The Project Gutenberg eBook, A History of England, by Charles Oman

A
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

BY
CHARLES OMAN,

FELLOW OF ALL SOULS' COLLEGE,
AND DEPUTY-PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD;

AUTHOR OF
"WARWICK THE KINGMAKER;" "ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY;
"A HISTORY OF GREECE;" "THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES;"
"THE HISTORY OF THE PENINSULAR WAR," ETC.

ELEVENTH EDITION.

LONDON:
EDWARD ARNOLD.
1904.

PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.

Pg iii

PREFACE

When adding one more to the numerous histories of England which have appeared of late years, the author feels that he must justify his conduct. Ten years of teaching in the Honour School of Modern History in the University of Oxford have convinced him that there may still be room for a single-volume history of moderate compass, which neither cramps the earlier annals of our island into a few pages, nor expands the last two centuries into unmanageable bulk. He trusts that his book may be useful to the higher forms of schools, and for the pass examinations of the Universities. The kindly reception which his History of Greece has met both here and in America, leads him to hope that a volume constructed on the same scale and the same lines may be not less fortunate.

He has to explain one or two points which may lead to criticism. In Old-English names he has followed the correct and original forms, save in some few cases, such as Edward and Alfred, where a close adherence to correctness might savour of pedantry. He wishes the maps to be taken, not as superseding the use of an atlas, but as giving boundaries, local details, and sites in which many atlases will be found wanting.

Finally, he has to give his best thanks to friends who Pg iv were good enough to correct certain sections of the book—especially to Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls' College, Mr. C. H. Turner of Magdalen College, and Mr. F. Haverfield of Christ Church. But most of all does he owe gratitude to the indefatigable compiler of the Index, whose hands made a burden into a pleasure.

Oxford,
January 25, 1895.

The fact that this book has passed through nine editions in seven years seems to show that it was not altogether written in vain, and has answered the purpose for which it was written.

The first edition carried the history of Great Britain to the year 1885. I have now prolonged it to the year 1902. The termination of the long reign of Queen Victoria, the end of the century, and the long-delayed pacification of South Africa, appeared to provide landmarks to which the narrative ought to be extended.

I have to thank many kind correspondents for corrections and suggestions made during the last seven years. They will note that their hints have not been neglected. A special word of thanks is due to the Rev. A. Beaven of Leamington, for a very copious and useful list of corrigenda, of which I have made full use.

Oxford,
September 15, 1902.

Pg v

CONTENTS.

Pg vii

Pg viii

Pg 1

A HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

In the dim dawn of history our island was a land of wood and marsh, broken here and there by patches of open ground, and pierced by occasional track-ways, which threaded the forest and circled round the edges of the impassable fen. The inhabited districts of the country were not the fertile river-bottoms where population grew thick in after-days; these were in primitive times nothing but sedgy water-meadows or matted thickets. Men dwelt rather on the thinly wooded upland, where, if the soil was poor, it was at any rate free from the tangled undergrowth that covered the valleys. It was on the chalk ridges of Kent or Wilts, or the moorland hills of Yorkshire or Cornwall, rather than on the brink of the Thames or Severn, that the British tribes clustered thick. Down by the rivers there were but small settlements of hunters and fishers perched on some knoll that rose above the brake and the rushes.

The earliest explorers from the south, who described the inhabitants of Britain, seem to have noticed little difference between one wild tribe and another. But as a matter of fact the islanders were divided into two or perhaps three distinct races, who had passed westward into our island at very different dates. First had come a short dark people, who knew not the use of metals, and wielded weapons of flint and bone. They were in the lowest grade of savagery, had not even learnt to till Pg 2 the soil, and lived by fishing and hunting. They dwelt in rude huts, or even in the caves from which they had driven out the bear and the wolf.

Long after these primitive settlers, the first wave of the Celts, seven or eight centuries before Christ, came flooding all over Western Europe, and drove the earlier races into nooks and corners of the earth. They crossed over into Britain after overrunning the lands on the other side of the Channel, and gradually conquered the whole island, as well as its neighbour, Erin. The Celts came in two waves; the first, composed of the people who were called Gael, seem to have appeared many generations before the second, who bore the name of Britons.

The Gael are the ancestors of the people of Ireland and the Scotch Highlands, while the Britons occupied the greater part of England and Wales, and are the progenitors of the Welsh of to-day. The old savage race who held the islands before the Celts appeared, were partly exterminated and partly absorbed by the new-comers. The Celts on the eastern side of the island remained unmixed with their predecessors; but into the mountainous districts of the west they penetrated in less numbers, and there the ancient inhabitants were not slain off, but became the serfs of their conquerors. Thus the eastern shore of Britain became a purely Celtic land; but in the districts along the shore of the Irish Sea, where the Gael bore rule, the blood of the earlier race remained, and the population was largely non-Celtic. There are to this day regions where the survival of the ancient inhabitants can be traced by the preponderance of short stature and dark hair among the inhabitants. Many such are to be found both in South Wales and in the Highlands of Scotland. The Gael, therefore, were of much less pure blood than the later-coming Britons.

The Britons and their Gaelic kinsmen, though far above the degraded tribes whom they had supplanted, still showed many signs of savagery. They practised horrid rites of human sacrifice, in which they burnt captives alive to their gods, cramming them into huge images of wicker-work. But the barbarous practice which most astonished the ancient world was their custom of marking themselves with bright blue patterns painted with the dye of woad, and this led the Romans to give Pg 3 the northern tribes, who retained the custom longest, the name of the Picti, or "painted men."

GAEL AND BRITON.

The Celts were a tall, robust, fair-haired race, who had reached a certain stage of civilization. They tilled the fields and sailed the seas, but their chief wealth consisted in great herds of cattle, which they pastured in the forest-clearings which then constituted inhabited Britain. They wore armour of bronze, and used brazen weapons, to which in a later time they added iron weapons also. They delighted to adorn their persons with "torques" or necklaces of twisted gold. Their chiefs went out to war in chariots drawn by small shaggy horses, but alighted, like the ancient Greeks of the Heroic Age, when the hand-to-hand fighting began.

Like all Celtic tribes in all ages, the Britons and the Gael showed small capacity for union. They dwelt apart in many separate tribes, though sometimes a great and warlike chief would compel one or two of his neighbours to do him homage. Pg 4 But such kingdoms usually fell to pieces at the death of the warrior who had built them up. After the kings and chiefs, the most important class among the Celts was that of the Druids, a caste of priests and soothsayers, who possessed great influence over the people. They it was who kept up the barbarous sacrifices which we have already mentioned. Although tribal wars were incessant, yet the Britons had learnt some of the arts of peace, and traded with each other and with the Celts across the Channel. For the tin of Cornwall it would seem that they made barter with the adventurous traders who pushed their way across Gaul from the distant Mediterranean to buy that metal, which was very rare in the ancient world. The Britons used money of gold and of tin, on which they stamped a barbarous copy of the devices on the coins of Philip, the great King of Macedonia, whose gold pieces found their way in the course of trade even to the shores of the Channel. The fact that they had discovered the advantages of a coinage proves sufficiently that they were no longer mere savages.

We have no materials for constructing a history of the ancient Celtic inhabitants of Britain till the middle of the first century before Christ, when the great Roman conqueror, Julius Cæsar, who had just subdued northern Gaul, determined to cross the straits and invade Britain. He wished to strike terror into its inhabitants, for the tribes south of the Thames were closely connected with their kinsmen on the other side of the Channel, and he suspected them of stirring up trouble among the Gauls. Cæsar took over two legions and disembarked near Romney (B.C. 55). The natives thronged down to the shore to oppose him, but his veterans plunged into the shallows, fought their way to land, and beat the Britons back into the interior. He found, however, that the land would not be an easy conquest, for all the tribes of the south turned out in arms against him. Therefore he took his legions back to Gaul as the autumn drew on, vowing to return in the next year.

In B.C. 54 he brought over an army twice as large as his first expedition, and boldly pushed into the interior. Cassivelaunus, the greatest chief of eastern Britain, roused a confederacy of tribes against him; but Cæsar forced the passage of the Thames, and burnt the great stockaded village in the woods beyond that river, where his enemy dwelt. Many of the neighbouring Pg 5 princes then did him homage; but troubles in Gaul called him home again, and he left the island, taking with him naught save a few hostages and a vague promise of tribute and submission from the kings of Kent.

Nearly a hundred years passed before Britain was to see another Roman army. The successors of Julius Cæsar left the island to itself, and it was only by peaceful commerce with the provinces of Gaul that the Britons learnt to know of the great empire that had come to be their neighbour. But there grew up a considerable intercourse between Britain and the continent: the Roman traders came over to sell the luxuries of the South to the islanders, and British kings more than once visited Rome to implore the aid of the emperor against their domestic enemies.

But such aid was not granted, and the island, though perceptibly influenced by Roman civilization, was for long years not touched by the Roman sword. At last, in A.D. 43, Claudius Cæsar resolved to subdue the Britons. The island was in its usual state of disorder, after the death of a great king named Cunobelinus—Shakespeare's "Cymbeline"—who had held down south-eastern Britain in comparative quiet and prosperity for many years. Some of the chiefs who fared ill in the civil wars asked Claudius to restore them, and he resolved to make their petition an excuse for conquering the island. Accordingly his general, Aulus Plautius, crossed the Channel, and overran Kent and the neighbouring districts in a few weeks. So easy was the conquest that the unwarlike emperor himself ventured over to Britain, and saw his armies cross the Thames, and occupy Camulodunum (Colchester), which had been the capital of King Cymbeline, and now was made a Roman colony, and re-named after Claudius himself.

The emperor returned to Rome after sixteen days spent in the island, there to build himself a memorial arch, and to celebrate a triumph in full form for the conquest of Britain. Aulus Plautius remained behind with four legions, and completed the subjection of the lands which lie between the Wash and Southampton Water, and thus formed the first Roman province in the island. There does not seem to have been very much serious fighting required to reduce the tribes of south-eastern Britain; the conquerors Pg 6 consented to accept as their vassals those chiefs who chose to do homage, and only used their arms against such tribes as refused to acknowledge the emperor's suzerainty.

Under successive governors the size of the province of Britain continued to grow, till in the reign of Nero it had advanced up to the line of the Severn and Humber, and included all the central and southern counties of modern England. But the wild tribes of the Welsh mountains and the Yorkshire moors opposed a determined resistance to the conquerors, and did not yield till a much later date. While the governor Suetonius Paulinus was engaged in a campaign on the Menai Straits, against the tribe of the Ordovices, there burst out behind him the celebrated rebellion of Queen Boudicca (Boadicea). This rising began among the Iceni, the tribe who dwelt in what is now Norfolk and Suffolk. They had long been governed by a vassal king; but when he died sonless, the Romans annexed his dominions and cruelly ill-treated his widow Boudicca and her daughters. Bleeding from the Roman rods, the indignant queen called her tribesmen to arms, and massacred all the Romans within her reach. All the tribes of eastern Britain rose to aid her, and the rebels cut to pieces the Ninth Legion, and sacked the three towns of Londinium, Verulamium, and Camulodunum, [1] slaying, it is said, as many as 70,000 persons in their wild cruelty. But presently the governor Paulinus returned from his campaign in Wales at the head of his army, and in a great battle defeated and destroyed the British hordes. Boudicca, who had led them to the field in person, slew herself when she saw the battle lost (A.D. 61).

Southern Britain never rose again, but the Romans had great trouble in conquering the Silurians and Ordovices of Wales, and the Brigantes beyond the Humber. They were finally subdued by the great general Agricola, who governed the British province from 78 to 85. This good man was the father-in-law of the historian Tacitus, who wrote his life—a document from which great part of our knowledge of Roman Britain is derived. After conquering North-Wales and Yorkshire, Agricola marched northward against the Gaelic tribes of Scotland. He overran the Lowlands, and then pushed forward into the hills of the Highlands. Pg 7 At a spot called the Graupian Mountain (Mons Graupius) somewhere in Perthshire, he defeated the Caledonians, the fierce race who dwelt beyond the Forth and Clyde, with great slaughter. It was his purpose to conquer the whole island to its northernmost cape, and even to subdue the neighbouring Gaels of Ireland. But ere his task was complete the cruel and suspicious emperor Domitian called him home, because he envied and feared his military talents.

The province of Britain remained very much as Agricola had left it, stopping short at the Forth, and leaving the Scottish Highlands outside the Roman pale. It was held down by three Roman legions, each of whom watched one of the three most unruly of the British tribes; one at Eboracum (York) curbed the Brigantes; a second at Deva (Chester) observed the Ordovices; and a third at Isca (Caerleon-on-Usk) was responsible for the good behaviour of the Silurians.

Agricola did much to make the Roman rule more palatable to the Britons by his wise ordinances for the government of the province. He tried to persuade the Celtic chiefs to learn Latin, and to take to civilized ways of life, as their kinsmen in Gaul had done. He kept the land so safe and well guarded that thousands of settlers from the continent came to dwell in its towns. His efforts won much success, and for the future, southern Britain was a very quiet province.

But the Caledonians to the north retained their independence, and often raided into the Lowlands, while the Brigantes of Yorkshire still kept rising in rebellion, and once in the reign of Hadrian massacred the whole legion that garrisoned York. It was perhaps this disaster that drew Hadrian himself to Britain in the course of his never-ending travels. The emperor journeyed across the isle, and resolved to fix the Roman boundary on a line traced across the Northumbrian moors from Carlisle to Newcastle. There was erected the celebrated "Wall of Hadrian," a solid stone wall drawn in front of the boundary-ditch that marked the old frontier, and furnished with forts at convenient intervals. This enormous work, eighty miles long, reached from sea to sea, and was garrisoned by a number of "auxiliary cohorts," or regiments drawn from the subject tribes of the empire—Moors, Spaniards, Thracians, and many more—for the Romans did not trust Pg 8 British troops to hold the frontier against their own untamed kinsmen. The legion at York remained behind to support the garrison of the wall in case of necessity.

A few years later the continued trouble which the northern parts of Britain suffered from the raids of the Caledonians, caused the governors of the province to build another wall in advance of that of Hadrian. This outer line of defence, a less solid work than that which ran from Newcastle to Carlisle, was composed of a trench, and an earthern wall of sods, drawn from the mouth of the Forth to the mouth of the Clyde, at the narrowest part of the island. It is generally called the Wall of Antoninus, from the name of the emperor who was reigning when it was erected.

Only once more did the Romans make any endeavour to complete the subjection of Britain by adding the Gaelic tribes of the Scottish Highlands to the list of their tributaries. In 208-9-10 the warlike emperor Severus led the legions north of the Wall of Antoninus, and set to work to tame the Caledonians by felling their forests, building roads across their hills, and erecting forts among them. He overran the land beyond the Firth of Forth, and might perchance have ended by conquering the whole island, but he died of disease at York early in 211. His successors drew back, abandoned his conquests, and never attempted again to subjugate the Caledonians.

Altogether the Romans abode in Britain for three hundred and sixty years (A.D. 43 to A.D. 410). Their occupation of the land was mainly a military one, and they never succeeded in teaching the mass of the natives to abandon their Celtic tongue, or to take up Roman customs and habits. The towns indeed were Romanized, and great military centres like Eboracum and Deva, or commercial centres like London, were filled with a Latin-speaking population, and boasted of fine temples, baths, and public buildings. But the villagers of the open country, and the Celtic landholders who dwelt among them, were very little influenced by the civilization of the town-dwellers, and lived on by themselves much in the way of their ancestors, worshipping the same Celtic gods, using the same rude tools and vessels, and dwelling in the same low clay huts, though the townsmen were Pg 10 accustomed to build stone houses after the Roman fashion, to employ all manner of foreign luxuries, and to translate into Minerva, or Apollo, or Mars, the names of their old Celtic deities Sul, or Mabon, or Belucatadrus.

ROMAN BRITAIN
Showing the
CHIEF ROMAN ROADS.

The Romans greatly changed the face of Britain by their great engineering works. They drew broad roads from place to place, seldom turning aside to avoid forest or river. Their solidly-built causeways were carried across the marshy tracts, and pierced through the midst of the densest woods. Where the road went, clearings on each side were made, and population sprang up in what had hitherto been trackless wilderness. The Romans explored the remotest corners of Wales and Cornwall in their search after mineral wealth; they worked many tin, lead, and copper mines in the island, and exported the ores to Gaul and Italy. They developed the fisheries of Britain, especially the oyster fishery; not only did they prize British pearls, but the oysters themselves were exported as a special luxury to the distant capital of the world. They improved the farming of the open country so much that in years of scarcity the corn of Britain fed northern Gaul. In the more pleasant corners of the land Roman officials or wealthy merchants built themselves fine villas, with floors of mosaic, and elaborate heating-apparatus to guard them against the cold of the northern winter. Hundreds of such abodes are to be found: they clustered especially thick along the south coast and in the vale of Gloucester.

Gauls, Italians, Greeks, and Orientals came to share in the trade of Britain, and at the same time many of its natives must have crossed to the continent, notably those who were sent to serve in the auxiliary cohorts of Britons, which formed part of the Roman army, and were quartered on the Rhine and Danube. But in spite of all this intercourse, the Celts did not become Romanized like the Gauls or Spaniards; the survival of their native tongue to this day sufficiently proves it. In all the other provinces of the West, Latin completely extinguished the old native languages. In the towns, however, the Britons often took Roman names, and men of note in the countryside did the same. Many of the commonest Welsh names of to-day are corrupt forms of Latin names: Owen, for example, is a degradation from Eugenius, and Rhys Pg 11 from Ambrosius, though they have lost so entirely the shape of their ancient originals.

Britain shared with the other provinces in the disasters which fell upon the empire in the third century, in the days of the weak usurpers who held the imperial throne after the extinction of the family of Severus. Three races are recorded as having troubled the land: the first was the ancient enemy, the Caledonians from beyond the wall, whom now the Chronicles generally style Picts, "the painted men," because they alone of the inhabitants of Britain still retained the barbarous habit of tattooing themselves. The second foe was the race of the Saxons, the German tribes who dwelt by the mouths of the Elbe and Weser. They were great marauders by sea, and so vexed the east of Britain by their descents that the emperors created an officer called "The Count of the Saxon Shore," [2] whose duty was to guard the coast from the Wash as far as Beachy Head by a chain of castles on the water's edge, and a flotilla of war-galleys. The third enemy was the Scottish race, a tribe who then occupied northern Ireland, and had not yet moved across to the land which now bears their name. They infested the shores of the province which lay between the Clyde and the Severn.

Attacked at once by Pict and Scot and Saxon, the province declined in prosperity, and gained little help from the continent where emperors were being made and remade at the rate of about one every three years. Britain seems to have first recovered herself in the time of Carausius, a "Count of the Saxon Shore," who proclaimed himself emperor, and reigned as an independent sovereign on our side of the Channel (287). His fleet drove off the Saxons, and his armies held back the Pict and Scot as long as he lived. But after a reign of seven years the rebel emperor was murdered, and three years later the province was reunited to the empire.

For the next twenty years Britain was under the rule of the emperors Constantius and Constantine, both of whom dwelt much in the island, and paid attention to its needs. Constantius died at York, and his son, Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, went forth from Britain to conquer all the Roman world. But with Pg 12 the extinction of this great man's family in 362, evil days began once more. Barbarians were thronging round every frontier of the empire, greedy for the plunder of its great cities, while within were weak rulers, vexed by constant military rebellions. The Pict, the Scot, and the Saxon returned to Britain in greater force than before, and pushed their raids into the very heart of the province. Meanwhile, the soldiery who should have defended the island were constantly being drawn away by ambitious generals, who wished to use them in attempts to seize Italy, and win the imperial diadem. The ruin of Britain must be attributed to this cause more than to any other: twice the whole of its garrison was taken across the Channel by the rebellious governors, who had staked their all on the cast for empire. It was after the second of these rebels had failed, in 410, that the feeble Honorius, the legitimate emperor of the West, refused to send back any troops to guard the unprotected island, and bade the dismayed provincials do their best to defend themselves, because he was unable to give them any assistance.

Britain therefore ceased to belong to the Roman empire, not because it wished to throw off the yoke, but because its masters declared that they could no longer protect it. Its inhabitants were by no means anxious to shift for themselves, and more than once they sent pathetic appeals to Rome to ask for aid against the savage Picts and Saxons. One of these appeals was written more than thirty years after Honorius abandoned the province. It was called "The Groans of the Britons," and ran thus: "The barbarians drive us into the sea, the sea drives us back on to the barbarians. Our only choice is whether we shall die by the sword or drown: for we have none to save us" (446).

In spite of these doleful complaints, Britain made a better fight against her invaders than did any other of the provinces which the Romans were constrained to abandon in the fifth century. But, unfortunately for themselves, the Britons were inspired by the usual Celtic spirit of disunion, and fell asunder into many states the moment that the hand of the master was removed. Sometimes they combined under a single leader, when the stress of invasion was unusually severe, but such leagues were precarious and temporary. The list of their Pg 13 princes shows that some of them were Romanized Britons, others pure Celts. By the side of names like Ambrosius, Constantine, Aurelius, Gerontius, Paternus, we have others like Vortigern, Cunedda, Maelgwn, and Kynan. Arthur, the legendary chief under whom the Britons are said to have turned back the Saxon invaders for a time, was—if he ever existed—the bearer of a Roman name, a corruption of Artorius. But Arthur's name and exploits are only found in romantic tales; the few historians of the time have no mention of him.

Celtic Britain, when the Romans abandoned it, had become a Christian country. Of the details of conversion of the land, we have only a few stories of doubtful authenticity; but we know that British bishops existed, and attended synods and councils on the continent, and that there were many churches scattered over the face of the land. The Britons were even beginning to send missionaries across the sea in the fifth century. St. Patrick, the apostle of the Irish Gael, was a native of the northern part of Roman Britain, who had been stolen as a slave by Scottish pirates, and returned after his release to preach the gospel to them, somewhere about the year 440. His name (Patricius) clearly shows that he was a Romanized Briton. A less happy product of the island was the heretical preacher Pelagius, whose doctrines spread far over all Western Europe, and roused the anger of the great African saint, Augustine of Hippo.

Here we must leave Celtic Britain, as the darkness of the fifth century closes over it. For a hundred and fifty years our knowledge of its history is most vague and fragmentary, and when next we see the island clearly, the larger half of it has passed into the hands of a new people, and is called England, and no longer Britain.

Pg 14

In the early half of the fifth century it seemed likely that Britain would become the prey of its old enemies the Picts and Scots, rather than of the more distant Saxons. But the wild tribes of the North came to plunder only, while the pirates from the Elbe and Eider had larger designs.

The conquest of Britain by the Angles and Saxons differed in every way from that of the other Western provinces of the Roman empire by the kindred tribes of the Goths, the Franks, and the Lombards. The Goths and the Franks had dwelt for two hundred years on the borders of the empire; they had traded with its merchants, served as mercenaries in its armies, and learnt to appreciate its luxuries. Many of them had accepted Christianity long before their conquest of the provinces which they turned into Teutonic kingdoms. But the Saxons were plunged in the blackest heathendom and barbarism, dwelling as they did by the Elbe and Eider, far at the back of the tribes that had any touch with or knowledge of the empire and its civilization. The Goth and the Frank came to enslave, and to enjoy; the Angle and the Saxon were bent purely on a work of destruction. Hence it came that, instead of contenting themselves with overthrowing the provincial government, and enthralling the inhabitants of the land, they swept away everything before them, and replaced the old civilization of Britain by a perfectly new social organization of their own.

If the Welsh legends speak truly, the first settlement of the Saxons on British soil was caused by the unwisdom of the native kings. We are told that Vortigern, the monarch who ruled Kent and south-eastern Britain, was so harried by the Picts and Scots that he sent in despair to hire some German chiefs to fight his battles for him. The story may be true, for in the decaying days of the Roman empire the Pg 15 Cæsars themselves had often hired one barbarian to fight another, and the British king may well have followed their example. The legend then proceeds to tell how Vortigern's invitation was accepted by Hengist and Horsa, two chiefs of Jutish blood, who came with their war-bands to the aid of the Britons, and drove away the Picts and Scots. But when the king of Kent wished to pay them their due and get them out of the country, Hengist and Horsa refused to depart: they seized and fortified the Isle of Thanet, which was then separated from the mainland by a broad marshy channel, and defied the Britons to drive them away (449). Then began a long war between the two sea-kings and their late employer, which, after many vicissitudes, ended in the conquest of the whole of Kent by Hengist. Horsa had been slain in the battle of Aylesford, which gave the invaders full possession of the land between the forest of the Weald and the estuary of the Thames. Hengist was saluted as king by his victorious followers, and was the ancestor of a long line of Kentish monarchs.

We cannot be sure that the details of the story of the conquest of Kent are correct, but they are not unlikely, and it is quite probable that this kingdom was the first state which the Germans built up on British ground.

Hengist and Horsa's warriors were not Saxons, but members of the tribe of the Jutes, who dwelt north of the Saxons in the Danish peninsula, where a land of moors and lakes still bears the name of Jutland. But the next band of invaders who seized on part of Britain were of Saxon blood. An "alderman" or chief called Aella brought his war-band to the southern shore of Britain in 477, and landed near the great fortress of Anderida (Pevensey), one of the strongholds that had, in old days, been under the care of the Roman "count of the Saxon shore." The followers of Aella sacked this town, and slew off every living thing that was therein. They went on to conquer the narrow slip of land between the sea and the forest of the Weald, as far as Chichester and Selsea, and made the chalky downs their own. Settling down thereon, they called themselves the South Saxons, and the district got from them the name of Sussex (Suth Seaxe). There Aella reigned as king, and many of his obscure descendants after him.

Pg 16

Twenty years later, another band of Saxon adventurers, led by the alderman Cerdic, landed on Southampton Water, west of the realm of Aella (495), and, after a hard fight with the Britons, won the valleys of the Itchen and the Test with the old Roman town of Venta (Winchester). Many years after his first landing, Cerdic took the title of king, like his neighbours of Kent and Sussex, and his realm became known as the land of the West Saxons (Wessex). Gradually pushing onward along the ridges of the downs, successive generations of the kings of Wessex drove the Britons out of Dorsetshire and Wiltshire till the line of conquest stopped at the forest-belt which lay east of Bath. Here the advance stood still for a time, for the British kings of the Damnonians, the tribes of Devon and Cornwall, made a most obstinate defence. So gallant was it that the Celts of a later generation believed that the legendary hero of their race, the great King Arthur, had headed the hosts of Damnonia in person, and placed his city of Camelot and his grave at Avilion within the compass of the western realm.

While Cerdic was winning the downs of Hampshire for himself, another band of Saxon warriors had landed on the northern shore of the Thames, and subdued the low-lying country between the old Roman towns of Camulodunum and Londinium, from the Colne as far as the Stour. This troop of adventurers took the name of the East Saxons, and were the last of their race to gain a footing on the British shores.

North of Essex it was no longer the Saxons who took up the task of conquest, but a kindred tribe, the Angles or English, who dwelt originally between the Saxons and the Jutes, in the district which is now called Schleswig. They were closely allied in blood and language to the earlier invaders of Britain, and very probably their chiefs may have aided in the earlier raids. About the year 520 the Angles descended in force on the eastern shore of Britain, and two of their war-bands established themselves in the land where the Celtic tribe of the Iceni had dwelt. These two bands called themselves the North Folk and South Folk, and from them the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk get Pg 17 their names. The kingdom formed by their union was known as that of the East Angles.

Still further to the north new Anglian bands seized on the lands north of the Humber, whence they obtained the name of Northumbrians. They built up two kingdoms in the old region of the Brigantes. One, from Forth to Tees, was called Bernicia, from Bryneich, the old Celtic name of the district. It comprised only a strip along the shore, reaching no further inland than the forest of Selkirk and the head-waters of the Tyne; its central stronghold was the sea-girt rock of Bamborough. The second Northumbrian kingdom was called Deira, a name derived, like that of Bernicia, from the former Celtic appellation of the land. Deira comprised the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, and centred round the old Roman city of Eboracum, whose name the Angles corrupted into Eofervic. The origin of Bernicia and Deira is ascribed to the years 547-550, so that northern Britain was not subdued by the invaders till a century after Kent had fallen into their hands.

Last of the English realms was established the great midland state of Mercia—the "March" or borderland. It was formed by the combination of three or four Anglian war-bands, who must have cut their way into the heart of Britain up the line of the Trent. Among these bodies of adventurers were the Lindiswaras—the troop who had won the old Roman city of Lindum, or Lincoln,—the Mid-Angles of Leicester, and the Mercians strictly so-called, who held the foremost line of advance against the Celts in the modern counties of Derby and Stafford. The Britons still maintained themselves at Deva and Uriconium (Chester and Wroxeter), two ancient Roman strongholds, and the Mercians had not yet reached the Severn at any point.

About 570, therefore, after a hundred and twenty years of hard fighting, the Angles and Saxons had conquered about one-half of Britain, but they were stopped by a line of hills and forests running down the centre of the island, and did not yet touch the western sea at any point. Behind this barrier dwelt the unsubdued Britons, who were styled by the English the "Welsh," or "foreigners," though they called themselves the Kymry, or "comrades." They were, now Pg 18 as always, divided into several kingdoms whose chiefs were perpetually at war, and failed most lamentably to support each other against the English invader. The most important of these kingdoms were Cumbria in the north, between the Clyde and Ribble, Gwynedd in North Wales, and Damnonia in Devon and Cornwall. Now and again prominent chiefs from one or other of these three realms succeeded in forcing their neighbours to combine against the Saxon enemy, and styled themselves lords of all the Britons, but the title was precarious and illusory. The Celts could never learn union or wisdom.

LIMIT OF THE ENGLISH CONQUESTS,
About A.D. 570.

The line of the British defence was at last broken in two points, and the Saxons and Angles pushed through till they touched the Irish Sea and the Bristol Channel. The first of the conquerors of Western Britain was Ceawlin, king of Wessex. After winning the southern midlands by a victory at Bedford in 571 he pushed along the upper Thames, and attacked the Welsh of the lower Severn. At a great battle fought at Deorham, in Gloucestershire, in 577, he slew the kings of Glevum, Corinium, and Aquae Sulis (Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath). All their realms fell into his hands, Pg 19 and so the West Saxons won their way to the Severn and the Bristol Channel, and cut off the Celts of Damnonia from the Celts of South Wales.

A generation later, in the year 613, Aethelfrith the Northumbrian, king of Bernicia and Deira, made a similar advance westward. In a great battle at Deva (Chester) he defeated the allied princes of Cumbria and North Wales. This fight was long remembered because of the massacre of a host of monks who had come to supplicate Heaven for the victory of the Celts over the pagan English. "If they do not fight against us with their arms, they do so with their prayers," said the Northumbrian king, and bade his warriors cut them all down. The city of Deva was sacked, and remained a mere ring of mouldering Roman walls for three centuries. The district round it became English, and thus the Cumbrians were separated from the North Welsh by a belt of hostile territory.

The battles of Chester and Deorham settled the future of Britain; the Celts became comparatively helpless when they had been cut into three distinct sections, in Cumbria, Wales, and Damnonia. The future of the island now lay in the hands of the English, not in that of the ancient inhabitants of Britain.

The states which the invaders had built up were, as might have been inferred from their origin, small military monarchies. The basis of each had been the war-band that followed some successful "alderman," for the invaders were not composed of whole tribes emigrating en masse, but of the more adventurous members of the race only. The bulk of the Saxons and Jutes remained behind on the continent in their ancient homes, and so did many of the Angles. When the successful chief had conquered a district of Britain and assumed the title of king, he would portion the land out among his followers, reserving a great share for his own royal demesne. Each of the king's sworn companions, or gesiths as the old English called them, became the centre of a small community of dependents—his children, servants, and slaves. At first the invaders often slew off the whole Celtic population of a valley, but ere long they found the convenience of reducing them to slavery and forcing them to till the land for their new masters. In eastern Britain and during the first days of the conquest the natives were often wholly extirpated, but in the Pg 20 central and still more in the western part of the island they were allowed to survive as serfs, and thus there is much Celtic blood in England down to this day. But this native element was never strong enough to prevail over and absorb the conquerors, as happened to the Goths of Spain and the Franks of Gaul, who finally lost their language and their national identity among the preponderant mass of their own dependents.

As the conquest of Britain went on, many families who had not been in the war-band of the original invader came in to join the first settlers, and to dwell among them, so that the king had many English subjects besides his original gesiths. Some of the villages in his dominions would therefore be inhabited by the servile dependents of one of these early-coming military chiefs, others by the free bands of kinsmen who had drifted in of their own accord to settle in the land. When we see an English village with a name like Saxmundham, or Edmonton, or Wolverton, we may guess that the place was originally the homestead of a lord named Saxmund, or Eadmund, or Wulfhere, and his dependents. But when it has a name like Buckingham, or Paddington, or Gillingham, we know that it was the common settlement of a family, the Buckings or the Paddings or the Gillings, for the termination -ing in old English invariably implied a body of descendants from common ancestors.

The early English states were administered under the king by aldermen, or military chiefs, to each of whom was entrusted the government of one of the various regions of the kingdom, and by reeves, who were responsible for the royal property and dues, each in his own district. The larger kingdoms, such as Wessex, were soon cut up into shires, each with its alderman and shire-reeve (sheriff), and many of these shires exist down to our own day.

The supreme council of the realm was formed by the king, the aldermen, and a certain number of the greater gesiths who served about the king's person. The king and great men discussed subjects of national moment, while the people sat round and shouted assent or dissent to their speeches. The king did not take any measure of importance without the advice of his councillors, who were known as the Witan, or Wise-men. When a king died, or ruled tyrannically, or became incompetent, it was the Witan who chose a new Pg 21 monarch from among the members of the royal family, for there was as yet no definite rule of hereditary succession, and the kingship was elective, though the Witan never went outside the limits of the royal house in their nominations.

The smaller matters of import in an old English kingdom were settled at the shire-moot, or meeting of all the freemen of a shire. There, once a month, the aldermen and reeve of the district called up the freeholders who dwelt in it, and by their aid settled disputes and lawsuits. Each freeman had his vote, so the shire-court was a much more democratic body than the Witan, where only great lords and officials could speak and give their suffrages.

Matters too small for the shire-moot were settled by the meeting of the villagers in their own petty tun-moot, which every freeman would attend. Here would be decided disputes between neighbours, as to their fields and cattle. Such cases would be numerous because, in the early settlements of the English, the ploughed fields and the pasture grounds of the village were both great unenclosed tracts with no permanent boundaries. Every man owned his house and yard, but the pasture and the waste land and woods around belonged to the community, and not to the individual.

The early English were essentially dwellers in the open country. They did not at first know how to deal with the old Roman towns, but simply plundered and burnt them, and allowed them to crumble away. They thought the deserted ruins were the homes of ghosts and evil spirits, and were not easily induced to settle near them. Even great towns like Canterbury and London and Bath seem to have lain waste for a space, between their destruction by the first invaders and their being again peopled. But ere long the advantages of the sites, and the abundance of building material which the old Roman buildings supplied, tempted the English back to the earlier centres of population. We can trace the ancient origin of many of our towns by their names: the English added the word -chester or -caster to the name of the places which were built on Roman sites—a word derived, of course, from the Latin castra. So Winchester and Rochester and Dorchester and Lancaster are shown to be old Roman towns rebuilt, but not founded by the new-comers.

Pg 22

In religion the old English were pure polytheists, worshipping the ancient gods of their German ancestors, Woden, the wise father of heaven, and Thunder (Thor), the god of storm and strength, and Balder, the god of youth and spring, and many more. But they were not an especially religious people; they had few temples and priests, and did not allow their superstition to influence their life or their politics to any great extent. We shall see that in a later age most of them deserted their pagan worship without much regret and after but a short struggle. It was more a matter of ancestral custom to them than a very fervent belief. It is noticeable that very few places in England get their names from the old gods; but we find a few, such as Wednesbury (Woden's-burh) or Thundersfield, or Balderston, scattered over the face of the country.

Pg 23

597-836.

After the battles of Deorham and Chester had broken the strength of the Britons, and all central Britain had fallen into English hands, the victorious invaders did not persevere in completing the conquest of the island, but turned to contend with each other. For the next two hundred years the history of England is the history of the conflict of the three larger kingdoms—Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex—for the supremacy and primacy in the island. First one, then the other obtained a mastery over its rivals, but the authority of an English king who claimed to be "Bretwalda," or paramount lord of Britain, was as vague and precarious as that of the Celtic chiefs who in an earlier age had asserted a similar domination over their tribal neighbours.

Both Ceawlin the victor of Deorham, and Aethelfrith the victor of Chester, were great conquerors in their own day, and are said to have claimed an over-lordship over their neighbours. But about the year 595, when the one was dead and the other had not yet risen, the chief king of Britain was Aethelbert of Kent, a warlike young monarch who subdued his neighbours of Sussex and Essex, and aspired to extend his influence all over the island.

To the court of this King Aethelbert there came, in the year 597, an embassy from beyond the high seas, which was destined to change the whole course of the history of England. It was led by the monk Augustine, and was composed of a small band of missionaries from Rome, who had set out in the hope of converting the English Pg 24 to Christianity. Twenty years before there had been a pious abbot in Rome named Gregory, who had earnestly desired to go forth to preach the gospel to the English. The well-known legend tells how he once saw exposed in the market for sale some young boys of a fair countenance. "Who are these children?" he asked of the slave-dealer. "Heathen Angles," was the reply. "Truly they have the faces of angels," said Gregory. "And whence have they been brought?" "From the kingdom of Deira," he was told. "Indeed, they should be brought de ira Dei, out from the land of the wrath of God," was the abbot's punning rejoinder. From that day Gregory strove to set forth for Britain, but circumstances always stood in his way. At last he became pope, and when he had gained this position of authority, he determined that he would send others, if he could not go himself, to care for the souls of the pagan English.

So in 596 he sent out the zealous monk Augustine, with a company of priests and others, to seek out the land of England. Augustine landed in Kent, both because King Aethelbert was the greatest chief in Britain, and because he had taken as his queen a Christian lady from Gaul, Bertha, the daughter of Charibert, king of Paris. So Augustine and his fellows came to Canterbury to the court of the king, and when Aethelbert saw them he asked his wife what manner of men they might be. When she had pleaded for them, he looked upon them kindly, and gave them the ruined Roman church of St. Martin outside the gates of Canterbury, and told them that they might preach freely to all his subjects. So Augustine dwelt in Kent, and taught the Kentishmen the truths of Christianity till many of them accepted the gospel and were baptized. Ere long King Aethelbert himself was converted, and when he had declared himself a Christian most of his gesiths and nobles followed him to the font. Then Augustine was made Archbishop of Canterbury, and his companion Mellitus Bishop of Rochester, and the kingdom of Kent became a part of Christendom once more.

Ere very long the kings of the East Saxons and East Angles, who were vassals to Aethelbert, declared that they also were ready to accept the gospel. They were baptized with many of their subjects, but Christianity was not yet very firmly rooted among them. When King Aethelbert died, and was succeeded Pg 25 by his son, who was a heathen and an evil liver, a great portion of the men who so easily accepted Christianity fell back into paganism again. They had conformed to please the king, not because they had appreciated the truths of the gospel. East Anglia and Essex relapsed almost wholly from the faith, and had to be reconverted a generation later; but in Kent Augustine's work had been more thorough, and after a short struggle the whole kingdom finally became Christian.

From Kent the true faith was conveyed to the English of the North. Eadwine, King of Northumbria, married a daughter of Aethelbert and Bertha. She was a Christian, and brought with her to York a Roman chaplain named Paulinus, one of the disciples of Augustine. By the exhortations of this Paulinus, King Eadwine was led toward Christianity. He was a great warrior, and while he was doubting as to the faith, it chanced that he had to set forth on an expedition against his enemy, the King of Wessex. Then he vowed that if the God of the Christians gave him victory and he should return in peace, he would be baptized. The campaign was successful, and Eadwine went joyfully to the baptismal font. It was long remembered how he held council with his Witan, urging them to leave darkness for light, and doubt for certainty. Then, because they had found little help in their ancient gods, and because the heathen faith gave them no good guidance for this life, and no good hope of a better life to come, the great men of Northumbria swore that they would follow their king. Coifi, the high priest, was the first to cast down his own idols and destroy the great temple of York, and with him the nobles and gesiths of Eadwine went down to the water and were all baptized (627).

For some time King Eadwine prospered greatly; he became the chief king of Britain, and made the East Angles and East Saxons his vassals. He destroyed the Welsh kingdom of Leeds, and added the West Riding of Yorkshire to the Northumbrian kingdom. He also smote the Picts beyond the Forth, and built a fleet on the Irish sea with which he reduced the isles of Man and Anglesea.

Eadwine's conquests roused all his neighbours against him, and in their common fear of the Northumbrian sword, English and Welsh princes were for the first time found joining in Pg 26 alliance. Penda, King of Mercia, an obstinate heathen and a great foe of the gospel, leagued himself with Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, the greatest of the Christian chiefs of Wales. Together they beset the realm of Eadwine, and the great King of Northumbria fell in battle with all his host, at Heathfield, near Doncaster (632).

The Welsh and Mercians overran Northumbria after slaying its king, and Cadwallon took York and burnt it. The Northumbrians thought that Eadwine's God had been found wanting in the day of battle, and most of them relapsed into paganism in their despair. Paulinus, who had become the first Bishop of York, had to flee away into Kent, the only kingdom where Christians were safe for the moment.

But ere very long the Northumbrians were saved from their despair. Eadwine and the ancient stock of the kings of Deira were swept away, but there were two princes alive of the royal house of Bernicia. Their names were Oswald and Oswiu, and during Eadwine's reign they had been living in exile. Their abode had been among those of the Scots who had crossed over from Ireland and settled on the coast of northern Britain, in the land which now bears their name. There the two brethren had fallen in with the disciples of the good Abbot Columba, the founder of the great monastery of Iona, and from them they had learnt the Christian faith. Columba, whose successors were to convert all the north of England, had been a man of great mark. He was an Irish monk who had left his own land in self-imposed exile, because he had been the cause of a tribal war among his countrymen. Crossing to the Argyleshire coast, he built a monastery on the lonely island of Iona, and from thence laboured for the conversion of the Picts and Scots.

When Oswald heard of the desperate condition of Northumbria after Eadwine's death, he resolved to go to the aid of his countrymen against the Welsh and Mercians. So he went southward with a few companions, and raised the Bernicians against their oppressors, setting up as his standard the cross that he had learnt to reverence in Iona. His effort was crowned with success, and at the Heavenfield, near the Roman wall, he completely defeated Pg 27 the Welsh and slew their king Cadwallon. Penda the Mercian was driven out of Northumbria also, and for eight years (634-642) Oswald maintained himself as king of all the land between Forth and Trent. He used his power most zealously for the propagation of Christianity. He sent to Iona for two pious monks, Aidan and Finan, who were successively bishops of York under him, and by their aid he so drew his people toward the faith of Christ that they never swerved from it again, as they had done after the death of Eadwine. Oswald also encouraged missionaries to go into the other English kingdoms. It was by his advice that Birinus went from Rome to Wessex, where he converted King Cynegils, and founded the bishopric of Dorchester-on-Thames.

But Oswald was not strong enough to put down his heathen neighbour, Penda, the King of Mercia, a mighty warrior who united all the English of central Britain under his sceptre, slaying the kings of the East Angles, and tearing away Gloucester and all the land of the Hwiccas [3] from the kings of Wessex. Penda and Oswald were constantly at war, and at last the Mercian slew the Northumbrian at the battle of Maserfield, in Shropshire, near Oswestry (642).

But the good King Oswald left a worthy successor in his brother Oswiu, as zealous a Christian and as vigorous a ruler as himself. Oswiu defeated Penda at the battle of the Winweed, and by slaying the slayer became the over-king of all England. He conquered the Picts between Forth and Tay, made the Welsh and the Cumbrians pay him tribute, and annexed northern Mercia, giving the rest of the kingdom over to Peada, Penda's son, only when he became a Christian. It was all over with the cause of heathenism when Penda fell, and the Mercians and their king bowed to the conquering faith, and listened to the preaching of Ceadda, one of the Northumbrian monks who had been taught by the Irish missionaries Aidan and Finan.

Mercia and Northumbria, therefore, owed their conversion to the disciples of Columba, and looked to the monastery of Iona as the source of their Christianity, while Kent and Wessex looked Pg 28 to Rome, from whence had come Augustine and Birinus. Unhappily there arose dissension between the clergy of the two churches, for the converts of the Irish monks thought that the South English paid too much deference to Rome, and differed from them on many small points of practice, such as the proper day for keeping Easter, and the way in which priests should cut their hair. King Oswiu was grievously vexed at these quarrels, and held a council at Whitby, or Streonshalch as it was then called, to hear both sides state their case before him. He made his decision in favour of the Roman observance, and many of the Irish clergy withdrew in consequence from his kingdom, rather than conform to the ways of their Roman brethren. This submission of the English to the Papal see was destined to lead to many evils in later generations, but at the time it was far the better alternative. If they had decided to adhere to the Irish connection, they would have stood aside from the rest of Western Christendom, and sundered themselves from the fellowship of Christian nations, and the civilizing influences of which Rome was then the centre (664).

The English Church, being thus united in communion with Rome, received as Archbishop of Canterbury a Greek monk named Theodore of Tarsus, whom Pope Vitalian recommended to them. It was this Theodore who first organized the Church of England into a united whole; down to his day the missionaries who worked in the different kingdoms had nothing to do with each other. But now all England was divided into bishoprics, which all paid obedience to the metropolitan see of Canterbury; and in each bishopric the countryside was furnished with clergy to work under the bishop. Some have said that Theodore cut up England into parishes, each served by a resident priest, but things had not advanced quite so far by his day. Under Theodore and his successors the bishops and clergy of all the kingdoms frequently met in councils and synods, so that England was united into a spiritual whole long before she gained political unity. It was first in these church meetings that Mercian, West Saxon, and Northumbrian learnt to meet as friends and equals, to work for the common good of them all.

Pg 29

The English Church was vigorous from the very first. Ere it had been a hundred years in existence it had begun to produce men of such wisdom and piety, that England was considered the most saintly land of Western Christendom. It sent out the missionaries who rescued Germany from heathenism—Willibrord, the apostle of Frisia ; Suidbert, who converted Hesse ; above all the great Winfrith (or Boniface), the first Archbishop of Mainz. This great man, the friend and adviser of the Frankish ruler Charles Martel, spread the gospel all over Central Germany, and organized a national church in the lands on the Main and Saal, where previously Woden and his fellows alone had been worshipped. He died a martyr among the heathen of the Frisian Marshes in 733.

Nor was the English Church less noted for its men of learning. Not only were they well versed in Latin, which was the common language of the clergy all over Europe, but some of them were skilled in Greek also, for the good Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus had instructed many in his native tongue. Among the old English scholars two deserve special mention: one is the Northumbrian Baeda (the Venerable Bede), a monk of Jarrow, who translated the Testament from Greek into English, and also wrote an ecclesiastical history of England which is our chief source for the knowledge of his times (d. 735); the second was another Northumbrian, Alcuin of York, whose knowledge was so celebrated all over Europe that the Emperor Charles the Great sent for him to Aachen, the Frankish capital, and made him his friend and tutor; for Charles ardently loved all manner of learning, and could find no one like Alcuin among his own people.

As long as Oswiu and his son Ecgfrith lived, Northumbria held the foremost place among the English kingdoms, and its rulers were accounted the chief kings of Britain. Ecgfrith conquered Carlisle and Cumbria from the Welsh, and even invaded Ireland, but in an attempt to add the highlands beyond the Forth to his realm, he was slain in battle by the Picts at Nechtansmere (685). With his death the greatness of Northumbria passed away, for his successors were weak men, and after a while grew so powerless that the kingdom was vexed by constant civil wars, and became Pg 30 the prey of its neighbours, the Mercians on the south, and the Picts and Scots on the north.

ENGLAND
in the 8^th Century.

The supremacy that had once been in the hands of the Northumbrians now passed away to the kings of Mercia, the largest and most central of the English kingdoms. Three great kings of that realm, Aethelred, Aethelbald and Offa, whose reigns occupied almost the whole of the period from 675 to 796, were all in their day reckoned as supreme lords of England. The rulers of East Anglia, Essex, and Kent were counted as their vassals, and they deprived Wessex of its dominions north of the Thames, and Northumbria of all that it had held south of the Trent and the Ribble. Offa pushed his boundary far to the west, into the lands of the Welsh; and, after conquering the valleys of the Wye and the upper Severn, drew a great dyke from sea to sea, reaching from near Chester on the north to Chepstow on the south; it marked the boundary between the English and the Cymry for three hundred years. Offa was the greatest king whom England had yet seen, and corresponded on equal Pg 31 terms with Charles the Great, the famous King of the Franks, who was his firm friend and ally (757-796).

Nevertheless, after Offa's day the sceptre passed away from Mercia, and his successors saw their vassal kings rebel and disown the Mercian allegiance. To maintain subject states in obedience was always a very hard task for the old English kings, because they had no standing armies, and no system of fortification. When a neighbouring realm was overrun by the tumultuary army of a victorious king, he had to be satisfied with the homage of its people, because he could not build fortresses in it, or leave a standing force to hold it down. The only way of keeping a conquest was to colonize it, as was done with the lands taken from the Welsh; but the English kings shrank from evicting their own kinsfolk, and seldom or never employed this device against them. Hence it always happened that, when a great king died, his vassals at once rebelled, and unless his successor was a man of ability he was unable to reconquer them.

From Mercia the primacy among the English states passed to Wessex, a state which had hitherto kept much to itself, and had busied itself in conquering land from the Welsh of Damnonia, rather than in striving with its English neighbours for the supremacy in mid-Britain. Wessex, indeed, had lost to the Mercians all its territory north of the Thames, and was now a purely south-country state. Its borders reached to the Tamar and the Cornish moors, since the days when Taunton in 710 and Exeter in 705 had fallen into the hands of its kings.

The West-Saxon king who succeeded to the power of Offa was Ecgbert, the ancestor of all the subsequent monarchs of Britain down to our own day. [4] He was a prince who had seen many troubles in his youth, having been driven over sea by his kinsman and forced to take refuge with Charles the Great. He spent some years in the court and army of the Frankish monarch, but was called to the throne of Wessex in 800, on the death of his unfriendly cousin. In a long reign that lasted Pg 32 for thirty-six years, Ecgbert not only subdued the small kingdoms of Kent and Sussex, and made the Welsh princes of Cornwall do him homage, but he even dared at last to attack his powerful neighbours the Mercians. At the battle of Ellandun, in Wiltshire (823), he defeated and slew King Beornwulf, the unworthy heir of Offa's greatness. Shortly after Mercia did him homage, and the Northumbrians, sorely vexed by civil wars, soon followed the example of their southern neighbours.

Thus Ecgbert became over-lord of Britain, in the same sense that Eadwine and Offa had previously held the title. But the dominion of the kings of Wessex was destined to be of a more enduring nature than that of their predecessors. This was not so much due to their own abilities as to the changed condition of the state of England. Not only were there strong tendencies arising towards unity within the English realms—due most especially to the influence of their common Church—but pressure from without was now about to be applied in a way that forced the English to combine.

Before Ecgbert had come to the throne, and even before Offa was dead, the first signs had been seen of the coming storm that was to sweep over England in the second half of the ninth century. The Danes had already begun to appear off the coasts of the island.

Pg 33

The English chronicles have accurately fixed for us the date of the first raid of the Northmen. In 787, three strange ships were seen off the Dorsetshire coast. From them landed a small band of marauders, who sacked the port of Wareham, and then hastily put to sea and vanished from sight. This insignificant descent was only the first of a series of dreadful ravages. A few years later, in 793, a greater band descended on Lindisfarne, the holy island of St. Cuthbert off the Bernician coast, the greatest and richest monastery of northern England. Thenceforth raids came thick and fast, till at last the sword of the invaders had turned half England into a desert.

The people of Scandinavia were at this moment in much the same state of development in which the English had been three centuries before, ere yet they left the shores of Saxony and Schleswig. The Danes and Norwegians were a hardy seafaring race, divided into many small kingdoms, always at war with each other. They were still wild heathens, and practised piracy as the noblest occupation for warriors and freemen. Just as Hengist and Aella had sailed out with their war-bands in search of plunder and land in the fifth century, so the chiefs of the Northmen were now preparing to lead out their followers into the western seas. For two centuries the onslaughts of the Vikings—as these piratical hordes were called—were fated to be the curse of Christendom. The Vikings in their early days were led, not by the greater kings of Denmark and Norway, but by leaders chosen by the pirate bands for their military abilities. Such chiefs were obeyed on the battle-field alone; off it they were Pg 34 treated with small respect by their comrades. There were dozens of these sea-kings on the water, each competing with the others for the largest following that he could get together.

The Northmen were at first seeking for nothing more than plunder. Western Christendom offered them a great field, because the Franks, English, and Irish of the ninth century almost all dwelt in open towns, had very few forts and castles, and had built enormous numbers of rich defenceless monasteries and churches. The Dane landed near a wealthy port or abbey, sacked it, and hastily took to sea again, before the countryside had time to muster in arms against him.

But after a time the continued successes of their first raids encouraged the Northmen to take the field in much greater numbers, so that fleets of a hundred ships, with eight or ten thousand men aboard them, were found sailing under some noted sea-king. When they grew so strong they took to making raids deeper into the land, boldly facing the force of an English shire or a Frankish county if they were brought to bay. When numbers were equal they generally had the advantage in the fray, for they were all trained warriors, and were fighting for their lives. Against them came only a rustic militia fresh from the plough. If beset by the overwhelming strength of a whole kingdom, they fortified themselves on a headland, an island, or a marsh-girt palisade, and held out till the enemy melted homeward for lack of provisions.

As long as Ecgbert lived he kept the Danes away from his kingdom of Wessex, dealing them heavy blows whenever they dared to march inland. The greatest of these victories was one gained at Hengistesdun (Hingston Down), near Plymouth, over the combined forces of the Danes and the revolted Welsh of Cornwall (835). But though he was able to protect his own realm, Ecgbert was unable to care for his Mercian and Northumbrian vassals; they were too far off, and his authority over them was too weak. So northern England was already suffering fearfully from the Viking raids even before Ecgbert died. His son Aethelwulf, who succeeded him as king of Wessex, was a pious easy-going man, destitute of his father's strength and ability. If the Mercians and Northumbrians had not been so Pg 35 desperately afflicted at the moment by the ravages of the Vikings, they would have undoubtedly taken the opportunity to throw off the yoke of the Wessex kings. But their troubles made them cautious of adding civil war to foreign invasion, and so Aethelwulf was allowed to keep his father's nominal suzerainty over the whole of England. More than once he led a West-Saxon army up to aid the Mercians, but he could not be everywhere at the same time, and while he was protecting one point, the Danes would slip round by sea and attack another. Wessex itself was no longer secure from their incursions, and the chronicles record several disastrous raids carried out on its coast.

All through King Aethelwulf's reign (836-858) the state of England was growing progressively worse. Commerce was at a standstill, many of the larger towns had been burnt by the Danes, the greatest of the monasteries had been destroyed, and their monks slain or scattered; with them perished the wealth and the learning which had made the English Church the pride of Western Christendom. The land was beginning to sink back into poverty and barbarism, and there seemed to be no hope left to the English, for the Viking armies grew larger and bolder every year.

After a time the invaders began to aim at something more than transitory raids; they took to staying over the winter in England, instead of returning to Norway or Denmark. Fortifying themselves in strong posts like the isles of Thanet or Sheppey, they defied King Aethelwulf to dislodge them. In a very short time it was evident that they would think of permanently occupying Britain, just as the Saxons and Angles had done three centuries back.

Aethelwulf, in great distress of mind, made a pilgrimage to Rome, and obtained the Pope's blessing for his efforts. But he fared none the better for that. It was equally in vain that he tried to concert measures for common defence with his neighbour across the Channel, King Charles the Bald, whose daughter Judith he took to wife. The Frankish king was even more vexed by the pirates than Aethelwulf himself, and no help was got from him.

The men of Wessex at last grew so discontented with Pg 36 Aethelwulf's weak rule that the Witan deposed him, and elected his son Aethelbald king in his stead (856). But they left the small kingdoms of Kent and Sussex to the old man for the term of his natural life, to maintain him in his royal state. Aethelwulf died two years later, and after him reigned his three short-lived sons—Aethelbald (856-860), Aethelbert (860-866), and Aethelred (866-871).

The fifteen years, during which they ruled, proved a time of even greater misery and distress than the latter days of their father's troubled reign. The Danes not only penetrated into every nook and corner of Mercia and Northumbria, but even struck at the heart of Wessex, and burnt its capital, the ancient city of Winchester (864).

But the sorest trial came two years later, in the time of King Aethelred. A vast confederacy of many Viking bands, which called itself the "Great Army," leagued themselves together and fell on England, no longer to plunder, but to subdue and occupy the whole land. Under two chiefs, called Ingwar and Hubba, they overran Northumbria in 867. The Northumbrians were divided by civil war, but the rival kings, Osbercht and Aella, joined their forces to resist the oncoming storm. Yet both of them were slain by the Danes in a great battle outside the gates of York, and the victors stormed and sacked the Northumbrian capital after the engagement. They then proceeded to divide up the land among themselves, and settled up all the old kingdom of Deira, from Tees to Trent. The English population was partly slain off, partly reduced to serfdom. So, after being for two hundred years a Christian kingdom, Deira became once more a community of wild heathen; the work of Oswald and Aidan seemed undone.

But the whole of the Danes of the "Great Army" could not find land in Deira. One division of them went off against the East Angles, under Jarl Ingwar, and fought a great battle with Edmund, the brave and pious king of that race. They took him prisoner, and when he would not do them homage or worship their gods, they shot him to death with arrows. His followers secretly buried his body, and raised over it a shrine which became the great abbey of St. Edmundsbury. East Anglia was then divided up among the Pg 37 victorious Danes, just as Yorkshire had been; but they did not settle down so thickly in the eastern counties as in the north, and the share of Danish blood in those districts is comparatively small (869).

King Aethelred of Wessex had not been able to afford any practical help to his Northumbrian and East Anglian neighbours. It was now his own turn to face the storm which had overwhelmed the two northern realms. In 870 the "Great Army," now under two kings, Guthrum and Bagsaeg, sailed up the Thames and threw itself upon Surrey and Berks, the northern border of Wessex. Aethelred came out in haste against them, and with him marched his younger brother Alfred, the youngest of the four sons of the old Aethelwulf, a youth of eighteen, who now entered on his first campaign. The men of Wessex made a far sterner defence than had the armies of the other English kingdoms. The two warrior-brothers Aethelred and Alfred fought no less than six battles with the "Great Army" in the single year 871. The war raged all along the line of the chalk downs of Berkshire, as the Danes strove to force their way westward. At last the men of Wessex gave them a thorough beating at Ashdown, where the Etheling Alfred won the chief honour of the day. The defeated Vikings sought refuge in a stockaded camp at Reading, between the waters of the Thames and the Kennet. Aethelred could not dislodge them from this stronghold, and in a skirmish with one of their foraging parties at Merton, in Surrey, he received a mortal wound (871).

Wearied with six battles, the army of Wessex broke up, and the thegns sadly bore King Aethelred home, to bury him at Wimborne. His young brother, the Etheling Alfred, succeeded him, and took up the task of defending Wessex in its hour of sore distress. It was fortunate that such a great man was at hand to bear the burden, for never was it more likely than now that the English name would be utterly swept off the face of the earth. In spite of his youth Alfred was quite capable of facing any difficulty or danger. From his boyhood upward he had always shown great promise; when a young child, he had been sent by his father, Aethelwulf, to Rome, and there had attracted the notice of Pope Leo, who Pg 38 anointed him, and predicted that he should one day be a king. He was able and brave, like most of the descendants of Ecgbert, but he was also far above all men of his day in his desire for wisdom and learning, and from his earliest years was known as a lover of books and scholars. Seldom, if ever, did any king combine so much practical ability in war and governance with such a keen taste for literature and science.

Alfred had short space to mourn his dead brother. The "Great Army" soon forced its way up from the Thames into Wiltshire, and beat the men of Wessex at Wilton. Then Alfred gave them great store of treasure to grant him peace, and they—since they found that the winning of Wessex cost so many hard blows—consented to turn aside for a space. But it was only in order to throw themselves on the neighbouring realm of Mercia. They dealt with it as they had already done with Deira and East Anglia. They defeated Burgred, its king, who fled away over sea and died at Rome; and then they took eastern Mercia and parcelled it out among themselves, while they gave its western half to an unwise thegn called Ceolwulf, who consented to be their vassal and proffered them a great tribute. It was not long, however, before they chased away him also. Now it was that there arose the great Danish towns in Mercia—Derby, Stamford, Leicester, Lincoln, and Nottingham, which, under the name of the "Five Boroughs," played a considerable part in English history for the next two centuries (876).

When Mercia had fallen, the Vikings turned once more against their old foes in Wessex. If only they could break down King Alfred's defences, they saw that the whole isle of Britain would be their own. So under the two kings, Guthrum and Hubba, they once more pushed southward beyond the Thames. There followed two years of desperate fighting (877-878). At first the invaders swept all before them. They took London, the greatest port of England, and Winchester, the capital of Wessex. Alfred, repeatedly beaten in battle, was forced westward, and driven to take refuge almost alone in the isle of Athelney, a marsh-girt spot in Somersetshire, between the Tone and the Parret. This was the scene of the celebrated legend of the burnt cakes. A curious memorial of Alfred's stay in Athelney is to be seen at Oxford—a Pg 39 gold and enamel locket bearing his name, [5] which was dug up in the island some nine hundred years after it was dropped by the wandering king.

While Alfred was in hiding, the Danes ranged all over Wessex; King Guthrum settled down at a fortified camp at Chippenham, in Wiltshire, while King Hubba ravaged Devon. But when all seemed in their power, they were suddenly disconcerted by a new gathering of the stubborn West Saxons. The men of Devon slew Hubba and took his raven banner, and then Alfred, issuing from Athelney, put himself at the head of the levies of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset, and made a desperate assault on Guthrum and the main body of the Danes. The king was victorious at Ethandun (Eddington), and drove the army of Guthrum into its stockade at Chippenham. There the Vikings were gradually forced by starvation to yield themselves up. Alfred granted them easy terms: if they would promise to quit Wessex for ever, and would swear homage to him as over-lord, and become Christians, he would grant them the lands of the East Angles and East Saxons to dwell in. Guthrum was fain to accept, so he was baptized, and received at Alfred's hands the new name of Aethelstan. Many of his host followed him to the font, and then they retired to East Anglia and dwelt therein, save those roving spirits who could not settle down anywhere. These latter went off to harry France, but King Guthrum and the majority abode in their new settlement, and were not such unruly or unfaithful subjects to Alfred as might have been expected from their antecedents.

In such troublous times it was not likely that Alfred would be free from other wars, but he came out of them all with splendid success. When new bands of Vikings assailed him in later years, he smote them again and again, and drove them out of the land. As a Norse poet once sang—

so they betook themselves elsewhere, to strive with less valiant kings beyond the seas.

Pg 40

By Alfred's agreement with Guthrum, England was divided into two halves, of which one was Danish and the other English. The old document called Alfred's and Guthrum's Frith gives the boundary of the Danelagh, or Danish settlement, thus: "Up the Lea and then across to Bedford, up the Ouse to Watling Street, and so along Watling Street to Chester." That is to say, that Northumbria and East Anglia and Essex, and the eastern half of Mercia, were left to the Danes, while Alfred reigned directly, not only over his own heritage of Wessex, Sussex, and Kent, but over western Mercia also. The nine counties [6] west of Watling Street became part of Wessex, so that Alfred's own kingdom came out of the Danish war much increased. Beyond its bounds he now had a nominal suzerainty over three Danish states, instead of four English ones. Guthrum reigned in the East, another Danish king at York, and between them lay the "Five Boroughs," which were independent of both kings, and were ruled by their own "jarls," as the Danes called their war-lords.

The Danish rule in North-Eastern England was made comparatively light to the old inhabitants of the land when Guthrum and his men embraced Christianity. Instead of killing the people off or reducing them to slavery, the Danes now were content to take tribute from them, and to occupy a certain portion of their lands. The limit and extent of the Danish settlement can be well traced by studying the names of places in the northern counties. Wherever the invaders established themselves we find the Danish termination by in greater or less abundance. We find such names strewn thick about Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire, less freely in Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, and the eastern counties. Rugby, close to the line of Watling Street, is the Danish settlement that lies furthest into the heart of Mercia. The Viking blood, therefore, is largely mixed with the English in the valleys of the Trent and Ouse, and close to the eastern coast, and grows proportionately less as Watling Street is approached. The Danes took very easily to English manners; they had all turned Christians within a very few years, and their language was so like Old English that their speech Pg 41 soon became assimilated to that of their subjects, and could only be told from that of South England by differences of dialect that gradually grew less. In the end England gained rather than suffered by their invasion, for they brought much hardy blood into the land, and came to be good Englishmen within a very few generations.

ENGLAND
IN THE YEAR 900.

But meanwhile, when they were but just settled down, and the Pg 42 land was still black with their burnings, England appeared in a sorry state, and Alfred the king had a hard task before him when he set to work to reform and reorganize his wasted realm. Well-nigh every town had been sacked and given to the flames at one time or another, during fifty years of war: the churches lay in ruins, the monasteries were deserted. Riches and learning had fled from the wasted land. "There was not one priest south of Thames," writes King Alfred himself, "who could properly understand the Latin of his own church-books, and very few in the whole of England." Moreover, the social condition of the people was rapidly becoming what we may style "feudalized"; that is, the smaller freeholders all over the country, unable to defend themselves from the Danes, were yielding themselves to be the "men" of their greater neighbours. This phrase implied that they surrendered their complete independence, and consented to pay the great men certain dues, and to follow them to the wars, and seek justice at their hands instead of from the free meeting of the village moot. The land still remained the peasant's own, but, instead of being personally free, he was now a dependent. It is noticeable that a similar state of things grew up from the same cause in every part of Western Europe during the ninth century.

Finding himself confronted with this new condition of affairs, Alfred strengthened the royal power by compelling all these great lords to become his own sworn followers—gesiths, as they would have been called in an earlier age. But now the word was thegn, though the status was much the same. So all the great landholders of England became the king's "men," just as the villagers had become the men of the great landholders. The thegns served the king in bower and hall, and had to follow him in person whenever he took the field, as the old gesiths had followed the leaders of the first Saxon war-bands. They were a numerous body, and constituted a kind of standing army, since it was their duty to serve whenever their master went out to battle. The fyrd, or local militia of the villages, Alfred divided into two parts, one of which was always left at home to till the fields when the other half went out to war. It was at the head of his thegns and this reorganized fyrd that Alfred smote the Danes when they dared to invade his realm in his later years.

Pg 43

Alfred has a great name as a law-giver, but he did more in the way of collecting and codifying the laws of the kings who were before him than in issuing new ordinances of his own. But since he made everything clear and orderly, the succeeding generations used to speak of the "laws of Alfred," when they meant the ancient statutes and customs of the realm.

The most noteworthy, however, of Alfred's doings, if we consider the troublous times in which he lived, were his long-sustained and successful endeavours to restore the civilization of England, at which the Danish wars had dealt such a deadly blow. He collected scholars of note from the Continent, from Wales and Ireland, and founded schools to restore the lost learning for which England had been famed in the last century. His interest in literature of all kinds was very keen. He collected the old heroic epics of the English, all of which, save the poem of "Beowulf," have now perished, or survive only in small fragments. He compiled the celebrated "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," and left it behind him as a legacy to be continued by succeeding ages—as indeed it was for nearly three hundred years. He also translated Baeda's Latin history of England into the vernacular tongue, as well as Orosius' general history of the world. Nor was history the only province in which he took interest; he also caused Pope Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care," and other theological works, to be done into English.

Alfred may also be reckoned the father of the English navy. In order to cope with the ships of the Vikings, he built new war-vessels of larger size than any that had yet been seen in Western Europe, and provided that they should be well manned. He encouraged sailors to go on long voyages, and sent out the captain Othere, who sailed into the Arctic seas and discovered the North Cape. He was a friend of merchants, and it was probably to him that we may attribute the law which allowed any trader who fared thrice over-sea in his own ship to take the rank and privileges of a thegn.

We have no space to tell of the many other spheres of Alfred's activity, such as his church-building, his mechanical inventions, and his zeal in almsgiving and missionary work, which was so great that he even sent contributions to the Pg 44 distant Christians of St. Thomas in India. What heightens our surprise at the many-sided activity of the man is, that he was of a weakly constitution, and was often prostrated by the attacks of a periodical illness which clung to him from his youth up.

Alfred lived till 901 in great peace and prosperity. He had increased the bounds of Wessex, saved England from the Dane, and brought her back to the foremost place among the peoples of Western Europe, for his Frankish contemporaries were sinking lower and lower amid the attacks of the Vikings, while England, under his care, was so rapidly recovering her strength. Even the Welsh, hostile hitherto to all who bore the English name, had done homage to him in 885, because they saw in him their only possible protection against the Dane.

Alfred's son and his three grandsons followed him on the throne in succession between the years 901 and 955. They were all brave, able, hard-working princes, the worthy offspring of such a progenitor. They carried out to the full the work that he had begun; while Alfred had checked the Danes and made them his vassals, his descendants completely subdued and incorporated them with the main body of the realm, so that they were no longer vassals, but direct subjects of the crown. And while Alfred had been over-king of England, his successors became over-kings of the whole isle of Britain, the suzerains of the Scots and the Welsh of Strathclyde, as well as of all the more southern peoples within the four seas.

Alfred's eldest son and successor was Edward, generally called Edward the Elder to distinguish him from two later kings of his line. He was a wise and powerful king, whose life-work was the incorporation of central England, south of the Humber, with his realm of Wessex, by the complete conquest of the Danes of East Anglia and the Five Boroughs. When Alfred was dead, his Danish vassals tried to stir up trouble by raising up against Edward his cousin Aethelwulf, son of Aethelred. This pretender the new king drove out, and then, turning on the eastern Danes, slew their king Euric, the son of Guthrum-Aethelstan, and made them swear homage to him again.

But a few years later the Danes broke out again into rebellion, Pg 45 and Edward then took in hand their complete subjection. His chief helper was the great ealdorman Aethelred of western or English Mercia, his brother-in-law. When this chief died, Edward found his widowed sister Aethelflaed, in whose hands he left the rule of the Mercian counties, no less zealous and able an assistant than her husband had been. It was with her co-operation that he started on his long series of campaigns against the Danes of central and eastern England. While Edward, starting forward from London, worked his way into Essex and East Anglia, Aethelflaed was at the same time urging on the Mercians against the Danes of the Five Boroughs. They moved forward systematically, erecting successive lines of "burghs," or moated and palisaded strongholds, opposite the centres of Danish resistance, and holding them with permanent garrisons.

The Danes were now much more easy to deal with than in the old days, for they had given hostages to fortune, and were the possessors of towns and villages which could be plundered, farmsteads that could be burned, and cattle that could be lifted. So when they found that they could not storm the "burghs" of Edward and Aethelflaed, or drive off the garrisons which raided on their fields, they began one after the other to submit. The last Danish king of East Anglia was slain in battle at Tempsford, near Bedford, in 921, and his realm was incorporated with Wessex. Then, while Aethelflaed compelled Derby and Leicester to yield, her brother subdued Stamford and Lincoln. So all England south of the Humber was won and cut up into new shires, like those of Wessex. Having accomplished her share in this great work, the Lady Aethelflaed died, and the great ealdormanry which she had ruled was absorbed into her brother's kingdom.

In their terror at Edward's ceaseless advance and never-ending successes, not only did the Danes of Northumbria do him homage, but even the distant kings of the Scots and the Strathclyde Welsh "took him to father and lord" in a great meeting held at Dore in 924.

Having thus become the over-lord of all Britain, Edward died in 925, leaving the throne to his son Aethelstan. This prince was his worthy successor, and carried out still further Pg 46 the process of annexing all England to the Wessex inheritance. His great achievement was the complete subjection and annexation of Northumbria. When Sihtric the Danish King of York died, Aethelstan seized on his kingdom, and drove his sons over sea. The dispossessed princes stirred up enemies against their conqueror, and formed a great league against him. Anlaf, the king of the Danes of Ireland, brought over a great host of Vikings, while Constantine, king of the Scots, and Owen, king of Cumbria, came down from the north to join him. The Danes of Yorkshire at once rose in rebellion to aid the invaders. Against this league Aethelstan marched forth at the head of the English of Mercia and Wessex. He met them at Brunanburgh, a spot of unknown site, somewhere in Lancashire. There Aethelstan smote them with a great slaughter, so that Anlaf returned to Ireland with but a handful of men, and Constantine—who lost his son and heir in the fight—fled away hastily to his own northern deserts. The fight of Brunanburgh, the greatest battle that the house of Alfred had yet won, finally settled the fact that Danish England was to be incorporated with the realm of the Wessex over-kings, and that there was to be one nation, not two, from the borders of Scotland to the British Channel. This great victory drew from an unknown poet the famous "Song of Brunanburgh" which has been inserted in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle." It tells of the glories of Aethelstan, and how—

The fight made Aethelstan once more lord of all Britain. The Scot king hastened to renew his submission, the Welsh and Cornish did him homage, the turbulent Northumbrian Danes bowed before him. He was considered so much the most powerful monarch in Western Europe, that all the neighbouring kings sought his alliance, and asked for the hands of ladies of his house. Of his sisters, one was married to the Emperor Otto I., one to Charles the Simple, King of the West Franks, others to the King of Arles and the Counts of Paris and Flanders.

Pg 47

Aethelstan died young, and left no son. He was followed on the throne by his two brothers Edmund and Eadred, who were equally unfortunate in being cut off in the flower of their age. Edmund suppressed more than one rebellion of the Northumbrian Danes, and completely conquered the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde. Instead of incorporating it with England, he bestowed it as a fief on his vassal, Malcolm, King of the Scots, "on condition that he should be his faithful fellow-worker by sea and land." This was the first extension of Scotland to the south of the Clyde and Forth. Up to this time the Scots and the Picts, with whom they had become blended since the Scot Kenneth McAlpine had been elected king of the Picts in 836, had only ruled in the Highlands. Edmund came to a strange and bloody end. As he feasted in his hall at Pucklechurch, in Gloucestershire, he saw to his anger and surprise a notorious outlaw named Leofa enter the hall and seat himself at a table. The servants tried to turn him out, but he held his place, and Edmund grew so wrathful that he sprang from his high seat and rushed down to drag the intruder out with his own hands. He seized Leofa by the hair and threw him down, but the outlaw drew a knife and stabbed him to the heart.

Eadred, the next king, was a prince of weak health, fonder of the church than the battle-field. Nevertheless he carried on his brother's policy, and kept a firm hand over the whole island of Britain. He put down the last rising of the Danes of Yorkshire, who had proclaimed Eric-with-the-bloody-axe as their king, and made one last attempt to assert their independence. After this he cut up Northumbria into two earldoms, and gave them both to an Englishman named Oswulf, to be ruled as separate provinces.

Eadred was the patron and protector of the wise abbot Dunstan, the first of the great clerical statesmen who made a mark on the history of England. He was a man of great ability and learning, who had risen to be abbot of Glastonbury under Edmund, and became one of the chief advisers of the pious Eadred, who was attracted to him as much by his asceticism as by his eminent mental qualities. Dunstan was a man with a purpose. He wished to reform the English Church in the direction of monastic asceticism, and Pg 48 was most especially anxious to make compulsory the celibacy of the clergy, a practice which had not hitherto been enforced in England. There was undoubtedly much ignorance and a certain amount of ill-living among the secular clergy, and Dunstan, not content with warring against this, tried also to reform the monasteries all over the face of the land, and to enforce the rule of St. Benedict, "poverty, chastity, and obedience," in every place. Dunstan's method of carrying out his views was by winning court influence, which he was very fitted to obtain, for he was the cleverest, most versatile, and most learned man of his day.

When the pious Eadred died, he was succeeded by his nephew Eadwig (Edwy), the son of his brother Edmund. This prince had been a child when Leofa the outlaw slew his father, and the Witan had put him aside in favour of his uncle, because the rule of a minor was always disliked by the English. But now he was seventeen, and a very rash and headstrong youth.

Eadwig very soon quarrelled with Dunstan and with Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, because he insisted on taking to wife the Lady Aelfgyfu (Elgiva), who was his near kinswoman, and within the "prohibited degrees" of the mediaeval Church. The churchmen declared her to be no true wife of the king, and treated the royal pair with such insult that Eadwig grew furious. The tale is well known how, when Eadwig at a high feast had retired betimes to his wife's chamber, Oda and another bishop followed him and dragged him back by force to the board where the thegns were feasting.

The king, as was natural, quarrelled with the Church party, and drove Dunstan out of England. But his clerical opponents were too much for him: they conspired with the Anglo-Danes of Northumbria, and with many discontented thegns, and set up against Eadwig his younger brother Eadgar, whom Archbishop Oda crowned as King of England. There followed civil war, in which Eadwig had the worst; his wife fell into the hands of Oda, who cruelly branded her with hot irons and shipped her to Ireland. Only Wessex adhered to the cause of Eadwig, and he was at last compelled to bow before his enemies. He acknowledged his brother as King of all England north of Thames, and died almost immediately after (959).

Pg 49

His death put the whole realm into the hands of Eadgar, or rather of Eadgar's friends of the Church party, for the new king was still very young. He recalled Dunstan from exile to make him his chief councillor; and when Archbishop Oda died, he gave the see of Canterbury to him. For the seventeen years of Eadgar's rule Dunstan was his prime minister, and much of the character of the earlier years of the king's reign must be attributed to the prelate.

Dunstan's policy had two sides: he used his secular powers to enforce his religious views, and everywhere he and his friends began reforming the monasteries by forcing them to adopt the Benedictine rule. They expelled the secular canons, many of whom were married men, from the cathedrals, and replaced them with monks. They also dealt severely with the custom of lay persons receiving church preferment, one of the commonest abuses of the time.

But Dunstan was not only an ecclesiastical reformer. His activity had another and a more practical side. To him, in conjunction with Eadgar, is to be attributed the complete unification of the Anglo-Danes and the English. Instead of being treated as subjects of doubtful loyalty, the men of the Danelagh were now made the equals of the men of Wessex, by being promoted to ealdormanries and bishoprics, and admitted as members of the Witan. Eadgar kept so many of them about his person that he even provoked the thegns of Wessex to murmuring. But the policy of trust and conciliation had the best effects, and for the future the Anglo-Danes may be regarded as an integral part of the English nation.

When he came to years of maturity, Eadgar proved to be a capable prince. His power was so universally acknowledged in Britain that his neighbours never dared attack him, and he became known as the rex pacificus in whose time were known no wars. All the kings of the island served him with exact obedience; the story is well known how he made his six chief vassals—the kings of Scotland, Cumbria, Man, and three Welsh chiefs—row him across the Dee, and then exclaimed that those who followed might now in truth call themselves kings of Britain.

Eadgar was a firm ruler, and the author of a very considerable Pg 50 body of laws. To him is attributable the first organization of local police in England, by the issue of the "Ordinance of the Hundred," which divided the shires into smaller districts after the Frankish model, and made the inhabitants of each hundred responsible for the putting down of theft, robbery, and violence in their own district. He allowed the Danish half of England to keep a code of laws of its own, but assimilated it, as much as he was able, to that which prevailed in the rest of the land, making Dane and Englishman as equal in all things as he could contrive.

To the misfortune of his realm, Eadgar died in 975, before he had attained his fortieth year, leaving behind him two young sons, neither of whom had yet reached his majority. When he was gone, it was soon seen how much the prosperity of England had depended on the personal ability of the house of Alfred. Under weak kings there began once more to arise great troubles for the land.

Pg 51

For a full century (871-975) England had been under the rule of a series of kings of marked ability. Only the short reign of the unfortunate Eadwig interrupts the succession of strong rulers. We have seen how in that century England fought down all her troubles, and, after appearing for a time to be on the brink of destruction, emerged as a strong and united power. But on the death of Eadgar a new problem had to be faced—the kingdom passed to two young boys, of whom the second proved to be one of the most unworthy and incompetent monarchs that England was ever to know.

Edward the Younger, or the Martyr, as after-generations called him, only sat for three years on his father's throne. He endeavoured to follow in Eadgar's steps, and retained Dunstan as his chief councillor. But he found the great ealdormen unruly subjects; they would not obey a young boy as they had obeyed the great Eadgar. Dunstan was made the chief mark of their envy, because he represented the policy of a firm central government and a strong monarchical power. Probably they would have succeeded in getting him dismissed at the Witan held at Calne, if a supposed miracle had not intervened to save him. While his adversaries were pleading against him, the floor of the upper chamber where the Witan was sitting gave way, owing to the breaking of a beam, and they were precipitated into the room below, some being killed and others maimed. But the piece of flooring where Dunstan stood did not fall with the rest, so that he remained unharmed amid the general destruction, wherefore men deemed that God had intervened to bear witness to his innocence.

But Dunstan was not to rule much longer. In 978 his young Pg 52 master was cruelly murdered by his step-mother, Queen Aelfthryth, who knew that the crown would fall to her own son if Edward died. For one day the king chanced to ride past her manor of Corfe, and, stopping at the door, craved a cup of wine. She brought it out to him herself, and while he was drinking it to her health, one of her retainers stabbed him in the back. His horse started forward, and he lost his seat and was dragged some way by the stirrup ere he died. The queen's friends threw the body into a ditch, and gave out that he had perished by an accidental fall, but all the realm knew or suspected the truth.

Nevertheless, Aelfthryth's boy Aethelred got the profit of his mother's wicked deed, for the Witan crowned him as the sole heir to King Eadgar. His long reign was worthy of its evil commencement, for it proved one unbroken series of disasters, and brought England at last to the feet of a foreign conqueror. He ruled for thirty-eight years of misery and trouble, for which he was himself largely responsible, for he was a selfish, idle, dilatory, hard-hearted man, and let himself be guided by unworthy flatterers and favourites, who sought nothing but their own private advantage. Wherefore men called him Aethelred the Redeless, that is the ill-counselled, because he would always choose the evil counsel rather than the good. Yet the king was not wholly to blame for the misfortunes of his reign, for the great ealdormen had their share in the guilt. Freed from the strong hand of Dunstan, who was soon driven away from the court, they acted as independent rulers, each in his own ealdormanry, quarrelled with each other, and disobeyed the king's commands. It was their divisions and jealousies and selfishness that made the king's weakness and idleness so fatal, for, when they refused to obey, he neither could nor would coerce them.

The curse of the reign of Aethelred the Redeless was the second coming of the Danes and Northmen to England. For many years they had avoided this island, because they knew that only hard blows awaited them there. But they swarmed all over the rest of Europe, won Normandy from the kings of the West Franks, and pushed their raids as far as the distant shores of Andalusia and Italy. But the news that a weak young king, with disobedient nobles to rule Pg 53 under him, sat on Eadgar's seat, soon brought them back to England. First there came mere plundering bands, as in the old days of the eighth century; but Aethelred did not deal with them sharply and strongly. He bade the ealdormen drive them off; but they were too much occupied with their own quarrels to stir. Then the invaders came in greater numbers, and Aethelred thought to bribe them to go away by giving them money, and raised the tax called the Danegelt to satisfy their rapacity. But it seemed that the more that gold was given the more did Danes appear, for the news of Aethelred's wealth and weakness flew round the North, and brought swarm after swarm of marauders upon him. Then followed twenty miserable years of desultory fighting and incessant paying of tribute. Sometimes individual ealdormen fought bravely against the Danes, and held them at bay for a space; sometimes the king himself mustered an army and strove to do something for the realm; sometimes he tried to hire one band of Vikings to fight against another, with the deplorable results that might have been expected. His worst and most unwise action was the celebrated massacre of St. Brice's Day, in 1002, when he caused all the Danes on whom he could lay hands to be killed. In this case it was not open enemies whom he slew, for it was a time of truce, but Danish merchants and adventurers who had settled down in England and done him homage. By this cruel deed Aethelred won the deadly hatred of Swegen, King of Denmark, whose sister and her husband had been among the slain.

Swegen became Aethelred's bitterest foe, and repeatedly warred against him, not with mere Viking bands, but with the whole force of Denmark at his back, a great national army bent on serious invasion of the land, not on transient raiding. The English were driven to despair by Swegen's ravages, and the king did nothing to save them. He had now fallen entirely into the hands of an unscrupulous favourite, named Eadric Streona, or the Grasper, and was guided in all things by this low-born adventurer. He even created him Ealdorman of Mercia, and made him the second person in the land. Eadric cared only for ruining any noble who could possibly be his rival, and for enlarging his ealdormanry; of the defence of England he took no more thought than did his master.

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At last, in 1013, there came a Danish invasion of exceptional severity. The marauders dashed through the country from end to end; they took Canterbury and slew the good Archbishop Elfheah (St. Alphege), because he refused to pay them an exorbitant ransom. Then Eadric gathered together the Witan, without the king's presence, and, with infamous treachery to his benefactor, proposed to them to submit entirely to the Danes. So when Swegen came over again in the next year, the whole realm bowed before him, and the great men, headed by the traitor Eadric, offered him the crown. Only London held out for King Aethelred, and stood a long siege, till its citizens learnt that their master had deserted them and fled over sea to the Duke of Normandy, whose sister Emma he had married. Then they too yielded, and the Witan of all England took Swegen as their king. But the Dane died immediately after his election, and then the majority of the English refused to choose his son Cnut as his successor. They sent to Normandy for their old king, and did homage once more to Aethelred; but the traitor Eadric resolved to adhere to Cnut, because he had lately murdered the thegns of the Five Boroughs, and dreaded the wrath of their followers. So Eadric's Mercian subjects and some of the men of Wessex joined the Danes, and there was civil war once more in England, till Aethelred the Ill-counselled died in 1016.

Then his followers chose in his stead his brave son Edmund II., who was called Ironside because of his prowess in war. The new king was a worthy descendant of Alfred, and would have made no small mark in better times, but he spent his short reign in one unceasing series of combats with Cnut, a man as able and as warlike as himself. The two young kings fought five pitched battles with each other, and fortune swayed to Edmund's side; but in the sixth, at Assandun (Ashington, in Essex), he was defeated, owing to the treachery of the wretched Eadric the Grasper, who first joined him with a large body of Mercian troops, and then turned against him in the heat of the battle (1016).

Then Edmund and Cnut, having learnt to respect each other's courage, met in the Isle of Alney, outside the walls of Gloucester, and agreed to divide the realm between them. Cnut took, as was natural, the Anglo-Danish districts of Northumbria and the Pg 55 Five Boroughs, together with Eadric's Mercian ealdormanry. Edmund kept Wessex, Kent, London, and East Anglia. But this partition was not destined to endure. Ere the year was out the foul traitor Eadric procured the murder of King Edmund, and then the Witan of Wessex chose Cnut as king over the south as well as the north. The late king's young brothers and his two little sons fled to the Continent.

So Cnut the Dane became King of all England, and ruled it wisely and well for nineteen years (1016-35). He proved a much better king than people expected, for, being a very young man and easily impressed, he grew to be more of an Englishman than a Dane in all his manners and habits of thought. He ruled in Denmark and Norway as well as in this island, but he made England his favourite abode, and regarded it as the centre and heart of his empire. The moment that he was firmly established on the throne, he took measures for restoring the prosperity of the land, which had been reduced to an evil plight by forty years of ill-governance and war. He swept away the great ealdormen who had been such a curse to the land, slaying the traitor Eadric the Grasper, and Uhtred the turbulent governor of Northumbria. Then he divided England into four great earldoms, as these provinces began to be called, for the Danish name jarl (earl) was beginning to supersede the Saxon name ealdorman. Of these he entrusted the two Anglo-Danish earldoms, Northumbria and East Anglia, to men of Danish blood, while he gave Wessex and Mercia to two Englishmen who had served him faithfully, the earls Godwine and Leofric. The confidence in the loyalty of his English subjects which Cnut displayed was very marked: he sent home to Denmark the whole of his army, save a body-guard of two thousand or three thousand house-carles, or personal retainers, and did not divide up the lands of England among them. He kept many Englishmen about his person, and even sent them as bishops or royal officers to Denmark, a token of favour of which the Danes did not altogether approve. He endeavoured to connect himself with the old English royal house, by marrying Emma of Normandy, the widow of King Aethelred, though she was somewhat older than himself, so Cnut's younger children were the half-brothers of Aethelred's.

Cnut gave England the peace which she had not known since Pg 56 the death of Eadgar, for no one dared to stir up war against a king who was not only Lord of Britain, but ruled all the lands of the Northmen, as far as Iceland and the Faroes and the outlying Danish towns in Ireland. The Welsh and Scots served Cnut as they had served Aethelstan and Eadgar, and were his obedient vassels. In reward of the services of Malcolm of Scotland Cnut gave him the district of Lothian, the northern half of Bernicia, to hold as his vassal. This was the first piece of English-speaking land that any Scottish king ruled, and it was from thence that the English tongue and manners afterwards spread over the whole of the Lowlands beyond the Tweed.

The rapid recovery of prosperity which followed on Cnut's strong and able government is the best testimony to his wisdom. The wording of the code of laws which he promulgated is a witness to his good heart and excellent purposes. His subjects loved him well, and many tales survive to show their belief in his sagacity, such as the well-known story of his rebuke to the flattering courtiers who ascribed to him omnipotence by the incoming waves of Southampton Water.

Cnut died in 1035, before he had much passed the boundary of middle age. He left two sons, Harold and Harthacnut, the former the child of a concubine, the latter the offspring of Queen Emma. With his death his empire broke up, for Norway revolted, and the Danes of Denmark chose Harthacnut as their king, while those of England preferred the bastard Harold. Only Godwine, the great Earl of Wessex, declared for Harthacnut, and made England south of the Thames swear allegiance to him. So Harold reigned for a space in Northumbria and Mercia, while Denmark and Wessex obeyed his younger brother. The two sons of Cnut were rough, godless, unscrupulous young men, and hated each other bitterly, for each thought that the other had robbed him of part of his rightful heritage. Moreover, Harold enraged Harthacnut by catching and slaying his elder half-brother Alfred, the son of Aethelred and Emma, whom he enticed over to England by fair words, and then murdered by blinding him with hot irons.

After a space Harold overran Wessex, which Earl Godwine surrendered to him because Harthacnut sent no aid from Denmark, Pg 57 where he tarried over-long. But just after he had been saluted as ruler of all England, Harold died, and his realm fell to his absent brother. Harthacnut then came over with a large army, and took possession of the land. He ruled ill for the short space of his life; it was with horror that men saw him exhume his half-brother's corpse and cast it into a ditch. He raised great taxes to support his Danish army, and dealt harshly with those who did not pay him promptly. But just as all England was growing panic-stricken at his tyranny, he died suddenly. He was celebrating the marriage of one of his followers, Osgood Clapa, at the thegn's manor of Clapham, in Surrey, when, as he raised the wine-cup to drink the bridegroom's health, he fell back in an apoplectic fit, and never spoke again (1042).

The English Witan had now before them the task of choosing a new king. Cnut's house was extinct, and with it died all chance of the perpetuation of a northern empire in which England and Denmark should be united. It was natural that the council should cast their eyes back on the old royal house of Alfred, for its eldest member was at this time in England. Harthacnut had called over from Normandy Edward, his mother's second son by King Aethelred, the younger brother of that Etheling Alfred whom Harold had murdered five years before.

It was with little hesitation, therefore, that the Witan, led by Earl Godwine, the greatest of the rulers of the realm, elected Edward to fill the vacant throne. The prince's virtues were already known and esteemed, and his failings had yet to be learnt. Edward was now a man of middle age, mild, pious, and well-meaning, but wanting in strength and vigour, and needing some strong arm on which to lean. He had spent his whole youth in Normandy, at the court of Duke Richard, his mother's brother, and had almost forgotten England and the English tongue during his long exile. Just as Cnut had become an Englishman, so Edward had become for all intents and purposes a Norman.

During the first few years of his reign in England, the new king was entirely in the hands of Godwine, the great Earl of Wessex. He married the thegn's daughter Eadgyth (Edith), and entrusted him with the greater part of the administration of the realm. But Edward and Godwine were not likely to remain friends; Pg 58 there were several causes of dispute between them. The most important was the fact that the king secretly believed that Godwine had been a consenting party to the murder of his brother Alfred by King Harold. But the most obvious was Godwine's dislike for the Norman favourites of the king. For Edward sent for all the friends of his youth from Normandy, and gave them high preferment in England, making Robert of Jumièges Archbishop of Canterbury, and bestowing bishoprics on other Norman priests, and an earldom on Ralf of Mantes, his own nephew. He also showed high favour to two more of his continental kinsmen, Eustace, Count of Boulogne, and William the Bastard, the reigning duke of Normandy. William declared that Edward had even promised to leave the crown of England to him at his death; and it is possible that the king may have expressed some such wish, but he had not the power to carry it out, for the election of the English kings lay with the Witan, and not with the reigning sovereign.

The troubles of Edward's reign began in 1050, starting from a chance affray at Dover. Eustace of Boulogne was landing to pay a visit to the king, when some of his followers fell into a quarrel with some of the citizens. Men were slain on both sides, and the count was chased out of the town with hue and cry. The king took this ill, and bade Godwine—in whose earldom Dover lay—to punish the men who had insulted his noble kinsman. But Godwine refused, saying—what was true enough—that the count's followers were to blame, and the burghers in the right. Edward was angry at the earl's disobedience, and called to him in arms those of the English nobles who were jealous of Godwine, especially Leofric, the Earl of Mercia, and Siward, the Earl of Northumbria. Godwine also gathered a host of the men of Wessex, and it seemed that civil war would begin. But the earl was unwilling to fight the king, and when the Witan outlawed him, he fled over seas to Flanders with his sons, Harold, Swegen, and Tostig. Edward then fell entirely into the hands of his Norman favourites. He sent his wife, Godwine's daughter, to a nunnery, and disgraced all who had any kinship with the exiled earl. But the governance of the Norman courtiers was hateful to the English, and when Godwine and his sons came back a year later, and sailed up the Thames Pg 59 with a great fleet, the whole land was well pleased. No one would fight against him, and the Norman bishops and knights about the king's person had to fly in haste to save their lives. Then the Witan inlawed Godwine again, and Edward was obliged to give him back his ancient place (1052). So the great earl once more ruled England, holding Wessex himself, while his second son Harold ruled as earl in East Anglia, and his third son Tostig became the king's favourite companion, though he was a reckless, cruel man, very unlike the mild and pious Edward.

The house of Godwine kept a firm control over the realm during the last fourteen years of Edward's reign. When Godwine died suddenly at a great feast at Winchester, [7] his son Harold succeeded both to his earldom of Wessex and to his preponderant power in England. The years of Harold's governance were on the whole a time of prosperity, for he was a busy, capable man, much liked by all the English of the south, though the Mercians and Northumbrians did not love him so well.

Harold knew how to make the authority of the King of England over his smaller neighbours respected. It was during his tenure of power that Siward, earl of Northumbria, was sent into Scotland to put down Macbeth, the lord of Moray, who had murdered King Duncan and seized his crown. Siward slew Macbeth in battle at Lumphanan, and restored to the throne of Scotland Malcolm, the eldest son of the late king (1054). A little later Harold himself took the field to put down Gruffyd, the King of North Wales, who had risen in rebellion. He drove the Welsh up into the crags of Snowdon, and besieged them there till they slew their own king and laid his head at the earl's feet.

It was somewhere about this time that a misfortune fell upon Harold. He was sailing in the Channel, when a storm arose and drove his ship ashore on the coast of Ponthieu, near the Somme-mouth. Wido, the Count of Ponthieu, an unscrupulous and avaricious man, threw the earl into prison, and held him to ransom. But Pg 60 William, Duke of Normandy, who was Wido's feudal superior, delivered him from bonds, and brought him to his court at Rouen. Harold abode with the duke for some time, half as guest, half as hostage, for William would not let him depart. He went on an expedition against Brittany with the Normans, and received knighthood at the duke's hands. After a time he was told that he might return home if he would engage to use all his endeavours to get William elected King of England at the death of Edward. The duke said that he had gained such a promise from Edward himself, and thought he could make sure of the prize with Harold's aid. Thus tempted, the earl consented to swear this unwise and unjust oath, and in presence of the whole Norman court vowed to aid William's candidature. When he had sworn, the duke showed him that the shrine at which he had pledged his faith was full of the bones of all the saints of Normandy, which had been secretly collected to make the oath more solemn.

So Harold returned to England, and—as it would appear—soon forgot his oath altogether, or thought of it only as extorted by force and fear. He had anxieties enough to distract his mind to other subjects. First Mercia gave trouble, because Aelfgar, the son of Earl Leofric, was jealous of Harold's predominance in the realm. He twice took arms and was twice outlawed for treason. Nevertheless, Harold confirmed his son Eadwine in the possession of the Mercian earldom. Next, Northumbria broke out into armed rebellion. The king had made his favourite Tostig, Harold's younger brother, earl of the great northern province when the aged Siward, the conqueror of Macbeth, died. But Tostig ruled so harshly and so unjustly, that the Anglo-Danes of Yorkshire rose in rebellion, put Morcar, the son of Aelfgar of Mercia, at their head, and drove Tostig away. When Harold investigated the matter, he found that Tostig was so much in the wrong that he advised the king to banish his brother, and to confirm Morcar in the Northumbrian earldom. This resolve, though just and upright, weakened Harold's hold on the land, for Mercia and Northumbria were thus put in the hands of the two brothers, Eadwine and Morcar, who worked together in all things and were very jealous of the great Earl of Wessex, in spite of his kindly dealings with them (1065).

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Less than a year after Tostig's deposition King Edward died. The English mourned him greatly, for, in spite of his weakness and his tendency to favour the Normans over-much, he was an upright, kindly, well-intentioned man, whom none could hate or despise. Moreover, his sincere piety made the English revere him as a saint; it was said that he had divine revelations vouchsafed to him, and that St. Peter had once appeared to him in a vision and given him a ring. It is, at any rate, certain that he built the Abbey of Westminster in St. Peter's honour, and lavished on it a very rich endowment. The English looked back to Edward's reign as a kind of golden age in the evil times that followed, and worshipped him as a saint; but the good governance of the realm owed far more to Godwine and Harold than to the gentle, unworldly king.

On Edward's death the Witan had to choose them a king. The next heir of the house of Alfred was a child, Eadgar the Etheling, the great-nephew of the deceased monarch. He was only ten years of age, and there was no precedent for electing so young a boy to rule England. Outside the royal line there were two persons who were known to desire the crown: the first was the man who had for all practical purposes governed England for the last fourteen years, Earl Harold of Wessex, the late king's brother-in-law; the other was William the Norman. It was said that Edward had once promised to use his influence in his Norman cousin's favour, but it is certain that on his death-bed he recommended Harold to the assembled thegns and bishops. The Witan did not waver for a minute in their decision; they chose Harold, and he accepted the crown without any show of hesitation. Yet it was certain that his elevation would bring on him the bitter jealousy of the young Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, who regarded themselves as his equals, in every respect. And it was equally clear that William of Normandy, who had counted on Harold's assistance in his candidature for the throne, would vent his wrath and disappointment on the new king's head (Jan., 1066).

Harold attempted to conciliate the sons of Aelfgar by paying them every attention in his power, and by marrying their sister Ealdgyth. But to appease the stern Duke of Normandy Pg 62 he knew was impossible, and he looked for nothing but war from that quarter. Indeed, he was hardly mounted on the throne before William sent over ambassadors to formally bid him fulfil his oath and resign the crown, or take the consequences. It need hardly be added that Harold replied that the Witan's choice was his mandate, and that his oath had been extorted by force.

The Duke of Normandy was firmly resolved to assert his baseless claim to the throne by force of arms. He had a large treasure and many bold vassals, but he knew that his own strength was insufficient for such an enterprise as the invasion of England. Accordingly, he proclaimed his purpose all over Western Europe, and offered lands and spoil in England to every adventurer who would take arms in his cause. William's military reputation was so great, that he was able to enlist thousands of mercenaries from France, Brittany, Flanders, and Aquitaine. Of the great army that he mustered at the port of St. Valery, only one-third were native Normans. William took six months for his preparation; he had to build a fleet, since Harold had a navy able to keep the Channel, and to beat up every freelance that could be hired to take service with him. Nor did he neglect to add spiritual weapons to temporal: he won over the Pope to give his blessing on the invasion of England, because Harold had broken the oath he swore on the bones of all the saints, and had become a perjurer. There were other reasons for Pope Alexander's dislike for the English. Stigand, Harold's Archbishop of Canterbury, had acknowledged an anti-Pope, and Rome never forgave schism; moreover, the house of Godwine had not been friendly to the monks, but had been patrons of Dunstan's old foes, the secular canons. Alexander therefore sent William his blessing, and a consecrated banner to be unfurled when he should land in England.

Hearing of William's vast preparations, Harold arrayed a fleet to guard the narrow seas, and bade the fyrd of all England to be ready to muster on the Sussex coast. He was prepared to defend himself, and only wondered at the delay in his adversary's sailing, a delay which was caused by north-westerly winds, which kept the Normans storm-bound.

Suddenly there came to Harold disastrous and unexpected Pg 63 news from the north. His exiled brother Tostig had chosen this moment to do him an ill turn. He had gone to the north, and persuaded Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway, to invade England. Hardrada was the greatest Viking that ever existed, the most celebrated adventurer by sea and land of his age. When Tostig offered him the plunder of England, he took ship with all his host and descended on Northumbria. Morcar, the young earl of that region, came out to meet him, with his brother Eadwine at his side. But Hardrada defeated them with fearful slaughter before the gates of York, and took the city.

When Harold of England heard this news he was constrained to leave the south, and risk the chance of William's landing unopposed. He took with him his house-carles, the great band of his personal retainers, and marched in haste on York, picking up the levies of the midland shires on the way.

So rapidly did Harold move, that he caught the Northmen quite unprepared, and came upon them at Stamford Bridge, close to York, when they least expected him. There he defeated the invaders in a great battle. Its details are unfortunately lost, for the noble Norwegian saga that gives the story of Hardrada's fall was written too long after to be trusted as good history. It tells how the English king rode forward to the invading army, and, calling to his brother, offered him pardon and a great earldom. But Tostig asked what his friend Harald of Norway should receive. "Seven feet of English earth, seeing that he is taller than other men," answered Harold of England. Then Tostig cried aloud that he would never desert those who had helped him in his day of need, and the fight began. We know that both the rebel earl and the Norse king fell, that the raven banner of the Vikings was taken, and that the remnant only of their host escaped. It is said that they came in three hundred ships, and fled in twenty-four.

Harold of England was celebrating his victory at York by a great feast a few nights after the battle of Stamford Bridge, when a message was brought him that William of Normandy had crossed the Channel and landed in Sussex with a hundred thousand men at his back. Harold hurried southward with his house-carles, bidding the Earls Pg 64 Eadwine and Morcar bring on the levies of Mercia and Northumbria to his aid as fast as they might. But the envious sons of Aelfgar betrayed their brother-in-law, and followed so slowly that they never overtook him. Harold marched rapidly on London, and gathered up the fyrd of East Anglia, Kent, and Wessex, so that he reached the coast with a considerable army, though it was one far inferior in numbers to William's vast host. Not a man from Mercia or Northumbria was with him; but the levies of the southern shires, where the house of Godwine was so well loved, were present in full force.

William had now been on shore some ten or twelve days, and had built himself a great intrenched camp at Hastings. But the King of England, as befitted the commander of the smaller host, came to act on the defensive, not on the offensive. He took post on the hill of Senlac, where Battle Abbey now stands, and arrayed his army in a good position, strengthened with palisades. He was resolved to accept battle, though his brother Gyrth and many others of his council bade him wait till Eadwine and Morcar should come up with the men of the north, and meanwhile, to sweep the land clear of provisions and starve out William's army. The Norman duke desired nothing more than a pitched battle; he knew that he was superior in numbers, and believed that he could out-general his adversary. When he heard that Harold had halted at Senlac, he broke up his camp at Hastings, and marched inland. The English were found all on foot, for they had not yet learnt to fight on horseback, drawn up in one thick line on the hillside, around the dragon-banner of Wessex and the standard of the Fighting Man, which was Harold's private ensign. The king's house-carles, sheathed in complete mail, and armed with the two-handed Danish axe, were formed round the banners; on each flank were the levies of the shires, an irregular mass where well-armed thegns and yeomen were mixed with their poorer neighbours, who bore rude clubs and instruments of husbandry as their sole weapons.

William's army was marshalled in a different way. The flower of the duke's host was his cavalry, and the Norman knights were the best horse-soldiery in Europe. His army was drawn up in three great bodies, the two wings composed of his French, Flemish, and Breton mercenaries, the centre Pg 65 of the native Normans. In each body the mounted men were preceded by a double line of archers and troops on foot.

The two hosts joined in close combat, and for some hours the fighting was indecisive. Neither the arrows of the Norman bowmen, nor the charges of their knights, could break the English line of battle. The invaders were driven back again and again, and the axes of the men of Harold made cruel gaps in their ranks, cleaving man and horse with their fearful blows. At last William bade his knights draw off for a space, and bade the archers only continue the combat. He trusted that the English, who had no bowmen on their side, would find the rain of arrows so insupportable that they would at last break their line and charge, to drive off their tormentors. Nor was he wrong; after standing unmoved for some time, the English could no longer contain themselves, and, in spite of their king's orders and entreaties, the shire-levies on the wings rushed down the hill in wild rage and fell upon the Normans. When they were scattered by their fiery charge, the duke let loose his horsemen upon them, and the disorderly masses were ridden down and slain or driven from the field. The house-carles of Harold still stood firm around the two standards, from which they had not moved, but the rest of the English army was annihilated. Then William led his host against this remnant, a few thousand warriors only, but the pick of Harold's army. Formed in an impenetrable ring, the king's guards held out till nightfall, in spite of constant showers of arrows, alternating with desperate cavalry charges. But Harold himself was mortally wounded by an arrow in the eye, and one by one all his retainers fell around him, till, as the sun was setting, the Normans burst through the broken shield-wall, hewed down the English standards, and pierced the dying king with many thrusts. With Harold there fell his two brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, his uncle Aelfwig, most of the thegnhood of Wessex, and the whole of his heroic band of house-carles.

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THE ENGLISH KINGS OF THE HOUSE OF ECGBERT.

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William pitched his tents among the dead and dying where the English standards had stood. Next day he could judge of the greatness of his success, and see that the English army had been well-nigh annihilated. He vowed to build a great church on the spot, in memory of his victory, and kept his resolve, as Battle Abbey shows to this day. At first he wished to cast out his fallen rival's body on the sea-shore, as that of a perjurer and an enemy of the Church; but better counsels prevailed, and he finally permitted the canons of Waltham to bury Harold's corpse in holy ground. It is said that no one was able to identify the king among the heaps of stripped and mutilated slain except Edith with the Swan's Neck, a lady whom he had loved and left in earlier days.

William expected to encounter further resistance, and marched slowly and cautiously on London by a somewhat circuitous route, crossing the Thames as high up as Wallingford. But he met with no enemy. Dover, Canterbury, Winchester, and the other cities of the south yielded themselves up to him. In fact, Wessex had been so hard hit by the slaughter at Hastings, that scarce a thegn of note survived to organize resistance. Every grown-up man of Godwine's house had fallen, and of the whole race there remained but two young children of Harold's. Meanwhile the Witan met at London to elect a new king. The two sons of Aelfgar, whose treacherous sloth had ruined England, had hoped that one of them might be chosen to receive the crown; but their conduct had been observed and noted, and rather than take Eadwine or Morcar as lord, the Witan chose the last heir of the house of Aelfred, the boy Eadgar, great-nephew to St. Edward. This choice was hopelessly bad when a victorious enemy was Pg 68 thundering at the gates. Eadwine and Morcar disbanded their levies, and went home in wrath to their earldoms. The south could raise no second army to replace that which had fallen at Hastings, and when William pressed on toward London the followers of Eadgar gave up the contest. As he lay at Berkhamstead, the chief men of London and Ealdred, the Archbishop of York, came out to him, and offered to take him as lord and master. So he entered the city, and there was crowned on Christmas Day 1066, after he had been duly elected in the old English fashion. A strange accident attended the coronation: when the Archbishop Ealdred proposed William's name to the assembly, and the loud shout of assent was given, the Norman soldiery without thought that a riot was beginning, and cut down some of the spectators and fired some houses before they discovered their mistake. So William's reign began, as it was to continue, in blood and fire.

Eadwine and Morcar and the rest of the English nobles soon did homage to William; but the realm was only half subdued, for, save in the south-east, where the whole manhood of the land had been cut off at Hastings, the English had submitted more for want of leaders and union than because they regarded themselves as conquered. It remained to be seen how the new king would deal with his realm, whether he would make himself well loved by his subjects, as Cnut had done, or whether he would become a tyrant and oppressor. William, though stern and cruel, was a man politic and just according to his lights. He wished to govern England in law and order, and not to maltreat the natives. But he was in an unfortunate position. He knew nothing of the customs and manners of the English, and could not understand a word of their language. Moreover, he could not, like Cnut, send away his foreign army, and rely on the loyalty of the people of the land. For his army was a rabble of mercenaries drawn from many realms outside his own duchy, and he had promised them land and sustenance in England when they enlisted beneath his banner. Accordingly, he had to begin by declaring the estates of all who had fought at Hastings, from Harold the king down to the smallest freeholder, as forfeited to the crown. This put five-sixths of the countryside in Wessex, Essex, Kent, and East Anglia into the king's hands. Pg 69 These vast tracts of land were distributed among the Norman, French, Flemish, and Breton soldiery, in greater and smaller shares, to be held by feudal tenure of knight-service from the king's hands.

In the rest of England, those of the native landowners who had not fought at Hastings were allowed to "buy back their lands." That is, they paid William a fine, made him a formal surrender of their estates, and then received them back from him under the new feudal obligations, becoming tenants-in-chief of the crown; agreeing to hold their manors directly from the king as his personal dependents and vassals. So there was no longer any land in England held by the old German freehold tenure, where every man was the sole proprietor of his own soil.

If things had stopped here, northern England would have remained in the hands of the old landholders, while southern England passed away to Norman lords. But the rapacious followers of the Conqueror were soon to get foot in the north also. William went back to Normandy in 1067, leaving his brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, regent in his stead. The moment that he was gone, the new settlers began to treat the English with a contempt and cruelty which they had not dared to show in their master's presence, and Odo rather encouraged than rebuked them. There followed the natural result, a widespread rising in those parts of England which had not yet felt the Norman sword. Unfortunately for themselves, the English rose with no general plan, and with no unity of purpose, every district fighting for its own hand. The western counties sent for the two sons of Harold, who came to Exeter, and were there saluted as hereditary chiefs of Wessex. But in Northumbria the insurgents proclaimed the Etheling Eadgar as king; and in Mercia there arose a thegn, Eadric the Wild, who was descended from the wicked Eadric Streona, and wished to reassert hereditary claims to his ancestor's earldom.

William immediately returned to England, and attacked the rebels. They gave each other no aid; each district was subdued without receiving any succour from its neighbour. William first marched against Exeter, took it after a long siege, and drove the young sons of Harold over sea to Ireland. Then he moved into Mercia, and chased Pg 70 Eadric the Wild into Wales, clearing Gloucestershire and Worcestershire of insurgents. The North made a perfunctory submission, and a Norman earl, Robert de Comines, was set over it. These abortive insurrections led to much confiscation of landed property in the west and north, which was at once portioned out among William's military retainers (1068).

But there was hard fighting to follow. In the spring of 1069 a second and more serious rising broke out in Northumbria. The insurgents took Durham, slew Earl Robert, and sent to ask the aid of the Kings of Scotland and Denmark. They were headed by Waltheof, Earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, the son of that Siward who had vanquished Macbeth. Both the monarchs who had been asked for aid consented to join the rebels. Malcolm Canmore of Scotland had married Margaret, the sister of the Etheling Eadgar, and thought himself bound to aid his brother-in-law. Swegen of Denmark, on the other hand, had hopes of the English crown, to which, as Cnut's successor, he thought he might lay some claim. Waltheof and his army ere long took York, and killed or captured the whole Norman garrison. But after this success the allies drifted apart; Swegen did not care to make Eadgar King of England, and Eadgar's party were angry with the Danes for ravaging and plundering on their own account. When William came up against York with a great host, the Danes took to their ships and left the English unaided. William was too strong for the Northumbrians; he routed them, retook York, and then set to work to punish the country for its twice repeated rebellion. He harried the whole of the fertile Yorkshire plain, from the Humber to the Tees, with fire and sword. The entire population was slain, starved, or driven away. Many fled to Scotland and settled there; others took to the woods and lived like savages. Several years passed before any one ventured forth again to till the wasted lands, and when the great Domesday Book was compiled—nearly twenty years after—it recorded that Yorkshire was still an almost unpeopled wilderness. While William was venting his wrath on the unfortunate Northumbrians, the Danish king, instead of aiding the insurgents, sailed up the Nen to Peterborough, and sacked its great abbey, the pride of the Fenland; this act completely ruined the already failing cause of the English, who would not trust the Danes any longer.

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Meanwhile William marched at mid-winter through the snow-covered heights of the Peakland, from York to Chester, to crush out the last smouldering fires of the insurrection on the North-Welsh border. Cheshire and Shropshire bowed before him, and there was then nothing left of the English hosts, save a few scattered bands of fugitives. Waltheof, the leader of the rebellion, submitted to the king, and, to the surprise of all men, was pardoned and restored to his earldom. The Danes returned to Denmark, bribed by William to depart (1070). But the last remnants of the English gathered themselves together in the Fenland under Hereward the Wake, a Lincolnshire man, the most active and undaunted warrior of his day, Hereward fortified himself in an entrenched camp on the Isle of Ely, in the heart of the Fens, and defied the king to reduce him. For more than a year he held his own, and beat off every attack, though William brought up thousands of men and built vast causeways across the marshes in order to approach Hereward's camp of refuge.

It was at this moment, when the Isle of Ely was the only spot in England that was not in William's hands, that the foolish and selfish earls Eadwine and Morcar thought proper to rebel and take arms against the Normans. They had long lost all influence, even among their own followers, and were crushed with ease. Eadwine fell in a skirmish; Morcar escaped almost alone to Hereward's camp. Soon afterwards that stronghold fell, betrayed to William by the monks of Ely (1071). Hereward escaped, but most of his followers were captured. The king blinded or mutilated many of them, and put Morcar in close prison for the rest of his life. But he offered pardon to Hereward, as he had to Waltheof, for he loved an open foe. The "Last of the English" accepted his terms, was given some estates in Warwickshire, and is found serving with William's army in France a year later.

The English never rose again; their spirit was crushed; ruined by their own disunion and by the selfishness of their leaders, they felt unable to cope any longer with the stern King William. Any trouble that he met in his later years was not due to native rebellions, but to the turbulence and disloyalty of his own Norman followers. Those of the English who could not Pg 72 bear the yoke patiently, fled to foreign lands, many to the court of Scotland, where Queen Margaret, the sister of the Etheling Eadgar, made them welcome; some even as far as Constantinople, to enlist in the "Varangian guard" of the Eastern emperor.

In the fifteen years that followed, William recast the whole fabric of the English society and constitution, changing the realm into a feudal monarchy of the continental type. Even before the Conquest the tendency of the day had been towards feudalism, as is shown by the excessive predominance of the great earls in the days of Aethelred the Ill-counselled and Edward the Confessor, and by the decreasing importance of the smaller freeholders. As early as Eadgar's time a law bade all men below the rank of thegn to "find themselves a lord, who should be responsible for them;" that is, to commend themselves to one of their greater neighbours by a tie of personal homage. But the old-English tie of vassalage, though it placed the small freeholders in personal dependence on the thegns, left them their land as their own, and allowed a man to transfer his allegiance from one lord to another. When, however, the English thegnhood had fallen on Senlac Hill, or had lost their manors for joining in the rebellion of 1069, the condition of their former dependents was much changed for the worse. The Norman knights, who replaced the thegns, knew only the continental form of feudal tenure, where the land, as well as the personal obedience of the vassal, was deemed to belong to the lord. So the English ceorls, who had been the owners of their own land, though they did homage to some thegn for their persons, were reduced to the lower condition of villeinage—that is, they were regarded as tilling the lord's land as tenants, and receiving it from him, in return for a rent in service or in money due to him. And instead of the land being considered to belong to the farmer, the farmer was now considered to belong to the land; that is, he was bound to remain on it and till it, unless his lord gave him permission to depart, being glebae ascriptus, bound to the soil, though he could not, on the other hand, be dispossessed of his farm, or sold away like a slave. The condition of the villein was at its very worst in William's reign, because the burden was newly imposed, and because the Norman masters, who had just taken possession of the English manors, were foreigners who did not comprehend a word of their tenants' Pg 73 speech, or understand their customs and habits. They felt nothing but contempt for the conquered race, whom they regarded as mere barbarians; and hard as was the letter of the feudal law, they made it worse by adding insult to mere oppression. They crushed their vassals by incessant tallages, or demands for money over and above the rent in money or service that was due, and allowed their Norman stewards and underlings to maltreat the peasantry as much as they chose. It should be remembered also that, evil though the plight of the villein might be, there were others even more unhappy than he, since there were many among the peasantry who were actually slaves, and could be bought and sold like cattle. These were the class who represented the original theows or slaves of the old English social system.

Feudalism, then, so far as it meant the complete subjection of the peasant, both in body and in land, to the lord of his manor, was perfected in England by the Norman conquest. But there was another aspect of the feudal system, as it existed on the continent, which England was fortunate enough to escape. The crowning misery of the other lands of Western Europe was that the king's power in them had grown so weak, that he could not protect his subjects against the earls and barons who were their immediate lords. In France, for example, the king could not exercise the simplest royal rights in the land of his greater vassals, such as the Duke of Normandy or the Count of Anjou. All regal functions, from the coining of money to the holding of courts of justice, had passed to the great vassals. Even when a count or duke rebelled and declared war against the king, his liegemen were considered bound to follow their master and take part in his treason. Now William was determined that this abuse should never take root in England. He was careful not to allow any of his subjects to grow too strong; in distributing the lands of England he invariably scattered the possessions of each of his followers, so that no one man had any great district entirely in his hands. He gave his favourites land in eight or ten different counties, but in each they only possessed a fraction of the whole. There were only three exceptions to this rule. He created "palatine earls" in Cheshire, Shropshire, and Durham, who had the whole shire in their hands, and were allowed to hold their own courts of justice Pg 74 and raise the taxation of the district, like the counts of the continent. These exceptional grants were made because they were frontier shires, and the earls were intended to be bulwarks against the king's enemies—Chester and Shropshire against the Welsh, and Durham against the Scots.

In the rest of England the king kept the local government entirely in his own hands, using the sheriffs (shire-reeves), who had existed since the early days of the kings of Wessex, as his deputies. It was the sheriff who raised the taxes, led the military levy of the shire to war, and presided in the law courts of the district. The sheriffs, whom the king nominated as men whom he could completely trust, were the chief check on the earls and barons. Their office was not hereditary; they were purely dependent on the king, and he displaced them at his pleasure. By their means, William kept the government of England entirely in his own hands, and never allowed his greater vassals to trench upon his royal rights.

William also enunciated a most important doctrine, which clashed with the continental theory of feudalism. He insisted that every man's duty to the king outweighed that to his immediate feudal suzerain. If any lord opposed the king and bade his vassals follow him, the vassals would be committing high treason if they consented to do so. Their allegiance to the crown was more binding than that which they owed to their local baron or earl.

Although, then, the Norman conquest turned England into a feudal hierarchy, where the villein did homage to the knight, the knight to the earl, the earl to the king, yet the strength of the royal power gained rather than lost by the change. William was far more the master of his barons than was St. Edward of his great earls like Godwine or Siward. And this was not merely owing to the fact that William was a strong and Edward a weak man, but much more to the new political arrangements of the realm. William never allowed an earl to rule more than one shire, while Godwine or Leofric had ruled six or seven. William's sheriffs were a firm check on the local magnates, while Edward's had been no more than the king's local bailiffs. Moreover, there were many counties where William made no earl at all, and where his sheriff was therefore the sole representative of authority.

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The kingly power, too, was as much strengthened in the central as in the local government. The Saxon Witan had represented the nation as opposed to the king: it had an existence independent of him, and we have even seen it depose kings. The Norman "Great Council," on the other hand, which superseded the Witan, [8] was simply the assembly of the king's vassals called up by him to give him advice. Though the class of persons who were summoned to it was much the same as those who had appeared at the Witan—bishops, earls, and so forth—yet they now came, not as "the wise men of England," but as the king's personal vassals, his "tenants-in-chief." All who held land directly from the crown might appear if they chose, but as a matter of fact it was only the greater men who came; the knights and other small freeholders would not as a rule visit an assembly where their importance was small and their advice was not asked.

William's hand was felt almost as much by the Church as by the State. He began by clearing away, one after another, all the English bishops; Wulfstan of Worcester, a simple old man of very holy life, was ere long the sole survivor of the old hierarchy. Their places were filled by Normans and other foreigners, the primatial seat of Canterbury being placed in the hands of Lanfranc of Pavia, a learned Italian monk who had long been a royal chaplain, and had afterwards been made Abbot of Bec; he was always the best and most merciful of the king's counsellors. William and Lanfranc brought England into closer touch with the continental Church than had been known in earlier days. This was but natural when we remember that it was with the Pope's blessing and under his consecrated banner that the land had been conquered. The new Norman bishops continued Dunstan's old policy of favouring the monks at the expense of the secular clergy, and of establishing everywhere strict rules of clerical discipline. Their stern asceticism was not without its use, for the English clergy had of late grown somewhat lax in life, and unspiritual and worldly in their aims. It was with Lanfranc's aid that William took a step in the organization of the Church that was destined to be a sore trouble Pg 76 to his successors in later days. Hitherto offences against the law of the Church had been tried in the secular courts, and this was not felt to be a grievance by the clergy, because the bishops and abbots both sat in the Witan and attended the meetings of the local shire courts, where such offences—bigamy, for example, or perjury, or witchcraft, or heresy—were tried. But William and Lanfranc now gave the bishops separate Church courts of their own, and withdrew the inquiry into all ecclesiastical cases from the king's court. Though William did not grasp the fact, he was thus erecting an institution which might easily turn against the royal power, as the ecclesiastical judges in their new courts were not under the control of the crown, and had no reason to consult the king's interests. But in William's own time the Church-courts gave no trouble, for they had not yet learnt their power, and the bishops dreaded the king's arm too much to offend him. For William was no slave of the Church; when Pope Gregory VII. bade him do homage to the papacy for his English crown, because he had won England under the papal blessing, he sturdily refused. He announced also that he would outlaw any cleric who carried appeals or complaints to Rome without his permission, and he forbade the clergy to excommunicate any one of his knights for any ecclesiastical offence, unless the royal permission were first obtained.

We have already mentioned the fact that in the last fifteen years of his reign William had little or no trouble with his English subjects. But his life was far from being an easy one; he had both foreign enemies to meet and a turbulent baronage to keep down. Many of the new earls and barons were not born subjects of William, but Flemings, French, or Bretons, who looked upon him as merely the chief partner in their common enterprise of the conquest of England; even among the Normans themselves many were turbulent and disloyal. Within ten years of the Conquest, the king had to take arms against a rebellion of some of his own followers. Ralf, Earl of Norfolk, and Roger, Earl of Hereford, took counsel against him, and tried to enlist in their plot Waltheof, the last surviving English Earl. "Let one of us be king, and the two others great dukes, and so rule all England," was their suggestion to him, when they had gathered all their friends together under the pretence Pg 77 of Earl Ralf's marriage feast. Waltheof refused to join the rebellion, but thought himself in honour bound not to disclose the conspiracy to the king. When the two earls took arms they soon found that William was too strong for them. Ralf fled over sea; Roger was taken and imprisoned for life. Of their followers, some were blinded and some banished. But the hardest measure was dealt out to Earl Waltheof, whose only crime had been his silence. William was anxious to get rid of the last great English territorial magnate; he tried Waltheof for treason before the Great Council, and, when he was condemned, had him at once executed at Winchester (1076). His earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon were, however, allowed to pass to his daughter, who married a Norman, Simon of St. Liz.

Some few years after the abortive rising of Ralf and Roger, the king found worse enemies in his own household. His eldest son and heir, Robert, began to importune him to grant him some of his lands to rule, and begged for the duchy of Normandy. But William was wroth, and drove him away with words of sarcastic reproof. The headstrong young man fled from his father's court and took refuge with Philip, the French king, William's nominal suzerain. Supported by money and men from France, Robert made war upon his father, and defeated him at the fight of Gerberoi (1079). Both father and son rode in the forefront of the battle. They met without knowing each other, and William was unhorsed and wounded by his son's lance. Only the courage of an English thegn, Tokig of Wallingford, who gave his horse to his fallen master, and received a mortal wound while helping him to make off, saved William from death. It must be added that Robert was deeply moved when he learnt how near he had been to slaying his own father, and then he immediately after sought pardon, and received it. But he had lost the first place in the king's heart, which was given to his second son William, whose fidelity was always unshaken. Robert was not the only kinsman of the Conqueror who justly incurred his wrath. His brother Bishop Odo angered him sorely by his cruel and oppressive treatment of Northumbria, and still more by raising a private army to make war over-seas; William seized him and kept him shut up in prison as long as he lived.

Disputes with foreign powers also arose to vex William's later Pg 78 years. In 1084, Cnut, King of Denmark, threatened to invade the island, and such a heavy Danegelt was raised to pay the mercenary army which the king levied against him, that it is said that no such grievous tax had ever before been raised in England. Yet Cnut never came, being slain by his own people ere he sailed. Less threatening, but more perpetually troublesome than the danger of a Danish invasion, were William's broils with Philip of France, who even in time of peace was always stirring up strife. But Philip, though nominally ruler of all France, was practically too weak to cope with William, since his authority was quietly disregarded by most of the counts and dukes who owned him as liege lord.

It was probably the difficulty that had been found in raising men and money to resist the expected Danish invasion of 1084, that led William to order the compilation of the celebrated Domesday Book in 1085. This great statistical account of the condition of England was drawn up by commissioners sent down into every shire to make inquiry into its resources, population, and ownership. Therein was set down the name of every landholder, with the valuation of his manors, and an account of the service and money due from him to the king. It did not give merely a rent-roll of the estates, but a complete enumeration of the population, divided up by status into tenants-in-chief of the crown, sub-tenants who held under these greater landowners, burgesses of towns, free "sokmen," villeins, and serfs of lower degrees. Under each manor was given not only the name of its present holder and its actual value, but also a notice of its proprietor in the time of King Edward the Confessor, and of its value at Edward's death. This enables us to form an exact estimate of the change in the ownership of the lands of England brought about by the Conquest. We see that of the great English earls and magnates not a single one survived; all their lands had been confiscated and given away at one time or another. Of the thegns of lower degree some still retained their land, and had become the king's tenants-in-chief; many had sunk into sub-tenants of a Norman baron, instead of holding their estate directly from the crown; but still more had lost their heritage altogether. In some counties, especially in the south-east, where the whole thegnhood had fallen at Hastings, hardly a single English proprietor survived Pg 79. In others, such for example as Wiltshire or Nottingham, a large proportion of the old owners remained; but, on the whole, we gather that three-quarters of the acreage of England must have changed masters between 1066 and 1085. We discover also that while some parts of England had suffered little in material prosperity from the troublous times of the Conquest, others had been completely ruined. Yorkshire shows the worst record, a result of William's cruel harrying of the land in 1070; manor after manor is recorded as "waste," and the whole county shows a population less by far than that of the small shire of Berks.

Having ascertained by the completion of Domesday Book the exact names, status, and obligations of all the landholders of England, William used his knowledge to bid them all come to the Great Moot of Salisbury in 1086, where every landed proprietor, whether tenant-in-chief or sub-tenant, did personal homage to the king, and swore to follow him in all wars, even against his own feudal superior if need should so arise.

Two years after the compilation of the Domesday survey, and one year after the Great Oath of Salisbury, the troubled and busy reign of William came to an end. The king died, as he had lived, amid the alarms of war. He was always at odds with his suzerain, the King of France, since Philip had done him the evil turn of encouraging the rebellion of his son Robert. In 1087, William was lying ill at Rouen, when the report of a coarse jest that Philip had made on his increasing corpulence raised him in wrath from his sick-bed. He headed in person a raid into France, and sacked the town of Mantes, but while he watched his men burn the place, the king came to deadly harm. His horse, singed by a blazing beam, reared and plunged so that William received severe internal injuries from being thrown against the high pommel of his saddle. He was borne back to Rouen, and died there, deserted by well-nigh all his knights and attendants, who had rushed off in haste when they saw his death draw near. Even his burial was unseemly: when his corpse was borne to the abbey at Caen, which he had founded, a certain knight withstood the funeral procession, crying that the ground where the abbey stood had been forcibly taken from him by the king. Nor would he depart till the estimated value of the land had been paid over to him.

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Thus ended King William, a man prudent, untiring, and brave, and one who was pious and just according to his own lights, for he governed Church and State as one who deemed that he had an account to render for his deeds. But he was so unscrupulous in his ambition, so ruthless in sweeping away all who stood in his path, so much a stranger to pity and mercy, that he was feared rather than loved by his subjects, Norman as well as English. No man could pardon such acts as his harrying of Yorkshire, or forget his cruel forest laws, which inflicted death or mutilation on all who interfered with his royal pleasure of the chase. "He loved the tall deer as if he was their father," it was said, and ill did it fare with the unhappy subject who came between him and the favoured beasts. England has had many kings who were worse men than William the Bastard, but never one who brought her more sorrow, from the moment that he set foot on the shore of Sussex down to the day of his death.

THE HOUSE OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.

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The eighty years which followed the death of William the Conqueror were spent in the solution of the problem which he had left behind him. William had brought over to England two principles of conflicting tendency—the one that of strong monarchical government, where everything depends on the king; the other that of feudal anarchy. He himself had been able to control the turbulent horde of military adventurers among whom he had distributed the lands of England, but would his sons be equally successful? We have now to see how two strong-handed kings kept down the monster of feudal rebellion; how one weak king's reign sufficed to put the monarchy in the gravest danger; and how, finally, William's great-grandson quelled the unruly baronage so that it was never again a serious danger for the rest of England's national life.

William had left behind him three sons. To Robert the eldest, the rebel of 1079, he had bequeathed, not the English crown, but his own ancient heritage of Normandy. William the Red, the second son, who had always been his father's loyal helper, was to be King of England. Henry, the youngest son, was left only a legacy of £5000; the Conqueror would not parcel out his dominions any further, but said that his latest-born was too capable a man not to make his own way in the world.

William the Red hurried over to England the moment that the breath was out of his father's body, and was duly crowned by Lanfranc the archbishop. But it was no easy heritage that he took up; the Conqueror's death was the instant signal for the outbreak of Pg 82 feudal anarchy. All the more turbulent of the Norman barons and bishops, headed by Odo of Bayeux, who had just been released from prison, took arms, garrisoned their castles, and began to harass their neighbours. They made it their pretext that Duke Robert, as the eldest son, ought to succeed his father in all his dominions; but their true reason for espousing his cause was that Robert was known to be a weak and shiftless personage, under whose rule every great man would be able to do whatever he might please. In order to defeat this rising William the Red took the bold step of throwing himself upon the loyalty of the native English. He summoned out the militia of the shires, proclaiming that every man who did not follow his king to the field should be held nithing, a worthless coward, and promising that he would lighten his father's heavy yoke and rule with a gentle and merciful hand. The fyrd turned out in unexpected strength and loyalty, and with its aid William put down all the Norman rebels, and drove them out of the realm. Duke Robert, who had prepared to come to their aid, was too late, and had to return to his duchy foiled and shamed.

William's promise that he would be a good and easy lord to his subjects was not kept for long. The new king was in all things an evil copy of his father: he had William's courage and ability, but none of his better moral qualities; he had no sense of justice, and was not restrained by any religious scruples. He was, indeed, an open atheist, and scoffed at all forms of religion, scornfully observing that he would become a Jew if it was made worth his while. Moreover, his private life was infamous, and no man who cared for honour or purity could abide at his court.

Nevertheless, his government was far more tolerable than the anarchy of baronial rule would have been. If he sheared his subjects close himself, he took care that no one else should molest them, and one bad master is always better than many. Under him England was cruelly taxed, and many isolated acts of oppression were committed, but he put down civil war, overcame his foreign enemies, and ruled victoriously for all his days.

Of William's exploits, those which were the most profitable for the peace of England were his enterprises against the Scots and the Welsh. Malcolm Canmore, though he had done Pg 83 homage to William I., repeatedly led armies into England against William's son. In this first Scottish war the Red King, though his fleet was destroyed by a storm, compelled Malcolm to submit, and took from him the city of Carlisle and the district of Cumberland. This land, the southern half of the old Welsh principality of Strathclyde, had been tributary to the Scots ever since King Edmund granted it to Malcolm I. in 945. It now became an English county and bishopric, and the border of England was fixed at the Solway, and no longer at the hills of the Lake District (1092). Only a year later the Scottish king again invaded England, but was slain at Alnwick. He ran into an ambush which the Earl of Northumberland laid for him, and fell; with him died his son Edward and the best of his knights. The Scottish crown passed, after much fighting and contention, to Eadgar, Malcolm's second son by his English wife Margaret, the sister of Eadgar the Etheling. This prince, trained up by his pious and able mother, and aided and counselled by his uncle the Etheling, was the first King of Scotland who spoke English as his native tongue, and made the Lowlands his favourite abode. He surrounded himself with English followers, and ceased to be a mere Celtic lord of the Highlands, as his fathers had been.

William the Red's arms were as successful against Wales as against Scotland. During his reign the southern half of the land of the Cymry was overrun by Norman barons, who won for themselves new lordships beyond the Wye and Severn, and did homage for them to the king. Many of these adventurers married into the families of the South Welsh princes, and became the inheritors of their local power. In North Wales the Normans pushed across the Dee, and built great castles at Rhuddlan and Flint and Montgomery, but they could not win the mountainous districts about Snowdon, where the native chiefs still maintained a precarious independence.

Beyond the British seas William waged constant war with his brother Robert, and always had the better of his elder, for the duke, though a brave soldier, was a very incapable ruler, and lost by his shiftless negligence all that he gained by his sword. He was forced in Pg 84 1091 to cede several of his towns to William, and to promise to make him his heir if he should die without male issue. But in 1096 the king gained possession of the whole, and not a mere fraction, of the Norman duchy. For Robert, seized with a sudden access of piety and a spirit of wandering and unrest, vowed to go off to the First Crusade, which was then being preached. In order to get the money to fit out a large army, he unwisely mortgaged the whole of his lands to his grasping brother for the very moderate sum of £6666. So William ruled Normandy for a space, and Robert went off with half the baronage of Western Christendom, to deliver the Holy Sepulchre from the Turks, and to set up a Christian kingdom in Palestine. Among his companions were the Etheling Eadgar, and many Englishmen more. The duke fought so gallantly against the infidel that the Crusaders offered him the crown of Jerusalem; but he would have none of it, and set his face homeward after four years of absence (1099).

King William meanwhile had been ruling both England and Normandy with a high hand. He and his favourite minister, Ralf Flambard, had been devising all manner of new ways for raising money. When a tenant of the crown died, they would not let his son or heir succeed to his estate till he had paid an extortionate fine to the king. When a bishop or an abbot died, they kept his place empty for months—or even for years—and confiscated all the revenues of the see or abbey during the vacancy. It was on this question that there broke out the celebrated quarrel between William the Red and Archbishop Anselm. When Lanfranc, his father's wise counsellor, died in 1089, the king left the see of Canterbury unfilled for nearly four years, and embezzled its revenues. But, being stricken with illness in 1093, he had a moment of compunction, and filled up the archbishopric by appointing Anselm, Abbot of Bec. Anselm, like his predecessor Lanfranc, was a learned and pious Italian monk, who had governed his Norman abbey so well that he won the respect of all his neighbours. He was only persuaded with difficulty to accept the position of head of the English Church. "Will you couple me, a poor weak old sheep, to that fierce young bull the King of England?" he asked, when the bishops came to offer him the primacy. But Pg 85 they forced the pastoral staff into his hands, and hurried him off to be installed. When William recovered from his sickness he began to ask large sums of money from Anselm, in return for the piece of preferment that he had received. The king called this exacting his feudal dues, but the archbishop called it simony, the ancient crime of Simon Magus, who offered gold to the apostles to buy spiritual privileges. He sent £500, but when the king asked for more, utterly refused to comply. From this time forth there was constant strife between William and Anselm, the first beginning of that intermittent war between the crown and the Church which was to last for more than two centuries. The archbishop was always withstanding the king. When two popes disputed the tiara at Rome, William refused to acknowledge either; but Anselm would not allow that there was any doubt, did homage to Urban, and thus forced the king's hand by committing England to one side in the dispute. When Urban sent over to Anselm the pall, [9] the sign of his metropolitan jurisdiction over the island, the king wished to deliver it to the archbishop with his own hands. But Anselm vowed that this was receiving spiritual things from a secular master, and would not take it save with his own hands and from the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral. Nor did he cease denouncing the ill living of the king and his courtiers, till William grew so wrath that he would have slain him, had not all England revered the fearless archbishop as a saint. At last he found a way of molesting Anselm under form of law: he declared that the lands of the see of Canterbury had not sent an adequate feudal contingent to his Welsh wars, and imposed enormous fines on the archbishop for a breach of his duties as a tenant-in-chief of the crown. Soon afterwards Anselm left the realm, abandoning the king to his own devices as incorrigible, and took his way to Pope Urban at Rome; nor did he return till William was dead.

The end of the Red King was sudden and tragic. He was hunting in the New Forest—the great tract in Hampshire which his father had cleared of its inhabitants and turned into one vast deer-park—and he had chanced to draw apart from all his followers save Walter Tyrrel, Pg 86 one of his chief favourites. A great hart came bounding between them. The king loosed an arrow at it, and missed; "Shoot, Walter, shoot in the devil's name!" he cried. Tyrrel shot in haste, but missed the stag and pierced his master to the heart. Leaving William dead on the ground, he galloped off to the shore and took ship for the continent. William's corpse lay lost in the wood till a charcoal-burner came upon it next day, and bore it in his cart to Winchester. Such was the strange funeral procession of the lord of England and Normandy. William's death grieved none save his favourites and boon companions, for his manner of living was hateful to all good men, and his taxes and extortions had turned from him the hearts of all his subjects (August 2, 1100).

When the throne of England was thus suddenly left vacant, it remained to be seen who would become William's successor. His elder brother Robert, whom the baronage would have preferred, because of his slackness and easy ways, was still far away, on his return journey from the Crusade. But Henry, his younger brother, was on the spot, and knew how to take advantage of the opportunity. Hastily assembling the few members of the Great Council who were near at hand, he prevailed upon them by bribes or promises to elect him king, and was proclaimed at Winchester only three days after William's death, and long before the news that the throne was vacant had reached the turbulent barons of the North and West. After his proclamation at Winchester, Henry moved to London, and there was crowned. He did his best to win the good opinion of all his subjects by issuing a charter of promises to the nation, wherein he bound himself to abide by "the laws of Edward the Confessor," that is, the ancient customs of England, and not to ask of any man more than his due share of taxation—agreeing to abandon the arbitrary and illegal fines on succession to heritages which William II. had always exacted. He then proceeded to fill up all the abbeys and bishoprics which William had kept vacant for his own profit, to recall Anselm from his exile, and to cast into prison Ralf Flambard, [10] the chief instrument of his brother's oppression and extortions.

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Henry's conciliatory measures were not taken a moment too soon. He had but just time to announce his good intentions, and to give some earnest of his desire to carry them out, when he found himself involved in a desperate civil war. The barons had broken loose, headed by Robert of Belesme, the turbulent Earl of Shrewsbury, and they were set on making Duke Robert King of England. Robert, indeed, had just returned from Palestine, and had retaken possession of his duchy shortly after his brother's death. He planned an invasion of England to assist his partisans, and began to collect an army.

But the new king was too much for his shiftless brother. When Robert landed at Portsmouth, he bought him off for a moment by offering him a tribute of £3000, an irresistible bribe to the impecunious duke, and then used his opportunity to crush the rebellious barons. The fate of the rising was settled by the next summer. Gathering together the English shire levies and those of the baronage who were faithful to him, the king marched against Robert of Belesme and his associates. The successful sieges of Arundel and Bridgenorth decided the war: Robert was forced to surrender, and granted his life on condition of forfeiting his estates and leaving the realm. "Rejoice, King Henry, for now may you truly say that you are lord of England," cried the English levies to their monarch, "since you have put down Robert of Belesme, and driven him out of the bounds of your kingdom" (1101).

So Henry retained the crown that he had seized, and set to work to strengthen his position in the land. He did his best to conciliate the native English by marrying, five months after his accession, a princess of the old royal house of King Alfred. The lady was Eadgyth, or Matilda as the Normans re-named her, the daughter of Malcolm, the King of Scotland and of Margaret, the sister of Eadgar the Etheling. So the issue of King Henry, and all his descendants who sat on the English throne, had the blood of the ancient kings of Wessex in their veins. Some of the Normans mocked at this marriage, and at the anxiety which Henry showed to please his native-born subjects, and nicknamed him "Godric," an English name which sounded uncouth to their own ears. But the king heeded not, when he got so much solid Pg 88 advantage from his conduct, and the prosperity of his reign justified his wisdom.

Henry showed himself his father's true son, reproducing the good as well as the evil qualities of the Conqueror. He had the advantage over his father of having been born in England, and of living in a generation when the first bitterness of the strife of races was beginning to be assuaged. If he was selfish and hard-hearted and often cruel, yet he dispensed even-handed justice, curbed all oppressors, and kept to the letter of the law. He made so little difference between Norman and Englishman that the two races soon began to melt together: intermarriage between them became common in all classes save the highest nobility; the English thegns and yeomen began to christen their children by Norman names, while the Anglo-Normans began to learn English, and to draw apart from their kindred beyond the sea in the old duchy. Thirty years after Henry's death, it was remarked by a contemporary writer that no man could say that he was either Norman or English, so much had the two races become intermingled. Much of the benefit of this happy union must be laid to the credit of Henry himself, who both set the example of wedding a wife of English blood, and treated all his men of either race as equal before his eyes. Nor was he averse to granting a larger measure of liberty to his subjects: his charter to the city of London, issued in 1100, was a very liberal grant of self-government to the burghers of his capital, and served as a model ever after to his successors when they gave privileges to their town-dwelling liegemen. He allowed the Londoners to raise their own taxes, to choose their own sheriffs, and to make bye-laws for their municipal government.

But Henry's character had a bad side: he was at times as ruthlessly cruel as his father; he punished not only rebellion, but theft and offences against the forest laws, by death, or blinding, or mutilation. Once, when he found that the workmen of his mints had conspired together to issue base coins, he struck off the right hand of every moneyer in England. We shall see that he was capable of holding his own brother in close prison for thirty years. He was as grasping and avaricious as his predecessor William, though he was Pg 89 much less arbitrary and harsh in his exactions. His private life, though not a patent scandal like that of the Red King, was open to grave reproach. Above all things he was selfish; his own advantage was his aim, and if he governed the land wisely and justly, it was mainly because he thought that wisdom and justice were the best policy for himself.

Henry's long reign (1100-1135) was more noteworthy for the tendencies which were at work in it, than for the particular events which mark its individual years. It is mainly important as the time of the silent growth together of Norman and English, and the stereotyping of the constitution on a strong monarchical basis. In his day the king was everything, and the Great Council of tenants-in-chief was no check on him, and did little more than register his decrees. If his successors had all been like himself, England might have become a pure despotism, though one well ordered and—considering the lights of the times—not oppressively administered.

The strife between the monarchy and the Church, which had first taken shape in the quarrel of William Rufus and Anselm, continued in Henry's time, but raged on a new point of issue. When the archbishop returned from exile, he refused to take the usual oath of homage, and to be reinvested in his see by the new king, alleging that, as a spiritual person, he owed fealty to God alone, and received all his power and authority from God, and not from the king. This new and strange doctrine he had picked up in Rome during his exile: the papacy was at this time putting forth those monstrous claims to dominion over kings and princes with which it had been inspired a few years before by the imperious Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII.). Henry could only reply that, though the archbishop was a spiritual person, he was also a great tenant-in-chief, holding vast estates, and that for them he must do homage to the crown, like all other feudal landowners. Anselm refused, and there the matter stood still, for neither would yield, though they treated each other courteously enough, and did not indulge in the angry recrimination which had been wont to take place when Rufus was in Henry's place. Anselm even went into exile again for a space. But at last he and the king met at Bec, in Normandy, in 1106, and hit on a wise compromise, Pg 90 which they agreed to apply both to Anselm's case and to all future investitures of bishops. The newly elected prelate was to do homage, as a feudal tenant, for the estates of his see; but he was not to receive the symbols of his spiritual authority from the king, but was to take up his ring and crozier from the high altar of his cathedral, as direct gifts from God. This decision served as a model for the agreement between the Pope and the empire, when fourteen years later the "Contest about Investiture," as this widespread dispute was called, was brought to an end on the continent.

The chief incidents in the foreign relations of Henry's reign are his long wars with his shiftless brother Robert, and afterwards with Robert's son, William Clito. He had never forgiven the duke for his attempt to dethrone him by the aid of rebels in 1099; nor did the duke ever forgive him for having so promptly seized England at the moment of the death of William II. The peace which they had made in 1100 did not endure, and a long series of hostilities at last culminated in the battle of Tinchebrai (1106). Here Henry, who had invaded Normandy, completely defeated his brother and took him prisoner. He sent the unfortunate Robert to strict confinement in Cardiff Castle, and kept him there all the days of his life. For the rest of his reign Henry ruled Normandy as well as England, but his dominion in the duchy was very precarious. The baronage hated his strong hand and his strict enforcement of the law. They often rebelled against him, but he never failed to subdue them. When William, surnamed Clito, the son of the imprisoned duke, grew towards man's estate, he had no difficulty in finding partisans in Normandy who would do their best to win him back his father's heritage. Aided by the King of France, who was one of Henry's most consistent enemies, William Clito made several bold attempts to deprive his uncle of Normandy. He did not succeed, but presently he became Count of Flanders, to which he had a claim through his grandmother Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror. Possessed of this rich country, he grew to be a more serious danger to the English king, but he fell in battle in 1128, while striving with some Flemish rebels, and by his death Henry's position became unassailable.

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The King of England was troubled with many other enemies beside William Clito. Lewis VI. of France, and Fulk, Count of Anjou, were always molesting him. But he gained or lost little by his long and dreary border wars with them. The one noteworthy consequence of this strife was that, to confirm a peace with Count Fulk, the king married his two children to the son and daughter of the lord of Anjou. First, his son William was wedded to the count's daughter (1119), and some years later the Lady Matilda was married to Geoffrey, the count's son and heir (1127).

The importance of this latter marriage lay in the fact that Prince William had died in the intervening space, and that Matilda—a widowed princess whose first husband had been the Emperor Henry V.—was now the King of England's sole heiress. The end of her brother had been strange and tragic: he was following his father from Normandy to England, when a drunken skipper ran his vessel upon the reef of Catteville, only five miles from the Norman shore. The prince was hurried by his followers into the only boat that the ship possessed, and might have escaped, had he not seen that his half-sister, the Countess of Perche, [11] had been left behind. He bade the oarsmen put back, but when they reached the ship, a crowd of panic-stricken passengers sprang down into the boat and swamped it. The prince was drowned, and with him his half-brother Richard, his half-sister the Countess of Perche, the Earl of Chester, and many of the chief persons of the realm. Only one sailor-lad survived to tell the sad tale of the White Ship. When the news of the death of his only legitimate son reached the king, he was prostrated by it for many days, and it was said that he was never seen to smile again, though he lived for fifteen years after the disaster. But, if the chronicles speak true, the death of William was more of a loss to his father than to the realm, for they report him to have been a proud and cruel youth, who bid fair to reproduce some of the evil qualities of his uncle William Rufus.

Henry was determined that his realm should pass at his Pg 92 death to his daughter Matilda, and not to any of his nephews, the sons of William the Conqueror's daughters. But he knew that it would be a hard matter to secure her succession, for England had never been ruled by a queen-regnant, and it was very doubtful if the Great Council would elect a woman. Moreover, the barons grudged that she should have been married to a foreign count, for they had hoped that the king would have given her hand to one of his own earls. Henry endeavoured to support Matilda's cause by constraining all the chief men of the realm, and his own kinsfolk, to take an oath to choose her as queen after his death. But he well knew that oaths sworn under compulsion are lightly esteemed, and must have foreseen that on his death his daughter would have great difficulty in asserting her claims.

But, trusting his daughter's fate to the future, Henry persevered in his life's work, and left his kingdom behind him at his death in 1135 with a full treasury, an obedient baronage, and largely extended borders. Not only had he won Normandy, but he had completed the conquest of South Wales, and established large colonies of English and Flemings about Pembroke and in the peninsula of Gower. With his three brothers-in-law, who reigned in Scotland one after another, he dwelt on friendly terms; they did him homage, and he left them unmolested. They were wise princes who knew the value of peace, and under them the Scotch kingdom advanced in civilization and wealth, and grew more and more assimilated to its great southern neighbour.

On the 1st of December, 1135, King Henry died. Though a selfish and unscrupulous man, he had been a good king, and the troubles which followed his death soon taught the English how much they had owed to his strong and ruthless hand.

Immediately on the arrival of the news of his death, the Great Council met at London. It was soon evident that many of its members thought little of the oath that they had sworn ten years before. One after another they declared that the reign of a queen would be unprecedented and intolerable, and that a man must be chosen to rule over England. Of the male members of the royal house the one who was best known in England was Stephen of Blois, one of the late king's Pg 93 nephews, and the son of Adela, a daughter of William I., who had wedded the Count of Blois and Champagne. He had been the late king's favourite kinsman, and had taken the oath to uphold Matilda's rights before any of the lay members of the council. Now he lightly forgot his vow, and stood forward as a candidate for the crown. Matilda was absent abroad, and her husband Geoffrey of Anjou was much disliked, so that it was not difficult for Henry, Bishop of Winchester, Stephen's younger brother, to prevail on the majority of the magnates of the realm to reject her claim. In spite of the murmurings of a large minority, Stephen was chosen as king, and duly crowned at London, whose citizens liked him well, and hailed his accession with shouts of joy.

They were soon to change their tone, for ere long Stephen began to show that he was too weak for the task that he had undertaken. He was a good-natured, impulsive, volatile man, who could never refuse a friend's request, or keep an unspent penny in his purse. Save personal courage, he had not one of the qualities of a successful king. The baronage soon took the measure of Stephen's abilities, and saw that the time had come for them to make a bold strike for that anarchical feudal independence which was their dream. The name and cause of Matilda gave them an excellent excuse for throwing up their allegiance, and doing every man that which was right in his own eyes. The king put down a few spasmodic rebellions, but more kept breaking out, till in the third year of his reign a general explosion took place (1138). The cause of the Lady Matilda was taken up by two honest partisans, her uncle David, King of Scotland, and her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester; [12] but these two were aided by a host of turbulent self-seeking barons, who craved nothing save an excuse for defying the king and plundering their neighbours.

The Scot was the first to move; he crossed the Tweed with a great army, giving out that he came to make King Stephen grant him justice in the matter of the counties of Huntingdon and Northampton, which he claimed as the heir of the long-dead Earl Waltheof. [13]

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But the wild Highland clans that followed David ravaged Northumbria so cruelly that the barons and yeomen of Yorkshire turned out in great wrath to strike a blow for King Stephen. At Northallerton they barred the way of the invaders, mustering under Thurstan, Archbishop of York, and the two sheriffs of the county. They placed in their midst a car bearing the consecrated standards of the three Yorkshire saints—St. Peter of York, St. Wilfred of Ripon, and St. John of Beverley. Around it they stood in serried ranks, and beat off again and again the wild charges of the Highlanders and Galloway men who formed the bulk of King David's army. More than 10,000 Scots fell, and Yorkshire was saved; but the war was only just beginning (1138).

A few months after the Battle of the Standard the English partisans of Matilda took arms, headed by her brother, Earl Robert. Gloucester, Bristol, Hereford, Exeter, and most of the south-west of England at once fell into their hands. Stephen did his best to make head against them, by the aid of such of the baronage as adhered to him, and of great bodies of plundering mercenaries raised in Flanders and France. He bought off the opposition of the Scots by ceding Northumberland and Cumberland to Henry, the son of King David, who was to hold them as his vassal, and for the rest of Stephen's reign the two northern counties were in Scottish hands.

But at this critical moment the king ruined his own cause by a quarrel with the Church. He threw into prison the Bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln, because they refused to surrender their castles into his keeping, and treated them so roughly that every ecclesiastic in the realm—even including his own brother, Henry, Bishop of Winchester—took part against him (1139). Soon afterward Matilda landed in Sussex, and all the southern counties fell away to her. After much irregular fighting, the two parties came to a pitched battle at Lincoln. In spite of the feats of personal bravery which Stephen displayed, he was utterly defeated, and fell into the hands of his enemies (1141).

The cause of Matilda now seemed triumphant. She had captured her enemy, and most of the realm fell into her hands. She was saluted as "Lady of England" at Winchester, and there received the homage of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and most of the barons and bishops of the land. She then moved to Pg 95 London, to be crowned; but in the short space since her triumph she had shown herself so haughty, impracticable, and vindictive that men's minds were already turning against her. Most especially did she provoke Stephen's old partisans, by refusing to release him on his undertaking to quit the kingdom and formally resign his claims to the crown. This refusal led to the continuation of the war: Maud of Boulogne, Stephen's wife, rallied the wrecks of his party and continued to make resistance, and on the news of her approach the Londoners commenced to stir. Their new mistress had celebrated her advent by imposing a crushing tallage, or money-fine, on the city, and in wrath at her extortion the citizens rose in arms and chased her out of the place, before she had even been crowned.

The unhappy civil war—which for a moment had seemed at an end—now commenced again. Matilda steadily lost ground, and had to release Stephen in exchange for her brother, Robert of Gloucester, who had fallen into the hands of the king's party. She was besieged first at Winchester, then at Oxford, and on each occasion escaped with great difficulty from her adversaries. At Oxford she had to be let down by a rope at night from the castle keep, to thread her way through the hostile outposts, and then to walk on foot many miles over the snow.

The baronage were so well content with the practical independence which they enjoyed during the civil war, that they had no desire to see it end. They changed from side to side with the most indecent shamelessness, only taking care that at each change they got a full price for their treachery. Geoffrey de Mandeville, the wicked Earl of Essex, was perhaps the worst of them; he sold each party in turn, and finally fought for his own hand, taking no heed of king or queen, and only seeking to plunder his neighbours and annex their lands. He had many imitators; the last pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which finally comes to an end in Stephen's reign, are filled with a picture of the hopeless misery of the land. Every shire, it laments, was full of castles, and every castle was filled with devils and evil men. The lords took any weaker neighbours who were thought to have money, and put them in dungeons, and tortured them with unutterable devices. "The ancient martyrs were not so ill treated, for they hanged men by the thumbs, or by the head, and smoked Pg 96 them with foul smoke; they put knotted strings about their heads, and twisted them till they bit into the brain. They put them in dungeons with adders and toads, or shut them into close boxes filled with sharp stones, and pressed them there till their bones were broken. Many thousands they killed with hunger and torment, and that lasted the nineteen winters while Stephen was king. In those days, if three or four men came riding towards a township, all the township fled hastily before them, believing them to be robbers."

So fared England for many years, till in 1153 a peace was patched up at Wallingford. Matilda had quitted England long before, and her party was now led by her young son, Henry of Anjou, who had come over in 1152 to take her place. Stephen was now old and broken by constant campaigning; he had lately lost his son Eustace, whom he had destined to succeed him; and when it was proposed to him that he should hold the crown for his own life, but make Count Henry his heir, he closed with the offer. Less than a year later he died, leaving England in the worst plight that ever she knew since the days of Aethelred the Ill-counselled. For the king's mandate no longer ran over the land, and every baron was ruling for himself. Northumberland and Cumberland were in the hands of the Scots, the Welsh were harrying the border counties, and Yorkshire had been ravaged in 1153 by the last Viking raid recorded in English history. It was time that a strong man should pick up the broken sceptre of William the Conqueror.

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When Henry of Anjou, now a young man of twenty-one years, succeeded to Stephen's crown, he found the country in a most deplorable condition. The regular administration of justice had ceased, many of the counties had no sheriffs or other royal officers, the revenue had fallen off by a half, and the barons were exercising all the prerogatives of the king, even to the extent of coining money in their own names. A weak man would have found the position hopeless; a strong man, like Henry, saw that it required instant and unflinching energy, but that it was not beyond repair.

Henry started with the advantage of an undisputed title; his mother, Matilda, had ceded all her rights to him, and Stephen's surviving son, William of Boulogne, never attempted to lay any claim to the crown. Moreover, the king had enormous resources from abroad to aid him. His father was long dead, so that he was himself Count of Anjou and Touraine. He had his mother's lands of Normandy and Maine already in his hands. But he had become the ruler of a still larger realm by his marriage. He had taken to wife Eleanor, the Duchess of Aquitaine, whose enormous inheritance stretched from the Loire to the Pyrenees. This was a marriage of pure policy; Eleanor was an ill-conditioned, unprincipled woman, the divorced wife of King Lewis VII. of France, and she gave her second husband almost as much trouble as she had given her first. But by aid of her possessions Henry dominated the whole of France; indeed, he held much more French territory under him than did King Lewis VII. Pg 98 himself, and for the political gain he was prepared to endure the domestic trouble.

FRANCE, SHOWING HENRY II'^S. CONTINENTAL DOMINIONS.

The continental dominions of Henry were, indeed, so large that they quite outweighed England in his estimation. He was himself Angevin born and bred, and looked upon his position more as that of a French prince who owned a great dependency beyond sea, than as that of an English king who had possessions in France. He spent the greater part of his time on the continent, so that England was generally governed by the successive Justiciars, or prime ministers, who acted as regents while he was abroad. Henry's absence and his absorption in foreign politics were perhaps not a very grave misfortune for England; he was such a strong and able ruler, that when he had once put the realm to rights in the early part of his reign, the danger to be feared was no longer feudal anarchy, but royal despotism.

Henry's first measures, on succeeding to the throne, were very drastic. He began by ordering the barons to dismantle all the castles which had been built in the troublous times of Stephen, and enforced his command by appearing at the head Pg 99 of a large army. It is said that he levelled to the ground as many as 375 of these "adulterine castles," as they were called, because they had been erected without the king's leave. Very few of the barons ventured to resist; those who did were crushed without difficulty. Henry also resumed all the royal estates and revenues which Stephen and Matilda had lavished on their partisans during the civil war, annulling all his mother's unwise grants as well as those of her enemy. He filled up the vacant sheriffdoms, and commenced the despatch of itinerant justices round the country, to sit and decide cases in the shire courts; this custom, which became permanent, was the origin of our modern Assizes. After he had set England in order, Henry demanded the restoration of Northumberland and Cumberland from Malcolm of Scotland, the heir of King David. They were given back, after being seventeen years in Scottish hands. At the same time, Malcolm did homage to Henry for his remaining earldom in England, that of Huntingdon, which had descended to him from Waltheof. Owen, Prince of North Wales, submitted himself to the king in the same year, but not without some fighting, in which Henry met with checks at first.

Thus England was pacified, brought under firm and regular rule, and restored to her ancient frontiers. Henry even thought at this time of invading Ireland, and got a Bull from Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever sat upon the papal throne, to authorize him to subdue that country. The pretexts alleged were, that the Irish church was schismatic, inasmuch as it refused to acknowledge the papal authority, and also that Ireland was infamous for its slave-trading in Christian men. But no attempt was made to enforce the Bull Laudabiliter for many years to come.

Ireland might rest secure, because the king had turned aside into schemes for the augmentation of his continental dominions. Long and fruitless bickerings and negotiations with Lewis VII., the shifty King of France, ended in 1159 in the War of Toulouse. Henry laid claim to the great south-French county of Toulouse, as owing fealty to his wife's duchy of Aquitaine. He led against it the greatest army that had been seen for many years, in which the King of Scotland and the Prince of Wales served as his chief vassals. Pg 100 But when Lewis of France threw himself into Toulouse, Henry turned aside, moved, it is said, by the curious feudal scruple that it did not befit him as Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou to make a personal attack on his suzerain, the King of France. He ravaged the county, but did not proceed with the siege of Toulouse itself. Next year he patched up a peace with his feudal superior, which was to be confirmed by the marriage of his five-year-old son and heir, Prince Henry, with Margaret, the French king's daughter (1160). The chief interest of the very fruitless war of Toulouse was that Henry employed in it a new scheme of taxation, which was an indirect blow at the feudal system. As Toulouse was so very far from England, he allowed those of the English knighthood who preferred to stay at home, to pay him instead of personal service a composition called scutage (shield-money). The money thus received was used to hire a great body of mercenary men-at-arms, whom the king knew to be both more obedient and more efficient soldiers than the unruly feudal levies.

The interest of Henry's reign now shifts round to another point—the question of the relations between State and Church, which we have already seen cropping up in the reigns of Rufus and Henry I. In 1162 he appointed Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, and rued the choice ever after, for now his troubles began. Thomas, the son of a wealthy merchant of London, had been the king's chief secretary or Chancellor for the last eight years. He was a clever, versatile, not very scrupulous man, with a devouring ambition: hitherto he had been a devoted servant, and a genial companion to the king, and had lived much more like a layman than a cleric. In spite of his priesthood, he had borne arms in the war of Toulouse, and even distinguished himself in a single combat with a French champion. Henry thought that Thomas would be no less obliging and useful as archbishop than he had been as Chancellor. He was woefully deceived. No sooner was Thomas consecrated, than his whole conduct and manner of life suddenly changed. His ambition—now that he had become a great prelate—was to win the reputation of a saint. Casting away all his old habits, he began to practise the most rigid austerity, wearing a hair shirt next his skin, stinting himself in food and drink, and washing the feet of lepers and Pg 101 mendicants; from a supple courtier he had become the most angular and impracticable of saints. But it was not merely to mortify his own body that Becket had accepted the archbishopric; his real object was to claim for the head of the Church in England what the Popes of his day were claiming for themselves in Western Christendom—complete freedom from the control of the State. His dream was to make the English Church imperium in imperio, and to rule it himself as an absolute master. Without the reputation of a saint, he could not dare to compass this monstrous end, so a saint he had to become. The moment that he was consecrated, he opened his campaign against the king; he threw up the Chancellorship, which Henry had asked him to retain, and commenced at once to "vindicate the rights of the see of Canterbury," that is, to lay claim to a number of estates now in the hands of various lay owners, as being Church land. When his demands were withstood, he in some cases went to law with the owners, but in others used the arbitrary clerical punishment of excommunicating his adversaries. But this was only the beginning of troubles; in 1163 he began to oppose the king in the Great Council, taking up the ever-popular cry that the taxes were over-heavy. Henry, surprised at meeting opposition from such an unexpected quarter, withdrew his proposals, which seem indeed to have been intended rather to limit the profits of the sheriffs than to raise more money.

But the growing estrangement between the king and the archbishop did not come to a full head till the end of 1163, when they engaged in a desperate quarrel on the question of the rights and immunities of the clergy. We have mentioned in an earlier chapter how William the Conqueror had established separate courts for the trial of clerical offences, and had put them under the control of the bishops. Since his day, these courts had been steadily growing in importance, and putting forth wider and wider claims of jurisdiction. The anarchical reign of Stephen, when all lay courts of justice came to a standstill, had been especially favourable to their growth. The last development of their demands had been the extraordinary assertion that they ought to try, not only all ecclesiastical offences, but all offences in which ecclesiastics were concerned. That is, not only were such Pg 102 crimes as bigamy or heresy or perjury to come before them, but if a member of the clerical body committed theft or assault or murder, or, again, if a layman robbed or assaulted or murdered a cleric, the cases were to be taken out of the king's court, and to be brought before the bishop's. The most monstrous absurdity of this claim was that the ecclesiastical tribunal had no power to impose any but ecclesiastical punishments, that is to say, penance, excommunication, or deprivation of orders. So if a clergyman committed the most grievous crimes, he could not receive any greater penalty than suspension from his clerical duties, or penances which he might or might not perform. It had come to be a regular trick with habitual criminals to claim that they were in holy orders—which included not only the priesthood, but sacristans and sub-deacons and other minor church officers—and so to exchange death or blinding for the milder ecclesiastical punishments.

A very bad case of murder by a priest, which Becket punished merely by ordering the murderer to abstain from celebrating the Sacraments for two years, called King Henry's attention to the usurpation of the Church courts. When he found that their claims were quite modern, and had been unknown to the old English law, he resolved at once to take in hand the settlement of the whole question of the ecclesiastical courts. At a Great Council held at Westminster, he proposed to appoint a committee to investigate the matter, and to draw up a statement of the true law of the land with regard, not only to "criminous clerks," but to all the disputes between lay and clerical personages which could arise. Becket opposed the proposal as an invasion of the rights of the Church, and by his advice the other bishops, when asked if they would undertake to abide by the decision of the committee, replied that they would do so in so far as it did not impugn their rights—which meant not at all.

The statement of the laws of England was prepared by the committee, drawn up by the Justiciar, Richard de Lucy, and laid before the Great Council at Clarendon [14] early in the next year (1164), whence the document is known as the Constitutions of Clarendon. The king in it proposed a compromise—that the Church court should try whether a "criminous clerk" was Pg 103 guilty or innocent, and, if it pronounced him guilty, should hand him over to the king's officers to suffer the same punishment that a layman who had committed a similar offence would suffer. In other matters, where a layman and a cleric went to law on secular matters, the case was to be tried in the king's court. No layman was to be punished for spiritual offences, or excommunicated, without the king's leave, and the clergy were strictly prohibited from making appeals to Rome, or going thither, unless they had the royal authorization.

Becket declared that the Constitutions of Clarendon violated the immunities of the Church, but for a moment he yielded and consented to sign them. Next day, however, to the surprise of all men, he asserted that his consent had been a deadly sin, that he withdrew it, and that nothing should induce him to sign the constitutions. Henry vehemently urged him to do so, and pointed out that the Archbishop of York and the rest of the bishops were ready to accept the arrangement as just and fair. But Thomas took the attitude of a martyr, refused to move, and even sent to the Pope to get absolution for his so-called sin in giving a momentary consent to the king's proposals.

Seriously angry at the archbishop for binding up his cause with that of the criminous clerks and the usurpation of the Church courts, Henry took the rather unworthy step of endeavouring to bend Thomas to his will by allowing several of his courtiers to bring lawsuits against him, and by threatening to rake up and go through the accounts of all the public monies that had passed through his hands during the eight years that he had been Chancellor. But Becket was not a man to be bullied; he made himself yet more stiff-necked, and assumed the pose of a martyr for the rights of the Church. It was in vain that the other bishops urged him to yield; he attended the Great Council at Northampton in October, 1164, faced the king, refused to submit, and then, pretending that his life was in danger, fled by night and sailed over to Flanders. For the next six years Becket was on the continent, generally under the protection of Henry's suzerain and enemy, the King of France. He was regarded by the continental clergy as the champion of the rights of their order, and treated with the highest respect wherever he Pg 104 went. He did his best to stir up the King of France and his vassals against Henry II., and to induce the Pope Alexander III. to excommunicate him. But Alexander, deep in a quarrel with the great emperor Frederic Barbarossa, did not wish to make an enemy of the strongest king in Western Europe, and refused to do Becket's behest. On his own account, however, the exiled archbishop laid the sentence of excommunication on most of Henry's chief counsellors. As the great body of the bishops sided with the king, Becket's fulminations from over sea had little effect. In England he was treated as non-existent.

But in 1170 a new complication brought about a change in affairs. King Henry's eldest son and namesake, Henry the younger, was now a lad of fifteen, and his father wished to crown him and take him as colleague in his kingdom. The right to crown an English king was undoubtedly one of the prerogatives of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Henry left Becket out of account, and caused the ceremony to be performed by Roger of York. This invasion of his privileges wrought Thomas to such fury that he sought out the Pope, and won him over by his vehemence to threaten to lay all England under interdict—to cut it off from Christendom, and forbid the celebration of the Sacraments within its bounds.

King Henry, who was engaged in a troublesome war with the French king, was afraid of the consequences of the papal interdict; its enforcement, he thought, would make him too unpopular. So he humbled himself to patching up a truce with Becket, though they could not even yet come to any agreement on the question of the Constitutions of Clarendon. In the autumn of 1170 the king allowed him to return to England, on a tacit agreement that bygones were to be bygones.

But Becket had hidden his true purpose from the king. He returned to England bent, not on peace, but on war. Either because his anger carried him away, or because he was deliberately aiming at martyrdom and wished to provoke his enemies to violence, he proceeded to the most unheard-of measures. He first excommunicated the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Lincoln, who had taken part in the crowning of the younger Henry. Then he laid a similar Pg 105 sentence on those of the king's courtiers whom he accused of encroaching on the estates of the see of Canterbury.

The king was still over-sea in Normandy when the news of Becket's declaration of war was brought him. Henry was a man of violent passions, and the tale moved him to a sudden outbreak of fury. "Of all the idle servants that I maintain," he cried, "is there not one that will avenge me on this pestilent priest?" The words were wrung from him by the excitement of the moment, and soon forgotten, but they had a disastrous result. Among those who heard them were four reckless knights, some of whom had personal grudges against Becket, and all of whom were ready to win the king's favour by any means, fair or foul. Their names were Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard the Breton. These four took counsel with each other, secretly stole away from the court, and crossed the stormy December seas to England. They rode straight to Canterbury, sought audience with the archbishop, and bade him remove the excommunication of Roger of York and the rest, or face the king's wrath. Thomas met their words with a fierce refusal; thereupon they withdrew after defying him and warning him that his blood was on his own head. While they were girding on their coats of mail in the cathedral close, the monks of Canterbury besought the archbishop to fly. He had plenty of time to do so, but flight was not his purpose. Far from hiding himself, he called for his robes and his attendants, and went to join in the Vesper service at the cathedral. The knights were soon heard thundering at the door; Becket threw it open with his own hands, and asked their purpose. "Absolve the bishops or die," cried Fitzurse. "Never till they have done penance for their sin," was the reply. Tracy cast his arms about the archbishop and tried to drag him outside the cathedral; but Thomas cast him down. Then Fitzurse drew his sword and cut at Becket's head, and the others felled him with repeated strokes, while he kept crying that he died for the cause of God and the Church. So ended the great archbishop, slain by lawless violence on the consecrated stones of his own cathedral. The splendid courage with which he met his death, and the brutality of his assailants, persuaded most men that he must have been in the right. The clergy looked upon him as their Pg 106 knight and champion, and were only too ready to make capital out of his troubles and heroic end. The poor remembered his indiscriminate almsgiving, his austerities, his opposition to the Danegelt. Every class of men felt some respect for one who had suffered exile and death for loyal adhesion to a cause, and few, except the king, thoroughly realized that the cause had really been that of ill government and clerical tyranny. Hence it came that a man whose main characteristics were his ambition and his obstinacy, and whose saintliness was artificial and deliberately assumed, took his place in the English calendar as the favourite hero of the Church. The Pope made him a saint in 1174, a magnificent shrine was erected over his remains, and for 350 years pilgrims thronged in thousands to do homage to his bones. To relate how many hysterical persons or impostors gave out that they had been healed of their diseases by a visit to his sanctuary would be tedious. The thing which would have given Becket most pleasure, could he have lived again to view it, was the sight of Henry II. doing penance at his tomb in 1174, and baring his back to be scourged by the monks of Canterbury, as a slight reparation for the hasty words that had brought about his servants' deed of murder.

There is no doubt that Henry was sincerely shocked and horrified by the news of the archbishop's death. He sent instant messages to the Pope to clear himself of the accusation of having been privy to the crime, and offered any satisfaction that Alexander might demand. Meanwhile he undertook what might be considered a kind of crusade to Ireland, with the avowed purpose of reducing it to obedience to the papacy as well as to subjection to himself.

For during the times of Becket's exile (1164-70) two important series of events had been occurring, one of which put Henry in possession of Brittany, while the other had led to his interference in Ireland. The Dukes of Normandy had always claimed a feudal supremacy over Brittany. This claim Henry found an opportunity for asserting and turning to account, by forcing Conan, the Breton duke, to marry his infant heiress Constance to his own third son Geoffrey, a boy of seven years old (1166). When Conan died five years later, Henry ruled the whole duchy as guardian of his young son and daughter-in-law. Thus his Pg 107 power was extended over the whole western shore of France from the Somme to the Pyrenees.

Henry's interference in Ireland sprang from more complicated causes. Ireland in the twelfth century was—as it had been since the first dawn of history—a group of Celtic principalities, always engaged in weary tribal wars with each other. Sometimes one king gained a momentary superiority over the rest, but his power ceased with his life. In the ninth century the island had been overrun by the Danes; they had not succeeded in occupying a broad Danelagh such as they won in England, but had built up a number of small kingdoms on the coast, round their fortified strongholds of Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and Limerick. These principalities still existed in Henry's time, while the interior was held by the five kings of Ulster, Munster, Connaught, Meath, and Leinster. At this moment Roderic O'Connor of Connaught claimed and occasionally exercised authority as suzerain over the other kings. But he had no real power over the land, which lay half desolate, had become altogether barbarous, and teemed with cruel and squalid tribal wars. The introduction of this distressful country into English politics may be laid at the door of Dermot McMorrough, King of Leinster. This prince had been driven out of his realm by his suzerain, Roderic, King of Connaught, because he had carried off the wife of Roderic's vassal, O'Rourke, Lord of Breffny. Dermot came to England, and asked aid of Henry II., who, as we have already seen, had long possessed a papal Bull, authorizing the conquest of Ireland. [15] Henry would not stir himself, being in the midst of troubles with the King of France, but gave the exiled king leave to obtain what help he could from the English barons. Dermot placed himself in the hands of Richard de Clare, nicknamed Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke, a warlike but impecunious peer who had great influence in South Wales. Richard raised a small army of Anglo-Norman knights and Welsh archers—less than 2000 men in all—and landed in Ireland to restore Dermot to his throne. He met with quite unexpected success, sweeping Dermot's enemies out of Leinster, and conquering the Danish princes of Wexford and Dublin. He married Dermot's heiress Eva, and on the king's death in 1171 succeeded him as ruler in Pg 108 his kingdom. Other barons and knights from South Wales came over to join him, and they obtained a complete mastery over the native Irish, whose light-armed bands could not resist the charge of the mail-clad knights or stand before the archers, even when they were in overwhelming numerical superiority. In a battle before the gates of Dublin, a few hundred followers of Strongbow routed the whole host of Roderic of Connaught, though he was supported by a considerable body of Danish Vikings.

Now, Henry did not wish to see one of his vassals building up a great kingdom in Ireland, independent of his authority. So, taking advantage of the papal authorization that he had so long kept by him, he crossed himself in 1171 with a great army and fleet, landed at Waterford, and marched to Dublin. He had no trouble in getting his authority recognized. Not only did Strongbow do him homage for the kingdom of Leinster, but, one after another, most of the native Irish kings came to his court and paid allegiance to him. From henceforth the Kings of England might call themselves "Lords of Ireland," but their power in the island was not very easy to exercise, nor did it extend to the remoter corners of the land. About half the soil of Ireland was seized by English and Norman adventurers, who built themselves castles and held down the Celts around them. The other half, mostly consisting of the more rugged and barren districts, remained in the hands of the native chiefs. But the settlers in the course of time intermarried with the Irish, and adopted many of their customs, so that they became tribal chiefs themselves. A century later the grudge between the settlers and the natives was still bitter, but they had become so closely assimilated that it was hard for a stranger to distinguish them. The one were as turbulent, clannish, fierce, and barbarous as the other. Only on the east coast round Dublin, in the district that was afterwards known as the English 'Pale,' did the Anglo-Irish dwell in a settled and civilized manner of life, and obey the King of England's mandates. The larger part of the island had to be reconquered four centuries after.

Perhaps the only permanent and immediate result of Henry's visit to Ireland was the submission of the Irish Church to the Pope. In a synod held at Cashel in 1172, all the bishops of the Pg 109 land acknowledged the papal supremacy, and abandoned the old customs of their Church. Thus the papal yoke was the first and most unhappy gift of England to Ireland.

It was on his return from Dublin that King Henry met the legates of Alexander III. at Avranches, in Normandy, and, on swearing that he had neither planned nor consented to the murder of Becket, was taken into the Pope's favour, and received complete absolution. In return, he promised to go on a crusade, and swore that he would support Alexander against his enemy the Emperor Frederic I. He also consented to annul the Constitutions of Clarendon, but did not make any formal surrender of the principles on which they rested—the right of the State to deal with ecclesiastical persons guilty of secular offences. Thus ended the tragedy of Becket's strife with the king; the archbishop had obtained by his death what he could never win in his life, and the question between Church and State was left open, instead of being settled, as had at first seemed likely, in favour of the king.

In less than a year after the penance at Avranches, Henry was plunged into a new sea of troubles, in which the Church party saw the vengeance of Heaven for the fate of Becket. All these troubles sprang from the undutiful conduct of Henry's sons, four graceless youths who had been brought up in the worst of schools by their able but unprincipled mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry, the eldest son, was now in his nineteenth year; Richard, the second son, in his seventeenth. But, in spite of their youth, the two boys, encouraged and supported by their mother, conspired against their father and king. In 1173 Henry fled to the court of Lewis of France, alleging as his grievance the fact that the king would not grant him a great appanage—England or Normandy—to rule in his own right. With the aid of Louis VII, the young Henry stirred up all the discontented elements in his father's dominions. He arranged for a simultaneous rising of the discontented barons of Brittany, Anjou, and Poitou, for a rebellion in England to be headed by the earls of Leicester, Derby, and Norfolk, and for an invasion of Northumbria by William, the King of the Scots.

This widespread conspiracy actually came to a head; but its outbreak only served to show King Henry's strength and Pg 110 activity. He was himself in France when the storm burst: taking in hand the work that lay nearest to him, he put down the Bretons and Angevins, and forced the King of France to conclude a truce. Then in the winter of 1173-4 he turned upon his son Richard's partisans in Poitou, and, after much fighting, pacified the land. Meanwhile the king's representative in England, the Justiciar Richard de Lucy, had called out the levies of the shires against the revolted barons. The campaign was settled by a battle at Fornham, in Suffolk, where the rebels were scattered and the Earl of Leicester taken prisoner. One after another the castles of the disloyal barons fell, and when England was pacified, Ralf de Glanville led a force against the Scots, surprised them at Alnwick, and took their king William the Lion prisoner (1174).

Thus Henry had triumphed over all his foes. In the moment of victory he showed extraordinary moderation. He neither executed any of the rebels nor confiscated their lands, but only insisted that all their castles should be demolished. He gave his sons a full pardon, and restored them to his favour; with their mother he was far more wroth, and never would live with her again. The King of the Scots was only released on doing homage to the English crown, not merely for his earldoms of Huntingdon and Lothian, which had always been reckoned English fiefs, but for his whole kingdom of Scotland (1175).

This was Henry's greatest triumph: the danger of feudal anarchy had once more assailed him, and he had beaten it down with such a firm hand that England was never troubled again with a purely selfish and anarchic baronial rising for more than two centuries. But this victory did not win the king a quiet and glorious end to his reign. His wicked and ungrateful sons were to be the bane of his elder years.

The effect of the blow that he had dealt his disloyal subjects lasted about eight years, a period of quiet and prosperity on both sides of the Channel, during which Henry passed many excellent laws, and more especially dealt with the administration of justice, arranging permanent circuits for the itinerant justices who sat in the county courts to hold the assizes. He also issued regulations for the uniform arming and mustering of the shire-levies, the old English fyrd which had served him so well against the Pg 111 rebels in 1173. Abroad he was universally recognized as the greatest king of the West. He was chosen as the fairest arbitrator in several disputes between contemporary princes—even by the distant Kings of Spain. He married his daughters to the Kings of Castile and Sicily and the great Duke of Saxony, the chief vassal of the German crown. To each of his sons he promised a great inheritance: Henry was to have England, Normandy, and Anjou; Richard was to take his mother's portion in Aquitaine; Geoffrey was already provided for with his wife's duchy of Brittany: John, the youngest son, was to be King of Ireland, and the Irish chiefs were made to do homage to him.

All this prosperity lasted till 1183, when Henry was fifty-two, and his four sons respectively twenty-eight, twenty-six, twenty-four, and sixteen. Tired of waiting any longer for his inheritance, and forgetful of the warning that he had received in 1174, Henry the younger once more took arms against his father: his aider and abettor was the new King of France, Philip Augustus, the son of Lewis VII., as bitter an enemy of the Angevin house as his predecessor had been. Henry also persuaded his brother Geoffrey to bring in the Bretons to his aid. Richard and John, the king's second and fourth sons, were for the time being faithful to their father; indeed, the actual casus belli, which Henry the younger published as his justification, was that the king had unfairly favoured Richard against him. This time the fighting was all on the continent; the English baronage were too much cowed to stir.

Henry the younger had only been a few months in rebellion when he died, stricken down by a fever (1183). But the civil war in Aquitaine did not end with his death; it dragged on its path till Geoffrey, his accomplice in the rebellion, was accidentally killed at a tournament three years later (1186). Henry had no issue, but Geoffrey left an infant heir, the unfortunate Arthur of Brittany, whose sad end was to shock the succeeding generation.

Henry's two rebellious sons being dead, peace was for a time restored in his continental dominions. Men's minds were turned away for a time from civil strife by dire news from the East. The Saracens had just routed the Christian King of Palestine, and recaptured Jerusalem. The work of the First Crusade was undone, and the Pg 112 Holy Sepulchre and the True Cross had fallen back into the hands of the infidels. The nations of the West were profoundly shocked; King Henry, his eldest surviving son Richard, and his great enemy Philip of France, all swore to take the cross and go forth to save the wrecks of the kingdom of Jerusalem from Saladin, the victorious lord of Syria and Egypt. All their baronage vowed to follow them, and the Great Council of England voted for the support of the new crusade a heavy tax, the "Saladin tithe," as it was called, which was to be a tenth of every man's goods and chattels. This was the first impost levied on personal property, that is, property other than land, which was ever raised in England. Previously, the Danegelt and the other taxes that had been raised, were calculated on landed property alone.

It would have been well for the King of England if his son and his French neighbour had sailed for the Holy Land in the year that they made their vow. For another and crowning grief was about to fall upon Henry. Richard, now his heir, revolted against him, even as Henry the younger and Geoffrey had done four years before. Like his elder brother, Richard alleged that his father would not give him enough; he complained that the king did not allow him to be crowned as his colleague, and that he made too much of John, the youngest and best loved of his four sons. The ungrateful conduct of Richard broke Henry's heart; though only fifty-six years of age, he began visibly to fail in health and mind. He made little endeavour to resist his son, and allowed him to overrun Anjou and Maine unopposed. Instead of calling out all his energies and appealing to the loyalty of his English and Norman subjects, he cast himself upon his couch and gave himself up to passionate grief. Rather than take arms against Richard, he determined to give him all that he asked. So, rising from, his bed, he dragged himself to Colombières, where he met Richard and the King of France, and swore to grant all they claimed. It was noticed that his bodily weakness was so great that his servants had to hold him on his horse while the interview was taking place. Two days later he expired; the final death-blow that prostrated him was the discovery of the fact that his youngest son, John, whom he had believed to the last to be faithful to him, had secretly aided Pg 113 Richard and joined in the rebellion. For when he swore to pardon all Richard's accomplices, and was given the list of their names, he found that of John set at the head of the catalogue of traitors. "Let things go as they will; I have nothing to care for in the world now," he said; and, turning his face to the wall, gave up his spirit (July 7, 1189).

So died Henry of Anjou, whom after-ages styled Plantagenet. [16] He was an Englishman neither by birth nor by breeding, and the greater part of his reign was spent abroad—two years was the longest continuous stay that he ever made on this side of the Channel. But, foreigner as he was, he was the best king that England had known since Eadgar, or that she was to know till Edward I. That he ended the awful anarchy which had prevailed since the accession of Stephen, was a merit that should never be forgotten. When the feudal danger was at its greatest, he boldly faced it, ended private wars, pulled down illegal castles, and reduced the baronage to its due obedience. And when the land was subdued beneath his hand he ruled it justly, not as a grasping tyrant, but as a wise and merciful master. Among the kings of his day he was conspicuous for two rare virtues, a willingness to pardon and forget, and a determination to stand firm by the letter of his promise. He had his faults—a hasty temper, a far-reaching ambition, a tendency to deal with men as if they were merely counters in the great game of politics; nor was his private life entirely free from blame. But he loved order and justice so well, and gave them in such good measure to his subjects, that his virtues must always outweigh in English minds his occasional lapses from the right path.

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When Henry of Anjou died broken-hearted at Chinon, his eldest surviving son Richard succeeded him in all his vast dominions, save in the duchy of Brittany, which fell to the child Arthur, the son of Richard's brother Geoffrey. John, the late king's youngest-born, received a fit reward for his treachery to his father in losing the appanage that had been destined for him. He did not obtain any independent principality of his own, but Richard made him Earl of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset.

From the moment of his accession the new king began to busy himself with preparations for going to the Crusade. He had taken the Cross in 1187, and his penitence for lingering in Europe and troubling his father, when he should have been over-seas fulfilling his vow, seems to have had a real influence upon him. But the mere love of adventure must be allowed to have had a far larger share in turning his steps to the East. Richard had the habits and instincts of a turbulent feudal baron, not those of a king. He had spent his life up to this time in petty wars with his father, his brothers, and his vassals in Aquitaine; such an existence pleased him well, and he dreamed of more exciting warfare on a larger stage in the lands of the Infidel, as the highest ambition that he could conceive.

The moment that he had been crowned, Richard set to work to scrape together every penny that he could procure, in order to provide against the expenses of the forthcoming Crusade. He began by selling every office and dignity that was vacant, with a gross disregard for the interests of the crown and the welfare of his subjects. Pg 115 He took £3000 from William Longchamp, the haughty and quarrelsome Bishop of Ely, and appointed him both Chancellor and Justiciar; that is, he made regent in his absence the most unsuitable man that could have been found. He sold the earldom of Northumberland to Hugh, Bishop of Durham, for £1000. A still greater bargain was obtained by William, King of Scotland, who for the sum of 10,000 marks (£6666) was let off the homage to the crown of England, which Henry II. had imposed upon him after the battle of Alnwick. Richard jestingly said that "he would have sold London itself if he could have found a rich enough buyer." But every town that wanted a charter, every baron who coveted a slice of crown land, every knight who wished to be made a sheriff, obtained the desired object at a cheap rate.

Richard's reign began with an outburst of turbulence which illustrated his careless governance well enough. Among the many classes of subjects to whom his father had given peace and protection was the Jewish colony in England, a body which had been rapidly growing in numbers as England recovered from its ills under Henry's firm hand. The Jews were much hated by their neighbours, partly as rivals in trade of the native merchant, and as usurers who lent money at exorbitant interest, but most of all because of their race and religion. But they had settled under the king's protection, and in return for the heavy tribute which they paid him, obtained security for their life and goods. They were often called the "king's property," because he kept the right of taxing and managing them entirely in his own hands.

At Richard's coronation a deputation of Jewish elders came to bear him a gift. They were set upon by the king's foreign servants and cruelly beaten, in mere fanatical spite. The news spread, and on a false rumour that the king had approved the deed, the London mob rose and sacked the Jews' quarter. Nor was this all; the excitement spread over all England, and at Norwich, Stamford, Lincoln, York, and other places, there were riots in which many Jews were slain. At the last-named city a fearful tragedy occurred; all the Jews of York took refuge in the castle, and when they were beset by a howling mob who cried for their blood, they by common consent slew their wives and Pg 116 children, and then set fire to the castle and burnt themselves, rather than fall into the hands of their enemies. No adequate punishment was ever inflicted for these disgraceful riots; even at York only a fine was imposed on the town.

Richard left England in December, 1189, and, after raising additional forces and stores of money in his continental dominions, sailed from Marseilles for the East. Richard was one of three sovereign princes who engaged in the third Crusade; the other two were the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa and Philip Augustus, King of France. The emperor led the troops of Germany by the land route through Constantinople and Asia Minor, but Richard and Philip had wisely resolved to go by sea. Frederic lost three-fourths of his army in forcing his way through the Turkish sultanate in Asia Minor, and was accidentally drowned himself ere he crossed the borders of Syria. Only a small remnant of the German host ever reached the Holy Land. Richard and Philip fared much better, and gained the Levant in safety, after halting in Sicily for the winter of 1190-91. It was during their stay at Messina that the two kings became bitter personal enemies; in his father's time Richard had been the friend of the French, and he did not realize for some time the fact that in succeeding to Henry's dominions he had also succeeded to the jealous hatred which Philip nourished for his over-great vassal, the Duke of Aquitaine and Normandy. But in Sicily Richard detected the French king plotting and intriguing against him, and for the future regarded him as a secret enemy, and viewed all his acts with suspicion.

If we were relating the personal acts of Richard rather than the history of England, there would be much to tell of his feats in the East. He began by subduing the isle of Cyprus, whose ruler, Isaac Comnenus—a rebel against the Emperor of Constantinople—had ill-treated the shipwrecked crews of some English vessels. After conquering the whole island, he took formal possession of it, and with great pomp married there his affianced bride, Berengaria of Navarre, who had come out from Europe to join him. He then sailed for the Holy Land, and landed near Acre, in the centre of the seat of war.

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Acre was at this moment beset by those of the Crusaders who had arrived before Richard. But their camp was itself being besieged by a great Saracen host under Sultan Saladin, who had raised all the levies of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, to relieve the beleaguered city. The landing of the hosts of England and France soon turned the tide of war, and ere long Acre fell. Richard earned and obtained the whole credit of the success by his energy and courage, while his rival Philip, by his jealous bickering with the English, merited a name for disloyalty and lukewarm zeal. It must be confessed that Richard won himself many enemies by his haughtiness and hasty temper; not only did he quarrel with Philip, but he mortally offended Leopold of Babenberg, the Duke of Austria. The German had planted his banner upon the walls of Acre as if he had taken the town himself, and Richard had it hewn down and cast into the ditch.

Less than three weeks after Acre fell, the King of France suddenly announced his intention of returning home, though nothing had yet been done to defeat Saladin or recapture Jerusalem. He left part of his army behind him under the Duke of Burgundy, and sailed off, after making a vain promise that he would not molest Richard's dominions so long as he was at the Crusade.

Thus left to himself, Richard led the crusading host southward along the coast, and defeated Saladin at a pitched battle at Arsouf. He forced his way to within a few miles of Jerusalem, but, before attacking it, turned back to secure himself a base on the sea, through which he could get stores and provisions from his ships. He took Ascalon, therefore, and garrisoned it, and afterwards captured many neighbouring forts, and intercepted a great caravan which was bringing arms and stores for Saladin across the desert from Egypt. But when he wished to start again for Jerusalem, dissensions broke out in the crusading camp. The subject of dispute was the succession to the throne of Jerusalem. Richard supported Guy of Lusignan, one of his Poitevin vassals, while the French and the bulk of the other Crusaders wished to elect an Italian prince, Conrad of Montferrat. The quarrel kept the army idle till the hot season of 1092 arrived, and endured till Conrad was slain by a Saracen Pg 118 fanatic; then Richard moved forward, but when he had arrived within four hours' march of Jerusalem, the French portion of the army, worn out by thirst and exhaustion, refused to advance any further. Richard was forced to fall back when at the very goal, and refused even to look upon the Holy City. "My eyes shall never behold it, if my arm may not reconquer it," he cried, and, muffling his face in his cloak, he turned back towards the coast.

After defeating the Saracens in another fight near Jaffa, Richard patched up a truce for three years with Saladin, and resolved to return home. It was obvious that with thinned ranks and disloyal allies he could not retake Jerusalem, and he had received such news from England as to the doings of his brother John and his neighbour King Philip, that he was anxious to get home as soon as possible. So he made terms with the sultan, by which Acre and the other places that he had conquered were left to the Christians, and permission was given them to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem without let or hindrance. Then, without waiting for his fleet or his army, he started off in wild haste on a private ship, intending to land at Venice and make his way overland through Germany, for "he could not trust himself in France after the news that he had just received (1193).

But more haste proved less speed, in this as in so many other cases. Richard's ship was wrecked in the Adriatic, and he had to land at Ragusa. His path took him through the duchy of Leopold of Austria, whom he had so grievously offended at the siege of Acre. Although he was travelling in disguise, he was recognized at Vienna, and promptly cast into prison by the revengeful duke. After keeping him awhile in chains, Leopold sold him to his suzerain, the Emperor Henry VI. That monarch, being thus placed by chance in possession of the person of a sovereign with whom he was not at war, had the meanness to trump up charges against Richard in order to have some excuse for making him pay a ransom. So he accused his captive of having murdered Conrad of Montferrat, of having unjustly deprived the rebel Isaac of Cyprus of his realm, and of having insulted Leopold the Austrian. He was in prison Pg 119 more than a year, and no one in England knew what had become of him, since he had been travelling disguised and almost alone when he was taken.

Meanwhile, during the three years of Richard's absence England had been much disturbed. William Longchamp, the haughty and tactless bishop whom he had left behind him as Justiciar, made himself so much disliked by his pride, his despotism, and his violence that there was a general rising against him. The king's brother John, the Earl of Cornwall, put himself at the head of the malcontents, and began seizing all the royal castles on which he could lay hands. Longchamp was at last forced to resign his place and fled over-sea, hardly escaping the fury of the people at Dover, where he was caught in the disguise of a huckster-woman and nearly pulled to pieces. His place as Justiciar was taken by Archbishop Walter of Rouen, whom Richard sent home from the Crusade for the purpose. Walter was a prudent and able man, but found a hard task before him, for Earl John was set on making himself a party in England, and aimed at the crown. When the news of Richard's captivity reached London, John openly avowed his intention, and allied himself with Philip of France. That prince had begun to intrigue against the King of England the moment that he got back from the Crusade. He had a claim on the Vexin, a district on the Norman border, which he had once ceded to Henry II. on the understanding that it should be the dowry of a French princess whom Richard was to marry. As the marriage had never taken place, and the English king had chosen another bride, Philip had much show of reason on his side. But he aimed not only at recovering the Vexin, but at winning as much of his absent neighbour's land as he could seize. With this object he offered to support Earl John in his attempt to seize the English throne, in return for some territorial gains. John was ready enough to agree, did homage to him, and gave him up the Vexin and the city of Tours. Meanwhile they both sent secret messages to the Emperor Henry, to beg him to detain Richard in prison as long as possible.

But Henry thought more of screwing money out of his prisoner than of keeping him for ever in his grasp. He offered to release Richard on receiving the enormous ransom of 150,000 Pg 120 marks (£100,000). It was a huge sum for England to raise, but so anxious was the nation to get back its king, that no hesitation was made in accepting the bargain. Meanwhile John and Philip, knowing that their enemy would soon be loose, were stirred up to hasty action. Philip raised his host and attacked Normandy, but was beaten off with loss from Rouen. John hired mercenary soldiers, gathered his friends, and seized a number of the royal castles in England. But only a small number of discontented barons backed him, and he was held in check by the loyal majority, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, who put himself at the head of the king's party. Even while this civil war was in progress, the money for Richard's ransom was being raised, by the imposition of a crushing tax of "one-fourth on all movable goods, and twenty shillings on every knight's fee."

In the spring of 1194 the emperor gave Richard his liberty, after receiving the stipulated sum and making his prisoner swear an oath of homage to him for his kingdom of England. But this preposterous vow of allegiance was not taken seriously by Richard or by England, being wrung by force from a helpless captive. On reaching England, the king put himself at the head of the army which was operating against the rebels, and took Nottingham and Tickhill, the two last strongholds which held out. John himself fled over-sea; some months later he was pardoned by his long-suffering brother.

Thus Richard was once more a free man, and in full possession of his realm. There was much in the state of England that required the master's eye, but the king was far more set on punishing his neighbour, King Philip, than on attending to the wants of his subjects. After appointing new officials to take charge of the kingdom, and raising great sums of money, he hurried over to Normandy to plunge into hostilities with the French.

England never saw Richard again; indeed, in the whole course of his ten years' reign, he only spent seven months on this side of the channel. His heart was always in France, where he had been bred up, and not in England, though he had been born in the palace of Beaumont, in Oxford, not fifty yards from the spot where these lines are written. The remaining six years of Richard's Pg 121 reign were entirely occupied in fruitless and weary border wars with the French king. It was a war of sieges and skirmishes, not of great battles. Richard held his own, in spite of the rebellions stirred up by Philip among his vassals in Aquitaine; but he did not succeed in crushing his adversary, as might have been expected from his superior military skill. In England the struggle was only felt through the heavy taxation which the king imposed on the land, to keep up his large mercenary army over-sea. Archbishop Hubert Walter ruled as Justiciar with considerable wisdom and success, and as long as Richard was sent the money that he craved, he left the realm to itself. Hubert's rule was not altogether a quiet one, but the very troubles that arose against him show the growing strength of national feeling and liberty in England. In 1198, the Great Council, headed by Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, refused the king's newest and most exorbitant schemes of taxation, and Hubert could not force them to pay. London in the same year was disturbed by a great democratic rising of the poorer citizens, headed by one William Fitz-Osbert, called Longbeard, who rose in riot to compel the aldermen to readjust the taxes of the city, and the Justiciar had to take arms to put it down. Fitz-Osbert fortified himself in Bow Church, but was wounded, taken, and hung.

An obscure and unworthy end was reserved for the restless and reckless son of the great Henry. He heard that Widomar, Viscount of Limoges, one of his vassals in Aquitaine, had found a great treasure-trove of gold, and bade him give it up. The viscount would not surrender all his find, so Richard laid siege to his castle of Chaluz. The place was taken, but while directing the attack the king received a wound from a crossbow bolt in his shoulder. His unskilful surgeons could not cure him, the wound gangrened, and Richard saw that his days were numbered. When the castle fell, Bertrand de Gourdon, the archer who had discharged the fatal bolt, was sought out and brought to his bedside. "What had I done that you should deal thus with me?" asked the king. "You slew my father and my two brothers with your own hands," replied the soldier, "and now I am ready to bear any torture since I know that you have to die." The fierce answer touched a chord to which Richard could respond. He bade his officers Pg 122 send the man away unharmed, but Mercadet, the chief among his mercenary captains, kept Gourdon in bonds till the king breathed his last, and then flayed him alive (April 6, 1199).

Of all the kings who ever ruled in this land Richard cared least for England, and paid least attention to its needs. But his reign was not therefore one that was harmful to his realm. The yoke of an absent king, even if he be a spendthrift, is not so hard as that of a tyrant who dwells at home, and England has known much worse days than those of the later years of Richard Cœur de Lion. His ministers kept up the traditions of the administration of Henry II., and ruled the land with law and order, duly summoning the Great Council, assessing taxation with its aid, and levying it with as little oppression as they could, through agents selected by the nation. One considerable advance in the direction of liberty was granted by Richard, when he allowed the shire-moots to choose for themselves "coroners," officials who were to take charge of the royal prerogatives in the counties in place of the sheriff; they were to investigate such matters as murder, riot, or injury to the king's lands or revenues, and the other offences which were called "the pleas of the crown." Thus an officer chosen by the people was substituted for one chosen by the crown, a great advantage to those who were to come under his hand. The "coroner" still survives in England, but all his duties save that of inquiring into cases of suspicious death have long been stripped from him.

Richard the Lion-hearted left two male kinsmen to dispute about his vast dominions. These were Arthur of Brittany, the son of his next brother Geoffrey, and John of Cornwall, his false and turbulent youngest brother. The English Great Council chose John as king without any hesitation; they would not take Arthur, a mere boy of twelve, who had never been seen in England; they preferred John in spite of his great and obvious faults. But in the continental dominions of Richard there was no such unanimity: the unruly barons of Anjou and Aquitaine thought they would gain through having a powerless boy to reign over them, rather than the unscrupulous and grasping Earl John. If it had not been for the old queen dowager, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who came forward to defend her best-loved son's claims, and to persuade her Gascon vassals to adhere to his cause, John would never Pg 123 have obtained any hold on the continent. By Eleanor's aid he triumphed for a moment, but baron after baron rose against him, using Arthur's name as his pretence, and civil war never ceased from the moment of John's accession. Philip of France, who now, as always, had his own ends to serve, feigned to espouse the cause of Arthur, and acknowledged him as his uncle's heir alike in Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine. Thus the war between France and England, which had dragged on through the reign of Richard, continued in a new form all through the time of John. There was a partial pacification in 1200, when Philip was bought off from Arthur's cause by the cession of the county of Evreux; but he took arms again in 1202, on the flimsy pretext that John, as Duke of Normandy, refused to plead in French law courts against his own vassals.

Philip was induced to resume the struggle mainly because of his rival's growing unpopularity in all parts of his dominion. As king, John displayed on a larger scale all the faults that he had shown before his accession. All the vices of the Angevin house reached their highest development in him; he was as hot-tempered as his father, as false as his mother, as ungrateful as his brother Henry, as cruel, extravagant, and reckless as his brother Richard. His own special characteristic was a crooked and short-sighted cunning, which brought him through the troubles of one moment only to involve him in deeper vexations in the next. His reign in England had begun with heavy taxation for the French war. He had irritated the baronage by divorcing his wife Hawise, the heiress of the great earldom of Gloucester, without any cause or reason. Then he had carried off by violence Isabella of Angoulême from her affianced husband, the Count of La Marche, one of his greatest vassals in Aquitaine, and married her in spite of the threats of the Church.

It was Count Hugh of La Marche who in revenge led the next rising of the unruly French vassals of John. He sent for Arthur of Brittany, who came to his aid with a great band of King Philip's knights, and together they invaded Aquitaine and laid siege to Mirebeau, where lay the old Queen Eleanor, John's one trusty supporter in the south. Roused by the news of his mother's danger, the King of England made a hasty dash on Mirebeau, surprised the rebel camp, and captured Arthur of Brittany with all his chief Pg 124 supporters. This success was fated to be his ruin, for when he found his nephew in his hands, John could not resist the temptation to murder him. After keeping him in prison for some months, he had him secretly slain in the castle of Rouen (April, 1203). The poor lad had only just reached the age of sixteen when he was thus cut off.

Arthur's murder profoundly shocked John's subjects on both sides of the sea, but it was absolutely fatal to his cause in France. His rebellious subjects, unable to use Arthur's name against their master any longer, threw themselves into the hands of the King of France, and took him as their direct lord and sovereign. Philip went through a solemn form of summoning John, as Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, to present himself at Paris, and there be tried for slaying his nephew. When John failed—as was natural—to appear, he was condemned in his absence, and adjudged to have forfeited all the fiefs that he held from the French crown.

To give effect to his sentence, Philip invaded Normandy and began to lay siege to its fortresses. John crossed to Normandy, but did not take the field; his conduct was so strange that men thought that some infatuation from heaven had fallen upon him as a judgment for having slain his nephew. He lay at Rouen for many months, giving great feasts, and boasting that when he chose he would drive King Philip out of the duchy. But, instead of sallying out to make his vaunts good, he quietly looked on, while Philip took town after town with little resistance. The Normans did not love John, and fought feebly or not at all. Only Château Gaillard, a great castle which Richard I. had built to guard the valley of the lower Seine, made any serious defence. Instead of opposing the enemy, John fled from Normandy and took refuge in England. After his departure, Rouen and the remaining cities of the duchy threw open their gates to the French. In the following year Philip pursued his victorious career, and completed the conquest of Anjou and Touraine. In 1206 he fell upon Aquitaine, and conquered Poitou and Northern Guienne. Only the great ports of Bordeaux and La Rochelle, with the southern half of Guienne, remained true to John.

Thus passed away, not only the great but ephemeral continental empire which Henry II. had built up, but also the Norman duchy itself, whose fortunes had been united to those of England for Pg 125 nearly a century and a half. For the future the Plantagenet kings owned only a corner of southern France, and were no longer great continental sovereigns. The monarch's loss was the nation's gain. England's kings were no longer foreigners; they did not spend half their time abroad, or devote their whole energy to schemes of aggrandisement in France. The Anglo-Norman barons, too, were compelled to become wholly English, since their estates over-sea fell into the hands of the enemy and passed away from them. In this way John's cruelty and shiftlessness did more for England's good than the wisdom and strength of his father.

But in the mean while John, being deprived of his continental dominions, was constrained to reside in England, and proved a most undesirable neighbour to his unhappy subjects. After an unsuccessful attempt to reconquer Poitou in 1206, he made peace with King Philip, on such terms as he could obtain. Bordeaux and the duchy of Guienne remained with him, but he was compelled to acquiesce in the loss of all his other provinces.

John was barely quit of his disastrous French war when he became involved in a quarrel with the papacy, of which the issue was even more disgraceful than that of his strife with King Philip. In 1205 died Archbishop Hubert Walter, who had served King Richard so well as Justiciar. In ordinary times his successor would have been duly nominated by the king and elected by the monks of Canterbury, who formed the cathedral chapter of that see. But John was in evil plight at the time; he was universally disliked, and the clergy all over Europe were being spurred on by the example of the bold and arrogant Pope Innocent III. to assert new and unheard-of claims and privileges. When the news of Hubert's death was brought, a majority of the monks of Canterbury met in secret conclave and elected Reginald, their sub-prior, as archbishop, without asking the king's leave. Reginald at once started off for Rome to get his appointment confirmed by Pope Innocent. When John heard what had been done, he came to Canterbury in great wrath, and by threats and menaces compelled the monks to proceed to a second election, and to chose his favourite, John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, to fill Hubert Walter's place. He then sent an embassy to Rome to submit this election to the Pope. But Innocent III. would Pg 126 have neither Reginald nor John for archbishop; he said that the first had been secretly and illegally chosen, while the second had been imposed on the chapter by force and threats. Then he took the unprecedented step of appointing to the see himself; he made the representatives of both John and Reginald come before him, and frightened or cajoled them into accepting his nominee, Stephen Langton, a worthy and learned English cardinal who resided with him at Rome. Langton was personally all that could be desired, but it was a flagrantly illegal usurpation that the Pope should impose him on the English king and nation without their consent.

John was driven to fury by this arrogant claim of the Pope. He refused to accept the nomination, or to allow Langton to enter England. In return Innocent laid an interdict on the realm, suspending on his own authority the celebration of divine service, closing the churches, and even prohibiting the dead from being buried in consecrated ground. If the English Church had stood by the king and refused to take notice of this harsh decree, it would have been of little effect. But the clergy always followed the Pope; they looked upon themselves as a great international guild depending on the Roman see, and disregarded all their rights and sympathies as Englishmen. The majority of the bishops published the interdict, and bade their flocks observe it. Many of them, fearing John's inevitable wrath, fled over-sea the moment that they had promulgated the sentence (1208). They were wise to do so, for the king raged furiously against the whole body of clergy; he exiled the monks of Canterbury, seized the estates and revenues of the absconding bishops, and declared that, till the interdict was removed, all ecclesiastical persons should be outside the pale of the law. They should not be allowed to appear in the courts, and no one who molested them should be punished. John set the example of seizing clerical property himself, and many of his courtiers and officers followed his lead.

Thus began a long struggle between the power of the Pope and that of the king. For five years it continued, to the great misery of England, for the nation was deeply religious, and felt most keenly the deprivation of all its spiritual privileges. Yet for a long time the people stood by the king, for it was generally felt that the Pope's arbitrary conduct Pg 127 was indefensible. John himself cared nought for papal censures, as long as nothing more than spiritual pressure was brought to bear on him. He filled his coffers with Church money, and laughed at the interdict. But presently Innocent found a more effective way of bending the king's will. He proclaimed that he would depose John for contumacy, and give his kingdom to another. The mandate to drive him out was entrusted to John's old and active foe, Philip of France, who at once began to prepare a great fleet and army in Normandy (1213).

The English barons and people were more angered than frightened, and a great army mustered on Barham Down, in Kent, to oppose the French landing. But the king himself was much cowed by the Pope's threat. He knew that he was disliked and despised by his subjects, and he did not trust them in the hour of danger. Instead of fighting the quarrel out, he made secret proffers of submission. So the Pope's envoy, Pandulf, came to Dover, and received John's abject surrender. Not only did he agree to acknowledge Langton as archbishop, and to restore all the lands and revenues of which he had robbed the Church, but he stooped to win Innocent's favour by doing homage to him, and declaring the kingdom of England a fief of the Holy See. He gave his crown into Pandulf's hands, and then took it back from him as a gift from the Pope. In return the papal mandate to Philip was withdrawn, and Pandulf bade the French king dismiss his fleet and army, and cease to make war on the vassal of the Church (May, 1213).

John's gift of the English crown to the Pope had been done secretly and privately, without any summoning or consulting of the Great Council; it had been accomplished behind the back of the nation. When it became known, the baronage and the people were alike disgusted at the king's grovelling submission. He had induced them to suffer untold miseries in his cause, and had then left them in the lurch and surrendered all that they had been fighting for.

For the moment, however, John's intrigue had its success. The papal approval was withdrawn from the King of France, and—what was of more importance—an English fleet under William Longsword, the Earl of Salisbury fell upon the French invasion-flotilla as it lay Pg 128 in the Port of Damme, and took or sunk well-nigh every vessel. The king was free from danger again, and talked of taking the offensive against the French and crushing his enemy Philip.

The last act of John's troubled reign was now beginning. While the king was dreaming of nothing but war in France, the nation was preparing to put a stop to his erratic and tyrannical rule by armed force. When Archbishop Langton was received in England, he proved himself no mere creature of the Pope, but a good Englishman. One of his first acts was to propose to the baronage, at a great assembly in St. Paul's Cathedral, that the king should be asked to ratify and reissue the charter that his great-grandfather Henry I. had granted to the English people, binding himself to abstain from all vexatious and oppressive customs, and abide by the ancient customs of the realm. This proposal was accepted at once by the great majority of the barons as the wisest and most constitutional means of bringing pressure on the king.

John meanwhile had called out the whole military force of the nation for an invasion of France. But all the barons of the North refused to follow him, and so great was the discontent of the English that he had mainly to depend on foreign mercenaries. He staked all his fortunes on the ensuing campaign, believing that if he could reconquer his lost continental dominions, he would afterwards win his way to complete control in England. His schemes were very far-reaching: Philip was to be attacked from north and south at once; while John was to land in Poitou and march on the Loire, a great confederacy of John's allies were to assail France from the north. This league was headed by John's nephew, Otho of Saxony, who claimed the title of emperor, but had been withstood in Germany by competitors whom Philip of France had supported. In revenge Otho gathered a North-German army, supported by the Dukes of Brabant and Holland, and the Counts of Boulogne and Flanders. John sent a mercenary force under the Earl of Salisbury to join him, and the combined host entered France and met King Philip at Bouvines, near Lille. John had trusted that his own attack on southern France would have distracted the French king's attention, but Philip left him almost unopposed, and Pg 129 gathered the whole force of France to oppose the Germans and Flemings. While John was overrunning Poitou and storming Angers, Philip was crushing his confederates. At the battle of Bouvines the combined army was scattered to the winds; the emperor was put to flight, and the Earl of Salisbury and the Count of Boulogne captured (July 27, 1214). Otho of Saxony was ruined by the fight, and never raised his head again; nor did any German host invade France for the next three hundred years. John, though he had not been present at the fight, was as effectually crushed as Otho. Free from danger from the north, the French king turned upon him, and drove him out of his ephemeral conquests in Poitou, so that he had to return to England completely foiled and beaten.

But in England John had now to face his angry baronage. When he came home in wrath, and began to threaten to punish every man who had not followed him to the invasion of France, the barons drew together and prepared for armed resistance. In earlier days we have seen the English nobility withstanding the king in the cause of feudal anarchy. In the time of Stephen or of Henry II., the crown had represented the interests of the nation, and the barons those of their own class alone. It was then for England's good that the king should succeed in establishing a strong central government by putting down his turbulent vassals. But now things were changed. Henry II. had made the crown so strong that the nation was in far greater danger of misgovernment by a tyrannical king than of anarchy under a mob of feudal chiefs. The barons did not any longer represent themselves alone; they were closely allied both with the Church and with the people for the defence of the common rights of all three against a grasping and unscrupulous monarch. In the present struggle the baronage were headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, their wisest counsellor, and they were everywhere supported both by the towns and by the smaller freemen of the whole realm. We shall see that in the oncoming struggle they demanded, not new privileges for themselves, but law and liberty for every subject of the English crown.

The first meeting of the barons was held at Bury St. Edmunds, in November, 1214: it was attended mainly by the lords of the North; the majority of the nobility had not yet moved. They Pg 130 formulated their demand that the king should give England a charter of liberties, drew up a list of the points which were to be insisted on, and determined to go in arms to the king at Christmas to lay their requests before him. John was seriously frightened; he asked the Pope's aid, took the vows of a crusader in order to get the sympathy of the Church on his side, and collected an army of mercenaries. But when he sounded the intentions of those of his vassals who had not yet taken arms, he found that one and all approved of the demands of the insurgent barons, and refused to aid him against them.

John was always lacking in moral courage; instead of taking the field at the head of his mercenaries, he began to treat with the rebels, resolved to grant all they asked, and then to bide his time and repudiate his promises at the earliest possible opportunity. So befell the famous meeting at Runnymede, where the king solemnly swore to grant all the provisions of the "Great Charter," which had been drawn up for his signature by Archbishop Langton and a committee composed of an equal number of the insurgent barons and of those who had not taken up arms.

The Great Charter was signed on the 15th of June, 1215, in the presence of the archbishop, the whole of the baronage, and a vast assembly of all ranks. It is a document of sixty-three clauses, of which many were quite trivial and related to purely personal or local grievances. But the important part of its provisions may be summed up under six heads.

Firstly, the king promises that "the English Church shall be free"—free, that is, from violent interference in the election of its prelates, and from illegal taxation.

Secondly, the feudal rights of the king over his tenants-in-chief are defined. He is only to raise the customary "aids" and dues, and their amount is laid down. His rights of wardship over widows and orphans are stated and limited. In a similar way the tenants-in-chief promise to exercise only these same rights over their own vassals.

Thirdly, there is to be no taxation without the consent of the Great Council—the first indication of the control of Parliament over the national revenues.

Fourthly, the administration of justice is to be strengthened Pg 131 and purified. No one is to be tried or punished more than once for the same offence. No one is to be imprisoned on the king's private fiat, but if arrested he must be at once put on trial, and that before a jury of his peers. Fines for every sort of offence are to be fixed and made proportionate to the crime, not to the king's idea of the amount he could extract from the criminal.

Fifthly, the king is not to put foreigners, ignorant of the laws of England, in any judicial or administrative post, and he is at once to dismiss all his foreign mercenary troops.

Sixthly, the city of London, and all other cities which enjoy rights and privileges under earlier royal charters, are to be fully confirmed in them.

The Great Charter then plunges into a mass of smaller grievances, where we need not follow it. But it ends with a most peculiar and important clause, which shows how little the baronage trusted the king. A body of twenty-five guardians of the Charter is appointed, who undertake to see that the king carries it out, and they are authorized to constrain him to observe it by force of arms if he swerves from his plighted word. These guardians include seven earls, fourteen barons, three sons of great lords whose fathers still survived, and the Mayor of London.

The character of Magna Carta is very noticeable; it is rather unsystematic in shape, being mainly composed of a list of grievances which are to be remedied. It does not purport to be a full statement of the English constitution, but only a recapitulation of the points on which the king had violated it. But it is not merely a check on John's evil doings, but a solemn engagement between the king, the barons, the Church, and the people that each shall respect the rights of the other. Wherever it is stated that the king is to abstain from using any particular malpractice against his vassals, it is also added that his vassals will on their part never use that same form of oppression against their own tenants. Thus it guarantees the rights of the small man against the great, no less than those of the great man against the king. It is in this respect that the Charter differs from many grants of privileges exacted by foreign nobles from foreign kings. Abroad the barons often curbed the royal power, but they did it for their own selfish ends alone, not for the common good of the nation.

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John had signed the Charter in a moment of fear and depression of spirits. He did not intend to observe it a moment longer than he could help, and called its provisions "mere foolishness." When the barons dispersed, he violated his engagements by gathering another great horde of mercenaries, and sent to Rome to his suzerain Innocent III., to get absolution from the oath he had sworn. As he had once utilized the nation against the Pope, so he would now utilize the Pope against the nation.

Innocent, who cared nothing for the rights or wrongs of England, resolved to support his obedient vassal. He censured Archbishop Langton for siding with the barons, and summoned him to Rome to answer for his conduct. He freed the king from his oath, and he swore that he would excommunicate any man who took arms against him. But John had taught his barons to despise ecclesiastical thunders. They flew to arms, and war broke out. The king at first had the advantage; his mercenaries were all at hand, and the barons were scattered and unorganized. The king took Rochester, and hung the garrison who held out against him, and then started northward, harrying the land with fire and sword as far as Berwick.

Provoked beyond endurance, the majority of the barons swore that they would cast away John and all his house. They declared him deposed, and resolved to choose a new king. But they made a great mistake in their choice, for they offered the crown to Lewis, the Prince-royal of France, who had married Blanche, one of John's nieces. Any other candidate would have been better, for Lewis was the son of King Philip, the great enemy of England, and by calling him in, the barons seemed to be allying themselves with the national foe. Many who would have gladly served against John in another cause, refused to take arms in that of the Frenchman (1216).

Meanwhile Prince Lewis landed in Kent, was received into London, and became master of all eastern England. But he soon found that he was the king of a faction, not of the whole nation. Many of the barons joined John rather than serve a foreigner; many more remained neutral. The whole realm was divided; here and Pg 133 there castles and towns held out against the new king, and in especial the seamen and merchants of the Cinque Ports refused to open their gates to a Frenchman. John resolved to try the ordeal of battle; he took Lincoln, and marched southward. But while his army was crossing the sea-marshes of the Wash it was overtaken by a high tide, and all his baggage and treasure, with many of his men, were swept away. John himself escaped with difficulty, and fell ill next day, of rage and grief and overexertion, as is most probable, though contemporary writers thought he had been poisoned. To the great benefit of England, he died within a week of his seizure, at Newark Castle (October 19, 1216). No man had a good word to say for him; cruel, perjured, rash and cowardly by turns, an evil-liver, a treacherous son and brother, he was loathed by every one who knew him.

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The moment that John was dead, the insurgent barons began to be conscious of the huge mistake that they had made in calling over Lewis of France to their aid. John's successor was his eldest son Henry, a young boy of nine, against whom no one could feel any personal objection. But the rebels had committed themselves to the cause of Lewis, and could not go back. The civil war therefore continued, but the supporters of Lewis were without heart or enthusiasm in his cause.

The young Henry was in the hands of William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, one of the great barons who had refused to join Lewis. Pembroke at once crowned the young king at Gloucester, and made him declare his adherence to the Great Charter, and solemnly republish it. This act cut away the ground from under the feet of Lewis's party, as they could not any longer pretend that they were fighting merely to recover their constitutional rights. One after another they began to drop away, and go over to Henry's side.

The fortune of the civil war soon began to turn in favour of the young king. It was decided by two great battles. Lincoln castle was being besieged by the followers of Lewis, French and English. To relieve it William the Marshal set out with a small army, and, surprising the enemy in the streets of the town, while they were busied in the siege, he inflicted a great defeat upon them. Most of the great English barons of Lewis's party were taken prisoners in the fray. Shortly after a second decisive engagement completely shattered Lewis's hopes. He was expecting Pg 135 great reinforcements from France, which were to be brought to him by a fleet commanded by Eustace the Monk, a cruel pirate captain whom he had hired to serve him because of his naval skill. But Hubert de Burgh, the Justiciar of King Henry, put to sea from Dover with a small squadron of ships raised from the Cinque Ports, and met the French in mid-channel off Sandwich. The English had the better, most of the hostile vessels were captured, and Eustace the Monk was taken and hung for his former piracies. This was the first great naval battle which an English fleet ever won.

Deprived of hope of succour from France, and seeing most of his English supporters captives in Pembroke's hands, Prince Lewis resolved to abandon his enterprise and leave England. He proffered terms to Pembroke and de Burgh, who eagerly accepted them. So by the treaty of Lambeth he undertook to depart and give up his claim to the crown, while the Earl Marshal and Justiciar on their part consented to grant an amnesty to all Lewis's partisans, and to restore them to possession of their estates. To facilitate Lewis's quick retreat he was given a sum of 10,000 marks (September 17, 1217).

Thus the civil war came to an end, but its evil effects long endured, William of Pembroke, who acted till his death in 1219 as regent of the realm, did all that he could to quiet matters down; but there was much trouble left to his successor, Hubert de Burgh, the great Justiciar, who bore sway in England for all the remaining years of King Henry's minority. Hubert conferred many and signal benefits on the realm. He discomfited an attempt of the Pope to govern England through his legates, under the plea that John's homage of 1213 made the kingdom the property of the Holy See. He put down the turbulence of many of John's old courtiers and mercenaries, who, presuming on their fidelity in the civil war, refused obedience to the law of the land. The leaders of these persons were Peter des Roches, an intriguing Poitevin whom John had made Bishop of Winchester, and Fawkes de Bréauté, who had been the chief captain of the late king's Gascon soldiers. Peter was compelled to go on a Crusade, and Fawkes was crushed by force of arms when he presumed to refuse to give up the king's castle of Bedford, and had the impudence to seize and imprison a justice of assize who had given a legal Pg 136 decision against him. Fawkes himself escaped over-seas, but de Burgh took Bedford Castle, and hung William de Bréauté, the rebel's brother, because he had dared to hold out against the king's name (1224).

Hubert's wise and salutary rule endured till the king came of age (1227), and for some years after he was still retained as Justiciar. But Henry, on coming to maturity, soon showed himself jealous of the great man who had protected his helpless boyhood. The new king was a strange mixture of good and evil. He was a handsome, courteous youth, blameless in his private life, and kind and liberal to his friends. He proved a good father and husband, and a great friend to the Church. He loved the fine arts, and built many stately edifices, of which the famous abbey of Westminster is the best known. But he had many serious faults: he was an incorrigible spendthrift; he was quite incapable of keeping any promise for more than a few days. He was of a busy volatile disposition, always vaulting from project to project, and never carrying to its end any one single plan. Being full of self-confidence he much disliked any one who gave him unpalatable counsel, or strove to keep him from any of his wild ephemeral schemes. This was the secret of his ingratitude to Hubert de Burgh, who never shrank from opposing his young master when the occasion demanded it. Moreover, Henry had the great fault of loving foreigners over-much; he surrounded himself with a horde of his relatives from the continent. His wife Eleanor of Provence brought a host of brothers and uncles from Savoy and southern France, and his mother sent over to England her children by her second marriage with her old lover, the Count of La Marche. [17] On these kinsmen Henry lavished not only great gifts of money, but earldoms, baronies, and bishoprics, to the great vexation of the English. His strangest act was to confer the archbishopric of Canterbury on his wife's uncle, Boniface of Savoy, a flighty young man of most unclerical habits. Henry was not cruel or malicious, like his father, and personally he was not disliked by his subjects, a fact which explains the patience with which they bore his vagaries for many years. But his actions were nearly always unwise, and his undertakings were invariably unsuccessful, so that his long- suffering vassals were at last constrained to take the reins of government out of his hands.

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For thirty years, however, Henry worked his will on England (1228-58) before drawing down the storm on his head. For the first five of them he was still somewhat restrained by the influence of Hubert de Burgh. But in 1232 the old Justiciar was not only dismissed, but thrown into prison, because Henry was wroth with him for frustrating an unwise and unnecessary war with France. But the king's ingratitude provoked such angry opposition that Hubert was ultimately released, and suffered to dwell in peace on his own lands.

After dismissing Hubert, Henry threw himself into the hands of Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, one of John's old courtiers. Peter knew or cared nothing about English laws and customs, and led the king into so many illegal and unconstitutional acts, that the whole nation called for his banishment. At last the Great Council, led by Edmund of Abingdon, the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury, frightened the king into dismissing him (1234).

But England did not profit very much by Peter's fall. Henry resolved to become his own prime minister; he did not appoint any one to the office of Justiciar, and a little later he abolished that of Chancellor also. He thought that he would act as his own chief justice and private secretary, but, as he was no less volatile than busy, he only succeeded in getting all public business into hopeless arrears.

Henry's personal government endured for the weary time of twenty-four years. The events of the period were very insignificant, and only call for very brief mention. The sole foreign war was a brief struggle with Lewis IX. of France. One of Henry's many ephemeral schemes was the idea of winning back the continental dominions that his father had lost. So in 1241 he picked a quarrel with the good King Lewis, and invaded Poitou. He was disgracefully beaten at the battle of Taillebourg (1242), and was forced to make peace. The mild and pious King of France contented himself with leaving things as they had been before the war, though if he had chosen he might have forced Henry to surrender Bordeaux and Guienne, the last possessions of the English crown beyond the seas.

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Far worse for England than Henry's abortive invasion of France were his dealings with the papacy. Henry was a devoted servant of the Church, and whenever the Popes tried to lay any burden on England, Henry did his best to make the nation submit. Rome was at this time deep in a struggle with the brave and brilliant Emperor Frederic II., and the Popes were always wanting money to keep up the war against him. In 1238 Gregory IX. sent over to England his legate, Cardinal Otho, who pretended to come to reform the clergy, but really did little more than extort great sums of money from them, on all possible excuses. When he left the realm it was said that he took more English Church treasure with him than he left behind, and he had thrust 300 Italian priests into English benefices by the aid of the king's patronage. A few years later Henry allowed himself to be made the Pope's tool in an even more disgraceful way. Alexander IV. was trying to wrest the kingdom of Sicily from the heirs of the Emperor Frederic II., and, as he could not succeed by his own strength, determined to make the docile King of England do the work for him. So he offered to make Henry's younger son Edmund, a boy of ten, King of Sicily, if Henry would undertake the expense of conquering that country. The scheme was just one of the wild adventurous plans that took the flighty monarch's fancy, so he eagerly accepted the Sicilian crown for his son, and promised the Pope that he would find the money to raise a great army. But as he had never any gold in his own treasury—since he spent it all on his buildings and his wife's relatives—he had to raise the great sums required for the invasion of Sicily out of the nation. In 1257, therefore, he summoned the Great Council, and told them that he must at once have liberal grants from them, because he had pledged England's credit to the Pope, and had made the realm responsible to Alexander IV. for 140,000 marks. The baronage were full of rage and disgust, for the conquest of Sicily was no concern of England's, but a matter of private spite on the part of the papacy. And, moreover, the king had not the least right to pledge the revenues of England to Alexander without having consulted the Great Council. Instead, therefore, of a grant of 140,000 marks, Henry received the outpourings of thirty years of suppressed indignation and Pg 139 discontent. He was told that he could no longer be allowed to rule the realm without the aid and counsel of his barons; that his interference in distant wars was foolish; that his foreign relations were a flight of locusts eating up the land; that his ministers and favourites were unjust, greedy, and extortionate. The king was seriously frightened, and consented to call another Great Council together at Oxford, to provide for the better governance of the realm, and not merely for the payment of his own debts.

The sudden outburst of wrath on the part of the baronage in 1258 is explained not only by the fact that all men had lost patience with King Henry, for that had been the case for many years, but much more by the fact that the baronage had at last found a champion and mouthpiece in Simon de Montfort, the great Earl of Leicester. Simon was not one who might have been expected to prove a wise and patriotic statesman and a good Englishman, for he had originally come into notice as one of the king's foreign favourites. His grandmother had been the heiress of the earldom of Leicester, but she had married a Frenchman, the Count of Montfort. Their child was Simon the elder, a great crusading chief and a cruel persecutor of heretics. He was a bitter enemy of King John, and had never been permitted to get hold of the Leicester estates. In 1232 his son Simon the younger came across to England, to beg King Henry to make over to him the confiscated lands of his grandmother's earldom. Henry could never resist a petitioner, especially when he was a foreigner; he not only took Simon into favour and granted him the earldom of Leicester, but he married him to his sister, the Princess Eleanor, and for a time made him his confidant. But the king's sudden friendship did not endure, and ere very long he tired of Simon, and sent him over to govern Guienne, which was always in a state of chronic insurrection. Simon put down rebellion with a strong hand, and made himself unpopular with the Gascons, who sent many complaints of him to the king. But the fatal cause of estrangement between him and the earl was a money matter: Simon had expended large sums in the king's service, using his own money and borrowing more. When he sent in his accounts to Henry, the latter could not or would not pay, and very meanly allowed the loss to fall on Simon (1250).

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Simon then settled down into opposition to the king, though he was ready enough to serve the realm in all times of danger. He had now been living for many years in England, and his neighbours found him a just and sincere man, and one who had done his best to accustom himself to English ways of life and thought. He was especially beloved by the clergy, who admired his fervent piety and pure life. So it came to pass that the man who had once been known only as the king's favourite, was called Earl Simon the Righteous, and looked upon as the most patriotic and trustworthy of the nobles of the realm.

Great men had been singularly wanting among the ranks of the English baronage, since William of Pembroke died and Hubert de Burgh was disgraced. It was not till Simon came to the front as the king's opponent that the nation's discontent with Henry was adequately expressed.

The Great Council—or Parliament as we may now call it, since that word was just coming into use—met at Oxford in June, 1258, to take counsel for the better administration of England. Some called it the "Mad Parliament," because of the anger of the barons, and their desire to make hasty and sweeping changes. Henry, when he met it, found that he had no supporters save his foreign kinsmen and a few personal dependents, so that he was forced to submit to all the conditions which the barons imposed upon him.

So were ratified the "Provisions of Oxford," which provided for the government of England, not by the king, but by a group of committees. Henry was to do nothing without the consent of a privy council of fifteen members, which was now imposed upon him. Another committee of twenty-four was to investigate and right all the grievances of the realm; and a third, also of twenty-four, was to take charge of the financial side of the government, pay off the king's debts, and administer his revenues. Henry was forced to make a solemn oath to abide by the rules stated in Magna Carta, which he had often before promised to keep, but had always evaded or disregarded after a time.

By the Provisions of Oxford the governance of the realm was taken altogether out of the hands of the king, and handed over to those of the three committees. But the new scheme was far too cumbersome, for neither of the three bodies had any Pg 141 authority over the others, and it was difficult to keep them together. There were many who were jealous of Simon de Montfort, who sat in each of the three, and was the ruling spirit of the whole government. It was said that he took too much upon himself, and that the nation had not muzzled the king merely in order to hand itself over to be governed by the earl.

In spite of these murmurings, and in spite of the king's attempts to shake off the control which had been imposed on him, the Provisions of Oxford were observed for four years. But Henry was preparing to tear himself free as soon as possible. He sent privately to Rome and got absolved from his oath by the Pope. He courted those who were jealous of Earl Simon, and he encouraged many of his foreign relatives and dependents to creep back to England. In 1261 he felt strong enough to break loose, seized the Tower of London, and raised an army. But he found himself too weak, dared not come to blows with the adherents of the Provisions of Oxford, and again consented to place himself in the hands of the guarantors. But as disputes about his conduct continued to arise, he offered to submit his rights, and those of the barons, to the arbitration of his neighbour, St. Lewis of France, whose probity was recognized by all the world. Simon and his friends consented—an unwise act, for they might have remembered that the French king was not well acquainted with the constitution or the needs of England. By a decision called the Mise of Amiens, from the city at which it was proclaimed, St. Lewis announced that Henry ought to abide by the customs stated in Magna Carta, but that he need not keep the Provisions of Oxford, which were dishonourable to his crown and kingly dignity (1263).

The Mise of Amiens precipitated the outbreak of civil war, for Simon and his party refused to accept the decision which had been given against them, though they had promised to abide by it. This flinching from their word alienated from them many who would otherwise have taken the side of reform, and it was felt that a grave responsibility lay on Simon for striking the first blow. Hence it came to pass that the king was supported by a larger party than might have been expected. His own brother and son, Richard of Cornwall and Prince Edward, who had hitherto usually Pg 142 leaned to the party of reform and striven to guide him towards moderation, now supported him with all their power. The Earls of Norfolk and Hereford and many other great barons also took arms in his favour. Earl Simon, on the other hand, was helped by the Earls of Gloucester and Derby, and enthusiastically supported by the citizens of London, who had been maddened by the king's arbitrary taxes.

BATTLE OF LEWES.

When, after much preliminary fighting, the armies of Henry and Simon faced each other in Sussex for a decisive battle, it was found that the king had much the larger army. He drew up his host outside the walls of Lewes, while Simon, who had marched from London, lay on the downs beyond it. When the shock came, the fiery Prince Edward, who led the right wing of the royalists, fell furiously on Simon's left wing, which was mainly composed of the levies of London, and drove them far off the field. But, carried away by his pursuit, he never thought of returning to help his father, and meanwhile Earl Simon had beaten the king's division, and rolled the royalist army back against the town wall of Lewes, where those of them who could not enter Pg 143 the gate at once were taken prisoners. Among the captives were the king himself, his brother Richard of Cornwall, and most of the chiefs of the royalist party. Prince Edward, rather than continue the civil war, gave himself up to the insurgents on the following day, to share his father's fate (May, 1264).

The immediate result of the battle was the issue of a document called the Mise of Lewes, by which King Henry promised to keep the charter, to dismiss all his foreign relatives and dependents, and to place himself under the control of a privy council, whom Parliament should choose to act as his ministers and guardians.

A Parliament was hastily summoned and delegated three electors to nominate this privy council, namely, Earl Simon, the Earl of Gloucester, and the Bishop of Chichester. The electors, naturally but unwisely, appointed none but their own trusted supporters. Thus England came under the rule of a party, and a party whose violent action had been disliked by a great portion of the nation. The king was but a puppet in their hands; he was practically their prisoner, for three of the council always attended his steps and kept him in sight. Now, Henry, irritating and faithless as his conduct had always been, was not personally disliked, and the sight of their monarch led about like a captive and forced to obey every behest of his captors, was very displeasing to many who had formerly felt no sympathy for him. It was felt, too, that his son Edward was being very hardly treated by being kept in honourable captivity and deprived of all share in the government; for the prince had taken the side of reform till the outbreak of the civil war, had only joined his father when Simon took arms, and had behaved with great patriotism and self-denial in refusing to continue the struggle after Lewes.

For two years Earl Simon governed England, and the king was kept under close guard. This period was not one of peace or prosperity; the land was still troubled by the echoes of the civil war, and in his anxiety to maintain his dominant position the earl incurred many accusations of harshness and rapacity. He was especially blamed for depriving Prince Edward of his earldom of Chester, for favouring Llewellyn Prince of North Wales in his quarrel with Roger Mortimer, a great lord of the Welsh marches who had been on the king's side at Lewes, but Pg 144 most of all for giving too much trust and power to his own sons. The young Montforts were rash and arrogant men, who harmed the people's cause more by their turbulence than they aided it by their courage and fidelity. In short, they were as Samuel's sons of old, and wrought their father no small damage and discredit.

The chief event for which Earl Simon's tenure of power is remembered is his summons of the celebrated Parliament of 1265. This incident is noteworthy, not so much for anything that the Parliament did, as for the new system on which it was constructed. Hitherto the Great Council had usually been composed only of the barons and bishops, though on two or three occasions in the thirteenth century the smaller vassals of the crown had been represented by the summons of two knights from each shire, chosen in the county court by all the freeholders of the district. But de Montfort not only called these "knights of the shire" to his Parliament of 1265, but also summoned two citizens or two burgesses from each of the chief cities and boroughs of the realm. Thus he was the first to give the towns representation, and to put together the three elements, lords, borough members, and county members, which form the Parliament of to-day. It must be confessed that Simon's immediate object was probably to strengthen his own side in the assembly, rather than to initiate a scheme for the reform of the Great Council in a democratic direction. Many barons were against him, and them he did not summon at all. Many more were jealous or distrustful of him, and it was mainly in order to swamp their opposition that he called up the great body of knights of the shire and members for the towns,—for London and the rest of the chartered cities were strongly in favour of his cause.

This Parliament confirmed all Simon's acts; outlawed those of the king's party who had fled over-seas, and refused to accept the terms of the Mise of Lewes; imposed a three-years exile in Ireland on some of those who had made only a tardy submission, and put all the royal castles into the hands of trusty partisans of the earl. It made few regulations for the better governance of the realm, but left everything in Simon's hands and at his discretion.

It was impossible that the regency of the great earl should Pg 145 last for long. There were too many men in England who felt that it was unseemly that the king and his son should live in close restraint, while one who, in spite of all his merits, was still a foreigner and an adventurer, ruled the realm. The beginning of Simon's troubles came from a quarrel with his own chief supporter, the young Earl of Gloucester. Gilbert de Clare thought that he was not admitted to a sufficient share in the government of the kingdom, and soon fell into a bitter feud with Simon's sons. His anger led him into conspiring against the great earl. By his counsel Prince Edward escaped from his keepers, by an easy stratagem and a swift horse. Once free, the prince called his party to arms, and was joined by Gloucester, Mortimer, and many of the barons of the Welsh marches.

BATTLE OF EVESHAM.

On hearing of this rising in the west, Montfort hurried to the Welsh border with a small army, taking the king in his train. He bade Simon, the second of his sons, to collect a larger army and follow him. But Edward and Gloucester seized the line of the Severn, and threw themselves between father and son. The earl retraced his steps, slipped back across the Severn, and Pg 146 reached Evesham, while his son had marched as far as Kenilworth, so that a few miles only separated them. But Edward lay between, and was eager for the fight.

By a sudden and unexpected attack the prince surprised and scattered young Montfort's army under the walls of Kenilworth; he then hurried off to attack Simon. The earl lay in Evesham town, which is girt round by a deep loop of the river Avon. Edward and Gloucester seized the narrow neck of this loop, while another royalist force, under Mortimer, crossed the river and watched the only bridge which leads southward out of the town. Simon awoke to find himself surrounded. "God have mercy on our souls," he cried, "for our bodies are our enemy's." Gathering his little army in a compact mass, he dashed at the prince's superior force, and tried to cut his way through. But the odds were against him, and after a short sharp fight he was slain, with his eldest son Henry, Hugh Despencer the Justiciar of England, and many of the best knights of the baronial party. King Henry almost shared their fate: he had been compelled to put on his armour and ride in the earl's host, and was wounded and almost slain before he was recognized by his son's victorious soldiery.

Thus died Earl Simon the Righteous, a man much loved by those who knew him well, courteous and kindly, pious and honest, wise and liberal. But it cannot be denied that he was touched by an overweening ambition, and that when England fell beneath his hand, he ruled her more as a king than a regent, and forgot that he was but the deputy and representative of the nation. His rise and success freed England from the thriftless rule of Henry, and set a boundary to the use of the royal prerogative. His short tenure of power gave the realm the valuable gift of the full and representative Parliament. His fall was sad but not disastrous to the English, for his work was done, and he was fast drifting into the position of the autocratic leader of a party, and ceasing to be the true exponent of the will of the whole nation.

The best testimony to the benefits that Simon had conferred on England was the fact that Henry III. never fell back into his old ways. He was now an elderly man, and in his captivity had lost much of his self-confidence and restless activity. He had been freed, not by his Pg 147 own power, but by his son and the Earl of Gloucester, both of whom had been friends of reform, though enemies of Simon. Edward had now won an ascendency over his father which he never let slip, and his voice had for the future a preponderant share in the royal council. It is to his influence that we may ascribe the wise moderation with which the relics of Simon's party were treated.

Evesham fight did not end the war, for the three surviving sons of Simon, with the Earl of Derby and some other resolute friends, still held out. It took two years more to crush out the last sparks of civil strife, for the vanquished party fortified themselves in the castle of Kenilworth and the marshy isles of Ely and Axholme. But Edward gradually beat down all opposition, and the end of the war is marked by the Dictum of Kenilworth (October, 1266), in which the king solemnly confirms the Great Charter, and pardons all his opponents, on condition of their paying him a fine. Only the heirs of the Earls of Leicester and Derby were disinherited. The younger Montforts went into exile in Italy, where a little later they revenged themselves on the king by cruelly murdering his nephew Henry of Cornwall, as he was praying in Viterbo cathedral.

There is little to tell about the last five years of the reign of Henry III. The land gradually settled down into tranquillity, and we hear little more of the misgovernment which had rendered his early years so unbearable. Prince Edward went on a Crusade, when he saw that the realm was pacified. He greatly distinguished himself in the Holy Land, and took Nazareth from the infidels. He was still beating back the Saracen, when he was called home by the news of his father's decease. After a stormy life the old king had a peaceful ending, dying quietly in his bed on the 16th of November, 1272.

Pg 148

The confidence and admiration which the English nation felt for Prince Edward were well shown by the fact that he was proclaimed king on the day of his father's death without any form of election by the Parliament. This was the first time that the English crown was transferred by strict hereditary succession, and that the old traditions of the solemn choice by the Great Council were neglected. Edward was still absent in Palestine, but the government was carried on in his name without trouble or friction till he landed in England on August 2, 1274. It was nineteen months since his father had died, yet nothing had gone amiss in the interval, so great was the belief of the English in the wisdom and justice of the coming king.

Edward was probably the best and greatest ruler, save Alfred, that England has ever known. He was a most extraordinary contrast to his shifty father, and his cruel, treacherous grandsire. His private life was a model to all men; nothing could have shown a better conception of the respective claims of patriotism and of filial duty than his conduct during the civil war. His court was grave and virtuous, and his faithful wife, Eleanor of Castile, was the object of his chivalrous devotion. Edward was religious without superstition, liberal without unthriftiness, resolute without obstinacy. But the most striking feature of his character was his love of good faith and justice. His favourite device was Pactum serva, "Keep your promise," and in all his doings he strove to carry it out. It was this that made him such an admirable king for a country where constitutional liberty was just Pg 149 beginning to develop itself. If he promised his Parliament to abandon any custom or introduce any reform, he might be trusted honestly to do his best to adhere to his engagement. It must not be supposed that he never fell out with his subjects; his conceptions of the rights and duties of a king were so high that it was impossible for him to avoid collisions with Parliament. But when such collisions occurred, though he fought them out with firmness, yet, if beaten, he accepted his defeat without rancour. His justice was perhaps too severe: he could pardon on occasion, but he had a stern way of dealing with those whom he regarded as traitors or oath-breakers; the chief blots on his reign are instances of merciless severity to conquered rebels. Edward has been accused of having some times adhered too closely to the letter of the law, when it told in his own favour, but there seems little reason to doubt that he was honestly following his own lights. Compared with any contemporary sovereign, he was a very mirror of justice and equity.

In addition to showing great merits as administrator, Edward was notable both as a good soldier and a wise general. His tall and robust frame and dauntless courage made him one of the best knights of his day. Yet he was no mere fighting man, but a skilled tactician. He had long forgotten the reckless impulsiveness that lost the day at Lewes, and had become one of the best captains of his age. He deserves a prominent place in the history of the art of war for being the first who discovered the military value of the English long-bowmen, and turned them to good account in his battles. Hitherto English generals, like continental, had been trusting entirely to the charge of their mailed cavalry. Edward, as we shall see at Falkirk, had learnt that the bowman was no less effective than the knight in the deciding of battles.

The years of Edward's long and eventful reign are full of interest and importance both within and without the bounds of England. The history of his legislation and of the development of the power of Parliament under him deserve close observation no less than his successful dealings with Wales, and his almost successful scheme for the conquest of Scotland. Nor can his relations with France be left without remark.

His legislation, most of which falls into the earlier years of his Pg 150 reign, requires the first notice. Throughout the whole of it we trace a consistent purpose of strengthening the crown by restricting the rights both of the Church and the baronage. His first collision with the Church dates from 1279, when Archbishop Peckham made an attempt to reassert some of Becket's old doctrines as to the complete independence and wide scope of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. When Peckham summoned a national council of clergy at Reading in 1279, and issued certain "canons" in support of the independence of the Church courts, Edward replied not merely by compelling him to withdraw the objectionable document, but by passing the celebrated Statute of Mortmain, or De Religiosis, as it is sometimes called. This was a measure destined to prevent the further accumulation of estates in the "dead hand" (in mortua manu) of the Church. It was estimated that a fourth of the surface of England was already in the possession of the clerical body, and this land no longer paid its fair proportion of the taxes of the realm. For a large share of the king's revenue came from reliefs, or death-duties, and escheats, or resumption of lands to which there was no heir, and as a monastery or bishopric never died, the king got neither reliefs nor escheats from them. The statute prevented any man from alienating his land to the monasteries, and specially forbade the fraudulent practice of making ostensible gifts to the Church and receiving them back. For landholders had sometimes pretended to make over their estates to a monastery, in order to escape the taxation due on feudal fiefs, while really, by a corrupt agreement with the monks, they kept the property in their own power, and so enjoyed it tax-free. For the future land rarely fell into the "dead hand," since it could not be given away without the king's consent. Very few new monasteries were built or endowed after the passing of this statute, but the crown not unfrequently relaxed the rule in favour of the colleges in the universities, which were just now beginning to spring up.

Edward's dealings with the baronage are even more important in the history of the English constitution than his contest with the clerical body. He showed a consistent purpose of defending the rights of the crown against the great feudal lords, and of bringing all holders of land into close dependence on himself. His first attempt of Pg 151 the kind was the issue of the writ Quo Warranto in 1278. This writ was a royal mandate ordering an inquiry "by what warrant" many of the old royal estates had come into private hands, for the king thought that much state property had passed illegally out of the possession of the crown, by the thriftlessness of his father and the disorder of the civil wars of 1262-65. This project for an inquiry into old rights and documents both vexed and frightened the baronage. They murmured loudly. The tale is well known how John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, when asked to produce the evidence of his right to certain lands, dashed down an old rusty sword before the commissioners, crying, "This is my title-deed. My ancestors came over with King William, and won their lands by the sword, and with this same sword I will maintain them against any one who tries to take them from me." The whole baronage showed such a hostile feeling against Edward's proposal that he finally contented himself with making a complete list of the still remaining crown lands, but did not raise the question of the resumption of long-alienated estates.

Another device of the king's for binding the landholders of the realm more closely to himself, was his scheme for making knights of all persons who held estates worth more than £20 a year. His object was not so much to gain the fees due from those who received knighthood, as to bring all the middle class of landholders, who held under the great feudal lords, into closer relation with himself through the homage and oath which they made to him after receiving the honour (1278).

In subsequent legislation Edward took care to conciliate the baronage by strengthening not only his rights over them, but their rights over their vassals. The most important of these was "escheat," the right of resuming possession of land when its holder died without an heir. This right was always liable to be defeated by the tenant selling his land; and its value was yet more diminished if he could dispose of part of the land, in such a way that the buyer became his own sub-tenant. A clause in Magna Charta had restricted this process, but the barons wished to limit even more their tenants' power of parting with land. On the other hand, as society became more industrial, and less warlike, it became more desirable that land should pass freely from man to man Pg 152 These conflicting interests resulted in two enactments, which are landmarks in English History. The first, the Second Statute of Westminster, contains the famous clauses 'De Donis Conditionalibus.' It forbade the alienation of land granted to a person and his actual lineal descendants, or to use a modern phrase, it made possible the creation of perpetual entails. The barons soon saw that it enabled them to settle their lands on their own families, and it was regularly employed for this purpose for about 200 years, till at last a legal fiction was invented which greatly cut down the power of tying up land.

On the other hand, the statute Quia Emptores (1290), far from restricting the power of alienation, expressly allowed it in all cases not coming within the statute De Donis: but at the same time it enacted that the purchaser, whether of the whole or part of an estate, should become the tenant, not of the seller, but of the seller's lord; in other words, it put an end to subinfeudation. This led, in the end, to the enormous multiplication of the lesser vassals of the crown, and tended to the ultimate extinction of all subtenancies, so that the king was the gainer in the long run, since whenever a great estate was broken up, he became the immediate lord of all those among whom it was dispersed.

Besides the great statutes we have already named, several other items of King Edward's legislation demand a word of notice. The Statute of Winchester (1285) reorganized the national militia, the descendant of the old fyrd, ordaining what arms each man, according to his rank and wealth, should furnish for himself. It also provided for the establishment of a watch or local police for the suppression of robbers and outlaws.

But all the king's doings were not so wise; to his discredit must be named his intolerant edict for the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. Edward seems to have picked up in his crusading days a blind horror of infidels of all sorts. He disliked the Jews, somewhat for being inveterate clippers and debasers of the coinage, more for being usurers at extortionate rates in days when usury was held to be a deadly sin, but most of all for the mere reason that they were not Christians. To his own great loss—for the taxes of the Jews were a considerable item in his revenues—he banished Pg 153 them all from the land, giving them three months to sell their houses and realize their debts. It was 360 years before they were again allowed to return to the realm.

The same years that are notable for the passing of the statutes of Mortmain and Quia Emptores, and for the expulsion of the Jews, were those in which the English Parliament was gradually growing into its permanent shape. We have already told how Simon de Montfort summoned in 1265 the first assembly which corresponds to our modern idea of a Parliament, by containing representatives from shires and boroughs, as well as a muster of the great barons and bishops who were tenants-in-chief of the crown. As it chanced Edward did not call a Great Council in exactly that same form till 1295, but in the intervening years he generally summoned knights of the shire to attend the deliberation of his lords, and consent to the granting of money. On two occasions in 1283 the cities and boroughs were also bidden to send their representatives, but these were not full Parliaments, for at the first, held at Northampton, no barons were present, while at the second, which sat at Acton-Burnell, the clergy had not been summoned. It was not till 1295 that Edward, then in the thick of his Scotch and French wars, summoned barons, clergy, knights of the shire, and citizens, all to meet him, "because that which touches all should be approved by all." But the complete form of Parliament was found to work so well that it was always summoned in that shape for the future.

We may now turn to Edward's political doings. The affairs of Wales require the first notice. We have already mentioned in earlier chapters how the southern districts of that country had long ago passed, partly by conquest, partly by intermarriage with the families of native chiefs, into the hands of various Anglo-Norman barons. These nobles of the Welsh Marchland, or Lords Marchers as they were called, had as their main duty the task of overawing and restraining the princes of North Wales, where Celtic anarchy still reigned supreme. Anglesea, the mountain lands of Snowdon, Merioneth, and the valley of the Dee were the last home of the native Welsh. In this land of Gwynedd native princes still ruled, and proved most unruly vassals to the English crown. Whenever England was vexed by civil war, the Welsh descended from their hills, Pg 154 attacked the Lords Marchers, and pushed their incursions into Cheshire and Shropshire. Sometimes they pushed even further afield; in 1257 they ravaged as far as Cardiff and Hereford. If it had not been that the princes of North Wales were even more given to murderous family feuds than to raids on the English border, they would have been an intolerable pest; but their interminable petty strife with each other generally kept them quiet.

WALES IN 1282.

In 1272, the ruler of North Wales was Llewellyn-ap-Gruffyd, a bold and stirring prince, who had put down all his rebellious brothers and cousins, and united the whole of Gwynedd under his sword. Following the example of his ancestors, Llewellyn had plunged with alacrity into the English civil wars of the time of Henry III. He had allied himself with Simon de Montfort, and under cover of this alliance had made cruel ravages on the lands of the Lords Marchers in South Wales. He held out long after Simon fell Pg 155 at Evesham, and only made peace in 1267, when he was admitted to very favourable terms and confirmed in the full possession of his principality. When Edward ascended his father's throne, he bade Llewellyn come to his court and do him homage, such as the ancient princes of Wales had been accustomed to offer. But he was met with repeated refusals; six times he summoned the Welshman to appear, and six times he was denied, for Llewellyn said that he would not leave his hills unless he was given as hostages the king's brother, Edmund of Lancaster, and the Justiciar Ralph of Hengham. He feared for his life, he said, and would not trust himself in his suzerain's hands. Edward was not accustomed to have his word doubted, and, being conscious of his own honest intentions, was bitterly angered at his vassal's distrust and contumacious answers. But the king's wrath reached its highest pitch in 1275, when he found that Llewellyn had put himself in communication with France, and sent to the French court for Eleanor de Montfort, Earl Simon's daughter, to take her to wife. The ship that carried the bride was captured off the Scilly Isles by a Bristol privateer, and she with her brother, Amaury of Montfort, fell into Edward's hands. After Llewellyn had made one further refusal to do homage, Edward raised a great army and invaded Wales. The prince and his wild tribesmen took refuge in the fastnesses of Snowdon, but Edward blockaded all the outlets from the hills, and in a few months the Welsh were starved into submission. Llewellyn was forced to surrender himself into his suzerain's hands, but received better terms than might have been expected. He was made to do homage, and to give up the land between Conway and the Dee, the modern shire of Denbigh, but was allowed to retain the rest of his dominions, and received his bride from Edward's hands. He was also reconciled to his brothers, whom he had long before driven away from Wales, and David—the eldest of these exiles—was given a great barony cut out of the ceded lands on the Dee (1277).

Though he had felt the weight of Edward's hand, the Prince of Wales was unwise enough to provoke his suzerain the second time. Finding that there was much discontent in the ceded districts of Wales, because the king was systematically substituting English laws and customs for the old Celtic usages, Llewellyn resolved to make a Pg 156 sudden attempt to free them and to throw off his allegiance. His brother David joined in the plot, though he had always been protected by Edward, and owed all that he possessed to English aid. On Palm Sunday, 1282, the two brothers secretly took arms without any declaration of war. David surprised Hawarden Castle, captured the chief justice of Wales, and slew the garrison, while Llewellyn swept the whole coast-land as far as the gates of Chester with fire and sword.

This treacherous and unprovoked rebellion deeply angered the king; he swore that he would make an end of the troublesome principality, and raised an army and a fleet greater than any that had ever been sent against the Welsh. After some slight engagements, the English once more drove Llewellyn and his host into the crags of Snowdon. Convinced of his folly, the prince sent to ask for peace; but Edward would not again grant the easy terms that he had given in 1277. Llewellyn should become an English earl, he said, and be granted lands worth £1000 a year; but the independent principality of North Wales had been tried and found wanting—it should be abolished and annexed to England.

Llewellyn, though in the sorest straits, refused these terms. By a dangerous night march he slipped through the English lines with a few chosen followers, and hastened into mid-Wales, to stir up rebellion in Brecknock. But near Builth he fell in with a small party of English, and was slain in the skirmish which followed by an esquire named Adam of Frankton, who knew not with whom he was fighting. David, his brother, now proclaimed himself Prince of Wales, and held out in Snowdon for some months longer. But he was ultimately betrayed to the king by his own starving followers. He was taken over the border to be tried before the English Parliament, which met at Acton Burnell, just outside the walls of Shrewsbury. There was far more dislike felt for him than for his brother. Llewellyn had always been an open enemy, but David had long served at the English court, and had been granted his barony by Edward's special favour. Hence it came that the Parliament passed the death-sentence for treason on the last Prince of Wales, and he was executed at Shrewsbury, with all the horrid details of hanging, drawing, and quartering, which were the traitor's lot in Pg 157 those days. The harshness of his punishment almost makes us forget the provocation that he had given the king; mercy for traitors was not characteristic of Edward's temper (1283).

Edward stayed for nearly two years in Wales after the fighting had ended; he devoted himself to reorganizing the principality, on the English model. Llewellyn's dominions were cut up into the new counties of Anglesea, Merioneth, and Carnarvon. Strong castles were built at Conway, Beaumaris, Carnarvon, and Harlech, to hold them down, and colonies of English were tempted by liberal grants and charters to settle in the towns which grew up at points suitable for centres of commerce. For the future governance of the land Edward drew up the "Statute of Wales," issued at Rhuddlan in 1284; he allowed a certain amount of the old Celtic customary law to survive, but introduced English legal usages to a much larger extent. The Welsh murmured bitterly against the new customs, but found them in the end a great improvement. Edward endeavoured to solace their discontent by placing many of the administrative posts in Welsh hands, and their national pride by reviving the ancient name of the principality. For in 1301 he gave his heir Edward, who had been born at Carnarvon, the title of Prince of Wales, solemnly invested him with the rule of the principality at a great meeting of all the Welsh chiefs, and set him to govern the land. Later kings of England have followed the custom, and the title of Prince of Wales has become stereotyped as that of the heir to the English crown. It must not be supposed that Wales settled down easily and without friction beneath Edward's sceptre. There were three or four risings against his authority, headed by chiefs who thought that they had some claim to inherit the old principality. One of these insurrections was a really formidable affair; in 1294, Madoc, the son of Llewellyn, raised half North Wales to follow him, beat the Earl of Lincoln in open battle, and ravaged the English border. The king himself, though sorely vexed at the moment by wars in Gascony and Scotland, marched against him at mid-winter, but had to retire, foiled by the snows and torrents of the Welsh mountains. But next spring Madoc was pursued and captured, and sent to spend the rest of his life as a captive in the Tower of London (1295).

For a few years after the annexation of Wales, the annals of Pg 158 England are comparatively uneventful. Some of Edward's legislation, with which we have already dealt, falls into this period, but the king's attention was mainly taken up with foreign politics, into which he was drawn by his position as Duke of Aquitaine. He spent some time in Guienne, succeeded by careful diplomacy in keeping out of the wars between France and Aragon, which were raging near him, and introduced a measure of good government among his Gascon subjects. But more important events nearer home were soon to attract his attention.

In 1286 perished Alexander III., King of Scotland, cast over the cliffs of Kinghorn by the leap of an unruly horse. He was the last male of the old royal house that descended from Malcolm Canmore and the sainted Queen Margaret. Three children, two sons and a daughter, had been born to him, but they had all died young, and his only living descendant was his daughter's daughter, a child of four years. Her mother had wedded Eric, King of Norway, and it was at the Norwegian court that the little heiress was living when her grandfather died. Though Scotland had never before obeyed a queen-regnant, her nobles made no difficulty in accepting the child Margaret, the "maid of Norway" as they called her, for their sovereign. A regency was appointed in her name, and the whole nation accepted her sway.

Now Edward of England saw, in the accession of a young girl to the Scottish throne, a unique opportunity for bringing about a closer union of England and Scotland. There was no rational objection to the scheme: a century had elapsed since the two countries had been at war, their baronages had become united by constant intermarriage; the Lowlands—the more important half of the Scotch realm—were English in speech and manners. Most important of all, there were as yet few or no national grudges between the races on either bank of the Tweed. Of the rancorous hostility which was to divide them in the next century no man had any presage.

When the little Queen of Scotland had reached her seventh year, the king proposed to the Scots' regents that she should be married to his own son and heir, Edward of Carnarvon. He pledged himself that the kingdoms should not be forcibly united; Pg 159 Scotland should keep all its laws and liberties and be administered by Scots alone, without any interference from England. The regents did not mislike the scheme; they summoned the Parliament of the northern realm to meet at Brigham-on-Tweed, and there Edward's offers were accepted and ratified with the consent of the whole realm (July, 1290).

The next step was to send to Norway for the young queen, for she had been living at her father's court till now, and had never visited her own kingdom. She set sail for Scotland in the autumn of the year 1290, but adverse winds kept her vessel tossed for weeks in the wild North Sea. The strain was too much for the frail child; when at last she came ashore at Kirkwall in the Orkneys, it was only to die. With her life ended the fairest opportunity of uniting the two realms on equal terms that had ever been known.

Edward's scheme had fallen through, and his grief was great; but much greater was the dismay in Scotland, where the regents found themselves face to face with the calamity of the extinction of the whole royal house. There was no longer any king or queen in whose name the law of the realm could run, or the simplest duties of government be discharged. Gradually claimants for the crown began to step forward, basing their demands on ancient alliances with the old kingly line, but the nearest of these connections went back more than a hundred years, to female descendants of King David, who had died in 1153. In this strait the Scots determined to appeal to King Edward as arbitrator between the pretenders, whose rivalry seemed likely to split the kingdom up into a group of disorderly feudal principalities. Edward readily consented, seeing that in the capacity of arbitrator he could find an opportunity of making more real the old English right of suzerainty over the kingdom of Scotland. It will be remembered that as far back as the tenth century, the kings of the Scots had done homage to Edward the elder, and that they held the more important half of their realm, Lothian and Strathclyde, which together form the Lowlands, as grants under feudal obligations from the English crown. But the exact degree of dependence of Scotland on England had never been accurately fixed, though Scottish kings had often sat in English Parliaments, and sometimes served in the English armies. It might be pleaded by a Pg 160 patriotic Scot that, as Earl of Lothian, his king had certain obligations to the English sovereign, but that for his lands north of the Forth and Clyde he was liable to no such duties. This depended on the nature of the discharge given by Richard I. to William the Lion in 1190, when he sold the Scottish king a release of certain duties of homage in return for the sum of 10,000 marks. But the agreement of Richard and William had been drawn up in such an unbusiness-like manner that no one could say exactly what it covered.

King Edward was determined to put an end to this uncertainty, and, as a preliminary to accepting the post of arbitrator in the Scottish succession dispute, required that the regents and all the nobles of the northern realm should acknowledge his complete suzerainty over the whole kingdom. After some hesitation they consented. Edward made a tour through Edinburgh, Stirling, and St. Andrews, and there received the homage of the whole nobility of Scotland. He then appointed a court of arbitration to sit at Berwick, and adjudicate on the rights of the thirteen claimants to the crown; it consisted of eighty Scots and twenty-four Englishmen.

The court found that of serious claims to the crown there were only two—those of John Balliol and Robert Bruce, each of whom descended in the female line from the old King David I., who had died in 1153. The positions of Balliol and Bruce were closely similar: they were descended from two Anglo-Norman barons of the north country, who had married two sisters, Margaret and Isabella, the great-granddaughters of David I. Both of them were as much English as Scotch in blood and breeding. Balliol was Lord of Barnard Castle, in Durham; Bruce had been Sheriff of Cumberland, and had long served King Edward as chief justice of the King's Bench. Like so many of the Scottish barons, they were equally at home on either side of the border. The point of difficulty to decide between them was that, while Balliol descended from the elder of the two co-heiresses, Bruce was a generation nearer to the parent stem, and claimed to have a preference on this account by Scottish usage.

THE SCOTTISH SUCCESSION IN 1292.

The court of arbitration decided that this plea of Bruce's was unsound, and that his rival's right was undoubted. Edward Pg 162 therefore decided in favour of Balliol, who straightway did him homage as King of all Scotland, and was duly crowned at Scone (1292). So far the King of England's conduct had been unexceptionable; he had acted as an honest umpire, and had handed over the disputed realms to the rightful heir. But Edward's legal mind saw further consequences in the acknowledgment of allegiance which Balliol had made. This soon became evident when he began to allow persons who had been defeated in the Scottish law courts to appeal for a further decision to those of England, in virtue of the suzerainty of the latter country. Such a claim was valid in feudal law, and Edward as Duke of Aquitaine had often seen his Gascon subjects make an appeal from the courts of Bordeaux to those of Paris. But to the Scots the idea was new, for no such custom had prevailed between England and Scotland, and they complained that Edward was breaking the promise which he had made at the time of the arbitration, to respect all the old privileges of the Scotch crown. In this they were practically right, for ancient usage was on their side. Balliol was a weak man, and might have yielded to Edward's demand; but his barons refused to hear of it, and bound him to do nothing save with the consent of a council of twelve advisers, who were to determine his course of action. The discontent of the Scots was soon to have most deplorable consequences for both realms.

At this time Edward was just becoming involved in a bitter quarrel with Philip the Fair, the young King of France. Philip coveted Aquitaine, and was determined to have it. He picked a quarrel with the King of England about the piratical doings of certain English seamen in the Channel. The mariners of the Cinque Ports and of Normandy had long been sworn foes; they fought whenever they met, without any concern as to whether England and France were at war or not. In 1293 there was a regular pitched battle between them, off St. Mahé, in Brittany; the Normans had the worse, and many of them were slain. This affray seemed to King Philip an admirable excuse for attacking his neighbour. He summoned Edward to Paris, as Duke of Aquitaine, to answer before his feudal lord for the misdoings of the English seamen. The King of England was not averse to Pg 163 giving satisfaction, and sent to offer to submit to an arbitration, in which the damages done by his subjects should be assessed. But Philip was not seeking damages, but an excuse for war; he at once declared Edward contumacious for not appearing in person, and proclaimed the forfeiture of the whole duchy of Aquitaine. Hardly realizing the French king's intentions, Edward despatched his brother Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, to endeavour to satisfy his offended suzerain. Philip then declared that he would consider himself satisfied if Edward surrendered into his hand, as a token of submission, the chief fortresses of Gascony: they should be restored the moment that compensation had been made for the doings at St. Mahé. Earl Edmund accepted the offer, and the castles were duly placed in Philip's hands. Then, with a barefaced effrontery that disgusted even his own nobles, the French king repudiated the agreement, and declared that he should retain Guienne permanently. Edward was thus committed to an unexpected war, while all his strongholds in Aquitaine were already in the enemy's hands. He began to arm in great wrath, and sent ambassadors abroad to gather allies among Philip's continental foes, chief of whom were the Emperor Adolf of Nassau and the Counts of Brabant, Holland, and Flanders.

But Philip also had looked about him for allies. At this moment Madoc-ap-Llewellyn rose in rebellion in North Wales, relying on French aid, and, what was of far greater importance, the discontent of the Scots took the form of open war with England. John Balliol embraced the French alliance, promised to wed his son to Philip's daughter, and sent raiding bands across the border to harry Cumberland and Northumberland.

Edward resolved at once to ward off the nearer dangers before taking in hand the reconquest of Guienne. How he put down the dangerous rebellion of Madoc the Welshman, we have related in an earlier page. That campaign had taken up the best part of the year 1295; in the next spring the turn of Balliol came. He was summoned to appear before his suzerain at Newcastle, and when he did not obey, Edward crossed the Tweed with a great host. Berwick, the frontier fortress and chief port of Scotland, was stormed after a very short siege, and three weeks later the Pg 164 Scottish king was completely routed at the battle of Dunbar (April 27, 1296). So unskilfully did the Scots fight, that they were beaten by Edward's vanguard under John de Warenne—the hero of the rusty sword at the Quo Warranto inquest—before the king and the main body of the English army came upon the field. One after another, Edinburgh, Perth, Stirling, and all the chief towns of Scotland yielded themselves, and ere long the craven-spirited king of the north surrendered himself, and gave up his crown into Edward's hands, asking pardon as one who had been misled and coerced by evil counsellors.

Edward then held a Parliament of all the Scottish barons, and received their homage, being resolved to reign himself as king north as well as south of the Tweed. He told the assembled nobles that none of the old laws of Scotland should be changed, and issued an amnesty to Balliol's late partisans. It seemed that all resistance was at an end, and that the union of the crowns was to take place with no further trouble or bloodshed. John de Warenne—the victor of Dunbar—was appointed guardian of the realm, and Edward turned southward in triumph, taking with him the Scottish regalia, and the Holy Stone of Scone, on which the Kings of Scotland were wont to be crowned. That famous relic still remains at Westminster, where Edward placed it, and serves as the pedestal of the coronation chair of the Kings of England to this day.

The king thought that Scotland was tamed even as Wales had been, forgetting that the Scots had hardly tried their strength against him, and had yielded so easily mainly because their craven king had deserted them. Dismissing northern affairs from his mind, he now turned to the long-deferred expedition to Guienne. The greater part of that duchy was still in King Philip's greedy hands, and only Bayonne and a few other towns were holding out against him. Edward determined to land in Flanders himself, and there to stir up his German allies against France, but to send the great bulk of the English levies to Gascony, under the Marshal, Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk.

But the expedition was not to take place without much preliminary trouble and difficulty. Edward was in grave need of money to furnish forth his great army, and tried to levy new taxes without any formal grants from Parliament. This at Pg 165 once brought him into conflict with the clergy and the baronage. The arrogant Pope Boniface VIII. had just published a bull named Clericis Laicos, from its opening words. It forbade the clergy to pay any taxes to the crown from their ecclesiastical revenues. Archbishop Winchelsey thought himself bound to carry out the Pope's command, and refused, in the name of all his order, to assent to any portion of the national taxation falling on Church land. The king, who was in no mood to stand objections, was moved to great wrath at this unreasonable claim. He copied the behaviour of his grandfather, King John, in a similar crisis, and by his behest the judges proclaimed that no cleric should have law in the king's courts till the refusal to pay taxes was rescinded. Edward himself sequestrated the lands of the see of Canterbury, and intimated to all tenants on the estates of the clergy that nothing should be done against them if they refused to pay their rents. Many ecclesiastics thereupon withdrew their refusal to contribute to the national expenses; but the archbishop held out, and the quarrel ran on for some time. At last Boniface VIII. was induced to so far modify his bull as to admit that the Church might make voluntary grants for the purpose of national defence. Winchelsey therefore promised the king that he would endeavour to induce the clergy to make large contributions of their own free will, if Edward on his side would confirm the Great Charter, and swear to take no further measures against Church property. To this offer Edward could not refuse his consent; he was in urgent need of money, and, although it was a bad precedent to allow the clergy to assess their own taxation outside Parliament, and on a different scale from the contributions of the rest of the realm, he accepted Winchelsey's compromise.

But this struggle of the king and the Church was but one important episode of a contention between the king and the whole nation, which filled the years 1296-7. Edward had provoked the barons and the merchants of England no less than the clergy—the former by bidding them sail for Gascony in the winter, and pay him a heavy tax; the latter by seizing all their wool—England's greatest export—as it lay in harbour, and forcing them to pay a heavy fine, the mal-tolt, or evil tax, as Pg 166 it was called, before he would let it be sent over-sea. All this had been done without the consent of Parliament. The barons, headed by Roger Bigod, who had been told off to head the expedition to Guienne, refused to go abroad unless the king himself should lead them, urging that their feudal duty was only to defend the kingdom, and not to wage wars beyond it. Bigod flatly refused to set out unless the king went with him. "By God, Sir Earl, thou shalt either go or hang!" exclaimed Edward, irritated at the contumacy of one who, as Marshal of England, was bound to hold the most responsible post in the army that he was striving to raise. "And by God, Sir King, I will neither go nor hang!" shouted the equally enraged Earl Marshal. He flung himself out of the king's presence, and with the aid of his friend Bohun, the Earl of Hereford, gathered a great host, and prepared to withstand the king, if he should persist in endeavouring to carry out his design. Edward, however, sailed himself for the continent without forcing the barons to follow him. When he was gone, a Parliament met. Archbishop Winchelsey and the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford took the lead in protesting against the king's late arbitrary action, and by their council a recapitulation of the Great Charter was drawn up, with certain articles added at the end which expressly stipulated that the king should never raise any tax or impost without the consent of lords and commons in Parliament assembled—so that such an exaction as the late mal-tolt would be in future illegal. The document, which is generally known as the Confirmatio Cartarum, was sent over-sea to the king. He received it at Ghent, and after much doubting signed it, for he always wished to have the good-will of the nation, and knew that a persistence in the exercise of his royal prerogative would bring on a rebellion such as that which had overturned his father in 1263. From this moment dates the first practical control of the Parliament over the royal revenue, for the clause in Magna Carta which stipulates for such a right had been so often violated both by Henry III. and his son, that it required to be fully vindicated by the Confirmatio Cartarum before it was recognized as binding both by king and people.

Meanwhile Edward got little aid in Flanders from his German allies, and found that he had small chance of punishing King Pg 167 Philip by their arms. He saw Bruges and Lille taken by the French, and finally returned foiled to England, called thither by evil news from the north.

Scotland was once more up in arms. Though the Anglo-Norman lords who formed the bulk of the baronage had readily done homage to the English monarch, the mass of the nation were far less satisfied with the new condition of affairs. They felt that their king and nobles had betrayed them to the foreigner—for to many of them, notably the Highlanders, the Galloway men, and the Welsh of Strathclyde, the Englishman still seemed foreign. Edward had not made a very wise choice in the ministers whom he left behind in Scotland; Ormesby, the chief justice, and Cressingham, the treasurer, both made themselves hated by their harsh and unbending persistence in endeavouring to introduce English laws and English taxes. In the spring of 1297 an insurrection broke out in the West Lowlands, headed by a Strathclyde knight, named William Wallace (or le Walleys, i.e. the Welshman). He had been wronged by the Sheriff of Lanark, took to the hills, and was outlawed. His small band of followers soon swelled to a multitude, and the regent, John de Warenne, was obliged to march against him in person. Despising the tumultuary array of the rebels, who got no real help from the self-seeking barons of Scotland, the earl marched carelessly out of Stirling to attack Wallace, who lay on the hill across the river, beyond Cambuskenneth bridge. Instead of waiting to be attacked, Wallace charged when a third of the English host had crossed the stream. This vanguard was overwhelmed and driven into the Forth, while de Warenne could not bring up his reserves across the crowded bridge. He withdrew into Stirling, leaving several thousand dead on the field, among them the hated treasurer Cressingham, out of whose skin the victorious Scots are said to have cut straps and belts.

This unexpected victory caused a general rising: some of the barons and many of the gentry joined the insurgents. Wallace, Andrew Murray, and the Seneschal of Scotland, were proclaimed wardens of the realm in behalf of the absent John Balliol, and their authority was generally acknowledged. Warenne could do nothing against them, and prayed his master Pg 168 to come over-sea to his help. Meanwhile, Wallace crossed the Tweed at the head of a great band of marauders, and harried Northumberland with a wanton cruelty which was to lead to bitter reprisals later on.

It was not till 1298 that Edward returned to England, and took in hand the suppression of the rebellion. He crossed the border with the whole feudal levy of England, twenty thousand bowmen, and a great horde of Welsh light infantry; soon he was joined by many Scots of the English faction. Wallace burnt the Lothians behind him, and retired northward for some time without fighting. Edward's great host was almost forced to retire for want of provisions, but when the news was brought him that Wallace had pitched his camp at Falkirk, he pressed on to bring the Scots to action. He found them drawn up behind a morass, formed in four great clumps of pikemen, with archers in the intervals, and a few cavalry in the reserve. The first charge of the English horse was checked by the bog; the second was beaten back by the steady infantry of the Scots. Then Edward brought forward his archers, and bade them riddle the heavy masses of the enemy with ceaseless arrow-flights, till a gap was made. Then the English horse charged again; the Scottish knights in reserve fled without attempting to save the day, and the greater part of the squares of pikemen were ridden down and cut to pieces. Wallace fled to the hills, and the English cruelly ravaged all the Lowlands. But the Scots did not yet submit; the barons deposed Wallace, of whom they had always been jealous, and named a regency to supersede him, under John Comyn, the nephew of their exiled king. The struggle lingered on for several years more, for Edward was hindered from completing his work by the continual pressure of the French war. It was not till 1301-2 that he resumed and finished the conquest of the Lowlands. But in 1303 he was at length able to make a definitive peace with Philip IV., who restored to him all the lost fortresses of Guienne. Free at last from his continental troubles, Edward swept over Scotland from end to end, carrying his arms into the north as far as Elgin and Banff. The regent Comyn and all the barons of the land submitted to him, and by the capture of Stirling in 1304 the last embers of resistance were quenched.

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Scotland was apparently crushed: the king reorganized the whole country, cutting it up into counties and sheriffdoms like England, providing for its representation in the English Parliament, and setting up new judges and governors throughout the land. The administration was, for the most part, left in the hands of Scots, though the king's nephew, John of Brittany, was appointed regent and warden of the land. The last hope of the survival of Scottish independence seemed to vanish in 1305, when Wallace, who had maintained himself as an outlaw in the hills long after the rest of his countrymen had submitted, fell into the hands of the English. He was betrayed by some of his own men to Sir John Menteith, one of Edward's Scottish officials. Menteith sent him to London, where he was executed as a traitor, with all the cruelties that were prescribed for men guilty of high treason. It would have been better for the king's good name if he—like so many other Scots—had been pardoned; but Edward could not forgive the prime mover of the insurrection, and the cruel waster of the English border.

For some two years Scotland was governed as part of Edward's realm, but the nation submitted from sheer necessity, not from any good will. In 1306 the troubles broke out again, owing to the ambition of a single man. Robert Bruce, the grandson of the Bruce who had striven with Balliol in 1292, was the leader in the new rising. Like his grandfather, he was more of an English baron than a pure Scot. He had taken Edward's side in the civil wars, and seems to have hoped that his fidelity might be rewarded by the gift of the Scottish crown when the Balliols were finally dismissed. Receiving no such guerdon, he conspired with some of his kinsfolk and a few of the Scottish earls, and endeavoured to get John Comyn, the late regent of Scotland, to join him. But when Comyn refused—at an interview in the Greyfriars Kirk at Dumfries—to break his newly sworn faith to King Edward, Bruce slew him with his own hand before the altar, and fled to the north. There was method in this murder, for, after the Balliols, Comyn had the best hereditary claim to the Scottish throne. [18]

Gathering his followers at Scone, Bruce had himself crowned Pg 170 King of Scotland. But his royalty was of the most ephemeral nature; few of the Scots would join one whose past record was so unsatisfactory, and his army was beaten and dispersed by de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, whom King Edward sent against him. Bruce had to take to the hills almost alone, and for many months was chased about the woods and lochs of Perthshire and Argyleshire by Highland chiefs eager to earn the price that Edward had set upon his head. His kinsmen, Nigel, Alexander, and Thomas, with most of his chief followers, were captured, tried and executed, for Edward was driven to wild anger by the unprovoked rising of one who had hitherto been his hot partisan. Even the ladies of Bruce's house were cast into dungeons, and the Countess of Buchan, who had crowned him at Scone, was shut up in an iron cage. The king's hand fell far more heavily on Scotland than before: the lands of Bruce's partisans were confiscated and given to Englishmen, and all who had favoured him were slain or outlawed.

Unhappily for the king, these harsh measures had a very different result from that which he had expected. The hangings and confiscations gave Bruce many new partisans, and his misfortunes made him the nation's favourite. When he left his island refuge in Argyleshire in the spring of 1307 and landed in Carrick, he was joined by a considerable force. Edward, though now an old man, and stricken down by disease, swore that he would make an end of the traitor. He mounted his horse for the last time at Carlisle, and rode as far as Burgh-on-Sands, where bodily weakness forced him to stop. Feeling the hand of death upon him, he made his son Edward of Carnarvon swear to persevere in the expedition against Bruce. He even bade him bear his coffin forward into Scotland, for his very bones, he said, would make the Scots quake. Four days of illness ended his laborious life (July 17, 1307). His unworthy son at once broke up the army, leaving Bruce to make head unopposed, and used his father's funeral as an excuse for returning home. Edward was buried under a plain marble slab at Westminster, with the short inscription—

"EDWARDVS PRIMVS MALLEVS SCOTORVM HIC EST.
PACTVM SERVA."

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Seldom did a son contrast so strangely with his father as did Edward of Carnarvon with Edward the Hammer of the Scots. The mighty warrior and statesman begot a shiftless, thriftless craven, who did his best to bring to wrack and ruin all that his sire had built up. The younger Edward's character had been the cause of much misgiving to the old king during the last years of his life. He had already shown himself incorrigibly idle and apathetic, refusing to bear his share of the burdens of royalty, and wasting his time with worthless favourites. The chief of his friends was one Piers de Gaveston, a young Gascon knight, whom his father—much to his own sorrow—had made one of his household. Piers was a young man of many accomplishments, clever, brilliant, and showy, who kept a bitter tongue for all save his master, and had an unrivalled talent for making enemies. He kept the listless prince amused, and in return Edward gave him all he asked, which was no small grant, for Piers was both greedy and extravagant.

The new king was neither cruel nor vicious, but he was inconceivably obstinate, idle, and thriftless. It has been happily said of him that he was "the first King of England since the Conquest who was not a man of business." Hitherto the descendants of William the Norman had retained a share of their ancestor's energy; even the weak Henry III. had been a busy, bustling man, ready to meddle and muddle with all affairs of state, great or small. But Edward II. took no interest in anything; the best thing that his apologists find to say of him is that he showed some liking for farming.

The moment that his father was dead, Edward broke up the

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great army that had been mustered at Carlisle, and returned home. If the campaign had been pursued, there was every chance of crushing Bruce, whose position was still most precarious, for all the fortresses of the land were held by the English, and most of the Scottish nobles still refused to join the pretender. But Edward only sent north a small force under the Earl of Pembroke, which made no head against the forces of Bruce.

When Edward settled down in his kingship, the English nation found itself confronted by a new problem—how to deal with a king who altogether refused to trouble himself about the governance of the realm. He referred all men who came to him to his "good brother Piers," and went about his pleasures without further concern. When, a few months after his accession, he was to wed Isabel, the daughter of the King of France, he went over-sea, leaving the regency in the hands of the Gascon upstart, whom he created Earl of Cornwall, granting him the old royal earldom that had been held by the descendants of Richard, the brother of Henry III. He also gave him in marriage his niece, the daughter of the Earl of Gloucester, and lavished upon him a number of royal estates.

Baronage and people alike were moved to wrath by seeing the king hand over the governance of the realm to his favourite. The proud nobles who had been content to bend before Edward's father, would not for a moment yield to a king who was but the creature of Gaveston. Troubles began almost immediately on the young king's accession; he was besought, in and out of Parliament, to dismiss the Gascon. He bowed before the storm, and sent him out of England for the moment—but only to give him higher honours by making him Lord Deputy of Ireland. When the king recovered from his fright, Gaveston was recalled, and returned more powerful and more arrogant than before (1309).

Meanwhile the war in Scotland was going very badly. Many of the nobles, after long doubting, joined Bruce, because they saw that they were likely to get little protection from the feeble king whom they had hitherto served. Several important places fell into the insurgents' hands, and it was universally felt that only a great expedition headed by the king himself could stay Bruce's progress.

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Edward, however, was enduring too much trouble at home to think of reconquering Scotland. The barons were moving again, headed by three personal enemies of Gaveston's, whom he is said to have mortally offended by the nicknames he had bestowed on them. The first was the king's cousin, [19] Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, a turbulent, ambitious man, who covered a scheming love of power by an affectation of patriotism and disinterestedness. The other two were Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, [20] and Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. Gaveston's name for Lancaster was "The Actor," which, indeed, well hit off his pretence of unreal virtue. Pembroke he called "Joseph the Jew," and Warwick "The Black Dog of Arden."

It was these three lords who in 1310 led an attack in Parliament on the king and his favourite, and drew up a scheme for taking the direct rule of the realm out of their hands. Following the precedent of the Provisions of Oxford, [21] the Parliament named a committee of regency, or body of ministers, composed of twenty-one members, who were called the Lords Ordainers, and were to draw up a scheme for the reform of all the abuses of the kingdom. The twenty-one comprised the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the leading men of England, but Thomas of Lancaster and his friends had the ascendency among them. The king complained that he was treated like a lunatic, and deprived of the right that every man owns, of being allowed to manage his own household. He resolved by way of protest, to show that he could do something useful, and, taking Gaveston with him, made an incursion into Scotland. Bruce was cautious, and retired northward, burning the country behind him. The king struggled on as far as the Forth, and then turned back without having accomplished anything. On his return he was forced to sign a promise to redress many administrative grievances which the Lords Ordainers laid before him—to consent to banish Gaveston, choose all his ministers with the counsel and consent of his baronage, disallow all customs and taxes save such as Parliament should grant, and reform the administration of justice. Edward signed everything readily, but immediately departed

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into the north, bade Gaveston return to England and join him, and published a repudiation of the new ordinances, as forced on him by threats and violence (1311).

This contumacy brought matters to a head. Lancaster and his friends took arms and laid siege to Scarborough, where the favourite lay. Gaveston surrendered on a promise that he should have a fair trial in Parliament. But while he was being taken southward, the Earl of Warwick came upon his keepers, drove them away, and took Piers out of their hands. Without trial or form of justice, "The Black Dog of Arden" bade his retainers behead the favourite by the wayside on Blacklow Hill (May, 1312). Thomas of Lancaster approved by his presence this gross and faithless violation of the terms on which Gaveston had surrendered at Scarborough.

This outburst of lawless baronial vengeance removed Edward's favourite, but did the realm no other good. The king was compelled to pardon Gaveston's murderers, but he could not be forced to forget what they had done, and even his slow and craven heart conceived projects of revenge. But these had to be postponed for a time to the pressing needs of the Scotch war. Bruce had taken Perth in 1312, Edinburgh and Roxburgh fell to him in the following year, and he was besieging Stirling, the last important stronghold still in English hands. Even Edward was stirred: he bade all England arm, and vowed to march to the relief of Stirling in the next spring. A great host mustered under the royal banner, but Thomas of Lancaster factiously refused to appear, on the plea that the ordinances of 1311 forbade the king to go out to war without the consent of Parliament. This act alone is a sufficient proof that Thomas was a mere self-seeking politician, and not the patriot that he would fain have appeared.

BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN
June 24^TH 1314.

King Edward, with an army that is rated at nearly 100,000 men by the chronicler, pushed on to relieve Stirling, and met no opposition till he reached the burn of Bannock, two miles south of that town. There he found Bruce and his host of 40,000 men posted on a rising ground, with the brook and a broad bog in his front. On their flanks the Scots had protected themselves by digging many pits lightly covered with earth and brushwood, so as to break the charge of the English Pg 175 horse. Edward displayed all the marks of a bad general: instead of endeavouring to use his superior numbers to turn or surround the enemy, he flung them recklessly on the Scottish front. When his archers, who by themselves might have settled the battle, had been driven away by the Scots horse, he pushed his great array of mailed knights against the solid masses of Bruce's infantry. After struggling through brook and bog, the English came to a standstill before the steady line of spears. Charge after charge was made, but the knights could not break through the sturdy pikemen, and at last recoiled in disorder. At this moment a mass of Scottish camp-followers came rushing over the hill on the left, and were taken by the exhausted English for a new army. Edward's great host broke up and fled, the king himself outstripping his followers, and never halting till he reached Dunbar. The Earl of Gloucester, six other barons, two hundred knights, and many thousand men of Pg 176 lower rank were left upon the field. The Earls of Hereford and Angus, and seventy knights were taken prisoners.

The fight of Bannockburn completely did away with the last chance of the union of England and Scotland. The English garrisons surrendered, and the Scots of the English party yielded themselves to Bruce, save a few who, with the Earls of Athole and Buchan, took refuge south of the border. For the future Bruce was undisputed king beyond the Tweed, and, instead of acting upon the defensive, was able to push forward and attack England. His ambition was completely satisfied, and his long toils and wanderings ended in splendid success. His whole career, however, was that of a hardy adventurer rather than that of a patriotic king, and his triumph estranged two nations which had hitherto been able to dwell together in amity, and plunged them for nearly three centuries into bloody border wars. It was from the atrocities committed by Englishman on Scot and Scot on Englishman during the fatal years 1306-14 that the long national quarrel drew its bitterness, and for all this Bruce, who commenced his reign by treason, murder, and usurpation, is largely responsible, Edward I. must take his full share of blame for his hard hand and heart, but Bruce's ambition masquerading as patriotism must bear as great a load of guilt.

The shame which King Edward brought home from the ignominious day of Bannockburn, lowered him yet further in his subjects' eyes. The Earl of Lancaster, who had avoided participating in the defeat by his unpatriotic refusal to go forth with the king, was now able to take the administration of affairs into his hands. He dismissed all Edward's old servants, put him on an allowance of £10 a day for his household expenses, and for some years was practically ruler of the realm.

Lancaster might have passed for an able man if he had not laid his hand on the helm of the state; but he guided matters so badly that he soon wrecked his own reputation both for ability and for patriotism (1314-18). The generals of the Scottish king crossed the border and ravaged the country as far as York and Preston, and at the same time Edward Bruce, the brother of Robert, sailed over to Ireland with an army and began to raise the native Irish against their Pg 177 rulers. The great tribes of the O'Neils and the O'Connors joined him, in the hope of completely expelling the English, and by their aid Edward Bruce was crowned King of Ireland, and swept over the whole country from Antrim to Kerry, burning the towns and castles of the English settlers. It is from these unhappy years (1315-17) that we may date the weakening of the royal authority in Ireland, and the restriction of English rule to the eastern coast—"the Pale" about Dublin, Dundalk, and Wicklow. When the war seemed over, and the victory of Edward Bruce certain, the dissensions of the Irish ruined his cause. Lord Mortimer routed Edward's allies the O'Connors at Athenree in 1317, and the King of Ireland himself and his Scottish followers were cut to pieces at Dundalk, a year later, by the Chief Justice, John de Birmingham. Dublin and the Pale were thus saved, but little or no progress was made in restoring the King of England's authority in the rest of the land.

Though victorious in Ireland, the English under Lancaster's rule were unable to keep their own borders safe. Bruce took Berwick, ravaged Durham, and cut the whole shire-levy of Yorkshire to pieces at Mytton bridge. In despair, Lancaster asked for a truce, and obtained it (1320). But the temporary cessation of the Scottish war only gave the opportunity for the English to come to blows in civil strife. Thomas of Lancaster had by this time made so many enemies, that the king was able to gather together a party against him: though slow and idle, Edward was unforgiving, and well remembered that he had Gaveston's blood to avenge. He found his chief supporters in the two Despensers, West-country barons, the son and grandson of that Despenser who had been Simon de Montfort's Justiciar, and had fallen at Evesham. Taking advantage of the times, Edward assembled an army under the plea that he must chastise a baron named Baddlesmere, who had rudely excluded Queen Isabella from Leeds Castle, in Kent, when she wished to enter. Having taken Leeds and hung its garrison, the king with a most unexpected show of energy suddenly turned on Lancaster. Earl Thomas called out his friends, and the Earl of Hereford, Lord Mortimer, and many of the barons of the Welsh Marches rose in his favour. He was forced, however, to fly north when the king pursued him, and had made his way as far as Boroughbridge, in Pg 178 Yorkshire, when he found himself intercepted by the shire-levies of the north, headed by Harclay, the Governor of Carlisle. A battle followed, in which Hereford was slain and Lancaster taken prisoner.

The king was now able to wreak his long-delayed vengeance for Gaveston's murder. He sent Earl Thomas to the block, and hung or beheaded eight barons and thirty knights of his party. Lord Mortimer and the rest were stripped of their lands and banished. These wholesale executions and confiscations not only provoked the baronage, but caused the nation to look on Earl Thomas as a martyr, though he was in fact nothing better than a selfish and turbulent adventurer.

Edward, having taken his revenge, subsided into his former listlessness and sloth, handing over the whole conduct of affairs to his new ministers, the two Despensers. Father and son alike were unwise, greedy, and arrogant; they used the king's name for their own ends, and soon made themselves as well hated as Gaveston had been ten years before. Yet for four years they maintained themselves in power, even after they had advised the king to take the necessary but unpopular step of acknowledging Bruce as King of Scotland, and concluding a truce for thirteen years with him.

The slothful Edward and the arrogant Despensers soon tired out the patience of England, and they fell before the first blow levelled against them. The blow came from an unexpected quarter. Edward's wife, Isabella of France, was visiting the court of her brother, Charles IV., on a diplomatic mission concerning some frontier feuds in Guienne. At Paris she met and became desperately enamoured of the exiled Marcher-baron, Roger Mortimer. He drew her into a conspiracy against her husband; by his advice she induced her young son Edward, the heir of England, to cross over and join her. When the boy was safely in her hands, she sent to King Edward to bid him dismiss the Despensers, because they had wronged and insulted her. When he refused, she and Mortimer gathered a force of Flemish mercenaries and crossed to England. They had already enlisted the support of the kinsmen and friends of Lancaster, Hereford, Baddlesmere, Pg 179 and the other barons who had been slain in 1322. On landing in Suffolk, Isabella was at once joined by them, and found herself at the head of a large army. Edward and his unpopular ministers fled towards Wales; but the elder Despenser was caught at Bristol and promptly hanged. His son Hugh and the king were captured three weeks later; the former was executed, while his master was taken under guard to London (November, 1326).

The queen then summoned a Parliament in the name of her son, Prince Edward. Articles were placed before it, accusing the king of breaking his coronation oath, of wilfully neglecting the right governance of the land, of promoting unworthy favourites, of losing Scotland and Ireland, and of slaying his enemies without just cause or a fair trial. The Parliament pronounced him unfit to reign, deposed him, and elected his young son to fill his throne in his stead.

Edward was constrained by force to resign his crown, and at once thrown into prison. He was first consigned to the charge of Henry of Lancaster, the brother of Earl Thomas; but Henry kept him safely, and there were those who did not desire his safety. Presently the queen and Mortimer took him from Lancaster's hands and removed him to Berkeley Castle. There he was treated with gross neglect and cruelty, in the deliberate design of ending his life; but when his constitution proved strong enough to resist all privations, his keepers secretly put him to death (September 21, 1327).

Thus ended the unhappy son of Edward I., the victim of an unfaithful wife, and a knot of barons bent on revenging an old blood-feud. That he deserved his fate it would be hard to say, but that he owed it entirely to his own unwise choice of favourites it is impossible to deny.

Pg 180

Shameful as the state of the realm had been under the rule of Edward of Carnarvon and his favourites, a yet more disgraceful depth was reached in the years of minority of his son. The young king was only fourteen, and the government fell into the hands of those who had set him on the throne, his mother and her paramour, Roger Mortimer. A council, headed by Henry Earl of Lancaster, was supposed to guide the king's steps, but as a matter of fact he was in Queen Isabella's power, while she was entirely ruled by Mortimer. They were surrounded by a guard of 180 knights, and acted as they pleased in all things. It was only gradually that the nation realized the state of affairs, for the murder of Edward II. was long kept concealed, and the relations of the queen and Mortimer were not at first generally known.

The first blow to the new government was the renewal of the Scottish war. In 1328, Robert Bruce broke the truce that he had made six years before. He was now growing advanced in age, and was stricken by leprosy, but he sent out, under James "the Black Douglas," a great host, 4000 knights and squires, and 20,000 moss-troopers, all horsed on shaggy Galloway ponies. They harried England as far as the Tees, and successfully eluded Mortimer, who went out against them, taking the young king with him. Outmarching the English day by day, Douglas retired before them across the Northumbrian fells, occasionally harassing his pursuers by night-attacks; he returned home with much plunder, leaving not a cow unlifted nor a house unburnt in all Tynedale. The English host came back foiled and half starved, and Mortimer, not daring Pg 181 to face another campaign, advised the queen to make terms with the Scots. Accordingly "the Shameful Peace" was signed at Northampton, by which England resigned all claims of suzerainty over the Scotch realm, sent back the crown and royal jewels, which Edward I. had carried off to London, and gave the king's sister Joanna to be wed to Bruce's eldest son (1328).

Mortimer's failure led to insurrections against him; but they were mere baronial risings, not efforts of the whole people. Henry of Lancaster, who headed the first, was put down and heavily fined for his pains. Edmund, Earl of Kent, then took up the same plan, announcing that he would free his half-brother Edward II., who, as he was persuaded, still survived. But he fell into Mortimer's hands, and was beheaded.

It was the young king himself who was destined to put an end to the misrule of his mother and her minion. When he reached the age of eighteen, and realized the shameful tutelage in which he was being held, he resolved to free himself from it by force. While the court lay at Nottingham Castle in October, 1330, he gathered a small band of trustworthy adherents, and at midnight entered the queen's lodgings by a secret stair and seized Mortimer, in spite of his mother's tears and curses. The favourite was sent before his peers, tried, and executed; Isabella was relegated to honourable confinement at Castle-Rising, where she lived for many years after.

King Edward now himself assumed the reins of government; he was still very young, but in the middle ages men ripened quick if they died early, and Edward at nineteen was thought both by others and himself old enough to take charge of the policy of the realm. He was in his youth a very well-served and well-loved sovereign, for he had all the qualities that attract popularity—a handsome person, pleasant and affable manners, a fluent tongue, and an energy that contrasted most happily with the listless indolence of his miserable father. It was many years before the world discovered that he was selfish, thriftless, reckless of his country's needs, and set on gratifying his personal ambition and love of warlike feats to the sacrifice of every other consideration. He was a Pg 182 knight-errant of the type of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, not a statesman and warrior like his grandfather Edward I. In his later years his faculties showed a premature decay, and he fell into the hands of favourites, male and female, who were almost as offensive as the Gavestons and Despensers of the previous generation.

Edward's reign falls into three well-marked periods: the first, 1330-39, is that of his Scottish wars; the second, 1339-60, is that in which he began the famous and unhappy "Hundred Years' War" with France, and himself conducted it up to the brilliant but unwise Peace of Bretigny; the third, 1360-77, that of his declining years, is a time of trouble and misgovernment gradually increasing till Edward sank unregretted into his grave.

Robert Bruce, the terror of the English, had died in 1329, leaving his throne to his son David II., a child of five years. The government fell into the hands of regents, who ill supplied the place of the dead king, and their weakness tempted the survivors of the English party in Scotland to strike a blow. Edward Balliol, the son of the long-dead John Balliol, accordingly made secret offers to Edward III., that he would do homage to him for the Scottish crown, and reign as his vassal, if he were helped to win the land. With Edward's connivance the young Balliol gathered together the Earls of Buchan and Athole, and many other Scottish refugees in England, and took ship to Scotland. He landed in Fife, was joined by his secret friends, beat the regent, the Earl of Mar, and seized the greater part of Scotland. He was crowned at Scone, and forced the young David Bruce to flee over-sea to France to save his life. But soon the national party rose against Balliol, expelled him, and chased him back to England. Edward then took the field in his favour, and met the Scots at Halidon Hill, near Berwick. Here he inflicted on them a crushing defeat, which the English celebrated as a fair revenge for the blow of Bannockburn, for the regent Archibald Douglas, four earls, and many thousand men were left on the field. They fell mainly by the arrows of the English archery, for, having drawn themselves out on a hillside behind a marsh, they stood as a broad target for the bowmen, whom they were unable to reach. The intervening marshy ground prevented Pg 183 their heavy columns of pikemen from advancing, and they were routed without even the chance of coming to handstrokes (July, 1333). This victory made Edward Balliol King of Scotland for a second time; he did homage to his champion, and ceded to him Tweeddale and half Lothian. But the crown won by English help sat uneasily on Balliol's brow. After several years of spasmodic fighting, he was finally driven out of his realm, and took refuge again in England. This time he found less help, for Edward III. was now plunged deep in schemes of another kind.

Nine years of comparative quiet had done much to recover England from the misery it had known in the last reign. The baronage and people were serving the young king loyally, taxation had not yet been heavy, and the success of Halidon Hill had restored the nation's self-respect. Edward himself was flushed by victory and burning for fresh adventures. Hence it came that, neglecting the nearer but less showy task of restoring the English suzerainty over Scotland, he turned to wars over-sea.

One of the usual frontier-quarrels between French and Gascons had broken out in 1337 on the borders of Aquitaine. In consequence, Philip VI. of France had, like so many of his predecessors, taken measures to support Edward's Scottish enemies, and given shelter to the exiled boy-king, David Bruce. War between England and France was probably inevitable, but Edward chose to make it a life and death struggle, by laying claim to the throne of France and branding Philip VI. as a usurper.

The question of the French succession dated from some years back. In 1328 died Edward's uncle, King Charles IV., the last of the direct male descendants of Philip IV. The problem then cropped up for the first time whether the French crown could descend to females, or whether the next male heir must be chosen, although he was but the cousin of the late king. The peers of France adjudged that by the Salic Law, an old custom ascribed to the ancient Franks, only male descent counted in tracing claims to the throne. Accordingly they adjudged the kingdom to Philip of Valois, who was crowned as Philip VI. Edward, as own nephew Pg 184 through his mother to Charles IV., had protested at the time; but he had practically withdrawn his protest by doing homage to Philip for the Duchy of Aquitaine, and thereby acknowledging the justice of the award.

THE FRENCH SUCCESSION, 1337.

Now, in 1337 Edward began to think of reviving his dormant pretensions to the French crown, though they had two fatal defects. The first was that there had never been any precedent in France for a claim through the female line. The second was that, even if such descents could be counted, one of his mother's brothers had left a daughter, the Queen of Navarre, and the son of that princess had a better female claim than Edward himself. The only way in which this defect could be ignored was by pleading, like Bruce in 1292, that Edward was a generation nearer to the old royal stock than his cousin, Charles, King of Navarre.

On this rather futile plea Edward laid solemn claim to the French crown, and declared Philip of Valois a usurper. Perhaps there may be truth in the story which tells that he did not do so from any strong belief in his own theory, but because the Flemings, vassals to the French crown, had declared that they could not aid him, though willing to do so, on account of oaths of fealty sworn to the King of France. If Edward claimed to be king himself, they said, their allegiance and help would be due to Pg 185 him. Whether the tale be true or not, he at any rate made the claim.

In reliance on the assistance of the Flemings, and of their neighbours the Dukes of Brabant and Holland, and with the countenance of the Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, King Edward determined to land in the Low Countries and attack France from the north. He called out great bodies of soldiery, and took advantage of the devotion that the nation felt for him to raise illegal taxes for their pay. Violating his grandfather's engagements, he took a "tallage" from the towns, and levied a "mal-tolt" or extra customs-duty on the export of wool. In the excitement of the moment, little opposition was made to these high-handed measures.

But Edward's campaign against France proved utterly unsuccessful; his Netherland allies were of little use to him, King Philip refused to risk a battle in the field, and an attack on Cambray was defeated. Edward had to return to England to raise more money; while at home, he heard that a great French fleet had been collected for the conquest of Flanders and a subsequent attack on England. Hastily raising all the ships he could gather from London and the Cinque Ports, the king set sail to seek the enemy. He found them in harbour at the Flemish port of Sluys, and there brought them to action. They had chained their ships in three lines and built up barricades upon them; but, by pretending to fly, Edward induced them to cast loose and follow him, and, when they had got out to sea, turned and attacked. The English archery swept the enemy's decks, and then the king and his knights clambered up, and boarded vessel after vessel till well-nigh the whole French fleet was taken (1340). No such glorious day had been seen since Hubert de Burgh won the battle off Dover 120 years before.

The victory of Sluys freed England from the danger of invasion, but did nothing more. For when the king landed in Flanders, and pushed forward against France, he again failed to break through the line of strong towns that guarded Philip's frontier, and had to return home foiled. On coming to England he fell into a bitter strife with his Parliament, who were far from contented with the repeated checks in Flanders. Edward began by charging his failure on Pg 186 his ministers and dismissed them all, from the Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury downwards, accusing them of having misappropriated the taxes. He announced that he would bring them to trial, and appointed a special commission for the purpose. This led to a vindication of the ancient right of trial by a man's equals, for John de Stratford, the archbishop, insisted on being tried in Parliament by the barons his peers, and carried his point against the king's strenuous opposition. He was of course acquitted, as nothing could be found against him. The Parliament only consented to grant the king fresh supplies when he swore (1) to let them appoint a committee to audit the accounts of the money; (2) to take no further maltolts or tallages, but confine himself to the duly voted supplies; (3) to choose his ministers only with Parliament's consent, and make them answerable to Parliament for malfeasance in their office (1341). If these conditions had been kept, the crown would have been completely under control of the national council, but Edward shamelessly broke them when fortune turned in his favour.

England had now been five years at war with France, and had gained nothing thereby save the destruction of the French navy at Sluys. France had fared equally badly, and in a lucid moment the kings signed a truce. But both Edward and Philip and their subjects had come to dislike each other so bitterly, that no end could be put to the war till one or other had gained a decisive victory. The struggle was soon renewed on fresh ground—the duchy of Brittany, where a disputed succession had occurred. With strange want of logic, Philip VI. backed the claimant whose pretensions were based on a female descent, and Edward the one who claimed as next male heir under the Salic Law. Thus each supported in Brittany the theory of descent which he repudiated in France. After much indecisive fighting, both in Brittany and on the Gascon border, Edward determined on a new invasion of France in 1345. Giving out that he would sail to Bordeaux, he really landed near Cherbourg, in Normandy, where the enemy was not expecting him. He had determined to fight the campaign with English forces alone, and no longer to rely on untrustworthy continental friends. With 4000 men-at-arms, 10,000 bowmen, and 5000 light Welsh and Irish infantry, he Pg 187 pushed boldly through the land, sacking St. Lo and Caen, and driving the local levies of Normandy before him. But he had cut himself loose from the sea, and as his course drew him into the interior, the French began to muster on all sides of him in great numbers and in high wrath. It was evident that he ran great danger of being surrounded, and would certainly have to fight for his life. When he reached the Seine, King Philip broke down all the bridges to prevent his escape, and it was more by chance than good generalship that the English army succeeded in forcing a passage. Hearing of the vast numbers that were coming against him, Edward now turned north, but he was again checked by the river Somme, and only got across by fighting his way over the dangerous sea-swept ford of Blanchetaque, near the river's mouth, in face of the levies of Picardy. Three days later he was overtaken by the French at Crécy, in the county of Ponthieu, and had to turn and fight. King Philip had brought up a vast army, some 12,000 men-at-arms and 60,000 foot-soldiers, including several thousand Genoese cross-bowmen, who were reckoned the best mercenary troops in Europe. Edward drew up his host on a hillside, north of Crécy, placing his archers in front, with bodies of dismounted men-at-arms to support them; two-thirds of the army were arrayed in the front line, under the nominal command of Edward, Prince of Wales, the fifteen-year-old son and heir of the king. Edward kept the rest in reserve higher up the hill, under his own hand.

Crécy was the first fight which taught the rulers of the continent the worth of the English bowman. When the vast French army came up against them, they easily repelled every attack. First, they riddled with arrows the Genoese cross-bowmen, who could make no stand against them, for the archer could shoot six times before the Genoese could wind up their clumsy arbalests for a second discharge. Then when the French chivalry advanced, they shot down men and horses so fast that it was only at a few points that the enemy ever succeeded in reaching their line, and coming to handstrokes with the Prince of Wales and his dismounted knights. At evening the French fled, routed by less than a third of their numbers, before King Edward and his reserve had occasion to strike a single blow. Edward knighted Pg 188 his son on the field—the first victory of the celebrated "Black Prince," who was to prove as good a soldier as his father. When the French dead were counted, it was discovered that the English archery had slain 11 dukes and counts, 83 barons, 1200 knights, and more than 20,000 of the French soldiery. John, King of Bohemia, who had come to help Philip VI., though he was old and weak of sight, was also among the slain. On the other hand, the English had lost less than a thousand men (August 26, 1346).

BATTLE OF CRÉCY, 1346.

After this splendid victory, King Edward was able to march unmolested through the land. He resolved to end the campaign by taking Calais, the nearest French seaport to the English coast, and one which, if held permanently, would give him an ever-open door into France.

Accordingly, he sat down before Calais, and beleaguered it for many months, till it fell by famine in the next year. The King of France could do nothing to relieve it, and the town had to yield at discretion. The men of Calais had made many piratical descents on England, and Edward was known to bear them a grudge for this. Therefore seven chief burgesses of the place gallantly came forward to bear the brunt of his wrath, and offered themselves to him with halters round their necks, begging him to hang them, but spare Pg 189 the rest of their townsmen. Edward was at first inclined to take these patriotic citizens at their word, but his wife Queen Philippa urged him to gentler counsels, and he let them go. But he drove out of Calais every man who would not own him as king and swear him fealty, and filled their places with English colonists. Thus Calais became an English town, and so remained for more than 200 years, a thorn in the side of France, and an open gate for the invader from beyond the Channel.

While the siege of Calais had been in progress, the Scots had made a bold attempt to invade the north of England. The young king, David Bruce, grateful for the shelter which Philip VI. had given him in the days of his exile, had crossed the Tweed, in the hope of drawing Edward home, and so robbing him of the results of his campaign in France. But Queen Philippa summoned to her aid all the nobles who had not gone over-sea, and mustered them at Durham. David Bruce pushed forward to meet them, but at Neville's Cross he met with a crushing defeat. Once more it was found that the Scottish pikemen could not stand against the English archery. They were beaten with terrible loss, and the king himself and many of his nobles were taken prisoners and sent to London (October, 1346).

Edward came back from Calais to England laden with glory and spoil, but all his plunder could not pay for the exhaustion which his heavy taxes and levies of men had brought upon his realm. The nation, however, was blinded to its loss by the glory of Crécy, and the war would probably have been continued with increased energy but for a fearful disaster which befell the land in the year after the fall of Calais. A great plague which men called "the Black Death" came sweeping over Europe from the East, and in the awful havoc which it caused wars were for a time forgotten. England did not suffer worse than France or Italy, yet it is calculated that a full half of her population was stricken down by this unexampled pestilence. Manor-rolls and bishops' registers bear out by their lists in detail the statements which the contemporary chroniclers make at large. We note that in this unhappy year, 1348-9, many parishes had three, and some four successive vicars appointed to them in nine months. We see how, in small villages of 300 or 400 inhabitants, thirty or Pg 190 forty families, from their oldest to their youngest member, were swept away, so that their farms reverted to the lord of the land for want of heirs. We find monasteries in which every soul, from the prior to the youngest novice, died, so that the house was left entirely desolate. And thus we realize that the chroniclers are but telling us sober, unexaggerated facts, when they speak of this as a pestilence such as none had ever seen before, and none is ever like to see again. It seems to have been an eruptive form of that oriental plague which still lingers in Syria and the valley of the Euphrates. It began with great boils breaking out on the groin or under the armpits, culminated in sharp fever and violent retching, and generally carried off its victims within two days.

It is probable that England did not recover the loss of population which it now sustained for a couple of centuries. But if the nation was dreadfully thinned, the results of the plague were not all in the direction of evil. It certainly raised the position of the lower classes by making labour more scarce, and therefore more valuable. The surviving agricultural labourers were able to demand much higher wages than before, and it was in vain that Parliament, by the foolish Statute of Labourers (1349), tried to prescribe a maximum rate of wages for them, and to prevent employers giving more. Legislation is unable to prevent the necessary working of the laws of political economy, and in spite of the statute the peasant got his advantage.

About the time of the outbreak of the Black Death, the kings of England and France had signed a truce, being moved to turn their thoughts far from war by the terrible havoc that was going on around them. It was six years before they and their peoples could find heart to forget the plague, and once more resumed their reckless struggle. In 1355 Edward made proposals for a definitive peace to King John—Philip VI. had died in 1350—on the terms that he should give up his claims to the French crown, but receive Aquitaine free from all burden of homage to the King of France as suzerain. John refused this reasonable offer, and Edward recommenced his attacks on France. He himself landed at Calais and invaded Picardy, but was ere long recalled home by the news that the Scots also had renewed the war, and were over the Tweed. Edward spent the summer in beating them Pg 191 back and cruelly ravaging the whole of Lothian. Meanwhile, his son, the Black Prince, now a young man of twenty-five, started from Bordeaux and plundered the French province of Languedoc.

In the following year, the Black Prince made a similar incursion into Central France, and swept through the whole country from Limoges to Tours with a small army of 4000 mounted men and 3000 archers. When he turned his face homeward, however, he found that King John with a host of 40,000 men had blocked his road, by getting between him and Bordeaux. Thus intercepted, Prince Edward posted himself on the hill of Maupertuis, near Poictiers, and took up a defensive position. It is probable that the French, with their vastly superior numbers, could have completely surrounded him and starved him into surrender without any need of fighting. But King John, a fierce and reckless prince with none of a general's ability, preferred to take the English by force of arms, and, when they refused to surrender to him, prepared to storm their position.

BATTLE OF POICTIERS, SEP. 1356.

Edward's small army was drawn up behind a tall hedgerow and a ditch on the slope of a ridge, with the archers in front lining the hedgerow, and the men-at-arms behind them. All the latter save 300 were dismounted, as at Crécy. The Earls of Salisbury and Warwick had command of the two divisions which formed the front line, while the prince himself stayed behind with the reserve. John of France, remembering the disaster of Crécy, where the English arrows had slain so many horses, dismounted all his knights save a few hundred, and led them on foot up the hill in three divisions. Only a picked body of horsemen, under the two marshals, D'Audrehem and Clermont, pushed forward in front, to endeavour to ride down the English archers, as the Scottish cavalry had done so successfully at Bannockburn.

But, whether on foot or on horse, the French made little way with their attack. The cavalry in advance were all shot down as they tried to push through gaps in the hedge. The first division of the dismounted knights then climbed the slope, but, after severe fighting with the front line of the English, recoiled, unable to force their way over the ditch. They fell back on to the second line behind them, and put it into disorder before it could come near the Pg 192 English. Seeing two-thirds of the French army in this plight, the Prince of Wales resolved to strike a bold blow: he brought up his reserve to the front, and bade his whole army charge downhill on to the huddled mass below them. His quick eye had caught the right moment, for the whole of the French van and second division fled right and left without fighting. Only King John, with the rear line of his army, stood firm. With this body, one more numerous than the whole of his own host, Prince Edward had a fierce fight in the valley. But the French were broken in spirit by the sight of the rout of their van, and gave way when they were charged in the flank by a small body of troops whom Edward had detached to his right for that purpose. They all fled save the king and his young son Philip, who stood their ground for a long time with a small company of faithful vassals, and maintained the fight when all the rest had vanished. John's courageous obstinacy had the natural result: he, his son, and the faithful few about him were all surrounded and taken prisoners. When the English came to reckon up the results of the battle, they found that they had slain 2 dukes, 17 barons, and 2800 knights and men-at-arms, Pg 193 and taken captive a king, a prince, 13 counts, 15 barons, and 2000 knights and men-at-arms. Their own loss did not reach 300 men (September 19, 1356).

Edward returned in triumph to Bordeaux, and afterwards crossed to England, to present his all-important prisoner to the king his father. The prince treated John with great gentleness and courtesy, and did all that he could to avoid wounding his feelings. Nevertheless, he saw that in the pressure that could be brought to bear upon his captive, lay the best hope of winning an honourable and profitable peace from the French. John chafed bitterly at his detention in custody, and got little consolation from finding himself in the company of his ally David, King of Scotland, who had been a prisoner in England for ten years, ever since the battle of Neville's Cross.

The difficulty in negociating a peace did not come from King John, but from the regency which replaced him at Paris. The French did not see why they should sign a humiliating treaty merely in order to deliver a harsh and not very popular king from confinement. But a series of disasters at last forced them to submit. The three years 1357-60 were almost the most miserable that France ever knew. The young Dauphin Charles, a mere lad, proved quite unable to keep order in the land; the barons did what they pleased; hordes of disbanded mercenary soldiers, whom the government could not pay, roamed plundering over the countryside side. The people of Paris broke out into sedition, under a bold citizen named Etienne Marcel, and put the Dauphin himself in durance for a time. Last and worst of all, the peasantry of Central France, driven to despair by the general misery of the times, rose in rebellion against all constituted authority, slew every man of gentle blood that they could lay hands on, and roamed about in huge bands, burning castles and manors, and plundering towns and villages. The horrors of the Jacquerie, [22] as this anarchic revolt was called, bid fair to destroy all government in France, and it was only by a desperate rally that those who had anything to lose succeeded in banding themselves together and crushing the insurgents.

When France had suffered so bitterly from its foes within, Pg 194 Edward of England took a great army across the Channel, and in 1359-60 wasted the whole land as far as Paris and Rheims. But as the French refused to meet him in the field, he won no battles, took few towns, and got little profit from his destructive raid. It was at this juncture that he and the Dauphin at last came to terms. To end the war the French were ready to grant whatever conditions Edward chose to exact. He asked for a ransom of 3,000,000 gold crowns for the person of King John, and for the whole of the duchy of Aquitaine, as Duchess Eleanor had held it in 1154. In return, he would give up his claim on the crown of France, and be content to be independent Duke of Aquitaine only. So all the lands in Southern France which John and Henry III. had lost—Poitou, Saintonge, Perigord, Limoges, Quercy, and the rest,—were restored to the Plantagenets, after being 150 years in French hands. Calais and Ponthieu in the north were also formally ceded to King Edward by this celebrated treaty of Bretigny (May, 1360).

FRANCE 1380.
SHOWING THE ENGLISH BOUNDARIES
AFTER THE TREATY OF BRETIGNY.

It appeared for a moment as if a permanent peace between Pg 195 England and France had been established. King Edward, in return for giving up a claim on the whole of France, which no one had taken very seriously, had won the long-lost lands which his ancestors had never hoped to retake. He had also made an advantageous peace with Scotland, releasing King David for a ransom of 90,000 marks, and the fortresses of Berwick and Roxburgh.

Edward's fortune was now at its highest, and his reign promised to have a prosperous and peaceful end. He had reached the age of fifty, and was surrounded by a band of sons who should have been the strength of his old age. Edward the Black Prince he made Duke of Aquitaine; Lionel of Clarence, his second son, was married to the heiress of the great Irish family of de Burgh; John of Gaunt, the third son, was wedded to the heiress of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock, his fifth son, to one of the co-heiresses of the earldom of Hereford. Thus he trusted to identify by intermarriage the interests of the royal house and the greater baronage, not seeing that there was as much probability of his younger sons becoming leaders of baronial factions as of the barons forgetting their old jealousy of the royal house. Meanwhile, however, things went fairly well for some years after the peace of Bretigny. In spite of the vast expenditure of money on the war, and in spite of the ravages of the Black Death, the country was in many ways prosperous. England had enjoyed internal quiet for thirty years; her commerce with Flanders and Gascony was developing; her fleet, in spite of much piracy, was dominant in all the Western seas. The increase of wealth is shown by the fact that Edward III. first of all English monarchs issued a large currency of gold money (1349), and that his "nobles," as the broad thin pieces were called, became the favourite medium of exchange in all North-Western Europe, and formed the model for the gold coins of the Netherlands, part of Germany, and Scotland. Manufactures as well as foreign trade were beginning to grow important; the reign of Edward is always remembered for the development of the weaving industry in Eastern England. He induced many Flemish weavers to settle in Norwich and elsewhere, moved, it is said, by the advice of his Netherlandish queen, Philippa of Hainault. But the main exports of England were still raw Pg 196 material—especially wool and metals—and not manufactured goods. The English trader did not usually sail beyond Norway on the one hand, and North Spain on the other; intercourse with more distant countries was carried on mainly by companies of foreign merchants, of whom the men of the Hanse Towns were the most important. These Germans had a factory in London called the Steelyard, where they dwelt in a body, under strict rules and regulations. It was by them that English goods were taken to the more distant markets on the Baltic or the Mediterranean.

The reasons why the treaty of Bretigny failed to give a permanent settlement of the quarrel between England and France were many. The English pleaded that the French never fulfilled their obligations, for King John found his people very unwilling to raise his huge ransom, and never paid half of it. He returned to England in 1364 to surrender himself in default of payment—for he had a keen sense of honour in such things—and then died. His son, Charles V., at once refused—as was natural—to pay the arrears. But a more fruitful source of quarrelling was the civil war in Brittany, which still lingered on after twenty years of fighting; English and French succours came to help the two rival dukes, and fought each other on Breton soil, though peace reigned elsewhere. The same thing was soon after seen in Spain: Pedro the Cruel, the wicked King of Castile, was attacked by his bastard brother, Henry of Trastamara, who enlisted a great host of French mercenaries, under Bertrand du Guesclin, the best professional soldier in France. Driven out of Castile by the usurper and his allies, Pedro fled to Bordeaux, where the Black Prince was reigning as Duke of Aquitaine. He enlisted the help of the English, who were jealous of French influence in Spain, and bought the aid of Edward's younger brothers, John of Gaunt, who was now a widower, and Edmund of Cambridge, by marrying his two daughters to them. Edward raised a great army of English and Gascons, and crossed the Pyrenees to restore King Pedro. At Najara [23] he routed the French and Castilians, took Bertrand du Guesclin prisoner, and drove Henry of Trastamara out of the land (1367). But the ungrateful Pedro then refused to repay the large sums which Edward had spent in Pg 197 raising his army, and the prince withdrew in wrath to Aquitaine. He took back with him an intermittent fever which he had caught in Spain, and never recovered his health. Left to his own resources, Pedro was soon beset for a second time by his brother and the French; he was captured by treachery, and slain by Henry of Trastamara's own hand.

Edward had raised vast sums of money from Aquitaine for his Spanish expedition by heavy taxation which sorely vexed his new subjects. For the Poitevins and other French, who had become the unwilling vassals of an English lord by the treaty of Bretigny, were entirely without any sympathy for Edward and his plans. When the prince returned, broken in health and penniless, from Spain, they plotted rebellion against him, with the secret approval of the young King of France. It soon appeared that Edward III. had been unwise in annexing so many districts of purely French feeling and blood to the Gascon duchy. For in 1369-70 Poitou, Limoges, and all the northern half of Aquitaine broke out into rebellion, and Charles V. openly sent out his armies to aid them. The Black Prince took the field in a litter, for he was too weak to ride, and stormed Limoges, where he ordered a horrid massacre of the rebellious citizens, a deed that deeply stained his hitherto untarnished fame. But his strength could carry him no further; he returned helpless to Bordeaux, and presently resigned the duchy of Aquitaine and returned to England, thereto languish for some years, and die at last of his lingering disorder.

The king himself, though not yet sixty years of age, had fallen into a premature decay both of mind and body, so that his son's early decease was doubly unfortunate. After losing his excellent wife Queen Philippa in 1369, he had sunk into a deep depression, from which he only recovered to fall into the hands of unscrupulous favourites. In private he was governed by his chamberlain, Lord Latimer, and by a lady named Alice Perrers, who had become his mistress; both abused their influence to plunder his coffers and make market of his favour. The higher governance of the realm was mainly in the hands of John of Gaunt, the king's eldest surviving son, a selfish and headstrong prince, who made himself the head of the war-party, and hoped to gather laurels that might vie with those of his elder brother, the Black Prince.

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The last seven years of Edward's reign (1370-77) were full of disasters abroad and discontent at home. In France the successors of the Black Prince proved utterly unable to maintain their grasp on Aquitaine. Town by town and castle by castle, all the districts that had been won by the treaty of Bretigny passed into the hands of King Charles V. His skilful general Bertrand du Guesclin won his way to success without risking a single pitched battle with the invincible English archery. When John of Gaunt took a great host over to Calais in 1373, the French retired before him by their king's order, and shut themselves up behind stone walls, after sweeping the country bare of provisions. The Duke of Lancaster marched up to the gates of Paris, and then all through Central France down to Bordeaux; but, though he did much damage to the open country, he could not halt to besiege any great town for want of food, and finally reached Guienne with an army half-starved and woefully reduced in numbers. Before King Edward was in his grave his dominions in France had shrunk to a district far smaller than he had held before the "Hundred Years' War" had commenced. Nothing was left save the ports of Bordeaux and Bayonne, with the strip of Gascon coast between them; in the north, however, the all-important fortress of Calais was firmly and successfully maintained.

Meanwhile there was bitter strife in Parliament at home, for ill success without always brings on discontent within. John of Gaunt, since he was known to sway his father's councils, was forced to bear the brunt of the popular displeasure. It was he who was considered responsible for the misconduct of the French war, the peculations of the king's favourites, and the demands of the crown for increased taxation. The party opposed to him in Parliament counted as its head the good bishop William of Wykeham, who had been Chancellor from 1367 to 1371, and had been driven from office by Lancaster's command. He was supported by the clergy, and by most of the "knights of the shires," who formed the more important half of the House of Commons. It was probably the fact that the clergy were unanimously set against him that led John of Gaunt to seek allies for himself by giving countenance to an attack on the Church, which was just then Pg 199 beginning to develop. This was the anti-papal movement of the Lollards, or Wicliffites, as they were called after their leader John Wicliffe—the "Morning Star of the Reformation." The state of the Papacy and of the Church at large was at this moment very scandalous. The Pope was living no more at Rome, but at Avignon, under the shadow of the French king, and the power of the Papacy was being shamelessly misused for French objects. England had never loved the papal influence, and had still less reason to love it when it was employed for the benefit of her political enemies. The tale of the simony, corruption, and evil living of the papal court had gone forth all over Europe, and provoked even more wrath in England than elsewhere. The English Church itself was far from blameless: there were bishops who were mere statesmen and warriors, and neglected their diocesan work; there were secular clergy who never saw their parishes, and monasteries where religion and sound learning were less regarded than wealth and high living. It was especially the great wealth of the monasteries, and the small profit that it brought the nation, which provoked popular comment. Since the days of the Statute of Mortmain the spirit of the times was changed, and benefactors who desired to leave a good work behind them founded and endowed schools and colleges, and not abbeys as of old. It was John Wicliffe, an Oxford Doctor of Divinity, and sometime master of Balliol College, who gave voice to the popular discontent with the state of the Papacy and the national Church. He taught that the Pope's claim to be God's vicegerent on earth and to guide the consciences of all men was a blasphemous usurpation, because each individual was responsible to Heaven for his own acts and thoughts. "All men," he said in feudal phraseology, "are tenants-in-chief under God, and hold from him all that they are and possess: the Pope claims to be our mesne-lord, and to interfere between us and our divine suzerain, and therein he grievously errs." Wicliffe also held that the Church was far too rich; he thought that her virtue was oppressed by the load of wealth, and advocated a return to apostolic poverty, in which the clergy should surrender the greater part of their enormous endowments. At a later date he developed doubts on the Real Presence and other leading doctrines of the mediaeval Church, but it was mainly as a Pg 200 denouncer of the power of the Papacy and the riches and luxury of the clergy that he became known.

John of Gaunt's object in favouring Wicliffe was purely political; with the reformer's religious views he can have had little sympathy. But he wished to turn the seething discontent of England into the channel of an attack on the Church, and to keep it from his own doors. For the last twenty years legislation against ecclesiastical grievances had been not infrequent. In 1351 the Statute of Provisors had prohibited the Pope from giving away English benefices to his favourites. In 1353 the First Statute of Praemunire had forbidden English litigants to transfer their disputes to the Church courts abroad. Duke John's attempt to distract the attention of the nation to the reform of matters ecclesiastic was partly successful; we find many proposals in Parliament to strip the Church of part of her overgrown endowments, and utilize them for the service of the state. On this point clerk and layman had many a bitter wrangle. But Lancaster could not altogether keep the storm from beating on himself and his father; in 1376 the "Good Parliament" impeached Latimer and Neville, Edward's favourites and ministers, and removed and fined them. Alice Perrers, the old king's mistress, was at the same time banished. In the following year Lancaster reasserted himself, packed a Parliament with his supporters, and cancelled the condemnation of Latimer, Neville, and Alice Perrers. The Bishop of London in revenge arrested Lancaster's protégé Wicliffe, and began to try him for heresy; but the duke appeared in the court, and so threatened and browbeat the bishop that he was fain to release his prisoner.

But new complications were now at hand; the aspect of affairs was suddenly changed by the death of the old king on January 2, 1377, and political affairs took a new complexion on the accession of his young grandson, Richard II., the only surviving child of the Black Prince.

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DESCENDANTS OF EDWARD III.

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The little King Richard II. was a boy ten years old, born in the year when his father went on his ill-fated expedition to Spain to help Don Pedro. Richard's mother was Joan, Countess of Kent, the heiress of that unfortunate Earl Edmund, whom Mortimer beheaded in 1330. She had been a widow when the Black Prince wedded her, and had two sons by her first husband, Sir Thomas Holland. These two half-brothers of King Richard were ten years his seniors, and were destined to be not unimportant figures in the history of his reign; their names were Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent, and John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon.

The helplessness of the young king, the son of the deeply mourned Black Prince, at first touched the hearts of all men, and the parties which were represented by John of Gaunt and William of Wykeham reconciled themselves, and agreed to join in serving the king faithfully. A council of regency was appointed, in which both were represented, and it was agreed that Parliament alone should choose and dismiss the king's ministers. This happy concord, however, was not to last for long. The conduct of the foreign affairs of the nation was left in John of Lancaster's hands, and the continued misfortunes in the French war were laid to his charge. The troops of Charles V. were still carrying everything before them; they conquered all Aquitaine save Bordeaux and Bayonne, and overran the duchy of Brittany, the sole ally of England on the continent. Moreover, fleets of Norman privateers had begun to appear in the Channel. They landed boldly on the English coast, and burnt Winchelsea, Portsmouth, and Gravesend.

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To restore the fortune of war, money was urgently needed, and Duke John kept asking for more and more, to the discontent both of the Parliament and the nation. He was granted in 1379 a poll-tax, wherein every man was assessed according to his estate, from dukes and archbishops who paid £6 13s. 4d. to agricultural labourers who paid 4d. In 1380 followed another tax graduated from £1 to 1s. on every grown man or woman.

It was the collection of this very unpopular tax that precipitated the violent outbreak of a discontent that had been smouldering among the lower classes for the last thirty years. Ever since the Black Death a silent but bitter contention had been in progress between the landholding classes and their tenants, more especially those who were still villeins, and bound to the soil. The main stress of the struggle had come from the fact that the dearth of labourers, and the rise in wages which resulted from the Black Death, had caused the lords of the manors to press more hardly on their tenants. They tried to get all the labour they could out of the villeins, and refused to take money payments for their farms instead of days of labour on the lord's fields. It seems, too, that they strove to claim as villeins many who were, or wished to be, free rent-paying copyhold or leasehold tenants. Moreover, when forced to hire free labour, they tried to under-pay it, relying on the scale of wages fixed by the Statute of Labourers in 1350, instead of abiding by the laws of supply and demand. The pressure on the part of the lords led to combinations in secret clubs and societies among the tenants, who agreed to refuse the statutory wages, and determined to agitate for the removal of all the old labour-rents. Their idea was to commute all such service due on their little holdings into money-rents, at the rate of 4d. for every acre.

But the rising of 1380 was due to many other causes beside the grievance of the villeins. Much discontent can be traced to the mismanagement of the French war, which was all laid on John of Gaunt's shoulders. Much more was due to the filtering down of the teaching of the Lollards to the lower strata of the nation. Wicliffe had always preached that unjust and sinful rulers, whether clerks Pg 204 or laymen, were cut off from the right to use their authority by their own manifest unworthiness, and had no just dominion over their fellow-men. He had especially protested against the wealth and pomp of the clergy, and urged that they ought to return to apostolic poverty. The wilder and more headstrong of his followers had pressed his teaching to the advocacy of pure communism, saying that riches were in themselves evil, and that all men should be equal in all things. John Ball, the best known of these fanatical preachers, was wont to perambulate the country delivering sermons on his favourite text—

Wherever men were oppressed and discontented, they listened eagerly to these discourses, and began to talk of putting an end to all difference between man and man, and dividing all things equally between them. But it was only the wilder spirits who were imbued with these doctrines; the majority—like most discontented Englishmen in all ages—were only set on the practical task of endeavouring to redress their own particular grievances and to better their condition.

It was in June, 1381, that the rising broke out simultaneously in almost the whole of Eastern England, from Yorkshire to Hants. It has gained its name of "Wat Tyler's Rebellion" from Walter the Tyler of Maidstone, who was chief of the insurgents of Kent. Curiously enough, four other men bearing or assuming the name of "the Tyler" were prominent in the troubles. The main incidents of the rising took place round London, towards which the insurgents flocked from all quarters. Simultaneously the men of Essex, under a chief who called himself Jack Straw, marched to Hampstead, those of Hertfordshire to Highbury, and those of Kent to Blackheath. On their way they had done much damage; the Essex rioters had caught and murdered the Chief Justice of England, and the Kentishmen had slain several knights and lawyers who fell into their hands. Everywhere they pillaged the houses of the gentry, and sought out and burnt the manor-rolls which preserved the records of the duties and obligations of the villeins to the lord of the manor.

The king's council at London was quite helpless, for the Pg 205 sudden rising had taken them by surprise, and they had no troops ready. Seeing the city surrounded by the rioters, they shut its gates and sent to ask what were the grievances and demands of the mob. The claims that were formulated by the leaders of the rising were more moderate than might have been expected, for the wilder spirits were still kept in order by the cooler ones. They asked that villeinage should be abolished, and all lands held on villein-tenure be made into leasehold farms rated at 4d. an acre, that the tolls and market dues which heightened the price of provisions should be abolished, and that all who had been engaged in the rising should receive a full pardon for the murders and pillage that had taken place.

These demands were not too violent to be taken into consideration. While the regency hesitated, the young king, who displayed a spirit and resource most unusual in a boy of fourteen, announced that he would himself go to meet the rioters and try to quiet them, for as yet they had not said or done anything implying disrespect for the royal name. But meanwhile the Kentish insurgents had crossed the Thames and burnt John of Gaunt's great palace, the Savoy, which lay in the Strand outside the walls of London. Presently the mob in the city rose and opened the gates, so that Wat Tyler and his host were able to enter. They slew some foreign merchants and some lawyers, the two classes whom they seem most to have hated, but wrought no general pillage or massacre.

On the 13th of June, Richard, persisting in his resolve of bringing the insurgents to reason, rode out of Aldgate, and met the Essex men at Mile End. After hearing their petitions, he declared that they contained nothing impossible, and that he would undertake that they should be granted. But while the king was parleying with the eastern insurgents, the Kentishmen burst into the Tower, where the regency had been sitting, and committed a hideous outrage. They caught Simon of Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury—he was also Chancellor—Sir Robert Hales, the High Treasurer, and Legge, who had farmed the obnoxious poll-tax, dragged them forth to Tower Hill, and there slew them.

Notwithstanding these murders, the young king persisted in his Pg 206 design of treating with the insurgents. He bade Tyler and his host meet him next day in Smithfield, outside the city gates. They came, but Tyler, who had throughout shown himself the most violent of the insurgents, began wrangling with the king's suite instead of keeping to the business in hand. This so enraged William Walworth, the Mayor of London, that he drew a short sword and hewed the rebel down from his horse. Then one of the king's squires leapt down and stabbed him as he lay. Walworth's act was likely to have cost the king and his whole party their lives, for the insurgents bent their bows and shouted that they would avenge their captain there and then. But Richard, with extraordinary presence of mind in one so young, pushed his horse forward and bade them stand still, for they should have their demands granted, and he himself would be their captain since Tyler was dead. So there in Smithfield he had a charter drawn up, conceding all that the insurgents asked, and pardoning them for their treason. Satisfied with this, the Kentishmen dispersed to their homes.

Richard returned to London in triumph, as he well deserved, vowing that he had that day won back the realm of England, which had been as good as lost. Soon the nobles and their armed retainers began to gather to London, and when they found themselves in force, they began to discuss the legality of the king's concessions to the peasants. He had not, it was urged, the right to give away other men's property—namely, their feudal rights over their vassals—without the consent of Parliament. It was shocking, too, that the murderers of the archbishop, the lord chief justice, and the treasurer, should go unpunished. So Richard's charter was annulled and his general pardon cancelled; all the leaders of the revolt were caught one after another and hanged; even John Ball's priest's robe did not save him from the gallows, though clergymen were so seldom executed in the Middle Ages.

When Parliament met, the king proposed to them that his promise to the insurgents should stand firm so far as the abolition of villeinage was concerned, since this had been the main cause of the rising. But the barons and knights of the shire were loth to give up their feudal rights, and Pg 207 refused to confirm the king's grant; they replied that the trouble had really had its origin in the evil governance of the ministers, and turned them all out of office. Nevertheless, the rising had not failed in its object, for in future the lords of the manors were afraid to enforce the full letter of their claims over the peasants, and villeinage gradually sank into desuetude.

King Richard had shown his high spirit in the days of the rising, and four years later, when he had attained the age of eighteen, he endeavoured to take the reins of power into his own hands. His uncle of Lancaster did not gainsay him, for he felt himself to be unpopular with the nation, so he departed over-sea on a vain errand. In right of his wife Constance, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, he had a claim to the crown of Castile, and trusted to get aid from the Portuguese, to set him on the throne which Henry of Trastamara had usurped. So he gathered his retainers and many hired soldiers, and sailed away to Spain; nor was his face seen in England for more than four years.

Meanwhile the young king had placed his friends in office, and strove to rule for himself. His chief minister was Michael de la Pole, son of a rich merchant at Hull, whom he made Earl of Suffolk, to the disgust of many of the barons. He also favoured greatly Robert de Vere, whom he made Lord-Deputy of Ireland, and created Marquis of Dublin. In them and in his two half-brothers, Thomas and John Holland, he placed his confidence.

Richard was now twenty; he had been married some years back to Anne of Bohemia, the daughter of the Emperor Charles IV., and might have expected that all the world would have counted him old enough to administer the kingdom.

But he had reckoned without one man's ambition and jealousy. His youngest uncle, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, was an unscrupulous and domineering prince, who had hoped to succeed to John of Gaunt's position, and to have the chief part in ruling his nephew's realm. Richard knew him well, and had no intention of employing him. Seeing this, Duke Thomas began to gather a party among the greater nobles, persuading them that the king was putting the rule of England into the hands of mere upstarts and favourites, and that de la Pole and de Vere were no better than Gaveston Pg 208 or the Despensers. Gloucester drew into his designs many of the most important barons; the Earls of Warwick, Arundel, and Nottingham, and Henry of Bolingbroke, the son and heir of John of Gaunt, were the chief plotters. They stirred up the people and Parliament by complaints of the maladministration of the ministers, and used a threatened invasion of the French as a lever against those entrusted with the conduct of the long unhappy war with France. When they had excited public opinion, they had Suffolk impeached in Parliament for maladministration of the revenue. Though almost certainly guiltless, he was condemned and imprisoned. But when Parliament had dispersed, the king took him out of confinement, and restored him to favour, declaring that he had a full right to choose his own ministers.

There followed, shortly after, the armed rising of Thomas of Gloucester and his accomplices. Proclaiming that they wished only to free the king from evil councillors, Gloucester, Warwick, Arundel, Nottingham, and the young Henry of Bolingbroke marched on London with a great body of retainers. They called themselves the "Lords Appellant," because they appealed or accused of treason the king's ministers. Richard was taken by surprise at this very unjustifiable raising of civil war. He bade his friends arm, but de Vere, who had raised some levies in Oxfordshire, was beaten by the rebels at Radcot Bridge, and no one else tried to resist. De Vere and de la Pole succeeded in flying to France, where they both died shortly after in exile. But the king and the rest of his friends and ministers fell into the hands of the Lords Appellant.

Under the eyes of Gloucester and his accomplices the Merciless Parliament was summoned to London. Awed by the armed men around them, the members declared Suffolk and de Vere outlaws, and condemned to death seven of the king's minor ministers. So Tresilian the Chief Justice, Sir Simon Burley who had been the king's tutor, and five more were hanged (February, 1388). This disgraceful Parliament ended by voting £20,000 as a gift to the Lords Appellant for their services, and then dispersed.

Gloucester and his friends were in office for something more than a year, a period long enough to show the world that they Pg 209 were grasping self-seekers, and not patriots. The only service they did the country was to negociate truces with Scotland and France, which stopped for a time the lingering "Hundred Years' War."

By 1389 Richard had passed his majority. In a session of the royal council, he suddenly asked his uncle Gloucester how old he was. The duke replied that he was now in his twenty-second year. "Then," said the king, "I am certainly old enough to manage my own affairs." So, formally thanking Gloucester and the rest for their past services, he dismissed them from office. If he had replaced them by his own favourites the civil war would have broken out again, but Richard wisely called in the good bishop William of Wykeham, and other ancient councillors of his grandfather's, against whom no one had a word to say. He made no attempt to punish the Lords Appellant, and acted with such self-restraint and moderation that all the realm was soon full of his praises. Yet all the time he was dissembling, and biding his time for revenge on the men who had murdered his friends in 1388.

Richard's wise and moderate rule lasted for eight years, 1389-97. They were a prosperous time: the French war was suspended, and the king seemed to have put a permanent end to it, by marrying a French princess, Isabella, the daughter of Charles VI., after his first wife Anne of Bohemia had died. Perhaps the most important feature of the time was the growth of the Wicliffite movement. John Wicliffe himself had died, at a good old age, in 1384, but his disciples the Lollards continued to increase and multiply. We find them so powerful that in the Parliament of 1394 their representatives in the Commons had begun to agitate for a national declaration against some of the most prominent doctrines of the Roman Church—such as image-worship, the efficacy of pilgrimages, the celibacy of the clergy, and even the Real Presence in the Lord's Supper. They were only stopped by Richard himself, who hurried home from Ireland to rebuke them. He told them that he would hear nothing of such changes, but he did not molest or persecute them, and let the movement take its course. The "Great Schism" was at this time at its height, and the Church presented the disgraceful spectacle of two rival popes, at Rome and Pg 210 Avignon, anathematizing each other, and preaching a crusade against each other's adherents. When such was the state of affairs, and no one knew who was orthodox and who heretical, it was natural enough that the new doctrines should flourish.

In 1397 Richard thought himself so firmly seated on his throne that he could venture to execute his long-cherished vengeance on the Lords Appellant. He had won over two of them to himself, Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, and Henry of Bolingbroke, the heir of the old Duke of Lancaster. On the others his vengeance suddenly fell; he accused Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick, of plotting a new rebellion. They were seized and thrown into prison: Arundel was tried and executed; Gloucester was secretly murdered at Calais; Warwick was banished for life to the Isle of Man. Nor was this all: for a time Richard professed the greatest affection for Nottingham and Bolingbroke, the two survivors of the plotters of 1388. He even made them Dukes of Norfolk and Hereford. But in 1398 his vengeance fell on them also. He induced Hereford to accuse Norfolk of treasonable conversation, and when Mowbray denied it, proposed that they should meet in judicial combat in the lists at Coventry. They consented, but when the champions came ready armed before him, Richard suddenly stopped the duel, and announced to the astonished dukes that he had determined to banish them both from the realm—Norfolk for life, Hereford for ten years.

Having thus wreaked his vengeance on the last of the Lords Appellant, Richard proceeded to rule in a far more arbitrary manner than before, and decidedly outstepped his constitutional rights. He thought that there was no one left in the realm who would dare to oppose him, and that he could do all that he chose. His most flagrantly illegal step was to increase his revenue by raising forced loans from men of wealth, an ingenious means of getting money without having to apply to Parliament for it. But he kept up a considerable standing army of archers, to overawe discontent, and thought himself quite secure. When John of Gaunt died in 1399, he seized upon all the great estates of the duchy of Lancaster, and refused to allow the exiled Henry of Bolingbroke to claim his father's title and heritage. This roused much sympathy for Henry, since he had been promised that Pg 211 his banishment should make no difference to his rights of inheritance.

Richard's nearest kinsman and heir at this time was his cousin Roger, Earl of March, the grandson of Lionel of Clarence, the Black Prince's next brother. The king had sent him over to Ireland and entrusted him with the government of that country, for he paid more attention to Irish affairs than any of his ancestors, and had already made one expedition across St. George's Channel in 1394. Ireland had been in a state of complete anarchy ever since Edward Bruce broke up the foundations of English rule eighty years before, and both the Anglo-Norman lords of the Pale and the Irish chiefs of the west showed an utter disregard for the royal authority. Roger of March was killed by rebels in a skirmish at Kenlys-in-Ossory in 1398, and this so provoked Richard that he resolved to go over himself, with all his personal retainers and hired guards, and put an end to the anarchy.

Accordingly, early in 1399 the king sailed for Dublin, leaving England in charge of his one surviving uncle, Edmund, Duke of York, a weak old man who had always shown himself very loyal, but very incapable. When Richard was lost to sight in the Irish bogs, all his enemies began to take counsel against him. The barons began to murmur at his arbitrary rule, the citizens of London at his forced loans, the clergy at his tolerance for the Lollards. At the critical moment Henry of Bolingbroke landed unexpectedly at Ravenspur, in Yorkshire, proclaiming that he had only come to claim his father's duchy, which had been so wrongfully withheld from him. He was immediately joined by Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and many other northern lords. The regent Edmund of York gathered an army to withstand him, but when Bolingbroke explained to him that he came with no treasonable purpose, but only to plead for his forfeited estates, the simple old man dismissed his troops and went home. Thus unexpectedly freed from opposition, Bolingbroke soon showed his real mind by catching and hanging Richard's ministers, Scrope, Earl of Wiltshire, Bushey, and Greene.

The news of Duke Henry's landing had soon got to Ireland, and the king at once prepared to return and resist him. But Pg 212 for four weeks persistent easterly winds kept him storm-bound at Dublin. At last the wind turned, and Richard could cross, but he came too late. York's army had dispersed, and some Welsh levies, whom the Earl of Salisbury had raised, had also gone home, after waiting in vain for the king's landing. When Richard reached Flint Castle with the small following that he had brought with him, he was surrounded by troops under the Earl of Northumberland, who had been awaiting his arrival. Nothing but surrender was possible, so Richard yielded himself up, trusting that his cousin aimed merely at seizing the governance of the realm, and not at his master's life or crown.

Henry, however, had other views: he put Richard in strict custody, and took him to London. There the Parliament assembled, overawed by the armed retainers of the duke and his partisans. Richard was forced by threats to abdicate, and thought that he had thus secured his life. Then Henry caused the Parliament to accept his cousin's resignation, and claimed the crown for himself. This was in manifest disregard of the rights of Edmund of March, the young son of that Roger who had fallen in Ireland a year before. The Parliament, however, formally elected the duke to fill his cousin's throne, and saluted him as king by the name of Henry IV. Constitutionally, no doubt, they were acting within their rights; but it is only fair to say that Richard—headstrong and arbitrary though he had been—had scarcely deserved his fate. Nor was there any adequate reason for setting aside the clear hereditary claim of Edmund of March (1399).

Henry had grasped the crown, but he knew that his position was insecure. He had only a Parliamentary title, and what one Parliament had done another could undo. The late king had many faithful partisans, and was not misliked by the nation at large. Therefore the unscrupulous usurper determined to make away with him. Richard was sent to Pontefract Castle, and never seen again; undoubtedly he was murdered, but no one save Henry and his confidants knew how the deed was done. The details of the dark act have never come to light.

Pg 213

Henry of Bolingbroke had small comfort all his days on the throne which he had usurped. He was only the king of a faction, the nominee of the party which had once supported the Lords Appellant; if one half of the baronage was friendly to him for that reason, the other half was always estranged from him. It might almost be said that the "Wars of the Roses," the strife of the two great factions who adhered the one to the house of Lancaster and the other to the house of March, began on Henry's accession.

Richard's deposition had been the work, not of the whole nation, but of Henry's friends, the Percies of Northumberland, the Nevilles of Westmoreland, the Arundels—son and brother to the Arundel whom Richard had beheaded in 1397—and the Staffords [24] who represented the line of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. The Parliament had acquiesced in Henry's usurpation rather because it had been discontented with Richard's arbitrary rule, than because it had any very great liking for his cousin. Perhaps the more far-sighted of its members had concluded that the accession of a king whose only title rested on election would be favourable to the development of constitutional liberties, since Henry would—at least for a time—be very much dependent on the good-will of the body which had chosen him, and which might some day choose another ruler if he proved unpliable.

Before Henry had been two months on the throne, civil war had broken out. The insurgents were Richard's kinsmen and Pg 214 favourites. The two Hollands—Earls of Kent and Huntingdon, who were Richard's half-brothers—conspired with Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, and Lord Despenser, who had been his trusted friends. They plotted to seize King Henry, as he lay at Windsor keeping the festivities of Christmas, to slay or imprison him, and to release their old master from Pontefract Castle. Unfortunately for themselves, they took into their counsels Edward Earl of Rutland, the son of the old Duke of York. The cowardly prince, finding that he was suspected, informed the king of the plot before the conspirators were ready. Henry escaped from Windsor, and called his friends together at London. The rebel earls set out in various directions to endeavour to raise their retainers, but they were all overtaken. Kent and Salisbury fell into their enemies' hands at Cirencester, Huntingdon was caught in Essex, Despenser at Bristol. All were beheaded without any delay or form of trial. Henry's grim reply to this insurrection was the production of the dead body of King Richard, which was brought from Pontefract to London, and publicly displayed to prove his death. Nevertheless, many men refused to credit his decease, and for years after there were some who maintained that the body exposed in St. Paul's was not that of the late king, but that of his chaplain, who bore an extraordinary personal resemblance to him. They believed, or tried to believe, that Richard had escaped and was alive in Scotland. Trading on this notion, an impostor presented himself at the Scotch court, and was long entertained there as the true King of England by the simple Robert III.

Hardly was the rebellion of the Hollands put down before a second civil war arose. The Welsh had always been devoted to King Richard, and had taken his deposition very ill. In 1400, a gentleman named Owen-ap-Griffith, of Glendower, who had been one of Richard's squires, put himself at the head of a rising in North Wales. Owen was of the old princely blood of the house of Llewellyn, and proclaimed himself Prince of North Wales under the suzerainty of his master Richard, whom he declared to be still alive in Scotland. He was a guerilla captain of marked ability, and completely baffled the efforts that King Henry made to put him down. He swept all over North Wales, Pg 215 captured many of its castles, and extended his sway over the whole countryside. To the day of his death Owen maintained himself in independence, ravaging the English border when he was left alone, and retiring into the recesses of Snowdon when a great force took the field against him. His incursions penetrated as far as Worcester and Shrewsbury, and no man west of the Severn was safe from his plundering bands.

As if the Welsh trouble was not enough to keep King Henry employed, other wars broke out around him. The Scots under the Earl of Douglas crossed the border to harry Northumberland, and Lewis of Orleans, the uncle of Richard's queen Isabella, began to stir up the French court to attack England, and encouraged many descents of Norman privateers on the coasts of the Channel.

Henry's only resource was to keep the nation in good temper by a rigorous and punctual obedience to all the petitions and requests of his Parliament. Accordingly, he showed himself the most constitutional of sovereigns, and both now and for many years to come made himself the dutiful servant of the Commons. He also did his best to enlist the favour of Churchmen on his side by a cruel persecution of the Lollards. The disciples of Wicliffe had always favoured King Richard, who had shown them complete tolerance, and Henry felt that he was not estranging any of his own partisans when he handed over the Lollards to the mercy of the harsh and fanatical Archbishop Arundel. [25] It was under this prelate's guidance that the king assented to the infamous statute De Heretico Comburendo (1401), which condemned all convicted schismatics to the stake and fire. The first victim burnt was William Sawtree, a London clergyman, and others followed him at intervals all through Henry's reign.

The Scotch war came to a head in 1402, at the battle of Homildon Hill. There Murdoch of Albany, the son of the Scotch regent, was completely defeated by Percy of Northumberland and his son Harry Percy, whom the Borderers nicknamed Hotspur for his speed and energy. But the victory of Homildon was fated to do England more harm than any defeat, since it was to cause a renewal of the civil war. The Percies had taken many prisoners, including Pg 216 Murdoch himself, and three other Scots Earls, Douglas, Moray, and Orkney. From the ransoms of these peers they trusted to get great profit; but King Henry, who was at his wits' end to scrape money together without troubling Parliament, took the prisoners out of the Percies' hands and claimed the ransoms for himself. This mortally offended Northumberland, a proud and greedy chief, who had been Henry's main support at the time of his usurpation, and thought that in return the king ought to refuse nothing to him.

In sheer lawless wrath at the king's refusal to hear him, Northumberland resolved to dethrone Henry. He secretly concerted measures with Owen Glendower for a joint attack on the king, and released his captive, the Earl of Douglas, who in return brought him a band of Scottish auxiliaries. By Owen's counsel, aid was sought from France also, and it was settled that the young Earl of March should be proclaimed king, if Richard II. proved to be really dead.

In July, 1403, the Percies rose, and were joined by their kinsman the Earl of Worcester, and many more. Hotspur rapidly led his army towards Shrewsbury, where Glendower had promised to join him with a Welsh host. But King Henry was too quick for his foes; he threw himself between them, and caught the young Percy before the Welsh came up. The desperately fought battle of Shrewsbury (July 23, 1403) ended in the victory of the royal host. Hotspur was slain by an arrow, while Douglas and Worcester were taken, and the latter executed for treason. It was at this field that the king's eldest son, Henry of Monmouth, destined in later years to be the conqueror of France, first looked upon the face of war.

The Earl of Northumberland, who had not been present at Shrewsbury, but had kept at home in the north, was allowed to make his peace with the king on the payment of a great fine. But Henry was wrong in thinking that the crafty and resentful old earl was no longer dangerous. Though his brave son was dead, Percy stirred up a second rebellion two years later, by the aid of Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, son of Henry's old opponent in the lists of Coventry, [26] and of Scrope, Archbishop of York, brother of that Scrope, Earl of Wilts, whom the Lancastrians had hung in Pg 217 1399. But Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, who commanded for the king in the North, induced Scrope and Mowbray to lay down their arms and come to a conference, and there he seized them as traitors. They were at once put on trial, not before their peers as they claimed, but before two of the king's justices, who condemned them to death. Scrope's execution sent a thrill of horror throughout England, for no archbishop had ever before been slain by a king, save Thomas Becket, and many men counted him a martyr even as Becket. So Henry lost as much love of the clergy by this act as he had gained by his assent to the statute De Heretico Comburendo.

Northumberland escaped to Scotland in 1405, and lurked there for two years; but in 1407 he crossed the Tweed, raised his vassals, and made a dash for York. But he was intercepted at Bramham Moor, and there slain, fighting hard in spite of his seventy years.

After this King Henry was no more vexed with civil war in England, but his Welsh troubles showed no sign of ending. Owen Glendower eluded Henry, Prince of Wales, and all the other leaders who came against him, with complete success, and the English armies suffered so severely from storms among the Welsh hills that they swore that Owen was a magician and had conjured the elements against them.

It was the constant drain of money for this interminable war that kept the king in strict submission to his Parliament, so that he was obliged to allow them to audit all his accounts, and even to dismiss his servants when they thought that he kept too large and wasteful a household. Henry much disliked this control, but he always bowed before it. His health was failing, though he was still in middle age, and bodily weakness seems to have bent his will. From 1409 to 1412 he was so feeble that the government was really carried on by his son, the Prince of Wales, and his half-brothers, the Beauforts, Henry, Bishop of Winchester, and Thomas, the Chancellor. Of the Beaufort clan we shall hear much in the future; they were the sons of John of Gaunt's old age. After the death of his wife, Constance of Castile, a lady named Katharine Swinford became his mistress and bore him several sons. He afterwards married her, and the children were legitimatized by Act of Parliament. Of these the eldest Pg 218 was now Earl of Somerset, and the youngest Bishop of Winchester.

It was fortunate for England in these years, when the realm was ruled by a bedridden king and a very young Prince of Wales, that her neighbours to north and south had fallen on evil days. Neither Scot nor Frenchman was dangerous at this time. The Scots were bridled by the fact that the heir of the kingdom was in Henry's hands. For it chanced that King Robert III. was sending his son James to France, and that the ship was taken by an English privateer. "Why did they not send him straight to me?" said King Henry; "I could have taught him French as well as any man at Paris." So Prince James was kept at Windsor as a hostage for the good behaviour of Scotland. His jealous uncle Albany, the regent of that kingdom, did not want him released, and was quite content to leave him in Henry's power and keep the peace.

The cause of the quiescence of France was very different. King Charles VI. had become insane, and no longer ruled. A desperate civil war had been raging there ever since the king's brother, the Duke of Orleans, had been murdered by his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, in 1407. The partisans of the murdered duke, who were called the Armagnacs from their leader, Bernard, Count of Armagnac, were always endeavouring to revenge his death on Burgundy. They mustered most of the feudal nobility of France in their ranks, while their opponent was supported by the burghers of Paris and many of the towns of the north. John of Burgundy was lord of Flanders as well as of his own duchy, and was well able to hold his own even though his French partisans were outnumbered by the Armagnacs. Both factions sought the help of England, and King Henry was able to play a double game, and to negociate with each of them on the terms that he should be given back some of the lost districts of Aquitaine in return for his aid. In the end he closed with the offers of the Armagnacs, and sent over a small army to Normandy under his second son, Thomas, Duke of Clarence. Clarence accomplished little, but the fact that his troops were able to march across France to Bordeaux with little hindrance taught the English that the French were too helpless and divided to be formidable (1412). Pg 219 The lesson was taken to heart, as we shall see in the next reign.

While King Henry lay slowly dying of leprosy, his son, the Prince of Wales, was gaining the experience which was to serve him so well a few years later. Henry of Monmouth was a warrior from his youth up; at the age of fifteen he had been present at Shrewsbury field, and in the succeeding years he toiled in the hard school of the Welsh wars, leading expedition after expedition against Glyndower. The legendary tales which speak of him as a debauched and idle youth, who consorted with disreputable favourites, such as Shakespeare's famous "Sir John Falstaff," are entirely worthless. Of all these fables the only one that seems to have any foundation is that which tells how Henry was suspected by his father of over-great ambition and of aiming at the crown. It appears that the prince's supporters, the two Beauforts, suggested to King Henry that he should abdicate, and pass on the sceptre to his son. The king was much angered at the proposal, turned the Beauforts out of office, and was for a time estranged from the Prince of Wales. This was the reason why he sent Clarence rather than his elder brother to conduct the war in France. He even removed Prince Henry from his position as head of the royal council. But this outburst of anger was the king's last flash of energy. He died of his lingering disease on March 20, 1413.

Pg 220

Henry of Monmouth had a far easier task before him, when he ascended the throne, than his father had been forced to take in hand. He had the enormous advantage of succeeding to an established heritage, and was no mere usurper legalized by parliamentary election. So firm did he feel himself upon his seat, that he began his reign by releasing the young Earl of March, the legitimate heir of Richard II., whom Henry IV. had always kept in close custody. For he knew that none of the odium of his father's usurpation rested upon himself, and that he was well liked by the nation. Nor was his popularity ill deserved; though only twenty-five years of age, he was already a tried warrior and an able statesman. His life was sober and orderly, inclining rather toward Spartan rigour than display and luxury. He was grave and earnest in speech, courteous in all his dealings, and an enemy of flatterers and favourites. His sincere piety bordered on asceticism. If he had a fault, it was that he was somewhat overstern with those who withstood him, like his great ancestor Edward I. His enemies called him hard-hearted and sanctimonious.

Henry's piety and his love of order and orthodoxy were a source of much trouble to the unhappy Lollards. From the moment of his accession he bore very hardly upon them, and redoubled the severity of the persecution which his father had begun. He did not spare even his own friends, but arrested for heresy Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, who had been one of his most trusted servants. When accused of holding the doctrines of Wicliffe, Oldcastle boldly avowed his sympathy for them, spoke scornfully of Pg 221 the Papacy and its claims, and taunted his judge, Archbishop Arundel, with all the sins and failings of the clergy. He was condemned to be burnt, but escaped from the Tower and hid himself in the Marches of Wales. Long afterwards he was retaken, and suffered bravely for his opinions.

Henry's ill-treatment of the Lollards drove the unfortunate sectaries to despair. Some of the more reckless of them planned to put an end to their sufferings, by seizing the king's person, and compelling him to relax the persecution. They tried to stir up a popular rising, like that of Wat Tyler, but Henry got timely notice of their plot. When they began to assemble by night in St. Martin's fields, outside the gates of London, he came suddenly upon them with a great body of horse, and scattered them all. Forty were hung next day as traitors, and for the future they were treated as guilty of treason as well as of heresy.

Fortunately for England, Henry had other things in his mind besides the suppression of the Wicliffites. He knew that nothing serves so well to quiet down internal troubles as a successful and glorious foreign war. He believed himself, and rightly, to be capable of leading the national forces to victory, and he knew that England's old neighbour and enemy across the Channel was weak and divided. Accordingly, from the moment of his accession Henry began to prepare for an assault on France. He was determined to claim not merely the restoration of the lost provinces of Guienne, but the crown of France itself, as Edward III. had done in the days before the treaty of Bretigny. It is hard to discover how a sincerely religious and right-minded man, for such Henry of Monmouth undoubtedly was, could persuade his conscience that it was permissible to vamp up once more these antiquated claims. It would seem that he regarded himself as a divinely appointed guardian of law, order, morality, and religion, and had come to look upon the French factions with their open wickedness, their treason, treachery, murder, and rapine, as emissaries of Satan handed over to him for punishment. Moreover, Henry was, as we have said, a very zealous servant of the Church, and the Church did its best to egg him on to the war. Chicheley, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of the chief supporters of it, partly because he wished to distract Pg 222 attention from the persecution of the Lollards, and partly because Parliament had been talking of a proposal to confiscate some Church land, and the archbishop thought that he had better give them some other and more exciting subject of discussion. In his old age, Chicheley bitterly regretted his advice to King Henry, and built his college of All Souls at Oxford, to pray for the repose of those who had fallen in the great war which he had set going.

Before he had been a year upon the throne, Henry had broken with France. It was in vain that the Dauphin and the Armagnac faction, who were at this time predominant, endeavoured to turn him from his purpose. They offered him the hand of the Princess Catherine, the daughter of their mad king Charles VI., and with her the lost provinces of Aquitaine and a dowry of 600,000 gold crowns. But Henry only replied by asking for all that his ancestors had ever held in France, the ancient realm of Henry II., extending from Normandy to the Pyrenees. When this preposterous demand was refused, he summoned Parliament and laid before it his scheme for an invasion of France. The proposal was received with enthusiasm, partly from old national jealousy, partly because the English resented the doings of the French in the time of Henry IV., when Norman privateers had vexed the Channel ports, and French succour had been lent to Owen Glyndower and the Scots. The Commons and the clergy gave the king very liberal grants of money, which he increased by seizing the estates of the "alien priories," that is, the religious houses that were mere branches and dependencies of continental abbeys.

By spending every shilling that he could raise, and even pawning the crown jewels, the king collected and equipped a considerable army. He assembled at Southampton some 2500 men-at-arms and 7000 archers for the invasion. Just before he embarked, however, he found himself exposed to a deadly peril, which showed him how precarious was the hold of the Lancastrian dynasty on the throne. A plot had been formed by his cousin, Richard of Cambridge, the younger brother of that Edmund of Rutland who betrayed the rebels of 1399. It had as its object the murder of Henry and the coronation of Edmund, Earl of March, Pg 223 whose sister Richard had married. In the plot were implicated Lord Scrope, a kinsman of the archbishop whom Henry IV. had executed and several others who had grievances against the house of Lancaster. The king sent them all to the block, and would not delay his sailing for a moment.

He landed in Normandy late in the summer of 1415, and laid siege to Harfleur, which then occupied the position that Havre enjoys to-day, and was the chief commercial port at the mouth of the Seine. On the news of Henry's approach, the French factions for once suspended their hostilities, and many of the Burgundians, though not Duke John himself, agreed to assist the Armagnacs in repelling the invaders. But they were so long in gathering that Harfleur fell, after five weeks of siege. The capture, however, had cost the English dear; not only had they lost many men in the trenches, but a pestilence had broken out among them, and a third of the army were down with camp-fever. After shipping off his sick to Southampton, and providing a strong garrison for Harfleur, King Henry found that he had no more than 6000 men left, with whom to take the field against the oncoming French. But he would not withdraw ingloriously by sea, and resolved to march home to Calais across Northern France. This enterprise savoured of rashness, for the whole countryside was swarming with the levies of the enemy. They had placed the Constable of France, John d'Albret, in command: with him were the young Duke of Orleans and all the rest of the Armagnac leaders. Anthony of Brabant, brother to the Duke of Burgundy, was hurrying to their aid from the north. By rapid movements—his whole army, archers as well as men-at-arms, had been provided with horses taken from the countryside—Henry reached the Somme. But he lost time in trying to force a passage, and when at last he crossed the river high up, near Peronne, the Constable and his host had outmarched him and thrown themselves across the road to Calais. They were at least 30,000 strong, five times the force that Henry could put in line, and were in excellent condition, while the English were worn out by their long travel, amid violent October rains, and over bad country crossroads.

BATTLE OF AGINCOURT. 1415.

When King Henry reached Agincourt, he found the French Pg 224 army drawn up across his path, and was forced to halt. The Constable, like King John at Poictiers, was confident that he had the English in a trap, for they had exhausted all their provisions, and had the flooded Somme in their rear. Henry, however, was determined to fight, and put his hope in the bad management which always characterized the disorderly armies of feudal France. He was not disappointed: the Constable dismounted all his knights and bade them fight on foot, for fear of the effect of the archery on their horses. Only a few hundred mounted men formed a forlorn hope in front. He arranged his army in three heavy columns, one behind another, and formed the front entirely of mailed men-at-arms; the cross-bowmen and light troops were placed in the rear, where they could be of no possible use. The week had been rainy, and the space in front of the French was a newly ploughed field sodden with water, and hemmed in with woods and villages on either hand. At its further end the English were waiting. Henry had drawn them up in a single four-deep line, in order to make a front equal to that of the enemy. So arranged they just filled the space between the woods. The archers were on the wings, protected by chevaux-de-frise of pointed stakes which they had planted in front. The king with his men-at-arms formed the centre; a Pg 225 small flanking force of archers had also been sent into the woods on the right.

The Constable led his men straight on the English front, but they had a mile to go across the greasy mud of the fields. To men arrayed in the full knightly panoply, which had vastly increased in weight since the days of Edward III., the ploughland was almost impassable. After a space they began to sink as far as their ankles, and presently as far as their knees, in the mud. The mounted men struggled on, and gradually drew near the English, but they were shot down one after another as they slowly forced themselves up to the stakes of the archery. The main body of the first column never won its way so far; it literally stuck fast in the tenacious clay and stood a few score yards from the English line, as a target into which the archers emptied whole sheaves of arrows. The crowded mass was soon full of dead and dying, for at such short range armour could not protect its wearers. The whole column reeled and wavered. Then King Henry, seeing the moment was come, bade his whole line charge. The lightly equipped archers could cross with ease the ploughland where the men-at-arms had found themselves unable to move. They flung themselves upon the French knights, and by the force and fury of their assault completely rolled them over. Though unprotected by mail, they obtained a complete ascendency over the enemy, dashing them down with their axes and maces till they lay in heaps two or three deep. Henry and the band of men-at-arms around him seem to have met with the only stubborn resistance: the king had to fight hard for his life, and was nearly slain by the Duke of Alençon, who had already struck down his younger brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Alençon, however, was slain, and after his fall the whole of his column was destroyed or captured.

Without a moment's hesitation, the English pushed on to attack the second column, which was slowly advancing through the mud to aid the van. Incredible as it may appear, their second charge was as successful as the first, though the victors were exhausted and thinned in numbers by the previous fighting, and did not muster half their adversaries' force. Just after he had routed this second column, Henry received an alarm that a detached body of the French had assailed his camp in the Pg 226 rear, and were coming up to surround him. He at once bade his men slay the prisoners they had taken, a harsh and, as it proved, an unnecessary order, for the French in the rear only plundered the camp, and then dispersed with their booty. Although the king had completely scattered or destroyed the second French column, the third still remained in order before him; but, cowed by the fate of their comrades, they turned and retired hastily from the field, though they should by themselves have been more than enough to overwhelm the exhausted band of English.

In this astonishing victory, Henry's small army had slain a much larger number of men than they mustered in their own ranks. The Constable of France, Anthony, Duke of Brabant—brother of John of Burgundy—the Dukes of Bar and Alençon, and a whole crowd of counts and barons, had fallen; it is said that no less than 10,000 French were slain, of whom more than 8000 were men of gentle blood. In spite of the massacre of captives in the midst of the fighting, there were still some prisoners surviving. They included the young Duke of Orleans—the titular head of the Armagnac faction—the Duke of Bourbon, the Counts of Eu and Vendôme, and 1500 knights and nobles more. The English in this terrible fight had lost less than 200 men, but among them were two great peers, the Duke of York—the Edward of Rutland of whom we read in 1399—and the Earl of Suffolk.

Henry retraced his way to Calais, and crossed to England with his prisoners and his booty, there to be received with splendid festivities by his people, who regarded the glory of Agincourt as a sufficient compensation for the losses of a costly campaign which had added nothing save the single town of Harfleur to the possessions of the English crown. The ransoms of a host of noble captives were relied upon to replenish the exchequer, and the fearful losses of the Armagnac party, who saw half their leaders slain at Agincourt, would evidently weaken the strength of France in the remainder of the war.

Henry did not cross the Channel again in the year 1416, which he spent partly in negotiations with the Duke of Burgundy, whose help he wished to secure against the Armagnacs, partly in treating with the Emperor Sigismund about the Pg 227 common welfare of Christendom. Sigismund was hard at work endeavouring to put an end to the "Great Schism," the scandalous breach in the unity of the Church caused by the misconduct of the rival Popes at Rome and Avignon. He visited England, and won Henry's aid for his plans, which brought about the reunion of Christendom at the Council of Constance—a reunion under evil auspices, since it was marked by the burning of the great Bohemian teacher John Huss, who had made the doctrines of Wicliffe popular among his Slavonic countrymen in the far East. Moreover, it restored the unity of Christendom, but did not reform either the papacy or the national Churches. As this was not done, the general outbreak of religious ferment was made inevitable in a later generation; after the failure at Constance to reform the Church from within, it became necessary to reform her from without.

Having come to an agreement with the Duke of Burgundy, and obtained from him a promise of neutrality, Henry invaded France for the second time in the summer of 1417. He took with him an army of somewhat over 16,000 men, landed in Normandy, and began to reduce one after another all the fortresses of that province. Utterly humbled by the memory of Agincourt, the Armagnacs made no attempt to meet him in the open field. Some of the Norman towns held out gallantly enough, but they got no aid from without. At the end of a year the whole duchy, save its capital, the city of Rouen, was in English hands. Henry then assumed the state of Duke of Normandy, and put the whole land under orderly government, a boon it had not enjoyed for twenty years. He gave Norman baronies and earldoms to many of his English followers, and handed over the control of the cities to burghers of the Burgundian faction, who served the English readily enough, out of their hatred for the Armagnacs. For thirty years Normandy was to remain English. Rouen was added to the rest of the duchy after a long siege of six months, in which half the population perished by hunger. Irritated by this long resistance, Henry imposed on it the harsh terms of a ransom of 300,000 crowns, and hung Alain Blanchart, the citizen who had been the soul of the obstinate defence (January, 1419).

Pg 228

While the conquest of Normandy was in progress, the French factions had been more bitterly at strife than ever. In 1418 the Burgundian party in Paris rose against their rivals, and massacred every man on whom they could lay hands, including Bernard of Armagnac himself. The control of the party of the feudal noblesse then passed into the hands of the young dauphin Charles, the heir of France.

The fall of Rouen, however, frightened John of Burgundy, and unwilling that France should fall wholly into the power of his ally King Henry, he made proposals for a reconciliation with the Dauphin and his Armagnac followers. The treacherous young prince accepted the overtures with apparent cordiality, and invited Duke John to meet him on the bridge of Montereau to settle terms of peace. But when Burgundy came to the conference, he was deliberately slain by the Armagnac captains, in the presence and with the consent of the Dauphin (August, 1419).

The murder of Montereau was destined to make Henry master of France. When Philip of Burgundy, the son of Duke John, heard of his father's death, he vowed unending war against the Dauphin and his faction, and took the field to help the English to complete the conquest of France. Nor was Philip of Burgundy the only helper that Henry secured: the Queen of France, Isabella of Bavaria, bitterly hated her son the Dauphin, and was glad to do him an evil turn. She proposed that Charles should be disinherited, and that the crown should pass with her favourite daughter Catherine to the hands of the English king. So at Troyes, in Champagne, Henry, Philip of Burgundy, and Queen Isabella concluded a formal treaty by which Henry received Catherine to wife, and was to succeed to the French throne on the death of his father-in-law, the old King Charles VI., who still lingered on in complete imbecility (June 2, 1420).

The treaty of Troyes put Paris and the greater part of Northern France into Henry's hands. Casting national feeling aside in their bitter partisan spirit, the Burgundian faction everywhere accepted the King of England as the lawful regent and governor of France. South of the Loire the Dauphin and his Armagnac friends still held their own, but north of it they only possessed Pg 229 scattered fortresses dotted about in Picardy, the Isle-de-France, and Champagne, from Boulogne in the north to Orleans in the south.

After taking formal possession of Paris and holding a great meeting of the Estates of the French realm at Rouen, Henry returned in triumph to England with his young wife. He had reached a pitch of success in war such as no English king had ever attained before, and the nation, blinded by the personal merits of its king and gorged with the plunder of France, forgave him all his faults. The waste of life and money, the never-ending persecution of the Lollards, the precarious tenure of the conquests in France—due, in sober truth, merely to the aid of the Burgundian faction—were all forgotten.

Henry had not long been in England, when bad news crossed the Channel after him. He had left his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, with a small army, to hold Maine against the Dauphin's adherents. But the Armagnac bands had lately been strengthened by succours from Scotland, under the Earl of Buchan, the son of the regent Albany. For, although the King of Scots had been a prisoner in English hands for ten years and more, his subjects and his uncle the regent were not thereby constrained to keep the peace with England. Pushing forward rashly to attack the Scots and Armagnacs, Clarence was routed and slain at Beaugé (1421). The enemy at once overran Maine, and began to infest the borders of Normandy.

This compelled the king to cross once more over the sea in order to repair his brother's disastrous defeat. In a campaign extending from the summer of 1421 to that of the following year, he cleared the Dauphin's army out of their foothold north of the Loire, and then proceeded to starve out one by one their isolated strongholds in the north of France, the chief of which were Dreux and Meaux.

It was during the siege of Meaux, which continued all the winter of 1421 and spring of 1422, that Henry's health began to give dangerous signs of breaking up. He had been campaigning from his boyhood, and had never hitherto shown any weakness of constitution. But the winter colds of 1421-2, or the camp-fever bred in the Pg 230 trenches during the long siege of Meaux, had brought him very low. He was carried back toward Paris in a desperate state of weakness from ague and dysentery. Soon after, to the horror and dismay of the English and their French partisans, he died at the castle of Vincennes on August 31, 1422, before he had attained his thirty-fifth year.

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England had never yet had a sovereign of such tender age as the infant king who succeeded to the heritage of Henry V. It was under the rule of a child of less than twelve months old that the long and wearisome French war had to be continued. Yet at first the prospects of the reign did not look very dark. The struggle in France was not going ill, and seldom has any orphan had so zealous and capable a guardian by his cradle as John of Bedford, the little king's eldest uncle. He had, moreover, no domestic intrigues to fear; Edmund, Earl of March, the legitimate heir of Richard II., was the most unenterprising and loyal of men, and never gave any trouble.

On his death-bed Henry V. had not appointed his eldest and most capable brother, John of Bedford, to be the regent in England, as might have been expected. His ruling passion was strong in death, and he thought above all things of the maintenance of the English ascendency in France. Therefore he named Duke John to take charge of the government of that country. As Regent of England he designated his younger brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, a man of far less worth and weight. The Parliament, however, held that the king could not dispose of the regency by will; and though they named Gloucester Protector, placed many limitations on his power. Unfortunately, they could not remedy his reckless and flighty disposition.

During the whole of the long minority of Henry VI. the varying fortunes of the French war were almost the only topic that Pg 232 stirred the interest of the nation. The internal history of England is well-nigh a blank; no period since the Conquest is left so bare by the chroniclers, who seem to have no eyes or ears for anything save the fate of our armies across the Channel. The quarrels of Duke Humphrey with his colleagues in the regency are the only other topic on which they touch. The council carried out the policy of the late king, so far as any body of statesmen of average ability can continue the work of a single man of high military and political genius. They strained every nerve to keep up the war in France, and subordinated every other end to that purpose. Their wisest act was the release of the young King of Scots, after seventeen years of captivity. Seeing that his kinsman Albany was helping the French, they set James I. free, and sent him home. He married, ere he departed, Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and granddaughter of John of Gaunt, a lady for whom he had formed a romantic attachment in the days of his captivity. By her influence it was hoped that he would be kept firm in the English alliance. In some degree this hope was fulfilled: James promptly slew his cousins of Albany, and devoted himself to pacifying and bringing back into order the country from which he had been so long exiled.

We must now turn to the aspect of affairs beyond the Channel, the subject which seemed all-important to the English nation at this time. The old mad King of France had died only two months after his son-in-law, Henry V. (October, 1422). Bedford had, therefore, to proclaim his little nephew as king at Paris, and to rule in his name, no longer in that of the unhappy Charles VI. The Dauphin also assumed the title of King of France, and was acknowledged as monarch in all the lands south of the Loire. But he was an indolent and apathetic young man, governed entirely by his favourites, and wholly unskilled in and averse to military enterprises. He did so little for himself, and seemed so contented with his unsatisfactory position, that men called him in scorn "the King of Bourges"—his residence for the time—rather than the King of France.

There still appeared to be some chance that the English might maintain themselves in possession of Northern France. But this hope rested entirely on the firm and continued fidelity Pg 233 of the Burgundian party to their English allies. It was only by their help that success could be won, for ten or fifteen thousand English scattered from Calais to Bordeaux could not hold down a hostile France. For some time the Duke of Burgundy aided Bedford, and the Burgundian citizens in each town maintained their loyalty to King Henry.

Bedford's regency commenced with two victories, at Cravant (July, 1423) and Verneuil (August, 1424), which so tamed the Dauphin's partisans that the English were able to work slowly west and south, subduing the land. More would have been done, but for a sudden risk of a breach with Burgundy, caused by the reckless selfishness of the Duke of Gloucester.

Tired of long bickerings with his uncle, Bishop Beaufort of Winchester, and the other members of the council of regency, Humphrey had resolved to go off on an enterprise of his own. There was at this moment a distressed princess in the Netherlands, Jacquelaine, Duchess of Holland and Countess of Hainault. She had married Philip of Burgundy's cousin, the Duke of Brabant, a stupid debauchee who treated her very ill. Escaping from his court, she fled to London, and offered herself and her lands to Duke Humphrey, if he would take her under his protection. Of course, a divorce from her husband had first to be procured; but the pope refused to grant it. In spite of this trifling difficulty, Gloucester performed a ceremony of marriage with Jacquelaine, though both of them were well aware that it was a rank case of bigamy. They then crossed to the continent to take possession of her dominions, which were held by her husband, John of Brabant. This, of course, meant war; and not only war with Brabant, but with Burgundy also, for Duke Philip was the close ally of Duke John, and had no wish to see Gloucester established in his neighbourhood as ruler of Hainault and Holland.

Both Bedford and the English council of regency completely disavowed Gloucester's doings, but it was hard to persuade Burgundy that England had not determined to break with him. If Gloucester had been successful, there is no doubt that Burgundy would have joined the French and driven the English out of France. But Pg 234 fortunately for Bedford, his brother proved singularly unlucky in Hainault. Seeing himself outnumbered and surrounded by the Brabanters and Burgundians, Humphrey left his quasi-wife in the lurch, and fled back to England. The bigamous duchess fell into the hands of her enemies, and was placed in confinement. Gloucester took the news with equanimity, and consoled himself by marrying Eleanor Cobham, a lady of damaged reputation, whom he had known long before.

Owing to Gloucester's failure in Hainault, the breach between England and Burgundy did not widen into open disruption, but Duke Philip never again supported his allies with such vigour as in the earlier days of the war. It was not till 1428 that the English felt strong enough to make a fresh advance against the lands beyond the Loire. In that year the regent Bedford succeeded in equipping a small field army of five or six thousand men—half English, half French partisans of England. Placing them under Thomas Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, one of the best captains who had served Henry V., he sent them southward. Salisbury at first aimed at taking Angers, but turned aside to besiege Orleans, the key of the central valley of the Loire, and the one place of importance beyond that river which the French still held. On the 7th of October, 1428, he took post in front of it, and built strong redoubts facing each of its gates, for he had not a large enough army to surround so great a city. Thus Orleans was blockaded rather than besieged, since it was always possible for the French to get in or out in small parties between the fortified positions of the English.

Orleans held out long and stubbornly, and while its siege still dragged on, a new factor was suddenly introduced into the struggle. The widespread misery and devastation caused by thirteen years of uninterrupted war had moved the hearts of the French to despair; the people lay inert and passive, hating the English, but caring little for the despicable Charles and his Armagnac court at Bourges. It was left for a simple peasant girl to turn this apathy into energy, and to send forth the whole people of France on a wild crusade against the invader.

Jeanne d'Arc was the daughter of a villager of Domrémy, on the borders of Champagne. She was from her youth a girl of Pg 235 a mystic, visionary piety, who believed herself to be visited by dreams and visions from on high, which guided her in all the actions of her life. At the age of eighteen her "voices," as she called them, began to give her the strange command to go forth and deliver France from the English, whose arrogance and cruelty had moved the wrath of Heaven. Jeanne doubted the meaning of these hard sayings, but in repeated visions she thought that she saw St. Michael and St. Catherine appear to her, and bid her go to the Dauphin Charles and cause him to place her at the head of his armies. She resolved to obey their behests, and betook herself to Chinon, where she presented herself before the prince. Charles at first treated her slightingly, and his courtiers and captains laughed her to scorn. But she vehemently insisted on the importance of her mission, and at last made some impression on the Dauphin's weak and wavering mind. Apparently she revealed to him a secret known to himself alone, by some sort of clairvoyance. Charles resolved to give her mission a trial, and his captains agreed that perchance the company of an inspired prophetess might put heart into their dispirited troops. Jeanne's "voices" bade her clothe herself in knightly armour, display a white banner before her, and ride at the head of the Dauphin's men to the relief of Orleans. They promised her complete success in the enterprise, and prophesied that she should lead the prince in triumph to Rheims, and there crown him King of France.

In April, 1429, Jeanne entered Orleans with a convoy of food and a small troop of men-at-arms. The townsmen needed her encouragement, but their English foes outside were also in evil case. The task was too great for the little army of the besiegers, who had already lost many men, and had seen their leader, Thomas of Salisbury, slain by a cannon-shot as he was reconnoitering the walls. The Earl of Suffolk, who succeeded him, still held his ring of fortified posts round the city, on both sides of the Loire, but was quite unable to prevent food and reinforcements from entering it. Nevertheless the men of Orleans sorely needed the aid that Jeanne brought; for the Dauphin seemed to have abandoned them, and they had begun to despair. The success of Jeanne's mission was settled from the moment when the burghers of Orleans hailed her as a deliverer, and placed Pg 236 themselves at her disposal. If they had doubted and sneered, like the Dauphin's courtiers at Chinon, she could have done nothing. But the moment that she was within the walls, she bade the garrison arm and sally forth to attack the English redoubts that ringed them in. Her first effort was crowned with success; a sudden assault carried the nearest fort before succour could reach it from Suffolk's camp. The men of Orleans cried that Jeanne was indeed a prophetess and a deliverer sent by God, and henceforth followed her with a blind devotion which nothing could turn back or repel. It was in vain that the mercenary captains of the Dauphin's host endeavoured to moderate the reckless vigour of Jeanne's movements. After her first success she bade the garrison go on and conquer, and on four continuous days of fighting led them against the entrenchments of the English. One after another they fell, for the French were now fighting with a force and fury which nothing could resist. "Before that day," says the chronicler, "two hundred English would drive five hundred French before them. But now two hundred French would beat and chase four hundred English." The invaders came to dread the approach of Jeanne's white standard with a superstitious fear; they declared that she was a witch, and that the powers of hell fought behind her. At last Suffolk was fain to burn his camp, and to withdraw northwards with the remnant of his host.

But the disasters of the English were not yet ended. Jeanne had no intention of allowing them to remain unmolested; the troops who had already fought under her were ready to follow her anywhere, and the peasants and burghers all over France were beginning to take up arms, "now that the Lord had shown himself on the side of the Dauphin." With a host largely increased by fresh levies, Jeanne went to seek the English, and caught them up at Patay. There she charged them suddenly, "before the archers had even time to fix their stakes," and destroyed almost the whole force, taking captive Lord Talbot, its commander.

Jeanne now bade the Dauphin come forth from his seclusion and follow her to Rheims, the old crowning-place of the French kings. He obeyed, and brought a great host with him. At the approach of "the Maid of Orleans," as Jeanne was now styled, fortress after fortress in Champagne yielded. The regent Bedford was too weak in men Pg 237 to quit Paris, and so Jeanne was able to fulfil her promise by leading Charles to Rheims and there witnessing his coronation (July 17, 1429).

She then declared that her mission was ended, and asked to be allowed to return home to her father's house. But Charles would not suffer it, because of the enormous advantage that her presence gave to the French arms. She then bade him strike at Paris, the heart of the English possessions in France. For the first time in her career she failed; the Burgundian citizens manned their walls too well, and served their faction rather than their country. Jeanne was wounded in a fruitless assault on the city, and had to withdraw. But her campaign was not fruitless; Soissons, Laon, Beauvais, Senlis, Compiègne, Troyes, and well-nigh the whole of Isle-de-France and Champagne, were recovered from the English. The land which Bedford ruled as regent was now reduced to a triangular patch, with the sea as its base and Paris as its apex, and included little more than Normandy, Picardy, and Maine.

In spite of her failure at Paris, the prestige of the Maid of Orleans was still unbroken; she went on winning place after place for King Charles, though he supported her very grudgingly, and left her to depend on the enthusiasm of the people rather than the royal arm. But her career came suddenly to an end; while endeavouring to relieve Compiègne, then besieged by a Burgundian army, she was unhorsed in a skirmish, and fell into the hands of the enemy. Philip of Burgundy would not slay the maid himself, but he meanly sold her for ten thousand crowns to the English, though he knew that Bedford regarded her as a witch, and was resolved to punish her as such.

The cruel tragedy which followed will always leave a deep stain on the character of the regent, who in all other matters showed himself a just and righteous man. Jeanne was kept for many months in prison, subjected to cruel and ribald treatment, and examined again and again by bigoted ecclesiastics who were determined to prove her a witch. She constantly withstood them with a firm piety which moved their wrath, maintaining that her visions and voices were from God, and that all her acts had been done with His aid. After much quibbling, cross-examination, and persecution, a tribunal Pg 238 of French clergy, headed by the Bishop of Beauvais, pronounced her a sorceress and heretic, and handed her over to the secular arm for execution; the English, therefore, burnt her alive in the market-place of Rouen (May, 1431). Her callous master, Charles VII., made no attempt to save her, and seems to have viewed her fate with complete indifference.

Though Jeanne had met a martyr's death, her cause continued to prosper. The spell of the invincibility of the English had been broken, and with their inferior numbers they could no longer resist the French assaults, in which nobles, burghers, and peasants now all united with a single heart. It was in vain that Bedford brought over the little ten-year-old Henry VI. from England, and crowned him at Paris (1431). The ceremony was attended by hardly a single Frenchman; even the Burgundian faction in the capital were beginning to doubt and draw apart from their old allies.

Meanwhile in England the continued ill-success of the war was leading to the growth of a peace party, at whose head was Henry Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester, who had lately become a cardinal. That Beaufort supported any scheme was a sufficient reason for Gloucester to oppose it, and Humphrey made himself the mouthpiece of those who pleaded for perpetual war. The cardinal and the duke quarrelled in and out of Parliament, their followers were always brawling, and the action of the council of regency grew weak and divided.

At last Beaufort prevailed on the council to submit proposals for peace to the French court. At Arras the ambassadors of Henry VI., Charles VII., and Philip of Burgundy met, and strove to come to terms (1435). But the English still insisted on claiming the pompous style of King of France for their young master, and on retaining Paris and all the North for him. The French were only ready to grant Normandy and Guienne, and insisted on the renunciation of Henry's French title. It cannot be doubted that these terms were quite reasonable, but they were rejected, with the most disastrous results. Philip of Burgundy was now tired of the struggle, and thought that he had sufficiently revenged his father's murder by fifteen years of war with the murderer. On the ground that the English had rejected fair conditions of Pg 239 peace, he broke off his alliance with them, and made terms with Charles of France. He got Picardy and the counties of Macon and Auxerre as the price of his change of alliance.

Just as the Congress of Arras was breaking up, John of Bedford died, worn out before his time by his fourteen years of toilsome government in France. The breach with the Duke of Burgundy and the death of Bedford had the results that might have been expected. With one common accord the last French partisans of England threw off their allegiance to Henry VI. Paris itself opened its gates to the troops of Charles VII., and the English had soon to stand on the defensive in Normandy and Maine, their last foothold in Northern France (1437).

Nothing is more astonishing than the obstinate way in which the English government clung to the last remnants of the conquests of Henry V. By desperate and unremitting exertions the war was kept up in Normandy for no less than twelve years after Paris fell (1437-49). The heroes of this struggle were the veteran Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and the young Richard, Duke of York, who had just begun to come to the front. This prince was the son of that Richard Earl of Cambridge, who had paid with his life for his attempt to overturn Henry V. He was Duke of York as successor to his uncle Edmund, who fell at Agincourt, and Earl of March in right of his mother, the sister of the childless Edmund Mortimer, the last male of his house. York was governor in Normandy during the most important years of the struggle for the retention of the duchy, and gained much credit for repeatedly driving back the invasions which the French launched against it. He grew intoxicated with success, and made himself a prominent supporter of the unwise war-policy which Humphrey of Gloucester continued to advocate.

Meanwhile Cardinal Beaufort and the party which opposed Duke Humphrey—its chief members were Beaufort's nephews John and Edmund, successively Earls of Somerset, and William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk—were always watching for an opportunity of concluding a peace with France. Whenever they took negotiations in hand they were denounced by Gloucester as the hirelings of Charles VII., but they persisted in their purpose. In 1444 they Pg 240 thought that they had achieved it, for the French king, wearied by constant repulses in Normandy, consented to make a truce for two years, and to treat for a definite peace. He signed the compact at Tours, and ratified it by giving the hand of his kinswoman Margaret of Anjou to the young king Henry VI.; in consideration of the treaty, the English were to surrender Maine and its fortresses, while retaining Normandy entire.

Gloucester and Richard of York saluted this wise marriage and treaty with loud cries of wrath. They said that the Earl of Suffolk, who negotiated it, must have been sold to France, and spoke of the surrender of the fortresses of Maine as treason to the English crown. The greater part of the nation believed them to be right, for Humphrey and Richard were both popular with the masses, and it soon became a matter of faith that the Beauforts and Suffolk had betrayed their young master.

A strong king might have crushed this unwise opposition to peace. But Henry VI., who had now reached his majority, was anything but a strong king. He was frail and feeble both in body and mind, a simple soul much given to exercises of piety and to quiet study. He always sought some stronger arm on which to lean, and when he had chosen his friends, wisely or unwisely, he clung to them with the obstinacy that so often accompanies weakness. Worst of all, he had inherited a taint of madness from his grandfather, the insane Charles VI. of France, and from time to time his brain was clouded by fits of apathetic melancholy. Henry had learnt to trust his great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort and his minister Suffolk; he would never listen to any accusation against them. His views were shared by the fiery young queen, who soon began to rule him by dint of her stronger will.

The truce of Tours lasted for some three years. During this space the factions in England grew fiercer than ever, and in 1447 came to a head. At a Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds, Gloucester was suddenly arrested by order of Suffolk and the queen, and charged with treason. He died within a few days, probably from an apoplectic seizure, and not from any foul play. But it was natural that the rumour should get abroad that Suffolk had secretly murdered him.

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Gloucester was only outlived for a few weeks by his lifelong rival, the old Cardinal Beaufort. Their deaths cleared the way for the rise of new men: the Cardinal's place at the head of the peace party was taken by Suffolk and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, men of far lower stamp than the old churchman, who, though proud and worldly, had always done his best to serve England. Suffolk and Somerset were busy, self-important, self-seeking men, and coveted power and office for their own private ends. The Duke of York, who succeeded to Duke Humphrey's position, was a far more capable man, but he was committed to the hopelessly unpractical programme of perpetual war with France. His position, too, was rendered difficult by the fact that Duke Humphrey's death had made him next heir to the throne after the feeble young king, for there was now no other male of the house of Lancaster surviving. The queen, Suffolk, and Somerset began to look on him with suspicion, and he had to walk warily lest charges of treason should be brought against him, as they had been against his cousin of Gloucester. Meanwhile he was fain to accept the position of Lord Deputy of Ireland, which kept him out of harm's way.

In 1449 the truce with France which had accompanied the king's marriage was broken, by the gross fault of his minister Suffolk. Some of the Norman garrisons were left so long unpaid that they broke into mutiny, crossed the border, and sacked the rich Breton town of Fougéres. Failing to get satisfaction from Suffolk for this outrage, Charles VII. declared war. Normandy was now in the charge of Somerset, a man of very different calibre from Richard of York, who had held it against such odds in the days before the truce of Tours. The French, on invading the duchy, swept the English before them with an ease that astonished even themselves. The peasants and townsfolk rose against their masters on every side, and gave the invaders their best help. Town after town fell; Rouen, the capital of the duchy, was betrayed by traitors within the gates; and the unhappy Somerset had to fall back on Caen. That town, with Cherbourg and Harfleur, was soon all that remained to the English on Norman soil.

This terrible news stirred up great wrath and indignation in England against Suffolk and Somerset. An army was hastily got ready at Portsmouth, and sent over to Cherbourg, with Pg 242 orders to join Somerset at Caen. But the French threw themselves between, and forced the army of succour to give them battle at Formigny. At this disastrous fight well-nigh the whole English force was destroyed, overwhelmed by an attack from the rear at a moment when it was already engaged with a superior French army in front. Only its general, Sir Thomas Kyriel, and 400 men were granted quarter, while no less than 3000 were slain (April, 1450).

This disaster settled the fate of Normandy. Somerset was compelled to surrender Caen, and returned, covered with ignominy, to England. The other garrisons yielded one after another, and nothing remained of all the mighty conquests of Henry V. in Northern France.

Even before Formigny had been fought, or Caen had fallen, grave troubles had broken out in England. Suffolk had always been unpopular ever since he gave up Maine and signed the truce of Tours. The news of the loss of Rouen, and the other Norman towns, sufficed to ruin him. In spite of the king's continued assurance of his confidence in his minister, the House of Commons began to send up petitions against Suffolk, accusing him not only of losing Maine and Normandy, but of having sold himself for bribes to the King of France. Seditious riots in Kent and London gave point to the Commons' accusation. Cowed by such signs of danger, the feeble king removed Suffolk from office. The Commons then formally passed a bill of attainder against him for treasonable misconduct of the king's affairs during the last five years. But Henry would not allow his trusted servant to be harmed, gave him a formal pardon, and bade him go beyond seas till the trouble should blow over. Suffolk sailed for Calais, but in the Dover Straits his vessel was beset and captured by some London ships, which had been lying in wait for him. He was caught and beheaded after a mock trial, and his body was cast ashore on Dover Sands. The guilty parties in this extraordinary crime were never traced or convicted.

But the death of Suffolk did not imply the removal of Suffolk's friends from office. The king kept his ministry unchanged, a piece of obstinacy which provoked a fresh burst of popular indignation. In June, 1450, occurred the great political insurrection known as "Jack Cade's Pg 243 Rebellion." John Aylmer or Cade was a soldier of fortune, who had served under the Duke of York in France and Ireland. He gave out that he was akin to the house of Mortimer, and that he was acting by the consent of his cousin, Duke Richard. His programme was the removal and punishment of the king's ministers, and the restoration of strong government and even-handed justice. His rising, in short, was political in its objects, and did not aim at redressing social evils only, like that of Wat Tyler. Possibly, Richard of York may have had some hand in the business, but we have no actual proof that he had egged Cade on.

All Kent and Sussex rose to join Cade, who advanced to Blackheath, and boldly sent in his demands to the king. Many of the Londoners favoured him, and the gates of the city opened at his approach. For a moment he was in possession of the capital. Smiting London Stone with his drawn sword, he cried, "Now is Mortimer Lord of London." He exercised his lordship by seizing and beheading Lord Say, the treasurer, and Crowmere, Sheriff of Kent, two friends of Suffolk. He would have done the same with others of the king's servants if he could have caught them. But this violence and the plundering of houses and shops by his disorderly followers provoked the citizens, who closed the gates and came to blows with the rebels. The king brought up armed retainers to help the Londoners, and after a space Cade's men dispersed on the promise of a royal pardon. Their leader, however, refused to take advantage of the amnesty, fled to the woods, and was tracked down and slain a few weeks later. His rising had failed mainly because he was a mere adventurer, and could not keep his followers in order.

But hardly had Cade fallen, when the Duke of York, whose name he had been using so freely, suddenly came over in person from Ireland to put himself at the head of the opposition. His first demand was a change of ministry, and especially the dismissal of Somerset, who had now returned from Normandy, and had been placed at the head of the king's council, as if he had come back covered with glory instead of with dishonour. But Henry and his queen were set on keeping their cousin of Beaufort in power, and York had for the time to hold back, lest he should be accused of open treason.

His opportunity of speaking with effect was not long in Pg 244 coming. In 1451 the French attached Guienne, the last province over-sea where the English banner was still displayed. The loyal Gascons made a stout defence, but the king and Somerset sent them no aid, and Bordeaux was finally compelled to surrender. The loss of Guienne added the last straw to the burden of Somerset's misdeeds. York, aided by several other peers, took up arms to compel the king to send away his shiftless minister. Henry called out an army, and faced York in Kent; but both were unwilling to strike the first blow, and on receiving a promise that Somerset should be dismissed, and tried before his peers, the duke sent his men home.

The king, however, with a want of faith that he rarely displayed, refused to put Somerset on trial, and retained him as his minister. He endeavoured to distract the attention of the nation from his favourite's misdoings, by proposing that a vigorous attempt should be made to recover Guienne. The Gascons hated the French conqueror, and had sent secret messages to London offering to rise if assured of English aid. No one could refuse their appeal, and with the consent of all parties a new army was enrolled for the recovery of Bordeaux. It was given to the charge of Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the last survivor of the old captains of Henry V. The gallant veteran landed near Bordeaux with 5000 men, retook the city by the aid of its citizens, and overran the neighbouring districts. But fortune had definitely turned against England: in the next year he was slain and his army cut to pieces at the bloody battle of Castillon (July, 1453). Bordeaux held out for three months more, but was forced to yield to starvation before the year was out.

Thus was lost the last remnant of the great inheritance of Eleanor of Aquitaine, after it had remained just 300 years in the hands of the Plantagenets (1154-1453). England now retained none of her old possessions beyond sea save Calais and the Channel Islands, a strange surviving fragment of the duchy of Normandy.

The house of Lancaster and the English nation had sinned in company when they embarked so eagerly in 1415 on the wanton invasion of France. They had already paid for their crime by lavish expenditure of life and treasure on foreign battle-fields: they were now to incur the worse penalty of a savage and murderous civil war.

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In mediaeval England there was but one way of getting rid of political grievances which the king refused to redress—the old method of armed force, the means which we have seen used in the cases of Gaveston, the Despensers, and the favourites of Richard II. Henry VI. was not idle and vicious like Edward the Second, nor did he yearn for autocratic power like the second Richard. He was merely a simple, feeble, well-intentioned young man, who always required some prop to lean upon, who chose his servants unwisely, and adhered to them obstinately.

A wise king would have dismissed Somerset after the disasters in Normandy and Guienne, and taken a more profitable helper in the hard task of governing England. York was the obvious man to choose; he was an able general, and the first prince of the blood. But Henry distrusted York, and Henry's young queen viewed him with keen and unconcealed dislike. The thought that, if any harm should come to her husband, Duke Richard must succeed him, filled Margaret of Anjou with wrath and bitterness.

There are no signs that York yet entertained any disloyal designs on the throne, but he undoubtedly knew that, as the heir of the house of Mortimer, he owned a better hereditary claim to the throne than any member of the line of Lancaster. He was contented, however, to bide his time and wait for the succession of the childless king.

Meanwhile he took care to keep his party together, and steadfastly persevered in his very justifiable desire to evict the Pg 246 incapable Somerset from office. But it was the misfortune of England that Somerset was not friendless and unsupported, as Gaveston or the Despensers had been. He was the chief of a considerable family combination among the nobility, who were ready to aid him in keeping his place. There were, too, many others who disapproved of him personally, but were prepared to support him, some out of sheer loyalty to King Henry, some because they had old personal or family grudges against York or York's chief friends and supporters.

The chief misfortunes of the unhappy time that was now to set in, had their source in the swollen importance of the great noble houses, and the bitterness of their feuds with each other. For the last hundred years the landed wealth of England had been concentrating into fewer and fewer hands. The House of Lords contained less than a third of the numbers that it had shown in the days of Edward I. The greater peers had piled up such vast masses of estates that they were growing to be each a little king in his own district. The weak government of Henry VI. had allowed their insolence to come to a head, and for the last twenty years private wars between them had been growing more and more frequent. They found the tools of their turbulence in the hordes of disbanded soldiers sent home from France, who knew no other trade but fighting, and would sell themselves to be the household bullies of the highest bidder.

England was already honeycombed with family feuds, now ready to burst out into open violence. If we examine the lists of the supporters of York and of Somerset, we find that to a very large extent the politics of the English magnates were personal, and not national. With York were linked a great group of peers who were allied to him by blood. The chief of them were the younger branch of the Nevilles, represented by the two Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, a father and son who had each made his fortune by marrying the heiress of a great earldom. The Nevilles of the elder line, represented by the head of the house, the Earl of Westmoreland, had always been at feud with their cousins of the younger stock, and, since they were strong Lancastrians, the younger branch would probably have favoured York in any case. But their adhesion to him Pg 247 was rendered certain by the fact that Duke Richard had married Salisbury's sister. Another sister of the earl's was wedded to the next greatest supporter of York, John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. He was a nephew of that Mowbray whom Henry IV. had beheaded in 1405, in company with Archbishop Scrope, and so had his private grudge against the house of Lancaster. Among the other chiefs of the Yorkist party we can trace in almost every instance an old feud or a family alliance which seems to have determined their policy.

It was the same with the party that stood by the king and Somerset. It comprised, first of all, the houses which were allied in blood to the Lancastrian line—the king's cousins the Beauforts, the legitimized descendants of John of Gaunt, and his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor, Earls of Richmond and Pembroke. [27] After them came the Percies of Northumberland, the Westmoreland Nevilles, and the Staffords of Buckingham—the three houses which had been prominent in aiding the usurpation of Henry IV. The Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland were certainly confirmed in their loyalty to the king by their bitter quarrel with their kinsmen, the younger Nevilles, the strongest supporters of York.

But the "Wars of the Roses,"—as historians have chosen to name them, from the white rose which was the badge of York, and the red rose which was assumed long after as the emblem of Lancaster—were much more than a faction fight between two rival coteries of peers. At the first they were the attempt of the majority of the English nation to oust an unpopular minister from power by force of arms. There is no doubt that the greater part of England sided with York in this endeavour. The citizens and freeholders of London, Kent, the South, and the Midlands, where lay all the wealth and political energy of the nation, were strongly Yorkist. Henry, on the other hand, got his support from a group of great nobles who controlled the wild West and North, and the still wilder Wales.

Unfortunately for the nation, the constitutional aspect of the struggle was gradually obscured by the increasing bitterness Pg 248 of family blood-feuds. "Thy father slew mine, and now will I slay thee," was the cry of the Lancastrian noble to the enemy who asked for quarter, [28] and it expresses well enough the whole aspect of the later years of the struggle. The war commenced with an attempt to set right by force the government of the realm, but it ended as a mere series of bloody reprisals for slain kinsfolk. It left England in a far worse state, from the political and constitutional point of view, than it had known since the days of John. It began with the comparatively small affliction of a weak, well-intentioned king, who persisted in retaining an unpopular minister in power; it ended by leaving the realm in the hands of an arbitrary self-willed king, who ruled autocratically for himself, with no desire or intention of consulting the nation's wishes as to how it should be governed.

We might place the beginning of the Wars of the Roses at the moment of Cade's insurrection, but it was not till five years later that the struggle broke out in its bitterer form.

Strangely enough, the commencement of the strife was preceded by a time in which it seemed almost certain that the troubles of the realm would blow over. In 1453 the king went mad; the peers and commons unanimously called upon York, as the first prince of the blood, to take up the place of Protector of the realm. He did so to the general satisfaction of the nation, cast Somerset into the Tower, and replaced the old ministers by more capable men. But just as all seemed settled, and York's ultimate succession to the crown appeared inevitable, the whole aspect of affairs was altered by the queen giving birth to a son, after nine years of unfruitful wedlock. This completely cut away York's prospect of succession; but he accepted the situation with loyalty, and swore allegiance to the infant Prince of Wales. But after eighteen months, Henry VI. suddenly and unexpectedly recovered his sanity. At once, at Queen Margaret's behest, he dismissed York and his friends from office, and drew Somerset out of the Tower to make him minister once more.

This action drove Duke Richard to sudden violence. He hastily gathered his retainers from the Welsh Marches, called his kinsmen the two Neville earls to his aid, and marched

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on London. Somerset and the king had only the time to collect a few of their friends, when York came upon them at St. Albans. He laid before the king his ultimatum, requiring that Somerset should be given up to be tried, and, when it was rejected, attacked the town, in which the royal troops had barricaded themselves. After a short skirmish, the young Earl of Warwick, Richard Neville, burst his way into the streets and won the day for his uncle Duke Richard. The king was taken prisoner, while Somerset, the cause of all the trouble, was slain in the fray with several other lords of his party (May, 1455).

The first battle of St. Albans put the control of the king's person into the hands of York, who again assumed the management of the realm. But he only kept it for less than a year; in 1456 the king asserted his constitutional power of changing his ministers, and turned Duke Richard's friends out of office. As his foe Somerset was now dead, York was fairly contented to leave matters in the king's own control. But after the blood shed at St. Albans, there could be no true reconciliation between the friends of the king and the friends of York. The fierce and active young Queen Margaret put herself at the head of the party which Suffolk and Somerset had formerly led. She feared for her infant son's right of succession to the throne, and was determined to crush York to make his path clear. Throughout the years 1457-8, while a precarious peace was still preserved, Margaret was journeying up and down the land, enlisting partisans in her cause, and giving them her son's badge of the white swan to wear, in token of promised fidelity.

The inevitable renewal of the war came in 1459. Its immediate cause was an attempt by some of the Queen's retainers to slay the young Earl of Warwick, York's ablest and most energetic supporter. Then Salisbury, Warwick's father, raised his Yorkshire tenants in arms; the queen sent against them a force under Lord Audley, whom the elder Neville defeated and slew at Bloreheath. After this skirmish, all England flew to arms to aid one party or the other. York, Salisbury, and Warwick met at Ludlow, on the Welsh border, while the king gathered a great army at Worcester, taking the field himself, with a vigour which he never before or afterwards displayed. It seems that York's Pg 250 adherents were moved by the vehement appeals which King Henry made to their loyalty, and cowed by the superior forces that he mustered. At the Rout of Ludford they broke up without fighting, leaving their leaders to escape as best they might. York fled to Ireland, Salisbury and Warwick to Calais, of which the younger Neville was governor.

But surprising and sudden vicissitudes of fortune were the order of the day all through the Wars of the Roses. The queen and her friends ruled harshly and unwisely after they had driven York out of the land. They assembled a Parliament at Coventry, which dealt out hard measures of attainder and confiscation against all who had favoured Duke Richard. They sacked the open town of Newbury because it was supposed to favour York, and hung seven citizens of London of the duke's party. These cruel actions turned the heart of the nation from the king and the ruthless Queen Margaret.

Hearing of this state of affairs, Warwick and Salisbury suddenly made a descent from Calais, landed at Sandwich, and pushed boldly inland. The whole of Kent rose to join them, and they were able to march on London. The Yorkist partisans within the city were so strong that they threw open the gates, and the Nevilles seized the capital. The Londoners armed in their favour, and the Yorkist lords of the South flocked in to aid them; soon they were strong enough to strike at their enemies, whose forces were not yet concentrated. The queen had gathered at Northampton the loyalists of the Midland counties, but her friends of the North and West were not yet arrived.

Warwick, on July 10, 1460, stormed the entrenched camp of the Lancastrians in front of Northampton, and took the king prisoner. The queen escaped to Wales, but the greater part of the chiefs of her army were left dead on the field, for Warwick had bidden his men to spare the common folk, and slay none save knights and nobles. There fell the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and many other leading men of the king's party.

The Duke of York had crossed from Ireland too late to take any share in the fight of Northampton, but in time to reap the fruits of his nephew's victory. He advanced to London, and there summoned a Parliament. It then appeared that the Pg 251 vicissitudes of the last year had so embittered him that he was no longer content to act as regent for Henry VI. He fell back on his undisputed hereditary claim as the eldest heir of Richard II., and began to talk of deposing his cousin and assuming the crown. But his own partisans set their faces against this plan, for Henry was still personally popular, and all the blame of his misgovernment was laid on the queen and her friends. The Earl of Warwick openly told his uncle that he must be content to be regent, and York had to accept a compromise, by which Henry VI. was to retain the crown as long as he lived, but to leave it to Duke Richard on his death. The rights of the little Prince of Wales were ignored, and many of the Yorkists swore that he was a supposititious child, and no true son of King Henry.

But in making this arrangement the duke's party had reckoned without Queen Margaret, who was still free and busy. She had fled to the North, and there had gathered to her the Percies, the elder Nevilles, and the barons of the Border, all staunch Lancastrians. Hearing of this muster, Duke Richard marched northward, with his second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, and his brother-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury. He underrated the queen's forces, and rashly engaged with them under the walls of Sandal Castle, close to Wakefield. There, overwhelmed by numbers, he and his whole army were destroyed. Burning to avenge the slaughter of Northampton, the Lancastrians refused all quarter. The Earl of Rutland, a lad of seventeen, fell at the knees of Lord Clifford and asked for his life. "Thy father slew mine, and now will I slay thee," answered the rough Borderer, and stabbed him as he knelt. The Earl of Salisbury was captured and beheaded next day. Queen Margaret set the heads of the slain lords above the gate of York, Duke Richard's in the midst crowned in derision with a diadem of paper.

Thus perished Richard of York, a man who had always displayed great abilities, and down to the last year of his life had shown much self-control and moderation. His death was a great loss to England, as the headship of his house and his party now passed to his son, a selfish and hard-hearted—though very able—young man of eighteen.

The event of the battle of Wakefield came as a thunderclap to Pg 252 the Yorkists, who had hitherto despised the queen and her northern followers. Edward, Earl of March, Duke Richard's heir, was absent in the west, where he was striving with the Lancastrians of Wales. Only Richard of Warwick was in time to reach London before the northern army approached its walls. He rallied the Yorkists of the South, and led them to St. Albans, where Queen Margaret attacked him. Again the Northerners were victorious; they rescued King Henry from his captors, and scattered Warwick's army to the winds. The rancorous queen made her little seven-year old son sit in judgment on the prisoners, and bade him choose the form of death by which they each should die.

If Margaret had pushed on next day, the capital would have fallen into her hands; but her gentle and kindly spouse feared that the northern moss-troopers would sack and burn the city, and persuaded her to wait, in order that London might surrender in due form, and not be taken by assault. The short delay was fatal to him and his cause. While London was negotiating the terms on which it should yield, a new Yorkist army suddenly appeared on the scene.

Not many days before the second battle of St. Albans, the young Edward of York had routed the Lancastrians of Wales at the battle of Mortimer's Cross, in Herefordshire. He had then set out to march on London; on the way he was met by Warwick, who brought the news of his own defeat, and of the queen's approach to the capital. But, learning that she had not yet entered its walls, they marched night and day, and threw themselves into the city just as its gates were opening for surrender.

The arrival of the heir of York and his victorious troops turned the fortune of the war. Margaret's army had in great part dispersed to plunder the Midlands, for the Northerners had vowed to treat every man south of the Trent as an enemy. When Duke Edward advanced they gave way before him, and retreated towards York, wasting the country behind them on all sides.

The slaughter of Wakefield and St. Albans, and more especially the ruthless execution of prisoners which had followed each battle, had driven the Yorkists to a pitch of anger which Pg 253 they had not felt before. There was no longer any talk of making terms with Henry VI., and leaving him the crown. Warwick and the other nobles of his party besought the young duke to claim the crown, as the true heir of Richard II., and to stigmatize the three Lancastrian kings as usurpers. Edward readily consented, and proclaimed himself king at Westminster on his hereditary title, and without any form of election or assent of Parliament.

But the new king had to fight for his crown before he could wear it. He and Warwick pursued the queen's army over the Trent, and caught it up at Towton, near Tadcaster, in Yorkshire. Here was fought the greatest and fiercest of the battles of the Wars of the Roses. Both parties were present in full force; the South and Midlands had rallied round Edward IV. in their wrath at the plundering of the Northumbrians. The Lancastrians of Wales and the Midlands had joined the queen during her retreat. The chroniclers assert that the two armies together mustered nearly a hundred thousand men—an impossible figure, but one which vouches for the fact that Towton saw the largest hosts set against each other that ever met on an English battle-field.

This desperate and bloody fight was waged on a bleak hillside during a blinding snow-storm, which half hid the combatants from each other. It lasted for a whole March day from dawn to dusk, and ended in the complete rout of the queen's army. Thousands of the Lancastrians were crushed to death or drowned at the passing of the little river Cock, which lay behind their line of battle. There fell on the field the Earl of Northumberland, the Lords Clifford, Neville, Dacre, Welles, and Mauley—all the chiefs of the Lancastrian party in the north. Courtney, Earl of Devon, and Butler, Earl of Wilts, were captured, and beheaded some time after the fight. No less than forty-two men of knightly rank shared their fate, so savage were King Edward and Warwick in avenging their fathers and brothers who had died at Wakefield.

Henry VI., with his wife and son, and the young Duke of Somerset, escaped from the field and fled into Scotland, where they were kindly received by the regents who ruled that land for the little King James III.

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The carnage in and after Towton assured the crown to the house of York. Edward IV. was able to return to London and summon a Parliament, which formally acknowledged him as king, recognizing his hereditary right, and not going through any form of election. At his command they attainted the whole of the leaders of the Lancastrian party, both those who had fallen at Towton, and those who yet lived. Thinking his position sure, the young king then gave himself over to feasting and idleness, entrusting the completion of the war and the pacification of England to his cousin, the Earl of Warwick, whom men from this time forward called "the King-maker," because he had twice settled the fate of England, by winning the rule of the land for the house of York, at Northampton in 1460, and at Towton in 1461.

Edward IV. showed a strange mixture of qualities. On the battle-field he was a great commander, and in times of danger he was alert and dexterous. But when no perils were at hand, he became a reckless, heartless voluptuary, given to all manner of evil living and idle luxury, and letting affairs shift for themselves. For the first four years of his reign he handed over all cares of state to his cousin of Warwick, a busy capable man, who loved work and power, and strove not unsuccessfully to make himself the most popular man in England. Warwick called himself the friend of the commons, and used the vast wealth which he enjoyed as heir of all the broad lands of the Beauchamps, Nevilles, and Montacutes, to make himself partisans all over the country. He was self-confident and ambitious in the highest degree, and thoroughly enjoyed his position of chief minister to an idle and careless master. When he was at last deprived of it, we shall see that wounded pride could lead him to intrigue and treason.

The four years 1461-64 were occupied by the final crushing out of the civil war by the strong hand of the King-maker. The task proved longer than might have been expected, owing to the desperate efforts which Queen Margaret made to maintain her son's cause. After Towton nothing remained to her but some castles in Northumberland and Wales, but she bought the aid of the Scots by ceding Berwick, and obtained men and money from Lewis XI., Pg 255 the young King of France. That astute prince thought that a weak and divided England was the best security for the safety of France, and doled out occasional help to the queen in consideration of a promise to surrender Calais.

Warwick captured all the Northumbrian strongholds of the house of Percy,—Bamborough, Alnwick, and Dunstanborough—in 1462. But the North was thoroughly disaffected to the new king, and they were twice retaken by treachery when the queen, with her French and Scottish friends, appeared before them. In her third campaign she was aided by a rising of all the Lancastrians who had submitted to King Edward and been pardoned by him, headed by the Duke of Somerset, the son of him who fell at St. Albans. But the two battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham (April-May, 1464) crushed the last desperate effort of the northern Lancastrians: at the former fell Sir Ralph Percy, the last chief of the Percy clan who clung to the lost cause; at the second the Duke of Somerset was taken and executed. Both fights were won by Lord Montagu, the younger brother and lieutenant of the great Earl of Warwick. By June, 1464, Warwick himself stamped out the last embers of resistance by the second capture of Bamborough, the sole surviving Lancastrian stronghold in England.

The King-maker returned in triumph to London, and could report to his master that he had completely pacified England, and had also concluded an advantageous treaty with the Scots. He proposed to finish his work by making terms with the King of France, the last supporter of the Lancastrian cause, with whom Margaret and her young son had sought refuge. For this purpose he advised King Edward to endeavour to ally himself with some princess among the kinswomen of Lewis XI.

It was from this point that the breach between Edward and his great minister began. When pressed to marry, the king announced—to the great surprise and annoyance of Warwick and the rest of his council—that he was married already. He had secretly espoused Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, a staunch Lancastrian, and widow of Sir John Grey, another Lancastrian, who had fallen at St. Albans. She was some years older than Edward, and had a family by her first husband. But her beauty had captivated the susceptible young king, and he had married Pg 256 her in secret, in order to avoid the opposition of his family and his councillors.

When compelled to acknowledge this unwise match, Edward made the best of the matter, brought his wife to court, conferred an earldom on her father, and showered patronage upon her brothers and sisters. When Warwick ventured to remonstrate, he showed that he had no mind to be ruled any more by his too-powerful cousin, and redoubled his favours to the Woodvilles. He gave his wife's sisters as brides to the greatest peers of the realm, and made her father his Lord Treasurer. This was not pique, but policy, for Edward had come to the conclusion that the Neville clan was too strong, and had resolved to surround himself by another family connection which should owe everything to his protection (1465).

For a time an open breach between the king and the King-maker was delayed, and Edward's throne seemed firmly set. His position was made surer by the capture of the old King Henry VI., who was caught in Lancashire, where he had been lurking obscurely for some time. When Edward had placed him in the Tower of London, he thought that all his troubles were over. He forgot the unhealthy condition of the realm, the blood-feuds that reigned in every county, and the general disorganization of society that had resulted from six years of civil war and from the wholesale transference of lands and property that had accompanied it. Above all, he overlooked the vast power that had fallen into the hands of the great military peers, and especially of his ambitious cousin Warwick.

In 1467 Edward put his strength to the trial by dismissing all the King-maker's friends from office, and by ignominiously disavowing an embassy to France on which he had sent his cousin. From sheer desire to humiliate the great earl, he concluded an alliance with Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, the deadly enemy of France, because he knew that Warwick was opposed to such a tie. He gave his sister Margaret to be the duke's wife, and made Warwick escort her on her embarkation for Flanders.

The earl replied by setting treasonable intrigues on foot. He leagued himself with the king's younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, Shakespeare's "false, fleeting, perjured Clarence," Pg 257 a discontented young man of a very unamiable character. Warwick agreed to give his eldest daughter, the heiress of his vast estates, to the duke, and they swore to compel Edward to drive away the Woodvilles, and rule only under their guidance.

Warwick and Clarence were completely successful in their plot. They secretly suborned a rebellion in Yorkshire, under Sir John Conyers, one of Warwick's relatives, who was aided by the Neville retainers, as well as by the discontented Lancastrians of the North. Conyers called himself "Robin of Redesdale," and gave himself out as the champion of the poor and the redresser of grievances—much as Cade had done fifteen years before. He beat the king's army at Edgecote Field, near Banbury, and then Warwick and Clarence appeared upon the scene and apprehended Edward at Olney. They beheaded Earl Rivers, the father of all the Woodvilles, and Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the king's chief confidant. After keeping Edward some months in durance, they released him, on his undertaking to govern according to their desires (1469).

But the spirit of Edward always rose in times of trouble; he cast off his sloth, and plotted against the plotters. Taking advantage of an ill-planned Lancastrian rising in Lincolnshire, he raised a great army, and suddenly turned it against his disloyal brother and cousin. Warwick and Clarence were chased all across England, from Manchester to Dartmouth, and barely escaped with their lives by taking ship to France.

Furious at his failure, the King-maker resolved to sacrifice all his prejudices and predispositions to revenge. He met the exiled Queen Margaret at Angers, and proposed to her to restore Henry VI. to the throne, and make an end of the ungrateful Edward. After long doubting, Margaret resolved to take his offer, though she hated him bitterly, and never trusted him. To bind the alliance, Edward, Prince of Wales, the queen's young son, was married to Anne Neville, the earl's second daughter.

Then Warwick and Margaret joined to foment a rising in England. The numerous clan of the Nevilles were prepared to follow their chief, and the surviving Lancastrians were still Pg 258 ready to risk themselves in a new plan of insurrection. In the autumn of 1470, Warwick and Clarence landed in Devonshire and raised the standard of the imprisoned Henry VI. Their success showed the deep roots of the earl's popularity, and the precarious nature of King Edward's power. Simultaneous risings broke out all over England, and Edward, betrayed by most of his supporters, had to take ship and fly to Flanders. Henry VI. was drawn from his dungeon, and was for a few months again King of England.

But one more change of fortune was yet to come. Edward IV. borrowed men and money from his brother-in-law, Charles of Burgundy, and boldly returned to England in the spring of 1471. He landed in Yorkshire, called his partisans about him, and marched on London. Edward, when his mettle was up, was a captain of no mean ability. He completely out-generalled his enemy, and got between him and the capital. The Duke of Clarence, who had been entrusted with Warwick's western forces, betrayed his father-in-law, and joined his brother with the men whom he should have led to the earl's aid. London and the person of Henry VI. fell into King Edward's hands. Warwick came up too late, and had to fight the Yorkists at Barnet, a few miles north of the city. There he was completely defeated and slain, losing the battle mainly by the accident of a fog, which caused two divisions of his troops to attack one another. With Warwick fell his brother Lord Montagu, and most of the personal adherents on whom his power rested.

But Edward was not yet secure. On the very day of Barnet, Queen Margaret landed at Portsmouth to raise the Lancastrians of the South in Warwick's aid. Hearing of his fall, she turned westward, gathering up a considerable force of adherents as she fled. But Edward rapidly pursued her, and by dint of superior pace in marching, caught her up at Tewkesbury. The queen's army was intercepted, and penned up with its back to the Severn, then destitute of a bridge. Unable to fly, the Lancastrians had to turn, and fought a desperate battle outside Tewkesbury. But King Edward never suffered a defeat in all his days; his courage and skill carried all before it, and the queen's army was annihilated. Her young son Edward, Prince of Wales, was slain in the pursuit, though Pg 259 he cried for quarter to "his brother Clarence." The last Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Devon, and all the surviving Lancastrian magnates fell on the field, or were beheaded next day by the victor. Queen Margaret was taken prisoner and thrown into confinement.

On the death of Prince Edward, the old king Henry VI. was left the only survivor of the house of Lancaster. The ruthless heir of York resolved that he too should die, and on his return to London had the feeble and saintly prince murdered, by the hands of his young brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester (1471).

Thus ended the wars of the Roses, in the complete victory of York, and the extinction of the line of John of Gaunt, after it had sat for three generations on the English throne.

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All the males of the house of Lancaster had now fallen by the sword or the dagger, not only the last representatives of the elder and legitimate branch which had occupied the throne, but also the whole family of the Beauforts, the descendants of the natural sons of John of Gaunt, who had been legitimized by the grant of Richard II. Even in the female line there remained no one who showed any signs of disputing the claim of Edward IV. to the throne. The only descendants of John of Gaunt's first family who survived were the Kings of Spain and Portugal, who traced themselves back to John's eldest daughter; while the Beauforts were represented by Lady Margaret Beaufort, daughter of that Duke of Somerset who had died in 1444, the elder brother of the man who lost Normandy and fell at St. Albans. The Lady Margaret had married Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the half-brother of Henry VI., and by him had a single child, Henry, now Earl of Richmond by his father's decease. In Henry the Beaufort line had its last representative, but he was but a boy of fourteen, and was over-sea in Brittany, whither his mother had sent him for safety, while she herself had wedded as her second spouse Lord Stanley, a peer of strong Yorkist proclivities.

Neither the distant Spaniards nor the boy Henry of Richmond were seriously thought of—even by themselves—as claimants to the English crown, and King Edward might for the rest of his life repose on the laurels of Tewkesbury and Barnet, and take his ease without troubling himself about further dynastic troubles.

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He reigned for twelve years after his restoration in 1471, and did little that was noteworthy in that time. His love of ease gradually sapped all his energy; his life grew more and more extravagant and irregular, as he sank into all the grosser forms of self-indulgence. He completely ruined a handsome person and a robust constitution, and by the age of forty-two had declined into an unwieldy and bloated invalid.

Edward's rule was not so bad for England as might have been expected from his very unamiable character. His second reign was comparatively free from bloodshed—if we except one dreadful crime committed on the person of his own brother. Perhaps he deserves little praise on this score, for both the Lancastrians and the partisans of Warwick had been practically exterminated by the slaughters of 1471. It is more to his credit that he bore lightly on the nation in the matter of taxation. His pockets were full of the plunder of the house of Neville and the old Lancastrian families, and, though self-indulgent, he was not a spendthrift. Indeed, he lived within his means, and seldom asked for a subsidy from Parliament. This moderation, however, does not imply that he was a constitutional sovereign. He ruled through a small clique of ministers and personal dependents, mostly members of his wife's family. He disliked parliamentary control so much that he seldom summoned a Parliament at all. For one whole period of five years (1478-82), he was rich enough to be able to refrain from calling one together. When he did want money, however, he did not shrink from raising it in the most objectionable manner, by compelling rich men to pay him forced loans, called "benevolences." It is fair to add that he generally paid his debts, and only owed £13,000 when he died. On the whole it may be said that his rule, though selfish and autocratic, was not oppressive. He gave the land peace in his later years, and any kind of quiet was an intense relief after the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses.

Commerce and industry began slowly to rally, and the wealth of the land seems to have suffered less than might have been expected. The bloodshed and confiscations of the unhappy years between 1455 and 1471 had fallen almost entirely on the nobles and their military retainers, and the cities and the yeomen had fared comparatively well. England Pg 262 had never been left desolate like France at the end of the Hundred Years' War.

Edward's foreign policy was feeble and uncertain. At first, after his restoration, he intended to attack France in alliance with his brother-in-law, Charles the Rash of Burgundy, who had given him shelter and succour during his day of exile. He raised an army and crossed the Channel, talking of recovering Normandy, and of asserting his right to the French crown. But Lewis XI., the wily King of France, offered to buy him off, proffering him a great sum down and an annual subsidy, if he would abandon the cause of Duke Charles. Edward was selfish and ungrateful enough to accept the offer with delight. He met King Lewis in a formal interview at Picquigny, in Picardy, and bargained to retire and remain neutral for 75,000 gold crowns paid down, and an annuity of 50,000 more so long as he lived. He also wrung a second 50,000 out of Lewis as a ransom for the unfortunate Queen Margaret of Anjou, a prisoner since the day of Tewkesbury, and stipulated that the Dauphin was to be married to his eldest daughter, the Princess Elizabeth (1475).

Edward came home with money in his purse, and found that the French annuity, which was punctually paid him, was most useful in enabling him to avoid having to call Parliaments. His betrayal of Charles of Burgundy was deeply resented by that prince, but Edward took no heed, and the duke was slain not long after, while waging war on the Swiss and the Duke of Lorraine.

Two years after the treaty of Picquigny occurred a tragedy which showed that Edward could still on occasion burst out into his old fits of cruelty. His brother George, Duke of Clarence, had been received back into his favour after betraying Warwick in 1471, and had been granted half the King-maker's estates as the portion of his wife, Isabel Neville. But Clarence presumed on his pardon, and seems to have thought that all his treachery to his brother in 1468-70 had been forgotten as well as forgiven. He was always a turbulent, unwise, and reckless young man, and provoked the king by his insolent sayings and open disobedience. Edward had twice to interfere with him, once for illegally seizing, and causing to be executed, a lady whom he accused of bewitching Pg 263 his wife Isabel, who died in childbirth; a second time for trying to wed without his brother's leave Mary of Burgundy, the heiress of Charles the Rash. When Clarence was again detected in intrigues with a foreign power—this time with Scotland—the king resolved to make an end of him. Suddenly summoning a Parliament, he appeared before it, and accused his brother of treason, though he gave no clear or definite account of Clarence's misdeeds. Awed by Edward's wrath and vehemence, the two houses passed a bill declaring the duke convicted of high treason. The king then condemned him, cast him into the Tower, and there had him secretly slain (1478).

Edward for the future placed all his confidence in his youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who had served him faithfully all his life, had fled with him to Flanders in 1470, and had fought gallantly at Barnet and Tewkesbury. Gloucester had always been at odds with Clarence. He had married Anne Neville, the King-maker's younger daughter, widow of Edward Prince of Wales, who fell at Tewkesbury. In her right he claimed half the Neville lands, but Clarence had endeavoured to keep them from him, and had only been compelled to disgorge them under the king's stringent pressure. After 1478, Gloucester acted as his brother's chief councillor and representative, and showed himself a very capable and zealous servant.

It was Gloucester who was entrusted with the conduct of a campaign against Scotland, which was undertaken in 1482, and was the last important event of Edward's reign. This was a war not at all creditable to Edward, who intrigued with the rebellious brothers of James III., and picked a quarrel with the Scots on frivolous grounds. His real object was the recovery of Berwick, which had been in Scottish hands since Queen Margaret surrendered it in the year of Towton. Gloucester took Berwick, which after being lost for twenty years again became an English town. He also harried the Merse and Lothian, the Scots retiring before him without a battle. Soon after they made peace, ceding Berwick, and promising that their king's eldest son should marry Edward's daughter Cecily.

In the year following this treaty the king died, worn out in early middle age by his evil living and intemperance. He left Pg 264 a large family—two sons, Edward aged twelve and Richard aged nine, and five daughters, of whom Elizabeth, the eldest, had reached her eighteenth year.

The decease of Edward, though he was little regretted for himself, threw the nation into great fear and perplexity, for it was confronted with the dangerous problem of a minority, and no one knew who would succeed in grasping power as regent for the little king Edward V. It was almost inevitable that there should be a struggle for the post, for the late king's court had contained elements which were jealous of each other, and had only been kept from collision by Edward's personal influence.

There were two persons to whom the regency might have fallen—the queen-dowager, Elizabeth Woodville, and the late king's brother, Richard of Gloucester. Elizabeth's ascendency implied that England would be ruled by her brothers and the sons of her first marriage—the lords Rivers and Dorset, Sir John Grey, and Sir Edward Woodville, all uncles or half-brothers to the little Edward V. Their rule would mean the banishment or suppression of Gloucester, with whom they were already at secret feud. In the same way, the rise of Gloucester to power would certainly mean a like fall for the Woodville clan.

At the moment of his accession the young king was in Shropshire, in charge of his uncle, Earl Rivers, a fact which put the queen's party at a great advantage. Rivers at once proceeded to bring his little nephew toward London, for his coronation, guarding him with a considerable armed force. On their way Edward and his cavalcade were encountered at Stony Stratford by Richard of Gloucester, who had also brought with him a considerable body of retainers from his Yorkshire estates.

The two parties met with profuse protestations of mutual friendship and esteem, but when Rivers' suspicions were lulled to sleep, Gloucester suddenly seized him, flung him into fetters, and sent him a prisoner to the north. Rivers' fate was shared by Sir Richard Grey, the little king's half-brother, and several more of their party.

Gloucester then took charge of his nephew's person, and brought him up to London, where he summoned a Parliament to Pg 265 meet. The queen-dowager, on hearing that her brother Rivers and her son Richard Grey were cast into prison, knew that her chance of power was gone, and hastily took sanctuary at Westminster, with her youngest son, the little Duke of York, and her five daughters.

The nation was not displeased to learn that the regency would fall into the hands of Duke Richard, who was known as a good soldier, and had served his brother very faithfully; it much preferred him to the Queen and her relatives, who had a bad reputation for greed and arrogance. But it soon became evident that there was something more in the air than a mere transference of the regency. Gloucester not only filled all the places about the king with his own friends, but commenced to pack London with great bodies of armed men raised on his own estates, a precaution quite unnecessary when all his enemies were crushed. He also made the council of regency confer gifts of money, land, and offices, on a most unprecedented scale, upon his two chief confidants, Henry, Duke of Buckingham, and John, Lord Howard. They were evidently being bought for some secret purpose.

Gloucester and his nephew the king had been in London more than a month, and the day of the young king's coronation was at hand, when suddenly Duke Richard showed his real intentions by a sharp and bloody stroke. On the 13th of June the Privy Council was meeting in the Tower of London on business of no great importance, and the duke showed himself smooth and affable as was his wont. After a space he withdrew, but ere long returned with a changed countenance and an aspect of gloom and anger. "What shall be done," he suddenly asked, "to them that compass the destruction of me, being so near of blood to the king, and Protector of this realm?" He was answered by Lord Hastings, the late king's best friend, a man of great courage and experience, who had shared in the victories of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and had held the highest offices ever since. "They are worthy of death," said the unsuspicious baron, "whoever they may be." Then Gloucester burst out, "It is my brother's wife," and baring his left arm—which all men knew to be somewhat deformed since his earliest years—he cried, "Look what yonder sorceress and Pg 266 Shore's wife and those who are of their council have done unto me with their witchcrafts." Hastings started at the mention of Shore's wife, for Jane Shore was his own mistress, and an accusation of witchcraft against her touched him nearly. "If they have so done, my lord," he faltered, "they are worthy of heinous punishment." "Answeredst thou me with ifs?" replied Duke Richard. "I tell thee they have done it, and that I will prove upon thy body, thou traitor." Then he smote upon the table, and armed men, whom he had posted without, rushed into the council chamber. Richard bade them seize Hastings, Lord Stanley, the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of Ely, all firm and loyal friends of Edward IV.

Hastings was borne out to the court of the Tower and beheaded then and there; the others were placed in bonds. This sudden blow at the young king's most faithful adherents dismayed the whole city; but Gloucester hastened to give out that he had detected Hastings and his friends in a plot against his life, and, as he had hitherto been always esteemed a loyal and upright prince, his words were half believed.

Richard's real object was to free himself from men whom he knew to be faithful to the young king, and unlikely to join in the dark plot which he was hatching. He next went with a great armed following to Westminster, where lay the queen-dowager and her children. Surrounding the sanctuary with guards, and then threatening to break in if he was resisted, he sent Cardinal Bourchier, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury, to persuade Elizabeth to give up her young son, Richard of York. Half in terror, half persuaded by the smooth prelate, who pledged his word that no harm should befall the boy, the Queen placed him in Bourchier's hands. Richard at once sent him to join his brother in the Tower (June 16).

Having both his brother's sons in his power, and having crushed his brother's faithful friends, Richard now proceeded to show his real intent. He was aiming at the crown, and had been preparing to seize it from the moment that his brother died. This was the meaning of the gifts that he had been showering around, and of the masses of armed men that he had gathered.

On the 22nd of June he laid his purpose open. His chaplain, Pg 267 Doctor Shaw, was set up to preach to the people at St. Paul's Cross a marvellous sermon, in which he argued that Richard was the rightful king, though both Edward IV. and Clarence, his two elder brothers, had left sons behind them. The Londoners were told to their great surprise that the late king's marriage with Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid. Not only had they been secretly and unlawfully married in an unconsecrated place, but Edward had been betrothed long before to Lady Eleanor Talbot, the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. He had never been given any clerical dispensation from this bond, and therefore he was not free to wed, and his sons were bastards. As to Clarence, he had been attainted, and the blood of his heir was corrupted by his father's attainder.

The Londoners were astonished at this strange argument; they kept silence and so disappointed Gloucester, who had come to the sermon in hopes to meet an enthusiastic reception. But two days later, a stranger scene was enacted at the Guildhall: the Duke of Buckingham, Gloucester's chief confederate, summoned together the mayor and council of London, and, repeating all the arguments that Doctor Shaw had urged, bade them salute Richard as king. A few timid voices shouted approval, and then Buckingham declared that he recognized the assent and good-will of the people. Next day there met the Parliament which should have witnessed the coronation of Edward V. They were summoned to St. Paul's, where Buckingham presented to them a long document, setting forth the evil government of Edward IV., denouncing his sons as bastards, and ending with a petition to Richard of Gloucester to take upon him as his right the title and estate of king. The Lords and Commons yielded their silent assent, apparently without a word of discussion or argument, and Buckingham then led a deputation to Duke Richard, who, with much feigned reluctance, assented to the petition and declared himself king. The only excuse for this lamentable weakness shown by the Houses is that they were quite unprepared for the coup d'état, and were overawed by the thousands of men-at-arms in the livery of Gloucester and Buckingham, who packed every street.

So Richard was crowned with great pomp if with little rejoicing, Pg 268 and thought that he had attained the summit of his desires. But his position was from the first radically unsound. He had seized the throne so easily because his antecedents had not prepared men for such sudden and unscrupulous action, so that there had been no time to organize any opposition to him. But the pious and modest duke had suddenly blossomed forth into a bloodthirsty tyrant. On the very day of his accession he had the unfortunate Rivers and Grey beheaded at Pontefract, and six weeks later he wrought a much darker deed.

After starting on a festal progress through the midlands, he sent back a secret mandate to London, authorizing the murder of his little nephews, Edward and Richard. They were smothered at dead of night in their prison in the Tower, and secretly buried by the assassins. Their graves were never discovered till 1674, when masons repairing the building came upon the bones of two young boys thrust away under a staircase. The murder took place between the 7th and 14th of August, 1483, but its manner and details were never certainly known.

The horror which the disappearance of the harmless, unoffending, young princes caused all over England, was far more dangerous to Richard than their survival could possibly have been. It turned away from him the hearts of all save the most callous and ruffianly of his supporters. Within two months of their death a dangerous rebellion had broken out. It was headed by Buckingham, the very man who had appeared with such shameful prominence at the time of Richard's usurpation. No one can say whether he was shocked by the murder, or whether he was merely discontented with the vast bribes that the new king had given him, and craved yet more. But we find him conspiring with the queen's surviving kindred, the wrecks of the Lancastrian party, and some faithful adherents of Edward IV., to overturn the usurper. They proposed to call over the Earl of Richmond, and to marry him to the princess Elizabeth, the eldest sister of the murdered princes, so blending the claims of Lancaster and York (October, 1483).

The insurrection broke out in a dozen different districts all over England, but it was foiled by King Richard's untiring energy Pg 269 and great military talent. He smote down his enemies before they were able to unite, and caught Buckingham, who had been separated from the bulk of his fellow-conspirators by a sudden rising of the Severn. The duke was executed at Salisbury, with such of his party as were taken, but the majority escaped over-sea and joined the Earl of Richmond.

This was destined to be the last gleam of success that Richard was to see. The rest of his short reign (1483-85) was a period of unrelieved gloom. No protestations of his good-will to England, and no attempts, however honest, to introduce just and even-handed government, availed him aught. He summoned a Parliament in 1484, and caused it to pass several laws of excellent intention, but he was not able to observe them himself, much less to enforce them on others. After having with great solemnity abolished the custom of raising benevolences, or forced loans, such as his brother Edward IV. had loved, Richard was compelled by the emptiness of his treasury to have recourse to them again, in less than a twelvemonth after he had disavowed the practice.

Personal misfortunes came upon the king in a way which seemed to mark the judgment of Heaven. Less than a year after he had slain his nephews, his only son Edward, Prince of Wales, died suddenly in the flower of his boyhood (1484). Eleven months later his wife, Queen Anne, the daughter of the King-maker, followed his son to the grave. His enemies accused him of having poisoned her, for all charges were possible against one who had proved himself so cruel and treacherous.

It is said that Richard thought for a moment, after his wife's death, of compelling his niece Elizabeth, Edward IV.'s eldest daughter, to marry him, in order to merge her claim to the crown in his own. But the mere rumour of the intention so shocked the people that all his own partisans urged him to disavow it, which he accordingly did. Being wifeless and childless, he nominated as his heir his nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, the son of his eldest sister.

Meanwhile the conspiracy which had failed to overthrow Richard in the autumn of 1483, was again gathering head. The Earl of Richmond had obtained loans of men and money from Pg 270 France, and was only waiting for the news that his friends were ready, to make a second attempt on England. With him were all the enemies of King Richard who had escaped death—Dorset, the son of Queen Elizabeth, Edward Woodville, Morton Bishop of Ely, and the few surviving Lancastrian exiles headed by the Earls of Pembroke and Oxford. They relied, not on their French soldiery, but on the secret allies who were to join them in England, and especially on Lord Stanley, the Earl of Richmond's father-in-law. That noble, though he had been arrested in company with the unfortunate Hastings, had been pardoned by King Richard, and entrusted by him with much power in Lancashire and Cheshire. Richard's court was honeycombed with treason: his own Attorney-General, Morgan of Kidwelly, kept Richmond informed of his plans and actions. Of all those about the king only a very few were really faithful to him.

Richard knew that treason was abroad, though he could not identify the traitors. He struck cruelly and harshly at all that he could reach; his ferocity may be gauged from the fact that he actually hung a Wiltshire gentleman named Collingbourn for no more than a copy of verses. The unfortunate rhymester had scoffed at Richard's three favourites, Lord Lovel, Sir William Catesby, and Sir Richard Ratcliffe, in the lines—

The Hog was Richard himself, whose favourite badge was a white boar.

In August, 1485, Henry of Richmond landed at Milford Haven, and was joined by many of the Welsh, among whom he was popular because of his own Welsh blood, that came from his father, Edmund Tudor. Advancing into England, he met with aid from the Talbots of Shrewsbury and many other midland gentry. Lord Stanley gathered a considerable army in Lancashire and Cheshire, but did not openly join the earl, because his son, Lord Strange, was in the king's hands, and would have been slain if Richard had been certain of his father's treachery.

Advancing still further into the midlands, Henry met the king at Bosworth Field, near Leicester. Richard's army was twice the Pg 271 size of that of the earl. He must have conquered if his men had fought honestly for him. But when the battle was joined, the Earl of Northumberland, who led one wing of Richard's host, drew aside and would not fight, and presently Lord Stanley appeared with his contingent and charged the king in flank. The Yorkists began to disperse and fly, for they fought with little heart for their cruel master. But Richard himself would not turn back, though his attendants brought him his horse and besought him to save himself. He plunged into the thick of the fray, cut his way to Richmond's banner, and was there slain, fighting desperately to the last. With him fell his most faithful adherent, John Lord Howard, whom he had made Duke of Norfolk, and a few more of his chief captains. His favourite, Sir William Catesby, was taken prisoner and executed when the battle was over.

Richard's crown, beaten off his helmet by hard blows, was found in a hawthorn bush, and placed on Richmond's head by Lord Stanley, who then saluted him as king by the name of Henry VII. The dead monarch's body was taken to Leicester, and exposed naked before the people, but ultimately given honourable burial in the church of the Grey Friars.

Thus ended the prince who had wrought so much evil, and won his way to power by such unscrupulous cunning and cruelty. He was only thirty-three when he was cut off. There have been worse kings in history, and had his title been good and his hands clean of the blood of his kinsmen, he might have filled the English throne not unworthily. But the consequences of his first fatal crime drove him deeper and deeper into wickedness, and he left a worse name behind him than any of his predecessors. The historians of the next generation drew his portrait even darker than he deserved, making him a hideous hunchback with a malignant distorted countenance. As a matter of fact, his deformity was only that his left arm was somewhat withered, and his left shoulder consequently lower than his right. His portraits show a face not unlike that of his brother Edward, but thinner and set in a nervous and joyless look of suspicion.

Pg 272

Henry Tudor had the good fortune to appear upon the scene as the avenger of all wrongs, those of the injured heirs of York no less than those of the long-exiled partisans of Lancaster. His victory had been won by the aid of Yorkists like Stanley, Dorset, and Edward Woodville, no less than by that of Oxford, Pembroke, the Courtenays, the Talbots, and other old Lancastrian names. It had been settled, long before he started, that he should blend the claims of the two rival houses by marrying the Princess Elizabeth, the eldest child of Edward IV. Thus he was able to pose as the reconciler of parties, and the bringer-in of peace and quiet. He proved his moderation by abstaining from bloodshed; he spared all the prisoners of Bosworth save three alone, and though he caused a bill of attainder to be passed against King Richard's chief partisans, no more executions followed. Henry's wise view of the situation was set forth by a law which he caused one of his Parliaments to approve at a subsequent date, to the effect that no man should ever be accused of treason for supporting the king de facto against the king de jure.

It required all Henry's moderation and ability, however, to make firm his seat upon the throne. His title to it was very weak—only that of conquest in fact—for the legitimacy of the Beaufort line as representatives of John of Gaunt was more than doubtful. Henry refused to rest his claim to the crown merely on his marriage to Elizabeth of York; he would be no mere king-consort, and he deliberately put off the wedding until he had been crowned at Pg 273 Westminster, and had been saluted by Parliament as king in his own right. Having thus made his position clear, he married Elizabeth, six months after the day of Bosworth Field.

Henry Tudor was precisely the sovereign that England required to put an end to the general unrest and unruliness that were the legacy of the Wars of the Roses. He had not an amiable character; he was reserved and suspicious, a master of plot and intrigue, selfish in act and thought, prone to hoard money in and out of season, and ready to strike unmercifully when a stroke seemed necessary. But his brain ruled his passions, and from policy, if not from natural inclination, he was clement and slow to anger. He had some turn for art and letters, and was religious in his own self-centred way. His ministers were wisely chosen; the two chief of them, Bishops Morton and Foxe, were prudent and blameless men. If Empson and Dudley, his two financial advisers, were much hated by the people for their extortions, it was because their master bade them fill his coffers, and was content that they should bear the unpopularity which must otherwise have fallen on himself. He deliberately chose to have scapegoats, lest he should have to take the responsibility for the harsher side of his policy.

The earlier years of Henry's reign were much disturbed by petty rebellions, the last ground-swell of discontent and lawlessness which lingered on after the great tempest of the Wars of the Roses had abated. Richard III. had left behind him a few devoted partisans who had resolved never to submit; the chief were John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, who had been declared heir to the throne by the late king, and Lord Lovel, the sole survivor of the three favourites who had "ruled all England under the Hog." They were bold reckless men, ready to risk all for ambition and revenge. Before Henry had been a year on the throne, Lovel secretly collected a band of desperate friends, and tried to kidnap him while he was visiting York. Foiled in this scheme, Lovel fled to Flanders, where he was sheltered by Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the widowed sister of King Edward IV. With her and with Lincoln he concerted a second plan of rebellion. They resolved to try to rouse the wrecks of the Yorkist party in the name of Edward, Earl of Warwick, the son of Clarence, who Pg 274 had been put to death in 1478, and the only male heir of the house of York. This prince was in King Henry's hands, safely kept in custody in the Tower of London. Till they could liberate him they resolved to make an impostor assume his name and title. So they instructed a clever boy named Lambert Simnel, the son of an organ-maker at Oxford, to act the part of the young Clarence, reasoning that Henry would not dare to put the real prince to death, but would keep him alive in order to make the imposture clear, and so they could free the real Clarence if they succeeded, and dismiss the false one when he was no longer needed.

Ireland had always been friendly to the house of York, and there was no one there who knew the young prince or could detect his counterfeit. So Lambert Simnel was first sent thither, to try the temper of the Irish, giving out that he had just escaped from the Tower. The Earl of Kildare and other prominent Anglo-Irish barons were wholly cozened by the young impostor, and saluted him as king. Four thousand men under Lord Thomas Fitzgerald were raised to aid him; Lincoln and Lovel joined him with 2000 veteran German mercenaries under a captain named Martin Schwartz. They crossed to England and landed in Lancashire, where a few desperate Yorkists joined them. Then advancing inland, they met King Henry at Stoke, near Newark. But their ill-compacted army was routed, the Germans and Irish were cut to pieces, and Lincoln, Schwartz, and Fitzgerald all slain. Lovel escaped to his manor of Minster Lovel, in Oxfordshire, and lurked in a secret chamber, where he was starved to death in hiding. Lambert Simnel fell into the hands of the king, who treated him with contempt instead of slaying him. He lived many years after as a cook in the royal kitchen. The rebels in Ireland were pardoned on submission, for Henry was loth to stir up further troubles in that distressful country (1488).

Thinking perhaps to turn the attention of the nation from domestic troubles by the old expedient of a war with France, the king in the next year joined in a struggle which was raging in Brittany. Charles VIII., the son of Lewis XI., was trying to annex the duchy, whose heiress was a young girl, the Duchess Anne. Henry agreed to aid this ancient ally of England, and sent over troops Pg 275 both to Brittany and to Calais. The war went not unprosperously at first, and the garrison of Calais won a considerable victory at Dixmuide, in Flanders. But after a time the Bretons grew weary of the struggle, and the Duchess Anne surrendered herself to King Charles, and became his wife (1491). Thus the last of the great French feudal states was united to the crown. For the future the English could get no support from them, and as a consequence all English invasions of France in the ensuing age met with little good fortune. There was never again any chance of dismembering a divided France, such as that with which Edward III. and Henry V. had to deal. The king recognized his powerlessness, and gladly made peace with Charles VIII. on receiving a subsidy of 745,000 crowns, a better bargain than Edward IV. had made under similar circumstances at Picquigny (1492).

Henry was wise to make an early and profitable peace, for new troubles were brewing for him at home. News came from Ireland that a young man was secretly harboured at Cork, who gave himself out to be Richard of York, the younger of the two princes smothered in the Tower nine years before. When Henry ordered his arrest, he fled to Flanders and took refuge with Duchess Margaret, who at once recognized him as her true nephew, and gave him a royal reception and a safe refuge for two years. There is no doubt, however, that he was really Perkin Warbeck, the son of a citizen of Tournay, who had plunged very young into a life of adventure, and hoped to gain something by fishing in the troubled waters of English politics. By Margaret's help Perkin engaged in secret intrigues with the few Yorkists who yet survived in England. But King Henry traced out all his plots, and beheaded Lord Fitzwalter and Sir William Stanley, who had listened to his tempting. Stanley's case was a bad one: he had betrayed Richard III. at Bosworth—like his brother Lord Stanley—and had been lavishly rewarded by Henry VII., yet would not keep faithful to his new master because he was refused an earldom (1495).

Though his friends had been detected, the pretender persisted in venturing an attack on England. With 2000 men raised with money lent him by Duchess Margaret, he tried to land in Kent; but the Kentishmen rose and drove him off. He then sailed to Pg 276 Ireland, where—like his predecessor Lambert Simnel—he met with some support. But hearing that James IV. of Scotland was on the brink of war with the English, he soon passed over to the Scottish court, where he was received with royal state. James IV. married him to his cousin, Lady Catherine Gordon, and placed him at the head of an expedition with which he was to try and raise rebellion in Yorkshire, where the supporters of the house of York were still supposed to be numerous. But when Perkin crossed the Border, not an Englishman would join him, and he was obliged to return ignominiously to Scotland. From thence the restless adventurer soon set out on a new quest.

The heavy taxation which King Henry raised from his subjects to pay for an army to resist the Scots had provoked much murmuring in some parts of England. Most of all had it been resented in the remote shire of Cornwall, where the local discontent took the form of armed gatherings to resist the taxes. Flammock, a lawyer, and Michael Joseph, a farrier of Bodmin, two turbulent demagogues, put themselves at the head of the rioters, and persuaded them to march on London, there to expostulate with the king. Lord Audley, an unwise south-country baron, joined their company, and led them as far as Blackheath, close to the gates of London. From thence they sent the king messages, bidding him to dismiss his extortionate ministers, and remove his taxes. Henry was taken by surprise, as he had just sent off his army against the Scots, but he promptly recalled the expedition and gave battle to the Cornishmen. The fight of Blackheath ended in their complete discomfiture: Audley, Flammock, and Joseph were taken and executed, but the king let the rest go away unharmed, as mere deluded tools of their leaders (June, 1497).

Warbeck had heard of the rising of the Cornishmen, and thought that he discerned in it his best opportunity of making head against King Henry. He landed at Whitesand Bay, but found that he was too late, as the insurgents had already been defeated and scattered. But he rallied around him the wrecks of their bands, and made an attack on Exeter. Being foiled by the stout resistance of the citizens, and hearing that the king was coming against him with a great host, the pretender suddenly lost heart, left his men in the Pg 277 lurch, and fled away to take sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu (August, 1497).

King Henry showed extraordinary moderation in dealing with the insurgents: he fined Cornwall heavily, but ordered no executions. He promised Warbeck his life if he would leave his sanctuary, and when the impostor gave himself up, he was merely placed in honourable custody in the Tower. He was only made to publish the confession of his fraud, and to give a full account of his real life and adventures. Perkin might have lived to old age, like Lambert Simnel, if he had been content to keep quiet. But he made two attempts to escape from England, which roused the king's wrath. On the second occasion he persuaded another State prisoner, Edward of Clarence, the true heir of York, to fly with him; but they were detected, and the king, provoked at last, executed Warbeck, and made the unfortunate Prince Edward share his fate (1499). Perkin had merited his end, but it is impossible to pardon Henry's dealings with the unlucky heir of Clarence, who had been a prisoner ever since Richard III. sent him to the Tower sixteen years before. There is no doubt that Henry was glad of the excuse to lop off another branch from the stem of York. Noting this fact, the next heir of that line, Edmund de la Pole, brother of the Earl of Lincoln who fell at Stoke, wisely fled from England, lest his royal blood should be his ruin.

After Warbeck's failure, King Henry was for the future free from the danger of dynastic risings against the house of Tudor. He was able to develop his policy both at home and abroad without any further danger of insurrections. In domestic matters he strove very successfully to put an end to the turbulence which had been left behind from the times of the civil war. His chief weapon was legislation against "livery and maintenance," the evil custom by which a great lord gave his badge to his neighbours, and undertook to support them in their quarrels and lawsuits. This abuse of local influence was sternly suppressed, and no man, however great, was permitted to keep about him more than a limited number of liveried retainers. It is on record that Henry punished his oldest friend and supporter, the Earl of Oxford, for breaking this rule. On the occasion of a royal visit to his castle Pg 278 of Hedingham, Oxford received the king at the head of many hundreds of his followers, all clad in the de Vere livery, and was promptly made to pay a heavy fine for his ostentation.

Henry established a special tribunal for dealing with the offences of men, whose power and influence might foil and divert the ordinary course of justice. This was the new and unconstitutional "Court of Star Chamber," a committee of trusted members of the Privy Council, which met in a room at Westminster whose roof was decorated with a pattern of stars. The court was useful at the time, but grew to be a serious grievance in later days, because it stood over and above the ordinary law of the land, and was used to carry out any illegal punishment that the king might devise.

By these arbitrary means, Henry Tudor succeeded in taming the survivors of the baronage, and in reducing them to such a state of subjection to the crown as England had never before seen. Their spirit had already been broken by the endless slaughters and confiscations of the Wars of the Roses, and the majority of them were well content to surrender the anarchical independence which they had enjoyed of late, in return for a quiet and undisturbed security for life and land. It is to be noticed that many of the oldest and most powerful houses had now disappeared. By the year 1500 there only survived of the older and greater peerages those of Northumberland, Westmoreland, Arundel, Buckingham, Devon, and Oxford, to which may be added the duchy of Norfolk, afterwards restored to the Howards by Henry VIII. If we find other ancient titles borne by men of the Tudor time, we must remember that the holders were not the heirs of the lines whose names they bore, and did not possess the vast estates that had made those titles all-important. The Warwicks or Somersets, the Suffolks or Herefords of the sixteenth century are the mere creatures of Tudor caprice.

A few words are necessary to explain the tiresome and difficult subject of the foreign policy of Henry VII. We have seen that his venture of war with France in 1491 proved unfortunate, and he never repeated it. For the future he preferred to hoard money at home, rather than to lavish it on continental wars. But if he never fought again, he was always threatening to fight, winning what advantage he Pg 279 could by the menace of joining one or other of the parties which then divided Europe. The main troubles of continental politics in his period were caused by the restless ambition of the Kings of France. Freed from the lingering wars with England which had previously been their bane, the French monarchs had turned southward, and were striving to conquer Italy. Charles VIII. and Lewis XII., the two contemporaries of King Henry, spent all their energy in the attempt to annex the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan, to which they had some shadowy claim of succession. Their schemes called into the field the sovereigns whose position would have been imperilled by the French conquest of Italy—the Emperor, Maximilian of Austria, and Ferdinand and Isabella, the sovereigns of Aragon and Castile, whose marriage had created the united kingdom of Spain.

If the struggle had raged in Italy alone, Henry VII. might have viewed it with a philosophic indifference. But it also involved the Netherlands, the near neighbour of England, and the chief market for English trade. The Netherlands were at this moment in the hands of Philip of Austria, the son of the emperor, for Maximilian had married Mary of Burgundy, the heiress of the great dukes who had ruled in the Low Countries, and Philip was their only son. [29] Henry wished to keep on good terms with his neighbours in Flanders, more especially because it was there that the Yorkist refugees found shelter. Not only had the dowager Duchess Margaret aided them from thence, but Maximilian, while acting as regent in the Netherlands for his young son Philip, had given Perkin Warbeck much assistance.

Henry's policy was rendered difficult by the incurable perverseness of the emperor and his son, the Duke Philip, but he managed to keep out of war with them, and even obtained from them the "Great Intercourse," a commercial treaty with the Low Countries which was of much use to England, as it provided for the free entry of English goods into Flanders, and of Flemish goods into England, and stipulated that the king and the duke should join together to put down piracy in the Narrow Seas. Some years later Henry was enabled to wring some further advantages out of Duke Philip, in a not very honourable way. The duke was Pg 280 sailing to Spain, when his ship was driven into Weymouth by a storm. The king made him welcome and entertained him royally, but would not suffer him to depart till he had promised to surrender the Yorkist refugee, Edmund de la Pole, [30] who was then staying in Flanders, and to still further extend the terms of the "Great Intercourse" to the benefit of English merchants (1506).

With Ferdinand of Aragon, the astute and unscrupulous King of Spain, Henry was able to get on better terms than with his capricious neighbour in Flanders, since both were guided purely by self-interest. The two wily kings understood and respected each other, and resolved to ally themselves by a marriage. Accordingly Arthur, Prince of Wales, Henry's eldest son, was wedded to Catherine, the younger daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. They were both mere children, and the prince died before he had reached the age of seventeen. But Ferdinand resolved that the alliance should not drop through, and the Princess Catherine was passed on to Henry, Arthur's younger brother and successor in the title of Prince of Wales. He was some years younger than his bride, and the marriage, as we shall presently see, was a most unhappy one. With his son's wife the English king received a large but unpunctually paid dowry.

King Henry's long diplomatic intrigues with Spain and the Emperor brought him no very great profit in the end. But it was otherwise with his dealings with his neighbours in the British Isles. After the defeat of Perkin Warbeck, he made an advantageous peace with James IV. of Scotland, who married his daughter Margaret, and became his firm ally. For the last ten years of his reign Scotland gave no trouble. The still more difficult task of pacifying Ireland was also carried out with considerable success. Henry dealt very gently with the Irish chiefs, in spite of the treasonable support that they had given both to Simnel and to Warbeck. His plan of ruling the country was to enlist in his favour the Earl of Kildare, the most powerful of the Irish barons, by making him Lord Deputy, and entrusting him with very full control over the rest. "All Ireland cannot rule the Earl of Pg 281 Kildare," it had been said; but the king answered, "Then the Earl of Kildare shall rule all Ireland."

This policy was attended by a fair measure of success; if turbulent himself, the earl at least put down all other riotous chiefs. Henry's reign was also notable in Ireland for the passing of Poynings' Act at the Parliament of Drogheda. This put the Irish legislature in strict subordination to England, by providing that all laws brought before it must previously receive the assent of the king and his English Privy Council (1495).

Henry Tudor died before his time in 1509, having not yet reached the age of fifty-four. He left behind him a land peaceful and orderly, a nobility tamed and reduced to obedience, and a treasury filled with £1,800,000 in hard cash—the best possible witness to his wisdom and ability, for no king of England had ever built up such a hoard before. If his aims had been selfish and his hand hard, he had at any rate given England "strong governance," and saved her from sinking into anarchy.

Pg 282

The young king who succeeded to the cautious and politic Henry VII. was perhaps the most remarkable man who ever sat upon the English throne. He guided England through the epoch of change and unrest which lay between the middle ages and modern history, and his guidance was of such a peculiar and personal stamp that he left an indelible mark on the land for many succeeding generations. All Europe was transformed during his time, and that the transformation in England differed from that on the continent in almost every respect, was due to his own strange combination of qualities.

Henry's character was a very complex one, mingling qualities good and bad in strange confusion. In many things he showed the traits of his grandfather Edward IV., his selfishness, his love of display, his sensuality, his outbursts of ruthless cruelty. But Edward had been nothing more than a soldier and a man of pleasure; he had no love of work, no power to read the character of others. Henry VIII. was a student, a statesman, a deep plotter, a keen observer of other men. He chose his servants—or rather his tools—with a clear-headed sagacity which no king ever surpassed, and he could break them or fling them away when they became useless, with a coolness that was all his own. Love of power, love of work, love of pleasure, love of show and pomp, did not distract him the one from the other, but blended closely together into one complex impulse—the determination to have his own will in all things. Such a state of mind bespeaks the tyrant, and a tyrant Henry became; but a tyrant whose brain was as strong as his Pg 283 will—who knew the possible from the impossible, who could discern how far it was safe to go, and could check himself on the edge of any dangerous precipice of foreign or internal politics. He kept, as it were, a finger on the nation's pulse, and could restrain himself for a space if ever it began to beat too excitably. He did his best to court popularity with the English by an affable bearing and a regard for their prejudices. He strove to make them look on him as the nation's representative, and to flatter them into believing that his resolves were really in accordance with their own will and interests. He represented to them not only law and order, but national feeling and national pride. It was this clever acting that made it possible for him to manipulate England according to his wishes. He appeared to take the people into his confidence, and they replied by believing his statements even when they were most unfounded and misleading. Thus it was that Henry was able to rule despotically for forty years without having a serious quarrel with his Parliament, and without being compelled to raise a standing army—the tool which all contemporary despots were forced to employ.

Henry VIII. was very young when he came to the throne—he had only reached the age of eighteen. His character was still undeveloped, though he was known to be both clever and active. All that the nation knew of him was that he was a bright, handsome youth, fond of horse and hound, but equally fond of his books and his lute. He had from the first an eye for popularity, and did all that he could to please the people by shows and pageants that forced him to dip deeply into his father's hoarded money.

Yet the first act of Henry's reign was ominous of future cruelty and ruthlessness. Knowing the unpopularity of his father's harsh and extortionate but faithful servants, Empson and Dudley, he cast them into prison, and had them attainted by Parliament on a preposterous charge of treason. They were well hated, and the people saw their heads fall with joy, not reflecting on the character of a king who could deliberately slay his father's councillors merely to win popular applause.

Henry retained most of his father's old ministers in office, but he instantly reversed his father's policy of non-intervention in the Pg 284 wars of the continent. He had not long been seated on the throne when he joined the "Holy League," a confederacy formed against France by Pope Julius II., in which both those old intriguers, the Emperor Maximilian and King Ferdinand of Aragon, were already enlisted (1511). Henry might have left them to fight their own battles for the mastery of Italy and Flanders, but he was burning to assert his power in Europe and to win military distinction. His arms were fairly fortunate. A first attack on the south of France failed, but he met with considerable success in 1513, when he landed at Calais with 25,000 men, took the towns of Tournay and Térouanne, and routed the French army of the North at an engagement called "the Battle of the Spurs," from the haste with which the French knights urged their horses out of the fray. Finding his armies losing ground both in Italy and in Flanders, King Lewis XII. sought peace from Henry, and obtained it at the cheap price of paying 100,000 crowns, and marrying the Princess Mary, the young English monarch's favourite sister (1514). These easy terms were granted because Henry found that his two wily allies, Ferdinand and Maximilian, had no intention of helping him, and were bent purely on their own aggrandisement. The alliance with Lewis was not to have much duration, for within a year he was dead—killed, as the chroniclers assert, by the late hours and high living which his gay young English queen persuaded him to adopt. His widow soon dried her tears, and married Sir Charles Brandon, one of her brother's favourite companions, whom Henry, to grace the match, decorated with the ill-omened title of Duke of Suffolk, the spoil of the unhappy de la Poles. From this union sprang one who was to sit for a brief moment on the English throne. [31]

Ere the French treaty had been made, a short stirring episode of war had taken place on England's northern frontier. King James IV. of Scotland had certain border feuds to settle with the English, and thought he might best take his revenge while Henry and his army were over-seas in Flanders. So he suddenly declared war, and crossed the Tweed into Northumberland.

Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, son of John of Norfolk, who Pg 285 fell at Bosworth, was in charge of the Border at the time. He raised the levies of the northern counties, and marched to meet the Scots. By throwing himself between King James and his retreat on Scotland, he forced the enemy to fight. On Flodden Field, between the Till and the Tweed, the armies met and fought a fierce and doubtful battle which lasted far into the night. Though victorious on one wing, the Scots were beaten in the centre, and their king and most of his nobles fell in a desperate struggle around the royal banner. In the darkness the survivors of the struggle dispersed and fled home. The death of their warlike sovereign, and the slaughter which had thinned their fighting men, kept the Scots quiet for many a day. During the long and troublous minority of James V. King Henry need fear no danger from the north. As a reward for his victory, Surrey was restored to his father's dukedom of Norfolk (1513).

In these early years of his reign, King Henry had already taken as his chief minister the able statesman who was for twenty years to be the second personage in England. Thomas Wolsey, Dean of Lincoln, was the son of a butcher of Ipswich, who had sought advancement in the Church, the easiest career for an able man of low birth. He had served Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, one of Henry VII.'s chief advisers, and from his service passed into that of the king. He was an active, untiring man, with a great talent for work and organization of all sorts. Henry made him Bishop of Tournay, then Archbishop of York, and finally Chancellor. In this capacity he served for no less than fourteen years, and was the chosen instrument of all his master's schemes. His dignity was increased when, in 1515, the Pope made him a cardinal, and afterwards appointed him his legate in England—an office which seemed to trench over-much on the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury as head and primate of the English Church.

It suited King Henry to have a minister who could relieve him of much of the toil and drudgery of government, who did not fear responsibility, and who was entirely dependent on his master. As long as he was well served, and granted plenty of spare time for his pleasures and enjoyments, he allowed Wolsey a very free hand. The cardinal's head was somewhat turned by his elevation, and he indulged in a pomp and state such as Pg 286 almost befitted a king, never moving about without a sumptuous train of attendants. This arrogance made him much disliked, especially by the old nobility; but the king tolerated it with all the more ease because he preferred that his minister should be less popular than himself. It was always convenient to have some one on whom the blame of royal failures might be laid, and Wolsey, with his ostentation of power and pride, made an admirable shield for his master. Henry allowed him, therefore, the prominence in which his soul delighted, gave him his way in things indifferent, but was ready to check him sharply when he began to develop any tendency to act contrary to his own royal will.

In the earlier days of Wolsey's ministry, the face of Europe was profoundly changed by the deaths of the three old monarchs who had been the contemporaries of Henry VII. Lewis XII. of France died in 1515, Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516, the Emperor Maximilian in 1519. The successors of these old diplomatists were two young men, each slightly junior to the young King of England. In France the reckless and warlike Francis I. succeeded his cousin Lewis XII. In Spain and in the dominions of the house of Hapsburg, Ferdinand and Maximilian were followed by their grandson, Charles V., the child of the emperor's son and the king's daughter. Charles, being already King of Spain, Duke of Burgundy, and Archduke of Austria, was elected Emperor by the Germans in succession to his grandfather Maximilian.

THE KIN OF CHARLES V.

Now Francis of France and Charles of Austria were rivals from their youth, and their rivalry was the main source of trouble in European politics for a whole generation. England had to choose between them when she sought an ally, but Henry found it by no means easy to make up his mind. France was his hereditary enemy, but, on the other hand, Charles, by uniting Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria, and acquiring in addition the position of Emperor, had built up such a vast power that he overshadowed Europe, and seemed dangerous by reason of his over-great dominions and wealth.

Henry and Wolsey, therefore, fell back on the idea that a balance of power in Europe was the best thing for England. It would be a misfortune if either Francis I. or Charles V. should grow so powerful as to dominate the whole continent. England accordingly would do well to see that Pg 288 neither obtained complete success, and to make a rule of helping the weaker party from time to time. For the next ten years, therefore, Henry was always trimming the scales, and transferring his weight from one side to the other. Such a policy made him much courted by both parties, and won him much flattery, and an occasional subsidy or treaty of commerce. But, on the other hand, it prevented either Francis or Charles from looking upon him as a trustworthy ally, or dealing fairly with him in the hours of their success. For they argued that there was no object in serving a friend who might turn into an enemy at the shortest notice. Thus Henry and Wolsey, with all their astuteness, got no profit for England or for themselves, for they were never trusted, and promises made to them in the hour when their help was needed were never fulfilled when their aid was no longer necessary. There was something false, insincere, and degrading in this trimming policy. It is disgusting to read how Henry greeted his neighbour Francis in 1520 at the celebrated "Field of the Cloth of Gold" near Calais, with all manner of pomp and pageantry, and profuse protestations of brotherly love, and then within a month had met Charles at Gravelines, and concluded a secret treaty of alliance with him against the friend whose kiss was yet upon his cheek.

From all the negotiations and fighting which accompanied the changes of English policy, only one definite result was reached—England was beginning to grow poorer and more discontented. The hoarded treasure of Henry VII. had long been exhausted, and the taxation which his son was compelled to levy was growing more and more heavy. Henry had fallen into the evil habit of dispensing with parliamentary grants; from 1515 to 1523, and again in 1527 and 1528, he never summoned the two Houses to assemble. The money which he ought to have asked from them, he raised by the illegal devices of "benevolences" and forced loans. Wolsey got the credit of advising this tyrannous extortion, and gained no small hatred thereby, but his master was in truth far more responsible for it than he.

The cardinal, however, bore the blame, and it was said that all the chaotic changes in England's policy were inspired by Wolsey's desire to attain the position of Pope, by the aid of whichever of the two powers of France and Austria had the Pg 289 advantage for the moment. There is no doubt that there was some truth in the charge; the cardinal's ambition was overweening, and he would gladly have become Pope, because he had conceived great schemes of Church reform which the possession of the papacy alone would have enabled him to carry out. It is certain that Charles V. twice deluded Wolsey into aiding him, by the tempting bait of the papal tiara. But on each occasion the Emperor used his influence at Rome to get some surer partisan elected.

Wolsey's scheme of reforming the Church was no doubt suggested to him by the discontent against the clergy which was at this moment beginning to break out all over Europe. Since the days of Wicliffe, religious matters had not been taking any very prominent place in English politics, but a storm was now at hand far more terrible than that which had swept over the land in the days of the Lollards. The condition of the church of Western Christendom had become more and more deplorable of late. The worst example was set at head-quarters: bad as the Popes of the fourteenth century had been, those who were contemporary with the Tudors were far worse. Rome had seen in succession three scandalous Popes, the first of whom—Alexander VI., the celebrated Rodrigo Borgia—was a monster of depravity, a murderer given up to the practice of the foulest vices; the second—Julius II.—was a mere secular statesman with no piety, but a decided talent both for intrigue and for hard fighting; the third—Leo X.—was a cultured atheist, of artistic tastes, who used to tell his friends that "Christianity was a profitable superstition for Popes." Under such pontiffs all the abuses of the mediaeval Church came to a head. Ill living, corruption, open impiety, reckless interference in secular politics, non-residence, neglect of all spiritual duties, greed for money, were more openly practised by the clergy than in any previous age. Even the better sort of ecclesiastics could see no harm in obvious abuses;—Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, a man of great virtue, absented himself for twenty years from his see. Wolsey held three sees at once, and never went near any of them.

The lamentable state of the Church would have provoked murmuring in any age, but in the sixteenth century it led to open rebellion in all those countries of Europe which still retained Pg 290 some regard for religion and morals. The revival of arts and letters, which men call the Renaissance, was now at its height, and Europe was for the first time full of educated laymen who could criticize the Church from outside, and compare its teaching with its practice. The multiplication of books, owing to the discovery of printing, had placed the means of knowledge in every man's hands, and the revived study of Hebrew and Greek was setting the learned to read the Scriptures in their original tongues. All the elements of a violent outbreak against the papacy, its superstitions and its enormities, were ready to combine.

In 1517 a German friar, Martin Luther, had first given voice to the universal discontent, by opposing the immoral practice of selling "indulgences," or papal letters remitting penances for sins, in return for money. He had followed this up by preaching against many other papal abuses, and, when Leo X. replied by excommunicating him, he began to attack the whole system of the mediaeval Church—inveighing against the Pope's spiritual supremacy, the invocation of saints, the celibacy of the clergy, the adoption of the monastic life, and many other matters. He was supported by his prince, Frederick, Elector of Saxony, and a great part of Germany at once declared in his favour (1517-21).

England was not at first very much affected by the revolt of Germany against the papacy. The English Church was far less corrupt than those of France or Italy, and though full of abuses, was not really unpopular with the nation. It still retained much of the old national spirit, and was not the mere slave of the Pope. Neither king nor people showed any signs of following the lead of the Germans. Henry wrote a book to prove Luther's views heretical, and received in return from Leo X. the title of Defender of the Faith, which English sovereigns still display on their coinage. Wolsey devoted himself to practical reforms, leaving doctrine alone. His first measure was to suppress many small and decayed monasteries, and to build with their plunder his great foundation of Cardinal's College, afterwards known as Christ Church, in the University of Oxford.

It was not till about 1527 that England began to be drawn into the struggle which was convulsing all continental Europe, Pg 291 and then the cause of quarrel came from the king's private affairs, and not from any doctrinal dispute. It will be remembered that Henry had been affianced by his father to Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his brother, Arthur Prince of Wales. Marriage with a deceased brother's wife being illegal, a papal dispensation had been procured to remove the bar, and Henry had married Catherine on his accession, so that he could not plead compulsion on the part of his father. The marriage was not a wise one, for the queen, though a very gentle and virtuous woman, was six years older than her husband, had no personal attractions, and was delicate in health. All the children whom she bore to Henry died in infancy—except one, the Princess Mary. By 1527 Catherine was a confirmed invalid, and showed all the signs of premature old age, though she was only forty-two.

Now Henry VIII. was morbidly anxious for a son to succeed him; he was the only surviving male of the house of Tudor, and could not bear the thought of leaving the throne to a sickly girl. It was obvious that Catherine would bear him no more children, and, regardless of the duty and respect that he owed to her, he began to think of obtaining a divorce, and marrying a younger wife. His project took a definite shape when his eye was caught by the beautiful Anne Boleyn, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk, and one of the maids of honour. Becoming desperately enamoured of her, he resolved to press for a divorce at once. Wolsey, who saw that the kingdom needed a male heir, undertook to procure the Pope's consent to the repudiation of Catherine.

But this task proved more difficult than he had expected. Popes were generally indulgent enough to kings who would pay handsomely for their heart's desire. But the reigning pontiff, Clement VII., was in an unhappy position: he was completely at the mercy of the Emperor Charles V., whose troops had lately taken and sacked Rome. Charles was resolved that his aunt Catherine should not be divorced, and Pope Clement was mortally afraid of offending him. Instead, therefore, of granting the demand of Henry VIII., he temporized, and appointed two cardinals, Wolsey himself and Campeggio, the Italian bishop of Salisbury, to investigate the question. Henry and Wolsey hoped to force on Pg 292 a prompt decision: but Campeggio deliberately hung back, and the Pope finally recalled him, and summoned the king to send his case to be tried at Rome (1528). Henry wrongly thought that this check was due to some bungling or reluctance on the part of Wolsey, not seeing that the Pope's fears of the Emperor were the real cause.

He at once withdrew his support from the great minister, though Wolsey needed it more at this moment than ever before, for he was in great disfavour with the nation, both for his arrogance and for the heavy taxation which he had imposed on the land. He had actually demanded from Parliament the unprecedented tax of 4s. in the pound on all men's lands and incomes, and, though the House plucked up courage to resist this extortionate claim, had obtained as much as 2s. In 1529 the cardinal, fearing to meet another Parliament, had recourse to the old device of benevolences, on a larger scale than ever. This led to rioting and open resistance. Then the king, to the surprise of all men, suddenly declared that Wolsey's action was taken without his knowledge and consent, and dismissed him from the office of Chancellor, which he had held since 1515.

His place as the king's chief counsellor fell to the Duke of Norfolk, the uncle of Anne Boleyn. The king immediately proceeded to treat the cardinal with great ingratitude. Wolsey's harsh deeds had always been wrought for his master's benefit rather than his own, but Henry chose to ignore this fact, and to win a cheap popularity by persecuting his old and faithful servant. Probably Anne Boleyn and her uncle Norfolk, exasperated by the delay in the king's divorce, stirred up Henry to the attack. The cardinal was impeached for having accepted the title of legate from Rome, without the king's formal leave, many years before. Henry had made no objection at the time, and it was pure hypocrisy to pretend indignation now. But Wolsey was declared to have incurred penalties under the Statute of Praemunire, which forbad dealings with Rome conducted without royal leave. He was condemned, deprived of all his enormous personal property, and sent away from court, to live in his archbishopric of York. A year later Henry again commenced to molest him, and he was on his way to London, to answer a preposterous charge of treason, Pg 293 when he died at Leicester, as much of a broken heart as of any disease. He had been arrogant and harsh in his day of power, but had served his master so faithfully that nothing can excuse Henry's ingratitude. Unfortunately for England, he had taught the king the dangerous lesson that he could go very far in the direction of absolute and tyrannical government, and escape from the consequent unpopularity by throwing over his ministers. Henry used this knowledge to the full during the rest of his reign.

Meanwhile Wolsey's disgrace, and the complete failure of the attempt to win a divorce from the Pope, had been leading the king into new paths. He had taken to himself two new councillors. In secular matters he gave his confidence to Thomas Cromwell, a clever, low-born adventurer, whom Wolsey had discovered and brought to court. In matters religious he was beginning to listen to his chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, a man with a curious mixture of piety and weakness, one of the few Englishmen who had as yet been touched by the doctrines of the Continental Reformers. It was not, however, as a Reformer that Cranmer commended himself to his master; indeed, he kept his Lutheran opinions very secret. But he had suggested to the king a new method of dealing with the divorce question, which Henry considered not unpromising. It might be urged that marriage with a deceased brother's wife was so strictly and definitely forbidden in the Scriptures, that the Pope had no authority to sanction it, and so the permissory bull of Julius II. might be scouted as so much waste paper. Henry eagerly swallowed the idea, and sent round the question, stated as a moot point, to all the universities of Europe. About half of them answered, as he wished, that the marriage was illegal from the first. Armed with this authority, he resolved to go further.

But first Henry was resolved to show the English clergy that he was determined to stand no opposition from them on this point. He opened a campaign against all manner of Church abuses, with the object of winning for himself popularity with the nation, by the cheap expedient of a pretended zeal for purity and piety. He told the Convocation of the clergy that they had all made themselves liable to the penalties of Praemunire, for recognizing Wolsey as legate without the royal leave. They only got pardon by voting the king the Pg 294 large fine of £118,000. He also caused Convocation to address him as "Supreme Head, as far as the law of Christ will allow, of the English Church and clergy," thus casting a slur on the Pope's universal authority. Convocation was also forced to submit to an Act of Parliament which swept away two ancient abuses, the right to claim "benefit of clergy" when accused of felony, and so to escape the king's justice, and the power of evading the Statute of Mortmain, by receiving legacies under trust instead of in full proprietorship. The Pope still proving recalcitrant in the matter of the divorce, Henry took the further step of threatening to cut off the main contribution which England sent to Rome—the annates or first-fruits, paid by all benefices when they changed hands.

This menace did not bring Clement VII. to reason, and Henry at last took the step which involved a fatal breach with Rome. He appointed the pliant Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury, and bade him try the question of the divorce in an English ecclesiastical court, without any further application to Rome. Queen Catherine refused to appear before such a tribunal, and formally appealed to the Pope's justice. But Cranmer proceeded with the trial, declared the marriage contrary to the law of God, and pronounced the king free from all his ties and able to wed again. Even before the decision was announced, Henry had secretly married Anne Boleyn (January, 1533), and the moment that the court had given judgment he presented her to the nation as Queen of England. The unhappy Catherine retired into privacy at Kimbolton, where she survived nearly three years.

The Pope at once declared the new marriage illegal, and threatened Henry with an excommunication. Many good men were scandalized to see the king repudiate a wife who had lived as his faithful spouse for twenty years. Murmurings and prophecies of ill filled the air, and Henry felt that trouble was brewing. But he only hardened his heart, and caused Parliament to pass a bill for cutting short the Pope's spiritual authority over England, unless he should acknowledge the validity of the new marriage within three months. Clement refused to be bullied into compliance, and the rupture came (1533).

Queen Anne soon bore the king a daughter, the famous Queen Pg 295 Elizabeth, and Henry then ordered all his subjects to take an oath repudiating all obedience to papal orders, and acknowledging the child as rightful heiress of the realm, to the prejudice of his elder daughter Mary. This oath many persons refused to take, since it openly disavowed the Pope's authority over the English Church. The chief of them were Sir Thomas More, a learned and virtuous statesman who had succeeded Wolsey as Chancellor, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Henry cast them into prison, and soon after caused Parliament to pass the "Act of Supremacy," which declared him "Supreme Head of the Church of England," and pronounced any one who denied him this title guilty of high treason. Under this ferocious edict More and Fisher were beheaded, and many other minor personages suffered with them.

Pope Paul III., who had just succeeded to Pope Clement's tiara, now caused a Bull to be drawn up against his enemy (Dec. 15, 1535). He not only pronounced King Henry an excommunicated person, but declared him to be deposed from his throne. It was now war to the knife between the king and the papacy, and the rest of Henry's reign was to be taken up with the struggle. During the twelve years that he had still to live, he spent all his energies in severing every link that still bound England to Rome.

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The breach between England and Rome had become irreparable when Henry executed More and Fisher, and when Pope Paul had declared the king deposed. The Church of England had now seceded from the Roman obedience, and organized herself as an independent body with the sovereign as her Supreme Head. The secession had been carried out entirely on the king's initiative, but the nation had acquiesced in it because of the old and long-felt abuses of which the papacy had always been the maintainer. King and people alike wished to make an end of the customs by which the Pope had profited,—his vast gains from the annates of English sees and benefices; his habit of appointing non-resident Italians to the richest English preferments; his power of summoning litigants on ecclesiastical matters before the distant, costly, and corrupt Church courts at Rome. It was generally thought that when England freed herself from the Roman obedience, she would be able to reform in peace all the faults and abuses which disfigured her ecclesiastical system. Further than this the majority of the nation did not at first wish to go; they had not ceased to be Catholics, though they were no longer Roman Catholics. Only a comparatively small section of the English people had yet been affected by the later developments of Continental Protestantism.

But the conditions of the English and the Germans at the moment when both threw off the yoke of Rome, were sufficiently similar to make it inevitable that the theories of the Continental Reformers would ere long begin to act upon English minds. The German protest against the papacy Pg 297 had taken shape in the declaration that the Bible alone was the rule by which Christian men should order their lives—that the tradition of the mediaeval Church, which supplemented the teaching of the Gospels, was dangerous, full of errors and superstitions, and often directly opposed to scriptural precept. Mediaeval traditions were the bulwark of the Roman see, and ere long we find King Henry and his bishops following the Germans into this position, and basing the reform of the English Church on the Bible, and the Bible alone. But when tradition was rejected and the Scriptures taken as the sole test of all doctrines, further development became inevitable. There soon arose Reformers in England, as on the Continent, who could not find in their Bibles any justification for some of the doctrines to which King Henry clung most obstinately, and most of all for the dogma of Transubstantiation, round which the Roman Church had built up its main claim to rule the souls of men.

This doctrine concerning "the Sacrifice of the Mass," as commonly held at this time in the Western Church, taught that, at the celebration of the Holy Communion, when the priest had consecrated the sacramental bread and wine, the very flesh and blood of Christ became carnally and corporeally present in the chalice and patten—that the bread and wine were no longer bread and wine, but had been transubstantiated into Christ's own body, which was day by day offered up in sacrifice for the sins of the world. The Pope and the priesthood, by their power of granting or refusing the sacrament to the laity, stood as the sole mediators between God and man. The Continental Protestants, cut off from the main body of the Western Church by the Pope's ban, had formulated theories which struck at the roots of the power of the clergy. Many of them treated the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as no more than a solemn ceremony, denying any sacramental character to the rite. The majority of the early English Protestants fell into this extreme view.

Now Henry VIII. to the end of his days stood firm to the mediaeval doctrine of the sacrament, and fully accepted Transubstantiation, though he denied the deduction which the Roman Church had drawn from it—that by it the Pope and clergy are the despotic masters of the souls of men. He merely desired to place himself in the position Pg 298 which the Pope had hitherto held, as head of the spiritual hierarchy of England. With the pliant Cranmer and other bishops of his own to serve him, he wished to become as despotic a sovereign over the souls of Englishmen as he already was over their bodies. To a great extent he succeeded, and for the last twelve years of his reign he exercised a hateful spiritual tyranny over his subjects, drawing a hard-and-fast line of submission to his own views, which no man was allowed to overstep in either direction. Roman Catholics who denied his power to supersede the Pope's authority were hung as traitors. Protestants who refused to accept his theory of the Sacraments were burnt as heretics.

The turning-point of Henry's reign was the turbulent and boisterous year 1536-7. In pursuance of his plan of a campaign against the papacy, disguised under the shape of a reform of abuses, Henry had resolved to attack the monasteries. The monks had long been an unpopular class: the impulse towards monasticism, which had been so vigorous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had long died away, and ever since the time of Wicliffe men had been asking each other what was the use of the monasteries? There were no less than 619 of them in England. They were enormously wealthy, and they did little to justify their existence; they had long ceased to be centres of learning or of teaching. Beyond going through their daily round of mechanical Church services, their inmates did absolutely nothing. Their wealth had led to much luxury, both of splendid building and of high living. To this day the traveller who measures the ruins of enormous and sumptuous abbeys planted in the wilderness—like Tintern or Fountains—and learns that they served no public or spiritual end save the sheltering of a few dozen monks, wonders at the magnificence of the husk which contained so small and withered a kernel. But the monasteries were worse than useless—they were absolutely harmful; their worst habit was to acquire rich country livings, draw all the tithes from them, and work them with a vicar on starvation wages. If we see a poor living in modern England, we generally find that the monks sucked the marrow out of it in the Middle Ages, to rear their colossal chapels and their magnificent refectories. It was the monasteries, too, which by their indiscriminate doles and charities, reared and fostered the horde of Pg 299 itinerant beggars who, under the name of pilgrims, tramped from abbey to abbey all the year round. Worse than this, there is no doubt that a considerable amount of evil living prevailed in some of the monasteries. Before the Reformation had been heard of, we find Archbishop Warham and Cardinal Wolsey storming at the immorality of certain religious houses. It was but natural that idleness, luxury, and high living should breed such results among the grosser souls in the monastic corporations. In public esteem the better houses suffered for the sins of the worse.

The monks had always been the faithful allies of the Popes, and Henry determined to suppress this "papal militia," as they have been called, and at the same time to fill his pockets from their plunder. Accordingly, he sent commissioners round England, to report on the state of the religious houses. These officials—as the king had wished—drew up a very gloomy report. They declared that they found nothing but idleness and corruption among the smaller monasteries, and that many of the greater were no better. There can be no doubt that they grossly exaggerated the blackness of the picture, knowing that the king would welcome all possible justification for the action which he was meditating. But it is equally certain that in most parts of England the monks were deservedly unpopular, and that the commissioners' report only reflected the nation's belief.

Henry laid the report before his Parliament, and at his suggestion an act was passed suppressing the lesser monasteries—all such as had an income of less than £200 per annum. Their goods were confiscated to the Crown, but an allowance was made to such of the monks as did not find places in the surviving monasteries of the larger sort (1536).

The year of the dissolution of small monasteries was notable for a tragedy in the palace, which shows Henry's unlovely character at its worst. He had been growing cold to the fair and ambitious queen who had brought on him his quarrel with Rome. She had disappointed his hope of a male heir—only the Princess Elizabeth had sprung from the marriage. Henry had tired of her voluptuous airs and graces, and was beginning to feel vexed at the want of dignity and decorum which she displayed among his courtiers. Anne's Pg 300 light words and unseemly familiarity with many of the gentlemen of his household roused his anger. But what was most fatal to the unfortunate queen was that his eye had caught another face about the court, which now seemed to him more attractive than his wife's.

Suddenly and unexpectedly the storm burst. On May 2, 1536, the king sent Anne to the Tower, and charged her with misconduct with several members of his household. Protesting her innocence and amazement to the last, the unhappy young wife was tried, condemned, and executed, within a space of less than three weeks from her arrest. Her own father and uncle sat on the bench of peers which declared her an adulteress; but the fact witnesses to their shame and cowardice rather than to her criminality. In all probability she was guilty of nothing more than unwise levity; her real crime was not adultery, but standing in the way of Henry's lawless desires. With the most unseemly haste, the king wedded Jane Seymour, the lady who had already attracted his notice, the moment that his wretched second wife had breathed her last.

But he had small leisure to spend on his wedding, for the year 1536 was one of great peril to him. A rebellion in Ireland, led by the Fitzgeralds, the greatest of the Anglo-Irish nobles, was already in progress. A still more dangerous phenomenon was the stir which was arising in the North of England. The Northern counties were always a generation behind the rest of England in their politics. There the monks were more powerful and less disliked than in any other part of the land, and the nobles still retained much of their old feudal power over their vassals, and some of their old turbulence. The North had beheld the breach with Rome with dismay and dislike, and remained strongly Papist in its sympathies. The dissolution of the monasteries moved it to an active protest against the king's religious action.

Rioting suddenly broke out in Lincolnshire, and then in Yorkshire. The insurgents gathered in great bands, and at last no less than 30,000 men mustered at Doncaster, under Robert Aske, a lawyer, and Lord Darcy. They called themselves the army of the Church, raised a banner displaying the five wounds of Christ as their standard, Pg 301 and demanded a reconciliation with the Pope, the restoration of the religious houses, and the dismissal of the king's impious minister Cromwell, and the "heretic bishops" who had favoured the breach with Rome. The gentry of the North and the priors and abbots of the great abbeys of Yorkshire joined the rising, which men called "the Pilgrimage of Grace," because the rebels wished to go to meet the king, and to submit their demands to his personal judgment. Henry was caught unprepared, but he managed to extricate himself from the peril by his unscrupulous double-dealing. He sent the Duke of Norfolk, whose dislike of Protestantism was well known, to treat with the rebels. Norfolk pledged his word that the king would pardon the insurgents, and take all their demands into favourable consideration. The simple Northerners dispersed, trusting to Henry's good faith; but the king employed the time he had gained in raising an army, and getting together a great train of artillery. He then marched into Yorkshire as an invader, and made no further pretence of listening to the claims of the insurgents. In consequence, the more vehement of the partisans of the old faith again took arms. This was as Henry desired, for he wanted an excuse to terrorize the North. He easily put down the second rising, and hung all the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace: Aske, Lord Darcy, Lord Hussey, and the abbots of all the greatest monastic establishments of the North—Whalley, Fountains, Jervaulx, Barlings, and Sawley (March-May, 1537).

This fearful blow cowed most of the partisans of the papacy, and no more open revolts followed. But a little later the last representatives of the house of York were detected in paths which the king suspected to be treasonable. They thought, it seems, that the indignation of the Catholics against the king's doings might be turned into a dynastic revolution in favour of the old royal line. Edward Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, a grandson of Edward IV., and Henry Pole, Lord Montagu, a grandson of George of Clarence, were the persons implicated in this intrigue, which never got beyond the stage of treasonable talk. Nevertheless, the king beheaded them both, though the evidence against them was most imperfect; but Henry never stayed his hand for want of legal proof, and slew all whom he suspected. He even Pg 302 imprisoned, and some years afterwards executed, the aged mother of Lord Montagu—Margaret of Clarence, Countess of Salisbury, sister of the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, whom his father had slain forty-one years back.

The insurrection in Ireland, which had been raging at the same time as the Pilgrimage of Grace, ended in a way no less profitable to the king. Not only did he capture and hang well-nigh the whole family of the Fitzgeralds of Kildare, the heads of the rising, but his armies, under Lord-Deputy Grey, pushed out from the English Pale, and compelled most of the chiefs of Munster and Connaught to do homage to the Crown, though the king's writ had not run in those provinces for two centuries. This was the first step towards the conquest of Ireland afterwards carried out by Queen Elizabeth.

Meanwhile Henry's determination to strike at all the roots of papal power in England, had been carrying him further than he himself realized on the road towards Protestantism. The "Articles of 1536," drawn up by his own hand, declared that all doctrines and ceremonies for which authority could not be found in the Bible, were superstitious and erroneous. As a logical consequence of this declaration, the Bible itself, translated into English, was issued to the people by royal order in 1538, and ordered to be placed in every church. The translation used was that made by a zealous Protestant, William Tyndale, who had printed it in Antwerp some years before; the unfortunate translator had been caught and burnt by the Emperor Charles V., only a short time before his book became the rule of life for Englishmen.

When the Bible had once been placed in the hands of the people, Protestantism in England began to advance by leaps and bounds. It was secretly favoured both by Archbishop Cranmer and by the king's great minister Cromwell. The latter, more logical than his master, wished to see all traces of Roman Catholicism removed from England, and tried to guide the king towards a frank recognition of Protestantism, and an alliance with the Lutheran princes of Germany. But it was dangerous work to endeavour to govern or persuade Henry, as Cromwell was to find to his cost. One more step at least he did induce his master to take—the Pg 303 final destruction of all the remaining monasteries. The plunder of the lesser houses had been so profitable, that Henry was easily induced to doom the greater to the same fate. In the course of 1538-9-40 all were swept away; in many cases, the abbots and monks were induced to surrender their estates peaceably into the king's hands, in return for pensions or promotion. But where persuasion failed, force was used; an Act of Parliament was passed by Henry's submissive Commons, bestowing on him the lands of all monastic foundations. Then they were suppressed—the harmless and well-ordered ones no less than the worst and most corrupt. When the monks offered obstinate resistance, the king dealt very cruelly with them—the wealthy abbots of Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester, were all hung, really for reluctance to surrender their houses, nominally for treason in refusing to acknowledge the king's complete spiritual supremacy as head of the Church. The enormous plunder of the monasteries brought the king little permanent good; he had promised to use it for ecclesiastical purposes, and had broached a scheme for founding many new churches and schools, and creating twenty fresh bishoprics. But in the end he lavished most of the lands of the religious houses upon those of the nobles and gentry whom he thought worth bribing. The Church only benefited by the endowing of the six new bishoprics—Oxford, Chester, Peterborough, Bristol, Gloucester, and the short-lived see of Westminster.

But Henry was resolved to show the Protestants that they must not expect his countenance, in spite of the blows which he was dealing at the Roman Catholics. In the very year in which the majority of the greater monasteries fell, he forced his Parliament to pass the cruel "Bill of the Six Articles." This odious measure condemned to forfeiture on the first offence, and to death on the second, all who should write or speak against certain of the ancient doctrines of the mediaeval Church, of which Transubstantiation in the Sacrament, the celibacy of the clergy, and auricular confession were the chief (1539).

Meanwhile the king had at last obtained the male heir for whom he had so much longed. His third wife, Jane Seymour, bore him a son, Prince Edward, in 1537, though she died at the child's birth. On this boy all Henry's fondness was lavished: he was to be the Pg 304 sole heir to the throne, and his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, were both stigmatized as illegitimate.

After he had mourned Queen Jane for two years, Henry wished to marry again. By Cromwell's persuasion he sought a wife among the Protestant princes of Germany, thinking so to strengthen himself against the Emperor Charles, who never to his death forgave him the matter of Catherine of Aragon's divorce. To his own ruin, Cromwell persuaded the king to choose Anne, sister of Duke William of Cleves, as his fourth spouse. The lady was plain and stupid—facts which Cromwell carefully concealed from his master till she had been solemnly betrothed to him and brought over to England. Henry was bitterly provoked when he was confronted with his new queen, and could not behave with ordinary civility to her. When he learnt that the German alliances which he was to buy with his marriage had fallen through, he repudiated the unfortunate Anne. She was fortunately of a philosophic mood, and readily consented to be bought off for a large annual pension and a handsome residence at Chelsea.

Henry at once wreaked his vengeance on Cromwell for deceiving him as to Anne and for failing in his negotiations with the German princes. He had him arrested, and accused him of receiving bribes and of having favoured the Protestants by "dispersing heretical books and secretly releasing heretics from prison." Both charges were probably true, but they form no excuse for Henry's cruel treatment of the faithful and intrepid minister who had helped him through all the troubles of 1536-40. Cromwell was attainted and beheaded, to the great joy of the Roman Catholics, who thought that he had been the king's tempter and evil genius, whereas in truth he had been no more than his tool.

Cromwell's end greatly encouraged the Roman Catholic party, and they were still more elated when the king married a lady known to incline towards the old faith. This was Catherine Howard, a cousin of Anne Boleyn and, like her, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk (1540). Henry had been caught by her beauty, and had not discovered that she was a person of abandoned manners, whose amours were known to many persons about the court. Pg 305 Within eighteen months of her marriage, she was detected in misconduct with one of her old lovers, and sent to the block. In her case Henry had much more excuse for his ruthless cruelty than in that of Anne Boleyn; but what kind of wives could a monarch of such manners expect to find? He was undeservedly fortunate in his sixth marriage, with Catherine Parr, the dowager Lady Latimer, whom he wedded a year after Catherine Howard's execution. She was a young widow of twenty-six, a person of piety and discretion, who gave no opportunity of offence to the king, and nursed him faithfully through the infirmities of his later years. For Henry, who had now reached the age of fifty-two, was growing grossly corpulent and developing a complication of diseases which racked him fearfully during the last five years of his life, and partly explain the frantic exhibitions of cruelty to which he often gave way.

The time was a very evil one for England. Not only was the king persecuting Romanist and Protestant indifferently, but he had added external to internal troubles. A war with Scotland had broken out in 1540, and was always keeping the northern frontier unquiet, though the English had the better in the fighting. James V. allied himself to France, and Henry had to keep guard against attacks on the south as well as the north. The victory of Solway Moss (November, 1542) put an end to any danger from Scotland; the news of it killed King James, who left his throne to his infant daughter Mary, the celebrated "Queen of Scots." Her minority gave rise to factious struggles among the Scottish nobles, and Henry, by buying over one party, was able to keep the rest in check. In 1544 a great English army, under the Earl of Hertford, Jane Seymour's brother, laid waste the whole of the Lowlands and burnt Edinburgh, but did not succeed in driving the enemy to sue for peace.

The French war was far more dangerous. King Francis collected a great fleet in Normandy, and threatened an invasion of England. Henry was forced to arm and pay a vast array of shire levies to meet the attack, but when it came (1545) the French were only able to land and make a raid in the Isle of Wight. They drew back after fruitlessly demonstrating against Portsmouth and burning a few English ships. The balance of gain in the war was actually in Pg 306 favour of Henry, who had taken Boulogne (1544), and proved able to retain it against all attempts, till it was ceded to him by France at the peace of 1546.

But the struggles with France and Scotland had the most disastrous effects on the finances of the realm. Henry had wasted all the wealth that he had wrested from the monasteries, and now, to fill his pockets, tried the unrighteous expedient of debasing the currency. English money, which had been hitherto the best and purest in Europe, was horribly misused by him. He put one-sixth of copper into the gold sovereign, and one-half and afterwards two-thirds of copper into the silver shilling, to the lamentable defrauding of his subjects, who found that English money would no longer be accepted by Continental traders, though previously it had been more esteemed than that of any other country.

The debasement of the coinage was only one of the many symptoms of misgovernment which embittered the end of Henry's reign. The general upheaval of society caused by the overthrow of the monasteries, and the sudden transfer of their enormous estates to new holders, had given rise to much distress. Not only were the paupers who had lived on the monks' doles, and the pilgrims who had been wont to wander from abbey to abbey, thrown on the world to beg, but many of the old tenant farmers were displaced. For the new owners often preferred sheep-breeding to agriculture, and drove out the cottiers who had been wont to hold a few acres under the old-fashioned management of the monastic bodies. Contemporary writers speak bitterly of the plague of "sturdy and valiant beggars" who flooded the land—unfrocked monks, pilgrims whose trade was over, disbanded soldiers, and evicted peasantry. The king and his Parliament issued the most ferocious laws against these vagrants—when apprehended they were to be branded, and given as serfs for two years to any one who chose to ask for their services. If caught a second time, they were liable to be hung as incorrigible.

To complete this gloomy picture, there only remains to be added the story of the king's last outburst of suspicion and cruelty. Conceiving that the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, were counting on his approaching death to make an attempt to seize Pg 307 the regency, he had them both apprehended, though nothing definite could be alleged against them, save that of late they had taken to quartering the royal arms in their family shield—a distinction to which they were entitled as descended from Edward III. Surrey, a soldier of great promise and a poet of considerable power, was beheaded; his father was doomed to follow him, had not the king's death intervened. It is even said that Henry, in one of his more irritable moods, was threatening to try his blameless wife, Queen Catherine, for concealed Protestantism.

But to the general relief of England, Henry died before this last crime could be consummated (January 28, 1547). He left his realm in a condition of great misery, and for all its troubles he was personally responsible. His breach with the papacy had been the result of private pique, not of conscience or principle. When committed to the anti-Roman cause, he had refused to move forward with the one half of his subjects, or to remain behind with the other. He had anchored the English Church for a time in a middle position, intolerable alike to Protestant Reformers and to the Partisans of the Papacy and subjection to Rome. If the nation owed him a certain debt of gratitude for not committing England to some of the excesses of Continental Protestantism, yet it owed him no thanks for officering the Church with a hierarchy of bishops, some of whom, like Cranmer, were meanly timid and pliant, while others were men of low ideals and unworthy lives, the mere creatures of court favour. Nor is it possible to view with equanimity the way in which Henry wasted on pageants, foreign intrigues, and fawning courtiers, the vast sums which the State had acquired by the very proper and necessary abolition of the monasteries.

Of Henry's unbounded selfishness, of his ingratitude to those who had served him best, of his ruthless cruelty to all who stood in his way, we need not further speak. The story of his reign develops each of these traits in its own particular blackness.

Some historians have endeavoured to justify Henry's wavering foreign policy, and all his forcible-feeble wars with Continental powers, by the plea that, if he got no gain in land or gold thereby, yet he raised England to a higher place among European nations than she had held in his father's Pg 308 day. But this statement seems unwise. Henry, though much flattered and courted at times, was in fact the mere dupe of Francis I. and Charles V., each of whom cheated him again and again, and left him hopelessly in the lurch. England's growing wealth and power would have won her back her proper place in Europe far better than Henry's chaotic intrigues. His whole foreign policy was a mistake and a tangle from first to last.

It remained to be seen who would now sway the sword and sceptre that the dead tyrant had gripped so firmly. In his last years Henry had surrounded himself by ministers less notable and less capable than Wolsey or Cromwell. The chief place was held by his brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the brother of the unfortunate Queen Jane, and the uncle of Prince Edward, the heir to the crown. It was natural that the charge of the young king—a bright and promising, but delicate lad, now in his tenth year—should fall to his uncle; but the late king, distrusting Hertford's wisdom, had left the regency, not to him individually, but to a council of sixteen members, of which he was but the president. Seymour, however, succeeded in getting a more complete control over his colleagues than had been intended, mainly by bribing them to consent with titles and large gifts of money. They allowed him to make himself "Protector of the realm and of the king's person," and to create himself Duke of Somerset. In return he made the two chief members of the council earls; Wriothsley, head of the Anglo-Catholic party, became Earl of Southampton; Dudley—son of that Dudley who had paid with his head for serving Henry VII. too well—was created Earl of Warwick.

Having seized the reins of power, the Duke of Somerset soon showed himself a man of a character very different from the late king's expectation. Instead of pursuing the middle course of Anglo-Catholic policy which Henry had always marked out, he threw himself at once into the hands of the Protestants. His first actions were directed towards the completion of the Reformation, by sweeping away all those remnants of the old faith which the late king had retained himself and imposed upon his subjects. Henry VIII. had issued the Bible in English, and caused the Litany and certain other parts of the Church service to be said Pg 309 in the national tongue. But Somerset abolished the use of the Latin language altogether, and caused the Communion Service and all the rest of the rites of the Church to be celebrated in English. By the end of 1548 he had authorized the issue of the "First Book of Common Prayer," the earliest form of our own Anglican Prayer-book. Cranmer had the chief part in its compilation, and his great gifts of expression are borne witness to by many of the most spiritual and beautiful prayers of our splendid and sonorous liturgy. When the fear of Henry had been removed from his mind, Cranmer showed himself an undoubted Protestant; but he was a moderate man, and spared many old rites and customs, harmless in themselves, from a love of conservatism. The Prayer-book was well received by all save the extreme Romanists, and the few partisans of Continental Protestantism who complained that it did not go far enough.

If the introduction of the English Prayer-book was both popular and necessary, it was far otherwise with the measures which accompanied it. Somerset's first year of rule was the time of the demolition of all the old church ornaments and furniture, which the Protestants condemned as mere idols and lumber. Not only were the images and pictures removed, but much beautiful carved work and stained glass was ruthlessly broken up. This was done with an irreverence and violence which deeply shocked the majority of the nation, and Somerset's agents made no distinction between monuments of superstition and harmless works of religious art. Two of the bishops, Bonner of London and Gardiner of Winchester, who ventured to oppose the Protector's doings, were placed in honourable confinement.

While England was disturbed with these changes, many of them rational and necessary, but all of them hasty and rash, Somerset had succeeded in plunging the realm into two foreign wars. The English party north of the Tweed had promised the hand of their little five-year-old Queen Mary to King Edward, but when they proved unable to fulfil their promise, owing to the hatred of the majority of the Scots for England, the Protector resolved to use coercive measures. He declared war, and invaded the Lowlands in the autumn of 1547, wasting the country before him till he was met by the whole levy of Scotland on the hillside of Pinkie, near Musselborough. There he inflicted on them a bloody defeat, Pg 310 but gained no advantage thereby; for the Scots sent their child-queen over to France, to keep her safe from English hands, and when she reached the court of Henry II. she was wedded to his son, the Dauphin Francis. Thus Somerset entirely lost the object of his campaign, and only earned the desperate hate of the Scots for the carnage of Pinkie.

The war with Scotland brought about a war with France, in which the Protector wasted much money. The struggle went against the English, and ultimately led to the loss of Boulogne, the sole conquest of Henry VIII. While this war was in progress, Somerset was involved in serious troubles within the bounds of England itself. He detected his own brother, Lord Seymour of Sudely, plotting to marry the Princess Elizabeth, and oust him from the regency. Seymour was pardoned once, but, on renewing his conspiracy, was apprehended and beheaded. But domestic plots were less to be feared than popular risings. In 1548-49 two dangerous rebellions broke out in West and East. In Devonshire the old Catholic party rose in arms, clamouring for the restoration of the Mass and the suppression of Protestantism. In the Eastern Counties an insurrection of another sort was seen; the peasantry banded themselves together under the tanner Robert Ket, who called himself the "King of Norfolk and Suffolk." They dreamed of a social revolution such as that which Wat Tyler had demanded in an earlier age, though their grievances were not the same as those of the fourteenth century. They complained of the rapacity of the new landholders who had superseded the old monastic bodies, and who were evicting the old peasantry right and left, and turning farms into sheep-runs, because wool paid better than corn. The enclosure of common lands, the debasement of the coinage, and the slowness and inefficacy of the law when used by the poor man, were also denounced. Ket and his fellows began seizing and trying unpopular landholders, and spoke of making a clean sweep of the upper classes.

Now, the Protector had no scruple in putting down the rising of the Devonshire Papists with great severity, but he felt that the Norfolk men had great excuses for their anger, and did not deal promptly and sternly with them. Ket's rising became very dangerous, and it seemed as if Pg 311 anarchy would set in all over the Eastern Counties. The rebels defeated the Marquis of Northampton, and stormed Norwich; they were only dispersed at last by Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, who marched against them with a mercenary force which had been collected for the Scottish war, and routed them on Mousehold Heath. Ket was then hung, and the rebellion subsided.

Somerset's mismanagement and weakness had so disgusted his colleagues in the regency that, after the eastern rebellion, they resolved to depose him from the Protectorship. Finding that he could count on small support, and that the council would be able to turn against him the armies which had pacified Norfolk and Devon, he wisely laid down his power. He was sent for a short time to the Tower, but soon the council released him, and gave him a place among them (1550).

Somerset's place was taken by John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, son of the extortionate minister of Henry VII. The new Protector was far more unscrupulous and corrupt than his predecessor. Somerset had been a well-meaning if an incapable ruler. Warwick was purely self-seeking, and cared nothing for national ends. He showed himself not much more competent as a ruler than the man he had overthrown, but he kept his power more firmly than Somerset, because he never hesitated to strike down all who opposed him, without any regard for justice or mercy.

Warwick, finding the Protestant party in the ascendant, used them for his own ends, though in reality he was perfectly indifferent to religion. His tendencies were shown by the appointment of several bishops of ultra-Protestant views, and by the issuing of the "Second Book of Common Prayer," to supersede the first. In this volume strong signs of the influence of Continental Protestantism are found, and the many traces of the pre-Reformation ritual were swept away.

Warwick's administration (1550-53) was no happier than Somerset's. He was forced to make a humiliating peace with France, and to surrender Boulogne. Though he began to reform the coinage by issuing good silver money, yet he made the change harmful to the people by refusing to take back the old Pg 312 base money at the rate at which it had been issued, [32] and by actually uttering a considerable amount of debased money himself.

But reckless self-seeking was the main key-note of Warwick's rule. He employed his power unscrupulously to enrich both himself and his family. He took for himself the title of Duke of Northumberland, and ere long allied himself to the royal house by marrying his younger son, Guildford Dudley, to the king's cousin, Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of the Princess Mary, the favourite sister of Henry VIII. This alliance led him into schemes which were to prove his ruin. The young king was a bright and precocious boy, showing signs of capacity and strength of will beyond his years. If he had lived, he would have been a man of mark, for already in his sixteenth year he was showing a keen interest in politics and religion, and a tendency to think for himself. But he was incurably delicate, and by 1553 was obviously falling into consumption.

Dudley saw that his power was bound to vanish on the king's death, if the law of succession was maintained, and the king's eldest sister Mary, the child of Catherine of Aragon, allowed to succeed. The late king had drawn up a will, in which he indicated that, if Edward died, he should be followed first by Mary, and then by her younger sister Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. Henry had then added that, if all his children died heirless, he left the crown to the issue of his favourite sister Mary, the Duchess of Suffolk, and not to the descendants of his elder sister, Margaret of Scotland.

Now, Lady Jane Grey, the heiress of Mary of Suffolk, was in Northumberland's hands, through her marriage with his son. Accordingly, the duke resolved to persuade the young king to cut his sisters out of the succession, and leave the crown by will to his cousin. The pretext used was that both Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate, the marriages of Catherine and of Anne to Henry VIII. having both been declared void at different times by the obsequious Pg 313 Parliaments of the last reign. It was, of course, utterly absurd that a boy of sixteen should have the power to make a will transferring the crown, for by English usage the king's title depended on hereditary right and Parliamentary sanction, not on the arbitrary decision of his predecessor. It was entirely unconstitutional to think of disinheriting the two princesses by a mere private document drawn up by their brother. But the young king was persuaded to grant his guardian's request, mainly because he feared the Romanist reaction which he knew would follow on the accession of his elder sister, who had always remained an obstinate adherent of the papacy.

Long before the king's death, Northumberland had taken all the measures which he thought necessary for carrying out this arbitrary change in the succession. He had packed the council with his hired partisans, and swept away the only man that he feared, his predecessor Somerset. For noting that the late Protector was regaining popularity, and might prove a check upon him, he suddenly laid against him charges of treason and felony, alleging that he was plotting to regain the regency by force of arms. The unfortunate Somerset was condemned and executed, to the great indignation of the people, who esteemed his good heart, though they had doubted his judgment (1552).

All through the following year King Edward's health was failing, and Dudley was perfecting his plans. In the summer of 1553 the young king wasted away, and slowly sank into his grave. His cousin, Lady Jane, was at once proclaimed queen by the unscrupulous Protector.

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The death of Edward VI. gave the signal for the outbreak of trouble all over England. The nation had acquiesced in the selfish and unscrupulous government of Northumberland solely because of its loyalty to the young king. When Edward passed away, it became at once evident that the Protector's power had no firm base, and that his attempt to change the succession would be fruitless. For every man, the Protestant no less than the Catholic, was fully persuaded that the Princess Mary was the true heir to the crown, and there was no party in the state—save the personal adherents of Dudley—who were prepared to strike a blow against her.

Meanwhile, however, the Protector proclaimed his daughter-in-law queen in London, though citizens and courtiers alike maintained an attitude of cold disapproval. The Lady Jane was personally well liked; she was an innocent girl of seventeen, who loved her husband and her books, and had no knowledge or skill in affairs of state. But every one knew that she was a usurper—a fact which no personal merits could gloze over.

Northumberland directed his first efforts to seize the person of the Princess Mary. He sent his son, the Earl of Warwick, to lay hands on her, but she escaped and fled into the Eastern Counties, where the gentry of Norfolk and Suffolk, the most Protestant shires in the kingdom, hailed her as queen, and armed to defend her. Warwick's troops dispersed when he strove to induce them to attack the followers Pg 315 of the rightful heiress. This alarming symptom startled the Protector out of his security; he raised a larger force and set out at once to suppress the rising. But the moment that he had left London there was an outbreak in the capital itself. The majority of the royal council, when Northumberland's eye was off them, threw in their lot with the rioters, and London fell into the hands of Mary's partisans. Nor was this all. The whole of the shires from north to south rose in Mary's favour, and the Protector, who had marched as far as Cambridge, saw his army melt away from him. When the Earl of Arundel came against him in the name of the rightful queen, he was constrained to give up his sword and yield himself a prisoner. He was brought back to London, tried, and condemned for high treason. His last days showed the meanness of his character; for, in the hope of propitiating the queen, he declared himself a Catholic, heard Mass, and made fulsome and degrading protestations of contrition and humility. They did not save his life, for he was beheaded, to the great joy of all England, only six weeks after the death of Edward VI. (August 22, 1553). Mary cast into prison all Northumberland's tools: the unfortunate Lady Jane—queen for just thirteen days—her husband Lord Guildford Dudley, her father the Duke of Suffolk, and most of the Dudley kin. For the present they suffered no further harm.

The rightful heiress was now set upon the throne, and England had leisure to look on her and learn her moods. Mary was in her thirty-ninth year. Ever since her unfortunate mother's divorce she had been living in neglect and seclusion; her father had stigmatized her as a bastard, and her brother had kept her from court. For twenty years she had been nursing her own and her mother's wrongs in lonely country manors, denied all the state and deference that were her due, and closely supervised by the underlings of the Crown. It was small wonder that she had grown up discontented, suspicious, and morose. One help had sustained her through all her troubles—her intense faith in the old creed, which she believed to be true, and therefore bound to triumph in the end. Veritas temporis filia was her favourite motto. [33] Mary's Catholicism was something more than earnest; it was a devouring flame, ready to consume all that stood in its way. She was set on Pg 316 avenging all the blood that had been shed by her father, all the insults to the old faith that had been inflicted by the ministers of her brother. She thought that she had come with a mission not merely to reconcile England to the papacy, but to scourge her for her past backsliding.

The nation did not yet know of the habits of mind which its mistress harboured. The Protestants were ready to acquiesce in her rule; the majority, who were neither Protestants nor Papists, trusted that she was about to take up the middle course that her father had chosen; the Romanist minority hardly expected more than this from her at the first. But Mary's actions soon showed that she was set on a more violent reaction; not only did she release from bonds the imprisoned bishops, Bonner and Gardiner, the old Duke of Norfolk—a captive since 1547—and all others who had suffered under her father and brother, but she began to molest those who had taken a prominent part in the religious doings of the late reign. Proceedings were begun against ten Protestant bishops, including Cranmer, the Primate of England, before she had been two months on the throne. Some of them fled over seas; the others were caught and put into confinement. The restoration of the Latin Mass was everywhere commanded. All married clergy were threatened with removal from their benefices. Mary began to speak openly of placing her realm under the supremacy of the Pope, and even of restoring to the Church all the monastic estates that her father had appropriated, an idea which filled every landowner with dismay.

Meanwhile, another project was filling Mary's brain. She was determined to marry, and to rear up a Catholic heir to the throne; for she hated her half-sister, the Princess Elizabeth—Anne Boleyn's child—and utterly refused to acknowledge her legitimacy, or to own her as her next of kin. Mary had conceived a romantic affection on hearsay evidence for her cousin, Philip of Spain, the son and heir of the Emperor Charles V., a young prince twelve years her junior, whose charms and merits had been grossly overpraised to her by interested persons. The prospect of winning England for his son allured the Emperor, and he warmly pressed the marriage, though Philip did not view with satisfaction the pursuit of such an elderly bride.

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When the queen's intention of wedding Philip of Spain began to be known, it led to great discontent, for such a match implied not only a close union with the papal party on the Continent, but the resumption of the war with France, which had brought so much loss and so little gain under Henry VIII. and Edward VI.; for Spain and France were still involved in their standing struggle for domination on the Continent, and alliance with the one meant war with the other.

When the queen's betrothal to Philip was announced, trouble at once followed. The Protestant party had viewed with dismay the restoration of the Mass, and foresaw persecution close at hand; many who were not Protestants were anxious to stop the Spanish marriage and the renewal of the foreign war. Hence came the breaking out of a dangerous rebellion, aiming at Mary's deposition, and the substitution for her of her sister Elizabeth, who was, however, kept in ignorance of the plot. The conspirators intended her to marry Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, son of the Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, whom Henry VIII. had beheaded in 1539, and last heir of the house of York. Courtenay himself, a vain and incapable young man, was not the real head of the conspiracy, which was mainly guided by the Duke of Suffolk—the father of Lady Jane Grey—and by Sir Thomas Wyatt, a young knight of Kent. Courtenay's babbling folly betrayed the plot too soon, and the conspirators had to rise before they were ready. Their armed bands were easily crushed in all parts of England save in Kent; Wyatt raised 10,000 men in that very Protestant county, and boldly marched on London. The Government had no sufficient force ready to hold him back, and he nearly succeeded in seizing the capital and the queen's person, for many of the Londoners were ready to throw open the gates to him. But the queen induced him to halt for a day by sending offers for an accommodation, and when he reached London Bridge he found it so strongly held that after some heavy fighting he gave up the passage as impossible, and started westward to cross the Thames at Kingston. This delay saved Mary. She displayed great courage and activity, hurried up to London all the trustworthy gentry within her reach, persuaded many of the citizens to arm in her favour, and was able to offer a firm resistance Pg 318 when Wyatt at last appeared in Middlesex and pressed on into the western suburbs of the city. The queen's troops and the insurgents fought a running fight from Knightsbridge to Charing Cross; Wyatt, with the head of his column, cut his way down the Strand as far as Ludgate Hill, but his main body was broken up and dispersed, and he himself, after a gallant struggle, was taken prisoner at Temple Bar.

Mary had much excuse for severity against the conquered rebels, but her vengeance went far beyond the bounds of wisdom. Wyatt was cruelly tortured to make him implicate the Princess Elizabeth in the plot, but died protesting that he had acted without her knowledge. Suffolk and his brother, Sir Thomas Grey, were beheaded; eighty of the more important rebels were hung; but in addition the unpardonable crime of slaying Lady Jane Grey was committed. She and her husband had been prisoners all the time of the rising, but Mary thought the opportunity of getting rid of her too good to be lost, and beheaded both her and Lord Guildford Dudley, on the vain pretence that they had been concerned in the conspiracy. The young ex-queen suffered with a dignity and constancy that moved all hearts, affirming to the last her firm adherence to the Protestant faith, and her innocence of all treasonable intent against her cousin (February 12, 1554). There seems little doubt that the queen's own sister, the Princess Elizabeth, would have shared Lady Jane's fate, if only sufficient evidence against her could have been procured. The incapable Earl of Devon owed his life to his insignificance, and was banished after a long sojourn in the Tower.

Victorious over her enemies, Queen Mary was now able to carry out her unwise plans without hindrance. In July, 1554, Philip of Spain came over from Flanders, and wedded her at Winchester. In the same autumn a Parliament, elected under strong royal pressure, voted in favour of reconciliation with Rome, and a complete acknowledgment of the papal supremacy. In the capacity of Legate to England, there appeared Reginald Pole, a long-exiled English cardinal of Yorkist blood, brother of that Lord Montagu whom Henry VIII. had slain in 1539. He solemnly absolved the two Houses of Parliament from the papal excommunication which so long had lain upon the land. Shortly afterwards the Pg 319 submission of the realm to the papacy was celebrated in the most typical way by the solemn re-enacting of the cruel statute of Henry IV., De Heretico Comburendo, which made the stake once more the doom of all who refused to obey the Pope. Mary herself, a fanatical party among her bishops, of whom Bonner of London was the worst, and the Legate must all take their share of the responsibility for this crime. The queen had her wrongs to revenge; the bishops had suffered long in prison under King Edward; Pole had been accused by his enemies of Lutheranism, and was anxious to vindicate his orthodoxy by showing a readiness to put Protestants to death.

From the moment of the enacting of the laws against heresy (January, 1555), the history of Mary's reign became a catalogue of horrors. Even the callous Philip of Spain, moved by policy if not by pity, besought his wife to hold her hand. But Mary was inflexible. The burnings began with those of Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, and Rogers, Prebendary of St. Paul's, in February, 1555. They went steadily on at the rate of about ten persons a month, till the queen's death. The persecution raged worst in London, the see of the rough and harsh Bishop Bonner; in Canterbury, where Pole succeeded Cranmer; and in the Eastern Counties; there were comparatively few victims in the West and North. As cautious men fled over-sea, and weak men conformed to the queen's faith, it was precisely the most fervent and pious of the Protestants who suffered. The sight of so many men of godly life and blameless conversation going to the stake for their faith, achieved the end that neither the sternness of Henry VIII. nor the violence of Northumberland had been able to secure—it practically converted England to Protestantism. The bigoted queen was always remembered by the English as "Bloody Mary;" her victims as "the Martyrs." A few of them deserve special mention: Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, and Ridley, Bishop of London, were burnt together under the walls of Oxford, on September 7, 1555, after being kept in prison for two years. They had been well known as the best of the Protestant bishops, and Latimer's fearless sermons had often protested, in the presence of the late king and the Protectors, against the self-seeking and corruption of the court. "Play the man, Master Ridley," said Latimer, when he and his companion stood at the stake; "for we shall this day light such Pg 320 a candle in England, as by the grace of God shall never be put out."

Six months later there suffered a man of weaker and more vacillating faith, Archbishop Cranmer, against whom the queen was especially bitter, because he had pronounced her mother's divorce. Cranmer was a man of real piety, but wholly destitute of moral courage. His jailors forced him to witness the burning of Ridley and Latimer, in order to shake his courage, and subjected him to many harassing trials and cross-examinations, under which his spirit at last broke down. Yielding to a moment of weakness, and lured by a false hint that he might save his life by recantation, he consented to be received back into the Roman Communion. But when he found that his enemies were set upon his death, he refused to conform, bade the multitude assembled in St. Mary's Church at Oxford "beware of the Pope, Christ's enemy, a very Antichrist with all his false doctrine," and went with firmness to the stake, thrusting first into the flames the right hand with which he had written his promise to recant (March, 1556).

Altogether there suffered in the Marian persecution five bishops and about 300 others, among whom were included several women and even children. Mary looked upon her wicked doings not merely as righteous in themselves, but as a means of moving Heaven in her favour for the great end that she had in view—the raising up of a Catholic heir. Her heart was set on bearing a son, and when this was denied her, she fell into a state of gloomy depression. Her morbid and hysterical temper rendered her insufferable to her husband Philip, who betook himself to the Continent, where his father, Charles V., was about to abdicate in his favour. After he became King of Spain (1556) he only paid one short visit to his English realm and his jealous wife, and escaped as quickly as he might. Mary remained a prey to melancholy and disease, and obstinately persisted in "working out her salvation" by faggot and stake. The country grew more and more discontented; conspiracy was rife, fostered by the exiled Protestants, who had gathered in Paris, and tried to excite rebellion by the aid of the King of France. Their efforts nearly cost the life of the Princess Elizabeth, whom the queen kept in confinement, and would have slain if her cautious sister had not been wise enough to avoid all suspicion of offence.

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The war with France, which was the necessary consequence of the Spanish match, proved very disastrous for England. Mary's ministers gave Philip no very useful help, while, on the other hand, they contrived to lose the last Continental possession of the Crown. Calais, which had remained in English hands ever since Edward III. captured it in 1346, was suddenly invested by the Duke of Guise, who commanded the French army of the North. The garrison was caught unprepared, and was very weak in numbers. After a few days' siege it was forced to yield, before any help could come either from England or Spain (January, 1558). This disgrace told heavily on the queen's health; she cried that when she died "Calais" would be found written on her heart, and fell into a deeper melancholy than before.

Yet her miserable life was protracted ten months longer, and she survived till November, 1558, racked by disease, and calling in vain for her absent husband, yet persecuting vigorously to the last. Her cousin and adviser, Cardinal Pole, died within three days of her.

So ended Mary Tudor, who in five years had rendered Romanism more hateful in the eyes of Englishmen than five centuries of papal aggression had availed to make it, and who had by her persecutions caused the adoption of Protestantism under her successor to become inevitable.

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When Mary Tudor had passed away unwept and unregretted, all England heaved a sigh of relief, and turned to do homage to her sister Elizabeth. The daughter of Anne Boleyn was now a young woman of twenty-five. She had been living for the last five years in almost continual peril of her life, and had required all her caution to keep herself from the two snares which lay about her—the dangers of being accused of treason on the one hand and of heresy on the other. Fortunately for herself, Elizabeth was politic and cautious even to excess—all through her reign her most trusted ministers were often unable to discern her real thoughts and wishes—so that she came unharmed through her sister's reign of terror.

But when the lords of the council came flocking to Hatfield—the place of her honourable confinement—to salute her as queen, Elizabeth knew that her feet were still set in slippery places. The ultra-Catholic party was still in power, and the large majority of the nation were professing Romanists; on the other hand, she knew that her sister had made the name of Rome hateful, and there was a powerful and active band of Protestants, some in exile and some at home, who were ready to rush in and violently reverse all that Mary had done, if the new sovereign would give them any encouragement. Moreover, there was grave danger abroad: England was in the midst of war with France, yet Philip of Spain, the late queen's husband, was likely to be more dangerous than even the King of France, for it was obvious that he would be loth to let England out of his grasp, after he had profited by her alliance for four years.

Elizabeth's personal predilections, like those of her father, Pg 323 were in favour neither of Romanism nor of Protestantism. She did not wish to be the slave of the Pope, nor did she intend to be the tool of the zealots who had picked up in their Continental exile the newest doctrines of the Swiss and German Reformers. At the same time, she wished to offend neither the Catholic nor the Protestant, but to lead them both into the via media of an English National Church, which should be both orthodox and independent. She was not a woman of much spiritual piety or fervent zeal, and, judging from her own feelings, argued that it would be possible to make others conform, without much difficulty, to the Church which offered the happy mean.

Her position, however, was settled for her by the obstinacy of the extreme Romanists. The bishops whom Mary had appointed behaved in the most arrogant and insulting manner to her. When she had been duly saluted as queen by the nation and the Parliament, they tacitly denied her right to the throne; for with one accord they refused to be present at her coronation, much more to place the crown upon her head. In the view of the strict Papist, she was a bastard and a usurper. It was with great difficulty that a single bishop—Oglethorpe, of Carlisle—was at last persuaded to officiate at the ceremony. This senseless obstinacy on the part of the prelates drove Elizabeth further in the direction of Protestantism than she had intended to go. She was constrained to send for the exiled Protestant bishops of King Edward's making, and to replace them in their sees. The disloyal Romanist prelates were deposed, and in their places new men were consecrated by the restored Protestant bishops. Elizabeth took care that they should be moderate personages, who might be trusted not to give trouble; the most important of them was the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, a wise and pious man, who guided the Church of England through the crisis with singular discretion.

As it was impossible to conciliate the extreme Romanists, the queen resolved to take up her father's position, with some modifications in the direction of Protestantism. Unlike Henry VIII., she did not call herself Supreme Head of the Church, but all her subjects were summoned to take the oath of spiritual obedience to her. Only a few hundred persons refused it, though among Pg 324 them were all the old bishops. But the moderate Catholics accepted her, though they did not sacrifice their faith to their loyalty. Elizabeth then issued a new Liturgy to be the standard of the Creed of the English Church: it was a revision of the Second Prayer-book of Edward VI., amended in such a way as to make it less expressive of the views of the extreme Protestants. The Latin Mass was forbidden, and all the old ceremonies, which Mary had restored, were again swept away. There was, however, no attempt at enforcing obedience by persecution. Elizabeth had taken warning by the fate of her brother's and her sister's measures, and trusted to loyalty and national feeling, not to prison or stake. She was wise in her generation, for in ten years well-nigh all the moderate Catholics had conformed to the Anglican formularies, rallying to the national church when they saw that it was not to become ultra-Protestant. Their adhesion was the more easily effected because the Pope, on purely political grounds, did not excommunicate Elizabeth, or declare her deposed, so that to hold to the old faith was not yet inconsistent with loyalty to the Crown.

Ere Elizabeth's religious bent had been clearly ascertained, her widowed brother-in-law, Philip of Spain, had proposed that she should marry him, for he was much set on maintaining his hold on England. Elizabeth detested him, and steadfastly refused the offer, but with a show of politeness, lest she might bring war on herself. Fearing that when foiled Philip might become dangerous, she made peace and alliance with his enemy, the King of France, and left Calais in his hands, receiving instead a sum of 500,000 crowns.

Thus Elizabeth had tided over the first difficulties of her reign, and felt her throne growing firmer beneath her, though there were still dangers on every side. But her character was well suited to cope with the situation. Though marred by many failings peculiarly feminine, she had a man's brain and decision. She was vain of her handsome person, and loved to be flattered and worshipped; but her vanity was not great enough to induce her to put herself under the hand of a husband. She listened to suitor after suitor, but said them nay in the end. Only one of them ever seems to have touched her heart—this was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the son of Pg 325 Protector Northumberland. Though much taken with his comely face, the queen had strength of mind to deny him her hand, seeing that marriage with a subject would bring too many feuds and jealousies in its train. She consoled herself with pageants and pleasures, for which she retained a curious zest even far into her old age. Every one has heard of her elaborate toilette and her thousand gowns, and of how she danced before foreign ambassadors after she had passed the age of sixty.

But the vanity and love of pleasure which she inherited from her mother, Anne Boleyn, were of comparatively little moment in the ordering of the queen's life, because her clear and cold brain dominated her desires. Elizabeth was as cautious, as suspicious, and as secretive, as her grandfather Henry VII. She was very unscrupulous in her diplomacy, and did not stick at a lie when an evasion would no longer serve. Though she had plenty of courage for moments of danger, yet she always put off the struggle as long as possible, holding that every day of respite that she gained might chance to give some unexpected end to the crisis. It is undoubted that she missed many opportunities owing to this cautious slowness, but she also saved herself from many traps into which a more hasty politician would have fallen. We shall have to notice, again and again, her reluctance to interfere in the wars of the Continent, even when it had become inevitable that she must ultimately choose her side. This same caution made her a very economical ruler. She grudged every penny that was spent—except, indeed, the outgoings of her own privy purse—and often pushed parsimony to the most unwise extreme. The very fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada ran short both of powder and provisions before the fighting was quite over.

The English much admired their politic, unscrupulous, and parsimonious queen. They saw only that she gave them good and cheap governance, kept the kingdom out of unnecessary wars, and was, on the whole, both tolerant and merciful. As they watched her pick her way successfully through so many snares and perils, they came to look upon her as a sort of second Providence, and credited her with an almost superhuman sagacity and omniscience, which she was far from possessing. But they were not altogether wrong in their confidence; she was, in spite of her faults and foibles, a patriotic, clear-headed, hard-working sovereign, who did her best Pg 326 for her people as well as for herself. Above all, she had the invaluable gift of choosing her servants well; her two great ministers, Cecil and Walsingham, were the most capable men in England for their work, and she seldom failed to appreciate merit when once she cast her eye upon it.

For the first twelve years of Elizabeth's rule, England was occupied in slowly settling down after the storms of the last two reigns. The English Church was gradually absorbing the moderate men from both the Protestant and the Romanist ranks. Quiet times were repairing the wealth of the land, and the restoration of the purity of the coinage, which was the queen's earliest care, had put trade once more on a healthy basis. Foreign war was easily avoided; in France Henry II. died ere Elizabeth had reigned a year, and his weak sons had occupation enough in their civil wars with the Huguenots. Philip of Spain was ere long to find a similar distraction, from the stirring of discontent among his much-persecuted Protestant subjects in the Netherlands.

The chief troubles of the period 1558-68 came from another quarter—the turbulent kingdom of Scotland. Elizabeth's natural heir was her cousin, Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots, who represented the line of Henry VII.'s eldest daughter. Unless Elizabeth should marry and have issue, Mary stood next her in the line of succession. The Queen of Scots, however, was a most undesirable heiress. She had been brought up in France, had married the eldest son of Henry II. and hated England. She was a zealous Romanist, and ready to work hard for her faith. Moreover, she was greatly desirous of being recognized as Elizabeth's next of kin, and openly laid claim to the position. Though very young, she was clever and active, and possessed charms of person and manner which bent many men to her will.

Mary returned from France in 1561, having lost her husband, the young French king, after he had reigned but a single year. She found Scotland, as usual, in a state of turmoil and violence. The Parliament had, in her absence, followed the example of England, by casting off the Roman yoke, and declaring Protestantism the religion of the land. But a strong party of Romanist lords refused obedience, and with them the queen allied herself on her arrival.

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For the seven turbulent years of Mary's stay in Scotland, she was a grievous thorn in the side of Elizabeth. She was always laying claim to be acknowledged as heiress to the English crown, and her demand was secretly approved by the surviving Romanists to the south of the Tweed. Elizabeth replied by intriguing with the Protestant nobles of Scotland, and stirred up as much trouble as she could for her cousin, while outwardly professing the greatest love and esteem for her. The results of their machinations against each other were still uncertain, when Mary spoilt her own game by twice allowing her passion to overrule her judgment. She was fascinated by the handsome person of her first-cousin, Henry Lord Darnley, [34] and most unwisely married him, and made him king-consort. Darnley was a vicious, ill-conditioned young man, and soon made himself unbearable to his wife, by striving to get the royal power into his hands, and at the same time treating her with gross cruelty and neglect. His crowning offence was causing the assassination of Mary's private secretary, Rizzio, in her actual presence, under circumstances of the greatest brutality. After this, Mary completely lost her head. She lent her sanction to a plot for her husband's murder, framed by the Earl of Bothwell, a great lord of the Border. Bothwell slew the young king and blew up his residence with gunpowder, but disavowed the deed, and induced the queen to have him declared guiltless after a mock trial. Mary was well rid of her husband, and, her complicity in the plot not having been proved, she might have escaped the consequences of her crime but for a second fit of infatuation. She had become violently enamoured of the murderer Bothwell, and suffered him to carry her off to the castle of Dunbar, and there to marry her. No one now doubted her complicity in Darnley's murder, and the whole kingdom rose against her in righteous indignation. The army which Bothwell raised in her defence refused to strike a blow, and melted away when faced by the levies of the Protestant lords. The queen herself fell into their hands, was forced to Pg 328 abdicate, and was condemned to lifelong prison in Lochleven Castle. In Mary's place, her young son by Darnley, James VI., was proclaimed as king, the regency being given by the Parliament to James, Earl of Murray, an illegitimate son of James V. (June, 1567).

Queen Mary being thus imprisoned and discredited, Elizabeth thought that her troubles on the side of Scotland were over, and closely allied herself with the Regent Murray. But the struggle was not yet ended. The Romanist party in Scotland saw that the new Protestant rulers of the country would crush their faith, and determined on a desperate rising in favour of their old religion and their old sovereign.

Mary escaped by night from Lochleven, and joined the insurgents. The Regent gave chase, and caught her army up at Langside, near Glasgow. The queen's friends were routed in the fight that followed, and she herself, riding hard out of the fray, fled for the English border. After a moment's hesitation, she resolved to throw herself on Elizabeth's mercy, rather than to face the almost certain death which awaited her at the hands of her son's adherents. There was no time to wait for any promise of safe conduct or shelter, and she arrived at Carlisle, unprotected by any engagement on the part of the Queen of England (May, 1568).

Elizabeth's most dangerous enemy had thus fallen into her hands, but the position was not much simplified by the fact. It had to be decided whether the royal refugee should be allowed to proceed to France, as she herself wished; or handed over to the Scots, as the Regent Murray demanded; or kept in custody in England, as Elizabeth's self-interest seemed to require. To let her go to France would be generous, but dangerous; once arrived there, she would conspire with her cousins, the powerful family of Guise, against the peace of England. To send her back to Scotland would have some savour of legality about it, but would be equivalent to pronouncing her death-sentence; and from this Elizabeth shrank. To keep her captive in England seemed harsh, and even treacherous; for what right had one sovereign princess to imprison another? The politic Elizabeth resolved to take a cautious middle course. She protested to the Queen of Scots that she was willing to restore her to her throne, if she Pg 329 found that the accusations which her subjects made against her were untrue. This was practically putting her guest upon her trial for the murder of Darnley; for when the Regent and the Scots lords were informed of the decision, they came forward to accuse their exiled mistress. They laid before Elizabeth's commission of inquiry the famous "Casket Letters," a series of documents which had passed between Mary and Bothwell. If genuine—and it seems almost certain that they were—they proved the guilt and infatuation of the Queen of Scots up to the hilt. Mary protested that they were forgeries, and her followers down to this day have believed her. But she refused to stand any trial; declared that she, a crowned queen and no subject of England, would never plead before English judges, and demanded leave to quit the realm. Satisfied with the effect on English and Scottish public opinion which the "Casket Letters" had produced, Elizabeth now took the decisive step of consigning Mary to close custody; thus practically treating her as a criminal, though no decision had been given against her (January, 1569).

For nearly twenty years the unfortunate Queen of Scots was doomed to spend a weary life, moved about from one manor or castle to another, under the care of guardians who were little better than gaolers. But she soon began to revenge herself. As long as she lived she was undoubtedly Elizabeth's heiress, if hereditary right counted for anything. Using this fact as her weapon, she began to intrigue with English malcontents. She offered her hand to the Duke of Norfolk, an ambitious young man, who was dazzled by the prospect of succeeding to Elizabeth's throne. She stirred up the Catholic lords of the North, by promising to restore the old faith if they would overthrow her cousin. But Elizabeth's ministers were wary and suspicious; Norfolk's designs were discovered, and he was cast into the Tower. The news of his imprisonment led to the immediate outbreak of the Northern Romanists; Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, raised their retainers, and made a dash on Tutbury, where Mary was confined, intending to rescue her and proclaim her as queen.

But the days of the Wars of the Roses were past; the retainers of the northern lords could do nothing against the royal power, Pg 330 and the "Rising in the North," as the plot was called, came to an ignominious end. The two earls failed to seize the person of the Queen of Scots, and were easily driven away. They fled—the one to Scotland, the other to Spain,—and gave Elizabeth little further trouble. This was the last insurrection of the old feudal type in the pages of English history (October and November, 1569). Elizabeth showed herself more merciful than might have been expected to the plotters. Norfolk was released after a short captivity; the Queen of Scots suffered no further aggravation of her imprisonment. For this she gave her cousin small thanks, and without delay recommenced plotting to secure her liberty.

Meanwhile the aspect of affairs on the Continent was beginning to engage more and more of Elizabeth's attention. By this time civil wars were alight both in France and in the Netherlands. The French Protestants, or Huguenots, as they were called, had taken arms to secure themselves toleration as early as 1562. The Protestants of the Netherlands, after long suffering under the grinding tyranny of Philip of Spain and the Inquisition, had been driven to revolt in 1568. In both countries the insurgents appealed for help to Elizabeth; they implored the queen to save them from the triumph of popery, and pointed out that if they themselves failed, the victorious Romanists would inevitably turn against England, the only power in Western Europe which denied the Pope's supremacy. They might have added that the Queen of Scots was closely allied with the Guises, the heads of the Catholic party in France, and that she was also intriguing for the aid of Philip of Spain.

In her dealings with the Continental Protestants Elizabeth showed herself at her worst. Vacillation and selfishness marked her actions from first to last. She felt that the civil wars kept France and Spain from being dangerous to her. She knew also that if they ended in the suppression of the rebels, England would be in grave danger. But she hated rebellion, she could not understand religious enthusiasm, and she detested the violent Calvinism which both the Huguenots and the Netherlanders professed. All wars too, she knew, were expensive, and their issues doubtful. Hence it came that she displayed a reluctance to commit herself Pg 331 to one side or the other, which involved her in much double-dealing and even treachery. She refused to declare war either on Philip of Spain or on Charles of France, and allowed their ministers to remain at her court. But she several times sent the Huguenots help, both secretly and openly, and she allowed the Netherland Protestants to take shelter in England, and recruit themselves in her ports. She made no effort to prevent hundreds of English volunteers passing the Channel to aid the insurgents. For if the queen had doubts as to taking her side, the people had none; they sympathized heartily with the Huguenots and the Netherlanders, and did all that private persons could to bring them succour.

Yet Elizabeth refused to assume the position of the champion of Protestantism, even when the inducement to do so became more pressing. In 1570 Pope Pius V. formally excommunicated her, and declared her deposed, and her kingdom transferred to her cousin Mary. This declaration turned all the more violent and fanatical Romanists into potential traitors; if they believed in their Pope's decision, they were bound to regard Elizabeth as a bastard and a usurper, and to look upon Mary as the true queen. Most of the English Catholics steadily refused to take up this position, and remained loyal in spite of the many vexations to which their religion exposed them. But a violent minority accepted the papal decree, and spent their time in scheming to depose or even to murder their sovereign. The knowledge of their designs made Elizabeth doubly cautious and wary, but did not drive her into a crusade against Catholicism. Her Parliament, however, passed bills, making the introduction of papal bulls into the realm, as also the perversion of members of the Church of England to Romanism, high treason. But no attempt was made to save the Continental Protestants from their oppressors, or to put England at the head of a league against the Pope.

Meanwhile, the Bull of Deposition bore its first-fruits in a new conspiracy of the English Romanists, generally known as the "Ridolfi Plot," from the name of an Italian banker, who served as the go-between of the English malcontents and the King of Spain. The Duke of Norfolk, ungrateful for his pardon two years before, took the lead in the conspiracy, undertaking to seize or even to murder Elizabeth, Pg 332 and then to marry the Queen of Scots. Philip of Spain promised Norfolk's agent, Ridolfi, that the duke should have the aid of Spanish troops the moment that he took arms. But the plan came to Cecil's ears, some of Norfolk's papers fell into the minister's power, and he was able to lay his hands on all concerned in the plot. Norfolk lost his head, as he well deserved, and it was expected that the Queen of Scots would share his fate. But though the nation and the Parliament clamoured for Mary's blood, Elizabeth refused to touch her; she was left unharmed in her captivity. Nor did the queen declare war on Spain, though there was the clearest proof that Philip had been implicated in the plot. Her only wish seems to have been to put off the crisis as long as possible.

If her own danger could not tempt Elizabeth to interfere in Continental affairs, it was not likely that anything else would make her take up the sword. Not even the fearful Massacre of St. Bartholomew provoked her to take up arms against the Catholics—though on that one night the weak King of France, egged on by his wicked mother and brother, ordered the slaughter of 20,000 Protestants who had come up to Paris, relying on his good will and promised patronage (1572). Elizabeth stormed at the treacherous French court, but made no attempt to aid the surviving Huguenots in their gallant struggle against their persecutors. So great was her determination to keep the peace, that she even offered to mediate between Philip of Spain and the revolted provinces of the Low Countries, though it is fair to add that she—perhaps designedly—proposed conditions to them which it was unlikely that either would accept.

It was fortunate for England that both the Huguenots in France and the Dutch in the North displayed a far greater power of resistance than might have been expected. The former held their own, and even forced King Charles to come to terms and grant them toleration. The latter, though reduced to great straits, persevered to the end under their wise leader, William, Prince of Orange, and beat back the terrible Duke of Alva, King Philip's best general, from the walls of Alkmaar, when their fortunes seemed at the lowest (1573). Next year they forced Alva's successor, Requesens, to retire from Holland, after the gallant defence and relief of Leyden (October, 1574).

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Elizabeth, therefore, escaped the danger that the triumph of the King of Spain and the Catholic party in France would have brought upon her, though her safety came from no merit of her own. It was not till ten years more had passed that she was finally forced to draw the sword and fight for her life and crown. Meanwhile, it cannot be denied that her cautious and selfish policy did much for the material prosperity of England. In twenty years of peace the one country of Western Europe which enjoyed quiet and good government was bound to profit at the expense of its unfortunate neighbours. England became a land of refuge to all the Continental Protestants: to her shores the artisans of France transferred their industries, and the merchants of Antwerp their hoarded wealth. The new settlers were kindly received, as men persecuted in behalf of the true faith, and became good citizens of their adopted country. But most of all did the maritime trade of England prosper. Her seamen got the advantage that comes to the neutral flag in time of war, and began to take into their hands the commerce that had once been the staple of the Hanseatic Towns, the French ocean ports, and the cities of the much-vexed Low Countries. English ships had seldom been seen in earlier days beyond Hamburg or Lisbon, but now they began to push into the Baltic, to follow the Mediterranean as far as Turkey, and even to navigate the wild Arctic Ocean, as far as the ports of Northern Russia.

But the attention of the English seamen was directed most of all to the West, whither the reports of the vast wealth of America drew adventurous spirits as with a magnet. The gold which the Spaniards had plundered from the ancient empires of Mexico and Peru dazzled the eyes of all men, and the English seamen hoped to find some similar hoard on every barren shore from Newfoundland to Patagonia. But the Spaniards arrogated to themselves the sole right to America and its trade, basing their claim on a preposterous grant made them by Alexander VI., the notorious Borgia Pope. They treated all adventurers who pushed into the Western waters not only as intruders, but as pirates. Sir John Hawkins, the pioneer of English trade to America, was always coming into collision with them (1562-64). That more famous sea-captain, Sir Francis Drake, a cousin of Hawkins, spent most Pg 334 of his time in bickering in a somewhat piratical way with the Spanish authorities beyond the ocean. His second voyage to the West was a great landmark in English naval history. Starting in 1577 with the secret connivance of Elizabeth, he sailed round Cape Horn and up the coasts of Chili and Peru, capturing numberless Spanish ships, and often sacking a wealthy port. His greatest achievement was the seizing of the great Lima galleon, which was taking home to King Philip the annual instalment of American treasure—a sum of no less than £500,000. After taking this splendid booty, Drake reached England by crossing the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and rounding the Cape of Good Hope, thus making the first circumnavigation of the globe which an Englishman had accomplished. While Drake was gathering treasure in South America, other seamen pushed northward, endeavouring to find the "North-West Passage"—a navigable route which was supposed to exist round the northern shore of North America. There Frobisher discovered Labrador and Hudson's Bay, but brought back little profit from his adventures in the frozen Arctic seas.

While the emissaries of England were invading the Spanish waters, England herself was suffering from another kind of invasion at the hands of the friends of the King of Spain. Since the bull of 1570, Elizabeth was considered fair game by every fanatical Romanist on the Continent. Accordingly, there began to land in England many secret missionaries of the old faith, generally exiled Englishmen trained abroad in the "English colleges" at Rheims and Douay, where the banished Catholics mustered strongest. It was their aim not only to keep wavering Romanists in their faith, but to organize them in a secret conspiracy against the queen. They taught that all was permissible in dealing with heretics; their disciples were to feign loyalty, and even conformity with the English Church, but were to be ready to take up arms whenever the signal was given from the Continent. These Jesuits and seminary priests constituted a very serious danger, but they did not escape the eyes of Walsingham and Burleigh, Elizabeth's watchful ministers. Their plans were discovered, and several were caught and hung; yet the conspiracy went on, and was soon to take shape in overt action.

Its first working was seen in "Throckmorton's Plot," a widely Pg 335 spread scheme for an attack on England by all the Catholic powers combined (1583). The Duke of Guise prepared an army in France, the King of Spain another in the Netherlands, which were to unite for an invasion. Meanwhile, the English Romanists were to rise in favour of the Queen of Scots, and welcome the foreign armies. Throckmorton and a few more fanatics undertook to make the whole plan easier by assassinating the queen. But Walsingham's spies got scent of the matter, Throckmorton was caught and executed, and Elizabeth, convinced at last that dallying with Spain was no longer possible, dismissed King Philip's ambassador, and prepared for open war (1584).

The struggle which had so long been fought out by intrigue and unauthorized buccaneering, was now to be settled by honest hard fighting. It proved perilous enough, but far less formidable than the cautious queen had feared. Elizabeth was at last forced to lend open aid to the Protestants of the Continent, and 7000 men, under her favourite, the Earl of Leicester, sailed for Holland to aid the Dutch against King Philip. They won no great battles, but their presence was invaluable to the Netherlanders, who had begun to despair when their great leader, William of Orange, had been assassinated by a fanatic hired by Spanish gold. Leicester was an incapable general, but his men fought well, and learnt to despise the Spaniards. Even a defeat which they suffered at Zutphen encouraged them, for 500 English there made head against the whole Spanish army, and retired without great harm, though they lost Sir Philip Sidney, the most popular and accomplished young gentleman in England, well known as the author of a curious pastoral romance called "The Arcadia" (1586).

Far more important than the fighting in the Netherlands were the maritime exploits of the English seamen. The moment that they were let loose upon the Spaniards they asserted a clear supremacy at sea. Drake took and sacked Vigo, a great port of Northern Spain, and then, crossing the Atlantic, captured the chief cities of the West Indies and the Spanish main—St. Iago, Cartagena, and St. Domingo (1586).

Meanwhile, Mary Queen of Scots was playing her last stake.

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From her prison she made over to King Philip her rights to the throne of England, and besought him to despatch his armies to rescue her. But she also gave her approval to one more assassination-plot hatched by the English Catholics. Instigated by a Jesuit priest named Ballard, Anthony Babington, a gentleman of Derbyshire, and a handful of his friends agreed to murder Elizabeth in her own palace. But there were spies of the lynx-eyed Walsingham among the conspirators, and when the Queen of Scots and the would-be murderers were just prepared to strike, hands were laid upon them. Babington and his friends were executed, but this was not enough to appease the cry for blood which arose from the whole nation when the conspiracy was divulged. Urged on by her ministers, Elizabeth at last allowed the Queen of Scots to be put on her trial for this, the fourth attempt to strike down her cousin. Mary was tried by a commission of peers, and clearly convicted, not only of encouraging a Catholic rising and a Spanish invasion, but of having approved Babington's murderous plan. She was found guilty (October 25, 1586), and the Parliament, which met soon after, besought the queen to have her beheaded without delay.

But Elizabeth still hesitated. She hated Mary, but her high ideas of royal prerogative made her shrink from slaying a sovereign princess, and she still dreaded the explosion of wrath which she knew must follow all over Catholic Europe. The young King of Scotland might resent his mother's execution, and the Guises in France would never pardon their cousin's death. She lingered for more than three months before she would issue Mary's death-warrant; but at last she gave the fatal signature. Her ministers at once caused the warrant to be carried out, without allowing their mistress time to repent. The Queen of Scots was executed in her prison at Fotheringay Castle. She died with great dignity and courage, asserting on the scaffold that she was a martyr for her religion, not a criminal. Many both in her own day and since have believed her words, but it is impossible to read her story through from first to last, and then to conclude that she was only the victim of circumstances and the prey of unscrupulous enemies. Though much sinned against, she was far more the worker of her own undoing (February 8, 1587).

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Elizabeth expressed great wrath against her ministers for hurrying on the execution. She fined and imprisoned Davison, the Secretary of State, who had sent off Mary's death-warrant, and pretended that she had wished to pardon her. Perhaps her anger was real, but no one save the unfortunate Davison took it very seriously. The people felt nothing but satisfaction and relief, and rejoiced that there was no longer a Catholic heiress to trouble the realm. The King of Scots contented himself with a formal protest, and the Guises in France were too busy in their civil wars with King Henry III. and the Huguenots to think of assailing England.

Only Philip of Spain, who accepted in sober earnest the legacy of her rights which Mary had left him, took up the task of revenge, and he had already so many causes to hate Elizabeth, that he did not need this additional provocation to spur him on to attack her. He had already begun to prepare for a great naval expedition against England. All through the spring and summer of 1587 the ports of Spain, Portugal, Naples, and Sicily, were busy in manning and equipping every war-ship that the king could get together. The Duke of Parma, the Spanish viceroy in the Netherlands, was also directed to draw off every man that could be spared from the Dutch War, and to be ready to lead them across the Channel the moment that the king's fleet should have secured the Straits of Dover.

But the great flotilla, the Invincible Armada, as the Spaniards called it, was long in sailing. Ere it was ready, Drake made a bold descent on Cadiz, and burnt no less than 10,000 tons of shipping which lay in its harbour. He called this exploit "singeing the King of Spain's beard." This disaster caused so much delay that the expedition had to be put off till the next year.

In the spring of 1588, however, the Armada was at last ready to start. It comprised 130 vessels, half of which were great "galleons" of the largest size that were known to the sixteenth century, and carried 8000 seamen and nearly 20,000 soldiers. But the crews were raw, the ships were ill-found and ill-provisioned, and, what was most fatal of all, the admiral, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, was a mere fair-weather sailor, who hardly knew a mast from an anchor. It may be added that the vessels were overcrowded with the 20,000 soldiers whom they bore, and for the Pg 338 most part were armed with fewer and smaller cannons than their great bulk would have been able to carry.

Nevertheless, the Armada was an imposing force, and in strong hands ought to have achieved success. For Elizabeth had a very small permanent royal navy, and had to rely for the defence of her realm mainly on privateers and merchantmen hastily equipped for war service. Moreover, her parsimony had depleted the royal arsenals to such an extent, that in provisioning and arming their fleet the English were at much the same disadvantage as their enemies. But, unlike the Spaniards, they had excellent crews, and were led by old captains who had learnt their trade in long years of exploring and buccaneering across the Atlantic—men like Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and others whose names we have no space to mention. The command of the whole was given to Lord Howard of Effingham, a capable and cautious officer, who showed himself worthy of the queen's confidence—confidence that appeared all the more striking because he was suspected by many to be a Roman Catholic. In the mere number of ships the English fleet which mustered at Plymouth somewhat exceeded the Armada, but in size the individual vessels were far smaller than the Spanish galleons. But they were much more seaworthy, and were armed so heavily with artillery that it was found that an English ship could throw a broadside of the same weight of metal as a Spaniard of almost double its size.

The Armada left Corunna, the northernmost port of Spain, on July 22, and appeared off the Lizard on July 28. On the news of its approach, the English fleet put out of Plymouth, and the beacons summoned the militia to arms all over the land from Berwick to Penzance. The Duke of Medina Sidonia had resolved not to fight the English at once, but to pass up the Channel to the Dover Straits, and get into communication with his colleague Parma in Flanders, before engaging in a decisive battle. This unwise resolve gave the English a splendid opportunity. As the Armada slowly rolled eastward, it was beset on all sides by Lord Howard's lighter fleet, and for a whole week was battered and hustled along without being able to induce the enemy to close. The great galleons were so slow and unwieldy, that they could not come up with the English, who sailed around and about Pg 339 them, plying them with distant but effective artillery fire, and cutting off every vessel which was disabled or fell behind. By the time that the Spaniards reached Calais, they were thoroughly demoralized; they had lost comparatively few ships, but every one of the fleet was more or less shattered by shot, and the crews had suffered terribly from the cannonade. At Calais Medina Sidonia received the unwelcome news that Parma could not join him. A Dutch fleet was blockading the Flemish ports, and the viceroy was unable to get his transports out to sea. Thus brought to a check, the duke moored his fleet off Calais, to pause a moment and recruit (August 6). But that night the English sent fire-ships among his crowded vessels, and to escape them the Spaniards had to put off hastily in the darkness. This manœuvre proved fatal. Some vessels ran ashore on the French coast, others were burnt, others cut off by the enemy. A final engagement, on August 8-9, so shattered the fleet that Medina Sidonia lost heart, and fled away into the German Ocean, before a strong gale from the south which had sprung up. His vessels were dispersed, and each made its way out of the fight as best it could. Some were taken, many driven on to the Dutch coast, the rest passed out of sight of England, steering northward before the gale.

Lord Howard's fleet was therefore able to sail victorious into the Thames, and report the rout of the enemy. It was none too soon, for the English ammunition was well-nigh exhausted after ten days' continuous fighting. They were welcomed by the queen, who had gathered a great force of militia at Tilbury, in Essex, to fight Parma, if he should succeed in crossing. Elizabeth had behaved splendidly during the crisis; she had organized a strong army, and put herself at its head, inspiring every man by the cheerful and resolute spirit which she displayed. Even had the Armada swept away the English fleet, it is unlikely that Parma would have been successful against the numerous and enthusiastic levies which were ready to fight him.

But the Armada was now a thing of naught. Forced to return round the north of Scotland, it was utterly shattered in the unknown seas of the West. The cliffs of the Orkneys, the Hebrides, Connaught, and Kerry, were strewn with the wrecks of Spanish galleons, and only 53 ships out of the 130 that had started straggled back to the ports of northern Spain.

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The great crisis of the century was now past; queen and nation had been true to themselves and to each other, and the days of plots and invasions were over. For the future, Elizabeth could not only sleep secure of life and crown, but could feel that she might pose as the arbitress of Western Europe, since the domination of Spain was at an end.

But she was now too far gone in years—she had attained the age of fifty-six—to be able to start on a new and vigorous line of policy. Her old passion for caution and intrigue could not be shaken off, though they were no longer necessary. Hence it came to pass that, though England was strong, healthy, wealthy, and vigorous, she did not take up the dominant position that might have been expected. The queen persisted in her old policy of helping the Continental Protestants only by meagre doles of money, and small detachments of troops. By a vigorous effort she might have thrust the Spaniards completely out of the Low Countries, or enabled the Huguenots to make themselves supreme in France. But she refused to fit out any great expeditions; the expense appalled her parsimonious soul, and she dreaded the chances of war. Hence it came that in the Low Countries the Dutch established their independence in the "Seven United Provinces," but Spain continued to hold Belgium. Hence, too, French parties were condemned to six years more of civil war, which only ended when Henry of Navarre, the Protestant heir to the throne of France, abjured his religion in order to get accepted by the Catholics. "Paris is well worth a Mass," he cynically observed, and swore all that was required of him (1593). But he granted the Huguenots complete peace and toleration by the celebrated Edict of Nantes, and put an end to the civil war which had devastated his unhappy land for thirty years.

The chief efforts of Elizabeth's foreign policy during the last fifteen years of her reign were naval expeditions against the Spaniards. They caused King Philip much loss and much vexation of spirit, but they did not inflict any very crushing blow on him. The queen would never spend enough money on them, and generally allowed her subjects to carry on the war with squadrons of privateers. But the English adventurers very naturally sought plunder rather than solid political advantages—a fact which Pg 341 accounts for their failure to do anything great. A considerable expedition sent out in 1589 sacked Corunna and Vigo, but failed in an attempt to set upon the Portuguese throne a pretender hostile to King Philip. This was followed by a series of smaller expeditions to South America and the West Indies, in which Drake, and a younger adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth's favourite courtier, did Spain considerable harm, but England no great good. A larger armament sailed in 1596 against Cadiz, under the Earl of Essex and Lord Howard of Effingham. This force took the town, and destroyed Spain's largest naval arsenal and a great part of her fleet: a mere naval expedition could do no more.

These successive blows at Spain gave England the complete command of the seas. Hence it is not strange that we find the beginnings of colonial enterprise appearing. An attempt to found a settlement on the bleak shore of Newfoundland was a failure. But Sir Walter Raleigh planted a promising colony in the more clement district about the river Roanoke, which he named Virginia, after his mistress, the "Virgin-Queen," as she loved to be called. The first Virginian scheme came to naught—the Indians were hostile, and the improvident settlers planted tobacco instead of corn, and so starved themselves (1590). It was not till seventeen years later that the colony was founded for the second time, and began to flourish. It was from thence that Raleigh brought to England the two products that are always connected with his name, tobacco and potatoes.

Colonial enterprise was accompanied by increased trade with distant lands. The English ships began to appear as far afield as India, China, and even Japan. The merchants who worked the more difficult and dangerous routes, banded themselves into chartered companies, of which the Turkey Company, founded in 1581, the Russian Company, dating from 1566, and the far more famous East India Company (1600) were the most important. By the end of the queen's reign, English commerce had doubled and tripled, and the steady stream of wealth which it poured into the land had done much to end the social troubles and dangers which had marked the middle years of the century.

But nearly all the profit went to the town populations. Ports Pg 342 and markets flourished, merchants and skilled artisans grew rich, and a certain proportion of the wretched vagrant hordes, which had been the terror of the middle years of the century, were absorbed into the new employments which were springing up in the towns. But in the countryside, neither the landholder nor the peasant had nearly such a good position as in the days before the Reformation. The prices both of food and of manufactured goods had gone up about threefold, but rents had not risen perceptibly, and the wages of agricultural labour had only increased about 50 percent. The country gentleman, therefore, was no longer so opulent in comparison to the town-dwelling merchant, and the peasant stood far worse compared with the artisan than in the previous century. We may place in the time of Elizabeth the beginning of that rise of the importance of the urban as compared with the rural population, which has been going on ever since, till, in our own day, England is entirely dominated by her towns. It will be noticed that in the great political struggle of the next century, under the Stuarts, the party which represented the wealth and activity of the cities completely beat that which drew its strength from the peerage and gentry of the purely agricultural districts.

It would be wrong to leave the field of social change without mentioning the celebrated Poor Law of Queen Elizabeth (1601). All attempts to cope with pauperism by voluntary charity having failed, it was finally resolved to make the maintenance of the aged and invalid poor a statutory burden on the parishes. The new law provided that the able-bodied vagrant should be forced to work, and, if he refused, should be imprisoned, but that the impotent and deserving should be fed and housed by overseers, who were authorized to levy rates on the parish for their support. The system seems to have worked well, and we hear no complaints on the subject for three or four generations.

It is most noteworthy to mark the way in which the expansion of England in the spheres of political and commercial greatness was accompanied by a corresponding growth in the realms of intellect. The second half of Elizabeth's reign, a mere period of twenty years, was more fertile in great literary names than the two whole centuries Pg 343 which had preceded it. The excitement of the long religious wars, the sudden opening up of the dark places of the world by the great explorers, the free spirit of individual inquiry which accompanied the growth of Protestantism, all conspired to stir and develop men's minds. The greatest English dramatist, William Shakespeare, born in 1564, and the greatest English philosopher, Francis Bacon, born in 1561, were both children of the days of the long struggle with Spain, and had watched the final crisis of the Armada in their early manhood. Edmund Spenser, a few years older than his mightier contemporaries, shows even more clearly the spirit of the times. All through his lengthy epic of the Faërie Queene he is inspired by the enthusiasm of the struggles of England, and tells in allegory the glories of the great Elizabeth. We have but space to allude to Sir Philip Sydney and his pastoral romances, to Hooker's works on political philosophy, to Marlowe and other dramatists whose fame is half eclipsed by Shakespeare's genius. Never before or since has England produced in a few short years such a crop of great literary names.

The two main subjects of domestic importance in the last years of Elizabeth were the development of fresh forms of division in the English Church, and the troubles caused by the new conquest of Ireland. Both of these movements had begun in the earlier years of the reign, but did not fully expand till its end.

Elizabeth's chief problem in matters religious had for thirty years been that of dealing with the Roman Catholics. But after the death of Mary of Scotland and the defeat of the Armada this question retired somewhat into the background. The vast majority of the Romanists had conformed to the Anglican Church; of the remainder many were loyal, and were therefore tacitly left unharmed by the Government, save when they came into conflict with the Recusancy Laws, as the acts directed against them were called. The small but violent minority who listened to the Jesuits, and were still plotting against the queen, were, on the other hand, treated with the most vehement harshness. At one time and another, a very considerable number of them came to the gallows, though always, as Elizabeth was careful to explain, not as Papists, but as traitors. They were so hated by the nation, who identified Pg 344 them with nothing but assassination plots and intrigues with Spain, that they no longer constituted any danger.

But a new religious problem was growing up. Many of the Protestants who had conformed to the English Church system in Elizabeth's earlier years were growing out of touch with the National Establishment. Constant intercourse with the Huguenots and the Dutch, both of whom professed violent forms of Calvinism, had made them discontented with the ritual and organization of the English Church. Like their Continental friends, they came to hate bishops and canons, vestments and ritual, even things that seem to us parts of the common decencies of church service, such as the surplice in the reading-desk, the usage of kneeling at Holy Communion, the employment of the ring in marriage, and the sign of the cross at baptism. All these remnants of common Christian practice they considered to be "rags of Popery," vain survivals of the old Romanist days. And since they wished to sweep everything away, they were called in derision "Puritans," in allusion to their constant citation of "the pure Gospel."

Elizabeth detested the Puritan habit of mind. She loved decency and order, and she liked the pomp and splendour of the old church services; indeed, she would have gladly kept much that the Anglican Establishment has rejected. She was proud of her position as head and defender of the national Church, and looked upon the bishops as high and important state officials under her. The Puritan desire to abolish the episcopate, to do away with all ritual, to whitewash the churches and break down all their ornaments, seemed to her to savour of anarchic republicanism and rank disloyalty. She was determined that the Puritan, no less than the Romanist, should suffer if he refused to conform to the usages of the national Church. Hence it came that she dealt very hardly with the Puritans, suppressing their religious meetings for "prophesying"—as they called extempore preaching—and treating their pamphlets as seditious. One very scurrilous set of tracts, issued under the name of Martin Mar-prelate, provoked her wrath so much that John Penry, who was responsible for them, was actually hung for treasonable libel. Puritans who kept quiet did not suffer, any more than the Romanists who kept quiet, but those who resisted the queen were treated with a rigour that Pg 345 showed that the day of freedom of conscience was still far away. The discontented admirers of Calvinism still kept within the Church of England,—it was their ambition to change its doctrine, not to quit it; but already in Elizabeth's reign it was obvious that schism between the moderate and the violent parties was inevitable.

The most miserable and melancholy page of the history of Elizabeth's reign is that which is covered by the records of Ireland. We have already mentioned how Henry VIII. had extended the English influence beyond the borders of "the Pale," and done something towards subduing the whole island to obedience. But the most important share of the work was reserved for Elizabeth. Her intent was shown by her Act of 1569, for dividing the whole land into shires, to be ruled by sheriffs on the English plan—a device for destroying the patriarchal authority of the tribal chiefs, who from time immemorial had governed their clans according to old Celtic law. It was not to be expected that any such scheme could be carried out without causing friction with the natives. They were wholly unaccustomed to obey or respect the royal mandate, and acknowledged no authority higher than that of their own chief: English laws and English manners were alike hateful to them. In many districts they were little better than savages; the "wild Irish," as the more uncivilized tribes were called, dwelt in low huts of mud, wore no shoes or head-gear, and were clothed only in a rough kilt and mantle of frieze. They wore their hair long over neck and eyes, went everywhere armed to the teeth, and looked on tribal war and plundering as the sole serious business of life.

To teach such a race to live under the strict English law was an almost impossible task, requiring the utmost patience, and Elizabeth's ministers and officials were not patient. When the chiefs withstood their orders, they declared them traitors, confiscated the lands of whole tribes, and attempted to settle up the annexed districts with English colonists. This, of course, drove the Irish to desperation, and the incomers were soon slain or driven away. In return, the Lord-Deputy of Ireland or one of the "Presidents" of its four provinces would march against the rebels, slay every male person they met, armed or unarmed, and leave the women and children to Pg 346 starve. In this ruthless, devastating war, whole counties were depopulated and left waste, a few survivors only escaping into woods, bogs, or mountains. The worst feature of the struggle was the cruel double-dealing employed against the Irish chiefs; they were often induced to surrender by false promises of pardon, they were caught and slain by treachery, sometimes they were even poisoned. The intractable nature of the rebels explains, but does not excuse, the conduct of the English rulers. The Irish would never keep an oath or observe a peace; they plundered and murdered whenever the Lord-Deputy's eye was not on them, and they were always trying to get aid from Spain.

At first the struggle between English and Irish was purely a matter of race, but the religious element was soon introduced. Protestantism made no head in the country, and in 1579 a Papal Legate, Nicholas Sanders, came over to organize the tribes to unite in defence of the old religion. No man could ever persuade Irish parties to join for long, and Sanders's mission was in that respect a failure. But for the future the war was embittered by religious as well as racial hatred. In 1580 the Pope sent over a body of Italian and Spanish mercenaries to aid the rebels; but this force was blockaded by Lord Grey in its camp at Smerwick, a harbour in Kerry, and every man was put to the sword. At a later date Philip of Spain sent similar and equally ineffective help.

The two chief struggles of the Irish against the establishment of the English rule were that of the tribes of Munster in 1578-83, and that of the tribes of Ulster in 1595-1601. The former was led by Garrett Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, the greatest lord of the South, the descendant of one of those Anglo-Norman families which had become more Irish than the Irish themselves. In his desperate struggle with Lord-Deputy Grey and the English colonists in Munster, he saw all the land from Galway to Waterford harried into a wilderness, and was killed at last as a fugitive in the hills.

The Ulster rebellion of Hugh O'Neil, Earl of Tyrone, the head of the greatest of the native Irish septs, was far more formidable than that of the Fitzgeralds. The English could for a long time do nothing against him. In 1598 he defeated an army of 5000 men on the Blackwater and slew its leader, Sir Henry Bagenal, and most of his Pg 347 followers. Tyrone sent for aid to Spain, and so moved Queen Elizabeth's fears that she despatched against him the largest English force that ever went over-sea in her reign. An army of 20,000 men was placed under Robert Devereux, the young Earl of Essex, whom the queen loved most of all men in her later years, and sent over to Dublin. Essex, though he had won much credit for courage in Holland, and at the capture of Cadiz, was not a great general. He pacified Central and Southern Ireland, but did not succeed in crushing Tyrone. It would seem that he was disgusted at the cruelty and treachery of his predecessors in the government of Ireland, and wished to admit the rebels to submission on easy terms. At any rate, he made a truce with Tyrone in 1600, promising that the queen should grant him toleration in matters of religion, and leave him his earldom. Essex returned to England to get these terms ratified, but was received very coldly by his mistress and her council, who had sent him to Ireland to suppress, not to condone, the rebellion. His treaty was not confirmed, and the war with Tyrone went on. The earl got 7000 men from Spain, and ravaged all Central Ireland, till he was defeated by Lord Montjoy in an attempt to raise the siege of Kinsale (1601). In the next year he made complete submission to the queen, and was pardoned and given back most of his Ulster lands. But the eight years of war had made Northern Ireland a desert, and the power of the O'Neils was almost broken.

Meanwhile the short stay of Essex in Ireland had led to a strange tragedy in London. The young earl had been so much favoured by the queen in earlier years, that he could not brook the rebuke that fell upon him for his dealings with Tyrone. Presuming on the almost doting fondness which his sovereign had shown for him, the headstrong young man plunged into seditious courses. He swore that his enemies in the council had calumniated him to the queen, and that he would be revenged on them and drive them out of office. With this object he gathered many of the Puritan party about him—for he was a strong Protestant—and resolved to overturn the ministry by force. He caught the Lord Chancellor, and locked him up, and then sallied out armed into the streets of London with a band of his friends, calling on the people to rise and deliver the queen from false councillors. Pg 348 But he had counted too much on his popularity; no one joined him, and he was apprehended and put in prison.

Elizabeth was much enraged with her former favourite, and allowed his enemies to persuade her into permitting him to be tried and executed for treason. When he was dead she bitterly regretted him (February, 1601).

The great queen was now near her end. All her contemporaries, both friends and foes, had passed away already. Philip of Spain had died, a prey to religious melancholy, and racked by a loathsome disease, in 1598. That same year saw the end of the great minister, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. His colleague Walsingham had sunk into the grave some years earlier, in 1590. Leicester, whom the queen had loved till his death-day, had perished of a fever in 1588, the year of the Armada. A younger generation had arisen, which only knew Elizabeth as an old woman, and forgot her brilliant youth. To them the vivacity and love of pleasure which she displayed on the verge of her seventieth year seemed abnormal and even unseemly.

To the last she kept her talent for dealing with men. There was no greater instance of her cleverness shown in all her life than her management of her Parliament in 1601. The Commons had been growing more resolute and strong-willed as the queen grew older, and though Elizabeth often chid them, and sometimes even imprisoned members who displeased her, yet she knew when to yield with a good grace. The Parliament of 1601 was raging against "monopolies"—grants under the royal seal to individuals, permitting them to be the sole vendors or manufacturers of certain articles of trade. Seeing their resolution, Elizabeth came down in person to the House, and addressed the members at length, so cleverly that she persuaded them that she was as much opposed to the abuse as they themselves, and won enormous applause when she announced that all monopolies were at once to be withdrawn and made illegal.

Eighteen months after this strange scene Elizabeth died, in her seventy-first year. On her death-bed she assented to the designation of James of Scotland as her successor—a thing she would never suffer before, for she held that "an expectant heir is like a coffin always in sight."

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In spite of the many unamiable points in her character, Elizabeth was always liked by her subjects, and well deserved their liking. She had guided England through forty-five most troublous years, and left her subjects wealthy, prosperous, and contented. Her failures had always been upon the side of caution, and such mistakes are the easiest to repair and the soonest forgotten. Both in her own day and in ages to come, she received the credit for all the progress and prosperity of her reign. The nation, groaning under the unwisdom of the Stuarts, cried in vain for a renewal of "the days of good Queen Bess." The modern historian, when he recounts the great deeds of the Englishmen of the latter half of the sixteenth century, invariably speaks of the "Elizabethan age." Nor is this wrong. When we reflect on the evils which a less capable sovereign might have brought upon the realm in that time of storm and stress, we may well give her due meed of thanks to the cautious, politic, unscrupulous queen, who left such peace and prosperity behind her.

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The accession of Charles I. made a profound change in the destinies of England, for though the new king had the same policy and the same notions of government in Church and State as his father, yet his personal character was wholly different. James had been before all things a coward: he seldom dared to translate his theories into action, and hence it came that he died peacefully in his bed. His son, on the other hand, was not lacking in courage, and he was recklessly obstinate; nothing could bend his will or teach him submission; therefore he died on the scaffold.

Yet Charles was in every way superior to his father. He was a man of handsome face and stately carriage; though reared in a profligate and vicious court, he had grown up with all the private virtues; as a father and husband, he was admirable. He was sincerely religious, and ardently loved the Church of England. He was a wise and judicious patron of art and letters, but his tastes never led him into personal extravagance. If he had been born a peer instead of a prince, he would have been one of the best men of his day. But, unfortunately for England and for himself, he inherited a crown and not a coronet. He came to the helm of State fully persuaded of the truth of the two maxims that his father had taught him—that the royal prerogative overrode all the ancient national rights, and that the king ought to judge for himself in all things, and follow his own ideas, not the advice of his Parliament.

The accession of Charles was saluted with joy on all sides. Pg 363 The nation thought that the young, chivalrous, and enterprising prince would reverse all his father's policy—he would cast away the hated Spanish alliance, and place England at the head of the Protestant powers of Europe, the position that she had held in Elizabeth's day. It was hoped that he would relegate the upstart Buckingham to the background, and rule for himself, but in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the nation.

The first jarring note was struck when it became evident that the king was still under the control of his father's favourite. Villiers had somehow contrived to master the mind of the staid and firm Charles no less than that of the timid and irresolute James. When the first Parliament of the new reign was summoned, it found him in full possession of the king's ear, and dictating all his enterprises.

The enormous demands for money which Charles laid before the Commons were enough to dash their spirits. The late king had left some £800,000 of debts, and in addition to the sum required to discharge them, £1,000,000 more was asked for purposes of war with Spain and the Emperor. To the disgust of Charles and Buckingham, Parliament voted only two subsidies, about £150,000, and granted "Tunnage and Poundage"—the customs revenue of the kingdom—for one year only, though it had been usual, in late reigns, to give it for the whole term of the king's life.

The want of confidence which the Commons showed in Buckingham's administrative capacity was thoroughly justified. His first military adventure was a great expedition against the Spanish arsenal of Cadiz. A large fleet was sent out, but the generals were incapable, and the armament returned in a few months, without having accomplished anything save the capture of a single Spanish fort (1625).

Meanwhile a new trouble was brewing. Charles had carried out Buckingham's scheme for an alliance with France, and had taken to wife the Princess Henrietta Maria, sister of Lewis XIII., the moment that the mourning for his father was over. Shortly after, his brother-in-law asked him for the loan of eight men-of-war, for the French navy was small and weak. The request was granted, and the Pg 364 French government then proceeded to use the ships against the rebellious Huguenots of La Rochelle, who were in arms against the king.

Now, the English nation had always felt much sympathy with the French Protestants, their old companions-in-arms in the days of Elizabeth, and the news that the royal navy was being used to coerce the Huguenots caused a great outcry throughout the country. All the blame was laid on Buckingham, as was but natural. He had also to face another accusation. Unable to get enough money from Parliament to fit out the unhappy expedition to Cadiz, the king had raised large sums by "benevolences" and forced loans—the old expedient of Edward IV.

When, therefore, the second Parliament of the reign assembled in 1626, it proceeded, not to grant subsidies for the war, but to petition against Buckingham. The king took the matter in the most haughty and high-handed manner. "I must let you know," he exclaimed, "that I will not let any of my servants be questioned by you—much less those that are of eminent place, and near to me." He denied, in short, the ancient right of the House to petition against unpopular ministers—a right which it had used fifty times in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But the Commons hardened their hearts, and proceeded to impeach the duke for having raised illegal taxes, sold public offices to unworthy persons, and lent the ships to France contrary to the interests of the realm and the Protestant faith. The king's reply was to dissolve them (June, 1626).

But the king and the duke had been seriously moved by the outcry against the loan of the ships to King Lewis. In a vain attempt to conciliate public opinion, and put themselves right with the nation, they suddenly reversed their policy of the last two years, and resolved to break with France, even though the Spanish war was still on their hands. With inconceivable frivolity and thoughtlessness, Buckingham proceeded to pick a quarrel with the French government, and to announce his intention of aiding the Huguenot rebels in La Rochelle against their sovereign.

War was declared against France, and Buckingham undertook to lead in person a great armament which was to raise the Pg 365 siege of La Rochelle, now closely beleaguered by the royal armies. This expedition came to a bad end, like everything else which the headstrong and incapable duke took in hand. He landed on the Isle of Rhé, opposite La Rochelle, to drive off the French troops which shut the city in on the side of the sea. But there he suffered a fearful disaster: part of his army was cut to pieces, part compelled to surrender, and, after losing 4000 men, the duke hastily re-embarked for England (October, 1627).

But Buckingham was as obstinate as he was incompetent. He swore that he would still save La Rochelle, and began to gather a second army at Portsmouth to renew his attempt to raise the siege. While employed in organizing his new troops, he was stabbed and mortally wounded by John Felton, a discontented officer who had served under him in Rhé, and wished to avenge his private wrongs and free the country of a tyrant by this single blow (August, 1628).

By the death of his arrogant minister, the king obtained a splendid opportunity of setting himself right with the nation and turning over a new leaf. For men had agreed to consider Buckingham personally answerable for the disasters and illegalities of the two last years, and to hold the king guilty of nothing more than a misplaced confidence in his favourite.

Charles soon showed that he was not wiser nor more teachable than the duke. He took no new favourite into his confidence, and proceeded to act as his own prime minister, so that he made himself clearly responsible for all that followed. He had summoned his third Parliament early in 1628, hoping to extract from it the sums necessary to defray Buckingham's projected second expedition to La Rochelle. The Commons met in no pleasant mood, and were far more set on protesting against the doings of Buckingham than on granting money. The new House contained many men who were to be notable in after-years as the chief opponents of the king's misrule: Oliver Cromwell appeared for the first time to represent Huntingdon; Hampden, Pym, and Eliot were also numbered among the members—all three considerable personages, who had already protested against the methods of the king's administration.

Instead of waiting to be attacked, the Parliament of 1628 took Pg 366 the initiative, by presenting to the king the celebrated Petition of Right—a document which demanded that certain ancient rights of Englishmen should be formally conceded by the king, namely, that no benevolences or forced loans should be demanded, no soldiers billeted on citizens without payment, no man imprisoned except on a specified and definite charge, and no martial law proclaimed in time of peace. Unless this petition was granted, they intimated that no supplies of money should be forthcoming (May 28). After some quibbling and hesitation, Charles gave his assent; money was absolutely necessary to him, and he was determined to have it. The subsidies were granted, and then in a few months he proceeded to break his plighted word.

When the Parliament met after its adjournment in January, 1629, it found that the king had already begun raising Tunnage and Poundage, which had not yet been legally granted him, and was imprisoning those who refused to pay. Their indignation was thoroughly roused, and they displayed such a combative spirit, that Charles determined to dissolve them at once. While his messenger was knocking at the door of the House, the Commons passed a hasty resolution, "that any one who should countenance Popery, or advise the levying of subsidies not granted by Parliament, should be reputed a capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth." This declaration had hardly been carried, when the notice of dissolution was proclaimed (March 10, 1629).

After waging such bitter war with three successive Parliaments, Charles resolved to try the unprecedented experiment of governing without Parliaments at all. For eleven years he refused to summon the two Houses, and ruled autocratically without any check on his will (1629-1640). He marked his sense of the late Parliament's conduct by apprehending several of its members, and sending three of them to the Tower. Sir John Eliot, the most prominent of these captives, and one of the best men of his day, languished to death in his prison, after a confinement of no less than three years.

After this cruel and unconstitutional beginning, Charles persevered in his evil ways. He chose a body of ministers who would obey his every command, displaced such judges and officials as showed any regard for the old customs of the realm, Pg 367 and governed like a Continental tyrant. He was not a vicious or a malevolent man, but he was fully convinced that his prerogative covered every illegal act that he might commit, and he was persuaded that all who opposed him must be not only foolish but evil-disposed persons. As to the Petition of Right, he managed to forget that he had ever signed it.

The two chief councillors of the king in this unhappy period were William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford. The former was an honest but narrow-minded man, who had made a great reputation at Oxford as President of St. John's College, and had grown to note as the head of the High Church party in the University. He was a good scholar and an excellent organizer, but a martinet to the backbone. He accepted the archbishopric with the fixed idea of suppressing and crushing the Puritan party in and out of the Church of England. He hated the Puritan ideal of Church government on republican lines without king or bishop, and he equally detested the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, [38] which was the shibboleth of Puritan theology. The king was a good Churchman, and gave Laud his full confidence; Laud, in return, became the zealous servant of Charles in secular no less than in religious matters. Not only did he teach consistently that it was a subject's duty to submit without question to a divinely ordained king, not only did he devote himself to molesting and harassing Puritans in the Church Courts, but he made himself the most prominent personage among the king's ministers. His name is signed at the top of every unwise ordinance that the Privy Council ever produced. He sat regularly in the two ancient but unconstitutional courts, the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, which punished those who had offended King Charles in matters secular or spiritual. Hence it came that he was hated, not only as an ecclesiastical tyrant, but as a temporal oppressor. Yet at bottom he was an honest and well-meaning man, who did but follow the dictates of his somewhat pedantic conscience.

It is difficult to give even this moderate praise to the other great minister who served King Charles. Sir Thomas Wentworth had been a great enemy of Buckingham in Parliament,

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but after the duke's death he suddenly went over to the king, and enlisted in his service. Wentworth loved power above all things, and sold himself to Charles for high promotion. It was this desertion of his old party that made him so well hated by the friends of liberty. The king gave him the title of Strafford, and entrusted him first with the "Presidency of the North"—the government of the counties beyond the Humber; and afterwards with the Lord-Deputyship of Ireland. Strafford was a very capable man, with a hard hand and a great talent for organization. He called his system the policy of "Thorough," by which he meant a resolute persistence in ignoring all checks of custom or constitutional usage which might restrain the king's action, and a determination to crush all who dared to stand in his way.

The tale of Strafford's government in Ireland best illustrates what "Thorough" implied. He reduced the island to a more perfect obedience than it had ever known before, made its revenue and expenditure balance, kept up a large and efficient army, and encouraged trade and manufactures. But this was done at the cost of a ruthless disregard alike for law and morality. Strafford bullied and cheated the Irish Parliament; he set up illegal courts of justice; he dragooned the Scottish settlers in Ulster into accepting episcopacy. His worst measures, however, were reserved for the native Irish. On the preposterous plea that the landlords of Connaught could show no valid title-deeds for their estates, he proposed to confiscate the whole of that province, and settle it up with English. As a matter of fact, Connaught was mostly in the hands of ancient Celtic houses, who could show a tenure of many centuries, but had never consigned their claims to parchment. Strafford proposed to take heavy fines from a few of the unfortunate landholders, and to wholly evict the rest from their ancestral estates. And he would have done it, if troubles in England had not called him away from his task.

To enumerate all the unconstitutional acts of Charles I. in his eleven years of tyranny would be tedious. He had resolved to raise a sufficient revenue without Parliamentary grants, and to secure it he discovered the most monstrous devices. He established monopolies in the commonest products of trade, such as soap, linen, and Pg 369 leather. He declared whole districts of England to be under forest law, though the forests had disappeared centuries before, and took heavy fines from the inhabitants. He revived the old law of Edward I., which compelled all owners of £40 a year in land to receive knighthood, and made them pay exorbitant fees for the honour. The arbitrary Star Chamber was set to inflict heavy fines on rich men for offences which did not come under the letter of any law, it strained angry words into libel or treason, and made family broils or personal quarrels a fruitful source of revenue. The fines ran up as high as £20,000.

Another invention of the king was the celebrated Ship-Money. In ancient times sea-coast districts had been wont to pay a special contribution in time of war, to provide vessels for the royal navy. Charles, in full time of peace, proposed to raise this tax from every county in England, as an annual imposition. John Hampden, the member for Buckinghamshire in the last Parliament, refused to pay the twenty shillings at which he was assessed, and took the case before the courts. But the subservient judges decided in the king's favour, and Hampden was rigorously fined (1637).

Beside financial extortion, the king countenanced much oppression of other sorts. Laud and his spiritual courts were always at work against the Puritans. The net result of their work was that the whole Calvinistic party in the Church of England went over to Nonconformity, and became for the most part Presbyterians. Few but the "Arminian" [39] High Churchmen remained in the Establishment. It is probable that these eleven years tripled the number of schismatics in the country. To illustrate the dealings of the Government with clamorous Puritans, the case of Dr. John Bastwick may be taken as an example. He accused the bishops of a tendency to Popery in a tract called "The New Litany." For this he was sentenced to lose both his ears, to stand in the pillory, to be fined £5000, and to be imprisoned till his death (1637).

Such sentences, however, were not uncommon in the Court of Star Chamber; nor were they reserved for offenders against Pg 370 spiritual peers only. A case may be quoted even more astonishing than that of Bastwick. A lawyer named William Prynne wrote a book called "Histriomastix," protesting against the growing immorality of the stage. It contained words supposed to reflect on Queen Henrietta Maria, who was very fond of plays, and had sometimes acted in masques herself. For this Prynne was condemned to the same penalty as Bastwick—the pillory, the loss of his ears, and a fine of £5000.

It is not unnatural that England grew more and more disloyal as the years went by. The whole country was seething with discontent. Yet it was not south but north of the Tweed that the first blow was to be struck; it seemed that English wrath needed a Parliament to make its voice articulate. The Scots, on the other hand, found their centre of resistance in the strong local organization of their Kirk.

The cause of the Scottish outbreak was the king's attempt to force Episcopal government and High Church doctrine on the Kirk of Scotland, which was deeply attached to its Presbyterian constitution, and wholly committed to Calvinistic theology. Both James I. and Charles in his earlier years had made spasmodic attempts to bring the northern Church up to the same level of faith and ritual as that which prevailed in the south. They had been sturdily resisted, but the struggle had not grown quite desperate till 1637, when Charles and Laud seriously took in hand the conversion of Scotland. The first grievance was the issue, by royal authority alone, of a set of "canons"—or Church rules—drawn up by Laud (1636). They were universally disregarded, but in the following year matters came to a head when the king ordered a new Book of Common Prayer, drawn up on an Anglican model, to be taken into use in all the churches of Scotland. The attempt to introduce it led to the celebrated riot in St. Giles's, Edinburgh, where (as the story goes) the turmoil was started by an old woman hurling her stool at the dean's head, with the war-cry, "Will you say the Mass in my lug?" (ear). All the clergy who attempted to use the new Service-book were hustled and driven away (July, 1637).

It was evident that Charles would bitterly resent this national outburst, and in self-defence the Scots—nobles, ministers, and Pg 371 burgesses alike—entered into the "National Covenant," a solemn sworn agreement to stand by each other to resist tyranny and Popery. Soon after, the General Assembly of the Kirk met at Glasgow, declared the Scottish bishops tainted with Romanism, condemned the king's new canons and Book of Prayer, and proclaimed that Episcopacy was altogether opposed to the rules of faith.

This was open rebellion in the king's eyes, and he immediately began to make preparations for a military expedition against Scotland. The whole country was in the hands of the Covenanters, save some of the wild Highland districts, and it was evident that a national war was impending. At the first news of the king's movements, the Scots raised an army of more than 20,000 men, led by veteran officers who had served on the Protestant side in the wars of Germany. This formidable force advanced to Dunse Law, in Berwickshire, and prepared to defend the line of the Tweed. The king had no standing army, save the troops whom Strafford had organized in Ireland: he was therefore compelled to call out the gentry and militia of the northern counties. It soon became apparent that he would not be able to rely on any willing service from these levies. Half England thought the Scots in the right; the men came in unwillingly and in inadequate numbers; and Charles found at York only a raw discontented force, quite unready to take the field. Dismayed at his weakness, he began to negotiate with the insurgents (June, 1639), but they would take no compromise, and as neither men nor money were forthcoming, the king was forced to take the desperate step of summoning a Parliament to grant him supplies.

The two Houses met in the spring of 1640, in no placable frame of mind. Eleven years of tyranny had maddened the nation, and now that England had found her voice again, it spoke with no uncertain sound. Her mood was quickly shown. Led by John Pym, the member for Tavistock, the Commons at once announced that they were come together to discuss grievances before thinking of grants of supply. Charles immediately dissolved the Parliament ere it had sat three weeks. Hence it is known as the "Short Parliament" (April-May, 1640).

Hardening his heart, Charles raised a few thousand pounds Pg 372 by ship-money and other illegal devices, and launched his disaffected and undisciplined army against the Scots. But the men disbanded themselves at the first shot, and, after the disgraceful rout of Newburn, the Covenanters were able to occupy Northumberland and Durham, and established their head-quarters at Newcastle (August, 1640). The king had already summoned Strafford from Ireland, and the great Lord-Deputy had come over, but without his army. He was now given command of the wrecks of the levies in the north; but even he could not compel that discontented host to stand or fight. In despair, the king saw that he must make concessions to the nation, and called a new Parliament (November 3, 1640).

For the fifth time Charles found himself confronted with the angry representatives of the nation that he had wronged. But this time the engagement was to be no short skirmish, but a long and desperate battle, destined to endure for eight years, and to end only with his overthrow and death. The "Long Parliament," unlike its predecessors, was to exist for many years. With it the king was to fight out the great dispute for the "sovereignty" of England—to settle whether, for the future, the royal prerogative or the will of the Commons was to be the stronger factor in the governance of the realm. In the existing crisis Charles felt that he was, for the moment, entirely at the mercy of the two Houses. The exchequer was empty, the army disloyal, an active enemy was in possession of the Northern counties. He shrank from playing his last stake by bringing over Strafford's troops from Ireland to resist the Scots, though the stern Lord-Deputy strongly urged him to take that measure.

When Parliament met, the same men who had been seen as members in 1628, and in the "Short Parliament" of the last spring, stood forward to confront the king. Pym at once marshalled all the forces of discontent into a compact host; so great was the power over them which he displayed, that he soon was nicknamed "King Pym" by the friends of Charles. He and his confidants were already in secret communication with the Scots, and spoke all the more boldly, because they knew that they could call down the Covenanting host on London, if the king should dare to withstand them.

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The "Long Parliament" met on November 3. It at once proceeded to business. Eight days later, Pym moved that Strafford should be impeached for treason, and, in the following month, Laud was also arraigned on the same charge. Both were arrested, and sent to the Tower. The king made no attempt to defend them. Apparently, he was so conscious of his helplessness, and so dismayed by the riotous mob of London, and the fierce words of the Commons, that he had completely lost his head. It is certain that, if he had resisted, none but a few courtiers would have backed him. He sank in the most extraordinary way, in six months, from an autocrat into a nerveless, hunted creature, amazed at the wrath he had roused, and quite unable to defend himself.

The dealings of the Parliament with the two great ministers, the archbishop and the Lord-Deputy, were summary and harsh, even to injustice. It is true that both Laud and Strafford had been cruel enemies of the liberties of England, but it would have been well, in punishing them, to proceed on the best constitutional precedents, and to let the course of justice be clear and calm. Strafford was impeached before the peers, and there was brought against him a vast weight of evidence to prove that, both as President of the North and as Governor of Ireland, he had committed scores of illegal, arbitrary, and cruel acts. But that the acts amounted to treason was not evident, and Pym and his friends were determined to find Strafford guilty of nothing less. After fourteen days' sittings, the accusers suddenly determined to change their procedure. Dropping the method of impeachment, they determined to crush Strafford by a simple declaratory bill of attainder, which stated that he had committed treason, and was worthy of death. This bill was brought into the House of Commons on April 10, and all its three readings were carried in eleven days. The main point on which the charge of treason was founded, was Strafford's advice to the king to bring over the Irish army, and the only proof of that advice was a paper of notes made in the Privy Council, which had surreptitiously come into Pym's hands. [40] Strafford had said, "Your Majesty has an army in Pg 374 Ireland, that you may employ to reduce this kingdom to obedience." It was not even certain that "this kingdom" meant England, and not Scotland, but on that evidence Strafford was convicted of plotting to levy war against the State. The vast majority of the Commons were determined to have his blood; 204 members voted for the bill, only 59 against it, and the names of the minority were soon placarded all over London as traitors to the commonwealth. The House of Lords approved the bill of attainder, and it was sent to the king. Charles had secretly given Strafford a pardon for all his acts, and promised to save his life. But in a moment of alarm, with the angry shouts of the Londoners ringing in his ears, he gave his assent to the bill. It was an inexcusably selfish and cowardly act, the one deed in all his life which we must stamp as mean and perfidious, as well as unwise. Strafford suffered on Tower Hill, with the stern courage that had marked all his acts, muttering, "Put not your trust in princes" with his last breath (May 12, 1641).

It was now the turn of the old archbishop. He was impeached on the 15th of December, both for illegal acts in the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, of which he was undoubtedly guilty, and for secret encouragement of Popery, of which he was as undoubtedly innocent. The articles drawn up against him were approved by the vote of both Houses, but he was not at once tried, but allowed to linger in the Tower, where he was to spend more than two years. Several minor ministers of the Crown were also impeached—Windebank, the secretary of state; Finch, the lord keeper; and the judges who had given the unrighteous decision in the ship-money case. The more prominent of these tools of the king saved themselves by flying over-sea.

But while bent on vengeance for the past, the Long Parliament was also desirous of securing good governance for the future. The spring and summer of 1641 saw the abolition of most of the machinery which Charles had used to carry out his tyranny. The two great unconstitutional courts, the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, were abolished by a law passed in July. By another, carried in February, it was provided that Parliaments Pg 375 should be triennial, and that, if the king refrained for three years from calling the two Houses together, they should have the right to meet without his summons. In June a bill was drawn up, declaring illegal the exaction of ship-money, benevolences, and the rest of the king's favourite forms of extortion. An excellent device for keeping the law-courts free from royal interference was found by making the judges hold their office, not during the king's pleasure, but "dum se bene gesserint"—as long as they faithfully discharged their office. This swept away the power which the Stuarts had habitually used, of displacing every judge who gave decisions against the prerogative.

If the Long Parliament had halted here, we should owe it nothing but thanks and praise. Unfortunately, however, it soon began to press on from redressing national grievances to pandering to party animosities. Most of its leading members were Puritans, and of them a majority was formed by those who had left the Church and taken to Presbyterianism. These Nonconformists were burning to revenge themselves on the Church of England for the tyranny which Laud and the Court of High Commission had exercised over them. The first symptom of their wrath was a bill for excluding the bishops from the House of Lords; this was afterwards enlarged into a scheme for abolishing the bishops altogether, and reorganizing the Church on a Presbyterian basis. In this form it was popularly known as the "Root-and-Branch" Bill, from a term used in a great London petition in its favour.

This sweeping party measure at once threw all the moderate men in the House, who remained loyal Churchmen, though they were also constitutional reformers, into a violent opposition to the majority. After much fierce debating, Pym and his friends passed the second reading by a small majority (138 to 105) in May, 1641. The third reading was bitterly debated all through the summer, but never carried through; in face of the danger of splitting the party of reform, the promoters of the bill wisely dropped it (August, 1641). But they never succeeded in reuniting the Churchmen to themselves in the firm alliance that had existed before. Men like Lord Falkland, Edward Hyde, John Colepepper, and others of equally liberal views, began to doubt the wisdom of continuing to act with a party which was tending Pg 376 to appear more like a synod of fanatics than a committee of constitutional reformers.

It was the appearance of this split in the Parliament that first brought some comfort to the disconsolate Charles. After giving a weak and insincere assent to every bill that was sent up to him in the summer, he began to pluck up his heart in the autumn of 1641. It was now his cue to assume the position of a constitutional king, and to accept the present position of affairs. But in his heart he was, no doubt, beginning to dream of ridding himself of his oppressors by the aid of the Church party and the moderate men. He spent the autumn in a visit to Scotland, where he endeavoured to conciliate the Covenanters by granting every request that they laid before him. But, at the same time, he was in secret negotiation with those of the Scottish nobles who disliked the domination of the Kirk, and was endeavouring to build up a Royalist party in the land.

It was while Charles lay in the north that there burst out troubles in Ireland, which were fated to do him no small harm. The iron hand of Strafford had kept the Irish down for a space, in spite of all the wrongs and injustice which he had committed. When Strafford, however, was gone, the wrath of the oppressed natives boiled over, with all the more vigour because of this cruel repression. In October, 1641, there broke out a great national and religious rebellion, such as had not been seen since the days of Elizabeth. The old Irish clans rose to cast out and slay the English colonists. The Anglo-Irish Catholics of the Pale took arms at the same time, not to make Ireland independent, but to compel the king to take off all laws against Romanism, and turn the island into a Catholic country. In the North of Ireland, where the plantation of Ulster had worked the cruelest wrongs, the rising was attended with horrible atrocities. The natives, headed by Sir Phelim O'Neil, a distant kinsman of the old Earls of Tyrone, slew some 5000 of the unarmed colonists in cold blood. Many thousands more died from cold and starvation, being cast out of their dwellings and hunted away naked in the cold autumn weather. Unhappily for the king, the rebels thought it wise to give out that they acted by his permission in taking arms, and that they only struck at the English Parliament and the Pg 377 Protestant religion. Phelim O'Neil even showed a letter purporting to come from Charles, and bearing the royal seal of Scotland, where the king at that moment was staying. It was a forgery, and the seal was taken from an old deed; but the English Puritans would believe anything of Charles, and jumped to the conclusion that he was guilty of fostering the rising, and therefore of authorizing the massacre.

Under the stress of the news from Ireland, the Long Parliament reassembled in the winter of 1641-42, in no amiable frame of mind. They signalized their reassembly by putting forth the "Grand Remonstrance," a kind of historical summary of all the illegalities which Charles had committed since his accession, followed by a list of their own reforms already carried out, and a scheme for further reforms to come. These last were to include a bill to make the king choose no ministers or officials save such as Parliament should recommend to him, another for the complete suppression of Romanism, and a third for the "reformation" of the Church of England in the direction of pure Protestantism, that is, of extreme Puritanism. The first half of the "Remonstrance" passed the Commons with little opposition, but the last clauses, which practically bound the House to abolish Episcopacy and turn the Established Church into a Presbyterian Kirk, were hotly opposed by all the moderate party. In the end they passed by a narrow majority of eleven. But the victory of the Puritans involved a complete schism in the House. All the Church party now resolved that they would go no further; they would rather trust the king, in spite of all his faults, than the fanatical Presbyterians. For the first time in his life, Charles found himself allied to a powerful party in the Lower House.

He might have regained much of his authority if he had now played his cards wisely. But unwisdom was always his characteristic. Taking heart at the divisions among the Commons, he resolved to attempt a coup d'état. On January 4, 1642, he suddenly came down to the House, with a great armed retinue of three or four hundred men, intending to arrest the five chiefs of the Puritan party—Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazelrig, and Strode. They had received warning of his approach, and fled to the City, where the London militia armed in thousands to protect them. The Pg 378 king looked round the House, and noted that the five members were not present. "I see the birds are flown," he exclaimed, and, after an awkward speech of apology, left the House.

The plan had completely failed. The Puritans were warned that the king was ready to resume his old illegal habits, and had not learnt his new position as a constitutional ruler. Charles himself was so mortified at the frustration of his scheme, that he hastily decamped, abandoning his capital to the Parliament and its enthusiastic supporters, the merchants and burgesses of the City.

The die was now cast. The next six months were occupied by both sides in preparations for war, which was evidently at hand. Every man had now to choose his side and make up his mind. The king went round the Midlands, holding conferences with all whom he thought might be induced to support him. He found more encouragement than he had expected. A large majority of the peerage were on his side. They objected to being ruled by a House of Commons which had grown violent and fanatical. Almost the whole body of Churchmen all over the kingdom were also ready to join him. When forced to choose between a king who had been guilty of oppression and unwisdom, but who was undoubtedly a good Churchman like themselves, and a Parliament ruled by schismatics who wished to wreck the old Church, they reluctantly but firmly threw in their lot with Charles. There were whole shires where the Puritans were few and the Church was strong, and in these the king found promise of steady support. There were thousands who were moved by the old instinct of loyalty, and thousands more who hoped—unwisely perhaps, but whole-heartedly—that their master had learnt moderation, and would, if triumphant, never return to his old courses. Meanwhile Charles took a step which showed that he was preparing for the worst. He sent his wife over-sea, with all the money he could collect, and his crown jewels, bidding her spend the whole in buying munitions of war in France and Holland.

The Parliamentarians also were making their preparations. They were determined to get possession of the armed force of the nation—the militia, or "train-bands" of the shires and boroughs. With this object they sent the king proposals, which they could Pg 379 hardly expect him to accept, that for the future the right to call out and officer the militia should be vested in the two Houses, and not in the Crown. The negative answer was promptly sent them back from Newmarket. They then proceeded to pass an ordinance, arrogating to themselves the right to nominate the lord-lieutenants, the official commanders of the militia, and ordering military authorities to look for their orders to the Houses, and not to the king. This ordinance never received the royal sanction, and was, of course, illegal in form; nevertheless, it was acted upon.

The crisis began when, in April, the king called on Sir John Hotham, governor of Hull, to admit him within the walls of that town, and make over to him a store of arms and munitions which lay there. Hotham shut the gates, and answered that he took orders from the Parliament alone.

The next two months were spent by both parties in gathering armies. In June the king sent "commissions of array" to trustworthy persons in every county, bidding them muster men in his name. The Parliament replied, not only by putting the militia under arms, but by raising new levies for permanent service in the field, under officers whom they could trust. They gave the supreme command to the Earl of Essex, the man who thirty years before had been so cruelly wronged by James I. and his favourite Somerset.

On August 22 the king set up his standard at Nottingham, and bade all his friends come to meet him. At the same time, Essex marched north from London. The war had begun.

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Nine years of almost continuous war, broken by only one short interval in 1647-48, followed the raising of the royal standard at Nottingham, on the 22nd of August, 1642. The first half of the contest (1642-46) may be defined as the struggle against the person of Charles, the second as the struggle against the principle of kingly government after Charles himself had fallen.

When the war began there was hardly a man on either side who did not believe that he was fighting in behalf of constitutional monarchy. The king and his party disavowed all intention of restoring autocratic government. On the royal standard and the royal coinage Charles bade the motto be placed, "I will defend the laws of England, the liberties of Parliament, and the Protestant religion." He declared that he was in arms to protect the old constitution against the encroachments of a Parliamentary faction who wished to degrade the crown and to destroy the Church.

The followers of Pym and Hampden, on the other hand, were equally loud in protesting that they were in arms only to protect the ancient liberties of the realm, not to set up a new polity. They professed the greatest respect for the Crown, used the king's name in all their acts and documents, and stated that they were only anxious to come to terms with him on conditions which should give sufficient guarantees for the future welfare of the realm.

But there was a fatal weakness in the programme, both of the Pg 381 royal and the Parliamentary party. The king's friends could never trust the Parliament's professions, because they believed it to be led by a band of fanatical schismatics. The Parliamentarians could never bring themselves to confide in the ruler against whom there stood the evil record of the years 1629-1640, and the even more discreditable incident of the attempt to seize the five members. When two enemies cannot trust each other's plighted word, they can do nothing but fight out their quarrel to the bitter end.

At the moment when Charles marched from Nottingham, and Lord Essex from London, in August, 1642, neither party had yet any correct notion as to its own or its enemy's strength. In every county and borough of England each side had a following; as to which following was the stronger in each case, it was hard to make a guess. One thing only was clear—rural England was, on the whole, likely to cleave to the king; urban England to oppose him. Wherever the towns lay thick, Puritanism was strong; London, the populous Eastern Counties, Kent, the cluster of growing places on the borders of Yorkshire and Lancashire, from Leeds to Liverpool, were all Parliamentarian strongholds. On the other hand, in the West and the North, and among the Welsh hills, the Church was still omnipotent, and Nonconformity was weak. These districts were led by the local peers, and still more by the county gentry, and of both those classes a large majority held to the king.

But no general rule could be drawn. There were towns like Worcester, York, Oxford, Exeter, where for various local reasons the king's party was the stronger. Similarly, there were many peers—about a third of the House of Lords—who adhered to the Parliamentary interest, and where they dominated the countryside it stood by the cause of the Commons. We need only mention the local influence of the Earl of Warwick in his own district of the Midlands, of the Earl of Manchester in Huntingdonshire, of Lord Fairfax in Mid-Yorkshire, as examples of the fact that the Parliamentary cause could draw much assistance from the magnates of the land. Still more was this the case among the lesser landholders. In the east of England a very large proportion of the gentry and all the yeomanry Pg 382 were zealous Puritans; even in the west there was a sprinkling of "Roundheads" [41] among the Royalist majority.

It was the saddest feature of the war, therefore, that every man had to draw the sword against his nearest neighbour, and that the opponents differed from each other, not so much on principle as on a point of judgment—the doubt whether the king or the Parliamentary majority could best be trusted to defend the old constitution. On each side there were many who armed with a doubting heart, not fully convinced that they had chosen their side wisely. This, at any rate, had one good effect—the war was, on the whole, mercifully waged; there were few executions, no massacres, very little plundering. If we compare it with the civil wars of France or Germany, we are astonished at the moderation and self-restraint of our ancestors.

It was in August, 1642, as we have already mentioned, that King Charles bade his followers meet him at Nottingham. The Royalists of the Northern Midlands came to him in numbers far less than he had expected, wherefore he moved west to Shrewsbury, to rally his partisans from Lancashire, Cheshire, and Wales, where he knew that they were many and loyal. They came forward in great strength, and Charles was able to begin to organize his army into regiments and brigades. The cavalry was very numerous, if wholly untrained; the nobles and gentry turned out in vast throngs, and brought every tenant and servant that could sit a horse. The infantry were the weaker arm; the squires preferred to serve among the cavalry; the townsfolk and peasantry, who should have swelled the foot-levies, were often apathetic where they were not disloyal. It was only in certain limited districts—Wales, Cornwall, and the North were the most noted—that the king could raise a trustworthy foot-soldiery. In the army that mustered at Shrewsbury he had 6000 cavalry to 8000 infantry—far too large a proportion of the former. Nor was it easy to arm the foot; pikes and muskets were hard to procure, as compared with the trooper's sword. The king gave the command of the army to Lord Lindsey, but made his nephew, Rupert of the Palatinate, general of the horse.

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Among the troops which Essex was enrolling and drilling at Northampton, the exact reverse was the case. The infantry were numerous and willing; the artisans of London and the men of the Eastern Counties had volunteered in thousands. But the cavalry was weak; the admixture of gentry and yeomen in its ranks did not suffice to leaven the mass; many were city-bred men, unaccustomed to riding, many more were wastrels who had enlisted to get the better pay of the horse-soldier. Cromwell, who served in one of these regiments, denounced them to Hampden as "mostly old decayed tapsters and serving-men," and asked, "How shall such base and mean fellows be able to encounter gentlemen of honour and courage and resolution?"

In September the two raw armies were both moving westward, but when Charles had filled his ranks and got his men into some order, he determined to advance on London. Marching by Bridgenorth and Birmingham, he reached the slopes of Edgehill, on the borders of Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, on October 23. He had slipped round the flank of Lord Essex, who was waiting for him at Worcester, and the Parliamentary army only overtook him by hard marching. When he saw the enemy approaching, Charles ranged his order of battle on the hillside, and charged down on Essex, who was getting into array on the plain below.

The incidents of Edgehill were typical of the whole struggle. On each flank the king's gallant horsemen swept off the Parliamentarian cavalry like chaff before the wind; and a third of the infantry of Essex was also carried away in the disaster. But the reckless Cavaliers, headed by Prince Rupert, were so maddened by the joy of victory, that they rode on for miles, driving the fugitives before them, and gave no thought to the main battle. Meanwhile, in the centre, Lord Essex, at the head of the two-thirds of his infantry which had stood firm, had encountered the king's foot with very different results. After a short struggle, he burst through the Royalist centre, and captured the king's standard and the whole of his artillery. A few hundred Parliamentary horse—Oliver Cromwell was among them—had escaped from the general flight of their comrades, and by their aid Essex cut several Pg 384 regiments of the Royalists to pieces, and thrust the rest in disorder up the slopes of Edgehill.

EDGEHILL
Sept. 1642.

When Rupert and his horse returned at eventide, they found to their surprise that they had taken part in a drawn battle, not in a victory. Both sides were left in the same position as before the fight, but the king had one advantage—he was the nearer to London, and was able to march off in the direction of the capital. Essex, with his cavalry gone and his infantry much mauled, could not detain him, and was constrained to make for London by the long route of Warwick, Towcester, and St. Albans, while the king moved by a shorter line through Oxford and Reading. But Charles lingered on the way, and the travel-worn troops of the earl reached the goal first. Even now, if Charles had struck desperately at London, he might perhaps have taken it. But his irresolute mind was cowed by a strong line of earthworks at Turnham Green, behind which lay not only Essex, but the whole train-bands of the capital, 20,000 strong. Instead of assaulting the lines, he drew back to Reading, and sent proposals of peace to the Parliament, hoping that their confidence was sufficiently shaken to make them listen to his offers (November 11).

This retrograde movement was his ruin. The City had trembled while the host of the Cavaliers lay at Brentford and Kingston; but when it withdrew without daring an assault, the spirits of leaders and people rose again, and there was no talk of surrender or compromise. For the rest of the Pg 385 winter, however, the operations languished in front of London. The king retired to Oxford, which he made his arsenal and base of operations; the Parliamentarians remained quiet, guarding the capital.

While the campaign of Edgehill and Brentford was in progress, there was fighting going on all over England. In each district the local partisans of king and Commons were striving for the mastery. In the East the Roundheads carried the day everywhere; the whole coast from Portsmouth to Hull, with all the seaboard counties, fell into their hands. In the West and North the result was very different; Sir Ralph Hopton beat the king's enemies out of Cornwall and the greater part of Devon. The whole of Wales, except the single port of Pembroke, was won for Charles. In Yorkshire there was fierce fighting between two local magnates, the Marquis of Newcastle on the royal, Lord Fairfax on the Parliamentary side. By the end of the winter Newcastle had got possession of the whole county except Hull, and the cluster of manufacturing towns in the West Riding and on the Lancashire border. He had raised an army of 10,000 men, and controlled the whole countryside from the borders of the Scots as far as Newark-on-Trent. But in the Midlands the first campaign settled nothing; districts that held for the king and districts that held for the Parliament were intermixed in hopeless confusion. It would obviously need much further fighting before any definite result could be secured.

After futile negotiations had filled the winter months, the spring of 1643 saw the renewal of operations all over the face of the land. The negotiations, indeed, were but a foolish waste of time. It was not likely that the king would accept the two conditions which the Parliament made a sine quâ non—the grant to them of the power of the sword by the Militia Bill, and of the right to "reform" the Church by turning it into a Presbyterian Kirk. The struggle had to proceed, though both parties found it extremely hard to maintain. The king more especially had the greatest difficulty in finding the "sinews of war." The sale of the crown jewels was but a temporary expedient; the loyal offerings of the Oxford Colleges, who sent all their gold and silver plate to be melted down at the mint which the king had set up in their midst, could not last for long. Pg 386 The Royalist gentry soon stripped their sideboards and strong boxes bare. The want of a regular supply of money was always checking the king's movements. He called together a Parliament at Oxford, to which came a majority of the House of Lords, and nearly a third of the House of Commons, and this body granted him the right to raise forced loans under his privy seal, and to take excise duties all over the realm; but as the richest part of England was not in his hands, this financial scheme was not very successful. Charles was always on the verge of seeing his army disband for want of pay. The Parliamentarians were somewhat better off, owing to their control of London and the other chief ports of the kingdom, but even they were often in dire straits for money, and heard unpaid regiments clamouring in vain for food and raiment.

The events of the campaign of 1643 were no more decisive than those of the previous autumn. In the centre the king and Essex watched each other all through the summer without coming to a pitched battle. The only event of note in these months was the death of Hampden, the second man in importance among the Parliamentary leaders, in a cavalry skirmish at Chalgrove Field. But on the two flanks the Royalists gained important successes. Hopton, with the army of the West, swept over Somerset and Wilts, routing Sir William Waller—an enterprising but very unlucky general—at Lansdown (July 5), and afterwards at Roundway Down near Devizes (July 13). In consequence of these victories, Bristol, the second town in the kingdom, fell into Royalist hands (July 26). A further advance put the army of the West in possession of Hampshire and Dorsetshire, so the Roundheads retained nothing in the South, except the ports of Plymouth and Portsmouth, with a few scattered garrisons more.

At the same time, the Marquis of Newcastle beat Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas, the mainstays of the Parliamentary cause in the North—at Adwalton Moor (June 30)—a victory which enabled him to conquer the Puritan stronghold in the West Riding, and to drive the last wrecks of the enemy into Hull. Newcastle would have won Lincolnshire also, but for the resistance made by a new force, the levy of the "Associated Counties." The shires of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge, and Huntingdon, Pg 387 had banded themselves together to raise a local army. It was a zealous and well-disciplined force, commanded by Lord Manchester, under whom Oliver Cromwell served as general of horse. It was Cromwell's ability as a cavalry leader which saved Lincolnshire to the Parliament, by the winning of the hard-fought engagements of Gainsborough (July 28) and Winceby (October 11).

Charles should now have called in Hopton and Newcastle to his aid, and marched straight on London. But both the West-country and the Yorkshire Royalists disliked leaving their own districts. Hopton's and Newcastle's men protested against being called up to Oxford before they had made a complete end of their own local enemies. Charles was weak enough to yield to their wish, and meanwhile resolved to take Gloucester, the one great Roundhead stronghold left in the West. He laid siege to it on August 10; but on the news of his march westward, the Parliament gave Lord Essex peremptory orders to attempt its relief at all costs. Reinforced by six strong regiments of London train-bands, zealous but new to war, he marched with 15,000 men into the West. When he approached the besiegers, Charles resolved not to fight in his siege-lines, but to attack Essex in the open. He therefore raised the siege, allowed the earl to revictual Gloucester, but placed himself across the line of retreat to London. At Newbury, in Berkshire, Essex found the king's army arrayed on both sides of the London road, and ready to receive him (September 19). There followed a fierce fight among lanes and hedges, as Essex strove to pierce or outflank the royal line. Prince Rupert threw away the best of his horsemen in attempts to break the solid masses of the London train-bands, who showed a steady power of resistance very admirable in such young soldiers. In one of these desperate charges fell Lord Falkland, the wisest and most moderate of the king's councillors, who is said to have deliberately thrown away his life because of his sorrow at the long continuance of the war. After a hard day's work, the earl had partly cut his way through; and in the night the king, alarmed at the fact that his infantry and artillery had exhausted all their powder, ordered his army to retreat on Oxford. Then the Parliamentarians were able to force their way to Reading without further molestation.

Pg 388

ENGLAND
AT THE END OF 1643.

Thus the end of the campaign of 1643 left matters in the centre much as they had been nine months before. But on the flanks, in Yorkshire and the south-west, the Royalists had won much ground, and were in full communication with the king through their strong posts in Bristol and Newark. While arms had proved unable to settle the struggle, both sides had been trying to gain help from without—the Parliament in Scotland, the king in Ireland. The zealous Covenanters of the North, before consenting to give armed support to the Roundheads, insisted on receiving pledges from their allies. Accordingly, the Parliament swore a Solemn League and Covenant, "to preserve the Kirk of Scotland in doctrine, worship, and governance, and to reform religion in the Pg 389 Church of England according to God's Holy Word." The second clause implied the destruction of Episcopacy, and the introduction of Presbyterianism into the southern kingdom (September 25). In return for this pledge the Scots promised to send an army of 10,000 or 15,000 men over the Tweed in the following spring. The conclusion of this treaty was the last work of Pym, the king of the Commons, who died six weeks later. No civilian came forward among the ranks of the Parliamentarians to take up his mantle.

Meanwhile the king had sought aid from Ireland. Ever since the massacre of 1641, the Irish rebels had been fighting with the Marquis of Ormonde, Strafford's successor in the governance of that unruly realm. They had occupied six-sevenths of the country, and held Ormonde's men pinned up in Dublin, Cork, and a few other strongholds. Charles now conceived a scheme for patching up a peace with the rebels, and thus making it possible to bring over Ormonde's army, Strafford's veteran regiments, to join in the English war. With this end he negotiated a truce called "the Cessation" with the Irish (September 15), leaving the "Catholic Confederates" to govern all the districts that were in their hands, and promising to devise a scheme of toleration for Romanists. This truce enabled Ormonde to begin sending over his troops to England; it was also arranged that native Irish levies should be lent to the king by the "Catholic Confederates," and Lord Taaffe, one of the leading rebels, promised to make a beginning by bringing over 2000 men. This alliance with the fanatical Romanists of Ireland, the perpetrators of the Ulster Massacre of 1641, did Charles much harm. The Puritans began to dream of England dragooned by wild Irish Papists, and thought that the fires of Smithfield would ere long be relighted. They grew fiercer than ever against the king.

In December, 1643, Ormonde's first regiments began to pass the Channel and arrive at Chester. In January, 1644, the Scots crossed the Tweed under the Earl of Leven. Before winter was over the strife had begun, and the new forces on each side were engaged. In January Sir Thomas Fairfax, with the Yorkshire Parliamentarians, had slipped out of Hull, whose siege had been raised by the Marquis Pg 390 of Newcastle, and fell suddenly upon the Irish army at Nantwich, near Chester. He completely routed it, and dispersed or took almost the whole. Meanwhile the Scots were slowly pushing southward, driving the marquis before them through Durham and the North Riding. In April they joined Fairfax at Selby, near York, and the united forces so much outnumbered Newcastle's force, that he sent in haste to the king at Oxford, to say that all the North would be lost if he were not promptly aided by troops from the Midlands. Charles, though he could ill spare men, gave his nephew Rupert a large force of cavalry, and bade him march rapidly on York, picking up on his way all the reinforcements he could raise in Shropshire, Cheshire, and Lancashire. In June the prince reached York with nearly 10,000 men, and joined Newcastle's army. Even before his arrival the enemy received a corresponding reinforcement: Lord Manchester and Oliver Cromwell, with the army of the "Associated Counties," had crossed the Trent and entered Yorkshire to join Fairfax and the Scots. A great battle was imminent, and one that would be fought by forces far larger than had yet met in line during the war, for each side mustered more than 20,000 men.

MARSTON MOOR
July 2, 1644.

The fate of the Northern Counties was settled by the meeting of the two armies at Marston Moor, near York, on the 2nd of July. The Parliamentarians and their Scottish allies had drawn themselves up on a hillside overlooking the moor, Fairfax and his Yorkshiremen on the right, the Scots in the centre, Manchester and the men of the Eastern Counties on the left. Rupert marched out from York to meet them, and ranged his men on the moor below—he himself taking the right wing, while Newcastle's northern levies had the left. Before the prince's host was fully arrayed, the enemy charged down the hill, and the two armies clashed all along the line. On the Royalist left, Lord Goring with the northern horse completely routed the troops of Fairfax, and then turned against the Scots, and broke their flank regiments to pieces. Then, thinking the day their own, the Cavaliers rushed on in pursuit, and swept off the field. But on the Royalist right the matter had gone very differently. Cromwell, with the eastern horse, had there met the fiery Rupert in person; the struggle was long and fierce, but at last Cromwell's men, godly Pg 391 yeomen of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, whom their general had picked and trained with long care, showed that religious fervour was even better in battle than the reckless courage of the Cavaliers. Rupert's regiments were driven off the field, and then the cool-headed Cromwell, instead of flying in pursuit, led his troopers to aid the much-tried Scots in the centre. By his charge the Royalist foot was broken, and Goring's horse dispersed when it straggled back to the battle. The day, which had begun so doubtfully, ended in a complete victory for the Parliament. Rupert rallied 6000 horse, and took them back to Oxford, but the rest of the Royalist army was lost. Four thousand had fallen, many dispersed, the rest fell back into York, and there surrendered a few days later. Lord Newcastle, angry at Rupert's rashness before the fight and his mismanagement in it, took ship to Holland, and never struck another blow for the king. Meanwhile Manchester and the Scots overran all the North, and the land beyond Humber was wholly lost to the king. The northern Royalists had been utterly destroyed.

This disaster would have been completely ruinous to the king, if he had not partly preserved the balance of strength by winning a great victory in the south. The Parliament had hoped to do great things with their home army, and had started the campaign successfully, for Sir William Waller had beaten the west-country troops Pg 392 of Lord Hopton at Cheriton in March, and driven the Royalists out of Hampshire. But calamity followed this good fortune; in the summer the Earl of Essex led a great host into Wilts and Somerset, to complete Waller's success by recovering the whole of the South-Western Counties. But the king dropped down from Oxford with his main army, and placed himself between Essex and London. The position was much the same as it had been a year before at Newbury Field. But this time the earl displayed great indecision, and grossly mishandled his men. Instead of forcing his way home, at any cost, he retreated westward before Charles, and was gradually driven into Cornwall, where the country was bitterly hostile. After some ill-fought skirmishes, he was surrounded at Lostwithiel. His cavalry cut their way out, and got back to Hampshire; he himself escaped in a boat to Plymouth. But the whole of his infantry, guns, and stores were taken by the king. The Parliamentarian army of the South was as completely wiped out in September as the Royalist army of the North had been in July. But there was one important difference in the cases—Marston Moor stripped Charles not only of an army, but of six fair counties; Lostwithiel saw the troops of Essex annihilated, but did not give the king an inch of new ground. On the whole, the balance of the campaign of 1644 was against him.

To cover London from the king, the Parliament hastily summoned down Manchester's victorious army from Yorkshire, and added to it Sir William Waller's force. Their united hosts fought the indecisive second battle of Newbury with the royal troops on the 22nd of October. Here Manchester, by his sloth and indecision, left Waller to do all the fighting, and almost lost the day. But in the end Charles withdrew to Oxford, leaving the field to his enemies.

The winter of 1644-5 was fraught with events of deep importance. The Parliament made one final attempt to negotiate with the king, only to receive the answer, "I will not part with these three things—the Church, my crown, and my friends, and you will yet have much ado to get them from me." Irritated at the king's unbending attitude, they took a step which they knew must render all further attempts at peace impossible. Drawing out of prison the old Archbishop of Canterbury, they proceeded to pass a bill of attainder against Pg 393 him, and condemned him to death. Laud went piously and resolutely to the scaffold, asserting, and truly, that he died the martyr of the Church of England, not the victim of his political doings. This execution was an unpardonable act of cruelty and spite. The old man had lingered three years in prison, was perfectly harmless, and was slain partly to vex the king, partly to satiate the religious bigotry of the Presbyterians—a sect quite as intolerant as Laud himself.

But while Laud's attainder was passing, another important matter was in hand. The campaign of the previous year had been fatal to the reputation of the two chief Parliamentary generals, Essex and Manchester—the one for losing his army at Lostwithiel, the other for his perverse malingering at Newbury. Waller and several more were in little better odour. Cromwell, who had long served as Manchester's second in command, led a crusade against his chief, and accused him of deliberately protracting the war. It was generally felt that the armies of the Parliament would fare much better if they were entrusted to professional soldiers, and not to great peers or prominent politicians. Hence came the celebrated "Self-denying Ordinance," by which the members of the two Houses pledged themselves to give up their military posts, and confine their activity to legislative and administrative work. One exception was made—Oliver Cromwell, whom all acknowledged to be the best cavalry officer in the Parliamentary army, was permitted to keep his military post. But Essex, Manchester, and the rest retired into civil life.

At the same time, the Parliament resolved to remodel its army. Much inconvenience had arisen from the miscellaneous nature of the forces which took the field. County militia, London train-bands, voluntary levies, "pressed men" forced to the front, local organizations like the army of the "Associated Counties," had served side by side in some confusion. The conscripts were wont to desert, the militia protested against crossing their county boundary, the train-bands melted back to their shops if they were kept too long under arms. To do away with these troubles, the Parliament now created the "New-Model Army," a standing force of some 20,000 picked men, to be led by Sir Thomas Fairfax, with Cromwell as his second in command. This proved a very formidable Pg 394 host. The troops were mainly veterans, all were zealous and willing, and the officers were most carefully selected. The horsemen more especially were vastly superior to the old Parliamentary troopers. Cromwell modelled them on his own East-country regiment, filled the ranks with "men of religion," who looked upon the war as a crusade against Popery and tyranny, and drilled his cuirassiers—the "Ironsides," as they were called—into the highest state of efficiency.

NASEBY
1645.

Next spring the "New-Model" was sent out to try its fortune against the Cavaliers. The king had led his army northward to restore the fortunes of his party in the valley of the Trent, where Newark was now his most advanced post. On his way he stormed the important Parliamentary town of Leicester, but his progress was then stayed by the news of the approach of Fairfax. Despising the "New-Model," the Cavaliers turned fiercely to attack it, though the royal host was the smaller by several thousands. They seem to have put only 9000 men into the field against 13,000. Charles and Fairfax met at Naseby, in Northamptonshire, and there fought out the decisive battle of the first civil war. Once more it was Rupert Pg 395 who lost the day, and Cromwell who won it. The prince, with the right wing of the royal horse, routed his immediate opponents, and rode off the field in reckless pursuit of them. But on the king's left Cromwell and his Ironsides broke to pieces the Cavaliers of the North, and then steadied their ranks and rode against the flank of the Royalist infantry. Charles sent in his reserve to aid his flagging centre, and prepared to charge himself at the head of his body-guard. "Will you go to your death?" cried the Earl of Carnwath, who seized the royal rein, and turned his master out of the press. Charles yielded, and rode back. Far better would it have been for him and for England if he had gone on to make his end among the pikes. Cromwell's charge settled the day; the Royalist foot were ridden down or captured; the wrecks of the horse joined the late-returning Rupert, and escorted their master back to Oxford (June 14, 1645).

Naseby decided the fate of the war. The king could never raise another army in the Midlands. His whole infantry force was gone, and for the next eight months he rode helplessly about the shires with 2000 or 3000 horse, vainly trying to elude his pursuers and scrape together a new body of foot. His only hope was in an ally who had arisen in Scotland. James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, a Scottish peer who had grown discontented with the Covenant, had raised the royal standard in the Highlands in the preceding year. He was a born leader of men, and, though at first followed by a mere handful of wild clansmen, soon made his power felt in the war. After routing two small armies in the north-east, he turned upon Argyleshire, and almost extirpated the whole Covenanting clan of the Campbells at Inverlochy (January, 1645). Then, descending upon the Lowlands, he cut to pieces a large army at Kilsyth (August 15), seized Glasgow, and mastered the greater part of Scotland. Charles resolved on joining him, and trusted to turn the fate of the war by his aid. But Montrose's Highland levies melted home to stow away their plunder, and he was left at the head of a comparatively small force for the moment. Then Leslie led back across the Tweed the Scottish army which had been serving in England, and surprised and routed Montrose at Philiphaugh (September, 1645).

There was no further hope for Charles from Scotland, and Pg 396 his sole remaining army, the force in the West, under Hopton and Goring, was also doomed. After Naseby, Fairfax led the "New-Model" into Somersetshire, beat Goring at Langport, and captured Bristol (September, 1645). The Royalists were driven westward towards the Land's End. In the next spring Fairfax followed them, took Exeter, beat Hopton at Torrington, and steadily drove the wrecks of the enemy onward till their back was to the Cornish sea. Escape was impossible, and the king's army of the West laid down its arms (March, 1646).

The king had now lost all hope, and when the Roundhead armies began to muster for the siege of Oxford, his last stronghold, he took a desperate measure. He thought that the Scottish Covenanters were less bitterly hostile to him than the English Parliamentary party, and resolved to give himself up to them rather than to his English subjects. Slipping out of Oxford in disguise, he rode to the Scottish camp at Newark, and there surrendered himself (April, 1646). He was not without hope that he might yet save his crown by coming to terms with his subjects; for he had an overweening belief in his own power of diplomacy, and did not understand how deeply his old evasions and intrigues had shaken men's confidence in his plighted word. Yet he had his better side; he sincerely believed in his own good intentions and his hereditary rights, and there were two things which he would never give up under any pressure—his crown and his adherence to the Church of England.

The Scots were delighted to have Charles in their hands, and proposed to restore him to his throne if he would promise to take the Covenant and impose Presbyterianism on England. This demand hit the king on a point where his conscience was fixed and firm; he would never sell the Church to its foes, so he temporized and dallied with the Scots' proposals, but would not accept them. Disgusted at his refusal, the Covenanters resolved to surrender him to the English Parliament. After stipulating for the payment of all the arrears of the subsidies which were owed them for their services in England, they gave up the king to his enemies—a proceeding which contemporary opinion called "selling their master for £400,000" (January, 1647).

Pg 397

Even yet Charles had not abandoned all hope; he knew that his victorious enemies were much divided among themselves, and thought that by embroiling them with one another he might yet secure good terms for himself.

The two parties which split the Parliament were the Presbyterians and the Independents. The former, of whom we have heard so much already, were desirous of organizing all England into a Calvinistic Church on the model of the Scottish Kirk; they were as intolerant as Laud himself in the matter of conformity, and intended to force the whole nation into their new organization. Papists, Episcopalians, and Nonconformists of every kind were all to be driven into the fold. This plan did not please the "Independents"—a party who consisted of men of all sorts and conditions, who only agreed in disliking a State Church and a compulsory uniformity. Some of the Independents were wild sectaries—Anabaptists, Levellers, and Fifth-Monarchy-men, who held the strangest doctrines of an immediate Millennium. Others were men who merely insisted on the responsibility of the individual for his own conscience, and thought that the State Church, with its compulsory powers, was a mistake, coming between God and man where no mediator was required. Hence the watchword of the Independents was the toleration of all sects, and they steadfastly resisted the Presbyterian doctrine of forced conformity. The Independents were very strong in the army, and Cromwell, the coming man, was a pillar of their cause. On the other hand, the Presbyterians had a decided majority among the members of the Parliament.

As representing the party of toleration, the Independents were quite prepared to leave Episcopalians alone, and it was therefore with them, rather than with the rigid and bigoted Presbyterians, that the king hoped to be able to ally himself. But it was the Presbyterians who swayed the House, and had possession of Charles's person; with them, therefore, he had to treat. The Parliamentary majority did not yet dream of abolishing the monarchy; they were bent on two things—on tying the present king's hands so tightly that he should never again be a danger to the common weal, and on forcing him to consent to the establishment of Presbyterianism as the State religion. The former was a rational Pg 398 end enough, for Charles could never be trusted; the latter was a piece of insane bigotry, for the Presbyterians were a mere minority in the nation, far outnumbered by the Episcopalians and the Independents. The "Propositions" of the Parliament took the form of a demand that Charles should surrender all claim to control the militia, the fleet, and taxation, for twenty years; that he should take the Covenant himself, assent to its being forced on all his subjects, and order the persecution of all Romanists. [42] He was also to assent to the outlawing of his own chief supporters in the civil war.

Now Charles had declared long ago that he would never sacrifice his crown, his Church, or his friends, and in captivity he did his best to keep his vow. But his method was not to give a steady refusal, and bid his enemies do their worst. He answered their demands by long counter-propositions, flagrant evasions, and endless hair-splitting on every disputed point. Where he might have appeared a martyr, he chose to stand as a quibbling casuist. The Parliament kept him in easy and honourable confinement at Holmby House, in Northamptonshire, while the negotiations were in progress, and he was so carelessly guarded that he was able to keep up secret correspondence with all kinds of possible allies—the King of France, the Scots, and the chiefs of the Independent party.

But while king and Commons were haggling for terms, a new difficulty arose. The Presbyterian majority in Parliament were anxious to disband the army, both because of the expense of its maintenance, and still more because they knew it to be a stronghold of their enemies, the Independents. In March, 1647, they issued an ordinance for the dismissal of the whole force save a few regiments destined to suppress the Irish rebellion. But the "New-Model" refused to be dismissed; it hated Presbyterians, and it had learnt to look upon itself as a truer representative of the Puritan party than an out-of-date House which had been sitting more than seven years. Instead of disbanding, the army began to organize itself for resistance, and each regiment named two deputies, or "agitators," as they were called, to form a central military committee. This was done with the approval of Fairfax and Cromwell, the leaders Pg 399 of the host. The movement was natural, but quite unconstitutional; still more so was the next step of the soldiery. An officer named Joyce, with the secret sanction of the agitators and of Cromwell also, rode to Holmby with 500 men, seized the king's person, and took him to Newmarket, where the head-quarters of the army lay.

Next the army marched on London, and encamped before its gates (June 16, 1647). Many Presbyterian members fled in dismay from the House of Commons, and the Independents got for a moment a majority in Parliament. The victorious party then proceeded to treat with the king, offering him liberal terms—the complete toleration of all sects, the restriction of the royal power over the armed force of the realm for ten years only, and a pardon for all exiled Royalists except five.

In a moment of evil inspiration the king refused this moderate offer. Encouraged by the quarrel of the Presbyterians and the army, he had formed a secret plot for freeing himself from both. His old partisans all over England had agreed on a simultaneous rising, and they had obtained a promise of aid from the Scots; for those stern Presbyterians so hated the Independents and the English army, that they were prepared to join the king against them. On the 11th of November, 1647, Charles slipped away from his military captors, and succeeded in escaping to the Isle of Wight. Hammond, the governor of the island, kept him in security at Carisbrooke, but did not send him back to the army. From Carisbrooke, the king sent new offers of terms of accommodation both to the army and the Parliament, but he was merely trying to gain time for his friends to take arms.

On the 28th of April, 1648, he saw his plot begin to work. A body of north-country Royalists seized Berwick, and raised the royal standard. A few days later the Scots took arms and raised a large force, which was placed under the Duke of Hamilton, and ordered to cross the Border. At the same time a committee of Scots lords sent to France for the young Prince of Wales, and invited him to come among them and put himself at the head of his father's friends. The movement in Scotland was a signal for the general rising of the English Royalists. Insurrections broke out in May and June all Pg 400 over the land—in Wales, Kent, Essex, Cornwall, and even among the Eastern Counties of the "Association," where Puritanism was so strong.

For a moment it looked as if the king would win. It seemed that the army would be unable to cope with so many simultaneous risings. But Charles had not calculated on the military skill which Fairfax and Cromwell could display in the hour of danger. In less than three months' hard fighting the two generals had put down the whole insurrection. Fairfax routed the Kentishmen—the most dangerous body of insurgents in the South—by storming their stronghold of Maidstone. Then, crossing the Thames, he pacified the Eastern Counties, and drove all the insurgents of those parts into Colchester. In Colchester he met a vigorous resistance; the town held out for two months, and only yielded to starvation (August 27, 1648).

Meanwhile Cromwell had first struck down the Welsh Royalists, and then ridden north to oppose the Scots. The Duke of Hamilton had already crossed the Tweed, and had been joined by 4000 or 5000 Yorkshiremen. He moved southward, intending to reach Wales, but in Lancashire Cromwell caught him on the march, with his army spread out over many miles of road. Falling on the scattered host, Cromwell beat its rear at Preston (August 17); then, pressing on, he scattered or captured the whole army in three days of fierce fighting, though his force was far inferior in numbers to that of the enemy. But the imbecile Hamilton had so dispersed his men that he never could concentrate them for a battle. On August 25 the duke, with the last wrecks of his army, surrendered at Uttoxeter.

The second civil war thus ended in utter disaster to the king's friends. Moreover, it had sealed the fate of Charles himself. There arose a large party among the victors who were determined that he should be punished for the reckless intrigue by which he had stirred up the dying embers of strife, and set the land once more aflame. The temper of the army was so fierce that, for the first time since the war began, numerous executions followed the surrender of the vanquished Royalists. The Duke of Hamilton, who had led the Scots; Lucas and Lisle, who had defended Colchester; Pg 401 Lord Holland, who had been designated to command the Royalists of the south, all suffered death. Hundreds of prisoners of inferior rank were sent to serve as bondmen in the plantations of Barbados.

Charles himself was removed from Carisbrooke—he had made two unsuccessful attempts to escape from its walls—and put under strict guard at Hurst Castle. The Parliament still continued to negotiate with him, only making its terms more rigorous. But the army did not intend that any such agreement should be concluded. While the House of Commons was still treating, it was subjected to a sudden military outrage. Colonel Pride, a leading Independent officer, marched his regiment to Westminster on the 6th of December, 1648, and, as the members began to muster, seized one by one all the chiefs of the Presbyterian party. Forty-one were placed in confinement, ninety-six were turned back and warned never to come near the House again. Only sixty Independent members were allowed to enter, a body which was for the future known by the insulting name of "the Rump," as being the "sitting part" of the House.

Thus ended the famous Long Parliament, destroyed by the military monster which it had itself created. The "Rump," a ridiculous remnant, the slave of the soldiery, was alone left to represent the civil power in England.

The king's fate was now settled. The army had resolved to punish him, and the Parliament was to be the army's tool. On December 23, the members of the Rump passed a bill for trying the king. On January 1, 1649, they voted that "to levy war against the Parliament and realm of England was treason," and appointed a High Court of Justice to try the king for that offence. When it was seen that the king's life as well as his crown was aimed at, many of the leaders of the Independents, both military men and civilians, began to draw back. Fairfax, the chief of the whole army, refused to sit in the High Court, and of 135 persons designated to serve in it, only some seventy or eighty appeared. But the majority of the army, and Cromwell, the guiding spirit of the whole, were determined to go through with the business. The High Court met, with an obscure lawyer named Bradshaw as its president; its ranks were packed with military men, who Pg 402 were blind to all legal considerations, and had come merely to condemn the king. Charles was brought before the court, but refused to plead. Such a body, he said, had no right to try a King of England—it was a mere illegal meeting, deriving its sole authority from a factious remnant of a mutilated House of Commons. This was undoubtedly true, and, considering the temper of his judges, the king knew that all defence was useless. The course that he took was the only one that suited his dignity and conscience. While he stood dumb before his judges, they passed sentence of death upon him (January 26, 1649).

Four days later he was led to execution on a scaffold placed before the windows of Whitehall Palace. He died with a calm dignity that amazed the beholders. He was suffered to make a short speech, in which he bade the multitude remember that he died a victim to the "power of the sword," that the nation was now a slave to the army, and that it would never be free again till it remembered its duty to its God and its king. He must suffer, he said, because he would not assent to the handing Church and State over to "an arbitrary sway;" it was this that his captors had required of him. Finally, he said, he died a Christian according to the profession of the Church of England, which he had always striven to maintain. Then he laid his head upon the block and met the axe with unflinching courage, amid the groans of the people.

The hateful illegality of the king's trial, the violence of his enemies, and the dignity of his end have half redeemed his memory. In our dislike for those who slew him we almost forget his offences. But when we condemn his slayers we must not forget their provocation. Charles had ground the nation under his heel for eleven years of tyranny. He had involved it in a bitter civil war that lasted four years more. Then, when he fell into the victors' hands, he wasted two years in shifty and evasive negotiations, which he never intended to bring to an end. Finally, from his prison he had stirred up a second and wholly unnecessary civil war. Contemplating these acts, we must allow that he brought his evil end upon himself; violent and illegal as it was, we cannot say that it was undeserved.

The king's execution was immediately followed by the proclamation of a republic. The Independents and the army Pg 403 wished to be rid of the monarchy, no less than of the person of Charles. Accordingly a sweeping series of bills, passed in February, 1649, declared England a "Commonwealth," and vested its government in a single House of Commons and a Council of State. The House of Lords was abolished; of late it had been little more than a farce, for not a dozen peers had been wont to attend. But the "Rump," which now assumed to be the representative of the Commonwealth of England, was itself hardly more than a mockery. It never permitted the victims of "Pride's purge" to return to its benches, so that it was nothing better than a factious minority, depending on the swords of the army.

The Rump and the army were masters of England, but in Scotland and Ireland they were as yet powerless. Ireland was entirely in the hands of the Catholic confederates, save the two towns of Dublin and Londonderry. Scotland had never laid down its arms after Preston; there was no republican party north of the Tweed, and when the news of the king's execution arrived, it only led the Scots to proclaim his son the Prince of Wales, under the name of Charles II.

Unless England, Scotland, and Ireland were to part company, and relapse into separate kingdoms, it was obvious that the new government must try its sword upon the lesser realms. This it was fully prepared to do. In the spring of 1649 an expedition for the conquest of Ireland was ordered, and the command of it was given to the formidable Cromwell, who since the king's death had become more and more the recognized chief of the army, Fairfax having stepped into the background. Before the expedition sailed, however, Cromwell had no small trouble with his soldiery. The bad example which the generals and colonels had set in driving out the Long Parliament and overturning the monarchy, had turned the rank and file to similar thoughts. There had grown up among them a body of extreme democratic republicans, called the Levellers, from their wish to make all men equal; they were mostly members of obscure and fanatical sects, who looked for the triumph of the saints and the coming of the millennium. While the army was preparing for the Irish war, the Levellers broke out into open insurrection, demanding the dismissal of the "Rump," the introduction of annual Parliaments, the abolition Pg 404 of the Council of State, and the grant of "true and perfect freedom in all things spiritual and temporal." The zealots, however, were weaker than they imagined, and their mutiny was easily put down. Cromwell shot three or four of their leaders, and pardoned the rest of the band.

In August, 1649, Cromwell took over a powerful army to Ireland, where the civil war had never ceased since the rebellion eight years before. The remnant of the Anglo-Irish Royalists, under the Marquis of Ormonde, joined with the Romanists to oppose him, but their combined efforts were useless. So strong a man had never before laid his hand on Ireland. Starting from Dublin, the only large town in Parliamentary hands, he began by the conquest of Leinster. From the first he had determined to strike terror into the enemy. His stern veterans were capable of any extreme of cruelty against Romanists and rebels. But Cromwell is personally responsible for the two horrible blows that broke the Irish resistance. The enemy had made himself strong in the two towns of Drogheda and Wexford. Cromwell stormed them both, and forbade the giving of quarter, so that the whole garrison was in each case slaughtered to a man. Eight or nine thousand Irish perished, and such terror was struck into the rebels by these massacres that they made little more resistance. Cromwell had overrun half the island, when pressing need recalled him to England. He left part of his army under his son-in-law Ireton to complete the conquest, and hastily returned with the remainder (May, 1650).

The new danger was the Scottish war. Charles, Prince of Wales, had crossed to Scotland and put himself at the head of the national forces of the country. The unscrupulous young man had taken the "Covenant," and professed himself a Presbyterian to bind the Scots more closely to him. He suffered the execution of the gallant Marquis of Montrose, who had tried to raise a purely Royalist revolt in the Highlands, to pass without rebuke, and allied himself with the slayers of his friend. Charles was resolved to rouse the English royalists in his aid, and it was the news that he was proposing to cross the Tweed that called Cromwell home, for Fairfax had refused to lead an army against the Scots. Since the tragedy of January, 1649, he had lost his old confidence in the justice of the Puritan cause.

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Cromwell entered Scotland in July, 1650, and beat a very superior army at Dunbar, owing to the bad generalship of his opponents Leven and Leslie (September 3). He then took Edinburgh, slowly and steadily conquered the whole of the Lowlands, and pushed on into the interior of Scotland. But next year, when he had won his way to Perth, he learnt that Prince Charles and the Scots army had slipped past him and entered England, trusting to rouse Lancashire and Wales to their aid. Cromwell followed with fiery speed, and caught the invaders at Worcester (September 3, 1651). His iron veterans once more carried the day; the Scots were beaten and dispersed. Prince Charles barely escaped, and wandered for many days in peril of his life, till faithful friends enabled him to cross England and take ship at Brighton. From thence he came safely to France.

The battle of Worcester, which Cromwell called "the crowning mercy," put a final end to the civil war. Scotland submitted, Ireland was thoroughly conquered by Ireton, and the Rump and the army stood victorious over the last of their foes. It now remained to be seen whether the three kingdoms could settle down into a united Commonwealth under their new conditions.

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After the "crowning mercy" of Worcester fight, the rule of England lay nominally in the hands of its mutilated and discredited House of Commons, the representative of a mere fraction of the nation. But really the power to move the realm was in the hands of the army, which had made, and could as easily unmake, the mockery of representative government which sat at Westminster. And in the army Cromwell was growing more and more supreme; his old colleague Fairfax had sunk back into civil life; his mutinous subordinates the Levellers had been crushed; the colonels and generals who held power under him were for the most part his humble servants.

Cromwell had as yet no official post corresponding to his real omnipotence. He was commander of the army, and a member of the Council of State, but nothing more. His will, nevertheless, was the main factor in the governance of England.

It is time to say a few words of the character of this extraordinary man, whom we have hitherto seen merely as the heaven-sent leader of the Parliamentary armies, and the guiding spirit of the Independent party. Oliver was a county gentleman of Huntingdonshire, a man of religion from his youth up, and a prominent member of the Parliaments of 1628 and 1640. He was more than forty years old before he ever drew sword or put a squadron in battle array. No general save Julius Cæsar ever started on a great military career so late in life. Cromwell himself aimed at being a reformer of the life and faith of the nation much more than a Pg 407 soldier. He had taken to war because the times required it, but military power and military glory was not his end in life. He wished to see England orderly, prosperous, and free, according to his ideas of freedom in things spiritual and temporal. In religion his ideal was the Independent system, in which the state tolerated most forms of worship, and was itself committed to none. In things temporal he wished to see the realm ruled by a truly representative House of Commons, where every district should be represented according to its population. He had no patience for the existing House, in which a haphazard arrangement, dating back from the middle ages, gave no fair representation to England—where the vanished boroughs of Dunwich or Sarum had as many members as Yorkshire or Norfolk. If Cromwell had found a House of Commons that agreed with his views, he would have worked smoothly with them, and lived and died no more than their first servant.

Unfortunately, however, Cromwell's views did not happen to be shared by any large proportion of the nation. Half England was secretly Episcopalian; a large proportion of the rest was Presbyterian; among his own Independent party there were numberless sects and factions. In the constitution of England, then as now, there was no place for an over-great personality backed by a strong military force. But such a personage existed in Cromwell. The question now arose whether he would consent to see the land governed by men whom he despised, in ways of which he disapproved, or whether he would proceed to interfere. Interference would be unconstitutional; but everything had been unconstitutional in England for ten years, and the temptation to use force was irresistible to a man who had strong political theories, a self-reliant temper, and 20,000 formidable veterans at his back. He could never forget that the "Rump" was the army's creature, and that it had been created to carry out the army's views. His very energy and conscientiousness were certain to drive him into illegalities. It is customary to reproach Cromwell with dissimulation and ambition, to make his whole career turn on a settled desire to make himself despot of England. This view entirely misconceives the man. It is far more correct to look upon him as a man of strong principles and prejudices, who was carried away by his desire to work out his programme, and who struck Pg 408 down—often with great violence and illegality—all that stood in his way. If he finally seized autocratic power, it was because he found that in no other way could he put his plans in practice. Power, in short, was for him the means, not the end. Unfortunately for his reputation, England has always objected to being dragooned into the acceptance of any programme or set of views, and if she would not accept the theories of a Stuart, the child of a hundred kings, it was hardly likely that she would acquiesce tamely in those of a simple country gentleman of Huntingdonshire; the fact that he was the finest general of the seventeenth century did not make him an infallible law-giver.

When Cromwell came back victorious from Worcester field, the small and one-sided House of Commons which had ruled England since Pride's purge was still supreme in the state. Before he had been three weeks in London, Oliver hinted to the members that it was time that they should dissolve themselves, and give place to a freely elected house, where every shire and borough should be represented. Such a house had not been seen since 1642, when the Royalist third of the Commons had seceded at the king's command. But the "Rump" had enjoyed its two years of power, and had no wish to disperse. It was gradually growing to believe itself to be an irresponsible oligarchy with no duties to the nation, and to forget that it purported to represent England. When the question of dissolution was mooted, it proceeded to fix a date three years off as a suitable time for its own suppression, making the excuse that it must recast the constitution of the realm before it dispersed. This gravely vexed Cromwell and all the friends of reform; still more was their anger raised when the members proceeded to waste month after month in fruitless legal discussions, without succeeding in passing any bill of importance.

Meanwhile the country had become involved in a foreign war. All the powers of Europe looked unkindly upon the regicide Commonwealth of England, and its envoys were maltreated at more than one court. Two were actually murdered—Anthony Ascham at Madrid, Isaac Dorislaus, at the Hague; in each case the slayers were exiled English Royalists, and the foreign government gave little or no satisfaction for the crime. While English Pg 409 relations with Spain remained strained, those with Holland gradually grew to an open rupture. The Dutch had been interested in the Royalist cause because their stadtholder, William II., Prince of Orange, had married Mary, the eldest daughter of Charles I., and had sheltered the Prince of Wales at his court for many months. It was from Holland, too, that the Royalists had received their supplies of arms during the war. But there was more than this recent grudge in the ill-feeling between English and Dutch. They had grown of late to be rivals in the trade of East and West. Their merchants in the Spice Islands had come to blows as early as 1623, and in America the Dutch had planted the colony of "New Amsterdam," so as to cut the connection between Virginia and New England, as far back as 1625. At present they were competing for the carrying trade both of the Baltic and the Mediterranean.

Hence it was that when the indignation of the Parliament against the Dutch came to a head, it found vent in the celebrated Navigation Act (1651). This bill provided that goods brought to England from abroad must be carried either in English ships, or in the ships of the actual country that grew or manufactured them. Thus the Dutch carrying trade would be severely maimed. It was not a wise bill, or one in accordance with the laws of political economy, but it suited the spirit of the times, and even the usually clear-headed Cromwell gave it his support. This obvious blow at Dutch interests led, as was intended, to war (July, 1652).

In the struggle which followed, the English fleets were generally successful. Led by Robert Blake, a colonel of horse who became for the nonce an admiral, and showed no mean capacity in his new employment, they obtained several victories. The conflict was not without its vicissitudes, and on one occasion the Dutch Admiral Van Tromp won a battle, and sailed down the Channel with a broom at his masthead, to show that he had swept the seas clean. But his triumph was not for long; next spring Blake beat him in a fight off the North Foreland (June 3, 1653), and a final victory off the coast of Holland, in which the gallant Dutchman was slain, completed the success of the English fleet. A treaty followed in which the vanquished enemy accepted Pg 410 the bitter yoke of the Navigation Act, and promised to banish the Stuarts from Holland. This they did with the better grace because the republican party among them had just succeeded in excluding the House of Orange from the stadtholdership. The Orange interest, therefore, could no longer be exerted in favour of the exiled royal family of England (1654).

But ere the Dutch war had come to an end, there had occurred a sweeping political change in England. The "Rump" Parliament had persevered in its unwise courses; it had carried no reforms, either in Church or State, but spent all its time in profitless debating. Nor had it improved its popularity in the country by raising taxes by a new system which recalled the "tallages" of John or Henry III. Making lists of all who had taken the Royalist side in the old civil war, it imposed heavy fines on them, for offences of six or seven years ago. The army began to grow desperately impatient with the Parliament that it had made. In August, 1653, a great body of officers petitioned Cromwell, as their chief, to insist on the Commons dissolving themselves. Somewhat frightened, the House passed a bill for a dissolution, but with the extraordinary and preposterous claim that all sitting members should appear again in the next Parliament without having to seek re-election by their constituents.

This strange attempt to perpetuate themselves for ever provoked Cromwell's wrath to boiling-point. He resolved to take a step even more drastic than Pride's purge. On April 20, 1653, he went down to Westminster with a guard of musketeers, whom he left outside the door. Taking his seat as a private member, he presently arose and addressed his colleagues in a fiery harangue, in which he told them that they were a set of worthless talkers with no zeal for religion or reform. When shouted down by the angry Commons, he bade his soldiers enter, and thrust the dismayed politicians out of the door. The Speaker was hustled from his chair and Cromwell bade his men "take away that bauble," the great mace, which lay on the table and represented the dignity of the Commons of England.

Thus perished the last remnant of the mighty "Long Parliament," dissolved by the mere fiat of the great general. Nor did its fall cause much murmuring, for the nation had long ceased Pg 411 to regard it as anything more than a body of garrulous and self-seeking oligarchs.

For the moment there was no legal government in England, for Cromwell's position was quite unconstitutional. He felt this himself, and was anxious to create a new House, which should work with him and carry out his ideas of reform; as yet he had no intention of becoming an autocrat. Accordingly, he summoned in June an assembly which differed from all that had been before it, since the members were not elected by the shires and boroughs, but named by a committee of selection, at which Cromwell presided. This illegally created body was called the "Nominee Parliament," or more frequently "Barebones' Parliament," from a London merchant with the extraordinary name of Praise-God Barebones, who was one of its prominent members.

But Cromwell was to find by repeated experiments that it was impossible for him to discover any body of men who could work with him on exactly the lines that he chose. For his own opinions were not those of the majority of the nation, and hence any assembly that he called was bound, sooner or later, to quarrel with him. And since he possessed in his army a weapon able to dissolve any number of parliaments, he was tempted to bring every quarrel to an end by abruptly dismissing the recalcitrant House. A less self-confident man, or one who did not think that he possessed a mandate from above to reform England, might have learnt to co-operate with a Parliament. But Cromwell was so sure of his own good intentions, and so convinced that those who questioned them must be wrong-headed and factious, that he drove away three parliaments in succession with words of rebuke and of righteous anger.

Barebones' Parliament, a body full of stiff-backed and fanatical Independents, soon proved too restive for its creator. Cromwell smiled on their first efforts, when they began to codify the laws and abolished the Court of Chancery. But he began to frown when this conclave of "the Saints," as they called themselves, commenced to speak of confiscating Church-tithes—the maintenance of the clergy—and the rights both of state and of private patronage to livings. It is even said that they wished to substitute the Mosaic law from the Book of Deuteronomy for the ancient law of England. This drew down a rebuke from Pg 412 Cromwell, whereupon the House very honestly gave their power back into the hands from whence they had taken it, and dissolved themselves (December, 1653).

The dispersion of this unconstitutional assembly was followed by another experiment in illegality. Cromwell published a paper-constitution drawn up by himself, called the "Instrument of Government." This provided that England should be governed by a "Lord Protector" and a House of Commons. Cromwell himself, of course, took the post of Protector, which was to be held for life, and had a quasi-royal character, for it was he who was to summon and dissolve Parliaments, and his assent was required to all bills; but it was stipulated that "the Protector should have no power to reject such laws as were themselves in accordance with the constitution of the commonwealth"—a vague check, since he himself would have to decide on the legality of each enactment. The new House of Commons was a fairly constituted body, for it included members from Scotland and Ireland, and among the English seats all the "rotten boroughs" were disfranchised, while their members were distributed among the rising towns, such as Leeds, Liverpool, and Halifax, and the more populous counties. The Protector was to have no power of dissolving the Commons till they had sat five months at least (December 16, 1653).

For nine months Cromwell ruled as "Lord Protector" without any check on his power, for the Parliament was not to assemble till September, 1654. Pending its arrival, the Protector began to introduce many reforms; he recast the Courts of Justice, and introduced his favourite scheme for the government of the Church. This was the toleration of all Protestant sects, and the distribution of Church patronage among them by a committee of selection called "Triers." This body was only to inquire whether the candidate for a living was of a good life, and held the essential doctrines of Christianity. It was not to inquire whether he was Presbyterian, Independent, or Episcopalian; only Romanists were formally excluded. But, unfortunately for the content of the land, Cromwell's ordinance that the old Church of England Prayer-book was not to be used, effectually prevented any conscientious Episcopalian from applying to the "Triers." Pg 413 The Churchmen could only meet by stealth to celebrate their sacraments, and they formed at least half the nation. Cromwell's well-meant arrangements were gall and bitterness to them, and discontent was always rife.

Cromwell's New-Model Parliament met on September 3, 1654, the third anniversary of Worcester fight. It was a body that well expressed the wishes of the Puritan half of the nation, but the Royalists were, of course, excluded. The sense that it was a strong and representative body made it confident and haughty; it at once began to discuss the legality of the "Instrument of Government," and to pass bills restricting the Protector's power. Cromwell with some difficulty kept his temper for the statutory five months, and then dissolved it (January 22, 1655).

Once more the Lord Protector was left alone as autocrat of Great Britain. He was not happy in the position; the dissolution of the New-Model Parliament had angered Independents and Presbyterians alike. They murmured that a despotic Protector was no better than a despotic King. Conspiracies began to be formed against Cromwell, both by Royalists and extreme republicans. Some were for open rebellion, some for secret murder, for autocrats are easy to make away with. No one save Guy Fawkes ever tried to slay a whole Parliament, but the power of the individual despot is often tempered by assassination. Cromwell promptly got the better of a few wild spirits who tried to raise open war, for the army was still devotedly loyal to him. But his spirit was sorely tried by the assassination plots; the pamphlet which Colonel Sexby, the Leveller, published, under the title of Killing no Murder, especially incensed him. For the future he went on his way resolute, but nervously expecting a pistol-shot from every dark corner.

For eighteen months after the dissolution of the New-Model Parliament Cromwell ruled as autocrat without any House of Commons to check him (January, 1655, to September, 1656). This time he tried another unconstitutional experiment for the governance of the realm. He divided England into twelve districts, and set over them twelve major-generals picked from the army, whose despotic power replaced that of lords-lieutenant and Pg 414 sheriffs. This expedient made even more evident than before the fact that the army was holding down the nation by force, and provoked much adverse comment. As a matter of fact, Cromwell's rule, though utterly illegal, was very efficient. He gathered around him many capable men: the poet Milton—though a convinced republican—served as his foreign secretary; Thurlow, a very able man, was his Secretary of State. Both Monk, who governed Scotland, and Henry Cromwell, the Lord-Deputy of Ireland, the Protector's youngest son, were skilled administrators; and Blake, who had charge of the fleet, was the greatest admiral that England had yet seen. But no amount of good governance suffices to content a nation held down by armed force against its will, and Cromwell's rule could never be popular.

It was, however, successful and glorious, both in neighbouring lands and far abroad, if it was hated at home. Scotland was orderly and prosperous; Cromwell had much in common with the Covenanters, though he had suppressed them so sternly, and after 1651 there was not much opposition to him. In Ireland the matter was very different; Cromwell loathed Romanists with the hatred of the old Protestants of the Elizabethan age. His scheme of government for that realm was the drastic and cruel expedient of thrusting all the native Irish into the single province of Connaught, and of dividing up the rest of the land among English and Scots settlers, just as Ulster had been treated in the time of James I. The expulsion was carried out with merciless rigour, and thousands of Cromwell's discharged veterans and other colonists were planted in Munster and Leinster. But the settlement was only to be a very partial success; the old soldiers did not make good farmers in a pastoral country, and the native Irish gradually crept back to act as the servants and labourers of the conquerors, so that a homogeneous English and Protestant colony was never established. When the Protector died a few years later, many of the colonists departed, others were merged in the Irish masses, and only in limited districts did traces of his cruel work survive. But the "curse of Cromwell" remained the bitterest oath in the Irish peasant's mouth.

Master of Great Britain, the Lord Protector resolved that this country should resume the great place in the counsels of Pg 415 Europe which it had held in the time of Elizabeth. His foreign policy was the same as that of the great queen—resolute opposition to Spain as the foe of Protestantism and the monopolist of the trade of the Indies. In 1655 Cromwell declared war on Philip IV., and sent forth his fleets under Blake to prey on the Spaniards. The great admiral stormed the strongly fortified harbour of Teneriffe, in the Canary Islands, and sent home several silver-laden galleons from America which were lying therein (April, 1656). After several other successes he died at sea, just as he was returning to England. Another expedition under Venables captured the fertile island of Jamaica, in the West Indies, though it failed to get possession of the larger and stronger island of San Domingo. On the European continent Cromwell allied himself with France, the eternal enemy of Spain, and sent a strong brigade of his formidable regulars to aid the troops of the young Lewis XIV. This force much distinguished itself in the war, and won the ports of Dunkirk and Mardyke in Flanders (1657-58), which by agreement with the French were kept as English possessions. At this time Cromwell's arm reached so far that he was even able to interfere to prevent the Duke of Savoy from persecuting his Protestant subjects the Waldenses (1655), an event which called forth Milton's celebrated sonnet, commencing—

But though victorious abroad, the Lord Protector was still vexed that he could not build up a stable constitution at home. In the midst of his successes he summoned his third and last Parliament in September, 1656. He had now resolved to experiment in the direction of restoring many of the time-honoured arrangements of the monarchy. He had determined to create a second chamber, like the old House of Lords, and to assimilate his own position as Protector to that of the old kings. By excluding from election about a hundred persons who had been active in the Parliaments of 1653 and 1654, he obtained a House of Commons somewhat more docile than either of his earlier assemblies. In an address called "the humble Petition and Advice," they besought him to assume all the old prerogatives Pg 416 of royalty, and even the name of king. The last he refused, knowing the discontent it would arouse among his sternly republican followers in the army. But he accepted a status which gave him all that the regal name would have implied. At the same time he endeavoured to make his position less unconstitutional, by abolishing the major-generals, and giving the Commons complete control over taxation. But even with this loyal and obedient house the Lord Protector could not long agree. They fell out upon the question of the setting up of his new House of Lords, a body whose authority they utterly refused to acknowledge. On this point the Commons proved so recalcitrant that Oliver dissolved them after they had sat sixteen months (January, 1658).

This would not have been the last of his constitutional experiments if his life had been spared. But in the summer of the same year, while designs for a new Parliament were already being mooted, he was taken ill. His health had been broken by the constant nervous strain of facing perpetual assassination plots, and wrangling with refractory Parliaments. He died on September 3, 1658, the seventh anniversary of the "crowning mercy" of Worcester.

He left England great and prosperous, but discontented and unhappy. An autocrat, however well meaning, is never pardoned if he fails to understand and obey the feeling of the nation. Oliver was so much out of sympathy with the majority that he could not escape bitter hatred. Therefore all his work was built on the sand, and all that he had accomplished vanished with his death, save the mere material gains of commerce and colonies that he had won for England. His name, very unjustly, became a byword for ambition and religious cant. A whole generation had to pass before men dared speak well of him.

The moment that Cromwell died, his system began to break up; in six months it had disappeared; in eighteen months England once more was ruled by a Stuart king. The Lord Protector had named no successor, but the Council of State took the step of nominating his son Richard to his place, as being the man who would divide parties the least. Richard Cromwell was an easy-going country gentleman, without any of his father's characteristics. He was neither self-confident, nor a soldier, nor a man of fervent religion. When Pg 417 saluted as Protector, he observed that he would never make anything more than a fair chief-constable. He bore himself modestly and discreetly, and proceeded at once to endeavour to put himself right with the nation by calling a Parliament. It met in January, 1659, and was found to contain many concealed Royalists, and many more stiff republicans of the old Presbyterian type, who objected on principle to the protectorship. Such a body was bound to fall into internal quarrels; all parties in it concurred in treating the unfortunate Richard with disregard.

But it was not the Parliament which was to upset the new Lord Protector. The army saw that with Oliver's death their old power was gone, for neither Richard nor the two Houses had any sympathy with them. A council of officers met, and resolved to seize control of affairs. They petitioned for the appointment of a general-in-chief who should represent them and act as their leader. When this was refused, a deputation of colonels called on the weak Richard, and hectored him, by threats of violence, into dissolving Parliament (April, 1659). Equally unwilling and unable to become a military autocrat, the Lord Protector immediately after resigned his office, and went off in joy to his quiet country seat of Hursley. He lived there as an obscure squire for more than forty years, and survived till the reign of Queen Anne.

England was now without a Protector and without a Parliament, left in the hands of a ring of ambitious and fanatical military men. Looking round for the fittest tool to serve their purposes, the committee of officers resolved on restoring the old "Rump Parliament" which had disappeared so ignominiously six years before. Accordingly, they sought out the Independent members who had once sat in that body, and restored them to Westminster Hall. Forty survivors under Speaker Lenthall took their old places, and claimed to be the governing power of England (May 9).

Of all the bodies which had ever ruled England, the "Rump" had been the most incapable and the most despised. The whole nation was indignant at seeing its miserable remnant replaced in power. Meanwhile the officers began to fall out with each other: Lambert, Fleetwood, Desborough, had each his party among Pg 418 the soldiery, and aspired to fill Oliver's vacant place. Eight months of anarchy followed; the various generals bullied the Parliament and intrigued against each other. Royalist risings took place in Cheshire and the West. Finally Lambert, the most vigorous of the military men, entered London with his regiments and drove out the Parliament, just as Oliver had done six years before. But Lambert was no Cromwell; he only ruled a fraction of the soldiery, and had no party among the people (October, 1659).

The divisions of the army had at last broken the formidable military power which had so long repressed the wishes of the nation. Commonwealths and Protectors had been tried in the balance and found wanting. There was a general feeling that the only way out of anarchy was the restoration of the old constitution of England, with King, Lords, and Commons. The majority even of the original Parliamentarians of 1642 were ready to acknowledge that they had done unwisely, in breaking up the foundations of law and order by abolishing the monarchy. Calvinistic fervour had worked itself out; the majority of the old Puritans of the days of Charles I. had come to realize that Levellers, Fifth-monarchy men, and military saints were even more objectionable and impracticable than the Episcopalians whom they had once hated so sorely.

Meanwhile there was a man who saw clearly the one way to restore a stable government and to content the nation. George Monk, a calm, self-reliant soldier who commanded the army in Scotland, had resolved to use his regiments, on whose obedience he could implicitly count, to restore legal and constitutional rule. His own private ambition lay in the direction of a quiet and assured competence, not of an unsteady grasp on supreme power. He put himself secretly in communication with the exiled Prince of Wales and the chiefs of the English Royalists. No one else knew his design. Crossing the Tweed with 7000 men, he scattered the troops of Lambert and seized London. Then he summoned all the surviving members of the old "Long Parliament," as it had sat in 1642, to meet at Westminster, on the ground that it had been the last undoubtedly legal and constitutional government that England had possessed. The members met, now for the most Pg 419 part elderly men, cured of their old fanaticisms by ten years of military despotism, and ready for any reasonable compromise. By Monk's direction they issued writs for a new Parliament, and then formally dissolved themselves.

The new or Convention Parliament met on April 26, 1660; it was full of Royalists, who for the first time since the civil war dared show themselves and avow their opinions. Monk now openly began to negotiate with Prince Charles for a restoration of the monarchy, on the basis of oblivion of the past, and toleration and constitutional government for the future. The exiled Stuart promised these things in his "Declaration of Breda," though there were in his promises certain reservations, which cautious men regarded with distrust.

But the realm was yearning for repose and peace, and the Parliament accepted Charles's offer with haste and effusion. Lambert and a few fanatical regiments vainly attempted to struggle against the popular will, but Monk crushed them with ease. In May 1660, the Prince of Wales was formally invited to return and resume his hereditary rights. On the 29th of the month he landed at Dover, and was saluted as Charles II. by the unanimous voice of a rejoicing nation.

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Charles Stuart, who now returned to fill the English throne, was a young man of thirty. He had spent the last fourteen years of his life in exile, the penniless guest of many unwilling hosts in Holland, France, and Germany. Save eighteen uncomfortable months passed in the camp of the Scottish Covenanters, none of the days of his manhood had been spent on this side of the sea. He was continental in his manners, thoughts, and life. He had picked up his personal morals at the French court, and his political morals from the group of intriguing exiles who had formed his wandering and impecunious court. He laughed at purity in women and honesty in men. He was grossly selfish and ungrateful. Knowing by long experience how bitter is the bread doled out by the exile's host, "how steep to climb another's stair," he had one fixed idea—"he would never," as he phrased it, "go on his travels again." He had resolved to stay in England at all costs, to enjoy the Promised Land, now, contrary to all expectation, fallen into his hands. Accordingly, he wished to get as much out of his kingdom as was compatible with the necessity of never offending the majority of the nation. His personal leanings lay in the direction of absolute power and Right Divine, but he was perfectly ready to sacrifice them to his prudence. If he had any religious bias, it led him in the direction of Romanism—a comfortable creed for kings—but he was quite prepared to pose as a zealous Anglican, just as during his stay in Scotland he had become a conforming Presbyterian.

Charles, though destitute of personal beauty—his features Pg 421 were thin and harsh—had an affable address, a lively wit, and perfect manners. Supple and suave, he could make himself agreeable among any company. He had the careless good-humour that so often accompanies selfishness, and his character was too light and easy to make him a good hater. He was quite prepared to take to himself any allies who might appear, and to sell himself to any bidder whose terms were high enough.

Charles appeared in England as the representative of legality and constitutional rule, as the saviour of society who was to lay once more the foundations of peace and order, after ten years of military despotism. He was ready to accept just so much power as might be offered him, with the full intention of ultimately gaining as much more as he could safely assume. The "Convention Parliament," with which he had at first to deal, was a cautious body, containing many elderly men, who had fought against Charles I. and only accepted his son because of the dismal experience of ten years of rule by military "saints." The new king was therefore bound to be careful at first. Any unwise movement of opposition might upset his still unsteady throne.

The Parliament, however, was prepared to deal very liberally with Charles. They disbanded the old Cromwellian standing army. They granted him an annual revenue of £1,200,000 for life, to be raised from customs and excise. In return, the old vexatious feudal dues of the crown from reliefs, wardships, alienations, etc., were abolished. An amnesty was voted to all who had fought against the king in the old wars, with the single exception of those who had sat in the "High Court of Justice" of 1649, and been concerned in the execution of Charles I. Eighty-seven persons, of whom twenty-four were dead, came under this category. Of the survivors some score fled over-seas; the remainder were tried before a court of High Commission. Thirteen were executed, [43] twenty-five imprisoned for life, the rest punished with less rigour; at the same time the Earl of Argyle, the chief of the Scottish Covenanters, was executed at Edinburgh. The bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton were ordered to be disinterred and gibbeted—an unworthy and uncomely act for which the spirit of the time is no sufficient excuse. Pg 422 An "Act of Oblivion and Indemnity" was passed to cover acts of the governments of the last twelve years. It stipulated that Crown and Church lands which the Commonwealth had granted away should be restored by their present holders, who were not, however, to suffer any other penalty. Private lands were to be restored if they had been actually confiscated by the government, but not if they had been sold by the Cavalier owners under pressure of war or debt. Thus many who had served Charles I. to the best of their ability got no compensation from his son. Gratitude was not the new king's strong point.

There was a third problem on which the Convention Parliament found the gravest difficulty in arriving at an agreement—the settlement of the Church. The benefices of England were at the moment in the hands of Presbyterian and Independent ministers of various shades of creed. Many of them had replaced incumbents of the Church of England thrust out by the Long Parliament. Others had succeeded in more peaceful wise. On the other hand, the extruded clergy of the old Church were claiming restoration to the cures from which they had been so ruthlessly ejected. What was to be done between the old holders and the new? Was the Church of England to be restored in all its ancient organization, and to become Anglican and Episcopal once more, or was it to be a lax organization including all manner of beliefs within its fold? The Parliament included many who were for "comprehension," and many who were pledged to a rigid restoration of the old order. It had been unable to come to any conclusion when it was dissolved in December, 1660. The king, however, had issued a declaration that a conference should be held between an equal number of Presbyterian and Episcopal divines, with the object of arriving at a compromise.

The new House of Commons which met in the spring of 1661 was a very different body from the "Convention." Elected in the full flush of Royalist enthusiasm at the restoration of law and order, it contained a very small proportion of the old Roundhead party. Its members, young and old, were for the most part such zealous adorers of Church and King, that they received the name of the "Cavalier Parliament." Charles was ready to take all they cared to give him, while his prime minister Clarendon was a High Churchman, Pg 423 and an advocate of hereditary divine right; but even they found it necessary to restrain from time to time the exuberant loyalty of the Commons.

The "Cavalier Parliament" showed the blindest confidence in the king, whose real character his subjects had not yet discovered. They passed bills asserting the incompetency of the two Houses to legislate without the sovereign's consent, declaring that under no circumstances was it lawful to levy war against the king, and placing all the military and naval forces of the realm in his hands. The "Solemn League and Covenant," which had been the shibboleth of the old Roundheads, they ordered to be burnt by the common hangman.

These comparatively harmless beginnings were followed by a series of bills prompted by a spirit of unwise rancour against the men who had ruled England from 1648 to 1660. The Cavaliers had twelve years of spiritual and temporal oppression to revenge, and were determined to do as they had been done by. The Church settlement, which had been left pending by the Convention, they carried out in the most summary way. The king had promised that a meeting between divines of the old Church and Presbyterian ministers should be held, in order to endeavour to bring about a union. But the scheme came to nothing; at the "Savoy Conference" of 1661, each side refused to move an inch from its position. The Parliament then proceeded to pass the "Act of Uniformity," to force the Puritans either to conform or to leave the Church. The Book of Common Prayer, slightly revised, and the Thirty-nine Articles were to be the rule of faith, and every minister was ordered to use and abide by them. Every incumbent was to declare his assent to them by August 24, 1662, or to vacate his benefice; such was also to be the fate of all who refused to accept Episcopal ordination. This left the Puritan ministers three months to choose between conformity and expulsion—a longer shrift than they had allowed the Anglican clergy in the days of the triumph of Presbyterianism. The large majority of them conformed, and accepted Episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer; these men became the parents of the "Low Church" party of the succeeding age. The more stubborn souls refused obedience; about 2000 of them were expelled from their livings on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1662. They and their followers are the Pg 424 original progenitors of the dissenting sects of modern England. The extrusion of the Puritans was most thoroughly carried out, not only in the case of beneficed clergy, but in the Universities and schools. No University professor and no schoolmaster was to be allowed to teach, unless he got a certificate of orthodoxy from his bishop.

Not content with thrusting out the Puritan ministers from the livings they had held, the Parliament went on to legislate against the Puritan laity. The "Corporation Act" of 1661 enacted that all mayors, aldermen, and other office-holders in the cities and boroughs of England should, on assuming their functions, abjure the Covenant, take the oath of supremacy and allegiance to the king, and receive the Holy Communion according to the rites of the Anglican Church. Thus the Sacrament was made into a political test, a scandalous perversion of the Holy Table. This bill excluded all sectarians of the more conscientious and honest sort from municipal authority, but it also produced the unsatisfactory class of "occasional conformists," dissenters who took the oaths and the Communion according to law, but remained outside the Church.

Before passing on to matters outside the sphere of things ecclesiastical, we must mention two other persecuting bills passed, at a somewhat later date, by the "Cavalier Parliament." The "Conventicle Act" of 1664 forbade religious meetings of dissenters. Family worship was to be allowed, but if any number of persons more than five were present, beyond the members of the family, such a gathering was to be held a "conventicle," and the hearers to be punished. Lastly, the "Five-Mile Act" of 1665 forbade any minister who had refused to sign the "Act of Uniformity" to dwell within five miles of any city or corporate borough. It also prohibited such men from acting as tutors or schoolmasters, unless they took an oath "to attempt no alteration of the constitution in Church or State." These acts were purely vexatious and spiteful, as the Nonconformists were now completely crushed and harmless. Their numbers were already rapidly dwindling, and by the end of the century they did not number a fifth of the population of the realm. The vast majority of them had gone to swell the Low Church party within the Anglican establishment.

For the first seven years of the reign of Charles II., the days Pg 425 of the "Cavalier Parliament," the chief minister of the realm was Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon. He was a survivor from the days of the Long Parliament, being one of the original reforming members of that body who had gone over to the royal side when the Puritan majority commenced to attack the Church. He had been one of the wiser and more moderate councillors of Charles I., and had followed Charles II. all through the days of his exile. His daughter, Anne Hyde, had married James, Duke of York, the king's brother. Fourteen years of exile had put him somewhat out of touch of English politics, and his political ideals were more like those of the Elizabethan monarchy than those of his own day. He was an honest and capable, but not a very strong man. All through his life he preserved the theories which had guided him in the early days of the Long Parliament, wishing to keep a balance between the royal Prerogative and the power of the two Houses. Of course he failed to satisfy either king or Parliament, Charles thought that he was not so zealous a servant as he might have been; while the advocates of stringent checks on the monarchy thought him too subservient to his master. Clarendon was a strong Churchman, and must bear his share of the responsibility for the iniquitous "Conventicle" and "Five-Mile" acts. In secular matters he was more judicious; he always opposed the attempts of the king or Parliament to slur over the "Act of Oblivion and Indemnity" and hunt down the adherents of the Commonwealth. In foreign affairs he was a strong advocate of the old Elizabethan policy of war with Spain and friendship with France, a system which was rapidly becoming very dangerous, owing to the growing preponderance of France under the vigorous and ambitious young king, Lewis XIV. The first sign of his views was the sale of Dunkirk, Cromwell's old conquest, to the French for 5,000,000 francs.

Clarendon's great fault was that he had no influence over his master, the king. He allowed Charles to develop his unworthy personal habits without remonstrance. The king filled both his palace and the public service with disreputable favourites. He neglected his amiable but unattractive wife, Catherine of Portugal, [44] and filled his court with a Pg 426 perfect harem of mistresses, whose sons he made dukes and earls. England had never seen shameless immorality in high places so rampant in any previous age. The king's companions and servants were, as might have been expected, men of scandalous life, and quite unfit for the offices into which he thrust them. The tone of the court had a profound and unhappy influence on the manners of the day. Never were the private vices displayed so unblushingly; as if in protest against the formal piety and bleak austerity of the days of the Puritans, England—or at least its governing classes—plunged into extravagance and evil living of all sorts. Drunkenness, profanity, thriftless luxury, gambling, duelling, shameless lust, were accounted no discredit. The literature, and more especially the drama, of the Restoration is coarse and foul beyond belief. Even great poets like Dryden felt constrained to be scurrilous when they wished to please. The days of the great civil war had brought out the sterner virtues of Englishmen; the Restoration and the reign of domestic peace were marked by the outburst of all the folly and lewd frivolity which had so long been dormant beneath the surface.

The chief political event of Clarendon's administration was the second Dutch war, a struggle into which the minister was forced somewhat against his will. It was an unwise war, for, in spite of the fact that their commercial interests often clashed, England and Holland needed each other's aid against the dangerous and restless power of France. Narrow trade jealousy, however, sufficed to bring on a conflict which ended with little credit to England. The fleet was very unsuccessful at sea, not so much owing to its own fault, as to the unskilful hands of its admirals. Charles gave the command to two old military men—General Monk, the author of the Restoration, and Prince Rupert. These gallant cavalry officers were wholly unable to handle a fleet; they led their ships into battle, whatever the odds against them, and then left the day to be decided by hard fighting. At a great three-days' engagement in the Downs (January 1-2-3, 1666) Monk was totally defeated by the Dutch admiral, De Ruyter, and his ill-success was very insufficiently revenged by some predatory descents on the coast of Holland in the next autumn.

The days of the Dutch war were some of the most unhappy Pg 427 that England has ever known. In the summer and autumn of 1665, the land was smitten with the worst outbreak of pestilence that it has ever suffered. The "Great Plague" raged in London with awful severity. The crowded and ill-built city, utterly destitute of any sanitary appliances, and foul with the accumulated filth of centuries, became a very hotbed of contagion. Whole streets and parishes were swept clear of their inhabitants by death or desertion; the clergy fled from their cures, the physicians from their patients. All who could escape removed into the country, and London in the late autumn looked like a city of the dead, the grass growing high in its streets. The great plague-pits by St. Martin's-in-the-Fields and Mile-end had been filled one after another, as fast as they could be opened, with huddled bodies gathered in the dreaded death-cart. At least a hundred thousand persons perished; contemporary rumour named an even greater figure.

London had hardly recovered from the Plague, when in the next year it suffered a fresh calamity, the Great Fire. A chance conflagration, bursting out in the heart of the city, was carried west and north by a strong wind, and swept away two-thirds of the inhabited houses of the capital. All the great buildings of mediaeval London perished in the flames, the old Gothic Cathedral of St. Paul's, eighty-eight other churches, the Guildhall, the historic mansions of the nobility, the halls of the rich City Companies, hospitals, old monastic remains, all were swept away. Hence it comes that central London is poorer in ancient architectural monuments than many a country town. The popular dismay at such an unexampled catastrophe was so great that a rumour went abroad that the conflagration was no accident, but had been planned and spread by the Papists, who were believed capable of any enormity since the wild attempt of Guy Fawkes. The Great Fire was not without its benefits; it swept away for ever a thousand mediaeval fever-dens, and allowed of the rebuilding of the city with wider streets and more direct communications. Perhaps we may add that it gave a unique opportunity to the great architect Christopher Wren, to display his talents in the new St. Paul's and the many other churches which he was commissioned to rebuild.

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London was hardly beginning to rise again from its ashes, when the Dutch war ended, in some disgrace, but no loss to England. The English fleet had not recovered from the disaster in the Downs, for Charles II. had squandered on his palace and harem the liberal grants which Parliament made him to repair his navy. While the seas were unguarded, a Dutch squadron slipped up the Thames, burnt the English dockyard and ships at Chatham, and held the port of London blockaded for some days. But negotiations were already on foot before this disaster was suffered, and the Peace of Breda (1667) put an end to the war. The terms were less unfavourable than might have been expected; England modified the Navigation Act of Cromwell's day in favour of Holland, but kept the valuable conquest of New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony in North America, which lay between New England and Virginia. The settlement changed its name, and was called in the future New York, after the king's brother, James, Duke of York.

Just after the Peace of Breda, Clarendon lost his place as the king's chief minister. The disasters and mismanagement of the war were, very unjustly, imputed to him rather than to his master. The Commons impeached him for permitting corruption among the public servants, and for wilfully misconducting the war. Bowing to the storm, he left England and dwelt in exile till his death.

No one was more glad than the king at Clarendon's departure. He filled the place of his well-intentioned, if narrow-minded, minister with a clique of his disreputable friends. This administration was called the "Cabal" (from Cabala, the Hebrew word for strange and occult knowledge), as being the depository of the king's secrets. The name became popular because it chanced that the initials of the names of the five men who formed it spelt the word "Cabal." They were Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. Lord Clifford and the Earl of Arlington were Romanists, a fact which brought much odium and suspicion on their doings. George, Duke of Buckingham, the son of the favourite of Charles I., a volatile, insincere man—

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as Dryden wrote. He was the most profligate and unscrupulous man in England. Lauderdale, an ambitious Scottish peer, was a renegade Covenanter who had sold himself to the king for power. Anthony Ashley, Lord Shaftesbury, was also an old Roundhead, whose love of office and preferment had overcome his principles. He was an active, unscrupulous man, whose ready talents were only prevented from achieving greatness by his want of honesty and clear judgment.

In replacing Clarendon by the "Cabal," Charles had two objects. So far as he cared for anything beyond his own pleasures, he was set on attaining two ends which he knew to be hateful to the nation: one was to render himself independent of Parliamentary control; the other to secure toleration, and if possible predominance, in England for Romanism. He thought that his new ministers were sufficiently free from scruples to aid him in his projects.

His main helper in the scheme was to be his cousin Lewis XIV., the zealous champion of Roman Catholicism on the continent, and the most busy and ambitious monarch that France had ever known. Lewis had already started on his long career of aggression against Spain, Holland, and Austria. He was set on seizing for himself the frontier of the Rhine, the dream of all French statesmen since his day. To achieve this, he wished to conquer the Spanish Netherlands—the modern Belgium—and the petty principalities of the middle and lower Rhine. At the same time he was set on striking a blow against Protestantism, whenever he had the chance, and most especially against the Protestant power of Holland—for the "United Provinces" were both republican and Calvinist, the two things that he hated most in the world.

After diverting suspicions from his object for a moment, by concluding a treaty of alliance with Holland and Sweden, which met with universal approval, the king began to broach his scheme. It was worked out in the iniquitous "Treaty of Dover" (May, 1670). By this Charles undertook to join Lewis in destroying Holland and dividing up the Spanish Netherlands. In return for this service he was to receive a subsidy of £200,000 a year from France, and to have the aid of 6000 French troops to crush any rebellion that might arise in England when he took in hand the great project of Pg 430 restoring Catholic predominance in the realm. This last clause was only known to the king, and to Arlington and Clifford, the Romanist members of the Cabal. It was concealed from Lauderdale, Buckingham, and Shaftesbury, who only knew of the plan for the partition of Holland and the Spanish dominions.

Having concluded this iniquitous agreement with his cousin, Charles prorogued Parliament—he kept it from meeting for two years—and declared war on the Dutch, without any ostensible cause or reason. At the same time the French king launched a great army over his northern frontier, overran the Spanish Netherlands, and penetrated far into Holland. The Dutch were only saved from destruction by their desperate resistance. Their fleet fought a drawn battle with the English at Southwold, and staved off a naval invasion. Meanwhile the young William of Orange, the heir of the old stadtholders, saved Amsterdam from the French by breaking down the dykes and inundating South Holland. Driven back by the floods, the French had to evacuate their Dutch conquests (1672).

Meanwhile Charles began to carry out his agreement with Lewis for restoring Romanism, by issuing his "Declaration of Indulgence," suspending all the penal laws which imposed penalties on Roman Catholics. To cloak his design, he made the proclamations cover Protestant Nonconformists, as well as dissidents belonging to the older creed.

But the king had miscalculated the feeling of England. The "Declaration of Indulgence" raised a storm about his ears which he dared not face. So wrathful were the Churchmen, Low Church and High Church alike, that he felt in serious danger of deposition. The Parliament met in February, 1673, and passed an address requiring the king to withdraw the "Declaration." Charles felt his nerve give way; instead of standing his ground, and calling in his French auxiliaries, he yielded, and withdrew his edict of toleration. The Parliament then passed the "Test Act," which excluded all Nonconformists, Protestant and Romanist alike, from all official positions. This made it impossible for Charles to retain his Catholic ministers, Arlington and Clifford, and caused the downfall of the Cabal, which went out of office in Pg 431 the end of 1673. The Test Act also drove from his place as Lord High Admiral the king's brother James, who had become an avowed Romanist.

The failure of the king's schemes was still further marked by the conclusion of peace with Holland in February, 1674, and the appointment as chief minister of Thomas Osborne, Lord Danby, a good Churchman and an enemy of France. Determined "not to go on his travels again," Charles gave way on all points, to the deep disgust of his cousin of France, who despised him greatly for his craven desertion of the cause of Romanism.

But the king had not really given up his design. He was quite ready to renew his alliance with France when the times should be more favourable. Meanwhile he was compelled to profess an attachment to Holland, and married his heiress, the Princess Mary, his brother James's daughter, to the young Prince of Orange, the sworn foe of France (1677). By such means he was able to keep himself safe, and to laugh at the efforts of the Low Church party in Parliament.

This faction, the "country party," as it called itself, was now headed by the unscrupulous adventurer Shaftesbury, who from being a minister had become the king's deadly enemy, and was trying to stir up trouble by warning the nation to beware of the Romanist and absolutist tendencies of his old master—of whose reality none had a better knowledge than himself.

Danby was driven from office in 1678, owing to the discovery of some of the king's secret negotiations with France, to which he had been weak enough to give his assent for the moment, though his own views were opposed to the alliance with Lewis XIV. The French king knew this fact, and treacherously made the negotiations known, in order that Danby might be discredited, and replaced by a minister more suited to his tastes. His wily scheme was successful; Danby was hounded from office, impeached, and condemned to imprisonment in the Tower, though he produced the king's warrant for all he had done. But the Parliament voted that the king could do no wrong, and that a minister was responsible for all his acts, even when he acted under the strongest pressure Pg 432 from his master. Thus the theory of "ministerial responsibility" was fixedly and unequivocally proclaimed as part of the Constitution.

The fact that secret treaties with France were again in the air, gave Shaftesbury and his friends, the ultra-Protestants, a fine opportunity for a demonstration. Soon after Danby's fall, they raised a cry that the kingdom was in danger from a plot to restore Romanism by the aid of armed force from France. This was true enough, and the criminal was the King of England. But Shaftesbury did not strike at the king; he feared the loyalty of the Churchmen to the heir of Charles I., and thought that his sovereign was so supple and weak that he might be terrorized into becoming his instrument. The king was to be reduced to nullity, not removed.

When the cry against the Romanists was growing strong, there came forward a certain depraved clergyman named Titus Oates, who had been for a time perverted to Romanism, and had dwelt much with the Jesuits. He made himself Shaftesbury's tool, by declaring that he had gained knowledge of a great conspiracy against the peace of the realm. This "Popish Plot" was, he said, an agreement by a number of English Catholics to slay the king and introduce a French army into the realm in order to place James of York, the king's Romanist brother, on the throne. Now, it is probable enough that some of the accused were in correspondence with France, and letters were discovered from Coleman, secretary to the Duchess of York, written to friends abroad, which spoke of an approaching blow to the Protestant cause. But the blow was really to be dealt by Charles, not against him. It was he who was in truth conspiring to bring over the French and conquer his own realm by their aid.

Oates, however, perjured himself up to the hilt, bringing forward accusations against all the leading English Romanists, and hinting that even Queen Catherine herself was privy to a plot to murder her husband. Many minor informers also sprang up to corroborate the venomous tale of Oates. The nation was seriously alarmed. A perfect outburst of frenzy followed, and every Romanist in England was denounced as a disciple of Guy Fawkes. Charles, to his shame, pretended to take the story seriously, though none knew better than he its folly.

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A new Parliament met in March, 1679; it was elected in the full flood of indignation against the "Plot," and Shaftesbury found that he could command a clear majority of its votes. He used his power to bring in a bill excluding the Duke of York, as an avowed Romanist, from the throne. To save his brother's rights, Charles dissolved the Commons before they could pass it. The only work that this Parliament had succeeded in carrying through was the Habeas Corpus Act, a very important enactment prohibiting arbitrary imprisonment without a trial. No man was to be kept in gaol untried, and penalties were imposed on the gaoler who should detain him, and the judge who should refuse to hear him plead. This principle required to be explicitly reasserted under the later Stuarts, though it is found formulated in Magna Carta itself.

The second Parliament of 1679 was, to the king's disgust, almost as much under the influence of Shaftesbury and the alarmists as the first. The nation was still in a ferment; month after month prominent Catholics were imprisoned on the evidence of Oates and his gang, tried, and condemned to death. So great was the fear felt of the Romanist Duke of York, that a preposterous plan was formed by Shaftesbury and his friends to replace him as heir to the throne by the Duke of Monmouth, the eldest of the natural sons of King Charles. This was a manifest injustice to the Princess Mary, the Protestant daughter of Duke James. Her father's religion could not vitiate her rights. But Monmouth was a popular youth, of fair parts and abilities. He had won some military reputation by putting down a dangerous rebellion of the Scottish Covenanters, who had murdered the Archbishop of St. Andrews, risen in arms, and got possession of the Western Lowlands. After routing them at Bothwell Brig (June, 1679), Monmouth was saluted as a conquering hero, and rumours were put about that his mother, Lucy Walters, had been secretly married to the king. Charles himself hastened to deny this lie, but it had its effect, and a serious effort was made to substitute Monmouth for his uncle.

All through 1680 the struggle was at its height, though Shaftesbury was gradually losing ground, owing to the unwise violence of his conduct, and the growing disrepute of his tool, Pg 434 Titus Oates, whose reckless falsehoods were beginning to be detected by sober men. The contest turned on the fate of the Exclusion Bill, which declared James incapable of reigning, and transferred his rights to his daughter Mary, the Princess of Orange, though many suspected that Shaftesbury intended to substitute Monmouth for the princess.

It is at this moment that the famous political names which were to rule England for the next century and a half come into sight. At first the opponents of the Exclusion Bill, the supporters of the divine right of hereditary succession, and the defenders of the Duke of York, were called "Abhorrers," from the numerous addresses which they sent to the king declaring their abhorrence of the Exclusion Bill. On the other hand, the supporters of Shaftesbury, and the believers in the Popish Plot, were called "Petitioners," from the petitions which they kept signing in favour of the bill. But soon two less cumbrous, if stranger, names were found for the two parties. The "Abhorrers" were nicknamed "Tories" by their enemies, from the appellation of a horde of banditti, who lurked in the bogs of Ireland. The Petitioners, on the other hand, were christened "Whigs" by their rivals, after the name of a fanatical sect of Scottish Covenanters. These titles, bestowed in ridicule at first, were finally accepted in earnest, and became the usual denomination of the two great parties.

The Exclusion Bill was passed by Shaftesbury and his majority of Whigs in the Commons, once in 1679, and once in 1680. But the House of Lords threw it out, and Charles dissolved the Parliament once and again, till in 1681 the fear of the Popish Plot began to blow over, and the violence of Shaftesbury to disgust the moderate members of his own party. The cruel execution, in December, 1680, of Lord Stafford, an old Romanist peer of blameless life, whose innocence was known to all, was the last and most damaging triumph of the Whigs. Its injustice caused many of Shaftesbury's supporters to fall away. His intrigues in favour of Monmouth, and the open support which he gave to the lying Oates, had ruined him.

In 1681 the king accused him of high treason for collecting armed followers to overawe Parliament. A London jury refused to convict him, and he plunged into still more desperate Pg 435 courses. Conspiring with Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney to raise rebellion, he was detected and fled over-sea to escape punishment. Some of his more desperate followers went on with his plot, which they developed into a plan for assassinating Charles as he passed the Rye House in Hertfordshire, on his way to Newmarket. The disclosure of this reckless conspiracy ruined the Whigs; the whole party was believed to have been privy to it, though it was in truth the work of a very small clique, headed by one Colonel Rumbold, an old Cromwellian officer (1682).

The king, finding that public opinion was veering round to his side, was emboldened to strike a blow at the whole Whig faction. Mixing up the Rye-House Plot with Shaftesbury's abortive plans, he seized all their chief leaders, and had them tried for high treason. Subservient judges and a packed jury made their fall easy. Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney were beheaded; Lord Essex committed suicide in prison. The evidence connecting Russell and Sydney with the assassination plot was trivial, and their execution little else than a judicial murder (1683).

Charles was now in a better position to carry out his long-concealed plan for the restoration of arbitrary government and the furthering of Romanism than at any previous time in his reign. He left Parliament unsummoned for more than two years, prepared to renew his alliance with France, endeavoured to collect a body of ministers who would second his views, and largely increased his standing army. He made several unconstitutional encroachments on the liberty of his subjects—such as forfeiting the charters of many cities, including London itself—and was cautiously feeling his way towards more decisive measures. But on February 6, 1685, his plans were suddenly interrupted by a fatal apoplectic stroke, which carried him off before he had attained the age of fifty-five. On his death-bed he had himself openly received into the Roman Catholic faith, of which he had so long been the secret partisan. It was fortunate that his schemes were brought to such an untimely end, for if a cautious foe to the liberties of England, he was a very clever and insidious one. Of the stubborn folly which ruined his successor, he would never have been guilty.

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No greater testimony to the caution and cleverness of Charles II. can be given than the fact that, after a reign of twenty-five stormy years, he died in possession of a very considerable measure of absolute power, having lived down his troubles, secured the devotion of the larger half of the nation, strengthened himself with a standing army, and dispensed for three years with any summons of Parliament.

His successor was to prove that a man without tact and pliability, pursuing the same schemes for the restoration of arbitrary government and Romanism, might wreck himself in three years and die an exile.

Yet James of York was in many ways a stronger and a better man than Charles II. He possessed conscience and courage in a far greater measure than his brother. His life was not an open scandal; his word could be relied upon; his attachment to his faith was devoted and sincere. But he had three ruinous faults: he was obstinate to blindness; long after a fact had become patent to all men, he would refuse to recognize its existence. He was full of a bigoted self-sufficiency that arose from an overweening belief in his own good intentions and wisdom. Lastly, he was a man unable to forgive or forget; there was no drop of mercy in his composition; he could understand nothing but the letter of the law. Blind, conceited, pitiless, he was bound to win the hatred of all who differed from him, and it was soon to be discovered that nine-tenths of the English nation were numbered in that class.

James was a man of business and method, as well as a man of Pg 437 action. He had commanded a fleet with credit in the Dutch war; he had presided with success at the Admiralty till he was compelled to resign that office by the Test Act. He had ruled Scotland for a time with a very firm, if a rigid, hand. But no amount of mere administrative ability could make up for his entire want of judgment, foresight, and geniality.

Yet on his accession, the new king had everything in his favour. The Tory party was still in the ascendency which it had enjoyed ever since the Whigs had been discredited by the Rye-House Plot. It was resolved to trust and support James as long as he behaved in a constitutional manner, and had a strong confidence in his honesty. Accordingly, the king's first Parliament granted him the liberal income of £1,900,000 a year, and protested its complete reliance on his wisdom and good intentions. Nor was any objection made when James sought out and punished the informers who had fabricated the Popish Plot, though their chastisement was very barbarous. Oates, their chief, received 1700 lashes twice within forty-eight hours, yet survived, in spite of a sentence which had obviously been intended to kill him.

The first real shock to the confidence of the nation in the king was caused by the cruelty with which he put down an insurrection which broke out against him in the summer that followed his accession. The late king's bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, the tool of Shaftesbury in 1680, was living in exile in Holland, along with many violent Whigs, who were charged, truly or falsely, with participation in the Rye-House Plot. Monmouth, a vain and presumptuous young man, could not read the signs of the times, and thought that all England would rise to overturn a Romanist king, if only a Protestant leader presented himself to lead the people. Without securing any tangible promises of support from the chiefs of the Whig party in England, he resolved to attempt an invasion. He was to be aided by Archibald, Earl of Argyle, the exiled chief of the Scottish Covenanters, who undertook to stir up a rising among his clansmen in the Highlands.

Argyle landed in Scotland in May, 1685; Monmouth came ashore at Lyme, in Dorsetshire, in June. Each had brought a very small force with him, and relied wholly on the support Pg 438 he hoped to find at home. Argyle raised the Campbells, but found none else to join him; after a few days his men dispersed, and he was taken and beheaded.

Monmouth was at first more fortunate. He was well known and popular in Dorset and Somerset, and some thousands of countrymen came flocking to his banner, though none of the gentry would adhere to such a reckless adventurer. The duke appealed to all Protestants to aid him against a Papist king, declared that his mother had been the lawful wife of Charles II., and claimed the crown of England. But his proclamation did him no good, and his army of ploughmen and miners was but a half-armed rabble. Nevertheless, they fought bravely enough against James's regulars at Sedgemoor (July 5, 1685), and only dispersed when their leader fled in craven fear from the field. Monmouth was caught in disguise, and taken to London. He grovelled at the feet of James, and offered to submit to any indignity if his life might be spared. But the pitiless king, after chiding him for half an hour, sent him to the scaffold.

His fate provoked little sympathy, for he had clearly brought his trouble on his own head. But the cruel punishment that was dealt out to the poor ignorant peasants who had followed him shocked the whole nation. Hundreds of rebels taken in arms were hung, or shot after a summary court-martial by the brutal Colonel Kirke, a veteran who had learnt ferocity by serving against the Moors in Africa. After the summary executions were over, Judge Jeffreys, a clever but worthless lawyer, whom the king made the chief instrument of his cruelties, descended on the south-western counties. In the "Bloody Assize," as his circuit was called, he put to death more than 300 persons, after the barest mockery of a trial, and sent 1000 more to work as slaves on the plantations of Jamaica and Barbados. Of all Jeffreys' judicial murders, the worst was that of the aged Lady Lisle. For having sheltered a fugitive from Sedgemoor, she was sentenced by this barbarian to be burnt, and he thought it an act of clemency when he commuted the penalty to beheading (September, 1685).

The ease with which he had crushed the rising of Monmouth and Argyle emboldened James to take seriously in hand the great project of his life, the restoration of Romanism. His plan Pg 439 was to fill all offices in Church and State with open or secret Papists, and to overawe discontent by the muskets of a large standing army. That such a plan was dangerous, and even impossible, when nine-tenths of the nation was devotedly attached to Protestantism, he does not seem to have realized. He relied on his observations of the men about his own person, for many of the demoralized courtiers of Charles II. were quite ready to become Romanists if only it brought them preferment. They would probably have become Jews or Moslems if it had been made worth their while. The basest of these degraded opportunists was James's chief minister, Lord Sunderland, the tool of all his worst acts of tyranny and folly. With such a man as his chief adviser, and the infamous Jeffreys—now made Lord Chancellor—as his chief executioner, the king was likely to go to any lengths. Of his other councillors the chief were Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, a bigoted Irish Romanist of very depraved manners, and Father Petre, a Jesuit priest.

James commenced his campaign against Protestantism in 1686. The chief bar to the admission of Papists to office in the public service and the army was the Test Act of 1673, which excluded all save English Churchmen from any post in the state. Knowing that no Parliament would repeal this act, James resolved to annul it on his own authority. One of the oldest weapons of the Stuarts was the claim to a "dispensing power," a right of the king to grant immunity on his own authority for offences against the law of the land. This was the tool which he had now resolved to employ against the Test Act. He appointed a Romanist named Sir Edward Hales colonel of one of the new regiments which he was busily employed in raising. Hales was prosecuted for illegally accepting the commission, and pleaded in defence that the king had dispensed him from taking the test. The case was brought before a bench of judges carefully packed by the orders of James, and they gave the wholly unconstitutional decision that the king's dispensation covered Hales from all penalties. Armed with this opinion of the judges, James began to give place and office to Romanists right and left; they were made judges, officers, sheriffs, lord-lieutenants, mayors, all by virtue of the king's dispensing power. None but Catholics could for the future hope for any preferment.

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The king next proceeded to attack the Church of England; once more pleading his dispensing power, he began to give Papists office in the Church. Not only did he make over crown livings to them, but he filled two vacant headships of Oxford colleges with notorious Romanists, showing thereby his intention to put the control of education into the hands of his own co-religionists. Somewhat later, he expelled the whole body of Fellows and Scholars of Magdalen College, for refusing to receive the President whom he had chosen for them [1687], herein following the example of Charles, who had deprived the philosopher John Locke of his studentship at Christ Church, for holding Whig opinions. To deal with things religious, James revived the Court of High Commission, one of the old despotic courts which the Long Parliament had abolished forty years before; he placed Jeffreys at its head, and used it for the oppression of all clergy who showed signs of opposing him. Meanwhile a large army, including several Irish regiments, was concentrated at Hounslow to overawe London.

The nation, though sorely tried by these exhibitions of James's high-handed bigotry, required still further provocation before it rose against him. The Tory party were so deeply committed to the doctrine of divine right and passive obedience, that it required an even more desperate attack on the Church of England to set them in arms against the king. The Whigs were so crushed and depressed, that they had not the heart to rebel. It may be added that the fact that the king was an elderly man, while his heiress Mary, Princess of Orange, was a firm Protestant, kept many men quiet. They held that the king must die ere long, and that his wild schemes would die with him.

James began to embark on his last fatal measures of arbitrary power in the spring of 1688. Without calling or consulting a Parliament, he determined to issue on his own authority a "Declaration of Indulgence," which was to suspend all laws that were directed against Romanists. To partly cloak his plan, he added that the Declaration was also to free the Protestant Dissenters from the penal code of 1664-5. Toleration in itself is good, but toleration imposed by an autocratic and illegal mandate is a suspicious boon. The Dissenters themselves repudiated the gift, when Pg 441 given from such doubtful hands. To show his complete mastery over the Church of England, James ordered that the Declaration should be publicly read from the pulpit by every beneficed minister in the land.

This command provoked even the loyal Tories to resistance. When the appointed day came round, the clergy, almost without exception, refused to read the Declaration. The archbishop, William Sancroft, and six of his suffragans, [45] addressed a petition to the king begging that they might be excused from having to issue such a document. James was furious, and in his rage declared his intention of putting the bishops on trial for publishing a seditious libel—a most absurd description of their modestly worded plea. The seven prelates were arrested and sent as prisoners to the Tower. A month later they were brought before the Court of King's Bench. The whole nation was in agony as to their fate, but the preposterous nature of the prosecution abashed even the king's subservient judges. The charge was pressed in a half-hearted way, and the jury returned a verdict of "Not guilty." James's vexation at this acquittal was only surpassed by his outburst of wrath when he saw the universal demonstration of joy with which the news was received. Even his own soldiery in the camp at Hounslow lighted bonfires to celebrate the event.

In the very month of the acquittal of the seven bishops, an event happened which profoundly affected the king's prospects. His young second wife, Mary of Modena, bore him a son, the prince afterwards known as "the Old Pretender" (June 10, 1688). The birth of this child gave the king a Romanist heir, and cut the Princess of Orange out of the succession to the throne. This unexpected news filled England with dismay; it was evident that the king's schemes were no longer to be terminated with his own life; a dynasty of Romanists loomed on the horizon. In their wrath many men asserted that the child was supposititious, a changeling foisted on the nation by the king's malice. This groundless tale received much credit, for anything was believed possible in such a bigot as James.

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The birth of the Prince of Wales was immediately followed by the formation of a serious conspiracy to overthrow the king. The Tories forgot their loyalty and joined the Whigs. The first sketch of the plot was drawn up by the old Tory minister, Danby, in conjunction with the Earl of Devonshire, the chief of the Whigs, and Henry Sydney and Edward Russell, the kinsmen of the two Whig leaders of those names who had been beheaded by Charles II. in 1683. Their plan was to call over to England the Princess Mary and her husband the Prince of Orange, and set them up against the king. William of Orange, the champion of Protestantism on the continent, and the deadly foe of James's ally, the King of France, was known to be ready to strike any blow that would bring England over to his side. He had long been in secret communication with many leading men among the Whigs, and welcomed the appearance of a definite invitation with joy. On receiving satisfactory assurances of support, he consented to raise every man that he could put into the field, and to cross to England.

James at first received the news of suspicious warlike preparations in Holland with indifference. He relied on the fact that William was at war with France, and reasoned that while the Low Countries were threatened by French troops, his son-in-law would never dare to leave his own country unprotected and invade England. But the French king was more set on an invasion of Germany than on the conquest of Holland, and when Lewis sent his armies across the Upper Rhine, William was left unwatched, and was able to make his preparations at leisure. Many Englishmen of mark, Tories as well as Whigs, slipped over to join him, and bade him strike as quickly as possible. Though the storms of autumn were already raging, the Prince set sail from Helvoetsluys on the 2nd of November, and steered down the Channel, with fifty men-of-war, and transports carrying some 13,000 men.

James had a much larger force garrisoning the south of England. Combining his regular army with a number of newly raised regiments of Irish Romanists, he had quite 40,000 men under arms. But he soon discovered that the temper of the greater part of them was very bad; except the numerous Catholic officers to whom he had given commissions, there was hardly a man who could be trusted.

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When the news of William's final preparations reached England, James was suddenly struck by a panic as irrational as his previous over-confidence. He fell from blind arrogance into extreme depression, when he at last realized the universal discontent which his acts had created. With a craven and useless haste he suddenly began to endeavour to undo his policy of the last three years. He abolished the Court of High Commission, cancelled the appointments of many Romanist officials, recalled the Fellows whom he had banished from Oxford, and made the most profuse promises to respect all the rights and privileges of the Church of England for the future. But such conduct could not restore confidence; he could not make men forget the cruelties of the Bloody Assize, or the indignities which he had heaped on the seven bishops. Such a repentance at the eleventh hour deceived nobody.

On the 5th of November, 1688, William of Orange landed at Torbay, and three days later he seized Exeter. James, who had looked for an invasion on the Eastern coast, at once began to march his numerous army towards Devonshire. There was a moment's pause ere the opponents met. For some days no one of note joined the Prince of Orange, and it seemed doubtful if those who had pledged themselves to his cause were about to keep their promise. But the hesitation was not for long. Ere a shot had been fired in the west, insurrections began to break out in all the parts of England where the king had no armed force in garrison. Lord Danby seized York and the Earl of Devonshire Nottingham. But this was not the worst; as James advanced westward, first single officers, then whole companies and regiments, began to slink away from his host and join the enemy. Even those whom he most trusted left him; his own son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark, the husband of his younger daughter Anne, was one of those who absconded. Another was one of his most trusted officers, John Churchill, afterwards the famous Duke of Marlborough. With abominable treachery, Churchill tried to kidnap his master before deserting, and almost succeeded in the attempt.

Seeing his whole army melting away, James hastily returned to London, strove in vain to gain time by negotiating with the Pg 444 Prince of Orange, and then sent off his wife and son to France, and endeavoured to follow them himself. He was stopped by a mob at Faversham, in Kent, and forced back to the capital. But no one wished to keep him a prisoner, and, with the secret connivance of William of Orange, he was allowed to escape a second time, and to get clear away to France (December 18, 1688).

Thus ended in ignominious flight the preposterous attempt of a blind and arrogant king to coerce England into surrendering its constitution and its religion. The edifice which James had so laboriously reared, crumbled to pieces at the first touch of force from without.

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James II. had believed that by absconding to France he would plunge England into anarchy, and leave no constituted power behind him. With a childish worship of forms, he flung the Great Seal into the Thames as he fled, that no state document might be issued in due shape. His slow and pedantic mind conceived that the nation would be nonplussed by the loss of king and seal at once!

But Englishmen can always show a wise disregard for formulae when it is necessary. Though there was no king to summon a Parliament, yet a "Convention" at once met on the invitation of William of Orange. It consisted of the peers, and a lower House formed of all surviving members of the Commons who had sat under Charles II., together with the Aldermen and Common Councillors of London.

This body, though not a regularly constituted meeting of the two Houses, proceeded to deal at once with the question of the succession. There were three alternatives open—to make the Princess Mary queen in her father's room, or to crown both her and her husband William, or to declare them merely regents in the absence of the exiled king. The last alternative commended itself to many of the Tories, who still held strong theories about the divine right of kings, and were loath to surrender them by consenting to a deposition. But when the proposal was broached to William of Orange, he answered that he would never consent to be the mere locum tenens of his father-in-law. He would leave England if nothing more than the power of Pg 446 regent were granted him. It was then proposed that the Princess Mary should be queen regnant; but this too the prince refused—he would not become his wife's servant and minister. When the Tories showed signs of insisting on this project, William began to make preparations for returning to Holland. This brought the Convention to reason; they knew that they could not get on for a moment without the prince's guiding hand. Accordingly they were constrained to take the third course, and to offer the crown to William and Mary, as joint sovereigns with equal rights. No one spoke a word for Mary's infant brother, the Prince of Wales: not only was he over-seas in France, but most men believed him to be no true son of James II.

Before the throne was formally offered to William and Mary, the Convention proceeded to draw up the famous Declaration of Rights. This document contained a list of the main principles of the constitution which had been violated by James II., with a statement that they were ancient and undoubted rights of the English people. It stigmatised the powers claimed by the late king to dispense with or suspend laws as illegal usurpations. It stated that every subject had a right to petition the king, and should not be molested for so doing—an allusion to the case of the seven bishops. It stipulated for the frequent summoning of Parliaments, and for free speech and debate within the two Houses. The raising and maintenance of a standing army without the permission of Parliament was declared illegal. In a clause recalling the most famous paragraph of Magna Carta, it was stated that all levying of taxes or loans without the consent of the representatives of the nation was illegal. The Declaration then proceeded to provide for the succession: William and Mary, or the survivor of them, were first to rule; then any children who might be born to them. If Mary died childless, the Princess Anne and her issue were to inherit her sister's rights. Finally, any member of the royal house professing Romanism, or even marrying a Romanist, was to forfeit all claim to the crown. The Declaration was afterwards confirmed and made permanent as the "Bill of Rights."

William and Mary swore to observe the Declaration, and were proclaimed on February 13, 1689, after an interregnum which Pg 447 had lasted two months since the flight of James II. to France.

The new king and queen were not a well-matched pair, though, owing to Mary's amiable and tactful temper, they agreed better than might have been expected. The queen was lively, kind-hearted, and genial, well loved by all who knew her. William was a morose and unsociable invalid, who only recovered his spirits when he left the court for the camp. In spite of his wretched health, he was a keen soldier, and had the reputation of being one of the best, if also one of the most unlucky, generals of his time. His talent chiefly showed itself in repairing the consequences of his defeats, which he did so cleverly that his conquerors seldom drew any advantage from their success. In private life William was cold, suspicious, and reticent. He reserved his confidence for his Dutch friends, openly saying that the English, who had betrayed their natural king, could not be expected to be true to a foreigner. He knew that he was a political necessity for them, and nothing more. Hence he neither loved them nor expected them to love him.

William had expelled his father-in-law, not from a disinterested wish to put down his tyranny, nor merely from zeal against Romanism, but because he wished to see England drawn into the great European alliance against France, which it was his life's work to build up. He had spent all the days of his youth in opposing the ambition of the bigoted Lewis XIV., and all his thoughts were directed towards the construction of a league of states strong enough to keep the French from the Rhine. For Lewis was set on annexing the Spanish Netherlands, the Palatinate, and the duchy of Lorraine, so as to bring his frontier up to the great river. He had already made several steps towards securing his end, by seizing Alsace, the Franche Comté, and part of Flanders. If William had not hindered him, he would probably have accomplished his whole desire. But the Prince of Orange had induced the old enemies Spain and Holland to combine, and had enlisted the Emperor Leopold of Austria in his league. With the aid of England he thought that Lewis could be crushed beyond a doubt.

On the 13th of May, 1689, William had his wish, for England Pg 448 declared war on Lewis. It was already made inevitable by the conduct of the French monarch, who had not only received the fugitive James, but had lent him men and money to aid him in recovering his lost realms.

But William was not to be able to divert the strength of England into the continental war quite so soon as he had expected. He was forced to fight for his new crown for nearly two years, before he was able to turn off again to lead the armies of the coalition against Lewis.

The proclamation of William and Mary proved the beginning of new troubles both in England, Scotland, and Ireland. In England things were not serious: a certain portion of the Tory party declined to accept William as king, though they had been ready to take him as regent. For refusing to take the oath of allegiance to him, Archbishop Sancroft—the hero of the trial of the seven bishops—four other prelates, and four hundred clergy had been removed from their preferments. Some Tory laymen of scrupulous conscience gave up their offices. But these "Non-jurors," as they were called, made no open resistance, though many of them began to correspond secretly with the exiled king.

In Scotland, the crisis was far more serious. Both Charles II. and James II. had governed that realm with an iron hand. They had placed the rule of the land in the hands of the Scottish Episcopalians, who formed a very small minority of the nation. The Covenanters had been sternly repressed, and their ineffective rising, ending in the fight of Bothwell Brig, had been put down with the most rigorous harshness. [46] When James was overturned, the persecuted Presbyterians rose in high wrath, and swept all his friends out of office. They followed the example of the English in offering the crown to William and Mary, and began to revenge their late oppression by very harsh treatment of their former rulers, the Scottish Episcopalians. But James II. had a following in Scotland; though not a very large one, it had an exceedingly able man at its head—John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, who had commanded the royal forces in the realm for the last ten years. Dundee succeeded in rousing a Pg 449 number of the Highland chiefs to take arms for James II., not so much because they loved the king as because they hated the great clan of the Campbells, now, as always, the mainstay of the Covenanting interest north of Clyde and Forth. The new government collected an army under General Mackay, and sent it against Dundee. But the Jacobite leader retired before it till Mackay's men had pushed up the long and narrow pass of Killiecrankie. When the Lowland troops were just emerging from the northern end of the pass, Dundee fell on from an ambush. The wild rush of his Highlanders swept away the leading battalions, [47] and Mackay's entire force fled in disgraceful rout back to Dunkeld. The Jacobite general, however, fell in the moment of victory, and when his strong and able hand was removed, the rebel clans dropped asunder, and ceased to endanger the stability of William's throne (June 17, 1689). The insurrection, however, continued to linger on in the remoter recesses of the Highlands for two years more.

In Ireland the struggle was far longer and more bitter than in Scotland. In that country the old quarrel between the natives and the English settlers broke out under the new form of loyalty to James or William. In the time of Charles II., the old Irish or Anglo-Irish proprietors had been restored to about one-third of the lands from which they had been evicted by the Cromwellian settlement of 1652. They hoped, now that they had a king of their own faith, to recover the remaining two-thirds from the English planters. From the moment of his accession, James had done his best for the Irish Romanists. He had decreed the revocation of Cromwell's settlement, he had filled all places of trust and emolument with natives, and had raised an Irish army in which no Protestant was admitted to serve either as soldier or officer. His Lord-Deputy was Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, a violent and unscrupulous man, who was prepared to go even further than his master in the direction of suppressing Protestantism.

When the news of the landing of William of Orange at Pg 450 Torbay reached Ireland, the Lord-Deputy kept faith with James, and began arming the whole nation in his cause, till he is said to have had nearly 100,000 undisciplined levies under his orders. At the same time he summoned all Protestants in Ireland to give up their arms. The English settlers saw that the predominance of Tyrconnel and his hordes meant danger to themselves, and promptly fled by sea, or took refuge in the few towns where the Protestants had a majority, leaving their houses and property to be plundered by the Lord-Deputy's "rapparees." In Ulster, where they mustered most strongly, they shut themselves up in the towns of Derry and Enniskillen, proclaimed William and Mary as king and queen, and sent to implore instant aid from England.

In March, 1689, James II. landed in Ireland, convoyed by a French fleet, and bringing a body of French officers, 10,000 stand of arms, and a treasure of £112,000 pounds, all given him by Lewis XIV. He found himself master of the whole country except Derry and Enniskillen, and promptly ordered the siege of these places to begin. He summoned a Parliament to meet in Dublin, and there undid, so far as words and acts could do, all the doings of the English in Ireland for the last two centuries. The Irish peers and commons voted the resumption by the old native houses of all the lands confiscated by Elizabeth, James I., and Cromwell. They made Romanism the established religion of the land, and declared Ireland completely independent of the English Parliament. All this was natural and excusable enough; but a bloodthirsty act of attainder followed, condemning to death as traitors no less than 2500 Protestant peers, gentry, and clergy, who had either declared for William, or at least refused to join James.

This made the civil war an affair of life and death, since the Protestants of Derry and Enniskillen dared not surrender when they knew they would be treated as convicted traitors. Hence it came that both places held out with desperate resolution, though help was long in coming from England. Derry held out unsuccoured for 105 days (April to August, 1689) till it was relieved by a small fleet, which burst the boom that the Irish had thrown across Loch Foyle, and brought food to the starving garrison. The Pg 451 Protestants of Enniskillen saved themselves by an even more desperate exhibition of courage. Sallying out of their town, they beat the force that blockaded them at the battle of Newtown Butler (August 2, 1689), and drove them completely away.

In spite of these successes, the Ulstermen must have been crushed if the long-expected English army had not begun to cross the channel. But in October a force at last appeared in Down, under the Duke of Schomberg, a veteran French officer in the service of William. Schomberg had been expelled from the French army for refusing to become a Romanist, and devoted the last years of his life to a crusade against the bigoted Lewis XIV., who had driven him from home and office for religion's sake.

Through the winter of 1689, the Irish and English faced each other in Ulster without coming to a decisive engagement. But in the spring of 1690, William arrived in person with large reinforcements, and began to advance on Dublin with an army of 35,000 men.

James had done but little to strengthen his position during the eighteen months that Ireland had been in his hands. His army was still half trained and unpaid. He had caused untold distress to all classes by issuing a forced currency of copper crowns and shillings, which his creditors were compelled to accept or incur the charge of treason. His councillors, English and Irish, were quarrelling fiercely. His troops were unwisely dispersed, so that on the news of William's approach he found himself unable to concentrate them in time.

He gathered, however, some 30,000 men, of whom 6000 were French, and took up a strong position behind the river Boyne, to cover Dublin. In this position he was attacked by William, whose troops forded the river and charged up the opposite slope. The Irish cavalry fought well enough, but many regiments of their undisciplined infantry broke and fled after a few discharges. The wreck of the Jacobite army was only saved by the French auxiliaries, who stubbornly defended the pass of Duleek till the fugitives had got away (July 1, 1690).

James seemed panic-stricken by the result of the battle of the Boyne. Abandoning Dublin without firing a shot, he fled in Pg 452 craven haste and took ship for France. His deserted followers, however, made a long and gallant resistance in the West. William returned to England, leaving his army under the Dutch general Ginckel to subdue Connaught and Munster (September, 1690). The task proved harder than had been expected; Ginckel was unable to move till the next spring for want of food and transport. He forced the line of the Shannon by storming Athlone in June, 1691, but did not break the back of the Irish resistance till he had won the well-fought battle of Aughrim, scattered the army of Connaught, and slain its commander, the French marshal St. Ruth. Even after this decisive fight, Limerick held out for nearly three months. It surrendered on October 3, 1691, on terms which permitted the Irish army to take ship for France, and 11,000 men passed over-seas to serve Lewis XIV. At the same time, the representatives of William signed the "Pacification of Limerick," which granted an amnesty to all Irish who did not emigrate, and stipulated that they should be left unmolested in possession of the very limited civil and religious rights that they had enjoyed under Charles II.

These terms were broken in a most faithless manner by the Irish Parliament, now entirely in the hands of the victorious Protestant minority, only a few years after they had been signed (1697). By a new penal code that body prohibited Romanists from practising as lawyers, physicians, or schoolmasters, took away from them the right of sitting in Parliament, made marriages of Protestants and Romanists illegal, banished all monks and all clergy except registered parish priests from the realm, and prohibited any Romanist from possessing arms. But their worst device was a cruel scheme for promoting conversions, by a law which gave any son of a Romanist who abjured his religion, the right to succeed to all his father's property, to the exclusion of his unconverted brothers and sisters. Under this harsh code the Irish groaned for a whole century, but they had been so crushed by William's blows that they never rose in rebellion again till 1798.

The whole of Ireland was subdued ere the spring of 1692 began. A month later occurred the cruel deed which marked the final end of the revolt in the Scottish Highlands. The wrecks of Dundee's followers had been scattered at the skirmish Pg 453 of Cromdale in 1690. But a few chiefs still refused their submission. William proclaimed that there should be an amnesty for all who surrendered before January 1, 1692. This opportunity was taken by all the Highlanders, save Macdonald of Glencoe, a petty chief of 200 families in Argyleshire. He made his submission a few days later than the appointed time. Lord Stair, the Secretary of State for Scotland, prevailed upon William to give him leave to make an example of Macdonald and his tribe. A regiment was sent to Glencoe, and courteously received by the chief, who thought his tardy submission had brought him impunity. But, obeying their orders, the soldiery fell at midnight upon their unsuspecting hosts, shot Macdonald and all the men they could catch, and drove the survivors out of their valley. This cold-blooded outrage was sanctioned by William, but only because he had been carefully kept in ignorance of the fact that Macdonald had submitted a few days after the appointed date.

While the Irish war had been in progress, important events had been taking place nearer home. The war on the continent had proved indecisive, though if either party had a slight advantage, it was the French. Even at sea the fleets of Lewis at first gained some successes, mainly owing to the culpable slackness of the English admiral, Lord Torrington. His negligence—treachery would perhaps be the more appropriate word—was only a symptom of a very widespread spirit of disloyalty among the Tory party. Many persons had not got out of the Revolution the private advantages for which they had hoped. William III. had endeavoured to hold an equal balance between the English parties, but could not wholly conceal his suspicions of the Tories and his private preference for the Whigs. In consequence, some of those who had been foremost in expelling James II., now began to intrigue with him, and expressed a more or less real sympathy with his plans for recovering his crown. Among these traitors were the best sailor and the best soldier that England owned, Admiral Russell, who succeeded Torrington in command of the Channel fleet, and John Churchill—the Marlborough of later days—who had been appointed commander of the English troops whom William had taken to the continent. It is some palliation to their guilt that Pg 454 they neither of them actually did desert William in the moment of trial, but both were undoubtedly guilty of habitual correspondence with the enemy. Churchill even descended so far into the depths of baseness as to send secret intelligence of William's plans to the French—though, with characteristic duplicity, he sent them too late to be of any use.

How much these secret protestations of loyalty to James meant, was shown in 1692 by the event of the battle of La Hogue. The French king had collected an army in Normandy to invade England, and ordered up his ships from Brest to convoy it, relying on the promise of Russell that he would bring over the Channel fleet. But when the squadron of De Tourville came in sight, the admiral promptly attacked it. Either the spirit of fighting had overcome him, or compunction for his treachery smote him at the last moment. At any rate, he fell briskly upon the French—whose squadron was much inferior in numbers—destroyed twelve ships, and completely scattered the rest. This victory gained Russell a very undeserved peerage, and saved England from all danger of a French invasion or a Jacobite rising (May 19, 1692).

Meanwhile the armies of Lewis XIV. and William were contending obstinately in the Netherlands, without any marked success on either side. William was opposed by a general as able as himself in Marshal Luxembourg, and met his usual ill luck in the field. He was defeated at two great pitched battles, Steenkerke (August, 1692), and Landen (July, 1693), yet after each engagement he made such a formidable front, that the enemy gained nothing by his victory, and hardly won a foot of ground in the Spanish Netherlands. At each of these fights the English troops were in the thick of the fray, and justified by their conduct the anxiety that William had always shown to have England on his side. Yet Churchill, their best general, was not leading them; he had been deservedly disgraced in 1692, when his intrigues with James II. were discovered. When at last the fortune of war began to turn in favour of the allies (mainly owing to the death of William's great opponent, Marshal Luxembourg), it was again the English troops who got the chief credit in the one great success of the king's military life—the Pg 455 storm of Namur. When that great fortress, whose lofty citadel, overhanging the Meuse, was the strongest place in Belgium, was taken by assault in the very face of a French army of 80,000 men, it was the English infantry, under Lord Cutts, who forced their way into the breaches and compelled Marshal Boufflers to surrender (August, 1695).

After the fall of Namur the war languished: the King of France saw his resources wasting away, and, in spite of all his efforts, had utterly failed to conquer the Netherlands, though his armies had been somewhat more successful in Italy and Spain. He finally consented to treat for peace, which, after long negotiations, was at last secured by the treaty of Ryswick (1697). This was the first occasion on which the ambitious and grasping king had to own defeat. Making terms with England, Holland, Spain, and Austria, he surrendered all that he had gained since 1678, with the single exception of the town of Strasburg. He was also compelled to recognize William as the lawful King of England, though he refused to expel James II. and his family from their asylum at St. Germains, where they had been dwelling since 1691.

English domestic politics during the time of the struggle with Lewis XIV. had presented a shameful spectacle. It is difficult to say whether the Whigs or the Tories disgraced themselves the more, by their factious violence and treacherous intrigues. In all her history Britain has never known such a sordid gang of self-seeking, greedy, and demoralized statesmen, as the generation who had been reared in the evil times of Charles II. Danby, the corrupt old Tory minister of 1674; Sunderland, the renegade tool of James II.; the traitors Russell and Churchill, were typical men of the day. The party warfare of Whig and Tory was prosecuted by disgraceful personalities—impeachments for corruption, embezzlement, or treacherous correspondence with France; and, to the shame of England, the accusations were generally true. Even the unamiable William III. appears a comparatively dignified and sympathetic figure among these squalid intriguers. We cannot wonder that he disliked and distrusted Englishmen, when those with whom he had most to do were such a crew of sharpers and hypocrites. For eight years he contrived to combine Tories and Whigs in his ministry, an extraordinary Pg 456 testimony to his powers of management, and to his subjects' blind love of office. His own troubles were constant and galling; not only was he abused by both political parties for his moderation, but he was openly accused of favouritism and even of corruption. His very life was not safe: a conspiracy formed by some extreme Tories and Jacobites, headed by a member of Parliament named Sir John Fenwick, came to light in 1696, which was found to involve a plot to shoot the king as he was on his way to hunt in Richmond Park. When the conspirators were arrested and examined, evidence came to hand which proved that half the statesmen in England had been corresponding with James II., though it is true that no one of importance had been implicated in the actual assassination plot. It is no wonder that William grew yet more sour and cold as the years passed over his head. He had lost his bright and able wife, Queen Mary, on December 28, 1694, and after her death he felt himself more than ever a stranger in England. If only the political exigencies of his situation would have allowed it, he would have preferred to return to Holland for good.

Only two successful political experiments emerged from the faction-ridden times of William III. The first was the reform of the coinage in 1695, when the clipped and worn money of the Tudors and Stuarts was honestly redeemed by the government for new and good pieces—in earlier days the state had always cheated the public on the occasion of a recoinage. The other was the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. This excellent device was intended to give the nation a solid and solvent bank, provided with a government guarantee, that should be above the dangers of fraud and ill luck which render private banks dangerous to the investor. At the same time, in return for the grant of the government guarantee, the new Bank of England contracted to lend the state money, and took over the management of the National Debt, then a small matter of a very few millions.

The peace which followed the treaty of Ryswick lasted for four uneasy years only. The old war had hardly ceased before a new trouble began to appear on the horizon. This was the vexed question of the Spanish Succession. The reigning king of Spain, Charles II. was a Pg 457 hypochondriacal invalid. His next of kin was his eldest sister, Maria Theresa, who had wedded Lewis XIV.; her son, the Dauphin, would have been the natural heir to Spain, if his mother had not executed on her marriage a deed of renunciation of her rights of succession. After the Dauphin, the nearest relative of Charles II. was his younger sister Margaret, the wife of the Emperor Leopold I.; but the rights of this princess and her daughter, Maria Antonia, were also barred by a renunciation, made when she married the Emperor. Next in the family came Leopold himself, as the son of an aunt of Charles II., who had made no such engagement at her espousals. The question turned on the validity of the renunciations made by the two infantas. Lewis XIV. said that his wife's agreement was worthless, because no one can sign away the rights of their heirs. Yet the document had been solemnly sanctioned by the Cortes, the Spanish Parliament. The Emperor stood out for the validity of the document, and urged, not the claims of his Bavarian daughter, who had also been the victim of her mother's renunciation, but his own right as grandson of Philip III.

The real difficulty of the situation lay in the fact that all Europe viewed with dismay the union of Spain and France, and was very little better pleased at the idea of the union of Spain and the Empire. The Spanish dominions were still so broad and so wealthy, that they would throw out the balance of Pg 458 power in Europe, if they were united to any other large state. For Charles II. reigned not only over Spain, but in Belgium, in Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and over the rich Spanish colonies in Mexico, the West Indies, South America, and the Malay Archipelago.

While Charles II. was slowly sinking into his grave, all his heirs were busily engaged in discussing the changes that must follow his decease. Both Lewis and the Emperor saw that it would be unwise to claim Spain for themselves, therefore the French king named his youngest grandson, Philip, Duke of Anjou, as his representative, while the Austrian passed on his personal claims to his younger son, the Archduke Charles. They then arrived at an agreement that neither Philip nor Charles should have Spain itself, but that each should have compensation for resigning his full claim—the archduke was to take Milan, Duke Philip Naples and Sicily. Meanwhile Spain, Belgium, and the Indies were to go to the young Prince of Bavaria, the one claimant who was unobjectionable to all Europe; a secret treaty to this effect was signed, and carefully kept from the knowledge of the Spaniards, to whom it would have been very offensive, as taking away their obvious right to choose their own king. England and Holland, however, were both made consenting parties to the treaty, of which William III. fully approved.

But in 1699 the young Prince of Bavaria died, leaving no brother or sister to succeed to his claim. The whole matter of the succession was again thrown into confusion. But after long negotiation, Lewis XIV. agreed to permit the Archduke Charles to become King of Spain, if he were himself bought off with Naples, Sicily, and Milan.

But this compromise was never to come into operation. The news of it got abroad and reached Spain. Both Charles II. and his people were much enraged at seeing their empire parcelled out by foreigners without their own consent. Rousing himself on his very death-bed, the king solemnly declared Philip of Anjou his heir in the whole of the Spanish possessions, and expired immediately after (1700).

The temptation to accept the legacy of King Charles, and to claim Spain and the Indies for his grandson, was too much Pg 459 for Lewis XIV. In spite of the elaborate engagements with the Emperor Leopold to which he had plighted his faith, he resolved to snatch at the prize. If Spain, Belgium, and half Italy fell into his grandson's hands, he thought that the house of Bourbon must give the law to the whole of Europe. Accordingly, the Duke of Anjou was allowed to accept the Spanish throne when the Cortes offered it to him, and was proclaimed king as Philip V.

This was bound to lead to war. Austria could not brook the breach of faith, Holland and the minor German states could not tolerate the idea of seeing the Spanish Netherlands falling into the hands of a French prince. But if unaided by England, it was doubtful if the powers of Central Europe could face the united force of France and Spain. It was now all-important to know whether England would join them. William III. was eager to renew his old crusade against French aggression, but the English Parliament and people were far less certain of their purpose. The Tories, who were now dominant in Parliament, had of late been carping at every act of the king; they had cut down his revenue, forced him to reduce the standing army to 7000 men, and confiscated many estates in Ireland, which had been granted to his friends, Dutch and English. While William was dreaming of nothing but war, the Tory majority in the Lower House were solely intent on the impeachment of the Whig ministers who had been in office in 1696-1700, and on regulating the succession to the crown after William's death.

The important act which settled this question had become necessary on the death of William's nephew, the little Duke of Gloucester, the only surviving son of the Princess Anne. He was the sole near relative of the king who was not a Romanist, and, lest the crown should lapse back to James II. and his heirs, some new measures had to be taken. Accordingly the Parliament, Tory though it was, voted that the next Protestant heir should succeed on the death of William and his sister-in-law, the Princess Anne. This heir was a granddaughter of James I., the aged Electress Sophia of Hanover, the child of Frederic of the Palatinate and his wife Elizabeth of England, whose fortunes had moved the world so deeply some eighty years back. Her brother's children Pg 460 were all Romanists, and she was therefore preferred to them in the Act of Settlement. The crown was ensured to her and her heirs, to the prejudice of some dozen persons who stood before her in the line of succession. [48]

The act also laid down two important constitutional doctrines. In future the judges were to hold office quamdiu se bene gesserint, not at the king's pleasure, and only to be removable for misconduct upon an address of both Houses of Parliament. No pardon granted by the sovereign was to stand in the way of an impeachment by the Commons; ministers, therefore, would not be able to plead that they were irresponsible because the king had pardoned them.

It is very doubtful if the English Parliament would have consented to join in an alliance against France, if Lewis XIV. had not at this moment indulged in an ill-timed act of bravado which seemed especially designed to cast contempt on the "Act of Settlement." In 1701, the exiled James II. died at St. Germains. Lewis at once saluted his heir, the prince born in 1688, as rightful King of England, and hailed him by the title of James III.

The whole English nation was deeply excited and angered at this breach of the agreement in the treaty of Ryswick, by which Lewis had recognized William III. as legitimate ruler of Britain. Thus it became easy for the king to urge them into the breach with France and alliance with the Emperor, which it was his aim to bring about. The Whigs got a majority in the new Parliament, which met in the winter of 1701-2, and showed themselves enthusiastically ready for a war with France.

Just as his schemes were on the point of success, King William was suddenly removed from the scene. He broke his collar-bone while out hunting at Hampton Court, his enfeebled constitution could not stand the shock, and he expired in a few days (March 8, 1702). But he could die in peace. His work had not been wasted; England was committed to the new war, and the ambition of Lewis XIV. was to be effectually bridled by the great alliance which William left behind him. The lonely and morose invalid regretted but little his own release from an existence of pain and toil, when he saw that the great aim of his life had been achieved.

Pg 461

According to the provisions of the "Act of Settlement," the English crown passed, on the death of William III., to his sister-in-law, the Princess Anne, the second daughter of James II. The new sovereign was a worthy, pious woman, of simple domestic tastes, without a spark of intelligence or ambition. She was by far the most insignificant personage who had ever yet sat upon the throne of England. Her husband, Prince George of Denmark, was a fit match for her; he was reckoned the most harmless and the most stupid man within the four seas. "I have tried him drunk," said the shrewd Charles II., "and I have tried him sober, and there is nothing in him." He was the best of husbands, and always acted as his wife's humble attendant and admirer. He and his good-natured, placid, lymphatic spouse might possibly have managed a farm; it seemed almost ludicrous to see them set to manage three kingdoms.

The worthy Anne was inevitably doomed to fall under the dominion of some mind stronger than her own. It was notorious to every one that for the last twenty years she had been managed and governed by her chief lady-in-waiting, Sarah, Lady Churchill, the wife of the intriguing general who had betrayed James II. in 1688, and William III. in 1692. They had been friends and companions from their girlhood, and the imperious Sarah had always had the mastery over the yielding Anne. The princess saw with her favourite's eyes, and spoke with her favourite's words. Any faint symptoms of independence on her part were promptly Pg 462 crushed by the hectoring tongue of Lady Churchill, who had acquired such an ascendency over her mistress that she permitted herself the strangest licence, and cowed and deafened her by her angry and voluble reproaches. It is only fair to say that she exercised almost as great a tyranny over her own husband. The suave and shifty general looked upon his wife with doting admiration, and yielded a respectful obedience to her caprices.

It is a curious testimony to the survival of the personal power of the sovereign in England, that Anne's predilection for the two Churchills changed the face of domestic politics on her accession. During William's life, they had been eyed with distrust; now they became the most important personages in the realm. The queen dismissed most of the Whig ministers who had been in power when her brother-in-law died, and filled their places with Tories, or rather with friends and adherents of Churchill, who, though he called himself a Tory, was in reality a pure self-seeker who cared nothing for either party. The chief minister was Lord Godolphin, whose son had married Churchill's daughter, as shifty a politician as any of his contemporaries. He had long maintained a fruitless intrigue with the exiled Stuarts, but, when he came into power, dropped his correspondence with St. Germains, and ultimately became a Whig.

It was fortunate for England that Churchill and Godolphin were as clever as they were selfish. Though personally they were mere greedy adventurers, yet their policy was the best that could have been found. Churchill's military ambition made him anxious to proceed with the war which William III. had begun. The complete mastery over the queen which his wife possessed, made him firmly resolved to keep Anne on the throne at all costs. Hence there was no change either in the foreign or domestic policy of England: the new ministry were as much committed to maintaining the Protestant succession and the French war as their predecessors, though almost every individual among them had at one time or another held treasonable communications with James II.

The great alliance, therefore, which William III. had done his best to organize, was completed by the Godolphin cabinet, Pg 463 England, Holland, Austria, and most of the smaller states of the Empire bound themselves to frustrate the union of France and Spain, and to secure the inheritance of Charles II. for his namesake, the Austrian archduke. Portugal and Savoy joined the alliance ere the year was out.

On the other side, Lewis XIV. had the support of Spain: for the first time for two centuries the Spaniards and French were found fighting side by side. Only a small minority of the people of the Peninsula refused to accept Philip of Anjou as their rightful sovereign, and adhered to the archduke; this minority consisted of the Catalans, the inhabitants of the sea-coast of North-Eastern Spain, who had an old grievance against their kings for depriving them of certain local rights and privileges. By reason of the Spanish alliance, Lewis started on the war in complete military possession of two most important frontier regions, the Milanese in Italy, and the whole of the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) in the North. He had also a strong position in Germany, owing to the fact that he had secured the alliance of those powerful princes, the Elector of Bavaria and the Prince-archbishop of Cologne, two brothers of the house of Wittelsbach who had an old family grudge against the Emperor.

War had been declared by England and her allies in 1702, but it was not till 1703 that important operations began. They were waged simultaneously on four separate theatres—the Spanish Netherlands, South Germany, North Italy, and Spain. It appeared at first as if Lewis XIV. was to be the aggressor; from his points of vantage in Alsace, Milan, Bavaria, and the Spanish Netherlands, he seemed about to push forward against Holland and Austria. But he had now to cope with two generals such as no French army had ever faced—the Emperor's great captain, Prince Eugéne of Savoy; and the wary Churchill, now, by Queen Anne's favour, commander-in-chief of the English and the Dutch armies.

The first campaign was indecisive, the only considerable advantage secured by either side being that Churchill rendered a French invasion of Holland impossible, by capturing the north-eastern fortresses of the Spanish Netherlands, Venloo and Ruremonde, and by overrunning the Pg 464 electorate of Cologne and the bishopric of Liège. On his return to England, he was given the title by which he is best known, that of Duke of Marlborough.

Hitherto Churchill had shown himself an able general, but no one had taken the true measure of his abilities, or recognized the fact that he was by far the greatest military man that England had ever known. But now the ignominious political antecedents of Queen Anne's favourite were about to be hidden from view by the laurels that he was to win. John Churchill, when once he had intrigued his way to power, showed that he was well fitted to hold it. As a soldier he was the founder of a new school of scientific strategy: on the battle-field he was alert and vigorous, but he was greater in the operations that precede a battle. He had an unrivalled talent for careful and scientific combinations, by which he would deceive and circumvent an enemy, so as to attack him when least expected and at the greatest advantage. Where generals of an older school would run headlong into a fight and win with heavy loss, he would outflank or outmarch his enemy, and hustle him out of his positions with little or no bloodshed. On one occasion—as we shall see—he drove an army of 60,000 French before him and seized half the duchy of Brabant, without losing more than 80 men. Yet when hard blows were necessary he never shrank from the most formidable problems, and would lead his troops into the hottest fire with a cool-headed courage that won every man's admiration.

THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS
1702.

Great as were Marlborough's talents as a general, he was almost as notable as a diplomatist and administrator. He had all the gifts of a statesman: suave, affable, patient, and plausible, he was the one personage who could keep together the ill-assorted allies who had combined to attack Lewis XIV. The Dutch, the Austrians, and the small princes of the Empire had such divergent interests that it was a hard task to get them to work together. That they were kept from quarrelling and induced to combine their efforts was entirely Churchill's work. The organization of the allied army was in itself no mean problem; the English troops in it formed only a quarter or a third of the whole, and to manage the great body of Dutch, Prussians, Hanoverians, and Danes, who formed the bulk of the host, required infinite tact and discretion. Yet Pg 466 under Marlborough this motley array never marched save to victory, and never failed from lukewarmness or disunion.

When we recollect all Churchill's intellectual greatness, we are more than ever shocked with his moral failings. Not only was he an intriguer to the backbone, but he was grossly and indecently fond of money: he levied contributions on all the public funds that passed through his hands, was open to presents from every quarter, and did not shrink from gross favouritism where his interests moved him.

The first great campaign in which Marlborough showed his full powers was that of 1704. When it opened, his army lay on the Meuse and Lower Rhine, holding back the French from Holland. But meanwhile Lewis XIV. had pushed forward another army into South Germany to join the Bavarians, and their united forces held the valley of the Upper Danube, and seriously threatened Austria. Seeing that the sphere of decisive action lay in Bavaria, and not on the Meuse, Marlborough resolved to transfer himself to the point of danger by a rapid march across Germany. After with great difficulty persuading the Dutch to allow him to move their army eastward, he executed a series of skilful feints which led the French to imagine that he was about to invade Alsace. But having thoroughly misled them as to his intentions, he struck across Wurtemburg by forced marches, and appeared in the valley of the Danube. By storming the great fortified camp of the Bavarians on the Schellenberg, he placed himself between the enemy and Austria, and rendered any further advance towards Vienna impossible to them. When joined by a small Austrian army under Eugéne of Savoy, he found himself strong enough to fight the whole force of the French and Bavarians.

Accordingly he marched to attack them, and found them 56,000 strong, arrayed in a good position behind a marshy stream called the Nebel, which falls into the Danube near the village of Blenheim. Formidable though their line appeared, Marlborough thought that it might be broken. He sent Prince Eugéne with 20,000 men to keep employed the enemy's left wing, where the Bavarians lay. He himself with 32,000 assailed the French marshals Marsin and Tallard, who formed the hostile centre and right. On the two flanks the Anglo-Austrian army was brought to a standstill Pg 467 opposite the fortified villages of Blenheim and Oberglau, and could advance no further. But between them Marlborough himself found a weak point, just where the French and Bavarian armies joined. He made his men wade through the marshy stream, and then directed a series of furious cavalry charges against the hostile centre. After a stout resistance it broke, and the French and Bavarians were thrust apart. The Elector and his men got off without much hurt, for Prince Eugéne's force had been too much cut up early in the day to be able to pursue them. But the enemy's right wing fared very differently: Marlborough's victorious cavalry rolled it up and drove it southward into the Danube. The French had no choice but to drown or to surrender. Tallard was captured on the river-bank. Eleven thousand men laid down their arms in Blenheim village when they saw that their retreat was cut off; 15,000 more were drowned, slain, or wounded, and not half the Franco-Bavarian army succeeded in escaping (August 13, 1704).

BLENHEIM
AUG. 13, 1704.

This crushing blow saved Austria. The whole of Bavaria fell into Marlborough's hands, the French retired behind the Rhine, and for the future Germany was quite safe from the assaults of Pg 468 King Lewis. The duke then transferred himself back to the Dutch frontier so rapidly that the French had no time to do any mischief before his return. Next spring he was again on the Meuse, and threatening the Spanish Netherlands on their eastern flank.

It was not in Bavaria alone that the English arms fared well in the year 1704. A fleet under Admiral Rooke and a small army had been sent to Spain, to help the Catalan malcontents, who were ready to rise in the name of the Archduke Charles. They were foiled before Barcelona, but on their return took by surprise the almost impregnable fortress of Gibraltar, a stronghold which has remained in English hands ever since. The possession of this place, "the Key of the Mediterranean," has proved invaluable in every subsequent war, enabling England to watch, and often to hinder, every attempt to bring into co-operation the eastern and the western fleets of France and Spain. Cadiz cannot communicate with Cartagena, or Toulon with Brest, without being observed from Gibraltar, and a strong English fleet based on that port can practically close the entrance of the Mediterranean.

In 1705 Marlborough had intended to attack France by the valley of the Moselle, but owing to the feeble help given by the Austrians—Prince Eugéne had been sent off to Italy—he was compelled to try a less adventurous scheme in the Spanish Netherlands. The armies of King Lewis, now under Marshal Villeroi, had ranged themselves in a long line from Antwerp to Namur, covering every assailable point with elaborate fortified lines. By a system of skilful feints and countermarches, Marlborough broke through the lines with the loss of only 80 men, and got possession of the plain of Brabant. He would have fought a pitched battle on the field of Waterloo, but for the reluctance of the Dutch Government, who wished to withdraw their troops at the critical moment, and prevented the campaign from being decisive.

The next spring, however, brought Marlborough his reward. When he threatened the great fortress of Namur, Marshal Villeroi concentrated all the French troops in the Netherlands, and posted himself on the heights of Ramillies to cover the city. Marlborough's generalship was Pg 469 never better displayed than in the battle which ensued. Threatening the French left wing, he induced Villeroi to concentrate the stronger half of his army on that point. Then suddenly changing his order of attack, he flung himself on the extreme French right, and had taken Ramillies and stormed the heights behind it before Villeroi could hurry back his troops to the point of real danger. Each French brigade as it arrived was swept away by the advancing allies, and Villeroi lost his baggage and guns and half his army. The consequences of the fight were even more striking: Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, and all Flanders and Hainault fell into Marlborough's hands. In the whole of the Spanish Netherlands, Lewis XIV. now held nothing but the two fortresses of Mons and Namur. The French frontier was laid open on a front of more than 200 miles.

While the arms of France were faring so badly in the North, they were equally unsuccessful in the South. On September 6th of the same year, Prince Eugéne and the Duke of Savoy routed the French army of Italy in front of Turin; in consequence of this battle the generals of Lewis were obliged to evacuate the Milanese and Piedmont, and to retire behind the Alps. At the same time a second assault of the allies on Spain met with signal good fortune. The Catalans had risen in favour of the Archduke Charles, Barcelona had been stormed in 1705 by an Anglo-Austrian force under the Prince of Hesse, [49] and all Eastern Spain submitted. In 1706 an English force, reinforced by Portuguese, marched up to Madrid and seized it. It seemed that Philip V. would ere long be forced to leave Spain, and retire beyond the Pyrenees. The spirits of Lewis XIV. were so much dashed by this series of reverses that he, for the first time in his life, humbled himself to sue for peace from the allies—offering to waive his grandson's rights to Spain, Belgium, and the Indies, if he were allowed to keep the Spanish dominions in Italy—Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia.

The allies were unwise enough to reject these terms; Holland Pg 470 and the German states would have accepted them, but the Emperor was set on gaining the Milanese, and Marlborough, who loved the war for the wealth and glory that it brought him, persuaded the English Government to refuse to treat. This obstinate determination to push matters to extremity met with a well-deserved retribution. The fortune of war in 1707 commenced to turn against the allies. In Spain their army lost Madrid, and was almost annihilated at the battle of Almanza by the French and Spaniards. In consequence they lost all their foothold in the peninsula except Catalonia and Gibraltar. About the same time Eugéne of Savoy and the Austrians crossed the Alps and invaded Provence, but were beaten out of France after a disastrous failure before Toulon. Marlborough himself won no new successes in the Netherlands; the Austrians gave him little help, and his attention was distracted from Flanders by the enterprises of Charles XII. of Sweden. That brilliant and headstrong monarch, an old ally of France, had just invaded Germany from the rear, pursuing a quarrel with the Elector of Saxony. In great fear lest he might interfere in the war and join the French, Marlborough hastened to the far east, visited Charles at his camp in Saxony, and flattered and cajoled him into retiring. The Swede marched off into Poland, and Marlborough was able to return to Flanders with a quiet mind; but he had lost the best months of the campaigning season in his excursion to meet Charles.

In the next year his old fortune returned to him. Lewis XIV., encouraged by the events of 1707, had raised a great army for the invasion of Flanders. It was headed by his eldest grandson and heir, Lewis, Duke of Burgundy, who was to be advised by Marshal Vendôme, the best officer in the French service. They crossed the Lys into Flanders and captured Ghent, but Marlborough soon concentrated his forces and fell upon them at Oudenarde. The French army was mismanaged. Burgundy was obstinate, and Vendôme brutal and overbearing; they gave contradictory orders to the troops, and were caught in disorder by Marlborough's sudden advance. In a long running fight on the heights above Oudenarde, the French right wing was surrounded and cut to pieces; the remainder of the host fled back into France (July 11, 1708). Pg 471 They were soon pursued; the Austrian army came up under Prince Eugéne to help the English, and the allies crossed the frontier and laid siege to the great fortress of Lille, the northern bulwark of France. It fell, after a long siege, on December 9, 1708, when Marshal Boufflers and 15,000 men laid down their arms before the allied generals.

Lewis was now brought very low, lower even than in 1706. Once more he asked the allies for terms of peace. This time they were even harsher in their reply than at the previous negotiations. They demanded not only that he should surrender his grandson's claims to any part of the Spanish inheritance, but that he should guarantee to send an army into Spain to evict King Philip, if the latter refused to evacuate the realm which he had been ruling for the last six years. Lewis was also bidden to surrender Strasburg and some of the fortresses of French Flanders.

Though his armies were starving, and his exchequer drained dry, the King of France could not stoop to the humiliation of declaring war on his grandson. "If I must needs fight," he is reported to have said, "I would rather fight my enemies than my own children." So, protesting that the continuance of the war was no fault of his, he sent his plate to the mint, sold his costly furniture and pictures, and made a desperate appeal to the French nation to maintain the integrity of its frontiers and its national pride. By a supreme effort nearly 100,000 men, under Marshal Villars, were collected and ranged along the borders of Flanders.

With this army Marlborough had to deal in the next year. He was proceeding with the siege of the fortress of Mons, when Villars came up to hinder him, and took post on the heath of Malplaquet. The French position was very strong, covered on both flanks with thick woods, and defended with entrenchments and heavy batteries. Nevertheless Marlborough attacked, and met with his usual success, though on this occasion his victory was very dearly bought. His left wing, headed by the headstrong young Prince of Orange, made a rash and desperate assault on the French lines before the rest of the army had begun to advance, and was beaten back with fearful loss. But the duke broke through the centre of Villars' entrenchments by bringing up his reserves, and won the field, Pg 472 though he lost more men than the French, who had fought under cover all day. In consequence of this victory Mons fell, and the allies advanced into France, and began to besiege the fortresses of French Flanders and Artois. Their progress seemed to slacken among these thickly set strongholds, and the once rapid advance of Marlborough grew slow. This was more in consequence of the internal politics of England than of any falling off in the great general's capacity. The duke had ceased to command the obedience of the English ministry, and his friends had just been turned out of office.

From 1702 to 1710 Marlborough's connection, Godolphin, remained the chief minister. He had kept himself in power by utilizing the jealousies of Whig and Tory, and allying himself alternately to either party. Till 1706 Godolphin had posed as a Tory himself, but finding that the majority of the Tory party were lukewarm in supporting the war, and pressed for an early peace with France, he resolved to break with them. Accordingly he dismissed most of his old colleagues, and took into partnership Marlborough's son-in-law, the Earl of Sunderland, who, though the heir of the time-serving favourite of James II., was a violent Whig. It was the Godolphin-Sunderland ministry which rejected the French proposals for peace in 1708, when the most favourable terms might have been secured. But to subserve Marlborough's ambition and the fanatical hatred of the Whigs for Lewis XIV., the war was continued.

The only important event of domestic politics which occurred in this part of Anne's reign was the work of the Godolphin-Sunderland ministry. This was the celebrated "Union with Scotland" in 1707, which permanently united the crowns and parliaments of the two halves of Britain. The separation of the two kingdoms had many disadvantages, both commercial and political, and William III. had wished to unify them. But old local patriotism had frustrated the scheme hitherto, and the unfortunate Darien Scheme [50] had caused much Pg 473 bitter feeling in William's later years. Early in Anne's reign this took the ominous shape of an attempt to change the law of succession to the throne in Scotland, so that there appeared a grave danger of the separation of the two crowns at the queen's death. Fearing this, Godolphin's ministry made a resolute attempt to bring about a permanent union of the two crowns. An act to that effect was ultimately carried through the Scottish Parliament, but with the greatest difficulty. National pride, the fear lest England might endeavour to Anglicize the Kirk, the dislike of the citizens of Edinburgh to see their city lose its status as a capital, the secret hopes of the Jacobites to win the Scottish crown for James the Pretender, worked on one side. On the other the arguments used were the political and commercial convenience of the change, and the absolute necessity for making sure of the Protestant succession. When the English Government gave pledges for the security of the Kirk, and for the perpetuation of the Scottish law courts and universities, the majority yielded, and the bill passed (1707). For the future Scotland was represented in the United Parliament of Great Britain by 45 members of the Commons and 16 representative peers. The arms of England and Scotland were blended in the royal shield, and in the new British flag, the "Union Jack," the white saltire of St. Andrew and the red cross of St. George were combined.

It was many years, however, before the Scots came to acquiesce cordially in the Union, and the Jacobite party did their best to keep up the old national grudge, and to persuade Scotland that she had suffered by the change. But the allegation was proved so false by the course of events, that the outcry against the Union gradually died away. Scotland has since supplied a much larger proportion of the leaders of Britain alike in politics, war, literature, and philosophy, than her scanty population seemed to promise.

The domination of the Whigs was not to last much longer. They fell into disfavour for two reasons: the first was that the people had begun to realize the fact that the costly and bloody struggle with France ought to end, now that Lewis was humbled and ready to surrender all claims to domination in Europe. The second was that the Whigs had contrived to offend the religious sentiments Pg 474 of that great majority of the nation which clung to the Church of England and resented any action that seemed to put a slight upon her.

The Tories set to work to preach to the people that the war only continued because Marlborough profited by it, and because the Emperor and the Dutch wished to impose over-heavy terms on the French. This was on the whole quite true, and it was dinned into the ears of the nation by countless Tory speeches and pamphlets, of which the best-known is Dean Swift's cogent and caustic "Conduct of the Allies" (1711).

But a more active part in the fall of the Whig ministry was played by the Church question. High Churchmen had always suspected the Whigs of lukewarm orthodoxy, because of the attempts which were made by them from time to time to secure toleration for Dissenters. This, the best and wisest part of the Whig programme, brought them much enmity. They were already looked upon askance by many Churchmen, when they contrived to bring a storm about their ears by an attempt to suppress the liberty of the pulpit. Dr. Sacheverell, a Tory divine, had preached two violent political sermons, "On the Peril of False Brethren in Church and State." They were stupid and bombastic utterances, in which he compared Godolphin to Jeroboam, and called him "Volpone, the Old Fox." The minister was foolish enough to take this stuff seriously: he arrested Sacheverell, and announced his intention of impeaching him for sedition before the House of Lords. He carried out his purpose; the doctor was tried, and condemned by the Whig majority among the peers to suspension from his clerical function for three years, while his sermons were burnt by the common hangman. This decision produced riots and demonstrations over the whole country; the Whigs were denounced as violators of the freedom of the Church and as the secret allies of schism. The windy Sacheverell became the party hero of the day, and made a triumphal progress through the midlands. The agitation was still in full blast, when it was suddenly announced that the queen had dismissed her ministers, and charged Harley, the chief of the Tory party, to form a new cabinet.

Queen Anne's decisive and unexpected action was mainly due Pg 475 to personal causes. The domestic tyranny which the Duchess of Marlborough had exercised over her for so many years, had at last reached the point at which it became unbearable. The duchess had grown harsher and ruder with advancing years, and treated her royal friend with such gross impertinence that even the placid Anne became resentful. She gradually transferred her friendship to a new favourite, Mrs. Masham, one of her ladies in waiting, and a cousin of the Tory leader Harley. Provoked by some final explosions of the jealous wrath of the duchess, the queen sought the secret advice of Harley, and suddenly dismissed her from her offices, and bade her leave the court. After a scene of undignified recrimination with her mistress, the disgraced favourite was forced to retire: on her departure she completely wrecked, in a fit of anger, the rooms which she had so long occupied in St. James's Palace (1710).

Godolphin and Sunderland were dismissed from power immediately after the disgrace of the duchess, and Harley and the Tories were at once installed in office. They left Marlborough in command in the Netherlands for a time, but began at once to open negotiations for peace with France. This was an honest attempt to carry out the Tory programme, but it was made in an underhand way, for the Dutch and Austrians were kept entirely in the dark, and received no news of the step that England was taking.

Meanwhile Marlborough fought his last campaign in France; Marshal Villars had endeavoured to stop him by a long system of entrenchments and redoubts stretching from Hesdin to Bouchain. But Marlborough always laughed at such fortifications: he deceived Villars by his skilful feints, and easily burst through the vaunted lines, which the Frenchman had called his ne plus ultra. He took Bouchain, and was preparing to advance into Picardy, when he suddenly received the information that he was dismissed from his post and recalled to England. Harley had found the French ready to treat, and was resolved to stop the war. He gave the Duke of Ormonde, a Tory peer, the command of the English army, with the secret instructions that he was not to advance, or help the Austrians in any way (1711).

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Marlborough returned to England to protest, but found himself involved in serious troubles when he landed. The Tories had laid a trap for him, which his own avarice had prepared. He was accused of gross peculations committed while in command in Flanders. It was proved that he had taken presents to the amount of more than £60,000 from the contractors who supplied his army with food and stores. He had also received from the Emperor Joseph a douceur of 2-1/2 per cent. on all the subsidies which the English ministry had paid to Austria. More than £150,000 had gone into his pocket on this account alone. The discovery of these instances of greed blasted the duke's character; it was to no purpose that he pleaded that the money was a free gift, and that such transactions were customary in foreign services. He found himself looked upon askance by all parties, even by his old friends the Whigs, and retired to the continent.

In 1712, Harley, who had now been created Earl of Oxford, brought his negotiations with France to a close. They resulted in the celebrated treaty of Utrecht. By this agreement England recognized Philip V. as King of Spain and the Indies, stipulating that Austria and Holland were to be compensated out of the Spanish dominions in Italy and the Netherlands. France ceded to England Newfoundland, Acadia—since known as Nova Scotia—and the waste lands round Hudson's Bay. Spain also gave up Gibraltar and the important island of Minorca. Both France and Spain signed commercial treaties giving favourable conditions for English merchants. Even the long-closed monopoly of Spanish trade in South America was surrendered by the Asiento, an agreement which gave England certain rights of trade with those parts, especially the disgraceful but profitable privilege of supplying the Spanish colonies with negro slaves. Spain and France also recognized the Protestant succession in England, and agreed not to aid "the Pretender," as the young son of James II. was now called.

The minor allies of England also obtained advantages by the treaty of Utrecht. Holland was given a favourable commercial treaty and a line of strong towns in the Spanish Netherlands known as the "Barrier fortresses," because they lay along the Pg 477 frontier of France. They included Namur, Tournay, Ypres, and six or seven other places. The Duke of Savoy received Sicily and the title of king; the Elector of Brandenburg took Spanish Guelders—a district on the Meuse—and was recognized as King of Prussia. But Austria, our most powerful ally, does not appear in the agreement. The Emperor wished to continue the war, and refused to come into the general pacification.

The treaty of Utrecht was on the whole profitable to England, though it is certain that better terms could have been extorted from Lewis XIV. and Philip V., both of whom were in the last stage of exhaustion and despair. But in signing it England committed a grave breach of faith with Austria, who wished to continue the war. The English army, under Ormonde, was actually withdrawn in the middle of the campaign of 1712, so that the Austrian troops were left unsupported in France, and severely handled by the enemy. Harley's reason for refusing to stand by his allies was that Joseph I. had lately died, and had been succeeded by his brother, the Archduke Charles, who had so long claimed the Spanish throne. It seemed to the Tory ministry just as unwise to allow the house of Hapsburg to appropriate the bulk of the Spanish dominions as to allow them to fall into the hands of Lewis XIV. Accordingly, they refused to listen to the Emperor's plans for bringing further pressure on the enemy and for demanding harder terms. Left to himself, Charles VI. fared ill in the war, and was forced to sign the treaty of Rastadt in 1714. This agreement—a kind of supplement to the treaty of Utrecht—gave to the Austrians Naples, Sardinia, the Milanese, and most of the Spanish Netherlands; but a small part of the last-named country fell to Holland and Prussia, who, as we have already mentioned, acquired respectively the "Barrier fortresses" and the duchy of Guelders.

The peace of Utrecht had been signed early in 1713, and the Tory party could now settle down to administer England after their own ideas, undisturbed by alarms of war from without; but all other subjects of political importance were now thrown into the background by the question of the succession to the crown. The queen's health was manifestly beginning to fail, and it was evident that ere many years the Act of Settlement, passed in 1701, would Pg 478 come into operation, and Sophia of Hanover be called to the English throne. But there were many persons within the Tory party who viewed the approaching accession of this aged German lady with dislike, and wished, if it were but possible, to put the son of James II. on the throne. The exiled prince was now a young man of twenty-five, slow, apathetic, and deeply religious in his own narrow way. He was not the stuff of which successful pretenders are made, and played his cards very ill.

Nevertheless, there was for a time a considerable possibility that James III. might sit on the throne of England. It was generally felt that to exclude Anne's brother from the succession, in favour of her distant cousin, was hard. The large section of the Tory party who still clung to the old belief in the divine right of kings, were not comfortable in their consciences when they thought of the exclusion of the rightful heir. Another section, who had no principles, but a strong regard for their own interests, looked with dismay on the prospect of a Hanoverian succession, because they knew that the Electress Sophia and her son, the Elector George Lewis, were closely allied with the Whigs, and would certainly put them in office when the queen died.

If James Stuart had been willing to change his religion, or even to make a pretence of doing so, the Tory party would have accepted him as king, and his sister would have presented him to the people as her legitimate heir; but the Pretender was rigidly pious with the narrowest Romanist orthodoxy. He would not make the least concession on the religious point to his secret friends on this side of the water, when they besought him to hold out some prospect of his conversion. This honesty cost him his chance of recovering England.

When the Tories ascertained that James would never become a member of the Church of England, the party became divided. Harley, the prime minister, and the bulk of his followers would not lend themselves to a scheme for delivering England over to a Romanist. They continued to correspond with the Pretender, but refused to take any active steps in his cause, and let matters stand still. But there was another section of the party which was not so scrupulous, and was prepared to plunge into any treasonable plot, if only it could make sure of keeping the Pg 479 Whigs out of office. These men were led by Henry St. John Viscount Bolingbroke, one of the two Secretaries of State. St. John was a clever, plausible man, a ready writer and a brilliant speaker, but utterly unscrupulous, and filled with a devouring ambition. Though in secret a free-thinker, he pretended to be the most extreme of High Churchmen, and led the more bigoted and violent wing of the Tory party. St. John was set on becoming the ruler of England, and saw his way to the post if he could place James III. on the throne. His cautious colleague Harley stood in his way, so he set himself to expel him from office, by playing on the foibles of the queen and the High Churchmen. With this end he brought in the "Schism Act," a persecuting measure recalling the old legislation of Charles II. It proposed to prohibit Dissenters from keeping or teaching in schools, so as to force all Nonconformists under the instruction of the Church. Harley would not give this bigoted measure his support, and so lost the confidence of half his own party, and, moreover, the favour of the queen, who was persuaded by St. John to give her patronage to the bill.

In consequence Harley was dismissed from office, the Schism Act was passed, and Bolingbroke became the queen's chief minister. He set to work to prepare for a Jacobite restoration, filling all posts in the state with partisans of the exiled prince. So able and determined was he, that the Whigs took alarm, and began to make preparation to defend the Protestant succession. They put themselves into communication with George of Hanover, whose aged mother the electress was just dead, and swore to secure him the throne, even at the cost of civil war.

But the new ministry had only been in power a few days, when Queen Anne was stricken with a mortal sickness. Bolingbroke had not reckoned on this chance, and was caught but half prepared. He saw that unless he acted, and acted promptly, the law of the land must take its course, and the Elector George become King of England. But action was difficult; the army was Whig at heart, and even the majority of the Tories were not prepared to draw the sword to place a Romanist on the throne. While Bolingbroke hesitated, his enemies struck their blow.

As the English Constitution then stood, the Cabinet system Pg 480 was but half developed. The modern idea that the queen's advisers should be a small homogeneous body of men of the same party, meeting together under the presidency of the prime minister, was only just coming into being. It was still a moot point whether, during the sovereign's illness or at his or her death, the executive power lay in the hands of the whole Privy Council or of the members of it alone who were actually ministers and members of the Cabinet. The supporters of the Protestant succession took advantage of this doubt. While the queen lay speechless and dying, three dukes, Shrewsbury, a "Hanoverian Tory," and Argyle and Somerset, two Whigs, presented themselves at the meeting of the Cabinet and claimed a seat in the assembly as privy councillors. Bolingbroke did not dare to exclude them, and thereby lost his chance of carrying out a coup d'état. For the dukes called in all the other privy councillors, a majority of whom were Whigs or moderate Tories, and took the conduct of affairs out of the prime minister's hands. The queen died that night (August 1, 1714), and the Privy Council at once proclaimed the elector under the name of George I. Bolingbroke retired in wrath, muttering that if he had been granted six weeks for preparation, he would have given England a different king.

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THE STUARTS.
(Chart 1)

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George Lewis, Elector of Hanover, who in virtue of the Act of Settlement now mounted the English throne, was a selfish, hard-hearted, unamiable, and uninteresting man of fifty-four. He was intensely German in all his ideas and prejudices; he could not speak a word of English, nor had he the slightest knowledge of the political and social state of the kingdom that he was called upon to govern. Being a very cautious man, he had never thought himself secure of the English crown, and now that he had obtained it, he always looked upon it as a precarious piece of property, that might some day be taken from him. He was convinced that he might at any moment be forced to return to his native Hanover, so he did not attempt to make himself at home on this side of the North Sea. During his thirteen years of rule he never ceased to feel himself a stranger in his palaces at London or Windsor. He wished to make what profit he could out of England, but he was so ignorant of English politics that he felt himself constrained to rely entirely on his ministers, and let them manage his affairs for him. His sole fixed idea was that the Tory party were irretrievably committed to Jacobitism, and that, if he wished to keep his throne, he must throw himself entirely into the hands of his friends the Whigs. With his accession, therefore, began the political ascendency of that party, which was to last more than half a century [1714-1770].

There was no romantic loyalty or mutual respect in the bargain which was thus struck between the Whig party and the new dynasty. The king knew that his ministers looked upon him as a mere political necessity. Pg 483 They could have no liking for their stolid, selfish master. George was indeed most unlovable to those who knew him best. He had placed his wife, Sophia of Celle, in lifelong captivity on a charge of unfaithfulness. But he himself lived in open sin with two mistresses, whom he made Duchess of Kendal and Countess of Darlington when he came to the English throne. He was at bitter enmity with his son George, Prince of Wales; they never met if they could avoid a meeting. George was, in short, the very last person to command either love or respect from any man.

With the accession of George I. began the substitution of the prime minister and the Cabinet for the king as the actual ruler of England. Down to Anne's time the sovereign had habitually attended the meetings of the Privy Council, and was in constant contact with all the members of the ministry. They were still regarded as his personal servants, and he would often dismiss one minister without turning the whole ministry out of office. The notion that the Cabinet were jointly responsible for each other's actions, and that the king must accept any combination of ministers that a parliamentary majority chose to impose upon him, had not yet come into being. Even the mild and apathetic Queen Anne had been wont to remove her great officers of state at her own pleasure, without consulting the rest of the Cabinet, much less the Parliament.

But George I. was so absolutely ignorant of English politics, and placed at such a disadvantage by his inability to speak the English language, that he never attempted to interfere with his ministers. He seldom came to their meetings, and usually communicated with them through the prime minister of the day. A single fact gives a fair example of the difficulty which George found in dealing with his new subjects. He knew no English, while Walpole—his chief minister for more than half his reign—knew neither German nor French; they had therefore to discuss all affairs of state in Latin, which both of them spoke extremely ill. It can easily be understood that George was constrained to let all things remain in the hands of the Whig statesmen who had placed him on the throne. He fingered much English money, and he was occasionally able to use the influence of England for the profit of Hanover in continental politics. In other respects he was a perfect nonentity.

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The Whig party which now obtained possession of office, and clung to it for two full generations, was no longer led by its old chiefs. Godolphin had died in 1712; Marlborough, though he had returned to England, was not restored to power. His character had been irretrievably injured by the revelations of 1711, and he was suspected (not without foundation) of having renewed his old intrigues with the exiled Stuarts during Harley's tenure of office. The Whigs now gave him the honourable and lucrative post of commander-in-chief, but would not serve under him. Only a year after George's accession he was attacked by paralysis and softening of the brain, and retired to his great palace of Blenheim, in Oxfordshire, where he lingered till 1722, broken in mind and body.

The Whigs were now led by the Earl of Sunderland, the son-in-law of Marlborough, by Earl Stanhope—a general who had won some military reputation in Spain during the late war—by Lord Townshend, and Sir Robert Walpole, the youngest and ablest of the party chiefs. They were all four men of considerable ability, too much so for any one of them to be content to act as the subordinate and lieutenant of another. Hence it came that, though they had combined to put George I. on the throne, they soon fell to intriguing against each other, and split the Whig party into factions. These cliques did not differ from each other in principles, but were divided merely by personal grudges that their leaders bore against each other. They were always making ephemeral combinations with each other, and then breaking loose again. But on one thing they were agreed—the Tories should never come into power again, and to keep their enemies out of office they could always rally and present a united front.

The Whig party drew its main strength from three sources. The first was the strong Protestant feeling in England, which made most men resolve that the Pretender must be kept over-seas at any cost, even at that of submitting to the selfish and stolid George I. The second was the fact that the Whigs had enlisted the support of the mercantile classes all over the country by their care for trade and commerce. While in power in Anne's reign, they had done their best to make the war profitable by Pg 485 concluding commercial treaties with the allies, and by furthering the colonial expansion of England. This was never forgotten by the merchants. The third mainstay of the Whig party was their parliamentary influence. A majority of the House of Lords was on their side, and they contrived to manage the Commons by a judicious mixture of corruption and coercion.

The great peers had many "pocket boroughs" in their power—that is, they possessed such local influence in their own shires that they could rely on returning their own dependents or relatives for the seats that lay in their neighbourhood. Many of these "pocket boroughs" were also "rotten boroughs"—places, that is, which had been important in the middle ages, but had now decayed into mere hamlets with a few score of inhabitants. Over such constituencies the influence of the local landlord was so complete, that he could even sell or barter away the right to represent them in Parliament. The most extraordinary of these rotten boroughs were Old Sarum and Gatton, each of which owned only two voters, men paid to live on the deserted sites by their landlords. Yet they had as many representatives in the House of Commons as Yorkshire or Devon! Besides these nomination boroughs, the Whigs had now control over a number of crown boroughs, places where of late the members had been wont to be chosen by the sovereign; there were many such in Cornwall, where the king, as duke of that county, was supreme landlord. The Tudors had made many Cornish villages into parliamentary constituencies in order to pack the House of Commons with obedient members.

Hitherto the crown and the great peers had seldom acted together, and no one had realized how large a portion of the House of Commons could be influenced by their combination. But when, in the days of the two first Georges, the Whig oligarchy wielded the power of the crown as well as their own, they obtained a complete control over the Lower House. Often the Tory opposition shrank to a minority of sixty or eighty votes, and the only semblance of party government that remained was caused by the quarrels and intrigues of the leaders of the Whigs, who fought each other on personal grounds as bitterly as if they had been divided by some important principle.

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In the first year of King George, however, the Whigs were still kept together by their fear of the enemy. The Jacobites, who had seemed so near to triumph in Bolingbroke's short tenure of power, did not yield without an appeal to arms. The late prime minister and his chief military adviser, the Duke of Ormonde, both fled to France and joined the Pretender. When safe over-seas they began to organize an insurrection, counting on the active assistance of Lewis XIV., who was always ready to aid his old dependents the Stuarts. But the plot was not yet ready to burst, when the old king died, and his successor in power, the regent Philip of Orleans, refused to risk any step that might lead to a war with England.

Nevertheless, Bolingbroke and his master persevered. They had so many friends both in England and in Scotland, that they thought that they could hardly fail. They had not realized that most of these friends were lukewarm, and unprepared to take arms in order to give the crown to a Romanist. Two-thirds of the Tory party hated the Pope even more than they hated the Whigs and the Hanoverian king, and would not move unless James Stuart showed some signs of wishing to conform to the Church of England. Their loyalty to the national Church was stronger than their loyalty to the divine right of kings.

But the wilder and more excitable spirits in the party were ready to follow Bolingbroke. They saw all their hopes of political advancement cut away by George's alliance with the Whigs, and determined to make a bold stroke for power. In Scotland more especially did the emissaries of the Pretender meet with encouragement. The Scots were still very sore over the passing of the Act of Union in 1707, and nursed their ancient grudge against England. But the most active source of discontent was the hatred which the minor clans of the Highlands felt for the powerful tribe of the Campbells.

The rule of George I. in England implied the domination of that great Whig clan, and its chief the Duke of Argyle, over the lands north of Forth and Clyde. For now, as in 1645 and 1685, the chief of the Campbells, the MacCallain Mor, as his clansmen called him, was at the head Pg 487 of the Presbyterian or Whig party in Scotland. The chiefs of the other Highland tribes were as bitterly hostile to the present Duke of Argyle as their ancestors had been to his father and grandfather.

The head of the Jacobite plotters in the north was John Erskine, Earl of Mar, who had been Bolingbroke's Secretary of State for Scotland in the Cabinet of 1714. He was a busy and ambitious man, who was bitterly vexed at seeing his prospects of political advancement at an end. Under the pretence of gathering a great hunting-party, he assembled a number of the leading chiefs of the Highlands at Braemar Castle. On his persuasion they resolved to take arms for King James. Among the clans which joined in the rising were the Gordons, Murrays, Stuarts, Mackintoshes, Macphersons, Macdonalds, Farquharsons, and many more. In the Lowlands a simultaneous rising was arranged by some of the lords of the Border, headed by the Earls of Nithsdale, Carnwath and Wintoun, and Lord Kenmure. Meanwhile England was also to be stirred up. The Duke of Ormonde was to land in Devonshire with some refugees from France. Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster, a rich Northumbrian squire, undertook to raise and organize the northern counties. A third rising was to take place in Wales.

In the autumn of 1715 the Jacobites struck their blow. On September 6th Mar raised the royal standard of Scotland at the Castletown of Braemar. Immediately a score of chiefs joined him, and an army of 5000 or 6000 men was at his disposal. Nor were the Highlanders to be despised as a military force. The ancient Celtic turbulence and tribal feuds yet survived in the lands beyond the Tay, and the clansmen were still reared to arms from their youth up. Their fathers had fought under Dundee, and their grandfathers had served Montrose in the old civil wars of Charles I. The Scottish Government had never succeeded in pacifying the Highlands, and the clans were still wont to lift each other's cattle, and to engage in bloody affrays. They were blindly devoted to their chiefs, and would follow them into any quarrel; the cause in which they armed was indifferent to them—it was enough for them to know their master's will, Pg 488 and to carry it out. When called to arms, they came out with gun, broadsword, and shield. The force and fury of their charge were tremendous, and none but the best of regular troops could stand against them. But they were utterly undisciplined; it was difficult to keep them to their standards, since they were prone to melt home after a battle, to stow away their plunder. Moreover, their tribal pride was so great, and their ancient tribal feuds so many, that it was very hard to induce any two clans to serve side by side, or to help each other loyally.

Mar was a mere politician; he was destitute of force of character, and had earned the dishonourable name of "Bobbing John" by his fickle and shifty conduct. No worse leader could have been found to command the horde of high-spirited, jealous, and quarrelsome mountaineers whom he had called to arms.

When the news of Mar's rising was noised abroad, the Jacobites in the Scottish Lowlands and in Northumberland gathered themselves together according to their promise. But the insurrections in Devonshire and Wales, on which the Pretender had been counting, did not take place. The Whig Government had sent most of its available troops to the West of England, and had arrested the chief Jacobites of those parts, so that the Duke of Ormonde, on landing near Plymouth, found no support, and hastily returned to France. But Scotland and Northumberland were all ablaze, and it seemed that the throne of George I. was in great danger, for the army available against the insurgents was less than 10,000 strong, owing to the reductions which the Tories had carried out after the peace of Utrecht.

But the mistakes and feebleness of the Jacobite leaders sufficed to wreck their enterprise. The insurgents on the English and Scottish Border united, and advanced into Lancashire, where Roman Catholics were many and Toryism strong. But their imbecile and cowardly leader, Thomas Forster, allowed himself to be surrounded at Preston by a force of 1000 cavalry under General Carpenter, and tamely laid down his arms after a slight skirmish, though his men outnumbered the regulars by three to one. He and all his chief supporters, the Earls of Derwentwater, Nithsdale, Pg 489 Nairn, Carnwath and Wintoun, and Lord Kenmure, were sent prisoners to London (November 12, 1715).

Meanwhile Mar had gathered an army of 10,000 men, and had seized Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and the whole of the north of Scotland; but, with an unaccountable sluggishness, he lingered north of the Tay, and made no attempt to capture Edinburgh or to overrun the Lowlands. He allowed the Duke of Argyle, who had taken post at Stirling with 3000 men, to maintain the line of the Forth, and to keep separate the two areas of insurrection. It was only on the very day of the surrender of Preston that Mar at last consented to move southward from Perth. Argyle advanced to meet him, and then ensued the indecisive battle of Sheriffmuir. In this fight each army routed the left wing of the other, and then retired towards its base. Mar's bad generalship and the petty quarrels of the clans had neutralized the vast advantage of numbers which the Jacobites possessed (November 13, 1715).

Mar brought his army back to Perth in a mutinous and discontented condition; each chief laid on another the loss of the expected victory, and the Highlanders began to melt away to their homes. It was to no purpose that James Stuart himself at last appeared, to endeavour to rally his dispirited followers. The Pretender was a slow and ungenial young man, with a melancholy face and a hesitating manner. He failed to inspire his followers with the enthusiasm which he did not himself possess, and his cause continued to lose ground. When Argyle, largely reinforced from England, began to move northward, James deserted his army and took ship for France. The remnants of Mar's once formidable host then disbanded themselves; the chiefs fled over-sea or submitted to Argyle, while the clansmen dispersed to their valleys.

Thus ended in ignominious failure the great rising of 1715. The Whigs took no very cruel revenge on the insurgents. Two peers, the Lords Derwentwater and Kenmure, [51] were beheaded, and about 30 persons of meaner rank hanged. As the years went by, most of the Jacobite chiefs were pardoned and returned Pg 490 to England. Even Bolingbroke was allowed to come back from exile in 1722.

Even after his lamentable failure in 1715-16, the Pretender still nourished some hopes of exciting another rebellion. When France refused to help him, he turned to Spain, and got some small assistance from Philip V., who, as we shall see, had the best reasons for disliking the Whigs. A few hundred Spanish troops landed in Rosshire in 1719, and were joined by the clans of the neighbourhood; but no general rising took place, and the whole Jacobite force was dispersed or captured by Carpenter—the victor of Preston—at the battle of Glenshiel.

The tale of "the Fifteen" is the one stirring incident in the inglorious annals of George I. The domestic interest of the remainder of his reign centred in the quarrels and intrigues of the various Whig parties with each other. The only important constitutional change which dates from this time is the "Septennial Act" of 1716, which fixed the duration of Parliament at seven years. Since 1694 three years had been their legal term, but, on account of the inconvenience of general elections at such short intervals, the longer term was substituted and still prevails. In foreign politics the only notable event was a short war with Spain in 1718-20. This was caused by an attempt of Philip V. and his able minister, Cardinal Alberoni, to reconquer the old Spanish dominions in Sicily and Naples. England, as one of the guarantors of the treaty of Utrecht, interfered to aid the Austrians and the Duke of Savoy, the two powers whom Spain had attacked, and an English fleet under Admiral Byng destroyed off Cape Passaro the Spanish squadron which had accompanied the army that invaded Sicily.

In revenge Cardinal Alberoni gave the Jacobites what help he could, and endeavoured to concert an alliance with Charles XII., the warlike King of Sweden. But he and his helpers were too weak to cope with Austria, France, and England, who were all leagued against him. Alberoni was forced from office, and his master Philip V. signed an ignominious peace, and gave up his ephemeral conquests in Sicily (1720).

The ministry which had carried on the war with Spain had been composed of that section of the Whigs who followed Pg 491 Stanhope and Sunderland. But in the same year in which peace was signed, that cabinet was replaced by another, and England saw the advent to power of the prime minister who was to rule the three kingdoms for the next twenty-two years (1721-42), Sir Robert Walpole.

The Stanhope cabinet was overthrown, not by the strength of its enemies, but by its own misfortune in becoming involved in the great financial panic known as the "South Sea Bubble." The South Sea Company was a trading venture which had been started in 1711 for developing commerce with Spanish America and the countries of the Pacific. The undertaking had been very successful, and the shares of the company were much sought after, and commanded a very heavy premium. But the directors who managed it were venturesome and reckless men, who wished to extend their operations outside the sphere of trade into that of finance and stock-jobbing. They formed a great scheme for offering the Government the huge sum of £7,000,000 for the privilege of taking over the management of the National Debt, which had hitherto been in the hands of the Bank of England. They intended to recoup themselves by inducing the creditors who held the state loans to exchange them for new stock of the South Sea Company, which would thus accumulate a capital sufficient to develop its trade all over the world, and distance all rivals.

Stanhope and Sunderland accepted this wild offer; they were glad to get the burden of the National Debt off their shoulders, and did not stop to think if they were treating the public creditors fairly in handing them over to the mercies of a greedy trading company. Accordingly, the management of the debt was duly transferred to the South Sea Company, and the directors did their best to put off their shares on the late holders of Government stock. For a time they were successful; the exchange was in many cases effected, and on terms very favourable to the Company, whose prospects were so well thought of that a share nominally worth £100 was actually sold for £1000. But this prosperity was purely fictitious; the actual bulk and profit of the Company's trade with the Pacific was not able to bear a quarter of the financial mountain that had been built up upon it. The first shock to credit that occurred was sufficient Pg 492 to expose the fraud that had been perpetrated on the public. The success of the South Sea Company had led to the starting of many other companies, some of them genuine but hazardous ventures, some mere swindling devices for robbing the investor. A general madness seemed to have fallen upon the nation, and in the haste to make money quickly and without exertion, all classes rushed into the whirl of speculation and stock-jobbing. It is said that subscribers were found for schemes "to discover perpetual motion, and utilize it for machinery," "to make salt water fresh," "to render quicksilver malleable," "to fatten hogs by a new process," and even "to engage in a secret undertaking which shall hereafter be made public." Of course, all these bubble companies began to burst before they were many months old, and to ruin those who had engaged in them. The financial crisis which was brought about by these failures, led to a general panic, which affected all speculative enterprises, great and small. None suffered more than the South Sea Company itself, whose shares gradually sank from 1000 down to 135. This ruined thousands of investors, and finally broke the company itself, which proved unable to pay the Government the £7,000,000 that it had covenanted to give for the privilege of managing the National Debt.

On the suspension of the South Sea Company, a cry of wrath arose all over the country against the Stanhope cabinet, which had taken the venture under its patronage and entrusted it with such important public duties. It was whispered that some of the ministers had been induced to lend their aid to the scheme by corrupt influences, and that others had made money by using their official information to aid them in speculation. These suspicions were mooted in Parliament, and, when investigated, proved to be not without foundation. When an inquiry was pressed for, Craggs, the Postmaster-General, committed suicide; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was expelled from the House as "guilty of notorious and infamous corruption;" Stanhope, the prime minister, was being attacked in the Lords for the doings of his subordinates, when he fell down dead in an apoplectic fit. His colleague Sunderland resigned his post of First Lord of the Treasury, though he was personally acquitted of all blame in the matter of the South Sea Company.

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Thus the Stanhope-Sunderland cabinet had disappeared, and the other section of the Whigs, headed by Walpole and Townshend, came into office. The former became Chancellor of the Exchequer and took charge of home affairs, while Townshend was entrusted with the foreign relations of the country. Entering into power under pledges to stay the financial crisis and save all that could be rescued from the wreck of the South Sea Company, they executed their task with success. The company was let off the payment of £7,000,000 which it had promised to the state, but deprived of the charge of the National Debt. By confiscating the estates of its fraudulent directors, enough money was obtained to pay all its debtors, and thus the crisis proved less disastrous than had at first been expected.

Sir Robert Walpole was the ruling spirit of the new cabinet; he showed his masterful mind by keeping his brother-in-law Townshend in the second place, and ultimately turned him out of the ministry. "The firm," he said, "must be Walpole and Townshend, not Townshend and Walpole." He soon got the king into complete subjection, for George asked for nothing more than a liberal civil list and frequent opportunities of visiting his beloved Hanover. Nor was he less masterful with the two Houses, where the Tory opposition and the Whigs of the rival faction were equally unable to make any head against him.

Walpole was a strange example of the height to which the practical power of dealing with other men may raise one who is neither intellectually nor morally the superior of his fellows. He was a wealthy county gentleman from Norfolk, who had entered parliament early, and had already made himself a place in politics before the death of Queen Anne. The one subject of which he had a competent knowledge was finance; in most of the other spheres of politics he was grossly ignorant, and most of all was he deficient in a grasp of European politics. He did not understand a word of French or any other modern tongue, a fact which is enough by itself to account for his inadequate foreign policy. His morals and his language were alike coarse; he affected a shameless cynicism, which is well reflected in the saying that "every man has his price" which was put into his mouth by his enemies.

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This phrase, indeed, well expresses his political methods; his one end was to maintain himself in office, and for that purpose he kept his party in a state of complete subjection. Good service he rewarded by good pay, whether in the form of office and preferment, or in the grosser shape of hard cash. He was always prepared to buy any member or group of members by open bribery, and the taint of corruption dating from the times of Charles II. was still so strong in English politics that he seldom failed to secure his prize. He was impatient of opposition, and gradually turned out of office any colleague who would not obey his slightest nod; even his own brother-in-law Townshend and Lord Carteret, the ablest diplomatist of the day, were forced to leave his cabinet by his unreasoning jealousy. He preferred to work with nonentities, because they feared and obeyed him.

Walpole was a thoroughly bad influence in English politics; he lowered the moral tone of a whole generation by his constant sneers at probity and patriotism. He promoted a host of unworthy men to power. Most especially did he injure the national Church by his practice of bestowing bishoprics and other high preferments on mere political partisans, without any thought as to their spiritual fitness.

Though the Whigs professed to be the party of liberty, enlightenment, and toleration, Walpole did not pass one important bill to improve the constitution or the social state of the nation in his twenty-two years of power. He only took thought for the material prosperity of England, and cared nothing for her moral welfare. Hence it comes that his whole term of office is almost a blank in our political history.

So firm a grasp had Walpole on the helm of power, that his position was not in the least shaken by the death of his master George I. [1727]. The king died suddenly while absent on one of his periodical visits to Hanover, and was succeeded by his son and bitter enemy, George, Prince of Wales. The new sovereign disliked Walpole on principle, because he had been his father's confidant, but found himself quite unable to turn him out of power. Immediately on hearing of his predecessor's death, George II. bade Walpole give up his seals of office, but a few days later he had to ask him to resume them, after finding that no one else would undertake to construct Pg 495 a cabinet. For fifteen years more he was constrained to keep his father's old minister (1727-1742).

George II. was a man of much greater force of character than George I. He was a busy, consequential, irascible little man, who would have liked to play a considerable part in English politics if the Whigs had only allowed him. He was a keen if not an able soldier, and had served with some distinction under Marlborough in the Low Countries. He took a great interest in foreign affairs, and chafed bitterly at the way in which Walpole persisted in keeping out of all European complications. He spoke English fluently with a vile German accent: every one has heard of his famous dictum, "I don't like Boetry, and I don't like Bainting." His tastes were coarse, and his private life indifferent. But he was wise enough to let himself be guided in many things by his clever wife, Caroline of Anspach, who possessed the very qualities in which he was most wanting, was a judicious patroness of arts and letters, and knew how to win popularity both for her husband and herself. It was mainly by her advice that King George was induced to keep Walpole in power, instead of rushing into the turmoil that would have followed his dismissal.

Walpole went on, for the first twelve years of the reign of George II., ruling the country in the same unostentatious way as before. He only made one attempt to introduce a measure of importance in the whole time; this was his Excise Bill of 1733, a financial scheme for suppressing smuggling, and encouraging the use of England as a central depôt by other nations, by means of a system of free trade. Tobacco, wine, and spirits were to be imported without paying any customs duty at the port of entry, and were to be permitted to be re-exported without any charge. But the retailers of these commodities were to pay the duty on each quantity as they sold it, so that the tax should be paid inland if not at the seaport. When a great cry was raised against the bill, as inquisitorial and tyrannous, Walpole tamely dropped it rather than risk his hold on power.

Meanwhile the continent was much disturbed by the "War of the Polish Succession" (1733-1735), in which Austria fought unsuccessfully against Spain, France, and Turkey. But Walpole Pg 496 would not interfere to aid our old ally, and saw her lose Naples and Sicily without stirring a hand. Much was to be said in favour of keeping England out of foreign wars in which she had no direct interest; but the new union of France and Spain boded ill for England. Already these two powers had secretly formed a union, afterwards known as the "Family Compact," by which the uncle and nephew, Philip V. and Lewis XV., bound themselves to do their best to put an end to England's naval supremacy, and to crush her commercial greatness (1733).

This treaty was carefully kept dark, but the spirit which had inspired it could not be concealed. The Spanish government began to redouble its vexatious pretensions to a monopoly of the trade of South America, and to interfere with the commercial rights which England possessed under the treaty of Utrecht. The governors of the Spanish colonies and their custom-house officials waxed more and more tyrannous and insolent to the English merchants who endeavoured to carry on a trade with America. The state of public feeling in England grew very bitter over this matter—all the more so because Walpole refused to listen to any complaints, or to remonstrate with the Spaniards.

At last the case of a merchant captain named Jenkins brought the national anger to boiling-point. His vessel had been boarded, and he himself maltreated by a Spanish guarda-costa. He asserted that the officer who searched his ship had cut off his ear, and told him to take it back and show it to his masters. And he certainly produced the severed ear in a box, and exhibited it freely. His story may have been exaggerated, but it was universally believed, and Walpole was attacked on all sides for his tame submission to Spanish insults.

Determined to keep himself in power at all costs, the prime minister demanded reparation from Spain, and, on failing to obtain it, reluctantly declared war. The public joy on the news of the rupture was unbounded. Only Walpole was sad at the end of twenty years of peace and prosperity that his inglorious rule had given to the land. "Ring your bells now," he is reported to have said when he Pg 497 heard the rejoicings of London, "but you will soon be wringing your hands."

Thus England embarked on the first of four great continental wars, which were to cover the greater part of the eighteenth century.

THE HOUSE OF HANOVER.

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When the unwilling Walpole was driven into war with Spain in 1739 by the clamours of the nation, he believed that he was about to become responsible for a very dangerous struggle, for he had private knowledge of the existence of the "Family Compact," and knew that France was ready to back up Spain. England, on the other hand, was entirely without allies, having gone to war in defence of her maritime commerce, a subject in which no other power felt any interest. As a matter of fact, however, the war was necessary and wise, for we were bound to come into collision with France and Spain sooner or later on the matter of trade. They could not endure to look upon the rapid expansion of England's commercial and colonial power, which had been increasing at a prodigious rate since the peace of Utrecht. Our merchants were beginning to seize an ever-growing share of the trade of the world, and to oust the French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese from all the more distant markets, especially those of Africa, India, and the remoter East. In India the East India Company was making advances which exasperated its French rivals. In South America the Spaniards felt that their ancient monopoly was gradually slipping from their hands. In North America the prodigious growth in strength and population of our seaboard colonies threatened a speedy end to the French settlement in Canada. Since the acquisition of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland by the treaty of Utrecht, the English dominions seemed to shut out from the sea the vast but sparsely peopled tracts along the St. Lawrence which still belonged to King Lewis. In the West Indies, Jamaica and Barbados were gradually drawing away the wealth Pg 499 of the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Porto Rico, and Hispaniola, the old centres of the sugar and tobacco trade.

The French and Spaniards, therefore, had good reason to fear and hate England, and if we wished to keep our control of the commerce of the world, we were bound to fight for it. It was a misfortune, however, that we were committed to the struggle while Walpole was still minister. Disliking the war, he would not throw himself heartily into it, grudged spending money, and refused to undertake any serious operations. A few expeditions to Spanish America were all that he sent out. The first under Admiral Vernon, though composed of no more than six ships of war, took Porto Bello, one of the chief harbours of the Spanish Main (1739). But a second and much larger armament under the same leader failed disastrously before Cartagena, partly owing to mismanagement, partly to the marsh fever, which struck down the English in their trenches (1741). Walpole bore the discredit of his sluggish action and his failures; he was bitterly attacked in Parliament by all the Whigs whom he had been excluding from office for the last twenty years, and gradually saw the reins of power slipping from his hands. In time of war all his bribery and jobbing could not avail to save him; his bought majority dwindled away, and early in 1742 he was defeated in the House of Commons, and forced to resign. He retired into private life, and died three years later, making no further show in politics.

He was succeeded by a coalition of all the Whig factions, under the nominal premiership of Lord Wilmington, the greatest nonentity in the whole cabinet. The real chiefs of the new ministry were Lord Carteret, an able diplomatist with a vast knowledge of European politics, and the two Pelhams—Thomas, Duke of Newcastle, and Henry, his younger brother. These two kinsmen were a pair of busy and ambitious mediocrities, who stuck like limpets to office. They had been reared in Walpole's school, understood all his arts of management and corruption, and had served under him to the last, though for a year or more they had been quietly intriguing for his fall, in order that they might succeed to his power.

The Carteret-Pelham ministry had to face a much larger Pg 500 problem in European politics than the mere struggle with Spain. During the last year the whole continent had been set ablaze by the "War of the Austrian Succession." In 1740 died the Emperor Charles VI., the Archduke Charles who had been a claimant for the Spanish throne in the days before the peace of Utrecht. He was the last male of the house of Hapsburg, and his death opened a question somewhat resembling that of the Spanish succession in 1702. Charles had determined that his broad dominions—the Austrian archduchies, the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, the Austrian Netherlands, and the duchies of Milan and Parma in Italy—should pass in a body to his daughter Maria Theresa. He chose to ignore the fact that his own elder brother, Joseph I., had left two daughters, who on any principle of hereditary succession had a better claim to the Hapsburg inheritance than their younger cousin. The elder princess Maria Amelia was the wife of Charles, the reigning Elector of Bavaria. Charles VI. spent the last twenty years of his life in arranging for his daughter's quiet succession. He drew up an instrument called the "Pragmatic Sanction," by which she was recognized as his heiress, and got it ratified by the estates of the various principalities of his realm. He also induced most of the powers of Europe at one time and another to guarantee this settlement; England, France, Spain, Prussia, and Russia had all been brought to assent to it by concessions of some sort. Only the Elector of Bavaria, the prince whose rights were infringed by the "Pragmatic Sanction," had consistently refused to accept any compensation for abandoning his wife's claims.

But when Charles died in 1740, it was seen how little the promises of most of the European powers were worth. The accession to the Hapsburg heritage of a young princess with a doubtful title was too great an opportunity to be lost by the greedy neighbours of Austria. When Charles of Bavaria laid claim to his uncle's dominions, and presented himself as a candidate for the imperial throne, he got prompt assistance from many quarters. The first to stir was Frederic II., the able and unscrupulous King of Prussia. Frederic had some ancient claims to certain parts of the duchy of Silesia. He had also a devouring ambition and the best-disciplined army Pg 501 in Europe, an army which his eccentric father Frederic William had spent a whole lifetime in organizing. Without any formal declaration of war, Frederic II. threw himself on Silesia and swept out of it the armies which Maria Theresa hastily sent against him (1741).

Then France and Spain threw in their lot with the Elector of Bavaria. Lewis XV. had his eye on the conquest of the Austrian Netherlands, while the old Philip V. wanted the duchies of Parma and Milan for his younger son. Thus beset by France, Spain, Prussia, and Bavaria, it seemed certain that Maria Theresa must succumb. Her rival Charles was chosen Emperor by a majority of the electors, and it seemed as if the imperial sceptre was about to pass from the house of Hapsburg. The Austrian Netherlands, Silesia, Bohemia, and the Milanese were all invaded at once, and the armies of Maria Theresa could not make head at so many points against the numerical superiority of their foes. The only ally to whom she could look for aid was England, who was already the open enemy of Spain, and who could not tolerate the conquest of the Netherlands by France.

An appeal for aid to this quarter met with a ready response. George II. was anxious to help the Queen of Hungary because he disliked his nephew Frederic II., and did not wish to see a Bavarian Emperor. Carteret, the leading spirit in the ministry, was even more eager for the fight. He was a far-sighted man who had realized the fact that England must inevitably come into collision with France from their rivalry in trade and colonization, and he therefore held that France's enemies were our friends. It was his wish to see England embark boldly in the strife, and send a large army to Germany to aid the Austrians. If France were involved in an exhausting continental war, he held that she would be unable at the same time to keep up a maritime struggle with England. Accordingly, the ministry promised the Austrians a large subsidy, took 16,000 Hanoverian troops into British pay, and sent all the available strength of the national army to Germany. George II., who was burning for the fray, placed himself at the head of the Anglo-Hanoverian forces and moved rapidly down to the Main, to attack the flank of the French army which was invading Austria.

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The fortunes of Maria Theresa now began to look more prosperous. Carteret got her to buy off the ablest of her assailants, the King of Prussia, by ceding him Silesia. When Frederic had withdrawn from the struggle, the French and Bavarians were driven back from Austria, and retreated up the Danube. It was against their flank that George was operating in 1743, when his rather rash advance into the midst of foes very superior in numbers brought on the battle of Dettingen (July 27, 1743).

Finding that he was beset by forces nearly double the strength of his own 30,000 men, the king faced about, to retire up the banks of the Main. But the van of the French army of the Duc de Noailles outmarched him, and threw itself across his path at the village of Dettingen, while the main body of the enemy was rapidly coming up on his flank. George hastily formed up his troops as they arrived, and dashed forward to cut his way through, leading the advance in person. He was entirely successful, drove the French into the Main with great loss, and completely extricated himself from his difficulties. This was the last occasion on which a king of England has ever been under fire.

Further successes followed the victory of Dettingen. The Austrians overran Bavaria, and the Emperor Charles was obliged to lay down his arms and ask for peace. Carteret, who had followed the king to Germany, called together a congress at Worms, at which the representatives of England, Holland, Sardinia, and Saxony, guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction, and the integrity of the dominions of the house of Hapsburg. Next spring the allies pledged themselves to invade France, and Carteret, in his moment of triumph, drank to the restoration of Alsace to Germany—a wish not to be fulfilled for another 127 years.

But England and Austria were still far from their goal. The attack on France had to be postponed, because the unscrupulous Frederic of Prussia renewed the war in the North, and fell upon the rear of the Austrians. They withdrew great bodies of troops to face him, and were left comparatively weak on their western front.

Not long afterwards Carteret, the soul of the continental war, lost his place at the head of the ministry. His jealous colleagues, Pg 503 the two Pelhams, were anxious to get rid of him, and took a mean advantage of his long absences in Germany. They allowed him to be attacked as favouring a Hanoverian, not an English policy, and as consulting the wishes of the king rather than those of the Parliament. Carteret was violently assailed by a young politician named William Pitt, whose cry was always that France should be assailed at sea and in her colonies, not on her continental frontiers. The Pelhams would not defend him, and suffered him to be loaded with many ungrounded accusations. The opposition called his ministry "the drunken administration," because he was somewhat flighty in his demeanour, and was known to love his bottle of port over-well. They accused him of lavishing on German allies money that should have gone to our own fleet, and raised such a storm of words against him that the Pelhams had their excuse for throwing him over—a feat which they accomplished in the end of 1744, to the great detriment of England. William Pitt, when a minister himself in later years, confessed that he had discovered in the course of time that Carteret's plans were excellent, and that he had himself put them into practice with success, after having so often denounced them as ruinous and reckless.

The Pelhams thus became supreme in the conduct of affairs, and stuck to office as closely as their master Walpole. Henry, the younger of the two—"a fretful, suspicious, industrious mediocrity"—was prime minister till he died in 1754. His elder brother the duke then succeeded him, and kept his feeble hand on the helm of state till he lost office in 1756. English policy under these two narrow and shifty borough-mongers soon lost the vigour that the guidance of Carteret had imparted to it.

The war with France continued, but no longer with the same success as before. In the spring of 1745 the armies of Lewis XV., under the able Maurice of Saxony, the Maréchal de Saxe as the French called him, fell upon the Austrian Netherlands. Maria Theresa had so few troops in this quarter that the defence of the Belgian provinces fell entirely upon the English and Dutch. The allied armies did not act together with much success, and the Dutch general, the Count of Waldeck, quarrelled with his colleague, George Duke of Cumberland, the younger son of George II. It was this Pg 504 want of co-operation which led to the loss of the bloody battle of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745). The French army was besieging Tournay, when Waldeck and Cumberland came up to relieve it, and found the enemy drawn up along a line of woods strengthened with redoubts on their flanks—a position much like the neighbouring field of Malplaquet, where Marlborough had won his last fight thirty-six years before.

While Waldeck skirmished feebly with the French wings, the stubborn and reckless young duke pushed into the centre of the hostile army with a solid column of English and Hanoverian infantry. He broke through two lines of the French, and cut their host in twain, but failed for want of support on the flanks. He was encompassed by the French reserves, and forced back with fearful loss to his old position, but the enemy were too maltreated to molest him further.

The campaign of 1745 was still undecided, when the greater part of the English army was suddenly called home to face a new and unexpected danger. The ministers of Lewis XV. had determined to try the effect of stirring up a Jacobite rebellion, hoping to distract the strength of England even if the house of Hanover could not be overthrown. James Stuart, the "Old Pretender," was now elderly and had always been apathetic, but his son Charles Edward Stuart was a young prince of a very different character. Reckless, adventurous, and light-hearted, he was the very man to lead a desperate venture. The French gathered an army of 15,000 men at Dunkirk, and promised to put it at his disposal if he would invade Scotland. But a storm scattered the transports, and the troops were ultimately drawn off to the war in Flanders.

Nevertheless, Charles Edward resolved to persevere, and, on hearing of the fight of Fontenoy, slipped off on a small privateer and landed in Invernesshire with no more than seven companions, "the Seven Men of Moidart," as the Jacobites called them. His arrival was quite unexpected, and he had nothing more to rely upon than the traditional attachment of the Highlanders to the house of Stuart. The chiefs of the West were dismayed at the recklessness of the venture, and it was with difficulty that the enthusiasm and personal charm of the young prince induced them to take arms. At first only a few hundreds of the Camerons and Macdonalds Pg 505 joined him, but the absolute imbecility displayed by the English Government encouraged him more and more to make the venture. The Marquis of Tullibardine, an exile since 1715, roused the Perthshire clans, and the insurrection spread to South and East.

The Pelham cabinet only got news of the prince's coming three weeks after his landing in Moidart. They were in no small degree alarmed, for well-nigh the whole army was over-sea in Flanders, and no one knew how far disaffection might have extended in England and the Scottish Lowlands. The only troops in the North were four battalions of foot and two newly raised regiments of dragoons. This small army of 3000 men was entrusted to Sir John Cope, one of the incompetent men whom the Pelhams loved to employ, because they were pliant and docile. Cope hurried north, hoping to relieve the two isolated military posts of Fort William and Fort Augustus, the sole garrisons of the West Highlands. But finding the insurgents in possession of the pass of Corry-Arrack, over which his road ran, he swerved eastward to execute a long circular march by way of Inverness. Thus he was no longer placed between the enemy and the Lowlands, and left the way to Edinburgh open.

The prince's generalship was always bold even to recklessness; the moment that Cope had passed north of him, he dashed down into Perthshire and struck at the capital of Scotland. He met with no resistance till he was quite close to Edinburgh, when 600 dragoons, the only force left in the Lowlands, fled before him at the skirmish of Colt-Brig. The Scots of the South, Whigs and Presbyterians though they were, showed an extraordinary apathy. They did not join the prince, but they refused to take arms for King George. The militia of Edinburgh, whom the half-hearted magistrates had called to arms, dispersed when the Highlanders appeared at their gates. Thus Prince Charles was able to seize the city, to proclaim his father king at the market cross, and to hold his court at Holyrood.

Soon, however, he had to fight to preserve his conquest. Cope, on hearing that the Highland army had passed southward, had hurried to the coast and taken ship with his men, hoping to reach Edinburgh before the prince. But on landing at Dunbar he found that he was three Pg 506 days late, and that he must fight if he wished to recapture the city. Advancing to Preston Pans, he camped there in a strong position covered by a marsh. But the Highland army crossed the difficult ground in the dusk of dawn, and fell upon him in the early morning. Cope threw his men into line, and waited to be attacked. The result was a disgraceful rout; the wild rush of the clansmen carried all before it. The bayonets of the regulars proved no match for target and claymore, and the dragoons on the flanks fled in wild panic. Cope left the field among the first, and brought the news of his own defeat to Dunbar (September 21, 1745).

SCOTLAND IN THE 18^TH CENTURY.

The news of the fall of Edinburgh and the battle of Preston Pans came like a thunderclap to the English Government. There was hardly a soldier in the land save the royal guards in London; the militia had not been called out, and the temper of the people was unknown. The imbecile Pelhams were at their wits' end, and it is said Pg 507 that Newcastle even made secret overtures to the Pretender. If Charles Edward could have marched forward the morning after his victory, there is no knowing where his success would have ended.

But the prince halted for five weeks, to allow the Highlanders to stow away their plunder, and to raise and arm new levies. This delay was fatal to him; it gave the ministry time to summon over the English troops from Flanders, and to call out the militia—a numerous if not a very serviceable body.

When Charles Edward moved forward again on November 3, his chance was already gone. Marshal Wade lay at Newcastle with 10,000 veterans; the Duke of Cumberland with the rest of the army of Flanders was ten days behind him. The guards and the militia of the southern counties lay on Finchley Common to protect London.

The prince, ignorant of the fact that Jacobitism had almost disappeared in England during Walpole's peaceful rule, imagined that Wales and the North would rise in his favour, if only he were to show himself beyond the Tweed with an army at his back. Leaving 4000 men to garrison Scotland, he crossed the border with 6000 picked clansmen, routed the Cumbrian militia at Carlisle, and pushed rapidly southward into Lancashire. Before he had been ten days in England, he saw that he had been deceived as to the temper of the country. Hardly a man joined him—not 200 recruits were found for him in the Tory county of Lancaster, which had put 2000 men in the field in the old days of "the Fifteen." Hoping against hope, the prince pushed on still further, skilfully eluding the armies of Wade and Cumberland, who tried in vain to enclose him between them. But the Highlanders began to melt away from him, to drive home the cattle they had lifted, and the Jacobite chiefs were dismayed at the utter apathy of the English Tories. By the time that Derby was reached the rebel army had dwindled down to 3000 men, and it seemed likely that if Charles Edward persisted in advancing, he would arrive at London alone. Overborne by the arguments of his followers, he gave the order to retreat (December 6, 1745).

He was ignorant of the effect that his advance had caused in Pg 508 the South. Panic prevailed in London, and on the "Black Friday" when the news of his arrival at Derby arrived, the timid ministers had been preparing for the worst. The king's plate had been sent on shipboard, the Bank of England had paid away every guinea in its reserve, and the militia at Finchley were fully persuaded that they were to be attacked on the next day by 10,000 wild clansmen.

The Highland army slipped back to Scotland with little difficulty, evading both Wade and Cumberland, whose heavy regiments could make no speed over the snowy December roads. On recrossing the Border Charles called up his reserves, and was soon at the head of 10,000 men. He trusted to maintain his hold on Scotland, even if England was unassailable. When the royal troops advanced, he inflicted a smart check on their vanguard at the battle of Falkirk (January 17, 1746). But the English came pouring northward in numbers which he could not hope to resist; the fiery Duke of Cumberland had more than 30,000 men on the march by the spring of the New Year, and fresh levies were forming behind him. The Jacobite leaders saw that the day was lost, though hitherto all the fighting had been in their favour. Their undisciplined bands began to disperse once more, and the prince must have known that, unless the French came to his aid, the ruin of his cause was at hand. He was constrained to retire northward, first to Perth, then to Inverness, with an ever-dwindling host. Cumberland pushed on in his rear with 8000 picked men, resolved to revenge the disgraceful days of Preston Pans and Falkirk; the rest of the English army followed at leisure.

Charles Edward would not yield without one final blow. With the 5000 men who still followed his standard, he marched out from Inverness, and attacked the Duke on Culloden Moor (April 16, 1746). Cumberland was ready for the fight; he had warned his troops to receive the Highland rush as if it were a cavalry charge, doubling the files and presenting a triple line of bayonets by making the front ranks kneel, while cannon were placed in the intervals between the regiments. The clansmen charged with their usual fury, but were staggered by the artillery fire, and almost blown to pieces by the triple volley of three ranks of infantry Pg 509 delivered at a distance of only fifty paces. The survivors straggled up only to perish on the bayonets. The prince's left wing, where the Macdonald clan had held back on a foolish point of tribal jealousy, was still intact; but when the English cavalry advanced, Charles saw that the day was lost, and bade his followers disperse. Cumberland tarnished the glory of his victory by the savage cruelty which he displayed. He gave no quarter, shot 200 prisoners in cold blood, and burnt every dwelling in the glens of the rebel clans. A price of £30,000 was put upon the head of Charles Edward, who lurked for five months in the West Highlands before he could find a ship to take him to France. He passed through countless perils in safety, and found no man among his unfortunate followers mean enough to betray him in the day of adversity. The story of his romantic escape to Skye in the disguise of the maidservant of Flora Macdonald is well known to all.

After this gallant if reckless expedition, Charles Edward never appeared again in English politics. He did not at first despair of striking another blow, and in 1750 paid a secret visit to Britain to see if a second insurrection were possible. But in England the Jacobites were almost extinct, while in Scotland they had been so sorely crushed that they had no power to stir again. The prince had to return, having accomplished nothing. Hope long deferred makes the heart sick, and in middle life Charles Edward grew apathetic, took to drinking, and became only the wreck of his old self. When his father died in 1765, he proclaimed himself king as Charles III., but never made another attempt to disturb the peace of England down to his death in 1788. With his brother Henry, a cardinal of the Roman Church, the male line of the Stuarts expired in 1807.

The English Government dealt very hardly with the insurgents of 1745-6. Three Scottish peers, the Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino, and Lovat, were beheaded, as was Colonel Townley, the only Englishman of rank who had joined the prince. Many scores of men of less note were hanged or shot. A series of bills was passed in Parliament for weakening the clans and sapping their loyalty to their chiefs. One forbade the wearing of the Highland dress with its tribal tartans. Another abolished the feudal jurisdiction, Pg 510 which gave the chiefs power over their followers. Another made the possession of arms a penal offence. Good roads were pushed up into the remoter valleys, and an attempt was made to get rid of the Gaelic language by making English compulsory in schools. A few years later William Pitt took the wise step of endeavouring to turn the restless military energy of the Highlanders into patriotic channels, and raised several of the kilted regiments which have since distinguished themselves on so many British battle-fields. By the end of the century the Highlands were as quiet as any English shire, and Jacobitism had faded away into a romantic sentiment.

The war with France and Spain dragged on for three years more, under very indifferent management on both sides. The withdrawal of the English army from Flanders in 1745 had given the French an advantage in the Netherlands, from which they had greatly profited. They had overrun the whole of the Austrian provinces, and in 1746 threatened the frontier of Holland. Cumberland and his army were recalled, after the suppression of the Scottish rising, to check the advance of the Maréchal de Saxe. But the duke suffered at Lawfeldt, in front of Maestricht, a defeat of much the same character as that of Fontenoy (July 2, 1747). Nevertheless, the French in the following winter consented to treat for peace; they had fared badly along their frontier on the Rhine and in Italy, and looked upon their successes in Belgium as only sufficient to entitle them to ask for a mutual restitution of all conquests. Moreover, their maritime trade had been completely ruined by the war, and several of their colonies had fallen into English hands.

Hence came the treaty of Aachen (Aix la Chapelle), signed in the spring of 1748, to which all the powers who had been engaged in the War of the Austrian Succession gave their assent. Maria Theresa had finally to acquiesce in the loss of Silesia to the King of Prussia, and to make smaller territorial concessions in Italy to Spain and Sardinia, giving Parma to one, and a long slip of the duchy of Milan to the other. The remainder of her vast dominions she maintained intact, while her husband, Francis of Lorraine, was acknowledged by all parties as Emperor, in succession to the unfortunate Charles of Bavaria, who had died in 1745.

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England, France, and Spain restored to each other all that each had taken—no very considerable amount—and left the great question of their colonial and commercial rivalry quite unsettled. Another and a greater war was required to decide it. The results of the fighting beyond the seas between 1739 and 1748 had not been very important. We have already mentioned how the English had failed at Cartagena in 1741. On the other hand, they had captured the French island of Cape Breton, off the mouth of the St. Lawrence, in 1744, and had maintained with success a desultory struggle with the enemy along the inland frontier of Canada. One hazardous expedition against the Pacific ports of Spanish America had been carried to a brilliant end by Commodore Anson, who followed in the steps of Drake by capturing the great Acapulco galleon, with the yearly hoard of the mines of Mexico on board (1743). Like Drake, too, Anson returned to Europe by the Cape route, and brought his ship, the Centurion, back to Spithead in 1744, thus completing the circumnavigation of the world in three years.

While these comparatively unimportant events had been happening on the American side of the globe, the first war waged between England and France in India had been giving promise of more serious results. Down to the commencement of the eighteenth century the great empire of the Moguls had dominated Hindostan, and the traders of the English and French East India Companies had been no more than visitors to the coast, allowed to build factories at convenient ports by the bounty of the Great Mogul. But in 1707 had died Aurungzebe, the last powerful monarch of that house, and since his death the vast Mohammedan empire which his ancestors had built up was falling rapidly to pieces. Everywhere the Mogul viceroys, or "nawabs," were making themselves independent of their imperial master at Delhi. The native tribes of India also, more especially the brave Mahrattas of the Western Deccan, had been throwing off the Mussulman yoke and starting on a career of conquest. The European settlers in the ports of Southern India profited immensely by this relaxation of the central control which the Mogul government had been wont to exercise, and assumed a much less deferential tone when dealing with the revolted Pg 512 nawabs who now ruled in the Carnatic, Bengal, and the Deccan.

It was first during the War of the Austrian Succession that the English and French ventured to engage in hostilities with each other, without paying attention to the native powers, whose sovereign rights they were thereby impugning. The factories of the two powers were scattered along the Coromandel coast in curious alternation, and it was here that the struggle took place. The English were based on their chief settlement at Madras, the French on their stronghold of Pondicherry.

Four years of fighting gave a decided superiority to the French, who were headed by Dupleix, a man of great energy and far-reaching views. He was the first to discover the part that might be played in Indian politics by native troops officered and drilled by Europeans. These Sepoys (Sipahis is the more correct form) had originally been small armed guards employed by the governors of the factories. Dupleix discovered, from a chance encounter at St. Thomé (1746), that a small body of these disciplined mercenaries could defeat whole hordes of native cavalry, and used his discovery with skill and promptitude. Raising large numbers of Sepoys, he built up the first regular army that had been seen in India. In his struggle with the English he was very successful. Madras and almost all the other English factories fell into his hands, and it looked as if the French were to be the sole power in Southern Hindostan. The complete triumph of Dupleix was only prevented by his quarrels with his colleague Labourdonnais, the governor of the Mauritius, who had come to his aid at the head of a fleet. They were both energetic and arbitrary, refused to fall in with each other's plans, and so failed to completely expel the English from the Coromandel coast. The other settlements of the East India Company—the island port of Bombay, the old dowry of Catherine of Portugal, and the factory of Fort William at Calcutta in Bengal—were not molested.

To the intense disgust of Dupleix, the treaty of Aachen stipulated the mutual restoration of conquests, and the English settlements were all given back in 1748. In India, as in America, all was left unsettled, and the struggle for supremacy had to be deferred for a space.

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Eight years of uneasy peace followed the indecisive and vague treaty of Aachen (1748-1756). England, under the feeble rule of the two Pelhams, seemed to have sunk back into the same condition of prosperous lethargy which had been her lot in the uneventful days of Walpole. In her political history there is nothing of moment to relate; the Pelhams had almost silenced opposition by the simple expedient of finding places in the cabinet or the public service for any one who might have made himself dangerous to them. Even the eloquent and energetic William Pitt, the consistent denouncer of all ministers, had been quieted for a time by the gift of the lucrative post of Paymaster of the Forces. Room was found for so many and diverse persons in the Pelham cabinet, that it was known as the "Broad-Bottom Administration."

The Pelhams, though using the old Whig catchwords about liberty and reform, were, like Walpole, only anxious to keep things quiet and to preserve themselves in office. Hence there is little or nothing to record of their doings. We may mention, however, the creation of our celebrated 3 per cents. by Henry Pelham, who was somewhat of a financier, his sole accomplishment. The National Debt, then a sum of £78,000,000, was paying 4 per cent. at the time of the treaty of Aachen. The premier, seeing that the public credit was good, and money cheap, resolved to reduce the rate of interest. This he accomplished by borrowing money at 3 per cent. to pay off all those national creditors who would not accept the new scale. The conversion was accomplished with ease, and relieved the revenue of some £500,000 a year of expenses. The debt, thus reduced and simplified, received its new name of "Consols," all the old loans having been consolidated into one (1750).

A word may be also given to the reform of the Calendar in 1752. England up to this time had used the "Old Style," or Julian Calendar, invented by Julius Cæsar eighteen centuries before. A slight error in the calculation of the great Roman had made the year too short, and in the lapse of the ages this error had grown by accumulation into as much as eleven days. England, later than most nations, adopted the reformed or Gregorian Calendar—named Pg 514 after Pope Gregory XIII.—during the Pelham administration. Thus, the change being made on September 2, 1752, the day that followed became the 14th instead of the 3rd. This bewildered the multitude, and was made a serious charge against the minister by many ignorant folks, who complained that they had been defrauded of eleven days of their lives!

In such comparatively trifling events the middle years of the eighteenth century passed away. The stagnant times of the old Whig oligarchy were drawing towards their close, and the movements which were to stir England so deeply in the next generation were beginning to develop.

We have already spoken of the increasing commercial supremacy of England in the period. This growth in foreign trade was now beginning to be supplemented by an increased activity in manufacturing industry, which was to be the distinguishing mark of the second half of the century. But the first signs of it were already apparent before 1750. The earliest attempt for the improvement of the inland communications of the kingdom may be traced to 1720, when the Irwell canal was opened to Manchester. As important a landmark is the discovery of the process of smelting iron by means of coal in 1740. Up to this time iron had always been worked with charcoal, and the manufacture of it had been almost confined to the wooded districts of southern England, most especially to the Sussex Weald. But the new process opened up the Yorkshire iron mines, which were to completely supersede those of the South, for in the North iron and coal are found together in most convenient proximity. All this development, however, belongs to the times of George III. rather than those of George II.

Even more important in the history of the social life of England than the expansion of her commercial resources, was another change which began about the middle of the eighteenth century, in the sphere of spiritual things. The Whig supremacy in the State, which had begun in 1714, had the most deplorable results on the Church. Walpole and his disciples were men quite out of sympathy with any religious impulse; their lives and morals would not bear looking into, and they openly scoffed at religion. To them the Pg 515 Church was simply a field of patronage for friends and dependents, and a machine for supplementing the working of the State. Down to the time of Anne's death the Tory party had been supreme within the bounds of the establishment, and the Whigs therefore viewed the whole body of the clergy with suspicion. They stopped in 1717 the meetings of Convocation, which had existed from time immemorial, wishing to prevent the clerical body from finding a mouthpiece. They systematically officered the Church with Whig bishops, of whom nothing was asked but political orthodoxy. As was likely, men chosen on this principle were often most unfit pastors of the Church. A Walpole or a Pelham was not likely to select men whose characteristics were fervour or enthusiasm. The Whig bishops were generally of two classes—either they were prominent political clergy, court chaplains and the like, who laid themselves out to win preferment by their sermons, or they were "Greek-play bishops"—to use an expressive phrase—mere scholars, whose title to promotion was to have edited a classic author or ruled a public school. Both classes were, as a rule, very inefficient; many were scandalous non-residents, and seldom went near their dioceses, dwelling in London all the year round and haunting the court. Remote sees like Bangor or Carlisle hardly knew the face of their bishops. Some of these prelates were more notable for their political than their religious orthodoxy; of these "Latitudinarian" bishops perhaps the best known is Hoadley, whom the Whigs promoted to four sees one after another, in spite of the fact that his views on the Trinity were hardly consistent with his position as a member of the Church.

It was not to be expected that such prelates would be in touch with their subordinates the country clergy, who still for the most part remained Tory in their views, looked on the least measure for the political emancipation of Dissenters or Romanists with horror, and nourished a strong personal dislike for the two first Georges and their ministers. Hence came such a breach in the unity and organization of the Church as had never been seen before. The upper clergy were careless and unspiritual, the lower clergy grew lethargic and apathetic under the neglect of their superiors. There was a general tendency to praise common sense and morality, and to sneer at theological learning or evangelical fervour.

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This general deadness in the Church could not long continue without causing a reaction. The great feature in the second quarter of the eighteenth century was the appearance of the "Methodist" movement, of which John Wesley was the originator. Shocked by the want of energy and enthusiasm among the clergy, Wesley, a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, devoted himself to active evangelical work, and especially to public preaching. He is first heard of as preaching to the poor of neglected Oxford parishes, and to the prisoners in the jail (1729). A few years later he went out as a missionary to America, and laboured in the backwoods of Georgia. Returning in 1738, he resumed his work in England, passing from place to place, and addressing large congregations of all sorts and conditions of men. His fervent eloquence and enthusiasm came as a revelation to the neglected masses of the cities, or to congregations condemned to many years of sermons on dry morality. He spoke of sin and conversion with an earnestness which had not been seen since the days of early Puritan enthusiasm. Wesley and the numerous followers who sprang up to join him might have inspired the Church with a new spirit of fervour, if they had but been permitted to do so. But, unfortunately, the Latitudinarian bishops disliked his emotional harangues and his clear-cut dogma, and the parish clergy often treated him as an intruder when he appeared inside their cures. Hence, though a strong Churchman at first, he was gradually driven into schism, and became the founder of a new Nonconformist sect, instead of the restorer of the spirituality of the Church from within. Towards the end of his sixty years of labour (1729-91), he took the final step of ordaining preachers and allowing them to celebrate the sacraments, thus committing his followers to abandoning the national Church. His work, however, was not without its effect inside the Church of England; many who sympathized with him remained Churchmen, and from them came the Evangelical, or newer Low-Church party, within the establishment.

From Wesley and his contemporaries began a decided improvement in the moral life of England. After remaining at its lowest ebb in the eighty years that followed the Restoration, it began to mend about the middle of the century. The change is marked in all the Pg 517 most characteristic spheres of action, by an increased humanity to prisoners, paupers, and slaves, an improved tone in literature and the drama, and a growing demand for the observation of a higher standard of morals by public men. Political corruption and ostentatious ill living, which had been the rule in the beginning of the eighteenth century, had become the exception at its end.

But if England was more serious and more moral by the end of the century, no small share in that result must be attributed to the sobering effect of three long and desperate wars, which more than once seemed about to be the ruin of the realm. Between 1756 and 1815 there were to be thirty-six years of war to twenty-three of peace, and two whole generations were bred up in times of stress and trouble, which developed the sterner virtues, and taught men no longer to sneer at fervour, whether displayed in patriotism or in religion.

The "Seven Years' War" into which England was plunged in 1756, while still under the imbecile guidance of the elder Pelham, was the most important struggle in which she had engaged since the days of the Spanish Armada. It definitely settled all the points which had been left undetermined by the peace of Aachen, and gave her the empire of the seas and the lion's share of the commerce of the world. Her hold on these gains was to be shaken in later wars, but never lost.

The Seven Years' War, like the War of the Austrian Succession, had two sides—the Colonial and the European. In 1756, as in 1742, England, while contending for her own objects beyond seas, was also subsidizing a powerful continental ally, who had his own interests to serve, in order to distract the attention of France from the more distant struggle. The new war resembled the old in another respect. In each case it was the colonial quarrel which first came to the front; the European strife was a later development. The causes which provoked the Seven Years' War were to be found both in America and in India. In both of these quarters the representatives of England and of France came to blows before the mother countries had resolved on war. The quarrel was the result of natural causes which made it inevitable, and not the deliberate work of the timid Newcastle or the selfish Lewis XV.

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It was in India that the first hostilities broke out, not very long after the peace of Aachen had been signed. We have already mentioned how the French governor Dupleix had raised an army of Sepoys, and resolved to employ it for the furtherance of French interests in Southern India. He was enabled to do this by the fact that a war of succession had broken out in each of the two great native states which were neighbours to the European settlements on the Coromandel coast. In the Deccan two princes of the Nizam family, an uncle and a nephew, were disputing for the throne of Hyderabad. In the Carnatic a rebellious minister was trying to usurp his master's throne. Dupleix resolved to sell the aid of his army to one pretender for use against the other. The appearance of his disciplined battalions in the field settled the fortune of war at once. He gained for his ally Mozuffer Jung the whole of the Hyderabad dominions. Then he turned against the Carnatic, slew the old nawab in battle, and drove his son, Mohammed Ali, into Trichinopoly, his last stronghold. The rebel minister, Chunda Sahib, was then saluted as ruler of the land. The two new nawabs soon became the mere creatures of Dupleix, whose military strength completely overawed their motley armies. They lavished millions of rupees upon him, and Mozuffer Jung gave him the title of Supreme Vizier of all India south of the river Kistnah, and appointed him permanent chief of his army.

Dupleix was in truth master of Southern India, a fact viewed with dismay by the English settlers along the Coromandel coast. They had, in rivalry with him, espoused the cause of the two nawabs whom he had crushed. One of these princes was now dead, the other besieged in his last stronghold. The rulers of Madras despaired, but a single bold spirit persuaded them to venture a blow against the power of the Frenchman. Robert Clive, the scapegrace son of a Shropshire squire, had been sent out to Madras as a clerk in the East India Company's service to keep him out of mischief. But he changed his pen for the sword, and became a captain in the Company's army. Now he persuaded Governor Saunders to entrust him with a few hundred men, to make a diversion in favour of the besieged nawab, Mohammed Ali. To draw away the army which was beleaguering Trichinopoly, Clive resolved to Pg 519 strike at the capital of the Carnatic, the town of Arcot. Marching by night and with great speed, he seized the place and fortified himself in its citadel. He was at once attacked by the forces of the Chunda Sahib, aided by a division of the army of Dupleix. But he contrived to inspire his 500 men with such obstinate courage, that they repulsed all the assaults of 10,000 enemies, and finally compelled the nawab's army to withdraw foiled (1751).

After thus winning Arcot, Clive was entrusted by the Madras Council with all their disposable troops—200 Europeans and 700 English Sepoys. With these reinforcements he took the field against Dupleix and Chunda Sahib, routed a number of French detachments, and finally recovered the whole of the Carnatic for Mohammed Ali, the protégé of the English. Chunda Sahib surrendered to his enemy, who had him murdered. Dupleix played a losing game against his greater rival for two more years, and was finally recalled in disgrace by the French Government (1754). Thus the English carried out the lesson which the great Frenchman had taught them, that India might be conquered with Indian arms, and that its princes might be made the vassals of the mere traders who had paid them humble tribute a few years before. With the establishment of the English suzerainty over the nawab Mohammed Ali and his realm of the Carnatic begins the English empire in Hindostan.

Clive and Dupleix had posed as the mere auxiliaries of the nawabs, and their struggle was not supposed to commit the mother country to war. But a less disguised form of hostilities between England and France commenced somewhat later in America. Its cause was the want of any definite boundary between the settlements of the two nations. It was the ambition of the English colonists to push westward from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and gradually to colonize all the waste lands, sparsely inhabited by savage Indian tribes, which lay between them and the Mississippi. But the French had another and a no less ambitious scheme. Besides their dominions in Canada, they possessed another colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, round the town of New Orleans. They claimed that this territory of Louisiana stretched up to the head-waters of the great river, and it was their object Pg 520 to connect it with Canada by a string of forts placed along the Mississippi and its tributary the Ohio. If they could have carried out this gigantic and wide-stretching plan, they would have shut in the English colonies between the Alleghany mountains and the sea, and prevented them from extending into the interior of the continent. The weak point of the plan was that the French were far too few in numbers to execute any such project. Though they counted among them many hardy backwoodsmen and fur-traders, who had explored all the waterways of the West, they could not back these pioneers up with solid masses of population. There were not more than 180,000 Pg 521 French emigrants in America, while the English colonies boasted at this time nearly 2,000,000 sturdy settlers.

ENGLAND AND FRANCE IN AMERICA.
1706.

In spite of this disparity of numbers, the French governors were set on executing their venturous scheme. It was their active advance into the wilderness that lay between Canada and the English colonies, that brought about the first collisions with the English outposts. The three northern links of the chain that was to join Canada with Louisiana were Fort Ticonderoga, at the south end of Lake Champlain, Fort Niagara, near the Great Falls between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and Fort Duquesne, at the head-waters of the Ohio. The first and last of these were a very few miles from the English back-settlements, and their establishment in 1754-55 was looked upon as a direct challenge by the inhabitants of Pennsylvania and Virginia. In 1754 a party of Virginian militia, headed by Major George Washington, of whom we shall hear much later on, made a dash on Fort Duquesne. But they were beaten and forced to surrender after a fight at Great Meadows. This provoked the colonies, and at their request General Braddock repeated the attack in the next year with a force of 2200 men, part of whom were British regulars. But he was drawn into an ambuscade by a very inferior force of French and Indians, his force was disgracefully routed, and he himself was slain. The fighting at once began to spread, and both England and France sent out reinforcements to America. Yet the two nations were still nominally at peace, and the French, who were just about to engage in a great war in Germany, were not anxious to commence hostilities with England at this particular moment. Newcastle, however, precipitated the outbreak of the struggle by a characteristic half-measure. He sent out Admiral Boscawen with orders not to attack all French ships, but to intercept a particular squadron carrying troops to Canada. Boscawen met it, and took two vessels after a fight; this made war inevitable. It broke out in the spring of 1756, and opened with a series of disasters for England, a fact which causes no surprise when we remember that her forces were under the direction of the imbecile Newcastle.

Just at the same moment another struggle was commencing on the Continent. The Empress Maria Theresa had never forgiven the King of Prussia for robbing her of Silesia in the Pg 522 hour of her distress, fourteen years before. She had devoted much time and trouble to forming a great coalition for the purpose of punishing the plunderer, and had secretly enlisted in her alliance France, Russia, Sweden, Saxony, and most of the smaller German states. For the unscrupulous and rapacious Frederic was not viewed with love by his neighbours, and it was easy to combine them against him. His venomous pen had made enemies of two vindictive women, Elizabeth Empress of Russia, and Madame de Pompadour, the all-powerful mistress of Lewis XV., and though political expediency did not prescribe war with Prussia to either Russia or France, yet personal resentment brought it about.

The open war between England and France had broken out in the spring of 1756. In the autumn of the same year the continental struggle began. Getting secret intelligence of the plot that was maturing against him, Frederic resolved to strike before his numerous adversaries were ready, and invaded Saxony. He overran the whole electorate and annihilated the Saxon army in a fortnight. But Austria, Russia, Sweden, and France immediately fell upon him, and he had much ado to avoid being crushed by brute force of numbers; for Prussia was but a small state of 5,000,000 souls, while the confederacy ranged against her counted half Europe in its ranks.

Alone among a host of foes, Frederic was desperately in need of an ally. And only one ally was possible—England. For both England and Prussia were now at war with France, and it was obvious that they ought to aid each other against their common foe.

Moreover, the English Government was itself sadly in need of assistance, for the war had opened with a series of disasters in more than one quarter of the world. The most serious loss had been suffered in the Mediterranean: a French fleet and army under the Duc de Richelieu had slipped out of Toulon and fallen on Minorca, the Spanish island which had formed part of England's plunder at the peace of Utrecht. The English garrison was weak, for it had always been supposed that we were strong enough at sea to prevent the enemy from approaching this important possession, Pg 523 which was to us then what Malta is now. But when the Mediterranean fleet under Admiral Byng came up to relieve the troops beleaguered in the citadel of Port Mahon, a disgraceful sight was seen. The English admiral, finding that the French squadron was slightly superior to his own, refused to fight, and fled away to Gibraltar, though his second in command urged him hotly to risk everything in order to save the island. The deserted garrison held out a month longer, and then was forced to surrender (June, 1756).

Nor was this the only disaster with which the Seven Years' War opened. Montcalm, the French commander in Canada, made a dash against the frontier garrisons of the British colonists in America, and took Forts Oswego and William Henry, our outposts on the North-West.

Still more shocking news was on its way home from India. The Nawab of Bengal, a cruel and debauched tyrant named Suraj-ud-Dowlah, had picked a quarrel with the governor of Calcutta, the English factory near the mouth of the Ganges. Suddenly declaring war in June, 1756, the same month that Minorca was lost, he captured Calcutta with ease. In his hour of triumph, he bade his guards thrust all his captives into the "Black Hole," a small dungeon not much more than twenty feet square, which had been wont to serve as the prison of the factory. No less than 146 persons—merchants, officials, soldiers, and women—were driven into this confined space, and locked in for the night. They were tightly wedged together, had no air save from two narrow barred windows, and could not move. In the stifling heat of a Bengal June, nearly the whole of them perished of suffocation. Only twenty-three—one of whom was a woman—were found alive next morning. The horrors of the Black Hole were soon to be revenged, but long ere the news of the punishment which Clive wreaked on the nawab came home, the Newcastle ministry had been driven from office.

The popular outcry at the mismanagement of the war, and above all at the loss of Minorca, had been too great for the feeble Newcastle to withstand. It was in vain that he arrested Byng and promised to try him for cowardice. For Byng could not be made the scapegoat for disasters in America or India, and the universal indignation Pg 524 against Newcastle's administration of the war forced him to resign in November, 1756. Shortly after the admiral was tried by court-martial, condemned, and shot, for disobedience to orders and for criminal feebleness, though he was acquitted of any treasonable intent or personal cowardice. His death served, as Voltaire remarked at the time, "pour encourager les autres," and English admirals since then have never shirked an engagement with an enemy of only slightly superior force.

The king summoned the opposition Whigs to form a cabinet, and William Pitt and the Duke of Devonshire took office. Pitt, as we have already had occasion to remark, was the fighting man of the Whig party, and the advocate of a vigorous colonial and commercial policy. He was the one statesman of the day who commanded the confidence of the nation, because he was the only one whose reputation was entirely free from the stain of political corruption. He was an able, eloquent man, whose scathing denunciations of the errors and feebleness of the late ministry were convincing to all who heard them. It remained to be seen if his own administration would prove more successful. At first, however, it seemed likely that Pitt would have small opportunity of trying his hand at the helm. Though he was trusted by the nation, he was not trusted by the House of Commons. Newcastle set himself to overthrow his successor, by bidding his hirelings in the Lower House to vote consistently against the new ministers. Moreover, King George disliked Pitt for his vehemence and his pompous language.

Hence came a vexatious crisis in April, 1757, when Pitt found himself in a minority in the House of Commons, and was dismissed from office by the king. But the public outcry against the proposed resumption of office by Newcastle was so loud, that a curious and not very satisfactory compromise was arranged. The duke offered to take Pitt as his colleague, and to give him a free hand in the management of the war and all foreign policy, if he himself were permitted to retain the direction of domestic affairs. Pitt believed himself to be necessary to his country; he thought that he could bring the war to a successful conclusion, and that no one else could do so. Hence, though he was thoroughly acquainted with the mean and intriguing spirit of the duke, he Pg 525 took his offer. Newcastle wanted no more than the power of managing Parliament and dispensing patronage—his ideas of government went no further. In return he placed his subservient parliamentary majority at Pitt's disposal. The result was, as a shrewd contemporary observer remarked, that "Mr. Pitt does everything, and the Duke of Newcastle gives everything."

The Pitt-Newcastle ministry lasted nearly six years, and its excellent results almost justified the ignominious compact on which it was founded. Soon after Pitt got the control of affairs, the fortune of war began to mend. His first attempts at launching expeditions against France were, it is true, unsuccessful. The Duke of Cumberland was sent to Hanover to defend the electorate against the French. But he suffered the same misfortune as at Fontenoy and Lawfeldt, once more showing himself a brave soldier, but a bad strategist. At Hastenbeck he was defeated, and, retiring northward, was pressed back against the North Sea near Stade, and forced to sign the Convention of Closter-Seven, by which the Hanoverian army laid down its arms (June, 1757).

This disaster exposed the western frontier of Prussia to the French, and might have proved the ruin of King Frederic. But that marvellous general saved himself by the rapid blows which he dealt to West and East. Flying into central Germany, he routed the French at Rossbach (November 5); and then, returning to Silesia before the Austrians had missed him, he defeated the troops of the Empress at Leuthen (December 5). Thus he won himself six months' respite, and during that time Pitt raised another army for service in Germany, which was placed under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, a distant cousin of the royal family, but a general of very different order from the unlucky George of Cumberland. This force effectually protected the western borders of Prussia and the electorate of Hanover from the French during the remainder of the war.

With the opening of the year 1758 began a succession of victories all over the world, which effectually justified the claims of Pitt to be the restorer of the greatness of Britain. He had everywhere put new vigour into the Pg 526 struggle, by placing young generals, chosen by himself, at the head of his expeditions, and by raising loans for war expenses with a profusion which appalled more timid financiers. Part of this wealth was lavished on the King of Prussia, whose aid was invaluable in distracting the forces of France. "I am conquering Canada on the plains of Germany," observed Pitt to those who reproached him for the vast subsidies which he sent to Frederic. And the epigram was true, for the reinforcements which were absolutely necessary if France was to retain her American possessions, were being sent across the Rhine to join in the great European struggle. Pitt, in fact, was working out to a glorious end the policy which Carteret had sketched nearly twenty years before.

While Ferdinand of Brunswick with his Anglo-Hanoverian army beat the French at Crefeldt, and kept them back on the Rhine (June, 1758), still more important things were being effected in America. A general advance was made along the whole front of the French possessions in America. In the north Admiral Boscawen and the young General Wolfe captured Louisbourg, the strongly fortified capital of the island of Cape Breton. In the south Fort Duquesne was occupied by a force consisting mainly of colonial militia, and thus the line of French communications between Canada and Louisiana was effectually cut. The jubilant colonists changed the name of the place to Pittsburg in honour of the great minister. Only in the centre of the advance was a reverse sustained; there the French commander, the gallant Montcalm, had collected the bulk of his forces behind the ramparts of Ticonderoga, to bar the line of advance up the Hudson. General Abercrombie was repulsed with fearful loss when he attempted to take the place by assault, though his men did all that could be done, and Pitt's new Highland regiments absolutely filled the ditch with their bodies ere they could be forced to retire. But the fall of Canada was only delayed a few months by this check to the British arms.

The next year, 1759, was even more fertile in successes. The naval strength of France received its final blow in two decisive battles. The French Mediterranean fleet ran out of Toulon and tried to escape into the Atlantic, but Admiral Boscawen met them off Lagos in Pg 527 Portugal, and took or destroyed most of the vessels. Some months later Admiral Hawke attacked the French Atlantic fleet, which had come out of Brest and was lying in Quiberon Bay. Though a fierce storm was raging, he ran into the bay and forced the enemy to engage. In the heat of the fight many of their ships were driven ashore and lost, while Hawke carried off two prizes, and only a few out of the hostile fleet escaped into the mouth of the river Vilaine. After the battles of Lagos and Quiberon Bay, the enemy never attempted to appear at sea in any force during the remaining four years of the war. Indeed, the French marine was almost entirely destroyed, for sixty-four line-of-battle ships had been sunk or taken in 1758-1759.

In the same year a great victory had been gained in Germany. When the French reinforced their army of the Rhine and again pushed forward toward Hanover, Prince Ferdinand gave them battle at Minden, and inflicted on them a defeat which sent them back in haste towards their own borders. The chief honour of the fight fell to seven regiments of English infantry, which received and repelled the fierce charges of the whole of the cavalry of the French army; but a slur was cast on the victory by the misconduct of Lord George Sackville, the general of the English horse, who refused—out of temper or cowardice—to charge the broken enemy and complete their rout. Nevertheless the fight did its work, and proved the salvation of our ally, Frederic II., who was just at this moment in the depths of despair. He had suffered a fearful defeat at the hands of the Russians at Künersdorf, on the Oder, and was only saved from complete destruction by being able to draw aid from the victorious army of Prince Ferdinand.

QUEBEC 1759.

But events of far greater import had happened in America during this summer. Pitt had sketched out a concentric attack on Canada from three sides. General Amherst had taken Ticonderoga, the fort that had baffled Abercrombie in the previous year, while another expedition captured Fort Niagara and the other western strongholds of the French. But the main blow was struck in the North. An English fleet appeared in the St. Lawrence and put ashore General Wolfe, Pitt's favourite officer, with an army of 8000 men. Montcalm hurried to the spot with all the French regulars in the province, and a horde of Canadian militia, and Pg 528 hastened to the defence of Quebec, the capital of the land. The place was very strongly placed, being protected on two sides by the rivers St. Lawrence and St. Charles, and watched by Montcalm's entrenched camp at Beauport. After failing to break the French lines, Wolfe ventured on a hazardous flank attack. The cliffs overhanging the St. Lawrence were believed to be inaccessible, as there was only a single precipitous goat-track which mounted them, and this was protected by a guard. But Wolfe resolved to risk the danger of assaulting them. His Pg 529 men dropped down the river in boats under cover of the night, reached the foot of the crags, and crept up one after another on hands and knees, pulling themselves up by the aid of trees and shrubs. The French picket at the top was surprised and fled. Thus Wolfe had 4000 men in line on the ground above the cliffs, "the Heights of Abraham," before the day dawned. When they became visible to Montcalm, he was forced to come out of his impregnable lines and fight in the open, under pain of losing Quebec. There followed a short sharp conflict, in which the English had from the first the advantage. The Canadian militia fled in panic, the French regulars were cut to pieces, and Montcalm himself was mortally wounded. But Wolfe had also been struck down in the moment of victory; he lived just long enough to hear that the battle was won, and died on the field (September 13, 1759). He was only thirty-three, and, had he survived, would have had a long career of glory before him. But to have conquered America for England was in itself a sufficient title to immortality. For the battle of Quebec was the decisive day in the history of the continent.

The wrecks of the French army evacuated the capital, and fell back on Montreal. Thither they were followed in the next spring both by the forces under Amherst, which had ascended the Hudson, and by Wolfe's army from Quebec. Surrounded by vastly superior numbers, de Vaudreuil, the viceroy of Canada, was forced to lay down his arms, and surrender the remnant of the French possessions in the north. Thus ended in ignominious failure the great scheme which Montcalm had formed for securing inland America for his king, and penning the English colonists between the ocean and the Alleghanies. The British flag now waved without a rival from the North Pole to the boundary of Spanish America.

Meanwhile events of importance had been happening in the far East. While England was laying her hand on the Western Continent, she was also winning her first territorial dominions in India. We have already told the tale of the Black Hole and the fall of Calcutta. Its sequel has yet to be related. Just when the news of Suraj-ud-Dowlah's wicked doings reached Madras, Clive chanced to return from England, where he had been for two years on leave. The task of chastising the nawab was at once made over to him. He Pg 530 was entrusted with one regiment of British troops, the 39th, which bears on its colours the honourable legend Primus in Indis, and with 2000 Madras sepoys. With this small force he did not hesitate to invade the vast but unwarlike province of Bengal. He forced his way up the Hoogly and recovered Calcutta with ease. But he hesitated some time before advancing into the interior, to strike at the nawab's capital of Moorshedabad.

Soon, however, he learnt that Suraj-ud-Dowlah was hated by his subjects, and that his own ministers were ready to betray him. Armed with this knowledge, Clive advanced from Calcutta as far as the village of Plassey, where he found himself in face of the nawab's hordes, 50,000 irregular horse and foot of the worst quality. The English were attacked but feebly and half-heartedly, for the enemy had no confidence in their prince. Moreover, Mir Jaffar, who commanded one wing of his army, had sold himself to Clive for the promise of his master's throne, and held aloof all day, like Northumberland at Bosworth Field. At the hour of noon Clive bade his men charge, and the contemptible soldiery of Suraj-ud-Dowlah fled before the assault, though they outnumbered the English by eighteen to one. Only the nawab's French artillerymen stood firm, and were bayoneted at their guns. This battle, which gave England the rich realm of Bengal, was won with a loss of only 72 men to the victors. Clive soon seized Moorshedabad and installed Mir Jaffar as nawab in his master's room. The deposed tyrant was caught by his successor and promptly strangled. Mir Jaffar ruled for the future as the dependent of England, paid the East India Company a tribute, and acted as their vassal. Thus Bengal, though not annexed, was for all practical purposes made a part of the British empire.

Clive sullied his laurels by two acts which show the unscrupulous character that was allied with his great talents. Before Plassey, a Bengali named Omichund discovered the intrigue with Mir Jaffar, and threatened to reveal it to the nawab. Clive bought him off by a forged promise of money signed with the name of Admiral Watson. When the danger was over, he avowed his forgery to the traitor, who thereupon went mad with rage and disappointed greed. After Plassey Clive committed his second fault, by accepting for his private use huge sums of gold which Mir Jaffar offered him. When Pg 531 taunted with this, he only replied that "he was astonished at his own moderation, considering the enormously larger amount that he might have asked and received" (1757). After settling Bengal and defeating an attempt to reconquer it made by Shah Alum, the heir of the Great Moguls, Clive returned to England in 1759, to be saluted as the conqueror of the East.

While Clive was overrunning Bengal, the English armies in the Carnatic were making an end of the small remnants of the French power in India. The operations were protracted, till in January, 1760, Sir Eyre Coote routed the last French army at Wandewash, and, ere another year was out, Pondicherry and all the other strongholds of the enemy were in his hands.

While England was thus triumphant alike in Europe, India, and America, and Pitt was at the height of his glory, the old king, George II., died suddenly in his seventy-eighth year (October 25, 1760). His death made an instant change in the national politics both at home and abroad, for his successor was not one of those sovereigns who were contented to obey their ministers and meekly bear the yoke of the great Whig oligarchy.

Pg 532

In the last two centuries of English history the accession of a new king has not often caused a complete revolution in politics. The change of sovereigns often gives us an unfortunate and misleading cross-division, cutting periods in two that are really one, or making us dream that there is a unity in periods which are really divided in their interest and meaning.

This was not the case, however, when George III. succeeded his grandfather George II. For the last time in English history, the change of kings implied a real break in the continuity of the politics of the time. The new monarch was only twenty-two years of age, and was totally unversed in affairs of state. George II. had lived in bitter enmity with his feeble and factious son, Frederic Prince of Wales, the nonentity of whom the contemporary satirist wrote—

After the prince's death, the old king had transferred his dislike to his son's widow and his grandson. George III. had therefore been brought up almost in seclusion. The most notable point in his education was that his mother, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, had taught him to despise his grandfather and his grandfather's position in the State. He had been told from his earliest years that the position of a sovereign who allowed himself to be led and governed by his ministers was degrading. "When you come to the throne," we are told that his mother said, "George, be king." The idea had taken root, and the young prince had made up his mind that he should rule his ministers, not his Pg 533 ministers him. That the cabinet should be responsible to the king as well as to Parliament, was the keystone of his theory. He would have the choice of his ministers lie in his own hands, not in those of the great Whig houses. George did not wish to rule unconstitutionally, to fly in the face of Parliament, or to govern without it, as the Stuarts had tried to do. He had, indeed, such a belief in his own good intentions, that he thought that they must coincide with the nation's will, and there were circumstances which for some time bore him out in his view.

George's main bent was to assert his individuality, and take the chief share in the governance of the country. The other features of his character are easy to describe. His tastes were frugal, and his private life strictly virtuous, a thing which had not been known in an English king for more than a century. He was sincerely pious, though, as some critics observed, he was better at scenting out other persons' sins than his own. He had an enormous capacity for hard work, though no very great brain-power to guide him through it. He had a great share of self-restraint and reticence, so that it was not easy to guess what plans he had in hand when he did not wish them to be known. Above all, he was terribly obstinate, with the obstinacy of a good-hearted man, who feels he is in the right, and believes that he will be doing wrong if he gives up his own opinion. Lastly, though he had no power of appreciating greatness of any kind (he called Shakespeare "sad stuff, only one must not say so," and thought Pitt a bombastic old actor), yet he had great penetration in measuring littleness in others. This made him exceedingly fitted to cope with the average Whig statesmen of his day.

When George came to the throne he was greeted with the usual popularity which attends a new and untried sovereign. He showed himself affable and good-tempered, a model of decorum and respectability, and won all hearts by his English habits and prejudices. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been Germans in mind and language. George III. took the first opportunity of declaring that he was English born and bred, and that "he gloried in the name of Briton." By so doing he won all men's hearts. Thus in the beginning of his struggle with the Whigs he had the inestimable advantage of personal popularity with the nation.

Pg 534

The king had, as we have already said, passed his youth in seclusion, with few friends and no organized band of retainers. He had to build up his own party, if he wished to carry out his schemes. This he at once began to do. Descending into the arena of politics, he set to work to make himself a following, much as Newcastle or Walpole had done in a previous generation. But George, unlike those statesmen, had not to rely on bribery or borough-mongering alone. He could count on all the prestige and attraction which surrounds the crown, to draw men into his net. Some of the "King's Friends" (as his followers grew to be called) were politicians bought by pensions or titles, but many were honest supporters, who found their pleasure in displaying their loyalty to the crown.

In especial George won to himself from the first the very considerable remnants of the old Tory party. Jacobitism had now become such a thing of the past, that the vast majority of the Tories were ready to accept with enthusiasm a king whose views exactly coincided with their own old doctrines. For George was a stout defender of the Church of England, in which his godless old grandfather had never professed any interest. He held the ancient Tory doctrine that the royal prerogative should be actively exercised in the affairs of the nation. Most important of all, he hated the Whig oligarchy, a fact which could not fail to recommend him to their long-oppressed rivals. Hence it came that the most prominent element among the "King's Friends" was drawn from the Tory party. One condition was demanded of all who joined that body—implicit obedience to George's will, the will of a man of limited abilities and narrow mind. This fact sufficiently accounts for the result that the "King's Friends" never included any men of marked talent; to obey George in all things would have been too trying for any one of real genius or breadth of spirit.

The king's first and most injudicious way of attempting to interfere in politics was worked out through the medium of Lord Bute. That nobleman was a Scottish peer of respectable character, moderate abilities, and a rather pedantic disposition. He had aided the Princess of Wales in giving George such instruction in statecraft as he had Pg 535 received. Bute was almost absolutely unacquainted with Parliament or practical politics. Yet a few months after his accession, the king insisted that the Pitt-Newcastle cabinet should take his old tutor into partnership. Bute was made one of the Secretaries of State, and at once began to show a great independence of the nominal prime minister. He rebuked Newcastle for keeping the details of his political jobbing from the king, and for filling posts without consulting royalty. At the same time he spoke strongly against the continuance of the war with France, and most particularly against the lavish subsidies with which the great war-minister was maintaining our much-tried ally, the King of Prussia. The fact was that George had observed that the Whig ministry depended for its strength on the combination of Newcastle's corrupt influence over Parliament with Pitt's hold on the nation, secured by successful war. To end it he wished to deprive the duke of his patronage, and to close the war, so as to make Pitt no longer indispensable.

In this matter the king's private designs clashed most unhappily with the interests of England, for Pitt's vigorous policy was still bearing the best of fruits. Ere King George had been a year upon the throne, Pitt could announce to him that Pondicherry, the last French fortress in India; Belleisle, a large island off the coast of Brittany; and Dominica, a rich West-Indian island, had fallen into his hands. After these last disasters the ministers of Lewis XV. began to make overtures for peace, which Bute wished to accept; but Pitt withstood him, partly because he thought that England had yet more to gain, partly because he had secret knowledge that France was trying to create a diversion by stirring up Spain against us. Charles III., the king of that country, was an old enemy of England, and had offered to renew with his cousin, Lewis XV., the "Family Compact" of 1733—the old pact of the Bourbon princes for the checking of English maritime supremacy. Having news of this transaction, Pitt advised instant war with Spain. But Bute opposed him, and when the king openly gave his support to his old tutor, Pitt was forced to resign the office which he had held for five years with such credit and distinction (October 5, 1761).

The king received the great minister's resignation with joy, and Pg 536 next set himself to get rid of Pitt's unworthy colleague, Newcastle. That old jobber clung to his place till May, 1762: but, finding that the king was determined to strip him of his crown patronage, and thwart him in his management of the House of Commons, he was finally forced to follow Pitt into retirement. Thus Bute became the chief minister of the realm.

The king's favourite was to hold power for less than two years, but into that short space many important events were compressed. The war with Spain, which Pitt had declared to be imminent, broke out in 1762, and the French hoped for a moment that they might be saved by their new ally. But Spain's power proved to have declined so low, that her interference made no difference to the fate of the war. The able generals and admirals whom Pitt had discovered and promoted, made short work of the Spanish fleets and armies. Ere he had been a year at war with England, Charles III. saw two of his greatest colonies fall into the hands of his enemy. Havanna, the richest city of the West Indies, and Manilla, the capital of the Philippine Islands in the far East, were both in English hands by the end of 1762. In the same space of time Admiral Rodney captured Martinique, St. Lucia, and all the rest of the French West Indies. Meanwhile Ferdinand of Brunswick, with the Anglo-Hanoverian army in Germany, had maintained his old superiority over the French army of the Rhine.

Stripped of her colonies, with her fleet entirely destroyed, her armies on the continent beaten back, and her exchequer completely drained dry, France was now compelled to sue for any terms that Bute and King George would grant her. Her ally Spain, equally disheartened by the turn which the war had taken, followed her example.

Nothing could please the English king better than the conclusion of peace. He gave Bute a free hand, and readily consented to the conclusion of the treaty of Paris (February, 1763). By this agreement France ceded to England the vast province of Canada, and all her American claims east of the Mississippi, retaining only some fishing rights on the coast of Newfoundland, which have proved very troublesome in our own day. At the same time, the West Indian Pg 537 Islands of St. Vincent, Tobago, Grenada, and Dominica were surrendered, as well as the African settlement of Senegal. France also undertook to keep no garrisons in her factories in Hindostan, when they should be restored to her. She gave back Minorca, which she had held since Byng's disaster, and withdrew her armies from Germany. But she received back much that she had lost, and had no power of recovering—Belleisle in Europe, Martinique, St. Lucia, and Guadaloupe in the West Indies, Goree in Africa, and all her Indian establishments. In a similar way Spain ceded to us the swampy and uninhabited peninsula of Florida, which rounded off the line of our North American colonies; but she received back the two wealthy settlements of Havanna and Manilla, which she could never have regained by force of arms.

The peace of Paris was not received with enthusiasm in England. It was said, and truly, that Pitt would have asked and obtained much better terms, and that it was weak and futile to restore to France and Spain their lost colonies. Yet, looking at our enormous gains, it seems absurd to complain. The treaty made England supreme in America and in Hindostan, and ratified her permanent ascendency at sea. When so much was secured, it appeared greedy to ask for yet more, for never by any previous treaty had England won so much or brought a war so triumphantly to a close.

But one blot on Bute's reputation can not be passed over. He deserted, most shamelessly, our useful if unscrupulous ally, King Frederic of Prussia. Having gained what England required, he left Frederic to shift for himself, withdrawing our armies from Germany, and stopping the liberal subsidies which had maintained the king's famishing exchequer. If fortune had not favoured him, Frederic might have been ruined by the loss of his only ally. He was saved, however, by the unexpected withdrawal of Russia from the hostile ranks. He proved able to hold his own against Austria, his one remaining foe, and brought the Seven Years' War to an end by the treaty of Hubertsburg ere the year 1763 had expired. But he never forgave England for the mean trick which Bute had played him, and would never again make an alliance with her.

When the war was over, Bute found his position as prime Pg 538 minister quite unbearable. He was clamoured at by Pitt's numerous admirers for making peace on too easy terms. At the same time the Whig borough-mongers, who followed Newcastle, took their revenge on him in Parliament by rejecting all his bills. He was decried as an upstart Scot, a mere court favourite, "the Gaveston of the eighteenth century," and the enemy of the greatness of England. Though he lavished the public money and the crown patronage on all sides, even more shamelessly than Newcastle had done, he could not hold his own. Bute was a sensitive man, and apparently could not bear up against the odium which his position as a court-minister, disliked both by the nation and the Houses of Parliament, brought upon him. In April, 1763, he laid down the seals of office, much to the regret of his royal master.

Thus King George had been defeated in his first contest with the Whigs. He was compelled to draw back for a moment and to rearrange his plans. His next scheme was to try the effect of playing off the various clans and factions of the Whigs one against another. For the fall of the great Pitt-Newcastle cabinet had split the Whig party into a complicated series of family groups and alliances—divided by no difference in principle, but only by matters of personal interest. The king thought that he could make and unmake ministries by the unscrupulous use of the votes of his "friends" in Parliament, and so hold the balance between the various sections of his enemies, till he could reduce them all to powerlessness.

To succeed the Earl of Bute, George made choice of the Whig leader whom he thought least objectionable, a narrow-minded statesman named George Grenville, who had hitherto shown himself fairly amenable to the royal influence. But the king had made a mistake; Grenville was as obstinate as himself, and when he found his master interfering in his patronage and intriguing with his followers, he allied himself with one of the great Whig clans, that headed by the Duke of Bedford—a faction which was jocosely called the "Bloomsbury Gang," because it centred at the duke's residence, Bedford House, Bloomsbury.

The Grenville-Bedford ministry only lasted two years (1763-1765), Pg 539 and was overthrown by another Whig alliance, whose principal leaders were the Duke of Grafton and the Marquis of Rockingham. But short though its tenure of office was, it left its mark on history. In England itself the act of this cabinet which made most noise was the prosecution of Wilkes. John Wilkes was a member of Parliament, a party journalist of gross scurrility and a man of scandalous private life, but he had the good fortune to be made twice in his life a martyr to oppressive government. He had grossly libelled Lord Bute in his newspaper, the North Briton, but his chief offence in the eyes of Grenville was that he had, in No. 45 of that publication, made abusive comments on the royal speech at the end of the session of 1763. For this he was illegally seized and imprisoned, under a "general warrant," a document issued by Grenville, not against him by name, but against "the authors, printers, and publishers of No. 45 of the North Briton." He was acquitted when put on his trial, under the plea that he had been illegally arrested. "A general warrant is no warrant, because it names no one," was the decision of Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice; and so this dangerous and tyrannical form of arrest was declared illegal. Wilkes posed as a victim of arbitrary government, and obtained great popularity in spite of his infamous character. But Grenville then prosecuted him for publishing a blasphemous and obscene poem. Feeling sure that he would be condemned, Wilkes absconded to France, and lived there four years; he was accounted by many a victim of malicious political persecution, and never lost his favour with the mob of London.

But while raising this storm in a teacup about the worthless Wilkes, George Grenville was committing another and a very different mistake in a matter of the highest importance. It is to him that we must attribute the first beginnings of the quarrel between England and her North-American colonies.

The Seven Years' War had left behind it a heavy burden of debt and taxation, and George Grenville, while searching around for new sources of revenue, was struck with the bright idea that he might tax the colonies. Accordingly, he brought forward in 1764, and passed in 1765, a bill which asserted the right of Parliament to lay imposts on our possessions over-seas, and proceeded to prescribe that Pg 540 certain stamp duties on legal documents were in future to be paid by our American colonies. The proceeds were to go to maintain the British troops quartered among them.

The Stamp Act was bitterly resented by the inhabitants of America. It was the first circumstance that really taught the thirteen colonies, which lay scattered along the coast from Massachusetts to Georgia, to combine in a common movement. Hitherto they had been without any formal bond of union between themselves. Legally, New York had no more to do with Virginia than in our own day Jamaica has with Tasmania. Each was administered as a separate unity depending immediately on the English crown. Their origins and the character of their population were very different. The Puritan farmers and seamen of Massachusetts, the slave-owning planters of Virginia, the Anglo-Dutch of New York, and the Quakers of Pennsylvania had few sympathies in common. Hitherto they had been jealous of each other; colony quarrelled fiercely with colony, and the chief tie that had kept them together was the common dread which all felt, of the aggression of the enterprising French governors at Quebec. It was this fear of the French which had enabled William Pitt to induce them to join loyally in his great scheme for the conquest of Canada.

Now that the restraining influence of their dread of France was removed, the colonies were no longer compelled to lean so closely on England. They were rapidly growing in population, wealth, and national spirit. It only required some common provocation to make them forget their petty local jealousies and turn fiercely to defend what they believed to be their rights. This provocation the pedantic George Grenville now proceeded to supply.

Grenville had much to say on his side. It was quite fair that the colonies should pay something towards the expenses of the Seven Years' War, which had largely been incurred for their benefit. It was rational that they should be asked to maintain the troops still quartered in America for their protection. And the Stamp Act imposed on them a very small tax, only some few thousands a year. Moreover, Grenville had studied the old precedents, and could show clear instances of imperial taxation levied in the past from various Pg 541 possessions over-sea. But, above the letter of the law, statesmen are responsible to the nation for the wisdom as well as for the legality of their actions. It is no excuse for the unwise minister to plead that he has the statute-book on his side, if it can be proved that he has common sense against him. It is for this reason that Grenville and his two successors, Grafton and North, are held to have incurred a graver load of responsibility than any other British statesman has ever borne.

The main line of protest which the colonists adopted was grounded on a favourite maxim of William Pitt, that "there should be no taxation without representation"; that is, that any persons taxed ought to be represented in Parliament, and allowed a share in voting their own contributions. It was, of course, impossible in those days to ask that American representatives should appear in the House of Commons, an idea which the remoteness of their country and the slowness of communication with it rendered absurd. What the colonists therefore meant was that, being unrepresented, they ought not to be taxed. They were growing so strong that they would no longer endure to be treated as mere dependencies, and governed solely for the benefit of England.

Serious trouble would have ensued if George Grenville had been able to persist in his schemes. But he was overthrown in 1765 by the machinations of George III., who bade the eighty or ninety "King's Friends" in the Commons to vote against him, and combine with the Opposition Whigs to turn him out of office. Grenville was evicted and dismissed. He was replaced by a new combination of Whig clans. The new cabinet was formed by the junction of the Marquis of Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton, to whom the old Duke of Newcastle was for the moment allied. Lord Rockingham was a more moderate man than Grenville, though a less able one. He disliked trouble, and, to silence American complaints, took the very wise step of repealing the Stamp Act. But the Rockingham administration lasted only a year, for in 1766 the "King's Friends" once more received orders from their master to overthrow the cabinet of the day. Rockingham was left in a minority, and forced to lay down his seals, and a second Whig faction had felt the weight of King George's hand.

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The next ministry marked a new shifting of the political kaleidoscope. Pitt, who had been out of place since 1761, was now invited by the king to take office. He consented, believing (as he always did) that he was the one man able to administer the British empire. To fill up his cabinet he chose some of the younger Whig leaders, who were ready to serve under him from their admiration for his personality. The chief of them were the Duke of Grafton and Lord Shelburne. But the Pitt-Grafton ministry lasted for a few months only. Pitt was growing old, and his powers were weakening. He felt the hard work of the House of Commons too much for him, and on taking office retired to the House of Lords as Earl of Chatham (July, 1766). But even there the strain over-taxed his strength. Less than a twelvemonth after he had taken office he was stricken down by illness, which took the form of brain-trouble. He grew incompetent to transact any business, and the cabinet which he had formed passed entirely under the control of his colleague, the Duke of Grafton.

The ministry of the Duke of Grafton proved the most disastrous that England has ever known, with the single exception of that of Grafton's immediate successor, Lord North. It was this Whig administration that finally renewed the struggle with America, which had been suspended since the repeal of the Stamp Act. With the duke's assent, Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, brought in a bill for raising in America duties on tea, glass, paper, and painter's colours. The whole was to bring in about £40,000 a year. Like the Stamp Act, this measure distinctly affirmed the right of England to tax her colonies without their consent. The Americans remembered that their previous resistance had been crowned with success, and commenced an agitation against the new act. A brisk fire of petitions was kept up by the houses of representatives of the various colonies, who besought the king—both publicly and privately—the House of Commons, and the ministers to remove the tax, restating their old theory of "No taxation without representation." Moreover, the colonies began formally to correspond with each other, and to find that the same spirit of discontent prevailed in all, a fact very ominous for the home government.

At the head of the thirteen colonies was Massachusetts, whose Pg 543 capital Boston was the largest town in America, and a very thriving port. Its seafaring population had the greatest objection to the new customs duties. Mobs were continually filling the streets to demonstrate against England, and as early as 1768 the rioting grew serious. In 1770 Boston saw the first bloodshed in the American quarrel. A party of soldiers, stoned by a mob till they could no longer keep their temper, fired and shot four or five rioters. This "massacre," as the colonists called it, brought the bitter feeling against England to a head.

The Grafton cabinet at home could not at all understand the feelings of the Americans. They supposed that it was the mere amount of the tax that was causing discontent, and contented themselves with pointing out that it was insignificant, not seeing that it was the principle of taxation, not the small sum actually levied, that was exasperating the colonists.

But the duke and his followers were not to see the end of the matter. In 1770 their day of reckoning with their master, the king, had arrived. George III. had been perpetually increasing his band of followers in the Commons, and the new Tory party was grown large enough, not only to hold the balance between two Whig cliques, but to make a bid for power on its own account.

The Grafton ministry fell before a double assault. Pitt, whose health had now recovered so far that he was able to appear in his seat in the House of Lords, was thundering at them for their misconduct of American affairs. But another difficulty was far more actively operative in their overthrow. The irrepressible John Wilkes had returned from France, had stood for the county of Middlesex, and had been elected. The cabinet declared him ineligible, on account of his old outlawry, and made the House of Commons expel him. Nothing daunted, Wilkes appeared as a candidate again, and was re-elected. Then Grafton and his majority enacted that the defeated opponent of Wilkes, who had received only three hundred votes, was the legitimate member for Middlesex. This iniquitous step roused public feeling; it was said that liberty was at an end if the ministry could appoint members of Parliament in defiance of the votes of the electors. Even Charles I. in his worst days had not falsified the results of elections, as the Whigs of Grafton's party were doing.

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Stormed at by Pitt, scurrilously libelled by the able but malignant political writer who signed himself Junius, hooted down by the mob of London, and abandoned by the "King's Friends" in his moment of distress, Grafton resigned. It was generally thought that another Whig ministry would appear on the scene, probably an alliance between Pitt and Lord Rockingham. This, however, was not to be so. The king had been counting up his forces. Having upset in succession four different Whig ministries, he now thought himself strong enough to renew the experiment which he had tried in Bute's day.

Accordingly, the nation was surprised by the news that George had made Lord North prime minister. North was a parliamentary jobber of the same type as Newcastle. He was a good-natured, indolent man, of limited intelligence, but shrewd and business-like. He made his bargain with the king, and undertook to carry out his policy. He was the tool, George the hand that guided it.