such a title could pass through a female, notwithstanding the half-blood. It is quite possible to maintain that he was king of England by hereditary right.

Anyhow, he said he was. In his first address to the collected parliament, Nov. 9, 1485, he declared that he had come to the crown by just title of inheritance, and by the true judgment of God in giving him the victory over his enemy: the parliament accepted the fact, and passed a statute, in avoiding all ambiguities and questionings, ordaining, establishing, and enacting that the inheritance of the crowns of England and France, and so on, be, rest and remain, in the person of our now sovereign lord and in the heirs of his body. You may think that this was enough, but the pope clenched the matter in a bull of March 27, 1486, declaring that Henry was king not only by the right of war, and by the notorious and undoubted nearest title of succession, but also by the choice and vote of all the prelates, peers, magnates, nobles, and of the whole realm of England, and by ordinance, decree, and statute of the three estates of the realm called the parliament, for this purpose publicly and generally held. Perhaps the good old man swore a little too hard; the accumulation of reasons may show that Innocent VIII had some misgiving.

Trebly certain, however, as all this was, by a scale of verdicts rising from the king's own assertion, to the parliament, to the pope, and to the judgment of the Almighty, the king would make assurance doubly sure by marrying the equally undoubted heiress of the rival line. He was espoused to Elizabeth of York on the 18th of January, 1486. He had not waited for her to be crowned with him; he himself had been crowned on the 30th of October: and he was in no great hurry to admit her to a share of his dignity. She was not crowned until the 25th of November, 1487, and a great deal had happened in