Part 341

After this, things went badly with the English, though some years passed before Charles VII. was roused again to any display of capable powers. At last, in 1435, a general conference of all parties in the war was brought about at Arras. The English were offered Normandy and Aquitaine in full sovereignty, but they refused it, and withdrew from the conference when greater concessions were denied to them. The Duke of Burgundy then made terms with King Charles, abandoning the English alliance, and obtaining satisfaction for the murder of his father. Charles was now able, for the first time in his reign, to enter the capital of his kingdom (May, 1436), and it is said that he found it so wasted by a pestilence and so ruined and deserted, that wolves came into the city, and that forty persons were devoured by them in a single week, some two years later.

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Charles now began to show better qualities than had appeared in his character before. He adopted strong measures to suppress the bands of marauders who harassed and wasted the country, and to bring all armed forces in the kingdom under the control and command of the Crown. He began the creation of a disciplined and regulated militia in France. He called into his service the greatest French merchant of the day, Jacques Cœur, who successfully reorganized the finances of the state, and whose reward, after a few years, was to be prosecuted and plundered by malignant courtiers, while the king looked passively on, as he had looked on at the trial and execution of Jeanne d'Arc.

In 1449, a fresh attack upon the English in Normandy was begun; and as civil war—the War of the Roses—was then at the point of outbreak in England, they could make no effective resistance. Within a year, the whole of Normandy had become obedient again to the rule of the king of France. In two years more Guienne had been recovered, and when, in October, 1453, the French king entered Bordeaux, the English had been finally expelled from every foot of the realm except Calais and its near neighborhood. The Hundred Years War was at an end.

England under Edward III.

The century of the Hundred Years War had been, in England, one of few conspicuous events; and when the romantic tale of that war—the last sanguinary romance of expiring Chivalry—is taken out of the English annals of the time, there is not much left that looks interesting on the surface of things. Below the surface there are movements of no little importance to be found.

When Edward III. put forward his claim to the crown of France, and prepared to make it good by force of arms, the English nation had absolutely no interest of its own in the enterprise, from which it could derive no possible advantage, but which did, on the contrary, promise harm to it, very plainly, whatever might be the result. If the king succeeded, his English realm would become a mere minor appendage to a far more imposing continental dominion, and he and his successors might easily acquire a power independent and absolute, over their subjects. If he failed, the humiliation of failure would wound the pride and the prestige of the nation, while its resources would have been drained for naught. But these rational considerations did not suffice to breed any discoverable opposition to King Edward's ambitious undertaking. The Parliament gave sanction to it; most probably the people at large approved, with exultant expectations of national glory; and when Crécy and Poitiers, with victories over the hostile Scots, filled the measure of England's glory to overflowing, they were intoxicated by it, and had little thought then of the cost or the consequences.

But long before Edward's reign came to an end, the splendid pageantries of the war had passed out of sight, and a new generation was looking at, and was suffering from, the miseries and mortifications that came in its train. The attempt to conquer France had failed; the fruits of the victories of Crécy and Poitiers had been lost; even Guienne, which had been English ground since the days of Henry II., was mostly given up. And England was weak from the drain of money and men which the war had caused. The awful plague of the 14th century, the Black Death, had smitten her people hard and left diminished numbers to bear the burden. There had been famine in the land, and grievous distress, and much sorrow.

But the calamities of this bitter time wrought beneficent effects, which no man then living is likely to have clearly understood. By plague, famine and battle, labor was made scarce, wages were raised, the half-enslaved laborer was speedily emancipated, despite the efforts of Parliament to keep him in bonds, and land-owners were forced to let their lands to tenant-farmers, who strengthened the English middle-class. By the demands of the war for money and men, the king was held more in dependence on Parliament than he might otherwise have been, and the plant of constitutional government, which began its growth in the previous century, took deeper root.

In the last years of his life Edward III. lost all of his vigor, and fell under the influence of a woman, Alice Perrers, who wronged and scandalized the nation. The king's eldest son, the Black Prince, was slowly dying of an incurable disease, and took little part in affairs; when he interfered, it seems to have been with some leanings to the popular side. The next in age of the living sons of Edward was a turbulent, proud, self-seeking prince, who gave England much trouble and was hated profoundly. This was John, Duke of Lancaster, called John of Gaunt, or Ghent, because of his birth in that city.

England under Richard II.

The Black Prince, dying in 1376, left a young son, Richard, then ten years old, who was immediately recognized as the heir to the throne, and who succeeded to it in the following year, when Edward III. died. The Duke of Lancaster had been suspected of a design to set Richard aside and claim the crown for himself. But he did not venture the attempt; nor was he able to secure even the regency of the kingdom during the young king's minority. The distrust of him was so general that Parliament and the lords preferred to invest Richard with full sovereignty even in his boyhood. But John of Gaunt, notwithstanding these endeavors to exclude him from any place of authority, contrived to attain a substantial mastery of the government, managing the war in France and the expenditure of public moneys in his own way, and managing them very badly. At least, he was held chiefly responsible for what was bad, and his name was heard oftenest in the mutterings of popular discontent. The peasants were now growing very impatient of the last fetters of villeinage which they wore, and very conscious of their right to complete freedom. Those feelings were strongly stirred in them by a heavy poll-tax which Parliament levied in 1381. The consequence was an outbreak of insurrection, led by one Wat the Tyler, which became formidable and dangerous. The insurgents began by making everybody they encountered swear to be true to King Richard, and to submit to no king named John, meaning John of Gaunt. They increased in numbers and boldness until they entered and took possession of the city of London, where they beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other obnoxious persons; but permitted no thieving to be done. {1041} The day after this occurred, Wat Tyler met the young king at Smithfield, for a conference, and was suddenly killed by one of those who attended the king. The excuse made for the deed was some word of insolence on the part of the insurgent leader; but there is every appearance of a foul act of treachery in the affair. Richard on this occasion behaved boldly and with much presence of mind, acquiring by his courage and readiness a command over the angry rebels, which resulted in their dispersion.

The Wat Tyler rebellion appears to have manifested a more radically democratic state of thinking and feeling among the common people than existed again in England before the seventeenth century. John Ball, a priest, and others who were associated with Wat Tyler in the leadership, preached doctrines of social equality that would nearly have satisfied a Jacobin of the French Revolution.

This temper of political radicalism had no apparent connection with the remarkable religious feeling of the time, which the great reformer, Wyclif, had aroused; yet the two movements of the English mind were undoubtedly started by one and the same revolutionary shock, which it took from the grave alarms and anxieties of the age, and for which it had been prepared by the awakening of the previous century. Wyclif was the first English Puritan, and more of the spirit of the reformation of religion which he sought, than the spirit of Luther's reformation, went into the Protestantism that ultimately took form in England. The movement he stirred was a more wonderful anticipation of the religious revolt of the sixteenth century than any other which occurred in Europe; for that of Huss in Bohemia took its impulse from Wyclif and the English Lollards, as Wyclif's followers were called.

Richard was a weak but wilful king, and the kingdom was kept in trouble by his fitful attempts at independence and arbitrary rule. He made enemies of most of the great lords, and lost the good will and confidence of Parliament. He did what was looked upon as a great wrong to Henry of Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt, by banishing both him and the Duke of Norfolk from the kingdom, when he should have judged between them; and he made the wrong greater by seizing the lands of the Lancastrian house when John of Gaunt died. This caused his ruin. Henry of Bolingbroke, now Duke of Lancaster, came back to England (1399), encouraged by the discontent in the kingdom, and was immediately joined by so many adherents that Richard could offer little resistance. He was deposed by act of Parliament, and the Duke of Lancaster (a grandson of Edward III., as Richard was), was elected to the throne, which he ascended as Henry IV. By judgment of King and Parliament, Richard was presently condemned to imprisonment for life in Pomfret Castle; and, early in the following year, after a conspiracy in his favor had been discovered, he died mysteriously in his prison.

England Under Henry IV.

The reign of Henry IV., which lasted a little more than thirteen years, was troubled by risings and conspiracies, all originating among the nobles, out of causes purely personal or factious, and having no real political significance. But no events in English history are more commonly familiar, or seem to be invested with a higher importance, than the rebellions of Owen Glendower and the Percys,—Northumberland and Harry Hotspur,—simply because Shakespeare has laid his magic upon what otherwise would be a story of little note. Wars with the always hostile Scots supplied other stirring incidents to the record Of the time; but these came to a summary end in 1405, when the crown prince, James, of Scotland, voyaging to France, was driven by foul winds to the English coast and taken prisoner. The prince's father, King Robert, died on hearing the news, and James, the captive, was now entitled to be king. But the English held him for eighteen years, treating him as a guest at their court, rather than as a prisoner, and educating him with care, but withholding him from his kingdom.

To strengthen his precarious seat upon the throne, Henry cultivated the friendship of the Church, and seems to have found this course expedient, even at considerable cost to his popularity. For the attitude of the commons towards the Church during his reign was anything but friendly. They went so far as to pass a bill for the confiscation of Church property, which the Lords rejected; and they seem to have repented of an Act passed early in his reign, under which a cruel persecution of the Lollards was begun. The clergy and the Lords, with the favor of the king, maintained the barbarous law, and England for the first time saw men burned at the stake for heresy.

England Under Henry V. and Henry VI.

Henry IV. died in 1413, and was succeeded by his spirited and able, but too ambitious son, Henry V., the Prince Hal of Shakespeare, who gave up riotous living when called to the grave duties of government and showed himself to be a man of no common mould. The war in France, which he renewed, and the chief events of which have been sketched already, filled up most of his brief reign of nine years. His early death (1422) left two crowns to an infant nine months old. The English crown was not disputed. The French crown, though practically won by conquest, was not permanently secured, but was still to be fought for; and in the end, as we have seen, it was lost. No more need be said of the incidents of the war which had that result.

The infant king was represented in France by his elder uncle, the Duke of Bedford. In England, the government was carried on for him during his minority by a council, in which his younger uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, occupied the chief place, but with powers that were jealously restricted. While the war in France lasted, or during most of the thirty-one years through which it was protracted after Henry V.'s death, it engrossed the English mind and overshadowed domestic interests, so that the time has a meagre history.

Soon after he came of age, Henry VI. married (1444) Margaret of Anjou, daughter of René, Duke of Anjou, who claimed to be King of Naples and Jerusalem. The marriage, which aimed at peace with France, and which had been brought about by the cession to that country of Maine and Anjou, was unpopular in England. Discontent with the feeble management of the war, and with the general weakness and incapability of the government, grew apace, and showed itself, among other exhibitions, in a rebellion (1450) known as Jack Cade's, from the name of an Irishman who got the lead of it. Jack Cade and his followers took possession of London and held it for three days, only yielding at last to an offer of general pardon, after they had beheaded Lord Say, the most obnoxious adviser of the king. A previous mob had taken the head of the Earl of Suffolk, who was detested still more as the contriver of the king's marriage and of the humiliating policy in France.

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The Wars of the Roses.

At length, the Duke of York, representing an elder line of royal descent from Edward III., took the lead of the discontented in the nation, and civil war was imminent in 1452; but pacific counsels prevailed for the moment. The king, who had always been weak-minded, and entirely under the influence of the queen, now sank for a time into a state of complete stupor, and was incapable of any act. The Lords in Parliament thereupon appointed the Duke of York Protector of England, and the government was vigorously conducted by him for a few months, until the king recovered. The queen, and the councillors she favored, now regained their control of affairs, and the opposition took arms.

The long series of fierce struggles between these two parties, which is commonly called the Wars of the Roses, began on the 22d of May, 1455, with a battle at St. Albans—the first of two that were fought on the same ground. At the beginning, it was a contest for the possession of the unfortunate, irresponsible king, and of the royal authority which resided nominally in his person. But it became, ere long, a contest for the crown which Henry wore, and to which the Duke of York denied his right. The Duke traced his ancestry to one son of Edward III., and King Henry to another son. But the Duke's forefather, Lionel, was prior in birth to the King's forefather, John of Gaunt, and, as an original proposition, the House of York was clearly nearer than the House of Lancaster to the royal line which had been interrupted when Richard II. was deposed. The rights of the latter House were such as it had gained prescriptively by half a century of possession.

At one time it was decided by the Lords that Henry should be king until he died, and that the Duke of York and his heirs should succeed him. But Queen Margaret would not yield the rights of her son, and renewed the war. The Duke of York was killed in the next battle fought. His son, Edward, continued the contest, and early in 1461, having taken possession of London, he was declared king by a council of Lords, which formally deposed Henry. The Lancastrians were driven from the kingdom, and Edward held the government with little disturbance for eight years. Then a rupture occurred between him and his most powerful supporter, the Earl of Warwick. Warwick put himself at the head of a rebellion which failed in the first instance, but which finally, when Warwick had joined forces with Queen Margaret, drove Edward to flight. The latter took refuge in the Netherlands (1470), where he received protection and assistance from the Duke of Burgundy, who was his brother-in-law. Henry VI. was now restored to the throne; but for no longer a time than six months. At the end of that period Edward landed again in England, with a small force, professing that he came only to demand his dukedom. As soon as he found himself well received and strongly supported, he threw off the mask, resumed the title of king, and advanced to London, where the citizens gave him welcome. A few days later (April 14, 1471) he went out to meet Warwick and defeated and slew him in the fierce battle of Barnet. One more fight at Tewkesbury, where Queen Margaret was taken prisoner, ended the war. King Henry died, suspiciously, in the Tower, on the very night of his victorious rival's return to London, and Edward IV. had all his enemies under his feet.

England under the House of York.

For a few years England enjoyed peace within her borders, and the material effects of the protracted civil wars were rapidly effaced. Indeed, the greater part of England appears to have been lightly touched by those effects. The people at large had taken little part in the conflict, and had been less disturbed by it, in their industries and in their commerce, than might have been expected. It had been a strife among the great families, enlisting the gentry to a large extent, no doubt, but not the middle class. Hence its chief consequence had been the thinning and weakening of the aristocratic order, which relatively enhanced the political importance of the commons. But the commons were not yet trained to act independently in political affairs. Their rise in power had been through joint action of lords and commons against the Crown, with the former in the lead; they were accustomed to depend on aristocratic guidance, and to lean on aristocratic support. For this reason, they were not only unprepared to take advantage of the great opportunity which now opened to them, for decisively grasping the control of government, but they were unfitted to hold what they had previously won, without the help of the class above them. As a consequence, it was the king who profited by the decimation and impoverishment of the nobles, grasping not only the power which they lost, but the power which the commons lacked skill to use. For a century and a half following the Wars of the Roses, the English monarchy approached more nearly to absolutism than at any other period before or after.

The unsparing confiscations by which Edward IV. and his triumphant party crushed their opponents enriched the Crown for a time and made it independent of parliamentary subsidies. When supply from that source began to fall short, the king invented another. He demeaned himself so far as to solicit gifts from the wealthy merchants of the kingdom, to which he gave the name of "benevolences," and he practiced this system of royal beggary so persistently and effectually that he had no need to call Parliament together. He thus began, in a manner hardly perceived or resisted, the arbitrary and unconstitutional mode of government which his successors carried further, until the nation roused itself and took back its stolen liberties with vengeance and wrath.

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Richard III. and the first of the Tudors.

Edward IV. died in 1483, leaving two young sons, the elder not yet thirteen. Edward's brother, Richard, contrived with amazing ability and unscrupulousness to acquire control of the government, first as Protector, and presently as King. The young princes, confined in the Tower, were murdered there, and Richard III. might have seemed to be secure on his wickedly won throne; for he did not lack popularity, notwithstanding his crimes. But an avenger soon came, in the person of Henry, Earl of Richmond, who claimed the Crown. Henry's claim was not a strong one. Through his mother, he traced his lineage to John of Gaunt, as the Lancastrians had done; but it was the mistress and not the wife of that prince who bore Henry's ancestor. His grandfather was a Welsh chieftain, Sir Owen Tudor, who won the heart of the widowed queen of Henry V., Catherine of France, and married her. But the claim of Henry of Richmond, if a weak one genealogically, sufficed for the overthrow of the red-handed usurper, Richard. Henry, who had been in exile, landed in England in August, 1485, and was quickly joined by large numbers of supporters. Richard hastened to attack them, and was defeated and slain on Bosworth Field. With no more opposition, Henry won the kingdom, and founded, as Henry VII., the Tudor dynasty which held the throne until the death of Elizabeth.

Under that dynasty, the history of England took on a new character, disclosing new tendencies, new impulses, new currents of influence, new promises of the future. We will not enter upon it until we have looked at some prior events in other regions.

Germany.

If we return now to Germany, we take up the thread of events at an interesting point. We parted from the affairs of that troubled country while two rival Emperors, Louis IV., or Ludwig, of Bavaria, and Frederick of Austria, were endeavoring (1325) to settle their dispute in a friendly way, by sharing the throne together. Before noting the result of that chivalric and remarkable compromise, let us glance backward for a moment at the most memorable and important incident of the civil war which led to it.

Birth of the Swiss Confederacy.