The works of Francis Bacon, lord chancellor of England.

CIVIL HISTrORY.
HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF KING HENRY VII.
To the Most Illustrious and Most Excellent PRINCE CHARLES, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall,
Earl of Chester, &c.
IT rTAY PLEASE YOUR HIGHNESS,
IN part of my acknowledgment to your highness, I have endeavoured to do honour to the memory
of the last King of England that was ancestor to the king your father and yourself: and was that
king to whom both unions may in a sort refer, that of the roses being in him consummate, and that
of the kingdoms by him begun: besides, his times deserve it. For he was a wise man and an excellent king: and yet the times were rough, and full of mutations, and rare accidents. And it is with
times as it is with ways; some are more up-hill and down-hill, and some are more flat and plain;
and the one is better for the liver, and the other for the writer. I have not flattered him, but took him
to life as well as I could, sitting so far off, and having no better light. It is true your highness hath
a living pattern, incomparable, of the king your father: but it is not amiss for you also to see one
of these ancient pieces. God preserve your highness.
Your highness's most humble and devoted servant,
FRANCIS ST. ALBAN.
AFTER that Richard, the third of that name, king ignominy or contumely unworthy of him that had
in fact only, but tyrant both in title and regiment, been the executioner of King Henry the Sixth,
and so commonly termed and reputed in all times that innocent prince, with his own hands; the
since, was, by the divine revenge favouring the contriver of the death of the Duke of Clarence, his
design of an exiled man, overthrown and slain at brother; the murderer of his two nephews, one of
Bosworthfield; there succeeded in the kingdom them his lawful king in the present, and the other
the Earl of Richmond, thenceforth styled Henry in the future, failing of him; and vehemently susthe Seventh. The king, immediately after the pected to have been the irnpoisoner of his wife,
victory, as one that had been bred under a devout thereby to make vacant his bed, for a marriage
mother, and was in his nature a great observer of within the degrees forbidden. And although he
religious forms, caused "Te Deum laudamus" to were a prince in military virtue approved, jealous
be solemnly sung in the presence of the whole of the honour of the English nation, and likewise
army upon the place, and was himself, with ge- a good law-maker, for the ease and solace of the
neral applause and great cries of joy, in a kind of common people; yet his cruelties and parricide,
military election or recognition, saluted king. in the opinion of all men, weighed down his virMeanwhile the body of Richard, after many in- tues and merits; and, in the opinion of wise men,
dignities and reproaches, the" diriges" and obse- even those virtues themselves were conceived to
quies of the common people towards tyrants, was be rather feigned and affected things to serve his
obscurely buried. For though the king of his no- ambition, than true qualities ingenerate in hisjudgbleness gave charge unto the friars of Leicester mert or nature. And therefore it was noted by
to see an honourable interment to be given to it, men of great understanding, who seeing his afteryet the religious people themselves, being not free acts looked back upon his former proceedings,
from the humours of the vulgar, neglected it; that even in the time of King Edward his brother,
wherein nevertheless they did not then incur any he was not without secret trains and mines to
man's blame or censure: no man thinking any turn envy and hatred upon his brother's govern314