THE WARS OF THE ROSES.
THE KING-MAKER.
“_Heard ye the din of battle bray,_
_Lance to lance, and horse to horse?_
_Long years of havoc urge their destined course,_
_And through the kindred, squadrons mow their way._”
A GREAT noble now rides by on a magnificent coal-black steed. At once
your eye is attracted by him, and you feel that here is a Paladin worthy
of the pen of poet and romancer. Mark his great stature; his vast width
and depth of chest; his high forehead; his black, curling hair fretted
from the temples by the friction of his helmet; his handsome oval face;
his bold features; and his massive jaw, which speaks only too plainly of
his masterful nature and inflexible determination. You can readily
believe that he is the idol of thousands of his countrymen, and “a
setter up and plucker down” of kings.
Who is this remarkable man? He is none other than Richard Neville, Earl
of Warwick, the richest and most powerful noble in England. Thirty
thousand men eat his bread daily at the tables of his various great
castles; his retainers alone constitute an army, all clad in scarlet
coats with the “ragged staff” worked on back and front. His boundless
wealth, his profuse hospitality, his great family connections raise him
head and shoulders above his peers. He is the premier noble of England,
the arbiter of her destinies, and the “last of the barons.”
He lives in an age of battle, murder, and sudden death. His land is torn
by the long and fierce quarrels of two great families which are
selfishly and ruthlessly fighting for the crown. Henry the Sixth, a
mild, merciful, long-suffering, pious man, weak of health and weak of
purpose, a hater of strife and bloodshed and a lover of religion and
learning, sits insecurely on the throne, bolstered thereon by his
strong-willed, indomitable queen, Margaret of Anjou. He is the grandson
of that Lancastrian king who thrust from the throne the grandson of
Edward the Third. His hereditary right to the crown is inferior to that
of Richard, Duke of York; but his family has now been in possession of
the throne for more than half a century, and the brilliant victories of
his father have made men proud of the Lancastrian lineage. But feeble
son has succeeded valiant sire. France has been lost; there is no child
to succeed him; and he is surrounded by ambitious, quarrelsome nobles,
who make him a pawn in their selfish game. Already the great houses of
the realm have taken sides, and are sporting either the red or the white
rose. The citizens of London, the wealthy traders and craftsmen now
rising into a powerful caste, throw in their lot with York, and the
yeomen of the South and Midlands are for him too. And now, in the year
1453, the poor king goes mad, and York is made Protector of the realm.
He quite expects to be king when Henry passes away.
But a new arrival comes on the scene to dash all his hopes and force him
to the arbitrament of the sword. Queen Margaret bears a son, Henry
recovers, and York is dismissed from his post. He appeals to his friend
the great Warwick, and soon a large force rallies to his standard. The
rival armies meet at the old town of St. Albans, but ere the fight
begins York seeks the king and endeavours to make terms. But Henry, who
is as clay in the hands of his implacable wife—“the foreign woman” as
the English folk call her—is for the moment moulded into something
resembling courage. “I will live and die this day in the quarrel,” he
exclaims, and York is cavalierly dismissed. The royalists barricade the
streets, and bid the foe come on. The great earl by skilful generalship
breaks into the gardens behind the houses, and his archers gain the
streets with trumpets blowing and the war-cry “A Warwick! a Warwick!” A
tough street fight follows, but it is soon over. The king’s chief
supporter is dead, and he himself is in the hands of York. The wars of
the Roses have begun, and for more than thirty years the realm will be
plunged in a civil war so ghastly and unrelenting that even now it marks
the blackest page in our national history.
Not that the people generally will join in the strife. The family feuds
of great nobles concern them but little; they merely desire peace and
good government, that they may till their lands, labour in their
workshops, buy and sell, and fill their exhausted purses without
distraction. Right willingly would they let the sword rust in its
scabbard and the unstrung bow hang idly on the wall. But the land is
full of men who have made war their trade in France, and they are eager
to be hired for any adventure that is going. These roving mercenaries,
the gentry, and their hosts of retainers constitute the armies which
will maintain the long and bitter contest. But despite the bloody duels
of factious nobles, the business of the country is not interrupted. The
judges go on circuit as of old, taking their commissions from whichever
king is in the ascendant; and the peasant pauses in his hillside furrow
and leans on the handles of his plough to view the nobles of the land
dashing themselves to pieces in battle on the plain below. The war is a
war of nobles, and not of the commonalty.
The wild northern levies triumph, and the king is recovered. Then
Margaret arrays her prisoners, and sets up the little prince, her son,
to judge them. “Fair son,” she cries, “what deaths shall they die?” and
the lad forthwith orders their heads to be struck off. The wild, lawless
host tarries eight days at St. Albans, and this delay enables Warwick to
unite with the new Duke of York and reach London. The king and queen
gain nothing from their victory. They are forced to march north, and the
Londoners, glad to be saved from Margaret and her Border freebooters,
welcome York’s heir, and sing:—
“He that could London forsake, we will no more to us take.”
They crown the young man at Westminster, and as Edward the Fourth he
takes up the sceptre. It is Warwick who has made him king.
Now comes the story of a great quarrel and its dramatic sequel. Edward
has fallen in love with beautiful Elizabeth Woodville, the daughter of a
Red Rose father, and the widow of a Red Rose husband. He marries her
secretly, and all the while Warwick is negotiating a foreign marriage
for him with the French king’s sister. When Edward’s marriage to
Elizabeth Woodville is announced, Warwick’s annoyance and disgust know
no bounds. He dissembles, however, though day by day he grows angrier
and angrier as he sees power slipping from him and passing to the
“upstart” relatives of the new queen.
Edward, instigated by his new domestic circle, is bent on throwing off
the Neville yoke. So he heaps honours, high offices, lands, and wealth
on the Greys and the Woodvilles, and Warwick is furious. Such treatment
he will not brook. He who has set up the king can pull him down again.
So he seeks “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,” who is now jealous of
his brother, the king, and eager for a throne. Clarence marries
Warwick’s daughter, and the strings of insurrection are vigorously
pulled by the wily earl. Edward rouses himself at last and hastens
northward, where his cannon soon put the rebels to flight, and their
captured leader reveals Warwick’s plot to make Clarence king. At once
the pair of conspirators flee to France.
Warwick and that crafty intriguer, Louis the Eleventh, now concoct a
plan for driving their common enemy, King Edward, off the throne, and
restoring Henry the Sixth. Queen Margaret at first indignantly refuses
to accept the support of the man who has driven her into exile, and cast
foul aspersions on her character; but Warwick goes on bended knee to
her, and withdraws every charge. The queen keeps him in this humiliating
position for a quarter of an hour, and then relents. She agrees that her
son shall marry Warwick’s daughter, but only when he has restored Henry
to his throne. Then the king-maker, who has broken so many solemn oaths,
swears on a piece of the true cross to remain faithful to the
Lancastrian cause. A fleet is fitted out, Warwick lands at Dartmouth,
proclaims King Henry, and summons the national levies to his banner. As
Edward lies in bed at Doncaster, two friends burst into his chamber and
bid him rise and flee, for his foes are within an hour’s march. He
flings on his clothes, and without armour or money rides at breakneck
speed to Lynn, where he sets sail for Holland. Once more the king-maker
has made and unmade a king.
The old king is clad in a robe of blue velvet, brought out of the Tower,
set on horseback, and led to St. Paul’s amidst crowds of Londoners who
shout “God save King Henry.” The poor old king knows full well that the
proud noble who bears his train in the state procession is his and
England’s master, and that he must do his bidding or return whence he
came. Warwick has again triumphed, but his hold on power is far from
secure. The Lancastrians have no desire for a puppet king whose strings
are worked by their old enemy, and the Yorkists are busy preparing for
the return of Edward. Next spring he appears in the Humber, and pushes
on to London, where the gates are opened to him, and he secures the
person of King Henry. Warwick is in battle-array to the north of Barnet,
his forces “under a hedge-side.” Clarence, who has made peace with his
brother, offers mediation; but Warwick, angry at his double
faithlessness, contemptuously rejects his advances.
“Last scene of all, to end this strange, eventful history.” Raw, cold,
and dismal dawns the morning on Easter Sunday in the year 1471. A heavy
mist, which many a soldier ascribes to magical arts, rolls over the
field and hides the opposing armies from each other. The battle begins,
and men fight as in a dream, striking wildly at each other, and scarce
distinguishing friend from foe. Now Warwick thinks the day is his; now
Edward believes victory to be in his grasp. Then comes a lift of the
cloud, and both generals perceive that their hopes are vain. For three
hours the desperate fight rages; the bombards roar, and sword and arrow
do their deadly work. Now deluded by the mist, the two wings of
Warwick’s army are busy fighting each other, and the fatal cry “Treason!
treason!” is heard on the field. Warwick’s men give way, his brother is
slain, and there is only safety for the great earl in flight. He leaps
on horseback and gallops to a neighbouring wood, from which there is no
egress. He is followed and surrounded, and though he plies his great
battle-axe fiercely he is overborne by superior numbers and slain. The
king-maker will never make or unmake kings again.
“Now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.”
[Illustration: =DEATH OF WARWICK.=
(_From the picture by T. A. Houston, R.S.A._)]
[Illustration]
THE LITTLE PRINCES IN THE TOWER.
“_Let us sit upon the ground_
_And tell sad stories of the death of kings._”
Now hand in hand two pathetic figures appear. They are victims marked
for the slaughter; their tender age and innocence will not save them,
for they stand between a bold, unscrupulous man and the throne. You have
already made acquaintance with their father, the fourth Edward, he who
owed all to the king-maker, whom he left dead on Barnet Field. But
Edward has gone to his account, leaving his two young sons and their
mother to the tender mercies of selfish, intriguing nobles, brutalized
by a long course of civil war. As Protector of the realm, their father’s
brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, aims at the throne, and his first
step is to secure the custody of the two royal lads, who are now in the
guardianship of their maternal uncle, Earl Rivers, and of Lord Richard
Grey. The elder—a boy of thirteen—is seized and brought to London by
his Uncle Richard, while the lad’s guardians are flung into prison. The
false uncle treats his young charge with every show of loyal and
submissive regard, and brings him in great state to London for his
coronation. The wretched mother knows instinctively the fate in store
for her offspring, and takes sanctuary at Westminster with her second
son, the little Duke of York, a boy of eleven years of age. With fair
and specious words a prince of the Church persuades the widow to
surrender the lad, and forthwith he joins his brother in the Tower.
And now Gloucester ruthlessly hurries to the block those who by the ties
of kindred and friendship are likely to befriend the boys, and ere long
no man dares raise his voice against any of his bloodthirsty acts. He is
a dictator—and dictators easily develop into kings. His minions offer
him the crown, which, after a slight show of refusal, he accepts. Then
with consummate skill he proceeds to bolster up the throne which his
successful villainy has won. He is crowned with great pomp and ceremony,
and soon after the little princes disappear. What becomes of them is not
clearly known, but gradually a rumour spreads that the unnatural uncle
has done them to death. His crime profits him little; a great wave of
pity for the untimely fate of the unhappy boys swells up in the land,
and men recoil in horror from a murderer king. Two years later avenging
justice smites him; he lies dead on the battlefield, and another fills
his throne.
Sir Thomas More, writing twenty-eight years after Richard’s death, tells
the story of the crime, and there is no good reason to dispute its
substantial accuracy. He tells us that the king plotted the death of the
young princes while making a holiday progress through the country. From
Gloucester he dispatched one of his pages to Sir Robert Brackenbury, the
governor of the Tower, commanding him to make away with the lads quietly
and speedily. Brackenbury indignantly refused the office of assassin,
but a more facile tool was found in Sir James Tyrell, who had already
stained his hands in secret crime. The princes were confined in the
Portcullis Tower, under the constant supervision of four keepers, their
personal attendant being a fellow known as Black Will or Will Slaughter.
Richard roused Tyrell from his bed at midnight, and sent him to the
Tower with an order commanding Brackenbury to give up the keys of the
fortress. “Then,” says Sir Thomas More, “Sir James Tyrell desired that
the princes should be murdered in bed, to the execution whereof he
appropriated Miles Forest, one of their keepers, a fellow flesh-bred in
murder, and to him joined John Dighton, his own horse-keeper, a big,
broad, square knave. The young king had certainly a clear apprehension
of his fate, for he was heard sighingly to say, ‘I would mine uncle
would let me have my life, though he taketh my crown.’ After which time
the prince never tied his points nor anything attended to himself, but
that young babe, his brother, lingered in thought and heaviness till the
traitorous deed delivered them from their wretchedness.
“All their other attendants being removed from them, and the harmless
children in bed, these men came into their chamber, and suddenly lapping
them in the clothes smothered and stifled them till thoroughly dead.
Then laying out their bodies on the bed, they fetched Sir James to see
them, who caused the murderers to bury them at the stairfoot, deep in
the ground, under a heap of stones. Then rode Sir James in great haste
to King Richard, and showed him the manner of the murder, who gave him
great thanks.”
More than two centuries later the skeletons of two young lads were found
under a staircase leading to the chapel in the White Tower. In all
probability they were the mortal remains of the unhappy princes.
On the eve of the battle which resulted in the overthrow and death of
the murderer king, Shakespeare depicts him as visited by the ghosts of
the many whom he has foully slain. The spirits of the murdered boys
appear hand in hand:—
“Dream on thy cousins smothered in the Tower:
Let us be lead within thy breast, Richard,
And weigh thee down to ruin, shame, and death.
Thy nephews’ souls bid thee despair and die!”
And thus do they hearten the avenger, whose forces are even now
marshalled on Bosworth Field:—
“Sleep, Richmond, sleep in peace, and wake in joy;
Good angels guard thee from the boar’s annoy!
Live, and beget a happy race of kings.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration: =The Little Princes in the Tower.=
(_From the picture by Paul Delaroche._)]
[Illustration: =RICHARD III. AT THE BATTLE OF BOSWORTH.=
(_From the picture by A. Cooper. By permission of Messrs. Henry Graves
and Co._)]
[Illustration]