XIII. EDWARD III

1327-1377.

Shameful as the state of the realm had been under the rule of Edward of Carnarvon and his favourites, a yet more disgraceful depth was reached in the years of minority of his son. The young king was only fourteen, and the government fell into the hands of those who had set him on the throne, his mother and her paramour, Roger Mortimer. A council, headed by Henry Earl of Lancaster, was supposed to guide the king's steps, but as a matter of fact he was in Queen Isabella's power, while she was entirely ruled by Mortimer. They were surrounded by a guard of 180 knights, and acted as they pleased in all things. It was only gradually that the nation realized the state of affairs, for the murder of Edward II. was long kept concealed, and the relations of the queen and Mortimer were not at first generally known.

[Sidenote: =Second Scottish invasion.--"The Shameful Peace."=]

The first blow to the new government was the renewal of the Scottish war. In 1328, Robert Bruce broke the truce that he had made six years before. He was now growing advanced in age, and was stricken by leprosy, but he sent out, under James "the Black Douglas," a great host, 4000 knights and squires, and 20,000 moss-troopers, all horsed on shaggy Galloway ponies. They harried England as far as the Tees, and successfully eluded Mortimer, who went out against them, taking the young king with him. Outmarching the English day by day, Douglas retired before them across the Northumbrian fells, occasionally harassing his pursuers by night-attacks; he returned home with much plunder, leaving not a cow unlifted nor a house unburnt in all Tynedale. The English host came back foiled and half starved, and Mortimer, not daring to face another campaign, advised the queen to make terms with the Scots. Accordingly "the Shameful Peace" was signed at Northampton, by which England resigned all claims of suzerainty over the Scotch realm, sent back the crown and royal jewels, which Edward I. had carried off to London, and gave the king's sister Joanna to be wed to Bruce's eldest son (1328).

[Sidenote: =Risings against Mortimer.=]

Mortimer's failure led to insurrections against him; but they were mere baronial risings, not efforts of the whole people. Henry of Lancaster, who headed the first, was put down and heavily fined for his pains. Edmund, Earl of Kent, then took up the same plan, announcing that he would free his half-brother Edward II., who, as he was persuaded, still survived. But he fell into Mortimer's hands, and was beheaded.

[Sidenote: =The king asserts himself--Mortimer executed.=]

It was the young king himself who was destined to put an end to the misrule of his mother and her minion. When he reached the age of eighteen, and realized the shameful tutelage in which he was being held, he resolved to free himself from it by force. While the court lay at Nottingham Castle in October, 1330, he gathered a small band of trustworthy adherents, and at midnight entered the queen's lodgings by a secret stair and seized Mortimer, in spite of his mother's tears and curses. The favourite was sent before his peers, tried, and executed; Isabella was relegated to honourable confinement at Castle-Rising, where she lived for many years after.

[Sidenote: =Character of Edward III.=]

King Edward now himself assumed the reins of government; he was still very young, but in the middle ages men ripened quick if they died early, and Edward at nineteen was thought both by others and himself old enough to take charge of the policy of the realm. He was in his youth a very well-served and well-loved sovereign, for he had all the qualities that attract popularity--a handsome person, pleasant and affable manners, a fluent tongue, and an energy that contrasted most happily with the listless indolence of his miserable father. It was many years before the world discovered that he was selfish, thriftless, reckless of his country's needs, and set on gratifying his personal ambition and love of warlike feats to the sacrifice of every other consideration. He was a knight-errant of the type of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, not a statesman and warrior like his grandfather Edward I. In his later years his faculties showed a premature decay, and he fell into the hands of favourites, male and female, who were almost as offensive as the Gavestons and Despensers of the previous generation.

Edward's reign falls into three well-marked periods: the first, 1330-39, is that of his Scottish wars; the second, 1339-60, is that in which he began the famous and unhappy "Hundred Years' War" with France, and himself conducted it up to the brilliant but unwise Peace of Bretigny; the third, 1360-77, that of his declining years, is a time of trouble and misgovernment gradually increasing till Edward sank unregretted into his grave.

[Sidenote: =War with Scotland.--Battle of Halidon Hill.=]

Robert Bruce, the terror of the English, had died in 1329, leaving his throne to his son David II., a child of five years. The government fell into the hands of regents, who ill supplied the place of the dead king, and their weakness tempted the survivors of the English party in Scotland to strike a blow. Edward Balliol, the son of the long-dead John Balliol, accordingly made secret offers to Edward III., that he would do homage to him for the Scottish crown, and reign as his vassal, if he were helped to win the land. With Edward's connivance the young Balliol gathered together the Earls of Buchan and Athole, and many other Scottish refugees in England, and took ship to Scotland. He landed in Fife, was joined by his secret friends, beat the regent, the Earl of Mar, and seized the greater part of Scotland. He was crowned at Scone, and forced the young David Bruce to flee over-sea to France to save his life. But soon the national party rose against Balliol, expelled him, and chased him back to England. Edward then took the field in his favour, and met the Scots at Halidon Hill, near Berwick. Here he inflicted on them a crushing defeat, which the English celebrated as a fair revenge for the blow of Bannockburn, for the regent Archibald Douglas, four earls, and many thousand men were left on the field. They fell mainly by the arrows of the English archery, for, having drawn themselves out on a hillside behind a marsh, they stood as a broad target for the bowmen, whom they were unable to reach. The intervening marshy ground prevented their heavy columns of pikemen from advancing, and they were routed without even the chance of coming to handstrokes (July, 1333). This victory made Edward Balliol King of Scotland for a second time; he did homage to his champion, and ceded to him Tweeddale and half Lothian. But the crown won by English help sat uneasily on Balliol's brow. After several years of spasmodic fighting, he was finally driven out of his realm, and took refuge again in England. This time he found less help, for Edward III. was now plunged deep in schemes of another kind.

Nine years of comparative quiet had done much to recover England from the misery it had known in the last reign. The baronage and people were serving the young king loyally, taxation had not yet been heavy, and the success of Halidon Hill had restored the nation's self-respect. Edward himself was flushed by victory and burning for fresh adventures. Hence it came that, neglecting the nearer but less showy task of restoring the English suzerainty over Scotland, he turned to wars over-sea.

[Sidenote: =Quarrel with France.--The Hundred Years' War begins.=]

One of the usual frontier-quarrels between French and Gascons had broken out in 1337 on the borders of Aquitaine. In consequence, Philip VI. of France had, like so many of his predecessors, taken measures to support Edward's Scottish enemies, and given shelter to the exiled boy-king, David Bruce. War between England and France was probably inevitable, but Edward chose to make it a life and death struggle, by laying claim to the throne of France and branding Philip VI. as a usurper.

[Sidenote: =The French succession.--The Salic Law.=]

The question of the French succession dated from some years back. In 1328 died Edward's uncle, King Charles IV., the last of the direct male descendants of Philip IV. The problem then cropped up for the first time whether the French crown could descend to females, or whether the next male heir must be chosen, although he was but the cousin of the late king. The peers of France adjudged that by the Salic Law, an old custom ascribed to the ancient Franks, only male descent counted in tracing claims to the throne. Accordingly they adjudged the kingdom to Philip of Valois, who was crowned as Philip VI. Edward, as own nephew through his mother to Charles IV., had protested at the time; but he had practically withdrawn his protest by doing homage to Philip for the Duchy of Aquitaine, and thereby acknowledging the justice of the award.

THE FRENCH SUCCESSION, 1337.

Now, in 1337 Edward began to think of reviving his dormant pretensions to the French crown, though they had two fatal defects. The first was that there had never been any precedent in France for a claim through the female line. The second was that, even if such descents could be counted, one of his mother's brothers had left a daughter, the Queen of Navarre, and the son of that princess had a better female claim than Edward himself. The only way in which this defect could be ignored was by pleading, like Bruce in 1292, that Edward was a generation nearer to the old royal stock than his cousin, Charles, King of Navarre.

[Sidenote: =Edward claims the French crown.=]

On this rather futile plea Edward laid solemn claim to the French crown, and declared Philip of Valois a usurper. Perhaps there may be truth in the story which tells that he did not do so from any strong belief in his own theory, but because the Flemings, vassals to the French crown, had declared that they could not aid him, though willing to do so, on account of oaths of fealty sworn to the King of France. If Edward claimed to be king himself, they said, their allegiance and help would be due to him. Whether the tale be true or not, he at any rate made the claim.

In reliance on the assistance of the Flemings, and of their neighbours the Dukes of Brabant and Holland, and with the countenance of the Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, King Edward determined to land in the Low Countries and attack France from the north. He called out great bodies of soldiery, and took advantage of the devotion that the nation felt for him to raise illegal taxes for their pay. Violating his grandfather's engagements, he took a "tallage" from the towns, and levied a "mal-tolt" or extra customs-duty on the export of wool. In the excitement of the moment, little opposition was made to these high-handed measures.

[Sidenote: =First campaign.--Naval victory off Sluys.=]

But Edward's campaign against France proved utterly unsuccessful; his Netherland allies were of little use to him, King Philip refused to risk a battle in the field, and an attack on Cambray was defeated. Edward had to return to England to raise more money; while at home, he heard that a great French fleet had been collected for the conquest of Flanders and a subsequent attack on England. Hastily raising all the ships he could gather from London and the Cinque Ports, the king set sail to seek the enemy. He found them in harbour at the Flemish port of Sluys, and there brought them to action. They had chained their ships in three lines and built up barricades upon them; but, by pretending to fly, Edward induced them to cast loose and follow him, and, when they had got out to sea, turned and attacked. The English archery swept the enemy's decks, and then the king and his knights clambered up, and boarded vessel after vessel till well-nigh the whole French fleet was taken (1340). No such glorious day had been seen since Hubert de Burgh won the battle off Dover 120 years before.

[Sidenote: =Contest with Parliament.=]

The victory of Sluys freed England from the danger of invasion, but did nothing more. For when the king landed in Flanders, and pushed forward against France, he again failed to break through the line of strong towns that guarded Philip's frontier, and had to return home foiled. On coming to England he fell into a bitter strife with his Parliament, who were far from contented with the repeated checks in Flanders. Edward began by charging his failure on his ministers and dismissed them all, from the Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury downwards, accusing them of having misappropriated the taxes. He announced that he would bring them to trial, and appointed a special commission for the purpose. This led to a vindication of the ancient right of trial by a man's equals, for John de Stratford, the archbishop, insisted on being tried in Parliament by the barons his peers, and carried his point against the king's strenuous opposition. He was of course acquitted, as nothing could be found against him. The Parliament only consented to grant the king fresh supplies when he swore (1) to let them appoint a committee to audit the accounts of the money; (2) to take no further maltolts or tallages, but confine himself to the duly voted supplies; (3) to choose his ministers only with Parliament's consent, and make them answerable to Parliament for malfeasance in their office (1341). If these conditions had been kept, the crown would have been completely under control of the national council, but Edward shamelessly broke them when fortune turned in his favour.

[Sidenote: =Edward invades Normandy.--Battle of Crécy.=]

England had now been five years at war with France, and had gained nothing thereby save the destruction of the French navy at Sluys. France had fared equally badly, and in a lucid moment the kings signed a truce. But both Edward and Philip and their subjects had come to dislike each other so bitterly, that no end could be put to the war till one or other had gained a decisive victory. The struggle was soon renewed on fresh ground--the duchy of Brittany, where a disputed succession had occurred. With strange want of logic, Philip VI. backed the claimant whose pretensions were based on a female descent, and Edward the one who claimed as next male heir under the Salic Law. Thus each supported in Brittany the theory of descent which he repudiated in France. After much indecisive fighting, both in Brittany and on the Gascon border, Edward determined on a new invasion of France in 1345. Giving out that he would sail to Bordeaux, he really landed near Cherbourg, in Normandy, where the enemy was not expecting him. He had determined to fight the campaign with English forces alone, and no longer to rely on untrustworthy continental friends. With 4000 men-at-arms, 10,000 bowmen, and 5000 light Welsh and Irish infantry, he pushed boldly through the land, sacking St. Lo and Caen, and driving the local levies of Normandy before him. But he had cut himself loose from the sea, and as his course drew him into the interior, the French began to muster on all sides of him in great numbers and in high wrath. It was evident that he ran great danger of being surrounded, and would certainly have to fight for his life. When he reached the Seine, King Philip broke down all the bridges to prevent his escape, and it was more by chance than good generalship that the English army succeeded in forcing a passage. Hearing of the vast numbers that were coming against him, Edward now turned north, but he was again checked by the river Somme, and only got across by fighting his way over the dangerous sea-swept ford of Blanchetaque, near the river's mouth, in face of the levies of Picardy. Three days later he was overtaken by the French at Crécy, in the county of Ponthieu, and had to turn and fight. King Philip had brought up a vast army, some 12,000 men-at-arms and 60,000 foot-soldiers, including several thousand Genoese cross-bowmen, who were reckoned the best mercenary troops in Europe. Edward drew up his host on a hillside, north of Crécy, placing his archers in front, with bodies of dismounted men-at-arms to support them; two-thirds of the army were arrayed in the front line, under the nominal command of Edward, Prince of Wales, the fifteen-year-old son and heir of the king. Edward kept the rest in reserve higher up the hill, under his own hand.

[Sidenote: =The English archers.=]

Crécy was the first fight which taught the rulers of the continent the worth of the English bowman. When the vast French army came up against them, they easily repelled every attack. First, they riddled with arrows the Genoese cross-bowmen, who could make no stand against them, for the archer could shoot six times before the Genoese could wind up their clumsy arbalests for a second discharge. Then when the French chivalry advanced, they shot down men and horses so fast that it was only at a few points that the enemy ever succeeded in reaching their line, and coming to handstrokes with the Prince of Wales and his dismounted knights. At evening the French fled, routed by less than a third of their numbers, before King Edward and his reserve had occasion to strike a single blow. Edward knighted his son on the field--the first victory of the celebrated "Black Prince," who was to prove as good a soldier as his father. When the French dead were counted, it was discovered that the English archery had slain 11 dukes and counts, 83 barons, 1200 knights, and more than 20,000 of the French soldiery. John, King of Bohemia, who had come to help Philip VI., though he was old and weak of sight, was also among the slain. On the other hand, the English had lost less than a thousand men (August 26, 1346).

After this splendid victory, King Edward was able to march unmolested through the land. He resolved to end the campaign by taking Calais, the nearest French seaport to the English coast, and one which, if held permanently, would give him an ever-open door into France.

[Sidenote: =Capture of Calais.=]

Accordingly, he sat down before Calais, and beleaguered it for many months, till it fell by famine in the next year. The King of France could do nothing to relieve it, and the town had to yield at discretion. The men of Calais had made many piratical descents on England, and Edward was known to bear them a grudge for this. Therefore seven chief burgesses of the place gallantly came forward to bear the brunt of his wrath, and offered themselves to him with halters round their necks, begging him to hang them, but spare the rest of their townsmen. Edward was at first inclined to take these patriotic citizens at their word, but his wife Queen Philippa urged him to gentler counsels, and he let them go. But he drove out of Calais every man who would not own him as king and swear him fealty, and filled their places with English colonists. Thus Calais became an English town, and so remained for more than 200 years, a thorn in the side of France, and an open gate for the invader from beyond the Channel.

[Sidenote: =Scottish invasion.--Battle of Neville's Cross.=]

While the siege of Calais had been in progress, the Scots had made a bold attempt to invade the north of England. The young king, David Bruce, grateful for the shelter which Philip VI. had given him in the days of his exile, had crossed the Tweed, in the hope of drawing Edward home, and so robbing him of the results of his campaign in France. But Queen Philippa summoned to her aid all the nobles who had not gone over-sea, and mustered them at Durham. David Bruce pushed forward to meet them, but at Neville's Cross he met with a crushing defeat. Once more it was found that the Scottish pikemen could not stand against the English archery. They were beaten with terrible loss, and the king himself and many of his nobles were taken prisoners and sent to London (October, 1346).

[Sidenote: =The Black Death.=]

Edward came back from Calais to England laden with glory and spoil, but all his plunder could not pay for the exhaustion which his heavy taxes and levies of men had brought upon his realm. The nation, however, was blinded to its loss by the glory of Crécy, and the war would probably have been continued with increased energy but for a fearful disaster which befell the land in the year after the fall of Calais. A great plague which men called "the Black Death" came sweeping over Europe from the East, and in the awful havoc which it caused wars were for a time forgotten. England did not suffer worse than France or Italy, yet it is calculated that a full half of her population was stricken down by this unexampled pestilence. Manor-rolls and bishops' registers bear out by their lists in detail the statements which the contemporary chroniclers make at large. We note that in this unhappy year, 1348-9, many parishes had three, and some four successive vicars appointed to them in nine months. We see how, in small villages of 300 or 400 inhabitants, thirty or forty families, from their oldest to their youngest member, were swept away, so that their farms reverted to the lord of the land for want of heirs. We find monasteries in which every soul, from the prior to the youngest novice, died, so that the house was left entirely desolate. And thus we realize that the chroniclers are but telling us sober, unexaggerated facts, when they speak of this as a pestilence such as none had ever seen before, and none is ever like to see again. It seems to have been an eruptive form of that oriental plague which still lingers in Syria and the valley of the Euphrates. It began with great boils breaking out on the groin or under the armpits, culminated in sharp fever and violent retching, and generally carried off its victims within two days.

[Sidenote: RISE IN WAGES.--THE STATUTE OF LABOURERS.]

It is probable that England did not recover the loss of population which it now sustained for a couple of centuries. But if the nation was dreadfully thinned, the results of the plague were not all in the direction of evil. It certainly raised the position of the lower classes by making labour more scarce, and therefore more valuable. The surviving agricultural labourers were able to demand much higher wages than before, and it was in vain that Parliament, by the foolish Statute of Labourers (1349), tried to prescribe a maximum rate of wages for them, and to prevent employers giving more. Legislation is unable to prevent the necessary working of the laws of political economy, and in spite of the statute the peasant got his advantage.

[Sidenote: =Renewal of the French war.--The Black Prince.=]

About the time of the outbreak of the Black Death, the kings of England and France had signed a truce, being moved to turn their thoughts far from war by the terrible havoc that was going on around them. It was six years before they and their peoples could find heart to forget the plague, and once more resumed their reckless struggle. In 1355 Edward made proposals for a definitive peace to King John--Philip VI. had died in 1350--on the terms that he should give up his claims to the French crown, but receive Aquitaine free from all burden of homage to the King of France as suzerain. John refused this reasonable offer, and Edward recommenced his attacks on France. He himself landed at Calais and invaded Picardy, but was ere long recalled home by the news that the Scots also had renewed the war, and were over the Tweed. Edward spent the summer in beating them back and cruelly ravaging the whole of Lothian. Meanwhile, his son, the Black Prince, now a young man of twenty-five, started from Bordeaux and plundered the French province of Languedoc.

In the following year, the Black Prince made a similar incursion into Central France, and swept through the whole country from Limoges to Tours with a small army of 4000 mounted men and 3000 archers. When he turned his face homeward, however, he found that King John with a host of 40,000 men had blocked his road, by getting between him and Bordeaux. Thus intercepted, Prince Edward posted himself on the hill of Maupertuis, near Poictiers, and took up a defensive position. It is probable that the French, with their vastly superior numbers, could have completely surrounded him and starved him into surrender without any need of fighting. But King John, a fierce and reckless prince with none of a general's ability, preferred to take the English by force of arms, and, when they refused to surrender to him, prepared to storm their position.

[Sidenote: =The Battle of Poictiers.=]

Edward's small army was drawn up behind a tall hedgerow and a ditch on the slope of a ridge, with the archers in front lining the hedgerow, and the men-at-arms behind them. All the latter save 300 were dismounted, as at Crécy. The Earls of Salisbury and Warwick had command of the two divisions which formed the front line, while the prince himself stayed behind with the reserve. John of France, remembering the disaster of Crécy, where the English arrows had slain so many horses, dismounted all his knights save a few hundred, and led them on foot up the hill in three divisions. Only a picked body of horsemen, under the two marshals, D'Audrehem and Clermont, pushed forward in front, to endeavour to ride down the English archers, as the Scottish cavalry had done so successfully at Bannockburn.

[Sidenote: =Rout of the French.--King John a prisoner.=]

But, whether on foot or on horse, the French made little way with their attack. The cavalry in advance were all shot down as they tried to push through gaps in the hedge. The first division of the dismounted knights then climbed the slope, but, after severe fighting with the front line of the English, recoiled, unable to force their way over the ditch. They fell back on to the second line behind them, and put it into disorder before it could come near the English. Seeing two-thirds of the French army in this plight, the Prince of Wales resolved to strike a bold blow: he brought up his reserve to the front, and bade his whole army charge downhill on to the huddled mass below them. His quick eye had caught the right moment, for the whole of the French van and second division fled right and left without fighting. Only King John, with the rear line of his army, stood firm. With this body, one more numerous than the whole of his own host, Prince Edward had a fierce fight in the valley. But the French were broken in spirit by the sight of the rout of their van, and gave way when they were charged in the flank by a small body of troops whom Edward had detached to his right for that purpose. They all fled save the king and his young son Philip, who stood their ground for a long time with a small company of faithful vassals, and maintained the fight when all the rest had vanished. John's courageous obstinacy had the natural result: he, his son, and the faithful few about him were all surrounded and taken prisoners. When the English came to reckon up the results of the battle, they found that they had slain 2 dukes, 17 barons, and 2800 knights and men-at-arms, and taken captive a king, a prince, 13 counts, 15 barons, and 2000 knights and men-at-arms. Their own loss did not reach 300 men (September 19, 1356).

Edward returned in triumph to Bordeaux, and afterwards crossed to England, to present his all-important prisoner to the king his father. The prince treated John with great gentleness and courtesy, and did all that he could to avoid wounding his feelings. Nevertheless, he saw that in the pressure that could be brought to bear upon his captive, lay the best hope of winning an honourable and profitable peace from the French. John chafed bitterly at his detention in custody, and got little consolation from finding himself in the company of his ally David, King of Scotland, who had been a prisoner in England for ten years, ever since the battle of Neville's Cross.

[Sidenote: =Misery and anarchy in France.--The Jacquerie.=]

The difficulty in negociating a peace did not come from King John, but from the regency which replaced him at Paris. The French did not see why they should sign a humiliating treaty merely in order to deliver a harsh and not very popular king from confinement. But a series of disasters at last forced them to submit. The three years 1357-60 were almost the most miserable that France ever knew. The young Dauphin Charles, a mere lad, proved quite unable to keep order in the land; the barons did what they pleased; hordes of disbanded mercenary soldiers, whom the government could not pay, roamed plundering over the countryside side. The people of Paris broke out into sedition, under a bold citizen named Etienne Marcel, and put the Dauphin himself in durance for a time. Last and worst of all, the peasantry of Central France, driven to despair by the general misery of the times, rose in rebellion against all constituted authority, slew every man of gentle blood that they could lay hands on, and roamed about in huge bands, burning castles and manors, and plundering towns and villages. The horrors of the Jacquerie,[22] as this anarchic revolt was called, bid fair to destroy all government in France, and it was only by a desperate rally that those who had anything to lose succeeded in banding themselves together and crushing the insurgents.

[Sidenote: =Edward again invades France.--Treaty of Bretigny.=]

When France had suffered so bitterly from its foes within, Edward of England took a great army across the Channel, and in 1359-60 wasted the whole land as far as Paris and Rheims. But as the French refused to meet him in the field, he won no battles, took few towns, and got little profit from his destructive raid. It was at this juncture that he and the Dauphin at last came to terms. To end the war the French were ready to grant whatever conditions Edward chose to exact. He asked for a ransom of 3,000,000 gold crowns for the person of King John, and for the whole of the duchy of Aquitaine, as Duchess Eleanor had held it in 1154. In return, he would give up his claim on the crown of France, and be content to be independent Duke of Aquitaine only. So all the lands in Southern France which John and Henry III. had lost--Poitou, Saintonge, Perigord, Limoges, Quercy, and the rest,--were restored to the Plantagenets, after being 150 years in French hands. Calais and Ponthieu in the north were also formally ceded to King Edward by this celebrated treaty of Bretigny (May, 1360).

It appeared for a moment as if a permanent peace between England and France had been established. King Edward, in return for giving up a claim on the whole of France, which no one had taken very seriously, had won the long-lost lands which his ancestors had never hoped to retake. He had also made an advantageous peace with Scotland, releasing King David for a ransom of 90,000 marks, and the fortresses of Berwick and Roxburgh.

[Sidenote: =Development of trade.--The Flemish weavers.=]

Edward's fortune was now at its highest, and his reign promised to have a prosperous and peaceful end. He had reached the age of fifty, and was surrounded by a band of sons who should have been the strength of his old age. Edward the Black Prince he made Duke of Aquitaine; Lionel of Clarence, his second son, was married to the heiress of the great Irish family of de Burgh; John of Gaunt, the third son, was wedded to the heiress of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock, his fifth son, to one of the co-heiresses of the earldom of Hereford. Thus he trusted to identify by intermarriage the interests of the royal house and the greater baronage, not seeing that there was as much probability of his younger sons becoming leaders of baronial factions as of the barons forgetting their old jealousy of the royal house. Meanwhile, however, things went fairly well for some years after the peace of Bretigny. In spite of the vast expenditure of money on the war, and in spite of the ravages of the Black Death, the country was in many ways prosperous. England had enjoyed internal quiet for thirty years; her commerce with Flanders and Gascony was developing; her fleet, in spite of much piracy, was dominant in all the Western seas. The increase of wealth is shown by the fact that Edward III. first of all English monarchs issued a large currency of gold money (1349), and that his "nobles," as the broad thin pieces were called, became the favourite medium of exchange in all North-Western Europe, and formed the model for the gold coins of the Netherlands, part of Germany, and Scotland. Manufactures as well as foreign trade were beginning to grow important; the reign of Edward is always remembered for the development of the weaving industry in Eastern England. He induced many Flemish weavers to settle in Norwich and elsewhere, moved, it is said, by the advice of his Netherlandish queen, Philippa of Hainault. But the main exports of England were still raw material--especially wool and metals--and not manufactured goods. The English trader did not usually sail beyond Norway on the one hand, and North Spain on the other; intercourse with more distant countries was carried on mainly by companies of foreign merchants, of whom the men of the Hanse Towns were the most important. These Germans had a factory in London called the Steelyard, where they dwelt in a body, under strict rules and regulations. It was by them that English goods were taken to the more distant markets on the Baltic or the Mediterranean.

[Sidenote: =Desultory fighting in Brittany.--Spanish war.=]

The reasons why the treaty of Bretigny failed to give a permanent settlement of the quarrel between England and France were many. The English pleaded that the French never fulfilled their obligations, for King John found his people very unwilling to raise his huge ransom, and never paid half of it. He returned to England in 1364 to surrender himself in default of payment--for he had a keen sense of honour in such things--and then died. His son, Charles V., at once refused--as was natural--to pay the arrears. But a more fruitful source of quarrelling was the civil war in Brittany, which still lingered on after twenty years of fighting; English and French succours came to help the two rival dukes, and fought each other on Breton soil, though peace reigned elsewhere. The same thing was soon after seen in Spain: Pedro the Cruel, the wicked King of Castile, was attacked by his bastard brother, Henry of Trastamara, who enlisted a great host of French mercenaries, under Bertrand du Guesclin, the best professional soldier in France. Driven out of Castile by the usurper and his allies, Pedro fled to Bordeaux, where the Black Prince was reigning as Duke of Aquitaine. He enlisted the help of the English, who were jealous of French influence in Spain, and bought the aid of Edward's younger brothers, John of Gaunt, who was now a widower, and Edmund of Cambridge, by marrying his two daughters to them. Edward raised a great army of English and Gascons, and crossed the Pyrenees to restore King Pedro. At Najara[23] he routed the French and Castilians, took Bertrand du Guesclin prisoner, and drove Henry of Trastamara out of the land (1367). But the ungrateful Pedro then refused to repay the large sums which Edward had spent in raising his army, and the prince withdrew in wrath to Aquitaine. He took back with him an intermittent fever which he had caught in Spain, and never recovered his health. Left to his own resources, Pedro was soon beset for a second time by his brother and the French; he was captured by treachery, and slain by Henry of Trastamara's own hand.

[Sidenote: =Rebellion in Aquitaine.--Massacre at Limoges.=]

Edward had raised vast sums of money from Aquitaine for his Spanish expedition by heavy taxation which sorely vexed his new subjects. For the Poitevins and other French, who had become the unwilling vassals of an English lord by the treaty of Bretigny, were entirely without any sympathy for Edward and his plans. When the prince returned, broken in health and penniless, from Spain, they plotted rebellion against him, with the secret approval of the young King of France. It soon appeared that Edward III. had been unwise in annexing so many districts of purely French feeling and blood to the Gascon duchy. For in 1369-70 Poitou, Limoges, and all the northern half of Aquitaine broke out into rebellion, and Charles V. openly sent out his armies to aid them. The Black Prince took the field in a litter, for he was too weak to ride, and stormed Limoges, where he ordered a horrid massacre of the rebellious citizens, a deed that deeply stained his hitherto untarnished fame. But his strength could carry him no further; he returned helpless to Bordeaux, and presently resigned the duchy of Aquitaine and returned to England, thereto languish for some years, and die at last of his lingering disorder.

[Sidenote: =Premature decay of the king.=]

The king himself, though not yet sixty years of age, had fallen into a premature decay both of mind and body, so that his son's early decease was doubly unfortunate. After losing his excellent wife Queen Philippa in 1369, he had sunk into a deep depression, from which he only recovered to fall into the hands of unscrupulous favourites. In private he was governed by his chamberlain, Lord Latimer, and by a lady named Alice Perrers, who had become his mistress; both abused their influence to plunder his coffers and make market of his favour. The higher governance of the realm was mainly in the hands of John of Gaunt, the king's eldest surviving son, a selfish and headstrong prince, who made himself the head of the war-party, and hoped to gather laurels that might vie with those of his elder brother, the Black Prince.

[Sidenote: =Loss of possessions in France.=]

The last seven years of Edward's reign (1370-77) were full of disasters abroad and discontent at home. In France the successors of the Black Prince proved utterly unable to maintain their grasp on Aquitaine. Town by town and castle by castle, all the districts that had been won by the treaty of Bretigny passed into the hands of King Charles V. His skilful general Bertrand du Guesclin won his way to success without risking a single pitched battle with the invincible English archery. When John of Gaunt took a great host over to Calais in 1373, the French retired before him by their king's order, and shut themselves up behind stone walls, after sweeping the country bare of provisions. The Duke of Lancaster marched up to the gates of Paris, and then all through Central France down to Bordeaux; but, though he did much damage to the open country, he could not halt to besiege any great town for want of food, and finally reached Guienne with an army half-starved and woefully reduced in numbers. Before King Edward was in his grave his dominions in France had shrunk to a district far smaller than he had held before the "Hundred Years' War" had commenced. Nothing was left save the ports of Bordeaux and Bayonne, with the strip of Gascon coast between them; in the north, however, the all-important fortress of Calais was firmly and successfully maintained.

[Sidenote: =Discontent and intrigue in England.--The Lollards.=]

Meanwhile there was bitter strife in Parliament at home, for ill success without always brings on discontent within. John of Gaunt, since he was known to sway his father's councils, was forced to bear the brunt of the popular displeasure. It was he who was considered responsible for the misconduct of the French war, the peculations of the king's favourites, and the demands of the crown for increased taxation. The party opposed to him in Parliament counted as its head the good bishop William of Wykeham, who had been Chancellor from 1367 to 1371, and had been driven from office by Lancaster's command. He was supported by the clergy, and by most of the "knights of the shires," who formed the more important half of the House of Commons. It was probably the fact that the clergy were unanimously set against him that led John of Gaunt to seek allies for himself by giving countenance to an attack on the Church, which was just then beginning to develop. This was the anti-papal movement of the Lollards, or Wicliffites, as they were called after their leader John Wicliffe--the "Morning Star of the Reformation." The state of the Papacy and of the Church at large was at this moment very scandalous. The Pope was living no more at Rome, but at Avignon, under the shadow of the French king, and the power of the Papacy was being shamelessly misused for French objects. England had never loved the papal influence, and had still less reason to love it when it was employed for the benefit of her political enemies. The tale of the simony, corruption, and evil living of the papal court had gone forth all over Europe, and provoked even more wrath in England than elsewhere. The English Church itself was far from blameless: there were bishops who were mere statesmen and warriors, and neglected their diocesan work; there were secular clergy who never saw their parishes, and monasteries where religion and sound learning were less regarded than wealth and high living. It was especially the great wealth of the monasteries, and the small profit that it brought the nation, which provoked popular comment. Since the days of the Statute of Mortmain the spirit of the times was changed, and benefactors who desired to leave a good work behind them founded and endowed schools and colleges, and not abbeys as of old. It was John Wicliffe, an Oxford Doctor of Divinity, and sometime master of Balliol College, who gave voice to the popular discontent with the state of the Papacy and the national Church. He taught that the Pope's claim to be God's vicegerent on earth and to guide the consciences of all men was a blasphemous usurpation, because each individual was responsible to Heaven for his own acts and thoughts. "All men," he said in feudal phraseology, "are tenants-in-chief under God, and hold from him all that they are and possess: the Pope claims to be our mesne-lord, and to interfere between us and our divine suzerain, and therein he grievously errs." Wicliffe also held that the Church was far too rich; he thought that her virtue was oppressed by the load of wealth, and advocated a return to apostolic poverty, in which the clergy should surrender the greater part of their enormous endowments. At a later date he developed doubts on the Real Presence and other leading doctrines of the mediaeval Church, but it was mainly as a denouncer of the power of the Papacy and the riches and luxury of the clergy that he became known.

[Sidenote: =Policy of John of Gaunt.--The Good Parliament.=]

John of Gaunt's object in favouring Wicliffe was purely political; with the reformer's religious views he can have had little sympathy. But he wished to turn the seething discontent of England into the channel of an attack on the Church, and to keep it from his own doors. For the last twenty years legislation against ecclesiastical grievances had been not infrequent. In 1351 the Statute of Provisors had prohibited the Pope from giving away English benefices to his favourites. In 1353 the First Statute of Praemunire had forbidden English litigants to transfer their disputes to the Church courts abroad. Duke John's attempt to distract the attention of the nation to the reform of matters ecclesiastic was partly successful; we find many proposals in Parliament to strip the Church of part of her overgrown endowments, and utilize them for the service of the state. On this point clerk and layman had many a bitter wrangle. But Lancaster could not altogether keep the storm from beating on himself and his father; in 1376 the "Good Parliament" impeached Latimer and Neville, Edward's favourites and ministers, and removed and fined them. Alice Perrers, the old king's mistress, was at the same time banished. In the following year Lancaster reasserted himself, packed a Parliament with his supporters, and cancelled the condemnation of Latimer, Neville, and Alice Perrers. The Bishop of London in revenge arrested Lancaster's protégé Wicliffe, and began to try him for heresy; but the duke appeared in the court, and so threatened and browbeat the bishop that he was fain to release his prisoner.

But new complications were now at hand; the aspect of affairs was suddenly changed by the death of the old king on January 2, 1377, and political affairs took a new complexion on the accession of his young grandson, Richard II., the only surviving child of the Black Prince.

DESCENDANTS OF EDWARD III.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] So called from Jacques Bonhomme, the nickname of the typical French peasant.

[23] Sometimes also called Navarette; it lies beyond the Ebro, near Logroño.

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XIV. RICHARD II

1377-1399.

The little King Richard II. was a boy ten years old, born in the year when his father went on his ill-fated expedition to Spain to help Don Pedro. Richard's mother was Joan, Countess of Kent, the heiress of that unfortunate Earl Edmund, whom Mortimer beheaded in 1330. She had been a widow when the Black Prince wedded her, and had two sons by her first husband, Sir Thomas Holland. These two half-brothers of King Richard were ten years his seniors, and were destined to be not unimportant figures in the history of his reign; their names were Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent, and John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon.

[Sidenote: =The regency.--Disasters abroad.=]

The helplessness of the young king, the son of the deeply mourned Black Prince, at first touched the hearts of all men, and the parties which were represented by John of Gaunt and William of Wykeham reconciled themselves, and agreed to join in serving the king faithfully. A council of regency was appointed, in which both were represented, and it was agreed that Parliament alone should choose and dismiss the king's ministers. This happy concord, however, was not to last for long. The conduct of the foreign affairs of the nation was left in John of Lancaster's hands, and the continued misfortunes in the French war were laid to his charge. The troops of Charles V. were still carrying everything before them; they conquered all Aquitaine save Bordeaux and Bayonne, and overran the duchy of Brittany, the sole ally of England on the continent. Moreover, fleets of Norman privateers had begun to appear in the Channel. They landed boldly on the English coast, and burnt Winchelsea, Portsmouth, and Gravesend.

[Sidenote: =Heavy taxation.=]

To restore the fortune of war, money was urgently needed, and Duke John kept asking for more and more, to the discontent both of the Parliament and the nation. He was granted in 1379 a poll-tax, wherein every man was assessed according to his estate, from dukes and archbishops who paid £6 13_s._ 4_d._ to agricultural labourers who paid 4_d._ In 1380 followed another tax graduated from £1 to 1_s._ on every grown man or woman.

[Sidenote: =Discontent of labouring classes.=]

It was the collection of this very unpopular tax that precipitated the violent outbreak of a discontent that had been smouldering among the lower classes for the last thirty years. Ever since the Black Death a silent but bitter contention had been in progress between the landholding classes and their tenants, more especially those who were still villeins, and bound to the soil. The main stress of the struggle had come from the fact that the dearth of labourers, and the rise in wages which resulted from the Black Death, had caused the lords of the manors to press more hardly on their tenants. They tried to get all the labour they could out of the villeins, and refused to take money payments for their farms instead of days of labour on the lord's fields. It seems, too, that they strove to claim as villeins many who were, or wished to be, free rent-paying copyhold or leasehold tenants. Moreover, when forced to hire free labour, they tried to under-pay it, relying on the scale of wages fixed by the Statute of Labourers in 1350, instead of abiding by the laws of supply and demand. The pressure on the part of the lords led to combinations in secret clubs and societies among the tenants, who agreed to refuse the statutory wages, and determined to agitate for the removal of all the old labour-rents. Their idea was to commute all such service due on their little holdings into money-rents, at the rate of 4_d._ for every acre.

[Sidenote: =Communist doctrines of the Lollards.=]

But the rising of 1380 was due to many other causes beside the grievance of the villeins. Much discontent can be traced to the mismanagement of the French war, which was all laid on John of Gaunt's shoulders. Much more was due to the filtering down of the teaching of the Lollards to the lower strata of the nation. Wicliffe had always preached that unjust and sinful rulers, whether clerks or laymen, were cut off from the right to use their authority by their own manifest unworthiness, and had no just dominion over their fellow-men. He had especially protested against the wealth and pomp of the clergy, and urged that they ought to return to apostolic poverty. The wilder and more headstrong of his followers had pressed his teaching to the advocacy of pure communism, saying that riches were in themselves evil, and that all men should be equal in all things. John Ball, the best known of these fanatical preachers, was wont to perambulate the country delivering sermons on his favourite text--

"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?"

Wherever men were oppressed and discontented, they listened eagerly to these discourses, and began to talk of putting an end to all difference between man and man, and dividing all things equally between them. But it was only the wilder spirits who were imbued with these doctrines; the majority--like most discontented Englishmen in all ages--were only set on the practical task of endeavouring to redress their own particular grievances and to better their condition.

[Sidenote: ="Wat Tyler's rebellion."--March upon London.=]

It was in June, 1381, that the rising broke out simultaneously in almost the whole of Eastern England, from Yorkshire to Hants. It has gained its name of "Wat Tyler's Rebellion" from Walter the Tyler of Maidstone, who was chief of the insurgents of Kent. Curiously enough, four other men bearing or assuming the name of "the Tyler" were prominent in the troubles. The main incidents of the rising took place round London, towards which the insurgents flocked from all quarters. Simultaneously the men of Essex, under a chief who called himself Jack Straw, marched to Hampstead, those of Hertfordshire to Highbury, and those of Kent to Blackheath. On their way they had done much damage; the Essex rioters had caught and murdered the Chief Justice of England, and the Kentishmen had slain several knights and lawyers who fell into their hands. Everywhere they pillaged the houses of the gentry, and sought out and burnt the manor-rolls which preserved the records of the duties and obligations of the villeins to the lord of the manor.

[Sidenote: =Demands of the rioters.=]

The king's council at London was quite helpless, for the sudden rising had taken them by surprise, and they had no troops ready. Seeing the city surrounded by the rioters, they shut its gates and sent to ask what were the grievances and demands of the mob. The claims that were formulated by the leaders of the rising were more moderate than might have been expected, for the wilder spirits were still kept in order by the cooler ones. They asked that villeinage should be abolished, and all lands held on villein-tenure be made into leasehold farms rated at 4_d._ an acre, that the tolls and market dues which heightened the price of provisions should be abolished, and that all who had been engaged in the rising should receive a full pardon for the murders and pillage that had taken place.

[Sidenote: =Attitude of the King.--Progress of the riot.=]

These demands were not too violent to be taken into consideration. While the regency hesitated, the young king, who displayed a spirit and resource most unusual in a boy of fourteen, announced that he would himself go to meet the rioters and try to quiet them, for as yet they had not said or done anything implying disrespect for the royal name. But meanwhile the Kentish insurgents had crossed the Thames and burnt John of Gaunt's great palace, the Savoy, which lay in the Strand outside the walls of London. Presently the mob in the city rose and opened the gates, so that Wat Tyler and his host were able to enter. They slew some foreign merchants and some lawyers, the two classes whom they seem most to have hated, but wrought no general pillage or massacre.

On the 13th of June, Richard, persisting in his resolve of bringing the insurgents to reason, rode out of Aldgate, and met the Essex men at Mile End. After hearing their petitions, he declared that they contained nothing impossible, and that he would undertake that they should be granted. But while the king was parleying with the eastern insurgents, the Kentishmen burst into the Tower, where the regency had been sitting, and committed a hideous outrage. They caught Simon of Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury--he was also Chancellor--Sir Robert Hales, the High Treasurer, and Legge, who had farmed the obnoxious poll-tax, dragged them forth to Tower Hill, and there slew them.

[Sidenote: =The king meets the rioters.--Tyler slain.=]

Notwithstanding these murders, the young king persisted in his design of treating with the insurgents. He bade Tyler and his host meet him next day in Smithfield, outside the city gates. They came, but Tyler, who had throughout shown himself the most violent of the insurgents, began wrangling with the king's suite instead of keeping to the business in hand. This so enraged William Walworth, the Mayor of London, that he drew a short sword and hewed the rebel down from his horse. Then one of the king's squires leapt down and stabbed him as he lay. Walworth's act was likely to have cost the king and his whole party their lives, for the insurgents bent their bows and shouted that they would avenge their captain there and then. But Richard, with extraordinary presence of mind in one so young, pushed his horse forward and bade them stand still, for they should have their demands granted, and he himself would be their captain since Tyler was dead. So there in Smithfield he had a charter drawn up, conceding all that the insurgents asked, and pardoning them for their treason. Satisfied with this, the Kentishmen dispersed to their homes.

[Sidenote: =Punishment of the leaders.--Richard's concessions annulled.=]

Richard returned to London in triumph, as he well deserved, vowing that he had that day won back the realm of England, which had been as good as lost. Soon the nobles and their armed retainers began to gather to London, and when they found themselves in force, they began to discuss the legality of the king's concessions to the peasants. He had not, it was urged, the right to give away other men's property--namely, their feudal rights over their vassals--without the consent of Parliament. It was shocking, too, that the murderers of the archbishop, the lord chief justice, and the treasurer, should go unpunished. So Richard's charter was annulled and his general pardon cancelled; all the leaders of the revolt were caught one after another and hanged; even John Ball's priest's robe did not save him from the gallows, though clergymen were so seldom executed in the Middle Ages.

[Sidenote: =Decay of villeinage.=]

When Parliament met, the king proposed to them that his promise to the insurgents should stand firm so far as the abolition of villeinage was concerned, since this had been the main cause of the rising. But the barons and knights of the shire were loth to give up their feudal rights, and refused to confirm the king's grant; they replied that the trouble had really had its origin in the evil governance of the ministers, and turned them all out of office. Nevertheless, the rising had not failed in its object, for in future the lords of the manors were afraid to enforce the full letter of their claims over the peasants, and villeinage gradually sank into desuetude.

[Sidenote: =Richard assumes the government.=]

King Richard had shown his high spirit in the days of the rising, and four years later, when he had attained the age of eighteen, he endeavoured to take the reins of power into his own hands. His uncle of Lancaster did not gainsay him, for he felt himself to be unpopular with the nation, so he departed over-sea on a vain errand. In right of his wife Constance, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, he had a claim to the crown of Castile, and trusted to get aid from the Portuguese, to set him on the throne which Henry of Trastamara had usurped. So he gathered his retainers and many hired soldiers, and sailed away to Spain; nor was his face seen in England for more than four years.

[Sidenote: =His ministers.=]

Meanwhile the young king had placed his friends in office, and strove to rule for himself. His chief minister was Michael de la Pole, son of a rich merchant at Hull, whom he made Earl of Suffolk, to the disgust of many of the barons. He also favoured greatly Robert de Vere, whom he made Lord-Deputy of Ireland, and created Marquis of Dublin. In them and in his two half-brothers, Thomas and John Holland, he placed his confidence.

Richard was now twenty; he had been married some years back to Anne of Bohemia, the daughter of the Emperor Charles IV., and might have expected that all the world would have counted him old enough to administer the kingdom.

[Sidenote: =Schemes of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester.=]

But he had reckoned without one man's ambition and jealousy. His youngest uncle, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, was an unscrupulous and domineering prince, who had hoped to succeed to John of Gaunt's position, and to have the chief part in ruling his nephew's realm. Richard knew him well, and had no intention of employing him. Seeing this, Duke Thomas began to gather a party among the greater nobles, persuading them that the king was putting the rule of England into the hands of mere upstarts and favourites, and that de la Pole and de Vere were no better than Gaveston or the Despensers. Gloucester drew into his designs many of the most important barons; the Earls of Warwick, Arundel, and Nottingham, and Henry of Bolingbroke, the son and heir of John of Gaunt, were the chief plotters. They stirred up the people and Parliament by complaints of the maladministration of the ministers, and used a threatened invasion of the French as a lever against those entrusted with the conduct of the long unhappy war with France. When they had excited public opinion, they had Suffolk impeached in Parliament for maladministration of the revenue. Though almost certainly guiltless, he was condemned and imprisoned. But when Parliament had dispersed, the king took him out of confinement, and restored him to favour, declaring that he had a full right to choose his own ministers.

[Sidenote: =The "Lords Appellant."=]

There followed, shortly after, the armed rising of Thomas of Gloucester and his accomplices. Proclaiming that they wished only to free the king from evil councillors, Gloucester, Warwick, Arundel, Nottingham, and the young Henry of Bolingbroke marched on London with a great body of retainers. They called themselves the "Lords Appellant," because they appealed or accused of treason the king's ministers. Richard was taken by surprise at this very unjustifiable raising of civil war. He bade his friends arm, but de Vere, who had raised some levies in Oxfordshire, was beaten by the rebels at Radcot Bridge, and no one else tried to resist. De Vere and de la Pole succeeded in flying to France, where they both died shortly after in exile. But the king and the rest of his friends and ministers fell into the hands of the Lords Appellant.

[Sidenote: =The Merciless Parliament.=]

Under the eyes of Gloucester and his accomplices the Merciless Parliament was summoned to London. Awed by the armed men around them, the members declared Suffolk and de Vere outlaws, and condemned to death seven of the king's minor ministers. So Tresilian the Chief Justice, Sir Simon Burley who had been the king's tutor, and five more were hanged (February, 1388). This disgraceful Parliament ended by voting £20,000 as a gift to the Lords Appellant for their services, and then dispersed.

Gloucester and his friends were in office for something more than a year, a period long enough to show the world that they were grasping self-seekers, and not patriots. The only service they did the country was to negociate truces with Scotland and France, which stopped for a time the lingering "Hundred Years' War."

[Sidenote: =Dismissal of Gloucester.=]

By 1389 Richard had passed his majority. In a session of the royal council, he suddenly asked his uncle Gloucester how old he was. The duke replied that he was now in his twenty-second year. "Then," said the king, "I am certainly old enough to manage my own affairs." So, formally thanking Gloucester and the rest for their past services, he dismissed them from office. If he had replaced them by his own favourites the civil war would have broken out again, but Richard wisely called in the good bishop William of Wykeham, and other ancient councillors of his grandfather's, against whom no one had a word to say. He made no attempt to punish the Lords Appellant, and acted with such self-restraint and moderation that all the realm was soon full of his praises. Yet all the time he was dissembling, and biding his time for revenge on the men who had murdered his friends in 1388.

[Sidenote: =Moderation of Richard.--Growth of Lollardry.=]

Richard's wise and moderate rule lasted for eight years, 1389-97. They were a prosperous time: the French war was suspended, and the king seemed to have put a permanent end to it, by marrying a French princess, Isabella, the daughter of Charles VI., after his first wife Anne of Bohemia had died. Perhaps the most important feature of the time was the growth of the Wicliffite movement. John Wicliffe himself had died, at a good old age, in 1384, but his disciples the Lollards continued to increase and multiply. We find them so powerful that in the Parliament of 1394 their representatives in the Commons had begun to agitate for a national declaration against some of the most prominent doctrines of the Roman Church--such as image-worship, the efficacy of pilgrimages, the celibacy of the clergy, and even the Real Presence in the Lord's Supper. They were only stopped by Richard himself, who hurried home from Ireland to rebuke them. He told them that he would hear nothing of such changes, but he did not molest or persecute them, and let the movement take its course. The "Great Schism" was at this time at its height, and the Church presented the disgraceful spectacle of two rival popes, at Rome and Avignon, anathematizing each other, and preaching a crusade against each other's adherents. When such was the state of affairs, and no one knew who was orthodox and who heretical, it was natural enough that the new doctrines should flourish.

[Sidenote: =Richard's revenge on the Lords Appellant.=]

In 1397 Richard thought himself so firmly seated on his throne that he could venture to execute his long-cherished vengeance on the Lords Appellant. He had won over two of them to himself, Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, and Henry of Bolingbroke, the heir of the old Duke of Lancaster. On the others his vengeance suddenly fell; he accused Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick, of plotting a new rebellion. They were seized and thrown into prison: Arundel was tried and executed; Gloucester was secretly murdered at Calais; Warwick was banished for life to the Isle of Man. Nor was this all: for a time Richard professed the greatest affection for Nottingham and Bolingbroke, the two survivors of the plotters of 1388. He even made them Dukes of Norfolk and Hereford. But in 1398 his vengeance fell on them also. He induced Hereford to accuse Norfolk of treasonable conversation, and when Mowbray denied it, proposed that they should meet in judicial combat in the lists at Coventry. They consented, but when the champions came ready armed before him, Richard suddenly stopped the duel, and announced to the astonished dukes that he had determined to banish them both from the realm--Norfolk for life, Hereford for ten years.

[Sidenote: =Tyranny of Richard.=]

Having thus wreaked his vengeance on the last of the Lords Appellant, Richard proceeded to rule in a far more arbitrary manner than before, and decidedly outstepped his constitutional rights. He thought that there was no one left in the realm who would dare to oppose him, and that he could do all that he chose. His most flagrantly illegal step was to increase his revenue by raising forced loans from men of wealth, an ingenious means of getting money without having to apply to Parliament for it. But he kept up a considerable standing army of archers, to overawe discontent, and thought himself quite secure. When John of Gaunt died in 1399, he seized upon all the great estates of the duchy of Lancaster, and refused to allow the exiled Henry of Bolingbroke to claim his father's title and heritage. This roused much sympathy for Henry, since he had been promised that his banishment should make no difference to his rights of inheritance.

[Sidenote: =Condition of Ireland.--Richard's Irish expedition.=]

Richard's nearest kinsman and heir at this time was his cousin Roger, Earl of March, the grandson of Lionel of Clarence, the Black Prince's next brother. The king had sent him over to Ireland and entrusted him with the government of that country, for he paid more attention to Irish affairs than any of his ancestors, and had already made one expedition across St. George's Channel in 1394. Ireland had been in a state of complete anarchy ever since Edward Bruce broke up the foundations of English rule eighty years before, and both the Anglo-Norman lords of the Pale and the Irish chiefs of the west showed an utter disregard for the royal authority. Roger of March was killed by rebels in a skirmish at Kenlys-in-Ossory in 1398, and this so provoked Richard that he resolved to go over himself, with all his personal retainers and hired guards, and put an end to the anarchy.

[Sidenote: =Return of Bolingbroke.=]

Accordingly, early in 1399 the king sailed for Dublin, leaving England in charge of his one surviving uncle, Edmund, Duke of York, a weak old man who had always shown himself very loyal, but very incapable. When Richard was lost to sight in the Irish bogs, all his enemies began to take counsel against him. The barons began to murmur at his arbitrary rule, the citizens of London at his forced loans, the clergy at his tolerance for the Lollards. At the critical moment Henry of Bolingbroke landed unexpectedly at Ravenspur, in Yorkshire, proclaiming that he had only come to claim his father's duchy, which had been so wrongfully withheld from him. He was immediately joined by Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and many other northern lords. The regent Edmund of York gathered an army to withstand him, but when Bolingbroke explained to him that he came with no treasonable purpose, but only to plead for his forfeited estates, the simple old man dismissed his troops and went home. Thus unexpectedly freed from opposition, Bolingbroke soon showed his real mind by catching and hanging Richard's ministers, Scrope, Earl of Wiltshire, Bushey, and Greene.

[Sidenote: =Richard returns from Ireland--is overpowered.=]

The news of Duke Henry's landing had soon got to Ireland, and the king at once prepared to return and resist him. But for four weeks persistent easterly winds kept him storm-bound at Dublin. At last the wind turned, and Richard could cross, but he came too late. York's army had dispersed, and some Welsh levies, whom the Earl of Salisbury had raised, had also gone home, after waiting in vain for the king's landing. When Richard reached Flint Castle with the small following that he had brought with him, he was surrounded by troops under the Earl of Northumberland, who had been awaiting his arrival. Nothing but surrender was possible, so Richard yielded himself up, trusting that his cousin aimed merely at seizing the governance of the realm, and not at his master's life or crown.

[Sidenote: =Richard abdicates.--Election of Henry.=]

Henry, however, had other views: he put Richard in strict custody, and took him to London. There the Parliament assembled, overawed by the armed retainers of the duke and his partisans. Richard was forced by threats to abdicate, and thought that he had thus secured his life. Then Henry caused the Parliament to accept his cousin's resignation, and claimed the crown for himself. This was in manifest disregard of the rights of Edmund of March, the young son of that Roger who had fallen in Ireland a year before. The Parliament, however, formally elected the duke to fill his cousin's throne, and saluted him as king by the name of Henry IV. Constitutionally, no doubt, they were acting within their rights; but it is only fair to say that Richard--headstrong and arbitrary though he had been--had scarcely deserved his fate. Nor was there any adequate reason for setting aside the clear hereditary claim of Edmund of March (1399).

[Sidenote: =Murder of Richard.=]

Henry had grasped the crown, but he knew that his position was insecure. He had only a Parliamentary title, and what one Parliament had done another could undo. The late king had many faithful partisans, and was not misliked by the nation at large. Therefore the unscrupulous usurper determined to make away with him. Richard was sent to Pontefract Castle, and never seen again; undoubtedly he was murdered, but no one save Henry and his confidants knew how the deed was done. The details of the dark act have never come to light.

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XV. HENRY IV

1399-1413.

[Sidenote: =Position and title of Henry.=]

Henry of Bolingbroke had small comfort all his days on the throne which he had usurped. He was only the king of a faction, the nominee of the party which had once supported the Lords Appellant; if one half of the baronage was friendly to him for that reason, the other half was always estranged from him. It might almost be said that the "Wars of the Roses," the strife of the two great factions who adhered the one to the house of Lancaster and the other to the house of March, began on Henry's accession.

Richard's deposition had been the work, not of the whole nation, but of Henry's friends, the Percies of Northumberland, the Nevilles of Westmoreland, the Arundels--son and brother to the Arundel whom Richard had beheaded in 1397--and the Staffords[24] who represented the line of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. The Parliament had acquiesced in Henry's usurpation rather because it had been discontented with Richard's arbitrary rule, than because it had any very great liking for his cousin. Perhaps the more far-sighted of its members had concluded that the accession of a king whose only title rested on election would be favourable to the development of constitutional liberties, since Henry would--at least for a time--be very much dependent on the good-will of the body which had chosen him, and which might some day choose another ruler if he proved unpliable.

[Sidenote: =Rebellion of the Hollands.=]

Before Henry had been two months on the throne, civil war had broken out. The insurgents were Richard's kinsmen and favourites. The two Hollands--Earls of Kent and Huntingdon, who were Richard's half-brothers--conspired with Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, and Lord Despenser, who had been his trusted friends. They plotted to seize King Henry, as he lay at Windsor keeping the festivities of Christmas, to slay or imprison him, and to release their old master from Pontefract Castle. Unfortunately for themselves, they took into their counsels Edward Earl of Rutland, the son of the old Duke of York. The cowardly prince, finding that he was suspected, informed the king of the plot before the conspirators were ready. Henry escaped from Windsor, and called his friends together at London. The rebel earls set out in various directions to endeavour to raise their retainers, but they were all overtaken. Kent and Salisbury fell into their enemies' hands at Cirencester, Huntingdon was caught in Essex, Despenser at Bristol. All were beheaded without any delay or form of trial. Henry's grim reply to this insurrection was the production of the dead body of King Richard, which was brought from Pontefract to London, and publicly displayed to prove his death. Nevertheless, many men refused to credit his decease, and for years after there were some who maintained that the body exposed in St. Paul's was not that of the late king, but that of his chaplain, who bore an extraordinary personal resemblance to him. They believed, or tried to believe, that Richard had escaped and was alive in Scotland. Trading on this notion, an impostor presented himself at the Scotch court, and was long entertained there as the true King of England by the simple Robert III.

[Sidenote: =Rebellion in Wales.--Owen Glendower.=]

Hardly was the rebellion of the Hollands put down before a second civil war arose. The Welsh had always been devoted to King Richard, and had taken his deposition very ill. In 1400, a gentleman named Owen-ap-Griffith, of Glendower, who had been one of Richard's squires, put himself at the head of a rising in North Wales. Owen was of the old princely blood of the house of Llewellyn, and proclaimed himself Prince of North Wales under the suzerainty of his master Richard, whom he declared to be still alive in Scotland. He was a guerilla captain of marked ability, and completely baffled the efforts that King Henry made to put him down. He swept all over North Wales, captured many of its castles, and extended his sway over the whole countryside. To the day of his death Owen maintained himself in independence, ravaging the English border when he was left alone, and retiring into the recesses of Snowdon when a great force took the field against him. His incursions penetrated as far as Worcester and Shrewsbury, and no man west of the Severn was safe from his plundering bands.

[Sidenote: =England harassed by Scotland and France.=]

As if the Welsh trouble was not enough to keep King Henry employed, other wars broke out around him. The Scots under the Earl of Douglas crossed the border to harry Northumberland, and Lewis of Orleans, the uncle of Richard's queen Isabella, began to stir up the French court to attack England, and encouraged many descents of Norman privateers on the coasts of the Channel.

[Sidenote: =Henry and the Parliament.--Persecution of the Lollards.=]

Henry's only resource was to keep the nation in good temper by a rigorous and punctual obedience to all the petitions and requests of his Parliament. Accordingly, he showed himself the most constitutional of sovereigns, and both now and for many years to come made himself the dutiful servant of the Commons. He also did his best to enlist the favour of Churchmen on his side by a cruel persecution of the Lollards. The disciples of Wicliffe had always favoured King Richard, who had shown them complete tolerance, and Henry felt that he was not estranging any of his own partisans when he handed over the Lollards to the mercy of the harsh and fanatical Archbishop Arundel.[25] It was under this prelate's guidance that the king assented to the infamous statute De Heretico Comburendo (1401), which condemned all convicted schismatics to the stake and fire. The first victim burnt was William Sawtree, a London clergyman, and others followed him at intervals all through Henry's reign.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Homildon Hill.=]

The Scotch war came to a head in 1402, at the battle of Homildon Hill. There Murdoch of Albany, the son of the Scotch regent, was completely defeated by Percy of Northumberland and his son Harry Percy, whom the Borderers nicknamed Hotspur for his speed and energy. But the victory of Homildon was fated to do England more harm than any defeat, since it was to cause a renewal of the civil war. The Percies had taken many prisoners, including Murdoch himself, and three other Scots Earls, Douglas, Moray, and Orkney. From the ransoms of these peers they trusted to get great profit; but King Henry, who was at his wits' end to scrape money together without troubling Parliament, took the prisoners out of the Percies' hands and claimed the ransoms for himself. This mortally offended Northumberland, a proud and greedy chief, who had been Henry's main support at the time of his usurpation, and thought that in return the king ought to refuse nothing to him.

[Sidenote: =Rebellion of the Percies.=]

In sheer lawless wrath at the king's refusal to hear him, Northumberland resolved to dethrone Henry. He secretly concerted measures with Owen Glendower for a joint attack on the king, and released his captive, the Earl of Douglas, who in return brought him a band of Scottish auxiliaries. By Owen's counsel, aid was sought from France also, and it was settled that the young Earl of March should be proclaimed king, if Richard II. proved to be really dead.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Shrewsbury.--Death of Hotspur.=]

In July, 1403, the Percies rose, and were joined by their kinsman the Earl of Worcester, and many more. Hotspur rapidly led his army towards Shrewsbury, where Glendower had promised to join him with a Welsh host. But King Henry was too quick for his foes; he threw himself between them, and caught the young Percy before the Welsh came up. The desperately fought battle of Shrewsbury (July 23, 1403) ended in the victory of the royal host. Hotspur was slain by an arrow, while Douglas and Worcester were taken, and the latter executed for treason. It was at this field that the king's eldest son, Henry of Monmouth, destined in later years to be the conqueror of France, first looked upon the face of war.

[Sidenote: =Second Rebellion.--Execution of Scrope.=]

The Earl of Northumberland, who had not been present at Shrewsbury, but had kept at home in the north, was allowed to make his peace with the king on the payment of a great fine. But Henry was wrong in thinking that the crafty and resentful old earl was no longer dangerous. Though his brave son was dead, Percy stirred up a second rebellion two years later, by the aid of Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, son of Henry's old opponent in the lists of Coventry,[26] and of Scrope, Archbishop of York, brother of that Scrope, Earl of Wilts, whom the Lancastrians had hung in 1399. But Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, who commanded for the king in the North, induced Scrope and Mowbray to lay down their arms and come to a conference, and there he seized them as traitors. They were at once put on trial, not before their peers as they claimed, but before two of the king's justices, who condemned them to death. Scrope's execution sent a thrill of horror throughout England, for no archbishop had ever before been slain by a king, save Thomas Becket, and many men counted him a martyr even as Becket. So Henry lost as much love of the clergy by this act as he had gained by his assent to the statute De Heretico Comburendo.

Northumberland escaped to Scotland in 1405, and lurked there for two years; but in 1407 he crossed the Tweed, raised his vassals, and made a dash for York. But he was intercepted at Bramham Moor, and there slain, fighting hard in spite of his seventy years.

After this King Henry was no more vexed with civil war in England, but his Welsh troubles showed no sign of ending. Owen Glendower eluded Henry, Prince of Wales, and all the other leaders who came against him, with complete success, and the English armies suffered so severely from storms among the Welsh hills that they swore that Owen was a magician and had conjured the elements against them.

[Sidenote: =Henry's submission to Parliament .--The Beauforts.=]

It was the constant drain of money for this interminable war that kept the king in strict submission to his Parliament, so that he was obliged to allow them to audit all his accounts, and even to dismiss his servants when they thought that he kept too large and wasteful a household. Henry much disliked this control, but he always bowed before it. His health was failing, though he was still in middle age, and bodily weakness seems to have bent his will. From 1409 to 1412 he was so feeble that the government was really carried on by his son, the Prince of Wales, and his half-brothers, the Beauforts, Henry, Bishop of Winchester, and Thomas, the Chancellor. Of the Beaufort clan we shall hear much in the future; they were the sons of John of Gaunt's old age. After the death of his wife, Constance of Castile, a lady named Katharine Swinford became his mistress and bore him several sons. He afterwards married her, and the children were legitimatized by Act of Parliament. Of these the eldest was now Earl of Somerset, and the youngest Bishop of Winchester.

[Sidenote: =Detention of Prince James of Scotland.=]

It was fortunate for England in these years, when the realm was ruled by a bedridden king and a very young Prince of Wales, that her neighbours to north and south had fallen on evil days. Neither Scot nor Frenchman was dangerous at this time. The Scots were bridled by the fact that the heir of the kingdom was in Henry's hands. For it chanced that King Robert III. was sending his son James to France, and that the ship was taken by an English privateer. "Why did they not send him straight to me?" said King Henry; "I could have taught him French as well as any man at Paris." So Prince James was kept at Windsor as a hostage for the good behaviour of Scotland. His jealous uncle Albany, the regent of that kingdom, did not want him released, and was quite content to leave him in Henry's power and keep the peace.

[Sidenote: =Civil War in France.--Armagnacs and Burgundians.=]

The cause of the quiescence of France was very different. King Charles VI. had become insane, and no longer ruled. A desperate civil war had been raging there ever since the king's brother, the Duke of Orleans, had been murdered by his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, in 1407. The partisans of the murdered duke, who were called the Armagnacs from their leader, Bernard, Count of Armagnac, were always endeavouring to revenge his death on Burgundy. They mustered most of the feudal nobility of France in their ranks, while their opponent was supported by the burghers of Paris and many of the towns of the north. John of Burgundy was lord of Flanders as well as of his own duchy, and was well able to hold his own even though his French partisans were outnumbered by the Armagnacs. Both factions sought the help of England, and King Henry was able to play a double game, and to negociate with each of them on the terms that he should be given back some of the lost districts of Aquitaine in return for his aid. In the end he closed with the offers of the Armagnacs, and sent over a small army to Normandy under his second son, Thomas, Duke of Clarence. Clarence accomplished little, but the fact that his troops were able to march across France to Bordeaux with little hindrance taught the English that the French were too helpless and divided to be formidable (1412). The lesson was taken to heart, as we shall see in the next reign.

[Sidenote: =Prince Henry of Monmouth.=]

While King Henry lay slowly dying of leprosy, his son, the Prince of Wales, was gaining the experience which was to serve him so well a few years later. Henry of Monmouth was a warrior from his youth up; at the age of fifteen he had been present at Shrewsbury field, and in the succeeding years he toiled in the hard school of the Welsh wars, leading expedition after expedition against Glyndower. The legendary tales which speak of him as a debauched and idle youth, who consorted with disreputable favourites, such as Shakespeare's famous "Sir John Falstaff," are entirely worthless. Of all these fables the only one that seems to have any foundation is that which tells how Henry was suspected by his father of over-great ambition and of aiming at the crown. It appears that the prince's supporters, the two Beauforts, suggested to King Henry that he should abdicate, and pass on the sceptre to his son. The king was much angered at the proposal, turned the Beauforts out of office, and was for a time estranged from the Prince of Wales. This was the reason why he sent Clarence rather than his elder brother to conduct the war in France. He even removed Prince Henry from his position as head of the royal council. But this outburst of anger was the king's last flash of energy. He died of his lingering disease on March 20, 1413.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Thomas of Gloucester's only daughter had married Edmund, Earl of Stafford.

[25] Brother of the Arundel whom Richard II. beheaded.

[26] See p. 210.

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XVI. HENRY V

1413-1422.

Henry of Monmouth had a far easier task before him, when he ascended the throne, than his father had been forced to take in hand. He had the enormous advantage of succeeding to an established heritage, and was no mere usurper legalized by parliamentary election. So firm did he feel himself upon his seat, that he began his reign by releasing the young Earl of March, the legitimate heir of Richard II., whom Henry IV. had always kept in close custody. For he knew that none of the odium of his father's usurpation rested upon himself, and that he was well liked by the nation. Nor was his popularity ill deserved; though only twenty-five years of age, he was already a tried warrior and an able statesman. His life was sober and orderly, inclining rather toward Spartan rigour than display and luxury. He was grave and earnest in speech, courteous in all his dealings, and an enemy of flatterers and favourites. His sincere piety bordered on asceticism. If he had a fault, it was that he was somewhat overstern with those who withstood him, like his great ancestor Edward I. His enemies called him hard-hearted and sanctimonious.

[Sidenote: =Persecution of the Lollards.=]

Henry's piety and his love of order and orthodoxy were a source of much trouble to the unhappy Lollards. From the moment of his accession he bore very hardly upon them, and redoubled the severity of the persecution which his father had begun. He did not spare even his own friends, but arrested for heresy Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, who had been one of his most trusted servants. When accused of holding the doctrines of Wicliffe, Oldcastle boldly avowed his sympathy for them, spoke scornfully of the Papacy and its claims, and taunted his judge, Archbishop Arundel, with all the sins and failings of the clergy. He was condemned to be burnt, but escaped from the Tower and hid himself in the Marches of Wales. Long afterwards he was retaken, and suffered bravely for his opinions.

Henry's ill-treatment of the Lollards drove the unfortunate sectaries to despair. Some of the more reckless of them planned to put an end to their sufferings, by seizing the king's person, and compelling him to relax the persecution. They tried to stir up a popular rising, like that of Wat Tyler, but Henry got timely notice of their plot. When they began to assemble by night in St. Martin's fields, outside the gates of London, he came suddenly upon them with a great body of horse, and scattered them all. Forty were hung next day as traitors, and for the future they were treated as guilty of treason as well as of heresy.

[Sidenote: =Henry and the French crown.=]

Fortunately for England, Henry had other things in his mind besides the suppression of the Wicliffites. He knew that nothing serves so well to quiet down internal troubles as a successful and glorious foreign war. He believed himself, and rightly, to be capable of leading the national forces to victory, and he knew that England's old neighbour and enemy across the Channel was weak and divided. Accordingly, from the moment of his accession Henry began to prepare for an assault on France. He was determined to claim not merely the restoration of the lost provinces of Guienne, but the crown of France itself, as Edward III. had done in the days before the treaty of Bretigny. It is hard to discover how a sincerely religious and right-minded man, for such Henry of Monmouth undoubtedly was, could persuade his conscience that it was permissible to vamp up once more these antiquated claims. It would seem that he regarded himself as a divinely appointed guardian of law, order, morality, and religion, and had come to look upon the French factions with their open wickedness, their treason, treachery, murder, and rapine, as emissaries of Satan handed over to him for punishment. Moreover, Henry was, as we have said, a very zealous servant of the Church, and the Church did its best to egg him on to the war. Chicheley, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the chief supporters of it, partly because he wished to distract attention from the persecution of the Lollards, and partly because Parliament had been talking of a proposal to confiscate some Church land, and the archbishop thought that he had better give them some other and more exciting subject of discussion. In his old age, Chicheley bitterly regretted his advice to King Henry, and built his college of All Souls at Oxford, to pray for the repose of those who had fallen in the great war which he had set going.

[Sidenote: =Preparations for war.=]

Before he had been a year upon the throne, Henry had broken with France. It was in vain that the Dauphin and the Armagnac faction, who were at this time predominant, endeavoured to turn him from his purpose. They offered him the hand of the Princess Catherine, the daughter of their mad king Charles VI., and with her the lost provinces of Aquitaine and a dowry of 600,000 gold crowns. But Henry only replied by asking for all that his ancestors had ever held in France, the ancient realm of Henry II., extending from Normandy to the Pyrenees. When this preposterous demand was refused, he summoned Parliament and laid before it his scheme for an invasion of France. The proposal was received with enthusiasm, partly from old national jealousy, partly because the English resented the doings of the French in the time of Henry IV., when Norman privateers had vexed the Channel ports, and French succour had been lent to Owen Glyndower and the Scots. The Commons and the clergy gave the king very liberal grants of money, which he increased by seizing the estates of the "alien priories," that is, the religious houses that were mere branches and dependencies of continental abbeys.

[Sidenote: =Conspiracy of Cambridge and Scrope.=]

By spending every shilling that he could raise, and even pawning the crown jewels, the king collected and equipped a considerable army. He assembled at Southampton some 2500 men-at-arms and 7000 archers for the invasion. Just before he embarked, however, he found himself exposed to a deadly peril, which showed him how precarious was the hold of the Lancastrian dynasty on the throne. A plot had been formed by his cousin, Richard of Cambridge, the younger brother of that Edmund of Rutland who betrayed the rebels of 1399. It had as its object the murder of Henry and the coronation of Edmund, Earl of March, whose sister Richard had married. In the plot were implicated Lord Scrope, a kinsman of the archbishop whom Henry IV. had executed and several others who had grievances against the house of Lancaster. The king sent them all to the block, and would not delay his sailing for a moment.

[Sidenote: =Siege of Harfleur.=]

He landed in Normandy late in the summer of 1415, and laid siege to Harfleur, which then occupied the position that Havre enjoys to-day, and was the chief commercial port at the mouth of the Seine. On the news of Henry's approach, the French factions for once suspended their hostilities, and many of the Burgundians, though not Duke John himself, agreed to assist the Armagnacs in repelling the invaders. But they were so long in gathering that Harfleur fell, after five weeks of siege. The capture, however, had cost the English dear; not only had they lost many men in the trenches, but a pestilence had broken out among them, and a third of the army were down with camp-fever. After shipping off his sick to Southampton, and providing a strong garrison for Harfleur, King Henry found that he had no more than 6000 men left, with whom to take the field against the oncoming French. But he would not withdraw ingloriously by sea, and resolved to march home to Calais across Northern France. This enterprise savoured of rashness, for the whole countryside was swarming with the levies of the enemy. They had placed the Constable of France, John d'Albret, in command: with him were the young Duke of Orleans and all the rest of the Armagnac leaders. Anthony of Brabant, brother to the Duke of Burgundy, was hurrying to their aid from the north. By rapid movements--his whole army, archers as well as men-at-arms, had been provided with horses taken from the countryside--Henry reached the Somme. But he lost time in trying to force a passage, and when at last he crossed the river high up, near Peronne, the Constable and his host had outmarched him and thrown themselves across the road to Calais. They were at least 30,000 strong, five times the force that Henry could put in line, and were in excellent condition, while the English were worn out by their long travel, amid violent October rains, and over bad country crossroads.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Agincourt.=]

When King Henry reached Agincourt, he found the French army drawn up across his path, and was forced to halt. The Constable, like King John at Poictiers, was confident that he had the English in a trap, for they had exhausted all their provisions, and had the flooded Somme in their rear. Henry, however, was determined to fight, and put his hope in the bad management which always characterized the disorderly armies of feudal France. He was not disappointed: the Constable dismounted all his knights and bade them fight on foot, for fear of the effect of the archery on their horses. Only a few hundred mounted men formed a forlorn hope in front. He arranged his army in three heavy columns, one behind another, and formed the front entirely of mailed men-at-arms; the cross-bowmen and light troops were placed in the rear, where they could be of no possible use. The week had been rainy, and the space in front of the French was a newly ploughed field sodden with water, and hemmed in with woods and villages on either hand. At its further end the English were waiting. Henry had drawn them up in a single four-deep line, in order to make a front equal to that of the enemy. So arranged they just filled the space between the woods. The archers were on the wings, protected by chevaux-de-frise of pointed stakes which they had planted in front. The king with his men-at-arms formed the centre; a small flanking force of archers had also been sent into the woods on the right.

The Constable led his men straight on the English front, but they had a mile to go across the greasy mud of the fields. To men arrayed in the full knightly panoply, which had vastly increased in weight since the days of Edward III., the ploughland was almost impassable. After a space they began to sink as far as their ankles, and presently as far as their knees, in the mud. The mounted men struggled on, and gradually drew near the English, but they were shot down one after another as they slowly forced themselves up to the stakes of the archery. The main body of the first column never won its way so far; it literally stuck fast in the tenacious clay and stood a few score yards from the English line, as a target into which the archers emptied whole sheaves of arrows. The crowded mass was soon full of dead and dying, for at such short range armour could not protect its wearers. The whole column reeled and wavered. Then King Henry, seeing the moment was come, bade his whole line charge. The lightly equipped archers could cross with ease the ploughland where the men-at-arms had found themselves unable to move. They flung themselves upon the French knights, and by the force and fury of their assault completely rolled them over. Though unprotected by mail, they obtained a complete ascendency over the enemy, dashing them down with their axes and maces till they lay in heaps two or three deep. Henry and the band of men-at-arms around him seem to have met with the only stubborn resistance: the king had to fight hard for his life, and was nearly slain by the Duke of Alençon, who had already struck down his younger brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Alençon, however, was slain, and after his fall the whole of his column was destroyed or captured.

Without a moment's hesitation, the English pushed on to attack the second column, which was slowly advancing through the mud to aid the van. Incredible as it may appear, their second charge was as successful as the first, though the victors were exhausted and thinned in numbers by the previous fighting, and did not muster half their adversaries' force. Just after he had routed this second column, Henry received an alarm that a detached body of the French had assailed his camp in the rear, and were coming up to surround him. He at once bade his men slay the prisoners they had taken, a harsh and, as it proved, an unnecessary order, for the French in the rear only plundered the camp, and then dispersed with their booty. Although the king had completely scattered or destroyed the second French column, the third still remained in order before him; but, cowed by the fate of their comrades, they turned and retired hastily from the field, though they should by themselves have been more than enough to overwhelm the exhausted band of English.

In this astonishing victory, Henry's small army had slain a much larger number of men than they mustered in their own ranks. The Constable of France, Anthony, Duke of Brabant--brother of John of Burgundy--the Dukes of Bar and Alençon, and a whole crowd of counts and barons, had fallen; it is said that no less than 10,000 French were slain, of whom more than 8000 were men of gentle blood. In spite of the massacre of captives in the midst of the fighting, there were still some prisoners surviving. They included the young Duke of Orleans--the titular head of the Armagnac faction--the Duke of Bourbon, the Counts of Eu and Vendôme, and 1500 knights and nobles more. The English in this terrible fight had lost less than 200 men, but among them were two great peers, the Duke of York--the Edward of Rutland of whom we read in 1399--and the Earl of Suffolk.

[Sidenote: =Henry returns to England.=]

Henry retraced his way to Calais, and crossed to England with his prisoners and his booty, there to be received with splendid festivities by his people, who regarded the glory of Agincourt as a sufficient compensation for the losses of a costly campaign which had added nothing save the single town of Harfleur to the possessions of the English crown. The ransoms of a host of noble captives were relied upon to replenish the exchequer, and the fearful losses of the Armagnac party, who saw half their leaders slain at Agincourt, would evidently weaken the strength of France in the remainder of the war.

[Sidenote: =End of the Great Schism.--Council of Constance.=]

Henry did not cross the Channel again in the year 1416, which he spent partly in negotiations with the Duke of Burgundy, whose help he wished to secure against the Armagnacs, partly in treating with the Emperor Sigismund about the common welfare of Christendom. Sigismund was hard at work endeavouring to put an end to the "Great Schism," the scandalous breach in the unity of the Church caused by the misconduct of the rival Popes at Rome and Avignon. He visited England, and won Henry's aid for his plans, which brought about the reunion of Christendom at the Council of Constance--a reunion under evil auspices, since it was marked by the burning of the great Bohemian teacher John Huss, who had made the doctrines of Wicliffe popular among his Slavonic countrymen in the far East. Moreover, it restored the unity of Christendom, but did not reform either the papacy or the national Churches. As this was not done, the general outbreak of religious ferment was made inevitable in a later generation; after the failure at Constance to reform the Church from within, it became necessary to reform her from without.

[Sidenote: =Second invasion of France.--Conquest of Normandy.=]

Having come to an agreement with the Duke of Burgundy, and obtained from him a promise of neutrality, Henry invaded France for the second time in the summer of 1417. He took with him an army of somewhat over 16,000 men, landed in Normandy, and began to reduce one after another all the fortresses of that province. Utterly humbled by the memory of Agincourt, the Armagnacs made no attempt to meet him in the open field. Some of the Norman towns held out gallantly enough, but they got no aid from without. At the end of a year the whole duchy, save its capital, the city of Rouen, was in English hands. Henry then assumed the state of Duke of Normandy, and put the whole land under orderly government, a boon it had not enjoyed for twenty years. He gave Norman baronies and earldoms to many of his English followers, and handed over the control of the cities to burghers of the Burgundian faction, who served the English readily enough, out of their hatred for the Armagnacs. For thirty years Normandy was to remain English. Rouen was added to the rest of the duchy after a long siege of six months, in which half the population perished by hunger. Irritated by this long resistance, Henry imposed on it the harsh terms of a ransom of 300,000 crowns, and hung Alain Blanchart, the citizen who had been the soul of the obstinate defence (January, 1419).

While the conquest of Normandy was in progress, the French factions had been more bitterly at strife than ever. In 1418 the Burgundian party in Paris rose against their rivals, and massacred every man on whom they could lay hands, including Bernard of Armagnac himself. The control of the party of the feudal noblesse then passed into the hands of the young dauphin Charles, the heir of France.

[Sidenote: =Murder of the Duke of Burgundy.=]

The fall of Rouen, however, frightened John of Burgundy, and unwilling that France should fall wholly into the power of his ally King Henry, he made proposals for a reconciliation with the Dauphin and his Armagnac followers. The treacherous young prince accepted the overtures with apparent cordiality, and invited Duke John to meet him on the bridge of Montereau to settle terms of peace. But when Burgundy came to the conference, he was deliberately slain by the Armagnac captains, in the presence and with the consent of the Dauphin (August, 1419).

[Sidenote: =Treaty of Troyes.=]

The murder of Montereau was destined to make Henry master of France. When Philip of Burgundy, the son of Duke John, heard of his father's death, he vowed unending war against the Dauphin and his faction, and took the field to help the English to complete the conquest of France. Nor was Philip of Burgundy the only helper that Henry secured: the Queen of France, Isabella of Bavaria, bitterly hated her son the Dauphin, and was glad to do him an evil turn. She proposed that Charles should be disinherited, and that the crown should pass with her favourite daughter Catherine to the hands of the English king. So at Troyes, in Champagne, Henry, Philip of Burgundy, and Queen Isabella concluded a formal treaty by which Henry received Catherine to wife, and was to succeed to the French throne on the death of his father-in-law, the old King Charles VI., who still lingered on in complete imbecility (June 2, 1420).

[Sidenote: =Henry master of Northern France.=]

The treaty of Troyes put Paris and the greater part of Northern France into Henry's hands. Casting national feeling aside in their bitter partisan spirit, the Burgundian faction everywhere accepted the King of England as the lawful regent and governor of France. South of the Loire the Dauphin and his Armagnac friends still held their own, but north of it they only possessed scattered fortresses dotted about in Picardy, the Isle-de-France, and Champagne, from Boulogne in the north to Orleans in the south.

After taking formal possession of Paris and holding a great meeting of the Estates of the French realm at Rouen, Henry returned in triumph to England with his young wife. He had reached a pitch of success in war such as no English king had ever attained before, and the nation, blinded by the personal merits of its king and gorged with the plunder of France, forgave him all his faults. The waste of life and money, the never-ending persecution of the Lollards, the precarious tenure of the conquests in France--due, in sober truth, merely to the aid of the Burgundian faction--were all forgotten.

[Sidenote: =Defeat of the English at Beaugé.=]

Henry had not long been in England, when bad news crossed the Channel after him. He had left his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, with a small army, to hold Maine against the Dauphin's adherents. But the Armagnac bands had lately been strengthened by succours from Scotland, under the Earl of Buchan, the son of the regent Albany. For, although the King of Scots had been a prisoner in English hands for ten years and more, his subjects and his uncle the regent were not thereby constrained to keep the peace with England. Pushing forward rashly to attack the Scots and Armagnacs, Clarence was routed and slain at Beaugé (1421). The enemy at once overran Maine, and began to infest the borders of Normandy.

[Sidenote: =Henry's third expedition.=]

This compelled the king to cross once more over the sea in order to repair his brother's disastrous defeat. In a campaign extending from the summer of 1421 to that of the following year, he cleared the Dauphin's army out of their foothold north of the Loire, and then proceeded to starve out one by one their isolated strongholds in the north of France, the chief of which were Dreux and Meaux.

[Sidenote: =Siege of Meaux.--Death of Henry.=]

It was during the siege of Meaux, which continued all the winter of 1421 and spring of 1422, that Henry's health began to give dangerous signs of breaking up. He had been campaigning from his boyhood, and had never hitherto shown any weakness of constitution. But the winter colds of 1421-2, or the camp-fever bred in the trenches during the long siege of Meaux, had brought him very low. He was carried back toward Paris in a desperate state of weakness from ague and dysentery. Soon after, to the horror and dismay of the English and their French partisans, he died at the castle of Vincennes on August 31, 1422, before he had attained his thirty-fifth year.

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XVII. THE LOSS OF FRANCE

1422-1453.

England had never yet had a sovereign of such tender age as the infant king who succeeded to the heritage of Henry V. It was under the rule of a child of less than twelve months old that the long and wearisome French war had to be continued. Yet at first the prospects of the reign did not look very dark. The struggle in France was not going ill, and seldom has any orphan had so zealous and capable a guardian by his cradle as John of Bedford, the little king's eldest uncle. He had, moreover, no domestic intrigues to fear; Edmund, Earl of March, the legitimate heir of Richard II., was the most unenterprising and loyal of men, and never gave any trouble.

[Sidenote: =The Regency.=]

On his death-bed Henry V. had not appointed his eldest and most capable brother, John of Bedford, to be the regent in England, as might have been expected. His ruling passion was strong in death, and he thought above all things of the maintenance of the English ascendency in France. Therefore he named Duke John to take charge of the government of that country. As Regent of England he designated his younger brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, a man of far less worth and weight. The Parliament, however, held that the king could not dispose of the regency by will; and though they named Gloucester Protector, placed many limitations on his power. Unfortunately, they could not remedy his reckless and flighty disposition.

[Sidenote: =James I. of Scotland released.=]

During the whole of the long minority of Henry VI. the varying fortunes of the French war were almost the only topic that stirred the interest of the nation. The internal history of England is well-nigh a blank; no period since the Conquest is left so bare by the chroniclers, who seem to have no eyes or ears for anything save the fate of our armies across the Channel. The quarrels of Duke Humphrey with his colleagues in the regency are the only other topic on which they touch. The council carried out the policy of the late king, so far as any body of statesmen of average ability can continue the work of a single man of high military and political genius. They strained every nerve to keep up the war in France, and subordinated every other end to that purpose. Their wisest act was the release of the young King of Scots, after seventeen years of captivity. Seeing that his kinsman Albany was helping the French, they set James I. free, and sent him home. He married, ere he departed, Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and granddaughter of John of Gaunt, a lady for whom he had formed a romantic attachment in the days of his captivity. By her influence it was hoped that he would be kept firm in the English alliance. In some degree this hope was fulfilled: James promptly slew his cousins of Albany, and devoted himself to pacifying and bringing back into order the country from which he had been so long exiled.

[Sidenote: =Death of Charles VI.--Henry proclaimed King of France.=]

We must now turn to the aspect of affairs beyond the Channel, the subject which seemed all-important to the English nation at this time. The old mad King of France had died only two months after his son-in-law, Henry V. (October, 1422). Bedford had, therefore, to proclaim his little nephew as king at Paris, and to rule in his name, no longer in that of the unhappy Charles VI. The Dauphin also assumed the title of King of France, and was acknowledged as monarch in all the lands south of the Loire. But he was an indolent and apathetic young man, governed entirely by his favourites, and wholly unskilled in and averse to military enterprises. He did so little for himself, and seemed so contented with his unsatisfactory position, that men called him in scorn "the King of Bourges"--his residence for the time--rather than the King of France.

There still appeared to be some chance that the English might maintain themselves in possession of Northern France. But this hope rested entirely on the firm and continued fidelity of the Burgundian party to their English allies. It was only by their help that success could be won, for ten or fifteen thousand English scattered from Calais to Bordeaux could not hold down a hostile France. For some time the Duke of Burgundy aided Bedford, and the Burgundian citizens in each town maintained their loyalty to King Henry.

[Sidenote: =Victories of Bedford.=]

Bedford's regency commenced with two victories, at Cravant (July, 1423) and Verneuil (August, 1424), which so tamed the Dauphin's partisans that the English were able to work slowly west and south, subduing the land. More would have been done, but for a sudden risk of a breach with Burgundy, caused by the reckless selfishness of the Duke of Gloucester.

[Sidenote: =Gloucester's expedition to Hainault.=]

Tired of long bickerings with his uncle, Bishop Beaufort of Winchester, and the other members of the council of regency, Humphrey had resolved to go off on an enterprise of his own. There was at this moment a distressed princess in the Netherlands, Jacquelaine, Duchess of Holland and Countess of Hainault. She had married Philip of Burgundy's cousin, the Duke of Brabant, a stupid debauchee who treated her very ill. Escaping from his court, she fled to London, and offered herself and her lands to Duke Humphrey, if he would take her under his protection. Of course, a divorce from her husband had first to be procured; but the pope refused to grant it. In spite of this trifling difficulty, Gloucester performed a ceremony of marriage with Jacquelaine, though both of them were well aware that it was a rank case of bigamy. They then crossed to the continent to take possession of her dominions, which were held by her husband, John of Brabant. This, of course, meant war; and not only war with Brabant, but with Burgundy also, for Duke Philip was the close ally of Duke John, and had no wish to see Gloucester established in his neighbourhood as ruler of Hainault and Holland.

[Sidenote: =Threatened breach with Burgundy.=]

Both Bedford and the English council of regency completely disavowed Gloucester's doings, but it was hard to persuade Burgundy that England had not determined to break with him. If Gloucester had been successful, there is no doubt that Burgundy would have joined the French and driven the English out of France. But fortunately for Bedford, his brother proved singularly unlucky in Hainault. Seeing himself outnumbered and surrounded by the Brabanters and Burgundians, Humphrey left his quasi-wife in the lurch, and fled back to England. The bigamous duchess fell into the hands of her enemies, and was placed in confinement. Gloucester took the news with equanimity, and consoled himself by marrying Eleanor Cobham, a lady of damaged reputation, whom he had known long before.

[Sidenote: =Siege of Orleans.=]

Owing to Gloucester's failure in Hainault, the breach between England and Burgundy did not widen into open disruption, but Duke Philip never again supported his allies with such vigour as in the earlier days of the war. It was not till 1428 that the English felt strong enough to make a fresh advance against the lands beyond the Loire. In that year the regent Bedford succeeded in equipping a small field army of five or six thousand men--half English, half French partisans of England. Placing them under Thomas Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, one of the best captains who had served Henry V., he sent them southward. Salisbury at first aimed at taking Angers, but turned aside to besiege Orleans, the key of the central valley of the Loire, and the one place of importance beyond that river which the French still held. On the 7th of October, 1428, he took post in front of it, and built strong redoubts facing each of its gates, for he had not a large enough army to surround so great a city. Thus Orleans was blockaded rather than besieged, since it was always possible for the French to get in or out in small parties between the fortified positions of the English.

[Sidenote: =Jeanne d'Arc.=]

Orleans held out long and stubbornly, and while its siege still dragged on, a new factor was suddenly introduced into the struggle. The widespread misery and devastation caused by thirteen years of uninterrupted war had moved the hearts of the French to despair; the people lay inert and passive, hating the English, but caring little for the despicable Charles and his Armagnac court at Bourges. It was left for a simple peasant girl to turn this apathy into energy, and to send forth the whole people of France on a wild crusade against the invader.

Jeanne d'Arc was the daughter of a villager of Domrémy, on the borders of Champagne. She was from her youth a girl of a mystic, visionary piety, who believed herself to be visited by dreams and visions from on high, which guided her in all the actions of her life. At the age of eighteen her "voices," as she called them, began to give her the strange command to go forth and deliver France from the English, whose arrogance and cruelty had moved the wrath of Heaven. Jeanne doubted the meaning of these hard sayings, but in repeated visions she thought that she saw St. Michael and St. Catherine appear to her, and bid her go to the Dauphin Charles and cause him to place her at the head of his armies. She resolved to obey their behests, and betook herself to Chinon, where she presented herself before the prince. Charles at first treated her slightingly, and his courtiers and captains laughed her to scorn. But she vehemently insisted on the importance of her mission, and at last made some impression on the Dauphin's weak and wavering mind. Apparently she revealed to him a secret known to himself alone, by some sort of clairvoyance. Charles resolved to give her mission a trial, and his captains agreed that perchance the company of an inspired prophetess might put heart into their dispirited troops. Jeanne's "voices" bade her clothe herself in knightly armour, display a white banner before her, and ride at the head of the Dauphin's men to the relief of Orleans. They promised her complete success in the enterprise, and prophesied that she should lead the prince in triumph to Rheims, and there crown him King of France.

[Sidenote: =Jeanne enters Orleans.--The siege raised.=]

In April, 1429, Jeanne entered Orleans with a convoy of food and a small troop of men-at-arms. The townsmen needed her encouragement, but their English foes outside were also in evil case. The task was too great for the little army of the besiegers, who had already lost many men, and had seen their leader, Thomas of Salisbury, slain by a cannon-shot as he was reconnoitering the walls. The Earl of Suffolk, who succeeded him, still held his ring of fortified posts round the city, on both sides of the Loire, but was quite unable to prevent food and reinforcements from entering it. Nevertheless the men of Orleans sorely needed the aid that Jeanne brought; for the Dauphin seemed to have abandoned them, and they had begun to despair. The success of Jeanne's mission was settled from the moment when the burghers of Orleans hailed her as a deliverer, and placed themselves at her disposal. If they had doubted and sneered, like the Dauphin's courtiers at Chinon, she could have done nothing. But the moment that she was within the walls, she bade the garrison arm and sally forth to attack the English redoubts that ringed them in. Her first effort was crowned with success; a sudden assault carried the nearest fort before succour could reach it from Suffolk's camp. The men of Orleans cried that Jeanne was indeed a prophetess and a deliverer sent by God, and henceforth followed her with a blind devotion which nothing could turn back or repel. It was in vain that the mercenary captains of the Dauphin's host endeavoured to moderate the reckless vigour of Jeanne's movements. After her first success she bade the garrison go on and conquer, and on four continuous days of fighting led them against the entrenchments of the English. One after another they fell, for the French were now fighting with a force and fury which nothing could resist. "Before that day," says the chronicler, "two hundred English would drive five hundred French before them. But now two hundred French would beat and chase four hundred English." The invaders came to dread the approach of Jeanne's white standard with a superstitious fear; they declared that she was a witch, and that the powers of hell fought behind her. At last Suffolk was fain to burn his camp, and to withdraw northwards with the remnant of his host.

But the disasters of the English were not yet ended. Jeanne had no intention of allowing them to remain unmolested; the troops who had already fought under her were ready to follow her anywhere, and the peasants and burghers all over France were beginning to take up arms, "now that the Lord had shown himself on the side of the Dauphin." With a host largely increased by fresh levies, Jeanne went to seek the English, and caught them up at Patay. There she charged them suddenly, "before the archers had even time to fix their stakes," and destroyed almost the whole force, taking captive Lord Talbot, its commander.

[Sidenote: =The Dauphin crowned at Rheims.=]

Jeanne now bade the Dauphin come forth from his seclusion and follow her to Rheims, the old crowning-place of the French kings. He obeyed, and brought a great host with him. At the approach of "the Maid of Orleans," as Jeanne was now styled, fortress after fortress in Champagne yielded. The regent Bedford was too weak in men to quit Paris, and so Jeanne was able to fulfil her promise by leading Charles to Rheims and there witnessing his coronation (July 17, 1429).

She then declared that her mission was ended, and asked to be allowed to return home to her father's house. But Charles would not suffer it, because of the enormous advantage that her presence gave to the French arms. She then bade him strike at Paris, the heart of the English possessions in France. For the first time in her career she failed; the Burgundian citizens manned their walls too well, and served their faction rather than their country. Jeanne was wounded in a fruitless assault on the city, and had to withdraw. But her campaign was not fruitless; Soissons, Laon, Beauvais, Senlis, Compiègne, Troyes, and well-nigh the whole of Isle-de-France and Champagne, were recovered from the English. The land which Bedford ruled as regent was now reduced to a triangular patch, with the sea as its base and Paris as its apex, and included little more than Normandy, Picardy, and Maine.

[Sidenote: =Successes and capture of Jeanne.=]

In spite of her failure at Paris, the prestige of the Maid of Orleans was still unbroken; she went on winning place after place for King Charles, though he supported her very grudgingly, and left her to depend on the enthusiasm of the people rather than the royal arm. But her career came suddenly to an end; while endeavouring to relieve Compiègne, then besieged by a Burgundian army, she was unhorsed in a skirmish, and fell into the hands of the enemy. Philip of Burgundy would not slay the maid himself, but he meanly sold her for ten thousand crowns to the English, though he knew that Bedford regarded her as a witch, and was resolved to punish her as such.

[Sidenote: =Jeanne burnt.=]

The cruel tragedy which followed will always leave a deep stain on the character of the regent, who in all other matters showed himself a just and righteous man. Jeanne was kept for many months in prison, subjected to cruel and ribald treatment, and examined again and again by bigoted ecclesiastics who were determined to prove her a witch. She constantly withstood them with a firm piety which moved their wrath, maintaining that her visions and voices were from God, and that all her acts had been done with His aid. After much quibbling, cross-examination, and persecution, a tribunal of French clergy, headed by the Bishop of Beauvais, pronounced her a sorceress and heretic, and handed her over to the secular arm for execution; the English, therefore, burnt her alive in the market-place of Rouen (May, 1431). Her callous master, Charles VII., made no attempt to save her, and seems to have viewed her fate with complete indifference.

[Sidenote: =Weakness of the English.=]

Though Jeanne had met a martyr's death, her cause continued to prosper. The spell of the invincibility of the English had been broken, and with their inferior numbers they could no longer resist the French assaults, in which nobles, burghers, and peasants now all united with a single heart. It was in vain that Bedford brought over the little ten-year-old Henry VI. from England, and crowned him at Paris (1431). The ceremony was attended by hardly a single Frenchman; even the Burgundian faction in the capital were beginning to doubt and draw apart from their old allies.

[Sidenote: =Dissensions in the Regency.=]

Meanwhile in England the continued ill-success of the war was leading to the growth of a peace party, at whose head was Henry Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester, who had lately become a cardinal. That Beaufort supported any scheme was a sufficient reason for Gloucester to oppose it, and Humphrey made himself the mouthpiece of those who pleaded for perpetual war. The cardinal and the duke quarrelled in and out of Parliament, their followers were always brawling, and the action of the council of regency grew weak and divided.

[Sidenote: =Peace proposals.--Burgundy joins the French.=]

At last Beaufort prevailed on the council to submit proposals for peace to the French court. At Arras the ambassadors of Henry VI., Charles VII., and Philip of Burgundy met, and strove to come to terms (1435). But the English still insisted on claiming the pompous style of King of France for their young master, and on retaining Paris and all the North for him. The French were only ready to grant Normandy and Guienne, and insisted on the renunciation of Henry's French title. It cannot be doubted that these terms were quite reasonable, but they were rejected, with the most disastrous results. Philip of Burgundy was now tired of the struggle, and thought that he had sufficiently revenged his father's murder by fifteen years of war with the murderer. On the ground that the English had rejected fair conditions of peace, he broke off his alliance with them, and made terms with Charles of France. He got Picardy and the counties of Macon and Auxerre as the price of his change of alliance.

[Sidenote: =Death of Bedford.--Fall of Paris.=]

Just as the Congress of Arras was breaking up, John of Bedford died, worn out before his time by his fourteen years of toilsome government in France. The breach with the Duke of Burgundy and the death of Bedford had the results that might have been expected. With one common accord the last French partisans of England threw off their allegiance to Henry VI. Paris itself opened its gates to the troops of Charles VII., and the English had soon to stand on the defensive in Normandy and Maine, their last foothold in Northern France (1437).

[Sidenote: =Struggle for Normandy.--Richard, Duke of York.=]

Nothing is more astonishing than the obstinate way in which the English government clung to the last remnants of the conquests of Henry V. By desperate and unremitting exertions the war was kept up in Normandy for no less than twelve years after Paris fell (1437-49). The heroes of this struggle were the veteran Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and the young Richard, Duke of York, who had just begun to come to the front. This prince was the son of that Richard Earl of Cambridge, who had paid with his life for his attempt to overturn Henry V. He was Duke of York as successor to his uncle Edmund, who fell at Agincourt, and Earl of March in right of his mother, the sister of the childless Edmund Mortimer, the last male of his house. York was governor in Normandy during the most important years of the struggle for the retention of the duchy, and gained much credit for repeatedly driving back the invasions which the French launched against it. He grew intoxicated with success, and made himself a prominent supporter of the unwise war-policy which Humphrey of Gloucester continued to advocate.

[Sidenote: =Treaty of Tours.--Marriage of Henry.=]

Meanwhile Cardinal Beaufort and the party which opposed Duke Humphrey--its chief members were Beaufort's nephews John and Edmund, successively Earls of Somerset, and William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk--were always watching for an opportunity of concluding a peace with France. Whenever they took negotiations in hand they were denounced by Gloucester as the hirelings of Charles VII., but they persisted in their purpose. In 1444 they thought that they had achieved it, for the French king, wearied by constant repulses in Normandy, consented to make a truce for two years, and to treat for a definite peace. He signed the compact at Tours, and ratified it by giving the hand of his kinswoman Margaret of Anjou to the young king Henry VI.; in consideration of the treaty, the English were to surrender Maine and its fortresses, while retaining Normandy entire.

[Sidenote: =Indignation in England.=]

Gloucester and Richard of York saluted this wise marriage and treaty with loud cries of wrath. They said that the Earl of Suffolk, who negotiated it, must have been sold to France, and spoke of the surrender of the fortresses of Maine as treason to the English crown. The greater part of the nation believed them to be right, for Humphrey and Richard were both popular with the masses, and it soon became a matter of faith that the Beauforts and Suffolk had betrayed their young master.

[Sidenote: =Feebleness of Henry.=]

A strong king might have crushed this unwise opposition to peace. But Henry VI., who had now reached his majority, was anything but a strong king. He was frail and feeble both in body and mind, a simple soul much given to exercises of piety and to quiet study. He always sought some stronger arm on which to lean, and when he had chosen his friends, wisely or unwisely, he clung to them with the obstinacy that so often accompanies weakness. Worst of all, he had inherited a taint of madness from his grandfather, the insane Charles VI. of France, and from time to time his brain was clouded by fits of apathetic melancholy. Henry had learnt to trust his great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort and his minister Suffolk; he would never listen to any accusation against them. His views were shared by the fiery young queen, who soon began to rule him by dint of her stronger will.

[Sidenote: =Death of the Duke of Gloucester and Cardinal Beaufort.=]

The truce of Tours lasted for some three years. During this space the factions in England grew fiercer than ever, and in 1447 came to a head. At a Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds, Gloucester was suddenly arrested by order of Suffolk and the queen, and charged with treason. He died within a few days, probably from an apoplectic seizure, and not from any foul play. But it was natural that the rumour should get abroad that Suffolk had secretly murdered him.

Gloucester was only outlived for a few weeks by his lifelong rival, the old Cardinal Beaufort. Their deaths cleared the way for the rise of new men: the Cardinal's place at the head of the peace party was taken by Suffolk and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, men of far lower stamp than the old churchman, who, though proud and worldly, had always done his best to serve England. Suffolk and Somerset were busy, self-important, self-seeking men, and coveted power and office for their own private ends. The Duke of York, who succeeded to Duke Humphrey's position, was a far more capable man, but he was committed to the hopelessly unpractical programme of perpetual war with France. His position, too, was rendered difficult by the fact that Duke Humphrey's death had made him next heir to the throne after the feeble young king, for there was now no other male of the house of Lancaster surviving. The queen, Suffolk, and Somerset began to look on him with suspicion, and he had to walk warily lest charges of treason should be brought against him, as they had been against his cousin of Gloucester. Meanwhile he was fain to accept the position of Lord Deputy of Ireland, which kept him out of harm's way.

[Sidenote: =Renewal of the war.=]

In 1449 the truce with France which had accompanied the king's marriage was broken, by the gross fault of his minister Suffolk. Some of the Norman garrisons were left so long unpaid that they broke into mutiny, crossed the border, and sacked the rich Breton town of Fougéres. Failing to get satisfaction from Suffolk for this outrage, Charles VII. declared war. Normandy was now in the charge of Somerset, a man of very different calibre from Richard of York, who had held it against such odds in the days before the truce of Tours. The French, on invading the duchy, swept the English before them with an ease that astonished even themselves. The peasants and townsfolk rose against their masters on every side, and gave the invaders their best help. Town after town fell; Rouen, the capital of the duchy, was betrayed by traitors within the gates; and the unhappy Somerset had to fall back on Caen. That town, with Cherbourg and Harfleur, was soon all that remained to the English on Norman soil.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Formigny.=]

This terrible news stirred up great wrath and indignation in England against Suffolk and Somerset. An army was hastily got ready at Portsmouth, and sent over to Cherbourg, with orders to join Somerset at Caen. But the French threw themselves between, and forced the army of succour to give them battle at Formigny. At this disastrous fight well-nigh the whole English force was destroyed, overwhelmed by an attack from the rear at a moment when it was already engaged with a superior French army in front. Only its general, Sir Thomas Kyriel, and 400 men were granted quarter, while no less than 3000 were slain (April, 1450).

[Sidenote: =Loss of Normandy.=]

This disaster settled the fate of Normandy. Somerset was compelled to surrender Caen, and returned, covered with ignominy, to England. The other garrisons yielded one after another, and nothing remained of all the mighty conquests of Henry V. in Northern France.

[Sidenote: =The Commons attack the Earl of Suffolk.--His death.=]

Even before Formigny had been fought, or Caen had fallen, grave troubles had broken out in England. Suffolk had always been unpopular ever since he gave up Maine and signed the truce of Tours. The news of the loss of Rouen, and the other Norman towns, sufficed to ruin him. In spite of the king's continued assurance of his confidence in his minister, the House of Commons began to send up petitions against Suffolk, accusing him not only of losing Maine and Normandy, but of having sold himself for bribes to the King of France. Seditious riots in Kent and London gave point to the Commons' accusation. Cowed by such signs of danger, the feeble king removed Suffolk from office. The Commons then formally passed a bill of attainder against him for treasonable misconduct of the king's affairs during the last five years. But Henry would not allow his trusted servant to be harmed, gave him a formal pardon, and bade him go beyond seas till the trouble should blow over. Suffolk sailed for Calais, but in the Dover Straits his vessel was beset and captured by some London ships, which had been lying in wait for him. He was caught and beheaded after a mock trial, and his body was cast ashore on Dover Sands. The guilty parties in this extraordinary crime were never traced or convicted.

[Sidenote: =Cade's rebellion.=]

But the death of Suffolk did not imply the removal of Suffolk's friends from office. The king kept his ministry unchanged, a piece of obstinacy which provoked a fresh burst of popular indignation. In June, 1450, occurred the great political insurrection known as "Jack Cade's Rebellion." John Aylmer or Cade was a soldier of fortune, who had served under the Duke of York in France and Ireland. He gave out that he was akin to the house of Mortimer, and that he was acting by the consent of his cousin, Duke Richard. His programme was the removal and punishment of the king's ministers, and the restoration of strong government and even-handed justice. His rising, in short, was political in its objects, and did not aim at redressing social evils only, like that of Wat Tyler. Possibly, Richard of York may have had some hand in the business, but we have no actual proof that he had egged Cade on.

All Kent and Sussex rose to join Cade, who advanced to Blackheath, and boldly sent in his demands to the king. Many of the Londoners favoured him, and the gates of the city opened at his approach. For a moment he was in possession of the capital. Smiting London Stone with his drawn sword, he cried, "Now is Mortimer Lord of London." He exercised his lordship by seizing and beheading Lord Say, the treasurer, and Crowmere, Sheriff of Kent, two friends of Suffolk. He would have done the same with others of the king's servants if he could have caught them. But this violence and the plundering of houses and shops by his disorderly followers provoked the citizens, who closed the gates and came to blows with the rebels. The king brought up armed retainers to help the Londoners, and after a space Cade's men dispersed on the promise of a royal pardon. Their leader, however, refused to take advantage of the amnesty, fled to the woods, and was tracked down and slain a few weeks later. His rising had failed mainly because he was a mere adventurer, and could not keep his followers in order.

[Sidenote: =The Dukes of York and Somerset.=]

But hardly had Cade fallen, when the Duke of York, whose name he had been using so freely, suddenly came over in person from Ireland to put himself at the head of the opposition. His first demand was a change of ministry, and especially the dismissal of Somerset, who had now returned from Normandy, and had been placed at the head of the king's council, as if he had come back covered with glory instead of with dishonour. But Henry and his queen were set on keeping their cousin of Beaufort in power, and York had for the time to hold back, lest he should be accused of open treason.

[Sidenote: =Loss of Guienne.--The Duke of York takes up arms.=]

His opportunity of speaking with effect was not long in coming. In 1451 the French attached Guienne, the last province over-sea where the English banner was still displayed. The loyal Gascons made a stout defence, but the king and Somerset sent them no aid, and Bordeaux was finally compelled to surrender. The loss of Guienne added the last straw to the burden of Somerset's misdeeds. York, aided by several other peers, took up arms to compel the king to send away his shiftless minister. Henry called out an army, and faced York in Kent; but both were unwilling to strike the first blow, and on receiving a promise that Somerset should be dismissed, and tried before his peers, the duke sent his men home.

[Sidenote: =Last expedition against France.=]

The king, however, with a want of faith that he rarely displayed, refused to put Somerset on trial, and retained him as his minister. He endeavoured to distract the attention of the nation from his favourite's misdoings, by proposing that a vigorous attempt should be made to recover Guienne. The Gascons hated the French conqueror, and had sent secret messages to London offering to rise if assured of English aid. No one could refuse their appeal, and with the consent of all parties a new army was enrolled for the recovery of Bordeaux. It was given to the charge of Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the last survivor of the old captains of Henry V. The gallant veteran landed near Bordeaux with 5000 men, retook the city by the aid of its citizens, and overran the neighbouring districts. But fortune had definitely turned against England: in the next year he was slain and his army cut to pieces at the bloody battle of Castillon (July, 1453). Bordeaux held out for three months more, but was forced to yield to starvation before the year was out.

Thus was lost the last remnant of the great inheritance of Eleanor of Aquitaine, after it had remained just 300 years in the hands of the Plantagenets (1154-1453). England now retained none of her old possessions beyond sea save Calais and the Channel Islands, a strange surviving fragment of the duchy of Normandy.

The house of Lancaster and the English nation had sinned in company when they embarked so eagerly in 1415 on the wanton invasion of France. They had already paid for their crime by lavish expenditure of life and treasure on foreign battle-fields: they were now to incur the worse penalty of a savage and murderous civil war.

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XVIII. THE WARS OF THE ROSES

1454-1471.

In mediaeval England there was but one way of getting rid of political grievances which the king refused to redress--the old method of armed force, the means which we have seen used in the cases of Gaveston, the Despensers, and the favourites of Richard II. Henry VI. was not idle and vicious like Edward the Second, nor did he yearn for autocratic power like the second Richard. He was merely a simple, feeble, well-intentioned young man, who always required some prop to lean upon, who chose his servants unwisely, and adhered to them obstinately.

A wise king would have dismissed Somerset after the disasters in Normandy and Guienne, and taken a more profitable helper in the hard task of governing England. York was the obvious man to choose; he was an able general, and the first prince of the blood. But Henry distrusted York, and Henry's young queen viewed him with keen and unconcealed dislike. The thought that, if any harm should come to her husband, Duke Richard must succeed him, filled Margaret of Anjou with wrath and bitterness.

[Sidenote: =Policy of the Duke of York.=]

There are no signs that York yet entertained any disloyal designs on the throne, but he undoubtedly knew that, as the heir of the house of Mortimer, he owned a better hereditary claim to the throne than any member of the line of Lancaster. He was contented, however, to bide his time and wait for the succession of the childless king.

Meanwhile he took care to keep his party together, and steadfastly persevered in his very justifiable desire to evict the incapable Somerset from office. But it was the misfortune of England that Somerset was not friendless and unsupported, as Gaveston or the Despensers had been. He was the chief of a considerable family combination among the nobility, who were ready to aid him in keeping his place. There were, too, many others who disapproved of him personally, but were prepared to support him, some out of sheer loyalty to King Henry, some because they had old personal or family grudges against York or York's chief friends and supporters.

[Sidenote: =Power of the nobility.=]

The chief misfortunes of the unhappy time that was now to set in, had their source in the swollen importance of the great noble houses, and the bitterness of their feuds with each other. For the last hundred years the landed wealth of England had been concentrating into fewer and fewer hands. The House of Lords contained less than a third of the numbers that it had shown in the days of Edward I. The greater peers had piled up such vast masses of estates that they were growing to be each a little king in his own district. The weak government of Henry VI. had allowed their insolence to come to a head, and for the last twenty years private wars between them had been growing more and more frequent. They found the tools of their turbulence in the hordes of disbanded soldiers sent home from France, who knew no other trade but fighting, and would sell themselves to be the household bullies of the highest bidder.

[Sidenote: =The rival factions.--The Yorkists.=]

England was already honeycombed with family feuds, now ready to burst out into open violence. If we examine the lists of the supporters of York and of Somerset, we find that to a very large extent the politics of the English magnates were personal, and not national. With York were linked a great group of peers who were allied to him by blood. The chief of them were the younger branch of the Nevilles, represented by the two Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, a father and son who had each made his fortune by marrying the heiress of a great earldom. The Nevilles of the elder line, represented by the head of the house, the Earl of Westmoreland, had always been at feud with their cousins of the younger stock, and, since they were strong Lancastrians, the younger branch would probably have favoured York in any case. But their adhesion to him was rendered certain by the fact that Duke Richard had married Salisbury's sister. Another sister of the earl's was wedded to the next greatest supporter of York, John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. He was a nephew of that Mowbray whom Henry IV. had beheaded in 1405, in company with Archbishop Scrope, and so had his private grudge against the house of Lancaster. Among the other chiefs of the Yorkist party we can trace in almost every instance an old feud or a family alliance which seems to have determined their policy.

[Sidenote: =The Lancastrians.=]

It was the same with the party that stood by the king and Somerset. It comprised, first of all, the houses which were allied in blood to the Lancastrian line--the king's cousins the Beauforts, the legitimized descendants of John of Gaunt, and his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor, Earls of Richmond and Pembroke.[27] After them came the Percies of Northumberland, the Westmoreland Nevilles, and the Staffords of Buckingham--the three houses which had been prominent in aiding the usurpation of Henry IV. The Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland were certainly confirmed in their loyalty to the king by their bitter quarrel with their kinsmen, the younger Nevilles, the strongest supporters of York.

[Sidenote: =Character of the Wars of the Roses.=]

But the "Wars of the Roses,"--as historians have chosen to name them, from the white rose which was the badge of York, and the red rose which was assumed long after as the emblem of Lancaster--were much more than a faction fight between two rival coteries of peers. At the first they were the attempt of the majority of the English nation to oust an unpopular minister from power by force of arms. There is no doubt that the greater part of England sided with York in this endeavour. The citizens and freeholders of London, Kent, the South, and the Midlands, where lay all the wealth and political energy of the nation, were strongly Yorkist. Henry, on the other hand, got his support from a group of great nobles who controlled the wild West and North, and the still wilder Wales.

Unfortunately for the nation, the constitutional aspect of the struggle was gradually obscured by the increasing bitterness of family blood-feuds. "Thy father slew mine, and now will I slay thee," was the cry of the Lancastrian noble to the enemy who asked for quarter,[28] and it expresses well enough the whole aspect of the later years of the struggle. The war commenced with an attempt to set right by force the government of the realm, but it ended as a mere series of bloody reprisals for slain kinsfolk. It left England in a far worse state, from the political and constitutional point of view, than it had known since the days of John. It began with the comparatively small affliction of a weak, well-intentioned king, who persisted in retaining an unpopular minister in power; it ended by leaving the realm in the hands of an arbitrary self-willed king, who ruled autocratically for himself, with no desire or intention of consulting the nation's wishes as to how it should be governed.

We might place the beginning of the Wars of the Roses at the moment of Cade's insurrection, but it was not till five years later that the struggle broke out in its bitterer form.

[Sidenote: =Madness of the king.--Birth of his son.=]

Strangely enough, the commencement of the strife was preceded by a time in which it seemed almost certain that the troubles of the realm would blow over. In 1453 the king went mad; the peers and commons unanimously called upon York, as the first prince of the blood, to take up the place of Protector of the realm. He did so to the general satisfaction of the nation, cast Somerset into the Tower, and replaced the old ministers by more capable men. But just as all seemed settled, and York's ultimate succession to the crown appeared inevitable, the whole aspect of affairs was altered by the queen giving birth to a son, after nine years of unfruitful wedlock. This completely cut away York's prospect of succession; but he accepted the situation with loyalty, and swore allegiance to the infant Prince of Wales. But after eighteen months, Henry VI. suddenly and unexpectedly recovered his sanity. At once, at Queen Margaret's behest, he dismissed York and his friends from office, and drew Somerset out of the Tower to make him minister once more.

[Sidenote: =Outbreak of war.--First battle of St. Albans.=]

This action drove Duke Richard to sudden violence. He hastily gathered his retainers from the Welsh Marches, called his kinsmen the two Neville earls to his aid, and marched on London. Somerset and the king had only the time to collect a few of their friends, when York came upon them at St. Albans. He laid before the king his ultimatum, requiring that Somerset should be given up to be tried, and, when it was rejected, attacked the town, in which the royal troops had barricaded themselves. After a short skirmish, the young Earl of Warwick, Richard Neville, burst his way into the streets and won the day for his uncle Duke Richard. The king was taken prisoner, while Somerset, the cause of all the trouble, was slain in the fray with several other lords of his party (May, 1455).

The first battle of St. Albans put the control of the king's person into the hands of York, who again assumed the management of the realm. But he only kept it for less than a year; in 1456 the king asserted his constitutional power of changing his ministers, and turned Duke Richard's friends out of office. As his foe Somerset was now dead, York was fairly contented to leave matters in the king's own control. But after the blood shed at St. Albans, there could be no true reconciliation between the friends of the king and the friends of York. The fierce and active young Queen Margaret put herself at the head of the party which Suffolk and Somerset had formerly led. She feared for her infant son's right of succession to the throne, and was determined to crush York to make his path clear. Throughout the years 1457-8, while a precarious peace was still preserved, Margaret was journeying up and down the land, enlisting partisans in her cause, and giving them her son's badge of the white swan to wear, in token of promised fidelity.

[Sidenote: =Renewal of the war.--Rout of Ludford.=]

The inevitable renewal of the war came in 1459. Its immediate cause was an attempt by some of the Queen's retainers to slay the young Earl of Warwick, York's ablest and most energetic supporter. Then Salisbury, Warwick's father, raised his Yorkshire tenants in arms; the queen sent against them a force under Lord Audley, whom the elder Neville defeated and slew at Bloreheath. After this skirmish, all England flew to arms to aid one party or the other. York, Salisbury, and Warwick met at Ludlow, on the Welsh border, while the king gathered a great army at Worcester, taking the field himself, with a vigour which he never before or afterwards displayed. It seems that York's adherents were moved by the vehement appeals which King Henry made to their loyalty, and cowed by the superior forces that he mustered. At the Rout of Ludford they broke up without fighting, leaving their leaders to escape as best they might. York fled to Ireland, Salisbury and Warwick to Calais, of which the younger Neville was governor.

[Sidenote: =Harsh measures of the queen.=]

But surprising and sudden vicissitudes of fortune were the order of the day all through the Wars of the Roses. The queen and her friends ruled harshly and unwisely after they had driven York out of the land. They assembled a Parliament at Coventry, which dealt out hard measures of attainder and confiscation against all who had favoured Duke Richard. They sacked the open town of Newbury because it was supposed to favour York, and hung seven citizens of London of the duke's party. These cruel actions turned the heart of the nation from the king and the ruthless Queen Margaret.

Hearing of this state of affairs, Warwick and Salisbury suddenly made a descent from Calais, landed at Sandwich, and pushed boldly inland. The whole of Kent rose to join them, and they were able to march on London. The Yorkist partisans within the city were so strong that they threw open the gates, and the Nevilles seized the capital. The Londoners armed in their favour, and the Yorkist lords of the South flocked in to aid them; soon they were strong enough to strike at their enemies, whose forces were not yet concentrated. The queen had gathered at Northampton the loyalists of the Midland counties, but her friends of the North and West were not yet arrived.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Northampton.=]

Warwick, on July 10, 1460, stormed the entrenched camp of the Lancastrians in front of Northampton, and took the king prisoner. The queen escaped to Wales, but the greater part of the chiefs of her army were left dead on the field, for Warwick had bidden his men to spare the common folk, and slay none save knights and nobles. There fell the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and many other leading men of the king's party.

The Duke of York had crossed from Ireland too late to take any share in the fight of Northampton, but in time to reap the fruits of his nephew's victory. He advanced to London, and there summoned a Parliament. It then appeared that the vicissitudes of the last year had so embittered him that he was no longer content to act as regent for Henry VI. He fell back on his undisputed hereditary claim as the eldest heir of Richard II., and began to talk of deposing his cousin and assuming the crown. But his own partisans set their faces against this plan, for Henry was still personally popular, and all the blame of his misgovernment was laid on the queen and her friends. The Earl of Warwick openly told his uncle that he must be content to be regent, and York had to accept a compromise, by which Henry VI. was to retain the crown as long as he lived, but to leave it to Duke Richard on his death. The rights of the little Prince of Wales were ignored, and many of the Yorkists swore that he was a supposititious child, and no true son of King Henry.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Wakefield.--Slaughter of Yorkist leaders.=]

But in making this arrangement the duke's party had reckoned without Queen Margaret, who was still free and busy. She had fled to the North, and there had gathered to her the Percies, the elder Nevilles, and the barons of the Border, all staunch Lancastrians. Hearing of this muster, Duke Richard marched northward, with his second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, and his brother-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury. He underrated the queen's forces, and rashly engaged with them under the walls of Sandal Castle, close to Wakefield. There, overwhelmed by numbers, he and his whole army were destroyed. Burning to avenge the slaughter of Northampton, the Lancastrians refused all quarter. The Earl of Rutland, a lad of seventeen, fell at the knees of Lord Clifford and asked for his life. "Thy father slew mine, and now will I slay thee," answered the rough Borderer, and stabbed him as he knelt. The Earl of Salisbury was captured and beheaded next day. Queen Margaret set the heads of the slain lords above the gate of York, Duke Richard's in the midst crowned in derision with a diadem of paper.

Thus perished Richard of York, a man who had always displayed great abilities, and down to the last year of his life had shown much self-control and moderation. His death was a great loss to England, as the headship of his house and his party now passed to his son, a selfish and hard-hearted--though very able--young man of eighteen.

[Sidenote: =Second Battle of St. Albans.=]

The event of the battle of Wakefield came as a thunderclap to the Yorkists, who had hitherto despised the queen and her northern followers. Edward, Earl of March, Duke Richard's heir, was absent in the west, where he was striving with the Lancastrians of Wales. Only Richard of Warwick was in time to reach London before the northern army approached its walls. He rallied the Yorkists of the South, and led them to St. Albans, where Queen Margaret attacked him. Again the Northerners were victorious; they rescued King Henry from his captors, and scattered Warwick's army to the winds. The rancorous queen made her little seven-year old son sit in judgment on the prisoners, and bade him choose the form of death by which they each should die.

[Sidenote: =London saved by Edward of York.=]

If Margaret had pushed on next day, the capital would have fallen into her hands; but her gentle and kindly spouse feared that the northern moss-troopers would sack and burn the city, and persuaded her to wait, in order that London might surrender in due form, and not be taken by assault. The short delay was fatal to him and his cause. While London was negotiating the terms on which it should yield, a new Yorkist army suddenly appeared on the scene.

Not many days before the second battle of St. Albans, the young Edward of York had routed the Lancastrians of Wales at the battle of Mortimer's Cross, in Herefordshire. He had then set out to march on London; on the way he was met by Warwick, who brought the news of his own defeat, and of the queen's approach to the capital. But, learning that she had not yet entered its walls, they marched night and day, and threw themselves into the city just as its gates were opening for surrender.

[Sidenote: =Retreat of the queen.=]

The arrival of the heir of York and his victorious troops turned the fortune of the war. Margaret's army had in great part dispersed to plunder the Midlands, for the Northerners had vowed to treat every man south of the Trent as an enemy. When Duke Edward advanced they gave way before him, and retreated towards York, wasting the country behind them on all sides.

[Sidenote: =Edward proclaims himself king.=]

The slaughter of Wakefield and St. Albans, and more especially the ruthless execution of prisoners which had followed each battle, had driven the Yorkists to a pitch of anger which they had not felt before. There was no longer any talk of making terms with Henry VI., and leaving him the crown. Warwick and the other nobles of his party besought the young duke to claim the crown, as the true heir of Richard II., and to stigmatize the three Lancastrian kings as usurpers. Edward readily consented, and proclaimed himself king at Westminster on his hereditary title, and without any form of election or assent of Parliament.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Towton.=]

But the new king had to fight for his crown before he could wear it. He and Warwick pursued the queen's army over the Trent, and caught it up at Towton, near Tadcaster, in Yorkshire. Here was fought the greatest and fiercest of the battles of the Wars of the Roses. Both parties were present in full force; the South and Midlands had rallied round Edward IV. in their wrath at the plundering of the Northumbrians. The Lancastrians of Wales and the Midlands had joined the queen during her retreat. The chroniclers assert that the two armies together mustered nearly a hundred thousand men--an impossible figure, but one which vouches for the fact that Towton saw the largest hosts set against each other that ever met on an English battle-field.

[Sidenote: =Slaughter of Lancastrian leaders.=]

This desperate and bloody fight was waged on a bleak hillside during a blinding snow-storm, which half hid the combatants from each other. It lasted for a whole March day from dawn to dusk, and ended in the complete rout of the queen's army. Thousands of the Lancastrians were crushed to death or drowned at the passing of the little river Cock, which lay behind their line of battle. There fell on the field the Earl of Northumberland, the Lords Clifford, Neville, Dacre, Welles, and Mauley--all the chiefs of the Lancastrian party in the north. Courtney, Earl of Devon, and Butler, Earl of Wilts, were captured, and beheaded some time after the fight. No less than forty-two men of knightly rank shared their fate, so savage were King Edward and Warwick in avenging their fathers and brothers who had died at Wakefield.

Henry VI., with his wife and son, and the young Duke of Somerset, escaped from the field and fled into Scotland, where they were kindly received by the regents who ruled that land for the little King James III.

[Sidenote: =Rule of Edward.--Warwick the King-maker.=]

The carnage in and after Towton assured the crown to the house of York. Edward IV. was able to return to London and summon a Parliament, which formally acknowledged him as king, recognizing his hereditary right, and not going through any form of election. At his command they attainted the whole of the leaders of the Lancastrian party, both those who had fallen at Towton, and those who yet lived. Thinking his position sure, the young king then gave himself over to feasting and idleness, entrusting the completion of the war and the pacification of England to his cousin, the Earl of Warwick, whom men from this time forward called "the King-maker," because he had twice settled the fate of England, by winning the rule of the land for the house of York, at Northampton in 1460, and at Towton in 1461.

Edward IV. showed a strange mixture of qualities. On the battle-field he was a great commander, and in times of danger he was alert and dexterous. But when no perils were at hand, he became a reckless, heartless voluptuary, given to all manner of evil living and idle luxury, and letting affairs shift for themselves. For the first four years of his reign he handed over all cares of state to his cousin of Warwick, a busy capable man, who loved work and power, and strove not unsuccessfully to make himself the most popular man in England. Warwick called himself the friend of the commons, and used the vast wealth which he enjoyed as heir of all the broad lands of the Beauchamps, Nevilles, and Montacutes, to make himself partisans all over the country. He was self-confident and ambitious in the highest degree, and thoroughly enjoyed his position of chief minister to an idle and careless master. When he was at last deprived of it, we shall see that wounded pride could lead him to intrigue and treason.

[Sidenote: =Last efforts of the Lancastrians.=]

The four years 1461-64 were occupied by the final crushing out of the civil war by the strong hand of the King-maker. The task proved longer than might have been expected, owing to the desperate efforts which Queen Margaret made to maintain her son's cause. After Towton nothing remained to her but some castles in Northumberland and Wales, but she bought the aid of the Scots by ceding Berwick, and obtained men and money from Lewis XI., the young King of France. That astute prince thought that a weak and divided England was the best security for the safety of France, and doled out occasional help to the queen in consideration of a promise to surrender Calais.

Warwick captured all the Northumbrian strongholds of the house of Percy,--Bamborough, Alnwick, and Dunstanborough--in 1462. But the North was thoroughly disaffected to the new king, and they were twice retaken by treachery when the queen, with her French and Scottish friends, appeared before them. In her third campaign she was aided by a rising of all the Lancastrians who had submitted to King Edward and been pardoned by him, headed by the Duke of Somerset, the son of him who fell at St. Albans. But the two battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham (April-May, 1464) crushed the last desperate effort of the northern Lancastrians: at the former fell Sir Ralph Percy, the last chief of the Percy clan who clung to the lost cause; at the second the Duke of Somerset was taken and executed. Both fights were won by Lord Montagu, the younger brother and lieutenant of the great Earl of Warwick. By June, 1464, Warwick himself stamped out the last embers of resistance by the second capture of Bamborough, the sole surviving Lancastrian stronghold in England.

The King-maker returned in triumph to London, and could report to his master that he had completely pacified England, and had also concluded an advantageous treaty with the Scots. He proposed to finish his work by making terms with the King of France, the last supporter of the Lancastrian cause, with whom Margaret and her young son had sought refuge. For this purpose he advised King Edward to endeavour to ally himself with some princess among the kinswomen of Lewis XI.

[Sidenote: =Marriage of Edward.=]

It was from this point that the breach between Edward and his great minister began. When pressed to marry, the king announced--to the great surprise and annoyance of Warwick and the rest of his council--that he was married already. He had secretly espoused Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, a staunch Lancastrian, and widow of Sir John Grey, another Lancastrian, who had fallen at St. Albans. She was some years older than Edward, and had a family by her first husband. But her beauty had captivated the susceptible young king, and he had married her in secret, in order to avoid the opposition of his family and his councillors.

[Sidenote: =Breach between Warwick and Edward.=]

When compelled to acknowledge this unwise match, Edward made the best of the matter, brought his wife to court, conferred an earldom on her father, and showered patronage upon her brothers and sisters. When Warwick ventured to remonstrate, he showed that he had no mind to be ruled any more by his too-powerful cousin, and redoubled his favours to the Woodvilles. He gave his wife's sisters as brides to the greatest peers of the realm, and made her father his Lord Treasurer. This was not pique, but policy, for Edward had come to the conclusion that the Neville clan was too strong, and had resolved to surround himself by another family connection which should owe everything to his protection (1465).

For a time an open breach between the king and the King-maker was delayed, and Edward's throne seemed firmly set. His position was made surer by the capture of the old King Henry VI., who was caught in Lancashire, where he had been lurking obscurely for some time. When Edward had placed him in the Tower of London, he thought that all his troubles were over. He forgot the unhealthy condition of the realm, the blood-feuds that reigned in every county, and the general disorganization of society that had resulted from six years of civil war and from the wholesale transference of lands and property that had accompanied it. Above all, he overlooked the vast power that had fallen into the hands of the great military peers, and especially of his ambitious cousin Warwick.

In 1467 Edward put his strength to the trial by dismissing all the King-maker's friends from office, and by ignominiously disavowing an embassy to France on which he had sent his cousin. From sheer desire to humiliate the great earl, he concluded an alliance with Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, the deadly enemy of France, because he knew that Warwick was opposed to such a tie. He gave his sister Margaret to be the duke's wife, and made Warwick escort her on her embarkation for Flanders.

[Sidenote: =Conspiracy of Warwick.=]

The earl replied by setting treasonable intrigues on foot. He leagued himself with the king's younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, Shakespeare's "false, fleeting, perjured Clarence," a discontented young man of a very unamiable character. Warwick agreed to give his eldest daughter, the heiress of his vast estates, to the duke, and they swore to compel Edward to drive away the Woodvilles, and rule only under their guidance.

[Sidenote: =Defeat and capture of Edward.=]

Warwick and Clarence were completely successful in their plot. They secretly suborned a rebellion in Yorkshire, under Sir John Conyers, one of Warwick's relatives, who was aided by the Neville retainers, as well as by the discontented Lancastrians of the North. Conyers called himself "Robin of Redesdale," and gave himself out as the champion of the poor and the redresser of grievances--much as Cade had done fifteen years before. He beat the king's army at Edgecote Field, near Banbury, and then Warwick and Clarence appeared upon the scene and apprehended Edward at Olney. They beheaded Earl Rivers, the father of all the Woodvilles, and Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the king's chief confidant. After keeping Edward some months in durance, they released him, on his undertaking to govern according to their desires (1469).

[Sidenote: =Warwick driven from England.=]

But the spirit of Edward always rose in times of trouble; he cast off his sloth, and plotted against the plotters. Taking advantage of an ill-planned Lancastrian rising in Lincolnshire, he raised a great army, and suddenly turned it against his disloyal brother and cousin. Warwick and Clarence were chased all across England, from Manchester to Dartmouth, and barely escaped with their lives by taking ship to France.

[Sidenote: =He joins the Lancastrians.=]

Furious at his failure, the King-maker resolved to sacrifice all his prejudices and predispositions to revenge. He met the exiled Queen Margaret at Angers, and proposed to her to restore Henry VI. to the throne, and make an end of the ungrateful Edward. After long doubting, Margaret resolved to take his offer, though she hated him bitterly, and never trusted him. To bind the alliance, Edward, Prince of Wales, the queen's young son, was married to Anne Neville, the earl's second daughter.

[Sidenote: =Henry again king.=]

Then Warwick and Margaret joined to foment a rising in England. The numerous clan of the Nevilles were prepared to follow their chief, and the surviving Lancastrians were still ready to risk themselves in a new plan of insurrection. In the autumn of 1470, Warwick and Clarence landed in Devonshire and raised the standard of the imprisoned Henry VI. Their success showed the deep roots of the earl's popularity, and the precarious nature of King Edward's power. Simultaneous risings broke out all over England, and Edward, betrayed by most of his supporters, had to take ship and fly to Flanders. Henry VI. was drawn from his dungeon, and was for a few months again King of England.

[Sidenote: =Return of Edward.--Battle of Barnet.=]

But one more change of fortune was yet to come. Edward IV. borrowed men and money from his brother-in-law, Charles of Burgundy, and boldly returned to England in the spring of 1471. He landed in Yorkshire, called his partisans about him, and marched on London. Edward, when his mettle was up, was a captain of no mean ability. He completely out-generalled his enemy, and got between him and the capital. The Duke of Clarence, who had been entrusted with Warwick's western forces, betrayed his father-in-law, and joined his brother with the men whom he should have led to the earl's aid. London and the person of Henry VI. fell into King Edward's hands. Warwick came up too late, and had to fight the Yorkists at Barnet, a few miles north of the city. There he was completely defeated and slain, losing the battle mainly by the accident of a fog, which caused two divisions of his troops to attack one another. With Warwick fell his brother Lord Montagu, and most of the personal adherents on whom his power rested.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Tewkesbury.--End of the war.=]

But Edward was not yet secure. On the very day of Barnet, Queen Margaret landed at Portsmouth to raise the Lancastrians of the South in Warwick's aid. Hearing of his fall, she turned westward, gathering up a considerable force of adherents as she fled. But Edward rapidly pursued her, and by dint of superior pace in marching, caught her up at Tewkesbury. The queen's army was intercepted, and penned up with its back to the Severn, then destitute of a bridge. Unable to fly, the Lancastrians had to turn, and fought a desperate battle outside Tewkesbury. But King Edward never suffered a defeat in all his days; his courage and skill carried all before it, and the queen's army was annihilated. Her young son Edward, Prince of Wales, was slain in the pursuit, though he cried for quarter to "his brother Clarence." The last Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Devon, and all the surviving Lancastrian magnates fell on the field, or were beheaded next day by the victor. Queen Margaret was taken prisoner and thrown into confinement.

[Sidenote: =Murder of Henry.=]

On the death of Prince Edward, the old king Henry VI. was left the only survivor of the house of Lancaster. The ruthless heir of York resolved that he too should die, and on his return to London had the feeble and saintly prince murdered, by the hands of his young brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester (1471).

Thus ended the wars of the Roses, in the complete victory of York, and the extinction of the line of John of Gaunt, after it had sat for three generations on the English throne.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] The sons of Catherine of France, the widow of Henry V., by her second marriage with a Welsh knight named Owen Tudor.

[28] See p. 251.

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XIX. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF YORK

1471-1485.

[Sidenote: =The Lancastrian line.--Henry, Earl of Richmond.=]

All the males of the house of Lancaster had now fallen by the sword or the dagger, not only the last representatives of the elder and legitimate branch which had occupied the throne, but also the whole family of the Beauforts, the descendants of the natural sons of John of Gaunt, who had been legitimized by the grant of Richard II. Even in the female line there remained no one who showed any signs of disputing the claim of Edward IV. to the throne. The only descendants of John of Gaunt's first family who survived were the Kings of Spain and Portugal, who traced themselves back to John's eldest daughter; while the Beauforts were represented by Lady Margaret Beaufort, daughter of that Duke of Somerset who had died in 1444, the elder brother of the man who lost Normandy and fell at St. Albans. The Lady Margaret had married Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the half-brother of Henry VI., and by him had a single child, Henry, now Earl of Richmond by his father's decease. In Henry the Beaufort line had its last representative, but he was but a boy of fourteen, and was over-sea in Brittany, whither his mother had sent him for safety, while she herself had wedded as her second spouse Lord Stanley, a peer of strong Yorkist proclivities.

[Sidenote: =Secure rule of Edward IV.=]

Neither the distant Spaniards nor the boy Henry of Richmond were seriously thought of--even by themselves--as claimants to the English crown, and King Edward might for the rest of his life repose on the laurels of Tewkesbury and Barnet, and take his ease without troubling himself about further dynastic troubles.

He reigned for twelve years after his restoration in 1471, and did little that was noteworthy in that time. His love of ease gradually sapped all his energy; his life grew more and more extravagant and irregular, as he sank into all the grosser forms of self-indulgence. He completely ruined a handsome person and a robust constitution, and by the age of forty-two had declined into an unwieldy and bloated invalid.

[Sidenote: =Parliament rarely summoned.--Benevolences.=]

Edward's rule was not so bad for England as might have been expected from his very unamiable character. His second reign was comparatively free from bloodshed--if we except one dreadful crime committed on the person of his own brother. Perhaps he deserves little praise on this score, for both the Lancastrians and the partisans of Warwick had been practically exterminated by the slaughters of 1471. It is more to his credit that he bore lightly on the nation in the matter of taxation. His pockets were full of the plunder of the house of Neville and the old Lancastrian families, and, though self-indulgent, he was not a spendthrift. Indeed, he lived within his means, and seldom asked for a subsidy from Parliament. This moderation, however, does not imply that he was a constitutional sovereign. He ruled through a small clique of ministers and personal dependents, mostly members of his wife's family. He disliked parliamentary control so much that he seldom summoned a Parliament at all. For one whole period of five years (1478-82), he was rich enough to be able to refrain from calling one together. When he did want money, however, he did not shrink from raising it in the most objectionable manner, by compelling rich men to pay him forced loans, called "benevolences." It is fair to add that he generally paid his debts, and only owed £13,000 when he died. On the whole it may be said that his rule, though selfish and autocratic, was not oppressive. He gave the land peace in his later years, and any kind of quiet was an intense relief after the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses.

[Sidenote: =Revival of industry.=]

Commerce and industry began slowly to rally, and the wealth of the land seems to have suffered less than might have been expected. The bloodshed and confiscations of the unhappy years between 1455 and 1471 had fallen almost entirely on the nobles and their military retainers, and the cities and the yeomen had fared comparatively well. England had never been left desolate like France at the end of the Hundred Years' War.

[Sidenote: =Treaty of Picquigny.=]

Edward's foreign policy was feeble and uncertain. At first, after his restoration, he intended to attack France in alliance with his brother-in-law, Charles the Rash of Burgundy, who had given him shelter and succour during his day of exile. He raised an army and crossed the Channel, talking of recovering Normandy, and of asserting his right to the French crown. But Lewis XI., the wily King of France, offered to buy him off, proffering him a great sum down and an annual subsidy, if he would abandon the cause of Duke Charles. Edward was selfish and ungrateful enough to accept the offer with delight. He met King Lewis in a formal interview at Picquigny, in Picardy, and bargained to retire and remain neutral for 75,000 gold crowns paid down, and an annuity of 50,000 more so long as he lived. He also wrung a second 50,000 out of Lewis as a ransom for the unfortunate Queen Margaret of Anjou, a prisoner since the day of Tewkesbury, and stipulated that the Dauphin was to be married to his eldest daughter, the Princess Elizabeth (1475).

Edward came home with money in his purse, and found that the French annuity, which was punctually paid him, was most useful in enabling him to avoid having to call Parliaments. His betrayal of Charles of Burgundy was deeply resented by that prince, but Edward took no heed, and the duke was slain not long after, while waging war on the Swiss and the Duke of Lorraine.

[Sidenote: =Death of the Duke of Clarence.=]

Two years after the treaty of Picquigny occurred a tragedy which showed that Edward could still on occasion burst out into his old fits of cruelty. His brother George, Duke of Clarence, had been received back into his favour after betraying Warwick in 1471, and had been granted half the King-maker's estates as the portion of his wife, Isabel Neville. But Clarence presumed on his pardon, and seems to have thought that all his treachery to his brother in 1468-70 had been forgotten as well as forgiven. He was always a turbulent, unwise, and reckless young man, and provoked the king by his insolent sayings and open disobedience. Edward had twice to interfere with him, once for illegally seizing, and causing to be executed, a lady whom he accused of bewitching his wife Isabel, who died in childbirth; a second time for trying to wed without his brother's leave Mary of Burgundy, the heiress of Charles the Rash. When Clarence was again detected in intrigues with a foreign power--this time with Scotland--the king resolved to make an end of him. Suddenly summoning a Parliament, he appeared before it, and accused his brother of treason, though he gave no clear or definite account of Clarence's misdeeds. Awed by Edward's wrath and vehemence, the two houses passed a bill declaring the duke convicted of high treason. The king then condemned him, cast him into the Tower, and there had him secretly slain (1478).

[Sidenote: =Richard, Duke of Gloucester.=]

Edward for the future placed all his confidence in his youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who had served him faithfully all his life, had fled with him to Flanders in 1470, and had fought gallantly at Barnet and Tewkesbury. Gloucester had always been at odds with Clarence. He had married Anne Neville, the King-maker's younger daughter, widow of Edward Prince of Wales, who fell at Tewkesbury. In her right he claimed half the Neville lands, but Clarence had endeavoured to keep them from him, and had only been compelled to disgorge them under the king's stringent pressure. After 1478, Gloucester acted as his brother's chief councillor and representative, and showed himself a very capable and zealous servant.

[Sidenote: =Scottish war.--Recovery of Berwick.=]

It was Gloucester who was entrusted with the conduct of a campaign against Scotland, which was undertaken in 1482, and was the last important event of Edward's reign. This was a war not at all creditable to Edward, who intrigued with the rebellious brothers of James III., and picked a quarrel with the Scots on frivolous grounds. His real object was the recovery of Berwick, which had been in Scottish hands since Queen Margaret surrendered it in the year of Towton. Gloucester took Berwick, which after being lost for twenty years again became an English town. He also harried the Merse and Lothian, the Scots retiring before him without a battle. Soon after they made peace, ceding Berwick, and promising that their king's eldest son should marry Edward's daughter Cecily.

[Sidenote: =Death of Edward IV.=]

In the year following this treaty the king died, worn out in early middle age by his evil living and intemperance. He left a large family--two sons, Edward aged twelve and Richard aged nine, and five daughters, of whom Elizabeth, the eldest, had reached her eighteenth year.

The decease of Edward, though he was little regretted for himself, threw the nation into great fear and perplexity, for it was confronted with the dangerous problem of a minority, and no one knew who would succeed in grasping power as regent for the little king Edward V. It was almost inevitable that there should be a struggle for the post, for the late king's court had contained elements which were jealous of each other, and had only been kept from collision by Edward's personal influence.

[Sidenote: =Claimants for the Regency.=]

There were two persons to whom the regency might have fallen--the queen-dowager, Elizabeth Woodville, and the late king's brother, Richard of Gloucester. Elizabeth's ascendency implied that England would be ruled by her brothers and the sons of her first marriage--the lords Rivers and Dorset, Sir John Grey, and Sir Edward Woodville, all uncles or half-brothers to the little Edward V. Their rule would mean the banishment or suppression of Gloucester, with whom they were already at secret feud. In the same way, the rise of Gloucester to power would certainly mean a like fall for the Woodville clan.

[Sidenote: =Seizure of Earl Rivers.=]

At the moment of his accession the young king was in Shropshire, in charge of his uncle, Earl Rivers, a fact which put the queen's party at a great advantage. Rivers at once proceeded to bring his little nephew toward London, for his coronation, guarding him with a considerable armed force. On their way Edward and his cavalcade were encountered at Stony Stratford by Richard of Gloucester, who had also brought with him a considerable body of retainers from his Yorkshire estates.

The two parties met with profuse protestations of mutual friendship and esteem, but when Rivers' suspicions were lulled to sleep, Gloucester suddenly seized him, flung him into fetters, and sent him a prisoner to the north. Rivers' fate was shared by Sir Richard Grey, the little king's half-brother, and several more of their party.

[Sidenote: =Gloucester takes charge of the young king.=]

Gloucester then took charge of his nephew's person, and brought him up to London, where he summoned a Parliament to meet. The queen-dowager, on hearing that her brother Rivers and her son Richard Grey were cast into prison, knew that her chance of power was gone, and hastily took sanctuary at Westminster, with her youngest son, the little Duke of York, and her five daughters.

[Sidenote: =Schemes of Gloucester.=]

The nation was not displeased to learn that the regency would fall into the hands of Duke Richard, who was known as a good soldier, and had served his brother very faithfully; it much preferred him to the Queen and her relatives, who had a bad reputation for greed and arrogance. But it soon became evident that there was something more in the air than a mere transference of the regency. Gloucester not only filled all the places about the king with his own friends, but commenced to pack London with great bodies of armed men raised on his own estates, a precaution quite unnecessary when all his enemies were crushed. He also made the council of regency confer gifts of money, land, and offices, on a most unprecedented scale, upon his two chief confidants, Henry, Duke of Buckingham, and John, Lord Howard. They were evidently being bought for some secret purpose.

[Sidenote: =Execution of Lord Hastings.=]

Gloucester and his nephew the king had been in London more than a month, and the day of the young king's coronation was at hand, when suddenly Duke Richard showed his real intentions by a sharp and bloody stroke. On the 13th of June the Privy Council was meeting in the Tower of London on business of no great importance, and the duke showed himself smooth and affable as was his wont. After a space he withdrew, but ere long returned with a changed countenance and an aspect of gloom and anger. "What shall be done," he suddenly asked, "to them that compass the destruction of me, being so near of blood to the king, and Protector of this realm?" He was answered by Lord Hastings, the late king's best friend, a man of great courage and experience, who had shared in the victories of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and had held the highest offices ever since. "They are worthy of death," said the unsuspicious baron, "whoever they may be." Then Gloucester burst out, "It is my brother's wife," and baring his left arm--which all men knew to be somewhat deformed since his earliest years--he cried, "Look what yonder sorceress and Shore's wife and those who are of their council have done unto me with their witchcrafts." Hastings started at the mention of Shore's wife, for Jane Shore was his own mistress, and an accusation of witchcraft against her touched him nearly. "If they have so done, my lord," he faltered, "they are worthy of heinous punishment." "Answeredst thou me with ifs?" replied Duke Richard. "I tell thee they have done it, and that I will prove upon thy body, thou traitor." Then he smote upon the table, and armed men, whom he had posted without, rushed into the council chamber. Richard bade them seize Hastings, Lord Stanley, the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of Ely, all firm and loyal friends of Edward IV.

Hastings was borne out to the court of the Tower and beheaded then and there; the others were placed in bonds. This sudden blow at the young king's most faithful adherents dismayed the whole city; but Gloucester hastened to give out that he had detected Hastings and his friends in a plot against his life, and, as he had hitherto been always esteemed a loyal and upright prince, his words were half believed.

[Sidenote: =Gloucester gets possession of the Duke of York.=]

Richard's real object was to free himself from men whom he knew to be faithful to the young king, and unlikely to join in the dark plot which he was hatching. He next went with a great armed following to Westminster, where lay the queen-dowager and her children. Surrounding the sanctuary with guards, and then threatening to break in if he was resisted, he sent Cardinal Bourchier, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury, to persuade Elizabeth to give up her young son, Richard of York. Half in terror, half persuaded by the smooth prelate, who pledged his word that no harm should befall the boy, the Queen placed him in Bourchier's hands. Richard at once sent him to join his brother in the Tower (June 16).

Having both his brother's sons in his power, and having crushed his brother's faithful friends, Richard now proceeded to show his real intent. He was aiming at the crown, and had been preparing to seize it from the moment that his brother died. This was the meaning of the gifts that he had been showering around, and of the masses of armed men that he had gathered.

[Sidenote: =Doctor Shaw's sermon.=]

On the 22nd of June he laid his purpose open. His chaplain, Doctor Shaw, was set up to preach to the people at St. Paul's Cross a marvellous sermon, in which he argued that Richard was the rightful king, though both Edward IV. and Clarence, his two elder brothers, had left sons behind them. The Londoners were told to their great surprise that the late king's marriage with Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid. Not only had they been secretly and unlawfully married in an unconsecrated place, but Edward had been betrothed long before to Lady Eleanor Talbot, the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. He had never been given any clerical dispensation from this bond, and therefore he was not free to wed, and his sons were bastards. As to Clarence, he had been attainted, and the blood of his heir was corrupted by his father's attainder.

[Sidenote: =Gloucester declared king.=]

The Londoners were astonished at this strange argument; they kept silence and so disappointed Gloucester, who had come to the sermon in hopes to meet an enthusiastic reception. But two days later, a stranger scene was enacted at the Guildhall: the Duke of Buckingham, Gloucester's chief confederate, summoned together the mayor and council of London, and, repeating all the arguments that Doctor Shaw had urged, bade them salute Richard as king. A few timid voices shouted approval, and then Buckingham declared that he recognized the assent and good-will of the people. Next day there met the Parliament which should have witnessed the coronation of Edward V. They were summoned to St. Paul's, where Buckingham presented to them a long document, setting forth the evil government of Edward IV., denouncing his sons as bastards, and ending with a petition to Richard of Gloucester to take upon him as his right the title and estate of king. The Lords and Commons yielded their silent assent, apparently without a word of discussion or argument, and Buckingham then led a deputation to Duke Richard, who, with much feigned reluctance, assented to the petition and declared himself king. The only excuse for this lamentable weakness shown by the Houses is that they were quite unprepared for the coup d'état, and were overawed by the thousands of men-at-arms in the livery of Gloucester and Buckingham, who packed every street.

[Sidenote: =Execution of Rivers and Grey.=]

So Richard was crowned with great pomp if with little rejoicing, and thought that he had attained the summit of his desires. But his position was from the first radically unsound. He had seized the throne so easily because his antecedents had not prepared men for such sudden and unscrupulous action, so that there had been no time to organize any opposition to him. But the pious and modest duke had suddenly blossomed forth into a bloodthirsty tyrant. On the very day of his accession he had the unfortunate Rivers and Grey beheaded at Pontefract, and six weeks later he wrought a much darker deed.

[Sidenote: =Murder of the young princes.=]

After starting on a festal progress through the midlands, he sent back a secret mandate to London, authorizing the murder of his little nephews, Edward and Richard. They were smothered at dead of night in their prison in the Tower, and secretly buried by the assassins. Their graves were never discovered till 1674, when masons repairing the building came upon the bones of two young boys thrust away under a staircase. The murder took place between the 7th and 14th of August, 1483, but its manner and details were never certainly known.

[Sidenote: =Buckingham heads a rebellion.=]

The horror which the disappearance of the harmless, unoffending, young princes caused all over England, was far more dangerous to Richard than their survival could possibly have been. It turned away from him the hearts of all save the most callous and ruffianly of his supporters. Within two months of their death a dangerous rebellion had broken out. It was headed by Buckingham, the very man who had appeared with such shameful prominence at the time of Richard's usurpation. No one can say whether he was shocked by the murder, or whether he was merely discontented with the vast bribes that the new king had given him, and craved yet more. But we find him conspiring with the queen's surviving kindred, the wrecks of the Lancastrian party, and some faithful adherents of Edward IV., to overturn the usurper. They proposed to call over the Earl of Richmond, and to marry him to the princess Elizabeth, the eldest sister of the murdered princes, so blending the claims of Lancaster and York (October, 1483).

[Sidenote: =Defeat and death of Buckingham.=]

The insurrection broke out in a dozen different districts all over England, but it was foiled by King Richard's untiring energy and great military talent. He smote down his enemies before they were able to unite, and caught Buckingham, who had been separated from the bulk of his fellow-conspirators by a sudden rising of the Severn. The duke was executed at Salisbury, with such of his party as were taken, but the majority escaped over-sea and joined the Earl of Richmond.

This was destined to be the last gleam of success that Richard was to see. The rest of his short reign (1483-85) was a period of unrelieved gloom. No protestations of his good-will to England, and no attempts, however honest, to introduce just and even-handed government, availed him aught. He summoned a Parliament in 1484, and caused it to pass several laws of excellent intention, but he was not able to observe them himself, much less to enforce them on others. After having with great solemnity abolished the custom of raising benevolences, or forced loans, such as his brother Edward IV. had loved, Richard was compelled by the emptiness of his treasury to have recourse to them again, in less than a twelvemonth after he had disavowed the practice.

[Sidenote: =Death of the king's wife and son.=]

Personal misfortunes came upon the king in a way which seemed to mark the judgment of Heaven. Less than a year after he had slain his nephews, his only son Edward, Prince of Wales, died suddenly in the flower of his boyhood (1484). Eleven months later his wife, Queen Anne, the daughter of the King-maker, followed his son to the grave. His enemies accused him of having poisoned her, for all charges were possible against one who had proved himself so cruel and treacherous.

It is said that Richard thought for a moment, after his wife's death, of compelling his niece Elizabeth, Edward IV.'s eldest daughter, to marry him, in order to merge her claim to the crown in his own. But the mere rumour of the intention so shocked the people that all his own partisans urged him to disavow it, which he accordingly did. Being wifeless and childless, he nominated as his heir his nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, the son of his eldest sister.

[Sidenote: =Renewal of the rebellion.=]

Meanwhile the conspiracy which had failed to overthrow Richard in the autumn of 1483, was again gathering head. The Earl of Richmond had obtained loans of men and money from France, and was only waiting for the news that his friends were ready, to make a second attempt on England. With him were all the enemies of King Richard who had escaped death--Dorset, the son of Queen Elizabeth, Edward Woodville, Morton Bishop of Ely, and the few surviving Lancastrian exiles headed by the Earls of Pembroke and Oxford. They relied, not on their French soldiery, but on the secret allies who were to join them in England, and especially on Lord Stanley, the Earl of Richmond's father-in-law. That noble, though he had been arrested in company with the unfortunate Hastings, had been pardoned by King Richard, and entrusted by him with much power in Lancashire and Cheshire. Richard's court was honeycombed with treason: his own Attorney-General, Morgan of Kidwelly, kept Richmond informed of his plans and actions. Of all those about the king only a very few were really faithful to him.

Richard knew that treason was abroad, though he could not identify the traitors. He struck cruelly and harshly at all that he could reach; his ferocity may be gauged from the fact that he actually hung a Wiltshire gentleman named Collingbourn for no more than a copy of verses. The unfortunate rhymester had scoffed at Richard's three favourites, Lord Lovel, Sir William Catesby, and Sir Richard Ratcliffe, in the lines--

"The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel our Dog Rule all England under a Hog."

The Hog was Richard himself, whose favourite badge was a white boar.

[Sidenote: =Richmond lands in Wales.=]

In August, 1485, Henry of Richmond landed at Milford Haven, and was joined by many of the Welsh, among whom he was popular because of his own Welsh blood, that came from his father, Edmund Tudor. Advancing into England, he met with aid from the Talbots of Shrewsbury and many other midland gentry. Lord Stanley gathered a considerable army in Lancashire and Cheshire, but did not openly join the earl, because his son, Lord Strange, was in the king's hands, and would have been slain if Richard had been certain of his father's treachery.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Bosworth Field.=]

Advancing still further into the midlands, Henry met the king at Bosworth Field, near Leicester. Richard's army was twice the size of that of the earl. He must have conquered if his men had fought honestly for him. But when the battle was joined, the Earl of Northumberland, who led one wing of Richard's host, drew aside and would not fight, and presently Lord Stanley appeared with his contingent and charged the king in flank. The Yorkists began to disperse and fly, for they fought with little heart for their cruel master. But Richard himself would not turn back, though his attendants brought him his horse and besought him to save himself. He plunged into the thick of the fray, cut his way to Richmond's banner, and was there slain, fighting desperately to the last. With him fell his most faithful adherent, John Lord Howard, whom he had made Duke of Norfolk, and a few more of his chief captains. His favourite, Sir William Catesby, was taken prisoner and executed when the battle was over.

Richard's crown, beaten off his helmet by hard blows, was found in a hawthorn bush, and placed on Richmond's head by Lord Stanley, who then saluted him as king by the name of Henry VII. The dead monarch's body was taken to Leicester, and exposed naked before the people, but ultimately given honourable burial in the church of the Grey Friars.

[Sidenote: =Character of Richard III.=]

Thus ended the prince who had wrought so much evil, and won his way to power by such unscrupulous cunning and cruelty. He was only thirty-three when he was cut off. There have been worse kings in history, and had his title been good and his hands clean of the blood of his kinsmen, he might have filled the English throne not unworthily. But the consequences of his first fatal crime drove him deeper and deeper into wickedness, and he left a worse name behind him than any of his predecessors. The historians of the next generation drew his portrait even darker than he deserved, making him a hideous hunchback with a malignant distorted countenance. As a matter of fact, his deformity was only that his left arm was somewhat withered, and his left shoulder consequently lower than his right. His portraits show a face not unlike that of his brother Edward, but thinner and set in a nervous and joyless look of suspicion.

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XX. HENRY VII

1485-1509.

Henry Tudor had the good fortune to appear upon the scene as the avenger of all wrongs, those of the injured heirs of York no less than those of the long-exiled partisans of Lancaster. His victory had been won by the aid of Yorkists like Stanley, Dorset, and Edward Woodville, no less than by that of Oxford, Pembroke, the Courtenays, the Talbots, and other old Lancastrian names. It had been settled, long before he started, that he should blend the claims of the two rival houses by marrying the Princess Elizabeth, the eldest child of Edward IV. Thus he was able to pose as the reconciler of parties, and the bringer-in of peace and quiet. He proved his moderation by abstaining from bloodshed; he spared all the prisoners of Bosworth save three alone, and though he caused a bill of attainder to be passed against King Richard's chief partisans, no more executions followed. Henry's wise view of the situation was set forth by a law which he caused one of his Parliaments to approve at a subsequent date, to the effect that no man should ever be accused of treason for supporting the king de facto against the king de jure.

[Sidenote: =Title of Henry VII. to the throne.=]

It required all Henry's moderation and ability, however, to make firm his seat upon the throne. His title to it was very weak--only that of conquest in fact--for the legitimacy of the Beaufort line as representatives of John of Gaunt was more than doubtful. Henry refused to rest his claim to the crown merely on his marriage to Elizabeth of York; he would be no mere king-consort, and he deliberately put off the wedding until he had been crowned at Westminster, and had been saluted by Parliament as king in his own right. Having thus made his position clear, he married Elizabeth, six months after the day of Bosworth Field.

[Sidenote: =Character of Henry.=]

Henry Tudor was precisely the sovereign that England required to put an end to the general unrest and unruliness that were the legacy of the Wars of the Roses. He had not an amiable character; he was reserved and suspicious, a master of plot and intrigue, selfish in act and thought, prone to hoard money in and out of season, and ready to strike unmercifully when a stroke seemed necessary. But his brain ruled his passions, and from policy, if not from natural inclination, he was clement and slow to anger. He had some turn for art and letters, and was religious in his own self-centred way. His ministers were wisely chosen; the two chief of them, Bishops Morton and Foxe, were prudent and blameless men. If Empson and Dudley, his two financial advisers, were much hated by the people for their extortions, it was because their master bade them fill his coffers, and was content that they should bear the unpopularity which must otherwise have fallen on himself. He deliberately chose to have scapegoats, lest he should have to take the responsibility for the harsher side of his policy.

[Sidenote: =Lovel's rising.=]

[Sidenote: =Lambert Simnel.=]

The earlier years of Henry's reign were much disturbed by petty rebellions, the last ground-swell of discontent and lawlessness which lingered on after the great tempest of the Wars of the Roses had abated. Richard III. had left behind him a few devoted partisans who had resolved never to submit; the chief were John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, who had been declared heir to the throne by the late king, and Lord Lovel, the sole survivor of the three favourites who had "ruled all England under the Hog." They were bold reckless men, ready to risk all for ambition and revenge. Before Henry had been a year on the throne, Lovel secretly collected a band of desperate friends, and tried to kidnap him while he was visiting York. Foiled in this scheme, Lovel fled to Flanders, where he was sheltered by Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the widowed sister of King Edward IV. With her and with Lincoln he concerted a second plan of rebellion. They resolved to try to rouse the wrecks of the Yorkist party in the name of Edward, Earl of Warwick, the son of Clarence, who had been put to death in 1478, and the only male heir of the house of York. This prince was in King Henry's hands, safely kept in custody in the Tower of London. Till they could liberate him they resolved to make an impostor assume his name and title. So they instructed a clever boy named Lambert Simnel, the son of an organ-maker at Oxford, to act the part of the young Clarence, reasoning that Henry would not dare to put the real prince to death, but would keep him alive in order to make the imposture clear, and so they could free the real Clarence if they succeeded, and dismiss the false one when he was no longer needed.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Stoke.=]

Ireland had always been friendly to the house of York, and there was no one there who knew the young prince or could detect his counterfeit. So Lambert Simnel was first sent thither, to try the temper of the Irish, giving out that he had just escaped from the Tower. The Earl of Kildare and other prominent Anglo-Irish barons were wholly cozened by the young impostor, and saluted him as king. Four thousand men under Lord Thomas Fitzgerald were raised to aid him; Lincoln and Lovel joined him with 2000 veteran German mercenaries under a captain named Martin Schwartz. They crossed to England and landed in Lancashire, where a few desperate Yorkists joined them. Then advancing inland, they met King Henry at Stoke, near Newark. But their ill-compacted army was routed, the Germans and Irish were cut to pieces, and Lincoln, Schwartz, and Fitzgerald all slain. Lovel escaped to his manor of Minster Lovel, in Oxfordshire, and lurked in a secret chamber, where he was starved to death in hiding. Lambert Simnel fell into the hands of the king, who treated him with contempt instead of slaying him. He lived many years after as a cook in the royal kitchen. The rebels in Ireland were pardoned on submission, for Henry was loth to stir up further troubles in that distressful country (1488).

[Sidenote: =French war.--Brittany united to France.=]

Thinking perhaps to turn the attention of the nation from domestic troubles by the old expedient of a war with France, the king in the next year joined in a struggle which was raging in Brittany. Charles VIII., the son of Lewis XI., was trying to annex the duchy, whose heiress was a young girl, the Duchess Anne. Henry agreed to aid this ancient ally of England, and sent over troops both to Brittany and to Calais. The war went not unprosperously at first, and the garrison of Calais won a considerable victory at Dixmuide, in Flanders. But after a time the Bretons grew weary of the struggle, and the Duchess Anne surrendered herself to King Charles, and became his wife (1491). Thus the last of the great French feudal states was united to the crown. For the future the English could get no support from them, and as a consequence all English invasions of France in the ensuing age met with little good fortune. There was never again any chance of dismembering a divided France, such as that with which Edward III. and Henry V. had to deal. The king recognized his powerlessness, and gladly made peace with Charles VIII. on receiving a subsidy of 745,000 crowns, a better bargain than Edward IV. had made under similar circumstances at Picquigny (1492).

[Sidenote: =Perkin Warbeck.=]

Henry was wise to make an early and profitable peace, for new troubles were brewing for him at home. News came from Ireland that a young man was secretly harboured at Cork, who gave himself out to be Richard of York, the younger of the two princes smothered in the Tower nine years before. When Henry ordered his arrest, he fled to Flanders and took refuge with Duchess Margaret, who at once recognized him as her true nephew, and gave him a royal reception and a safe refuge for two years. There is no doubt, however, that he was really Perkin Warbeck, the son of a citizen of Tournay, who had plunged very young into a life of adventure, and hoped to gain something by fishing in the troubled waters of English politics. By Margaret's help Perkin engaged in secret intrigues with the few Yorkists who yet survived in England. But King Henry traced out all his plots, and beheaded Lord Fitzwalter and Sir William Stanley, who had listened to his tempting. Stanley's case was a bad one: he had betrayed Richard III. at Bosworth--like his brother Lord Stanley--and had been lavishly rewarded by Henry VII., yet would not keep faithful to his new master because he was refused an earldom (1495).

Though his friends had been detected, the pretender persisted in venturing an attack on England. With 2000 men raised with money lent him by Duchess Margaret, he tried to land in Kent; but the Kentishmen rose and drove him off. He then sailed to Ireland, where--like his predecessor Lambert Simnel--he met with some support. But hearing that James IV. of Scotland was on the brink of war with the English, he soon passed over to the Scottish court, where he was received with royal state. James IV. married him to his cousin, Lady Catherine Gordon, and placed him at the head of an expedition with which he was to try and raise rebellion in Yorkshire, where the supporters of the house of York were still supposed to be numerous. But when Perkin crossed the Border, not an Englishman would join him, and he was obliged to return ignominiously to Scotland. From thence the restless adventurer soon set out on a new quest.

[Sidenote: =Cornish rising.=]

The heavy taxation which King Henry raised from his subjects to pay for an army to resist the Scots had provoked much murmuring in some parts of England. Most of all had it been resented in the remote shire of Cornwall, where the local discontent took the form of armed gatherings to resist the taxes. Flammock, a lawyer, and Michael Joseph, a farrier of Bodmin, two turbulent demagogues, put themselves at the head of the rioters, and persuaded them to march on London, there to expostulate with the king. Lord Audley, an unwise south-country baron, joined their company, and led them as far as Blackheath, close to the gates of London. From thence they sent the king messages, bidding him to dismiss his extortionate ministers, and remove his taxes. Henry was taken by surprise, as he had just sent off his army against the Scots, but he promptly recalled the expedition and gave battle to the Cornishmen. The fight of Blackheath ended in their complete discomfiture: Audley, Flammock, and Joseph were taken and executed, but the king let the rest go away unharmed, as mere deluded tools of their leaders (June, 1497).

[Sidenote: =Failure of Warbeck.=]

Warbeck had heard of the rising of the Cornishmen, and thought that he discerned in it his best opportunity of making head against King Henry. He landed at Whitesand Bay, but found that he was too late, as the insurgents had already been defeated and scattered. But he rallied around him the wrecks of their bands, and made an attack on Exeter. Being foiled by the stout resistance of the citizens, and hearing that the king was coming against him with a great host, the pretender suddenly lost heart, left his men in the lurch, and fled away to take sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu (August, 1497).

[Sidenote: =Warbeck and the Earl of Warwick executed.=]

King Henry showed extraordinary moderation in dealing with the insurgents: he fined Cornwall heavily, but ordered no executions. He promised Warbeck his life if he would leave his sanctuary, and when the impostor gave himself up, he was merely placed in honourable custody in the Tower. He was only made to publish the confession of his fraud, and to give a full account of his real life and adventures. Perkin might have lived to old age, like Lambert Simnel, if he had been content to keep quiet. But he made two attempts to escape from England, which roused the king's wrath. On the second occasion he persuaded another State prisoner, Edward of Clarence, the true heir of York, to fly with him; but they were detected, and the king, provoked at last, executed Warbeck, and made the unfortunate Prince Edward share his fate (1499). Perkin had merited his end, but it is impossible to pardon Henry's dealings with the unlucky heir of Clarence, who had been a prisoner ever since Richard III. sent him to the Tower sixteen years before. There is no doubt that Henry was glad of the excuse to lop off another branch from the stem of York. Noting this fact, the next heir of that line, Edmund de la Pole, brother of the Earl of Lincoln who fell at Stoke, wisely fled from England, lest his royal blood should be his ruin.

[Sidenote: =Suppression of livery and maintenance.=]

After Warbeck's failure, King Henry was for the future free from the danger of dynastic risings against the house of Tudor. He was able to develop his policy both at home and abroad without any further danger of insurrections. In domestic matters he strove very successfully to put an end to the turbulence which had been left behind from the times of the civil war. His chief weapon was legislation against "livery and maintenance," the evil custom by which a great lord gave his badge to his neighbours, and undertook to support them in their quarrels and lawsuits. This abuse of local influence was sternly suppressed, and no man, however great, was permitted to keep about him more than a limited number of liveried retainers. It is on record that Henry punished his oldest friend and supporter, the Earl of Oxford, for breaking this rule. On the occasion of a royal visit to his castle of Hedingham, Oxford received the king at the head of many hundreds of his followers, all clad in the de Vere livery, and was promptly made to pay a heavy fine for his ostentation.

[Sidenote: =The Star Chamber founded.=]

Henry established a special tribunal for dealing with the offences of men, whose power and influence might foil and divert the ordinary course of justice. This was the new and unconstitutional "Court of Star Chamber," a committee of trusted members of the Privy Council, which met in a room at Westminster whose roof was decorated with a pattern of stars. The court was useful at the time, but grew to be a serious grievance in later days, because it stood over and above the ordinary law of the land, and was used to carry out any illegal punishment that the king might devise.

[Sidenote: =Reduction of the surviving barons.=]

By these arbitrary means, Henry Tudor succeeded in taming the survivors of the baronage, and in reducing them to such a state of subjection to the crown as England had never before seen. Their spirit had already been broken by the endless slaughters and confiscations of the Wars of the Roses, and the majority of them were well content to surrender the anarchical independence which they had enjoyed of late, in return for a quiet and undisturbed security for life and land. It is to be noticed that many of the oldest and most powerful houses had now disappeared. By the year 1500 there only survived of the older and greater peerages those of Northumberland, Westmoreland, Arundel, Buckingham, Devon, and Oxford, to which may be added the duchy of Norfolk, afterwards restored to the Howards by Henry VIII. If we find other ancient titles borne by men of the Tudor time, we must remember that the holders were not the heirs of the lines whose names they bore, and did not possess the vast estates that had made those titles all-important. The Warwicks or Somersets, the Suffolks or Herefords of the sixteenth century are the mere creatures of Tudor caprice.

[Sidenote: =Foreign policy of Henry.=]

A few words are necessary to explain the tiresome and difficult subject of the foreign policy of Henry VII. We have seen that his venture of war with France in 1491 proved unfortunate, and he never repeated it. For the future he preferred to hoard money at home, rather than to lavish it on continental wars. But if he never fought again, he was always threatening to fight, winning what advantage he could by the menace of joining one or other of the parties which then divided Europe. The main troubles of continental politics in his period were caused by the restless ambition of the Kings of France. Freed from the lingering wars with England which had previously been their bane, the French monarchs had turned southward, and were striving to conquer Italy. Charles VIII. and Lewis XII., the two contemporaries of King Henry, spent all their energy in the attempt to annex the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan, to which they had some shadowy claim of succession. Their schemes called into the field the sovereigns whose position would have been imperilled by the French conquest of Italy--the Emperor, Maximilian of Austria, and Ferdinand and Isabella, the sovereigns of Aragon and Castile, whose marriage had created the united kingdom of Spain.

[Sidenote: =The Netherlands.=]

If the struggle had raged in Italy alone, Henry VII. might have viewed it with a philosophic indifference. But it also involved the Netherlands, the near neighbour of England, and the chief market for English trade. The Netherlands were at this moment in the hands of Philip of Austria, the son of the emperor, for Maximilian had married Mary of Burgundy, the heiress of the great dukes who had ruled in the Low Countries, and Philip was their only son.[29] Henry wished to keep on good terms with his neighbours in Flanders, more especially because it was there that the Yorkist refugees found shelter. Not only had the dowager Duchess Margaret aided them from thence, but Maximilian, while acting as regent in the Netherlands for his young son Philip, had given Perkin Warbeck much assistance.

[Sidenote: =The "Great Intercourse."=]

Henry's policy was rendered difficult by the incurable perverseness of the emperor and his son, the Duke Philip, but he managed to keep out of war with them, and even obtained from them the "Great Intercourse," a commercial treaty with the Low Countries which was of much use to England, as it provided for the free entry of English goods into Flanders, and of Flemish goods into England, and stipulated that the king and the duke should join together to put down piracy in the Narrow Seas. Some years later Henry was enabled to wring some further advantages out of Duke Philip, in a not very honourable way. The duke was sailing to Spain, when his ship was driven into Weymouth by a storm. The king made him welcome and entertained him royally, but would not suffer him to depart till he had promised to surrender the Yorkist refugee, Edmund de la Pole,[30] who was then staying in Flanders, and to still further extend the terms of the "Great Intercourse" to the benefit of English merchants (1506).

[Sidenote: =Marriage of the Prince of Wales to Catherine of Aragon.=]

With Ferdinand of Aragon, the astute and unscrupulous King of Spain, Henry was able to get on better terms than with his capricious neighbour in Flanders, since both were guided purely by self-interest. The two wily kings understood and respected each other, and resolved to ally themselves by a marriage. Accordingly Arthur, Prince of Wales, Henry's eldest son, was wedded to Catherine, the younger daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. They were both mere children, and the prince died before he had reached the age of seventeen. But Ferdinand resolved that the alliance should not drop through, and the Princess Catherine was passed on to Henry, Arthur's younger brother and successor in the title of Prince of Wales. He was some years younger than his bride, and the marriage, as we shall presently see, was a most unhappy one. With his son's wife the English king received a large but unpunctually paid dowry.

[Sidenote: =Scotland and Ireland.=]

King Henry's long diplomatic intrigues with Spain and the Emperor brought him no very great profit in the end. But it was otherwise with his dealings with his neighbours in the British Isles. After the defeat of Perkin Warbeck, he made an advantageous peace with James IV. of Scotland, who married his daughter Margaret, and became his firm ally. For the last ten years of his reign Scotland gave no trouble. The still more difficult task of pacifying Ireland was also carried out with considerable success. Henry dealt very gently with the Irish chiefs, in spite of the treasonable support that they had given both to Simnel and to Warbeck. His plan of ruling the country was to enlist in his favour the Earl of Kildare, the most powerful of the Irish barons, by making him Lord Deputy, and entrusting him with very full control over the rest. "All Ireland cannot rule the Earl of Kildare," it had been said; but the king answered, "Then the Earl of Kildare shall rule all Ireland."

[Sidenote: =Poynings' Act.=]

This policy was attended by a fair measure of success; if turbulent himself, the earl at least put down all other riotous chiefs. Henry's reign was also notable in Ireland for the passing of Poynings' Act at the Parliament of Drogheda. This put the Irish legislature in strict subordination to England, by providing that all laws brought before it must previously receive the assent of the king and his English Privy Council (1495).

Henry Tudor died before his time in 1509, having not yet reached the age of fifty-four. He left behind him a land peaceful and orderly, a nobility tamed and reduced to obedience, and a treasury filled with £1,800,000 in hard cash--the best possible witness to his wisdom and ability, for no king of England had ever built up such a hoard before. If his aims had been selfish and his hand hard, he had at any rate given England "strong governance," and saved her from sinking into anarchy.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] See table on p. 287.

[30] Seven years later, Henry VIII. executed this unhappy prisoner in cold blood, and for no new offence.

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XIII. EDWARD III…

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XIII. EDWARD III

XIV. RICHARD II

XV. HENRY IV

XVI. HENRY V

XVII. THE LOSS OF FRANCE

XVIII. THE WARS OF THE ROSES

XIX. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF YORK

XX. HENRY VII