By the confiscation of one-fifth of the landed estate of the Kingdom, vast wealth poured into the King's treasury. He had no need now to summon Parliament to vote him supplies. The clergy, rendered feeble and lifeless from decline in spiritual enthusiasm, and by its blind hostility to the intellectual movement of the time, crept closer to the throne, while Parliament, with its partially disfranchised House of Commons, was so rarely summoned that it almost ceased to exist. In the midst of the general wreck, the Kingship towered in solitary greatness.
Edward IV. was absolute sovereign. He had no one to fear, unless it was his intriguing brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who, during the twenty-three years of Edward's reign, was undoubtedly carefully planning the bloodstained steps by which he himself should reach the throne.
Acute in intelligence, distorted in form and in character, this Richard was a monster of iniquity. The hapless boy left heir to the throne upon the death of Edward IV., his father, was placed under the guardianship of his misshapen uncle, who until the majority of the young King, Edward V., was to reign under the title of Protector.
[Sidenote: Richard III., 1483-1485. Death of the Princes in the Tower.]
How this "Protector" protected his nephews all know. The two boys (Edward V. and Richard, Duke of York) were carried to the Tower. The world has been reluctant to believe that they were really smothered, as has been said; but the finding, nearly two hundred years later, of the skeletons of two children which had been buried or concealed at the foot of the stairs leading to their place of confinement, seems to confirm it beyond a doubt.
[Sidenote: Bosworth Field. House of Tudor, 1485-1603. Henry VII., 1485-1509.]
Retribution came swiftly. Two years later Richard fell at the battle of Bosworth Field, and the crown won by numberless crimes, rolled under a hawthorn bush. It was picked up and placed upon a worthier head.
Henry Tudor, an offshoot of the House of Lancaster, was proclaimed King
Henry VII., and his marriage with Princess Elizabeth of York (sister of
the princes murdered in the Tower) forever blended the White and the
Red Rose in peaceful union.
[Sidenote: Printing Introduced into England.]
During all this time, while Kings came and Kings went, the people viewed these changes from afar. But if they had no longer any share in the government, a great expansion was going on in their inner life. Caxton had set up his printing press, and the "art preservative of all arts," was bringing streams of new knowledge into thousands of homes. Copernicus had discovered a new Heaven, and Columbus a new Earth. The sun no longer circled around the Earth, nor was the Earth a flat plain. There was a revival of classic learning at Oxford, and Erasmus, the great preacher, was founding schools and preparing the minds of the people for the impending change, which was soon to be wrought by that Monk in Germany, whose soul was at this time beginning to be stirred to its mighty effort at reform.