Part 19

ALSO IN: _W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chapter 18, section 696._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1474. Treaty with the Hanseatic League.

See HANSA TOWNS.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1476. Introduction of Printing by Caxton.

See PRINTING, &c.: A. D. 1476-1491.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1483-1485. Murder of the young king, Edward V. Accession of Richard III. The battle of Bosworth and the fall of the House of York.

On the death of Edward IV., in 1483, his crafty and unscrupulous brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, gathered quickly into his hands the reins of power, proceeding with consummate audacity and ruthlessness to sweep every strong rival out of his path. Contenting himself for a few weeks, only, with the title of Protector, he soon disputed the validity of his brother Edward's marriage, caused an obsequious Parliament to set aside the young sons whom the latter had left, declaring them to be illegitimate, and placed the crown on his own head. The little princes (King Edward V., and Richard, Duke of York), immured in the Tower, were murdered presently at their uncle's command, and Richard III. appeared, for the time, to have triumphed in his ambitious villainy. But, popular as he made himself in many cunning ways, his deeds excited a horror which united Lancastrians with the party of York in a common detestation. Friends of Henry, Earl of Richmond, then in exile, were not slow to take advantage of this feeling. Henry could claim descent from the same John of Gaunt, son of Edward III., to whom the House of Lancaster traced its lineage; but his family--the Beauforts--sprang from the mistress, not the wife, of the great Duke of Lancaster, and had only been legitimated by act of Parliament. The Lancastrians, however, were satisfied with the royalty of his blood, and the Yorkists were made content by his promise to marry a daughter of Edward IV. On this understanding being arranged, Henry came over from Brittany to England, landing at Milford Haven on the 7th or 8th of August, 1485, and advancing through Wales, being joined by great numbers as he moved. Richard, who had no lack of courage, marched quickly to meet him, and the two forces joined battle on Bosworth Field, in Leicestershire, on Sunday, August 21. At the outset of the fighting Richard was deserted by a large division of his army and saw that his fate was sealed. He plunged, with despairing rage, into the thickest of the struggle and was slain. His crowned helmet, which he had worn, was found by Sir Reginald Bray, battered and broken, under a hawthorn bush, and placed on the head of his rival, who soon attained a more solemn coronation, as Henry VII.

_C. M. Yonge, Cameos from English History, 3d Series, chapters 19-20._

"I must record my impression that a minute study of the facts of Richard's life has tended more and more to convince me of the general fidelity of the portrait with which we have been made familiar by Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More. I feel quite ashamed, at this day, to think how I mused over this subject long ago, wasting a great deal of time, ink and paper, in fruitless efforts to satisfy even my own mind that traditional black was real historical white, or at worst a kind of grey. ... {823} Both the character and personal appearance of Richard III. have furnished matter of controversy. But with regard to the former the day has now gone by when it was possible to doubt the evidence at least of his principal crime; and that he was regarded as a tyrant by his subjects seems almost equally indisputable. At the same time he was not destitute of better qualities. ... As king he seems really to have studied his country's welfare, passed good laws, endeavoured to put an end to extortion, declined the free gifts offered to him by several towns, and declared he would rather have the hearts of his subjects than their money. His munificence was especially shown in religious foundations. ... His hypocrisy was not of the vulgar kind which seeks to screen habitual baseness of motive by habitual affectation of virtue. His best and his worst deeds were alike too well known to be either concealed or magnified; at least, soon after he became king, all doubt upon the subject must have been removed. ... His ingratiating manners, together with the liberality of his disposition, seem really to have mitigated to a considerable extent the alarms created by his fitful deeds of violence. The reader will not require to be reminded of Shakespeare's portrait of a murderer who could cajole the woman whom he had most exasperated and made a widow into marrying himself. That Richard's ingenuity was equal to this extraordinary feat we do not venture to assert; but that he had a wonderful power of reassuring those whom he had most intimidated and deceiving those who knew him best there can be very little doubt. ... His taste in building was magnificent and princely. ... There is scarcely any evidence of Richard's [alleged] deformity to be derived from original portraits. The number of portraits of Richard which seem to be contemporary is greater than might have been expected. ... The face in all the portraits is a remarkable one, full of energy and decision, yet gentle and sad-looking, suggesting the idea not so much of a tyrant as of a mind accustomed to unpleasant thoughts. Nowhere do we find depicted the warlike hard-favoured visage attributed to him by Sir Thomas More. ... With such a one did the long reign of the Plantagenets terminate. The fierce spirit and the valour of the race never showed more strongly than at the close. The Middle Ages, too, as far as England was concerned, may be said to have passed away with Richard III."

_J. Gairdner, History of the Life, and Reign of Richard The Third, introduction and chapter 6._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1485. Accession of King Henry VII.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1485-1528. The Sweating Sickness.

See SWEATING SICKNESS.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1485-1603. The Tudors.

The Tudor family, which occupied the English throne from the accession of Henry VII., 1485, until the death of Elizabeth, 1603, took its name, but not its royal lineage, from Sir Owen Tudor, a handsome Welsh chieftain, who won the heart and the hand of the young widow of Henry V., Catherine of France. The eldest son of that marriage, made Earl of Richmond, married in his turn Margaret Beaufort, great-granddaughter to John of Gaunt, or Ghent, who was one of the sons of Edward III. From this latter union came Henry of Richmond, as he was known, who disputed the crown with Richard III. and made his claim good on Bosworth Field, where the hated Richard was killed. Henry's pretensions were based on the royal descent of his mother--derived, however, through John of Gaunt's mistress-- and the dynasty which he founded was closely related in origin to the Lancastrian line. Henry of Richmond strengthened his hold upon the crown, though not his title to it, by marrying Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV., thus joining the white rose to the red. He ascended the throne as Henry VII., A. D. 1485; was succeeded by his son, Henry VIII., in 1509, and the latter by his three children, in order as follows: Edward VI., 1547; Mary, 1553; Elizabeth, 1558. The Tudor family became extinct on the death of Queen Elizabeth, in 1603. "They [the Tudors] reigned in England, without a successful rising against them, for upwards of a hundred years; but not more by a studied avoidance of what might so provoke the country, than by the most resolute repression of every effort, on the part of what remained of the peerage and great families, to make head against the throne. They gave free indulgence to their tyranny only within the circle of the court, while they unceasingly watched and conciliated the temper of the people. The work they had to do, and which by more scrupulous means was not possible to be done, was one of paramount necessity; the dynasty uninterruptedly endured for only so long as was requisite to its thorough completion; and to each individual sovereign the particular task might seem to have been specially assigned. It was Henry's to spurn, renounce and utterly cast off, the Pope's authority, without too suddenly revolting the people's usages and habits; to arrive at blessed results by ways that a better man might have held to be accursed; during the momentous change in progress to keep in necessary check both the parties it affected; to persecute with an equal hand the Romanist and the Lutheran; to send the Protestant to the stake for resisting Popery, and the Roman Catholic to the scaffold for not admitting himself to be Pope; while he meantime plundered the monasteries, hunted down and rooted out the priests, alienated the abbey lands, and glutted himself and his creatures with that enormous spoil. It was Edward's to become the ready and undoubting instrument of Cranmer's design, and, with all the inexperience and more than the obstinacy of youth, so to force upon the people his compromise of doctrine and observance, as to render possible, even perhaps unavoidable, his elder sister's reign. It was Mary's to undo the effect of that precipitate eagerness of the Reformers, by lighting the fires of Smithfield; and opportunely to arrest the waverers from Protestantism, by exhibiting in their excess the very worst vices, the cruel bigotry, the hateful intolerance, the spiritual slavery, of Rome. It was Elizabeth's finally and forever to uproot that slavery from amongst us, to champion all over the world a new and nobler faith, and immovably to establish in England the Protestant religion."

_J. Forster, Historical and Biographical Essays, pages 221-222._

ALSO IN: _S. R. Gardiner and J. B. Mullinger, Introduction to the Study of English History, chapter 6._

_C. E. Moberly, The Early Tudors._

{824}

ENGLAND: A. D. 1487-1497. The Rebellions of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

Although Henry VII., soon after he attained the throne, married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV., and thus united the two rival houses, the Yorkists were discontented with his rule. "With the help of Margaret of Burgundy, Edward IV. 's sister, and James IV. of Scotland, they actually set up two impostors, one after the other, to claim the throne. There was a real heir of the House of York still alive--young Edward, Earl of Warwick [son of the Duke of Clarence, brother to Edward IV.], ... and Henry had taken the precaution to keep him in the Tower. But in 1487 a sham Earl of Warwick appeared in Ireland, and being supported by the Earl of Kildare, was actually crowned in Dublin Cathedral. Henry soon put down the imposture by showing the real earl to the people of London, and defeating the army of the pretended earl at Stoke, near Newark, June, 1487. He proved to be a lad named Lambert Simnel, the son of a joiner at Oxford, and he became a scullion in the king's kitchen." In 1492 another pretender of like character was brought forward. "A young man, called Perkin Warbeck, who proved afterwards to be a native of Tournay, pretended that he was Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two little princes in the Tower, and that he had escaped when his brother Edward V. was murdered. He persuaded the king of France and Margaret of Burgundy to acknowledge him, and was not only received at the foreign courts, but, after failing in Ireland, he went to Scotland, where James IV. married him to his own cousin Catharine Gordon, and helped him to invade England in 1496. The invasion was defeated however, by the Earl of Surrey, and then Perkin went back to Ireland, where the people had revolted against the heavy taxes. There he raised an army and marched to Exeter, but meeting the king's troops at Taunton, he lost courage, and fled to the Abbey of Beaulieu, where he was taken prisoner, and sent to the Tower in 1497." In 1501 both Perkin Warbeck and the young Earl of Warwick were executed.

_A. B. Buckley, History of England for Beginners, chapter 13._

ALSO IN: _J. Gairdner, Story of Perkin Warbeck (appendix to Life of Richard III.)._

_C. M, Yonge, Cameos from English History, 3d series, chapters 21 and 24._

_J. Gairdner, Henry VII., chapters 4 and 7._

ENGLAND: 15th-16th Centuries. The Renaissance. Life in "Merry England." Preludes to the Elizabethan Age of literature.

"Toward the close of the fifteenth century ... commerce and the woollen trade made a sudden advance, and such an enormous one that corn-fields were changed into pasture-lands, 'whereby the inhabitants of the said town (Manchester) have gotten and come into riches and wealthy livings,' so that in 1553, 40,000 pieces of cloth were exported in English ships. It was already the England which we see to-day, a land of meadows, green, intersected by hedgerows, crowded with cattle, abounding in ships, a manufacturing, opulent land, with a people of beef-eating toilers, who enrich it while they enrich themselves. They improved agriculture to such an extent, that in half a century the produce of an acre was doubled. They grew so rich, that at the beginning of the reign of Charles I. the Commons represented three times the wealth of the Upper House. The ruin of Antwerp by the Duke of Parma sent to England 'the third part of the merchants and manufacturers, who made silk, damask, stockings, taffetas, and serges.' The defeat of the Armada and the decadence of Spain opened the seas to their merchants. The toiling hive, who would dare, attempt, explore, act in unison, and always with profit, was about to reap its advantages and set out on its voyages, buzzing over the universe. At the base and on the summit of society, in all ranks of life, in all grades of human condition, this new welfare became visible. ... It is not when all is good, but when all is better, that they see the bright side of life, and are tempted to make a holiday of it. This is why at this period they did make a holiday of it, a splendid show, so like a picture that it fostered painting in Italy, so like a representation, that it produced the drama in England. Now that the battle-axe and sword of the civil wars had beaten down the independent nobility, and the abolition of the law of maintenance had destroyed the petty royalty of each great feudal baron, the lords quitted their sombre castles, battlemented fortresses, surrounded by stagnant water, pierced with narrow windows, a sort of stone breast-plates of no use but to preserve the life of their masters. They flock into new palaces, with vaulted roofs and turrets, covered with fantastic and manifold ornaments, adorned with terraces and vast staircases, with gardens, fountains, statues, such as were the palaces of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, half Gothic and half Italian, whose convenience, grandeur, and beauty announced already habits of society and the taste for pleasure. They came to court and abandoned their old manners; the four meals which scarcely sufficed their former voracity were reduced to two; gentlemen soon became refined, placing their glory in the elegance and singularity of their amusements and their clothes. ... To vent the feelings, to satisfy the heart and eyes, to set free boldly on all the roads of existence the pack of appetites and instincts, this was the craving which the manners of the time betrayed. It was 'merry England,' as they called it then. It was not yet stern and constrained. It expanded widely, freely, and rejoiced to find itself so expanded. No longer at court only was the drama found but in the village. Strolling companies betook themselves thither, and the country folk supplied any deficiencies when necessary. Shakspeare saw, before he depicted them, stupid fellows, carpenters, joiners, bellow-menders, play Pyramus and Thisbe, represent the lion roaring as gently as possible, and the wall, by stretching out their hands. Every holiday was a pageant, in which townspeople, workmen, and children bore their parts. ... A few sectarians, chiefly in the towns and of the people, clung gloomily to the Bible. But the court and the men of the world sought their teachers and their heroes from pagan Greece and Rome. About 1490 they began to read the classics; one after the other they translated them; it was soon the fashion to read them in the original. Elizabeth, Jane Grey, the Duchess of Norfolk, the Countess of Arundel, many other ladies, were conversant with Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero in the original, and appreciated them. Gradually, by an insensible change, men were raised to the level of the great and healthy minds who had freely handled ideas of all kinds fifteen centuries ago. They comprehended not only their language, but their thought; they did not repeat lessons from, but held conversations with them; they were their equals, and found in them intellects as manly as their own. ... {825} Across the train of hooded school men and sordid cavillers the two adult and thinking ages were united, and the moderns, silencing the infantine or snuffling voices of the middle-age, condescended only to converse with the noble ancients. They accepted their gods, at least they understand them, and keep them by their side. In poems, festivals, tapestries, almost all ceremonies they appear, not restored by pedantry merely, but kept alive by sympathy, and glorified by the arts of an age as flourishing and almost as profound as that of their earliest birth. After the terrible night of the middle-age, and the dolorous legends of spirits and the damned, it was a delight to see again Olympus shining upon us from Greece; its heroic and beautiful deities once more ravishing the heart of men, they raised and instructed this young world by speaking to it the language of passion and genius; and the age of strong deeds, free sensuality, bold invention, had only to follow its own bent, in order to discover in them the eternal promoters of liberty and beauty. Nearer still was another paganism, that of Italy; the more seductive because more modern, and because it circulates fresh sap in an ancient stock; the more attractive, because more sensuous and present, with its worship of force and genius, of pleasure and voluptuousness. ... At that time Italy clearly led in every thing, and civilisation was to be drawn thence as from its spring. What is this civilisation which is thus imposed on the whole of Europe, whence every science and every elegance comes, whose laws are obeyed in every court, in which Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Shakspeare sought their models and their materials? It was pagan in its elements and its birth; in its language, which is but slightly different from Latin; in its Latin traditions and recollections, which no gap has come to interrupt; in its constitution, whose old municipal life first led and absorbed the feudal life; in the genius of its race, in which energy and enjoyment always abounded."

_H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, book 2, chapter 1 (volume 1)._