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parallel fails. When Edward landed, he found that none durst speak in his favor for dread of Warwick; and he could advance into the country only, as Bolingbroke had done, under the crafty plea that he came to claim no more than his duchy. The disguise was, ere long, thrown off; he fought and gained a battle in which his chief adversary, the king-maker Warwick, was left dead on the field. He entered London in triumph, was king again, and poor King Henry, of whom we never hear anything, except when something is done to him, was remanded to the Tower, never again to leave it alive.

31. The last convulsive effort of Queen Margaret was made at Tewkesbury, where the Lancastrian party met with its final defeat. The misery of the hapless queen was completed by the barbarous murder of her only child, the young Prince of Wales, who was stabbed to death, it is supposed, by King Edward's brothers, Clarence and Gloster-the horrid deed which Shakspeare has fitly made one of the phantoms that haunted the death-dream of Clarence:

"Then came wandering by,

A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood;-and he shrick'd out aloud,
'Clarence is come-false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence,
That stabb'd me in the field by Tewkesbury ;-

Seize on him, furies,-take him to your torments."

32. The murder of the old king, the harmless Henry, soon followed, the bloody release to his grieved spirit being given by the dagger of the Duke of Gloster-if popular belief has rightly rested on that, one of the dark deeds which belong to the history of the Tower of London. The Lancastrian king and the Lancastrian heir having been destroyed, their great champion, the queen, Margaret of Anjou, is left alone; and, so far as the story of her life is connected with the annals of England, the last image which we have of her is, as she stands in the tragic sublimity of woe, discrowned, widowed, childless, captive, and desolate.

33. For sixteen years had the War of the Roses lasted, and eleven fierce and bloody battles had been fought by English

with English alone within the narrow limits of England. Children had grown up with no other spectacle of their native land than as a battle-ground on which their countrymen were shedding one another's blood; and now that the war was at an end-at least so far as the undisturbed occupation of the throne of England was affected by it-the question naturally presents itself what meaning had this war?

34. Can it be possible that all this ferocity and havoc was significant of nothing more than the contest for the throne? Can it be that the mere question, which of two cousins should ill the throne-whether Henry Plantagenet or Edward Plan

enet should wear the crown-drove the multitudes of men Lo such fierce extremities of civil strife? Was all the misery and bloodshed of this war expended for no other consequence than a dubious settlement of succession? We should, indeed, study history very superficially if we thought so.

35. In the progress of constitutional freedom there was a great and permanent consequence of this civil war, which outweighs a thousand-fold the importance of any right of York or Lancaster. It was a result which the combatants on neither side contended for, and, indeed, they could not have dreamed of it. It was this: the devastation of the war wrought the downfall of English feudalism, and thus effected a great revolution in the aristocratic element of the Constitution.

36. The war was the unconscious death-struggle of the martial power of the nobility. It would seem as if feudalism was to display its greatest splendor immediately before it was extinguished-as if it were to rise to its highest powers immediately before it fell into irretrievable exhaustion. As the sun of feudal power in England went down, it blazed forth with the light of a larger and redder orb through the clouds of war that gathered round its setting.

37. During the whole extent of England's history, under the Saxon, Dane, or Norman, the mightiest of her barons was the king-maker, Warwick. It was his power that made Edward king, and his that unmade him. It was his power that dethroned King Henry, and it was his that restored him.

Each monarch in turn became the captive and prisoner of this great earl. With princely revenues and estates, Warwick's vassals were an army; and some notion may be formed of the force he could, at will, bring armed into the field, from the fact that he is said to have daily feasted, at his numerous manors and castles, upward of thirty thousand persons.

38. The other nobles possessed, in their degree, the power of an armed feudal retinue, ready to follow their lord to battle in any cause of his choosing; and thus there was a baronial power of which modern England shows only the shadow. As the traveller now beholds the stately walls of Warwick Castle, or wanders amid the ruins of Kenilworth

"Where battlement and moated gate

Are objects only for the hand

Of hoary Time to decorate"

he can scarce, with all the impulse given to his imagination, call up the vision of the armed hosts which, some three hundred years ago, could, at a moment's summons, be gathered there in battle array.

39. The war of York and Lancaster was a self-exhausting contest of the nobles. At the battle of Northampton the order was given through the field to strike at the lords, knights, and esquires, rather than at the common people. In the course of the war eighty princes of the blood were killed, and the ancient nobility nearly annihilated. Every individual of two generations of the families of Somerset and Warwick fell on the field or on the scaffold.

40. Many of those who escaped the carnage were impoverished and outcast from their homes. "I myself saw," says Philip de Comines, "the Duke of Exeter, the King of England's brother-in-law, walking barefoot after the Duke of Burgundy's train, and earning his bread by begging from door to door." The martial fierceness of a feudal nobility was tamed, and, with the decline of the force which feudalism armed them with, the way was prepared for converting them into the pacific aristocracy of more modern times.

The Battle of Towton.-Shakspeare.

[The following extract is from the Third Part of "King Henry VI.," in which Shakspeare dramatically represents some of the terrible incidents of the tremendous battle of Towton-a conflict in which the nearest relatives and friends were arrayed against one another. The peaceful character of the king is also graphically depicted.]

SCENE V.-Part of the Field of Towton.

Alarum. Enter KING HENRY.

K. Hen. This battle fares like to the morning's war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light;
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day, nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea,
Fore'd by the tide to combat with the wind;
Now sways it that way, like the self-same sea,
Forc'd to retire by fury of the wind;

Sometime, the flood prevails; and then the wind;
Now, one the better; then, another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror, nor conquer'd;
So is the equal poise of this fell war.
Here on this molehill will I sit me down.
To whom God will, there be the victory!
For Margaret my queen, and Clifford too,
Have chid me from the battle; swearing both,
They prosper best of all when I am thence.
Would I were dead! if God's good will were so;
For what is in this world, but grief and woe?
O God! methinks, it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain;
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,

To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run:
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live.

When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock;
So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;

So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean;
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece;
So minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years,
Pass'd over to the end they were created,

Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.
Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds, looking on their silly sheep,
Than doth a rich embroider'd canopy
To kings, that fear their subjects' treachery?
O, yes it doth; a thousand-fold it doth.
And, to conclude, the shepherd's homely curds,
His cold, thin drink out of his leather bottle,
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince's delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,

His body couch'd in a curious bed,

When care, mistrust, and treason wait on him.

Alarum. Enter a SON, that has killed his father dragging in the dead body.

Son. Ill blows the wind that profits nobody,-
This man, whom hand to hand I slew in fight,
May be possess'd with some store of crowns:
And I, that haply take them from him now,
May yet ere night yield both my life and them
To some man else, as this dead man doth me.→
Who's this?-O God! it is my father's face,
Whom in this conflict I unawares have kill'd
O heavy times, begetting such events!

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