shortly after, the hitherto insignificant second husband of Jaquetta was made Lord High Constable in lieu of the Earl of Worcester. Other great families were irritated by the Queen absorbing five heirs of dukes or earls for her five unmarried sisters. For a

time the history of this reign is nothing but a scandalous chronicle of match-making and match-breaking, and selfish family intrigues.'

But away with this scene, and take another. Edward dies. Richard of Gloucester, steeped in murder and bloodshed, even of his own kin, mounts the throne; and does it occasion any horror, or any revolting amongst the possessors of pure blood? Not the slightest. On the contrary, we read that" On the 6th of July he was crowned in Westminster Abbey with his wife, Anne, the daughter of Warwick. Neither lords spiritual nor lords temporal started the least difficulty; the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his clergy, anointed the usurper. There was a very full attendance of peers and peeresses; and while the Duke of Buckingham bore the train of the King, the Countess of Rutland did the like office for the Queen. +

This is an awful exhibition of human nature, but this is not the worst. Richard had not only murdered the sons of Elizabeth Woodville, the Queen of England, and thus destroyed all the hopes of a line of kings descending from her on the throne of England, but he had cut off the heads of her own brother, Earl Rivers, and her immediate relative, the Lord Gray; yet the next thing that we find is Richard proposing to get rid of Anne of Warwick, and to marry Elizabeth, the daughter of this queen-dowager, so as to strengthen his own title. The queendowager was already in treaty for a marriage of this daughter with Henry, Earl of Richmond, as the man who was destined to hurl down Gloucester, and ascend the throne; but, at once, she flings up this scheme, and eagerly embraces the offer of uniting her daughter to the murderer of her brothers and uncles! The daughter, worthy child of such a mother, jumps as eagerly at the proposition. She is placed about the person of the Queen, as if to watch her march out of the world. The Queen falls suddenly ill such things can always occur when necessary in courts, and especially in a court like Richard's. It is quite calculated that she shall die, and in the mean time this amiable specimen of royalty, this child of a palace, this Elizabeth, the daughter of the luxurious, adulterous, and murderous Edward, and of the unscrupulous Elizabeth Woodville, writes to Howard, Duke of Norfolk, who is in high favour with the King, im

* Knight's Hist. England.

+ Sir Thomas More; Const. Hist. England; Knight's History.

F

ploring his good offices to forward this her marriage with Richard, whom she calls "her joy and maker in this world-the master of her heart and thoughts.' She expresses her surprise that the Queen should be so long in dying. "The better part of February," she observes, "is past, and the Queen still alive— will she never die ?" *

Anne died in March, and this impatient aspirant had already worn royal robes, and appeared at court balls and festivals as the particular object of the virtuous court's particular attentions, and was ready to mount the throne, when Richard took other counsel, and soon after finished his dark career on the field of Bosworth. What a sweet race of princes might have been expected from such a pair, had the union taken place: as it was, the "White Rose of England," as she was called, was reserved for Henry VII., and became the fitting mother of Henry VIII.

CHAPTER VIII.

"But the great element which was to act powerfully in the work of European civilization was the decline in England of the feudal aristocracy." PICTORIAL HIST. OF ENGLAND.

THE blow was struck! With the accession of Henry VII. to the throne, the fate of the feudal aristocracy was sealed, and their first great era was closed;—the bulk of them, and the greatest of them had fallen in the wars of the Roses. Edward IV. took possession, at one time, of the confiscated estates of one hundred and forty of the principal nobility and gentry who had supported the rival family; Richard cut off a few more, and Henry, with untiring coolness, pursued the trimming and reducing system. The various impostors, which the unprecedented murders of his predecessors, and his own want of a good title to the throne, as well as his retention of the true heir male, Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, son of the Duke of Clarence, in the Tower, and the impressions which these things had left on the popular imagination, from time to time brought forward, afforded him frequent opportunities for beheading and confiscation. He first attainted thirty of the nobles and gentlemen who had supported, Richard, amongst them the Duke of

*Pictorial History.

Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, Lords Lovel and Ferrers, and seized their estates. All grants made since the thirtyfourth of Henry IV. were resumed, and thus he obtained full power over the greater part of the property of the Yorkists, and removed them, or reduced them to full dependence on him, as he found most advisable. By the affair of Lambert Simnel, he got rid of Lord Lovel, and of the dangerous claimant on the throne, De la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, son of the sister of Edward IV. and Richard III. Perkin Warbeck helped him to get rid of Sir Simon Montford, Lord Audley, Sir Robert Ratcliffe, Sir William Daubeney, and Lord Fitzwalter; but more especially of Sir William Stanley, his own Lord Chamberlain, the richest subject in England, whom he contrived, in a deep-laid plot with the traitor Clifford, to impeach, to confiscate his property, and to behead him.

"See!

'Tis Stanley, Lord Great Chamberlain, 'tis he!
Whose tongue the senate, sword the battle sways,
Unmatched in both, since Clifford both betrays.
Hailed as St. Michael-militant and mild !

How grand, how gemmed-oh, Fortune's favourite child!"

But Henry, spite of his greatness, soon decoys him into his royal trap, the Tower.

"For-when events he feared, or planned, drew nigh,
Still in those walls that monarch loved to lie.
There, safe for him, barred others from support;
There held in gage his nobles, called to court;

There screened from sight, and yet secured arrests;

Here guests were captives, captives seemed but guests;
And barons, wont the distant law to mock,

Here learned obeisance to its bench and block."

And soon from this den of royal crimes Stanley walked forth to that block.

"Three suns sunk on him, and a fourth arose,
When reeves of London came with bills and bows,
With crape-bound banners, horns of muffled breath,
Low-wailing fifes, and drums intoning death;
And showed the manual sign and writ of fate,
Demanding Stanley at the western gate."

MOILE'S STATE TRIALS.

The last and most devoted of his victims was the unfortunate Earl of Warwick, whom he had kept all his life in the Tower to his twenty-ninth year. To destroy this last descendant of the

Plantagenets, his only possible competitor, he had recourse to the poor pretence that this youth, who was actually ignorant of the world and almost everybody in it, had conspired in the Tower with Perkin Warbeck to dethrone him. He was, says the historian, as innocent as a child when he was judicially murdered on Tower-hill by the king and the degraded peers of England. But though venal statesmen might applaud the deed, the uncor-, rupted people expressed such horror of the deed, as startled the wily king on his throne.* Henry, however, went on scraping up money, and thus increasing his power, till death carried off his cunning soul to another scene of action.

But if Henry VII. had laid the weight of his hand on the nobility in beheadings and confiscations, Henry VIII. laid the weight of his whole ponderous body upon them. The nobility, reduced to the feeblest condition by the wholesale destructions of the last five reigns; he himself enriched by these very means, and more especially by the cautious, grinding system of his father; the people yet passive, and glad enough to be freed from the consuming rage and lawlessness of the civil wars; and he himself being of a most sensual, domineering, vain, and desperate temperament;-all these circumstances conspired to render Henry VIII. one of the most absolute and bloody tyrants that ever lived. We will not pursue at much length his too well known story. He struck a terror into church, aristocracy, and people. It has been admirably said of him, "that he spared no man in his vengeance, nor woman in his lust.' Of his six wives, two he divorced, and two he beheaded to make way for fresh ones. One escaped him by dying soon after child-birth; and one had a hair-breadth escape for her neck. Before the divorce of the first, he had actually married the second. On the morning of the execution of this second, the beautiful Anne Boleyn, whom he moved heaven and earth to obtain, he went to hunt in Epping Forest. As he sate at breakfast, he listened for the signal gun which should announce her death. On hearing it, he started up joyfully, exclaiming-" Ha! it is done! the business is done! Uncouple the dogs, and let us follow the sport." In the evening he returned gaily from the chase, and the next morning got married again. This lady, Jane Seymour, died, as we have said, a natural death, and his next, Anne of Cleves, the unlucky Flanders mare, being a great horror to him, he tolerated but about four or five months, and took a fifth, Catherine Howard. As he could not enjoy the decapitation of Anne of Cleves, he celebrated his marriage with Catherine Howard by cutting off the +Nott's Life of Surrey.

*Lord Bacon.

head of his minister, Cromwell, as well as that of Lord Hungerford, and burning alive three heretics, and hanging, drawing, and quartering three deniers of his supremacy-a very suitable mode of celebration of such a marriage by such a king. He wound up his honeymoon as characteristically with hanging the Prior of Doncaster, and six others, for defending the institution of the monastic life.

In one year he was tired of this wife, and within two years and a half from their marriage he had her head off, with that of Lady Rochford, at the same time. The marriage of his last wife, Catherine Parr, he may be said to have celebrated in his usual way; for Catherine being a good Protestant, during their honeymoon, that is only sixteen days after their wedding, he burnt there Protestants alive in Smithfield. He was a monarch of so lusty a humour, that he did not fancy himself properly married without he amused his people with the falling head of a wife, a minister, or with the flames and cries of a few heretics. This exemplary husband never wanted a candidate for the vacant wifeship. As if the ladies were in love with divorcing and beheading, we read of but one who declined the proffered honour of matrimonial martyrdom. This was a witty Duchess Dowager of Milan, who replied, "that she, unfortunately, had but one head, and could not afford to lose it." But what will not man or woman do or risk for royalty?

Such were the pleasant matrimonial humours of this monarch. His nobles, unlike those proud, iron men who made his predecessors tremble or fall before them, crouched before him like beaten hounds. He began his bloody work upon them in the very commencement of his reign, by cutting off the head of the Duke of Suffolk in the Tower, a legacy left him by his father, who, in his very last moments, signed an order for this execution. His next victim was the Duke of Buckingham, the son of that duke whose head Richard III. had taken off. This nobleman had two mortal faults in Henry's eyes: he was a direct descendant of Edward III., and he was one of the richest men in England. But besides this, he had made an equally dangerous enemy, Wolsey, whose pride he had hurt by contemptuously pouring the water into his shoes, which he, Buckingham, held for the king, and into which Wolsey also made free to dip his fingers. Wolsey vowed to "sit on his skirt." Next fell Bishop Fisher and the learned and witty Sir Thomas More. Then with his wife, Anne Boleyn, he beheaded Lord Rochford, and four gentlemen, Norris, Weston, Brereton, and Smeaton, for Henry generally immolated a whole troop with one of his wives. But, observes the historian, Henry had no monopoly of crime. The

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