For the succeeding 56 years John's son, Henry III., was King of
England. While this vain, irresolute, ostentatious king was extorting
money for his ambitious designs and extravagant pleasures, and
struggling to get back the pledges given in the Great Charter, new and
higher forces, to which he gave no heed, were at work in his kingdom.
Paris at this time was the centre of a great intellectual revival,
brought about by the Crusades. We have seen that through the despised
Jew, at the time of the Conquest, a higher civilization was brought
into England. Along with his hoarded gold came knowledge and culture,
which he had obtained from the Saracen. Now, these germs had been
revived by direct contact with the sources of ancient knowledge in {52}
the East during the Crusades; and while the long mental torpor of
Europe was rolling away like mist before the rising sun, England felt
the warmth of the same quickening rays, and Oxford took on a new life.
It was not the stately Oxford of to-day, but a rabble of roystering,
revelling youths, English, Welsh, and Scotch, who fiercely fought out
their fathers' feuds.
They were a turbulent mob, who gave advance opinion, as it were, upon
every ecclesiastical or political measure, by fighting it out on the
streets of their town, so that an outbreak at Oxford became a sort of
prelude to every great political movement.
Impossible as it seems, intellectual life grew and expanded in this
tumultuous atmosphere; and while the democratic spirit of the
University threatened the king, its spirit of free intellectual inquiry
shook the Church.
The revival of classical learning, bringing streams of thought from old
Greek and Latin fountains, caused a sudden expansion. It was like the
discovery of an unsuspected and greater world, with a body of new
truth, {53} which threw the old into contemptuous disuse. A spirit of
doubt, scepticism, and denial, was engendered. They comprehended now
why Abelard had claimed the "supremacy of reason over faith," and why
Italian poets smiled at dreams of "immortality." Then, too, the new
culture compelled respect for infidel and for Jew. Was it not from
their impious hands, that this new knowledge of the physical universe
had been received?
Roger Bacon drank deeply from these fountains, new and old, and
struggled like a giant to illumine the darkness of his time, by
systematizing all existing knowledge. His "Opus Majus" was intended to
bring these riches to the unlearned. But he died uncomprehended, and
it was reserved for later ages to give recognition to his stupendous
work, wrought in the twilight out of dimly comprehended truth.
Pursued by the dream of recovering the French Empire, lost by his
father, and of retracting the promises given in the Charter, Henry III.
spent his entire reign in conflict with the barons and the people, who
were {54} closely drawn together by the common danger and rallied to
the defence of their liberties under the leadership of Simon de
Montfort.
It was at the town of Oxford that the great council of barons and
bishops held its meetings. This council, which had long been called
"Parliament" (from _parler_), in the year 1265 became for the first
time a representative body, when Simon de Montfort summoned not alone
the lords and bishops--but two citizens from every city, and two
burghers from every borough. A Rubicon was passed when the merchant,
and the shopkeeper, sat for the first time with the noble and the
bishops in the great council. It was thirty years before the change
was fully effected, it being in the year 1295, a little more than 600
years ago, that the first true Parliament met. But the "House of
Lords" and the germ of the "House of Commons," existed in this assembly
at Oxford in 1265, and a government "of the people, for the people, by
the people," had commenced.
Edward I., the son and successor of Henry III., not only graciously
confirmed {55} the Great Charter, but added to its privileges. His
expulsion of the Jews, is the one dark blot on his reign.
He conquered North Wales, the stronghold where those Keltic Britons,
the Welsh, had always maintained a separate existence; and as a
recompense for their wounded feelings bestowed upon the heir to the
throne, the title "_Prince of Wales_."
Westminster Abbey was completed at this time and began to be the
resting-place for England's illustrious dead. The invention of
gunpowder, which was to make iron-clad knights a romantic tradition,
also belongs to this period, which saw too, the conquest of Scotland;
and the magic stone supposed to have been Jacob's pillow at Bethel, and
which was the Scottish talisman, was carried to Westminster Abbey and
built into a coronation-chair, which has been used at the crowning of
every English sovereign since that time.
Scottish liberties were not so sacrificed by this conquest as had been
the Irish. The Scots would not be slaves, nor would they stay
conquered without many a struggle.
{56}
Robert Bruce led a great rebellion, which extended into the succeeding
reign, and Bruce's name was covered with glory by his great victory at
Bannockburn (1314).
We need not linger over the twenty years during which Edward II., by
his private infamies, so exasperated his wife and son that they brought
about his deposition, which was followed soon after by his murder; and
then by a disgraceful regency, during which the Queen's favorite,
Mortimer, was virtually king. But King Edward III. commenced to rule
with a strong hand. As soon as he was eighteen years old he summoned
the Parliament. Mortimer was hanged at Tyburn, and his queen-mother
was immured for life.
We have turned our backs upon Old England. The England of a
representative Parliament and a House of Commons, of ideals derived
from a wider knowledge, the England of a Westminster Abbey, and
gunpowder, and cloth-weaving, is the England we all know to-day.
Vicious kings and greed of territory, and lust of power, will keep the
road from being a smooth one, {57} but it leads direct to the England
of Edward VII.; and 1906 was roughly outlined in 1327, when Edward III.
grasped the helm with the decision of a master.
After completing the subjection of Scotland he invaded France,--the
pretext of resisting her designs upon the Netherlands, being merely a
cover for his own thirst for territory and conquest. The victory over
the French at Crecy, 1346, (and later of Poitiers,) covered the warlike
king and his son, Edward the "Black Prince," with imperishable renown.
Small cannon were first used at that battle. The knights and the
archers laughed at the little toy, but found it useful in frightening
the enemies' horses.
Edward III. covered England with a mantle of military glory, for which
she had to pay dearly later. He elevated the kingship to a more
dazzling height, for which there have also been some expensive
reckonings since. He introduced a new and higher dignity into nobility
by the title of Duke, which he bestowed upon his sons; the great
landholders or barons, having until that time constituted a body in
which all were peers. {58} He has been the idol of heroic England.
But he awoke the dream of French conquest, and bequeathed to his
successors a fatal war, which lasted for 100 years.
The "Black Prince" died, and the "Black Death," a fearful pestilence,
desolated a land already decimated by protracted wars. The valiant old
King, after a life of brilliant triumphs, carried a sad and broken
heart to the grave, and Richard II., son of the heroic Prince Edward,
was king.
This last of the Plantagenets had need of great strength and wisdom to
cope with the forces stirring at that time in his kingdom, and was
singularly deficient in both. The costly conquests of his grandfather,
were a troublesome legacy to his feeble grandson. Enormous taxes
unjustly levied to pay for past glories, do not improve the temper of a
people. A shifting of the burden from one class to another arrayed all
in antagonisms against each other, and finally, when the burden fell
upon the lowest order, as it is apt to do, it rose in fierce rebellion
under the leadership of Wat Tyler, a blacksmith (1381).
Concessions were granted and quiet {59} restored, but the people had
learned a new way of throwing off injustice. There began to be a new
sentiment in the air. Men were asking why the few should dress in
velvet and the many in rags. It was the first English revolt against
the tyranny of wealth, when people were heard on the streets singing
the couplet--
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
As in the times of the early Saxon kings, the cause breeding
destruction was the widening distance between the king and the people.
In those earlier times the people unresistingly lapsed into decadence,
but the Anglo-Saxon had learned much since then, and it was not so safe
to degrade him and trample on his rights.
Then, too, John Wickliffe had been telling some very plain truths to
the people about the Church of Rome, and there was developing a
sentiment which made Pope and Clergy tremble. There was a spirit of
inquiry, having its centre at Oxford, looking into the title-deeds of
the great ecclesiastical {60} despotism. Wickliffe heretically claimed
that the Bible was the one ground of faith, and he added to his heresy
by translating that Book into simple Saxon English, that men might
learn for themselves what was Christ's message to man.
Luther's protest in the 16th Century was but the echo of Wickliffe's in
the 14th,--against the tyranny of a Church from which all spiritual
life had departed, and which in its decay tightened its grasp upon the
very things which its founder put "behind Him" in the temptation on the
mountain, and aimed at becoming a temporal despotism.
Closely intermingled with these struggles was going on another,
unobserved at the time. Three languages held sway in England--Latin in
the Church, French in polite society, and English among the people.
Chaucer's genius selected the language of the people for its
expression, as also of course, did Wickliffe in his translation of the
Bible. French and Latin were dethroned, and the "King's English"
became the language of the literature and speech of the English nation.
{61}
He would have been a wise and great King who could have comprehended
and controlled all the various forces at work at this time. Richard
II. was neither. This seething, tumbling mass of popular discontents
was besides only the groundwork for the personal strifes and ambitions
which raged about the throne. The wretched King, embroiled with every
class and every party, was pronounced by Parliament unfit to reign, the
same body which deposed him, giving the crown to his cousin Henry of
Lancaster (1399), and the reign of the Plantagenets was ended.
{62}