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of the merchant of Hull now attained! Two crowns glittering before them, two great kingdoms for their appanage, the founder of a royal line-the mother of a race of kings! Such was the prospect of the two grandchildren of William, first Duke of Suffolk, grandson of the "beloved merchant" of the great Edward. Had the current of events flowed on in their even course, the Royal House of De la Pole would have occupied the throne; and England, without the Tudors, would have left unwritten in her history those grave events, whether for good or ill, of the sixteenth century which flowed from their brief possession of the crown. But the fate of a single battle-Bosworth Field - dispelled for ever the De la Poles' golden dream of royalty. The fall of the House of York was the culminating point in the wayward destiny of their fate.

Little remains to be told in the history of the De la Poles. The Earl of Lincoln made a vain attempt to retrieve the disaster of Bosworth. He entered England at the head of a small army, composed partly of troops furnished by his aunt, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, and partly of Irish auxiliaries, led by two of the Geraldines. His defeat and death at Stoke, 1487, in the life-time of his father, who survived till 1491, extinguished his hopes, his kingly aspirations and his title of Earl. His next brother, Edmund De la Pole, the second Duke, also a Plantagenet by the mother's side, although one of the last persons of rank remaining of the Yorkists, entered into Henry VII.'s service, in the beginning of that monarch's reign. He was in arms, in the twelfth of Henry VII., with

the Lords Essex and Mountjoy, against Lord Audley and the Cornish men, who suffered so memorable a defeat on Blackheath. But this apparently politic course did not succeed. It failed in its object, to break the fall of the De la Poles. Henry desired to extinguish every trace of the house of York. He affected to look upon the Duke as heir of his attainted brother, the Earl of Lincoln, and not of his father, the Duke of Suffolk.

The Duke, in a scuffle, killed a man who had affronted him. Under other circumstances, the case would have passed without notice. But his Grace was subjected to the ignominy of a public trial [although immediately pardoned] for "killing an ordinary person in wrath;" and he indignantly withdrew without permission to the Court of his aunt, the Duchess of Burgundy, then the asylum for all the attached and suffering adherents of the Whitc Rose. He returned, however, soon after, and, excusing himself to the King, attended the marriage of Arthur, Prince of Wales, with Catharine of Arragon. On that occasion, the splendour of his equipage and his attentions to the royal family were remarkable. But this public homage to the house of Lancaster did not avail him, and he fled a second time, with his brother Richard, to the Court of Burgundy. This friendly door, however, was soon closed against him. The Duchess died, and the Duke of Suffolk, her nephew, was left in great distress, wandering for a time through Germany. At length the Arch-Duke Philip permitted him to reside in his dominions. But he was followed there by the power of Henry, whose threats succeeded, and he was delivered over to his enemy, of the

hated house of Lancaster, but upon a guarantee exacted by Philip that his life should be spared. How unlike was this return to England, a prisoner, to the triumphal procession of the dead body of Earl Michael, of Agincourt, or of the royal bridal party, led by William, the first Duke! He was hurried across the Channel as a common malefactor, driven without attendants in an ordinary conveyance to London, and locked up in a cell in the Tower. Henry kept faith with the Arch-Duke Philip. He spared the Duke's life in his own time, but, with fiendish vindictiveness, left an order for his execution as a legacy to his son and successor.

Edmund De la Pole, second Duke of Suffolk, languished for years in prison. His estates were gone, they were confiscated and given away. No one was allowed to see him. No familiar face looked through the prison bars of the window, which cast a dim light into his solitary cell-not even the two priests, his brothers Humphrey and Edward, nor the nun at Sion, Anne, his sister, once the affianced bride of Scotland, nor the other nun, Anne, his only child by Margaret, his wife, daughter of Richard, Lord Scrope. That only child could but commune with him in spirit and in prayer from her lone cell in the convent of Minoresses without Aldgate. At length he was released, but it was by the arm of the headsman. Too faithfully the second Tudor fulfilled the legacy left to him by the first. Edmund De la Pole, second Duke of Suffolk, bent with age and suffering, mounted the scaffold with tottering footsteps, and in the broad light of day, with the sun of heaven shining down upon the

unholy drama, was beheaded, the 30th of April, 1513. A few more convulsive throes, and the light and glory of the De la Poles are extinguished for ever.

Richard, the late Duke's brother, an exile in France, commanded the French troops, 6,000 strong, at Therouenne, when besieged by Henry the Eighth; and at the battle of Pavia, 1524, where Francis I. was taken prisoner, De la Pole's heroic conduct excited the praise even of his foes; and among the heaps of slain there lay, "to the great satisfaction of King Henry, Richard De la Pole, the pretender to the English throne." The Duke of Bourbon honoured his remains with splendid obsequies, and attended in person as one of the chief mourners. And thus end the De la Poles! Their rise, rapid and brilliant as the meteor, was as evanescent. They shone in all the magnificence and splendor of exalted rank, wealth, and power, and descending with meteoric velocity, their light went out. For a hundred and fifty years they filled a vast space, as luminaries of magnitude, in the social and political hemisphere of England. And yet they are all but forgotten now. Their lives and actions are compressed within but a few pages of their country's history. Their memorials are to be found within the broken arch and tottering cloisters-the ivy-crypt and chancel of the old time-honoured abbeys which they raised-fit emblems of themselves, grand even in their very isolation and ruin. Religion in these crumbling temples of the past-sole guardians of their fame-points to their broken monumental tablets, overgrown with moss, and exclaims, with solemn warning, "Behold the greatness of the De la Poles!"

Hector Graham, of Tea Castle.

"I came of the Græmes-a people of ancient and hot blood." SCOTT.

ABOUT forty years ago, if a traveller bent on exploring the country had sallied south-east from the little town of Monaghan, in Ireland, he would probably have lighted on a queer and somewhat antiquated mansion in its immediate neighbourhood: this house stood topping a green ridge in the midst of long, solitary fields, and fallows, and farms separated by broad dykes full of water, and was accessible by a straight, stiff avenue of the Dutch order, which ran up to the hall door at right angles from the road. Two rows of magnificent lime-trees for many years had sentinelled the approach, towering over, one against another, like the French and English Grenadier Guards at the field of Fontenoy; of these one only now remained

"Like a brotherless hermit, the last of his race;"

a splendid tree for stem, and shape, and bough, and frondage; the rest of the family had been cut down to feed the fires which waste had kindled on the altars of Bacchus or of Momus; or had their death-warrant recorded on the pages of the betting-book of the old proprietors.

K