ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND BURGUNDY
After the Hundred Years' War had been in progress less than a quarter
of a century, it seemed as if Edward III. had won all that he could
possibly claim--peace and sovereignty over all the outlying parts of
his dominion at home, and over more than he had set out to gain on
the Continent. But the war was renewed by the action of Edward's
vassal lords in France, only nine years later, and before his death,
which happened in 1377, scarce a possession on the Continent was left
to England except the city of Calais and a narrow strip of coast
south of Bordeaux, in Guienne. Even at sea the French fleet, now
aided by the Spanish since the interference by the Black Prince with
the affairs of Spain--see p. 180--was completely victorious and made
raids on the south coast of England. At the end of the fourteenth
century it was on the terms that England should hold these fragments,
and these only, of her once great territory on the Continent, that a
treaty was made with France by Richard II., Edward's successor on the
English throne.
The cost and miseries incurred in England by those unsuccessful wars
in France led to serious riots against the Government. It was then
that Wat Tyler led his force of Kentish rebels to London, where only
the courage of the king, a boy of fourteen, and the resistance of the
militia of the town saved the city from the mob.
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Twice towards the end of the century Richard, now the French treaty
was arranged, found time to visit Ireland and claim the homage of the
chiefs of the Irish clans, and it was while he was in Ireland, on the
second of these expeditions, that his enemy, Henry, Earl of
Bolingbroke, whom he had banished, came back to England and was
joined by great forces in the country which had by now become
disgusted with Richard's tyranny. For though Richard had shown
extraordinary courage and manly wisdom as a boy, his later acts raise
a doubt whether he was quite sane. In the last year of the century,
1399, Henry came to the throne as Henry IV.
[Sidenote: Henry IV]
It was a troublous succession. There was discontent and active
rebellion of both lords and commons in England itself. Wales rose in
arms against the king and was followed by Scotland. France
threatened to renew the war. Gradually the king gained the victory
over each of these various forces opposed to him. Wales and Scotland
were subdued by arms. Against Scotland he had the help of the great
Earl of Northumberland and his son famous in story as "Hotspur."
Very shortly afterwards the power of Northumberland was brought into
opposition to the king, but was overthrown in that battle which
settled the Welsh trouble and, as Shakespeare relates to us, gave
Henry, the king's son--soon to be Henry V.--the chance of
distinguishing himself by killing "Hotspur" in single combat, and
thus proving that he was made for better things than to be the boon
companion of the drunken old knight Falstaff.
But with his own commons Henry IV. was able to make terms only by
giving up a serious piece of what had been the royal privilege
before. He agreed that the taxes raised to meet the expenses of the
war should be received and paid out again by a committee appointed by
the Parliament, and no longer by an {198} official appointed by the
king. The difference was of much importance for the liberties of the
English subject.
As for the threat of war from France, that threat died away for the
moment in consequence of an event which had a large effect on the
course of the story during most of the fifteenth century. This event
was the rise of the Duke of Burgundy to a power almost as great as
that of the King of France himself, the Duke's feudal overlord.
Burgundy had for very many years been the name of a territory varying
in extent, sometimes including portions of the present Italy and
Switzerland, and always some of the most fertile and beautiful
country in Europe. Towards the end of the fourteenth century it
gained greatly in wealth and territory by uniting with itself the
province of Flanders. This union came about through the marriage of
the heiress of the Count of Flanders with a Duke of Burgundy. The
province of Flanders included, as we have seen, semi-independent and
wealthy cities such as Bruges and Ghent. Its addition to the dukedom
of Burgundy made that chief vassal fully equal in possession of
territory and resources with his overlord, the King of France. The
story of the next many years in Europe is largely the story of the
struggle between this great vassal and his lord. Possibly it was a
struggle which saved our England, for England was very wearied and
weakened by foreign war; she was full of discontent at home; her
fleet had been beaten and broken up. If her old enemy of France had
been able to attack her with any united force at this moment, it
would have been hard for her to make head against it.
The threat of Burgundy gave the French king business to attend to
nearer home. Unfortunately it also gave England an easy opportunity
of vexing her ancient enemy by lending her aid to the Duke.
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[Sidenote: Agincourt]
Henry V., the Prince Hal of Shakespeare's dramas, developed from a
foolish prince into a wise king, but he was not wise enough to resist
the temptation, given him by the rivalry between the French king and
the powerful Duke, to regain what England once held on the Continent.
He was wise enough, however, to conduct his campaign in a different
manner from that in which former leaders of English armies in France
had waged war. The Black Prince and others had marched, conquering
and raiding, into the country, with very little apparent plan. Henry
V.'s first enterprise was indeed rather of the same kind, and nearly
ended in a disastrous failure. But he turned the threatened disaster
into a resounding victory in the battle of Agincourt. The chivalry
of France was caught up in marshy ground, and the archers of England
shot them down. It was a repetition of Crécy and of Poitiers. The
slaughter of Frenchmen of distinction and high birth was very great,
and this wonderful victory made the English soldier a terror in
France for years to come.
But the danger, from which only a wonderful victory could have
rescued him, seems to have taught Henry a lesson. In his next
campaign he set to work in a methodical way to conquer Normandy,
making the country safe behind him as he progressed. It was a slower
way than that of the Black Prince, but far more sure.
The French king was kept busy by Burgundy. He could send no help to
his vassal of Normandy, and the whole of Normandy fell into Henry's
hand. The Burgundians meantime had captured Paris; and now a
desperate deed of treachery was done by the heir to the French
throne. The actual King of France was insane, and incapable of
taking any part in the government.
To break, as he thought, the Burgundian power, {200} the Dauphin,
that is, the eldest son of the king, murdered the Duke of Burgundy
even as the latter knelt before him to do homage. The Duke's purpose
in doing this homage was to unite the forces of Burgundy and France
against the growing power of Henry. After this desperate deed the
Burgundians deemed it their best course to make terms with Henry, and
the terms they made were that he should marry the daughter of the mad
King of France and should be placed, with the help of Burgundy, on
the French throne as soon as the mad king died--excluding the Dauphin
from the succession.
They were terms which committed Henry to a constant war with the
Dauphin's forces. In this he was consistently successful; but the
project formed by his treaty with the Burgundians was broken by his
early death. Henry VI., his son and successor as King of England,
was then two years old.
The English regent, who had charge of the kingdom while Henry VI. was
under full age, carried on the war in France against the party of the
Dauphin. And it was waged with steady success, so that the Dauphin,
now come to the throne as Charles VII., was on the point of giving up
all as lost, when the tide of England's victory was checked and then
turned back by one of the most wonderful persons whom we meet in the
whole course of the story--Joan of Arc.
This peasant girl, becoming prophetess, led the soldiers of France to
victory and inspired them with the belief that heaven was on their
side. From that moment the tide turned and all went in France's
favour. The "Maid of Orleans," Joan herself, was captured by the
Burgundians, sold to the English, and to our shame was burnt by the
English as a heretic. But the French successes continued, none the
less; the Burgundians wavered and went over to the King of France
again; and precisely in the middle year of {201} the fifteenth
century, 1450, the English lost Normandy and all their hold on
Northern France.
Three years later that strip of Guienne, the coast line from Bordeaux
southward, went the same way, and England was left with not a foot of
French soil except the town of Calais.
And now it would seem as if England might at length hope to settle
her own troubles within her island boundaries. If that was a hope
which any men of that day entertained it was grievously disappointed,
for she was just about to enter on those terrible years of civil war
between the two great dukedoms of York and Lancaster, each claiming
the throne, which went on during nearly all the latter half of the
century. For their badge and emblem the Yorkists had a white rose
and the Lancastrians a red, and from these roses those dreadful wars
are known as the Wars of the Roses.
[Sidenote: Wars of the Roses]
The English people had naturally been bitterly disappointed by the
final result of the French war. England continued under the
practical governance of the regents even after the king had come of
age, and their rule caused great dissatisfaction. A dangerous mob
under one Jack Cade got the better of the king's troops and held the
city of London for two days. But his mob was undisciplined, and when
the citizens took arms in their own defence the rebellion was soon
put down. It was a sign, however, of the general discontent that the
rebellion could have even such success as this.
What helped to make the Wars of the Roses so prolonged and so bitter
was that the claim of each of the rivals was so nearly equal. In an
outlined story, such as this that I am trying to tell, there is no
place for the details of the claims of each; but we may note that the
claim as to the strict right of succession was complicated by the
claim put forward by the York {202} party that they stood for the
national welfare against the bad government of the Lancastrian king
and his regents. The Lancastrians posed as pure loyalists, affirming
that they stood for the legitimate rights of succession to the
throne. Certainly the evils of their government were obvious to all
men. They had lost France; England was without a fleet to protect
her shores, and the French landed and raided; the oversea trade of
England with the Continent was nearly ruined. Victory went now to
one and now to another of the evenly balanced forces, and with each
successive victory the vengeance taken by the victors, in retaliation
for what their side had suffered when it was defeated, became more
and more sanguinary. In one of the battles, that fought at Towton in
1461, which was a great Yorkist victory, the statement that more than
36,000 men were killed seems to be generally accepted, though it is
scarcely credible when we consider the small population of England at
this time. More than three-quarters of the loss was suffered by the
Lancastrians. Moreover, of twelve of what are regarded as the great
battles of these wars, it is notable that the Yorkists won nine and
the Lancastrians only three; yet the final battle, that of Bosworth
Field, the battle which "counted" above all the others, was won by
the Lancastrians, and its result was to place Henry VII. on the
throne. Bosworth and 1485 are usually named as the place and date of
the last battle in the long drawn-out Wars of the Roses, but in fact
the struggle was maintained till within three years of the end of the
century, and the really last battle was fought, again to a
Lancastrian victory, at Blackheath in 1497.
[Sidenote: Use of firearms]
In the beginning of the wars the unfortunate Henry VI. was twice
taken prisoner. King Edward IV. then comes to the throne. Henry is
released, regains the throne and Edward flees abroad. He gets {203}
the help of the Duke of Burgundy, and with a force of Burgundian
soldiers returns and dethrones Henry. We may note that these
Burgundians were armed with what were called arquebuses, firing
gunpowder, ignited by a match. The arquebuses were made somewhat
after the pattern of the crossbow, but of course without the bow, and
with a barrel in place of the open trough for the bolt. It was not
the first time of the use of firearms in England, but there seem to
have been more soldiers thus armed, in the battle which brought
Edward to the throne again, than ever before.
These Wars of the Roses, though they were waged for long, and though
the vengeance taken by the successive victors was heavy, seem to have
interfered surprisingly little with the agriculture and not greatly
with the commerce of the country. Although the victors' vengeance
was dire, it was directed mainly against the chiefs of the conquered
side. It did not fall on the rank and file. Population, in spite of
the war, increased both in town and country, and in rural districts
the tenant farmer more and more took the place of the villein. The
result was that when Edward IV. had firmly established himself on the
throne he found himself very largely free of that menace from the
great barons which had been a check on the authority of the kings
before him and had won privileges and charters from them. Many of
the great men had been killed in battle or in the executions which
followed a victory.
Therefore, had Edward so pleased, he might, as it seems, have been a
king almost as autocratic as any of the Tudors who followed him after
the brief reign of Richard III. Before the Tudor family succeeded
the Plantagenets, more battles were to be fought and the nobility
were still further to be weakened. But Edward was strong enough over
them. He, {204} fortunately for England, cared for prosperity rather
than for glory. He not only encouraged commerce, but was something
of a merchant on his own account, owning trading vessels and making
much money by the venture. The weaving trade, under him, extended in
England and its great centre at Coventry was established.
He did indeed send an army to the Continent, to aid Charles the Bold,
Duke of Burgundy, who was his brother-in-law, against Louis XI. of
France, but even this turned into a financial venture, for he allowed
Louis to bribe him out and took his army home again.
And here we touch a point, in the relations between Burgundy and
France, which is the point on which the final result of these
relations turned. The result was that France, under Louis XI.,
gained a complete victory and that he became really sovereign over
the land in which the sovereignty of the French kings had been
disputed very long and very hardly. But the point on which the
relations turned towards that result is indicated by the very title
given to Charles of Burgundy, "the Bold," while the extraordinary
character of the King of France is hinted by the means he employed to
get rid of Edward and the English army. He made appeal to the chief
desire of Edward's heart, the love of money. Louis is known in
history as perhaps the master diplomat and schemer of all the many
that its pages show us. He was a master in detecting and in playing
upon the weaknesses of men's characters. So he played on Edward's
avarice.
Against this cunning and scheming, for which the king had a genius,
his great vassal had perhaps in excess that quality of boldness which
his title implies. He was over-venturesome and hasty, and Louis
waited and schemed, like a spider in the web's centre, and finally
sucked the blood of the buzzing impetuous fly.
[Sidenote: The first Tudor king]
The claims of the first Tudor king to the throne of {205} England
will be seen to be none too sound, if looked at critically. Largely
it was Henry's own ability that enabled him to establish himself and
to make a final end of the opposition and rebellions after he had
been for twelve years king. It was an ability and strength of
purpose characteristic of all his successors until the throne of
England passed from the Tudors to the Scottish Stuarts. Yet always
the despotism of the English kings differed from that of the French
kings in this important point: that whereas the French kings had
their foot on the necks of both barons and commons, in England even
those who were most autocratic over their nobility always kept a wary
eye on their commons, and not even Mary in her zeal for the Roman
Catholic religion dared to go too far in opposition to the feeling of
the country.
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