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so much as proceed to the coronation of the queen, not vouchsafing her the honour of a matrimonial crown; for the coronation of her was not till almost two years after, when danger had taught him what to do." The dissatisfaction greatly increased when it came to be rumoured that Edward Plantagenet was intended to be secretly made away with in the Tower: the popular belief of this made Henry be thought almost as blood-thirsty a tyrant as Richard, whom he had supplanted. And all this while, Bacon confesses, it was still whispered everywhere that at least one of the children of Edward the Fourth was living. "Neither," he adds, was the king's nature and customs greatly fit to disperse these mists, but, contrariwise, he had a fashion rather to create doubts than assurance." In this state of things, a priest of Oxford, called Richard (or, according to others, William) Simon, or Simonds, is supposed to have originated the bold project of setting up as a claimant for the crown his pupil Lambert Simnell, the son of a baker, or, as another account has it, of an organ-maker, of that town. Simnell was about fifteen years of age, and he is described by Bacon as "a comely youth, and well favoured, not without some extraordinary dignity and grace of aspect." The priest's first design is affirmed to have been to present Simnell to the world as the Duke of York, the second son of Edward IV., said to have been murdered along with his brother, Edward V., in the Tower; but it was eventually determined that he should personate Edward Plantagenet, now lying a prisoner in that fortress. The audacity of this scheme, as Bacon remarks, seems scarcely credible; for the individual to be personated was neither one who was dead, nor one who had been carried away in infancy, and was known to few; but a "youth that, till the age almost of ten years, had been brought up in a court where infinite eyes had been upon him," and, what was still more unfavourable to the project, who could be produced at any moment to confute his counterfeit. The historian concludes that some great person who knew Edward Plantagenet particularly and familiarly must have had a hand

in the business; and he adds, "That which is most probable, out of the precedent and subsequent acts, is, that it was the queen dowager from whom this action had the principal source and motion. For certain it is, she was a busy negotiating woman, and in her withdrawing chamber had the fortunate conspiracy for the king against King Richard the Third been hatched; which the king knew, and remembered perhaps but too well; and [she] was at this time extremely discontent with the king, thinking her daughter, as the king handled the matter, not advanced, but depressed; and none could hold the book so well to prompt and instruct this stageplay as she could." Edward IV.'s sister, Margaret Duchess of Burgundy, also gave her countenance and effective aid to the enterprise of the pretender. "This princess," says Bacon, "having the spirit of a man, and malice of a woman, abounding in treasure by the greatness of her dower and her provident government, and being childless and without any nearer care, made it her design and enterprise to see the majesty royal of England once again replaced in her house; and had set up King Henry as a mark at whose overthrow all her actions should aim and shoot; insomuch as all the counsels of his succeeding troubles came chiefly out of that quiver. And she bare such a mortal hatred to the House of Lancaster, and personally to the king, as she was no ways mollified by the conjunction of the Houses in her niece's marriage, but rather hated her niece, as the means of the king's ascent to the crown and assurance therein.” The design of the Yorkists in thus patronizing the pretensions of Simnell was of course merely to make use of him for effecting their first object, the ejection of the reigning king; after which he himself would have been very easily disposed of. It is astonishing to what a height of temporary success the project attained. Simon, having taken his pupil over to Ireland, there presented him to the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Kildare, by whom he was at once recognised as the person he called himself. Kildare had been one of the chiefs of the Yorkist party, and it is impossible to believe that he had

not been from the first taken into the conspiracy. His acquiescence in the imposture naturally produced an immense effect. After a few days Simnell was proclaimed king, in Dublin, by the name of Edward the Sixth, with apparently the universal assent of the population of all classes. The boy, Bacon allows, became the part he acted well, and did nothing that betrayed the baseness of his real condition. The scheme, however, was too inherently hollow and flimsy to be long kept up. The first thing Henry did was to shut up the queen dowager in the nunnery of Bermondsey, and to seize all her lands and goods with his characteristic indirectness, however, professing to visit her with that punishment for having, after her agreement for the marriage of her daughter with himself, delivered Elizabeth out of sanctuary into the hands of King Richard. At this proceeding "there was," says Bacon, "much wondering ;—that a weak woman, for the yielding to the menaces and promises of a tyrant, after such a distance of time, wherein the king had shown no displeasure nor alteration, but much more after so happy a marriage between the king and her daughter, blessed with issue male, should, upon a sudden mutability or disclosure of the king's mind, be so severely handled." "This lady," adds the noble historian, was amongst the examples of great variety of fortune. She had first, from a distressed suitor and desolate widow, been taken to the marriage bed of a bachelor king, the goodliest personage of his time; and even in his reign she had endured a strange eclipse by the king's flight and temporary depriving from the crown. She was also very happy, in that she had by him fair issue, and continued his nuptial love, helping herself by some obsequious bearing and dissembling of his pleasures, to the very end. After her husband's death, she was matter of tragedy, having lived to see her brother beheaded, and her two sons deposed from the crown, bastarded in their blood, and cruelly murdered. For this while, nevertheless, she enjoyed her liberty, state, and fortunes: but afterwards, again, upon the rise of the wheel, when she had a king to her son-in-law, and was

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made grandmother to a grandchild of the best sex, yet was she, upon dark and unknown reasons, and no less strange pretences, precipitated and banished the world into a nunnery, where it was almost thought dangerous to visit her or see her, and where, not long after, she ended her life; but was, by the king's commandment, buried with the king her husband, at Windsor." The queen of Edward IV., originally Elizabeth Woodville, or Wydville, and, before she was raised to the throne, the wife of Sir John Grey, is supposed to have survived till about the year 1492. It appears that she was not kept all this while in close confinement; when the French ambassadors were introduced to her daughter at Westminster, in November, 1489, she is, in a contemporary record, expressly stated to have been present, as well as the king's mother, the Countess of Richmond. From this and other circumstances, Dr. Lingard is inclined to doubt altogether the fact of her apprehension upon the present occasion; but a story so distinetly told by all the old authorities, by Polydore Virgil, as well as by Hall, whom Bacon follows, can hardly be supposed to be a pure fiction.

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Another measure, however, that Henry adopted was more suited to tell immediately with a favourable effect upon the popular mind. On a Sunday he had the true Edward Plantagenet brought out from the Tower, and, after being carried through all the principal streets of London, conducted in solemn procession to St. Paul's, where," says Bacon, great store of people were assembled. And it was provided also in good fashion that divers of the nobility, and others of quality, especially of those that the king most suspected, and [that] knew the person of Plantagenet best, had communication with the young gentleman by the way, and entertained him with speech and discourse; which did in effect mar the pageant in Ireland with the subjects here, at least with so many as out of error, and not out of malice, might be misled. Nevertheless, in Ireland, where it was too late to go back, it wrought little or no effect. But, contrariwise, they turned the imposture upon the king, and

gave out that the king, to defeat the true inheritor, and to mock the world, and blind the eyes of simple men, had tricked up a boy in the likeness of Edward Plantagenet, and showed him to the people, not sparing to profane the ceremony of a procession, the more to countenance the fable."

The affair did not end without being brought to the arbitrement of the sword. The Duchess of Burgundy having sent over a force of two thousand veterans under an experienced officer, Martin Swartz, these Germans landed at Dublin; the young Earl of Lincoln, son of Edward IV.'s sister the Duchess of Suffolk, who had recently gone over to his aunt in Burgundy, accompanying them. It was now decided that the pretender should undergo the ceremony of a coronation. In all haste, accordingly, the people from all quarters assembled, Stow tells us, 66 at Divelin, or Dublin, and there, in Christ's Church, they crowned their idol, honouring him with titles imperial, feasting and triumphing, rearing mighty shouts and cries, carrying him thence to the king's castle upon tall men's shoulders, that he might be seen and noted, as he was surely an honourable boy to look upon." Other accounts state that he was carried from the church to the castle on the shoulders of an English chieftain named Darcy. He was crowned by the Bishop of Meath with a diadem taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary. This was on the 24th of May, 1487. Immediately afterwards writs were issued, and a parliament summoned, in his name. Then Lincoln and the Germans, together with what Hall calls "a great multitude of beggarly Irishmen, almost all naked and unarmed, saving skaynes [daggers] and mantles," sailed for England, and landed at the pile of Foudray, in the southern extremity of Furness, Lancashire. They were encountered on the 16th of June by the royal force, under the command of the king in person, at the village of Stoke, in Nottinghamshire, and there, after a short but sharp conflict, completely put to the rout. Among those slain was the Earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had, after the death of his son, declared heir to the throne. Francis Lord Lovell, the other

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