grown to manhood, weak in body and mind. At the age of twenty-three, all who saw him felt that he was destined through life to remain a mere puppet in the hands of the factions which divided his court. The bishop of Winchester resolved to forward the interests of his own party and oppose those of his rival, the duke of Gloucester, by negotiating a marriage between the king and a French princess, Margaret of Anjou, the daughter of René, titular king of Sicily and Jerusalem, and duke of Maine and Anjou. A clever, energetic, and high-spirited woman, it was expected that she would take the reins of government from the hands of her imbecile husband and become a powerful auxiliary to the party who had raised him to the throne. Nor were those expectations belied. Married at Lichfield in 1445, she lost no time in showing herself a partisan. The followers of Gloucester were relentlessly persecuted. His wife, Elinor Cobham, was apprehended as a sorceress. She was charged with having formed an image of the king in wax, which, when it was made to melt before the fire, had the effect of taking away his strength. Her incantations, it was alleged, had checked his growth and made him what he was. Found guilty of witchcraft and treason, she was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. The duke of Gloucester himself fared no better. He was cast into a dungeon, and there, not long afterwards, was found dead; a victim, it is supposed, to the jealousy of his successful rivals. This murder, and the discovery that one of the secret conditions of the marriage treaty had been the cession of Maine, gave rise to much discontent. The first symptom of popular disaffection was the insurrection of Jack Cade, an obscure adventurer, who, assuming the name of Mortimer, marched into London at the head of an army of followers who had joined him in Kent. The movement was attributed to the duke of York, the representative in the female line of the duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III.; King Henry VI. being the representative in the male line of John of Gaunt, the fourth son of the same king.—(See Henry IV.) The suspected nobleman represented the house of York and its claim to the crown. Possessed of all the qualifications which secure popularity, he had contracted an alliance with the Nevilles, the powerful earls of Westmoreland and Warwick, and had thereby immensely increased his influence. He was in Ireland at the period of Cade's insurrection; but dreading a plot against his own safety, after its suppression he returned in 1450 to England, and collecting an army of supporters, advanced towards London, not with the view of asserting his claim to the crown, but simply with that of intimidating his opponents. While he, by the advice of his kinsmen, retired to his strongholds in the country, the duke of Somerset, who as a descendant of John of Gaunt was considered by the Lancasterians to be next in succession to the crown, became the chief adviser of the queen. In 1453 the king, who had long been on the verge of imbecility, sank into total bodily and mental prostration. York was chosen protector of the kingdom, his rival, Somerset, being sent to the Tower. This triumph was, however, of short duration. The queen had given birth to a son. She went to see her husband with the child. The king asked its name, held up his hands, and thanked God, saying that he knew not till then that he had been ill. Having recovered the use of his reason, one of his first acts was to put an end to the protectorate and to liberate Somerset. On the recall of this nobleman, the duke of York retired to Wales, raised an army, and advanced towards London, declaring that he remained faithful to the king, and that his object simply was to secure the expulsion of Somerset from court. The king's reply to a message to this effect was, that he would sooner die than abandon any of the lords who were faithful to him. On the 31st May, 1455, an engagement accordingly took place at St. Albans, in which the royalists were defeated. Somerset was slain, and the king, wounded by an arrow, was taken prisoner. The duke of York reassumed the title of protector, the king being again declared imbecile, and unfit to exercise the functions of royalty. Peace, however, lasted but a short time. The intrigues of Queen Margaret stirred up a faction against the duke of York, and compelled him to seek for safety in flight. To uphold his cause the earl of Warwick raised an army, and defeated the queen at Northampton in July, 1460. He again took the king prisoner, without, however, making any attempt to deprive him of the crown, the reason probably being that the simplicity and uprightness of his character had won for him a sort of veneration both from the nobles and the common people. The queen was not so easily caught. She escaped with her son to the north of England, and there succeeded in mustering a large force. Marching southwards she encountered her enemies at Wakefield, where on 24th December, 1460, she gained a decisive victory. The duke of York falling in the battle, his head was severed from his body and, decked with a paper crown, was stuck upon the gates of the city from which he had taken his title. At a second battle fought at St. Albans, in which the queen was again victorious, she recovered her husband. These successes did not, however, enable her to advance to London. It had been secured by Warwick, and there the son of the duke of York, as Edward IV., was proclaimed king. In March, 1461, a great battle was fought at Towton in Yorkshire. The queen was defeated, but escaped with her husband to Scotland. Thence she proceeded to France. Returning with assistance obtained from Louis XI., she was again defeated at Hexham in Northumberland on 15th May, 1464. She effected her escape. Her husband was less fortunate. He wandered about for some time among the moors of Lancashire, securing shelter and protection from devoted followers; but he was caught at last and consigned to the Tower. He remained there for six years a prisoner, and had been well-nigh forgotten when an unexpected event brought him again upon the stage. Edward IV., supported by the powerful nobles of the Yorkist party, seemed to be securely seated on the throne. His marriage, however, was the cause of a quarrel with his powerful subject the earl of Warwick. While Edward escaped to Holland, the earl advanced to London at the head of a powerful army, dragged Henry VI. from his dungeon, and again proclaimed him king. Edward recovered from his panic and returned to England. Collecting an army he encountered Warwick on the plain of Barnet, near London, on 14th April, 1471, and gained a decisive victory, his opponent being sit. in. On the same day Margaret and her son, the prince of Wales, now a handsome young man, landed at Weymouth. At the head of an army hastily collected, she encountered Edward at Tewkesbury on the 4th May, 1471, and was totally defeated. This battle terminated the war. The prince of Wales was, it is said, murdered, the queen was sent to the Tower, and after four years imprisonment there, at Windsor, and Wallingford, she was ransomed by Louis XI., and returning to Anjou, died there. The king was also sent to the Tower, and did not long survive his son. An attempt made by the Bastard Fauconberg to break into the prison and carry him off, may have precipitated his fate. Certain it is that his dead body was exposed in St. Paul's on the 22nd May, 1471, and that the duke of Gloucester, afterwards Richard III., was generally believed to have murdered him. His remains were buried at first in the abbey at Chertsey, but they were afterwards removed to Windsor, where a monument was erected over them by order of Edward IV. The few cases in which Henry VI. had shown a will of his own, demonstrated his native goodness of heart. He was now revered as a martyr, and miracles were worked at his tomb. Pope Julius was asked to canonize him, but refused, according to Bacon, on the ground that the poor king was too simple to have been a saint.—G. B—y.
HENRY VII., King of England, and founder of the Tudor dynasty, was born at Pembroke castle on the 25th of June, 1456. His father, Edmond Tudor, earl of Richmond, survived his birth only a few months, leaving the infant earl to the care of his mother, a noble-minded and accomplished woman. It was from her that he derived those slender genealogical claims to the throne of England, which the fortune of war and a skilfully-contrived matrimonial alliance afterwards strengthened and confirmed. Margaret, countess of Richmond, was the great granddaughter of John of Gaunt, by his third wife, Catherine Swynford, the sister of the wife of the poet Chaucer. John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, from whom the mother of Henry VII. descended, was the eldest son of John of Gaunt by this connection, but had not been born in wedlock. He was legitimized by act of parliament; whether or not he and his descendants were formally excluded from the succession is a disputed point. Descendants of John of Gaunt by earlier marriages than that to Catherine Swynford were plentiful, but they were chiefly settled on the continent; and from an early period it would seem the little earl of Richmond was deemed a likely inheritor of the English crown. At least tradition tells of a prophecy to that effect uttered by Henry VI., when the child-earl was presented to him by his mother. But the boy's upbringing had little about it that was regal. "From the age of five," he told Philip de Comines long afterwards, he had
