heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

342 THE HERALDRY OF YORK MINSTER.
The generous Queen Margaret, second wife and widow of Edward I.
was buried here, and Queens Isabel and Joanna, as I have mentioned.
Near them was laid Isabel Duchess of Bedford, the eldest and favourite
daughter of Edward III., who was separated from her husband, Ingelram
de Coucy, by the wars between France and England.
John Hastings, the young Earl of Pembroke, slain by accident at a
Christmas tournament, in Woodstock Park, 1389, was buried here. Also
John Duke of Bourbon, taken prisoner at Agincourt, and confined in the
Tower for eighteen years. Sir Robert Tresilian, Lord Chief Justice of
England, and Nicholas Brembre, Lord Mayor of London, rapacious
favourites of Richard II., were here interred after being hung at Tyburn.
According to Hume, however (vol. ii.
page 246], Tresilian at least does
not deserve such a hard name. Gloucester and his associates had forced
Richard II. to
to him
sign a commission transferring the sovereign power
and thirteen other persons for a twelvemonth, in fact abdicating. Richard,
obliged to submit, nevertheless submitted it at Nottingham to Sir Robert
Tresilian, Chief Justice of the King's Bench; Sir Robert Belknappe,
Chief Justice of the Common Pleas ; Sir John Carey, Chief Baron of the
Exchequer Holt, Fulthorpe, and Bourg, inferior justices by whom he
; :
was advised that the late commission was derogatory to the royalty and
prerogative of the King that those who procured
it were punishable with
;
death ;
that those who compelled him were guilty of treason. But the
Duke of Gloucester, Earl of Derby (soon after Henry IV.), and the Earls
of Arundel, Warwick, and Nottingham, persuaded Parliament to summon
these judges and others before them; and without hearing a witness,
examining a fact, or deliberating on one point of law, to pronounce them
guilty of high treason, and Tresilian and Brembre were executed at once.
of men's actions and motives at this distance of
As far as we can judge
time, it appears to have been a most unjustifiable murder.
Sir John Mortimer, too, was buried here, a Yorkist hung by the
Lancastrian party when Henry VI. was but a child ;
and Thomas Burdet,
also a victim of Yorkist cruelty, hung for speaking a few angry words
about a favourite white buck which Edward IV. had carelessly killed.
What a list of noble and notorious dead ! But
the very place of
their sepulchres can no longer be traced ;
nay, even the stately walls
under the shadow of which their bodies rested have passed away, " and
" like the baseless fabric of a vision, left not a wreck behind." For when
the Reformation came and the brethren were dispersed and the buildings
dismantled, Henry VIII. gave the Grey Friars church to the city, to be
devoted to the relief of the poor, and for some years
it was used as a
storehouse for plunder taken from the French. Then, in 1552, the worthy
Ridley, preaching before the young King at Paul's Cross, on mercy and