the Lowlands. But the Scots did not yet submit; the barons deposed
Wallace, of whom they had always been jealous, and named a regency to
supersede him, under John Comyn, the nephew of their exiled king. The
struggle lingered on for several years more, for Edward was hindered
from completing his work by the continual pressure of the French war.
It was not till 1301-2 that he resumed and finished the conquest of
the Lowlands. But in 1303 he was at length able to make a definitive
peace with Philip IV., who restored to him all the lost fortresses
of Guienne. Free at last from his continental troubles, Edward swept
over Scotland from end to end, carrying his arms into the north as
far as Elgin and Banff. The regent Comyn and all the barons of the
land submitted to him, and by the capture of Stirling in 1304 the last
embers of resistance were quenched.

[Sidenote: =Subjection of Scotland.--Wallace executed.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Robert Bruce.--Murder of John Comyn.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Severity of Edward.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Death of Edward.=]

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

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

FOOTNOTE:

[18] See table on p. 160.

CHAPTER XII.

EDWARD II.

1307-1327.

[Sidenote: =Character of Edward II.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =The Scottish expedition abandoned.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Ascendency of Piers Gaveston.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =The Scottish war.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =The Lords Ordainers.=]

It was these three lords who in 1310 led an attack in Parliament on
the king and his favourite, and drew up a scheme for taking the direct
rule of the realm out of their hands. Following the precedent of the
Provisions of Oxford,[21] the Parliament named a committee of regency,
or body of ministers, composed of twenty-one members, who were called
the Lords Ordainers, and were to draw up a scheme for the reform of all
the abuses of the kingdom. The twenty-one comprised the Archbishop of
Canterbury and all the leading men of England, but Thomas of Lancaster
and his friends had the ascendency among them. The king complained that
he was treated like a lunatic, and deprived of the right that every
man owns, of being allowed to manage his own household. He resolved
by way of protest, to show that he could do something useful, and,
taking Gaveston with him, made an incursion into Scotland. Bruce was
cautious, and retired northward, burning the country behind him. The
king struggled on as far as the Forth, and then turned back without
having accomplished anything. On his return he was forced to sign a
promise to redress many administrative grievances which the Lords
Ordainers laid before him--to consent to banish Gaveston, choose all
his ministers with the counsel and consent of his baronage, disallow
all customs and taxes save such as Parliament should grant, and reform
the administration of justice. Edward signed everything readily, but
immediately departed into the north, bade Gaveston return to England
and join him, and published a repudiation of the new ordinances, as
forced on him by threats and violence (1311).

[Sidenote: =Murder of Gaveston.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Progress of Bruce.=]

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

[Illustration: BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN

June 24{TH} 1314.]

[Sidenote: =Battle of Bannockburn.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =Rule of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster.=]

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

[Sidenote: =War in Ireland.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Bruce invades England.--Edward recovers power.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Vengeance of Edward. 1322.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Rule of the Despensers, 1322-26.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Queen Isabella and Mortimer.--Fall of the Despensers.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Edward deposed.--His son proclaimed king.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Death of Edward.=]

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Son of Edward I.'s brother Edmund, Earl of Lancaster.

[20] A grandson of one of Henry III.'s foreign relatives.

[21] See p. 140.

CHAPTER XIII.

EDWARD III.

1327-1377.

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

[Sidenote: =Second Scottish invasion.--"The Shameful Peace."=]

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

[Sidenote: =Risings against Mortimer.=]

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

[Sidenote: =The king asserts himself--Mortimer executed.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Character of Edward III.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =War with Scotland.--Battle of Halidon Hill.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =Quarrel with France.--The Hundred Years' War begins.=]

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

[Sidenote: =The French succession.--The Salic Law.=]

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

THE FRENCH SUCCESSION, 1337.

                             PHILIP III.,
                              1270-1285.
                       +----------+----------------+
                       |                           |
                   PHILIP IV.,                  Charles,
                   1285-1314.               Count of Valois.
                       |                           |
      +-----------+----+------+------------+       +-----------+
      |           |           |            |                   |
  LOUIS X.,   PHILIP V.,  CHARLES IV.,  Isabella.     PHILIP of Valois,
  1314-1316.  1316-1322.  1322-1328.       |           king 1328-1350.
      |                                    |                  |
      +--+                                 |                  |
         |                                 |                  |
        Jane,                          Edward III.           JOHN,
  Queen of Navarre.                                        1350-1364.
      Charles,
  King of Navarre.

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

[Sidenote: =Edward claims the French crown.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =First campaign.--Naval victory off Sluys.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Contest with Parliament.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Edward invades Normandy.--Battle of Crécy.=]

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

[Sidenote: =The English archers.=]

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

[Illustration: BATTLE OF CRÉCY, 1346.]

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

[Sidenote: =Capture of Calais.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Scottish invasion.--Battle of Neville's Cross.=]

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

[Sidenote: =The Black Death.=]

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

[Sidenote: RISE IN WAGES.--THE STATUTE OF LABOURERS.]

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

[Sidenote: =Renewal of the French war.--The Black Prince.=]

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

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

[Illustration: BATTLE OF POICTIERS, SEP. 1356.]

[Sidenote: =The Battle of Poictiers.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Rout of the French.--King John a prisoner.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =Misery and anarchy in France.--The Jacquerie.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Edward again invades France.--Treaty of Bretigny.=]

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

[Illustration: FRANCE 1380.

SHOWING THE ENGLISH BOUNDARIES

AFTER THE

TREATY OF BRETIGNY.]

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

[Sidenote: =Development of trade.--The Flemish weavers.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Desultory fighting in Brittany.--Spanish war.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Rebellion in Aquitaine.--Massacre at Limoges.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Premature decay of the king.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Loss of possessions in France.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Discontent and intrigue in England.--The Lollards.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Policy of John of Gaunt.--The Good Parliament.=]

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

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

DESCENDANTS OF EDWARD III.

              EDWARD III. = Philippa of Hainault. (1)
     +-----------+--------------+-------------------------+
     |           |                                        |
    Edward    John of = (1)Blanche of                   Thomas,
  the Black   Gaunt  |     Lancaster.                   Duke of
   Prince.           | (2) Constance                   Gloucester.
     |               |     of Castile.                         |
  RICHARD II.,       | (3) Catherine          Edmund Earl = Anne of
  1377-1399.         |     Swinford.         of Stafford. | Gloucester.
                     |                                    |
                     |                             Humphrey, Duke
            (1)      | (3)       (3)               of Buckingham,
            +--------+--+-------------+               killed at
            |           |             |            Northampton, 1460.
        HENRY IV.,   Henry           John                 |
        1399-1413.  Beaufort,      Beaufort,       Humphrey, Earl
            |       Cardinal,      Earl of          of Stafford.
            |       died 1447.     Somerset.              |
            |                             |         Henry, Duke of
       +----+-----+---------+---------+   +----+     Buckingham,
       |          |         |         |        |    executed 1483.
       |          |         |         |        |          |
   HENRY V.,   Thomas    John of   Humphrey    |    Edward, Duke of
   1413-1422.    of      Bedford.     of       |      Buckingham,
       |      Clarence.           Gloucester.  |     executed 1521.
       |                                       |
   HENRY VI.,                                  |
   1422-1461.                                  |
            +----------------------------------+--+
            |                                     |
        John of                                Edmund of
        Somerset,                              Somerset,
        died 1444.                             killed at
            |                                  St. Albans.
            |                                      |
            +----------+                    +------+------+
                       |                    |      |      |
    Edmund Tudor, = Margaret              Henry, Edmund, John
    Earl of     |   Beaufort.             killed in the Wars
    Richmond.   |                            of the Roses.
        +-------+
    HENRY VII.  =  Elizabeth,
    1485-1509.     Daughter of
                   Edward IV.

                 EDWARD III. = Philippa of Hainault. (2)
           +-----------------------+----------------+
           |                                        |
       Lionel of = Elizabeth                     Edmund,
       Clarence  | De Burgh.                   Duke of York.
                 |                                    |
                 +------+                    +--------+
                        |                    |        |
    Edmund       =  Philippa              Edmund   Richard  =  Anne
   Mortimer,     |  of Clarence.        of York,      of    |  Mortimer.
  Earl of March. |                      killed at Cambridge.|
                 |                      Agincourt.          |
                 |                                          |
                 |                                          +---+
                 |                                              |
           Roger of March,            Cicely Neville. = Richard, Duke of
       killed in Ireland, 1398.                       | York, killed at
                 |                                    | Wakefield, 1460.
                 |                                    |
      +----------+                        +-----------+-----------+
      |          |                        |           |           |
   Edmund       Anne    = Richard,    EDWARD IV.,  George of   RICHARD
  of March,   Mortimer. | Earl of     1461-1483.   Clarence.     III.,
  died 1425.            | Cambridge.      |           |       1483-1485.
                        |                 |           |
              _See opposite, among        |           +-----------+
              descendants of Edmund,      |           |           |
                 Duke of York_.           |       Edward of  Margaret of
                                          |       Warwick,   Salisbury,
                                          |       executed   executed
                                          |         1499.      1541.
                             +------------+---------------+
                             |            |               |
                          EDWARD V.,   Richard  Elizabeth = HENRY VII.
                           1483.       of York.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] So called from Jacques Bonhomme, the nickname of the typical
French peasant.

[23] Sometimes also called Navarette; it lies beyond the Ebro, near
Logroño.

CHAPTER XIV.

RICHARD II.

1377-1399.

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

[Sidenote: =The regency.--Disasters abroad.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Heavy taxation.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Discontent of labouring classes.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Communist doctrines of the Lollards.=]

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

    "When Adam delved and Eve span,
    Who was then the gentleman?"

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

[Sidenote: ="Wat Tyler's rebellion."--March upon London.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Demands of the rioters.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Attitude of the King.--Progress of the riot.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =The king meets the rioters.--Tyler slain.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Punishment of the leaders.--Richard's concessions
annulled.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Decay of villeinage.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Richard assumes the government.=]

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

[Sidenote: =His ministers.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =Schemes of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester.=]

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

[Sidenote: =The "Lords Appellant."=]

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

[Sidenote: =The Merciless Parliament.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =Dismissal of Gloucester.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Moderation of Richard.--Growth of Lollardry.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Richard's revenge on the Lords Appellant.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Tyranny of Richard.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Condition of Ireland.--Richard's Irish expedition.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Return of Bolingbroke.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Richard returns from Ireland--is overpowered.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Richard abdicates.--Election of Henry.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Murder of Richard.=]

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

CHAPTER XV.

HENRY IV.

1399-1413.

[Sidenote: =Position and title of Henry.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =Rebellion of the Hollands.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Rebellion in Wales.--Owen Glendower.=]

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

[Sidenote: =England harassed by Scotland and France.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Henry and the Parliament.--Persecution of the Lollards.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Battle of Homildon Hill.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Rebellion of the Percies.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Battle of Shrewsbury.--Death of Hotspur.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Second Rebellion.--Execution of Scrope.=]

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

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

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

[Sidenote: =Henry's submission to Parliament .--The Beauforts.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Detention of Prince James of Scotland.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Civil War in France.--Armagnacs and Burgundians.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Prince Henry of Monmouth.=]

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

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Thomas of Gloucester's only daughter had married Edmund, Earl of
Stafford.

[25] Brother of the Arundel whom Richard II. beheaded.

[26] See p. 210.

CHAPTER XVI.

HENRY V.

1413-1422.

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

[Sidenote: =Persecution of the Lollards.=]

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

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

[Sidenote: =Henry and the French crown.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Preparations for war.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Conspiracy of Cambridge and Scrope.=]

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

[Sidenote: =Siege of Harfleur.=]

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

[Illustration: BATTLE OF AGINCOURT. 1415.]

[Sidenote: =Battle of Agincourt.=]

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

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