Unhappily for England and for himself, Warwick's loyalty was not
sufficient to restrain his ambition and his resentment. He felt the
ingratitude of the king, whom he had made, so bitterly that he stooped
ere long to intrigue and treason. Edward in 1467 openly broke with him
by dismissing his brother George Neville from the chancellorship, by
repudiating a treaty with France which the earl had just negotiated, and
by concluding an alliance with Burgundy against which he had always
protested. Warwick enlisted in his cause the king's younger brother
George of Clarence, who desired to marry his daughter and heiress
Isabella Neville, and with the aid of this unscrupulous but unstable
young man began to organize rebellion. His first experiment in treason
was the so-called "rising of Robin of Redesdale," which was ostensibly
an armed protest by the gentry and commons of Yorkshire against the
maladministration of the realm by the king's favourites--his wife's
relatives, and the courtiers whom he had lately promoted to high rank
and office. The rebellion was headed by well-known adherents of the
earl, and the nickname of "Robin of Redesdale" seems to have covered the
personality of his kinsman Sir John Conyers. When the rising was well
started Warwick declared his sympathy with the aims of the insurgents,
wedded his daughter to Clarence despite the king's prohibition of the
match, and raised a force at Calais with which he landed in Kent.
Battle of Edgecott. Edward a prisoner.
Execution of the queen's relatives.
But his plot was already successful before he reached the scene of
operations. The Yorkshire rebels beat the royalist army at the battle of
Edgecott (July 6, 1469). A few days later Edward himself was captured at
Olney and put into the earl's hands. Many of his chief supporters,
including the queen's father, Lord Rivers, and her brother, John
Woodville, as well as the newly-created earls of Pembroke and Devon,
were put to death with Warwick's connivance, if not by his direct
orders. The king was confined for some weeks in the great Neville
stronghold of Middleham Castle, but presently released on conditions,
being compelled to accept new ministers nominated by Warwick. The earl
supposed that his cousin's spirit was broken and that he would give no
further trouble. In this he erred grievously. Edward vowed revenge for
his slaughtered favourites, and waited his opportunity. Warwick had lost
credit by using such underhand methods in his attack on his master, and
had not taken sufficient care to conciliate public opinion when he
reconstructed the government. His conduct had destroyed his old
reputation for disinterestedness and honesty.
King Edward drives Warwick into exile.
In March 1470 the king seized the first chance of avenging himself. Some
unimportant riots had broken out in Lincolnshire, originating probably
in mere local quarrels, but possibly in Lancastrian intrigues. To
suppress this rising the king gathered a great force, carefully calling
in to his banner all the peers who were offended with Warwick or, at any
rate, did not belong to his family alliance. Having scattered the
Lincolnshire bands, he suddenly turned upon Warwick with his army, and
caught him wholly unprepared. The earl and his son-in-law Clarence were
hunted out of the realm before they could collect their partisans, and
fled to France; Edward seemed for the first time to be master in his own
realm.
Warwick takes up the cause of Henry VI.
He lands in England.
King Edward in exile.
But the Wars of the Roses had one more phase to come. Warwick's name was
still a power in the land, and his expulsion had been so sudden that he
had not been given an opportunity of trying his strength. His old enmity
for the house of Lancaster was completely swallowed up in his new grudge
against the king that he had made. He opened negotiations with the
exiled Queen Margaret, and offered to place his sword at her disposition
for the purpose of overthrowing King Edward and restoring King Henry.
The queen had much difficulty in forcing herself to come to terms with
the man who had been the bane of her cause, but finally, was induced by
Louis XI. to conclude a bargain. Warwick married his younger daughter to
her son Edward, prince of Wales, as a pledge of his good faith, and
swore allegiance to King Henry in the cathedral of Angers. He then set
himself to stir up the Yorkshire adherents of the house of Neville to
distract the attention of Edward IV. When the king had gone northward to
attack them, the earl landed at Dartmouth (Sept. 1470) with a small
force partly composed of Lancastrian exiles, partly of his own men. His
appearance had the effect on which he had calculated. Devon rose in the
Lancastrian interest; Kent, where the earl's name had always been
popular, took arms a few days later; and London opened its gates. King
Edward, hurrying south to oppose the invader, found his army melting
away from his banner, and hastily took ship at Lynn and fled to Holland.
He found a refuge with his brother-in-law and ally Charles the Bold, the
great duke of Burgundy.
Restoration of Henry VI.
Edward returns to England.
Battle of Barnet. Death of Warwick.
King Henry was released and replaced on the throne, and for six months
Warwick ruled England as his lieutenant. But there was bitterness and
mistrust between the old Lancastrian faction and the Nevilles, and Queen
Margaret refused to cross to England or to trust her son in the
king-maker's hands. Her partisans doubted his sincerity, while many of
the Yorkists who had hitherto followed Warwick in blind admiration found
it impossible to reconcile themselves to the new regime. The duke of
Clarence in particular, discontented at the triumph of Lancaster,
betrayed his father-in-law, and opened secret negotiations with his
exiled brother. Encouraged by the news of the dissensions among his
enemies, Edward IV. resolved to try his fortune once more, and landed
near Hull on the 15th of March 1471 with a body of mercenaries lent him
by the duke of Burgundy. The campaign that followed was most creditable
to Edward's generalship, but must have been fatal to him if Warwick had
been honestly supported by his lieutenants. But the duke of Clarence
betrayed to his brother the army which he had gathered in King Henry's
name, and many of the Lancastrians were slow to join the earl, from
their distrust of his loyalty. Edward, dashing through the midst of the
slowly gathering levies of his opponents, seized London, and two days
later defeated and slew Warwick at the battle of Barnet (April 13,
1471).
Battle of Tewkesbury. Death of Edward, prince of Wales.
Capture of Queen Margaret and murder of Henry VI.
On that same day Queen Margaret and her son landed at Weymouth, only to
hear that the earl was dead and his army scattered. But she refused to
consider the struggle ended, and gathered the Lancastrians of the west
for a final rally. On the fatal day of Tewkesbury (May 3, 1471) her army
was beaten, her son was slain in the flight, and the greater part of her
chief captains were taken prisoner. She herself was captured next day.
The victorious Edward sent to the block the last Beaufort duke of
Somerset, and nearly all the other captains of rank, whether
Lancastrians or followers of Warwick. He then moved to London, which was
being threatened by Kentish levies raised in Warwick's name, delivered
the city, and next day caused the unhappy Henry VI. to be murdered in
the Tower (May 21, 1471).
Edward IV.
The descendants of Henry IV. were now extinct, and the succession
question seemed settled for ever. No one dreamed of raising against King
Edward the claims of the remoter heirs of John of Gaunt--the young earl
of Richmond, who represented the Beauforts by a female descent, or the
king of Portugal, the grandson of Gaunt's eldest daughter. Edward was
now king indeed, with no over-powerful cousin at his elbow to curb his
will. He had, moreover, at his disposal plunder almost as valuable as
that which he had divided up in 1461--the estates of the great Neville
clan and their adherents. A great career seemed open before him; he had
proved himself a fine soldier and an unscrupulous diplomatist; he was in
the very prime of life, having not yet attained his thirty-first year.
He might have devoted himself to foreign politics and have rivalled the
exploits of Edward III. or Henry V.--for the state of the continent was
all in his favour--or might have set himself to organize an absolute
monarchy on the ruins of the parliament and the baronage. For the
successive attainders of the Lancastrians and the Nevilles had swept
away many of the older noble families, and Edward's house of peers
consisted for the main part of new men, his own partisans promoted for
good service, who had not the grip on the land that their predecessors
had possessed.
Character of the reign.
Murder of the duke of Clarence.
But Edward either failed to see his opportunity or refused to take it.
He did not plunge headlong into the wars of Louis XI. and Charles of
Burgundy, nor did he attempt to recast the institutions of the realm. He
settled down into inglorious ease, varied at long intervals by outbursts
of spasmodic tyranny. It would seem that the key to his conduct was that
he hated the hard work without which a despotic king cannot hope to
assert his personality, and preferred leisure and vicious
self-indulgence. In many ways the later years of his reign were marked
with all the signs of absolutism. Between 1475 and 1483 he called only
one single parliament, and that was summoned not to give him advice, or
raise him money, but purely and solely to attaint his brother, the duke
of Clarence, whom he had resolved to destroy. The duke's fate (Feb. 17,
1478) need provoke no sympathy, he was a detestable intriguer, and had
given his brother just offence by a series of deeds of high-handed
violence and by perpetual cavilling. But he had committed no act of real
treason since his long-pardoned alliance with Warwick, and was not in
any way dangerous; so that when the king caused him to be attainted, and
then privately murdered in the Tower, there was little justification for
the fratricide.
Fiscal policy.
Edward was a thrifty king; he was indeed the only medieval monarch of
England who succeeded in keeping free of debt and made his revenue
suffice for his expenses. But his methods of filling his purse were
often unconstitutional and sometimes ignominious. When the resources
drawn from confiscations were exhausted, he raised "benevolences"--forced
gifts extracted from men of wealth by the unspoken threat of the royal
displeasure--instead of applying to parliament for new taxes. But his
most profitable source of revenue was drawn from abroad. Having allied
himself with his brother-in-law Charles of Burgundy against the king of
France, he led an army into Picardy in 1475, and then by the treaty of
Picquigny sold peace to Louis XI. for 75,000 gold crowns down, and an
annual pension (or tribute as he preferred to call it) of 50,000 crowns
more. It was regularly paid up to the last year of his reign. Charles the
Bold, whom he had thus deliberately deserted in the middle of their joint
campaign, used the strongest language about this mean act of treachery,
and with good cause. But the king cared not when his pockets were full.
Another device of Edward for filling his exchequer was a very stringent
enforcement of justice; small infractions of the laws being made the
excuse for exorbitant fines. This was a trick which Henry VII. was to
turn to still greater effect. In defence of both it may be pleaded that
after the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses a strong hand was needed to
restore security for life and property, and that it was better that
penalties should be over-heavy rather than that there should be no
penalties at all. Another appreciable source of revenue to Edward was his
private commercial ventures. He owned many ships, and traded with great
profit to himself abroad, because he could promise, as a king, advantages
to foreign buyers and sellers with which no mere merchant could compete.
During the last period of Edward's rule England might have been
described as a despotism, if only the king had cared to be a despot. But
except on rare occasions he allowed his power to be disguised under the
old machinery of the medieval monarchy, and made no parade of his
autocracy. Much was pardoned by the nation to one who gave them
comparatively efficient and rather cheap government, and who was
personally easy of access, affable and humorous. It is with little
justification that he has been called the "founder of the new monarchy,"
and the spiritual ancestor of the Tudor despotism. Another king in his
place might have merited such titles, but Edward was too careless, too
unsystematic, too lazy, and too fond of self-indulgence to make a real
tyrant. He preferred to be a man of pleasure and leisure, only awaking
now and then to perpetrate some act of arbitrary cruelty.
Condition of the country.
Commercial development.
Manufactures and wool trade.
England was not unprosperous under him. The lowest point of her fortunes
had been reached under the administration of Margaret of Anjou, during
the weary years that preceded the outbreak of the civil wars in 1459. At
that time the government had been bankrupt, foreign trade had almost
disappeared, the French and pirates of all nations had possession of the
Channel, and the nation had lost heart, because there seemed no way out
of the trouble save domestic strife, to which all looked forward with
dismay. The actual war proved less disastrous than had been expected. It
fell heavily upon the baronage and their retainers, but passed lightly,
for the most part, over the heads of the middle classes. The Yorkists
courted the approval of public opinion by their careful avoidance of
pillage and requisitions; and the Lancastrians, though less scrupulous,
only once launched out into general raiding and devastation, during the
advance of the queen's army to St Albans in the early months of 1461. As
a rule the towns suffered little or nothing--they submitted to the king
of the moment, and were always spared by the victors. It is one of the
most curious features of these wars that no town ever stood a siege,
though there were several long and arduous sieges of baronial castles,
such as Harlech, Alnwick and Bamborough. Warwick, with his policy of
conciliation for the masses and hard blows for the magnates, was mainly
responsible for this moderation. In battle he was wont to bid his
followers spare the commons in the pursuit, and to smite only the
knights and nobles. Towton, where the Yorkist army was infuriated by the
harrying of the Midlands by their enemies in the preceding campaign,
was the only fight that ended in a general massacre. There were, of
course, many local feuds and riots which led to the destruction of
property; well-known instances are the private war about Caister Castle
between the duke of Norfolk and the Pastons, and the "battle of Nibley
Green," near Bristol, between the Berkeleys and the Talbots. But on the
whole there was no ruinous devastation of the land. Prosperity seems to
have revived early during the rule of York; Warwick had cleared the seas
of pirates, and both he and King Edward were great patrons of commerce,
though the earl's policy was to encourage trade with France, while his
master wished to knit up the old alliance with Flanders by adhering to
the cause of Charles of Burgundy. Edward did much in his later years to
develop interchange of commodities with the Baltic, making treaties with
the Hanseatic League which displeased the merchants of London, because
of the advantageous terms granted to the foreigner. The east coast ports
seem to have thriven under his rule, but Bristol was not less
prosperous. On the one side, developing the great salt-fish trade, her
vessels were encompassing Iceland, and feeling their way towards the
Banks of the West; on the other they were beginning to feel their way
into the Mediterranean. The famous William Canynges, the patriarch of
Bristol merchants, possessed 2500 tons of shipping, including some ships
of 900 tons, and traded in every sea. Yet we still find complaints that
too much merchandize reached and left England in foreign bottoms, and
King Edward's treaty with the Hansa was censured mainly for this reason.
Internal commerce was evidently developing in a satisfactory style,
despite of the wars; in especial raw wool was going out of England in
less bulk than of old, because cloth woven at home was becoming the
staple export. The woollen manufactures which had begun in the eastern
counties in the 14th century were now spreading all over the land,
taking root especially in Somersetshire, Yorkshire and some districts of
the Midlands. Coventry, the centre of a local woollen and dyeing
industry, was probably the inland town which grew most rapidly during
the 15th century. Yet there was still a large export of wool to
Flanders, and the long pack-trains of the Cotswold flockmasters still
wound eastward to the sea for the benefit of the merchants of the staple
and the continental manufacturer.
State of the rural population.
As regards domestic agriculture, it has been often stated that the 15th
century was the golden age of the English peasant, and that his
prosperity was little affected either by the unhappy French wars of
Henry VI. or by the Wars of the Roses. There is certainly very little
evidence of any general discontent among the rural population, such as
had prevailed in the times of Edward III. or Richard II. Insurrections
that passed as popular, like the risings of Jack Cade and Robin of
Redesdale, produced manifestos that spoke of political grievances but
hardly mentioned economic ones. There is a bare mention of the Statute
of Labourers in Jack Cade's ably drafted chapter of complaints. It would
seem that the manorial grudges between landowner and peasant, which had
been so fierce in the 14th century, had died down as the lords abandoned
the old system of working their demesne by villein labour. They were now
for the most part letting out the soil to tenant-farmers at a moderate
rent, and the large class of yeomanry created by this movement seem to
have been prosperous. The less popular device of turning old manorial
arable land into sheep-runs was also known, but does not yet seem to
have grown so common as to provoke the popular discontents which were to
prevail under the Tudors. Probably such labour as was thrown out of work
by this tendency was easily absorbed by the growing needs of the towns.
Some murmurs are heard about "enclosures," but they are incidental and
not widely spread.
Architecture.
One of the best tests of the prosperity of England under the Yorkist
rule seems to be the immense amount of building that was on hand.
Despite the needs of civil war, it was not on castles that the builders'
energy was spent; the government discouraged fortresses in private
hands, and the dwellings of the new nobility of Edward IV. were rather
splendid manor-houses, with some slight external protection of moat and
gate-house, than old-fashioned castles. But the church-building of the
time is enormous and magnificent. A very large proportion of the great
Perpendicular churches of England date back to this age, and in the
cathedrals also much work was going on.
Religious condition of the country.
Material prosperity does not imply spiritual development, and it must be
confessed that from the intellectual and moral point of view
15th-century England presents an unpleasing picture. The Wycliffite
movement, the one phenomenon which at the beginning of the century
seemed to give some promise of better things, had died down under
persecution. It lingered on in a subterranean fashion among a small
class in the universities and the minor clergy, and had some adherents
among the townsfolk and even among the peasantry. But the Lollards were
a feeble and helpless minority; they no longer produced writers,
organizers or missionaries. They continued to be burnt, or more
frequently to make forced recantations, under the Yorkist rule, though
the list of trials is not a long one. Little can be gathered concerning
them from chronicles or official records. We only know that they
continued to exist, and occasionally produced a martyr. But the
governing powers were not fanatics, bent on seeking out victims; the
spirit of Henry V. and Archbishop Arundel was dead. The life of the
church seems, indeed, to have been in a more stagnant and torpid
condition in this age than at any other period of English history. The
great prelates from Cardinal Beaufort down to Archbishops Bourchier and
Rotherham, and Bishop John Russell--trusted supporters of the Yorkist
dynasty--were mere politicians with nothing spiritual about them.
Occasionally they appear in odious positions. Rotherham was the ready
tool of Edward IV. in the judicial murder of Clarence. Russell became
the obsequious chancellor of Richard III. Bourchier made himself
responsible in 1483 for the taking of the little duke of York from his
mother's arms in order to place him in the power of his murderous uncle.
It is difficult to find a single bishop in the whole period who was
respected for his piety or virtue. The best of them were capable
statesmen, the worst were mean time-servers. Few of the higher clergy
were such patrons of learning as many prelates of earlier ages. William
Grey of Ely and James Goldwell of Norwich did something for scholars,
and there was one bishop in the period who came to sad grief through an
intellectual activity which was rare among his contemporaries. This was
the eccentric Reginald Pecock of Chichester, who, while setting himself
to confute Lollard controversialists, lapsed into heresy by setting
"reason" above "authority." He taught that the organization and many of
the dogmas of the medieval church should be justified by an appeal to
private judgment and the moral law, rather than to the scriptures, the
councils, or the fathers. For taking up this dangerous line of defence,
and admitting his doubts about several received articles of faith, he
was attacked by the Yorkist archbishop Bourchier in 1457, compelled to
do penance, and shut up in a monastery for the rest of his life. He
seems to have had no school of followers, and his doctrines died with
him.
The monasteries.
In nothing is the general stagnation of the church in the later 15th
century shown better than by the gradual cessation of the monastic
chronicles. The stream of narrative was still flowing strongly in 1400;
by 1485 it has run dry, even St Albans, the mother of historians,
produced no annalist after Whethamstede, whose story ceases early in the
Wars of the Roses. The only monastic chronicler who went on writing for
a few years after the extinction of the house of York was the "Croyland
continuator." For the last two-thirds of the century the various "London
chronicles," the work of laymen, are much more important than anything
which was produced in the religious houses. The regular clergy indeed
seem to have been sunk in intellectual torpor. Their numbers were
falling off, their zeal was gone; there is little good to be said of
them save that they were still in some cases endowing England with
splendid architectural decorations. But even in the wealthier abbeys we
find traces of thriftless administration, idleness, self-indulgence and
occasionally grave moral scandals. The parochial clergy were probably in
a healthier condition; but the old abuses of pluralism and non-residence
were as rampant as ever, and though their work may have been in many
cases honourably carried out, it is certain that energy and intelligence
were at a low ebb.
Moral decay of the nation.