been "either a fugitive or a prisoner." He was not five when Pembroke castle, where he was protected by his uncle Jasper, earl of Pembroke, was stormed; and he lived for a time on the bounty of his uncle's successor in the title and estates, William Herbert, the new earl of Pembroke. Jasper's subsequent recovery of his title and castle was but temporary, and, taking with him the young earl of Richmond, he sought a refuge in France. Landing on the coast of Brittany, uncle and nephew were detained for years in honourable duresse by its duke, Francis II., while the countess of Richmond remained in England, and married eventually Lord Stanley, first earl of Derby. After the murder, by Richard III., of the young princes in the Tower, the hopes of the disaffected, both Yorkists and Lancastrians, became centred in an alliance between the earl of Richmond, the descendant of John of Gaunt, and the Princess Elizabeth, the daughter and heiress of Edward IV. The queen-dowager and the countess of Richmond both favoured the scheme, which was approved of by leading churchmen and nobles, among the latter the duke of Buckingham. This was the origin of Henry's first and unsuccessful expedition to England, in which he was aided by the duke of Brittany. It came to nothing. His fleet was dispersed by a storm, and his confederate Buckingham was captured and executed. Henry returned to Brittany, but Richard gained over the minister of its duke, and the aspirant to the English throne took refuge in the territory of the French king, Charles VIII., who aided him to fit out a new expedition. He sailed with it from Harfleur on the 1st of August, 1485, and landed at Milford Haven on the 7th. The battle of Bosworth field was fought on the 22nd, and gained by Henry (his force was much inferior to that of his antagonist), chiefly by the timely aid of his step-father, Lord Stanley, who almost to the last moment had pretended to adhere to Richard. Richard III. was killed in the battle, and the Plantagenets made way for the Tudor dynasty. Wearied of the tyrant, hopeful of a monarch who was to terminate the long conflict between the White and Red Roses, the nation welcomed the accession of Henry VII. The new king, however, rested his right to the throne on conquest, and on his own hereditary claims; it was only after an express request from the parliament that he married Elizabeth of York. The estates of some leading Yorkists were confiscated, and that party again reared its head. The year after, Henry's accession was signalized by the insurrection of Lord Lovel, speedily suppressed, and by a more formidable movement, at the head of which Lambert Simnel was placed. A native of Oxford, and of humble extraction, this youth was put forward as the earl of Warwick, the son of the duke of Clarence and nephew of Richard III., a prince who all the time was a prisoner in the tower of London. The imposture, impudent as it was, attained a certain success especially in Ireland; Simnel was supported by disaffected noblemen like Lord Lovel, and countenanced by the duchess of Burgundy, the sister of Edward IV. His claims were annihilated by the defeat of his adherents at the battle of Stoke (June 16, 1487), and he himself was treated with contemptuous mercy by Henry, who gave him a menial post in the royal household.—(See Simnel, Lambert.) Another pretender started up in the person of Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be the duke of York, supposed to have been murdered by Richard III. in the Tower, and whose pretensions were supported, not only by the duchess of Burgundy, but by the kings of France and Scotland, the latter bestowing on him a beautiful and high-born wife. The suppression of the Warbeck insurrection, after it had lasted for several years (see Warbeck, Perkin), was followed by two important events. Not only was Warbeck executed, but so too, on a charge of complicity with him, was the last of the Plantagenets, the earl of Warwick, who had been rendered fatuous by almost life-long imprisonment, and who had not spirit or intellect left to declare his innocence. Henry now reigned without a rival. The defeat of Warbeck led to the peace with Scotland, which he had always desired, and it was cemented by the marriage of his eldest daughter Margaret to James of Scotland, an alliance which produced long afterwards the union of the two crowns. The execution of Warwick, under the peculiar circumstances of the case, aroused considerable discontent, which the politic king endeavoured to appease by alleging that Ferdinand, king of Castile, had refused assent to the marriage of his daughter Catherine of Arragon with Arthur, prince of Wales, so long as Warwick remained in the way of the succession. Prince Arthur died a few months after the solemnization of the marriage; the subsequent marriage of Catherine to his brother belongs to the biography of Henry VIII. By aiding to produce the English reformation it ranks among the cardinal events of European history. The suppression of the Warbeck insurrection, and of the much easier one of Wieford the shoemaker, who pretended to be the earl of Warwick, left Henry undisturbed by domestic plots and broils. An eminently pacific monarch, he was induced only by "public opinion" to interfere in the continental quarrel, excited by the claims of Charles of France and Maximilian to the hand and possessions of Anne of Brittany. The English parliament was unwilling to see France aggrandized by the possession of Brittany, and cheerfully voted money for a war with France. Henry accepted the money, but avoided the war as long as he could. When he did make it, it was to complete a peace previously arranged; and by the treaty of Estaples (confirmed by Charles' successor, Louis XII.), the king of France bound himself to pay to Henry a large annual subsidy. By even less justifiable means Henry gratified at home the passion of avarice, which ruled him more and more strongly as he grew older. By employing every possible legal device, by renewing old and dormant claims of the crown, by prosecutions for offences punishable by fine, he filled his coffers; and in his exactions he employed two men, Empson and Dudley, who, by their subserviency and co-operation, have acquired an infamous notoriety in English history. The power of the nobility had been broken by the wars of the Roses, which extinguished or impoverished many great families; and so low had the spirit of the commons sunk, that they chose one of Henry's two unscrupulous instruments their speaker. Henry VII. ranks among the most absolute of English monarchs. In his last year when gout and a wasting phthisis warned him of coming death, he yielded to ecclesiastical remonstrances, and professed his willingness to diminish his exactions, but the amendment was chiefly in words; and his will, published by Mr. Astle in last century, breathes what may be called a cautious remorse. He died at his palace of Richmond on the 22nd of April, 1509, and his subjects did not mourn him. By all historians it is agreed that the reign of Henry VII. marks a transition-period in English history. Under Henry the power of the nobility was finally curbed, though some have denied that the statute of fines, which by others is ascribed to his wish to prevent the territorial aggrandizement of the aristocracy, was planned with any such aim; and Mr. Hallam looks on it as a mere repetition of former legislation. Certainly, however, by his prohibition of the little standing armies, which under the guise of retainers the great nobles had kept up previously, he did much to destroy the imperium in imperio of a turbulent nobility. Modern political economy may smile at his efforts to encourage trade by legislation; but the great treaty of commerce between England and the Netherlands which he negotiated, forms an era in our industrial history. By launching the Great Harry, he founded the English navy. He aided Cabot to discover the mainland of America. The noble chapel in Westminster abbey, which bears his name, attests the munificence occasionally blended with his habitual parsimony. Henry VII. has found in Mr. Sharon Turner an apologist of his avarice and a panegyrist of his general policy; perhaps he may receive a more complete rehabilitation from some future Carlyle or Froude. But, in the meantime, the general estimate of his character remains what it was, when the great Lord Bacon painted it in his masterly biography, that of a subtle, dark, politic sovereign, perhaps to be respected as a legislator, but scarcely to be admired as a king, and certainly not to be loved as a man.—F. E.
HENRY VIII., King of England, was the son of Henry the Lancastrian Tudor and Elizabeth of York, and he not only united in his own person the claims of the rival factions of the White and Red Roses, but he had a nature composed of the contrary elements of craft and impetuosity, which characterized his father Henry VII. and his grandfather Edward IV. respectively. He was born on the 28th of June, 1491, being the second of three sons, and was destined by his father, say historians, for the office of archbishop of Canterbury. He was, however, only in his twelfth year when his elder brother Arthur died, leaving a widow to whom he had been married but a few months previously. Henry, now become prince of Wales, was required by the king to take this young widow, Catherine of Arragon, to be his wife, should certain negotiations with her father Ferdinand, relating
