Henry IV. was a usurper, in spite of his Parliamentary title,
according to all ideas of hereditary right; for, failing heirs of the
body to Richard II., the crown belonged to the House of Mortimer, in
virtue of the descent of its chief from the Duke of Clarence, third
son of Edward III, the Duke of Lancaster being fourth son of that
monarch. Henry IV. felt the force of the objection that existed to his
title, and he sought to evade it by pretending to found his claim to
the crown on descent from Edmund of Lancaster, whom he assumed to have
been the _elder_ brother of Edward I.; but no weight was attached
to this plea by his contemporaries, who saw in him a monarch created
by conquest and by Parliamentary action. The struggle that then began
endured until both Plantagenets and Tudors had become extinct, and
the English crown had passed to the House of Stuart, in the person of
James I., who was descended in the female line from the Duke of
Clarence, through Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV., and
wife of Henry VII. Intrigues, insurrections, executions, and finally
great civil wars, grew out of the usurpation of the throne by the line
of Lancaster. We find the War of the Roses spoken of by nearly all
writers on it as beginning in 1455, when the first battle of St.
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