to Sir Gilbert Talboys. By presumptive law the Princess was the next heir; but no woman had ever sat on the throne of England alone and in her own right, and it was doubtful whether the nation would submit to a female sovereign. The boy, though excluded by his birth from the prospect of the crown, was yet brought up with exceptional care, called a prince by his tutors, and probably regarded by his father as a possible successor should his sister go the way of her brothers. In 1525, after the King had deliberately withdrawn from Catherine, he was created Duke of Richmond—a title of peculiar significance, since it had been borne by his grandfather, Henry VII.—and he was granted precedence over the rest of the peerage. Illegitimacy was a serious, but, it might be thought, was not an absolute, bar. The Conqueror had been himself a bastard. The Church, by its habits of granting dispensations for irregular marriages or of dissolving them on pleas of affinity or consanguinity or other pretext, had confused the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate. A Church Court had illegitimatised the children of Edward IV. and Elizabeth Grey, on the ground of one of Edward's previous connections; yet no one regarded the princes murdered in the Tower as having been illegitimate in reality; and to prevent disputes and for an adequate object, the Duke of Richmond, had he grown to manhood, might, in the absence of other claims, have been recognised by Parliament. But the Duke was still a child, and might die as Henry's other sons had died; and other claims there were which, in the face of the bar sinister, could not fail to be asserted. James V. of Scotland was next in blood, being the son of Henry's eldest sister, Margaret. There were the Greys, inheriting from the sec-
