their fortifications, and the state and feeling of the whole
country were slowly lifted from the gloomy depth to which the
war had depressed them.
At length, in 1369, Charles felt prepared to challenge another
encounter with the English, by repudiating the ignominious
terms of the treaty of Bretigny. Before the year closed,
Edward's armies were in the country again, but accomplished
nothing beyond the havoc which they wrought as they marched.
The French avoided battles, and their cities were well
defended. Next year the English returned, and the Black Prince
earned infamy by a ferocious massacre of three thousand men,
women, and children, in the city of Limoges, when he had taken
it by storm. It was his last campaign. Already suffering from
a mortal disease, he returned to England, and died a few years
later. The war went on, with no decisive results, until 1375,
when it was suspended by a truce. In 1377, Edward III. died,
and the French king began war again with great success. Within
three years he expelled the English from every part of France
except Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg and Calais.
If he had lived a little longer, there might soon have been an
end of the war. But he died in 1380, and fresh calamities fell
upon unhappy France.
{1038}
Rising Power of Burgundy.
The son who succeeded him, Charles VI., was an epileptic boy
of twelve years, who had three greedy and selfish uncles to
quarrel over the control of him, and to plunder the Crown of
territory and treasures. One of these was the Duke of
Burgundy, the first prince of a new great house which King
John had foolishly created. Just before that fatuous king
died, the old line of Burgundian dukes came to an end, and he
had the opportunity, which wise kings before him would have
improved very eagerly, to annex that fief to the crown.
Instead of doing so, he gave it as an appanage to his son
Philip, called "the Bold," and thus rooted a new plant of
feudalism in France which was destined to cause much trouble.
Another of the uncles was Louis, Duke of Anjou, heir to the
crown of Naples under a will of the lately murdered Queen
Joanna, and who was preparing for an expedition to enforce his
claim. The third was Duke of Berry, upon whom his father, King
John, had conferred another great appanage, including Berry,
Poitou and Auvergne.
The pillage and misgovernment of the realm under these
rapacious guardians of the young king was so great that
desperate risings were provoked, the most formidable of which
broke out in Paris. They were all suppressed, and with
merciless severity. At the same time, the Flemings, who had
again submitted to their count, revolted once more, under the
lead of Philip van Arteveld, son of their former leader. The
French moved an army to the assistance of the Count of
Flanders, and the sturdy men of Ghent, who confronted it
almost alone, suffered a crushing defeat at Roosebeke (1382).
Philip van Arteveld fell in the battle, with twenty-six
thousand of his men. Two years later, the Count of Flanders
died, and the Duke of Burgundy, who had married his daughter,
acquired that rich and noble possession. This beginning of the
union of Burgundy and the Netherlands, creating a power by the
side of the throne of France which threatened to overshadow
it, and having for its ultimate consequence the casting of the
wealth of the Low Countries into the lap of the House of
Austria and into the coffers of Spain, is an event of large
importance in European history.
Burgundians and Armagnacs.
When Charles VI. came of age, he took the government into his
own hands, and for some years it was administered by capable
men. But in 1392 the king's mind gave way, and his uncles
regained control of affairs. Philip of Burgundy maintained the
ascendancy until his death, in 1404. Then the controlling
influence passed to the king's brother, the Duke of Orleans,
between whom and the new Duke of Burgundy, John, called the
Fearless, a bitter feud arose. John, who was unscrupulous,
employed assassins to waylay and murder the Duke of Orleans,
which they did in November, 1407. This foul deed gave rise to
two parties in France. Those who sought vengeance ranged
themselves under the leadership of the Count of Armagnac, and
were called by his name. The Burgundians, who sustained Duke
John, were in the main a party of the people; for the Duke had
cultivated popularity, especially in Paris, by advocating
liberal measures and extending the rights and privileges of
the citizens.
The kingdom was kept in turmoil and terror for years by the
war of these factions, especially in and about Paris, where
the guild of the butchers took a prominent part in affairs, on
the Burgundian side, arming a riotous body of men who were
called Cabochiens, from their leader's name. In 1413 the
Armagnacs succeeded in recovering possession of the capital
and the Cabochiens were suppressed.
Second Stage of the Hundred Years War.
Meantime, Henry V. of England, the ambitious young Lancastrian
king who came to the throne of that country in 1413, saw a
favorable opportunity, in the distracted state of France, to
reopen the questions left unsettled by the breaking of the
treaty of Bretigny. He invaded France in 1415, as the rightful
king coming to dethrone a usurper, and began by taking
Harfleur at the mouth of the Seine, after a siege which cost
him so heavily that he found it prudent to retreat towards
Calais. The French intercepted him at Agincourt and forced him
to give them battle. He had only twenty thousand men, but they
formed a well disciplined and well ordered army. The French
had gathered eighty thousand men, but they were a feudal mob.
The battle ended, like those of Crécy and Poitiers, in the
routing and slaughter of the French, with small loss to
Henry's force. His army remained too weak in numbers, however,
for operations in a hostile country, and the English king
returned home, with a great train of captive princes and
lords.
He left the Armagnacs and Burgundians still fighting one
another, and disabling France as effectually as he could do if
he stayed to ravage the land. In 1417 he came back and began
to attack the strong cities of Normandy, one by one, taking
Caen first. In the next year, by a horrible massacre, the
Burgundian mob in Paris overcame the Armagnacs there, and
reinstated Duke John of Burgundy in possession of the capital.
The latter was already in negotiation with the English king,
and evidently prepared to sacrifice the kingdom for whatever
might seem advantageous to himself. But in 1419 Henry V. took
Rouen, and, when all of Normandy submitted with its capital,
he demanded nothing less than that great province, with
Brittany, Guienne, Maine, Anjou and Touraine in addition,--or,
substantially, the western half of France.
Burgundian and English Alliance.
Parleyings were brought to an end in September of that year by
the treacherous murder of Duke John. The Armagnacs slew him
foully, at an interview to which he had been enticed, on the
bridge of Montereau. His son, Duke Philip of Burgundy, now
reopened negotiations with the invader, in conjunction with
Queen Isabella (wife of the demented king), who had played an
evil part in all the factious troubles of the time. These two,
having control of the king's person, concluded a treaty with
Henry V. at Troyes, according to the terms of which Henry
should marry the king's daughter Catherine; should be
administrator of the kingdom of France while Charles VI.
lived, and should receive the crown when the latter died. The
marriage took place at once, and almost the whole of France
north of the Loire seemed submissive to the arrangement. The
States-General and the Parliament of Paris gave official
recognition to it; the disinherited dauphin of France, whose
own mother had signed away his regal heritage, retired, with
his Armagnac supporters, to the country south of the Loire,
and had little apparent prospect of holding even that.
{1039}
Two Kings in France.
But a mortal malady had already stricken King Henry V., and he
died in August, 1422. The unfortunate, rarely conscious French
king, whose crown Henry had waited for, died seven weeks
later. Each left an heir who was proclaimed king of France.
The English pretender (Henry VI. in England, Henry II. in
France) was an innocent infant, ten months old; but his court
was in Paris, his accession was proclaimed with due ceremony
at St. Denis, his sovereignty was recognized by the Parliament
and the University of that city, and the half of France
appeared resigned to the lapse of nationality which its
acceptance of him signified. The true heir of the royal house
of France (Charles VII.) was a young man of nearly mature age
and of fairly promising character; but he was proclaimed in a
little town of Berry, by a small following of lords and
knights, and the nation for which he stood hardly seemed to
exist.
The English supporters of the English king of France were too
arrogant and overbearing to retain very long the good will of
their allies among the French people. Something like a
national feeling in northern France was aroused by the
hostility they provoked, and the strength of the position in
which Henry V. left them was steadily but slowly lost. Charles
proved incapable, however, of using any advantages which
opened to him, or of giving his better counsellors an
opportunity to serve him with good effect, and no important
change took place in the situation of affairs until the
English laid siege, in 1428, to the city of Orleans, which was
the stronghold of the French cause.
Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans.
Then occurred one of the most extraordinary episodes in
history; the appearance of the young peasant girl of Lorraine,
Jeanne d'Arc, whose coming upon the scene of war was like the
descent of an angel out of Heaven, sent with a Divine
commission to rescue France. Belief in the inspiration of this
simple maiden, who had faith in her own visions and voices,
was easier for that age than belief in a rational rally of
public energies, and it worked like a miracle on the spirit of
the nation. But it could not have done so with effect if the
untaught country girl of Domremy had not been endowed in a
wonderful way, with a wise mind, as well as with an
imaginative one, and with courage as well as with faith. When
the belief in her inspired mission gave her power to lead the
foolish king, and authority to command his disorderly troops,
she acted almost invariably with understanding, with good
sense, with a clear, unclouded judgment, with straightforward
singleness of purpose, and with absolute personal
fearlessness. She saw the necessity for saving Orleans; and
when that had been done under her own captaincy (1429), she
saw how greatly King Charles would gain in prestige if he made
his way to Rheims, and received, like his predecessors, a
solemn coronation and consecration in the cathedral of that
city. It was by force of her gentle obstinacy of determination
that this was done, and the effect vindicated the sagacity of
the Maid. Then she looked upon her mission as accomplished,
and would have gone quietly home to her village; for she seems
to have remained as simple in feeling as when she left her
father's house, and was innocent to the end of any selfish
pleasure in the fame she had won and the importance she had
acquired. But those she had helped would not let her go; and
yet they would not be guided by her without wrangle and
resistance. She wished to move the army straight from Rheims
to Paris, and enter that city before it had time to recover
from the consternation it was in. But other counsellors
retarded the march, by stopping to capture small towns on the
way, until the opportunity for taking Paris was lost. The
king, who had been braced up to a little energy by her
influence, sank back into his indolent pleasures, and faction
and frivolity possessed the court again. Jeanne strove with
high courage against malignant opposition and many
disheartenments, in the siege of Paris and after, exposing
herself in battle with the bravery of a seasoned warrior; and
her reward was to find herself abandoned at last, in a
cowardly way, to the enemy, when she had led a sortie from the
town of Compiegne, to drive back the Duke of Burgundy, who was
besieging it. Taken prisoner, she was given up to the Duke,
and sold by him to the English at Rouen.
That the Maid acted with supernatural powers was believed by
the English as firmly as by the French; but those powers, in
their belief, came, not from Heaven, but from Hell. In their
view she was not a saint, but a sorceress. They paid a high
price to the Duke of Burgundy for his captive, in order to put
her on trial for the witchcraft which they held she had
practised against them, and to destroy her mischievous power.
No consideration for her sex, or her youth, or for the beauty
and purity of character that is revealed in all the accounts
of her trial, moved her judges to compassion. They condemned
her remorselessly to the stake, and she was burned on the 31st
of May, 1431, with no effort put forth on the part of the
French or their ungrateful king to save her from that horrible
fate.
End of the Hundred Years War.
After this, things went badly with the English, though some
years passed before Charles VII. was roused again to any
display of capable powers. At last, in 1435, a general
conference of all parties in the war was brought about at
Arras. The English were offered Normandy and Aquitaine in full
sovereignty, but they refused it, and withdrew from the
conference when greater concessions were denied to them. The
Duke of Burgundy then made terms with King Charles, abandoning
the English alliance, and obtaining satisfaction for the
murder of his father. Charles was now able, for the first time
in his reign, to enter the capital of his kingdom (May, 1436),
and it is said that he found it so wasted by a pestilence and
so ruined and deserted, that wolves came into the city, and
that forty persons were devoured by them in a single week,
some two years later.
{1040}
Charles now began to show better qualities than had appeared
in his character before. He adopted strong measures to
suppress the bands of marauders who harassed and wasted the
country, and to bring all armed forces in the kingdom under
the control and command of the Crown. He began the creation of
a disciplined and regulated militia in France. He called into
his service the greatest French merchant of the day, Jacques
Cœur, who successfully reorganized the finances of the state,
and whose reward, after a few years, was to be prosecuted and
plundered by malignant courtiers, while the king looked
passively on, as he had looked on at the trial and execution
of Jeanne d'Arc.
In 1449, a fresh attack upon the English in Normandy was
begun; and as civil war--the War of the Roses--was then at the
point of outbreak in England, they could make no effective
resistance. Within a year, the whole of Normandy had become
obedient again to the rule of the king of France. In two years
more Guienne had been recovered, and when, in October, 1453,
the French king entered Bordeaux, the English had been finally
expelled from every foot of the realm except Calais and its
near neighborhood. The Hundred Years War was at an end.
England under Edward III.
The century of the Hundred Years War had been, in England, one
of few conspicuous events; and when the romantic tale of that
war--the last sanguinary romance of expiring Chivalry--is
taken out of the English annals of the time, there is not much
left that looks interesting on the surface of things. Below
the surface there are movements of no little importance to be
found.
When Edward III. put forward his claim to the crown of France,
and prepared to make it good by force of arms, the English
nation had absolutely no interest of its own in the
enterprise, from which it could derive no possible advantage,
but which did, on the contrary, promise harm to it, very
plainly, whatever might be the result. If the king succeeded,
his English realm would become a mere minor appendage to a far
more imposing continental dominion, and he and his successors
might easily acquire a power independent and absolute, over
their subjects. If he failed, the humiliation of failure would
wound the pride and the prestige of the nation, while its
resources would have been drained for naught. But these
rational considerations did not suffice to breed any
discoverable opposition to King Edward's ambitious
undertaking. The Parliament gave sanction to it; most probably
the people at large approved, with exultant expectations of
national glory; and when Crécy and Poitiers, with victories
over the hostile Scots, filled the measure of England's glory
to overflowing, they were intoxicated by it, and had little
thought then of the cost or the consequences.
But long before Edward's reign came to an end, the splendid
pageantries of the war had passed out of sight, and a new
generation was looking at, and was suffering from, the
miseries and mortifications that came in its train. The
attempt to conquer France had failed; the fruits of the
victories of Crécy and Poitiers had been lost; even Guienne,
which had been English ground since the days of Henry II., was
mostly given up. And England was weak from the drain of money
and men which the war had caused. The awful plague of the 14th
century, the Black Death, had smitten her people hard and left
diminished numbers to bear the burden. There had been famine
in the land, and grievous distress, and much sorrow.
But the calamities of this bitter time wrought beneficent
effects, which no man then living is likely to have clearly
understood. By plague, famine and battle, labor was made
scarce, wages were raised, the half-enslaved laborer was
speedily emancipated, despite the efforts of Parliament to
keep him in bonds, and land-owners were forced to let their
lands to tenant-farmers, who strengthened the English
middle-class. By the demands of the war for money and men, the
king was held more in dependence on Parliament than he might
otherwise have been, and the plant of constitutional
government, which began its growth in the previous century,
took deeper root.
In the last years of his life Edward III. lost all of his
vigor, and fell under the influence of a woman, Alice Perrers,
who wronged and scandalized the nation. The king's eldest son,
the Black Prince, was slowly dying of an incurable disease,
and took little part in affairs; when he interfered, it seems
to have been with some leanings to the popular side. The next
in age of the living sons of Edward was a turbulent, proud,
self-seeking prince, who gave England much trouble and was
hated profoundly. This was John, Duke of Lancaster, called
John of Gaunt, or Ghent, because of his birth in that city.
England under Richard II.
The Black Prince, dying in 1376, left a young son, Richard,
then ten years old, who was immediately recognized as the heir
to the throne, and who succeeded to it in the following year,
when Edward III. died. The Duke of Lancaster had been
suspected of a design to set Richard aside and claim the crown
for himself. But he did not venture the attempt; nor was he
able to secure even the regency of the kingdom during the
young king's minority. The distrust of him was so general that
Parliament and the lords preferred to invest Richard with full
sovereignty even in his boyhood. But John of Gaunt,
notwithstanding these endeavors to exclude him from any place
of authority, contrived to attain a substantial mastery of the
government, managing the war in France and the expenditure of
public moneys in his own way, and managing them very badly. At
least, he was held chiefly responsible for what was bad, and
his name was heard oftenest in the mutterings of popular
discontent. The peasants were now growing very impatient of
the last fetters of villeinage which they wore, and very
conscious of their right to complete freedom. Those feelings
were strongly stirred in them by a heavy poll-tax which
Parliament levied in 1381. The consequence was an outbreak of
insurrection, led by one Wat the Tyler, which became
formidable and dangerous. The insurgents began by making
everybody they encountered swear to be true to King Richard,
and to submit to no king named John, meaning John of Gaunt.
They increased in numbers and boldness until they entered and
took possession of the city of London, where they beheaded the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and other obnoxious persons; but
permitted no thieving to be done.
{1041}
The day after this occurred, Wat Tyler met the young king at
Smithfield, for a conference, and was suddenly killed by one
of those who attended the king. The excuse made for the deed
was some word of insolence on the part of the insurgent
leader; but there is every appearance of a foul act of
treachery in the affair. Richard on this occasion behaved
boldly and with much presence of mind, acquiring by his
courage and readiness a command over the angry rebels, which
resulted in their dispersion.
The Wat Tyler rebellion appears to have manifested a more
radically democratic state of thinking and feeling among the
common people than existed again in England before the
seventeenth century. John Ball, a priest, and others who were
associated with Wat Tyler in the leadership, preached
doctrines of social equality that would nearly have satisfied
a Jacobin of the French Revolution.
This temper of political radicalism had no apparent connection
with the remarkable religious feeling of the time, which the
great reformer, Wyclif, had aroused; yet the two movements of
the English mind were undoubtedly started by one and the same
revolutionary shock, which it took from the grave alarms and
anxieties of the age, and for which it had been prepared by
the awakening of the previous century. Wyclif was the first
English Puritan, and more of the spirit of the reformation of
religion which he sought, than the spirit of Luther's
reformation, went into the Protestantism that ultimately took
form in England. The movement he stirred was a more wonderful
anticipation of the religious revolt of the sixteenth century
than any other which occurred in Europe; for that of Huss in
Bohemia took its impulse from Wyclif and the English Lollards,
as Wyclif's followers were called.
Richard was a weak but wilful king, and the kingdom was kept
in trouble by his fitful attempts at independence and
arbitrary rule. He made enemies of most of the great lords,
and lost the good will and confidence of Parliament. He did
what was looked upon as a great wrong to Henry of Bolingbroke,
son of John of Gaunt, by banishing both him and the Duke of
Norfolk from the kingdom, when he should have judged between
them; and he made the wrong greater by seizing the lands of
the Lancastrian house when John of Gaunt died. This caused his
ruin. Henry of Bolingbroke, now Duke of Lancaster, came back to
England (1399), encouraged by the discontent in the kingdom,
and was immediately joined by so many adherents that Richard
could offer little resistance. He was deposed by act of
Parliament, and the Duke of Lancaster (a grandson of Edward
III., as Richard was), was elected to the throne, which he
ascended as Henry IV. By judgment of King and Parliament,
Richard was presently condemned to imprisonment for life in
Pomfret Castle; and, early in the following year, after a
conspiracy in his favor had been discovered, he died
mysteriously in his prison.
England Under Henry IV.
The reign of Henry IV., which lasted a little more than
thirteen years, was troubled by risings and conspiracies, all
originating among the nobles, out of causes purely personal or
factious, and having no real political significance. But no
events in English history are more commonly familiar, or seem
to be invested with a higher importance, than the rebellions
of Owen Glendower and the Percys,--Northumberland and Harry
Hotspur,--simply because Shakespeare has laid his magic upon
what otherwise would be a story of little note. Wars with the
always hostile Scots supplied other stirring incidents to the
record Of the time; but these came to a summary end in 1405,
when the crown prince, James, of Scotland, voyaging to France,
was driven by foul winds to the English coast and taken
prisoner. The prince's father, King Robert, died on hearing
the news, and James, the captive, was now entitled to be king.
But the English held him for eighteen years, treating him as a
guest at their court, rather than as a prisoner, and educating
him with care, but withholding him from his kingdom.
To strengthen his precarious seat upon the throne, Henry
cultivated the friendship of the Church, and seems to have
found this course expedient, even at considerable cost to his
popularity. For the attitude of the commons towards the Church
during his reign was anything but friendly. They went so far
as to pass a bill for the confiscation of Church property,
which the Lords rejected; and they seem to have repented of an
Act passed early in his reign, under which a cruel persecution
of the Lollards was begun. The clergy and the Lords, with the
favor of the king, maintained the barbarous law, and England
for the first time saw men burned at the stake for heresy.
England Under Henry V. and Henry VI.
Henry IV. died in 1413, and was succeeded by his spirited and
able, but too ambitious son, Henry V., the Prince Hal of
Shakespeare, who gave up riotous living when called to the
grave duties of government and showed himself to be a man of
no common mould. The war in France, which he renewed, and the
chief events of which have been sketched already, filled up
most of his brief reign of nine years. His early death (1422)
left two crowns to an infant nine months old. The English
crown was not disputed. The French crown, though practically
won by conquest, was not permanently secured, but was still to
be fought for; and in the end, as we have seen, it was lost.
No more need be said of the incidents of the war which had
that result.
The infant king was represented in France by his elder uncle,
the Duke of Bedford. In England, the government was carried on
for him during his minority by a council, in which his younger
uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, occupied the chief place,
but with powers that were jealously restricted. While the war
in France lasted, or during most of the thirty-one years
through which it was protracted after Henry V.'s death, it
engrossed the English mind and overshadowed domestic
interests, so that the time has a meagre history.
Soon after he came of age, Henry VI. married (1444) Margaret
of Anjou, daughter of René, Duke of Anjou, who claimed to be
King of Naples and Jerusalem. The marriage, which aimed at
peace with France, and which had been brought about by the
cession to that country of Maine and Anjou, was unpopular in
England. Discontent with the feeble management of the war, and
with the general weakness and incapability of the government,
grew apace, and showed itself, among other exhibitions, in a
rebellion (1450) known as Jack Cade's, from the name of an
Irishman who got the lead of it. Jack Cade and his followers
took possession of London and held it for three days, only
yielding at last to an offer of general pardon, after they had
beheaded Lord Say, the most obnoxious adviser of the king. A
previous mob had taken the head of the Earl of Suffolk, who
was detested still more as the contriver of the king's
marriage and of the humiliating policy in France.
{1042}
The Wars of the Roses.
At length, the Duke of York, representing an elder line of
royal descent from Edward III., took the lead of the
discontented in the nation, and civil war was imminent in
1452; but pacific counsels prevailed for the moment. The king,
who had always been weak-minded, and entirely under the
influence of the queen, now sank for a time into a state of
complete stupor, and was incapable of any act. The Lords in
Parliament thereupon appointed the Duke of York Protector of
England, and the government was vigorously conducted by him
for a few months, until the king recovered. The queen, and the
councillors she favored, now regained their control of
affairs, and the opposition took arms.
The long series of fierce struggles between these two parties,
which is commonly called the Wars of the Roses, began on the
22d of May, 1455, with a battle at St. Albans--the first of
two that were fought on the same ground. At the beginning, it
was a contest for the possession of the unfortunate,
irresponsible king, and of the royal authority which resided
nominally in his person. But it became, ere long, a contest
for the crown which Henry wore, and to which the Duke of York
denied his right. The Duke traced his ancestry to one son of
Edward III., and King Henry to another son. But the Duke's
forefather, Lionel, was prior in birth to the King's
forefather, John of Gaunt, and, as an original proposition,
the House of York was clearly nearer than the House of
Lancaster to the royal line which had been interrupted when
Richard II. was deposed. The rights of the latter House were
such as it had gained prescriptively by half a century of
possession.
At one time it was decided by the Lords that Henry should be
king until he died, and that the Duke of York and his heirs
should succeed him. But Queen Margaret would not yield the
rights of her son, and renewed the war. The Duke of York was
killed in the next battle fought. His son, Edward, continued
the contest, and early in 1461, having taken possession of
London, he was declared king by a council of Lords, which
formally deposed Henry. The Lancastrians were driven from the
kingdom, and Edward held the government with little
disturbance for eight years. Then a rupture occurred between
him and his most powerful supporter, the Earl of Warwick.
Warwick put himself at the head of a rebellion which failed in
the first instance, but which finally, when Warwick had joined
forces with Queen Margaret, drove Edward to flight. The latter
took refuge in the Netherlands (1470), where he received
protection and assistance from the Duke of Burgundy, who was
his brother-in-law. Henry VI. was now restored to the throne;
but for no longer a time than six months. At the end of that
period Edward landed again in England, with a small force,
professing that he came only to demand his dukedom. As soon as
he found himself well received and strongly supported, he
threw off the mask, resumed the title of king, and advanced to
London, where the citizens gave him welcome. A few days later
(April 14, 1471) he went out to meet Warwick and defeated and
slew him in the fierce battle of Barnet. One more fight at
Tewkesbury, where Queen Margaret was taken prisoner, ended the
war. King Henry died, suspiciously, in the Tower, on the very
night of his victorious rival's return to London, and Edward
IV. had all his enemies under his feet.
England under the House of York.
For a few years England enjoyed peace within her borders, and
the material effects of the protracted civil wars were rapidly
effaced. Indeed, the greater part of England appears to have
been lightly touched by those effects. The people at large had
taken little part in the conflict, and had been less disturbed
by it, in their industries and in their commerce, than might
have been expected. It had been a strife among the great
families, enlisting the gentry to a large extent, no doubt,
but not the middle class. Hence its chief consequence had been
the thinning and weakening of the aristocratic order, which
relatively enhanced the political importance of the commons.
But the commons were not yet trained to act independently in
political affairs. Their rise in power had been through joint
action of lords and commons against the Crown, with the former
in the lead; they were accustomed to depend on aristocratic
guidance, and to lean on aristocratic support. For this
reason, they were not only unprepared to take advantage of the
great opportunity which now opened to them, for decisively
grasping the control of government, but they were unfitted to
hold what they had previously won, without the help of the
class above them. As a consequence, it was the king who
profited by the decimation and impoverishment of the nobles,
grasping not only the power which they lost, but the power
which the commons lacked skill to use. For a century and a
half following the Wars of the Roses, the English monarchy
approached more nearly to absolutism than at any other period
before or after.
The unsparing confiscations by which Edward IV. and his
triumphant party crushed their opponents enriched the Crown
for a time and made it independent of parliamentary subsidies.
When supply from that source began to fall short, the king
invented another. He demeaned himself so far as to solicit
gifts from the wealthy merchants of the kingdom, to which he
gave the name of "benevolences," and he practiced this system
of royal beggary so persistently and effectually that he had
no need to call Parliament together. He thus began, in a
manner hardly perceived or resisted, the arbitrary and
unconstitutional mode of government which his successors
carried further, until the nation roused itself and took back
its stolen liberties with vengeance and wrath.
{1043}
Richard III. and the first of the Tudors.
Edward IV. died in 1483, leaving two young sons, the elder not
yet thirteen. Edward's brother, Richard, contrived with
amazing ability and unscrupulousness to acquire control of the
government, first as Protector, and presently as King. The
young princes, confined in the Tower, were murdered there, and
Richard III. might have seemed to be secure on his wickedly
won throne; for he did not lack popularity, notwithstanding
his crimes. But an avenger soon came, in the person of Henry,
Earl of Richmond, who claimed the Crown. Henry's claim was not
a strong one. Through his mother, he traced his lineage to
John of Gaunt, as the Lancastrians had done; but it was the
mistress and not the wife of that prince who bore Henry's
ancestor. His grandfather was a Welsh chieftain, Sir Owen
Tudor, who won the heart of the widowed queen of Henry V.,
Catherine of France, and married her. But the claim of Henry
of Richmond, if a weak one genealogically, sufficed for the
overthrow of the red-handed usurper, Richard. Henry, who had
been in exile, landed in England in August, 1485, and was
quickly joined by large numbers of supporters. Richard
hastened to attack them, and was defeated and slain on
Bosworth Field. With no more opposition, Henry won the
kingdom, and founded, as Henry VII., the Tudor dynasty which
held the throne until the death of Elizabeth.
Under that dynasty, the history of England took on a new
character, disclosing new tendencies, new impulses, new
currents of influence, new promises of the future. We will not
enter upon it until we have looked at some prior events in
other regions.
Germany.
If we return now to Germany, we take up the thread of events
at an interesting point. We parted from the affairs of that
troubled country while two rival Emperors, Louis IV., or
Ludwig, of Bavaria, and Frederick of Austria, were endeavoring
(1325) to settle their dispute in a friendly way, by sharing
the throne together. Before noting the result of that
chivalric and remarkable compromise, let us glance backward
for a moment at the most memorable and important incident of
the civil war which led to it.
Birth of the Swiss Confederacy.
The three cantons of Switzerland which are known distinctively
as the Forest Cantons, namely, Schwytz (which gave its name in
time to the whole country), Uri, and Unterwalden, had stood in
peculiar relations to the Hapsburg family since long before
Rudolph became Emperor and his house became the House of
Austria. In those cantons, the territorial rights were held
mostly by great monasteries, and the counts of Hapsburg for
generations past had served the abbots and abbesses in the
capacity of advocates, or champions, to rule their vassals for
them and to defend their rights. Authority of their own in the
cantons they had none. At the same time, the functions they
performed so continually developed ideas in their minds,
without doubt, which grew naturally into pretensions that were
offensive to the bold mountaineers. On the other hand, the
circumstances of the situation were calculated to breed
notions and feelings of independence among the men of the
mountains. They gave their allegiance to the Emperor--to the
high sovereign who ruled over all, in the name of Rome--and
they opposed what came between them and him. It is manifest
that a threatening complication for them arose when the Count
of Hapsburg became Emperor, which occurred in 1273. They had
no serious difficulty with Rudolph, in his time; but they
wisely prepared themselves for what might come, by forming, or
by renewing, in 1291, a league of the three cantons,--the
beginning and nucleus of the Swiss Confederation, which has
maintained its independence and its freedom from that day to
this. The league of 1291 had existed something more than
twenty years when the confederated cantons were first called
upon to stand together in resistance to the Austrian
pretensions. This occurred in 1315, during the war between
Louis and Frederick, when Leopold, Duke of Austria, invaded
the Forest Cantons and was disastrously beaten in a fight at
the pass of Morgarten. The victory of the confederates and the
independence secured by it gave them so much prestige that
neighboring cities and cantons sought admission to their
league. In 1332 Luzern was received as a member; in 1351,
1352, and 1353, Zurich, Glarus, Zug, and Bern came in,
increasing the membership to eight. It took the name of the
Old League of High Germany, and its members were known as
Eidgenossen, or Confederates.
Such, in brief, are the ascertained facts of the origin of the
Swiss Confederacy. There is nothing found in authentic history
to substantiate the popular legend of William Tell.
The questions between the league and the Austrian princes,
which continued to be troublesome for two generations, were
practically ended by the two battles of Sempach and Naefels,
fought in 1386 and 1388, in both of which the Austrians were
overthrown.
The Emperor Louis IV. and the Papacy,
While the Swiss were gaining the freedom which they never
lost, Germany at large was making little progress in any
satisfactory direction. Peace had not been restored by the
friendly agreement of 1325 between Ludwig and Frederick. The
partisans of neither were contented with it. Frederick was
broken in health and soon retired from the government; in 1330
he died. The Austrian house persisted in hostility to Louis;
but his more formidable enemies were the Pope and the King of
France. The period was that known in papal history as "the
Babylonish Captivity," when the popes resided at Avignon and
were generally creatures of the French court and subservient
to its ambitions or its animosities. Philip of Valois, who now
reigned in France, aspired to the imperial crown, which the head
of the Church had conferred on the German kings, and which the
same supreme pontiff might claim authority to transfer to the
sovereigns of France. This is supposed to have been the secret
of the relentless hostility with which Louis was pursued by
the Papacy--himself excommunicated, his kingdom placed under
interdict, and every effort made to bring about his deposition
by the princes of Germany. But divided and depressed as the
Germans were, they revolted against these malevolent
pretensions of the popes, and in 1338 the electoral princes
issued a bold declaration, asserting the sufficiency of the
act of election to confer imperial dignity and power, and
denying the necessity for any papal confirmation whatever. Had
Louis been a commanding leader, and independent of the Papacy in
his own feelings, he could probably have rallied a national
sentiment on this issue that would have powerfully affected
the future of German history.
{1044}
But he lacked the needful character, and his troubles
continued until he died (1347). A year before his death, his
opponents had elected and put forward a rival emperor,
Charles, the son of King John of Bohemia. Charles (IV.) was
subsequently recognized as king without dispute, and secured
the imperial crown. "It may be affirmed with truth that the
genuine ancient Empire, which contained a German kingdom, came
to an end with the Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian. None strove
again after his death to restore the imperial power. The
golden bull of his successor Charles IV. sealed the fate of
the old Empire. Through it, and indeed through the entire
conduct of Charles IV., King of Bohemia as he really was, and
emperor scarcely more than in name, the imperial government
passed more and more into the hands of the prince-electors,
who came to regard the emperor no longer as their master, but
as the president of an assembly in which he shared the power
with themselves." "From the time of Charles IV. the main
object and chief occupation of the emperors was not the
Empire, but the aggrandisement and security of their own
house. The Empire served only as the means and instrument of
their purpose" (Dollinger).
The Golden Bull of Charles IV.
The Golden Bull referred to by Dr. Dollinger was an instrument
which became the constitution, so to speak, of the Holy Roman
or Germanic Empire. It prescribed the mode of the election of
the King, and definitively named the seven Electors. It also
conferred certain special powers and privileges on these seven
princes, which raised them much above their fellows and gave
them an independence that may be said to have destroyed every
hope of Germanic unity. This was the one mark which the reign
of Charles IV. left upon the Empire. His exertions as Emperor
were all directed to the aggrandizement of his own family, and
with not much lasting result. In his own kingdom of Bohemia he
ruled with better effect. He made its capital, Prague, an
important city, adorning it with noble buildings and founding
in it the most ancient of German universities. This University
of Prague soon sowed seeds from which sprang the first
movement of religious reformation in Germany.
Charles IV., dying in 1378, was succeeded by his son Wenzel,
or Wenceslaus, on the imperial throne as well as the Bohemian.
Wenceslaus neglected both the Empire and the Kingdom, and the
confusion of things in Germany grew worse. Some of the
principal cities continued to secure considerable freedom and
prosperity for themselves, by the combined efforts of their
leagues; but everywhere else great disorder and oppression
prevailed. It was at this time that the Swabian towns, to the
number of forty-one, formed a union and waged unsuccessful war
with a league which the nobles entered into against them. They
were defeated, and crushingly dealt with by the Emperor.
In 1400 Wenceslaus was deposed and Rupert of the Palatinate
was elected, producing another civil war, and reducing the
imperial government to a complete nullity. Rupert died in
1410, and, after some contention, Sigmund, or Sigismund,
brother of Wenceslaus, was raised to the throne. He was
Margrave of Brandenburg and King of Hungary, and would become
King of Bohemia when Wenceslaus died.
The Reformation of Huss in Bohemia.
Bohemia was about to become the scene of an extraordinary
religious agitation, which John Huss, teacher and preacher in
the new but already famous University of Prague, was beginning
to stir. Huss, who drew more or less of his inspiration from
Wyclif, anticipated Luther in the boldness of his attacks upon
iniquities in the Church. In his case as in Luther's, the
abomination which he could not endure was the sale of papal
indulgences; and it was by his denunciation of that impious
fraud that he drew on himself the deadly wrath of the Roman
hierarchy. He was summoned before the great Council of the
Church which opened at Constance in 1414. He obeyed the
summons and went to the Council, bearing a safe-conduct from
the Emperor which pledged protection to him until he returned.
Notwithstanding this imperial pledge, he was imprisoned for
seven months at Constance, and was then impatiently listened
to and condemned to the stake. On the 6th of July, 1415, he
was burned. In the following May, his friend and disciple,
Jerome of Prague, suffered the same martyrdom. The Emperor,
Sigismund, blustered a little at the insolent violation of his
safe-conduct; but dared do nothing to make it effective.
In Bohemia, the excitement produced by these outrages was
universal. The whole nation seemed to rise, in the first
wide-spread aggressive popular revolt that the Church of Rome
had yet been called upon to encounter. In 1419 there was an
armed assembly of 40,000 men, on a mountain which they called
Tabor, who placed themselves under the leadership of John
Ziska, a nobleman, one of Huss' friends. The followers of
Ziska soon displayed a violence of temper and a radicalism
which repelled the more moderate Hussites, or Reformers, and
two parties appeared, one known as the Taborites, the other as
the Calixtines, or Utraquists. The former insisted on entire
separation from the Church of Rome; the latter confined their
demands to four reforms, namely: Free preaching of the Word of
God; the giving of the Eucharistic cup to the laity; the
taking of secular powers and of worldly goods from the clergy;
the enforcing of Christian discipline by all authorities. So much
stress was laid by the Calixtines on their claim to the
chalice or cup (communion in both kinds) that it gave them
their name. The breach between these parties widened until
they were as hostile to each other as to the Catholics, and
the Bohemian reform movement was ruined in the end by their
division.
In 1419, the deposed Emperor Wenceslaus, who had still
retained his kingdom of Bohemia, was murdered in his palace,
at Prague. His brother, the Emperor Sigismund, was his heir;
but the Hussites refused the crown to him, and resisted his
pretensions with arms. This added a political conflict to the
religious one, and Bohemia was afflicted with a frightful
civil war for fifteen years. Ziska fortified mount Tabor and
took possession of Prague. The Emperor and the Pope allied
themselves, to crush an insurrection which was aimed against
both. They summoned Christendom to a new crusade, and
Sigismund led 100,000 men against Prague, in 1420. Ziska met
him and defeated him, and drove him, with his crusaders, from
the country. The Taborites were now maddened by their success,
and raged over the land, destroying convents and burning
priests. Their doctrines, moreover, began to take on a
socialistic and republican character, threatening property in
general and questioning monarchy, too. The well-to-do and
conservative classes were more and more repelled from them.
{1045}
In 1421 a second crusading army, 200,000 strong, invaded
Bohemia and was scattered like chaff by Ziska (now blind) and
his peasant soldiery. The next year they defeated the Emperor
again; but in 1424 Ziska died, and a priest called Procopius
the Great took his place. Under their new leader, the fierce
Taborites were as invincible as they had been under Ziska.
They routed an imperial army in 1426, and then carried the war
into Austria and Silesia, committing fearful ravages. Still
another crusade was set in motion against them by the Pope,
and still another disastrous failure was made of it. Then
Germany again suffered a more frightful visitation from the
vengeful Hussites than before. Towns and villages were
destroyed by hundreds, and wide tracks of ruin and death were
marked on the face of the land, to its very center. Once more,
and for the last time, in 1431, the Germans rallied a great force
to retaliate these attacks, and they met defeat, as in all
previous encounters, but more completely than ever before.
Then the Pope and the Emperor gave up hope of putting down the
indomitable revolutionists by force, and opened parleyings.
The Pope called a council at Basel for the discussion of
questions with the Hussites, and, finally, in 1433, their
moderate party was prevailed upon to accept a compromise which
really conceded nothing to them except the use of the cup in
the communion. The Taborites refused the terms, and the two
parties grappled each other in a fierce struggle for the
control of the state. But the extremists had lost much of
their old strength, and the Utraquists vanquished them in a
decisive battle at Lipan, in May, 1434. Two years later
Sigismund was formally acknowledged King of Bohemia and
received in Prague. In 1437 he died. His son-in-law, Albert of
Austria, who succeeded him, lived but two years, and the heir
to the throne then was a son, Ladislaus, born after his
father's death. This left Bohemia in a state of great
confusion and disorder for several years, until a strong man,
George Podiebrad, acquired the control of affairs.
Meantime, the Utraquists had organized a National Church of
Bohemia, considerably divergent from Rome. It failed to
satisfy the deeper religious feelings that were widely current
among the Bohemians in that age, and there grew up a sect
which took the name of "Unitas Fratrum," or "Unity of the
Brethren," but which afterwards became incorrectly known as
the Moravian Brethren. This sect, still existing, has borne an
important part in the missionary history of the Christian
world.
The Papacy.--The Great Schism.
The Papacy, at the time of its conflict with the Hussites, in
Bohemia, was rapidly sinking to that lowest level of
debasement which it reached in the later part of the fifteenth
century. Its state was not yet so abhorrent as it came to be
under the Borgias; but it had been brought even more into
contempt, perhaps, by the divisions and contentions of "the
Great Schism." The so-called "Babylonish Captivity" of the
series of popes who resided for seventy years at Avignon
(1305-1376), and who were under French influence, had been
humiliating to the Church; but the schism which immediately
followed (1378-1417), when a succession of rival popes, or
popes and antipopes, thundered anathemas and excommunications
at one another, from Rome and from Avignon, was even more
scandalous and shameful. Christendom was divided by the
quarrel. France, Spain, Scotland, and some lesser states, gave
their allegiance to the pope at Avignon; England, Germany and
the northern kingdoms adhered to the pope at Rome. In 1402, an
attempt to heal the schism was made by a general Council of
the Church convened at Pisa. It decreed the deposition of both
the contending pontiffs, and elected a third; but its
authority was not recognized, and the confusion of the Church
was only made worse by bringing three popes into the quarrel,
instead of two. Twelve years later, another Council, held at
Constance,--the same which burned Huss,--had more success.
Europe had now grown so tired of the scandal, and so disgusted
with the three pretenders to spiritual supremacy, that the
action of the Council was backed by public opinion, and they
were suppressed. A fourth pope, Martin V., whom the Council
then seated in the chair of St. Peter (1417), was universally
acknowledged, and the Great Schism was at an end.
But other scandals and abuses in the Church, which public
opinion in Europe had already begun to cry loudly against,
were untouched by these Councils. A subsequent Council at
Basel, which met in 1431, attempted some restraints upon papal
extortion (ignoring the more serious moral evils that claimed
attention); but was utterly beaten in the conflict with Pope
Eugenius IV., which this action brought on, and its decrees
lost all effect. So the religious autocracy at Rome, sinking
stage by stage below the foulest secular courts of the time,
continued without check to insult and outrage, more and more,
the piety, the common sense, and the decent feeling of
Christendom, until the habit of reverence was quite worn out
in the minds of men throughout the better half of Europe.
Rome and the last Tribune, Rienzi.
The city of Rome had fallen from all greatness of its own when
it came to be dependent on the fortunes of the popes. Their
departure to Avignon had reduced it to a lamentable state.
They took with them, in reality, the sustenance of the city;
for it lived, in the main, on the revenues of the Papacy, and
knew little of commerce beyond the profitable traffic in
indulgences, absolutions, benefices, relics and papal
blessings, which went to Avignon with the head of the Church.
Authority, too, departed with the Pope, and the wretched city
was given up to anarchy almost uncontrolled. A number of
powerful families--the Colonna, the Orsini, and
others--perpetually at strife with one another, fought out
their feuds in the streets, and abused and oppressed their
neighbors with impunity. Their houses were impregnable
castles, and their retainers were a formidable army.
{1046}
It was while this state of things was at its worst that the
famous Cola di Rienzi, "last of the Tribunes," accomplished a
revolution which was short-lived but extraordinary. He roused
the people to action against their oppressors and the
disturbers of their peace. He appealed to them to restore the
republican institutions of ancient Rome, and when they
responded, in 1347, by conferring on him the title and
authority of a Tribune, he actually succeeded in expelling the
turbulent nobles, or reducing them to submission, and
established in Rome, for a little time, what he called "the
Good Estate." But his head was quickly turned by his success;
he was inflated with conceit and vanity; he became arrogant
and despotic; the people tired of him, and after a few months
of rule he was driven from Rome. In 1354 he came back as a
Senator, appointed by the Pope, who thought to use him for the
restoration of papal authority; but his influence was gone,
and he was slain by a-riotous mob.
The return of the Pope to Rome in 1376 was an event so long
and ardently desired by the Roman people that they submitted
themselves eagerly to his government. But his sovereignty over
the States of the Church was substantially lost, and the