The years went on, and after a very short illness, Edward IV. passed to his own account. After him came the deluge. Events succeeded one another with startling rapidity. Only for two months was that grave and gentle boy styled King Edward V. Then came the sudden coup d' etat, prepared for during many years, by which Gloucester seized the crown, and shut up the boy-King in prison. The Queen and Princesses once more fled to sanctuary; the old friends and adherents of Edward, some of whom had sold their very souls for the White Rose, were sacrificed on the most trifling pretexts: and among them, the best of them all, the upright and honourable Rivers. The boy-King and his brother were put quietly out of the way. The new King made a progress throughout the country, from Windsor to York, joined by the Queen at Warwick. One of those strange gleams of tenderness which now and then flit across the conduct of Richard III., as though for an instant he paused to listen to the whispers of his better angel, induced him to spare Anne Neville a royal progress which would have led her through Tewkesbury. At the close of the year King Richard was at Westminster, firmly seated on his blood-stained throne. He might well think, like the Spanish Regent, that he had not a single enemy: for he had shot them all. But he forgot one, yet left on earth: and he forgot one Other, who remaineth for ever in Heaven.
And then his Nemesis began to come upon him. His one cherished child died "an unhappy death" at Middleham Castle. His wife, once if selfishly, yet so passionately loved, faded away and died by inches, surviving her boy just twelve months. The terrors of God overwhelmed him. He was tormented by perpetual apprehensions of conspiracy, and distracted by nightly visions of horror. And then Richmond landed at Milford Haven, and the climax came. With that personal courage which was the best item of his bad character, Richard rushed into the field of Bosworth, "and, foremost fighting, fell."
So ended the male line of the White Rose. The Red was uppermost at last. The struggle, with all its untold agony, which had lasted through thirty years, was over at length, and for ever.
Some tardy justice was done now. To the poor old Countess of Warwick, starving in the north, her lands were given back, the iniquitous decree which had deprived her of them being stigmatised, as it deserved, as "against all reason, conscience, and course of nature, and contrary to the law of God and man." But not only the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, but also all covetous desires of the same, had long ago faded from that lonely and weary heart. All whom she had loved were in the grave, and her heirs were grandchildren whom she had never known, whose father had been her worst enemy, and who were abundantly provided for without a rood of any land of hers. Just a few pounds while she lived, just a shelter to cover her hoary head, was all that Anne Beauchamp craved for the little rest of life. She resigned all her property the same year to the Crown, receiving in exchange the manor of Sutton, in Warwickshire. It was probably there that she died, full of years and sorrows, in or shortly before 1493.
To "Dame Bessy Grey" the Nemesis came too. It is customary to bestow great pity on the widow of Edward IV.; and it is true that few women have known more crushing sorrow than she. But I think it is too commonly forgotten how much she had deserved it. She was a most designing woman—the truth was not in her: and she was pitiless to the sorrows of others. In her last years she retired to Bermondsey Convent—of her own motion; not, as has been represented, through coercion from her son-in-law—and there she died, on the 7th or 8th of June, 1493.
Except in the form of witnessing sorrows borne by his friends, no Nemesis ever came to Thomas Grey, now[#] Marquis of Dorset. That form is, to some natures, one of the very bitterest which pain can take: to others it is absolutely painless. Judging from what is known of his character, it may be surmised that the misfortunes of his friends would be a sorrow borne very philosophically by him. Two years' exile, during the short reign of King Richard, was the worst he had to bear for himself—that is, in this life.
[#] Created Apr. 18th, 1475. He is said to have been previously made Earl of Huntingdon, Aug. 4, 1471—the second title of the Duke of Exeter: but I never found one instance when he was so termed on the Rolls.
Notwithstanding his disappointment concerning Agnes, Master Rotherham kept up his acquaintance with Lovell Tower. He was present when she took the veil at Godstow, in the summer of 1476; and that she was not the only attraction he found in the family was proved by the continuance of his visits. About three years after her profession, Master Rotherham came to the conclusion, which he communicated to Lord Marnell, that his grief for the loss of Agnes would be considerably alleviated if he might have her sister Dorathie. Lord Marnell hesitated: for Dorathie's social position, as heiress presumptive to her mother's barony, was very different from that of Agnes. But he consulted the elder ladies, and found Lady Margery of opinion that a good, sensible man without title or large property would be a much better husband for Dorathie than a bad or foolish man who brought her a coronet and a county.
"Say you not so, Madam?" she concluded, turning to her mother.
The Lady Idonia's reply was to call Dorathie to her. She took her grand-daughter's face in both hands, and looked tenderly at the rosy cheeks and the pretty blue eyes, which were those neither of father nor mother, but which reminded Idonia Marnell, how often no one knew, of other blue eyes which were dust now in the Abbey of St. Albans.