perhaps somewhat fantastic person, who was happy in the pompous possession of three regal titles, without a rood of land in either of his kingdoms, Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem; and who spent his days in a sort of pleasant dream of the innocent play of chivalry and the songs of troubadours. Margaret came to England a Frenchwoman, to be the Queen of England just at the time when English pride was exasperated by French victories; and moreover, she was soon placed in the unnatural attitude of supplying by her character the feebleness of her husband's rule. I dare say that, in her way of life, there may have been much that is revolting to our sense of female character; indeed it could not be otherwise, for a woman can hardly play a man's part in the work of the world without grievous detriment to her own nature. But one is still entitled to contemplate Queen Margaret, not as a vulgar and hideous Amazon, but as a woman under the dire necessity of mingling in scenes of war. After the parliamentary compromise, in which the succession of her son was sacrificed, we can behold her as a heroic matron warring for the rights of her child when the father's feeble hand could not defend them. She gathers an army, which the Duke of York, contemptuously encountering, pays a bloody penalty for the folly of rashly despising an enemy. He was slain at the battle of Wakefield; and, in as short a time as two months after he had walked in procession to St. Paul's as newly-declared heir apparent, his gory head, insulted with a paper crown, was set upon the gate of York. supremacy. But the After such a catastrophe, the reader of history naturally looks for the establishment of Lancastrian no; the rights of the Duke of York, and the feudal inheritance of vengeance for his death, pass to his son, Earl of March, a youth of nineteen years of age; and from this time the war becomes more ferocious than ever, and with a deeper thirst for revenge. The warlike queen pur sues her success by the rescue of her husband from his captivity; but the young Duke of York enters London, and is proclaimed King Edward the Fourth. The coronation of the new monarch was postponed until further hostilities should give him stronger possession of the throne. There were now two kings in the land - Henry the Sixth and Edward the Fourth- and the battle that soon followed between the two royal armies shows more impressively, perhaps, than any other in the war, to what fearful issues of carnage and bloodshed the passions of faction and civil war can drive men of the same kindred and the same homes. No foreigner shared in the strife; there were none but Englishmen present, and of them more than one hundred thousand were drawn up in no very unequal division in hostile array on the field of Towton. Both sovereigns were present, King Edward and King Henry — or perhaps we had better say Queen Margaret. Proclamation had been made that no quarter should be given, and faithfully and fiercely was the order obeyed, so that it proved probably the bloodiest battle in British history. The desperate conflict lasted more than a day; and some idea may be formed of the slaughter when it is said the number of the Englishmen slain exceeded the sum of those who fell at Vimiera, Talavera, Albuera, Salamanca, Vittoria, five great battles of the Peninsular War, and at Waterloo combined. The enormous shedding of English blood was by English hands. The battle ended in the total rout of the Lancastrians, and the crown was firmly placed on the brow of Edward the Fourth. So decided a victory, one would imagine, must have closed the contest; but no; for ten perilous years was the struggle continued, chiefly by the indomitable energy of Queen Margaret. Poor King Henry was betrayed and committed prisoner to the Tower of London, while his queen, eluding her enemies, was without difficulty followed in her rapid and unwearied movements, at one time rallying her English partisans and risking battle, again seeking alliance and help from the King of France. Perils by land and perils by sea making up the wild story of her adventures, we hear of her at one time shipwrecked, and, at another, falling into the hands of a band of roving banditti. She struggled to the last-so long as she had a husband or a child whose rights were to be contended for. The later years of the war are no less perplexed than the beginning; and I do not know that, in the events that follow, there is to be discovered anything specially characteristic of the age, or expressive of the spirit of the times, except the conduct of that great feudal lord, the Earl of Warwick. It was chiefly by him that Edward IV. had been helped to the throne; and when the king-maker found cause of quarrel with the monarch he turned his allegiance away, and the greatest of the Yorkist chieftains was afterwards an adherent of the Lancastrians. King Edward became the prisoner of the proud nobleman, and one of the extraordinary spectacles which England exhibited in this war, was that of two rival kings, each confined in prison and at the same time. The king-maker was strong enough to lift up the prostrate Lancaster. Edward IV. fled from the palace and the kingdom, and his imprisoned rival was led forth from the Tower to hear the streets of London resounding once more with the name of King Henry. This surprising restoration gave, however, but a brief respite to the Lancastrian family before its final overthrow. The fugitive Edward returned to recover the crown, and, as it proved, to extinguish the opposing dynasty. He landed at Ravenspur the very place, as has been observed, where Bolingbroke, the Lancastrian progenitor, landed when he came to deprive Richard II. of the crown, and to usurp it for himself; so fatal was that spot to the Plantagenets, first of the one and then of the other line. The landing of Edward at Ravenspur has been compared to the return of Napoleon from Elba, when he came to shake the Bourbons again from the throne so lately restored to them. The comparison holds good as to the boldness and the rapidity of the exploits; for, in about forty days, the counter-revolution of Edward was completed. In regard to the first reception and the final results, the 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. 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 the king's brothers Clarence and Glo'ster. 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, -- 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 Glo'ster-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. 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? 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 fill the throne,—whether Henry Plantagenet or Edward Plantagenet should wear the crown,-drove the multitudes of men to such fierce extremities of civil strife? Was all the misery and bloodshed of the war expended for no other consequence than a dubious settlement of succession? We should, indeed, study history very superficially if we thought so. In the progress of constitutional freedom there was a great and permanent consequence of this civil war, which outweighs a thousandfold 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 downfal of English feudalism, and thus effected a great revolution in the aristocratic element of the Constitution. 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 prowess immediately before it fell into irretrievable ex |