said too, that, being stricken by his conscience, he dreamed
frightful dreams, and started up in the night-time, wild with
terror and remorse. Active to the last, through all this, he
issued vigorous proclamations against Henry of Richmond and all his
followers, when he heard that they were coming against him with a
Fleet from France; and took the field as fierce and savage as a
wild boar – the animal represented on his shield.
Henry of Richmond landed with six thousand men at Milford Haven,
and came on against King Richard, then encamped at Leicester with
an army twice as great, through North Wales. On Bosworth Field the
two armies met; and Richard, looking along Henry’s ranks, and
seeing them crowded with the English nobles who had abandoned him,
turned pale when he beheld the powerful Lord Stanley and his son
(whom he had tried hard to retain) among them. But, he was as
brave as he was wicked, and plunged into the thickest of the fight.
He was riding hither and thither, laying about him in all
directions, when he observed the Earl of Northumberland – one of
his few great allies – to stand inactive, and the main body of his
troops to hesitate. At the same moment, his desperate glance
caught Henry of Richmond among a little group of his knights.
Riding hard at him, and crying ‘Treason!’ he killed his standardbearer,
fiercely unhorsed another gentleman, and aimed a powerful
stroke at Henry himself, to cut him down. But, Sir William Stanley
parried it as it fell, and before Richard could raise his arm
again, he was borne down in a press of numbers, unhorsed, and
killed. Lord Stanley picked up the crown, all bruised and
trampled, and stained with blood, and put it upon Richmond’s head,
amid loud and rejoicing cries of ‘Long live King Henry!’
That night, a horse was led up to the church of the Grey Friars at
Leicester; across whose back was tied, like some worthless sack, a
naked body brought there for burial. It was the body of the last
of the Plantagenet line, King Richard the Third, usurper and
murderer, slain at the battle of Bosworth Field in the thirtysecond
year of his age, after a reign of two years.
CHAPTER XXVI – ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE SEVENTH
KING HENRY THE SEVENTH did not turn out to be as fine a fellow as
the nobility and people hoped, in the first joy of their
deliverance from Richard the Third. He was very cold, crafty, and
calculating, and would do almost anything for money. He possessed
considerable ability, but his chief merit appears to have been that
he was not cruel when there was nothing to be got by it.
The new King had promised the nobles who had espoused his cause
that he would marry the Princess Elizabeth. The first thing he
did, was, to direct her to be removed from the castle of Sheriff
Hutton in Yorkshire, where Richard had placed her, and restored to
the care of her mother in London. The young Earl of Warwick,
Edward Plantagenet, son and heir of the late Duke of Clarence, had
been kept a prisoner in the same old Yorkshire Castle with her.
This boy, who was now fifteen, the new King placed in the Tower for
safety. Then he came to London in great state, and gratified the
people with a fine procession; on which kind of show he often very
much relied for keeping them in good humour. The sports and feasts
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which took place were followed by a terrible fever, called the
Sweating Sickness; of which great numbers of people died. Lord
Mayors and Aldermen are thought to have suffered most from it;
whether, because they were in the habit of over-eating themselves,
or because they were very jealous of preserving filth and nuisances
in the City (as they have been since), I don’t know.
The King’s coronation was postponed on account of the general illhealth,
and he afterwards deferred his marriage, as if he were not
very anxious that it should take place: and, even after that,