Edward’s claim to the French crown embittered the strife in a most unnecessary fashion. It was an appeal to every discontented French vassal to become a traitor under a plausible show of loyalty, and from first to last many such persons utilized it. It also gave Edward an excuse for treating every loyal Frenchman as guilty of treason, and, to his shame, he did not always refrain from employing such a discreditable device. Yet, as has been already said, he showed his consciousness of the fallacy of his claim by offering to barter it again and again during the course of the war for land or money. But he finally passed on the wretched fiction as a heritage of his descendants, to cause untold woes in the 15th century. It is seldom in the world’s history that a hollow legal device such as this has had such long enduring and deplorable results.
In the commencement of his continental war Edward took little profit either from his assumption of the French royal title, or from the lengthy list of princes of the Low Countries whom he enrolled beneath his banner. His two land-campaignsBattle of Sluys.of 1339 and 1340 led to no victories or conquests, but cost enormous sums of money. The Netherland allies brought large contingents and took high pay from the king, but they showed neither energy nor enthusiasm in his cause. When Philip of Valois refused battle in the open, and confined his operations to defending fortified towns, or stockading himself in entranched camps, the allies drifted off, leaving the king with his English troops in force too small to accomplish anything. The sole achievement of the early years of the war which was of any profit to Edward or his realm was the great naval triumph of Sluys (June 24, 1340), which gave the English the command of the sea for the next twenty years. The French king had built or hired an enormous fleet, and with it threatened to invade England. Seeing that he could do nothing on land while his communications with the Low Countries were endangered by the existence of this armada, Edward levied every ship that was to be found, and brought the enemy to action in the Flemish harbour of Sluys. After a day of desperate hand to hand fighting—for the vessels grappled and the whole matter was settled by boarding—the French fleet was annihilated. Henceforth England was safe from coast raids, could conduct her commerce with Flanders without danger, and could strike without difficulty at any point of the French littoral. But it was not for some years that Edward utilized the advantage that Sluys had given him. As long as he persevered in the attempt to conduct the invasion of the northern frontier of France he achieved nothing.
Such schemes were finally abandoned simply because the king discovered that his allies were worthless and that his money was all spent. On his return from Flanders in 1340 he became involved in an angry controversy with hisFinancial crisis. Trial of Archbishop Stratford.ministers, whom he accused, quite unjustly, of wasting his revenue and wrecking his campaign thereby. He imprisoned some of them, and wished to try his late chancellor, Archbishop Stratford, for embezzlement, in the court of the exchequer. But the primate contended very vigorously for the right to be tried before his peers, and since the king could get no subsidies from his parliament till he acknowledged the justice of this claim, he was forced to concede it. Stratford was acquitted—the king’s thriftlessness and not the chancellor’s maladministration had emptied the treasury. Edward drifted on along the path to financial ruin till he actually went bankrupt in 1345, when he repudiated his debts, and ruined several great Italian banking houses, who had been unwise enough to continue lending him money to the last. The Flemings were also hard hit by this collapse of the king’s credit, and very naturally lost their enthusiasm for the English alliance. Van Artevelde, its chief advocate, was murdered by his own townsmen in this same year.
The second act of the Hundred Years’ War, after King Edward had abandoned in despair his idea of invading France from the side of the Netherlands, was fought out in another quarter—the duchy of Brittany. Here a war ofWar in Brittany.succession had broken out in which (oddly enough) Edward took up the cause of the pretender who had male descent, while Philip supported the one who represented a female line—each thus backing the theory of heritage by which his rival claimed the throne of France. By espousing the cause of John of Montfort Edward obtained a good foothold on theflank of France, for many of the Breton fortresses were put into his hands. But he failed to win any decisive advantage thereby over King Philip. It was not till 1346, when he adopted the new policy of trusting nothing to allies, and striking at the heart of France with a purely English army, that Edward found the fortune of war turning in his favour.
In this year he landed in Normandy, where the English banner had not been seen since the days of King John, and executed a destructive raid through the duchy, and up the Seine,Edward invades France.till he almost reached the gates of Paris. This brought out the king of France against him, with a mighty host, before which Edward retreated northward, apparently intending to retire to Flanders. But after crossing the Somme he halted at Creçy, near Abbeville, and offered battle to the pursuing enemy. He fought relying onBattle of Creçy.the tactics which had been tried against the Scots at Dupplin and Halidon Hill, drawing up his army with masses of dismounted men-at-arms flanked on either side by archery. This array proved as effective against the disorderly charges of the French noblesse as it had been against the heavy columns of the Scottish pikemen. Fourteen times the squadrons of King Philip came back to the charge; but mowed down by the arrow-shower, they seldom could get to handstrokes with the English knights, and at last rode off the field in disorder. This astonishing victory over fourfold numbers was no mere chivalrous feat of arms, it had the solid result of giving the victors aCapture of Calais.foothold in northern France. For Edward took his army to beleaguer Calais, and after blockading it for nearly a year forced it to surrender. King Philip, after his experience at Creçy, refused to fight again in order to raise the siege. From henceforth the English possessed a secure landing-place in northern France, at the most convenient point possible, immediately opposite Dover. They held it for over two hundred years, to their own inestimable advantage in every recurring war.
The years 1345-1347 saw the zenith of King Edward’s prosperity; in them fell not only his own triumphs at Creçy and Calais, but a victory at Auberoche in Périgord won by his cousin Henry of Lancaster, which restoredBattle of Neville’s Cross.many long-lost regions of Guienne to the English suzerainty (Oct. 21, 1345), and another and more famous battle in the far north. At Neville’s Cross, near Durham, the lords of the Border defeated and captured David Bruce, king of Scotland (Oct. 17, 1346). The loss of their king and the destruction of a fine army took the heart out of the resistance of the Scots, who for many years to come could give their French allies little assistance.
In 1347 Edward made a short truce with King Philip: even after his late victories he felt his strength much strained, his treasury being empty, and his army exhausted by the year-long siege of Calais. But he would have returnedTruce with France. The Black Death.to the struggle without delay had it not been for the dreadful calamity of the “Black Death,” which fell upon France and England, as upon all Europe, in the years 1348-1349. The disease, on which the 14th century bestowed this name, was the bubonic plague, still familiar in the East. After devastating western Asia, it reached the Mediterranean ports of Europe in 1347, and spread across the continent in a few months. It was said that in France, Italy and England a third of the population perished, and though this estimate may be somewhat exaggerated, local records of unimpeachable accuracy show that it cannot be very far from the truth. The bishop’s registers of the diocese of Norwich show that many parishes had three and some four successive vicars admitted in eighteen months. In the manor rolls it is not uncommon to find whole families swept away, so that no heir can be detected to their holdings. Among the monastic orders, whose crowded common life seems to have been particularly favourable to the spread of the plague, there were cases where a whole community, from the abbot down to the novices, perished. The upper classes are said to have suffered less than the poor; but the king’s daughter Joan and two archbishops of Canterbury were among the victims. The long continuance of the visitation, which as a rule took six or nine months to work out its virulence in any particular spot, seems to have cowed and demoralized society. Though it first spread from the ports of Bristol and Weymouth in the summer of 1348, it had not finished its destruction in northern England till 1350, and only spread into Scotland in the summer of that year.
When the worst of the plague was over, and panic had died down, it was found that the social conditions of England had been considerably affected by the visitation. The condition of the realm had been stable and prosperous duringEconomic and social effects of the Black Death.the earlier years of Edward III., the drain on its resources caused by heavy war-taxation having been more than compensated by the increased wealth that arose from growing commerce and developing industries. The victory of Sluys, which gave England the command of the seas, had been a great landmark in the economic no less than in the naval history of this island. But the basis of society was shaken by the Black Death; the kingdom was still essentially an agricultural community, worked on the manorial system; and the sudden disappearance of a third of the labouring hands by which that system had been maintained threw everything into disorder. The landowners found thousands of the crofts on which their villeins had been wont to dwell vacant, and could not fill them with new tenants. Even if they exacted the full rigour of service from the survivors, they could not get their broad demesne lands properly tilled. The landless labourers, who might have been hired to supply the deficiency, were so reduced in numbers that they could command, if free competition prevailed, double and triple rates of payment, compared with their earnings in the days before the plague. Hence there arose, almost at once, a bitter strife between the lords of manors and the labouring class, both landholding and landless. The lords wished to exact all possible services from the former, and to pay only the old two or three pence a day to the latter. The villeins, as hard hit as their masters, resented the tightening of old duties, which in some cases had already been commuted for small money rents during the prosperous years preceding the plague. The landless men formed combinations, disputed with the landlords, and asked and often got twice as much as the old rates, despite of the murmurings of the employer.
After a short experience of these difficulties the king and council, whose sympathies were naturally with the landholders, issued an ordinance forbidding workmen of any kind to demand more than they had been wont to receiveThe Statute of Labourers.before 1348. This was followed up by the famous Statute of Labourers of 1351, which fixed rates for all wages practically identical with those of the times before the Black Death. Those workmen who refused to accept them were to be imprisoned, while employers who went behind the backs of their fellows and secretly paid higher sums were to be punished by heavy fines. Later additions to the statute were devised to terrorize the labourer, by adding stripes and branding to his punishment, if he still remained recalcitrant or absconded. And landowners were empowered to seize all vagrant able-bodied men, and to compel them to work at the statutory wages. As some compensation for the low pay of the workmen, parliament tried to bring down the price of commodities to their former level, for (like labour) all manufactured articles had gone up immensely in value.
Thirty years of friction followed, while the parliament and the ruling classes tried in a spasmodic way to enforce the statute, and the peasantry strove to evade it. It proved impossible to carry out the scheme; the labourers were too many and too cunning to be crushed. If driven over hard they absconded to the towns, where hands were needed as much as in the countryside, or migrated to districts where the statute was laxly administered. Gradually the landowners discovered that the only practical way out of their difficulties was to give up the old custom of working the manorial demesne by the forced labour of their villeins, and to cut it up into farms which were rented out to free tenants, and cultivated by them. In the course of twogenerations the “farmers” who paid rent for these holdings became more and more numerous, and demesne land tilled by villein-service grew more and more rare. But enough old-fashioned landlords remained to keep up the struggle with the peasants to the end of the 14th century and beyond, and the number of times that the Statute of Labourers was re-enacted and recast was enormous. Nevertheless the struggle turned gradually to the advantage of the labourer, and ended in the creation of the sturdy and prosperous farming yeomanry who were the strength of the realm for several centuries to come.
One immediate consequence of the “Black Death” was the renewal of the truce between England and France by repeated agreements which lasted from 1347 to 1355. During this interval Philip of France died, in 1350, and was succeeded by his son John. The war did not entirely cease, but became local and spasmodic. In Brittany the factions which supported the two claimants to the ducal title were so embittered that they never laid down their arms. In 1351 the French noblesse of Picardy, apparently without their master’s knowledge or consent, made an attempt to surprise Calais, which was beaten off with some difficulty by King Edward in person. There was also constant bickering on the borders of Guienne. But the main forcesRenewal of the war with France.on both sides were not brought into action till the series of truces ran out in 1355. From that time onward the English took the offensive with great vigour. Edward, prince of Wales, ravaged Languedoc as far as the Mediterranean, while his younger brother John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, executed a less ambitious raid in Picardy and Artois. In the south this campaign marked real progress, not mere objectless plunder, for it was followed by the reconquest of great districts in Périgord and the Agenais, which had been lost to England since the 13th century. A similar double invasion of France led to even greater results in the following year, 1356. While Lancaster landed in Normandy, and with the aid of local rebels occupied the greater part of the peninsula of the Côtentin, the prince of Wales accomplished greater things on the borders of Aquitaine. After executing a great circular sweep through Périgord, Limousin and Berry, he was returning to Bordeaux laden with plunder, when he wasBattle of Poitiers.intercepted by the king of France near Poitiers. The battle that followed was the most astonishing of all the English victories during the Hundred Years’ War. The odds against the prince were far heavier than those of Creçy, but by taking up a strong position and using the national tactics which combined the use of archery and dismounted men-at-arms, the younger Edward not merely beat off his assailants in a long defensive fight, but finally charged out upon them, scattered them, and took King John prisoner (Sept. 19, 1356).
This fortunate capture put an enormous advantage in the hands of the English; for John, a facile and selfish prince, was ready to buy his freedom by almost any concessions. He signed two successive treaties which gave suchThe English ravage France.advantageous terms to Edward III. that the dauphin Charles, who was acting as regent, and the French states-general refused to confirm them. This drove the English king to put still further pressure on the enemy; in 1359 he led out from Calais the largest English army that had been seen during the war, devastated all northern France as far as Reims and the borders of Burgundy, and then—continuing the campaign through the heart of the winter—presented himself before the gates of Paris and ravaged the Île de France. This brought the regent Charles and his counsellors to the verge of despair;Peace of Brétigny.they yielded, and on the 8th of May 1360, signed an agreement at Brétigny near Chartres, by which nearly all King Edward’s demands were granted. These preliminaries were ratified by the definitive peace of Calais (Oct. 24, 1360), which brought the first stage of the Hundred Years’ War to an end.
By this treaty King Edward formally gave up his claim to the French throne, which he had always intended to use merely as an asset for barter, and was to receive in return not only a sum of 3,000,000 gold crowns for King John’s personal ransom, but an immense cession of territory which—in southern France at least—almost restored the old boundaries of the time of Henry II. The duchy of Aquitaine was reconstructed, so as to include not only the lands that Edward had inherited, and his recent conquests, but all Poitou, Limousin, Angoumois, Quercy, Rouergue and Saintonge—a full half of France south of the Loire. This vast duchy the English king bestowed not long after on his son Edward, the victor of Poitiers, who reigned there as a vassal-sovereign, owing homage to England but administering his possessions in his own right. In northern France, Calais and the county of Guînes, and also the isolated county of Ponthieu, the inheritance of the wife of Edward I., were ceded to the English crown. All these regions, it must be noted, were to be held for the future free of any homage or acknowledgment of allegiance to an overlord, “in perpetuity, and in the manner in which the kings of France had held them.” There was to be an end to the power of the courts of Paris to harass the duke of Aquitaine, by using the rights of the suzerain to interfere with the vassal’s subjects. It was hoped that for the future the insidious legal warfare which had been used with such effect by the French kings would be effectually prevented.
To complete the picture of the triumph of Edward III. at this, the culminating point of his reign, it must be mentioned that some time before the peace of Calais he had made terms with Scotland. David Bruce was to cede RoxburghSubmission of David of Scotland.and Berwick, but to keep the rest of his dominions on condition of paying a ransom of 100,000 marks. This sum could never be raised, and Edward always had it in his power to bring pressure to bear on the king of Scots by demanding the instalments, which were always in arrear. David gave no further trouble; indeed he became so friendly to England that he offered to proclaim Lionel of Clarence, Edward’s second son, as his heir, and would have done so but for the vigorous opposition of his parliament.
The English people had expected that a sort of Golden Age would follow the conclusion of the peace with Scotland and France. Freed from the war-taxes which had vexed them for the last twenty years, they would be ableEconomic progress in England.to repair the ravages of the Black Death, and to develop the commercial advantages which had been won at Sluys, and secured by the dominion of the seas which they had held ever since. In some respects this expectation was not deceived; the years that followed 1360 seem to have been prosperous at home, despite the continued friction arising from the Statute of Labourers. The towns would seem to have fared better than the countryside, partly indeed at its expense, for the discontented peasantry migrated in large numbers to the centres of population where newly-developed manufactures were calling for more hands. The weaving industry, introduced into the eastern counties by the king’s invitation to Flemish settlers, was making England something more than a mere producer of raw material for export. The seaports soon recovered from their losses in the Black Death, and English shipping was beginning to appear in the distant seas of Portugal and the Baltic. Nothing illustrates the growth of English wealth better than the fact that the kingdom had, till the time of Edward III., contrived to conduct all its commerce with a currency of small silver, but that within thirty years of his introduction of a gold coinage in 1343, the English “noble” was being struck in enormous quantities. It invaded all the markets of western Europe, and became the prototype of the gold issues of the Netherlands, Scotland, and even parts of Germany. It is in the latter years of Edward III. that we find the first forerunners of that class of English merchant princes who were to be such a marked feature in the succeeding reigns. The Poles of Hull, whose descendants rose in three generations to ducal rank, were the earliest specimens of their class. The poet Chaucer may serve as a humbler example of the rise of the burgher class—the son of a vintner, he became the father of a knight, and the ancestor, through female descents, of many baronial families. The second half of the 14th century is the first period in English history in which we can detect a distinct rise in the importanceof the commercial as opposed to the landed interest. The latter, hard hit by the manorial difficulties that followed the plague of 1348-1349, found their rents stationary or even diminishing, while the price of the commodities from which the former made their wealth had permanently risen. As to intellectual vigour, the age that produced two minds of such marked originality in different spheres as Wycliffe and Chaucer must not be despised, even if it failed to carry out all the promise of the 13th century.
For a few years after the peace of 1360 the political influence of Edward III. in western Europe seemed to be supreme. France, prostrated by the results of the English raids, by peasant revolts, and municipal and baronial turbulence,English rule in France.did not begin to recover strength till the thriftless king John had died (1364) and had been succeeded by his capable if unchivalrous son Charles V. Yet the state of the English dominions on the continent was not satisfactory; in building up the vast duchy of Aquitaine Edward had made a radical mistake. Instead of contenting himself with creating a homogeneous Gascon state, which might have grown together into a solid unit, he had annexed broad regions which had been for a century and a half united to France, and had been entirely assimilated to her. From the first Poitou, Quercy, Rouergue and the Limousin chafed beneath the English yoke; the noblesse in especial found the comparatively orderly and constitutional governance to which they were subjected most intolerable. They waited for the first opportunity to revolt, and meanwhile murmured against every act of their duke, the prince of Wales, though he did his best to behave as a gracious sovereign.
The younger Edward ended by losing his health and his wealth in an unnecessary war beyond the Pyrenees. He was persuaded by the exiled Peter the Cruel, king of Castile, to restore him to the throne which he had forfeited by his misgovernment.The Black Prince in Spain.In 1367 he gathered a great army, entered Castile, defeated the usurper Henry of Trastamara at the battle of Najera, and restored his ally. But Peter, when once re-established as king, forgot his obligations and left the prince burdened with the whole expense of the campaign. Edward left Spain with a discontented and unpaid army, and had himself contracted the seeds of a disease which was to leave him an invalid for the rest of his life. To pay his debts he was obliged to resort to heavy taxation in Aquitaine, which gave his discontented subjects in Poitou and the other outlying districts an excuse for the rebellion that they had been for some time meditating. In 1368 his greatest vassals, the counts of Armagnac, Périgord and Comminges, displayed their disloyalty by appealing to the king of France as their suzerain against the legality of Edward’s imposts. The French overlordship had been formally abolished by the treaty of 1360, so this appeal amounted to open rebellion. And when Charles V. accepted it, and cited Edward to appear before his parlement to answer the complaints of the counts, he was challenging England to renewed war. He found a preposterous excuse for repudiating the treaty by which he was bound, by declaring that some details had been omitted in its formal ratification.
The Hundred Years’ War, therefore, broke out again in 1369, after an interval of nine years. Edward III. assumed once more the title of king of France, while Charles V., in the usual style, declared that the whole duchy of AquitaineRenewal of the war with France.had been forfeited for treason and rebellion on the part of its present holder. The second period of war, which was to last till the death of the English king, and for some years after, was destined to prove wholly disastrous to England. All the conditions had changed since 1360. Edward, though only in his fifty-seventh year, was entering into a premature and decrepit old age, in which he became the prey of unworthy favourites, male and female. The men of the 14th century, who commanded armies and executedcoups d’étatat eighteen, were often worn out by sixty. The guidance of the war should have fallen into the hands of his eldest son, the victor of Poitiers and Najera, but the younger Edward had never recovered from the fatigues of his Spanish campaign; his disease having developed into a form of dropsy, he had become a confirmed invalid and could no longer take the field. The charge of the military operations of the English armies had passed to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the king’s younger son, a prince far inferior in capacity to his father and brother. Though not destitute of good impulses Lancaster was hasty, improvident and obstinate; he was unfortunate in his choice of friends, for he allied himself to all his father’s unscrupulous dependents. He was destitute of military skill, and wrecked army after army by attempting hard tasks at inappropriate times and by mistaken methods. Despite of all checks and disasters he remained active, self-confident and ambitious, and, since he had acquired a complete control over his father, he had ample opportunity to mismanage the political and military affairs of England.
Lancaster’s strategy, in the early years of the renewed war, consisted mainly of attempts to wear down the force of France by devastating raids; he hoped to provoke the enemy to battle by striking at the heart of his realm, butCharacter of the war.never achieved his purpose. Warned by the disasters of Creçy and Poitiers, Charles V. and his great captain Bertrand du Guesclin would never commit themselves to an engagement in the open field. They let the English invaders pass by, garrisoning the towns but abandoning the countryside. Since Lancaster, in his great circular raids, had never the leisure to sit down to a siege—generally a matter of long months in the 14th century—he repeatedly crossed France leaving a train of ruined villages behind him, but having accomplished nothing else save the exhaustion of his own army. For the French always followed him at a cautious distance, cutting off his stragglers, and restricting the area of his ravages by keeping flying columns all around his path. But while the duke was executing useless marches across France, the outlying lands of Aquitaine were falling away, one after the other, to the enemy. The limit of the territory which still remained loyal was ever shrinking, and what was once lost was hardly ever regained. Almost the only reconquest made was that of the city of Limoges, which was stormed in September 1370 by the troops of the Black Prince, who rose from his sick-bed to strike his last blow at the rebels. His success did almost as much harm as good to his cause, for the deliberate sack of the city was carried out with such ruthless severity that it roused wild wrath rather than terror in the neighbouring regions. Next spring the prince returned to England, feeling himself physically unable to administer or defend his duchy any longer.
The greater part of Poitou, Quercy and Rouergue had been lost, and the English cause was everywhere losing ground, when a new danger was developed. Since Sluys the enemy had never disputed the command of the seas; but inEnglish reverses.1372 a Spanish fleet joined the French, and destroyed off La Rochelle a squadron which was bringing reinforcements for Guienne. The disaster was the direct result of the campaign of Najera—for Henry of Trastamara, who had long since dethroned and slain his brother Peter the Cruel, remained a consistent foe of England. From this date onward Franco-Spanish fleets were perpetually to be met not only in the Bay of Biscay but in the Channel; they made the voyage to Bordeaux unsafe, and often executed descents on the shores of Kent, Sussex, Devon and Cornwall. It was to no effect that, in the year after the battle of La Rochelle, Lancaster carried out the last, the most expensive, and the most fruitless of his great raids across France. He marched from Calais to Bordeaux, inflicted great misery on Picardy, Champagne and Berry, and left half his army dead by the way.
This did not prevent Bertrand du Guesclin from expelling from his dominions John of Brittany, the one ally whom King Edward possessed in France, or from pursuing a consistent career of petty conquest in the heart of Aquitaine. By 1374 little was left of the great possessions which the English had held beyond the Channel save Calais, and the coast slip from Bordeaux to Bayonne, which formed the only loyal part of the duchy of Guienne. Next year King Edward sued for peace—he failed to obtain it, finding the French terms too hard for acceptance—buta truce at least was signed at Bruges (Jan. 1375) which endured till a few weeks before his death.
These two last years of Edward’s reign were filled with an episode of domestic strife, which had considerable constitutional importance. The nation ascribed the series of disasters which had filled the space from 1369 to 1375 entirelyDomestic strife.to the maladministration of Lancaster and the king’s favourites, failing to see that it was largely due to the mere fact that England was not strong enough to hold down Aquitaine, when France was administered by a capable king and served by a great general. Hence there arose, both in and out of parliament, a violent agitation for the removal of Lancaster from power, and the punishment of the favourites, who were believed, with complete justification, to be misusing the royal name for their own private profit. Among the leaders of this agitation were the clerical ministers whom John of Gaunt had expelled from office in 1371, and chiefly William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, the late chancellor; they were helped by Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, a personal enemy of Lancaster, and could count on the assistance of the prince of Wales when he was well enough to take a part in politics. The greater part of the House of Commons was on their side, and on the whole they may be regarded as the party of constitutional protest against maladministration. But there was another movement on foot at the same time, which cut across this political agitation in the most bewildering fashion. Protests against the corruption of theAgitation against the Church.Church and the interference of the papacy in national affairs had always been rife in England. At this moment they were more prevalent than ever, largely in consequence of the way in which the popes at Avignon had made themselves the allies and tools of the kings of France. The Statutes of Praemunire and Provisors had been passed a few years before (1351-1365) to check papal pretensions. There was a strong anti-clerical party, whose practical aim was to fill the coffers of the state by large measures of disendowment and confiscations of Church property. The intellectual head of this party at the time was John Wycliffe, a famous OxfordWycliffe.teacher, and for some time master of Balliol College. In his lectures and sermons he was always laying stress on the unsatisfactory state of the national church and the infamous corruption of the papacy. The doctrine which first made him famous, and commended him to all members of the anti-clerical faction, was that unworthy holders of spiritual endowments ought to be dispossessed of them, because “dominion” should depend on “grace.” Churchmen, small and great, as he held, had been corrupted, because they had fallen away from the early Christian idea of apostolic poverty. Instead of discharging their proper functions, bishops and abbots had become statesmen or wealthy barons, and took no interest in anything save politics. The monasteries, with their vast possessions, had become corporations of landlords, instead of associations for prayer and good works. The papacy, with its secular ambitions, and its insatiable greed for money, was the worst abuse of all. A bad pope, and most popes were bad, was the true Antichrist, since he was always overruling the divine law of the scriptures by his human ordinances. Every man, as Wycliffe taught—using the feudal analogies of contemporary society—is God’s tenant-in-chief, directly responsible for his acts to his overlord; the pope is always thrusting himself in between, like a mesne-tenant, and destroying the touch between God and man by his interference. Sometimes his commands are merely presumptuous; sometimes—as when, for example, he preaches crusades against Christians for purely secular reasons—they are the most horrible form of blasphemy. Wycliffe at a later period of his life developed views on doctrinal matters, not connected with his original thesis about the relations between Church and State, and foreshadowed most of the leading tenets of the reformers of the 16th century. But in 1376-1377 he was known merely as the outspoken critic of the “Caesarean clergy” and the papacy. He had a following of enthusiastic disciples at Oxford, and scattered adherents both among the burghers and the knighthood, the nucleus of the party that afterwards became famous as the Lollards. But they had not yet differentiated themselves from the body of those who were merely anti-clerical, without being committed to any theories of religious reform.
Since Wycliffe was, above all things, the enemy of the political clergy of high estate, and since those clergy were precisely the leaders of the attack upon John of Gaunt, it came to pass that hatred of a common foe drew the duke andJohn of Gaunt and Wycliffe.the doctor together for a space. There was a strange alliance between the advocate of clerical reform, and the practical exponent of secular misgovernment. The only point on which they were agreed was that it would be highly desirable to strip the Church of most of her endowments, in order to fill the exchequer of the state. Lancaster hoped to use Wycliffe as his mouthpiece against his enemies; Wycliffe hoped to see Lancaster disendowing bishops and monasteries and defying the pope. Hence the attempt of the political bishops to get Wycliffe condemned as a heretic became inextricably mixed with the attempt of the constitutional party, to which the bishops belonged, to evict the duke from his position of first councillor to the king and director of the policy of the realm.
The struggle began in the parliament of 1376, called by the anti-Lancastrian party the “Good Parliament.” Headed by the earl of March, William Courtenay, bishop of London,The “Good Parliament.”and Sir Peter de la Mare, the daring speaker of the House of Commons, the duke’s enemies began their campaign by accusing the king’s ministers and favourites of corruption. Here they were on safe ground, for the misdeeds of Lord Latimer—the king’s chamberlain, Lord Neville—his steward, Richard Lyons—his financial agent, and Alice Perrers—his greedy and shameless mistress,Overthrow of the king’s favourites.had been so flagrant that it was hard for Lancaster to defend them. In face of the evidence brought forward the old king and his son had to abandon their friends to the angry parliament. Latimer and Lyons were condemned to imprisonment and forfeiture of their goods, Alice Perrers was banished from court. Encouraged by this victory, the parliament passed on to constitutional reforms, forced on the king a council of twelve peers nominated by themselves, who were to exercise over him much the same controlConstitutional reforms.that the lords ordainers had held over his father, and compelled him to assent to a long list of petitions which, if properly carried out, would have removed most of the practical grievances of the nation. Having so done they dispersed, not guessing thatLancasterhad yielded so easily because he was set on undoing their work the moment that they were gone.
This, however, was the case; after the shortest of intervals the duke executed something like acoup d’état. In his father’s name he released Latimer and Lyons, dismissed the council of twelve, imprisoned Peter de la Mare,John of Gaunt re-establishes the royal power.sequestrated the temporalities of Bishop Wykeham, and sent the earl of March out of the realm. Alice Perrers took possession again of the king, and all his corrupt courtiers came back to him. A royal edict declared the statutes of the “Good Parliament” null and void. Lancaster would never have dared to defy public opinion and challenge the constitutional party to a life-and-death struggle in this fashion, had it not been that his brother the prince ofDeath of the Black Prince.Wales had died while the “Good Parliament” was sitting; thus the opposition had been deprived of their strongest support. The prince’s heir was a mere child, Richard of Bordeaux, aged only nine. It was feared by some that Duke John might carry his ambitions so far as to aim at the throne—he could do what he pleased with his doting father, and flaws might have been picked in the marriage of the Black Prince and his wife Joan of Kent, who were cousins, and therefore within the “prohibited degrees.” As a matter of fact Lancaster was a more honest man than his enemies suspected; he hastened to acknowledge his little nephew’s rights, acknowledged him as prince of Wales, and introduced him as his grandfather’s heir before the parliament of January 1377.
The character of this body was a proof of the great strengthof the royal name and power even in days when parliamentary institutions had been long in existence, and were supposed to act as a check on the crown. To legalize his arbitrary acts Duke John dared to summon the estates together, after he had issued stringent orders to the sheriffs to exclude his enemies and return his friends when the members for the Commons were chosen. He obtained a house of the complexion that he desired, and having a strong following among the peers actually succeeded in undoing all the work of 1376. No sign of trouble or rebellion followed, the opposition being destitute of a fighting leader. March had left the realm; Bishop Wykeham showed an unworthy subservience by suing for pardon through the mediation of Alice Perrers. Only Bishop Courtenay refused to be terrorized; he chose this moment to open a campaign against the duke’s ally, John Wycliffe, who was arraigned for heresy before the ecclesiastical courts. His trial, however, ended in a scandalous fiasco. Lancaster and his friend Lord Percy came to St Paul’s, and so insulted and browbeat the bishop, that the proceedings degenerated into a riot, and reached no conclusion (Feb. 19). Courtenay dared not recommence them, and Lancaster ruled as he pleased till his father, five months later, died. DesertedDeath of Edward III.by his worthless courtiers and plundered on his death-bed by his greedy mistress, the victor of Sluys and Creçy sank into an unhonoured grave. It was a relief to the nation that he was gone. Yet there was a general feeling that chaos might follow. If Lancaster should justify the malevolent rumours that were afloat by making a snatch at the crown, the last state of the realm might be worse than the first.
Duke John, however, was a better man than his enemies supposed. He was loyal to the crown according to his lights, and showed a chivalrous self-denial that had hardly been expected from him. He saluted his little nephew asRichard II.king without a moment’s hesitation, though he was aware that with the commencement of a new reign his own dictatorship had come to an end. The princess of Wales, in whose hands the young Richard II. was placed, had never been his friend, and was surrounded by adherents of her deceased husband, who belonged to the constitutional party. Disarmed, however, by the duke’s frank submission they wisely resolved not to push him to extremes, and the first council which was appointed to act for the new monarch was a sort of “coalition ministry” in which Lancaster’s followers as well as his foes were represented. For that very reason it was lacking in strength and unity of purpose, and proved lamentably incapable of dealing with the problems of the moment.
Of these the most pressing was the renewal of the French war; the truce had expired a few weeks before the death of Edward III., and the new reign began with a seriesThe French war.of military disasters. The French fleet landed in great force in Sussex, burnt Rye and Hastings and routed the shire levies. Simultaneously the seneschal of Aquitaine was defeated in battle, and Bergerac, the last great town in the inland which remained in English hands, was captured by the duke of Anjou.
The first parliament of Richard II. met in October under the most gloomy auspices. It showed its temper by taking up the work of the “Good Parliament.” Lancaster’s adherents were turned out of the council; the personsFirst parliament of Richard. Reforms.condemned in 1376 were declared incapable of serving in it; Alice Perrers was sentenced to banishment and forfeiture, and the little king was made to repudiate the declaration whereby his uncle had quashed the statutes of 1376 by declaring that “no act of parliament can be repealed save with parliament’s consent.” John of Gaunt bowed before the storm, retired to his estates, and for some time took little part in affairs of state.
Unfortunately the new government proved wholly unable either to conduct the struggle with France successfully or to pluck up courage to make a humiliating peace—the only wise course before them. The nation was too proud to accept defeat, and persevered in the unhappy attempt to reverse the fortunes of war. An almost unbroken series of petty disasters marked the first three years of King Richard. The worst was the failure of the last great devastating raid which the English launched against France. Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III., took a powerful army to Calais, and marched through Picardy and Champagne, past Orleans, and finally to Rennes in Brittany, but accomplished nothing save the ruin of his own troops and the wasting of a vast sum of money. Meanwhile taxation was heavy, the whole nation was seething with discontent, and—what was worst—no way was visible out of the miserable situation; ministers and councillors were repeatedly displaced, but their successors always proved equally incompetent to find a remedy.
This period of murmuring and misery culminated in the Great Revolt of 1381, a phenomenon whose origins must be sought in the most complicated causes, but whose outbreak was due in the main to a general feeling that the realmThe Great Revolt of 1381.was being misgoverned, and that some one must be made responsible for its maladministration. It was actually provoked by the unwise and unjust poll-tax of one shilling a head on all adult persons, voted by the parliament of Northampton in November 1380. The last poll-tax had been carefully graduated on a sliding scale so as to press lightly on the poorest classes; in this one a shilling for each person had to be exacted from every township, though it was provided that “the strong should help the weak” to a certain extent. But in hundreds of villages there were no “strong” residents, and the poorest cottager had to pay his three groats. The peasantry defended themselves by the simple device of understating the numbers of their families; the returns made it appear that the adult population of England had gone down from 1,355,000 to 896,000 since the poll-tax of 1379. Thereupon the government sent out commissioners to revise the returns and exact the missing shillings. Their appearance led to a series of widespread and preconcerted riots, which soon spread over all England from the Wash to the Channel, and in a few days developed into a formidable rebellion. The poll-tax was no more than the spark which fired the mine; it merely provided a good general grievance on which all malcontents could unite. In the districts which took arms two main causes of insurrection may be differentiated; the first and the most widespread was the discontent of the rural population with the landowners and the Statute of Labourers. Their aim was to abolish all villein-service, and to wring from their lords the commutation of all manorial customs and obligations for a small rent—fourpence an acre was generally the sum suggested. But there was a simultaneous outbreak in many urban districts. In Winchester, London, St Albans, Canterbury, Bury, Beverley, Scarborough and many other places the rioting was as violent as in the countryside. Here the object of the insurgents was in most cases to break down the local oligarchy, who engrossed all municipal office and oppressed the meaner citizens; but in less numerous instances their end was to win charters from lords (almost always ecclesiastical lords) who had hitherto refused to grant them. But it must not be forgotten that there was also a tinge of purely political discontent about the rising; the insurgents everywhere proclaimed their intention to destroy “traitors,” of whom the most generally condemned were the chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury, and the treasurer, Sir Robert Hailes, the two persons most responsible for the levy of the poll-tax. Often the rebels added the name of John of Gaunt to the list, looking upon him as the person ultimately responsible for the mismanagement of the war and the misgovernment of the realm. It must be added that though the leaders of the revolt were for the most part local demagogues, the creatures of the moment, there were among them a few fanatics like the “mad priest of Kent,” John Ball, who had long preached socialist doctrines from the old text:
“When Adam delved and Eve spanWho was then the gentleman?”
“When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?”
and clamoured for the abolition of all differences of rank, status and property. Though many clerics were found among the rebels, it does not seem that any of them were Wycliffites, or thatthe reformer’s teaching had played any part in exciting the peasantry at this time. No contemporary authority ascribes the rising to the Lollards.
The riots had begun, almost simultaneously in Kent and Essex: from thence they spread through East Anglia and the home counties. In the west and north there were only isolated and sporadic outbreaks, confined to a few turbulent towns. In the countryside the insurrection was accompanied by wholesale burnings of manor-rolls, the hunting down of unpopular bailiffs and landlords, and a special crusade against the commissioners of the poll-tax and the justices who had been enforcing the Statute of Labourers. There was more arson and blackmailing than murder, though some prominent persons perished, such as the judge, Sir John Cavendish, and the prior of Bury. In many regions the rising was purely disorderly and destitute of organization. This was not, however, the case in Kent and London.Wat Tyler.The mob which had gathered at Maidstone and Canterbury marched on the capital many thousands strong, headed by a local demagogue named Wat Tyler, whom they had chosen as their captain; his most prominent lieutenant was the preacher John Ball. They announced their intention of executing all “traitors,” seizing the person of the king, and setting up a new government for the realm. The royal council and ministers showed grievous incapacity and cowardice—they made no attempt to raise an army, and opened negotiations with the rebels. While these were in progress the malcontent party in London, headed by three aldermen, opened the gates of the city to Tyler and his horde. They poured in, and, joined by the London mob, sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy, the Temple, and many other buildings, while the ministers took refuge with the young king in the Tower. It was well known that not only the capital and the neighbouring counties but all eastern England was ablaze, and the council in despair sent out the young king to parley with Tyler at Mile End. The rebels at first demanded no more than that Richard should declare villeinage abolished, and that all feudal dues and services should be commuted for a rent of fourpence an acre. This was readily conceded, and charters were drawn up to that effect and sealed by the king. But, while the meeting was still going on, Tyler went off to the Tower with a part of his horde, entered the fortress unopposed, and murdered the unhappy chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury, the treasurer, and several victims more. This was only the beginning of massacre. Instead of dispersing with their charters, as did many of the peasants, Tyler and his confederates ran riot through London, burning houses and slaying lawyers, officials, foreign merchants and other unpopular persons. This had the effect of frightening the propertied classes in the city, who had hitherto observed a timid neutrality, and turned public opinion against the insurgents. Next day the rebel leaders again invited the king to a conference, in the open space of Smithfield, and laid before him a programme very different from that propounded at Mile End. Tyler demanded that all differences of rank and status should cease, that all church lands should be confiscated and divided up among the laity, that the game laws should be abolished, and that “no lord should any longer hold lordship except civilly.” Apparently he was set on provoking a refusal, and thus getting an excuse for seizing the person of the king. But matters went otherwise than he had expected; when he waxed unmannerly, and unsheathed his dagger to strike one of the royal retinue who had dared to answer him back, the mayor of London, William Walworth, drew his cutlass and cut him down. The mob strung their bows, and were about to shoot down the king and his suite. But Richard—who showed astounding nerve and presence of mind for a lad of fourteen—cantered up to them shouting that he would be their chief and captain and would give them their rights. The conference was continued, but, while it was in progress, the mayor brought up the whole civic militia of London, who had taken arms when they saw that the triumph of the rebels meant anarchy, and rescued the king out of the hands of the mob. Seeing such a formidable body of armed men opposed to them, the insurgents dispersed—without their reckless and ready-witted captain they were helpless (June 15, 1381).
This was the turning-point of the rebellion; within a few days the council had collected a considerable army, which marched through Essex scattering such rebel bands as still held together. Kent was pacified at the sameSuppression of the rising.time; and Henry Despenser, the warlike bishop of Norwich, made a separate campaign against the East Anglian insurgents, defeating them at the skirmish of North Walsham, and hanging the local leader Geoffrey Lister, who had declared himself “king of the commons” (June 25, 1381). After this there was nothing remaining save to punish the leaders of the revolt; a good many scores of them were hanged, though the vengeance exacted does not seem to have been greater than was justified by the numerous murders and burnings of which they had been guilty; the fanatic Ball was, of course, among the first to suffer. On the 30th of August the rough methods of martial law were suspended, and on the 14th of December the king issued an amnesty to all save certain leaders who had hitherto escaped capture. A parliament had been called in November; it voted that all the charters given by the king at Mile End were null and void, no manumissions or grants of privileges could have been valid without the consent of the estates of the realm, “and for their own parts they would never consent to such, of their own free will nor otherwise, even to save themselves from sudden death.”
The rebellion, therefore, had failed either to abolish villeinage in the countryside or to end municipal oligarchy in the towns, and many lords took the opportunity of the time of reaction in order to revindicate old claims over theirDecline of the manorial system.bondsmen. Nevertheless serfdom continued to decline all through the latter years of the 14th century, and was growing obsolete in the 15th. This, however, was the result not of the great revolt of 1381, but of economic causes working out their inevitable progress. The manorial system was already doomed, and the rent-paying tenant farmers, who had begun to appear after the Black Death, gradually superseded the villeins as the normal type of peasantry during the two generations that followed the outbreak that is generally known as “Wat Tyler’s rebellion.”
King Richard, though he had shown such courage and ready resources at Smithfield, was still only a lad of fourteen. For three years more he was under the control of tutors and governors appointed by his council. Their ruleWycliffe and the Lollards.was incompetent, but the chief danger to the realm had passed away when both Charles V. of France and his great captain Du Guesclin died in 1380. The new king at Paris was a young boy, whose councils were swayed by a knot of quarrelsome and selfish uncles; the vigour of the attack on England began to slacken. Nevertheless there was no change in the fortune of war, which continued to be disastrous, if on a smaller scale than before. The chief domestic event of the time was the attack of the clerical party on Wycliffe and his followers. The reformer had begun to develop dogmatic views, in addition to his old theories about the relations of Church and State. When he proceeded to deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, to assert the all-sufficiency of the Scriptures as a rule of life, to denounce saint-worship, pilgrimages, and indulgences, and to declare the pope to be Antichrist, he frightened his old supporter John of Gaunt and the politicians of the anti-clerical clique. They ceased to support him, and his followers became a sect rather than a political party. He and his disciples were expelled from Oxford, and ere long the bishops began to arrest and try them for heresy. Wycliffe himself, strange to say, was not molested. He survived to publish his translation of the Bible and to die in peace in December 1383. But his followers were being hunted, and imprisoned or forced to recant, all through the later years of Richard II. Yet they continued to multiply, and exercised at times considerable influence; though they had few supporters among the baronage, yet among the lesser gentry and still more among the burgher class and in the universities they were strong. It was not till the next reign, when thebishops succeeded in calling in the crown to their aid, and passed the statuteDe heretico comburendo, that Lollardy ceased to flourish.
King Richard meanwhile had grown to man’s estate, and had resolved to take the reins of power into his own hands. He was wayward, high-spirited and self-confident. He wished to restore the royal powers which had slippedRichard’s personal rule.into the hands of the council and parliament during his minority, and had small doubts of his capacity to restore it. His chosen instruments were two men whom his enemies called his “favourites,” though it was absurd to apply the name either to an elderly statesman like Michael de la Pole, who was made chancellor in 1384, or to Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, a young noble of the oldest lineage, who was the king’s other confidant. Neither of them was an upstart, and both, the one from his experience and the other from his high station, were persons who might legitimately aspire to a place among the advisers of the king. But Richard was tactless; he openly flouted his two uncles, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock, and took no pains to conciliate either the baronage or the commons. His autocratic airs and his ostentatious preference for his confidants—of whom he made the one earl of SuffolkImpeachment of the king’s “favourites.”and the other marquess of Dublin—provoked both lords and commons. Pole was impeached on a groundless charge of corruption and condemned, but Richard at once pardoned him and restored him to favour. De Vere was banished to Ireland, but at his master’s desire omitted to leave the realm. The contemptuous disregard for the will of parliament which the king displayed brought on him a worse fate than he deserved. His youngest uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, was a designing and ambitious prince who saw his own advantage in embittering the strife between Richard and his parliament. John of Gaunt having departed to Spain, where he was stirring up civil strife in the name of his wife, the heiress of Peter the Cruel, Gloucester put himself at the head of the opposition. Playing the part of the demagogue, and exaggerating all his nephew’s petulant acts and sayings, he declared the constitution in danger, and took arms at the head of a party of peers, the earls of Warwick, Arundel and Nottingham, and Henry, earl of Derby, the son of John ofThe “lords appellant.”Gaunt, who called themselves the lords appellant, because they were ready to “appeal” Richard’s councillors of treason. Public opinion was against the king, and the small army which his confidant De Vere raised under the royal banner was easily scattered by Gloucester’s forces at the rout of Radcot Bridge (Dec. 20, 1387). Oxford and Suffolk succeeded in escaping to France, but the king and the rest of his adherents fell into the hands of the lords appellant. They threatened for a moment to depose him, but finally placed him under the control of a council and ministersExecution of the king’s friends.chosen by themselves, and to put him in a proper state of terror, executed Lord Beauchamp, the judge, Sir Robert Tressilian, and six or seven more of his chief friends. This was a piece of gratuitous cruelty, for the king, though wayward and unwise, had done nothing to justify such treatment.
To the surprise of the nation Richard took his humiliation quietly. But he was merely biding his time; he had sworn revenge in his heart, but he was ready to wait long for it. For the next nine years he appeared an unexceptionableRichard rules constitutionally.sovereign, anxious only to conciliate the nation and parliament. He got rid of the ministers imposed upon him by the lords appellant, but replaced them by Bishop Wykeham and other old statesmen against whom no objection could be raised. He disarmed Gloucester by making a close alliance with his elder uncle John of Gaunt, who had been absent in Spain during the troubles of 1387-1388, and was displeased at the violent doings of his brother. His rule was mild and moderate, and he succeeded at last in freeingPeace with France.himself from the incubus of the French war—the source of most of the evils of the time, for it was the heavy taxation required to feed this struggle which embittered all the domestic politics of the realm. After two long truces, which filled the years 1390-1395, a definitive peace was at last concluded, by which the English king kept Calais and the coast-strip of Guienne, from Bordeaux to Bayonne, which had never been lost to the enemy. To confirm the peace, he married Isabella, the young daughter of Charles VI. (Nov. 1396); he had lost his first wife, the excellent Anne of Bohemia, two years before.
The king seemed firmly seated on his throne—so much so that in 1395 he had found leisure for a long expedition to Ireland, which none of his ancestors had visited since KingRichard reduces Ireland to obedience.John. He compelled all the native princes to do him homage, and exercised the royal authority in such a firm manner as had never before been known in the island. But those who looked forward to quiet and prosperous times both for Ireland and for England were destined to be undeceived. In 1397 Richard carried out an extraordinary and unexpectedcoup d’état, which he had evidently premeditated for many years. Having lived down his unpopularity, and made himself many powerful friends, he resolved to take his long-deferred revenge on Gloucester and the other lords appellant.His revenge on Gloucester and the lords appellant.He trumped up a vain story that his uncle was once more conspiring against him, arrested him, and sent him over to Calais, where he was secretly murdered in prison. At the same time Gloucester’s two chief confederates of 1387, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, were tried and sentenced to death: the former was actually executed, the latter imprisoned for life. The other two lords appellant, Mowbray, duke of Norfolk,2and Henry of Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, were dealt with a year later. Richard pretended to hold them among hisBanishment of Bolingbroke and Norfolk.best friends, but in 1398 induced Bolingbroke to accuse Norfolk of treasonable language. Mowbray denied it, and challenged his accuser to a judicial duel. When they were actually facing each other in the lists at Coventry, the king forbade them to fight, and announced that he banished them both—Henry for six years, Norfolk for life.
Having thus completed his vengeance on those who had slain his friends ten years before—their respective punishments were judiciously adapted to their several responsibilities in that matter—Richard began to behave in an arbitraryArbitrary rule of Richard.and unconstitutional fashion. He evidently thought that no one would dare to lift a hand against him after the examples that he had just made. This might have been so, if he had continued to rule as cautiously as during the time when he was nursing his scheme of revenge. But now his brain seemed to be turned by success—indeed his wild language at times seemed to argue that he was not wholly sane. He declared that all pardons issued since 1387 were invalid, and imposed heavy fines on persons, and even on whole shires, that had given the lords appellant aid. He made huge forced loans, and employed recklessly the abuse of purveyance. He browbeat the judges on the bench, and kept many persons under arrest for indefinite periods without a trial. But the act which provoked the nation most was that he terrified the parliament which met at Shrewsbury in 1398 into voting away its powers to a small committee of ten persons, all creatures of his own. This body he used as his instrument of government, treating its assent as equivalent to that of a whole parliament in session. There seemed to be an end to the constitutional liberties of England.
Such violence, however, speedily brought its own punishment. In 1399 Richard sailed over to Ireland to put down a revolt of the native princes, who had defeated and slain the earl of March, his cousin and their lord-lieutenant.Second expedition to Ireland.While he was absent Henry of Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspur with a small body of exiles and mercenaries. He pretended that he had merely come to claim the estates and title of his father John of Gaunt, who had died a few months before. The adventurer was at once joined by theearl of Northumberland and all the lords of the north; the armyHenry of Bolingbroke lands in England.which was called out against him refused to fight, and joined his banner, and in a few days he was master of all England (July 1399). King Richard, hurrying back from Ireland, landed at Milford Haven just in time to learn that the levies raised in his name had dispersed or joined the enemy. He still had with him a considerable force, and might have tried the fortune of war with some prospect of success. But his conduct seemed dictated by absolute infatuation; he might have fought, or he might have fled to his father-in-law in France, if he judged his troopsFlight of Richard.untrustworthy. Instead of taking either course, he deserted his army by night, and fled into the Welsh mountains, apparently with the intention of collecting fresh adherents from North Wales and Cheshire, the only regions where he was popular. But Bolingbroke had already seized Chester, and was marching against him at the head of such a large army that the countryside refused to stir. After skulking for three weeks in the hills, Richard surrendered to his cousin at Flint, on the 19th of August 1399, having previously stipulated that if he consented to abdicate his life should be spared,Surrender and abdication of Richard.his adherents pardoned, and an honourable livelihood assured to him. This surrender put the crown to his career of folly. He should have known that Henry would never feel safe while he survived, and that no oaths could be trusted in such circumstances. At all costs he should have endeavoured to escape abroad, a course that was still in his power.
Richard carried out his part of the bargain; he executed a deed of abdication in which he owned himself “insufficient and useless.” It was read to a parliament summoned in his name on the 30th of September, and the throne wasAccession of Henry IV.declared vacant. There was small doubt as to the personality of his successor; possession is nine points of the law, and Henry of Bolingbroke for the moment had the whole nation at his back. His hereditary title indeed was imperfect; though he was the eldest descendant of Edward III. in the male line after Richard, yet there was a whole family which stood between him and the crown. From Lionel of Clarence, the second son of Edward III. (John of Gaunt was only the third) descended the house of March, and the late king had proclaimed that Edmund of March would be his heir if he should die childless. Fortunately for Bolingbroke the young earl was only six years of age; not a voice was raised in his favour in parliament. When Henry stood forward and claimed the vacant throne by right of conquest and also by right of descent, no one gainsaid him. Lords and commons voted that they would have him for their king, and he was duly crowned on the 13th of October 1399. No faith was kept with the unhappy Richard; he was placed in close and secret confinement, and denied the ordinary comforts of life. Moreover the adherents for whose safety he had stipulated were at once impeached of treason.
Henry of Lancaster came to the throne, for all intents and purposes as an elective king; he had to depend for the future on his ability to conciliate and satisfy the baronage and the commons by his governance. For by hisPosition of the new king.usurpation he had sanctioned the theory that kings can be deposed for incapacity and maladministration. If he himself should become unpopular, all the arguments that he had employed against Richard might be turned against himself. The prospect was not reassuring; his revenue was small, and parliament would certainly murmur if he tried to increase it. The late king was not without partisans and admirers. There was a considerable chance that the French king might declare war—nominally to avenge his son-in-law, really to win Calais and Bordeaux. Of the partisans who had placed Henry on the throne many were greedy, and some were wholly unreasonable. But he trusted to his tact and his energy, and cheerfully undertook the task of ruling as a constitutional king—the friend of the parliament that had placed him on the throne.
The problem proved more weary and exhausting than he had suspected. From the very first his reign was a time of war, foreign and domestic, of murmuring, and of humiliating shifts and devices. Henry commenced his career byRebellion of the earls.granting the adherents of Richard II. their lives, after they had been first declared guilty of treason and had been deprived of the titles, lands and endowments given them by the late king. Their reply to this very modified show of mercy was to engage in a desperate conspiracy against him. If they had waited till his popularity had waned, they might have had some chance of success, but in anger and resentment they struck too soon. The earls of Kent and Huntingdon, close kinsmen of Richard on his mother’s side, the earl of Salisbury—a noted Lollard—and the lords Despenser and Lumley took arms at midwinter (Jan. 4, 1400) and attempted to seize the king at Windsor. They captured the castle, but Henry escaped, raised the levies of London against them, and beat them into the west. Kent and Salisbury were slain at Cirencester, the others captured and executed with many of their followers. Their rebellion sealed the fate of the master in whose cause they had risen. Henry and his counsellors were determined that there shouldMurder of Richard.be no further use made of the name of the “lawful king,” and Richard was deliberately murdered by privation—insufficient clothing, food and warmth—in his dungeon at Pontefract Castle (Feb. 17, 1400). It is impossible not to pity his fate. He had been wayward, unwise and occasionally revengeful; but his provocation had been great, and if few tyrants have used more violent and offensive language, few have committed such a small list of actual crimes. It was a curious commentary on Henry’s policy, that Richard, even when dead, did not cease to give him trouble. Rumour got abroad, owing to the secrecy of his end, that he was not really dead, and an impostor long lived at the Scottish court who claimed to be the missing king, and was recognized as Richard by many malcontents who wished to be deceived.
The rising of the earls was only the first and the least dangerous of the trials of Henry IV. Only a few months after their death a rebellion of a far more formidable sort broke out in Wales—where Richard II. had been popular,Welsh rising under Owen Glendower.and the house of March, his natural heirs, held large estates. The leader was a gentleman named Owen Glendower, who had the blood of the ancient kings of Gwynedd in his veins. Originally he had taken to the hills as a mere outlaw, in consequence of a quarrel with one of the marcher barons; but after many small successes he began to be recognized as a national leader by his countrymen, and proclaimed himself prince of Wales. The king marched against him in person in 1400 and 1401, but Glendower showed himself a master of guerrilla warfare; he refused battle, and defied pursuit in his mountains, till the stores of the English army were exhausted and Henry was forced to retire. His prestige as a general was shaken, and his treasury exhausted by these fruitless irregular campaigns.
Meanwhile worse troubles were to come. The commons were beginning to murmur at the king’s administration; they had obtained neither the peace nor the diminished taxationDiscontent of the commons.which they had been promised. Moreover, among some classes at least, he had won desperate hatred by his policy in matters of religion. One of his chief supporters in 1399 had been Archbishop Arundel, an old enemy of Richard II. and brother to the earl who had been beheaded in 1397. Arundel was determined to extirpate the Lollards, and used his influence on the king to induce him to frame andStatute De heretico comburendo.pass through parliament the detestable statuteDe heretico comburendo, which recognized death by burning at the stake as the penalty of heresy, and bound the civil authorities to arrest, hand over to the church courts, and receive back for execution, all contumacious Lollards. Henry himself does not seem to have been particularly enthusiastic for persecution, but in order to keep the church party on his side he was forced to sanction it. The burnings began with that of William Sawtré, a London vicar, on the 2nd ofMarch 1401; they continued intermittently throughout the reign. The victims were nearly all clergy or citizens; the king shrank from touching the Lollards of higher rank, and even employed in his service some who were notoriously tainted with heresy.
External troubles continued to multiply during Henry’s earlier years. The Scots had declared war, and there was every sign that the French would soon follow suit, for theWar with Scotland.king’s failure to crush Glendower had destroyed his reputation for capacity. The rebel achieved his greatest success in June 1402, when he surprised and routed the whole levy of the marcher lords at Bryn G’las, between Pilleth and Knighton, capturing (among many other prisoners) Sir Edmund Mortimer, the uncle and guardian of the young earl of March, whom all malcontents regarded as the rightful monarch of England. A few months after the king’s fortune seemed to take a turn for the better, when the Scots were defeated atBattle of Homildon Hill.Homildon Hill by the earl of Northumberland and his son Henry Percy, the celebrated “Hotspur.” But this victory was to be the prelude to new dangers: half the nobility of Scotland had been captured in the battle, and Northumberland intended to fill his coffers with their ransoms; but the king looked upon them as state prisoners and announced his intention of taking them out of the earl’s hands. Northumberland was a greedy and unscrupulous Border chief, who regarded himself as entitled to exact whatever he chose from his master, because he had been the first to join him at his landing in 1399, and had lent him a consistent support ever since. He had been amply rewarded by grants of land and money, but was not yet satisfied. In indignation at the first refusal that he had met, the earl conspired with Glendower toConspiracy of Northumberland with Glendower.raise rebellion in the name of the rightful heirs of King Richard, the house of March. The third party in the plot was Sir Edmund Mortimer, Glendower’s captive, who was easily persuaded to join a movement for the aggrandizement of his own family. He married Owen’s daughter, and became his trusted lieutenant. Northumberland also enlisted the services of his chief Scottish prisoner, the earl of Douglas, who promised him aid from beyond Tweed.
In July 1403 came the crisis of King Henry’s reign; while Glendower burst into South Wales, and overran the whole countryside as far as Cardiff and Carmarthen, the Percies raised their banner in the North. The old earlInsurrection in the north and west.set himself to subdue Yorkshire; his son Hotspur and the earl of Douglas marched south and opened communication with the Welsh. All Cheshire, a district always faithful to the name of Richard II., rose in their favour, and they were joined by Hotspur’s uncle, the earl of Worcester. They then advanced towards Shrewsbury, where they hoped that Glendower might meet them. But long ere the Welsh could appear, King Henry was on the spot; he brought the rebels to action at Hately Field, just outside the gates ofDefeat of the rebels at Shrewsbury.Shrewsbury, and inflicted on them a complete defeat, in which his young son Henry of Monmouth first won his reputation as a fighting man. Hotspur was slain, Worcester taken and beheaded, Douglas desperately wounded (July 23, 1403). On receiving this disastrous news the earl of Northumberland sued for pardon; the king was unwise enough to grant it, merely punishing him by fining him and taking all his castles out of his hands.