The first three years of the reign of Edward IV. were occupied by • prolongation of the contest that raged when he mounted the throne. The Lancastrians sustained a severe defeat from the king in person at Towton In Yorkshire, on the 29th of March 1401; but Queen Margaret was unwearied in her applications for assistance to France and Scot land, and she was at lit enabled to take the field with a new army. That too however was routed and dispersed at liexham by the forces of Edward under the command of Lord Montagu, on the 17th of May 1464. This victory, and the capture of Henry, which took place a few days after, put an end to the war. An event however occurred about the same time out of which now troubles soon arose. This was the marriage of the king with Elisabeth Woodville, the young and beautiful widow of Sir Thomas Gray, and the daughter of Sir Richard Woodville (afterwards created Earl Riser') by Jacquetta of Luxembourg, wheat; first husband had been the late Duke of Bedford. The connections of the lady, both by her birth and by her first marriage, were all of the Lancastrian party ; but Edward's passion was too violent to allow him to be stopped by this consideration; he was privately married to her at Grafton, near Stoney Stratford, on the 1st of May 1464: she was publicly acknowledged as his wife in September ; and she was crowned at Westminster on Ascension Day in the following year. The first effect of this marriage was to put an end to a negociation, in which some progress had been made, with the French King Louis XL for Edward's marriage with his sister-in-law the Princess Bonne of Savoy, an alliance which it was hoped might have proved a bond of amity betwixt the two kingdoms. It at the tame time alienated from the king the most powerful of his supporters, the Earl of Warwick, by whom the French negociatIon had been conducted, and whose disapprobation of the king's conduct in a political point of view was consequently sharpened by the sense of personal ill-usage. Above all, the honours and bounties lavished by Edward upon the obscure family of his queen disgusted the old nobility, and raised even a national feeling against him. It was some time before matters came to extremities; but at last, Warwick and Queen Margaret Laving entered into close alliance, England was once more, in 1469, deluged with the blood of a civil war. Nearly the whole of that and the following year was a season of confusion, of which it is scarcely possible to derive any consistent or Intelligible account from the imperfect documents of the time that remain, and the ill-informed chroniclers who have attempted to describe the course of occurrences. At last, in the beginning of October 1470, Edward found himself obliged to embark and fly to Holland. King Henry wit now released from the Tower, in which he had been confined for the preceding six years, and the royal authority was again exercised in his name. This revolution earned for Warwick his well-known title of the King-maker. Henry's reatoratiou however was a very short one. On the 14th of March 1471 Edward landed at the mouth of the llumber, with a force which La had raised in the Low Countries, made his way to London, was received with acclamations by the citizens, again obtained possession of the imbecile Henry, and abut him up in his old prison. He then, on the 14th of April, want out to meet Warwick, who was advancing from St. Albans : the two armies encountered at Barnet ; and the result was that the forces of the earl were completely defeated, and both ha and his brother Lord Montagu were left dead on the field. The war was finished by the second defeat of the Lancastrians on the 14th of May, at the great battle of Tewkesbury, where both Queen Margaret and her sou Prince Edward fell into the hands of their enemies. Margaret was sent to the Tower, and wee detained there till she was set at liberty in conformity with one of the articles of the treaty of Pecquigny, con cluded with Franca in 1475, the French king paying for her a ransom of 50,000 crowns. Her unfortunate son was brought before Edward on the day after the battle, and brutally put to death in his presence by the hands of the dukes of Clarence and Gloucester (the king's brothers), misted by two other noblemen. King Henry terminated his days in the Tower about three weeks after ; and it has generally been believed that he was also violently taken on; and that hie murderer was the Duke of Gloucester. Many executions of the members of the
Lancastrian party followed, and confiscations of their property In all parts of the kingdom.
The remainder of the reign of Edward IV, was marked by few memorable events. One that may deserve to be noticed is the fate of the king's next brother, George, duke of Clarence, who was attainted of treason by a parliament which met in January 1478, and imme diately after privately put to death, being drowned, it was generally believed, in a butt of malmsey. He had at one time taken part with Warwick against his brother, and had sealed his alliance with the earl by marrying hie daughter; nor, although he afterwards saw it prudent to break thin connection, had he and Edward ever probably beeu cordially reconciled. It seems to have been chiefly his nearness to the throne that at last fixed his brother in the determination of getting rid of him. Edward was at war both with Scotland and with France during the greater part of his reign ; but the military opera tions that took place were unimportant, and are not worth relating : they were never carried on with any vigour, and were frequently suependad by long truces, which however, in their turn, were generally broken by the one nation or the other before the proper term. In June 1475, Edward having previously sent a herald to King Louis to summon him to aurrender the whole kingdom of France, embarked with a large force, and landed at Calais; but the expedition ended within three months in the treaty of Pccquigny, or Amiens, already mentioned. By one of the articles it was agreed that the dauphin, Charles', should marry Elizabeth, the king of England's eldest daughter; and Louis also engaged to pay Edward an annuity of 50,000 crowns a year as long as they both lived. It appears that Edward's ministers as well as their royal master consented to receive pensions from the French king; large amount.; of money were dis tributed among them from time to time; and In their case at least this foreign pay was a mere bribe to engage them in the interests of the power from which they received it. Edward however is assorted to have himself shared in their gains; indeed his own acknowledged annuity, though it might boar the appearance of a compensation for advantages which he had given up, was itself In reality nothing else than a bribe; it was a supply obtained independently of parliament and the country, lie was driven indeed to many other shifts and illegal methods, as well as this, to raise money for his wasteful debaucheries and extravagant expenditure on the mistresses, favourites, and others that ministered to his personal pleasures. Louis however appears never to have had any intention of fulfilling his engagement as to the marriage; for some years he evaded Edward's importunities as well as he could; till at length, In 1482, ho contracted the dauphin in another quarter. Edward, incensed in the highest degree, was preparing to avenge this affront by a new descent upon France, in which the parliament had eagerly promised to assist him with their lives and fortunes, when he was suddenly cut off by a fever, on the 9th of April 1483, after a reign of twenty-two years.
Edward IV. had by his wife Elizabeth three sons—Edward, who succeeded him ; Richard, duke of York, born in 1474 ; and George, duke of Bedford, who died in infancy; and seven daughters—Elizabeth, born 11th of February 1466, contracted to the dauphin, and afterwards married to Henry VII.; Cecilia, contracted to Prince James (afterwards James IV.) of Scotland, and afterwards married first to John, viscount Wells, secondly to Mr. Kyme, of Lincolnshire ; Anne, contracted to Philip, son of the Archduke Maximilian of Austria and his wife the Duchess of Burgundy, and afterwards married to Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk; Bridget, born at Eltham, 10th of November 1480, who became a nun at Dartford ; Mary, contracted to John I., king of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, bnt who died at Greenwich in 1482, before the marriage was solemnised ; Margaret. born 19th of April 1472, who died 11th of December following ; and Catherine, contracted to John, eldest son of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and afterwards married to William Courtenay, earl of Devonshire. By one of his many mistresses, Elizabeth Lucy, he had two natural children—Arthur, surnamed Plantagenet, created Viscount Lisle by Henry VIII.; and Elizabsth, who became the wife of Thomas, lord Lnrnley.