ies and inconsistencies. No evidence was
offered; the conclusion was foregone from the beginning. So they died
on Southampton Green.

Perhaps Henry's heart failed him at the last moment. For some reason,
Richard of Conisborough was spared the last and worst ignominy of a
traitor's death--the exposure of the severed head on some city gate.
Henry allowed his remains to receive quiet and honourable burial.

The next day a decree was passed, pardoning March for all crimes and
offences. The only offence which he had ever committed against the
House of Lancaster was his own existence; and for that he could scarcely
be held responsible, either in law or equity. But can we say as much
for the offence against God and man which he committed on that sixth of
August, when he suffered himself to be dragged to the judge's bench, on
which he sat with others to condemn the husband of that sister Anne who
had been his all but mother?

We shall see no more of Edmund Mortimer. He ended life as he began it--
as much like a vegetable as a human being could well make himself. Few
Mortimers attained old age, nor did he. He died in his thirty-fourth
year, issueless and unwept; and Richard Duke of York, the son of Anne
Mortimer and Richard of Conisborough, succeeded to the White Rose's
"heritage of woe."

A week after the execution, the King sailed for Harfleur.

The campaign was short, for those days of long campaigns; but pestilence
raged among the troops, and cut off some of the finest men. The Earl of
Suffolk died before they left Harfleur, and ere they reached Picardy,
the Earl of Arundel. But the King pressed onward, till on the night of
the 24th of October, he encamped, ready to give battle, near the little
village of Azincour, to be thenceforward for ever famous, under its
English name of Agincourt.

The army was in a very sober mood. The night was spent quietly, by the
more careless in sleep, by the more thoughtful in prayer. The Duke of
York was among the former; the King among the latter. Henry is said to
have wrestled earnestly with God that no sins of his might be remembered
against him, to lead to the discomfiture of his army. There was need
for the entreaty. Perchance, had he slept that night, some such ghostly
visions, born of his own conscience, might have disturbed his sleep, as
those which troubled one of his successors on the eve of Bosworth Field.

When morning came, and the King was at breakfast with