date, we shall find that in compass, flexibility,
expressiveness, grace, and all the higher qualities of
poetical diction, he gave it at once the utmost perfection
which the materials at his hand would permit of. The English
writers of the fourteenth century had an advantage which was
altogether peculiar to their age and country. At all previous
periods, the two languages had co-existed, in a great degree
independently of each other, with little tendency to intermix;
but in the earlier part of that century, they began to
coalesce, and this process was going on with a rapidity that
threatened a predominance of the French, if not a total
extinction of the Saxon element. ... When the national spirit
was aroused, and impelled to the creation of a national
literature, the poet or prose writer, in selecting his
diction, had almost two whole vocabularies before him. That
the syntax should be English, national feeling demanded; but
French was so familiar and habitual to all who were able to
read, that probably the scholarship of the day would scarcely
have been able to determine, with respect to a large
proportion of the words in common use, from which of the two
great wells of speech they had proceeded. Happily, a great
arbiter arose at the critical moment of severance of the two
peoples and dialects, to preside over the division of the
common property, and to determine what share of the
contributions of France should be permanently annexed to the
linguistic inheritance of Englishmen. Chaucer did not
introduce into the English language words which it had
rejected as aliens before, but out of those which had been
already received, he invested the better portion with the
rights of citizenship, and stamped them with the mint-mark of
English coinage. In this way, he formed a vocabulary, which,
with few exceptions, the taste and opinion of succeeding
generations has approved; and a literary diction was thus
established, which, in all the qualities required for the
poetic art, had at that time no superior in the languages of
modern Europe. The soundness of Chaucer's judgment, the nicety
of his philological appreciation, and the delicacy of his
sense of adaptation to the actual wants of the English people,
are sufficiently proved by the fact that, of the Romance words
found in his writings, not much above one hundred have been
suffered to become obsolete, while a much larger number of
Anglo-Saxon words employed by him have passed altogether out
of use. ... In the three centuries which elapsed between the
Conquest and the noon-tide of Chaucer's life, a large
proportion of the Anglo-Saxon dialect of religion, of moral
and intellectual discourse, and of taste, had become utterly
obsolete, and unknown. The place of the lost words had been
partly supplied by the importation of Continental terms; but
the new words came without the organic power of composition
and derivation which belonged to those they had supplanted.
Consequently, they were incapable of those modifications of
form and extensions of meaning which the Anglo-Saxon roots
could so easily assume, and which fitted them for the
expression of the new shades of thought and of sentiment born
of every hour in a mind and an age like those of Chaucer."
G. P. Marsh,
Origin and History of the English Language,
lecture 9.
ALSO IN:
T. R. Lounsbury,
Studies in Chaucer.
A. W. Ward,
Chaucer.
W. Godwin,
Life of Geoffrey Chaucer.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1360-1414.
The Lollards.
"The Lollards were the earliest 'Protestants' of England. They
were the followers of John Wyclif, but before his time the
nickname of Lollard had been known on the continent. A little
brotherhood of pious people had sprung up in Holland, about
the year 1300, who lived in a half-monastic fashion and
devoted themselves to helping the poor in the burial of their
dead; and, from the low chants they sang at the
funerals--lollen being the old word for such singing--they
were called Lollards. The priests and friars hated them and
accused them of heresy, and a Walter Lollard, probably one of
them, was burnt in 1322 at Cologne as a heretic, and gradually
the name became a nickname for such people. So when Wyclif's
simple priests' were preaching the new doctrines, the name
already familiar in Holland and Germany, was given to them,
and gradually became the name for that whole movement of
religious reformation which grew up from the seed Wyclif
sowed."
B. Herford,
Story of Religion in England,
chapter 16.
{815}
"A turning point arrived in the history of the reforming party
at the accession of the house of Lancaster. King Henry the
Fourth was not only a devoted son of the Church, but he owed
his success in no slight measure to the assistance of the
Churchmen, and above all to that of Archbishop Arundel. It was
felt that the new dynasty and the hierarchy stood or fell
together. A mixture of religious and political motives led to
the passing of the well-known statute 'De hæretico comburendo'
in 1401 and thenceforward Lollardy was a capital offence."
R. L. Poole,
Wycliffe and Movements for Reform,
chapter 8.
"The abortive insurrection of the Lollards at the commencement
of Henry V. 's reign, under the leadership of Sir John
Oldcastle, had the effect of adding to the penal laws already
in existence against the sect." This gave to Lollardy a
political character and made the Lollards enemies against the
State, as is evident from the king's proclamation in which it
was asserted "that the insurgents intended to 'destroy him,
his brothers and several of the spiritual and temporal lords,
to confiscate the possessions of the Church, to secularize the
religious orders, to divide the realm into confederate
districts, and to appoint Sir John Oldcastle president of the
commonwealth.'"
T. P. Taswell-Langmead,
English Constitutional History (4th edition),
chapter 11.
"The early life of Wycliffe is obscure. ... He emerges into
distinct notice in 1360, ten years subsequent to the passing
of the first Statute of Provisors, having then acquired a
great Oxford reputation as a lecturer in divinity. ... He was
a man of most simple life; austere in appearance; with bare
feet and russet mantle. As a soldier of Christ, he saw in his
Great Master and his Apostles the patterns whom he was bound
to imitate. By the contagion of example he gathered about him
other men who thought as he did; and gradually, under his
captaincy, these 'poor priests' as they were called--vowed to
poverty because Christ was poor--vowed to accept no benefice
... spread out over the country as an army of missionaries, to
preach the faith which they found in the Bible--to preach, not of
relics and of indulgences, but of repentance and of the grace
of God. They carried with them copies of the Bible which
Wycliffe had translated, ... and they refused to recognize the
authority of the bishops, or their right to silence them. If
this had been all, and perhaps if Edward III. had been
succeeded by a prince less miserably incapable than his
grandson Richard, Wycliffe might have made good his ground;
the movement of the parliament against the pope might have
united in a common stream with the spiritual move against the
church at home, and the Reformation have been antedated by a
century. He was summoned to answer for himself before the
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1377. He appeared in court
supported by the presence of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster,
the eldest of Edward's surviving sons, and the authorities
were unable to strike him behind so powerful a shield. But the
'poor priests' had other doctrines. ... His [Wycliffe's]
theory of property, and his study of the character of Christ,
had led him to the near confines of Anabaptism." The rebellion
of Wat Tyler, which occurred in 1381, cast odium upon all such
opinions. "So long as Wycliffe lived, his own lofty character was
a guarantee for the conduct of his immediate disciples; and
although his favour had far declined, a party in the state
remained attached to him, with sufficient influence to prevent
the adoption of extreme measures against the 'poor priests.'
... They were left unmolested for the next twenty years. ...
On the settlement of the country under Henry IV. they fell
under the general ban which struck down all parties who had
shared in the late disturbances."
J. A. Froude,
History of England,
chapter 6.
"Wycliffe's translation of the Bible itself created a new era,
and gave birth to what may be said never to have existed till
then--a popular theology. ... It is difficult in our day to
imagine the impression such a book must have produced in an
age which had scarcely anything in the way of popular
literature, and which had been accustomed to regard the
Scriptures as the special property of the learned. It was
welcomed with an enthusiasm which could not be restrained, and
read with avidity both by priests and laymen. ... The homely
wisdom, blended with eternal truth, which has long since
enriched our vernacular speech with a multitude of proverbs,
could not thenceforth be restrained in its circulation by mere
pious awe or time-honoured prejudice. Divinity was discussed
in ale-houses. Popular preachers made war upon old prejudices.
and did much to shock that sense of reverence which belonged
to an earlier generation. A new school had arisen with a
theology of its own, warning the people against the delusive
preaching of the friars, and asserting loudly its own claims
to be true and evangelical, on the ground that it possessed
the gospel in the English tongue. Appealing to such an
authority in their favour, the eloquence of the new teachers
made a marvellous impression. Their followers increased with
extraordinary rapidity. By the estimate of an opponent they
soon numbered half the population, and you could hardly see
two persons in the street but one of them was a Wycliffite.
... They were supported by the powerful influence of John of
Gaunt, who shielded not only Wycliffe himself, but even the
most violent of the fanatics. And, certainly, whatever might
have been Wycliffe's own view, doctrines were promulgated by
his reputed followers that were distinctly subversive of
authority. John Ball fomented the insurrection of Wat Tyler,
by preaching the natural equality of men. ... But the
popularity of Lollardy was short-lived. The extravagance to
which it led soon alienated the sympathies of the people, and
the sect fell off in numbers almost as rapidly as it had
risen."
J. Gairdner,
Studies in English History, 1-2.
"Wyclif ... was not without numerous followers, and the
Lollardism which sprang out of his teaching was a living force
in England for some time to come. But it was weak through its
connection with subversive social doctrines. He himself stood
aloof from such doctrines, but he could not prevent his
followers from mingling in the social fray. It was perhaps
their merit that they did so. The established constitutional
order was but another name for oppression and wrong to the
lower classes. But as yet the lower classes were not
sufficiently advanced in moral and political training to make
it safe to entrust them with the task of righting their own
wrongs as they would have attempted to right them if they had
gained the mastery. It had nevertheless become impossible to
leave the peasants to be once more goaded by suffering into
rebellion. The attempt, if it had been made, to enforce
absolute labour-rents was tacitly abandoned, and gradually
during the next century the mass of the villeins passed into
the position of freemen.
{816}
For the moment, nobles and prelates, landowners and clergy,
banded themselves together to form one great party of
resistance. The church came to be but an outwork of the
baronage."
S. R. Gardiner and J. B. Mullinger,
Introduction to the Study of English History,
part 1, chapter 5, sections 14-15.
ALSO IN
L. Sergeant,
John Wyclif.
G. Lechler,
John Wiclif and his English Precursors.
See, also,
BOHEMIA; A. D. 1405-1415,
and BEGUINES.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1377.
Accession of King Richard II.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1377-1399.
The character and reign of Richard II.
"Richard II. was a far superior man to many of the weaker
kings of England; but being self-willed and unwarlike, he was
unfitted for the work which the times required. Yet, on a
closer inspection than the traditional view of the reign has
generally encouraged, we cannot but observe that the finer
qualities which came out in certain crises of his reign appear
to have frequently influenced his conduct: we know that he was
not an immoral man, that he was an excellent husband to an
excellent wife, and that he had devoted friends, willing to
lay down their lives for him when there was nothing whatever
left for them to gain. ... Richard, who had been brought up in
the purple quite as much as Edward II., was kept under
restraint by his uncles, and not being judiciously guided in
the arts of government, fell, like his prototype, into the
hands of favourites. His brilliant behaviour in the
insurrection of 1381 indicated much more than mere possession
of the Plantagenet courage and presence of mind. He showed a
real sympathy with the villeins who had undeniable grievances.
... His instincts were undoubtedly for freedom and
forgiveness, and there is no proof, nor even probability, that
he intended to use the villeins against his enemies. His early
and happy marriage with Anne of Bohemia ought, one might
think, to have saved him from the vice of favouritism; but he
was at least more fortunate than Edward II. in not being cast
under the spell of a Gaveston. When we consider the effect of
such a galling government as that of his uncle Gloucester, and
his cousin Derby, afterwards Henry IV., who seems to have been
pushing Gloucester on from the first, we can hardly be
surprised that he should require some friend to lean upon. The
reign is, in short, from one, and perhaps the truest, point of
view, a long duel between the son of the Black Prince and the
son of John of Gaunt. One or other of them must inevitably
perish. A handsome and cultivated youth, who showed himself at
fifteen every inch a king, who was married at sixteen, and led
his own army to Scotland at eighteen, required a different
treatment from that which he received. He was a man, and
should have been dealt with as such. His lavish and
reprehensible grants to his favourites were made the excuse
for Gloucester's violent interference in 1386, but there is
good ground for believing that the movement was encouraged by
the anti-Wicliffite party, which had taken alarm at the
sympathy with the Reformers shown at this time by Richard and
Anne."
M. Burrows,
Commentaries on the History of England,
book 2, chapter 5.
ALSO IN:
J. R. Green,
History of the English People,
book 4, chapter 4 (volume 1).
C. H. Pearson,
English History in the 14th Century,
chapter 10-12.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1381.
Wat Tyler's Rebellion.
"In June 1381 there broke out in England the formidable
insurrection known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion. The movement
seems to have begun among the bondmen of Essex and of Kent;
but it spread at once to the counties of Sussex Hertford,
Cambridge, Suffolk and Norfolk. The peasantry, armed with
bludgeons and rusty swords, first occupied the roads by which
pilgrims went to Canterbury, and made everyone swear that he
would be true to king Richard and not accept a king named
John. This, of course, was aimed at the government of John of
Gaunt [Duke of Lancaster], ... to whom the people attributed
every grievance they had to complain of. The principal, or at
least the immediate cause of offence arose out of a poll-tax
which had been voted in the preceding year."
J. Gairdner,
Houses of Lancaster and York,
chapter 2.
The leaders of the insurgents were Wat the Tyler, who had been
a soldier, John Ball, a priest and preacher of democratic and
socialistic doctrines, and one known as Jack Straw. They made
their way to London. "It ought to have been easy to keep them
out of the city, as the only approach to it was by London
Bridge, and the mayor and chief citizens proposed to defend
it. But the Londoners generally, and even three of the
aldermen, were well inclined to the rebels, and declared that
they would not let the gates be shut against their friends and
neighbours, and would kill the mayor himself if he attempted
to do it. So on the evening of Wednesday, June 13, the
insurgents began to stream in across the bridge, and next
morning marched their whole body across the river, and
proceeded at once to the Savoy, the splendid palace of the
Duke of Lancaster. Proclamation was made that any one found
stealing the smallest article would be beheaded; and the place
was then wrecked and burned with all the formalities of a
solemn act of justice. Gold and silver plate was shattered
with battle-axes and thrown into the Thames; rings and smaller
jewels were brayed in mortars; silk and embroidered dresses
were trampled under feet and torn up. Then the Temple was
burned with all its muniments. The poet Gower was among the
lawyers who had to save their lives by flight, and he passed
several nights in the woods of Essex, covered with grass and
leaves and living on acorns. Then the great house of the
Hospitallers at Clerkenwell was destroyed, taking seven days
to burn." The young king (Richard II.) and his court and
council had taken refuge in the Tower. The insurgents now
threatened to storm their stronghold if the king did not come
out and speak to them. The king consented and appointed a
rendezvous at Mile End. He kept the appointment and met his
turbulent subjects with so much courage and tact and so many
promises, that he persuaded a great number to disperse to
their homes. But while this pacific interview took place, Wat
Tyler, John Ball, and some 400 of their followers burst into
the Tower, determined to find the archbishop of Canterbury and
the Lord Treasurer, Sir Robert de Hales, who were the most
obnoxious ministers. "So great was the general consternation
that the soldiers dared not raise a hand while these ruffians
searched the different rooms, not sparing even the king's
bedroom, running spears into the beds, asked the king's mother
to kiss them, and played insolent jokes on the chief officers.
{817}
Unhappily they were not long in finding the archbishop, who
had said mass in the chapel, and was kneeling at the altar in
expectation of their approach." The Lord Treasurer was also
found, and both he and the archbishop were summarily beheaded
by the mob. "Murder now became the order of the day, and
foreigners were among the chief victims; thirteen Flemings
were dragged out of one church and beheaded, seventeen out of
another, and altogether it is said 400 perished. Many private
enmities were revenged by the London rabble on this day." On
the next day, June 15, the king, with an armed escort, went to
the camp of the insurgents, at Smithfield, and opened
negotiations with Tyler, offering successively three forms of
a new charter of popular rights and liberties, all of which
were rejected. Finally, Tyler was invited to a personal
conference, and there, in the midst of the king's party, on
some provocation or pretended provocation in his words or
bearing, the popular leader was struck from his horse and
killed. King Richard immediately rode out before the ranks of
the rebels, while they were still dazed by the suddenness and
audacity of the treacherous blow, crying "I will be your
leader; follow me." The thoughtless mob followed and soon
found itself surrounded by bodies of troops whose courage had
revived. The king now commanded the trembling peasants "to
fall on their knees, cut the strings of their bows, and leave
the city and its neighbourhood, under pain of death, before
nightfall. This command was instantly obeyed." Meantime and
afterwards there were many lesser risings in various parts of
the country, all of which were suppressed, with such rigorous
prosecutions in the courts that 1,500 persons are said to have
suffered judicially.
C. H. Pearson,
English History in the Fourteenth Century,
chapter 10.
The Wat Tyler insurrection proved disastrous in its effect on
the work of Church reform which Wyclif was then pursuing. "Not
only was the power of the Lancastrian party, on which Wyclif
had relied, for the moment annihilated, but the quarrel
between the Baronage and Church, on which his action had
hitherto been grounded, was hushed in the presence of a common
danger. Much of the odium of the outbreak, too, fell on the
Reformer. ... John Ball, who had figured in the front rank of
the revolt, was claimed as one of his adherents. ... Whatever
belief such charges might gain, it is certain that from this
moment all plans for the reorganization of the Church were
confounded in the general odium which attached to the projects
of the socialist peasant leaders."
J. R. Green,
Short History of the English People,
chapter 5, section 3.
"When Parliament assembled it proved itself as hostile as the
crown to the conceding any of the demands of the people; both
were faithful to all the records of history in similar cases;
they would have belied all experience if, being victorious,
they had consented to the least concession to the vanquished.
The upper classes repudiated the recognition of the rights of
the poor to a degree, which in our time would be considered
sheer insanity. The king had annulled, by proclamation to the
sheriffs, the charters of manumission which he had granted to
the insurgents, and this revocation was warmly approved by
both Lords and Commons, who, not satisfied with saying that
such enfranchisement could not be made without their consent,
added, that they would never give that consent, even to save
themselves from perishing altogether in one day. There was, it
is true, a vague rumour about the propriety and wisdom of
abolishing villanage; but the notion was scouted, and the
owners of serfs showed that they neither doubted the right by
which they held their fellow-creatures in a state of slavery,
nor would hesitate to increase the severity of the laws
affecting them. They now passed a law by which 'all riots and
rumours, and other such things were turned into high treason';
this law was most vaguely expressed, and would probably
involve those who made it in inextricable difficulties. It was
self-apparent, that this Parliament acted under the impulses
of panic, and of revenge for recent injuries. ... It might be
said that the citizens of the municipalities wrote their
charters of enfranchisement with the very blood of their lords
and bishops; yet, during the worst days of oppression, the
serfs of the cities had never suffered the cruel excesses of
tyranny endured by the country people till the middle of the
fifteenth century. And, nevertheless, the long struggles of
the townships, despite the bloodshed and cruelties of the
citizens, are ever considered and narrated as glorious
revolutions, whilst the brief efforts of the peasants for
vengeance, which were drowned in their own blood, have
remained as a stigma flung in the face of the country
populations whenever they utter a word claiming some
amelioration in their condition. Whence the injustice? The
bourgeoisie was victorious and successful. The rural
populations were vanquished and trampled upon. The
bourgeoisie, therefore, has had its poets, historians, and
flatterers, whilst the poor peasant, rude, untutored, and
ignorant, never had a lyre nor a voice to bewail his
lamentable sorrows and sufferings."
Prof. De Vericour,
Wat Tyler
(Royal Historical Society, Transactions,
number 8, volume 2).
ALSO IN:
G. Lechler,
John Wiclif,
chapter 9, section 3.
C. Knight,
Popular History of England,
volume 2, chapter 1.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1383.
The Bishop of Norwich's Crusade in Flanders.
See FLANDERS: A. D. 1383.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1388.
The Merciless or Wonderful Parliament.
See PARLIAMENT, THE WONDERFUL.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1399.
Accession of King Henry IV.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1399-1471.
House of Lancaster.
This name is given in English history to the family which
became royal in the person of Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of
Lancaster, who deposed his cousin, Richard II., or forced him
to abdicate the throne, and who was crowned king (Henry IV.),
Oct. 11, 1399, with what seemed to be the consent of the
nation. He not only claimed to be the next in succession to
Richard, but he put forward a claim of descent through his
mother, more direct than Richard's had been, from Henry III.
"In point of fact Henry was not the next in succession. His
father, John of Gaunt [or John of Ghent, in which city he was
born], was the fourth son of Edward III., and there were
descendants of that king's third son, Lionel Duke of Clarence,
living. ... At one time Richard himself had designated as his
successor the nobleman who really stood next to him in the
line of descent. This was Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, the
same who was killed by the rebels in Ireland. This Roger had
left a son Edmund to inherit his title, but Edmund was a mere
child, and the inconvenience of another minority could not
have been endured."
J. Gairdner,
Houses of Lancaster and York,
chapter 2.
{818}
As for Henry's pretensions through his mother, they were
founded upon what Mr. Gairdner calls an "idle story," that
"the eldest son of Henry III. was not king Edward, but his
brother Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, who was commonly
reputed the second son; and that this Edmund had been
purposely set aside on account of his personal deformity. The
plain fact of the matter was that Edmund Crouchback was six
years younger than his brother Edward I.; and that his surname
Crouchback had not the smallest reference to personal
deformity, but only implied that he wore the cross upon his
back as a crusader." Mr. Wylie (History of England under Henry
IV., volume 1, chapter 1) represents that this latter claim
was put forward under the advice of the leading jurists of the
time, to give the appearance of a legitimate succession;
whereas Henry took his real title from the will and assent of
the nation. Henry IV. was succeeded by his vigorous son, Henry
V. and he in turn by a feeble son, Henry VI., during whose
reign England was torn by intrigues and factions, ending in
the lamentable civil wars known as the "Wars of the Roses,"
the deposition of Henry VI. and the acquisition of the throne
by the "House of York," in the persons of Edward IV. and
Richard III. It was a branch of the House of Lancaster that
reappeared, after the death of Richard III. in the royal
family better known as the Tudors.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1400-1436.
Relations with Scotland.
See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1400-1436.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1402-1413.
Owen Glendower's Rebellion in Wales.
See WALES: A. D.1402-1413.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1403.
Hotspur's Rebellion.
The earl of Northumberland and his son, Henry Percy, called
"Hotspur," had performed great services for Henry IV., in
establishing and maintaining him upon the throne. "At the
outset of his reign their opposition would have been fatal to
him; their adhesion ensured his victory. He had rewarded them
with territory and high offices of trust, and they had by
faithful services ever since increased their claims to
gratitude and consideration. ... Both father and son were
high-spirited, passionate, suspicious men, who entertained an
exalted sense of their own services and could not endure the
shadow of a slight. Up to this time [early in 1403] not a
doubt had been cast on their fidelity. Northumberland was
still the king's chief agent in Parliament, his most valued
commander in the field, his Mattathias. It has been thought
that Hotspur's grudge against the king began with the notion
that the release of his brother-in-law, Edmund Mortimer [taken
prisoner, the year before, by the Welsh], had been neglected
by the king, or was caused by Henry's claim to deal with the
prisoners taken at Homildon; the defenders of the Percies
alleged that they had been deceived by Henry in the first
instance, and only needed to be persuaded that Richard lived
in order to desert the king. It is more probable that they
suspected Henry's friendship, and were exasperated by his
compulsory economies. ... Yet Henry seems to have conceived no
suspicion. ... Northumberland and Hotspur were writing for
increased forces [for the war with Scotland]. ... On the 10th
of July Henry had reached Northamptonshire on his way
northwards; on the 17th he heard that Hotspur with his uncle
the earl of Worcester were in arms in Shropshire. They raised
no cry of private wrongs, but proclaimed themselves the
vindicators of national right: their object was to correct the
evils of the administration, to enforce the employment of wise
counsellors, and the proper expenditure of public money. ...
The report ran like wildfire through the west that Richard was
alive, and at Chester. Hotspur's army rose to 14,000 men, and
not suspecting the strength and promptness of the king, he sat
down with his uncle and his prisoner, the earl of Douglas,
before Shrewsbury. Henry showed himself equal to the need.
From Burton-on-Trent, where on July 17 he summoned the forces
of the shires to join him, he marched into Shropshire, and
offered to parley with the insurgents. The earl of Worcester
went between the camps, but he was either an impolitic or a
treacherous envoy, and the negotiations ended in mutual
exasperation. On the 21st the battle of Shrewsbury was fought;
Hotspur was slain; Worcester was taken and beheaded two days
after. The old earl, who may or may not have been cognizant of
his son's intentions from the first, was now marching to his
succour. The earl of Westmoreland, his brother-in-law, met him
and drove him back to Warkworth. But all danger was over. On
the 11th of August he met the king at York, and submitted to
him."
W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
chapter 18, section 632.
ALSO IN:
J. H. Wylie,
History of England under Henry IV.,
volume 1, chapter 25.
W. Shakespeare,
King Henry IV.,
part 1.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1413.
Accession of King Henry V.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1413-1422.
Parliamentary gains under Henry V.
"What the sword had won the sword should keep, said Henry V.
on his accession; but what was meant by the saying has its
comment in the fact that, in the year which witnessed his
victory at Agincourt, he yielded to the House of Commons the
most liberal measure of legislation which until then it had
obtained. The dazzling splendour of his conquests in France
had for the time cast into the shade every doubt or question
of his title, but the very extent of those gains upon the
French soil established more decisively the worse than
uselessness of such acquisitions to the English throne. The
distinction of Henry's reign in constitutional history will
always be, that from it dates that power, indispensable to a
free and limited monarchy, called Privilege of Parliament; the
shield and buckler under which all the battles of liberty and
good government were fought in the after time. Not only were
its leading safeguards now obtained, but at once so firmly
established, that against the shock of incessant resistance in
later years they stood perfectly unmoved. Of the awful right
of impeachment, too, the same is to be said. It was won in the
same reign, and was never afterwards lost."
J. Forster,
Historical and Biographical Essays,
volume 1, page 207.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1415-1422.
Conquests of Henry V. in France.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1415; and 1417-1422.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1422.
Accession of King Henry VI.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1431-1453.
Loss of English conquests and possessions in France.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1431-1453,
and AQUITAINE: A. D. 1360-1453.
{819}
ENGLAND: A. D. 1450.
Cade's Rebellion.
A formidable rebellion broke out in Kent, under the leadership
of one Jack Cade, A. D. 1450. Overtaxation, the bad management
of the council, the extortion of the subordinate officers, the
injustice of the king's bench, the abuse of the right of
purveyance, the "enquestes" and amercements, and the
illegitimate control of elections were the chief causes of the
rising of 1450. "The rising was mainly political, only one
complaint was economical, not a single one was religious. We
find not a single demand for new legislation. ... The movement
was by no means of a distinctly plebeian or disorderly
character, but was a general and organized rising of the
people at large. It was a political upheaval. We find no trace
of socialism or of democracy. ... The commons in 1450 arose
against Lancaster and in favor of York. Their rising was the
first great struggle in the Wars of the Roses."
Kriehn,
Rising in 1450,
Chapter IV., VII.
Cade and his rebels took possession of London; but they were
beaten in a battle and forced to quit the city. Cade and some
followers continued to be turbulent and soon afterwards he was
killed.
J. Gairdner,
Houses of Lancaster and York,
chapter 7, section 6.
ALSO IN:
C. M. Yonge,
Cameos from English History,
3d series, chapter 7.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1455.
Demoralized state of the nation.
Effects of the wars in France.
"The whole picture of the times is very depressing on the
moral if not on the material side. There are few more pitiful
episodes in history than the whole tale of the reign of Henry
VI., the most unselfish and well-intentioned king that ever
sat upon the English throne--a man of whom not even his
enemies and oppressors could find an evil word to say; the
troubles came, as they confessed, 'all because of his false
lords, and never of him.' We feel that there must have been
something wrong with the heart of a nation that could see
unmoved the meek and holy king torn from wife and child, sent
to wander in disguise up and down the kingdom for which he had
done his poor best, and finally doomed to pine for five years a
prisoner in the fortress where he had so long held his royal
Court. Nor is our first impression concerning the
demoralisation of England wrong. Every line that we read bears
home to us more and more the fact that the nation had fallen
on evil times. First and foremost among the causes of its
moral deterioration was the wretched French War, a war begun
in the pure spirit of greed and ambition,--there was not even
the poor excuse that had existed in the time of Edward
III.--carried on by the aid of hordes of debauched foreign
mercenaries ... and persisted in long after it had become
hopeless, partly from misplaced national pride, partly because
of the personal interests of the ruling classes. Thirty-five
years of a war that was as unjust as it was unfortunate had
both soured and demoralised the nation. ... When the final
catastrophe came and the fights of Formigny [or Fourmigny] and
Chatillon [Castillon] ended the chapter of our disasters, the
nation began to cast about for a scapegoat on whom to lay the
burden of its failures. ... At first the unfortunate Suffolk
and Somerset had the responsibility laid upon them. A little
later the outcry became more bold and fixed upon the
Lancastrian dynasty itself as being to blame not only for
disaster abroad, but for want of governance at home. If King
Henry had understood the charge, and possessed the wit to
answer it, he might fairly have replied that his subjects must
fit the burden upon their own backs, not upon his. The war had
been weakly conducted, it was true; but weakly because the men
and money for it were grudged. ... At home, the bulwarks of
social order seemed crumbling away. Private wars, riot, open
highway robbery, murder, abduction, armed resistance to the
law, prevailed on a scale that had been unknown since the
troublous times of Edward II.--we might almost say since the
evil days of Stephen. But it was not the Crown alone that
should have been blamed for the state of the realm. The nation
had chosen to impose over-stringent constitutional checks on
the kingly power before it was ripe for self-government, and
the Lancastrian house sat on the throne because it had agreed
to submit to those checks. If the result of the experiment was
disastrous, both parties to the contract had to bear their
share of the responsibility. But a nation seldom allows that
it has been wrong; and Henry of Windsor had to serve as a
scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the realm, because Henry
of Bolingbroke had committed his descendants to the unhappy
compact. Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly
the complaint under which England was labouring in the middle
of the 15th century, and all the grievances against which
outcry was made were but symptoms of one latent disease. ...
All these public troubles would have been of comparatively
small importance if the heart of the nation had been sound.
The phenomenon which makes the time so depressing is the
terrible decay in private morals since the previous century.
... There is no class or caste in England which comes well out
of the scrutiny. The Church, which had served as the conscience
of the nation in better times, had become dead to spiritual
things. It no longer produced either men of saintly life or
learned theologians or patriotic statesmen. ... The baronage
of England had often been unruly, but it had never before
developed the two vices which distinguished it in the times of
the Two Roses--a taste for indiscriminate bloodshed and a turn
for political apostacy. ... Twenty years spent in contact with
French factions, and in command of the godless mercenaries who
formed the bulk of the English armies, had taught our nobles
lessons of cruelty and faithlessness such as they had not
before imbibed. ... The knights and squires showed on a
smaller scale all the vices of the nobility. Instead of
holding together and maintaining a united loyalty to the
Crown, they bound themselves by solemn sealed bonds and the
reception of 'liveries' each to the baron whom he preferred.
This fatal system, by which the smaller landholder agreed on
behalf of himself and his tenants to follow his greater
neighbour in peace and war, had ruined the military system of
England, and was quite as dangerous as the ancient feudalism.
... If the gentry constituted themselves the voluntary
followers of the baronage, and aided their employers to keep
England unhappy, the class of citizens and burgesses took a
very different line of conduct. If not actively mischievous,
they were solidly inert. They refused to entangle themselves
in politics at all. They submitted impassively to each ruler
in turn, when they had ascertained that their own persons and
property were not endangered by so doing. A town, it has been
remarked, seldom or never stood a siege during the Wars of the
Roses, for no town ever refused to open its gates to any
commander with an adequate force who asked for entrance."
C. W. Oman,
Warwick the King-maker,
chapter 1.
{820}
ENGLAND: A. D. 1455-1471.
The Wars of the Roses.
Beginning with a battle fought at St. Albans on the 23d of
May, 1455, England was kept in a pitiable state of civil war,
with short intervals of troubled peace, during thirty years.
The immediate cause of trouble was in the feebleness of King
Henry VI., who succeeded to the throne while an infant, and
whose mind, never strong, gave way under the trials of his
position when he came to manhood. The control of the
government, thus weakly commanded, became a subject of strife
between successive factions. The final leaders in such
contests were Queen Margaret of Anjou, the energetic consort
of the helpless king (with the king himself sometimes in a
condition of mind to cooperate with her), on one side, and, on
the other side, the Duke of York, who traced his lineage to
Edward III., and who had strong claims to the throne if Henry
should leave no heir. The battle at St. Albans was a victory
for the Yorkists and placed them in power for the next two
years, the Duke of York being named Protector. In 1456 the
king recovered so far as to resume the reigns of government,
and in 1459 there was a new rupture between the factions. The
queen's adherents were beaten in the battle of Bloreheath,
September 23d of that year; but defections in the ranks of the
Yorkists soon obliged the latter to disperse and their
leaders, York, Warwick and Salisbury, fled to Ireland and to
Calais. In June, 1460, the earls of Warwick, Salisbury and
March (the latter being the eldest son of the Duke of York)
returned to England and gathered an army speedily, the city of
London opening its gates to them. The king's forces were
defeated at Northampton (July 10) and the king taken prisoner.
A parliament was summoned and assembled in October. Then the Duke
of York came over from Ireland, took possession of the royal
palace and laid before parliament a solemn claim to the crown.
After much discussion a compromise was agreed upon, under
which Henry VI. should reign undisturbed during his life and
the Duke of York should be his undisputed successor. This was
embodied in an act of parliament and received the assent of
the king; but queen Margaret who had retired into the north,
refused to surrender the rights of her infant son, and a
strong party sustained her. The Duke of York attacked these
Lancastrian forces rashly, at Wakefield, Dec. 30, 1460, and
was slain on the field of a disastrous defeat. The queen's
army, then, marching towards London, defeated the Earl of
Warwick at St. Albans, February 17, 1461 (the second battle of
the war at that place), and recovered possession of the person
of the king. But Edward, Earl of March (now become Duke of
York, by the death of his father), who had just routed a
Lancastrian force at Mortimer's Cross, in Wales, joined his
forces with those of Warwick and succeeded in occupying
London, which steadily favored his cause. Calling together a
council of lords, Edward persuaded them to declare King Henry
deposed, on the ground that he had broken the agreement made
with the late Duke of York. The next step was to elect Edward
king, and he assumed the royal title and state at once. The
new king lost no time in marching northwards against the army
of the deposed sovereign, which lay near York. On the 27th of
March the advanced division of the Lancastrians was defeated
at Ferrybridge, and, two days later, their main body was
almost destroyed in the fearful battle of Towton,--said to
have been the bloodiest encounter that ever took place on
English soil. King Henry took refuge in Scotland and Queen
Margaret repaired to France. In 1464 Henry reappeared in the
north with a body of Scots and refugees and there were risings
in his favor in Northumberland, which the Yorkists crushed in
the successive battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham. The
Yorkist king (Edward IV.) now reigned without much disturbance
ntil 1470, when he quarreled with the powerful Earl of Warwick--
the "king-maker," whose strong hand had placed him on the
throne. Warwick then passed to the other side, offering his
services to Queen Margaret and leading an expedition which
sailed from Harfleur in September, convoyed by a French fleet.
Edward found himself unprepared to resist the Yorkist risings
which welcomed Warwick and he fled to Holland, seeking aid
from his brother-in-law, the Duke of Burgundy. For nearly six
months, the kingdom was in the hands of Warwick and the
Lancastrians; the unfortunate Henry VI., released from
captivity in the Tower, was once more seated on the throne.
But on the 14th of March, 1471, Edward reappeared in England,
landing at Ravenspur, professing that he came only to recover
his dukedom of York. As he moved southwards he gathered a
large force of supporters and soon reassumed the royal title
and pretensions. London opened its gates to him, and, on the
14th of April--exactly one month after his landing--he
defeated his opponents at Barnet, where Warwick, "the
king-maker"--the last of the great feudal barons--was slain.
Henry, again a captive, was sent back to the Tower. But
Henry's dauntless queen, who landed at Weymouth, with a body
of French allies on the very day of the disastrous Barnet
fight, refused to submit. Cornwall and Devon were true to her
cause and gave her an army with which she fought the last
battle of the war at Tewksbury on the 4th of May. Defeated and
taken prisoner, her young son slain--whether in the battle or
after it is unknown--the long contention of Margaret of Anjou
ended on that bloody field. A few days later, when the
triumphant Yorkist King Edward entered London, his poor,
demented Lancastrian rival died suddenly and suspiciously in
the Tower. The two parties in the long contention had each
assumed the badge of a rose--the Yorkists a white rose, the
Lancastrians a red one. Hence the name of the Wars of the
Roses. "As early as the time of John of Ghent, the rose was
used as an heraldic emblem, and when he married Blanche, the
daughter of the Duke of Lancaster, he used the red rose for a
device. Edmund of Langley, his brother, the fifth son of
Edward III., adopted the white rose in opposition to him; and
their followers afterwards maintained these distinctions in
the bloody wars of the fifteenth century. There is, however,
no authentic account of the precise period when these badges
were first adopted."
Mrs. Hookham,
Life and Times of Margaret of Anjou,
volume 2, chapter 1.
ALSO IN:
J. Gairdner,
Houses of Lancaster and York.
Sir J. Ramsay,
Lancaster and York.
C. W. Oman;
Warwick, the King-maker,
chapter 5-17.
See, also,
TOWTON, BARNET, and TEWKSBURY.
{821}
The effects of the Wars of the Roses.
"It is astonishing to observe the rapidity with which it [the
English nation] had settled down to order in the reign of
Henry VII. after so many years of civil dissension. It would
lead us to infer that those wars were the wars of a class, and
not of the nation; and that the effects of them have been
greatly exaggerated. With the single exception of Cade's
rebellion, they had nothing in common with the revolutions of
later or earlier times. They were not wars against classes,
against forms of government, against the order or the
institutions of the nation. It was the rivalry of two
aristocratic factions struggling for superiority, neither of
them hoping or desiring, whichever obtained the upper hand, to
introduce momentous changes in the State or its
administration. The main body of the people took little
interest in the struggle; in the towns at least there was no
intermission of employment. The war passed over the nation,
ruffling the surface, toppling down high cliffs here and
there, washing away ancient landmarks, attracting the
imagination of the spectator by the mightiness of its waves,
and the noise of its thunders; but the great body below the
surface remained unmoved. No famines, no plagues, consequent
on the intermittance of labour caused by civil war, are
recorded; even the prices of land and provisions scarcely
varied more than they have been known to do in times of
profoundest peace. But the indirect and silent operation of
these conflicts was much more remarkable. It reft into
fragments the confederated ranks of a powerful territorial
aristocracy, which had hitherto bid defiance to the King,
however popular, however energetic. Henceforth the position of
the Sovereign in the time of the Tudors, in relation to all
classes of the people, became very different from what it had
been; the royal supremacy was no longer a theory; but a fact.
Another class had sprung up on the decay of the ancient
nobility. The great towns had enjoyed uninterrupted
tranquility, and even flourished, under the storm that was
scourging the aristocracy and the rural districts. Their
population had increased by numbers whom fear or the horrors
of war had induced to find shelter behind stone walls. The
diminution of agricultural labourers converted into soldiers
by the folly of their lords had turned corn-lands into
pasture, requiring less skill, less capital, and less labour."
J. S. Brewer,
The Reign of Henry VIII.,
volume 1, chapter 2.
"Those who would estimate the condition of England aright
should remember that the War of the Roses was only a
repetition on a large scale of those private wars which
distracted almost every county, and, indeed, by taking away
all sense of security, disturbed almost every manor and every
class of society during the same century. ... The lawless
condition of English society in the 15th century resembled
that of Ireland in as recent a date as the beginning of the
19th century. ... In both countries women were carried off,
sometimes at night; they were first violated, then dragged to
the altar in their night-dress and compelled to marry their
captors. ... Children were seized and thrown into a dungeon
until ransomed by their parents."
W. Denton,
England in the 15th Century,
chapter 3.
"The Wars of the Roses which filled the second half of the
15th century furnished the barons with an arena in which their
instincts of violence had freer play than ever; it was they
who, under the pretext of dynastic interests which had ceased
to exist, of their own free choice prolonged the struggle.
Altogether unlike the Italian condottieri, the English barons
showed no mercy to their own order; they massacred and
exterminated each other freely, while they were careful to
spare the commonalty. Whole families were extinguished or
submerged in the nameless mass of the nation, and their
estates by confiscation or escheat helped to swell the royal
domain. When Henry VII. had stifled the last movements of
rebellion and had punished, through the Star Chamber, those
nobles who were still suspected of maintaining armed bands,
the baronage was reduced to a very low ebb; not more than
twenty-nine lay peers were summoned by the king to his first
Parliament. The old Norman feudal nobility existed no longer;
the heroic barons of the great charter barely survived in the
persons of a few doubtful descendants; their estates were
split up or had been forfeited to the Crown. A new class came
forward to fill the gap, that rural middle class which was
formed ... by the fusion of the knights with the free
landowners. It had already taken the lead in the House of
Commons, and it was from its ranks that Henry VII. chose
nearly all the new peers. A peerage renewed almost throughout,
ignorant of the habits and traditions of the earlier nobility,
created in large batches, closely dependent on the monarch who
had raised it from little or nothing and who had endowed it
with his bounty--this is the phenomenon which confronts us at
the end of the fifteenth century."
E. Boutmy,
The English Constitution,
chapter 5.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1461.
Accession of King Edward IV.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1461-1485.
House of York.
The House of York, which triumphed in the Wars of the Roses,
attaining the throne in the person of Edward IV. (A. D. 1461),
derived its claim to the crown through descent, in the female
line, from Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the third son of Edward
III. (the second son who lived to manhood and left children);
while the House of Lancaster traced its lineage to John of
Gaunt, a younger son of the same king Edward III., but the
line of Lancastrian succession was through males. "Had the
crown followed the course of hereditary succession, it would
have devolved on the posterity of Lionel. ... By the decease
of that prince without male issue, his possessions and
pretensions fell to his daughter Philippa, who by a singular
combination of circumstances had married Roger Mortimer earl
of March, the male representative of the powerful baron who
was attainted and executed for the murder of Edward II., the
grandfather of the duke of Clarence. The son of that potent
delinquent had been restored to his honours and estates at an
advanced period in the reign of Edward III. ... Edmund, his
grandson, had espoused Philippa of Clarence. Roger Mortimer,
the fourth in descent from the regicide, was lord lieutenant
of Ireland and was considered, or, according to some writers,
declared to be heir of the crown in the early part of
Richard's reign. Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, in whom the
hereditary claim to the crown was vested at the deposition of
Richard, was then only an infant of ten years of age. ...
{822}
Dying without issue, the pretensions to the crown, which he
inherited through the duke of Clarence, devolved on his sister
Anne Mortimer, who espoused Richard of York earl of Cambridge,
the grandson of Edward III. by his fourth [fifth] son Edmund
of Langley duke of York." Edward IV. was the grandson of this
Anne Mortimer and Richard of York.
Sir J. Mackintosh,
History of England,
volume 1, pages 338-339.
The House of York occupied the throne but twenty-four years.
On the death of Edward IV., in 1483, the crown was secured by
his brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who caused Edward's
two sons to be murdered in the Tower. The elder of these