ter
the battle of Hexham (see p. 331), the last male heir of the House of
Beaufort, as well as others, who had taken refuge in the abbey, were
afterwards put to death, though Edward had solemnly promised them
their lives. On the night after Edward's return to London Henry VI.
ended his life in the Tower. There can be no reasonable doubt that he
was murdered, and that, too, by Edward's directions.

9. =Edward IV. prepares for War with France. 1471--1474.=--Edward IV.
was now all powerful. He had no competitor to fear. No descendant of
Henry IV. remained alive. Of the Beauforts, the descendants of John of
Gaunt by Catherine Swynford (see p. 282), the male line had perished,
and the only representative was young Henry, Earl of Richmond, whose
mother, the Lady Margaret, was the daughter of the first Duke of
Somerset, and the cousin of the two dukes who had been executed after
the battles of Hexham and Tewkesbury.[32] His father, Edmund Tudor,
Earl of Richmond, who died before his birth, was the son of a Welsh
gentleman of no great mark, who had had the luck to marry Catherine of
France, the widow of Henry V. The young Richmond was, however, an
exile, and, as he was only fourteen years of age when Edward was
restored, no serious danger was as yet to be apprehended from that
side. Moreover, the slaughter amongst both the Yorkist and the
Lancastrian nobility had, for the time, put an end to all danger of a
rising. Edward was, therefore, at liberty to carry out his own foreign
policy. He obtained grants from Parliament to enable him, in alliance
with Charles of Burgundy, to make war against Louis XI. The grants
were insufficient, and he supplemented them by a newly invented system
of benevolences, which were nominally free gifts made to him by the
well-to-do, but which were in reality exactions, because those from
whom they were required dared not refuse to pay. The system raised
little general ill will, partly because the small owners of property
who were relieved from taxation were not touched by the benevolences,
and partly because the end which Edward had put to the civil war made
his government welcome. In some cases his personal charm counted for
something. One old lady whom he asked for ten pounds replied that for
the sake of his handsome face she would give him twenty. He kissed her
and she at once made it forty.

[Footnote 32: Genealogy of the Beauforts and the Tudors:--

John o