ts recognition
to his claim of the crown. The Act made no mention of hereditary right, or
of any right by conquest, but simply declared "that the inheritance of the
crown should be, rest, remain, and abide in the most royal person of their
sovereign Lord, King Henry the Seventh, and the heirs of his body lawfully
ensuing." Such a declaration gave Henry a true Parliamentary title to his
throne; and his consciousness of this was shown in a second Act which
assumed him to have been king since the death of Henry the Sixth and
attainted Richard and his adherents as rebels and traitors. But such an
Act was too manifestly unjust to give real strength to his throne; it was
in fact practically undone in 1495 when a new statute declared that no one
should henceforth be attainted for serving a de facto king; and so
insecure seemed Henry's title that no power acknowledged him as king save
France and the Pope, and the support of France--gained as men believed by
a pledge to abandon the English claims on Normandy and Guienne--was as
perilous at home as it was useful abroad.

[Sidenote: Revolt of Simnel]

It was in vain that he carried out his promise to Morton and the
Woodvilles by marrying Elizabeth of York; he had significantly delayed the
marriage till he was owned as king in his own right, and a purely
Lancastrian claim to the throne roused wrath in every Yorkist which no
after match could allay. During the early years of his reign the country
was troubled with local insurrections, some so obscure that they have
escaped the notice of our chroniclers, some, like that of Lovel and of the
Staffords, general and formidable. The turmoil within was quickened by
encouragement from without. The Yorkist sympathies of the Earl of Kildare,
the deputy of Ireland, offered a starting-point for a descent from the
west; while the sister of Edward the Fourth, the Duchess Margaret of
Burgundy, a fanatic in the cause of her house, was ready to aid any
Yorkist attempt from Flanders. A trivial rising in 1486 proved to be the
prelude of a vast conspiracy in the following year. The Earl of Warwick,
the son of the Duke of Clarence and thus next male heir of the Yorkist
line, had been secured by Henry as by Richard in the Tower; but in the
opening of 1487 Lambert Simnel, a boy carefully trained for the purpose of
this imposture, landed under his name in Ireland. The whole island
espoused Simnel's cause, the Lord Deputy supported him, and he was soon
j