dead at Tewksbury, stabbed by Yorkist lords. Henry VI. died in the
Tower, "mysteriously," as did all the deposed and imprisoned Kings;
Warwick was slain in battle, and with Edward IV, the reign of the House
of York commenced.

Such in brief is the story of the "_Wars of the Roses_" and of the
Earl of Warwick, the "_King Maker_."

[Sidenote: Edward IV., 1471-1483.]

At the close of the Wars of the Roses, feudalism was a ruin. The oak
with its dead roots had been prostrated by the storm. The imposing
system had wrought its own destruction. Eighty Princes of the blood
royal had perished, and more than half of the Nobility had died on the
field or the scaffold, or were fugitives in foreign lands. The great
Duke of Exeter, brother-in-law to a King, was seen barefoot begging
bread from door to door.

By the confiscation of one-fifth of the landed estate of the Kingdom,
vast wealth poured into the King's treasury. He had no need now to
summon Parliament to vote him supplies. The clergy, rendered feeble and
lifeless from decline in spiritual enthusiasm, and by its blind
hostility to the intellectual movement of the time, crept closer to the
throne, while Parliament, with its partially disfranchised House of
Commons, was so rarely summoned that it almost ceased to exist. In the
midst of the general wreck, the Kingship towered in solitary greatness.

Edward IV. was absolute sovereign. He had no one to fear, unless it was
his intriguing brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who, during the
twenty-three years of Edward's reign, was undoubtedly carefully