rs, executions,
treacheries, adorn a network of intrigue and villany, which was enough
to have made the "White" and the "Red Rose" forever hateful to English
eyes.

The great Earl of Warwick led the White Rose of York to victory,
sending the {68} Lancastrian King to the tower, his wife and child
fugitives from the Kingdom, and proclaimed Edward, (son of Richard Duke
of York, the original claimant, who had been slain in the conflict),
King of England.

Then, with an unscrupulousness worthy of the time and the cause,
Warwick opened communication with the fugitive Queen, offering her his
services, betrothed his daughter to the young Edward, Prince of Wales,
took up the red Lancastrian rose from the dust of defeat,--brought the
captive he had sent to the tower back to his throne--only to see him
once more dragged down again by the Yorkists--and for the last time
returned to captivity; leaving his wife a prisoner and his young son
dead at Tewksbury, stabbed by Yorkist lords. Henry VI. died in the
Tower, "mysteriously," as did all the deposed and imprisoned Kings;
Warwick was slain in battle, and with Edward IV. the reign of the House
of York commenced.

Such in brief is the story of the "Wars of the Roses" and of the Earl
of Warwick, the "King Maker."

At the close of the Wars of the Roses, {69} feudalism was a ruin. The
oak with its dead roots had been prostrated by the storm. The imposing
system had wrought its own destruction. Eighty Princes of the blood
royal had perished, and more than half of the Nobility had died on the
field or the scaffold, or were fugitives in foreign lands. The great
Duke of Exeter, brother-in-law to a King, was seen barefoot begging
bread from door to door.

By the confiscation of one-fifth of the landed estate of the Kingdom,
vast wealth poured into the King's treasury. He had no need now to
summon Parliament to vote him supplies. The clergy, rendered feeble
and lifeless from decline in spiritual enthusiasm, and by its blind
hostility to the intellectual movement of the time, crept closer to the
throne, while Parliament, with its partially disfranchised House of
Commons, was so rarely summoned that it almost ceased to exist. In the
midst of the general wreck, the Kingship towered in solitary greatness.

Edward IV. was absolute sovereign. He had no one to fear, unless it
was his {70} intriguing brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who,
during the twenty-three years of Edward's re