together of two armed forces with the melting of the fog. It was as though a peaceful entity had gently risen to yield place to a warlike one.

By now, the din and crash were become incessant. Wading hip deep in the reddening waters of the brook and in the crimsoning black mire of the morass, the men of the opposed armies met and battled, hand to hand.

From the wood belched flashes of fire. Heavy smoke clouds rolled away among the leaves. The thunder of primitive artillery reverberated across the meadow, mingling its sound of a new kind of warfare with that of the decadent.

Wherever a crescendo occurs, a diminuendo is commonly indicated. The augmenting of Richmond's desperately battling forces by those of Stanley marked the climax of the crescendo. The downfall of Richard the Third before the sturdy lance of Richmond, the beginning of the diminuendo; the fitting finale to the whole.

Wild of eye, disheveled, his charger struck away from beneath him, King Richard faced his mortal foe. Dauntless to the last gasping breath, he made one frenzied, vain effort to rally his scattering army.

"A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" he shrieked aloud; and then, dying, pitched forward into the dust.

The Battle of Bosworth Field was with the history of things past.

"His kingdom for a horse, quotha!" shouted Stanley. "His kingdom? Bah! What is his kingdom now, honest gentles?" he added, leaping from his blood-slavered stallion and contemptuously spurning with his steel-booted foot the pitiful remains of the dead monarch. "What is his kingdom now?" Sir William repeated, looking inquiringly about him. "Why, somewhat above three cubits of unwashed dirt. A full cubit less, by the rood, than any man of us here shall inherit."

"Body o' God! an he had him a barb now, my lord of Stanley, whither, thinkest thou, would he be riding?" shouted someone out of the circle of mailed warriors that was exultingly closing in around the limp, misshapen figure huddled upon the ground.

"Whither else but to the foul fiend!" returned Stanley, smiling grimly up into the speaker's face. "'Tis an easy riddle thou hast set me, a'Beckitt. But he'll need him no barb to fleet him his black soul into the burning lake, I'm thinking."

"An Crookback sink not a treacherous dagger within the back of old Charon before he's ferried him across the Styx, I am wide of my guess," interrupted a third.

"Or strike off and pole the three heads of Cerberus when he does get over," suggested another.

"Look you yonder at the redoubtable Cheyney," again spoke Stanley, pointing toward a gigantic body, sprawled limply, face downward, over the top of a tangled clump of copsewood. "Him, good gentles, I saw totter and go down before this lump of bent clay like unto a lightning-riven oak. I' faith, much doth it marvel me at the furious strength that kept its abode within this crooked carcase."

Upon an ebon-black stallion, and apart from the men hovering, vulturelike, above Richard's body, sat the Earl of Richmond, the fortunate young leader beneath whose lance the tyrant king had fallen. By reason of a natural eminence of heaped earth and stone he was raised well above the field, the whole of which he could command by a simple turning of his head to right and left. Behind him the deep shadows of Sutton Ambien Wood served picturesquely to emphasize the flash and glitter of the plated and richly inlaid armor that girded him from head to toe.

It was then but a brief fortnight and a day since the ship in which he had embarked at Bretagne had brought him careening through Bristol Channel to a safe landing upon England's coast at Milford Haven. In that short time he had succeeded in setting a period to the devastating Wars of the Roses, and in exchanging his earl's coronet for that which fortune subsequently decided should be a crown.

The lifeless body stretched before him in the hollow marked the pitiful end of nearly a century of deadly, internecine strife. Intently he watched them denuding the stiffening corpse of its costly armor and kingly vestments.

During these moments that England was without a legal monarch, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, remained motionless as a statue upon his black steed, solitary, unheralded, forgotten.

"Body o' God, men! we'll give him a horse," he heard them wildly shouting; and then impassively regarded them while they lashed the bent, and now naked body upon the broad back of a lively hackney. It was the final and brutal expression of a righteous indignation.

From every part of the field there rang in Henry's ears loud cries of exultation over the dead and vanquished Richard, which merged presently into a riotous pandemonium of inarticulate sound when the horse, bearing its gruesome burden, was paraded before the men in the direction of Market Bosworth Road.

"Le roi est mort,​—​vive le roi!" the clear voice of Henry's squire made itself manifest above the din.

Something the faintest of smiles broke upon the impassivity of the Earl's countenance as he turned his head in the direction whence this cry had come. Sir Richard, bearing a jeweled crown outstretched in his hands, was just leaping above the clump of copse-wood whereupon the body of Sir John Cheyney was lying.

Lord Stanley, who, by this time, had resumed seat upon his horse, quickly stationed himself between the approaching young knight and the Earl of Richmond. Then, taking the crown that had encircled Richard's helmet throughout the battle, he set it solemnly upon that of Henry.

Whereupon​—​"The King is dead, long live the King!" the cry rippled abroad over the sanguinary field of Bosworth; and the blazing August sun beat down upon a circle of upraised, flashing swords, unsheathed in promise of fealty to the new monarch.

CHAPTER I
A WARRANT UPON DOUGLAS

Upon a massive chair of state within the private audience chamber, which adjoined the throne room in the venerable castle of Kenilworth, sat King Henry VII, gloomily brooding. An ermine trimmed robe of softest velvet fell from his shoulders, rippling over the steps of the raised dais to the floor below; a golden, jeweled crown sat awry upon his head.

Five years as reigning monarch of a discontented and rebellious people had borne their weight more heavily upon him than had the whole of the twenty-nine preceding them. Though yet young, as time relatively to the man is commonly measured, his hair and carefully pointed beard were shot with premature gray. His countenance, deeply lined, was overspread with a sickly pallor. His hands, clutching upon the arms of the damask-covered chair into which he had thrown himself, and in which he was now half-sitting, half-reclining, trembled as though palsied with an enfeebled age.

His royal marriage with Elizabeth of York, daughter of Henry VI, had marked the consummation of his loftiest ambition. The omen of the white rose mingling with the red had been pleasantly fulfilled. Outwardly his position seemed sufficiently secure. But beneath the surface there were incessant ebullitions of seditious sentiment threatening momentarily to seethe to the top and engulf him. Always, must dissembling be met with keen and smooth diplomacy; plot, with adroit and clever counter-plot.

Because of his open aversion to war, his appreciation of the advantages of negotiation and arbitration, he was stigmatized by his secret enemies as being greedy and avaricious. Yet, on the other hand, had he amassed great armies