Page:The Queens of England.djvu/276

 236 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. While Edward was quelling his enemies in Gloucestershire, the queen and her children were exposed to some danger in the Tower by an attempt made by Thomas Neville, a natural son of the late William, Lord Fauconberge, to take it. Edward having gained the" battle of Tewkesbury, hastened to the de- fense of London, and having pursued Thomas Neville to Sandwich, to which place he had retreated, reduced that town and put an end to the last attempt of the Lancastrian party to dispute the crown with him. Young as was Elizabeth, she had already, although uncon- sciously, experienced some of the vicissitudes of fortune, to which the great are more frequently exposed than the less ele- vated, and her destiny had been placed in other hands than those of her father. The sovereigns of the period to which we refer were in the habit of using their children as instru- ments for forming treaties between them. Was an enemy to be conciliated, a dangerous neighbor to be bought over, or a wavering friend to be secured, the offer of a prince or prin- cess in marriage, with a dower in proportion to the importance of the object to be gained, presented a ready means for ac- complishing it. Edward the Fourth availed himself of this royal privilege ; for he offered the hand of Elizabeth when she was presumptive heiress to his crown, and still a child of' not more than five or six years old, to various parties ; to George Neville, in order to conciliate the Neville family, cre- ating him Duke of Bedford ; to Margaret of Anjou for her son Edward, as afterwards to Louis the Eleventh for the Dauphin of France ; while Cecelia, his third daughter, not then five years old, he offered to James the Third, king of Scotland, for his eldest son. In 1480, Elizabeth being then in her fourteenth year, and the Dauphin of France, to whom she had been affianced in 1476, being in his ninth, Edward, dissatisfied with the want of desire to bring the affair to a conclusion evinced by Louis, sent John, Lord Howard, to France, to arrange the time and place for the marriage, and for Elizabeth's going to France and taking possession of her dower. The crafty Louis, who had gained all the objects for which he had made this treaty of marriage, was so little disposed to complete it that he had entered into a new one for marrying the dauphin to Margaret, daughter of Maximilian of Austria, and Mary, heiress of Bour- gogne. Angered by this breach of faith and gross insult,