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THE

HISTORY OF THE REIGN

Of

KING HENRY THE SEVENTH.

ΤΟ

THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS AND MOST EXCELLENT

PRINCE CHARLES,

Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of
Chester, &c.

IT MAY PLEASE YOUR HIGHNESS,

IN part of my acknowledgment to your Highness, I have endeavoured to do honour to the memory of the last King of England, that was ancestor to the King your father and yourself; and was that King to whom both unions may in a sort refer: that of the roses being in him consummate, and that of the kingdoms by him begun besides, his times deserve it. For he was a wise man, and an excellent King; and yet the times were rough, and full of mutations, and rare accidents. And it is with times, as it is with ways: some are more up-hill and down-hill, and some are more flat and plain; and the one is better for the liver, and the other for the writer. I have not flattered him, but took him to life as well as I could, sitting so far off, and having no better light. It is true, your Highness hath a living pattern, incomparable, of the King your father but it is not amiss for you also to see one of these ancient pieces. God preserve your Highness.

Your Highness's most humble

and devoted servant, FRANCIS ST. ALBAN.

THE

HISTORY OF THE REIGN

OF

KING HENRY THE SEVENTH.

AFTER that Richard, the third of that name, King in fact only, but tyrant both in title and regiment, and so commonly termed and reputed in all times since, was, by the divine revenge favouring the design of an exiled man, overthrown and slain at Bosworth-field; there succeeded in the kingdom the earl of Richmond, thenceforth styled Henry the seventh. The King, immediately after the victory, as one that had been bred under a devout mother, and was in his nature a great observer of religious forms, caused Te Deum laudamus to be solemnly sung in the presence of the whole army upon the place, and was himself with general applause and great cries of joy, in a kind of military election or recognition, saluted King. Meanwhile the body of Richard, after many indignities and reproaches, the diriges and obsequies of the common people towards tyrants, was obscurely buried. For though the King of his nobleness gave charge unto the friars of Leicester to see an honourable interment to be given to it, yet the religious people themselves, being not free from the humours of the vulgar, neglected it; wherein nevertheless they did not then incur any man's blame or censure: no man thinking any ignominy or contumely unworthy of him, that had been the executioner of King Henry the sixth, that innocent Prince, with his own hands; the contriver of the death of the duke of Clarence his brother; the murderer of his two nephews, one of them his lawful King in the present, and the other in the future, failing of him, and vehemently suspected to have been the impoisoner of his wife,

thereby to make vacant his bed, for a marriage within the degrees forbidden. And although he were a Prince in military virtue approved, jealous of the honour of the English nation, and likewise a good law-maker, for the ease and solace of the common people; yet his cruelties and parricides, in the opinion of all men, weighed down his virtues and merits; and, in the opinion of wise men, even those virtues themselves were conceived to be rather feigned and affected things to serve his ambition, than true qualities ingenerate in his judgment or nature. And therefore it was noted by men of great understanding, who seeing his after-acts, looked back upon his former proceedings, that even in the time of King Edward his brother he was not without secret trains and mines to turn envy and hatred upon his brother's government; as having an expectation and a kind of divination, that the King, by reason of his many disorders, could not be of long life, but was like to leave his sons of tender years; and then he knew well, how easy a step it was, from the place of a protector, and first Prince of the blood, to the crown. And that out of this deep root of ambition it sprung, that as well at the treaty of peace that passed between Edward the fourth and Lewis the eleventh of France, concluded by interview of both Kings at Piqueny, as upon all other occasions, Richard, then duke of Gloucester, stood ever upon the side of honour, raising his own reputation to the disadvantage of the King his brother, and drawing the eyes of all, especially of the nobles and soldiers, upon himself; as if the King, by his voluptuous life and mean marriage, were become effeminate and less sensible of honour and reason of state than was fit for a King. And as for the politic and wholesome laws which were enacted in his time, they were interpreted to be but the brocage of an usurper, thereby to woo and win the hearts of the people, as being conscious to himself, that the true obligations of sovereignty in him failed, and were wanting. But King Henry, in the very entrance of his reign, and the instant of time when the kingdom was cast into his arms, met with a point of great difficulty, and knotty to solve, able

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