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,
And grievous has the expiation been."

§ 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.

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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.

§ 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

A.D. 1461.] HOUSES OF YORK AND LANCASTER.

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State by their legally constituted organs, and after a possession of so many years, its hereditary right had been ratified by the absence of opposition. The Yorkists were now the usurpers and intruders, and in a short time the nation seemed to feel remorse for its behaviour to the meek representative of a father and grandfather who had given such dignity to the English crown. In the very month of his accession Edward had to fight for the throne, and there was soon visible the fatally expanding nature of a civil war. The skirmishes of the beginning of this period were now succeeded by great and important battles. At Towton (March 29, 1461) there were a hundred and ten thousand combatants in the field, all English, and forming, if united, a force three times greater than that which under Wellington delivered the peninsula of Spain, and more than twice the number of those who fought at Waterloo; and such was the obstinacy of the engagement that upwards of thirty thousand lay dead.

§ 2. Edward consolidated his power by gaining over the towns; but his other method of strengthening his cause was perhaps more successful still: it was to weaken the nobility, first by indiscriminate slaughter in the field-"Spare the common men," he used to shout, galloping from rank to rank when the pursuit began, " and slay the gentlemen," and then by an equally indiscriminate seizure of their goods. Strange stories are told of the helpless misery to which the greatest families were reduced by these pitiless forfeitures. The Duke of Exeter, next in rank to the Lancasters, and brother-in-law of the king, was so impoverished that he was recognised as a humble menial in the service of the Duke of Burgundy. The heir of the Cliffords was brought up for many years in the disguise of a poor shepherd among the hills of Westmoreland; and with all their wealth, and lordly castles, and well-stocked farms, Edward rewarded the fidelity of his followers, and fed his own extravagance; for a more voluptuous, self-indulgent epicure, in the intervals of peace, was nowhere to be found.

His feasts, and tournaments, and wilder excesses were the wonder of the time, and it was only when "wild war's deadly blast was blown" that the sensualist threw aside his enjoyments, and faced his enemies like a man.

§ 3. Margaret marshalled the forces on the other side. Everywhere, where a friend was to be made, or foe to be won over, that vengeful wife and mother was to be found. In 1462 she raised a trouble in the north, and, while flying with her son towards Scotland, fell into the hands of an outlaw in a forest. The robber considered them of course his legal prey; but Margaret, stepping forward, enlisted the manly sympathies. of the robber in her favour by saying, "This is the son of your king, I commit him to your charge; I am your queen." But it was easier to soften the successor of Robin Hood in Yorkshire, than the successor of her husband in Windsor.

§ 4. Another battle at Hexham was as much against her as Towton itself. The defeat of the Lancastrians was so complete that the contest seemed really at an end; dukes and marquises were beheaded after the fight, and the king's coffers filled with forfeitures. Encouraged by the prosperous state of his affairs, he ventured to acknowledge a secret marriage he had contracted with the widow of Sir John Grey and daughter of Sir Richard Woodville. But a negotiation for his alliance with a French princess had unluckily been entrusted to the great Earl of Warwick, and bitter was his wrath and disappointment at being balked of the opportunity of adding queenmaker as well as king-maker to his name. The new queen, moreover, had brothers and other kin. Edward married them into such noble houses, and loaded them with such wealth and honours, that Warwick perceived there was a new influence in the State which did not arise from him.

Clarence, the king's brother, who had married Warwick's daughter, shared in his father-in-law's indignation, and the two discontented magnates retired to Calais to mature their plans, while orders were left with Warwick's retainers to