English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 1: From Celt to Tudor

by Donald Grant Mitchell

King. Nay it will please him well, Kate. It shall please him, Kate, and upon that, I kiss your hand and call you “my Queen.”

Kate. Dat is not de fashion pour les ladies of France—to kiss before marriage.

King. O Kate, [loftily] nice customs courtesy to great Kings:—here comes your father.

And these two did marry; the Queen being—as Shakespeare represents—in a large sense, the spoil of war. Out of this union sprung the next King, Henry VI., crowned when an infant. But this does not close the story of Katharine: three years after the King’s death, she married a Welsh knight—named Sir Owen Tudor. (He, poor man, lost his head, some years after, for his temerity in marrying a King’s widow.) But from the second marriage of Katharine, was born a son who became the father of that Henry VII., who sixty years later conquered Richard III. on Bosworth field—brought to an end the wars of York and Lancaster, and gave his own surname of Tudor to his son Henry VIII., to the great Elizabeth and to bloody Mary.

Seeing thus how the name of Tudor came into the royal family, through that Katharine of Valois, whose courtship is written in the play of Henry V., I will try on the same page to fasten in mind the cause of the great civil wars of York and Lancaster, or of the white and red roses, which desolated England in the heart of the fifteenth century.[62]

You will recall my having spoken of Chaucer as a favorite in the household of John of Gaunt, and as an inmate also in the household of John’s older brother, Lionel. You will remember, too, that Henry IV., son of John of Gaunt, succeeded the hapless and handsome Richard II. on the throne; but his right was disputed, and with a great deal of reason, by the heirs of the older brother, Lionel (who had title of Duke of Clarence). There was not however power and courage enough to contest the claim, until the kingship of young Henry VI.—crowned when an infant—offered opportunity. Thereafter and thereby came the broils, the apprehensions, the doubts, the conspiracies, the battles, which made England one of the worst of places to live in: all this bitterness between York and Lancaster growing out of the rival claims of the heirs of our old acquaintances Lionel and John of Gaunt, whom we met in the days of Chaucer.

Joan of Arc and Richard III.

If we look for any literary illumination of this period, we shall scarce find it, except we go again to the historic plays of Shakespeare: The career of Henry VI. supplies to him the groundwork for three dramas: the first, dealing with the English armies in France, which, after Henry V.’s death are beaten back and forth by French forces, waked to new bravery under the strange enthusiasm and heroic leadership of Joan of Arc. Of course she comes in for her picture in Shakespeare’s story: but he gives us an ignoble one (though not so bad as Voltaire’s in the ribald poem of La Pucelle).

No Englishman of that day, or of Shakespeare’s day, could do justice to the fiery, Gallic courage, the self-devotion, the religious ennoblement of that earnest, gallant soul who was called the Maid of Orleans. A far better notion of her presence and power than Shakespeare gave is brought to mind by that recent French painting of Bastien-Lepage—so well known by engraving—which aims to set forth the vision and the voices that came to her amid the forest silence and shadows. Amid those shadows she stands—startled: a strong, sweet figure of a peasant maiden; stoutly clad and simply; capable of harvest-work with the strongest of her sisterhood; yet not coarse; redeemed through every fibre of body and soul by a light that shines in her eye, looking dreamily upward; seeing things others see not; hoping things others hope not, and with clenched hand putting emphasis to the purpose—which the hope and the vision kindle; pitying her poor France, and nerved to help her—as she did—all the weary and the troublesome days through, till the shameful sacrifice at English hands, on the market-place of Rouen, closed her life and her story.

The two closing portions of the Henry VI. dramas relate to home concerns. There is much blood in them and tedium too (if one dare say this), and flashes of wit—a crazy tangle of white and red roses in that English garden—cleared up at last in Shakespeare’s own way, when Richard III.[63] comes, in drama of his own, and crookedness, and Satanry of his own, and laughs his mocking laugh over the corpses he makes of kings and queens and princes; and at last in Bosworth field, upon the borders of Warwickshire and near to the old Roman Watling Street, the wicked hunchback, fighting like a demon, goes down under the sword-thrust of that Henry (VII.) of Richmond, who, as I have said, was grandson to Katharine of Valois, of the coquettish courtship.