Clarence, his eldest son
being but twelve years old. He had no opportunity to have troubles
with his boys, and he loved women too well to fall out with his
daughters, the eldest of whom was but just turned of seventeen. The
history of Edward IV. is admirably calculated to furnish matter for a
sermon on the visitation of the sins of parents on their children. He
had talent enough to have made himself master of Western Europe,
but he followed a life of debauchery, by which he was cut off in his
prime, leaving a large number of young children to encounter the worst
of fortunes. Both of his sons disappeared, whether murdered by Richard
III. or Henry VII. no one can say; and his daughters had in part to
depend upon that bastard slip of the Red-Rose line, Henry VII., for
the means to enable them to live as gentlewomen,--all but the eldest,
whom Henry took to wife as a point of policy, which her father would
have considered the greatest misfortune of all those that befell his
offspring. Richard III's only legitimate son died a mere boy.

[Footnote A: It has been said of the Plantagenets that they "never
shed the blood of a woman." This is nonsense, as we could, time and
space permitting, show by the citation of numerous facts, but we shall
here mention only one. King John had a noble woman shut up with her
son, and starved to death. Perhaps that was not shedding her blood,
but it was something worse. Before English statesmen and orators and
writers take all the harlotry of Secessia under their kind care and
championship, it would be well for them to read up their own country's
history, and see how abominably women have been used in England for a
thousand years, from queens to queans.]

The Tudors fame to the English throne in 1485. There was no want of
domestic quarrelling with them. Arthur, Henry VII.'s eldest son, died
young, but left a widow, Catharine of Aragon, whom the King treated
badly; and he appears to have been jealous of the Prince of Wales,
afterward Henry VIII., but died too soon to allow of that jealousy's
blooming into quarrels. According to some authorities, the Prince
thought of seizing the crown, on the ground that it belonged to him in
right of his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet, who was unquestionably the
legitimate heir. Henry VIII. himself, who would have made a splendid
tyrant over a son who should have readied to man's estate,--an
absolute model in that way to all after-sovereigns,--was denied
by fort