and the least scrupulous in the means which he employed for the attainment of his ends.  A combination between these potent adversaries being secretly formed against Clarence, it was determined to begin by attacking his friends.  He was alarmed when he found acts of tyranny exercised on all around him; but, instead of securing his own life against the present danger by silence and reserve, he was open and loud in justifying the innocence of his friends and in exclaiming against the iniquity of their prosecutors.  The King, highly offended with his freedom, or using that pretence against him, committed him to the Tower, 1478, summoned a parliament, and tried him for his life.  Clarence was pronounced guilty by the peers.  The House of Commons was no less slavish and unjust; they both petitioned for the execution of the Duke and afterward passed a bill of attainder against him.

The only favor which the King granted him after his condemnation was to leave him the choice of his death; and he was privately drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower—­a whimsical choice, which implies that he had an extraordinary passion for that liquor.

The Duke left two children by the elder daughter of the Earl of Warwick:  a son, created an earl by his grandfather’s title, and a daughter, afterward Countess of Salisbury.  Both this Prince and Princess were also unfortunate in their end, and died violent deaths—­a fate which, for many years, attended almost all the descendants of the royal blood of England.  There prevails a report that a chief source of the violent prosecution of the Duke of Clarence, whose name was George, was a current prophecy that the King’s son should be murdered by one the initial letter of whose name was G. It is not impossible but, in those ignorant times, such a silly reason might have some influence; but it is more probable that the whole story is the invention of a subsequent period, and founded on the murder of these children by the Duke of Gloucester.

All the glories of Edward’s reign terminated with the civil wars, where his laurels, too, were extremely sullied with blood, violence, and cruelty.  His spirit seems afterward to have been sunk in indolence and pleasure, or his measures were frustrated by imprudence and the want of foresight.  While he was making preparations for a French war he was seized with a distemper, of which he expired, 1483, in the forty-second year of his age and the twenty-third of his reign.

During the latter years of Edward IV the nation, having in a great measure forgotten the bloody feuds between the two roses, and peaceably acquiescing in the established government, was agitated only by some court intrigues, which, being restrained by the authority of the King, seemed nowise to endanger the public tranquillity.  But Edward knew that, though he himself had been able to overawe rival factions, many disorders might arise from their contests during the minority of his son;