The new king did not inherit the throne; he was _elected_ to it. He
was an arbitrary creation of Parliament. The Duke of Lancaster,
Henry's father (John of Gaunt), was only a younger son of Edward III.
According to the strict rules of hereditary succession, there were two
others with claims superior to Henry's. Richard Duke of York, his
cousin, claimed a double descent from the Duke Clarence and also from
the Duke of York, both sons of Edward III.
This led later to the dreariest chapter in English history, "the Wars
of the Roses."
It is an indication of the enormous increase in the strength of
Parliament, that such an exercise of power, the creating of a king, was
possible. Haughty, arrogant kings bowed submissively to its will.
Henry could not make laws nor impose {63} taxes without first summoning
Parliament and obtaining his subjects' consent. But corrupting
influences were at work which were destined to cheat England out of her
liberties for many a year.
The impoverishment of the country to pay for war and royal
extravagances, had awakened a troublesome spirit in the House of
Commons. Cruelty to heretics also, and oppressive enactments were
fought and defeated in this body. The King, clergy, and nobles, were
drawing closer together and farther away from the people, and were
devising ways of stifling their will.
If the King might not resist the will of Parliament, he could fill it
with men who would not resist his; so, by a system of bribery and force
in the boroughs, the House of Commons had injected into it enough of
the right sort to carry obnoxious measures. This was only one of the
ways in which the dearly bought liberties were being defeated.
Henry IV., the first Lancastrian king, lighted the fires of persecution
in England. The infamous "Statute of Heresy" was {64} passed 1401.
Its first victim was a priest who was thrown to the flames for denying
the doctrine of transubstantiation.
Wickliffe had left to the people not a party, but a sentiment. The
"Lollards," as they were called, were not an organization, but rather a
pervading atmosphere of revolt, which naturally combined with the
social discontent of the time, and there came to be more of hate than
love in the movement, which was at its foundation a revolt against
inequality of condition. As in all such movements, much that was
vicious and unwise in time mingled with it, tending to give some excuse
for its repression. The discarding of an old faith, unless at once
replaced by a new one, is a time fraught with many dangers to Society
and State.
Such were some of the forces at work for fourteen brief years while
Henry IV. wore the coveted crown, and while his son, the roystering
"Prince Hal," in the new character of King (Henry V.) lived out his
brief nine years of glory and conquest.
France, with an insane King, vicious Queen Regent, and torn by the
dissensions {65} of ambitious Dukes, had reached her hour of greatest
weakness, when Henry V. swept down upon her with his archers, and broke
her spirit by his splendid victory at Agincourt; then married her
Princess Katharine, and was proclaimed Regent of France, The rough
wooing of his French bride, immortalized by Shakespeare, throws a
glamour of romance over the time.
But an all-subduing King cut short Henry's triumphs. He was stricken
and died (1422), leaving an infant son nine months old, who bore the
weight of the new title, "King of England and France," while Henry's
brother, the Duke of Bedford, reigned as Regent.
Then it was, that by a mysterious inspiration, Joan of Arc, a child and
a peasant, led the French army to the besieged City of Orleans, and the
crucial battle was won.
Charles VII. was King. The English were driven out of France, and the
Hundred Years' War ended in defeat (1453). England had lost Aquitaine,
which for two hundred years (since Henry II.) had been hers, {66} and
had not a foot of ground on Norman soil.
The long shadow cast by Edward III. upon England was deepening. A
ruinous war had drained her resources and arrested her liberties; and
now the odium of defeat made the burdens it imposed intolerable. The
temper of every class was strained to the danger point. The wretched
government was held responsible, followed, as usual, by impeachments,
murders, and impotent outbursts of fury.
While, owing to social processes long at work, feudalism was in fact a
ruin, a mere empty shell, it still seemed powerful as ever; just as an
oak, long after its roots are dead, will still carry aloft a waving
mass of green leafage. The great Earl of Warwick when he went to
Parliament was still followed by 600 liveried retainers. But when Jack
Cade led 20,000 men in rebellion at the close of the French war, they
were not the serfs and villeinage of other times, but farmers and
laborers, who, when they demanded a more economical expenditure of
royal revenue, freedom at elections, and the removal {67} of
restrictions on their dress and living, knew their rights, and were not
going to give them up without a struggle.
But the madness of personal ambition was going to work deeper ruin and
more complete wreck of England's fortunes. We have seen that by the
interposition of Parliament, the House of Lancaster had been placed on
the throne contrary to the tradition which gave the succession to the
oldest branch, which Richard, the Duke of York, claimed to represent;
his claim strengthened by a double descent from Edward III. through his
two sons, Lionel and Edward.
For twenty-one years, (1450-1471) these descendants of Edward III. were
engaged in the most savage war, for purely selfish and personal ends,
with not one noble or chivalric element to redeem the disgraceful
exhibition of human nature at its worst. Murders, executions,
treacheries, adorn a network of intrigue and villany, which was enough
to have made the "White" and the "Red Rose" forever hateful to English
eyes.
The great Earl of Warwick led the White Rose of York to victory,
sending the {68} Lancastrian King to the tower, his wife and child
fugitives from the Kingdom, and proclaimed Edward, (son of Richard Duke
of York, the original claimant, who had been slain in the conflict),
King of England.
Then, with an unscrupulousness worthy of the time and the cause,
Warwick opened communication with the fugitive Queen, offering her his
services, betrothed his daughter to the young Edward, Prince of Wales,
took up the red Lancastrian rose from the dust of defeat,--brought the
captive he had sent to the tower back to his throne--only to see him
once more dragged down again by the Yorkists--and for the last time
returned to captivity; leaving his wife a prisoner and his young son
dead at Tewksbury, stabbed by Yorkist lords. Henry VI. died in the
Tower, "mysteriously," as did all the deposed and imprisoned Kings;
Warwick was slain in battle, and with Edward IV. the reign of the House
of York commenced.
Such in brief is the story of the "Wars of the Roses" and of the Earl
of Warwick, the "King Maker."
At the close of the Wars of the Roses, {69} feudalism was a ruin. The
oak with its dead roots had been prostrated by the storm. The imposing
system had wrought its own destruction. Eighty Princes of the blood
royal had perished, and more than half of the Nobility had died on the
field or the scaffold, or were fugitives in foreign lands. The great
Duke of Exeter, brother-in-law to a King, was seen barefoot begging
bread from door to door.
By the confiscation of one-fifth of the landed estate of the Kingdom,
vast wealth poured into the King's treasury. He had no need now to
summon Parliament to vote him supplies. The clergy, rendered feeble
and lifeless from decline in spiritual enthusiasm, and by its blind
hostility to the intellectual movement of the time, crept closer to the
throne, while Parliament, with its partially disfranchised House of
Commons, was so rarely summoned that it almost ceased to exist. In the
midst of the general wreck, the Kingship towered in solitary greatness.
Edward IV. was absolute sovereign. He had no one to fear, unless it
was his {70} intriguing brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who,
during the twenty-three years of Edward's reign, was undoubtedly
carefully planning the bloodstained steps by which he himself should
reach the throne.
Acute in intelligence, distorted in form and in character, this Richard
was a monster of iniquity. The hapless boy left heir to the throne
upon the death of Edward IV., his father, was placed under the
guardianship of his misshapen uncle, who until the majority of the
young King, Edward V., was to reign under the title of Protector.
How this "Protector" protected his nephews all know. The two boys
(Edward V. and Richard, Duke of York) were carried to the Tower. The
world has been reluctant to believe that they were really smothered, as
has been said; but the finding, nearly two hundred years later, of the
skeletons of two children which had been buried or concealed at the
foot of the stairs leading to their place of confinement, seems to
confirm it beyond a doubt.
Retribution came swiftly. Two years {71} later Richard fell at the
battle of Bosworth Field, and the crown won by numberless crimes,
rolled under a hawthorn bush. It was picked up and placed upon a
worthier head.
Henry Tudor, an offshoot of the House of Lancaster, was proclaimed King
Henry VII., and his marriage with Princess Elizabeth of York (sister of
the princes murdered in the Tower) forever blended the White and the
Red Rose in peaceful union.
During all this time, while Kings came and Kings went, the people
viewed these changes from afar. But if they had no longer any share in
the government, a great expansion was going on in their inner life.
Caxton had set up his printing press, and the "art preservative of all
arts," was bringing streams of new knowledge into thousands of homes.
Copernicus had discovered a new Heaven, and Columbus a new Earth. The
sun no longer circled around the Earth, nor was the Earth a flat plain.
There was a revival of classic learning at Oxford, and Erasmus, the
great preacher, was founding schools and preparing the minds of the
{72} people for the impending change, which was soon to be wrought by
that Monk in Germany, whose soul was at this time beginning to be
stirred to its mighty effort at reform.
{73}