cendant of Edward
the Third by his son John of Gaunt--landed for the second time to
head the insurrection against the bloody tyrant, Sir Paul Stukely
and a gallant little following marched amongst the first to join
his standard, and upon the bloody field of Bosworth, Paul felt that
he saw revenged to the full the tragedy of Tewkesbury.

He was there, close beside Henry Tudor, when the last frantic
charge of the wretched monarch in his despair was made, and when
Richard, after unhorsing many amongst Henry's personal attendants
in order to come to a hand-to-hand combat with his foe, witnessed
the secession from his ranks of Sir William Stanley, and fell,
crying "Treason, treason!" with his last breath. He who had
obtained his crown by treachery, cruelty, and treason of the
blackest kind, was destined to fall a victim to the treachery of
others. As Paul saw the mangled corpse flung across a horse's back
and carried ignominiously from the field, he felt that the God of
heaven did indeed look down and visit with His vengeance those who
had set at nought His laws, and that in the miserable death of this
last son of the House of York the cause of the Red Rose was amply
avenged.

A few years later, in the bright summertide, when the politic rule
of Henry the Seventh was causing the exhausted country to recover
from the ravages of the long civil war, Sir Paul Stukely and his
two sons, fine, handsome lads of ten and twelve years old, were
making a little journey (as we should now call it, though it seemed
a long one to the excited and delighted boys) from his pleasant
manor near St. Albans through a part of the county of Essex.

Paul had prospered during these past years. The king had rewarded
his early fealty by a grant of lands and a fine manor near to St.
Albans, whither he had removed his wife and family, so as to be
within easy reach of them at such times as he was summoned by the
king to Westminster. The atmosphere of home was dearer to him than
that of courts, and he was no longer away from his own house than
his duty to his king obliged him to be. But he had been much
engaged by public duties of late, and the holiday he had promised
himself had been long in coming. It had been a promise of some
standing to his two elder sons, Edward and Paul, that he would take
them some day to visit the spots which he talked of when they
climbed upon his knee after his day's work was done to beg for the
story of "the little prince,"