Part 2 — Chapter III. (These four articles abrogated by the four articles following them, 118-122.) Article 118. The Federal Constitution may at any time be amended. (continued 18)

B. Ten Brink, History of English Literature, book 4, chapter 4 (volume 2, part 1).

"English was not taught in the schools, but French only, until after the accession of Richard II., or possibly the latter years of Edward III., and Latin was always studied through the French. Up to this period, then, as there were no standards of literary authority, and probably no written collections of established forms, or other grammatical essays, the language had no fixedness or uniformity, and hardly deserved to be called a written speech. … From this Babylonish confusion of speech, the influence and example of Chaucer did more to rescue his native tongue than any other single cause; and if we compare his dialect with that of any writer of an earlier date, we shall find that in compass, flexibility, expressiveness, grace, and all the higher qualities of poetical diction, he gave it at once the utmost perfection which the materials at his hand would permit of. The English writers of the fourteenth century had an advantage which was altogether peculiar to their age and country. At all previous periods, the two languages had co-existed, in a great degree independently of each other, with little tendency to intermix; but in the earlier part of that century, they began to coalesce, and this process was going on with a rapidity that threatened a predominance of the French, if not a total extinction of the Saxon element. … When the national spirit was aroused, and impelled to the creation of a national literature, the poet or prose writer, in selecting his diction, had almost two whole vocabularies before him. That the syntax should be English, national feeling demanded; but French was so familiar and habitual to all who were able to read, that probably the scholarship of the day would scarcely have been able to determine, with respect to a large proportion of the words in common use, from which of the two great wells of speech they had proceeded. Happily, a great arbiter arose at the critical moment of severance of the two peoples and dialects, to preside over the division of the common property, and to determine what share of the contributions of France should be permanently annexed to the linguistic inheritance of Englishmen. Chaucer did not introduce into the English language words which it had rejected as aliens before, but out of those which had been already received, he invested the better portion with the rights of citizenship, and stamped them with the mint-mark of English coinage. In this way, he formed a vocabulary, which, with few exceptions, the taste and opinion of succeeding generations has approved; and a literary diction was thus established, which, in all the qualities required for the poetic art, had at that time no superior in the languages of modern Europe. The soundness of Chaucer's judgment, the nicety of his philological appreciation, and the delicacy of his sense of adaptation to the actual wants of the English people, are sufficiently proved by the fact that, of the Romance words found in his writings, not much above one hundred have been suffered to become obsolete, while a much larger number of Anglo-Saxon words employed by him have passed altogether out of use. … In the three centuries which elapsed between the Conquest and the noon-tide of Chaucer's life, a large proportion of the Anglo-Saxon dialect of religion, of moral and intellectual discourse, and of taste, had become utterly obsolete, and unknown. The place of the lost words had been partly supplied by the importation of Continental terms; but the new words came without the organic power of composition and derivation which belonged to those they had supplanted. Consequently, they were incapable of those modifications of form and extensions of meaning which the Anglo-Saxon roots could so easily assume, and which fitted them for the expression of the new shades of thought and of sentiment born of every hour in a mind and an age like those of Chaucer."

G. P. Marsh, Origin and History of the English Language, lecture 9.

ALSO IN: T. R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer.

A. W. Ward, Chaucer.

W. Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1360-1414. The Lollards.

"The Lollards were the earliest 'Protestants' of England. They were the followers of John Wyclif, but before his time the nickname of Lollard had been known on the continent. A little brotherhood of pious people had sprung up in Holland, about the year 1300, who lived in a half-monastic fashion and devoted themselves to helping the poor in the burial of their dead; and, from the low chants they sang at the funerals—lollen being the old word for such singing—they were called Lollards. The priests and friars hated them and accused them of heresy, and a Walter Lollard, probably one of them, was burnt in 1322 at Cologne as a heretic, and gradually the name became a nickname for such people. So when Wyclif's simple priests' were preaching the new doctrines, the name already familiar in Holland and Germany, was given to them, and gradually became the name for that whole movement of religious reformation which grew up from the seed Wyclif sowed."

B. Herford, Story of Religion in England, chapter 16.

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"A turning point arrived in the history of the reforming party at the accession of the house of Lancaster. King Henry the Fourth was not only a devoted son of the Church, but he owed his success in no slight measure to the assistance of the Churchmen, and above all to that of Archbishop Arundel. It was felt that the new dynasty and the hierarchy stood or fell together. A mixture of religious and political motives led to the passing of the well-known statute 'De hæretico comburendo' in 1401 and thenceforward Lollardy was a capital offence."

R. L. Poole, Wycliffe and Movements for Reform, chapter 8.

"The abortive insurrection of the Lollards at the commencement of Henry V. 's reign, under the leadership of Sir John Oldcastle, had the effect of adding to the penal laws already in existence against the sect." This gave to Lollardy a political character and made the Lollards enemies against the State, as is evident from the king's proclamation in which it was asserted "that the insurgents intended to 'destroy him, his brothers and several of the spiritual and temporal lords, to confiscate the possessions of the Church, to secularize the religious orders, to divide the realm into confederate districts, and to appoint Sir John Oldcastle president of the commonwealth.'"

T. P. Taswell-Langmead, English Constitutional History (4th edition), chapter 11.

"The early life of Wycliffe is obscure. … He emerges into distinct notice in 1360, ten years subsequent to the passing of the first Statute of Provisors, having then acquired a great Oxford reputation as a lecturer in divinity. … He was a man of most simple life; austere in appearance; with bare feet and russet mantle. As a soldier of Christ, he saw in his Great Master and his Apostles the patterns whom he was bound to imitate. By the contagion of example he gathered about him other men who thought as he did; and gradually, under his captaincy, these 'poor priests' as they were called—vowed to poverty because Christ was poor—vowed to accept no benefice … spread out over the country as an army of missionaries, to preach the faith which they found in the Bible—to preach, not of relics and of indulgences, but of repentance and of the grace of God. They carried with them copies of the Bible which Wycliffe had translated, … and they refused to recognize the authority of the bishops, or their right to silence them. If this had been all, and perhaps if Edward III. had been succeeded by a prince less miserably incapable than his grandson Richard, Wycliffe might have made good his ground; the movement of the parliament against the pope might have united in a common stream with the spiritual move against the church at home, and the Reformation have been antedated by a century. He was summoned to answer for himself before the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1377. He appeared in court supported by the presence of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the eldest of Edward's surviving sons, and the authorities were unable to strike him behind so powerful a shield. But the 'poor priests' had other doctrines. … His [Wycliffe's] theory of property, and his study of the character of Christ, had led him to the near confines of Anabaptism." The rebellion of Wat Tyler, which occurred in 1381, cast odium upon all such opinions. "So long as Wycliffe lived, his own lofty character was a guarantee for the conduct of his immediate disciples; and although his favour had far declined, a party in the state remained attached to him, with sufficient influence to prevent the adoption of extreme measures against the 'poor priests.' … They were left unmolested for the next twenty years. … On the settlement of the country under Henry IV. they fell under the general ban which struck down all parties who had shared in the late disturbances."

J. A. Froude, History of England, chapter 6.

"Wycliffe's translation of the Bible itself created a new era, and gave birth to what may be said never to have existed till then—a popular theology. … It is difficult in our day to imagine the impression such a book must have produced in an age which had scarcely anything in the way of popular literature, and which had been accustomed to regard the Scriptures as the special property of the learned. It was welcomed with an enthusiasm which could not be restrained, and read with avidity both by priests and laymen. … The homely wisdom, blended with eternal truth, which has long since enriched our vernacular speech with a multitude of proverbs, could not thenceforth be restrained in its circulation by mere pious awe or time-honoured prejudice. Divinity was discussed in ale-houses. Popular preachers made war upon old prejudices. and did much to shock that sense of reverence which belonged to an earlier generation. A new school had arisen with a theology of its own, warning the people against the delusive preaching of the friars, and asserting loudly its own claims to be true and evangelical, on the ground that it possessed the gospel in the English tongue. Appealing to such an authority in their favour, the eloquence of the new teachers made a marvellous impression. Their followers increased with extraordinary rapidity. By the estimate of an opponent they soon numbered half the population, and you could hardly see two persons in the street but one of them was a Wycliffite. … They were supported by the powerful influence of John of Gaunt, who shielded not only Wycliffe himself, but even the most violent of the fanatics. And, certainly, whatever might have been Wycliffe's own view, doctrines were promulgated by his reputed followers that were distinctly subversive of authority. John Ball fomented the insurrection of Wat Tyler, by preaching the natural equality of men. … But the popularity of Lollardy was short-lived. The extravagance to which it led soon alienated the sympathies of the people, and the sect fell off in numbers almost as rapidly as it had risen."

J. Gairdner, Studies in English History, 1-2.

"Wyclif … was not without numerous followers, and the Lollardism which sprang out of his teaching was a living force in England for some time to come. But it was weak through its connection with subversive social doctrines. He himself stood aloof from such doctrines, but he could not prevent his followers from mingling in the social fray. It was perhaps their merit that they did so. The established constitutional order was but another name for oppression and wrong to the lower classes. But as yet the lower classes were not sufficiently advanced in moral and political training to make it safe to entrust them with the task of righting their own wrongs as they would have attempted to right them if they had gained the mastery. It had nevertheless become impossible to leave the peasants to be once more goaded by suffering into rebellion. The attempt, if it had been made, to enforce absolute labour-rents was tacitly abandoned, and gradually during the next century the mass of the villeins passed into the position of freemen. {816} For the moment, nobles and prelates, landowners and clergy, banded themselves together to form one great party of resistance. The church came to be but an outwork of the baronage."

S. R. Gardiner and J. B. Mullinger, Introduction to the Study of English History, part 1, chapter 5, sections 14-15.

ALSO IN L. Sergeant, John Wyclif.

G. Lechler, John Wiclif and his English Precursors.

See, also, BOHEMIA; A. D. 1405-1415, and BEGUINES.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1377. Accession of King Richard II.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1377-1399. The character and reign of Richard II.

"Richard II. was a far superior man to many of the weaker kings of England; but being self-willed and unwarlike, he was unfitted for the work which the times required. Yet, on a closer inspection than the traditional view of the reign has generally encouraged, we cannot but observe that the finer qualities which came out in certain crises of his reign appear to have frequently influenced his conduct: we know that he was not an immoral man, that he was an excellent husband to an excellent wife, and that he had devoted friends, willing to lay down their lives for him when there was nothing whatever left for them to gain. … Richard, who had been brought up in the purple quite as much as Edward II., was kept under restraint by his uncles, and not being judiciously guided in the arts of government, fell, like his prototype, into the hands of favourites. His brilliant behaviour in the insurrection of 1381 indicated much more than mere possession of the Plantagenet courage and presence of mind. He showed a real sympathy with the villeins who had undeniable grievances. … His instincts were undoubtedly for freedom and forgiveness, and there is no proof, nor even probability, that he intended to use the villeins against his enemies. His early and happy marriage with Anne of Bohemia ought, one might think, to have saved him from the vice of favouritism; but he was at least more fortunate than Edward II. in not being cast under the spell of a Gaveston. When we consider the effect of such a galling government as that of his uncle Gloucester, and his cousin Derby, afterwards Henry IV., who seems to have been pushing Gloucester on from the first, we can hardly be surprised that he should require some friend to lean upon. The reign is, in short, from one, and perhaps the truest, point of view, a long duel between the son of the Black Prince and the son of John of Gaunt. One or other of them must inevitably perish. A handsome and cultivated youth, who showed himself at fifteen every inch a king, who was married at sixteen, and led his own army to Scotland at eighteen, required a different treatment from that which he received. He was a man, and should have been dealt with as such. His lavish and reprehensible grants to his favourites were made the excuse for Gloucester's violent interference in 1386, but there is good ground for believing that the movement was encouraged by the anti-Wicliffite party, which had taken alarm at the sympathy with the Reformers shown at this time by Richard and Anne."

M. Burrows, Commentaries on the History of England, book 2, chapter 5.

ALSO IN: J. R. Green, History of the English People, book 4, chapter 4 (volume 1).

C. H. Pearson, English History in the 14th Century, chapter 10-12.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1381. Wat Tyler's Rebellion.

"In June 1381 there broke out in England the formidable insurrection known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion. The movement seems to have begun among the bondmen of Essex and of Kent; but it spread at once to the counties of Sussex Hertford, Cambridge, Suffolk and Norfolk. The peasantry, armed with bludgeons and rusty swords, first occupied the roads by which pilgrims went to Canterbury, and made everyone swear that he would be true to king Richard and not accept a king named John. This, of course, was aimed at the government of John of Gaunt [Duke of Lancaster], … to whom the people attributed every grievance they had to complain of. The principal, or at least the immediate cause of offence arose out of a poll-tax which had been voted in the preceding year."

J. Gairdner, Houses of Lancaster and York, chapter 2.

The leaders of the insurgents were Wat the Tyler, who had been a soldier, John Ball, a priest and preacher of democratic and socialistic doctrines, and one known as Jack Straw. They made their way to London. "It ought to have been easy to keep them out of the city, as the only approach to it was by London Bridge, and the mayor and chief citizens proposed to defend it. But the Londoners generally, and even three of the aldermen, were well inclined to the rebels, and declared that they would not let the gates be shut against their friends and neighbours, and would kill the mayor himself if he attempted to do it. So on the evening of Wednesday, June 13, the insurgents began to stream in across the bridge, and next morning marched their whole body across the river, and proceeded at once to the Savoy, the splendid palace of the Duke of Lancaster. Proclamation was made that any one found stealing the smallest article would be beheaded; and the place was then wrecked and burned with all the formalities of a solemn act of justice. Gold and silver plate was shattered with battle-axes and thrown into the Thames; rings and smaller jewels were brayed in mortars; silk and embroidered dresses were trampled under feet and torn up. Then the Temple was burned with all its muniments. The poet Gower was among the lawyers who had to save their lives by flight, and he passed several nights in the woods of Essex, covered with grass and leaves and living on acorns. Then the great house of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell was destroyed, taking seven days to burn." The young king (Richard II.) and his court and council had taken refuge in the Tower. The insurgents now threatened to storm their stronghold if the king did not come out and speak to them. The king consented and appointed a rendezvous at Mile End. He kept the appointment and met his turbulent subjects with so much courage and tact and so many promises, that he persuaded a great number to disperse to their homes. But while this pacific interview took place, Wat Tyler, John Ball, and some 400 of their followers burst into the Tower, determined to find the archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Treasurer, Sir Robert de Hales, who were the most obnoxious ministers. "So great was the general consternation that the soldiers dared not raise a hand while these ruffians searched the different rooms, not sparing even the king's bedroom, running spears into the beds, asked the king's mother to kiss them, and played insolent jokes on the chief officers. {817} Unhappily they were not long in finding the archbishop, who had said mass in the chapel, and was kneeling at the altar in expectation of their approach." The Lord Treasurer was also found, and both he and the archbishop were summarily beheaded by the mob. "Murder now became the order of the day, and foreigners were among the chief victims; thirteen Flemings were dragged out of one church and beheaded, seventeen out of another, and altogether it is said 400 perished. Many private enmities were revenged by the London rabble on this day." On the next day, June 15, the king, with an armed escort, went to the camp of the insurgents, at Smithfield, and opened negotiations with Tyler, offering successively three forms of a new charter of popular rights and liberties, all of which were rejected. Finally, Tyler was invited to a personal conference, and there, in the midst of the king's party, on some provocation or pretended provocation in his words or bearing, the popular leader was struck from his horse and killed. King Richard immediately rode out before the ranks of the rebels, while they were still dazed by the suddenness and audacity of the treacherous blow, crying "I will be your leader; follow me." The thoughtless mob followed and soon found itself surrounded by bodies of troops whose courage had revived. The king now commanded the trembling peasants "to fall on their knees, cut the strings of their bows, and leave the city and its neighbourhood, under pain of death, before nightfall. This command was instantly obeyed." Meantime and afterwards there were many lesser risings in various parts of the country, all of which were suppressed, with such rigorous prosecutions in the courts that 1,500 persons are said to have suffered judicially.

C. H. Pearson, English History in the Fourteenth Century, chapter 10.

The Wat Tyler insurrection proved disastrous in its effect on the work of Church reform which Wyclif was then pursuing. "Not only was the power of the Lancastrian party, on which Wyclif had relied, for the moment annihilated, but the quarrel between the Baronage and Church, on which his action had hitherto been grounded, was hushed in the presence of a common danger. Much of the odium of the outbreak, too, fell on the Reformer. … John Ball, who had figured in the front rank of the revolt, was claimed as one of his adherents. … Whatever belief such charges might gain, it is certain that from this moment all plans for the reorganization of the Church were confounded in the general odium which attached to the projects of the socialist peasant leaders."

J. R. Green, Short History of the English People, chapter 5, section 3.

"When Parliament assembled it proved itself as hostile as the crown to the conceding any of the demands of the people; both were faithful to all the records of history in similar cases; they would have belied all experience if, being victorious, they had consented to the least concession to the vanquished. The upper classes repudiated the recognition of the rights of the poor to a degree, which in our time would be considered sheer insanity. The king had annulled, by proclamation to the sheriffs, the charters of manumission which he had granted to the insurgents, and this revocation was warmly approved by both Lords and Commons, who, not satisfied with saying that such enfranchisement could not be made without their consent, added, that they would never give that consent, even to save themselves from perishing altogether in one day. There was, it is true, a vague rumour about the propriety and wisdom of abolishing villanage; but the notion was scouted, and the owners of serfs showed that they neither doubted the right by which they held their fellow-creatures in a state of slavery, nor would hesitate to increase the severity of the laws affecting them. They now passed a law by which 'all riots and rumours, and other such things were turned into high treason'; this law was most vaguely expressed, and would probably involve those who made it in inextricable difficulties. It was self-apparent, that this Parliament acted under the impulses of panic, and of revenge for recent injuries. … It might be said that the citizens of the municipalities wrote their charters of enfranchisement with the very blood of their lords and bishops; yet, during the worst days of oppression, the serfs of the cities had never suffered the cruel excesses of tyranny endured by the country people till the middle of the fifteenth century. And, nevertheless, the long struggles of the townships, despite the bloodshed and cruelties of the citizens, are ever considered and narrated as glorious revolutions, whilst the brief efforts of the peasants for vengeance, which were drowned in their own blood, have remained as a stigma flung in the face of the country populations whenever they utter a word claiming some amelioration in their condition. Whence the injustice? The bourgeoisie was victorious and successful. The rural populations were vanquished and trampled upon. The bourgeoisie, therefore, has had its poets, historians, and flatterers, whilst the poor peasant, rude, untutored, and ignorant, never had a lyre nor a voice to bewail his lamentable sorrows and sufferings."

Prof. De Vericour, Wat Tyler (Royal Historical Society, Transactions, number 8, volume 2).

ALSO IN: G. Lechler, John Wiclif, chapter 9, section 3.

C. Knight, Popular History of England, volume 2, chapter 1.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1383. The Bishop of Norwich's Crusade in Flanders.

See FLANDERS: A. D. 1383.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1388. The Merciless or Wonderful Parliament.

See PARLIAMENT, THE WONDERFUL.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1399. Accession of King Henry IV.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1399-1471. House of Lancaster.

This name is given in English history to the family which became royal in the person of Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, who deposed his cousin, Richard II., or forced him to abdicate the throne, and who was crowned king (Henry IV.), Oct. 11, 1399, with what seemed to be the consent of the nation. He not only claimed to be the next in succession to Richard, but he put forward a claim of descent through his mother, more direct than Richard's had been, from Henry III. "In point of fact Henry was not the next in succession. His father, John of Gaunt [or John of Ghent, in which city he was born], was the fourth son of Edward III., and there were descendants of that king's third son, Lionel Duke of Clarence, living. … At one time Richard himself had designated as his successor the nobleman who really stood next to him in the line of descent. This was Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, the same who was killed by the rebels in Ireland. This Roger had left a son Edmund to inherit his title, but Edmund was a mere child, and the inconvenience of another minority could not have been endured."

J. Gairdner, Houses of Lancaster and York, chapter 2.

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As for Henry's pretensions through his mother, they were founded upon what Mr. Gairdner calls an "idle story," that "the eldest son of Henry III. was not king Edward, but his brother Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, who was commonly reputed the second son; and that this Edmund had been purposely set aside on account of his personal deformity. The plain fact of the matter was that Edmund Crouchback was six years younger than his brother Edward I.; and that his surname Crouchback had not the smallest reference to personal deformity, but only implied that he wore the cross upon his back as a crusader." Mr. Wylie (History of England under Henry IV., volume 1, chapter 1) represents that this latter claim was put forward under the advice of the leading jurists of the time, to give the appearance of a legitimate succession; whereas Henry took his real title from the will and assent of the nation. Henry IV. was succeeded by his vigorous son, Henry V. and he in turn by a feeble son, Henry VI., during whose reign England was torn by intrigues and factions, ending in the lamentable civil wars known as the "Wars of the Roses," the deposition of Henry VI. and the acquisition of the throne by the "House of York," in the persons of Edward IV. and Richard III. It was a branch of the House of Lancaster that reappeared, after the death of Richard III. in the royal family better known as the Tudors.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1400-1436. Relations with Scotland.

See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1400-1436.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1402-1413. Owen Glendower's Rebellion in Wales.

See WALES: A. D.1402-1413.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1403. Hotspur's Rebellion.

The earl of Northumberland and his son, Henry Percy, called "Hotspur," had performed great services for Henry IV., in establishing and maintaining him upon the throne. "At the outset of his reign their opposition would have been fatal to him; their adhesion ensured his victory. He had rewarded them with territory and high offices of trust, and they had by faithful services ever since increased their claims to gratitude and consideration. … Both father and son were high-spirited, passionate, suspicious men, who entertained an exalted sense of their own services and could not endure the shadow of a slight. Up to this time [early in 1403] not a doubt had been cast on their fidelity. Northumberland was still the king's chief agent in Parliament, his most valued commander in the field, his Mattathias. It has been thought that Hotspur's grudge against the king began with the notion that the release of his brother-in-law, Edmund Mortimer [taken prisoner, the year before, by the Welsh], had been neglected by the king, or was caused by Henry's claim to deal with the prisoners taken at Homildon; the defenders of the Percies alleged that they had been deceived by Henry in the first instance, and only needed to be persuaded that Richard lived in order to desert the king. It is more probable that they suspected Henry's friendship, and were exasperated by his compulsory economies. … Yet Henry seems to have conceived no suspicion. … Northumberland and Hotspur were writing for increased forces [for the war with Scotland]. … On the 10th of July Henry had reached Northamptonshire on his way northwards; on the 17th he heard that Hotspur with his uncle the earl of Worcester were in arms in Shropshire. They raised no cry of private wrongs, but proclaimed themselves the vindicators of national right: their object was to correct the evils of the administration, to enforce the employment of wise counsellors, and the proper expenditure of public money. … The report ran like wildfire through the west that Richard was alive, and at Chester. Hotspur's army rose to 14,000 men, and not suspecting the strength and promptness of the king, he sat down with his uncle and his prisoner, the earl of Douglas, before Shrewsbury. Henry showed himself equal to the need. From Burton-on-Trent, where on July 17 he summoned the forces of the shires to join him, he marched into Shropshire, and offered to parley with the insurgents. The earl of Worcester went between the camps, but he was either an impolitic or a treacherous envoy, and the negotiations ended in mutual exasperation. On the 21st the battle of Shrewsbury was fought; Hotspur was slain; Worcester was taken and beheaded two days after. The old earl, who may or may not have been cognizant of his son's intentions from the first, was now marching to his succour. The earl of Westmoreland, his brother-in-law, met him and drove him back to Warkworth. But all danger was over. On the 11th of August he met the king at York, and submitted to him."

W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chapter 18, section 632.

ALSO IN: J. H. Wylie, History of England under Henry IV., volume 1, chapter 25.

W. Shakespeare, King Henry IV., part 1.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1413. Accession of King Henry V.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1413-1422. Parliamentary gains under Henry V.

"What the sword had won the sword should keep, said Henry V. on his accession; but what was meant by the saying has its comment in the fact that, in the year which witnessed his victory at Agincourt, he yielded to the House of Commons the most liberal measure of legislation which until then it had obtained. The dazzling splendour of his conquests in France had for the time cast into the shade every doubt or question of his title, but the very extent of those gains upon the French soil established more decisively the worse than uselessness of such acquisitions to the English throne. The distinction of Henry's reign in constitutional history will always be, that from it dates that power, indispensable to a free and limited monarchy, called Privilege of Parliament; the shield and buckler under which all the battles of liberty and good government were fought in the after time. Not only were its leading safeguards now obtained, but at once so firmly established, that against the shock of incessant resistance in later years they stood perfectly unmoved. Of the awful right of impeachment, too, the same is to be said. It was won in the same reign, and was never afterwards lost."

J. Forster, Historical and Biographical Essays, volume 1, page 207.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1415-1422. Conquests of Henry V. in France.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1415; and 1417-1422.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1422. Accession of King Henry VI.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1431-1453. Loss of English conquests and possessions in France.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1431-1453, and AQUITAINE: A. D. 1360-1453.

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ENGLAND: A. D. 1450. Cade's Rebellion.

A formidable rebellion broke out in Kent, under the leadership of one Jack Cade, A. D. 1450. Overtaxation, the bad management of the council, the extortion of the subordinate officers, the injustice of the king's bench, the abuse of the right of purveyance, the "enquestes" and amercements, and the illegitimate control of elections were the chief causes of the rising of 1450. "The rising was mainly political, only one complaint was economical, not a single one was religious. We find not a single demand for new legislation. … The movement was by no means of a distinctly plebeian or disorderly character, but was a general and organized rising of the people at large. It was a political upheaval. We find no trace of socialism or of democracy. … The commons in 1450 arose against Lancaster and in favor of York. Their rising was the first great struggle in the Wars of the Roses."

Kriehn, Rising in 1450, Chapter IV., VII.

Cade and his rebels took possession of London; but they were beaten in a battle and forced to quit the city. Cade and some followers continued to be turbulent and soon afterwards he was killed.

J. Gairdner, Houses of Lancaster and York, chapter 7, section 6.

ALSO IN: C. M. Yonge, Cameos from English History, 3d series, chapter 7.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1455. Demoralized state of the nation. Effects of the wars in France.

"The whole picture of the times is very depressing on the moral if not on the material side. There are few more pitiful episodes in history than the whole tale of the reign of Henry VI., the most unselfish and well-intentioned king that ever sat upon the English throne—a man of whom not even his enemies and oppressors could find an evil word to say; the troubles came, as they confessed, 'all because of his false lords, and never of him.' We feel that there must have been something wrong with the heart of a nation that could see unmoved the meek and holy king torn from wife and child, sent to wander in disguise up and down the kingdom for which he had done his poor best, and finally doomed to pine for five years a prisoner in the fortress where he had so long held his royal Court. Nor is our first impression concerning the demoralisation of England wrong. Every line that we read bears home to us more and more the fact that the nation had fallen on evil times. First and foremost among the causes of its moral deterioration was the wretched French War, a war begun in the pure spirit of greed and ambition,—there was not even the poor excuse that had existed in the time of Edward III.—carried on by the aid of hordes of debauched foreign mercenaries … and persisted in long after it had become hopeless, partly from misplaced national pride, partly because of the personal interests of the ruling classes. Thirty-five years of a war that was as unjust as it was unfortunate had both soured and demoralised the nation. … When the final catastrophe came and the fights of Formigny [or Fourmigny] and Chatillon [Castillon] ended the chapter of our disasters, the nation began to cast about for a scapegoat on whom to lay the burden of its failures. … At first the unfortunate Suffolk and Somerset had the responsibility laid upon them. A little later the outcry became more bold and fixed upon the Lancastrian dynasty itself as being to blame not only for disaster abroad, but for want of governance at home. If King Henry had understood the charge, and possessed the wit to answer it, he might fairly have replied that his subjects must fit the burden upon their own backs, not upon his. The war had been weakly conducted, it was true; but weakly because the men and money for it were grudged. … At home, the bulwarks of social order seemed crumbling away. Private wars, riot, open highway robbery, murder, abduction, armed resistance to the law, prevailed on a scale that had been unknown since the troublous times of Edward II.—we might almost say since the evil days of Stephen. But it was not the Crown alone that should have been blamed for the state of the realm. The nation had chosen to impose over-stringent constitutional checks on the kingly power before it was ripe for self-government, and the Lancastrian house sat on the throne because it had agreed to submit to those checks. If the result of the experiment was disastrous, both parties to the contract had to bear their share of the responsibility. But a nation seldom allows that it has been wrong; and Henry of Windsor had to serve as a scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the realm, because Henry of Bolingbroke had committed his descendants to the unhappy compact. Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly the complaint under which England was labouring in the middle of the 15th century, and all the grievances against which outcry was made were but symptoms of one latent disease. … All these public troubles would have been of comparatively small importance if the heart of the nation had been sound. The phenomenon which makes the time so depressing is the terrible decay in private morals since the previous century. … There is no class or caste in England which comes well out of the scrutiny. The Church, which had served as the conscience of the nation in better times, had become dead to spiritual things. It no longer produced either men of saintly life or learned theologians or patriotic statesmen. … The baronage of England had often been unruly, but it had never before developed the two vices which distinguished it in the times of the Two Roses—a taste for indiscriminate bloodshed and a turn for political apostacy. … Twenty years spent in contact with French factions, and in command of the godless mercenaries who formed the bulk of the English armies, had taught our nobles lessons of cruelty and faithlessness such as they had not before imbibed. … The knights and squires showed on a smaller scale all the vices of the nobility. Instead of holding together and maintaining a united loyalty to the Crown, they bound themselves by solemn sealed bonds and the reception of 'liveries' each to the baron whom he preferred. This fatal system, by which the smaller landholder agreed on behalf of himself and his tenants to follow his greater neighbour in peace and war, had ruined the military system of England, and was quite as dangerous as the ancient feudalism. … If the gentry constituted themselves the voluntary followers of the baronage, and aided their employers to keep England unhappy, the class of citizens and burgesses took a very different line of conduct. If not actively mischievous, they were solidly inert. They refused to entangle themselves in politics at all. They submitted impassively to each ruler in turn, when they had ascertained that their own persons and property were not endangered by so doing. A town, it has been remarked, seldom or never stood a siege during the Wars of the Roses, for no town ever refused to open its gates to any commander with an adequate force who asked for entrance."

C. W. Oman, Warwick the King-maker, chapter 1.

{820}

ENGLAND: A. D. 1455-1471. The Wars of the Roses.

Beginning with a battle fought at St. Albans on the 23d of May, 1455, England was kept in a pitiable state of civil war, with short intervals of troubled peace, during thirty years. The immediate cause of trouble was in the feebleness of King Henry VI., who succeeded to the throne while an infant, and whose mind, never strong, gave way under the trials of his position when he came to manhood. The control of the government, thus weakly commanded, became a subject of strife between successive factions. The final leaders in such contests were Queen Margaret of Anjou, the energetic consort of the helpless king (with the king himself sometimes in a condition of mind to cooperate with her), on one side, and, on the other side, the Duke of York, who traced his lineage to Edward III., and who had strong claims to the throne if Henry should leave no heir. The battle at St. Albans was a victory for the Yorkists and placed them in power for the next two years, the Duke of York being named Protector. In 1456 the king recovered so far as to resume the reigns of government, and in 1459 there was a new rupture between the factions. The queen's adherents were beaten in the battle of Bloreheath, September 23d of that year; but defections in the ranks of the Yorkists soon obliged the latter to disperse and their leaders, York, Warwick and Salisbury, fled to Ireland and to Calais. In June, 1460, the earls of Warwick, Salisbury and March (the latter being the eldest son of the Duke of York) returned to England and gathered an army speedily, the city of London opening its gates to them. The king's forces were defeated at Northampton (July 10) and the king taken prisoner. A parliament was summoned and assembled in October. Then the Duke of York came over from Ireland, took possession of the royal palace and laid before parliament a solemn claim to the crown. After much discussion a compromise was agreed upon, under which Henry VI. should reign undisturbed during his life and the Duke of York should be his undisputed successor. This was embodied in an act of parliament and received the assent of the king; but queen Margaret who had retired into the north, refused to surrender the rights of her infant son, and a strong party sustained her. The Duke of York attacked these Lancastrian forces rashly, at Wakefield, December 30, 1460, and was slain on the field of a disastrous defeat. The queen's army, then, marching towards London, defeated the Earl of Warwick at St. Albans, February 17, 1461 (the second battle of the war at that place), and recovered possession of the person of the king. But Edward, Earl of March (now become Duke of York, by the death of his father), who had just routed a Lancastrian force at Mortimer's Cross, in Wales, joined his forces with those of Warwick and succeeded in occupying London, which steadily favored his cause. Calling together a council of lords, Edward persuaded them to declare King Henry deposed, on the ground that he had broken the agreement made with the late Duke of York. The next step was to elect Edward king, and he assumed the royal title and state at once. The new king lost no time in marching northwards against the army of the deposed sovereign, which lay near York. On the 27th of March the advanced division of the Lancastrians was defeated at Ferrybridge, and, two days later, their main body was almost destroyed in the fearful battle of Towton,—said to have been the bloodiest encounter that ever took place on English soil. King Henry took refuge in Scotland and Queen Margaret repaired to France. In 1464 Henry reappeared in the north with a body of Scots and refugees and there were risings in his favor in Northumberland, which the Yorkists crushed in the successive battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham. The Yorkist king (Edward IV.) now reigned without much disturbance ntil 1470, when he quarreled with the powerful Earl of Warwick— the "king-maker," whose strong hand had placed him on the throne. Warwick then passed to the other side, offering his services to Queen Margaret and leading an expedition which sailed from Harfleur in September, convoyed by a French fleet. Edward found himself unprepared to resist the Yorkist risings which welcomed Warwick and he fled to Holland, seeking aid from his brother-in-law, the Duke of Burgundy. For nearly six months, the kingdom was in the hands of Warwick and the Lancastrians; the unfortunate Henry VI., released from captivity in the Tower, was once more seated on the throne. But on the 14th of March, 1471, Edward reappeared in England, landing at Ravenspur, professing that he came only to recover his dukedom of York. As he moved southwards he gathered a large force of supporters and soon reassumed the royal title and pretensions. London opened its gates to him, and, on the 14th of April—exactly one month after his landing—he defeated his opponents at Barnet, where Warwick, "the king-maker"—the last of the great feudal barons—was slain. Henry, again a captive, was sent back to the Tower. But Henry's dauntless queen, who landed at Weymouth, with a body of French allies on the very day of the disastrous Barnet fight, refused to submit. Cornwall and Devon were true to her cause and gave her an army with which she fought the last battle of the war at Tewksbury on the 4th of May. Defeated and taken prisoner, her young son slain—whether in the battle or after it is unknown—the long contention of Margaret of Anjou ended on that bloody field. A few days later, when the triumphant Yorkist King Edward entered London, his poor, demented Lancastrian rival died suddenly and suspiciously in the Tower. The two parties in the long contention had each assumed the badge of a rose—the Yorkists a white rose, the Lancastrians a red one. Hence the name of the Wars of the Roses. "As early as the time of John of Ghent, the rose was used as an heraldic emblem, and when he married Blanche, the daughter of the Duke of Lancaster, he used the red rose for a device. Edmund of Langley, his brother, the fifth son of Edward III., adopted the white rose in opposition to him; and their followers afterwards maintained these distinctions in the bloody wars of the fifteenth century. There is, however, no authentic account of the precise period when these badges were first adopted."

Mrs. Hookham, Life and Times of Margaret of Anjou, volume 2, chapter 1.

ALSO IN: J. Gairdner, Houses of Lancaster and York.

Sir J. Ramsay, Lancaster and York.

C. W. Oman; Warwick, the King-maker, chapter 5-17.

See, also, TOWTON, BARNET, and TEWKSBURY.

{821}

The effects of the Wars of the Roses.

"It is astonishing to observe the rapidity with which it [the English nation] had settled down to order in the reign of Henry VII. after so many years of civil dissension. It would lead us to infer that those wars were the wars of a class, and not of the nation; and that the effects of them have been greatly exaggerated. With the single exception of Cade's rebellion, they had nothing in common with the revolutions of later or earlier times. They were not wars against classes, against forms of government, against the order or the institutions of the nation. It was the rivalry of two aristocratic factions struggling for superiority, neither of them hoping or desiring, whichever obtained the upper hand, to introduce momentous changes in the State or its administration. The main body of the people took little interest in the struggle; in the towns at least there was no intermission of employment. The war passed over the nation, ruffling the surface, toppling down high cliffs here and there, washing away ancient landmarks, attracting the imagination of the spectator by the mightiness of its waves, and the noise of its thunders; but the great body below the surface remained unmoved. No famines, no plagues, consequent on the intermittance of labour caused by civil war, are recorded; even the prices of land and provisions scarcely varied more than they have been known to do in times of profoundest peace. But the indirect and silent operation of these conflicts was much more remarkable. It reft into fragments the confederated ranks of a powerful territorial aristocracy, which had hitherto bid defiance to the King, however popular, however energetic. Henceforth the position of the Sovereign in the time of the Tudors, in relation to all classes of the people, became very different from what it had been; the royal supremacy was no longer a theory; but a fact. Another class had sprung up on the decay of the ancient nobility. The great towns had enjoyed uninterrupted tranquility, and even flourished, under the storm that was scourging the aristocracy and the rural districts. Their population had increased by numbers whom fear or the horrors of war had induced to find shelter behind stone walls. The diminution of agricultural labourers converted into soldiers by the folly of their lords had turned corn-lands into pasture, requiring less skill, less capital, and less labour."

J. S. Brewer, The Reign of Henry VIII., volume 1, chapter 2.

"Those who would estimate the condition of England aright should remember that the War of the Roses was only a repetition on a large scale of those private wars which distracted almost every county, and, indeed, by taking away all sense of security, disturbed almost every manor and every class of society during the same century. … The lawless condition of English society in the 15th century resembled that of Ireland in as recent a date as the beginning of the 19th century. … In both countries women were carried off, sometimes at night; they were first violated, then dragged to the altar in their night-dress and compelled to marry their captors. … Children were seized and thrown into a dungeon until ransomed by their parents."

W. Denton, England in the 15th Century, chapter 3.

"The Wars of the Roses which filled the second half of the 15th century furnished the barons with an arena in which their instincts of violence had freer play than ever; it was they who, under the pretext of dynastic interests which had ceased to exist, of their own free choice prolonged the struggle. Altogether unlike the Italian condottieri, the English barons showed no mercy to their own order; they massacred and exterminated each other freely, while they were careful to spare the commonalty. Whole families were extinguished or submerged in the nameless mass of the nation, and their estates by confiscation or escheat helped to swell the royal domain. When Henry VII. had stifled the last movements of rebellion and had punished, through the Star Chamber, those nobles who were still suspected of maintaining armed bands, the baronage was reduced to a very low ebb; not more than twenty-nine lay peers were summoned by the king to his first Parliament. The old Norman feudal nobility existed no longer; the heroic barons of the great charter barely survived in the persons of a few doubtful descendants; their estates were split up or had been forfeited to the Crown. A new class came forward to fill the gap, that rural middle class which was formed … by the fusion of the knights with the free landowners. It had already taken the lead in the House of Commons, and it was from its ranks that Henry VII. chose nearly all the new peers. A peerage renewed almost throughout, ignorant of the habits and traditions of the earlier nobility, created in large batches, closely dependent on the monarch who had raised it from little or nothing and who had endowed it with his bounty—this is the phenomenon which confronts us at the end of the fifteenth century."

E. Boutmy, The English Constitution, chapter 5.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1461. Accession of King Edward IV.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1461-1485. House of York.

The House of York, which triumphed in the Wars of the Roses, attaining the throne in the person of Edward IV. (A. D. 1461), derived its claim to the crown through descent, in the female line, from Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the third son of Edward III. (the second son who lived to manhood and left children); while the House of Lancaster traced its lineage to John of Gaunt, a younger son of the same king Edward III., but the line of Lancastrian succession was through males. "Had the crown followed the course of hereditary succession, it would have devolved on the posterity of Lionel. … By the decease of that prince without male issue, his possessions and pretensions fell to his daughter Philippa, who by a singular combination of circumstances had married Roger Mortimer earl of March, the male representative of the powerful baron who was attainted and executed for the murder of Edward II., the grandfather of the duke of Clarence. The son of that potent delinquent had been restored to his honours and estates at an advanced period in the reign of Edward III. … Edmund, his grandson, had espoused Philippa of Clarence. Roger Mortimer, the fourth in descent from the regicide, was lord lieutenant of Ireland and was considered, or, according to some writers, declared to be heir of the crown in the early part of Richard's reign. Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, in whom the hereditary claim to the crown was vested at the deposition of Richard, was then only an infant of ten years of age. … {822} Dying without issue, the pretensions to the crown, which he inherited through the duke of Clarence, devolved on his sister Anne Mortimer, who espoused Richard of York earl of Cambridge, the grandson of Edward III. by his fourth [fifth] son Edmund of Langley duke of York." Edward IV. was the grandson of this Anne Mortimer and Richard of York.

Sir J. Mackintosh, History of England, volume 1, pages 338-339.

The House of York occupied the throne but twenty-four years. On the death of Edward IV., in 1483, the crown was secured by his brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who caused Edward's two sons to be murdered in the Tower. The elder of these murdered princes is named in the list of English kings as Edward V.; but he cannot be said to have reigned. Richard III. was overthrown and slain on Bosworth field in 1485.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1471-1485. The New Monarchy. The rise of Absolutism and the decline of Parliamentary government.

"If we use the name of the New Monarchy to express the character of the English sovereignty from the time of Edward IV. to the time of Elizabeth, it is because the character of the monarchy during this period was something wholly new in our history. There is no kind of sibilantly between the kingship of the Old English, of the Norman, the Angevin, or the Plantagenet sovereigns, and the kingship of the Tudors. … What the Great Rebellion in its final result actually did was to wipe away every trace of the New Monarchy, and to take up again the thread of our political development just where it had been snapped by the Wars of the Roses. … The founder of the New Monarchy was Edward IV. … While jesting with aldermen, or dallying with his mistresses, or idling over the new pages from the printing press [Caxton's] at Westminster, Edward was silently laying the foundations of an absolute rule which Henry VII. did little more than develop and consolidate. The almost total discontinuance of Parliamentary life was in itself a revolution. Up to this moment the two Houses had played a part which became more and more prominent in the government of the realm. … Under Henry VI. an important step in constitutional progress had been made by abandoning the old form of presenting the requests of the Parliament in the form of petitions which were subsequently moulded into statutes by the Royal Councils; the statute itself, in its final form, was now presented for the royal assent, and the Crown was deprived of its former privilege of modifying it. Not only does this progress cease, but the legislative activity of Parliament itself comes abruptly to an end. … The necessity for summoning the two Houses had, in fact, been removed by the enormous tide of wealth which the confiscation of the civil war poured into the royal treasury. … It was said that nearly a fifth of the land had passed into the royal possession at one period or another of the civil war. Edward added to his resources by trading on a vast scale. … The enterprises he had planned against France … enabled Edward not only to increase his hoard, but to deal a deadly blow at liberty. Setting aside the usage of loans sanctioned by the authority of Parliament, Edward called before him the merchants of the city and requested from each a present or benevolence in proportion to the need. Their compliance with his prayer was probably aided by his popularity with the merchant class; but the system of benevolence was soon to be developed into the forced loans of Wolsey and the ship-money of Charles I."

J. R. Green, Short History of the English People, chapter 6, section 3.

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

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

See HANSA TOWNS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See SWEATING SICKNESS.

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

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

J. Forster, Historical and Biographical Essays, pages 221-222.

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

C. E. Moberly, The Early Tudors.

{824}

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

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

A. B. Buckley, History of England for Beginners, chapter 13.

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

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

J. Gairdner, Henry VII., chapters 4 and 7.

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

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

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

"The intellectual movement, to which we give the name of Renaissance, expressed itself in England mainly through the Drama. Other races in that era of quickened activity, when modern man regained the consciousness of his own strength and goodliness after centuries of mental stagnation and social depression, threw their energies into the plastic arts and scholarship. The English found a similar outlet for their pent-up forces in the Drama. The arts and literature of Greece and Rome had been revealed by Italy to Europe. Humanism had placed the present once more in a vital relation to the past. The navies of Portugal and Spain had discovered new continents beyond the ocean; the merchants of Venice and Genoa had explored the farthest East. Copernicus had revolutionised astronomy, and the telescope was revealing fresh worlds beyond the sun. The Bible had been rescued from the mortmain of the Church; scholars studied it in the language of its authors, and the people read it in their own tongue. In this rapid development of art, literature, science, and discovery, the English had hitherto taken but little part. But they were ready to reap what other men had sown. Unfatigued by the labours of the pioneer, unsophisticated by the pedantries and sophistries of the schools, in the freshness of their youth and vigour, they surveyed the world unfolded to them. For more than half a century they freely enjoyed the splendour of this spectacle, until the struggle for political and religious liberty replunged them in the hard realities of life. During that eventful period of spiritual disengagement from absorbing cares, the race was fully conscious of its national importance. It had shaken off the shackles of oppressive feudalism, the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. It had not yet passed under the Puritan yoke, or felt the encroachments of despotic monarchy. It was justly proud of the Virgin Queen, with whose idealised personality the people identified their newly acquired sense of greatness. … What in those fifty years they saw with the clairvoyant eyes of artists, the poets wrote. And what they wrote, remains imperishable. It is the portrait of their age, the portrait of an age in which humanity stood self-revealed, a miracle and marvel to its own admiring curiosity. England was in a state of transition when the Drama came to perfection. That was one of those rare periods when the past and the future are both coloured by imagination, and both shed a glory on the present. The medieval order was in dissolution; the modern order was in process of formation. Yet the old state of things had not faded from memory and usage; the new had not assumed despotic sway. Men stood then, as it were, between two dreams—a dream of the past, thronged with sinister and splendid reminiscences; a dream of the future, bright with unlimited aspirations and indefinite hopes. Neither the retreating forces of the Middle Ages nor the advancing forces of the modern era pressed upon them with the iron weight of actuality. The brutalities of feudalism had been softened; but the chivalrous sentiment remained to inspire the Surreys and the Sidneys of a milder epoch. … What distinguished the English at this epoch from the nations of the South was not refinement of manners, sobriety, or self-control. On the contrary they retained an unenviable character for more than common savagery. … Erasmus describes the filth of their houses, and the sicknesses engendered in their cities by bad ventilation. What rendered the people superior to Italians and Spaniards was the firmness of their moral fibre, the sweetness of their humanity, a more masculine temper, less vitiated instincts and sophisticated intellects, a law-abiding and religious conscience, contempt for treachery and baseness, intolerance of political or ecclesiastical despotism combined with fervent love of home and country. They were coarse, but not vicious; pleasure-loving, but not licentious; violent, but not cruel; luxurious but not effeminate. Machiavelli was a name of loathing to them. Sidney, Essex, Raleigh, More, and Drake were popular heroes; and whatever may be thought of these men, they certainly counted no Marquis of Pescara, no Duke of Valentino, no Malatesta Baglioni, no Cosimo de' Medici among them. The Southern European type betrayed itself but faintly in politicians like Richard Cromwell and Robert Dudley. … Affectations of foreign vices were only a varnish on the surface of society. The core of the nation remained sound and wholesome. Nor was the culture which the English borrowed from less unsophisticated nations, more than superficial. The incidents of Court gossip show how savage was the life beneath. {826} Queen Elizabeth spat, in the presence of her nobles, at a gentleman who had displeased her; struck Essex on the cheek; drove Burleigh blubbering from her apartment. Laws in merry England were executed with uncompromising severity. Every township had its gallows; every village its stocks, whipping-post and pillory. Here and there, heretics were burned upon the market-place; and the block upon Tower Hill was seldom dry. … Men and women who read Plato, or discussed the elegancies of Petrarch, suffered brutal practical jokes, relished the obscenities of jesters, used the grossest language of the people. Carrying farms and acres on their backs in the shape of costly silks and laces, they lay upon rushes filthy with the vomit of old banquets. Glittering in suits of gilt and jewelled mail, they jostled with town-porters in the stench of the bear-gardens, or the bloody bull-pit. The church itself was not respected. The nave of old S. Paul's became a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes. … It is difficult, even by noting an infinity of such characteristics, to paint the many-coloured incongruities of England at that epoch. Yet in the midst of this confusion rose cavaliers like Sidney, philosophers like Bacon, poets like Spenser; men in whom all that is pure, elevated, subtle, tender, strong, wise, delicate and learned in our modern civilisation displayed itself. And the masses of the people were still in harmony with these high strains. They formed the audience of Shakspere. They wept for Desdemona, adored Imogen, listened with Jessica to music in the moon-light at Belmont, wandered with Rosalind through woodland glades of Arden. Such was the society of which our theatre became the mirror."

J. A. Symonds, Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama, chapter 2, section 1, 2, and 5.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1497. Cabot's discovery of the North American Continent.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1497.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1498. Voyage and discoveries of Sebastian Cabot. Ground of English claims in the New World.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1498.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1502. The marriage which brought the Stuarts to the English throne.

See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1502.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1509. The character and reign of Henry VII.

"As a king, Bacon tells us that he was 'a wonder for wise men.' Few indeed were the councillors that shared his confidence, but the wise men, competent to form an estimate of his statesmanship, had but one opinion of his consummate wisdom. Foreigners were greatly struck with the success that attended his policy. Ambassadors were astonished at the intimate knowledge he displayed of the affairs of their own countries. From the most unpropitious beginnings, a proscribed man and an exile, he had won his way in evil times to a throne beset with dangers; he had pacified his own country, cherished commerce, formed strong alliances over Europe, and made his personal influence felt by the rulers of France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as that of a man who could turn the scale in matters of the highest importance to their own domestic welfare. … From first to last his policy was essentially his own; for though he knew well how to choose the ablest councillors, he asked or took their advice only to such an extent as he himself deemed expedient. … No one can understand his reign, or that of his son, or, we might add, of his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth, without appreciating the fact that, however well served with councillors, the sovereign was in those days always his own Prime Minister. … Even the legislation of the reign must be regarded as in large measure due to Henry himself. We have no means, it is true, of knowing how much of it originated in his own mind; but that it was all discussed with him in Council and approved before it was passed we have every reason to believe. For he never appears to have put the royal veto upon any Bill, as constitutional usage both before and after his days allowed. He gave his assent to all the enactments sent up to him for approval, though he sometimes added to them provisos of his own. And Bacon, who knew the traditions of those times, distinctly attributes the good legislation of his days to the king himself. 'In that part, both of justice and policy, which is the most durable part, and cut, as it were, in brass or marble, the making of good laws, he did excel.' This statement, with but slight variations in the wording, appears again and again throughout the History; and elsewhere it is said that he was the best lawgiver to this nation after Edward I. … The parliaments, indeed, that Henry summoned were only seven in number, and seldom did anyone of them last over a year, so that during a reign of nearly twenty-four years many years passed away without a Parliament at all. But even in those scanty sittings many Acts were passed to meet evils that were general subjects of complaint. … He could scarcely be called a learned man, yet he was a lover of learning, and gave his children an excellent education. His Court was open to scholars. … He was certainly religious after the fashion of his day. … His religious foundations and bequests perhaps do not necessarily imply anything more than conventional feeling. But we must not overlook the curious circumstance that he once argued with a heretic at the stake at Canterbury and got him to renounce his heresy. It is melancholy to add that he did not thereupon release him from the punishment to which he had been sentenced; but the fact seems to show that he was afraid of encouraging insincere conversions by such leniency. During the last two or three years of the 15th century there was a good deal of procedure against heretics, but on the whole, we are told, rather by penances than by fire. Henry had no desire to see the old foundations of the faith disturbed. His zeal for the Church was recognised by no less than three Popes in his time, who each sent him a sword and a cap of maintenance. … To commerce and adventure he was always a good friend. By his encouragement Sebastian Cabot sailed from Bristol and discovered Newfoundland—The New Isle, as it at first was called. Four years earlier Columbus had first set foot on the great western continent, and had not his brother been taken by pirates at sea, it is supposed that he too might have made his great discovery under Henry's patronage."

James Gairdner, Henry the Seventh, chapter 13.

ALSO IN: Lord Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry VII.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1509, Accession of King Henry VIII.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1151-1513. Enlisted In the Holy League of Pope Julius II. against France.

See ITALY: A. D. 1510-1513.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1513. Henry's invasion of France. The victory of the Battle of the Spurs.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1513-1515.

{827}

ENGLAND: A. D. 1513-1529. The ministry of Cardinal Wolsey.

From 1513 to 1529, Thomas Wolsey, who became Archbishop of York in 1514, and Cardinal in 1515, was the minister who guided the policy of Henry VIII., so far as that head-strong and absolute monarch could be guided at all. "England was going through a crisis, politically, socially, and intellectually, when Wolsey undertook the management of affairs. … We must regret that he put foreign policy in the first place, and reserved his constructive measures for domestic affairs. … Yet even here we may doubt if the measures of the English Reformation would have been possible if Wolsey's mind had not inspired the king and the nation with a heightened consciousness of England's power and dignity. Wolsey's diplomacy at least tore away all illusions about Pope and Emperor, and the opinion of Europe, and taught Henry VIII. the measure of his own strength. It was impossible that Wolsey's powerful hand should not leave its impression upon everything which it touched. If Henry VIII. inherited a strong monarchy, Wolsey made the basis of monarchical power still stronger. … Wolsey saw in the royal power the only possible means of holding England together and guiding it through the dangers of impending change. … Wolsey was in no sense a constitutional minister, nor did he pay much heed to constitutional forms. Parliament was only summoned once during the time that he was in office, and then he tried to browbeat Parliament and set aside its privileges. In his view the only function of Parliament was to grant money for the king's needs. The king should say how much he needed, and Parliament ought only to advise how this sum might be most conveniently raised. … He was unwise in his attempt to force the king's will upon Parliament as an unchangeable law of its action. Henry VIII. looked and learned from Wolsey's failure, and when he took the management of Parliament into his own hands he showed himself a consummate master of that craft. … He was so skilful that Parliament at last gave him even the power over the purse, and Henry, without raising a murmur, imposed taxes which Wolsey would not have dared to suggest. … Where Wolsey would have made the Crown independent of Parliament, Henry VIII. reduced Parliament to be a willing instrument of the royal will. … Henry … clothed his despotism with the appearance of paternal solicitude. He made the people think that he lived for them, and that their interests were his, whereas Wolsey endeavoured to convince the people that the king alone could guard their interests, and that their only course was to put entire confidence in him. Henry saw that men were easier to cajole than to convince. … In spite of the disadvantage of a royal education, Henry was a more thorough Englishman than Wolsey, though Wolsey sprang from the people. It was Wolsey's teaching, however, that prepared Henry for his task. The king who could use a minister like Wolsey and then throw him away when he was no longer useful, felt that there was no limitation to his self-sufficiency. … For politics in the largest sense, comprising all the relations of the nation at home and abroad, Wolsey had a capacity which amounted to genius, and it is doubtful if this can be said of any other Englishman. … Taking England as he found her, he aimed at developing all her latent possibilities, and leading Europe to follow in her train. … He made England for a time the centre of European politics, and gave her an influence far higher than she could claim on material grounds. … He was indeed a political artist, who worked with a free hand and a certain touch. … He was, though he knew it not, fitted to serve England, but not to serve the English king. He had the aims of a national statesman, not of a royal servant. Wolsey's misfortune was that his lot was cast on days when the career of a statesman was not distinct from that of a royal servant."

M. Creighton, Cardinal Wolsey, chapters 8 and 11.

ALSO IN: J. S. Brewer, The Reign of Henry VIII.

J. A. Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey, chapters 1-2.

G. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1514. Marriage of the king's sister with Louis XII. of France.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1513-1515.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1516-1517. Intrigues against France.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1516-1517.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1519. Candidacy of Henry VIII. for the imperial crown.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1519.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1520-1521. Rivalry of the Emperor and the French King for the English alliance.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1520-1523.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1525. The king changes sides in European politics and breaks his alliance with the Emperor.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1525-1526.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1527. New alliance with France and Venice against Charles V. Formal renunciation of the claim of the English kings to the crown of France.

See ITALY: A. D. 1527-1529.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1527-1534. Henry VIII. and the Divorce question. The rupture with Rome.

Henry VIII. owed his crown to the early death of his brother Arthur, whose widow, Catharine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand, and consequently the aunt of Charles V. [emperor], Henry was enabled to marry through a dispensation obtained by Henry VII. from Pope Julius II.,—marriage with the wife of a deceased brother being forbidden by the laws of the Church. Henry was in his twelfth year when the marriage was concluded, but it was not consummated until the death of his father. … The question of Henry's divorce from Catharine soon became a subject of discussion, and the effort to procure the annulling of the marriage from the pope was prosecuted for a number of years. Henry professed, and perhaps with sincerity, that he had long been troubled with doubts of the validity of the marriage, as being contrary to the divine law, and therefore not within the limit of the pope's dispensing power. The death of a number of his children, leaving only a single daughter, Mary, had been interpreted by some as a mark of the displeasure of God. At the same time the English people, in the fresh recollection of the long dynastic struggle, were anxious on account of the lack of a male heir to the throne. On the queen's side it was asserted that it was competent for the pope to authorize a marriage with a brother's widow, and that no doubt could possibly exist in the present case, since, according to her testimony, her marriage with Arthur had never been completed. The eagerness of Henry to procure the divorce increased with his growing passion for Anne Boleyn. The negotiations with Rome dragged slowly on. Catharine was six years older than himself, and had lost her charms. {828} He was enamored of this young English girl, fresh from the court of France. He resolved to break the marriage bond with the Spanish princess who had been his faithful wife for nearly twenty years. It was not without reason that the king became more and more incensed at the dilatory and vacillating course of the pope. … Henry determined to lay the question of the validity of his marriage before the universities of Europe, and this he did, making a free use of bribery abroad and of menaces at home. Meantime, he took measures to cripple the authority of the pope and of the clergy in England. In these proceedings he was sustained by a popular feeling, the growth of centuries, against foreign ecclesiastical interference and clerical control in civil affairs. The fall of Wolsey was the effect of his failure to procure the divorce, and of the enmity of Anne Boleyn and her family. … In order to convict of treason this minister, whom he had raised to the highest pinnacle of power, the king did not scruple to avail himself of the ancient statute of præmunire, which Wolsey was accused of having transgressed by acting as the pope's legate in England—it was dishonestly alleged, without the royal license. Early in 1531 the king charged the whole body of the clergy with having incurred the penalties of the same law by submitting to Wolsey in his legatine character. Assembled in convocation, they were obliged to implore his pardon, and obtained it only in return for a large sum of money. In their petition he was styled, in obedience to his dictation, 'The Protector and Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England,' to which was added, after long debate, at the suggestion of Archbishop Warham—'as far as is permitted by the law of Christ.' The Church, prostrate though it was at the feet of the despotic king, showed some degree of self-respect in inserting this amendment. Parliament forbade the introduction of papal bulls into England. The king was authorized if he saw fit, to withdraw the annats—first-fruits of benefices—from the pope. Appeals to Rome were forbidden. The retaliatory measures of Henry did not move the pope to recede from his position. On or about January 25, 1533, the king was privately married to Anne Boleyn. … In 1534 Henry was conditionally excommunicated by Clement VII. The papal decree deposing him from the throne, and absolving his subjects from their allegiance, did not follow until 1538, and was issued by Paul III. Clement's bull was sent forth on the 23 of March. On the 23 of November Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, without the qualifying clause which the clergy had attached to their vote. The king was, moreover, clothed with full power and authority to repress and amend all such errors, heresies, and abuses as 'by any manner of spiritual authority or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed.' Thus a visitatorial function of vast extent was recognized as belonging to him. In 1532 convocation was driven to engage not 'to enact or promulge or put in execution' any measures without the royal license, and to promise to change or to abrogate any of the 'provincial constitutions' which he should judge inconsistent with his prerogative. The clergy were thus stripped of all power to make laws. A mixed commission, which Parliament ordained for the revision of the whole canon law, was not appointed in this reign. The dissolution of the king's marriage thus dissolved the union of England with the papacy."