paternal uncle, Richard, duke of Gloucester. On the 4th of May, the day first fixed for his coronation, which had, however, been postponed till the 22nd of June, the young prince was led by his uncle into the capital. At Hornsey Park they were met by the lord mayor, aldermen, and a large body of the citizens. Richard, with his head bare, rode before his nephew, and pointed him out for the acclamations of the people. Edward lodged in the palace of the bishop, and received the homage and fealty of the bishops, lords, and commoners who were present. In the course of the month, Richard was declared "protector of the king and of the kingdom" at a great council, and got possession of the person of the duke of York, the king's younger brother, who, along with his mother and sister, had taken refuge in Westminster abbey. The two boys were conveyed to the Tower of London, under the pretence of being kept there in safety till the coronation; but, on the 26th of June, 1483, Richard proceeded to Westminster hall, and there formally declared himself king. Edward and his brother were murdered about this time, as has been generally believed, by their uncle's orders. Sir Thomas More, who was born some years before the death of Edward IV., and whose testimony may therefore be regarded as that of a contemporary, speaks of the murder of these two boys as a matter regarding which he had no doubt. See his unfinished tract—A History of the Pitiful Life and Unfortunate Death of Edward V. and the Duke of York, his brother, with the Troublesome and Tyrannical Government of the Usurpation of Richard III., and his Miserable End. More's account is, that Richard sent a message to Sir Robert Brackenbury, the constable of the Tower, desiring him to put the children to death. Brackenbury refused to comply with Richard's expressed wish, but agreed, on receiving a second message, to what was little, if at all, less infamous—he gave the keys of the Tower for twenty-four hours to Sir James Tyrrell, under whose directions the children were put to death by suffocation. The assassins were Miles Forrest one of the keepers, and John Dighton one of Tyrrell's servants. Several writers, particularly Sir George Buck, in his Life and Reign of Richard III.; Horace Walpole, in his Historic Doubts; and Laing, in his Dissertation appended to Henry's History of Great Britain, have attempted to bring discredit on More's story of the murder of the children of Edward IV.; but the controversy is much more like an exercise of paradoxical ingenuity than a discussion, with a view to elicit truth, of points regarding which there is real uncertainty. The accuracy of More's statement has been accepted by Mackintosh, and has been confirmed through the industry and skill of Lingard by a remarkable array of proof. Buck, Walpole, and others lay much stress on the circumstance that the bodies of the princes were not found, though much search was professedly made for them. It is remarkable that in 1674, when some alterations were made in the Tower, the labourers discovered a quantity of human bones, which on examination were found to be those of two boys of the ages of the princes. These bones were by order of Charles II. deposited in Westminster abbey, and an inscription was placed over them, expressive of the belief that they were the remains of the murdered sons of Edward IV. The public events of the reign of Edward V., who was king for a few weeks only, and king in nothing but the name, will be found narrated under Richard III.—J. B. J.
EDWARD VI., King of England, was born on the 12th of October, 1537, at Hampton court, the son of Henry VIII. and his third wife, Jane Seymour. To the Seymour family the newborn prince seemed destined from his cradle to be fatal—his birth cost his mother her life. From his earliest infancy a considerable establishment was devoted to him by his father; and at eighteen months old he was painted by Holbein "in a linen cap." "Until he was six years old," he has said of himself in his diary, "he continued to be brought up among the women." Then he was placed under several masters, the most famous of them being Sir John Cheke the Grecian, and Roger Ascham, who instructed him in caligraphy. All accounts agree as to his early amiability and piety, and the almost precocious quickness of his parts. "He would often," Roger Ascham has recorded, "gently promise me one day to do me good." He learned to speak and read Latin well, to have a fair knowledge of Greek, to be a good French scholar, and to play upon the lute. Nor were athletic exercises forgotten, and in many passages of his diary he has chronicled his fondness for the games of the high-born juveniles of his time. He was not ten years old when Henry VIII. died, and the possession of supreme power under the boy-king became and continued the object of intrigue among his guardians. In the council of regency nominated by Henry, no one had any priority over his colleagues; but the majority favoured the pretensions of one of the king's uncles, Edward, earl of Hertford, who was accordingly appointed protector, and made duke of Somerset. Another maternal uncle, Sir Thomas Seymour, was created Lord Seymour of Suedey, and appointed high-admiral of the kingdom. Forthwith the two brothers began to aim at each other's downfall. Scarcely was Henry cold in his grave, when Lord Seymour married his widow, Catherine Parr; and when, after a brief interval, she too died, the admiral was no despised wooer of the Princess Elizabeth, afterwards queen. He provided his royal nephew lavishly with money, and sought to supplant the protector in his good graces. Somerset had inaugurated his rule by an expedition against the Scots, to compel the execution of treaties for the marriage of their infant sovereign to the child-king of England; but in the midst of a brilliant, though brief campaign, he suddenly withdrew, to check it was supposed the intrigues of his younger brother. It soon became apparent that one or other of the two brothers must fall. It was Somerset who triumphed. Lord Seymour was accused of high treason, as having conspired to change the form of government. He was condemned by the summary process of a bill of attainder, and expiated his ambition on the block, being beheaded on Tower Hill, on the 20th of March, 1549. Edward easily abandoned to his fate the uncle who had petted him, and no entry in his diary records the slightest emotion at the execution of Lord Seymour of Sudeley. Indeed, throughout his brief reign, he was the merest puppet in the hands of others, so far as merely secular government was concerned, and nothing purely and simply political seems to have elicited from him a spark of the Tudor fire. In what is perhaps the most remarkable of his writings, his treatise on government, entitled "Discourse on the Reformation of Abuses," and the authorship of which is referred to 1551, when he was fourteen, it is curious to observe how little of the personal element enters into his royal meditations. The encroachments of the mercantile classes upon the aristocracy, the monopolizing tendencies of landowners, the universal lust of gain, and similar topics, are dwelt on with emphasis and gravity; but it is the work of a youthful philosopher much more than of a youthful king, eager for the day when he shall wield the sceptre uncontrolled. Edward's, moreover, was an isolated position. He was an orphan, and by the death of Catherine Parr he lost the only person who could have supplied the place of a mother. His sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, had separate establishments, and his intercourse with them was infrequent. Of mild disposition, he surrendered himself to those who were in authority; and while on all public occasions he bore himself with dignity, he appears to have been but repeating a lesson taught him by others. He fell back upon study and religion. Of his zeal for the latter, as for the former, there is no doubt. He was an earnest protestant, with leanings towards something very like Puritanism. His reproofs to his sister Mary for her countenance of the mass, bear the stamp of strong conviction overriding personal affection; and it was no wonder that he became the hope, not only in England, but through Europe, of the protestant leaders, who loved to call him the English Josiah. An anti-protestant rising in Devonshire in 1549 was accompanied by the more formidable insurrection known as Kett's rebellion, which combined anti-aristocratic with anti-protestant appeals to the passions of the multitude. It devolved on the earl of Warwick to suppress this dangerous movement, and his success at once marked him as the rival and competitor of Somerset, The fall of the latter was hastened by a war with France, provoked, against his wishes, by the policy of a majority of his colleagues, but the early disasters of which were ascribed to his incapacity. Early in the October of 1549, Warwick put himself at the head of a movement which had the deposition of Somerset for its object. Towards the middle of the month, the once-powerful protector, abandoned by the council, was committed to the Tower. Warwick, afterwards created Duke of Northumberland and lord high-admiral, reigned in his stead, without, however, the title of Protector. The opinions of the new premier, so to speak, were known to lean towards the old religion, and with his elevation the friends of protestantism began to fear for the prospects of their cause, and the fate of their champion Somerset. But here very probably, as it seems to us, the personal
