XV.] DYNASTIC RISINGS. doubt that hung over the death of Edward V and his brother Richard. It is curious to "trace the intertwining of these really incompatible and inconsistent interests, and yet the only conclusion at which we can fairly arrive is the utterly desperate and unprincipled character of the Yorkist intrigues. The first rising is perhaps the most desperate ; in April i486 the Viscount Lovel, and Humfrey and Thomas Stafford, rose in Worcestershire ; the king, as Bacon tells us, thought it a mere rag of Bosworth : although at one time it seemed to be becoming formidable, it collapsed before the king's offer of pardon. Lovel escaped to the Duchess Margaret, Humfrey Stafford was executed, and Thomas was pardoned. Whether the original motive of the rising was the despair of the attainted leaders, or an intrigue of the as yet unreconciled Yorkist remnant, it is, by the agency of Lord Lovel, linked on with the second rising, that of 1487, in the name of Lambert Simnel. The idea of dethroning the new king by setting up as claimant a person, who pretended to be another person, who was well known to be a prisoner in the king's hands, is not only desperate but unprincipled, and, if I can say it without offence, not only unprincipled and desperate, but Irish. Lambert Simnel, a boy of twelve years old, the son of an organ-maker at Oxford, educated by a clever priest named Symonds, a name still known here, was presented to the world as Edward Earl of Warwick; was received in Ireland in February 1487, crowned at Dublin in May, brought to England in June, and taken prisoner at Stoke near Newark on the 16th of that month. In this most extravagant imposture the Yorkist remnant was thoroughly implicated: the Duchess Margaret was represented by Martin Swart and his men ; the Earl of Lincoln, the cousin of Warwick, was slain fighting for Simnel ; the Lord Lovel, ' the dog ' minister òf Richard, disappeared on the field, and Henry's suspicions