Part 23

Under Henry VI, whose power was for some time in the hands of his uncle the Duke of Bedford, the English maintained their footing in France for several years, and at the battle of Verneuil, in 1424, rivaled the glory of Cressy and Poitiers. At that conflict, a body of Scotch, 7000 strong, who had proved of material service to the French, were nearly cut off. In 1428, when France seemed completely sunk beneath the English rule, the interests of the native prince were suddenly revived by a simple maiden, named Joan of Arc, who pretended to have been commissioned by Heaven to save her country; and entering into the French army, was the cause of several signal reverses to the English. By her enthusiastic exertions, and the trust everywhere reposed in her supernatural character, Charles VII was crowned at Rheims in 1430. Being soon after taken prisoner, the heroic maiden was, by the English, condemned for witchcraft, and burnt. Nevertheless, about the year 1453, the French monarch had retrieved the whole of his dominions from the English, with the exception of Calais.

Henry VI was remarkable for the extreme weakness of his character. His cousin, Richard, Duke of York, descended from an elder son of Edward III, and therefore possessed of a superior title to the throne, conceived that Henry’s imbecility afforded a good opportunity for asserting what he thought his birthright. Thus commenced the famous _Wars of the Roses_, as they were called, from the badges of the families of York and Lancaster――the former of which was a white, while the latter was a red rose. In 1454, the duke gained a decisive victory over the forces of Henry, which were led by his spirited consort, Margaret of Anjou. In some succeeding engagements the friends of Henry were victorious; and at length, in the battle of Wakefield (December 24, 1460), the forces of the Duke of York were signally defeated, and himself, with one of his sons, taken and put to death. His pretensions were then taken up by his eldest son Edward, who, with the assistance of the Earl of Warwick, gained such advantages next year, that he assumed the crown. Before this was accomplished, many thousands had fallen on both sides. Henry, who cared little for the pomp of sovereignty, was confined in the Tower.

Scotland, in the meantime (1424), had redeemed her king from his captivity in England; and that prince, styled JAMES I, had proved a great legislator and reformer, not to speak of his personal accomplishments in music and literature, which surpassed those of every cotemporary monarch. James did much to reduce the Highlands to an obedience under the Scottish government, and also to break up the enormous power of the nobles. By these proceedings, however, he excited a deep hatred in the bosoms of some of his subjects; and in 1437 he fell a victim to assassination at Perth. He was succeeded by his infant son, JAMES II, the greater part of whose reign was spent in a harassing contention with the powerful house of Douglas, and who was finally killed, in the flower of his age, by the bursting of a cannon before Roxburgh Castle. His successor, JAMES III, was also a minor, and, on reaching man’s estate, proved to be a weak, though not ill-meaning prince. He fell a victim, in 1488, to a conspiracy formed by his subjects, and which was led by his eldest son. The morality of princes in this age seems to have been much upon a par with that ascribed to the Turkish sovereigns of a later period. They never scrupled to destroy life, either within the circle of their own family, or out of it, when it suited their interests or their ambition to do so.

HOUSE OF YORK.

Edward, of the House of York, styled EDWARD IV, who commenced his reign in the nineteenth year of his age, reigned ten years, perpetually disturbed by renewed attempts of the Lancastrian party, of which he mercilessly sacrificed many thousands who fell into his hands. At length, having offended the Earl of Warwick, who had been chiefly instrumental in placing him upon the throne, that powerful nobleman raised an insurrection against him, and in eleven days was master of the kingdom, while Edward had to take refuge on the continent. Henry VI was then restored, and Warwick acquired the title of King-maker. Nine months after (1471), Edward landed with a small body of followers, and having called his partisans arround him, overthrew and killed Warwick at St. Alban’s. Margaret of Anjou, who had fought battles for her husband in almost every province of England, gathered a new army, and opposed Edward at Tewkesbury Park, where she was completely defeated. Her son and husband being taken, were murdered in cold blood, and she herself spent the remainder of her singular life in France. Edward reigned, a profligate and a tyrant, till 1483, when he died in the forty-second year of his age. He had previously caused his brother, the equally profligate Duke of Clarence, to be drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine.

During the reign of Edward IV, the plague frequently broke out in England, and carried off immense numbers of the people. It was particularly fatal in London, and in all other places where many houses were huddled closely together, with imperfect means of cleaning and ventilation. It was calculated that the disease, on one occasion in this reign, destroyed as many lives as the fifteen years’ war. The plague did not cease to occur in England, as well as in other European countries, until considerable improvements had taken place in the habits of the people, especially in point of cleanliness.

EDWARD V, the eldest son of Edward IV, was a boy of eleven years when he succeeded to the crown. His uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a wicked and deformed wretch, soon after contrived to obtain the chief power, and also to cause the murder of the young king and his still younger brother in the Tower. He then mounted the throne under the title of RICHARD III. For two years, this disgrace to humanity continued to reign, though universally abhorred by his people. At length, in 1485, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, a connexion rather than a descendant of the Lancaster family, resolved to make an attempt upon the English crown. Having landed with about 2000 followers at Milford Haven, he advanced into the country, and speedily gained such accession of force as enabled him to meet and overthrow Richard at Bosworth Field, where the tyrant was slain, and the victorious Richmond was immediately proclaimed king, under the title of HENRY VII. The new monarch soon after sought to strengthen his title by marrying Elizabeth, the daughter and heir of Edward IV, by which it was said the families of York and Lancaster were united.

HOUSE OF TUDOR――HENRY VII.

Under Henry VII the country revived from the evils of a long civil war, in the course of which the chief nobility had been broken down, and the industry and commerce of the land interrupted. It was remarkable, nevertheless, that, during the past period, England was upon the whole an improving country. The evils of war had fallen chiefly on those who made it; the government, however disturbed by various claimants of the throne, was mild and equitable――at least as compared with that of other countries; and the people at large throve under a system in which their own consent, by the voice of the House of Commons, was necessary to the making of every new law, and the laying on of every tax. The reign of Henry VII was much disturbed by insurrections, in consequence of his imperfect title. A baker’s boy, named Lambert Symnel, and a Jew’s son, named Perkin Warbeck, were successively set up by the York party――the one as a son of the late Duke of Clarence, and the other as the younger brother of Edward V, but were both defeated. Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn in 1499; and nearly about the same time, Henry procured, by forms of law, the death of the Earl of Warwick, the real son of the late Duke of Clarence, a poor idiot boy, whom he had kept fifteen years in confinement, and whose title to the throne, being superior to his own, rendered him uneasy.

Henry though a cruel prince, as were most of the sovereigns of his age, was a sagacious and peaceful ruler. He paid great attention to all his affairs, and in some of his acts looked far beyond the present time. For example, by marrying his daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland, he provided for the possibility of the future union of the two crowns. By a law allowing men of property to break entails, he insured the reduction of the great lords, and the increase of the number of small proprietors. His constant policy was to depress the chief nobles, and to elevate the clergy, lawyers, and men of new families, as most likely to be dependent on him. The greatest fault of his character was his excessive love of money, of which he amassed an immense sum. During his reign, Ireland was made more dependent on the English crown by a statute prohibiting any parliament from being held in it until the king should give his consent.

HENRY VIII.

Henry VII died in April 1509, in the fifty-third year of his age. His eldest surviving son and successor, HENRY VIII, was now in his eighteenth year. Young, handsome, and supposed to be amiable, he enjoyed at first a high degree of popularity. Some years before, he had been affianced to Catharine, a Spanish princess, who had previously been the wife of his deceased brother Arthur: he was now married to this lady, the Pope having previously granted a dispensation for that purpose. For many years the reign of Henry was unmarked by any unusual incidents. The chief administration of affairs was committed to a low-born but proud churchman, the celebrated Cardinal Wolsey. The king became much engaged in continental politics; and during a war which he carried on against France, his brother-in-law James IV, who sided with that state, made an unfortunate irruption into the north of England, and was overthrown and slain, with the greater part of his nobility (September 9, 1513), at Flodden.

About this time some changes of great importance to European society took place. Almost ever since the destruction of the Roman Empire, the nations which arose out of it had remained in subjection to the Papal See, which might be said to have inherited the universal sway of that government, but altered from an authority over the bodies of men to an empire over their minds. In the opinion of many, this authority of the Roman Catholic religion had in the course of time become much abused, while the religion itself was corrupted by many superstitious observances. So long as men had continued to be the thoughtless warriors and unlettered peasants which they had been in the middle ages, it is not probable that they would ever have called in question either the authority of the Pope or the purity of the Catholic faith. But, with knowledge, and the rise of a commercial and manufacturing class, came a disposition to inquire into the authority of this great religious empire. The art of printing, discovered about the middle of the preceding century, and which was now rendering literature accessible to most classes of the community, tended greatly to bring about this revolution in European intellect. The minds of men, indeed, seem at this time as if awaking from a long sleep; and it might well have been a question with persons who had reflection, but no experience, whether the change was to turn to evil or to good.

When men’s minds are in a state of preparation for any great change, a very small matter is required to set them in motion. At Wittemberg, in Germany, there was an Augustine monk, named Martin Luther, who became incensed at the Roman see, in consequence of some injury which he conceived to have been done to his order by the Pope having granted the privilege of selling indulgences to the Dominican order of friars. Being a man of a bold and inquiring mind, he did not rest satisfied till he had convinced himself, and many others around him, that the indulgences were sinful, and that the Pope had no right to grant them. This happened about the year 1517. Controversy and persecution gradually extended the views of Luther, till he at length openly disavowed the authority of the Pope, and condemned some of the most important peculiarities of the Catholic system of worship. In these proceedings, Luther was countenanced by some of the states in Germany, and his doctrines were speedily established in the northern countries of Europe.

THE REFORMATION.

Henry VIII, as the second son of his father, had been originally educated for the church, and still retained a taste for theological learning. He now distinguished himself by writing a book against the Lutheran doctrines; and the Pope was so much pleased with it as to grant him the title of _Defender of the Faith_. Henry was not destined, however, to continue long an adherent of the Roman pontiff. In the year 1527, he became enamored of a young gentlewoman named Anne Boleyn, who was one of his wife’s attendants. He immediately conceived the design of annuling his marriage with Catharine, and marrying this younger and more agreeable person. Finding a pretext for such an act in the previous marriage of Catharine to his brother, he attempted to obtain from the Pope a decree, declaring his own marriage unlawful, and that the dispensation upon which it had proceeded was beyond the powers of the former Pope to grant. The pontiff (Clement VII) was much perplexed by this request of King Henry, because he could not accede to it without offending Charles V, Emperor of Germany, one of his best supporters, and the nephew of Queen Catharine, and at the same time humbling the professed powers of the Papacy, which were now trembling under the attacks of Luther.

Henry desired to employ the influence of his minister, Cardinal Wolsey, who had now reached a degree of opulence and pride never before attained by a subject of England. But Wolsey, with all his greatness, could not venture to urge a matter disagreeable to the Pope, who was more his master than King Henry. The process went on for several years, and still his passion for Anne Boleyn continued unabated. Wolsey at length fell under the king’s displeasure for refusing to serve him in this object, was stripped of all his places of power and wealth, and in November 1530, expired at Leicester Abbey, declaring that, if he had served his God as diligently as his king, he would not thus have been given over in his gray hairs. The uncontrollable desire of the king to possess Anne Boleyn, was destined to be the immediate cause of one of the most important changes that ever took place in England――no less than a total reformation of the national religion. In order to annul his marriage with Catharine, and enable him to marry Anne Boleyn, he found it necessary to shake off the authority of the Pope, and procure himself to be acknowledged in Parliament as the supreme head of the English church. His marriage with Anne took place in 1533, and in the same year was born his celebrated daughter Elizabeth.

In 1536, Henry became as anxious to put away Queen Anne as he had ever been to rid himself of Queen Catharine. He had contracted a passion for Jane Seymour, a young lady then of the queen’s bedchamber, as Anne herself had been in that of Catharine. In order to gratify this new passion, he accused Anne of what appears to have been an imaginary frailty, and within a month from the time when she had been an honored queen, she was beheaded (May 19) in the Tower. On the very next day he married Jane Seymour, who soon after died in giving birth to a son (afterwards Edward VI.) His daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were declared illegitimate by act of Parliament, and therefore excluded from the succession.

Hitherto, though professing independence of Rome, Henry still maintained, and even enforced, by severe and bloody laws, the most of its doctrines. He now took measures for altering this system of worship to something nearer the Lutheran model, and also for suppressing the numerous monasteries through the country. Being possessed of more despotic power, and, what is stranger still, of more popularity, than any former sovereign of England, he was able to encounter the dreadful risk of offending by these means a vastly powerful corporation, which seems moreover, to have been regarded with much sincere affection and respect in many parts of England. No fewer than 645 monasteries, 2374 chanteries and chapels, 90 colleges, and 110 hospitals, enjoying altogether a revenue of £161,000, were broken up by this powerful and unscrupulous monarch. He partly seized the revenues for his own use, and partly gave them away to the persons who most actively assisted him and who seemed most able to protect his government from the effects of such a sweeping reform. By this act, which took place in 1537, the Reformation was completed in England. Yet for many years Henry vacillated so much in his opinions, and enforced these with such severe enactments, that many persons of both religions were burnt as heretics. It was in the southern and eastern parts of England, where the commercial class at this time chiefly resided, that the doctrines of the Reformation were most prevalent. In the western and northern parts of the country, Catholicism continued to flourish; and in Ireland, which was remotest of all from the continent, the Protestant faith made little or no impression.

After the death of Jane Seymour, Henry married Anne of Cleves, a German princess, with whose person, however, he was not pleased; and he therefore divorced her by an act of Parliament. He next married Catherine Howard, niece to the Duke of Norfolk; but had not been long united to her when he discovered that she had committed a serious indiscretion before marriage. This was considered a sufficient reason for beheading the unfortunate queen, and attainting all her relations. Though Henry had thus murdered two wives, and divorced other two, and become, moreover, a monster in form as well as in his passions and mind, he succeeded in obtaining for his sixth wife (1543) Catherine Parr, widow of Lord Latimer, who, it is certain, only contrived to escape destruction by her extraordinary prudence. Almost all who ever served Henry VIII as ministers, either to his authority or to his pleasures, were destroyed by him. Wolsey was either driven to suicide, or died of a broken heart. Thomas Cromwell, who succeeded that minister, and chiefly aided the king in bringing about the Reformation――Sir Thomas More, lord chancellor, the most virtuous, most able and most consistent man of his time――the Earl of Surrey, who was one of the most accomplished knights of the age, and the first poet who wrote the English language with perfect taste――all suffered the same fate with Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

When James IV died at Flodden, in 1513, the Scottish crown fell to his infant son JAMES V, who struggled through a turbulent minority, and was now a gay, and, upon the whole, an amiable prince. His uncle, Henry VIII, endeavored to bring him into his views respecting religion; but James, who was much in the power of the Catholic clergy, appears to have wished to become the head of the Popish party in England, in the hope of succeeding, by their means, to the throne of that country. A war latterly broke out between the two monarchs, and the Scottish army having refused to fight, from a dislike to the expedition, James died (December 1542) of a broken heart, leaving an only child, MARY, who was not above a week old. Henry immediately conceived the idea of marrying his son Edward to this infant queen, by which he calculated that two hostile nations should be united under one sovereignty, and the Protestant church in England be supported by a similar establishment in Scotland. This project, however, was resisted by the Scots, of whom very few as yet were inclined to the Protestant doctrines. Henry, enraged at their hesitation, sent a fleet and army, in 1544, to inflict vengeance upon them. The Scots endured with great patience the burning of their capital city, and many other devastations, but still refused the match. The government of Scotland was now chiefly in the hands of Cardinal Beaton, a man of bold and decisive intellect, who zealously applied himself to suppress the reforming preachers, and regarded the English match as likely to bring about the destruction of the Catholic religion.

EDWARD VI――QUEEN MARY.

Henry died, January 28, 1547, leaving the throne to his only son, a boy of ten years of age, who was immediately proclaimed king under the title of EDWARD VI. The Duke of Somerset, maternal uncle to the young king, became supreme ruler under the title of Protector, and continued to maintain the Protestant doctrines. Under this reign, the church of England assumed its present form, and the Book of Common Prayer was composed nearly as it now exists. Somerset being resolved to effect, if possible, the match between Edward VI and Mary of Scotland, invaded that country in the autumn of 1547, and was met at Musselburgh by a large army under the governor, the Earl of Arran. Though the Scotch were animated by bitter animosity against the English, against their religion, and against the object of their expedition, they did not fight with their usual resolution, but were defeated, and pursued with great slaughter. Finding them still obstinate in refusing to give up their queen, Somerset laid waste a great part of the country, and then retired. Previous to this period, Cardinal Beaton had been assassinated by private enemies; but the Scotch were encouraged to persevere by the court of France, to which they now sent the young queen for protection.