radically democratic state of thinking and feeling among the
common people than existed again in England before the
seventeenth century. John Ball, a priest, and others who were
associated with Wat Tyler in the leadership, preached
doctrines of social equality that would nearly have satisfied
a Jacobin of the French Revolution.
This temper of political radicalism had no apparent connection
with the remarkable religious feeling of the time, which the
great reformer, Wyclif, had aroused; yet the two movements of
the English mind were undoubtedly started by one and the same
revolutionary shock, which it took from the grave alarms and
anxieties of the age, and for which it had been prepared by
the awakening of the previous century. Wyclif was the first
English Puritan, and more of the spirit of the reformation of
religion which he sought, than the spirit of Luther's
reformation, went into the Protestantism that ultimately took
form in England. The movement he stirred was a more wonderful
anticipation of the religious revolt of the sixteenth century
than any other which occurred in Europe; for that of Huss in
Bohemia took its impulse from Wyclif and the English Lollards,
as Wyclif's followers were called.
Richard was a weak but wilful king, and the kingdom was kept
in trouble by his fitful attempts at independence and
arbitrary rule. He made enemies of most of the great lords,
and lost the good will and confidence of Parliament. He did
what was looked upon as a great wrong to Henry of Bolingbroke,
son of John of Gaunt, by banishing both him and the Duke of
Norfolk from the kingdom, when he should have judged between
them; and he made the wrong greater by seizing the lands of
the Lancastrian house when John of Gaunt died. This caused his
ruin. Henry of Bolingbroke, now Duke of Lancaster, came back to
England (1399), encouraged by the discontent in the kingdom,
and was immediately joined by so many adherents that Richard
could offer little resistance. He was deposed by act of
Parliament, and the Duke of Lancaster (a grandson of Edward
III., as Richard was), was elected to the throne, which he
ascended as Henry IV. By judgment of King and Parliament,
Richard was presently condemned to imprisonment for life in
Pomfret Castle; and, early in the following year, after a
conspiracy in his favor had been discovered, he died
mysteriously in his prison.
England Under Henry IV.
The reign of Henry IV., which lasted a little more than
thirteen years, was troubled by risings and conspiracies, all
originating among the nobles, out of causes purely personal or
factious, and having no real political significance. But no
events in English history are more commonly familiar, or seem
to be invested with a higher importance, than the rebellions
of Owen Glendower and the Percys,--Northumberland and Harry
Hotspur,--simply because Shakespeare has laid his magic upon
what otherwise would be a story of little note. Wars with the
always hostile Scots supplied other stirring incidents to the
record Of the time; but these came to a summary end in 1405,
when the crown prince, James, of Scotland, voyaging to France,
was driven by foul winds to the English coast and taken
prisoner. The prince's father, King Robert, died on hearing
the news, and James, the captive, was now entitled to be king.
But the English held him for eighteen years, treating him as a
guest at their court, rather than as a prisoner, and educating
him with care, but withholding him from his kingdom.
To strengthen his precarious seat upon the throne, Henry
cultivated the friendship of the Church, and seems to have
found this course expedient, even at considerable cost to his
popularity. For the attitude of the commons towards the Church
during his reign was anything but friendly. They went so far
as to pass a bill for the confiscation of Church property,
which the Lords rejected; and they seem to have repented of an
Act passed early in his reign, under which a cruel persecution
of the Lollards was begun. The clergy and the Lords, with the
favor of the king, maintained the barbarous law, and England
for the first time saw men burned at the stake for heresy.
England Under Henry V. and Henry VI.
Henry IV. died in 1413, and was succeeded by his spirited and
able, but too ambitious son, Henry V., the Prince Hal of
Shakespeare, who gave up riotous living when called to the
grave duties of government and showed himself to be a man of
no common mould. The war in France, which he renewed, and the
chief events of which have been sketched already, filled up
most of his brief reign of nine years. His early death (1422)
left two crowns to an infant nine months old. The English
crown was not disputed. The French crown, though practically
won by conquest, was not permanently secured, but was still to
be fought for; and in the end, as we have seen, it was lost.
No more need be said of the incidents of the war which had
that result.
The infant king was represented in France by his elder uncle,
the Duke of Bedford. In England, the government was carried on
for him during his minority by a council, in which his younger
uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, occupied the chief place,
but with powers that were jealously restricted. While the war
in France lasted, or during most of the thirty-one years
through which it was protracted after Henry V.'s death, it
engrossed the English mind and overshadowed domestic
interests, so that the time has a meagre history.
Soon after he came of age, Henry VI. married (1444) Margaret
of Anjou, daughter of René, Duke of Anjou, who claimed to be
King of Naples and Jerusalem. The marriage, which aimed at
peace with France, and which had been brought about by the
cession to that country of Maine and Anjou, was unpopular in
England. Discontent with the feeble management of the war, and
with the general weakness and incapability of the government,
grew apace, and showed itself, among other exhibitions, in a
rebellion (1450) known as Jack Cade's, from the name of an
Irishman who got the lead of it. Jack Cade and his followers
took possession of London and held it for three days, only
yielding at last to an offer of general pardon, after they had
beheaded Lord Say, the most obnoxious adviser of the king. A
previous mob had taken the head of the Earl of Suffolk, who
was detested still more as the contriver of the king's
marriage and of the humiliating policy in France.
{1042}
The Wars of the Roses.
At length, the Duke of York, representing an elder line of
royal descent from Edward III., took the lead of the
discontented in the nation, and civil war was imminent in
1452; but pacific counsels prevailed for the moment. The king,
who had always been weak-minded, and entirely under the
influence of the queen, now sank for a time into a state of
complete stupor, and was incapable of any act. The Lords in
Parliament thereupon appointed the Duke of York Protector of
England, and the government was vigorously conducted by him
for a few months, until the king recovered. The queen, and the
councillors she favored, now regained their control of
affairs, and the opposition took arms.
The long series of fierce struggles between these two parties,
which is commonly called the Wars of the Roses, began on the
22d of May, 1455, with a battle at St. Albans--the first of
two that were fought on the same ground. At the beginning, it
was a contest for the possession of the unfortunate,
irresponsible king, and of the royal authority which resided
nominally in his person. But it became, ere long, a contest
for the crown which Henry wore, and to which the Duke of York
denied his right. The Duke traced his ancestry to one son of
Edward III., and King Henry to another son. But the Duke's
forefather, Lionel, was prior in birth to the King's
forefather, John of Gaunt, and, as an original proposition,
the House of York was clearly nearer than the House of
Lancaster to the royal line which had been interrupted when
Richard II. was deposed. The rights of the latter House were
such as it had gained prescriptively by half a century of
possession.
At one time it was decided by the Lords that Henry should be
king until he died, and that the Duke of York and his heirs
should succeed him. But Queen Margaret would not yield the
rights of her son, and renewed the war. The Duke of York was
killed in the next battle fought. His son, Edward, continued
the contest, and early in 1461, having taken possession of
London, he was declared king by a council of Lords, which
formally deposed Henry. The Lancastrians were driven from the
kingdom, and Edward held the government with little
disturbance for eight years. Then a rupture occurred between
him and his most powerful supporter, the Earl of Warwick.
Warwick put himself at the head of a rebellion which failed in
the first instance, but which finally, when Warwick had joined
forces with Queen Margaret, drove Edward to flight. The latter
took refuge in the Netherlands (1470), where he received
protection and assistance from the Duke of Burgundy, who was
his brother-in-law. Henry VI. was now restored to the throne;
but for no longer a time than six months. At the end of that
period Edward landed again in England, with a small force,
professing that he came only to demand his dukedom. As soon as
he found himself well received and strongly supported, he
threw off the mask, resumed the title of king, and advanced to
London, where the citizens gave him welcome. A few days later
(April 14, 1471) he went out to meet Warwick and defeated and
slew him in the fierce battle of Barnet. One more fight at
Tewkesbury, where Queen Margaret was taken prisoner, ended the
war. King Henry died, suspiciously, in the Tower, on the very
night of his victorious rival's return to London, and Edward
IV. had all his enemies under his feet.
England under the House of York.
For a few years England enjoyed peace within her borders, and
the material effects of the protracted civil wars were rapidly
effaced. Indeed, the greater part of England appears to have
been lightly touched by those effects. The people at large had
taken little part in the conflict, and had been less disturbed
by it, in their industries and in their commerce, than might
have been expected. It had been a strife among the great
families, enlisting the gentry to a large extent, no doubt,
but not the middle class. Hence its chief consequence had been
the thinning and weakening of the aristocratic order, which
relatively enhanced the political importance of the commons.
But the commons were not yet trained to act independently in
political affairs. Their rise in power had been through joint
action of lords and commons against the Crown, with the former
in the lead; they were accustomed to depend on aristocratic
guidance, and to lean on aristocratic support. For this
reason, they were not only unprepared to take advantage of the
great opportunity which now opened to them, for decisively
grasping the control of government, but they were unfitted to
hold what they had previously won, without the help of the
class above them. As a consequence, it was the king who
profited by the decimation and impoverishment of the nobles,
grasping not only the power which they lost, but the power
which the commons lacked skill to use. For a century and a
half following the Wars of the Roses, the English monarchy
approached more nearly to absolutism than at any other period
before or after.
The unsparing confiscations by which Edward IV. and his
triumphant party crushed their opponents enriched the Crown
for a time and made it independent of parliamentary subsidies.
When supply from that source began to fall short, the king
invented another. He demeaned himself so far as to solicit
gifts from the wealthy merchants of the kingdom, to which he
gave the name of "benevolences," and he practiced this system
of royal beggary so persistently and effectually that he had
no need to call Parliament together. He thus began, in a
manner hardly perceived or resisted, the arbitrary and
unconstitutional mode of government which his successors
carried further, until the nation roused itself and took back
its stolen liberties with vengeance and wrath.
{1043}
Richard III. and the first of the Tudors.
Edward IV. died in 1483, leaving two young sons, the elder not
yet thirteen. Edward's brother, Richard, contrived with
amazing ability and unscrupulousness to acquire control of the
government, first as Protector, and presently as King. The
young princes, confined in the Tower, were murdered there, and
Richard III. might have seemed to be secure on his wickedly
won throne; for he did not lack popularity, notwithstanding
his crimes. But an avenger soon came, in the person of Henry,
Earl of Richmond, who claimed the Crown. Henry's claim was not
a strong one. Through his mother, he traced his lineage to
John of Gaunt, as the Lancastrians had done; but it was the
mistress and not the wife of that prince who bore Henry's
ancestor. His grandfather was a Welsh chieftain, Sir Owen
Tudor, who won the heart of the widowed queen of Henry V.,
Catherine of France, and married her. But the claim of Henry
of Richmond, if a weak one genealogically, sufficed for the
overthrow of the red-handed usurper, Richard. Henry, who had
been in exile, landed in England in August, 1485, and was
quickly joined by large numbers of supporters. Richard
hastened to attack them, and was defeated and slain on
Bosworth Field. With no more opposition, Henry won the
kingdom, and founded, as Henry VII., the Tudor dynasty which
held the throne until the death of Elizabeth.
Under that dynasty, the history of England took on a new
character, disclosing new tendencies, new impulses, new
currents of influence, new promises of the future. We will not
enter upon it until we have looked at some prior events in
other regions.
Germany.
If we return now to Germany, we take up the thread of events
at an interesting point. We parted from the affairs of that
troubled country while two rival Emperors, Louis IV., or
Ludwig, of Bavaria, and Frederick of Austria, were endeavoring
(1325) to settle their dispute in a friendly way, by sharing
the throne together. Before noting the result of that
chivalric and remarkable compromise, let us glance backward
for a moment at the most memorable and important incident of
the civil war which led to it.
Birth of the Swiss Confederacy.
The three cantons of Switzerland which are known distinctively
as the Forest Cantons, namely, Schwytz (which gave its name in
time to the whole country), Uri, and Unterwalden, had stood in
peculiar relations to the Hapsburg family since long before
Rudolph became Emperor and his house became the House of
Austria. In those cantons, the territorial rights were held
mostly by great monasteries, and the counts of Hapsburg for
generations past had served the abbots and abbesses in the
capacity of advocates, or champions, to rule their vassals for
them and to defend their rights. Authority of their own in the
cantons they had none. At the same time, the functions they
performed so continually developed ideas in their minds,
without doubt, which grew naturally into pretensions that were
offensive to the bold mountaineers. On the other hand, the
circumstances of the situation were calculated to breed
notions and feelings of independence among the men of the
mountains. They gave their allegiance to the Emperor--to the
high sovereign who ruled over all, in the name of Rome--and
they opposed what came between them and him. It is manifest
that a threatening complication for them arose when the Count
of Hapsburg became Emperor, which occurred in 1273. They had
no serious difficulty with Rudolph, in his time; but they
wisely prepared themselves for what might come, by forming, or
by renewing, in 1291, a league of the three cantons,--the
beginning and nucleus of the Swiss Confederation, which has
maintained its independence and its freedom from that day to
this. The league of 1291 had existed something more than
twenty years when the confederated cantons were first called
upon to stand together in resistance to the Austrian
pretensions. This occurred in 1315, during the war between
Louis and Frederick, when Leopold, Duke of Austria, invaded
the Forest Cantons and was disastrously beaten in a fight at
the pass of Morgarten. The victory of the confederates and the
independence secured by it gave them so much prestige that
neighboring cities and cantons sought admission to their
league. In 1332 Luzern was received as a member; in 1351,
1352, and 1353, Zurich, Glarus, Zug, and Bern came in,
increasing the membership to eight. It took the name of the
Old League of High Germany, and its members were known as
Eidgenossen, or Confederates.
Such, in brief, are the ascertained facts of the origin of the
Swiss Confederacy. There is nothing found in authentic history
to substantiate the popular legend of William Tell.
The questions between the league and the Austrian princes,
which continued to be troublesome for two generations, were
practically ended by the two battles of Sempach and Naefels,
fought in 1386 and 1388, in both of which the Austrians were
overthrown.
The Emperor Louis IV. and the Papacy,
While the Swiss were gaining the freedom which they never
lost, Germany at large was making little progress in any
satisfactory direction. Peace had not been restored by the
friendly agreement of 1325 between Ludwig and Frederick. The
partisans of neither were contented with it. Frederick was
broken in health and soon retired from the government; in 1330
he died. The Austrian house persisted in hostility to Louis;
but his more formidable enemies were the Pope and the King of
France. The period was that known in papal history as "the
Babylonish Captivity," when the popes resided at Avignon and
were generally creatures of the French court and subservient
to its ambitions or its animosities. Philip of Valois, who now
reigned in France, aspired to the imperial crown, which the head
of the Church had conferred on the German kings, and which the
same supreme pontiff might claim authority to transfer to the
sovereigns of France. This is supposed to have been the secret
of the relentless hostility with which Louis was pursued by
the Papacy--himself excommunicated, his kingdom placed under
interdict, and every effort made to bring about his deposition
by the princes of Germany. But divided and depressed as the
Germans were, they revolted against these malevolent
pretensions of the popes, and in 1338 the electoral princes
issued a bold declaration, asserting the sufficiency of the
act of election to confer imperial dignity and power, and
denying the necessity for any papal confirmation whatever. Had
Louis been a commanding leader, and independent of the Papacy in
his own feelings, he could probably have rallied a national
sentiment on this issue that would have powerfully affected
the future of German history.
{1044}
But he lacked the needful character, and his troubles
continued until he died (1347). A year before his death, his
opponents had elected and put forward a rival emperor,
Charles, the son of King John of Bohemia. Charles (IV.) was
subsequently recognized as king without dispute, and secured
the imperial crown. "It may be affirmed with truth that the
genuine ancient Empire, which contained a German kingdom, came
to an end with the Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian. None strove
again after his death to restore the imperial power. The
golden bull of his successor Charles IV. sealed the fate of
the old Empire. Through it, and indeed through the entire
conduct of Charles IV., King of Bohemia as he really was, and
emperor scarcely more than in name, the imperial government
passed more and more into the hands of the prince-electors,
who came to regard the emperor no longer as their master, but
as the president of an assembly in which he shared the power
with themselves." "From the time of Charles IV. the main
object and chief occupation of the emperors was not the
Empire, but the aggrandisement and security of their own
house. The Empire served only as the means and instrument of
their purpose" (Dollinger).
The Golden Bull of Charles IV.
The Golden Bull referred to by Dr. Dollinger was an instrument
which became the constitution, so to speak, of the Holy Roman
or Germanic Empire. It prescribed the mode of the election of
the King, and definitively named the seven Electors. It also
conferred certain special powers and privileges on these seven
princes, which raised them much above their fellows and gave
them an independence that may be said to have destroyed every
hope of Germanic unity. This was the one mark which the reign
of Charles IV. left upon the Empire. His exertions as Emperor
were all directed to the aggrandizement of his own family, and
with not much lasting result. In his own kingdom of Bohemia he
ruled with better effect. He made its capital, Prague, an
important city, adorning it with noble buildings and founding
in it the most ancient of German universities. This University
of Prague soon sowed seeds from which sprang the first
movement of religious reformation in Germany.
Charles IV., dying in 1378, was succeeded by his son Wenzel,
or Wenceslaus, on the imperial throne as well as the Bohemian.
Wenceslaus neglected both the Empire and the Kingdom, and the
confusion of things in Germany grew worse. Some of the
principal cities continued to secure considerable freedom and
prosperity for themselves, by the combined efforts of their
leagues; but everywhere else great disorder and oppression
prevailed. It was at this time that the Swabian towns, to the
number of forty-one, formed a union and waged unsuccessful war
with a league which the nobles entered into against them. They
were defeated, and crushingly dealt with by the Emperor.
In 1400 Wenceslaus was deposed and Rupert of the Palatinate
was elected, producing another civil war, and reducing the
imperial government to a complete nullity. Rupert died in
1410, and, after some contention, Sigmund, or Sigismund,
brother of Wenceslaus, was raised to the throne. He was
Margrave of Brandenburg and King of Hungary, and would become
King of Bohemia when Wenceslaus died.
The Reformation of Huss in Bohemia.
Bohemia was about to become the scene of an extraordinary
religious agitation, which John Huss, teacher and preacher in
the new but already famous University of Prague, was beginning
to stir. Huss, who drew more or less of his inspiration from
Wyclif, anticipated Luther in the boldness of his attacks upon
iniquities in the Church. In his case as in Luther's, the
abomination which he could not endure was the sale of papal
indulgences; and it was by his denunciation of that impious
fraud that he drew on himself the deadly wrath of the Roman
hierarchy. He was summoned before the great Council of the
Church which opened at Constance in 1414. He obeyed the
summons and went to the Council, bearing a safe-conduct from
the Emperor which pledged protection to him until he returned.
Notwithstanding this imperial pledge, he was imprisoned for
seven months at Constance, and was then impatiently listened
to and condemned to the stake. On the 6th of July, 1415, he
was burned. In the following May, his friend and disciple,
Jerome of Prague, suffered the same martyrdom. The Emperor,
Sigismund, blustered a little at the insolent violation of his
safe-conduct; but dared do nothing to make it effective.