368 



HENRY VII. (OF ENGLAND). 



HENRY VII. (OF ENGLAND). 



S70 



the rebellion of Wat Tyler, seventy years before. [CADE, JOHN.] 

 Before the close of the following year the French, in addition to 

 Normandy, had recovered all Guienne; and with the exception of 

 Calais, not a foot of ground remained to England of all her recent 

 continental possessions. Bordeaux, which had been subject to the 

 English government for three centuries and a half, revolted the follow- 

 ing year; and the brave Talbot, now eighty years of age, wag sent to 

 Guienne to take advantage of that movement ; but both he and his 

 son fell in battle, 20th of July 1463; and on the 10th of October 

 following Bordeaux surrendered to Charles. 



The remainder of the history of the reign of Henry VI. is made 

 up of the events that arose out of the contest for the crown which 

 eventually placed another family on the throne. [EDWARD IV.] It is 

 only necessary here to enumerate in their chronological order the 

 leading facts in the story of Henry's personal fortunes. On the 13th 

 of October 1453 Queen Margaret was delivered at Westminster of a 

 son, who was named Edward, and early in the next year, according to 

 custom, created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. About the 

 same time the king sunk into a state of mind amounting to absolute 

 incapacity. By the beginning of the year 1455 however he hac 

 recovered such use of his faculties as he had formerly had, and again 

 took upon him the nominal administration of the government, which 

 during bis malady had been committed to the Duke of York. In the 

 contest of arms that soon ensued, he was taken prisoner by the Ear 

 of Warwick at St. Albans, 23rd of May 1455, and towards the end o 

 that year he was again declared to be in a state of incapacity, and 

 the Duke of York resumed the management of affairs with the title ol 

 protector. Again however in a few months Henry recovered his 

 health, and the government was conducted in his name till his second 

 capture by the young Karl of March (afterwards Edward IV.) al 

 Northampton, 10th of July 1460. On this occasion the queen escaped 

 with her son, and eventually made her way to Scotland. The victory 

 obtained by Margaret over the Earl of Warwick at Barnet Heath, 

 1 7th of February 1461, again liberated her husband ; after which, and 

 the issue of the battle of Towton, 29th of March, which established 

 Edward on the throne, he retired with the queen and Prince Edward 

 to Scotland. When Margaret again took up arms and invaded England 

 in 1462, Henry was placed for security in the castle of Hardlough in 

 Merionethshire; and here he remained till the spring of 1464, when 

 he was brought from Wales to join a new insurrection of his adherents 

 in the north of England. After the two final defeats of the Lancas- 

 trians at Hedgley Moor, 25th of April, and at Hexham, 15th of May, 

 the deposed king lurk, d for more than a year among the moors of 

 Lancashire and Westmorland, till he was at last betrayed by a monk 

 of Addington, and seized as he sat at dinner in Waddington Hall in 

 Yorkshire, in June 1465. He was immediately conducted to London 

 and consigned to the Tower, where he remained in close confinement, 

 till the extraordinary revolution of October 1470 again restored him, 

 for a few months, to both his liberty and his crown. He was carried 

 from London to the battle of Barnet, fought 14th of April 1471, and 

 there fell into the hands of Edward, who immediately remanded him 

 to his cell in the Tower. The old man survived the final defeat of 

 his adherents, and the death of his son at Tewkesbury, 4th of May; 

 and a few days after an attempt, which had nearly succeeded, was 

 made by Thomas Nevil, culled the Bastard of Falconberg, to break 

 into his prison and carry him off by force. This probably determined 

 Edward to take effectual means for the prevention of further disturb- 

 ance from the same quarter. All that is further known is that on 

 Wednesday the 22nd the dead body of Henry was exposed to public 

 view in St. Paul's. Generally however it has been believed that he 

 was murdered, and that his murderer was the king's brother, the 

 Duke of Gloucester, afterwards Richard III. Henry VI. was after his 

 death revered as a martyr by the Lancastrians, and many miracles 

 were reported to have been wrought at his tomb. An attempt was 

 made in the next century by his successor Henry VII. to prevail 

 upon Pope Julius II. to canonise him; the pope referred the matter 

 to the examination of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops 

 of London, Winchester, and Durham ; but it came to nothing. " The 

 general opinion was," says Bacon (' Life of Henry VII.'), " that Pope 

 Julius was too dear, and that the king would not come to his rates. 

 But it is more probable that that pope, who was extremely jealous of 

 the dignity of the see of Home, and of the acts thereof, knowing 

 that king Henry VI. was reputed in the world abroad bat for a 

 simple man, was afraid it would but diminish the estimation of that 

 kind of honour, if there were not a distance kept between innocents 

 anil saints." 



HENRY VIL was born at Pembroke Castle on the 21st of January 

 1456. His father was Edmund Tudor, surnamed of Hudham, who 

 had been created Earl of Richmond in 1452, being the son of Sir Owen 

 Tudor and Queen Catherine, widow of Henry V. He was thus pater- 

 nally descended both from the royal house of France and also, it is 

 said, from the ancient sovereigns of Wales, for such is the derivation 

 assigned by the genealogists to the Tudors. But it was his maternal 

 extraction that gave Henry Tudor his political importance. His 

 mother was Margaret, the only child of John Beaufort, duke of Somer- 

 set, whose father of the same name was the eldest of the sons of Johu 

 of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the root of the Lancastrian house, by 

 bis third wife, Catherine Swynford. The Beauforts, as tho children 



11IOU. DIV. VOL. Ill, 



of Gaunt by this wife were named, having been born before marriage, 

 and only subsequently legitimated by a patent entered on the rolls of 

 parliament, which appears (though there is some doubt as to that 

 point) not to have opened to them the succession to the crown, were 

 not at first looked upon as in themselves or their descendants forming 

 strictly a branch of the House of Lancaster; their name itself dis- 

 tinguished them as another family. But towards the close of the 

 reign of Henry VI. their royal descent and proximity to the throne 

 began to be spoken of as giving them important pretensions. After 

 the termination of the wars of the Roses, tho Somerset family remained 

 the only representatives of the House of Lancaster in England : there 

 were indeed in Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Denmark, nearly a 

 dozen descendants of the daughters of John of Gaunt by his two 

 earlier marriages, some of whom at least, namely, those sprung from 

 Henry IV., had clearly a prior place in the line of succession to the 

 Beaufbrts, had the legitimation of the latter been ever so perfect ; but 

 the circumstances of the time were not such as to allow any validity 

 to these foreign titles. After Richard III. obtained the throne, only 

 two really formidable members of the House of Laucaster survived, 

 namely, this Henry, earl of Richmond, and Henry, duke of Bucking- 

 ham, whose mother was also a Margaret Beaufort, a great-grand-daughter 

 of John of Gaunt. But her father was a younger brother of the father 

 of the Countess of Richmond, whose son therefore undoubtedly stood 

 first in the lino of the family succession. 



Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, died in 1456, the same year in 

 which his son Henry was born. Throughout the stormy period that 

 followed the child found a protector in his uncle Jasper Tudor, earl 

 of Pembroke, till on the accession of Edward IV., in 1461, the earl 

 was attainted and obliged to fly the country. Henry appears to have 

 been then consigned by the new king to the charge of Sir William 

 Herbert, baron Herbert (afterwards created Earl of Pembroke), and 

 to have been carried by that nobleman to his residence of Raglan 

 Castle in Monmouthshire. Long afterwards he told the French histo- 

 rian Comiues that he had been either in prison or under strict 

 surveillance from the time he was five years of age. He is said how- 

 ever to have been brought to court on the restoration of Henry VI. 

 in 1470, and it is to this date that the story is assigned of his having 

 been prophetically pointed out by Henry as the person that was to 

 bring to a close the contest between the two houses. It must have 

 been at this time also that he was sent to Eton, if he ever really 

 studied, us is reported by some, at that school. After the battle of 

 Tewkesbury he seems to have been, sent back to Raglan Castle, and 

 to have remained there till his uncle, who had fled to France, returned 

 secretly, and found means to carry him off to his own castle of Pem- 

 broke. Upon this Edward immediately took measures to recover 

 possession of the boy, but his uncle at last contrived to embark with 

 him at Tenby, with the intention of proceeding to France. They were 

 forced however by stress of weather to put into a port of Bretagne, 

 and there they were detained by the duke, Francis II. But although 

 this prince would not suffer them to pursue their journey, he allowed 

 them an honourable maintenance, and as much liberty as was con- 

 sistent with his design that they should not pass out of his dominions, 

 nor although repeatedly importuned by King Edward to deliver them 

 up would he ever listen to the proposal. Henry continued resident 

 in these circumstances in the town of Vonnes in Bretague till after 

 the accession of Richard III. 



As soon as it came to be known that Edward V. and his brother 

 no longer existed, a fact which Richard III. himself took pains to 

 publish, without any attempt to make it appear that they had not 

 been taken off by violence, the minds of men turned to the young 

 Earl of Richmond as the most eligible opponent to set up against the 

 actual possessor of the crown. Morton, bishop of Ely, afterwards 

 archbishop of Canterbury and cardinal, has the credit of having first 

 suggested to the heads of his party, that the crown should be offered 

 to Henry on condition of his engaging to espouse the Princess Eliza- 

 beth, daughter of Edward IV., and since the death of her brothers 

 the undoubted heiress of the rights of the House of York. The 

 scheme received the assent of the leaders of the various interests 

 already confederated against Richard of the queen dowager, of her 

 son the Marquis of Dorset, and of the Duke of Buckingham, what- 

 ever were the motives that had induced the last-mentioned nobleman 

 ;o make his sudden change from the one side to the other. Com- 

 munications were immediately entered into with Henry's mother the 

 2ountess of Richmond, and she also entered cordially into the design, 

 although her present husband Lord Stanley had all along steadily 

 adhered to Richard, with whom he at present was. A messenger was 

 now despatched to Henry in Bretagne, September 24, 1483, and he 

 was informed that the general rising in his favour would take place 

 on the 18th of October. Tho issue of this first attempt was eminently 

 disastrous to the confederacy of the earl's friends. Henry sailed from 

 St. Malo with a fleet of forty sail, which he had been enabled to pro- 

 vide partly by the assistance of the Duke of Bretagne ; but a storm 

 dispersed his ships as he crossed the Channel, and when he reached 

 ,he English coast near Poole he deemed it prudent, with tho insuf- 

 icicut force that he had remaining, not to land. Meanwhile the hasty, 

 11-combined revolt of Buckingham ami his associates fell to pieces 

 without the striking of a blow. Buckingham himself was taken and 

 as a traitor: of tho othr chief persons engaged iu tho 



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