What follows belongs to the history of England. Yet it must be briefly narrated for the part taken in these events by the City. Gloucester began by executing without trial and without law Lord Hastings, the most powerful friend of the young King, on a trumped-up charge of conspiracy. He then called the Mayor and Aldermen to the Tower and gave them his version of the business. For himself the execution served his purposes: it removed an obstacle and it proclaimed his power. He next issued a proclamation as to the treason of Hastings, whom he connected with the notorious and unbridled incontinency of the late King. He then courted the City favour by bestowing honours on the City magistrates. London has always been open to flattery by royal distinctions. He made the Mayor a Privy Councillor. This drew to his side, one may suppose, not only the Mayor himself, but some of the Aldermen, with the Mayor’s brother, Dr. Shaw, a celebrated preacher. It was arranged that Shaw, who was to preach on the following Sunday at Paul’s Cross, should open the subject of the succession. The subject and the matter of the sermon were obviously agreed upon beforehand. The sermon is “reported” in More’s _Life of Edward V_. If his account of it be true then Shaw must have been one of the most brazen liars then living. His text was taken from the Book of Wisdom, and it showed at the outset what line the sermon would take. The words “Bastard slips shall take no deep root.” He said that the late King having promised marriage to the Lady Elizabeth Lucy before she would consent to her own dishonour, and having had a child by her, was already married to her—yet a Catholic Priest knew very well that there is no marriage except that which is celebrated by the Church: that his marriage with Elizabeth Woodville was therefore null and void, and that his children by Elizabeth were illegitimate. Therefore, of course, they could not succeed. Next, neither the late King, nor his late brother, the Duke of Clarence, nor, consequently, the son of Clarence, had any right to the throne because, as was well known—the allegation may have had some slight foundation in scandals and gossip but could not be known to the citizens,—their mother, the late Duchess of York, was an adulteress, and these two Princes were the children of a certain person about the Duke of York’s Court. “But,” he cried, “in ancestry my Lord Protector, that noble Prince, the Pattern of all Virtuous and Heroic Actions, carried in his Air and in his Mien and in his Soul the perfect Image of his illustrious father the Great Duke of York.”