blished, and the continental conquests of the Plantagenets ceased forever.

During that war in France, the Duke of Bedford died —his regency unaccomplished, but distinguished for wisdom and ability; he was buried in one of the old cathedrals of France, and a stately monument erected over his body.

It was said by an old chronicler that, in the next French reign, King Louis the Eleventh-"By certain indiscreet persons was counselled to deface the tomb of the Duke of Bedford in the cathedral church of our Lady in Rouen, being told that it was a great dishonour both to the king and to the realm to see the enemy of his father and theirs have so solemn and rich memorial. He answered, saying, What honour shall it be to us or to you, to break this monument and to pull out of the ground the dead bones of him who, in his lifetime, neither my father nor your progenitors, with all their power, puissance, and friends, were not able to make flee one foot backward; but who, by his strength, wit, and policy, kept them all out of the principal dominions of the realm of France, and out of this noble and famous duchy of Normandy. Wherefore, I say, first-God have his soul, and let his body lie in rest, which, when he was alive, would have disquieted the proudest of all; and, as for the tomb, I assure you it is not so decent or convenient as his honour and acts deserved, although it were much richer and more beautiful."*

This was a piece of generosity which one would hardly

*Lingard cites for this surprising act of Louis the Eleventh, Stow, p. 475; Hall, 129.

have expected from a man so cold-hearted and unscrupulous as Louis the Eleventh; and, as the incident is told in the simple language of the chronicler, it has a poetic aspect, and recalls—once scarce knows how-those simple lines of Coleridge which Walter Scott was fond of quoting:

"The knight's bones are dust,

And his good sword rust;

His soul is with the saints, I trust."*

It was my intention to have included in this lecture that part of the civil war which belongs to the reign of Henry the Sixth; but the truth is, I have been glad to escape into the French history connected with that reign, and I could not forbear dwelling upon the story of Joan of Arc longer than I at first contemplated.

The next lecture must, therefore, comprehend the subject of the war of the houses of York and Lancaster from its origin to the end of the reign of Richard the Third.

*Christabel. Poetical Works, p. 276, Am. ed.

LECTURE IX.*

The Wars of the Roses.

Closing scenes of the Plantagenet dynasty-Want of interest in the War of the Roses-The question of genealogy-No actuating principle in the contest-Its obscurity-A series of bloody battlesSaintly character of the king-His solitary sadness-Loss of the French conquests-The Duke of Suffolk-Popular tumult-Jack Cade The Temple Garden-Richard of York and Somerset-The battle of St. Albans-The Earl of Warwick, the king-makerHenry's captivity-The Parliament-Margaret of Anjou-Her character-King René-Injustice of English writers to her memoryThe battle of Wakefield-Two crowned Kings of England-The slaughter at Towton-Tewksbury-The queen-Sir Walter Scott's tribute to her-Political effects of the civil war-Death struggle of the military power of the nobles-The last of the barons-CliffordNo feud among the people or vassals-The separation of the church from the conflict-Education-The foundation of Eton.

THE first part of the reign of Henry of Windsor being connected with the close of the war against France, I was tempted, in the last lecture, to digress in some measure into French history, partly because one could hardly help expatiating on the splendid and sad story of that Christian heroine, the Maid of Orleans, and partly because I would fain escape, at least for a little while, from the unpromising and unsatisfactory subject

*February 22d, 1847.

that must be encountered now-I mean the history of that hateful civil feud between the families of York and Lancaster, which has nothing attractive in it save its pretty symbolical title of the "War of the Roses." The subject which I have now to treat of is the civil war between the two branches of the Plantagenet family, from the origin of their contention down to the defeat and death of Richard the Third at the battle of Bosworth Field, when the body of that last of the Yorkists was stripped and thrown across a horse's back, like a slaughtered wild beast, besmeared with blood and dirt, and thus carried to an unhonoured burial at Leicester. So it was,

that, after more than three centuries of majestic rule and after fourteen reigns, the dominion of the Plantagenet dynasty in England, the Saxon and the Norman race combined, passed away forever.

Taken in its fullest extent, down to the battle of Bosworth Field, this civil war occupied a period of thirty years, embracing what one of the old English chroniclers has entitled "the troublous season of King Henry the Sixth, the prosperous reign of King Edward the Fourth, the pitiful life of King Edward the Fifth, and the tragical doings of King Richard the Third." A struggle so protracted and so sanguinary as it was has not been without permanent political consequences, which I will endeavour to indicate in the course of this lecture; but, however important were these remote results in the national progress of England, they do not give an interest to the story of the struggle itself. If the War of the Roses be considered by itself-separated, on the one hand, from the earlier events, with which it is morally connected by retribution for ancestral guilt, and, on the other hand,

from the later times, in which unlooked-for consequences are seen-there cannot, I think, be found an era of history more unsatisfactory. It is scarcely possible, it seems to me, to awaken in our minds any strong feeling on either side of this domestic warfare by the statement of the respective claims of the two parties. The particulars of the genealogical question are no sooner received into the mind than they are very apt to escape out of the memory. It is enough, however, to remember, for the purpose of understanding the issue, that both parties trace their claims back to a common ancestor, Edward the Third. There being no descendants from either the first or second son of that sovereign, the controversy lay between the posterity of the third and fourth sons. The three Lancastrian kings, being descended from the fourth son, had occupied the throne for more than half a century, to the exclusion of the lineage of the third, to whom the rights of the Duke of Clarence had descended in due course of inheritance.

His

Now, a judgment on the respective merits of the Yorkist and Lancastrian claims can only be formed after determining whether the law of the English monarchy is indefeasible, unalterable, hereditary right, or whether the rule of succession may undergo a change by the action of Parliament, as the great national council. torians, accordingly, are found with York or Lancaster predilections and prejudices, as they respectively incline to the theory of the absolute, hereditary right of the monarch, or to that of the supremacy of the Parliament. But, whatever be the merits of this question, they are not of such a nature as to inspire us with an interest in the