But who was Anne Mortimer that no honest Lancastrian could hear her name with patience?
In Shakspeare’s Henry IV. when the Percies revolt against Henry of Lancaster, Hotspur says he will find the king asleep and holla Mortimer in his ear; he will have a starling taught to say nothing but Mortimer and give it to the king.
What was there in the name of Mortimer to startle so rough a soldier as Henry IV.?
Lionel duke of Clarence was the third son of Edward III. older therefore than John of Gaunt. Lionel married an Irish girl named Burke. They had a daughter Philippa who married Edmund Mortimer earl of March. The grand-children of Edmund and Philippa were a second Edmund Mortimer and Anne. It was this Edmund whose name Hotspur threatened to holla in the ear of the sleeping king. Edmund Mortimer was at that moment king by right, according to the laws of succession to the crown then as now. The House of Mortimer however could not vindicate its right against two such powerful usurpers as Henry IV. and Henry V. But their successor Henry VI. was one of the weakest of monarchs, and under him the Mortimers began to hold up their heads. By that time they had become Plantagenets again. Edmund had died without issue; and Anne was the last of her family. She married as I have said, Richard Plantagenet earl of Cambridge. Their son was Richard duke of York who won the first battle of Saint Albans, and came near seizing the crown. His son Edward IV. did seize it. He married that charming widow Lady Grey daughter of Jaqueline of Luxembourg. (See Two Jaquelines.) The daughter of that marriage was Elizabeth Plantagenet who married Henry Tudor, Henry VII. It is there that Plantagenet becomes Tudor. Their daughter, Margaret Tudor married James Stuart, James IV. of Scotland, and it is there that Tudor becomes Stuart. The son of James and Margaret, was another James Stuart, James V. who married Mary of Guise of that famous House of Lorraine the upshoot of which is a remarkable event in French history. It took two assassinations to save the last of the Valois from having the crown snatched from his head by that able and unscrupulous family. The daughter of James V. and Mary of Guise was Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. She married her half-cousin Henry Stuart lord Darnley who like herself was grandchild of Margaret Tudor, and next to herself, heir to the English crown. The son of Mary and Henry Stuart was James VI. of Scotland and first of England. He married Anne of Denmark, and their daughter Elizabeth Stuart married Frederic count Palatine. The daughter of Elizabeth and Frederic was Sophia who married Ernest Augustus, elector of Hanover, and became the mother of George I. George III. was great-grandson of George I. and Victoria is granddaughter of George III.
Thus have we traced the pedigree of the Queen from Peter-the-cruel.
After so fatiguing a stretch, it is a comfort to take breath and reflect that thus far the Queen has not developed the objectionable traits of her ancestor. She has never been known to poison anybody, nor has a single case of midnight assassination been made out against her.
John Wiclif
IT has been said that three men struck telling blows at the Roman hierarchy: Philip the fourth, John Wiclif and Martin Luther: a Frenchman, an Englishman and a German. The first opened the way for the other two. Philip IV. called the fair, that is the handsome, was the greatest of the Capetien kings, but his greatness was intellectual only. If he contributed largely to lead mankind out of the bog of superstition in which they were swamped, he did it simply to gratify his own rapacity and ambition. He was the first monarch to challenge the Church to a combat à outrance; and he succeeded in leading her captive literally as well as figuratively.
It is useless to try, as some quasi historians do, to explain the career of Wiclif without taking into consideration the state of the Church at that epoch; and if the reader is not informed on that point, he will not profit much by this essay till he has read, marked, learned and inwardly digested the previous one on the Captivity of Babylon.