should have no share whatever in the property; but only let Richard get the lady, and he would soon possess himself of the lands. The question was debated by the two brothers with such fury, before the council, that civil war was anticipated.
All this time the property was rightfully that of the widow of Warwick, the mother of the two young ladies. Anne, the Countess of Warwick, was the sole heiress of the vast estates of the Despensers and the Beauchamps, Earls of Warwick. Her husband, the king-maker, had entered on the estates and title by his marriage with her. So far, therefore, as all law and right were concerned, no person whatever but herself, during her lifetime, had any claim on those estates. But in that miserable age, laws, right, honour, or natural affection had little or no existence. The widow of Warwick, the mother of the two ladies thus striven for, the rightful possessor of the estates hankered after, was not in the slightest degree regarded. She was retained an actual prisoner in the sanctuary of Beaulien, whither she fled on the death of her husband. A party of soldiers was maintained by Edward, who stood sentinels over the sanctuary, disturbing the devotional quiet of the place, and by their insolent maraudings keeping the whole neighbourhood in terror. The unhappy mother of the two ladies who were thus to be placed, by marriage with the princes of the blood, almost on a level with the throne, in vain petitioned even for her liberty. Two years after the battle of Tewkesbury, the countess petitioned the House of Commons for her liberty. She complained in that petition that she had, within five days of her retreat into the sanctuary, commenced her earnest suit to the king for the restoration of her freedom, and sufficient of her property to maintain her; but her requests had been treated with the utmost indifference. She had then tried the sympathies of the queen, Elizabeth Wydville, but without any success. Elizabeth was a woman who never thought of property without wanting to get it into her own family. She had after that tried Clarence, her son-in-law, the father of her grandchildren, and Gloucester, who wanted to become her son-in-law. In vain. Then she applied to the king's sisters, the Duchesses of Essex and Suffolk, old Jacquetta, the Duchess of Bedford, the queen's mother. To all the great court party, who had once been her friends—as the world calls friendship—and many of them her humble flatterers and admirers, she applied, in the most moving terms, for their kind aid in obtaining a modicum of freedom and support out of her own lands, the most wealthy in England.
But it was not her that the two princes courted, it was her property; and nobody dared or cared to move a finger in favour of the once great Anne of Warwick. The daughter Anne, so far from desiring to marry Richard of Gloucester, detested him. She was said to have had a real affection for her unfortunate husband, the murdered Prince of Wales, and shrunk in horror from the idea of wedding the murderer. Co-operating, therefore, with the wishes and interests of Clarence, she, by his assistance, escaped out of the sanctuary of Beaulieu, where she had been with the countess, her mother, and disappeared. For some time no trace of her could be discovered; but Gloucester had his spies and emissaries everywhere; and, at length, the daughter of Warwick, and the future queen of England, was found in the guise of a cookmaid in London. Gloucester removed her to the sanctuary of St. Martin's-le-Grand. Afterwards, she was allowed to visit her uncle, the Archbishop of York, before his disgrace, and the Queen Margaret in the Tower. All this was probably conceded by Gloucester, in order to win Anne'e favour; but Anne still repelling with disgust his addresses, he refused her those solaces, and procuring the removal of her mother from Beaulieu, sent her, under the escort of Sir John Tyrrell, into the north, where he is said to have kept her confined till his own death, even while she was his mother-in-law. Anne was at length compelled to marry the hated Gloucester; and her hatred appeared to increase from nearer acquaintance, for she was soon after praying for a divorce.
The king was compelled to award to Gloucester a large share of Warwick's property; and the servile Parliament passed an act in 1474, embodying the disgraceful commands of these most unnatural and unprincipled princes. The two daughters were to succeed to the Warwick property, as though their mother, the possessor in her own right, were dead. If either of them should die before her husband, he should continue to retain her estates during his natural life. If a divorce should take place between Richard and Anne, for which Anne was striving, Richard was still to retain her property, provided he married or did his best to marry her to some one else. Thus, by this most iniquitous arrangement, while Richard kept his wife's property, they made it a motive with her to force her into some other alliance, if not so hateful, perhaps more degrading. It is impossible to conceive the tyranny of vice and selfishness carried farther than in these odious transactions. But this was not all. There was living a son of the Marquis of Montacute, Warwick's brother; and to prevent any claim from him as next heir male, all such lands as he might become the claimant of, were tied upon Clarence and Gloucester, and their heirs, so long as there should remain any heirs male of the marquis. By these means did these amiable brothers imagine that they had stepped into the full and perpetual possession of the enormous wealth of the great Warwick. Edward, having rather smoothed over than appeased the jealousies and ambition of his brothers, now turned his ambition to foreign conquest.
In all his contests at home, Edward had shown great military talents. He had fought ten battles, and never lost one; for at the time of the treason of Lord Montacute in 1740, he had not fought at all, but, deserted by his army, had fled to Flanders. He had always entertained a flattering idea that he could emulate the martial glory of the Edwards and of Henry V., and once more recover the lost territories of France, and the lost prestige of the British arms on the Continent. His relations with France and Burgundy were such as encouraged this roseate notion. Louis XL had supported the claims of Henry, and accomplishing the alliance of Margaret and his most formidable enemy Warwick, had sent them to push him from his throne. The time appeared to be arrived for inflicting full retribution. Burgundy was his brother-in-law, and had aided him in recovering his crown. True, the aid of Burgundy had not been prompted by love to him, but by enmity to Warwick and Louis; nor had his reception of him in his day of distress been such as to
