"Up into the church, with full devout singing;
And when he had made his offering,
The mayor, the citizens, bowed and left him."
While all the dark troubles still were pending, we find the Duke of York taking a solemn oath on the host of fealty to King Henry. Six years later, after the battle of St. Albans, the Yorkists and Lancastrians met again at the altar of St. Paul's in feigned unity. The poor weak monarch was crowned, and had sceptre in hand, and his proud brilliant queen followed him in smiling converse with the Duke of York. Again the city poet broke into rejoicing at the final peace:—
"At Paul's in London, with great renown,
On Lady Day in Lent, this peace was wrought;
The King, the Queen, with lords many an one,
To worship the Virgin as they ought,
Went in procession, and spared right nought
In sight of all the commonalty;
In token this love was in heart and thought,
Rejoice England in concord and unity."
THE CHURCH OF ST. FAITH, THE CRYPT OF OLD ST. PAUL'S, FROM A VIEW BY HOLLAR
Alas for such reconciliations! Four years later more blood had been shed, more battle-fields strewn with dead. The king was a captive, had disinherited his own son, and granted the succession to the Duke of York, whose right a Parliament had acknowledged. His proud queen was in the North rallying the scattered Lancastrians. York and Warwick, Henry's deadly enemies, knelt before the primate, and swore allegiance to the king; and the duke's two sons, March and Rutland, took the same oath.
Within a few months Wakefield was fought; Richard was slain, and the duke's head, adorned with a mocking paper crown, was sent, by the she-wolf of a queen, to adorn the walls of York.
The next year, however, fortune forsook Henry for ever, and St. Paul's welcomed Edward IV. and the redoubtable "king-maker," who had won the crown for him at the battle of Mortimer's Cross; and no Lancastrian dared show his face on that triumphant day. Ten years later Warwick, veering to the downfallen king, was slain at Barnet, and the body of the old warrior, and that of his brother, were exposed, barefaced, for three days in St. Paul's, to the delight of all true Yorkists. Those were terrible times, and the generosity of the old chivalry seemed now despised and forgotten. The next month there was even a sadder sight, for the body of King Henry himself was displayed in the Cathedral. Broken-hearted, said the Yorkists, but the Lancastrian belief (favoured by Shakespeare) was that Richard Duke of Gloucester, the wicked Crookback, stabbed him with his own hand in the Tower, and it was said that blood poured from the body when it lay in the Cathedral. Again St. Paul's was profaned at the death of Edward IV., when Richard came to pay his ostentatious orisons in the Cathedral, while he was already planning the removal of the princes to the Tower. Always anxious to please the London citizens, it was to St. Paul's Cross that Richard sent Dr. Shaw to accuse Clarence of illegitimacy. At St. Paul's, too, according to Shakespeare, who in his historic plays often follows traditions now forgotten, or chronicles that have perished, the charges against Hastings were publicly read. Jane Shore, the mistress, and supposed accomplice of Hastings in bewitching Richard, did penance in St. Paul's. She was the wife of a London goldsmith, and had been mistress of Edward IV. Her beauty, as she walked downcast with shame, is said to have moved every heart to pity. On his accession, King Richard, nervously fingering his dagger, as was his wont to do according to the chronicles, rode to St. Paul's, and was received by procession, amid great congratulation and acclamation from the fickle people. Kemp, who was the Yorkist bishop during all these dreadful times, rebuilt St. Paul's Cross, which then became one of the chief ornaments of London.