resound to her heart-rending outcries as she cursed the "foul, bloated spider" that had wrought so much evil in her house. Tradition has it that Margaret, in her bitterness, rejoiced when she heard that her rival Elizabeth Woodville's children had been slain.

Margaret's imprisonment in the Tower, and subsequently at Windsor, was rigorous; but after a time she was allowed more freedom, and spent some years in comparative peace with Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk, the poet's great-granddaughter, as we learn from a Paston Letter dated July 8, 1471: "And as for Queen Margaret, I understand that she is removed to Wallingford, nigh unto Evelyn, my Lady of Suffolk's place in Oxfordshire"; and we also know that Edward Iv. allowed the Duchess 4 marks a week for his royal prisoner's maintenance. Five years later her aged father, the minstrel King René of Provence, ruined himself to pay her ransom, and thus the last two years of her wretched life were spent with him peacefully enough at Reculée. She had formally renounced all she "could pretend to in England, as well as the conditions of her marriage settlement." Villeneuve, who saw her at this period, tells us that "the once peerless Margaret had become a horror to look upon. Grief had turned the whole volume of her blood to water; her once superb eyes were swollen and red with weeping, and her skin covered with blotches like leprosy." King René died first, in 1480, "very old and mult triste." After her father's death Margaret went to Dempière, near Anjou, where she died in that superb château that has resisted to our day the wear and tear of age and of revolutions. "The Lancastrian lioness, Anjou's proud matron," was in her fifty-first year when she was laid to rest in the tomb of her father and mother in the fine old cathedral of Angers. When the sun passes behind the great stained-glass window at the back of the choir, a transparent portrait of Queen Margaret reveals itself—a noble head, a handsome face, full dark eyes, and long black locks hanging to the waist.

There was a Requiem sung at St. Paul's for the repose of Queen Margaret, and no doubt the scant gathering of her faithful friends had many stories to whisper to each other concerning the late Queen as they passed out of the Cathedral. Some of them could remember her as the handsomest, most accomplished,

and bravest princess of her time; and then as the most miserable, bearing the burden of anarchy, poverty, civil war, and malediction.

The funeral of Henry vi. must have been an uncanny function. The persistent rumours of assassination had to be silenced, and so, on the day after Ascension (1471), the corpse, "surrounded by more glaives and bills than torches," was borne bare-faced -"that every man might see it "-on its bier to St. Paul's, and there Mass was sung. In the middle of the service the wounds began to bleed, which filled all present with horror. Thence the body was taken to Blackfriars. Here again it bled profusely, even upon the pavement, "a dread token of the manner of his death." At midnight the bloodstained hearse was conveyed on the still, dark waters of the Thames, followed by many boats and barges lighted with torches, all filled with monks singing dirges, to Chertsey Abbey, where it was interred, and where miracles presently began to be wrought at the tomb of the assassinated monarch. These facts suggest a rearrangement of the famous scene in Shakespeare's Richard III. Glos'ter ought to meet the body of his victim, and with it the Lady Anne, as they land from the river and not on the highroad. Shakespeare was evidently unaware that the royal corpse was conveyed by water and not by land to Chertsey, and also that the Lady Anne, Princess of Wales, was at this time a close prisoner in the Tower.

When Edward IV. died at Westminster (April 9, 1483) the sinister rumours of foul play, that had filled the city when Henry vi. was despatched, buzzed again. To disprove these reports the body, after being disembowelled and embalmed, was exposed, nude to the waist, for ten days, on a bier under a canopy of black cloth fringed with gold, placed in the centre of the Royal Chapel of Westminster Palace, and not in Westminster Hall, as is generally stated. During this singular lying-in-state, Low Masses were said continuously at a temporary altar erected at the foot of the bier. Meanwhile, for three days, an interminable procession of nobles and ecclesiastics, and of the general public, passed in front of the corpse to assure themselves that the monarch was really dead. This ceremony over, the corpse was enclosed in a leaden coffin, and then in a casket of oak, covered by a pall of black velvet, with a great cross in cloth-of-gold down its centre.

The usual effigy of the King, in "habet royall crowned with a crowne upon his hed and septer in his one hand and ball in the other," was set up. Sir William Stonor stood at the right corner of this catafalque, holding the banner of Holy Trinity; opposite to him stood Sir Henry Ferris with the banner of Our Lady; Sir James Radcliffe held the banner of St. George, and Sir George Browne that of St. Edward. In the great procession that swept to the Abbey marched the Archbishop of York, and the Bishops of London, Ely, Norwich, Durham, Lincoln, and Rochester, all in black pontificalibus; with them were the Abbots of Avendon and Bermondsey. After a High Mass of Requiem, a grand cavalcade of nobles and gentlemen escorted the body of the deceased Sovereign through London to Windsor. The bier rested at Charing Cross, where the Abbot of Westminster, the Archbishop and the Bishops, censed it, and after taking a solemn leave, returned, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Sheriffs, to the Abbey in time for dinner. The procession passed on to Sheen, where it rested the night in the chapel of the Carthusians, and only reached Windsor the following afternoon. The next morning a Mass of Requiem was sung in St. George's Chapel, and then the body of Edward Iv. was consigned to the vault where his gigantic skeleton still lies, not far from the remains of his consort Elizabeth Woodville, and of Henry VIII., Jane Seymour, and Charles 1.-a weird royal company!

On the night of May 3 of the same year, London heard with stupefaction that "the bird of ill-omen, Dickon of Glos'ter," abetted by Buckingham, had intercepted young King Edward the Fifth's progress to London and had carried him off captive.

That Richard of Glos'ter was preparing to usurp his brother's throne during his last illness is proved by the following significant anecdote related by Sir Thomas More, who must have known intimately many men who had lived through the scenes he describes so graphically in his History of Richard III. "On the night King Edward IV. died, one Mystlebrook came," says he, "long before daybreak, to the house of a Mr. Pottyer in Redcross Street, without Cripplegate, and rapped on his door: but it was opened by Pottyer in person. Mystlebrook now announced that King Edward had departed. By my troth, man,' quoth Mr. Pottyer, then will my master, the Duke of

Glos'ter, be King." More, who received the story direct from the lips of his own father, shrewdly asks, "What cause had Pottyer to say this unless he had some inkling of his master's schemes?"

The terror and confusion into which London was thrown during the five months of little King Edward the Fifth's reign baffles description. Our honest citizens were now daily startled by some appalling tragedy that filled England, nay all Europe, with consternation. None the less, as in Paris during the worst period of the Revolution, so now in the metropolis the current of everyday life was not checked by this reign of terror,—the buying and selling, the marrying, the christening and the burying, the laughing and the weeping, the cheating and the lying, all went on as usual. There were no papers, but news travelled quickly enough, and the effort made to suppress details added, rather than otherwise, to the eagerness with which it was sought after and retailed. Trembling for her own safety as well as for that of her youngest boy and daughters, Queen Elizabeth Woodville immediately sought sanctuary with them at Westminster.1

Here then was a queen of England, "alone and forlorn, desolate and dismayed," sitting on rushes, her weeping children clinging round her! The room may be seen to this day, with the remains of the louvre in the roof through which the smoke from the fire escaped. It was the Abbot's Chamber, and is still used by an Abbey dignitary, remaining one of the most interesting relics of old London.

The Guildhall, which in the course of its eventful history has witnessed many an extraordinary scene, never beheld one more extraordinary than that which occurred on the morning of June 24, 1483, when the Duke of Buckingham, appearing before the Mayor and Aldermen and the more prominent citizens, strove to persuade them that the late King Edward iv. had married one of his mistresses, and that his marriage with Elizabeth Woodville was therefore illegal, and her children

1 The children with the distracted Queen were-Anne, aged eight, afterwards Lady Thomas Howard; Katherine, afterwards married to the Earl of Devonshire, four; Bridget, only three, who died a nun at Dartford; Elizabeth, afterwards Queen of Henry VII., aged seven years; Cicely, afterwards Viscountess Welles,—not Villiers, as usually stated,—aged six; and Richard, Duke of York, aged eleven.

bastards. The assembled citizens were, however, no more convinced than they had been on the previous Sunday, when Dr. Shaw, or Shore, a relative of the notorious Jane of that ilk, had made the same statement at Paul's Cross. The Hall was, however, so thickly packed by the Duke of Gloucester's partisans, that on an offer being made to the citizens to accept Richard as their King, the voices of the more loyal were drowned by their clamour. The next day-exactly two days after the execution of Hastings and the arrest of Jane Shore-a deputation proceeded to Baynard's Castle, where Gloucester was then residing (he had left Crosby Hall), and offered him the crown. On the following morning he hurried off, almost unattended, to Westminster Abbey, where he seated himself in the Confessor's Chair and proclaimed himself King both by inheritance and election. His first thought after this audacious act was to devise a way of getting rid of Elizabeth Woodville and her children.

The Queen's folly in delivering up her younger son to his kind uncle's care (probably she could not help herself) forms one of the most pathetic incidents in this woeful tragedy. "And therewithal," says Sir Thomas More, "she cried, 'Farewell, my sweete sonne. Let me kiss you ere you go-for God knows if we shall ever kiss again,' and so fell to kissing him and to weeping sore; and the child, poor innocent, wept as fast as herself." The rest of the dire tale is soon told. Mother and sons never met again. Richard of York shared the fate of his beautiful elder brother-"the fairest child that ever lived,”and who does not know what that fate was!

The frantic grief of Elizabeth Woodville is most tragically described by More in his Life of Richard III.—

"She swooned and fell to the ground, and there lay in great agony, yet like a dead corpse. When she came to her memory

1 These facts are very rarely noticed by historians. Mr. A. Sharpe, however, gives them full value in his remarkable book London and the Kingdom. The complete list of the personages who attended the coronation of Richard III. is preserved in the city archives, and in a curious pamphlet entitled Report on the Coronations, printed in 1831. There are included also the names of all persons who in the same capacity attended the coronations of each of our kings down to George IV., with the sole exception of that of Charles II.