The Evolution of an Empire: A Brief Historical Sketch of England Part 4

Charles VII. was King. The English were driven out of France, and the Hundred Years' War ended in defeat (1453). England had lost Aquitaine, which for two hundred years (since Henry II.) had been hers, and had not a foot of ground on Norman soil.

The long shadow cast by Edward III upon England was deepening. A ruinous war had drained her resources and arrested her liberties; and now the odium of defeat made the burdens it imposed intolerable. The temper of every cla.s.s was strained to the danger point. The wretched government was held responsible, followed, as usual, by impeachments, murders, and impotent outbursts of fury.

[Sidenote: Jack Cade's Insurrection, 1450]

While, owing to social processes long at work, feudalism was in fact a ruin, a mere empty sh.e.l.l, it still seemed powerful as ever; just as an oak, long after its roots are dead, will still carry aloft a waving ma.s.s of green leaf.a.ge. The great Earl of Warwick when he went to Parliament was still followed by 600 liveried retainers. But when Jack Cade led 20,000 men in rebellion at the close of the French war, they were not the serfs and villeinage of other times, but farmers and laborers, who, when they demanded a more economical expenditure of royal revenue, freedom at elections, and the removal of restrictions on their dress and living, knew their rights, and were not going to give them up without a struggle.

But the madness of personal ambition was going to work deeper ruin and more complete wreck of England's fortunes. We have seen that by the interposition of Parliament, the House of Lancaster had been placed on the throne contrary to the tradition which gave the succession to the oldest branch, which Richard, the Duke of York, claimed to represent; his claim strengthened by a double descent from Edward III. through his two sons, Lionel and Edward.

[Sidenote: Wars of the Roses 1455-1485]

For twenty-one years, (1450-1471) these wars of the descendants of Edward III. were engaged in the most savage war, for purely selfish and personal ends, with not one n.o.ble or chivalric element to redeem the disgraceful exhibition of human nature at its worst. Murders, executions, treacheries, adorn a network of intrigue and villany, which was enough to have made the "White" and the "Red Rose" forever hateful to English eyes.

The great Earl of Warwick led the White Rose of York to victory, sending the Lancastrian King to the tower, his wife and child fugitives from the Kingdom, and proclaimed Edward, (son of Richard Duke of York, the original claimant, who had been slain in the conflict), King of England.

[Sidenote: Death of Henry VI. House of York, 1461-1485.]

Then, with an unscrupulousness worthy of the time and the cause, Warwick opened communication with the fugitive Queen, offering her his services, betrothed his daughter to the young Edward, Prince of Wales, took up the red Lancastrian rose from the dust of defeat,--brought the captive he had sent to the tower back to his throne--only to see him once more dragged down again by the Yorkists--and for the last time returned to captivity; leaving his wife a prisoner and his young son dead at Tewksbury, stabbed by Yorkist lords. Henry VI. died in the Tower, "mysteriously," as did all the deposed and imprisoned Kings; Warwick was slain in battle, and with Edward IV, the reign of the House of York commenced.

Such in brief is the story of the "_Wars of the Roses_" and of the Earl of Warwick, the "_King Maker_."

[Sidenote: Edward IV., 1471-1483.]

At the close of the Wars of the Roses, feudalism was a ruin. The oak with its dead roots had been prostrated by the storm. The imposing system had wrought its own destruction. Eighty Princes of the blood royal had perished, and more than half of the n.o.bility had died on the field or the scaffold, or were fugitives in foreign lands. The great Duke of Exeter, brother-in-law to a King, was seen barefoot begging bread from door to door.

By the confiscation of one-fifth of the landed estate of the Kingdom, vast wealth poured into the King's treasury. He had no need now to summon Parliament to vote him supplies. The clergy, rendered feeble and lifeless from decline in spiritual enthusiasm, and by its blind hostility to the intellectual movement of the time, crept closer to the throne, while Parliament, with its partially disfranchised House of Commons, was so rarely summoned that it almost ceased to exist. In the midst of the general wreck, the Kings.h.i.+p towered in solitary greatness.

Edward IV. was absolute sovereign. He had no one to fear, unless it was his intriguing brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who, during the twenty-three years of Edward's reign, was undoubtedly carefully planning the bloodstained steps by which he himself should reach the throne.

Acute in intelligence, distorted in form and in character, this Richard was a monster of iniquity. The hapless boy left heir to the throne upon the death of Edward IV., his father, was placed under the guardians.h.i.+p of his misshapen uncle, who until the majority of the young King, Edward V., was to reign under the t.i.tle of Protector.

[Sidenote: Richard III., 1483-1485. Death of the Princes in the Tower.]

How this "Protector" protected his nephews all know. The two boys (Edward V. and Richard, Duke of York) were carried to the Tower. The world has been reluctant to believe that they were really smothered, as has been said; but the finding, nearly two hundred years later, of the skeletons of two children which had been buried or concealed at the foot of the stairs leading to their place of confinement, seems to confirm it beyond a doubt.

[Sidenote: Bosworth Field. House of Tudor, 1485-1603. Henry VII., 1485-1509.]

Retribution came swiftly. Two years later Richard fell at the battle of Bosworth Field, and the crown won by numberless crimes, rolled under a hawthorn bush. It was picked up and placed upon a worthier head.

Henry Tudor, an offshoot of the House of Lancaster, was proclaimed King Henry VII., and his marriage with Princess Elizabeth of York (sister of the princes murdered in the Tower) forever blended the White and the Red Rose in peaceful union.

[Sidenote: Printing Introduced into England.]

During all this time, while Kings came and Kings went, the people viewed these changes from afar. But if they had no longer any share in the government, a great expansion was going on in their inner life.

Caxton had set up his printing press, and the "art preservative of all arts," was bringing streams of new knowledge into thousands of homes.

Copernicus had discovered a new Heaven, and Columbus a new Earth. The sun no longer circled around the Earth, nor was the Earth a flat plain.

There was a revival of cla.s.sic learning at Oxford, and Erasmus, the great preacher, was founding schools and preparing the minds of the people for the impending change, which was soon to be wrought by that Monk in Germany, whose soul was at this time beginning to be stirred to its mighty effort at reform.

CHAPTER VI.

[Sidenote: Henry VIII., 1509-1517]

When in the year 1509 a handsome youth of eighteen came to the throne, the hopes of England ran high. His intelligence, his frank, genial manners, his sympathy with the "new learning," won all cla.s.ses. Erasmus in his hopes of purifying the Church, and Sir Thomas More in his "Utopian" dreams for politics and society, felt that a friend had come to the throne in the young Henry VIII.

Spain had become great through a union of the rival Kingdoms Castile and Aragon; so a marriage with the Princess Katharine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, had been arranged for the young Prince Henry, who had quietly accepted for his Queen his brother's widow, six years his senior.

France under Francis I. had risen into a state no less imposing than Spain, and Henry began to be stirred with an ambition to take part in the drama of events going on upon the greater stage, across the Channel. The old dream of French conquest returned. Francis I. and Charles V. of Germany had commenced their struggle for supremacy in Europe. Henry's ambition was fostered by their vying with each other to secure his friends.h.i.+p. He was soon launched in a deep game of diplomacy, in which three intriguing Sovereigns were striving each to outwit the others.

What Henry lacked in experience and craft was supplied by his Chancellor Wolsey, whose private and personal ambition to reach the Papal Chair was dexterously mingled with the royal game. The game was dazzling and absorbing, but it was unexpectedly interrupted; and the golden dreams of Erasmus and More, of a slow and orderly development in England through an expanding intelligence, were rudely shaken.

Martin Luther audaciously nailed on the door of the Church at Wittenberg a protest against the selling of papal indulgences, and the pent-up hopes, griefs and despair of centuries burst into a storm which shook Europe to its centre.

[Sidenote: Reformation, 1517]

Since England had joined in the great game of European politics, she had advanced from being a third-rate power to the front rank among nations; so it was with great satisfaction that Catholic Europe heard Henry VIII. denounce the new Reformation, which had swiftly a.s.sumed alarming proportions.

[Sidenote: Marriage with Anne Boleyn, 1533.]

But a woman's eyes were to change all this. As Henry looked into the fair face of Anne Boleyn, his conscience began to be stirred over his marriage with his brother's widow, Katharine. He confided his scruples to Wolsey, who promised to use his efforts with the Pope to secure a divorce from Katharine. But this lady was niece to Charles V., the great Champion of the Church in its fight with Protestantism. It would never do to alienate him. So the divorce was refused.

Henry VIII. was not as flexible and amiable now as the youth of eighteen had been. He defied the Pope, married Anne (1533), and sent his Minister into disgrace for not serving him more effectually. "There was the weight which pulled me down," said Wolsey of Anne, and death from a broken heart mercifully saved the old man from the scaffold he would certainly have reached.

The legion of demons which had been slumbering in the King were awakened. He would break no law, but he would bend the law to his will.

He commanded a trembling Parliament to pa.s.s an act sustaining his marriage with Anne. Another permitting him to name his successor, and then another--making him _supreme head of the Church in England_. The Pope was forever dethroned in his Kingdom, and Protestantism had achieved a bloodstained victory.

[Sidenote: His Supremacy. Henry a Protestant. Anne Boleyn's Death, 1536.]

Henry alone could judge what was orthodoxy and what heresy; but to disagree with _him_, was death. Traitor and heretic went to the scaffold in the same hurdle; the Catholic who denied the King's supremacy riding side by side with the Protestant who denied transubstantiation. The Protestantism of this great convert was political, not religious; he despised the doctrines of Lutheranism, and it was dangerous to believe too much and equally dangerous to believe too little. Heads dropped like leaves in the forest, and in three years the Queen who had overturned England and almost Europe, was herself carried to the scaffold (1536).

It was in truth a "Reign of Terror" by an absolutism standing upon the ruin of every rival. The power of the Barons had gone; the Clergy were panic-stricken, and Parliament was a servant, which arose and bowed humbly to his vacant throne at mention of his name! A member for whom he had sent knelt trembling one day before him. "Get my bill pa.s.sed to- morrow, my little man," said the King, "or to-morrow, this head of yours will be off." The next day the bill pa.s.sed, and millions of Church property was confiscated, to be thrown away in gambling, or to enrich the adherents of the King.

Thomas Cromwell, who had succeeded to Wolsey's vacant place, was his efficient instrument. This student of Machiavelli's "Prince," without pa.s.sion or hate, pity or regret, marked men for destruction, as a woodman does tall trees, the highest and proudest names in the Kingdom being set down in his little notebook under the head of either "Heresy"

or "Treason." Sir Thomas More, one of the wisest and best of men, would not say he thought the marriage with Katharine had been unlawful, and paid his head as the price of his fearless honesty.

Jane Seymour, whom Henry married the day after Anne Boleyn's execution, died within a year at the birth of a son (Edward VI.). In 1540 Cromwell arranged another union with the plainest woman in Europe, Anne of Cleves; which proved so distasteful to Henry that he speedily divorced her, and in resentment at Cromwell's having entrapped him, by a flattering portrait drawn by Holbein, the Minister came under his displeasure, which at that time meant death. He was beheaded in 1540, and in that same year occurred the King's marriage with Katharine Howard, who one year later met same fate as Anne Boleyn.

[Sidenote: Katherine Howard's Death 1541. Death of Henry VIII., 1547.]

Katharine Parr, the fifth and last wife, and an ardent Protestant and reformer, also narrowly escaped, and would undoubtedly at last have gone to the block. But Henry, who at fifty-six was infirm and wrecked in health, died in the year 1547, the signing of death-warrants being his occupation to the very end.

Whatever his motive, Henry VIII. had in making her Protestant, placed England firmly in the line of the world's highest progress; and strange to say, that Kingdom is most indebted to two of her worst Kings.

[Sidenote: Edward VI 1547-1555. Lady Jane Grey's Death, 1553.]