So miserably and brutally perished the Lady Katharine Bonville's _second_ husband, one of the chief friends and favourites of Edward IV., through the remorseless malice aforethought of that king's brother, the Duke of Gloucester. Lord Hastings was a prominent, it may be said, representative character of that age of intrigue and unscrupulous ambition. Although loyal to Edward and his sons, he was a "sworn enemy" to Queen Elizabeth Woodville, notwithstanding his wife's daughter, Cicely Bonville, was married to her eldest son, and he is said to have "greatly contributed" to the execution of the prisoners at Pontefract, Anthony, Earl Rivers, and Richard, Lord Grey, the Queen's brothers, and near relatives of his step-daughter Cicely Bonville's husband, the Marquis of Dorset; by a most remarkable retribution he was awarded a similar fate to theirs, said to have occurred on the same day, and at the same hour. His hands too are reputed to have been imbrued with the blood of Margaret of Anjou's unfortunate youthful son. His amour with Jane Shore was made the handle of Gloucester's accusation, and sudden and cruel as his fate was, it was perhaps merciful as compared with the suffering that was reserved for her. While Hastings, her protector, lived, her position was one of comparative safety, but at his death none dared befriend her, and true to the hideous completeness of the part Gloucester was acting, she was to be the next victim. Then the poor, frail, beautiful and withal amiable creature,--Edward used to call her the 'holiest' of his three mistresses, the other two being respectively the 'wittiest' and the 'merriest'--one to whom a king, and 'the handsomest man in Europe' to boot, had paid court, amid unstinted opulence and luxury, was dragged forth and exposed to the gibes, jeers, and insults of a vulgar mob, with studied opprobrium publicly disgraced, and finally with contumely driven away to eke out the remainder of her days in the most abject poverty, misery, and distress. The purist,--forgetful his mother was a woman,--may say the degradation was deserved; but there is no human shortcoming that gives justification for unmanliness, the most detestable of all crimes. By his wife Katharine, widow of William Bonville, and daughter of Richard Nevill, Earl of Salisbury, Lord Hastings had issue four sons:--1. Edward, eldest son and heir; he married Mary, grand-daughter and heiress of Robert, Baron Hungerford, Bottreaux, Molyns, and Moels, and in right of his wife was summoned to Parliament, though still a minor, in 1483, by the title of Baron Hastings of Hungerford; he died in 1507.--2. Sir Richard.--3. Sir William.--4. Sir George; and one daughter, Anne, married to George Talbot, fourth Earl of Shrewsbury.