That closing scene was the most strange and tragic of all. “The King-Maker” has quarreled with the king whom he made Edward IV., and under the sting of that licentious prince’s plot to corrupt the virtue of Warwick’s favorite daughter, Anne Neville (afterward wife of Richard III.), the father has hastened to France and offered to Margaret the King-Maker’s sword to make the young Edward of Lancaster king of England. After long delays, again buffeted by conspiring waves, Warwick, Margaret, and Edward (now a soldierly youth of eighteen), land in England, but separately. Her ill-fortune follows her to the last, and their divided forces are cut off in detail by Henry’s army. The battle of Barnet, where “the Last of the Barons” falls, is lost because of a fog in which his troops destroy each other by mistake. Then in a few days Margaret is hemmed in with her little army against the river Severn, and the last act of the tragedy is enacted at Tewksbury. When all is lost, the woman in the heroic queen asserts itself in a swoon, and her son is captured fighting fiercely to cover the escape of the mother who had fought so fiercely and so many times to cover his. The young prince is brought bound into King Henry’s tent, and the contending cousins stand face to face—the representatives of the expiring Past and the living Future. “What brings you to England?” sternly demands the king. “I came to seek my father’s crown and mine own inheritance,” replies the undaunted representative of the older England. For answer the king strikes the manacled youth in the face with his steel gauntlet. Yes, there can be no mistaking it. Chivalry is dead! The Duke of Clarence and the Duke of Gloucester draw and bravely cut down the prisoner, and the last hope of Lancaster’s royal line is dead upon the ground. Richard II. is avenged, and one more tragedy is added to the fearful chronicle of royal crimes. One day in May, 1471, the pale, meek face of Henry VI. looked down from a grated window in the tower upon a street pageant which his wife graced as a captive in the train of the victorious Edward IV. Then a few days later that same face, just as calm but paler, was exhibited in St. Paul’s. The Yorkists said he died of grief. The Tudor historians placed his death, with the invented hump, on the back of Richard III., and the genius of Shakspere riveted them there and a fearful load of other sins on top of them. So closed the usurping line of Lancaster at the hands of the usurpers of York.