eir
opponents. Though holding Church views in other points, and at any
rate a persecutor of the Lollards, he did not however allow the clergy
to enter on their temporalities without heavy payments: he created
monopolies in the case of some especially profitable articles of
trade. In short, he neglected no means to render the administration of
the supreme power independent of the money-grants of Parliament. He
made room for the royal prerogative as understood by the old kings, as
well as for the right of birth.

But yet he had not established a secure position, since the party of
the enemy was still very powerful, and after his early death a quarrel
broke out in his own house which could not fail to destroy it.

To the characteristic traits of the Plantagenets, their world-wide
views, their chivalry abroad, their versatility at home, the ceaseless
war they waged with each other and with others for power, their
inextinguishable love of rule, belongs also the way in which those who
held power rid themselves of foes within their own family. As formerly
King John had murdered in prison Arthur the lawful heir to the throne,
so Richard II imprisoned and murdered his uncle Thomas of Gloucester,
who was dangerous to himself. Richard II, like Edward II, died by the
hand of a relative who had wrested the crown from him; of the details
of his death we have not even a legend left. Another Gloucester, who
had for many years guarded the crown for the infant Henry VI, was, at
the very moment when he might become dangerous to the new government,
found dead in his bed. So Henry VI perished in the Tower the day
before Edward IV made his entry into London. Edward IV preferred to
have his brother Clarence, though already under sentence of death,
privately killed. But the most atrocious murder of all was that of the
two infant sons of Edward IV himself; they were both murdered at once,
as was fully believed, at the behest of their uncle Richard III, who
had put himself in possession of the throne. I know not whether the
actual character of Richard answered to that type of inborn wickedness
which commits crime because it wills it as crime, such as following
the hints of the Chronicle[71] a great poet has drawn for us in
imperishable traits, and linked with his name: or whether it was not
rather the love of power, that animated the whole family, which in
Richard III grew step by step into a passion that made him forget all
laws human and div