The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Morton had watched over his interests while in exile; he first had excited the duke of Buckingham to revolt, and hatched the plot which placed Richmond on the throne.
The council held was long and solemn, and the results brought about more by insinuation than open argument, were different from those expected by most of the persons present. First it was resolved that a general pardon should be proclaimed to the insurgents. No exceptions were to be made; those persons then in the very act of setting up his adversary were included; for as, by the second decree, that the real earl of Warwick should be shown publicly in London, the deception would become manifest; if indeed they were deceived, it was thought more politic to reclaim them by clemency, than by severe measures to drive them to despair.
The third and last enactment was levelled against the queen dowager. Many of the council were astonished to hear it proposed, that she should forfeit all her goods and lands, and be confined for life in a convent, for having consented to the marriage of her daughter and Richard the Third, while the ready acquiescence of the king and his chief advisers made them perceive that this measure was no new resolve. These three decrees passed, the council separated, and Henry returned to Westminster, accompanied by Sir William Stanley. To him he spoke openly of the treason of the queen: he even ventured to say, that he was sure that some mystery lurked beneath; he commissioned Stanley, therefore, to notify the order of council to her majesty; but at the same time to show her, that disclosure, and reliance on the king, would obtain her pardon. Sir William Stanley was a courtier in the best sense of the term; a man of gentle manners; desirous of doing right, easily excited to compassion, but ambitious and timid; one in truth than whom none could be more dangerous; for his desire to please those immediately before him, led him to assume every appearance of sincerity, and perpetually to sacrifice the absent to the present.
Elizabeth heard, with utter dismay, the sentence passed against her;—courage was restored only when she found that her freedom could be purchased by the confession of her son's existence, and place of abode. She repelled Stanley's solicitations with disdain; answered his entreaties with an appeal to his own feelings, of how far, if such a secret existed, it were possible that she, a mother, should intrust it to the false and cruel king. Stanley speedily found his whole battery of persuasion exhausted; he withdrew in some wonder as to what the real state of things might be, and full of the deepest compassion. She had indeed scarcely veiled the truth to him; for, calling to mind the fate of the wretched Margaret of Anjou, she asked him, whether, like her, she should expose the young orphan York to the fate of the Lancastrian Prince Edward. But Stanley shrunk from being privy to such disclosures, and hastily withdrew.
Henry had not exhausted all his hopes: glad as he was to wreak his vengeance on the queen, and to secure her possessions to himself, he was not so blind as not to see that the knowledge of her secret were a far greater prize. His next implement was her eldest son, the marquess of Dorset. Lord Dorset had been so active in his opposition to Richard the Third, and had done such good service to his adversary, that Henry overlooked his near kindred to the queen dowager, regarding him rather as the representative of his father. Sir John Gray, who had fallen in the cause of Lancaster. He became indeed a sort of favourite with the king. Dorset was proud, self-sufficient, and extravagant, but his manners were fascinating, his spirit buoyant, and Henry, who was accustomed to find the storms of party lowering like winter over his domestic circle, found relief only when Dorset was present. The present occasion, however, called forth other feelings in the haughty noble; he might be angry with his mother's plotting, but he was more indignant at the severity exercised against her; and far from furthering Henry's designs, he applauded her resistance, and so irritated the king, that it ended by his sudden arrest, and being committed to the Tower.
And now all hope was at an end for the unhappy lady. The various acts of her tragic history were to close in the obscurity and poverty of a convent-prison. Fearful that her despair would lead her to some deed that might at least disturb the quiet and order he loved, Henry had resolved that no delay should have place, but that on the very morrow she should be conveyed to Bermondsey. She was to be torn from her family—her five young daughters, with whom she resided. The heartless tyrant was callous to every pang that he inflicted, or rejoiced that he had the power to wound so deeply one whom he abhorred. Lady Brampton was with her to the last; not to sustain and comfort her; the queen's courage and firmness was far greater than that of her angry friend; she pointed out the hope, that the cruelties exercised towards her might animate the partisans of York to greater ardour; and tears forced themselves into her eyes only when she pictured Richard, her victorious sovereign and son, hastening to unbar her prison doors to restore her to liberty and rank. The night was spent in such discourses between the ladies. With early dawn came the fated hour, the guard, the necessity for instant departure. She disdained to show regret before Henry's emissaries; and with one word only to her friend—"I commit him to your guidance," she yielded to her fate; submitting to be torn from all she loved, and, without an expressed murmur, entered the litter that bore her singly to her living grave.
The same sun that rose upon the melancholy progress of Elizabeth Woodville towards Bermondsey, shone on a procession, more gaudy in appearance, yet, if that were possible, more sad at heart. This was the visit, ordered by the king, of the earl of Warwick to St. Paul's Cathedral; thus to contradict to the eyes of all men the pretender in Ireland. Warwick had spent a year in the Tower, in almost solitary imprisonment. Hopeless of freedom, worn in health, dejected from the overthrow of all the wild schemes he had nourished at Sheriff Hutton, linked with the love he bore his cousin, the Lady Elizabeth, now queen of England, he could hardly be recognized as the same youth who had been her companion during her residence there. He was pale; he had been wholly neglectful of his person; carking sorrow had traced lines on his young brow. At first he had contemplated resisting the order of being led out as a show to further his enemies' cause: one futile and vague hope, which could only have sprung up in a lover's heart, made him concede this point. Perhaps the court—the queen would be there.
He met several noble friends, commanded by Henry to attend him; for it was the king's policy to surround him with Yorkists, so to prove that he was no counterfeit. Alas!
"These cloudy princes, and heart-sorrowing peers,"
assembled like shadows in the dim abyss, mourning the splendour of the day for ever set. They entered the cathedral, which stood a heavy Gothic pile, on a grassy mound, removed from all minor edifices. There was a vast assemblage of ladies and knights; all looked compassionately on this son of poor murdered Clarence, the luckless flower, brought to bloom for an hour, and then to be cast into perpetual darkness. The solemn religious rites, the pealing organ, the grandeur of the church, and chequered painted light thrown from the windows, for a moment filled with almost childish delight the earl's young heart; that this scene, adapted to his rank, should be so single and so transient, filled his soul with bitterness. Once or twice he thought to appeal to his noble friends, to call on them to resist the tyrant—Elizabeth's husband. His heart chilled at the idea; his natural timidity resumed its sway, and he was led back to the prison-fortress, despairing, but unresisting.
Yet, at this hour, events were in progress which filled many hearts with hope of such change as he would gladly hail. On the news of the queen's arrest. Lord Lincoln had departed with all speed to Flanders, to his aunt, the duchess of Burgundy, to solicit her aid to attack and overcome the enemy of their vanquished family. The Lady Margaret, sister of Edward the Fourth of England, and wife of Charles the Rash of Burgundy, was a woman distinguished by her wisdom and her goodness. When Charles fell before Nancv, and his more than princely domains descended into the hands of his only child, a daughter—and the false Louis the Eleventh of France, on one hand, and the turbulent Flemings on the other, coalesced to rend in pieces, and to prey upon, the orphan's inheritance—her mother-in-law, the Lady Margaret, was her sage and intrepid counsellor; and when this young lady died, leaving two infant children as coheirs, the dowager duchess entirely loved, and tenderly brought them up, attending to their affairs with maternal solicitude, and governing the countries subject to them with wisdom and justice. This lady was warmly attached to her family: to her the earl of Lincoln and Lord Lovel resorted, revealing the state of things—how her nephew, young Richard, was concealed in poor disguise in French Flanders, and how they had consented to Richard Simon's plots, and hoped that their result would be to restore her brother's