old enemy, having plenty of fighting to do on their own account, might leave them alone for evermore—a vain hope if it were seriously entertained. After an interval of six years, the Wars of the Roses—so-called because the red rose was the badge of the House of Lancaster and the white that of the House of York—broke out more violently than before, because Henry VI, who had been declared imbecile and unfit to reign, suddenly recovered his intellect, and Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, who claimed a prior right to the throne, and had been appointed Regent, with the right of succession, refused to give up his authority. Henry had a son by his brave wife, Margaret of Anjou. He might be called a weakling, but she summoned the people to defend the rights of her son. York was defeated, captured, and beheaded at Wakefield, in 1461, but his son Edward, Earl of March, routed the queen’s army immediately afterward and ascended the throne as Edward IV. Struggle succeeded struggle, but the House of York achieved a crowning triumph at Tewkesbury and again at Barnet Heath, where Warwick, the King Maker, fell. The direct male line of the House of Lancaster perished at Tewkesbury, where, it is alleged, the gallant Prince Edward, son of Henry VI, was murdered, after having been made prisoner, by Edward IV and George, Duke of Clarence—the same afterward drowned in a butt of wine by order of his cruel brother. King Edward IV, after a reign of twenty-two years, marked by slaughter of his foes and some of his friends, notorious immorality, and swinish debauchery, died of a fever brought on by his excesses, in 1483, and his vile younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, succeeded the boy-king, Edward V, by process of murder, in the same year. The last battle of the Wars of the Roses was fought at Bosworth, near Leicester, August 22, 1485. Richard, last king of the Plantagenet family, fell and was succeeded by his rival, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, descended, in the female line, from John of Gaunt, who ascended the throne as Henry VII.