There is justice in that impression, but there is also injustice. In his latter years, it is hardly too much to call him detestable. He had reigned for fourteen years before he committed the one commonplace crime of tyrants which stains his record, the execution of Warwick. From that time a kind of degeneration seems to have come upon him, accelerated by the deaths first of his wisest counsellor Morton, then, two years later, of the son he loved, and then of his wife. To these years belongs nearly every story which tells seriously to his discredit. But during the earlier and longer half of his reign, his record is remarkably free from blemish, and shows an enlightenment which under happier conditions might have won him a place not only among the kings who have deserved well of the State--that, at least in the historian’s eyes, he did achieve--but among those whose memory posterity have cherished. II HENRY’S EARLY YEARS, ACCESSION, AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DYNASTY After the death of Henry V., his widow accepted in marriage the hand of a Welsh knight of ancient lineage, Owen Tudor. In 1456, their son Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took to himself a very youthful bride, the Lady Margaret Beaufort, the representative of John of Gaunt’s family by Katherine Swynford, legitimatised by Act of Parliament in the reign of Richard II. On January 28, 1457, Margaret gave birth to a son, Henry, some weeks after Edmund himself had died; the charge of the boy devolving mainly upon Edmund’s brother Jasper, Earl of Pembroke. During the next fourteen years, the great Earl of Warwick was playing see-saw with the fortunes of the rival houses of York and Lancaster. In 1461, the Yorkists won the upper hand; but Jasper held out in Wales for Lancaster, for nearly seven years. Then Harlech Castle was surrendered, and young Henry was placed in charge of its captor, the new Earl of Pembroke, and was well enough treated. Then Lancaster had a turn of success, but the party was crushed at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and the line was quenched by the deaths of Henry VI. and his son. Yorkists and Lancastrians alike fixed upon young Henry Tudor as being now the representative of John of Gaunt; England was too dangerous a habitation for a possible claimant to the throne; and the boy in his fifteenth year was successfully shipped off by his friends to Brittany, where for twelve years he abode under the Duke’s protection.