second son of the Earl of Salisbury, had married the heiress of the Beauchamps, and acquired the earldom of Warwick. He was in his twenty-seventh year when he led the van of the Yorkist army at the battle of St. Albans, and was rewarded for his zeal by the captain-generalship of Calais. § 12. While the struggle was raging between the leaders of the feudal families, and the plains of England were covered with the corpses of their military retainers, the body of the people pursued their way in peace. The towns were little disturbed, except when they lay in the line of march. At other times, when hostilities ceased, as they sometimes did for long periods, the policy of the conflicting parties was equally shown in consideration for the interests of the general population. It was like a hostile invasion, conducted on all the rules of honourable warfare as regarded the noncombatants; property was spared; even trade was protected, and no contributions were levied on unresisting parishes; but in their treatment of each other, the cruelties which characterize all civil dissensions were carried to their utmost limits. Prisoners were slain, enemies' houses were burnt, and their lands destroyed. The aim of both the factions appeared to be to exterminate the order to which they belonged; and the slaughter of so many lords, and the ruin of so many estates, in what they thought the support of the power of the nobility, were the circumstances which laid them all at the feet of the first sagacious and courageous monarch who perceived the opening left for the kingly power. The great barons who destroyed the authority of Henry VI. and made the tenure of Edward IV. precarious, built up the tyranny of Henry VII., from which it took two hundred years to set us completely free. The rapidity of the changes of fortune shows that neither cause had the broad foundation of national favour to rest upon. If the nation had been equally divided, the struggle would have been more obstinate and the progress of A.D. 1459-1460.] YORKISTS AND LANCASTRIANS. 387 events more steady; but the fate of a battle decided for a while the position of the rival chiefs. If defeated, their followers dispersed, and the opposite faction got the custody of the king's person and the confiscation of their estates. Suddenly a lucky engagement restored them to their former power, Henry changed his keepers, and the Lancastrian lands were forfeited to the Yorkists. After a skirmish, for instance, on the 23rd September of this year, at Blore Heath, in Staffordshire, wherein Salisbury, the father of Warwick, was triumphant, the Yorkists proceeded to Ludlow in search of the king. York himself was in command, and Warwick and Salisbury were beside him. But the Lancastrians appeared in greater force than they expected; one of their lieutenants went over to the enemy, and in a moment the expedition was at an end. York fled for safety to Dublin; Warwick escaped to Calais, where he gave an asylum to his father and Edward of March; and no time was lost by the triumphant kingsmen in getting bills of attainder passed through parliament, and legal forfeitures of their enemies' estates. The ink of the attainders was scarcely dry when Warwick, Salisbury, and Edward landed in Kent. London opened its gates, and issuing from the great city where their forces. had been gathering, they marched to Northampton, and so completely defeated the royal army, commanded by the Duke of Buckingham and the queen, that no spot of English ground was safe for the lately ruling party. Henry was taken prisoner, and Margaret and her unfortunate son took refuge across the Tweed. Things seemed so settled by this decisive action, that the mask of moderation was thrown off, and the throne was formally claimed by the Duke of York. An arrangement was come to, founded on that between Henry II. and Stephen, that Henry should continue king for life, and York should be his successor. But Margaret had not been consulted on this forcible exclusion of the Prince of Wales. Collecting followers in the north, she advanced to Sandal Castle, near Wakefield, into which York, who had gone down to oppose her, was forced to retire. Nobody in those days seems ever to have known beforehand the number of the enemy's troops. York, therefore, kept his position within the walls, believing he was overmatched, but venturing on a sally, was repulsed and killed. His son, young Rutland, was slain in cold blood after capture, by the ferocious Clifford; and Warwick's father, the brave old Salisbury, was executed without trial on the following day. These butcheries left legacies of revenge which were too faithfully paid. For the passions which might have lain dormant under ordinary defeat were stirred to madness by the mockeries heaped upon the prisoners and the slain. Margaret received the bleeding head of York with an outbreak of triumphant malice. Some chroniclers of the losing party go so far as to say that those indignities were lavished upon him alive; that he was seated on an ant-hill, with a crown of grass upon his brows, and tauntingly addressed as king. The same brutal Clifford who slaughtered the youthful Rutland was loud in his derision of the father; and the queen, gratifying her imperious nature, concluded the dismal tragedy, so unEnglish in all its circumstances, by fixing the unhappy Duke's head upon the gate of York, surmounted by a paper coronet. The nobles on the other side were as unpitying when their turn came; "Implacable resentment was their crime, § 13. Edward of March was now Duke of York, and successor to all his father's rights and prospects. At this time he was twenty years of age, and, making every allowance for the flatteries of the court, we may believe he was the handsomest prince of his time. Courageous and skilful he had already shown himself, and he had not yet had an opportunity of revealing the darker shades of his character. Popular favour, A.D. 1461.] EDWARD IV. PROCLAIMED. 389 therefore, followed the gracious manners and majestic beauty of the youthful candidate, which had been denied to the more mature experience of his father. He revenged that father's death in a great battle at Mortimer's Cross, near Wigmore, where he defeated the Earl of Pembroke, and put the prisoners to death; among these was Pembroke's father, Owen Tudor, who had married Catherine of France, the widow of Henry V. Pembroke himself escaped, and carried with him into his long and dreary exile his brother Richmond's son, young Henry Tudor, who was afterwards Henry VII. § 14. In spite of a rally in favour of the queen, and the defeat sustained by Warwick in the second battle of St. Albans, the game was near an end. York carried his army to London, and strengthening himself with as great an appearance of constitutional support as he could obtain, gathered all the peers, bishops, and burgesses within his reach in the great hall at Westminster, and having laid his claims before them, received a parliamentary sanction to his demands, and was declared king, as next in blood to our late lord, King Edward III. A.D. LANDMARKS OF CHRONOLOGY. A.D. 1455. 1460. Rebellion of the Duke of York, 1459. The Earl of Warwick styled 1461. are driven from France. 390 YORKIST BRANCH OF THE PLANTAGENET LINE. CHAPTER XII. EDWARD THE FOURTH. A.D. 1461 TO A.D. 1483. CONTEMPORARY SOVEREIGNS. FRANCE.-Louis XI. SCOTLAND.-James III. POPES.-Pius II.; Paul II.; Sixtus IV. § 1. EDWARD IV. assumes the crown during the lifetime of Henry VI. Claims of the rival houses of York and Lancaster.-§ 2. Means adopted by Edward to consolidate his power.—§ 3. Queen Margaret. -§ 4. Battle of Hexham, and defeat of the Lancastrians. Contests between the houses of York and Lancaster, commonly known as the Wars of the Roses. Earl of Warwick; his dissatisfaction at the king's marriage.-§ 5. Warwick returns from France, and invades England. Edward flies to Flanders, but returns and fights the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury. Death of Henry VI. and of his only son. § 6. Despotic measures and tyrannical proceedings of Edward. Execution of the Duke of Clarence.-§ 7. Edward's depravity of character. His death. § 1. THE three last kings were declared usurpers and intruders, though they had filled the English throne for sixty years; but the meeting which made this declaration was summoned by the successful Edward, and passed whatever resolutions he pleased. In no sense could the line of Lancaster, at all events from the death of Henry IV., be considered either usurping or intrusive. It had received the sanction of Church and |