relics of the Yorkshire faction in England. A plot was formed; but Henry countermined it. He shut up the English market in Antwerp, and opened one in Calais. Bribing the leading agent of the White Roses, Sir Robert Clifford, he so prepared his plans that he pounced swiftly and surely on the nest of plotters. Three of them suffered death. On the same charge -conspiracy in favour of Warbeck died Sir William Stanley, who had helped his noble brother in placing Henry on the throne.

It became necessary to make the government of Ireland more secure. This was effected by Sir Edward Poynings, the

lord-deputy, who passed a measure called Poynings's 1494 Law, which made the English supremacy in Ireland a

reality. It provided that the Irish Parliament should not meet without the sanction of the English Government; and that no Bill could be introduced into it until it had first received the assent of the king and his council. The measure gave the English sovereigns a firmer hold on the island.

Warbeck next made a sudden descent on Deal. He sent some hundreds to the shore; but the Kentish men drove 1495 them fiercely back, taking many prisoners, whose gibbeted corpses soon poisoned all the south-eastern seaAfter a stay in Flanders, he tried Ireland a second time, but to little purpose. He then passed over to Scotland, where he found a hearty welcome and a pretty wife.

board.

Much had happened lately to irritate the old sores which rankled between the neighbour nations. Stout Sir Andrew Wood, a sea-captain of Largo, had drubbed the English sailors twice. within the Firth of Forth, and had hauled his battered prizes at the stern of the Flower and the Yellow Carvel into the roadsteads of Leith and Dundee (1489). James the Fourth knew that his English cousin was plotting darkly against his person and his throne. So Warbeck received a hearty welcome, and sat, with the honours of a rightful prince, at tournaments and banquets.

James permitted him to marry Lady Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, and a kinswoman of his own. When from the untiring Duchess of Burgundy there came some money and arms, and men to wield them, the Scottish king crossed the Border with his guest. Warbeck sent his story on before him, but it failed to kindle a rising in his favour. His motley troops did nothing but squabble and rob wher- 1496 ever some incautious yeoman had left his cattle in field or byre. Without firing a shot or striking a blow, except at one another, the gang of bonneted moss-1 3-troopers and their foreign aids shrank back behind the Cheviots and the Tweed. Henry used the invasion as an excuse for a new tax. Parliament granted a subsidy; but the Cornish men resisted the collection, and marched to London, led by Lord Audley and a blacksmith named Michael Joseph. They were attacked on Blackheath, and were dispersed with the loss of two thousand men. Their leaders were seized and executed. Meanwhile King James had entered England a second time, but the approach of Surrey caused him to retreat. Feeling then that Warbeck's cause was hopeless, and dazzled by the glittering bait of a marriage with the English princess Margaret, James resolved to send the Yorkist adventurer off to seek his misfortunes elsewhere.

Warbeck, bandied from court to court, and baffled in all his ambitious snatches at the crown, possessed in his wife a jewel worth many crowns, if he had known how to prize its value. She left her country and her home to follow him through perils by water and land she clung to him, all the more fondly, no doubt, when he tossed a wreck upon the sea of life. The hardships and escapes of his third attempt to rouse the Irish people did not daunt her heroic heart. She crossed with him to Cornwall, where he made his final and fatal move, and waited, panting with eager love, at Mount St. Michael, to hear that her Richard had won his crown at last. Impostor or no

1497

impostor, she loved him well. Marching from Bodmin, where he had assumed the kingly style of Richard the Fourth, he found the gates and guns of Exeter too strong for the undisciplined rabble that he led. He hurried on to Taunton, where a royal army lay camping in the Dean, and there he disgraced himself irretrievably by a sudden flight. From the wife that clung to his broken fortunes, and the men that had risked their lives in his cause, he stole, thieflike, in the dark, and galloped at full speed to the sanctuary of Beaulieu in the New Forest.

1498

Riding

We need not dwell on the rest of Warbeck's story. behind Henry through London streets, he passed to the Tower, and back again to Westminster, where he lived a while in honourable custody, watched by sleepless eyes. An attempted escape, which carried him as far as the Priory of Sheen, created an excuse for rougher treatment. Shut into the stocks at Westminster and at Cheapside on two successive days, he there read a confession, embodying that view of his early life which suited Henry. There seems little doubt that the printed copy of this confession was concocted by some one before it reached the public. Committed, after this degrading exposure, to the Tower, he found there poor young Warwick, whom life-long imprisonment had made almost imbecile. The discovery of a plot among the keepers of the Tower to set Warwick and Warbeck free brought destruction on both. It has been supposed that Henry tempted his prisoners to such attempts at escape as might give him a reasonable excuse for putting them to death. Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn on the 23rd of November 1499; and on the following day Warwick's head, still bright with youth-for he was only twenty-nine-rolled from the block on Tower Hill.*

1499

The faithful wife of Perkin Warbeck remained in the court of the queen, wearing the name of "The White Rose of England." When time had cured her grief, she married Sir Matthew Cradoc of North Wales.

CHAPTER II.

CARDINAL WOLSEY.

At Oxford-Lymington and Calais-Thistle and Rose-A lucky trip-Putting on the screw- -Revels-A French war-Flodden-Cardinal and chancellor Silver and red-The plain of Ardres-Execution of Buckingham-Fidei Defensor-Playing for a tiara-Scene in the Commons--Wolsey at home-Dark hints-The divorce broached-BlackfriarsMiserrimus-Leicester Abbey.

W1

HILE Perkin Warbeck was playing out the last scenes of his tragedy, Thomas Wolsey, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, was engaged in forcing a love for the classics on the sons of the English nobility. He then held the honourable post of master in the preparatory school attached to his college. Born at Ipswich in 1471, this son of "an honest poor man," whom common rumour called a butcher, had attained the degree of Bachelor so early as his fifteenth year—a feat which won for him the title of the Boy Bachelor. As 1486 the friend of Erasmus, he lent his aid to that distinguished Dutchman in promoting the new study of Greek. To his fellowship and his mastership was soon added the bursary of Magdalen, and in this capacity a little cloud gathered around his name; for, with that love of architecture which distinguished all the celebrated priests of the Middle Ages, he added a tower of chaste and delicate beauty to the college chapel, and, it is alleged, made free with the college funds to pay the masons.

The Christmas of 1499 led him to the household of the

1500

Marquis of Dorset,* whose three sons studied at Magdalen School, and who by-and-by rewarded him with the rectory of Lymington in Somersetshire. His two years in this country parish went by without much to mark them, and then he passed from Lymington to the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury, where he acted as domestic chaplain, though still drawing the revenue of his deserted cure. The prelate's death brought a change. Sir John Nanfan, who had known him in Somersetshire, and who found the duties of the treasurership of Calais pressing too heavily on an aged frame, invited him to be his chaplain and assistant. Accepting the offer, Wolsey made this post a stepping-stone to fortune and royal favour; for Nanfan was so pleased with his deputy's tact and energy that he recommended the young priest to the notice of Henry the Seventh.

That king now sat securely on his throne, and he occupied himself with schemes for allying that royal seat to all the strong or dangerous neighbours he could reach. Marriage was the bond he chose. To Spain, then a leading state in Europe, his eyes naturally turned first. In 1501, Arthur, Prince of Wales, was married in St. Paul's to Catherine of Aragon, the fourth daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. The death, some months later, of the bridegroom, a mere boy in years, did not snap the tie, for the girlish widow was at once betrothed to her brother-in-law Prince Henry, now the heir-apparent. Henry was determined that her dowry should not go back to Spain.

Another marriage, fraught with more lasting results, 1503 took place in 1503, when the English princess Margaret rode over the Border into Scotland, to meet a royal husband-King James the Fourth. Little did the fair girl dream on that bright day at Lamberton, where Surrey gave her to the keeping of the Scottish lords, that, a few miles off, lay Flodden * Thomas Grey, son of Sir John Grey and Elizabeth Woodville, afterwards queen of Edward IV.

They were not married till 1509.