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ARTHUR TUDOR,

PRINCE OF WALES.

MANY centuries before the Plantagenet kings presided over the destinies of England, a Welsh prince-Cadwallader by name-is said to have predicted that, at some future period, his offspring should reign over the realm. A most improbable event this long seemed; but at length, in the fifteenth century, the eccentric love of a Queen-dowager for a handsome soldier elevated to royal rank an obscure Welsh sept, who claimed Cadwallader as an ancestor.

Remarkable, indeed, were the circumstances that translated the Tudors from a Welsh brewery to Windsor Castle. We need not relate how, at a period subsequent to Agincourt, the fifth Henry fought his way to Parishow he espoused a daughter of France and how he expired in the midst of his triumphs. Suffice it to say that he left the beautiful Katherine de Valois to mourn his untimely fate, and that the heart of the royal widow-though she was little more than twentymight have long lingered about the tomb of the heroking, had not accident thrown Owen Tudor in her

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way. Owen, who is said to have been the son of a brewer at Beaumaris, looked a handsome man, and boasted of being a gentleman of Wales." Even a yeoman of Kent, or a pricker of Northumberland, would have sneered at a person of that rank. Katherine became so enamoured that she sacrificed ambition to love; and a man who had fought as a private soldier on the field of Agincourt linked his fate with the daughter of a French, and the widow of an English, king.

The

Henry the Sixth never acknowledged Owen as Katherine's husband, nor does it appear that the Church ever celebrated their union. When their sons grew up, however, the monk-monarch created one Earl of Richmond, the other Earl of Pembroke. former took to wife Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of John of Gaunt, and was blessed with a son, named Henry, who, after passing years as an exile in Britanny, landed in England, was victorious at Bosworth against Richard, espoused the eldest daughter of Edward, and ascended the throne as Henry the Seventh.

On the 20th of September, 1486—rather more than a year after Lord Stanley had at Bosworth placed the crown of England on Henry Tudor's head-his queen, Elizabeth Plantagenet, gave birth to a son. She was then residing under the care of her mother at Winchester; for Henry, indulging as he did in the harmless delusion of being descended from the old princes of Wales, was all anxiety that his heir should be born in

that palace which King Arthur was supposed to have founded. Four days after he saw the light, the roya infant was baptized in the cathedral. Elizabeth Woodville appeared at the font as godmother; the Earls of Derby and Oxford took part in the ceremony as godfathers; and Henry, whose mind was deeply imbued with the traditions of Wales and Britanny, thought proper to name his son Arthur, in honour of the legendary hero.

Young Arthur was, according to all accounts, a fair prince"-healthy and lively, but not likely to turn out quite such a prodigy as flatterers predicted. Servility has seldom carried men to greater excesses than on the occasion of his birth. The event was celebrated in Latin and English, poets and chroniclers vied with. each other in adulation, and the hermit or Guy's Cliff went the length of prognosticating that this greatgrandson of Owen Tudor would, as time passed on, win fame far surpassing that of the mystic hero who instituted the Round Table. While it was still the fashion to give expression to such nonsense, rumours began to creep about which gave time-servers uneasiness, which caused Henry sore trouble, and which made it politic to convey the infant Arthur and the Queen, for security, to the strong Castle of Kenilworth. The throne to which Arthur was supposed to be the rightful heir tottered; there was a prospect that the crown which Henry wore would be plucked from his brow by one who had still less right to it than himself.

When Henry had succeeded in putting down the insurrection raised by Lambert Simnel in the name of the young Earl of Warwick, and in converting a mock prince into a real turnspit, he lost no time in investing the son of his hopes with those symbols of rank befitting the heir of England. On the 1st of October, 1489, Arthur was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester; soon after this he was elected a Companion of the Bath; on the 8th of May, 1491, when the feast of St. George was kept at Windsor, he was installed as a Knight of the Order of the Garter; and in the autumn of 1492, when the King undertook an expedition against France, he was appointed Guardian of the Realm. But his tenure of this office was speedily terminated in a way that could hardly have been very satisfactory to the noble order into which he had been admitted-that illustrious fraternity whose heraldic banners, waving in St. George's Hall, recall to memory those heroes who made England terrible on the Continent. In fact, Henry, who had fleeced the English people of money to carry on an unnecessary war, accepted a large bribe from the French King to conclude a humiliating peace, and returned to guard against a peril which beset his throne. A new Pretender was in the field-that mysterious being who figures in the annals of England as Perkin Warbeck.

Having, after much difficulty, disposed of Perkin whom many believed to be the second son of the fourth

Edward, and persuaded the servile peers of England to murder the young Earl of Warwick under judicial forms, Henry began in earnest to advance the fortunes of those children of whom a picture by Mabuse, the precursor of Holbein, is preserved at Hampton Court. An interesting family must the little Tudors have been, with their bright complexions and glittering hair.

Margaret, a young beauty not yet in her teens, had from infancy been destined to share the Scottish throne, and regarded as "the dove that was to bring to the island kingdom the blessings of permanent peace." She was still dancing, and singing, and playing the lute, without any prophetic glimpses of the troubles that awaited her, or the scandal which she was to raise on the other side of the Tweed.

Henry, Duke of York, born at Greenwich in 1491, was two years younger than the Princess, and had already appeared prominently in public at a tournament held in her honour, when he rode through London with a magnificent retinue to witness the feats of arms. It was not, however, for chivalrous scenes that he was intended. His avaricious sire, with an eye to the rich revenues of the see of Canterbury, designed him for an ecclesiastic, and intrusted his education to Skelton the poet. Henry, under Skelton's auspices, was taught to hate the Scotch; and learning, in some other way, that the Tudors were not quite the thing, he thought it politic to pride himself on being a Plantagenet. The resemblance, real or imaginary, between Henry and his