XV.] THE TWO MOTHERS. 395 by ordinance, decree, and statute of the three estates of the realm called the parliament, for this purpose publicly and generally held. Perhaps the good old man swore a little too hard; the accumulation of reasons may show that Innocent VIII had some misgiving. Trebly certain, however, as all this was, by a scale of verdicts rising from the king's own assertion, to the parliament, to the pope, and to the judgment of the Almighty, the king would make assurance doubly sure by marrying the equally undoubted heiress of the rival line. He was espoused" to Elizabeth of York on the 18th of January, i486. He had not waited for her to be crowned with him ; he himself had been crowned on the 30th of October : and he was in no great hurry to admit her to a share of his dignity. She was not crowned until the 25th of November, 1487, and a great deal had happened in the meantime. I am not sure that the marriage was a very happy one. A priori, there was no reason why it should, although I believe it is certain that husband and wife were faithful. But Elizabeth was a silly woman, and Henry was not a sympathetic man. It was said she would have married her uncle, and certainly her marriage with Henry was a marriage of convenience. Their family politics must have been very much opposed ;. that is if we suppose them to have had any family affections at all, which is rather a strong effort to suppose in the case of kings and queens in the fifteenth century. But it is still more certain that they both had mothers alive, and there would be, according to all analogies, no love lost. Henry was an affectionate and obedient son to a pious and noble mother : Elizabeth had a mother who had not much sense or discretion, and was constantly in disgrace. The lady Margaret was strict and stately, and a woman of great experience, of many husbands and good advisers : the queen dowager may have learned, in the romantic seclusion to which her son-in-law consigned