In the Wars of the Roses: A Story for the YoungEverett-Green, Evelyn
History
In the Wars of the Roses: A Story for the Young
Everett-Green, Evelyn
Great Britain -- History -- Wars of the Roses, 1455-1485 -- Juvenile fiction
The next death in that ill-omened race was that of King Richard's
own son, in the tenth year of his age. As Duke of Gloucester, he
had stood by to see the death of young Edward, even if his hand had
not been raised to strike him. He had then forced into reluctant
wedlock with himself the betrothed bride of the murdered
prince--the unhappy Lady Anne. He had murdered his brother's
children to raise himself to the throne, and had committed many
other crimes to maintain himself thereon; and his own son--another
Edward, Prince of Wales--was doomed to meet a sudden death, called
by the chroniclers of the time "unhappy," as though some strange or
painful circumstance attached to it, in the absence of both his
parents: and lastly, the lonely monarch, wifeless and childless,
was called upon to reap the fruits of the bitter hostility and
distrust which his cruel and arbitrary rule had awakened in the
breasts of his own nobles and of his subjects in general.
Paul Stukely, now a married man with children of his own growing up
about him, watched with intense interest the course of public
events; and when Henry of Richmond--a lineal descendant of Edward
the Third by his son John of Gaunt--landed for the second time to
head the insurrection against the bloody tyrant, Sir Paul Stukely
and a gallant little following marched amongst the first to join
his standard, and upon the bloody field of Bosworth, Paul felt that
he saw revenged to the full the tragedy of Tewkesbury.
He was there, close beside Henry Tudor, when the last frantic
charge of the wretched monarch in his despair was made, and when
Richard, after unhorsing many amongst Henry's personal attendants
in order to come to a hand-to-hand combat with his foe, witnessed
the secession from his ranks of Sir William Stanley, and fell,
crying "Treason, treason!" with his last breath. He who had
obtained his crown by treachery, cruelty, and treason of the
blackest kind, was destined to fall a victim to the treachery of
others. As Paul saw the mangled corpse flung across a horse's back
and carried ignominiously from the field, he felt that the God of
heaven did indeed look down and visit with His vengeance those who
had set at nought His laws, and that in the miserable death of this
last son of the House of York the cause of the Red Rose was amply
avenged.
A few years later, in the bright summertide, when the politic rule
of Henry the Seventh was causing the exhausted country to recover
from the ravages of the long civil war, Sir Paul Stukely and his
two sons, fine, handsome lads of ten and twelve years old, were
making a little journey (as we should now call it, though it seemed
a long one to the excited and delighted boys) from his pleasant
manor near St. Albans through a part of the county of Essex.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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