Young Folks' History of England

CHAPTER XXII

EDWARD IV

A.D. 1461—1483

Though Edward IV. was made king, the wars of the Red and White Roses were not over yet. Queen Margaret and her friends were always trying to get help for poor King Henry. Edward had been so base and mean as to have him led into London, with his feet tied together under his horse, while men struck him on the face, and cried out, "Behold the traitor!" But Henry was meek, patient, and gentle throughout; and, when shut up in the Tower, spent his time in reading and praying, or playing with his little dog.

Queen Margaret and her son Edward were living with her father in France, and she was always trying to have her husband set free, and brought back to his throne. In the meantime, all England was exceedingly surprised to find that Edward IV. had been secretly married to a beautiful lady named Elizabeth Woodville—Lady Grey. Her first husband had been killed fighting for Henry, and she had stood under an oak tree, when King Edward was passing, to entreat that his lands might not be taken from her little boys. The king fell in love with her and married her, but for a long time he was afraid to tell the Earl of Warwick; and when he did, Warwick was greatly offended—and all the more because Elizabeth's relations were proud and gay in their dress, and tried to set themselves above all the old nobles. Warwick himself had no son, but he had two daughters, whom he meant to marry to the king's two brothers—George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Edward thought this would make Warwick too powerful, and though he could not prevent George from marrying Isabel Nevil, the eldest daughter, the discontent grew so strong that Warwick persuaded George to fly with him, turn against his own brother, and offer Queen Margaret their help! No wonder Margaret did not trust them, and was very hard to persuade that Warwick could mean well by her; but at last she consented, and gave her son Edward—a fine lad of sixteen—to marry his daughter, Anne Nevil; after which, Warwick—whom men began to call the king-maker— went back to England with Clarence, to raise their men, while she was to follow with her son and his young wife. Warwick came so suddenly that he took the Yorkists at unawares. Edward had to flee for his life to Flanders, leaving his wife and his babies to take shelter in Westminster Abbey—since no one durst take any one out of that holy place—and poor Henry was taken out of prison and set on the throne again. However, Edward soon got help in Flanders, where his sister was married to the Duke of Burgundy. He came back again, gathered his friends, and sent messages to his brother Clarence that he would forgive him if he would desert the earl. No one ever had less faith or honor than George of Clarence. He did desert Warwick, just as the battle of Barnet Heath was beginning; and Warwick's king-making all ended, for he was killed, with his brother and many others, in the battle.

And this was the first news that met Margaret when, after being long hindered by foul weather, she landed at Plymouth. She would have done more wisely to have gone back, but her son Edward longed to strike a blow for his inheritance, and they had friends in Wales whom they hope to meet. So they made their way into Gloucestershire; but there King Edward, with both his brothers, came down upon them at Tewkesbury, and there their army was routed, and the young prince taken and killed—some say by the king himself and his brothers. Poor broken hearted Queen Margaret was made prisoner too, and carried to the Tower, where she arrived a day or two after the meek and crazed captive, Henry VI., had been slain, that there might be no more risings in his name. And so ended the long war of York and Lancaster —though not in peace or joy to the savage, faithless family who had conquered.

Edward was merry and good-natured when not angered, and had quite sense and ability enough to have been a very good king, if he had not been lazy, selfish, and full of vices. He actually set out to conquer France, and then let himself be persuaded over and paid off by the cunning King of France, and went home again, a laughing-stock to everybody. The two kings had an interview on a bridge over the River Somme in France, where they talked through a kind of fence, each being too suspicious of the other to meet, without such a barrier between them. As to George, the king had never trusted him since his shameful behavior when Warwick rebelled; besides, he was always abusing the queen's relations, and Richard was always telling the king of all the bad and foolish things he did or said. At last there was a great outbreak of anger, and the king ordered the Duke of Clarence to be imprisoned in the Tower; and there, before long, he too was killed. The saying was that he was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine, but this is not at all likely to be true. He left two little children, a boy and a girl.

So much cruel slaughter had taken place, that most of the noble families in England had lost many sons, and a great deal of their wealth, and none of them ever became again so mighty as the king- maker had been. His daughter, Anne, the wife of poor Edward of Lancaster, was found by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, hidden as a cook-maid in London, and she was persuaded to marry him—as, indeed, she had always been intended for him. He was a little, thin, slight man, with one shoulder higher than the other, and keen, cunning dark eyes; and as the king was very tall, with a handsome, blue-eyed face, people laughed at the contrast, called Gloucester Richard Crook-back and were very much afraid of him.

It was in this reign that books began to be printed in England instead of written. Printing had been found out in Germany a little before, and books had been shown to Henry VI., but the troubles of his time kept him from attending to them. Now, however, Edward's sister, the Duchess of Burgundy, much encouraged a printer named Caxton, whose books she sent her brother, and other presses were set up in London. Another great change had come in. Long ago, in the time of Henry III., a monk name Roger Bacon had made gunpowder; but nobody used it much until, in the reign of Edward III., it was found out how cannon might be fired with it; and some say it was first used in the battle of Crecy. But it was not till the reign of Edward IV. that smaller guns, such as each soldier could carry one of for himself, were invented— harquebuses, as they were called;—and after this the whole way of fighting was gradually altered. Printing and gunpowder both made great changes in everything, though not all at once. King Edward did not live to see the changes. He had hurt his health with his revellings and amusements, and died quite in middle age, in the year 1483: seeing, perhaps, at last, how much better a king he might have been.

CHAPTER XXIII

EDWARD V

A.D. 1483

Edward IV. left several daughters and two sons—Edward, Prince of Wales, who was fourteen years old, and Richard, Duke of York, who was eleven. Edward was at Ludlow Castle—where the princes of Wales were always brought up—with his mother's brother, Lord Rivers; his half-brother, Richard Grey; and other gentlemen.

When the tidings came of his father's death, they set out to bring him to London to be crowned king.

But, in the meantime, the Duke of Gloucester and several of the noblemen, especially the Duke of Buckingham, agreed that it was unbearable that the queen and her brothers should go on having all the power, as they had done in Edward's time. Till the king was old enough to govern, his father's brother, the Duke of Gloucester, was the proper person to rule for him, and they would soon put an end to the Woodvilles. The long wars had made everybody cruel and regardless of the laws, so that no one made much objection when Gloucester and Buckingham met the king and took him from his uncle and half-brother, who were sent off to Pontefract Castle, and in a short time their heads were cut off there. Another of the late king's friends was Lord Hastings; and as he sat at the council table in the Tower of London, with the other lords, Richard came in, and showing his own lean, shrunken arm, declared that Lord Hastings had bewitched him, and made it so. The other lords began to say the _if_ he done so it was horrible. But Richard would listen to no _ifs_, and said he would not dine till Hasting's head was off. And his cruel word was done.

The queen saw that harm was intended, and went with all her other children to her former refuge in the sanctuary at Westminster; nor would she leave it when her son Edward rode in state into London and was taken to the Tower, which was then a palace as well as a prison.

The Duke of Gloucester and the Council said that this pretence at fear was very foolish, and that the little Duke of York ought to be with his brother; and they sent the Archbishop of Canterbury to desire her to give the boy up. He found the queen sitting desolate, with all her long light hair streaming about her, and her children round her; and he spoke kindly to her at first and tried to persuade her of what he really believed himself—that it was all her foolish fears and fancies that the Duke of Gloucester could mean any ill to his little nephew, and that the two brothers ought to be together in his keeping.

Elizabeth cried, and said that the boys were better apart, for they quarrelled when they were together, and that she could not give up little Richard. In truth, she guessed that their uncle wanted to get rid of them and to reign himself; and she knew that while she had Richard, Edward would be safe, since it would not make him king to destroy one without the other. Archbishop Morton, who believed Richard's smooth words, and was a very good, kind man, thought this all a woman's nonsense, and told her that if she would not give up the boy freely, he would be taken from her by force. If she had been really a wise, brave mother, she would have gone to the Tower with her boy, as queen and mother, and watched over her children herself. But she had always been a silly, selfish woman, and she was afraid for herself. So she let the archbishop lead her child away, and only sat crying in the sanctuary instead of keeping sight of him.

The next thing that happened was, that the Duke of Gloucester caused one Dr. Shaw to preach a sermon to the people of London in the open air, explaining that King Edward IV. had been a very bad man, and had never been properly married to Lady Grey, and so that she was no queen at all, and her children had no right to reign. The Londoners liked Gloucester and hated the Woodvilles, and all belonging to them, and after some sermons and speeches of this sort, there were so many people inclined to take as their king the man rather than the boy, that the Duke of Buckingham led a deputation to request Richard to accept the crown in his nephew's stead. He met it as if the whole notion was quite new to him, but, of course, accepted the crown, sent for his wife, Anne Nevil, and her son, and was soon crowned as King Richard III. of England.

As for the two boys, they were never seen out of the Tower again. They were sent into the prison part of it, and nobody exactly knows what became of them there; but there cannot be much doubt that they must have been murdered. Some years later, two men confessed that they had been employed to smother the two brothers with pillows, as they slept; and though they added some particulars to the story that can hardly be believed, it is most likely that this was true. Full two hundred years later, a chest was found under a staircase, in what is called the White Tower, containing bones that evidently had belonged to boys of about fourteen and eleven years old; and these were placed in a marble urn among the tombs of the kings in Westminster Abbey. But even to this day, there are some people who doubt whether Edward V. and Richard of York were really murdered, or if Richard were not a person who came back to England and tried to make himself king.

CHAPTER XXIV

RICHARD III

A.D. 1483—1485

Richard III. seems to have wished to be a good and great king; but he had made his way to the throne in too evil a manner to be likely to prosper. How many people he had put to death we do not know, for when the English began to suspect the he had murdered his two nephews, they also accused him of the death of everyone who had been secretly slain ever since Edward IV. came to the throne, when he had been a mere boy. He found he must be always on the watch; and his home was unhappy, for his son, for whose sake he had striven so hard to be king, died while yet a boy, and Anne, his wife, not long after.

Then his former staunch friend, the Duke of Buckingham, began to feel that though he wanted the sons of Elizabeth Woodville to be set aside from reigning, it was quite another thing to murder them. He was a vain, proud man, who had a little royal blood—being descended from Thomas, the first Duke of Gloucester, son of Edward III.—and he bethought himself that, now all the House of Lancaster was gone, and so many of the House of York, he might possibly become king. But he had hardly begun to make a plot, before the keen-sighted, watchful Richard found it out, and had him seized and beheaded.

There was another plot, though, that Richard did not find out in time. The real House of Lancaster had ended when poor young Edward was killed at Tewkesbury; but the Beauforts—the children of that younger family of John of Gaunt, who had first begun the quarrel with the Duke of York—were not all dead. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of the eldest son, had married a Welsh gentleman named Edmund Tudor, and had a son called Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Edward IV. had always feared that this youth might rise against him, and he had been obliged to wander about in France and Brittany since the death of his father; but nobody was afraid of Lady Margaret, and she had married a Yorkist nobleman, Lord Stanley.

Now, the eldest daughter of Edward IV.—Elizabeth, or Lady Bessee, as she was called—was older than her poor young brothers; and she heard, to her great horror, that her uncle wanted to commit the great wickedness of making her his wife, after poor Anne Nevil's death. There is a curious old set of verses, written by Lord Stanley's squire, which says that Lady Bessee called Lord Stanley to a secret room, and begged him to send to his stepson, Richmond, to invite him to come to England and set them all free.

Stanley said he could not write well enough, and that he could not trust a scribe; but Lady Bessee said she could write as well as any scribe in England. So she told him to come to her chamber at nine that evening, with his trusty squire; and there she wrote letters, kneeling by the table, to all the noblemen likely to be discontented with Richard, and appointing a place of meeting with Stanley; and she promised herself that, if Henry Tudor would come and overthrow the cruel tyrant Richard, she would marry him: and she sent him a ring in pledge of her promise.

Henry was in Brittany when he received the letter. He kissed the ring, but waited long before he made up his mind to try his fortune. At last he sailed in a French ship, and landed at Milford Haven—for he knew the Welsh would be delighted to see him; and, as he was really descended from the great British chiefs, they seemed to think that to make him king of England would be almost like having King Arthur back again.

They gathered round him, and so did a great many English nobles and gentlemen. But Richard, though very angry, was not much alarmed, for he knew Henry Tudor had never seen a battle. He marched out to meet him, and a terrible fight took place at Redmore Heath, near Market Bosworth, where, after long and desperate struggling, Richard was overwhelmed and slain, his banner taken, and his men either killed or driven from the field. His body was found gashed, bleeding, and stripped; and thus was thrown across a horse and carried into Leicester, where he had slept the night before.

The crown he had worn over his helmet was picked up from the branches of a hawthorn, and set on the head of Henry Tudor. Richard was the last king of the Plantagenet family, who had ruled over England for more than three hundred years. This battle of Bosworth likewise finished the whole bloody war of the Red and White Roses.

CHAPTER XXV

HENRY VII

A.D. 1485—1509

Henry Tudor married the Lady Bessee as soon as he came to London, and by this marriage the causes of the Red and white Roses were united; so that he took for his badge a great rose—half red and half white. You may see it carved all over the beautiful chapel that he built on to Westminster Abbey to be buried in.

He was not a very pleasant person; he was stiff, and cold, and dry, and very mean and covetous in some ways—though he liked to make a grand show, and dress all his court in cloth of gold and silver, and the very horses in velvet housings, whenever there was any state occasion. Nobody greatly cared for him; but the whole country was so worn out with the troubles of the Wars of the Roses, that there was no desire to interfere with him; and people only grumbled, and said he did not treat his gentle, beautiful wife Elizabeth as he ought to do, but was jealous of her being a king's daughter. There was one person who did hate him most bitterly, and that was the Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of Edward IV. and Richard III.: the same who, as I told you, encouraged printing so much. She felt as if a mean upstart had got into the place of her brothers, and his having married her niece did not make it seem a bit the better to her. There was one nephew left—the poor young orphan son of George, Duke of Clarence—but he had always been quite silly, and Henry VII. had him watched carefully, for fear some one should set him up to claim the crown. He was called Earl of Warwick, as heir to his grandfather, the king-maker.

Suddenly, a young man came to Ireland and pretended to be this Earl of Warwick. He deceived a good many of the Irish, and the Mayor of Dublin actually took him to St. Patrick's Cathedral, where he was crowned as King Edward the Sixth: and then he was carried to the banquet upon an Irish chieftain's back. He came to England with some Irish followers, and some German soldiers hired by the duchess; and a few, but not many, English joined him. Henry met him at a village called Stoke, near Newark, and all his Germans and Irish were killed, and he himself made prisoner. Then he confessed that he was really a baker's son named Lambert Simnel; and, as he turned out to be a poor weak lad, whom designing people had made to do just what they pleased, the king took him into his kitchen as a scullion; and, as he behaved well there, afterwards set him to look after the falcons, that people used to keep to go out with to catch partridges and herons.

But after this, a young man appeared under the protection of the Duchess of Burgundy, who said he was no other than the poor little Duke of York, Richard, who had escaped from the Tower when his brother was murdered. Englishmen, who came from Flanders, said that he was a clever, cowardly lad of the name of Peter (or Perkin) Warbeck, the son of a townsman of Tournay; but the duchess persuaded King James IV. of Scotland to believe him a real royal Plantagenet. He went to Edinburgh, married a beautiful lady, cousin to the king, and James led him into England at the head of an army to put forward his claim. But nobody would join him, and the Scots did not care about him; so James sent him away to Ireland, whence he went to Cornwall. However, he soon found fighting was of no use, and fled away to the New Forest, where he was taken prisoner. He was set in the stocks, and there made to confess that he was really Perkin Warbeck and no duke, and then he was shut up in the Tower. But there he made friends with the real Earl of Warwick, and persuaded him into a plan for escape; but this was found out, and Henry, thinking that he should never have any peace or safety whilst either of them was alive, caused Perkin to be hanged, and poor innocent Edward of Warwick to be beheaded.

It was thought that this cruel deed was done because Henry found that foreign kings did not think him safe upon the throne while one Plantagenet was left alive, and would not give their children in marriage to his sons and daughters. He was very anxious to make grand marriages for his children, and make peace with Scotland by a wedding between King James and his eldest daughter, Margaret. For his eldest son, Arthur, Prince of Wales, he obtained Katharine, the daughter of the King of Aragon and Queen of Castille, and she was brought to England while both were mere children. Prince Arthur died when only eighteen years old; and King Henry then said that they had been both such children that they could not be considered really married, and so that Katharine had better marry his next son, Henry, although everyone knew that no marriage between a man and his brother's widow could be lawful. The truth was that he did not like to give up all the money and jewels she had brought; and the matter remained in dispute for some years—nor was it settled when King Henry himself died, after an illness that no one expected would cause his death. Nobody was very sorry for him, for he had been hard upon everyone, and had encouraged two wicked judges, named Dudley and Empson, who made people pay most unjust demands, and did everything to fill the king's treasury and make themselves rich at the same time.

It was a time when many changes were going on peacefully. The great nobles had grown much poorer and less powerful; and the country squires and chief people in the towns reckoned for much more in the State. Moreover, there was much learning and study going on everywhere. Greek began to be taught as well as Latin, and the New Testament was thus read in the language in which the apostles themselves wrote; and that led people to think over some of the evil ways that had grown up in their churches and abbeys, during those long, grievous years, when no one thought of much but fighting, or of getting out of the way of the enemy.

The king himself, and all his family, loved learning, and nobody more than his son Henry, who—if his elder brother had lived—was to have been archbishop of Canterbury.

It was in this reign, too, that America was discovered—though not by the English, but by Christopher Columbus, an Italian, who came out in ships that were lent to him by Isabel, the Queen of Spain, mother to Katharine, Princess of Wales. Henry had been very near sending Columbus, only he did not like spending so much money. How ever, he afterwards did send out some ships, which discovered Newfoundland. Henry died in the year 1509.

CHAPTER XXVI

HENRY VIII. AND CARDINAL WOLSEY

A.D. 1509—1529

The new king was very fond of the Princess Katharine, and he married her soon after his father's death, without asking any more questions about the right or wrong of it. He began with very gallant and prosperous times. He was very handsome, and skilled in all sports and games, and had such frank, free manners, that the people felt as if they had one of their best old Plantagenets back again. They were pleased, too, when he quarreled with the King of France, and like an old Plantagenet, led an army across the sea and besieged the town of Tournay. Again, it was like the time of Edward III., for James IV. of Scotland was a friend of the French king, and came across the Border with all the strength of Scotland, to ravage England while Henry was away. But there were plenty of stout Englishmen left, and under the Earl of Surrey, they beat the Scots entirely at the battle of Flodden field; and King James himself was not taken, but left dead upon the field, while his kingdom went to his poor little baby son. Though there had been a battle in France it was not another Crecy, for the French ran away so fast that it was called the battle of the Spurs. However, Henry's expedition did not come to much, for he did not get all the help he was promised; and he made peace with the French king, giving him in marriage his beautiful young sister Mary— though King Louis was an old, helpless, sickly man. Indeed, he only lived six weeks after the wedding, and before there was time to fetch Queen Mary home again, she had married a gentleman named Charles Brandon. She told he brother that she had married once to please him, and now she had married to please herself. But he forgave her, and made her husband Duke of Suffolk.

Henry's chief adviser, at this time, was Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York; a very able man, and of most splendid tastes and habits— outdoing even the Tudors in love of show. The pope had made him a cardinal—that is, one of the clergy, who are counted as parish priests in the diocese of Rome, and therefore have a right to choose the pope. They wear scarlet hats, capes, and shoes, and are the highest rank of all the clergy except the pope. Indeed, Cardinal Wolsey was in hopes of being chosen pope himself, and setting the whole Church to rights—for there had been several very wicked men reigning at Rome, one after the other, and they had brought things to such a pass that everyone felt there would be some great judgment from God if some improvement were not made. Most of Wolsey's arrangements with foreign princes had this end in view. The new king of France, Francis I., was young, brilliant and splendid, like Henry, and the two had a conference near Calais, when they brought their queens and their whole Court, and put up tents of velvet, silk, and gold—while everything was so extraordinarily magnificent, that the meeting has ever since been called the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

However, nothing came of it all. Cardinal Wolsey thought Francis's enemy—the Emperor Charles V.—more likely to help him to be pope, and make his master go over to that side; but after all an Italian was chosen in his stead. And there came a new trouble in his way. The king and queen had been married a good many years, and they had only one child alive, and that was a girl, the Lady Mary—all the others had died as soon as they were born—and statesmen began to think that if there never was a son at all, there might be fresh wars when Henry died; while others said that the loss of the children was to punish them for marrying unlawfully. Wolsey himself began to wish that the pope would say that it had never been a real marriage, and so to set the king free to put Katharine away and take another wife— some grand princess abroad. This was thinking more of what seemed prudent than of the right; and it turned out ill for Wolsey and all besides, for no sooner had the notion of setting aside poor Katharine come into his mind, than the king cast his eyes on Anne Boleyn, one of her maids of honor—a lively lady, who had been to France with his sister Mary. He was bent on marrying her, and insisted on the pope's giving sentence against Katharine. But the pope would not make any answer at all; first, because he was enquiring, and then because he could not well offend Katharine's nephew, the Emperor. Time went on, and the king grew more impatient, and at last a clergyman, named Thomas Cranmer, said that he might settle the matter by asking the learned men at the universities whether it was lawful for a man to marry his brother's widow. "He has got the right sow by the ear," cried Henry, who was not choice in his words, and he determined that the universities should decide it. But Wolsey would not help the king here. He knew that the pope had been the only person to decide such questions all over the Western Church for many centuries; and, besides, he had never intended to assist the king to lower himself by taking a wife like Anne Boleyn. But his secretary, Thomas Crumwell, told the king all of Wolsey's disapproval, and between them they found out something that the cardinal had done by the king's own wish, but which did not agree with the old disused laws. He was put down from all his offices of state, and accused of treason against the king; but while he was being brought to London to be tried, he became so ill at the abbey at Leicester that he was forced to remain there, and in a few days he died, saying, sadly—"If I had served God as I have served my king, He would not have forsaken me in my old age."

With Cardinal Wolsey ended the first twenty years of Henry's reign, and all that had ever been good in it.

CHAPTER XXVII