CHAPTER I

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HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME III

by

JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.

Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford

THE PARLIAMENT, 1399-1461

THE MONARCHY, 1461-1540

First Edition, Demy 8vo, November 1877;

Reprinted December 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890.

Eversley Edition, 1895.

London MacMillan and Co. and New York 1896

CONTENTS

Volume III

Book IV -- The Parliament -- 1399-1461

Chapter V -- The House of Lancaster -- 1399-1422

Chapter VI -- The Wars of the Roses -- 1422-1461

Book V -- The Monarchy -- 1461-1540

Authorities for Book V

Chapter I -- The House of York -- 1461-1485

Chapter II -- The Revival of Learning -- 1485-1514

Chapter III -- Wolsey -- 1514-1529

Chapter IV -- Thomas Cromwell -- 1529-1540

LIST OF MAPS

The Wars of the Roses

In Chapter I. some changes have been made which exactly follow corrections

made by Mr. Green himself in the margin of his volume of the original

edition.

A.S. Green.

VOLUME III

BOOK IV

THE PARLIAMENT

1399-1461

CHAPTER V

THE HOUSE OF LANCASTER

1399-1422

[Sidenote: Henry the Fourth]

Once safe in the Tower, it was easy to wrest from Richard a resignation of

his crown; and this resignation was solemnly accepted by the Parliament

which met at the close of September 1399. But the resignation was

confirmed by a solemn Act of Deposition. The coronation oath was read, and

a long impeachment which stated the breach of the promises made in it was

followed by a solemn vote of both Houses which removed Richard from the

state and authority of king. According to the strict rules of hereditary

descent as construed by the feudal lawyers by an assumed analogy with the

rules which governed descent of ordinary estates the crown would now have

passed to a house which had at an earlier period played a leading part in

the revolutions of the Edwards. The great-grandson of the Mortimer who

brought about the deposition of Edward the Second had married the daughter

and heiress of Lionel of Clarence, the third son of Edward the Third. The

childlessness of Richard and the death of Edward's second son without

issue placed Edmund Mortimer, the son of the Earl who had fallen in

Ireland, first among the claimants of the crown; but he was now a child of

six years old, the strict rule of hereditary descent had never received

any formal recognition in the case of the Crown, and precedent suggested a

right of Parliament to choose in such a case a successor among any other

members of the Royal House. Only one such successor was in fact possible.

Rising from his seat and crossing himself, Henry of Lancaster solemnly

challenged the crown, "as that I am descended by right line of blood

coming from the good lord King Henry the Third, and through that right

that God of his grace hath sent me with help of my kin and of my friends

to recover it: the which realm was in point to be undone by default of

governance and undoing of good laws." Whatever defects such a claim might

present were more than covered by the solemn recognition of Parliament.

The two Archbishops, taking the new sovereign by the hand, seated him upon

the throne, and Henry in emphatic words ratified the compact between

himself and his people. "Sirs," he said to the prelates, lords, knights,

and burgesses gathered round him, "I thank God and you, spiritual and

temporal, and all estates of the land; and do you to wit it is not my will

that any man think that by way of conquest I would disinherit any of his

heritage, franchises, or other rights that he ought to have, nor put him

out of the good that he has and has had by the good laws and customs of

the realm, except those persons that have been against the good purpose

and the common profit of the realm."

[Sidenote: Statute of Heresy]

The deposition of a king, the setting aside of one claimant and the

elevation of another to the throne, marked the triumph of the English

Parliament over the monarchy. The struggle of the Edwards against its

gradual advance had culminated in the bold effort of Richard the Second to

supersede it by a commission dependent on the Crown. But the House of

Lancaster was precluded by its very position from any renewal of the

struggle. It was not merely that the exhaustion of the treasury by the war

and revolt which followed Henry's accession left him even more than the

kings who had gone before in the hands of the Estates; it was that his

very right to the Crown lay in an acknowledgement of their highest

pretensions. He had been raised to the throne by a Parliamentary

revolution. His claim to obedience had throughout to rest on a

Parliamentary title. During no period of our early history therefore were

the powers of the two Houses so frankly recognized. The tone of Henry the

Fourth till the very close of his reign is that of humble compliance in

all but ecclesiastical matters with the prayers of the Parliament, and

even his imperious successor shrank almost with timidity from any conflict

with it. But the Crown had been bought by pledges less noble than this.

Arundel was not only the representative of constitutional rule; he was

also the representative of religious persecution. No prelate had been so

bitter a foe of the Lollards, and the support which the Church had given

to the recent revolution had no doubt sprung from its belief that a

sovereign whom Arundel placed on the throne would deal pitilessly with the

growing heresy. The expectations of the clergy were soon realized. In the

first Convocation of his reign Henry declared himself the protector of the

Church and ordered the prelates to take measures for the suppression of

heresy and of the wandering preachers. His declaration was but a prelude

to the Statute of Heresy which was passed at the opening of 1401. By the

provisions of this infamous Act the hindrances which had till now

neutralized the efforts of the bishops to enforce the common law were

utterly taken away. Not only were they permitted to arrest all preachers

of heresy, all schoolmasters infected with heretical teaching, all owners

and writers of heretical books, and to imprison them even if they recanted

at the king's pleasure, but a refusal to abjure or a relapse after

abjuration enabled them to hand over the heretic to the civil officers,

and by these--so ran the first legal enactment of religious bloodshed

which defiled our Statute-book--he was to be burned on a high place before

the people. The statute was hardly passed when William Sautre became its

first victim. Sautre, while a parish priest at Lynn, had been cited before

the Bishop of Norwich two years before for heresy and forced to recant.

But he still continued to preach against the worship of images, against

pilgrimages, and against transubstantiation, till the Statute of Heresy

strengthened Arundel's hands. In February, 1401, Sautre was brought before

the Primate as a relapsed heretic, and on refusing to recant a second time

was degraded from his orders. He was handed to the secular power, and on

the issue of a royal writ publicly burned.

[Sidenote: England and France]

The support of the nobles had been partly won by a hope hardly less fatal

to the peace of the realm, the hope of a renewal of the strife with

France. The peace of Richard's later years had sprung not merely from the

policy of the English king, but from the madness of Charles the Sixth of

France. France fell into the hands of its king's uncle, the Duke of

Burgundy, and as the Duke was ruler of Flanders and peace with England was

a necessity for Flemish industry, his policy went hand in hand with that

of Richard. His rival, the king's brother, Lewis, Duke of Orleans, was the

head of the French war-party; and it was with the view of bringing about

war that he supported Henry of Lancaster in his exile at the French court.

Burgundy on the other hand listened to Richard's denunciation of Henry as

a traitor, and strove to prevent his departure. But his efforts were in

vain, and he had to witness a revolution which hurled Richard from the

throne, deprived Isabella of her crown, and restored to power the baronial

party of which Gloucester, the advocate of war, had long been the head.

The dread of war was increased by a pledge which Henry was said to have

given at his coronation that he would not only head an army in its march

into France but that he would march further into France than ever his

grandfather had done. The French Court retorted by refusing to acknowledge

Henry as king, while the truce concluded with Richard came at his death

legally to an end. In spite of this defiance however Burgundy remained

true to the interests of Flanders, and Henry clung to a truce which gave

him time to establish his throne. But the influence of the baronial party

in England made peace hard to keep; the Duke of Orleans urged on France to

war; and the hatred of the two peoples broke through the policy of the two

governments. Count Waleran of St. Pol, who had married Richard's

half-sister, put out to sea with a fleet which swept the east coast and

entered the Channel. Pirates from Britanny and Navarre soon swarmed in the

narrow seas, and their ravages were paid back by those of pirates from the

Cinque Ports. A more formidable trouble broke out in the north. The enmity

of France roused as of old the enmity of Scotland; the Scotch king Robert

the Third refused to acknowledge Henry, and Scotch freebooters cruised

along the northern coast.

[Sidenote: Richard's death]

Attack from without woke attack from within the realm. Henry had shown

little taste for bloodshed in his conduct of the revolution. Save those of

the royal councillors whom he found at Bristol no one had been put to

death. Though a deputation of lords with Archbishop Arundel at its head

pressed him to take Richard's life, he steadily refused, and kept him a

prisoner at Pomfret. The judgements against Gloucester, Warwick, and

Arundel were reversed, but the lords who had appealed the Duke were only

punished by the loss of the dignities which they had received as their

reward. Richard's brother and nephew by the half-blood, the Dukes of

Exeter and Surrey, became again Earls of Huntingdon and Kent. York's son,

the Duke of Albemarle, sank once more into Earl of Rutland. Beaufort, Earl

of Somerset, lost his new Marquisate of Dorset; Spenser lost his Earldom

of Gloucester. But in spite of a stormy scene among the lords in

Parliament Henry refused to exact further punishment; and his real temper

was seen in a statute which forbade all such appeals and left treason to

be dealt with by ordinary process of law. But the times were too rough for

mercy such as this. Clouds no sooner gathered round the new king than the

degraded lords leagued with the Earl of Salisbury and the deposed Bishop

of Carlisle to release Richard and to murder Henry. Betrayed by Rutland in

the spring of 1400, and threatened by the king's march from London, they

fled to Cirencester; but the town was against them, its burghers killed

Kent and Salisbury, and drove out the rest. A terrible retribution

followed. Lord Spenser and the Earl of Huntingdon were taken and summarily

beheaded; thirty more conspirators fell into the king's hands to meet the

same fate. They drew with them in their doom the wretched prisoner in

whose name they had risen. A great council held after the suppression of

the revolt prayed "that if Richard, the late king, be alive, as some

suppose he is, it be ordained that he be well and securely guarded for the

safety of the states of the king and kingdom; but if he be dead, then that

he be openly showed to the people that they may have knowledge thereof."

The ominous words were soon followed by news of Richard's death in prison.

His body was brought to St. Paul's, Henry himself with the princes of the

blood royal bearing the pall: and the face was left uncovered to meet

rumours that the prisoner had been assassinated by his keeper, Sir Piers

Exton.

[Sidenote: Revolt of Wales]

In June Henry marched northward to end the trouble from the Scots. With

their usual policy the Scottish army under the Duke of Albany withdrew as

the English crossed the border, and looked coolly on while Henry invested

the castle of Edinburgh. The wants of his army forced him in fact to raise

the siege; but even success would have been fruitless, for he was recalled

by trouble nearer home. Wales was in full revolt. The country had been

devoted to Richard; and so notorious was its disaffection to the new line

that when Henry's son knelt at his father's feet to receive a grant of the

Principality a shrewd bystander murmured, "He must conquer it if he will

have it." The death of the fallen king only added to the Welsh disquiet,

for in spite of the public exhibition of his body he was believed to be

still alive. Some hold that he had escaped to Scotland, and an impostor

who took his name was long maintained at the Scottish Court. In Wales it

was believed that he was still a prisoner in Chester Castle. But the

trouble would have died away had it not been raised into revolt by the

energy of Owen Glyndwr or Glendower. Owen was a descendant of one of the

last native Princes, Llewelyn-ap-Jorwerth, and the lord of considerable

estates in Merioneth. He had been squire of the body to Richard the

Second, and had clung to him till he was seized at Flint. It was probably

his known aversion from the revolution which had deposed his master that

brought on him the hostility of Lord Grey of Ruthin, the stay of the

Lancastrian cause in North Wales; and the same political ground may have

existed for the refusal of the Parliament to listen to his prayer for

redress and for the restoration of the lands which Grey had seized. But

the refusal was embittered by words of insult; when the Bishop of St.

Asaph warned them of Owen's power the lords retorted that "they cared not

for barefoot knaves." They were soon to be made to care. At the close of

1400 Owen rose in revolt, burned the town of Ruthin, and took the title of

Prince of Wales.

[Sidenote: Owen Glyndwr]

His action at once changed the disaffection into a national revolt. His

raids on the Marches and his capture of Radnor marked its importance, and

Henry marched against him in the summer of 1401. But Glyndwr's post at

Corwen defied attack, and the pressure in the north forced the king to

march away into Scotland. Henry Percy, who held the castles of North Wales

as Constable, was left to suppress the rebellion, but Owen met Percy's

arrival by the capture of Conway, and the king was forced to hurry fresh

forces under his son Henry to the west. The boy was too young as yet to

show the military and political ability which was to find its first field

in these Welsh campaigns, and his presence did little to stay the growth

of revolt. While Owen's lands were being harried Owen was stirring the

people of Caermarthen into rebellion and pressing the siege of

Abergavenny; nor could the presence of English troops save Shropshire from

pillage. Everywhere the Welshmen rose for their "Prince"; the Bards

declared his victories to have been foretold by Merlin; even the Welsh

scholars at Oxford left the University in a body and joined his standard.

The castles of Ruthin, Hawarden, and Flint fell into his hands, and with

his capture of Conway gave him command of North Wales. The arrival of help

from Scotland and the hope of help from France gave fresh vigour to Owen's

action, and though Percy held his ground stubbornly on the coast and even

recovered Conway he at last threw up his command in disgust. A fresh

inroad of Henry on his return from Scotland again failed to bring Owen to

battle, and the negotiations which he carried on during the following

winter were a mere blind to cover preparations for a new attack. So strong

had Glyndwr become in 1402 that in June he was able to face an English

army in the open field at Brynglas and to defeat it with a loss of a

thousand men. The king again marched to the border to revenge this blow.

But the storms which met him as he entered the hills, storms which his

archers ascribed to the magic powers of Owen, ruined his army, and he was

forced to withdraw as of old. A raid over the northern border distracted

the English forces. A Scottish army entered England with the impostor who

bore Richard's name, and though it was utterly defeated by Henry Percy in

September at Homildon Hill the respite had served Owen well. He sallied

out from the inaccessible fastnesses in which he had held Henry at bay to

win victories which were followed by the adhesion of all North Wales and

of great part of South Wales to his cause.

[Sidenote: The Percies]

What gave life to these attacks and conspiracies was the hostility of

France. The influence of the Duke of Burgundy was still strong enough to

prevent any formal hostilities, but the war party was gaining more and

more the ascendant. Its head, the Duke of Orleans, had fanned the growing

flame by sending a formal defiance to Henry the Fourth as the murderer of

Richard. French knights were among the prisoners whom the Percies took at

Homildon Hill; and it may have been through their intervention that the

Percies themselves were now brought into correspondence with the court of

France. No house had played a greater part in the overthrow of Richard, or

had been more richly rewarded by the new king. But old grudges existed

between the house of Percy and the house of Lancaster. The Earl of

Northumberland had been at bitter variance with John of Gaunt; and though

a common dread of Richard's enmity had thrown the Percies and Henry

together the new king and his powerful subjects were soon parted again.

Henry had ground indeed for distrust. The death of Richard left the young

Mortimer, Earl of March, next claimant in blood of the crown, and the king

had shown his sense of this danger by imprisoning the earl and his sisters

in the Tower. But this imprisonment made their uncle, Sir Edmund Mortimer,

the representative of their house; and Edmund withdrew to the Welsh

Marches, refusing to own Henry for king. The danger was averted by the

luck which threw Sir Edmund as a captive into the hands of Owen Glyndwr in

the battle of Brynglas. It was natural that Henry should refuse to allow

Mortimer's kinsmen to ransom so formidable an enemy; but among these

kinsmen Henry Percy ranked himself through his marriage with Sir Edmund's

sister, and the refusal served as a pretext for a final breach with the

king.

[Sidenote: Overthrow of the Percies]

Percy had withdrawn from the Welsh war in wrath at the inadequate support

which Henry gave him; and his anger had been increased by a delay in

repayment of the sums spent by his house in the contest with Scotland, as

well as by the king's demand that he should surrender the Earl of Douglas

whom he had taken prisoner at Homildon Hill. He now became the centre of a

great conspiracy to place the Earl of March upon the throne. His father,

the Earl of Northumberland, his uncle, Thomas Percy, the Earl of

Worcester, joined in the plot. Sir Edmund Mortimer negotiated for aid from

Owen Glyndwr; the Earl of Douglas threw in his fortunes with the

confederates; and Henry Percy himself crossed to France and obtained

promises of support. The war party had now gained the upper hand at the

French court; in 1403 preparations were made to attack Calais, and a

Breton fleet put to sea. At the news of its presence in the Channel Henry

Percy and the Earl of Worcester at once rose in the north and struck

across England to join Owen Glyndwr in Wales, while the Earl of

Northumberland gathered a second army and advanced more slowly to their

support. But Glyndwr was still busy with the siege of Caermarthen, and the

king by a hasty march flung himself across the road of the Percies as they

reached Shrewsbury. On the twenty-third of July a fierce fight ended in

the defeat of the rebel force. Henry Percy was slain in battle, the Earl

of Worcester taken and beheaded; while Northumberland, who had been

delayed by an army under his rival in the north, Neville, Earl of

Westmoreland, was thrown into prison, and only pardoned on his

protestations of innocence. The quick, hard blow did its work. The young

Earl of March betrayed the plans of his partizans to purchase pardon. The

Breton fleet, which had defeated an English fleet in the Channel and made

a descent upon Plymouth, withdrew to its harbours; and though the Duke of

Burgundy was on the point of commencing the siege of Calais the plans of

an attack on that town were no more heard of.

[Sidenote: Henry's difficulties]

But the difficulty of Wales remained as great as ever. The discouragement

of Owen at the failure of the conspiracy of the Percies was removed by the

open aid of the French Court. In July 1404 the French king in a formal

treaty owned Glyndwr as Prince of Wales, and his promises of aid gave

fresh heart to the insurgents. What hampered Henry's efforts most in

meeting this danger was the want of money. At the opening of 1404 the

Parliament grudgingly gave a subsidy of a twentieth, but the treasury

called for fresh supplies in October, and the wearied Commons fell back on

their old proposal of a confiscation of Church property. Under the

influence of Archbishop Arundel the Lords succeeded in quashing the

project, and a new subsidy was voted; but the treasury was soon as empty

as before. Treason was still rife; the Duke of York, who had played so

conspicuous a part in Richard's day as Earl of Rutland, was sent for a

while to the Tower on suspicion of complicity in an attempt of his sister

to release the Earl of March; and Glyndwr remained unconquerable.

[Sidenote: Turn of the tide]

But fortune was now beginning to turn. The danger from Scotland was

suddenly removed. King Robert resolved to send his son James for training

to the court of France, but the boy was driven to the English coast by a

storm and Henry refused to release him. Had the Scots been friends, the

king jested, they would have sent James to him for education, as he knew

the French tongue quite as well as King Charles. Robert died of grief at

the news; and Scotland fell into the hands of his brother, the Duke of

Albany, whose one aim was that his nephew should remain a prisoner. James

grew up at the English Court; and, prisoner though he was, the excellence

of his training was seen in the poetry and intelligence of his later life.

But with its king as a hostage Scotland was no longer to be dreaded as a

foe. France too was weakened at this moment; for in 1405 the

long-smouldering jealousy between the Dukes of Orleans and of Burgundy

broke out at last into open strife. The break did little indeed to check

the desultory hostilities which were going on. A Breton fleet made

descents on Portland and Dartmouth. The Count of Armagnac, the strongest

supporter of Orleans and the war party, led troops against the frontier of

Guienne. But the weakness of France and the exhaustion of its treasury

prevented any formal denunciation of the truce or declaration of war.

Though Henry could spare not a soldier for Guienne Armagnac did little

hurt. An English fleet repaid the ravages of the Bretons by harrying the

coast of Britanny; and the turn of French politics soon gave Frenchmen too

much work at home to spare men for work abroad. At the close of 1407 the

murder of the Duke of Orleans by the order of the Duke of Burgundy changed

the weak and fitful strife which had been going on into a struggle of the

bitterest hate. The Count of Armagnac placed himself at the head of the

murdered duke's partizans; and in their furious antagonism Armagnac and

Burgundian alike sought aid from the English king.

[Sidenote: Prince Henry]

But the fortune which favoured Henry elsewhere was still slow to turn in

the West. In the opening of 1405 the king's son, Henry Prince of Wales,

had taken the field against Glyndwr. Young as he was, Henry was already a

tried soldier. As a boy of thirteen he had headed an incursion into

Scotland in the year of his father's accession to the throne. At fifteen

he fought in the front of the royal army in the desperate fight at

Shrewsbury. Slight and tall in stature as he seemed, he had outgrown the

weakness of his earlier years and was vigorous and swift of foot; his

manners were courteous, his air grave and reserved; and though wild tales

ran of revels and riots among his friends, the poets whom he favoured and

Lydgate whom he set to translate "the drery piteous tale of him of Troy"

saw in him a youth "both manful and vertuous." There was little time

indeed for mere riot in a life so busy as Henry's, nor were many

opportunities for self-indulgence to be found in campaigns against

Glyndwr. What fitted the young general of seventeen for the thankless work

in Wales was his stern, immoveable will. But fortune as yet had few smiles

for the king in this quarter, and his constant ill-success continued to

wake fresh troubles within England itself. The repulse of the young prince

in a spring campaign in 1405 was at once followed by a revolt in the

north. The pardon of Northumberland had left him still a foe; the Earl of

Nottingham was son of Henry's opponent, the banished Duke of Norfolk;

Scrope, Archbishop of York, was brother of Richard's counsellor, the Earl

of Wiltshire, who had been beheaded on the surrender of Bristol. Their

rising in May might have proved a serious danger had not the treachery of

Ralph Neville, the Earl of Westmoreland, who still remained steady to the

Lancastrian cause, secured the arrest of some of its leaders. Scrope and

Lord Nottingham were beheaded, while Northumberland and his partizan Lord

Bardolf fled into Scotland and from thence to Wales. Succours from France

stirred the king to a renewed attack on Glyndwr in November; but with the

same ill-success. Storms and want of food wrecked the English army and

forced it to retreat; a year of rest raised Glyndwr to new strength; and

when the long-promised body of eight thousand Frenchmen joined him in 1407

he ventured even to cross the border and to threaten Worcester. The threat

was a vain one and the Welsh army soon withdrew; but the insult gave fresh

heart to Henry's foes, and in 1408 Northumberland and Bardolf again

appeared in the north. Their overthrow at Bramham Moor put an end to the

danger from the Percies; for Northumberland and Bardolf alike fell on the

field. But Wales remained as defiant as ever. In 1409 a body of Welshmen

poured ravaging into Shropshire; many of the English towns had fallen into

Glyndwr's hands; and some of the Marcher Lords made private truces with

him.

[Sidenote: Oldcastle]

The weakness which was produced by this ill-success in the West as well as

these constant battlings with disaffection within the realm was seen in

the attitude of the Lollards. Lollardry was far from having been crushed

by the Statute of Heresy. The death of the Earl of Salisbury in the first

of the revolts against Henry's throne, though his gory head was welcomed

into London by a procession of abbots and bishops who went out singing

psalms of thanksgiving to meet it, only transferred the leadership of the

party to one of the foremost warriors of the time, Sir John Oldcastle. If

we believe his opponents, and we have no information about him save from

hostile sources, he was of lowly origin, and his rise must have been due

to his own capacity and services to the Crown. In his youth he had

listened to the preaching of Wyclif, and his Lollardry--if we may judge

from its tone in later years--was a violent fanaticism. But this formed no

obstacle to his rise in Richard's reign; his marriage with the heiress of

that house made him Lord Cobham; and the accession of Henry of Lancaster,

to whose cause he seems to have clung in these younger days, brought him

fairly to the front. His skill in arms found recognition in his

appointment as sheriff of Herefordshire and as castellan of Brecknock; and

he was among the leaders who were chosen in later years for service in

France. His warlike renown endeared him to the king, and Prince Henry

counted him among the most illustrious of his servants. The favour of the

royal house was the more noteable that Oldcastle was known as "leader and

captain" of the Lollards. His Kentish castle of Cowling served as the

headquarters of the sect, and their preachers were openly entertained at

his houses in London or on the Welsh border. The Convocation of 1413

charged him with being "the principal receiver, favourer, protector, and

defender of them; and that, especially in the dioceses of London,

Rochester, and Hereford, he hath sent out the said Lollards to preach ...

and hath been present at their wicked sermons, grievously punishing with

threatenings, terror, and the power of the secular sword such as did

withstand them, alleging and affirming among other matters that we, the

bishops, had no power to make any such Constitutions" as the Provincial

Constitutions, in which they had forbidden the preaching of unlicensed

preachers. The bold stand of Lord Cobham drew fresh influence from the

sanctity of his life. Though the clergy charged him with the foulest

heresy, they owned that he shrouded it "under a veil of holiness." What

chiefly moved their wrath was that he "armed the hands of laymen for the

spoil of the Church." The phrase seems to hint that Oldcastle was the

mover in the repeated attempts of the Commons to supply the needs of the

State by a confiscation of Church property. In 1404 they prayed that the

needs of the kingdom might be defrayed by a confiscation of Church lands,

and though this prayer was fiercely met by Archbishop Arundel it was

renewed in 1410. The Commons declared as before that by devoting the

revenues of the prelates to the service of the state maintenance could be

made for fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, and six thousand squires,

while a hundred hospitals might be established for the sick and infirm.

Such proposals had been commonly made by the baronial party with which the

house of Lancaster had in former days been connected, and hostile as they

were to the Church as an establishment they had no necessary connexion

with any hostility to its doctrines. But a direct sympathy with Lollardism

was seen in the further proposals of the Commons. They prayed for the

abolition of episcopal jurisdiction over the clergy and for a mitigation

of the Statute of Heresy.

[Sidenote: Action of Prince Henry]

But formidable as the movement seemed it found a formidable opponent. The

steady fighting of Prince Henry had at last met the danger from Wales, and

Glyndwr, though still unconquered, saw district after district submit

again to English rule. From Wales the Prince returned to bring his will to

bear on England itself. It was through his strenuous opposition that the

proposals of the Commons in 1410 were rejected by the Lords. He gave at

the same moment a more terrible proof of his loyalty to the Church in

personally assisting at the burning of a layman, Thomas Badby, for a

denial of transubstantiation. The prayers of the sufferer were taken for a

recantation, and the Prince ordered the fire to be plucked away. But when

the offer of life and a pension failed to break the spirit of the Lollard

Henry pitilessly bade him be hurled back to his doom. The Prince was now

the virtual ruler of the realm. His father's earlier popularity had

disappeared amidst the troubles and heavy taxation of his reign. He was

already a victim to the attack of epilepsy which brought him to the grave;

and in the opening of 1410 the Parliament called for the appointment of a

Continual Council. The Council was appointed, and the Prince placed at its

head. His energy was soon seen in a more active interposition in the

affairs of France. So bitter had the hatred grown between the Burgundian

and Armagnac parties that both in turn appealed again to England for help.

The Burgundian alliance found favour with the Council. In August, 1411,

the Duke of Burgundy offered his daughter in marriage to the Prince as the

price of English aid, and four thousand men with Lord Cobham among their

leaders were sent to join his forces at Paris. Their help enabled Duke

John to bring his opponents to battle at St. Cloud, and to win a decisive

victory in November. But already the king was showing himself impatient of

the Council's control; and the Parliament significantly prayed that "as

there had been a great murmur among your people that you have had in your

heart a heavy load against some of your lieges come to this present

Parliament," they might be formally declared to be "faithful lieges and

servants." The prayer was granted, but in spite of the support which the

Houses gave to the Prince, Henry the Fourth was resolute to assert his

power. At the close of 1411 he declared his will to stand in as great

freedom, prerogative, and franchise as any of his predecessors had done,

and annulled on that ground the appointment of the Continual Council.

[Sidenote: Death of Henry the Fourth]

The king's blow had been dealt at the instigation of his queen, and it

seems to have been prompted as much by a resolve to change the outer

policy which the Prince had adopted as to free himself from the Council.

The dismissal of the English troops by John of Burgundy after his victory

at St. Cloud had irritated the English Court; and the Duke of Orleans took

advantage of this turn of feeling to offer Catharine, the French king's

daughter, in marriage to the Prince, and to promise the restoration of all

that England claimed in Guienne and Poitou. In spite of the efforts of the

Prince and the Duke of Burgundy a treaty of alliance with Orleans was

signed on these terms in May, 1412, and a force under the king's second

son, the Duke of Clarence, disembarked at La Hogue. But the very profusion

of the Orleanist offers threw doubt on their sincerity. The Duke was only

using the English aid to put a pressure on his antagonist, and its landing

in August at once brought John of Burgundy to a seeming submission. While

Clarence penetrated by Normandy and Maine into the Orleanais and a second

English force sailed for Calais, both the French parties joined in

pledging their services to King Charles "against his adversary of

England." Before this union Clarence was forced in November to accept

promise of payment for his men from the Duke of Orleans and to fall back

on Bordeaux. The failure no doubt gave fresh strength to Prince Henry. In

the opening of 1412 he had been discharged from the Council and Clarence

set in his place at its head; he had been defeated in his attempts to

renew the Burgundian alliance, and had striven in vain to hinder Clarence

from sailing. The break grew into an open quarrel. Letters were sent into

various counties refuting the charges of the Prince's detractors, and in

September Henry himself appeared before his father with a crowd of his

friends and supporters demanding the punishment of those who accused him.

The charges made against him were that he sought to bring about the king's

removal from the throne; and "the great recourse of people unto him, of

which his court was at all times more abundant than his father's," gave

colour to the accusation. Henry the Fourth owned his belief in these

charges, but promised to call a Parliament for his son's vindication; and

the Parliament met in the February of 1413. But a new attack of epilepsy

had weakened the king's strength; and though galleys were gathered for a

Crusade which he had vowed he was too weak to meet the Houses on their

assembly. If we may trust a charge which was afterwards denied, the king's

half-brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester, one of the Beaufort children of

John of Gaunt, acting in secret co-operation with the Prince, now brought

the peers to pray Henry to suffer his son to be crowned in his stead. The

king's refusal was the last act of a dying man. Before the end of March he

breathed his last in the "Jerusalem Chamber" within the Abbot's house at

Westminster; and the Prince obtained the crown which he had sought.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Lollards]

The removal of Archbishop Arundel from the Chancellorship, which was given

to Henry Beaufort of Winchester, was among the first acts of Henry the

Fifth; and it is probable that this blow at the great foe of the Lollards

gave encouragement to the hopes of Oldcastle. He seized the opportunity of

the coronation in April to press his opinions on the young king, though

probably rather with a view to the plunder of the Church than to any

directly religious end. From the words of the clerical chroniclers it is

plain that Henry had no mind as yet for any open strife with either party,

and that he quietly put the matter aside. He was in fact busy with foreign

affairs. The Duke of Clarence was recalled from Bordeaux, and a new truce

concluded with France. The policy of Henry was clearly to look on for a

while at the shifting politics of the distracted kingdom. Soon after his

accession another revolution in Paris gave the charge of the mad King

Charles, and with it the nominal government of the realm, to the Duke of

Orleans; and his cause derived fresh strength from the support of the

young Dauphin, who was afterwards to play so great a part in the history

of France as Charles the Seventh. John of Burgundy withdrew to Flanders,

and both parties again sought Henry's aid. But his hands were tied as yet

by trouble at home. Oldcastle was far from having abandoned his projects,

discouraged as they had been by his master; while the suspicions of

Henry's favour to the Lollard cause which could hardly fail to be roused

by his favour to the Lollard leader only spurred the bold spirit of

Arundel to energetic action. A council of bishops gathered in the summer

to denounce Lollardry and at once called on Henry to suffer Oldcastle to

be brought to justice. The king pleaded for delay in the case of one who

was so close a friend, and strove personally to convince Lord Cobham of

his errors. All however was in vain, and Oldcastle withdrew to his castle

of Cowling, while Arundel summoned him before his court and convicted him

as a heretic. His open defiance at last forced the king to act. In

September a body of royal troops arrested Lord Cobham and carried him to

the Tower; but his life was still spared, and after a month's confinement

his imprisonment was relaxed on his promise of recantation. Cobham however

had now resolved on open resistance. He broke from the Tower in November,

and from his hiding-place organized a vast revolt. At the opening of 1414

a secret order summoned the Lollards to assemble in St. Giles's Fields

outside London. We gather, if not the real aims of the rising, at least

the terror it caused, from Henry's statement that its purpose was "to

destroy himself, his brothers, and several of the spiritual and temporal

lords"; from Cobham's later declarations it is probable that the pretext

of the rising was to release Richard, whom he asserted to be still alive,

and to set him again on the throne. But the vigilance of the young king

prevented the junction of the Lollards within the city with their

confederates without, and these as they appeared at the place of meeting

were dispersed by the royal troops.

[Sidenote: Renewal of the French War]

The failure of the rising only increased the rigour of the law.

Magistrates were directed to arrest all heretics and hand them over to the

bishops; a conviction of heresy was made to entail forfeiture of blood and

estate; and the execution of thirty-nine prominent Lollards as traitors

gave terrible earnest of the king's resolve to suppress their sect.

Oldcastle escaped, and for four years longer strove to rouse revolt after

revolt. He was at last captured on the Welsh border and burned as a

heretic; but from the moment when his attempt at revolt was crushed in St.

Giles's Fields the dread of Lollardry was broken and Henry was free to

take a more energetic course of policy on the other side the sea. He had

already been silently preparing for action by conciliatory measures, by

restoring Henry Percy's son to the Earldom of Northumberland, by the

release of the Earl of March, and by the solemn burial of Richard the

Second at Westminster. The suppression of the Lollard revolt was followed

by a demand for the restoration of the English possessions in France, and

by alliances and preparations for war. Burgundy stood aloof in a sullen

neutrality, and the Duke of Orleans, who was now virtually ruler of the

French kingdom, in vain proposed concession after concession. All

negotiation indeed broke down when Henry formally put forward his claim on

the crown of France. No claim could have been more utterly baseless, for

the Parliamentary title by which the House of Lancaster held England could

give it no right over France, and the strict law of hereditary succession

which Edward asserted could be pleaded, if pleaded at all, only by the

House of Mortimer. Not only the claim indeed, but the very nature of the

war itself was wholly different from that of Edward the Third. Edward had

been forced into the struggle against his will by the ceaseless attacks of

France, and his claim of the crown was little but an afterthought to

secure the alliance of Flanders. The war of Henry on the other hand,

though in form a mere renewal of the earlier struggle on the close of the

truce made by Richard the Second, was in fact an aggression on the part of

a nation tempted by the helplessness of its opponent and galled by the

memory of former defeat. Its one excuse lay in the attacks which France

for the past fifteen years had directed against the Lancastrian throne,

its encouragement of every enemy without and of every traitor within.

Henry may fairly have regarded such a ceaseless hostility, continued even

through years of weakness, as forcing him in sheer self-defence to secure

his realm against the weightier attack which might be looked for, should

France recover her strength.

[Sidenote: Agincourt]

In the summer of 1415 the king prepared to sail from Southampton, when a

plot reminded him of the insecurity of his throne. The Earl of March was

faithful: but he was childless, and his claim would pass at his death

through a sister who had wedded the Earl of Cambridge, a son of the Duke

of York, to her child Richard, the Duke who was to play so great a part in

the War of the Roses. It was to secure his boy's claims that the Earl of

Cambridge seized on the king's departure to conspire with Lord Scrope and

Sir Thomas Grey to proclaim the Earl of March king. The plot however was

discovered and the plotters beheaded before the king sailed in August for

the Norman coast. His first exploit was the capture of Harfleur. Dysentery

made havoc in his ranks during the siege, and it was with a mere handful

of men that he resolved to insult the enemy by a daring march like that of

Edward upon Calais. The discord however on which he probably reckoned for

security vanished before the actual appearance of the invaders in the

heart of France; and when his weary and half-starved force succeeded in

crossing the Somme it found sixty thousand Frenchmen encamped on the field

of Agincourt right across its line of march. Their position, flanked on

either side by woods, but with a front so narrow that the dense masses

were drawn up thirty men deep, though strong for purposes of defence was

ill suited for attack; and the French leaders, warned by the experience of

Crecy and Poitiers, resolved to await the English advance. Henry on the

other hand had no choice between attack and unconditional surrender. His

troops were starving, and the way to Calais lay across the French army.

But the king's courage rose with the peril. A knight in his train wished

that the thousands of stout warriors lying idle that night in England had

been standing in his ranks. Henry answered with a burst of scorn. "I would

not have a single man more," he replied. "If God give us the victory, it

will be plain we owe it to His grace. If not, the fewer we are, the less

loss for England." Starving and sick as they were, the handful of men whom

he led shared the spirit of their king. As the chill rainy night passed

away he drew up his army on the twenty-fifth of October and boldly gave

battle. The English archers bared their arms and breasts to give fair play

to "the crooked stick and the grey goose wing," but for which--as the rime

ran--"England were but a fling," and with a great shout sprang forward to

the attack. The sight of their advance roused the fiery pride of the

French; the wise resolve of their leaders was forgotten, and the dense

mass of men-at-arms plunged heavily forward through miry ground on the

English front. But at the first sign of movement Henry had halted his

line, and fixing in the ground the sharpened stakes with which each man

was furnished his archers poured their fatal arrow-flights into the

hostile ranks. The carnage was terrible, for though the desperate charges

of the French knighthood at last drove the English archers to the

neighbouring woods, from the skirt of these woods they were still able to

pour their shot into the enemy's flanks, while Henry with the men-at-arms

around him flung himself on the French line. In the terrible struggle

which followed the king bore off the palm of bravery: he was felled once

by a blow from a French mace and the crown of his helmet was cleft by the

sword of the Duke of Alencon; but the enemy was at last broken, and the

defeat of the main body of the French was followed by the rout of their

reserve. The triumph was more complete, as the odds were even greater,

than at Crecy. Eleven thousand Frenchmen lay dead on the field, and more

than a hundred princes and great lords were among the fallen.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Normandy]

The immediate result of the battle of Agincourt was small, for the English

army was too exhausted for pursuit, and it made its way to Calais only to

return to England. Through 1416 the war was limited to a contest for the

command of the Channel, till the increasing bitterness of the strife

between the Burgundians and Armagnacs, and the consent of John of Burgundy

to conclude an alliance, encouraged Henry to resume his attempt to recover

Normandy. Whatever may have been his aim in this enterprise--whether it

were, as has been suggested, to provide a refuge for his house, should its

power be broken in England, or simply to acquire a command of the

seas--the patience and skill with which his object was accomplished raise

him high in the rank of military leaders. Disembarking in July 1417 with

an army of forty thousand men near the mouth of the Touque, he stormed

Caen, received the surrender of Bayeux, reduced Alencon and Falaise, and

detaching his brother the Duke of Gloucester in the spring of 1418 to

occupy the Cotentin made himself master of Avranches and Domfront. With

Lower Normandy wholly in his hands, he advanced upon Evreux, captured

Louviers, and seizing Pont-de-l'Arche, threw his troops across the Seine.

The end of these masterly movements was now revealed. Rouen was at this

time the largest and wealthiest of the towns of France; its walls were

defended by a powerful artillery; Alan Blanchard, a brave and resolute

patriot, infused the fire of his own temper into the vast population; and

the garrison, already strong, was backed by fifteen thousand citizens in

arms. But the genius of Henry was more than equal to the difficulties with

which he had to deal. He had secured himself from an attack on his rear by

the reduction of Lower Normandy, his earlier occupation of Harfleur

severed the town from the sea, and his conquest of Pont-de-l'Arche cut it

off from relief on the side of Paris. Slowly but steadily the king drew

his lines of investment round the doomed city; a flotilla was brought up

from Harfleur, a bridge of boats thrown over the Seine above the town, the

deep trenches of the besiegers protected by posts, and the desperate

sallies of the garrison stubbornly beaten back. For six months Rouen held

resolutely out, but famine told fast on the vast throng of country folk

who had taken refuge within its walls. Twelve thousand of these were at

last thrust out of the city gates, but the cold policy of the conqueror

refused them passage, and they perished between the trenches and the

walls. In the hour of their agony women gave birth to infants, but even

the new-born babes which were drawn up in baskets to receive baptism were

lowered again to die on their mothers' breasts. It was little better

within the town itself. As winter drew on one-half of the population

wasted away. "War," said the terrible king, "has three handmaidens ever

waiting on her, Fire, Blood, and Famine, and I have chosen the meekest

maid of the three." But his demand of unconditional surrender nerved the

citizens to a resolve of despair; they determined to fire the city and

fling themselves in a mass on the English lines; and Henry, fearful lest

his prize should escape him at the last, was driven to offer terms. Those

who rejected a foreign yoke were suffered to leave the city, but his

vengeance reserved its victim in Alan Blanchard, and the brave patriot was

at Henry's orders put to death in cold blood.

[Sidenote: Death of Henry the Fifth]

A few sieges completed the reduction of Normandy. The king's designs were

still limited to the acquisition of that province; and pausing in his

career of conquest, he strove to win its loyalty by a remission of

taxation and a redress of grievances, and to seal its possession by a

formal peace with the French Crown. The conferences however which were

held for this purpose at Pontoise in 1419 failed through the temporary

reconciliation of the French factions, while the length and expense of the

war began to rouse remonstrance and discontent at home. The king's

difficulties were at their height when the assassination of John of

Burgundy at Montereau in the very presence of the Dauphin with whom he had

come to hold conference rekindled the fires of civil strife. The whole

Burgundian party with the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, at its

head flung itself in a wild thirst for revenge into Henry's hands. The mad

king, Charles the Sixth, with his queen and daughters was in Philip's

power; and in his resolve to exclude the Dauphin from the throne the Duke

stooped to buy English aid by giving Catharine, the eldest of the French

princesses, in marriage to Henry, by conferring on him the Regency during

the life of Charles, and recognizing his succession to the crown at that

sovereign's death. A treaty which embodied these terms was solemnly

ratified by Charles himself in a conference at Troyes in May 1420; and

Henry, who in his new capacity of Regent undertook to conquer in the name

of his father-in-law the territory held by the Dauphin, reduced the towns

of the Upper Seine, and at Christmas entered Paris in triumph side by side

with the king. The States-General of the realm were solemnly convened to

the capital; and strange as the provisions of the Treaty of Troyes must

have seemed they were confirmed without a murmur. Henry was formally

recognized as the future sovereign of France. A defeat of his brother

Clarence at Bauge in Anjou in the spring of 1421 called him back to the

war. His reappearance in the field was marked by the capture of Dreux, and

a repulse before Orleans was redeemed in the summer of 1422 by his success

in the long and obstinate siege of Meaux. At no time had the fortunes of

Henry reached a higher pitch than at the moment when he felt the touch of

death. In the month which followed the surrender of Meaux he fell ill at

Corbeil; the rapidity of his disease baffled the skill of the physicians;

and at the close of August, with a strangely characteristic regret that he

had not lived to achieve the conquest of Jerusalem, the great conqueror

passed away.

CHAPTER VI

THE WARS OF THE ROSES

1422-1461

[Sidenote: Plans of Henry V]

At the moment when death so suddenly stayed his course the greatness of

Henry the Fifth had reached its highest point. In England his victories

had hushed the last murmurs of disaffection. The death of the Earl of

Cambridge, the childhood of his son, removed all danger from the claims of

the house of York. The ruin of Lord Cobham, the formal condemnation of

Wyclif's doctrines in the Council of Constance, broke the political and

the religious strength of Lollardry. Henry had won the Church by his

orthodoxy, the nobles by his warlike prowess, the whole people by his

revival of the glories of Crecy and Poitiers. In France his cool policy

had transformed him from a foreign conqueror into a legal heir to the

crown. The King was in his hands, the Queen devoted to his cause, the Duke

of Burgundy was his ally, his title of Regent and of successor to the

throne rested on the formal recognition of the estates of the realm.

Although southern France still clung to the Dauphin, the progress of Henry

to the very moment of his death promised a speedy mastery of the whole

country. His European position was a commanding one. Lord of the two great

western kingdoms, he was linked by close ties of blood with the royal

lines of Portugal and Castille; and his restless activity showed itself in

his efforts to procure the adoption of his brother John as her successor

by the queen of Naples, and in the marriage of a younger brother,

Humphrey, with Jacqueline, the Countess of Holland and Hainault. Dreams of

a vaster enterprise filled the soul of the great conqueror himself; he

loved to read the story of Godfrey of Bouillon and cherished the hope of a

crusade which should beat back the Ottoman and again rescue the Holy Land

from heathen hands. Such a crusade might still have saved Constantinople,

and averted from Europe the danger which threatened it through the century

that followed the fall of the imperial city. Nor was the enterprise a

dream in the hands of the cool, practical warrior and ruler of whom a

contemporary could say, "He transacts all his affairs himself, he

considers well before he undertakes them, he never does anything

fruitlessly."

[Sidenote: John of Bedford]

But the hopes of far-off conquests found a sudden close in Henry's death.

His son, Henry the Sixth of England, was a child of but nine months old:

and though he was peacefully recognized as king in his English realm and

as heir to the throne in the realm of France his position was a very

different one from his father's. The death of King Charles indeed, two

months after that of his son-in-law, did little to weaken it; and at first

nothing seemed lost. The Dauphin at once proclaimed himself Charles the

Seventh of France: but Henry was owned as Sovereign over the whole of the

territory which Charles had actually ruled; and the incursions which the

partizans of Charles, now reinforced by Lombard soldiers from the Milanese

and by four thousand Scots under the Earl of Douglas, made with fresh

vigour across the Loire were easily repulsed by Duke John of Bedford, the

late king's brother, who had been named in his will Regent of France. In

genius for war as in political capacity John was hardly inferior to Henry

himself. Drawing closer his alliance with the Duke of Burgundy by marriage

with that prince's sister, and holding that of Britanny by a patient

diplomacy, he completed the conquest of Northern France, secured his

communications with Normandy by the capture of Meulan, and made himself

master of the line of the Yonne by a victory near Auxerre. In 1424 the

Constable of Buchan pushed from the Loire to the very borders of Normandy

to arrest his progress, and attacked the English army at Verneuil. But a

repulse hardly less disastrous than that of Agincourt left a third of the

French knighthood on the field: and the Regent was preparing to cross the

Loire for a final struggle with "the King of Bourges" as the English in

mockery called Charles the Seventh when his career of victory was broken

by troubles at home.

[Sidenote: Humphrey of Gloucester]

In England the Lancastrian throne was still too newly established to

remain unshaken by the succession of a child of nine months old. Nor was

the younger brother of Henry the Fifth, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, whom

the late king's will named as Regent of the realm, a man of the same noble

temper as the Duke of Bedford. Intellectually the figure of Humphrey is

one of extreme interest, for he is the first Englishman in whom we can

trace the faint influence of that revival of knowledge which was to bring

about the coming renascence of the western world. Humphrey was not merely

a patron of poets and men of letters, of Lydgate and William of Worcester

and Abbot Whethamstede of St. Albans, as his brother and other princes of

the day had been, but his patronage seems to have sprung from a genuine

interest in learning itself. He was a zealous collector of books and was

able to bequeath to the University of Oxford a library of a hundred and

thirty volumes. A gift of books indeed was a passport to his favour, and

before the title of each volume he possessed the Duke wrote words which

expressed his love of them, "moun bien mondain," "my worldly goods"!

Lydgate tells us how "notwithstanding his state and dignyte his corage

never doth appalle to studie in books of antiquitie." His studies drew him

to the revival of classic learning which was becoming a passion across the

Alps. One wandering scholar from Forli, who took the pompous name of Titus

Livius and who wrote at his request the biography of Henry the Fifth,

Humphrey made his court poet and orator. The Duke probably aided Poggio

Bracciolini in his search for classical manuscripts when he visited

England in 1420. Leonardo Aretino, one of the scholars who gathered about

Cosmo de Medici, dedicated to him a translation of the _Politics_ of

Aristotle, and when another Italian scholar sent him a fragment of a

translation of Plato's _Republic_ the Duke wrote to beg him to send the

rest. But with its love of learning Humphrey combined the restlessness,

the immorality, the selfish, boundless ambition which characterized the

age of the Renascence. His life was sullied by sensual excesses, his greed

of power shook his nephew's throne. So utterly was he already distrusted

that the late king's nomination of him as Regent was set aside by the

royal Council, and he was suffered only to preside at its deliberations

with the nominal title of Protector during Bedford's absence. The real

direction of affairs fell into the hands of his uncle, Henry Beaufort, the

Bishop of Winchester, a legitimated son of John of Gaunt by his mistress

Catharine Swynford.

[Sidenote: Jacqueline of Hainault]

Two years of useless opposition disgusted the Duke with this nominal

Protectorship, and in 1424 he left the realm to push his fortunes in the

Netherlands. Jacqueline, the daughter and heiress of William, Count of

Holland and Hainault, had originally wedded John, Duke of Brabant; but

after a few years of strife she had procured a divorce from one of the

three claimants who now disputed the Papacy, and at the close of Henry the

Fifth's reign she had sought shelter in England. At his brother's death

the Duke of Gloucester avowed his marriage with her and adopted her claims

as his own. To support them in arms however was to alienate Philip of

Burgundy, who was already looking forward to the inheritance of his

childless nephew, the Duke of Brabant; and as the alliance with Burgundy

was the main strength of the English cause in France, neither Bedford, who

had shown his sense of its value by a marriage with the Duke's sister, nor

the English council were likely to support measures which would imperil or

weaken it. Such considerations however had little weight with Humphrey;

and in October 1424 he set sail for Calais without their knowledge with a

body of five thousand men. In a few months he succeeded in restoring

Hainault to Jacqueline, and Philip at once grew lukewarm in his adherence

to the English cause. Though Bedford's efforts prevented any final break,

the Duke withdrew his forces from France to aid John of Brabant in the

recovery of Hainault and Holland. Gloucester challenged Philip to decide

their claims by single combat. But the enterprise was abandoned as hastily

as it had been begun. The Duke of Gloucester was already disgusted with

Jacqueline and enamoured of a lady in her suite, Eleanor, the daughter of

Lord Cobham; and in the summer of 1425 he suddenly returned with her to

England and left his wife to defend herself as she might.

[Sidenote: Henry Beaufort]

What really called him back was more than his passion for Eleanor Cobham

or the natural versatility of his temper; it was the advance of a rival in

England to further power over the realm. This was his uncle, Henry

Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. The bishop had already played a leading

political part. He was charged with having spurred Henry the Fifth to the

ambitious demands of power which he made during his father's lifetime; he

became chancellor on his accession; and at his death the king left him

guardian of the person of his boy. He looked on Gloucester's ambition as a

danger to his charge, withstood his recognition as Regent, and remained at

the head of the Council that reduced his office of Protector to a name.

The Duke's absence in Hainault gave fresh strength to his opponent: and

the nomination of the Bishop to the Chancellorship marked him out as the

virtual ruler of the realm. On the news of this appointment Gloucester

hurried back to accept what he looked on as a challenge to open strife.

The Londoners rose in his name to attack Beaufort's palace in Southwark,

and at the close of 1425 Bedford had to quit his work in France to appease

the strife. In the following year Gloucester laid a formal bill of

accusation against the bishop before the Parliament, but its rejection

forced him to a show of reconciliation, and Bedford was able to return to

France. Hardly was he gone however when the quarrel began anew. Humphrey

found a fresh weapon against Beaufort in his acceptance of the dignity of

a Cardinal and of a Papal Legate in England; and the jealousy which this

step aroused drove the Bishop to withdraw for a while from the Council and

to give place to his unscrupulous opponent.

[Sidenote: Siege of Orleans]

Beaufort possessed an administrative ability, the loss of which was a

heavy blow to the struggling Regent over sea, where Humphrey's restless

ambition had already paralyzed Bedford's efforts. Much of his strength

rested on his Burgundian ally, and the force of Burgundy was drawn to

other quarters. Though Hainault had been easily won back on Gloucester's

retreat and Jacqueline taken prisoner, her escape from prison enabled her

to hold Holland for three years against the forces of the Duke of Brabant

and after his death against those of the Duke of Burgundy to whom he

bequeathed his dominions. The political strife in England itself was still

more fatal in diverting the supplies of men and money which were needful

for a vigorous prosecution of the war. To maintain even the handful of

forces left to him Bedford was driven to have recourse to mere forays

which did little but increase the general misery. The north of France

indeed was being fast reduced to a desert by the bands of marauders which

traversed it. The husbandmen fled for refuge to the towns till these in

fear of famine shut their gates against them. Then in their despair they

threw themselves into the woods and became brigands in their turn. So

terrible was the devastation that two hostile bodies of troops failed at

one time even to find one another in the desolate Beauce. Misery and

disease killed a hundred thousand people in Paris alone. At last the

cessation of the war in Holland and the temporary lull of strife in

England enabled the Regent to take up again his long-interrupted advance

upon the South. Orleans was the key to the Loire; and its reduction would

throw open Bourges where Charles held his court. Bedford's resources

indeed were still inadequate for such a siege; and though the arrival of

reinforcements from England under the Earl of Salisbury enabled him to

invest it in October 1428 with ten thousand men, the fact that so small a

force could undertake the siege of such a town as Orleans shows at once

the exhaustion of England and the terror which still hung over France. As

the siege went on however even these numbers were reduced. A new fit of

jealousy on the part of the Duke of Burgundy brought about a recall of his

soldiers from the siege, and after their withdrawal only three thousand

Englishmen remained in the trenches. But the long series of English

victories had so demoralized the French soldiery, that in February 1429 a

mere detachment of archers under Sir John Fastolfe repulsed a whole army

in what was called "the Battle of the Herrings" from the convoy of

provisions which the victors brought in triumph into the camp before

Orleans. Though the town swarmed with men-at-arms not a single sally was

ventured on through the six months' siege, and Charles the Seventh did

nothing for its aid but shut himself up in Chinon and weep helplessly.

[Sidenote: Jeanne Darc]

But the success of this handful of besiegers rested wholly on the spell of

terror which had been cast over France, and at this moment the appearance

of a peasant maiden broke the spell. Jeanne Darc was the child of a

labourer of Domremy, a little village in the neighbourhood of Vaucouleurs

on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne. Just without the cottage where

she was born began the great woods of the Vosges where the children of

Domremy drank in poetry and legend from fairy ring and haunted well, hung

their flower garlands on the sacred trees, and sang songs to the "good

people" who might not drink of the fountain because of their sins. Jeanne

loved the forest; its birds and beasts came lovingly to her at her

childish call. But at home men saw nothing in her but "a good girl, simple

and pleasant in her ways," spinning and sewing by her mother's side while

the other girls went to the fields, tender to the poor and sick, fond of

church, and listening to the church-bell with a dreamy passion of delight

which never left her. This quiet life was broken by the storm of war as it

at last came home to Domremy. As the outcasts and wounded passed by the

little village the young peasant girl gave them her bed and nursed them in

their sickness. Her whole nature summed itself up in one absorbing

passion: she "had pity," to use the phrase for ever on her lip, "on the

fair realm of France." As her passion grew she recalled old prophecies

that a maid from the Lorraine border should save the land; she saw

visions; St. Michael appeared to her in a flood of blinding light, and

bade her go to the help of the king and restore to him his realm.

"Messire," answered the girl, "I am but a poor maiden; I know not how to

ride to the wars, or to lead men-at-arms." The archangel returned to give

her courage, and to tell her of "the pity" that there was in heaven for

the fair realm of France. The girl wept and longed that the angels who

appeared to her would carry her away, but her mission was clear. It was in

vain that her father when he heard her purpose swore to drown her ere she

should go to the field with men-at-arms. It was in vain that the priest,

the wise people of the village, the captain of Vaucouleurs, doubted and

refused to aid her. "I must go to the King," persisted the peasant girl,

"even if I wear my limbs to the very knees." "I had far rather rest and

spin by my mother's side," she pleaded with a touching pathos, "for this

is no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it, for my Lord wills it."

"And who," they asked, "is your Lord?" "He is God." Words such as these

touched the rough captain at last: he took Jeanne by the hand and swore to

lead her to the king. She reached Chinon in the opening of March, but here

too she found hesitation and doubt. The theologians proved from their

books that they ought not to believe her. "There is more in God's book

than in yours," Jeanne answered simply. At last Charles himself received

her in the midst of a throng of nobles and soldiers. "Gentle Dauphin,"

said the girl, "my name is Jeanne the Maid. The Heavenly King sends me to

tell you that you shall be anointed and crowned in the town of Reims, and

you shall be lieutenant of the Heavenly King who is the King of France."

[Sidenote: Relief of Orleans]

Orleans had already been driven by famine to offers of surrender when

Jeanne appeared in the French court, and a force was gathering under the

Count of Dunois at Blois for a final effort at its relief. It was at the

head of this force that Jeanne placed herself. The girl was in her

eighteenth year, tall, finely formed, with all the vigour and activity of

her peasant rearing, able to stay from dawn to nightfall on horseback

without meat or drink. As she mounted her charger, clad in white armour

from head to foot, with a great white banner studded with fleur-de-lys

waving over her head, she seemed "a thing wholly divine, whether to see or

hear." The ten thousand men-at-arms who followed her from Blois, rough

plunderers whose only prayer was that of La Hire, "Sire Dieu, I pray you

to do for La Hire what La Hire would do for you, were you captain-at-arms

and he God," left off their oaths and foul living at her word and gathered

round the altars on their march. Her shrewd peasant humour helped her to

manage the wild soldiery, and her followers laughed over their camp-fires

at an old warrior who had been so puzzled by her prohibition of oaths that

she suffered him still to swear by his baton. For in the midst of her

enthusiasm her good sense never left her. The people crowded round her as

she rode along, praying her to work miracles, and bringing crosses and

chaplets to be blest by her touch. "Touch them yourself," she said to an

old Dame Margaret; "your touch will be just as good as mine." But her

faith in her mission remained as firm as ever. "The Maid prays and

requires you," she wrote to Bedford, "to work no more distraction in

France but to come in her company to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the

Turk." "I bring you," she told Dunois when he sallied out of Orleans to

meet her after her two days' march from Blois, "I bring you the best aid

ever sent to any one, the aid of the King of Heaven." The besiegers looked

on overawed as she entered Orleans and, riding round the walls, bade the

people shake off their fear of the forts which surrounded them. Her

enthusiasm drove the hesitating generals to engage the handful of

besiegers, and the enormous disproportion of forces at once made itself

felt. Fort after fort was taken till only the strongest remained, and then

the council of war resolved to adjourn the attack. "You have taken your

counsel," replied Jeanne, "and I take mine." Placing herself at the head

of the men-at-arms, she ordered the gates to be thrown open, and led them

against the fort. Few as they were, the English fought desperately, and

the Maid, who had fallen wounded while endeavouring to scale its walls,

was borne into a vineyard, while Dunois sounded the retreat. "Wait a

while!" the girl imperiously pleaded, "eat and drink! so soon as my

standard touches the wall you shall enter the fort." It touched, and the

assailants burst in. On the next day the siege was abandoned, and on the

eighth of May the force which had conducted it withdrew in good order to

the north.

[Sidenote: Coronation of Charles]

In the midst of her triumph Jeanne still remained the pure, tender-hearted

peasant girl of the Vosges. Her first visit as she entered Orleans was to

the great church, and there, as she knelt at mass, she wept in such a

passion of devotion that "all the people wept with her." Her tears burst

forth afresh at her first sight of bloodshed and of the corpses strewn

over the battle-field. She grew frightened at her first wound, and only

threw off the touch of womanly fear when she heard the signal for retreat.

Yet more womanly was the purity with which she passed through the brutal

warriors of a mediaeval camp. It was her care for her honour that led her

to clothe herself in a soldier's dress. She wept hot tears when told of

the foul taunts of the English, and called passionately on God to witness

her chastity. "Yield thee, yield thee, Glasdale," she cried to the English

warrior whose insults had been foulest as he fell wounded at her feet;

"you called me harlot! I have great pity on your soul." But all thought of

herself was lost in the thought of her mission. It was in vain that the

French generals strove to remain on the Loire. Jeanne was resolute to

complete her task, and while the English remained panic-stricken around

Paris she brought Charles to march upon Reims, the old crowning-place of

the kings of France. Troyes and Chalons submitted as she reached them,

Reims drove out the English garrison and threw open her gates to the king.

[Sidenote: Capture of Jeanne]

With his coronation the Maid felt her errand to be over. "O gentle King,

the pleasure of God is done," she cried, as she flung herself at the feet

of Charles and asked leave to go home. "Would it were His good will," she

pleaded with the Archbishop as he forced her to remain, "that I might go

and keep sheep once more with my sisters and my brothers: they would be so

glad to see me again!" But the policy of the French Court detained her

while the cities of the North of France opened their gates to the

newly-consecrated king. Bedford however, who had been left without money

or men, had now received reinforcements. Excluded as Cardinal Beaufort had

been from the Council by Gloucester's intrigues, he poured his wealth

without stint into the exhausted treasury till his loans to the Crown

reached the sum of half-a-million; and at this crisis he unscrupulously

diverted an army which he had levied at his own cost for a crusade against

the Hussites in Bohemia to his nephew's aid. The tide of success turned

again. Charles, after a repulse before the walls of Paris, fell back

behind the Loire; while the towns on the Oise submitted anew to the Duke

of Burgundy, whose more active aid Bedford had bought by the cession of

Champagne. In the struggle against Duke Philip Jeanne fought with her

usual bravery but with the fatal consciousness that her mission was at an

end, and during the defence of Compiegne in the May of 1430 she fell into

the power of the Bastard of Vendome, to be sold by her captor into the

hands of the Duke of Burgundy and by the Duke into the hands of the

English. To the English her triumphs were victories of sorcery, and after

a year's imprisonment she was brought to trial on a charge of heresy

before an ecclesiastical court with the Bishop of Beauvais at its head.

[Sidenote: Death of Jeanne]

Throughout the long process which followed every art was used to entangle

her in her talk. But the simple shrewdness of the peasant girl foiled the

efforts of her judges. "Do you believe," they asked, "that you are in a

state of grace?" "If I am not," she replied, "God will put me in it. If I

am, God will keep me in it." Her capture, they argued, showed that God had

forsaken her. "Since it has pleased God that I should be taken," she

answered meekly, "it is for the best." "Will you submit," they demanded at

last, "to the judgement of the Church Militant?" "I have come to the King

of France," Jeanne replied, "by commission from God and from the Church

Triumphant above: to that Church I submit." "I had far rather die," she

ended passionately, "than renounce what I have done by my Lord's command."

They deprived her of mass. "Our Lord can make me hear it without your

aid," she said, weeping. "Do your voices," asked the judges, "forbid you

to submit to the Church and the Pope?" "Ah, no! our Lord first served."

Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it was no wonder that as the long

trial dragged on and question followed question Jeanne's firmness wavered.

On the charge of sorcery and diabolical possession she still appealed

firmly to God. "I hold to my Judge," she said, as her earthly judges gave

sentence against her, "to the King of Heaven and Earth. God has always

been my Lord in all that I have done. The devil has never had power over

me." It was only with a view to be delivered from the military prison and

transferred to the prisons of the Church that she consented to a formal

abjuration of heresy. She feared in fact among the soldiery those outrages

to her honour, to guard against which she had from the first assumed the

dress of a man. In the eyes of the Church her dress was a crime and she

abandoned it; but a renewed affront forced her to resume the one safeguard

left her, and the return to it was treated as a relapse into heresy which

doomed her to death. At the close of May, 1431, a great pile was raised in

the market-place of Rouen where her statue stands now. Even the brutal

soldiers who snatched the hated "witch" from the hands of the clergy and

hurried her to her doom were hushed as she reached the stake. One indeed

passed to her a rough cross he had made from a stick he held, and she

clasped it to her bosom. As her eyes ranged over the city from the lofty

scaffold she was heard to murmur, "O Rouen, Rouen, I have great fear lest

you suffer for my death." "Yes! my voices were of God!" she suddenly cried

as the last moment came; "they have never deceived me!" Soon the flames

reached her, the girl's head sank on her breast, there was one cry of

"Jesus!"--"We are lost," an English soldier muttered as the crowd broke

up; "we have burned a Saint."

[Sidenote: Death of Bedford]

The English cause was indeed irretrievably lost. In spite of a pompous

coronation of the boy-king Henry at Paris at the close of 1431, Bedford

with the cool wisdom of his temper seems to have abandoned from this time

all hope of permanently retaining France and to have fallen back on his

brother's original plan of securing Normandy. Henry's Court was

established for a year at Rouen, a university founded at Caen, and

whatever rapine and disorder might be permitted elsewhere, justice, good

government, and security for trade were steadily maintained through the

favoured provinces. At home Bedford was resolutely backed by Cardinal

Beaufort, whose services to the state as well as his real powers had at

last succeeded in outweighing Duke Humphrey's opposition and in restoring

him to the head of the royal Council. Beaufort's diplomatic ability was

seen in the truces he wrung from Scotland, and in his personal efforts to

prevent the impending reconciliation of the Duke of Burgundy with the

French king. But the death of the duke's sister, who was the wife of

Bedford, severed the last link which bound Philip to the English cause. He

pressed for peace: and conferences for this purpose were held at Arras in

1435. Their failure only served him as a pretext for concluding a formal

treaty with Charles; and his desertion was followed by a yet more fatal

blow to the English cause in the death of Bedford. The loss of the Regent

was the signal for the loss of Paris. In the spring of 1436 the city rose

suddenly against its English garrison and declared for King Charles.

Henry's dominion shrank at once to Normandy and the outlying fortresses of

Picardy and Maine. But reduced as they were to a mere handful, and fronted

by a whole nation in arms, the English soldiers struggled on with as

desperate a bravery as in their days of triumph. Lord Talbot, the most

daring of their leaders, forded the Somme with the water up to his chin to

relieve Crotoy, and threw his men across the Oise in the face of a French

army to relieve Pontoise.

[Sidenote: Richard of York]

Bedford found for the moment an able and vigorous successor in the Duke of

York. Richard of York was the son of the Earl of Cambridge who had been

beheaded by Henry the Fifth; his mother was Anne, the heiress of the

Mortimers and of their claim to the English crown as representatives of

the third son of Edward the Third, Lionel of Clarence. It was to assert

this claim on his son's behalf that the Earl embarked in the fatal plot

which cost him his head. But his death left Richard a mere boy in the

wardship of the Crown, and for years to come all danger from his

pretensions was at an end. Nor did the young Duke give any sign of a

desire to assert them as he grew to manhood. He appeared content with a

lineage and wealth which placed him at the head of the English baronage;

for he had inherited from his uncle the Dukedom of York, his wide

possessions embraced the estates of the families which united in him, the

houses of York, of Clarence, and of Mortimer, and his double descent from

Edward the Third, if it did no more, set him near to the Crown. The nobles

looked up to him as the head of their order, and his political position

recalled that of the Lancastrian Earls at an earlier time. But the

position of Richard was as yet that of a faithful servant of the Crown;

and as Regent of France he displayed the abilities both of a statesman and

of a general. During the brief space of his regency the tide of ill

fortune was stemmed; and towns and castles were recovered along the

border.

[Sidenote: Eleanor Cobham]

His recall after a twelvemonth's success is the first indication of the

jealousy which the ruling house felt of triumphs gained by one who might

some day assert his claim to the throne. Two years later, in 1440, the

Duke was restored to his post, but it was now too late to do more than

stand on the defensive, and all York's ability was required to preserve

Normandy and Maine. Men and money alike came scantily from England--where

the Duke of Gloucester, freed from the check which Bedford had laid on him

while he lived, was again stirring against Beaufort and the Council. But

his influence had been weakened by a marriage with his mistress, Eleanor

Cobham, and in 1441 it was all but destroyed by an incident which paints

the temper of the time. The restless love of knowledge which was the one

redeeming feature in Duke Humphrey's character drew to him not only

scholars but a horde of the astrologers and claimants of magical powers,

who were the natural product of an age in which the faith of the Middle

Ages was dying out before the double attack of scepticism and heresy.

Amongst these was a priest named Roger Bolinbroke. Bolinbroke was seized

on a charge of compassing the king's death by sorcery; and the sudden

flight of Eleanor Cobham to the sanctuary at Westminster was soon

explained by a like accusation. Her judges found that she had made a waxen

image of the king and slowly melted it at a fire, a process which was held

to account for Henry's growing weakness both of body and mind. The Duchess

was doomed to penance for her crime; she was led bareheaded and barefooted

in a white penance-sheet through the streets of London, and then thrown

into prison for life. Humphrey never rallied from the blow. But his

retirement from public affairs was soon followed by that of his rival,

Cardinal Beaufort. Age forced Beaufort to withdraw to Winchester; and the

Council was from that time swayed mainly by the Earl of Suffolk, William

de la Pole, a grandson of the minister of Richard the Second.

[Sidenote: The Beauforts]

Few houses had served the Crown more faithfully than that of De la Pole.

His father fell at the siege of Harfleur; his brother had been slain at

Agincourt; William himself had served and been taken prisoner in the war

with France. But as a statesman he was powerless in the hands of the

Beauforts, and from this moment the policy of the Beauforts drew England

nearer and nearer to the chaos of civil war. John Beaufort, Duke of

Somerset, and his brother, Edmund, Earl of Dorset, were now the

representatives of this house. They were grandsons of John of Gaunt by his

mistress, Catharine Swynford. In later days Catharine became John's wife,

and his uncle's influence over Richard at the close of that king's reign

was shown in a royal ordinance which legitimated those of his children by

her who had been born before marriage. The ordinance was confirmed by an

Act of Parliament, which as it passed the Houses was expressed in the

widest and most general terms; but before issuing this as a statute Henry

the Fourth inserted provisions which left the Beauforts illegitimate in

blood so far as regarded the inheritance of the crown. Such royal

alterations of statutes however had been illegal since the time of Edward

the Third; and the Beauforts never recognized the force of this provision.

But whether they stood in the line of succession or no, the favour which

was shown them alike by Henry the Fifth and his son drew them close to the

throne, and the weakness of Henry the Sixth left them at this moment the

mainstay of the House of Lancaster. Edmund Beaufort had taken an active

part in the French wars, and had distinguished himself by the capture of

Harfleur and the relief of Calais. But he was hated for his pride and

avarice, and the popular hate grew as he showed his jealousy of the Duke

of York. Loyal indeed as Richard had proved himself as yet, the

pretensions of his house were the most formidable danger which fronted the

throne; and with a weak and imbecile king we can hardly wonder that the

Beauforts deemed it madness to leave in the Duke's hands the wide power of

a Regent in France and the command of the armies across the sea. In 1444

York was recalled, and his post was taken by Edmund Beaufort himself.

[Sidenote: Loss of Normandy]

But the claim which York drew from the house of Mortimer was not his only

claim to the crown; as the descendant of Edward the Third's fifth son the

crown would naturally devolve upon him on the extinction of the House of

Lancaster, and of the direct line of that house Henry the Sixth was the

one survivor. It was to check these hopes by continuing the Lancastrian

succession that Suffolk in 1445 brought about the marriage of the young

king with Margaret, the daughter of Duke Rene of Anjou. But the marriage

had another end. The English ministers were anxious for the close of the

war; and in the kinship between Margaret and King Charles of France they

saw a chance of bringing it about. A truce was concluded as a prelude to a

future peace, and the marriage-treaty paved the way for it by ceding not

only Anjou, of which England possessed nothing, but Maine, the bulwark of

Normandy, to Duke Rene. For his part in this negotiation Suffolk was

raised to the rank of marquis; but the terms of the treaty and the delays

which still averted a final peace gave new strength to the war-party with

Gloucester at its head, and troubles were looked for in the Parliament

which met at the opening of 1447. The danger was roughly met. Gloucester

was arrested as he rode to Parliament on a charge of secret conspiracy;

and a few days later he was found dead in his lodging. Suspicions of

murder were added to the hatred against Suffolk; and his voluntary

submission to an enquiry by the Council into his conduct in the

marriage-treaty, which was followed by his acquittal of all blame, did

little to counteract this. What was yet more fatal to Suffolk was the

renewal of the war. In the face of the agitation against it the English

ministers had never dared to execute the provisions of the

marriage-treaty; and in 1448 Charles the Seventh sent an army to enforce

the cession of Le Mans. Its surrender averted the struggle for a moment.

But in the spring of 1449 a body of English soldiers from Normandy,

mutinous at their want of pay, crossed the border and sacked the rich town

of Fougeres in Britanny. Edmund Beaufort, who had now succeeded to the

dukedom of Somerset, protested his innocence of this breach of truce, but

he either could not or would not make restitution, and the war was

renewed. From this moment it was a mere series of French successes. In two

months half Normandy was in the hands of Dunois; Rouen rose against her

feeble garrison and threw open her gates to Charles; and the defeat at

Fourmigny of an English force which was sent to Somerset's aid was a

signal for revolt throughout the rest of the provinces. The surrender of

Cherbourg in August, 1450, left Henry not a foot of Norman ground.

[Sidenote: National discontent]

The loss of Normandy was generally laid to the charge of Somerset. He was

charged with a miserly hoarding of supplies as well as planning in

conjunction with Suffolk the fatal sack of Fougeres. His incapacity as a

general added to the resentment at his recall of the Duke of York, a

recall which had been marked as a disgrace by the despatch of Richard into

an honourable banishment as lieutenant of Ireland. But it was this very

recall which proved most helpful to York. Had he remained in France he

could hardly have averted the loss of Normandy, though he might have

delayed it. As it was the shame of its loss fell upon Somerset, while the

general hatred of the Beauforts and the growing contempt of the king whom

they ruled expressed itself in a sudden rush of popular favour towards the

man whom his disgrace had marked out as the object of their ill-will. From

this moment the hopes of a better and a stronger government centred

themselves in the Duke of York. The news of the French successes was at

once followed by an outbreak of national wrath. Political ballads

denounced Suffolk as the ape with his clog that had tied Talbot, the good

"dog" who was longing to grip the Frenchmen. When the Bishop of

Chichester, who had been sent to pay the sailors at Portsmouth, strove to

put off the men with less than their due, they fell on him and slew him.

Suffolk was impeached, and only saved from condemnation by submitting

himself to the king's mercy. He was sent into exile, but as he crossed the

sea he was intercepted by a ship of Kentishmen, beheaded, and his body

thrown on the sands at Dover.

[Sidenote: Revolt of Kent]

Kent was the centre of the national resentment. It was the great

manufacturing district of the day, seething with a busy population, and

especially concerned with the French contest through the piracy of the

Cinque Ports. Every house along its coast showed some spoil from the wars.

Here more than anywhere the loss of the great province whose cliffs could

be seen from its shores was felt as a crowning disgrace, and as we shall

see from the after complaints of its insurgents, political wrongs added

their fire to the national shame. Justice was ill administered; taxation

was unequal and extortionate. Redress for such evils would now naturally

have been sought from Parliament; but the weakness of the Crown gave the

great nobles power to rob the freeholders of their franchise and return

the knights of the shire. Nor could redress be looked for from the Court.

The murder of Suffolk was the act of Kentishmen, and Suffolk's friends

still held control over the royal councils. The one hope of reform lay in

arms; and in the summer of 1450, while the last of the Norman fortresses

were throwing open their gates, the discontent broke into open revolt. The

rising spread from Kent over Surrey and Sussex. Everywhere it was general

and organized--a military levy of the yeomen of the three shires. The

parishes sent their due contingent of armed men; we know that in many

hundreds the constables formally summoned their legal force to war. The

insurgents were joined by more than a hundred esquires and gentlemen; and

two great landholders of Sussex, the Abbot of Battle and the Prior of

Lewes, openly favoured their cause. John Cade, a soldier of some

experience in the French wars, took at this crisis the significant name of

Mortimer and placed himself at their head. The army, now twenty thousand

men strong, marched in the beginning of June on Blackheath. On the advance

of the king with an equal force however they determined to lay their

complaint before the royal Council and withdraw to their homes. The

"Complaint of the Commons of Kent" is of high value in the light which it

throws on the condition of the people. Not one of the demands touches on

religious reform. The question of villeinage and serfage finds no place in

it. In the seventy years which had intervened since the last peasant

rising, villeinage had died naturally away before the progress of social

change. The Statutes of Apparel, which from this time encumber the

Statute-book, show in their anxiety to curtail the dress of the labourer

and the farmer the progress of these classes in comfort and wealth; and

from the language of the statutes themselves it is plain that as wages

rose both farmer and labourer went on clothing themselves better in spite

of sumptuary provisions. With the exception of a demand for the repeal of

the Statute of Labourers, the programme of the Commons was not social but

political. The "Complaint" calls for administrative and economical

reforms; it denounces the exclusion of the Duke of York and other nobles

from the royal councils; it calls for a change of ministry, a more careful

expenditure of the royal revenue, and for the restoration of freedom of

election which had been broken in upon by the interference both of the

Crown and the great landowners.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the revolt]

The Council refused to receive the "Complaint," and a body of troops under

Sir Humphrey Stafford fell on the Kentishmen as they reached Sevenoaks.

This attack however was roughly beaten off, and Cade's host turned back to

encounter the royal army. But the royal army itself was already calling

for justice on the traitors who misled the king; and at the approach of

the Kentishmen it broke up in disorder. Its dispersion was followed by

Henry's flight to Kenilworth and the entry of the Kentishmen into London,

where the execution of Lord Say, the most unpopular of the royal

ministers, broke the obstinacy of his colleagues. For three days the

peasants entered the city freely, retiring at nightfall to their camp

across the river: but on the fifth of July the men of London, goaded by

the outrages of the rabble whom their presence roused to plunder, closed

the bridge against them, and beat back an attack with great slaughter. The

Kentishmen still however lay unbroken in Southwark, while Bishop Waynflete

conferred with Cade on behalf of the Council. Their "Complaint" was

received, pardons were granted to all who had joined in the rising, and

the insurgents dispersed quietly to their homes. Cade had striven in vain

to retain them in arms; on their dispersion he formed a new force by

throwing open the gaols, and carried off the booty he had won to

Rochester. Here however his men quarrelled over the plunder; his force

broke up, and Cade himself was slain by Iden, the Sheriff of Kent, as he

fled into Sussex.

[Sidenote: York and the Beauforts]

Kent remained restless through the year, and a rising in Wiltshire showed

the growing and widespread trouble of the time. The "Complaint" indeed had

only been received to be laid aside. No attempt was made to redress the

grievances which it stated or to reform the government. On the contrary

the main object of popular hate, the Duke of Somerset, was at once

recalled from Normandy to take his place at the head of the royal Council.

York on the other hand, whose recall had been pressed in the "Complaint,"

was looked upon as an open foe. "Strange language," indeed, had long

before the Kentish rising been uttered about the Duke. Men had threatened

that he "should be fetched with many thousands," and the expectation of

his coming to reform the government became so general that orders were

given to close the western ports against his landing. If we believe the

Duke himself, he was forced to move at last by efforts to indict him as a

traitor in Ireland itself. Crossing at Michaelmas to Wales in spite of the

efforts to arrest him, he gathered four thousand men on his estates and

marched upon London. No serious effort was made to prevent his approach to

the king; and Henry found himself helpless to resist his demand of a

Parliament and of the admission of new councillors to the royal

council-board. Parliament met in November, and a bitter strife between

York and Somerset ended in the arrest of the latter. A demand which at

once followed shows the importance of his fall. Henry the Sixth still

remained childless; and Young, a member for Bristol, proposed in the

Commons that the Duke of York should be declared heir to the throne. But

the blow was averted by repeated prorogations, and Henry's sympathies were

shown by the committal of Young to the Tower, by the release of Somerset,

and by his promotion to the captaincy of Calais, the most important

military post under the Crown. The Commons indeed still remained resolute.

When they again met in the summer of 1451 they called for the removal of

Somerset and his creatures from the king's presence. But Henry evaded the

demand, and the dissolution of the Houses announced the royal resolve to

govern in defiance of the national will.

[Sidenote: Failure of York]

The contest between the Houses and the Crown had cost England her last

possessions across the Channel. As York marched upon London Charles closed

on the fragment of the duchy of Guienne which still remained to the

descendants of Eleanor. In a few months all was won. Bourg and Blaye

surrendered in the spring of 1451, Bordeaux in the summer; two months

later the loss of Bayonne ended the war in the south. Of all the English

possessions in France only Calais remained; and in 1452 Calais was

threatened with attack. The news of this crowning danger again called York

to the front. On the declaration of Henry's will to resist all change in

the government the Duke had retired to his castle of Ludlow, arresting the

whispers of his enemies with a solemn protest that he was true liegeman to

the king. But after events show that he was planning a more decisive

course of action than that which had broken down with the dissolution of

the Parliament, and the news of the approaching siege gave ground for

taking such a course at once. Somerset had been appointed Captain of

Calais, and as his incapacity had lost England Normandy, it would cost

her--so England believed--her last fortress in France. It was said indeed

that the Duke was negotiating with Burgundy for its surrender. In the

spring of 1452 therefore York again marched on London, but this time with

a large body of ordnance and an army which the arrival of reinforcements

under Lord Cobham and the Earl of Devonshire raised to over twenty

thousand men. Eluding the host which gathered round the king and Somerset

he passed by the capital, whose gates had been closed by Henry's orders,

and entering Kent took post at Dartford. His army was soon fronted by the

superior force of the king, but the interposition of the more moderate

lords of the Council averted open conflict. Henry promised that Somerset

should be put on his trial on the charges advanced by the Duke, and York

on this pledge disbanded his men. But the pledge was at once broken.

Somerset remained in power. York found himself practically a prisoner, and

only won his release by an oath to refrain from further "routs" or

assemblies.

[Sidenote: Loss of Guienne]

Two such decisive failures seemed for the time to have utterly broken

Richard's power. Weakened as the crown had been by losses abroad, it was

clearly strong enough as yet to hold its own against the chief of the

baronage. A general amnesty indeed sheltered York's adherents and enabled

the Duke himself to retire safely to Ludlow, but for more than a year his

rival Somerset wielded without opposition the power Richard had striven to

wrest from him. A favourable turn in the progress of the war gave fresh

vigour to the Government. The French forces were abruptly called from

their march against Calais to the recovery of the south. The towns of

Guienne had opened their gates to Charles on his pledge to respect their

franchises, but the need of the French treasury was too great to respect

the royal word, and heavy taxation turned the hopes of Gascony to its old

masters. On the landing of an English force under Talbot, Earl of

Shrewsbury, a general revolt restored to the English their possessions on

the Garonne. Somerset used this break of better fortune to obtain heavy

subsidies from Parliament in 1453; but ere the twenty thousand men whose

levy was voted could cross the Channel a terrible blow had again ruined

the English cause. In a march to relieve Castillon on the Dordogne

Shrewsbury suddenly found himself face to face with the whole French army.

His men were mown down by its guns, and the Earl himself left dead on the

field. His fall was the signal for a general submission. Town after town

again threw open its gates to Charles, and Bordeaux capitulated in

October.

[Sidenote: Madness of the King]

The final loss of Gascony fell upon England at a moment when two events at

home changed the whole face of affairs. After eight years of childlessness

the king became in October the father of a son. With the birth of this boy

the rivalry of York and the Beauforts for the right of succession ceased

to be the mainspring of English politics; and the crown seemed again to

rise out of the turmoil of warring factions. But with the birth of the son

came the madness of the father. Henry the Sixth sank into a state of

idiotcy which made his rule impossible, and his ministers were forced to

call a great Council of peers to devise means for the government of the

realm. York took his seat at this council, and the mood of the nobles was

seen in the charges of misgovernment which were at once made against

Somerset, and in his committal to the Tower. But Somerset was no longer at

the head of the royal party. With the birth of her son the queen, Margaret

of Anjou, came to the front. Her restless despotic temper was quickened to

action by the dangers which she saw threatening her boy's heritage of the

crown; and the demand to be invested with the full royal power which she

made after a vain effort to rouse her husband from his lethargy aimed

directly at the exclusion of the Duke of York. The demand however was

roughly set aside; the Lords gave permission to York to summon a

Parliament as the king's lieutenant; and on the assembly of the Houses in

the spring of 1454, as the mental alienation of the king continued, the

Lords chose Richard Protector of the Realm. With Somerset in prison little

opposition could be made to the Protectorate, and that little was soon put

down. But the nation had hardly time to feel the guidance of Richard's

steady hand when it was removed. At the opening of 1455 the king recovered

his senses, and York's Protectorate came at once to an end.

[Sidenote: York's revolt]

Henry had no sooner grasped power again than he fell back on his old

policy. The queen became his chief adviser. The Duke of Somerset was

released from the Tower and owned by Henry in formal court as his true and

faithful liegeman. York on the other hand was deprived of the government

of Calais, and summoned with his friends to a council at Leicester, whose

object was to provide for the surety of the king's person. Prominent among

these friends were two Earls of the house of Neville. We have seen how

great a part the Nevilles played after the accession of the house of

Lancaster; it was mainly to their efforts that Henry the Fourth owed the

overthrow of the Percies, their rivals in the mastery of the north; and

from that moment their wealth and power had been steadily growing. Richard

Neville, Earl of Salisbury, was one of the mightiest barons of the realm;

but his power was all but equalled by that of his son, a second Richard,

who had won the Earldom of Warwick by his marriage with the heiress of the

Beauchamps. The marriage of York to Salisbury's sister, Cecily Neville,

had bound both the earls to his cause, and under his Protectorate

Salisbury had been created Chancellor. But he was stripped of this office

on the Duke's fall; and their summons to the council of Leicester was held

by the Nevilles to threaten ruin to themselves as to York. The three

nobles at once took arms to secure, as they alleged, safe access to the

king's person. Henry at the news of their approach mustered two thousand

men, and with Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland, and other nobles in

his train, advanced to St. Albans.

[Sidenote: The civil war]

On the 23rd of May York and the two Earls encamped without the town, and

called on Henry "to deliver such as we will accuse, and they to have like

as they have deserved and done." The king's reply was as bold as the

demand. "Rather than they shall have any lord here with me at this time,"

he replied, "I shall this day for their sake and in this quarrel myself

live and die." A summons to disperse as traitors left York and his

fellow-nobles no hope but in an attack. At eventide three assaults were

made on the town. Warwick was the first to break in, and the sound of his

trumpets in the streets turned the fight into a rout. Death had answered

the prayer which Henry rejected, for the Duke of Somerset with Lord

Clifford and the Earl of Northumberland was among the fallen. The king

himself fell into the victors' hands. The three lords kneeling before him

prayed him to take them for his true liegemen, and then rode by his side

in triumph into London, where a parliament was at once summoned which

confirmed the acts of the Duke; and on a return of the king's malady again

nominated York as Protector. But in the spring of 1456 Henry's recovery

again ended the Duke's rule; and for two years the warring parties

sullenly watched one another. A temporary reconciliation between them was

brought about by the misery of the realm, but an attempt of the queen to

arrest the Nevilles in 1458 caused a fresh outbreak of war. Salisbury

defeated Lord Audley in a fight at Bloreheath in Staffordshire, and York

with the two Earls raised his standard at Ludlow. But the crown was still

stronger than any force of the baronage. The king marched rapidly on the

insurgents, and a decisive battle was only averted by the desertion of a

part of the Yorkist army and the disbanding of the rest. The Duke himself

fled to Ireland, the Earls to Calais, while the queen, summoning a

Parliament at Coventry in November, pressed on their attainder. But the

check, whatever its cause, had been merely a temporary one. York and

Warwick planned a fresh attempt from their secure retreats in Ireland and

Calais; and in the midsummer of 1460 the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick,

with Richard's son Edward, the young Earl of March, again landed in Kent.

Backed by a general rising of the county they entered London amidst the

acclamations of its citizens. The royal army was defeated in a hard-fought

action at Northampton in July. Margaret fled to Scotland, and Henry was

left a prisoner in the hands of the Duke of York.

[Sidenote: Richard claims the crown]

The position of York as heir-presumptive to the crown by his descent from

Edmund of Langley had ceased with the birth of a son to Henry the Sixth:

but the victory of Northampton no sooner raised him to the supreme control

of affairs than he ventured to assert the far more dangerous claims which

he had secretly cherished as the representative of Lionel of Clarence, and

to their consciousness of which was owing the hostility of Henry and his

queen. Such a claim was in direct opposition to that power of the two

Houses whose growth had been the work of the past hundred years. There was

no constitutional ground for any limitation of the right of Parliament to

set aside an elder branch in favour of a younger, and in the Parliamentary

Act which placed the House of Lancaster on the throne the claim of the

House of Mortimer had been deliberately set aside. Possession, too, told

against the Yorkist pretensions. To modern minds the best reply to

Richard's claim lay in the words used at a later time by Henry himself.

"My father was King; his father also was King; I myself have worn the

crown forty years from my cradle: you have all sworn fealty to me as your

sovereign, and your fathers have done the like to mine. How then can my

right be disputed?" Long and undisturbed possession as well as a

distinctly legal title by free vote of Parliament was in favour of the

House of Lancaster. But the persecution of the Lollards, the interference

with elections, the odium of the war, the shame of the long misgovernment,

told fatally against the weak and imbecile king whose reign had been a

long battle of contending factions. That the misrule had been serious was

shown by the attitude of the commercial class. It was the rising of Kent,

the great manufacturing district of the realm, which brought about the

victory of Northampton. Throughout the struggle which followed London and

the great merchant towns were steady for the House of York. Zeal for the

Lancastrian cause was found only in Wales, in northern England, and in the

south-western shires. It is absurd to suppose that the shrewd traders of

Cheapside were moved by an abstract question of hereditary right, or that

the wild Welshmen believed themselves to be supporting the right of

Parliament to regulate the succession. But it marks the power which

Parliament had gained that, directly as his claims ran in the teeth of a

succession established by it, the Duke of York felt himself compelled to

convene the two Houses in October and to lay his claim before the Lords as

a petition of right. Neither oaths nor the numerous Acts which had settled

and confirmed the right to the crown in the House of Lancaster could

destroy, he pleaded, his hereditary claim. The bulk of the Lords refrained

from attendance, and those who were present received the petition with

hardly concealed reluctance. They solved the question, as they hoped, by a

compromise. They refused to dethrone the king, but they had sworn no

fealty to his child, and at Henry's death they agreed to receive the Duke

as successor to the crown.

[Illustration: The Wars of the Roses]

[Sidenote: Wars of the Roses]

But the open display of York's pretensions at once united the partizans of

the royal House in a vigorous resistance; and the deadly struggle which

received the name of the Wars of the Roses from the white rose which

formed the badge of the House of York and the red rose which was the

cognizance of the House of Lancaster began in a gathering of the North

round Lord Clifford and of the West round Henry, Duke of Somerset, the son

of the Duke who had fallen at St. Albans. York, who hurried in December to

meet the first with a far inferior force, was defeated and slain at

Wakefield. The passion of civil war broke fiercely out on the field. The

Earl of Salisbury who had been taken prisoner was hurried to the block.

The head of Duke Richard, crowned in mockery with a diadem of paper, is

said to have been impaled on the walls of York. His second son, Lord

Rutland, fell crying for mercy on his knees before Clifford. But

Clifford's father had been the first to fall in the battle of St. Albans

which opened the struggle. "As your father killed mine," cried the savage

baron, while he plunged his dagger in the young noble's breast, "I will

kill you!" The brutal deed was soon to be avenged. Richard's eldest son,

Edward, the Earl of March, was busy gathering a force on the Welsh border

in support of his father at the moment when the Duke was defeated and

slain. Young as he was Edward showed in this hour of apparent ruin the

quickness and vigour of his temper, and routing on his march a body of

Lancastrians at Mortimer's Cross struck boldly upon London. It was on

London that the Lancastrian army had moved after its victory at Wakefield.

A desperate struggle took place at St. Albans where a force of Kentish men

with the Earl of Warwick strove to bar its march on the capital, but

Warwick's force broke under cover of night and an immediate advance of the

conquerors might have decided the contest. Margaret however paused to

sully her victory by a series of bloody executions, and the rough

northerners who formed the bulk of her army scattered to pillage while

Edward, hurrying from the west, appeared before the capital. The citizens

rallied at his call, and cries of "Long live King Edward!" rang round the

handsome young leader as he rode through the streets. A council of Yorkist

lords, hastily summoned, resolved that the compromise agreed on in

Parliament was at an end and that Henry of Lancaster had forfeited the

throne. The final issue however now lay not with Parliament, but with the

sword. Disappointed of London, the Lancastrian army fell rapidly back on

the North, and Edward hurried as rapidly in pursuit. On the 29th of March,

1461, the two armies encountered one another at Towton Field, near

Tadcaster. In the numbers engaged, as well as in the terrible obstinacy of

the struggle, no such battle had been seen in England since the fight of

Senlac. The two armies together numbered nearly 120,000 men. The day had

just broken when the Yorkists advanced through a thick snowfall, and for

six hours the battle raged with desperate bravery on either side. At one

critical moment Warwick saw his men falter, and stabbing his horse before

them, swore on the cross of his sword to win or die on the field. The

battle was turned at last by the arrival of the Duke of Norfolk with a

fresh force from the Eastern Counties, and at noon the Lancastrians gave

way. A river in their rear turned the retreat into a rout, and the flight

and carnage, for no quarter was given on either side, went on through the

night and the morrow. Edward's herald counted more than 20,000 Lancastrian

corpses on the field. The losses of the conquerors were hardly less heavy

than those of the conquered. But their triumph was complete. The Earl of

Northumberland was slain; the Earls of Devonshire and Wiltshire were taken

and beheaded; the Duke of Somerset fled into exile. Henry himself with his

queen was forced to fly over the border and to find a refuge in Scotland.

The cause of the House of Lancaster was lost; and with the victory of

Towton the crown of England passed to Edward of York.

BOOK V

THE MONARCHY

1461-1540

AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK V

1461-1540

Edward the Fifth is the subject of a work attributed to Sir Thomas More,

and which almost certainly derives much of its information from Archbishop

Morton. Whatever its historical worth may be, it is remarkable in its

English form as the first historical work of any literary value which we

possess written in our modern prose. The "Letters and Papers of Richard

the Third and Henry the Seventh," some "Memorials of Henry the Seventh,"

including his life by Bernard Andre of Toulouse, and a volume of

"Materials" for a history of his reign have been edited for the Rolls

Series. A biography of Henry is among the works of Lord Bacon. The history

of Erasmus in England must be followed in his own interesting letters; the

most accessible edition of the typical book of the revival, the "Utopia,"

is the Elizabethan translation, published by Mr. Arber. Mr. Lupton has

done much to increase our scanty knowledge of Colet by his recent editions

of several of his works. Halle's Chronicle extends from the reign of

Edward the Fourth to that of Henry the Eighth; for the latter he is copied

by Grafton and followed by Holinshed. Cavendish has given a faithful and

touching account of Wolsey in his later days, but for any real knowledge

of his administration or the foreign policy of Henry the Eighth we must

turn from these to the invaluable Calendars of State Papers for this

period from the English, Spanish, and Austrian archives, with the prefaces

of Professor Brewer and Mr. Bergenroth. Cromwell's early life as told by

Foxe is a mass of fable, and the State Papers afford the only real

information as to his ministry. For Sir Thomas More we have a touching

life by his son-in-law, Roper. The more important documents for the

religious history of the time will be found in Mr. Pocock's edition of

Burnet's "History of the Reformation"; those relating to the dissolution

of the monasteries in the collection of letters on that subject published

by the Camden Society, and in the "Original Letters" of Sir Henry Ellis. A

mass of materials of very various value has been accumulated by Strype in

his collections, which commence at this period.

CHAPTER I

THE HOUSE OF YORK

1461-1485

[Sidenote: English freedom]

With the victory of Towton the war of the succession came practically to

an end. Though Margaret still struggled on the northern border and the

treachery of Warwick for a while drove the new king from his realm, this

gleam of returning fortune only brought a more fatal ruin on the House of

Lancaster and seated the House of York more firmly on the throne. But the

Wars of the Roses did far more than ruin one royal house or set up

another. They found England, in the words of Commines, "among all the

world's lordships of which I have knowledge, that where the public weal is

best ordered, and where least violence reigns over the people." An English

king--the shrewd observer noticed--"can undertake no enterprise of account

without assembling his Parliament, which is a thing most wise and holy,

and therefore are these kings stronger and better served" than the

despotic sovereigns of the Continent. The English kingship, as a judge,

Sir John Fortescue, could boast when writing at this time, was not an

absolute but a limited monarchy; the land was not a land where the will of

the prince was itself the law, but where the prince could neither make

laws nor impose taxes save by his subjects' consent. At no time had

Parliament played so constant and prominent a part in the government of

the realm. At no time had the principles of constitutional liberty seemed

so thoroughly understood and so dear to the people at large. The long

Parliamentary contest between the Crown and the two Houses since the days

of Edward the First had firmly established the great securities of

national liberty--the right of freedom from arbitrary taxation, from

arbitrary legislation, from arbitrary imprisonment, and the responsibility

of even the highest servants of the Crown to Parliament and to the law.

[Sidenote: Results of the Wars of the Roses]

But with the close of the struggle for the succession this liberty wholly

disappeared. If the Wars of the Roses failed in utterly destroying English

freedom, they succeeded in arresting its progress for more than a hundred

years. With them we enter on an epoch of constitutional retrogression in

which the slow work of the age that went before it was rapidly undone.

From the accession of Edward the Fourth Parliamentary life was almost

suspended, or was turned into a mere form by the overpowering influence of

the Crown. The legislative powers of the two Houses were usurped by the

royal Council. Arbitrary taxation reappeared in benevolences and forced

loans. Personal liberty was almost extinguished by a formidable spy-system

and by the constant practice of arbitrary imprisonment. Justice was

degraded by the prodigal use of bills of attainder, by a wide extension of

the judicial power of the royal Council, by the servility of judges, by

the coercion of juries. So vast and sweeping was the change that to

careless observers of a later day the constitutional monarchy of the

Edwards and the Henries seemed suddenly to have transformed itself under

the Tudors into a despotism as complete as the despotism of the Turk. Such

a view is no doubt exaggerated and unjust. Bend and strain the law as he

might, there never was a time when the most wilful of English rulers

failed to own the restraints of law; and the obedience of the most servile

among English subjects lay within bounds, at once political and religious,

which no theory of king-worship could bring them to overpass. But even if

we make these reserves, the character of the monarchy from the days of

Edward the Fourth to the days of Elizabeth remains something strange and

isolated in our history. It is hard to connect the kingship of the old

English, the Norman, the Angevin, or the Plantagenet kings with the

kingship of the House of York or of the House of Tudor.

[Sidenote: New strength of the Crown]

The primary cause of this great change lay in the recovery of its older

strength by the Crown. Through the last hundred and fifty years the

monarchy had been hampered by the pressure of the war. Through the last

fifty it had been weakened by the insecurity of a disputed succession. It

was to obtain supplies for the strife with Scotland and the strife with

France that the earlier Plantagenets had been forced to yield to the

ever-growing claims which were advanced by the Parliament. It was to win

the consent of Parliament to its occupation of the throne and its support

against every rival that the House of Lancaster bent yet more humbly to

its demands. But with the loss of Guienne the war with France came

virtually to an end. The war with Scotland died down into a series of

border forays. The Wars of the Roses settled the question of the

succession, first by the seeming extinction of the House of Lancaster, and

then by the utter ruin of the House of York. The royal treasury was not

only relieved from the drain which had left the crown at the mercy of the

Third Estate; it was filled as it had never been filled before by the

forfeitures and confiscations of the civil war. In the one bill of

attainder which followed Towton twelve great nobles and more than a

hundred knights and squires were stripped of their estates to the king's

profit. Nearly a fifth of the land is said to have passed into the royal

possession at one period or other of the civil strife. Edward the Fourth

and Henry the Seventh not only possessed a power untrammelled by the

difficulties which had beset the Crown since the days of Edward the First,

but they were masters of a wealth such as the Crown had never known since

the days of Henry the Second.

[Sidenote: Its New Policy]

Throughout their reigns these kings showed a firm resolve to shun the two

rocks on which the monarchy had been so nearly wrecked. No policy was too

inglorious that enabled them to avoid the need of war. The inheritance of

a warlike policy, the consciousness of great military abilities, the cry

of his own people for a renewal of the struggle, failed to lure Edward

from his system of peace. Henry clung to peace in spite of the threatening

growth of the French monarchy: he refused to be drawn into any serious war

even by its acquisition of Britanny and of a coast-line that ran unbroken

along the Channel. Nor was any expedient too degrading if it swelled the

royal hoard. Edward by a single stroke, the grant of the customs to the

king for life, secured a source of revenue which went far to relieve the

Crown from its dependence on Parliament. He stooped to add to the gold

which his confiscations amassed by trading on a vast scale; his ships,

freighted with tin, wool, and cloth, made the name of the merchant-king

famous in the ports of Italy and Greece. Henry was as adroit and as

shameless a financier as his predecessor. He was his own treasurer, he

kept his own accounts, he ticked off with his own hand the compositions he

levied on the western shires for their abortive revolts.

[Sidenote: Suspension of Parliamentary life]

With peace and a full treasury the need for calling Parliament together

was removed. The collapse of the Houses was in itself a revolution. Up to

this moment they had played a more and more prominent part in the

government of the realm. The progress made under the earlier Plantagenets

had gone as steadily on under Henry the Fourth and his successors. The

Commons had continued their advance. Not only had the right of

self-taxation and of the initiation of laws been explicitly yielded to

them, but they had interfered with the administration of the state, had

directed the application of subsidies, and called royal ministers to

account by repeated instances of impeachment. Under the first two kings of

the House of Lancaster Parliament had been summoned almost every year.

Under Henry the Sixth an important step was made in constitutional

progress by abandoning the old custom of presenting the requests of

Parliament in the form of petitions which were subsequently moulded into

statutes by the royal Council. The statute itself in its final shape was

now presented for the royal assent and the Crown deprived of all

opportunity of modifying it. But with the reign of Edward the Fourth not

only this progress but the very action of Parliament comes almost to an

end. For the first time since the days of John not a single law which

promoted freedom or remedied the abuses of power was even proposed. The

Houses indeed were only rarely called together by Edward; they were only

twice summoned during the last thirteen years of Henry the Seventh.

[Sidenote: Parliament and the Civil War]

But this discontinuance of Parliamentary life was not due merely to the

new financial system of the Crown. The policy of the kings was aided by

the internal weakness of Parliament itself. No institution suffered more

from the civil war. During its progress the Houses had become mere

gatherings of nobles with their retainers and partizans. They were like

armed camps to which the great lords came with small armies at their

backs. When arms were prohibited the retainers of the warring barons

appeared, as in the Club Parliament of 1426, with clubs on their

shoulders. When clubs were forbidden they hid stones and balls of lead in

their clothes. Amidst scenes such as these the faith in and reverence for

Parliaments could hardly fail to die away. But the very success of the

House of York was a more fatal blow to the trust in them. It was by the

act of the Houses that the Lancastrian line had been raised to the throne.

Its title was a Parliamentary title. Its existence was in fact a

contention that the will of Parliament could override the claims of blood

in the succession to the throne. With all this the civil war dealt roughly

and decisively. The Parliamentary line was driven from the throne. The

Parliamentary title was set aside as usurpation. The House of York based

its claim to the throne on the incapacity of Parliament to set aside

pretensions which were based on sheer nearness of blood. The fall of the

House of Lancaster, the accession of the Yorkist kings, must have seemed

to the men who had witnessed the struggle a crushing defeat of the

Parliament.

[Sidenote: Ruin of Feudal Organization]

Weakened by failure, discredited by faction, no longer needful as a source

of supplies, it was easy for the Monarchy to rid itself of the check of

the two Houses, and their riddance at once restored the Crown to the power

it had held under the earlier kings. But in actual fact Edward the Fourth

found himself the possessor of a far greater authority than this. The

structure of feudal society fronted a feudal king with two great rival

powers in the Baronage and the Church. Even in England, though feudalism

had far less hold than elsewhere, the noble and the priest formed

effective checks on the monarchy. But at the close of the Wars of the

Roses these older checks no longer served as restraints upon the action of

the Crown. With the growth of Parliament the weight of the Baronage as a

separate constitutional element in the realm, even the separate influence

of the Church, had fallen more and more into decay. For their irregular

and individual action was gradually substituted the legal and continuous

action of the three Estates; and now that the assembly of the estates

practically ceased it was too late to revive the older checks which in

earlier days had fettered the action of the Crown. Nor was the growth of

Parliament the only cause for the weakness of these feudal restraints. The

older social order which had prevailed throughout Western Europe since the

fall of the Roman Empire was now passing away. The speculation of the

twelfth century, the scholastic criticism of the thirteenth, the Lollardry

and socialism of the fourteenth century, had at last done their work. The

spell of the past, the spell of custom and tradition, which had enchained

the minds of men was roughly broken. The supremacy of the warrior in a

world of war, the severance of privileged from unprivileged classes, no

longer seemed the one natural structure of society. The belief in its

possession of supernatural truths and supernatural powers no longer held

man in unquestioning awe of the priesthood. The strength of the Church was

sapped alike by theological and moral revolt, while the growth of new

classes, the new greed of peace and of the wealth that comes of peace, the

advance of industry, the division of property, the progress of centralized

government, dealt fatal blows at the feudal organization of the state.

[Sidenote: Weakness of the Baronage]

Nor was the danger merely an external one. Noble and priest alike were

beginning to disbelieve in themselves. The new knowledge which was now

dawning on the world, the direct contact with the Greek and Roman

literatures which was just beginning to exert its influence on Western

Europe, told above all on these wealthier and more refined classes. The

young scholar or noble who crossed the Alps brought from the schools of

Florence the dim impression of a republican liberty or an imperial order

which disenchanted him of the world in which he found himself. He looked

on the feudalism about him as a brutal anarchy, he looked on the Church

itself as the supplanter of a nobler and more philosophic morality.

Besides this moral change, the barons had suffered politically from the

decrease of their numbers in the House of Lords. The statement which

attributes the lessening of the baronage to the Wars of the Roses seems

indeed to be an error. Although Henry the Seventh, in dread of opposition

to his throne, summoned only a portion of the temporal peers to his first

Parliament, there were as many barons at his accession as at the accession

of Henry the Sixth. Of the greater houses only those of Beaufort and

Tiptoft were extinguished by the civil war. The decline of the baronage,

the extinction of the greater families, the break-up of the great estates,

had in fact been going on throughout the reign of the Edwards; and it was

after Agincourt that the number of temporal peers sank to its lowest ebb.

From that time till the time of the Tudors they numbered but fifty-two. A

reduction in the numbers of the baronage however might have been more than

compensated by the concentration of great estates in the hands of the

houses that survived. What wrecked it as a military force was the

revolution which was taking place in the art of war. The introduction of

gunpowder ruined feudalism. The mounted and heavily-armed knight gave way

to the meaner footman. Fortresses which had been impregnable against the

attacks of the Middle Ages crumbled before the new artillery. Although

gunpowder had been in use as early as Crecy, it was not till the accession

of the House of Lancaster that it was really brought into effective

employment as a military resource. But the revolution in warfare was

immediate. The wars of Henry the Fifth were wars of sieges. The "Last of

the Barons," as Warwick has picturesquely been styled, relied mainly on

his train of artillery. It was artillery that turned the day at Barnet and

Tewkesbury, and that gave Henry the Seventh his victory over the

formidable dangers which assailed him. The strength which the change gave

to the Crown was in fact almost irresistible. Throughout the Middle Ages

the call of a great baron had been enough to raise a formidable revolt.

Yeomen and retainers took down the bow from their chimney corner, knights

buckled on their armour, and in a few days a host threatened the throne.

Without artillery however such a force was now helpless, and the one train

of artillery in the kingdom lay at the disposal of the king.

[Sidenote: Weakness of the Church]

The Church too was in no less peril than the baronage. In England as

elsewhere the great ecclesiastical body still seemed imposing from the

memories of its past, its immense wealth, its tradition of statesmanship,

its long association with the intellectual and religious aspirations of

men, its hold on social life. But its real power was small. Its moral

inertness, its lack of spiritual enthusiasm, gave it less and less hold on

the religious minds of the day. Its energies indeed seemed absorbed in a

mere clinging to existence. For in spite of steady repression Lollardry

still lived on, no longer indeed as an organized movement, but in

scattered and secret groups whose sole bond was a common loyalty to the

Bible and a common spirit of revolt against the religion of their day.

Nine years after the accession of Henry the Sixth the Duke of Gloucester

was traversing England with men-at-arms to repress the risings of the

Lollards and hinder the circulation of their invectives against the

clergy. In 1449 "Bible men" were still formidable enough to call a prelate

to the front as a controversialist: and the very title of Bishop Pecock's

work, "A Repressor of overmuch blaming of the clergy," shows the damage

done by their virulent criticism. Its most fatal effect was to rob the

priesthood of moral power. Taunted with a love of wealth, with a lower

standard of life than that of the ploughman and weaver who gathered to

read the Bible by night, dreading in themselves any burst of emotion or

enthusiasm as a possible prelude to heresy, the clergy ceased to be the

moral leaders of the nation. They plunged as deeply as the men about them

into the darkest superstition, and above all into the belief in sorcery

and magic which formed so remarkable a feature of the time. It was for

conspiracy with a priest to waste the king's life by sorcery that Eleanor

Cobham did penance through the streets of London. The mist which wrapped

the battle-field of Barnet was attributed to the incantations of Friar

Bungay. The one pure figure which rises out of the greed, the selfishness,

the scepticism of the time, the figure of Joan of Arc, was looked on by

the doctors and priests who judged her as that of a sorceress.

The prevalence of such beliefs tells its own tale of the intellectual

state of the clergy. They were ceasing in fact to be an intellectual class

at all. The monasteries were no longer seats of learning. "I find in

them," says Poggio, an Italian scholar who visited England some twenty

years after Chaucer's death, "men given up to sensuality in abundance but

very few lovers of learning and those of a barbarous sort, skilled more in

quibbles and sophisms than in literature." The statement is no doubt

coloured by the contempt of the new scholars for the scholastic philosophy

which had taken the place of letters in England as elsewhere, but even

scholasticism was now at its lowest ebb. The erection of colleges, which

began in the thirteenth century but made little progress till the time we

have reached, failed to arrest the quick decline of the universities both

in the numbers and learning of their students. Those at Oxford amounted to

only a fifth of the scholars who had attended its lectures a century

before, and Oxford Latin became proverbial for a jargon in which the very

tradition of grammar had been lost. Literature, which had till now rested

mainly in the hands of the clergy, came almost to an end. Of all its

nobler forms history alone lingered on; but it lingered in compilations or

extracts from past writers, such as make up the so-called works of

Walsingham, in jejune monastic annals, or worthless popular compendiums.

The only real trace of mental activity was seen in the numerous treatises

which dealt with alchemy or magic, the elixir of life, or the

philosopher's stone; a fungous growth which even more clearly than the

absence of healthier letters witnessed to the progress of intellectual

decay.

Somewhat of their old independence lingered indeed among the lower clergy

and the monastic orders; it was in fact the successful resistance of the

last to an effort made to establish arbitrary taxation which brought about

their ruin. Up to the terrible statutes of Thomas Cromwell the clergy in

convocation still asserted boldly their older rights against the Crown.

But it was through its prelates that the Church exercised a directly

political influence, and these showed a different temper from the clergy.

Their weakness told directly on the constitutional progress of the realm,

for through the diminution in the number of the peers temporal the greater

part of the House of Lords was now composed of spiritual peers, of bishops

and the greater abbots. Driven by sheer need, by the attack of the barons

on their temporal possessions and of the Lollard on their spiritual

authority, into dependence on the Crown, their weight was thrown into the

scale of the monarchy.

[Sidenote: Change in the Lower House]

And while the ruin of the baronage, and the weakness of the prelacy, broke

the power of the House of Lords, the restriction of the suffrage broke the

growing strength of the House of Commons. Even before the outbreak of the

civil war the striving of the proprietary classes, landowners and

merchants, after special privileges which the Crown alone could bestow,

had produced important constitutional results. The character of the House

of Commons had been changed by the restriction of both the borough and the

county franchise. Up to this time all freemen settling in a borough, and

paying their dues to it became by the mere fact of settlement its

burgesses.

[Sidenote: Restriction of Borough Freedom]

But during the reign of Henry the Sixth and still more under Edward the

Fourth this largeness of borough life was roughly curtailed. The trade

companies which vindicated civic freedom from the tyranny of the older

merchant gilds themselves tended to become a narrow and exclusive

oligarchy. Most of the boroughs had by this time acquired civic property,

and it was with the aim of securing their own enjoyment of this against

any share of it by "strangers" that the existing burgesses for the most

part procured charters of incorporation from the Crown, which turned them

into a close body and excluded from their number all who were not

burgesses by birth or who failed henceforth to purchase their right of

entrance by a long apprenticeship. In addition to this narrowing of the

burgess-body the internal government of the boroughs had almost

universally passed since the failure of the Communal movement in the

thirteenth century from the free gathering of the citizens in borough-mote

into the hands of Common Councils, either self-elected or elected by the

wealthier burgesses; and to these councils, or to a yet more restricted

number of "select men" belonging to them, clauses in the new charters

generally confined the right of choosing their representatives in

Parliament. It was with this restriction that the long process of

degradation began which ended in reducing the representation of our

boroughs to a mere mockery. Influences which would have had small weight

over the town at large proved irresistible by the small body of

corporators or "select men." Great nobles, neighbouring landowners, the

Crown itself, seized on the boroughs as their prey, and dictated the

choice of their representatives. Corruption did whatever force failed to

do: and from the Wars of the Roses to the days of Pitt the voice of the

people had to be looked for not in the members for the towns but in the

knights for the counties.

[Sidenote: Restriction of County Franchise]

The restriction of the county franchise on the other hand was the direct

work of the Parliament itself. Economic changes were fast widening the

franchise in the shires. The number of freeholders increased with the

subdivision of estates and the social changes which we have already

noticed. But this increase of independence was marked by "riots and

divisions between the gentlemen and other people" which the statesmen of

the day attributed to the excessive number of voters. In many counties the

power of the great lords undoubtedly enabled them to control elections

through the number of their retainers. In Cade's revolt the Kentishmen

complained that "the people of the shire are not allowed to have their

free elections in the choosing of knights for the shire, but letters have

been sent from divers estates to the great nobles of the county, the which

enforceth their tenants and other people by force to choose other persons

than the common will is." It was primarily to check this abuse that a

statute of the reign of Henry the Sixth restricted in 1430 the right of

voting in shires to freeholders holding land worth forty shillings, a sum

equal in our money to at least twenty pounds a year and representing a far

higher proportional income at the present time. Whatever its original

purpose may have been, the result of the statute was a wide

disfranchisement. It was aimed, in its own words, against voters "of no

value, whereof every of them pretended to have a voice equivalent with the

more worthy knights and esquires dwelling in the same counties." But in

actual working the statute was interpreted in a more destructive fashion

than its words were intended to convey. Up to this time all suitors who

attended at the Sheriff's Court had voted without question for the Knight

of the Shire, but by the new statute the great bulk of the existing

voters, every leaseholder and every copyholder, found themselves

implicitly deprived of their franchise.

[Sidenote: The French War and the Baronage]

The kingship of Edward and his successors therefore was not a mere

restoration of the kingship of John or of Henry the Second. It was the

kingship of those kings apart from the constitutional forces which in

their case stood side by side with kingship, controlling and regulating

its action, apart from the force of custom, from the strong arm of the

baron, from the religious sanctions which formed so effective a weapon in

the hands of the priest, in a word, apart from that social organization

from which our political constitution had sprung; even the power of

Parliament itself died down at the very moment when the cessation of war,

the opening of new sources of revenue, the cry for protection against

social anarchy, doubled the strength of the Crown. The force of the

monarchy however lay above all in its position as the one representative

of national order and in its policy of peace. For two hundred years

England had been almost constantly at war, and to war without had been

added discord and misrule within. The violence and anarchy which had

always clung like a taint to the baronage grew more and more unbearable as

the nation moved forward to a more settled peacefulness and industry. At

the very time however when this movement became most pronounced under

Edward the Third, the tendency of the nobles to violence received a new

impulse from the war with France. Long before the struggle was over it had

done its fatal work on the mood of the English noble. His aim had become

little more than a lust for gold, a longing after plunder, after the

pillage of farms, the sack of cities, the ransom of captives. So intense

was the greed of gain that in the later years of the war only a threat of

death could keep the fighting-men in their ranks, and the results of

victory after victory were lost through the anxiety of the conquerors to

deposit their booty and captives safely at home. The moment the hand of

such leaders as Henry the Fifth or Bedford was removed the war died down

into mere massacre and brigandage. "If God had been a captain now-a-days,"

exclaimed a French general, "he would have turned marauder."

[Sidenote: Grant of Liveries]

The temper thus nursed on the fields of France found at last scope for

action in England itself. Even before the outbreak of the War of the Roses

the nobles had become as lawless and dissolute at home as they were greedy

and cruel abroad. But with the struggle of York and Lancaster and the

paralysis of government which it brought with it, all hold over the

baronage was gone; and the lawlessness and brutality of their temper

showed itself without a check. The disorder which their violence wrought

in a single district of the country is brought home by the Paston Letters,

an invaluable series of domestic correspondence which lifts for us a

corner of the veil that hides the social state of England in the fifteenth

century. We see houses sacked, judges overawed or driven from the bench,

peaceful men hewn down by assassins or plundered by armed bands, women

carried off to forced marriages, elections controlled by brute force,

parliaments degraded into camps of armed retainers. As the number of their

actual vassals declined with the progress of enfranchisement and the

upgrowth of the freeholder, the nobles had found a substitute for them in

the grant of their "liveries," the badges of their households, to the

smaller gentry and farmers of their neighbourhood, and this artificial

revival of the dying feudalism became one of the curses of the day. The

outlaw, the broken soldier returning penniless from the wars, found

shelter and wages in the train of the greater barons, and furnished them

with a force ready at any moment for violence or civil strife. The same

motives which brought the freeman of the tenth century to commend himself

to thegn or baron forced the yeoman or smaller gentleman of the fifteenth

to don the cognizance of his powerful neighbour, and ask for a grant of

"livery," or to seek at his hand "maintenance" in the law-courts, and thus

secure his aid and patronage in fray or suit. For to meddle with such a

retainer was perilous even for sheriff or judge; and the force which a

noble could summon at his call sufficed to overawe a law-court or to drag

a culprit from prison or dock. The evils of the system of "maintenance"

had been felt long before the Wars of the Roses; and statutes both of

Edward the First and of Richard the Second had been aimed against it. But

it was in the civil war that it showed itself in its full force. The

weakness of the Crown and the strife of political factions for supremacy

left the nobles masters of the field; and the white rose of the House of

York, the red rose of the House of Lancaster, the portcullis of the

Beauforts, the pied bull of the Nevilles, the bear and ragged staff which

Warwick borrowed from the Beauchamps, were seen on hundreds of breasts in

Parliament or on the battle-field.

[Sidenote: The Social Revolution]

The lawlessness of the baronage tended as it had always tended to the

profit of the crown by driving the people at large to seek for order and

protection at the hands of the monarchy. And at this moment the craving

for such a protection was strengthened by the general growth of wealth and

industry. The smaller proprietors of the counties were growing fast both

in wealth and numbers, while the burgess class in the cities were drawing

fresh riches from the developement of trade which characterized this

period. The noble himself owed his importance to his wealth. Poggio, as he

wandered through the island, noted that "the noble who has the greatest

revenue is most respected; and that even men of gentle blood attend to

country business and sell their wool and cattle, not thinking it any

disparagement to engage in rural industry." Slowly but surely the foreign

commerce of the country, hitherto conducted by the Italian, the Hanse

merchant, or the trader of Catalonia or southern Gaul, was passing into

English hands. English merchants were settled at Florence and at Venice.

English merchant ships appeared in the Baltic. The first faint upgrowth of

manufactures was seen in a crowd of protective statutes which formed a

marked feature in the legislation of Edward the Fourth. The weight which

the industrial classes had acquired was seen in the bounds which their

opinion set to the Wars of the Roses. England presented to Philippe de

Commines the rare spectacle of a land where, brutal as was its civil

strife, "there are no buildings destroyed or demolished by war, and where

the mischief of it falls on those who make the war." The ruin and

bloodshed were limited in fact to the great lords and their feudal

retainers. If the towns once or twice threw themselves, as at Towton, into

the struggle, the trading and agricultural classes for the most part stood

wholly apart from it. While the baronage was dashing itself to pieces in

battle after battle justice went on undisturbed. The law-courts sat at

Westminster. The judges rode on circuit as of old. The system of jury

trial took more and more its modern form by the separation of the jurors

from the witnesses.

But beneath this outer order and prosperity the growth of wealth in the

trading classes was fast bringing about a social revolution which tended

as strongly as the outrages of the baronage to the profit of the crown.

The rise in the price of wool was giving a fresh impulse to the changes in

agriculture which had begun with the Black Death and were to go steadily

on for a hundred years to come. These changes were the throwing together

of the smaller holdings, and the introduction of sheep-farming on an

enormous scale. The new wealth of the merchant classes helped on the

change. They began to invest largely in land, and these "farming gentlemen

and clerking knights," as Latimer bitterly styled them, were restrained by

few traditions or associations in their eviction of the smaller tenants.

The land indeed had been greatly underlet, and as its value rose with the

peace and firm government of the early Tudors the temptation to raise the

customary rents became irresistible. "That which went heretofore for

twenty or forty pounds a year," we learn in Henry the Eighth's day, "now

is let for fifty or a hundred." But it had been only by this low scale of

rent that the small yeomanry class had been enabled to exist. "My father,"

says Latimer, "was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a

farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he

tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep,

and my mother milked thirty kine; he was able and did find the king a

harness with himself and his horse while he came to the place that he

should receive the king's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness

when he went to Blackheath Field. He kept me to school: he married my

sisters with five pounds apiece, so that he brought them up in godliness

and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some

alms he gave to the poor, and all this he did of the same farm, where he

that now hath it payeth sixteen pounds by year or more, and is not able to

do anything for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a

cup of drink to the poor."

[Sidenote: Evictions and Enclosures]

Increase of rent ended with such tenants in the relinquishment of their

holdings, but the bitterness of the ejections which the new system of

cultivation necessitated was increased by the iniquitous means that were

often employed to bring them about. The farmers, if we believe More in

1515, were "got rid of either by fraud or force, or tired out with

repeated wrongs into parting with their property." "In this way it comes

to pass that these poor wretches, men, women, husbands, orphans, widows,

parents with little children, households greater in number than in wealth

(for arable farming requires many hands, while one shepherd and herdsman

will suffice for a pasture farm), all these emigrate from their native

fields without knowing where to go." The sale of their scanty household

stuff drove them to wander homeless abroad, to be thrown into prison as

vagabonds, to beg and to steal. Yet in the face of such a spectacle as

this we still find the old complaint of scarcity of labour, and the old

legal remedy for it in a fixed scale of wages. The social disorder, in

fact, baffled the sagacity of English statesmen, and they could find no

better remedy for it than laws against the further extension of

sheep-farms, and a formidable increase of public executions. Both were

alike fruitless. Enclosures and evictions went on as before and swelled

the numbers and the turbulence of the floating labour class. The riots

against "enclosures," of which we first hear in the time of Henry the

Sixth and which became a constant feature of the Tudor period, are

indications not only of a perpetual strife going on in every quarter

between the landowners and the smaller peasant class, but of a mass of

social discontent which was to seek constant outlets in violence and

revolution.

And into this mass of disorder the break-up of the military households and

the return of wounded and disabled soldiers from the wars introduced a

dangerous leaven of outrage and crime. England for the first time saw a

distinct criminal class in the organized gangs of robbers which began to

infest the roads and were always ready to gather round the standard of

revolt. The gallows did its work in vain. "If you do not remedy the evils

which produce thieves," More urged with bitter truth, "the rigorous

execution of justice in punishing thieves will be vain." But even More

could only suggest a remedy which, efficacious as it was subsequently to

prove, had yet to wait a century for its realization. "Let the woollen

manufacture be introduced, so that honest employment may be found for

those whom want has made thieves or will make thieves ere long." The

extension of industry at last succeeded in absorbing this mass of surplus

labour, but the process was not complete till the close of Elizabeth's

day, and throughout the time of the Tudors the discontent of the labour

class bound the wealthier classes to the crown. It was in truth this

social danger which lay at the root of the Tudor despotism. For the

proprietary classes the repression of the poor was a question of life and

death. Employer and proprietor were ready to surrender freedom into the

hands of the one power which could preserve them from social anarchy. It

was to the selfish panic of the landowners that England owed the Statute

of Labourers and its terrible heritage of pauperism. It was to the selfish

panic of both landowner and merchant that she owed the despotism of the

Monarchy.

[Sidenote: The Nevilles]

Thus we find that in the years which followed the Wars of the Roses a

change passed over the spirit of English government which was little short

of a revolution. As the country tasted the sweets of rest and firm

government that reaction of feeling, that horror of fresh civil wars, that

content with its own internal growth and indifference to foreign

aggrandizement, which distinguished the epoch of the Tudors, began to

assert its power. The Crown became identified with the thought of national

prosperity, almost with the thought of national existence. Loyalty drew to

itself the force of patriotism. Devotion to the crown became one in men's

minds with devotion to their country. For almost a hundred years England

lost all sense of a national individuality; it saw itself only in the

Crown. The tendency became irresistible as the nation owned in the power

of its kings its one security for social order, its one bulwark against

feudal outrage and popular anarchy. The change however was a slow and

gradual one. It is with the victory of Towton that the new power of the

Monarchy begins, but in the years that immediately followed this victory

there was little to promise the triumph of the Crown. The king, Edward the

Fourth, was but a boy of nineteen; and decisive as his march upon London

proved, he had as yet given few signs of political ability. His luxurious

temper showed itself in the pomp and gaiety of his court, in feast and

tourney, or in love-passages with city wives and noble ladies. The work of

government, the defence of the new throne against its restless foes, he

left as yet to sterner hands. Among the few great houses who recalled the

might of the older baronage two families of the northern border stood

first in power and repute. The Percies had played the chief part in the

revolution which gave the crown to the House of Lancaster. Their rivals,

the Nevilles, had set the line of York on the throne. Fortune seemed to

delight in adding lands and wealth to the last powerful family. The

heiress of the Montacutes brought the Earldom of Salisbury and the barony

of Monthermer to a second son of their chief, the Earl of Westmoreland;

and Salisbury's son, Richard Neville, won the Earldom of Warwick with the

hand of the heiress of the Beauchamps. The ruin of the Percies, whose

lands and Earldom of Northumberland were granted to Warwick's brother,

Lord Montagu, raised the Nevilles to unrivalled greatness in the land.

Warwick, who on his father's death added the Earldom of Salisbury to his

earlier titles, had like his father warmly espoused the cause of Richard

of York, and it was to his counsels that men ascribed the decisive step by

which his cousin Edward of March assumed the crown. From St. Albans to

Towton he had been the foremost among the assailants of the Lancastrian

line; and the death of his uncle and father, the youth of the king, and

the glory of the great victory which confirmed his throne, placed the Earl

at the head of the Yorkist party.

[Sidenote: Warwick]

Warwick's services were munificently rewarded by a grant of vast estates

from the confiscated lands of the Lancastrian baronage, and by his

elevation to the highest posts in the service of the State. He was Captain

of Calais, Admiral of the fleet in the Channel, and Warden of the Western

Marches. The command of the northern border lay in the hands of his

brother, Lord Montagu. A younger brother, George Neville, already raised

to the post of Lord Chancellor, was soon to receive the See of York.

Lesser rewards fell to Warwick's uncles, the minor chiefs of the House of

Neville, Lords Falconberg, Abergavenny, and Latimer. The vast power which

such an accumulation of wealth and honours placed at the Earl's disposal

was wielded with consummate ability. In outer seeming Warwick was the very

type of the feudal baron. He could raise armies at his call from his own

earldoms. Six hundred liveried retainers followed him to Parliament.

Thousands of dependants feasted in his courtyard. But few men were really

further from the feudal ideal. Active and ruthless warrior as he was, his

enemies denied to the Earl the gift of personal daring. In war he showed

himself more general than soldier, and in spite of a series of victories

his genius was not so much military as diplomatic. A Burgundian chronicler

who knew him well describes him as the craftiest man of his day, "le plus

soubtil homme de son vivant." Secret, patient, without faith or loyalty,

ruthless, unscrupulous, what Warwick excelled in was intrigue, treachery,

the contrivance of plots, and sudden desertions.

His temper brought out in terrible relief the moral disorganization of the

time. The old order of the world was passing away. Since the fall of the

Roman Empire civil society had been held together by the power of the

given word, by the "fealty" and "loyalty" that bound vassal to lord and

lord to king. A common faith in its possession of supernatural truths and

supernatural powers had bound men together in the religious society which

knew itself as the Church. But the spell of religious belief was now

broken and the feudal conception of society was passing away. On the other

hand the individual sense of personal duty, the political consciousness of

each citizen that national order and national welfare are essential to his

own well-being, had not yet come. The bonds which had held the world

together through so many ages loosened and broke only to leave man face to

face with his own selfishness. The motives that sway and ennoble the

common conduct of men were powerless over the ruling classes. Pope and

king, bishop and noble, vied with each other in greed, in self-seeking, in

lust, in faithlessness, in a pitiless cruelty. It is this moral

degradation that flings so dark a shade over the Wars of the Roses. From

no period in our annals do we turn with such weariness and disgust. Their

savage battles, their ruthless executions, their shameless treasons, seem

all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the ends for which men

fought, for the utter want of all nobleness and chivalry in the contest

itself, of all great result in its close. And it is this moral

disorganization that expresses itself in the men whom the civil war left

behind it. Of honour, of loyalty, of good faith, Warwick knew nothing. He

had fought for the House of Neville rather than for the House of York, had

set Edward on the throne as a puppet whom he could rule at his will, and

his policy seemed to have gained its end in leaving the Earl master of the

realm.

[Sidenote: Edward the Fourth]

In the three years which followed Towton the power of the Nevilles

overshadowed that of the king. Warwick was now all-powerful in the state,

but the cessation of the war was the signal for a silent strife between

the Earl and his young sovereign. In Edward indeed Warwick was to meet not

only a consummate general but a politician whose subtlety and rapidity of

conception were far above his own. As a mere boy Edward had shown himself

among the ablest and the most pitiless of the warriors of the civil war.

He had looked on with cool ruthlessness while grey-haired nobles were

hurried to the block. The terrible bloodshed of Towton woke no pity in his

heart; he turned from it only to frame a vast bill of attainder which

drove twelve great nobles and a hundred knights to beggary and exile. When

treachery placed his harmless rival in his power he visited him with cruel

insult. His military ability had been displayed in his rapid march upon

London, the fierce blow which freed him from his enemy in the rear, the

decisive victory at Towton. But his political ability was slower in

developing itself. In his earliest years he showed little taste for the

work of rule. While Warwick was winning triumphs on battle-field after

battle-field, the young king seemed to abandon himself to a voluptuous

indolence, to revels with the city wives of London, and to the caresses of

mistresses like Jane Shore. Tall in stature and of singular beauty, his

winning manners and gay carelessness of bearing secured Edward a

popularity which had been denied to nobler kings. When he asked a rich old

lady for ten pounds towards a war with France, she answered, "For thy

comely face thou shalt have twenty." The king thanked and kissed her, and

the old woman made her twenty forty. In outer appearance indeed no one

could contrast more utterly with the subtle sovereigns of his time, with

the mean-visaged Lewis of France or the meanly-clad Ferdinand of Aragon.

But Edward's work was the same as theirs and it was done as completely.

While jesting with aldermen, or dallying with mistresses, or idling over

new pages from the printing press at Westminster, Edward was silently

laying the foundations of an absolute rule.

The very faults of his nature helped him to success. His pleasure-loving

and self-indulgent temper needed the pressure of emergency, of actual

danger, to flash out into action. Men like Commines who saw him only in

moments of security and indolence scorned Edward as dull, sensual, easy to

be led and gulled by keener wits. It was in the hour of need and despair

that his genius showed itself, cool, rapid, subtle, utterly fearless,

moving straight to its aim through clouds of treachery and intrigue, and

striking hard when its aim was reached. But even in his idler hours his

purpose never wavered. His indolence and gaiety were in fact mere veils

thrown over a will of steel. From the first his aim was to free the Crown

from the control of the baronage. He made no secret of his hostility to

the nobles. At Towton as in all his after battles he bade his followers

slay knight and baron, but spare the commons. In his earliest Parliament,

that of 1461, he renewed the statutes against giving of liveries, and

though this enactment proved as fruitless as its predecessors to reduce

the households of the baronage it marked Edward's resolve to adhere to the

invariable policy of the Crown in striving for their reduction. But

efforts like these, though they indicated the young king's policy, could

produce little effect so long as the mightiest of the barons overawed the

throne. Yet even a king as bold as Edward might well have shrunk from a

struggle with Warwick. The Earl was all-powerful in the state; the

military resources of the realm were in his hands. As Captain of Calais he

was master of the one disciplined force at the disposal of the Crown, and

as admiral he controlled the royal fleet. The strength he drew from his

wide possessions, from his vast wealth (for his official revenues alone

were estimated at eighty thousand crowns a year), from his warlike renown

and his wide kinship, was backed by his personal popularity. Above all the

Yorkist party, bound to Warwick by a long series of victories, looked on

him rather than on the young and untried king as its head.

[Sidenote: Lewis the Eleventh]

The policy of Warwick pointed to a close alliance with France. The Hundred

Years War, though it had driven the English from Guienne and the south,

had left the French Monarchy hemmed in by great feudatories on every other

border. Britanny was almost independent in the west. On the east the house

of Anjou lay, restless and ambitious, in Lorraine and Provence, while the

house of Burgundy occupied its hereditary duchy and Franche Comte. On the

northern frontier the same Burgundian house was massing together into a

single state nearly all the crowd of counties, marquisates, and dukedoms

which now make up Holland and Belgium. Nobles hardly less powerful or more

dependent on the Crown held the central provinces of the kingdom when

Lewis the Eleventh mounted its throne but a few months after Edward's

accession. The temper of the new king drove him to a strife for the

mastery of his realm, and his efforts after centralization and a more

effective rule soon goaded the baronage into a mood of revolt. But Lewis

saw well that a struggle with it was only possible if England stood aloof.

His father's cool sagacity had planned the securing of his conquests by

the marriage of Lewis himself to an English wife, and though this project

had fallen through, and the civil wars had given safety to France to the

end of Charles's reign, the ruin of the Lancastrian cause at Towton again

roused the danger of attack from England at the moment when Lewis mounted

the throne. Its young and warlike king, the great baron who was still

fresh from the glory of Towton, might well resolve to win back the

heritage of Eleanor, that Duchy of Guienne which had been lost but some

ten years before. Even if such an effort proved fruitless, Lewis saw that

an English war would not only ruin his plans for the overthrow of the

nobles, but would leave him more than ever at their mercy. Above all it

would throw him helplessly into the hands of the Burgundian Duke. In the

new struggle as in the old the friendship of Burgundy could alone bring a

favourable issue, and such a friendship would have to be paid for by

sacrifices even more terrible than those which had been wrenched from the

need of Charles the Seventh. The passing of Burgundy from the side of

England to the side of France after the Treaty of Arras had been bought by

the cession to its Duke of the towns along the Somme, of that Picardy

which brought the Burgundian frontier to some fifty miles from Paris.

Sacrifices even more costly would have to buy the aid of Burgundy in a

struggle with Edward the Fourth.

[Sidenote: The Triple Alliance]

How vivid was his sense of these dangers was seen in the eagerness of

Lewis to get the truce with England renewed and extended. But his efforts

for a general peace broke down before the demands of the English council

for the restoration of Normandy and Guienne. Nor were his difficulties

from England alone. An English alliance was unpopular in France itself.

"Seek no friendship from the English, Sire!" said Pierre de Breze, the

Seneschal of Normandy, "for the more they love you, the more all Frenchmen

will hate you!" All Lewis could do was to fetter Edward's action by giving

him work at home. When Margaret appealed to him for aid after Towton he

refused any formal help, but her pledge to surrender Calais in case of

success drew from him some succour in money and men which enabled the

queen to renew the struggle in the north. Though her effort failed, the

hint so roughly given had been enough to change the mood of the English

statesmen; the truce with France was renewed, and a different reception

met the new proposals of alliance which followed it. Lewis indeed was now

busy with an even more pressing danger. In any struggle of the king with

England or the nobles what gave Burgundy its chief weight was the

possession of the towns on the Somme, and it was his consciousness of the

vital importance of these to his throne that spurred Lewis to a bold and

dexterous diplomacy by which Duke Philip the Good, under the influence of

counsellors who looked to the French king for protection against the

Duke's son, Charles of Charolais, was brought to surrender Picardy on

payment of the sum stipulated for its ransom in the Treaty of Arras. The

formal surrender of the towns on the Somme took place in October 1463, but

they were hardly his own when Lewis turned to press his alliance upon

England. From Picardy, where he was busy in securing his newly-won

possessions, he sought an interview with Warwick. His danger indeed was

still great; for the irritated nobles were already drawing together into a

League of the Public Weal, and Charles of Charolais, indignant at the

counsellors who severed him from his father and at the king who traded

through them on the Duke's dotage, was eager to place himself at its head.

But these counsellors, the Croys, saw their own ruin as well as the ruin

of Lewis in the success of a league of which Charles was the head; and at

their instigation Duke Philip busied himself at the opening of 1464 as the

mediator of an alliance which would secure Lewis against it, a triple

alliance between Burgundy and the French and English kings.

[Sidenote: Warwick's Policy]

Such an alliance had now become Warwick's settled policy. In it lay the

certainty of peace at home as abroad, the assurance of security to the

throne which he had built up. While Henry was sheltered in Scotland where

French influence was supreme, and while Margaret of Anjou could look for

aid from France, the house of York could hope for no cessation of the

civil war. A union between France, Burgundy, and England left the

partizans of Lancaster without hope. When Lewis therefore summoned him to

an interview on the Somme, Warwick, though unable to quit England in face

of the dangers which still threatened from the north, promised to send his

brother the Chancellor to conduct a negotiation. Whether the mission took

place or no, the questions not only of peace with France but of a marriage

between Edward and one of the French king's kinswomen were discussed in

the English Council as early as the spring of 1464, for in the May of that

year a Burgundian agent announced to the Croys that an English embassy

would be despatched to St. Omer on the coming St. John's day to confer

with Lewis and Duke Philip on the peace and the marriage-treaty. But at

this very moment Warwick, followed by the king, was hurrying to meet a new

rising which Margaret had brought about by a landing in the north. On 15th

May the Lancastrians were finally routed by Lord Montagu in the battle of

Hexham, and the queen and her child driven over the Scotch border. The

defeat of this rising seemed at last to bring the miserable war to a

close. The victory of Hexham, with the capture of Henry that followed a

year later, successes which were accepted by foreign powers as a final

settlement of the civil strife, left Edward's hands free as they had never

been free before, while his good fortune quickened the anxiety of Lewis,

who felt every day the toils of the great confederacy of the French

princes closing more tightly round him. But Margaret was still in his

hands, and Warwick remained firm in his policy of alliance. At Michaelmas

the Earl prepared to cross the sea for the meeting at St. Omer.

[Sidenote: Edward's Marriage]

It was this moment that Edward chose for a sudden and decisive blow. Only

six days before the departure of the embassy the young king informed his

Council that he was already wedded. By a second match with a Kentish

knight, Sir Richard Woodville, Jacquetta of Luxemburg, the widow of the

Regent Duke of Bedford, had become the mother of a daughter Elizabeth.

Elizabeth married Sir John Grey, a Lancastrian partizan, but his fall some

few years back in the second battle of St. Albans left her a widow, and

she returned to her mother's home. Here on his march northward to meet the

rising which ended at Hexham, she caught the young king's fancy. At the

opening of May, at the moment when Warwick's purpose to conclude the

marriage-treaty was announced to the court of Burgundy, Edward secretly

made her his wife. He reserved, however, the announcement of his marriage

till the very eve of the negotiations, when its disclosure served not only

to shatter Warwick's plans but to strike a sudden and decisive blow at the

sway he had wielded till now in the royal Council. The blow in fact was so

sudden and unexpected that Warwick could only take refuge in a feigned

submission. "The King," wrote one of his partizans, Lord Wenlock, to the

Court of Burgundy, "has taken a wife at his pleasure, without knowledge of

them whom he ought to have called to counsel him; by reason of which it is

highly displeasing to many great lords and to the bulk of his Council. But

since the marriage has gone so far that it cannot be helped, we must take

patience in spite of ourselves." Not only did the negotiations with France

come to an end, but the Earl found himself cut off from the king's

counsels. "As one knows not," wrote his adherent, "seeing the marriage is

made in this way, what purpose the King may have to go on with the other

two points, truce or peace, the opinion of the Council is that my Lord of

Warwick will not pass the sea till one learns the King's will and pleasure

on that point." Even Warwick indeed might have paused before the new

aspect of affairs across the Channel. For at this moment the growing

weakness of Duke Philip enabled Charles of Charolais to overthrow the

Croys, and to become the virtual ruler of the Burgundian states. At the

close of 1464 the League of the Public Weal drew fast to a head, and

Charles despatched the Chancellor of Burgundy to secure the aid of

England. But the English Council met the advances of the League with

coldness. Edward himself could have seen little save danger to his throne

from its triumph. Count Charles, proud of his connexion with the House of

Lancaster through his Portuguese mother, a descendant of John of Gaunt,

was known to be hostile to the Yorkist throne. The foremost of his

colleagues, John of Calabria, was a son of Rene of Anjou and a brother of

Margaret. Another of the conspirators, the Count of Maine, was Margaret's

uncle. It was significant that the Duke of Somerset had found a place in

the train of Charles of Charolais. On the other hand the warmest advocates

of the French alliance could hardly press for closer relations with a king

whose ruin seemed certain, and even Warwick must have been held back by

the utter collapse of the royal power when the League attacked Lewis in

1465. Deserted by every great noble, and cooped up within the walls of

Paris, the French king could only save himself by a humiliating submission

to the demands of the Leaguers.

[Sidenote: The Woodvilles]