This also happening so opportunely, to represent the danger to the King's estate from the Earl of Warwick, and thereby to color the King's severity that followed; together with the madness of the friar so vainly and desperately to divulge a treason before it had gotten any manner of strength; and the saving of the friar's life, which nevertheless was, indeed, but the privilege of his order; and the pity in the common people, which, if it run in a strong stream, doth ever cast up scandal and envy, made it generally rather talked than believed that all was but the King's device. But howsoever it were, hereupon Perkin, that had offended against grace now the third time, was at last proceeded with, and by commissioners of oyer and determiner, arraigned at Westminster upon divers treasons committed and perpetrated after his coming on land within this kingdom, for so the judges advised, for that he was a foreigner, and condemned, and a few days after executed at Tyburn; where he did again openly read his confession, and take it upon his death to be true. This was the end of this little cockatrice of a king that was able to destroy those that did not espy him first. It was one of the longest plays of that kind that had been in memory, and might perhaps have had another end if he had not met with a king wise, stout, and fortunate. [Footnote 1: Sister to Edward IV, and widow of Charles _le Téméraire_, Duke of Burgundy.] [Footnote 2: Bernard André, the poet laureate of Henry VII, states in his manuscript life of his patron, that Perkin, when a boy, was "_servant_ in England to a Jew named Edward, who was baptized, and adopted as godson by Edward IV, and was on terms of intimacy with the King and his family." Speed, mistranslating André's words, makes Perkin the _son_ of the Jew, instead of the servant; and Bacon amplifies the error, and transforms John Osbeck into the convert Jew, who, having a handsome wife, it might be surmised why the licentious King "should become gossip in so mean a house." Hume adds: "People thence accounted for that resemblance which was afterward remarked between young Perkin and that monarch." The surmise of Bacon, grounded upon the error of Speed, is clinched into the positive assertion of Hume as to a popular belief for which there is not the slightest ground.--_Charles Knight_.] [Footnote:3 The Abbey of Beaulieu, near Southampton.] SAVONAROLA'S REFORMS AND DEATH THE FRENCH INVADE ITALY A.D. 1494 PASQUALE VILLARI JEAN C. L. SISMONDI