32 THE HISTOKY OF THE ROYAL BUCKHOUNDS. 



and Willoughby, and his grandson, Sir Robert Welles, severally 

 perished by the axe of the executioner. Long as is this 

 catalogue of slaughtered heroes, there might be appended 

 many other and no less illustrious names. At the battle of 

 Bloreheath was slain James Touchet, Lord Audley ; at the 

 battle of Northampton, John, Viscount de Beaumont ; at 

 Wakefield, William Bonville, Lord Harrington ; at Tewkesbury, 

 John, Lord Wenlock ; at Towton, Banulph, Lord Dacre of 

 Gillesland ; and at Bosworth, John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, 

 and Walter Devereux, Lord Ferriers of Chartley. Lastly, on 

 the scaffold perished William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke ; 

 John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester ; James Butler, Earl of 

 Wiltshire; William Bonville, Lord Bonville; William, Lord 

 Hastings ; Sir Owen Tudor, grandfather of Henry VII. ; and 

 Sir Bernard Brocas, second Hereditary Master of the Royal 

 Buckhounds, under the circumstances mentioned in the pre- 

 ceding chapter. The ancient nobility had been almost entirely 

 annihilated ; and in the renowned and powerful Earl of 

 Warwick, who is said to have feasted at his board, in the 

 different manors and castles he possessed, upward of thirty 

 thousand persons, there had fallen the greatest and the last of 

 those mighty barons by whom the Crown had in former times 

 been checked and overawed. Such, indeed, had been this 

 deluge of noble blood in the field or on the scaffold that 

 Henry VII. could find only twenty-eight temporal peers to 

 summon to his first Parliament ; and such the change effected 

 by it, in a political sense, on the management of public affairs, 

 that the accession of the first Tudor is considered the origin of 

 the modern system, and from it the constitutional historian 

 of England, notwithstanding all the charters and acts to be 

 found in the statute-book prior to this time, has dated the 

 commencement of his history. 



This fearful picture of the state of the country in those 

 days supplies a sufiicient excuse for the barrenness of our 

 subject during this unhappy period. With the union of the 

 Houses of York and Lancaster by the marriage of Henry VII. 

 with Elizabeth of York a happier state of affairs ensued. 



