"All I have is your majesty's," said the man, "even my life. I will at once conduct you to my humble dwelling." And he lifted the weary boy tenderly in his arms, and led the queen to his cottage in the wood, where they got both food and shelter, and every care and attention from the robber's good wife. "Mother," said the young prince that night, "thou saidst right, that Heaven would protect us." "Ay, my boy, and will still protect us!" For some days they rested at the cottage, tended with endless care by the loyal robber and his wife, until the pursuit from the battle of Hexham was over. Then, with the aid of her protector, the queen made her way to the coast, where a vessel waited to convey her and the prince to Flanders. Thus, for a time they escaped from all their dangers. Had the young prince lived to become King of England, we may be sure that the kind act of the robber would not have been suffered to die unrewarded. But, alas! Edward of Lancaster was never King of England. The Wars of the Roses, as we all know, resulted in the utter defeat of the young prince's party. He was thirteen years old when the rival Houses of York and Lancaster fought their twelfth battle in the meadow at Tewkesbury. On that occasion Edward fought bravely in his own cause, but he and his followers were completely routed by the troops of King Edward the Fourth. Flying from the field of battle, he was arrested and brought before the young king. "How dared you come here?" wrathfully inquired the usurper. "To recover my father's crown and my own inheritance," boldly replied the prince. Whereat, the history says, Edward struck at him with his iron gauntlet, and his attendants fell upon him and slew him with their swords. CHAPTER TWENTY NINE. EDWARD THE SIXTH, THE GOOD KING OF ENGLAND. It was a strange moment in the history of England when the great King Henry the Eighth. ("Bluff King Hal," as his subjects called him) breathed his last. However popular he may have been on account of his courage and energy, he possessed vices which must always withhold from him the name of a _good_ king, and which, in fact, rendered his reign a continuous scene of cruelty and oppression. People were sick of hearing of the king and his wives--how he had beheaded one, and put away another, and ill-treated another, for no reason at all but his own selfish caprice. And men trembled for their lives when they remembered how Wolsey, and More, and Cromwell, and others had been sacrificed to the whimsical temper of this tyrannical sovereign. England, in fact, was tired out when Henry the Eighth died.