A Student's History of England Volume I Part 18

[Ill.u.s.tration: Henry of Lancaster claiming the throne: from Harl. MS.

1319.]

15. =The Deposition of Richard and the Enthronement of Henry IV.

1399.=--By lying promises Lancaster induced Richard to place himself in his power at Flint. "My lord," said Lancaster to him, "I have now come before you have sent for me. The reason is that your people commonly say you have ruled them very rigorously for twenty or two and twenty years; but, if it please G.o.d, I will help you to govern better." The pretence of helping the king to govern was soon abandoned. Richard was carried to London and thrown into the Tower. He consented, probably not till after he had been threatened with the fate of Edward II., to sign his abdication. On the following morning the act of abdication was read in Parliament. The throne was empty Then Lancaster stepped forward. "In the name," he said, "of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster, challenge this realm of England, and the crown with all its members and appurtenances, as I am descended by right line of the blood coming from the good lord King Henry the Third,[27] and through that right G.o.d of his grace hath sent me, with help of my kin and of my friends, to recover it, the which realm was in point to be undone for default of governance and undoing of the good laws." The a.s.sent of Parliament was given, and Lancaster took his seat in Richard's throne as King Henry IV.

[Footnote 27: Genealogy of the claimants of the throne in 1399:--

HENRY III.

1216-1272 | --------------------------------- | | EDWARD I. Edmund 1272-1307 | | ---------------------- | | | EDWARD II. Thomas, Henry, 1307-1327 Earl of Lancaster Earl of Lancaster | | EDWARD III | 1327-1377 | | | -------------------- | | | Henry, Duke of Lancaster Edward, Lionel, | the Black Prince Duke of Clarence Blanche = John of Gaunt, | | | Duke of RICHARD II. Philippa = Edmund Mortimer, | Lancaster 1377-1399 | Earl of March | | | Roger Mortimer, HENRY IV.

Earl of March 1399-1413 | Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Effigy of a knight at Clehonger, showing development of plate armour. Date, about 1400.]

16. =Nature of the Claim of Henry IV.=--The claim which Henry put forward would certainly not bear investigation. It laid stress on right of descent, and it has since been thought that Henry intended to refer to a popular belief that his ancestor Edmund, the second son of Henry III., was in reality the eldest son, but had been set aside in favour of his younger brother, Edward I., on account of a supposed physical deformity from which he was known as Edmund Crouchback. As a matter of fact the whole story was a fable, and the name Crouchback had been given to Edmund not because his back was crooked, but because he had worn a cross on his back as a crusader (see p. 197). That Henry should have thought it necessary to allude to this story, if such was really his meaning, shows the hold which the idea of hereditary succession had taken on the minds of Englishmen. In no other way could he claim hereditary right as a descendant of Henry III. Richard had selected as his heir Roger Mortimer, the son of the daughter of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the next son of Edward III., after the Black Prince, who lived to be old enough to have children. Roger Mortimer, indeed, had recently been killed in Ireland, but he had left a boy, Edmund Mortimer, who, on hereditary principles, was heir to the kingdom, unless the doctrine announced by Edward III. that a claim to the crown descended through females was to be set aside. In fact the real importance of the change of kings lay not in what Henry said, but in what he avoided saying. It was a reversion to the old right of election, and to the precedent set in the deposition of Edward II.

Henry tacitly announced that in critical times, when the wearer of the crown was hopelessly incompetent, the nation, represented by Parliament, might step in and change the order of succession. The question at issue was not merely a personal one between Richard and Henry. It was a question between hereditary succession leading to despotism on the one side, and to parliamentary choice, perhaps to anarchy, on the other. That there were dangers attending the latter solution of the const.i.tutional problem would not be long in appearing.

_Books recommended for further study of Part III._

GREEN, J. R. History of the English People. Vol. i. pp. 189-520.

STUBBS, W. (Bishop of Oxford). Const.i.tutional History of England. Vol.

i. chap. xii. sections 151-155; vol. ii. chaps. ix. and x.

---- The Early Plantagenets, 129-276.

NORGATE, Miss K. England under the Angevin Kings. Vol. ii. p. 390.

MICHELET, J. History of France (Middle Ages). Translated by G. H.

Smith.

LONGMAN, W. The History of the Life and Times of Edward III.

GAIRDNER, James. The Houses of Lancaster and York, pp. 1-64.

ROGERS, James E. Thorold. A History of Agriculture and Prices in England. Vols. i. and ii.

CUNNINGHAM, W. Growth of English Industry and Commerce in the Early and Middle Ages, pp. 172-365.

WAKEMAN, H. O. and Ha.s.sALL, A. (Editors). Essays Introductory to the Study of English Const.i.tutional History.

ASHLEY, W. J. An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory.

Vol. i.

JUSSERAND, J. J. English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages. Translated by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Miss).

BROWNE, M. Chaucer's England.

JESSOPP, A., Dr. The Coming of the Friars, and other Historic Essays.

OMAN, C. W. C. The Art of War in the Middle Ages.

ADAMS, G. B. The Political History of England. Vol. ii. From the Norman Conquest to the Death of John (1066-1216).

TOUT, T. F. The Political History of England. Vol. iii. From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377).

OMAN, C. The Political History of England. Vol. iv. From the Accession of Richard II. to the Death of Richard III. (1377-1485).

PART IV.

_LANCASTER, YORK, AND TUDOR._ =1399--1509.=

CHAPTER XIX.

HENRY IV. AND HENRY V.

HENRY IV., =1399--1413=. HENRY V., =1413--1422=.

LEADING DATES

Accession of Henry IV. 1399 Statute for the burning of heretics 1401 Battle of Shrewsbury 1403 Fight at Bramham Moor 1408 Succession of Henry V. 1413 Battle of Agincourt 1415 Treaty of Troyes 1420 Death of Henry V. 1422

1. =Henry's First Difficulties. 1399--1400.=--Henry IV. fully understood that his only chance of maintaining himself on the throne was to rule with due consideration for the wishes of Parliament. His main difficulty, like that of his predecessor, was that the great lords preferred to hold their own against him individually with the help of their armies of retainers, instead of exercising political power in Parliament. In his first Parliament an angry brawl arose. The lords who in the last reign had taken the side of Gloucester flung their gloves on the floor of the House as a challenge to those who had supported Richard when he compa.s.sed Gloucester's death; and though Henry succeeded in keeping the peace for the time, a rebellion broke out early in =1400= in the name of Richard. Henry, like the kings before him, found his support against the turbulent n.o.bles in the townsmen and the yeomen, and he was thus able to suppress the rebellion. Some of the n.o.blemen who were caught by the excited defenders of the throne were butchered without mercy and without law.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Henry IV. and his queen, Joan of Navarre: from their tomb in Canterbury Cathedral.]

2. =Death of Richard II. 1400.=--A few weeks after the suppression of this conspiracy it was rumoured that Richard had died in prison at Pontefract. According to Henry's account of the matter he had voluntarily starved himself to death. Few, however, doubted that he had been put to death by Henry's orders. To prove the untruth of this story, Henry had the body brought to St. Paul's, where he showed to the people only the face of the corpse, as if this could be any evidence whatever. After Richard's death, if hereditary succession had been regarded, the person having a claim to the crown in preference to Henry was the young Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, the descendant of Lionel, Duke of Clarence (see p. 287). Henry therefore took care to keep the boy under custody during the whole of his reign.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Royal arms as borne by Henry IV. after about 1408, and by successive sovereigns down to 1603.]

3. =Henry IV. and the Church.=--Besides seeking the support of the commonalty, Henry sought the support of the Church. Since the rise of the friars at the beginning of the thirteenth century (see p. 191) the Church had produced no new orders of monks or friars. In the thirteenth and fourteenth she produced the schoolmen, a succession of great thinkers who systematised her moral and religious teaching.

Imagining that she had no more to learn, she now attempted to strengthen herself by persecuting those who disbelieved her teaching, and after the suppression of the revolt of the peasants, made common cause with the landlords, who feared pecuniary loss from the emanc.i.p.ation of the villeins. This conservative alliance against social and religious change was the more easily made because many of the bishops were now members of n.o.ble families, instead of springing, as had usually been the case in the better days of the mediaeval Church, from poor or middle-cla.s.s parentage. In the reign of Richard II. a Courtenay, a kinsman of the Earl of Devons.h.i.+re, had become first Bishop of London (see p. 263), and then Archbishop of Canterbury. He was succeeded in his archbishopric by an Arundel, brother of the Earl of Arundel who had been executed by Richard, and Archbishop Arundel was in the days of Henry IV. the spokesman of the clergy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Thomas Cranley, Archbishop of Dublin, 1397-1417: from his bra.s.s at New College, Oxford. Showing the archiepiscopal ma.s.s-vestments and the cross and pall. Date, about 1400.]

4. =The Statute for the Burning of Heretics. 1401.=--In =1401= the clergy cried aloud for new powers. The ecclesiastical courts could condemn men as heretics, but had no power to burn them. Bishops and abbots formed the majority of the House of Lords, and though the Commons had not lost that craving for the wealth of the Church which had distinguished John of Gaunt's party, they had no sympathy with heresy. Accordingly the statute for the burning of heretics (_De haeretico comburendo_), the first English law for the suppression of religious opinion, was pa.s.sed with the ready consent of the king and both Houses. The first victim was William Sawtre, a priest who held, amongst other things, "that after the words of consecration in the Eucharist the bread remains bread, and nothing more." He was burnt by a special order from the king and council even before the new law had been enacted.

5. =Henry IV. and Owen Glendower. 1400--1402.=--If Henry found it difficult to maintain order in England, he found it still more difficult to keep the peace on the borders of Wales. In =1400= an English n.o.bleman, Lord Grey of Ruthyn, seized on an estate belonging to Owen Glendower, a powerful Welsh gentleman. Owen Glendower called the Welsh to arms, ravaged Lord Grey's lands, and proclaimed himself Prince of Wales. For some years Wales was practically independent.

English townsmen and yeomen were ready to support Henry against any sudden attempt of the n.o.bility to crush him with their retainers, but they were unwilling to bear the burden of taxation needed for the steady performance of a national task. In the meanwhile Henry was constantly exposed to secret plots. In =1401= he found an iron with four spikes in his bed. In the autumn of =1402= he led an expedition into Wales, but storms of rain and snow forced him back. His English followers attributed the disaster to the evil spirits which, as they fully believed, were at the command of the wizard Glendower.