FOOTNOTES:
[24] Thomas of Gloucester's only daughter had married Edmund, Earl of Stafford.
[25] Brother of the Arundel whom Richard II. beheaded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
BATTLE OF AGINCOURT. 1415.
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.
Without a moment's hesitation, the English pushed on to attack the second column, which was slowly advancing through the mud to aid the van. Incredible as it may appear, their second charge was as successful as the first, though the victors were exhausted and thinned in numbers by the previous fighting, and did not muster half their adversaries' force. Just after he had routed this second column, Henry received an alarm that a detached body of the French had assailed his camp in the rear, and were coming up to surround him. He at once bade his men slay the prisoners they had taken, a harsh and, as it proved, an unnecessary order, for the French in the rear only plundered the camp, and then dispersed with their booty. Although the king had completely scattered or destroyed the second French column, the third still remained in order before him; but, cowed by the fate of their comrades, they turned and retired hastily from the field, though they should by themselves have been more than enough to overwhelm the exhausted band of English.
In this astonishing victory, Henry's small army had slain a much larger number of men than they mustered in their own ranks. The Constable of France, Anthony, Duke of Brabant—brother of John of Burgundy—the Dukes of Bar and Alençon, and a whole crowd of counts and barons, had fallen; it is said that no less than 10,000 French were slain, of whom more than 8000 were men of gentle blood. In spite of the massacre of captives in the midst of the fighting, there were still some prisoners surviving. They included the young Duke of Orleans—the titular head of the Armagnac faction—the Duke of Bourbon, the Counts of Eu and Vendôme, and 1500 knights and nobles more. The English in this terrible fight had lost less than 200 men, but among them were two great peers, the Duke of York—the Edward of Rutland of whom we read in 1399—and the Earl of Suffolk.
Henry returns to England.
Henry retraced his way to Calais, and crossed to England with his prisoners and his booty, there to be received with splendid festivities by his people, who regarded the glory of Agincourt as a sufficient compensation for the losses of a costly campaign which had added nothing save the single town of Harfleur to the possessions of the English crown. The ransoms of a host of noble captives were relied upon to replenish the exchequer, and the fearful losses of the Armagnac party, who saw half their leaders slain at Agincourt, would evidently weaken the strength of France in the remainder of the war.
End of the Great Schism.—Council of Constance.
Henry did not cross the Channel again in the year 1416, which he spent partly in negotiations with the Duke of Burgundy, whose help he wished to secure against the Armagnacs, partly in treating with the Emperor Sigismund about the common welfare of Christendom. Sigismund was hard at work endeavouring to put an end to the "Great Schism," the scandalous breach in the unity of the Church caused by the misconduct of the rival Popes at Rome and Avignon. He visited England, and won Henry's aid for his plans, which brought about the reunion of Christendom at the Council of Constance—a reunion under evil auspices, since it was marked by the burning of the great Bohemian teacher John Huss, who had made the doctrines of Wicliffe popular among his Slavonic countrymen in the far East. Moreover, it restored the unity of Christendom, but did not reform either the papacy or the national Churches. As this was not done, the general outbreak of religious ferment was made inevitable in a later generation; after the failure at Constance to reform the Church from within, it became necessary to reform her from without.
Second invasion of France.—Conquest of Normandy.
Having come to an agreement with the Duke of Burgundy, and obtained from him a promise of neutrality, Henry invaded France for the second time in the summer of 1417. He took with him an army of somewhat over 16,000 men, landed in Normandy, and began to reduce one after another all the fortresses of that province. Utterly humbled by the memory of Agincourt, the Armagnacs made no attempt to meet him in the open field. Some of the Norman towns held out gallantly enough, but they got no aid from without. At the end of a year the whole duchy, save its capital, the city of Rouen, was in English hands. Henry then assumed the state of Duke of Normandy, and put the whole land under orderly government, a boon it had not enjoyed for twenty years. He gave Norman baronies and earldoms to many of his English followers, and handed over the control of the cities to burghers of the Burgundian faction, who served the English readily enough, out of their hatred for the Armagnacs. For thirty years Normandy was to remain English. Rouen was added to the rest of the duchy after a long siege of six months, in which half the population perished by hunger. Irritated by this long resistance, Henry imposed on it the harsh terms of a ransom of 300,000 crowns, and hung Alain Blanchart, the citizen who had been the soul of the obstinate defence (January, 1419).
While the conquest of Normandy was in progress, the French factions had been more bitterly at strife than ever. In 1418 the Burgundian party in Paris rose against their rivals, and massacred every man on whom they could lay hands, including Bernard of Armagnac himself. The control of the party of the feudal noblesse then passed into the hands of the young dauphin Charles, the heir of France.
Murder of the Duke of Burgundy.
The fall of Rouen, however, frightened John of Burgundy, and unwilling that France should fall wholly into the power of his ally King Henry, he made proposals for a reconciliation with the Dauphin and his Armagnac followers. The treacherous young prince accepted the overtures with apparent cordiality, and invited Duke John to meet him on the bridge of Montereau to settle terms of peace. But when Burgundy came to the conference, he was deliberately slain by the Armagnac captains, in the presence and with the consent of the Dauphin (August, 1419).
Treaty of Troyes.
The murder of Montereau was destined to make Henry master of France. When Philip of Burgundy, the son of Duke John, heard of his father's death, he vowed unending war against the Dauphin and his faction, and took the field to help the English to complete the conquest of France. Nor was Philip of Burgundy the only helper that Henry secured: the Queen of France, Isabella of Bavaria, bitterly hated her son the Dauphin, and was glad to do him an evil turn. She proposed that Charles should be disinherited, and that the crown should pass with her favourite daughter Catherine to the hands of the English king. So at Troyes, in Champagne, Henry, Philip of Burgundy, and Queen Isabella concluded a formal treaty by which Henry received Catherine to wife, and was to succeed to the French throne on the death of his father-in-law, the old King Charles VI., who still lingered on in complete imbecility (June 2, 1420).
Henry master of Northern France.
The treaty of Troyes put Paris and the greater part of Northern France into Henry's hands. Casting national feeling aside in their bitter partisan spirit, the Burgundian faction everywhere accepted the King of England as the lawful regent and governor of France. South of the Loire the Dauphin and his Armagnac friends still held their own, but north of it they only possessed scattered fortresses dotted about in Picardy, the Isle-de-France, and Champagne, from Boulogne in the north to Orleans in the south.
After taking formal possession of Paris and holding a great meeting of the Estates of the French realm at Rouen, Henry returned in triumph to England with his young wife. He had reached a pitch of success in war such as no English king had ever attained before, and the nation, blinded by the personal merits of its king and gorged with the plunder of France, forgave him all his faults. The waste of life and money, the never-ending persecution of the Lollards, the precarious tenure of the conquests in France—due, in sober truth, merely to the aid of the Burgundian faction—were all forgotten.
Defeat of the English at Beaugé.
Henry had not long been in England, when bad news crossed the Channel after him. He had left his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, with a small army, to hold Maine against the Dauphin's adherents. But the Armagnac bands had lately been strengthened by succours from Scotland, under the Earl of Buchan, the son of the regent Albany. For, although the King of Scots had been a prisoner in English hands for ten years and more, his subjects and his uncle the regent were not thereby constrained to keep the peace with England. Pushing forward rashly to attack the Scots and Armagnacs, Clarence was routed and slain at Beaugé (1421). The enemy at once overran Maine, and began to infest the borders of Normandy.
Henry's third expedition.
This compelled the king to cross once more over the sea in order to repair his brother's disastrous defeat. In a campaign extending from the summer of 1421 to that of the following year, he cleared the Dauphin's army out of their foothold north of the Loire, and then proceeded to starve out one by one their isolated strongholds in the north of France, the chief of which were Dreux and Meaux.
Siege of Meaux.—Death of Henry.
It was during the siege of Meaux, which continued all the winter of 1421 and spring of 1422, that Henry's health began to give dangerous signs of breaking up. He had been campaigning from his boyhood, and had never hitherto shown any weakness of constitution. But the winter colds of 1421-2, or the camp-fever bred in the trenches during the long siege of Meaux, had brought him very low. He was carried back toward Paris in a desperate state of weakness from ague and dysentery. Soon after, to the horror and dismay of the English and their French partisans, he died at the castle of Vincennes on August 31, 1422, before he had attained his thirty-fifth year.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE LOSS OF FRANCE.
1422-1453.
England had never yet had a sovereign of such tender age as the infant king who succeeded to the heritage of Henry V. It was under the rule of a child of less than twelve months old that the long and wearisome French war had to be continued. Yet at first the prospects of the reign did not look very dark. The struggle in France was not going ill, and seldom has any orphan had so zealous and capable a guardian by his cradle as John of Bedford, the little king's eldest uncle. He had, moreover, no domestic intrigues to fear; Edmund, Earl of March, the legitimate heir of Richard II., was the most unenterprising and loyal of men, and never gave any trouble.
The Regency.
On his death-bed Henry V. had not appointed his eldest and most capable brother, John of Bedford, to be the regent in England, as might have been expected. His ruling passion was strong in death, and he thought above all things of the maintenance of the English ascendency in France. Therefore he named Duke John to take charge of the government of that country. As Regent of England he designated his younger brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, a man of far less worth and weight. The Parliament, however, held that the king could not dispose of the regency by will; and though they named Gloucester Protector, placed many limitations on his power. Unfortunately, they could not remedy his reckless and flighty disposition.
James I. of Scotland released.
During the whole of the long minority of Henry VI. the varying fortunes of the French war were almost the only topic that stirred the interest of the nation. The internal history of England is well-nigh a blank; no period since the Conquest is left so bare by the chroniclers, who seem to have no eyes or ears for anything save the fate of our armies across the Channel. The quarrels of Duke Humphrey with his colleagues in the regency are the only other topic on which they touch. The council carried out the policy of the late king, so far as any body of statesmen of average ability can continue the work of a single man of high military and political genius. They strained every nerve to keep up the war in France, and subordinated every other end to that purpose. Their wisest act was the release of the young King of Scots, after seventeen years of captivity. Seeing that his kinsman Albany was helping the French, they set James I. free, and sent him home. He married, ere he departed, Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and granddaughter of John of Gaunt, a lady for whom he had formed a romantic attachment in the days of his captivity. By her influence it was hoped that he would be kept firm in the English alliance. In some degree this hope was fulfilled: James promptly slew his cousins of Albany, and devoted himself to pacifying and bringing back into order the country from which he had been so long exiled.
Death of Charles VI.—Henry proclaimed King of France.
We must now turn to the aspect of affairs beyond the Channel, the subject which seemed all-important to the English nation at this time. The old mad King of France had died only two months after his son-in-law, Henry V. (October, 1422). Bedford had, therefore, to proclaim his little nephew as king at Paris, and to rule in his name, no longer in that of the unhappy Charles VI. The Dauphin also assumed the title of King of France, and was acknowledged as monarch in all the lands south of the Loire. But he was an indolent and apathetic young man, governed entirely by his favourites, and wholly unskilled in and averse to military enterprises. He did so little for himself, and seemed so contented with his unsatisfactory position, that men called him in scorn "the King of Bourges"—his residence for the time—rather than the King of France.
There still appeared to be some chance that the English might maintain themselves in possession of Northern France. But this hope rested entirely on the firm and continued fidelity of the Burgundian party to their English allies. It was only by their help that success could be won, for ten or fifteen thousand English scattered from Calais to Bordeaux could not hold down a hostile France. For some time the Duke of Burgundy aided Bedford, and the Burgundian citizens in each town maintained their loyalty to King Henry.
Victories of Bedford.
Bedford's regency commenced with two victories, at Cravant (July, 1423) and Verneuil (August, 1424), which so tamed the Dauphin's partisans that the English were able to work slowly west and south, subduing the land. More would have been done, but for a sudden risk of a breach with Burgundy, caused by the reckless selfishness of the Duke of Gloucester.
Gloucester's expedition to Hainault.
Tired of long bickerings with his uncle, Bishop Beaufort of Winchester, and the other members of the council of regency, Humphrey had resolved to go off on an enterprise of his own. There was at this moment a distressed princess in the Netherlands, Jacquelaine, Duchess of Holland and Countess of Hainault. She had married Philip of Burgundy's cousin, the Duke of Brabant, a stupid debauchee who treated her very ill. Escaping from his court, she fled to London, and offered herself and her lands to Duke Humphrey, if he would take her under his protection. Of course, a divorce from her husband had first to be procured; but the pope refused to grant it. In spite of this trifling difficulty, Gloucester performed a ceremony of marriage with Jacquelaine, though both of them were well aware that it was a rank case of bigamy. They then crossed to the continent to take possession of her dominions, which were held by her husband, John of Brabant. This, of course, meant war; and not only war with Brabant, but with Burgundy also, for Duke Philip was the close ally of Duke John, and had no wish to see Gloucester established in his neighbourhood as ruler of Hainault and Holland.
Threatened breach with Burgundy.
Both Bedford and the English council of regency completely disavowed Gloucester's doings, but it was hard to persuade Burgundy that England had not determined to break with him. If Gloucester had been successful, there is no doubt that Burgundy would have joined the French and driven the English out of France. But fortunately for Bedford, his brother proved singularly unlucky in Hainault. Seeing himself outnumbered and surrounded by the Brabanters and Burgundians, Humphrey left his quasi-wife in the lurch, and fled back to England. The bigamous duchess fell into the hands of her enemies, and was placed in confinement. Gloucester took the news with equanimity, and consoled himself by marrying Eleanor Cobham, a lady of damaged reputation, whom he had known long before.
Siege of Orleans.
Owing to Gloucester's failure in Hainault, the breach between England and Burgundy did not widen into open disruption, but Duke Philip never again supported his allies with such vigour as in the earlier days of the war. It was not till 1428 that the English felt strong enough to make a fresh advance against the lands beyond the Loire. In that year the regent Bedford succeeded in equipping a small field army of five or six thousand men—half English, half French partisans of England. Placing them under Thomas Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, one of the best captains who had served Henry V., he sent them southward. Salisbury at first aimed at taking Angers, but turned aside to besiege Orleans, the key of the central valley of the Loire, and the one place of importance beyond that river which the French still held. On the 7th of October, 1428, he took post in front of it, and built strong redoubts facing each of its gates, for he had not a large enough army to surround so great a city. Thus Orleans was blockaded rather than besieged, since it was always possible for the French to get in or out in small parties between the fortified positions of the English.
Jeanne d'Arc.
Orleans held out long and stubbornly, and while its siege still dragged on, a new factor was suddenly introduced into the struggle. The widespread misery and devastation caused by thirteen years of uninterrupted war had moved the hearts of the French to despair; the people lay inert and passive, hating the English, but caring little for the despicable Charles and his Armagnac court at Bourges. It was left for a simple peasant girl to turn this apathy into energy, and to send forth the whole people of France on a wild crusade against the invader.
Jeanne d'Arc was the daughter of a villager of Domrémy, on the borders of Champagne. She was from her youth a girl of a mystic, visionary piety, who believed herself to be visited by dreams and visions from on high, which guided her in all the actions of her life. At the age of eighteen her "voices," as she called them, began to give her the strange command to go forth and deliver France from the English, whose arrogance and cruelty had moved the wrath of Heaven. Jeanne doubted the meaning of these hard sayings, but in repeated visions she thought that she saw St. Michael and St. Catherine appear to her, and bid her go to the Dauphin Charles and cause him to place her at the head of his armies. She resolved to obey their behests, and betook herself to Chinon, where she presented herself before the prince. Charles at first treated her slightingly, and his courtiers and captains laughed her to scorn. But she vehemently insisted on the importance of her mission, and at last made some impression on the Dauphin's weak and wavering mind. Apparently she revealed to him a secret known to himself alone, by some sort of clairvoyance. Charles resolved to give her mission a trial, and his captains agreed that perchance the company of an inspired prophetess might put heart into their dispirited troops. Jeanne's "voices" bade her clothe herself in knightly armour, display a white banner before her, and ride at the head of the Dauphin's men to the relief of Orleans. They promised her complete success in the enterprise, and prophesied that she should lead the prince in triumph to Rheims, and there crown him King of France.
Jeanne enters Orleans.—The siege raised.
In April, 1429, Jeanne entered Orleans with a convoy of food and a small troop of men-at-arms. The townsmen needed her encouragement, but their English foes outside were also in evil case. The task was too great for the little army of the besiegers, who had already lost many men, and had seen their leader, Thomas of Salisbury, slain by a cannon-shot as he was reconnoitering the walls. The Earl of Suffolk, who succeeded him, still held his ring of fortified posts round the city, on both sides of the Loire, but was quite unable to prevent food and reinforcements from entering it. Nevertheless the men of Orleans sorely needed the aid that Jeanne brought; for the Dauphin seemed to have abandoned them, and they had begun to despair. The success of Jeanne's mission was settled from the moment when the burghers of Orleans hailed her as a deliverer, and placed themselves at her disposal. If they had doubted and sneered, like the Dauphin's courtiers at Chinon, she could have done nothing. But the moment that she was within the walls, she bade the garrison arm and sally forth to attack the English redoubts that ringed them in. Her first effort was crowned with success; a sudden assault carried the nearest fort before succour could reach it from Suffolk's camp. The men of Orleans cried that Jeanne was indeed a prophetess and a deliverer sent by God, and henceforth followed her with a blind devotion which nothing could turn back or repel. It was in vain that the mercenary captains of the Dauphin's host endeavoured to moderate the reckless vigour of Jeanne's movements. After her first success she bade the garrison go on and conquer, and on four continuous days of fighting led them against the entrenchments of the English. One after another they fell, for the French were now fighting with a force and fury which nothing could resist. "Before that day," says the chronicler, "two hundred English would drive five hundred French before them. But now two hundred French would beat and chase four hundred English." The invaders came to dread the approach of Jeanne's white standard with a superstitious fear; they declared that she was a witch, and that the powers of hell fought behind her. At last Suffolk was fain to burn his camp, and to withdraw northwards with the remnant of his host.
But the disasters of the English were not yet ended. Jeanne had no intention of allowing them to remain unmolested; the troops who had already fought under her were ready to follow her anywhere, and the peasants and burghers all over France were beginning to take up arms, "now that the Lord had shown himself on the side of the Dauphin." With a host largely increased by fresh levies, Jeanne went to seek the English, and caught them up at Patay. There she charged them suddenly, "before the archers had even time to fix their stakes," and destroyed almost the whole force, taking captive Lord Talbot, its commander.
The Dauphin crowned at Rheims.
Jeanne now bade the Dauphin come forth from his seclusion and follow her to Rheims, the old crowning-place of the French kings. He obeyed, and brought a great host with him. At the approach of "the Maid of Orleans," as Jeanne was now styled, fortress after fortress in Champagne yielded. The regent Bedford was too weak in men to quit Paris, and so Jeanne was able to fulfil her promise by leading Charles to Rheims and there witnessing his coronation (July 17, 1429).
She then declared that her mission was ended, and asked to be allowed to return home to her father's house. But Charles would not suffer it, because of the enormous advantage that her presence gave to the French arms. She then bade him strike at Paris, the heart of the English possessions in France. For the first time in her career she failed; the Burgundian citizens manned their walls too well, and served their faction rather than their country. Jeanne was wounded in a fruitless assault on the city, and had to withdraw. But her campaign was not fruitless; Soissons, Laon, Beauvais, Senlis, Compiègne, Troyes, and well-nigh the whole of Isle-de-France and Champagne, were recovered from the English. The land which Bedford ruled as regent was now reduced to a triangular patch, with the sea as its base and Paris as its apex, and included little more than Normandy, Picardy, and Maine.
Successes and capture of Jeanne.
In spite of her failure at Paris, the prestige of the Maid of Orleans was still unbroken; she went on winning place after place for King Charles, though he supported her very grudgingly, and left her to depend on the enthusiasm of the people rather than the royal arm. But her career came suddenly to an end; while endeavouring to relieve Compiègne, then besieged by a Burgundian army, she was unhorsed in a skirmish, and fell into the hands of the enemy. Philip of Burgundy would not slay the maid himself, but he meanly sold her for ten thousand crowns to the English, though he knew that Bedford regarded her as a witch, and was resolved to punish her as such.
Jeanne burnt.
The cruel tragedy which followed will always leave a deep stain on the character of the regent, who in all other matters showed himself a just and righteous man. Jeanne was kept for many months in prison, subjected to cruel and ribald treatment, and examined again and again by bigoted ecclesiastics who were determined to prove her a witch. She constantly withstood them with a firm piety which moved their wrath, maintaining that her visions and voices were from God, and that all her acts had been done with His aid. After much quibbling, cross-examination, and persecution, a tribunal of French clergy, headed by the Bishop of Beauvais, pronounced her a sorceress and heretic, and handed her over to the secular arm for execution; the English, therefore, burnt her alive in the market-place of Rouen (May, 1431). Her callous master, Charles VII., made no attempt to save her, and seems to have viewed her fate with complete indifference.
Weakness of the English.
Though Jeanne had met a martyr's death, her cause continued to prosper. The spell of the invincibility of the English had been broken, and with their inferior numbers they could no longer resist the French assaults, in which nobles, burghers, and peasants now all united with a single heart. It was in vain that Bedford brought over the little ten-year-old Henry VI. from England, and crowned him at Paris (1431). The ceremony was attended by hardly a single Frenchman; even the Burgundian faction in the capital were beginning to doubt and draw apart from their old allies.
Dissensions in the Regency.
Meanwhile in England the continued ill-success of the war was leading to the growth of a peace party, at whose head was Henry Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester, who had lately become a cardinal. That Beaufort supported any scheme was a sufficient reason for Gloucester to oppose it, and Humphrey made himself the mouthpiece of those who pleaded for perpetual war. The cardinal and the duke quarrelled in and out of Parliament, their followers were always brawling, and the action of the council of regency grew weak and divided.
Peace proposals.—Burgundy joins the French.
At last Beaufort prevailed on the council to submit proposals for peace to the French court. At Arras the ambassadors of Henry VI., Charles VII., and Philip of Burgundy met, and strove to come to terms (1435). But the English still insisted on claiming the pompous style of King of France for their young master, and on retaining Paris and all the North for him. The French were only ready to grant Normandy and Guienne, and insisted on the renunciation of Henry's French title. It cannot be doubted that these terms were quite reasonable, but they were rejected, with the most disastrous results. Philip of Burgundy was now tired of the struggle, and thought that he had sufficiently revenged his father's murder by fifteen years of war with the murderer. On the ground that the English had rejected fair conditions of peace, he broke off his alliance with them, and made terms with Charles of France. He got Picardy and the counties of Macon and Auxerre as the price of his change of alliance.
Death of Bedford.—Fall of Paris.
Just as the Congress of Arras was breaking up, John of Bedford died, worn out before his time by his fourteen years of toilsome government in France. The breach with the Duke of Burgundy and the death of Bedford had the results that might have been expected. With one common accord the last French partisans of England threw off their allegiance to Henry VI. Paris itself opened its gates to the troops of Charles VII., and the English had soon to stand on the defensive in Normandy and Maine, their last foothold in Northern France (1437).
Struggle for Normandy.—Richard, Duke of York.
Nothing is more astonishing than the obstinate way in which the English government clung to the last remnants of the conquests of Henry V. By desperate and unremitting exertions the war was kept up in Normandy for no less than twelve years after Paris fell (1437-49). The heroes of this struggle were the veteran Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and the young Richard, Duke of York, who had just begun to come to the front. This prince was the son of that Richard Earl of Cambridge, who had paid with his life for his attempt to overturn Henry V. He was Duke of York as successor to his uncle Edmund, who fell at Agincourt, and Earl of March in right of his mother, the sister of the childless Edmund Mortimer, the last male of his house. York was governor in Normandy during the most important years of the struggle for the retention of the duchy, and gained much credit for repeatedly driving back the invasions which the French launched against it. He grew intoxicated with success, and made himself a prominent supporter of the unwise war-policy which Humphrey of Gloucester continued to advocate.
Treaty of Tours.—Marriage of Henry.
Meanwhile Cardinal Beaufort and the party which opposed Duke Humphrey—its chief members were Beaufort's nephews John and Edmund, successively Earls of Somerset, and William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk—were always watching for an opportunity of concluding a peace with France. Whenever they took negotiations in hand they were denounced by Gloucester as the hirelings of Charles VII., but they persisted in their purpose. In 1444 they thought that they had achieved it, for the French king, wearied by constant repulses in Normandy, consented to make a truce for two years, and to treat for a definite peace. He signed the compact at Tours, and ratified it by giving the hand of his kinswoman Margaret of Anjou to the young king Henry VI.; in consideration of the treaty, the English were to surrender Maine and its fortresses, while retaining Normandy entire.
Indignation in England.
Gloucester and Richard of York saluted this wise marriage and treaty with loud cries of wrath. They said that the Earl of Suffolk, who negotiated it, must have been sold to France, and spoke of the surrender of the fortresses of Maine as treason to the English crown. The greater part of the nation believed them to be right, for Humphrey and Richard were both popular with the masses, and it soon became a matter of faith that the Beauforts and Suffolk had betrayed their young master.
Feebleness of Henry.
A strong king might have crushed this unwise opposition to peace. But Henry VI., who had now reached his majority, was anything but a strong king. He was frail and feeble both in body and mind, a simple soul much given to exercises of piety and to quiet study. He always sought some stronger arm on which to lean, and when he had chosen his friends, wisely or unwisely, he clung to them with the obstinacy that so often accompanies weakness. Worst of all, he had inherited a taint of madness from his grandfather, the insane Charles VI. of France, and from time to time his brain was clouded by fits of apathetic melancholy. Henry had learnt to trust his great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort and his minister Suffolk; he would never listen to any accusation against them. His views were shared by the fiery young queen, who soon began to rule him by dint of her stronger will.
Death of the Duke of Gloucester and Cardinal Beaufort.
The truce of Tours lasted for some three years. During this space the factions in England grew fiercer than ever, and in 1447 came to a head. At a Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds, Gloucester was suddenly arrested by order of Suffolk and the queen, and charged with treason. He died within a few days, probably from an apoplectic seizure, and not from any foul play. But it was natural that the rumour should get abroad that Suffolk had secretly murdered him.
Gloucester was only outlived for a few weeks by his lifelong rival, the old Cardinal Beaufort. Their deaths cleared the way for the rise of new men: the Cardinal's place at the head of the peace party was taken by Suffolk and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, men of far lower stamp than the old churchman, who, though proud and worldly, had always done his best to serve England. Suffolk and Somerset were busy, self-important, self-seeking men, and coveted power and office for their own private ends. The Duke of York, who succeeded to Duke Humphrey's position, was a far more capable man, but he was committed to the hopelessly unpractical programme of perpetual war with France. His position, too, was rendered difficult by the fact that Duke Humphrey's death had made him next heir to the throne after the feeble young king, for there was now no other male of the house of Lancaster surviving. The queen, Suffolk, and Somerset began to look on him with suspicion, and he had to walk warily lest charges of treason should be brought against him, as they had been against his cousin of Gloucester. Meanwhile he was fain to accept the position of Lord Deputy of Ireland, which kept him out of harm's way.
Renewal of the war.
In 1449 the truce with France which had accompanied the king's marriage was broken, by the gross fault of his minister Suffolk. Some of the Norman garrisons were left so long unpaid that they broke into mutiny, crossed the border, and sacked the rich Breton town of Fougéres. Failing to get satisfaction from Suffolk for this outrage, Charles VII. declared war. Normandy was now in the charge of Somerset, a man of very different calibre from Richard of York, who had held it against such odds in the days before the truce of Tours. The French, on invading the duchy, swept the English before them with an ease that astonished even themselves. The peasants and townsfolk rose against their masters on every side, and gave the invaders their best help. Town after town fell; Rouen, the capital of the duchy, was betrayed by traitors within the gates; and the unhappy Somerset had to fall back on Caen. That town, with Cherbourg and Harfleur, was soon all that remained to the English on Norman soil.
Battle of Formigny.
This terrible news stirred up great wrath and indignation in England against Suffolk and Somerset. An army was hastily got ready at Portsmouth, and sent over to Cherbourg, with orders to join Somerset at Caen. But the French threw themselves between, and forced the army of succour to give them battle at Formigny. At this disastrous fight well-nigh the whole English force was destroyed, overwhelmed by an attack from the rear at a moment when it was already engaged with a superior French army in front. Only its general, Sir Thomas Kyriel, and 400 men were granted quarter, while no less than 3000 were slain (April, 1450).
Loss of Normandy.
This disaster settled the fate of Normandy. Somerset was compelled to surrender Caen, and returned, covered with ignominy, to England. The other garrisons yielded one after another, and nothing remained of all the mighty conquests of Henry V. in Northern France.
The Commons attack the Earl of Suffolk.—His death.
Even before Formigny had been fought, or Caen had fallen, grave troubles had broken out in England. Suffolk had always been unpopular ever since he gave up Maine and signed the truce of Tours. The news of the loss of Rouen, and the other Norman towns, sufficed to ruin him. In spite of the king's continued assurance of his confidence in his minister, the House of Commons began to send up petitions against Suffolk, accusing him not only of losing Maine and Normandy, but of having sold himself for bribes to the King of France. Seditious riots in Kent and London gave point to the Commons' accusation. Cowed by such signs of danger, the feeble king removed Suffolk from office. The Commons then formally passed a bill of attainder against him for treasonable misconduct of the king's affairs during the last five years. But Henry would not allow his trusted servant to be harmed, gave him a formal pardon, and bade him go beyond seas till the trouble should blow over. Suffolk sailed for Calais, but in the Dover Straits his vessel was beset and captured by some London ships, which had been lying in wait for him. He was caught and beheaded after a mock trial, and his body was cast ashore on Dover Sands. The guilty parties in this extraordinary crime were never traced or convicted.
Cade's rebellion.
But the death of Suffolk did not imply the removal of Suffolk's friends from office. The king kept his ministry unchanged, a piece of obstinacy which provoked a fresh burst of popular indignation. In June, 1450, occurred the great political insurrection known as "Jack Cade's Rebellion." John Aylmer or Cade was a soldier of fortune, who had served under the Duke of York in France and Ireland. He gave out that he was akin to the house of Mortimer, and that he was acting by the consent of his cousin, Duke Richard. His programme was the removal and punishment of the king's ministers, and the restoration of strong government and even-handed justice. His rising, in short, was political in its objects, and did not aim at redressing social evils only, like that of Wat Tyler. Possibly, Richard of York may have had some hand in the business, but we have no actual proof that he had egged Cade on.
All Kent and Sussex rose to join Cade, who advanced to Blackheath, and boldly sent in his demands to the king. Many of the Londoners favoured him, and the gates of the city opened at his approach. For a moment he was in possession of the capital. Smiting London Stone with his drawn sword, he cried, "Now is Mortimer Lord of London." He exercised his lordship by seizing and beheading Lord Say, the treasurer, and Crowmere, Sheriff of Kent, two friends of Suffolk. He would have done the same with others of the king's servants if he could have caught them. But this violence and the plundering of houses and shops by his disorderly followers provoked the citizens, who closed the gates and came to blows with the rebels. The king brought up armed retainers to help the Londoners, and after a space Cade's men dispersed on the promise of a royal pardon. Their leader, however, refused to take advantage of the amnesty, fled to the woods, and was tracked down and slain a few weeks later. His rising had failed mainly because he was a mere adventurer, and could not keep his followers in order.
The Dukes of York and Somerset.
But hardly had Cade fallen, when the Duke of York, whose name he had been using so freely, suddenly came over in person from Ireland to put himself at the head of the opposition. His first demand was a change of ministry, and especially the dismissal of Somerset, who had now returned from Normandy, and had been placed at the head of the king's council, as if he had come back covered with glory instead of with dishonour. But Henry and his queen were set on keeping their cousin of Beaufort in power, and York had for the time to hold back, lest he should be accused of open treason.
Loss of Guienne.—The Duke of York takes up arms.
His opportunity of speaking with effect was not long in coming. In 1451 the French attached Guienne, the last province over-sea where the English banner was still displayed. The loyal Gascons made a stout defence, but the king and Somerset sent them no aid, and Bordeaux was finally compelled to surrender. The loss of Guienne added the last straw to the burden of Somerset's misdeeds. York, aided by several other peers, took up arms to compel the king to send away his shiftless minister. Henry called out an army, and faced York in Kent; but both were unwilling to strike the first blow, and on receiving a promise that Somerset should be dismissed, and tried before his peers, the duke sent his men home.
Last expedition against France.
The king, however, with a want of faith that he rarely displayed, refused to put Somerset on trial, and retained him as his minister. He endeavoured to distract the attention of the nation from his favourite's misdoings, by proposing that a vigorous attempt should be made to recover Guienne. The Gascons hated the French conqueror, and had sent secret messages to London offering to rise if assured of English aid. No one could refuse their appeal, and with the consent of all parties a new army was enrolled for the recovery of Bordeaux. It was given to the charge of Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the last survivor of the old captains of Henry V. The gallant veteran landed near Bordeaux with 5000 men, retook the city by the aid of its citizens, and overran the neighbouring districts. But fortune had definitely turned against England: in the next year he was slain and his army cut to pieces at the bloody battle of Castillon (July, 1453). Bordeaux held out for three months more, but was forced to yield to starvation before the year was out.
Thus was lost the last remnant of the great inheritance of Eleanor of Aquitaine, after it had remained just 300 years in the hands of the Plantagenets (1154-1453). England now retained none of her old possessions beyond sea save Calais and the Channel Islands, a strange surviving fragment of the duchy of Normandy.
The house of Lancaster and the English nation had sinned in company when they embarked so eagerly in 1415 on the wanton invasion of France. They had already paid for their crime by lavish expenditure of life and treasure on foreign battle-fields: they were now to incur the worse penalty of a savage and murderous civil war.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE WARS OF THE ROSES.
1454-1471.
In mediaeval England there was but one way of getting rid of political grievances which the king refused to redress—the old method of armed force, the means which we have seen used in the cases of Gaveston, the Despensers, and the favourites of Richard II. Henry VI. was not idle and vicious like Edward the Second, nor did he yearn for autocratic power like the second Richard. He was merely a simple, feeble, well-intentioned young man, who always required some prop to lean upon, who chose his servants unwisely, and adhered to them obstinately.
A wise king would have dismissed Somerset after the disasters in Normandy and Guienne, and taken a more profitable helper in the hard task of governing England. York was the obvious man to choose; he was an able general, and the first prince of the blood. But Henry distrusted York, and Henry's young queen viewed him with keen and unconcealed dislike. The thought that, if any harm should come to her husband, Duke Richard must succeed him, filled Margaret of Anjou with wrath and bitterness.
Policy of the Duke of York.
There are no signs that York yet entertained any disloyal designs on the throne, but he undoubtedly knew that, as the heir of the house of Mortimer, he owned a better hereditary claim to the throne than any member of the line of Lancaster. He was contented, however, to bide his time and wait for the succession of the childless king.
Meanwhile he took care to keep his party together, and steadfastly persevered in his very justifiable desire to evict the incapable Somerset from office. But it was the misfortune of England that Somerset was not friendless and unsupported, as Gaveston or the Despensers had been. He was the chief of a considerable family combination among the nobility, who were ready to aid him in keeping his place. There were, too, many others who disapproved of him personally, but were prepared to support him, some out of sheer loyalty to King Henry, some because they had old personal or family grudges against York or York's chief friends and supporters.
Power of the nobility.
The chief misfortunes of the unhappy time that was now to set in, had their source in the swollen importance of the great noble houses, and the bitterness of their feuds with each other. For the last hundred years the landed wealth of England had been concentrating into fewer and fewer hands. The House of Lords contained less than a third of the numbers that it had shown in the days of Edward I. The greater peers had piled up such vast masses of estates that they were growing to be each a little king in his own district. The weak government of Henry VI. had allowed their insolence to come to a head, and for the last twenty years private wars between them had been growing more and more frequent. They found the tools of their turbulence in the hordes of disbanded soldiers sent home from France, who knew no other trade but fighting, and would sell themselves to be the household bullies of the highest bidder.
The rival factions.—The Yorkists.
England was already honeycombed with family feuds, now ready to burst out into open violence. If we examine the lists of the supporters of York and of Somerset, we find that to a very large extent the politics of the English magnates were personal, and not national. With York were linked a great group of peers who were allied to him by blood. The chief of them were the younger branch of the Nevilles, represented by the two Earls of Salisbury and Warwick, a father and son who had each made his fortune by marrying the heiress of a great earldom. The Nevilles of the elder line, represented by the head of the house, the Earl of Westmoreland, had always been at feud with their cousins of the younger stock, and, since they were strong Lancastrians, the younger branch would probably have favoured York in any case. But their adhesion to him was rendered certain by the fact that Duke Richard had married Salisbury's sister. Another sister of the earl's was wedded to the next greatest supporter of York, John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. He was a nephew of that Mowbray whom Henry IV. had beheaded in 1405, in company with Archbishop Scrope, and so had his private grudge against the house of Lancaster. Among the other chiefs of the Yorkist party we can trace in almost every instance an old feud or a family alliance which seems to have determined their policy.
The Lancastrians.
It was the same with the party that stood by the king and Somerset. It comprised, first of all, the houses which were allied in blood to the Lancastrian line—the king's cousins the Beauforts, the legitimized descendants of John of Gaunt, and his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor, Earls of Richmond and Pembroke. [27] After them came the Percies of Northumberland, the Westmoreland Nevilles, and the Staffords of Buckingham—the three houses which had been prominent in aiding the usurpation of Henry IV. The Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland were certainly confirmed in their loyalty to the king by their bitter quarrel with their kinsmen, the younger Nevilles, the strongest supporters of York.
Character of the Wars of the Roses.
But the "Wars of the Roses,"—as historians have chosen to name them, from the white rose which was the badge of York, and the red rose which was assumed long after as the emblem of Lancaster—were much more than a faction fight between two rival coteries of peers. At the first they were the attempt of the majority of the English nation to oust an unpopular minister from power by force of arms. There is no doubt that the greater part of England sided with York in this endeavour. The citizens and freeholders of London, Kent, the South, and the Midlands, where lay all the wealth and political energy of the nation, were strongly Yorkist. Henry, on the other hand, got his support from a group of great nobles who controlled the wild West and North, and the still wilder Wales.
Unfortunately for the nation, the constitutional aspect of the struggle was gradually obscured by the increasing bitterness of family blood-feuds. "Thy father slew mine, and now will I slay thee," was the cry of the Lancastrian noble to the enemy who asked for quarter, [28] and it expresses well enough the whole aspect of the later years of the struggle. The war commenced with an attempt to set right by force the government of the realm, but it ended as a mere series of bloody reprisals for slain kinsfolk. It left England in a far worse state, from the political and constitutional point of view, than it had known since the days of John. It began with the comparatively small affliction of a weak, well-intentioned king, who persisted in retaining an unpopular minister in power; it ended by leaving the realm in the hands of an arbitrary self-willed king, who ruled autocratically for himself, with no desire or intention of consulting the nation's wishes as to how it should be governed.
We might place the beginning of the Wars of the Roses at the moment of Cade's insurrection, but it was not till five years later that the struggle broke out in its bitterer form.
Madness of the king.—Birth of his son.
Strangely enough, the commencement of the strife was preceded by a time in which it seemed almost certain that the troubles of the realm would blow over. In 1453 the king went mad; the peers and commons unanimously called upon York, as the first prince of the blood, to take up the place of Protector of the realm. He did so to the general satisfaction of the nation, cast Somerset into the Tower, and replaced the old ministers by more capable men. But just as all seemed settled, and York's ultimate succession to the crown appeared inevitable, the whole aspect of affairs was altered by the queen giving birth to a son, after nine years of unfruitful wedlock. This completely cut away York's prospect of succession; but he accepted the situation with loyalty, and swore allegiance to the infant Prince of Wales. But after eighteen months, Henry VI. suddenly and unexpectedly recovered his sanity. At once, at Queen Margaret's behest, he dismissed York and his friends from office, and drew Somerset out of the Tower to make him minister once more.
This action drove Duke Richard to sudden violence. He hastily gathered his retainers from the Welsh Marches, called his kinsmen the two Neville earls to his aid, and marched
Outbreak of war.—First battle of St. Albans.
on London. Somerset and the king had only the time to collect a few of their friends, when York came upon them at St. Albans. He laid before the king his ultimatum, requiring that Somerset should be given up to be tried, and, when it was rejected, attacked the town, in which the royal troops had barricaded themselves. After a short skirmish, the young Earl of Warwick, Richard Neville, burst his way into the streets and won the day for his uncle Duke Richard. The king was taken prisoner, while Somerset, the cause of all the trouble, was slain in the fray with several other lords of his party (May, 1455).
The first battle of St. Albans put the control of the king's person into the hands of York, who again assumed the management of the realm. But he only kept it for less than a year; in 1456 the king asserted his constitutional power of changing his ministers, and turned Duke Richard's friends out of office. As his foe Somerset was now dead, York was fairly contented to leave matters in the king's own control. But after the blood shed at St. Albans, there could be no true reconciliation between the friends of the king and the friends of York. The fierce and active young Queen Margaret put herself at the head of the party which Suffolk and Somerset had formerly led. She feared for her infant son's right of succession to the throne, and was determined to crush York to make his path clear. Throughout the years 1457-8, while a precarious peace was still preserved, Margaret was journeying up and down the land, enlisting partisans in her cause, and giving them her son's badge of the white swan to wear, in token of promised fidelity.
Renewal of the war.—Rout of Ludford.
The inevitable renewal of the war came in 1459. Its immediate cause was an attempt by some of the Queen's retainers to slay the young Earl of Warwick, York's ablest and most energetic supporter. Then Salisbury, Warwick's father, raised his Yorkshire tenants in arms; the queen sent against them a force under Lord Audley, whom the elder Neville defeated and slew at Bloreheath. After this skirmish, all England flew to arms to aid one party or the other. York, Salisbury, and Warwick met at Ludlow, on the Welsh border, while the king gathered a great army at Worcester, taking the field himself, with a vigour which he never before or afterwards displayed. It seems that York's adherents were moved by the vehement appeals which King Henry made to their loyalty, and cowed by the superior forces that he mustered. At the Rout of Ludford they broke up without fighting, leaving their leaders to escape as best they might. York fled to Ireland, Salisbury and Warwick to Calais, of which the younger Neville was governor.
Harsh measures of the queen.
But surprising and sudden vicissitudes of fortune were the order of the day all through the Wars of the Roses. The queen and her friends ruled harshly and unwisely after they had driven York out of the land. They assembled a Parliament at Coventry, which dealt out hard measures of attainder and confiscation against all who had favoured Duke Richard. They sacked the open town of Newbury because it was supposed to favour York, and hung seven citizens of London of the duke's party. These cruel actions turned the heart of the nation from the king and the ruthless Queen Margaret.
Hearing of this state of affairs, Warwick and Salisbury suddenly made a descent from Calais, landed at Sandwich, and pushed boldly inland. The whole of Kent rose to join them, and they were able to march on London. The Yorkist partisans within the city were so strong that they threw open the gates, and the Nevilles seized the capital. The Londoners armed in their favour, and the Yorkist lords of the South flocked in to aid them; soon they were strong enough to strike at their enemies, whose forces were not yet concentrated. The queen had gathered at Northampton the loyalists of the Midland counties, but her friends of the North and West were not yet arrived.
Battle of Northampton.
Warwick, on July 10, 1460, stormed the entrenched camp of the Lancastrians in front of Northampton, and took the king prisoner. The queen escaped to Wales, but the greater part of the chiefs of her army were left dead on the field, for Warwick had bidden his men to spare the common folk, and slay none save knights and nobles. There fell the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and many other leading men of the king's party.
The Duke of York had crossed from Ireland too late to take any share in the fight of Northampton, but in time to reap the fruits of his nephew's victory. He advanced to London, and there summoned a Parliament. It then appeared that the vicissitudes of the last year had so embittered him that he was no longer content to act as regent for Henry VI. He fell back on his undisputed hereditary claim as the eldest heir of Richard II., and began to talk of deposing his cousin and assuming the crown. But his own partisans set their faces against this plan, for Henry was still personally popular, and all the blame of his misgovernment was laid on the queen and her friends. The Earl of Warwick openly told his uncle that he must be content to be regent, and York had to accept a compromise, by which Henry VI. was to retain the crown as long as he lived, but to leave it to Duke Richard on his death. The rights of the little Prince of Wales were ignored, and many of the Yorkists swore that he was a supposititious child, and no true son of King Henry.
Battle of Wakefield.—Slaughter of Yorkist leaders.
But in making this arrangement the duke's party had reckoned without Queen Margaret, who was still free and busy. She had fled to the North, and there had gathered to her the Percies, the elder Nevilles, and the barons of the Border, all staunch Lancastrians. Hearing of this muster, Duke Richard marched northward, with his second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, and his brother-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury. He underrated the queen's forces, and rashly engaged with them under the walls of Sandal Castle, close to Wakefield. There, overwhelmed by numbers, he and his whole army were destroyed. Burning to avenge the slaughter of Northampton, the Lancastrians refused all quarter. The Earl of Rutland, a lad of seventeen, fell at the knees of Lord Clifford and asked for his life. "Thy father slew mine, and now will I slay thee," answered the rough Borderer, and stabbed him as he knelt. The Earl of Salisbury was captured and beheaded next day. Queen Margaret set the heads of the slain lords above the gate of York, Duke Richard's in the midst crowned in derision with a diadem of paper.
Thus perished Richard of York, a man who had always displayed great abilities, and down to the last year of his life had shown much self-control and moderation. His death was a great loss to England, as the headship of his house and his party now passed to his son, a selfish and hard-hearted—though very able—young man of eighteen.
Second Battle of St. Albans.
The event of the battle of Wakefield came as a thunderclap to the Yorkists, who had hitherto despised the queen and her northern followers. Edward, Earl of March, Duke Richard's heir, was absent in the west, where he was striving with the Lancastrians of Wales. Only Richard of Warwick was in time to reach London before the northern army approached its walls. He rallied the Yorkists of the South, and led them to St. Albans, where Queen Margaret attacked him. Again the Northerners were victorious; they rescued King Henry from his captors, and scattered Warwick's army to the winds. The rancorous queen made her little seven-year old son sit in judgment on the prisoners, and bade him choose the form of death by which they each should die.
London saved by Edward of York.
If Margaret had pushed on next day, the capital would have fallen into her hands; but her gentle and kindly spouse feared that the northern moss-troopers would sack and burn the city, and persuaded her to wait, in order that London might surrender in due form, and not be taken by assault. The short delay was fatal to him and his cause. While London was negotiating the terms on which it should yield, a new Yorkist army suddenly appeared on the scene.
Not many days before the second battle of St. Albans, the young Edward of York had routed the Lancastrians of Wales at the battle of Mortimer's Cross, in Herefordshire. He had then set out to march on London; on the way he was met by Warwick, who brought the news of his own defeat, and of the queen's approach to the capital. But, learning that she had not yet entered its walls, they marched night and day, and threw themselves into the city just as its gates were opening for surrender.
Retreat of the queen.
The arrival of the heir of York and his victorious troops turned the fortune of the war. Margaret's army had in great part dispersed to plunder the Midlands, for the Northerners had vowed to treat every man south of the Trent as an enemy. When Duke Edward advanced they gave way before him, and retreated towards York, wasting the country behind them on all sides.
Edward proclaims himself king.
The slaughter of Wakefield and St. Albans, and more especially the ruthless execution of prisoners which had followed each battle, had driven the Yorkists to a pitch of anger which they had not felt before. There was no longer any talk of making terms with Henry VI., and leaving him the crown. Warwick and the other nobles of his party besought the young duke to claim the crown, as the true heir of Richard II., and to stigmatize the three Lancastrian kings as usurpers. Edward readily consented, and proclaimed himself king at Westminster on his hereditary title, and without any form of election or assent of Parliament.
Battle of Towton.
But the new king had to fight for his crown before he could wear it. He and Warwick pursued the queen's army over the Trent, and caught it up at Towton, near Tadcaster, in Yorkshire. Here was fought the greatest and fiercest of the battles of the Wars of the Roses. Both parties were present in full force; the South and Midlands had rallied round Edward IV. in their wrath at the plundering of the Northumbrians. The Lancastrians of Wales and the Midlands had joined the queen during her retreat. The chroniclers assert that the two armies together mustered nearly a hundred thousand men—an impossible figure, but one which vouches for the fact that Towton saw the largest hosts set against each other that ever met on an English battle-field.
Slaughter of Lancastrian leaders.
This desperate and bloody fight was waged on a bleak hillside during a blinding snow-storm, which half hid the combatants from each other. It lasted for a whole March day from dawn to dusk, and ended in the complete rout of the queen's army. Thousands of the Lancastrians were crushed to death or drowned at the passing of the little river Cock, which lay behind their line of battle. There fell on the field the Earl of Northumberland, the Lords Clifford, Neville, Dacre, Welles, and Mauley—all the chiefs of the Lancastrian party in the north. Courtney, Earl of Devon, and Butler, Earl of Wilts, were captured, and beheaded some time after the fight. No less than forty-two men of knightly rank shared their fate, so savage were King Edward and Warwick in avenging their fathers and brothers who had died at Wakefield.
Henry VI., with his wife and son, and the young Duke of Somerset, escaped from the field and fled into Scotland, where they were kindly received by the regents who ruled that land for the little King James III.
Rule of Edward.—Warwick the King-maker.
The carnage in and after Towton assured the crown to the house of York. Edward IV. was able to return to London and summon a Parliament, which formally acknowledged him as king, recognizing his hereditary right, and not going through any form of election. At his command they attainted the whole of the leaders of the Lancastrian party, both those who had fallen at Towton, and those who yet lived. Thinking his position sure, the young king then gave himself over to feasting and idleness, entrusting the completion of the war and the pacification of England to his cousin, the Earl of Warwick, whom men from this time forward called "the King-maker," because he had twice settled the fate of England, by winning the rule of the land for the house of York, at Northampton in 1460, and at Towton in 1461.
Edward IV. showed a strange mixture of qualities. On the battle-field he was a great commander, and in times of danger he was alert and dexterous. But when no perils were at hand, he became a reckless, heartless voluptuary, given to all manner of evil living and idle luxury, and letting affairs shift for themselves. For the first four years of his reign he handed over all cares of state to his cousin of Warwick, a busy capable man, who loved work and power, and strove not unsuccessfully to make himself the most popular man in England. Warwick called himself the friend of the commons, and used the vast wealth which he enjoyed as heir of all the broad lands of the Beauchamps, Nevilles, and Montacutes, to make himself partisans all over the country. He was self-confident and ambitious in the highest degree, and thoroughly enjoyed his position of chief minister to an idle and careless master. When he was at last deprived of it, we shall see that wounded pride could lead him to intrigue and treason.
Last efforts of the Lancastrians.
The four years 1461-64 were occupied by the final crushing out of the civil war by the strong hand of the King-maker. The task proved longer than might have been expected, owing to the desperate efforts which Queen Margaret made to maintain her son's cause. After Towton nothing remained to her but some castles in Northumberland and Wales, but she bought the aid of the Scots by ceding Berwick, and obtained men and money from Lewis XI., the young King of France. That astute prince thought that a weak and divided England was the best security for the safety of France, and doled out occasional help to the queen in consideration of a promise to surrender Calais.
Warwick captured all the Northumbrian strongholds of the house of Percy,—Bamborough, Alnwick, and Dunstanborough—in 1462. But the North was thoroughly disaffected to the new king, and they were twice retaken by treachery when the queen, with her French and Scottish friends, appeared before them. In her third campaign she was aided by a rising of all the Lancastrians who had submitted to King Edward and been pardoned by him, headed by the Duke of Somerset, the son of him who fell at St. Albans. But the two battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham (April-May, 1464) crushed the last desperate effort of the northern Lancastrians: at the former fell Sir Ralph Percy, the last chief of the Percy clan who clung to the lost cause; at the second the Duke of Somerset was taken and executed. Both fights were won by Lord Montagu, the younger brother and lieutenant of the great Earl of Warwick. By June, 1464, Warwick himself stamped out the last embers of resistance by the second capture of Bamborough, the sole surviving Lancastrian stronghold in England.
The King-maker returned in triumph to London, and could report to his master that he had completely pacified England, and had also concluded an advantageous treaty with the Scots. He proposed to finish his work by making terms with the King of France, the last supporter of the Lancastrian cause, with whom Margaret and her young son had sought refuge. For this purpose he advised King Edward to endeavour to ally himself with some princess among the kinswomen of Lewis XI.
Marriage of Edward.
It was from this point that the breach between Edward and his great minister began. When pressed to marry, the king announced—to the great surprise and annoyance of Warwick and the rest of his council—that he was married already. He had secretly espoused Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, a staunch Lancastrian, and widow of Sir John Grey, another Lancastrian, who had fallen at St. Albans. She was some years older than Edward, and had a family by her first husband. But her beauty had captivated the susceptible young king, and he had married her in secret, in order to avoid the opposition of his family and his councillors.
Breach between Warwick and Edward.
When compelled to acknowledge this unwise match, Edward made the best of the matter, brought his wife to court, conferred an earldom on her father, and showered patronage upon her brothers and sisters. When Warwick ventured to remonstrate, he showed that he had no mind to be ruled any more by his too-powerful cousin, and redoubled his favours to the Woodvilles. He gave his wife's sisters as brides to the greatest peers of the realm, and made her father his Lord Treasurer. This was not pique, but policy, for Edward had come to the conclusion that the Neville clan was too strong, and had resolved to surround himself by another family connection which should owe everything to his protection (1465).
For a time an open breach between the king and the King-maker was delayed, and Edward's throne seemed firmly set. His position was made surer by the capture of the old King Henry VI., who was caught in Lancashire, where he had been lurking obscurely for some time. When Edward had placed him in the Tower of London, he thought that all his troubles were over. He forgot the unhealthy condition of the realm, the blood-feuds that reigned in every county, and the general disorganization of society that had resulted from six years of civil war and from the wholesale transference of lands and property that had accompanied it. Above all, he overlooked the vast power that had fallen into the hands of the great military peers, and especially of his ambitious cousin Warwick.
In 1467 Edward put his strength to the trial by dismissing all the King-maker's friends from office, and by ignominiously disavowing an embassy to France on which he had sent his cousin. From sheer desire to humiliate the great earl, he concluded an alliance with Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, the deadly enemy of France, because he knew that Warwick was opposed to such a tie. He gave his sister Margaret to be the duke's wife, and made Warwick escort her on her embarkation for Flanders.
Conspiracy of Warwick.
The earl replied by setting treasonable intrigues on foot. He leagued himself with the king's younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, Shakespeare's "false, fleeting, perjured Clarence," a discontented young man of a very unamiable character. Warwick agreed to give his eldest daughter, the heiress of his vast estates, to the duke, and they swore to compel Edward to drive away the Woodvilles, and rule only under their guidance.
Defeat and capture of Edward.
Warwick and Clarence were completely successful in their plot. They secretly suborned a rebellion in Yorkshire, under Sir John Conyers, one of Warwick's relatives, who was aided by the Neville retainers, as well as by the discontented Lancastrians of the North. Conyers called himself "Robin of Redesdale," and gave himself out as the champion of the poor and the redresser of grievances—much as Cade had done fifteen years before. He beat the king's army at Edgecote Field, near Banbury, and then Warwick and Clarence appeared upon the scene and apprehended Edward at Olney. They beheaded Earl Rivers, the father of all the Woodvilles, and Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the king's chief confidant. After keeping Edward some months in durance, they released him, on his undertaking to govern according to their desires (1469).
Warwick driven from England.
But the spirit of Edward always rose in times of trouble; he cast off his sloth, and plotted against the plotters. Taking advantage of an ill-planned Lancastrian rising in Lincolnshire, he raised a great army, and suddenly turned it against his disloyal brother and cousin. Warwick and Clarence were chased all across England, from Manchester to Dartmouth, and barely escaped with their lives by taking ship to France.
He joins the Lancastrians.
Furious at his failure, the King-maker resolved to sacrifice all his prejudices and predispositions to revenge. He met the exiled Queen Margaret at Angers, and proposed to her to restore Henry VI. to the throne, and make an end of the ungrateful Edward. After long doubting, Margaret resolved to take his offer, though she hated him bitterly, and never trusted him. To bind the alliance, Edward, Prince of Wales, the queen's young son, was married to Anne Neville, the earl's second daughter.
Henry again king.
Then Warwick and Margaret joined to foment a rising in England. The numerous clan of the Nevilles were prepared to follow their chief, and the surviving Lancastrians were still ready to risk themselves in a new plan of insurrection. In the autumn of 1470, Warwick and Clarence landed in Devonshire and raised the standard of the imprisoned Henry VI. Their success showed the deep roots of the earl's popularity, and the precarious nature of King Edward's power. Simultaneous risings broke out all over England, and Edward, betrayed by most of his supporters, had to take ship and fly to Flanders. Henry VI. was drawn from his dungeon, and was for a few months again King of England.
Return of Edward.—Battle of Barnet.
But one more change of fortune was yet to come. Edward IV. borrowed men and money from his brother-in-law, Charles of Burgundy, and boldly returned to England in the spring of 1471. He landed in Yorkshire, called his partisans about him, and marched on London. Edward, when his mettle was up, was a captain of no mean ability. He completely out-generalled his enemy, and got between him and the capital. The Duke of Clarence, who had been entrusted with Warwick's western forces, betrayed his father-in-law, and joined his brother with the men whom he should have led to the earl's aid. London and the person of Henry VI. fell into King Edward's hands. Warwick came up too late, and had to fight the Yorkists at Barnet, a few miles north of the city. There he was completely defeated and slain, losing the battle mainly by the accident of a fog, which caused two divisions of his troops to attack one another. With Warwick fell his brother Lord Montagu, and most of the personal adherents on whom his power rested.
Battle of Tewkesbury.—End of the war.
But Edward was not yet secure. On the very day of Barnet, Queen Margaret landed at Portsmouth to raise the Lancastrians of the South in Warwick's aid. Hearing of his fall, she turned westward, gathering up a considerable force of adherents as she fled. But Edward rapidly pursued her, and by dint of superior pace in marching, caught her up at Tewkesbury. The queen's army was intercepted, and penned up with its back to the Severn, then destitute of a bridge. Unable to fly, the Lancastrians had to turn, and fought a desperate battle outside Tewkesbury. But King Edward never suffered a defeat in all his days; his courage and skill carried all before it, and the queen's army was annihilated. Her young son Edward, Prince of Wales, was slain in the pursuit, though he cried for quarter to "his brother Clarence." The last Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Devon, and all the surviving Lancastrian magnates fell on the field, or were beheaded next day by the victor. Queen Margaret was taken prisoner and thrown into confinement.
Murder of Henry.
On the death of Prince Edward, the old king Henry VI. was left the only survivor of the house of Lancaster. The ruthless heir of York resolved that he too should die, and on his return to London had the feeble and saintly prince murdered, by the hands of his young brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester (1471).
Thus ended the wars of the Roses, in the complete victory of York, and the extinction of the line of John of Gaunt, after it had sat for three generations on the English throne.