ly in Wales, in northern England, and in the
south-western shires. It is absurd to suppose that the shrewd traders of
Cheapside were moved by an abstract question of hereditary right, or that
the wild Welshmen believed themselves to be supporting the right of
Parliament to regulate the succession. But it marks the power which
Parliament had gained that, directly as his claims ran in the teeth of a
succession established by it, the Duke of York felt himself compelled to
convene the two Houses in October and to lay his claim before the Lords as
a petition of right. Neither oaths nor the numerous Acts which had settled
and confirmed the right to the crown in the House of Lancaster could
destroy, he pleaded, his hereditary claim. The bulk of the Lords refrained
from attendance, and those who were present received the petition with
hardly concealed reluctance. They solved the question, as they hoped, by a
compromise. They refused to dethrone the king, but they had sworn no
fealty to his child, and at Henry's death they agreed to receive the Duke
as successor to the crown.

[Illustration: The Wars of the Roses]

[Sidenote: Wars of the Roses]

But the open display of York's pretensions at once united the partizans of
the royal House in a vigorous resistance; and the deadly struggle which
received the name of the Wars of the Roses from the white rose which
formed the badge of the House of York and the red rose which was the
cognizance of the House of Lancaster began in a gathering of the North
round Lord Clifford and of the West round Henry, Duke of Somerset, the son
of the Duke who had fallen at St. Albans. York, who hurried in December to
meet the first with a far inferior force, was defeated and slain at
Wakefield. The passion of civil war broke fiercely out on the field. The
Earl of Salisbury who had been taken prisoner was hurried to the block.
The head of Duke Richard, crowned in mockery with a diadem of paper, is
said to have been impaled on the walls of York. His second son, Lord
Rutland, fell crying for mercy on his knees before Clifford. But
Clifford's father had been the first to fall in the battle of St. Albans
which opened the struggle. "As your father killed mine," cried the savage
baron, while he plunged his dagger in the young noble's breast, "I will
kill you!" The brutal deed was soon to be avenged. Richard's eldest son,
Edward, the Earl of March, was busy gathering a force on the Welsh border
in support of