was then brought to the house of one of his own servants, by name Rutland, whence, after his wounds had been bandaged by a surgeon, he was conveyed to the sanctuary at Westminster. From this place of refuge he sent messengers to deprecate the King's anger, and his near relationship to the blood royal might, under ordinary circumstances, have been suffered to plead in his favour; but his wife, Anne, the king's sister, instead of assisting him in his prayers for life, was busily employed in soliciting a divorce, a point which she at length carried by dint of importunity. Whether the Duke obtained a remission of his sentence, so far as regarded life and limb, or whether he fled in secret from the sanctuary, does not appear. However this may be, like so many others of the Lancastrians, he was reduced to the most abject state of poverty and distress, of which we have a lively picture in the pages of Philip de Comines. “I saw one of them,” says that delightful chronicler of the past, "who was Duke of Exeter (but he concealed his name), following the Duke of Burgundy's train bare-foot and bare-legged, begging his bread from door to door. This person was the next of the house of Lancaster; he had married King Edward's sister, and being afterwards known, had a small pension granted to him." It would seem that he afterwards made an attempt to return to England, for his dead body was found upon the shore of Kent, as if it had been cast there by shipwreck. This event took place in the thirteenth year of Edward the Fourth, Anno Domini 1475. Anne had one daughter by the Duke, who bore the same Christian name, and died in her mother's lifetime. But soon. after her divorce she married again, and had another daughter, Anne, by her second husband, Sir Thomas St. Leger, who is known to us as having founded a chantry in the north cross of the royal chapel of St. George, in Windsor Castle, and who married SIR GEORGE MANNERS, Lord Ros, father by her of Thomas first EARL OF RUTLAND. Anne of York did not survive her second marriage more than two years. Her remains were interred, with those of her husband, in the Chapel Royal. Elizabeth of York. HE Princess Elizabeth, surnamed of York, was the eldest daughter of Edward the Fourth, by his Queen, Elizabeth Wydeville. Her birth took place at Westminster on the eleventh day of February, 1464-5; and soon afterwards she was christened in the abbey there, with the pomp and circumstance suitable to the state of her, who would one day, to all appearance, become the sovereign of England. It was probably owing to this prospect of succession, that the king, her father, bestowed so much care upon her education; she was taught both French and Spanish, and it is recorded of her by the chroniclers, with much emphasis, that she could read and write her own language; their admiration upon this head leaving us to infer that these were no common accomplishments amongst the ladies of her period. These brilliant expectations, perhaps happily for Elizabeth, were not destined to be realized, for the turbulent nobles, who were with difficulty kept in order by the strong hand of man, already began to murmur at the prospect of a female ruler. After the lapse, a son was born to Edward, and he was subsequently followed by a second. While Elizabeth was yet a child, Edward more than once used the hope of obtaining her in marriage as a peace-offering to reconcile his enemies, or as a lure to confirm the wavering. In this way he won over the Nevilles, when he was their prisoner at Middleham, proposing that, as soon as she came of ripe years, she should marry George Neville, the eldest son of John, Earl of Northumberland, afterwards Marquess of Montagu. The young lover, in the prospect of this arrangement being one day carried out, was created Duke of Bedford; but his subsequent defection from the King broke off the design, and in the year 1477 he was degraded from all his honours. Again, when there was a treaty of marriage afoot between the Lancastrian Prince of Wales and Anne of Warwick, King Edward adopted the same convenient and ready line of policy, and endeavoured to defeat the negociation by offering " my lady Princess" to Queen Margaret for her son. The Lancastrian cause, however, triumphed for a time by force of arms, without the necessity of such an union. Edward, baffled and defeated, was compelled to ensure his personal safety by flying to the continent, where he found a refuge with the Duke of Burgundy; while his Queen, with Elizabeth and two younger children, sought and found a refuge in the sanctuary at Westminster. Here it was that she first gave birth to a son, thus removing Elizabeth from her dangerous proximity to a throne, sure at all events to be contested, and doubly so if the sceptre had fallen into the feeble grasp of a woman. Scarcely have we grown familiar with the idea of a king of the House of Lancaster, than the various characters, as if in some mazy dance, once again shift their places; the first become last, those who were at the top are now precipitated to the bottom, until the head, in truth, becomes giddy by this incessant whirr and whirling of the wheel of fortune. The Lancastrians are in their turn defeated, the Yorkist King regains his sceptre, and, following out his old policy, offers Elizabeth's hand to the young Earl of Richmond. But the latter, who was then an exile, suspected, and probably with reason, that this offer was no more than a lure to get him into the king's power. He declined the dangerous honour. In the June of 1475, Edward resolved to occupy the thoughts and hands of his turbulent nobles in the favourite warfare of that age, as the crusades were of a yet earlier period. He collected a numerous army for the invasion of France, to which country, either in whole or in part, the English monarchs never failed to lay claim whenever a momentary cessation from intestine dispute gave them leisure for so agreeable an amusement. Previous to his departure at Southampton, Edward made his will, in which he thus alludes to the princess Elizabeth— "Item, We will that owre doughter Elizabeth have xм marc, towards her marriage, and that owre doughter Marie have also to her marriage Xм marc, soo that they may be goaverned and rieuled in their mariages by owre deirest wiff the Queen and by owre said son the Prince if God fortune him to comme to age of discrecion. And if he decease afore such age, as God defende, then by such as God disposeth to bee owre heir and by such lords and other as then shall bee of their counsaill ; and if either of owre said doughters doo marie thaims self without such advys and assent soo as they bee disparaged, as God forbede that then she soo marieng herself have noo paiement of her said XM marc, but that it be emploied by owre executours towards the hasty paiment of owre debtes, &c." Happily for the real interests of the people in either country, the threatened war was averted by the French King's concessions to the unreasonable demands of the haughty Edward, but with no intention, as the result proved, of keeping word in any of them. Amongst these conditions, the Princess Elizabeth, as usual, came into play. It was stipulated that the Dauphin should marry her when she arrived at the connubial age; or, if she died before that period, that then he should give his hand to her sister Mary. From this time forward Elizabeth was always addressed, in the palace, as Madame la Dauphine; a certain portion of the tribute-money, paid by Louis the Twelfth to her father, being carried over to account for her use, as the daughter-in-law of the French monarch. Louis also bound himself to defray the expenses of her journey into France when the time came for her nuptials; while for a set-off to these concessions, Edward surrendered to his son-in-law the titular right to the long-contested dukedom of Guienne, or Acquitain ; these territories being reckoned a part of Elizabeth's dower. It soon, however, appeared that while Louis promised thus largely, he had, in truth, no intention of strengthening England's claims to the crown of France by such an union. Three years had scarcely elapsed when he showed how little he had been in earnest with this projected match, by his demanding the heiress of Burgundy for his son the Dauphin, and thus Elizabeth was once again bandied to and fro between acceptance and rejection, like a ball between the rackets. With the usual aptitude that the world has for attributing the deaths of kings to any but the natural causes, it was asserted by many, at the time, and the tale has since been with easy faith repeated, that Edward died from a paroxysm of rage occasioned by this unlooked-for insult. However this may be, his death occurred at Westminster, on the ninth of April, 1483, and the crown devolved to his eldest son, who, unfortunately for himself as well as the state, was then a minor. The long-cherished ambition of the Duke of Gloucester had thus a full field to display itself; and in the murders and embroilments that followed, the treachery of the French king appears to have been forgotten. England, at war with herself, had no leisure for quarrels with her neighbours. Elizabeth was now nearly eighteen years of age, when, with her second brother and two younger sisters, she was hurried into the sanctuary at Westminster by the fears of her mother, who had taken alarm at the way in which the Duke had treated |