As soon as it came to be known that Edward V. and his brother no longer existed, a fact which Richard III. himself took pains to publish, without any attempt to make it appear that they had not been taken off by violence, the minds of men turned to the young Earl of Richmond as the most eligible opponent to set up against the actual possessor of the crown. Morton, bishop of Ely, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury and cardinal, has the credit of having first suggested to the heads of hie party, that the crown should be offered to Henry on condition of his engaging to espouse the Princess Eliza beth, daughter of Edward IV., and since the death of her brothers the undoubted heiress of the rights of the House of York. The tcheme received the assent of the leaders of the various interests already confederated against Richard—of the queen dowager, of her son the Marquis of Dorset, and of the Duko of Buckingham, what aver were the motives that had induced the last-mentioned nobleman ba make his sudden change from the one side to the other. Com nunicatiene were immediately entered into with Henry's mother tho countess of Richmond, and she also entered cordially into tho design, although her present husband Lord Stanley had all along steadily tdhered to Richard, with whom he at present was. A messenger was sow despatched to Henry in Bretagne, September 24, 1483, and he vas informed that the general rising in his favour would take place m the 18th of October. Tho issue of this first attempt was eminently lisastrous to the confederacy of the earl's friends. Henry sailed from 3t. Maio with a fleet of forty sail, which he had been enabled to pro ride partly by the assistance of the Duke of Bretagne; but a storm lispereed his ships as he crossed the Channel, and when he reached he English coast near Poole he deemed it prudent, with the insuf icieut force that he had remaining, not to land. Meanwhile the hasty, 11-combined revolt of Buckingham and Ida associates fell to pieces vithout the atrikiog of a blow. Buckingham himself was taken and xacuted as a traitor; of the other chief persons engaged iu the attempt, several underwent the same foto ; others escaped death by flight ; many were attainted, among tho rest the Counter of Rich mond, whose Ho warn only spared at the intercession of her husband Lord Stanley. Henry himself returned to Bretague, and there at Chrixtenas, in the presence of a meeting of the English exiles to tho number of 500, held in the cathedral of Ithedou, he solemnly swore to marry Flizabeth as soon as ho should have triumphed over the usurper, and in return the assembly promised him fealty on that condition, and did him homage as their sovereign. A few months after this however Henry and his friends found it expedient to withdraw from Bretagne to avoid the machinations of the duko's minister Landois, who had been gained over by Richard, and had prevailed upon the duke to take measures for betraying them to the English king. They succeeded in making their escape to the territory of the French king, where they spent another year in making prepare Cons for a new expedition under the countenance and with tho assist ance of the king, Charles VIII. At length, on the 1st of August 1485, Henry sailed with his fleet from Harfieur, and on the 7th landed at Milford.] raven in Wales. The two rivals encountered at Bosworth in Leicestershire, on the 22nd, when the result was that Henry obtained a complete victory, which, with the death of Richard, who fell in the battle, at once placed the crown on his head. This was afterwards reckoned the first day of his reign, an arrangement by which only those who had actually drawn their swords ngainat him at Bosworth were made to be guilty of treason, and whatever nets had been done in the service of the usurper (as Richard was considered) up to the eve of that battle were overlooked. [Iticriann Iii.) Henry's marriage with Elizabeth was not solemnised till the 18th of January 1486, before which time it had been enacted by the parlia ment that " the inheritauco of the crown should be, rest, remain, and abide in the most royal person of the then sovereign lord King Henry VII, and the heirs of his body lawfully coming, perpetually with the grace of Cod so to endure, and in none other ;" the only security taken for the marriage being a request subsequently pre sented to the king by the Commons along with the grant of tonnage and poundage for life, that ho would be pleased " to take to wife and consort the Princess Elizabeth," with which, after it had been formally concurred in by the lords spiritual and temporal, Henry intimated that he was willing to comply. It has been usually asserted that Henry throughout their union treated his queen with marked coldness and neglect. He must have felt indeed that he owed nothing to any
preference that had been shown for him by a woman who was equally ready to give her hand to his deadliest enemy, had the fortune of the coutest been different; but it would appear that, from policy, if not from affection, he latterly behaved to her with more attention than he had at first shown ; and there is even some evidence that their domestic intercourse came at length to breathe more cordiality and tenderness than has been generally supposed.
It was net to be expected that a reign commencing in such cir cumstances should be undisturbed by insurrectionary attempts. A enceession of such movements kept Henry in disquietude for many years. The first that occurred was that headed by Francis, viscount Level, in April 1486, which was speedily and effectually put down. Before the end of the name year however a new and more formidable commotion was excited by the imposture of the boy Lambert Simnel, the son of a joiner at Oxford, who was put forward as Edward Plan tagenet, earl of Warwick, the son and heir of the late Duke of Clarence, brother of Richard III. The young prince in question bad, in fact, been lodged in the Tower by Henry among the first acts of his reign, and he remained immured in that fortress while the person who had assumed his name was receiving royal honours in Ireland es Edward VI. Simnel was soon joined both by Lord Level, who had made his escape from the recent disturbance, and by John de In Pole, earl of Lincoln, whole mother was a sister of Edward IV., and who had been at one time declared heir to the crown by the Into king after the death of his own sou. The Duchess of Burgundy, another sister of Edward IV., also gave her countenance and effective aid to the enterprise of the pretender, whom probably the friends of the House of York merely intended to make use of for effecting their first object, the ejection of the present king. The brief royalty of Simnel however was termi nated Juno 16, 1487, by the defeat of his adherents in the battle of Stoke, in which Lincoln himself wan slain. The imposture of' Simnel was followed after some years by the appearance of the more cele brated pretender Perkin Warbeck, who was asserted by his adherents to be Richard, duke of York, the younger brother of Edward V., and generally supposed to have been murdered along with him in the Tower. Warbeck arrived in Ireland from Lisbon in the beginning of May 1492, and was afterwards acknowledged as Duke of York, or rather as Richard, king of England, not only by the Duchess of Burgundy, but by the governments both of France and Scotland. This affair occupied Henry for the next five or six years; for it was not till the end of 1497 that the adventurer was finally put down. Another pretended Earl of' Warwick next arose, one Ralph Wulford, or Wilford, the sou of a shoemaker, svhoso attempt however was immediately nipped in the bud by hie apprehension and execution, in March 1499. The restless succession of these conspiracies seems at last to have convinced Henry that his throne would never be secure, nor the kingdom at peace, until the persona who were made rallying-points by his enemies were put out of existence. The same year in which Wulford was put to death witnessed the executions of both Perkin Wrirbeek and the Earl of Warwick. From this time I lenry'a reign was one of complete internal tranquillity, of which he chiefly took advantage to augment his revenue and his hoarded treasures—extracting money from his subjects on all sorts of pretences, which were not the less oppressive for being gene rally legal in their form and colour. The English law at this time, if only stretched as far as it would go, was abundantly sufficient for the purposes of the most exorbitant tyranny. The chief instruments of Henry's rapacity were two lawyers, Sir Richard Empeon and Edmund Dudley, names immortalised by the detestation of their conntry.
Henry was early in his reign involved in tho politics of the Continent by the quarrel which arose between Francis, duke of Bretagne, and Charles VIII. of France, with both of whom he had been connected before he came to the throne, and each of whom applied to him for his assistance. This quarrel, by the death of Francis soon after it broke out, leaving only two daughters, one of whom also soon afterwards died, became in fact a contest for the possession of' Bretagne on the pert of France. This was an object to which the public mind iu England was strongly opposed ; but although Henry was forced to appear to go along with the national feeling, lie deferred taking any steps to prevent the subjugation of the Bretone till it was too late.