soner the Earl of Rutland, in cold blood, at the termination
of it, has gained a passport to an odious immortality from the soaring
genius of the bard of Avon. But his real fate is far more striking, both
in a moral and in a poetical point of view, than that assigned to him by
our great dramatist. On the evening before the battle of Towton Field,
and after the termination of the skirmish which preceded it, an unknown
archer shot him in the throat, as he was putting off his gorget, and so
avenged the wretched victims, whose blood he had shed like water upon
Wakefield Bridge. The vengeance of the Yorkists was not, however,
satiated by the death of the Butcher, as Leland informs us that they
called him:--for they attainted him, in the first year of the reign of
Edward the Fourth, and granted his estates, a few years afterwards, to
the Duke of Gloucester, who retained them in his iron grasp till he lost
them with his crown and life at the battle of Bosworth. The history of
his son is a romance ready made. His relations, fearing lest the
partisans of the house of York should avenge the death of the young Earl
of Rutland on the young Lord Clifford, then a mere infant, concealed him
for the next twenty-five years of his life in the Fells of Cumberland,
where he grew up as hardy as the heath on which he vegetated, and as
ignorant as the rude herds which bounded over it. One of the first acts
of Henry the Seventh, after his accession to the throne, was to reverse
the attainder which had been passed against his father; and immediately
afterwards the young lord emerged from the hiding place, where he had
been brought up in ignorance of his rank, and with the manners and
education of a mere shepherd. Finding himself more illiterate than was
usual even in an illiterate age, he retired to a tower, which he built in
the beautiful forest of Barden, and there, under the direction of the
monks of Bolton Abbey, gave himself up to the forbidden studies of
alchemy and astrology. His son, who was the first Earl of Cumberland,
embittered the conclusion of his life, by embarking in a series of
adventures, which, in spite of their profligacy, or rather in consequence
of it, possess a very strong romantic interest. Finding that his father
was either unwilling or unable to furnish him with funds to maintain his
inordinate riot and luxury, he became the leader of a band of outlaws,
and, by their agency, levied aids and benevolences upon the different