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A HISTORY OF ENGLAND
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Books by |
RuDYARD Kipling |
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Actions and Reactions |
Light That Failed, The |
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Brushwood Bot, The |
Many Inventions |
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Captains Coubageous Collected Verse Day's Work, The |
Naulahka.The (WithWolcott Balestier) Plain Tales from the Hills Puck of Pook's Hill |
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Departmental Ditties AND Ballads and Barrack- Room Ballads Five Nations, The Jungle Book, The Jungle Book, Second Just So Song Book |
Rewards and Fairies Sea to Sea, From Seven Seas, The Soldier Stories Soldiers Three, The Story OF the Gadsbys, and In Black and White |
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Just So Stories |
Stalky & Co. |
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Kim |
They |
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Kipling Stories and Poems Evert Child Should Know |
Traffics and Discoveries Under the Deodars, The |
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Kipling Birthday Book, The |
Phantom 'Rickshaw, and |
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Life's Handicap; |
Being |
Wee Willie Winkie |
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Stories of Mine Own People |
With the Night Mail |
A History of England
By
C. R. L. Fletcher
AND
Rudyard Kipling
Pictures by Henry Ford
Garden City New York
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911
V
M^i
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY RUDYARD KIPLING
J
V /
v
C;CI.A285680f^
PREFACE
This book is written for all boys and girls who are interested in the story of Great Britain and her Empire.
C. R. L. F.
R.K. March, 1911.
The publishers desire to express their thanks to the Manager and officials of the United Services Museum, Whitehall, for their courtesy in giving facilities to the artist for making studies of the mihtary and naval material in the museum.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. From the Earliest Time to the De- parture OF the Romans . 3
II. Saxon England ... .23
III. The Norman Kings, 1066-1154 . . 50
IV. Henry II to Henry III, 1154-1272: the
Beginnings of Parliament . . 70
V. The Three Edwards, 1272-1377 . . 95
VI. The End of the Middle Ages; Richard
II TO Richard III, 1377-1485 . 112
VII. The Tudors and the Awakening of
England, 1485-1603 . . .129
VIII. The Early Stuarts and the Great
Civil War, 1603-1660 . . .165
IX. The Fall of the Stuarts and the Revo- lution, 1660-1688 . . .194
X. William III to George II, 1688-1760;
THE Growth of Empire . .212
XI. The American Rebellion and the Great French War, 1760 -1815; Reign of George III . 239
XII. George III to George V, 1815-1911 . 266
POEMS
The River's Tale . The Roman Centurion Speaks The Pirates in England . ^The Saxon Foundations of England What "Dane-geld" means William the Conqueror's Work Norman and Saxon The Reeds of Runnymede My Father's Chair The Davm Wind . The King's Job With Drake in the Tropics "Together" .... Before Edgehill Fight . The Dutch in the Medway "Brown Bess" " 'Twas not while England's sword unsheathed After the War The French Wars . The Bells and the Queen, 1911 Big Steamers
The Secret of the Machines The Glory of the Garden
PAGE 3
16 23 31
40 49 56
86 94 127 129 158 163 183 201 212 239 243 264 269 287 303 306
LIST OF COLOURED PLATES
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William I at Hastings |
Frontispiece |
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FACING PAGE |
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The Cave People 6 |
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The Landing of the Danes |
36 |
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Richard I in the Holy Land |
80 |
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Edward III at Calais |
108 |
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Richard II and Wat Tyler . . . |
114 |
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An Imaginary Map of America, 1500 |
126 |
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With Drake in the Tropics |
158 |
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Prince Rupert at Oxford, going to battle |
184 |
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CromweU with his "Ironsides " |
186 |
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The Dutch in the Med way |
202 |
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King George at Dettingen |
228 |
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Quiberon Bay .... |
236 |
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Waterloo, 7 p. m., June 18, 1815 |
264 |
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A Glimpse of the Future |
304 |
LIST OF DRAWINGS
how the King shared the
The Landing of the Romans . ■The Building of the Wall St. Augustine preaching to Ethelbert The Murder of Becket . King John signs the Great Charter Edward I's Wars with the Welsh —
hardships of his men English Archery wins at Agincourt How Henry VIII had the Monks turned out of the Monasteries Henry VIII sees that England has a good Fleet At the time of the Armada — Elizabeth reviews the Troops at
Tilbury
Brown Bess
Nelson shot at the Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805 .
14
20 34 76 84
96 118 140
142
IGO 212 258
LIST OF MAPS
FACING PAGE
Britain from the Coming of the Romans to the Norman Conquest 24
France 106
Great Britain, to illustrate history from the Norman Conquest to
the present day ........ 166
Ireland 178
British Colonial Empire after the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713 . . 224
Western Europe ....... At end
The World, showing the British Empire . . . At end
A HISTORY OF ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
FROM THE EARLIEST TIME TO THE DEPARTURE OF THE ROMANS
The River's Tale
Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew Wanted to know what the River knew. For they were young and the Thames
was old. And this is the tale that the River told:
I walk my beat before London Town,
Five hours up and seven down.
Up I go and I end my run
At Tide-end-town, which is Teddington.
Down I come with the mud in my hands
And plaster it over the Maplin Sands.
But I'd have you know that these waters
of mine Were once a branch of the River Rhine, When hundreds of miles to the east I went And England was joined to the Continent.
THE BRITISH ISLANDS
I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds. The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds. And the giant tigers that stalked them
down Through Regent's Park into Camden Town. And I remember like yesterday The earliest Cockney who came my way When he pushed through the forest that
lined the Strand, With paint on his face and a club in his
hand. He was death to feather and fin and fur. He trapped my beavers at Westminster, He netted my salmon, he hunted my
deer. He killed my herons off Lambeth Pier; He fought his neighbour with axes and
swords, Flint or bronze, at my upper fords.
While down at Greenwich for slaves and
tin The tall Phoenician ships stole in. And North Sea war-boats, painted and
gay. Flashed like dragon-flies Erith way; And Norseman and Negro and Gaul
and Greek. Prank with the Britons in Barking Creek,
THE RIVER'S TALE 5
And life was gay, and the world was new. And I was a mile across at Kew! But the Roman came with a heavy hand. And bridged and roaded and ruled the land. And the Roman left and the Danes blew
in — And that's where your history books
begin !
This is to be a short history of all the people The land who have lived in the British Islands. I have just counted up over a hundred of these islands on the map, some of them mere rocks, some as big as small counties; besides England with Scotland, and Ireland. But when first there were men in Britain it was not a group of isl- ands, but one stretch of land joining the great continent of Europe, which then reached out into the Atlantic Ocean more than fifty miles west of Ireland. The English Channel, the North Sea, and the Irish Sea were then land through which ran huge European rivers. The land was covered with forests and swamps and full of wild beasts, some of which have now vanished from the earth, while others, such as the tiger and the elephant, have gone to warmer climates. As for wolves, the land was alive with them. Indeed, the last wolf in Scotland was killed only 240 years ago; the
6 THE BRITISH ISLANDS
last in Ireland about 180 years ago. The beaver was one of the commonest animals of those early times, and perhaps helped to make our flat meadows by the dams he built across the streams.
But we know almost nothing about the first men who lived here, except that they were
Perhaps naked and very hairy; they slept in trees and years ago. Hvcd ou raw flcsh or fruit, or dug for roots with
^^^men! crookcd brauches. After a long while, prob- ably thousands of years, the climate got gradually colder, and great sheets of ice covered all Northern Europe. Then these first men either died out or went away southward. Again thousands of years passed, and the west end of Europe got freed of ice and sank several hundred feet, and the sea flooded over the lower parts. So Britain became an island or a group of islands.
Perhaps Thcu the sccoud race of men came, perhaps years ago. in somc kind of boats made of skins stretched ^nin/over bent poles. About this race we do know something. They were jolly, cunning, dark little fellows with long black hair. At first they lived high up on the hills, so that they could see their enemies from a distance. They could cook food, they dug out caves to live in, they made arrows and axes of sharp stones, and so stood a very fair chance of fighting the
THE CAVE PEOPLE
THE CAVE MEN 7
wild beasts. Their brains, though perhaps small compared to ours, were worth all the strength of all the beasts that ever howled at night. No doubt they had still something of the beast in them; they could run very swiftly; could chmb trees like monkeys; could smell their enemies and their prey far off. They grew up early and died young. Most of their children died in infancy. They clothed them- ^[if^^ selves in skins, and at first hved entirely by hunting and fishing. Their whole time was devoted to getting food for themselves and their famihes. But just think what a lot of things they had to make for themselves. How long it must have taken to poHsh a piece of flint until it was sharp enough to cut down a tree or to cut up a tough old wolf! How long to make a fish-hook or a needle of bone! How clever and hard-working these men must have been ! No doubt there were a few sneaks and lazy wretches then, as there are now% who tried to beg from other people instead of fighting for themselves and their wives. But I fancy such fellows had a worse time of it then than they have now. A man who wouldn't work very soon died.
No doubt there were holidays, too, after a successful hunt; or long lazy summer days, when it was too hot to go out after deer or
8 THE BRITISH ISLANDS
bison, and when even the women laid aside their everlasting skin-stitching and told each other stories of their babies; and the babies toddled about after butterflies, larger and brighter than the peacocks and tortoise shells of to-day. I don't suppose that these men thought of Britain as their "country"; but they thought of their family or their tribe as something sacred, for which they would fight and die; and the spirit of the good land took hold of them, the smell of the good damp mother- earth, the hum of the wild bees, the rustle of
Their heather and murmur of fern; they made rude songs about it, and carved pictures of their fights on the shoulder-blades of the beasts they had killed. As time went on they grew still more cunning, and began to tame the young of some of the beasts, such as puppies, lambs, calves and kids; and they found out the delights of a good drink of milk. And
Corn so to the hunting trade they added the shep-
growing. , . ,
herd's trade, which is a much more paying one. Then some wonderful fellow discovered how to sow seeds of wheat, or some other corn; and that these, when ripened, gathered and ground to powder, made a delicious food, which we call bread. When that was found out real civilization began; for a third trade was added, that of agriculture, the most paying of all.
THE CAVE MEN 9
So one by one the earth gave up her secrets Their
triDGS
to our forefathers, and, Hke Adam and Eve, they went forth to subdue and replenish this Isle of Britain. Each century that passed, they lived longer, were better fed, better housed, used better weapons, killed off more wild beasts. They quarrelled, of course, and even killed each other; family often fought with family, tribe with tribe, for they were always breaking the Tenth Commandment. But such quarrels were not perpetual; tribe might often join with tribe, and so begin to form one nation or people. How they were governed, what their laws and customs were, what their religious ideas were, we can only Their guess. Perhaps the eldest man of the tribe °^^' was a sort of king and declared what were the "customs" which the tribe must keep; said "this would make the gods angry" and that would not; settled the disputes about a sheep or piece of corn-land; led the tribe to fight in battle. Perhaps this king pretended to be descended from the gods, and his tribe got to believe it.
Who were the gods? Sun, moon, stars. Their rivers, trees, lakes; the rain, the lightning, the ^° ^' clouds; perhaps certain animals; dead ances- tors, if they had been brave men, would come to be counted gods. But all round you were
10 THE BRITISH ISLANDS
gods and spirits of some sort whom you must appease by sacrifices, or by absurd customs. "Do not cut your hair by moonlight, or the goddess of the moon will be angry." "If you are the king, never cut your hair at all." "Luck" perhaps was the origin of many of such customs; some famous man had once cut his hair by moonlight, and next day he had been struck by lightning. Then there were priests, or "medicine-men" of some kind. These would generally support the king; but they would often bully him also, and try to make him enforce absurd customs. , .Their Aii(j so the agcs rolled along, and these
buildings. ccc^ A s» 1
"Cave men or Stone Age men began to thin the forests a little or took advantage of the clearings caused by forest fires. They began to come down from the hill-tops, on which their earliest homes had been made, into the valleys. They began to come out of their caves, and began to build themselves villages of little wooden huts; they began to make regular beaten track-ways along the slopes of the downs; they began, perhaps, to raise huge stone temples to their heathen gods. Was it they who built Stonehenge, whose ruins even now strike us with wonder and terror? Their Tribe began to exchange its goods with foreiyers. tribe; the flints of Sussex for the deer horns of
THE CELTS 11
Devon, for deer horns make excellent pickaxes. Foreign traders came too, to buy the skins of the wild animals, also perhaps to buy slaves. Our ancestors were quite willing to sell their fellow men, captives taken in war from other tribes. What these foreigners brought in return is not very clear; perhaps only toys and ornaments, such as we now sell to savages; perhaps casks of strong drink; perhaps a few metal tools and weapons. For in Southern Europe men had now begun to make tools and weapons of bronze; the day of stone axes was nearly over. So by degrees the Stone Age men of Britain learned that there were richer and more civilized men than themselves living beyond the seas, who had things which they lacked; and, as they coveted such things, they had to make or catch something to buy them with. Therefore they bred more big dogs, killed and skinned more deer, caught more slaves. So trade began in Britain, and its benefits came first to those dwellers of the southern and south-eastern coasts who were nearest to the ports of Europe.
But the foreign traders also took home with Perhaps them the report that Britain looked a fertile ago. ^^^^ country, and was quite worth conquering. And so, perhaps about a thousand years before ^^^M^ Christ, a set of new tribes began to cross the Celts.
12 THE BRITISH ISLANDS
Channel, and to land in our islands, not as traders, but as fighters. Terrible big fellows they were, with fair hair, and much stronger than the Stone Age men. They were armed, too, with this new-fangled bronze, which made short work of our poor little bows and flint- tipped arrows and spears. Those of us who were not killed or made slaves at once fled to the forests, fled ever northward or westward, or hid in our caves again. But many of us were made slaves, especially the women, some of whom afterward married their conquerors. The Celts, for that was the name of the new people, seized all the best land, all the flocks and herds, and all the strong places on the hill- tops, and began to lead in Britain the life which they had been leading for several centuries in the country we now call France. From these Celts the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh people are mainly descended. Life of the They rodc on war-ponies, and, like the Assyrians in the Bible, they drove war-chariots; they knew, or were soon taught by foreign traders, how to dig in the earth for minerals, and they soon did a large trade in that valuable metal, tin, which is found in Cornwall, They were in every way more civilized than the Stone Age men; their gods were fiercer and stronger; their priests, called Druids, more powerful;
THE ROMAN INVASION 13
their tribes were much larger and better or- ganized for war. Their methods of hunting and fishing, of agriculture, of sheep and cow breeding, were much better; their trade with their brothers in France was far greater. Be- fore they, in their turn, were conquered, they had found out the use of iron for tools and weapons; flint had gone down before bronze; so now bronze, which is a soft metal and takes time to make, rapidly went down before the cheap and hard gray iron. He who has the best tools will win in the fight with Nature; he who has the best weapons will beat his fellow men in battle.
Meanwhile, far away in the East, great Growth of
. ' o empires
empires had been growmg up and decaying in distant for six or seven thousand years. Each con- tributed something to civilization, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece; each in turn made a bid for conquering and civilizing the "known world." But the world that they knew stretched little beyond the warm and ^°^^' tideless Mediterranean Sea. After all these arose the mighty empire of Rome, the heiress and conqueror of all these civiHzations and empires. Rome brought to her task a genius for war and government which none of them had known. The Roman armies had passed in conquest into Spain, into France, and from
14 THE BRITISH ISLANDS
Caesar's Francc they passed to Britain. The greatest of BrUaTn! ^^ Romaii soldicrs, Caius JuHus Caesar, who 55, 54 B.C. ^ag conquering the Celts in France, landed somewhere in Kent, about fifty years before Christ's birth. He found it a tough job to struggle up to the Thames, which he crossed a little above London; tough almost as much because of the forests as because of the valiant Britons, although in the open field these were no match for the disciplined Roman regiments called "legions." It is this Caesar who wrote the first account of our island and our people which has come down to us. He was very much astonished at the tide which he found in the Channel; and his book leaves us with the impression that the spirit of the dear mother- land had breathed valour and cunning in defence into the whole British people. Second For ninety years after his raid no Roman i^aSon armies came to the island. But Roman traders A.D. 43. came and Romanized Celts from France, who laughed at the "savage" ways of the British Celts. Men began to talk, in the wooden or wattle huts of British Kings (hitherto believed by the Britons to be the most magnificent buildings imaginable), of the name and fame of the great empire, of streets paved with marble, and of houses roofed with gilded bronze; of the invincible Roman legions clad
THE LANDING OF THE ROMANS
THE ROMAN CONQUEST 15
in steel and moving like steel machines; of the great paved roads driven like arrows over hill and dale, through the length and breadth of Western Europe, of the temples and baths, of the luxurious waterways of the South. Rome attracted and terrified many peoples, even before she conquered them. The Roman Emperor seemed to men who had never seen him to be a very god upon earth.
But the Roman conquest began in earnest The in the year 43, and within half a century was commest fairly complete. At first it was cruel; Roman soldiers were quite pitiless; for those who resisted they had only the sword or slavery. The north and west of Britain resisted long and hard and often. Once under the great Queen Boadicea, whose statue now stands on West- minister Bridge in London, the Britons cut to pieces a whole Roman legion. Then came cruel vengeance and reconquest; but, after reconquest, came such peace and good govern- ment as Britain had never seen before. The The Peace Romans introduced into all their provinces a gave.^°™^ system of law so fair and so strong that almost all the best laws of modern Europe have been founded on it. Everywhere the weak were protected against the strong; castles were built on the coast, with powerful garrisons in them; fleets patrolled the Channel and the
16 THE BRITISH ISLANDS
North Sea. Great roads crossed the island from east to west and from north to south. Great cities, full of all the luxuries of the South, grew up. Temples were built to the Roman gods; and country-houses of rich Roman gentle- men, of which you may still see the remains here and there. These gentlemen at first talked about exile, shivered and cursed the "beastly British climate," heated their houses with hot air, and longed to get home to Italy. But many stayed; their duty or their business obliged them to stay: and into them too the spirit of the dear motherland entered and became a passion. Their children, perhaps, never saw Rome; but Rome and Britain had an equal share of their love and devotion, and they, perhaps, thought something like this:
The Roman Centurion Speaks A Roman Legate, I had the news last night. My cohort's
soldier ■• -t ■,
who loves ordered home,
Britain, "gy gj^-p ^^ Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome. I've marched the companies aboard, the arms
are stowed below: Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go!
i
THE PEACE THAT ROME GAVE 17
I've served in Britain forty years, from Vectis
to the Wall I have none other home than this, nor any
life at all. Last night I did not understand, but, now the
hour draws near That calls me to my native land, I feel that
land is here.
Here where men say my name was made,
here where my work was done, Here where my dearest dead are laid — my
wife — my wife and son; Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age,
memory, service, love. Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how
shall I remove .^^
For me this land, that sea, these airs, those
folk and fields suffice. What purple Southern pomp can match our
changeful Northern skies. Black with December snows unshed or pearled
with August haze, The clanging arch of steel-gray March, or June's
long-lighted days?
You'll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean
IS THE BRITISH ISLANDS
Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps
Nemausus clean To Arelate's triple gate; but let me linger on, Here where our stiff-necked British oaks con- front Euroclydon!
You'll take the old Aurelian Road through shore-descending pines
Where, blue as any peacock's neck, the Tyr- rhene Ocean shines.
You'll go where laurel crowns are won, but will you e'er forget
The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?
Let me work here for Britain's sake — at any
task you will — A marsh to drain, a road to make, or native
troops to drill. Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or
granite Border keep. Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old
mess-mates sleep.
Legate, I come to you in tears — my cohort
ordered home ! I've served in Britain forty years. What
should I do in Rome?
ROME'S FAILURE 19
Here is my heart, my soul, my mind — the
only life I know — I cannot leave it all behind. Command me
not to go!
And peace was imposed all over Southern Mixture Britain; and the legions came to be stationed and"*'^ only on the frontier, afid hardly ever moved. ^«™^° No doubt at first these legions were recruited from all the regions over which Rome ruled, and she ruled from Euphrates to Tyne, from Rhine to Africa. Soon, however, they must have been recruited in Britain itself and from Britons. Celtic mothers bore British sons to Roman fathers, and crooned Celtic songs over the cradles of babies who would one day carry the Roman flag. The beautiful Latin tongue, which the Romans had brought with them, was enriched with many Celtic words.
It was, however, a misfortune for Britain What that Rome never conquered the whole island, failed to The great warrior Agricola did, between a.d. ^°* 79 and 85, penetrate far into Scotland; but he could leave no traces of civilization behind him, and Ireland he never touched at all. So Ireland never went to school, and has been a spoilt child ever since. And there was always a "Scottish frontier" to be guarded, and along this frontier the Emperor Hadrian, early in
20 THE BRITISH ISLANDS
the second century, began the famous Roman Wall. His successors improved on it until it Roman bccamc a mighty rampart of stone, eighty Wall, miles long, from Tyne to Solway, with ditches in front and behind and a strong garrison kept in its watch-towers.
To the north of the wall roamed, almost untouched, certainly unsubdued, the wilder Celts whom the Romans called "Picts" or painted men; the screen of the wall seemed a perfectly sufficient defence against these. But prosperity and riches are often bad for men; they lead to the neglect of defence. I fear that Roman Britain went to sleep behind her walls, recruiting fell off, the strength of the legions became largely a "paper strength."
Decay of And not ouly in Britain. The greatest power empire that the world has ever seen was slowly
***^a.^d! ^yi^g ^t the heart, dying of too much power, too much prosperity, too much luxury. What a lesson for us all to-day! There were pirates abroad, who smelt plunder afar off, land- thieves and sea- thieves. They began to break
i^^^^ions through the frontiers. One fine day the ter- Picts. rible news came to York, the capital of Roman Britain, that the Picts were over the wall. Where was the commander-in-chief.? Oh! he was at Bath taking the waters to cure his in- ; digestion. Where was the prefect (the highest
THE BUILDING OF THE WALL
ROME'S FAILURE 21
representative of the Emperor)? Oh! he lived at Lyons in Southern France; for he governed France as well as Britain. Quite possibly he was actually in rebellion against the Emperor of Rome, and was thinking of marching down to Italy to make himself Emperor! If so, he would be for withdrawing the few soldiers that were left in Britain instead of sending more to defend it. "A few barbarians more or less over the wall" mattered very little to a man who lived, by neglecting his duties, in Southern France; *'they could easily be driven back next year."
But it soon came to be less easy, and the Fail of
t 1 • J. I. ii p Roman
barbarians soon came to be more than a tew. Britain. An officer, called the "Count of the Saxon Shore," was created to watch against the pirates. The cities of Britain, hitherto undefended by fortifications, hastily began to run up walls for themselves. One day even these walls were in vain. Rome, Britain, and civilization were equally coming to an end, and it would be long before they revived. Half a century had completed the Roman conquest of the island; two and a half centuries of happy peace English had followed; in another half century it was f^^^^^^
from
all over. Long before the last Roman legions North were withdrawn, in 407, pirates had been break- aboS^°^ ing down all the walls and defences of Britain. 450'. ^^^"
22 THE BRITISH ISLANDS
Celtic Picts from the North, Celtic Scots from Ireland; worse than all, down the North-east wind came terrible "Englishmen," "Saxons," from the shores of North Germany and Den- mark. Rome had forced the wolf and the eagle to content themselves with rabbits and lambs; now they were going to feast once more upon the corpses of men.
CHAPTER II SAXON ENGLAND
a
The Pirates in England
When Rome was rotten-ripe to her fall. And the sceptre passed from her hand.
The pestilent Picts leaped over the wall To harry the British land.
The little dark men of the mountain and waste,
So quick to laughter and tears, They came panting with hate and haste
For the loot of five hundred years.
They killed the trader, they sacked the shops, They ruined temple and town —
They swept like wolves through the standing crops Crying that Rome was down.
They wiped out all that they could find Of beauty and strength and worth,
But they could not wipe out the Viking's Wind, That brings the ships from the North.
"^ 23
M SAXON ENGLAND
They could not wipe out the North-east gales 5
Nor what those gales set free —
The pirate ships with their close-reefed sails. Leaping from sea to sea.
They had forgotten the shield-hung hull
Seen nearer and more plain, Dipping into the troughs like a gull.
And gull-like rising again —
The painted eyes that glare and frown. In the high snake-headed stem.
Searching the beach while her sail comes down, They had forgotten them!
There was no Count of the Saxon Shore
To meet her hand to hand, As she took the beach with a surge and a roar.
And the pirates rushed inland.
The Early in the fourth century the Roman ^cS^ Empire had become Christian. And among tians. the benefits Rome had brought to Britain was the preaching of the Gospel. We know very little about the old British Church, except the names of several martyrs who died for the faith before the conversion of the Empire. One of these was the soldier, St. Alban, to whom the greatest abbey in England was
BRITAIN
to illustrate History from the
coming of the Romans
to the Norman Conquest
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THE BRITISH CHRISTIANS 25
afterward dedicated. It is probable, however, that, as in other parts of the Roman Empire, Britain was divided in bishoprics, churches were built, and heathen temples pulled down.
Our English and Saxon friends, when they The first landed in Kent and Eastern Britain, were ^a?onr° violent — you might almost say conscientious |°^.. , — heathens. They feared and hated Chris- tianity and all other traces of Roman civiliza- tion; and they rooted out everything Roman that they could lay hands on. Other provinces of the Empire, Italy, France and Spain, were also being overrun by barbarians, but none of these was as remorseless and destructive as the Saxons. Therefore in Italy, France, and Spain the "re-making" of nations on the ruins of Rome began fairly soon, but not in Britain. The Saxons made a clean sweep of the eastern half of the island, from the Forth to the Channel and westward to the Severn. An old British chronicle gives us a hint of the awful thoroughness with which they worked. "Some therefore of the miserable remnant (of Britons) being taken in the mountains were murdered in great numbers, others con- strained by famine came and yielded them- selves to be slaves forever to their foes, running the risk of being instantly slain, which truly was the greatest favour that could be offered
26 SAXON ENGLAND
them: some others passed beyond the seas with loud lamentations." The The Saxons brought their wives and children Conq^ue^st with them, though it is difficult to believe that A°- ^^J- they were so stupid as to kill all the Britons instead of enslaving them and marrying their wives. Yet, if they had not done this, surely there would have been some traces left of Latin or Celtic speech, law, and religion. But there were none. When, in the eighth and ninth centuries, we begin to see a little into the dark- ness, we find that England has become a purely English country, with a purely English and rather absurd system of law, and a purely English language; while, as for religion, the people have to be converted all over again by a special mission from the Pope at Rome. Ruin of Probably the British made a very desperate *^^\w defence, and were only slowly beaten west- ward into Wales, Lancashire, Devon, and Cornwall. Something like two centuries passed before the English were thorough masters of the eastern half of the island. And all that while Roman temples, churches, roads, and cities were crumbling away and grass was growing over their ruins. Studying the history of those days is like looking at a battlefield in a fog. As the fog clears we get some notion of our dear barbarian forefathers.
LIFE OF THE SAXONS 27
The Saxon Englishman was a savage, with Life of the the vices and cruelties of an overgrown boy; ^*^o°«- a drunkard and a gambler, and very stupid. But he was a truth-teller, a brave, patient, and cool-headed fellow. A Roman historian describes him as "a free-necked man married to a white-armed woman who can hit as hard as horses kick." He honoured his women and he loved his home; and the spirit of the land entered into him, even more than into any of those who lived before or came after him. He never knew when he was beaten, and so he took a lot of beating. He was not quarrelsome by nature, and, indeed, when he had once settled down in Britain, he was much too apt, as his descendants are to-day, to neglect soldiering altogether. He forgot his noble trade of sailor, which had brought him to Britain, so completely that within two centuries his coasts were at the mercy of every sea-thief in Europe; and down the north-east wind the sea-thieves were always coming. England should always beware of the north- east wind. It blows her no good.
Tilling the fields was the Saxon's real job; The he was a plough-boy and a cow-boy by nature, li^^\. and hke a true plough- and cow-boy he was boy. always grumbling. He hated being governed; he always stood up for his "rights," and often
28 SAXON ENGLAND
talked a lot of nonsense about them. He obeyed his kings when he pleased, which was not often, and these kings had very little power over him. But he loved his land, and he grubbed deep into it with his clumsy plough. In the sweat of his brow he ate the bread and pork and drank the beer (too much of the beer) which he raised on it. A Saxon Evcry English village could keep itself to ^' *^^" itself, since it produced nearly everything its people wanted, except salt, iron, and millstones, which could only be found in certain favoured places. In most villages there was a sort of squire called a "thegn," who paid something, either a rent or a service of some kind, to a king or to a bigger thegn, and owned much more land than the ordinary freemen. Prob- ably also he owned a few slaves, whether of English or British birth. There was also a smith and a miller, a swineherd to take the village pigs into the forest to feed, a shepherd and a cowherd, and a doctor who would be more or less of a wizard. After the conversion to Christianity in the seventh century there was also in most villages a priest. Of the free- men, every head of a family owned certain strips of land on which he grew corn, and each helped his neighbour to plough the land with teams of oxen. There was also a great common
I
SAXON GOVERNMENT 29
on which all freemen could pasture their cattle, and a wood wherein the pigs fed. There were few horses, there was no hay to feed them on, cows were only killed for food when they were too old to draw the plough, sheep were chiefly kept for wool, and so the pig was the real friend of hungry men.
There was in each district some sort of rude The small government by some sort of rude king, whose kfng" ancestor may have been a leading pirate of the *^°™^" first ship-load of Saxons who landed near that place. No doubt many tiny " kingdoms" sprang up, as ship-load after ship-load of pirates explored and settled inland. Probably the first "king- doms" extended as far as an armed man could walk before a day's honest fighting, but these would naturally melt into or be conquered into larger territories. In the seventh century there were at least seven little kingdoms, but, by the eighth, only three of any importance remained :
1. Northumbria, stretching from the Forth The three to the Humber, and westward to the hills sJ|on that part Cumberland and Lancashire from ¥°^' Yorkshire and Northumberland.
2. Mercia, or Middle England, reaching from the Humber to the Thames and west- ward to the Severn.
3. Wessex, comprising all south of the Thames and as far west as Devon.
30 SAXON ENGLAND
When they were tired of fighting the Britons, the kings of these small kingdoms constantly- fought each other. Their There were laws, or, rather, deeply rooted ^*^menT- '^customs," mostly connected with fighting, their or COWS or ploughing. There were rude courts of justice, which would fine a man so many sheep or so many silver pennies for murder or wounding or cow-stealing. The king had a council of "wise men," who met in his wooden house to advise him, and to drink with him afterward at his rude feasts. There were gods, called Tiu and Woden and Thor and Freya, from whom our Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are derived. They lived in a heaven called Valhalla, where, our ances- tors thought, there was an endless feast of pork and strong ale, with no headaches to follow. A barbar- All this, as you scc, was a barbarous bus- *'"^ dom iness, after the well-organized, civilized Roman life; but at least it was a life with a good deal of freedom in it. Rome had stifled freedom too much; the Saxons went to the other ex- treme. It is quite possible to have too much freedom, and you will see what a price these Saxons, before the end of their six hundred years of freedom, had to pay for theirs.
SAXON GOVERNMENT 31
After the sack of the City when Rome was xhe sunk to a name, Saxon
XT 1 IT founda-
In the years when the hghts were darkened, tions of or ever St. Wilfred came, ^^^^ '
Low on the borders of Britain (the ancient poets sing)
Between the cHff and the forest there ruled a Saxon King.
Stubborn were all his people from cotter
to overlord. Not to be cowed by the cudgel, scarce to be
schooled by the sword. Quick to turn at their pleasure, cruel to cross
in their mood, And set on paths of their choosing as the hogs
of Andred's Wood.
Laws they made in the Witan, the laws of
flaying and fine — Common, loppage and pannage, the theft
and the track of kine, Statues of tun and of market for the fish and
the malt and the meal. The tax on the Bramber packhorse, and the
tax on the Hastings keel. Over the graves of the Druids and under the
wreck of Rome, Rudely but surely they bedded, the plinth
of the days to come.
owners.
32 SAXON ENGLAND
Behind the feet of the Legions and before
the Normans' ire. Rudely but greatly begat they the bones of
state and of shire; Rudely but deeply they laboured, and their
labour stands till now, If we trace on our ancient headlands, the
twist of their eight-ox plough.
Growth of There was no king really powerful enough ^"^^n^w^prs to rule the whole island. In a land of forest and swamp, where roads hardly exist for eight months of the year, it must always be difficult for armed men, judges or traders to pass from place to place, except on horseback; and the Saxons were no great horse-soldiers. I think we shall see that it was the knight and his horse, who, from the eleventh century onward, first made the rule of one king possible over the whole island. Meanwhile, the "great men" of the Saxons, "thegns," "aldermen," "earls," or whatever they were called, took most of the power, and naturally began to oppress their poorer neighbours. They got the courts of justice into their own hands; they grabbed the land, they exacted rents and services from the poorer landowners; they made what is called a "feudal" state of society. In the year 600 a free Kentish farmer might own 120
THE SAXONS BECOME CHRISTIAN 33
acres of land; in the year 1000 he seldom owned more than 30, and for this he probably- had to pay a heavy rent and to labour on some great man's land.
The first rudiments of civilization were The brought back to this barbarous England by become the Christian missionaries whom Pope Gregory aftej-"*^^" sent thither in the year 597. St. Augustine ^97. came and preached in Kent and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. From Canter- bury missionaries spread all over the island, and, in a century, the heathenism that had rooted out Christianity two hundred years before was quite gone. It seems that the fierce Saxon gods made a very poor fight of it. The old Roman capital of York recovered „• u
^ ^ iiisnops
its importance and became an archbishopric, and Some seventeen other bishoprics arose all over the country, and, even more important than the bishoprics, great abbeys and monas- teries full of monks and nuns. A monk is a person who retires from the world in order to devote himself to prayer with a view to saving his own soul.
Besides preaching the true Gospel of our ^jf^g ^j Lord, these missionaries preached the worship land to the
. , monks.
of samts, and every church was dedicated to some particular saint, who was believed to watch over its congregation. A gift of land
34 SAXON ENGLAND
to a monastery was called "a gift to God and His saints." If you were not holy enough to go into the monastery, the next best thing you could do, said the monks, was to give your land to the saints. But this meant that you neglected your worldly duties, such as defend- ing your country, tilling your fields, providing for your wife and children. The world, in fact, was painted to our Saxon ancestors by the monks as such a terribly wicked place that the best thing they could do was to get Power of out of it as quickly as possible. The Popes t e ope. ^£ Kome, who had about this time made them- selves supreme heads of all Western Christen- dom, encouraged this view; and the monks were always devoted servants of the Popes. But there were other priests who were not monks, and these usually served the parish churches, which gradually but slowly grew up in England; they were always rather jealous of the monks. Life of the Humau lovc and common sense were too ™'*" ^' strong to be taken in altogether by this new unworldly spirit. Even the monks themselves soon became very human, and, as they had to eat and drink, they had to cultivate their fields to raise food. Indeed, they soon began to do this more intelligently than most people; and so the monasteries became very rich.
ST. AUGUSTINE PREACHING TO ETHELBERT
POWER OF THE KINGS S5
I think it is to the monks that we EngHsh owe our strong love of gardening and flowers; and also our love of fishing. The Church said you were to eat only fish and eggs in the season of Lent and on other "fast-days," and so every monastery, however far from a river, had to have a fish-pond well stocked with fish, or else live upon salt herrings, which were difficult to get far inland. I always like to think of the dear old monks, in their thick, black woollen frocks, with their sleeves tucked up, watching their floats in the pond. I hope they were always strictly truthful as to the size of the fish which they hooked but did not land. The monks also kept alive what remains of learning there were: they brought books from beyond the seas; they taught schools; made musical instruments, were builders, painters, and crafts- men of all kinds; and produced famous men of learning like Bede and Wilfred. English mis- sionaries went from English abbeys to preach the Gospel to heathen Germans. So rich and powerful did the Church become that in the councils of our tenth-century kings the bishops and abbots were even more important than the thegns and earls.
The Church then taught men much and Power of tamed them a little. It certainly helped of North- to ward uniting the jarring kingdoms; for eS-S.
36 SAXON ENGLAND
Christian Northumbria, in the seventh century, was the first to exercise a real sort of leader- ship over the other kingdoms ; it was a North- umbrian king, Edwin, who built and gave his name to Edinburgh; it was in the North- umbrian monastery of Jarrow that the good monk Bede wrote the first history of England. You may still see Bede's tomb in Durham Ca- thedral, with the Latin rhyme on the great stone lid. The last important Northumbrian king fell fighting against the Picts beyond the Forth. Kings of Mercia had her turn of supremacy in the 750-800* ^ig^itli century, under King Offa, who drove back the Welsh and took in a lot of their land beyond the Severn. Perhaps it was he who built a great rampart there called Offa's Dyke; beyond it, even to this day, all is ** Wales." Egbert, Then his family in turn was beaten by Egbert, Wessex, King of Wcsscx (802-39) . Thenceforth, Wessex was, in name at least, supreme over all England. If ever there was a capital city of England before Norman times it was Winchester, the chief town of Wessex; though London, one of the few Roman cities that have never been destroyed or left desolate, must always have Pirates bccu a morc important place of trade. From from Egbert King George V is directkj descended!
Denmark ^ !• i
and Egbert and his son and grandsons had to 800-noo! meet a new and terrible foe. Down to the
THE LANDING OF THE BANES
THE DANES 37
north-east wind, from Denmark, Norway, and tKe Baltic, all through the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, a continual stream of fierce and cunning pirates began to pour upon Western Europe. We call them "the Danes," or North-men. The British Isles lay right in their path, and at one time or another they harried them from end to end. The churches, in which the principal wealth of the country was stored, were sacked; the monks were killed, and then the pirates went back to their ships. From Britain they went on to France and even into the Mediterranean: some of them, indeed, crossed the Northern Ocean to Iceland, to Greenland, to North America. Their ships, some 80 feet long, and 16 feet broad, with a draught of 4 feet, might carry crews of fifty men apiece, armed to the teeth in shirts of mail, and bearing heavy axes with shafts as long as a man. Often they came under pretence of trading in slaves, and would trade honestly enough if they thought the country too strong These to be attacked. About the middle of the begin to ninth century they began to settle and make Engilnd homes in the very lands they had been plunder- ^boutseo. ing. Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire were regularly colonized by them. So were the Orkney and Shetland Isles, the Hebrides, Caithness, and Sutherland,
88 SAXON ENGLAND
as well as the Isle of Man and the eastern coast of Ireland.
Their numbers were, however, small, and if
Saxon England under weak kings had not
enjoyed too much "freedom," they might have
been beaten off; but it seemed impossible for
the Saxons to collect an army in less than a
month, or to keep it in the field when collected.
Long before the English "host" was ready to
"^Great fight, the piratcs had harried the land and
Southlrn disappeared. Atlast Alfred the Great (871-901),
England, graudsou of Egbert, began to turn the tide
against the invaders. He defended Wessex
all along the line of the Upper Thames, in
battle after desperate battle, and at last beat
a big Danish army somewhere in Wiltshire.
The pirate king Guthrum agreed to become a
Christian, and was allowed to settle with his
men in North-eastern England. Soon after
that we find English and "settled" Danes
fighting valiantly for their country against fresh
bands of Danish pirates. We may call Alfred
the first real "King of England"; he picked up
the threads of the national life which the
Danes had cut to pieces. He translated good
books into the Saxon tongue; he started the
The great great history of England, called the " Chronicle,"
Wessex of which was kept year by year, in more than one
century, monastery, down to 1154. He and his sou
ETHELRED THE UNREADY 39
Edward, and his grandsons Athelstan and Edmund, built fleets and fortresses, armed their people afresh and compelled them to fight in their own defence. For some years every fresh band of pirates met a warm reception and every rising of the Danes within the country was beaten down. King Edgar, 959-75, was called *'The Peaceful," and boasted that he had been rowed about on the river Dee by six lesser kings.
It was a brief respite,
For all about the shadowy kings, Denmark's grim ravens cowered their wings ;
and in the reign of Edgar's foolish son, Ethelred the Unready, the pirates came back more King determined than before. Sweyn, king of SS'^un^ Denmark, came in person, and his son Canute; g^g^foie- and this time tHe Danes intended a thorough fresh and wholesale conquest. This time Wessex raids. fell also; even Canterbury was sacked, and its archbishop pelted to death with beef-bones after dinner. The "wise men" of unwise Ethelred were as useless as the House of Com- mons would be to-day if there were a big inva- sion. They talked, but did nothing. A country in such a plight wants a man to lead it to war; not thirty "wise men" or six hundred mem-
40 SAXON ENGLAND
bers of Parliament, with a sprinkling of traitors
among them, to discuss how to make peace.
Ethelred's "wise men" could only recommend
him to buy off the Danes with hard cash called
"Danegold" or "Dane-geld." The Danes
^^ pocketed the silver pennies, laughed, and came
"Dane- back for more. When for a moment there
^^ ' arose a hero, Ethelred's son, Edmund Ironside,
he fought in one year, as Alfred had fought,
six pitched battles and almost beat Canute.
Then he agreed to divide the island with Canute,
King and was murdered in the next year (1017).
T016- Canute ruled England until his death in 1053.
1035. jj^ ruled Denmark and Norway also, and was
in fact a sort of Northern Emperor.
What ii is always a temptation to an armed and geld" agile nation
means. ^^ ^^^j upou a neighbour and to sayi
" We invaded you last night — we are quite prepared to fight. Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld, And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane- geld And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
WHAT DANE-GELD MEANS 41
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy- nation To puff and look important and to say: "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again. That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane!
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation. For fear they should succumb and go astray. So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say:
"We never pay any one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost.
For the end of that game is oppression and shame. And the nation that plays it is lost!"
And Canute ruled England righteously. He turned Christian, he rebuilt the abbeys and churches which his ancestors had burned, he
42 SAXON ENGLAND
kept a strong little army of English or Danish
soldiers about his person, and he kept order
and peace. His sons, however, were good for
King nothing; and in 1042 Edward, the younger
t^e^CoS^ son of Ethelred, was recalled from " Normandy,"
fessor, whither he had been sent to be out of Canute's
1042-1066.
* way, and ruled England as king till 1066. Dangers Now, as wc approach the end of the Saxon from period of our history let us take a look at our
abroad. ^ ^ ^ '^
foreign neighbours. Those who will be im- portant to us are four in number.
1. Denmark and Norway; except in the reign of Canute, these were always hostile. Scotland. %, Scotland, once Pict-land, the district north of the Forth and Clyde. Celtic "Scots" from Ireland had conquered Celtic Picts from the sixth to the ninth century. They had brought with them the Christian faith, which had been preached in Ireland by St. Patrick in the fifth century. These Scots and Picts continually raided Northumbria, just as the Picts had raided Roman Britain; and Canute had bought off their raids by giving to them all the land as far south as the Tweed, which thus became the "border," as we have it to-day, be- tween England and Scotland. Cumberland and Lancashire seem to have remained an independ- ent Celtic country till the end of the eleventh century, just as Wales did till the thirteenth.
DANGERS FROM ABROAD 43
3. Flanders, that is, roughly speaking, the Flanders. modern Holland and Belgium; a land already famous both for pirates and traders; it lies
right opposite the mouth of the Thames, and was just the place where the pirates could sell the gold candlesticks which they stole out of English churches.
4. Normandy, the great province on the Nor- north coast of France, of which the river Seine ^nd%e is the centre. This land the great Danish Normans. pirate, RoUo, had harried early in the tenth century, until the wearied King of France gave
it him to keep, on condition that he would become a Christian. The "Normans," that is North-men, married French wives, and became the cleverest, the fiercest, and, accord- ing to the ideas of the day, the most pious of Frenchmen. They did not cease to be adventurers, and we find their young men seeking their fortunes all over Europe. They thought their Saxon neighbours very slow and stupid fellows, who were somehow in possession of a very desirable island which they managed very badly, and which it was the Norman's duty to take if possible.
Now King Edward was at heart more a Duke Norman than an Englishman, so pious that he ^'"'*'°- was called "the Confessor," always confessing sins that he had not committed, and for-
44 SAXON ENGLAND
getting his real sin, which was the neglect of the defence of his island. Like the Normans, he despised his own people. He gave himself away to his young cousin, Duke William of Normandy, and would have liked to give the crown and land of England as well — in fact, he made some sort of promise to do so — and he filled his court with Norman favourites and bishops. England had never yet been a united country. Ethelred, and Canute after him, had allowed great "aldermen" or earls to govern it, one for Northumbria, one for Mercia, one for Wessex; Edward continued the same plan, and so these great earls were more power- ful than the King himself. Northumbria and Mercia were largely Danish at heart and looked more to Denmark than to Wessex for a king. It was on Wessex, then, that the main resist- ance to Normandy would fall if the Normans attacked England. Earl Edward had no children, and as he drew ^Wessex! toward his death, the great Earl Harold of Wessex had to make up his mind whether he ^^Ki^? would submit to Duke WiUiam of Normandy, 1066. or call in Danish help, or seize the crown Invasions ^^ England for himself. Ambition and pa- prepared triotism both said "Seize it"; and on Edward's way and death, in January 1066, Harold did so. mandy' Daucs and Norwegians were on the alert
BATTLE OF HASTINGS 45
too; and it looked as if England might be crushed between two sets of enemies. For William had long been preparing for a spring at it: he had won the friendship of Flanders; and he had the Pope on his side, for the Eng- lish Church was by no means too obedient to the Pope at this time. William now set about collecting a great army of the best fighting men that France, Brittany, and Flan- ders could produce. Our brave Harold, on his side, got the Wessex men under arms, and kept them watching all the summer. Northern England could not help him, for, a month before William landed from France, a mighty Norwegian host appeared in the Humber.
Harold, then, had to prepare to meet two Battle of invasions; and most gallantly he met them. Bridge, He flew to York, smashed the Norwegians to temberr^ pieces at Stamford Bridge, and flew south again: but before he reached London William had landed in Sussex. There, upon October Battle of 14th, on or near the spot where Battle Abbey 10^6^6^^^' now stands, was fought the Battle of Hastings, ^'^^'^ber. one of the most decisive battles in history. It was the fight of French cavalry and archers against the English and Danish foot-soldiers and axe-men, a fight of valour and cunning against valour without cunning. All day they fought, till, in the autumn darkness, the last
46 SAXON ENGLAND
of Harold's axe-men had fallen beside their dying King, and the few English survivors had fled toward London. One of them left a bag of coins in a ditch at Sedlescombe, which was dug out a few years ago; the poor little silver pieces are a token of the many foreign countries with which Old England had dealings. Results of The Battle of Hastings decided, though not man Con- evcu William knew it, that the great, slow, quest. (Jogged English race was to be governed and disciplined (and at first severely bullied in the process) by a small number of the cleverest, strongest, most adventurous race then alive. Nothing more was wanted to make our island the greatest country in the world. The Saxons had been sinking down into a sleepy, fat, drunken, unenterprising folk. The Normans were tem- perate in food and drink, highly educated, as education went in those days, restless, and fiery. They brought England back by the scruff of the neck into the family of European nations, back into close touch with the Roman Church, to which a series of vigorous and clever Popes was then giving a new life. Such remains of Roman ideas of government and order as were left in Europe were saved for us by the Normans. The great Roman em- pire was like a ship that had been wrecked on a beach; its cargo was plundered by nation
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 47
after nation. But if any nation had got the Hon's share of its leavings it was the French- men, and through the Frenchmen the Nor- mans, and through the Normans the Enghsh.
It cost WilHam about six years of utterly The ruthless warfare to become master of all Eng- com^"^^*^ land. England resisted him bit by bit; its ^QQ^^r^^ leaders had a dozen different plans; he had but one plan, and he drove it through. He was going to make an England that would resist the next invader as one people. He had to do terrible things: he had to harry all Yorkshire into a desert; he had to drive all the bravest English leaders into forest and fen, or over the Scottish border, and to kill them when he caught them. He spared no man who stood in his way, but he spared all who asked his mercy. He could not subdue Scotland; but once he marched to the Tay and brought the Scottish king Malcolm to his knees for the time.
William could not quite give up the plan The great of governing England by great earls; he was iand™^° obliged to reward the most powerful of his o^'^^''^- French followers with huge grants of English land; and these followers, who had been quite accustomed to rebel against him in Normandy, often rebelled against him and his descendants in England. But his gifts of land were nearly always scattered in such a way that one great
48 SAXON ENGLAND
man might have land perhaps in ten different counties, but not too much in any one place. Besides, every landowner, big or little, had to swear a strong oath to be faithful to the King. All gifts of land were to come only from the King, all courts of justice should depend upon the King alone. It remained for William's great-grandson Henry II to put all this down in black and white, in ink, on parchment. Henry knew, what even William had not learned, that the pen is a much more terrible and lasting recorder than the sword. King In a word, William would be King not only S-10S7! of Wessex but of every rood of English land and of all men dwelling thereon. And so the country began once more to enjoy a peace it had never known since the Roman legions left. The sons of the very men who had fought William at Hastings flew to fight for William against some rebel Norman earl, and earls and other men found that if they wanted to play the game of rebellion they had better go back to France. And the actual number of Normans who remained in England and took root was really very small, though among them we should find nearly all the nobles, bishops, great abbots, and other leaders of the people. Very few Norman women came, so these men married English wives, and, within
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 49
150 years, all difference between Normans and Englishmen had vanished. The Norman Conquest of 1066 was the beginning of the history of the English race as one people and of England as a great power in Europe. You might say, indeed:
England's on the anvil — hear the hammers wiiiiam' ring — ^'^'-k-
Clanging from the Severn to the Tyne! Never was a blacksmith like our Norman King — England's being hammered, hammered, hammered into line!
England's on the anvil! Heavy are the blows! (But the work will be a marvel when it's done) Little bits of kingdoms cannot stand against their foes. England's being hammered, hammered, hammered into one!
There shall be one people — it shall serve one Lord — (Neither Priest nor Baron shall escape!) It shall have one speech and law, soul and strength and sword. England's being hammered, hammered, V hammered into shape!
CHAPTER III
THE NORMAN KINGS 1066-1154
The So AT last there was going to be a real govern-
the^kings ^^^^ in this country, and it was going to do its
in Nor- duty. Few kings in the Middle Ages had any
England, high idea of their ''duty toward their people"
such as a great Roman emperor had, or such
as King George V has. They chiefly thought
of their country as a property, or ''estate," which
they were going to cultivate mainly for their
own benefit. But the hettev a king 's " estate "
was cultivated, the better off were the people on
it; and, when I say the " people," I mean every
one except a few, perhaps a couple of hundred
of the "barons" or greatest landowners. A
king could only grow very rich and powerful
when his country was at peace at home and well
armed against foreign foes; his people could
only grow rich under the same conditions.
Their Not SO the great barons. Each of them could
with the most casily increase his riches at the expense
1066^1175.' ^^ some other great baron or of the king; and
the people who lived near him would be the first
50
POWER OF THE KINGS 51
to suffer if he were allowed to do so. William had been obliged to allow his barons and earls to judge and govern their tenants in accordance with those "'feudal'* customs which had come to be univer- sal in Western Europe since Roman law had been lost and strong government with it. The great kings who succeeded him slowly, painfully, out of scanty material, had to recreate a strong government, and, so, to give peace and order.
Now of the first four, whom alone we call "Norman" kings, three were wise and strong — • Wilham I, WiUiam II, and Henry I — and the fourth, Stephen, was foolish and weak. So, while the first sixty-nine years after the con- quest were a time of increasing peace and pros- perity, the next nineteen were the most dreadful period in our history.
Remember that the Norman barons were only five or six generations removed from the fierce Danish pirates who followed Rollo to France. There, as there were no strong kings to restrain them, they had been accustomed to build cas- tles and to make their tenants fight for them in their private quarrels. W^hen they got to England, and grew richer in lands and tenants than they had been in Normandy, they expected to play their familiar game with even greater success. Their kings, however, from the first, determined they should not do so.
52 WILLIAM I
The William found, in the slow, undisciplined old win^heip Saxon life, several things which served him to ^^ag^ist keep his barons in order. For instance, there
the ^as an officer in every county called a sheriff;
barons. j i V
he collected the King s rents and taxes; he presided over the rude court of justice which The was held in every county; he was supposed to lead to battle the free landowners of that county. William made his sheriffs much more powerful, and made them responsible for the peace of their counties. In England, too, there had Castles, been few castles, and these only stockades of wood on the top of earthen mounds; whereas in France every baron had a castle. On the Welsh and Scottish borders William was obliged to allow, and even to encourage, his followers to build castles, but elsewhere he forbade it. But he built a great many royal castles and filled them with faithful paid soldiers. Again, in Normandy there had been barons as rich in lands and money as the Duke himself; but William kept enormous tracts of English land in his own hands, and so made the Crown ten times richer than any baron. In Normandy Taxes, the Dukc had no real system of taxes; in Eng- land the King could and did levy a regular tax of so many shillings on each estate. Ethelred had begun this in order to get money to bribe the Danes; the later kings had continued it.
DOMESDAY BOOK 53
Many estates were, however, free from this Domes- tax, and no doubt it was always difficult to 1085. ^^ ' collect. So, in 1085, William sent officers to every village and county in England to find out who must pay the tax and how much each must pay. These officers called together a sort of "jury " of the villagers, who declared the value of the estate. The results were collected and written down in "Domesday Book," which you may see in the British Museum. An extract from it will run somewhat like this: "County of Cambridge: In Blackacre are ten hides (the hide is an old measure of land, say 120 acres). Thurstan holds it. In King Edward's time Wulfstan held it. It was worth £2 Qs. Sd. Now it is worth £4 13^. 4(^. It never paid tax. There is land for eight ploughs. There are two freeholders and ten serfs. The priest holds half a hide. There is a mill, value 10s. There is wood for 100 pigs, and pasture for 20 cows."
Are you astonished at the small value of Old land.f^ You must remember that you could MSiey. then buy with £l what might now cost you £40. For there was little silver and less gold in Europe before the discovery of America. Few gold coins were made in England before the reign of Edward III.
From" Domesday Book "we can make a rough
54 WILLIAM I
The guess at the population of England in the
tion"^of eleventh century, say about 2,000,000, whereas
England now it is ovcr 40,000,000. The book does not
m 1085. . IP 1 ' 1
mention the number of people m the towns, but in many towns it does mention the number of houses. Probably no town, except London, had then as many as ten thousand people. Of many places the book says that they were "waste," that is, had been burned, either by accidental fires (which must constantly have been occurring when all buildings were of wood) or by Danes or Normans in the process of con- Customs quest. It also tells something of the "customs" and laws, ^j^j^^jj prevailed in different counties and towns. We are getting near an age when we shall be able to call such customs "Laws." The Norman kings tried to use old English customs and to improve them. But theft and murder were still reckoned more as offences against the family of the person wronged than as crimes against the state. You could still atone for such of- fences by a fine. It was not till late in the twelfth century that you would infallibly be hanged if you were caught; and the cer- tainty of punishment is what really prevents Free ^rime. land- Now, you cau see that the result of an in-
owners . . . '
and irn- quiry like Domesday was that the kings knew tenants, a great deal about their country and about their
LIFE IN THE COUNTRY 55
people. They would know, for instance, what great baron or earl was really dangerous; on what part of England what taxes could be levied, and so on. No doubt the new Norman land- owners were often hard to their Saxon tenants. But it would not pay them to be too hard. They wanted rents and labour, and a starving man cannot pay rent or work in the fields. Life in the The land was the only source of riches, and *^°"" ^^' therefore every gentleman had to be first and foremost a farmer, and his tenants under him had to be farmers or farm labourers too. Domesday mentions, under strange names, a great number of different classes of farming tenants; but, within the next century, we find that all these are melted away into two, the free and the unfree, the freeholders and the ' ' villeins " or * ' serfs . ' ' The former are men whose land averages perhaps forty acres. They pay some small rent in money or in produce to the squire or "lord of the manor," they follow the sheriff to battle when he bids them. The villein perhaps farms nearly as much land as the freeholder. But he is not free; he is bound to pay a rent in labour, say two or even three days a week on the squire's land, many extra days at harvest time, and perhaps to pay so many eggs, or pigs, or hens every year; nor may he sell his land or go away without his squire 's
56 WILLIAM I
leave. In fact he is very much at the mercy of the squire until the latter half of the twelfth century, when the King's Law begins to pro- tect him against the squire, to hang him if he commits crimes, and to enroll him as a soldier. But it will not pay the squire to oppress him too much if he is to get good work out of him. These clever Normans, all but a few of the great- est barons, soon made common cause with their tenants, soon became English at heart. Over them, too, the good land threw its dear familiar spell, and made them love it beyond all things.
Norman and Saxon
Views of " My son," said the Norman Baron, " I am dying, ^ ^"bTron and you will be heir
about his To all the broad acres in England that William
property. *="
in 1100. gave me for my share
When we conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and
a nice little handful it is. But before you go over to rule it I want you to
understand this:
"The Saxon is not like us Normans; his
manners are not so polite; But he never means anything serious till he
talks about justice and right;
NORMAN AND SAXON 57
When he stands Hke an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, 'This isn't fair dealing,' my son, leave the Saxon alone.
"You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or
torture your Picardy spears. But don't try that game on the Saxon; you'll
have the whole brood round your ears. From the richest old Thane in the county to the
poorest chained serf in the fields. They '11 be at you and on you like hornets, and,
if you are wise, you will yield !
"But first you must master their language, their
dialect, proverbs, and songs. Don't trust any clerk to interpret when they
come with the tale of their wrongs. Let them know that you know what they're
saying; let them feel that you know what
to say; Yes, even when you want to go hunting, hear
them out if it takes you all day.
"They'll drink every hour of the daylight and
poach every hour of the dark, It's the sport, not the rabbits, they're after
(we've plenty of game in the park).
58 WILLIAM I
Don't liang them or cut off their fingers.
That 's wasteful as well as unkind. For a hard-bitten, South-country poacher makes
the best man-at-arms you can find.
'* Appear with your wife and the children at their weddings and funerals and feasts;
Be polite but not friendly to bishops; be good to all poor parish priests ;
Say "we," "us," and "ours" when you're talk- ing, instead of "you fellows" and "I."
Don't ride over seeds; keep your temper; and never you tell 'em a lie!'^
Life in the The towus wcrc uo doubt horrid places. The fortification of one or more " boroughs " in each county had been begun by the son and grand- sons of King Alfred in their wars against the Danes. Besides a wooden castle on a mound of earth, there would probably be some sort of wooden paling round the towns; and in the twelfth century palings would be replaced by stone walls. London, York, and Chester probably kept their old Roman walls of stone and occa- sionally repaired them. As for cleanliness and what we now call "sanitation," there was none. All refuse was thrown into the streets, which only rainstorms washed, and where pigs, dogs, and kites scavenged freely. Each trade or
LIFE IN THE TOWNS 59
craft had its own street, and a walk down ''Butcher's Row" would probably be unpleas- ing to modern noses. But there was strong patriotism in the towns, and great rivalry be- tween them. A townsman from Abingdon was a suspected "foreigner" to the citizens of Oxford. In Sussex to-day the old folk in some villages speak of a hop-picker from another village as a "foreigner."
Both in town and country the food, even of The the poorest, was fairly plentiful. Salt meat, of°?he mainly pork, and in Lent salt fish, was the rule, people. and was washed down by huge floods of strong beer. There were no workhouses and no pro- vision for the poor except charity, but charity (called "almsgiving") was universal, and beggars swarmed everywhere. If no one else would feed them, the monks always would, and I fear they made little difference between those who were really in need and those who preferred begging to working. Washing was almost un- known. Even in the King's household, while there were hundreds of servants in the cooking departments, there were only four persons in the laundry. Horrible diseases like leprosy were common, and occasionally pestilence swept away whole villages and streets of people.
Life then was undoubtedly shorter, and its The
,.. Ti I , ,.,. jNorman
conditions harder, than to-day; but I think it Church.
60 WILLIAM I
was often merrier. Holidays were much more frequent; for the all-powerful Church forbade work on the very numerous saints' days. Re- ligion influenced every act of life from the cra- dle to the grave. All the village feasts and fairs centred round the village church and were blessed by some saint. The Norman bishops at once woke up the sleepy Saxon priests and abbots, taught them to use better music, more splendid and more frequent services, cleaner ways of life. Stone churches replaced the w ooden ones, and those mighty Norman cathedrals, so much of which remains to-day, began to grow up. The zeal for monkery continued right into the thirteenth century, although a pious Nor- man gentleman seldom went into a monastery himself till his fighting days were over. In the Church a career was open to the poorest village lad who was clever and industrious; he might rise to be abbot, bishop, councillor of kings, or even Pope. All schools were in the hands of churchmen, and Latin was the universal language of the Church throughout Western Europe. The In King William's Great Council, which ^^^^ll took the place of the Saxon "Wise Men," and Council, which became the direct father of the House of Lords, there would sit perhaps 150 great lay barons, nineteen bishops, and some thirty
THE KING'S GREAT COUNCIL 61
abbots; but the churchmen would be the most learned, the most cunning and the most regular attendants. Though this Great Council met only for a few days in each year, the King would need secretaries, and lawyers, and officials of one kind or another to be continually about his person; and most of these would be churchmen whom he would reward with bishoprics and abbeys and livings. So far as there was what we now call a " Ministry " or a "Privy Council," it consisted mainly of churchmen.
So powerful indeed was the Church that Quarrels quarrels between it and the strong kings were of King^with frequent occurrence during the next century ^q^^j.^^^ or two. The churchmen were too apt to look to the Pope as their real head instead of the King. The Popes always tried to keep the Church independent of the King. They wanted the clergy to pay no taxes for their lands, to have separate courts of justice, to be governed by other laws than those of the laymen, and yet to be wholly defended by the kings and laymen. Now no good king approved of these demands, which were indeed monstrous if you consider that the clergy owned between one quarter and one third of the land of England, and were get- ting more and more, from gifts by pious laymen, every day. Wilham I had to grant separate courts of justice, and he had no actual quarrel
62 WILLIAM I
with the Pope, mainly because his archbishop, Lanfranc, was a very wise man. But WilHam II and Henry I each had sharp quarrels with Arch- bishop Anselm, while as for poor Stephen, he was at the mercy of the great bishops. Task of I don 't think you want to know at what date Norman ^^is or that barou rebelled against William or kings. Henry, or at what date William or Henry sent an army against the King of France or the Welsh; I would rather that you would under- stand how these kings were pursuing, on the whole, two main tasks. First, they were trying to make England and Wales one compact king- dom, and, secondly, they were obliged, because they were Dukes of Normandy, to quarrel with the Kings of France. It was they, then, who founded our 800-year-long hostility to the gal- lant Frenchmen, which is now, happily, at an end. Begin- The first of these tasks was mainly left to the the^Con- great Norman barons, the Earls of Chester, *^"waief Shrewsbury and Gloucester, who built castles on the Welsh border and sent continual expe- ditions far into Wales. William II once marched himself to the foot of Snowdon, and gave the Welsh thieves a very severe lesson against stealing English cattle and murdering English settlers. Henry I started a regular colony of Englishmen in Pembrokeshire. Welsh ^'princes "
QUARRELS WITH KING OF FRANCE 63
continued to exist till the end of the thirteenth century, but only once troubled England seri- ously after Henry I's time.
In the North-west, William II completely conquered Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cum- and of berland, made them English ground forever, land; and rebuilt the old Roman fortress of Carlisle. On the Scottish border William I built a great fortress at Newcastle-on-Tyne; but this did not attitude stop King Malcolm's raids, for many Saxons, Norman who had lost their lands in 1066, had fled to Scotland. Scotland and helped in these raids. But William II and Henry I managed their Scottish neighbours so cleverly that from 1095 to 1138 there were no more Scottish raids at all. Dur- ing these years of peace many Norman barons got into the south of Scotland, were welcomed and were endowed with lands by King David I.
As regards the French business, there was Quarrels very little real peace between the Duke of Nor- King of mandy and the French King. And as the for- ^qqq^^' mer was now King of England also, he generally ii^'*- got the best of it. Until the middle of the twelfth century the King of France was very poor and could get very few people to fight for him, whereas Henry I once shipped a lot of sturdy English soldiers across the Channel and won a great victory at Tenchebray, 1106, over Norman rebels who were being aided by the
64 WILLIAM II
French King. As a rule, however, our kings fought their battles in France with foreign soldiers hired in Flanders. The English kings even had some sort of a fleet, for the "Cinque Ports " (Dover, Sandwich, Hythe, Romney, and Hastings) were obliged to furnish them a cer- tain number of ships every year. The causes of these quarrels with France are not interesting to us. They were usually about some frontier castle which the French King had grabbed or wanted to grab from the Duke, or the Duke from the King. At one of these quarrels William the Conqueror met his death in 1087. A terrible king and a terrible man he had been; but he had kept peace, and the fiercest baron had trembled before him. His one pleasure was hunting, and he was so greedy of it that he began to make a series of cruel laws against poachers which later kings kept up till 1217. It was death to kill a stag in the royal forests. His eldest son, Robert, was a weak, good- natured fellow, who had once rebelled against his father, and was the darling of the turbulent barons. So William had left Normandy to The Robert and England to his second son, William, wmiam I. who was called '' Ruf us " from his red hair. Ruf us William ^^^^ ^ violcut ruffiau, grasping and cruel, and II, called mocked at everything holy; but he was strong 1087-1100. and clever, too, a mighty warrior and leader of
THE FIRST CRUSADE 65
men. He had at once to meet a fearful re- bellion got up by Robert, but the English free- holders turned out in crowds to help him, and he smashed the rebels and battered down their castles, as he battered down everything that came in his path. Soon he managed to grab Normandy also from poor Robert, who was always deep in debt and trouble of every sort.
In 1096 Robert had gone to the East, and The first many of the turbulent French and Norman foggl^^''' barons with him. They had gone in order to fulfil one of the noblest yet vainest dreams of those times, to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel Saracens or *' Turks," who had recently taken Jerusalem. The Saracens bullied pil- grims who went thither to venerate the places of Christ's earthly ministry and passion. These expeditions from the West were called "Crusades," and pious adventurers went with them from all parts of Europe. A man who died upon a crusade thought that he was fairly sure of going straight to Heaven. This first Crusade was successsful and a Christian king- dom was set up in Jerusalem, which lasted there for eighty-eight years, and, in some parts of Palestine, for nearly two hundred years. Eu- rope learned much from the Crusades, and many luxuries, arts and crafts were brought back to it from the East. But the name got much abused,
66 HENRY I
and at last the Popes called every private quarrel of their own a crusade, promising their blessing to all who paid money to it, and scolding all who refused.
A prudent yet wicked English king like Rufus stayed at home in spite of the Pope 's scoldings, and grabbed as much as he could of the property of his neighbours who went upon the Crusade. Henry I, Whcu Robert came back he found that he had lost another chance. Rufus had been shot in the year 1100, while hunting in the New Forest, and his youngest brother, Henry, had seized the crown of England. Of course Robert rebelled, and the great barons, both of England and Nor- mandy, with him. But, equally of course, Henry and his faithful Englishmen made short work of every rebellion. English chroniclers called Henry I the " Lion of Justice," and it was not a bad name for him. Though cruel and selfish, he was a much more respectable char- acter than Rufus, and he kept order splen- didly. He was a man of learning, which till then had been unusual in royal families. "An unlearned king," he used to say, *'is a crowned ass." Only one of his descendants, before the eighteenth century, was wholly unlearned, and that was Edward II, who came to a bad end. Henry endeared himself to his Englishmen by marrying the last princess of the old Saxon race,
CIVIL WAR 67
Edith, daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, who was the great-great-granddaughter of Ethelred the Unready. Among Henry's cour- tiers and servants we often find the names of EngHshmen as well as Normans, though all the highest places in the Church were still held by Normans or by men of mixed race. Well able to fight, and quite ready to do so when it was necessary, Henry, like other clever kings, avoided all unnecessary wars, and got on well with the Scottish and sometimes even with the French kings.
But his only son was drowned in the wreck of Stephen the White Ship in crossing the Channel; and Matilda, when Henry died, in 1135, his heir was his only ii^^-^^- daughter, Matilda, whose second husband was Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou in France. Now no woman had ever reigned in England, and so, when Count Stephen of Blois, son of William I 's daughter Adela, appeared in London and claimed the crown, he was welcomed as King, although he and most of the barons had already promised to uphold the claim of Ma- tilda. Stephen was known to be a kind-hearted fellow who would not rule too strictly; he was in fact just like his uncle Robert.
Alas for England ! Matilda, naturally enough, civil War claimed her "rights, " and civil war began almost ^^^^"^^• at once. Nothing could have suited the barons
68 STEPHEN
better. They changed sides continually and fought now for Stephen and now for Matilda, as long as there was any one left to fight. "For The nineteen winters," says the old English chron- '^feUoo^e! icier, who was still writing in his monastery at Peterboro, "this went on." Castles sprang up everywhere, "full of devils," who tortured men for their riches, made war for sport, burned towns and corn crops, coined their own money and compelled the poor to take it in payment. At the end of the reign it was said there were over three hundred unlicensed castles in Eng- land. Poor Stephen did his best ; he flew hither and thither besieging these castles, but seldom had patience to take one. He and Matilda (who was just as bad, and a horrid female into the bargain) could only think of bribing the great barons to fight for them by heaping lands, riches, and offices on them; and, between the pair of them, the treasures of the crown of England were soon spent. The King of Scots, David I, who was Matilda's cousin, rushed in at the very beginning with a great army of wild men, and, though the Yorkshiremen gave him a sound thrashing at the "Battle of the Stand- "Battie ard," near Northallerton (1138), he stuck to Stand- Cumberland, and Stephen soon tried to bribe ard." him by giving him Northumberland also. So, as the old chronicler says, "it seemed to Eng-
"BATTLE OF THE STANDARD" 69
lishmen as if God slept and all His saints. " The Church alone remained a refuge for the op- pressed, and, naturally enough, the Church came out at the end of it all, not only much richer, but with much more power over the hearts of men.
At last, in 1152, young Henry, the son of Ma- Peace tilda and Geoffrey, made peace at Walhngford Waifing- with Stephen, who was now an old and worn- *°'"'i' ii^^. out man. Henry was to govern England as chief minister while Stephen lived, and then to succeed to the crown. And in two years Stephen died and Henry II became King of England.
CHAPTER IV
HENRY II TO HENRY III,
1154-1272: THE BEGINNINGS OF
PARLIAMENT
The task The young man of twenty-one whom we call KinVi'n Henry II came to a country absolutely wasted 1154. with civil war. When he died, thirty -five years later, he left it the richest, the most peace- ful, the most intelligent, and most united king- dom in Europe. There is no misery like that of civil war; there have been two civil wars since that date, one in the fifteenth and one in the seventeenth century; and of course during these wars the country people suffered. But so firmly did the sense of law and order, which Henry II drove into his people's heads, take root, that there was no complete upset of civil life, even in these later civil wars. We cannot of course attribute all the later good fortune of the country to one man, not even to such a great and wise man as Henry II. His path had been prepared for him long before, and he was extraordinarily fortunate in his opportunity.
70
CHARACTER OF HENRY II 71
A great revival of intelligence had already be- His fa- gun all over Europe, and a great revival of opportu- trade, no doubt largely owing to the lessons ^^^^' learned in the Crusades. Long-neglected books of Roman Law had been found, and French and Italian lawyers were reading them. Schools were increasing, and even "universities," of which Oxford was the first in England, were beginning. The towns had been gaining in riches in spite of the civil war; London, to which Henry I had given a ''charter," allowing it to govern itself and keep its own customs, was even more ahead of the other English towns than it is to-day. The difference of race be- tween Norman and Englishman was being for- gotten. We were growing into one "people." The worst followers of the worst barons had killed each other off during the war, or gone away to the Crusades. Henry had little difficulty in getting rid of those that remained, and knocking down their ramshackle castles.
But great as the opportunity was, it would Charac- have been of no use if Henry had not been a very Henry ii. great man; one of the greatest kings who ever lived. His power of work, and of making other people work, was amazing; he seemed to have a hundred pairs of eyes. Laziness was to him the one unpardonable crime. For pomp, even for dignity, he cared nothing. He was cursed.
72 HENRY II
as all kings of his race were, with the most frightful temper; but he was merciful and for- giving when his rage was over. Norman on the mother's side, English on the grand- mother 's, he was the most French of Frenchmen by his father's family, the House of Anjou. He had just married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the greatest heiress in Europe, who owned all South- western France, from the River Loire to the Pyrenees. , His Aquitaine, or " Gascony," or "Guienne," as the posses- southern part of it is called, was a land of small and very turbulent nobles, who could never get enough fighting. Even Henry never suc- ceeded in keeping them in order. But of course, with all this land, and with the riches of Eng- land at his back, Henry ought to have been a much more powerful man than his "overlord," the King of France. Yet the truth is that all these different French provinces, — Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Aquitaine — were rather a trouble than an advantage to him. They cost more to keep in order than they brought ^oTln*^ in in rents and taxes, and they led to continual land and quarrcls, mostly about frontier castles, with the French King Louis VII and his successor, Philip II. Henry and his son, Richard I, in fact did well in keeping their huge loosely knit bundle of provinces together as long as they
sions
really a
burden to
him.
as Law- giver.
HENRY II AS LAWGIVER 73
did. John, who succeeded Richard, lost all the best parts of them at once.
For the kings of France were doing just what our kings were doing; they were trying to make all Frenchmen feel that they were one people. So Henry, Richard, and John were really fighting a losing battle in France. For the details of that battle I do not care two straws. Moreover, our sympathies ought to be on the side of the French kings, unless they invaded England.
What really matters to us is what Henry was Henry ii doing in England. You may be sure that he gave no one any rest there, neither his many friends, nor his few foes. The greatest thing England owes to him is the system of Law, which really began in his reign, and has gone on being improved by skilful lawyers ever since. Till his reign, all the King 's servants, sheriffs, officers, bishops, and the rest had acted as judges, rent collectors, soldiers, taxing-men without distinction; and the King's courts of justice had been held wherever the King happened to be. But Henry picked out spe- cially trained men for judges, and confined them to the one business of judging. He chose men who knew some Roman Law, and who would be able to improve our stupid, old-fashioned cus- toms by its light. He swept away a great many of such customs, among other things the
74 HENRY II
fines for murder, which he treated by hanging; he built prisons in every county, and kept of- fenders in them until the judges came round "on circuit," as, you know, they still do four times a year. The judges gave these offenders a fair trial, in which some sort of "jury" of their neighbours had a hand; and if they were found guilty they were hanged — which surprised them a good deal. The King could not wholly put down the barons' private courts of justice, but he took away every shred of real power from them; his sheriffs, he said, were to go everywhere, no matter what privileges a baron might claim. Another splendid thing which Henry did was to establish one coinage for the whole country, stamped at his royal mint ; and woe it was to the man who "uttered" false coins! He trains As regards his army of freeholders, he com- pelled every man to keep arms in his house, to be used when the sheriff called him to battle. A rich landowner had to be armed in complete chain mail, to provide his own horses and to serve in the cavalry, and was called a "knight." But even a man who possessed the small sum of £6 ISs. 4}d. had to provide himself with a steel cap, a neck-piece of mail, and a spear; while every free man, in town or country, had to have a leather jacket, a steel cap, and a spear. And this " territorial army" was not only to
the nation to war
HIS QUARREL WITH BECKET 15
fight, but to keep the peace also, to chase rogues and thieves, to watch at night at the town gates ; in fact, as we should now say, to "assist the police."
As regards taxes, Henry did not demand huge His taxes, sums from all his subjects without distinction of wealth, but he sent officials round the country, who called together the principal inhabitants of each village and town, and got them to say what their neighbours as well as themselves could afford to pay. So you see, by all these measures. King Henry interested Ms subjects in the government. He made them see that they had duties as well as rights, a fact which the poorer classes of Englishmen have almost wholly forgotten to-day.
But for one frightful stroke of ill-luck Henry His might have left an England completely united. ^^^^^ Hear the story of St. Thomas Becket. Thomas
The twelfth century was the "golden age" 1164-76. of the Church. The aims of the popes, even of those popes who were most hostile to the growth of nations, were not entirely selfish. Christendom was to them one family which God had given them to rule. Kings were to be the earthly instruments of their will, to be petted as long as they obeyed, but scolded and even deposed when they did not. No king and no lay court of justice was to dare to touch a priest.
76 HENRY II
much less to hang him if he committed murder or theft, which too many priests still did. Henry- wanted to hang such priests. He was told of a hundred murders committed by priests in the first ten years of his reign which had gone un- punished, because the Church said all priests were "sacred." So he chose his favourite min- ister, Thomas Becket, already Chancellor of England, to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He believed that Thomas would help him to make one law for clergymen and laymen alike; but Thomas, as proud and hot-tempered a man as the King, had no sooner become Archbishop than he turned right round and supported the most extreme claims of the Church. He even went farther than the Pope, who was most anxious not to quarrel with Henry. "The Church lands," he said, "should pay no taxes; as for hanging priests, he would not hear of it." Henry was naturally furious, especially when Thomas went abroad and stirred up the King of France and the Pope against him. After a long and weary quarrel Henry, in a fit of passion. Murder of uscd somc rash words which some wicked court- ^"nio. i^rs interpreted to mean that they were to kill Thomas. They slipped away secretly from the King's court and murdered the Archbishop in his own cathedral.
Such a deed of horror was unknown since the
n:HE, MURDER. OF BLCKET
LAST BARONIAL REBELLION 77
days of the heathen Danes. Thomas at once "Saint became both martyr and saint, even in the eyes the°"^^^ of those who had hated his pride while he lived, ^^rtyr." Men believed that miracles were worked at his tomb, that a touch of his bones would restore the dead to life. A pilgrimage to his shrine at Canterbury became before long the duty of every pious Englishman.
But the worst result was that all the King's The last attempts to bring the Churchmen under the rebellion, law utterly failed; and the claims of the Church ^^^^"^• to be independent of the State actually in- creased for a century to come. All Henry's enemies also took the opportunity to jump on him at once. A fearful outbreak of the barons (who had been quiet for twenty years), both in England and Normandy, came to a head in 1174, and was supported by both the French and Scottish kings, by Henry's own eldest son (a vain young fool), and by Queen Eleanor her- self. Henry's throne rocked and tottered; but, of course, all good Englishmen stood stiffly for their King, and, when he had knelt in pen- itence at Becket's tomb, and allowed the Can- terbury monks to give him a sound flogging there, he triumphed over his enemies. He took the King of Scots prisoner, and compelled the rest of the barons to sue for mercy. This mercy he freely gave them. No one was hanged for the
78 HENRY II
rebellion, and most people concerned got off with a fine. Henry His last six ycars were again disturbed by ^LtI revolts, but not in England. Philip II was the
1175-89. gj,g|. ^£ ^Yie really great French kings bent on uniting all Frenchmen; and he easily enticed, not only Henry's barons, but his three younger sons, Richard, Geoffrey and John, into rebellion. Henry died of a broken heart at their ingrati- tude in 1189.
His visit ^^^ event of his reign must not be forgotten,
to ^^^^l"^^ his visit to Ireland in 1171-2. St. Patrick, you
may have heard, had banished the snakes from
that island, but had not succeeded in banishing
the murderers and thieves, who were worse than
State of many snakes. In spite of some few settlements
Ire and. ^^ Danish pirates and traders on the eastern coast, Ireland had remained purely Celtic and purely a pasture country. All wealth was reck, oned in cows; Rome had never set foot there, so there was a king for every day in the week, and the sole amusement of such persons was to drive off each other's cows, and to kill all who resisted. In Henry II 's time this had been going on for at least 700 years, and during the 700 that have followed much the same thing would have been going on if the English gov- ernment had not occasionally interfered.
Well, in 1168, one of these wild kings, being
STATE OF IRELAND 79
in more than usual trouble, came to Henry and asked for help. Henry said, "Oh, go and try some of my barons on the Welsh border; they are fine fighting-men. I have no objection to their going to help you." The Welsh border barons promptly went, and, of course, being well armed and trained, a few hundred of their soldiers simply drove everything before them in Ireland, and won, as their reward, enormous estates there. The King began to be anxious about the business, and so, in 1171, he sailed over to Waterford and spent half a year in Ire- land. The Irish kings hastened, one after another, to make complete submission to him; he confirmed his English subjects in their new possessions; he divided the island into counties, appointed sheriffs and judges for it — and then he went home. He had made only a half- conquest, which is always a bad business, and the English he left behind him soon became as wild and barbarous as the Irishmen themselves.
Henry was succeeded in all his vast dominions Richard i, by his eldest surviving son, Richard I, "Richard the Lion Heart," "Richard Yea and Nay," so called because he spoke the truth. He found England at profound peace; his father's great lawyers and ministers continued to govern it for him until his death ten years later. He himself cared little for it, except for the money
80 RICHARD I
he could squeeze out of it to serve the two ob- jects which really interested him. These were to deliver Jerusalem, which had again been taken by the Saracens, and to save his foreign provinces from being swallowed by the French King. Richard Richard was a most gallant soldier and a born CnSade! leader of men in war; he was generous and for- quaneis ^i^iug; but of his father's really great qualities with he had very few. He had been spoiled as a child, and he remained a great, jolly, impatient child till his death. He and his rival. King Philip, at once set out on the Crusade in 1190, and quarrelled continually. Philip soon slipped off home, and began to grab Richard's French provinces, with the aid of the treacherous John, Richard's youngest brother, who had stayed in England. John was the one unmitigated scoundrel in the whole family; and he rejoiced greatly when he heard that his brother, who had failed to deliver Jerusalem, had been taken captive on his way home from Palestine, by the unscrupulous German Emperor, Henry VI. This royal brigand demanded an enormous ransom for Richard, and of course heavy taxes had to be raised in England to pay him. But it did not interrupt the good peace, and Richard, who forgave his wicked brother directly he was free, spent the rest of his short reign in France
RICHARD I IN THE HOLY LAND
MURDER OF PRINCE ARTHUR 81
fighting King Philip, not altogether without success. He was killed at the siege of a small French castle in 1199.
The proper heir to the throne was Arthur John, of Brittany, a mere boy, son of Henry II 's third 11%' son Geoffrey, who had died in 1186. But John was in England and seized the crown without much difficulty. Of course he quarrelled at once with his old friend Philip, and Philip knew that his own time and that of France had now come. John did, indeed, get hold of little Arthur and Murder of had him murdered; but then dawdled away his |™^^ time in small sieges and useless raids in France, about ' while Philip overran all John's French do- minions except Aquitaine with perfect ease.
By 1205, Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Loss of the inheritance of the mighty Norman and mandy, Angevin races, had gone to France for good, i^^^- And of the French possessions of England only the far South-west remained.
The English barons, most of whom had owned Anger of lands in Normandy ever since 1066, were of barons. course furious with their King, especially when he kept on screwing enormous sums of money from them, calling out large armies to fight, and then running away without fighting. As for Aquitaine, none of them owned lands there, and they refused to defend it. John raved and cursed, and practised horrible cruelties on any
82 JOHN
enemies he could catch, and generally behaved in a most unkingly fashion. But in 1206 he John's began quite a new quarrel with the English with'pop^e Church and the Pope. His cause was at first Iii"i206- a good one, for it was about the appointment 1^- of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both the Pope and the monks at Canterbury had refused to accept the man whom John named as Arch- bishop; and the Pope had even appointed one Stephen Langton in his place. John swore "by God's teeth" that he would never receive Langton as Archbishop; and for five years he held his own. The Pope tried every weapon at his command; he ''excommunicated" John, that is to say, he cut him off from all Christian rites; he put England under an "interdict," which meant that no one could be buried with the full burial service, no one married in church, no church bells rung, and in fact all the best relig- ious services and sacraments were suspended. Finally, the Pope declared John deposed and told Philip to go and depose him.
Now, much as Englishmen hated their ty- rannical King, they hated still more the idea of an Italian priest dealing thus with the crown and liberty of England; and most honest men were prepared to support even John against Philip and the Pope.
John, for his part, confiscated all Church
THE GREAT CHARTER 83
property in Ensfland and bestowed it on a set J°^°.
p P ■ (. ■ ' submits to
of foreign favourites and parasites, mostly mer- the Pope, cenary soldiers from Flanders. Then suddenly he gave away his own cause. In 1213 he became frightened, made the most abject submission to the Pope, and promised to hold his crown and country for the future as the Pope's "vassal," and to pay tribute for it. This was too much for Fury of all Englishmen, and the country fairly boiled men.^^ " over with rage. --
Yet "rebellion" was a dreadful thing. John The was rich, powerful, and held all the important iead*°the castles of Ensjland in his own hands. The man ""f^^^^ ^f
. . the
who gave the English barons courage to resist Nation, was the very man over whom all this fuss had 1215! begun — Stephen Langton. He called meet- ings of the leading barons, and either drew up or got them to draw up a list of their grievances and those of other classes of Englishmen. This document was to be taken to the King and, if he refused to listen, the barons were to rebel. Nearly all the towns and most of the church- men were on their side; yet they were only able to raise a little army of 2,000 men. Luckily John again lost his head and agreed to all their demands. The document which they presented to him at Runny mede, near Windsor, in June, The Great 1215, and which he signed, was called "Magna onS?. Charta" — the "Great Charter of Liberties."
84 JOHN
John soon repented of signing it, sent for his hirehng soldiers, sent to his "Holy Father," the Pope (who at once absolved him from his oath to observe the Charter, and hurled dreadful curses at the rebel barons), and scattered the little national army like chaff before him. In despair some of the barons took the fooHsh step of calling in Prince Louis of France and offering him the Enghsh crown. But within fifteen months England
Death of was savcd. John, having grossly overeaten {aie! himself one night at Newark Abbey, died sud- denly in October, 1216.
Contents If you wiU cousidcr the Great Charter for a Grlat few minutes you will see what a long road
Charter, toward uuion and peace England had travelled since the last barons' rebellion in 1174. In that year the fight had been one of barons against King and people; now it was one of barons and people against King. All classes of the nation suffered and >had called on the barons to lead them. They could not have done this if the bar- ons had still held their lands in Normandy; and so it was the loss of those lands that finally made the barons Englishmen.
The nation had grown up; it had "come of age.'* What it wanted was to make its King give security that he would not oppress it in future. So, by the Great Charter, it proposed
KING, 30HN aiGNS THE QKEaT CHARTER^
THE GREAT CHARTER 85
to "tie his hands " in several ways. He is not to levy any more land-taxes without calling his Great Council of all the great landowners (barons and others), and asking their consent. He is not to exact higher payments of rent or of other customary dues than earlier kings did. He is to pay his debts to his creditors. His courts of justice shall sit regularly as those of Henry II and Richard had sat; and they shall sit in a fixed place instead of rambling over England and France in the train of the King. (This "fixed place" came to be Westminster.) All men shall be entitled to a fair trial, and shall not be deprived of their land without a fair trial. The great abuses of the game laws shall be abolished.
And so on. No doubt to many of the barons of this year, 1215, it was their own grievances of which they were thinking most — the grind- ing taxes, the loss of their Norman lands, their cruelly murdered kinsfolk. But in order to get these grievances redressed they were obliged to ask also for the redress of the grievances from which other classes were suffering; even "villeins" are carefully protected by one of the articles of the Charter; even to the hated Scots and Welsh "justice" is to be done. To the Church much more than justice is to be done; it is to be " made free," which, I fear, means that the kings are
86 JOHN
not to appoint its bishops. But later kings always found a way of avoiding this restric- tion.
The Reeds of Runnymede
^m^de" -^^ Runnymede, at Runnymede, June 15, What say the reeds at Runnymede?
The lissom reeds that give and take, That bend so far, but never break. They keep the sleepy Thames awake With tales of John at Runnymede.
At Runnymede, at Runnymede, Oh hear the reeds at Runnymede:
"You mustn't sell, delay, deny,
A freeman 's right or liberty.
It wakes the stubborn Englishry, We saw 'em roused at Runnymede!
"When through our ranks the Barons came. With little thought of praise or blame. But resolute to play the game.
They lumbered up to Runnymede; And there they launched in solid line. The first attack on Right Divine — The curt, uncompromising ' Sign ! '
That settled John at Runnymede.
CHARACTER OF HENRY IH 87
"At Runnymede, at Runnymede, Your rights were won at Runnymede! No freeman shall be fined or bound.
Or dispossessed of freehold ground. Except by lawful judgment found And passed upon him by his peers! — Forget not, after all these years.
The Charter signed at Runnymede."
And still when mob or monarch lays Too rude a hand on English ways. The whisper wakes, the shudder plays.
Across the reeds at Runnymede. And Thames, that knows the moods of kings. And crowds and priests and suchlike things. Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings
Their warning down from Runnymede!
John 's heir was a boy of nine years, who was Henry to reign for fifty -six years as Henry III. A 72^'^^^^" wise Regent was quickly chosen for him, William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke; the French prince was still in the land, but his friends soon deserted him, and he was glad to make a treaty and go away. The Pope supported the new The government, for by John's submission the thrPopl young King had become his "vassal." The Pope expected to make a good thing out of it, and he intended Henry to help him, which
88 HENRY III
Henry, when he grew up, was only too ready to
^f^iTen^ ^^' -^^^ ^^^ I^irigj with many good quahties, III- such as piety and mercy, with much learning and good taste for art and building, ^as quite un-English. He was the first king, since Ed- ward the Confessor, who had leaned wholly upon foreign favourites and despised his own sturdy people. He was frightfully extravagant, and a natural, though not an intentional, liar. England was to him only a very rich farm, out of which he could squeeze for himself and the " Holy Father," the Pope at Rome, cash, more cash, and ever more and more cash. His own share of it he spent on building beautiful churches, such as Westminster Abbey, and in useless wars with his noble overlord. King Louis IX of France, who always beat him, but allowed him to retain Southern Aquitaine, that is, Gascony. Down till about 1232 Henry governed by native English or Norman ministers; and, so long as Langton lived, the Pope did not interfere much.
Extrava- g^t soou after that the King 's extravagance and
gance of . . ^ i p
Henry the Popc s lucrcasmg demands tor money began to be felt, and the nation grumbled. The barons were now thorough Englishmen, who had no interests outside England at all. They began to wonder whether Magna Charta was a mere bit of waste paper or not; the King observed few of its provisions, though he con-
CHARACTER OF HENRY III 89
stantly swore to observe them. In fact, he pubHshed it at the beginning of his reign with several important articles omitted. Yet it was difficult to catch him out. He was not in the least a "gory tyrant," like his father; he simply maddened every one by his useless ex- travagances, by never paying his debts, and by never keeping his promises. At last the barons Remon- found that he had promised the Pope an enor- Ifl^l^ mous sum of money, in return for which the ^^f^^'^s- Pope had promised to one of Henry's sons the crown of Sicily. Sicily, forsooth! What had England to do with an island in the Mediter- ranean, while French pirates were burning the towns on our south coast without a single King 's ship being sent to prevent them.^*
This was in 1257. The barons met the King National in council after council and utterly refused to "IS^es. pay a penny for the Sicilian job. Endless doc- uments were drawn up for the King to sign. He signed them quite readily, promised what- ever he was asked, but never kept his word. The chief spokesman of the barons was one Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. The ^'""'l*^^ nation and all the best of the churchmen rallied heartily to Simon's side, especially the men of London, and things ended in a kind of war, wherein, at the battle of Lewes in 1264, the King and his eldest son. Prince Edward, fell
90 HENRY III
into Earl Simon's hands. For a year Simon governed in the King's name; but he was a hot- headed and rather grasping man, and quar- relled with his own best supporters. He even P"°^^ called in the aid of the Welsh. At last Prince
Hidward
learns a Edward cscapcd from captivity, rallied his father's friends, defeated and slew Simon at Evesham, and put his father back on the throne. Little vengeance was taken; and the last seven years of Henry 's reign were peaceful, so peaceful indeed, that, though Prince Edward was away in Palestine when Henry died in 1272, no one questioned his right to be crowned king when he returned. The Two things rendered Henry's long reign Engind! memorable; the coming of the Friars, and the beginning of Parliament. The Friars were the last offshoot of the dying tree of monkery. , Wise people began to see that a monk who shut 1 himself up in a monastery might no doubt save his own soul, but could do little for the souls of other people. What was wanted was men who could go about in the world preaching and doing good. Two great men, St. Dominic, a Span- iard, and St. Francis, an Italian, founded brotherhoods of "Friars" (the word means brothers), who were to fulfil this mission. It was a splendid idea, and St. Francis is one of the most beautiful figures in history. The Friars
1
THE FRIARS IN ENGLAND 91
came and lodged with the very poor in the filthy slums, and did such work as our clergy are doing to-day in all great cities. Others walked all over the land, preaching in the streets and villages. But soon this movement also began to fail; for pious laymen heaped lands and riches on these brotherhoods, until in little more than a century they had become as rich and as worldly as the monks. Moreover, the ordinary parish and town priests, who suffered even more than the laymen from the greedy demands of the Pope, began to think of monks and friars alike, as mere agents of the Pope, as something foreign to the "national Church." Hence, after 1300, there were few gifts of land ^^°^^ to monks or friars; people preferred rather, colleges. to found schools and colleges. Both at Oxford and Cambridge colleges had been founded before that year.
The second thing, the beginning of Parlia- The Germ
, . . , , -r^ . of Parlia-
ment, IS even more important. Jiver since ment.
Magna Charta had been signed the idea that
the nation ought in some way to control the
King was in the air; and the question was what
shape this control should take. As you know.
Parliament to-day consists of two houses.
Lords and Commons. The House of Lords JJ^^
House 01
is a direct descendant of the barons of the Lords. thirteenth century. The eldest son of a baron.
92 HENRY III
earl, marquis, or duke inherits the right to re- ceive from the King a letter calling him by name to Parliament whenever it meets. The King can "create" a man a baron, and the crea- tion carries with it this right to receive the letter of summons. Perhaps there were nearly two hundred great barons in Henry Ill's reign; there are now over six hundred. The bishops always received a similar letter of summons, and, until the Reformation, so did the leading abbots. It was in the reign of Henry III that this Great Council began to take its shape. The King no doubt disliked it, for he disliked all control, and its business certainly was to control him. But he found that he could not do without it. The The origin of the House of Commons is quite ''c^om- different. It, to-day, also has over six hundred mons. niembers, chosen from different towns and dis- tricts of the United Kingdom, by all persons who have the right to vote. Now, in the reign of Henry III, and even earlier, as I told you, the King had been in the habit of sending offi- cials into each county and town to consult with the chief landowners and citizens, and to dis- cover what amount of taxes that county or city could bear. These people met in the old Saxon court of justice, called the ''County Court," to which all free landowners ought to come; and they elected "knights" or gentlemen to
THE FIRST PARLIAMENTS 93 ,
speak for them. In Henry Ill's reign the brilliant idea occurred to somebody, ^' Why not send these elected knights or gentlemen to meet the King himself in some general assembly? Each of them can speak for his own county, and the King will get a fair idea of what amount of money the whole of England is able to give him."
Now no general assembly other than that of The first the Great Council of barons existed, so the menS in elected knights from the counties and the elected ^f H^e^f" citizens from the towns used occasionally to be m- called to the Great Council, and there met the barons and the King. Then there would be a great Talking or *'Parliamentum" (French parler, to talk). Such knights and citizens would naturally grow bolder when they found themselves met together, and found that the barons were much the same sort of fellows as themselves, and had the same ideas about the King's extravagance and his ridiculous foreign wars. It was on such occasions that they thoroughly realized that the barons were their natural leaders. Soon, they too would begin to present petitions about the grievances of their districts, and to beg the King to make particular laws. Earl Simon has got much fame because, while he was ruling in 1265, there met, for the first time, in one assembly,
94 HENRY III
barons, bishops, abbots, "knights of the shire," and citizens. You will see in the next chapter how Edward I shaped these assemblies into regular parliaments, and what powers they won for themselves.
My Father's Chair.
There are four good legs to my Father's Chair —
Priest and People and Lords and Crown. I sit on all of 'em fair and square,
And that is the reason it don't break down.
I won't trust one leg, nor two, nor three. To carry my weight when I sit me down;
I want all four of 'em under me —
Priest and People and Lords and Crown.
I sit on all four and I favour none —
Priest, nor People, nor Lords, nor Crown —
And I never tilt in my Chair, my son.
And that is the reason it don't break down!
When your time comes to sit in my Chair, Remember your Father's habits and rules:
Sit on all four legs, fair and square.
And never be tempted by one-legged stools !
CHAPTER V THE THREE EDWARDS, 1272—1377
Edward I, II, and III (notice the grand old Saxon name; we are all one people now) may be called Edward the Lawgiver, Edward the Poltroon, Edward the Knight. The greatest of these was Edward I.
He ranks with the half dozen greatest Edward i, "makers of England," with Alfred, Wilham 1272-1307. the Conqueror, Henry II, Henry VIII, Eliza- beth, and Victoria the Great. I should, indeed, say "makers of Britain," for it was Edward who planned, and almost carried out, the union of the whole island under one crown. It was he who gave the abiding shape to our Parlia- ment, who dealt the first successful blow to the pretensions of the Pope, and who first armed his soldiers with the all-conquering long- bow. His care for our coast defences was an example to his descendants. His legal re- forms were hardly less than those of Henry II, and at the end of his reign the law of England and the law courts of England had
^ 95
9Q EDWARD I
taken the shape that they bore down to the
nineteenth century.
His Edward I was a brave, truthful, honourable
^ ^ter] nian, of rather narrow sympathies, and could
be very cruel to his foes. He had learned
much from his father's muddled reign; he would
engage in no rash foreign adventures to please
and his tli^ Popc or any one else. Of course, he must
task. (Jefei2(j iiis Qne foreign possession, Gascony;
and he fortified it very strongly. Occasionally
he was obliged to fight King Philip IV of
France, but that was because that cunning
gentleman was trying to swallow not only
Gascony but also little Flanders, which was
now the most important market for English
wool, and also because Philip was helping
Edward's enemies the Scots. What Edward
himself was really set upon was the union of
Conquest Walcs and Scotland to England. With Wales
of VVS'lcs
1282! he was finally successful. After two or three long and patient campaigns, full of painful marches and costly castle-building, he managed to shut up Llewellyn, the last "Prince of North Wales," in the mountainous district of Snow- don; and when Llewellyn was killed in a skir- mish, Edward organized Wales into counties, with regular sheriffs, judges and law courts, all under the English crown. From that time the eldest son of the King of England has
^BDVARD i;,S WARS ^^71T11 rilE"U7SSLSH -- tTovD the King vsKavecl ft^e Ir^rdsKi^^ of 3\is merv
CONQUEST OF WALES 97
always borne the name of "Prince of Wales." The first Englishman to be Prince of Wales could at least speak no English when the title was given to him, for he was only a few hours old. But the King stained his victory by the cruel execution of a Welsh prince, David, who, after all, had only done what all Celtic princes had been doing for centuries, namely, promised to submit and then rebelled again.
With Scotland Edward just failed, and his Attempt failure brought a terrible retribution on both quer countries. For nearly a century before this 1294-*° ' time Scotland had been at peace with Eng- ^^^^' land, and its southern half had been grow- ing richer and happier. Many Norman and Pros- English barons owned lands on both sides of Scotland the border and so were "vassals" of the kings ^^ward of both countries. Even the Scottish King I'swars. held a small English earldom, and for that he was, of course, the "vassal" of King Edward. But the crown of Scotland he held from God alone, as Edward held the crown of England.
King Alexander III of Scotland died in 1286, Contest leaving an infant grand-daughter known as the Scottish "Maid of Norway." Edward at once pro- 1290°' posed to marry her to his eldest son. Nothing could have been better for both kingdoms, and all reasonable Scots would have welcomed a union. But in 1290 the baby queen died, and
98 EDWARD I
at once there was a dispute for the crown between several great Scottish barons. They appealed to Edward, and in their appeal ac- knowledged him to be "overlord" of Scotland. He gave his decision in favour of John Balliol, who was duly crowned at Scone as King of Scotland. Edward's Thcu, in his new capacity as overlord, Scotland, Edward began to bully Balliol and to treat ^^^*' Scotland as if it were already a part of England. Balliol was a weak creature, and threw him- self into the arms of Philip of France, who saw a splendid opportunity of diverting Edward from Flanders and Gascony by aiding the Scots. So was founded the great alliance between France and Scotland which was to last for over two hundred years. Edward thereon declared Balliol deposed and sent men to conquer Scotland. He only succeeded in rousing every Scottish heart to desperate William resistance. Of this resistance a small land- owner, called William Wallace, was the first hero. Edward, with his mailed knights and his terrible archers, gave Wallace and the Scots a severe thrashing at Falkirk (1298), but he could not hunt down a whole nation in that wild hill country. During the nine years between the battle of Falkirk and Edward's death it became a war to the knife between the
THE BORDER WARS 99
two nations, which ten years before had been ready to lie down Hke lambs together.
The result was that, for fifty miles on each The side of the border, the land became a desert, and\he through which swept, almost yearly, fierce ^^J^^''' raids from either country; and this state of i^o^-
. . 1550
things continued far into the sixteenth century. Every Scot whom Edward caught he would hang as a traitor (Wallace was hanged in 1305), which was quite a new practice in foreign or even in civil war, wherein there had been a great deal of "live and let live" on either side. Like other narrow and upright men, Edward failed to see that those who resisted him could be as upright as himself. Yet he was such a good soldier and so patient that he had very nearly finished off the conquest of all Southern Scotland when he died on his last campaign in 1307. "Carry my bones into battle against them," were his last instructions, "and on my tomb carve 'Edward, the hammer of the Scots.'" But it was too late; Scotland had just Robert found a deliverer in Robert Bruce, a baron of King^of Norman descent, who was crowned at Scone fsSe^"'^' in 1306 as King Robert I.
Great as a warrior and imperialist, Edward Edward was even greater as a lawgiver and organizer, ments. All his laws obtained the full sanction of the now regularly constituted House of Lords.
100 EDWARD I
The House of Commons generally met at the same time, and was made up of over two hundred borough-members and seventy-four Knights of the Shire. It had, at first, no share in the law-making, but it constantly petitioned in favour of particular laws. The clergy, after a short struggle, preferred not to be represented in Parliament except by their bishops and great abbots, who sat with the Lords; but Edward allowed them two assem- blies called "Convocations," one in the Arch- bishopric of Canterbury and one in that of York. These bodies voted taxes for the clergy to pay, just as Lords and Commons voted them for the laymen to pay. His Law- The House of Lords also became the chief law court to which you could "appeal" from all the three "common" law courts, which were now fixed at Westminster, with a sepa- rate staff of judges for each. In some cases, if you couldn't get justice anywhere else, you might go to the King himself, who would order his Chancellor to look into your case; and that was the beginning of the "Court of Chancery." The Chancellor was the greatest official in the kingdom and kept the King's "Great Seal," with which all legal documents must be sealed. One of the most useful laws which Edward made was called
giving.
RICHES OF ENGLAND 101
*' Mortmain," forbidding people to leave more lands to the Church, which was growing a little too powerful. Another was the "Statute of Winchester," a great measure for compelling all men to help in keeping the peace; it created "police-constables" (with whom, as friends or foes, most boys are still familiar) in every town and village. Another was a law allowing the free sale and division of great estates of land. His heavy In all his laws, as in all his wars, we may say **^^^" that Edward, like Henry II, took his people into his confidence, which is the secret of good govern- ment. It was expensive, as all good govern- ment must be; and, as no one likes paying taxes, there was once a sort of outbreak, both of barons and clergy, against the expense of it. Edward was very angry, but he gave way and confirmed Magna Charta, with the additional promise added that he would take no taxes at all without consent of his full Parliament.
He kept his promise. "Pactum serva" Riches of (keep troth) was his motto. Indeed the growth oi country was now able to bear heavy taxes. ^°°'- Early in the twelfth century an order of monks called "Cistercians" had begun to devote themselves to breeding sheep on a great scale, in order to sell wool; and England at the end of the thirteenth century was the greatest wool-growing country in the world. We did
102 EDWARD I
not yet know how to weave fine cloth, so our
The wool wool was all exported to Flanders, and Parlia-
Fiand^s^^ mcnt Said that every sack that was sent there
should pay the King 6*. 8d. The "Flemings"
(men of Flanders) wove the cloth and sent it
all over Europe. This trade made it more
important than ever for our kings to keep the
sea clear of pirates, and Edward worked hard
at this task. There were other rich trades
such as that in wine with Bordeaux, and in
furs and leather with North Germany; foreign
merchants had to pay the King something for
leave to come to sell and buy, for as yet there
were very few English merchant-ships.
Edward Edward I's quarrel with the clergy was a
with^the ^^^y short and simple affair. The English
Pope, Church had been long; growing more and more
1296. o o o
a part of the nation and less and less dependent on the Pope. But still the Pope was the head of all European churches, and had to be obeyed if possible. In 1296 Pope Boniface VIII startled the whole of Europe by absolutely forbidding any clergyman to pay any taxes to any king. It was only a few years since Edward had got his regular system of taxing the clergy comfortably arranged. He and the King of France rose in wrath against this absurd suggestion. Edward simply told his clergy that he would put them "out of law'*
DEATH OF EDWARD I 103
{i.e., withdraw all legal protection from them)
if they obeyed the Pope; and he seized all their
wool by way of precaution. They very soon
gave way. The King of France went much
further; he sent men to Italy who maltreated The decay
the haughty Pope and the Pope died, perhaps Popes,
in consequence of the rough handling he got.
He put a creature of his own on the Papal
throne, and compelled him to come and live
in France. For seventy years this "Captivity"
of Popes lasted (1305-78), and, as England was
at war with France for much of that time,
the respect of Englishmen for a French Pope
was naturally slight. After the "Captivity"
came the "Schism" (division) (1378-1415), J
during which there were two and sometimes '"
three persons each calling himself Pope. In
fact the old Church of the Middle Ages was
fast going down hill.
Edward's death closes the best period of Death of these "Middle Ages." From that time to the 130?^ ' Reformation the country, except in material wealth, did not improve. Even the glorious foreign wars of Edward III brought in the long run more harm than good to England.
Edward II ("the Poltroon") was a most Edward impossible person, heartless, ignorant, extra v- 27. agant, cruel, and weak-minded. Men rubbed their eyes and said, "Is this creature the son
I
104 EDWARD II
His idle- of *Pactum scrva'?" He gave up the Scottish extra^4^ wai at oiice, and, when in 1314 he was obhged gance. ^q IslI^q ft up again, his enormous army got a most thorough thrashing from the Scottish spearmen at Bannockburn. He hung on the neck of a low-class Gascon favourite, who made fun of the sober English barons till they caught and killed him. Edward afterward The Earl took a fcarful revenge on such barons as he ^^castS" c<^uld catch, especially on his cousin Earl Thomas of Lancaster. Thus began a feud between the Crown and this man's family which ended in the overthrow of Edward's great-grandson Richard II and eventually in the civil "Wars of the Roses." Decay of The barous grew worse as well as the King baronage! — for uo ouc class in a country can be bad 1500 without the others suffering; they used the meetings of Parliament to carry on their quar- rels. Several of them were of royal descent (from younger sons of Henry III and Edward I); these had married great English heiresses, and began to fight each other for lands and earldoms. The King seemed to be at their mercy. At last, in 1327, a general rising, headed by the wicked French wife of Edward, „ . swept him away and set up his son, aged 13, tion of as Edward III. Edward II was a bad King; II, 1327. but his deposition and murder were a bad job,
DEPOSITION OF EDWARD II 105
because there had been no one great national grievance, only a lot of private ones of certain great nobles. He had wasted his life, and in the end was deposed for nothing in particular.
Edward III ("the Knight"), by interesting f-.^'^fli^^^ these barons m his French and Scottish wars, where there were lands and money as well as glory to be gained, snuffed out their quarrels for nearly fifty years; but he, too, had several younger sons who quarrelled with each other after his strong hand was gone.
He was a man of many different sides of His character. He loved pageants and splendour, and popu- but he also loved hard knocks in hard fights *" ^' by sea and land. He was merchant-king, sailor- king, soldier-king, and Parliament's king too, for he added greatly to the power of the House of Commons, which, when he died, had obtained a full share in all law-making, could call the King's ministers to account if it thought they were misbehaving, and, in fact, was almost as powerful as the House of Lords. It was always ready to vote Edward enormous sums of money. Finally, Edward thoroughly understood the needs of English trade, and he founded English manufactures; for it was he who invited Flemings to come from Flanders and settle in Norwich and teach us how to weave fine cloth.
106 EDWARD III
The great Yet Edward has a bad name in history war^caUed ^ecause he plunged England into that great the Hun- war with France which lasted off and on for Years' 100 ycars. In the beginning, I think, he could S- hardly help fighting. At the best of times 1453. England and France were rather like two fierce, well-fed dogs, the doors of whose ken- nels looked right into each other. Edward had wisely begun his reign with several serious attempts to conquer Scotland, and had won Causes of ^ great battle at Halidon Hill in Berwick- the war. s^jre, while, all the time, French help was being poured into Scotland. Then, again, the French never ceased their attempts to eat up our old ally, Flanders, now more than ever necessary to English trade. Finally, no Eng- lish King of any spirit could refuse to defend Gascony, our one foreign possession. The war opened with a great English victory on the seas, at Sluys off the River Scheldt (1340); and, just before this victory, Edward had been persuaded by the Flemings to come to their Edward help on land and to take the title of "King
claims to -^ . . . 1
be King of of Fraucc." By English law his claim to the 1340. French crown would have been a good one, because his mother was the daughter of King Philip IV, but French law did not recognize that a man could inherit a kingdom through his mother. However, from this time forward
Boundary of Henry ll's possessions P°" I,
English possess7oiTS at accession of Edward lit ^^M ^alals English possessions after Treaty of Bretigny \'Z(/^-SA V
Agincout
nl'isj^
FRANCE
Engfisb Miles
Q 20 40 ^ 80 100
Marseilles [Mediterranean Sea
Emery Walk"- so
THE BLACK PRINCE 107
until 1802 all English kings called themselves "Kings of France" and put the French Lilies beside the English Leopards on their Royal Standard. This was the most expensive piece of gardening on record, but the war gave the English a long experience in hard knocks which stood them in good stead.
Edward had in him a good deal of the The "knight-errant," the sort of brave, reckless nation rider who was supposed to go about seeking h"^^^'^'^^ adventures, rescuing ladies in distress, and cutting the throats of giants. But he had also a rich kingdom at his back and plenty of fighting barons, knights, and freeholders, as greedy of adventure as himself. His subjects, in fact, urged him on and gloried in his splen- did series of victories.
Perhaps you are disappointed that I am not going to describe any of his great battles or rides through France; but I had much rather that you learned why a King of England was fighting in France than the dates of the Battle Battles of of Crecy (1346) or Poitiers (1356). In the iS' open field, up to 1361, we were always vie- iSe!' ' torious. This was because the English leaders, including the King himself, his noble son called the "Black Prince," Chandos, Manny, Sfjf'^ Knollys, and many others thoroughly under- p gai- stood "tactics" — that is to say, they knew soldiers.
108 EDWARD III
how to move their men on the battlefield. The French used to huddle too many heavy- armed knights, whether on horse or foot, into too small a space, and trusted to crushing the English by mere weight of numbers. But it is an old saying that "the thicker the hay is, the more easy it is to mow it." The French light infantry was contemptible and was despised by its own knights; whereas our Use of the sturdy yeomen, armed with the long-bow, were long-bow. ^YiQ first line of every English force and could pour in such showers of arrows as neither horses nor men could face. Then our cavalry could charge in after the arrows had blinded or frightened whole battalions of the enemy. Capture In the course of the war Edward captured "^ ^1347] the great city of Calais, which, as you know, is right opposite Dover. He wanted, or said that he wanted, to hang six of the principal citizens of Calais, for the city had made a desperate resistance and cost him much trouble; but his good Queen Philippa begged them off. By the possession of Calais we got command of the "narrow seas" as we had never had it before, and Edward III might well put the picture of a ship on his new gold coins, to show that he was "Sovereign of the Seas." We held Calais for 200 years. After more than twenty years of war Flanders was free from the French,
EDWARD 111 AT CALAIS
PESTILENCE OF 1348-9 109
Gascony was safe, and, though Scotland was as unconquered as ever, a Scottish king had been taken prisoner at the Battle of Neville's Cross near Durham (1346), and a French king at the Battle of Poitiers. A peace was Peace of concluded in 1361, which left Edward in full ^^qi^^' possession of all the old inheritance of Henry II's wife (Eleanor of Aquitaine), as well as of Calais.
France had been harried from end to end; The but so had Northern England by the Scots. PfS.g^ And, though our country was gorged with French gold, it was by no means happy. The war had in fact become a war of plunder, which is the worst kind of war. And in 1348 a pes- tilence, called the Black Death, had swept off j| more than a third of the population of Eng- '^' land, which early in the century had perhaps reached four millions. The exceedingly dirty habits of our ancestors had frequently caused epidemics of various horrible diseases, but never before upon such a scale. No doubt Results of this plague was brought by travellers and fJncron goods coming from the East. All Southern [if^ and Europe suffered, but England perhaps worse than any country. The "villein" class was certainly diminished by one half; and so land- owners could no longer get their labour-rents, or, indeed, get their land tilled at all. Prices
110 EDWARD III
doubled everywhere, and the few "villeins" that were left demanded enormous wages for a little work. All the "feudal" ties which had bound village life together were snapped. Men began to wander "in search of work" from the old home where they had been born and where their ancestors had lived from earliest Saxon days. Landowners, finding they could get no reapers or threshers, began to sell their land, or take to sheep farming, which wants few hands. Parliament went on saying: "Oh, ye villeins, you shall work for the old wages; oh, ye land- owners, you shall not pay higher ones." But it was not a bit of good. There was a great deal of work to be done; there were very few men to do it, and those men asked and received higher wages. For a year or two it seemed as if society would come to an end. Last years Then, slowly, thiugs got a little better, but, ni'\^69^ as you shall hear, there was a fierce rebellion '^'^' of the peasants in the next reign. Edward Spanish III*s last ycars were unhappy. His son, the ^^^'^^70' Black Prince, governed Aquitaine, and was beguiled by a Spanish scoundrel, called King Pedro, to interfere in a Spanish civil war. Wherever the Prince and his archers fought they won, but his army suffered dreadfully from the climate. A new King of France took the opportunity to renew the great war (1369)
DEATH OF THE BLACK PRINCE 111
His captains had been learning tactics from their EngHsh foes by the simple process of being beaten till they understood how to hit back, and slowly and patiently began to win back castles and frontier provinces in Aqui- taine. The Black Prince, sore stricken with Death of fever, turned every now and then, like a dying pHnce!''^ leopard, and tore his victorious foes, but in ^^'^^^ vain. He died in 1376; and his father. King and of Edward, worn out with hard battles and also 111,1377. with luxurious living between compaigns, died in the next year. The heir was little Richard, son of the Black Prince, aged eleven. Two greedy and unscrupulous uncles, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, were glaring at the boy and at each other. So the great reign closed in gloom and fear for the future.
CHAPTER VI
THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES; RICHARD II TO RICHARD III, 1377-1485.
The As WE go on in English history each period century, a secms to have a character of its own. The ""'^Tfrni! twelfth century, in spite of Stephen's reign, is hopeful; the thirteenth is glorious, rich, and fairly peaceful. In the fourteenth begins a decline, of which it is difficult to explain all the causes; both men and classes have begun to snarl at each other. In the fifteenth, the period now before us, they are going to bite each other; the century seems to be a failure all round. The old The nation at large was by no means rotten; brTaki? ^^^ men's sense of right and wrong had been up- corrupted by the French and Scottish wars. Too much fighting is as bad for men as too little. Also they were losing their faith in the Church, which had ceased to be the pro- tector of the poor and thought mainly of keep- ing its enormous riches safe. Men were soon
Hie
QUARRELSOME EARLS 113
to lose their faith in the Crown as well, and even in the Law. In a rude state of society, when the barons were again becoming too rich and too powerful, and the Crown becoming too poor and too weak, the excellent system of government by Parliament, and even the excellent law courts, were of very little use; the barons used both for their own ends, and they kept armed men to enforce their views.
In those days armies were only raised for Quarrel- particular campaigns, and, when peace came, g^fgand were disbanded; and the soldiers, who had Barons. perhaps been fighting for ten years in France, were not likely to be peaceful when they came home. So they used to attach themselves to some great lord or baron who could employ them in his private quarrels. The numbers of the barons were now very small, but each was proportionately more powerful; and a great man might perhaps hold four or five earldoms. The younger sons of the kings held many of these, and were often the worst rowdies at the fashionable game of " beggar-my -neighbour " and *'king of the castle." In my schoolboy days, when we were asked what we knew of any particular baron in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, we usually thought it safe to answer: "He was the King's uncle and was put to death." Most of the King's uncles and cousins
114 RICHARD II
were put to death, and more of them deserved to be.
As regards the mere "politics" and wars of
the hundred and eight years from the accession
of Richard II to the death of Richard III,
there is Httle that you need remembpr.
Richard Richard II had many good quahties, but
^*99fhis ^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ hot-headed; while he was a
chaiac- ^qv his uuclcs and some four or five other
ter. "
great barons were always trying to rule in his name; when they found this difficult, they con- spired against him and killed his best friends. When he came of age they despised him be- cause he kept the peace with France, whereas they and their plundering followers had en- joyed the war. Richard, however, was no coward, and when he was not yet fifteen he had a fine opportunity of showing his pluck. In 1381 the question of the wages of farm la- bourers, which had been so much upset by the Black Death in 1348, led to a fearful outbreak called the "Peasant Revolt" (1381) all over the richest lands of England. It was headed by The one Wat Tyler. London was occupied by the Revolt! rebels, and King and courtiers had to fly to ^2^1- the Tower. Again the ship of state seemed in danger of foundering; but the] peasants lacked real leadership. Young King Richard II (he was then fourteen) showed the greatest pluck
RICHARD II AND WAT TYLER
HIS VIOLENCE 115
Tyler was killed and the revolt was put down, not without a good deal of hanging. When that was over, men's eyes began to open to the fact that new conditions of life had begun. "Villeinage" was dead; the only labourers left were jree labourers, who naturally would bargain for the highest wages they could get. Also, much land had ceased to be ploughed and had gone back into pasture for sheep; for wool increased in value every year, and sheep need few hands to guard them.
But for the rest of his reisjn the King was P^^ ^i^
" ^ _ ience m
either chafing against his uncles and their i397. friends, or else planning schemes of vengeance against them. In 1397, after long waiting, he struck swiftly at the leaders of the barons, killing his uncle Thomas and banishing his cousin Henry of Lancaster (son of John of Gaunt, Edward Ill's third son). Then he got Parliament to pass certain acts which gave him almost absolute power, and all sober men, who reverenced both the Crown and the "Con- stitution" (which, roughly speaking, means government through Parliament), stood aghast at this. lZl\l
In 1399 Henry of Lancaster returned, accused J-ancaster,
_ •' ' ^ becomes
Richard of misgovernment, deposed him, and King, perhaps had him murdered. He then took Henry the crown, and for fourteen years tried to rule 1413
116 HENRY V
England as King Henry IV, but without much success. The very barons who had aided him to usurp the throne said he did not reward them enough; they rose against him and a sort of civil war began in 1403 and smouldered on for three or four years. Henry was not a bad fellow personally; he was devoted to the Church, and the Church supported him; so did the House of Commons, which got much power in his reign. But to keep order, the first task of a Henry v. King, was too hard a task for him. He died
141 ^_22
in 1413. His son Henry V, equally devoted to the Church, was a much stronger and cleverer man; there was no civil war in his short reign. But this was mainly because he put all his energies into renewing the war with France. This really was wicked: whatever right attack oi^ Edward III might have had to the French ^""iJiJ; crown, Henry V could have none, for he was not the best living heir of Edward III. The Earl of March was the best living heir of Edward III, for he was descended from Ed- ward's second son. King Henry V only from his third; but March had been quietly shoved aside when Henry IV seized the English crown. However, France was in a worse condition than England: her King Charles VI was mad, and her great nobles were tearing each other and their beautiful country to pieces. Henry
BATTLE OF AGINCOURT 117
V saw his opportunity and used it without mercy or remorse. He probably thought that such a war would at least draw away all the baronial rowdies and their followers from England, and it did. Henry set about the business of making war in the most practical His fleet
*^ , -^ , and guns.
manner. We owe him one great blessing: he was the first King since the Conquest who began to build a Royal fleet, as distinguished from the fleet of the Cinque Ports (which he also kept going); he was the first to use guns on a large scale, both on his ships and with his land army. Guns and gunpowder had been known before the middle of the fourteenth century, but so far had been little used. Their use explains Henry's success in his sieges in France, for with big guns you can batter down stone walls pretty quickly, whereas Edward III had spent eight months over the taking of Calais, which he only won by starving it out. The French towns defended themselves gallantly, but before his death Henry had managed to conquer all Normandy, and had even reached the River Loire. But his great Battle of feat was the glorious Battle of Agincourt, won f^^^^ against enormous odds in 1415. Finally in ^*^^- 1420 he got hold of the poor, mad Charles VI, entered Paris with him and compelled him to Treaty of
Troves
conclude the Treaty of Troyes, by which he, 1420.
118 HENRY V
Henry, should succeed to the French crown and marry the French Princess Katharine.
Death of Then, in the flower of his age, and leaving to 1422.' an infant of nine months old the succession to both crowns, he died in 1422.
Henry VT, There was one good "King's uncle," John,
1422-61. . .
The Duke Dukc of Bedford, who did his best to keep these fo*rd con- two crowus ou his nephew's head; but there ^'^French ^^^^ othcr uuclcs and cousins who were not war. SO good. Little Henry VI grew up into a gentle, pious, tender-hearted man, who hated war, hated wicked courtiers, loved only learn- ing and learned men, founded the greatest school in the world (Eton), and shut his eyes to the fact that England was getting utterly out of hand. Bedford just managed to hold down Northern France (which had always hated the Treaty of 1420) until his own death Joan of in 1425; after that all Frenchmen rallied to their natural King, Charles VII. The noble French "Maid of God," Joan of Arc, came to lead her people and inspired them with the belief that God would fight for them if they would fight bravely for their country. She was just a peasant-girl of no education, but of beautiful life and well able to stand hardship; she believed that the Saints appeared to her and urged her to deliver France. The French i| soldiers came to believe it too, and she led them
ENGL15H BKCHE.RY WIM5 AT J?^\GlNCaVB.T!
I
JOAN OF ARC 119
to battle dressed in full armour and riding astride of a white horse. She allowed no bad language to be used in the army: "If you must swear, Marshal," she said to one of the proudest French nobles, "you may swear by your stick, but by nothing else." The English caught her and burned her as a witch, but she lives in the hearts of all good Frenchmen (and Eng- lishmen) as a saint and a heroine until this The day. Step by step the English were driven J^^Jg^^^t back till all Normandy, all Aquitaine were lost, of France.
. . 1430-53.
and in 1453 nothing remained to us but Calais.
King Henry VI was not sorry; by this time ^nger of he knew how wicked his father's attack upon ^^ j. j^. France had been. But the fighting instinct of weakness Englishmen was desperately sore; defeat after vi's^""^^ such victories seemed unbearable. And, while ^e^™" the barons' quarrels round the King's tottering throne became shriller and shriller, there were but too many men in England ready to fight somebody, they did not much care whom so long as there was plunder at the end. Henry's wife, Margaret of Anjou, a fiery, cruel woman, ignored her gentle husband and governed in his name. She had already made herself the partisan of one of the two baronial factions, and had struck down the King's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. Her favourite minister, the Duke of Suffolk, was actually caught and
120 HENRY VI |
beheaded by common sailors on board a King's ship as he was flying to France. What should we say if a lot of British sailors now caught and beheaded Mr. Asquith on board the insurrec- Dreadnouqht? In the same year, 1450, there
tion of PPl- • • T7- 111
Jack Cade was a leariul insurrection m Hent, led by a scamp called Jack Cade, who marched into London and beheaded several more of the King's ministers. Law and order were utterly at an end.
The Duke The Dukc of York, who was now the best
the House living heir of Edward III, at length took up the and the cudgcls agaiust the House of Lancaster.
L^nSster^ Thcrc was civil war for some six years (1455- 61), and battle after battle. The horror of it all had driven the good King, on two occa- |, sions, out of his mind. It was called the war Wars of ^^ ^^ House of York against the House of the Roses, Lancaster, of the "White Rose" against the "Red Rose"; really, it was the war of some dozen savage barons on one side against another dozen on the other. Each of them had a little army of archers and spearmen; each had perhaps the grudges of a century to pay off upon some rival. The war hardly affected the towns at all, and stopped trade very little, and even the country districts, except in the actual presence of the armies, seem to have suffered little. The growth of wool, at any
EDWARD IV BECAMES KING 121
rate, and with it the increase of riches, went on as fast as ever. "The King ought to put a sheep instead of a ship on his coins," was a common saying of the day. Of course the coasts were utterly undefended, and pirates of all sorts had a happy time in the Channel.
If any line of division can be discovered in the country we may say roughly that the North and West were Lancastrian, the South and East (then the richest counties) Yorkist. At last Henry VI was deposed, Queen Margaret took flight and Edward, Duke of York, became King as Edward IV. He was a thoroughly Edward bad man, being cruel, vindictive and, except comes in warfare, lazy. But Margaret had been ^ef.' vindictive too, and, as regards cruelty, there was little to choose between the parties; after every battle the leaders of the vanquished side were put to death almost as a matter of course.
But, just as Henry IV had quarrelled with TheEarf
or WfiT*"
the barons who had crowned him, so did Edward wick, IV quarrel with his "Kingmaker" and best Kiig^'^^ friend, the Earl of Warwick. Warwick there- ^^^^^ upon deposed Edward and took poor Henry VI, who had been an ill-used prisoner in the Tower of London, and put him back on the throne again. It was only a six months' res- tion oT" toration (1470-1), for Edward returned, slew uTo'l^^'
1^2 EDWARD IV AND EDWARD V
Warwick in battle, slew Henry's only son after
the battle, slew all the Lancastrian leaders he
Edward ^^^^^ catch, and finally had King Henry mur-
IV again, dcrcd in the Tower. After this he "reigned
1471-83.
more fiercely than before"; he struck down his own brother George, Duke of Clarence; he employed spies, tortured his prisoners, and hardly called Parliament at all; he took what taxes he pleased from the rich. But he kept order very little better than Henry VI had done. Once he thought he would play the part of a "fine old English King," so he led a great army across to France in 1475, but there allowed himself to be bribed by the cunning Louis XI to go home again without firing a shot. At his death in 1483 his brother, the hunchback Richard, seized the crown, and Edward V murdcred Edward's two sons (Edward V and
1483 •
Richard Richard, Duke of York) in the Tower. Richard
'^^85' III was a fierce, vigorous villain, and had, in
two years and a half, succeeded in murdering
a good many nobles, both of the Lancastrian
and Yorkist parties.
The Earl Finally, all the sober English leaders who still mond kept their heads began to send secret messages
E^iand! to a famous exiled gentleman, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who was descended through his mother from the House of Lancaster, beg- ging him to come over from France and upset
BATTLE OF BOSWORTH 123
the tyrant. He was to marry Edward IV's daughter Ehzabeth, and thus to unite the red and white roses. Henry landed in South Wales with a very small army, which increased as he marched eastward. He met Kinsj 5^ttie of
, " JtJoswortn
Richard, defeated and slew him at Bosworth i485. in Leicestershire, 1485. Then he advanced to London and was received with joy and relief as King Henry VII.
Apart from the politics and wars of this ^/^^j^^^^^^ dreary period there are one or two things to be Reforma- noticed of much greater interest for us. Every age is only preparation for the next, and the seeds of many of the great "awakenings" of the sixteenth century were sowed in the fifteenth.
First, of the religious awakening. We had long been accustomed to growl at the riches of the Church, but, till the end of Edward Ill's reign, no one had questioned its spiritual powers. No one had doubted that priests could really pardon sin. Men hated the Pope, §^^g^^^^ but no one had yet doubted that he was the of the rich "Head of the Church" any more than they had Len. doubted that every priest performed a miracle every time he consecrated the Holy Sacrament. Few had even questioned that by payment of money to Rome you could buy salvation. But the popes, when they got back to Rome in 1415
124 SEEDS OF THE REFORMATION
after the great *' Schism," were Httle more than Itahan bishops, mainly occupied with wars against their neighbours. No doubt their bark was still terrible, but what about their bite? Had they, people wondered, any teeth left to bite with? „ Jo^P At the end of Edward Ill's reign the great
Wyclif.
English scholar, John Wyclif, began to ask questions about all these things, and to argue that the favourite doctrines of the Roman Church were all comparatively new, that they were not part of Christ's teaching, and could not be found in the Bible at all. He published an English translation of the Bible; hitherto men had only a Latin version of it, and the Church did not encourage laymen to read it. He also founded an order of "poor priests," who were to go about preaching simple Christianity. The The English bishops were absolutely terrified,
"heresy." and the monks, abbots, and friars more terrified still. These had long known what greedy eyes laymen cast on their vast wealth. Wyclif, said the great churchmen, was a "heretic," and ought to be burned alive (he died in his
Heretics bed all Safe in 1384). In the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V the clergy persuaded Parlia- ment to make laws saying that heretics should be burned alive, and many of Wyclif's
COMING CHANGES 125
followers, during the next hundred and twenty years, were actually so burned. The Church nicknamed them "Lollards," or babblers.
The "State," as represented by the King and Parliament, somewhat unwillingly sup- ported the churchmen in this matter; yet on the whole the State considered that these Lollards were raising dreadful questions, and it would be better to crush them and not allow them the safety-valve of talking. The Church sat on the safety-valve as long as it could; but the steam of free thought was bubbling under- neath, and, once it had gathered head enough, would blow those that sat on the safety-valve sky-high into little tiny pieces. When Lol- lardy bursts forth again in the reign of Henry Vni it will be called by the better name of *' Protestantism."
Other changes, too, were not far away. For Changes nearly a thousand years past the nations of over Europe had been considered as one great family ^^^^^' of which the Pope, and, since 800, some hazy German king who called himself "Roman Emperor," were supposed to be the two heads; other kings were, or ought to be, vassals of these 'I
two. The Kings of England and France had never really admitted these large claims, and that was why England and France were ahead of other nations. But all these ideas were
126 SEEDS OF THE REFORMATION
out of date; the spirit of the Crusades was
dead, the commercial rivalry of great nations
Gun- had begun. Gunpowder was changing the face
powder. " ^ ii
ot war and was making the strongest and heav- Printmg. icst armour quite useless. The printing of books with movable type was discovered about 1459, and, at Westminster, William Caxton was printing English and Latin books in the Dis- reign of Edward IV. In the same reign certain Bristol merchants were saihng far into the Atlantic, to discover half-mythical islands, of which dim stories, long forgotten, were now being revived and retold; they did not find any such islands till the reign of Henry VII had begun. Spaniards led by Columbus were the first to set foot in America in 1492; Portu- guese were the first to round the Cape of Good Hope five years later. But the idea of new Greek worlds to bc discovcrcd was in the air. Finally, the Turks had taken Constantinople in 1453, and its exiles, who still spoke a sort of Greek and possessed many manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophers, came to Italy and began to spread the knowledge of Greek to Western Europe. Men Four things, then, were to change the face wake up, of the world — gunpowder, printing, geo- graphical discovery, and Greek. They would lead men first to wonder, then to reflect, and
Here
Ptolei^y fall of ^iJvf> ^^
ricH i|>iefe& <Z/ '^
'!'.''
y'-'
^ o
This is aMa)J of MMERfCa On<i the Wa/ to
shewed to King H
AN IMAGINA
I
Here men say the ma.rtv)er'5
^e
, ./^Ss 'These is.le> /^ -" '^/-"^^O^belVdo-S Demon
AV'Hite C^ There loas here
r---^ . BERl dn ISLE was DUTned
''^~ ^i
^'^t) Ice
3
»«n. believed It to be,^ u>hlcb an old. P)L.O"r
lERICA, 1500
THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN 127
lastly to question — to question whether all the tales which the Church had been telling the world for a thousand years were true or false. Could Becket's bones really restore a dead man to life? Could a priest turn bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ? Was the world really flat and did the sun and moon go round it, as the Church said they did? Might there possibly be other worlds? You can understand, then, that the end of the fifteenth century left men rubbing their eyes, half awake and uneasy, but think- ing — thinking hard.
The Dawn Wind
At two o'clock in the morning if you open your The hour
1 1 T I before the
Window and usten, dawn.
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is
going to call the sun. And the trees in the shadow rustle and the
trees in the moonlight glisten. And though it is deep, dark night, you feel
that the night is done.
So do the cows in the field. They graze for an hour and lie down. Dozing and chewing the cud ; or a bird in the ivy wakes.
128 SEEDS OF THE REFORMATION
Chirrups one note and is still, and the restless Wind strays on, Fidgeting far down the road, till, softly, the darkness breaks.
Back comes the Wind full strength with a blow like an angel's wing. Gentle but waking the world, as he shouts: "The Sun! The Sun!" And the light floods over the fields and the birds begin to sing. And the Wind dies down in the grass. It is Day and his work is done.
So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan, Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking, And every one smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own!
CHAPTER VII
THE TUDORS AND THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND, 1485—1603
The King's Job
Once on a time was a King anxious to under- stand
What was the wisest thing a man could do for his land.
Most of his population hurried to answer the question,
Each with a long oration, each with a new sug- gestion.
They interrupted his meals, he wasn't safe in his bed from 'em.
They hung round his neck and heels, and at last His Majesty fled from 'em.
He put on a leper's cloak (people leave lepers alone) ,
Out of the window he broke, and abdicated his throne.
All that rapturous day, while his Court and his Ministers mourned him,
129
130 THE TUDORS
He danced on his own highway till his own
policemen warned him. Gay and cheerful he ran (lepers don't cheer
as a rule) Till he found a philosopher-man teaching an
infant school. The windows were open wide, the King sat
down on the grass, And heard the children inside reciting "Our
King is an ass.'* The King popped in his head, "Some people
would call this treason. But I think you are right," he said; "will you
kindly give me your reason .f^" Lepers in school are rare as kings with a leper's
dress on. But the class didn't stop or stare; it calmly
went on with the lesson: ^^The wisest thing, we suppose, that a man can
do for his land. Is the work that lies under his nose, with the
tools that lie under his hand.^' The King whipped off his cloak and stood in
his crown before 'em. He said : " My dear little folk. Ex ore parvulorum (Which is Latin for ' Children know more than grown-ups would credit'). You have shown me the road to go, and I propose to tread il."
AWAKENING OF ENGLAND 131
Back to his Kingdom he ran, and issued a Proclamation,
"Let every Uving man return to his occupa- tion!"
Then he explained to the mob that cheered in his palace and round it,
"I've been to look for a job, and Heaven be praised I've found it!"
Now we come to a very different part of The Six- history, the period when our own modern century; world began to be born. It was a dreadful ened stretch of years because the breaking up of ^°^^^' the old ideas of religion, of geography and of trade was accompanied by great suffering to many classes and by the loss of many noble lives of those who clung to the old ideas. Yet Struggle
between
it was a splendid period because of the close old and union and understanding between the new Tudor kings and their people; because Eng- land armed herself to face dangers from foreign foes so resolutely that, at the end of it, she was the first sea-power in the world. And it was a time in which England produced a series of really great men in every walk of life. Men's minds were stirred up to think, and so the men with the greatest minds came to the front;
The old order changeth, giving place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways.
132 HENRY VII
Wyclif had done little more than prepare the bed in which the seed was to be sowed, the seed of knowledge and of the "Spirit which giveth life." England was, as she is still, a deeply conservative country; our people were slow at taking up new ideas, and too much in love with money. They wanted kings who would give them peace and order, knock down the great nobles, restrict or even abolish the Pope's power. But they did not at first want "heresy" or wish to break with the Catholic Church of their fathers. Henry Hcury VII was a King admirably suited to 1509; Ms carry out some of these wishes. If you gave ' him a name you would call him "Henry the Prudent." He did not do as did the king in the poem on page 129, nor did any real king of whom I ever heard; but Henry tried hard to find out what a king's real "job" should be, and he set to work to do it; moreover, he did his best to make Englishmen stop talking and fighting among themselves, and set them to work each at his own job. His claim to the throne was not a very good one, and his aim therefore was to "let sleeping dogs lie. " " Mind your own businesses, my dear subjects, and let me mind mine," was what he said to him- self. Plis main task was to heal the wounds left by the civil war; and, in a reign of twenty-
HIS CHARACTER 133
four years, he had almost completely healed them. There were at first som^e smiall insur- rections, after-swells of the late storm, but they were put down with ease. Henry called few parliaments and asked for little money, but heaped up treasure by other ways. He taxed rich people, though he had no legal caution- right to do so; he carefully nursed trade and manufacture; and he imposed enormous fines on all big men who broke his laws, especially his laws which forbade them to keep large bands of retainers who would fight their quarrels. His ministers and privy councillors were either bishops or middle-class laymen; and the Privy Council became almost more important than Parliament. He cut off few heads, but chose them wisely, for those he did cut off were the most dangerous. A great monarchy was growing up in Spain as well as in France; even tisioveof Germany was trying hard to be a united coun- try. Henry watched them all, and made numerous treaties with them, but refused to be led into expense or adventures; above all he avoided wars. With Scotland he kept firm peace, the first real peace since 1290, and he married his daughter Margaret to King James IV; it was the great-grandson of this marriage, who, as James I, finally united the two coun- tries in 1603. As for the Church, it also seemed
134 HENRY VIII
to be wrapped in profound peace; the mutter- ings against it were all under the surface.
The "New Yet bcforc Henry died the "New Learning," founded which was to lead to the Reformation, was in full swing in England. Great scholars like John Colet and Thomas More were reading the Scriptures in their original Greek, and find- ing out how very much the Roman Church differed from the earliest forms of Christianity. The study of Greek had begun at both uni- versities, and English scholars were continually travelling to Germany and Italy. Henry In 1509 Henry died, and was succeeded by 1509-47; his son Henry VIII, aged eighteen, a most splendid young man, of great natural cleverness and devoted to the New Learning, but devoted also to every sort of game, pleasure and extrava- gance. For the business of the State he at first cared nothing. "Oh, go and talk to my Cardinal Chancellor about that," he would say. His
his foolish Chancellor was the cunning Thomas Wolsey, ^^ganS" afterward Cardinal, Archbishop of York and Legate (i. e. special agent) of the Pope. Wol- sey got all power into his own hands and man- aged things badly. He allowed his master to waste the treasures heaped up by Henry VII, and, when the King called Parhaments, they growled at this extravagance, and refused to vote the huge sums for which he asked them.
his early years
WAR WITH SCOTLAND 135
He plunged into foreign politics, and made a War witii
PT1 '1-1^ I'l 11 Scotland,
loolisn war with France, wmcn at once broke battle of the long peace with Scotland; for James IV 1513.^°* invaded England with a huge army, which was defeated by Henry's general, the Earl of Surrey, at Flodden Field (1513). Wolsey real- ized that the Church was in danger, both from the New Learning and from the growing out- cry against its riches, and he was most anxious to put off any open attack on it; but as for reform he had no plans.
The storm broke first in Germany, where. The in 1517, the simple monk, Martin Luther, tion°^*' began by attacking some of the more scanda- fj^™*"^' lous abuses of the Church, and ended, a year \>^s^^s to
" . miluence
or two later, by declaring the Pope to be *' Anti- England, christ." Henry VIII professed himseK to be deeply shocked at this, wrote a book in defence of the Catholic doctrines, and forbade Englishmen to read Luther's books. But these books, and many others upon the same side, could not be kept out of England, and nothing could prevent eager young men from reading them. By the year 1527 there was a small but vigorous body of scholars in England who were prepared to attack the teaching of the old Church as well as its riches. They called The First themselves ""Protestants"; their enemies called tan^.^' them "heretics." Their main cry was for th**
136 HENRY VIII
Bible as the ground of all Christian teaching; "away with everything that cannot be found in the Bible."
a^S^^ Until 1527 the Government sternly repressed
divorce, every movement against the Pope. Then a purely political event caused it to turn round. King Henry wanted to divorce his wife Kath- arine, a Spanish princess, who had been the wife of his brother Arthur. Arthur had died in 1501. The Pope had allowed Henry to marry Kath- arine, although many people had doubted whether such a marriage could possibly be lawful. Only one child of this marriage. Princess Mary, born 1516, had survived, and Henry thought, or professed to think, that this was a "judgment of God" on him. Also he wanted to marry some one else, the Lady
^Anne ^jmQ Bolcyu, oue of Queen Katharine's court ladies. He applied to the Pope for a divorce. Popes were in the bad habit of doing these little jobs to please kings; but Pope Clement VII would not do this. King Charles of Spain and Germany, called the "Emperor," was the nephew of Queen Katharine; he was much the most powerful monarch in Europe, and Clement Henry dared not offend him. So the Pope, and Wol-
ciement scy for him, shifted and twisted and turned '^^29" and promised, but could not give the King of England his wishes.
WHAT THE NATION DESIRED 137
Suddenly, to the surprise of all his courtiers, of all England, of all Europe, Henry roared out, "Pope! What do I care for the Pope? Call my Parliament!"
It was the year 1529. The King was thirty- The Par- eight years old, and quite unknown to his 1529-36. people, except from the rumours of his extra va- umon of gance. Suddenly he appeared before them pg°Y°*^ as their leader and friend, prepared to do all, and more than all, on which their hearts were set. The nation had hardly dared to whisper its desire to curb the Pope and the Church; here was a King who shouted it aloud !
Do not think that I praise Henry VIII. It was a selfish and wicked motive that started the idea in his mind. What I say is that, once the idea was started, he would have all the Kings of Europe against him, and no friend but his own people; and so King and people now became one as they had never been before.
Very few Englishmen were as yet prepared what the to accept any new sort of Church; most of Sed. them hated the idea of "heresy." Henry hated it also, and continued to the end of his life to burn a few extreme heretics. King and people wished no more than to abolish the power of the Pope in England, to strip the Church of its enormous wealth, and yet
138 HENRY VIII
to remain "good Catholics." Was this pos- sible? History was to prove that it was not; once the Pope was pulled down in England a "Reformation" of all the Church in England must follow, in spite of any effort to prevent * it. Henry just managed to stave off this reformation while he lived. The Laws 'pjjg Parliament of 1529 sat for seven years
against , *'
the Pope, and when it rose a new England had begun.
1529-36 .
How the new laws against the Church were forced through the House of Lords no one knows ; one fears it was by terror and threats, for nearly all the bishops and certainly all the ab- bots would be against them; and of the forty- five lay peers, a strong minority must have hated serious changes. But the House of Commons, almost to a man, welcomed these changes; and that House then represented the sober country gentlemen and the sober mer- chants of England.
One by one all the powers of the Pope were shorn away, the power of making laws for them- selves was taken from the clergy, the Church was declared to be independent of any foreign influence, but wholly dependent on the Crown. Every one was obliged to swear that the King was the "Head of the Church." The new btsho" Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, Cranmer. prououuccd thc divorcc from Katharine, and
MONASTERIES DISSOLVED 139
married his King to Anne Boleyn; the Princess Mary was set aside, and when Anne's daughter, the Princess EHzabeth, was born, she was declared heir to the throne. All the smaller .,
Monas-
monasteries were dissolved and their lands teries handed over to the Crown; Henry gave most of them to his courtiers and to important country gentlemen, and so a new set of nobles, newly enriched from Church lands and entirely dependent on the King, rapidly came to the front.
Many of the best men in England were JJ^™*^ deeply shocked at these changes, even some well; who had been prepared to go a long way in re- measures forming the abuses of the Church. But Henry tfg^^ij and his savage minister, Thomas Cromwell, Church
, . . and the
struck down every one who stood m their old path. The Courtenays and Poles, descended from Edward IV, were imprisoned, or driven into exile, or had their heads cut off. Sir Thomas More, once the King's intimate friend, and Bishop Fisher of Rochester, both men of European fame for their learning and piety, were the most distinguished victims. In the North of England, in 1536, a fierce insurrection Pilgrim- broke out called the "Pilgrimage of Grace"; ^race, the rebels cried out for the restoration of the ^^^^' monasteries, for in that wild country the monks had been the only doctors and their houses
140 HENRY Vni
had been open to all travellers. The rising was put down with great cruelty, for Henry was naturally a cruel man, and he was now drunk with pride and power. ^Prhice ^^ ^^^ already beheaded his second wife, Edward, Auuc, and married his third, Jane Seymour:
1537. . . «/ 5
she bore to him in 1537 a son, afterward Edward VI, and died a few days afterward. In the last seven years of his life he married three more wives, one of whom he divorced, another he beheaded, and the third survived him.
^\°nd^ In 1539 the remaining monasteries, even owners, the greatest, were dissolved and, as a result, the great abbots ceased to attend Parliament. Some of their wealth was used to found schools and professorships at Oxford and Cambridge and to create six new bishoprics; but most of it went to the nobles and gentlemen. Thus, within three years, nearly a quarter of the land of England had got new owners. All the great offices of state had been wholly taken away from churchmen, and were now in the hands
The Con- of thcsc ucw uoblcs. Ncw " Conf cssious of
IGSSIOIIS
of Faith. Faith" (declaring what was the true teaching of the Church of England) were published; first the "Ten Articles, " then the " Six Articles"; the former was a step in the direction of the German Protestantism; the latter was very
ijOW >iE:NR.Y^/lll HAD THE. MQ>at<S TvjKMI-ID OUT OFTMe f^ONASTER!IE..S
THE ENGLISH BIBLE 141
neany the old Catholic faith but without the Pope; and I must repeat that it was this mid- way position which, as late as Henry's own death, most people in England preferred.
But Henry had ordered an English trans- Jhe lation of the Bible to be placed in every parish Bible, church for every one to read, and in 1544 he allowed the Litany to be said in English; this was really the beginning of our beloved Prayer Book. And, once lay Englishmen began to read the Bible for themselves, they would not long be content to believe in confession to a priest or in the miracle of the Mass (both of which were taught in the Six Articles).
Now all these changes were carried through Danger of under continued danger from abroad, for of invasion course the Pope had declared Henry to be de- o?the posed, and called on all Catholic princes to go ^°p®' and depose him. Much of the danger was from the old alliance of France and Scotland, but far more from the power of Spain, Germany, and Flanders, now all in the hands of the. Emperor, Charles V. Threats of invasion were incessant, but Henry armed his people to the Henry teeth, and, at the end of his reign, had a navy p™pie/^ of seventy ships ready for action. He built castles all round his southern and eastern coasts, and was always making great guns to put in them. He knew that the few remaining de-
142 HENRY VIII
scendants of Edward III were plotting to upset his throne, especially the exiled Reginald Pole, a great favourite of the Pope. He had already sliced off the heads of all his royal cousins whom he could catch. With the approval of sh^w ^^^ Parliament, he had settled that the crown succeed sliould go after his death to his son Edward;
Henry?
if Edward had no children, to Mary; then, if Mary had no children, to Elizabeth; lastly, if all three of his children died without direct heirs, it was to go to the heirs of his younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, not to those of his elder sister, Margaret, Queen of Scot- land. He hated Scotland as bitterly as Edward I, and continued the Border wars as fiercely until his death in 1547. Henry's Thus you wiU Say I have drawn for you the ter. picture of a monster of cruelty and selfishness? Yes, Henry was just that. But he was also something much more. He was a great patriot, a great Englishman. He taught Englishmen to rely on themselves and their ships; and he taught future English kings to rely on their people. He shivered in pieces the foreign yoke that had bound the Church of England since Saint Augustine had preached in the open air Sufferings to the early Kings of Kent. Great suffering | Vor! accompanied these great changes; and they were thoroughly bad for the moral character
THE HENRY GRACE A D)BV caltecL THE^QREAT HARRV^s HENR'^'i>-^blCG|EST^3HIP^^ >
|H£NRY Vlll -SEELS THAT E.NGLAND HAS A GOOD FLEET- I
GREED OF THE RICH 143
of the generation which saw them. The new landowners were men who thought only of riches, and turned out the tenants of the old monks by the score, and by the hundred. A swarm of beggars were let loose over the coun- try, beggars to whom the monks had given daily doles of bread and beer. Savage laws of whipping and forced labour had to be passed to keep these men in order. Moreover, since ^^^^ the discovery by the Spaniards of rich gold and rich. silver mines in America, money had come into Europe in great floods and this had sent up the price of all goods at a fearful rate; all trade seemed uncertain; great fortunes might be suddenly made, and as suddenly lost. So the strong and the clever (and often the wicked) prospered, and the weak and the old-fashioned people were ruined.
The six years' reign of the boy Edward VI v?T547- (1547 — 53) only made all this social misery worse. 53.' Every one had been afraid of Henry VIII; no one was afraid of a child of ten, though he Scramble was a clever and strong-willed child. The new result was that the government became a scram- riche?Ind ble for wealth and power among the new nobles, power, the Seymours, Dudleys, Russells, Herberts, Greys, and many more who had been enriched with abbey lands. It was the fear of losing these lands and the desire of confiscating for
144 EDWARD VI
themselves what remained of Church property that drove these men, quite against the wishes of sober people, to force on a reformation of They de- the teaching of the Church. The result in the Reforma- loug ruu was good, bccausc the Protestant ^^°^' faith did then first get a lawful footing in England; but the result for the moment was bad, because moderate men began to mistrust a Reformation which seemed to be bound up with greed for spoil and with contempt for all the past traditions of England. At the same time the leaders of the new Protestant Church were all men of high character. Cran- mer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper, all bishops of King Edward, all died for their faith in the next reign. The two However much we may rightly abuse the BookTof greedy nobles, we can never wholly regret ^^mo ^ reign which first gave us the Prayer Book in and 1552. English and substituted the Communion for the Mass. Cranmer prepared two successive Prayer Books, the second (1552) somewhat more Protestant than the first of 1549, and it was the second which, with very slight alter- ations, became our present Prayer Book in the reign of Elizabeth. In Edward's reign also the marriage of priests was allowed, and the laws about burning heretics were abolished. In his reign too, alas, the beautiful stained-
QUARREL WITH SCOTLAND 145
glass windows, statues and pictures were re- moved from most of our churches, whose walls were now covered with whitewash.
Edward's first Regent or "Protector" was his mother's brother, Edward Seymour, Duke of The Duke
. oi bomer-
Somerset; a man of much higher character set, Pro- than most of the nobles, but rash and hot- headed, and quite unfit to lead the nation. He continued Henry's vindictive quarrel with ^^^ ,
. . , . , quarrel
Scotland, won a great victory at Pinkie, and withScot- drove the Scots once more into the arms of 1548. France. Their girl-queen, Mary Stuart, who might have been a bride for our boy -king, was sent for safety to France and married to the French King's son. Somerset was soon upset by a much more violent person, the ruffian ^i^^^jf® John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who umber- pushed on the Reformation at greater speed 1550-53. for purely selfish ends, and disgusted all sober men with it. He brought in a lot of foreign Protestants and gave them places in the violence English Church; he brought in foreign troops formers. to be his bodyguard, bullied the Princess Mary (who was the natural head of the Catholic party), thrust all the leading Catholics into prison, and tossed the remaining Church lands to his fellow nobles.
But Edward, who had always been very Edward
VI, very
delicate, began early in 1553 to draw near his m.
His death 1553.
146 MARY I
end. Mary's succession was sure, and, though no one knew exactly what line she would take in religious matters, it was certain that she would stop the violent progress of the Refor- mation, and quite certain that she would kill Northumberland. So the Duke persuaded the dying boy-king, now sixteen, to make a will, passing over both his sisters, and leaving the ^Mie crown to his cousin. Lady Jane Grey, heiress of the Suffolk line and recently-married to one of Northumberland's sons. When Edward died in July, Jane was actually proclaimed Queen in London.
But not a cheer was raised by the crowd, and the whole nation rose as one man for the injured Princess Mary. Within nine days Jane was a prisoner in the Tower, where a few months afterward she was executed, and Mary rode into London with her sister Elizabeth at her side. Mary I, Mary's reign of five years and four months her char- is the greatest tragedy in our history. She was a good woman, passionately attached to the Catholic faith and to the memory of her mother. She was learned, clever and of lofty courage. But she was a Spaniard at heart and never an Englishwoman. Like a Spaniard she was vindictive, and, unfortunately, she had deep wrongs to avenge.
HER MARRIAGE 147
Yet, if Protestantism were to triumph in J^^ %
p 1 p p 1 1 formation
the long run, something of the fearful cruelty in danger, she was going to inflict upon it was necessary; for moderate men had hitherto mainly seen it as the religion of a gang of selfish nobles seeking to divide all the riches of England among themselves. Nine tenths of England preferred anything — almost the Pope — to North- umberland and his land-grabbing crew. At the least, they wanted a return to the state of things at the end of Henry's reign. "No for- eigners," was the cry; "England and English Church for the English."
But Mary cared little for her countrymen, ^^^ h° cared only for her Church; she was determined woman; to restore the state of things which had existed riage to at the beginning, not at the end, of her father's gp^^^P °^ reign; to restore the Pope and all his works, and to do this by making the closest alliance with the Emperor Charles and his son Philip, whom she determined, against all good advice, to marry. In six months she had terrified her people; in two years she had completely lost their hearts; in six years she had wrecked for- ever the Catholic faith in the minds of intelli- gent Englishmen.
She hurled all the leaders of the Reformed Catholic Church into prison at once, and set about re- up again. establishing the Catholic services everywhere.
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148 MARY I
The greedy nobles, one and all, now professed themselves to be good Catholics, and them she dared not touch. The one thing they feared was to lose their new grants of the abbey lands. They knew the Queen was bent upon restoring the monasteries, and the laws for burning heretics, which had been abolished in the reign of Edward VI; but she was not able to persuade her Parliaments to do the latter until the end of 1554, and the lands she was never able to touch at all. But Reginald Pole, long an exile and