now the third time, was at last proceeded with, and by commissioners of oyer and determiner, arraigned at Westminster upon divers treasons committed and perpetrated after his coming on land within this kingdom, for so the judges advised, for that he was a foreigner, and condemned, and a few days after executed at Tyburn; where he did again openly read his confession, and take it upon his death to be true.  This was the end of this little cockatrice of a king that was able to destroy those that did not espy him first.  It was one of the longest plays of that kind that had been in memory, and might perhaps have had another end if he had not met with a king wise, stout, and fortunate.

[Footnote 1:  Sister to Edward IV, and widow of Charles le Temeraire, Duke of Burgundy.]

[Footnote 2:  Bernard Andre, the poet laureate of Henry VII, states in his manuscript life of his patron, that Perkin, when a boy, was “servant in England to a Jew named Edward, who was baptized, and adopted as godson by Edward IV, and was on terms of intimacy with the King and his family.”  Speed, mistranslating Andre’s words, makes Perkin the son of the Jew, instead of the servant; and Bacon amplifies the error, and transforms John Osbeck into the convert Jew, who, having a handsome wife, it might be surmised why the licentious King “should become gossip in so mean a house.”  Hume adds:  “People thence accounted for that resemblance which was afterward remarked between young Perkin and that monarch.”  The surmise of Bacon, grounded upon the error of Speed, is clinched into the positive assertion of Hume as to a popular belief for which there is not the slightest ground.—­Charles Knight.]

[Footnote:3 The Abbey of Beaulieu, near Southampton.]

SAVONAROLA’S REFORMS AND DEATH

THE FRENCH INVADE ITALY

A.D. 1494

PASQUALE VILLARI JEAN C. L. SISMONDI

Girolamo Savonarola, the great moral, political, and religious reformer of Italy, was born in Ferrara, September 21, 1452.  He was of noble family, studied medicine, but renounced his intended profession and became a Dominican monk.  In 1491 he became prior of St. Mark’s, Florence.  When he began to preach in the Church of St. Mark on the sins of the time, he applied to Italy the prophetic language of the Apocalypse.  He predicted the restoration of the Church in Italy through severe divine viistations.  His power in the pulpit was overwhelming, and the fame of his preaching was spread abroad, many regarding him as an inspired prophet.  In his denunciations he spared neither wealth nor position, laity nor clergy, and he exhorted the people to order their lives by the simple rules of Scripture.