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 33)

In this contest with the Papacy, Philip threw himself on the support of the whole body of his people, convoking (1302) the first meeting of the Three Estates—the first of the few general Parliaments—ever assembled in France.

Destruction of the Templars.

A more sinister event in the reign of Philip IV. was his prosecution and destruction of the famous Order of the Knights Templars. The dark, dramatic story has been told many times, and its incidents are familiar. Perhaps there will never be agreement as to the bottom of truth that might exist in the charges brought against the Order; but few question the fact that its blackest guilt in the eyes of the French King was its wealth, which he coveted and which he was resolved to find reasons for taking to himself. The knights were accused of infidelity, blasphemy, and abominable vices. They were tried, tortured, tempted to confessions, burned at the stake, and their lands and goods were divided between the Crown and the Knights of St. John.

Flemish Wealth and Independence.

The wilful king had little mercy in his cold heart and few scruples in his calculating brain. His character was not admirable; but the ends which he compassed were mostly good for the strength and independence of the monarchy of France, and, on the whole, for the welfare of the people subject to it. Even the disasters of his reign had sometimes their good effect: as in the case of his failure to subjugate the great county of Flanders. Originally a fief of the Kings of France, it had been growing apart from the French monarchy, through the independent interests and feelings that rose in it with the increase of wealth among its singularly industrious and thrifty people. The Low Countries, or Netherlands, on both sides of the Rhine, had been the first in western Europe to develop industrial arts and the trade that goes with them in a thoroughly intelligent and systematic way. The Flemings were leaders in this industrial development. Their country was full of busy cities,—communes, with large liberties in possession,—where prosperous artisans, pursuing many crafts, were organized in gilds and felt strong for the defense of their chartered rights. Ghent exceeded Paris in riches and population at the end of the thirteenth century. Bruges was nearly its equal; and there were many of less note. The country was already a prize to be coveted by kings; and the kings of France, who claimed the rights of feudal superiority over its count, had long been seeking to make their sovereignty direct, while the spirit of the Flemings carried them more and more toward independence.

In 1294, Philip IV. became involved in war with Edward I. of England over Guienne. Flanders, which traded largely with England and was in close friendship with the English king and people, took sides with the latter, and was basely abandoned when Philip and Edward made peace, in 1302. The French king then seized his opportunity to subjugate the Flemings, which he practically accomplished for a time, mastering all of their cities except Ghent. His need and his greed made the burden of taxes which he now laid on these new subjects very heavy and they were soon in revolt. By accident, and the folly of the French, they won a fearfully decisive victory at Courtray, where some thousands of the nobles and knights of France charged blindly into a canal, and were drowned, suffocated and slaughtered in heaps. The carnage was so great that it broke the strength of the feudal chivalry of France, and the French crown, while it lost Flanders, yet gained power from the very disaster.

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In 1314, Philip IV. died, leaving three sons, who occupied the throne for brief terms in succession: Louis X, surnamed Hutin (disorder), who survived his father little more than a year; Philip V., called "the Long" (1316-1322), and Charles IV., known as "the Fair" (1322-1328). With the death of Charles the Fair, the direct line of the Capetian Kings came to an end, and Philip, Count of Valois, first cousin of the late kings, and grandson of Philip III., came to the throne, as Philip VI.—introducing the Valois line of kings.

Claims of Edward III. of England.

The so-called Salic law, excluding females, in France, from the throne, had now, in the arrangement of these recent successions, been affirmed and enforced. It was promptly disputed by King Edward III. of England, who claimed the French crown by right of his mother, daughter of Philip IV. and sister of the last three kings. His attempt to enforce this claim was the beginning of the wicked, desolating "Hundred Years War" between England and France, which well-nigh ruined the latter, while it contributed in the former to the advancement of the commons in political power.

England after the Norman Conquest.

The England of the reign of Edward III., when the Hundred Years War began, was a country quite different in condition from that which our narrative left, at the time it had yielded (about 1071) to William the Norman conqueror. The English people were brought low by that subjugation, and the yoke which the Normans laid upon them was heavy indeed. They were stripped of their lands by confiscation; they were disarmed and disorganized; every attempt at rebellion failed miserably, and every failure brought wider confiscations. The old nobility suffered most and its ranks were thinned. England became Norman in its aristocracy and remained English in its commons and its villeinage.

Modified Feudalism in England.

Before the Conquest, feudalism had crept into its southern parts and was working a slow change of its old free Germanic institutions. But the Normans quickened the change and widened it. At the same time they controlled it in certain ways, favorably both to the monarchy and the people. They established a feudal system, but it was a system different from that which broke up the unity of both kingdoms of the Franks. William, shrewd statesman that he was, took care that no dangerous great fiefs should be created; and he took care, too, that every landlord in England should swear fealty direct to the king,—thus placing the Crown in immediate relations with all its subjects, permitting no intermediary lord to take their first allegiance to himself and pass it on at second hand to a mere crowned overlord.

The effect of this diluted organization of feudalism in England was to make the monarchy so strong, from the beginning, that both aristocracy and commons were naturally put on their defence against it, and acquired a feeling of association, a sense of common interest, a habit of alliance, which became very important influences in the political history of the nation. In France, as we have seen, there had been nothing of this. There, at the beginning, the feudal aristocracy was dominant, and held itself so haughtily above the commons, or Third Estate, that no political cooperation between the two orders could be thought of when circumstances called for it. The kings slowly undermined the aristocratic power, using the communes in the process; and when, at last, the power of the monarchy had become threatening to both orders in the state, they were separated by too great an alienation of feeling and habit to act well together.

It was the great good fortune of England that feudalism was curbed by a strong monarchy. It was the greater good fortune of the English people that their primitive Germanic institutions—their folk-moots, and their whole simple popular system of local government—should have had so long and sturdy a growth before the feudal scheme of society began seriously to intrude upon them. The Norman conqueror did no violence to those institutions. He claimed to be a lawful English king, respecting English laws. The laws, the customs, the organization of government, were, indeed, greatly modified in time; but the modification was slow, and the base of the whole political structure that rose in the Anglo-Norman kingdom remained wholly English.

Norman Influences in England.

The Normans brought with them into England a more active, enterprising, enquiring spirit than had animated the land before. They brought an increase of learning and of the appetite for knowledge. They brought a more educated taste in art, to improve the building of the country and its workmanship in general. They brought a wider acquaintance with the affairs of the outside world, and drew England into political relations with her continental neighbors, which were not happy for her in the end, but which may have contributed for a time to her development. They brought, also, a more powerful organization of the Church, which gave England trouble in later days.

The Conqueror's Sons.

When the Conqueror died (1087), his eldest son Robert succeeded him in Normandy, but he wished the crown of England to go to his son William, called Rufus, or "the Red." He could not settle the succession by his will, because in theory the succession was subject to the choice or assent of the nobles of the realm. But, in fact, William Rufus became king through mere tardiness of opposition; and when, a few months after his coronation, a formidable rebellion broke out among the Normans in England, who preferred his wayward brother Robert, it was the native English who sustained him and established him on the throne. The same thing occurred again after William Rufus died (1100). The Norman English tried again to bring in Duke Robert, while the native English preferred the younger brother, Henry, who was born among them. They won the day. Henry I., called Beauclerc, the Scholar, was seated on the throne. Unlike William Rufus, who had no gratitude for the support the English gave him, and ruled them harshly, Henry showed favor to his English subjects, and, during his reign of thirty-five years, the two races were so effectually reconciled and drawn together that little distinction between them appears thereafter.

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Henry acquired Normandy, as well as England, uniting again the two sovereignties of his father. His thriftless brother, Robert, had pledged the dukedom to William Rufus, who lent him money for a crusading expedition. Returning penniless, Robert tried to recover his heritage; but Henry claimed it and made good the claim.

Anarchy in Stephen's Reign.

At Henry's death, the succession fell into dispute. He had lost his only son. His daughter, Matilda, first married to the Emperor Henry V., had subsequently wedded Count Geoffrey of Anjou, by whom she had a son. Henry strove, during his life, to bind his nobles by oath to accept Matilda and her son as his successors. But on his death (1135) their promises were broken. They gave the crown to Stephen of Blois, whose mother was Henry's sister; whereupon there ensued the most dreadful period of civil war and anarchy that England ever knew. Stephen, at his coronation, swore to promises which he did not keep, losing many of his supporters for that reason; the Empress Matilda and her young son Henry had numerous partisans; and each side was able to destroy effectually the authority of the other. "The price of the support given to both was the same—absolute licence to build castles, to practise private war, to hang their private enemies, to plunder their neighbours, to coin their money, to exercise their petty tyrannies as they pleased." "Castles innumerable sprang up, and as fast as they were built they were filled with devils; each lord judged and taxed and coined. The feudal spirit of disintegration had for once its full play. Even party union was at an end, and every baron fought on his own behalf. Feudalism had its day, and the completeness of its triumph ensured its fall" (Stubbs).

Angevin Kings of England.

At length, in 1153, peace was made by a treaty which left Stephen in possession of the throne during his life, but made Henry, already recognized as Duke of Normandy, his heir. Stephen died the following year, and Henry II., now twenty-one years old, came quietly into his kingdom, beginning a new royal line, called the Angevin kings, because of their descent from Geoffrey of Anjou; also taking the name Plantagenets from Geoffrey's fashion of wearing a bit of broom, Planta Genista, in his hat.

Henry II. proved, happily, to be a king of the strong character that was needed in the England of that wretched time. He was bold and energetic, yet sagacious, prudent, politic. He loved power and he used it with an unsparing hand; but he used it with wise judgment, and England was the better for it. He struck hard and persistently at the lawlessness of feudalism, and practically ended it forever as a menace to order and unity of government in England. He destroyed hundreds of the castles which had sprung up throughout the land in Stephen's time, to be nests of robbers and strongholds of rebellion. He humbled the turbulent barons. He did in England, for the promotion of justice, and for the enforcement of the royal authority, what Louis IX. did a little later in France: that is, he reorganized and strengthened the king's courts, creating a judicial system which, in its most essential features, has existed to the present time. His organizing hand brought system and efficiency into every department of the government. He demanded of the Church that its clergy should be subject to the common laws of the kingdom, in matters of crime, and to trial before the ordinary courts; and it was this most just reform of a crying abuse—the exemption of clerics from the jurisdiction of secular courts—which brought about the memorable collision of King Henry with Thomas Becket, the inflexible archbishop of Canterbury. Becket's tragical death made a martyr of him, and placed Henry in a penitential position which checked his great works of reform; but, on the whole, his reign was one of splendid success, and shines among the epochs that throw light on the great after-career of the English nation.

Aside from his importance as an English statesman, Henry II. figured largely, in his time, among the most powerful of the monarchs of Europe. His dominions on the continent embraced much more of the territory of modern France than was ruled directly by the contemporary French king, though nominally he held them as a vassal of the latter. Normandy came to him from his grandfather; from his father he inherited the large possessions of the House of Anjou; by his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine (divorced by Louis VII. of France, as mentioned already) he acquired her wide and rich domain. On the continent, therefore, he ruled Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Guienne, Poitou and Gascony. He may be said to have added Ireland to his English kingdom, for he began the conquest. He held a great place, in his century, and historically he is a notable figure in the time.

His rebellious, undutiful son Richard, Cœur de Lion, the Crusader, the hard fighter, the knight of many rude adventures, who succeeded Henry II. in 1189, is popularly better known than he; but Richard's noisy brief career shows poorly when compared with his father's life of thoughtful statesmanship. It does not show meanly, however, like that of the younger son, John, who came to the throne in 1199. The story of John's probable murder of his young nephew, Arthur, of Brittany, and of his consequent loss of all the Angevin lands, and of Normandy (excepting only the Norman islands, the Jerseys, which have remained English to our own day) has been briefly told heretofore, when the reign of Philip Augustus of France was under review.

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The whole reign of John was ignominious. He quarreled with the Pope—with the inflexible Innocent III., who humbled many kings—over a nomination to the Archbishopric of Canterbury (1205); his kingdom was put under interdict (1208); he was threatened with deposition; and when, in affright, he surrendered, it was so abjectly done that he swore fealty to the Pope, as a vassal to his suzerain, consenting to hold his kingdom as a fief of the Apostolic See. The triumph of the Papacy in this dispute brought one great good to England. It made Stephen Langton Archbishop of Canterbury, and thereby gave a wise and righteous leader to the opponents of the king's oppressive rule. Lords and commons, laity and clergy, were all alike sufferers from John's greed, his perfidy, his mean devices and his contempt of law. Langton rallied them to a sober, stern, united demonstration, which awed King John, and compelled him to put his seal to Magna Charta—the grand Charter of English liberties (1215). A few weeks later he tried to annul what he had done, with encouragement from the Pope, who anathematized the Charter and all who had to do with it. Then certain of the barons, in their rage, offered the English crown to the heir of France, afterwards Louis VIII.; and the French prince actually came to England (1216) with an army to secure it. But before the forces gathered on each side were brought to any decisive battle, John died. Louis' partisans then dropped away from him and the next year, after a defeat at sea, he returned to France.

Henry III. and the Barons' War.

John left a son, a lad of nine years, who grew to be a better man than himself, though not a good king, for he was weak and untruthful in character, though amiable and probably well-meaning. He held the throne for fifty-six years, during which long time, after his minority was passed, no minister of ability and honorable character could get and keep office in the royal service. He was jealous of ministers, preferring mere administrative clerks; while he was docile to favorites, and picked them for the most part from a swarm of foreign adventurers whom the nation detested. The Great Charter of his father had been reaffirmed in his name soon after he received the crown, and in 1225 he was required to issue it a third time, as the condition of a grant of money; but he would not rule honestly in compliance with its provisions, and sought continually to lay and collect heavy taxes in unlawful ways. He spent money extravagantly, and was foolish and reckless in foreign undertakings, accepting, for example, the Kingdom of Sicily, offered to his son Edmund by the Pope, whose gift could only be made good by force of arms. At the same time he was servile to the popes, whose increasing demands for money from England were rousing even the clergy to resistance. So the causes of discontent grew abundantly until they brought it to a serious head. All classes of the people were drawn together again, as they had been to resist the aggressions of John. The great councils of the kingdom, or assemblies of barons and bishops (which had taken the place of the witenagemot of the old English time, and which now began to be called Parliaments), became more and more united against the king. At last the discontent found a leader of high capacity and of heroic if not blameless character, in Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Simon de Montfort was of foreign birth,—son of that fanatical crusader of the same name, who spread ruin over the fair country of the Albigeois. The English earldom of Leicester had passed to his family, and the younger Simon, receiving it, came to England and became an Englishman. After some years he threw himself into the struggle with the Crown, and his leadership was soon recognized. In 1258, a parliament held at London compelled the king to consent to the appointment of an extraordinary commission of twenty-four barons, clothed with full power to reform the government. The commission was named at a subsequent meeting of parliament, the same year, at Oxford, where the grievances to be redressed were set forth in a paper known as the Provisions of Oxford. From the twenty-four commissioners there were chosen fifteen to be the King's Council. This was really the creation of a new constitution for the kingdom, and Henry swore to observe it. But ere long he procured a bull from the Pope, absolving him from his oath, and he began to prepare for throwing off the restraints that had been put upon him. The other side took up arms, under Simon's lead; but peace was preserved for a time by referring all questions in dispute to the arbitration of Louis IX. of France. The arbiter decided against the barons (1264) and Montfort's party refused to abide by the award. Then followed the civil conflict known as the Barons' War. The king was defeated and taken prisoner, and was obliged to submit to conditions which practically transferred the administration of the government to three counsellors, of whom Simon de Montfort was the chief.

Development of the English Parliament;

In January, 1265, a memorable parliament was called together. It was the first national assembly in which the larger element of the English Commons made its appearance; for Montfort had summoned to it certain representatives of borough towns, along with the barons, the bishops and the abbots, and along, moreover, with representative knights, who had been gaining admittance of late years to what now became a convocation of the Three Estates. The parliamentary model thus roughly shaped by the great Earl of Leicester was not continuously followed until another generation came; but it is his glory, nevertheless, to have given to England the norm and principle on which its unexampled parliament was framed. By dissensions among themselves, Simon de Montfort and his party soon lost the great advantage they had won, and on another appeal to arms they were defeated (1265) by the king's valiant and able son, afterwards King Edward I., and Montfort was slain. It was seven years after this before Edward succeeded his father, and nine before he came to the throne, because he was absent on a Crusade; but when he did, it was to prove himself, not merely one of the few statesmen-kings of England, but one large enough in mind to take lessons from the vanquished enemies of the Crown. He, in reality, took up the half-planned constitutional work of Simon de Montfort, in the development of the English Parliament as a body representative of all orders in the nation, and carried it forward to substantial completion. He did it because he had wit to see that the people he ruled could be led more easily than they could be driven, and that their free-giving of supplies to the Crown would be more open-handed than their giving under compulsion. The year 1295 "witnessed the first summons of a perfect and model parliament; the clergy represented by their bishops, deans, archdeacons, and elected proctors; the barons summoned severally in person by the king's special writ, and the commons summoned by writs addressed to the sheriffs, directing them to send up two elected knights from each shire, two elected citizens from each city, and two elected burghers from each borough" (Stubbs). {1034} Two years later, the very fundamental principle of the English Constitution was established, by a Confirmation of the Charters, conceded in Edward's absence by his son, but afterwards assented to by him, which definitely renounced the right of the king to tax the nation without its consent. Thus the reign of Edward I. was really the most important in the constitutional history of England. It was scarcely less important in the history of English jurisprudence; for Edward was in full sympathy with the spirit of an age in which the study and reform of the law were wonderfully awakened throughout Europe. The great statutes of his reign are among the monuments of Edward's statesmanship, and not the least important of them are those by which he checked the encroachments of the Church and its dangerous acquisition of wealth.

At the same time, the temper of this vigorous king was warlike and aggressive. He subdued the Welsh and annexed Wales as a principality to England. He enforced the feudal supremacy which the English kings claimed over Scotland, and, upon the Scottish throne becoming vacant, in 1290, seated John Baliol, as a vassal who did homage to him. The war of Scottish Independence then ensued, of which William Wallace and Robert Bruce were the heroes. Wallace perished on an English scaffold in 1305; Bruce, the next year, secured the Scottish crown, and eventually broke the bonds in which his country was held.

Edward I. died in 1307, and his kingly capability died with him. He transmitted neither spirit nor wisdom to his son, the second Edward, who gave himself and his kingdom up to foreign favorites, as his grandfather had done. His angry subjects practically took the government out of his hands (1310), and confided it to a body of twenty-one members, called Ordainers. His reign of twenty years was one of protracted strife and disorder; but the constitutional power of Parliament made gains. In outward appearance, however, there was nothing to redeem the wretchedness of the time. The struggle of factions was pushed to civil war; while Scotland, by the great blow struck at Bannockburn (1314), made her independence complete. In 1322, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, whose descent was as royal as the king's, but who headed the opponents of Edward and Edward's unworthy favorites, was defeated in battle, taken prisoner, and brought to the block. This martyrdom, as it was called, embalmed Lancaster's memory in the hearts of the people.

Edward III. and his French Claims.

The queen of Edward II., Isabella of France, daughter of Philip the Fair, made, at last, common cause with his enemies. In January, 1327, he was forced to formally resign the crown, and in September of the same year he was murdered, the queen, with little doubt, assenting to the deed. His son, Edward III., who now came to the throne, founded claims to the crown of France upon the rights of his mother, whose three brothers, as we have seen, had been crowned in succession and had died, bringing the direct line of royalty in France to an end. By this claim the two countries were plunged into the miseries of the dreadful Hundred Years War, and the progress of civilization in Europe was seriously checked.

Recovery of Christian Spain.

Before entering that dark century of war, it will be necessary to go back a little in time, and carry our survey farther afield, in the countries of Europe more remote from the center of the events we have already scanned. In Spain, for example, there should be noticed, very briefly, the turning movement of the tide of Mahometan conquest which drove the Spanish Christians into the mountains of the North. In the eighth century, their little principality of Asturia had widened into the small kingdom of Leon, and the eastern county of Leon had taken the name of Castella (Castile) from the number of forts or castles with which it bristled, on the Moorish border. East of Leon, in the Pyrenees, there grew up about the same time the kingdom of Navarre, which became important in the eleventh century, under an enterprising king, Sancho the Great, who seized Castile and made a separate kingdom of it, which he bequeathed to his son. The same Navarrese king extended his dominion over a considerable part of the Spanish March, which Charlemagne had wrested from the Moors in the ninth century, and out of this territory the kingdom of Aragon was presently formed. These four kingdoms, of Leon, Navarre, Castile, and Aragon, were shuffled together and divided again, in changing combinations, many times during the next century or two; but Castile and Leon were permanently united in 1230. Meantime Portugal, wrested from the Moors, became a distinct kingdom; while Navarre was reduced in size and importance. Castile, Aragon, and Portugal are from that time the Christian Powers in the Peninsula which carried on the unending war with their Moslem neighbors. By the end of the thirteenth century they had driven the Moors into the extreme south of the peninsula, where the latter, thenceforth, held little beyond the small kingdom of Granada, which defended itself for two centuries more.

Moorish Civilization and its Decay.

The Christians were winners and the Moslems were losers in this long battle, because adversity had disciplined the one and prosperity had relaxed and vitiated the other. Success bred disunion, and the spoils of victory engendered corruption, among the followers of Mahomet, very quickly in their career. The middle of the eighth century was hardly passed when the huge empire they had conquered broke in twain, and two Caliphates on one side of the Mediterranean, imitated the two Roman Empires on the other. We have seen how the Caliphate of the East, with its seat at Bagdad, went steadily to wreck; but fresh converts of Islam, out of deserts at the North, were in readiness, there, to gather the fragments and construct a new Mahometan power. In the West, where the Caliphs held their court at Cordova, the same crumbling of their power befell them, through feuds and jealousies and the decay of a sensuous race; but there were none to rebuild it in the Prophet's name. The Moor gave way to the Castilian in Spain for reasons not differing very much from the reasons which explain the supplanting of the Arab by the Turk in the East.

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While its grandeur lasted in Spain,—from the eighth to the eleventh centuries—the empire of the Saracens, or Moors, was the most splendid of its age. It developed a civilization which must have been far finer, in the superficial showing, and in much of its spirit as well, than anything found in Christian Europe at that time. Its religious temper was less fierce and intolerant. Its intellectual disposition was towards broader thinking and freer inquiry. Its artistic feeling was truer and more instinctive. It took lessons from classic learning and philosophy before Germanized Europe had become aware of the existence of either, and it gave the lessons at second hand to its Christian neighbors. Its industries were conducted with a knowledge and a skill that could be found among no other people. Says Dr. Draper: "Europe at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement, more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. Their houses were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by underground pipes from flower beds. They had baths, and libraries, and dining halls, fountains of quicksilver and water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of dancing to lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their northern neighbors, the feasts of the Saracens were marked with sobriety."

The brilliancy of the Moorish civilization seems like that of some short-lived flower, which may spring from a thin soil of no lasting fertility. The qualities which yielded it had their season of ascendancy over the deeper-lying forces that worked in the Gothic mind of Christian Spain; but time exhausted the one, while it matured the other.

Mediæval Spanish Character.

There seems to be no doubt that the long conflict of races and religions in the peninsula affected the character of the Spanish Christians more profoundly, both for good and for ill, than it affected the people with whom they strove. It hardened and energized them, preparing them for the bold adventures they were soon to pursue in a new-found world, and for a lordly career in all parts of the rounded globe. It embittered and gave fierceness to a sentiment among them which bore some likeness to religion, but which was, in reality, the partisanship of a church, and not the devotion of a faith. It tended to put bigotry in the place of piety—religious rancor in the place of charity—priests and images in the place of Christ—much more among the Spaniards than among other peoples; for they, alone, were Crusaders against the Moslem for eight hundred years.

Early Free Institutions in Spain.

The political effects of those centuries of struggle in the peninsula were also remarkable and strangely mixed. In all the earlier stages of the national development, until the close of the mediæval period, there seems to have been as promising a growth of popular institutions, in most directions, as can be found in England itself. Apparently, there was more good feeling between classes than elsewhere in Europe. Nobles, knights and commons fought side by side in so continuous a battle that they were more friendly and familiar in acquaintance with one another. Moreover, the ennobled and the knighted were greatly more numerous in Spain than in the neighboring countries. The kings were lavish of such honors in rewarding valor, on every battlefield and after every campaign. It was impossible, therefore, for so great a distance to widen between the grandee and the peasant or the burgher as that which separated the lord and the citizen in Germany or France. The division of Christian Spain into several petty kingdoms, and the circumstances under which they were placed, retarded the growth of monarchical power, and yet did not tend to a feudal disintegration of society; because the pressure of its perpetual war with the infidels forced the preservation of a certain degree of unity, sufficient to be a saving influence. At the same time, the Spanish cities became prosperous, and naturally, in the circumstances of the country, acquired much freedom and many privileges. The inhabitants of some cities in Aragon enjoyed the privileges of nobility as a body; the magistrates of other cities were ennobled. Both in Aragon and Castile, the towns had deputies in the Cortes before any representatives of boroughs sat in the English Parliament; and the Cortes seems to have been, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a more potent factor in government than any assembly of estates in any other part of Europe.

But something was wanting in Spain that was not wanting in England and in the Netherlands, for example, to complete the evolution of a popular government from this hopeful beginning. And the primary want, it would seem, was a political sense or faculty in the people. To illustrate this in one particular: the Castilian Commons did not grasp the strings of the national purse when they had it in their hands, as the practical Englishmen did. They allowed the election of deputies from the towns to slip out of their hands and to become an official function of the municipalities, where it was corrupted and controlled by the Crown. In Aragon, the popular rights were more efficiently maintained, perhaps; but even there the political faculty of the people must have been defective, as compared with that of the nations in the North which developed free government from less promising germs. And, yet, it is possible that the whole subsequent failure of Spain may be fully explained by the ruinous prosperity of her career in the sixteenth century,—by the fatal gold it gave her from America, and the independent power it put into the hands of her kings.

Northern and North-eastern Europe.

While the Spaniards in their southern peninsula were wrestling with the infidel Moor, their Gothic kindred of Sweden, and the other Norse nations of that opposite extremity of Europe, had been casting off paganism and emerging from the barbarism of their piratical age, very slowly. It was not until the tenth and eleventh centuries that Christianity got footing among them. It was not until the thirteenth century that unity and order, the fruits of firm government, began to be really fixed in any part of the Scandinavian peninsulas.

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The same is substantially true of the greater Slavic states on the eastern side of Europe. The Poles had accepted Christianity in the tenth century, and their dukes, in the same century, had assumed the title of kings. In the twelfth century they had acquired a large dominion and exercised great power; but the kingdom was divided, was brought into collision with the Teutonic Knights, who conquered Prussia, and it fell into a disordered state. The Russians had been Christianized in the same missionary century—the tenth; but civilization made slow progress among them, and their nation was being divided and re-divided in shifting principalities by contending families and lords. In the thirteenth century they were overwhelmed by the fearful calamity of a conquest by Mongol or Tartar hordes, and fell under the brutal domination of the successors of Genghis Khan.

Latin Conquest of Constantinople.

At Constantinople, the old Greek-Roman Empire of the East had been passing through singular changes since we noticed it last. The dread with which Alexius Comnenius saw the coming of the Crusaders in 1097 was justified by the experience of his successors, after little more than a hundred years. In 1204, a crusade, which is sometimes numbered as the fourth and sometimes as the fifth in the crusading series, was diverted by Venetian influence from the rescue of Jerusalem to the conquest of Constantinople, ostensibly in the interest of a claimant of the Imperial throne. The city was taken and pillaged, and the Greek line of Emperors was supplanted by a Frank or Latin line, of which Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was the first. But this Latin Empire was reduced to a fraction of the conquered dominion, the remainder being divided among several partners in the conquest; while two Greek princes of the fallen house saved fragments of the ancient realm in Asia, and throned themselves as emperors at Trebizond and Nicæa. The Latin Empire was maintained, feebly and without dignity, a little more than half a century; and then (1261) it was extinguished by the sovereign of its Nicæan rival, Michael Palæologus, who took Constantinople by a night surprise, helped by treachery within. Thus the Greek or Byzantine Empire was restored, but much shorn of its former European possessions, and much weakened by loss of commerce and wealth. It was soon involved in a fresh struggle for life with the Turks.

The Thirteenth Century.

We have now, in our general survey of European history, just passed beyond the thirteenth century, and it will be instructive to pause here a moment and glance back over the movements and events which distinguish that remarkable age. For the thirteenth century, while it belongs chronologically to mediæval times, seems nearer in spirit to the Renaissance—shows more of the travail of the birth of our modern mind and life—than the fourteenth, and even more than the greater part of the years of the fifteenth century.

For England, it was the century in which the enduring bases of constitutional government were laid down; within which Magna Charta and its Confirmations were signed; within which the Parliament of Simon de Montfort and the Parliaments of Edward I. gave a representative form and a controlling power to the wonderful legislature of the English nation. In France, it was the century of the Albigenses; of Saint Louis and his judicial reforms; and it stretched within two years of the first meeting of the States-General of the kingdom. In Switzerland, it was the century which began the union of the three forest cantons. In Spain, it was the century which gave Aragon the "General Privilege" of Peter III.; in Hungary, it was the century of its Golden Bull. In Italy it was the century of Frederick II.,—the man of modern spirit set in mediæval circumstances; and it was the century, too, which moulded the city-republics that resisted and defeated his despotic pretensions. Everywhere, it was an age of impulses toward freedom, and of mighty upward strivings out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal state. It was an age of vast energies, directed with practical judgment and power. It organized the great league of the Hansa Towns, which surpassed, as an enterprise of combination in commercial affairs, the most stupendous undertakings of the present time. It put the weavers and traders of Flanders on a footing with knights and princes. In Venice and Genoa it crowned the merchant like a king. It sent Marco Polo to Cathay, and inoculated men with the itch of exploration from which they find no ease to this day. It was the century which saw painting revived as a living art in the world by Cimabue and Giotto, and sculpture restored by Niccola Pisano. It was the age of great church-building in Italy, in Germany and in France. It was the century of St. Francis of Assisi, and of the creation of the mendicant orders in the Church,—a true religious reformation in its spirit, however unhappy in effect it may have been. It was the time of the high tide of mediæval learning; the epoch of Aquinas, of Duns Scotus, of Roger Bacon; the true birth-time of the Universities of Paris and Oxford. It was the century which educated Dante for his immortal work.

The Fourteenth Century.

The century which followed was a period of many wars—of ruinous and deadly wars, and miserable demoralizations and disorders, which depressed all Europe by their effects. In the front of them all was the wicked Hundred Years War, forced on France by the ambition of an English king to wear two crowns; while with it came the bloody insurrection of the Jacquerie, the ravages of the free companies, and ruinous anarchy everywhere. Then, in Italy, there was a duel to the death between Venice and Genoa; and a long, wasting contest of rivals for the possession of Naples. In Germany, a contested imperial election, and the struggle of the Swiss against the Austrian Dukes. In Flanders, repeated revolts under the two Artevelds. In the East, the terrible fight of Christendom with the advancing Turk. And while men were everywhere so busily slaying one another, there came the great pestilence which they called the Black Death, to help them in the grim work, and Europe was half depopulated by it. At the same time, the Church, which might have kindled some beacon lights of faith and hope in the midst of all this darkness and terror, was sinking to its lowest state, and Rome had become an unruled robbers' den.

There were a few voices heard, above the wailing and the battle-din of the afflicted age, which charmed and comforted it; voices which preached the pure gospel of Wycliffe and Huss,—which recited the great epic of Dante,—which syllabled the melodious verse of Petrarch and Chaucer,—which told the gay tales of Boccaccio; but the pauses of peace in which men might listen to such messages and give themselves to such delights were neither many nor long.

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The Hundred Years War.

The conflict between England and France began in Flanders, then connected with the English very closely in trade. Philip VI. of France forced the Count of Flanders to expel English merchants from his territory. Edward III. retaliated (1336) by forbidding the exportation of wool to Flanders, and this speedily reduced the Flemish weavers to idleness. They rose in revolt, drove out their count, and formed an alliance with England, under the lead of Jacob van Arteveld, a brewer, of Ghent. The next year (1337) Edward joined the Flemings with an army and entered France; but made no successful advance, although his fleet won a victory, in a sea-fight off Sluys, and hostilities were soon suspended by a truce. In 1341 they were renewed in Brittany, over a disputed succession to the dukedom, and the scattered sieges and chivalric combats which made up the war in that region for two years are described with minuteness by Froissart, the gossipy chronicler of the time. After a second truce, the grimly serious stage of the war was reached in 1346. It was in that year that the English won the victory at Crécy, which was the pride and boast of their nation for centuries; and the next season they took Calais, which they held for more than two hundred years.

Philip died in 1350 and was succeeded by his son John. In 1355, Edward of England repeated his invasion, ravaging Artois, while his son, the Black Prince, from Guienne (which the English had held since the Angevin time), devastated Languedoc. The next year, this last named prince made another sally from Bordeaux, northwards, towards the Loire, and was encountered by the French king, with a splendid army, at Poitiers. The victory of the English in this case was more overwhelming than at Crécy, although they were greatly outnumbered. King John was taken prisoner and conveyed to London. His kingdom was in confusion. The dauphin called together the States-General of France, and that body, in which the commons, or third estate, attained to a majority in numbers, assumed powers and compelled assent to reforms which seemed likely to place it on a footing of equal importance with the Parliament of England. The leader of the third estate in these measures was Etienne or Stephen Marcel, provost of Paris, a man of commanding energy and courage. The dauphin, under orders from his captive father, attempted to nullify the ordinances of the States-General. Paris rose at the call of Marcel and the frightened prince became submissive; but the nobles of the provinces resented these high-handed proceedings of the Parisians and civil war ensued. The peasants, who were in great misery, took advantage of the situation to rise in support of the Paris burgesses, and for the redressing of their own wrongs. This insurrection of the Jacquerie, as it is known, produced horrible deeds of outrage and massacre on both sides, and seems to have had no other result. Paris, meantime (1358), was besieged and hard pressed; Marcel, suspected of an intended treachery, was killed, and with his death the whole attempt to assert popular rights fell to the ground.

The state of France at this time was one of measureless misery. It was overrun with freebooters—discharged soldiers, desperate homeless and idle men, and the ruffians who always bestir themselves when authority disappears. They roamed the country in bands, large and small, stripped it of what war had spared, and left famine behind them.

At length, in 1360, terms of peace were agreed upon, in a treaty signed at Bretigny, and fighting ceased, except in Brittany, where the war went on for four years more. By the treaty, all French claims upon Aquitaine and the dependencies were given up, and Edward acquired full sovereignty there, no longer owing homage, as a vassal, to the king of France. Calais, too, was ceded to England, and so heavy a ransom was exacted from the captive King John that he failed to collect money for the payment of it and died in London (1364).

Charles the Wise.

Charles V., who now ruled independently, as he had ruled for some years in his father's name, proved to be a more prudent and capable prince, and his counsellors and captains were wisely chosen. He was a man of studious tastes and of considerable learning for that age, with intelligence to see and understand the greater sources of evil in his kingdom. Above all, he had patience enough to plant better things in the seed and wait for them to grow, which is one of the grander secrets of statesmanship. By careful, judicious measures, he and those who shared the task of government with him slowly improved the discipline and condition of their armies. The "great companies" of freebooters, too strong to be put down, were lured out of the kingdom by an expedition into Spain, which the famous warrior Du Guesclin commanded, and which was sent against the detestable Pedro, called the Cruel, of Castile, whom the English supported. A stringent economy in public expenditure was introduced, and the management of the finances was improved. The towns were encouraged to strengthen their fortifications, and the state and feeling of the whole country were slowly lifted from the gloomy depth to which the war had depressed them.

At length, in 1369, Charles felt prepared to challenge another encounter with the English, by repudiating the ignominious terms of the treaty of Bretigny. Before the year closed, Edward's armies were in the country again, but accomplished nothing beyond the havoc which they wrought as they marched. The French avoided battles, and their cities were well defended. Next year the English returned, and the Black Prince earned infamy by a ferocious massacre of three thousand men, women, and children, in the city of Limoges, when he had taken it by storm. It was his last campaign. Already suffering from a mortal disease, he returned to England, and died a few years later. The war went on, with no decisive results, until 1375, when it was suspended by a truce. In 1377, Edward III. died, and the French king began war again with great success. Within three years he expelled the English from every part of France except Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg and Calais.

If he had lived a little longer, there might soon have been an end of the war. But he died in 1380, and fresh calamities fell upon unhappy France.

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Rising Power of Burgundy.

The son who succeeded him, Charles VI., was an epileptic boy of twelve years, who had three greedy and selfish uncles to quarrel over the control of him, and to plunder the Crown of territory and treasures. One of these was the Duke of Burgundy, the first prince of a new great house which King John had foolishly created. Just before that fatuous king died, the old line of Burgundian dukes came to an end, and he had the opportunity, which wise kings before him would have improved very eagerly, to annex that fief to the crown. Instead of doing so, he gave it as an appanage to his son Philip, called "the Bold," and thus rooted a new plant of feudalism in France which was destined to cause much trouble. Another of the uncles was Louis, Duke of Anjou, heir to the crown of Naples under a will of the lately murdered Queen Joanna, and who was preparing for an expedition to enforce his claim. The third was Duke of Berry, upon whom his father, King John, had conferred another great appanage, including Berry, Poitou and Auvergne.

The pillage and misgovernment of the realm under these rapacious guardians of the young king was so great that desperate risings were provoked, the most formidable of which broke out in Paris. They were all suppressed, and with merciless severity. At the same time, the Flemings, who had again submitted to their count, revolted once more, under the lead of Philip van Arteveld, son of their former leader. The French moved an army to the assistance of the Count of Flanders, and the sturdy men of Ghent, who confronted it almost alone, suffered a crushing defeat at Roosebeke (1382). Philip van Arteveld fell in the battle, with twenty-six thousand of his men. Two years later, the Count of Flanders died, and the Duke of Burgundy, who had married his daughter, acquired that rich and noble possession. This beginning of the union of Burgundy and the Netherlands, creating a power by the side of the throne of France which threatened to overshadow it, and having for its ultimate consequence the casting of the wealth of the Low Countries into the lap of the House of Austria and into the coffers of Spain, is an event of large importance in European history.

Burgundians and Armagnacs.

When Charles VI. came of age, he took the government into his own hands, and for some years it was administered by capable men. But in 1392 the king's mind gave way, and his uncles regained control of affairs. Philip of Burgundy maintained the ascendancy until his death, in 1404. Then the controlling influence passed to the king's brother, the Duke of Orleans, between whom and the new Duke of Burgundy, John, called the Fearless, a bitter feud arose. John, who was unscrupulous, employed assassins to waylay and murder the Duke of Orleans, which they did in November, 1407. This foul deed gave rise to two parties in France. Those who sought vengeance ranged themselves under the leadership of the Count of Armagnac, and were called by his name. The Burgundians, who sustained Duke John, were in the main a party of the people; for the Duke had cultivated popularity, especially in Paris, by advocating liberal measures and extending the rights and privileges of the citizens.

The kingdom was kept in turmoil and terror for years by the war of these factions, especially in and about Paris, where the guild of the butchers took a prominent part in affairs, on the Burgundian side, arming a riotous body of men who were called Cabochiens, from their leader's name. In 1413 the Armagnacs succeeded in recovering possession of the capital and the Cabochiens were suppressed.

Second Stage of the Hundred Years War.

Meantime, Henry V. of England, the ambitious young Lancastrian king who came to the throne of that country in 1413, saw a favorable opportunity, in the distracted state of France, to reopen the questions left unsettled by the breaking of the treaty of Bretigny. He invaded France in 1415, as the rightful king coming to dethrone a usurper, and began by taking Harfleur at the mouth of the Seine, after a siege which cost him so heavily that he found it prudent to retreat towards Calais. The French intercepted him at Agincourt and forced him to give them battle. He had only twenty thousand men, but they formed a well disciplined and well ordered army. The French had gathered eighty thousand men, but they were a feudal mob. The battle ended, like those of Crécy and Poitiers, in the routing and slaughter of the French, with small loss to Henry's force. His army remained too weak in numbers, however, for operations in a hostile country, and the English king returned home, with a great train of captive princes and lords.

He left the Armagnacs and Burgundians still fighting one another, and disabling France as effectually as he could do if he stayed to ravage the land. In 1417 he came back and began to attack the strong cities of Normandy, one by one, taking Caen first. In the next year, by a horrible massacre, the Burgundian mob in Paris overcame the Armagnacs there, and reinstated Duke John of Burgundy in possession of the capital. The latter was already in negotiation with the English king, and evidently prepared to sacrifice the kingdom for whatever might seem advantageous to himself. But in 1419 Henry V. took Rouen, and, when all of Normandy submitted with its capital, he demanded nothing less than that great province, with Brittany, Guienne, Maine, Anjou and Touraine in addition,—or, substantially, the western half of France.

Burgundian and English Alliance.

Parleyings were brought to an end in September of that year by the treacherous murder of Duke John. The Armagnacs slew him foully, at an interview to which he had been enticed, on the bridge of Montereau. His son, Duke Philip of Burgundy, now reopened negotiations with the invader, in conjunction with Queen Isabella (wife of the demented king), who had played an evil part in all the factious troubles of the time. These two, having control of the king's person, concluded a treaty with Henry V. at Troyes, according to the terms of which Henry should marry the king's daughter Catherine; should be administrator of the kingdom of France while Charles VI. lived, and should receive the crown when the latter died. The marriage took place at once, and almost the whole of France north of the Loire seemed submissive to the arrangement. The States-General and the Parliament of Paris gave official recognition to it; the disinherited dauphin of France, whose own mother had signed away his regal heritage, retired, with his Armagnac supporters, to the country south of the Loire, and had little apparent prospect of holding even that.

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Two Kings in France.

But a mortal malady had already stricken King Henry V., and he died in August, 1422. The unfortunate, rarely conscious French king, whose crown Henry had waited for, died seven weeks later. Each left an heir who was proclaimed king of France. The English pretender (Henry VI. in England, Henry II. in France) was an innocent infant, ten months old; but his court was in Paris, his accession was proclaimed with due ceremony at St. Denis, his sovereignty was recognized by the Parliament and the University of that city, and the half of France appeared resigned to the lapse of nationality which its acceptance of him signified. The true heir of the royal house of France (Charles VII.) was a young man of nearly mature age and of fairly promising character; but he was proclaimed in a little town of Berry, by a small following of lords and knights, and the nation for which he stood hardly seemed to exist.

The English supporters of the English king of France were too arrogant and overbearing to retain very long the good will of their allies among the French people. Something like a national feeling in northern France was aroused by the hostility they provoked, and the strength of the position in which Henry V. left them was steadily but slowly lost. Charles proved incapable, however, of using any advantages which opened to him, or of giving his better counsellors an opportunity to serve him with good effect, and no important change took place in the situation of affairs until the English laid siege, in 1428, to the city of Orleans, which was the stronghold of the French cause.

Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans.

Then occurred one of the most extraordinary episodes in history; the appearance of the young peasant girl of Lorraine, Jeanne d'Arc, whose coming upon the scene of war was like the descent of an angel out of Heaven, sent with a Divine commission to rescue France. Belief in the inspiration of this simple maiden, who had faith in her own visions and voices, was easier for that age than belief in a rational rally of public energies, and it worked like a miracle on the spirit of the nation. But it could not have done so with effect if the untaught country girl of Domremy had not been endowed in a wonderful way, with a wise mind, as well as with an imaginative one, and with courage as well as with faith. When the belief in her inspired mission gave her power to lead the foolish king, and authority to command his disorderly troops, she acted almost invariably with understanding, with good sense, with a clear, unclouded judgment, with straightforward singleness of purpose, and with absolute personal fearlessness. She saw the necessity for saving Orleans; and when that had been done under her own captaincy (1429), she saw how greatly King Charles would gain in prestige if he made his way to Rheims, and received, like his predecessors, a solemn coronation and consecration in the cathedral of that city. It was by force of her gentle obstinacy of determination that this was done, and the effect vindicated the sagacity of the Maid. Then she looked upon her mission as accomplished, and would have gone quietly home to her village; for she seems to have remained as simple in feeling as when she left her father's house, and was innocent to the end of any selfish pleasure in the fame she had won and the importance she had acquired. But those she had helped would not let her go; and yet they would not be guided by her without wrangle and resistance. She wished to move the army straight from Rheims to Paris, and enter that city before it had time to recover from the consternation it was in. But other counsellors retarded the march, by stopping to capture small towns on the way, until the opportunity for taking Paris was lost. The king, who had been braced up to a little energy by her influence, sank back into his indolent pleasures, and faction and frivolity possessed the court again. Jeanne strove with high courage against malignant opposition and many disheartenments, in the siege of Paris and after, exposing herself in battle with the bravery of a seasoned warrior; and her reward was to find herself abandoned at last, in a cowardly way, to the enemy, when she had led a sortie from the town of Compiegne, to drive back the Duke of Burgundy, who was besieging it. Taken prisoner, she was given up to the Duke, and sold by him to the English at Rouen.

That the Maid acted with supernatural powers was believed by the English as firmly as by the French; but those powers, in their belief, came, not from Heaven, but from Hell. In their view she was not a saint, but a sorceress. They paid a high price to the Duke of Burgundy for his captive, in order to put her on trial for the witchcraft which they held she had practised against them, and to destroy her mischievous power. No consideration for her sex, or her youth, or for the beauty and purity of character that is revealed in all the accounts of her trial, moved her judges to compassion. They condemned her remorselessly to the stake, and she was burned on the 31st of May, 1431, with no effort put forth on the part of the French or their ungrateful king to save her from that horrible fate.

End of the Hundred Years War.

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

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

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

England under Edward III.

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

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

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

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

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

England under Richard II.

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

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

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

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

England Under Henry IV.

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

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

England Under Henry V. and Henry VI.

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

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

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

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The Wars of the Roses.

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

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

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

England under the House of York.

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

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

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Richard III. and the first of the Tudors.

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

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

Germany.

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

Birth of the Swiss Confederacy.

The three cantons of Switzerland which are known distinctively as the Forest Cantons, namely, Schwytz (which gave its name in time to the whole country), Uri, and Unterwalden, had stood in peculiar relations to the Hapsburg family since long before Rudolph became Emperor and his house became the House of Austria. In those cantons, the territorial rights were held mostly by great monasteries, and the counts of Hapsburg for generations past had served the abbots and abbesses in the capacity of advocates, or champions, to rule their vassals for them and to defend their rights. Authority of their own in the cantons they had none. At the same time, the functions they performed so continually developed ideas in their minds, without doubt, which grew naturally into pretensions that were offensive to the bold mountaineers. On the other hand, the circumstances of the situation were calculated to breed notions and feelings of independence among the men of the mountains. They gave their allegiance to the Emperor—to the high sovereign who ruled over all, in the name of Rome—and they opposed what came between them and him. It is manifest that a threatening complication for them arose when the Count of Hapsburg became Emperor, which occurred in 1273. They had no serious difficulty with Rudolph, in his time; but they wisely prepared themselves for what might come, by forming, or by renewing, in 1291, a league of the three cantons,—the beginning and nucleus of the Swiss Confederation, which has maintained its independence and its freedom from that day to this. The league of 1291 had existed something more than twenty years when the confederated cantons were first called upon to stand together in resistance to the Austrian pretensions. This occurred in 1315, during the war between Louis and Frederick, when Leopold, Duke of Austria, invaded the Forest Cantons and was disastrously beaten in a fight at the pass of Morgarten. The victory of the confederates and the independence secured by it gave them so much prestige that neighboring cities and cantons sought admission to their league. In 1332 Luzern was received as a member; in 1351, 1352, and 1353, Zurich, Glarus, Zug, and Bern came in, increasing the membership to eight. It took the name of the Old League of High Germany, and its members were known as Eidgenossen, or Confederates.

Such, in brief, are the ascertained facts of the origin of the Swiss Confederacy. There is nothing found in authentic history to substantiate the popular legend of William Tell.

The questions between the league and the Austrian princes, which continued to be troublesome for two generations, were practically ended by the two battles of Sempach and Naefels, fought in 1386 and 1388, in both of which the Austrians were overthrown.

The Emperor Louis IV. and the Papacy.

While the Swiss were gaining the freedom which they never lost, Germany at large was making little progress in any satisfactory direction. Peace had not been restored by the friendly agreement of 1325 between Ludwig and Frederick. The partisans of neither were contented with it. Frederick was broken in health and soon retired from the government; in 1330 he died. The Austrian house persisted in hostility to Louis; but his more formidable enemies were the Pope and the King of France. The period was that known in papal history as "the Babylonish Captivity," when the popes resided at Avignon and were generally creatures of the French court and subservient to its ambitions or its animosities. Philip of Valois, who now reigned in France, aspired to the imperial crown, which the head of the Church had conferred on the German kings, and which the same supreme pontiff might claim authority to transfer to the sovereigns of France. This is supposed to have been the secret of the relentless hostility with which Louis was pursued by the Papacy—himself excommunicated, his kingdom placed under interdict, and every effort made to bring about his deposition by the princes of Germany. But divided and depressed as the Germans were, they revolted against these malevolent pretensions of the popes, and in 1338 the electoral princes issued a bold declaration, asserting the sufficiency of the act of election to confer imperial dignity and power, and denying the necessity for any papal confirmation whatever. Had Louis been a commanding leader, and independent of the Papacy in his own feelings, he could probably have rallied a national sentiment on this issue that would have powerfully affected the future of German history. {1044} But he lacked the needful character, and his troubles continued until he died (1347). A year before his death, his opponents had elected and put forward a rival emperor, Charles, the son of King John of Bohemia. Charles (IV.) was subsequently recognized as king without dispute, and secured the imperial crown. "It may be affirmed with truth that the genuine ancient Empire, which contained a German kingdom, came to an end with the Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian. None strove again after his death to restore the imperial power. The golden bull of his successor Charles IV. sealed the fate of the old Empire. Through it, and indeed through the entire conduct of Charles IV., King of Bohemia as he really was, and emperor scarcely more than in name, the imperial government passed more and more into the hands of the prince-electors, who came to regard the emperor no longer as their master, but as the president of an assembly in which he shared the power with themselves." "From the time of Charles IV. the main object and chief occupation of the emperors was not the Empire, but the aggrandisement and security of their own house. The Empire served only as the means and instrument of their purpose" (Dollinger).

The Golden Bull of Charles IV.

The Golden Bull referred to by Dr. Dollinger was an instrument which became the constitution, so to speak, of the Holy Roman or Germanic Empire. It prescribed the mode of the election of the King, and definitively named the seven Electors. It also conferred certain special powers and privileges on these seven princes, which raised them much above their fellows and gave them an independence that may be said to have destroyed every hope of Germanic unity. This was the one mark which the reign of Charles IV. left upon the Empire. His exertions as Emperor were all directed to the aggrandizement of his own family, and with not much lasting result. In his own kingdom of Bohemia he ruled with better effect. He made its capital, Prague, an important city, adorning it with noble buildings and founding in it the most ancient of German universities. This University of Prague soon sowed seeds from which sprang the first movement of religious reformation in Germany.

Charles IV., dying in 1378, was succeeded by his son Wenzel, or Wenceslaus, on the imperial throne as well as the Bohemian. Wenceslaus neglected both the Empire and the Kingdom, and the confusion of things in Germany grew worse. Some of the principal cities continued to secure considerable freedom and prosperity for themselves, by the combined efforts of their leagues; but everywhere else great disorder and oppression prevailed. It was at this time that the Swabian towns, to the number of forty-one, formed a union and waged unsuccessful war with a league which the nobles entered into against them. They were defeated, and crushingly dealt with by the Emperor.

In 1400 Wenceslaus was deposed and Rupert of the Palatinate was elected, producing another civil war, and reducing the imperial government to a complete nullity. Rupert died in 1410, and, after some contention, Sigmund, or Sigismund, brother of Wenceslaus, was raised to the throne. He was Margrave of Brandenburg and King of Hungary, and would become King of Bohemia when Wenceslaus died.

The Reformation of Huss in Bohemia.

Bohemia was about to become the scene of an extraordinary religious agitation, which John Huss, teacher and preacher in the new but already famous University of Prague, was beginning to stir. Huss, who drew more or less of his inspiration from Wyclif, anticipated Luther in the boldness of his attacks upon iniquities in the Church. In his case as in Luther's, the abomination which he could not endure was the sale of papal indulgences; and it was by his denunciation of that impious fraud that he drew on himself the deadly wrath of the Roman hierarchy. He was summoned before the great Council of the Church which opened at Constance in 1414. He obeyed the summons and went to the Council, bearing a safe-conduct from the Emperor which pledged protection to him until he returned. Notwithstanding this imperial pledge, he was imprisoned for seven months at Constance, and was then impatiently listened to and condemned to the stake. On the 6th of July, 1415, he was burned. In the following May, his friend and disciple, Jerome of Prague, suffered the same martyrdom. The Emperor, Sigismund, blustered a little at the insolent violation of his safe-conduct; but dared do nothing to make it effective.

In Bohemia, the excitement produced by these outrages was universal. The whole nation seemed to rise, in the first wide-spread aggressive popular revolt that the Church of Rome had yet been called upon to encounter. In 1419 there was an armed assembly of 40,000 men, on a mountain which they called Tabor, who placed themselves under the leadership of John Ziska, a nobleman, one of Huss' friends. The followers of Ziska soon displayed a violence of temper and a radicalism which repelled the more moderate Hussites, or Reformers, and two parties appeared, one known as the Taborites, the other as the Calixtines, or Utraquists. The former insisted on entire separation from the Church of Rome; the latter confined their demands to four reforms, namely: Free preaching of the Word of God; the giving of the Eucharistic cup to the laity; the taking of secular powers and of worldly goods from the clergy; the enforcing of Christian discipline by all authorities. So much stress was laid by the Calixtines on their claim to the chalice or cup (communion in both kinds) that it gave them their name. The breach between these parties widened until they were as hostile to each other as to the Catholics, and the Bohemian reform movement was ruined in the end by their division.

In 1419, the deposed Emperor Wenceslaus, who had still retained his kingdom of Bohemia, was murdered in his palace, at Prague. His brother, the Emperor Sigismund, was his heir; but the Hussites refused the crown to him, and resisted his pretensions with arms. This added a political conflict to the religious one, and Bohemia was afflicted with a frightful civil war for fifteen years. Ziska fortified mount Tabor and took possession of Prague. The Emperor and the Pope allied themselves, to crush an insurrection which was aimed against both. They summoned Christendom to a new crusade, and Sigismund led 100,000 men against Prague, in 1420. Ziska met him and defeated him, and drove him, with his crusaders, from the country. The Taborites were now maddened by their success, and raged over the land, destroying convents and burning priests. Their doctrines, moreover, began to take on a socialistic and republican character, threatening property in general and questioning monarchy, too. The well-to-do and conservative classes were more and more repelled from them.