long ere morning came in great haste to the house of one Pottyer, dwelling in Redcross street without Cripplegate; and when he was with hasty rapping quickly letten in, he showed unto Pottyer, that King Edward was departed. 'By my troth, man,' quod Pottyer, then will my master the duke of Glo'ster be king.' What cause he had so to think, hard it is to say, whether he being toward him anything knew that he such thing purposed, or otherwise had any inkling thereof, for he was not likely to speak it of nought.”

To this the Latin history makes the very remarkable addition: "Quem ego sermonem ab eo memini "qui colloquentes audiverat jam tum patri meo renun"ciatum, cum adhuc nulla proditionis ejus suspicio ha"beretur." The author had heard this anecdote reported to his father before any one suspected what Glo'ster was aiming at, that is to say, within a few days or weeks of the death of Edward IV., or at all events before Richard became King. This More could not possibly have remembered, or even understood, if he was born, as is commonly supposed, in 1480; for in that case he was only three years old at Richard's accession. But the date of his birth rests on very uncertain testimony, the earliest authority for it being More's great grandson, who, as Mr. Hunter thinks, "followed the

inscription on the painting of the More family at "Burford." "We may observe," adds Mr. Hunter, "that if Lewis has given the inscriptions correctly "from the Well Hall picture, or if those inscriptions "were themselves correct, Sir Thomas More's birth "should be carried back to 1476, for he was aged 50' "when Ann Cresacre was aged 15,' and her birth is "fixed by very decisive evidence to 1511." If Sir Thomas More was born in 1476, all difficulty in supposing him the author of the Latin history, so far as this anecdote goes, is at an end.

In the history of the succeeding reign we have no such trustworthy guidance. The events are hidden in deeper darkness. If the strictly contemporary narratives

are few in the case of Richard, they are fewer still and far more bald in the case of Henry VII. And if we had lost contemporary narratives altogether, the doings of Richard left far too deep an impression not to be well and graphically recorded. It was very different in the reign which followed.

I have already said that these letters do not always tell their own story. In most men's correspondence passages may be found more or less enigmatical to all, save the parties concerned; but where we have only single letters, few and far between, we are in special need of light from other sources, After all that I have been able to collect, I must still own that the letters of Henry VII,'s reign are extremely scanty. The first ten years are almost an absolute blank; the remaining fourteen only a slight degree more satisfactory, And what seems most unaccountable, we learn here nothing whatever of the men who are supposed to have directed Henry's counsels. I have looked in vain even for a single specimen of the handwriting of Cardinal Morton; in vain also for that of Reginald Bray. Of Richard Fox three unimportant letters are all that I can find belonging to the reign of Henry VII., besides the instructions given him to treat with the Scotch. What part did these men play in the affairs of the time? Were they nothing but agents of the royal will? It is not on such matters that we must look for information in these volumes. What was done in the council chamber probably was not recorded; at least the records do not appear to exist. We have, indeed, through Mr. Bergenroth's recent labours, much more knowledge of Henry VII.'s diplomacy than we could at one time have supposed attainable; but it is from Spanish, not from English sources. Of Henry himself or his ministers, there is hardly a state paper in England, to tell us what was done or thought advisable at any juncture of this chequered reign,

But there are facts of no less value than these which can only be traced in scattered documents. If we would really know what times Henry VII. had fallen upon, we must read the language used in the times themselves ; and if we cannot penetrate the "cor Regis inscrutabile,' we may at least, see glimpses of what was done outside the palace, It is unnecessary to state generally what may be found in these byways of history. We have already seen some specimens in the preceding volume, and we have still somewhat to say of it in detail, The main circumstances, however, which moulded Henry's life, demand a little preliminary attention.

mother.

When Henry came into the world his father was Henry VII. already dead. The care of his education, the charge and his of protecting his childhood, amid the dangers of the times, fell upon his uncle Jasper, Earl of Pembroke. But he had still one parent who attended him through his whole career, and who, as if she had nothing else to live for, died just two months after him. She had been a mother at an unusually early age,-it was even said, as early as fourteen,' and Henry was her only offspring. Two subsequent marriages had no way tended to diminish her jealous care of a son, to whom a great party looked as the hope of England and the house of Lancaster; on the contrary, they had strengthened her to promote his interests. The second brought over the Stanleys to his party, which may be said to have decided the critical day of Bosworth. It was she who turned to his advantage the self-seeking plans of Buckingham, and negociated with Elizabeth Woodville the union of the Roses. A faculty of planning and arranging, which she had in no small degree, became, when the occa

1 Bishop Blyth (see vol. i. p. 422), and Polydore Vergil, (ed, 1546), p. 522, both agree in saying, before

she had completed her fourteenth
year.

sion required it, high diplomacy and statesmanship; yet it was called forth by maternal anxiety alone. When the battle had been won, and Henry from an exile had become a king, her particular talent found employment in the ordering of his household, making arrangements for the queen's lying-in, and for the christening of the royal children. But she did better work in her time than this, and some of it has lasted to our own time. She was a patroness of William Caxton. She translated from the French various books of piety and devotion, of which some were printed after her death by Pynson. She was the first patroness of the martyred Bishop Fisher, who was her confessor; and she endowed colleges and professorships, both at Oxford and Cambridge, where her name will not readily be forgotten.'

To such a mother it may almost be said that Henry owed more than ordinary filial obligations. He was fully conscious of the debt. Her influence at court was marked by Ayala and the sub-prior of Santa Cruz, and it is reported by both these witnesses that she kept the queen, her daughter-in-law, in subjection. Yet we should be slow to believe against Fisher's testimony, that her disposition was harsh or tyrannical. Three of her letters have been preserved,

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which, while they confirm our belief in her affection for Henry, seem to indicate no less surely that it extended to his wife and children. One of them betrays a touch of humour, a thing rarely met with in letters of that early age. She writes to the Earl of Ormond, the Queen's Chamberlain, at a time when he seems to have been abroad on an embassy, acknowledging some gloves that he had procured for her. Finding them too large for her hand, "I think," she says, the "ladies in that parts be great ladies all, and according "to their great estate they have great personages." All else that she had to say on this occasion was as follows: "Blessed be God, the king, the queen, and all "our sweet children be in good heal. The queen hath "been a little crased, but now she is well, God be "thanked. Her sickness is [not?] so good as I would, "but I trust hastily it shall, with God's grace." Trifles of the hour these things doubtless are in themselves; but they aid us to understand the character of Margaret, Countess of Richmond.

To us, indeed, such indications are all the more valuable, because no eulogist of her own time would have thought them worth preserving. So long as monasticism existed, and seemed to the world the best ideal of a Christian life, neither cheerfulness nor natural affection ranked high among the Christian graces. It was not in such things that her devoted Fisher praised her merits. Much of what he loved to tell was of the opposite complexion, and shows us how far she was influenced by religious sentiments at that time universal. That she was studious in books and abstemious in diet; that she wore out her body in religious exercises; that she used hair shirts; and that, though three times married, she separated from her last husband by his consent to enter a state of religion, are the points he finds worthy of special commendation. They are at least necessary to complete the portrait.