Little Arthur's history of England

by Lady Maria Callcott

FOOTNOTES:

[1] If little Arthur has forgotten what I mean by the people being free, let him read the eighth chapter over again.

CHAPTER XXII.
HENRY III.—1216 to 1272.
Why taxes are paid; how Henry the Third robbed the people; how Simon de Montfort fought against King Henry, and made him agree not to tax the people without the consent of the parliament.

The reign of John’s son, who was called Henry the Third, was very long and very miserable. He was made king when he was only nine years old, and there were civil wars for almost fifty years while he lived.

You must think that such a little boy as Henry was, when he was made king, could not do much for himself, or anything at all for his subjects. But he had a wise guardian, called the Earl of Pembroke, who did many things to repair the mischief done by King John. However, that wise man died very soon, and then the king behaved so ill that there was nothing but quarrelling and fighting for the greater part of his life.

I think you do not know what TAXES are; I must tell you, that you may understand some things you must read about in History.

Taxes are the money which subjects pay to the king, or to those persons who govern his kingdom for him.

I must now tell you why taxes are paid. Every man likes to live safely in his own house; he likes to know that he and his wife, and his children, may stay there without being disturbed, and that they may go to sleep safely, and not be afraid that wild beasts, or wicked men, or enemies like the old Danes, may come and kill them while they are asleep. Next to his life and the lives of his wife and children, a man likes to know that his money and his furniture are safe in his house, and that his horses and cows, and his trees and his corn-fields, are safe out of doors.

Now he could never have time to watch all these things himself, and perhaps he might not be strong enough to fight and drive away the wicked men who might try to rob or kill him; so he gives money, which he calls taxes, to the king, who pays soldiers and sailors to keep foreign enemies away, and policemen to watch the streets and houses, to keep away thieves and robbers: besides he pays the judges to punish men who are found doing anything wrong.

So you see that whoever wishes to live safely and comfortably ought to pay some taxes.

Sometimes it happens that a king spends his money foolishly, instead of putting it to the good uses I have mentioned, and then wishes to get more, even by unjust means. And this is what King Henry and his father, King John, were always trying to do. And they were so wicked as to rob their subjects, many of whom they put into prison, or threatened to kill, if they did not give them all they asked for, and that was the beginning of the miserable civil wars in the time of Henry the Third.

The whole story of these wars would be too long for us now. So I will only tell you that one of the bravest men that fought against the king was Simon de Montfort, who was a very wise man; and although he was killed in a great battle, he had forced the king and parliament, before he died, to observe a custom which is most useful even to us who live now.

It is this: No king can make his subjects pay a tax without their own consent or that of the parliament. Now, though several kings tried, after this time, to get money by some other means than these, the people would never allow them to do so, and their only trying to do it always did themselves a great deal of mischief, as you will read by and by.

And I want you to remember that Simon de Montfort was the first man in England that called the people in the towns to send members to parliament. This was in the year 1265. The common people loved him so much that, when he was dead, they called him Sir Simon the Righteous.

I am afraid this is a very dull chapter, but you see it is very short.

CHAPTER XXIII.
EDWARD I.—1272 to 1307.
How Edward the First learnt many good things abroad, and did many more to make the people happy; how he caused the burgesses to come to Parliament; how he made good laws; why he was called Longshanks.

When the unhappy King Henry the Third died, his eldest son Edward was abroad, fighting in the same country where I told you William the Conqueror’s eldest son Robert went, and where Richard of the Lion’s heart spent the greatest part of his reign. When he heard his father was dead he came home, and brought with him his very good wife, Eleanor of Castile, who had saved his life in Syria, by taking great care of him when he was wounded.

Edward was crowned king as soon as he came to England; he was as wise as Henry the Second, and as brave as King Richard of the Lion’s heart.

His wisdom was shown in the manner in which he governed his people. His bravery everybody had seen before he was king, and he showed it afterwards in fighting against the Welsh and the Scotch, which I will tell you about by and by.

While Edward was a young man, he travelled a great deal into different countries, and whenever he saw anything done that he thought good and right, he remembered it, that he might have the same thing done in England when he was king.

When he was in Spain he married his good wife Eleanor; and as her father and brother were wise kings, he learned a great many useful things from them.

One thing was, how to take care of cows and horses much better than the English had done before; and another thing was, to improve the gardens and fields with many kinds of vegetables for eating, and with new sorts of grass for the cattle. In return for what he learned in Spain he sent some good sheep from England to that country, because the sheep they had before were small, and had not such fine wool as our sheep; but since the English sheep went to feed among the Spanish hills, their wool has been the best in the world.

When King Edward came home to England, he determined to do everything he could to make the people happy: he knew they could not be happy if the laws were not obeyed; so he was determined that no wicked person should escape without punishment, and that all good people might live quietly, and do what they liked best.

I told you before that wise Simon de Montfort, who was killed in Henry the Third’s reign, had got the king to observe the custom of not taking money from the people without the consent of the parliament or of the people themselves. This law King Edward improved very much, and he improved the parliament too.

Edward, who was very wise, thought that, as there were a great many more towns than there used to be in the olden times, and a great many more people in all the towns, it would be a good thing if some of the best men belonging to the largest towns came to the parliament. The largest towns in England were then called burghs, and the richest men who lived in them were called burgesses, and King Edward settled that one or two burgesses out of almost every burgh should come along with the great noblemen, and the bishops, and the gentlemen to the parliament. I told you in the last chapter that Simon de Montfort did this once; but Edward first made it the rule.

These burgesses made the parliament complete. In the first place, there was the king to answer for himself; in the second place, the great lords and bishops to answer for themselves; and, thirdly, the gentlemen and burgesses to answer for the country gentlemen and the farmers and the merchants and the shopkeepers. For a time the clergy also sent persons to act for them; but they soon gave up doing so.

So King Edward the First made good rules about the parliament, which were not much changed for a very long time. Besides that, he improved the laws, so as to punish the wicked more certainly, and to protect the lives and goods of everybody. And in these things Edward was one of the best kings that ever reigned in England.

We will end this chapter here, while we can praise King Edward the First,—who was, as I told you, wise and brave, and very handsome; but people used to call him Longshanks, because his legs were rather too long.

CHAPTER XXIV.
EDWARD I.—Continued.
How King Edward went to war with the Welsh; how Prince Llewellyn and his brother David were put to death for defending their country; how he made war upon Scotland, and put Sir William Wallace to death; and how ambition was the cause of his cruelty.

I am afraid I must not praise King Edward so much, now we are come to his wars, for he was twice very cruel indeed.

You remember that the old Britons were driven by the Angles and Saxons out of England into different countries, and that most of them went to live among the mountains in Wales, where the conquerors could not easily get to them.

These Britons chose princes of their own: one to reign over them in North Wales, one in South Wales, and one in Powys, which was between the two. Many of these princes were very good rulers of the country, and protected it from all enemies, and improved the people very much, by making good laws.

I am sorry to say, however, that the princes of the different parts of Wales sometimes quarrelled with one another, and very often quarrelled with the English who lived nearest to Wales. They did so while Edward was King of England, and he went to war with them, as he said only to make their prince come to him and do him the homage that the Welsh princes had done in former times. But, finding that he could very easily conquer the first of them with whom he fought, he determined to get all Wales for himself, by degrees, and to join it forever with England.

Llewellyn was the last real Prince of Wales before it was taken by the English kings. He loved a young lady called Elinor de Montfort very much, for she was good and beautiful, and he intended to marry her. She was the daughter of the brave Simon de Montfort who fought against Henry the Third. She had been staying a little while in France, and was coming to Wales in a ship, and was to be married to Llewellyn as soon as she arrived. Unhappily, King Edward heard of this, and sent a stronger ship to sea, and took the young lady prisoner, and shut her up in one of his castles for more than two years, and would not let the prince see her until he should do him homage.

Llewellyn fought a great many battles to defend his native land. At last he had no part of Wales left but Snowdon and the country round it. Then he yielded to Edward, who gave him Elinor de Montfort to wife. But he soon began to fight again, hoping that he might by degrees get the better of the English, but at the last he was killed by a soldier, who cut off his head and took it to King Edward, who was then at Shrewsbury.

Edward was so glad to find that Llewellyn was dead, that he forgot how unbecoming it is for really a brave man to be revengeful, especially after an enemy as brave as himself is dead; and I am sorry and ashamed to say that, instead of sending the head of Llewellyn to his relations, to be buried with his body, he sent it to London, and had it stuck up over one of the gates of the city with a wreath of willow on it, because the Welsh people used to love to crown their princes with willow.

Soon after the death of Llewellyn, his brother David was made prisoner by the English. Edward treated him with still greater cruelty than he had treated Llewellyn, and, after his head was cut off, set it up over the same gate with his brother’s.

Death of Llewellyn, last of the Welsh Princes.

It has been said, that because the bards or poets of Wales used to make verses, and sing them to their harps, to encourage the Welshmen to defend their country and their own princes from Edward, he was so cruel as to order them all to be put to death. I hope it is not true.

For two hundred years Wales was in a sad state. The English kings did not rule it wisely; for they did not treat the Welsh so well as they did the English. The Welsh, therefore, feeling this to be very unjust, were often trying to set up princes for themselves. But at last, a king of Welsh descent, named Henry the Eighth, thought it right to make the Welsh and English equal: and from that time they have lived happily together.

We must now speak of King Edward’s wars in Scotland.

I told you that, while Henry the Second was king, William, King of Scotland, had made war in England; and after being taken prisoner and brought to London, Henry had set him free, on his promising that the kings of England should be lords over the kings of Scotland.

Now, it happened that while Edward the First was King of England, Alexander, King of Scotland, died, and left no sons. The Scotch sent to fetch Alexander’s granddaughter from Norway, where she was living with her father, King Eric, that she might be their queen. But the poor young princess died.

Two of her cousins, John Baliol and Robert Bruce, now wanted to be king; but as they could not both be so, they agreed to ask King Edward to judge between them; and King Edward was very glad, because their asking him showed the people that they owned he was Lord of Scotland, and he chose John Baliol to be king of Scotland.

You will read the story of all that John Baliol did in the history of Scotland.

Edward watched Scotland very narrowly, and when any Scotsman thought that King John had treated him unjustly, he would appeal for justice to Edward, who said that, as he was Lord of Scotland, he would take care that Scotland was governed properly; till at last John Baliol went to war with Edward; but he was beaten, and the richest and best part of Scotland was taken by Edward. He was very severe, nay, cruel, to the Scots.

At last a gentleman named Sir William Wallace could not bear to have the Scots so ill treated as they were by the English governors that Edward sent into the country. So he went himself, or sent messengers to all the barons and gentlemen he knew to beg them to join him, and drive the English out of Scotland; and they did so, and might have made their own country free, if Sir William Wallace had not been taken prisoner and carried to London, where King Edward ordered his head to be cut off; which was as wicked and cruel as his cutting off the heads of the two Welsh princes.

This did not end the war in Scotland; for another Robert Bruce, who had come to be king after Baliol, determined to do what Sir William Wallace had begun; I mean, to drive the English out of Scotland; and he made ready for a long and troublesome war, and King Edward did the same; but when Edward had got to the border of Scotland with his great army, to fight King Robert, he died.

If King Edward I. had been content to rule over his own subjects, and to mend their laws, and encourage them to trade and to study, he would have made them happier; and we who live now should have said he deserved better to be loved.

Indeed, he did so much that was right and wise, that I am sorry we cannot praise him in everything.

His greatest fault was ambition,—I mean, a wish to be above everybody else, by any means. Now, ambition is good when it only makes us try to be wiser and better than other people, by taking pains with ourselves, and being good to the very persons we should wish to get the better of.

But when ambition makes us try to get things that belong to others, by all means, bad or good, it is wrong.

Ambition caused wise King Edward to forget himself, after conquering the Prince of Wales, and to take Wales as if it were his own country, that there might never be greater men in Wales than the kings of England.

The ambition to be King of Scotland made Edward go to war with the Scots, and made him so cruel as to cut off the head of Sir William Wallace, because he wanted to save his country from being conquered by Edward.

So you see ambition led Edward to do the two most cruel actions he was ever guilty of.

CHAPTER XXV.
EDWARD II.—1307 to 1327.
Why Edward the Second was called Prince of Wales; how his idleness and evil companions caused a civil war; how he was beaten by Robert Bruce at Bannockburn; how the Queen fought against the King and took him prisoner, and how her favorite, Mortimer, had King Edward murdered.

Edward the Second was made king after his father’s death. He is often called Edward of Caernarvon, because he was born at a town of that name in Wales. He was the first English prince who was called Prince of Wales.

Since his reign the eldest son of the King of England has almost always been called so.

Edward of Caernarvon was the most unhappy man that ever was King of England.

And this was in great part his own fault.

He was very fond of all kinds of amusements, and instead of taking the trouble, while he was young, to learn what was good and useful for his people, so as to make them happy, he spent all his time in the company of young men as idle and as foolish as he was. One of the first of these was called Pierce Gaveston. Edward the First had sent that young man away, and on his death-bed begged his son not to take him back again, for he would be sure to lead him into evil ways. But the prince was obstinate, and chose to have him with him.

After Edward of Caernarvon became king, this same Gaveston caused him a great deal of trouble. He made the king quarrel with his nobles, who were very haughty and fierce, and did not like to see the king always in the company of foolish young men.

Moreover, the queen, Isabella of France, was very proud and hot-tempered, and did not strive to make the king better, as she might have done had she been gentle and amiable.

The nobles were greatly vexed because Edward spent all the money they had given to his father in making presents to Gaveston and his other companions, so they joined together and made war upon the king. There was civil war for many years; and so many wicked things were done in that war, that I am sure you would not wish me to tell them. It ended by Gaveston being killed by order of the barons.

This civil war was hardly over before the king made war against Robert Bruce, the King of Scotland, and went with a large army into Scotland; but he was beaten at the battle of Bannockburn in such a manner that he was glad to get back to England, and to promise that neither he nor any of the kings of England would call themselves kings of Scotland again.

You would think that Edward would now have been wise enough neither to vex the barons and the people by foolishly spending the money trusted to him, nor to make himself disliked by choosing bad companions. But I am sorry to say he did not grow wiser as he grew older, and the queen behaved very foolishly and wickedly. The king chose a favourite of the name of Spenser; the queen’s chief friend was a baron named Mortimer.

Very soon there was another civil war: the queen kept her eldest son Edward, the Prince of Wales, with her, and said she only fought against the king for his sake; and that if she did not, the king would give so much to Spenser that he would leave nothing for the prince.

At last the queen and her friends took the king prisoner. They shut him up in a castle called Berkeley Castle. They gave him bad food to eat, and dirty water to drink and to wash himself with. They never let him go into the open air to see any of his friends. This poor king was very soon murdered. The queen’s favourite, Mortimer, being afraid the people would be sorry for poor Edward, when they heard how ill he had been used, and might perhaps take him out of prison and make him king again, sent some wicked men secretly to Berkeley Castle, and they killed the king in such a cruel way that his cries and shrieks were heard all over the castle.

He had been king twenty years, but had not been happy one single year.

CHAPTER XXVI.
EDWARD III.—1327 to 1377.
How Queen Isabella was put in prison, and her favourite hanged; how Queen Philippa did much good for the people; and how Edward the Third went to war to conquer France.

When poor Edward of Caernarvon was murdered, his son Edward, who had been made king in his place, was only fourteen years old.

Queen Isabella and her wicked friend Mortimer ruled the kingdom, as they said, only for the good of young king Edward. But, in reality, they cared for nothing but their own pleasure and amusement, and behaved so ill to the people, that the young king’s uncles and some other barons joined together against Mortimer. But he was too strong for them, and beheaded one of the king’s uncles.

At last the young king had the spirit to seize Mortimer, and he was hanged for a traitor. Queen Isabella was put in prison: but as she was the king’s mother, he would not have her killed, although she was so wicked, but gave her a good house to live in, instead of a prison, and paid her a visit every year as long as she lived. Thus, the young King Edward the Third, at eighteen years old, took the kingdom into his own hands, and governed it wisely and happily.

In many things he was like his grandfather, Edward the First. He was wise and just to his own subjects. He was fond of war, and sometimes he was cruel.

I must tell you a little about his wife and children, before we speak of his great wars.

His wife’s name was Philippa of Hainault. She was one of the best and cleverest and most beautiful women in the world.

She was very fond of England, and did a great deal of good to the people. A great many beautiful churches were built in Edward’s reign, but it was Queen Philippa who encouraged the men who built them. She paid for building a college and new schools in Oxford and other places. She invited a French clergyman, named Sir John Froissart, to England, that he might see everything, and write about it in the book he called his Chronicles, which is the most amusing book of history I ever read. Queen Philippa and her son, John of Gaunt, who was called the Duke of Lancaster, loved and encouraged Chaucer, the first great English poet. By and by, when you are a little older, you will like to read the stories he wrote. Besides all this, there were some good men who wished to translate the Bible into English, so that all the people might read and understand it. The leader of these good men was John Wiclif, the first great reformer of religion in England. In this reign the great people began to leave off talking Norman French and to talk English, almost like our English now. And the king ordered the lawyers to conduct their business in English instead of French.

Queen Philippa had a great many children, all of whom she brought up wisely and carefully. Her eldest son Edward was called the Black Prince, it is said because he used to wear black armour. He was the bravest and politest prince at that time in the world; and Queen Philippa’s other sons and her daughters were all thought better than any family of princes at that time.

We must now speak of the king and his wars. These wars made him leave England, and go to foreign countries very often; but as he left Queen Philippa to take care of the country while he was away, everything went on as well as if he had been at home.

Soon after Edward became King of England, Charles, King of France, who was Edward’s uncle, died. And as Charles had no children, Edward thought he had a right to be King of France, rather than his cousin Philip, who had made himself king on Charles’s death. The two cousins disputed a good while as to who should be king. At last, as they could not agree, they went to war, and this was the beginning of the long wars which lasted for many kings’ reigns between France and England.

In that time, a great many kings and princes, and barons, or, as they began to be commonly called, nobles, did many brave and generous deeds, and gained a great deal of honour for themselves, and glory for their country; but the poor people, both in England and France, suffered a great deal. The English parliament was so pleased that our kings should overcome the French, that they allowed the king to have such great taxes to pay the soldiers with, that the people could hardly keep enough to live upon. And the French people suffered more, because, besides paying taxes, the armies used to fight in their land, and the soldiers trampled down the corn in the fields, and burned their towns and villages, and often robbed the people themselves. And so it must always be in a country where there is war. If the captains and officers are ever so kind, and the soldiers ever so good, they cannot help doing mischief where they fight.

In the next chapter I will tell you of two or three of the chief things that happened while King Edward was at war with France.

CHAPTER XXVII.
EDWARD III.—Continued.
How the English gained a sea-fight; how King Edward and his son the Black Prince won the battle of Crecy; how Calais was taken, and how Queen Philippa saved the lives of six of the citizens; how the Black Prince won the battle of Poitiers, and took the King of France prisoner, and brought him to London.

You have heard, I am sure, that the English are famous for being the best sailors in the world, and for gaining the greatest victories when they fight at sea. At the beginning of Edward’s French war he gained the first very great battle that had been fought at sea by the English, since the times when they had to drive away the Danes: it was fought very near a town called Sluys, on the coast of Flanders. Instead of guns to fire from the ships, they had great stones for the men to throw at one another when they were near enough, and bows and arrows to shoot with from a distance. This was indeed a very great battle; the English and the French never before fought by sea with so many men and so many and such big ships; and so I have told you of it.

Besides this sea-fight, there were two great victories won by King Edward on land, which are among the most glorious that ever have been gained by the English. The first was the battle of Crecy.

The French had three times as many men as the English at Crecy, so King Edward knew he must be careful how he placed his army, that it might not be beaten. And he took care that the soldiers should have a good night’s rest, and a good breakfast before they began the battle; so they were fresh, and ready to fight well.

Then the king sent forward his dear son, Edward the Black Prince, who was only sixteen years old, to begin the fight. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, on a hot summer’s day, when the battle began, and they fought till dark. At one time, some of the gentlemen near the prince were afraid he would be overcome, and sent to his father to beg him to come and help him. The king asked if his son was killed or hurt. “No,” said the messenger. “Then,” said the king, “he will do well, and I choose him to have the honour of the day himself.” Soon after this the French began to run away, and it is dreadful to think how many of them were killed.

Two kings who had come to help the King of France, one of the king’s brothers, and more French barons, gentlemen, and common soldiers than I can tell you, were killed. But very few English indeed were slain. When the King of England met his son at night, after the great battle of Crecy was won, he took him in his arms and cried, “My brave son! Go on as you have begun! You are indeed my son, for you have behaved bravely to-day! You have shown that you are worthy to be a king.” And I believe that it made King Edward happier to see his son behave so bravely in the battle, and so modestly afterwards, than even the winning of that great victory.

A year after the battle of Crecy, the city of Calais, which you know is in France, on the coast just opposite to Dover, in England, was taken by Edward.

The people of Calais, who did not wish their town to belong to the King of England, had defended it almost a year, and would not have given it up to him at last, if they could have got anything to eat. But Edward’s soldiers prevented the market people from carrying bread, or meat, or vegetables, into the city, and many people died of hunger before the captain would give it up.

I am sorry to tell you that Edward, instead of admiring the citizens for defending their town so well, was so enraged at them, that he wanted to have them all hanged; and when his chief officers begged him not to be cruel to those who had been so faithful to their own king, he said he would only spare them on condition that six of their best men should bring him the keys of the city gates, that they must come bare-headed and bare-footed, with nothing but their shirts on, and with ropes round their necks, as he meant to hang them at least.

When the people of Calais heard this, the men and women, and even the children, thought it would almost be better to die of hunger, than to give up the brave men who had been their companions in all their misery. Nobody could speak.

At last Eustace de St. Pierre, one of the chief gentlemen in Calais, offered to be one of the six; then another of the richest citizens, and then four other gentlemen came forward, and said they would willingly die to save the rest of the people in Calais. And they took the keys, and went out of the town in their shirts, bare-headed and bare-footed, to King Edward’s tent, which was a little way from the city gates.

Then King Edward called for the headsman, and wanted him to cut off the heads of those gentlemen directly; but Queen Philippa, who was in the tent, hearing what the king had ordered, came out suddenly, and fell upon her knees, and would not get up till the king promised to spare the lives of the six brave men of Calais. At last Edward, who loved her very dearly, said, “Dame, I can deny you nothing”; and so he ordered his soldiers to let the good Eustace de St. Pierre and his companions go where they pleased, and entirely forgave the citizens of Calais.

The second great victory which made King Edward’s name so glorious was that of Poitiers. It was gained about ten years after the battle of Crecy.

King Philip of France, with whom Edward had quarrelled, was dead, and his son John, who was called the Good, had become King of France. Edward went to war again with him, to try to get the kingdom for himself, and at first he thought he might succeed.

The Black Prince was in France with a small army, and reached a place near Poitiers before he met the King of France, who had a great army, with at least five men for every one that was with Edward.

But Prince Edward followed the example his father had set him at the battle of Crecy: he placed his soldiers very skilfully, and he took care that they should have rest and food. The battle began early in the morning, and ended as the battle of Crecy did, by the greater number of the French running away, and a great many of their best gentlemen and soldiers being killed.

But the chief thing that happened was, that King John of France and his youngest son were taken prisoners, and brought to the Black Prince’s tent, where he was resting himself after the fight. Prince Edward received King John as kindly as if he had come to pay him a visit of his own accord. He seated him in his own place, ordered the best supper he could get to be made ready for him, and waited on the king at table as carefully as if he had not been his prisoner. Then he said everything he could to comfort him; and all the time he was with him he behaved with the greatest kindness and respect.

When Prince Edward brought his prisoner, the King of France, to London, as there were no carriages then, they rode on horseback into the city. King John was well dressed, and mounted on a beautiful white horse which belonged to the prince; while Edward himself rode by his side upon a black pony to wait upon him and do anything he might want. And in that manner he went with King John to the palace belonging to the King of England called the Savoy. King John was set free when peace was made; but the French never could afford money enough to pay the English what they asked for letting him go back to his people. So the good King John came back, to keep his word of honour, and died in England.

This goodness and gentleness of the Black Prince made everybody love him. And his bravery in battle, and his wisdom in governing those parts of France which his father and he had conquered, gave the English hopes that when he became king he would be as good a king as his father, and that England would be still happier.

Edward the Black Prince waiting on John, King of France.

But the Black Prince died at the age of forty-six, just one year before his father. His good mother Philippa, had died some years before. And all the people of England grieved very much. Their good queen, their favourite prince, and their wise and brave King Edward the Third, all died while the Black Prince’s son was quite a child. And though some of the prince’s brothers were brave and clever men, the people knew, by what had happened in former times, that the country is never well ruled while the king is too young to govern for himself.

CHAPTER XXVIII.
RICHARD II.—1377 to 1399.
How Richard the Second sent men round the country to gather the taxes; how Wat Tyler killed one of them and collected an army; how he met the King in Smithfield, and was killed by the Mayor; how King Richard behaved cruelly to his uncles; how he was forced to give up the crown to his cousin Henry of Hereford, and died at Pomfret.

Richard the Second was only eleven years old when his grandfather, King Edward the Third, died. He was made king immediately. The people, who loved him for the sake of his good and brave father, the Black Prince, were very peaceable and quiet in the beginning of his reign. But his uncles, who were clever men, and wanted to be powerful, did not agree very well with one another.

When Richard was about sixteen, a civil war had very nearly taken place. I will tell you how it happened.

The king was not so well brought up as he ought to have been, and he loved eating and drinking and fine clothes, and he made a great many feasts, and gave fine presents to his favourites, so that he often wanted money before it was the right time to pay the taxes. It happened, as I said, when the king was about sixteen, that he wanted money, and so did his uncles, who were in France, where the French and English still continued to fight now and then. The great lords sent the men who gathered the king’s taxes round the country, and one of them, whose business was to get the poll-tax, that is, a tax on everybody’s head, was so cruel, and so rude to the daughter of a poor man named Wat Tyler, that Wat, who could not bear to see his child ill-used, struck him on the head with his hammer and killed him.

Wat Tyler’s neighbours, hearing the noise, all came round, and, finding how much the taxgatherer had vexed Wat, they took his part, and got their friends to do the same, and a great many thousands of them collected together at Blackheath, and sent to the king, who then lived in the Tower of London, to beg him to listen to their complaints, and not to allow the noblemen to oppress them, nor to send to gather taxes in a cruel manner. The king did not go to them, but he read the paper of complaints they sent, and promised to do his people justice. A few days afterwards, the king, with his officers, met Wat Tyler, and a great many of the people who had joined him, in Smithfield, and spoke to him about the complaints the people had made. The Mayor of London, who was near them, fancied Wat Tyler was going to stab the king, so he rode up to him and killed him.

Wat Tyler’s friends now thought it best to make peace with the king; so for this time the civil war was stopped.

Death of Wat Tyler.

I have told you this story, to show you what mischief is done by cruelty and injustice. It was unjust to collect the taxes at a wrong time, and for a bad purpose. It was cruel in the taxgatherer to behave ill to Tyler’s daughter. That injustice and cruelty brought about the death of the tax-man, and that of Wat Tyler, who seems to have been a bold, brave man, wishing to do what was right.

Soon after this disturbance, the king was married to a princess of Bohemia, who was so gentle and kind to the people, that they called her the good Queen Anne, and they hoped that she would persuade the king to send away his bad companions; but they were disappointed, for Richard II. was too ill-tempered to take her advice, and the people, who had loved him when he was a child for his father’s sake, now began to hate him.

In the meantime he was at war with Scotland, and with Ireland, and with France; and instead of gaining battles, and making the name of our dear England glorious, he lost, by degrees, all credit, and was laughed at by foreigners, as well as by his own subjects.

I have told you that the king had several uncles, who took care of the kingdom while he was a child. Instead of being grateful for this, he ordered one to be put to death, and ill-used another; and when his third uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, died, he took all his money and lands away from John’s son, whose name was Henry of Hereford, and made use of his riches to spend in eating, drinking, and riot of all kinds.

The good Queen Anne died soon, and she had no son, and the people all began to wish they had another king instead of this Richard, who was a disgrace to his good father the Black Prince.

Now Henry of Hereford, who was the king’s cousin, was very clever; and the people knew he was very brave, for he had fought in the armies of some foreign princes at one time. Besides, he behaved kindly and good-naturedly to the people, so a good many of them began to wish him to be king. Then Richard grew afraid of him, and sent him out of the country.

Henry of Hereford claiming the Crown of England.

Soon word was sent to Henry that King Richard was gone to Ireland to quiet some disturbance there, and that, if he pleased to come to England and make himself king, he would find many persons ready to take his part.

Henry came accordingly, and, on King Richard’s return from Ireland, he forced him to call the parliament to meet him in London. Now the lords and the gentlemen, or, as they began to be called, the commons of the parliament, all agreed that Richard was too cruel, and revengeful, and extravagant to be king any longer, and that his cousin, Henry of Hereford, son of the great Duke of Lancaster, should be king.

Richard was forced to give up the crown; and of all the people who had lived with him, and to whom he had shown kindness, there was only one, the Bishop of Carlisle, who took his part, or said a word in his favour; so he was put into prison at Pomfret Castle, and some time afterwards he died there. Some people say he was killed by a bad man called Exton; others say he was starved to death.

CHAPTER XXIX.
HENRY IV.—1399 to 1413.
How Henry the Fourth had a dispute with Earl Percy and his son Hotspur about their Scotch prisoners; how the Percys went to war with the King, and were joined by Owen Glendower; how Hotspur was killed in the battle of Shrewsbury; why some men are made nobles, and how they are useful to their country; how King Henry punished people on account of their religion.

I think that Henry of Hereford did not act rightly in taking the kingdom from his cousin Richard, but he became a good king for England. He was the first king of the family of Lancaster, and is sometimes called Henry of Lancaster.

During the fourteen years Henry was king he was chiefly busy in making or improving laws for the people.

He had little foreign war to disturb him; but the Welsh and Scotch several times made war upon the English who lived nearest to them. There was in Henry’s days a very famous Scotch earl called James of Douglas, and he came into the north of England and began to burn the villages, and rob the people, until the Earl of Northumberland, whose name was Percy, and his son, Henry Hotspur, gathered their soldiers together, and went to fight Douglas, at a place called Holmedon, and they beat him, and took a great many prisoners.

In those days it was the custom for everybody to do as they pleased with the prisoners they took. A cruel man might kill them, another might make slaves of them; one, a little kinder, might say, “If your friends will send me some money, I will let you go;” but the kindest of all would let them go home again without paying for it.

Now King Henry had a dispute with Earl Percy about those Scotch prisoners, and Percy and his son were so affronted, that they determined to make a civil war, and they were joined by several English lords; but the person who helped them most was a Welsh gentleman, named Owen Glendower, who was related to the old princes of Wales.

He was very angry with King Henry the Fourth, because he thought he behaved ill to Wales, which was his own country; besides, he had been a friend of poor Richard the Second; and though he might have thought it right to keep him in prison, he could not bear to think of his having been put to death.

These reasons made him join the Percys, and they collected a very large army to fight against King Henry. The Earl Percy’s son was called Harry Hotspur, because he was very impatient, as well as very brave. Indeed, he and the young Prince of Wales, who was called Henry of Monmouth, were the two bravest young men in England. The king’s army met the army that Percy and Owen Glendower had raised against him near Shrewsbury, and then everybody thought a great deal about the two young Harrys, who were both so brave and handsome. The battle was fought, and the king gained the victory. Henry of Monmouth behaved as bravely as the Black Prince used to do, and he was not hurt in the battle. Harry Hotspur was equally brave, but he was killed. Oh! civil war is a sad thing. There was one of the finest young noblemen in England killed among Englishmen, who ought to have agreed, and helped, and loved one another, instead of fighting.

Perhaps you will wonder why I mention the young noblemen particularly, when so many other Englishmen were killed; and you will wonder if it is of any use that there should be noblemen.

I think it is, and I will tell you why. The first noblemen were those men who had been either very good in all things, or who had found out something useful for everybody, or who had been very brave in battle, or very wise in giving good advice.

These their companions called Nobles, and paid them great respect, and gave them more lands, and goods, and money, than other people. And in the Bible you read that the names of those men who do rightly shall be remembered. Now when a man has been made a noble, and his name is remembered because he is good, or manly, or clever, or brave, or wise, his sons will say to themselves, “Our dear father has been made a noble, because he was good or brave; we must be good or brave, or useful too, that people may see that he taught us well, and that we know how to love and honour him, by following his good example.” Then their children will think of how good both their father and grandfather were, and that they will not do anything that they would not have liked, and so they will try to keep the good and noble name one after another, as it was given to the first of their grandfathers. If the young nobles do this properly, you know they will always be ready to do good to their country, by helping to make good laws, and to do justice in time of peace, and to fight for the safety and glory of their own land in time of war, as their fathers did. Then they will say to themselves, “I am noble and rich, and other people will look up to me; I must, therefore, try to be better than others, that I may set a good example to the young, and that those who are old enough to remember my father and grandfather may think I have done as well as they did.”

The nobles of England are useful to the country. As they are rich enough to live without working for themselves and their families, they have time to be always ready when the king wants advice; or when there is a parliament to make laws; or when the king wishes to send messages to other kings. And as their forefathers were made noble because of their goodness, wisdom, or bravery, they have in general followed their example; and they have always, next after the king, been the people we have loved best, and who have done us the most good.

The noblemen made King John do justice to the people, and give them the good laws written in the Great Charter. The noblemen prevented the foolish Kings Henry the Third and Richard the Second from doing a great deal of mischief, and they helped our good Kings Henry the Second, Edward the First, and Edward the Third to do all the good and useful things I have told you of. So you see that noblemen have been of great use in England.

When you are older you will understand this better, and you will find out many more reasons to be glad that we have noblemen in our own dear country.

Henry the Fourth died at Westminster, when he had been king only fourteen years. He was wise and just, except in one thing; and that was, that he punished persons who did not agree with the bishops about the proper way to worship God. Some good men, called Lollards, who loved to read the Bible in English, were put in prison, and otherwise ill-used, on that account.

CHAPTER XXX.
HENRY V.—1413 to 1422.
How Henry the Fifth was very gay and thoughtless when he was Prince of Wales, but became a great and wise King; how he went to war with France, and gained the battle of Agincourt, and how the people lamented at his death.

I think you would have liked King Henry the Fifth who was often called Harry of Monmouth.

He was very good-natured and very gay; yet, when it was right to be grave and wise, he could be so, and we never had a braver king in England.

I must tell you a little about his behaviour while he was a young man, and only Prince of Wales, before I say anything about the time when he was king.

It is said that he was very merry and fond of playing wild pranks with gay and reckless young men of low birth; but all the stories told about his conduct at this time can hardly be true. I will tell you some of them.

Once, when he had been doing something wrong, his father, who was ill at Windsor, sent for him, and he went directly in a very droll dress, that he had had made for some frolic; it was of light blue satin, and it had a great many odd puckers in the sleeves, and at every pucker he made the tailor leave a bit of blue thread and a tag like a needle. When the king saw such a strange coat, he was a little vexed that he should dare to come to him, while he was so ill, in it. But Prince Harry said he was in such a hurry to see his father, and to do whatever he wished for, that he could not spare time to take off the coat, and so he came in it just as he was; and his father forgave him because of his obedience.

Another time he was strolling about in London with some idle merry companions, when he heard that one of his servants had behaved ill, and had been carried before the chief judge, whose name was Sir William Gascoyne. He went directly to the court where the judge was, and desired him to let his servant go because he was the king’s son. But the judge refused, and said he was sitting there for the king himself, to do justice to everybody alike, and he would not let the man go till he had been punished. The prince was in too great a passion to think rightly at that moment, and he struck the chief justice. That wise and good man instantly ordered the officers to take the bold young prince to prison, and it was not till he had made very humble excuses that he forgave him, and set him free. He said that such an act was worse in the king’s son than in anybody else; because, as he was sitting in the court for the king, other people, if they offended, were only subjects doing wrong, but the prince, being the king’s son, as well as his subject, was offending both king and father. Harry had the sense to understand this; and when his passion was over he thanked the judge, promised never to behave so ill again, and kept his word.

The king, you may be sure, was pleased with the judge, who was not afraid to do justice on his son; and he praised his son for getting the better of his passion, and submitting to the judge without complaining. I must tell you, however, that Gascoyne was removed from being chief justice soon after Henry became king, but that was because he had grown very old and was no longer fit to do the duty of a judge.

When King Henry the Fourth died, the people may have been a little afraid lest Harry should not make a good king, though he might be a merry one. If they were they soon saw they were mistaken.

None of our kings was ever more wise, or clever, or brave, or fonder of doing justice; and even now nobody in England ever thinks of Henry the Fifth without loving him.

In the very beginning of his reign there was a war with France. The poor King of France was mad. His queen was a very wicked woman, and his son very young. All the noblemen were quarrelling with one another, and the whole together with the King of England.

So Henry made ready his army, and sailed over to France, and, after having taken a town called Harfleur, met a very large French army at a place called Agincourt.

The English soldiers were tired with a long march; they had had very bad weather to march in, which made many of them ill, and they had not enough to eat. But they loved the king; they knew he was as badly off as they were, and he was so kind and good-humoured, and talked so cheerfully to them, that in spite of hunger, and weariness, and sickness, they went to battle in good spirits. The English bowmen shot their long arrows all at once with such force, that the French soldiers, especially those on horseback, were obliged to give way; and in a very short time King Henry won as great a victory at Agincourt, as Edward the Third and the Black Prince did at Crecy and Poitiers. One day, when you are older, you will read a most delightful play written by the poet Shakspeare about this battle, and some other parts of King Henry the Fifth’s life.

Not long after the battle, Henry went to Paris, and there the princes and nobles told him that, if he would let the poor mad King Charles be called king while he lived, Henry and his children should be always Kings of France. And so peace was made, and Henry governed France for a little while, and he married the French Princess Catherine, and they had a little son born at Windsor, who was called Henry of Windsor, Prince of Wales, and was afterwards King Henry the Sixth.

Very soon afterwards, King Henry the Fifth was taken very ill at Paris. He knew he was going to die, so he sent for his brothers and the other English lords who were in France, and gave them a great deal of good advice about ruling England and France, and begged them to take care of his little son. He then told his chaplain to chant some of the psalms to him, and died very quietly.

The English people wept and lamented bitterly, when they found that they had lost their king.

He was kind to them, and so true and honest, that even his enemies trusted entirely to him. He was very handsome, and so good-humoured, that everybody who knew him liked his company; so good and just, that wicked men were afraid of him; so wise, that his laws were the fittest for his people that could have been made at the time; so brave, that the very name of Henry, King of England, kept his enemies in fear. And above all this, he was most pious towards God.

CHAPTER XXXI.
HENRY VI.—1422 to 1461.
How Henry the Sixth became King while he was an infant; how the Duke of Bedford governed in France; how Joan of Arc persuaded the Dauphin and the French soldiers to take courage; how they nearly drove the English out of France; how Joan was taken prisoner and put to death.

Henry of Windsor, the poor little Prince of Wales, was not a year old when his father died. He was made King of England directly, and became King of France soon after.

The parliament that his wise father left gave good guardians and protectors to the little king, and to England and to France.

The war in France began again, for the mad king having died, his son, who was almost as good for France as our Henry of Monmouth had been for England, began to try to get back all his father’s kingdom. However, the Duke of Bedford, uncle to the little King of England, managed so well for the English, that it really seemed as if France was always to be subject to the King of England.

It was fortunate, for the good of both countries, that it was not to be so.

When the people of France were so tired of war that they were not able to fight longer, and the king himself had lost all hope of getting back his kingdom, one of the strangest things happened that I ever read about.

A young woman called Joan of Arc, who was servant at a country inn at Domremy in France, had heard a great many people talk about the sad state of all the country, and the great unhappiness of the young French Prince Charles. She thought about this so much, that at last she fancied that God had sent her to help the Prince to get back his kingdom, and to drive the English out of France.

So she dressed herself like a young man, and got a sword and spear, and went to Chinon, a castle where the prince was, and there she told him, and the few French nobles who were with him, that, if they would only follow her when they were next attacked, she would teach them how to conquer the English.

I should tell you, that the eldest son of the King of France was called the Dauphin, as the eldest son of the King of England is called Prince of Wales.

Well, at first the dauphin and his friends thought that Joan was mad; but she began to talk to them so wisely, that they listened to her. She cheered the dauphin, who seemed quite without hope of saving his kingdom; she said that he ought to call himself king directly, and go to Rheims, where all the kings of France used to be crowned, and have the crown put upon his head; that the people might know he was king.

She told the nobles that the English, if they conquered France, would take away their estates and make them beggars; that it was shameful to let the poor young dauphin be driven from the kingdom of his forefathers; and that they deserved to lose the name of nobles if they were afraid to fight for their own country and king.

Then she went among the common soldiers and the poor people. She said, God would have pity on them, if they would fight bravely against the English, who were strangers, and who only came to France to take all that was good from them, and spoil their towns, and trample down their corn, and kill their king, and make beggars of them all.

So by the time the French and English met again in battle, the French had recovered their spirits. And when the king, and the nobles, and the people saw that young woman go in front of the army, and into every dangerous place, and fight better than any of the bravest soldiers, they would have been ashamed not to follow her; so that her bravery and her good advice did really begin to save her country.

The French drove the English army away from Orleans, and Joan of Arc has been called the Maid of Orleans ever since.

The Maid of Orleans next persuaded the dauphin to go and have the crown set on his head, and so make himself king; and as soon as that was done, a great many people came to him, and he very soon had a large army, with which he drove the English out of the greater part of France.

It was a grand sight when Charles the Dauphin went to Rheims, and was crowned, while all the nobles stood by, and the Maid of Orleans close to him, holding the white flag of France in her hand.

I am sorry to tell you the end of the brave Maid of Orleans. She was taken prisoner by the English, and kept in prison for some time. At last, they were so cruel as to burn her alive, because they could not forgive her for saving her country and her king. But they pretended she was a witch.

Soon after this cruel murder the Duke of Bedford died, and by degrees the English lost everything in France but a very little corner of the country, out of all that Henry the Fifth had conquered.

I shall end this chapter here, because we have nothing more to say about France for a long while; but we shall have to read of some sad civil wars in England, which began at this time.

CHAPTER XXXII.
HENRY VI.—Continued.
How Queen Margaret and Cardinal Beaufort are said to have caused Duke Humphrey to be murdered; how the wars of the White and the Red Roses were brought about; how Edward of York was chosen King by the Londoners.

Henry the Sixth grew up to be a very good but very weak man. He was married to a beautiful lady called Margaret of Anjou, who was very fierce and cruel, and who behaved more like a man than a woman. She wanted to govern the kingdom entirely herself; and as the only person she was afraid of was the king’s uncle, Humphrey, the good Duke of Gloucester, it is supposed that she agreed with Cardinal Beaufort and another person, who hated Duke Humphrey, and that they had him put to death very cruelly.

Soon after this, as the queen and her friends behaved so ill, several of the noblemen, most of the gentlemen in Parliament, and the people in London, began to think it would be better to take away the crown from the poor king, who was too silly to govern for himself, and was often so ill that he could not speak for days together.

The person they wished to make king was his cousin the Duke of York.

I have read, that some gentlemen were walking together in the Temple garden after dinner, and disputing about the king and the Duke of York; one of them took the king’s part, and said, that, though he was silly, his little son Edward, who was just born, might be wise; and he was determined to defend King Henry and his family, and desired all who agreed with him to do as he did, and pluck a red rose, and wear it in their caps, as a sign that they would defend the family of Lancaster.

The gentlemen who thought it would be best to have the Duke of York for their king turned to a white-rose bush, and each took a white rose, and put it in his cap, as a sign he loved the Duke of York; and for more than thirty years afterwards the civil wars in England were called the Wars of the Roses.

At first, the party of York only wished Richard, Duke of York, to be the king’s guardian, and govern for him; and as Duke Richard was wise and good, it might have been well for England if he had been allowed to do so.

But Queen Margaret raised an army to keep away the Duke of York, and the first battle between the people of the Red Rose and the people of the White Rose was fought at St. Alban’s.

The Yorkists gained the victory, and there was quiet for a few years. Then another battle was fought, and the queen, with the little prince, went to Scotland, and for some time the Duke of York ruled the kingdom with the king’s consent.

However, the queen found means to come back to England, and to gather another great army, with which she fought the Duke of York’s army several times, and at last beat them, at a place called Wakefield Green. She cut off the Duke of York’s head, and stuck a paper crown upon it, and put it over one of the gates of York.

Could you have thought a woman would be so cruel?

One of her friends, called Clifford, did something still worse. He saw a handsome youth of seventeen, along with an old clergyman, who was his tutor, trying to get away to some safe place after the battle: he asked who he was, and when the child said he was Rutland, the Duke of York’s son, the fierce Clifford stabbed him to the heart with his dagger, although the poor youth and his good tutor fell upon their knees and begged for mercy.

When the people knew of these two cruel things, they began to hate Queen Margaret, and a great many went to the Duke of York’s eldest son, Edward, and desired he would make himself king.

Now this Edward was brave and handsome, and loved laughing and merriment, but he was very cruel and too fond of pleasure. However, he was better than Margaret, and the people in London chose him to be king; and so there were two kings in England for ten years: one, the King of the White Rose, that was Edward; and one, the King of the Red Rose, that was poor Henry.

CHAPTER XXXIII.
EDWARD IV. of YORK.—1461 to 1483.
How the Yorkists beat Queen Margaret at Hexham; how the Queen and Prince escaped to Flanders; why the Earl of Warwick was called the King-maker; how Prince Edward was murdered by King Edward’s brothers; how King Henry and the Duke of Clarence were put to death.

In those years, while there were two kings, nobody knew which king to obey. Few people minded the laws, and the armies of the Lancastrians and the Yorkists did a great deal of mischief in every part of the country. A great many battles were fought, and many thousands of Englishmen were killed.

After one of these battles, which was fought at Towton, in Yorkshire, King Henry was obliged to hide himself for a long time in Scotland, and the parts of England close to it. He sometimes slept in the woods, and sometimes in caves, and was near dying of hunger.

At last Queen Margaret contrived to gather another army; but the Yorkists beat her at Hexham, and King Henry was taken prisoner, and sent to the Tower. Queen Margaret and the young prince escaped into a wild forest. There they were met by some robbers, who took away the queen’s necklace and her rings, and then began to quarrel about who should have the most.

Escape of Queen Margaret.

Queen Margaret took the opportunity of their quarrelling, and, holding her little son by the hand, she began running through the forest, in hopes of meeting some of her friends; but she only met with another robber. She was afraid he would kill her and the little prince, because they had nothing to give him. Margaret then fell upon her knees, and owned she was the queen, and begged the robber to protect his king’s son. The robber was surprised, indeed, to see the queen and prince by themselves, half-starved, and weary with running in that wild place. But he was a good-natured man, and took them under his care; he got them some food, and took them to a cottage to rest; after which he contrived to take them safely to the seaside, where they got on board ship and went to Flanders.

Now that King Henry was safe in the Tower of London, and Queen Margaret was gone abroad, everybody in England hoped there would be an end to the civil wars, and King Edward of York married a beautiful lady called Elizabeth Woodville, and he had many children, and there was nothing but feasting and rejoicing.

But the king had two brothers, George Duke of Clarence, who was rather foolish, and Richard, who was young, brave, and clever, but deformed and wicked. The Duke of Clarence had married a daughter of the Earl of Warwick, who had been very useful to the Yorkists. But he was vexed with the king for marrying without asking his advice, so he determined to begin the civil war again.

This Earl of Warwick was a very brave man, but he was very changeable; at one time he fought for Edward of York, at another for Margaret and Henry of Lancaster; so, as he chose to call first one of them king, and then the other, he was nicknamed the King-maker. Once Warwick forced King Edward to flee from England, and put Henry on the throne again. But Edward came back, and Warwick was killed in a battle at Barnet, near London, and poor Henry was sent back to the Tower.

About three weeks after that battle of Barnet, there was another at Tewkesbury, where Edward of York took Queen Margaret and her son Edward prisoners; for they had come to England again, in hopes the Earl of Warwick would get the kingdom back for the Lancastrians.

When they were brought before King Edward, he asked the boy how he dared to come to England. The brave lad answered, that he came to try to get back his father’s crown; upon which Edward cruelly struck him on the face, and his brothers Clarence and Gloucester, and two other lords, stabbed the poor prince till he died.

This was even more cruel than anything Margaret had ever done.

That miserable queen was sent to prison in the Tower immediately afterwards, where her poor husband was a prisoner. But a very few days after the battle of Tewkesbury, Henry was found dead in his prison, and he was most likely murdered. The King of France paid Edward a large sum of money to set Queen Margaret free.

Now, all Edward of York’s enemies being either dead or overcome, he feasted and enjoyed himself, and was very wicked and cruel. His foolish brother, the Duke of Clarence, quarrelled with the queen and her relations, and also with the Duke of Gloucester. So Edward had Clarence sent to the Tower, where he was put to death. Many people thought that the Duke of Gloucester murdered King Henry the Sixth, and caused the Duke of Clarence to be drowned in a cask of Malmsey wine; but I am not sure of this.

About four years after this, King Edward the Fourth died, and left two little sons and five daughters.

I can say very little good of him, except that he was brave and handsome, and good-humoured in company; but then he was cruel and revengeful, and, when the wars were over, he loved his own pleasure and amusement too well to do anything good or useful for the people, and he did them much wrong.

CHAPTER XXXIV.
EDWARD V.—Only ten weeks of 1483.
How Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was guardian to the young King Edward the Fifth; how he put Lord Hastings to death, and made himself King; and how the little King Edward and his brother were murdered in the Tower.

When Edward the Fourth died, his son Edward, Prince of Wales, was only thirteen years old; and his younger son, Richard, Duke of York, only ten.

The Prince of Wales was with some of his relations at Ludlow, and the little duke with his mother in London.

Their guardian was their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, whose wicked and cruel deeds you read about in the last chapter.

Now the Duke of Gloucester, whom the people called Crook-back, because he was deformed, wished to be king himself; but there were several noblemen who determined to try to prevent his depriving his little nephew of the kingdom; and when the boy was brought to London, and lodged in the palace in the Tower, to keep him safe, as his uncle said, they tried to watch over him, and prevent any wrong from being done to him. But Richard of Gloucester was too cunning and too cruel for them. He contrived, in the first place, to get the little Duke of York out of his mother’s hands, and to lodge him in the Tower, as well as his brother. He next pretended that he wanted to talk with the little king’s friends about the proper day for setting the crown on his head, and letting the people see him as their king. So the lords who wished well to the young princes all came to the Tower, and were sitting together waiting for the Duke of Gloucester.

At last he came, and said, very angrily, that he had found out several persons who were making plans to put him to death, and had bribed some persons to poison him; and then turning to Lord Hastings, who was one of young Edward’s best friends, asked him fiercely what the persons deserved who had done so? “They deserve severe punishment,” said Lord Hastings, “IF they have done so.”—“If! dost thou answer me with IFS?” roared out Gloucester; “by St. Paul, I will not dine till thy head is off!”

The moment he had said this he struck his hand upon the table, and some soldiers came into the room. He made a sign to them to take away Lord Hastings, and they took him directly to the court before the windows. There they laid him down with his neck on a log of wood, and cut off his head, and the cruel Gloucester went to his dinner.

After this, nobody was surprised to hear that Richard had put to death several more of the king’s friends; and that the next thing he did was to get the people to make him king, and to say that the young prince was not fit to be king.

After this, he ordered both the princes to be murdered in the Tower; and I will tell you how it was done.

Death of the little Princes in the Tower.

The governor of the Tower at that time was Sir Robert Brackenbury, and Richard found that he was so honest, that while he was there he would not let anybody hurt the little princes, so that he sent away Brackenbury upon some business that was to take him two or three days, and gave the keys to a wicked servant of his own to keep till Brackenbury came back. The bad man’s name was Tyrrell; and he had no sooner got the charge of the little king and his brother, than he sent for two persons more wicked even than himself, and promised them a great deal of money, if they would go into the children’s room while they were asleep and murder them.

These two men’s names were Dighton and Forrest. They went into the room where the princes were both on the same bed. Their little arms were round each other’s necks, and their little cheeks close together. Then the wicked murderers took some cushions, and laid them over the poor children as they lay asleep, and smothered them.

Then they took them on their shoulders, and carried them to a little back-staircase, near their room in the Tower, and buried them in a great hole under the stairs, and threw a heap of stones over them; and a long time afterwards, some workmen, who were employed to repair that part of the Tower, found their bones in that place.

And this was the end of our little King Edward the Fifth, and his brother York.

You will read something about their sister Elizabeth very soon.

CHAPTER XXXV.
RICHARD III.—1483 to 1485.
How Richard the Third tried to make the people his friends; how the Duke of Buckingham rebelled and was put to death; how Richard was killed at Bosworth fighting against the Earl of Richmond, who was made King.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had got himself made king, as I told you, before he murdered his young nephews in the Tower. The people were told that the young princes had died suddenly.

He tried to make the people forget the wicked way in which he came to be king by making some good laws; but he could not succeed. The English could not love so base and cruel a man, and Richard had but a short and troublesome reign.

The first vexation he had was caused by a cousin of his, the Duke of Buckingham, almost as bad a man as himself, who had helped him in most of his bad deeds, but who did not mean to let him kill the little princes. So the Duke got an army together, and hoped by beginning a civil war to punish Richard; but he was taken prisoner, and Richard treated him as he had done Lord Hastings, that is, he cut off his head directly.

But there was another cousin of Richard’s, and a much better man, about whom I must tell you a great deal more. His name was Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Now his father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, was related to the old princes of Wales, who you must remember were Britons, and his mother, the Countess of Richmond, was a lady of the family of Lancaster, or the Red Rose. Richard the Third hated the Earl of Richmond, because he knew that many people thought Henry ought to be king, and he did everything he could to injure him and his family. But Richmond himself was abroad, where Richard could not hurt him.

But after a little while Richmond wrote to his friends in England, that, if they would be ready to help him when he came, he would bring with him from abroad money and men, and then England might get rid of the wicked King Richard of the White Rose, and take him instead for their king.

The best gentlemen in England immediately got ready to receive Richmond; all the relations of the persons Richard had put to death were glad to join with him to punish that bad man. The people in Wales were delighted to think of having one belonging to their ancient princes to be their king, and, not long after Richmond had landed at Milford Haven, he found several thousand men ready to follow him.

Richard, who was brave, although he was cruel, got ready an army also to fight Richmond, and he met him at a place called Bosworth, in Leicestershire, where they fought a great battle.

I have read that King Richard, when he was lying in his tent the night before the battle, could not help thinking of all the cruel things he had done. Besides those he had killed in battle, he remembered the young prince Edward of Lancaster, whom he stabbed at Tewkesbury, and poor Henry the Sixth, whom he had murdered in prison, and his own brother Clarence, whom he had caused to be killed. Then he began to think of Lord Hastings, and all his friends, six or seven, I think, whom he had beheaded, and his little nephews, who were smothered in the Tower, and his cousin Buckingham, and, last of all, his wife, Queen Anne, whom he had used so ill that she died.

And so when he got up in the morning he was tired and unhappy, and did not fight so well as he might have done.

However that might be, he was killed in the battle of Bosworth Field. His crown was found upon the field of battle, and Lord Stanley put it upon the Earl of Richmond’s head, upon which the whole army shouted “Long live King Henry the Seventh!” and so from that day the British prince, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and heir of Lancaster, was king of England.

CHAPTER XXXVI.
HENRY VII.—1485 to 1509.
How Henry the Seventh united the parties of the White and the Red Roses; how Lambert Simnel, and afterwards Perkin Warbeck, rebelled against him, but were subdued; how the people began to improve themselves in learning; how America was discovered; how King Henry did many useful things, but was not beloved by the people.

When the Earl of Richmond was made king, and was called Henry the Seventh, many persons began to be afraid that the wars of the Roses would begin again. But Henry was a wise man, and he had made friends of the party of York, by promising to marry his cousin Elizabeth, the sister of the little princes who were smothered in the Tower. So, as soon as he was crowned himself, and the people had owned him for their king, he married Elizabeth; and as Henry was King of the Red Rose party, and she was Queen of the White Rose party, the people agreed better than they had done for more than thirty years, and England began to be quiet and happy.

However, there were two disturbances in the beginning of Henry’s reign that I must tell you of. There was a very good-looking young man, called Lambert Simnel, that some people thought was very like the Earl of Warwick, a son of that Duke of Clarence who was killed in the Tower; and some persons, who wished to annoy Henry the Seventh, persuaded Lambert to say he was Warwick, and that he had run away from the Tower, and had hidden himself till after his uncle Richard’s death; but that now, as Richard and his little cousins were all dead, he had a right to be king. Some few Englishmen joined him, and a good many Irish. But in a battle at Stoke, in the North of England, they were all driven away, and Lambert was taken prisoner.

Marriage of King Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York.

The king, who knew the poor young man had been forced to do what he did by other people, did not send him to prison, but made him a turnspit in his kitchen; and, as he behaved very well there, he afterwards gave him the care of his hawks.

The second disturbance was of more consequence. A young man, called Perkin Warbeck, was taught by one of King Henry’s enemies, the Duchess of Burgundy, to call himself Richard Duke of York.

He said that he was the brother to the little king killed by Richard in the Tower, and that Dighton and Forrest could not bear to kill them both, and that he had hidden himself till he could get to the duchess, who, as he said, was his aunt.

Now King Henry knew this story was not true, yet it vexed him very much. For Perkin Warbeck prevailed on several noblemen in Ireland to take his part, and he went to Scotland, and got the king to believe him, and to let him marry a beautiful young lady, named Catharine Gordon, the king’s own cousin, and to march into England with an army, where he did a great deal of mischief before King Henry’s army could drive him away. Then Perkin sailed to Cornwall, and collected a small army; but after doing just enough mischief to make everybody fear him and his people, he was taken prisoner by King Henry, who kept him some time in the Tower: at last he was hanged at Tyburn, and nobody was sorry for him but his poor wife Lady Catharine.

King Henry sent for that unfortunate lady, and took her to the queen, who treated her very kindly, and made her live with her, and did all she could to make her happy again.

England was quite quiet for the rest of King Henry’s reign; and Wales, which had been ill-treated by the Kings of England ever since Edward the First conquered it, was better treated by Henry.

As there was no fighting, the young men began to try to improve themselves in learning. Some years before that time, some clever men in Germany had found out how to print books instead of copying them in writing, so there were a great many more books, and more people could learn to read. The young men in Cambridge and Oxford began to read the good books that had been forgotten in the wars of the Roses, and they were ashamed to find that there were not half a dozen men in England who knew anything at all about Greek. I think one of those few was Grocyn, a teacher at Oxford.

But the English had soon a very good Greek teacher. A young man born at Canterbury, called Thomas Linacre, after learning all he could at the school in his own town, and at Oxford, went to travel in Italy, where the most learned men in the world lived at that time. These learned men soon found out that Thomas Linacre was very clever indeed, and so they helped him to learn everything that he desired, for the sake of improving his own country when he came back. He studied everything so carefully, that on his return to Oxford the greatest and wisest men went to him to be taught Greek, besides many other things he had learned in his travels. He was chosen to be tutor to the king’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, and he was afterwards tutor to some of the next king’s children. He was the greatest physician in England, and before he died he founded the same College of Physicians that we have now.

In the next chapter we shall have a great deal to read about several of Linacre’s scholars; but I tell you about him now that you may know that it was in this king’s time that the gentlemen of England began to think of reading and studying, instead of doing nothing but fight.

About this time, sailors from Europe first found their way to America. Christopher Columbus went from Spain, Americo Vespucci from Italy, and Sebastian Cabot from England. They all arrived safe at the other side of the wide ocean, and then it was first known for certain that there was such a place as America. How surprised all their friends must have been, when they came home, and told of the strange things they had seen! The trees and the flowers were all different from ours. The birds were larger, and had more beautiful feathers; the butterflies had gayer colours than we had ever seen. Then they brought home turkeys, which their found in the woods, and potatoes, which they had eaten for the first time, to plant in our fields and gardens. But I should fill a whole book if I tried to tell you of all the things that were brought from the new countries found out in Henry the Seventh’s time.

We must now speak of the king himself. His wife, Elizabeth of York, was dead. She had four children, Arthur and Henry, Mary and Margaret. Mary became Queen of France, and Margaret Queen of Scotland. Arthur, who was the eldest, was good and clever, but very sickly, and he died before his father; so Henry was the next king.

Henry the Seventh was a very wise man, and a severe king. His greatest fault was loving money, so that he took unjust ways to get it from his subjects. He was very unwilling to spend anything upon himself or other people. But yet he laid out a great deal of money in building a great palace at Richmond, and in adding a beautiful chapel to Westminster Abbey, and in other fine buildings. He sent to Italy for painters and sculptors, to make pictures and statues; and he was fond of encouraging learning and trade.

But though he did many good and useful things, nobody loved him; and when he died there were very few persons indeed sorry for him.

CHAPTER XXXVII.
HENRY VIII.—1509 to 1547.
How Henry the Eighth made war upon Scotland and France, and gained the battle of Flodden and the battle of the Spurs; how he met the King of France in the Field of the Cloth of Gold; how Cardinal Wolsey fell into disgrace and died.

I have so many things to tell you about Henry the Eighth, that I dare say I shall fill three chapters.

When he first became king, everybody liked him. He was very handsome, and generous, and good-humoured. Besides all that, he was very clever, and very learned; he liked the company of wise men, and treated them all very kindly. One of his great amusements after dinner was to invite the greatest scholars and the cleverest men, such as clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and painters, to go and talk with him. And so he learned a great deal from hearing what they said.

But as Henry grew older, I am sorry to say that he changed very much, and became cruel and hard-hearted, as you will read by-and-by.

The wise old king, Henry the Seventh, had been very careful to keep peace with the French and Scotch all his life, but the young king liked the thoughts of gaining a little glory by fighting; so very soon after he became king, he had a war with France, and another with Scotland.

The war with Scotland ended sadly for the Scotch. The English army was commanded by a very brave and clever nobleman, named the Earl of Surrey, and he had with him several brave lords and knights. The Scotch army was almost all made up of the boldest and best men in Scotland, with their own king, James the Fourth, to command them. The two armies met at a place called Flodden Field. They fought all day; sometimes one side got the better and sometimes the other; so when night came, nobody knew which had beaten the other. But in the morning the Scots found that they had lost their king, whom they all loved very much, and that with him the best and bravest of the Scottish nobles had been killed.

After this there was peace between Scotland and England.

As to King Henry’s war in France, it did not last very long. I told you Henry was young, and wished for the kind of glory that princes gain by fighting. But he forgot that, besides the glory, there must be a great deal of fatigue and suffering; so, after one battle, he was persuaded to make peace. That one battle was called the BATTLE OF THE SPURS, because the French made more use of their spurs, to make their horses run away, than of their swords to fight with.

Not long after this battle, the old French king died. The new king was called Francis the First. He was almost as young as Henry the Eighth. He was handsome, too, and very fond of gaiety, and dancing, and riding, and feasting, and playing at fighting, which is called jousting. So the two young kings agreed that they would meet together, and have some merry days. And so they did.

Henry VIII. embarking for France.

They met near a place called Ardres, in France. The richest noblemen, both of France and England, and their wives and daughters, were there. The tents they feasted in were made of silk, with gold flowers; their dresses were covered over with gold and jewels; even their very horses were dressed up with silk and golden fringes; and there was feasting, and dancing, and jousting, and music every day.

The two kings amused themselves with dancing, and all sorts of games, till at last they found it was time to go home, and mind the affairs of their own kingdoms.

This meeting was called THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD, because there was so much gold in the dresses and tents, and the ornaments used by the kings and their lords and ladies.

Besides the two kings who were at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, there was a great man there, whom you must know something about. His name was Wolsey. He was a clergyman, and in the time of King Henry the Seventh he was known to be very clever indeed. But Henry the Eighth first made him a bishop, and then the Pope (who you know is the Bishop of Rome) gave him the rank of Cardinal.

In those days a cardinal was thought to be almost as great a man as a king. He dressed in long fine silk robes, trimmed with fur, and when he went out he wore a scarlet hat with a broad brim and fine red cords and tassels.

This Cardinal Wolsey was very clever, as I told you, and very learned; he was one of the scholars at Oxford when Thomas Linacre taught Greek there; and with a part of the great riches that he got from the king he built the great college, called Christ Church, at Oxford, and a school at Ipswich, the town where he was born. He also built the great palace of Hampton Court, and made a present of it to the king. And these you know were all useful things.

But Cardinal Wolsey was proud towards the nobles, and had to tax the people heavily to pay for the king’s wars; so he was greatly disliked. And some persons told the king that the cardinal spoke ill of him, and that he boasted of being richer and more powerful than the king. So Henry, who was very passionate, ordered all his riches to be taken away from him suddenly, and sent for him to London, where I am almost sure he intended to order his head to be cut off. But the cardinal fell ill and died on the road. His last words were—“If I had served God as diligently as I have served the king, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”

Now I must end this chapter. In the next I shall tell you about King Henry’s six wives.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.
HENRY VIII.—Continued.
How King Henry married six times; and how he got rid of his wives when he was tired of them.

Henry the Eighth’s first wife was Catherine of Arragon. She was a princess from Spain, who came to England to be married to Prince Arthur, King Henry’s brother. But as you read in the chapter before the last, Prince Arthur died when he was very young; and Catherine was married to Henry.

They had only one daughter, the Princess Mary, who came to be Queen of England, as you will read. Now, though Henry was very fond of his wife for a great many years, he grew tired of her at last, and wished very much to marry a beautiful young lady who lived with Queen Catherine.

Wolsey entering Leicester Abbey.

He determined to get some of those people who are always willing to do as their king pleases, instead of being honest and doing only what is right, to find out some excuses for sending away good Queen Catherine, for indeed she was very good, and loved the king very dearly. So at last they found some, which you could not understand if I told you; and they divorced Queen Catherine, that is, they sent her away from the king, and said he might marry anybody else that he pleased.

The good queen lived about three years afterwards, sometimes at Ampthill, sometimes at other country places, and died at Kimbolton.

The second wife of Henry was the beautiful young lady, Anne Boleyn, whose daughter, Elizabeth, became Queen of England after her sister Mary. But now King Henry, who had found out that he could make excuses for sending away one wife, began to wish for another change.

I told you Anne Boleyn was young and beautiful. She was also clever and pleasant and I believe really good. But the king and some of his wicked friends pretended that she had done several bad things; and, as Henry had become very cruel as well as changeable, he ordered poor Anne’s head to be cut off.

On the day she was to suffer death she sent to beg the king to be kind to her little daughter Elizabeth. She said to the last moment that she was innocent; she prayed God to bless the king and the people, and then she knelt down, and her head was cut off.

I ought to have told you, that, before she was brought out of her room to be beheaded, she said to the gentleman who went to call her, “I hear the executioner is very skilful; my neck is very small;” and she put her hands round it and smiled, and made ready to die.

The cruel king married another very pretty young woman the very next day. Her name was Jane Seymour, and she had a son, who was afterwards King Edward the Sixth. She died twelve days after the little prince was born, or perhaps Henry might have used her as ill as he did poor Anne Boleyn.

The king’s fourth wife was found for him by his minister, Thomas Cromwell. She was the Princess Anne of Cleves, a German lady. But Henry took a dislike to her looks, so he put her away as he did Queen Catherine, and gave her a house to live in, and a good deal of money to spend, and thought no more about her.

Next he married the Lady Catherine Howard; but a very few months afterwards he accused her of some bad actions; and he had her beheaded. So he had put away two of his wives, he had cut off the heads of two others, and only one had died a natural death.

Yet he found a lady, named Catherine Parr, who was a widow; and she married him very willingly, for she was ready to run the risk for the sake of being a queen. She was very clever, and contrived to keep the passionate and cruel king in good humour till he died, when I dare say she was not sorry to find herself alive and safe, for he had once intended to put her to death like Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

Now we will end this chapter about Henry’s wives. You will find that as he grew old he grew more and more passionate and cruel; and in what I have to tell you about some other parts of his reign, in the next chapter, you will see that he grew wicked in almost everything.

CHAPTER XXXIX.
HENRY VIII.—Continued.
How the Pope and the friars imposed upon the people; how disputes arose in England about religion; how King Henry seized the convents and turned out the monks and nuns; how he called himself Supreme Head of the Church, and put many people to death who did not agree with him in all things.

In several parts of our history we have read of the Pope, that is, the Bishop of Rome. When Thomas à Becket was murdered in the reign of Henry the Second, I told you it was done after a quarrel between the king and Thomas, because Thomas wanted the Pope to have the power to punish clergymen in England, or to let them go without punishment, when they did wrong, without caring at all what the law of the country might be.

Now more than three hundred years had passed, and the Popes still pretended to have great power. And a great many new kinds of clergymen, especially the FRIARS, had begun to go about the country, doing nothing themselves, and pretending that the people ought to give them meat, and drink, and lodging, because they could read and say prayers. Besides that, they used to pretend to cure diseases, by making people kiss old bones, or bits of rag, and other trash, which they said had once belonged to some holy person or another, which was as wicked as it was foolish. It was wicked to tell such lies. It was foolish, because the cures that God has appointed for diseases are only to be learned by care and patience, and have nothing to do with such things as old bones and rags.

However, almost everybody believed these things for a long time. But at last, people began to read more books, as I told you in the chapter about Henry the Seventh; and they learned how foolish it was to believe all the friars had said.

One of the first books they began to read was the Bible, in which they found the commands of God; and they saw that all men ought to obey the laws of the countries they live in. And they found that clergymen might marry, and that, though they ought to be paid for teaching the people, they had no business to live idle.

It was not only in England that the people began to think of these things, but in other countries, especially in Germany, where a learned man, named Martin Luther, was the first who dared to tell the clergymen how ill he thought they behaved, and to try to persuade all kings and princes to forbid the Pope’s messengers and priests to meddle with the proper laws of the country. There were many other things he found fault with very justly, which I cannot tell you now, as we must speak of what was done in England.

You have not forgotten that I told you that gentlemen began to study a great deal in the reign of Henry the Seventh, and I promised to tell you something about Thomas Linacre’s scholars.

One of these was a gentleman of Rotterdam, in Holland, who came to England on purpose to learn Greek. His name was Erasmus, and he was famous for writing better Latin than anybody had done since the time of the old Romans.

Another was Sir Thomas More, who was Lord Chancellor of England during part of Henry the Eighth’s reign; he was very learned and wise, and besides that, very good-humoured and cheerful.

Erasmus and Sir Thomas More were very great friends, especially when Sir Thomas was young; and they used to write pleasant letters and books, to show how wrong those persons were who believed in the foolish stories told by the friars, and how wicked many of the clergymen were, who lived idle lives, and passed their time in eating and drinking, and in doing many bad things, instead of teaching the people, as it was their duty to do.

Besides these two great friends, there were several others, especially Tonstall and Latimer, who both were taught by Linacre, and are remembered to our time for being learned and good.

By degrees, the English heard all that Martin Luther said in Germany about the Pope and his messengers, and the bad part of the clergymen; and many disputes arose among the people. Some said that we had no business to obey the Pope at all in anything, and that many of the things the clergymen of Rome taught were wicked and false, and that God would punish those who believed them, now that they could read the Bible, and learn for themselves what was right.

Others said that those things were not false, and that we ought to believe them; and as to the Pope, we ought to obey him in everything about our churches and our prayers, and the way of worshipping God.

But the thing that made the people, who took the opposite side in the dispute most angry, was the quantity of land and money that the clergymen had persuaded different people to give them. Those who were against the Pope said that the clergymen had deceived the people and had pretended that they could prevail upon God to forgive their worst sins, if they would only give their lands and money to the churches and convents, that the monks and friars might live in idleness.

The others, who were for the Pope, pretended that clergymen were better and wiser than others, and therefore they ought to live in comfort, and grandeur, and leisure, and to have more power and money than other men.

Now I believe the truth is, that in those days the clergymen were a great deal too rich and powerful, and that they oppressed the people in every country, and that they tried to keep them from learning to read, that they might not find out the truth from the Bible and other good books.

However, in England there were a great many good men on both sides.

At first, the king took the part of the Pope, and as he was very fond of showing his learning, he wrote a book to defend him against Martin Luther; in return for which the Pope called Henry the DEFENDER OF THE FAITH.

But soon afterwards King Henry began to change his mind. He thought the English clergymen would be better governed if the King of England were at their head instead of the Pope. Then he thought that, if all the convents were pulled down, and the monks and nuns made to live like other people, instead of idly, without doing anything, he might take their lands and money and give to his servants, or spend himself, just as he liked.

As soon as Henry thought of these things, he set about doing what he wished. He would not listen even to the old men and women, who had lived in the convents till they were too old to work; he turned them all out. He would not listen to some good advice about leaving a few convents for those who took care of the strangers and sick people, but, like a cruel and passionate man as he was, he turned them all out: many of them actually died of hunger and distress, and many more ended their lives as beggars.

Yet, although Henry was so cruel to the monks and priests, he would not allow the people to change many of the things that the followers of the Pope were most to blame for. He was glad enough to be master, or, as he called it, SUPREME HEAD of the English church and clergy, and to take the lands and money from the convents and abbeys. But he would not let everybody read the Bible, and would insist upon their worshipping God as he pleased, not in the way they believed to be right.

I have already told you that many very good men wished a great many changes to be made in the manner of worship, in teaching the people, and letting them read; besides taking some of the lands and money of the convents, and forcing the clergymen to use the rest of their riches properly. Besides, they wished the clergymen to be allowed to marry.

The chief persons who wished for these changes were—Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; Latimer, Bishop of Worcester; Shaxton, Bishop of Salisbury; all very learned men; and they had most of the gentlemen and many of the people with them.

Those who followed after these wise men were called Protestants.

But there were many great and good men who thought that the clergymen might alter some small things for the better, but they would not consent to pulling down the convents, nor taking their lands and money, nor to changing the way of worshipping God, nor to the king’s being at the head of the Church of England, instead of the Pope. These men were called Papists.

At the head of them were—Sir Thomas More; Tonstall, Bishop of Durham; Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury; and most of the lords in the kingdom.

Now King Henry, although he chose to change the way of worship a little, and liked very well, as I said before, to get all the lands and money into his hands, still wanted to go on with some of the worst customs of the old clergymen, and, according to his cruel temper, he made some very hard laws, and threatened to burn people alive who would not believe what he believed, and worship God in the way he chose.

Many people, who could hardly understand what the king meant, were really burnt alive, according to that wicked law: but the thing that showed Henry’s badness more than any other, was his ordering Sir Thomas More’s head to be cut off, because he would not do as the king wished, nor say what he did not think was true. But I will write a chapter about that good man on purpose, after we have done with this wicked King Henry.

Besides putting Sir Thomas More to death, the king cut off the heads of Bishop Fisher, the Marquis of Exeter, Lord Montague, Sir Edward Nevil, and, most shocking of all, the head of an old lady with grey hairs, named Margaret Plantagenet, only because her son, Reginald Pole, afterwards called Cardinal Pole, would not come to England when Henry invited him.

I dare say you are tired of reading of so much wickedness. I am sure I am tired of writing it, and I will only mention one thing more. A few days before Henry died he ordered the Earl of Surrey’s head to be cut off.

This Earl of Surrey was the most polite and pleasant, and clever young gentleman in England. But Henry was afraid that he would give trouble to his little son after his death. He was also going to cut off the head of Surrey’s father, the old Duke of Norfolk, but the king died that night, before that was to have been done, and so the Duke was saved. I do not believe that there was one person in England who could be sorry when Henry died. Even now, whenever his name is mentioned, we think of everything that is wicked.

CHAPTER XL.
How Sir Thomas More studied law, and became an orator; the wise and good men who visited him; how he was for some time in the King’s favor, but was afterwards imprisoned and put to death because he would not do everything the King wished.

Well, my dear little Arthur, we have done with the cruel King Henry the Eighth, and I am going to keep my promise, and write a little chapter about Sir Thomas More.

We read in the chapter about Henry the Seventh, that in his reign the young gentlemen of England began to study and read, and even to write books, instead of spending all their time in fighting or hunting. And I told you that Thomas Linacre, the great physician, taught a great many gentlemen at Oxford to read and write Greek, and that Sir Thomas More was one of his scholars.

Sir Thomas More’s father wished him to be a lawyer, and, though he did not like it himself, he left his other learning and studied law to please his father, and he became a great lawyer.

He was handsome and good-natured, very cheerful, and fond of laughing. He had a pleasant voice, and it is said that he was the first Englishman who could be called an ORATOR, that is, a man who can speak well before a great number of others (as a clergyman does when he preaches in a large church), and either teach them or persuade them to think or do as he wishes.

But what you will like best to hear is, how good he was to his little son and his daughters: he used to laugh with them and talk with them, and as he had a pretty garden round his house at Chelsea, he used to walk and play with them there.

Besides this, he was so kind to them, that he had the best masters in England to teach them different languages, and music; and they used to have very pleasant concerts, when his wife and daughters used to play on different instruments, and sing to him. He was very fond of painting, and had the famous painter, Hans Holbein, in his house a long time.

Sometimes he and his children read pleasant books together, and he was particularly careful to instruct his little girls, and they read and wrote Latin very well, besides being very good workwomen with their needles, and understanding how to take care of a house.

You may think what a happy family this was, and how much all the children and the parents loved one another. All the best men that were then alive used to come now and then and see Sir Thomas More and family. There was the famous Erasmus, whom I mentioned before; and Bishop Tonstall, who often contrived to save people from the cruel Henry, when he had ordered them to be burnt; and Dean Colet, who began that good school at St. Paul’s in London, for boys whose parents were too poor to have them properly taught. You may think how happy Sir Thomas More was at Chelsea, loving his wife and children, who were all good, and most of them clever, and seeing his good and wise friends every day.

But you know that God gives men duties to do for the country they live in, as well as for themselves; and as Sir Thomas More was a lawyer, he was obliged to attend to his business, and when he became a judge, it took up so much of his time that he could not be so much at his house at Chelsea as he wished. It was still worse when Henry the Eighth made him Lord Chancellor of England, and required most of his spare time to talk with him, instead of letting him go home.

For some time King Henry liked him very much, and everybody was in hopes that he might make the king a better man.

But Henry was too bad and too cruel to take advice. The first dislike he showed to Sir Thomas More was because that honest man did not wish him to send away his good wife, Catherine of Arragon, and marry another woman while she was alive. Afterwards he was angry with him because he would not leave off thinking that the Pope was head of the Christian Church, and say what Henry pleased, though he tried every means to persuade him to do so.

At last the king sent him to prison on that account, and kept him there a whole year, and sent all sorts of people to him, to try and get him to say the king was in the right, whatever he might say or do, and particularly that it was right for him to be called the Supreme Head of the Church of England.

But More would not tell a lie. He knew his duty to God required him to speak the truth; and as he thought the king wrong, he said so boldly. This so enraged the cruel tyrant, that he determined to put him to death; but he made believe to be sorry, and said he should have a fair trial, and sent for him out of prison, and made a number of noblemen and gentlemen ask him the same things over again that he had been asked in prison before. And as he still gave the same answers, the king ordered his head to be cut off.

In all the whole year he had been in prison he had only been allowed to see his wife once; and his eldest daughter Margaret, who was married to a Mr. Roper, once also. The cruel king now ordered that he should be kept in prison, without seeing any of his family again before his death; but Margaret Roper waited in the street, and knelt down near where he must pass, that he might give her his blessing. Then she determined to try to kiss her own dear father before he died; so, without minding the soldiers who were carrying him to prison, or the crowd which were standing round, she ran past them all and caught her father in her arms, and kissed him over and over again, and cried so bitterly that even the soldiers could not help crying too.

The only thing More begged of the king on the day he was beheaded was, that his dear daughter might be allowed to go to his funeral; and he felt happy when they told him all his family might go.

After Sir Thomas More’s head was cut off, the cruel king ordered it to be stuck up on a pole on London bridge; but Margaret Roper soon contrived to get it down. She kept it carefully till she died, and then it was buried with her.

As long as there are any good people in the world, Sir Thomas More and his daughter will be loved whenever their names are heard.

CHAPTER XLI.
EDWARD VI.—1547 to 1553.
How Edward the Sixth was taught to be a Protestant; how the Protector Somerset went to war in Scotland; how he caused his brother to be beheaded, and was afterwards beheaded himself; how the Duke of Northumberland persuaded the King to leave the kingdom to Lady Jane Grey.

When King Henry the Eighth died, his only son, who was but nine years old, was made king under the name of Edward the Sixth.

Of course the little prince could not do much of a king’s proper business himself; but his guardians, and especially his mother’s brother, managed the kingdom tolerably well for him at first.

The little boy was very gentle and fond of learning. He was serious and clever too: he wrote down in a book every day what he had been about, and seemed to wish to do what was right; so the people thought they might have a really good king.

I told you, when I mentioned the alteration in religion in Henry the Eighth’s reign, that though nearly all the nobles continued Papists, yet many of the gentlemen and the people were Protestants. Now King Edward’s uncles and teachers were Protestants, and they taught the young king to be one also, and laws were made by which all the people in England were ordered to be Protestants too.

The Bible was allowed to be read by everybody who chose it, in English, and the clergymen were ordered to say the prayers in English instead of Latin, which very few could understand. The king was declared to be the head of the Church; clergymen were allowed to marry; and those persons whom Henry the Eighth had put in prison were set free.

These things were not only good for the people then, but they have been of use ever since. As the English clergymen, and schools, and colleges, have had no foreign Pope to interfere with them, they have been able to teach such things as are good and useful to England. Clergymen who are married, and have families living in the country among the farmers and cottagers, may set good examples and teach useful things, by the help of their wives and children, which the clergy who were not married could never do.

And as for reading the Bible, and saying prayers in English, it must be better for us all to learn our duties, and speak of our wants to God, in the language we understand best.

For these reasons the reign of Edward the Sixth is always reckoned a very good one for England.

There were, however, some very wrong things done in it, and some unhappy ones, owing to the king’s being so very young.

I told you he was only nine years old when he came to be king. Those in whose care his father had placed him and the kingdom, allowed one of the king’s uncles, the Duke of Somerset, to become his chief guardian and adviser, and he is always called the Lord Protector Somerset.

A quarrel which Henry the Eighth had begun with Scotland was carried on by Somerset, who went himself to Scotland with an army, and beat the Scots at the battle of Pinkie; but the war did no good, and was not even honourable to England. Somerset offered to make peace if the Scottish lords would allow their young Queen Mary to marry our young King Edward, when the children were old enough, and then England and Scotland might have been one kingdom from that time.

I should tell you that the last king of Scotland, James the Fifth, was dead, and that his widow was a French lady, and ruled the kingdom, with the help of the Scottish nobles, for her little daughter, who was five years old. She and the nobles at that time were Papists, and would not allow Mary to marry the Protestant King Edward of England, but sent her to France, where she married a French prince, and was Queen of France for a little while.

When the Protector Somerset came back from Scotland, the great Lords at first seemed glad to see him; but by degrees they made the young king think very ill of him. Besides, many hated Somerset for his pride. He pulled down several churches and bishops’ palaces, to make room for his own palace in the Strand. The great building that now stands in the same place is still called Somerset House.

I am sorry to tell you that one of the Protector’s enemies was his own brother, Lord Seymour of Sudely, a very brave but bad man, who was the High Admiral of England.

Now the Admiral wished to be the king’s guardian instead of Somerset; and he was trying to do this by force. So he was seized and tried; and his own brother, the Protector, signed the order for him to be beheaded.

Somerset did this to save his own life; but soon after this his enemies grew too strong for him, and Lord Warwick, who had become the chief ruler, got the king to sign an order to behead Somerset.

Although he was a king, the poor boy must have been very unhappy. He had been persuaded to order his own two uncles to be beheaded; and although he had two sisters, he could not make friends with them, because they were brought up to think all he did was wrong.

The Protector Somerset accusing his Brother before King Edward VI.

The eldest was the daughter of Henry the Eighth’s first wife, Catherine of Arragon. She was twenty-one years older than the king, and she was a Papist, and hated all the Protestants, and the king most of all.

The king’s second sister was the daughter of poor Queen Anne Boleyn. Her name was Elizabeth; she was a Protestant, and was only four years older than her brother, who loved her, and used to call her his “sweet sister Temperance.”

He had one cousin, whom he saw often, and who was very beautiful and good, and loved learning; her name was Lady Jane Grey. I shall have a good deal to tell you about her, and how she used to read and learn as well as the little king.

But I must now tell you what happened when the Protector was beheaded. Although he had offended the great lords, and they had persuaded the king that he deserved to die, the people loved him. He had always been kind to them, and the laws made while he was Protector were all good for England. On the day when his head was cut off on Tower-Hill—it was early in the morning—a great many people were collected to see him die. Suddenly one of the king’s messengers rode up to the scaffold where Somerset stood ready for the executioner; the people hoped the king had sent a pardon for his uncle, and shouted out, “A pardon! a pardon! God save the king!” But it was not true; there was no pardon. Somerset was a little moved when the people shouted, but soon became quite quiet. He spoke kindly and thankfully to some of his friends who were shedding tears near him, and then laid his head upon the block, and was beheaded.

After this time the Earl of Warwick managed the country for the king. But the poor young prince did not live long. Soon after his uncle’s death he began to cough and look very ill, and everybody saw that he was likely to die.

Now the person who was to reign over England after Edward’s death was his eldest sister, the Princess Mary, and, as I told you, she was a Papist, or, as we now call it, a Roman Catholic.

The Earl of Warwick, who had been made Duke of Northumberland, had a son named Lord Guildford Dudley, who married the king’s good and beautiful cousin, Lady Jane Grey. These young people were both Protestants, and Northumberland hoped that the people would like to have Lady Jane for their queen, in case the young king should die, better than the Roman Catholic Princess Mary; and then he thought that, as he was the father of Jane’s husband, he might rule the kingdom in her name, and get all the power for himself.

Poor King Edward now grew weaker and weaker: he was taken to Greenwich for change of air, and seemed at first a little better, so that the people, who really loved their gentle and sweet-tempered young king, began to hope he might live.

But Northumberland knew that Edward was dying, and he never left him, that he might persuade him to make a will, leaving the kingdom to his dear cousin, Lady Jane Grey, after his death.

This was very wrong, because the king is only placed at the head of the kingdom, to do justice and to exercise mercy. He cannot buy or sell the kingdom, or any part of it. He cannot change the owner of the smallest bit of land without the authority of the whole parliament, made up of the king himself, and the lords and gentlemen of the commons along with him. Of course, therefore, Northumberland was wrong, in persuading the young king to make such a will without the advice of parliament. You will read presently how Northumberland was punished.

Soon after this will was made poor Edward the Sixth died. He was not quite sixteen years old. He was so mild and gentle, that everybody loved him. He took such pains to learn, and do what was right, that the people were in hopes of having a really good and wise king. But it pleased God that he should die. His last prayer as he lay a dying was, “O Lord, save thy chosen people of England. Defend this realm from papistry, and maintain thy true religion.”

CHAPTER XLII.
THE STORY OF LADY JANE GREY.
How Lady Jane Grey was called Queen for ten days, and was afterwards imprisoned; how she was fond of learning; how she was persuaded to become Queen against her will; and how she and her husband were put to death by Queen Mary.

Two days after King Edward died, Northumberland had Lady Jane Grey proclaimed, or called queen in London.

On the same day the Lady Mary’s friends had her proclaimed at Norwich.

Some people would have liked Lady Jane best, first, because their dear young King Edward had wished her to be queen; and next, because she was beautiful, virtuous, and wise, and, above all, a Protestant. But then they feared and hated her father-in-law, Northumberland. They remembered that he had persuaded King Edward to order the Protector Somerset to be beheaded. They knew that he was cruel, and jealous, and revengeful; they thought that he only pretended to be a Protestant, and because he was such a bad man, they were afraid to let his son’s wife be queen.

One by one all Northumberland’s friends left him and joined the Lady Mary, who was the rightful queen; and after Lady Jane Grey had been called queen for ten days, she went to her private home at Sion House, a great deal happier than the day when they took her away to make her a queen.

It would have been well if Queen Mary had left her cousin there. But she was of a cruel and revengeful temper, and not content with sending Northumberland to prison in the Tower of London, for setting up her cousin as queen, she sent Lady Jane and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, also to the Tower.

But I must tell you a great deal more about Lady Jane Grey, and I will begin her story at the time when she was very young indeed.

As she was only a few months older than her cousin Edward the Sixth, she had the same teachers in everything, and she was like him in gentleness, goodness, and kindness. Her masters found that she was still cleverer than the little king, and that she learned Latin and Greek too more readily than he did. She knew French, and Spanish, and Italian perfectly, and loved music and painting. She used to thank God that she had strict parents and a kind and gentle schoolmaster.

She was married when very young to Lord Guildford Dudley, only a few weeks before King Edward died; and she was very sorry when she found out that her husband wanted to be king.

When King Edward died, Lady Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, and her husband’s father, the Duke of Northumberland, went to Lady Jane, and fell upon their knees before her, and offered her the crown of England, at the same time telling her that her cousin the king, whom she loved very much, was dead. On hearing this she fainted, and then refused the crown, saying, that while the ladies Mary and Elizabeth were alive, nobody else could have a right to it.

Lady Jane Grey refusing the Crown.

At last, however, though the two dukes could not prevail upon her to allow herself to be called Queen of England, her husband and her mother begged her so hard to be queen, that she consented.

I have already told you that she was only called queen for ten days, and that Queen Mary sent her and her husband to the Tower.

They were not allowed to see one another in their prison. However, as they were not beheaded immediately, people hoped that Mary would spare them. But she was too cruel. After she had kept them closely shut up for nearly eight months, she ordered both their heads to be cut off. Dudley was to be executed on Tower-Hill, in sight of all the people; Lady Jane in a court within the Tower, with only a few persons round her.

When Lady Jane knew this, she had no wish to do anything but prepare for her own death next day. She wrote a letter to her father, to take leave of him, in which she said, “My guiltless blood may cry before the Lord, mercy to the innocent!” She left her Greek Testament to her sister Catherine, with a Greek letter written on a blank leaf in it.

Early in the morning of the 12th day of February Lady Jane stood by the iron-barred window of her prison, and saw her dear husband led through the Tower gate to be beheaded. Not long afterwards she was praying near the same spot, and saw a common cart coming from the gate, and in it her husband’s body, all covered with blood.

When she was taken from prison to be beheaded, she spoke kindly and gently to everybody near her. As Sir John Brydges, the keeper of the Tower, led her from her room to the scaffold, he asked her for a keepsake, and she gave him a little book, in which she had written three sentences, one in Greek, one in Latin, and one in English.

She spoke to the officers and servants before she was beheaded, saying that she had never intended to do wrong, that she only obeyed her parents in being queen, and that she trusted to be forgiven.

Her maidens then took off some part of her dress; she knelt down and laid her head upon the block, and her beautiful head was cut off before she was seventeen years old.

The people now were sorry they had allowed Mary to be queen, for they thought that if she could order these two good and innocent young people to be put to death she would not spare anybody whom she might happen to hate. And so it proved, as you will read in the next chapter.

CHAPTER XLIII.
MARY.—1553 to 1558.
How Sir Thomas Wyat rebelled against Queen Mary, but was overcome, and he and many others were put to death; how she offended the people by marrying the King of Spain; and how a great many people were burnt for being Protestants.

Mary, the daughter of Henry the Eighth, and of Catherine of Arragon, his first wife, was so cruel that she is always called Bloody Mary.

She was at Hunsdon when her brother died; but instead of going directly to London to be made queen, she went first to Norwich, for fear of the Duke of Northumberland, and afterwards to London, as you read in the last chapter.

One of the very first things she did was to order the heads of the Duke of Northumberland and several other gentlemen to be cut off. She then offended the people by forbidding them to say their public prayers or to read the Bible in English: she ordered all the clergymen to send away their wives, and she determined to restore the Roman Catholic worship again.

Many now began to be sorry that Mary was queen, and a number of people collected under the command of Sir Thomas Wyat and the Duke of Suffolk, to try to drive Mary out, and release Lady Jane, for this was before she was put to death. At one time Mary was in great danger, but Wyat’s men fell away from him, and he was taken and put to death.

The hard-hearted queen determined to be revenged on those who had been with Sir Thomas Wyat. Besides beheading Lady Jane, as I have told you, she ordered the heads of the Duke of Suffolk and of many more gentlemen to be cut off, and stuck up the heads on poles all about the streets. She had fifty-two gentlemen hanged, all on the same day, and the people called the day Black Monday. She soon sent to fetch her sister Elizabeth from her house at Ashbridge, and on her coming to London sent her to the Tower. For two months Elizabeth was kept close in prison, whilst her enemies strove hard to have her beheaded. At last her friends prevailed, and she went to live at Hatfield.

The next thing Mary did to offend the people of England was to marry the Spanish prince, who was soon after Philip the Second, King of Spain. He was as ill-tempered and as cruel as the queen, and encouraged her in hating the Protestants, and in trying to make all the English people Roman Catholics again.

The queen’s cousin, Cardinal Pole, was soon sent from Rome by the Pope. And one day Queen Mary and King Philip, with the nobles and commons, knelt before the Cardinal, and confessed the wickedness of England in casting off the power of the Pope. So the Cardinal forgave them, and received England back to the Romish Church.

The persons who helped Mary most in her cruelty were Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and Bishop Bonner. These two men were the most cruel I ever heard of, and determined to burn everybody who would not agree with the queen in her religion.

The first person Gardiner ordered to be burnt alive was one of the clergymen belonging to the great church of St. Paul in London; his name was Rogers. That good man would not do what he thought wrong towards God to please either Gardiner or the queen, so they sent him to the great square called Smithfield, and there had him tied to a stake, and a fire lighted all around him, so as to kill him. As he was going along to be burnt, his wife and his ten little children met him, and kissed him, and took leave of him, for Gardiner would not let them go to him while he kept him in prison before his death.

The next was Dr. Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester. He died saying prayers, and preaching to the people round about him, and thanking God for giving him strength to speak the truth, and keep His commandments.

Altogether, there were nearly three hundred men and women burnt by Queen Mary’s orders; but I will only tell you the names of three more, for I hate to write about such wicked doings.

You remember I mentioned Bishop Latimer among the good men who were Protestants. He had come to be a very old man in Mary’s reign; but she would not spare him, but sent him with another bishop, a friend of his, as good and learned as himself, named Ridley, to Oxford, where they were burned together, only because they were Protestants.

At last Mary determined to order the death of the wise and good Archbishop Cranmer. He had always been very gentle and rather fearful, and he wrote to Mary, and tried by every means to get her to allow him to live. They made him hope to be spared if he would give up his religion, and promise to be a Papist. As soon as he had been so weak as to do this, she ordered him to be burned at Oxford. When he was taken to be tied to the stake, he stretched out his right hand that it might burn first, because it had written through fear what he did not mean. He took off all his clothes but his shirt, and with a very cheerful countenance he began to praise God aloud, and to pray for pardon for the faults he might have committed during a long life. His patience in bearing the torment of burning, and his courage in dying, made all the people love him as much as it made them hate the queen and Bonner.

Nothing did well in this cruel queen’s reign. She went to war with France to please her husband the king of Spain, and in that war the French took Calais from the English, who had kept it ever since Edward the Third’s reign.[2]

Queen Mary died the same year in which she lost Calais, after being queen only five years.