magars: and all these by more certain tradition than you have. Then we have divers inventors of our own, of excellent works, which, since you have not seen, it were too long to make descriptions of them; and besides, in the right understanding of those descriptions you might easily err. For upon every invention of value, we erect a statue to the inventor, and give him a liberal and honourable reward. These statues are some of brass; some of marble and touchstone; some of cedar, and other special woods gilt and adorned; some of iron; some of silver; some of gold.

"We have certain hymns and services, which we say daily of laud and thanks to God for his marvellous works; and forms of prayers imploring his aid and blessing for the illumination of our labours, and the turning them into good and holy uses,

Lastly, we have circuits or visits of divers principal cities of the kingdom, where, as it cometh to pass, we do publish such now profitable inventions as we think good. And we do also declare natural divinations of diseases, plagues, swarms of hurtful creatures, scarcity, tempests, earthquakes, great inundations, comets, temperature of the year, and divers other things; and we give counsel thereupon what the people shall do for the prevention and remedy of them."

And whom he had said this, he stood up; and I, as I had been taught, kneeled down, and he laid his right hand upon my head, and said, "God bless thee, my son, and God bless this relation which I have made; I give thee leave to publish it for the good of other nations, for we here are in God's bosom, a land unknown." And so he left me, having assigned a value of about two thousand ducats for a bounty to me and my fellows; for they give great largesses where they come upon all occasions.

(The rest was not perfected.)

THE HISTORY

OF THE REIGN OF

KING HENRY THE SEVENTH.

To the Most Illustrious and Most Excellent Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester, &c.

IT MAY PLEASE YOUR HIGHNESS,-In part of my acknowledgment to your Highness, I have endeavoured to do honour to the memory of the last king of England, that was ancestor to the king your father and yourself; and was that king to whom both unions may in a sort refer: that of the roses being in him consummate, and that of the kingdoms by him begun besides, his times deserve it. For he was a wise man, and an excellent king; and yet the times were rough and full of mutations and rare accidents. And it is with times as it is with ways: some are more uphill and downhill, and some are more flat and plain; and the one is better for the liver, and the other for the writer. I have not flattered him, but took him to life as well as I could, sitting so far off, and having no better light. It is true your Highness hath a living pattern, incomparable, of the king your father; but it is not amiss for you also to see one of these ancient pieces. God preserve your Highness.Your Highness's most humble and devoted servant,

FRANCIS ST. ALBAN.

AFTER that Richard, the third of that name, king in fact only, but tyrant both in title and regiment, and so commonly termed and reputed in all times since, was, by the Divine revenge favouring the design of an exiled man, overthrown and slain at Bosworth-field, there succeeded in the kingdom the earl of Richmond, thenceforth styled Henry the Seventh. The king immediately after the victory, as one that had been bred under a devout mother, and was in his nature a great observer of religious forms, caused "Te Deum laudamus" be solemnly sung in the presence of the whole army upon the place, and was himself with general applause and great cries. of joy, in a kind of military election or recognition, saluted

to

king. Meanwhile the body of Richard, after many indignities and reproaches, the diriges and obsequies of the common people towards tyrants, was obscurely buried. For though the king of his nobleness gave charge unto the friars of Leicester to see an honourable interment to be given to it, yet the religious people themselves, being not free from the humours of the vulgar, neglected it; wherein nevertheless they did not then incur any man's blame or censure: no man thinking any ignominy or contumely unworthy of him that had been the executioner of King Henry the Sixth, that innocent prince, with his own hands; the contriver of the death of the duke of Clarence, his brother; the murderer of his two nephews, one of them his lawful king in the present, and the other in the future, failing of him; and vehemently suspected to have been the impoisoner of his wife, thereby to make vacant his bed, for a marriage within the degrees forbidden. And although he were a prince in military virtue approved, jealous of the honour of the English nation, and likewise a good law-maker, for the ease and solace of the common people; yet his cruelties and parricides, in the opinion of all men, weighed down his virtues and merits; and, in the opinion of wise men, even those virtues themselves were conceived to be rather feigned and affected things to serve his ambition, than true qualities ingenerate in his judgment or nature. And therefore it was noted by men of great understanding, who, seeing his after-acts, looked back upon his former proceedings, that even in the time of King Edward his brother he was not without secret trains and mines to turn envy and hatred upon his brother's government; as having an expectation and a kind of divination, that the king, by reason of his many disorders, could not be of long life, but was like to leave his sons of tender years; and then he knew well, how easy a step it was, from the place of a protector, and first prince of the blood, to the crown. And that out of this deep root of ambition it sprung, that as well at the treaty of peace that passed between Edward the Fourth and Lewis the Eleventh of France concluded by interview of both kings at Piqueny, as upon all other occasions, Richard, then duke of Gloucester, stood ever upon the side of honour, raising his own reputation to the disadvantage of the king his brother, and drawing the eyes

of all, especially of the nobles and soldiers, upon himself; as if the king, by his voluptuous life and mean marriage, were become effeminate and less sensible of honour and reason of state than was fit for a king. And as for the politic and wholesome laws which were enacted in his time, they were interpreted to be but the brokage of an usurper, thereby to woo and win the hearts of the people, as being conscious to himself, that the true obligations of sovereignty in him failed, and were wanting. But King Henry, in the very entrance of his reign, and the instant of time when the kingdom was cast into his arms, met with a point of great difficulty, and knotty to solve, able to trouble and confound the wisest king in the newness of his estate; and so much the more, because it could not endure a deliberation, but must be at once deliberated and determined. There were fallen to his lot, and concurrent in his person, three several titles to the imperial crown. The first, the title of the Lady Elizabeth, with whom by precedent pact with the party that brought him in, he was to marry. The second, the ancient and long-disputed title both by plea and arms, of the house of Lancaster, to which he was inheritor in his own person. The third, the title of the sword or conquest, for that he came in by victory of battle, and that the king in possession was slain in the field. The first of these was fairest, and most like to give contentment to the people, who by two-and-twenty years' reign of King Edward the Fourth, had been fully made capable of the clearness of the title of the white rose, or house of York; and by the mild and plausible reign of the same king towards his latter time, were become affectionate to that line. But then it lay plain before his eyes, that if he relied upon that title, he could be but a king at courtesy, and have rather a matrimonial than a regal power; the right remaining in his queen, upon whose decease, either with issue or without issue, he was to give place and be removed. And though he should obtain by parliament to be continued, yet he knew there was a very great difference between a king that holdeth his crown by a civil act of estates, and one that holdeth it originally by the law of nature and descent of blood. Neither wanted there even at that time secret rumours and whisperings, which afterwards gathered strength and turned to great troubles, that the two young sons of King

Edward the Fourth, or one of them, which were said to be destroyed in the Tower, were not indeed murdered, but conveyed secretly away, and were yet living: which, if it had been true, had prevented the title of the Lady Elizabeth. On the other side, if he stood upon his own title of the house of Lancaster, inherent in his person, he knew it was a title condemned by parliament, and generally prejudged in the common opinion of the realm, and that it tended directly to the disinherison of the line of York, held then the indubitate heirs of the crown. So that if he should have no issue by the Lady Elizabeth, which should be descendants of the double line, then the ancient flames of discord and intestine wars, upon the competition of both houses, would again return and revive.

As for conquest, notwithstanding Sir William Stanley, after some acclamations of the soldiers in the field, had put a crown of ornament, which Richard wore in the battle, and was found amongst the spoils, upon King Henry's head, as if there were his chief title; yet he remembered well upon what conditions and agreements he was brought in; and that to claim as conqueror, was to put as well his own party, as the rest, into terror and fear; as that which gave him power of disannulling of laws, and disposing of men's fortunes and estates, and the like points of absolute power, being in themselves so harsh and odious, as that William himself, commonly called the Conqueror, howsoever he used and exercised the power of a conqueror to reward his Normans, yet he forbore to use that claim in the beginning, but mixed it with a titulary pretence, grounded upon the will and designation of Edward the Confessor. But the king, out of the greatness of his own mind, presently cast the die; and the inconveniences appearing unto him on all parts, and knowing there could not be any interreign, or suspension of title, and preferring his affection to his own line and blood, and liking that title best which made him independent; and being in his nature and constitution of mind not very apprehensive or forecasting of future events afar off, but an entertainer of fortune by the day; resolved to rest upon the title of Lancaster as the main, and to use the other two, that of marriage and that of battle, but as supporters, he one to appease secret discontents, and the other to beat