Part 21

But his plot was already successful before he reached the scene of operations. The Yorkshire rebels beat the royalist army at the battle of Edgecott (July 6, 1469). A few days later Edward himself was captured at Olney and put into the earl's hands. Many of his chief supporters, including the queen's father, Lord Rivers, and her brother, John Woodville, as well as the newly-created earls of Pembroke and Devon, were put to death with Warwick's connivance, if not by his direct orders. The king was confined for some weeks in the great Neville stronghold of Middleham Castle, but presently released on conditions, being compelled to accept new ministers nominated by Warwick. The earl supposed that his cousin's spirit was broken and that he would give no further trouble. In this he erred grievously. Edward vowed revenge for his slaughtered favourites, and waited his opportunity. Warwick had lost credit by using such underhand methods in his attack on his master, and had not taken sufficient care to conciliate public opinion when he reconstructed the government. His conduct had destroyed his old reputation for disinterestedness and honesty.

King Edward drives Warwick into exile.

In March 1470 the king seized the first chance of avenging himself. Some unimportant riots had broken out in Lincolnshire, originating probably in mere local quarrels, but possibly in Lancastrian intrigues. To suppress this rising the king gathered a great force, carefully calling in to his banner all the peers who were offended with Warwick or, at any rate, did not belong to his family alliance. Having scattered the Lincolnshire bands, he suddenly turned upon Warwick with his army, and caught him wholly unprepared. The earl and his son-in-law Clarence were hunted out of the realm before they could collect their partisans, and fled to France; Edward seemed for the first time to be master in his own realm.

Warwick takes up the cause of Henry VI.

He lands in England.

King Edward in exile.

But the Wars of the Roses had one more phase to come. Warwick's name was still a power in the land, and his expulsion had been so sudden that he had not been given an opportunity of trying his strength. His old enmity for the house of Lancaster was completely swallowed up in his new grudge against the king that he had made. He opened negotiations with the exiled Queen Margaret, and offered to place his sword at her disposition for the purpose of overthrowing King Edward and restoring King Henry. The queen had much difficulty in forcing herself to come to terms with the man who had been the bane of her cause, but finally, was induced by Louis XI. to conclude a bargain. Warwick married his younger daughter to her son Edward, prince of Wales, as a pledge of his good faith, and swore allegiance to King Henry in the cathedral of Angers. He then set himself to stir up the Yorkshire adherents of the house of Neville to distract the attention of Edward IV. When the king had gone northward to attack them, the earl landed at Dartmouth (Sept. 1470) with a small force partly composed of Lancastrian exiles, partly of his own men. His appearance had the effect on which he had calculated. Devon rose in the Lancastrian interest; Kent, where the earl's name had always been popular, took arms a few days later; and London opened its gates. King Edward, hurrying south to oppose the invader, found his army melting away from his banner, and hastily took ship at Lynn and fled to Holland. He found a refuge with his brother-in-law and ally Charles the Bold, the great duke of Burgundy.

Restoration of Henry VI.

Edward returns to England.

Battle of Barnet. Death of Warwick.

King Henry was released and replaced on the throne, and for six months Warwick ruled England as his lieutenant. But there was bitterness and mistrust between the old Lancastrian faction and the Nevilles, and Queen Margaret refused to cross to England or to trust her son in the king-maker's hands. Her partisans doubted his sincerity, while many of the Yorkists who had hitherto followed Warwick in blind admiration found it impossible to reconcile themselves to the new regime. The duke of Clarence in particular, discontented at the triumph of Lancaster, betrayed his father-in-law, and opened secret negotiations with his exiled brother. Encouraged by the news of the dissensions among his enemies, Edward IV. resolved to try his fortune once more, and landed near Hull on the 15th of March 1471 with a body of mercenaries lent him by the duke of Burgundy. The campaign that followed was most creditable to Edward's generalship, but must have been fatal to him if Warwick had been honestly supported by his lieutenants. But the duke of Clarence betrayed to his brother the army which he had gathered in King Henry's name, and many of the Lancastrians were slow to join the earl, from their distrust of his loyalty. Edward, dashing through the midst of the slowly gathering levies of his opponents, seized London, and two days later defeated and slew Warwick at the battle of Barnet (April 13, 1471).

Battle of Tewkesbury. Death of Edward, prince of Wales.

Capture of Queen Margaret and murder of Henry VI.

On that same day Queen Margaret and her son landed at Weymouth, only to hear that the earl was dead and his army scattered. But she refused to consider the struggle ended, and gathered the Lancastrians of the west for a final rally. On the fatal day of Tewkesbury (May 3, 1471) her army was beaten, her son was slain in the flight, and the greater part of her chief captains were taken prisoner. She herself was captured next day. The victorious Edward sent to the block the last Beaufort duke of Somerset, and nearly all the other captains of rank, whether Lancastrians or followers of Warwick. He then moved to London, which was being threatened by Kentish levies raised in Warwick's name, delivered the city, and next day caused the unhappy Henry VI. to be murdered in the Tower (May 21, 1471).

Edward IV.

The descendants of Henry IV. were now extinct, and the succession question seemed settled for ever. No one dreamed of raising against King Edward the claims of the remoter heirs of John of Gaunt--the young earl of Richmond, who represented the Beauforts by a female descent, or the king of Portugal, the grandson of Gaunt's eldest daughter. Edward was now king indeed, with no over-powerful cousin at his elbow to curb his will. He had, moreover, at his disposal plunder almost as valuable as that which he had divided up in 1461--the estates of the great Neville clan and their adherents. A great career seemed open before him; he had proved himself a fine soldier and an unscrupulous diplomatist; he was in the very prime of life, having not yet attained his thirty-first year. He might have devoted himself to foreign politics and have rivalled the exploits of Edward III. or Henry V.--for the state of the continent was all in his favour--or might have set himself to organize an absolute monarchy on the ruins of the parliament and the baronage. For the successive attainders of the Lancastrians and the Nevilles had swept away many of the older noble families, and Edward's house of peers consisted for the main part of new men, his own partisans promoted for good service, who had not the grip on the land that their predecessors had possessed.

Character of the reign.

Murder of the duke of Clarence.

But Edward either failed to see his opportunity or refused to take it. He did not plunge headlong into the wars of Louis XI. and Charles of Burgundy, nor did he attempt to recast the institutions of the realm. He settled down into inglorious ease, varied at long intervals by outbursts of spasmodic tyranny. It would seem that the key to his conduct was that he hated the hard work without which a despotic king cannot hope to assert his personality, and preferred leisure and vicious self-indulgence. In many ways the later years of his reign were marked with all the signs of absolutism. Between 1475 and 1483 he called only one single parliament, and that was summoned not to give him advice, or raise him money, but purely and solely to attaint his brother, the duke of Clarence, whom he had resolved to destroy. The duke's fate (Feb. 17, 1478) need provoke no sympathy, he was a detestable intriguer, and had given his brother just offence by a series of deeds of high-handed violence and by perpetual cavilling. But he had committed no act of real treason since his long-pardoned alliance with Warwick, and was not in any way dangerous; so that when the king caused him to be attainted, and then privately murdered in the Tower, there was little justification for the fratricide.

Fiscal policy.

Edward was a thrifty king; he was indeed the only medieval monarch of England who succeeded in keeping free of debt and made his revenue suffice for his expenses. But his methods of filling his purse were often unconstitutional and sometimes ignominious. When the resources drawn from confiscations were exhausted, he raised "benevolences"--forced gifts extracted from men of wealth by the unspoken threat of the royal displeasure--instead of applying to parliament for new taxes. But his most profitable source of revenue was drawn from abroad. Having allied himself with his brother-in-law Charles of Burgundy against the king of France, he led an army into Picardy in 1475, and then by the treaty of Picquigny sold peace to Louis XI. for 75,000 gold crowns down, and an annual pension (or tribute as he preferred to call it) of 50,000 crowns more. It was regularly paid up to the last year of his reign. Charles the Bold, whom he had thus deliberately deserted in the middle of their joint campaign, used the strongest language about this mean act of treachery, and with good cause. But the king cared not when his pockets were full. Another device of Edward for filling his exchequer was a very stringent enforcement of justice; small infractions of the laws being made the excuse for exorbitant fines. This was a trick which Henry VII. was to turn to still greater effect. In defence of both it may be pleaded that after the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses a strong hand was needed to restore security for life and property, and that it was better that penalties should be over-heavy rather than that there should be no penalties at all. Another appreciable source of revenue to Edward was his private commercial ventures. He owned many ships, and traded with great profit to himself abroad, because he could promise, as a king, advantages to foreign buyers and sellers with which no mere merchant could compete.

During the last period of Edward's rule England might have been described as a despotism, if only the king had cared to be a despot. But except on rare occasions he allowed his power to be disguised under the old machinery of the medieval monarchy, and made no parade of his autocracy. Much was pardoned by the nation to one who gave them comparatively efficient and rather cheap government, and who was personally easy of access, affable and humorous. It is with little justification that he has been called the "founder of the new monarchy," and the spiritual ancestor of the Tudor despotism. Another king in his place might have merited such titles, but Edward was too careless, too unsystematic, too lazy, and too fond of self-indulgence to make a real tyrant. He preferred to be a man of pleasure and leisure, only awaking now and then to perpetrate some act of arbitrary cruelty.

Condition of the country.

Commercial development.

Manufactures and wool trade.

England was not unprosperous under him. The lowest point of her fortunes had been reached under the administration of Margaret of Anjou, during the weary years that preceded the outbreak of the civil wars in 1459. At that time the government had been bankrupt, foreign trade had almost disappeared, the French and pirates of all nations had possession of the Channel, and the nation had lost heart, because there seemed no way out of the trouble save domestic strife, to which all looked forward with dismay. The actual war proved less disastrous than had been expected. It fell heavily upon the baronage and their retainers, but passed lightly, for the most part, over the heads of the middle classes. The Yorkists courted the approval of public opinion by their careful avoidance of pillage and requisitions; and the Lancastrians, though less scrupulous, only once launched out into general raiding and devastation, during the advance of the queen's army to St Albans in the early months of 1461. As a rule the towns suffered little or nothing--they submitted to the king of the moment, and were always spared by the victors. It is one of the most curious features of these wars that no town ever stood a siege, though there were several long and arduous sieges of baronial castles, such as Harlech, Alnwick and Bamborough. Warwick, with his policy of conciliation for the masses and hard blows for the magnates, was mainly responsible for this moderation. In battle he was wont to bid his followers spare the commons in the pursuit, and to smite only the knights and nobles. Towton, where the Yorkist army was infuriated by the harrying of the Midlands by their enemies in the preceding campaign, was the only fight that ended in a general massacre. There were, of course, many local feuds and riots which led to the destruction of property; well-known instances are the private war about Caister Castle between the duke of Norfolk and the Pastons, and the "battle of Nibley Green," near Bristol, between the Berkeleys and the Talbots. But on the whole there was no ruinous devastation of the land. Prosperity seems to have revived early during the rule of York; Warwick had cleared the seas of pirates, and both he and King Edward were great patrons of commerce, though the earl's policy was to encourage trade with France, while his master wished to knit up the old alliance with Flanders by adhering to the cause of Charles of Burgundy. Edward did much in his later years to develop interchange of commodities with the Baltic, making treaties with the Hanseatic League which displeased the merchants of London, because of the advantageous terms granted to the foreigner. The east coast ports seem to have thriven under his rule, but Bristol was not less prosperous. On the one side, developing the great salt-fish trade, her vessels were encompassing Iceland, and feeling their way towards the Banks of the West; on the other they were beginning to feel their way into the Mediterranean. The famous William Canynges, the patriarch of Bristol merchants, possessed 2500 tons of shipping, including some ships of 900 tons, and traded in every sea. Yet we still find complaints that too much merchandize reached and left England in foreign bottoms, and King Edward's treaty with the Hansa was censured mainly for this reason. Internal commerce was evidently developing in a satisfactory style, despite of the wars; in especial raw wool was going out of England in less bulk than of old, because cloth woven at home was becoming the staple export. The woollen manufactures which had begun in the eastern counties in the 14th century were now spreading all over the land, taking root especially in Somersetshire, Yorkshire and some districts of the Midlands. Coventry, the centre of a local woollen and dyeing industry, was probably the inland town which grew most rapidly during the 15th century. Yet there was still a large export of wool to Flanders, and the long pack-trains of the Cotswold flockmasters still wound eastward to the sea for the benefit of the merchants of the staple and the continental manufacturer.

State of the rural population.

As regards domestic agriculture, it has been often stated that the 15th century was the golden age of the English peasant, and that his prosperity was little affected either by the unhappy French wars of Henry VI. or by the Wars of the Roses. There is certainly very little evidence of any general discontent among the rural population, such as had prevailed in the times of Edward III. or Richard II. Insurrections that passed as popular, like the risings of Jack Cade and Robin of Redesdale, produced manifestos that spoke of political grievances but hardly mentioned economic ones. There is a bare mention of the Statute of Labourers in Jack Cade's ably drafted chapter of complaints. It would seem that the manorial grudges between landowner and peasant, which had been so fierce in the 14th century, had died down as the lords abandoned the old system of working their demesne by villein labour. They were now for the most part letting out the soil to tenant-farmers at a moderate rent, and the large class of yeomanry created by this movement seem to have been prosperous. The less popular device of turning old manorial arable land into sheep-runs was also known, but does not yet seem to have grown so common as to provoke the popular discontents which were to prevail under the Tudors. Probably such labour as was thrown out of work by this tendency was easily absorbed by the growing needs of the towns. Some murmurs are heard about "enclosures," but they are incidental and not widely spread.

Architecture.

One of the best tests of the prosperity of England under the Yorkist rule seems to be the immense amount of building that was on hand. Despite the needs of civil war, it was not on castles that the builders' energy was spent; the government discouraged fortresses in private hands, and the dwellings of the new nobility of Edward IV. were rather splendid manor-houses, with some slight external protection of moat and gate-house, than old-fashioned castles. But the church-building of the time is enormous and magnificent. A very large proportion of the great Perpendicular churches of England date back to this age, and in the cathedrals also much work was going on.

Religious condition of the country.

Material prosperity does not imply spiritual development, and it must be confessed that from the intellectual and moral point of view 15th-century England presents an unpleasing picture. The Wycliffite movement, the one phenomenon which at the beginning of the century seemed to give some promise of better things, had died down under persecution. It lingered on in a subterranean fashion among a small class in the universities and the minor clergy, and had some adherents among the townsfolk and even among the peasantry. But the Lollards were a feeble and helpless minority; they no longer produced writers, organizers or missionaries. They continued to be burnt, or more frequently to make forced recantations, under the Yorkist rule, though the list of trials is not a long one. Little can be gathered concerning them from chronicles or official records. We only know that they continued to exist, and occasionally produced a martyr. But the governing powers were not fanatics, bent on seeking out victims; the spirit of Henry V. and Archbishop Arundel was dead. The life of the church seems, indeed, to have been in a more stagnant and torpid condition in this age than at any other period of English history. The great prelates from Cardinal Beaufort down to Archbishops Bourchier and Rotherham, and Bishop John Russell--trusted supporters of the Yorkist dynasty--were mere politicians with nothing spiritual about them. Occasionally they appear in odious positions. Rotherham was the ready tool of Edward IV. in the judicial murder of Clarence. Russell became the obsequious chancellor of Richard III. Bourchier made himself responsible in 1483 for the taking of the little duke of York from his mother's arms in order to place him in the power of his murderous uncle. It is difficult to find a single bishop in the whole period who was respected for his piety or virtue. The best of them were capable statesmen, the worst were mean time-servers. Few of the higher clergy were such patrons of learning as many prelates of earlier ages. William Grey of Ely and James Goldwell of Norwich did something for scholars, and there was one bishop in the period who came to sad grief through an intellectual activity which was rare among his contemporaries. This was the eccentric Reginald Pecock of Chichester, who, while setting himself to confute Lollard controversialists, lapsed into heresy by setting "reason" above "authority." He taught that the organization and many of the dogmas of the medieval church should be justified by an appeal to private judgment and the moral law, rather than to the scriptures, the councils, or the fathers. For taking up this dangerous line of defence, and admitting his doubts about several received articles of faith, he was attacked by the Yorkist archbishop Bourchier in 1457, compelled to do penance, and shut up in a monastery for the rest of his life. He seems to have had no school of followers, and his doctrines died with him.

The monasteries.

In nothing is the general stagnation of the church in the later 15th century shown better than by the gradual cessation of the monastic chronicles. The stream of narrative was still flowing strongly in 1400; by 1485 it has run dry, even St Albans, the mother of historians, produced no annalist after Whethamstede, whose story ceases early in the Wars of the Roses. The only monastic chronicler who went on writing for a few years after the extinction of the house of York was the "Croyland continuator." For the last two-thirds of the century the various "London chronicles," the work of laymen, are much more important than anything which was produced in the religious houses. The regular clergy indeed seem to have been sunk in intellectual torpor. Their numbers were falling off, their zeal was gone; there is little good to be said of them save that they were still in some cases endowing England with splendid architectural decorations. But even in the wealthier abbeys we find traces of thriftless administration, idleness, self-indulgence and occasionally grave moral scandals. The parochial clergy were probably in a healthier condition; but the old abuses of pluralism and non-residence were as rampant as ever, and though their work may have been in many cases honourably carried out, it is certain that energy and intelligence were at a low ebb.

Moral decay of the nation.

The "Paston Letters."

Influence of the Italian Renaissance.