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BATTLE OF TEWKESBURY.

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A.D. 1471.] conduct. While preserving a mask of loyalty towards Edward, he is supposed to have prompted the measures adopted by the leaders of the insurrection. On the failure of a second attempt to overturn the king's power, he and the Duke of Clarence escaped to France, where a reconciliation took place between Warwick and Margaret of Anjou (1470). This was cemented by the marriage of her son Prince Edward to Anne Neville, Warwick's second daughter. As it had been agreed that in the event of the triumph of the Lancastrian cause, Prince Henry should succeed Henry VI., this reconciliation and marriage displeased the Duke of Clarence, who was at this time heir-apparent, and his wife Isabella, Warwick's eldest daughter. With a fleet provided by Louis XI., Warwick, bearing the Lancastrian standard, landed in Kent, while Edward was in the north of England repressing an insurrection. Within eleven days from his landing, Warwick made himself master of the kingdom, and Edward IV. was a fugitive at the court of his brother-in-law, the Duke of Burgundy, in Flanders.

Henry VI. was thus suddenly restored to the throne, the Parliament ratifying all the Lancastrian measures, and annulling those of their opponents. In their hour of triumph, the Lancastrians showed more clemency than had been exhibited by the Yorkists; but their triumph was short: for Edward, aided clandestinely by the Duke of Burgundy, landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire, and advanced towards London. The two armies met at Barnet (10th battle), 14th April 1471. The Duke of Clarence, who had been waiting for an opportunity to betray Warwick, ever since the marriage of the second daughter of the latter to Prince Edward, went over with 12,000 men to his brother's camp. Edward was victorious. Warwick, the king-maker, and his brother Lord Montague, fell in this engagement. On the day of this fatal defeat of her party, Margaret of Anjou and her son landed in England. She was induced by her advisers to hazard another battle which was fought at Tewkesbury (11th battle), on the banks of the Severn (4th May 1471). The Lancastrians were defeated, and their leader, the Duke of Somerset, taken and be

88

MURDER OF PRINCE EDWARD AND HENRY VI. [A.D. 1471.

headed. Prince Edward, Margaret's son, was killed in cold blood by the king's brothers, the Dukes of Gloucester and Clarence, and Margaret herself was thrown into the Tower, and in the same place Henry VI. was murdered a few days after. By some historians this act is said to have been perpetrated by Richard duke of Gloucester. Henry Tudor, the young Earl of Richmond, and his uncle Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, found refuge at the court of the Duke of Brittany. The Duke of Clarence seized the possessions of his father-in-law, the late Earl of Warwick. His brother Richard, duke of Gloucester, in order to entitle himself to a share of this vast inheritance, married Anne Neville, widow of Prince Edward, whom he had helped to murder-a step which increased the rancour already existing between the royal brothers.

In the meanwhile Charles duke of Burgundy, and other powerful French vassals, were constantly in arms against Louis XI. in defence of the feudal system. The Duke of Burgundy, with a view to strengthen his party, invited Edward to revive the old claim of the Plantagenets to the throne of France. The English Parliament, approving of the project, voted liberal subsidies, and Edward with a large army, and attended by his chief nobility, landed at Calais (1473). The Duke of Burgundy, however, who passed his life in projecting schemes for his own aggrandizement, was, at the time of Edward's invasion of France, endeavouring to form for himself a kingdom out of the provinces lying on the frontiers of France and Germany, and to obtain the title of King from the Emperor Frederick III. His absence at so critical a time, and his subsequent conduct, so displeased Edward, that he listened to the overtures made by that cleverest and most subtle of politicians, Louis XI., with whom he had an interview at Pecquigny (1475), on a bridge over the Somme. By feasting, magnificent gifts, and liberal pensions skilfully bestowed, Louis persuaded the English to sail back to their own country. The most honourable part of the treaty of Pecquigny, was the ransom Louis agreed to pay for Margaret of Anjou, who returned to her native country, where she died in 1482.

A.D. 1478.]

EXECUTION OF CLARENCE.

89

Clarence was unpopular at court, and hated by his brothers Edward and Richard duke of Gloucester, who now resolved on his destruction. On paltry pretexts they caused a couple of Clarence's friends to be tried and executed, hoping to provoke him to utter expressions which they might construe into high treason. The ruse succeeded he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, the king himself conducting the accusation. Some historians say he However this may be,

was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. it is certain that by some means or other he was violently put to death in the Tower (1478). He left two children, a son created Earl of Warwick, and a daughter afterwards the Countess of Salisbury. By his death his brother Richard of Gloucester sucIceeded to the remainder of Warwick's estates-one-half of which he already possessed, through his wife the late Earl's daughter.

After this act of fratricide, Edward passed his time in planning brilliant marriages for his children, not one of which was effected. He was preparing an attack on Scotland when he died (1483), in the forty-second year of his age, leaving five daughters and two sons, Edward his successor, aged thirteen, and Richard duke of York, aged nine.

Edward IV. introduced the practice of raising loans or benevolences from his subjects, a practice afterwards much abused, and leading to serious consequences.

Judge Lyttelton the famous lawyer wrote in this reign, and Caxton the printer was encouraged.

Cotemporary Sovereigns and Events.-France: Louis XI. tion established in Spain (1481).

Scotland: James III. Inquisi

Questions.-1. Give the dates and issue of the first three battles fought between the Lancastrians and Yorkists after Edward IV.'s accession. 2. What circumstances alienated Clarence and Warwick the king-maker from Edward III.? 3. How did Warwick act after the battle of Banbury; and what circumstances led to the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury? 4. What was the result of these two battles?

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DESTRUCTION OF THE WOODVILLE FAMILY.

[A.D. 1483.

3. Edward V.

9TH APRIL 1483, TO JUNE 26TH, SAME YEAR.

RICHARD, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER, PROTECTOR-OVERTHROW OF THE WOODVILLE FAMILY-RICHARD INTRIGUES TO OBTAIN THE CROWN, AND REMOVES HIS ENEMIES ON THE PLEA THAT THEY WERE CONSPIRING AGAINST HIM-IS CROWNED.

The jealousy that had long been felt by the old nobility towards the family of Edward the Fourth's queen, broke out the moment of the king's death. Edward v. was in Shropshire with his maternal uncle Lord Rivers, who was one of the most accomplished men of the time, and patron of Caxton, the first English printer. Elizabeth immediately wrote to her brother ordering him to levy a force to escort her son, the young king, to London, but this order was vigorously opposed by Lord Hastings, who, though attached to Edward's dynasty, shared the jealousy existing towards the Woodvilles, and was resolved to oppose their ascendency over the young king. Elizabeth's order was accordingly countermanded. Richard duke of Gloucester, whom Edward IV. had appointed regent during his son's minority, hastened from York, and was met at Northampton by the Duke of Buckingham. There they waited in order to join Edward's escort on the way to London, but the Earl of Rivers sending the young king on to Stoney Stratford, came with Sir Richard Grey, Edward's half-brother, and Sir Thomas Vaughan, to Northampton, where they were apparently most cordially received by the Dukes of Gloucester and Buckingham. Next morning the whole party proceeded to Stoney Stratford; on entering which the Earl of Rivers, Lord Grey, and Sir Thomas Vaughan, were suddenly arrested and conducted by Gloucester's order to Pomfret Castle, where, a few weeks after (13th June), without

A.D. 1483.]

DEATH OF LORD HASTINGS.

91

form of trial, they were beheaded by Sir Richard Ratcliffe, the executioner of Richard duke of Gloucester's cruelties.

Gloucester then conveyed the young king to the state-rooms in the Tower, and while acting as Regent and Protector, managed to fill all the offices of state with his own adherents. As the queen had taken refuge in Westminster Abbey, then considered an inviolable asylum, with her second son the little Duke of York, and as Gloucester knew his schemes would be incomplete if the younger brother escaped him, he employed the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to persuade her to yield up the child. Further, to insure the destruction of those he most dreaded, he accused Edward's queen of exercising magical arts against his life, and others of conspiracy; and finding Lord Hastings' fidelity to young Edward an obstacle in the way of his own ambition, he had him beheaded without a moment's notice, on a log of wood in the yard of the Tower.

Richard's next step was to persuade the people that the late king had been privately married before marrying Elizabeth Woodville, thereby hoping to prove the illegitimacy of Edward v.; but as his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence, had left a son and daughter, whose title would be superior to his own, Gloucester had to go a step further, and declare that the late king, and his brother Clarence, were also both illegitimate. To make a display of his own virtue, and cast reflection on the late king, he had Jane Shore, who had lived with Edward IV., condemned to do public penance in a white sheet, and barefoot.

Obstacles having now been removed, and the people being accustomed to his exercise of power, he employed the Duke of Buckingham, his tool, to get up a pretended petition from the citizens of London, begging him to accept the crown. The result was, that the preparations that had been made for the coronation of Edward v. were used for that of his uncle Richard, duke of Gloucester, who, with his wife Anne, daughter of Warwick the king-maker and widow of that Prince Edward whom Gloucester had stabbed to death, was crowned, at Westminster, 6th July

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