Page:The Queens of England.djvu/277

ELIZABETH OF YORK. 237 Edward vowed to avenge it, but dared not carry war into France while on bad terms with Scotland. He, however, so successfully managed the invasion of Scotland, and so grati- fied his subjects by the recovery of Berwick, the maintenance of a garrison at which place had been so heavy an "expense that they, by their liberality, enabled him to prepare for a war with France. While bent on this project, he was attacked by a quartan ague, which after ten or twelve days, carried him off on the 9th of April, 1483, in the forty-first year of his age, leaving two sons and six daughters. No sooner had Rich- ard, Duke of Gloucester, brother to the late king and uncle to the present, obtained possession of Edward the Fifth, on his route from Ludlow to London, and imprisoned Anthony, Lord Rivers, and Sir Richard Grey, the brother and son of the queen, than she, greatly alarmed, once more sought refuge in the sanctuary with the Marquis of Dorset and her daugh- ters, and her second son, Richard, Duke of York. But the Duke of Gloucester, having succeeded in getting himself de- clared Protector and Defender of the kingdom, proved too unequal a foe for the widowed queen to contend with, who, having through her own exactions and those of her family, incurred much enmity, now found herself friendless in her hour of need. Having craftily concealed his projects by pro- claiming his young nephew king, and afterwards by making preparations for his coronation, Richard complained to the council of the queen's having entered the sanctuary and keep- ing her second son there, as an insult offered to himself, and calculated to convey the worst suspicions against him. He alleged, also, that the youthful king pined for his brother's company. This artful conduct blinded all parties ; and the archbishops, with the Duke of Buckingham, the Lord How- ard, and others of the council, were appointed to wait upon the queen and persuade her to deliver up the Duke of York. Whatever presentiments of danger may have filled the heart of the unhappy mother, and that she had such can hardly be doubted by her still remaining with her daughters in the sanc- tuary, she was lured into delivering the doomed boy to his enemy, and never more beheld him. The king and his brother now in the power of their ruthless uncle; he hesitated not to take measures, not only for their destruction, but for the ruin and degredation of the queen and her daughters, by having a charge brought forward to prove that by a former marriage