William Stanley had formed a project with others to go over to the enemy; but he protested his father's innocence, and assured the king that he would obey his summons. He was made to understand that his own life depended on his doing so, and he wrote a letter to his father accordingly.

Richard having mustered his followers at Nottingham, went on to Leicester to meet his antagonist, and encamped at Bosworth on the night of August 21. The Earl of Richmond had arrived near the same place with an army of five thousand men, which is supposed to have been not more than half that of the king. That day, however, Lord Stanley had come to the earl secretly at Atherstonet to assure him of his support in the coming battle. He and his brother Sir William were each at the head of a force not far off, and were only temporizing to save the life of his son Lord Strange. This information relieved Henry's mind of much anxiety, for at various times since he landed he had felt serious misgivings about the success of the enterprise. The issue was now to be decided on the following day.

Early in the morning [August 22, 1485] both parties prepared for the battle. Richard arose before daybreak, much agitated, it is said, by dreadful dreams that had haunted his imagination in the night-time. But he entered the field wearing his crown

*Bosworth, or Market Bosworth, eleven and a half miles west of Leicester. (See map.)

+ Atherstone, a town in Warwickshire, twenty-five miles south-west of Bosworth.

upon his head, and encouraged his troops with an eloquent harangue.* There was, however, treason in his camp, and many of his followers were only seeking an opportunity to desert and take part with the enemy. A warning, indeed, had been conveyed by an unknown hand to his foremost supporter, the Duke of Norfolk, in the following rhyme, which was discovered the night before written on the door of his tent:

"Jack of Norfolk, be not too bold;

For Dicken, thy master, is bought and sold."

Lord Stanley, who had drawn up his men at about equal distance from both armies, received messages early in the morning from both leaders desiring his immediate assistance. His policy, however, was to stand aloof to the very last moment, and he replied in each case that he would come at a convenient opportunity. Dissatisfied with this answer, Richard ordered his son to be beheaded, but was persuaded to suspend the execution of the order till the day should be decided.

After a discharge of arrows on both sides, the armies soon came to a hand-to-hand encounter. Lord Stanley joined the earl in the midst of the engagement; and the Earl of Northumberland, on whose support Richard had relied, stood still with all his followers and looked on. The day was going hard against the king. Norfolk fell in the thickest of the fight; and his son the Earl of Surrey, after fighting with great valor, was surrounded and taken prisoner. Richard endeavored to single out his adversary, whose position on the field was pointed out to him. He suddenly rushed upon Henry's body-guard, and unhorsed successively two of his attendants, one of whom, the earl's standard-bearer, fell dead to the ground. The earl himself was in great danger but that Sir William Stanley, who had hitherto abstained from joining the combat, now endeavored to surround the king with his force of three thousand men. Richard perceived that he was betrayed, and crying out, "Treason! treason!" endeavored only to sell his life as dearly as possible. powered by numbers, he fell dead in the midst of his enemies. The battered crown that had fallen from Richard's head was

Over

* See Shakspeare's Richard III., act v., scene 3. Mr. Gairdner has made a special study of Richard III. (History of the Life and Reign of Richard III., 1878). He tells us that, for twenty years, he strove to persuade himself that Richard had been misunderstood and maligned, but that, after the minutest scrutiny of all original authorities, he is compelled to acknowledge the general accuracy of the terrible picture given by Shakspeare and Sir Thomas More.

picked up upon the field of battle, and Sir William Stanley placed it upon the head of the conqueror, who was saluted as King by his whole army. The body of Richard, on the other hand, was treated with a degree of indignity which expressed but too plainly the disgust excited in the minds of the people by his inhuman tyranny. It was stripped naked and thrown upon a horse, a halter being placed round the neck, and in that fashion carried into Leicester, where it was buried with little honor in the Grey Friars' Church.

Such was the end of the last king of England of the line of the Plantagenets. In warlike qualities he was not inferior to the best of his predecessors; but his rule was such as alienated the hearts of the greater part of his subjects, and caused him to be remembered as a monster. In person, too, he is represented to have been deformed, with the right shoulder higher than the left; and he is traditionally regarded as a hunchback. But it may be that even his bodily defects were exaggerated after he was gone. Stories got abroad that he was born with teeth and hair coming down to the shoulders, and that his birth was attended by other circumstances altogether repugnant to the order of nature.

One fact that can hardly be a misstatement is that he was small of stature, which makes it all the more remarkable that in this last battle he overthrew in personal encounter a man of great size and strength named Sir John Cheyney. He was, in fact, a great soldier-king, in whom alike the valor and the violence of his race had been matured and brought to a climax by civil wars and family dissensions. It was inevitable that kings of this sort should give place to kings of a different stamp. His rival Henry, henceforth King Henry VII., inaugurated a new era, in which prudence and policy were made to serve the interests of peace, and secure the throne, even with a doubtful title, against the convulsions to which it had been hitherto exposed. By his marriage with the Princess Elizabeth he was considered to have at length united the houses of York and Lancaster; and he left to his son Henry VIII., who succeeded him, a title almost as free from dispute or cavil as that of any king in more recent times.

The civil wars, in fact, had worked themselves out. The too powerful nobility had destroyed each other in these internecine struggles; and as the lords of each party were attainted by turns, their great estates were confiscated and passed into the

hands of the crown. This gave the Tudor sovereigns an advantage that they knew well how to use. Watchful and suspicious of their nobility, they understood, as few other sovereigns did, the value of property; and under Henry VIII. the English monarchy attained a power and absolutism unparalleled before or since. The Houses of Lancaster and York (1877).

COBDEN AND THE CORN LAWS.

JOHN MORLEY.

[In the departments of literature and biography, Mr. Morley is one of the foremost writers of the day. He edited the Fortnightly Review from 1867 to 1882; and the series of English Men of Letters has appeared under his supervision. His own contributions to biography include, besides his Life of Richard Cobden here quoted, studies of the great French writers of the prerevolutionary era. Mr. Morley's analysis is searching and refined, though his generalizations are to be received with caution. His style is vigorous and direct.]

1. Cobden as an Orator.

Cobden seemed to have few of the endowments of an agitator as that character is ordinarily thought of; he had no striking physical gifts of the histrionic* kind. He had one physical quality which must be ranked first among the secondary endowments of great workers. Later in life he said, "If I had not had the faculty of sleeping like a dead fish, in five minutes after the most exciting mental effort, and with the certainty of having oblivion for six consecutive hours, I should not have been alive now." In his early days, he was slight in frame and build. He afterwards grew nearer to portliness. He had a large and powerful head, and the indescribable charm of a candid eye. His features were not of a commanding type; but they were illuminated and made attractive by the brightness of intelligence, of sympathy, and of earnestness. About the mouth there was a curiously winning mobility and play. His voice was clear, varied in its tones, sweet, and penetrating; but it had scarcely the compass, or the depth, or the many resources that have usually been found in orators who have drawn great multitudes of men to listen to them. Of nervous fire, indeed, he had abundance, though it was not the fire which flames up in the radiant colors of a strong imagination. It was rather the glow of a thoroughly convinced reason, of intellectual ingenuity, of argumentative keenness. It came from transparent honesty, * Of the kind that would make a good actor.

thoroughly clear ideas, and a very definite purpose. These were exactly the qualities that Cobden's share in the work

demanded.

2. Bright and Cobden Contrasted.

Mr.

It has often been pointed out how the two great spokesmen of the League were the complements of each other; how their gifts differed, so that one exactly covered the ground which the other was predisposed to leave comparatively untouched. The differences between them, it is true, were not so many as the points of resemblance. If in Mr. Bright there was a deeper austerity, in both there was the same homeliness of allusion and the same graphic plainness. Both avoided the stilted abstractions of rhetoric, and neither was ever afraid of the vulgarity of details. In Cobden, as in Bright, we feel that there was nothing personal or small, and that what they cared for so vehemently were great causes. There was a resolute standing aloof from the small things of party, which would be almost arrogant, if the whole texture of what they had to say were less thoroughly penetrated with political morality and with humanity. Then there came the points of difference. Bright had all the resources of passion alive within his breast. He was carried along by vehement political anger; and, deeper than that, there glowed a wrath as stern as that of an ancient prophet. To cling to a mischievous error seemed to him to savor of moral depravity and corruption of heart. What he saw was the selfishness of the aristocracy and the landlords, and he was too deeply moved by hatred of this to care to deal very patiently with the bad reasoning which their own self-interest inclined his adversaries to mistake for good. His invective was not the expression of mere irritation, but a profound and menacing passion. Hence he dominated his audiences from a height, while his companion rather drew them along after him as friends and equals. Cobden was by no means incapable of passion, of violent feeling, or of vehement expression. His fighting qualities were in their own way as formidable as Mr. Bright's; and he had a way of dropping his jaw and throwing back his head, when he took off the gloves for an encounter in good earnest, which was not less alarming to his opponents than the more sombre style of his colleague. Still, it was not passion to which we must look for the secret of his oratorical success. I have asked many scores of those who knew him, Conservatives as well as Liberals, what this secret was; and in no single case