Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/359

 dynastic rivalries to secure their victory or revenge, and there were administrative difficulties emerging in discontents which had little to do with either dynastic or hereditary struggles, but lent aid to both and borrowed pretext from both.

It is hardly necessary for me perhaps to recall to your minds what roots of dynastic bitterness still subsisted: but for the sake of clearness I will enumerate them. There was the Dowager Margaret of Burgundy, ready to say or do or believe anything for the sake of revenge; there was the son of Clarence, a prisoner in the king's hands; there were the De la Poles, the five sons of John, Duke of Suffolk, by Elizabeth of York, the eldest of whom had been recognised by Richard III as his presumptive heir; and there was the doubt that hung over the death of Edward V and his brother Richard. It is curious to trace the intertwining of these really incompatible and inconsistent interests, and yet the only conclusion at which we can fairly arrive is the utterly desperate and unprincipled character of the Yorkist intrigues.

The first rising is perhaps the most desperate; in April 1486 the Viscount Lovel, and Humfrey and Thomas Stafford, rose in Worcestershire; the king, as Bacon tells us, thought it a mere rag of Bosworth: although at one time it seemed to be becoming formidable, it collapsed before the king's offer of pardon. Lovel escaped to the Duchess Margaret, Humfrey Stafford was executed, and Thomas was pardoned. "Whether the original motive of the rising was the despair of the attainted leaders, or an intrigue of the as yet unreconciled Yorkist remnant, it is, by the agency of Lord Lovel, linked on with the second rising, that of 1487, in the name of Lambert Simnel. The idea of dethroning the new king by setting up as claimant a person, who pretended to be another person, who was well known to be a prisoner in the king's hands, is not only desperate but unprincipled, and, if I can say it without offence, not only unprincipled and desperate, but Irish. Lambert Simnel, a boy of twelve years old, the son of an organ-maker at Oxford, educated by a clever priest named Symonds, a name still known here, was presented to the