THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND
Volume One of Three
FROM THE INVASION OF JULIUS CÆSAR
TO THE END OF THE REIGN OF
JAMES THE SECOND,
BY DAVID HUME, ESQ.
1688
London: James S. Virtue, City Road and Ivy Lane
New York: 26 John
Street
1860
And
Philadelphia:
J. B.
Lippincott & Co.
March 17, 1901
In Three Volumes:
VOLUME ONE: The History Of England From The Invasion Of Julius VOLUME TWO: Continued from the Reign VOLUME THREE: From the Accession of George III. to the |
VOLUME ONE
Part B.
From Henry III. to Richard III.
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
CHAPTER XII.
HENRY III.
1216.
Most sciences, in proportion as they increase and improve, invent methods
by which they facilitate their reasonings, and, employing general
theorems, are enabled to comprehend, in a few propositions, a great number
of inferences and conclusions. History, also, being a collection of facts
which are multiplying without end, is obliged to adopt such arts of
abridgment, to retain the more material events, and to drop all the minute
circumstances, which are only interesting during the time, or to the
persons engaged in the transactions. This truth is nowhere more evident
than with regard to the reign upon which we are going to enter. What
mortal could have the patience to write or read a long detail of such
frivolous events as those with which it is filled, or attend to a tedious
narrative which would follow, through a series of fifty-six years, the
caprices and weaknesses of so mean a prince as Henry? The chief reason why
Protestant writers have been so anxious to spread out the incidents of
this reign, is in order to expose the rapacity, ambition, and artifices of
the court of Rome, and to prove, that the great dignitaries of the
Catholic church, while they pretended to have nothing in view but the
salvation of souls, had bent all their attention to the acquisition of
riches, and were restrained by no sense of justice or of honor in the
pursuit of that great object.[*] But this conclusion would readily be
allowed them, though it were not illustrated by such a detail of
uninteresting incidents; and follows indeed, by an evident necessity, from
the very situation in which that church was placed with regard to the rest
of Europe. For, besides that ecclesiastical power, as it can always cover
its operations under a cloak of sanctity, and attacks men on the side
where they dare not employ their reason, lies less under control than
civil government; besides this general cause, I say, the pope and his
courtiers were foreigners to most of the churches which they governed;
they could not possibly have any other object than to pillage the
provinces for present gain; and as they lived at a distance, they would be
little awed by shame or remorse in employing every lucrative expedient
which was suggested to them. England being one of the most remote
provinces attached to the Romish hierarchy, as well as the most prone to
superstition, felt severely, during this reign, while its patience was not
yet fully exhausted, the influence of these causes, and we shall often
have occasion to touch cursorily upon such incidents. But we shall not
attempt to comprehend every transaction transmitted to us: and till the
end of the reign, when the events become more memorable, we shall not
always observe an exact chronological order in our narration.
The earl of Pembroke, who at the time of John’s death, was mareschal of
England, was, by his office, at the head of the armies, and consequently,
during a state of civil wars and convulsions, at the head of the
government; and it happened, fortunately for the young monarch and for the
nation, that the power could not have been intrusted into more able and
more faithful hands. This nobleman, who had maintained his loyalty
unshaken to John during the lowest fortune of that monarch, determined to
support the authority of the infant prince; nor was he dismayed at the
number and violence of his enemies. Sensible that Henry, agreeably to the
prejudices of the times, would not be deemed a sovereign till crowned and
anointed by a churchman, he immediately carried the young prince to
Glocester, where the ceremony of coronation was performed, in the presence
of Gualo, the legate, and of a few noblemen, by the bishops of Winchester
and Bath.[*] As the concurrence of the papal authority was requisite to
support the tottering throne, Henry was obliged to swear fealty to the
pope, and renew that homage to which his father had already subjected the
kingdom:[**] and in order to enlarge the authority of Pembroke, and to
give him a more regular and legal title to it, a general council of the
barons was soon after summoned at Bristol, where that nobleman was chosen
protector of the realm.
Pembroke, that he might reconcile all men to the government of his pupil,
made him grant a new charter of liberties, which, though mostly copied
from the former concessions extorted from John, contains some alterations
which may be deemed remarkable.[*] The full privilege of elections in the
clergy, granted by the late king, was not confirmed, nor the liberty of
going out of the kingdom without the royal consent: whence we may
conclude, that Pembroke and the barons, jealous of the ecclesiastical
power, both were desirous of renewing the king’s claim to issue a congé
d’élire to the monks and chapters, and thought it requisite to put some
check to the frequent appeals to Rome. But what may chiefly surprise us
is, that the obligation to which John had subjected himself, of obtaining
the consent of the great council before he levied any aids or scutages
upon the nation, was omitted; and this article was even declared hard and
severe, and was expressly left to future deliberation. But we must
consider, that, though this limitation may perhaps appear to us the most
momentous in the whole charter of John, it was not regarded in that light
by the ancient barons, who were more jealous in guarding against
particular acts of violence in the crown than against such general
impositions which, unless they were evidently reasonable and necessary,
could scarcely, without general consent, be levied upon men who had arms
in their hands, and who could repel any act of oppression by which they
were all immediately affected. We accordingly find, that Henry, in the
course of his reign, while he gave frequent occasions for complaint with
regard to his violations of the Great Charter, never attempted, by his own
will, to levy any aids or scutages, though he was often reduced to great
necessities, and was refused supply by his people.
So much easier was it for him to transgress the law, when individuals
alone were affected, than even to exert his acknowledged prerogatives,
where the interest of the whole body was concerned.
This charter was again confirmed by the king in the ensuing year, with the
addition of some articles to prevent the oppressions by sheriffs; and also
with an additional charter of forests, a circumstance of great moment in
those ages, when hunting was so much the occupation of the nobility, and
when the king comprehended so considerable a part of the kingdom within
his forests, which he governed by peculiar and arbitrary laws. All the
forests, which had been enclosed since the reign of Henry II., were
disafforested, and new perambulations were appointed for that purpose;
offences in the forests were declared to be no longer capital, but
punishable by fine, imprisonment, and more gentle penalties; and all the
proprietors of land recovered the power of cutting and using their own
wood at their pleasure.
Thus these famous charters were brought nearly to the shape in which they
have ever since stood; and they were, during many generations, the
peculiar favorites of the English nation, and esteemed the most sacred
rampart to national liberty and independence. As they secured the rights
of all orders of men, they were anxiously defended by all, and became the
basis, in a manner, of the English monarchy, and a kind of original
contract which both limited the authority of the king and insured the
conditional allegiance of his subjects. Though often violated, they were
still claimed by the nobility and people; and as no precedents were
supposed valid that infringed them, they rather acquired than lost
authority, from the frequent attempts made against them in several ages by
regal and arbitrary power.
While Pembroke, by renewing and confirming the Great Charter, gave so much
satisfaction and security to the nation in general, he also applied
himself successfully to individuals; he wrote letters, in the king’s name,
to all the malcontent barons; in which he represented to them that,
whatever jealousy and animosity they might have entertained against the
late king, a young prince, the lineal heir of their ancient monarchs, had
now succeeded to the throne, without succeeding either to the resentments
or principles of his predecessor; that the desperate expedient, which they
had employed, of calling in a foreign potentate, had, happily for them as
well as for the nation, failed of entire success, and it was still in
their power, by a speedy return to their duty, to restore the independence
of the kingdom, and to secure that liberty for which they so zealously
contended; that as all past offences of the barons were now buried in
oblivion, they ought, on their part, to forget their complaints against
their late sovereign, who, if he had been anywise blamable in his conduct
had left to his son the salutary warning, to avoid the paths which had led
to such fatal extremities: and that having now obtained a charter for
their liberties, it was their interest to show, by their conduct, that
this acquisition was not incompatible with their allegiance, and that the
rights of king and people, so far from being hostile and opposite, might
mutually support and sustain each other.[*]
These considerations, enforced by the character of honor and constancy
which Pembroke had ever maintained, had a mighty influence on the barons;
and most of them began secretly to negotiate with him, and many of them
openly returned to their duty. The diffidence which Lewis discovered of
their fidelity, forwarded this general propension towards the king; and
when the French prince refused the government of the castle of Hertford to
Robert Fitz-Walter, who had been so active against the late king, and who
claimed that fortress as his property, they plainly saw that the English
were excluded from every trust, and that foreigners had engrossed all the
confidence and affection of their new sovereign.[**] The excommunication,
too, denounced by the legate against all the adherents of Lewis, failed
not, in the turn which men’s dispositions had taken, to produce a mighty
effect upon them; and they were easily persuaded to consider a cause as
impious, for which they had already entertained an unsurmountable
aversion.[***] Though Lewis made a journey to France, and brought over
succors from that kingdom [****] he found, on his return, that his party
was still more weakened by the desertion of his English confederates, and
that the death of John had, contrary to his expectations, given an
incurable wound to his cause. The earls of Salisbury Arundel, and
Warrenne, together with William Mareschal, eldest son of the protector,
had embraced Henry’s party; and every English nobleman was plainly
watching for an opportunity of returning to his allegiance.
Pembroke was so much strengthened by these accessions, that he ventured to
invest Mount Sorel; though, upon the approach of the count of Perche with
the French army, he desisted from his enterprise, and raised the siege.[*]
The count, elated with this success, marched to Lincoln; and being
admitted into the town, he began to attack the castle, which he soon
reduced to extremity. The protector summoned all his forces from every
quarter, in order to relieve a place of such importance; and he appeared
so much superior to the French, that they shut themselves up within the
city, and resolved to act upon the defensive.[**] But the garrison of the
castle, having received a strong reënforcement, made a vigorous sally upon
the besiegers; while the English army, by concert, assaulted them in the
same instant from without, mounted the walls by scalade, and bearing down
all resistance, entered the city sword in hand. Lincoln was delivered over
to be pillaged; the French army was totally routed; the count de Perche,
with only two persons more, was killed, but many of the chief commanders,
and about four hundred knights, were made prisoners by the English.[***]
So little blood was shed in this important action, which decided the fate
of one of the most powerful kingdoms in Europe; and such wretched soldiers
were those ancient barons, who yet were unacquainted with every thing but
arms!
Prince Lewis was informed of this fatal event while employed in the siege
of Dover, which was still valiantly defended against him by Hubert de
Burgh. He immediately retreated to London, the centre and life of his
party; and he there received intelligence of a new disaster, which put an
end to all his hopes. A French fleet, bringing over a strong,
reënforcement, had appeared on the coast of Kent; where they were attacked
by the English under the command of Philip d’Albiney, and were routed with
considerable loss. D’Albiney employed a stratagem against them, which is
said to have contributed to the victory: having gained the wind of the
French, he came down upon them with violence; and throwing in their faces
a great quantity of quick lime, which he purposely carried on board, he so
blinded them, that they were disabled from defending themselves.[*]
After this second misfortune of the French, the English barons hastened
every where to make peace with the protector, and, by an early submission,
to prevent those attainders to which they were exposed on account of their
rebellion. Lewis, whose cause was now totally desperate, began to be
anxious for the safety of his person, and was glad, on any honorable
conditions, to make his escape from a country where he found every thing
was now become hostile to him. He concluded a peace with Pembroke,
promised to evacuate the kingdom, and only stipulated in return an
indemnity to his adherents, and a restitution of their honors and
fortunes, together with the free and equal enjoyment of those liberties
which had been granted to the rest of the nation.[**] Thus was happily
ended a civil war which seemed to be founded on the most incurable hatred
and jealousy, and had threatened the kingdom with the most fatal
consequences.
The precautions which the king of France used in the conduct of this whole
affair are remarkable. He pretended that his son had accepted of the offer
from the English barons without his advice, and contrary to his
inclination: the armies sent to England were levied in Lewis’s name: when
that prince came over to France for aid, his father publicly refused to
grant him any assistance, and would not so much as admit him to his
presence: even after Henry’s party acquired the ascendant, and Lewis was
in danger of falling into the hands of his enemies, it was Blanche of
Castile his wife, not the king his father, who raised armies and equipped
fleets for his succor.[***]
All these artifices were employed, not to satisfy the pope; for he had too
much penetration to be so easily imposed on: nor yet to deceive the
people; for they were too gross even for that purpose: they only served
for a coloring to Philip’s cause; and in public affairs men are often
better pleased that the truth, though known to every body, should be
wrapped up under a decent cover, than if it were exposed in open daylight
to the eyes of all the world.
After the expulsion of the French, the prudence and equity of the
protector’s subsequent conduct contributed to cure entirely those wounds
which had been made by intestine discord. He received the rebellious
barons into favor; observed strictly the terms of peace which he had
granted them; restored them to their possessions; and endeavored, by an
equal behavior, to bury all past animosities in perpetual oblivion. The
clergy alone, who had adhered to Lewis, were sufferers in this revolution.
As they had rebelled against their spiritual sovereign, by disregarding
the interdict and excommunication, it was not in Pembroke’s power to make
any stipulations in their favor; and Gualo, the legate, prepared to take
vengeance on them for their disobedience.[*] Many of them were deposed;
many suspended; some banished; and all who escaped punishment made
atonement for their offence, by paying large sums to the legate, who
amassed an immense treasure by this expedient.
The earl of Pembroke did not long survive the pacification, which had been
chiefly owing to his wisdom and valor;[*] and he was succeeded in the
government by Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, and Hubert de Burgh,
the justiciary. The counsels of the latter were chiefly followed; and had
he possessed equal authority in the kingdom with Pembroke, he seemed to be
every way worthy of filling the place of that virtuous nobleman. But the
licentious and powerful barons, who had once broken the reins of
subjection to their prince, and had obtained by violence an enlargement of
their liberties and independence, could ill be restrained by laws under a
minority; and the people, no less than the king, suffered from their
outrages and disorders. They retained by force the royal castles, which
they had seized during the past convulsions, or which had been committed
to their custody by the protector;[**] they usurped the king’s
demesnes;[***] they oppressed their vassals; they infested their weaker
neighbors; they invited all disorderly people to enter in their retinue,
and to live upon their lands; and they gave them protection in all their
robberies and extortions.
No one was more infamous for these violent and illegal practices than the
earl of Albemarle; who, though he had early returned to his duty, and had
been serviceable in expelling the French, augmented to the utmost the
general disorder, and committed outrages in all the counties of the north.
In order to reduce him to obedience, Hubert seized an opportunity of
getting possession of Rockingham Castle, which Albemarle had garrisoned
with his licentious retinue: but this nobleman, instead of submitting,
entered into a secret confederacy with Fawkes de Breauté, Peter de
Mauleon, and other barons, and both fortified the Gastle of Biham for his
defence, and made himself master by surprise of that of Fotheringay.
Pandulf, who was restored to his legateship, was active in suppressing
this rebellion; and with the concurrence of eleven bishops, he pronounced
the sentence of excommunication against Albemarle and his adherents:[*] an
army was levied: a scutage of ten shillings a knight’s fee was imposed on
all the military tenants. Albemarle’s associates gradually deserted him;
and he himself was obliged at last to sue for mercy. He received a pardon,
and was restored to his whole estate.
This impolitic lenity, too frequent in those times, was probably the
result of a secret combination among the barons, who never could endure to
see the total ruin of one of their own order: but it encouraged Fawkes de
Breauté, a man whom King John had raised from a low origin, to persevere
in the course of violence to which he had owed his fortune and to set at
nought all law and justice. When thirty-five verdicts were at one time
found against him, on account of his violent expulsion of so many
freeholders from their possessions, he came to the court of justice with
an armed force, seized the judge who had pronounced the verdicts, and
imprisoned him in Bedford Castle. He then levied open war against the
king; but being subdued and taken prisoner, his life was granted him; but
his estate was confiscated, and he was banished the kingdom.[**]
1222.
Justice was executed with greater severity against disorders less
premeditated, which broke out in London. A frivolous emulation in a match
of wrestling, between the Londoners on the one hand, and the inhabitants
of Westminster and those of the neighboring villages on the other,
occasioned this commotion. The former rose in a body, and pulled down some
houses belonging to the abbot of Westminster: but this riot, which,
considering the tumultuous disposition familiar to that capital, would
have been little regarded, seemed to become more serious by the symptoms
which then appeared of the former attachment of the citizens to the French
interest. The populace, in the tumult, made use of the cry of war commonly
employed by the French troops: “Mountjoy, Mountjoy, God help us and our
lord Lewis.” The justiciary made inquiry into the disorder; and finding
one Constantine Fitz-Arnulf to have been the ring-*leader, an insolent
man, who justified his crime in Hubert’s presence, he proceeded against
him by martial law, and ordered him immediately to be hanged, without
trial or form of process. He also cut off the feet of some of
Constantine’s accomplices.[*]
This act of power was complained of as an infringement of the Great
Charter: yet the justiciary, in a parliament summoned at Oxford, (for the
great councils about this time began to receive that appellation,) made no
scruple to grant in the king’s name a renewal and confirmation of that
charter. When the assembly made application to the crown for this favor,—as
a law in those times seemed to lose its validity if not frequently
renewed,—William de Briewere, one of the council of regency, was so
bold as to say openly, that those liberties were extorted by force, and
ought not to be observed: but he was reprimanded by the archbishop of
Canterbury, and was not countenanced by the king or his chief
ministers.[**] A new confirmation was demanded and granted two years
after; and an aid, amounting to a fifteenth of all movables, was given by
the parliament, in return for this indulgence. The king issued writs anew
to the sheriffs, enjoining the observance of the charter; but he inserted
a remarkable clause in the writs, that those who paid not the fifteenth
should not for the future be entitled to the benefit of those
liberties.[***]
The low state into which the crown was fallen, made it requisite for a
good minister to be attentive to the preservation of the royal
prerogatives, as well as to the security of public liberty. Hubert applied
to the pope, who had always great authority in the kingdom, and was now
considered as its superior lord, and desired him to issue a bull,
declaring the king to be of full age, and entitled to exercise in person
all the acts of royalty.[*] In consequence of this declaration, the
justiciary resigned into Henry’s hands the two important fortresses of the
Tower and Dover Castle, which had been intrusted to his custody; and he
required the other barons to imitate his example. They refused compliance:
the earls of Chester and Albemarle, John Constable of Chester, John de
Lacy, Brian de l’Isle, and William de Cantel, with some others, even
formed a conspiracy to surprise London, and met in arms at Waltham with
that intention: but finding the king prepared for defence, they desisted
from their enterprise. When summoned to court in order to answer for their
conduct, they scrupled not to appear, and to confess the design: but they
told the king that they had no bad intentions against his person, but only
against Hubert de Burgh, whom they were determined to remove from his
office.[**] They appeared too formidable to be chastised; and they were so
little discouraged by the failure of their first enterprise, that they
again met in arms at Leicester, in order to seize the king, who then
resided at Northampton: but Henry, informed of their purpose, took care to
be so well armed and attended, that the barons found it dangerous to make
the attempt; and they sat down and kept Christmas in his
neighborhood.[***] The archbishop and the prelates, finding every thing
tend towards a civil war, interposed with their authority, and threatened
the barons with the sentence of excommunication, if they persisted in
detaining the king’s castles. This menace at last prevailed: most of the
fortresses were surrendered; though the barons complained that Hubert’s
castles were soon after restored to him, while the king still kept theirs
in his own custody. There are said to have been one thousand one hundred
and fifteen castles at that time in England.[****]
It must be acknowledged that the influence of the prelates and the clergy
was often of great service to the public.
Though the religion of that age can merit no better name than that of
superstition, it served to unite together a body of men who had great sway
over the people, and who kept the community from falling to pieces, by the
factions and independent power of the nobles. And what was of great
importance, it threw a mighty authority into the hands of men, who by
their profession were averse to arms and violence, who tempered by their
mediation the general disposition towards military enterprises; and who
still maintained, even amidst the shock of arms, those secret links,
without which it is impossible for human society to subsist.
Notwithstanding these intestine commotions in England, and the precarious
authority of the crown, Henry was obliged to carry on war in France; and
he employed to that purpose the fifteenth which had been granted him by
parliament. Lewis VIII., who had succeeded to his father Philip, instead
of complying with Henry’s claim, who demanded the restitution of Normandy
and the other provinces wrested from England, made an irruption into
Poictou, took Rochelle[*] after a long siege, and seemed determined to
expel the English from the few provinces which still remained to them.
Henry sent over his uncle, the earl of Salisbury, together with his
brother, Prince Richard, to whom he had granted the earldom of Cornwall,
which had escheated to the crown. Salisbury stopped the progress of
Lewis’s arms, and retained the Poictevin and Gascon vassals in their
allegiance: but no military action of any moment was performed on either
side. The earl of Cornwall, after two years’ stay in Guienne, returned to
England.
1227.
This prince was nowise turbulent or factious in his disposition: his
ruling passion was to amass money, in which he succeeded so well as to
become the richest subject in Christendom: yet his attention to gain threw
him sometimes into acts of violence, and gave disturbance to the
government. There was a manor, which had formerly belonged to the earldom
of Cornwall but had been granted to Waleran de Ties, before Richard had
been invested with that dignity, and while the earldom remained in the
crown. Richard claimed this manor, and expelled the proprietor by force:
Waleran complained: the king ordered his brother to do justice to the man,
and restore him to his rights: the earl said that he would not submit to
these orders, till the cause should be decided against him by the judgment
of his peers: Henry replied, that it was first necessary to reinstate
Waleran in possession, before the cause could be tried; and he reiterated
his orders to the earl.[*] We may judge of the state of the government,
when this affair had nearly produced a civil war The earl of Cornwall,
finding Henry peremptory in his commands, associated himself with the
young earl of Pembroke who had married his sister, and who was displeased
on account of the king’s requiring him to deliver up some royal castles
which were in his custody. These two malecontents took into the
confederacy the earls of Chester, Warrenne, Glocester, Hereford, Warwick,
and Ferrers, who were all disgusted on a like account. [**] They assembled
an army, which the king had not the power or courage to resist; and he was
obliged to give his brother satisfaction, by grants of much greater
importance than the manor, which had been the first ground of the
quarrel.[***]
The character of the king, as he grew to man’s estate, became every day
better known; and he was found in every respect unqualified for
maintaining a proper sway among those turbulent barons, whom the feudal
constitution subjected to his authority. Gentle, humane, and merciful even
to a fault, he seems to have been steady in no other circumstance of his
character; but to have received every impression from those who surrounded
him, and whom he loved, for the time, with the most imprudent and most
unreserved affection. Without activity or vigor, he was unfit to conduct
war; without policy or art, he was ill fitted to maintain peace: his
resentments, though hasty and violent, were not dreaded, while he was
found to drop them with such facility; his friendships were little valued,
because they were neither derived from choice, nor maintained with
constancy: a proper pageant of state in a regular monarchy, where his
ministers could have conducted all affairs in his name and by his
authority; but too feeble in those disorderly times to sway a sceptre,
whose weight depended entirely on the firmness and dexterity of the hand
which held it.
The ablest and most virtuous minister that Henry ever possessed was Hubert
de Burgh;[*] a man who had been steady to the crown in the most difficult
and dangerous times, and who yet showed no disposition, in the height of
his power, to enslave or oppress the people. The only exceptionable part
of his conduct is that which is mentioned by Matthew Paris,[**] if the
fact be really true, and proceeded from Hubert’s advice, namely, the
recalling publicly and the annulling of the charter of forests, a
concession so reasonable in itself, and so passionately claimed both by
the nobility and people: but it must be confessed that this measure is so
unlikely, both from the circumstances of the times and character of the
minister, that there is reason to doubt of its reality, especially as it
is mentioned by no other historian. Hubert, while he enjoyed his
authority, had an entire ascendant over Henry, and was loaded with honors
and favors beyond any other subject.
1231.
Besides acquiring the property of many castles and manors, he married the
eldest sister of the king of Scots, was created earl of Kent, and, by an
unusual concession, was made chief justiciary of England for life; yet
Henry, in a sudden caprice, threw off his faithful minister, and exposed
him to the violent persecutions of his enemies. Among other frivolous
crimes objected to him, he was accused of gaining the king’s affections by
enchantment, and of purloining from the royal treasury a gem which had the
virtue to render the wearer invulnerable, and of sending this valuable
curiosity to the prince of Wales.[***] The nobility, who hated Hubert on
account of his zeal in resuming the rights and possessions of the crown,
no sooner saw the opportunity favorable, than they inflamed the king’s
animosity against him, and pushed him to seek the total ruin of his
minister. Hubert took sanctuary in a church: the king ordered him to be
dragged from thence: he recalled those orders: he afterwards renewed them:
he was obliged by the clergy to restore him to the sanctuary: he
constrained him soon after to surrender himself prisoner, and he confined
him in the castle of the Devizes. Hubert made his escape, was expelled the
kingdom, was again received into favor, recovered a great share of the
king’s confidence, but never showed any inclination to reinstate himself
in power and authority.[****]
The man who succeeded him in the government of the king and kingdom, was
Peter, bishop of Winchester, a Poictevin by birth, who had been raised by
the late king, and who was no less distinguished by his arbitrary
principles and violent conduct, than by his courage and abilities. This
prelate had been left by King John justiciary and regent of the kingdom
during an expedition which that prince made into France; and his illegal
administration was one chief cause of that great combination among the
barons, which finally extorted from the crown the charter of liberties,
and laid the foundation of the English constitution. Henry, though
incapable, from his character, of pursuing the same violent maxims which
had governed his father, had imbibed the same arbitrary principles; and in
prosecution of Peter’s advice, he invited over a great number of
Poictevins and other foreigners, who, he believed, could more safely be
trusted than the English, and who seemed useful to counterbalance the
great and independent power of the nobility.[*] Every office and command
was bestowed on these strangers; they exhausted the revenues of the crown,
already too much impoverished;[**] they invaded the rights of the people;
and their insolence, still more provoking than their power, drew on them
the hatred and envy of all orders of men in the kingdom.[***]
1233.
The barons formed a combination against this odious ministry, and withdrew
from parliament, on pretence of the danger to which they were exposed from
the machinations of the Poictevins. When again summoned to attend, they
gave for answer, that the king should dismiss his foreigners, otherwise
they would drive both him and them out of the kingdom, and put the crown
on another head, more worthy to wear it: [****] such was the style they
used to their sovereign. They at last came to parliament, but so well
attended, that they seemed in a condition to prescribe laws to the king
and ministry.
Peter des Roches, however, had in the interval found means of sowing
dissension among them, and of bringing over to his party the earl of
Cornwall, as well as the earls of Lincoln and Chester. The confederates
were disconcerted in their measures: Richard, earl Mareschal, who had
succeeded to that dignity on the death of his brother William, was chased
into Wales; he thence withdrew into Ireland, where he was treacherously
murdered by the contrivance of the bishop of Winchester.[*] The estates of
the more obnoxious barons were confiscated, without legal sentence or
trial by their peers; [**] and were bestowed with a profuse liberality on
the Poictevins. Peter even carried his insolence so far as to declare
publicly, that the barons of England must not pretend to put themselves on
the same foot with those of France, or assume the same liberties and
privileges: the monarch in the former country had a more absolute power
than in the latter. It had been more justifiable for him to have said,
that men so unwilling to submit to the authority of laws, could with the
worst grace claim any shelter or protection from them.
When the king at any time was checked in his illegal practices, and when
the authority of the Great Charter was objected to him, he was wont to
reply, “Why should I observe this charter, which is neglected by all my
grandees, both prelates and nobility?” It was very reasonably said to him,
“You ought, sir, to set them the example.” [***]
So violent a ministry as that of the bishop of Winchester could not be of
long duration; but its fall proceeded at last from the influence of the
church, not from the efforts of the nobles. Edmond, the primate, came to
court, attended by many of the other prelates, and represented to the king
the pernicious measures embraced by Peter des Roches, the discontents of
his people, the ruin of his affairs; and after requiring the dismission of
the minister and his associates, threatened him with excommunication in
case of his refusal. Henry, who knew that an excommunication so agreeable
to the sense of the people could not fail of producing the most dangerous
effects, was obliged to submit: foreigners were banished; the natives were
restored to their place in council;[****] the primate, who was a man of
prudence, and who took care to execute the laws and observe the charter of
liberties, bore the chief sway in the government.
1236.
But the English in vain flattered themselves that they should be long free
from the dominion of foreigners. The king, having married Eleanor,
daughter of the count of Provence,[*****] was surrounded by a great number
of strangers from that country, whom he caressed with the fondest
affection, and enriched by an imprudent generosity.[******]
The bishop of Valence, a prelate of the house of Savoy, and maternal uncle
to the queen, was his chief minister, and employed every art to amass
wealth for himself and his relations. Peter of Savoy, a brother of the
same family, was invested in the honor of Richmond, and received the rich
wardship of Earl Warrenne; Boniface of Savoy was promoted to the see of
Canterbury: many young ladies were invited over to Provence, and married
to the chief noblemen of England, who were the king’s wards. [*] And, as
the source of Henry’s bounty began to fail, his Savoyard ministry applied
to Rome, and obtained a bull, permitting him to resume all past grants;
absolving him from the oath which he had taken to maintain them; even
enjoining him to make such a resumption, and representing those grants as
invalid, on account of the prejudice which ensued from them to the Roman
pontiff, in whom the superiority of the kingdom was vested.[**] The
opposition made to the intended resumption prevented it from taking place;
but the nation saw the indignities to which the king was willing to
submit, in order to gratify the avidity of his foreign favorites. About
the same time he published in England the sentence of excommunication,
pronounced against the emperor Frederic, his brother-in-law;[***] and said
in excuse, that, being the pope’s vassal, he was obliged by his allegiance
to obey all the commands of his holiness. In this weak reign, when any
neighboring potentate insulted the king’s dominions, instead of taking
revenge for the injury, he complained to the pope as his superior lord,
and begged him to give protection to his vassal.[****]
1247.
The resentment of the English barons rose high at the preference given to
foreigners; but no remonstrance or complaint could ever prevail on the
king to abandon them, or even to moderate his attachment towards them.
After the Provencals and Savoyards might have been supposed pretty well
satiated with the dignities and riches which they had acquired, a new set
of hungry foreigners were invited over, and shared among them those favors
which the king ought in policy to have conferred on the English nobility,
by whom his government could have been supported and defended. His mother
Isabella, who had been unjustly taken by the late king from the count de
la Marche, to whom she was betrothed, was no mistress of herself by the
death of her husband, than she married that nobleman;[*] and she had born
him four sons, Guy, William, Geoffrey, and Aymer, whom she sent over to
England, in order to pay a visit to their brother. The good-natured and
affectionate disposition of Henry was moved at the sight of such near
relations; and he considered neither his own circumstances, nor the
inclinations of his people, in the honors and riches which he conferred
upon them.[**] Complaints rose as high against the credit of the Gascon,
as ever they had done against that of the Poictevin and of the Savoyard
favorites; and to a nation prejudiced against them, all their measures
appeared exceptionable and criminal. Violations of the Great Charter were
frequently mentioned; and it is indeed more than probable, that
foreigners, ignorant of the laws, and relying on the boundless affections
of a weak prince, would, in an age when a regular administration was not
any where known, pay more attention to their present interest than to the
liberties of the people. It is reported that the Poictevins and other
strangers, when the laws were at any time appealed to in opposition to
their oppressions, scrupled not to reply, “What did the English laws
signify to them? They minded them not.” And as words are often more
offensive than actions, this open contempt of the English tended much to
aggravate the general discontent, and made every act of violence committed
by the foreigners appear not only an injury, but an affront to them.[***]
I reckon not among the violations of the Great Charter some arbitrary
exertions of prerogative to which Henry’s necessities pushed him, and
which, without producing any discontent, were uniformly continued by all
his successors, till the last century. As the parliament often refused him
supplies, and that in a manner somewhat rude and indecent,[****] he
obliged his opulent subjects, particularly the citizens of London, to
grant him loans of money; and it is natural to imagine that the same want
of economy which reduced him to the necessity of borrowing, would prevent
him from being very punctual in the repayment.[*****] He demanded
benevolences, or pretended voluntary contributions, from his nobility and
prelates.[******]
He was the first king of England, since the conquest, that could fairly be
said to lie under the restraint of law; and he was also the first that
practised the dispensing power, and he employed the clause of “non
obstante” in his grants and patents. When objections were made to this
novelty, he replied that the pope exercised that authority, and why might
not he imitate the example? But the abuse which the pope made of his
dispensing power, in violating the canons of general councils, in invading
the privileges and customs of all particular churches, and in usurping on
the rights of patrons, was more likely to excite the jealousy of the
people than to reconcile them to a similar practice in their civil
government. Roger de Thurkesby, one of the king’s justices, was so
displeased with the precedent, that he exclaimed, “Alas! what times are we
fallen into? Behold, the civil court is corrupted in imitation of the
ecclesiastical, and the river is poisoned from that fountain.”
The king’s partiality and profuse bounty to his foreign relations, and to
their friends and favorites, would have appeared more tolerable to the
English, had any thing been done meanwhile for the honor of the nation, or
had Henry’s enterprises in foreign countries been attended with any
success or glory to himself or to the public; at least, such military
talents in the king would have served to keep his barons in awe, and have
given weight and authority to his government. But though he declared war
against Lewis IX. in 1242, and made an expedition into Guienne, upon the
invitation of his father-in-law, the count de la Marche, who promised to
join him with all his forces, he was unsuccessful in his attempts against
that great monarch, was worsted at Taillebourg, was deserted by his
allies, lost what remained to him of Poictou, and was obliged to return
with loss of honor into England.[*]
1253.
The Gascon nobility were attached to the English government, because the
distance of their sovereign allowed them to remain in a state of almost
total independence; and they claimed, some time after, Henry’s protection
against an invasion which the king of Castile made upon that territory.
Henry returned into Guienne, and was more successful in this expedition;
but he thereby involved himself and his nobility in an enormous debt,
which both increased their discontents, and exposed him to greater danger
from their enterprises.[**]
Want of economy and an ill-judged liberality were Henry’s great defects;
and his debts, even before this expedition, had become so troublesome,
that he sold all his plate and jewels, in order to discharge them. When
this expedient was first proposed to him, he asked where he should find
purchasers. It was replied, the citizens of London. “On my word,” said he,
“if the treasury of Augustus were brought to sale, the citizens are able
to be the purchasers: these clowns, who assume to themselves the name of
barons, abound in every thing, while we are reduced to necessities.”[*]
And he was thenceforth observed to be more forward and greedy in his
exactions upon the citizens.[**]
But the grievances which the English during this reign had reason to
complain of in the civil government, seem to have been still less
burdensome than those which they suffered from the usurpations and
exactions of the court of Rome. On the death of Langton, in 1228, the
monks of Christ-church elected Walter de Hemesham, one of their own body,
for his successor: but as Henry refused to confirm the election, the pope,
at his desire, annulled it;[***] and immediately appointed Richard,
chancellor of Lincoln, for archbishop, without waiting for a new election.
On the death of Richard, in 1231, the monks elected Ralph de Neville,
bishop of Chichester; and though Henry was much pleased with the election,
the pope, who thought that prelate too much attached to the crown, assumed
the power of annulling his election.[****] He rejected two clergymen more,
whom the monks had successively chosen; and he at last told them that, if
they would elect Edmond, treasurer of the church of Salisbury, he would
confirm their choice; and his nomination was complied with. The pope had
the prudence to appoint both times very worthy primates; but men could not
forbear observing his intention of thus drawing gradually to himself the
right of bestowing that important dignity.
The avarice, however, more than the ambition of the see of Rome, seems to
have been in this age the ground of general complaint. The papal
ministers, finding a vast stock of power amassed by their predecessors,
were desirous of turning it to immediate profit, which they enjoyed at
home, rather than of enlarging their authority in distant countries, where
they never intended to reside. Every thing was become venal in the Romish
tribunals: simony was openly practised; no favors, and even no justice,
could be obtained without a bribe; the highest bidder was sure to have the
preference, without regard either to the merits of the person or of the
cause; and besides the usual perversions of right in the decision of
controversies, the pope openly assumed an absolute and uncontrolled
authority of setting aside, by the plenitude of his apostolic power, all
particular rules, and all privileges of patrons, churches, and convents.
On pretence of remedying these abuses, Pope Honorius, in 1226, complaining
of the poverty of his see as the source of all grievances, demanded from
every cathedral two of the best prebends, and from every convent two
monks’ portions, to be set apart as a perpetual and settled revenue of the
papal crown; but all men being sensible that the revenue would continue
forever, and the abuses immediately return, his demand was unanimously
rejected. About three years after, the pope demanded and obtained the
tenth of all ecclesiastical revenues, which he levied in a very oppressive
manner; requiring payment before the clergy had drawn their rents or
tithes, and sending about usurers, who advanced them the money at
exorbitant interest. In the year 1240, Otho the legate, having in vain
attempted the clergy in a body, obtained separately, by intrigues and
menaces, large sums from the prelates and convents, and on his departure
is said to have carried more money out of the kingdom than he left in it
This experiment was renewed four years after with success by Martin the
nuncio, who brought from Rome powers of suspending and excommunicating all
clergymen that refused to comply with his demands. The king, who relied on
the pope for the support of his tottering authority, never failed to
countenance those exactions.
Meanwhile all the chief benefices of the kingdom were conferred on
Italians; great numbers of that nation were sent over at one time to be
provided for; non-residence and pluralities were carried to an enormous
height; Mansel, the king’s chaplain, is computed to have held at once
seven hundred ecclesiastical livings; and the abuses became so evident, as
to be palpable to the blindness of superstition itself. The people,
entering into associations, rose against the Italian clergy; pillaged
their barns; wasted their lands; insulted the persons of such of them as
they found in the kingdom;[*] and when the justices made inquiry into the
authors of this disorder, the guilt was found to involve so many, and
those of such high rank, that it passed unpunished.
* Rymer, vol. i. p. 323. M. Paris, p. 255, 257.
At last, when Innocent IV., in 1245, called a general council at Lyons, in
order to excommunicate the emperor Frederic, the king and nobility sent
over agents to complain, before the council, of the rapacity of the Romish
church. They represented, among many other grievances, that the benefices
of the Italian clergy in England had been estimated, and were found to
amount to sixty thousand marks[*] a year, a sum which exceeded the annual
revenue of the crown itself.[**] They obtained only an evasive answer from
the pope; but as mention had been made, before the council, of the feudal
subjection of England to the see of Rome, the English agents, at whose
head was Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, exclaimed against the pretension,
and insisted that King John had no right, without the consent of his
barons, to subject the kingdom to so ignominious a servitude.[***] The
popes, indeed, afraid of carrying matters too far against England, seem
thenceforth to have little insisted on that pretension.
This check, received at the council of Lyons, was not able to stop the
court of Rome in its rapacity: Innocent exacted the revenues of all vacant
benefices, the twentieth of all ecclesiastical revenues without exception;
the third of such as were exceeded a hundred marks a year; the half of
such as were possessed by non-residents.[****] He claimed the goods of all
intestate clergymen;[*****] he pretended a title to inherit all money
gotten by usury: he levied benevolences upon the people; and when the
king, contrary to his usual practice, prohibited these exactions, he
threatened to pronounce against him the same censures which he had emitted
against the emperor Frederic.[******]
1255.
But the most oppressive expedient employed by the pope, was the embarking
of Henry in a project for the conquest of Naples, or Sicily on this side
the Fare, as it was called; an enterprise which threw much dishonor on the
king, and involved him, during some years, in great trouble and expense.
The Romish church, taking advantage of favorable incidents, had reduced
the kingdom of Sicily to the same state of feudal vassalage which she
pretended to extend over England; and which, by reason of the distance, as
well as high spirit of this latter kingdom, she was not able to maintain.
After the death of the emperor Frederic II., the succession of Sicily
devolved to Conradine, grandson of that monarch; and Mainfroy, his natural
son, under pretence of governing the kingdom during the minority of the
prince, had formed a scheme of establishing his own authority. Pope
Innocent, who had carried on violent war against the emperor Frederic, and
had endeavored to dispossess him of his Italian dominions, still continued
hostilities against his grandson; but being disappointed in all his
schemes by the activity and artifices of Mainfroy, he found that his own
force alone was not sufficient to bring to a happy issue so great an
enterprise. He pretended to dispose of the Sicilian crown, both as
superior lord of that particular kingdom, and as vicar of Christ, to whom
all kingdoms of the earth were subjected; and he made a tender of it to
Richard, earl of Cornwall, whose immense riches, he flattered himself,
would be able to support the military operations against Mainfroy. As
Richard had the prudence to refuse the present,[*] he applied to the king,
whose levity and thoughtless disposition gave Innocent more hopes of
success; and he offered him the crown of Sicily for his second son,
Edmond.[**] Henry, allured by so magnificent a present, without reflecting
on the consequences, without consulting either with his brother or the
parliament, accepted of the insidious proposal, and gave the pope
unlimited credit to expend whatever sums he thought necessary for
completing the conquest of Sicily. Innocent, who was engaged by his own
interests to wage war with Mainfroy, was glad to carry on his enterprises
at the expense of his ally: Alexander IV., who succeeded him in the papal
throne, continued the same policy, and Henry was surprised to find himself
on a sudden involved in an immense debt, which he had never been consulted
in contracting. The sum already amounted to a hundred and thirty-five
thousand five hundred and forty-one marks, beside interest;[***] and he
had the prospect, if he answered this demand, of being soon loaded with
more exorbitant expenses if he refused it, of both incurring the pope’s
displeasure, and losing the crown of Sicily, which he hoped soon to have
the glory of fixing on the head of his son.
He applied to the parliament for supplies; and that he might be sure not
to meet with opposition, he sent no writs to the more refractory barons:
but even those who were summoned, sensible of the ridiculous cheat imposed
by the pope, determined not to lavish their money on such chimerical
projects; and making a pretext of the absence of their brethren, they
refused to take the king’s demands into consideration.[*] In this
extremity the clergy were his only resource; and as both their temporal
and spiritual sovereign concurred in loading them, they were ill able to
defend themselves against this united authority.
The pope published a crusade for the conquest of Sicily; and required
every one who had taken the cross against the infidels, or had vowed to
advance money for that service, to support the war against Mainfroy, a
more terrible enemy, as he pretended, to the Christian faith than any
Saracen.[**] He levied a tenth on all ecclesiastical benefices in England
for three years; and gave orders to excommunicate all bishops who made not
punctual payment. He granted to the king the goods of intestate clergymen;
the revenues of vacant benefices, the revenues of all non-residents.[***]
But these taxations, being levied by some rule, were deemed less grievous
than another imposition, which arose from the suggestion of the bishop of
Hereford, and which might have opened the door to endless and intolerable
abuses.
This prelate, who resided at the court of Rome by a deputation from the
English church, drew bills of different values but amounting on the whole
to a hundred and fifty thousand five hundred and forty marks on all the
bishops and abbots of the kingdom; and granted these bills to Italian
merchants, who, it was pretended, had advanced money for the service of
the war against Mainfroy.[****] As there was no likelihood of the English
prelates’ submitting, without compulsion, to such an extraordinary demand,
Rustand the legate was charged with the commission of employing authority
to that purpose, and he summoned an assembly of the bishops and abbots
whom he acquainted with the pleasure of the pope and of the king.
Great were the surprise and indignation of the assembly: the bishop of
Worcester exclaimed, that he would lose his life rather than comply: the
bishop of London said, that the pope and king were more powerful than he;
but if his mitre were taken off his head, he would clap on a helmet in its
place.[*] The legate was no less violent on the other hand; and he told
the assembly, in plain terms, that all ecclesiastical benefices were the
property of the pope, and he might dispose of them, either in whole or in
part, as he saw proper.[**] In the end, the bishops and abbots, being
threatened with excommunication, which made all their revenues fall into
the king’s hands, were obliged to submit to the exaction; and the only
mitigation which the legate allowed them was, that the tenths already
granted should be accepted as a partial payment of the bills. But the
money was still insufficient for the pope’s purpose: the conquest of
Sicily was as remote as ever: the demands which came from Rome were
endless: Pope Alexander became so urgent a creditor, that he sent over a
legate to England, threatening the kingdom with an interdict, and the king
with excommunication, if the arrears, which he pretended to be due to him,
were not instantly remitted;[***] and at last Henry, sensible of the
cheat, began to think of breaking off the agreement, and of resigning into
the pope’s hands that crown which it was not intended by Alexander that he
or his family should ever enjoy.[****]
The earl of Cornwall had now reason to value himself on his foresight, in
refusing the fraudulent bargain with Rome, and in preferring the solid
honors of an opulent and powerful prince of the blood of England, to the
empty and precarious glory of a foreign dignity. But he had not always
firmness sufficient to adhere to this resolution: his vanity and ambition
prevailed at last over his prudence and his avarice; and he was engaged in
an enterprise no less expensive and vexatious than that of his brother,
and not attended with much greater probability of success. The immense
opulence of Richard having made the German princes cast their eye on him
as a candidate for the empire, he was tempted to expend vast sums of money
on his election; and he succeeded so far as to be chosen king of the
Romans, which seemed to render his succession infallible to the imperial
throne. He went over to Germany, and carried out of the kingdom no less a
sum than seven hundred thousand marks, if we may credit the account given
by some ancient authors,[*] which is probably much exaggerated.[**] His
money, while it lasted, procured him friends and partisans; but it was
soon drained from him by the avidity of the German princes; and, having no
personal or family connections in that country, and no solid foundation of
power, he found, at last, that he had lavished away the frugality of a
whole life in order to procure a splendid title; and that his absence from
England, joined to the weakness of his brother’s government, gave reins to
the factious and turbulent dispositions of the English barons, and
involved his own country and family in great calamities.
The successful revolt of the nobility from King John, and their imposing
on him and his successors limitations of their royal power, had made them
feel their own weight and importance, had set a dangerous precedent of
resistance, and being followed by a long minority, had impoverished as
well as weakened that crown which they were at last induced, from the fear
of worse consequences, to replace on the head of young Henry. In the
king’s situation, either great abilities and vigor were requisite to
overawe the barons, or great caution and reserve to give them no pretence
for complaints; and it must be confessed, that this prince was possessed
of neither of these talents. He had not prudence to choose right measures;
he wanted even that constancy which sometimes gives weight to wrong ones;
he was entirely devoted to his favorites, who were always foreigners; he
lavished on them, without discretion, his diminished revenue; and finding
that his barons indulged their disposition towards tyranny, and observed
not to their own vassals the same rules which they had imposed on the
crown, he was apt, in his administration, to neglect all the salutary
articles of the Great Charter; which he remarked to be so little regarded
by his nobility. This conduct had extremely lessened his authority in the
kingdom; had multiplied complaints against him; and had frequently exposed
him to affronts, and even to dangerous attempts upon his prerogative. In
the year 1244, when he desired a supply from parliament, the barons,
complaining of the frequent breaches of the Great Charter, and of the many
fruitless applications which they had formerly made for the redress of
this and other grievances, demanded in return, that he should give them
the nomination of the great justiciary and of the chancellor, to whose
hands chiefly the administration of justice was committed: and, if we may
credit the historian,[*] they had formed the plan of other limitations, as
well as of associations to maintain them, which would have reduced the
king to be an absolute cipher, and have held the crown in perpetual
pupillage and dependence. The king, to satisfy them, would agree to
nothing but a renewal of the charter, and a general permission to
excommunicate all the violators of it; and he received no supply, except a
scutage of twenty shillings on each knight’s fee for the marriage of his
eldest daughter to the king of Scotland; a burden which was expressly
annexed to their feudal tenures.
Four years after, in a full parliament, when Henry demanded a new supply,
he was openly reproached with the breach of his word, and the frequent
violations of the charter. He was asked whether he did not blush to desire
any aid from his people, whom he professedly hated and despised; to whom
on all occasions he preferred aliens and foreigners, and who groaned under
the oppressions which he either permitted or exercised over them. He was
told that, besides disparaging his nobility by forcing them to contract
unequal and mean marriages with strangers, no rank of men was so low as to
escape vexations from him or his ministers; that even the victuals
consumed in his household, the clothes which himself and his servants
wore, still more the wine which they used, were all taken by violence from
the lawful owners, and no compensation was ever made them for the injury;
that foreign merchants, to the great prejudice and infamy of the kingdom
shunned the English harbors as if they were possessed by pirates, and the
commerce with all nations was thus cut off by these acts of violence; that
loss was added to loss, and injury to injury, while the merchants, who had
been despoiled of their goods, were also obliged to carry them at their
own charge to whatever place the king was pleased to appoint them; that
even the poor fishermen on the coast could not escape his oppressions and
those of his courtiers; and finding that they had not full liberty to
dispose of their commodities in the English market, were frequently
constrained to carry them to foreign ports, and to hazard all the perils
of the ocean, rather than those which awaited them from his oppressive
emissaries; and that his very religion was a ground of complaint to his
subjects, while they observed, that the waxen tapers and splendid silks,
employed in so many useless processions, were the spoils which he had
forcibly ravished from the true owners.[*] Throughout this remonstrance,
in which the complaints derived from an abuse of the ancient right of
purveyance may be supposed to be somewhat exaggerated, there appears a
strange mixture of regal tyranny in the practices which gave rise to it,
and of aristocratical liberty, or rather licentiousness, in the
expressions employed by the parliament. But a mixture of this kind is
observable in all the ancient feudal governments, and both of them proved
equally hurtful to the people.
As the king, in answer to their remonstrance, gave the parliament only
good words and fair promises, attended with the most humble submissions,
which they had often found deceitful, he obtained at that time no supply;
and therefore, in the year 1253, when he found himself again under the
necessity of applying to parliament, he had provided a new pretence, which
he deemed infallible, and taking the vow of a crusade, he demanded their
assistance in that pious enterprise.[**] The parliament, however, for some
time hesitated to comply, and the ecclesiastical order sent a deputation
consisting of four prelates, the primate and the bishops of Winchester
Salisbury, and Carlisle, in order to remonstrate with him on his frequent
violations of their privileges, the oppressions with which he had loaded
them and all his subjects,[***] and the uncanonical and forced elections
which were made to vacant dignities.
“It is true,” replied the king, “I have been somewhat faulty in this
particular: I obtruded you, my lord of Canterbury, upon your see; I was
obliged to employ both entreaties and menaces, my lord of Winchester, to
have, you elected; my proceedings, I confess, were very irregular, my
lords of Salisbury and Carlisle, when I raised you from the lowest
stations to your present dignities; I am determined henceforth to correct
these abuses; and it will also become you, in order to make a thorough
reformation, to resign your present benefices; and try to enter again in a
more regular and canonical manner.”[*] The bishops, surprised at these
unexpected sarcasms, replied, that the question was not at present how to
correct past errors, but to avoid them for the future. The king promised
redress both of ecclesiastical and civil grievances; and the parliament in
return agreed to grant him a supply, a tenth of the ecclesiastical
benefices, and a scutage of three marks on each knight’s fee: but as they
had experienced his frequent breach of promise, they required that he
should ratify the Great Charter in a manner still more authentic and more
solemn than any which he had hitherto employed. All the prelates and
abbots were assembled: they held burning tapers in their hands: the Great
Charter was read before them: they denounced the sentence of
excommunication against every one who should thenceforth violate that
fundamental law: they threw their tapers on the ground, and exclaimed,
“May the soul of every one who incurs this sentence so stink and corrupt
in hell!” The king bore a part in this ceremony, and subjoined, “So help
me God, I will keep all these articles inviolate, as I am a man, as I am a
Christian, as I am a knight, and as I am a king crowned and anointed.”[**]
Yet was the tremendous ceremony no sooner finished, than his favorites,
abusing his weakness, made him return to the same arbitrary and irregular
administration; and the reasonable expectations of his people were thus
perpetually eluded and disappointed.[***]
1258.
All these imprudent and illegal measures afforded a pretence to Simon de
Mountfort, earl of Leicester, to attempt an innovation in the government,
and to wrest the sceptre from the feeble and irresolute hand which held
it. This nobleman was a younger son of that Simon de Mountfort who had
conducted with such valor and renown the crusade against the Albigenses,
and who, though he tarnished his famous exploits by cruelty and ambition,
had left a name very precious to all the bigots of that age, particularly
to the ecclesiastics. A large inheritance in England fell by succession to
this family; but as the elder brother enjoyed still more opulent
possessions in France, and could not perform fealty to two masters, he
transferred his right to Simon, his younger brother, who came over to
England, did homage for his lands, and was raised to the dignity of earl
of Leicester. In the year 1238, he espoused Eleanor, dowager of William,
earl of Pembroke, and sister to the king;[*] but the marriage of this
princess with a subject and a foreigner, though contracted with Henry’s
consent, was loudly complained of by the earl of Cornwall and all the
barons of England; and Leicester was supported against their violence by
the king’s favor and authority alone.[**] But he had no sooner established
himself in his possessions and dignities, than he acquired, by insinuation
and address, a strong interest with the nation, and gained equally the
affections of all orders of men. He lost, however, the friendship of Henry
from the usual levity and fickleness of that prince; he was banished the
court; he was recalled; he was intrusted with the command of Guienne,[***]
where he did good service and acquired honor; he was again disgraced by
the king, and his banishment from court seemed now final and irrevocable.
Henry called him traiter to his face; Leicester gave him the lie, and told
him that, if he were not his sovereign, he would soon make him repent of
that insult. Yet was this quarrel accommodated, either from the good
nature or timidity of the king, and Leicester was again admitted into some
degree of favor and authority. But as this nobleman was become too great
to preserve an entire complaisance to Henry’s humors, and to act in
subserviency to his other minions, he found more advantage in cultivating
his interest with the public, and in inflaming the general discontents
which prevailed against the administration. He filled every place with
complaints against the infringement of the Great Charter, the acts of
violence committed on the people, the combination between the pope and the
king in their tyranny and extortions, Henry’s neglect of his native
subjects and barons; and though himself a foreigner, he was more loud than
any in representing the indignity of submitting to the dominion of
foreigners.
By his hypocritical pretensions to devotion he gained the favor of the
zealots and clergy: by his seeming concern for public good he acquired the
affections of the public: and besides the private friendships which he had
cultivated with the barons, his animosity against the favorites created a
union of interests between him and that powerful order.
A recent quarrel which broke out between Leicester and William de Valence,
Henry’s half brother and chief favorite, brought matters to extremity,[*]
and determined the former to give full scope to his bold and unbounded
ambition, which the laws and the king’s authority had hitherto with
difficulty restrained. He secretly called a meeting of the most
considerable barons, particularly Humphrey de Bohun, high constable, Roger
Bigod, earl mareschal, and the earls of Warwick and Glocester; men who by
their family and possessions stood in the first rank of the English
nobility. He represented to this company the necessity of reforming the
state, and of putting the execution of the laws into other hands than
those which had hitherto appeared, from repeated experience, so unfit for
the charge with which they were intrusted. He exaggerated the oppressions
exercised against the lower orders of the state, the violations of the
barons’ privileges, the continued depredations made on the clergy; and in
order to aggravate the enormity of this conduct, he appealed to the Great
Charter, which Henry had so often ratified, and which was calculated to
prevent forever the return of those intolerable grievances. He magnified
the generosity of their ancestors, who, at a great expense of blood, had
extorted that famous concession from the crown; but lamented their own
degeneracy, who allowed so important an advantage, once obtained, to be
wrested from them by a weak prince and by insolent strangers. And he
insisted that the king’s word, after so many submissions and fruitless
promises on his part, could no longer be relied on; and that nothing but
his absolute inability to violate national privileges could henceforth
insure the regular observance of them.
These topics, which were founded in truth, and suited so well the
sentiments of the company, had the desired effect, and the barons embraced
a resolution of redressing the public grievances, by taking into their own
hands the administration of government. Henry having summoned a
parliament, in expectation of receiving supplies for his Sicilian project,
the barons appeared in the hall, clad in complete armor, and with their
swords by their side: the king, on his entry, struck with the unusual
appearance, asked them what was their purpose, and whether they pretended
to make him their prisoner.[*] Roger Bigod replied in the name of the
rest, that he was not their prisoner, but their sovereign; that they even
intended to grant him large supplies, in order to fix his son on the
throne of Sicily; that they only expected some return for this expense and
service; and that, as he had frequently made submissions to the
parliament, had acknowledged his past errors, and had still allowed
himself to be carried into the same path, which gave them such just reason
of complaint, he must now yield to more strict regulations, and confer
authority on those who were able and willing to redress the national
grievances. Henry, partly allured by the hopes of supply, partly
intimidated by the union and martial appearance of the barons, agreed to
their demand, and promised to summon another parliament at Oxford, in
order to digest the new plan of government, and to elect the persons who
were to be intrusted with the chief authority.
This parliament, which the royalists, and even the nation, from experience
of the confusions that attended its measures, afterwards denominated the
“mad parliament,” met on the day appointed; and as all the barons brought
along with them their military vassals, and appeared with an armed force,
the king, who had taken no precautions against them, was in reality a
prisoner in their hands, and was obliged to submit to all the terms which
they were pleased to impose upon him. Twelve barons were selected from
among the king’s ministers; twelve more were chosen by parliament: to
these twenty-four unlimited authority was granted to reform the state; and
the king himself took an oath, that he would maintain whatever ordinances
they should think proper to enact for that purpose.[**] Leicester was at
the head of this supreme council, to which the legislative power was thus
in reality transferred; and all their measures were taken by his secret
influence and direction.
Their first step bore a specious appearance, and seemed well calculated
for the end which they professed to be the object of all these
innovations; they ordered that four knights should be chosen by each
county; that they should make inquiry into the grievances of which their
neighborhood had reason to complain, and should attend the ensuing
parliament, in order to give information to that assembly of the state of
their particular counties;[*] a nearer approach to our present
constitution than had been made by the barons in the reign of King John,
when the knights were only appointed to meet in their several counties,
and there to draw up a detail of their grievances. Meanwhile the
twenty-four barons proceeded to enact some regulations, as a redress of
such grievances as were supposed to be sufficiently notorious. They
ordered, that three sessions of parliament should be regularly held every
year, in the months of February, June, and October; “that a new sheriff
should be annually elected by the votes of the freeholders in each
county;[**] that the sheriffs should have no power of fining the barons
who did not attend their courts, or the circuits of the justiciaries; that
no heirs should be committed to the wardship of foreigners, and no castles
intrusted to their custody; and that no new warrens or forests should be
created, nor the revenues of any counties or hundreds be let to farm.”
Such were the regulations which the twenty-four barons established at
Oxford, for the redress of public grievances.
But the earl of Leicester and his associates, having advanced so far to
satisfy the nation, instead of continuing in this popular course, or
granting the king that supply which they had promised him, immediately
provided for the extension and continuance of their own authority. They
roused anew the popular clamor which had long prevailed against
foreigners; and they fell with the utmost violence on the king’s half
brothers, who were supposed to be the authors of, all national grievances,
and whom Henry had no longer any power to protect. The four brothers,
sensible of their danger, took to flight, with an intention of making
their escape out of the kingdom; they were eagerly pursued by the barons;
Aymer, one of the brothers, who had been elected to the see of Winchester
took shelter in his episcopal palace, and carried the others along with
him; they were surrounded in that place, and threatened to be dragged out
by force, and to be punished for their crimes and misdemeanors; and the
king, pleading the sacredness of an ecclesiastical sanctuary, was glad to
extricate them from this danger by banishing them the kingdom. In this act
of violence, as well as in the former usurpations of the barons, the queen
and her uncles were thought to have secretly concurred; being jealous of
the credit acquired by the brothers, which, they found, had eclipsed and
annihilated their own.
But the subsequent proceedings of the twenty-four barons were sufficient
to open the eyes of the nation, and to prove their intention of reducing
forever both the king and the people under the arbitrary power of a very
narrow aristocracy., which must at last have terminated either in anarchy,
or in a violent usurpation and tyranny. They pretended that they had not
yet digested all the regulations necessary for the reformation of the
state, and for the redress of grievances; and that they must still retain
their power, till that great purpose were thoroughly effected: in other
words, that they must be perpetual governors, and must continue to reform,
till they were pleased to abdicate their authority. They formed an
association among themselves, and swore that they would stand by each
other with their lives and fortunes; they displaced all the chief officers
of the crown, the justiciary, the chancellor, the treasurer; and advanced
either themselves or their own creatures in their place: even the offices
of the king’s household were disposed of at their pleasure: the government
of all the castles was put into hands in whom they found reason to
confide: and the whole power of the state being thus transferred to them,
they ventured to impose an oath, by which all the subjects were obliged to
swear, under the penalty of being declared public enemies, that they would
obey and execute all the regulations, both known and unknown, of the
twenty-four barons: and all this, for the greater glory of God, the honor
of the church, the service of the king, and the advantage of the
kingdom.[*]
No one dared to withstand this tyrannical authority: Prince Edward
himself, the king’s eldest son, a youth of eighteen, who began to give
indications of that great and manly spirit which appeared throughout the
whole course of his life, was, after making some opposition, constrained
to take that oath, which really deposed his father and his family from
sovereign authority.[*] Earl Warrenne was the last person in the kingdom
that could be brought to give the confederated barons this mark of
submission.
But the twenty-four barons, not content with the usurpation of the royal
power, introduced an innovation in the constitution of parliament, which
was of the utmost importance. They ordained, that this assembly should
choose a committee of twelve persons, who should, in the intervals of the
sessions, possess the authority of the whole parliament, and should
attend, on a summons, the person of the king, in all his motions. But so
powerful were these barons, that this regulation was also submitted to;
the whole government was overthrown or fixed on new foundations; and the
monarchy was totally subverted, without its being possible for the king to
strike a single stroke in defence of the constitution against the
newly-erected oligarchy.
1259.
The report that the king of the Romans intended to pay a visit to England,
gave alarm to the ruling barons, who dreaded lest the extensive influence
and established authority of that prince would be employed to restore the
prerogatives of his family, and overturn their plan of government.[**]
They sent over the bishop of Worcester, who met him at St. Omars; asked
him, in the name of the barons, the reason of his journey, and how long he
intended to stay in England; and insisted that, before he entered the
kingdom he should swear to observe the regulations established at Oxford.
On Richard’s refusal to take this oath, they prepared to resist him as a
public enemy; they fitted out a fleet, assembled an army, and exciting the
inveterate prejudices of the people against foreigners, from whom they had
suffered so many oppressions, spread the report that Richard, attended by
a number of strangers, meant to restore by force the authority of his
exiled brothers, and to violate all the securities provided for public
liberty. The king of the Romans was at last obliged to submit to the terms
required of him. [***]
But the barons, in proportion to their continuance in power, began
gradually to lose that popularity which had assisted them in obtaining it;
and men repined, that regulations, which were occasionally established for
the reformation of the state, were likely to become perpetual, and to
subvert entirely the ancient constitution. They were apprehensive lest the
power of the nobles, always oppressive, should now exert itself without
control, by removing the counterpoise of the crown; and their fears were
increased by some new edicts of the barons, which were plainly calculated
to procure to themselves an impunity in all their violences. They
appointed that the circuits of the itinerant justices, the sole check on
their arbitrary conduct, should be held only once in seven years, and men
easily saw that a remedy which returned after such long intervals, against
an oppressive power which was perpetual, would prove totally insignificant
and useless.[*] The cry became loud in the nation, that the barons should
finish their intended regulations. The knights of the shires, who seem now
to have been pretty regularly assembled, and sometimes in a separate
house, made remonstrances against the slowness of their proceedings. They
represented that, though the king had performed all the conditions
required of him, the barons had hitherto done nothing for the public good,
and had only been careful to promote their own private advantage, and to
make inroads on royal authority; and they even appealed to Prince Edward,
and claimed his interposition for the interests of the nation, and the
reformation of the government.[**] The prince replied that, though it was
from constraint, and contrary to his private sentiments, he had sworn to
maintain the provisions of Oxford, he was determined to observe his oath:
but he sent a message to the barons, requiring them to bring their
undertaking to a speedy conclusion, and fulfil their engagements to the
public: otherwise, he menaced them, that at the expense of his life, he
would oblige them to do their duty, and would shed the last drop of his
blood in promoting the interests and satisfying the just wishes of the
nation.[***]
The barons, urged by so pressing a necessity, published at last a new code
of ordinances for the reformation of the state: [****] but the
expectations of the people were extremely disappointed when they found
that these consisted only of some trivial alterations in the municipal
law; and still more, when the barons pretended that the task was not yet
finished and that they must further prolong their authority, in order to
bring the work of reformation to the desired period.
The current of popularity was now much turned to the side of the crown;
and the barons had little, to rely on for their support besides the
private influence and power of their families, which, though exorbitant,
was likely to prove inferior to the combination of king and people. Even
this basis of power was daily weakened by their intestine jealousies and
animosities; their ancient and inveterate quarrels broke out when they
came to share the spoils of the crown; and the rivalship between the earls
of Leicester and Glocester, the chief leaders among them, began to
disjoint the whole confederacy. The latter, more moderate in his
pretensions, was desirous of stopping or retarding the career of the
barons’ usurpations; but the former, enraged at the opposition which, he
met with in his own party, pretended to throw up all concern in English
affairs; and he retired into France.[*]
The kingdom of France, the only state with which England had any
considerable intercourse, was at this time governed by Lewis IX., a prince
of the most singular character that is to be met with in all the records
of history. This monarch united to the mean and abject superstition of a
monk all the courage and magnanimity of the greatest hero; and, what may
be deemed more extraordinary, the justice and integrity of a disinterested
patriot, the mildness and humanity of an accomplished philosopher. So far
from taking advantage of the divisions among the English, or attempting to
expel those dangerous rivals from the provinces which they still possessed
in France, he had entertained many scruples with regard to the sentence of
attainder pronounced against the king’s father, had even expressed some
intention of restoring the other provinces, and was only prevented from
taking that imprudent resolution by the united remonstrances of his own
barons, who represented the extreme danger of such a measure,[**] and,
what had a greater influence on Lewis, the justice of punishing by a legal
sentence the barbarity and felony of John. Whenever this prince interposed
in English affairs, it was always with an intention of composing the
differences between the king and his nobility: he recommended to both
parties every peaceable and reconciling measure; and he used all his
authority with the earl of Leicester, his native subject, to bend him to a
compliance with Henry.
He made a treaty with England at a time when the distractions of that
kingdom were at the greatest height, and when the king’s authority was
totally annihilated; and the terms which he granted might, even in a more
prosperous state of their affairs, be deemed reasonable and advantageous
to the English. He yielded up some territories which had been conquered
from Poictou and Guienne; he insured the peaceable possession of the
latter province to Henry; he agreed to pay that prince a large sum of
money; and he only required that the king should, in return, make a final
cession of Normandy and the other provinces, which he could never
entertain any hopes of recovering by force of arms.[*] This cession was
ratified by Henry, by his two sons and two daughters, and by the king of
the Romans and his three sons: Leicester alone, either moved by a vain
arrogance, or desirous to ingratiate himself with the English populace,
protested against the deed, and insisted on the right, however distant,
which might accrue to his consort.[**] Lewis saw in his obstinacy the
unbounded ambition of the man; and as the barons insisted that the money
due by treaty should be at their disposal, not at Henry’s, he also saw,
and probably with regret, the low condition to which this monarch, who had
more erred from weakness than from any bad intentions, was reduced by the
turbulence of his own subjects.
1261.
But the situation of Henry soon after wore a more favorable aspect. The
twenty-four barons had now enjoyed the sovereign power near three years;
and had visibly employed it, not for the reformation of the state, which
was their first pretence, but for the aggrandizement of themselves and of
their families. The breach of trust was apparent to all the world: every
order of men felt it, and murmured against it: the dissensions among the
barons themselves, which increased the evil, made also the remedy more
obvious and easy: and the secret desertion in particular of the earl of
Glocester to the crown, seemed to promise Henry certain success in any
attempt to resume his authority. Yet durst he not take that step, so
reconcilable both to justice and policy, without making a previous
application to Rome, and desiring an absolution from his oaths and
engagements.[***]
The pope was at this time much dissatisfied with the conduct of the
barons; who, in order to gain the favor of the people and clergy of
England, had expelled all the Italian ecclesiastics, had confiscated their
benefices, and seemed determined to maintain the liberties and privileges
of the English church, in which the rights of patronage belonging to their
own families were included. The extreme animosity of the English clergy
against the Italians was also a source of his disgust to the order; and an
attempt which had been made by them for further liberty and greater
independence on the civil power, was therefore less acceptable to the
court of Rome.[*] About the same time that the barons at Oxford had
annihilated the prerogatives of the monarchy, the clergy met in a synod at
Merton, and passed several ordinances, which were no less calculated to
promote their own grandeur at the expense of the crown. They decreed, that
it was unlawful to try ecclesiastics by secular judges; that the clergy
were not to regard any prohibitions from civil courts; that lay patrons
had no right to confer spiritual benefices; that the magistrate was
obliged, without further inquiry, to imprison all excommunicated persons;
and that ancient usage, without any particular grant or charter, was a
sufficient authority for any clerical possessions or privileges.[**] About
a century before, these claims would have been supported by the court of
Rome beyond the most fundamental articles of faith: they were the chief
points maintained by the great martyr Becket; and his resolution in
defending them had exalted him to the high station which he held in the
catalogue of Romish saints. But principles were changed with the times:
the pope was become somewhat jealous of the great independence of the
English clergy, which made them stand less in need of his protection, and
even imboldened them to resist his authority, and to complain of the
preference given to the Italian courtiers, whose interests, it is natural
to imagine, were the chief object of his concern. He was ready, therefore,
on the king’s application, to annul these new constitutions of the church
of England.[***] And, at the same time, he absolved the king and all his
subjects from the oath which they had taken to observe the provisions of
Oxford.[****]
Prince Edward, whose liberal mind, though in such early youth, had taught
him the great prejudice which his father had incurred by his levity,
inconstancy, and frequent breach of promise, refused for a long time to
take advantage of thus absolution; and declared that the provisions of
Oxford, how unreasonable soever in themselves, and how much soever abused
by the barons, ought still to be adhered to by those who had sworn to
observe them:[*] he himself had been constrained by violence to take that
oath; yet was he determined to keep it. By this scrupulous fidelity the
prince acquired the confidence of all parties, and was afterwards enabled
to recover fully the royal authority, and to perform such great actions
both during his own reign and that of his father.
The situation of England, during this period, as well as that of most
European kingdoms, was somewhat peculiar. There was no regular military
force maintained in the nation: the sword, however, was not, properly
speaking, in the hands of the people; the barons were alone intrusted with
the defence of the community; and after any effort which they made, either
against their own prince or against foreigners, as the military retainers
departed home, the armies were disbanded, and could not speedily be
reassembled at pleasure. It was easy, therefore, for a few barons, by a
combination, to get the start of the other party, to collect suddenly
their troops, and to appear unexpectedly in the field with an army, which
their antagonists, though equal or even superior in power and interest,
would not dare to encounter. Hence the sudden revolutions which often took
place in those governments; hence the frequent victories obtained without
a blow by one faction over the other; and hence it happened, that the
seeming prevalence of a party was seldom a prognostic of its long
continuance in power and authority.
1262.
The king, as soon as he received the pope’s absolution from his oath,
accompanied with menaces of excommunication against all opponents,
trusting to the countenance of the church, to the support promised him by
many considerable barons, and to the returning favor of the people,
immediately took off the mask. After justifying his conduct by a
proclamation, in which he set forth the private ambition and the breach of
trust conspicuous in Leicester and his associates, be declared that he had
resumed the government, and was determined thenceforth to exert the royal
authority for the protection of his subjects.
He removed Hugh le Despenser and Nicholas de Ely, the justiciary and
chancellor appointed by the barons; and put Philip Basset and Walter de
Merton in their place. He substituted new sheriffs in all the counties,
men of character and honor; he placed new governors in most of the
castles; he changed all the officers of his household; he summoned a
parliament, in which the resumption of his authority was ratified, with
only five dissenting voices; and the barons, after making one fruitless
effort to take the king by surprise at Winchester, were obliged to
acquiesce in those new regulations.[*]
The king, in order to cut off every objection to his conduct, offered to
refer all the differences between him and the earl of Leicester to
Margaret, queen of France.[**] The celebrated integrity of Lewis gave a
mighty influence to any decision which issued from his court; and Henry
probably hoped, that the gallantry on which all barons, as true knights,
valued themselves, would make them ashamed not to submit to the award of
that princess. Lewis merited the confidence reposed in him. By an
admirable conduct, probably as political as just, he continually
interposed his good offices to allay the civil discords ol the English: he
forwarded all healing measures which might give security to both parties:
and he still endeavored, though in vain, to soothe by persuasion the
fierce ambition of the earl of Leicester, and to convince him how much it
was his duty to submit peaceably to the authority of his sovereign.
1263.
That bold and artful conspirator was nowise discouraged by the bad success
of his past enterprises. The death of Richard, earl of Glocester, who was
his chief rival in power, and who, before his decease, had joined the
royal party seemed to open a new field to his violence, and to expose the
throne to fresh insults and injuries. It was in vain that the king
professed his intentions of observing strictly the great charter, even of
maintaining all the regulations made by the reforming barons at Oxford or
afterwards, except those with entirely annihilated the royal authority;
these powerful chieftains, now obnoxious to the court, could not peaceably
resign the hopes of entire independence and uncontrolled power with which
they had flattered themselves, and which they had so long enjoyed. Many of
them engaged in Leicester’s views, and among the rest, Gilbert, the young
earl of Glocester, who brought him a mighty accession of power, from the
extensive authority possessed by that opulent family. Even Henry, son of
the king of the Romans, commonly called Henry d’Allmaine, though a prince
of the blood, joined the party of the barons against the king, the head of
his own family Leicester himself, who still resided in France, secretly
formed the links of this great conspiracy, and planned the whole scheme of
operations.
The princes of Wales, notwithstanding the great power of the monarchs both
of the Saxon and Norman line, still preserved authority in their own
country. Though they had often been constrained to pay tribute to the
crown of England, they were with difficulty retained in subordination or
even in peace; and almost through every reign since the conquest, they had
infested the English frontiers with such petty incursions and sudden
inroads, as seldom merit to have place in a general history. The English,
still content with repelling their invasions, and chasing them back into
their mountains, had never pursued the advantages obtained over them, nor
been able, even under their greatest and most active princes, to fix a
total, or so much as a feudal subjection on the country. This advantage
was reserved to the present king, the weakest and most indolent. In the
year 1237, Lewellyn, prince of Wales, declining in years and broken with
infirmities, but still more harassed with the rebellion and undutiful
behavior of his youngest son Griffin, had recourse to the protection of
Henry; and consenting to subject his principality, which had so long
maintained, or soon recovered, its independence to vassalage under the
crown of England, had purchased security and tranquillity on these
dishonorable terms. His eldest son and heir, David, renewed the homage to
England; and having taken his brother prisoner, delivered him into Henry’s
hands, who committed him to custody in the Tower. That prince, endeavoring
to make his escape, lost his life in the attempt; and the prince of Wales,
freed from the apprehensions of so dangerous a rival, paid thenceforth
less regard to the English monarch, and even renewed those incursions by
which the Welsh, during so many ages, had been accustomed to infest the
English borders. Lewellyn, however, the foil of Griffin, who succeeded to
his uncle, had been obliged to renew the homage which was now claimed by
England as an established right; but he was well pleased to inflame those
civil discords, on which he rested his present security and founded his
hopes of future independence. He entered into a confederacy with the earl
of Leicester, and collecting all the force of his principality, invaded
England with an army of thirty thousand men. He ravaged the lands of Roger
de Mortimer, and of all the barons who adhered to the crown;[*] he marched
into Cheshire, and committed like depredations on Prince Edward’s
territories; every place where his disorderly troops appeared was laid
waste with fire and sword; and though Mortimer, a gallant and expert
soldier, made stout resistance, it was found necessary that the prince
himself should head the army against this invader. Edward repulsed Prince
Lewellyn, and obliged him to take shelter in the mountains of North Wales:
but he was prevented from making further progress against the enemy by the
disorders which soon after broke out in England.
The Welsh invasion was the appointed signal for the malecontent barons to
rise in arms; and Leicester, coming over secretly from France, collected
all the forces of his party, and commenced an open rebellion. He seized
the person of the bishop of Hereford, a prelate obnoxious to all the
inferior clergy, on account of his devoted attachment to the court of
Rome.[**] Simon, bishop of Norwich, and John Mansel, because they had
published the pope’s bull, absolving the king and kingdom from their oaths
to observe the provisions of Oxford, were made prisoners, and exposed to
the rage of the party. The king’s demesnes were ravaged with unbounded
fury,[***] and as it was Leicester’s interest to allure to his side, by
the hopes of plunder, all the disorderly ruffians in England he gave them
a general license to pillage the barons of the opposite party, and even
all neutral persons.
But one of the principal resources of his faction was the populace of the
cities, particularly of London; and as he had, by his hypocritical
pretensions to sanctity, and his zeal against Rome, engaged the monks and
lower ecclesiastics in his party, his dominion over the inferior ranks of
men became uncontrollable. Thomas Fitz-Richard, mayor of London, a furious
and licentious man, gave the countenance of authority to these disorders
in the capital; and having declared war against the substantial citizens,
he loosened all the bands of government, by which that turbulent city was
commonly but ill restrained. On the approach of Easter, the zeal of
superstition, the appetite for plunder, or what is often as prevalent with
the populace as either of these motives, the pleasure of committing havoc
and destruction, prompted them to attack the unhappy Jews, who were first
pillaged without resistance, then massacred, to the number of five hundred
persons.[*] The Lombard bankers were next exposed to the rage of the
people; and though, by taking sanctuary in the churches, they escaped with
their lives, all their money and goods became a prey to the licentious
multitude. Even the houses of the rich citizens, though English, were
attacked by night; and way was made by sword and by fire to the pillage of
their goods, and often to the destruction of their persons. The queen,
who, though defended by the Tower, was terrified by the neighborhood of
such dangerous commotions, resolved to go by water to the Castle of
Windsor; but as she approached the bridge, the populace assembled against
her: the cry ran, “Drown the witch;” and besides abusing her with the most
opprobrious language, and pelting her with rotten eggs and dirt, they had
prepared large stones to sink her barge, when she should attempt to shoot
the bridge; and she was so frightened, that she returned to the Tower[**]
The violence and fury of Leicester’s faction had risen to such a height in
all parts of England, that the king, unable to resist their power, was
obliged to set on foot a treaty of peace, and to make an accommodation
with the barons on the most disadvantageous terms.[***]
He agreed to confirm anew the provisions of Oxford, even those which
entirely annihilated the royal authority; and the barons were again
reinstated in the sovereignty of the kingdom. They restored Hugh le
Despenser to the office of chief justiciary: they appointed their own
creatures sheriffs in every county of England; they took possession of all
the royal castles and fortresses; they even named all the officers of the
king’s household; and they summoned a parliament to meet at Westminster,
in order to settle more fully their plan of government. They here produced
a new list of twenty-four barons, to whom they proposed that the
administration should be entirely committed; and they insisted that the
authority of this junto should continue not only during the reign of the
king, but also during that of Prince Edward.
This prince, the life and soul of the royal party, had unhappily, before
the king’s accommodation with the barons, been taken prisoner by Leicester
in a parley at Windsor;[*] and that misfortune, more than any other
incident, had determined Henry to submit to the ignominious conditions
imposed upon him. But Edward, having recovered his liberty by the treaty,
employed his activity in defending the prerogatives of his family; and he
gained a great party even among-those who had at first adhered to the
cause of the barons. His cousin, Henry d’Allmaine, Roger Bigod, earl
mareschal, Earl Warrenne, Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford, John Lord
Basset, Ralph Basset, Hammond l’Estrange, Roger Mortimer, Henry de Piercy,
Robert de Brus, Roger de Leybourne, with almost all the lords marchers, as
they were called, on the borders of Wales and of Scotland, the most
warlike parts of the kingdom, declared in favor of the royal cause; and
hostilities, which were scarcely well composed, were again renewed in
every part of England. But the near balance of the parties, joined to the
universal clamor of the people, obliged the king and barons to open anew
the negotiations for peace; and it was agreed by both sides to submit
their differences to the arbitration of the king of France.[**]
1264.
This virtuous prince, the only man, who, in like circumstances, could
safely have been intrusted with such an authority by a neighboring nation,
had never ceased to interpose his good, offices between the English
factions, and had, even, during the short interval of peace, invited over
to Paris both the king and the earl of Leicester, in order to accommodate
the differences between them, but found that the fears and animosities on
both sides, as well as the ambition of Leicester, were so violent, as to
render all his endeavors ineffectual. But when this solemn appeal,
ratified by the oaths and subscriptions of the leaders in both factions,
was made to his judgment, he was not discouraged from pursuing his
honorable purpose: he summoned the states of France at Amiens; and there,
in the presence of that assembly, as well as in that of the king of
England and Peter de Mountfort, Leicester’s son, he brought this great
cause to a trial and examination. It appeared to him, that the provisions
of Oxford, even had they not been extorted by force, had they not been so
exorbitant in their nature and subversive of the ancient constitution,
were expressly established as a temporary expedient, and could not,
without breach of trust, be rendered perpetual by the barons. He therefore
annulled these provisions; restored to the king the possession of his
castles, and the power of nomination to the great offices; allowed him to
retain what foreigners he pleased in his kingdom, and even to confer on
them places of trust and dignity; and, in a word, reestablished the royal
power in the same condition on which it stood before the meeting of the
parliament at Oxford. But while he thus suppressed dangerous innovations,
and preserved unimpaired the prerogatives of the English crown, he was not
negligent of the rights of the people; and besides ordering that a general
amnesty should be granted for all past offences, he declared, that his
award was not anywise meant to derogate from the privileges and liberties
which the nation enjoyed by any former concessions or charters of the
crown.[*]
This equitable sentence was no sooner known in England, than Leicester and
his confederates determined to reject it and to have recourse to arms, in
order to procure to themselves more safe and advantageous conditions.[**]
Without regard to his oaths and subscriptions, that enterprising
conspirator directed his two sons, richard and Peter de Mountfort, in
conjunction with Robert de Ferrers, earl of Derby, to attack the city of
Worcester; while Henry and Simon de Mountfort, two others of his sons,
assisted by the prince of Wales, were ordered to lay waste the estate of
Roger de Mortimer. He himself resided at London; and employing as his
instrument Fitz-Richard, the seditious mayor, who had violently and
illegally prolonged his authority, he wrought up that city to the highest
ferment and agitation. The populace formed themselves into bands and
companies; chose leaders; practised all military exercises; committed
violence on the royalists; and to give them greater countenance in their
disorders, an association was entered into between the city and eighteen
great barons, never to make peace with the king but by common consent and
approbation. At the head of those who swore to maintain this association,
were the earls of Leicester, Glocester, and Derby, with Le Despenser, the
chief justiciary; men who had all previously sworn to submit to the award
of the French monarch. Their only pretence for this breach of faith was,
that the latter part of Lewis’s sentence was, as they affirmed, a
contradiction to the former. He ratified the charter of liberties, yet
annulled the provisions of Oxford, which were only calculated, as they
maintained, to preserve that charter; and without which, in their
estimation, they had no security for its observance.
The king and prince, finding a civil war inevitable, prepared themselves
for defence; and summoning the military vassals from all quarters, and
being reinforced by Baliol, lord of Galloway, Brus, lord of Annandale,
Henry Piercy, John Comyn,[*] and other barons of the north, they composed
an army, formidable as well from its numbers as its military prowess and
experience. The first enterprise of the royalists was the attack of
Northampton, which was defended by Simon de Mountfort, with many of the
principal barons of that party: and a breach being; made in the walls by
Philip Basset, the place was carried by assault, and both the governor and
the garrison were made prisoners. The royalists marched thence to
Leicester and Nottingham; both which places having opened their gates to
them, Prince Edward proceeded with a detachment into the county of Derby,
in order to ravage with fire and sword the lands of the earl of that name,
and take revenge on, him for his disloyalty. Like maxims of war prevailed
with both parties throughout England; and the kingdom was thus exposed in
a moment to greater devastation, from the animosities of the rival barons,
than it would have suffered from many years of foreign or even domestic
hostilities, conducted by more humane and more generous principles.
The earl of Leicester, master of London, and of the counties in the
south-east of England, formed the siege of Rochester, which alone declared
for the king in those parts, and which, besides Earl Warrenne, the
governor, was garrisoned by many noble and powerful barons of the royal
party. The king and prince hastened from Nottingham, where they were then
quartered, to the relief of the place; and on their approach, Leicester
raised the siege and retreated to London, which, being the centre of his
power, he was afraid might, in his absence, fall into the king’s hands,
either by force or by a correspondence with the principal citizens, who
were all secretly inclined to the royal cause. Reënforced [**unusual
spelling but that is what it looks like] by a great body of Londoners, and
having summoned his partisans from all quarters, he thought himself strong
enough to hazard a general battle with the royalists, and to determine the
fate of the nation in one great engagement, which, if it proved
successful, must be decisive against the king, who had no retreat for his
broken troops in those parts, while Leicester himself, in case of any
sinister accident, could easily take shelter in the city. To give the
better coloring to his cause, he previously sent a message with conditions
of peace to Henry, submissive in the language, but exorbitant in the
demands;[*] and when the messenger returned with the lie and defiance from
the king, the prince, and the king of the Romans, he sent a new message,
renouncing, in the name of himself and of the associated barons, all
fealty and allegiance to Henry. He then marched out of the city with his
army, divided into four bodies: the first commanded by his two sons, Henry
and Guy de Mountfort, together with Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford,
who had deserted to the barons; the second led by the earl of Glocester,
with William de Montchesney and John Fitz-John; the third, composed of
Londoners, under the command of Nicholas de Segrave; the fourth headed by
himself in person. The bishop of Chichester gave a general absolution to
the army, accompanied with assurances, that, if any of them fell in the
ensuing action, they would infallibly be received into heaven, as the
reward of their suffering in so meritorious a cause.
Leicester, who possessed great talents for war, conducted his march with
such skill and secrecy, that he had well nigh surprised the royalists in
their quarters at Lewes, in Sussex, but the vigilance and activity of
Prince Edward soon repaired this negligence; and he led out the king’s
army to the field in three bodies. He himself conducted the van, attended
by Earl Warrenne and William de Valence; the main body was commanded by
the king of the Romans and his son Henry; the king himself was placed in
the rear at the head of his principal nobility. Prince Edward rushed upon
the Londoners who had demanded the post of honor in leading the rebel
army, but who, from their ignorance of discipline and want of experience,
were ill fitted to resist the gentry and military men, of whom the
prince’s body was composed. They were broken in an instant; were chased
off the field; and Edward, transported by his martial ardor, and eager to
revenge the insolence of the Londoners against his mother,[*] put them to
the sword for the length of four miles, without giving them any quarter,
and without reflecting on the fate which in the mean time attended the
rest of the army. The earl of Leicester, seeing the royalists thrown into
confusion by their eagerness in the pursuit, led on his remaining troops
against the bodies commanded by the two royal brothers: he defeated with
great slaughter the forces headed by the king of the Romans; and that
prince was obliged to yield himself prisoner to the earl of Glocester: he
penetrated to the body where the king himself was placed, threw it into
disorder, pursued his advantage, chased it into the town of Lewes, and
obliged Henry to surrender himself prisoner.[**]
Prince Edward, returning to the field of battle from his precipitate
pursuit of the Londoners, was astonished to find it covered with the dead
bodies of his friends, and still more to hear that his father and uncle
were defeated and taken prisoners, and that Arundel, Comyn, Brus, Hamond
l’Estrange, Roger Leybourne, and many considerable barons of his party
were in the hands of the victorious enemy. Earl Warrenne, Hugh Bigod, and
William de Valence, struck with despair at this event, immediately took to
flight, hurried to Pevencey, and made their escape beyond sea:[***] but
the prince, intrepid amidst the greatest disasters, exhorted his troops to
revenge the death of their friends, to relieve the royal captives, and to
snatch an easy conquest from an enemy disordered by their own
victory.[****] He found his followers intimidated by their situation,
while Leicester, afraid of a sudden and violent blow from the prince,
amused him by a feigned negotiation, till he was able to recall his troops
from the pursuit, and to bring them into order.[*****]
There now appeared no further resource to the royal party, surrounded by
the armies and garrisons of the enemy, destitute of forage and provisions,
and deprived of their sovereign, as well as of their principal leaders,
who could alone inspirit them to an obstinate resistance. The prince,
therefore, was obliged to submit to Leicester’s terms, which were short
and severe, agreeably to the suddenness and necessity of the situation. He
stipulated that he and Henry d’Allmaine should surrender themselves
prisoners as pledges in lieu of the two kings; that all other prisoners on
both sides should be released;[*] and that in order to settle fully the
terms of agreement, application should be made to the king of France, that
he should name six Frenchmen, three prelates and three noblemen; these six
to choose two others of their own country, and these two to choose one
Englishman, who, in conjunction with themselves, were to be invested by
both parties with full powers to make what regulations they thought proper
for the settlement of the kingdom. The prince and young Henry accordingly
delivered themselves into Leicester’s hands, who sent them under a guard
to Dover Castle. Such are the terms of agreement, commonly called the Mise
of Lewes, from an obsolete French term of that meaning; for it appears
that all the gentry and nobility of England, who valued themselves on
their Norman extraction, and who disdained the language of their native
country, made familiar use of the French tongue till this period, and for
some time after.
Leicester had no sooner obtained this great advantage and gotten the whole
royal family in his power, than he openly violated every article of the
treaty, and acted as sole master, and even tyrant of the kingdom. He still
detained the king in effect a prisoner, and made use of that prince’s
authority to purposes the most prejudicial to his interests, and the most
oppressive of his people.[**] He every where disarmed the royalists, and
kept all his own partisans in, a military posture:[***] he observed the
same partial conduct in the deliverance of the captives, and even threw
many of the royalists into prison, besides those who were taken in the
battle of Lewes; he carried the king from place to place, and obliged all
the royal castles, on pretence of Henry’s commands, to receive a governor
and garrison of his own appointment.
All the officers of the crown and of the household were named by him, and
the whole authority, as well as arms of the state, was lodged in his
hands: he instituted in the counties a new kind of magistracy, endowed
with new and arbitrary powers, that of conservators of the peace;[*] his
avarice appeared bare-faced, and might induce us to question the greatness
of his ambition, at least the largeness of his mind, if we had not reason
to think that he intended to employ his acquisitions as the instruments
for attaining further power and grandeur. He seized the estates of no less
than eighteen barons as his share of the spoil gained in the battle of
Lewes: he engrossed to himself the ransom of all the prisoners; and told
his barons, with a wanton insolence, that it was sufficient for them that
he had saved them by that victory from the forfeitures and attainders
which hung over them:[**] he even treated the earl of Glocester in the
same injurious manner, and applied to his own use the ransom of the king
of the Romans, who in the field of battle had yielded himself prisoner to
that nobleman. Henry, his eldest son, made a monopoly of all the wool in
the kingdom, the only valuable commodity for foreign markets which it at
that time produced.[***] The inhabitants of the cinque ports, during the
present dissolution of government, betook themselves to the most
licentious piracy, preyed on the ships of all nations, threw the mariners
into the sea, and by these practices, soon banished all merchants from the
English coasts and harbors. Every foreign commodity rose to an exorbitant
price, and woollen cloth, which the English had not then the art of
dyeing, was worn by them white, and without receiving the last hand of the
manufacturer. In answer to the complaints which arose on this occasion,
Leicester replied that the kingdom could well enough subsist within
itself, and needed no intercourse with foreigners. And it was found that
he even combined with the pirates of the cinque ports, and received as his
share the third of their prizes.[****]
No further mention was made of the reference to the king of France, so
essential an article in the agreement of Lewes; and Leicester summoned a
parliament, composed altogether of his own partisans, in order to rivet,
by their authority, that power which he had acquired by so much violence,
and which he used with so much tyranny and injustice. An ordinance was
there passed, to which the king’s consent had been previously extorted,
that every act of royal power should be exercised by a council of nine
persons, who were to be chosen and removed by the majority of three,
Leicester himself, the earl of Glocester, and the bishop of Chichester.[*]
By this intricate plan of government, the sceptre was really put into
Leicester’s hands; as he had the entire direction of the bishop of
Chichester, and thereby commanded all the resolutions of the council of
three, who could appoint or discard at pleasure every member of the
supreme council.
But it was impossible that things could long remain in this strange
situation. It behoved Leicester either to descend with some peril into the
rank of a subject, or to mount up with no less into that of a sovereign;
and his ambition, unrestrained either by fear or by principle, gave too
much reason to suspect him of the latter intention. Meanwhile he was
exposed to anxiety from every quarter; and felt that the smallest incident
was capable of overturning that immense and ill-cemented fabric which he
had reared. The queen, whom her husband had left abroad, had collected in
foreign parts an army of desperate adventurers, and had assembled a great
number of ships, with a view of invading the kingdom, and of bringing
relief to her unfortunate family. Lewis, detesting Leicester’s usurpations
and perjuries, and disgusted at the English barons, who had refused to
submit to his award, secretly favored all her enterprises, and was
generally believed to be making preparations for the same purpose. An
English army, by the pretended authority of the captive king, was
assembled on the sea-coast, to oppose this projected invasion;[**] but
Leicester owed his safety more to cross winds, which long detained and at
last dispersed and ruined the queen’s fleet, than to any resistance which,
in their present situation, could have been expected from the English.
Leicester found himself better able to resist the spiritual thunders which
were levelled against him. The pope, still adhering to the king’s cause
against the barons, despatched Cardinal Guido as his legate into England,
with orders to excommunicate by name the three earls, Leicester,
Glocester, and Norfolk, and all others in general, who concurred in the
oppression and captivity of their sovereign.[*] Leicester menaced the
legate with death if he set foot within the kingdom; but Guido, meeting in
France the bishops of Winchester, London, and Worcester, who had been sent
thither on a negotiation, commanded them, under the penalty of
ecclesiastical censures, to carry his bull into England, and to publish it
against the barons. When the prelates arrived off the coast, they were
boarded by the piratical mariners of the cinque ports, to whom probably
they gave a hint of the cargo which they brought along with them: the bull
was torn and thrown into the sea; which furnished the artful prelates with
a plausible excuse for not obeying the orders of the legate. Leicester
appealed from Guido to the pope in person; but before the ambassadors
appointed to defend his cause could reach Rome, the pope was dead; and
they found the legate himself, from whom they had appealed, seated on the
papal throne, by the name of Urban IV. That daring leader was nowise
dismayed with this incident; and as he found that a great part of his
popularity in England was founded on his opposition to the court of Rome,
which was now become odious, he persisted with the more obstinacy in the
prosecution of his measures.
1265.
That he might both increase and turn to advantage his popularity,
Leicester summoned a new parliament in London, where he knew his power was
uncontrollable; and he fixed this assembly on a more democratical basis
than any which had ever been summoned since the foundation of the
monarchy. Besides the barons of his own party, and several ecclesiastics,
who were not immediate tenants of the crown, he ordered returns to be made
of two knights from each shire, and, what is more remarkable, of deputies
from the boroughs, an order of men which, in former ages, had always been
regarded as too mean to enjoy a place in the national councils.[**] This
period is commonly esteemed the epoch of the house of commons in England;
and it is certainly the first time that historians speak of any
representatives sent to parliament by the boroughs and even in the most
particular narratives delivered of parliamentary transactions, as in the
trial of Thomas à Becket, where the events of each day, and almost of each
hour, are carefully recorded by contemporary authors,[***] there is not,
throughout the whole, the least appearance of a house of commons.
In all the general accounts given in preceding times of those assemblies,
the prelates and barons only are mentioned as the constituent members. But
though that house derived its existence from so precarious and even so
invidious an origin as Leicester’s usurpation, it soon proved, when
summoned by the legal princes, one of the most useful, and, in process of
time, one of the most powerful members of the national constitution; and
gradually rescued the kingdom from aristocratical as well as from regal
tyranny. But Leicester’s policy, if we must ascribe to him so great a
blessing, only forwarded by some years an institution, for which the
general state of things had already prepared the nation; and it is
otherwise inconceivable, that a plant, set by so inauspicious a hand,
could have attained to so vigorous a growth, and have flourished in the
midst of such tempests and convulsions. The feudal system, with which the
liberty, much more the power of the commons, was totally incompatible,
began gradually to decline; and both the king and the commonalty, who felt
its inconveniencies, contributed to favor this new power, which was more
submissive than the barons to the regular authority of the crown, and at
the same time afforded protection to the inferior orders of the state.
Leicester, having thus assembled a parliament of his own model, and
trusting to the attachment of the populace of London, seized the
opportunity of crushing his rivals among the powerful barons. Robert de
Ferrers, earl of Derby, was accused in the king’s name, seized, and
committed to custody, without being brought to any legal trial.[*] John
Gifford, menaced with the same fate, fled from London, and took shelter in
the borders of Wales. Even the earl of Glocester, whose power and
influence had so much contributed to the success of the barons, but who of
late was extremely disgusted with Leicester’s arbitrary conduct, found
himself in danger from the prevailing authority of his ancient
confederate; and he retired from parliament.[**] This known dissension
gave courage to all Leicester’s enemies and to the king’s friends; who
were now sure of protection from so potent a leader.
Though Roger Mortimer, Hamond l’Estrange, and other powerful marchers of
Wales, had been obliged to leave the kingdom, their authority still
remained over the territories subjected to their jurisdiction; and there
were many others who were disposed to give disturbance to the new
government. The animosities inseparable from the feudal aristocracy, broke
out with fresh violence, and threatened the kingdom with new convulsions
and disorders.
The earl of Leicester, surrounded with these difficulties, embraced a
measure, from which he hoped to reap some present advantages, but which
proved in the end the source of all his future calamities. The active and
intrepid Prince Edward had anguished in prison ever since the fatal battle
of Lewes; and as he was extremely popular in the kingdom there arose a
general desire of seeing him again restored to liberty.[*] Leicester,
finding that he could with difficulty oppose the concurring wishes of the
nation, stipulated with the prince, that, in return, he should order his
adherents to deliver up to the barons all their castles, particularly
those on the borders of Wales; and should swear neither to depart the
kingdom during three years, nor introduce into it any foreign forces.[**]
The king took an oath to the same effect, and he also passed a charter in
which he confirmed the agreement or Mise of Lewes; and even permitted his
subjects to rise in arms against him, if he should ever attempt to
infringe it.[***] So little care did Leicester take, though he constantly
made use of the authority of this captive prince, to preserve to him any
appearance of royalty or kingly prerogatives.
In consequence of this treaty, Prince Edward was brought into Westminster
Hall, and was declared free by the barons: but instead of really
recovering his liberty, as he had vainly expected, he found that the whole
transaction was a fraud on the part of Leicester; that he himself still
continued a prisoner at large, and was guarded by the emissaries of that
nobleman; and that, while the faction reaped all the benefit from the
performance of his part of the treaty, care was taken that he should enjoy
no advantage by it. As Glocester, on his rupture with the barons, had
retired for safety to his estates on the borders of Wales, Leicester
followed him with an army to Hereford,[*] continued still to menace ana
negotiate, and that he might add authority to his cause, he carried both
the king and prince along with him. The earl of Glocester here concerted
with young Edward the manner of that prince’s escape. He found means to
convey to him a horse of extraordinary swiftness; and appointed Roger
Mortimer who had returned into the kingdom, to be ready at hand with a
small party to receive the prince, and to guard him to a place of safety.
Edward pretended to take the air with some of Leicester’s retinue, who
were his guards; and making matches between their horses, after he thought
he had tired and blown them sufficiently, he suddenly mounted Glocester’s
horse, and called to his attendants that he had long enough enjoyed the
pleasure of their company, and now bade them adieu. They followed him for
some time without being able to overtake him; and the appearance of
Mortimer with his company put an end to their pursuit.
The royalists, secretly prepared for this event, immediately flew to arms;
and the joy of this gallant prince’s deliverance, the oppressions under
which the nation labored, the expectation of a new scene of affairs, and
the countenance of the earl of Glocester, procured Edward an army which
Leicester was utterly unable to withstand. This nobleman found himself in
a remote quarter of the kingdom; surrounded by his enemies; barred from
all communication with his friends by the Severn, whose bridges Edward had
broken down; and obliged to fight the cause of his party under these
multiplied disadvantages. In this extremity he wrote to his son, Simon de
Mountfort, to hasten from London with an army for his relief; and Simon
had advanced to Kenilworth with that view, where, fancying that all
Edward’s force and attention were directed against his father, he lay
secure and unguarded. But the prince, making a sudden and forced march,
surprised him in his camp, dispersed his army, and took the earl of Oxford
and many other noblemen prisoners, almost without resistance. Leicester,
ignorant of his son’s fate, passed the Severn in boats during Edward’s
absence, and lay at Evesham, in expectation of being every hour joined by
his friends from London; when the prince, who availed himself of every
favorable moment, appeared in the field before him. Edward made a body of
his troops advance from the road which led to Kenilworth, and ordered them
to carry the banners taken from Simon’s army; while he himself, making a
circuit with the rest of his forces, purposed to attack the enemy on the
other quarter. Leicester was long deceived by this stratagem, and took one
division of Edward’s army for his friends; but at last, perceiving his
mistake, and observing the great superiority and excellent disposition of
the royalists, he exclaimed, that they had learned from him the art of
war; adding, “The Lord have mercy on our souls, for I see our bodies are
the prince’s!” The battle immediately began, though on very unequal terms.
Leicester’s army, by living in the mountains of Wales without bread, which
was not then much used among the inhabitants, had been extremely weakened
by sickness and desertion, and was soon broken by the victorious
royalists; while his Welsh allies, accustomed only to a desultory kind of
war, immediately took to flight, and were pursued with great slaughter.
Leicester himself, asking for quarter, was slain in the heat of the
action, with his eldest son Henry, Hugh le Despenser, and about one
hundred and sixty knights, and many other gentlemen of his party. The old
king had been purposely placed by the rebels in the front of the battle,
and being clad in armor, and thereby not known by his friends, he received
a wound, and was in danger of his life; but crying out, “I am Henry of
Winchester, your king,” he was saved, and put in a place of safety by his
son, who flew to his rescue.
The violence, ingratitude, tyranny, rapacity, and treachery of the earl of
Leicester, give a very bad idea of his moral character, and make us regard
his death as the most fortunate event which, in this conjuncture, could
have happened to the English nation: yet must we allow the man to have
possessed great abilities, and the appearance of great virtues, who,
though a stranger, could, at a time when strangers were the most odious
and the most universally decried, have acquired so extensive an interest
in the kingdom, and have so nearly paved his way to the throne itself. His
military capacity, and his political craft, were equally eminent: he
possessed the talents both of governing men and conducting business; and
though his ambition was boundless, it seems neither to have exceeded his
courage nor his genius; and he had the happiness of making the low
populace, as well as the haughty barons, coöperate towards the success of
his selfish and dangerous purposes. A prince of greater abilities and
vigor than Henry might have directed the talents of this nobleman either
to the exaltation of his throne or to the good of his people but the
advantages given to Leicester, by the weak and variable administration of
the king, brought on the ruin of royal authority, and produced great
confusions in the kingdom which, however, in the end, preserved and
extremely improved national liberty and the constitution. His popularity,
even after his death, continued so great, that, though he was
excommunicated by Rome, the people believed him to be a saint; and many
miracles were said to be wrought upon his tomb.[*]
1266.
The victory of Evesham, with the death of Leicester, proved decisive in
favor of the royalists, and made an equal though an opposite impression on
friends and enemies, in every part of England. The king of the Romans
recovered his liberty: the other prisoners of the royal party were not
only freed, but courted by their keepers; Fitz-Richard, the seditious
mayor of London, who had marked out forty of the most wealthy citizens for
slaughter, immediately stopped his hand on receiving intelligence of this
great event; and almost all the castles, garrisoned by the barons,
hastened to make their submissions, and to open their gates to the king.
The Isle of Axholme alone, and that of Ely, trusting to the strength of
their situation, ventured to make resistance; but were at last reduced, as
well as the Castle of Dover, by the valor and activity of Prince
Edward.[**] Adam de Gourdon, a courageous baron, maintained himself during
some time in the forests of Hampshire, committed depredations in the
neighborhood, and obliged the prince to lead a body of troops into that
country against him. Edward attacked the camp of the rebels; and being
transported by the ardor of battle, leaped over the trench with a few
followers, and encountered Gourdon in single combat. The victory was long
disputed between these valiant combatants; but ended at last in the
prince’s favor, who wounded his antagonist, threw him from his horse, and
took him prisoner. He not only gave him his life; but introduced him that
very night to the queen at Guildford, procured him his pardon, restored
him to his estate, received him into favor, and was ever after faithfully
served by him.[***]
A total victory of the sovereign over so extensive a rebellion commonly
produces a revolution of government, and strengthens, as well as enlarges,
for some time, the prerogatives of the crown; yet no sacrifices of
national liberty were made on this occasion; the Great Charter remained
still inviolate; and the king, sensible that his own barons, by whose
assistance alone he had prevailed, were no less jealous of their
independence than the other party, seems thenceforth to have more
carefully abstained from all those exertions of power which had afforded
so plausible a pretence to the rebels. The clemency of this victory is
also remarkable; no blood was shed on the scaffold; no attainders, except
of the Mountfort family, were carried into execution; and though a
parliament, assembled at Winchester, attainted all those who had borne
arms against the king, easy compositions were made with them for their
lands;[*] and the highest sum levied on the most obnoxious offenders
exceeded not five years’ rent of their estate. Even the earl of Derby, who
again rebelled, after having been pardoned and restored to his fortune,
was obliged to pay only seven years’ rent, and was a second time restored.
The mild disposition of the king, and the prudence of the prince, tempered
the insolence of victory and gradually restored order to the several
members of the state, disjointed by so long a continuance of civil wars
and commotions.
The city of London, which had carried farthest the rage and animosity
against the king, and which seemed determined to stand upon its defence
after almost all the kingdom had submitted, was, after some interval,
restored to most of its liberties and privileges; and Fitz-Richard, the
mayor, who had been guilty of so much illegal violence, was only punished
by fine and imprisonment. The countess of Leicester, the king’s sister,
who had been extremely forward in all attacks on the royal family, was
dismissed the kingdom with her two sons, Simon and Guy, who proved very
ungrateful for this lenity. Five years afterwards, they assassinated, at
Viterbo in Italy, their cousin Henry d’Allmaine, who at that very time was
endeavoring to make their peace with the king; and by taking sanctuary in
the church of the Franciscans, they escaped the punishment due to so great
an enormity.[**]
1267.
The merits of the earl of Glocester, after he returned to his allegiance,
had been so great, in restoring the prince to his liberty, and assisting
him in his victories against the rebellious barons, that it was almost
impossible to content him in his demands; and his youth and temerity as
well as his great power, tempted him, on some new disgust, to raise again
the flames of rebellion in the kingdom. The mutinous populace of London at
his instigation took to arms; and the prince was obliged to levy an army
of thirty thousand men in order to suppress them. Even this second
rebellion did not provoke the king to any act of cruelty; and the earl of
Glocester himself escaped with total impunity. He was only obliged to
enter into a bond of twenty thousand marks, that he should never again be
guilty of rebellion; a strange method of enforcing the laws, and a proof
of the dangerous independence of the barons in those ages! These potent
nobles were, from the danger of the precedent, averse to the execution of
the laws of forfeiture and felony against any of their fellows; though
they could not, with a good grace, refuse to concur in obliging them to
fulfil any voluntary contract and engagement into which they had entered.
1270.
The prince, finding the state of the kingdom tolerably composed, was
seduced by his avidity for glory, and by the prejudices of the age, as
well as by the earnest solicitations of the king of France, to undertake
an expedition against the infidels in the Holy Land;[*] and he endeavored
previously to settle the state in such a manner, as to dread no bad
effects from his absence. As the formidable power and turbulent
disposition of the earl of Glocester gave him apprehensions, he insisted
on carrying him along with him, in consequence of a vow which that
nobleman had made to undertake the same voyage: in the mean time, he
obliged him to resign some of his castles, and to enter into a new bond
not to disturb the peace of the kingdom.[**]
He sailed from England with an army; and arrived in Lewis’s camp before
Tunis in Africa, where he found that monarch already dead, from the
intemperance of the climate and the fatigues of his enterprise. The great,
if not only weakness of this prince, in his government, was the imprudent
passion for crusades; but it was this zeal chiefly that procured him from
the clergy the title of St. Lewis, by which he is known in the French
history and if that appellation had not been so extremely prostituted as
to become rather a term of reproach, he seems, by his uniform probity and
goodness, as well as his piety, to have fully merited the title. He was
succeeded by his son Philip, denominated the Hardy; a prince of some
merit, though much inferior to that of his father.
1271.
Prince Edward, not discouraged by this event, continued his voyage to the
Holy Land, where he signalized himself by acts of valor; revived the glory
of the English name in those parts; and struck such terror into the
Saracens, that they employed an assassin to murder him, who wounded him in
the arm, but perished in the attempt.[*] Meanwhile his absence from
England was attended with many of those pernicious consequences which had
been dreaded from it. The laws were not executed: the barons oppressed the
common people with impunity: they gave shelter on their estates to bands
of robbers, whom they employed in committing ravages on the estates of
their enemies: the populace of London returned to their usual
licentiousness: and the old king, unequal to the burden of public affairs,
called aloud for his gallant son to return,[**] and to assist him in
swaying that sceptre which was ready to drop from his feeble and
irresolute hands. At last, overcome by the cares of government and the
infirmities of age, he visibly declined, and he expired at St. Edmondsbury
in the sixty-fourth year of his age, and fifty-sixth of his reign;[***]
the longest reign that is to be met with in the English annals.
1272.
His brother, the king of the Romans, (for he never attained the title of
emperor,) died about seven months before him.
The most obvious circumstance of Henry’s character is his incapacity for
government, which rendered him as much a prisoner in the hands of his own
ministers and favorites, and as little at his own disposal, as when
detained a captive in the hands of his enemies. From this source, rather
than from insincerity or treachery, arose his negligence in observing his
promises; and he was too easily induced, for the sake of present
convenience, to sacrifice the lasting advantages arising from the trust
and confidence of his people. Hence too were derived his profusion to
favorites, his attachment to strangers, the variableness of his conduct,
his hasty resentments, and his sudden forgiveness and return of affection.
Instead of reducing the dangerous power of his nobles, by obliging them to
observe the laws towards their inferiors, and setting them the salutary
example in his own government, he was seduced to imitate their conduct,
and to make his arbitrary will, or rather that of his ministers, the rule
of his actions. Instead of accommodating himself, by a strict frugality,
to the embarrassed situation in which his revenue had been left by the
military expeditions of his uncle, the dissipations of his father, and the
usurpations of the barons, he was tempted to levy money by irregular
exactions, which, without enriching himself, impoverished, at least
disgusted, his people. Of all men, nature seemed least to have fitted him
for being a tyrant, yet are there instances of oppression in his reign,
which, though derived from the precedents left him by his predecessors,
had been carefully guarded against by the Great Charter, and are
inconsistent with all rules of good government. And on the whole, we may
say, that greater abilities, with his good dispositions, would have
prevented him from falling into his faults, or with worse dispositions,
would have enabled him to maintain and defend them.
This prince was noted for his piety and devotion, and his regular
attendance on public worship; and a saying of his on that head is much
celebrated by ancient writers. He was engaged in a dispute with Lewis IX.
of France, concerning the preference between sermons and masses: he
maintained the superiority of the latter, and affirmed, that he would
rather have one hour’s conversation with a friend, than hear twenty of the
most elaborate discourses pronounced in his praise.[*]
Henry left two sons, Edward, his successor, and Edmond earl of Lancaster;
and two daughters, Margaret, queen of Scotland, and Beatrix, duchess of
Brittany. He had five other children, who died in their infancy.
The following are the most remarkable laws enacted during this reign.
There had been great disputes between the civil and ecclesiastical courts
concerning bastardy. The common law had deemed all those to be bastards
who were born before wedlock; by the canon law they were legitimate: and
when any dispute of inheritance arose, it had formerly been usual for the
civil courts to issue writs to the spiritual, directing them to inquire
into the legitimacy of the person. The bishop always returned an answer
agreeable to the canon law, though contrary to the municipal law of the
kingdom. For this reason, the civil courts had changed the terms of their
writ; and instead of requiring the spiritual courts to make inquisition
concerning the legitimacy of the person, they only proposed the simple
question of fact, whether he were born before or after wedlock. The
prelates complained of this practice to the parliament assembled at Merton
in the twentieth of this king, and desired that the municipal law might be
rendered conformable to the canon; but received from all the nobility the
memorable reply, “Nolumus leges Angliae mutare.” We will not change the
laws of England.[*]
After the civil wars, the parliament summoned at Marlebridge gave their
approbation to most of the ordinances which had been established by the
reforming barons, and which though advantageous to the security of the
people, had not received the sanction of a legal authority. Among other
laws, it was there enacted, that all appeals from the courts of inferior
lords should be carried directly to the king’s courts, without passing
through the courts of the lords immediately superior.[**] It was ordained,
that money should bear no interest during the minority of the debtor.[***]
This law was reasonable, as the estates of minors were always in the hands
of their lords, and the debtors could not pay interest where they had no
revenue. The charter of King John had granted this indulgence: it was
omitted in that of Henry III., for what reason is not known; but it was
renewed by the statute of Marlebridge. Most of the other articles of this
statute are calculated to restrain the oppressions of sheriffs, and the
violence and iniquities committed in distraining cattle and other goods.
Cattle and the instruments of husbandry formed at that time the chief
riches of the people.
In the thirty-fifth year of this king, an assize was fixed of bread, the
price of which was settled according to the different prices of corn, from
one shilling a quarter to seven shillings and sixpence,[****] money of
that age. These great variations are alone a proof of bad tillage:[*****]
yet did the prices often rise much higher than any taken notice of by the
statute.
The Chronicle of Dunstable tells us, that in this reign wheat was once
sold for a mark, nay, for a pound a quarter; that is, three pounds of our
present money.[*] The same law affords us a proof of the little
communication between the parts of the kingdom, from the very different
prices which the same commodity bore at the same time. A brewer, says the
statute, may sell two gallons of ale for a penny in cities, and three or
four gallons for the same price in the country. At present, such
commodities, by the great consumption of the people, and the great stocks
of the brewers, are rather cheapest in cities. The Chronicle above
mentioned observes, that wheat one year was sold in many places for eight
shillings a quarter, but never rose in Dunstable above a crown.
Though commerce was still very low, it seems rather to have increased
since the conquest; at least, if we may judge of the increase of money by
the price of corn. The medium between the highest and lowest prices of
wheat, assigned by the statute, is four shillings and threepence a
quarter; that is, twelve shillings and ninepence of our present money.
This is near half of the middling price in our time. Yet the middling
price of cattle, so late as the reign of King Richard, we find to be above
eight, near ten times lower than the present. Is not this the true
inference, from comparing these facts, that, in all uncivilized nations,
cattle, which propagate of themselves, bear always a lower price than
corn, which requires more art and stock to render it plentiful than those
nations are possessed of? It is to be remarked, that Henry’s assize of
corn was copied from a preceding assize established by King John;
consequently, the prices which we have here compared of corn and cattle
may be looked on as contemporary; and they were drawn, not from one
particular year, but from an estimation of the middling prices for a
series of years. It is true, the prices assigned by the assize of Richard
were meant as a standard for the accompts of sheriffs and escheators and
as considerable profits were allowed to these ministers, we may naturally
suppose that the common value of cattle was somewhat higher: yet still, so
great a difference between the prices of corn and cattle as that of four
to one, compared to the present rates, affords important reflections
concerning the very different state of industry and tillage in the two
periods.
Interest had in that age mounted to an enormous height, as might be
expected from the barbarism of the times and men’s ignorance of commerce.
Instances occur of fifty per cent. paid for money.[*] There is an edict of
Philip Augustus, near this period, limiting the Jews in France to
forty-eight per cent.[**] Such profits tempted the Jews to remain in the
kingdom, notwithstanding the grievous oppressions to which, from the
prevalent bigotry and rapine of the age, they were continually exposed. It
is easy to imagine how precarious their state must have been under an
indigent prince, somewhat restrained in his tyranny over his native
subjects, but who possessed an unlimited authority over the Jews, the sole
proprietors of money in the kingdom, and hated on account of their riches,
their religion, and their usury; yet will our ideas scarcely come up to
the extortions which in fact we find to have been practised upon them. In
the year 1241, twenty thousand marks were exacted from them;[***] two
years after money was again extorted; and one Jew alone, Aaron of York,
was obliged to pay above four thousand marks;[****] in 1250, Henry renewed
his oppressions; and the same Aaron was condemned to pay him thirty
thousand marks upon an accusation of forgery;[*****] the high penalty
imposed upon him, and which, it seems, he was thought able to pay, is
rather a presumption of his innocence than of his guilt.
In 1255, the king demanded eight thousand marks from the Jews, and
threatened to hang them if they refused compliance. They now lost all
patience, and desired leave to retire with their effects out of the
kingdom. But the king replied, “How can I remedy the oppressions you
complain of? I am myself a beggar. I am spoiled, I am stripped of all my
revenues; I owe above two hundred thousand marks; and if I had said three
hundred thousand, I should not exceed the truth; I am obliged to pay my
son, Prince Edward, fifteen thousand marks a year; I have not a farthing;
and I must have money from any hand, from any quarter, or by any means.”
He then delivered over the Jews to the earl of Cornwall, that those whom
the one brother had flayed, the other might embowel, to make use of the
words of the historian.[*] King John, his father, once demanded ten
thousand marks from a Jew of Bristol; and on his refusal, ordered one of
his teeth to be drawn every day till he should comply. The Jew lost seven
teeth, and then paid the sum required of him.[**] One talliage laid upon
the Jews, in 1243, amounted to sixty thousand marks;[***] a sum equal to
the whole yearly revenue of the crown.
To give a better pretence for extortions, the improbable and absurd
accusation, which has been at different times advanced against that
nation, was revived in England, that they had crucified a child in
derision of the sufferings of Christ. Eighteen of them were hanged at once
for this crime;[****] though it is nowise credible that even the antipathy
borne them by the Christians, and the oppressions under which they
labored, would ever have pushed them to be guilty of that dangerous
enormity. But it is natural to imagine, that a race exposed to such
insults and indignities, both from king and people, and who had so
uncertain an enjoyment of their riches, would carry usury to the utmost
extremity, and by their great profits make themselves some compensation
for their continual perils.
Though these acts of violence against the Jews proceeded much from
bigotry, they were still more derived from avidity and rapine. So far from
desiring in that age to convert them, it was enacted by law in France,
that if any Jew embraced Christianity, he forfeited all his goods, without
exception, to the king or his superior lord. These plunderers were careful
lest the profits accruing from their dominion over that unhappy race
should be diminished by their conversion.[*****]
Commerce must be in a wretched condition where interest was so high, and
where the sole proprietors of money employed it in usury only, and were
exposed to such extortion and injustice. But the bad police of the country
was another obstacle to improvements, and rendered all communication
dangerous, and all property precarious. The Chronicle of Dunstable
says,[******] that men were never secure in their houses, and that whole
villages were often plundered by bands of robbers, though no civil wars at
that time prevailed in the kingdom.
In 1249, some years before the insurrection of the barons, two merchants
of Brabant came to the king at Winchester, and told him that they had been
spoiled of all their goods by certain robbers, whom they knew, because
they saw their faces every day in his court; that like practices prevailed
all over England, and travellers were continually exposed to the danger of
being robbed, bound, wounded, and murdered; that these crimes escaped with
impunity, because the ministers of justice themselves were in a
confederacy with the robbers; and that they, for their part, instead of
bringing matters to a fruitless trial by law, were willing, though
merchants, to decide their cause with the robbers by arms and a duel. The
king, provoked at these abuses, ordered a jury to be enclosed, and to try
the robbers: the jury, though consisting of twelve men of property in
Hampshire, were found to be also in a confederacy with the felons, and
acquitted them. Henry, in a rage, committed the jury to prison, threatened
them with severe punishment, and ordered a new jury to be enclosed, who,
dreading the fate of their fellows, at last found a verdict against the
criminals. Many of the king’s own household were discovered to have
participated in the guilt; and they said for their excuse, that they
received no wages from him, and were obliged to rob for a maintenance.[*]
“Knights and esquires,” says the Dictum of Kenilworth, “Who were robbers,
if they have no land, shall pay the half of their goods, and find
sufficient security to keep henceforth the peace of the kingdom.” Such
were the manners of the times!
One can the less repine, during the prevalence of such manners, at the
frauds and forgeries of the clergy; as it gives less disturbance to
society to take men’s money from them with their own consent, though by
deceits and lies, than to ravish it by open force and violence. During
this reign the papal power was at its summit, and was even beginning
insensibly to decline, by reason of the immeasurable avarice and
extortions of the court of Rome, which disgusted the clergy as well as
laity in every kingdom of Europe. England itself, though sunk in the
deepest abyss of ignorance and superstition, had seriously entertained
thoughts of shaking off the papal yoke;[**] and the Roman pontiff was
obliged to think of new expedients for rivetting it faster upon the
Christian world.
For this purpose, Gregory IX. published his decretals,[*] which are a
collection of forgeries favorable to the court of Rome, and consist of the
supposed decrees of popes in the first centuries. But these forgeries are
so gross, and confound so palpably all language, history, chronology, and
antiquities,—matters more stubborn than any speculative truths
whatsoever,—that even that church, which is not startled at the most
monstrous contradictions and absurdities, has been obliged to abandon them
to the critics. But in the dark period of the thirteenth century, they
parsed for undisputed and authentic; and men, entangled in the mazes of
this false literature, joined to the philosophy, equally false, of the
times, had nothing wherewithal to defend themselves, but some small
remains of common sense, which passed for profaneness and impiety, and the
indelible regard to self-interest, which, as it was the sole motive in the
priests for framing these impostures, served also, in some degree, to
protect the laity against them.
Another expedient, devised by the church of Rome, in this period, for
securing her power, was the institution of new religious orders, chiefly
the Dominicans and Franciscans, who proceeded with all the zeal and
success that attend novelties; were better qualified to gain the populace
than the old orders, now become rich and indolent; maintained a perpetual
rivalship with each other in promoting their gainful superstitions; and
acquired a great dominion over the minds, and consequently over the
purses, of men, by pretending a desire of poverty and a contempt for
riches. The quarrels which arose between these orders, lying still under
the control of the sovereign pontiff, never disturbed the peace of the
church, and served only as a spur to their industry in promoting the
common cause; and though the Dominicans lost some popularity by their
denial of the immaculate conception,—a point in which they unwarily
engaged too far to be able to recede with honor,—they
counterbalanced this disadvantage by acquiring more solid establishments,
by gaining the confidence of kings and princes, and by exercising the
jurisdiction assigned them of ultimate judges and punishers of heresy.
Thus the several orders of monks became a kind of regular troops or
garrisons of the Romish church; and though the temporal interests of
society, still more the cause of true piety, were hurt, by their various
devices to captivate the populace, they proved the chief supports of that
mighty fabric of superstition, and, till the revival of true learning,
secured it from any dangerous invasion.
The trial by ordeal was abolished in this reign by order of council; a
faint mark of improvement in the age.[*]
Henry granted a charter to the town of Newcastle, in which he gave the
inhabitants a license to dig coal. This is the first mention of coal in
England.
We learn from Madox,[**] that this king gave at one time one hundred
shillings to Master Henry, his poet; also the same year he orders this
poet ten pounds.
It appears from Selden, that in the forty-seventh of this reign, a hundred
and fifty temporal and fifty spiritual barons were summoned to perform the
service, due by their tenures.[***] In the thirty-fifth of the subsequent
reign, eighty-six temporal barons, twenty bishops, and forty-eight abbots,
were summoned to a parliament convened at Carlisle.[****]
CHAPTER XIII.
EDWARD I.
1272.
The English were as yet so little inured to obedience under a regular
government, that the death of almost every king, since the conquest, had
been attended with disorders, and the council, reflecting on the recent
civil wars, and on the animosities which naturally remain after these
great convulsions, had reason to apprehend dangerous consequences from the
absence of the son and successor of Henry. They therefore hastened to
proclaim Prince Edward, to swear allegiance to him, and to summon the
states of the kingdom, in order to provide for the public peace in this
important conjuncture.[*]
Walter Giffard, archbishop of York, the earl of Cornwall, son of Richard,
king of the Romans, and the earl of Glocester, were appointed guardians of
the realm, and proceeded peaceably to the exercise of their authority,
without either meeting with opposition from any of the people, or being
disturbed with emulation and faction among themselves. The high character
acquired by Edward during the late commotions, his military genius, his
success in subduing the rebels, his moderation in settling the kingdom,
had procured him great esteem, mixed with affection, among all orders of
men; and no one could reasonably entertain hopes of making any advantage
of his absence, or of raising disturbance in the nation. The earl of
Glocester himself, whose great power and turbulent spirit had excited most
jealousy, was forward to give proofs of his allegiance; and the other
malecontents, being destitute of a leader, were obliged to remain in
submission to the government.
Prince Edward had reached Sicily in his return from the Holy Land, when he
received intelligence of the death of his father; and he discovered a deep
concern on the occasion. At the same time, he learned the death of an
infant son, John whom his princess, Eleanor of Castile, had born him at
Acre, in Palestine; and as he appeared much less affected with that
misfortune, the king of Sicily expressed a surprise at this difference of
sentiment; but was told by Edward, that the death of a son was a loss
which he might hope to repair; the death of a father was a loss
irreparable.[*]
Edward proceeded homeward; but as he soon learned the quiet settlement of
the kingdom, he was in no hurry to take possession of the throne, but
spent near a year in France, before he made his appearance in England.
1273.
In his passage by Chalons, in Burgundy, he was challenged by the prince of
the country to a tournament which he was preparing; and as Edward excelled
in those martial and dangerous exercises, the true image of war, he
declined not the opportunity of acquiring honor in that great assembly of
the neighboring nobles. But the image of war was here unfortunately turned
into the thing itself. Edward and his retinue were so successful in the
jousts, that the French knights, provoked at their superiority, made a
serious attack upon them, which was repulsed, and much blood was idly shed
in the quarrel.[**] This rencounter received the name of the petty battle
of Chalons.
1274.
Edward went from Chalons to Paris, and did homage to Philip for the
dominions which he held in France.[***] He thence returned to Guienne, and
settled that province, which was in some confusion. He made his journey to
London through France; in his passage, he accommodated at Montreuil a
difference with Margaret, countess of Flanders, heiress of that
territory;[****] he was received with joyful acclamations by his people,
and was solemnly crowned at Westminster by Robert, archbishop of
Canterbury.
The king immediately applied himself to the reestablishment of his
kingdom, and to the correcting of those disorders which the civil
commotions and the loose administration of his father had introduced into
every part of government. The plan of his policy was equally generous and
prudent. He considered the great barons both as the immediate rivals of
the crown and oppressors of the people; and he purposed, by an exact
distribution of justice, and a rigid execution of the laws, to give at
once protection to the inferior orders of the state, and to diminish the
arbitrary power of the great, on which their dangerous authority was
chiefly founded. Making it a rule in his own conduct to observe, except on
extraordinary occasions, the privileges secured to them by the Great
Charter, he acquired a right to insist upon their observance of the same
charter towards their vassals and inferiors; and he made the crown be
regarded by all the gentry and commonalty of the kingdom, as the fountain
of justice, and the general asylum against oppression.
1275.
Besides enacting several useful statutes, in a parliament which he
summoned at Westminster, he took care to inspect the conduct of all his
magistrates and judges, to displace such as were either negligent or
corrupt, to provide them with sufficient force for the execution of
justice, to extirpate all bands and confederacies of robbers, and to
repress those more silent robberies which were committed either by the
power of the nobles or under the countenance of public authority. By this
rigid administration, the face of the kingdom was soon changed; and order
and justice took place of violence and oppression: but amidst the
excellent institutions and public-spirited plans of Edward, there still
appears somewhat both of the severity of his personal character and of the
prejudices of the times.
As the various kinds of malefactors, the murderers, robbers, incendiaries,
ravishers, and plunderers, had become so numerous and powerful, that the
ordinary ministers of justice, especially in the western counties, were
afraid to execute the laws against them, the king found it necessary to
provide an extraordinary remedy for the evil; and he erected a new
tribunal, which, however useful, would have been deemed in times of more
regular liberty, a great stretch of illegal and arbitrary power. It
consisted of commissioners, who were empowered to inquire into disorders
and crimes of all kinds, and to inflict the proper punishments upon them.
The officers charged with this unusual commission, made their circuits
throughout the counties of England most infested with this evil, and
carried terror into all those parts of the kingdom. In their zeal to
punish crimes, they did not sufficiently distinguish between the innocent
and guilty; the smallest suspicion became a ground of accusation and
trial; the slightest evidence was received against criminals; prisons were
crowded with malefactors, real or pretended; severe fines were levied for
small offences; and the king, though his exhausted exchequer was supplied
by this expedient, found it necessary to stop the course of so great
rigor, and after terrifying and dissipating by this tribunal the gangs of
disorderly people in England, he prudently annulled the commission;[*] and
never afterwards renewed it.
Among the various disorders to which the kingdom was subject, no one was
more universally complained of than the adulteration of the coin; and as
this crime required more art than the English of that age, who chiefly
employed force and violence in their iniquities, were possessed of, the
imputation fell upon the Jews.[**] Edward also seems to have indulged a
strong prepossession against that nation; and this ill-judged zeal for
Christianity being naturally augmented by an expedition to the Holy Land,
he let loose the whole rigor of his justice against that unhappy people.
Two hundred and eighty of them were hanged at once for this crime in
London alone, besides those who suffered in other parts of the
kingdom.[***]
The houses and lands, (for the Jews had of late ventured to make purchases
of that kind,) as well as the goods of great multitudes, were sold and
confiscated; and the king, lest it should be suspected that the riches of
the sufferers were the chief part of their guilt, ordered a moiety of the
money raised by these confiscations to be set apart, and bestowed upon
such as were willing to be converted to Christianity. But resentment was
more prevalent with them than any temptation from their poverty; and very
few of them could be induced by interest to embrace the religion of their
persecutors. The miseries of this people did not here terminate. Though
the arbitrary talliages and exactions levied upon them had yielded a
constant and a considerable revenue to the crown, Edward prompted by his
zeal and his rapacity, resolved some time after[*] to purge the kingdom
entirely of that hated race, and to seize to himself at once their whole
property as the reward of his labor.[**] He left them only money
sufficient to bear their charges into foreign countries, where new
persecutions and extortions awaited them: but the inhabitants of the
cinque ports, imitating the bigotry and avidity of their sovereign,
despoiled most of them of this small pittance, and even threw many of them
into the sea; a crime for which the king, who was determined to be the
sole plunderer in his dominions, inflicted a capital punishment upon them.
No less than fifteen thousand Jews were at this time robbed of their
effects, and banished the kingdom: very few of that nation have since
lived in England: and as it is impossible for a nation to subsist without
lenders of money, and none will lend without a compensation, the practice
of usury, as it was then called, was thenceforth exercised by the English
themselves upon their fellow-citizens, or by Lombards and other
foreigners. It is very much to be questioned, whether the dealings of
these new usurers were equally open and unexceptionable with those of the
old. By a law of Richard, it was enacted, that three copies should be made
of every bond given to a Jew; one to be put into the hands of a public
magistrate, another into those of a man of credit, and a third to remain
with the Jew himself.[***] But as the canon law, seconded by the
municipal, permitted no Christian to take interest, all transactions of
this kind must, after the banishment of the Jews, have become more secret
and clandestine, and the lender, of consequence, be paid both for the use
of his money, and for the infamy and danger which he incurred by lending
it.
The great poverty of the crown, though no excuse, was probably the cause
of this egregious tyranny exercised against the Jews; but Edward also
practised other more honorable means of remedying that evil. He employed a
strict frugality in the management and distribution of his revenue: he
engaged the parliament to vote him a fifteenth of all movables; the pope
to grant him the tenth of all ecclesiastical revenues for three years; and
the merchants to consent to a perpetual imposition of half a mark on every
sack of wool exported, and a mark on three hundred skins. He also issued
commissions to inquire into all encroachments on the royal demesne; into
the value of escheats, forfeitures, and Wardships; and into the means of
repairing or improving every branch of the revenue.[*] The commissioners,
in the execution of their office, began to carry matters too far against
the nobility, and to question titles to estates which had been transmitted
from father to son for several generations. Earl Warrenne, who had done
such eminent service in the late reign, being required to show his titles,
drew his sword; and subjoined, that William the bastard had not conquered
the kingdom for himself alone: his ancestor was a joint adventurer in the
enterprise; and he himself was determined to maintain what had from that
period remained unquestioned in his family. The king, sensible of the
danger, desisted from making further inquiries of this nature.
1276.
But the active spirit of Edward could not long remain without employment.
He soon after undertook an enterprise more prudent for himself, and more
advantageous to his people. Lewellyn, prince of Wales, had been deeply
engaged with the Mountfort faction; had entered into all their
conspiracies against the crown; had frequently fought on their side; and,
till the battle of Evesham, so fatal to that party, had employed every
expedient to depress the royal cause, and to promote the success of the
barons. In the general accommodation made with the vanquished, Lewellyn
had also obtained his pardon; but as he was the most powerful, and
therefore the most obnoxious vassal of the crown, he had reason to
entertain anxiety about his situation, and to dread the future effects of
resentment and jealousy in the English monarch. For this reason he
determined to provide for his security by maintaining a secret
correspondence with his former associates; and he even made his addresses
to a daughter of the earl of Leicester, who was sent to him from beyond
sea, but being intercepted in her passage near the Isles of Scilly, was
detained in the court of England.[**]
This incident increasing the mutual jealousy between Edward and Lewellyn,
the latter, when required to come to England, and do homage to the new
king, scrupled to put himself in the hands of an enemy, desired a
safe-conduct from Edward, insisted upon having the king’s son and other
noblemen delivered to him as hostages, and demanded that his consort
should previously be set at liberty.[*] The king, having now brought the
state to a full settlement, was not displeased with this occasion of
exercising his authority, and subduing entirely the principality of Wales.
He refused all Lewellyn’s demands, except that of a safe-conduct; sent him
repeated summons to perform the duty of a vassal; levied an army to reduce
him to obedience; obtained a new aid of a fifteenth from parliament; and
marched out with certain assurance of success against the enemy.
1277.
Besides the great disproportion of force between the kingdom and the
principality, the circumstances of the two states were entirely reversed;
and the same intestine dissensions which had formerly weakened England,
now prevailed in Wales, and had even taken place in the reigning family.
David and Roderic, brothers to Lewellyn, dispossessed of their inheritance
by that prince, had been obliged to have recourse to the protection of
Edward, and they seconded with all their interest, which was extensive,
his attempts to enslave their native country. The Welsh prince had no
resource but in the inaccessible situation of his mountains, which had
hitherto, through many ages, defended his forefathers against all attempts
of the Saxon and Norman conquerors; and he retired among the hills of
Snowdun, resolute to defend himself to the last extremity. But Edward,
equally vigorous and cautious, entering by the north with a formidable
army, pierced into the heart of the country; and having carefully explored
every road before him, and secured every pass behind him, approached the
Welsh army in its last retreat. He here avoided the putting to trial the
valor of a nation proud of its ancient independence, and inflamed with
animosity against its hereditary enemies; and he trusted to the slow, but
sure effects of famine, for reducing that people to subjection. The rude
and simple manners of the natives, as well as the mountainous situation of
their country, had made them entirely neglect tillage, and trust to
pasturage alone for their subsistence; a method of life which had
hitherto[*] secured them against the irregular attempts of the English,
out exposed them to certain ruin, when the conquest of the country was
steadily pursued, and prudently planned by Edward. Destitute of magazines,
cooped up in a narrow corner, they, as well as their cattle, suffered all
the rigors of famine; and Lewellyn, without being able to strike a stroke
for his independence, was at last obliged to submit at discretion, and
receive the terms imposed upon him by the victor.[**] He bound himself to
pay to Edward fifty thousand pounds, as a reparation of damages; to do
homage to the crown of England; to permit all the other barons of Wales,
except four near Snowdun, to swear fealty to the same crown; to relinquish
the country between Cheshire and the River Conway; to settle on his
brother Roderic a thousand marks a year, and on David five hundred; and to
deliver ten hostages as security for his future submission.[***]
Edward, on the performance of the other articles, remitted to the prince
of Wales the payment of the fifty thousand pounds;[****] which were
stipulated by treaty, and which, it is probable, the poverty of the
country made it absolutely impossible for him to levy. But,
notwithstanding this indulgence, complaints of iniquities soon arose on
the side of the vanquished: the English, insolent on their easy and
bloodless victory, oppressed the inhabitants of the districts which were
yielded to them: the lords marchers committed with impunity all kinds of
violence on their Welsh neighbors: new and more severe terms were imposed
on Lewellyn himself; and Edward, when the prince attended him at
Worcester, exacted a promise that he would retain no person in his
principality who should be obnoxious to the English monarch.[****]
There were other personal insults which raised the indignation of the
Welsh, and made them determine rather to encounter a force which they had
already experienced to be so much superior, than to bear oppression from
the haughty victors. Prince David, seized with the national spirit, made
peace with his brother, and promised to concur in the defence of public
liberty. The Welsh flew to arms; and Edward, not displeased with the
occasion of making his conquest final and absolute, assembled all his
military tenants, and advanced into Wales with an army which the
inhabitants could not reasonably hope to resist. The situation of the
country gave the Welsh at first some advantage over Luke de Tany, one of
Edward’s captains, who had passed the Menau with a detachment;[*] but
Lewelly, being surprised by Mortimer, was defeated and slain in an action,
and two thousand of his followers were put to the sword.[**] David, who
succeeded him in the principality, could never collect an army sufficient
to face the English; and being chased from hill to hill, and hunted from
one retreat to another, was obliged to conceal himself under various
disguises, and was at last betrayed in his lurking-place to the enemy.
1283.
Edward sent him in chains to Shrewsbury; and bringing him to a formal
trial before all the peers of England, ordered this sovereign prince to be
hanged, drawn, and quartered, as a traitor, for defending by arms the
liberties of his native country, together with his own hereditary
authority.[***] All the Welsh nobility submitted to the conqueror; the
laws of England, with the sheriffs and other ministers of justice, were
established in that principality; and though it was long before national
antipathies were extinguished, and a thorough union attained between the
people, yet this important conquest, which it had required eight hundred
years fully to effect, was at last, through the abilities of Edward,
completed by the English.
1284
The king, sensible that nothing kept alive the ideas of military valor and
of ancient glory so much as the traditional poetry of the people, which,
assisted by the power of music and the jollity of festivals, made deep
impression on the minds of the youth, gathered together all the Welsh
bards, and from a barbarous, though not absurd policy, ordered them to be
put to death.[****]
There prevails a vulgar story, which, as it well suits the capacity of the
monkish writers, is carefully recorded by them; that Edward, assembling
the Welsh, promised to give them a prince of unexceptionable manners, a
Welshman by birth, and one who could speak no other language. On their
acclamations of joy, and promise of obedience, he invested in the
principality his second son, Edward, then an infant, who had been born at
Carnarvon. The death of his eldest son Alphonso, soon after, made young
Edward heir of the monarchy; the principality of Wales was fully annexed.
1286.
The settlement of Wales appeared so complete to Edward, that in less than
two years after, he went abroad, in order to make peace between Alphonso,
king of Arragon, and Philip the Fair, who had lately succeeded his father,
Philip the Hardy, on the throne of France.[*] The difference between these
two princes had arisen about the kingdom of Sicily, which the pope, after
his hopes from England failed him, had bestowed on Charles, brother to St.
Lewis, and which was claimed upon other titles by Peter, king of Arragon,
father to Alphonso. Edward had powers from both princes to settle the
terms of peace, and he succeeded in his endeavors; but as the controversy
nowise regards England, we shall not enter into a detail of it. He staid
abroad above three years; and on his return found many disorders to have
prevailed, both from open violence and from the corruption of justice.
Thomas Chamberlain, a gentleman of some note, had assembled several of his
associates at Boston, in Lincolnshire, under pretence of holding a
tournament, an exercise practised by the gentry only; but in reality with
a view of plundering the rich fair of Boston, and robbing the merchants.
To facilitate his purpose, he privately set fire to the town; and while
the inhabitants were employed in quenching the flames, the conspirators
broke into the booths, and carried off the goods. Chamberlain himself was
detected and hanged; but maintained so steadily the point of honor to his
accomplices, that he could not be prevailed on, by offers or promises, to
discover any of them. Many other instances of robbery and violence broke
out in all parts of England; though the singular circumstances attending
this conspiracy have made it alone be particularly recorded by
historians.[**]
1289.
But the corruption of the judges, by which the fountains of justice were
poisoned, seemed of still more dangerous consequence. Edward, in order to
remedy this prevailing abuse, summoned a parliament, and brought the
judges to a trial; where all of them, except two, who were clergymen, were
convicted of this flagrant iniquity, were fined, and deposed. The amount
of the fines levied upon them is alone a sufficient proof of their guilt;
being above one hundred thousand marks, an immense sum in those days, and
sufficient to defray the charges of an expensive war between two great
kingdoms. The king afterwards made all the new judges swear that they
would take no bribes; but his expedient of deposing and fining the old
ones, was the more effectual remedy.
We now come to give an account of the state of affairs in Scotland, which
gave rise to the most interesting transactions of this reign, and of some
of the subsequent; though the intercourse of that kingdom with England,
either in peace or war, had hitherto produced so few events of moment,
that, to avoid tediousness, we have omitted many of them, and have been
very concise in relating the rest. If the Scots had, before this period,
any real history worthy of the name, except what they glean from scattered
passages in the English historians, those events, however minute, yet
being the only foreign transactions of the nation, might deserve a place
in it.
Though the government of Scotland had been continually exposed to those
factions and convulsions which are incident to all barbarous and to many
civilized nations; and though the successions of their kings, the only
part of their history which deserves any credit had often been disordered
by irregularities and usurpations; the true heir of the royal family had
still in the end prevailed, and Alexander III., who had espoused the
sister of Edward, probably inherited, after a period of about eight
hundred years, and through a succession of males, the sceptre of all the
Scottish princes who had governed the nation since its first establishment
in the island. This prince died in 1286, by a fall from his horse at
Kinghorn,[*] without leaving any male issue, and without any descendant,
except Margaret, born of Eric, king of Norway, and of Margaret, daughter
of the Scottish monarch. This princess, commonly called the Maid of
Norway, though a female, and an infant, and a foreigner, yet being the
lawful heir of the kingdom, had, through her grandfather’s care, been
recognized successor by the states of Scotland;[**] and on Alexander’s
death, the dispositions which had been previously made against that event,
appeared so just and prudent, that no disorders, as might naturally be
apprehended, ensued in the kingdom.
Margaret was acknowledged queen of Scotland; five guardians, the bishops
of St. Andrews and Glasgow, the earls of Fife and Buchan, and James,
steward of Scotland, entered peaceably upon the administration; and the
infant princess, under the protection of Edward, her great uncle, and
Eric, her father, who exerted themselves on this occasion, seemed firmly
seated on the throne of Scotland. The English monarch was naturally led to
build mighty projects on this incident; and having lately, by force of
arms, brought Wales under subjection, he attempted, by the marriage of
Margaret with his eldest son, Edward, to unite the whole island into one
monarchy, and thereby to give it security both against domestic
convulsions and foreign invasions.
1290.
The amity which had of late prevailed between the two nations, and which,
even in former times, had never been interrupted by any violent wars or
injuries, facilitated extremely the execution of this project, so
favorable to the happiness and grandeur of both kingdoms; and the states
of Scotland readily gave their assent to the English proposals, and even
agreed that their young sovereign should be educated in the court of
Edward. Anxious, however, for the liberty and independency of their
country, they took care to stipulate very equitable conditions, ere they
intrusted themselves into the hands of so great and so ambitious a
monarch. It was agreed that they should enjoy all their ancient laws,
liberties, and customs; that in case young Edward and Margaret should die
without issue, the crown of Scotland should revert to the next heir, and
should be inherited by him free and independent; that the military tenants
of the crown should never be obliged to go out of Scotland, in order to do
homage to the sovereign of the united kingdoms, nor the chapters of
cathedral, collegiate, or conventual churches, in order to make elections;
that the parliaments summoned for Scottish affairs should always be held
within the bounds of that kingdom; and that Edward should bind himself,
under the penalty of one hundred thousand marks, payable to the pope for
the use of the holy wars to observe all these articles.[*]
It is not easy to conceive that two nations could have treated more on a
footing of equality than Scotland and England maintained during the whole
course of this transaction; and though Edward gave his assent to the
article concerning the future independency of the Scottish crown, with a
“saving of his former rights,” this reserve gave no alarm to the nobility
of Scotland, both because these rights, having hitherto been little heard
of had occasioned no disturbance, and because the Scots had so near a
prospect of seeing them entirely absorbed in the rights of their
sovereignty.
1291.
But this project, so happily formed and so amicably conducted, failed of
success, by the sudden death of the Norwegian princess, who expired on her
passage to Scotland,[*] and left a very dismal prospect to the kingdom.
Though disorders were for the present obviated by the authority of the
regency formerly established, the succession itself of the crown was now
become an object of dispute; and the regents could not expect that a
controversy, which is not usually decided by reason and argument alone,
would be peaceably settled by them, or even by the states of the kingdom,
amidst so many powerful pretenders. The posterity of William, king of
Scotland, the prince taken prisoner by Henry II., being all extinct by the
death of Margaret of Norway, the right to the crown devolved on the issue
of David, earl of Huntingdon brother to William, whose male line being
also extinct, left the succession open to the posterity of his daughters.
The earl of Huntingdon had three daughters; Margaret, married to Alan,
lord of Galloway, Isabella, wife of Robert Brus or Bruce lord of
Annandale, and Adama, who espoused Henry, Lord Hastings. Margaret, the
eldest of the sisters, left one daughter, Devergilda, married to John
Baliol, by whom she had a son of the same name, one of the present
competitors for the crown: Isabella II. bore a son, Robert Bruce, who was
now alive, and who also insisted on his claim: Adama III. left a son, John
Hastings, who pretended that the kingdom of Scotland, like many other
inheritances, was divisible among the three daughters of the earl of
Huntingdon, and that he, in right of his mother, had a title to a third of
it. Baliol and Bruce united against Hastings, in maintaining that, the
kingdom was indivisible; but each of them, supported by plausible reasons,
asserted the preference of his own title. Baliol was sprung from the elder
branch: Bruce was one degree nearer the common stock: if the principle of
representation was regarded, the former had the better claim: if
propinquity was considered, the latter was entitled to the preference.[**]
The sentiments of men were divided: all the nobility had taken part on one
side or the other: the people followed implicitly their leaders: the two
claimants themselves had great power and numerous retainers in Scotland:
and it is no wonder that, among a rude people, more accustomed to arms
than inured to laws, a controversy of this nature, which could not be
decided by any former precedent among them, and which is capable of
exciting commotions in the most legal and best established governments,
should threaten the state with the most fatal convulsions.
Each century has its peculiar mode in conducting business; and men, guided
more by custom than by reason, follow, without inquiry, the manners which
are prevalent in their own time. The practice of that age in controversies
between states and princes, seems to have been to choose a foreign prince
as an equal arbiter, by whom the question was decided, and whose sentence
prevented those dismal confusions and disorders, inseparable at all times
from war, but which were multiplied a hundred fold, and dispersed into
every corner, by the nature of the feudal governments. It was thus that
the English king and barons, in the preceding reign, had endeavored to
compose their dissensions by a reference to the king of France; and the
celebrated integrity of that monarch had prevented all the bad effects
which might naturally have been dreaded from so perilous an expedient. It
was thus that the kings of France and Arragon, and afterwards other
princes, had submitted their controversies to Edward’s judgment; and the
remoteness of their states, the great power of the princes, and the little
interest which he had on either side, had induced him to acquit himself
with honor in his decisions. The parliament of Scotland, therefore,
threatened with a furious civil war, and allured by the great reputation
of the English monarch, as well as by the present amicable correspondence
between the kingdoms, agreed in making a reference to Edward; and Fraser,
bishop of St. Andrews, with other deputies, was sent to notify to him
their resolution, and to claim his good offices in the present dangers to
which they were exposed.[*]
His inclination, they flattered themselves, led him to prevent their
dissensions, and to interpose with a power which none of the competitors
would dare to withstand: when this expedient was proposed by one party,
the other deemed it dangerous to object to it: indifferent persons thought
that the imminent perils of a civil war would thereby be prevented; and no
one reflected on the ambitious character of Edward, and the almost certain
ruin which must attend a small state divided by faction, when it thus
implicitly submits itself to the will of so powerful and encroaching a
neighbor.
The temptation was too strong for the virtue of the English monarch to
resist. He purposed to lay hold of the present favorable opportunity, and
if not to create, at least to revive, his claim of a feudal superiority
over Scotland; a claim which had hitherto lain in the deepest obscurity,
and which, if ever it had been an object of attention, or had been so much
as suspected, would have effectually prevented the Scottish barons from
choosing him for an umpire. He well knew that, if this pretension were
once submitted to, as it seemed difficult in the present situation of
Scotland to oppose it, the absolute sovereignty of that kingdom (which had
been the case with Wales) would soon follow; and that one great vassal,
cooped up in an island with his liege lord, without resource from foreign
powers, without aid from any fellow-vassals, could not long maintain his
dominions against the efforts of a mighty kingdom, assisted by all the
cavils which the feudal law afforded his superior against him. In pursuit
of this great object, very advantageous to England, perhaps in the end no
less beneficial to Scotland, but extremely unjust and iniquitous in
itself, Edward busied himself in searching for proofs of his pretended
superiority; and, instead of looking into his own archives, which, if his
claim had been real, must have afforded him numerous records of the
homages done by the Scottish princes, and could alone yield him any
authentic testimony, he made all the monasteries be ransacked for old
chronicles and histories written by Englishmen, and he collected all the
passages which seemed anywise to favor his pretensions.[*] Yet even in
this method of proceeding, which must have discovered to himself the
injustice of his claim, he was far from being fortunate. He began his
proofs from the time of Edward the Elder, and continued them through all
the subsequent Saxon and Norman times; but produced nothing to his
purpose.[**]
The whole amount of his authorities during the Saxon period, when stripped
of the bombast and inaccurate style of the monkish historians, is, that
the Scots had sometimes been defeated by the English, had received peace
on disadvantageous terms, had made submissions to the English monarch, and
had even perhaps fallen into some dependence on a power which was so much
superior, and which they had not at that time sufficient force to resist.
His authorities from the Norman period were, if possible, still less
conclusive: the historians indeed make frequent mention of homage done by
the northern potentate; but no one of them says that it was done for his
kingdom; and several of them declare, in express terms that it was
relative only to the fiefs which he enjoyed south of the Tweed;[*] in the
same manner, as the king of England himself swore fealty to the French
monarch, for the fiefs which he inherited in France. And to such
scandalous shifts was Edward reduced, that he quotes a passage from
Hoveden[**] where it is asserted that a Scottish king had done homage to
England; but he purposely omits the latter part of the sentence, which
expresses that this prince did homage for the lands which he held in
England.
When William, king of Scotland, was taken prisoner in the battle of
Alnwick, he was obliged, for the recovery of his liberty, to swear fealty
to the victor for his crown itself. The deed was performed according to
all the rites of the feudal law: the record was preserved in the English
archives, and is mentioned by all the historians: but as it is the only
one of the kind, and as historians speak of this superiority as a great
acquisition gained by the fortunate arms of Henry II.,[***] there can
remain no doubt that the kingdom of Scotland was, in all former periods,
entirely free and independent. Its subjection continued a very few years:
King Richard, desirous, before his departure for the Holy Land, to
conciliate the friendship of William, renounced that homage, which, he
says in express terms, had been extorted by his father; and he only
retained the usual homage which had been done by the Scottish princes for
the lands which they held in England.
But though this transaction rendered the independence of Scotland still
more unquestionable, than if no fealty had ever been sworn to the English
crown, the Scottish kings, apprised of the point aimed at by their
powerful neighbors, seem for a long time to have retained some jealousy on
that head, and, in doing homage, to have anxiously obviated all such
pretensions. When William, in 1200, did homage to John at Lincoln, he was
careful to insert a salvo for his royal dignity;[*] when Alexander III.
sent assistance to his father-in-law, Henry III., during the wars of the
barons, he previously procured an acknowledgment, that this aid was
granted only from friendship, not from any right claimed by the English
monarch;[**] and when that same prince was invited to assist at the
coronation of this very Edward, he declined attendance till he received a
like acknowledgment.[***] 1
But as all these reasons (and stronger could not be produced) were but a
feeble rampart against the power of the sword, Edward, carrying with him a
great army, which was to enforce his proofs, advanced to the frontiers,
and invited the Scottish parliament, and all the competitors, to attend
him in the Castle of Norham, a place situated on the southern banks of the
Tweed, in order to determine the cause which had been referred to his
arbitration. But though this deference seemed due to so great a monarch,
and was no more than what his father and the English barons had, in
similar circumstances, paid to Lewis IX., the king, careful not to give
umbrage, and determined never to produce his claim till it should be too
late to think of opposition, sent the Scottish barons an acknowledgment,
that, though at that time they passed the frontiers, this step should
never be drawn into precedent, or afford the English kings a pretence for
exacting a like submission in any future transaction.[****] When the whole
Scottish nation had thus unwarily put themselves in his power, Edward
opened the conferences at Norham: he informed the parliament, by the mouth
of Roger le Brabançon, his chief justiciary, that he was come thither to
determine the right among the competitors to their crown; that he was
determined to do strict justice to all parties; and that he was entitled
to this authority, not in virtue of the reference made to him, but in
quality of superior and liege lord of the kingdom.[*****] 2
He then produced his proofs of this superiority, which he pretended to be
unquestionable, and he required of them an acknowledgment of it; a demand
which was superfluous if the fact were already known and avowed, and which
plainly betrays Edward’s consciousness of his lame and defective title.
The Scottish parliament was astonished at so new a pretension, and
answered only by their silence. But the king, in order to maintain the
appearance of free and regular proceedings, desired them to remove into
their own country, to deliberate upon his claim, to examine his proofs, to
propose all their objections, and to inform him of their resolution; and
he appointed a plain at Upsettleton, on the northern banks of the Tweed,
for that purpose.
When the Scottish barons assembled in this place, though moved with
indignation at the injustice of this unexpected claim, and at the fraud
with which it had been conducted, they found themselves betrayed into a
situation in which it was impossible for them to make any defence for the
ancient liberty and independence of their country. The king of England, a
martial and politic prince, at the head of a powerful army, lay at a very
small distance, and was only separated from them by a river fordable in
many places. Though, by a sudden flight, some of them might themselves be,
able to make their escape, what hopes could they entertain of securing the
kingdom against his future enterprises? Without a head, without union
among themselves, attached all of them to different competitors, whose
title they had rashly submitted to the decision of this foreign usurper,
and who were thereby reduced to an absolute dependence upon him, they
could only expect by resistance to entail on themselves and their
posterity a more grievous and more destructive servitude. Yet even in this
desperate state of their affairs the Scottish barons, as we learn from
Walsingham,[*] one of the best historians of that period, had the courage
to reply that, till they had a king, they could take no resolution on so
momentous a point: the journal of King Edward says, that they made no
answer at all;[**] that is, perhaps, no particular answer or objection to
Edward’s claim: and by this solution it is possible to reconcile the
journal with the historian. The king, therefore, interpreting their
silence as consent, addressed himself to the several competitors.
It is evident from the genealogy of the royal family of Scotland, that
there could only be two questions about the succession—that between
Baliol and Bruce on the one hand, and Lord Hastings on the other,
concerning the partition of the crown: and that between Baliol and Bruce
themselves concerning the preference of their respective titles, supposing
the kingdom indivisible: yet there appeared on this occasion no less than
nine claimants besides; John Comyn or Cummin, lord of Badenoch, Florence,
earl of Holland, Patric Dunbar, earl of March, William de Vescey, Robert
de Pynkeni, Nicholas de Soules, Patric Galythly, Roger de Mandeville,
Robert de Ross; not to mention the king of Norway, who claimed as heir to
his daughter Margaret.[*] Some of these competitors were descended from
more remote branches of the royal family; others were even sprung from
illegitimate children; and as none of them had the least pretence of
right, it is natural to conjecture that Edward had secretly encouraged
them to appear in the list of claimants, that he might sow the more
division among the Scottish nobility, make the cause appear the more
intricate, and be able to choose, among a great number, the most
obsequious candidate.
But he found them all equally obsequious on this occasion.[**] Robert
Bruce was the first that acknowledged Edward’s right of superiority over
Scotland; and he had so far foreseen the king’s pretensions, that even in
his petition, where he set forth his claim to the crown, he had previously
applied to him as liege lord of the kingdom; a step which was not taken by
any of the other competitors.[***] They all, however, with seeming
willingness, made a like acknowledgment when required; though Baliol, lest
he should give offence to the Scottish nation, had taken care to be absent
during the first days; and he was the last that recognized the king’s
title.[****]
Edward next deliberated concerning the method of proceeding in the
discussion of this great controversy. He gave orders that Baliol, and such
of the competitors as adhered to him should choose forty commissioners;
Bruce and his adherents forty more: to these the king added twenty-four
Englishmen: he ordered these hundred and four commissioners to examine the
cause deliberately among themselves, and make their report to him:[*] and
he promised in the ensuing year to give his determination. Meanwhile he
pretended that it was requisite to have all the fortresses of Scotland
delivered into his hands, in order to enable him, without opposition, to
put the true heir in possession of the crown; and this exorbitant demand
was complied with, both by the states and by the claimants.[**] The
governors also of all the castles immediately resigned their command;
except Umfreville, earl of Angus, who refused, without a formal and
particular acquittal from the parliament and the several claimants, to
surrender his fortresses to so domineering an arbiter, who had given to
Scotland so many just reasons of suspicion.[***] Before this assembly
broke up, which had fixed such a mark of dishonor on the nation, all the
prelates and barons there present swore fealty to Edward; and that prince
appointed commissioners to receive a like oath from all the other barons
and persons of distinction in Scotland.[****]
The king, having finally made, as he imagined, this important acquisition,
left the commissioners to sit at Berwick, and examine the titles of the
several competitors who claimed the precarious crown, which Edward was
willing for some time to allow the lawful heir to enjoy. He went
southwards, both in order to assist at the funeral of his mother, Queen
Eleanor, who died about this time, and to compose some differences which
had arisen among his principal nobility. Gilbert, earl of Glocester, the
greatest baron of the kingdom, had espoused the king’s daughter; and being
elated by that alliance, and still more by his own power, which, he
thought, set him above the laws, he permitted his bailiffs and vassals to
commit violence on the lands of Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford, who
retaliated the injury by like violence. But this was not a reign in which
such illegal proceedings could pass with impunity. Edward procured a
sentence against the two earls, committed them both to prison, and would
not restore them to their liberty, till he had exacted a fine of one
thousand marks from Hereford, and one of ten thousand from his son-in-law.
1292.
During this interval, the titles of John Baliol and of Robert Bruce, whose
claims appeared to be the best founded among the competitors for the crown
of Scotland, were the subject of general disquisition, as well as of
debate among the commissioners. Edward, in order to give greater authority
to his intended decision, proposed this general question both to the
commissioners and to all the celebrated lawyers in Europe, “Whether a
person descended from the elder sister, but farther removed by one degree,
were preferable, in the succession of kingdoms, fiefs, and other
indivisible inheritances, to one descended from the younger sister, but
one degree nearer to the common stock?” This was the true state of the
case; and the principle of representation had now gained such ground every
where, that a uniform answer was returned to the king in the affirmative.
He therefore pronounced sentence in favor of Balioi; and when Bruce, upon
this disappointment, joined afterwards Lord Hastings, and claimed a third
of the kingdom, which he now pretended to be divisible, Edward, though his
interests seemed more to require the partition of Scotland, again
pronounced sentence in favor of Baliol. That competitor, upon renewing his
oath of fealty to England, was put in possession of the kingdom;[*] all
his fortresses were restored to him;[**] and the conduct of Edward, both
in the deliberate solemnity of the proceedings, and in the justice of the
award, was so far unexceptionable.
1293.
Had the king entertained no other view than that of establishing his
superiority over Scotland, though the iniquity of that claim was apparent,
and was aggravated by the most egregious breach of trust, he might have
fixed his pretensions, and have left that important acquisition to his
posterity: but he immediately proceeded in such a manner as made it
evident that, not content with this usurpation, he aimed also at the
absolute sovereignty and dominion of the kingdom. Instead of gradually
inuring the Scots to the yoke, and exerting his rights of superiority with
moderation, he encouraged all appeals to England; required King John
himself, by six different summons on trivial occasions, to come to
London;[***] refused him the privilege of defending his cause by a
procurator; and obliged him to appear at the bar of his parliament as a
private person.[****]
These humiliating demands were hitherto quite unknown to a king of
Scotland: they are, however, the necessary consequence of vassalage by the
feudal law; and as there was no preceding instance of such treatment
submitted to by a prince of that country, Edward must, from that
circumstance alone, had there remained any doubt, have been himself
convinced that his claim was altogether a usurpation.[*] 3 But his
intention plainly was to enrage Baliol by these indignities, to engage him
in rebellion, and to assume the dominion of the state as the punishment of
his treason and felony. Accordingly Baliol, though a prince of a soft and
gentle spirit, returned into Scotland highly provoked at this usage, and
determined at all hazards to vindicate his liberty; and the war which soon
after broke out between France and England, gave him a favorable
opportunity of executing his purpose.
The violence, robberies, and disorders, to which that age was so subject,
were not confined to the licentious barons and their retainers at land:
the sea was equally infested with piracy: the feeble execution of the laws
had given license to all orders of men: and a general appetite for rapine
and revenge, supported by a false point of honor, had also infected the
merchants and mariners; and it pushed them, on any provocation, to seek
redress by immediate retaliation upon the aggressors. A Norman and an
English vessel met off the coast near Bayonne; and both of them having
occasion for water, they sent their boats to land, and the several crews
came at the same time to the same spring: there ensued a quarrel for the
preference: a Norman, drawing his dagger, attempted to stab an Englishman;
who, grappling with him, threw his adversary on the ground; and the
Norman, as was pretended, falling on his own dagger, was slain.[**] This
scuffle between two seamen about water, soon kindled a bloody war between
the two nations, and involved a great part of Europe in the quarrel. The
mariners of the Norman ship carried their complaints to the French king:
Philip, without inquiring into the fact, without demanding redress, bade
them take revenge, and trouble him no more about the matter.[***]
The Normans, who had been more regular than usual in applying to the
crown, needed but this hint to proceed to immediate violence. They seized
an English ship in the channel; and hanging, along with some dogs, several
of the crew on the yard-arm, in presence of their companions, dismissed
the vessel; [*] and bade the mariners inform their countrymen that
vengeance was now taken for the blood of the Norman killed at Bayonne.
This injury, accompanied with so general and deliberate an insult, was
resented by the mariners of the cinque ports, who, without carrying any
complaint to the king, or waiting for redress, retaliated by committing
like barbarities on all French vessels without distinction. The French,
provoked by their losses, preyed on the ships of all Edward’s subjects,
whether English or Gascon: the sea became a scene of piracy between the
nations: the sovereigns, without either seconding or repressing the
violence of their subjects, seemed to remain indifferent spectators: the
English made private associations with the Irish and Dutch seamen; the
French with the Flemish and Genoese;[**] and the animosities of the people
on both sides became every day more violent and barbarous. A fleet of two
hundred Norman vessels set sail to the south for wine and other
commodities; and in their passage seized all the English ships which they
met with, hanged the seamen, and seized the goods. The inhabitants of the
English seaports, informed of this incident, fitted out a fleet of sixty
sail, stronger and better manned than the others, and awaited the enemy on
their return. After an obstinate battle, they put them to rout, and sunk,
destroyed, or took the greater part of them.[***] No quarter was given;
and it is pretended that the loss of the French amounted to fifteen
thousand men; which is accounted for by this circumstance, that the Norman
fleet was employed in transporting a considerable body of soldiers from
the south.
The affair was now become too important to be any longer overlooked by the
sovereigns. On Philip’s sending an envoy to demand reparation and
restitution, the king despatched the bishop of London to the French court,
in order to accommodate the quarrel. He first said, that the English
courts of justice were open to all men; and if any Frenchman were injured,
he might seek reparation by course of law.[****]
He next offered to adjust the matter by private arbiters, or by a personal
interview with the king of France, or by a reference either to the pope,
or the college of cardinals, or any particular cardinals, agreed on by
both parties.[*] The French, probably the more disgusted, as they were
hitherto losers in the quarrel, refused all these expedients: the vessels
and the goods of merchants were confiscated on both sides: depredations
were continued by the Gascons on the western coast of France, as well as
by the English in the Channel: Philip cited the king, as duke of Guienne,
to appear in his court at Paris, and answer for these offences; and
Edward, apprehensive of danger to that province, sent John St. John, an
experienced soldier, to Bordeaux, and gave him directions to put Guienne
in a posture of defence.[**]
1294.
That he might, however, prevent a final rupture between the nations, the
king despatched his brother, Edmond, earl of Lancaster, to Paris; and as
this prince had espoused the queen of Navarre, mother to Jane, queen of
France, he seemed, on account of that alliance, the most proper person for
finding expedients to accommodate the difference. Jane pretended to
interpose with her good offices: Mary, the queen dowager, feigned the same
amicable disposition: and these two princesses told Edmond, that the
circumstance the most difficult to adjust was the point of honor with
Philip, who thought himself affronted by the injuries committed against
him by his sub-vassals in Guienne; but if Edward would once consent to
give him seizin and possession of that province, he would think his honor
fully repaired, would engage to restore Guienne immediately, and would
accept of a very easy satisfaction for all the other injuries. The king
was consulted on the occasion; and as he then found himself in immediate
danger of war with the Scots, which he regarded as the more important
concern, this politic prince, blinded by his favorite passion for subduing
that nation, allowed himself to be deceived by so gross an artifice.[***]
He sent his brother orders to sign and execute the treaty with the two
queens; Philip solemnly promised to execute his part of it; and the king’s
citation to appear in the court of France, was accordingly recalled; but
the French monarch was no sooner put in possession of Guienne, than the
citation was renewed; Edward was condemned for non-appearance; and
Guienne, by a formal sentence, was declared to be forfeited and annexed to
the crown.[****]
Edward, fallen into a like snare with that which he himself had spread for
the Scots, was enraged; and the more so, as he was justly ashamed of his
own conduct, in being so egregiously overreached by the court of France.
Sensible of the extreme difficulties which he should encounter in the
recovery of Gascony, where he had not retained a single place in his
hands, he endeavored to compensate that loss by forming alliances with
several princes, who, he projected, should attack France on all quarters,
and make a diversion of her forces. Adolphus de Nassau, king of the
Romans, entered into a treaty with him for that purpose;[*] as did also
Amadæus, count of Savoy, the archbishop of Cologne, the counts of Gueldre
and Luxembourg; the duke of Brabant and count of Barre, who had married
his two daughters, Margaret and Eleanor: but these alliances were
extremely burdensome to his narrow revenues, and proved in the issue
entirely ineffectual. More impression was made on Guienne by an English
army, which he completed by emptying the jails of many thousand thieves
and robbers, who had been confined there for their crimes. So low had the
profession of arms fallen, and so much had it degenerated from the
estimation in which it stood during the vigor of the feudal system!
1295.
The king himself was detained in England, first by contrary winds,[**]
then by his apprehensions of a Scottish invasion, and by a rebellion of
the Welsh, whom he repressed and brought again under subjection.[***] The
army which he sent to Guienne, was commanded by his nephew, John de
Bretagne, earl of Richmond, and under him by St. John, Tibetot, De Vere,
and other officers of reputation;[****] who made themselves masters of the
town of Bayonne, as well as of Bourg, Blaye, Reole, St. Severe, and other
places, which straitened Bordeaux, and cut off its communication both by
sea and land.
The favor which the Gascon nobility bore to the English government
facilitated these conquests, and seemed to promise still greater
successes; but this advantage was soon lost by the misconduct of some of
the officers. Philip’s brother, Charles de Valois, who commanded the
French armies, having laid siege to Podensac, a small fortress near Reole,
obliged Giffard, the governor, to capitulate; and the articles though
favorable to the English, left all the Gascons prisoners at discretion, of
whom about fifty were hanged by Charles as rebels; a policy by which he
both intimidated that people, and produced an irreparable breach between
them and the English.[*] That prince immediately attacked Reole, where the
earl of Richmond himself commanded; and as the place seemed not tenable,
the English general drew his troops to the water side, with an intention
of embarking with the greater part of the army. The enraged Gascons fell
upon his rear, and at the same time opened their gates to the French, who,
besides making themselves masters of the place, took many prisoners of
distinction. St. Severe was more vigorously defended by Hugh de Vere, son
of the earl of Oxford; but was at last obliged to capitulate. The French
king, not content with these successes in Gascony, threatened England with
an invasion; and, by a sudden attempt, his troops took and burnt
Dover,[**] but were obliged soon after to retire. And in order to make a
greater diversion of the English force, and engage Edward in dangerous and
important wars, he formed a secret alliance with John Baliol, king of
Scotland; the commencement of that strict union which, during so many
centuries, was maintained, by mutual interests and necessities, between
the French and Scottish nations. John confirmed this alliance by
stipulating a marriage between his eldest son and the daughter of Charles
de Valois.[***]
The expenses attending these multiplied wars of Edward, and his
preparations for war, joined to alterations which had insensibly taken
place in the general state of affairs, obliged him to have frequent
recourse to parliamentary supplies, introduced the lower orders of the
state into the public councils, and laid the foundations of great and
important changes in the government.
Though nothing could be worse calculated for cultivating the arts of
peace, or maintaining peace itself, than the long subordination of
vassalage from the king to the meanest gentleman, and the consequent
slavery of the lower people, evils inseparable from the feudal system,
that system was never able to fix the state in a proper warlike posture,
or give it the full exertion of its power for defence, and still less for
offence, against a public enemy. The military tenants, unacquainted with
obedience, unexperienced in war, held a rank in the troops by their birth,
not by their merits or services; composed a disorderly and consequently a
feeble army; and during the few days which they were obliged by their
tenures to remain in the field, were often more formidable to their own
prince than to foreign powers, against whom they were assembled. The
sovereigns came gradually to disuse this cumbersome and dangerous machine,
so apt to recoil upon the hand which held it; and exchanging the military
service for pecuniary supplies, enlisted forces by means of a contract
with particular officers, (such as those the Italians denominate
“condottieri,”) whom they dismissed at the end of the war.[*] The barons
and knights themselves often entered into these engagements with the
prince; and were enabled to fill their bands, both by the authority which
they possessed over their vassals and tenants, and from the great numbers
of loose, disorderly people whom they found on their estates, and who
willingly embraced an opportunity of gratifying their appetite for war and
rapine.
Meanwhile the old Gothic fabric, being neglected, went gradually to decay.
Though the Conqueror had divided all the lands of England into sixty
thousand knights’ fees, the number of these was insensibly diminished by
various artifices; and the king at last found that, by putting the law in
execution, he could assemble a small part only of the ancient force of the
kingdom. It was a usual expedient for men who held of the king or great
barons by military tenure, to transfer their land to the church, and
receive it back by another tenure, called frankalmoigne, by which they
were not bound to per form any service.[**] A law was made against this
practice; but the abuse had probably gone far before it was attended to,
and probably was not entirely corrected by the new statute, which, like
most laws of that age, we may conjecture to have been but feebly executed
by the magistrate against the perpetual interest of so many individuals.
The constable and mareschal, when they mustered the armies, often in a
hurry, and for want of better information, received the service of a baron
for fewer knights’ fees than were due by him; and one precedent of this
kind was held good against the king, and became ever after a reason for
diminishing the service.[***]
The rolls of knights’ fees were inaccurately kept; no care was taken to
correct them before the armies were summoned into the field,[*] it was
then too late to think of examining records and charters; and the service
was accepted on the footing which the vassal himself was pleased to
acknowledge, after all the various subdivisions and conjunctions of
property had thrown an obscurity on the nature and extent of his
tenure.[**] It is easy to judge of the intricacies which would attend
disputes of this kind with individuals; when even the number of military
fees belonging to the church, whose property way fixed and unalienable,
became the subject of controversy; and we find in particular, that when
the bishop of Durham was charged with seventy knights’ fees for the aid
levied on occasion of the marriage of Henry II.‘s daughter to the duke of
Saxony, the prelate acknowledged ten, and disowned the other sixty.[***]
It is not known in what mariner this difference was terminated; but had
the question been concerning an armament to defend the kingdom, the
bishop’s service would probably have been received without opposition for
ten fees; and this rate must also have fixed all his future payments.
Pecuniary scutages, therefore, diminished as much as military
services;[****] other methods of filling the exchequer, as well as the
armies, must be devised: new situations produced new laws and
institutions; and the great alterations in the finances and military power
of the crown, as well as in private property, were the source of equal
innovations in every part of the legislature or civil government.
The exorbitant estates conferred by the Norman on his barons and
chieftains, remained not long entire and unimpaired. The landed property
was gradually shared out into more hands; and those immense baronies were
divided, either by provisions to younger children, by partitions among
co-heirs, by sale, or by escheating to the king, who gratified a great
number of his courtiers by dealing them out among them in smaller
portions. Such moderate estates, as they required economy, and confined
the proprietors to live at home, were better calculated for duration; and
the order of knights and small barons grew daily more numerous, and began
to form a very respectable rank or order in the state. As they were all
immediate vassals of the crown by military tenure, they were, by the
principles of the feudal law, equally entitled with the greatest barons to
a seat in the national or general councils; and this right, though
regarded as a privilege which the owners would not entirely relinquish,
was also considered as a burden which they desired to be subjected to on
extraordinary occasions only. Hence it was provided in the charter of King
John, that, while the great barons were summoned to the national council
by a particular writ, the small barons, under which appellation the
knights were also comprehended, should only be called by a general summons
of the sheriff. The distinction between great and small barons, like that
between rich and poor, was not exactly defined; but, agreeably to the
inaccurate genius of that age, and to the simplicity of ancient
government, was left very much to be determined by the discretion of the
king and his ministers. It was usual for the prince to require, by a
particular summons, the attendance of a baron in one parliament, and to
neglect him in future parliaments;[*] nor was this uncertainty ever
complained of as an injury. He attended when required: he was better
pleased on other occasions to be exempted from the burden: and as he was
acknowledged to be of the same order with the greatest barons, it gave
them no surprise to see him take his seat in the great council, whether he
appeared of his own accord, or by a particular summons from the king. The
barons by writ, therefore, began gradually to intermix themselves with the
barons by tenure; and, as Camden tells us,[**] from an ancient manuscript
now lost, that after the battle of Evesham, a positive law was enacted,
prohibiting every baron from appearing in parliament, who was not invited
thither by a particular summons, the whole baronage of England held
thenceforward their seat by writ, and this important privilege of their
tenures was in effect abolished. Only where writs had been regularly
continued for some time in one great family, the omission of them would
have been regarded as an affront, and even as an injury.
A like alteration gradually took place in the order of earls who were the
highest rank of barons. The dignity of an earl, like that of a baron, was
anciently territorial and official:[*] he exercised jurisdiction within
his county: he levied the third of the fines to his own profit: he was at
once a civil and a military magistrate: and though his authority, from the
time of the Norman conquest, was hereditary in England, the title was so
much connected with the office, that where the king intended to create a
new earl, he had no other expedient than to erect a certain territory into
a county or earldom, and to bestow it upon the person and his family.[**]
But as the sheriffs, who were the vicegerents of the earls, were named by
the king, and removable at pleasure, he found them more dependent upon
him; and endeavored to throw the whole authority and jurisdiction of the
office into their hands. This magistrate was at the head of the finances,
and levied all the king’s rents within the county: he assessed at pleasure
the talliages of the inhabitants in royal demesne: he had usually
committed to him the management of wards, and often of escheats: he
presided in the lower courts of judicature: and thus, though inferior to
the earl in dignity, he was soon considered, by this union of the judicial
and fiscal powers, and by the confidence reposed in him by the king, as
much superior to him in authority, and undermined his influence within his
own jurisdiction.[***] It became usual, in creating an earl, to give him a
fixed salary, commonly about twenty pounds a year, in lieu of his third of
the fines: the diminution of his power kept pace with the retrenchment of
his profit: and the dignity of earl, instead of being territorial and
official, dwindled into personal and titular. Such were the mighty
alterations which already had fully taken place, or were gradually
advancing, in the house of peers; that is, in the parliament: for there
seems anciently to have been no other house.
But though the introduction of barons by writ, and of titular earls, had
given some increase to royal authority, there were other causes which
counterbalanced those innovations, and tended in a higher degree to
diminish the power of the sovereign. The disuse into which the feudal
militia had in a great measure fallen made the barons almost entirely
forget their dependence on the crown: by the diminution of the number of
knights’ fees the king had no reasonable compensation when he levied
scutages, and exchanged their service for money: the alienations of the
crown lands had reduced him to poverty: and above all, the concession of
the Great Charter had set bounds to royal power, and had rendered it more
difficult and dangerous for the prince to exert any extraordinary act of
arbitrary authority. In this situation it was natural for the king to
court the friendship of the lesser barons and knights, whose influence was
no ways dangerous to him, and who, being exposed to oppression from their
powerful neighbors, sought a legal protection under the shadow of the
throne. He desired, therefore, to have their presence in parliament, where
they served to control the turbulent resolutions of the great. To exact a
regular attendance of the whole body would have produced confusion, and
would have imposed too heavy a burden upon them. To summon only a few by
writ, though it was practised and had a good effect, served not entirely
the king’s purpose; because these members had no further authority than
attended their personal character, and were eclipsed by the appearance of
the more powerful nobility, He therefore dispensed with the attendance of
most of the lesser barons in parliament; and in return for this indulgence
(for such it was then esteemed) required them to choose in each county a
certain number of their own body, whose charges they bore, and who, having
gained the confidence, carried with them, of course, the authority of the
whole order. This expedient had been practised at different times in the
reign of Henry III.,[*] and regularly during that of the present king. The
numbers sent up by each county varied at the will of the prince:[**] they
took their seat among the other peers; because by their tenure they
belonged to that order:[***] the introducing of them into that house
scarcely appeared an innovation: and though it was easily in the king’s
power, by varying their number, to command the resolutions of the whole
parliament this circumstance was little attended to in an age when force
was more prevalent than laws, and when a resolution, though taken by the
majority of a legal assembly, could not be executed, if it opposed the
will of the more powerful minority.
But there were other important consequences, which followed the diminution
and consequent disuse of the ancient feudal militia. The king’s expense in
levying and maintaining a military force for every enterprise, was
increased beyond what his narrow revenues were able to bear: as the
scutages of his military tenants, which were accepted in lieu of their
personal service, had fallen to nothing, there were no means of supply but
from voluntary aids granted him by the parliament and clergy, or from the
talliages which he might levy upon the towns and inhabitants in royal
demesne. In the preceding year, Edward had been obliged to exact no less
than the sixth of all movables from the laity, and a moiety of all
ecclesiastical benefices[*] for his expedition into Poictou, and the
suppression of the Welsh: and this distressful situation which was likely
often to return upon him and his successors, made him think of a new
device, and summon the representatives of all the boroughs to parliament.
This period, which is the twenty-third of his reign, seems to be the real
and true epoch of the house of commons, and the faint dawn of popular
government in England. For the representatives of the counties were only
deputies from the smaller barons and lesser nobility; and the former
precedent of representatives from the boroughs, who were summoned by the
earl of Leicester, was regarded as the act of a violent usurpation, had
beer, discontinued in all the subsequent parliaments; and if such a
measure had not become necessary on other accounts, that precedent was
more likely to blast than give credit to it.
During the course of several years, the kings of England, in imitation of
other European princes, had embraced the salutary policy of encouraging
and protecting the lower and more industrious orders of the state; whom
they found well disposed to obey the laws and civil magistrate, and whose
ingenuity and labor furnish commodities requisite for the ornament of
peace and support of war. Though the inhabitants of the country were still
left at the disposal of their imperious lords, many attempts were made to
give more security and liberty to citizens, and make them enjoy unmolested
the fruits of their industry. Boroughs were erected by royal patent within
the demesne lands; liberty of trade was conferred upon them; the
inhabitants were allowed to farm, at a fixed rent, their own tolls and
customs,[*] they were permitted to elect their own magistrates; justice
was administered to them by these magistrates, without obliging them to
attend the sheriff or county court: and some shadow of independence, by
means of these equitable privileges, was gradually acquired by the
people.[**] The king, however, retained still the power of levying
talliage or taxes upon them at pleasure;[***] and though their poverty and
the customs of the age made these demands neither frequent or exorbitant,
such unlimited authority in the sovereign was a sensible check upon
commerce, and was utterly incompatible with all the principles of a free
government. But when the multiplied necessities of the crown produced a
greater avidity for supply, the king, whose prerogative entitled him to
exact it, found that he had not power sufficient to enforce his edicts,
and that it was necessary, before he imposed taxes, to smooth the way for
his demand, and to obtain the previous consent of the boroughs, by
solicitations, remonstrances, and authority. The inconvenience of
transacting this business with every particular borough was soon felt; and
Edward became sensible, that the most expeditious way of obtaining supply,
was to assemble the deputies of all the boroughs, to lay before them the
necessities of the state, to discuss the matter in their presence, and to
require their consent to the demands of their sovereign, For this reason,
he issued writs to the sheriffs, enjoining them to send to parliament,
along with two knights of the shire two deputies from each borough within
their county,[****] and these provided with sufficient powers from their
community to consent, in their name, to what he and his council should
require of them.
“As it is a most equitable rule,” says he, in his preamble to this writ,
“that what concerns all should be approved of by all; and common dangers
be repelled by united efforts;”[*] a noble principle, which may seem to
indicate a liberal mind in the king, and which laid the foundation of a
free and an equitable government.
After the election of these deputies by the aldermen and common council,
they gave sureties for their attendance before the king and parliament:
their charges were respectively borne by the borough which sent them; and
they had so little idea of appearing as legislators,—a character
extremely wide of their low rank and condition,[**]—that no
intelligence could be more disagreeable to any borough, than to find that
they must elect, or to any individual than that he was elected, to a trust
from which no profit or honor could possibly be derived.[***] They
composed not, properly speaking, any essential part of the parliament:
they sat apart both from the barons and knights,[****] who disdained to
mix with such mean personages: after they had given their consent to the
taxes required of them, their business being then finished, they
separated, even though the parliament still continued to sit, and to
canvass the national business.[*****] And as they all consisted of men who
were real burgesses of the place from which they were sent, the sheriff,
when he found no person of abilities or wealth sufficient for the office,
often used the freedom of omitting particular boroughs in his returns; and
as he received the thanks of the people for this indulgence, he gave no
displeasure to the court, who levied on all the boroughs, without
distinction, the tax agreed to by the majority of deputies.[******]
The union, however, of the representatives from the boroughs gave
gradually more weight to the whole order; and it became customary for
them, in return for the supplies which they granted, to prefer petitions
to the crown for the redress of any particular grievance, of which they
found reason to complain. The more the king’s demands multiplied, the
faster these petitions increased both in number and authority; and the
prince found it difficult to refuse men whose grants had supported his
throne, and to whose assistance he might so soon be again obliged to have
recourse. The commons, however, were still much below the rank of
legislators.[*] 4 Their petitions, though they received a verbal
assent from the throne, were only the rudiments of laws: the judges were
afterwards intrusted with the power of putting them into form. and the
king, by adding to them the sanction of his authority, and that sometimes
without the assent of the nobles, bestowed validity upon them. The age did
not refine so much as to perceive the danger of these irregularities. No
man was displeased that the sovereign, at the desire of any class of men,
should issue an order which appeared only to concern that class; and his
predecessors were so near possessing the whole legislative power, that he
gave no disgust by assuming it in this seemingly inoffensive manner. But
time and further experience gradually opened men’s eyes, and corrected
these abuses. It was found that no laws could be fixed for one order of
men without affecting the whole; and that the force and efficacy of laws
depended entirely on the terms employed in wording them. The house of
peers, therefore, the most powerful order in the state, with reason,
expected that their assent should be expressly granted to all public
ordinances:[**]
But no durable or general statute seems ever to have been made by the king
from the petition of the commons alone, without the assent of the peers.
It is more likely that the peers alone without the commons, would enact
statutes, and in the reign of Henry V., the commons required, that no laws
should be framed merely upon their petitions, unless the statutes were
worded by themselves, and had passed their house in the form of a bill.[*]
But as the same causes which had produced a partition of property
continued still to operate, the number of knights and lesser barons, or
what the English call the gentry, perpetually increased, and they sunk
into a rank still more inferior to the great nobility. The equality of
tenure was lost in the great inferiority of power and property; and the
house of representatives from the counties was gradually separated from
that of the peers, and formed a distinct order in the state.[**] The
growth of commerce, meanwhile, augmented the private wealth and
consideration of the burgesses; the frequent demands of the crown
increased their public importance; and as they resembled the knights of
shires in one material circumstance, that of representing particular
bodies of men, it no longer appeared unsuitable to unite them together in
the same house, and to confound their rights and privileges.[***] 5 Thus the
third estate that of the commons, reached at last its present form; and as
the country gentlemen made thenceforwards no scruple of appearing as
deputies from the boroughs, the distinction between the members was
entirely lost, and the lower house acquired thence a great accession of
weight and importance in the kingdom. Still, however, the office of this
estate was very different from that which it has since exercised with so
much advantage to the public. Instead of checking and controlling the
authority of the king, they were naturally induced to adhere to him, as
the great fountain of law and justice, and to support him against the
power of the aristocracy, which at once was the source of oppression to
themselves, and disturbed him in the execution of the laws. The king, in
his turn, gave countenance to an order of men so useful and so little
dangerous: the peers also were obliged to pay them some consideration: and
by this means the third estate, formerly so abject in England, as well as
in all other European nations, rose by slow degrees to their present
importance; and in their progress made arts and commerce, the necessary
attendants of liberty and equality, flourish in the kingdom.[****] 6
What sufficiently proves that the commencement of the house of burgesses,
who are the true commons, was not an affair of chance, but arose from the
necessities of the present situation, is, that Edward, at the very same
time, summoned deputies from the inferior clergy, the first that ever met
in England,[*] and he required them to impose taxes on their constituents
for the public service. Formerly the ecclesiastical benefices bore no part
of the burdens of the state: the pope indeed of late had often levied
impositions upon them: he had sometimes granted this power to the
sovereign:[**] the king himself had in the preceding year exacted, by
menaces and violence, a very grievous tax of half the revenues of the
clergy: but as this precedent was dangerous, and could not easily be
repeated in a government which required the consent of the subject to any
extraordinary resolution, Edward found it more prudent to assemble a lower
house of convocation, to lay before them his necessities, and to ask some
supply. But on this occasion he met with difficulties. Whether that the
clergy thought themselves the most independent body in the kingdom, or
were disgusted by the former exorbitant impositions, they absolutely
refused their assent to the king’s demand of a fifth of their movables;
and it was not till a second meeting that, on their persisting in this
refusal, he was willing to accept of a tenth. The barons and knights
granted him, without hesitation, an eleventh; the burgesses, a seventh.
But the clergy still scrupled to meet on the king’s writ, lest by such an
instance of obedience they should seem to acknowledge the authority of the
temporal power: and this compromise was at last fallen upon, that the king
should issue his writ to the archbishop; and that the archbishop should,
in consequence of it, summon the clergy, who, as they then appeared to
obey their spiritual superior, no longer hesitated to meet in convocation.
This expedient, however, was the cause why the ecclesiastics were
separated into two houses of convocation, under their several archbishops,
and formed not one estate, as in other countries of Europe; which was at
first the king’s intention.[***] We now return to the course of our
narration.
Edward, conscious of the reasons of disgust which he had given to the king
of Scots, informed of thu dispositions of that people, and expecting the
most violent effects of their resentment, which he knew he had so well
merited, employed the supplies granted him by his people in making
preparations against the hostilities of his northern neighbor. When in
this situation, he received intelligence of the treaty secretly concluded
between John and Philip; and though uneasy at this concurrence of a French
and Scottish war he resolved not to encourage his enemies by a
pusillanimous behavior, or by yielding to their united efforts.
1296.
He summoned John to perform the duty of a vassal, and to send him a supply
of forces against an invasion from France, with which he was then
threatened: he next required that the fortresses of Berwick, Jedburgh, and
Roxburgh should be put into his hands as a security during the war; he
cited John to appear in an English parliament to be held at Newcastle; and
when none of these successive demands were complied with, he marched
northward with numerous forces, thirty thousand foot and four thousand
horse, to chastise his rebellious vassal. The Scottish nation, who had
little reliance on the vigor and abilities of their prince, assigned him a
council of twelve noblemen, in whose hands the sovereignty was really
lodged, and who put the country in the best posture of which the present
distractions would admit. A great army, composed of forty thousand
infantry, though supported only by five hundred cavalry advanced to the
frontiers; and after a fruitless attempt upon Carlisle, marched eastwards
to defend those provinces which Edward was preparing to attack. But some
of the most considerable of the Scottish nobles, Robert Bruce, the father
and son, the earls of March and Angus, prognosticating the ruin of their
country from the concurrence of intestine divisions and a foreign
invasion, endeavored here to ingratiate themselves with Edward by an early
submission; and the king, encouraged by this favorable incident, led his
army into the enemy’s country, and crossed the Tweed without opposition at
Coldstream. He then received a message from John, by which that prince,
having now procured for himself and his nation Pope Celestine’s
dispensation from former oaths, renounced the homage which had been done
to England, and set Edward at defiance. This bravado was but ill supported
by the military operations of the Scots.
Berwick was already taken by assault: Sir William Douglas, the governor,
was made prisoner: above seven thousand of the garrison were put to the
sword: and Edward, elated by this great advantage, despatched Earl
Warrenne with twelve thousand men to lay siege to Dunbar, which was
defended by the flower of the Scottish nobility.
The Scots, sensible of the importance of this place, which, if taken, laid
their whole country open to the enemy, advanced with their main army,
under the command of the earls of Buchan, Lenox, and Marre, in order to
relieve it. Warrenne, not dismayed at the great superiority of their
number, marched out to give them battle. He attacked them with great
vigor; and as undisciplined troops, when numerous, are but the more
exposed to a panic upon any alarm, he soon threw them into confusion, and
chased them off the field with great slaughter. The loss of the Scots is
said to have amounted to twenty thousand men: the Castle of Dunbar, with
all its garrison, surrendered next day to Edward, who, after the battle,
had brought up the main body of the English, and who now proceeded with an
assured confidence of success. The Castle of Roxburgh was yielded by
James, steward of Scotland; and that nobleman, from whom is descended the
royal family of Stuart, was again obliged to swear fealty to Edward. After
a feeble resistance, the Castles of Edinburgh and Stirling opened their
gates to the enemy. All the southern parts were instantly subdued by the
English; and to enable them the better to reduce the northern, whose
inaccessible situation seemed to give them some more security, Edward sent
for a strong reënforcement of Welsh and Irish, who, being accustomed to a
desultory kind of war, were the best fitted to pursue the fugitive Scots
into the recesses of their lakes and mountains. But the spirit of the
nation was already broken by their misfortunes and the feeble and timid
Baliol, discontented with his own subjects, and overawed by the English,
abandoned all those resources which his people might yet have possessed in
this extremity. He hastened to make his submissions to Edward, he
expressed the deepest penitence for his disloyalty to his liege lord; and
he made a solemn and irrevocable resignation of his crown into the hands
of that monarch.[*]
Edward marched northwards to Aberdeen and Elgin, without meeting an enemy:
no Scotchman approached him but to pay him submission and do him homage:
even the turbulent Highlanders, ever refractory to their own princes, and
averse to the restraint of laws, endeavored to prevent the devastation of
their country, by giving him early proofs of obedience: and Edward, having
brought the whole kingdom to a seeming state of tranquillity, returned to
the south with his army. There was a stone to which the popular
superstition of the Scots paid the highest veneration: all their kings
were seated on it when they received the rite of inauguration: an ancient
tradition assured them that, wherever this stone was placed, their nation
should always govern: and it was carefully preserved at Scone, as the
true, palladium of their monarchy, and their ultimate resource amidst all
their misfortunes. Edward got possession of it, and carried it with him to
England.[*] He gave orders to destroy the records, and all those monuments
of antiquity which might preserve the memory of the independence of the
kingdom, and refute the English claims of superiority. The Scots pretend
that he also destroyed all the annals preserved in their convents: but it
is not probable that a nation, so rude and unpolished, should be possessed
of any history which deserves much to be regretted. The great seal of
Bailol was broken; and that prince himself was carried prisoner to London,
and committed to custody in the Tower. Two years after he was restored to
liberty, and submitted to a voluntary banishment in France; where, without
making any further attempts for the recovery of his royalty, he died in a
private station. Earl Warrenne was left governor of Scotland:[**]
Englishmen were intrusted with the chief offices: and Edward, flattering
himself that he had attained the end of all his wishes, and that the
numerous acts of fraud and violence, which he had practised against
Scotland, had terminated in the final reduction of that kingdom, returned
with his victorious army into England.
An attempt, which he made about the same time, for the recovery of
Guienne, was not equally successful. He sent thither an army of seven
thousand men, under the command of his brother, the earl of Lancaster.
That prince gained at first some advantages over the French at Bordeaux:
but he was soon after seized with a distemper, of which he died at
Bayonne. The command devolved on the earl of Lincoln, who was not able to
perform any thing considerable during the rest of the campaign.[*]
But the active and ambitious spirit of Edward, while his conquests brought
such considerable accessions to the English monarchy, could not be
satisfied, so long as Guienne, the ancient patrimony of his family, was
wrested from him by the dishonest artifices of the French monarch. Finding
that the distance of that province rendered all his efforts against it
feeble and uncertain, he purposed to attack France in a quarter where she
appeared more vulnerable; and with this view he married his daughter
Elizabeth to John, earl of Holland, and at the same time contracted an
alliance with Guy, earl of Flanders, stipulated to pay him the sum of
seventy-five thousand pounds, and projected an invasion with their united
forces upon Philip, their common enemy.[**] He hoped that, when he
himself, at the head of the English, Flemish, and Dutch armies, reënforced
by his German allies, to whom he had promised or remitted considerable
sums, should enter die frontiers of France, and threaten the capital
itself, Philip would at last be obliged to relinquish his acquisitions,
and purchase peace by the restitution of Guienne. But in order to set this
great machine in movement, considerable supplies were requisite from the
parliament; and Edward, without much difficulty, obtained from the barons
and knights a new grant of a twelfth of all their movables, and from the
boroughs that of an eighth. The great and almost unlimited power of the
king over the latter, enabled him to throw the heavier part of the burden
on them; and the prejudices which he seems always to have entertained
against the church, on account of the former zeal of the clergy for the
Mountfort faction, made him resolve to load them with still more
considerable impositions, and he required of them a fifth of their
movables. But he here met with an opposition, which for some time
disconcerted all his measures, and engaged him in enterprises that were
somewhat dangerous to him; and would have proved fatal to any of his
predecessors.
Boniface VIII., who had succeeded Celestine in the papal throne, was a man
of the most lofty and enterprising spirit; and though not endowed with
that severity of manners which commonly accompanies ambition in men of his
order, he was determined to carry the authority of the tiara, and his
dominion over the temporal power, to as great a height as it had ever
attained in any former period. Sensible that his immediate predecessors,
by oppressing the church in every province of Christendom, had extremely
alienated the affections of the clergy, and had afforded the civil
magistrate a pretence for laying like impositions on ecclesiastical
revenues, he attempted to resume the former station of the sovereign
pontiff, and to establish himself as the common protector of the spiritual
order against all invaders. For this purpose he issued very early in his
pontificate a general bull, prohibiting all princes from levying without
his consent any taxes upon the clergy, and all clergymen from submitting
to such impositions; and he threatened both of them with the penalties of
excommunication in case of disobedience.[*] This important edict is said
to have been procured by the solicitation of Robert de Win chelsey,
archbishop of Canterbury, who intended to employ it as a rampart against
the violent extortions which the church had felt from Edward, and the
still greater, which that prince’s multiplied necessities gave them reason
to apprehend. When a demand, therefore, was made on the clergy of a fifth
of their movables, a tax which was probably much more grievous than a
fifth of their revenue, as their lands were mostly stocked with their
cattle, and cultivated by their villains, the clergy took shelter under
the bull of Pope Boniface and pleaded conscience in refusing
compliance.[**] The king came not immediately to extremities on this
repulse; but after locking up all their granaries and barns, and
prohibiting all rent to be paid them, he appointed a new synod, to confer
with him upon his demand. The primate, not dismayed by these proofs of
Edward’s resolution, here plainly told him that the clergy owed obedience
to two sovereigns, their spiritual and their temporal; but their duty
bound them to a much stricter attachment to the former than to the latter:
they could not comply with his commands, (for such, in some measure, the
requests of the crown were then deemed,) in contradiction to the express
prohibition of the sovereign pontiff.[***]
1297.
The clergy had seen, in many instances, that Edward paid little regard to
those numerous privileges on which they set so high a value. He had
formerly seized, in an arbitrary manner, all the money and plate belonging
to the churches and convents, and had applied them to the public
service;[*] and they could not but expect more violent treatment on this
sharp refusal, grounded on such dangerous principles. Instead of applying
to the pope for a relaxation of his bull, he resolved immediately to
employ the power in his hands; and he told the ecclesiastics that, since
they refused to support the civil government, they were unworthy to
receive any benefit from it; and he would accordingly put them out of the
protection of the laws. This vigorous measure was immediately carried into
execution.[**] Orders were issued to the judges to receive no cause
brought before them by the clergy; to hear and decide all causes in which
they were defendants; to do every man justice against them; to do them
justice against nobody.[***] The ecclesiastics soon found themselves in
the most miserable situation imaginable. They could not remain in their
own houses or convents for want of subsistence; if they went abroad in
quest of maintenance, they were dismounted, robbed of their horses and
clothes, abused by every ruffian, and no redress could be obtained by them
for the most violent injury. The primate himself was attacked on the
highway, was stripped of his equipage and furniture, and was at last
reduced to board himself with a single servant in the house of a country
clergyman.[****] The king, meanwhile, remained an indifferent spectator of
all these violences: and without employing his officers in committing any
immediate injury on the priests, which might have appeared invidious and
oppressive, he took ample vengeance on them for their obstinate refusal of
his demands. Though the archbishop issued a general sentence of
excommunication against all who attacked the persons or property of
ecclesiastics, it was not regarded; while Edward enjoyed the satisfaction
of seeing the people become the voluntary instruments of his justice
against them, and inure themselves to throw off that respect for the
sacred order by which they had so long been overawed and governed.
The spirits of the clergy were at last broken by this harsh treatment.
Besides that the whole province of York, which lay nearest the danger that
still hung over them from the Scots, voluntarily, from the first, voted a
fifth of their movables, the bishops of Salisbury, Ely, and some others,
made a composition for the secular clergy within their dioceses; and they
agreed not to pay the fifth, which would have been an act of disobedience
to Boniface’s bull, but to deposit a sum equivalent in some church
appointed them, whence it was taken by the king’s officers.[*] Many
particular convents and clergymen made payment of a like sum, and received
the king’s protection.[**] Those who had not ready money, entered into
recognizances for the payment. And there was scarcely found one
ecclesiastic in the kingdom who seemed willing to suffer, for the sake of
religious privileges, this new species of martyrdom, the most tedious and
languishing of any, the most mortifying to spiritual pride, and not
rewarded by that crown of glory which the church holds up with such
ostentation to her devoted adherents.
But as the money granted by parliament, though considerable, was not
sufficient to supply the king’s necessities, and that levied by
compositions with the clergy came in slowly, Edward was obliged, for the
obtaining of further supply, to exert his arbitrary power, and to lay an
oppressive hand on all orders of men in the kingdom. He limited the
merchants in the quantity of wool allowed to be exported; and at the same
time forced them to pay him a duty of forty shillings a sack, which was
computed to be above the third of the value.[***] He seized all the rest
of the wool, as well as all the leather of the kingdom, into his hands,
and disposed of these commodities for his own benefit;[****] he required
the sheriffs of each county to supply him with two thousand quarters of
wheat, and as many of oats, which he permitted them to seize wherever they
could find them: the cattle and other commodities necessary for supplying
his army, were laid hold of without the consent of the owners;[*****] and
though he promised to pay afterwards the equivalent of all these goods,
men saw but little probability that a prince, who submitted so little to
the limitations of law, could ever, amidst his multiplied necessities, be
reduced to a strict observance of his engagements.
He showed at the same time an equal disregard to the principles of the
feudal law, by which all the lands of his kingdom were held: in order to
increase his army, and enable him to support that great effort which he
intended to make against France, he required the attendance of every
proprietor of land possessed of twenty pounds a year, even though he held
not of the crown, and was not obliged by his tenure to perform any such
service.[*]
These acts of violence and of arbitrary power, notwithstanding the great
personal regard generally borne to the king, bred murmurs in every order
of men; and it was not long ere some of the great nobility, jealous of
their own privileges, as well as of national liberty, gave countenance and
authority to these complaints. Edward assembled on the sea-coast an army
which he purposed to send over to Gascony, while he himself should in
person make an impression on the side of Flanders; and he intended to put
these forces under the command of Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford, the
constable, and Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, the mareschal of England. But
these two powerful earls refused to execute his commands, and affirmed
that they were only obliged by their office to attend his person in the
wars. A violent altercation ensued: and the king, in the height of his
passion, addressing himself to the constable, exclaimed, “Sir Earl, by
God, you shall either go or hang.” “By God, Sir King,” replied Hereford,
“I will neither go nor hang.”[**] And he immediately departed with the
mareschal and above thirty other considerable barons.
Upon this opposition, the king laid aside the project of an expedition
against Guienne, and assembled the forces which he himself purposed to
transport into Flanders. But the two earls, irritated in the contest and
elated by impunity, pretending that none of their ancestors had ever
served in that country, refused to perform the duty of their office in
mustering the army.[***] The king, now finding it advisable to proceed
with moderation, instead of attainting the earls, who possessed their
dignities by hereditary right, appointed Thomas de Berkeley and Geoffrey
de Geyneville to act in that emergence as constable and mareschal.[****]
He endeavored to reconcile himself with the church; took the primate again
into favor,[*] made him, in conjunction with Reginald de Grey, tutor to
the prince, whom he intended to appoint guardian of the kingdom during his
absence; and he even assembled a great number of the nobility in
Westminster Hall, to whom he deigned to make an apology for his past
conduct. He pleaded the urgent necessities of the crown; his extreme want
of money; his engagements from honor as well as interest to support his
foreign allies; and he promised, if ever he returned in safety, to redress
all their grievances, to restore the execution of the laws, and to make
all his subjects compensation for the losses which they had sustained.
Meanwhile, he begged them to suspend their animosities; to judge of him by
his future conduct, of which, he hoped, he should be more master; to
remain faithful to his government, or, if he perished in the present war,
to preserve their allegiance to his son and successor.[**]
There were, certainly, from the concurrence of discontents among the
great, and grievances of the people, materials sufficient in any other
period to have kindled a civil war in England: but the vigor and abilities
of Edward kept every one in awe; and his dexterity in stopping on the
brink of danger, and retracting the measures to which he had been pushed
by his violent temper and arbitrary principles, saved the nation from so
great a calamity. The two great earls dared not to break out into open
violence: they proceeded no further than framing a remonstrance, which was
delivered to the king at Winchelsea, when he was ready to embark for
Flanders. They there complained of the violations of the Great Charter,
and that of forests; the violent seizure of corn, leather, cattle, and,
above all, of wool, a commodity which they affirmed to be equal in value
to half the lands of the kingdom; the arbitrary imposition of forty
shillings a sack on the small quantity of wool allowed to be exported by
the merchants; and they claimed an immediate redress of all these
grievances.[***] The king told them that the greater part of his council
were now at a distance, and without their advice he could not deliberate
on measures of so great importance.[****]
But the constable and mareschal, with the barons of their party resolved
to take advantage of Edward’s absence and to obtain an explicit assent to
their demands. When summoned to attend the parliament at London, they came
with a great body of cavalry and infantry; and before they would enter the
city, required that the gates should be put into their custody.[*] The
primate, who secretly favored all their pretensions, advised the council
to comply; and thus they became masters both of the young prince and of
the resolutions of parliament. Their demands, however, were moderate, and
such as sufficiently justify the purity of their intentions in all their
past measures: they only required that the two charters should receive a
solemn confirmation; that a clause should be added to secure the nation
forever against all impositions and taxes without consent of parliament;
and that they themselves, and their adherents, who had refused to attend
the king into Flanders, should be pardoned for the offence, and should be
again received into favor.[**] The prince of Wales and his council
assented to these terms, and the charters were sent over to the king in
Flanders, to be there confirmed by him. Edward felt the utmost reluctance
to this measure, which, he apprehended, would for the future impose
fetters on his conduct, and set limits to his lawless authority. On
various pretences he delayed three days giving any answer to the deputies;
and when the pernicious consequences of his refusal were represented to
him, he was at last obliged, after many internal struggles, to affix his
seal to the charters, as also to the clause that bereaved him of the power
which he had hitherto assumed, of imposing arbitrary taxes upon the
people.
That we may finish at once this interesting transaction concerning the
settlement of the charters, we shall briefly mention the subsequent events
which relate to it. The constable and mareschal, informed of the king’s
compliance, were satisfied, and not only ceased from disturbing the
government, but assisted the regency with their power against the Scots,
who had risen in arms, and had thrown off the yoke of England.[***]
But being sensible that the smallest pretence would suffice to make Edward
retract these detested laws, which, though they had often received the
sanction both of king and parliament, and had been acknowledged during
three reigns, were never yet deemed to have sufficient validity, they
insisted that he should again confirm them on his return to England, and
should thereby renounce all plea which he might derive from his residing
in a foreign country when he formerly affixed his seal to them.[*] It
appeared that they judged aright of Edward’s character and intentions: he
delayed this confirmation as long as possible; and, when the fear of worse
consequences obliged him again to comply, he expressly added a salvo for
his royal dignity or prerogative, which in effect enervated the whole
force of the charters.[**] The two earls and their adherents left the
parliament in disgust; and the king was constrained on a future occasion
to grant to the people, without any subterfuge, a pure and absolute
confirmation of those laws[***] which were so much the object of their
passionate affection. Even further securities were then provided for the
establishment of national privileges. Three knights were appointed to be
chosen in each county, and were invested with the power of punishing, by
fine and imprisonment, every transgression or violation of the
charters;[****] a precaution which, though it was soon disused, as
encroaching too much on royal prerogative, proves the attachment which the
English in that age bore to liberty, and their well-grounded jealousy of
the arbitrary disposition of Edward.
The work, however, was not yet entirely finished and complete. In order to
execute the lesser charter, it was requisite, by new perambulations, to
set bounds to the royal forests, and to disafforest all land which former
encroachments had comprehended within their limits. Edward discovered the
same reluctance to comply with this equitable demand; and it was not till
after many delays on his part, and many solicitations and requests, and
even menaces of war and violence,[*****] on the part of the barons, that
the perambulations were made, and exact boundaries fixed by a jury in each
county to the extent of his forests.[******] Had not his ambitious and
active temper raised him so many foreign enemies, and obliged him to have
recourse so often to the assistance of his subjects, it is not likely that
those concessions could ever have been extorted from him.
But while the people, after so many successful struggles, deemed
themselves happy in the secure possession of their privileges, they were
surprised in 1305 to find that Edward had secretly applied to Rome, and
had procured from that mercenary court an absolution from all the oaths
and engagements, which he had so often reiterated, to observe both the
charters. There are some historians,[*] so credulous as to imagine, that
this perilous step was taken by him for no other purpose than to acquire
the merit of granting a new confirmation of the charters, as he did soon
after; and a confirmation so much the more unquestionable, as it could
never after be invalidated by his successors, on pretence of any force or
violence which had been imposed upon him. But, besides that this might
have been done with a better grace if he had never applied for any such
absolution, the whole tenor of his conduct proves him to be little
susceptible of such refinements in patriotism; and this very deed itself,
in which he anew confirmed the charters, carries on the face of it a very
opposite presumption. Though he ratified the charters in general, he still
took advantage of the papal bull so far as to invalidate the late
perambulations of the forests, which had been made with such care and
attention, and to reserve to himself the power, in case of favorable
incidents, to extend as much as formerly those arbitrary jurisdictions. If
the power was not in fact made use of, we can only conclude that the
favorable incidents did not offer.
Thus, after the contests of near a whole century, and these ever
accompanied with violent jealousies, often with public convulsions, the
Great Charter was finally established; and the English nation have the
honor of extorting, by their perseverance, this concession from the
ablest, the most warlike, and the most ambitious of all their princes.[**]
It is computed that above thirty confirmations of the charter were done at
different times.
To return to the period from which this account of the charters has led
us: though the king’s impatience to appear at the head of his armies in
Flanders made him overlook all considerations, either of domestic
discontents or of commotions among the Scots, his embarkation had been so
long retarded by the various obstructions thrown in his way, that he lost
the proper season for action, and after his arrival made no progress
against the enemy. The king of France, taking advantage of his absence,
had broken into the Low Countries; had defeated the Flemings in the battle
of Furnes; had made himself master of Lisle, St. Omer, Courtrai, and
Ypres; and seemed in a situation to take full vengeance on the earl of
Flanders, his rebellious vassal. But Edward, seconded by an English army
of fifty thousand men, (for this is the number assigned by historians,[*])
was able to stop the career of his victories; and Philip, finding all the
weak resources of his kingdom already exhausted, began to dread a reverse
of fortune, and to apprehend an invasion on France itself.
The king of England, on the other hand, disappointed of assistance from
Adolph, king of the Romans, which he had purchased at a very high price,
and finding many urgent calls for his presence in England, was desirous of
ending, on any honorable terms, a war which served only to divert his
force from the execution of more important projects. This disposition in
both monarchs soon produced a cessation of hostilities for two years; and
engaged them to submit their differences to the arbitration of Pope
Boniface.
1298.
Boniface was among the last of the sovereign pontiffs that exercised an
authority over the temporal jurisdiction of princes; and these exorbitant
pretensions, which he had been tempted to assume from the successful
example of his predecessors, but of which the season was now past,
involved him in so many calamities, and were attended with so unfortunate
a catastrophe, that they have been secretly abandoned, though never openly
relinquished, by his successors in the apostolic chair. Edward and Philip,
equally jealous of papal claims, took care to insert in their reference,
that Boniface was made judge of the difference by their consent, as a
private person, not by any right of his pontificate; and the pope, without
seeming to be offended at this mortifying clause, proceeded to give a
sentence between them, in which they both acquiesced.[*] He brought them
to agree, that their union should be cemented by a double marriage; that
of Edward himself, who was now a widower, with Margaret, Philip’s sister,
and that of the prince of Wales with Isabella, daughter of that
monarch.[**]
Philip was likewise willing to restore Guienne to the English, which he
had indeed no good pretence to detain; but he insisted that the Scots, and
their king, John Baliol, should, as his allies, be comprehended in the
treaty, and should be restored to their liberty. The difference., after
several disputes, was compromised, by their making mutual sacrifices to
each other. Edward agreed to abandon his ally the earl of Flanders, on
condition that Philip should treat in like manner his ally the king of
Scots. The prospect of conquering these two countries, whose situation
made them so commodious an acquisition to the respective kingdoms,
prevailed over all other considerations; and though they were both finally
disappointed in their hopes, their conduct was very reconcilable to the
principles of an interested policy. This was the first specimen which the
Scots had of the French alliance, and which was exactly conformable to
what a smaller power must always expect, when it blindly attaches itself
to the will and fortunes of a greater. That unhappy people now engaged in
a brave though unequal contest for their liberties, were totally
abandoned, by the ally in whom they reposed their final confidence, to the
will of an imperious conqueror.
Though England, as well as other European countries, was, in its ancient
state, very ill qualified for making, and still worse for maintaining
conquests, Scotland was so much inferior in its internal force, and was so
ill situated for receiving foreign succors, that it is no wonder Edward,
an ambitious monarch, should have cast his eye on so tempting an
acquisition, which brought both security and greatness to his native
country. But the instruments whom he employed to maintain his dominion
over the northern kingdom were not happily chosen, and acted not with the
requisite prudence and moderation, in reconciling the Scottish nation to a
yoke which they bore with such extreme reluctance. Warrenne, retiring into
England on account of his bad state of health, left the administration
entirely in the hands of Ormesby, who was appointed justiciary of
Scotland, and Cressingham, who bore the office of treasurer; and a small
military force remained, to secure the precarious authority of those
ministers. The latter had no other object than the amassing of money by
rapine and injustice: the former distinguished himself by the rigor and
severity of his temper: and both of them, treating the Scots as a
conquered people, made them sensible, too early, of the grievous servitude
into which they had fallen. As Edward required that all the proprietors of
land should swear fealty to him, every one who refused or delayed giving
this testimony of submission, was outlawed and imprisoned, and punished
without mercy; and the bravest and most generous spirits of the nation
were thus exasperated to the highest degree against the English
government.[*]
There was one William Wallace, of a small fortune, but descended of an
ancient family in the west of Scotland, whose courage prompted him to
undertake, and enabled him finally to accomplish, the desperate attempt of
delivering his native country from the dominion of foreigners. This man,
whose valorous exploits are the object of just admiration, but have been
much exaggerated by the traditions of his countrymen, had been provoked by
the insolence of an English officer to put him to death; and finding
himself obnoxious on that account to the severity of the administration,
he fled into the woods, and offered himself as a leader to all those whom
their crimes, or bad fortune, or avowed hatred of the English, had reduced
to a like necessity. He was endowed with gigantic force of body, with
heroic courage of mind, with disinterested magnanimity, with incredible
patience, and ability to bear hunger, fatigue, and all the severities of
the seasons; and he soon acquired, among those desperate fugitives, that
authority to which his virtues so justly entitled him. Beginning with
small attempts, in which he was always successful, he gradually proceeded
to more momentous enterprises; and he discovered equal caution in securing
his followers, and valor in annoying the enemy. By his knowledge of the
country he was enabled, when pursued, to insure a retreat among the
morasses, or forests, or mountains; and again collecting his dispersed
associates, he unexpectedly appeared in another quarter, and surprised,
and routed, and put to the sword the unwary English. Every day brought
accounts of his great actions, which were received with no less favor by
his countrymen than terror by the enemy: all those who thirsted after
military fame were desirous to partake of his renown: his successful valor
seemed to vindicate the nation from the ignominy into which it had fallen,
by its tame submission to the English; and though no nobleman of note
ventured as yet to join his party, he had gained a general confidence and
attachment, which birth and fortune are not alone able to confer.
Wallace, having, by many fortunate enterprises, brought the valor of his
followers to correspond to his own, resolved to strike a decisive blow
against the English government; and he concerted the plan of attacking
Ormesby at Scone; and of taking vengeance on him for all the violence and
tyranny of which he had been guilty. The justiciary, apprised of his
intentions, fled hastily into England: all the other officers of that
nation imitated his example: their terror added alacrity and courage to
the Scots, who betook themselves to arms in every quarter; many of the
principal barons, and among the rest Sir William Douglas,[*] openly
countenanced Wallace’s party: Robert Bruce secretly favored and promoted
the same cause: and the Scots, shaking off their fetters, prepared
themselves to defend, by a united effort, that liberty which they had so
unexpectedly recovered from the hands of their oppressors.
But Warrenne, collecting an army of forty thousand men in the north of
England, determined to reëstablish his authority; and he endeavored, by
the celerity of his armament and of his march, to compensate for his past
negligence, which had enabled the Scots to throw off the English
government. He suddenly entered Annandale, and came up with the enemy at
Irvine, before their forces were fully collected, and before they had put
themselves in a posture of defence. Many of the Scottish nobles, alarmed
with their dangerous situation, here submitted to the English, renewed
their oaths of fealty, promised to deliver hostages for their good
behavior, and received a pardon for past offences.[*] Others, who had not
yet declared themselves, such as the steward of Scotland and the earl of
Lenox, joined, though with reluctance, the English army, and waited a
favorable opportunity for embracing the cause of their distressed
countrymen. But Wallace, whose authority over his retainers was more fully
confirmed by the absence of the great nobles, persevered obstinately in
his purpose; and finding himself unable to give battle to the enemy, he
marched northwards, with an intention of prolonging the war, and of
turning to his advantage the situation of that mountainous and barren
country. When Warrenne advanced to Stirling, he found Wallace encamped at
Cambuskenneth, on the opposite banks of the Forth; and being continually
urged by the impatient Cressingham, who was actuated both by personal and
national animosities against the Scots,[**] he prepared to attack them in
that position, which Wallace, no less prudent than courageous, had chosen
for his army.[***]
In spite of the remonstrances of Sir Richard Lundy, a Scotchman of birth
and family, who sincerely adhered to the English, he ordered his army to
pass a bridge which lay over the Forth; but he was soon convinced, by
fatal experience, of the error of his conduct. Wallace, allowing such
numbers of the English to pass as he thought proper, attacked them before
they were fully formed, put them to rout, pushed part of them into the
river, destroyed the rest by the edge of the sword, and gained a complete
victory over them.[*] Among the slain was Cressingham himself, whose
memory was so extremely odious to the Scots, that they flayed his dead
body, and made saddles and girths of his skin.[**] Warrenne, finding the
remainder of his army much dismayed by this misfortune, was obliged again
to evacuate the kingdom, and retire into England. The Castles of Roxburgh
and Berwick, ill fortified and feebly defended, fell soon after into the
hands of the Scots.
Wallace, universally revered as the deliverer of his country, now
received, from the hands of his followers, the dignity of regent or
guardian under the captive Baliol; and finding that the disorders of war,
as well as the unfavorable seasons, had produced a famine in Scotland, he
urged his army to march into England, to subsist at the expense of the
enemy, and to revenge all past injuries, by retaliating on that hostile
nation. The Scots, who deemed everything possible under such a leader,
joyfully attended his call. Wallace, breaking into the northern counties
during the winter season, laid every place waste with fire and sword; and
after extending on all sides, without opposition, the fury of his ravages
as far as the bishopric of Durham, he returned, loaded with spoils and
crowned with glory, into his own country.[***] The disorders which at that
time prevailed in England, from the refractory behavior of the constable
and mareschal, made it impossible to collect an army sufficient to resist
the enemy, and exposed the nation to this loss and dishonor.
But Edward, who received in Flanders intelligence of these events, and had
already concluded a truce with France, now hastened over to England, in
certain hopes, by his activity and valor, not only of wiping off this
disgrace, but of recovering the important conquest of Scotland, which he
always regarded as the chief glory and advantage of his reign. He appeased
the murmurs of his people by concessions and promises: he restored to the
citizens of London the election of their own magistrates, of which they
had been bereaved in the latter part of his father’s reign: he ordered
strict inquiry to be made concerning the corn and other goods which had
been violently seized before his departure, as if he intended to pay the
value to the owners:[*] and making public professions of confirming and
observing the charters he regained the confidence of the discontented
nobles. Having by all these popular arts rendered himself entirely master
of his people, he collected the whole military force of England, Wales,
and Ireland, and marched with an army of near a hundred thousand
combatants to the northern frontiers.
Nothing could have enabled the Scots to resist, but for one season, so
mighty a power, except an entire union among themselves; but as they were
deprived of their king, whose personal qualities, even when he was
present, appeared so contemptible, and had left among his subjects no
principle of attachment to him or his family, factions, jealousies, and
animosities unavoidably arose among the great, and distracted all their
councils. The elevation of Wallace, though purchased by so great merit,
and such eminent services, was the object of envy to the nobility, who
repined to see a private gentleman raised above them by his rank, and
still more by his glory and reputation. Wallace himself, sensible of their
jealousy and dreading the ruin of his country from those intestine
discords, voluntarily resigned his authority, and retained only the
command over that body of his followers who, being accustomed to victory
under his standard, refused to follow into the field any other leader. The
chief power devolved on the steward of Scotland, and Cummin of Badenoch;
men of eminent birth, under whom the great chieftains were more willing to
serve in defence of their country. The two Scottish commanders, collecting
their several forces from every quarter, fixed their station at Falkirk,
and purposed there to abide the assault of the English. Wallace was at the
head of a third body, which acted under his command. The Scottish army
placed their pikemen along their front; lined the intervals between the
three bodies with archers; and dreading the great superiority of the
English in cavalry, endeavored to secure their front by palisadoes, tied
together by ropes.[**] In this disposition they expected the approach of
the enemy.
The king, when he arrived in sight of the Scots, was pleased with the
prospect of being able, by one decisive stroke, to determine the fortune
of the war; and dividing his army also into three bodies, he led them to
the attack. The English archers, who began about this time to surpass
those of other nations, first chased the Scottish bowmen off the field;
then pouring in their arrows among the pikemen, who were cooped up within
their intrenchments, threw them into disorder, and rendered the assault of
the English pikemen and cavalry more easy and successful. The whole
Scottish army was broken, and chased off the field with great slaughter;
which the historians, attending more to the exaggerated relations of the
populace than to the probability of things, make amount to fifty or sixty
thousand men.[*] It is only certain, that the Scots never suffered a
greater loss in any action, nor one which seemed to threaten more
inevitable ruin to their country.
In this general rout of the army, Wallace’s military skill and presence of
mind enabled him to keep his troops entire and retiring behind the Carron,
he marched leisurely along the banks of that small river, which protected
him from the enemy. Young Bruce, who had already given many proofs of his
aspiring genius, but who served hitherto in the English army, appeared on
the opposite banks, and distinguishing the Scottish chief, as well by his
majestic port as by the intrepid activity of his behavior, called out to
him, and desired a short conference. He here represented to Wallace the
fruitless and ruinous enterprise in which he was engaged; and endeavored
to bend his inflexible spirit to submission under superior power and
superior fortune: he insisted on the unequal contest between a weak state,
deprived of its head and agitated by intestine discord, and a mighty
nation, conducted by the ablest and most martial monarch of the age, and
possessed of every resource either for protracting the war, or for pushing
it with vigor and activity; if the love of his country were his motive for
perseverence, his obstinacy tended only to prolong her misery; if he
carried his views to private grandeur and ambition, he might reflect that,
even if Edward should withdraw his armies, it appeared from past
experience, that so many haughty nobles, proud of the preeminence of their
families, would never submit to personal merit, whose superiority they
were less inclined to regard as an object of admiration than as a reproach
and injury to themselves. To these exhortations Wallace replied that, if
he had hitherto acted alone, as the champion of his country, it was solely
because no second or competitor, or what he rather wished, no leader, had
yet appeared to place himself in that honorable station: that the blame
lay entirely on the nobility, and chiefly on Bruce himself, who, uniting
personal merit to dignity of family, had deserted the post which both
nature and fortune, by such powerful calls, invited him to assume: that
the Scots, possessed of such a head, would, by their unanimity and
concord, have surmounted the chief difficulty under which they now
labored, and might hope, notwithstanding their present losses, to oppose
successfully all the power and abilities of Edward: that heaven itself
could not set a more glorious prize before the eyes either of virtue or
ambition, than to join in one object, the acquisition of royalty with the
defence of national independence: and that as the interests of his
country, no more than those of a brave man, could never be sincerely
cultivated by a sacrifice of liberty, he himself was determined, as far as
possible, to prolong, not her misery, but her freedom, and was desirous
that his own life, as well as the existence of the nation, might terminate
when they could no otherwise be preserved than by receiving the chains of
a haughty victor. The gallantry of these sentiments, though delivered by
an armed enemy, struck the generous mind of Bruce: the flame was conveyed
from the breast of one hero to that of another: he repented of his
engagements with Edward; and opening his eyes to the honorable path
pointed out to him by Wallace, secretly determined to seize the first
opportunity of embracing the cause, however desperate, of his oppressed
country.[*]
1299.
The subjection of Scotland, notwithstanding this great victory of Edward,
was not yet entirely completed. The English army, after reducing the
southern provinces, was obliged to retire for want of provisions; and left
the northern counties in the hands of the natives. The Scots, no less
enraged at their present defeat than elated by their past victories, still
maintained the contest for liberty; but being fully sensible of the great
inferiority of their force, they endeavored, by applications to foreign
courts, to procure to themselves some assistance. The supplications of the
Scottish ministers were rejected by Philip; but were more successful with
the court of Rome.
1300.
Boniface, pleased with an occasion of exerting his authority, wrote a
letter to Edward, exhorting him to put a stop to his oppressions in
Scotland, and displaying all the proofs, such as they had probably been
furnished him by the Scots themselves, for the ancient independence of
that kingdom.[*] Among other arguments hinted at above, he mentioned the
treaty conducted and finished by Edward himself, for the marriage of his
son with the heiress of Scotland; a treaty which would have been absurd,
had he been superior lord of the kingdom, and had possessed by the feudal
law the right of disposing of his ward in marriage. He mentioned several
other striking facts, which fell within the compass of Edward’s own
knowledge particularly that Alexander, when he did homage to the king,
openly and expressly declared in his presence, that he swore fealty not
for his crown, but for the lands which he held in England: and the pope’s
letter might have passed for a reasonable one, had he not subjoined his
own claim to be liege lord of Scotland; a claim which had not once been
heard of, but which, with a singular confidence, he asserted to be full,
entire, and derived from the most remote antiquity. The affirmative style,
which had been so successful with him and his predecessors in spiritual
contests, was never before abused after a more egregious manner in any
civil controversy.
1301.
The reply which Edward made to Boniface’s letter, contains particulars no
less singular and remarkable.[**] He there proves the superiority of
England by historical facts, deduced from the period of Brutus, the
Trojan, who, he said, founded the British monarchy in the age of Eli and
Samuel: he supports his position by all the events which passed in the
island before the arrival of the Romans: and after laying great stress on
the extensive dominions and heroic victories of King Arthur, he vouchsafes
at last to descend to the time of Edward the Elder, with which, in his
speech to the states of Scotland, he had chosen to begin his claim of
superiority. He asserts it to be a fact, “notorious and confirmed by the
records of antiquity,” that the English monarchs had often conferred the
kingdom of Scotland on their own subjects, had dethroned these vassal
kings when unfaithful to them; and had substituted others in their stead.
He displays with great pomp the full and complete homage which William had
done to Henry II.; without mentioning the formal abolition of that
extorted deed by King Richard, and the renunciation of all future claims
of the same nature. Yet this paper he begins with a solemn appeal to the
Almighty, the searcher of hearts for his own firm persuasion of the
justice of his claim; and no less than a hundred and four barons,
assembled in parliament at Lincoln, concur in maintaining before the pope,
under their seals, the validity of these pretensions.[*] At the same time,
however, they take care to inform Boniface, that, though they had
justified their cause before him, they did not acknowledge him for their
judge: the crown of England was free and sovereign: they had sworn to
maintain all its royal prerogatives, and would never permit the king
himself, were he willing, to relinquish its independency.
1302.
That neglect, almost total, of truth and justice, which sovereign states
discover in their transactions with each other, is an evil universal and
inveterate; is one great source of the misery to which the human race is
continually exposed; and it may be doubted whether, in many instances, it
be found in the end to contribute to the interests of those princes
themselves, who thus sacrifice their integrity to their politics. As few
monarchs have lain under stronger temptations to violate the principles of
equity than Edward in his transactions with Scotland, so never were they
violated with less scruple and reserve: yet his advantages were hitherto
precarious and uncertain, and the Scots, once roused to arms and inured to
war, began to appear a formidable enemy, even to this military and
ambitious monarch. They chose John Cummin for their regent; and, not
content with maintaining their independence in the northern parts, they
made incursions into the southern counties, which Edward imagined he had
totally subdued. John de Segrave, whom he had left guardian of Scotland,
led an army to oppose them; and lying at Roslin, near Edinburgh, sent out
his forces in three divisions, to provide themselves with forage and
subsistence from the neighborhood.
1303.
One party was suddenly attacked by the regent and Sir Simon Fraser; and
being unprepared, was immediately routed and pursued with great slaughter.
The few that escaped, flying to the second division, gave warning of the
approach of the enemy: the soldiers ran to their arms; and were
immediately led on to take revenge for the death of their countrymen. The
Scots, elated with the advantage already obtained made a vigorous
impression upon them: the English, animated with a thirst of vengeance,
maintained a stout resistance: the victory was long undecided between
them; but at last declared itself entirely in favor of the former, who
broke the English, and chased them to the third division, now advancing
with a hasty march to support their distressed companions. Many of the
Scots had fallen in the two first actions; most of them were wounded, and
all of them extremely fatigued by the long continuance of the combat: yet
were they so transported with success and military rage, that, having
suddenly recovered their order, and arming the followers of their camp
with the spoils of the slaughtered enemy, they drove with fury upon the
ranks of the dismayed English. The favorable moment decided the battle;
which the Scots, had they met with a steady resistance, were not long able
to maintain: the English were chased off the field: three victories were
thus gained in one day;[*] and the renown of these great exploits,
seconded by the favorable dispositions of the people, soon made the regent
master of all the fortresses in the south; and it became necessary for
Edward to begin anew the conquest of the kingdom.
The king prepared himself for this enterprise with his usual vigor and
abilities. He assembled both a great fleet and a great army; and entering
the frontiers of Scotland, appeared with a force which the enemy could not
think of resisting in the open field: the English navy, which sailed along
the coast, secured the army from any danger of famine: Edward’s vigilance
preserved it from surprises: and by this prudent disposition they marched
victorious from one extremity of the kingdom to the other, ravaging the
open country, reducing all the castles,[**] and receiving the submissions
of all the nobility, even those of Cummin, the regent.
The most obstinate resistance was made by the Castle of Brechin, defended
by Sir Thomas Maule; and the place opened not its gates, till the death of
the governor, by discouraging the garrison, obliged them to submit to the
fate which had overwhelmed the rest.
1304.
Edward, having completed his conquest, which employed him during the space
of near two years, now undertook the more difficult work of settling the
country, of establishing a new form of government, and of making his
acquisition durable to the crown of England. He seems to have carried
matters to extremity against the natives: he abrogated all the Scottish
laws and customs:[*] he endeavored to substitute the English in their
place: he entirely razed or destroyed all the monuments of antiquity: such
records or histories as had escaped his former search were now burnt or
dispersed: and he hastened, by too precipitate steps, to abolish entirely
the Scottish name, and to sink it finally in the English.
1305.
Edward, however, still deemed his favorite conquest exposed to some danger
so long as Wallace was alive; and being prompted both by revenge and
policy, he employed every art to discover his retreat, and become master
of his person. At last that hardy warrior, who was determined, amidst the
universal slavery of his countrymen, still to maintain his independency,
was betrayed into Edward’s hands by Sir John Monteith, his friend, whom he
had made acquainted with the place of his concealment. The king, whose
natural bravery and magnanimity should have induced him to respect like
qualities in an enemy, enraged at some acts of violence committed by
Wallace during the fury of war, resolved to overawe the Scots by an
example of severity: he ordered Wallace to be carried in chains to London;
to be tried as a rebel and traitor, though he had never made submissions
or sworn fealty to England; and to be executed on Tower Hill. This was the
unworthy fate of a hero, who, through a course of many years, had, with
signal conduct, intrepidity, and perseverance, defended, against a public
and oppressive enemy, the liberties of his native country.
But the barbarous policy of Edward failed of the purpose to which it was
directed. The Scots, already disgusted at the great innovations introduced
by the sword of a conqueror into their laws and government, were further
enraged at the injustice and cruelty exercised upon Wallace; and all the
envy which, during his lifetime, had attended that gallant chief, being
now buried in his grave, he was universally regarded as the champion of
Scotland and the patron of her expiring independency. The people, inflamed
with resentment, were every where disposed to rise against the English
government; and it was not long ere a new and more fortunate leader
presented himself, who conducted them to liberty, to victory, and to
vengeance.
1306.
Robert Bruce, grandson of that Robert who had been one of the competitors
for the crown, had succeeded, by his grandfather’s and father’s death, to
all their rights; and the demise of John Baliol, together with the
captivity of Edward, eldest son of that prince, seemed to open a full
career to the genius and ambition of this young nobleman. He saw that the
Scots, when the title to their crown had expired in the males of their
ancient royal family, had been divided into parties nearly equal between
the houses of Bruce and Baliol; and that every incident which had since
happened, had tended to wean them from any attachment to the latter. The
slender capacity of John had proved unable to defend them against their
enemies: he had meanly resigned his crown into the hands of the conqueror:
he had, before his deliverance from captivity, reiterated that resignation
in a manner seemingly voluntary; and had in that deed thrown out many
reflections extremely dishonorable to his ancient subjects, whom he
publicly called traitors, ruffians, and rebels, and with whom, he
declared, he was determined to maintain no further correspondence;[*] he
had, during the time of his exile, adhered strictly to that resolution;
and his son, being a prisoner, seemed ill qualified to revive the rights,
now fully abandoned, of his family.
Bruce therefore hoped that the Scots, so long exposed, from the want of a
leader, to the oppressions of their enemies, would unanimously fly to his
standard, and would seat him on the vacant throne, to which he brought
such plausible pretensions. His aspiring spirit, inflamed by the fervor of
youth, and buoyed up by his natural courage, saw the glory alone of the
enterprise, or regarded the prodigious difficulties which attended it as
the source only of further glory. The miseries and oppressions which he
had beheld his countrymen suffer in their unequal contest, the repeated
defeats and misfortunes which they had undergone, proved to him so many
incentives to bring them relief, and conduct them to vengeance against the
haughty victor. The circumstances which attended Bruce’s first declaration
are variously related; but we shall rather follow the account given by the
Scottish historians; not that their authority is in general anywise
comparable to that of the English, but because they may be supposed
sometimes better informed concerning facts which so nearly interested
their own nation.
Bruce, who had long harbored in his breast the design of freeing his
enslaved country, ventured at last to open his mind to John Cummin, a
powerful nobleman, with whom he lived in strict intimacy. He found his
friend, as he imagined, fully possessed with the same sentiments; and he
needed to employ no arts of persuasion to make him embrace the resolution
of throwing off, on the first favorable opportunity, the usurped dominion
of the English. But on the departure of Bruce, who attended Edward to
London, Cummin, who either had all along dissembled with him, or began to
reflect more coolly in his absence on the desperate nature of the
undertaking, resolved to atone for his crime in assenting to this
rebellion, by the merit of revealing the secret to the king of England.
Edward did not immediately commit Bruce to custody; because he intended at
the same time to seize his three brothers, who resided in Scotland; and he
contented himself with secretly setting spies upon him, and ordering all
his motions to be strictly watched. A nobleman of Edward’s court, Bruce’s
intimate friend, was apprised of his danger; but not daring, amidst so
many jealous eyes, to hold any conversation with him, he fell on an
expedient to give him warning, that it was full time he should make his
escape. He sent him by his servant a pair of gilt spurs and a purse of
gold, which he pretended to have borrowed from him; and left it to the
sagacity of his friend to discover the meaning of the present. Bruce
immediately contrived the means of his escape; and as the ground was at
that time covered with snow, he had the precaution, it is said, to order
his horses to be shod with their shoes inverted, that he might deceive
those who should track his path over the open fields or cross roads,
through which he purposed to travel. He arrived in a few days at Dumfries,
in Annandale, the chief seat of his family interest; and he happily found
a great number of the Scottish nobility there assembled, and among the
rest, John Cummin, his former associate.
The noblemen were astonished at the appearance of Bruce among them; and
still more when he discovered to them the object of his journey. He told
them that he was come to live or die with them in defence of the liberties
of his country, and hoped, with their assistance, to redeem the Scottish
name from all the indignities which it had so long suffered from the
tyranny of their imperious masters: that the sacrifice of the rights of
his family was the first injury which had prepared the way for their
ensuing slavery; and by resuming them, which was his firm purpose, he
opened to them the joyful prospect of recovering from the fraudulent
usurper their ancient and hereditary independence: that all past
misfortunes had proceeded from their disunion; and they would soon appear
no less formidable than of old to their enemies, if they now deigned to
follow into the field their rightful prince, who knew no medium between
death and victory, that their mountains and their valor, which had, during
so many ages, protected their liberty from all the efforts of the Roman
empire, would still be sufficient, were they worthy of their generous
ancestors, to defend them against the utmost violence of the English
tyrant: that it was unbecoming men, born to the most ancient independence
known in Europe, to submit to the will of any masters; but fatal to
receive those who, being irritated by such persevering resistance, and
inflamed with the highest animosity, would never deem themselves secure in
their usurped dominion but by exterminating all the ancient nobility, and
even all the ancient inhabitants: and that, being reduced to this
desperate extremity, it were better for them at once to perish like brave
men, with swords in their hands, than to dread long, and at last undergo,
the fate of the unfortunate Wallace, whose merits, in the brave and
obstinate defence of his country, were finally rewarded by the hands of an
English executioner.
The spirit with which this discourse was delivered, the bold sentiments
which it conveyed, the novelty of Bruce’s declaration, assisted by the
graces of his youth and manly deportment, made deep impression on the
minds of his audience, and roused all those principles of indignation and
revenge, with which they had so long been secretly actuated. The Scottish
nobles declared their unanimous resolution to use the utmost efforts in
delivering their country from bondage, and to second the courage of Bruce,
in asserting his and their undoubted rights against their common
oppressors. Cummin alone who had secretly taken his measures with the
king, opposed this general determination; and by representing the great
power of England, governed by a prince of such uncommon vigor and
abilities, he endeavored to set before them the certain destruction which
they must expect, if they again violated their oaths of fealty, and shook
off their allegiance to the victorious Edward.[*] Bruce, already apprised
of his treachery, and foreseeing the certain failure of all his own
schemes of ambition and glory from the opposition of so potent a leader,
took immediately his resolution; and moved partly by resentment, partly by
policy, followed Cummin on the dissolution of the assembly, attacked him
in the cloisters of the Gray Friars, through which he passed, and running
him through the body, left him for dead. Sir Thomas Kirkpatric, one of
Bruce’s friends, asking him soon after if the traitor were slain, “I
believe so,” replied Bruce. “And is that a matter,” cried Kirkpatric, “to
be left to conjecture? I will secure him.” Upon which he drew his dagger,
ran to Cummin, and stabbed him to the heart. This deed of Bruce and his
associates, which contains circumstances justly condemned by our present
manners, was regarded in that age as an effort of manly vigor and just
policy. The family of Kirkpatric took for the crest of their arms, which
they still wear, a hand with a bloody dagger; and chose for their motto
these words, “I will secure him;” the expression employed by their
ancestor when he executed that violent action.
The murder of Cummin affixed the seal to the conspiracy of the Scottish
nobles: they had now no resource left but to shake off the yoke of
England, or to perish in the attempt: the genius of the nation roused
itself from its present dejection: and Bruce, flying to different
quarters, excited his partisans to arms, attacked with success the
dispersed bodies of the English, got possession of many of the castles,
and having made his authority be acknowledged in most parts of the
kingdom, was solemnly crowned and inaugurated in the abbey of Scone by the
bishop of St. Andrews, who had zealously embraced his cause. The English
were again chased out of the kingdom, except such as took shelter in the
fortresses that still remained in their hands; and Edward found that the
Scots, twice conquered in his reign, and often defeated, must yet be anew
subdued. Not discouraged with these unexpected difficulties, he sent Aymer
de Valence with a considerable force into Scotland, to check the progress
of the malecontents; and that nobleman, falling unexpectedly upon Bruce,
at Methven, in Perthshire, threw his army into such disorder as ended in a
total defeat.[*] Bruce fought with the most heroic courage, was thrice
dismounted in the action, and as often recovered himself; but was at last
obliged to yield to superior fortune, and take shelter, with a few
followers, in the Western Isles. The earl of Athole, Sir Simon Fraser, and
Sir Christopher Seton, who had been taken prisoners, were ordered by
Edward to be executed as rebels and traitors.[**]
1307.
Many other acts of rigor were exercised by him; and that prince, vowing
revenge against the whole Scottish nation, whom he deemed incorrigible in
their aversion to his government, assembled a great army, and was
preparing to enter the frontiers, secure of success, and determined to
make the defenceless Scots the victims of his severity, when he
unexpectedly sickened and died near Carlisle; enjoining with his last
breath his son and successor to prosecute the enterprise, and never to
desist till he had finally subdued the kingdom of Scotland. He expired in
the sixty-ninth year of his age, and the thirty-fifth of his reign, hated
by his neighbors, but extremely respected and revered by his own subjects.
The enterprises finished by this prince, and the projects which he formed
and brought near to a conclusion, were more prudent, more regularly
conducted, and more advantageous to the solid interests of his kingdom,
than those which were undertaken in any reign, either of his ancestors or
his successors. He restored authority to the government, disordered by the
weakness of his father; he maintained the laws against all the efforts of
his turbulent barons; he fully annexed to his crown the principality of
Wales; he took many wise and vigorous measures for reducing Scotland to a
like condition; and though the equity of this latter enterprise may
reasonably be questioned, the circumstances of the two kingdoms promised
such certain success, and the advantage was so visible of uniting the
whole island under one head, that those who give great indulgence to
reasons of state in the measures of princes, will not be apt to regard
this part of his conduct with much severity. But Edward, however
exceptionable his character may appear on the head of justice, is the
model of a politic and warlike king: he possessed industry, penetration,
courage, vigilance, and enterprise: he was frugal in all expenses that
were not necessary; he knew how to open the public treasures on a proper
occasion; he punished criminals with severity; he was gracious and affable
to his servants and courtiers; and being of a majestic figure, expert in
all military exercises, and in the main well proportioned in his limbs,
notwithstanding the great length and the smallness of his legs, he was as
well qualified to captivate the populace by his exterior appearance, as to
gain the approbation of men of sense by his more solid virtues.
But the chief advantage which the people of England reaped, and still
continue to reap, from the reign of this great prince, was the correction,
extension, amendment, and establishment of the laws which Edward
maintained in great vigor, and left much improved to posterity; for the
acts of a wise legislator commonly remain, while the acquisition of a
conqueror often perish with him. This merit has justly gained to Edward
the appellation of the English Justinian. Not only the numerous statutes
passed in his reign touch the chief points of jurisprudence, and,
according to Sir Edward Coke,[*] truly deserve the name of establishments,
because they were more constant, standing, and durable laws than any made
since; but the regular order maintained in his administration gave an
opportunity to the common law to refine itself, and brought the judges to
a certainty in their determinations, and the lawyers to a precision in
their pleadings. Sir Matthew Hale has remarked the sudden improvement of
English law during this reign; and ventures to assert, that till his own
time it had never received any considerable increase.[**] Edward settled
the jurisdiction of the several courts; first established the office of
justice of peace; abstained from the practice, too common before him, of
interrupting justice by mandates from the privy-council;[***] repressed
robberies and Edward enacted a law to this purpose; but it is doubtful
whether he ever observed it. We are sure that scarcely any of his
successors did.
The multitude of these disorders[*] encouraged trade, by giving merchants
an easy method of recovering their debts;[**] and, in short, introduced a
new face of things by the vigor and wisdom of his administration. As law
began now to be well established, the abuse of that blessing began also to
be remarked. Instead of their former associations for robbery and
violence, men entered into formal combinations to support each other in
lawsuits, and it was found requisite to check this iniquity by act of
parliament.[***]
There happened in this reign a considerable alteration in the execution of
the laws: the king abolished the office of chief justiciary, which, he
thought, possessed too much power, and was dangerous to the crown;[****]
he completed the division of the court of exchequer into four distinct
courts, which managed each its several branch, without dependence on any
one magistrate; and as the lawyers afterwards invented a method, by means
of their fictions, of carrying business from one court to another, the
several courts became rivals and checks to each other; a circumstance
which tended much to improve the practice of the law in England.
But though Edward appeared thus, throughout his whole reign, a friend to
law and justice, it cannot be said that he was an enemy to arbitrary
power; and in a government more regular and legal than was that of England
in his age, such practices as those which may be remarked in his
administration, would have given sufficient ground of complaint, and
sometimes were even in his age the object of general displeasure. The
violent plunder and banishment of the Jews; the putting of the whole
clergy at once, and by an arbitrary edict, out of the protection of law;
the seizing of all the wool and leather of the kingdom; the heightening of
the impositions on the former valuable commodity; the new and illegal
commission of Trailbaston; the taking of all the money and plate of
monasteries and churches, even before he had any quarrel with the clergy;
the subjecting of every man possessed of twenty pounds a year to military
service, though by the statute of Northampton, passed in the second of
Edward III.; but it still continued, like many other abuses. There are
instances of it so late as the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
The chief obstacle to the execution of justice in those times was the
power of the great barons; and Edward was perfectly qualified, by his
character and abilities, for keeping these tyrants in awe, and restraining
their illegal practices. This salutary purpose was accordingly the great
object of his attention; yet was he imprudently led into a measure which
tended to increase and confirm their dangerous authority. He passed a
statute which, by allowing them to entail their estates, made it
impracticable to diminish the property of the great families, and left
them every means of increase and acquisition.[*]
Edward observed a contrary policy with regard to the church: he seems to
have been the first Christian prince that passed a statute of mortmain;
and prevented by law the clergy from making new acquisitions of lands,
which by the ecclesiastical canons they were forever prohibited from
alienating. The opposition between his maxims with regard to the nobility
and to the ecclesiastics, leads us to conjecture, that it was only by
chance he passed the beneficial statute of mortmain, and that his sole
object was to maintain the number of knights’ fees, and to prevent the
superiors from being defrauded of the profits of wardship, marriage,
livery, and other emoluments arising from the feudal tenures. This is
indeed, the reason assigned in the statute itself, and appears to have
been his real object in enacting it. The author of the Annals of Waverley
ascribes this act chiefly to the king’s anxiety for maintaining the
military force of the kingdom but adds, that he was mistaken in his
purpose; for that the Amalekites were overcome more by the prayers of
Moses than by the sword of the Israelites.[*] The statute of mortmain was
often evaded afterwards by the invention of “uses.”
Edward was active in restraining the usurpations of the church; and
excepting his ardor for crusades, which adhered to him during his whole
life, seems in other respects to have been little infected with
superstition, the vice chiefly of weak minds. But the passion for crusades
was really in that age the passion for glory. As the pope now felt himself
somewhat more restrained in his former practice of pillaging the several
churches in Europe by laying impositions upon them, he permitted the
generals of particular orders, who resided at Rome, to levy taxes on the
convents subjected to their jurisdiction; and Edward was obliged to enact
a law against this new abuse. It was also become a practice of the court
of Rome to provide successors to benefices before they became vacant:
Edward found it likewise necessary to prevent by law this species of
injustice.
The tribute of one thousand marks a year, to which King John, in doing
homage to the pope, had subjected the kingdom, had been pretty regularly
paid since his time, though the vassalage was constantly denied, and
indeed, for fear of giving offence, had been but little insisted on. The
payment was called by a new name of “census,” not by that of tribute. King
Edward seems to have always paid this money with great reluctance; and he
suffered the arrears at one time to run on for six years,[**] at another
for eleven:[***] but as princes in that age stood continually in need of
the pope’s good offices, for dispensations of marriage and for other
concessions, the court of Rome always found means, sooner or later, to
catch the money. The levying of first-fruits was also a new device begun
in this reign, by which his holiness thrust his fingers very frequently
into the purses of the faithful; and the king seems to have unwarily given
way to it.
In the former reign, the taxes had been partly scutages, partly such a
proportional part of the movables as was granted by parliament; in this,
scutages were entirely dropped, and the assessment on movables was the
chief method of taxation. Edward, in his fourth year, had a fifteenth
granted him; in his fifth year, a twelfth; in his eleventh year, a
thirtieth from the laity, a twentieth from the clergy; in his eighteenth
year, a fifteenth; in his twenty-second year, a tenth from the laity, a
sixth from London and other corporate towns, half of their benefices from
the clergy; in his twenty-third year, an eleventh from the barons and
others, a tenth from the clergy, a seventh from the burgesses; in his
twenty fourth year, a twelfth from the barons and others, an eighth from
the burgesses, from the clergy nothing, because of the pope’s inhibition;
in his twenty-fifth year, an eighth from the laity, a tenth from the
clergy of Canterbury, a fifth from those of York; in his twenty-ninth
year, a fifteenth from the laity, on account of his confirming the
perambulations of the forests; the clergy granted nothing; in his
thirty-third year, first, a thirtieth from the barons and others, and a
twentieth from the burgesses, then a fifteenth from all his subjects; in
his thirty fourth year, a thirtieth from all his subjects, for knighting
his eldest son.
These taxes were moderate; but the king had also duties upon exportation
and importation granted him from time to time: the heaviest were commonly
upon wool. Poundage, or a shilling a pound, was not regularly granted the
kings for life till the reign of Henry V.
In 1296, the famous mercantile society, called the “merchant adventurers,”
had its first origin: it was instituted for the improvement of the woollen
manufacture, and the vending of the cloth abroad, particularly at
Antwerp:[*] for the English at this time scarcely thought of any more
distant commerce.
This king granted a charter or declaration of protection and privileges to
foreign merchants, and also ascertained the customs or duties which those
merchants were in return to pay on merchandise imported and exported. He
promised them security; allowed them a jury on trials, consisting half of
natives, half of foreigners; and appointed them a justiciary in London for
their protection. But notwithstanding this seeming attention to foreign
merchants, Edward did not free them from the cruel hardship of making one
answerable for the debts, and even for the crimes of another, that came
from the same country.[**]
We read of such practices among the present barbarous nations. The king
also imposed on them a duty of two shillings on each tun of wine imported,
over and above the old duty; and forty pence on each sack of wool exported
besides half a mark, the former duty.[*]
In the year 1303, the exchequer was robbed, and of no less a sum than one
hundred thousand pounds, as is pretended.[**] The abbot and monks of
Westminster were indicted for this robbery, but acquitted. It does not
appear that the king ever discovered the criminals with certainty, though
his indignation fell on the society of Lombard merchants, particularly the
Frescobaldi, very opulent Florentines.
The pope having in 1307 collected much money in England, the king enjoined
the nuncio not to export it in specie but in bills of exchange;[***] a
proof that commerce was but ill understood at that time.
Edward had by his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, four sons; but Edward,
his heir and successor, was the only one that survived him. She also bore
him eleven daughters, most of whom died in their infancy: of the
surviving, Joan was married first to the earl of Glocester, and after his
death to Ralph de Monthermer: Margaret espoused John, duke of Brabant:
Elizabeth espoused first John, earl of Holland, and afterwards the earl of
Hereford: Mary was a nun at Ambresbury. He had by his second wife,
Margaret of France, two sons and a daughter; Thomas, created earl of
Norfolk and mareschal of England; and Edmund, who was created earl of Kent
by his brother when king. The princess died in her infancy.
CHAPTER XIV.
EDWARD II.
1307.
The prepossessions entertained in favor of young Edward, kept the English
from being fully sensible of the extreme loss which they had sustained by
the death of the great monarch who filled the throne; and all men hastened
with alacrity to take the oath of allegiance to his son and successor.
This prince was in the twenty-third year of his age, was of an agreeable
figure, of a mild and gentle disposition, and having never discovered a
propensity to any dangerous vice, it was natural to prognosticate
tranquillity and happiness from his government. But the first act of his
reign blasted all these hopes, and showed him to be totally unqualified
for that perilous situation in which every English monarch during those
ages had, from the unstable form of the constitution, and the turbulent
dispositions of the people derived from it, the misfortune to be placed.
The indefatigable Robert Bruce, though his army had been dispersed, and he
himself had been obliged to take shelter in the Western Isles, remained
not long inactive; but before the death of the late king, had sallied from
his retreat, had again collected his followers, had appeared in the field,
and had obtained by surprise an important advantage over Aymer de Valence,
who commanded the English forces.[*]
He was now become so considerable as to have afforded the king of England
sufficient glory in subduing him, without incurring any danger of seeing
all those mighty preparations, made by his father, fail in the enterprise.
But Edward, instead of pursuing his advantages, marched but a little way
into Scotland; and having an utter incapacity, and equal aversion, for all
application or serious business, he immediately returned upon his
footsteps, and disbanded his army. His grandees perceived, from this
conduct, that the authority of the crown, fallen into such feeble hands,
was no longer to be dreaded, and that every insolence might be practised
by them with impunity.
The next measure taken by Edward gave them an inclination to attack those
prerogatives which no longer kept them in awe. There was one Piers
Gavaston, son of a Gascon knight of some distinction, who had honorably
served the late king and who, in reward of his merits, had obtained an
establishment for his son in the family of the prince of Wales. This young
man soon insinuated himself into the affections of his master, by his
agreeable behavior, and by supplying him with all those innocent though
frivolous amusements which suited his capacity and his inclinations. He
was endowed with the utmost elegance of shape and person, was noted for a
fine mien and easy carriage, distinguished himself in all warlike and
genteel exercises, and was celebrated for those quick sallies of wit in
which his countrymen usually excel. By all these accomplishments, he
gained so entire an ascendant over young Edward, whose heart was strongly
disposed to friendship and confidence, that the late king, apprehensive of
the consequences, had banished him the kingdom, and had, before he died,
made his son promise never to recall him. But no sooner did he find
himself master, as he vainly imagined, than he sent for Gavaston; and even
before his arrival at court, endowed him with the whole earldom of
Cornwall, which had escheated to the crown by the death of Edmond, son of
Richard, king of the Romans.[*] Not content with conferring on him those
possessions, which had sufficed as an appanage for a prince of the blood,
he daily loaded him with new honors and riches; married him to his own
niece, sister of the earl of Glocester; and seemed to enjoy no pleasure in
his royal dignity, but as it enabled him to exalt to the highest splendor
this object of his fond affections.
The haughty barons, offended at the superiority of a minion, whose birth,
though reputable, they despised as much inferior to their own, concealed
not their discontent; and soon found reasons to justify their animosity in
the character and conduct of the man they hated. Instead of disarming envy
by the moderation and modesty of his behavior, Gavaston displayed his
power and influence with the utmost ostentation; and deemed no
circumstance of his good fortune so agreeable as its enabling him to
eclipse and mortify all his rivals. He was vain-glorious, profuse,
rapacious; fond of exterior pomp and appearance, giddy with prosperity;
and as he imagined that his fortune was now as strongly rooted in the
kingdom as his ascendant was uncontrolled over the weak monarch, he was
negligent in engaging partisans, who might support his sudden and
ill-established grandeur. At all tournaments he took delight in foiling
the English nobility by his superior address: in every conversation he
made them the object of his wit and raillery: every day his enemies
multiplied upon him; and nought was wanting but a little time to cement
their union, and render it fatal both to him and to his master.[*]
It behoved the king to take a journey to France, both in order to do
homage for the duchy of Guienne, and to espouse the Princess Isabella, to
whom he had long been affianced, though unexpected accidents had hitherto
retarded the completion of the marriage.[**] Edward left Gavaston guardian
of the realm,[***] with more ample powers than had usually been
conferred;[****] and, on his return with his young queen, renewed all the
proofs of that fond attachment to the favorite of which every one so
loudly complained. This princess was of an imperious and intriguing
spirit; and finding that her husband’s capacity required, as his temper
inclined, him to be governed, she thought herself best entitled, on every
account, to perform the office, and she contracted a mortal hatred against
the person who had disappointed her in these expectations. She was well
pleased, therefore, to see a combination of the nobility forming against
Gavaston, who, sensible of her hatred, had wantonly provoked her by new
insults and injuries.
1308.
Thomas, earl of Lancaster, cousin-german to the king, and first prince of
the blood, was by far the most opulent and powerful subject in England,
and possessed in his own right, and soon after in that of his wife,
heiress of the family of Lincoln, no less than six earldoms, with a
proportionable estate in land, attended with all the jurisdictions and
power which commonly in that age were annexed to landed property. He was
turbulent and factious in his disposition; mortally hated the favorite,
whose influence over the king exceeded his own; and he soon became the
head of that party among the barons who desired the depression of this
insolent stranger. The confederated nobles bound themselves by oath to
expel Gavaston: both sides began already to put themselves in a warlike
posture: the licentiousness of the age broke out in robberies and other
disorders, the usual prelude of civil war, and the royal authority,
despised in the king’s own hands, and hated in those of Gavaston, became
insufficient for the execution of the laws and the maintenance of peace in
the kingdom. A parliament being summoned at Westminster, Lancaster and his
party came thither with an armed retinue; and were there enabled to impose
their own terms on the sovereign. They required the banishment of
Gavaston, imposed an oath on him never to return, and engaged the bishops,
who never failed to interpose in all civil concerns, to pronounce him
excommunicated if he remained any longer in the kingdom.[*] Edward was
obliged to submit;[**] but even in his compliance gave proofs of his fond
attachment to his favorite. Instead of removing all umbrage by sending him
to his own country, as was expected, he appointed him lord lieutenant of
Ireland[***], attended him to Bristol on his journey thither, and before
his departure conferred on him new lands and riches both in Gascony and
England.[****] Gavaston, who did not want bravery, and possessed talents
for war,[*****] acted, during his government, with vigor against some
Irish rebels, whom he subdued.
Meanwhile, the king, less shocked with the illegal violence which had been
imposed upon him, than unhappy in the absence of his minion, employed
every expedient to soften the opposition of the barons to his return; as
if success in that point were the chief object of his government. The high
office of hereditary steward was conferred on Lancaster: his
father-in-law, the earl of Lincoln, was bought off by other concessions:
Earl Warrenne was also mollified by civilities, grants, or promises: the
insolence of Gavaston, being no longer before men’s eyes, was less the
object of general indignation; and Edward, deeming matters sufficiently
prepared for his purpose, applied to the court of Rome, and obtained for
Gavaston a dispensation from that oath which the barons had compelled him
to take, that he would forever abjure the realm.[*] He went down to
Chester to receive him on his first landing from Ireland; flew into his
arms with transports of joy; and having obtained the formal consent of the
barons in parliament to his reëstablishment, set no longer any bounds to
his extravagant fondness and affection. Gavaston himself, forgetting his
past misfortunes, and blind to their causes, resumed the same ostentation
and insolence, and became more than ever the object of general detestation
among the nobility.
The barons first discovered their animosity by absenting themselves from
parliament; and finding that this expedient had not been successful, they
began to think of employing sharper and more effectual remedies. Though
there had scarcely been any national ground of complaint, except some
dissipation of the public treasure: though all the acts of
mal-administration objected to the king and his favorite, seemed of a
nature more proper to excite heart-burnings in a ball or assembly, than
commotions in a great kingdom: yet such was the situation of the times,
that the barons were determined, and were able, to make them the reasons
of a total alteration in the constitution and civil government. Having
come to parliament, in defiance of the laws and the king’s prohibition,
with a numerous retinue of armed followers, they found themselves entirely
masters; and they presented a petition which was equivalent to a command,
requiring Edward to devolve on a chosen junto the whole authority, both of
the crown and of the parliament. The king was obliged to sign a
commission, empowering the prelates and barons to elect twelve persons,
who should, till the term of Michaelmas in the year following, have
authority to enact ordinances for the government of the kingdom, and
regulation of the king’s household; consenting that these ordinances
should, thenceforth and forever have the force of laws; allowing the
ordainers to form associations among themselves and their friends, for
their strict and regular observance; and all this for the greater glory of
God, the security of the church, and the honor and advantage of the king
and kingdom.[**]
The barons, in return signed a declaration, in which they acknowledged
that they owed these concessions merely to the king’s free grace; promised
that this commission should never be drawn into precedent; and engaged
that the power of the ordainers should expire at the time appointed.[*]
1311.
The chosen junto accordingly framed their ordinances, and presented them
to the king and parliament, for their confirmation in the ensuing year.
Some of these ordinances were laudable, and tended to the regular
execution of justice; such as those requiring sheriffs to be men of
property, abolishing the practice of issuing privy seals for the
suspension of justice, restraining the practice of purveyance, prohibiting
the adulteration and alteration of the coin, excluding foreigners from the
farms of the revenue, ordering all payments to be regularly made into the
exchequer, revoking all late grants of the crown, and giving the parties
damages in the case of vexatious prosecutions. But what chiefly grieved
the king was the ordinance for the removal of evil counsellors, by which a
great number of persons were by name excluded from every office of power
and profit; and Piers Gavaston himself was forever banished the king’s
dominions, under the penalty, in case of disobedience, of being declared a
public enemy. Other persons, more agreeable to the barons, were
substituted in all the offices. And it was ordained that, for the future,
all the considerable dignities in the household, as well as by the law,
revenue, and military governments, should be appointed by the baronage in
parliament; and the power of making war, or assembling his military
tenants, should no longer be vested solely in the king, nor be exercised
without the consent of the nobility.
Edward, from the same weakness both in his temper and situation which had
engaged him to grant this unlimited commission to the barons, was led to
give a parliamentary sanction to their ordinances; but as a consequence of
the same character, he secretly made a protest against them, and declared
that, since the commission was granted only for the making of ordinances
to the advantage of king and kingdom, such articles as should be found
prejudicial to both, were to be held as not ratified and confirmed.[**]
It is no wonder, indeed, that he retained a firm purpose to revoke
ordinances which had been imposed on him by violence, which entirely
annihilated the royal authority, and above all, which deprived him of the
company and society of a person whom, by an unusual infatuation, he valued
above all the world, and above every consideration of interest or
tranquillity.
As soon, therefore, as Edward, removing to York, had freed himself from
the immediate terror of the barons’ power, he invited back Gavaston from
Flanders, which that favorite had made the place of his retreat; and
declaring his banishment to be illegal, and contrary to the laws and
customs of the kingdom,[*] openly reinstated him in his former credit and
authority.
1312.
The barons, highly provoked at this disappointment, and apprehensive of
danger to themselves from the declared animosity of so powerful a minion,
saw that either his or their ruin was now inevitable; and they renewed
with redoubled zeal their former confederacies against him. The earl of
Lancaster was a dangerous head of this alliance; Guy, earl of Warwick,
entered into it with a furious and precipitate passion; Humphrey Bohun,
earl of Hereford, the constable, and Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke,
brought to it a great accession of power and interest; even Earl Warrenne
deserted the royal cause, which he had hitherto supported, and was induced
to embrace the side of the confederates;[**] and as Robert de Winchelsey,
archbishop of Canterbury, professed himself of the same party, he
determined the body of the clergy, and consequently the people, to declare
against the king and his minion. So predominant at that time was the power
of the great nobility, that the combination of a few of them was always
able to shake the throne; and such a universal concurrence became
irresistible. The earl of Lancaster suddenly raised an army, and marched
to York, where he found the king already removed to Newcastle:[***] he
flew thither in pursuit of him, and Edward had just time to escape to
Tinmouth, where he embarked, and sailed with Gavaston to Scarborough. He
left his favorite in that fortress, which, had it been properly supplied
with provisions, was deemed impregnable, and he marched forward to York,
in hopes of raising an army which might be able to support him against his
enemies.
Pembroke was sent by the confederates to besiege the Castle of
Scarborough, and Gavaston, sensible of the bad condition of his garrison,
was obliged to capitulate, and to surrender himself prisoner.[*] He
stipulated that he should remain in Pembroke’s hands for two months; that
endeavors should, during that time, be mutually used for a general
accommodation; that if the terms proposed by the barons were not accepted,
the castle should be restored to him in the same condition as when he
surrendered it; and that the earl of Pembroke and Henry Piercy should, by
contract, pledge all their lands for the fulfilling of these
conditions.[**] Pembroke, now master of the person of this public enemy,
conducted him to the Castle of Dedington, near Banbury, where, on pretence
of other business, he left him, protected by a feeble guard.[***] Warwick,
probably in concert with Pembroke, attacked the castle: the garrison
refused to make any resistance; Gavaston was yielded up to him, and
conducted to Warwick Castle; the earls of Lancaster, Hereford, and Arundel
immediately repaired thither;[****] and, without any regard either to the
laws or the military capitulation, they ordered the head of the obnoxious
favorite to be struck off by the hands of the executioner.[*****]
The king had retired northward to Berwick, when he heard of Gavaston’s
murder; and his resentment was proportioned to the affection which he had
ever borne him while living. He threatened vengeance on all the nobility
who had been active in that bloody scene; and he made preparations for war
in all parts of England. But being less constant in his enmities than in
his friendships, he soon after hearkened to terms of accommodation;
granted the barons a pardon of all offences; and as they stipulated to ask
him publicly pardon on their knees,[******] he was so pleased with these
vain appearances of submission, that he seemed to have sincerely forgiven
them all past injuries. But as they still pretended, notwithstanding their
lawless conduct, a great anxiety for the maintenance of law, and required
the establishment of their former ordinances, as a necessary security for
that purpose, Edward told them that he was willing to grant them a free
and legal confirmation of such of those ordinances as were not entirely
derogatory to the prerogative of the crown. This answer was received for
the present as satisfactory. The king’s person, after the death of
Gavaston, was now become less obnoxious to the public; and as the
ordinances insisted on appeared to be nearly the same with those which had
formerly been extorted from Henry III. by Mountfort, and which had been
attended with so many fatal consequences, they were, on that account,
demanded with less vehemence by the nobility and people. The minds of all
men seemed to be much appeased; the animosities of faction no longer
prevailed; and England, now united under its head, would henceforth be
able, it was hoped, to take vengeance on all its enemies, particularly on
the Scots, whose progress was the object of general resentment and
indignation.
Immediately after Edward’s retreat from Scotland, Robert Bruce left his
fastnesses, in which he intended to have sheltered his feeble army; and
supplying his defect of strength by superior vigor and abilities, he made
deep impression on all his enemies, foreign and domestic. He chased Lord
Argyle and the chieftain of the Macdowals from their hills, and made
himself entirely master of the high country; he thence invaded with
success the Cummins in the low countries of the north: he took the castles
of Inverness, Forfar, and Brechin; he daily gained some new accession of
territory; and what was a more important acquisition, he daily reconciled
the minds of the nobility to his dominion, and enlisted under his standard
every bold leader, whom he enriched by the spoils of his enemies. Sir
James Douglas, in whom commenced the greatness and renown of that warlike
family, seconded him in all his enterprises: Edward Bruce, Robert’s own
brother, distinguished himself by acts of valor; and the terror of the
English power being now abated by the feeble conduct of the king, even the
least sanguine of the Scots began to entertain hopes of recovering their
independence; and the whole kingdom, except a few fortresses which he had
not the means to attack, had acknowledged the authority of Robert.
In this situation, Edward had found it necessary to grant a truce to
Scotland; and Robert successfully employed the interval in consolidating
his power, and introducing order into the civil government, disjointed by
a long continuance of wars and factions. The interval was very short; the
truce, ill observed on both sides, was at last openly violated, and war
recommenced with greater fury than ever. Robert, not content with
defending himself, had made successful inroads into England, subsisted his
needy followers by the plunder of that country, and taught them to despise
the military genius of a people who had long been the object of their
terror. Edward at last, roused from his lethargy, had marched an army into
Scotland, and Robert, determined not to risk too much against an enemy so
much superior, retired again into the mountains. The king advanced beyond
Edinburgh; but being destitute of provisions, and being ill supported by
the English nobility, who were then employed in framing their ordinances,
he was soon obliged to retreat, without gaining any advantage over the
enemy. But the appearing union of all the parties in England, after the
death of Gavaston, seemed to restore that kingdom to its native force,
opened again the prospect of reducing Scotland, and promised a happy
conclusion to a war, in which both the interests and passions of the
nation were so deeply engaged.
1314.
Edward assembled forces from all quarters, with a view of finishing at one
blow this important enterprise. He summoned the most warlike of his
vassals from Gascony; he enlisted troops from Flanders and other foreign
countries; he invited over great numbers of the disorderly Irish as to a
certain prey; he joined to them a body of the Welsh, who were actuated by
like motives; and, assembling the whole military force of England, he
marched to the frontiers with an army which, according to the Scotch
writers, amounted to a hundred thousand men.
The army collected by Robert exceeded not thirty thousand combatants; but
being composed of men who had distinguished themselves by many acts of
valor, who were rendered desperate by their situation, and who were inured
to all the varieties of fortune, they might justly, under such a leader,
be deemed formidable to the most numerous and best appointed armies. The
Castle of Stirling, which, with Berwick, was the only fortress in Scotland
that remained in the hands of the English, had long been besieged by
Edward Bruce: Philip de Mowbray, the governor, after an obstinate defence,
was at last obliged to capitulate, and to promise, that if, before a
certain day, which was now approaching, he were not relieved, he should
open his gates to the enemy.[*]
Robert, therefore, sensible that here was the ground on which he must
expect the English, chose the field of battle with all the skill and
prudence imaginable, and made the necessary preparations for their
reception. He posted himself at Bannockburn, about two miles from
Stirling, where he had a hill on his right flank, and a morass on his
left; and not content with having taken these precautions to prevent his
being surrounded by the more numerous army of the English, he foresaw the
superior strength of the enemy in cavalry, and made provision against it.
Having a rivulet in front, he commanded deep pits to be dug along its
banks, and sharp stakes to be planted in them; and he ordered the whole to
be carefully covered over with turf.[*] The English arrived in sight on
the evening, and a bloody conflict immediately ensued between two bodies
of cavalry; where Robert, who was at the head of the Scots, engaged in
single combat with Henry de Bohun, a gentleman of the family of Hereford;
and at one stroke cleft his adversary to the chin with a battle-axe, in
sight of the two armies. The English horse fled with precipitation to
their main body.
The Scots, encouraged by this favorable event, and glorying in the valor
of their prince, prognosticated a happy issue to the combat on the ensuing
day: the English, confident in their numbers, and elated with former
successes, longed for an opportunity of revenge; and the night, though
extremely short in that season and in that climate, appeared tedious to
the impatience of the several combatants. Early in the morning, Edward
drew out his army, and advanced towards the Scots. The earl of Glocester,
his nephew, who commanded the left wing of the cavalry, impelled by the
ardor of youth, rushed on to the attack without precaution, and fell among
the covered pits, which had been prepared by Bruce for the reception of
the enemy.[**] This body of horse was disordered; Glocester himself was
overthrown and slain: Sir James Douglas, who commanded the Scottish
cavalry, gave the enemy no leisure to rally, but pushed them off the field
with considerable loss, and pursued them in sight of their whole line of
infantry. While the English army were alarmed with this unfortunate
beginning of the action, which commonly proves decisive, they observed an
army on the heights towards the left, which seemed to be marching
leisurely in order to surround them; and they were distracted by their
multiplied fears. This was a number of wagoners and sumpter boys, whom
Robert had collected; and having supplied them with military standards,
gave them the appearance at a distance of a formidable body.
The stratagem took effect: a panic seized the English: they threw down
their arms and fled: they were pursued with great slaughter for the space
of ninety miles, till they reached Berwick: and the Scots, besides an
inestimable booty, took many persons of quality prisoners, and above four
hundred gentlemen, whom Robert treated with great humanity,[*] and whose
ransom was a new accession of wealth to the victorious army. The king
himself narrowly escaped by taking shelter in Dunbar, whose gates were
opened to him by the earl of March; and he thence passed by sea to
Berwick.
Such was the great and decisive battle of Bannockburn, which secured the
independence of Scotland, fixed Bruce on the throne of that kingdom, and
may be deemed the greatest overthrow that the English nation, since the
conquest, has ever received. The number of slain on those occasions is
always uncertain, and is commonly much magnified by the victors: but this
defeat made a deep impression on the mind of the English; and it was
remarked that, for some years, the superiority of numbers could encourage
them to keep the field against the Scots. Robert, in order to avail
himself of his present success, entered England, and ravaged all the
northern counties without opposition: he besieged Carlisle; but that place
was saved by the valor of Sir Andrew Harcla, the governor: he was more
successful against Berwick, which he took by assault: and this prince,
elated by his continued prosperity, now entertained hopes of making the
most important conquests on the English.
1315.
He sent over his brother Edward, with an army of six thousand men, into
Ireland; and that nobleman assumed the title of king of that island; he
himself followed soon after with more numerous forces: the horrible and
absurd oppressions which the Irish suffered under the English government,
made them, at first, fly to the standard of the Scots, whom they regarded
as their deliverers: but a grievous famine, which at that time desolated
both Ireland and Britain, reduced the Scottish army to the greatest
extremities; and Robert was obliged to return, with his forces much
diminished, into his own country. His brother, after having experienced a
variety or fortune, was defeated and slain near Dundalk by the English,
commanded by Lord Bermingham: and these projects, too extensive for the
force of the Scottish nation, thus vanished into smoke.
Edward, besides suffering those disasters from the invasion of the Scots
and the insurrection of the Irish, was also infested with a rebellion in
Wales; and above all, by the factions of his own nobility, who took
advantage of the public calamities, insulted his fallen fortunes, and
endeavored to establish their own independence on the ruins of the throne.
Lancaster and the barons of his party, who had declined attending him on
his Scottish expedition, no sooner saw him return with disgrace, than they
insisted on the renewal of their ordinances, which, they still pretended,
had validity; and the king’s unhappy situation obliged him to submit to
their demands. The ministry was new-modelled by the direction of
Lancaster:[*] that prince was placed at the head of the council: it was
declared, that all the offices should be filled, from time to time, by the
votes of parliament, or rather by the will of the great barons:[**] and
the nation, under this new model of government, endeavored to put itself
in a better posture of defence against the Scots. But the factious nobles
were far from being terrified with the progress of these public enemies:
on the contrary, they founded the hopes of their own future grandeur on
the weakness and distresses of the crown: Lancaster himself was suspected,
with great appearance of reason, of holding a secret correspondence with
the king of Scots: and though he was intrusted with the command of the
English armies, he took care that every enterprise should be disappointed,
and every plan of operations prove unsuccessful.
All the European kingdoms, especially that of England, were at this time
unacquainted with the office of a prime minister, so well understood at
present in all regular monarchies; and the people could form no conception
of a man who, though still in the rank of a subject, possessed all the
power of a sovereign, eased the prince of the burden of affairs, supplied
his want of experience or capacity, and maintained all the rights of the
crown, without degrading the greatest nobles by their submission to his
temporary authority. Edward was plainly by nature unfit to hold himself
the reins of government: he had no vices, but was unhappy in a total
incapacity for serious business: he was sensible of his own defects, and
necessarily sought to be governed: yet every favorite whom he successively
chose, was regarded as a fellow-subject exalted above his rank and
station: he was the object of envy to the great nobility: his character
and conduct were decried with the people: his authority over the king and
kingdom was considered as a usurpation: and unless the prince had embraced
the dangerous expedient of devolving his power on the earl of Lancaster,
or some mighty baron, whose family interest was so extensive as to be able
alone to maintain his influence, he could expect no peace or tranquillity
upon the throne.
The king’s chief favorite, after the death of Gavaston, was Hugh le
Despenser, or Spenser, a young man of English birth, of high rank, and of
a noble family.[*] He possessed all the exterior accomplishments of person
and address which were fitted to engage the weak mind of Edward; but was
destitute of that moderation and prudence which might have qualified him
to mitigate the envy of the great, and conduct him through all the perils
of that dangerous station to which he was advanced. His father, who was of
the same name, and who, by means of his son, had also attained great
influence over the king, was a nobleman venerable from his years,
respected through all his past life for wisdom, valor, and integrity, and
well fitted by his talents and experience, could affairs have admitted of
any temperament, to have supplied the defects both of the king and of his
minion.[**] But no sooner was Edward’s attachment declared for young
Spenser, than the turbulent Lancaster, and most of the great barons,
regarded him as their rival, made him the object of their animosity, and
formed violent plans for his ruin.[***] They first declared their
discontent by withdrawing from parliament; and it was not long ere they
found a pretence for proceeding to greater extremities against him.
1321.
The king, who set no limits to his bounty toward his minions, had married
the younger Spenser to his niece one of the coheirs of the earl of
Glocester, slain at Bannockburn. The favorite, by his succession to that
opulent family, had inherited great possessions in the marches of
Wales,[****] and being desirous of extending still farther his influence
in those quarters, he is accused of having committed injustice on the
barons of Audley and Ammori, who had also married two sisters of the same
family.
There was likewise a baron in that neighborhood, called William de
Braouse, lord of Gower, who had made a settlement of his estate on John de
Mowbray, his son-in-law; and in case of failure of that nobleman and his
issue, had substituted the earl of Hereford in the succession to the
barony of Gower. Mowbray, on the decease of his father-in-law, entered
immediately in possession of the estate, without the formality of taking
livery and seizin from the crown; but Spenser, who coveted that barony,
persuaded the king to put in execution the rigor of the feudal law, to
seize Gower as escheated to the crown, and to confer it upon him.[*] This
transaction, which was the proper subject of a lawsuit, immediately
excited a civil war in the kingdom. The earls of Lancaster and Hereford
flew to arms: Audle and Ammori joined them with all their forces: the two
Rogers de Mortimer and Roger de Clifford, with many others, disgusted for
private reasons at the Spensers, brought a considerable accession to the
party; and their army being now formidable, they sent a message to the
king, requiring him immediately to dismiss or confine the younger Spenser;
and menacing him, in case of refusal, with renouncing their allegiance to
him, and taking revenge on that minister by their own authority. They
scarcely waited for an answer; but immediately fell upon the lands of
young Spenser, which they pillaged and destroyed; murdered his servants,
drove off his cattle, and burned his houses.[**] They thence proceeded to
commit like devastations on the estates of Spenser the father, whose
character they had hitherto seemed to respect. And having drawn and signed
a formal association among themselves,[***] they marched to London with
all their forces, stationed themselves in the neighborhood of that city,
and demanded of the king the banishment of both the Spensers.
These noblemen were then absent; the father abroad, the son at sea; and
both of them employed in different commissions: the king therefore
replied, that his coronation oath, by which he was bound to observe the
laws, restrained him from giving his assent to so illegal a demand, or
condemning noblemen who were accused of no crime, nor had any opportunity
afforded them of making answer.[*] Equity and reason were but a feeble
opposition to men who had arms in their hands, and who, being already
involved in guilt, saw no safety but in success and victory. They entered
London with their troops; and giving in to the parliament, which was then
sitting, a charge against the Spensers, of which they attempted not to
prove one article, they procured, by menaces and violence, a sentence of
attainder and perpetual exile against these ministers.[**] This sentence
was voted by the lay barons alone; for the commons, though now an estate
in parliament, were yet of so little consideration, that their assent was
not demanded; and even the votes of the prelates were neglected amidst the
present disorders. The only symptom which these turbulent barons gave of
their regard to law, was their requiring from the king an indemnity for
their illegal proceedings;[***] after which they disbanded their army, and
separated, in security, as they imagined, to their several castles.
This act of violence, in which the king was obliged to acquiesce, rendered
his person and his authority so contemptible, that every one thought
himself entitled to treat him with neglect. The queen, having occasion
soon after to pass by the castle of Leeds in Kent, which belonged to the
lord Badlesmere, desired a night’s lodging, but was refused admittance;
and some of her attendants, who presented themselves at the gate, were
killed.[****] The insult upon this princess, who had always endeavored to
live on good terms with the barons, and who joined them heartily in their
hatred of the young Spenser, was an action which nobody pretended to
justify; and the king thought that he might, without giving general
umbrage, assemble an army, and take vengeance on the offender. No one came
to the assistance of Badlesmere; and Edward prevailed.[*****]
But having now some forces on foot, and having concerted measures with his
friends throughout England, he ventured to take off the mask, to attack
all his enemies, and to recall the two Spensers, whose sentence he
declared illegal, unjust, contrary to the tenor of the Great Charter,
passed without the assent of the prelates, and extorted by violence from
him and the estate of barons.[*] Still the commons were not mentioned by
either party.
1322.
The king had now got the start of the barons, an advantage which, in those
times, was commonly decisive, and he hastened with his army to the marches
of Wales, the chief seat of the power of his enemies, whom he found
totally unprepared for resistance. Many of the barons in those parts
endeavored to appease him by submission:[**] their castles were seized,
and their persons committed to custody. But Lancaster, in order to prevent
the total ruin of his party, summoned together his vassals and retainers;
declared his alliance with Scotland, which had long been suspected;
received the promise of a reënforcement from that country, under the
command of Randolf, earl of Murray, and Sir James Douglas;[***] and being
joined by the earl of Hereford, advanced with all his forces against the
king, who had collected an army of thirty thousand men, and was superior
to his enemies. Lancaster posted himself at Burton upon Trent, and
endeavored to defend the passages of the river:[****] but being
disappointed in that plan of operations, this prince, who had no military
genius, and whose personal courage was even suspected, fled with his army
to the north, in expectation of being there joined by his Scottish
allies.[*****] He was pursued by the king, and his army diminished daily,
till he came to Boroughbridge, where he found Sir Andrew Harcla posted
with some forces on the opposite side of the river, and ready to dispute
the passage with him. He was repulsed in an attempt which he made to force
his way: the earl of Hereford was killed; the whole army of the rebels was
disconcerted: Lancaster himself was become incapable of taking any
measures either for flight or defence; and he was seized without
resistance by Harcla, and conducted to the king.[******]
In those violent times, the laws were so much neglected on both sides,
that, even where they might, without any sensible inconvenience, have been
observed, the conquerors deemed it unnecessary to pay any regard to them.
Lancaster, who was guilty of open rebellion, and was taken in arms against
his sovereign, instead of being tried by the laws of his country, which
pronounced the sentence of death against him, was condemned by a
court-martial,[*] and led to execution. Edward, however, little vindictive
in his natural temper, here indulged his revenge, and employed against the
prisoner the same indignities which had been exercised by his orders
against Gavaston. He was clothed in a mean attire, placed on a lean jade
without a bridle, a hood was put on his head, and in this posture,
attended by the acclamations of the people, this prince was conducted to
an eminence near Pomfret, one of his own castles, and there beheaded.[**]
Thus perished Thomas, earl of Lancaster, prince of the blood, and one of
the most potent barons that had ever been in England. His public conduct
sufficiently discovers the violence and turbulence of his character: his
private deportment appears not to have been more innocent: and his
hypocritical devotion, by which he gained the favor of the monks and
populace, will rather be regarded as an aggravation than an alleviation of
his guilt. Badlesmere, Giffard, Barret, Cheyney, Fleming, and about
eighteen of the most notorious offenders, were afterwards condemned by a
legal trial, and were executed. Many were thrown into prison: others made
their escape beyond sea: some of the king’s servants were rewarded from
the forfeitures: Harcla received for his services the earldom of Carlisle,
and a large estate, which he soon after forfeited with his life, for a
treasonable correspondence with the king of Scotland. But the greater part
of those vast escheats were seized by young Spenser, whose rapacity was
insatiable. Many of the barons of the king’s party were disgusted with
this partial division of the spoils: the envy against Spenser rose higher
than ever: the usual insolence of his temper, inflamed by success,
impelled him to commit many acts of violence: the people, who always hated
him, made him still more the object of aversion: all the relations of the
attainted barons and gentlemen secretly vowed revenge: and though
tranquillity was in appearance restored to the kingdom, the general
contempt of the king, and odium against Spenser, bred dangerous humors,
the source of future revolutions and convulsions.
In this situation, no success could be expected from foreign wars; and
Edward, after making one more fruitless attempt against Scotland, whence
he retreated with dishonor, found it necessary to terminate hostilities
with that kingdom, by a truce of thirteen years.[*] Robert, though his
title to the crown was not acknowledged in the treaty, was satisfied with
insuring his possession of it during so long a time. He had repelled with
gallantry all the attacks of England: he had carried war both into that
kingdom and into Ireland: he had rejected with disdain the pope’s
authority, who pretended to impose his commands upon him, and oblige him
to make peace with his enemies: his throne was firmly established, as well
in the affections of his subjects, as by force of arms: yet there
naturally remained some inquietude in his mind, while at war with a state
which, however at present disordered by faction, was of itself so much an
overmatch for him both in riches and in numbers of people. And this truce
was, at the same time, the more seasonable for England, because the nation
was at that juncture threatened with hostilities from France.
1324.
Philip the Fair, king of France, who died in 1315, had left the crown to
his son Lewis Hutin, who, after a short reign, dying without male issue,
was succeeded by Philip the Long, his brother, whose death soon after made
way for Charles the Fair, the youngest brother of that family. This
monarch had some grounds of complaint against the king’s ministers in
Guienne; and as there was no common or equitable judge in that strange
species of sovereignty established by the feudal law, he seemed desirous
to take advantage of Edward’s weakness, and under that pretence to
confiscate all his foreign dominions.[**]
After an embassy by the earl of Kent, the king’s brother, had been tried
in vain, Queen Isabella obtained permission to go over to Paris, and
endeavor to adjust, in an amicable manner, the difference with her
brother: but while she was making some progress in this negotiation,
Charles started a new pretension, the justice of which could not be
disputed, that Edward himself should appear in his court, and do homage
for the fees which he held in France. But there occurred many difficulties
in complying with this demand. Young Spenser, by whom the king was
implicitly governed, had unavoidably been engaged in many quarrels with
the queen, who aspired to the same influence, and though that artful
princess, on her leaving England, had dissembled her animosity, Spenser,
well acquainted with her secret sentiments, was unwilling to attend his
master to Paris, and appear in a court where her credit might expose him
to insults, if not to danger. He hesitated no less on allowing the king to
make the journey alone; both fearing lest that easy prince should in his
absence fall under other influence, and foreseeing the perils to which he
himself should be exposed if, without the protection of royal authority,
he remained in England where he was so generally hated.
1325.
While these doubts occasioned delays and difficulties, Isabella proposed
that Edward should resign the dominion of Guienne to his son, now thirteen
years of age; and that the prince should come to Paris, and do the homage
which every vassal owed to his superior lord. This expedient, which seemed
so happily to remove all difficulties, was immediately embraced: Spenser
was charmed with the contrivance: young Edward was sent to Paris: and the
ruin covered under this fatal snare, was never perceived or suspected by
any of the English council.
The queen, on her arrival in France, had there found a great number of
English fugitives, the remains of the Lancastrian faction; and their
common hatred of Spenser soon begat a secret friendship and correspondence
between them and that princess. Among the rest was young Roger Mortimer, a
potent baron in the Welsh marches, who had been obliged, with others, to
make his submissions to the king, had been condemned for high treason; but
having received a pardon for his life, was afterwards detained in the
Tower, with an intention of rendering his confinement perpetual, He was so
fortunate as to make his escape into France;[*] and being one of the most
considerable persons now remaining of the party, as well as distinguished
by his violent animosity against Spenser, he was easily admitted to pay
his court to Queen Isabella. The graces of his person and address advanced
him quickly in her affections: he became her confident and counsellor in
all her measures; and gaining ground daily upon her heart, he engaged her
to sacrifice at last, to her passion, all the sentiments of honor and of
fidelity to her husband.[**]
Hating now the man whom she had injured, and whom she never valued, she
entered ardently into all Mortimer’s conspiracies; and having artfully
gotten into her hands the young prince, and heir of the monarchy, she
resolved on the utter ruin of the king, as well as of his favorite. She
engaged her brother to take part in the same criminal purpose: her court
was daily filled with the exiled barons: Mortimer lived in the most
declared intimacy with her: a correspondence was secretly carried on with
the malecontent party in England: and when Edward, informed of those
alarming circumstances, required her speedily to return with the prince,
she publicly replied, that she would never set foot in the kingdom till
Spenser was forever removed from his presence and councils; a declaration
which procured her great popularity in England, and threw a decent veil
over all her treasonable enterprises.
Edward endeavored to put himself in a posture of defence;[*] but, besides
the difficulties arising from his own indolence and slender abilities, and
the want of authority, which of consequence attended all his resolutions,
it was not easy for him, in the present state of the kingdom and revenue,
to maintain a constant force ready to repel an invasion, which he knew not
at what time or place he had reason to expect.
All his efforts were unequal to the traitorous and hostile conspiracies
which, both at home and abroad, were forming against his authority, and
which were daily penetrating farther even into his own family. His
brother, the earl of Kent, a virtuous but weak prince, who was then at
Paris, was engaged by his sister-in-law, and by the king of France, who
was also his cousin-german, to give countenance to the invasion, whose
sole object, he believed, was the expulsion of the Spensers: he prevailed
on his elder brother, the earl of Norfolk, to enter secretly into the same
design: the earl of Leicester, brother and heir of the earl of Lancaster,
had too many reasons for his hatred of these ministers to refuse his
concurrence. Walter de Reynel, archbishop of Canterbury, and many of the
prelates, expressed their approbation of the queen’s measures: several of
the most potent barons, envying the authority of the favorite, were ready
to fly to arms: the minds of the people, by means of some truths and many
calumnies, were strongly disposed to the same party: and there needed but
the appearance of the queen and prince, with such a body of foreign troops
as might protect her against immediate violence, to turn all this tempest,
so artfully prepared, against the unhappy Edward.
1326.
Charles, though he gave countenance and assistance to the faction, was
ashamed openly to support the queen and prince against the authority of a
husband and father; and Isabella was obliged to court the alliance of some
other foreign potentate, from whose dominions she might set out on her
intended enterprise. For this purpose, she affianced young Edward, whose
tender age made him incapable to judge of the consequences, with Philippa,
daughter of the count of Holland and Hainault;[*] and having, by the open
assistance of this prince, and the secret protection of her brother,
enlisted in her service near three thousand men, she set sail from the
harbor of Dort, and landed safely, and without opposition, on the coast of
Suffolk. The earl of Kent was in her company: two other princes of the
blood, the earl of Norfolk and the earl of Leicester, joined her soon
after her landing with all their followers: three prelates, the bishops of
Ely, Lincoln, and Hereford, brought her both the force of their vassals
and the authority of their character:[**] even Robert de Watteville, who
had been sent by the king to oppose her progress in Suffolk, deserted to
her with all his forces. To render her cause more favorable, she renewed
her declaration, that the solo purpose of her enterprise was to free the
king and kingdom from the tyranny of the Spensers, and of Chancellor
Baldoc, their creature.[*] The populace were allured by her specious
pretences: the barons thought themselves secure against forfeitures by the
appearance of the prince in her army: and a weak, irresolute king,
supported by ministers generally odious, was unable to stem this torrent,
which bore with such irresistible violence against him.
Edward, after trying in vain to rouse the citizens of London to some sense
of duty,[****] departed for the west, where he hoped to meet with a better
reception; and he had no sooner discovered his weakness by leaving the
city, than the rage of the populace broke out without control against him
and his ministers.
They first plundered, then murdered all those who were obnoxious to them:
they seized the bishop of Exeter, a virtuous and loyal prelate, as he was
passing through the streets; and having beheaded him, they threw his body
into the river.[*] They made themselves masters of the Tower by surprise;
then entered into a formal association to put to death, without mercy,
every one who should dare to oppose the enterprise of Queen Isabella, and
of the prince.[**] A like spirit was soon communicated to all other parts
of England; and threw the few servants of the king, who still entertained
thoughts of performing their duty, into terror and astonishment.
Edward was hotly pursued to Bristol by the earl of Kent, seconded by the
foreign forces under John de Hainault. He found himself disappointed in
his expectations with regard to the loyalty of those parts; and he passed
over to Wales, where, he flattered himself, his name was more popular, and
which he hoped to find uninfected with the contagion of general rage which
had seized the English.[***] The elder Spenser, created earl of
Winchester, was left governor of the castle of Bristol; but the garrison
mutinied against him, and he was delivered into the hands of his enemies.
This venerable noble, who had nearly reached his ninetieth year, was
instantly without trial, or witness, or accusation, or answer, condemned
to death by the rebellious barons: he was hanged on a gibbet; his body was
cut in pieces, and thrown to the dogs;[****] and his head was sent to
Winchester, the place whose title he bore, and was there set on a pole and
exposed to the insults of the populace.
The king, disappointed anew in his expectations of succor from the Welsh,
took shipping for Ireland; but being driven back by contrary winds, he
endeavored to conceal himself in the mountains of Wales: he was soon
discovered, was put under the custody of the earl of Leicester, and was
confined in the castle of Kenilworth. The younger Spenser, his favorite,
who also fell into the hands of his enemies, was executed, like his
father, without any appearance of a legal trial.[*****]
The earl of Arundel, almost the only man of his rank in England who had
maintained his loyalty, was, without any trial, put to death at the
instigation of Mortimer: Baldoc, the chancellor, being a priest, could not
with safety be so suddenly despatched; but being sent to the bishop of
Hereford’s palace in London, he was there, as his enemies probably
foresaw, seized by the populace, was thrown into Newgate, and soon after
expired, from the cruel usage which he had received.[*] Even the usual
reverence paid to the sacerdotal character gave way, with every other
consideration, to the present rage of the people.
1327.
The queen, to avail herself of the prevailing delusion, summoned, in the
king’s name, a parliament at Westminster; where, together with the power
of her army, and the authority of her partisans among the barons, who were
concerned to secure their past treasons by committing new acts of violence
against their sovereign, she expected to be seconded by the fury of the
populace, the most dangerous of all instruments, and the least answerable
for their excesses. A charge was drawn up against the king, in which, even
though it was framed by his inveterate enemies, nothing but his narrow
genius, or his misfortunes, were objected to him; for the greatest malice
found no particular crime with which it could reproach this unhappy
prince. He was accused of incapacity for government, of wasting his time
in idle amusements, of neglecting public business, of being swayed by evil
counsellors, of having lost, by his misconduct, the kingdom of Scotland,
and part of Guienne; and to swell the charge, even the death of some
barons, and the imprisonment of some prelates, convicted of treason, were
laid to his account.[**] It was in vain, amidst the violence of arms and
tumult of the people, to appeal either to law or to reason: the deposition
of the king, without any appearing opposition, was voted by parliament:
the prince, already declared regent by his party,[***] was placed on the
throne: and a deputation was sent to Edward at Kenilworth, to require his
resignation, which menaces and terror soon extorted from him.
But it was impossible that the people, however corrupted by the barbarity
of the times, still further inflamed by faction, could forever remain
insensible to the voice of nature. Here a wife had first deserted, next
invaded, and then dethroned her husband; had made her minor son an
instrument in this unnatural treatment of his father; had, by lying
pretences, seduced the nation into a rebellion against their sovereign had
pushed them into violence and cruelties that had dishonored them: all
those circumstances were so odious in themselves, and formed such a
complicated scene of guilt, that the least reflection sufficed to open
men’s eyes, and make them detest this flagrant infringement of every
public and private duty. The suspicions which soon arose of Isabella’s
criminal commerce with Mortimer, the proofs which daily broke out of this
part of her guilt, increased the general abhorrence against her; and her
hypocrisy, in publicly bewailing with tears the king’s unhappy fate,[*]
was not able to deceive even the most stupid and most prejudiced of her
adherents. In proportion as the queen became the object of public hatred
the dethroned monarch, who had been the victim of her crimes and her
ambition, was regarded with pity, with friendship, with veneration: and
men became sensible, that all his misconduct, which faction had so much
exaggerated, had been owing to the unavoidable weakness, not to any
voluntary depravity, of his character. The earl of Leicester, now earl of
Lancaster, to whose custody he had been committed, was soon touched with
those generous sentiments; and besides using his prisoner with gentleness
and humanity, he was suspected to have entertained still more honorable
intentions in his favor. The king, therefore, was taken from his hands,
and delivered over to Lord Berkeley, and Mautravers, and Gournay, who were
intrusted alternately, each for a month, with the charge of guarding him.
While he was in the custody of Berkeley, he was still treated with the
gentleness due to his rank and his misfortunes; but when the turn of
Mautravers and Gournay came, every species of indignity was practised
against him, as if their intention had been to break entirely the prince’s
spirit, and to employ his sorrows and afflictions, instead of more violent
and more dangerous expedients, for the instruments of his murder.[**] It
is reported, that one day, when Edward was to be shaved, they ordered cold
and dirty water to be brought from the ditch for that purpose; and when he
desired it to be changed, and was still denied his request, he burst into
tears which bedewed his cheeks; and he exclaimed, that in spite of their
insolence, he should be shaved with clean and warm water.[***]
But as this method of laying Edward, in his grave appeared still too slow
to the impatient Mortimer, he secretly sent orders to the two keepers, who
were at his devotion instantly to despatch him: and these ruffians
contrived to make the manner of his death as cruel and barbarous as
possible. Taking advantage of Berkeley’s sickness, in whose custody he
then was, and who was thereby incapacitated from attending his charge,[*]
they came to Berkeley Castle, and put themselves in possession of the
king’s person. They threw him on a bed; held him down violently with a
table, which they flung over him; thrust into his fundament a red-hot
iron, which they inserted through a horn; and though the outward marks of
violence upon his person were prevented by this expedient, the horrid deed
was discovered to all the guards and attendants by the screams with which
the agonizing king filled the castle while his bowels were consuming.
Gournay and Mautravers were held in general detestation, and when the
ensuing revolution in England threw their protectors from power, they
found it necessary to provide for their safety by flying the kingdom.
Gournay was afterwards seized at Marseilles, delivered over to the
seneschal of Guienne, put on board a ship with a view of carrying him to
England; but he was beheaded at sea, by secret orders, as was supposed,
from some nobles and prelates in England, anxious to prevent any discovery
which he might make of his accomplices. Mautravers concealed himself for
several years in Germany; but having found means of rendering some service
to Edward III., he ventured to approach his person, threw himself on his
knees before him, submitted to mercy, and received a pardon.[**]
It is not easy to imagine a man more innocent and inoffensive than the
unhappy king whose tragical death we have related; nor a prince less
fitted for governing that fierce and turbulent people subjected to his
authority. He was obliged to devolve on others the weight of government,
which he had neither ability nor inclination to bear: the same indolence
and want of penetration led him to make choice of ministers and favorites
who were not always the best qualified for the trust committed to them:
the seditious grandees, pleased with his weakness, yet complaining of it,
under pretence of attacking his ministers, insulted his person and invaded
his authority: and the impatient populace, mistaking the source of their
grievances, threw all the blame upon the king, and increased the public
disorders by their faction and violence. It was in vain to look for
protection from the laws, whose voice, always feeble in those times, was
not heard amidst the din of arms—what could not defend the king, was
less able to give shelter to any of the people: the whole machine of
government was torn in pieces with fury and violence; and men, instead of
regretting the manners of their age, and the form of their constitution,
which required the most steady and most skilful hand to conduct them,
imputed all errors to the person who had the misfortune to be intrusted
with the reins of empire.
But though such mistakes are natural and almost unavoidable while the
events are recent, it is a shameful delusion in modern historians, to
imagine that all the ancient princes who were unfortunate in their
government, were also tyrannical in their conduct; and that the seditions
of the people always proceeded from some invasion of their privileges by
the monarch. Even a great and a good king was not in that age secure
against faction and rebellion, as appears in the case of Henry II.; but a
great king had the best chance, as we learn from the history of the same
period, for quelling and subduing them. Compare the reigns and characters
of Edward I. and II. The father made several violent attempts against the
liberties of the people: his barons opposed him: he was obliged, at least
found it prudent, to submit: but as they dreaded his valor and abilities,
they were content with reasonable satisfaction, and pushed no farther
their advantages against him. The facility and weakness of the son, not
his violence, threw every thing into confusion: the laws and government
were overturned: an attempt to reinstate them was an unpardonable crime:
and no atonement but the deposition and tragical death of the king himself
could give those barons contentment. It is easy to see, that a
constitution which depended so much on the personal character of the
prince, must necessarily, in many of its parts, be a government of will,
not of laws. But always to throw, without distinction, the blame of all
disorders upon the sovereign would introduce a fatal error in politics,
and serve as a perpetual apology for treason and rebellion: as if the
turbulence of the great, and madness of the people, were not, equally with
the tyranny of princes, evils incident to human society, and no less
carefully to be guarded against in every well-regulated constitution.
While these abominable scenes passed in England, the theatre of France was
stained with a wickedness equally barbarous, and still more public and
deliberate. The order of knights templars had arisen during the first
fervor of the crusades; and uniting the two qualities the most popular in
that age, devotion and valor, and exercising both in the most popular of
all enterprises, the defence of the Holy Land, they had made rapid
advances in credit and authority, and had acquired, from the piety of the
faithful, ample possessions in every country of Europe, especially in
France. Their great riches, joined to the course of time, had, by degrees,
relaxed the severity of these virtues; and the templars had, in a great
measure, lost that popularity which first raised them to honor and
distinction. Acquainted from experience with the fatigues and dangers of
those fruitless expeditions to the East, they rather chose to enjoy in
ease their opulent revenues in Europe: and being all men of birth,
educated, according to the custom of that age, without any tincture of
letters, they scorned the ignoble occupations of a monastic life, and
passed their time wholly in the fashionable amusements of hunting,
gallantry, and the pleasures of the table. Then rival order, that of St.
John of Jerusalem, whose poverty had as yet preserved them from like
corruptions, still distinguished themselves by their enterprises against
the infidels, and succeeded to all the popularity which was lost by the
indolence and luxury of the templars. But though these reasons had
weakened the foundations of this order, once so celebrated and revered,
the immediate cause of their destruction proceeded from the cruel and
vindictive spirit of Philip the Fair, who, having entertained a private
disgust against some eminent templars, determined to gratify at once his
avidity and revenge, by involving the whole order in an undistinguished
ruin. On no better information than that of two knights, condemned by
their superiors to perpetual imprisonment for their vices and profligacy,
he ordered on one day all the templars in France to be committed to
prison, and imputed to them such enormous and absurd crimes as are
sufficient of themselves to destroy all the credit of the accusation.
Besides their being universally charged with murder, robbery, and vices
the most shocking to nature, every one, it was pretended, whom they
received into their order, was obliged to renounce his Savior, to spit
upon the cross,[*] and to join to this impiety the superstition of
worshipping a gilded head, which was secretly kept in one of their houses
at Marseilles.
They also initiated, it was said, every candidate by such infamous rites
as could serve to no other purpose than to degrade the order in his eyes,
and destroy forever the authority of all his superiors over him.[*] Above
a hundred of these unhappy gentlemen were put to the question, in order to
extort from them a confession of their guilt: the more obstinate perished
in the hands of their tormentors: several, to procure immediate ease in
the violence of their agonies, acknowledged whatever was required of them:
forged confessions were imputed to others: and Philip, as if their guilt
were now certain, proceeded to a confiscation of all their treasures. But
no sooner were the templars relieved from their tortures, than, preferring
the most cruel execution to a life with infamy, they disavowed their
confessions, exclaimed against the forgeries, justified the innocence of
their order, and appealed to all the gallant actions performed by them in
ancient or later times, as a full apology for their conduct. The tyrant,
enraged at this disappointment, and thinking himself now engaged in honor
to proceed to extremities, ordered fifty-four of them, whom he branded as
relapsed heretics, to perish by the punishment of fire in his capital:
great numbers expired, after a like manner, in other parts of the kingdom:
and when he found that the perseverance of these unhappy victims, in
justifying to the last their innocence, had made deep impression on the
spectators, he endeavored to overcome the constancy of the templars by new
inhumanities. The grand master of the order, John de Molay, and another
great officer, brother to the sovereign of Dauphiny, were conducted to a
scaffold erected before the church of Notredame, at Paris: a full pardon
was offered them on the one hand; the fire destined for their execution
was shown them on the other: these gallant nobles still persisted in the
protestations of their own innocence and that of their order; and were
instantly hurried into the flames by the executioner.[**]
In all this barbarous injustice, Clement V., who was the creature of
Philip, and then resided in France, fully concurred; and without examining
a witness, or making any inquiry into the truth of facts, he summarily, by
the plenitude of his apostolic power, abolished the whole order. The
templars all over Europe were thrown into prison; their conduct underwent
a strict scrutiny; the power of their enemies still pursued and oppressed
them; but nowhere, except in France, were the smallest traces of their
guilt pretended to be found. England sent an ample testimony of their
piety and morals; but as the order was now annihilated, the knights were
distributed into several convents, and their possessions were, by command
of the pope, transferred to the order of St. John.[*] We now proceed to
relate some other detached transactions of the present period.
The kingdom of England was afflicted with a grievous famine during several
years of this reign. Perpetual rains and cold weather not only destroyed
the harvest, but bred a mortality among the cattle, and raised every kind
of food to an enormous price.[**] The parliament in 1315 endeavored to fix
more moderate rates to commodities! not sensible that such an attempt was
impracticable, and that, were it possible to reduce the price of
provisions by any other expedient than by introducing plenty, nothing
could be more pernicious and destructive to the public. Where the produce
of a year, for instance, falls so far short as to afford full subsistence
only for nine months, the only expedient for making it last all the
twelve, is to raise the prices, to put the people by that means on short
allowance, and oblige them to save their food till a more plentiful
season. But in reality the increase of prices is a necessary consequence
of scarcity; and laws, instead of preventing it, only aggravate the evil,
by cramping and restraining commerce. The parliament accordingly, in the
ensuing year, repealed their ordinance, which they had found useless and
burdensome.[***]
The prices affixed by the parliament are somewhat remarkable: three pounds
twelve shillings of our present money for the best stalled ox; for other
oxen, two pounds eight shillings; a fat hog of two years old, ten
shillings; a fat wether unshorn, a crown; if shorn, three shillings and
sixpence; a fat goose, sevenpence halfpenny; a fat capon, sixpence; a fat
hen, threepence; two chickens, threepence; four pigeons, threepence; two
dozen of eggs, threepence.[****]
If we consider these prices, we shall find that butcher’s meat, in this
time of great scarcity, must still have been sold, by the parliamentary
ordinance, three times cheaper than our middling prices at present;
poultry somewhat lower, because, being now considered as a delicacy, it
has risen beyond its proportion. In the country places of Ireland and
Scotland, where delicacies bear no price, poultry is at present as cheap,
if not cheaper than butcher’s meat. But the inference I would draw from
the comparison of prices is still more considerable: I suppose that the
rates affixed by parliament were inferior to the usual market prices in
those years of famine and mortality of cattle; and that these commodities,
instead of a third, had really risen to a half of the present value. But
the famine at that time was so consuming, that wheat was sometimes sold
for above four pounds ten shillings a quarter,[*] usually for three
pounds;[**] that is, twice our middling prices: a certain proof of the
wretched state of tillage in those ages. We formerly found, that the
middling price of corn in that period was half of the present price; while
the middling price of cattle was only an eighth part: we here find the
same immense disproportion in years of scarcity. It may thence be inferred
with certainty, that the raising of corn was a species of manufactory,
which few in that age could practise with advantage: and there is reason
to think, that other manufactures, more refined, were sold even beyond
their present prices; at least, there is a demonstration for it in the
reign of Henry VII., from the rates affixed to scarlet and other
broadcloth by act of parliament. During all those times it was usual for
the princes and great nobility to make settlements of their velvet beds
and silken robes, in the same manner as of their estates and manors.[***]
In the list of jewels and plate which had belonged to the ostentatious
Gavaston, and which the king recovered from the earl of Lancaster after
the murder of that favorite, we find some embroidered girdles, flowered
shirts, and silk waistcoats.[****]
It was afterwards one article of accusation against that potent and
opulent earl, when he was put to death, that he had purloined some of that
finery of Gavaston’s. The ignorance of those ages in manufactures, and
still more their unskilful husbandry, seem a clear proof that the country
was then far from being populous.
All trade and manufactures, indeed, were then at a very low ebb. The only
country in the northern parts of Europe, where they seem to have risen to
any tolerable degree of improvement, was Flanders. When Robert, earl of
that country, was applied to by the king, and was desired to break off
commerce with the Scots, whom Edward called his rebels, and represented as
excommunicated on that account by the church, the earl replied, that
Flanders was always considered as common, and free and open to all
nations.[*]
The petition of the elder Spenser to parliament, complaining of the
devastation committed on his lands by the barons, contains several
particulars which are curious, and discover the manners of the age.[**]
He affirms, that they had ravaged sixty-three manors belonging to him, and
he makes his losses amount to forty-six thousand pounds; that is, to one
hundred and thirty-eight thousand of our present money. Among other
particulars, he enumerates twenty-eight thousand sheep, one thousand oxen
and heifers, twelve hundred cows with their breed for two years, five
hundred and sixty cart-horses, two thousand hogs, together with six
hundred bacons, eighty carcasses of beef, and six hundred muttons in the
larder; ten tuns of cider, arms for two hundred men, and other warlike
engines and provisions. The plain inference is, that the greater part of
Spenser’s vast estate, as well as the estates of the other nobility, was
farmed by the landlord himself, managed by his stewards or bailiffs, and
cultivated by his villains. Little or none of it was let on lease to
husbandmen: its produce was consumed in rustic hospitality by the baron or
his officers: a great number of idle retainers, ready for any disorder or
mischief, were maintained by him: all who lived upon his estate were
absolutely at his disposal: instead of applying to courts of justice, he
usually sought redress by open force and violence: the great nobility were
a kind of independent potentates, who, if they submitted to any
regulations at all, were less governed by the municipal law than by a rude
species of the law of nations. The method in which we find they treated
the king’s favorites and ministers, is a proof of their usual way of
dealing with each other. A party which complains of the arbitrary conduct
of ministers, ought naturally to affect a great regard for the laws and
constitution, and maintain at least the appearance of justice in their
proceedings; yet those barons, when discontented, came to parliament with
an armed force, constrained the king to assent to their measures, and
without any trial, or witness, or conviction, passed, from the pretended
notoriety of facts, an act of banishment or attainder against the
minister, which, on the first revolution of fortune, was reversed by like
expedients. The parliament during factious times was nothing but the organ
of present power. Though the persons of whom it was chiefly composed
seemed to enjoy great independence, they really possessed no true liberty;
and the security of each individual among them was not so much derived
from the general protection of law, as from his own private power and that
of his confederates. The authority of the monarch, though far from
absolute, was irregular, and might often reach him: the current of a
faction might overwhelm him: a hundred considerations of benefits and
injuries, friendships and animosities, hopes and fears, were able to
influence his conduct; and amidst these motives, a regard to equity, and
law, and justice was commonly, in those rude ages, of little moment. Nor
did any man entertain thoughts of opposing present power, who did not deem
himself strong enough to dispute the field with it by force, and was not
prepared to give battle to the sovereign or the ruling party.
Before I conclude this reign, I cannot forbear making another remark,
drawn from the detail of losses given in by the elder Spenser;
particularly the great quantity of salted meat which he had in his larder,
six hundred bacons, eighty carcasses of beef, six hundred muttons. We may
observe, that the outrage of which he complained began after the third of
May, or the eleventh, new style, as we learn from the same paper. It is
easy, therefore, to conjecture what a vast store of the same kind he must
have laid up at the beginning of winter; and we may draw a new conclusion
with regard to the wretched state of ancient husbandry, which could not
provide subsistence for the cattle during winter, even in such a temperate
climate as the south of England; for Spenser had but one manor so far
north as Yorkshire. There being few or no enclosures, except perhaps for
deer, no sown grass, little hay, and no other resource for feeding cattle,
the barons, as well as the people, were obliged to kill and salt their
oxen and sheep in the beginning of winter, before they became lean upon
the common pasture; a precaution still practised with regard to oxen in
the least cultivated parts of this island. The salting of mutton is a
miserable expedient, which has every where been long disused. From this
circumstance, however trivial in appearance, may be drawn important
inferences with regard to the domestic economy and manner of life in those
ages.
The disorders of the times, from foreign wars and intestine dissensions,
but above all, the cruel famine, which obliged the nobility to dismiss
many of their retainers, increased the number of robbers in the kingdom;
and no place was secure from their incursions.[*] They met in troops like
armies, and over-ran the country. Two cardinals themselves, the pope’s
legates, notwithstanding the numerous train which attended them, were
robbed and despoiled of their goods and equipage, when they travelled on
the highway.[**]
Among the other wild fancies of the age, it was imagined, that the persons
affected with leprosy (a disease at that time very common, probably from
bad diet) had conspired with the Saracens to poison all the springs and
fountains; and men, being glad of any pretence to get rid of those who
were a burden to them, many of those unhappy people were burnt alive on
this chimerical imputation. Several Jews, also, were punished in their
persons, and their goods were confiscated on the same account.[***]
Stowe, in his Survey of London, gives us a curious instance of the
hospitality of the ancient nobility in this period; it is taken from the
accounts of the cofferer or steward of Thomas earl of Lancaster, and
contains the expenses of that earl during the year 1313, which was not a
year of famine. For the pantry, buttery, and kitchen, three thousand four
hundred and five pounds. For three hundred and sixty-nine pipes of red
wine, and two of white, one hundred and four pounds, etc. The whole, seven
thousand three hundred and nine pounds; that is, near twenty-two thousand
pounds of our present money; and making allowance for the cheapness of
commodities, near a hundred thousand pounds.
I have seen a French manuscript, containing accounts of some private
disbursements of this king. There is an article, among others, of a crown
paid to one for making the king laugh. To judge by the events of the
reign, this ought not to have been an easy undertaking.
This king left four children, two sons and two daughters: Edward, his
eldest son and successor; John, created afterwards earl of Cornwall, who
died young at Perth; Jane, afterwards married to David Bruce, king of
Scotland; and Eleanor, married to Reginald, count of Gueldres.
CHAPTER XV.
EDWARD III.
1327.
The violent party which had taken arms against Edward II., and finally
deposed that unfortunate monarch, deemed it requisite for their future
security to pay so far an exterior obeisance to the law, as to desire a
parliamentary indemnity for all their illegal proceedings; on account of
the necessity which, it was pretended, they lay under, of employing force
against the Spensers and other evil counsellors, enemies of the kingdom.
All the attainders, also, which had passed against the earl of Lancaster
and his adherents, when the chance of war turned against them, were easily
reversed during the triumph of their party;[*] and the Spensers, whose
former attainder had been reversed by parliament, were now again, in this
change of fortune, condemned by the votes of their enemies.
A council of regency was likewise appointed by parliament, consisting of
twelve persons; five prelates, the archbishops of Canterbury and York, the
bishops of Winchester, Worcester, and Hereford; and seven lay peers, the
earls of Norfolk, Kent, and Surrey, and the lords Wake, Ingham, Piercy,
and Ross. The earl of Lancaster was appointed guardian and protector of
the king’s person. But though it was reasonable to expect that, as the
weakness of the former king had given reins to the licentiousness of the
barons, great domestic tranquillity would not prevail during the present
minority; the first disturbance arose from an invasion by foreign enemies.
The king of Scots, declining in years and health, but retaining still that
martial spirit which had raised his nation from the lowest ebb of fortune,
deemed the present opportunity favorable for infesting England. He first
made an attempt on the Castle of Norham, in which he was disappointed; he
then collected an army of twenty-five thousand men on the frontiers, and
having given the command to the earl of Murray and Lord Douglas,
threatened an incursion into the northern counties. The English regency,
after trying in vain every expedient to restore peace with Scotland, made
vigorous preparations for war; and besides assembling an English army of
near sixty thousand men, they invited back John of Hainault, and some
foreign cavalry whom they had dismissed, and whose discipline and arms had
appeared superior to those of their own country. Young Edward himself,
burning with a passion for military fame, appeared at the head of these
numerous forces; and marched from Durham, the appointed place of
rendezvous, in quest of the enemy, who had already broken into the
frontiers, and were laying every thing waste around them.
Murray and Douglas were the two most celebrated warriors, bred in the long
hostilities between the Scots and English; and their forces, trained in
the same school, and inured to hardships, fatigues, and dangers, were
perfectly qualified, by their habits and manner of life, for that
desultory and destructive war which they carried into England. Except a
body of about four thousand cavalry, well armed, and fit to make a steady
impression in battle, the rest of the army were light-armed troops,
mounted on small horses, which found subsistence every where, and carried
them with rapid and unexpected marches, whether they meant to commit
depredations on the peaceable inhabitants, or to attack an armed enemy, or
to retreat into their own country. Their whole equipage consisted of a bag
of oatmeal, which, as a supply in case of necessity, each soldier carried
behind him; together with a light plate of iron, on which he instantly
baked the meal into a cake in the open fields. But his chief subsistence
was the cattle which he seized; and his cookery was as expeditious as all
his other operations. After flaying the animal, he placed the skin, loose
and hanging in the form of a bag, upon some stakes; he poured water into
it, kindled a fire below, and thus made it serve as a caldron for the
boiling of his victuals.[*]
The chief difficulty which Edward met with, after composing some dangerous
frays which broke out between his foreign forces and the English,[*] was
to come up with an army so rapid in its marches, and so little encumbered
in its motions. Though the flame and smoke of burning villages directed
him sufficiently to the place of their encampment, he found, upon hurrying
thither, that they had already dislodged; and he soon discovered, by new
marks of devastation, that they had removed to some distant quarter. After
harassing his army during some time in this fruitless chase, he advanced
northwards, and crossed the Tyne, with a resolution of awaiting them on
their return homewards, and taking vengeance for all their
depredations.[**] But that whole country was already so much wasted by
their frequent incursions, that it could not afford subsistence to his
army; and he was obliged again to return southwards, and change his plan
of operations. He had now lost all track of the enemy; and though he
promised the reward of a hundred pounds a year to any one who should bring
him an account of their motions, he remained inactive some days before he
received any intelligence of them.[***] He found at last that they had
fixed their camp on the southern banks of the Were, as if they intended to
await a battle; but their prudent leaders had chosen the ground with such
judgment, that the English, on their approach, saw it impracticable,
without temerity, to cross the river in their front, and attack them in
their present situation. Edward, impatient for revenge and glory, here
sent them a defiance, and challenged them, if they dared, to meet him in
an equal field, and try the fortune of arms. The bold spirit of Douglas
could ill brook this bravado, and he advised the acceptance of the
challenge; but he was overruled by Murray, who replied to Edward that he
never took the counsel of an enemy in any of his operations. The king,
therefore, kept still his position opposite to the Scots; and daily
expected that necessity would oblige them to change their quarters, and
give him an opportunity of overwhelming them with superior forces. After a
few days, they suddenly decamped, and marched farther up the river; but
still posted themselves in such a manner as to preserve the advantage of
the ground if the enemy should venture to attack them.[****]
Edward insisted that all hazards should be run, rather than allow these
ravagers to escape with impunity; but Mortimer’s authority prevented the
attack, and opposed itself to the valor of the young monarch. While the
armies lay in this position, an incident happened which had well nigh
proved fatal to the English. Douglas, having gotten the word, and surveyed
exactly the situation of the English camp, entered it secretly in the
night-time, with a body of two hundred determined soldiers, and advanced
to the royal tent, with a view of killing or carrying off the king in the
midst of his army. But some of Edward’s attendants, awaking in that
critical moment, made resistance; his chaplain and chamberlain sacrificed
their lives for his safety; the king himself, after making a valorous
defence, escaped in the dark; and Douglas, having lost the greater part of
his followers, was glad to make a hasty retreat with the remainder.[*]
Soon after, the Scottish army decamped without noise in the dead of night;
and having thus gotten the start of the English, arrived without further
loss in their own country. Edward, on entering the place of the Scottish
encampment, found only six Englishmen, whom the enemy, after breaking
their legs, had tied to trees, in order to prevent their carrying any
intelligence to their countrymen.[**]
The king was highly incensed at the disappointment which he had met with
in his first enterprise, and at the head of so gallant an army. The
symptoms which he had discovered of bravery and spirit gave extreme
satisfaction, and were regarded as sure prognostics of an illustrious
reign: but the general displeasure fell violently on Mortimer, who was
already the object of public odium; and every measure which he pursued
tended to aggravate, beyond all bounds, the hatred of the nation both
against him and Queen Isabella.
When the council of regency was formed, Mortimer, though in the plenitude
of his power, had taken no care to insure a place in it; but this
semblance of moderation was only a cover to the most iniquitous and most
ambitious projects. He rendered that council entirely useless, by usurping
to himself the whole sovereign authority; he settled on the queen dowager
the greater part of the royal revenues; he never consulted either the
princes of the blood or the nobility in any public measure; the king
himself was so besieged by his creatures, that no access could be procured
to him; and all the envy which had attended Gavaston and Spenser fell much
more deservedly on the new favorite.
1328.
Mortimer, sensible of the growing hatred of the people, thought it
requisite on any terms to secure peace abroad; and he entered into a
negotiation with Robert Bruce for that purpose. As the claim of
superiority in England, more than any other cause, had tended to inflame
the animosities between the two nations, Mortimer, besides stipulating a
marriage between Jane, sister of Edward, and David, the son and heir of
Robert, consented to resign absolutely this claim, to give up all the
homages done by the Scottish parliament and nobility, and to acknowledge
Robert as independent sovereign of Scotland.[*] In return for these
advantages, Robert stipulated the payment of thirty thousand marks to
England. This treaty was ratified by parliament;[**] but was nevertheless
the source of great discontent among the people, who, having entered
zealously into the pretensions of Edward I., and deeming themselves
disgraced by the successful resistance made by so inferior a nation, were
disappointed, by this treaty, in all future hopes both of conquest and of
vengeance.
The princes of the blood, Kent, Norfolk, and Lancaster, were much united
in their councils; and Mortimer entertained great suspicions of their
designs against him. In summoning them to parliament, he strictly
prohibited them, in the king’s name, from coming attended by an armed
force; an illegal but usual practice in that age. The three earls, as they
approached to Salisbury, the place appointed for the meeting of
parliament, found, that though they themselves, in obedience to the king’s
command, had brought only their usual retinue with them, Mortimer and his
party were attended by all their followers in arms; and they began with
some reason to apprehend a dangerous design against their persons. They
retreated, assembled their retainers, and were returning with an army to
take vengeance on Mortimer; when the weakness of Kent and Norfolk, who
deserted the common cause, obliged Lancaster also to make his
submissions.[***]
The quarrel by the interposition of the prelates, seemed for the present
to be appeased.
1329.
But Mortimer, in order to intimidate the princes, determined to have a
victim; and the simplicity, with the good intentions of the earl of Kent,
afforded him soon after an opportunity of practising upon him. By himself
and his emissaries he endeavored to persuade that prince that his brother,
King Edward, was still alive, and detained in some secret prison in
England. The earl, whose remorses for the part which he had acted against
the late king probably inclined him to give credit to this intelligence,
entered into a design of restoring him to liberty, of reinstating him on
the throne, and of making thereby some atonement for the injuries which he
himself had unwarily done him.[*]
1330.
After this harmless contrivance had been allowed to proceed a certain
length, the earl was seized by Mortimer, was accused before the
parliament, and condemned, by those slavish though turbulent barons, to
lose his life and fortune. The queen and Mortimer, apprehensive of young
Edward’s lenity towards his uncle, hurried on the execution, and the
prisoner was beheaded next day: but so general was the affection borne
him, and such pity prevailed for his unhappy fate, that, though peers had
been easily found to condemn him, it was evening before his enemies could
find an executioner to perform the office.[**]
The earl of Lancaster, on pretence of his having assented to this
conspiracy, was soon after thrown into prison: many of the prelates and
nobility were prosecuted: Mortimer employed this engine to crush all his
enemies, and to enrich himself and his family by the forfeitures. The
estate of the earl of Kent was seized for his younger son, Geoffrey: the
immense fortunes of the Spensers and their adherents were mostly converted
to his own use: he affected a state and dignity equal or superior to the
royal: his power became formidable to every one: his illegal practices
were daily complained of: and all parties, forgetting past animosities,
conspired in their hatred of Mortimer.
It was impossible that these abuses could long escape the observation of a
prince endowed with so much spirit and judgment as young Edward, who,
being now in his eighteenth year, and feeling himself capable of
governing, repined at being held in fetters by this insolent minister. But
so much was he surrounded by the emissaries of Mortimer, that it behoved
him to conduct the project for subverting him with the same secrecy and
precaution as if he had been forming a conspiracy against his sovereign.
He communicated his intentions to Lord Mountacute, who engaged the Lords
Molins and Clifford, Sir John Nevil of Hornby, Sir Edward Bohun, Ufford,
and others, to enter into their views; and the Castle of Nottingham was
chosen for the scene of the enterprise. The queen dowager and Mortimer
lodged in that fortress: the king also was admitted, though with a few
only of his attendants: and as the castle was strictly guarded, the gates
locked every evening, and the keys carried to the queen, it became
necessary to communicate the design to Sir William Eland, the governor,
who zealously took part in it. By his direction, the king’s associates
were admitted through a subterraneous passage, which had formerly been
contrived for a secret outlet from the castle, but was now buried in
rubbish; and Mortimer, without having it in his power to make resistance,
was suddenly seized in an apartment adjoining to the queen’s.[*] A
parliament was immediately summoned for his condemnation. He was accused
before that assembly of having usurped regal power from the council of
regency appointed by parliament; of having procured the death of the late
king; of having deceived the earl of Kent into a conspiracy to restore
that prince; of having solicited and obtained exorbitant grants of the
royal demesnes; of having dissipated the public treasure; of secreting
twenty thousand marks of the money paid by the king of Scotland; and of
other crimes and misdemeanors.[**] The parliament condemned him from the
supposed notoriety of the facts, without trial, or hearing his answer, or
examining a witness; and he was hanged on a gibbet at the Elmes, in the
neighborhood of London. It is remarkable, that this sentence was near
twenty years after reversed by parliament, in favor of Mortimer’s son; and
the reason assigned was, the illegal manner of proceeding.[***] The
principles of law and justice were established in England, not in such a
degree as to prevent any iniquitous sentence against a person obnoxious to
the ruling party; but sufficient, on the return of his credit, or that of
his friends, to serve as a reason or pretence for its reversal.
1331.
Justice was also executed by a sentence of the house of peers on some of
the inferior criminals, particularly on Simon de Bereford: but the barons,
in that act of jurisdiction, entered a protest, that though they had tried
Bereford, who was none of their peers, they should not for the future be
obliged to receive any such indictment. The queen was confined to her own
house at Risings, near London: her revenue was reduced to four thousand
pounds a year:[*] and though the king, during the remainder of her life,
paid her a decent visit once or twice a year, she never was able to
reinstate herself in any credit or authority.
Edward, having now taken the reins of government into his own hands,
applied himself, with industry and judgment, to redress all those
grievances which had proceeded either from want of authority in the crown,
or from the late abuses of it. He issued writs to the judges, enjoining
them to administer justice, without paying any regard to arbitrary orders
from the ministers: and as the robbers, thieves, murderers, and criminals
of all kinds, had, during the course of public convulsions, multiplied to
an enormous degree, and were openly protected by the great barons, who
made use of them against their enemies, the king, after exacting from the
peers a solemn promise in parliament, that they would break off all
connections with such malefactors,[**] set himself in earnest to remedy
the evil. Many of these gangs had become so numerous as to require his own
presence to disperse them; and he exerted both courage and industry in
executing this salutary office. The ministers of justice, from his
example, employed the utmost diligence in discovering, pursuing, and
punishing the criminals; and this disorder was by degrees corrected, at
least palliated; the utmost that could be expected with regard to a
disease hitherto inherent in the constitution.
In proportion as the government acquired authority at home, it became
formidable to the neighboring nations; and the ambitious spirit of Edward
sought, and soon found, an opportunity of exerting itself. The wise and
valiant Robert Bruce, who had recovered by arms the independence of his
country, and had fixed it by the last treaty of peace with England, soon
after died, and left David his son, a minor, under the guardianship of
Randolph, earl of Murray, the companion of all his victories. It had been
stipulated in this treaty, that both the Scottish nobility who, before the
commencement of the wars enjoyed lands in England, and the English who
inherited estates in Scotland, should be restored to their respective
possessions:[*] but though this article had been executed pretty regularly
on the part of Edward, Robert, who observed that the estates claimed by
Englishmen were much more numerous and valuable than the others, either
thought it dangerous to admit so many secret enemies into the kingdom, or
found it difficult to wrest from his own followers the possessions
bestowed on them as the reward of former services; and he had protracted
the performance of his part of the stipulation. The English nobles,
disappointed in their expectations, began to think of a remedy; and as
their influence was great in the north, their enmity alone, even though
unsupported by the King of England, became dangerous to the minor prince
who succeeded to the Scottish throne.
1332.
Edward Baliol, the son of that John who was crowned king of Scotland, had
been detained some time a prisoner in England after his father was
released; but having also obtained his liberty, he went over to France,
and resided in Normandy, on his patrimonial estate in that country,
without any thoughts of reviving the claims of his family to the crown of
Scotland. His pretensions, however plausible, had been so strenuously
abjured by the Scots and rejected by the English, that he was universally
regarded as a private person; and he had been thrown into prison on
account of some private offence of which he was accused. Lord Beaumont, a
great English baron, who, in the right of his wife, claimed the earldom of
Buchan in Scotland,[**] found him in this situation; and deeming him a
proper instrument for his purpose, made such interest with the king of
France, who was not aware of the consequences, that he recovered him his
liberty, and brought him over with him to England.
The injured nobles, possessed of such a head, began to think of
vindicating their rights by force of arms; and they applied to Edward for
his concurrence and assistance. But there were several reasons which
deterred the king from openly avowing their enterprise. In his treaty with
Scotland he had entered into a bond of twenty thousand pounds, payable to
the pope, if within four years he violated the peace; and as the term was
not yet elapsed, he dreaded the exacting of that penalty by the sovereign
pontiff, who possessed so many means of forcing princes to make payment.
He was also afraid that violence and injustice would every where be
imputed to him, if he attacked with superior force a minor king, and a
brother-in-law, whose independent title had so lately been acknowledged by
a solemn treaty. And as the regent of Scotland, on every demand which had
been made of restitution to the English barons, had always confessed the
justice of their claim, and had only given an evasive answer, grounded on
plausible pretences, Edward resolved not to proceed by open violence, but
to employ like artifices against him. He secretly encouraged Baliol in his
enterprise; connived at his assembling forces in the north; and gave
countenance to the nobles who were disposed to join in the attempt. A
force of near two thousand five hundred men was enlisted under Baliol, by
Umfreville, earl of Angus, the lords Beaumont, Ferrars, Fitz-warin, Wake,
Stafford, Talbot, and Moubray. As these adventurers apprehended that the
frontiers would be strongly armed and guarded, they resolved to make their
attack by sea; and having embarked at Ravenspur, they reached in a few
days the coast of Fife.
Scotland was at that time in a very different situation from that in which
it had appeared under the victorious Robert. Besides the loss of that
great monarch, whose genius and authority preserved entire the whole
political fabric, and maintained a union among the unruly barons, Lord
Douglas, impatient of rest, had gone over to Spain in a crusade against
the Moors, and had there perished in battle:[*] the earl of Murray, who
had long been declining through age and infirmities, had lately died, and
had been succeeded in the regency by Donald, earl of Marre, a man of much
inferior talents: the military spirit of the Scots, though still unbroken,
was left without a proper guidance and direction: and a minor king seemed
ill qualified to defend an inheritance, which it had required all the
consummate valor and abilities of his father to acquire and maintain.
But as the Scots were apprised of the intended invasion, great numbers, on
the appearance of the English fleet, immediately ran to the shore, in
order to prevent the landing of the enemy. Baliol had valor and activity,
and he drove back the Scots with considerable loss.[*] He marched westward
into the heart of the country; flattering himself that the ancient
partisans of his family would declare for him. But the fierce animosities
which had been kindled between the two nations, inspiring the Scots with a
strong prejudice against a prince supported by the English, he was
regarded as a common enemy; and the regent found no difficulty in
assembling a great army to oppose him. It is pretended that Marre had no
less than forty thousand men under his banners; but the same hurry and
impatience that made him collect a force, which, from its greatness, was
so disproportioned to the occasion, rendered all his motions unskilful and
imprudent. The River Erne ran between the two armies; and the Scots,
confiding in that security, as well as in their great superiority of
numbers, kept no order in their encampment. Baliol passed the river in the
night-time; attacked the unguarded and undisciplined Scots; threw them
into confusion, which was increased by the darkness, and by their very
numbers, to which they trusted; and he beat them off the field with great
slaughter.[**] But in the morning, when the Scots were at some distance,
they were ashamed of having yielded the victory to so weak a foe, and they
hurried back to recover the honor of the day. Their eager passions urged
them precipitately to battle, without regard to some broken ground which
lay between them and the enemy, and which disordered and confounded their
ranks. Baliol seized the favorable opportunity, advanced his troops upon
them, prevented them from rallying, and anew chased them off the field
with redoubled slaughter. There fell above twelve thousand Scots in this
action; and among these the flower of their nobility; the regent himself,
the earl of Carrick, a natural son of their late king, the earls of Athole
and Monteith, lord Hay of Errol, constable, and the lords Keith and
Lindsey. The loss of the English scarcely exceeded thirty men; a strong
proof, among many others, of the miserable state of military discipline in
those ages.[***]
Baliol soon after made himself master of Perth; but still was not able to
bring over any of the Scots to his party. Patric Dunbar, earl of Marche,
and Sir Archibald Douglas, brother to the lord of that name, appeared at
the head of the Scottish armies, which amounted still to near forty
thousand men; and they purposed to reduce Baliol and the English by
famine. They blockaded Perth by land; they collected some vessels with
which they invested it by water; but Baliol’s ships, attacking the
Scottish fleet, gained a complete victory, and opened the communication
between Perth and the sea.[*] The Scotch armies were then obliged to
disband for want of pay and subsistence: the nation was in effect subdued
by a handful of men: each nobleman who found himself most exposed to
danger, successively submitted to Baliol: that prince was crowned at
Scone: David, his competitor, was sent over to France with his betrothed
wife Jane, sister to Edward: and the heads of his party sued to Baliol for
a truce, which he granted them, in order to assemble a parliament in
tranquillity, and have his title recognized by the whole Scottish nation.
1333.
But Baliol’s imprudence, or his necessities, making him dismiss the
greater part of his English followers, he was, notwithstanding the truce,
attacked of a sudden near Annan, by Sir Archibald Douglas and other
chieftains of that party; he was routed; his brother, John Baliol, was
slain; he himself was chased into England in a miserable condition; and
thus lost his kingdom by a revolution as sudden as that by which he had
acquired it.
While Baliol enjoyed his short-lived and precarious royalty, he had been
sensible that, without the protection of England, it would be impossible
for him to maintain possession of the throne; and he had secretly sent a
message to Edward, offering to acknowledge his superiority, to renew the
homage for his crown, and to espouse the princess Jane, if the pope’s
consent could be obtained for dissolving her former marriage, which was
not yet consummated. Edward, ambitious of recovering that important
concession, made by Mortimer during his minority, threw off all scruples,
and willingly accepted the offer; but as the dethroning of Baliol had
rendered this stipulation of no effect, the king prepared to reinstate him
in possession of the crown; an enterprise which appeared from late
experience so easy and so little hazardous. As he possessed many popular
arts, he consulted his parliament on the occasion; but that assembly,
finding the resolution already taken, declined giving any opinion, and
only granted him, in order to support the enterprise, an aid of a
fifteenth from the personal estates of the nobility and gentry, and a
tenth of the movables of boroughs. And they added a petition, that the
king would thenceforth live on his own revenue, without grieving his
subjects by illegal taxes, or by the outrageous seizure of their goods in
the shape of purveyance.[*]
As the Scots expected that the chief brunt of the war would fall upon
Berwick, Douglas, the regent, threw a strong garrison into that place,
under the command of Sir William Keith, and he himself assembled a great
army on the frontiers, ready to penetrate into England as soon as Edward
should have invested that place. The English army was less numerous, but
better supplied with arms and provisions, and retained in stricter
discipline; and the king, notwithstanding the valiant defence made by
Keith, had in two months reduced the garrison to extremities, and had
obliged them to capitulate: they engaged to surrender, if they were not
relieved within a few days by their countrymen.[**] This intelligence
being conveyed to the Scottish army, which was preparing to invade
Northumberland, changed their plan of operations, and engaged them to
advance towards Berwick, and attempt the relief of that important
fortress. Douglas, who had ever purposed to decline a pitched battle, in
which he was sensible of the enemy’s superiority, and who intended to have
drawn out the war by small skirmishes, and by mutually ravaging each
other’s country, was forced, by the impatience of his troops, to put the
fate of the kingdom upon the event of one day. He attacked the English at
Halidown Hill, a little north of Berwick; and though his heavy-armed
cavalry dismounted, in order to render the action more steady and
desperate, they were received with such valor by Edward, and were so
galled by the English archers, that they were soon thrown into disorder
and on the fall of Douglas, their general, were totally routed. The whole
army fled in confusion, and the English, but much more the Irish, gave
little quarter in the pursuit: all the nobles of chief distinction were
either slain or taken prisoners: near thirty thousand of the Scots fell in
the action; while the loss of the English amounted only to one knight, one
esquire, and thirteen private soldiers; an inequality almost
incredible.[***]
After this fatal blow, the Scottish nobles had no other resource than
instant submission; and Edward, leaving a considerable body with Baliol to
complete the conquest of the kingdom, returned with the remainder of his
army to England. Baliol was acknowledged king by a parliament assembled at
Edinburgh;[*] the superiority of England was again recognized; many of the
Scottish nobility swore fealty to Edward; and to complete the misfortunes
of that nation, Baliol ceded Berwick, Dunbar, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, and all
the south-east counties of Scotland, which were declared to be forever
annexed to the English monarchy.[**]
1334.
If Baliol on his first appearance was dreaded by the Scots, as an
instrument employed by England for the subjection of the kingdom, this
deed confirmed all their suspicions, and rendered him the object of
universal hatred. Whatever submissions they might be obliged to make, they
considered him not as their prince, but as the delegate and confederate of
their determined enemy: and neither the manners of the age, nor the state
of Edward’s revenue, permitting him to maintain a standing army in
Scotland, the English forces were no sooner withdrawn, than the Scots
revolted from Baliol, and returned to their former allegiance under Bruce.
Sir Andrew Murray, appointed regent by the party of this latter prince,
employed with success his valor and activity in many small but decisive
actions against Baliol; and in a short time had almost wholly expelled him
the kingdom.
1335.
Edward was obliged again to assemble an army, and to march into Scotland:
the Scots, taught by experience, withdrew into their hills and fastnesses:
he destroyed the houses and ravaged the estates of those whom he called
rebels: but this confirmed them still further in their obstinate antipathy
to England and to Baliol; and being now rendered desperate, they were
ready to take advantage, on the first opportunity, of the retreat of their
enemy, and they soon reconquered their country from the English.
1336.
Edward made anew his appearance in Scotland with like success: he found
every thing hostile in the kingdom, except the spot on which he was
encamped: and though he marched uncontrolled over the low countries, the
nation itself was farther than ever from being broken and subdued. Besides
being supported by their pride and anger, passions difficult to tame, they
were encouraged, amidst all their calamities, by daily promises of relief
from France; and as war was now likely to break out between that kingdom
and England, they had reason to expect, from this incident, a great
diversion of that force which had so long oppressed and overwhelmed them.
1337.
We now come to a transaction on which depended the most memorable events,
not only of this long and active reign, but of the whole English and
French history during more than a century; and it will therefore be
necessary to give a particular account of the springs and causes of it.
It had long been a prevailing opinion, that the crown of France could
never descend to a female; and in order to give more authority to this
maxim, and assign it a determinate origin, it had been usual to derive it
from a clause in the Salian code, the law of an ancient tribe among the
Franks; though that clause, when strictly examined, carries only the
appearance of favoring this principle, and does not really, by the
confession of the best antiquaries, bear the sense commonly imposed upon
it. But though positive law seems wanting among the French for the
exclusion of females, the practice had taken place; and the rule was
established beyond controversy on some ancient as well as some modern
precedents. During the first race of the monarchy, the Franks were so rude
and barbarous a people, that they were incapable of submitting to a female
reign; and in that period of their history there were frequent instances
of kings advanced to royalty, in prejudice of females who were related to
the crown by nearer degrees of consanguinity. These precedents, joined to
like causes, had also established the male succession in the second race;
and though the instances were neither so frequent nor so certain during
that period, the principle of excluding the female line seems still to
have prevailed, and to have directed the conduct of the nation. During the
third race, the crown had descended from father to son for eleven
generations, from Hugh Capet to Lewis Hutin; and thus, in fact, during the
course of nine hundred years, the French monarchy had always been governed
by males, and no female, and none who founded his title on a female, had
ever mounted the throne. Philip the Fair, father of Lewis Hutin, left
three sons, this Lewis, Philip the Long, and Charles the Fair, and one
daughter, Isabella, queen of England. Lewis Hutin, the eldest, left at his
death one daughter, by Margaret, sister to Eudes, duke of Burgundy; and as
his queen was then pregnant, Philip, his younger brother, was appointed
regent, till it should appear whether the child proved a son or a
daughter. The queen bore a male, who lived only a few days: Philip was
proclaimed king: and as the duke of Burgundy made some opposition, and
asserted the rights of his niece, the states of the kingdom, by a solemn
and deliberate decree, gave her an exclusion, and declared all females
forever incapable of succeeding to the crown of France. Philip died after
a short reign, leaving three daughters; and his brother Charles, without
dispute or controversy, then succeeded to the crown. The reign of Charles
was also short; he left one daughter; but as his queen was pregnant, the
next male heir was appointed regent, with a declared right of succession
if the issue should prove female. This prince was Philip de Valois,
cousin-german to the deceased king; being the son of Charles de Valois,
brother of Philip the Fair. The queen of France was delivered of a
daughter: the regency ended; and Philip de Valois was unanimously placed
on the throne of France.
The king of England, who was at that time a youth of fifteen years of age,
embraced a notion that he was entitled, in right of his mother, to the
succession of the kingdom, and that the claim of the nephew was preferable
to that of the cousin-german. There could not well be imagined a notion
weaker or worse grounded. The principle of excluding females was of old an
established opinion in France, and had acquired equal authority with the
most express and positive law: it was supported by ancient precedents: it
was confirmed by recent instances, solemnly and deliberately decided: and
what placed it still farther beyond controversy, if Edward was disposed to
question its validity, he thereby cut off his own pretensions; since the
three last kings had all left daughters, who were still alive, and who
stood before him in the order of succession. He was therefore reduced to
assert that, though his mother Isabella was, on account of her sex,
incapable of succeeding, he himself, who inherited through her, was liable
to no such objection, and might claim by the right of propinquity. But,
besides that this pretension was more favorable to Charles, king of
Navarre, descended from the daughter of Lewis Hutin, it was so contrary to
the established principles of succession in every country of Europe,[*]
was so repugnant to the practice both in private and public inheritances,
that nobody in France thought of Edward’s claim.
Philip’s title was universally recognized;[*] and he never imagined that
he had a competitor, much less so formidable a one as the king of England.
But though the youthful and ambitious mind of Edward had rashly
entertained this notion, he did not think proper to insist on his
pretensions, which must have immediately involved him, on very unequal
terms, in a dangerous and implacable war with so powerful a monarch.
Philip was a prince of mature years, of great experience, and at that time
of an established character both for prudence and valor; and by these
circumstances, as well as by the internal union of his people, and their
acquiescence in his undoubted right, he possessed every advantage above a
raw youth, newly raised, by injustice and violence, to the government of
the most intractable and most turbulent subjects in Europe. But there
immediately occurred an incident which required that Edward should either
openly declare his pretensions, or forever renounce and abjure them. He
was summoned to do homage for Guienne: Philip was preparing to compel him
by force of arms: that country was in a very bad state of defence: and the
forfeiture of so rich an inheritance was, by the feudal law, the immediate
consequence of his refusing or declining to perform the duty of a vassal.
Edward therefore thought it prudent to submit to present necessity: he
went over to Amiens, did homage to Philip, and as there had arisen some
controversy concerning the terms of this submission, he afterwards sent
over a formal deed, in which he acknowledged that he owed liege homage to
France;[**] which was in effect ratifying, and that in the strongest
terms, Philip’s title to the crown of that kingdom. His own claim indeed
was so unreasonable, and so thoroughly disavowed by the whole French
nation, that to insist on it was no better than pretending to the violent
conquest of the kingdom; and it is probable that he would never have
further thought of it, had it not been for some incidents which excited an
animosity between the monarchs.
Robert of Artois was descended from the blood royal of France, was a man
of great character and authority, had espoused Philip’s sister, and by his
birth, talents, and credit was entitled to make the highest figure, and
fill the most important offices in the monarchy. This prince had lost the
county of Artois, which he claimed as his birthright, by a sentence,
commonly deemed iniquitous, of Philip the Fair; and he was seduced to
attempt recovering possession by an action so unworthy of his rank and
character as a forgery.[*] The detection of this crime covered him with
shame and confusion: his brother-in-law not only abandoned him, but
prosecuted him with violence: Robert, incapable of bearing disgrace, left
the kingdom, and hid himself in the Low Countries: chased from that
retreat by the authority of Philip, he came over to England; in spite of
the French king’s menaces and remonstrances, he was favorably received by
Edward; [**] and was soon admitted into the councils and shared the
confidence of that monarch. Abandoning himself to all the movements of
rage and despair, he endeavored to revive the prepossession entertained by
Edward in favor of his title to the crown of France, and even flattered
him that it was not impossible for a prince of his valor and abilities to
render his claim effectual.
The king was the more disposed to hearken to suggestions of this nature,
because he had, in several particulars, found reason to complain of
Philip’s conduct with regard to Guienne, and because that prince had both
given protection to the exiled David Bruce, and supported, at least
encouraged, the Scots in their struggles for independence. Thus resentment
gradually filled the breasts of both monarchs, and made them incapable of
hearkening to any terms of accommodation proposed by the pope, who never
ceased interposing his good offices between them. Philip thought that he
should be wanting to the first principles of policy if he abandoned
Scotland: Edward affirmed that he must relinquish all pretensions to
generosity if he withdrew his protection from Robert. The former, informed
of some preparations for hostilities which had been made by his rival,
issued a sentence of felony and attainder against Robert, and declared
that every vassal of the crown, whether within or without the kingdom, who
gave countenance to that traitor, would be involved in the same sentence;
a menace easy to be understood: the latter, resolute not to yield,
endeavored to form alliances in the Low Countries and on the frontiers of
Germany, the only places from which he either could make an effectual
attack upon France, or produce such a diversion as might save the province
of Guienne, which lay so much exposed to the power of Philip.
The king began with opening his intentions to the count of Hainault, his
father-in-law; and having engaged him in his interests, he employed the
good offices and councils of that prince in drawing into his alliance the
other sovereigns of that neighborhood. The duke of Brabant was induced, by
his mediation, and by large remittances of money from England, to promise
his concurrence;[*] the archbishop of Cologne, the duke of Gueldres, the
marquis of Juliers, the count of Namur, the lords of Fauquemont and
Baquen, were engaged by like motives to embrace the English alliance.[**]
These sovereign princes could supply, either from their own states or from
the bordering countries, great numbers of warlike troops; and nought was
wanting to make the force on that quarter very formidable but the
accession of Flanders; which Edward procured by means somewhat
extraordinary and unusual.
As the Flemings were the first people in the northern parts of Europe that
cultivated arts and manufactures, the lower ranks of men among them had
risen to a degree of opulence unknown elsewhere to those of their station
in that barbarous age; had acquired privileges and independence, and began
to emerge from that state of vassalage, or rather of slavery, into which
the common people had been universally thrown by the feudal institutions.
It was probably difficult for them to bring their sovereign and their
nobility to conform themselves to the principles of law and civil
government, so much neglected in every other country: it was impossible
for them to confine themselves within the proper bounds in their
opposition and resentment against any instance of tyranny: they had risen
in tumults: had insulted the nobles: had chased their earl into France;
and delivering themselves over to the guidance of a seditious leader, had
been guilty of all that insolence and disorder to which the thoughtless
and enraged populace are so much inclined, wherever they are unfortunate
enough to be their own masters.[***]
Their present leader was James d’Arteville, a brewer in Ghent, who
governed them with a more absolute sway than had ever been assumed by any
of their lawful sovereigns: he placed and displaced the magistrates at
pleasure: he was accompanied by a guard, who, on the least signal from
him, instantly assassinated any man that happened to fall under his
displeasure: all the cities of Flanders were full of his spies: and it was
immediate death to give him the smallest umbrage: the few nobles who
remained in the country, lived in continual terror from his violence: he
seized the estates of all those whom he had either banished or murdered;
and bestowing part on their wives and children, converted the remainder to
his own use.* Such were the first effects that Europe saw of popular
violence, after having groaned, during so many ages, under monarchical and
aristocratical tyranny.
James d’Arteville was the man to whom Edward addressed himself for
bringing over the Flemings to his interests; and that prince, the most
haughty and most aspiring of the age, never courted any ally with so much
assiduity and so many submissions as he employed towards this seditious
and criminal tradesman. D’Arteville, proud of these advances from the king
of England, and sensible that the Flemings were naturally inclined to
maintain connections with the English who furnished them the materials of
their woollen manufactures, the chief source of their opulence, readily
embraced the interests of Edward, and invited him over into the Low
Countries. Edward, before he entered on this great enterprise, affected to
consult his parliament, asked their advice, and obtained their consent.[*]
And the more to strengthen his hands, he procured from them a grant of
twenty thousand sacks of wool; which might amount to about a hundred
thousand pounds: this commodity was a good instrument to employ with the
Flemings; and the price of it with his German allies. He completed the
other necessary sums by loans, by pawning the crown jewels, by
confiscating or rather robbing at once all the Lombards, who now exercised
the invidious trade formerly monopolized by the Jews, of lending on
interest;[**] and being attended by a body of English forces, and by
several of his nobility, he sailed over to Flanders.
1338.
The German princes, in order to justify their unprovoked hostilities
against France, had required the sanction of some legal authority; and
Edward, that he might give them satisfaction on this head, had applied to
Lewis of Bavaria, then emperor, and had been created by him “vicar of the
empire;” an empty title, but which seemed to give him a right of
commanding the service of the princes of Germany.[*] The Flemings, who
were vassals of France, pretending like scruples with regard to the
invasion of their liege lord; Edward, by the advice of d’Arteville,
assumed, in his commissions, the title of king of France; and, in virtue
of this right, claimed their assistance for dethroning Philip de Valois,
the usurper of his kingdom.[**]
This step, which he feared would destroy all future amity between the
kingdoms, and beget endless and implacable jealousies in France, was not
taken by him without much reluctance and hesitation: and not being in
itself very justifiable, it has in the issue been attended with many
miseries to both kingdoms. From this period we may date the commencement
of that great animosity which the English nation have ever since borne to
the French, which has so visible an influence on all future transactions,
and which has been, and continues to be, the spring of many rash and
precipitate resolutions among them. In all the preceding reigns since the
conquest, the hostilities between the two crowns had been only casual and
temporary; and as they had never been attended with any bloody or
dangerous event, the traces of them were easily obliterated by the first
treaty of pacification. The English nobility and gentry valued themselves
on their French or Norman extraction: they affected to employ the language
of that country in all public transactions, and even in familiar
conversation; and both the English court and camp being always full of
nobles who came from different provinces of France, the two people were,
during some centuries, more intermingled together than any two distinct
nations whom we meet with in history. But the fatal pretensions of Edward
III. dissolved all these connections, and left the seeds of great
animosity in both countries, especially among the English. For it is
remarkable, that this latter nation, though they were commonly the
aggressors, and by their success and situation were enabled to commit the
most cruel injuries on the other, have always retained a stronger tincture
of national antipathy; nor is their hatred retaliated on them to an equal
degree by the French. That country lies in the middle of Europe, has been
successively engaged in hostilities with all its neighbors, the popular
prejudices have been diverted into many channels, and, among a people of
softer manners, they never rose to a great height against any particular
nation.
Philip made great preparations against the attack from the English, and
such as seemed more than sufficient to secure him from the danger. Besides
the concurrence of all the nobility in his own populous and warlike
kingdom, his foreign alliances were both more cordial and more powerful
than those which were formed by his antagonist. The pope, who, at this
time, lived in Avignon, was dependent on France; and being disgusted at
the connections between Edward and Lewis of Bavaria, whom he had
excommunicated, he embraced with zeal and sincerity the cause of the
French monarch. The king of Navarre, the duke of Brittany, the count of
Bar, were in the same interests; and on the side of Germany, the king of
Bohemia, the Palatine, the dukes of Lorraine and Austria, the bishop of
Liege, the counts of Deuxpont, Vaudemont, and Geneva. The allies of Edward
were in themselves weaker; and having no object but his money, which began
to be exhausted, they were slow in their motions and irresolute in their
measures.
1339.
The duke of Brabant, the most powerful among them, seemed even inclined to
withdraw himself wholly from the alliance; and the king was necessitated
both to give the Brabanters new privileges in trade, and to contract his
son Edward with the daughter of that prince, ere he could bring him to
fulfil his engagements. The summer was wasted in conferences and
negotiations before Edward could take the field; and he was obliged, in
order to allure his German allies into his measures, to pretend that the
first attack should be made upon Cambray, a city of the empire which had
been garrisoned by Philip.[*] But finding, upon trial, the difficulty of
the enterprise, he conducted them towards the frontiers of France; and he
there saw, by a sensible proof, the vanity of his expectations: the count
of Namur, and even the count of Hainault, his brother-in-law (for the old
count was dead,) refused to commence hostilities against their liege lord,
and retired with their troops.[**] So little account did they make of
Edward’s pretensions to the crown of France!
The king, however, entered the enemy’s country, and encamped on the fields
of Vironfosse, near Capeile, with an army of near fifty thousand men,
composed almost entirely of foreigners: Philip approached him with an army
of near double the force, composed chiefly of native subjects; and it was
daily expected that a battle would ensue. But the English monarch was
averse to engage against so great a superiority: the French thought it
sufficient if he eluded the attacks of his enemy, without running any
unnecessary hazard. The two armies faced each other for some days: mutual
defiances were sent: and Edward, at last, retired into Flanders, and
disbanded his army.[*]
Such was the fruitless and almost ridiculous conclusion of Edward’s mighty
preparations; and as his measures were the most prudent that could be
embraced in his situation, he might learn from experience in what a
hopeless enterprise he was engaged. His expenses, though they had led to
no end, had been consuming and destructive; he had contracted near three
hundred thousand pounds of debt;[**] he had anticipated all his revenue;
he had pawned every thing of value which belonged either to himself or his
queen; he was obliged in some measure even to pawn himself to his
creditors, by not sailing to England till he obtained their permission,
and by promising on his word of honor to return in person, if he did not
remit their money.
But he was a prince of too much spirit to be discouraged by the first
difficulties of an undertaking; and he was anxious to retrieve his honor
by more successful and more gallant enterprises. For this purpose he had,
during the course of the campaign, sent orders to summon a parliament by
his son Edward, whom he had left with the title of guardian, and to demand
some supply in his urgent necessities. The barons seemed inclined to grant
his request; but the knights, who often, at this time, acted as a separate
body from the burgesses, made some scruple of taxing their constituents
without their consent; and they desired the guardian to summon a new
parliament, which might be properly empowered for that purpose. The
situation of the king and parliament was for the time, nearly similar to
that which they constantly fell into about the beginning of the last
century; and similar consequences began visibly to appear. The king,
sensible of the frequent demands which he should be obliged to make on his
people, had been anxious to insure to his friends a seat in the house of
commons, and at his instigation the sheriffs and other placemen had made
interest to be elected into that assembly; an abuse which the knights
desired the king to correct by the tenor of his writ of summons, and which
was accordingly remedied. On the other hand, the knights had professedly
annexed conditions to their intended grant, and required a considerable
retrenchment of the royal prerogatives, particularly with regard to
purveyance, and the levying of the ancient feudal aids for knighting the
king’s eldest son, and marrying his eldest daughter. The new parliament,
called by the guardian, retained the same free spirit; and though they
offered a large supply of thirty thousand sacks of wool, no business was
concluded; because the conditions which they annexed appeared too high to
be compensated by a temporary concession. But when Edward himself came
over to England, he summoned another parliament, and he had the interest
to procure a supply on more moderate terms. A confirmation of the two
charters, and of the privileges of boroughs, a pardon for old debts and
trespasses, and a remedy for some abuses in the execution of common law,
were the chief conditions insisted on; and the king, in return for his
concessions on these heads, obtained from the barons and knights an
unusual grant for two years, of the ninth sheaf, lamb, and fleece on their
estates, and from the burgesses a ninth of their movables at their true
value. The whole parliament also granted a duty of forty shillings on each
sack of wool exported, on each three hundred woolfells, and on each last
of leather for the same term of years, but dreading the arbitrary spirit
of the crown, they expressly declared, that this grant was to continue no
longer, and was not to be drawn into precedent. Being soon after sensible
that this supply, though considerable, and very unusual in that age, would
come in slowly, and would not answer the king’s urgent necessities,
proceeding both from his debts and his preparations for war, they agreed
that twenty thousand sacks of wool should immediately be granted him, and
their value be deducted from the ninths which were afterwards to be
levied.
But there appeared at this time another jealousy in the parliament, which
was very reasonable, and was founded on a sentiment that ought to have
engaged them rather to check than support the king in all those ambitious
projects, so little likely to prove successful, and so dangerous to the
nation if they did. Edward, who, before the commencement of the former
campaign, had, in several commissions, assumed the title of king of
France, now more openly, in all public deeds, gave himself that
appellation, and always quartered the arms of France with those of England
in his seals and ensigns. The parliament thought proper to obviate the
consequences of this measure, and to declare that they owed him no
obedience as king of France, and that the two kingdoms must forever remain
distinct and independent.[*] They undoubtedly foresaw that France, if
subdued, would in the end prove the seat of government; and they deemed
this previous protestation necessary, in order to prevent their becoming a
province to that monarchy: a frail security if the event had really taken
place!
1340.
As Philip was apprised, from the preparations which were making both in
England and the Low Countries, that he must expect another invasion from
Edward, he fitted out a great fleet of four hundred vessels, manned with
forty thousand men: and he stationed them off Sluise, with a view of
intercepting the king in his passage. The English navy was much inferior
in number, consisting only of two hundred and forty sail; but whether it
were by the superior abilities of Edward, or the greater dexterity of his
seamen, they gained the wind of the enemy, and had the sun in their backs:
and with these advantages began the action. The battle was fierce and
bloody: the English archers, whose force and address were now much
celebrated, galled the French on their approach: and when the ships
grappled together, and the contest became more steady and furious, the
example of the king, and of so many gallant nobles who accompanied him,
animated to such a degree the seamen and soldiery, that they maintained
every where a superiority over the enemy. The French also had been guilty
of some imprudence in taking their station so near the coast of Flanders,
and choosing that place for the scene of action. The Flemings, descrying
the battle, hurried out of their harbors, and brought a reënforcement to
the English; which, coming unexpectedly, had a greater effect than in
proportion to its power and numbers. Two hundred and thirty French ships
were taken: thirty thousand Frenchmen were killed, with two of their
admirals: the loss of the English was inconsiderable, compared to the
greatness and importance of the victory.[*] None of Philip’s courtiers, it
is said, dared to inform him of the event; till his fool or jester gave
him a hint, by which he discovered the loss that he had sustained.[**]
The lustre of this great success increased the king’s authority among his
allies, who assembled their forces with expedition, and joined the English
army. Edward marched to the frontiers of France at the head of above one
hundred thousand men, consisting chiefly of foreigners, a more numerous
army than either before or since has ever been commanded by any king of
England.[***] At the same time the Flemings, to the number of fifty
thousand men, marched out under the command of Robert of Artois, and laid
siege to St. Omer; but this tumultuary army, composed entirely of
tradesmen unexperienced in war, was routed by a sally of the garrison, and
notwithstanding the abilities of their leader, was thrown into such a
panic, that they were instantly dispersed, and never more appeared in the
field. The enterprises of Edward, though not attended with so inglorious
an issue, proved equally vain and fruitless. The king of France had
assembled an army more numerous than the English; was accompanied by all
the chief nobility of his kingdom; was attended by many foreign princes,
and even by three monarchs, the kings of Bohemia, Scotland, and
Navarre:[****] yet he still adhered to the prudent resolution of putting
nothing to hazard; and after throwing strong garrisons into all the
frontier towns, he retired backwards, persuaded that the enemy, having
wasted their force in some tedious and unsuccessful enterprise, would
afford him an easy victory.
Tournay was at that time one of the most considerable cities of Flanders,
containing above sixty thousand inhabitants of all ages, who were
affectionate to the French government: and as the secret of Edward’s
designs had not been strictly kept, Philip learned that the English, in
order to gratify their Flemish allies, had intended to open the campaign
with the siege of this place: he took care therefore to supply it with a
garrison of fourteen thousand men, commanded by the bravest nobility of
France; and he reasonably expected that these forces, joined to the
inhabitants, would be able to defend the city against all the efforts of
the enemy. Accordingly Edward, when he commenced the siege about the end
of July found every where an obstinate resistance: the valor of one side
was encountered with equal valor by the other: every assault was repulsed,
and proved unsuccessful: and the king was at last obliged to turn the
siege into a blockade, in hopes that the great numbers of the garrison and
citizens, which had enabled them to defend themselves against his attacks,
would but expose them to be the more easily reduced by famine.[*] The
count of Eu, who commanded in Tournay, as soon as he perceived that the
English had formed this plan of operations endeavored to save his
provisions by expelling all the useless mouths; and the duke of Brabant,
who wished no success to Edward’s enterprises, gave every one a free
passage through his quarters.
After the siege had continued ten weeks, the city was reduced to distress;
and Philip, recalling all his scattered garrisons, advanced towards the
English camp at the head of a mighty army, with an intention of still
avoiding any decisive action, but of seeking some opportunity for throwing
relief into the place. Here Edward, irritated with the small progress he
had hitherto made, and with the disagreeable prospect that lay before him,
sent Philip a defiance by a herald and challenged him to decide their
claims for the crown of France either by single combat, or by an action of
a hundred against a hundred, or by a general engagement. But Philip
replied, that Edward having done homage to him for the duchy of Guienne,
and having solemnly acknowledged him for his superior, it by no means
became him to send a defiance to his liege lord and sovereign: that he was
confident, notwithstanding all Edward’s preparations, and his conjunction
with the rebellious Flemings, he himself should soon be able to chase him
from the frontiers of France: that as the hostilities from England had
prevented him from executing his purposed crusade against the infidels, he
trusted in the assistance of the Almighty, who would reward his pious
intentions, and punish the aggressor, whose ill-grounded claims had
rendered them abortive: that Edward proposed a duel on very unequal terms,
and offered to hazard only his own person against both the kingdom of
France and the person of the king: but that, if he would increase the
stake, and put also the kingdom of England on the issue of the duel, he
would, notwithstanding that the terms would still be unequal, very
willingly accept of the challenge.[*] It was easy to see that these mutual
bravadoes were intended only to dazzle the populace, and that the two
kings were too wise to think of executing their pretended purpose.
While the French and English armies lay in this situation, and a general
action was every day expected, Jane, countess dowager of Hainault,
interposed with her good offices, and endeavored to conciliate peace
between the contending monarchs, and to prevent any further effusion of
blood. This princess was mother-in-law to Edward, and sister to Philip;
and though she had taken the vows in a convent, and had renounced the
world, she left her retreat on this occasion, and employed all her pious
efforts to allay those animosities which had taken place between persons
so nearly related to her and to each other. As Philip had no material
claims on his antagonist, she found that he hearkened willingly to the
proposals; and even the haughty and ambitious Edward, convinced of his
fruitless attempt, was not averse to her negotiation. He was sensible,
from experience, that he had engaged in an enterprise which far exceeded
his force; and that the power of England was never likely to prevail over
that of a superior kingdom, firmly united under an able and prudent
monarch. He discovered that all the allies whom he could gain by
negotiation were at bottom averse to his enterprise; and though they might
second it to a certain length, would immediately detach themselves, and
oppose its final accomplishment, if ever they could be brought to think
that there was seriously any danger of it. He even saw that their chief
purpose was to obtain money from him; and as his supplies from England
came in very slowly, and had much disappointed his expectations, he
perceived their growing indifference in his cause, and their desire of
embracing all plausible terms of accommodation. Convinced at last that an
undertaking must be imprudent which could only be supported by means so
unequal to the end, he concluded a truce, which left both parties in
possession of their present acquisitions, and stopped all further
hostilities on the side of the Low Countries, Guienne, and Scotland, till
midsummer next.[*] A negotiation was soon after opened at Arras, under the
mediation of the pope’s legates; and the truce was attempted to be
converted into a solid peace. Edward here required that Philip should free
Guienne from all claims of superiority, and entirely withdraw his
protection from Scotland: but as he seemed not anywise entitled to make
such high demands, either from his past successes or future prospects,
they were totally rejected by Philip, who agreed only to a prolongation of
the truce.
The king of France soon after detached the emperor Lewis from the alliance
of England, and engaged him to revoke the title of imperial vicar, which
he had conferred on Edward.[**] The king’s other allies on the frontiers
of France, disappointed in their hopes, gradually withdrew from the
confederacy. And Edward himself, harassed by his numerous and importunate
creditors, was obliged to make his escape by stealth into England.
The unusual tax of a ninth sheaf, lamb, and fleece, imposed by parliament,
together with the great want of money, and still more, of credit in
England, had rendered the remittances to Flanders extremely backward; nor
could it be expected, that any expeditious method of collecting an
imposition, which was so new in itself, and which yielded only a gradual
produce, could possibly be contrived by the king or his ministers. And
though the parliament, foreseeing the inconvenience, had granted, as a
present resource, twenty thousand sacks of wool, the only English goods
that bore a sure price in foreign markets, and were the next to ready
money, it was impossible but the getting possession of such a bulky
commodity, the gathering of it from different parts of the kingdom, and
the disposing of it abroad, must take up more time than the urgency of the
king’s affairs would permit, and must occasion all the disappointments
complained of during the course of the campaign. But though nothing had
happened which Edward might not reasonably have foreseen, he was so
irritated with the unfortunate issue of his military operations, and so
much vexed and affronted by his foreign creditors, that he was determined
to throw the blame somewhere off himself and he came in very bad humor
into England. He discovered his peevish disposition by the first act which
he performed after his arrival: as he landed unexpectedly, he found the
Tower negligently guarded; and he immediately committed to prison the
constable and all others who had the charge of that fortress, and he
treated them with unusual rigor.[*] His vengeance fell next on the
officers of the revenue, the sheriffs, the collectors of the taxes, the
undertakers of all kinds; and besides dismissing all of them from their
employments, he appointed commissioners to inquire into their conduct; and
these men, in order to gratify the king’s humor, were sure not to find any
person innocent who came before them.[**] Sir John St. Paul, keeper of the
privy seal, Sir John Stonore, chief justice, Andrew Aubrey, mayor of
London, were displaced and imprisoned; as were also the bishop of
Chichester, chancellor, and the bishop of Lichfield, treasurer; Stratford,
archbishop of Canterbury, to whom the charge of collecting the new taxes
had been chiefly intrusted, fell likewise under the king’s displeasure;
but being absent at the time of Edward’s arrival, he escaped feeling the
immediate effects of it.
There were strong reasons, which might discourage the kings of England, in
those ages, from bestowing the chief offices of the crown on prelates and
other ecclesiastical persons. These men had so intrenched themselves in
privileges and immunities, and so openly challenged an exemption from all
secular jurisdiction, that no civil penalty could be inflicted on them for
any malversation in office; and as even treason itself was declared to be
no canonical offence, nor was allowed to be a sufficient reason for
deprivation or other spiritual censures, that order of men had insured to
themselves an almost total impunity, and were not bound by any political
law or statute. But, on the other hand, there were many peculiar causes
which favored their promotion. Besides that they possessed almost all the
learning of the age, and were best qualified for civil employments, the
prelates enjoyed equal dignity with the greatest barons, and gave weight
by their personal authority, to the powers intrusted with them; while, at
the same time, they did not endanger the crown by accumulating wealth or
influence in their families, and were restrained, by the decency of their
character, from that open rapine and violence so often practised by the
nobles. These motives had induced Edward, as well as many of his
predecessors, to intrust the chief departments of government in the hands
of ecclesiastics; at the hazard of seeing them disown his authority as
soon as it was turned against them.
1341.
This was the case with Archbishop Stratford. That prelate, informed of
Edward’s indignation against him prepared himself for the storm; and not
content with standing upon the defensive, he resolved, by beginning the
attack, to show the king that he knew the privileges of his character, and
had courage to maintain them. He issued a general sentence of
excommunication against all who, on any pretext, exercised violence on the
person or goods of clergymen; who infringed those privileges secured by
the Great Charter, and by ecclesiastical canons; or who accused a prelate
of treason or any other crime, in order to bring him under the king’s
displeasure.[*]
Even Edward had reason to think himself struck at by this sentence; both
on account of the imprisonment of the two bishops and that of other
clergymen concerned in levying the taxes, and on account of his seizing
their lands and movables, that he might make them answerable for any
balance which remained in their hands. The clergy, with the primate at
their head, were now formed into a regular combination against the king;
and many calumnies were spread against him, in order to deprive him of the
confidence and affections of his people. It was pretended that he meant to
recall the general pardon, and the remission which he had granted of old
debts, and to impose new and arbitrary taxes without consent of
parliament. The archbishop went so far, in a letter to the king himself,
as to tell him, that there were two powers by which the world was
governed, the holy pontifical apostolic dignity, and the royal subordinate
authority: that of these two powers, the clerical was evidently the
supreme; since the priests were to answer, at the tribunal of the divine
judgment, for the conduct of kings themselves: that the clergy were the
spiritual fathers of all the faithful, and amongst others of kings and
princes; and were entitled, by a heavenly charter, to direct their wills
and actions, and to censure their transgressions: and that prelates had
hitherto cited emperors before their tribunal, had sitten in judgment on
their life and behavior, and had anathematized them for their obstinate
offences.[*] These topics were not well calculated to appease Edward’s
indignation; and when he called a parliament, he sent not to the primate,
as to the other peers, a summons to attend it. Stratford was not
discouraged at this mark of neglect or anger: he appeared before the
gates, arrayed in his pontifical robes, holding the crosier in his hand
and accompanied by a pompous train of priests and prelates; and he
required admittance as the first and highest peer in the realm. During two
days the king rejected his application: but sensible, either that this
affair might be attended with dangerous consequences, or that in his
impatience he had groundlessly accused the primate of malversation in his
office, which seems really to have been the case, he at last permitted him
to take his seat, and was reconciled to him.[**]
Edward now found himself in a bad situation, both with his own people and
with foreign states; and it required all his genius and capacity to
extricate himself from such multiplied difficulties and embarrassments.
His unjust and exorbitant claims on France and Scotland had engaged him in
an implacable war with those two kingdoms, his nearest neighbors: he had
lost almost all his foreign alliances by his irregular payments: he was
deeply involved in debts, for which he owed a consuming interest: his
military operations had vanished into smoke; and, except his naval
victory, none of them had been attended even with glory or renown, either
to himself or to the nation: the animosity between him and the clergy was
open and declared: the people were discontented on account of many
arbitrary measures, in which he had been engaged, and what was more
dangerous, the nobility, taking advantage of his present necessities, were
determined to retrench his power, and by encroaching on the ancient
prerogatives of the crown, to acquire to themselves independence and
authority. But the aspiring genius of Edward, which had so far transported
him beyond the bounds of discretion, proved at last sufficient to
reinstate him in his former authority, and finally to render his reign the
most triumphant that is to be met with in English story; though for the
present he was obliged, with some loss of honor, to yield to the current
which bore so strongly against him.
The parliament framed an act which was likely to produce considerable
innovations in the government. They premised, that, whereas the Great
Charter had, to the manifest peril and slander of the king and damage of
his people, been violated in many points, particularly by the imprisonment
of freemen and the seizure of their goods, without suit, indictment, or
trial, it was necessary to confirm it anew, and to oblige all the chief
officers of the law, together with the steward and chamberlain of the
household, the keeper of the privy seal, the controller and treasurer of
the wardrobe, and those who were intrusted with the education of the young
prince, to swear to the regular observance of it. They also remarked, that
the peers of the realm had formerly been arrested and imprisoned, and
dispossessed of their temporalities and lands, and even some of them put
to death, without judgment or trial; and they therefore enacted that such
violences should henceforth cease, and no peer be punished but by the
award of his peers “in parliament.” They required, that, whenever any of
the great offices above mentioned became vacant, the king should fill it
by the advice of his council, and the consent of such barons as should at
that time be found to reside in the neighborhood of the court. And they
enacted, that, on the third day of every session, the king should resume
into his own hand all these offices, except those of justices of the two
benches and the barons of exchequer; that the ministers should for the
time be reduced to private persons; that they should in that condition
answer before parliament to any accusation brought against them; and that
if they were found anywise guilty, they should finally be dispossessed of
their offices, and more able persons be substituted in their place.[*] By
these last regulations, the barons approached as near as they durst to
those restrictions which had formerly been imposed on Henry III. and
Edward II., and which, from the dangerous consequences attending them, had
become so generally odious, that they did not expect to have either the
concurrence of the people in demanding the*n, or the assent of the present
king in granting them.
* 15 Edward III.
In return for these important concessions, the parliament offered the king
a grant of twenty thousand sacks of wool; and his wants were so urgent
from the clamors of his creditors and the demands of his foreign allies,
that he was obliged to accept of the supply on these hard conditions. He
ratified this statute in full parliament: but he secretly entered a
protest of such a nature as was sufficient, one should imagine to destroy
all future trust and confidence with his people; he declared that, as soon
as his convenience permitted, he would, from his own authority, revoke
what had been extorted from him.[*] Accordingly he was no sooner possessed
of the parliamentary supply, than he issued an edict, which contains many
extraordinary positions and pretensions. He first asserts, that that
statute had been enacted contrary to law, as if a free legislative body
could ever do any thing illegal. He next affirms, that as it was hurtful
to the prerogatives of the crown, which he had sworn to defend, he had
only dissembled when he seemed to ratify it, but that he had never in his
own breast given his assent to it. He does not pretend that either he or
the parliament lay under force; but only that some inconvenience would
have ensued, had he not seemingly affixed his sanction to that pretended
statute. He therefore, with the advice of his council and of some earls
and barons, abrogates and annuls it; and though he professes himself
willing and determined to observe such articles of it as were formerly
law, he declares it to have thenceforth no force or authority.[**] The
parliaments that were afterwards assembled took no notice of this
arbitrary exertion of royal power, which, by a parity of reason, left all
their laws at the mercy of the king; and, during the course of two years,
Edward had so far reëstablished his influence, and freed himself from his
present necessities, that he then obtained from his parliament a legal
repeal of the obnoxious statute.[***] This transaction certainly contains
remarkable circumstances, which discover the manners and sentiments of the
age; and may prove what inaccurate work might be expected from such rude
hands, when employed in legislation, and in rearing the delicate fabric of
laws and a constitution.
But though Edward had happily recovered his authority at home, which had
been impaired by the events of the French war, he had undergone so many
mortifications from that attempt.
John III., duke of Brittany, had, during some years, found himself
declining through age and infirmities; and having no issue, he was
solicitous to prevent those disorders to which, on the event of his
demise, a disputed succession might expose his subjects. His younger
brother, the count of Penthiev had left only one daughter, whom the duke
deemed his heir; and as his family had inherited the duchy by a female
succession, he thought her title preferable to that of the count of
Mountfort, who, being his brother by a second marriage, was the male heir
of that principality.[*] He accordingly purposed to bestow his niece in
marriage on some person who might be able to defend her rights; and he
cast his eye on Charles of Blois, nephew of the king of France, by his
mother, Margaret of Valois, sister to that monarch. But as he both loved
his subjects and was beloved by them, he determined not to take this
important step without their approbation; and having assembled the states
of Brittany, he represented to them the advantages of that alliance, and
the prospect which it gave of an entire settlement of the succession. The
Bretons willingly concurred in his choice: the marriage was concluded: all
his vassals, and among the rest the count of Mountfort, swore fealty to
Charles and to his consort, as to their future sovereigns; and every
danger of civil commotions seemed to be obviated, as far as human prudence
could provide a remedy against them.
But on the death of this good prince, the ambition of the count of
Mountfort broke through all these regulations, and kindled a war, not only
dangerous to Brittany, but to a great part of Europe. While Charles of
Blois was soliciting at the court of France the investiture of the duchy,
Mountfort was active in acquiring immediate possession of it; and by force
or intrigue he made himself master of Rennes, Nantz, Brest Hennebonne, and
all the most important fortresses, and engaged many considerable barons to
acknowledge his authority.[**] Sensible that he could expect no favor from
Philip, he made a voyage to England, on pretence of soliciting his claim
to the earldom of Richmond, which had devolved to him by his brother’s
death; and there, offering to do homage to Edward, as king of France, for
the duchy of Brittany, he proposed a strict alliance for the support of
their mutual pretensions.
Edward saw immediately the advantages attending this treaty: Mountfort, an
active and valiant prince, closely united to him by interest, opened at
once an entrance into the heart of France, and afforded him much more
flattering views than his allies on the side of Germany and the Low
Countries, who had no sincere attachment to his cause, and whose progress
was also obstructed by those numerous fortifications which had been raised
on that frontier. Robert of Artois was zealous in enforcing these
considerations: the ambitious spirit of Edward was little disposed to sit
down under those repulses which he had received, and which he thought had
so much impaired his reputation; and it required a very short negotiation
to conclude a treaty of alliance between two men, who, though their pleas
with regard to the preference of male or female succession were directly
opposite, were intimately connected by their immediate interests.[*]
As this treaty was still a secret, Mountfort, on his return, ventured to
appear at Paris, in order to defend his cause before the court of peers;
but observing Philip and his judges to be prepossessed against his title,
and dreading their intentions of arresting him, till he should restore
what he had seized by violence, he suddenly made his escape; and war
immediately commenced between him and Charles of Blois.[**] Philip sent
his eldest son, the duke of Normandy, with a powerful army, to the
assistance of the latter; and Mountfort, unable to keep the field against
his rival, remained in the city of Nantz, where he was besieged. The city
was taken by the treachery of the inhabitants; Mountfort fell into the
hands of his enemies, was conducted as a prisoner to Paris, and was shut
up in the tower of the Louvre.[***]
1342.
This event seemed to put an end to the pretensions of the count of
Mountfort; but his affairs were immediately retrieved by an unexpected
incident, which inspired new life and vigor into his party. Jane of
Flanders, countess of Mountfort, the most extraordinary woman of the age,
was roused, by the captivity of her husband, from those domestic cares to
which she had hitherto limited her genius; and she courageously undertook
to support the falling fortunes of her family No sooner did she receive
the fatal intelligence, than she assembled the inhabitants of Rennes,
where she then resided; and carrying her infant son in her arms, deplored
to them the calamity of their sovereign. She recommended to their care the
illustrious orphan, the sole male remaining of their ancient princes, who
had governed them with such indulgence and lenity, and to whom they had
ever professed the most zealous attachment. She declared herself willing
to run all hazards with them in so just a cause; discovered the resources
which still remained in the alliance of England; and entreated them to
make one effort against a usurper, who, being imposed on them by the arms
of France, would in return make a sacrifice to his protector of the
ancient liberties of Brittany. The audience, moved by the affecting
appearance, and inspirited by the noble conduct of the princess, vowed to
live and die with her in defending the rights of her family: all the other
fortresses of Brittany embraced the same resolution: the countess went
from place to place encouraging the garrisons, providing them with every
thing necessary for subsistence, and concerting the proper plans of
defence; and after she had put the whole province in a good posture, she
shut herself up in Hennebonne, where she waited with impatience the
arrival of those succors which Edward had promised her. Meanwhile she sent
over her son to England, that she might both put him in a place of safety,
and engage the king more strongly, by such a pledge, to embrace with zeal
the interests of her family.
Charles of Blois, anxious to make himself master of so important a
fortress as Hennebonne, and still more to take the countess prisoner, from
whose vigor and capacity all the difficulties to his succession in
Brittany now proceeded, sat down before the place with a great army,
composed of French, Spaniards, Genoese, and some Bretons; and he conducted
the attack with indefatigable industry.[*]
The defence was no less vigorous: the besiegers were repulsed in every
assault: frequent sallies were made with success by the garrison; and the
countess herself being the most forward in all military operations, every
one was ashamed not to exert himself to the utmost in this desperate
situation. One day, she perceived that the besiegers, entirely occupied in
an attack, had neglected a distant quarter of their camp; and she
immediately sallied forth at the head of a body of two hundred cavalry,
threw them into confusion, did great execution upon them, and set fire to
their tents, baggage, and magazines; but when she was preparing to return,
she found that she was intercepted, and that a considerable body of the
enemy had thrown themselves between her and the gates. She instantly took
her resolution; she ordered her men to disband, and to make the best of
their way by flight to Brest; she met them at the appointed place of
rendezvous, collected another body of five hundred horse, returned to
Hennebonne, broke unexpectedly through the enemy’s camp, and was received
with shouts and acclamations by the garrison, who, encouraged by this
reënforcement, and by so rare an example of female valor, determined to
defend themselves to the last extremity.
The reiterated attacks, however, of the besiegers had at length made
several breaches in the walls; and it was apprehended that a general
assault, which was every hour expected would overpower the garrison,
diminished in numbers, and extremely weakened with watching and fatigue.
It became necessary to treat of a capitulation; and the bishop of Leon was
already engaged, for that purpose, in a conference with Charles of Blois,
when the countess, who had mounted to a high tower, and was looking
towards the sea with great impatience, descried some sails at a distance.
She immediately exclaimed, “Behold the succors! the English succors! No
capitulation!”[*] This fleet had on board a body of heavy-armed cavalry,
and six thousand archers, whom Edward had prepared for the relief of
Hennebonne, but who had been long detained by contrary winds. They entered
the harbor under the command of Sir Walter Manny, one of the bravest
captains of England: and having inspired fresh courage into the garrison,
immediately sallied forth, beat the besiegers from all their posts, and
obliged them to decamp.
But notwithstanding this success, the countess of Mountfort found that her
party, overpowered by numbers, was declining in every quarter; and she
went over to solicit more effectual succors from the king of England.
Edward granted her a considerable reënforcement under Robert of Artois,
who embarked on board a fleet of forty-five ships, and sailed to Brittany.
He was met in his passage by the enemy; an action ensued, where the
countess behaved with her wonted valor, and charged the enemy sword in
hand; but the hostile fleets, after a sharp action, were separated by a
storm, and the English arrived safely in Brittany. The first exploit of
Robert was the taking of Vannes, which he mastered by conduct and
address;[*] but he survived a very little time this prosperity. The Breton
noblemen of the party of Charles assembled secretly in arms, attacked
Vannes of a sudden, and carried the place; chiefly by reason of a wound
received by Robert, of which he soon after died at sea, on his return to
England.[**]
After the death of this unfortunate prince, the chief author of all the
calamities with which his country was overwhelmed for more than a century,
Edward undertook in person the defence of the countess of Mountfort; and
as the last truce with France was now expired, the war, which the English
and French had hitherto carried on as allies to the competitors for
Brittany, was thenceforth conducted in the name and under the standard of
the two monarchs. The king landed at Morbian, near Vannes, with an army of
twelve thousand men; and being master of the field, he endeavored to give
a lustre to his arms, by commencing at once three important sieges, that
of Vannes, of Rennes, and of Nantz. But by undertaking too much, he failed
of success in all his enterprises. Even the siege of Vannes, which Edward
in person conducted with vigor, advanced but slowly;[***] and the French
had all the leisure requisite for making preparations against him.
The duke of Normandy, eldest son of Philip, appeared in Brittany at the
head of an army of thirty thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry; and
Edward was now obliged to draw together all his forces, and to intrench
himself strongly before Vannes, where the duke of Normandy soon after
arrived, and in a manner invested the besiegers. The garrison and the
French camp were plentifully supplied with provisions; while the English,
who durst not make any attempt upon the place in the presence of a
superior army, drew all their subsistence from England, exposed to the
hazards of the sea, and sometimes to those which arose from the fleet of
the enemy.
1243.
In this dangerous situation, Edward willingly hearkened to the mediation
of the pope’s legates, the cardinals of Palestrine and Frescati, who
endeavored to negotiate, if not a peace, at east a truce, between the two
kingdoms. A treaty was concluded for a cessation of arms during three
years;[*] and Edward had the abilities, notwithstanding his present
dangerous situation, to procure to himself very equal and honorable terms,
It was agreed that Vannes should be sequestered, during the truce, in the
hands of the legates, to be disposed of afterwards as they pleased; and
though Edward knew the partiality of the court of Rome towards his
antagonists, he saved himself by this device from the dishonor of having
undertaken a fruitless enterprise. It was also stipulated, that all
prisoners should be released, that the places in Brittany should remain in
the hands of the present possessors, and that the allies on both sides
should be comprehended in the truce.[**] Edward, soon after concluding
this treaty, embarked with his army for England.
The truce, though calculated for a long time, was of very short duration;
and each monarch endeavored to throw on the other the blame of its
infraction. Of course the historians of the two countries differ in their
account of the matter. It seems probable, however, as is affirmed by the
French writers, that Edward, in consenting to the truce, had no other view
than to extricate himself from a perilous situation into which he had
fallen, and was afterwards very careless in observing it. In all the
memorials which remain on this subject, he complains chiefly of the
punishment inflicted on Oliver de Clisson, John de Montauban, and other
Breton noblemen, who, he says, were partisans of the family of Mountfort,
and consequently under the protection of England.[***] But it appears
that, at the conclusion of the truce, those noblemen had openly, by their
declarations and actions, embraced the cause of Charles of Blois;[****]
and if they had entered into any secret correspondence and engagements
with Edward, they were traitors to their party, and were justly punishable
by Philip and Charles for their breach of faith; nor had Edward any ground
of complaint against France for such severities.
1344.
But when he laid these pretended injuries before the parliament, whom he
affected to consult on all occasions, that assembly entered into the
quarrel, advised the king not to be amused by a fraudulent truce, and
granted him supplies for the renewal of the war: the counties were charged
with a fifteenth for two years, and the boroughs with a tenth. The clergy
consented to give a tenth for three years.
These supplies enabled the king to complete his military preparations; and
he sent his cousin, Henry, earl of Derby, son of the earl of Lancaster,
into Guienne, for the defence of that province.[*] This prince, the most
accomplished in the English court, possessed to a high degree the virtues
of justice and humanity, as well as those of valor and conduct;[**] and
not content with protecting and cherishing the province committed to his
care, he made a successful invasion on the enemy. He attacked the count of
Lisle, the French general, at Bergerac, beat him from his intrenchments,
and took the place. He reduced a great part of Perigord, and continually
advanced in his conquests, till the count of Lisle, having collected an
army of ten or twelve thousand men, sat down before Auberoche, in hopes of
recovering that place, which had fallen into the hands of the English.
1345.
The earl of Derby came upon him by surprise with only a thousand cavalry,
threw the French into disorder, pushed his advantage, and obtained a
complete victory. Lisle himself, with many considerable nobles, was taken
prisoner.[***] After this important success, Derby made a rapid progress
in subduing the French provinces. He took Monsegur, Monpesat,
Villefranche, Miremont, and Tonnins, with the fortress of Damassen.
Aiguillon, a fortress deemed impregnable, fell into his hands from the
cowardice of the governor. Angouleme was surrendered after a short siege.
The only place where he met with considerable resistance, was Reole,
which, however, was at last reduced, after a siege of above nine
weeks.[****] He made an attempt on Blaye, but thought it more prudent to
raise the siege than waste his time before a place of small
importance.[*****]
1346.
The reason why Derby was permitted to make, without opposition, such
progress on the side of Guienne, was the difficulties under which the
French finances then labored, and which had obliged Philip to lay on new
impositions, particularly the duty on salt, to the great discontent, and
almost mutiny, of his subjects. But after the court of France was supplied
with money, great preparations were made: and the duke of Normandy,
attended by the duke of Burgundy and other great nobility, led towards
Guienne a powerful army, which the English could not think of resisting in
the open field. The earl of Derby stood on the defensive, and allowed the
French to carry on at leisure the siege of Angouleme, which was their
first enterprise. John Lord Norwich, the governor, after a brave and
vigorous defence, found himself reduced to such extremities as obliged him
to employ a stratagem, in order to save his garrison, and to prevent his
being reduced to surrender at discretion. He appeared on the walls, and
desired a parley with the duke of Normandy. The prince there told Norwich,
that he supposed he intended to capitulate. “Not at all,” replied the
governor: “but as to-morrow is the feast of the Virgin, to whom I know
that you, sir, as well as myself, bear a great devotion, I desire a
cessation of arms for that day.” The proposal was agreed to; and Norwich,
having ordered his forces to prepare all their baggage, marched out next
day, and advanced towards the French camp. The besiegers, imagining they
were to be attacked, ran to their arms; but Norwich sent a messenger to
the duke, reminding him of his engagement. The duke, who piqued himself on
faithfully keeping his word exclaimed, “I see the governor has outwitted
me: but let us be content with gaining the place.” And the English were
allowed to pass through the camp unmolested.[*] After some other
successes, the duke of Normandy laid siege to Aiguillon; and as the
natural strength of the fortress, together with a brave garrison under the
command of the earl of Pembroke and Sir Walter Manny, rendered it
impossible to take the place by assault, he purposed, after making several
fruitless attacks,[**] to reduce it by famine: but before he could finish
this enterprise, he was called to another quarter of the kingdom by one of
the greatest disasters that ever befell the French monarchy.[***]
Edward, informed by the earl of Derby of the great danger to which Guienne
was exposed, had prepared a force with which he intended in person to
bring it relief. He embarked at Southampton on board a fleet of near a
thousand sail of all dimensions; and carried with him, besides all the
chief nobility of England, his eldest son, the prince of Wales, now
fifteen years of age. The winds proved long contrary;[*] and the king, in
despair of arriving in time at Guienne, was at last persuaded, by Geoffrey
d’Harcourt, to change the destination of his enterprise. This nobleman was
a Norman by birth, had long made a considerable figure in the court of
France, and was generally esteemed for his personal merit and his valor;
but being disobliged and persecuted by Philip, he had fled into England;
had recommended himself to Edward, who was an excellent judge of men; and
had succeeded to Robert of Artois in the invidious office of exciting and
assisting the king in every enterprise against his native country. He had
long insisted, that an expedition to Normandy promised, in the present
circumstances, more favorable success than one to Guienne; that Edward
would find the northern provinces almost destitute of military force,
which had been drawn to the south; that they were full of flourishing
cities, whose plunder would enrich the English; that their cultivated
fields, as yet unspoiled by war, would supply them with plenty of
provisions; and that the neighborhood of the capital rendered every event
of importance in those quarters.[**] These reasons, which had not before
been duly weighed by Edward, began to make more impression after the
disappointments which he had met with in his voyage to Guienne: he ordered
his fleet to sail to Normandy, and safely disembarked his army at La
Hogue.
This army, which, during the course of the ensuing campaign, was crowned
with the most splendid success, consisted of four thousand men at arms,
ten thousand archers, ten thousand Welsh infantry, and six thousand Irish.
The Welsh and the Irish were light, disorderly troops, fitter for doing
execution in a pursuit, or scouring the country, than for any stable
action. The bow was always esteemed a frivolous weapon, where true
military discipline was known, and regular bodies of well-armed foot
maintained. The only solid force in this army were the men at arms; and
even these, being cavalry, were on that account much inferior in the shock
of battle to good infantry: and as the whole were new-levied troops, we
are led to entertain a very mean idea of the military force of those ages,
which, being ignorant of every other art, had not properly cultivated the
art of war itself, the sole object of general attention.
The king created the earl of Arundel constable of his army and the earls
of Warwick and Harcourt mareschals: he bestowed the honor of knighthood on
the prince of Wales and several of the young nobility, immediately upon
his landing. After destroying all the ships in La Hogue, Barfleur, and
Cherbourg, he spread his army over the whole country, and gave them an
unbounded license of burning, spoiling, and plundering every place of
which they became masters. The loose discipline then prevalent could not
be much hurt by these disorderly practices; and Edward took care to
prevent any surprise, by giving orders to his troops, however they might
disperse themselves in the day-time, always to quarter themselves at night
near the main body. In this manner, Montebourg, Carentan, St. Lo,
Valognes, and other places in the Cotentin, were pillaged without
resistance; and a universal consternation was spread over the province.[*]
The intelligence of this unexpected invasion soon reached Paris, and threw
Philip into great perplexity. He issued orders, however, for levying
forces in all quarters, and despatched the count of Eu, constable of
France, and the count of Tancarville, with a body of troops, to the
defence of Caen, a populous and commercial but open city, which lay in the
neighborhood of the English army. The temptation of so rich a prize soon
allured Edward to approach it; and the inhabitants, encouraged by their
numbers, and by the reënforcements which they daily received from the
country, ventured to meet him in the field. But their courage failed them
on the first shock: they fled with precipitation: the counts of Eu and
Tancarville were taken prisoners: the victors entered the city along with
the vanquished, and a furious massacre commenced, without distinction of
age, sex, or condition. The citizens, in despair, barricaded their and
assaulted the English with stones, bricks, and every missile weapon: the
English made way by fire to the destruction of the citizens; till Edward,
anxious to save both his spoil and his soldiers, stopped the massacre; and
having obliged the inhabitants to lay down their arms, gave his troops
license to begin a more regular and less hazardous plunder of the city.
The pillage continued for three days: the king reserved for his own share
the jewels, plate, silks, fine cloth, and fine linen; and he bestowed all
the remainder of the spoil on his army. The whole was embarked on board
the ships, and sent over to England, together with three hundred of the
richest citizens of Caen, whose ransom was an additional profit, which he
expected afterwards to levy.[*] This dismal scene passed in the presence
of two cardinal legates, who had come to negotiate a peace between the
kingdoms.
The king moved next to Rouen, in hopes of treating that city in the same
manner; but found that the bridge over the Seine was already broken down,
and that the king of France himself was arrived there with his army. He
marched along the banks of that river towards Paris, destroying the whole
country, and every town and village which he met with on his road.[**]
Some of his light troops carried their ravages even to the gates of Paris;
and the royal palace of St. Germains, together with Nanterre, Ruelle, and
other villages, was reduced to ashes within sight of the capital.
The English intended to pass the river at Poissy, but found the French
army encamped on the opposite banks, and the bridge at that place, as well
as all others over the Seine, broken down by orders from Philip. Edward
now saw that the French meant to enclose him in their country, in hopes of
attacking him with advantage on all sides: but he saved himself by a
stratagem from this perilous situation. He gave his army orders to
dislodge, and to advance farther up the Seine; but immediately returning
by the same road, he arrived at Poissy, which the enemy had already
quitted, in order to attend his motions. He repaired the bridge with
incredible celerity, passed over his army, and having thus disengaged
himself from the enemy, advanced by quick marches towards Flanders. His
vanguard, commanded by Harcourt, met with the townsmen of Amiens, who were
hastening to reënforce their king, and defeated them with great
slaughter;[*] he passed by Beauvais, and burned the suburbs of that city:
but as he approached the Somme, he found himself in the same difficulty as
before; all the bridges on that river were either broken down or strongly
guarded: an army, under the command of Godemar de Faye, was stationed on
the opposite banks: Philip was advancing on him from the other quarter,
with an army of a hundred thousand men; and he was thus exposed to the
danger of being enclosed, and of starving in an enemy’s country. In this
extremity, he published a reward to any one that should bring him
intelligence of a passage over the Somme. A peasant, called Gobin Agace,
whose name has been preserved by the share which he had in these important
transactions, was tempted on this occasion to betray the interests of his
country; and he informed Edward of a ford below Abbeville, which had a
sound bottom, and might be passed without difficulty at low water.[**] The
king hastened thither, but found Godemar de Faye on the opposite banks.
Being urged by necessity, he deliberated not a moment; but threw himself
into the river, sword in hand, at the head of his troops; drove the enemy
from their station; and pursued them to a distance on the plain.[***] The
French army under Philip arrived at the ford, when the rearguard of the
English were passing: so narrow was the escape which Edward, by his
prudence and celerity, made from this danger! The rising of the tide
prevented the French king from following him over the ford, and obliged
that prince to take his route over the bridge at Abbeville; by which some
time was lost.
It is natural to think that Philip, at the head of so vast an army, was
impatient to take revenge on the English, and to prevent the disgrace to
which he must be exposed if an inferior enemy should be allowed, after
ravaging so great a part of his kingdom, to escape with impunity. Edward
also was sensible that such must be the object of the French monarch; and
as he had advanced but a little way before his enemy, he saw the danger of
precipitating his march over the plains of Picardy, and of exposing his
rear to the insults of the numerous cavalry in which the French camp
abounded. He took, therefore, a prudent resolution: he chose his ground
with advantage near the village of Crecy; he disposed his army in
excellent older; he determined to await in tranquillity the arrival of the
enemy; and he hoped that their eagerness to engage, and to prevent his
retreat, after all their past disappointments would hurry them on to some
rash and ill-concerted action. He drew up his army on a gentle ascent, and
divided them into three lines: the first was commanded by the prince of
Wales, and under him by the earls of Warwick and Oxford, by Harcourt, and
by the lords Chandos, Holland, and other noblemen: the earls of Arundel
and Northampton, with the lords Willoughby, Basset, Roos, and Sir Lewis
Tufton, were at the head of the second line: he took to himself the
command of the third division, by which he purposed either to bring succor
to the two first lines, or to secure a retreat in case of any misfortune,
or to push his advantages against the enemy. He had likewise the
precaution to throw up trenches on his flanks, in order to secure himself
from the numerous bodies of the French who might assail him from that
quarter; and he placed all his baggage behind him in a wood, which he also
secured by an intrenchment.[*]
The skill and order of this disposition, with the tranquillity in which it
was made, served extremely to compose the minds of the soldiers; and the
king, that he might further inspirit them, rode through the ranks with
such an air of cheerfulness and alacrity, as conveyed the highest
confidence into every beholder. He pointed out to them the necessity to
which they were reduced, and the certain and inevitable destruction which
awaited them, if, in their present situation, enclosed on all hands in an
enemy’s country, they trusted to any thing but their own valor, or gave
that enemy an opportunity of taking revenge for the many insults and
indignities which they had of late put upon him. He reminded them of the
visible ascendant which they had hitherto maintained over all the bodies
of French troops that had fallen in their way; and assured them, that the
superior numbers of the army which at present hovered over them, gave them
not greater force, but was an advantage easily compensated by the order in
which he had placed his own army, and the resolution which he expected
from them. He demanded nothing, he said, but that they would imitate his
own example, and that of the prince of Wales: and as the honor, the lives,
the liberties of all, were now exposed to the same danger, he was
confident that they would make one common effort to extricate themselves
from the present difficulties, and that their united courage would give
them the victory over all their enemies.
It is related by some historians,[*] that Edward, besides the resources
which he found in his own genius and presence of mind, employed also a new
invention against the enemy, and placed in his front some pieces of
artillery, the first that had yet been made use of on any remarkable
occasion in Europe. This is the epoch of one of the most singular
discoveries that has been made among men; a discovery which changed by
degrees the whole art of war, and by consequence many circumstances in the
political government of Europe. But the ignorance of that age in the
mechanical arts, rendered the progress of this new invention very slow.
The artillery first framed were so clumsy, and of such difficult
management, that men were not immediately sensible of their use and
efficacy and even to the present times improvements have been continually
making on this furious engine, which, though it seemed contrived for the
destruction of mankind, and the overthrow of empires, has in the issue
rendered battles less bloody, and has given greater stability to civil
societies. Nations, by its means, have been brought more to a level:
conquests have become less frequent and rapid: success in war has been
reduced nearly to be a matter of calculation: and any nation, overmatched
by its enemies, either yields to their demands or secures itself by
alliances against their violence and invasion.
The invention of artillery was at this time known in France as well as in
England;[**] but Philip, in his hurry to overtake the enemy, had probably
left his cannon behind him, which he regarded as a useless encumbrance.
All his other movements discovered the same imprudence and precipitation.
Impelled by anger, a dangerous counsellor, and trusting to the great
superiority of his numbers, he thought that all depended on forcing an
engagement with the English; and that if he could once reach the enemy in
their retreat, the victory on his side was certain and inevitable. He made
a hasty march, in some confusion, from Abbeville; but after he had
advanced above two leagues, some gentlemen, whom he had sent before to
take a view of the enemy, returned to him, and brought him intelligence
that they had seen the English drawn up in Bombarda great order, and
awaiting his arrival.
They therefore devised him to defer the combat till the ensuing day, when
his army would have recovered from their fatigue, and might be disposed
into better order than their present hurry had permitted them to observe.
Philip assented to this counsel; but the former precipitation of his
march, and the impatience of the French nobility, made it impracticable
for him to put it in execution. One division pressed upon another: orders
to stop were not seasonably conveyed to all of them: this immense body was
not governed by sufficient discipline to be manageable; and the French
army, imperfectly formed into three lines, arrived, already fatigued and
disordered, in presence of the enemy. The first line, consisting of
fifteen thousand Genoese cross-bow men, was commanded by Anthony Doria and
Charles Grimaldi: the second was led by the count of Alençon, brother to
the king: the king himself was at the head of the third. Besides the
French monarch, there were no less than three crowned heads in this
engagement; the king of Bohemia, the king of the Romans, his son, and the
king of Majorca; with all the nobility and great vassals of the crown of
France. The army now consisted of above one hundred and twenty thousand
men, more than three times the number of the enemy. But the prudence of
one man was superior to the advantage of all this force and splendor.
The English, on the approach of the enemy, kept their ranks firm and
immovable; and the Genoese first began the attack. There had happened, a
little before the engagement, a thunder shower, which had moistened and
relaxed the strings of the Genoese cross-bows; their arrows for this
reason fell short of the enemy. The English archers, taking their bows out
of their cases, poured in a shower of arrows upon this multitude who were
opposed to them, and soon threw them into disorder. The Genoese fell back
upon the heavy-armed cavalry of the count of Alençon;[*] who, enraged at
their cowardice, ordered his troops to put them to the sword.
The artillery fired amidst the crowd; the English archers continued to
send in their arrows among them; and nothing was to be seen in that vast
body but hurry and confusion, terror and dismay. The young prince of Wales
had the presence of mind to take advantage of this situation, and to lead
on his line to the charge. The French cavalry, however, recovering
somewhat their order, and encouraged by the example of their leader, made
a stout resistance; and having at last cleared themselves of the Genoese
runaways, advanced upon their enemies, and by their superior numbers began
to hem them round. The earls of Arundel and Northampton now advanced their
line to sustain the prince, who, ardent in his first feats of arms, set an
example of valor which was imitated by all his followers. The battle
became for some time hot and dangerous, and the earl of Warwick,
apprehensive of the event, from the superior numbers of the French,
despatched a messenger to the king, and entreated him to send succors to
the relief of the prince. Edward had chosen his station on the top of the
hill; and he surveyed in tranquillity the scene of action. When the
messenger accosted him, his first question was, whether the prince were
slain or wounded. On receiving an answer in the negative, “Return,” said
he, “to my son, and tell him that I reserve the honor of the day to him: I
am confident that he will show himself worthy of the honor of knighthood
which I so lately conferred upon him: he will be able, without my
assistance, to repel the enemy.”[*] This speech, being reported to the
prince and his attendants, inspired them with fresh courage: they made an
attack with redoubled vigor on the French, in which the count of Alençon
was slain: that whole line of cavalry was thrown into disorder: the riders
were killed or dismounted: the Welsh infantry rushed into the throng, and
with their long knives cut the throats of all who had fallen; nor was any
quarter given that day by the victors.[**]
The king of France advanced in vain with the rear to sustain the line
commanded by his brother: he found them already discomfited; and the
example of their rout increased the confusion which was before but too
prevalent in his own body. He had himself a horse killed under him: he was
remounted; and, though left almost alone, he seemed still determined to
maintain the combat; when John of Hainault seized the reins of his bridle,
turned about his horse, and carried him off the field of battle. The whole
French army took to flight, and was followed and put to the sword without
mercy by the enemy, till the darkness of the night put an end to the
pursuit. The king, on his return to the camp, flew into the arms of the
prince of Wales, and exclaimed, “My brave son persevere in your honorable
course: you are my son! for valiantly have you acquitted yourself to-day:
you have shown yourself worthy of empire.”[*]
This battle, which is known by the name of the battle of Crecy, began
after three o’clock in the afternoon, and continued till evening. The next
morning was foggy; and as the English observed that many of the enemy had
lost their way in the night and in the mist, they employed a stratagem to
bring them into their power: they erected on the eminences some French
standards which they had taken in the battle, and all who were allured by
this false signal were put to the sword, and no quarter given them. In
excuse for this inhumanity, it was alleged that the French king had given
like orders to his troops; but the real reason probably was, that the
English, in their present situation, did not choose to be encumbered with
prisoners. On the day of battle, and on the ensuing, there fell, by a
moderate computation, one thousand two hundred French knights, one
thousand four hundred gentlemen, four thousand men at arms, besides about
thirty thousand of inferior rank:[**] many of the principal nobility of
France, the dukes of Lorraine and Bourbon, the earls of Flanders, Blois,
Vaudemont, Aumale, were left on the field of battle. The kings also of
Bohemia and Majorca were slain: the fate of the former was remarkable: he
was blind from age; but being resolved to hazard his person, and set an
example to others, he ordered the reins of his bridle to be tied on each
side to the horses of two gentlemen of his train; and his dead body, and
those of his attendants, were afterwards found among the slain, with their
horses standing by them in that situation.[***] His crest was three
ostrich feathers; and his motto these German words, Ich dien,—“I
serve;” which the prince of Wales and his successors adopted in memorial
of this great victory. The action may seem no less remarkable for the
small loss sustained by the English, than for the great slaughter of the
French: there were killed in it only one esquire and three knights,[****]
and very few of inferior rank; a demonstration that the prudent
disposition planned by Edward, and the disorderly attack made by the
French, had rendered the whole rather a rout than a battle, which was
indeed the common case with engagements in those times.
The great prudence of Edward appeared not only in obtaining this memorable
victory, but in the measures which he pursued after it. Not elated by his
present prosperity so far as to expect the total conquest of France, or
even that of any considerable provinces, he purposed only to secure such
an easy entrance into that kingdom, as might afterwards open the way to
more moderate advantages. He knew the extreme distance of Guienne: he had
experienced the difficulty and uncertainty of penetrating on the side of
the Low Countries, and had already lost much of his authority over
Flanders by the death of D’Arteville, who had been murdered by the
populace themselves, his former partisans, on his attempting to transfer
the sovereignty of that province to the prince of Wales.[*] The king,
therefore, limited his ambition to the conquest of Calais; and after the
interval of a few days, which he employed in interring the slain, he
marched with his victorious army, and presented himself before the place.
John of Vienne, a valiant knight of Burgundy, was governor of Calais, and
being supplied with every thing necessary for defence, he encouraged the
townsmen to perform to the utmost their duty to their king and country.
Edward, therefore, sensible from the beginning that it was in vain to
attempt the place by force, purposed only to reduce it by famine; he chose
a secure station for his camp; drew intrenchments around the whole city;
raised huts for his soldiers, which he covered with straw or broom; and
provided his army with all the conveniences necessary to make them endure
the winter season, which was approaching. As the governor soon perceived
his intentions, he expelled all the useless mouths; and the king had the
generosity to allow these unhappy people to pass through his camp, and he
even supplied them with money for their journey.[**]
While Edward was engaged in this siege, which employed him near a
twelvemonth, there passed in different places many other events: and all
to the honor of the English arms.
The retreat of the duke of Normandy from Guienne left the earl of Derby
master of the field; and he was not negligent in making his advantage of
the superiority. He took Mirebeau by assault: he made himself master of
Lusignan in the same manner: Taillebourg and St. Jean d’Angeli fell into
his hands: Poictiers opened its gates to him; and Derby, having thus
broken into the frontiers on that quarter, carried his incursions to the
banks of the Loire, and filled all the southern provinces of France with
horror and devastation.[*]
The flames of war were at the same time kindled in Brittany. Charles of
Blois invaded that province with a considerable army, and invested the
fortress of Roche de Rien; but the countess of Mountfort, reënforced by
some English troops under Sir Thomas Dagworth, attacked him during the
night in his intrenchments, dispersed his army, and took Charles himself
prisoner.[**] His wife, by whom he enjoyed his pretensions to Brittany,
compelled by the present necessity, took on her the government of the
party, and proved herself a rival in every shape, and an antagonist to the
countess of Mountfort, both in the field and in the cabinet. And while
these heroic dames presented this extraordinary scene to the world,
another princess in England, of still higher rank, showed herself no less
capable of exerting every manly virtue.
The Scottish nation, after long defending, with incredible perseverance,
their liberties against the superior force of the English, recalled their
king, David Bruce, in 1342. Though that prince, neither by his age nor
capacity, could bring them great assistance, he gave them the countenance
of sovereign authority; and as Edward’s wars on the continent proved a
great diversion to the force of England, they rendered the balance more
equal between the kingdoms. In every truce which Edward concluded with
Philip, the king of Scotland was comprehended; and when Edward made his
last invasion upon France, David was strongly solicited by his ally to
begin also hostilities, and to invade the northern counties of England.
The nobility of his nation being always forward in such incursions, David
soon mustered a great army, entered Northumberland at the head of above
fifty thousand men, and carried his ravages and devastations to the gates
of Durham.[***] But Queen Philippa, assembling a body of little more than
twelve thousand men,[****] which she intrusted to the command of Lord
Piercy, ventured to approach him at Neville’s Cross near that city; and
riding through the ranks of her army, exhorted every man to do his duty,
and to take revenge on these barbarous ravagers.[*****]
Nor could she be persuaded to leave the field, till the armies were on the
point of engaging. The Scots have often been unfortunate in the great
pitched battles which they fought with the English; even though they
commonly declined such engagements where the superiority of numbers was
not on their side: but never did they receive a more fatal blow than the
present. They were broken and chased off the field: fifteen thousand of
them (some historians say twenty thousand) were slain; among whom were
Edward Keith, earl mareschal, and Sir Thomas Charteris, chancellor: and
the king himself was taken prisoner, with the earls of Sutherland, Fife,
Monteith, Carrick, Lord Douglas, and many other noblemen.[*]
Philippa, having secured her royal prisoner in the Tower,[**] crossed the
sea at Dover; and was received in the English camp before Calais with all
the triumph due to her rank, her merit, and her success. This age was the
reign of chivalry and gallantry: Edward’s court excelled in these
accomplishments as much as in policy and arms: and if any thing could
justify the obsequious devotion then professed to the fair sex, it must be
the appearance of such extraordinary women as shone forth during that
period.
1347.
The town of Calais had been defended with remarkable vigilance, constancy,
and bravery by the townsmen, during a siege of unusual length: but Philip,
informed of their distressed condition, determined at last to attempt
their relief; and he approached the English with an immense army, which
the writers of that age make amount to two hundred thousand men. But he
found Edward so surrounded with morasses, and secured by intrenchments,
that, without running on inevitable destruction, he concluded it
impossible to make an attempt on the English camp. He had no other
resource than to send his rival a vain challenge to meet him in the open
field; which being refused, he was obliged to decamp with his army, and
disperse them into their several provinces.[***]
John of Vienne, governor of Calais, now saw the necessity of surrendering
his fortress, which was reduced to the last extremity by famine and the
fatigue of the inhabitants. He appeared on the walls, and made a signal to
the English sentinels that he desired a parley. Sir Walter Manny was sent
to him by Edward. “Brave knight,” cried the governor “I have been
intrusted by my sovereign with the command of this town: it is almost a
year since you besieged me; and I have endeavored, as well as those under
me, to do our duty. But you are acquainted with our present condition: we
have no hopes of relief; we are perishing with hunger; I am willing
therefore to surrender, and desire, as the sole condition, to insure the
lives and liberties of these brave men, who have so long shared with me
every danger and fatigue.” [*]
Manny replied, that he was well acquainted with the intentions of the king
of England; that that prince was incensed against the townsmen of Calais
for their pertinacious resistance, and for the evils which they had made
him and his subjects suffer; that he was determined to take exemplary
vengeance on them; and would not receive the town on any condition which
should confine him in the punishment of these offenders. “Consider,”
replied Vienne, “that this is not the treatment to which brave men are
entitled: if any English knight had been in my situation, your king would
have expected the same conduct from him. The inhabitants of Calais have
done for their sovereign what merits the esteem of every prince; much more
of so gallant a prince as Edward. But I inform you, that, if we must
perish, we shall not perish unrevenged; and that we are not yet so reduced
but we can sell our lives at a high price to the victors. It is the
interest of both sides to prevent these desperate extremities; and I
expect that you yourself, brave knight, will interpose your good offices
with your prince in our behalf.”
Manny was struck with the justness of these sentiments, and represented to
the king the danger of reprisals, if he should give such treatment to the
inhabitants of Calais. Edward was at last persuaded to mitigate the rigor
of the conditions demanded: he only insisted, that six of the most
considerable citizens should be sent to him to be disposed of as he
thought proper; that they should come to his camp carrying the keys of the
city in their hands, bareheaded and barefooted, with ropes about their
necks: and on these conditions he promised to spare the lives of all the
remainder.[**]
When this intelligence was conveyed to Calais, it struck the inhabitants
with new consternation. To sacrifice six of their fellow-citizens to
certain destruction for signalizing their valor in a common cause,
appeared to them even more severe than that general punishment with which
they were before threatened; and they found themselves incapable of coming
to any resolution in so cruel and distressful a situation. At last, one of
the principal inhabitants, called Eustace de St. Pierre, whose name
deserves to be recorded, stepped forth, and declared himself willing to
encounter death for the safety of his friends and companions: another,
animated by his example, made a like generous offer: a third and a fourth
presented themselves to the same fate; and the whole number was soon
completed. These six heroic burgesses appeared before Edward in the guise
of malefactors, laid at his feet the keys of their city, and were ordered
to be led to execution. It is surprising that so generous a prince should
ever have entertained such a barbarous purpose against such men; and still
more that he should seriously persist in the resolution of executing
it.[*] 7
But the entreaties of his queen saved his memory from that infamy: she
threw herself on her knees before him, and with tears in her eyes begged
the lives of these citizens. Having obtained her request, she carried them
into her tent, ordered a repast to be set before them, and, after making
them a present of money and clothes, dismissed them in safety.[**]
The king took possession of Calais; and immediately executed an act of
rigor, more justifiable, because more necessary, than that which he had
before resolved on. He knew that notwithstanding his pretended title to
the crown of France, every Frenchman regarded him as a mortal enemy: he
therefore ordered all the inhabitants of Calais to evacuate the town, and
he peopled it anew with English; a policy which probably preserved so long
to his successors the dominion of that important fortress. He made it the
staple of wool, leather, tin, and lead; the four chief, if not the sole
commodities of the kingdom, for which there was any considerable demand in
foreign markets. All the English were obliged to bring thither these
goods: foreign merchants came to the same place in order to purchase them:
and at a period when posts were not established, and when the
communication between states was so imperfect, this institution, though it
hurt the navigation of England, was probably of advantage to the kingdom.
1348.
Through the mediation of the pope’s legates, Edward concluded a truce with
France; but even during this cessation of arms, he had very nearly lost
Calais, the sole fruit of all his boasted victories. The king had
intrusted that place to Aimery de Pavie, an Italian, who had discovered
bravery and conduct in the wars, but was utterly destitute of every
principle of honor and fidelity. This man agreed to deliver up Calais for
the sum of twenty thousand crowns; and Geoffrey de Charni, who commanded
the French forces in those quarters, and who knew that, if he succeeded in
this service, he should not be disavowed, ventured, without consulting his
master, to conclude the bargain with him. Edward, informed of this
treachery, by means of Aimery’s secretary, summoned the governor to London
on other pretences; and having charged him with the guilt, promised him
his life, but on condition that he would turn the contrivance to the
destruction of the enemy. The Italian easily agreed to this double
treachery. A day was appointed for the admission of the French; and Edward
having prepared a force of about a thousand men, under Sir Walter Manny,
secretly departed from London, carrying with him the prince of Wales; and,
without being suspected, arrived the evening before at Calais. He made a
proper disposition for the reception of the enemy, and kept all his forces
and the garrison under arms. On the appearance of Charni, a chosen band of
French soldiers was admitted at the postern, and Aimery, receiving the
stipulated sum, promised that, with their assistance, he would immediately
open the great gate to the troops, who were waiting with impatience for
the fulfilling of his engagement.
1349.
All the French who entered were immediately slain or taken prisoners: the
great gate opened: Edward rushed forth with cries of battle and of
victory: the French, though astonished at the event, behaved with valor: a
fierce and bloody engagement ensued. As the morning broke, the king, who
was not distinguished by his arms, and who fought as a private man under
the standard of Sir Walter Manny, remarked a French gentleman, called
Eustace de Ribaumont, who exerted himself with singular vigor and bravery;
and he was seized with a desire of trying a single combat with him. He
stepped forth from his troop and challenging Ribaumont by name, (for he
was known to him,) began a sharp and dangerous encounter. He was twice
beaten to the ground by the valor of the Frenchman: he twice recovered
himself: blows were redoubled with equal force on both sides: the victory
was long undecided; till Ribaumont, perceiving himself to be left almost
alone, called out to his antagonist, “Sir Knight, I yield myself your
prisoner;” and at the same time delivered his sword to the king. Most of
the French, being overpowered by numbers, and intercepted in their
retreat, lost either their lives or their liberty.[*]
The French officers who had fallen into the hands of the English, were
conducted into Calais; where Edward discovered to them the antagonist with
whom they had had the honor to be engaged, and treated them with great
regard and courtesy. They were admitted to sup with the prince of Wales
and the English nobility; and after supper, the king himself came into the
apartment, and went about, conversing familiarly with one or other of his
prisoners. He even addressed himself to Charni, and avoided reproaching
him, in too severe terms, with the treacherous attempt which he had made
upon Calais during the truce: but he openly bestowed the highest encomiums
on Ribaumont; called him the most valorous knight that he had ever been
acquainted with; and confessed that he himself had at no time been in so
great danger as when engaged in combat with him. He then took a string of
pearls, which he wore about his own head, and throwing it over the head of
Ribaumont, he said to him, “Sir Eustace, I bestow this present upon you as
a testimony of my esteem for your bravery; and I desire you to wear it a
year for my sake. I know you to be gay and amorous; and to take delight in
the company of ladies and damsels: let them all know from what hand you
had the present. You are no longer a prisoner; I acquit you of your
ransom; and you are at liberty to-morrow to dispose of yourself as you
think proper.”
Nothing proves more evidently the vast superiority assumed by the nobility
and gentry above all the other orders of men, during those ages, than the
extreme difference which Edward made in his treatment of these French
knights, and that of the six citizens of Calais, who had exerted more
signal bravery in a cause more justifiable and more honorable.
CHAPTER XVI.
EDWARD III.
1349.
THE prudent conduct and great success of Edward in his foreign wars had
excited a strong emulation and a military genius among the English
nobility; and these turbulent barons, overawed by the crown, gave now a
more useful direction to their ambition, and attached themselves to a
prince who led them to the acquisition of riches and of glory. That he
might further promote the spirit of emulation and obedience, the king
instituted the order of the garter, in imitation of some orders of a like
nature, religious as well as military, which had been established in
different parts of Europe. The number received into this order consisted
of twenty-five persons, besides the sovereign; and as it has never been
enlarged, this badge of distinction continues as honorable as at its first
institution, and is still a valuable though a cheap present, which the
prince can confer on his greatest subjects. A vulgar story prevails, but
is not supported by any ancient authority, that at a court ball, Edward’s
mistress, commonly supposed to be the countess of Salisbury, dropped her
garter; and the king, taking it up, observed some of the courtiers to
smile, as if they thought that he had not obtained this favor merely by
accident: upon which he called out, “Honi soit qui mal y pense,”—Evil
to him that evil thinks; and as every incident of gallantry among those
ancient warriors was magnified into a matter of great importance,[*] he
instituted the order of the garter in memorial of this event, and gave
these words as the motto of the order. 8 This origin, though
frivolous, is not unsuitable to the manners of the times; and it is indeed
difficult by any other means to account either for the seemingly unmeaning
terms of the motto, or for the peculiar badge of the garter, which seems
to have no reference to any purpose either of military use or ornament.
But a sudden damp was thrown over this festivity and triumph of the court
of England, by a destructive pestilence, which invaded that kingdom as
well as the rest of Europe; and is computed to have swept away near a
third of the inhabitants in every country which it attacked. It was
probably more fatal in great cities than in the country; and above fifty
thousand souls are said to have perished by it in London alone.[*] This
malady first discovered itself in the north of Asia, was spread over all
that country, made its progress from one end of Europe to the other, and
sensibly depopulated every state through which it passed. So grievous a
calamity, more than the pacific disposition of the princes, served to
maintain and prolong the truce between France and England.
1350.
During this truce, Philip de Valois died, without being able to
reestablish the affairs of France, which his bad success against England
had thrown into extreme disorder. This monarch, during the first years of
his reign, had obtained the appellation of Fortunate, and acquired the
character of prudent; but he ill maintained either the one or the other;
less from his own fault, than because he was overmatched by the superior
fortune and superior genius of Edward. But the incidents in the reign of
his son John gave the French nation cause to regret even the calamitous
times of his predecessor. John was distinguished by many virtues,
particularly a scrupulous honor and fidelity: he was not deficient in
personal courage: but as he wanted that masterly prudence and foresight,
which his difficult situation required his kingdom was at the same time
disturbed by intestine commotions, and oppressed with foreign wars.
1354.
The chief source of its calamities, was Charles, king of Navarre who
received the epithet of the Bad, or Wicked, and whose conduct fully
entitled him to that appellation. This prince was descended from males of
the blood royal of France; his mother was daughter of Lewis Hutin; he had
himself espoused a daughter of King John: but all these ties, which ought
to have connected him with the throne, gave him only greater power to
shake and overthrow it. With regard to his personal qualities, he was
courteous, affable, engaging eloquent; full of insinuation and address;
inexhaustible in his resources; active and enterprising. But these
splendid accomplishments were attended with such defects as rendered them
pernicious to his country, and even ruinous to himself: he was volatile,
inconstant, faithless, revengeful, malicious; restrained by no principle
or duty; insatiable in his pretensions: and whether successful or
unfortunate in one enterprise he immediately undertook another, in which
he was never deterred from employing the most criminal and most
dishonorable expedients.
The constable of Eu, who had been taken prisoner by Edward at Caen,
recovered his liberty, on the promise of delivering, as his ransom, the
town of Guisnes, near Calais of which he was superior lord: but as John
was offended at this stipulation, which, if fulfilled, opened still
farther that frontier to the enemy, and as he suspected the constable of
more dangerous connections with the king of England, he ordered him to be
seized, and without any legal or formal trial, put him to death, in
prison. Charles de la Cerda was appointed constable in his place; and had
a like fatal end: the king of Navarre ordered him to be assassinated; and
such was the weakness of the crown, that this prince, instead of dreading
punishment, would not even agree to ask pardon for his offence, but on
condition that he should receive an accession of territory: and he had
also John’s second son put into his hands, as a security for his person,
when he came to court, and performed this act of mock penitence and
humiliation before his sovereign.[*]
1355.
The two French princes seemed entirely reconciled; but this dissimulation,
to which John submitted from necessity, and Charles from habit, did not
long continue; and the king of Navarre knew that he had reason to
apprehend the most severe vengeance for the many crimes and treasons which
he had already committed, and the still greater, which he was meditating.
To insure himself of protection, he entered into a secret correspondence
with England, by means of Henry, earl of Derby, now earl of Lancaster, who
at that time was employed in fruitless negotiations for peace at Avignon,
under the mediation of the pope. John detected this correspondence; and to
prevent the dangerous effects of it, he sent forces into Normandy, the
chief seat of the king of Navarre’s power, and attacked his castles and
fortresses. But hearing that Edward had prepared an army to support his
ally, he had the weakness to propose an accommodation with Charles, and
even to give this traitorous subject the sum of a hundred thousand crowns,
as the purchase of a feigned reconcilement, which rendered him still more
dangerous. The king of Navarre, insolent from past impunity, and desperate
from the dangers which he apprehended, continued his intrigues; and
associating himself with Geoffrey d’Harcourt, who had received his pardon
from Philip de Valois, but persevered still in his factious disposition,
he increased the number of his partisans in every part of the kingdom. He
even seduced, by his address, Charles, the king of France’s eldest son, a
youth of seventeen years of age, who was the first that bore the
appellation of “dauphin,” by the reunion of the province of Dauphiny to
the crown. But this prince, being made sensible of the danger and folly of
these connections, promised to make atonement for the offence by the
sacrifice of his associates; and in concert with his father, he invited
the king of Navarre, and other noblemen of the party, to a feast at Rouen,
where they were betrayed into the hands of John. Some of the most
obnoxious were immediately led to execution: the king of Navarre was
thrown into prison;[*] but this stroke of severity in the king, and of
treachery in the dauphin, was far from proving decisive in maintaining the
royal authority. Philip of Navarre, brother to Charles, and Geoffrey
d’Harcourt, put all the towns and castles belonging to that prince in a
posture of defence; and had immediate recourse to the protection of
England in this desperate extremity.
The truce between the two kingdoms, which had always been ill observed on
both sides, was now expired; and Edward was entirely free to support the
French malecontents. Well pleased that the factions in France had at
length gained him some partisans in that kingdom, which his pretensions to
the crown had never been able to accomplish, he purposed to attack his
enemy both on the side of Guienne, under the command of the prince of
Wales, and on that of Calais, in his own person.
Young Edward arrived in the Garronne with his army, on board a fleet of
three hundred sail, attended by the earls of Avesbury, p. 243. Warwick,
Salisbury, Oxford, Suffolk, and other English noblemen. Being joined by
the vassals of Gascony, he took the field; and as the present disorders in
France prevented every proper plan of defence, he carried on with impunity
his ravages and devastations, according to the mode of war in that age. He
reduced all the villages and several towns in Languedoc to ashes: he
presented himself before Toulouse; passed the Garronne, and burned the
suburbs of Carcassonne; advanced even to Narbonne, laying every place
waste around him; and after an incursion of six weeks, returned with a
vast booty and many prisoners to the Guienne, where he took up his winter
quarters.[*] The constable of Bourbon, who commanded in those provinces,
received orders, though at the head of a superior army, on no account to
run the hazard of a battle.
The king of England’s incursion from Calais was of the samme nature, and
attended with the same issue. He broke into France at the head of a
numerous army; to which he gave a full license of plundering and ravaging
the open country. He advanced to St. Omer, where the king of France was
posted; and on the retreat of that prince, followed him to Hesdin.[**]
John still kept at a distance, and declined an engagement: but in order to
save his reputation, he sent Edward a challenge to fight a pitched battle
with him; a usual bravado in that age, derived from the practice of single
combat, and ridiculous in the art of war. The king, finding no sincerity
in this defiance, retired to Calais, and thence went over to England, in
order to defend that kingdom against a threatened invasion of the Scots.
The Scots, taking advantage of the king’s absence, and that of the
military power of England, had surprised Berwick; and had collected an
army with a view of committing ravages upon the northern provinces: but on
the approach of Edward, they abandoned that place, which was not tenable,
while the castle was in the hands of the English; and retiring to their
mountains, gave the enemy full liberty of burning and destroying the whole
country from Berwick to Edinburgh.[***]
Baliol attended Edward on this expedition; but finding that his constant
adherence to the English had given his countrymen an unconquerable
aversion to his title, and that he himself was declining through age and
infirmities, he finally resigned into the king’s hands his pretensions to
the crown of Scotland,[*] and received in lieu of them an annual pension
of two thousand pounds, with which he passed the remainder of his life in
privacy and retirement.
During these military operations, Edward received information of the
increasing disorders in France, arising from the imprisonment of the king
of Navarre; and he sent Lancaster at the head of a small army, to support
the partisans of that prince in Normandy. The war was conducted with
various success, but chiefly to the disadvantage of the French
malecontents; till an important event happened in the other quarter of the
kingdom, which had well nigh proved fatal to the monarchy of France, and
threw every thing into the utmost confusion.
1356.
The prince of Wales, encouraged by the success of the preceding campaign,
took the field with an army, which no historian makes amount to above
twelve thousand men, and of which not a third were English; and with this
small body, he ventured to penetrate into the heart of France. After
ravaging the Agenois, Quercy, and the Limousin, he entered the province of
Berry; and made some attacks, though without success, on the towns of
Bourges and Issoudun. It appeared that his intentions were to march into
Normandy, and to join his forces with those of the earl of Lancaster, and
the partisans of the king of Navarre; but finding all the bridges on the
Loire broken down, and every pass carefully guarded, he was obliged to
think of making his retreat into Guienne.[**] He found this resolution the
more necessary, from the intelligence which he received of the king of
France’s motions. That monarch, provoked at the insult offered him by this
incursion, and entertaining hopes of success from the young prince’s
temerity, collected a great army of above sixty thousand men, and advanced
by hasty marches to intercept his enemy. The prince, not aware of John’s
near approach, lost some days, on his retreat, before the castle of
Remorantin;[***] and thereby gave the French an opportunity of overtaking
him. They came within sight at Maupertuis, near Poiotiers; and Edward,
sensible that his retreat was now become impracticable, prepared for
battle with all the courage of a young hero, and with all the prudence of
the oldest and most experienced commander.
But the utmost prudence and courage would have proved insufficient to save
him in this extremity, had the king of France known how to make use of his
present advantages. His great superiority in numbers enabled him to
surround the enemy; and by intercepting all provisions, which were already
become scarce in the English camp, to reduce this small army, without a
blow, to the necessity of surrendering at discretion. But such was the
impatient ardor of the French nobility, and so much had their thoughts
been bent on overtaking the English as their sole object, that this idea
never struck any of the commanders; and they immediately took measures for
the assault, as for a certain victory. While the French army was drawn up
in order of battle, they were stopped by the appearance of the cardinal of
Perigord; who, having learned the approach of the two armies to each
other, had hastened, by interposing his good offices, to prevent any
further effusion of Christian blood. By John’s permission, he carried
proposals to the prince of Wales; and found him so sensible of the bad
posture of his affairs, that an accommodation seemed not impracticable.
Edward told him, that he would agree to any terms consistent with his own
honor and that of England; and he offered to purchase a retreat, by ceding
all the conquests which he had made during this and the former campaign,
and by stipulating not to serve against France during the course of seven
years. But John, imagining that he had now got into his hands a sufficient
pledge for the restitution of Calais, required that Edward should
surrender himself prisoner with a hundred of his attendants; and offered,
on these terms, a safe retreat to the English army. The prince rejected
the proposal with disdain; and declared that, whatever fortune might
attend him, England should never be obliged to pay the price of his
ransom. This resolute answer cut off all hopes of accommodation; but as
the day was already spent in negotiating, the battle was delayed till the
next morning.[*]
The cardinal of Perigord, as did all the prelates of the court of Rome,
bore a great attachment to the French interest; but the most determined
enemy could not, by any expedient, have done a greater prejudice to John’s
affairs, than he did them by this delay. The prince of Wales had leisure,
daring the night, to strengthen, by new intrenchments, the post which he
had before so judiciously chosen; and he contrived an ambush of three
hundred men at arms, and as many archers, whom he put under the command of
the Captal de Buche, and ordered to make a circuit, that they might fall
on the flank or rear of the French army during the engagement. The van of
his army was commanded by the earl of Warwick, the rear by the earls of
Salisbury and Suffolk, the main body by the prince himself. The Lords
Chandos, Audeley, and many other brave and experienced commanders, were at
the head of different corps of his army.
John also arranged his forces in three divisions, nearly equal: the first
was commanded by the duke of Orleans, the king’s brother; the second by
the dauphin, attended by his two younger brothers; the third by the king
himself, who had by his side Philip, his fourth son and favorite, then
about fourteen years of age. There was no reaching the English army but
through a narrow lane, covered on each side by hedges and in order to open
this passage, the mareschals, Andrehen and Clermont, were ordered to
advance with a separate detachment of men at arms. While they marched
along the lane, a body of English archers, who lined the hedges, plied
them on each side with their arrows; and being very near them, yet placed
in perfect safety, they coolly took their aim against the enemy, and
slaughtered them with impunity. The French detachment, much discouraged by
the unequal combat, and diminished in their number, arrived at the end of
the lane, where they met on the open ground the prince of Wales himself,
at the head of a chosen body, ready for their reception. They were
discomfited and overthrown: one of the mareschals was slain; the other
taken prisoner: and the remainder of the detachment, who were still in the
lane, and exposed to the shot of the enemy, without being able to make
resistance, recoiled upon their own army, and put every thing into
disorder.[*]
In that critical moment the Captal de Buche unexpectedly appeared, and
attacked in flank the dauphin’s line, which fell into some confusion.
Landas, Bodenai, and St. Venant, to whom the care of that young prince and
his brothers had been committed, too anxious for their charge, or for
their own safety, carried them off the field, and set the example of
flight, which was followed by that whole division. The duke of Orleans,
seized with alike panic, and imagining all was lost, thought no longer of
fighting, but carried off his division by a retreat, which soon turned
into a flight. Lord Chandos called out to the prince, that the day was
won; and encouraged him to attack the division under King John, which,
though more numerous than the whole English army, were somewhat dismayed
with the precipitate flight of their companions. John here made the utmost
efforts to retrieve by his valor what his imprudence had betrayed; and the
only resistance made that day was by his line of battle. The prince of
Wales fell with impetuosity on some German cavalry placed in the front,
and commanded by the counts of Sallebruche, Nydo, and Nosto; a fierce
battle ensued: one side were encouraged by the near prospect of so great a
victory; the other were stimulated by the shame of quitting the field to
an enemy so much inferior: but the three German generals, together with
the duke of Athens, constable of France, falling in battle, that body of
cavalry gave way, and left the king himself exposed to the whole fury of
the enemy. The ranks were every moment thinned around him: the nobles fell
by his side one after another: his son, scarce fourteen years of age,
received a wound, while he was fighting valiantly in defence of his
father: the king himself, spent with fatigue and overwhelmed by numbers,
might easily have been slain; but every English gentleman, ambitious of
taking alive the royal prisoner, spared him in the action, exhorted him to
surrender, and offered him quarter: several, who attempted to seize him,
suffered for their temerity. He still cried out, “Where is my cousin, the
prince of Wales?” and seemed unwilling to become prisoner to any person of
inferior rank. But being told that the prince was at a distance on the
field, he threw down his gauntlet, and yielded himself to Dennis de
Morbec, a knight of Arras, who had been obliged to fly his country for
murder. His son was taken with him.[*]
The prince of Wales, who had been carried away in pursuit of the flying
enemy, finding the field entirely clear, had ordered a tent to be pitched,
and was reposing himself after the toils of battle; inquiring still with
great anxiety concerning the fate of the French monarch. He despatched the
earl of Warwick to bring him intelligence; and that nobleman came happily
in time to save the life of the captive prince which was exposed to
greater danger than it had been during the heat of the action. The English
had taken him by violence from Morbec: the Gascons claimed the honor of
detaining the royal prisoner; and some brutal soldiers, rather than yield
the prize to their rivals, had threatened to put him to death.[*] Warwick
overawed both parties, and approaching the king with great demonstrations
of respect, offered to conduct him to the prince’s tent.
Here commences the real and truly admirable heroism of Edward; for
victories are vulgar things in comparison of that moderation and humanity
displayed by a young prince of twenty-seven years of age, not yet cooled
from the fury of battle, and elated by as extraordinary and as unexpected
success as had ever crowned the arms of any commander. He came forth to
meet the captive king with all the marks of regard and sympathy;
administered comfort to him amidst his misfortunes; paid him the tribute
of praise due to his valor; and ascribed his own victory merely to the
blind chance of war, or to a superior providence, which controls all the
efforts of human force and prudence.[**] The behavior of John showed him
not unworthy of this courteous treatment; his present abject fortune never
made him forget a moment that he was a king: more touched by Edward’s
generosity than by his own calamities, he confessed that, notwithstanding
his defeat and captivity, his honor was still unimpaired; and that if he
yielded the victory, it was at least gained by a prince of such consummate
valor and humanity.
Edward ordered a repast to be prepared in his tent for the prisoner; and
he himself served at the royal captive’s table, as if he had been one of
his retinue: he stood at the king’s back during the meal; constantly
refused to take a place at table; and declared that, being a subject, he
was too well acquainted with the distance between his own rank and that of
royal majesty, to assume such freedom. All his father’s pretensions to the
crown of France were now buried in oblivion: John in captivity received
the honors of a king, which were refused him when seated on the throne:
his misfortunes, not his title, were respected; and the French prisoners,
conquered by this elevation of mind, more than by their late discomfiture,
burst into tears of admiration; which were only checked by the reflection,
that such genuine and unaltered heroism in an enemy must certainly in the
issue prove but the more dangerous to their native country.[*]
All the English and Gascon knights imitated the generous example set them
by their prince. The captives were every where treated with humanity, and
were soon after dismissed, on paying moderate ransoms to the persons into
whose hands they had fallen. The extent of their fortunes was considered;
and an attention was given that they should still have sufficient means
left to perform their military service in a manner suitable to their rank
and quality. Yet so numerous were the noble prisoners, that these ransoms,
added to the spoils gained in the field, were sufficient to enrich the
prince’s army; and as they had suffered very little in the action, their
joy and exultation were complete.
The prince of Wales conducted his prisoner to Bordeaux; and not being
provided with forces so numerous as might enable him to push his present
advantages, he concluded a two years’ truce with France,[**] which was
also become requisite, that he might conduct the captive king with safety
into England. He landed at Southwark, and was met by a great concourse of
people, of all ranks and stations. {1357.
The prisoner was clad in royal apparel, and mounted on a white steed,
distinguished by its size and beauty, and by the richness of its
furniture. The conqueror rode by his side in a meaner attire, and carried
by a black palfrey. In this situation, more glorious than all the insolent
parade of a Roman triumph, he passed through the streets of London, and
presented the king of France to his father, who advanced to meet him, and
received him with the same courtesy as if he had been a neighboring
potentate that had voluntarily come to pay him a friendly visit.[***] It
is impossible, in reflecting on this noble conduct, not to perceive the
advantages which resulted from the otherwise whimsical principles of
chivalry, and which gave men in those rude times some superiority even
over people of a more cultivated age and nation.
The king of France, besides the generous treatment which he met with in
England, had the melancholy consolation of the wretched, to see companions
in affliction. The king of Scots had been eleven years a captive in
Edward’s hands; and the good fortune of this latter monarch had reduced at
once the two neighboring potentates, with whom he was engaged in war, to
be prisoners in his capital.
1357.
But Edward finding that the conquest of Scotland was nowise advanced by
the captivity of its sovereign, and that the government conducted by
Robert Stuart, his nephew and heir, was still able to defend itself,
consented to restore David Bruce to his liberty, for the ransom of one
hundred thousand marks sterling; and that prince delivered the sons of all
his principal nobility, as hostages for the payment.[*]
1358.
Meanwhile, the captivity of John, joined to the preceding disorders of the
French government, had produced in that country a dissolution, almost
total, of civil authority, and had occasioned confusions the most horrible
and destructive that had ever been experienced in any age or in any
nation. The dauphin, now about eighteen years of age, naturally assumed
the royal power during his father’s captivity; but though endowed with an
excellent capacity, even in such early years, he possessed neither
experience nor authority sufficient to defend a state, assailed at once by
foreign power and shaken by intestine faction. In order to obtain supply,
he assembled the states of the kingdom: that assembly, instead of
supporting his administration, were themselves seized with the spirit of
confusion; and laid hold of the present opportunity to demand limitations
of the prince’s power, the punishment of past malversations, and the
liberty of the king of Navarre. Marcel, provost of the merchants and first
magistrate of Paris, put himself at the head of the unruly populace; and
from the violence and temerity of his character, pushed them to commit the
most criminal outrages against the royal authority. They detained the
dauphin in a sort of captivity; they murdered in his presence Robert de
Clermont and John de Conflans, mareschals, the one of Normandy, the other
of Burgundy; they threatened all the other ministers with a like fate; and
when Charles, who was obliged to temporize and dissemble, made his escape
from their hands, they levied war against him, and openly erected the
standard of rebellion, The other cities of the kingdom, in imitation of
the capital, shook off the dauphin’s authority, took the government into
their own hands, and spread the disorder into every province. The nobles,
whose inclinations led them to adhere to the crown, and were naturally
disposed to check these tumults, had lost all their influence; and being
reproached with cowardice on account of the base desertion of their
sovereign in the battle of Poiotiers, were treated with universal contempt
by the inferior orders. The troops, who, from the deficiency of pay, were
no longer retained in discipline, threw off all regard to their officers,
sought the means of subsistence by plunder and robbery, and associating to
them all the disorderly people with whom that age abounded, formed
numerous bands, which infested all parts of the kingdom. They desolated
the open country; burned and plundered the villages; and by cutting off
all means of communication or subsistence, reduced even the inhabitants of
the walled towns to the most extreme necessity. The peasants, formerly
oppressed, and now left unprotected by their masters, became desperate
from their present misery; and rising every where in arms, carried to the
last extremity those disorders which were derived from the sedition of the
citizens and disbanded soldiers.[*]
The gentry, hated for their tyranny, were every where exposed to the
violence of popular rage; and instead of meeting with the regard due to
their past dignity, became only, on that account, the object of more
wanton insult to the mutinous peasants. They were hunted like wild beasts,
and put to the sword without mercy: their castles were consumed with fire,
and levelled to the ground: their wives and daughters were first ravished,
then murdered: the savages proceeded so far as to impale some gentlemen,
and roast them alive before a slow fire: a body of nine thousand of them
broke into Meaux, where the wife of the dauphin, with above three hundred
ladies, had taken shelter: the most brutal treatment and most atrocious
cruelty were justly dreaded by this helpless company: but the Captal de
Buche, though in the service of Edward, yet moved by generosity and by the
gallantry of a true knight, flew to their rescue, and beat off the
peasants with great slaughter. In other civil wars, the opposite factions,
falling under the government of their several leaders, commonly preserve
still the vestige of some rule and order: but here the wild state of
nature seemed to be renewed: every man was thrown loose and independent of
his fellows: and the populousness of the country, derived from the
preceding police of civil society, served only to increase the horror and
confusion of the scene.
Amidst these disorders, the king of Navarre made his escape from prison,
and presented a dangerous leader to the furious malecontents.[*] But the
splendid talents of this prince qualified him only to do mischief, and to
increase the public distractions: he wanted the steadiness and prudence
requisite for making his intrigues subservient to his ambition, and
forming his numerous partisans into a regular faction. He revived his
pretensions, somewhat obsolete, to the crown of France: but while he
advanced this claim, he relied entirely on his alliance with the English,
who were concerned in interest to disappoint his pretensions; and who,
being public and inveterate enemies to the state, served only, by the
friendship which they seemingly bore him, to render his cause the more
odious. And in all his operations, he acted more like a leader of
banditti, than one who aspired to be the head of a regular government, and
who was engaged by his station to endeavor the reëstablishment of order in
the community.
The eyes, therefore, of all the French, who wished to restore peace to
their miserable and desolated country, were turned towards the dauphin;
and that young prince, though not remarkable for his military talents,
possessed so much prudence and spirit, that he daily gained the ascendant
over all his enemies. Marcel, the seditious provost of Paris, was slain,
while he was attempting to deliver the city to the king of Navarre and the
English; and the capital immediately returned to its duty.[**] The most
considerable bodies of the mutinous peasants were dispersed, and put to
the sword: some bands of military robbers underwent the same fate: and
though many grievous disorders still remained, France began gradually to
assume the face of a regular civil government, and to form some plan for
its defence and security.
During the confusion in the dauphin’s affairs, Edward seemed to have a
favorable opportunity for pushing his conquests: but besides that his
hands were tied by the truce, and he could only assist underhand the
faction of Navarre, the state of the English finances and military power,
during those ages, rendered the kingdom incapable of making any regular or
steady effort, and obliged it to exert its force at very distant
intervals, by which all the projected ends were commonly disappointed.
Edward employed himself, during a conjuncture so inviting, chiefly in
negotiations with his prisoner; and John had the weakness to sign terms of
peace, which, had they taken effect, must have totally ruined and
dismembered his kingdom. He agreed to restore all the provinces which had
been possessed by Henry II. and his two sons, and to annex them forever to
England, without any obligation of homage or fealty on the part of the
English monarch. But the dauphin and the states of France rejected this
treaty, so dishonorable and pernicious to the kingdom;[*] and Edward on
the expiration of the truce, having now, by subsidies and frugality,
collected some treasure, prepared himself for a new invasion of France.
The great authority and renown of the king and the prince of Wales, the
splendid success of their former enterprises, and the certain prospect of
plunder from the defenceless provinces of France, soon brought together
the whole military power of England; and the same motives invited to
Edward’s standard all the hardy adventurers of the different countries of
Europe.[**] He passed over to Calais, where he assembled an army of near a
hundred thousand men; a force which the dauphin could not pretend to
withstand in the open field: that prince, therefore, prepared himself to
elude a blow, which it was impossible for him to resist. He put all the
considerable towns in a posture of defence; ordered them to be supplied
with magazines and provisions; distributed proper garrisons in all places;
secured every thing valuable in the fortified cities; and chose his own
station at Paris, with a view of allowing the enemy to vent their fury on
the open country.
1359.
The king, aware of this plan of defence, was obliged to carry along with
him six thousand wagons, loaded with the provisions necessary for the
subsistence of his army. After ravaging the province of Picardy, he
advanced into Champagne; and having a strong desire of being crowned king
of France at Rheims, the usual place in which this ceremony is performed,
he laid siege to that city, and carried on his attacks, though without
success, for the space of seven weeks.[***]
1360.
The place was bravely defended by the inhabitants, encouraged by the
exhortations of the archbishop, John de Craon; till the advanced season
(for this expedition was entered upon in the beginning of winter) obliged
the king to raise the siege. The province of Champagne, meanwhile, was
desolated by his incursions; and he thence conducted his army, with a like
intent, into Burgundy. He took and pillaged Tonnerre, Gaillon, Avalon, and
other small places; but the duke of Burgundy, that he might preserve his
country from further ravages, consented to pay him the sum of one hundred
thousand nobles.[*] Edward then bent his march towards the Nivernois,
which saved itself by a like composition: he laid waste Brie and the
Gatinois; and after a long march, very destructive to France, and somewhat
ruinous to his own troops, he appeared before the gates of Paris, and
taking up his quarters at Bourg-la-Reine, extended his army to Longjumeau,
Montrouge, and Vaugirard. He tried to provoke the dauphin to hazard a
battle, by sending him a defiance; but could not make that prudent prince
change his plan of operations. Paris was safe from the danger of an
assault by its numerous garrison; from that of a blockade by its
well-supplied magazines: and as Edward himself could not subsist his army
in a country wasted by foreign and domestic enemies, and left also empty
by the precaution of the dauphin, he was obliged to remove his quarters;
and he spread his troops into the provinces of Maine, Beausse, and the
Chartraine, which were abandoned to the fury of their devastations.[**]
The only repose which France experienced was during the festival of
Easter, when the king stopped the course of his ravages. For superstition
can sometimes restrain the rage of men, which neither justice nor humanity
is able to control.
While the war was carried on in this ruinous manner, the negotiations for
peace were never interrupted: but as the king still insisted on the full
execution of the treaty which he had made with his prisoner at London, and
which was strenuously rejected by the dauphin, there appeared no
likelihood of an accommodation. The earl, now duke of Lancaster, (for
this, title was introduced into England during the present reign,)
endeavored to soften the rigor of these terms, and to finish the war on
more equal and reasonable conditions. He insisted with Edward, that,
notwithstanding his great and surprising successes, the object of the war,
if such were to be esteemed the acquisition of the crown of France, was
not become any nearer than at the commencement of it; or rather, was set
at a greater distance by those very victories and advantages which seemed
to lead to it. That his claim of succession had not from the first
procured him one partisan in the kingdom; and the continuance of these
destructive hostilities had united every Frenchman in the most implacable
animosity against him. That though intestine faction had crept into the
government of France, it was abating every moment; and no party, even
during the greatest heat of the contest, when subjection under a foreign
enemy usually appears preferable to the dominion of fellow-citizens, had
ever adopted the pretensions of the king of England. That the king of
Navarre himself, who alone was allied with the English, instead of being a
cordial friend, was Edward’s most dangerous rival, and, in the opinion of
his partisans, possessed a much preferable title to the crown of France.
That the prolongation of the war, however it might enrich the English
soldiers, was ruinous to the king himself, who bore all the charges of the
armament, without reaping any solid or durable advantage from it. That if
the present disorders of France continued, that kingdom would soon be
reduced to such a state of desolation, that it would afford no spoils to
its ravagers, if it could establish a more steady government, it might
turn the chance of war in its favor, and by its superior force and
advantages be able to repel the present victors. That the dauphin, even
during his greatest distresses, had yet conducted himself with so much
prudence, as to prevent the English from acquiring one foot of land in the
kingdom; and it were better for the king to accept by a peace what he had
in vain attempted to acquire by hostilities, which, however hitherto
successful, had been extremely expensive, and might prove very dangerous.
And that Edward having acquired so much glory by his arms, the praise of
moderation was the only honor to which he could now aspire; an honor so
much the greater, as it was durable, was united with that of prudence, and
might be attended with the most real advantages.[*]
These reasons induced Edward to accept of more moderate terms of peace;
and it is probable that, in order to palliate this change of resolution,
he ascribed it to a vow made during a dreadful tempest, which attacked his
army on their march, and which ancient historians represent as the cause
of this sudden accommodation.[*] The conferences between the English and
French commissioners were carried on during a few days at Bretigni, in the
Chartraine, and the peace was at last concluded on the following
conditions:[**] it was stipulated that King John should be restored to his
liberty, and should pay as his ransom three millions of crowns of gold,
about one million five hundred thousand pounds of our present money;[***]
9 which
was to be discharged at different payments: that Edward should forever
renounce all claim to the crown of France, and to the provinces of
Normandy, Maine, Touraine, and Anjou, possessed by his ancestors; and
should receive in exchange the provinces of Poictou, Xaintonge, l’Agenois,
Perigord, the Limousin, Quercy, Rovergue, l’Angoumois, and other districts
in that quarter, together with Calais, Guisnes, Montreuil, and the county
of Ponthieu, on the other side of France: that the full sovereignty of all
these provinces, as well as that of Guienne, should be vested in the crown
of England, and that France should renounce all title to feudal
jurisdiction, homage, or appeal from them: that the king of Navarre should
be restored to all his honors and possessions: that Edward should renounce
his confederacy with the Flemings, John his connections with the Scots:
that the disputes concerning the succession of Brittany, between the
families of Blois and Mountfort, should be decided by arbiters appointed
by the two kings; and if the competitors refused to submit to the award,
the dispute should no longer be a ground of war between the kingdoms; and
that forty hostages, such as should be agreed on, should be sent to
England as a security for the execution of all these conditions.[****]
In consequence of this treaty, the king of France was brought over to
Calais; whither Edward also soon after repaired; and there both princes
solemnly ratified the treaty.
John was sent to Boulogne; the king accompanied him a mile on his journey;
and the two monarchs parted with many professions, probably cordial and
sincere, of mutual amity.[*] The good disposition of John made him fully
sensible of the generous treatment which he had received in England, and
obliterated all memory of the ascendant gained over him by his rival.
There seldom has been a treaty of so great importance so faithfully
executed by both parties. Edward had scarcely from the beginning
entertained any hopes of acquiring the crown of France: by restoring John
to his liberty, and making peace at a juncture so favorable to his arms,
he had now plainly renounced all pretensions of this nature; he had sold
at a very high price that chimerical claim; and had at present no other
interest than to retain those acquisitions which he had made with such
singular prudence and good fortune. John, on the other hand, though the
terms were severe, possessed such fidelity and honor, that he was
determined at all hazards to execute them, and to use every expedient for
satisfying a monarch who had indeed been his greatest political enemy, but
had treated him personally with singular humanity and regard. But,
notwithstanding his endeavors, there occurred many difficulties in
fulfilling his purpose; chiefly from the extreme reluctance which many
towns and vassals in the neighborhood of Guienne expressed against
submitting to the English dominion;[**] and John, in order to adjust these
differences, took a resolution of coming over himself to England.
1363.
His council endeavored to dissuade him from this rash design; and probably
would have been pleased to see him employ more chicanes for eluding the
execution of so disadvantageous a treaty: but John replied to them, that
though good faith were banished from the rest of the earth, she ought
still to retain her habitation in the breasts of princes. Some historians
would detract from the merit of this honorable conduct, by representing
John as enamored of an English lady, to whom he was glad on this pretence
to pay a visit; but besides that this surmise is not founded on any good
authority, it appears somewhat unlikely on account of the advanced age of
that prince, who was now in his fifty-sixth year.
1364.
He was lodged in the Savoy; the palace where he had resided during his
captivity, and where he soon after sickened and died. Nothing can be a
stronger proof of the great dominion of fortune over men, than the
calamities which pursued a monarch of such eminent valor, goodness, and
honor, and which he incurred merely by reason of some slight imprudences,
which, in other situations, would have been of no importance. But though
both his reign and that of his father proved extremely unfortunate to
their kingdom, the French crown acquired, during their time, very
considerable accessions—those of Dauphiny and Burgundy. This latter
province, however, John had the imprudence again to dismember by bestowing
it on Philip, his fourth son, the object of his most tender affections;[*]
a deed which was afterwards the source of many calamities to the kingdom.
John was succeeded in the throne by Charles the dauphin, a prince educated
in the school of adversity, and well qualified, by his consummate prudence
and experience, to repair all the losses which the kingdom had sustained
from the errors of his two predecessors. Contrary to the practice of all
the great princes of those times, which held nothing in estimation but
military courage, he seems to have fixed it as a maxim never to appear at
the head of his armies; and he was the first king in Europe that showed
the advantage of policy, foresight, and judgment, above a rash and
precipitate valor. The events of his reign, compared with those of the
preceding, are a proof how little reason kingdoms have to value themselves
on their victories, or to be humbled by their defeats; which in reality
ought to be ascribed chiefly to the good or bad conduct of their rulers,
and are of little moment towards determining national characters and
manners.
Before Charles could think of counterbalancing so great a power as
England, it was necessary for him to remedy the many disorders to which
his own kingdom was exposed. He turned his arms against the king of
Navarre, the great disturber of France during that age; he defeated this
prince by the conduct of Bertrand du Guesclin, a gentleman of Brittany,
one of the most accomplished characters of the age, whom he had the
discernment to choose as the instrument of all his victories:[**] and he
obliged his enemy to accept of moderate terms of peace.
Du Guesclin was less fortunate in the wars of Brittany, which still
continued, notwithstanding the mediation of France and England: he was
defeated and taken prisoner at Auray by Chandos: Charles of Blois was
there slain, and the young count of Mountfort soon after got entire
possession of that duchy.[*] But the prudence of Charles broke the force
of this blow: he submitted to the decision of fortune: he acknowledged the
title of Mountfort, though a zealous partisan of England; and received the
proffered homage for his dominions. But the chief obstacle which the
French king met with in the settlement of the state, proceeded from
obscure enemies, whom their crimes alone rendered eminent, and their
number dangerous.
On the conclusion of the treaty of Bretigni, the many military adventurers
who had followed the standard of Edward being dispersed into the several
provinces, and possessed of strongholds, refused to lay down their arms,
or relinquish a course of life to which they were now accustomed, and by
which alone they could gain a subsistence.[**] They associated themselves
with the banditti, who were already inured to the habits of rapine and
violence; and under the name of the “companies” and “companions,” became a
terror to all the peaceable inhabitants. Some English and Gascon gentlemen
of character, particularly Sir Matthew Gournay, Sir Hugh Calverly, the
chevalier Verte, and others, were not ashamed to take the command of these
ruffians, whose numbers amounted on the whole to near forty thousand, and
who bore the appearance of regular armies, rather than bands of robbers.
These leaders fought pitched battles with the troops of France, and gained
victories; in one of which Jaques de Bourbon, a prince of the blood, was
slain:[***] and they proceeded to such a height, that they wanted little
but regular establishments to become princes, and thereby sanctify, by the
maxims of the world, their infamous profession. The greater spoil they
committed on the country, the more easy they found it to recruit their
number: all those who were reduced to misery and despair, flocked to their
standard: the evil was every day increasing; and though the pope declared
them excommunicated, these military plunderers, however deeply affected
with the sentence, to which they paid a much greater regard than to any
principles of morality, could not be induced by it to betake themselves to
peaceable or lawful professions.
1366.
As Charles was not able by power to redress so enormous a grievance, he
was led by necessity, and by the turn of his character, to correct it by
policy, and to contrive some method of discharging into foreign countries
this dangerous and intestine evil.
Peter, king of Castile, stigmatized by his contemporaries and by posterity
with the epithet of Cruel, had filled with blood and murder his kingdom
and his own family; and having incurred the universal hatred of his
subjects, he kept from present terror alone, an anxious and precarious
possession of the throne. His nobles fell every day the victims of his
severity: he put to death several of his natural brothers, from groundless
jealousy: each murder, by multiplying his enemies, became the occasion of
fresh barbarities; and as he was not destitute of talents, his neighbors,
no less than his own subjects, were alarmed at the progress of his
violence and injustice. The ferocity of his temper, instead of being
softened by his strong propensity to love, was rather inflamed by that
passion, and took thence new occasion to exert itself. Instigated by Mary
de Padilla, who had acquired the ascendant over him, he threw into prison
Blanche de Bourbon, his wife, Bister to the queen of France; and soon
after made way by poison for the espousing of his mistress.
Henry, count of Transtamare, his natural brother, seeing the fate of every
one who had become obnoxious to this tyrant, took arms against him; but
being foiled in the attempt, he sought for refuge in France, where he
found the minds of men extremely inflamed against Peter, on account of his
murder of the French princess. He asked permission of Charles to enlist
the “companies” in his service, and to lead them into Castile; where, from
the concurrence of his own friends, and the enemies of his brother, he had
the prospect of certain and immediate success. The French king, charmed
with the project, employed Du Guesclin in negotiating with the leaders of
these banditti. The treaty was soon concluded. The high character of honor
which that general possessed, made every one trust to his promises: though
the intended expedition was kept a secret, the “companies” implicitly
enlisted under his standard; and they required no other condition before
their engagement, than an assurance that they were not to be led against
the prince of Wales in Guienne. But that prince was so little averse to
the enterprise, that he allowed some gentlemen of his retinue to enter
into the service under Du Guesclin.
Du Guesclin, having completed his levies, led the army first to Avignon,
where the pope then resided, and demanded, sword in hand, an absolution
for his soldiers, and the sum of two hundred thousand livres. The first
was readily promised him; some more difficulty was made with regard to the
second. “I believe that my fellows,” replied Du Guesclin, “may make a
shift to do without your absolution; but the money is absolutely
necessary.” The pope then extorted from the inhabitants in the city and
neighborhood the sum of a hundred thousand livres, and offered it to Du
Guesclin. “It is not my purpose,” cried that generous warrior, “to oppress
the innocent people. The pope and his cardinals themselves can well spare
me that sum from their own coffers. This money, I insist, must be restored
to the owners. And should they be defrauded of it, I shall myself return
from the other side of the Pyrenees, and oblige you to make them
restitution.” The pope found the necessity of submitting, and paid him
from his treasury the sum demanded.[*] The army, hallowed by the
blessings, and enriched by the spoils, of the church, proceeded on their
expedition.
These experienced and hardy soldiers, conducted by so able a general,
easily prevailed over the king of Castile, whose subjects, instead of
supporting their oppressor, were ready to join the enemy against him.[**]
Peter fled from his dominions took shelter in Guienne, and craved the
protection of the prince of Wales, whom his father had invested with the
sovereignty of these conquered provinces, by the title of the principality
of Aquitaine.[***]
1367.
The prince seemed now to have entirely changed his sentiments with regard
to the Spanish transactions: whether that he was moved by the generosity
of supporting a distressed prince, and thought, as is but too usual among
sovereigns, that the rights of the people were a matter of much less
consideration; or dreaded the acquisition of so powerful a confederate to
France as the new king of Castile; or, what is most probable, was
impatient of rest and ease, and sought only an opportunity for exerting
his military talents, by which he had already acquired so much renown. He
promised his assistance to the dethroned monarch; and having obtained the
consent of his father, he levied a great army, and set out upon his
enterprise. He was accompanied by his younger brother, John of Gaunt,
created duke of Lancaster, in the room of the good prince of that name,
who had died without any male issue, and whose daughter he had espoused.
Chandos, also, who bore among the English the same character which Du
Guesclin had acquired among the French, commanded under him in this
expedition.
The first blow which the prince of Wales gave to Henry of Transtamare, was
the recalling of all the “companies” from his service; and so much
reverence did they bear to the name of Edward, that great numbers of them
immediately withdrew from Spain, and enlisted under his banners. Henry,
however, beloved by his new subjects, and supported by the king of Arragon
and others of his neighbors, was able to meet the enemy with an army of
one hundred thousand men; forces three times more numerous than those
which were commanded by Edward. Du Guesclin, and all his experienced
officers, advised him to delay any decisive action, to cut off the prince
of Wales’s provisions, and to avoid every engagement with a general, whose
enterprises had hitherto been always conducted with prudence, and crowned
with success. Henry trusted too much to his numbers; and ventured to
encounter the English prince at Najara.[*]
Historians of that age are commonly very copious in describing the shock
of armies in battle, the valor of the combatants, the slaughter and
various successes of the day: but though small rencounters in those times
were often well disputed, military discipline was always too imperfect to
preserve order in great armies; and such actions deserve more the name of
routs than of battles. Henry was chased off the field, with the loss of
above twenty thousand men: there perished only four knights and forty
private men on the side of the English.
Peter, who so well merited the infamous epithet which he bore, purposed to
murder all his prisoners in cold blood; but was restrained from this
barbarity by the remonstrance, of the prince of Wales. All Castile now
submitted to the victor: Peter was restored to the throne; and Edward
finished his perilous enterprise with his usual glory. But he had soon
reason to repent his connections with a man like Peter, abandoned to all
sense of virtue and honor. The ungrateful tyrant refused the stipulated
pay to the English forces; and Edward finding his soldiers daily perish by
sickness, and even his own health impaired by the climate, was obliged,
without receiving any satisfaction on this head, to return into
Guienne.[*]
The barbarities exercised by Peter over his helpless subjects, whom he now
regarded as vanquished rebels, revived all the animosity of the Castilians
against him; and on the return of Henry of Transtamare, together with Du
Guesclin, and some forces levied anew in France, the tyrant was again
dethroned, and was taken prisoner. His brother, in resentment of his
cruelties, murdered him with his own hand: and was placed on the throne of
Castile, which he transmitted to his posterity. The duke of Lancaster, who
espoused in second marriage the eldest daughter of Peter, inherited only
the empty title of that sovereignty, and, by claiming the succession,
increased the animosity of the new king of Castile against England.
1368.
But the prejudice which the affairs of Prince Edward received from this
splendid though imprudent expedition, ended not with it. He had involved
himself in so much debt by his preparations and the pay of his troops,
that he found it necessary, on his return, to impose on his principality a
new tax, to which some of the nobility consented with extreme reluctance,
and to which others absolutely refused to submit.[**]
This incident revived the animosity which the inhabitants bore to the
English, and which all the amiable qualities of the prince of Wales were
not able to mitigate or assuage. They complained that they were considered
as a conquered people, that their privileges were disregarded, that all
trust was given to the English alone, that every office of honor and
profit was conferred on these foreigners, and that the extreme reluctance,
which most of them had expressed, to receive the new yoke, was likely to
be long remembered against them. They cast, therefore, their eyes towards
their ancient sovereign, whose prudence they found had now brought the
affairs of his kingdom into excellent order; and the counts of Armagnac,
Comminge, and Perigord, the lord d’Albret, with other nobles, went to
Paris, and were encouraged to carry their complaints to Charles, as to
their lord paramount, against these oppressions of the English
government.[*]
In the treaty of Bretigm it had been stipulated, that the two kings should
make renunciations; Edward, of his claim to the crown of France, and to
the provinces of Normandy, Maine, and Anjou; John, of the homage and
fealty due for Guienne and the other provinces ceded to the English. But
when that treaty was confirmed and renewed at Calais, it was found
necessary, as Edward was not yet in possession of all the territories,
that the mutual renunciations should for some time be deferred; and it was
agreed, that the parties, meanwhile, should make no use of their
respective claims against each other.[**] Though the failure in exchanging
these renunciations had still proceeded from France,[***] Edward appears
to have taken no umbrage at it; both because this clause seemed to give
him entire security, and because some reasonable apology had probably been
made to him for each delay. It was, however, on this pretence, though
directly contrary to treaty, that Charles resolved to ground his claim of
still considering himself as superior lord of those provinces, and of
receiving the appeals of his sub-vassals.[****]
1369.
But as views of policy, more than those of justice, enter into the
deliberations of princes; and as the mortal injuries received from the
English, the pride of their triumphs, the severe terms imposed by the
treaty of peace, seemed to render every prudent means of revenge honorable
against them; Charles was determined to take this measure, less by the
reasonings of his civilians and lawyers, than by the present situation of
the two monarchies. He considered the declining years of Edward, the
languishing state of the prince of Wales’s health, the affection which the
inhabitants of all these provinces bore to their ancient master, their
distance from England, their vicinity to France, the extreme animosity
expressed by his own subjects against these invaders, and their ardent
thirst of vengeance; and having silently made all the necessary
preparations, he sent to the prince of Wales a summons to appear in his
court at Paris, and there to justify his conduct towards his vassals. The
prince replied, that he would come to Paris, but it should be at the head
of sixty thousand men.[*] The unwarlike character of Charles kept Prince
Edward, even yet, from thinking that that monarch was in earnest in this
bold and hazardous attempt.
It soon appeared what a poor return the king had received by his distant
conquests for all the blood and treasure expended in the quarrel, and how
impossible it was to retain acquisitions, in an age when no regular force
could be maintained sufficient to defend them against the revolt of the
inhabitants, especially if that danger was joined with the invasion of a
foreign enemy.
1370.
Charles fell first upon Ponthieu, which gave the English an inlet into the
heart of France: the citizens of Abbeville opened their gates to him:[**]
those of St. Valori, Rue, and Crotoy imitated the example, and the whole
country was, in a little time, reduced to submission. The dukes of Berri
and Anjou, brothers to Charles, being assisted by Du Guesclin, who was
recalled from Spain, invaded the southern provinces; and by means of their
good conduct, the favorable dispositions of the people, and the ardor of
the French nobility, they made every day considerable progress against the
English. The state of the prince of Wales’s health did not permit him to
mount on horseback, or exert his usual activity: Chandos, the constable of
Guienne, was slain in one action;[***] the Captal de Buche, who succeeded
him in that office, was taken prisoner in another:[****] and when young
Edward himself was obliged by his increasing infirmities to throw up the
command, and return to his native country, the affairs of the English in
the south of France seemed to be menaced with total ruin.
The king, incensed at these injuries, threatened to put to death all the
French hostages who remained in his hands; but on reflection abstained
from that ungenerous revenge. After resuming, by advice of parliament, the
vain title of king of France,[*****] he endeavored to send succors into
Gascony, but all his attempts, both by sea and land, proved unsuccessful.
The earl of Pembroke was intercepted at sea, and taken prisoner with his
whole army, near Rochelle, by a fleet which the king of Castile had fitted
out for that purpose:[*] Edward himself embarked for Bordeaux with another
army; but was so long detained by contrary winds, that he was obliged to
lay aside the enterprise.[**] Sir Robert Knolles, at the head of thirty
thousand men, marched out of Calais, and continued his ravages to the
gates of Paris, without being able to provoke the enemy to an engagement:
he proceeded in his march to the provinces of Maine and Anjou, which he
laid waste; but part of his army being there defeated by the conduct of Du
Guesclin, who was now created constable of France, and who seems to have
been the first consummate general that had yet appeared in Europe, the
rest were scattered and dispersed, and the small remains of the English
forces, instead of reaching Guienne, took shelter in Brittany, whose
sovereign had embraced the alliance of England.[***] The duke of
Lancaster, some time after, made a like attempt with an army of
twenty-five thousand men; and marched the whole length of France from
Calais to Bordeaux: but was so much harassed by the flying parties which
attended him, that he brought not the half of his army to the place of
their destination. Edward, from the necessity of his affairs was at last
obliged to conclude a truce with the enemy;[****] after almost all his
ancient possessions in France had been ravished from him, except Bordeaux
and Bayonne, and all his conquests, except Calais.
The decline of the king’s life was exposed to many mortifications, and
corresponded not to the splendid and noisy scenes which had filled the
beginning and the middle of it. Besides seeing the loss of his foreign
dominions, and being baffled in every attempt to defend them, he felt the
decay of his authority at home; and experienced, from the sharpness of
some parliamentary remonstrances, the great inconstancy of the people, and
the influence of present fortune over all their judgments.[*****]
This prince, who, during the vigor of his age, had been chiefly occupied
in the pursuits of war and ambition, began, at an unseasonable period, to
indulge himself in pleasure; and being now a widower, he attached himself
to a lady of sense and spirit, one Alice Pierce, who acquired a great
ascendant over him, and by her influence gave such general disgust that,
in order to satisfy the parliament, he was obliged to remove her from
court.[*]
The indolence also, naturally attending old age and infirmities, had made
him in a great measure resign the administration into the hands of his
son, the duke of Lancaster, who, as he was far from being popular,
weakened extremely the affection which the English bore to the person and
government of the king. Men carried their jealousies very far against the
duke; and as they saw, with much regret, the death of the prince of Wales
every day approaching, they apprehended lest the succession of his son
Richard, now a minor, should be defeated by the intrigues of Lancaster,
and by the weak indulgence of the old king. But Edward, in order to
satisfy both the people and the prince on this head, declared in
parliament his grandson heir and successor to the crown; and thereby cut
off all the hopes of the duke of Lancaster, if he ever had the temerity to
entertain any.
1376.
The prince of Wales, after a lingering illness, died in the forty-sixth
year of his age; and left a character illustrious for every eminent
virtue, and, from his earliest youth till the hour he expired, unstained
by any blemish. His valor and military talents formed the smallest part of
his merit: his generosity, humanity, affability, moderation, gained him
the affections of all men; and he was qualified to throw a lustre, not
only on that rude age in which he lived, and which nowise infected him
with its vices, but on the most shining period of ancient or modern
history.
1377.
The king survived about a year this melancholy incident: England was
deprived at once of both these princes, its chief ornament and support: he
expired in the sixty-fifth year of his age and the fifty-first of his
reign; and the people were then sensible, though too late, of the
irreparable loss which they had sustained.
The English are apt to consider with peculiar fondness the history of
Edward III., and to esteem his reign, as it was one of the longest, the
most glorious also, that occurs in the annals of their nation. The
ascendant which they then began to acquire over France, their rival and
supposed national enemy, makes them cast their eyes on this period with
great complacency, and sanctifies every measure which Edward embraced for
that end. But the domestic government of this prince is really more
admirable than his foreign victories; and England enjoyed, by the prudence
and vigor of his administration, a longer interval of domestic peace and
tranquillity than she had been blessed with in any former period, or than
she experienced for many ages after. He gained the affections of the
great, yet curbed their licentiousness: he made them feel his power,
without their daring, or even being inclined, to murmur at it: his affable
and obliging behavior, his munificence and generosity, made them submit
with pleasure to his dominion; his valor and conduct made them successful
in most of their enterprises; and their unquiet spirits, directed against
a public enemy, had no leisure to breed those disturbances to which they
were naturally so much inclined, and which the frame of the government
seemed so much to authorize. This was the chief benefit which resulted
from Edward’s victories and conquests. His foreign wars were, in other
respects, neither founded in justice, nor directed to any salutary
purpose. His attempt against the king of Scotland, a minor and a
brother-in-law, and the revival of his grandfather’s claim of superiority
over that kingdom, were both unreasonable and ungenerous; and he allowed
himself to be too easily seduced, by the glaring prospect of French
conquests, from the acquisition of a point which was practicable, and
which, if attained, might really have been of lasting utility to his
country and his successors. The success which he met with in France,
though chiefly owing to his eminent talents, was unexpected; and yet, from
the very nature of things, not from any unforeseen accidents, was found,
even during his lifetime, to have procured him no solid advantages. But
the glory of a conqueror is so dazzling to the vulgar, the animosity of
nations is so violent, that the fruitless desolation of so fine a part of
Europe as France, is totally disregarded by us, and is never considered as
a blemish in the character or conduct of this prince. And indeed, from the
unfortunate state of human nature, it will commonly happen, that a
sovereign of genius, such as Edward, who usually finds every thing easy in
his domestic government, will turn himself towards military enterprises,
where alone he meets with opposition, and where he has full exercise for
his industry and capacity.
Edward had a numerous posterity by his queen, Philippa of Hainault. His
eldest son was the heroic Edward, usually denominated the Black Prince
from the color of his armor. This prince espoused his cousin Joan,
commonly called the “fair maid of Kent,” daughter and heir of his uncle,
the earl of Kent, who was beheaded in the beginning of this reign. She was
first married to Sir Thomas Holland, by whom she had children. By the
prince of Wales she had a son, Richard, who alone survived his father.
The second son of King Edward (for we pass over such as died in their
childhood) was Lionel, duke of Clarence, who was first married to
Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter and heir of the earl of Ulster, by whom he
left only one daughter, married to Edmund Mortimer, earl of Marche. Lionel
espoused in second marriage Violante, the daughter of the duke of
Milan,[*] and died in Italy soon after the consummation of his nuptials,
without leaving any posterity by that princess. Of all the family, he
resembled most his father and elder brother in his noble qualities.
Edward’s third son was John of Gaunt, so called from the place of his
birth: he was created duke of Lancaster; and from him sprang that branch
which afterwards possessed the the crown. The fourth son of this royal
family was Edmund created earl of Cambridge by his father, and duke of
York by his nephew. The fifth son was Thomas, who received the title of
earl of Buckingham from his father, and that of duke of Glocester from his
nephew. In order to prevent confusion, we shall always distinguish these
two princes by the titles of York and Glocester, even before they were
advanced to them.
There were also several princesses born to Edward by Philippa; to wit,
Isabella, Joan, Mary, and Margaret, who espoused, in the order of their
names, Ingelram de Coucy, earl of Bedford, Alphonso, king of Castile, John
of Mountfort, duke of Brittany, and John Hastings, earl of Pembroke. The
princess Joan died at Bordeaux before the consummation of her marriage.
It is remarked by an elegant historian,[**] that conquerors though usually
the bane of bunian kind, proved often, in those feudal limes, the most
indulgent of sovereigns: they stood most in need of supplies from their
people; and not being able to compel them by force to submit to the
necessary impositions, they were obliged to make them some compensation,
by equitable laws and popular concessions.
This remark is, in some measure, though imperfectly, justified by the
conduct of Edward III. He took no steps of moment without consulting his
parliament, and obtaining their approbation, which he afterwards pleaded
as a reason for their supporting his measures.[*] The parliament,
therefore, rose into greater consideration during his reign, and acquired
more regular authority, than in any former time; and even the house of
commons, which, during turbulent and factious periods, was naturally
depressed by the greater power of the crown and barons, began to appear of
some weight in the constitution. In the latter years of Edward, the king’s
ministers were impeached in parliament, particularly Lord Latimer, who
fell a sacrifice to the Authority of the commons;[**] and they even
obliged the king to banish his mistress by their remonstrances. Some
attention was also paid to the election of their members; and lawyers in
particular, who were at that time men of a character somewhat inferior,
were totally excluded the house during several parliaments.[***]
One of the most popular laws enacted by any prince, was the statute which
passed in the twenty-fifth of this reign,[****] and which limited the
cases of high treason, before vague and uncertain, to three principal
heads—conspiring the death of the king, levying war against him, and
adhering to his enemies and the judges were prohibited, if any other cases
should occur, from inflicting the penalty of treason without an
application to parliament. The bounds of treason were indeed so much
limited by this statute, which still remains in force without any
alteration, that the lawyers were obliged to enlarge them, and to explain
a conspiracy for levying war against the king, to be equivalent to a
conspiracy against his life; and this interpretation, seemingly forced,
has, from the necessity of the case, been tacitly acquiesced in.
It was also ordained that a parliament should be held once a year, or
oftener, if need be; a law which, like many others, was never observed and
lost its authority by disuse.[*]
Edward granted above twenty parliamentary confirmations of the Great
Charter; and these concessions are commonly appealed to as proofs of his
great indulgence to the people, and his tender regard for their liberties.
But the contrary presumption is more natural. If the maxims of Edward’s
reign had not been in general somewhat arbitrary, and if the Great Charter
had not been frequently violated, the parliament would never have applied
for these frequent confirmations, which could add no force to a deed
regularly observed, and which could serve to no other purpose, than to
prevent the contrary precedents from turning into a rule, and acquiring
authority. It was indeed the effect of the irregular government during
those ages, that a statute which had been enacted some years, instead of
acquiring, was imagined to lose, force by time, and needed to be often
renewed by recent statutes of the same sense and tenor. Hence likewise
that general clause, so frequent in old acts of parliament, that the
statutes, enacted by the king’s progenitors, should be observed;[**] a
precaution which, if we do not consider the circumstances of the times,
might appear absurd and ridiculous. The frequent confirmations in general
terms of the privileges of the church proceeded from the same cause.
It is a clause in one of Edward’s statutes, “that no man, of what estate
or condition soever, shall be put out of land or tenement, nor taken, nor
imprisoned, nor disherited, nor put to death, without being brought in
answer by due process of the law.”[***] This privilege was sufficiently
secured by a clause of the Great Charter, which had received a general
confirmation in the first chapter of the same statute. Why then is the
clause so anxiously, and, as we may think, so superfluously repeated?
Plainly, because there had been some late infringements of it, which gave
umbrage to the commons.[****]
But there is no article in which the laws are more frequently repeated
during this reign, almost in the same terms, than that of purveyance which
the parliament always calls an outrageous and intolerable grievance, and
the source of infinite damage to the people.[*] The parliament tried to
abolish this prerogative altogether, by prohibiting any one from taking
goods without the consent of the owners,[**] and by changing the heinous
name of purveyors, as they term it, into that of buyers;[***] but the
arbitrary conduct of Edward still brought back the grievance upon them,
though contrary both to the Great Charter and to many statutes. This
disorder was in a great measure derived from the state of the public
finances, and of the kingdom; and could therefore the less admit of
remedy. The prince frequently wanted ready money; yet his family must be
subsisted: he was therefore obliged to employ force and violence for that
purpose, and to give tallies, at what rate he pleased, to the owners of
the goods which he laid hold of. The kingdom also abounded so little in
commodities, and the interior communication was so imperfect, that had the
owners been strictly protected by law, they could easily have exacted any
price from the king; especially in his frequent progresses, when he came
to distant and poor places, where the court did not usually reside, and
where a regular plan for supplying it could not be easily established. Not
only the king, but several great lords, insisted upon this right of
purveyance within certain districts.[****]
The magnificent Castle of Windsor was built by Edward III., and his method
of conducting the work may serve as a specimen of the condition of the
people in that age. Instead of engaging workmen by contracts and wages, he
assessed every county in England to send him a certain number of masons,
tilers, and carpenters, as if he had been levying an army.[*****]
They mistake, indeed, very much the genius of this reign, who imagine that
it was not extremely arbitrary. All the high prerogatives of the crown
were to the full exerted in it; but what gave some consolation, and
promised in time some relief to the people, they were always complained of
by the commons: such as the dispensing power;[******] the extension of the
forests;[*******] erecting monopolies;[********] exacting loans—[*********]
—stopping justice by particular warrants;[*] the renewal of the
commission of “trailbaton;”[**] pressing men and ships into the public
service;[***] levying arbitrary and exorbitant fines;[****] extending the
authority of the privy council or star-chamber to the decision of private
causes;[*****] enlarging the power of the mareschal’s and other arbitrary
courts;[******] imprisoning members for freedom of speech in
parliament;[*******] obliging people without any rule to send recruits of
men at arms, archers, and hoblers to the army.[********]
But there was no act of arbitrary power more frequently repeated in this
reign, than that of imposing taxes without consent of parliament. Though
that assembly granted the king greater supplies than had ever been
obtained by any of his predecessors, his great undertakings, and the
necessity of his affairs, obliged him to levy still more; and after his
splendid success against France had added weight to his authority, these
arbitrary impositions became almost annual and perpetual. Cotton’s
Abridgment of the records affords numerous instances of this kind, in the
first[*] year of his reign, in the thirteenth year,[**] in the
fourteenth,[***] in the twentieth,[****] in the twenty-first,[*****] in
the twenty-second,[******] in the twenty fifth,[*******] in the
thirty-eighth,[********] in the fiftieth,[*********] and in the
fifty-first,[**********]
The king openly avowed and maintained this power of levying taxes at
pleasure. At one time, he replied to the remonstrance made by the commons
against it, that the impositions had been exacted from great necessity,
and had been assented to by the prelates, earls, barons, and some of the
commons;[*] at another, that he would advise with his council.[**] When
the parliament desired that a law might be enacted for the punishment of
such as levied these arbitrary impositions he refused compliance.[***]
In the subsequent year, they desired that the king might renounce this
pretended prerogative; but his answer was, that he would levy no taxes
without necessity for the defence of the realm, and where he reasonably
might use that authority.[*] This incident passed a few days before his
death; and these were, in a manner, his last words to his people. It would
seem that the famous charter or statute of Edward I., “de tallagio non
concedendo,” though never repealed, was supposed to have already lost by
age all its authority.
These facts can only show the practice of the times: for as to the right,
the continual remonstrances of the commons may seem to prove that it
rather lay on their side: at least, these remonstrances served to prevent
the arbitrary practices of the court from becoming an established part of
the constitution. In so much a better condition were the privileges of the
people even during the arbitrary reign of Edward III., than during some
subsequent ones, particularly those of the Tudors, where no tyranny or
abuse of power ever met with any check or opposition, or so much as a
remonstrance, from parliament.
In this reign, we find, according to the sentiments of an ingenious and
learned author, the first strongly marked and probably contested
distinction between a proclamation by the king and his privy council, and
a law which had received the assent of the lords and commons.[**]
It is easy to imagine, that a prince of so much sense and spirit as
Edward, would be no slave to the court of Rome. Though the old tribute was
paid during some years of his minority,[***] he afterwards withheld it;
and when the pope, in 1367, threatened to cite him to the court of Rome
for default of payment, he laid the matter before his parliament. That
assembly unanimously declared, that King John could not, without a
national consent, subject his kingdom to a foreign power; and that they
were therefore determined to support their sovereign against this unjust
pretension.[****]
During this reign, the statute of provisors was enacted, rendering it
penal to procure any presentations to benefices from the court of Rome,
and securing the rights of all patrons and electors, which had been
extremely encroached on by the pope.[*] By a subsequent statute, every
person was outlawed who carried any cause by appeal to the court of
Rome.[**]
The laity at this time seem to have been extremely prejudiced against the
papal power, and even somewhat against their own clergy, because of their
connections with the Roman pontiff. The parliament pretended, that the
usurpations of the pope were the cause of all the plagues, injuries,
famine, anc poverty of the realm; were more destructive to it than al the
wars; and were the reason why it contained not a third of the inhabitants
and commodities which it formerly possessed: that the taxes levied by him
exceeded five times those which were paid to the king; that every thing
was venal in that sinful city of Rome; and that even the patrons in
England had thence learned to practise simony without shame or
remorse.[***] At another time, they petition the king to employ no
churchman in any office of state;[****] and they even speak in plain terms
of expelling by force the papal authority, and thereby providing a remedy
against oppressions, which they neither could, nor would, any longer
endure.[*****] Men who talked in this strain, were not far from the
reformation: but Edward did not think proper to second all this zeal.
Though he passed the statute of provisors, he took little care of its
execution; and the parliament made frequent complaints of his negligence
on this head.[******] He was content with having reduced such of the
Romish ecclesiastics as possessed revenues in England, to depend entirely
upon him by means of that statute.
As to the police of the kingdom during this period, it was certainly
better than during times of faction, civil war, and disorder, to which
England was so often exposed: yet were there several vices in the
constitution, the bad consequences of which all the power and vigilance of
the king could not prevent. The barons, by their confederacies with those
of their own order, and by supporting and defending their retainers in
every iniquity,[*******] were the chief abettors of robbers, murderers,
and ruffians of all kinds; and no law could be executed against those
criminals.
The nobility were brought to give their promise in parliament, that they
would not avow retain, or support any felon or breaker of the law;[*] yet
this, engagement, which we may wonder to see exacted from men of their
rank, was never regarded by them. The commons make continual complaints of
the multitude of robberies, murders, rapes, and other disorders, which,
they say, were become numberless in every part of the kingdom, and which
they always ascribe to the protection that the criminals received from the
great.[**]The king of Cyprus, who paid a visit to England in this reign,
was robbed and stripped on the highway with his whole retinue.[***] Edward
himself contributed to this dissolution of law, by his facility in
granting pardons to felons, from the solicitation of the courtiers. Laws
were made to retrench this prerogative,[****] and remonstrances of the
commons were presented against the abuse of it;[*****] but to no purpose.
The gratifying of a powerful nobleman continued still to be of more
importance than the protection of the people. The king also granted many
franchises, which interrupted the course of justice and the execution of
the laws.[******]
Commerce and industry were certainly at a very low ebb during this period.
The bad police of the country alone affords a sufficient reason. The only
exports were wool, skins, hides leather, butter, tin, lead, and such
unmanufactured goods, of which wool was by far the most considerable.
Knyghton has asserted, that one hundred thousand sacks of wool were
annually exported, and sold at twenty pounds a sack, money of that age.
But he is widely mistaken both in the quantity exported and in the value.
In 1349, the parliament remonstrate, that the king, by an illegal
imposition of forty shillings on each sack exported, had levied sixty
thousand pounds a year:[*] which reduces the annual exports to thirty
thousand sacks. A sack contained twenty-six stone, and each stone fourteen
pounds;[**] and at a medium was not valued at above five pounds a
sack,[***] that is, fourteen or fifteen pounds of our present money.
Knyghton’s computation raises it to sixty pounds, which is near four times
the present price of wool in England.
According to this reduced computation, the export of wool brought into the
kingdom about four hundred and thousand pounds of our present money,
instead of six millions, which is an extravagant sum. Even the former sum
is so high, as to afford a suspicion of some mistake in the computation of
the parliament with regard to the number of sacks exported. Such mistakes
were very usual in those ages.
Edward endeavored to introduce and promote the woolen manufacture, by
giving protection and encouragement to foreign weavers,[*] and by enacting
a law, which prohibited every one from wearing any cloth but of English
fabric.[*] The parliament prohibited the exportation of woollen goods,
which was not so well judged, especially while the exportation of
unwrought wool was so much allowed and encouraged. A like injudicious law
was made against the exportation of manufactured iron.[**]
It appears from a record in the exchequer, that in 1354 the exports of
England amounted to two hundred and ninety-four thousand one hundred and
eighty-four pounds seventeen shillings and twopence; the imports to
thirty-eight thousand nine hundred and seventy pounds three shillings and
sixpence, money of that time. This is a great balance, considering that it
arose wholly from the exportation of raw wool and other rough materials.
The import was chiefly linen and fine cloth, and some wine. England seems
to have been extremely drained at this time by Edward’s foreign
expeditions and foreign subsidies, which probably was the reason why the
exports so much exceed the imports.
The first toll we read of in England for mending the highways, was imposed
in this reign: it was that for repairing the road between St. Giles’s and
Temple Bar.[***]
In the first of Richard II., the parliament complain extremely of the
decay of shipping during the preceding reign, and assert that one seaport
formerly contained more vessels than were then to be found in the whole
kingdom. This calamity they ascribe to the arbitrary seizure of ships by
Edward for the service of his frequent expeditions.[****] The parliament
in the fifth of Richard renew the same complaint;[*****] and we likewise
find it made in the forty-sixth of Edward III.
So false is the common opinion that this reign was favorable to commerce.
There is an order of this king, directed to the mayor and sheriffs of
London, to take up all ships of forty ton and upwards, to be converted
into ships of war.[*]
The parliament attempted the impracticable scheme of reducing the price of
labor after the pestilence, and also that of poultry,[**] A reaper, in the
first week of August, was not allowed above twopence a day, or near
sixpence of our present money; in the second week, a third more. A master
carpenter was limited through the whole year to threepence a day, a common
carpenter to twopence, money of that age.[***] It is remarkable that, in
the same reign, the pay of a common soldier, an archer, was sixpence a
day; which, by the change both in denomination and value, would be
equivalent to near five shillings of our present money.[****] Soldiers
were then enlisted only for a very short time; they lived idle all the
rest of the year, and commonly all the rest of their lives: one successful
campaign, by pay and plunder, and the ransom of prisoners, was supposed to
be a small fortune to a man; which was a great allurement to enter into
the service.[*****]
The staple of wool, wool-fells, leather, and lead, was fixed by act of
parliament in particular towns of England.[*] Afterwards it was removed by
law to Calais: but Edward, who commonly deemed his prerogative above law,
paid little regard to these statutes; and when the parliament remonstrated
with him on account of those acts of power, he plainly told them, that he
would proceed in that matter as he thought proper.[**] It is not easy to
assign the reason of this great anxiety for fixing a staple; unless,
perhaps, it invited foreigners to a market, when they knew beforehand,
that they should there meet with great choice of any particular species of
commodity. This policy of inviting foreigners to Calais was carried so
far, that all English merchants were prohibited by law from exporting any
English goods from the staple; which was in a manner the total abandoning
of all foreign navigation, except that to Calais;[***] a contrivance
seemingly extraordinary.
The pay of a man at arms was quadruple. We may therefore conclude, that
the numerous armies mentioned by historians in those times, consisted
chiefly of ragamuffins who followed the camp, and lived by plunder.
Edward’s army before Calais consisted of thirty-one thousand and
ninety-four men; yet its pay for sixteen months was only one hundred and
twenty-seven thousand two hundred and one pounds.
It was not till the middle of this century that the English began to
extend their navigation even to the Baltic;[*] nor till the middle of the
subsequent, that they sailed to the Mediterranean.[**]
Luxury was complained of in that age, as well as in others of more
refinement; and attempts were made by parliament to restrain it,
particularly on the head of apparel, where surely it is the most obviously
innocent and inoffensive. No man under a hundred a year was allowed to
wear gold, silver, or silk in his clothes; servants, also, were prohibited
from eating flesh meat, or fish, above once a day.[***] By another law it
was ordained, that no one should be allowed, either for dinner or supper,
above three dishes in each course, and not above two courses; and it is
likewise expressly declared that “soused” meat is to count as one of these
dishes.[****] It was easy to foresee that such ridiculous laws must prove
ineffectual, and could never be executed.
The use of the French language, in pleadings and public deeds, was
abolished.[*****] It may appear strange, that the nation should so long
have worn this badge of conquest: but the king and nobility seem never to
have become thoroughly English, or to have forgotten their French
extraction, till Edward’s wars with France gave them an antipathy to that
nation. Yet still it was long before the use of the English tongue came
into fashion. The first English paper which we meet with in Rymer is in
the year 1386, during the reign of Richard II.[******]
There are Spanish papers in that collection of more ancient date:[*] and
the use of the Latin and French still continued. We may judge of the
ignorance of this age in geography, from a story told by Robert of
Avesbury. Pope Clement VI having, in 1344, created Lewis of Spain prince
of the Fortunate Islands, meaning the Canaries, then newly discovered, the
English ambassador at Rome and his retinue were seized with an alarm, that
Lewis had been created king of England; and they immediately hurried home,
in order to convey this important intelligence. Yet such was the ardor for
study at this time, that Speed in his Chronicle informs us, there were
then thirty thousand students in the university of Oxford alone. What was
the occupation of all these young men? To learn very bad Latin, and still
worse logic.
In 1364, the commons petitioned, that, in consideration of the preceding
pestilence, such persons as possessed manors holding of the king in chief,
and had let different leases without obtaining licenses, might continue to
exercise the same power, till the country were become more populous.[**]
The commons were sensible, that this security of possession was a good
means for rendering the kingdom prosperous and flourishing; yet durst not
apply, all at once, for a greater relaxation of their chains.
There is not a reign among those of the ancient English monarchs, which
deserves more to be studied than that of Edward III., nor one where the
domestic transactions will better discover the true genius of that kind of
mixed government, which was then established in England. The struggles
with regard to the validity and authority of the Great Charter were now
over: the king was acknowledged to lie under some limitations: Edward
himself was a prince of great capacity, not governed by favorites, nor led
astray by any unruly passion, sensible that nothing could be more
essential to his interests than to keep on good terms with his people:
yet, on the whole, it appears that the government at best was only a
barbarous monarchy, not regulated by any fixed maxims, or bounded by any
certain undisputed rights, which in practice were regularly observed. The
king conducted himself by one set of principles, the barons by another,
the commons by a third, the clergy by a fourth. All these systems of
government were opposite and incompatible: each of them prevailed in its
turn, as incidents were favorable to it: a great prince rendered the
monarchical power predominant; the weakness of a king gave reins to the
aristocracy; a superstitious age saw the clergy triumphant; the people,
for whom chiefly government was instituted, and who chiefly deserve
consideration, were the weakest of the whole. But the commons, little
obnoxious to any other order, though they sunk under the violence of
tempests, silently reared their head in more peaceable times; and while
the storm was brewing, were courted by all sides, and thus received still
some accession to their privileges, or, at worst, some confirmation of
them.
It has been an established opinion that gold coin was not struck till this
reign; but there has lately been found proof that it is as ancient as
Henry III.[*]
CHAPTER XVII.
RICHARD II.
1377.
THE parliament which was summoned soon after the king’s accession, was
both elected and assembled in tranquillity; and the great change, from a
sovereign of consummate wisdom and experience to a boy of eleven years of
age, was not immediately felt by the people. The habits of order and
obedience which the barons had been taught, during the long reign of
Edward, still influenced them; and the authority of the king’s three
uncles, the dukes of Lancaster, York, and Glocester, sufficed to repress,
for a time, the turbulent spirit to which that order, in a weak reign, was
so often subject. The dangerous ambition, too, of these princes themselves
was checked, by the plain and undeniable title of Richard, by the
declaration of it made in parliament, and by the affectionate regard which
the people bore to the memory of his father, and which was naturally
transferred to the young sovereign upon the throne. The different
characters, also, of these three princes rendered them a counterpoise to
each other; and it was natural to expect, that any dangerous designs which
might be formed by one brother, would meet with opposition from the
others. Lancaster, whose age and experience, and authority under the late
king, gave him the ascendant among them, though his integrity seemed not
proof against great temptations, was neither of an enterprising spirit,
nor of a popular and engaging temper. York was indolent, inactive, and of
slender capacity. Glocester was turbulent, bold, and popular; but being
the youngest of the family, was restrained by the power and authority of
his elder brothers. There appeared, therefore, no circumstance in the
domestic situation of England which might endanger the public peace, or
give any immediate apprehensions to the lovers of their country.
But as Edward, though he had fixed the succession to the crown, had taken
no care to establish a plan of government during the minority of his
grandson, it behoved the parliament to supply this defect; and the house
of commons distinguished themselves by taking the lead on the occasion.
This house, which had been rising to consideration during the whole course
of the late reign, naturally received an accession of power during the
minority; and as it was now becoming a scene of business, the members
chose for the first time a speaker, who might preserve order in their
debates, and maintain those forms which are requisite in all numerous
assembles. Peter de la Mare was the man pitched on; the same person that
had been imprisoned and detained in custody by the late king for his
freedom of speech, in attacking the mistress and the ministers of that
prince. But though this election discovered a spirit of liberty in the
commons, and was followed by further attacks, both on these ministers and
on Alice Pearce,[*] they were still too sensible of their great
inferiority to assume at first any immediate share in the administration
of government, or the care of the king’s person. They were content to
apply by petition to the lords for that purpose, and desire them both to
appoint a council of nine, who might direct the public business, and to
choose men of virtuous life and conversation, who might inspect the
conduct and education of the young prince. The lords complied with the
first part of this request, and elected the bishops of London, Carlisle,
and Salisbury, the earls of Marche and Stafford, Sir Richard de Stafford,
Sir Henry le Scrope, Sir John Devereux, and Sir Hugh Segrave, to whom they
gave authority for a year to conduct the ordinary course of business.[**]
But as to the regulation of the king’s household, they declined
interposing in an office which, they said, both was invidious in itself,
and might prove disagreeable to his majesty.
The commons, as they acquired more courage, ventured to proceed a step
farther in their applications. They presented a petition, in which they
prayed the king to check the prevailing custom among the barons of forming
illegal confederacies, and supporting each other, as well as men of
inferior rank, in the violations of law and justice. They received from
the throne a general and an obliging answer to this petition: but another
part of their application, that all the great officers should, during the
king’s minority, be appointed by parliament, which seemed to require the
concurrence of the commons, as well as that of the upper house, in the
nomination, was not complied with: the lords alone assumed the power of
appointing these officers. The commons tacitly acquiesced in the choice;
and thought that, for, the present, they themselves had proceeded a
sufficient length, if they but advanced their pretensions, though
rejected, of interposing in these more important matters of state.
On this footing then the government stood. The administration was
conducted entirely in the king’s name: no regency was expressly appointed:
the nine counsellors and the great officers named by the peers, did their
duty each in his respective department; and the whole system was for some
years kept together, by the secret authority of the king’s uncles,
especially of the duke of Lancaster, who was in reality the regent.
The parliament was dissolved, after the commons had represented the
necessity of their being reassembled once every year, as appointed by law;
and after having elected two citizens as their treasurers, to receive and
disburse the produce of two fifteenths and tenths, which they had voted to
the crown. In the other parliaments called during the minority, the
commons still discover a strong spirit of freedom, and a sense of their
own authority, which, without breeding any disturbance, tended to secure
their independence and that of the people.[*] 11
Edward had left his grandson involved in many dangerous wars. The
pretensions of the duke of Lancaster to the crown of Castile, made that
kingdom still persevere in hostilities against England. Scotland, whose
throne was now filled by Robert Stuart, nephew to David Bruce, and the
first prince of that family, maintained such close connections with
France, that war with one crown almost inevitably produced hostilities
with the other. The French monarch, whose prudent conduct had acquired him
the surname of Wise, as he had already baffled all the experience and
valor of the two Edwards, was likely to prove a dangerous enemy to a minor
king: but his genius, which was not naturally enterprising, led him not at
present to give any disturbance to his neighbors; and he labored, besides,
under many difficulties at home, which it was necessary for him to
surmount, before he could think of making conquests in a foreign country.
England was master of Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne; had lately acquired
possession of Cherbourg from the cession of the king of Navarre, and of
Brest from that of the duke of Brittany;[*] and having thus an easy
entrance into France from every quarter, was able, even in its present
situation, to give disturbance to his government. Before Charles could
remove the English from these important posts, he died in the flower of
his age, and left his kingdom to a minor son who bore the name of Charles
VI.
1378.
Meanwhile the war with France was carried on in a manner somewhat languid,
and produced no enterprise of great lustre or renown. Sir Hugh Calverly,
governor of Calais, making an inroad into Picardy with a detachment of the
garrison, set fire to Boulogne.[**] The duke of Lancaster conducted an
army into Brittany, but returned without being able to perform any thing
memorable.
1380.
In a subsequent year, the duke of Glocester marched out of Calais with a
body of two thousand cavalry and eight thousand infantry, and scrupled
not, with his small army, to enter into the heart of France, and to
continue his ravages through Picardy, Champaigne, the Brie, the Beausse,
the Gatinois, the Orleanois, till he reached his allies in the province of
Brittany.[***] The duke of Burgundy, at the head of a more considerable
army, came within sight of him; but the French were so overawed by the
former successes of the English, that no superiority of numbers could
tempt them to venture a pitched battle with the troops of that nation. As
the duke of Brittany, soon after the arrival of these succors, formed an
accommodation with the court of France, this enterprise also proved in the
issue unsuccessful, and made no durable impression upon the enemy.
The expenses of these armaments, and the usual want of economy attending a
minority, much exhausted the English treasury, and obliged the parliament,
besides making some alterations in the council, to impose a new and
unusual tax of three groats on every person, male and female, above
fifteen years of age; and they ordained that, in levying that tax, the
opulent should relieve the poor by an equitable compensation. This
imposition produced a mutiny, which was singular in its circumstances. All
history abounds with examples where the great tyrannize over the meaner
sort; but here the lowest populace rose against their rulers, committed
the most cruel ravages upon them, and took vengeance for all former
oppressions.
1381.
The faint dawn of the arts and of good government in that age, had excited
the minds of the populace, in different states of Europe, to wish for a
better condition, and to murmur against those chains which the laws
enacted by the haughty nobility and gentry, had so long imposed upon them.
The commotions of the people in Flanders, the mutiny of the peasants in
France, were the natural effects of this growing spirit of independence;
and the report of these events being brought into England, where personal
slavery, as we learn from Froissard,[*] was more general than in any other
country in Europe, had prepared the minds of the multitude for an
insurrection. One John Ball, also, a seditious preacher, who affected low
popularity, went about the country and inculcated on his audience the
principles of the first origin of mankind from one common stock, their
equal right to liberty and to all the goods of nature, the tyranny of
artificial distinctions, and the abuses which had arisen from the
degradation of the more considerable part of the species, and the
aggrandizement of a few insolent rulers.[**] These doctrines, so agreeable
to the populace, and so conformable to the ideas of primitive equality
which are engraven in the hearts of all men, were greedily received by the
multitude, and scattered the sparks of that sedition which the present tax
raised into a conflagration.[***]
The imposition of three groats a head had been farmed out to tax-gatherers
in each county, who levied the money on the people with rigor; and the
clause, of making the rich ease their poorer neighbors of some share of
the burden, being so vague and undeterminate, had doubtless occasioned
many partialities, and made the people more sensible of the unequal lot
which Fortune had assigned them in the distribution of her favors. The
first disorder was raised by a blacksmith in a village of Essex. The
tax-gatherers came to this man’s shop while he was at work, and they
demanded payment for his daughter, whom he asserted to be below the age
assigned by the statute. One of these fellows offered to produce a very
indecent proof to the contrary, and at the same time laid hold of the
maid; which the father resenting, immediately knocked out the ruffian’s
brains with his hammer. The bystanders applauded the action, and
exclaimed, that it was full time for the people to take vengeance on their
tyrants, and to vindicate their native liberty. They immediately flew to
arms: the whole neighborhood joined in the sedition: the flame spread in
an instant over the county: it soon propagated itself into that of Kent,
of Hertford, Surrey, Sussex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge, and Lincoln.
Before the government had the least warning of the danger, the disorder
had grown beyond control or opposition: the populace had shaken off all
regard to their former masters; and being headed by the most audacious and
criminal of their associates, who assumed the feigned names of Wat Tyler,
Jack Straw, Hob Carter, and Tom Miller, by which they were fond of
denoting their mean origin, they committed every where the most outrageous
violence on such of the gentry or nobility as had the misfortune to fall
into their hands.
The mutinous populace, amounting to a hundred thousand men, assembled on
Blackheath under their leaders, Tyler and Straw; and as the princess of
Wales, the king’s mother, returning from a pilgrimage to Canterbury,
passed through the midst of them, they insulted her attendants, and some
of the most insolent among them, to show their purpose of levelling all
mankind, forced kisses from her; but they allowed her to continue her
journey, without attempting any further injury.[*] They sent a message to
the king, who had taken shelter in the Tower; and they desired a
conference with him. Richard sailed down the river in a barge for that
purpose; but on his approaching the shore, he saw such symptoms of tumult
and insolence, that he put back and returned to that fortress.[**]
The seditious peasants, meanwhile, favored by the populace of London, had
broken into the city; had burned the duke of Lancaster’s palace of the
Savoy; cut off the heads of all the gentlemen whom they laid hold of;
expressed a particular animosity against the lawyers and attorneys; and
pillaged the warehouses of the rich merchants.[*] A great body of them
quartered themselves at Mile End; and the king, finding no defence in the
Tower, which was weakly garrisoned and ill supplied with provisions, was
obliged to go out to them and ask their demands. They required a general
pardon, the abolition of slavery, freedom of commerce in market towns
without toll or impost, and a fixed rent on lands, instead of the services
due by villainage. These requests, which, though extremely reasonable in
themselves, the nation was not sufficiently prepared to receive, and which
it was dangerous to have extorted by violence, were, however, complied
with; charters to that purpose were granted them; and this body
immediately dispersed, and returned to their several homes.[**]
During this transaction, another body of the rebels had broken into the
Tower; had murdered Simon Sudbury, the primate and chancellor, with Sir
Robert Hales, the treasurer, and some other persons of distinction; and
continued their ravages in the city.[***]
The king, passing along Smithfield, very slenderly guarded, met with Wat
Tyler at the head of these rioters, and entered into a conference with
him. Tyler, having ordered his companions to retire till he should give
them a signal, after which they were to murder all the company except the
king himself, whom they were to detain prisoner, feared not to come into
the midst of the royal retinue. He there behaved himself in such a manner,
that Walworth, the mayor of London, not able to bear his insolence, drew
his sword, and struck him so violent a blow as brought him to the ground,
where he was instantly despatched by others of the king’s attendants. The
mutineers, seeing their leader fall, prepared themselves for revenge; and
this whole company, with the king himself, had undoubtedly perished on the
spot, had it not been for an extraordinary presence of mind which Richard
discovered on the occasion. He ordered his company to stop; he advanced
alone towards the enraged multitude, and accosting them with an affable
and intrepid countenance, he asked them, “What is the meaning of this
disorder my good people? Are ye angry that ye have lost your leader? I am
your king: I will be your leader.” The populace, overawed by his presence,
implicitly followed him. He led them into the fields, to prevent any
disorder which might have arisen by their continuing in the city. Being
there joined by Sir Robert Knolles, and a body of well-armed veteran
soldiers, who had been secretly drawn together, he strictly prohibited
that officer from falling on the rioters, and committing an
undistinguished slaughter upon them; and he peaceably dismissed them with
the same charters which had been granted to their fellows.[*] Soon after,
the nobility and gentry, hearing of the king’s danger, in which they were
all involved, flocked to London, with their adherents and retainers; and
Richard took the field at the head of an army forty thousand strong.[**]
It then behoved all the rebels to submit: the charters of enfranchisement
and pardon were revoked by parliament; the low people were reduced to the
same slavish condition as before; and several of the ringleaders were
severely punished for the late disorders. Some were even executed without
process or form of law.[***] It was pretended, that the intentions of the
mutineers had been to seize the king’s person, to carry him through
England at their head; to murder all the nobility, gentry, and lawyers,
and even all the bishops and priests, except the mendicant friars; to
despatch afterwards the king himself, and, having thus reduced all to a
level, to order the kingdom at their pleasure.[****] It is not impossible
but many of them, in the delirium of their first success, might have
formed such projects: but of all the evils incident to human society, the
insurrections of the populace, when not raised and supported by persons of
higher quality, are the least to be dreaded: the mischiefs consequent to
an abolition of all rank and distinction become so great, that they are
immediately felt, and soon bring affairs back to their former order and
arrangement.
A youth of sixteen, (which was at this time the king’s age) who had
discovered so much courage, presence of mind, and address, and had so
dexterously eluded the violence of this tumult, raised great expectations
in the nation; and it was natural to hope that he would, in the course of
his life, equal the glories which had so uniformly attended his father and
his grandfather in all their undertakings. {1385.
But in proportion as Richard advanced in years, these hopes vanished; and
his want of capacity, at least of solid judgment, appeared in every
enterprise which he attempted. The Scots, sensible of their own deficiency
in cavalry, had applied to the regency of Charles VI.; and John de Vienne,
admiral of France, had been sent over with a body of one thousand five
hundred men at arms, to support them in their incursions against the
English. The danger was now deemed by the king’s uncles somewhat serious;
and a numerous army of sixty thousand men was levied, and they marched
into Scotland with Richard himself at their head. The Scots did not
pretend to make resistance against so great a force: they abandoned
without scruple their country to be pillaged and destroyed by the enemy:
and when De Vienne expressed his surprise at this plan of operations, they
told him, that all their cattle was driven into the forests and
fastnesses; that their houses and other goods were of small value; and
that they well knew how to compensate any losses which they might sustain
in that respect, by making an incursion into England. Accordingly, when
Richard entered Scotland by Berwick and the east coast, the Scots, to the
number of thirty thousand men, attended by the French, entered the borders
of England by the west, and carrying their ravages through Cumberland,
Westmoreland, and Lancashire, collected a rich booty, and then returned in
tranquillity to their own country. Richard, meanwhile, advanced towards
Edinburgh, and destroyed in his way all the towns and villages on each
side of him: he reduced that city to ashes: he treated in the same manner
Perth, Dundee, and other places in the low countries; but when he was
advised to march towards the west coast, to await there the return of the
enemy, and to take revenge on them for their devastations, his impatience
to return to England, and enjoy his usual pleasures and amusements,
outweighed every consideration; and he led back his army without effecting
any thing by all these mighty preparations. The Scots, soon after, finding
the heavy bodies of French cavalry very useless in that desultory kind of
war to which they confined themselves, treated their allies so ill, that
the French returned home, much disgusted with the country and with the
manners of its inhabitants.[*] And the English, though they regretted the
indolence and levity of their king, saw themselves for the future secured
against any dangerous invasion from that quarter.
1386.
But it was so material an interest of the French court to wrest the
seaport towns from the hands of their enemy, that they resolved to attempt
it by some other expedient, and found no means so likely as an invasion of
England itself. They collected a great fleet and army at Sluise; for the
Flemings were now in alliance with them: all the nobility of France were
engaged in this enterprise: the English were kept in alarm: great
preparations were made for the reception of the invaders: and though the
dispersion of the French ships by a storm, and the taking of many of them
by the English, before the embarkation of the troops, freed the kingdom
from the present danger, the king and council were fully sensible that
this perilous situation might every moment return upon them.[**]
There were two circumstances, chiefly, which engaged the French at this
time to think of such attempts. The one was the absence of the duke of
Lancaster, who had carried into Spain the flower of the English military
force, in prosecution of his vain claim to the crown of Castile; an
enterprise in which, after some promising success, he was finally
disappointed: the other was, the violent dissensions and disorders which
had taken place in the English government.
The subjection in which Richard was held by his uncles, particularly by
the duke of Glocester, a prince of ambition and genius, though it was not
unsuitable to his years and slender capacity, was extremely disagreeable
to his violent temper; and he soon attempted to shake off the yoke imposed
upon him. Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, a young man of a noble family,
of an agreeable figure, but of dissolute manners, had acquired an entire
ascendant over him, and governed him with an absolute authority. The king
set so little bounds to his affection, that he first created his favorite
marquis of Dublin, a title before unknown in England, then duke of
Ireland; and transferred to him by patent, which was confirmed in
parliament, the entire sovereignty for life of that island.[***]
He gave him in marriage his cousin-german, the daughter of Ingelram de
Couci, earl of Bedford; but soon after he permitted him to repudiate that
lady, though of an unexceptionable character, and to marry a foreigner, a
Bohemian, with whom he had become enamored.[*] These public declarations
of attachment turned the attention of the whole court towards the minion:
all favors passed through his hands: access to the king could only be
obtained by his mediation: and Richard seemed to take no pleasure in royal
authority, but so far as it enabled him to load with favors, and titles,
and dignities, this object of his affections.
The jealousy of power immediately produced an animosity Between the minion
and his creatures on the one hand, and the princes of the blood and chief
nobility on the other; and the usual complaints against the insolence of
favorites were loudly echoed, and greedily received, in every part of the
kingdom. Moubray, earl of Nottingham, the mareschal, Fitz-Alan, earl of
Arundel, Piercy, earl of Northumberland, Montacute, earl of Salisbury,
Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, were all connected with each other, and with
the princes, by friendship or alliance, and still more by their common
antipathy to those who had eclipsed them in the king’s favor and
confidence. No longer kept in awe by the personal character of the prince,
they scorned to submit to his ministers; and the method which they took to
redress the grievance complained of well suited the violence of the age,
and proves the desperate extremities to which every opposition was sure to
be instantly carried.
Michael de la Pole, the present chancellor, and lately created earl of
Suffolk, was the son of an eminent merchant; but had risen by his
abilities and valor during the wars of Edward III., had acquired the
friendship of that monarch, and was esteemed the person of greatest
experience and capacity among those who were attached to the duke of
Ireland and the king’s secret council. The duke of Glocester, who had the
house of commons at his devotion, impelled them to exercise that power
which they seem first to have assumed against Lord Latimer during the
declining years of the late king; and an impeachment against the
chancellor was carried up by them to the house of peers, which was no less
at his devotion. The king foresaw the tempest preparing against him and
his ministers. After attempting in vain to rouse the Londoners to his
defence, he withdrew from parliament, and retired with his court to
Eltham. The parliament sent a deputation, inviting him to return, and
threatening that, if he persisted in absenting himself, they would
immediately dissolve, and leave the nation, though at that time in
imminent danger of a French invasion, without any support or supply for
its defence. At the same time, a member was encouraged to call for the
record containing the parliamentary deposition of Edward II.; a plain
intimation of the fate which Richard, if he continued refractory, had
reason to expect from them. The king, finding himself unable to resist,
was content to stipulate that, except finishing the present impeachment
against Suffolk, no attack should be made upon any other of his ministers;
and on that condition he returned to the parliament.[*] 12
Nothing can prove more fully the innocence of Suffolk, than the
frivolousness of the crimes which his enemies, in the present plenitude of
their power, thought proper to object against him.[**] It was alleged,
that being chancellor, and obliged by his oath to consult the king’s
profit, he had purchased lands of the crown below their true value; that
he had exchanged with the king a perpetual annuity of four hundred marks a
year, which he inherited from his father, and which was assigned upon the
customs of the port of Hull, for lands of an equal income; that having
obtained for his son the priory of St. Anthony, which was formerly
possessed by a Frenchman, an enemy and a schismatic, and a new prior being
at the same time named by the pope, he had refused to admit this person,
whose title was not legal, till he made a composition with his son, and
agreed to pay him a hundred pounds a year from the income of the benefice;
that he had purchased, from one Tydeman, of Limborch, an old and forfeited
annuity of fifty pounds a year upon the crown, and had engaged the king to
admit that bad debt; and that, when created earl of Suffolk, he had
obtained a grant of five hundred pounds a year to support the dignity of
that title.[***]
We may even the proof of these articles, frivolous as they are, was found
very deficient upon the trial: it appeared that Suffolk had made no
purchase from the crown while he was chancellor, and that all his bargains
of that kind were made before he was advanced to that dignity.[*] It is
almost needless to add, that he was condemned, notwithstanding his
defence; and that he was deprived of his office.
Glocester and his associates observed their stipulation with the king, and
attacked no more of his ministers: but they immediately attacked himself
and his royal dignity, and framed a commission after the model of those
which had been attempted almost in every reign since that of Richard I.,
and which had always been attended with extreme confusion.[**] By this
commission, which was ratified by parliament, a council of fourteen
persons was appointed, all of Glocester’s faction, except Nevil,
archbishop of York: the sovereign power was transferred to these men for a
twelvemonth: the king, who had now reached the twenty-first year of his
age, was in reality dethroned: the aristocracy was rendered supreme: and
though the term of the commission was limited, it was easy to foresee that
the intentions of the party were to render it perpetual, and that power
would with great difficulty be wrested from those grasping hands to which
it was once committed. Richard, however, was obliged to submit: he signed
the commission which violence had extorted from him; he took an oath never
to infringe it; and though at the end of the session he publicly entered a
protest, that the prerogatives of the crown, notwithstanding his late
concession, should still be deemed entire and unimpaired,[***] the new
commissioners, without regarding this declaration, proceeded to the
exercise of their authority.
1887.
The king, thus dispossessed of royal power, was soon sensible of the
contempt into which he was fallen. His favorites and ministers, who were
as yet allowed to remain about his person, failed not to aggravate the
injury which without any demerit on his part, had been offered to him. And
his eager temper was of itself sufficiently inclined to remark that the
dukes of Glocester and York, though vastly rich received at the same time
each of them a thousand pounds a year top support their dignity and to
seek the means, both of recovering his authority, and of revenging himself
on those who had invaded it. As the house of commons appeared now of
weight in the constitution, he secretly tried some expedients for
procuring a favorable election: he sounded some of the sheriffs, who,
being at that time both the returning officers, and magistrates of great
power in the counties, had naturally considerable influence in
elections.[*] But as most of them had been appointed by his uncles, either
during his minority or during the course of the present commission, he
found them in general averse to his enterprise. The sentiments and
inclinations of the judges were more favorable to him. He met at
Nottingham Sir Robert Tresilian, chief justice of the king’s bench, Sir
Robert Belknappe, chief justice of the common pleas, Sir John Gary, chief
baron of the exchequer, Holt, Fulthorpe, and Bourg, inferior justices, and
Lockton, serjeant at law; and he proposed to them some queries, which
these lawyers, either from the influence of his authority or of reason,
made no scruple of answering in the way he desired. They declared that the
late commission was derogatory to the royalty and prerogative of the king;
that those who procured it, or advised the king to consent to it, were
punishable with death; that those who necessitated and compelled him were
guilty of treason; that those were equally criminal who should persevere
in maintaining it; that the king has the right of dissolving parliaments
at pleasure; that the parliament, while it sits, must first proceed upon
the king’s business; and that this assembly cannot without his consent
impeach any of his ministers and judges.[**] Even according to our present
strict maxims with regard to law and the royal prerogative, all these
determinations, except the two last, appear justifiable: and as the great
privileges of the commons, particularly that of impeachment, were hitherto
new and supported by few precedents, there want not plausible reasons to
justify these opinions of the judges.[***]
They obliged the king to summon a parliament, which was entirely at their
devotion, they had full power, by observing a few legal forms, to take
vengeance on all their enemies. Five great peers, men whose combined power
was able at any time to shake the throne,—the duke of Glocester, the
king’s uncle; the earl of Derby, son of the duke of Lancaster; the earl of
Arundel; the earl of Warwick; and the earl of Nottingham, mareschal of
England,—entered before the parliament an accusation, or appeal, as
it was called, against the five counsellors whom they had already accused
before the king. The parliament, who ought to have been judges, were not
ashamed to impose an oath on all their members, by which they bound
themselves to live and die with the lords appellants, and to defend them
against all opposition with their lives and fortunes.[*]
The duke of Glocester and his adherents soon got intelligence of this
secret consultation, and were naturally very much alarmed at it. They saw
the king’s intentions; and they determined to prevent the execution of
them. As soon as he came to London, which they knew was well disposed to
their party, they secretly assembled their forces, and appeared in arms at
Haringay Park, near Highgate, with a power which Richard and his ministers
were not able to resist. They sent him a message by the archbishop of
Canterbury, and the lords Lovel Cobham, and Devereux, and demanded that
the persons who had seduced him by their pernicious counsel, and were
traitors both to him and to the kingdom, should be delivered up to them. A
few days after, they appeared in his presence, armed, and attended with
armed followers; and they accused by name the archbishop of York, the duke
of Ireland, the earl of Suffolk, Sir Robert Tresilian, and Sir Nicholas
Brembre, as public and dangerous enemies to the state. They threw down
their gauntlets before the king, and fiercely offered to maintain the
truth of their charge by duel. The persons accused, and all the other
obnoxious ministers, had withdrawn or had concealed themselves.
The duke of Ireland fled to Cheshire, and levied some forces, with which
he advanced to relieve the king from the violence of the nobles. Glocester
encountered him in Oxfordshire with much superior forces; routed him,
dispersed his followers, and obliged him to fly into the Low Countries,
where he died in exile a few years after.
The other proceedings were well suited to the violence and iniquity of the
times. A charge consisting of thirty-nine articles, was delivered in by
the appellants; and as none of the accused counsellors, except Sir
Nicholas Brembre, was in custody, the rest were cited to appear; and upon
their absenting themselves, the house of peers, after a very short
interval, without hearing a witness, without examining a fact, or
deliberating on one point of law, declared them guilty of high treason.
Sir Nicholas Brembre, who was produced in court, had the appearance, and
but the appearance, of a trial: the peers, though they were not by law his
proper judges, pronounced, in a very summary manner, sentence of death
upon him; and he was executed, together with Sir Robert Tresilian, who had
been discovered and taken in the interval.
It would be tedious to recite the whole charge delivered in against the
five counsellors; which is to be met with in several collections.[*]
It is sufficient to observe in general, that if we reason upon the
supposition, which is the true one, that the royal prerogative was invaded
by the commission extorted by the duke of Glocester and his associates,
and that the king’s person was afterwards detained in custody by rebels,
many of the articles will appear not only to imply no crime in the duke of
Ireland and the ministers, but to ascribe to them actions which were
laudable, and which they were bound by their allegiance to perform. The
few articles impeaching the conduct of these ministers before that
commission, which subverted the constitution, and annihilated all justice
and legal authority, are vague and general; such as their engrossing the
king’s favor, keeping his barons at a distance from him, obtaining
unreasonable grants for themselves or their creatures, and dissipating the
public treasure by useless expenses. No violence is objected to them; no
particular illegal act;[*] no breach of any statute; and their
administration may therefore be concluded to have been so far innocent and
inoffensive. All the disorders indeed seem to have proceeded not from any
violation of the laws, or any ministerial tyranny, but merely from a
rivalship of power, which the duke of Glocester and the great nobility,
agreeably to the genius of the times, carried to the utmost extremity
against their opponents, without any regard to reason, justice, or
humanity.
But these were not the only deeds of violence committed during the triumph
of the party. All the other judges who had signed the extrajudicial
opinions at Nottingham, were condemned to death, and were, as a grace or
favor, banished to Ireland; though they pleaded the fear of their lives,
and the menaces of the king’s ministers as their excuse. Lord Beauchamp of
Holt, Sir James Berners, and John Salisbury, were also tried and condemned
for high treason, merely because they had attempted to defeat the late
commission: but the life of the latter was spared. The fate of Sir Simon
Burley was more severe: this gentleman was much beloved for his personal
merit, had distinguished himself by many honorable actions,[*] 13 was
created knight of the garter, and had been appointed governor to Richard,
by the choice of the late king and of the Black Prince: he had attended
his master from the earliest infancy of that prince, and had ever remained
extremely attached to him: yet all these considerations could not save him
from falling a victim to Glocester’s vengeance.
This execution, more than all the others, made a deep impression on the
mind of Richard; his queen too (for he was already married to the sister
of the emperor Winceslaus, King of Bohemia) interested herself in behalf
of Burley: she remained three hours on her knees before the duke of
Glocester, pleading for that gentleman’s life; but though she was become
extremely popular by her amiable qualities, which had acquired her the
appellation of “the good Queen Anne,” her petition was sternly rejected by
the inexorable tyrant.[*]
The parliament concluded this violent scene by a declaration, that none of
the articles decided on these trials to be treason, should ever afterwards
be drawn into precedent by the judges, who were still to consider the
statute of the twenty-fifth of Edward as the rule of their decisions. The
house of lords seem not at that time to have known or acknowledged the
principle, that they themselves were bound, in their judicial capacity, to
follow the rules which they, in conjunction with the king and commons, had
established in their legislature.[*] 14 It was also enacted, that
every one should swear to the perpetual maintenance and support of the
forfeitures and attainders, and of all the other acts passed during this
parliament. The archbishop of Canterbury added the penalty of
excommunication, as a further security to these violent transactions.
1389.
It might naturally be expected, that the king, being reduced to such
slavery by the combination of the princes and chief nobility, and having
appeared so unable to defend his servants from the cruel effects of their
resentment, would long remain in subjection to them; and never would
recover the royal power, without the most violent struggles and
convulsions: but the event proved contrary. In less than a twelvemonth,
Richard, who was in his twenty-third year, declared in council, that, as
he had now attained the full age which entitled him to govern by his own
authority his kingdom and household, he resolved to exercise his right of
sovereignty; and when no one ventured to contradict so reasonable an
intention, he deprived Fitz-Alan, archbishop of Canterbury, of the dignity
of chancellor, and bestowed that high office on William of Wickham, bishop
of Winchester; the bishop of Hereford was displaced from the office of
treasurer; the earl of Arundel from that of admiral; even the duke of
Glocester and the earl of Warwick were removed for a time from the
council: and no opposition was made to these great changes. The history of
this reign is imperfect, and little to be depended on, except where it is
supported by public records; and it is not easy for us to assign the
reason of this unexpected event. Perhaps some secret animosities,
naturally to be expected in that situation, had crept in among the great
men, and had enabled the king to recover his authority. Perhaps the
violence of their former proceedings had lost them the affections of the
people, who soon repent of any cruel extremities to which they are carried
by their leaders. However this may be, Richard exercised with moderation
the authority which he had resumed. He seemed to be entirely reconciled to
his uncles[*] and the other great men, of whom he had so much reason to
complain: he never attempted to recall from banishment the duke of
Ireland, whom he found so obnoxious to them: he confirmed by proclamation
the general pardon which the parliament had passed for all offences; and
he courted the affections of the people, by voluntarily remitting some
subsidies which had been granted him: a remarkable, and almost singular
instance of such generosity.
After this composure of domestic differences, and this restoration of the
government to its natural state, there passes an interval of eight years
which affords not many remarkable events. The duke of Lancaster returned
from Spain; having resigned to his rival all pretensions to the crown of
Castile upon payment of a large sum of money,[**] and having married his
daughter, Philippa, to the king of Portugal. The authority of this prince
served to counterbalance that of the duke of Glocester, and secured the
power of Richard, who paid great court to his eldest uncle, by whom he had
never been offended, and whom he found more moderate in his temper than
the younger. He made a cession to him for life of the duchy of
Guienne,[***] which the inclinations and changeable humor of the Gascons
had restored to the English government; but as they remonstrated loudly
against this deed, it was finally, with the duke’s consent, revoked by
Richard.[****]
There happened an incident which produced a dissension between Lancaster
and his two brothers. After the death of the Spanish princess, he espoused
Catharine Swineford, daughter of a private knight of Hainault, by whose
alliance York and Glocester thought the dignity of their family much
injured; but the king gratified his uncle by passing in parliament a
charter of legitimation to the children whom that lady had borne him
before marriage, and by creating the eldest earl of Somerset.[*]
The wars, meanwhile, which Richard had inherited with his crown, still
continued; though interrupted by frequent truces, according to the
practice of that age, and conducted with little vigor, by reason of the
weakness of all parties. The French war was scarcely heard of; the
tranquillity of the northern borders was only interrupted by one inroad of
the Scots, which proceeded more from a rivalship between the two martial
families of Piercy and Douglas, than from any national quarrel: a fierce
battle or skirmish was fought at Otterborne,[**] in which young Piercy,
surnamed Hotspur, from his impetuous valor, was taken prisoner, and
Douglas slain; and the victory remained undecided.[***] Some insurrections
of the Irish obliged the king to make an expedition into that country,
which he reduced to obedience; and he recovered, in some degree, by this
enterprise, his character of courage, which had suffered a little by the
inactivity of his reign.
1396.
At last, the English and French courts began to think in earnest of a
lasting peace; but found it so difficult to adjust their opposite
pretensions, that they were content to establish a truce of twenty-five
years: Brest and Cherbourg were restored, the former to the duke of
Brittany, the latter to the king of Navarre: both parties were left in
possession of all the other places which they held at the time of
concluding the truce; and to render the amity between the two crowns more
durable, Richard,[****] who was now a widower, was affianced to Isabella,
the daughter of Charles. This princess was only seven years of age; but
the king agreed to so unequal a match, chiefly that he might fortify
himself by this alliance against the enterprises of his uncles, and the
incurable turbulence, as well as inconstancy, of his barons.
The administration of the king, though it was not in this interval sullied
by any unpopular act, except the seizing of the charter of London,[******]
which was soon after restored, tended not much to corroborate his
authority; and his personal character brought him into contempt, even
while his public government appeared in a good measure unexceptionable.
Indolent, profuse, addicted to low pleasures, he spent his whole time in
feasting and jollity, and dissipated, in idle show, or in bounties to
favorites of no reputation, that revenue which the people expected to see
him employ in enterprises directed to public honor and advantage. He
forgot his rank by admitting all men to his familiarity; and he was not
sensible, that their acquaintance with the qualities of his mind was not
able to impress them with the respect which he neglected to preserve from
his birth and station. The earls of Kent and Huntingdon, his half
brothers, were his chief confidants and favorites; and though he never
devoted himself to them with so profuse an affection as that with which he
had formerly been attached to the duke of Ireland, it was easy for men to
see, that every grace passed through their hands, and that the king had
rendered himself a mere cipher in the government. The small regard which
the public bore to his person, disposed them to murmur against his
administration, and to receive with greedy ears every complaint which the
discontented or ambitious grandees suggested to them.
1397.
Glocester soon perceived the advantages which this dissolute conduct gave
him; and finding that both resentment and jealousy on the part of his
nephew still prevented him from acquiring any ascendant over that prince,
he determined to cultivate his popularity with the nation, and to revenge
himself on those who eclipsed him in favor and authority. He seldom
appeared at court or in council; he never declared his opinion but in
order to disapprove of the measures embraced by the king and his
favorites; and he courted the friendship of every man whom disappointment
or private resentment had rendered an enemy to the administration. The
long truce with France was unpopular with the English, who breathed
nothing but war against that hostile nation; and Glocester took care to
encourage all the vulgar prejudices which prevailed on this subject.
Forgetting the misfortunes which attended the English arms during the
later years of Edward, he made an invidious comparison between the glories
of that reign and the inactivity of the present; and he lamented that
Richard should have degenerated so much from the heroic virtues by which
his father and his grandfather were distinguished. The military men were
inflamed with a desire of war when they heard him talk of the signal
victories formerly obtained, and of the easy prey which might be made of
French riches by the superior valor of the English; the populace readily
embraced the same sentiments; and all men exclaimed, that this prince,
whose counsels were so much neglected, was the true support of English
honor and alone able to raise the nation to its former power and splendor.
His great abilities, his popular manners, his princely extraction, his
immense riches, his high office of constable;[*] all these advantages, not
a little assisted by his want of court favor, gave him a mighty authority
in the kingdom, and rendered him formidable to Richard and his ministers.
Froissard,[**] a contemporary writer, and very impartial, but whose credit
is somewhat impaired by his want of exactness in material facts, ascribes
to the duke of Glocester more desperate views, and such as were totally
incompatible with the government and domestic tranquillity of the nation.
According to that historian, he proposed to his nephew, Roger Mortimer,
earl of Marche, whom Richard had declared his successor, to give him
immediate possession of the throne, by the deposition of a prince so
unworthy of power and authority: and when Mortimer declined the project,
he resolved to make a partition of the kingdom between himself, his two
brothers, and the earl of Arundel; and entirely to dispossess Richard of
the crown. The king, it is said, being informed of these designs, saw that
either his own ruin, or that of Glocester, was inevitable; and he resolved
by a hasty blow to prevent the execution of such destructive projects.
This is certain, that Glocester, by his own confession, had often affected
to speak contemptuously of the king’s person and government; had
deliberated concerning the lawfulness of throwing off allegiance to him;
and had even borne part in a secret conference, where his deposition was
proposed, and talked of, and determined:[***] but it is reasonable to
think, that his schemes were not so far advanced.
But whatever opinion we may form of the danger arising from Glocester’s
conspiracies, his aversion to the French truce and alliance was public and
avowed; and that court which had now a great influence over the king,
pushed him to provide for his own safety, by punishing the traitorous
designs of his uncle. The resentment against his former acts of violence
revived; the sense of his refractory and uncompliant behavior was still
recent; and a man whose ambition had once usurped royal authority, and who
had murdered all the faithful servants of the king, was thought capable,
on a favorable opportunity, of renewing the same criminal enterprises. The
king’s precipitate temper admitted of no deliberation: he ordered
Glocester to be unexpectedly arrested; to be hurried on board a ship which
was lying in the river; and to be carried over to Calais, where alone, by
reason of his numerous partisans, he could safely be detained in
custody.[*] The earls of Arundel and Warwick were seized at the same time:
the malecontents so suddenly deprived of their leaders, were astonished
and overawed; and the concurrence of the dukes of Lancaster and York in
those measures, together with the earls of Derby and Rutland, the eldest
sons of these princes,[**] bereaved them of all possibility of resistance.
A parliament was immediately summoned at Westminster; and the king doubted
not to find the peers, and still more the commons, very compliant with his
will. This house had in a former parliament given him very sensible proofs
of their attachment;[***] 15 and the present suppression of Glocester’s
party made him still more assured of a favorable election. As a further
expedient for that purpose, he is also said to have employed the influence
of the sheriffs; a practice which, though not unusual, gave umbrage, but
which the established authority of that assembly rendered afterwards still
more familiar to the nation. Accordingly, the parliament passed whatever
acts the king was pleased to dictate to them:[****] they annulled forever
the commission which usurped upon the royal authority, and they declared
it treasonable to attempt, in any future period, the revival of any
similar commission: they abrogated all the acts which attainted the king’s
ministers, and which that parliament who passed them, and the whole nation
had sworn inviolably to maintain: and they declared the general pardon
then granted to be invalid, as extorted by force, and never ratified by
the free consent of the king.
Though Richard, after he resumed the government, and lay no longer under
constraint, had voluntarily, by proclamation, confirmed that general
indemnity, this circumstance seemed not, in their eyes, to merit any
consideration. Even a particular pardon, granted six years after to the
earl of Arundel, was annulled by parliament, on pretence that it had been
procured by surprise, and that the king was not then fully apprized of the
degree of guilt incurred by that nobleman.
The commons then preferred an impeachment against Fitz-Alan, archbishop of
Canterbury, and brother to Arundel, and accused him for his concurrence in
procuring the illegal commission, and in attainting the king’s ministers.
The primate pleaded guilty; but as he was protected by the ecclesiastical
privileges, the king was satisfied with a sentence which banished him the
kingdom, and sequestered his temporalities.[*] An appeal or accusation was
presented against the duke of Glocester, and the earls of Arundel and
Warwick, by the earls of Rutland, Kent, Huntingdon, Somerset, Salisbury,
and Nottingham, together with the lords Spenser and Scrope, and they were
accused of the same crimes which had been imputed to the archbishop, as
well as of their appearance against the king in a hostile manner at
Haringay Park. The earl of Arundel, who was brought to the bar, wisely
confined all his defence to the pleading of both the general and
particular pardon of the king; but his plea being overruled, he was
condemned and executed.[**]
The earl of Warwick, who was also convicted of high treason, was, on
account of his submissive behavior, pardoned as to his life, but doomed to
perpetual banishment in the Isle of Man. No new acts of treason were
imputed to either of these noblemen. The only crimes for which they were
condemned, were the old attempts against the crown, which seemed to be
obliterated both by the distance of time and by repeated pardons.[*] The
reasons of this method of proceeding it is difficult to conjecture. The
recent conspiracies of Glocester seem certain from his own confession; but
perhaps the king and ministry had not at that time in their hands any
satisfactory proof of their reality; perhaps it was difficult to convict
Arundel and Warwick of any participation in them; perhaps an inquiry into
these conspiracies would have involved in the guilt some of those great
noblemen who now concurred with the crown, and whom it was necessary to
cover from all imputation; or perhaps the king, according to the genius of
the age, was indifferent about maintaining even the appearance of law and
equity, and was only solicitous by any means to insure success in these
prosecutions. This point, like many others in ancient history, we are
obliged to leave altogether undetermined.
A warrant was issued to the earl mareschal, governor of Calais, to bring
over the duke of Glocester, in order to his trial; but the governor
returned for answer, that the duke had died suddenly of an apoplexy in
that fortress. Nothing could be more suspicious, from the time, than the
circumstances of that prince’s death: it became immediately the general
opinion, that he was murdered by orders from his nephew: in the subsequent
reign, undoubted proofs were produced in parliament, that he had been
suffocated with pillows by his keepers:[**] and it appeared that the king,
apprehensive lest the public trial and execution of so popular a prince,
and so near a relation, might prove both dangerous and invidious, had
taken this base method of gratifying, and, as he fancied, concealing, his
revenge upon him. Both parties, in their successive triumphs, seem to have
had no further concern than that of retaliating upon their adversaries;
and neither of them were aware that, by imitating, they indirectly
justified, as far as it lay in their power, all the illegal violence of
the opposite party.
This session concluded with the creation or advancement of several peers:
the earl of Derby was made duke of Hereford; the earl of Rutland, duke of
Albemarle; the earl of Kent, duke of Surrey; the earl of Huntingdon, duke
of Exeter; the earl of Nottingham, duke of Norfolk; the earl of Somerset,
marquis of Dorset; Lord Spenser, earl of Glocester; Rulph Nevil, earl of
Westmoreland; Thomas Piercy, earl of Worcester; William Scrope, earl of
Wiltshire.[*] The parliament, after a session of twelve days, was
adjourned to Shrewsbury. The king, before the departure of the members,
exacted from them an oath for the perpetual maintenance and establishment
of all their acts; an oath similar to that which had formerly been
required by the duke of Glocester and his party, and which had already
proved so vain and fruitless.
1398.
Both king and parliament met in the same dispositions at Shrewsbury. So
anxious was Richard for the security of these acts, that he obliged the
lords and commons to swear anew to them on the cross of Canterbury;[**]
and he soon after procured a bull from the pope, by which they were, as he
imagined, perpetually secured and established.[***] The parliament, on the
other hand, conferred on him for life the duties on wool, wool-fells, and
leather, and granted him, besides, a subsidy of one tenth and a half, and
one fifteenth and a half. They also reversed the attainder of Tresilian
and the other judges; and, with the approbation of the present judges,
declared the answers for which these magistrates had been impeached to be
just and legal:[****] and they carried so far their retrospect as to
reverse, on the petition of Lord Spenser, earl of Glocester, the attainder
pronounced against the two Spensers in the reign of Edward II.[*****] The
ancient history of England is nothing but a catalogue of reversals: every
thing is in fluctuation and movement: one faction is continually undoing
what was established by another: and the multiplied oaths which each party
exacted for the security of the present acts, betray a perpetual
consciousness of their instability.
The parliament, before they were dissolved, elected a committee of twelve
lords and six commoners,[******] whom they invested with the whole power
both of lords and commons, and endowed with full authority to finish all
business which had been laid before the houses, and which they had not had
leisure to bring to a conclusion.[*******]
This was an unusual concession; and though it was limited in the object,
might, either immediately or as a precedent, have proved dangerous to the
constitution; but the cause of that extraordinary measure was an event
singular and unexpected, which engaged the attention of the parliament.
After the destruction of the duke of Glocester and the heads of that
party, a misunderstanding broke out among those noblemen who had joined in
the prosecution; and the king wanted either authority sufficient to
appease it, or foresight to prevent it. The duke of Hereford appeared in
parliament, and accused the duke of Norfolk of having spoken to him, in
private, many slanderous words of the king, and of having imputed to that
prince an intention of subverting and destroying many of his principal
nobility.[**] Norfolk.. denied the charge, gave Hereford the lie, and
offered to prove his own innocence by duel. The challenge was accepted:
the time and place of combat were appointed: and as the event of this
important trial by arms might require the interposition of legislative
authority, the parliament thought it more suitable to delegate their power
to a committee, than to prolong the session beyond the usual time which
custom and general convenience had prescribed to it.[***]
The duke of Hereford was certainly very little delicate in the point of
honor, when he revealed a private conversation to the ruin of the person
who had intrusted him; and we may thence be more inclined to believe the
duke of Norfolk’s denial, than the other’s asseveration. But Norfolk had
in these transactions betrayed an equal neglect of honor, which brings him
entirely on a level with his antagonist. Though he had publicly joined
with the duke of Glocester and his party in all the former acts of
violence against the king.
The lists for this decision of truth and right were appointed at Coventry
before the king: all the nobility of England banded into parties, and
adhered either to the one duke or the other: the whole nation was held in
suspense with regard to the event; but when the two champions appeared in
the field accoutred for the combat, the king interposed, to prevent both
the present effusion of such noble blood, and the future consequences of
the quarrel. By the advice and authority of the parliamentary
commissioners, he stopped the duel; and to show his impartiality, he
ordered, by the same authority both the combatants to leave the
kingdom;[*] assigning one country for the place of Norfolk’s exile, which
he declared perpetual, another for that of Hereford, which he limited to
ten years.
Hereford was a man of great prudence and command of temper; and he behaved
himself with so much submission in these delicate circumstances, that the
king, before his departure, promised to shorten the term of his exile four
years; and he also granted him letters patent, by which he was empowered,
in case any inheritance should in the interval accrue to him, to enter
immediately in possession, and to postpone the doing of homage till his
return.
The weakness and fluctuation of Richard’s counsels appear nowhere more
evident than in the conduct of this affair. No sooner had Hereford left
the kingdom, than the king’s jealousy of the power and riches of that
prince’s family revived; and he was sensible that by Glocester’s death he
had only removed a counterpoise to the Lancastrian interest which was now
become formidable to his crown and kingdom. Being informed that Hereford
had entered into a treaty of marriage with the daughter of the duke of
Berry, uncle to the French king, he determined to prevent the finishing of
an alliance which would so much extend the interest of his cousin in
foreign countries; and he sent over the earl of Salisbury to Paris with a
commission for that purpose.
1399.
The death of the duke of Lancaster, which happened soon after, called upon
him to take new resolutions with regard to that opulent succession. The
present duke, in consequence of the king’s patent, desired to be put in
possession of the estate and jurisdictions of his father; but Richard,
afraid of strengthening the hands of a man whom he had already so much
offended, applied to the parliamentary commissioners, and persuaded them
that this affair was but an appendage to that business which the
parliament had delegated to them. By their authority he revoked his
letters patent, and retained possession of the estate of Lancaster; and by
the same authority he seized and tried the duke’s attorney, who had
procured and insisted on the letters, and he had him condemned as a
traitor for faithfully executing that trust to his master;[*] an
extravagant act of power! even though the king changed, in favor of the
attorney, the penalty of death into that of banishment.
Henry, the new duke of Lancaster, had acquired by his conduct and
abilities the esteem of the public; and having served with distinction
against the infidels in Lithuania, he had joined to his other praises
those of piety and valor, virtues which have at all times a great
influence over mankind, and were, during those ages, the qualities chiefly
held in estimation.[**] He was connected with most of the principal
nobility by blood, alliance, or friendship; and as the injury done him by
the king might in its consequences affect all of them, he easily brought
them, by a sense of common interest, to take part in his resentment. The
people, who must have an object of affection, who found nothing in the
king’s person which they could love or revere, and who were even disgusted
with many parts of his conduct[***] easily transferred to Henry that
attachment which the death of the duke of Glocester had left.
While such were the dispositions of the people, Richard had the imprudence
to embark for Ireland, in order to revenge the death of his cousin, Roger,
earl of Marche, the presumptive heir of the crown, who had lately been
slain in a skirmish by the natives; and he thereby left the kingdom of
England open to the attempts of his provoked and ambitious enemy. Henry,
embarking at Nantz with a retinue of sixty persons, among whom were the
archbishop of Canterbury and the young earl of Arundel, nephew to that
prelate, landed at Ravenspur, in Yorkshire; and was immediately joined by
the earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, two of the most potent
barons in England. He here took a solemn oath, that he had no other
purpose hi this invasion than to recover the duchy of Lancaster, unjustly
detained from him; and he invited all his friends in England, and all
lovers of their country, to second him in this reasonable and moderate
pretension. Every place was in commotion: the malecontents in all quarters
flew to arms: London discovered the strongest symptoms of its disposition
to mutiny and rebellion: and Henry’s army, increasing on every day’s
march, soon amounted to the number of sixty thousand combatants.
The duke of York was left guardian of the realm; a place to which his
birth entitled him, but which both his slender abilities, and his natural
connections with the duke of Lancaster, rendered him utterly incapable of
filling in such a dangerous emergency. Such of the chief nobility as were
attached to the crown, and could either have seconded the guardian’s good
intentions, or have overawed his infidelity, had attended the king into
Ireland; and the efforts of Richard’s friends were every where more feeble
than those of his enemies. The duke of York, however, appointed the
rendezvous of his forces at St. Albans, and soon assembled an army of
forty thousand men; but found them entirely destitute of zeal and
attachment to the royal cause, and more inclined to join the party of the
rebels. He hearkened therefore very readily to a message from Henry, who
entreated him not to oppose a loyal and humble supplicant in the recovery
of his legal patrimony; and the guardian even declared publicly that he
would second his nephew in so reasonable a request. His army embraced with
acclamations the same measures; and the duke of Lancaster, reenforced by
them, was now entirely master of the kingdom. He hastened to Bristol, into
which some of the king’s ministers had thrown themselves; and soon
obliging that place to surrender, he yielded to the popular wishes, and
without giving them a trial, ordered the earl of Wiltshire, Sir John
Bussy, and Sir Henry Green, whom he there took prisoners, to be led to
immediate execution.
The king, receiving intelligence of this invasion and insurrection,
hastened over from Ireland, and landed in Milford Haven with a body of
twenty thousand men: but even this army, so much inferior to the enemy,
was either overawed oy the general combination of the kingdom, or seized
with the same spirit of disaffection; and they gradually deserted him,
till he found that he had not above six thousand men who followed his
standard. It appeared, therefore, necessary to retire secretly from this
small body, which served only to expose him to danger; and he fled to the
Isle of Anglesea, where he purposed to embark either for Ireland or
France, and there await the favorable opportunities which the return of
his subjects to a sense of duty, or their future discontents against the
duke of Lancaster, would probably afford him. Henry, sensible of the
danger, sent to him the earl of Northumberland, with the strongest
professions of loyalty and submission; and that nobleman, by treachery and
false oaths, made himself master of the king’s person, and carried him to
his enemy at Flint Castle. Richard was conducted to London by the duke of
Lancaster, who was there received with the acclamations of the mutinous
populace. It is pretended that the recorder met him on the road, and in
the name of the city entreated him, for the public safety, to put Richard
to death, with all his adherents who were prisoners; but the duke
prudently determined to make many others participate in his guilt, before
he would proceed to these extremities. For this purpose he issued writs of
election in the king’s name, and appointed the immediate meeting of a
parliament at Westminster.
Such of the peers as were most devoted to the king, were either fled or
imprisoned; and no opponents, even among the barons, dared to appear
against Henry, amidst that scene of outrage and violence which commonly
attends revolutions, especially in England during those turbulent ages, It
is also easy to imagine, that a house of commons, elected during this
universal ferment, and this triumph of the Lancastrian party, would be
extremely attached to that cause, and ready to second every suggestion of
their leaders. That order, being an yet of too little weight to stem the
torrent, was always carried along with it, and served only to increase the
violence which the public interest required it should endeavor to control.
The duke of Lancaster, therefore, sensible that he should be entirely
master, began to carry his views to the crown itself; and he deliberated
with his partisans concerning the most proper means of effecting his
daring purpose. He first extorted a resignation from Richard;[*] but as he
knew that this deed would plainly appear the result of force and fear, he
also purposed, notwithstanding the danger of the precedent to himself and
his posterity, to have him solemnly deposed in parliament for his
pretended tyranny and misconduct. A charge, consisting of thirty-three
articles, was accordingly drawn up against him, and presented to that
assembly.[**]
If we examine these articles, which are expressed with extreme acrimony
against Richard, we shall find that, except some rash speeches, which are
imputed to him,[***] and of whose reality, as they are said to have passed
in private conversation, we may reasonably entertain some doubt,—the
chief amount of the charge is contained in his violent conduct during the
two last years of his reign, and naturally divides itself into two
principal heads. The first and most considerable is the revenge which he
took on the princes and great barons who had formerly usurped, and still
persevered in controlling and threatening his authority; the second is the
violation of the laws and general privileges of his people. But the
former, however irregular in many of its circumstances, was fully
supported by authority of parliament, and was but a copy of the violence
which the princes and barons themselves, during their former triumph, had
exercised against him and his party. The detention of Lancaster’s estate
was, properly speaking a revocation, by parliamentary authority, of a
grace which the King himself had formerly granted him. The murder of
Glocester (for the secret execution, however merited, of that prince
certainly deserves this appellation) was a private deed formed not any
precedent, and implied not any usurped or arbitrary power of the crown
which could justly give umbrage to the people. It really proceeded from a
defect of power in the king, rather than from his ambition; and proves
that, instead of being dangerous to the constitution, he possessed not
even the authority necessary for the execution of the laws.
Concerning the second head of accusation, as it mostly consists of general
facts, was framed by Richard’s inveterate enemies, and was never allowed
to be answered by him or his friends, it is more difficult to form a
judgment. The greatest part of these grievances imputed to Richard, seems
to be the exertion of arbitrary prerogatives; such as the dispensing
power,[*] levying purveyance,[**] employing the mareschal’s court,[***]
extorting loans,[****] granting protections from lawsuits;[*****]
prerogatives, which, though often complained of, had often been exercised
by his predecessors, and still continued to be so by his successors. But
whether his irregular acts of this kind were more frequent, and
injudicious and violent than usual, or were only laid hold of and
exaggerated by the factions to which the weakness of his reign had given
birth, we are not able at this distance to determine with certainty. There
is, however, one circumstance in which his conduct is visibly different
from that of his grandfather: he is not accused of having imposed one
arbitrary tax, without consent of parliament, during his whole
reign;[******] scarcely a year passed during the reign of Edward, which
was free from complaints with regard to this dangerous exertion of
authority. But, perhaps, the ascendant which Edward had acquired over the
people, together with his great prudence, enabled him to make a use very
advantageous to his subjects of this and other arbitrary prerogatives, and
rendered them a smaller grievance in his hands, than a less absolute
authority in those of his grand son.
This is a point which it would be rash for us to decide positively on
either side; but it is certain, that a charge drawn up by the duke of
Lancaster, and assented to by a parliament, situated in those
circumstances, forms no manner of presumption with regard to the unusual
irregularity or violence of the king’s conduct in this particular.[*] 16
When the charge against Richard was presented to the parliament, though it
was liable, almost in every article, to objections, it was not canvassed,
nor examined, nor disputed in either house, and seemed to be received with
universal approbation. One man alone, the bishop of Carlisle, had the
courage, amidst this general disloyalty and violence, to appear in defence
of his unhappy master, and to plead his cause against all the power of the
prevailing party. Though some topics employed by that virtuous prelate may
seem to favor too much the doctrine of passive obedience, and to make too
large a sacrifice of the rights of mankind, he was naturally pushed into
that extreme by his abhorrence of the present licentious factions; and
such intrepidity, as well as disinterestedness of behavior, proves that,
whatever his speculative principles were his heart was elevated far above
the meanness and abject submission of a slave. He represented to the
parliament, that all the abuses of government which could justly be
imputed to Richard, instead of amounting to tyranny, were merely the
result of error, youth, or misguided counsel, and admitted of a remedy
more easy and salutary than a total subversion of the constitution. That
even had they been much more violent and dangerous than they really were,
they had chiefly proceeded from former examples of resistance, which,
making the prince sensible of his precarious situation, had obliged him to
establish his throne by irregular and arbitrary expedients. That a
rebellious disposition in subjects was the principal cause of tyranny in
kings; laws could never secure the subject, which did not give security to
the sovereign; and if the maxim of inviolable loyalty, which formed the
basis of the English government, were once rejected, the privileges
belonging to the several orders of the state, instead of being fortified
by that licentiousness, would thereby lose the surest foundation of their
force and stability. That the parliamentary deposition of Edward II., far
from making a precedent which could control this maxim, was only an
example of successful violence; and it was sufficiently to be lamented,
that crimes were so often committed in the world, without establishing
principles which might justify and authorize them.
That even that precedent, false and dangerous as it was, could never
warrant the present excesses; which were so much greater, and which would
entail distraction and misery on the nation, to the latest posterity. That
the succession, at least, of the crown, was then preserved inviolate: the
lineal heir was placed on the throne; and the people had an opportunity,
by their legal obedience to him, of making atonement for the violence
which they had committed against his predecessor. That a descendant of
Lionel, duke of Clarence, the elder brother of the late duke of Lancaster,
had been declared in parliament successor to the crown; he had left
posterity; and their title, however it might be overpowered by present
force and faction, could never be obliterated from the minds of the
people. That if the turbulent disposition alone of the nation had
overturned the well-established throne of so good a prince as Richard,
what bloody commotions must ensue, when the same cause was united to the
motive of restoring the legal and undoubted heir to his authority? That
the new government intended to be established, would stand on no
principle; and would scarcely retain any pretence by which it could
challenge the obedience of men of sense and virtue. That the claim of
lineal descent was so gross, as scarcely to deceive the most ignorant of
the populace: conquest could never be pleaded by a rebel against his
sovereign; the consent of the people had no authority in a monarchy not
derived from consent, but established by hereditary right; and however the
nation might be justified in deposing the misguided Richard, it could
never have any reason for setting aside his lawful heir and successor, who
was plainly innocent. And that the duke of Lancaster would give them but a
bad specimen of the legal moderation which might be expected from his
future government, if he added,[**typo?] to the crime of his past
rebellion, the guilt of excluding the family, which, both by right of
blood and by declaration of parliament, would, in case of Richard’s demise
or voluntary resignation, have been received as the undoubted heirs of the
monarchy.[*]
All the circumstances of this event, compared to those which attended the
late revolution in 1688, show the difference between a great and civilized
nation, deliberately vindicating its established privileges, and a
turbulent and barbarous aristocracy, plunging headlong from the extremes
of one faction into those of another. This noble freedom of the bishop of
Carlisle, instead of being applauded, was not so much as tolerated: he was
immediately arrested by order of the duke of Lancaster, and sent a
prisoner to the abbey of St. Albans. No further debate was attempted:
thirty-three long articles of charge were, in one meeting, voted against
Richard; and voted unanimously by the same peers and prelates who, a
little before, had voluntarily and unanimously authorized those very acts
of violence of which they now complained. That prince was deposed by the
suffrages of both houses; and the throne being now vacant, the duke of
Lancaster stepped forth, and having crossed himself on the forehead and on
the breast, and called upon the name of Christ,[*] he pronounced these
words, which we shall give in the original language, because of their
singularity.
“In the name of Fadher, Son, and Holy Ghost, I Henry of Lancaster,
challenge this rewme of Ynglande, and the croun with all the membres, and
the appurtenances; als I that am descendit by right line of the blode,
coming fro the gude king Henry therde, and throge that right that God of
his grace hath sent me, with helpe of kyn, and of my frendes to recover
it; the which rewme was in poynt to be ondone by defaut of governance, and
ondoying of the gude lawes.”[**]
In order to understand this speech, it must be observed, that there was a
silly story, received among some of the lowest vulgar, that Edmond, earl
of Lancaster, son of Henry III., was really the elder brother of Edward
I.; but that, by reason of some deformity in his person, he had been
postponed in the succession, and his younger brother imposed on the nation
in his stead. As the present duke of Lancaster inherited from Edmond by
his mother, this genealogy made him the true heir of the monarchy, and it
is therefore insinuated in Henry’s speech: but the absurdity was too gross
to be openly avowed either by him or by the parliament. The case is the
same with regard to his right of conquest: he was a subject who rebelled
against his sovereign: he entered the kingdom with a retinue of no more
than sixty persons.
The subsequent events discover the same headlong violence of conduct, and
the same rude notions of civil government. The deposition of Richard
dissolved the parliament: it was necessary to summon a new one: and Henry,
in six days after, called together, without any new election, the same
members; and this assembly he denominated a new parliament. They were
employed in the usual task of reversing every deed of the opposite party.
All the acts o£ the last parliament of Richard, which had been confirmed
by their oaths, and by a papal bull, were abrogated: all the acts which
had passed in the parliament where Glocester prevailed: which had also
been confirmed by their oaths, but which had been abrogated by Richard,
were anew established:[**] the answers of Tresifian and the other judges,
which a parliament had annulled, but which a new parliament and new judges
had approved, here received a second condemnation.
The peers who had accused Glocester, Arundel, and Warwick, and who had
received higher titles for that piece of service, were all of them
degraded from their new dignities; even the practice of prosecuting
appeals in parliament, which bore the air of a violent confederacy against
an individual, rather than of a legal indictment, was wholly abolished,
and trials were restored to the course of common law.* The natural effect
of this conduct was, to render the people giddy with such rapid and
perpetual changes, and to make them lose all notions of right and wrong in
the measures of government.
The earl of Northumberland made a motion, in the house of peers, with
regard to the unhappy prince whom they had deposed. He asked them, what
advice they would give the king for the future treatment of him; since
Henry was resolved to spare his life. They unanimously replied, that he
should be imprisoned under a secure guard, in some secret place, and
should be deprived of all commerce with any of his friends or partisans.
It was easy to foresee, that he would not long remain alive in the hands
of such barbarous and sanguinary enemies. Historians differ with regard to
the manner in which he was murdered. It was long the prevailing opinion,
that Sir Piers Exton, and others of his guards, fell upon him in the
Castle of Pomfret, where he was confined, and despatched him with their
halberts. But it is more probable that he was starved to death in prison;
and after all sustenance was denied him, he prolonged his unhappy life, it
is said, for a fortnight, before he reached the end of his miseries. This
account is more consistent with the story, that his body was exposed in
public, and that no marks of violence were observed upon it. He died in
the thirty-fourth year of his age, and the twenty-third of his reign. He
left no posterity, either legitimate or illegitimate.
All the writers who have transmitted to us the history of Richard, lived
during the reigns of the Lancastrian princes, and candor requires, that we
should not give entire credit to the reproaches which they have thrown
upon his memory. But after making all proper allowances, he still appears
to have been a weak prince, and unfit for government, less for want of
natural parts and capacity, than of solid judgment and a good education.
He was violent in his temper, profuse in his expenses, fond of idle show
and magnificence, devoted to favorites, and addicted to pleasure;
passions, all of them the most inconsistent with a prudent economy, and
consequently dangerous in a limited and mixed government. Had he possessed
the talents of gaining, and still more those of overawing, his great
barons, he might have escaped all the misfortunes of his reign, and been
allowed to carry much further his oppressions over the people, if he
really was guilty of any, without their daring to rebel, or even to murmur
against him. But when the grandees were tempted, by his want of prudence
and of vigor, to resist his authority, and execute the most violent
enterprises upon him, he was naturally led to seek an opportunity of
retaliation: justice was neglected; the lives of the chief nobility were
sacrificed; and all these enormities seem to have proceeded less from a
settled design of establishing arbitrary power, than from the insolence of
victory, and the necessities of the king’s situation. The manners indeed
of the age were the chief source of such violence: laws, which were feebly
executed in peaceable times, lost all their authority during public
convulsions: both parties were alike guilty: or, if any difference may be
remarked between them, we shall find, that the authority of the crown,
being more legal, was commonly carried, when it prevailed, to less
desperate extremities, than was that of the aristocracy.
On comparing the conduct and events of this reign with those of the
preceding, we shall find equal reason to admire Edward and to blame
Richard; but the circumstance of opposition, surely, will not lie in the
strict regard paid by the former to national privileges, and the neglect
of them by the latter. On the contrary, the prince of small abilities, as
he felt his want of power, seems to have been more moderate in this
respect than the other. Every parliament assembled during the reign of
Edward, remonstrates against the exertion of some arbitrary prerogative or
other: we hear not any complaints of that kind during the reign of
Richard, till the assembling of his last parliament, which was summoned by
his inveterate enemies, which dethroned him, which framed their complaints
during the time of the most furious convultions, and whose testimony must
therefore have, on that account, much less authority with every equitable
judge.[*] Both these princes experienced the encroachments of the great
upon their authority. Edward, reduced to necessities, was obliged to make
an express bargain with his parliament and to sell some of his
prerogatives for present supply; but as they were acquainted with his
genius and capacity, they ventured not to demand any exorbitant
concessions, or such as were incompatible with regal and sovereign power:
the weakness of Richard tempted the parliament to extort a commission,
which, in a manner, dethroned the prince, and transferred the sceptre into
the hands of the nobility. The events of these encroachments were also
suitable to the character of each. Edward had no sooner gotten the supply,
than he departed from the engagements which had induced the parliament to
grant it; he openly told his people, that he had but dissembled with them
when he seemed to make them these concessions; and he resumed and retained
all his prerogatives. But Richard, because he was detected in consulting
and deliberating with the judges on the lawfulness of restoring the
constitution, found his barons immediately in arms against him; was
deprived of his liberty; saw his favorites, his ministers, his tutor,
butchered before his face, or banished and attainted; and was obliged to
give way to all this violence. There cannot be a more remarkable contrast
between the fortunes of two princes: it were happy for society, did this
contrast always depend on the justice or injustice of the measures which
men embrace; and not rather on the different degrees of prudence and vigor
with which those measures are supported.
There was a sensible decay of ecclesiastical authority during this period.
The disgust which the laity had received from the numerous usurpations
both of the court of Rome and of their own clergy, had very much weaned
the kingdom from superstition; and strong symptoms appeared, from time to
time, of a general desire to shake off the bondage of the Romish church.
In the committee of eighteen, to whom Richard’s last parliament delegated
their whole power, there is not the name of one ecclesiastic to be found;
a neglect which is almost without example, while the Catholic religion
subsisted in England.[**] 17
The aversion entertained against the established church soon found
principles, and tenets, and reasonings, by which it could justify and
support itself. John Wickliffe, a secular priest, educated at Oxford,
began in the latter end of Edward III. to spread the doctrine of
reformation by his discourses, sermons, and writings; and he made many
disciples among men of all ranks and stations. He seems to have been a man
of parts and learning; and has the honor of being the first person in
Europe that publicly called in question those principles which had
universally passed for certain and undisputed during so many ages.
Wickliffe himself, as well as his disciples, who received the name of
Wickliffites, or Lollards, was distinguished by a great austerity of life
and manners; a circumstance common to almost all those who dogmatize in
any new way; both because men who draw to them the attention of the
public, and expose themselves to the odium of great multitudes, are
obliged to be very guarded in their conduct, and because few who have a
strong propensity to pleasure or business, will enter upon so difficult
and laborious an undertaking. The doctrines of Wickliffe being derived
from his search into the Scriptures and into ecclesiastical antiquity,
were nearly the same with those which were propagated by the reformers in
the sixteenth century: he only carried some of them farther than was done
by the more sober part of these reformers. He denied the doctrine of the
real presence, the supremacy of the church of Rome, the merit of monastic
vows: he maintained, that the Scriptures were the sole rule of faith; that
the church was dependent on the state, and should be reformed by it; that
the clergy ought to possess no estates; that the begging friars were a
nuisance, and ought not to be supported;[*] that the numerous ceremonies
of the church were hurtful to true piety: he asserted that oaths were
unlawful, that dominion was founded in grace, that everything was subject
to fate and destiny, and that all men were preordained either to eternal
salvation or reprobation,[**] From the whole of his doctrines, Wickliffe
appears to have been strongly tinctured with enthusiasm, and to have been
thereby the better qualified to oppose a church whose chief characteristic
is superstition.
The propagation of these principles gave great alarm to the clergy; and a
bull was issued by Pope Gregory XI. for taking Wickliffe into custody, and
examining into the scope of his opinions.[*] Courteney, bishop of London,
cited him before his tribunal; but the reformer had now acquired powerful
protectors, who screened him from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The
duke of Lancaster, who then governed the kingdom, encouraged the
principles of Wickliffe; and he made no scruple, as well as Lord Piercy,
the mareschal, to appear openly in court with him, in order to give him
countenance upon his trial: he even insisted, that Wickliffe should sit in
the bishop’s presence while his principles were examined: Courteney
exclaimed against the insult: the Londoners, thinking their prelate
affronted, attacked the duke and mareschal, who escaped from their hands
with some difficulty.[**] And the populace, soon after, broke into the
houses of both these noblemen, threatened their persons, and plundered
their goods. The bishop of London had the merit of appeasing their fury
and resentment.
The duke of Lancaster, however, still continued his protection to
Wickliffe, during the minority of Richard; and the principles of that
reformer had so far propagated themselves, that when the pope sent to
Oxford a new bull against these doctrines, the university deliberated for
some time whether they should receive the bull; and they never took any
vigorous measures in consequence of the papal orders.[***] Even the
populace of London were at length brought to entertain favorable
sentiments of this reformer: when he was cited before a synod at Lambeth,
they broke into the assembly, and so overawed the prelates, who found both
the people and the court against them, that they dismissed him without any
further censure.
The clergy, we may well believe, were more wanting in power than in
inclination to punish this new heresy which struck at all their credit,
possessions, and authority. But there was hitherto no law in England by
which the secular arm was authorized to support orthodoxy; and the
ecclesiastics endeavored to supply the defect by an extraordinary and
unwarrantable artifice. In the year 1381, there was an act passed,
requiring sheriffs to apprehend the preachers of heresy and their
abettors; but this statute had been surreptitiously obtained by the
clergy, and had the formality of an enrolment without the consent of the
commons. In the subsequent session, the lower house complained of the
fraud; affirmed, that they had no intention to bind themselves to the
prelates further than their ancestors had done before them; and required
that the pretended statute should be repealed, which was done
accordingly.* But it is remarkable, that notwithstanding this vigilance of
the commons, the clergy had so much art and influence, that the repeal was
suppressed, and the act, which never had any legal authority, remains to
this day upon the statute book;[*] though the clergy still thought proper
to keep it in reserve and not proceed to the immediate execution of it.
But besides this defect of power in the church, which saved Wickliffe,
that reformer himself, notwithstanding his enthusiasm, seems not to have
been actuated by the spirit of martyrdom; and in all subsequent trials
before the prelates, he so explained away his doctrine by tortured
meanings, as to render it quite innocent and inoffensive.[**] Most of his
followers imitated his cautious disposition, and saved themselves either
by recantations or explanations. He died of a palsy, in the year 1385, at
his rectory of Lutterworth, in the county of Leicester; and the clergy,
mortified that he should have escaped their vengeance, took care, besides
assuring the people of his eternal damnation, to represent his last
distemper as a visible judgment of Heaven upon him for his multiplied
heresies and impieties.[***]
The proselytes, however, of Wickliffe’s opinions still increased in
England:[****] some monkish writers represent one half of the kingdom as
infected by those principles: they were carried over to Bohemia by some
youth of that nation, who studied at Oxford: but though the age seemed
strongly disposed to receive them, affairs were not yet fully ripe for
this great revolution; and the finishing blow to ecclesiastical power was
reserved to a period of more curiosity, literature, and inclination for
novelties.
Meanwhile the English parliament continued to check the clergy and the
court of Rome, by more sober and more legal expedients. They enacted anew
the statute of “provisors,” and affixed higher penalties to the
transgression of it, which, in some instances, was even made capital.[*]
The court of Rome had fallen upon a new device, which increased their
authority over the prelates: the pope, who found that the expedient of
arbitrarily depriving them was violent, and liable to opposition, attained
the same end by transferring such of them as were obnoxious to poorer
sees, and even to nominal sees, “in partibus infidelium.” It was thus that
the archbishop of York, and the bishops of Durham and Chichester, the
king’s ministers, had been treated after the prevalence of Glocester’s
faction: the bishop of Carlisle met with the same fate after the accession
of Henry IV. For the pope always joined with the prevailing powers, when
they did not thwart his pretensions. The parliament, in the reign of
Richard, enacted a law against this abuse: and the king made a general
remonstrance to the court of Rome against all those usurpations, which he
calls “horrible excesses” of that court.[**]
It was usual for the church, that they might elude the mortmain act, to
make their votaries leave lands in trust to certain persons, under whose
name the clergy enjoyed the benefit of the bequest: the parliament also
stopped the progress of this abuse.[***] In the seventeenth of the king,
the commons prayed, “that remedy might be had against such religious
persons as cause their villains to marry free women inheritable, whereby
the estate comes to those religious hands by collusion.”[****] This was a
new device of the clergy.
The papacy was at this time somewhat weakened by a schism, which lasted
during forty years, and gave great scandal to the devoted partisans of the
holy see. After the pope had resided many years at Avignon, Gregory XI.
was persuaded to return to Rome; and upon his death, which happened in
1380, the Romans, resolute to fix, for the future, the seat of the papacy
in Italy, besieged the cardinals in the conclave, and compelled them,
though they were mostly Frenchmen, to elect Urban VI., an Italian, into
that high dignity. The French cardinals, as soon as they recovered their
liberty, fled from Rome, and protesting against the forced election, chose
Robert, son of the count of Geneva, who took the name of Clement VII., and
resided at Avignon. All the Kingdoms of Christendom, according to their
several interests and inclinations, were divided between these two
pontiffs. The court of France adhered to Clement, and was followed by its
allies, the king of Castile and the king of Scotland: England of course
was thrown into the other party, and declared for Urban. Thus the
appellation of Clementines and Urbanists distracted Europe for several
years; and each party damned the other as schismatics, and as rebels to
the true vicar of Christ. But this circumstance, though it weakened the
papal authority, had not so great an effect as might naturally be
imagined. Though any king could easily, at first, make his kingdom embrace
the party of one pope or the other, or even keep it some time in suspense
between them, he could not so easily transfer his obedience at pleasure:
the people attached themselves to their own party, as to a religious
opinion; and conceived an extreme abhorrence to the opposite party, whom
they regarded as little better than Saracens, or infidels. Crusades were
even undertaken in this quarrel; and the zealous bishop of Norwich, in
particular, led over, in 1382 near sixty thousand bigots into Flanders
against the Clementines; but after losing a great part of his followers,
he returned with disgrace into England.[*] Each pope, sensible, from this
prevailing spirit among the people, that the kingdom which once embraced
his cause would always adhere to him, boldly maintained all the
pretensions of his see, and stood not much more in awe of the temporal
sovereigns, than if his authority had not been endangered by a rival.
We meet with this preamble to a law enacted at the very beginning of this
reign: “Whereas divers persons of small garrison of land or other
possessions do make great retinue of people, as well of esquires as of
others, in many parts of the realm, giving to them hats and other livery
of one suit by year taking again towards them the value of the same
livery, or percase the double value, by such covenant and assurance, that
every of them shall maintain other in all quarrels, be they reasonable or
unreasonable, to the great mischief and oppression of the people,
etc.”[**]
This preamble contains a true picture of the state of the kingdom. The
laws had been so feebly executed, even during the long, active, and
vigilant reign of Edward III., that no subject could trust to their
protection. Men openly associated themselves, under the patronage of some
great baron, for their mutual defence. They wore public badges, by which
their confederacy was distinguished. They supported each other in all
quarrels, iniquities, extortions, murders, robberies, and other crimes.
Their chief was more their sovereign than the king himself; and their own
band was more connected with them than their country. Hence the perpetual
turbulence, disorders, factions, and civil wars of those times: hence the
small regard paid to a character, or the opinion of the public: hence the
large discretionary prerogatives of the crown, and the danger which might
have ensued from the too great limitation of them. If the king had
possessed no arbitrary powers, while all the nobles assumed and exercised
them, there must have ensued an absolute anarchy in the state.
One great mischief attending these confederacies was, the extorting from
the king pardons for the most enormous crimes. The parliament often
endeavored, in the last reign, to deprive the prince of this prerogative;
but, in the present, they were content with an abridgment of it. They
enacted, that no pardon for rapes, or for murder from malice prepense,
should be valid, unless the crime were particularly specified in it.[*]
There were also some other circumstances required for passing any pardon
of this kind: an excellent law, but ill observed, like most laws that
thwart the manners of the people, and the prevailing customs of the times.
It is easy to observe, from these voluntary associations among the people,
that the whole force of the feudal system was in a manner dissolved, and
that the English had nearly returned, in that particular, to the same
situation in which they stood before the Norman conquest. It was, indeed,
impossible that that system could long subsist under the perpetual
revolutions to winch landed property is every where subject. When the
great feudal baronies were first erected, the lord lived in opulence in
the midst of his vassals: he was in a situation to protect, and cherish
and defend them: the quality of patron naturally united itself to that of
superior: and these two principles of authority mutually supported each
other. But when by the various divisions and mixtures of property, a man’s
superior came to live at a distance from him, and could no longer give him
shelter or countenance, the tie gradually became more fictitious than
real: new connections from vicinity or other causes were formed:
protection was sought by voluntary services and attachment: the appearance
of valor spirit, abilities in any great man, extended his interest very
far, and if the sovereign were deficient in these qualities, he was no
less, if not more exposed to the usurpations of the aristocracy, than even
during the vigor of the feudal system.
The greatest novelty introduced into the civil government during this
reign was the creation of peers by patent. Lord Beauchamp, of Holt, was
the first peer that was advanced to the house of lords in this manner. The
practice of levying benevolences is also first mentioned in the present
reign. This prince lived in a more magnificent manner than perhaps any of
his predecessors or successors. His household consisted of ten thousand
persons: he had three hundred in his kitchen; and all the other offices
were furnished in proportion.[*] It must be remarked, that this enormous
train had tables supplied them at the king’s expense, according to the
mode of that age. Such prodigality was probably the source of many
exactions by purveyors, and was one chief reason of the public
discontents.
CHAPTER XVIII.
HENRY IV
1399.
The English had so long been familiarized to the hereditary succession of
their monarchs, the instances of departure from it had always borne such
strong symptoms of injustice and violence, and so little of a national
choice or election, and the returns to the true line had ever been deemed
such fortunate incidents in their history, that Henry was afraid, lest, in
resting his title on the consent of the people, he should build on a
foundation to which the people themselves were not accustomed, and whose
solidity they would with difficulty be brought to recognize. The idea too
of choice seemed always to imply that of conditions, and a right of
recalling the consent upon any supposed violation of them; an idea which
was not naturally agreeable to a sovereign, and might in England be
dangerous to the subjects, who, lying so much under the influence of
turbulent nobles, had ever paid but an imperfect obedience even to their
hereditary princes. For these reasons Henry was determined never to have
recourse to this claim; the only one on which his authority could
consistently stand: he rather chose to patch up his title, in the best
manner he could, from other pretensions: and in the end, he left himself,
in the eyes of men of sense, no ground of right but his present
possession; a very precarious foundation, which, by its very nature, was
liable to be overthrown by every faction of the great, or prejudice of the
people. He had indeed a present advantage over his competitor: the heir of
the house of Mortimer, who had been declared in parliament heir to the
crown, was a boy of seven years of age:[*] his friends consulted his
safety by keeping silence with regard to his title: Henry detained him and
his younger brother in an honorable custody at Windsor Castle.
But he had reason to dread that, in proportion as that nobleman grew to
man’s estate, he would draw to him the attachment of the people, and make
them reflect on the fraud, violence, and injustice by which he had been
excluded from the throne. Many favorable topics would occur in his behalf:
he was a native of England; possessed an extensive interest from the
greatness and alliances of his family; however criminal the deposed
monarch, this youth was entirely innocent; he was of the same religion,
and educated in the same manners with the people, and could not be
governed by any separate interest: these views would all concur to favor
his claim; and though the abilities of the present prince might ward off
any dangerous revolution, it was justly to be apprehended, that his
authority could with difficulty be brought to equal that of his
predecessors.
Henry, in his very first parliament, had reason to see the danger
attending that station which he had assumed, and the obstacles which he
would meet with in governing an unruly aristocracy, always divided by
faction, and at present inflamed with the resentments consequent on such
recent convulsions. The peers, on their assembling, broke out into violent
animosities against each other; forty gauntlets, the pledges of furious
battle, were thrown on the floor of the house by noblemen who gave mutual
challenges; and “liar” and “traitor” resounded from all quarters. The king
had so much authority with these doughty champions, as to prevent all the
combats which they threatened; but he was not able to bring them to a
proper composure, or to an amicable disposition towards each other.
1400.
It was not long before these passions broke into action. The earls of
Rutland, Kent, and Huntingdon, and Lord Spenser, who were now degraded
from the respective titles of Albemarle, Surrey, Exeter, and Glocester,
conferred on them by Richard, entered into a conspiracy, together with the
earl of Salisbury and Lord Lumley, for raising an insurrection, and for
seizing the king’s person at Windsor;[*] but the treachery of Rutland gave
him warning of the danger. He suddenly withdrew to London; and the
conspirators, who came to Windsor with a body of five hundred horse, found
that they had missed this blow, on which all the success of their
enterprise depended.
Henry appeared, next day, at Kingston upon Thames, at the head of twenty
thousand men, mostly drawn from the city; and his enemies, unable to
resist his power, dispersed themselves, with a view of raising their
followers in the several counties which were the seat of their interest.
But the adherents of the king were hot in the pursuit, and every where
opposed themselves to their progress. The earls of Kent and Salisbury were
seized at Cirencester by the citizens, and were next day beheaded without
further ceremony, according to the custom of the times.[*] The citizens of
Bristol treated Spenser and Lumley in the same manner. The earl of
Huntingdon, Sir Thomas Blount, and Sir Benedict Sely, who were also taken
prisoners, suffered death, with many others of the conspirators, by orders
from Henry. And when the quarters of these unhappy men were brought to
London, no less than eighteen bishops and thirty-two mitred abbots joined
the populace, and met them with the most indecent marks of joy and
exultation.
But the spectacle the most shocking to every one, who retained any
sentiment either of honor or humanity, still remained. The earl of Rutland
appeared, carrying on a pole the head of Lord Spenser, his brother-in-law,
which he presented in triumph to Henry as a testimony of his loyalty. This
infamous man, who was soon after duke of York by the death of his father,
and first prince of the blood, had been instrumental in the murder of his
uncle, the duke of Glocester;[**] had then deserted Richard, by whom he
was trusted; had conspired against the life of Henry, to whom he had sworn
allegiance; had betrayed his associates, whom he had seduced into this
enterprise; and now displayed, in the face of the world, these badges of
his multiplied dishonor.
1401.
Henry was sensible that, though the execution of these conspirators might
seem to give security to his throne, the animosities which remain after
such bloody scenes, are always dangerous to royal authority; and he
therefore determined not to increase, by any hazardous enterprise, those
numerous enemies with whom he was every where environed. While a subject,
he was believed to have strongly imbibed all the principles of his father,
the duke of Lancaster, and to have adopted the prejudices which the
Lollards inspired against the abuses of the established church: but
finding, himself possessed of the throne by so precarious a title, he
thought superstition a necessary implement of public authority; and he
resolved, by every expedient, to pay court to the clergy. There were
hitherto no penal laws enacted against heresy; an indulgence which had
proceeded, not from a spirit of toleration in the Romish church, but from
the ignorance and simplicity of the people, which had rendered them unfit
either for starting or receiving any new or curious doctrines, and which
needed not to be restrained by rigorous penalties. But when the learning
and genius of Wickliffe had once broken, in some measure, the fetters of
prejudice, the ecclesiastics called aloud for the punishment of his
disciples; and the king, who was very little scrupulous in his conduct,
was easily induced to sacrifice his principles to his interest, and to
acquire the favor of the church by that most effectual method, the
gratifying of their vengeance against opponents. He engaged the parliament
to pass a law for that purpose: it was enacted, that when any heretic, who
relapsed, or refused to abjure his opinions, was delivered over to the
secular arm by the bishop or his commissaries, he should be committed to
the flames by the civil magistrate before the whole people.[*] This weapon
did not long remain unemployed in the hands of the clergy: William Sautré,
rector of St. Osithes in London, had been condemned by the convocation of
Canterbury; his sentence was ratified by the house of peers; the king
issued his writ for the execution; [**] and the unhappy man atoned for his
erroneous opinions by the penalty of fire. This is the first instance of
that kind in England; and thus one horror more was added to those dismal
scenes which at that time were already but too familiar to the people.
But the utmost precaution and prudence of Henry could not shield him from
those numerous inquietudes which assailed him from every quarter. The
connections of Richard with the royal family of France, made that court
exert its activity to recover his authority, or revenge his death. [***]
But though the confusions in England tempted the French to engage in some
enterprise by which they might distress their ancient enemy, the greater
confusions which they experienced at home, obliged them quickly to
accommodate matters; and Charles, content with recovering his daughter
from Henry’s hands, laid aside his preparations, and renewed the truce
between the kingdoms.[*] The attack of Guienne was also an inviting
attempt, which the present factions that prevailed among the French
obliged them to neglect. The Gascons, affectionate to the memory of
Richard, who was born among them, refused to swear allegiance to a prince
that had dethroned and murdered him; and the appearance of a French army
on their frontiers would probably have tempted them to change masters.[**]
But the earl of Worcester, arriving with some English troops, gave
countenance to the partisans of Henry, and overawed their opponents.
Religion too was here found a cement to their union with England. The
Gascons had been engaged by Richard’s authority to acknowledge the pope of
Rome; and they were sensible that, if they submitted to France, it would
be necessary for them to pay obedience to the pope of Avignon, whom they
had been taught to detest as a schismatic. Their principles on this head
were too fast rooted to admit of any sudden or violent alteration.
The revolution in England proved likewise the occasion of an insurrection
in Wales. Owen Glendour, or Glendourduy, descended from the ancient
princes of that country, had become obnoxious on account of his attachment
to Richard: and Reginald, Lord Gray of Ruthyn, who was closely connected
with the new king, and who enjoyed a great fortune in the marches of
Wales, thought the opportunity favorable for oppressing his neighbor, and
taking possession of his estate. [***] Glendour, provoked at the
injustice, and still more at the indignity, recovered possession by the
sword; [****] Henry sent assistance to Gray; [*****] the Welsh took part
with Glendour: a troublesome and tedious war was kindled, which Glendour
long sustained by his valor and activity, aided by the natural strength of
the country, and the untamed spirit of its inhabitants.
As Glendour committed devastations promiscuously on all the English, he
infested the estate of the earl of Marche; and Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle
to that nobleman, led out the retainers of the family, and gave battle to
the Welsh chieftain: his troops were routed, and he was taken prisoner:[*]
at the same time, the earl himself, who had been allowed to retire to his
castle of Wigmore, and who, though a mere boy, took the field with his
followers, fell also into Glendour’s hands, and was carried by him into
Wales.[**] As Henry dreaded and hated all the family of Marche, he allowed
the earl to remain in captivity; and though that young nobleman was nearly
allied to the Piercies, to whose assistance he himself had owed his crown,
he refused to the earl of Northumberland permission to treat of his ransom
with Glendour.
The uncertainty in which Henry’s affairs stood during a long time with
France, as well as the confusions incident to all great changes in
government, tempted the Scots to make incursions into England; and Henry,
desirous of taking revenge upon them, but afraid of rendering his new
government unpopular by requiring great supplies from his subjects,
summoned at Westminster a council of the peers, without the commons, and
laid before them the state of his affairs.[***] The military part of the
feudal constitution was now much decayed: there remained only so much of
that fabric as affected the civil rights and properties of men: and the
peers here undertook, but voluntarily, to attend the king in an expedition
against Scotland, each of them at the head of a certain number of his
retainers. [****] Henry conducted this army to Edinburgh, of which he
easily made himself master; and he there summoned Robert III. to do homage
to him for his crown.[*****] But finding that the Scots would neither
submit nor give him battle, he returned in three weeks, after making this
useless bravado; and he disbanded his army.
1402.
In the subsequent season, Archibald, earl of Douglas, at the head of
twelve thousand men, and attended by many of the principal nobility of
Scotland, made an irruption into England, and committed devastations on
the northern counties. On his return home, he was overtaken by the
Piercies, at Homeldom, on the borders of England, and a fierce battle
ensued, where the Scots were totally routed. Douglas himself was taken
prisoner; as was Mordác, earl of Fife, son of the duke of Albany, and
nephew of the Scottish king, with the earls of Angus, Murray, and Orkney,
and many others of the gentry and nobility. [******] | When Henry received
intelligence of this victory, he sent the earl of Northumberland orders
not to ransom his prisoners, which that nobleman regarded as his right by
the laws of war received in that age. The king intended to detain them,
that he might be able by their means to make an advantageous peace with
Scotland; but by this policy he gave a fresh disgust to the family of
Piercy.
1403.
The obligations which Henry had owed to Northumberland, were of a kind the
most likely to produce ingratitude on the one side, and discontent on the
other. The sovereign naturally became jealous of that power which had
advanced him to the throne; and the subject was not easily satisfied in
the returns which he thought so great a favor had merited. Though Henry,
on his accession, had bestowed the office of constable on Northumberland
for life,[*] and conferred other gifts on that family, these favors were
regarded as their due; the refusal of any other request was deemed an
injury.
The impatient spirit of Harry Piercy, and the factious disposition of the
earl of Worcester, younger brother of Northumberland, inflamed the
discontents of that nobleman; and the precarious title of Henry tempted
him to seek revenge, by overturning that throne which he had at first
established. He entered into a correspondence with Glendour: he gave
liberty to the earl of Douglas, and made an alliance with that martial
chief: he roused up all his partisans to arms; and such unlimited
authority at that time belonged to the great families, that the same men,
whom, a few years before, he had conducted against Richard, now followed
his standard in opposition to Henry. When war was ready to break out,
Northumberland was seized with a sudden illness at Berwick: and young
Piercy, taking the command of the troops, marched towards Shrewsbury, in
order to join his forces with those of Glendour, The king had happily a
small army on foot, with which he had intended to act against the Scots;
and knowing the importance of celerity in all civil wars, he instantly
hurried down, that he might give battle to the rebels. He approached
Piercy near Shrewsbury, before that nobleman was joined by Glendour; and
the policy of one leader, and impatience of the other, made them hasten to
a general engagement.
The evening before the battle, Piercy sent a manifesto to Henry, in which
he renounced his allegiance, set that prince at defiance, and, in the name
of his father and uncle, as well as his own, enumerated all the grievances
of which, he pretended, the nation had reason to complain; He upbraided
him with the perjury of which he had been guilty, when, on landing at
Ravenspur, he had sworn upon the Gospels, before the earl of
Northumberland, that he had no other intension than to recover the duchy
of Lancaster, and that he would ever remain a faithful subject to King
Richard. He aggravated his guilt in first dethroning, then murdering that
prince, and in usurping on the title of the house of Mortimer, to whom,
both by lineal succession, and by declarations of parliament, the throne,
when vacant by Richard’s demise, did of right belong. He complained of his
cruel policy in allowing the young earl of Marche, whom he ought to regard
as his sovereign, to remain a captive in the hands of his enemies, and in
even refusing to all his friends permission to treat of his ransom; He
charged him again with perjury in loading the nation with heavy taxes,
after having sworn that, without the utmost necessity, he would never levy
any impositions upon them. And he reproached him with the arts employed in
procuring favorable elections into parliament; arts which he himself had
before imputed as a crime to Richard, and which he had made one chief
reason of that prince’s arraignment and deposition.[*] This manifesto was
well calculated to inflame the quarrel between the parties: the bravery of
the two leaders promised an obstinate engagement; and the equality of the
armies, being each about twelve thousand men, a number which was not
unmanageable by the commanders, gave reason to expect a great effusion of
blood on both sides, and a very doubtful issue to the combat.
We shall scarcely find any battle in those ages where the shock was more
terrible and more constant. Henry exposed his person in the thickest of
the fight: his gallant son, whose military achievements were afterwards so
renowned, and who here performed his novitiate in arms, signalized himself
on his father’s footsteps; and even a wound, which he received in the face
with tin arrow, could not oblige him to quit the field.[**]
Piercy supported that fame which he had acquired in many a bloody combat.
And Douglas, his ancient enemy, and now his friend, still appeared his
rival amidst the horror and confusion of the day. This nobleman performed
feats of valor which are almost incredible: he seemed determined that the
king of England should that day fall by his arm: he sought him all over
the field of battle: and as Henry, either to elude the attacks of the
enemy upon his person, or to encourage his own men by the belief of his
presence every where, had accoutred several captains in the royal garb,
the sword of Douglas rendered this honor fatal to many.[*] But while the
armies were contending in this furious manner, the death of Piercy, by an
unknown hand, decided the victory, and the royalists prevailed. There are
said to have fallen that day on both sides near two thousand three hundred
gentlemen; but the persons of greatest distinction were on the king’s; the
earl of Stafford, Sir Hugh Shirley, Sir Nicholas Gausel, Sir Hugh
Mortimer, Sir John Massey, Sir John Calverly. About six thousand private
men perished, of whom two thirds were of Piercy’s army.[**] The earls of
Worcester and Douglas were taken prisoners: the former was beheaded at
Shrewsbury; the latter was treated with the courtesy due to his rank and
merit.
The earl of Northumberland, having recovered from his sickness, had levied
a fresh army, and was on his march to join his son; but being opposed by
the earl of Westmoreland, and hearing of the defeat at Shrewsbury, he
dismissed his forces, and came with a small retinue to the king at
York.[***] He pretended that his sole intention in arming was to mediate
between the parties: Henry thought proper to accept of the apology, and
even granted him a pardon for his offence: all the other rebels were
treated with equal lenity; and, except the earl of Worcester and Sir
Richard Vernon, who were regarded as the chief authors of the
insurrection, no person engaged in this dangerous enterprise seems to have
perished by the hands of the executioner.[****]
1405.
But Northumberland, though he had been pardoned, knew that he never should
be trusted, and that he was too powerful to be cordially forgiven by a
prince whose situation gave him such reasonable grounds of jealousy. It
was the effect either of Henry’s vigilance or good fortune, or of the
narrow genius of his enemies, that no proper concert was ever formed among
them: they rose in rebellion one after another; and thereby afforded him
an opportunity of suppressing singly those insurrections which, had they
been united, might have proved fatal to his authority. The earl of
Nottingham, son of the duke of Norfolk, and the archbishop of York,
brother to the earl of Wiltshire, whom Henry, then duke of Lancaster, had
beheaded at Bristol, though they had remained quiet while Piercy was in
the field, still harbored in their breast a violent hatred against the
enemy of their families; and they determined, in conjunction with the earl
of Northumberland, to seek revenge against him. They betook themselves to
arms before that powerful nobleman was prepared to join them; and
publishing a manifesto, in which they reproached Henry with his usurpation
of the crown and the murder of the late king, they required that the right
line should be restored, and all public grievances be redressed. The earl
of Westmoreland, whose power lay in the neighborhood, approached them with
an inferior force at Shipton, near York; and being afraid to hazard an
action, he attempted to subdue them by a stratagem, which nothing but the
greatest folly and simplicity on their part could have rendered
successful. He desired a conference with the archbishop and earl between
the armies: he heard their grievances with great patience: he begged them
to propose the remedies: he approved of every expedient which they
suggested: he granted them all their demands: he also engaged that Henry
should give them entire satisfaction: and when he saw them pleased with
the facility of his concessions, he observed to them, that, since amity
was now in effect restored between them, it were better on both sides to
dismiss their forces, which otherwise would prove an insupportable burden
to the country. The archbishop and the earl of Nottingham immediately gave
directions to that purpose: their troops disbanded upon the field: but
Westmoreland, who had secretly issued contrary orders to his army, seized
the two rebels without resistance, and carried them to the king, who was
advancing with hasty marches to suppress the insurrection.[*]
The trial and punishment of an archbishop might have proved a troublesome
and dangerous undertaking, had Henry proceeded regularly, and allowed time
for an opposition to form itself against that unusual measure: the
celerity of the execution alone could here render it safe and prudent.
Finding that Sir William Gascoigne, the chief justice, made some scruple
of acting on this occasion, he appointed Sir William Fulthorpe for judge;
who, without any indictment, trial, or defence pronounced sentence of
death upon the prelate which was presently executed. This was the first
instance in England of a capital punishment inflicted on a bishop; whence
the clergy of that rank might learn that their crimes, more than those of
laies, were not to pass with impunity. The earl of Nottingham was
condemned and executed in the same summary manner: but though many other
persons of condition, such as Lord Falconberg, Sir Ralph Hastings, Sir
John Colville, were engaged in this rebellion, no others seem to have
fallen victims to Henry’s severity.
The earl of Northumberland, on receiving this intelligence, fled into
Scotland, together with Lord Bardolf;[*] and the king, without opposition,
reduced all the castles and fortresses belonging to these noblemen. He
thence turned his arms against Glendour, over whom his son, the prince of
Wales, had attained some advantages; but that enemy, more troublesome than
dangerous, still found means of defending himself in his fastnesses, and
of eluding, though not resisting, all the force of England.
1407.
In a subsequent season, the earl of Northumberland and Lord Bardolf,
impatient of their exile, entered the north, in hopes of raising the
people to arms; but found the country in such a posture as rendered all
their attempts unsuccessful. Sir Thomas Rokesby, sheriff of Yorkshire,
levied some forces, attacked the invaders at Bramham, and gained a
victory, in which both Northumberland and Bardolf were slain.** This
prosperous event, joined to the death of Glendour, which happened soon
after, freed Henry from all his domestic enemies; and this prince, who had
mounted the throne by such unjustifiable means, and held it by such an
exceptionable title, had yet, by his valor, prudence, and address,
accustomed the people to the yoke, and had obtained a greater ascendant
over his haughty barons, than the law alone, not supported by these active
qualities, was ever able to confer.
About the same time, fortune gave Henry an advantage over that neighbor,
who, by his situation, was most enabled to disturb his government. Robert
III., king of Scots, was a prince, though of slender capacity, extremely
innocent and inoffensive in his conduct: but Scotland, at that time, was
still less fitted than England for cherishing, or even enduring sovereigns
of that character. The duke of Albany, Robert’s brother, a prince of more
abilities, at least of a more boisterous and violent disposition, had
assumed the government of the state; and, not satisfied with present
authority, he entertained the criminal purpose of extirpating his
brother’s children, and of acquiring the crown to his own family. He threw
in prison David, his eldest nephew; who there perished by hunger: James
alone, the younger brother of David, stood between that tyrant and the
throne; and King Robert, sensible of his son’s danger, embarked him on
board a ship, with a view of sending him to France, and intrusting him to
the protection of that friendly power. Unfortunately, the vessel was taken
by the English; Prince James, a boy about nine years of age, was carried
to London; and though there subsisted at that time a truce between the
kingdoms, Henry refused to restore the young prince to his liberty.
Robert, worn out with cares and infirmities, was unable to bear the shock
of this last misfortune; and he soon after died, leaving the government in
the hands of the duke of Albany.[*] Henry was now more sensible than ever
of the importance of the acquisition which he had made: while he retained
such a pledge, he was sure of keeping the duke of Albany in dependence;
or, if offended, he could easily, by restoring the true heir, take ample
revenge upon the usurper. But though the king, by detaining James in the
English court, had shown himself somewhat deficient in generosity, he made
ample amends by giving that prince an excellent education, which
afterwards qualified him, when he mounted the throne, to reform in some
measure the rude and barbarous manners of his native country.
The hostile dispositions which of late had prevailed between France and
England, were restrained, during the greater part of this reign, from
appearing in action. The jealousies and civil commotions with which both
nations were disturbed, kept each of them from taking advantage of the
unhappy situation of its neighbor. But as the abilities and good fortune
of Henry had sooner been able to compose the English factions, this prince
began, in the latter part of his reign, to look abroad, and to foment the
animosities between the families of Burgundy and Orleans, by which the
government of France was, during that period, so much distracted. He knew
that one great source of the national discontent against his predecessor
was the inactivity of his reign; and he hoped, by giving a new direction
to the restless and unquiet spirits of his people, to prevent their
breaking out in domestic wars and disorders.
1411.
That he might unite policy with force, he first entered into treaty with
the duke of Burgundy, and sent that prince a small body of troops, which
supported him against his enemies.[*] Soon after, he hearkened to more
advantageous proposals made him by the duke of Orleans, and despatched a
greater body to support that party.
1412.
But the leaders of the opposite factions having made a temporary
accommodation, the interests of the English were sacrificed; and this
effort of Henry proved, in the issue, entirely vain and fruitless. The
declining state of his health, and the shortness of his reign, prevented
him from renewing the attempt, which his more fortunate son carried to so
great a length against the French monarchy.
Such were the military and foreign transactions of this reign: the civil
and parliamentary are somewhat more memorable, and more worthy of our
attention. During the two last reigns, the elections of the commons had
appeared a circumstance of government not to be neglected; and Richard was
even accused of using unwarrantable methods for procuring to his partisans
a seat in that house. This practice formed one considerable article of
charge against him in his deposition; yet Henry scrupled not to tread in
his footsteps, and to encourage the same abuses in elections. Laws were
enacted against such undue influence; and even a sheriff was punished for
an iniquitous return which he had made:[**] but laws were commonly at that
time very ill executed; and the liberties of the people, such as they
were, stood on a surer basis than on laws and parliamentary elections.
Though the house of commons was little able to withstand the violent
currents which perpetually ran between the monarchy and the aristocracy,
and though that house might easily be brought, at a particular time, to
make the most unwarrantable concessions to either, the general
institutions of the state still remained invariable; the interests of the
several members continued on the same footing; the sword was in the hands
af the subject; and the government, though thrown into temporary disorder,
soon settled itself on its ancient foundations.
During the greater part of this reign, the king was obliged to court
popularity; and the house of commons, sensible of their own importance,
began to assume powers which had not usually been exercised by their
predecessors. In the first year of Henry, they procured a law, that no
judge, in concurring with any iniquitous measure, should be excused by
pleading the orders of the king, or even the danger of his* own life from
the menaces of the sovereign.[*] In the second year, they insisted on
maintaining the practice of not granting any supply before they received
an answer to their petitions, which was a tacit manner of bargaining with
the prince.[**] In the fifth year, they desired the king to remove from
his household four persons who had displeased them, among whom was his own
confessor, and Henry, though he told them that he knew of no offence which
these men had committed, yet, in order to gratify them, complied with
their request.[***] In the sixth year, they voted the king supplies, but
appointed treasurers of their own, to see the money disbursed for the
purposes intended, and required them to deliver in their accounts to the
house.[****] In the eighth year, they proposed, for the regulation of the
government and household, thirty important articles, which were all agreed
to; and they even obliged all the members of council, all the judges, and
all the officers of the household, to swear to the observance of
them.[*****] The abridger of the records remarks the unusual liberties
taken by the speaker and the house during this period.[******] But the
great authority of the commons was but a temporary advantage, arising from
the present situation. In a subsequent parliament, when the speaker made
his customary application to the throne for liberty of speech, the king,
having now overcome all his domestic difficulties, plainly told him that
he would have no novelties introduced, and would enjoy his prerogatives.
But on the whole, the limitations of the government seem to have been more
sensibly felt, and more carefully maintained, by Henry than by any of his
predecessors.
During this reign, when the house of commons were at any time brought to
make unwary concessions to the crown they also showed their freedom by a
speedy retractation of them. Henry, though he entertained a perpetual and
well grounded jealousy of the family of Mortimer, allowed not their name
to be once mentioned in parliament; and as none of the rebels had ventured
to declare the earl of Marche king, he never attempted to procure, what
would not have been refused him, an express declaration against the claim
of that nobleman; because he knew that such a declaration, in the present
circumstances, would have no authority, and would only serve to revive the
memory of Mortimer’s title in the minds of the people. He proceeded in his
purpose after a more artful and covert manner. He procured a settlement of
the crown on himself and his heirs male,[*] thereby tacitly excluding the
females, and transferring the Salic law into the English government. He
thought that, though the house of Plantagenet had at first derived their
title from a female, this was a remote event, unknown to the generality of
the people; and if he could once accustom them to the practice of
excluding women, the title of the earl of Marche would gradually be
forgotten and neglected by them. But he was very unfortunate in this
attempt. During the long contests with France, the injustice of the Salic
law had been so much exclaimed against by the nation, that a contrary
principle had taken deep root in the minds of men; and it was now become
impossible to eradicate it. The same house of commons, therefore, in a
subsequent session, apprehensive that they had overturned the foundations
of the English government, and that they had opened the door to more civil
wars than might ensue even from the irregular elevation of the house of
Lancaster, applied with such earnestness for a new settlement of the
crown, that Henry yielded to their request, and agreed to the succession
of the princesses of his family;[**] a certain proof that nobody was, in
his heart, satisfied with the king’s title to the crown, or knew on what
principle to rest it.
But though the commons, during this reign, showed a laudable zeal for
liberty in their transactions with the crown, their efforts against the
church were still more extraordinary, and seemed to anticipate very much
the spirit which became so general in little more than a century
afterwards. I know that the credit of these passages rests entirely on one
ancient historian;[***] but that historian was contemporary, was a
clergyman, and it was contrary to the interests of his order to preserve
the memory of such transactions, much more to forge precedents which
posterity might some time be tempted to imitate.
This is a truth so evident, that the most likely way of accounting for the
silence of the records on this head, is by supposing that the authority of
some churchmen was so great as to procure a razure, with regard to these
circumstances, which the indiscretion of one of that order has happily
preserved to us.
In the sixth of Henry, the commons, who had been required to grant
supplies, proposed in plain terms to the king, that he should seize all
the temporalities of the church, and employ them as a perpetual fund to
serve the exigencies of the state. They insisted that the clergy possessed
a third of the lands of the kingdom; that they contributed nothing to the
public burdens; and that their riches tended only to disqualify them from
performing their ministerial functions with proper zeal and attention.
When this address was presented, the archbishop of Canterbury, who then
attended the king, objected that the clergy, though they went not in
person to the wars, sent their vassals and tenants in all cases of
necessity; while at the same time they themselves, who staid at home, were
employed night and day in offering up their prayers for the happiness and
prosperity of the state. The speaker smiled, and answered without reserve,
that he thought the prayers of the church but a very slender supply. The
archbishop, however, prevailed in the dispute; the king discouraged the
application of the commons; and the lords rejected the bill which the
lower house had framed for stripping the church of her revenues.[*]
The commons were not discouraged by this repulse: in the eleventh of the
king, they returned to the charge with more zeal than before: they made a
calculation of all the ecclesiastical revenues, which, by their account,
amounted to four hundred and eighty-five thousand marks a year, and
contained eighteen thousand four hundred ploughs of land. They proposed to
divide this property among fifteen new earls, one thousand five hundred
knights, six thousand esquires, and a hundred hospitals, besides twenty
thousand pounds a year, which the king might take for his own use; and
they insisted, that the clerical functions would be better performed than
at present by fifteen thousand parish priests, paid at the rate of seven
marks apiece of yearly stipend.[*] This application was accompanied with
an address for mitigating the statutes enacted against the Lollards, which
shows from what source the address came. The king gave the commons a
severe reply and further to satisfy the church, and to prove that he was
quite in earnest, he ordered a Lollard to be burned before the dissolution
of the parliament.[**]
1413.
We have now related almost all the memorable transactions of this reign,
which was busy and active, but produced few events that deserve to be
transmitted to posterity. The king was so much employed in defending his
crown, which he had obtained by unwarrantable means, and possessed by a
bad title, that he had little leisure to look abroad, or perform any
action which might redound to the honor and advantage of the nation. His
health declined some months before his death; he was subject to fits,
which bereaved him, for the time, of his senses; and though he was yet in
the flower of his age, his end was visibly approaching. He expired at
Westminster, in the forty-sixth year of his age, and the thirteenth of his
reign.
The great popularity which Henry enjoyed before he attained the crown, and
which had so much aided him in the acquisition of it, was entirely lost
many years before the end of his reign; and he governed his people more by
terror than by affection, more by his own policy than by their sense of
duty or allegiance. When men came to reflect, in cool blood, on the crimes
which had led him to the throne; the rebellion against his prince; the
deposition of a lawful king, guilty sometimes, perhaps, of oppression, but
more frequently of indiscretion; the exclusion of the true heir; the
murder of his sovereign and near relation; these were such enormities as
drew on him the hatred of his subjects, sanctified all the rebellions
against him, and made the executions, though not remarkably severe, which
he found necessary for the maintenance of his authority, appear cruel as
well as iniquitous to the people. Yet, without pretending to apologize for
these crimes, which must ever be held in detestation, it may be remarked,
that he was insensibly led into this blamable conduct by a train of
incidents which few men possess virtue enough to withstand. The injustice
with which his predecessor had treated him, in first condemning him to
banishment, then despoiling him of his patrimony, made him naturally think
of revenge, and of recovering his lost rights; the headlong zeal of the
people hurried him into the throne; the care of his own security, as well
as his ambition, made him a usurper; and the steps have always been so few
between the prisons of princes and their graves, that we need not wonder
that Richard’s fate was no exception to the general rule. All these
considerations make Henry’s situation, if he retained any sense of virtue,
much to be lamented; and the inquietude with which he possessed his envied
greatness, and the remorses by which, it is said, he was continually
haunted, render him an object of our pity, even when seated upon the
throne. But it must be owned, that his prudence, and vigilance, and
foresight, in maintaining his power, were admirable; his command of temper
remarkable; his courage, both military and political, without blemish; and
he possessed many qualities which fitted him for his high station, and
which rendered his usurpation of it, though pernicious in after times,
rather salutary, during his own reign, to the English nation.
Henry was twice married: by his first wife, Mary deBohun, daughter and
coheir of the earl of Hereford, he had four sons, Henry, his successor in
the throne, Thomas, duke of Clarence, John, duke of Bedford, and Humphrey,
duke of Glocester: and two daughters, Blanche and Philippa; the former
married to the duke of Bavaria, the latter to the king of Denmark. His
second wife, Jane, whom he married after he was king, and who was daughter
of the king of Navarre, and widow of the duke of Brittany, brought him no
issue.
By an act of the fifth of this reign, it is made felony to cut out any
person’s tongue, or put out his eyes; crimes which, the act says, were
very frequent. This savage spirit of revenge denotes a barbarous people;
though, perhaps, it was increased by the prevailing factions and civil
commotions.
Commerce was very little understood in this reign, as in all the
preceding. In particular, a great jealousy prevailed against merchant
strangers; and many restraints were by law imposed upon them; namely, that
they should lay out in English manufactures or commodities all the money
acquired by the sale of their goods; that they should not buy or sell with
one another; and that all their goods should be disposed of three months
after importation.[*]
This last clause was found so inconvenient, that it was soon after
repealed by parliament.
It appears that the expense of this king’s household amounted to the
yearly sum of nineteen thousand five hundred pounds, money of that age.[*]
Guicciardin tells us, that the Flemings in this century learned from Italy
all the refinements in arts, which they taught the rest of Europe. The
progress, however, of the arts was still very slow and backward in
England.
CHAPTER XIX.
HENRY V.
1413.
THE many jealousies to which Henry IV.‘s situation naturally exposed him,
had so infected his temper, that he had entertained unreasonable
suspicions with regard to the fidelity of his eldest son; and during the
latter years of his life, he had excluded that prince from all share in
public business, and was even displeased to see him at the head of armies,
where his martial talents, though useful to the support of government,
acquired him a renown, which he thought might prove dangerous to his own
authority. The active spirit of young Henry, restrained from its proper
exercise, broke out into extravagances of every kind; and the riot of
pleasure, the frolic of debauchery, the outrage of wine, filled the
vacancies of a mind better adapted to the pursuits of ambition and the
cares of government. This course of life threw him among companions, whose
disorders, if accompanied with spirit and humor, he indulged and seconded;
and he was detected in many sallies, which, to severer eyes, appeared
totally unworthy of his rank and station. There even remains a tradition
that, when heated with liquor and jollity, he scrupled not to accompany
his riotous associates in attacking the passengers on the streets and
highways, and despoiling them of their goods; and he found an amusement in
the incidents which the terror and regret of these defenceless people
produced on such occasions. This extreme of dissoluteness proved equally
disagreeable to his father, as that eager application to business which
had at first given him occasion of jealousy; and he saw in his son’s
behavior the same neglect of decency, the same attachment to low company,
which had degraded the personal character of Richard, and which, more than
all his errors in government, had tended to overturn his throne. But the
nation in general considered the young prince with more indulgence; and
observed so many gleams of generosity, spirit, and magnanimity, breaking
continually through the cloud which a wild conduct threw over his
character, that they never ceased hoping for his amendment; and they
ascribed all the weeds, which shot up in that rich soil, to the want of
proper culture and attention in the king and his ministers. There happened
an incident which encouraged these agreeable views, and gave much occasion
for favorable reflections to all men of sense and candor. A riotous
companion of the prince’s had been indicted before Gascoigne, the chief
justice, for some disorders; and Henry was not ashamed to appear at the
bar with the criminal, in order to give him countenance and protection.
Finding that his presence had not overawed the chief justice, he proceeded
to insult that magistrate on his tribunal; but Gascoigne, mindful of the
character which he then bore, and the majesty of the sovereign and of the
laws which he sustained, ordered the prince to be carried to prison for
his rude behavior.[*] The spectators were agreeably disappointed, when
they saw the heir of the crown submit peaceably to this sentence, make
reparation for his error by acknowledging it, and check his impetuous
nature in the midst of its extravagant career.
The memory of this incident, and of many others of a like nature, rendered
the prospect of the future reign nowise disagreeable to the nation, and
increased the joy which the death of so unpopular a prince as the late
king naturally occasioned. The first steps taken by the young prince
confirmed all those prepossessions entertained in his favor.[**] He called
together his former companions, acquainted them with his intended
reformation, exhorted them to imitate his example, but strictly inhibited
them, till they had given proofs of their sincerity in this particular,
from appearing any more in his presence; and he thus dismissed them with
liberal presents.[***]
The wise ministers of his father, who had checked his riots, found that
they had unknowingly been paying the highest court to him; and were
received with all the marks of favor and confidence. The chief justice
himself, who trembled to approach the royal presence, met with praises
instead of reproaches for his past conduct, and was exhorted to persevere
in the same rigorous and impartial execution of the laws. The surprise of
those who expected an opposite behavior, augmented their satisfaction; and
the character of the young king appeared brighter than if it had never
been shaded by any errors.
But Henry was anxious not only to repair his own misconduct, but also to
make amends for those iniquities into which policy or the necessity of
affairs had betrayed his father. He expressed the deepest sorrow for the
fate of the unhappy Richard, did justice to the memory of that unfortunate
prince, even performed his funeral obsequies with pomp and solemnity, and
cherished all those who had distinguished themselves by their loyalty and
attachment towards him.[*] Instead of continuing the restraints which the
jealousy of his father had imposed on the earl of Marche, he received that
young nobleman with singular courtesy and favor; and by this magnanimity
so gained on the gentle and unambitious nature of his competitor, that he
remained ever after sincerely attached to him, and gave him no disturbance
in his future government. The family of Piercy was restored to its fortune
and honors.[**] The king seemed ambitious to bury all party distinctions
in oblivion: the instruments of the preceding reign, who had been advanced
from their blind zeal for the Lancastrian interests, more than from their
merits, gave place every where to men of more honorable characters; virtue
seemed now to have an open career, in which it might exert itself: the
exhortations, as well as example of the prince, gave it encouragement: all
men were unanimous in their attachment to Henry; and the defects of his
title were forgotten, amidst the personal regard which was universally
paid to him.
There remained among the people only one party distinction, which was
derived from religious differences, and which, as it is of a peculiar and
commonly a very obstinate nature, the popularity of Henry was not able to
overcome. The Lollards were every day increasing in the kingdom, and were
become a formed party, which appeared extremely dangerous to the church,
and even formidable to the civil authority.[***] The enthusiasm by which
these sectaries were generally actuated the great alterations which they
pretended to introduce, the hatred which they expressed against the
established hierarchy, gave an alarm to Henry; who, either from a sincere
attachment to the ancient religion, or from a dread of the unknown
consequences which attend all important changes, was determined to execute
the laws against such bold innovators.
The head of this sect was Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, a nobleman who
had distinguished himself by his valor and his military talents, and had,
on many occasions, acquired the esteem both of the late and of the present
king.[*] His high character and his zeal for the new sect pointed him out
to Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, as the proper victim of
ecclesiastical severity, whose punishment would strike a terror into the
whole party, and teach them that they must expect no mercy under the
present administration. He applied to Henry for a permission to indict
Lord Cobham;[**] but the generous nature of the prince was averse to such
sanguinary methods of conversion. He represented to the primate, that
reason and conviction were the best expedients for supporting truth; that
all gentle means ought first to be tried, in order to reclaim men from
error; and that he himself would endeavor, by a conversation with Cobham,
to reconcile him to the Catholic faith. But he found that nobleman
obstinate in his opinions, and determined not to sacrifice truths of such
infinite moment to his complaisance for sovereigns.[***]
Henry’s principles of toleration, or rather his love of the practice,
could carry him no farther; and he then gave full reins to ecclesiastical
severity against the inflexible heresiarch. The primate indicted Cobham,
and with the assistance of his three suffragans, the bishops of London,
Winchester, and St. David’s, condemned him to the flames for his erroneous
opinions. Cobham, who was confined in the Tower, made his escape before
the day appointed for his execution. The bold spirit of the man, provoked
by persecution and stimulated by zeal, was urged to attempt the most
criminal enterprises; and his unlimited authority over the new sect proved
that he well merited the attention of the civil magistrate. He formed in
his retreat very violent designs against his enemies; and despatching his
emissaries to all quarters, appointed a general rendezvous of the party,
in order to seize the person of the king at Eltham, and put their
persecutors to the sword.[*]
1414.
Henry, apprised of their intention, removed to Westminster: Cobham was not
discouraged by this disappointment; but changed the place of rendezvous to
the field near St. Giles; the king, having shut the gates of the city, to
prevent any reënforcement to the Lollards from that quarter, came into the
field in the night-time, seized such of the conspirators as appeared, and
afterwards laid hold of the several parties who were hastening to the
place appointed. It appeared, that a few only were in the secret of the
conspiracy; the rest implicitly followed their leaders: but upon the trial
of the prisoners, the treasonable designs of the sect were rendered
certain, both from evidence and from the confession of the criminals
themselves.[**] Some were executed; the greater number pardoned.[***]
Cobham himself, who made his escape by flight, was not brought to justice
till four years after; when he was hanged as a traitor; and his body was
burnt on the gibbet, in execution of the sentence pronounced against him
as a heretic.[****] This criminal design, which was perhaps somewhat
aggravated by the clergy, brought discredit upon the party, and checked
the progress of that sect, which had embraced the speculative doctrines of
Wickliffe, and at the same time aspired to a reformation of ecclesiastical
abuses.
These two points were the great objects of the Lollards; but the bulk of
the nation was not affected in the same degree by both of them. Common
sense and obvious reflection had discovered to the people the advantages
of a reformation in discipline; but the age was not yet so far advanced as
to be seized with the spirit of controversy, or to enter into those
abstruse doctrines which the Lollards endeavored to propagate throughout
the kingdom. The very notion of heresy alarmed the generality of the
people: innovation in fundamental principles was suspicious: curiosity was
not, as yet, a sufficient counterpoise to authority; and even many, who
were the greatest friends to the reformation of abuses, were anxious to
express their detestation of the speculative tenants of the Wickliffites,
which, they feared, threw disgrace on so good a cause. This turn of
thought appears evidently in the proceedings of the parliament which was
summoned immediately after the detection of Cobham’s conspiracy. That
assembly passed severe laws against the new heretics: they enacted, that
whoever was convicted of Lollardy before the ordinary besides suffering
capital punishment according to the laws formerly established, should also
forfeit his lands and goods to the king; and that the chancellor,
treasurer, justices of the two benches, sheriffs, justices of the peace,
and all the chief magistrates in every city and borough, should take an
oath to use their utmost endeavors for the extirpation of heresy.[*] Yet
this very parliament, when the king demanded supply, renewed the offer
formerly pressed upon his father, and entreated him to seize all the
ecclesiastical revenues, and convert them to the use of the crown.[**] The
clergy were alarmed: they could offer the king no bribe which was
equivalent: they only agreed to confer on him all the priories alien,
which depended on capital abbeys in Normandy, and had been bequeathed to
these abbeys, when that province remained united to England: and
Chicheley, now archbishop of Canterbury, endeavored to divert the blow by
giving occupation to the king, and by persuading him to undertake a war
against France, in order to recover his lost rights to that kingdom.[***]
It was the dying injunction of the late king to his son, not to allow the
English to remain long in peace, which was apt to breed intestine
commotions; but to employ them in foreign expeditions, by which the prince
might acquire honor; the nobility, in sharing his dangers, might attach
themselves to his person; and all the restless spirits find occupation for
their inquietude. The natural disposition of Henry sufficiently inclined
him to follow this advice, and the civil disorders of France, which had
been prolonged beyond those of England, opened a full career to his
ambition.
1415.
The death of Charles V., which followed soon after that of Edward III.,
and the youth of his son, Charles VI., put the two kingdoms for some time
in a similar situation; and it was not to be apprehended, that either of
them, during a minority, would be able to make much advantage of the
weakness of the other. The jealousies also between Charles’s three uncles,
the dukes of Anjou, Bern, and Burgundy, had distracted the affairs of
France rather more than those between the dukes of Lancaster, York, and
Gloucester. Richard’s three uncles, disordered those of England; and had
carried off the attention of the French nation from any vigorous
enterprise against foreign states. But in proportion as Charles advanced
in years, the factions were composed; his two uncles, the dukes of Anjou
and Burgundy, died; and the king himself, assuming the reins of
government, discovered symptoms of genius and spirit, which revived the
drooping hopes of his country. This promising state of affairs was not of
long duration: the unhappy prince fell suddenly into a fit of frenzy,
which rendered him incapable of exercising his authority; and though he
recovered from this disorder, he was so subject to relapses, that his
judgment was gradually but sensibly impaired, and no steady plan of
government could be pursued by him. The administration of affairs was
disputed between his brother, Lewis, duke of Orleans, and his
cousin-german, John, duke of Burgundy: the propinquity to the crown
pleaded in favor of the former: the latter, who, in right of his mother,
had inherited the county of Flanders, which he annexed to his father’s
extensive dominions, derived a lustre from his superior power: the people
were divided between these contending princes; and the king, now resuming,
now dropping his authority, kept the victory undecided, and prevented any
regular settlement of the state by the final prevalence of either party.
At length, the dukes of Orleans and Burgundy, seeming to be moved by the
cries of the nation, and by the interposition of common friends, agreed to
bury all past quarrels in oblivion, and to enter into strict amity: they
swore before the altar the sincerity of their friendship; the priest
administered the sacrament to both of them; they gave to each other every
pledge which could be deemed sacred among men: but all this solemn
preparation was only a cover for the basest treachery, which was
deliberately premeditated by the duke of Burgundy. He procured his rival
to be assassinated in the streets of Paris: he endeavored for some time to
conceal the part which he took in the crime; but being detected, he
embraced a resolution still more criminal and more dangerous to society,
by openly avowing and justifying it.[*]
The parliament itself of Paris, the tribunal of justice, heard the
harangues of the duke’s advocate in defence of assassination, which he
termed tyrannicide; and that assembly, partly influenced by faction,
partly overawed by power, pronounced no sentence of condemnation against
this detestable doctrine.[*]
The same question was afterwards agitated before the council of Constance;
and it was with difficulty that a feeble decision in favor of the contrary
opinion, was procured from these fathers of the church, the ministers of
peace and of religion. But the mischievous effects of that tenet, had they
been before anywise doubtful, appeared sufficiently from the present
incidents. The commission of this crime, which destroyed all trust and
security, rendered the war implacable between the French parties, and cut
off every means of peace and accommodation. The princes of the blood,
combining with the young duke of Orleans and his brothers, made violent
war on the duke of Burgundy; and the unhappy king, seized sometimes by one
party, sometimes by the other, transferred alternately to each of them the
appearance of legal authority. The provinces were laid waste by mutual
depredations: assassinations were every where committed, from the
animosity of the several leaders; or, what was equally terrible,
executions were ordered, without any legal or free trial, by pretended
courts of judicature. The whole kingdom was distinguished into two
parties, the Burgundians and the Armagnacs; so the adherents of the young
duke of Orleans were called, from the count of Armagnac, father-in-law to
that prince. The city of Paris, distracted between them, but inclining
more to the Burgundians, was a perpetual scene of blood and violence; the
king and royal family were often detained captives in the hands of the
populace; their faithful ministers were butchered or imprisoned before
their face; and it was dangerous for any man, amidst these enraged
factions, to be distinguished by a strict adherence to the principles of
probity and honor.
During this scene of general violence, there rose into some consideration
a body of men, which usually makes no figure in public transactions, even
during the most peaceful times; and that was the university of Paris,
whose opinion was sometimes demanded, and more frequently offered, in the
multiplied disputes between the parties. The schism by which the church
was at that time divided, and which occasioned frequent controversies in
the university, had raised the professors to an unusual degree of
importance; and this connection between literature and superstition had
bestowed on the former a weight to which reason and knowledge are not of
themselves anywise entitled among men. But there was another society,
whose sentiments were much more decisive, at Paris,—the fraternity
of butchers, who, under the direction of their ringleaders, had declared
for the duke of Burgundy, and committed the most violent outrages against
the opposite party. To counterbalance their power, the Armagnacs made
interest with the fraternity of carpenters; the populace ranged themselves
on one side or the other; and the fate of the capital depended on the
prevalence of either party.
The advantage which might be made of these confusions was easily perceived
in England; and, according to the maxims which usually prevail among
nations, it was determined to lay hold of the favorable opportunity. The
late king, who was courted by both the French parties, fomented the
quarrel, by alternately sending assistance to each; but the present
sovereign, impelled by the vigor of youth and the ardor of ambition,
determined to push his advantages to a greater length, and to carry
violent war into that distracted kingdom. But while he was making
preparations for this end, he tried to effect his purpose by negotiation;
and he sent over ambassadors to Paris, offering a perpetual peace and
alliance; but demanding Catharine, the French king’s daughter, in
marriage, two millions of crowns as her portion, one million six hundred
thousand as the arrears of King John’s ransom, and the immediate
possession and full sovereignty of Normandy, and of all the other
provinces which had been ravished from England by the arms of Philip
Augustus; together with the superiority of Brittany and Flanders.[*] Such
exorbitant demands show that he was sensible of the present miserable
condition of France; and the terms offered by the French court, though
much inferior, discover their consciousness of the same melancholy truth.
They were willing to give him the princess in marriage, to pay him eight
hundred thousand crowns, to resign the entire sovereignty of Guienne, and
to annex to that province the country of Perigord, Rovergue Xaintonge, the
Angoumois, and other territories.[**]
It is reported by some historians, (see Hist. Croyl. Cont. p. 500,) that
the dauphin, in derision of Henry’s claims and dissolute character, sent
him a box of tennis balls; intimating, that these implements of play were
better adapted to him than the instruments of war. But this story is by no
means credible; rejected these conditions, and scarcely hoped that his own
demands would be complied with, he never intermitted a moment his
preparations for war; and having assembled a great fleet and army at
Southampton, having invited all the nobility and military men of the
kingdom to attend him by the hopes of glory and of conquest, he came to
the sea-side with a purpose of embarking on his expedition.
But while Henry was meditating conquests upon his neighbors, he
unexpectedly found himself in danger from a conspiracy at home, which was
happily detected in its infancy. The earl of Cambridge, second son of the
late duke of York, having espoused the sister of the earl of Marche, had
zealously embraced the interests of that family; and had held some
conferences with Lord Scrope of Masham, and Sir Thomas Grey of Heton,
about the means of recovering to that nobleman his right to the crown of
England. The conspirators, as soon as detected, acknowledged their guilt
to the king; [*] and Henry proceeded without delay to their trial and
condemnation. The utmost that could be expected of the best king in those
ages, was, that he would so far observe the essentials of justice, as not
to make an innocent person a victim to his severity; but as to the
formalities of law, which are often as material as the essentials
themselves, they were sacrificed without scruple to the least interest or
convenience. A jury of commoners was summoned: the three conspirators were
indicted before them: the constable of Southampton Castle swore that they
had separately confessed their guilt to him: without other evidence, Sir
Thomas Grey was condemned and executed; but as the earl of Cambridge and
Lord Scrope pleaded the privilege of their peerage, Henry thought proper
to summon a court of eighteen barons, in which the duke of Clarence
presided: the evidence given before the jury was read to them: the
prisoners, though one of them was a prince of the blood, were not
examined, nor produced in court, nor heard in their own defence; but
received sentence of death upon this proof, which was every way irregular
and unsatisfactory; and the sentence was soon after executed. The earl of
Marche was accused of having given his approbation to the conspiracy, and
received a general pardon from the great offers made by the court of
France show that they had already entertained a just idea of Henry’s
character, as well as of their own situation.
The successes which the arms of England have, in different ages, obtained
over those of France, have been much owing to the favorable situation of
the former kingdom. The English, happily seated in an island, could make
advantage of every misfortune which attended their neighbors, and were
little exposed to the danger of reprisals. They never left their own
country but when they were conducted by a king of extraordinary genius, or
found their enemy divided by intestine factions, or were supported by a
powerful alliance on the continent; and as all these circumstances
concurred at present to favor their enterprise, they had reason to expect
from it proportionable success. The duke of Burgundy, expelled France by a
combination of the princes, had been secretly soliciting the alliance of
England; [**] and Henry knew that this prince, though he scrupled at first
to join the inveterate enemy of his country, would willingly, if he saw
any probability of success, both assist him with his Flemish subjects, and
draw over to the same side all his numerous partisans in France. Trusting,
therefore, to this circumstance, but without establishing any concert with
the duke, he put to sea, and landed near Harfleur, at the head of an army
of six thousand men at arms, and twenty-four thousand foot, mostly
archers. He immediately began the siege of that place, which was valiantly
defended by D’Estouteville, and under him by De Guitri, De Gaucourt, and
others of the French nobility; but as the garrison was weak, and the
fortifications in bad repair, the governor was at last obliged to
capitulate; and he promised to surrender the place, if he received no
succor before the eighteenth of September. The day came, and there was no
appearance of a French army to relieve him. Henry, taking possession of
the town, placed a garrison in it, and expelled all the French
inhabitants, with an intention of peopling it anew with English.
The fatigues of this siege, and the unusual heat of the season, had so
wasted the English army, that Henry could enter on no further enterprise;
and was obliged to think of returning into England. He had dismissed his
transports, which could not anchor in an open road upon the enemy’s
coasts; and he lay under a necessity of marching by land to Calais, before
he could reach a place of safety. A numerous French army of fourteen
thousand men at arms and forty thousand foot, was by this time assembled
in Normandy under the constable D’Albret; a force which, if prudently
conducted, was sufficient either to trample down the English in the open
field, or to harass and reduce to nothing their small army, before they
could finish so long and difficult a march. Henry, therefore, cautiously
offered to sacrifice his conquest of Harfleur for a safe passage to
Calais; but his proposal being rejected, he determined to make his way by
valor and conduct through all the opposition of the enemy.[*] That he
might not discourage his army by the appearance of flight, or expose them
to those hazards which naturally attend precipitate marches, he made slow
and deliberate journeys,[*] till he reached the Somme, which he purposed
to pass at the ford of Blanquetague, the same place where Edward, in a
like situation, had before escaped from Philip de Valois. But he found the
ford rendered impassable by the precaution of the French general, and
guarded by a strong body on the opposite bank;[*] and he was obliged to
march higher up the river, in order to seek for a safe passage. He was
continually harassed on his march by flying parties of the enemy; saw
bodies of troops on the other side ready to oppose every attempt; his
provisions were cut off; his soldiers languished with sickness and
fatigue; and his affairs seemed to be reduced to a desperate situation;
when he was so dexterous or so fortunate as to seize, by surprise, a
passage near St. Quintin, which had not been sufficiently guarded; and he
safely carried over his army.[**]
Henry then bent his march northwards to Calais; but he was still exposed
to great and imminent danger from the enemy, who had also passed the
Somme, and threw themselves full in his way, with a purpose of
intercepting his retreat. After he had passed the small river of Ternois
at Blangi, he was surprised to observe from the heights the whole French
army drawn up in the plains of Azincour, and so posted that it was
impossible for him to proceed on his march without coming to an
engagement. Nothing in appearance could be more unequal than the battle
upon which his safety and all his fortunes now depended. The English army
was little, more than half the number which had disembarked at Harfleur;
and they labored under every discouragement and necessity. The enemy was
four times more numerous; was headed by the dauphin and all the princes of
the blood; and was plentifully supplied with provisions of every kind.
Henry’s situation was exactly similar to that of Edward at Crecy, and that
of the Black Prince at Poietiers; and the memory of these great events,
inspiring the English with courage, made them hope for a like deliverance
from their present difficulties. The king likewise observed the same
prudent conduct which had been followed by these great commanders: he drew
up his army on a narrow ground between two woods, which guarded each
flank; and he patiently expected in that posture the attack of the
enemy.[*] Had the French constable been able either to reason justly upon
the present circumstances of the two armies, or to profit by past
experience, he had declined a combat, and had waited till necessity,
obliging the English to advance, had made them relinquish the advantages
of their situation. But the impetuous valor of the nobility, and a vain
confidence in superior numbers, brought on this fatal action, which proved
the source of infinite calamities to their country. The French archers on
horseback and their men at arms, crowded in their ranks, advanced upon the
English archers, who had fixed palisadoes in their front to break the
impression of the enemy, and who safely plied them, from behind that
defence, with a shower of arrows, which nothing could resist.[**]
The clay soil, moistened by some rain which had lately fallen, proved
another obstacle to the force of the French cavalry: the wounded men and
horses discomposed their ranks: the narrow compass in which they were pent
hindered them from recovering any order: the whole army was a scene of
confusion, terror, and dismay: and Henry, perceiving his advantage,
ordered the English archers, who were light and unencumbered, to advance
upon the enemy, and seize the moment of victory. They fell with their
battle-axes upon the French, who, in their present posture, were incapable
either of flying or of making defence: they hewed them in pieces without
resistance:[*] and being seconded by the men at arms who also pushed on
against the enemy, they covered the field with the killed, wounded,
dismounted, and overthrown.
After all appearance of opposition was over, the English had leisure to
make prisoners; and having advanced with uninterrupted success to the open
plain, they there saw the remains of the French rear guard, which still
maintained the appearance of a line of battle. At the same time, they
heard an alarm from behind: some gentlemen of Picardy, having collected
about six hundred peasants, had fallen upon the English baggage, and were
doing execution on the unarmed followers of the camp, who fled before
them, Henry, seeing the enemy on all sides of him, began to entertain
apprehensions from his prisoners; and he thought it necessary to issue
general orders for putting them to death: but on discovering the truth, he
stopped the slaughter, and was still able to save a great number.
No battle was ever more fatal to France, by the number of princes and
nobility slain or taken prisoners. Among the former were the constable
himself, the count of Nevers and the duke of Brabant, brothers to the duke
of Burgundy; the count of Vaudemont, brother to the duke of Lorraine, the
duke of Alençon, the duke of Barre, the count of Marle. The most eminent
prisoners were the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the Counts d’Eu, Vendôme,
and Richemont, and the mareschal of Boucicaut. An archbishop of Sens also
was slain in this battle. The killed are computed on the whole to have
amounted to ten thousand men; and as the slaughter fell chiefly upon the
cavalry, it is pretended that, of these, eight thousand were gentlemen.
Henry was master of fourteen thousand prisoners. The person of chief note
who fell among the English, was the duke of York, who perished fighting by
the king’s side, and had an end more honorable than his life. He was
succeeded in his honors and fortune by his nephew, son of the earl of
Cambridge, executed in the beginning of the year. All the English who were
slain exceeded not forty; though some writers, with greater probability,
make the number more considerable.
The three great battles of Crecy, Poictiers, and Azincour bear a singular
resemblance to each other in their most considerable circumstances. In all
of them there appears the same temerity in the English princes, who,
without any object of moment, merely for the sake of plunder, had ventured
so far into the enemy’s country as to leave themselves no retreat; and
unless saved by the utmost imprudence in the French commanders, were, from
their very situation, exposed to inevitable destruction. But allowance
being made for this temerity, which, according to the irregular plans of
war followed in those ages, seems to have been, in some measure,
unavoidable there appears, in the day of action, the same presence of
mind, dexterity, courage, firmness, and precaution on the part of the
English; the same precipitation, confusion, and vain confidence on the
part of the French: and the events were such as might have been expected
from such opposite conduct. The immediate consequences too of these three
great victories were similar: instead of pushing the French with vigor,
and taking advantage of their consternation, the English princes, after
their victory, seem rather to have relaxed their efforts, and to have
allowed the enemy leisure to recover from his losses. Henry interrupted
not his march a moment after the battle of Azincour; he carried his
prisoners to Calais, thence to England; he even concluded a truce with the
enemy; and it was not till after an interval of two years that any body of
English troops appeared in France.
The poverty of all the European princes, and the small resources of their
kingdoms, were the cause of these continual interruptions in their
hostilities; and though the maxims of war were in general destructive,
their military operations were mere incursions, which, without any settled
plan, they carried on against each other. The lustre, however, attending
the victory of Azincour, procured some supplies from the English
parliament; though still unequal to the expenses of a campaign. They
granted Henry an entire fifteenth of movables; and they conferred on him
for life the duties of tonnage and poundage, and the subsidies on the
exportation of wool and leather. This concession is more considerable than
that which had been granted to Richard II. by his last parliament and
which was afterwards, on his deposition, made so great an article of
charge against him.
But during this interruption of hostilities from England, France was
exposed to all the furies of civil war, and the several parties became
every day more enraged against each other. The duke of Burgundy, confident
that the French ministers and generals were entirely discredited by the
misfortune at Azincour, advanced with a great army to Paris, and attempted
to reinstate himself in possession of the government, as well as of the
person of the king. But his partisans in that city were overawed by the
court, and kept in subjection: the duke despaired of success; and he
retired with his forces, which he immediately disbanded in the Low
Countries.[*]
1417.
He was soon after invited to make a new attempt, by some violent quarrels
which broke out in the royal family. The queen, Isabella, daughter of the
duke of Bavaria, who had been hitherto an inveterate enemy to the
Burgundian faction, had received a great injury from the other party,
which the implacable spirit of that princess was never able to forgive.
The public necessities obliged the count of Armagnac, created constable of
France in the place of D’Albret, to seize the great treasures which
Isabella had amassed: and when she expressed her displeasure at this
injury, he inspired into the weak mind of the king some jealousies
concerning her conduct, and pushed him to seize, and put to the torture,
and afterwards throw into the Seine, Boisbourdon, her favorite, whom he
accused of a commerce of gallantry with that princess. The queen herself
was sent to Tours, and confined under a guard;[**] and after suffering
these multiplied insults, she no longer scrupled to enter into a
correspondence with the duke of Burgundy. As her son, the dauphin Charles,
a youth of sixteen, was entirely governed by the faction of Armagnac, she
extended her animosity to him, and sought his destruction with the most
unrelenting hatred. She had soon an opportunity of rendering her unnatural
purpose effectual. The duke of Burgundy, in concert with her, entered
France at the head of a great army: he made himself master of Amiens,
Abbeville, Dourlens, Montreuil, and other towns in Picardy; Senlis,
Rheims, Chalons, Troye, and Auxerre, declared themselves of his
party.[***] He got possession of Beaumont, Pontoise, Vernon, Meulant,
Montlheri, towns in the neighborhood of Paris; and carrying further his
progress towards the west, he seized Etampes, Chartres, and other
fortresses; and was at last able to deliver the queen, who fled to Troye,
and openly declared against those ministers who, she said, detained her
husband in captivity.[****]
Meanwhile the partisans of Burgundy raised a commotion in Paris, which
always inclined to that faction. Lile-Adam, one of the duke’s captains,
was received into the city in the night-time, and headed the insurrection
of the people, which in a moment became so impetuous that nothing could
oppose it. The person of the king was seized: the dauphin made his escape
with difficulty; great numbers of the faction of Armagnac were immediately
butchered: the count himself, and many persons of note, were thrown into
prison: murders were daily committed from private animosity, under
pretence of faction: and the populace, not satiated with their fury, and
deeming the course of public justice too dilatory, broke into the prisons,
and put to death the count of Armagnac, and all the other nobility who
were there confined.[*]
1418.
While France was in such furious combustion, and was so ill prepared to
resist a foreign enemy, Henry, having collected some treasure and levied
an army, landed in Normandy at the head of twenty-five thousand men; and
met with no considerable opposition from any quarter. He made himself
master of Falaise; Evreux and Caen submitted to him; Pont de l’Arche
opened its gates; and Henry, having subdued all the lower Normandy, and
having received a reënforcement of fifteen thousand men from England,[**]
formed the siege of Rouen, which was defended by a garrison of four
thousand men, seconded by the inhabitants, to the number of fifteen
thousand.[***] The cardinal des Ursins here attempted to incline him
towards peace, and to moderate his pretensions; but the king replied to
him in such terms as showed that he was fully sensible of all his present
advantages: “Do you not see,” said he, “that God has led me hither as by
the hand? France has no sovereign: I have just pretensions to that
kingdom: every thing is here in the utmost confusion: no one thinks of
resisting me. Can I have a more sensible proof, that the Being who
disposes of empires has determined to put the crown of France upon my
head?”[****]
But though Henry had opened his mind to this scheme of ambition, he still
continued to negotiate with his enemies, and endeavored to obtain more
secure, though less considerable advantages. He made, at the same time,
offers of peace to both parties; to the queen and duke of Burgundy on the
one hand, who, having possession of the king’s person, carried the
appearance of legal authority;[*] and to the dauphin on the other, who,
being the undoubted heir of the monarchy, was adhered to by every one that
paid any regard to the true interests of their country.[****] These two
parties also carried on a continual negotiation with each other. The terms
proposed on all sides were perpetually varying: the events of the war and
the intrigues of the cabinet intermingled with each other: and the fate of
France remained long in this uncertainty. After many negotiations, Henry
offered the queen and the duke of Burgundy to make peace with them, to
espouse the Princess Catharine, and to accept of all the provinces ceded
to Edward III. by the treaty of Bretigni, with the addition of Normandy,
which he was to receive in full and entire sovereignty.[*]
1419.
These terms were submitted to: there remained only some circumstances to
adjust, in order to the entire completion of the treaty; but in this
interval the duke of Burgundy secretly finished his treaty with the
dauphin; and these two princes agreed to share the royal authority during
King Charles’s lifetime, and to unite their arms in order to expel foreign
enemies.[****]
This alliance which seemed to cut off from Henry all hopes of further
success, proved in the issue the most favorable event that could have
happened for his pretensions. Whether the dauphin and the duke of Burgundy
were ever sincere in their mutual engagements, is uncertain; but very
fatal effects resulted from their momentary and seeming union. The two
princes agreed to an interview, in order to concert the means of rendering
effectual their common attack on the English; but how both or either of
them could with safety venture upon this conference, it seemed somewhat
difficult to contrive. The assassination perpetrated by the duke of
Burgundy, and still more his open avowal of the deed, and defence of the
doctrine, tended to dissolve all the bands of civil society; and even men
of honor, who detested the example, might deem it just, on a favorable
opportunity, to retaliate upon the author. The duke, therefore, who
neither dared to give, nor could pretend to expect, any trust, agreed to
all the contrivances for mutual security which were proposed by the
ministers of the dauphin. The two princes came to Montereau: the duke
lodged in the Castle; the dauphin in the town, which was divided from the
castle by the River Yonne: the bridge between them was chosen for the
place of interview: two high rails were drawn across the bridge: the gates
on each side were guarded, one by the officers of the dauphin, the other
by those of the duke: the princes were to enter into the intermediate
space by the opposite gates, accompanied each by ten persons; and with all
these marks of diffidence, to conciliate their mutual friendship. But it
appeared that no precautions are sufficient where laws have no place, and
where all principles of honor are utterly abandoned. Tannegui de Chatel,
and others of the dauphin’s retainers, had been zealous partisans of the
late duke of Orleans; and they determined to seize the opportunity of
revenging on the assassin the murder of that prince; they no sooner
entered the rails, than they drew their swords and attacked the duke of
Burgundy; his friends were astonished and thought not of making any
defence; and all of them either shared his fate, or were taken prisoners
by the retinue of the dauphin.[*]
The extreme youth of this prince made it doubtful whether he had been
admitted into the secret of the conspiracy; but as the deed was committed
under his eye, by his most intimate friends, who still retained their
connections with him, the blame of the action, which was certainly more
imprudent than criminal, fell entirely upon him. The whole state of
affairs was every where changed by this unexpected incident. The city of
Paris, passionately devoted to the family of Burgundy, broke out into the
highest fury against the dauphin. The court of King Charles entered from
interest into the same views; and as all the ministers of that monarch had
owed their preferment to the late duke, and foresaw their downfall if the
dauphin should recover possession of his father’s person, they were
concerned to prevent by any means the success of his enterprise. The
queen, persevering in her unnatural animosity against her son, increased
the general flame, and inspired into the king, as far as he was
susceptible of any sentiment the same prejudices by which she herself had
long been actuated. But above all, Philip, count of Charolois, now duke of
Burgundy, thought himself bound by every tie of honor and of duty to
revenge the murder of his father, and to prosecute the assassin to the
utmost extremity. And in this general transport of rage, every
consideration of national and family interest was buried in oblivion by
all parties: the subjection to a foreign enemy, the expulsion of the
lawful heir, the slavery of the kingdom, appeared but small evils, if they
led to the gratification of the present passion.
The king of England had, before the death of the duke of Burgundy,
profited extremely by the distractions of France and was daily making a
considerable progress in Normandy. He had taken Rouen after an obstinate
siege:[*] he had made himself master of Pontoise and Gisors: he even
threatened Paris, and by the terror of his arms had obliged the court to
remove to Troye: and in the midst of his successes, he was agreeably
surprised to find his enemies, instead of combining against him for their
mutual defence, disposed to rush into his arms, and to make him the
instrument of their vengeance upon each other. A league was immediately
concluded at Arras between him and the duke of Burgundy. This prince,
without stipulating any thing for himself, except the prosecution of his
father’s murder, and the marriage of the duke of Bedford with his sister,
was willing to sacrifice the kingdom to Henry’s ambition; and he agreed to
every demand made by that monarch.
1420.
In order to finish this astonishing treaty, which was to transfer the
crown of France to a stranger, Henry went to Troye, accompanied by his
brothers, the dukes of Clarence and Glocester; and was there met by the
duke of Burgundy. The imbecility into which Charles had fallen, made him
incapable of seeing any thing but through the eyes of those who attended
him; as they, on their part, saw every thing through the medium of their
passions. The treaty, being already concerted among the parties, was
immediately drawn, and signed, and ratified: Henry’s will seemed to be a
law throughout the whole negotiation: nothing was attended to but his
advantages.
The principal articles of the treaty were, that Henry should espouse the
Princess Catharine: that King Charles, during his lifetime, should enjoy
the title and dignity of king of France: that Henry should be declared and
acknowledged heir of the monarchy, and be intrusted with the present
administration of the government: that that kingdom should pass to his
heirs general: that France and England should forever be united under one
king; but should still retain their several usages, customs, and
privileges: that all the princes, peers, vassals, and communities of
France should swear, that they would both adhere to the future succession
of Henry, and pay him present obedience as regent: that this prince should
unite his arms to those of King Charles and the duke of Burgundy, in order
to subdue the adherents of Charles, the pretended dauphin: and that these
three princes should make no peace or truce with him but by common consent
and agreement.[*]
Such was the tenor of this famous treaty; a treaty which, as nothing but
the most violent animosity could dictate it, so nothing but the power of
the sword could carry into execution. It is hard to say whether its
consequences, had it taken effect, would have proved more pernicious to
England or to France. It must have reduced the former kingdom to the rank
of a province: it would have entirely disjointed the succession of the
latter, and have brought on the destruction of every descendant of the
royal family; as the houses of Orleans, Anjou, Alençon, Brittany, Bourbon,
and of Burgundy itself, whose titles were preferable to that of the
English princes, would on that account have been exposed to perpetual
jealousy and persecution from the sovereign. There was even a palpable
deficiency in Henry’s claim, which no art could palliate. For, besides the
insuperable objections to which Edward III.‘s pretensions were exposed, he
was not heir to that monarch: if female succession were admitted, the
right had devolved on the house of Mortimer: allowing that Richard II. was
a tyrant, and that Henry IV.‘s merits in deposing him were so great
towards the English, as to justify that nation in placing him on the
throne, Richard had nowise offended France, and his rival had merited
nothing of that kingdom: it could not possibly be pretended, that the
crown of France was become an appendage to that of England; and that a
prince, who by any means got possession of the latter, was, without
further question, entitled to the former. So that, on the whole, it must
be allowed that Henry’s claim to France was, if possible, still more
unintelligible than the title by which his father had mounted the throne
of England.
But though all these considerations were overlooked, amidst the hurry of
passion by which the courts of France and Burgundy were actuated, they
would necessarily revive during times of more tranquillity; and it behoved
Henry to push his present advantages, and allow men no leisure for reason
or reflection. In a few days after, he espoused the Princess Catharine: he
carried his father-in-law to Paris, and put himself in possession of that
capital: he obtained from the parliament and the three estates a
ratification of the treaty of Troye: he supported the duke of Burgundy in
procuring a sentence against the murderers of his father: and he
immediately turned his arms with success against the adherents of the
dauphin, who, as soon as he heard of the treaty of Troye, took on him the
style and authority of regent, and appealed to God and his sword for the
maintenance of his title.
The first place that Henry subdued was Sens, which opened its gates after
a slight resistance. With the same facility he made himself master of
Montereau. The defence of Melun was more obstinate: Barbasan, the
governor, held out for the space of four months against the besiegers; and
it was famine alone which obliged him to capitulate. Henry stipulated to
spare the lives of all the garrison, except such as were accomplices in
the murder of the duke of Burgundy; and as Barbasan himself was suspected
to be of the number, his punishment was demanded by Philip: but the king
had the generosity to intercede for him, and to prevent his execution.[*]
1421.
The necessity of providing supplies both of men and money, obliged Henry
to go over to England; and he left the duke of Exeter, his uncle, governor
of Paris during his absence. The authority which naturally attends
success, procured from the English parliament a subsidy of a fifteenth;
but, if we may judge by the scantiness of the supply, the nation was
nowise sanguine on their king’s victories; and in proportion as the
prospect of their union with France became nearer, they began to open
their eyes, and to see the dangerous consequences with which that event
must necessarily be attended. It was fortunate for Henry that he had other
resources, besides pecuniary supplies from his native subjects. The
provinces which he had already conquered maintained his troops; and the
hopes of further advantages allured to his standard all men of ambitious
spirits in England, who desired to signalize themselves by arms. He levied
a new army of twenty-four thousand archers and four thousand horsemen,[**]
and marched them to Dover, the place of rendezvous.
Every thing had remained in tranquillity at Paris under the duke of Exeter
but there had happened, in another quarter of the kingdom, a misfortune
which hastened the king’s embarkation.
The detention of the young king of Scots in England had hitherto proved
advantageous to Henry; and by keeping the regent in awe, had preserved,
during the whole course of the French war, the northern frontier in
tranquillity. But when intelligence arrived in Scotland of the progress
made by Henry, and the near prospect of his succession to the crown of
France, the nation was alarmed, and foresaw their own inevitable ruin, if
the subjection of their ally left them to combat alone a victorious enemy,
who was already so much superior in power and riches. The regent entered
into the same views; and though he declined an open rupture with England,
he permitted a body of seven thousand Scots, under the command of the earl
of Buchan, his second son, to be transported into France for the service
of the dauphin. To render this aid ineffectual, Henry had, in his former
expedition, carried over the king of Scots, whom he obliged to send orders
to his countrymen to leave the French service; but the Scottish general
replied, that he would obey no commands which came from a king in
captivity, and that a prince, while in the hands of his enemy, was nowise
entitled to authority. These troops, therefore, continued still to act
under the earl of Buchan: and were employed by the dauphin to oppose the
progress of the duke of Clarence in Anjou. The two armies encountered at
Baugé: the English were defeated: the duke himself was slain by Sir Allan
Swinton, a Scotch knight, who commanded a company of men at arms: and the
earls of Somerset,[*] Dorset, and Huntingdon were taken prisoners.[**]
This was the first action that turned the tide of success against the
English; and the dauphin, that he might both attach the Scotch to his
service, and reward the valor and conduct of the earl of Buchan, honored
that nobleman with the office of constable.
But the arrival of the king of England with so considerable an army, was
more than sufficient to repair this loss. Henry was received at Paris with
great expressions of joy, so obstinate were the prejudices of the people;
and he immediately conducted his army to Chartres, which had long been
besieged by the dauphin. That prince raised the siege on the approach of
the English; and being resolved to decline a battle, he retired with his
army.[*] Henry made himself master of Dreux without a blow: he laid siege
to Meaux, at the Solicitation of the Parisians, who were much incommoded
by the garrison of that place. This enterprise employed the English arms
during the space of eight months: the bastard of Vaurus, governor of
Meaux, distinguished himself by an obstinate defence; but was at last
obliged to surrender at discretion. The cruelty of this officer was equal
to his bravery: he was accustomed to hang, without distinction, all the
English and Burgundians who fell into his hands: and Henry, in revenge of
his barbarity, ordered him immediately to be hanged on the same tree which
he had made the instrument of his inhuman executions.[**]
This success was followed by the surrender of many other places in the
neighborhood of Paris, which held for the dauphin: that prince was chased
beyond the Loire, and he almost totally abandoned all the northern
provinces: he was even pursued into the south by the united arms of the
English and Burgundians, and threatened with total destruction.
Notwithstanding the bravery and fidelity of his captains, he saw himself
unequal to his enemies in the field; and found it necessary to temporize,
and to avoid all hazardous actions with a rival who had gained so much the
ascendant over him. And to crown all the other prosperities of Henry, his
queen was delivered of a son, who was called by his father’s name, and
whose birth was celebrated by rejoicings no less pompous, and no less
sincere, at Paris than at London. The infant prince seemed to be
universally regarded as the future heir of both monarchies.
1422.
But the glory of Henry, when it had nearly reached the summit, was stopped
short by the hand of nature; and all his mighty projects vanished into
smoke. He was seized with a fistula, a malady which the surgeons at that
time had not skill enough to cure; and he was at last sensible that his
distemper was mortal, and that his end was approaching He sent for his
brother the duke of Bedford, the earl of Warwick, and a few noblemen more,
whom he had honored with his friendship; and he delivered to them, in
great tranquillity, his last will with regard to the government of his
kingdom and family. He entreated them to continue towards his infant son
the same fidelity and attachment which they had always professed to
himself during his lifetime, and which had been cemented by so many mutual
good offices. He expressed his indifference on the approach of death; and
though he regretted that he must leave unfinished a work so happily begun,
he declared himself confident that the final acquisition of France would
be the effect of their prudence and valor. He left the regency of that
kingdom to his elder brother, the duke of Bedford; that of England to his
younger, the duke of Glocester; and the care of his son’s person to the
earl of Warwick. He recommended to all of them a great attention to
maintain the friendship of the duke of Burgundy; and advised them never to
give liberty to the French princes taken at Azincour, till his son were of
age, and could himself hold the reins of government. And he conjured them,
if the success of their arms should not enable them to place young Henry
on the throne of France, never at least to make peace with that kingdom,
unless the enemy, by the cession of Normandy, and its annexation to the
crown of England, made compensation for all the hazard and expense of his
enterprise.[*]
He next applied himself to his devotions, and ordered his chaplain to
recite the seven penitential psalms. When that passage of the fifty-first
psalm was read, “build thou the walls of Jerusalem,” he interrupted the
chaplain, and declared his serious intention, after he should have fully
subdued France, to conduct a crusade against the infidels, and recover
possession of the Holy Land.[**] So ingenious are men in deceiving
themselves, that Henry forgot, in those moments, all the blood spilt by
his ambition; and received comfort from this late and feeble resolve,
which, as the mode of these enterprises was now passed, he certainly would
never have carried into execution. He expired in the thirty-fourth year of
his age and the tenth of his reign.
This prince possessed many eminent virtues; and if we give indulgence to
ambition in a monarch, or rank it, as the vulgar are inclined to do, among
his virtues, they were unstained by any considerable blemish. His
abilities appeared equally in the cabinet and in the field: the boldness
of his enterprises was no less remarkable than his personal valor in
conducting them. He had the talent of attaching his friends by affability,
and of gaining his enemies by address and clemency. The English, dazzled
by the lustre of his character, still more than by that of his victories,
were reconciled to the defects in his title: the French almost forgot that
he was an enemy: and his care in maintaining justice in his civil
administration, and preserving discipline in his armies, made some amends
to both nations for the calamities inseparable from those wars in which
his short reign was almost entirely occupied, That he could forgive the
earl of Marche, who had a better title to the crown than himself, is a
sure indication of his magnanimity; and that the earl relied so entirely
on his friendship, is no less a proof of his established character for
candor and sincerity. There remain in history few instances of such mutual
trust; and still fewer where neither party found reason to repent it.
The exterior figure of this great prince, as well as his deportment, was
engaging. His stature was somewhat above the middle size; his countenance
beautiful; his limbs genteel and slender, but full of vigor; and he
excelled in all warlike and manly exercises.[*] He left by his queen,
Catharine of France, only one son, not full nine months old; whose
misfortunes, in the course of his life, surpassed all the glories and
successes of his father.
In less than two months after Henry’s death, Charles VI. of France, his
father-in-law, terminated his unhappy life. He had for several years
possessed only the appearance of royal authority: yet was this mere
appearance of considerable advantage to the English; and divided the duty
and affections of the French between them and the dauphin. This prince was
proclaimed and crowned king of France at Poictiers, by the name of Charles
VII. Rheims, the place where this ceremony is usually performed, was at
that time in the hands of his enemies.
Catharine of France, Henry’s widow, married, soon after his death, a Welsh
gentleman, Sir Owen Tudor, said to be descended from the ancient princes
of that country: she bore him two sons, Edmund and Jasper, of whom the
eldest was created earl of Richmond; the second earl of Pembroke The
family of Tudor, first raised to distinction by this alliance, mounted
afterwards the throne of England.
The long schism, which had divided the Latin church for near forty years,
was finally terminated in this reign by the council of Constance; which
deposed the pope, John XXIII., for his crimes, and elected Martin V. in
his place, who was acknowledged by almost all the kingdoms of Europe. This
great and unusual act of authority in the council, gave the Roman pontiffs
ever after a mortal antipathy to those assemblies. The same jealousy which
had long prevailed in most European countries, between the civil
aristocracy and monarchy, now also took place between these powers in the
ecclesiastical body. But the great separation of the bishops in the
several states, and the difficulty of assembling them, gave the pope a
mighty advantage, and made it more easy for him to centre all the powers
of the hierarchy in his own person. The cruelty and treachery which
attended the punishment of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, the unhappy
disciples of Wickliffe, who, in violation of a safe-conduct were burned
alive for their errors by the council of Constance prove this melancholy
truth, that toleration is none of the virtues of priests in any form of
ecclesiastical government But as the English nation had little or no
concern in these great transactions, we are here the more concise in
relating them.
The first commission of array which we meet with, was issued in this
reign.[*] The military part of the feudal system, which was the most
essential circumstance of it, was entirely dissolved, and could no longer
serve for the defence of the kingdom. Henry, therefore, when he went to
France, in 1415, empowered certain commissioners to take in each county a
review of all the freemen able to bear arms, to divide them into
companies, and to keep them in readiness for resisting an enemy. This was
the era when the feudal militia in England gave place to one which was
perhaps still less orderly and regular.
* Rymer, vol, ix. p. 254, 255.
We have an authentic and exact account of the ordinary revenue of the
crown during this reign; and it amounts only to fifty-five thousand seven
hundred and fourteen pounds ten shillings and tenpence a year. [*] This is
nearly the same with the revenue of Henry III.; and the kings of England
had neither become much richer nor poorer in the course of so many years.
The ordinary expense of the government amounted to forty-two thousand five
hundred and seven pounds sixteen shillings and tenpence; so that the king
had a surplus only of thirteen thousand two hundred and six pounds
fourteen shillings for the support of his household; for his wardrobe; for
the expense of embassies; and other articles. This sum was nowise
sufficient: he was therefore obliged to have frequent recourse to
parliamentary supplies, and was thus, even in time of peace, not
altogether independent of his people. But wars were attended with a great
expense, which neither the prince’s ordinary revenue, nor the
extraordinary supplies, were able to bear; and the sovereign was always
reduced to many miserable shifts, in order to make any tolerable figure in
them. He commonly borrowed money from all quarters; he pawned his jewels,
and sometimes the crown itself;[**] he ran in arrears to his army; and he
was often obliged, notwithstanding all these expedients, to stop in the
midst of his career of victory, and to grant truces to the enemy. The high
pay which was given to soldiers agreed very ill with this low income. All
the extraordinary supplies, granted by parliament to Henry during the
course of his reign, were only seven tenths and fifteenths, about two
hundred and three thousand pounds.[***] It is easy to compute how soon
this money must be exhausted by armies of twenty-four thousand archers and
six thousand horse; when each archer had sixpence a day,[****] and each
horseman two shillings. The most splendid successes proved commonly
fruitless when supported by so poor a revenue; and the debts and
difficulties which the king thereby incurred, made him pay dear for his
victories. The civil administration, likewise, even in time of peace,
could never be very regular, where the government was so ill enabled to
support itself.
Henry, till within a year of his death, owed debts which he had contracted
when prince of Wales.[*] It was in vain that the parliament pretended to
restrain him from arbitrary practices, when he was reduced to such
necessities. Though the right of levying purveyance for instance, had been
expressly guarded against by the Great Charter itself, and was frequently
complained of by the commons, it was found absolutely impracticable to
abolish it; and the parliament at length, submitting to it as a legal
prerogative, contented themselves with enacting laws to limit and confine
it. The duke of Glocester, in the reign of Richard II., possessed a
revenue of sixty thousand crowns, (about thirty thousand pounds a year of
our present money,) as we learn from Froissard,[**] and was consequently
richer than the king himself, if all circumstances be duly considered.
It is remarkable, that the city of Calais alone was an annual expense to
the crown of nineteen thousand one hundred and nineteen pounds;[***] that
is, above a third of the common charge of the government in time of peace.
This fortress was of no use to the defence of England, and only gave that
kingdom an inlet to annoy France. Ireland cost two thousand pounds a year,
over and above its own revenue; which was certainly very low. Every thing
conspires to give us a very mean idea of the state of Europe in those
ages.
From the most early times till the reign of Edward III., the denomination
of money had never been altered; a pound sterling was still a pound troy;
that is, about three pounds of our present money. That conqueror was the
first that innovated in this important article. In the twentieth of his
reign, he coined twenty-two shillings from a pound troy; in his
twenty-seventh year, he coined twenty-five shillings. But Henry V., who
was also a conqueror, raised still farther the denomination, and counted
thirty shillings from a pound troy:[****] his revenue therefore must have
been about one hundred and ten thousand pounds of our present money; and
by the cheapness of provisions, was equivalent to above three hundred and
thirty thousand pounds.
None of the princes of the house of Lancaster ventured to impose taxes
without consent of parliament: their doubtful or bad title became so far
of advantage to the constitution. The rule was then fixed, and could not
safely be broken afterwards, even by more absolute princes.
CHAPTER XX.
HENRY VI.
CONTEMPORARY MONARCHS.
1422.
During the reigns of the Lancastrian princes, the authority of parliament
seems to have been more confirmed, and the privileges of the people more
regarded, than during any former period; and the two preceding kings,
though men of great spirit and abilities, abstained from such exertions of
prerogative, as even weak princes, whose title was undisputed, were
tempted to think they might venture upon with impunity. The long minority,
of which there was now the prospect, encouraged still further the lords
and commons to extend their influence; and without paying much regard to
the verbal destination of Henry V., they assumed the power of giving a new
arrangement to the whole administration. They declined altogether the name
of “Regent” with regard to England: they appointed the duke of Bedford
“protector” or “guardian” of that kingdom, a title which they supposed to
imply less authority: they invested the duke of Glocester with the same
dignity during the absence of his elder brother;[*] and in order to limit
the power of both these princes, they appointed a council, without whose
advice and approbation no measure of importance could be determined.[**]
The person and education of the infant prince were committed to Henry
Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, his great uncle, and the legitimated son
of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; a prelate who, as his family could
never have any pretensions to the crown, might safely, they thought, be
intrusted with that important charge.[***]
The two princes, the dukes of Bedford and Glocester, who seemed injured by
this plan of government, yet, being persons of great integrity and honor,
acquiesced in any appointment which tended to give security to the public;
and as the wars in France appeared to be the object of greatest moment,
they avoided every dispute which might throw an obstacle in the way of
foreign conquests.
When the state of affairs between the English and French kings was
considered with a superficial eye, every advantage seemed to be on the
side of the former; and the total expulsion of Charles appeared to be an
event which might naturally be expected from the superior power of his
competitor. Though Henry was yet in his infancy, the administration was
devolved on the duke of Bedford, the most accomplished prince of his age;
whose experience, prudence, valor, and generosity qualified him for his
high office, and enabled him both to maintain union among his friends, and
to gain the confidence of his enemies. The whole power of England was at
his command; he was at the head of armies inured to victory; he was
seconded by the most renowned generals of the age, the earls of Somerset,
Warwick, Salisbury, Suffolk, and Arundel, Sir John Talbot, and Sir John
Fastolffe: and besides Guienne, the ancient inheritance of England, he was
master of the capital, and of almost all the northern provinces, which
were well enabled to furnish him with supplies both of men and money, and
to assist and support his English forces.
But Charles, notwithstanding the present inferiority of his power,
possessed some advantages, derived partly from his situation, partly from
his personal character, which promised him success, and served, first to
control, then to overbalance, the superior force and opulence of his
enemies. He was the true and undoubted heir of the monarchy: all
Frenchmen, who knew the interests, or desired the independence, of their
country, turned their eyes towards him as its sole resource; the exclusion
given him by the imbecility of his father, and the forced or precipitate
consent of the states, had plainly no validity: that spirit of faction
which had blinded the people, could not long hold them in so gross a
delusion: their national and inveterate hatred against the English, the
authors of all their calamities, must soon revive, and inspire them with
indignation at bending their necks under the yoke of that hostile people:
great nobles and princes, accustomed to maintain an independence against
their native sovereigns, would never endure a subjection to strangers; and
though most of the princes of the blood were, since the fatal battle of
Azincour detained prisoners in England, the inhabitants of their de
mesnes, their friends their vassals, all declared a zealous attachment to
the king and exerted themselves in resisting the violence of foreign
invaders.
Charles himself, though only in his twentieth year, was of a character
well calculated to become the object of these benevolent sentiments; and
perhaps from the favor which naturally attends youth, was the more likely,
on account of his tender age, to acquire the good-will of his native
subjects. He was a prince of the most friendly and benign disposition, of
easy and familiar manners, and of a just and sound, though not a very
vigorous understanding. Sincere, generous, affable, he engaged from
affection the services of his followers, even while his low fortunes might
make it their interest to desert him; and the lenity of his temper could
pardon in them those sallies of discontent, to which princes in his
situation are so frequently exposed. The love of pleasure often seduced
him into indolence; but amidst all his irregularities, the goodness of his
heart still shone forth; and by exerting at intervals his courage and
activity, he proved that his general remissness proceeded not from the
want either of a just spirit of ambition, or of personal valor.
Though the virtues of this amiable prince lay some time in obscurity, the
duke of Bedford knew that his title alone made him formidable, and that
every foreign assistance would be requisite, ere an English regent could
hope to complete the conquest of France; an enterprise which, however it
might seem to be much advanced, was still exposed to many and great
difficulties. The chief circumstance which had procured to the English all
their present advantages, was the resentment of the duke of Burgundy
against Charles; and as that prince seemed intent rather on gratifying his
passion than consulting his interests, it was the more easy for the
regent, by demonstrations of respect and confidence, to retain him in the
alliance of England. He bent, therefore, all his endeavors to that
purpose: he gave the duke every proof of friendship and regard: he even
offered him the regency of France, which Philip declined: and that he
might corroborate national connections by private ties, he concluded his
own marriage with the princess of Burgundy, which had been stipulated by
the treaty of Arras.
1423.
Being sensible that, next to the alliance of Burgundy, the friendship of
the duke of Brittany was of the greatest importance towards forwarding the
English conquests; and that, as the provinces of France, already subdued,
lay between the dominions of these two princes, he could never hope for
any security without preserving his connections with them; he was very
intent on strengthening himself also from that quarter. The duke of
Brittany, having received many just reasons of displeasure from the
ministers of Charles, had already acceded to the treaty of Troye, and had,
with other vassals of the crown, done homage to Henry V. in quality of
heir to the kingdom: but as the regent knew that the duke was much
governed by his brother, the count of Richemont, he endeavored to fix his
friendship, by paying court and doing services to this haughty and
ambitious prince.
Arthur, count of Richemont, had been taken prisoner at the battle of
Azincour, had been treated with great indulgence by the late king, and had
even been permitted on his parole to take a journey into Brittany, where
the state of affairs required his presence. The death of that victorious
monarch happened before Richemont’s return; and this prince pretended
that, as his word was given personally to Henry V., he was not bound to
fulfil it towards his son and successor; a chicane which the regent, as he
could not force him to compliance, deemed it prudent to overlook. An
interview was settled at Amiens between the dukes of Bedford, Burgundy,
and Brittany, at which the count of Richemont was also present:[*] the
alliance was renewed between these princes: and the regent persuaded
Philip to give in marriage to Richemont his eldest sister, widow of the
deceased dauphin, Lewis, the elder brother of Charles. Thus Arthur was
connected both with the regent and the duke of Burgundy, and seemed
engaged by interest to prosecute the same object, in forwarding the
success of the English arms.
While the vigilance of the duke of Bedford was employed in gaining or
confirming these allies, whose vicinity rendered them so important, he did
not overlook the state of more remote countries. The duke of Albany,
regent of Scotland, had died: and his power had devolved on Murdac, his
son, a prince of a weak understanding and indolent disposition; who, far
from possessing the talents requisite for the government of that fierce
people, was not even able to maintain authority in his own family, or
restrain the petulance and insolence of his sons. The ardor of the Scots
to serve in France, where Charles treated them with great honor and
distinction, and where the regent’s brother enjoyed the dignity of
constable, broke out afresh under this feeble administration: new succors
daily came over, and filled the armies of the French king: the earl of
Douglas conducted a reënforcement of five thousand men to his assistance:
and it was justly to be dreaded that the Scots, by commencing open
hostilities in the north, would occasion a diversion still more
considerable of the English power, and would ease Charles, in part, of
that load by which he was at present so grievously oppressed. The duke of
Bedford, therefore, persuaded the English council to form an alliance with
James, their prisoner; to free that prince from his long captivity; and to
connect him with England by marrying him to a daughter of the earl of
Somerset, and cousin of the young king.[*] As the Scottish regent, tired
of his present dignity, which he was not able to support, was now become
entirely sincere in his applications for James’s liberty, the treaty was
soon concluded; a ransom of forty thousand pounds was stipulated;[**] and
the king of Scots was restored to the throne of his ancestors, and proved,
in his short reign, one of the most illustrious princes that had ever
governed that kingdom. He was murdered, in 1437, by his traitorous kinsman
the earl of Athole. His affections inclined to the side of France; but the
English had never reason during his lifetime to complain of any breach of
the neutrality by Scotland.
But the regent was not so much employed in these political negotiations as
to neglect the operations of war, from which alone he could hope to
succeed in expelling the French monarch. Though the chief seat of
Charles’s power lay in the southern provinces beyond the Loire, his
partisans were possessed of some fortresses in the northern, and even in
the neighborhood of Paris; and it behoved the duke of Bedford first to
clear these countries from the enemy, before he could think of attempting
more distant conquests. The Castle of Dorsoy was taken after a siege of
six weeks: that of Noyelle and the town of Rue, in Picardy, underwent the
same fate: Pont sur Seine, Vertus, Montaigu, were subjected by the English
arms: and a more considerable advantage was soon after gained by the
united forces of England and Burgundy. John Stuart, constable of Scotland,
and the lord of Estissac had formed the siege of Crevant, in Burgundy: the
earls of Salisbury and Suffolk, with the count of Toulongeon, were sent to
its relief: a fierce and well-disputed action ensued; the Scots and French
were defeated: the constable of Scotland and the count of Ventadour were
taken prisoners; and above a thousand men, among whom was Sir William
Hamilton, were left on the field of battle.[*] The taking of Gaillon upon
the Seine, and of La Charité upon the Loire, was the fruit of this
victory: and as this latter place opened an entrance into the southern
provinces, the acquisition of it appeared on that account of the greater
importance to the duke of Bedford, and seemed to promise a successful
issue to the war.
1424.
The more Charles was threatened with an invasion in those provinces which
adhered to him, the more necessary it became that he should retain
possession of every fortress which he still held within the quarters of
the enemy. The duke of Bedford had besieged in person, during the space of
three months, the town of Yvri, in Normandy: and the brave governor,
unable to make any longer defence, was obliged to capitulate; and he
agreed to surrender the town, if, before a certain term, no relief
arrived. Charles, informed of these conditions, determined to make an
attempt for saving the place. He collected, with some difficulty, an army
of fourteen thousand men, of whom one half were Scots; and he sent them
thither under the command of the earl of Buchan, constable of France; who
was attended by the earl of Douglas, his countryman, the duke of Alençon,
the mareschal de la Fayette, the count of Aumale, and the viscount of
Narbonne. When the constable arrived within a few leagues of Yvri, he
found that he was come too late, and that the place was already
surrendered. He immediately turned to the left, and sat down before
Verneuil, which the inhabitants, in spite of the garrison, delivered up to
him.[*] Buchan might now have returned in safety, and with the glory of
making an acquisition no less important than the place which he was sent
to relieve: but hearing of Bedford’s approach, he called a council of war,
in order to deliberate concerning the conduct which he should hold in this
emergence.
The wiser part of the council declared for a retreat; and represented,
that all the past misfortunes of the French had proceeded from their
rashness in giving battle when no necessity obliged them; that this army
was the last resource of the king, and the only defence of the few
provinces which remained to him; and that every reason invited him to
embrace cautious measures, which might leave time for his subjects to
return to a sense of their duty, and give leisure for discord to arise
among his enemies, who, being united by no common bond of interest or
motive of alliance, could not long persevere in their animosity against
him. All these prudential considerations were overborne by a vain point of
honor, not to turn their backs to the enemy; and they resolved to await
the arrival of the duke of Bedford.
The numbers were nearly equal in this action; and as the long continuance
of war had introduced discipline, which, however imperfect, sufficed to
maintain some appearance of order in such small armies, the battle was
fierce, and well disputed, and attended with bloodshed on both sides. The
constable drew up his forces under the walls of Verneuil, and resolved to
abide the attack of the enemy: but the impatience of the viscount of
Narbonne, who advanced precipitately, and obliged the whole line to follow
him in some hurry and confusion, was the cause of the misfortune which
ensued. The English archers, fixing their palisadoes before them,
according to their usual custom, sent a volley of arrows amidst the
thickest of the French army; and though beaten from their ground, and
obliged to take shelter among the baggage, they soon rallied, and
continued to do great execution upon the enemy. The duke of Bedford,
meanwhile, at the head of the men at arms, made impression on the French,
broke their ranks, chased them off the field, and rendered the victory
entirely complete and decisive.[*]
The constable himself perished in battle as well as the earl of Douglas
and his son, the counts of Aumale, Tonnerre, and Ventadour, with many
other considerable nobility. The duke of Alençon, the mareschal de la
Fayette, the lords of Gaucour and Mortemar, were taken prisoners. There
fell about four thousand of the French, and sixteen hundred of the
English; a loss esteemed, at that time, so unusual on the side of the
victors, that the duke of Bedford forbade all rejoicings for his success,
Verneuil was surrendered next day by capitulation.[*]
The condition of the king of France now appeared very terrible, and almost
desperate. He had lost the flower of his army and the bravest of his
nobles in this fatal action: he had no resource either for recruiting or
subsisting his troops; he wanted money even for his personal subsistence;
and though all parade of a court was banished, it was with difficulty he
could keep a table, supplied with the plainest necessaries, for himself
and his few followers: every day brought him intelligence of some loss or
misfortune: towns which were bravely defended, were obliged at last to
surrender for want of relief or supply: he saw his partisans entirely
chased from all the provinces which lay north of the Loire: and he
expected soon to lose, by the united efforts of his enemies, all the
territories of which he had hitherto continued master; when an incident
happened which saved him on the brink of ruin, and lost the English such
an opportunity for completing their conquests, as they never afterwards
were able to recall.
Jacqueline, countess of Hainault and Holland, and heir of these provinces,
had espoused John, duke of Brabant cousin-german to the duke of Burgundy;
but having made this choice from the usual motives of princes, she soon
found reason to repent of the unequal alliance. She was a princess of a
masculine spirit and uncommon understanding: the duke of Brabant was of a
sickly complexion and weak mind: she was in the vigor of her age; he had
only reached his fifteenth year: these causes had inspired her with such
contempt for her husband, which soon proceeded to antipathy that she
determined to dissolve a marriage, where, it is probable, nothing but the
ceremony had as yet intervened. The court of Rome was commonly very open
to applications of this nature, when seconded by power and money; but as
the princess foresaw great opposition from her husband’s relations, and
was impatient to effect her purpose, she made her escape into England, and
threw herself under the protection of the duke of Glocester. That prince,
with many noble qualities had the defect of being governed by an impetuous
temper and vehement passions; and he was rashly induced, as well by the
charms of the countess herself, as by the prospect of possessing her rich
inheritance, to offer himself to her as a husband. Without waiting for a
papal dispensation; without endeavoring to reconcile the duke of Burgundy
to the measure; he entered into a contract of marriage with Jaqueline, and
immediately attempted to put himself in possession of her dominions.
Philip was disgusted with so precipitate a conduct: he resented the injury
done to the duke of Brabant, his near relation: he dreaded to have the
English established on all sides of him: and he foresaw the consequences
which must attend the extensive and uncontrolled dominion of that nation,
if, before the full settlement of their power, they insulted and injured
an ally to whom they had already been so much indebted, and who was still
so necessary for supporting them in their further progress. He encouraged,
therefore, the duke of Brabant to make resistance: he engaged many of
Jaqueline’s subjects to adhere to that prince: he himself marched troops
to his support: and as the duke of Glocester still persevered in his
purpose, a sharp war was suddenly kindled in the Low Countries. The
quarrel soon became personal as well as political. The English prince
wrote to the duke of Burgundy, complaining of the opposition made to his
pretensions; and though, in the main, he employed amicable terms in his
letter, he took notice of some falsehoods into which, he said, Philip had
been betrayed during the course of these transactions. This unguarded
expression was highly resented: the duke of Burgundy insisted that he
should retract it; and mutual challenges and defiances passed between them
on this occasion.[*]
The duke of Bedford could easily foresee the bad effects of so ill-timed
and imprudent a quarrel. All the succors which he expected from England,
and which were so necessary in this critical emergence, were intercepted
by his brother, and employed in Holland and Hainault: the forces of the
duke of Burgundy, which he also depended on, were diverted by the same
wars: and besides this double loss, he was in imminent danger of
alienating forever that confederate whose friendship was of the utmost
importance, and whom the late king had enjoined him, with his dying
breath, to gratify by every mark of regard and attachment. He represented
all these topics to the duke of Glocester: he endeavored to mitigate the
resentment of the duke of Burgundy: he interposed with his good offices
between these princes, but was not successful in any of his endeavors; and
he found that the impetuosity of his brother’s temper was still the chief
obstacle to all accommodation.[*] For this reason, instead of pushing the
victory gained at Verneuil, he found himself obliged to take a journey
into England, and to try, by his counsels and authority, to moderate the
measures of the duke of Glocester.
There had likewise broken out some differences among the English ministry,
which had proceeded to great extremities, and which required the regent’s
presence to compose them.[**] The bishop of Winchester, to whom the care
of the king’s person and education had been intrusted, was a prelate of
great capacity and experience, but of an intriguing and dangerous
character; and as he aspired to the government of affairs, he had
continual disputes with his nephew the protector; and he gained frequent
advantages over the vehement and impolitic temper of that prince.
1425.
The duke of Bedford employed the authority of parliament to reconcile
them; and these rivals were obliged to promise, before that assembly, that
they would bury all quarrels in oblivion.[***] Time also seemed to open
expedients for composing the difference with the duke of Burgundy. The
credit of that prince had procured a bull from the pope; by which not only
Jaqueline’s contract with the duke of Glocester was annulled, but it was
also declared that, even in case of the duke of Brabant’s death, it should
never be lawful for her to espouse the English prince. Humphrey,
despairing of success, married another lady of inferior rank, who had
lived some time with him as his mistress.[****]
The duke of Brabant died; and his widow, before she could recover
possession of her dominions, was obliged to declare the duke of Burgundy
her heir, in case she should die without issue, and to promise never to
marry without his consent. But though the affair was thus terminated to
the satisfaction of Philip, it left a disagreeable impression on his mind:
it excited an extreme jealousy of the English, and opened his eyes to his
true interests: and as nothing but his animosity against Charles had
engaged him in alliance with them, it counterbalanced that passion by
another of the same kind, which in the end became prevalent, and brought
him back, by degrees, to his natural connections with his family and his
native country.
About the same time, the duke of Brittany began to withdraw himself from
the English alliance. His brother, the count of Richemont, though
connected by marriage with the dukes of Burgundy and Bedford, was
extremely attached by inclination to the French interest; and he willingly
hearkened to all the advances which Charles made him for obtaining his
friendship. The staff of constable, vacant by the earl of Buchan’s death,
was offered him; and as his martial and ambitious temper aspired to the
command of armies, which he had in vain attempted to obtain from the duke
of Bedford, he not only accepted that office, but brought over his brother
to an alliance with the French monarch. The new constable, having made
this one change in his measures, firmly adhered ever after to his
engagements with France. Though his pride and violence, which would admit
of no rival in his master’s confidence, and even prompted him to
assassinate the other favorites, had so much disgusted Charles, that he
once banished him the court, and refused to admit him to his presence, he
still acted with vigor for the service of that monarch, and obtained at
last, by his perseverance, the pardon of all past offences.
1426.
In this situation, the duke of Bedford, on his return, found the affairs
of France, after passing eight months in England. The duke of Burgundy was
much disgusted. The duke of Brittany had entered into engagements with
Charles, and had done homage to that prince for his duchy. The French had
been allowed to recover from the astonishment into which their frequent
disasters had thrown them. An incident too had happened, which served
extremely to raise their courage. The earl of Warwick had besieged
Montargis with a small army of three thousand men, and the place was
reduced to extremity, when the bastard of Orleans undertook to throw
relief into it. This general, who was natural son to the prince
assassinated by the duke of Burgundy, and who was afterwards created count
of Dunois, conducted a body of one thousand six hundred men to Montargis,
and made an attack on the enemy’s trenches with so much valor, prudence,
and good fortune, that he not only penetrated into the place, but gave a
severe blow to the English, and obliged Warwick to raise the siege.[*]
This was the first signal action that raised the fame of Dunois, and
opened him the road to those great honors which he afterwards attained.
But the regent, soon after his arrival, revived the reputation of the
English arms by an important enterprise which he happily achieved. He
secretly brought together, in separate detachments, a considerable army to
the frontiers of Brittany; and fell so unexpectedly upon that province,
that the duke, unable to make resistance, yielded to all the terms
required of him. he renounced the French alliance; he engaged to maintain
the treaty of Troye; he acknowledged the duke of Bedford for regent of
France; and promised to do homage for his duchy to King Henry.[**] And the
English prince, having thus freed himself from a dangerous enemy who lay
behind him, resolved on an undertaking, which, if successful, would, he
hoped, cast the balance between the two nations, and prepare the way for
the final conquest of France.
1428.
The city of Orleans was so situated between the provinces commanded by
Henry, and those possessed by Charles, that it opened an easy entrance to
either; and as the duke of Bedford intended to make a great effort for
penetrating into the south of France, it behoved him to begin with this
place, which, in the present circumstances, was become the most important
in the kingdom. He committed the conduct of the enterprise to the earl of
Salisbury, who had newly brought him a reënforcement of six thousand men
from England, and who had much distinguished himself by his abilities
during the course of the present war. Salisbury, passing the Loire, made
himself master of several small places, which surrounded Orleans on that
side;[***] and as his intentions were thereby known, the French king used
every expedient to supply the city with a garrison and provisions, and
enable it to maintain a long and obstinate siege.
The lord of Gaucour, a brave and experienced captain, was appointed
governor: many officers of distinction threw themselves into the place:
the troops which they conducted were inured to war, and were determined to
make the most obstinate resistance: and even the inhabitants, disciplined
by the long continuance of hostilities, were well qualified, in their own
defence, to second the efforts of the most veteran forces. The eyes of all
Europe were turned towards this scene; where, it was reasonably supposed,
the French were to make their last stand for maintaining the independence
of their monarchy, and the rights of their sovereign.
The earl of Salisbury at last approached the place with an army, which
consisted only of ten thousand men; and not being able, with so small a
force, to invest so great a city, that commanded a bridge over the Loire,
he stationed himself on the southern side towards Sologne, leaving the
other, towards the Beausse, still open to the enemy. He there attacked the
fortifications which guarded the entrance to the bridge; and, after an
obstinate resistance, he carried several of them; but was himself killed
by a cannon ball as he was taking a view of the enemy.[*]
The earl of Suffolk succeeded to the command; and being reënforced with
great numbers of English and Burgundians, he passed the river with the
main body of his army, and invested Orleans on the other side. As it was
now the depth of winter, Suffolk, who found it difficult, in that season,
to throw up intrenchments all around, contented himself, for the present,
with erecting redoubts at different distances, where his men were lodged
in safety, and were ready to intercept the supplies which the enemy might
attempt to throw into the place. Though he had several pieces of artillery
in his camp, (and this is among the first sieges in Europe where cannon
were found to be of importance,) the art of engineering was hitherto so
imperfect, that Suffolk trusted more to famine than to force for subduing
the city; and he purposed in the spring to render the circumvallation more
complete, by drawing intrenchments from one redoubt to another. Numberless
feats of valor were performed both by the besiegers and besieged during
the winter: bold sallies were made, and repulsed with equal boldness:
convoys were sometimes introduced, and often intercepted: the supplies
were still unequal to the consumption of the place: and the English seemed
daily, though slowly, to be advancing towards the completion of their
enterprise.
1429.
But while Suffolk lay in this situation, the French parties ravaged all
the country around; and the besiegers, who were obliged to draw their
provisions from a distance were themselves exposed to the danger of want
and famine. Sir John Fastolffe was bringing up a large convoy of even kind
of stores, which he escorted with a detachment of two thousand five
hundred men; when he was attacked by a body of four thousand French, under
the command of the counts of Clermont and Dunois. Fastolffe drew up his
troops behind the wagons; but the French generals, afraid of attacking him
in that posture, planted a battery of cannon against him; which threw
every thing into confusion, and would have insured them the victory, had
not the impatience of some Scottish troops, who broke the line of battle,
brought on an engagement, in which Fastolffe was victorious. The count of
Dunois was wounded; and about five hundred French were left on the field
of battle. This action, which was of great importance in the present
conjuncture, was commonly called the battle of Herrings; because the
convoy brought a great quantity of that kind of provisions, for the use of
the English army during the Lent season.[*]
Charles seemed now to have but one expedient for saving this city, which
had been so long invested. The duke of Orleans, who was still prisoner in
England, prevailed on the protector and the council to consent that all
his demesnes should be allowed to preserve a neutrality during the war,
and should be sequestered, for greater security, into the hands of the
duke of Burgundy. This prince, who was much less cordial in the English
interests than formerly, went to Paris, and made the proposal to the duke
of Bedford; but the regent coldly replied, that he was not of a humor to
beat the bushes while others ran away with the game; an answer which so
disgusted the duke, that he recalled all the troops of Burgundy that acted
in the siege.[**]
This place, however, was every day more and more closely invested by the
English: great scarcity began already to be felt by the garrison and
inhabitants: Charles, in despair of collecting an army which should dare
to approach the enemy’s intrenchments, not only gave the city for lost,
but began to entertain a very dismal prospect with regard to the general
state of his affairs. He saw that the country in which he had hitherto
with great difficulty subsisted, would be laid entirely open to the
invasion of a powerful and victorious enemy; and he already entertained
thoughts of retiring with the remains of his forces into Languedoc and
Dauphiny, and defending himself as long as possible in those remote
provinces. But it was fortunate for this good prince that, as he lay under
the dominion of the fair, the women whom he consulted had the spirit to
support his sinking resolution in this desperate extremity. Mary of Anjou,
his queen, a princess of great merit and prudence, vehemently opposed this
measure, which, she foresaw, would discourage all his partisans, and serve
as a general signal for deserting a prince who seemed himself to despair
of success. His mistress too, the fair Agnes Sorel, who lived in entire
amity with the queen, seconded all her remonstrances, and threatened that,
if he thus pusillanimously threw away the sceptre of France, she would
seek in the court of England a fortune more correspondent to her wishes.
Love was able to rouse in the breast of Charles that courage which
ambition had failed to excite: he resolved to dispute every inch of ground
with an imperious enemy, and rather to perish with honor in the midst of
his friends, than yield ingloriously to his bad fortune; when relief was
unexpectedly brought him by another female of a very different character,
who gave rise to one of the most singular revolutions that is to be met
with in history.
In the village of Domremi, near Vaucouleurs, on the borders of Lorraine,
there lived a country girl of twenty-seven years of age, called Joan
d’Arc, who was servant in a small inn, and who in that station had been
accustomed to tend the horses of the guests, to ride them without a saddle
to the watering-place, and to perform other offices which, in well
frequented inns, commonly fall to the share of the men servants.[*]
This girl was of an irreproachable life, and had not hitherto been
remarked for any singularity; whether that she had met with no occasion to
excite her genius, or that the unskilful eyes of those who conversed with
her had not been able to discern her uncommon merit. It is easy to
imagine, that the present situation of France was an interesting object
even to persons of the lowest rank, and would become the frequent subject
of conversation: a young prince, expelled his throne by the sedition of
native subjects, and by the arms of strangers, could not fail to move the
compassion of all his people whose hearts were uncorrupted by faction; and
the peculiar character of Charles, so strongly inclined to friendship and
the tender passions, naturally rendered him the hero of that sex whose
generous minds know no bounds in their affections. The siege of Orleans,
the progress of the English before that place, the great distress of the
garrison and inhabitants, the importance of saving this city and its brave
defenders, had turned thither the public eye; and Joan, inflamed by the
general sentiment, was seized with a wild desire of bringing relief to her
sovereign in his present distresses. Her unexperienced mind, working day
and night on this favorite object, mistook the impulses of passion for
heavenly inspirations; and she fancied that she saw visions, and heard
voices, exhorting her to reëstablish the throne of France, and to expel
the foreign invaders. An uncommon intrepidity of temper made her overlook
all the dangers which might attend her in such a path; and thinking
herself destined by Heaven to this office, she threw aside all that
bashfulness and timidity so natural to her sex, her years, and her low
station. She went to Vaucouleurs; procured admission to Baudricourt, the
governor; informed him of her inspirations and intentions; and conjured
him not to neglect the voice of God, who spoke through her, but to second
those heavenly revelations which impelled her to this glorious enterprise.
Baudricourt treated her at first with some neglect; but on her frequent
returns to him, and importunate solicitations, he began to remark
something extraordinary in the maid, and was inclined, at all hazards, to
make so easy an experiment. It is uncertain whether this gentleman had
discernment enough to perceive, that great use might be made with the
vulgar of so uncommon an engine; or, what is more likely in that credulous
age, was himself a convert to this visionary; but he adopted at last the
schemes of Joan; and he gave her some attendants, who conducted her to the
French court, which at that time resided at Chinon.
It is the business of history to distinguish between the miraculous and
the marvellous; to reject the first in all narrations merely profane and
human; to doubt the second; and when obliged by unquestionable testimony,
as in the present case, to admit of something extraordinary, to receive as
little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circumstances. It
is pretended, that Joan, immediately on her admission, knew the king,
though she had never seen his face before, and though he purposely kept
himself in the crowd of courtiers, and had laid aside every thing in his
dress and apparel which might distinguish him: that she offered him, in
the name of the supreme Creator, to raise the siege of Orleans, and
conduct him to Rheims to be there crowned and anointed; and on his
expressing doubts of her mission, revealed to him, before some sworn
confidants, a secret which was unknown to all the world beside himself,
and which nothing but a heavenly inspiration could have discovered to her:
and that she demanded, as the instrument of her future victories, a
particular sword, which was kept in the church of St. Catharine of
Fierbois, and which, though she had never seen it, she described by all
its marks, and by the place in which it had long lain neglected.[*] This
is certain, that all these miraculous stories were spread abroad, in order
to captivate the vulgar. The more the king and his ministers were
determined to give into the illusion, the more scruples they pretended. An
assembly of grave doctors and theologians cautiously examined Joan’s
mission, and pronounced it undoubted and supernatural. She was sent to the
parliament, then residing at Poictiers; and was interrogated before that
assembly: the presidents, the counsellors, who came persuaded of her
imposture, went away convinced of her inspiration. A ray of hope began to
break through that despair in which the minds of all men were before
enveloped. Heaven had now declared itself in favor of France, and had laid
bare its outstretched arm to take vengeance on her invaders. Few could
distinguish between the impulse of inclination and the force of
conviction; and none would submit to the trouble of so disagreeable a
scrutiny.
After these artificial precautions and preparations had been for some time
employed, Joan’s requests were at last complied with: she was armed
cap-à-pie, mounted on horseback, and shown in that martial habiliment
before the whole people. Her dexterity in managing her steed, though
acquired in her former occupation, was regarded as a fresh proof of her
mission; and she was received with the loudest acclamations by the
spectators. Her former occupation was even denied: she was no longer the
servant of an inn. She was converted into a shepherdess, an employment
much more agreeable to the imagination. To render her still more
interesting, near ten years were subtracted from her age; and all the
sentiments of love and of chivalry were thus united to those of
enthusiasm, in order to inflame the fond fancy of the people with
prepossessions in her favor.
When the engine was thus dressed up in full splendor, it was determined to
essay its force against the enemy. Joan was sent to Blois, where a large
convoy was prepared for the supply of Orleans, and an army of ten thousand
men, under the command of St. Severe, assembled to escort it. She ordered
all the soldiers to confess themselves before they set out on the
enterprise: she banished from the camp all women of bad fame: she
displayed in her hands a consecrated banner, where the Supreme Being was
represented, grasping the globe or earth, and surrounded with flower de
luces. And she insisted, in right of her prophetic mission, that the
convoy should enter Orleans by the direct road from the side of Beausse:
but the count of Dunois, unwilling to submit the rules of the military art
to her inspirations, ordered it to approach by the other side of the
river, where he knew the weakest part of the English army was stationed.
Previous to this attempt, the maid had written to the regent, and to the
English generals before Orleans, commanding them, in the name of the
omnipotent Creator, by whom she was commissioned, immediately to raise the
siege; and to evacuate France; and menacing them with divine vengeance in
case of their disobedience. All the English affected to speak with
derision of the maid, and of her heavenly commission; and said, that the
French king was now indeed reduced to a sorry pass, when he had recourse
to such ridiculous expedients: but they felt their imagination secretly
struck with the vehement persuasion which prevailed in all around them;
and they waited with an anxious expectation, not unmixed with horror, for
the issue of these extraordinary preparations.
As the convoy approached the river, a sally was made by the garrison on
the side of Beausse, to prevent the English general from sending any
detachment to the other side: the provisions were peaceably embarked in
boats, which the inhabitants of Orleans had sent to receive them: the maid
covered with her troops the embarkation: Suffolk did not venture to attack
her: and the French general carried back the army in safety to Blois; an
alteration of affairs which was already visible to all the world, and
which had a proportional effect on the minds of both parties.
The maid entered the city of Orleans, arrayed in her military garb, and
displaying her consecrated standard; and was received as a celestial
deliverer by all the inhabitants. They now believed themselves invincible
under her influence; and Dunois himself, perceiving such a mighty
alteration both in friends and foes, consented, that the next convoy,
which was expected in a few days, should enter by the side of Beausse. The
convoy approached: no sign of resistance appeared in the besiegers: the
wagons and troops passed without interruption between the redoubts of the
English: a dead silence and astonishment reigned among those troops,
formerly so elated with victory, and so fierce for the combat.
The earl of Suffolk was in a situation very unusual and extraordinary, and
which might well confound the man of the greatest capacity and firmest
temper. He saw his troops overawed, and strongly impressed with the idea
of a divine influence accompanying the maid. Instead of banishing these
vain terrors by hurry, and action, and war, he waited till the soldiers
should recover from the panic; and he thereby gave leisure for those
prepossessions to sink still deeper into their minds. The military maxims
which are prudent in common cases, deceived him in these unaccountable
events. The English felt their courage daunted and overwhelmed; and thence
inferred a divine vengeance hanging over them. The French drew the same
inference from an inactivity so new and unexpected. Every circumstance was
now reversed in the opinions of men, on which all depends: the spirit
resulting from a long course of uninterrupted success, was on a sudden
transferred from the victors to the vanquished.
The maid called aloud, that the garrison should remain no longer on the
defensive; and she promised her followers the assistance of Heaven in
attacking those redoubts of the enemy which had so long kept them in awe,
and which they had never hitherto dared to insult. The generals seconded
her ardor: an attack was made on one redoubt, and it proved successful:[*]
all the English who defended the intrenchments were put to the sword or
taken prisoners: and Sir John Talbot himself, who had drawn together, from
the other redoubts, some troops to bring them relief, durst not appear in
the open field against so formidable an enemy.
Nothing, after this success, seemed impossible to the maid and her
enthusiastic votaries. She urged the generals to attack the main body of
the English in their intrenchments, but Dunois, still unwilling to hazard
the fate of France by too great temerity, and sensible that the least
reverse of fortune would make all the present visions evaporate, and
restore every thing to its former condition, checked her vehemence and
proposed to her first to expel the enemy from their forts on the other
side of the river, and thus lay the communication with the country
entirely open, before she attempted any more hazardous enterprise. Joan
was persuaded, and these forts were vigorously assailed. In one attack the
French were repulsed; the maid was left almost alone; she was obliged to
retreat, and join the runaways; but, displaying her sacred standard, and
animating them with her countenance, her gestures, her exhortations, she
led them back to the charge, and overpowered the English in their
intrenchments. In the attack of another fort, she was wounded in the neck
with an arrow; she retreated a moment behind the assailants; she pulled
out the arrow with her own hands; she had the wound quickly dressed; and
she hastened back to head the troops, and to plant her victorious banner
on the ramparts of the enemy.
By all these successes, the English were entirely chased from their
fortifications on that side: they had lost above six thousand men in these
different actions; and, what was still more important, their wonted
courage and confidence were wholly gone, and had given place to amazement
and despair. The maid returned triumphant over the bridge, and was again
received as the guardian angel of the city. After performing such
miracles, she convinced the most obdurate incredulity of her divine
mission: men felt themselves animated as by a superior energy, and thought
nothing impossible to that divine hand which so visibly conducted them. It
was in vain even for the English generals to oppose with their soldiers
the prevailing opinion of supernatural influence: they themselves were
probably moved by the same belief: the utmost they dared to advance was,
that Joan was not an instrument of God; she was only the implement of the
devil: but as the English had felt, to their sad experience, that the
devil might be allowed sometimes to prevail, they derived not much
consolation from the enforcing of this opinion.
It might prove extremely dangerous for Suffolk, with such intimidated
troops, to remain any longer in the presence of so courageous and
victorious an enemy; he therefore raised the siege, and retreated with all
the precaution imaginable. The French resolved to push their conquests,
and to allow the English no leisure to recover from their consternation.
Charles formed a body of six thousand men, and sent them to attack
Jergeau, whither Suffolk had retired with a detachment of his army. The
siege lasted ten days; and the place was obstinately defended. Joan
displayed her wonted intrepidity on the occasion. She descended into the
fosse, in leading the attack: and she there received a blow on the head
with a stone, by which she was confounded and beaten to the ground: but
she soon recovered herself, and in the end rendered the assault
successful: Suffolk was obliged to yield himself prisoner to a Frenchman
called Renaud; but before he submitted, he asked his adversary whether he
were a gentleman. On receiving a satisfactory answer, he demanded whether
he were a knight. Renaud replied, that he had not yet attained that honor.
“Then I make you one,” replied Suffolk; upon which he gave him the blow
with his sword which dubbed him into that fraternity; and he immediately
surrendered himself his prisoner.
The remainder of the English army was commanded by Fastolffe, Scales, and
Talbot, who thought of nothing but of making their retreat, as soon as
possible, into a place of safety; while the French esteemed the overtaking
them equivalent to a victory; so much had the events which passed before
Orleans altered every thing between the two nations! The vanguard of the
French under Richemont and Xaintrailles attacked the rear of the enemy at
the village of Patay. The battle lasted not a moment: the English were
discomfited and fled: the brave Fastolffe himself showed the example of
flight to his troops; and the order of the garter was taken from him, as a
punishment for this instance of cowardice.[*] Two thousand men were killed
in this action, and both Talbot and Scales taken prisoners.
In the account of all these successes, the French writers, to magnify the
wonder, represent the maid (who was now known by the appellation of “the
Maid of Orleans”) as not only active in combat, but as performing the
office of general; directing the troops, conducting the military
operations, and swaying the deliberations in all councils of war. It is
certain that the policy of the French court endeavored to maintain this
appearance with the public: but it is much more probable, that Dunois and
the wiser commanders prompted her in all her measures, than that a country
girl, without experience of education, could on a sudden become expert in
a profession which requires more genius and capacity than any other active
scene of life. It is sufficient praise, that she could distinguish the
persons on whose judgment she might rely; that she could seize their hints
and suggestions, and on a sudden, deliver their opinions as her own; and
that she could curb, on occasion, that visionary and enthusiastic spirit
with which she was actuated, and could temper it with prudence and
discretion.
The raising of the siege of Orleans was one part of the maid’s promise to
Charles: the crowning of him at Rheims was the other: and she now
vehemently insisted that he should forthwith set out on that enterprise. A
few weeks before, such a proposal would have appeared the most extravagant
in the world. Rheims lay in a distant quarter of the kingdom; was then in
the hands of a victorious enemy; the whole road which led to it was
occupied by their garrisons; and no man could be so sanguine as to imagine
that such an attempt could so soon come within the bounds of possibility.
But as it was extremely the interest of Charles to maintain the belief of
something extraordinary and divine in these events, and to avail himself
of the present consternation of the English, he resolved to follow the
exhortations of his warlike prophetess, and to lead his army upon this
promising adventure. Hitherto he had kept remote from the scene of war: as
the safety of the state depended upon his person, he had been persuaded to
restrain his military ardor: but observing this prosperous turn of
affairs, he now determined to appear at the head of his armies, and to set
the example of valor to all his soldiers, And the French nobility saw at
once their young sovereign assuming a new and more brilliant character,
seconded by fortune, and conducted by the hand of Heaven, and they caught
fresh zeal to exert themselves in replacing him on the throne of his
ancestors.
Charles set out for Rheims at the head of twelve thousand men: he passed
by Troye, which opened its gates to him; Chalons imitated the example:
Rheims sent him a deputation with its keys, before his approach to it: and
he scarcely perceived, as he passed along, that he was marching through an
enemy’s country. The ceremony of his coronation was here performed[*] with
the holy oil, which a pigeon had brought to King Clovis from heaven, on
the first establishment of the French monarchy: the maid of Orleans stood
by his side in complete armor, and displayed her sacred banner, which had
so often dissipated and confounded his fiercest enemies: and the people
shouted with the most unfeigned joy, on viewing such a complication of
wonders. After the completion of the ceremony, the maid threw herself at
the king’s feet, embraced his knees, and with a flood of tears, which
pleasure and tenderness extorted from her, she congratulated him on this
singular and marvellous event.
Charles, thus crowned and anointed, became more respectable in the eyes of
all his subjects, and seemed, in a manner, to receive anew, from a
heavenly commission, his title to their allegiance. The inclinations of
men swaying their belief, no one doubted of the inspirations and prophetic
spirit of the maid: so many incidents which passed all human
comprehension, left little room to question a superior influence: and the
real and undoubted facts brought credit to every exaggeration, which could
scarcely be rendered more wonderful. Laon, Soissons, Chateau-Thierri,
Provins, and many other towns and fortresses in that neighborhood,
immediately after Charles’s coronation, submitted to him on the first
summons; and the whole nation was disposed to give him the most zealous
testimonies of their duty and affection.
Nothing can impress us with a higher idea of the wisdom, address, and
resolution of the duke of Bedford, than his being able to maintain himself
in so perilous a situation, and to preserve some footing in France, after
the defection of so many places, and amidst the universal inclination of
the rest to imitate that contagious example. This prince seemed present
every where by his vigilance and foresight: he employed every resource
which fortune had yet left him: he put all the English garrisons in a
posture of defence: he kept a watchful eye over every attempt among the
French towards an insurrection: he retained the Parisians in obedience, by
alternately employing caresses and severity: and knowing that the duke of
Burgundy was already wavering in his fidelity, he acted with so much skill
and prudence, as to renew, in this dangerous crisis, his alliance with
that prince; an alliance of the utmost importance to the credit and
support of the English government.
The small supplies which he received from England set the talents of this
great man in a still stronger light. The ardor of the English for foreign
conquests was now extremely abated by time and reflection: the parliament
seems even to have become sensible of the danger which might attend their
further progress: no supply of money could be obtained by the regent
during his greatest distresses: and men enlisted slowly under his
standard, or soon deserted, by reason of the wonderful accounts which had
reached England, of the magic and sorcery, and diabolical power of the
maid of Orleans.[*] It happened fortunately, in this emergency, that the
bishop of Winchester, now created a cardinal, landed at Calais with a body
of five thousand men, which he was conducting into Bohemia, on a crusade
against the Hussites. He was persuaded to lend these troops to his nephew
during the present difficulties;[**] and the regent was thereby enabled to
take the field, and to oppose the French king, who was advancing with his
army to the gates of Paris.
The extraordinary capacity of the duke of Bedford appeared also in his
military operations. He attempted to restore the courage of his troops by
boldly advancing to the face of the enemy; but he chose his posts with so
much caution, as always to decline a combat, and to render it impossible
for Charles to attack him. He still attended that prince in all his
movements; covered his own towns and garrisons; and kept himself in a
posture to reap advantage from every imprudence or false step of the
enemy. The French army, which consisted mostly of volunteers, who served
at their own expense, soon after retired and was disbanded: Charles went
to Bourges, the ordinary place of his residence; but not till he made
himself master of Compiegne, Beauvais, Senlis, Sens, Laval, Lagni, St.
Denis, and of many places in the neighborhood of Paris, which the
affections of the people had put into his hands.
1430.
The regent endeavored to revive the declining state of his affairs, by
bringing over the young king of England, and having him crowned and
anointed at Paris,[***] All the vassals of the crown who lived within the
provinces possessed by the English, swore anew allegiance, and did homage
to him.
But this ceremony was cold and insipid, compared with the lustre which had
attended the coronation of Charles at Rheims; and the duke of Bedford
expected more effect from an accident, which put into his hands the person
that had been the author of all his calamities.
The maid of Orleans, after the coronation of Charles, declared to the
count of Dunois that her wishes were now fully gratified, and that she had
no further desire than to return to her former condition, and to the
occupation and course of life which became her sex: but that nobleman,
sensible of the great advantages which might still be reaped from her
presence in the army, exhorted her to persevere, till, by the final
expulsion of the English, she had brought all her prophecies to their full
completion. In pursuance of this advice, she threw herself into the town
of Compiegne, which was at that time besieged by the duke of Burgundy,
assisted by the earls of Arundel and Suffolk; and the garrison, on her
appearance, believed themselves thenceforth invincible. But their joy was
of short duration. The maid, next day after her arrival, headed a sally
upon the quarters of John of Luxembourg; she twice drove the enemy from
their intrenchments; finding their numbers to increase every moment, she
ordered a retreat; when hard pressed by the pursuers, she turned upon
them, and made them again recoil; but being here deserted by her friends,
and surrounded by the enemy, she was at last, after exerting the utmost
valor, taken prisoner by the Burgundians.[*] The common opinion was, that
the French officers, finding the merit of every victory ascribed to her,
had, in envy to her renown, by which they were themselves so much
eclipsed, willingly exposed her to this fatal accident.
The envy of her friends, on this occasion, was not a greater proof of her
merit than the triumph of her enemies. A complete victory would not have
given more joy to the English and their partisans. The service of Te Deum,
which has so often been profaned by princes, was publicly celebrated on
this fortunate event at Paris. The duke of Bedford fancied that, by the
captivity of that extraordinary woman, who had blasted all his successes,
he should again recover his former ascendant over France; and to push
farther the present advantage, he purchased the captive from John of
Luxembourg, and formed a prosecution against her, which, whether it
proceeded from vengeance or policy, was equally barbarous and
dishonorable.
1431.
There was no possible reason why Joan should not be regarded as a prisoner
of war, and be entitled to all the courtesy and good usage which civilized
nations practise towards enemies on these occasions. She had never, in her
military capacity, forfeited, by any act of treachery or cruelty, her
claim to that treatment: she was unstained by any civil crime: even the
virtues and the very decorums of her sex had ever been rigidly observed by
her: and though her appearing in war, and leading armies to battle, may
seem an exception, she had thereby performed such signal service to her
prince, that she had abundantly compensated for this irregularity; and
was, on that very account, the more an object of praise and admiration. It
was necessary, therefore, for the duke of Bedford to interest religion
some way in the prosecution, and to cover under that cloak his violation
of justice and humanity.
The bishop of Beauvais, a man wholly devoted to the English interests,
presented a petition against Joan, on pretence that she was taken within
the bounds of his diocese; and he desired to have her tried by an
ecclesiastical court for sorcery, impiety, idolatry, and magic: the
university of Paris was so mean as to join in the same request: several
prelates, among whom the cardinal of Winchester was the only Englishman,
were appointed her judges: they held their court in Rouen, where the young
king of England then resided: and the maid, clothed in her former military
apparel, but loaded with irons, was produced before this tribunal.
She first desired to be eased of her chains: her judges answered, that she
had once already attempted an escape by throwing herself from a tower: she
confessed the fact, maintained the justice of her intention, and owned
that, if she could, she would still execute that purpose. All her other
speeches showed the same firmness and intrepidity: though harassed with
interrogatories during the course of near four months, she never betrayed
any weakness or womanish submission; and no advantage was gained over her.
The point which her judges pushed most vehemently, was her visions and
revelations, and intercourse with departed saints; and they asked her,
whether she would submit to the church the truth of these inspirations:
she replied, that she would submit them to God, the fountain of truth.
They then exclaimed, that she was a heretic, and denied the authority of
the church. She appealed to the pope: they rejected her appeal.
They asked her, why she put trust in her standard, which had been
consecrated by magical incantations: she replied that she put trust in the
Supreme Being alone, whose image was impressed upon it. They demanded, why
she carried in her hand that standard at the anointment and coronation of
Charles at Rheims: she answered, that the person who had shared the danger
was entitled to share the glory. When accused of going to war, contrary to
the decorums of her sex, and of assuming government and command over men,
she scrupled not to reply, that her sole purpose was to defeat the
English, and to expel them the kingdom. In the issue, she was condemned
for all the crimes of which she had been accused, aggravated by heresy;
her revelations were declared to be inventions of the devil to delude the
people; and she was sentenced to be delivered over to the secular arm.
Joan, so long surrounded by inveterate enemies, who treated her with every
mark of contumely; browbeaten and overawed by men of superior rank, and
men invested with the ensigns of a sacred character, which she had been
accustomed to revere, felt her spirit at last subdued; and those visionary
dreams of inspiration, in which she had been buoyed up by the triumphs of
success and the applauses of her own party, gave way to the terrors of
that punishment to which she was sentenced. She publicly declared herself
willing to recant: she acknowledged the illusion of those revelations
which the church had rejected; and she promised never more to maintain
them. Her sentence was then mitigated: she was condemned to perpetual
imprisonment, and to be fed during life on bread and water.
Enough was now done to fulfil all political views, and to convince both
the French and the English, that the opinion of divine influence, which
had so much encouraged the one and daunted the other, was entirely without
foundation. But the barbarous vengeance of Joan’s enemies was not
satisfied with this victory. Suspecting that the female dress, which she
had now consented to wear, was disagreeable to her, they purposely placed
in her apartment a suit of men’s apparel; and watched for the effects of
that temptation upon her. On the sight of a dress in which she had
acquired so much renown, and which, she once believed, she wore by the
particular appointment of Heaven, all her former ideas and passions
revived; and she ventured in her solitude to clothe herself again in the
forbidden garment. Her insidious enemies caught her in that situation: her
fault was interpreted to be no less than a relapse into heresy: no
recantation would now suffice; and no pardon could be granted her. She was
condemned to be burned in the market-place of Rouen; and the infamous
sentence was accordingly executed. This admirable heroine, to whom the
more generous superstition of the ancients would have erected altars, was,
on pretence of heresy and magic, delivered over alive to the flames, and
expiated, by that dreadful punishment, the signal services which she had
rendered to her prince and to her native country.
1432.
The affairs of the English, far from being advanced by this execution,
went every day more and more to decay: the great abilities of the regent
were unable to resist the strong inclination which had seized the French
to return under the obedience of their rightful sovereign, and which that
act of cruelty was ill fitted to remove. Chartres was surprised, by a
stratagem of the count of Dunois: a body of the English, under Lord
Willoughby, was defeated at St. Celerin upon the Sarte:[*] the fair in the
suburbs of Caen, seated in the midst of the English territories, was
pillaged by De Lore, a French officer: the duke of Bedford himself was
obliged by Dunois to raise the siege of Lagni with some loss of
reputation: and all these misfortunes, though light, yet being continued
and uninterrupted, brought discredit on the English, and menaced them with
an approaching revolution. But the chief detriment which the regent
sustained, was by the death of his duchess, who had hitherto preserved
some appearance of friendship between him and her brother, the duke of
Burgundy:[**] and his marriage, soon afterwards, with Jaqueline of
Luxembourg, was the beginning of a breach between them.[***] Philip
complained, that the regent had never had the civility to inform him of
his intentions, and that so sudden a marriage was a slight on his sister’s
memory.
The cardinal of Winchester meditated a reconciliation between these
princes, and brought both of them to St. Omers for that purpose. The duke
of Bedford here expected the first visit, both as he was son, brother, and
uncle to a king, and because he had already made such advances as to come
into the duke of Burgundy’s territories, in order to have an interview
with him: but Philip, proud of his great power and independent dominions,
refused to pay this compliment to the regent; and the two princes, unable
to adjust the ceremonial, parted without seeing each other.[*] A bad
prognostic of their cordial intentions to renew past amity!
Nothing could be more repugnant to the interests of the house of Burgundy,
than to unite the crowns of France and England on the same head; an event
which, had it taken place, would have reduced the duke to the rank of a
petty prince, and have rendered his situation entirely dependent and
precarious. The title also to the crown of France, which, after the
failure of the elder branches, might accrue to the duke or his posterity,
had been sacrificed by the treaty of Troye; and strangers and enemies were
thereby irrevocably fixed upon the throne. Revenge alone had carried
Philip into these impolitic measures; and a point of honor had hitherto
induced him to maintain them. But as it is the nature of passion gradually
to decay, while the sense of interest maintains a permanent influence and
authority, the duke had, for some years, appeared sensibly to relent in
his animosity against Charles, and to hearken willingly to the apologies
made by that prince for the murder of the late duke of Burgundy. His
extreme youth was pleaded in his favor; his incapacity to judge for
himself; the ascendant gained over him by his ministers; and his inability
to resent a deed which, without his knowledge, had been perpetrated by
those under whose guidance he was then placed. The more to flatter the
pride of Philip, the king of France had banished from his court and
presence Tanegui de Chatel, and all those who were concerned in that
assassination; and had offered to make every other atonement which could
be required of him. The distress which Charles had already suffered, had
tended to gratify the duke’s revenge; the miseries to which France had
been so long exposed, had begun to move his compassion; and the cries of
all Europe admonished him, that his resentment, which might hitherto be
deemed pious, would, if carried further, be universally condemned as
barbarous and unrelenting. While the duke was in this disposition, every
disgust which he received from England made a double impression upon him;
the entreaties of the count of Richemont and the duke of Bourbon, who had
married his two sisters, had weight; and he finally determined to unite
himself to the royal family of France, from which his own was descended.
1435.
For this purpose, a congress was appointed at Arras under the mediation of
deputies from the pope and the council of Basle: the duke of Burgundy came
thither in person: the duke of Bourbon, the count of Richemont, and other
persons of high rank, appeared as ambassadors from France: and the English
having also been invited to attend, the cardinal of Winchester, the
bishops of Norwich and St. David’s, the earls of Huntingdon and Suffolk,
with others, received from the protector and council a commission for that
purpose.[*]
The conferences were held in the abbey of St. Vaast, and began with
discussing the proposals of the two crowns which were so wide of each
other as to admit of no hopes of accommodation. France offered to cede
Normandy with Guienne, but both of them loaded with the usual homage and
vassalage to the crown. As the claims of England upon France were
universally unpopular in Europe, the mediators declared the offers of
Charles very reasonable, and the cardinal of Winchester, with the other
English ambassadors, without giving a particular detail of their demands,
immediately left the congress. There remained nothing but to discuss the
mutual pretensions of Charles and Philip. These were easily adjusted: the
vassal was in a situation to give law to his superior; and he exacted
conditions which, had it not been for the present necessity, would have
been deemed, to the last degree, dishonorable and disadvantageous to the
crown of France. Besides making repeated atonements and acknowledgments
for the murder of the duke of Burgundy, Charles was obliged to cede all
the towns of Picardy which lay between the Somme and the Low Countries; he
yielded several other territories; he agreed that these and all the other
dominions of Philip should be held by him, during his life, without doing
any homage, or swearing fealty to the present king; and he freed his
subjects from all obligations to allegiance, if ever he infringed this
treaty.[**] Such were the conditions upon which France purchased the
friendship of the duke of Burgundy.
The duke sent a herald to England with a letter, in which he notified the
conclusion of the treaty of Arras, and apologized for his departure from
that of Troye. The council received the herald with great coldness: they
even assigned him his lodgings in a shoemaker’s house, by way of insult;
and the populace were so incensed, that if the duke of Glocester had not
given him guards, his life had been exposed to danger when he appeared in
the streets. The Flemings, and other subjects of Philip, were insulted,
and some of them murdered by the Londoners; and every thing seemed to tend
towards a rupture between the two nations.[*] These violences were not
disagreeable to the duke of Burgundy; as they afforded him a pretence for
the further measures which he intended to take against the English, whom
he now regarded as implacable and dangerous enemies.
A few days after the duke of Bedford received intelligence of this treaty,
so fatal to the interests of England, he died at Rouen; a prince of great
abilities, and of many virtues; and whose memory, except from the
barbarous execution of the maid of Orleans, was unsullied by any
considerable blemish. Isabella, queen of France, died a little before him,
despised by the English, detested by the French, and reduced, in her
latter years, to regard with an unnatural horror the progress and success
of her own son, in recovering possession of his kingdom. This period was
also signalized by the death of the earl of Arundel,[**] a great English
general, who, though he commanded three thousand men, was foiled by
Xaintrailles at the head of six hundred, and soon after expired of the
wounds which he received in the action.
1436
The violent factions which prevailed between the duke of Glocester and the
cardinal of Winchester, prevented the English from taking the proper
measures for repairing these multiplied losses, and threw all their
affairs into confusion. The popularity of the duke, and his near relation
to the crown, gave him advantages in the contest, which he often lost by
his open and unguarded temper, unfit to struggle with the politic and
interested spirit of his rival. The balance, meanwhile, of these parties,
kept every thing in suspense; foreign affairs were much neglected; and
though the duke of York, son to that earl of Cambridge who was executed in
the beginning of the last reign, was appointed successor to the duke of
Bedford, it was seven months before his commission passed the seals; and
the English remained so long in an enemy’s country, without a proper head
or governor.
The new governor, on his arrival, found the capital already lost. The
Parisians had always been more attached to the Burgundian than to the
English interest; and after the conclusion of the treaty of Arras, their
affections, without any further control, universally led them to return to
their allegiance under their native sovereign. The constable, together
with Lile-Adam, the same person who had before put Paris into the hands of
the duke of Burgundy, was introduced in the night-time by intelligence
with the citizens: Lord Willoughby, who commanded only a small garrison of
fifteen hundred men, was expelled: this nobleman discovered valor and
presence of mind on the occasion; but unable to guard so large a place
against such multitudes, he retired into the Bastile, and being there
invested, he delivered up that fortress, and was contented to stipulate
for the safe retreat of his troops into Normandy.[*]
In the same season, the duke of Burgundy openly took part against England,
and commenced hostilities by the siege of Calais, the only place which now
gave the English any sure hold of France, and still rendered them
dangerous. As he was beloved among his own subjects, and had acquired the
epithet of Good, from his popular qualities, he was able to interest all
the inhabitants of the Low Countries in the success of this enterprise;
and he invested that place with an army formidable from its numbers, but
without experience, discipline, or military spirit.[**] On the first alarm
of this siege, the duke of Glocester assembled some forces, sent a
defiance to Philip, and challenged him to wait the event of a battle,
which he promised to give, as soon as the wind would permit him to reach
Calais. The warlike genius of the English had at that time rendered them
terrible to all the northern parts of Europe; especially to the Flemings,
who were more expert in manufactures than in arms; and the duke of
Burgundy, being already foiled in some attempts before Calais, and
observing the discontent and terror of his own army, thought proper to
raise the siege, and to retreat before the arrival of the enemy.[***]
The English were still masters of many fine provinces in France; but
retained possession more by the extreme weakness of Charles, than by the
strength of their own garrisons or the force of their armies. Nothing,
indeed, can be more surprising than the feeble efforts made, during the
course of several years, by these two potent nations against each other
while the one struggled for independence, and the other aspired to a total
conquest of its rival. The general want of industry, commerce, and police
in that age, had rendered all the European nations, and France and England
no less than the others, unfit for bearing the burdens of war, when it was
prolonged beyond one season; and the continuance of hostilities had, long
ere this time, exhausted the force and patience of both kingdoms. Scarcely
could the appearance of an army be brought into the field on either side;
and all the operations consisted in the surprisal of places, in the
rencounter of detached parties, and in incursions upon the open country;
which were performed by small bodies, assembled on a sudden from the
neighboring garrisons. In this method of conducting the war, the French
king had much the advantage: the affections of the people were entirely on
his side: intelligence was early brought him of the state and motions of
the enemy: the inhabitants were ready to join in any attempts against the
garrisons: and thus ground was continually, though slowly, gained upon the
English. The duke of York, who was a prince of abilities, struggled
against these difficulties during the course of five years; and being
assisted by the valor of Lord Talbot, soon after created earl of
Shrewsbury, he performed actions which acquired him honor, but merit not
the attention of posterity. It would have been well, had this feeble war,
in sparing the blood of the people, prevented likewise all other
oppressions; and had the fury of men, which reason and justice cannot
restrain, thus happily received a check from their impotence and
inability. But the French and English, though they exerted such small
force, were, however, stretching beyond their resources, which were still
smaller; and the troops, destitute of pay, were obliged to subsist by
plundering and oppressing the country, both of friends and enemies. The
fields in all the north of France, which was the seat of war, were laid
waste and left uncultivated.[*]
1440.
The cities were gradually depopulated, not by the blood spilt in battle,
but by the more destructive pillage of the garrisons;[*] and both parties,
weary of hostilities which decided nothing, seemed at last desirous of
peace, and they set on foot negotiations for that purpose. But the
proposals of France, and the demands of England, were still so wide of
each other, that all hope of accommodation immediately vanished. The
English ambassadors demanded restitution of all the provinces which had
once been annexed to England, together with the final cession of Calais
and its district; and required the possession of these extensive
territories without the burden of any fealty or homage on the part of
their prince: the French offered only part of Guienne, part of Normandy,
and Calais, loaded with the usual burdens. It appeared in vain to continue
the negotiation while there was so little prospect of agreement. The
English were still too haughty to stoop from the vast hopes which they had
formerly entertained, and to accept of terms more suitable to the present
condition of the two kingdoms.
The duke of York soon after resigned his government to the earl of
Warwick, a nobleman of reputation, whom death prevented from long enjoying
this dignity. The duke, upon the demise of that nobleman, returned to his
charge; and during his administration, a truce was concluded between the
king of England and the duke of Burgundy, which had become necessary for
the commercial interests of their subjects.[**] The war with France
continued in the same languid and feeble state as before.
The captivity of five princes of the blood, taken prisoners in the battle
of Azincour, was a considerable advantage, which England long enjoyed over
its enemy; but this superiority was now entirely lost. Some of these
princes had died; some had been ransomed; and the duke of Orleans, the
most powerful among them, was the last that remained in the hands of the
English. He offered the sum of fifty-four thousand nobles[***] for his
liberty; and when this proposal was laid before the council of England, as
every question was there an object of faction, the party of the duke of
Glocester, and that of the cardinal of Winchester, were divided in their
sentiments with regard to it.
The duke reminded the council of the dying advice of the late king, that
none of these prisoners should on any account be released, till his son
should be of sufficient age to hold himself the reins of government. The
cardinal insisted on the greatness of the sum offered, which, in reality,
was nearly equal to two thirds of all the extraordinary supplies that the
parliament, during the course of seven years, granted for the support of
the war. And he added, that the release of this prince was more likely to
be advantageous than prejudicial to the English interests; by filling the
court of France with faction, and giving a head to those numerous
malecontents whom Charles was at present able with great difficulty to
restrain. The cardinal’s party, as usual, prevailed: the duke of Orleans
was released, after a melancholy captivity of twenty-five years:[*] and
the duke of Burgundy, as a pledge of his entire reconciliation with the
family of Orleans, facilitated to that prince the payment of his ransom.
It must be confessed, that the princes and nobility, in those ages, went
to war on very disadvantageous terms. If they were taken prisoners, they
either remained in captivity during life, or purchased their liberty at
the price which the victors were pleased to impose, and which often
reduced their families to want and beggary.
1443.
The sentiments of the cardinal, some time after, prevailed in another
point of still greater moment. That prelate had always encouraged every
proposal of accommodation with France; and had represented the utter
impossibility, in the present circumstances, of pushing farther the
conquests in that kingdom, and the great difficulty of even maintaining
those which were already made. He insisted on the extreme reluctance of
the parliament to grant supplies; the disorders in which the English
affairs in Normandy were involved; the daily progress made by the French
king; and the advantage of stopping his hand by a temporary accommodation
which might leave room for time and accidents to operate in favor of the
English. The duke of Glocester, high-spirited and haughty, and educated in
the lofty pretensions which the first successes of his two brothers had
rendered familiar to him, could not yet be induced to relinquish all hopes
of prevailing over France; much less could he see with patience his own
opinion thwarted and rejected by the influence of his rival in the English
council. But, notwithstanding his opposition, the earl of Suffolk, a
nobleman who adhered to the cardinal’s party, was despatched to Tours, in
order to negotiate with the French ministers. It was found impossible to
adjust the terms of a lasting peace; but a truce for twenty-two months was
concluded, which left every thing on the present footing between the
parties. The numerous disorders under which the French government labored,
and which time alone could remedy, induced Charles to assent to this
truce; and the same motives engaged him afterwards to prolong it.[*] But
Suffolk, not content with executing this object of his commission,
proceeded also to finish another business, which seems rather to have been
implied than expressed in the powers that had been granted him.[**]
In proportion as Henry advanced in years, his character became fully known
in the court, and was no longer ambiguous to either faction. Of the most
harmless, inoffensive, simple manners, but of the most slender capacity,
he was fitted, both by the softness of his temper and the weakness of his
understanding, to be perpetually governed by those who surrounded him; and
it was easy to foresee that his reign would prove a perpetual minority. As
he had now reached the twenty-third year of his age, it was natural to
think of choosing him a queen; and each party was ambitious of having him
receive one from their hand, as it was probable that this circumstance
would decide forever the victory between them. The duke of Glocester
proposed a daughter of the count of Armagnac; but had not credit to effect
his purpose. The cardinal and his friends had cast their eye on Margaret
of Anjou, daughter of Regnier, titular king of Sicily, Naples, and
Jerusalem, descended from the count of Anjou, brother of Charles V., who
had left these magnificent titles, but without any real power or
possessions, to his posterity. This princess herself was the most
accomplished of her age, both in body and mind; and seemed to possess
those qualities which would equally qualify her to acquire the ascendant
over Henry, and to supply all his defects and weaknesses. Of a masculine,
courageous spirit, of an enterprising temper, endowed with solidity as
well as vivacity of understanding, she had not been able to conceal these
great talents even in the privacy of her father’s family; and it was
reasonable to expect, that when she should mount the throne, they would
break out with still superior lustre. The earl of Suffolk, therefore, in
concert with his associates of the English council, made proposals of
marriage to Margaret, which were accepted. But this nobleman, besides
preoccupying the princess’s favor by being the chief means of her
advancement, endeavored to ingratiate himself with her and her family, by
very extraordinary concessions: though Margaret brought no dowry with her,
he ventured of himself, without any direct authority from the council, but
probably with the approbation of the cardinal and the ruling members, to
engage, by a secret article, that the province of Maine, which was at that
time in the hands of the English, should be ceded to Charles of Anjou, her
uncle,[*] who was prime minister and favorite of the French king, and who
had already received from his master the grant of that province as his
appanage.
The treaty of marriage was ratified in England: Suffolk obtained first the
title of marquis, then that of duke; and even received the thanks of
parliament for his services in concluding it.[**] The princess fell
immediately into close connections with the cardinal and his party, the
dukes of Somerset, Suffolk, and Buckingham;[***] who, fortified by her
powerful patronage, resolved on the final ruin of the duke of Glocester.
1447.
This generous prince, worsted in all court intrigues, for which his temper
was not suited, but possessing in a high degree the favor of the public,
had already received from his rivals a cruel mortification, which he had
hitherto borne without violating public peace, but which it was impossible
that a person of his spirit and humanity could ever forgive. His duchess,
the daughter of Reginald Lord Cobham, had been accused of the crime of
witchcraft; and it was pretended, that there was found in her possession a
waxen figure of the king, which she and her associates, Sir Roger
Bolingbroke, a priest, and one Margery Jordan, of Eye, melted in a magical
manner before a slow fire, with an intention of making Henry’s force and
vigor waste away by like insensible degrees. The accusation was well
calculated to affect the weak and credulous mind of the king, and to gain
belief in an ignorant age; and the duchess was brought to trial with her
confederates. The nature of this crime, so opposite to all common sense,
seems always to exempt the accusers from observing the rules of common
sense in their evidence: the prisoners were pronounced guilty; the duchess
was condemned to do public penance, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment;
the others were executed.[*] But as these violent proceedings were
ascribed solely to the malice of the duke’s enemies, the people, contrary
to their usual practice in such marvellous trials, acquitted the unhappy
sufferers; and increased their esteem and affection towards a prince who
was thus exposed, without protection, to those mortal injuries.
These sentiments of the public made the cardinal of Winchester and his
party sensible that it was necessary to destroy a man whose popularity
might become dangerous, and whose resentment they had so much cause to
apprehend. In order to effect their purpose, a parliament was summoned to
meet, not at London, which was supposed to be too well affected to the
duke, but at St. Edmondsbury, where they expected that he would lie
entirely at their mercy. As soon as he appeared, he was accused of
treason, and thrown into prison. He was soon after found dead in his
bed;[**] and though it was pretended that his death was natural, and
though his body, which was exposed to public view, bore no marks of
outward violence, no one doubted but he had fallen a victim to the
vengeance of his enemies.
An artifice, formerly practised in the case of Edward II., Richard II.,
and Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Glocester, could deceive nobody. The
reason of this assassination of the duke seems, not that the ruling party
apprehended his acquittal in parliament on account of his innocence,
which, in such times, was seldom much regarded, but that they imagined his
public trial and execution would have been more invidious than his private
murder which they pretended to deny. Some gentlemen of his retinue were
afterwards tried as accomplices in his treasons, and were condemned to be
hanged, drawn, and quartered, They were hanged and cut down; but just as
the executioner was proceeding to quarter them, their pardon was produced,
and they were recovered to life;[*] the most barbarous kind of mercy that
can possibly be imagined!
This prince is said to have received a better education than was usual in
his age, to have founded one of the first public libraries in England, and
to have been a great patron of learned men. Among other advantages which
he reaped from this turn of mind, it tended much to cure him of credulity
of which the following instance is given by Sir Thomas More. There was a
man who pretended that, though he was born blind, he had recovered his
sight by touching the shrine of St. Albans. The duke, happening soon after
to pass that way, questioned the man, and seeming to doubt of his sight,
asked him the colors of several cloaks, worn by persons of his retinue.
The man told them very readily. “You are a knave,” cried the prince; “had
you been born blind, you could not so soon have learned to distinguish
colors;” and immediately ordered him to be set in the stocks as an
impostor.[**]
The cardinal of Winchester died six weeks after his nephew whose murder
was universally ascribed to him as well as to the duke of Suffolk, and
which, it is said, gave him more remorse in his last moments than could
naturally be expected from a man hardened, during the course of a long
life, in falsehood and in politics. What share the queen had in this guilt
is uncertain; her usual activity and spirit made the public conclude, with
some reason, that the duke’s enemies durst not have ventured on such a
deed without her privity. But there happened, soon after, an event of
which she and her favorite, the duke of Suffolk, bore incontestably the
whole odium.
That article of the marriage treaty by which the province of Maine was to
be ceded to Charles of Anjou, the queen’s unele, had probably been
hitherto kept secret; and during the lifetime of the duke of Glocester, it
might have been dangerous to venture on the execution of it. But as the
court of France strenuously insisted on performance, orders were now
despatched, under Henry’s hand, to Sir Francis Surienne, governor of Mans,
commanding him to surrender that place to Charles of Anjou. Surienne,
either questioning the authenticity of the order, or regarding his
government as his sole fortune, refused compliance; and it became
necessary for a French army, under the count of Dunois, to lay siege to
the city. The governor made as good a defence as his situation could
permit; but receiving no relief from Edmund, duke of Somerset, who was at
that time governor of Normandy, he was at last obliged to capitulate, and
to surrender not only Mans, but all the other fortresses of that province,
which was thus entirely alienated from the crown of England.
1448.
The bad effects of this measure stopped not here. Surienne, at the head of
all his garrisons, amounting to two thousand five hundred men, retired
into Normandy, in expectation of being taken into pay, and of being
quartered in some towns of that province. But Somerset, who had no means
of subsisting such a multitude, and who was probably incensed at
Surienne’s disobedience, refused to admit him; and this adventurer, not
daring to commit depredations on the territories either of the king of
France or of England, marched into Brittany, seized the town of Fougeres,
repaired the fortifications of Pontorson and St. James de Beuvron, and
subsisted his troops by the ravages which he exercised on that whole
province.[*] The duke of Brittany complained of this violence to the king
of France, his liege lord: Charles remonstrated with the duke of Somerset:
that nobleman replied, that the injury was done without his privity, and
that he had no authority over Surienne and his companions.[**] Though this
answer ought to have appeared satisfactory to Charles, who had often felt
severely the licentious independent spirit of such mercenary soldiers, he
never would admit of the apology. He still insisted that these plunderers
should be recalled, and that reparation should be made to the duke of
Brittany for all the damages which he had sustained: and in order to
render an accommodation absolutely impracticable, he made the estimation
of damages amount to no less a sum than one million six hundred thousand
crowns. He was sensible of the superiority which the present state of his
affairs gave him over England; and he determined to take advantage of it.
No sooner was the truce concluded between the two kingdoms, than Charles
employed himself, with great industry and judgment, in repairing those
numberless ills to which France, from the continuance of wars both foreign
and domestic, had so long been exposed. He restored the course of public
justice; he introduced order into the finances; he established discipline
in his troops; he repressed faction in his court; he revived the languid
state of agriculture and the arts; and, in the course of a few years, he
rendered his kingdom flourishing within itself, and formidable to its
neighbors. Meanwhile, affairs in England had taken a very different turn.
The court was divided into parties, which were enraged against each other:
the people were discontented with the government: conquests in France,
which were an object more of glory than of interest, were overlooked
amidst domestic incidents, which engrossed the attention of all men: the
governor of Normandy, ill supplied with money, was obliged to dismiss the
greater part of his troops, and to allow the fortifications of the towns
and castles to become ruinous; and the nobility and people of that
province had, during the late open communication with France, enjoyed
frequent opportunities of renewing connections with their ancient master,
and of concerting the means for expelling the English. The occasion,
therefore, seemed favorable to Charles for breaking the truce.
1449.
Normandy was at once invaded by four powerful armies: one commanded by the
king himself; a second by the duke of Brittany; a third by the duke of
Alençon; and a fourth by the count of Dunois. The places opened their
gates almost as soon as the French appeared before them; Verneuil, Nogent,
Chateau Gaillard, Ponteau de Mer, Gisors, Mante, Vernon, Argentan Lisieux,
Fecamp, Coutances, Belesme, Pont de l’Arche, fell in an instant into the
hands of the enemy. The duke of Somerset, so far from having an army which
could take the field and relieve these places, was not able to supply them
with the necessary garrisons and provisions. He retired, with the few
troops of which he was master, into Rouen; and thought it sufficient, if,
till the arrival of succors from England, he could save that capital from
the general fate of the province. The king of France, at the head of a
formidable army, fifty thousand strong, presented himself before the
gates: the dangerous example of revolt had infected the inhabitants; and
they called aloud for a capitulation. Somerset, unable to resist at once
both the enemies within one from without, retired with his garrison into
the palace and castle; which, being places not tenable he was obliged to
surrender: he purchased a retreat to Harfleur by the payment of fifty-six
thousand crowns, by engaging to surrender Arques, Tancarville, Caudebec,
Honfleur, and other places in the higher Normandy, and by delivering.
hostages for the performance of articles.[*]
1450.
The governor of Honfleur refused to obey his orders; upon which the earl
of Shrewsbury, who was one of the hostages, was detained prisoner; and the
English were thus deprived of the only general capable of recovering them
from their present distressed; situation. Harfleur made a better defence
under Sir Thomas Curson, the governor; but was finally obliged to open its
gates to Dunois. Succors at last appeared from England, under Sir Thomas
Kyriel, and landed at Cherbourg: but these came very late, amounted only
to four thousand men, and were soon after put to rout at Fourmigni by the
count of Clermont.[**] This battle, or rather skirmish, was the only
action fought by the English for the defence of their dominions in France,
which they had purchased at such an expense of blood and treasure.
Somerset, shut up in Caen, without any prospect of relief, found it
necessary to capitulate: Falaise opened its gates, on condition that the
earl of Shrewsbury should be restored to liberty: and Cherbourg, the last
place of Normandy which remained in the hands of the English, being
delivered up, the conquest of that important province was finished in a
twelvemonth by Charles, to the great joy of the inhabitants, and of his
whole kingdom.[***]
A like rapid success attended the French arms in Guienne; though the
inhabitants of that province were, from long custom, better inclined to
the English government. Dunois was despatched thither, and met with no
resistance in the field, and very little from the towns. Great
improvements had been made during this age in the structure and management
of artillery, and none in fortification; and the art of defence was by
that means more unequal, than either before or since, to the art of
attack. After all the small places about Bordeaux were reduced, that city
agreed to submit, if not relieved by a certain time; and as no one in
England thought Seriously of these distant concerns, no relief appeared;
the place surrendered; and Bayonne being taken soon after, this whole
province, which had remained united to England since the accession of
Henry II., was, after a period of three centuries, finally swallowed up in
the French monarchy.
Though no peace or truce was concluded between France and England, the war
was in a manner at an end. The English, torn in pieces by the civil
dissensions which ensued, made but one feeble effort more for the recovery
of Guienne, and Charles, occupied at home in regulating the government,
and fencing against the intrigues of his factious son, Lewis the dauphin,
scarcely ever attempted to invade them in their island, or to retaliate
upon them, by availing himself of their intestine confusions.
CHAPTER XXI.
HENRY VI.
1450.
A WEAK prince, seated on the throne of England, had never failed, how
gentle soever and innocent, to be infested with faction, discontent,
rebellion, and evil commotions; and as the incapacity of Henry appeared
every day in a fuller light, these dangerous consequences began, from past
experience, to be universally and justly apprehended Men also of unquiet
spirits, no longer employed in foreign wars, whence they were now excluded
by the situation of the neighboring states, were the more likely to excite
intestine, disorders, and by their emulation, rivalship, and animosities,
to tear the bowels of their native country. But though these causes alone
were sufficient to breed confusion, there concurred another circumstance
of the most dangerous, nature: a pretender to the crown appeared: the tie
itself of the weak prince who enjoyed the name of sovereignty, was
disputed; and the English were now to pay the severe though late penalty
of their turbulence under Richard II., and of their levity in violating,
without any necessity or just reason, the lineal succession of their
monarchs.
All the males of the house of Mortimer were extinct; but Anne, the sister
of the last earl of Marche, having espoused the earl of Cambridge,
beheaded in the reign of Henry V. had transmitted her latent, but not yet
forgotten claim to be; on Richard, duke of York. This prince, thus
descended by his mother from Philippa, only daughter of the duke of
Clarence, second son of Edward III., stood plainly in the order of
succession before the king, who derived his descent from the duke of
Lancaster, third son of that monarch; and that claim could not, in many
respects, have fallen into more dangerous hands man those of the duke of
York. Richard was a man of valor and abilities, of a prudent conduct and
mild disposition: he had enjoyed an opportunity of displaying these
virtues in his government of France; and though recalled from that command
by the intrigues and superior interest of the duke of Somerset, he had
been sent to suppress a rebellion in Ireland; had succeeded much better in
that enterprise than his rival in the defence of Normandy, and had even
been able to attach to his person and family the whole Irish nation, whom
he was sent to subdue.[*] In the right of his father, he bore the rank of
first prince of the blood; and by this station he gave a lustre to his
title derived from the family of Mortimer, which, though of great
nobility, was equalled by other families in the kingdom, and had been
eclipsed by the royal descent of the house of Lancaster. He possessed an
immense fortune from the union of so many successions, those of Cambridge
and York on the one hand, with those of Mortimer on the other; which last
inheritance had before been augmented by a union of the estates of
Clarence and Ulster with the patrimonial possessions of the family of
Marche. The alliances too of Richard, by his marrying the daughter of
Ralph Nevil, earl of Westmoreland, had widely extended his interest among
the nobility, and had procured him many connections in that formidable
order.
The family of Nevil was perhaps at this time the most potent, both from
their opulent possessions and from the characters of the men, that has
ever appealed in England. For, besides the earl of Westmoreland, and the
lords Latimer, Fauconberg, and Abergavenny, the earls of Salisbury and
Warwick were of that family, and were of themselves, on many accounts, the
greatest noblemen in the kingdom. The earl of Salisbury, brother-in-law to
the duke of York, was the eldest son by a second marriage of the earl of
Westmoreland; and inherited by his wife, daughter and heir of Montacute,
earl of Salisbury, killed before Orleans, the possessions and title of
that great family. His eldest son, Richard, had married Anne, the daughter
and heir of Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, who died governor of France; and
by this alliance he enjoyed the possessions, and had acquired the title,
of that other family, one of the most opulent, most ancient, and most
illustrious in England. The personal qualities also of these two earls,
especially of Warwick enhanced the splendor of their nobility, and
increased then influence over the people. This latter nobleman commonly
known, from the subsequent events, by the appellation of the “king-maker,”
had distinguished himself by his gallantry in the field, by the
hospitality of his table, by Ore magnificence, and still more by the
generosity, of his expense, and by the spirited and bold manner which
attended him in all his actions. The undesigning frankness and openness of
his character rendered his conquest over men’s affections the more certain
and infallible: his presents were regarded as sure testimonials of esteem
and friendship; and his professions as the over-flowings of his genuine
sentiments. No less than thirty thousand persons are said to have daily
lived at his board In the different manors and castles which he possessed
in England: the military men, allured by his munificence and hospitality,
as well as by his bravery, were zealously attached to his interests: the
people in general bore him an unlimited affection: his numerous retainers
were more devoted to his will than to the prince or to the laws: and he
was the greatest, as well as the last, of those mighty barons who formerly
overawed the crown, and rendered the people incapable of any regular
system of civil government.
But the duke of York, besides the family of Nevil, had many other
partisans among the great nobility. Courtney, earl of Devonshire,
descended from a very noble family of that name in France, was attached to
his interests: Moubray, duke of Norfolk, had, from his hereditary hatred
to the family of Lancaster, embraced the same party: and the discontents
which universally prevailed among the people, rendered every combination
of the great the more dangerous to the established government.
Though the people were never willing to grant the supplies necessary for
keeping possession of the conquered provinces in France, they repined
extremely at the loss of these boasted acquisitions; and fancied, because
a sudden irruption could make conquests, that, without steady counsels and
a uniform expense, it was possible to maintain them. The voluntary cession
of Maine to the queen’s uncle, had made them suspect treachery in the loss
of Normandy and Guienne. They still considered Margaret as a French woman,
and a latent enemy of the kingdom. And when they saw her father and all
her relations active in promoting the success of the French, they could
not be persuaded that she, who was all-powerful in the English council,
would very zealously oppose them in their enterprises.
But the most fatal blow given to the popularity of the crown and to the
interests of the house of Lancaster, was by the assassination of the
virtuous duke of Glocester; whose character, had he been alive, would have
intimidated the partisans of York; but whose memory, being extremely
cherished by the people, served to throw an odium on all his murderers. By
this crime the reigning family suffered a double prejudice it was deprived
of its firmest support; and it was loaded with all the infamy of that
imprudent and barbarous assassination.
As the duke of Suffolk was known to have had an active hand in the crime,
he partook deeply of the hatred attending it; and the clamors which
necessarily rose against him, as prime minister and declared favorite of
the queen, were thereby augmented to a tenfold pitch, and became
absolutely uncontrollable. The great nobility could ill brook to see a
subject exalted above them; much more one who was only great-grandson to a
merchant, and who was of a birth so much inferior to theirs. The people
complained of his arbitrary measures; which were, in some degree, a
necessary consequence of the irregular power then possessed by the prince,
but which the least disaffection easily magnified into tyranny. The great
acquisitions which he daily made were the object of envy; and as they were
gained at the expense of the crown, which was itself reduced to poverty,
they appeared on that account, to all indifferent persons, the more
exceptionable and invidious.
The revenues of the crown, which had long been disproportioned to its
power and dignity, had been extremely dilapidated during the minority of
Henry;[*] both by the rapacity of the courtiers, which the king’s uncles
could not control, and by the necessary expenses of the French war, which
had always been very ill supplied by the grants of parliament.
The royal demesnes were dissipated; and at the same time the king was
loaded with a debt of three hundred and seventy-two thousand pounds, a sum
so great, that the parliament could never think of discharging it. This
unhappy situation forced the ministers upon many arbitrary measures: the
household itself could not be supported without stretching to the utmost
the right of purveyance, and rendering it a kind of universal robbery upon
the people: the public clamor rose high upon this occasion, and no one had
the equity to make allowance for the necessity of the king’s situation.
Suffolk, once become odious, bore the blame of the whole; and every
grievance, in every part of the administration, was universally imputed to
his tyranny and injustice.
This nobleman, sensible of the public hatred under which he labored, and
foreseeing an attack from the commons endeavored to overawe his enemies,
by boldly presenting himself to the charge, and by insisting upon his own
innocence and even upon his merits, and those of his family, in the public
service. He rose in the house of peers; took notice of the clamors
propagated against him; and complained that after serving the crown in
thirty-four campaigns; after living abroad seventeen years, without once
returning to his native country; after losing a father and three brothers
in the wars with France; after being himself a prisoner, and purchasing
his liberty by a great ransom; it should yet be suspected, that he had
been debauched from his allegiance by that enemy whom he had ever opposed
with such zeal and fortitude, and that he had betrayed his prince, who had
rewarded his services by the highest honors and greatest offices that it
was in his power to confer.[*] This speech did not answer the purpose
intended. The commons, rather provoked at his challenge, opened their
charge against him, and sent up to the peers an accusation of high
treason, divided into several articles. They insisted, that he had
persuaded the French king to invade England with an armed force, in order
to depose the king, and to place on the throne his own son, John de la
Pole, whom he intended to marry to Margaret, the only daughter of the late
John, duke of Somerset, and to whom, he imagined, he would by that means
acquire a title to the crown: that he had contributed to the release of
the duke of Orleans, in hopes that that prince would assist King Charles
in expelling the English from France, and recovering full possession of
his kingdom: that he had afterwards encouraged that monarch to make open
war on Normandy and Guienne, and had promoted his conquests by betraying
the secrets of England, and obstructing the succors intended to be sent to
those provinces; and that he had, without any powers or commission,
promised by treaty to cede the province of Maine to Charles of Anjou, and
had accordingly ceded it; which proved in the issue the chief cause of the
loss of Normandy.[**]
It is evident, from a review of these articles, that the commons adopted
without inquiry all the popular clamors against the duke of Suffolk, and
charged him with crimes of which none but the vulgar could seriously
believe him guilty. Nothing can be more incredible, than that a nobleman,
so little eminent by his birth and character, could think of acquiring the
crown to his family, and of deposing Henry by foreign force, and, together
with him, Margaret, his patron, a princess of so much spirit and
penetration. Suffolk appealed to many noblemen in the house, who knew that
he had intended to marry his son to one of the coheirs of the earl of
Warwick, and was disappointed in his views only by the death of that lady:
and he observed, that Margaret of Somerset could bring to her husband no
title to the crown; because she herself was not so much as comprehended in
the entail settled by act of parliament. It is easy to account for the
loss of Normandy and Guienne, from the situation of affairs in the two
kingdoms, without supposing any treachery in the English ministers; and it
may safely be affirmed, that greater vigor was requisite to defend these
provinces from the arms of Charles VII., than to conquer them at first
from his predecessor. It could never be the interest of any English
minister to betray and abandon such acquisitions; much less of one who was
so well established in his master’s favor, who enjoyed such high honors
and ample possessions in his own country, who had nothing to dread but the
effects of popular hatred and who could never think, without the most
extreme reluctance, of becoming a fugitive and exile in a foreign land.
The only article which carries any face of probability, is his engagement
for the delivery of Maine to the queen’s uncle: but Suffolk maintained,
with great appearance of truth, that this measure was approved of by
several at the council table; [*] and it seems hard to ascribe to it, as
is done by the commons, the subsequent loss of Normandy and expulsion of
the English. Normandy lay open on every side to the invasion of the
French: Maine, an inland province, must soon after have fallen without any
attack; and as the English possessed in other parts more fortresses than
they could garrison or provide for, it seemed no bad policy to contract
their force, and to render the defence practicable, by reducing it within
a narrower compass.
The commons were probably sensible, that this charge of treason against
Suffolk would not bear a strict scrutiny; and they therefore, soon after,
sent up against him a new charge of misdemeanors, which they also divided
into several articles. They affirmed, among other imputations, that he had
procured exorbitant grants from the crown, had embezzled the public money,
had conferred offices on improper persons, had perverted justice by
maintaining iniquitous causes, and had procured pardons for notorious
offenders.[*] The articles are mostly general, but are not improbable; and
as Suffolk seems to have been a bad man and a bad minister, it will not be
rash in us to think that he was guilty, and that many of these articles
could have been proved against him. The court was alarmed at the
prosecution of a favorite minister, who lay under such a load of popular
prejudices; and an expedient was fallen upon to save him from present
ruin. The king summoned all the lords, spiritual and temporal, to his
apartment: the prisoner was produced before them, and asked what he could
say in his own defence: he denied the charge; but submitted to the king’s
mercy: Henry expressed himself not satisfied with regard to the first
impeachment for treason; but in consideration of the second for
misdemeanors, he declared that, by virtue of Suffolk’s own submission, not
by any judicial authority, he banished him the kingdom during five years.
The lords remained silent; but as soon as they returned to their own
house, they entered a protest, that this sentence should nowise infringe
their privileges, and that, if Suffolk had insisted upon his right, and
had not voluntarily submitted to the king’s commands, he was entitled to a
trial by his peers in parliament.
It was easy to see, that these irregular proceedings were meant to favor
Suffolk, and that, as he still possessed the queen’s confidence, he would,
on the first favorable opportunity, be restored to his country, and be
reinstated in his former power and credit. A captain of a vessel was
therefore employed by his enemies to intercept him in his passage to
France: he was seized near Dover; his head struck off on the side of a
long-boat; and his body thrown into the sea,[**] No inquiry was made after
the actors and accomplices in this atrocious deed of violence.
The duke of Somerset succeeded to Suffolk’s power in the ministry, and
credit with the queen; and as he was the person under whose government the
French provinces had been lost, the public, who always judge by the event,
soon made him equally the object of their animosity and hatred. The duke
of York was absent in Ireland during all these transactions and however it
might be suspected that his partisans had excited and supported the
prosecution against Suffolk, no immediate ground of complaint could, on
that account, lie against him. But there happened, soon after, an incident
which roused the jealousy of the court, and discovered to them the extreme
danger to which they were exposed from the pretensions of that popular
prince.
The humors of the people, set afloat by the parliamentary impeachment, and
by the fall of so great a favorite as Suffolk, broke out in various
commotions, which were soon suppressed, but there arose one in Kent which
was attended with more dangerous consequences. A man of low condition, one
John Cade, a native of Ireland, who had been obliged to fly into France
for crimes, observed, on his return to England, the discontents of the
people; and he laid on them the foundation of projects which were at first
crowned with surprising success. He took the name of John Mortimer;
intending, as is supposed, to pass himself for a son of that Sir John
Mortimer who had been sentenced to death by parliament, and executed, in
the beginning of this reign, without any trial or evidence, merely upon an
indictment of high treason given in against him.[*] On the first mention
of that popular name, the common people of Kent, to the number of twenty
thousand, flocked to Cade’s standard; and he excited their zeal by
publishing complaints against the numerous abuses in government, and
demanding a redress of grievances. The court, not yet fully sensible of
the danger, sent a small force against the rioters, under the command of
Sir Humphrey Stafford, who was defeated and slain in an action near
Sevenoke;[**] and Cade, advancing with his followers towards London,
encamped on Blackheath.
Though elated by his victory, he still maintained the appearance of
moderation; and sending to the court a plausible list of grievances,[*] he
promised that, when these should be redressed, and when Lord Say, the
treasurer, and Cromer, sheriff of Kent, should be punished for their
malversations, he would immediately lay down his arms. The council, who
observed that nobody was willing to fight against men so reasonable in
their pretensions, carried the king, for present safety, to Kenilworth;
and the city immediately opened its gates to Cade, who maintained, during
some time, great order and discipline among his followers. He always led
them into the fields during the night-time; and published severe edicts
against plunder and violence of every kind: but being obliged, in order to
gratify their malevolence against Say and Cromer, to put these men to
death without a legal trial,[**] he found that, after the commission of
this crime, he was no longer master of their riotous disposition, and that
all his orders were neglected.[***] They broke into a rich house, which
they plundered; and the citizens, alarmed at this act of violence, shut
their gates against them; and being seconded by a detachment of soldiers,
sent them by Lord Scales, governor of the Tower, they repulsed the rebels
with great slaughter.[****] The Kentish men were so discouraged by the
blow, that upon receiving a general pardon from the primate, then
chancellor, they retreated towards Rochester, and there dispersed. The
pardon was soon after annulled, as extorted by violence: a price was set
on Cade’s head,[*****] who was killed by one Iden, a gentleman of Sussex;
and many of his followers were capitally punished for their rebellion.
It was imagined by the court, that the duke of York had secretly
instigated Cade to this attempt, in order to try, by that experiment, the
dispositions of the people towards his title and family:[*] and as the
event had so far succeeded to his wish, the ruling party had greater
reason than ever to apprehend the future consequences of his pretensions.
At the same time they heard that he intended to return from Ireland; and
fearing that he meant to bring an armed force along with him, they issued
orders, in the king’s name, for opposing him, and for debarring him
entrance into England.[*] But the duke refuted his enemies by coming
attended with no more than his ordinary retinue: the precautions of the
ministers served only to show him their jealousy and malignity against
him: he was sensible that his title, by being dangerous to the king, was
also become dangerous to himself: he now saw the impossibility of
remaining in his present situation, and the necessity of proceeding
forward in support of his claim. His partisans, therefore, were instructed
to maintain, in all companies, his right by succession, and by the
established laws and constitution of the kingdom: these questions became
every day more and more the subject of conversation: the minds of men were
insensibly sharpened against each other by disputes, before they came to
more dangerous extremities: and various topics were pleaded in support of
the pretensions of each party.
The partisans of the house of Lancaster maintained that, though the
elevation of Henry IV. might at first be deemed somewhat irregular, and
could not be justified by any of those principles on which that prince
chose to rest his title, it was yet founded on general consent, was a
national act, and was derived from the voluntary approbation of a free
people, who, being loosened from their allegiance by the tyranny of the
preceding government, were moved by gratitude, as well as by a sense of
public interest, to intrust the sceptre into the hands of their deliverer:
that, even if that establishment were allowed to be at first invalid, it
had acquired solidity by time; the only principle which ultimately gives
authority to government, and removes those scruples which the irregular
steps attending almost all revolutions, naturally excite in the minds of
the people: that the right of succession was a rule admitted only for
general good, and for the maintenance of public order; and could never be
pleaded to the overthrow of national tranquillity, and the subversion of
regular establishments; that the principles of liberty, no less than the
maxims of internal peace, were injured by these pretensions of the house
of York; and if so many reiterated acts of the legislature, by which the
crown was entailed on the present family, were now invalidated, the
English must be considered not as a free people, who could dispose of
their own government, but as a troop of slaves, who were implicitly
transmitted by succession from one master to another that the nation was
bound to allegiance under the house of Lancaster by moral no less than by
political duty; and were they to infringe those numerous oaths of fealty
which they had sworn to Henry and his predecessors, they would thenceforth
be thrown loose from all principles, and it would be found difficult ever
after to fix and restrain them: that the duke of York himself had
frequently done homage to the king as his lawful sovereign, and had
thereby, in the most solemn manner, made an indirect renunciation of those
claims with which he now dared to disturb the tranquillity of the public:
that even though the violation of the rights of blood, made on the
deposition of Richard, was perhaps rash and imprudent, it was too late to
remedy the mischief; the danger of a disputed succession could no longer
be obviated; the people, accustomed to a government which, in the hands of
the late king, had been so glorious, and in that of his predecessor, so
prudent and salutary, would still ascribe a right to it; by causing
multiplied disorders, and by shedding an inundation of blood, the
advantage would only be obtained of exchanging one pretender for another;
and the house of York itself, if established on the throne, would, on the
first opportunity, be exposed to those revolutions, which the giddy spirit
excited in the people gave so much reason to apprehend: and that, though
the present king enjoyed not the shining talents which had appeared in his
father and grandfather, he might still have a son who should be endowed
with them; he is himself eminent for the most harmless and inoffensive
manners; and if active princes were dethroned on pretence of tyranny, and
indolent ones on the plea of incapacity, there would thenceforth remain in
the constitution no established rule of obedience to any sovereign.
Those strong topics in favor of the house of Lancaster, were opposed by
arguments no less convincing on the side of the house of York. The
partisans of this latter family asserted, that the maintenance of order in
the succession of princes, far from doing injury to the people, or
invalidating their fundamental title to good government, was established
only for the purposes of government, and served to prevent those
numberless confusions which must ensue, if no rule were followed but the
uncertain and disputed views of present convenience and advantage: that
the same maxims which insured public peace, were also salutary to national
liberty the privileges of the people could only be maintained by the
observance of laws; and if no account were made of the rights of the
sovereign, it could less be expected that any regard would be paid to the
property and freedom of the subject: that it was never too late to correct
any pernicious precedent; an unjust establishment, the longer it stood,
acquired the greater sanction and validity; it could, with more appearance
of reason, be pleaded as an authority for a like injustice; and the
maintenance of it, instead of favoring public tranquillity, tended to
disjoint every principle by which human society was supported: that
usurpers would be happy, if their present possession of power, or their
continuance for a few years, could convert them into legal princes; but
nothing would be more miserable than the people, if all restraints on
violence and ambition were thus removed, and a full scope given to the
attempts of every turbulent innovator: that time indeed might bestow
solidity on a government whose first foundations were the most infirm; but
it required both a long course of time to produce this effect, and the
total extinction of those claimants whose title was built on the original
principles of the constitution: that the deposition of Richard II., and
the advancement of Henry IV., were not deliberate national acts, but the
result of the levity and violence of the people, and proceeded from those
very defects in human nature which the establishment of political society,
and of an order in succession, was calculated to prevent: that the
subsequent entails of the crown were a continuance of the same violence
and usurpation; they were not ratified by the legislature, since the
consent of the rightful king was still wanting; and the acquiescence,
first of the family of Mortimer, then of the family of York, proceeded
from present necessity, and implied no renunciation of their pretensions
that the restoration of the true order of succession could not be
considered as a change which familiarized the people to devolutions; but
as the correction of a former abuse, which had itself encouraged the giddy
spirit of innovation, rebellion, and disobedience: and that, as the
original title of Lancaster stood only, in the person of Henry IV., on
present convenience, even this principle, unjustifiable as it was when not
supported by laws and warranted by the constitution, had now entirely gone
over to the other side; nor was there any comparison between a prince
utterly unable to sway the sceptre, and blindly governed by corrupt
ministers, or by an imperious queen, engaged in foreign and hostile
interests and a prince of mature years, of approved wisdom and experience,
a native of England, the lineal heir of the crown, who, by his
restoration, would replace every thing on ancient foundations.
So many plausible arguments could be urged on both sides of this
interesting question, that the people were extremely divided in their
sentiments; and though the noblemen of greatest power and influence seem
to have espoused the party of York, the opposite cause had the advantage
of being supported by the present laws, and by the immediate possession of
royal authority. There were also many great noblemen in the Lancastrian
party, who balanced the power of their antagonists, and kept the nation in
suspense between them. The earl of Northumberland adhered to the present
government: the earl of Westmoreland, in spite of his connections with the
duke of York, and with the family of Nevil, of which he was the head, was
brought over to the same party; and the whole north of England, the most
warlike part of the kingdom, was, by means of these two potent noblemen,
warmly engaged in the interests of Lancaster. Edmund Beaufort, duke of
Somerset, and his brother Henry, were great supports of that cause; as
were also Henry Holland duke of Exeter, Stafford, duke of Buckingham, the
earl of Shrewsbury, the Lords Clifford, Dudley, Scales, Audley, and other
noblemen.
While the kingdom was in this situation, it might naturally be expected
that so many turbulent barons, possessed of so much independent authority,
would immediately have flown to arms, and have decided the quarrel, after
their usual manner, by war and battle, under the standards of the
contending princes. But there still were many causes which retarded these
desperate extremities, and made a long train of faction, intrigue, and
cabal, precede the military operations. By the gradual progress of arts in
England, as well as in other parts of Europe, the people were now become
of some importance; laws were beginning to be respected by them; and it
was requisite, by various pretences, previously to reconcile their minds
to the overthrow of such an ancient establishment as that of the house of
Lancaster, ere their concurrence could reasonably be expected. The duke of
York himself, the new claimant, was of a moderate and cautious character,
an enemy to violence and disposed to trust rather to time and policy, than
to sanguinary measures, for the success of his pretensions. The very
imbecility itself of Henry tended to keep the factions in suspense, and
make them stand long in awe of each other: it rendered the Lancastrian
party unable to strike any violent blow against their enemies; it
encouraged the Yorkists to hope that, after banishing the king’s
ministers, and getting possession of his person, they might gradually
undermine his authority, and be able, without the perilous experiment of a
civil war, to change the succession by parliamentary and legal authority.
1451.
The dispositions which appeared in a parliament assembled soon after the
arrival of the duke of York from Ireland, favored these expectations of
his partisans, and both discovered an unusual boldness in the commons, and
were a proof of the general discontents which prevailed against the
administration. The lower house, without any previous inquiry or
examination, without alleging any other ground of complaint than common
fame, ventured to present a petition against the duke of Somerset, the
duchess of Suffolk, the bishop of Chester, Sir John Sutton, Lord Dudley,
and several others of inferior rank; and they prayed the king to remove
them forever from his person and councils, and to prohibit them from
approaching within twelve miles of the court.[*] This was a violent
attack, somewhat arbitrary, and supported but by few precedents, against
the ministry; yet the king durst not openly oppose it: he replied that,
except the lords, he would banish all the others from court during a year,
unless he should have occasion for their service in suppressing any
rebellion. At the same time he rejected a bill, which had passed both
houses, for attainting the late duke of Suffolk, and which, in several of
its clauses, discovered a very general prejudice against the measures of
the court.
1452.
The duke of York, trusting to these symptoms, raised an army of ten
thousand men, with which he marched towards London, demanding a
reformation of the government, and the removal of the duke of Somerset
from all power and authority.[**] He unexpectedly found the gates of the
city shut against him; and on his retreating into Kent, he was followed by
the king at the head of a superior army; in which several of Richard’s
friends, particularly Salisbury and Warwick appeared; probably with a view
of mediating between the parties, and of seconding, on occasion, the duke
of York’s pretensions.
A parley ensued; Richard still insisted upon the removal of Somerset, and
his submitting to a trial in parliament: the court pretended to comply
with his demand; and that nobleman was put in arrest: the duke of York was
then persuaded to pay his respects to the king in his tent; and, on
repeating his charge against the duke of Somerset, he was surprised to see
that minister step from behind the curtain, and offer to maintain his
innocence. Richard now found that he had been betrayed; that he was in the
hands of his enemies; and that it was become necessary, for his own
safety, to lower his pretensions. No violence, however, was attempted
against him: the nation was not in a disposition to bear the destruction
of so popular a prince: he had many friends in Henry’s camp; and his son,
who was not in the power of the court, might still be able to revenge his
death on all his enemies: he was therefore dismissed; and he retired to
his seat of Wigmore, on the borders of Wales.[*]
While the duke of York lived in this retreat, there happened an incident
which, by increasing the public discontents, proved favorable to his
pretensions. Several Gascon lords, affectionate to the English government,
and disgusted at the new dominion of the French, came to London, and
offered to return to their allegiance under Henry.[**]
1453.
The earl of Shrewsbury, with a body of eight thousand men, was sent over
to support them. Bordeaux opened its gates to him: he made himself master
of Fronsac, Castillon, and some other places: affairs began to wear a
favorable aspect; but as Charles hastened to resist this dangerous
invasion, the fortunes of the English were soon reversed: Shrewsbury, a
venerable warrior, above fourscore years of age, fell in battle; his
conquests were lost; Bordeaux was again obliged to submit to the French
king;[***] and all hopes of recovering the province of Gascony were
forever extinguished.
Though the English might deem themselves happy to be fairly rid of distant
dominions, which were of no use to them, and which they never could defend
against the growing power of France, they expressed great discontent on
the occasion: and they threw all the blame on the ministry, who had not
been able to effect impossibilities. While they were in this disposition,
the queen’s delivery of a son, who received the name of Edward, was deemed
no joyful incident; and as it removed all hopes of the peaceable
succession of the duke of York, who was otherwise, in the right of his
father, and by the laws enacted since the accession of the house of
Lancaster, next heir to the crown, it had rather a tendency to inflame the
quarrel between the parties. But the duke was incapable of violent
counsels; and even when no visible obstacle lay between him and the
throne, he was prevented by his own scruples from mounting it.
1454.
Henry, always unfit to exercise the government, fell at this time into a
distemper, which so far increased his natural imbecility, that it rendered
him incapable of maintaining even the appearance of royalty. The queen and
the council, destitute of this support, found themselves unable to resist
the York party; and they were obliged to yield to the torrent. They sent
Somerset to the Tower, and appointed Richard lieutenant of the kingdom,
with powers to open and hold a session of parliament.[*]
That assembly, also, taking into consideration the state of the kingdom,
created him protector during pleasure. Men who thus intrusted sovereign
authority to one that had such evident and strong pretensions to the
crown, were not surely averse to his taking immediate and full possession
of it; yet the duke, instead of pushing them to make further concessions,
appeared somewhat timid and irresolute even in receiving the power which
was tendered to him. He desired that it might be recorded in parliament,
that this authority was conferred on him from their own free motion,
without any application on his part: he expressed his hopes that they
would assist him in the exercise of it: he made it a condition of his
acceptance, that the other lords who were appointed to be of his council,
should also accept of the trust, and should exercise it; and he required,
that all the powers of his office should be specified and defined by act
of parliament. This moderation of Richard was certainly very unusual and
very amiable; yet was it attended with bad consequences in the present
juncture; and by giving time to the animosities of faction to rise and
ferment, it proved the source of all those furious wars and commotions
which ensued.
The enemies of the duke of York soon found it in their power to make
advantage of his excessive caution. Henry being so far recovered from his
distemper, as to carry the appearance of exercising the royal power, they
moved him to resume his authority, to annul the protectorship of the duke
to release Somerset from the Tower,[*] and to commit the administration
into the hands of that nobleman.
1455.
Richard, sensible of the dangers which might attend his former acceptance
of the parliamentary commission, should he submit to the annulling of it,
levied an army; but still without advancing any pretensions to the crown.
He complained only of the king’s ministers, and demanded a reformation of
the government. A battle was fought at St. Albans, in which the Yorkists
were superior, and, without suffering any material loss, slew about five
thousand of their enemies; among whom were the duke of Somerset, the earl
of Northumberland, the earl of Stafford, eldest son of the duke of
Buckingham, Lord Clifford, and many other persons of distinction.[**] The
king himself fell into the hands of the duke of York, who treated him with
great respect and tenderness: he was only obliged (which he regarded as no
hardship) to commit the whole authority of the crown into the hands of his
rival.
This was the first blood spilt in that fatal quarrel which was not
finished in less than a course of thirty years, which was signalized by
twelve pitched battles, which opened a scene of extraordinary fierceness
and cruelty, is computed to have cost the lives of eighty princes of the
blood, and almost entirely annihilated the ancient nobility of England.
The strong attachments, which, at that time, men of the same kindred bore
to each other, and the vindictive spirit, which was considered as a point
of honor, rendered the great families implacable in their resentments, and
every moment widened the breach between the parties. Yet affairs did not
immediately proceed to the last extremities; the nation was kept some time
in suspense; the vigor and spirit of Queen Margaret, supporting her small
power, still proved a balance to the great authority of Richard, which was
checked by his irresolute temper. A parliament, which was soon after
assembled, plainly discovered, by the contrariety of their proceedings,
the contrariety of the motives by which they were actuated. They granted
the Yorkists a general indemnity, and they restored the protectorship to
the duke, who, in accepting it, still persevered in all his former
precautions; but at the same time they renewed their oaths of fealty to
Henry, and fixed the continuance of the protectorship to the majority of
his son Edward, who was vested with the usual dignities of prince of
Wales, duke of Cornwall, and earl of Chester. The only decisive act passed
in this parliament, was a full resumption of all the grants which had been
made since the death of Henry V., and which had reduced the crown to great
poverty.
1456.
It was not found difficult to wrest power from hands so little tenacious
as those of the duke of York. Margaret, availing herself of that prince’s
absence, produced her husband before the house of lords; and as his state
of health permitted him at that time to act his part with some tolerable
decency, he declared his intentions of resuming the government, and of
putting an end to Richard’s authority. This measure, being unexpected, was
not opposed by the contrary party; the house of lords, who were many of
them disgusted with the late act of resumption, assented to Henry’s
proposal; and the king was declared to be reinstated in sovereign
authority. Even the duke of York acquiesced in this irregular act of the
peers, and no disturbance ensued. But that prince’s claim to the crown was
too well known, and the steps which he had taken to promote it were too
evident ever to allow sincere trust and confidence to have place between
the parties.
1457.
The court retired to Coventry, and invited the duke of York and the earls
of Salisbury and Warwick to attend the king’s person. When they were on
the road, they received intelligence that designs were formed against
their liberties and lives. They immediately separated themselves; Richard
withdrew to his castle of Wigmore; Salisbury to Middleham, in Yorkshire,
and Warwick to his government of Calais, which had been committed to him
after the battle of St. Albans, and which, as it gave him the command of
the only regular military force maintained by England, was of the utmost
importance in the present juncture. Still, men of peaceable dispositions,
and among the rest Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury, thought it not too
late to interpose with their good offices, in order to prevent that
effusion of blood, with which the kingdom was threatened; and the awe in
which each party stood of the other, rendered the mediation for some time
successful. It was agreed that all the great leaders on both sides should
meet in London, and be solemnly reconciled.
1458.
The duke of York and his partisans came thither with numerous retinues,
and took up their quarters near each other for mutual security. The
leaders of the Lancastrian party used the same precaution. The mayor, at
the head of five thousand men, kept a strict watch, night and day; and was
extremely vigilant in maintaining peace between them.[*]
Terms were adjusted, which removed not the ground of difference. An
outward reconciliation only was procured; and in order to notify this
accord to the whole people, a solemn procession to St. Paul’s was
appointed, where the duke of York led Queen Margaret, and a leader of one
party marched hand in hand with a leader of the opposite. The less real
cordiality prevailed, the more were the exterior demonstrations of amity
redoubled. But it was evident, that a contest for a crown could not thus
be peaceably accommodated; that each party watched only for an opportunity
of subverting the other; and that much blood must yet be spilt, ere the
nation could be restored to perfect tranquillity, or enjoy a settled and
established government.
1459.
Even the smallest accident, without any formed design, was sufficient, in
the present disposition of men’s minds, to dissolve the seeming harmony
between the parties; and had the intentions of the leaders been ever so
amicable they would have found it difficult to restrain the animosity of
their followers. One of the king’s retinue insulted one of the earl of
Warwick’s: their companions on both sides took part in the quarrel: a
fierce combat ensued: the earl apprehended his life to be aimed at: he
fled to his government of Calais; and both parties, in every county of
England, openly made preparations for deciding the contest by war and
arms.
The earl of Salisbury, marching to join the duke of York, was overtaken at
Blore Heath, on the borders of Staffordshire, by Lord Audley, who
commanded much superior forces; and a small rivulet with steep banks ran
between the armies. Salisbury here supplied his defect in numbers by
stratagem, a refinement of which there occur few instances in the English
civil wars, where a headlong courage, more than military conduct, is
commonly to be remarked. He feigned a retreat, and allured Audley to
follow him with precipitation; but when the van of the royal army had
passed the brook, Salisbury suddenly turned upon them; and partly by the
surprise, partly by the division, of the enemies’ forces, put this body to
rout: the example of flight was followed by the rest of the army: and
Salisbury, obtaining a complete victory, reached the general rendezvous of
the Yorkists at Ludlow.[*]
The earl of Warwick brought over to this rendezvous a choice body of
veterans from Calais, on whom, it was thought the fortune of the war would
much depend; but this reënforcement occasioned, in the issue, the
immediate ruin of the duke of York’s party. When the royal army
approached, and a general action was every hour expected, Sir Andrew
Trollop, who commanded the veterans, deserted to the king in the
night-time; and the Yorkists were so dismayed at this instance of
treachery, which made every man suspicious of his fellow, that they
separated next day without striking a stroke:[**] the duke fled to
Ireland: the earl of Warwick, attended by many of the other leaders,
escaped to Calais; where his great popularity among all orders of men,
particularly among the military, soon drew to him partisans, and rendered
his power very formidable. The friends of the house of York in England
kept themselves every where in readiness to rise on the first summons from
their leaders.
1460.
After meeting with some successes at sea, Warwick landed in Kent, with the
earl of Salisbury, and the earl of Marche, eldest son of the duke of York;
and being met by the primate, by Lord Cobham, and other persons of
distinction, he marched, amidst the acclamations of the people, to London.
The city immediately opened its gates to him; and his troops increasing on
every day’s march, he soon found himself in a condition to face the royal
army, which hastened from Coventry to attack him. The battle was fought at
Northampton; and was soon decided against the royalists by the infidelity
of Lord Grey of Ruthin, who, commanding Henry’s van, deserted to the enemy
during the heat of action, and spread a consternation through the troops.
The duke of Buckingham, the earl of Shrewsbury, the Lords Beaumont and
Egremont, and Sir William Lucie were killed in the action or pursuit: the
slaughter fell chiefly on the gentry and nobility; the common people were
spared by orders of the earls of Warwick and Marche.[***]
Henry himself, that empty shadow of a king, was again taken prisoner; and
as the innocence and simplicity of his manners, which bore the appearance
of sanctity, had procured him the tender regard of the people,[*] the earl
of Warwick and the other leaders took care to distinguish themselves by
their respectful demeanor towards him.
A parliament was summoned in the king’s name, and met at Westminster;
where the duke soon after appeared from Ireland. This prince had never
hitherto advanced openly any claim to the crown: he had only complained of
ill ministers, and demanded a redress of grievances; and even in the
present crisis, when the parliament was surrounded by his victorious army,
he showed such a regard to law and liberty, as is unusual during the
prevalence of a party in any civil dissensions; and was still less to be
expected in those violent and licentious times. He advanced towards the
throne; and being met by the archbishop of Canterbury, who asked him,
whether he had yet paid his respects to the king, he replied, that he knew
of none to whom he owed that title. He then stood near the throne,[**] and
addressing himself to the house of peers, he gave them a deduction of his
title by descent, mentioned the cruelties by which the house of Lancaster
had paved their way to sovereign power, insisted on the calamities which
had attended the government of Henry, exhorted them to return into the
right path, by doing justice to the lineal successor, and thus pleaded his
cause before them as his natural and legal judges.[***] This cool and
moderate manner of demanding a crown intimidated his friends and
encouraged his enemies: the lords remained in suspense;[****] and no one
ventured to utter a word on the occasion.
Richard, who had probably expected that the peers would have invited him
to place himself on the throne, was much disappointed at their silence;
but desiring them to reflect on what he had proposed to them, he departed
the house. The peers took the matter into consideration, with as much
tranquillity as if it had been a common subject of debate: they desired
the assistance of some considerable members among the commons in their
deliberations: they heard in several successive days, the reasons alleged
for the duke of York: they even ventured to propose objections to his
claim founded on former entails of the crown, and on the oaths of fealty
sworn to the house of Lancaster:[*] they also observed that as Richard had
all along borne the arms of York, not those of Clarence, he could not
claim as successor to the latter family: and after receiving answers to
these objections, derived from the violence and power by which the house
of Lancaster supported their present possession of the crown, they
proceeded to give a decision. Their sentence was calculated, as far as
possible, to please both parties: they declared the title of the duke of
York to be certain and indefeasible; but in consideration that Henry had
enjoyed the crown, without dispute or controversy, during the course of
thirty-eight years, they determined that he should continue to possess the
title and dignity during the remainder of his life; that the
administration of the government, meanwhile, should remain with Richard;
that he should be acknowledged the true and lawful heir of the monarchy;
that every one should swear to maintain his succession, and it should be
treason to attempt his life; and that all former settlements of the crown,
in this and the two last reigns, should be abrogated and rescinded.[**]
The duke acquiesced in this decision: Henry himself, being a prisoner,
could not oppose it: even if he had enjoyed his liberty, he would not
probably have felt any violent reluctance against it: and the act thus
passed with the unanimous consent of the whole legislative body. Though
the mildness of this compromise is chiefly to be ascribed to the
moderation of the duke of York, it is impossible not to observe in those
transactions visible marks of a higher regard to law, and of a more fixed
authority enjoyed by parliament, than has appeared in any former period of
English history.
It is probable that the duke, without employing either menaces or
violence, could have obtained from the commons a settlement more
consistent and uniform: but as many, if not all the members of the upper
house, had received grants, concession, or dignities, during the last
sixty years, when the house of Lancaster was possessed of the government,
they were afraid of invalidating their own titles by too sudden and
violent an overthrow of that family; and in thus temporizing between the
parties, they fixed the throne on a basis upon which it could not possibly
stand. The duke, apprehending his chief danger to arise from the genius
and spirit of Queen Margaret sought a pretence for banishing her the
kingdom: he sent her, in the king’s name, a summons to come immediately to
London; intending, in case of her disobedience, to proceed to extremities
against her. But the queen needed not this menace to excite her activity
in defending the rights of her family. After the defeat at Northampton,
she had fled with her infant son to Durham, thence to Scotland; but soon
returning, she applied to the northern barons, and employed every motive
to procure their assistance. Her affability, insinuation, and address,—qualities
in which she excelled,—her caresses, her promises, wrought a
powerful effect on every one who approached her: the admiration of her
great qualities was succeeded by compassion towards her helpless
condition: the nobility of that quarter, who regarded themselves as the
most warlike in the kingdom, were moved by indignation to find the
southern barons pretend to dispose of the crown and settle the government.
And that they might allure the people to their standard, they promised
them the spoils of all the provinces on the other side of the Trent. By
these means, the queen had collected an army twenty thousand strong, with
a celerity which was neither expected by her friends nor apprehended by
her enemies.
The duke of York, informed of her appearance in the north, hastened
thither with a body of five thousand men, to suppress, as he imagined, the
beginnings of an insurrection; when, on his arrival at Wakefield, he found
himself so much outnumbered by the enemy. He threw himself into Sandal
Castle, which was situated in the neighborhood; and he was advised by the
earl of Salisbury, and other prudent counsellors, to remain in that
fortress till his son, the earl of Marche, who was levying forces in the
borders of Wales, could advance to his assistance.[*] But the duke, though
deficient in political courage, possessed personal bravery in an eminent
degree; and notwithstanding his wisdom and experience, he thought that he
should be forever disgraced, if, by taking shelter behind walls, he should
for a moment resign the victory to a woman.
He descended into the plain, and offered battle to the enemy, which was
instantly accepted. The great inequality of numbers was sufficient alone
to decide the victory; but the queen, by sending a detachment, who fell on
the back of the duke’s army, rendered her advantage still more certain and
undisputed. The duke himself was killed in the action; and as his body was
found among the slain, the head was cut off by Margaret’s orders, and
fixed on the gates of York, with a paper crown upon it, in derision of his
pretended title. His son, the earl of Rutland, a youth of seventeen, was
brought to Lord Clifford; and that barbarian, in revenge of his father’s
death, who had perished in the battle of St. Albans, murdered in cool
blood, and with his own hands, this innocent prince, whose exterior
figure, as well as other accomplishments, are represented by historians as
extremely amiable. The earl of Salisbury was wounded and taken prisoner,
and immediately beheaded, with several other persons of distinction, by
martial law at Pomfret.[*] There fell near three thousand Yorkists in this
battle: the duke himself was greatly and justly lamented by his own party;
a prince who merited a better fate, and whose errors in conduct proceeded
entirely from such qualities as render him the more an object of esteem
and affection. He perished in the fiftieth year of his age, and left three
sons, Edward, George, and Richard, with three daughters, Anne, Elizabeth,
and Margaret.
1461.
The queen, after this important victory, divided her army. She sent the
smaller division, under Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, half brother to
the king, against Edward the new duke of York. She herself marched with
the larger division towards London, where the earl of Warwick had been
left with the command of the Yorkists. Pembroke was defeated by Edward at
Mortimer’s Cross, in Herefordshire, with the loss of near four thousand
men: his army was dispersed; he himself escaped by flight; but his father,
Sir Owen Tudor, was taken prisoner, and immediately beheaded by Edward’s
orders. This barbarous practice, being once begun, was continued by both
parties, from a spirit of revenge, which covered itself under the pretence
of retaliation.[**]
Margaret compensated this defeat by a victory which she obtained over the
earl of Warwick. That nobleman on the approach of the Lancastrians, led
out his army, reënforced by a strong body of the Londoners, who were
affectionate to his cause; and he gave battle to the queen at St. Albans.
While the armies were warmly engaged, Lovelace, who commanded a
considerable body of the Yorkists, withdrew from the combat; and this
treacherous conduct, of which there are many instances in those civil
wars, decided the victory in favor of the queen. About two thousand three
hundred of the vanquished perished in the battle and pursuit; and the
person of the king fell again into the hands of his own party. This weak
prince was sure to be almost equally a prisoner whichever faction had the
keeping of him; and scarce any more decorum was observed by one than by
the other, in their method of treating him. Lord Bonville, to whose care
he had been intrusted by the Yorkists, remained with him after the defeat,
on assurances of pardon given him by Henry: but Margaret, regardless of
her husband’s promise, immediately ordered the head of that nobleman to be
struck off by the executioner.[*] Sir Thomas Kiriel, a brave warrior, who
had signalized himself in the French wars, was treated in the same manner.
The queen made no great advantage of this victory: young Edward advanced
upon her from the other side; and collecting the remains of Warwick’s
army, was soon in a condition of giving her battle with superior forces.
She was sensible of her danger, while she lay between the enemy and the
city of London; and she found it necessary to retreat with her army to the
north.[**]
Edward entered the capital amidst the acclamations of the citizens, and
immediately opened a new scene to his party. This prince, in the bloom of
youth, remarkable for the beauty of this person, for his bravery, his
activity, his affability, and every popular quality, found himself so much
possessed of public favor, that, elated with the spirit natural to his
age, he resolved no longer to confine himself within those narrow limits
which his father had prescribed to himself, and which had been found by
experience so prejudicial to his cause. He determined to assume the name
and dignity of king; to insist openly on his claim; and thenceforth to
treat the opposite party as traitors and rebels to his lawful authority.
But as a national consent, or the appearance of it, still seemed,
notwithstanding his plausible title, requisite to precede this bold
measure, and as the assembling of a parliament might occasion too many
delays, and be attended with other inconveniences, he ventured to proceed
in a less regular manner, and to put it out of the power of his enemies to
throw obstacles in the way of his elevation. His army was ordered to
assemble in St. John’s Fields; great numbers of people surrounded them; an
harangue was pronounced to this mixed multitude, setting forth the title
of Edward, and inveighing against the tyranny and usurpation of the rival
family; and the people were then asked whether they would have Henry of
Lancaster for king. They unanimously exclaimed against the proposal. It
was then demanded whether they would accept of Edward, eldest son of the
late duke of York. They expressed their assent by loud and joyful
acclamations.[*] A great number of bishops, lords, magistrates, and other
persons of distinction were next assembled at Baynard’s Castle, who
ratified the popular election; and the new king was on the subsequent day
proclaimed in London, by the title of Edward IV.[**]
In this manner ended the reign of Henry VI., a monarch, who, while in his
cradle, had been proclaimed king both of France and England, and who began
his life with the most splendid prospects that any prince in Europe had
ever enjoyed. The revolution was unhappy for his people, as it was the
source of civil wars; but was almost entirely indifferent to Henry
himself, who was utterly incapable of exercising his authority, and who,
provided he personally met with good usage, was equally easy, as he was
equally enslaved, in the hands of his enemies and of his friends. His
weakness and his disputed title were the chief causes of the public
calamities: but whether his queen and his ministers were not also guilty
of some great abuses of power, it is not easy for us at this distance of
time to determine: there remain no proofs on record of any considerable
violation of the laws, except in the assassination of the duke of
Glocester, which was a private crime, formed no precedent, and was but too
much of a piece with the usual ferocity and cruelty of the times.
The most remarkable law which passed in this reign, was that for the due
election of members of parliament in counties. After the fall of the
feudal system, the distinction of tenures was in some measure lost; and
every freeholder, as well those who held of mesne lords, as the immediate
tenants of the crown, were by degrees admitted to give their votes at
elections. This innovation (for such it may probably be esteemed) was
indirectly confirmed by a law of Henry IV.[***] which gave right to such a
multitude of electors, as was the occasion of great disorder.
In the eighth and tenth of this king, therefore, laws were enacted,
limiting the electors to such as possessed forty shillings a year in land,
free from all burdens within the county.[*] This sum was equivalent to
near twenty pounds a year of our present money, and it were to be wished,
that the spirit, as well as letter, of this law had been maintained.
The preamble of the statute is remarkable: “Whereas the elections of
knights have of late, in many counties of England, been made by outrageous
and excessive numbers of people, many of them of small substance and
value, yet pretending to a right equal to the best knights and esquires;
whereby manslaughters, riots, batteries, and divisions among the gentlemen
and other people of the same counties, shall very likely rise and be,
unless due remedy be provided in this behalf, etc.” We may learn from
these expressions, what an important matter the election of a member of
parliament was now become in England: that assembly was beginning in this
period to assume great authority: the commons had it much in their power
to enforce the execution of the laws; and if they failed of success in
this particular, it proceeded less from any exorbitant power of the crown,
than from the licentious spirit of the aristocracy, and perhaps from the
rude education of the age, and their own ignorance of the advantages
resulting from a regular administration of justice.
When the duke of York, the earls of Salisbury and Warwick, fled the
kingdom upon the desertion of their troops, a parliament was summoned at
Coventry in 1460, by which they were all attainted. This parliament seems
to have been very irregularly constituted, and scarcely deserves the name;
insomuch, that an act passed in it, “that all such knights of any county,
as were returned by virtue of the king’s letters, without any other
election, should be valid; and that no sheriff should, for returning them,
incur the penalty of the statute of Henry IV.”[**] All the acts of that
parliament were afterwards reversed; “because it was unlawfully summoned,
and the knights and barons not duly chosen.”[***]
The parliaments in this reign, instead of relaxing their vigilance against
the usurpations of the court of Rome, endeavored to enforce the former
statutes enacted for that purpose. The commons petitioned, that no
foreigner should be capable of any church preferment, and that the patron
might be allowed to present anew upon the non-residence of any
incumbent:[*] but the king eluded these petitions. Pope Martin wrote him a
severe letter against the statute of provisors; which he calls an
abominable law, that would infallibly damn every one who observed it.[**]
The cardinal of Winchester was legate; and as he was also a kind of prime
minister, and immensely rich from the profits of his clerical dignities,
the parliament became jealous lest he should extend the papal power; and
they protested, that the cardinal should absent himself in all affairs and
councils of the king, whenever the pope or see of Rome was touched
upon.[***]
Permission was given by parliament to export corn when it was at low
prices; wheat at six shillings and eightpence a quarter, money of that
age; barley at three shillings and fourpence.[****] It appears from these
prices, that corn still remained at near half its present value; though
other commodities were much cheaper. The inland commerce of corn was also
opened in the eighteenth of the king, by allowing any collector of the
customs to grant a license of carrying it from one county to
another.[*****] The same year a kind of navigation act was proposed with
regard to all places within the Straits; but the king rejected it.[******]
The first instance of debt contracted upon parliamentary security occurs
in this reign.[*******] The commencement of this pernicious practice
deserves to be noted; a practice the more likely to become pernicious, the
more a nation advances in opulence and credit. The ruinous effects of it
are now become apparent, and threaten the very existence of the nation.
CHAPTER XXII.
EDWARD IV.
1461.
Young Edward, now in his twentieth year, was of a temper well fitted to
make his way through such a scene of war, havoc, and devastation, as must
conduct him to the full possession of that crown, which he claimed from
hereditary right, but which he had assumed from the tumultuary election
alone of his own party. He was bold, active, enterprising; and his
hardness of heart and severity of character rendered him impregnable to
all those movements of compassion which might relax his vigor in the
prosecution of the most bloody revenges upon his enemies. The very
commencement of his reign gave symptoms of his sanguinary disposition. A
tradesman of London, who kept shop at the sign of the Crown, having said
that he would make his son heir to the crown; this harmless pleasantry was
interpreted to be spoken in derision of Edward’s assumed title; and he was
condemned and executed for the offence.[*] Such an act of tyranny was a
proper prelude to the events which ensued. The scaffold, as well as the
field, incessantly streamed with the noblest blood of England, spilt in
the quarrel between the two contending families, whose animosity was now
become implacable. The people, divided in their affections, took different
symbols of party: the partisans of the house of Lancaster chose the red
rose as their mark of distinction;[**] those of York were denominated from
the white; and these civil wars were thus known over Europe by the name of
the quarrel between the two roses.
The license in which Queen Margaret had been obliged to indulge her
troops, infused great terror and aversion into the city of London, and all
the southern parts of the kingdom; and as she there expected an obstinate
resistance, she had prudently retired northwards among her own partisans.
The same license, joined to the zeal of faction, soon brought great
multitudes to her standard; and she was able, in a few days, to assemble
an army sixty thousand strong in Yorkshire. The king and the earl of
Warwick hastened, with an army of forty thousand men, to check her
progress; and when they reached Pomfret, they despatched a body of troops,
under the command of Lord Fitzwalter, to secure the passage of Ferrybridge
over the River Are, which lay between them and the enemy. Fitzwalter took
possession of the post assigned him; but was not able to maintain it
against Lord Clifford, who attacked him with superior numbers. The
Yorkists were chased back with great slaughter; and Lord Fitzwalter
himself was slain in the action.[*] The earl of Warwick, dreading the
consequences of this disaster, at a time when a decisive action was every
hour expected, immediately ordered his horse to be brought him, which he
stabbed before the whole army; and kissing the hilt of his sword, swore
that he was determined to share the fate of the meanest soldier.[**] And
to show the greater security, a proclamation was at the same time issued,
giving to every one full liberty to retire, but menacing the severest
punishment to those who should discover any symptoms of cowardice in the
ensuing battle.[***] Lord Falconberg was sent to recover the post which
had been lost: he passed the river some miles above Ferrybridge, and
falling unexpectedly on Lord Clifford, revenged the former disaster by the
defeat of the party and the death of their leader.[****]
The hostile armies met at Touton; and a fierce and bloody battle ensued.
While the Yorkists were advancing to the charge, there happened a great
fall of snow, which, driving full in the faces of their enemies, blinded
them; and this advantage was improved by a stratagem of Lord Falconberg’s.
That nobleman ordered some infantry to advance before the line, and, after
having sent a volley of flight-arrows, as they were called, amidst the
enemy, immediately to retire. The Lancastrians, imagining that they were
gotten within reach of the opposite army, discharged all their arrows,
which thus fell short of the Yorkists.[*] After the quivers of the enemy
were emptied, Edward advanced his line, and did execution with impunity on
the dismayed Lancastrians: the bow, however, was soon laid aside, and the
sword decided the combat, which ended in a total victory on the side of
the Yorkists. Edward issued orders to give no quarter.[**] The routed army
was pursued to Tadcaster with great bloodshed and confusion; and above
thirty-six thousand men are computed to have fallen in the battle and
pursuit:[***] among these were the earl of Westmoreland, and his brother
Sir John Nevil, the earl of Northumberland, the Lords Dacres and Welles,
and Sir Andrew Trollop.[****] The earl of Devonshire, who was now engaged
in Henry’s party, was brought a prisoner to Edward; and was soon after
beheaded by martial law at York. His head was fixed on a pole erected over
a gate of that city; and the head of Duke Richard and that of the earl of
Salisbury were taken down, and buried with their bodies. Henry and
Margaret had remained at York during the action, but learning the defeat
of their army, and being sensible that no place in England could now
afford them shelter, they fled with great precipitation into Scotland.
They were accompanied by the duke of Exeter, who, though he had married
Edward’s sister, had taken part with the Lancastrians; and by Henry, duke
of Somerset, who had commanded in the unfortunate battle of Touton, and
who was the son of that nobleman killed in the first battle of St. Albans.
Notwithstanding the great animosity which prevailed between the kingdoms,
Scotland had never exerted itself with vigor, to take advantage either of
the wars which England carried on with France, or of the civil commotions
which arose between the contending families. James I., more laudably
employed in civilizing his subjects, and taming them to the salutary yoke
of law and justice, avoided all hostilities with foreign nations; and
though he seemed interested to maintain a balance between France and
England, he gave no further assistance to the former kingdom in its
greatest distresses, than permitting, and perhaps encouraging, his
subjects to enlist in the French service. After the murder of that
excellent prince, the minority of his son and successor, James II., and
the distractions incident to it, retained the Scots in the same state of
neutrality; and the superiority visibly acquired by France, rendered it
then unnecessary for her ally to interpose in her defence. But when the
quarrel commenced between the houses of York and Lancaster, and became
absolutely incurable but by the total extinction of one party, James, who
had now risen to man’s estate, was tempted to seize the opportunity, and
he endeavored to recover those places which the English had formerly
conquered from his ancestors. He laid siege to the Castle of Roxburgh in
1460, and had provided himself with a small train of artillery for that
enterprise: but his cannon were so ill framed, that one of them burst as
he was firing it, and put an end to his life in the flower of his age. His
son and successor, James III., was also a minor on his accession: the
usual distractions ensued in the government: the queen dowager, Anne of
Gueldres, aspired to the regency: the family of Douglas opposed her
pretensions: and Queen Margaret, when she fled into Scotland, found there
a people little less divided by faction, than those by whom she had been
expelled. Though she pleaded the connections between the royal family of
Scotland and the house of Lancaster, by the young king’s grandmother, a
daughter of the earl of Somerset, she could engage the Scottish council to
go no further than to express their good wishes in her favor; but on her
offer to deliver to them immediately the important fortress of Berwick,
and to contract her son in marriage with a sister of King James, she found
a better reception; and the Scots promised the assistance of their arms to
reinstate her family upon the throne.[*] But as the danger from that
quarter seemed not very urgent to Edward, he did not pursue the fugitive
king and queen into their retreat; but returned to London, where a
parliament was summoned for settling the government.
On the meeting of this assembly, Edward found the good effects of his
vigorous measure in assuming the crown, as well as of his victory at
Touton, by which he had secured it;[**] the parliament no longer hesitated
between the two families or proposed any of those ambiguous decisions
which could only serve to perpetuate and inflame the animosities of party.
They recognized the title of Edward, by hereditary descent, through the
family of Mortimer; and declared that he was king by right, from the death
of his father, who had also the same lawful title; and that he was in
possession of the crown from the day that he assumed the government,
tendered to him by the acclamations of the people.[*] They expressed their
abhorrence of the usurpation and intrusion of the house of Lancaster,
particularly that of the earl of Derby, otherwise called Henry IV.; which,
they said, had been attended with every kind of disorder, the murder of
the sovereign, and the oppression of the subject. They annulled every
grant which had passed in those reigns; they reinstated the king in all
the possessions which had belonged to the crown at the pretended
deposition of Richard II.; and though they confirmed judicial deeds and
the decrees of inferior courts, they reversed all attainders passed in any
pretended parliament; particularly the attainder of the earl of Cambridge,
the king’s grandfather; as well as that of the earls of Salisbury and
Glocester, and of Lord Lumley, who had been forfeited for adhering to
Richard II.[**]
Many of these votes were the result of the usual violence of party: the
common sense of mankind, in more peaceable times, repealed them: and the
statutes of the house of Lancaster, being the deeds of an established
government, and enacted by princes long possessed of authority, have
always been held as valid and obligatory. The parliament, however, in
subverting such deep foundations, had still the pretence of replacing the
government on its ancient and natural basis: but in their subsequent
measures, they were more guided by revenge, at least by the views of
convenience, than by the maxims of equity and justice. They passed an act
of forfeiture and attainder against Henry VI. and Queen Margaret and their
infant son Prince Edward: the same act was extended to the dukes of
Somerset and Exeter; to the earls of Northumberland, Devonshire, Pembroke,
Wilts; to the Viscount Beaumont; the Lords Roos, Nevil, Clifford, Welles,
Dacre, Gray of Rugemont, Hungerford; to Alexander Hedie, Nicholas Latimer,
Edmond Mountfort, John Heron, and many other persons of distinction.[***]
The parliament vested the estates of all these attainted persons in the
crown, though their sole crime was the adhering to a prince whom every
individual of the parliament had long recognized, and whom that very king
himself, who was now seated on the throne, had acknowledged and obeyed as
his lawful sovereign.
The necessity of supporting the government established will more fully
justify some other acts of violence, though the method of conducting them
may still appear exceptionable. John, earl of Oxford, and his son Aubrey
de Vere were detected in a correspondence with Margaret, were tried by
martial law before the constable, were condemned and executed.[*] Sir
William Tyrrel, Sir Thomas Tudenham, and John Montgomery were convicted in
the same arbitrary court; were executed, and their estates forfeited. This
introduction of martial law into civil government was a high strain of
prerogative; which, were it not for the violence of the times, would
probably have appeared exceptionable to a nation so jealous of their
liberties as the English were now become.[**] 18 It was impossible but
such a great and sudden revolution must leave the roots of discontent and
dissatisfaction in the subject, which would require great art, or, in lieu
of it, great violence, to extirpate them. The latter was more suitable to
the genius of the nation in that uncultivated age.
But the new establishment still seemed precarious and uncertain; not only
from the domestic discontents of the people, but from the efforts of
foreign powers. Lewis, the eleventh of the name, had succeeded to his
father, Charles, in 1460; and was led, from the obvious motives of
national interest, to feed the flames of civil discord among such
dangerous neighbors, by giving support to the weaker party. But the
intriguing and politic genius of this prince was here checked by itself:
having attempted to subdue the independent spirit of his own vassals, he
had excited such an opposition at home, as prevented him from making all
the advantage, which the opportunity afforded, of the dissensions among
the English.
1462.
He sent, however, a small body to Henry’s assistance under Varenne,
seneschal of Normandy;[***] who landed in Northumberland, and got
possession of the Castle of Alnwick; but as the indefatigable Margaret
went in person to France, where she solicited larger supplies and promised
Lewis to deliver up Calais, if her family should by his means be restored
to the throne of England; he was induced to send along with her a body of
two thousand men at arms, which enabled her to take the field, and to make
an inroad into England.
1464.
Though reënforced by a numerous train of adventurers from Scotland, and by
many partisans of the family of Lancaster she received a check at
Hedgley-more from Lord Montacute, or Montague, brother to the earl of
Warwick, and warden of the east marches between Scotland and England.
Montague was so encouraged with this success, that, while a numerous
reënforcement was on their march to join him by orders from Edward, he yet
ventured, with his own troops alone, to attack the Lancastrians at Hexham;
and he obtained a complete victory over them. The duke of Somerset, the
Lords Roos and Hungerford, were taken in the pursuit, and immediately
beheaded by martial law at Hexham. Summary justice was in like manner
executed at Newcastle on Sir Humphrey Nevil, and several other gentlemen.
All those who were spared in the field, suffered on the scaffold; and the
utter extermination of their adversaries was now become the plain object
of the York party; a conduct which received but too plausible an apology
from the preceding practice of the Lancastrians.
The fate of the unfortunate royal family, after this defeat, was singular.
Margaret, flying with her son into a forest, where she endeavored to
conceal herself, was beset, during the darkness of the night, by robbers,
who, either ignorant or regardless of her quality, despoiled her of her
rings and jewels, and treated her with the utmost indignity. The partition
of this rich booty raised a quarrel among them; and while their attention
was thus engaged, she took the opportunity of making her escape with her
son into the thickest of the forest where she wandered for some time,
overspent with hunger and fatigue, and sunk with terror and affliction.
While in this wretched condition, she saw a robber approach with his naked
sword; and finding that she had no means of escape, she suddenly embraced
the resolution of trusting entirely for protection to his faith and
generosity. She advanced towards him; and presenting to him the young
prince, called out to him, “Here, my friend, I commit to your care the
safety of your king’s son.” The man, whose humanity and generous spirit
had been obscured, not entirely lost, by his vicious course of life, was
struck with the singularity of the event, was charmed with the confidence
reposed in him, and vowed, not only to abstain from all injury against the
princess, but to devote himself entirely to her service.[*] By his means
she dwelt some time concealed in the forest, and was at last conducted to
the sea-coast, whence she made her escape into Flanders. She passed thence
into her father’s court, where she lived several years in privacy and
retirement. Her husband was not so fortunate or so dexterous in finding
the means of escape. Some of his friends took him under their protection,
and conveyed him into Lancashire, where he remained concealed during a
twelvemonth; but he was at last detected, delivered up to Edward, and
thrown into the Tower.[**] The safety of his person was owing less to the
generosity of his enemies, than to the contempt which they had entertained
of his courage and his understanding.
The imprisonment of Henry, the expulsion of Margaret, the execution and
confiscation of all the most eminent Lancastrians, seemed to give full
security to Edward’s government; whose title by blood, being now
recognized by parliament, and universally submitted to by the people, was
no longer in danger of being impeached by any antagonist. In this
prosperous situation, the king delivered himself up, without control, to
those pleasures which his youth, his high fortune, and his natural temper
invited him to enjoy; and the cares of royalty were less attended to than
the dissipation of amusement, or the allurements of passion. The cruel and
unrelenting spirit of Edward, though inured to the ferocity of civil wars,
was at the same time extremely devoted to the softer passions, which,
without mitigating his severe temper, maintained a great influence over
him, and shared his attachment with the pursuits of ambition and the
thirst of military glory. During the present interval of peace, he lived
in the most familiar and sociable manner with his subjects,[***]
particularly with the Londoners; and the beauty of his person, as well as
the gallantry of his address, which, even unassisted by his royal dignity,
would have rendered him acceptable to the fair, facilitated all his
applications for their favor.
This easy and pleasurable course of life augmented every day his
popularity among all ranks of men: he was the peculiar favorite of the
young and gay of both sexes. The disposition of the English little
addicted to jealousy, kept them from taking umbrage at these liberties:
and his indulgence in amusements, while it gratified his inclination, was
thus become, without design, a means of supporting and securing his
government. But as it is difficult to confine the ruling passion within
strict rules of prudence, the amorous temper of Edward led him into a
snare, which proved fatal to his repose, and to the stability of his
throne.
Jaqueline of Luxembourg, duchess of Bedford, had, after her husband’s
death, so far sacrificed her ambition to love, that she espoused, in
second marriage, Sir Richard Woodeville a private gentleman, to whom she
bore several children; and among the rest, Elizabeth, who was remarkable
for the grace and beauty of her person, as well as for other amiable
accomplishments. This young lady had married Sir John Gray of Groby, by
whom she had children; and her husband being slain in the second battle of
St. Albans, fighting on the side of Lancaster, and his estate being for
that reason confiscated, his widow retired to live with her father, at his
seat of Grafton, in Northamptonshire. The king came accidentally to the
house after a hunting party, in order to pay a visit to the duchess of
Bedford; and as the occasion seemed favorable for obtaining some grace
from this gallant monarch, the young widow flung herself at his feet, and
with many tears entreated him to take pity on her impoverished and
distressed children. The sight of so much beauty in affliction strongly
affected the amorous Edward; love stole sensibly into his heart under the
guise of compassion; and her sorrow, so becoming a virtuous matron, made
his esteem and regard quickly correspond to his affection. He raised her
from the ground with assurances of favor; he found his passion increase
every moment, by the conversation of the amiable object; and he was soon
reduced, in his turn, to the posture and style of a supplicant at the feet
of Elizabeth. But the lady, either averse to dishonorable love from a
sense of duty, or perceiving that the impression which she had made was so
deep as to give her hopes of obtaining the highest elevation, obstinately
refused to gratify his passion; and all the endearments, caresses, and
importunities of the young and amiable Edward proved fruitless against her
rigid and inflexible virtue. His passion, irritated by opposition, and
increased by his veneration for such honorable sentiments carried him at
last beyond all bounds of reason and he offered to share his throne, as
well as his heart, with the woman whose beauty of person and dignity of
character seemed so well to entitle her to both. The marriage was
privately celebrated at Grafton:[**] the secret was carefully kept for
some time: no one suspected that so libertine a prince could sacrifice so
much to a romantic passion; and there were, in particular, strong reasons,
which, at that time, rendered this step, to the highest degree, dangerous
and imprudent.
The king, desirous to secure his throne, as well by the prospect of issue
as by foreign alliances, had, a little before, determined to make
application to some neighboring princess, and he had cast his eye on Bona
of Savoy, sister to the queen of France, who, he hoped, would by her
marriage insure him the friendship of that power, which was alone both
able and inclined to give support and assistance to his rival. To render
the negotiation more successful, the earl of Warwick had been despatched
to Paris, where the princess then resided; he had demanded Bona in
marriage for the king; his proposals had been accepted; the treaty was
fully concluded; and nothing remained but the ratification of the terms
agreed on, and the bringing over the princess to England.[**] But when the
secret of Edward’s marriage broke out, the haughty earl, deeming himself
affronted, both by being employed in this fruitless negotiation, and by
being kept a stranger to the king’s intentions, who had owed every thing
to his friendship, immediately returned to England, inflamed with rage and
indignation. The influence of passion over so young a man as Edward, might
have served as an excuse for his imprudent conduct, had he deigned to
acknowledge his error, or had pleaded his weakness as an apology; but his
faulty shame or pride prevented him from so much as mentioning the matter
to Warwick; and that nobleman was allowed to depart the court, full of the
same ill humor and discontent which he brought to it.
1466.
Every incident now tended to widen the breach between the king and this
powerful subject. The queen, who lost not her influence by marriage, was
equally solicitous to draw every grace and favor to her own friends and
kindred, and to exclude those of the earl, whom she regarded as her
mmortal enemy. Her father was created earl of Rivers: he was made
treasurer in the room of Lord Mountjoy:[*] he was invested in the office
of constable for life; and his son received the survivance of that high
dignity.[**] The same young nobleman was married to the only daughter of
Lord Scales, enjoyed the great estate of that family, and had the title of
Scales conferred upon him. Catharine, the queen’s sister, was married to
the young duke of Buckingham, who was a ward of the crown:[***] Mary,
another of her sisters espoused William Herbert, created earl of
Huntingdon: Anne, a third sister, was given in marriage to the son and
heir of Gray, Lord Ruthyn, created earl of Kent.[****] The daughter and
heir of the duke of Exeter, who was also the king’s niece, was contracted
to Sir Thomas Gray, one of the queen’s sons by her former husband; and as
Lord Montague was treating of a marriage between his son and this lady,
the preference given to young Gray was deemed an injury and affront to the
whole family of Nevil.
The earl of Warwick could not suffer with patience the least diminution of
that credit which he had long enjoyed, and which he thought he had merited
by such important services. Though he had received so many grants from the
crown, that the revenue arising from them amounted, besides his
patrimonial estate, to eighty thousand crowns a year, according to the
computation of Philip de Comines,[*****] his ambitious spirit was still
dissatisfied, so long as he saw others surpass him in authority and
influence with the king.[******] Edward also, jealous of that power which
had supported him and which he himself had contributed still higher to
exalt, was well pleased to raise up rivals in credit to the earl of
Warwick; and he justified, by this political view, his extreme partiality
to the queen’s kindred. But the nobility of England, envying the sudden
growth of the Woodevilles,[*******] were more inclined to take part with
Warwick’s discontent, to whose grandeur they were already accustomed, and
who had reconciled them to his superiority by his gracious and popular
manners.
And as Edward obtained from parliament a general resumption of all grants,
which he had made since his accession, and which had extremely
impoverished the crown,[*] this act, though it passed with some
exceptions, particularly one in favor of the earl of Warwick, gave a
general alarm to the nobility, and disgusted many, even zealous partisans
of the family of York.
But the most considerable associate that Warwick acquired to his party,
was George, duke of Clarence, the king’s second brother. This prince
deemed himself no less injured than the other grandees, by the
uncontrolled influence of the queen and her relations; and as his fortunes
were still left upon a precarious footing, while theirs were fully
established, this neglect, joined to his unquiet and restless spirit,
inclined him to give countenance to all the malecontents.[**] The
favorable opportunity of gaining him was espied by the earl of Warwick,
who offered him in marriage his elder daughter, and coheir of his immense
fortunes; a settlement which, as it was superior to any that the king
himself could confer upon him, immediately attached him to the party of
the earl.[***] Thus an extensive and dangerous combination was insensibly
formed against Edward and his ministry. Though the immediate object of the
malecontents was not to overturn the throne, it was difficult to foresee
the extremities to which they might be carried: and as opposition to
government was usually in those ages prosecuted by force of arms, civil
convulsions and disorders were likely to be soon the result of these
intrigues and confederacies.
While this cloud was gathering at home, Edward carried his views abroad,
and endeavored to secure himself against his factious nobility, by
entering into foreign alliances. The dark and dangerous ambition of Lewis
XI., the more it was known, the greater alarm it excited among his
neighbors and vassals; and as it was supported by great abilities, and
unrestrained by any principle of faith or humanity, they found no security
to themselves but by a jealous combination against him. Philip, duke of
Burgundy, was now dead: his rich and extensive dominions were devolved to
Charles, his only son, whose martial disposition acquired him the surname
of Bold, and whose ambition, more outrageous than that of Lewis, but
seconded by less power and policy, was regarded with a more favorable eye
by the other potentates of Europe.
The opposition of interests, and still more a natural antipathy of
character, produced a declared animosity between these bad princes; and
Edward was thus secure of the sincere attachment of either of them, for
whom he should choose to declare himself. The duke of Burgundy, being
descended by his mother, a daughter of Portugal, from John of Gaunt, was
naturally inclined to favor the house of Lancaster:[*] but this
consideration was easily overbalanced by political motives; and Charles,
perceiving the interests of that house to be extremely decayed in England,
sent over his natural brother, commonly called the Bastard of Burgundy, to
carry in his name proposals of marriage to Margaret, the king’s sister.
1468.
The alliance of Burgundy was more popular among the English than that of
France; the commercial interests of the two nations invited the princes to
a close union; their common jealousy of Lewis was a natural cement between
them; and Edward, pleased with strengthening himself by so potent a
confederate, soon concluded the alliance, and bestowed his sister upon
Charles.[**] A league, which Edward at the same time concluded with the
duke of Brittany, seemed both to increase his security, and to open to him
the prospect of rivalling his predecessors in those foreign conquests,
which, however short-lived and unprofitable, had rendered their reigns so
popular and illustrious.[***]
1469.
But whatever ambitious schemes the king might have built on these
alliances, they were soon frustrated by intestine commotions, which
engrossed all his attention. These disorders probably arose not
immediately from the intrigues of the earl of Warwick, but from accident,
aided by the turbulent spirit of the age, by the general humor of
discontent which that popular nobleman had instilled into the nation, and
perhaps by some remains of attachment to the house of Lancaster. The
hospital of St. Leonard’s, near York, had received, from an ancient grant
of King Athelstane, a right of levying a thrave of corn upon every
plough-land in the county; and as these charitable establishments are
liable to abuse, the country people complained, that the revenue of the
hospital was no longer expended for the relief of the poor, but was
secreted by the managers, and employed to their private purposes.
After long repining at the contribution, they refused payment:
ecclesiastical and civil censures were issued against them, their goods
were distrained, and their persons thrown into jail: till, as their ill
humor daily increased, they rose in arms; fell upon the officers of the
hospital, whom they put to the sword; and proceeded in a body, fifteen
thousand strong, to the gates of York. Lord Montague, who commanded in
those parts, opposed himself to their progress; and having been so
fortunate in a skirmish as to seize Robert Hulderne, their leader, he
ordered him immediately to be led to execution, according to the practice
of the times. The rebels, however, still continued in arms; and being soon
headed by men of greater distinction: Sir Henry Nevil, son of Lord
Latimer, and Sir John Coniers, they advanced southwards, and began to
appear formidable to government. Herbert, earl of Pembroke, who had
received that title on the forfeiture of Jasper Tudor, was ordered by
Edward to march against them at the head of a body of Welshmen; and he was
joined by five thousand archers, under the command of Stafford, earl of
Devonshire, who had succeeded in that title to the family of Courtney,
which had also been attainted. But a trivial difference about quarters
having begotten an animosity between these two noblemen, the earl of
Devonshire retired with his archers, and left Pembroke alone to encounter
the rebels. The two armies approached each other near Banbury; and
Pembroke, having prevailed in a skirmish, and having taken Sir John Nevil
prisoner, ordered him immediately to be put to death, without any form of
process. This execution enraged without terrifying the rebels: they
attacked the Welsh army, routed them, put them to the sword without mercy;
and having seized Pembroke, they took immediate revenge upon him for the
death of their leader. The king, imputing this misfortune to the earl of
Devonshire, who had deserted Pembroke, ordered him to be executed in a
like summary manner. But these speedy executions, or rather open murders,
did not stop there: the northern rebels, sending a party to Grafton,
seized the earl of Rivers and his son John; men who had become obnoxious
by their near relation to the king, and his partiality towards them: and
they were immediately executed by orders from Sir John Coniers.[*]
There is no part of English history since the conquest so obscure, so
uncertain, so little authentic or consistent, as that of the wars between
the two “roses:” historians differ about many material circumstances; some
events of the utmost consequence, in which they almost all agree, are
incredible, and contradicted by records;[*] 19 and it is remarkable,
that this profound darkness falls upon us just on the eve of the
restoration of letters, and when the art of printing was already known in
Europe. All we can distinguish with certainty through the deep cloud which
covers that period, is a scene of horror and bloodshed: savage manners,
arbitrary executions, and treacherous, dishonorable conduct in all
parties. There is no possibility, for instance, of accounting for the
views and intentions of the earl of Warwick at this time. It is agreed
that he resided, together with his son-in-law, the duke of Clarence, in
his government of Calais during the commencement of this rebellion; and
that his brother Montague acted with vigor against the northern rebels. We
may thence presume, that the insurrection had not proceeded from the
secret counsels and instigation of Warwick; though the murder committed by
the rebels on the earl of Rivers, his capital enemy, forms, on the other
hand, a violent presumption against him. He and Clarence came over to
England, offered their service to Edward, were received without any
suspicion, were intrusted by him in the highest commands,[**] and still
persevered in their fidelity. Soon after, we find the rebels quieted and
dispersed by a general pardon granted by Edward from the advice of the
earl of Warwick: but why so courageous a prince, if secure of Warwick’s
fidelity, should have granted a general pardon to men who had been guilty
of such violent and personal outrages against him, is not intelligible;
nor why that nobleman, if unfaithful, should have endeavored to appease a
rebellion of which he was able to make such advantages. But it appears,
that after this insurrection, there was an interval of peace, during which
the king loaded the family of Nevil with honors and favors of the highest
nature: he made Lord Montague a marquis, by the same name: he created his
son George duke of Bedford;[***] he publicly declared his intention of
marrying that young nobleman to his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who, as he
had yet no sons, was presumptive heir of the crown: yet we find that soon
after, being invited to a feast by the archbishop of York, a younger
brother of Warwick and Montague, he entertained a sudden suspicion that
they intended to seize his person or to murder him: and he abruptly left
the entertainment.[****]
1470.
Soon after, there broke out another rebellion, which is as unaccountable
as all the preceding events; chiefly because no sufficient reason is
assigned for it, and because, so far as appears, the family of Nevil had
no hand in exciting and fomenting it. It arose in Lincolnshire, and was
headed by Sir Robert Welles, son to the lord of that name. The army of the
rebels amounted to thirty thousand men; but Lord Welles himself, far from
giving countenance to them, fled into a sanctuary, in order to secure his
person against the king’s anger or suspicions. He was allured from this
retreat by a promise of safety; and was soon after, notwithstanding this
assurance, beheaded, along with Sir Thomas Dymoc, by orders from
Edward.[*] The king fought a battle with the rebels, defeated them, took
Sir Robert Welles and Sir Thomas Launde prisoners, and ordered them
immediately to be beheaded.
Edward, during these transactions, had entertained so little jealousy of
the earl of Warwick or duke of Clarence, that he sent them with
commissions of array to levy forces against the rebels:[**] but these
malecontents, as soon as they left the court, raised troops in their own
name, issued declarations against the government, and complained of
grievances, oppressions, and bad ministers. The unexpected defeat of
Welles disconcerted all their measures; and they retired northwards into
Lancashire, where they expected to be joined by Lord Stanley, who had
married the earl of Warwick’s sister. But as that nobleman refused all
concurrence with them, and as Lord Montague also remained quiet in
Yorkshire, they were obliged to disband their army, and to fly into
Devonshire, where they embarked and made sail towards Calais.[***]
The deputy governor, whom Warwick had left at Calais, was one Vaucler, a
Gascon, who, seeing the earl return in this miserable condition, refused
him admittance; and would not so much as permit the duchess of Clarence to
land, though, a few days before, she had been delivered on shipboard of a
son, and was at that time extremely disordered by sickness. With
difficulty he would allow a few flagons of wine to be carried to the ship
for the use of the ladies: but as he was a man of sagacity, and well
acquainted with the revolutions to which England was subject, he secretly
apologized to Warwick for this appearance of infidelity, and represented
it as proceeding entirely from zeal for his service. He said that the
fortress was ill supplied with provisions; that he could not depend on the
attachment of the garrison; that the inhabitants, who lived by the English
commerce, would certainly declare for the established government; that the
place was at present unable to resist the power of England on the one
hand, and that of the duke of Burgundy on the other; and that, by seeming
to declare for Edward, he would acquire the confidence of that prince, and
still keep it in his power, when it should become safe and prudent, to
restore Calais to its ancient master.[*] It is uncertain whether Warwick
was satisfied with this apology, or suspected a double infidelity in
Vaucler; but he feigned to be entirely convinced by him; and having seized
some Flemish vessels which he found lying off Calais, he immediately made
sail towards France.
The king of France, uneasy at the close conjunction between Edward and the
duke of Burgundy, received with the greatest demonstrations of regard the
unfortunate Warwick,[**] with whom he had formerly maintained a secret
correspondence, and whom he hoped still to make his instrument in
overturning the government of England, and reëstablishing the house of
Lancaster.
No animosity was ever greater than that which had long prevailed between
that house and the earl of Warwick. His father had been executed by orders
from Margaret: he himself had twice reduced Henry to captivity, had
banished the queen, had put to death all their most zealous partisans
either in the field or on the scaffold, and had occasioned innumerable
ills to that unhappy family. For this reason, believing that such
inveterate rancor could never admit of any cordial reconciliation, he had
not mentioned Henry’s name when he took arms against Edward; and he rather
endeavored to prevail by means of his own adherents, than revive a party
which he sincerely hated. But his present distresses and the entreaties of
Lewis made him hearken to terms of accommodation; and Margaret being sent
for from Angers, where she then resided, an agreement was, from common
interest, soon concluded between them. It was stipulated, that Warwick
should espouse the cause of Henry, and endeavor to restore him to liberty,
and to reëstablish him on the throne; that the administration of the
government, during the minority of young Edward, Henry’s son, should be
intrusted conjointly to the earl of Warwick and the duke of Clarence; that
Prince Edward should marry the Lady Anne, second daughter of that
nobleman; and that the crown, in case of the failure of male issue in that
prince, should descend to the duke of Clarence, to the entire exclusion of
King Edward and his posterity. Never was confederacy, on all sides, less
natural, or more evidently the work of necessity: but Warwick hoped, that
all former passions of the Lancastrians might be lost in present political
views; and that, at worst, the independent power of his family, and the
affections of the people, would suffice to give him security, and enable
him to exact the full performance of all the conditions agreed on. The
marriage of Prince Edward with the Lady Anne was immediately celebrated in
France.
Edward foresaw that it would be easy to dissolve an alliance composed of
such discordant parts. For this purpose, he sent over a lady of great
sagacity and address, who belonged to the train of the duchess of
Clarence, and who, under color of attending her mistress, was empowered to
negotiate with the duke, and to renew the connections of that prince with
his own family.[*] She represented to Clarence, that he had unwarily, to
his own ruin, become the instrument of Warwick’s vengeance, and had thrown
himself entirely in the power of his most inveterate enemies; that the
mortal injuries which the one royal family had suffered from the other,
were now past all forgiveness, and no imaginary union of interests could
ever suffice to obliterate them; that even if the leaders were willing to
forget past offences, the animosity of their adherents would prevent a
sincere coalition of parties, and would, in spite of all temporary and
verbal agreements, preserve an eternal opposition of measures between
them; and that a prince who deserted his own kindred, and joined the
murderers of his father, left himself single, without friends, without
protection, and would not, when misfortunes inevitably fell upon him, be
so much as entitled to any pity or regard from the rest of mankind.
Clarence was only one and twenty years of age, and seems to have possessed
but a slender capacity; yet could he easily see the force of these
reasons; and, upon the promise of forgiveness from his brother, he
secretly engaged, on a favorable opportunity, to desert the earl of
Warwick, and abandon the Lancastrian party.
During this negotiation, Warwick was secretly carrying on a correspondence
of the same nature with his brother, the marquis of Montague, who was
entirely trusted by Edward; and like motives produced a like resolution in
that nobleman. The marquis, also, that he might render the projected blow
the more deadly and incurable, resolved, on his side, to watch a favorable
opportunity for committing his perfidy, and still to maintain the
appearance of being a zealous adherent to the house of York.
After these mutual snares were thus carefully laid, the decision of the
quarrel advanced apace. Lewis prepared a fleet to escort the earl of
Warwick, and granted him a supply of men and money.[*] The duke of
Burgundy, on the other hand, enraged at that nobleman for his seizure of
the Flemish vessels before Calais, and anxious to support the reigning
family in England, with whom his own interests were now connected, fitted
out a larger fleet, with which he guarded the Channel: and he incessantly
warned his brother-in-law of the imminent perils to which he was exposed.
But Edward, though always brave and often active, had little foresight or
penetration. He was not sensible of his danger; he made no suitable
preparations against the earl of Warwick;[**] he even said that the duke
might spare himself the trouble of guarding the seas, and that he wished
for nothing more than to see Warwick set foot on English ground.[***] A
vain confidence in his own prowess, joined to the immoderate love of
pleasure, had made him incapable of all sound reason and reflection.
The event soon happened, of which Edward seemed so desirous. A storm
dispersed the Flemish navy, and left the sea open to Warwick.[****] That
nobleman seized the opportunity, and setting sail, quickly landed at
Dartmouth with the duke of Clarence, the earls of Oxford and Pembroke, and
a small body of troops, while the king was in the north, engaged in
suppressing an insurrection which had been raised by Lord Fitz-Hugh,
brother-in-law to Warwick.
The scene which ensues resembles more the fiction of a poem or romance
than an event in true history. The prodigious popularity of Warwick,[*]
the zeal of the Lancastrian party, the spirit of discontent with which
many were infected, and the general instability of the English nation,
occasioned by the late frequent revolutions, drew such multitudes to his
standard, that in a very few days his army amounted to sixty thousand men
and was continually increasing. Edward hastened southwards to encounter
him; and the two armies approached each other near Nottingham, where a
decisive action was every hour expected. The rapidity of Warwick’s
progress had incapacitated the duke of Clarence from executing his plan of
treachery; and the marquis of Montague had here the opportunity of
striking the first blow. He communicated the design to his adherents, who
promised him their concurrence: they took to arms in the night-time, and
hastened with loud acclamations to Edward’s quarters; the king was alarmed
at the noise, and starting from bed, heard the cry of war usually employed
by the Lancastrian party. Lord Hastings, his chamberlain, informed him of
the danger, and urged him to make his escape by speedy flight from an army
where he had so many concealed enemies, and where few seemed zealously
attached to his service. He had just time to get on horseback, and to
hurry with a small retinue to Lynne, in Norfolk, where he luckily found
some ships ready, on board of which he instantly embarked.[**] And after
this manner the earl of Warwick, in no longer space than eleven days after
his first landing, was left entire master of the kingdom.
But Edward’s danger did not end with his embarkation. The Easterlings or
Hanse Towns were then at war both with France and England; and some ships
of these people, hovering on the English coast, espied the king’s vessels,
and gave chase to them; nor was it without extreme difficulty that he made
his escape into the port of Alcmaer, in Holland. He had fled from England
with such precipitation, that he had carried nothing of value along with
him; and the only reward which he could bestow on the captain of the
vessel that brought him over, was a robe lined with sables; promising him
an ample recompense if fortune should ever become more propitious to
him.[*]
It is not likely that Edward could be very fond of presenting himself in
this lamentable plight before the duke of Burgundy; and that having so
suddenly, after his mighty vaunts, lost all footing in his own kingdom, he
could be insensible to the ridicule which must attend him in the eyes of
that prince. The duke, on his part, was no less embarrassed how he should
receive the dethroned monarch. As he had ever borne a greater affection to
the house of Lancaster than to that of York, nothing but political views
had engaged him to contract an alliance with the latter; and he foresaw,
that probably the revolution in England would now turn this alliance
against him, and render the reigning family his implacable and jealous
enemy. For this reason, when the first rumor of that event reached him,
attended with the circumstance of Edward’s death, he seemed rather pleased
with the catastrophe; and it was no agreeable disappointment to find, that
he must either undergo the burden of supporting an exiled prince, or the
dishonor of abandoning so near a relation. He began already to say, that
his connections were with the kingdom of England, not with the king; and
it was indifferent to him whether the name of Edward or that of Henry were
employed in the articles of treaty. These sentiments were continually
strengthened by the subsequent events. Vaucler, the deputy-governor of
Calais, though he had been confirmed in his command by Edward, and had
even received a pension from the duke of Burgundy on account of his
fidelity to the crown, no sooner saw his old master, Warwick, reinstated
in authority, than he declared for him, and with great demonstrations of
zeal and attachment, put the whole garrison in his livery. And the
intelligence which the duke received every day from England, seemed to
promise an entire and full settlement in the family of Lancaster.
Immediately after Edward’s flight had left the kingdom at Warwick’s
disposal, that nobleman hastened to London; and taking Henry from his
confinement in the Tower, into which he himself had been the chief cause
of throwing him, he proclaimed him king with great solemnity. A parliament
was summoned in the name of that prince, to meet at Westminster, and as
this assembly could pretend to no liberty while surrounded by such enraged
and insolent victors, governed by such an impetuous spirit as Warwick,
their votes were entirely dictated by the ruling faction. The treaty with
Margaret was here fully executed: Henry was recognized as lawful king; but
his incapacity for government being avowed, the regency was intrusted to
Warwick and Clarence till the majority of Prince Edward; and in default of
that prince’s issue, Clarence was declared successor to the crown. The
usual business also of reversals went on without opposition: every statute
made during the reign of Edward was repealed; that prince was declared to
be a usurper; he and his adherents were attainted; and in particular
Richard, duke of Glocester, his younger brother: all the attainders of the
Lancastrians, the dukes of Somerset and Exeter, the earls of Richmond,
Pembroke, Oxford, and Ormond, were reversed; and every one was restored
who had lost either honors or fortunes by his former adherence to the
cause of Henry.
The ruling party were more sparing in their executions than was usual
after any revolution during those violent times. The only victim of
distinction was John Tibetot, earl of Worcester. This accomplished person,
born in an age and nation where the nobility valued themselves on
ignorance as their privilege, and left learning to monks and
schoolmasters, for whom indeed the spurious erudition that prevailed was
best fitted, had been struck with the first rays of true science, which
began to penetrate from the south, and had been zealous, by his
exhortation and example, to propagate the love of letters among his
unpolished countrymen. It is pretended, that knowledge had not produced on
this nobleman himself the effect which naturally attends it, of humanizing
the temper and softening the heart;[*] and that he had enraged the
Lancastrians against him by the severities which he exercised upon them
during the prevalence of his own party.
He endeavored to conceal himself after the flight of Edward, but was
caught on the top of a tree in the forest of Weybridge, was conducted to
London, tried before the earl of Oxford, condemned, and executed. All the
other considerable Yorkists either fled beyond sea, or took shelter in
sanctuaries, where the ecclesiastical privileges afforded them protection.
In London alone it is computed that no less than two thousand persons
saved themselves in this manner;[*] and among the rest, Edward’s queen,
who was there delivered of a son, called by his father’s name.[**]
Queen Margaret, the other rival queen, had not yet appeared in England,
but on receiving intelligence of Warwick’s success, was preparing with
Prince Edward for her journey. All the banished Lancastrians flocked to
her; and, among the rest, the duke of Somerset, son of the duke beheaded
after the battle of Hexham. This nobleman, who had long been regarded as
the head of the party, had fled into the Low Countries on the discomfiture
of his friends; and as he concealed his name and quality, he had there
languished in extreme indigence. Philip de Comines tells us,[***] that he
himself saw him, as well as the duke of Exeter, in a condition no better
than that of a common beggar; till being discovered by Philip, duke of
Burgundy, they had small pensions allotted them, and were living in
silence and obscurity when the success of their party called them from
their retreat. But both Somerset and Margaret were detained by contrary
winds from reaching England,[****] till a new revolution in that kingdom,
no less sudden and surprising than the former, threw them into greater
misery than that from which they had just emerged.
Though the duke of Burgundy, by neglecting Edward, and paying court to the
established government, had endeavored to conciliate the friendship of the
Lancastrians, he found that he had not succeeded to his wish; and the
connections between the king of France and the earl of Warwick still held
him in great anxiety.[*****] This nobleman, too hastily regarding Charles
as a determined enemy, had sent over to Calais a body of four thousand
men, who made inroads into the Low Countries;[******] and the duke of
Burgundy saw himself in danger of being overwhelmed by the united arms of
England and of France. He resolved therefore to grant some assistance to
his brother-in-law; but in such a covert manner as should give the least
offence possible to the English government.
1471.
He equipped four large vessels, in the name of some private merchants, at
Terveer, in Zealand; and causing fourteen ships to be secretly hired from
the Easterlings, he delivered this small squadron to Edward, who,
receiving also a sum of money from the duke, immediately set sail for
England. No sooner was Charles informed of his departure than he issued a
proclamation inhibiting all his subjects from giving him countenance or
assistance;[*] an artifice which could not deceive the earl of Warwick,
but which might serve as a decent pretence, if that nobleman were so
disposed, for maintaining friendship with the duke of Burgundy.
Edward, impatient to take revenge on his enemies, and to recover his lost
authority, made an attempt to land with his forces, which exceeded not two
thousand men, on the coast of Norfolk; but being there repulsed, he sailed
northwards, and disembarked at Ravenspur, in Yorkshire. Finding that the
new magistrates, who had been appointed by the earl of Warwick, kept the
people every where from joining him, he pretended, and even made oath,
that he came not to challenge the crown, but only the inheritance of the
house of York, which of right belonged to him; and that he did not intend
to disturb the peace of the kingdom. His partisans every moment flocked to
his standard: he was admitted into the city of York: and he was soon in
such a situation as gave him hopes of succeeding in all his claims and
pretensions. The marquis of Montague commanded in the northern counties;
but from some mysterious reasons, which, as well as many other important
transactions in that age, no historian has cleared up, he totally
neglected the beginnings of an insurrection which he ought to have
esteemed so formidable. Warwick assembled an army at Leicester, with an
intention of meeting and of giving battle to the enemy; but Edward, by
taking another road, passed him unmolested, and presented himself before
the gates of London. Had he here been refused admittance, he was totally
undone: but there were many reasons which inclined the citizens to favor
him. His numerous friends, issuing from their sanctuaries, were active in
his cause; many rich merchants, who had formerly lent him money, saw no
other chance for their payment but his restoration; the city dames who had
been liberal of their favors to him, and who still retained an affection
for this young and gallant prince, swayed their husbands and friends in
his favor;[**] and above all, the archbishop of York, Warwick’s brother,
to whom the care of the city was committed, had secretly, from unknown
reasons, entered into a correspondence with him; and he facilitated
Edward’s admission into London.
The most likely cause which can be assigned for those multiplied
infidelities, even in the family of Nevil itself, is the spirit of
faction, which, when it becomes inveterate, it is very difficult for any
man entirely to shake off. The persons who had long distinguished
themselves in the York party, were unable to act with zeal and cordiality
for the support of the Lancastrians; and they were inclined, by any
prospect of favor or accommodation offered them by Edward, to return to
their ancient connections. However this may be, Edward’s entrance into
London made him master not only of that rich and powerful city, but also
of the person of Henry, who, destined to be the perpetual sport of
fortune, thus fell again into the hands of his enemies.[*]
It appears not that Warwick, during his short administration, which had
continued only six months, had been guilty of any unpopular act, or had
anywise deserved to lose that general favor with which he had so lately
overwhelmed Edward. But this prince, who was formerly on the defensive,
was now the aggressor; and having overcome the difficulties which always
attend the beginnings of an insurrection, possessed many advantages above
his enemy: his partisans were actuated by that zeal and courage which the
notion of an attack inspires his opponents were intimidated for a like
reason; every one who had been disappointed in the hopes which he had
entertained from Warwick’s elevation, either became a cool friend or an
open enemy to that nobleman; and each malecontent, from whatever cause,
proved an accession to Edward’s army. The king, therefore, found himself
in a condition to face the earl of Warwick; who, being reënforced by his
son-in-law the duke of Clarence, and his brother the marquis of Montague,
took post at Barnet, in the neighborhood of London. The arrival of Queen
Margaret was every day expected, who would have drawn together all the
genuine Lancastrians, and have brought a great accession to Warwick’s
forces: but this very consideration proved a motive to the earl rather to
hurry on a decisive action than to share the victory with rivals and
ancient enemies, who, he foresaw, would, in case of success, claim the
chief merit in the enterprise.[**]
But while his jealousy was always directed towards that side, he
overlooked the dangerous infidelity of friends, who lay the nearest to his
bosom. His brother Montague, who had lately temporized, seems now to have
remained sincerely attached to the interests of his family: but his
son-in-law, though bound to him by every tie of honor and gratitude,
though he shared the power of the regency, though he had been invested by
Warwick in all the honors and patrimony of the house of York, resolved to
fulfil the secret engagements which he had formerly taken with his
brother, and to support the interests of his own family: he deserted to
the king in the night-time, and carried over a body of twelve thousand men
along with him.[*] Warwick was now too far advanced to retreat; and as he
rejected with disdain all terms of peace offered him by Edward and
Clarence, he was obliged to hazard a general engagement. The battle was
fought with obstinacy on both sides: the two armies, in imitation of their
leaders displayed uncommon valor; and the victory remained long undecided
between them. But an accident threw the balance to the side of the
Yorkists. Edward’s cognizance was a sun; that of Warwick a star with rays;
and the mistiness of the morning rendering it difficult to distinguish
them, the earl of Oxford, who fought on the side of the Lancastrians, was
by mistake attacked by his friends, and chased off the field of
battle.[**] Warwick, contrary to his more usual practice, engaged that day
on foot, resolving to show his army that he meant to share every fortune
with them; and he was slain in the thickest of the engagement;[***] his
brother underwent the same fate; and as Edward had issued orders not to
give any quarter, a great and undistinguished slaughter was made in the
pursuit. There fell about one thousand five hundred on the side of the
victors.
The same day on which this decisive battle was fought,[****] Queen
Margaret and her son, now about eighteen years of age, and a young prince
of great hopes, landed at Weymouth, supported by a small body of French
forces.
When this princess received intelligence of her husband’s captivity, and
of the defeat and death of the earl of Warwick, her courage which had
supported her under so many disastrous events, here quite left her; and
she immediately foresaw all the dismal consequences of this calamity. At
first she took sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu;[*] but being encouraged
by the appearance of Tudor, earl of Pembroke, and Courtney, earl of
Devonshire, of the Lords Wenlock and St. John, with other men of rank, who
exhorted her still to hope for success, she resumed her former spirit, and
determined to defend to the utmost the ruins of her fallen fortunes. She
advanced through the counties of Devon, Somerset, and Glocester,
increasing her army on each day’s march; but was at last overtaken by the
rapid and expeditious Edward, at Tewkesbury, on the banks of the Severn.
The Lancastrians were here totally defeated: the earl of Devonshire and
Lord Wenlock were killed in the field: the duke of Somerset, and about
twenty other persons of distinction, having taken shelter in a church,
were surrounded, dragged out, and immediately beheaded: about three
thousand of their side fell in battle: and the army was entirely
dispersed.
Queen Margaret and her son were taken prisoners, and brought to the king,
who asked the prince, after an insulting manner, how he dared to invade
his dominions. The young prince, more mindful of his high birth than of
his present fortune, replied, that he came thither to claim his just
inheritance. The ungenerous Edward, insensible to pity, struck him on the
face with his gauntlet; and the dukes of Clarence and Glocester, Lord
Hastings, and Sir Thomas Gray, taking the blow as a signal for further
violence, hurried the prince into the next apartment, and there despatched
him with their daggers.[**] Margaret was thrown into the Tower: King Henry
expired in that confinement a few days after the battle of Tewkesbury; but
whether he died a natural or violent death is uncertain. It is pretended,
and was generally believed, that the duke of Glocester killed him with his
own hands:[***] but the universal odium which that prince had incurred,
inclined perhaps the nation to aggravate his crimes without any sufficient
authority.
It is certain, however, that Henry’s death was sudden; and though he
labored under an ill state of health, this circumstance, joined to the
general manners of the age, gave a natural ground, of suspicion; which was
rather increased than diminished by the exposing of his body to public
view. That precaution served only to recall many similar instances in the
English history, and to suggest the comparison.
All the hopes of the house of Lancaster seemed now to be utterly
extinguished. Every legitimate prince of that family was dead: almost
every great leader of the party had perished in battle or on the scaffold:
the earl of Pembroke, who was levying forces in Wales, disbanded his army
when he received intelligence of the battle of Tewkesbury; and he fled
into Brittany with his nephew, the young earl of Richmond.[*] The bastard
of Falconberg, who had levied some forces, and had advanced to London
during Edward’s absence, was repulsed; his men deserted him; he was taken
prisoner and immediately executed:[**] and peace being now fully restored
to the nation, a parliament was summoned, which ratified as usual, all the
acts of the victor, and recognized his legal authority.
But this prince, who had been so firm, and active, and intrepid during the
course of adversity, was still unable to resist the allurements of a
prosperous fortune; and he wholly devoted himself, as before, to pleasure
and amusement, after he became entirely master of his kingdom, and had no
longer any enemy who could give him anxiety or alarm. He recovered,
however, by this gay and inoffensive course of life, and by his easy,
familiar manners, that popularity which, it is natural to imagine, he had
lost by the repeated cruelties exercised upon his enemies; and the example
also of his jovial festivity served to abate the former acrimony of
faction among his subjects, and to restore the social disposition which
had been so long interrupted between the opposite parties. All men seemed
to be fully satisfied with the present government; and the memory of past
calamities served only to impress the people more strongly with a sense of
their allegiance, and with the resolution of never incurring any more the
hazard of renewing such direful scenes.
1474.
But while the king was thus indulging himself in pleasure, he was roused
from his lethargy by a prospect of foreign conquests, which, it is
probable, his desire of popularity, more than the spirit of ambition, had
made him covet. Though he deemed himself little beholden to the duke of
Burgundy for the reception which that prince had given him during his
exile,[*] the political interests of their states maintained still a close
connection between them; and they agreed to unite their arms in making a
powerful invasion on France. A league was formed, in which Edward
stipulated to pass the seas with an army exceeding ten thousand men, and
to invade the French territories: Charles promised to join him with all
his forces: the king was to challenge the crown of France, and to obtain
at least the provinces of Normandy and Guienne; the duke was to acquire
Champaigne and some other territories, and to free all his dominions from
the burden of homage to the crown of France: and neither party was to make
peace without the consent of the other.[**] They were the more encouraged
to hope for success from this league, as the count of St. Pol, constable
of France, who was master of St. Quintin and other towns on the Somme, had
secretly promised to join them; and there were also hopes of engaging the
duke of Brittany to enter into the confederacy.
The prospect of a French war was always a sure means of making the
parliament open their purses, as far as the habits of that age would
permit. They voted the king a tenth of rents, or two shillings in the
pound; which must have been very inaccurately levied, since it produced
only thirty-one thousand four hundred and sixty pounds; and they added to
this supply a whole fifteenth, and three quarters of another;[***] but as
the king deemed these sums still unequal to the undertaking, he attempted
to levy money by way of benevolence, a kind of exaction which, except
during the reigns of Henry III. and Richard II., had not been much practised
in former times, and which, though the consent of the parties was
pretended to be gained, could not be deemed entirely voluntary.[****]
The clauses annexed to the parliamentary grant show sufficiently the
spirit of the nation in this respect. The money levied by the fifteenth
was not to be put into the king’s hands but to be kept in religious
houses; and if the expedition into France should not take place, it was
immediately to be refunded to the people. After these grants, the
parliament was dissolved, which had sitten near two years and a half, and
had undergone several prorogations; a practice not very usual at that time
in England.
1475.
The king passed over to Calais with an army of one thousand five hundred
men at arms and fifteen thousand archers, attended by all the chief
nobility of England, who, prognosticating future successes from the past,
were eager to appear on this great theatre of honor.[*] But all their
sanguine hopes were damped when they found, on entering the French
territories, that neither did the constable open his gates to them, nor
the duke of Burgundy bring them the smallest assistance. That prince,
transported by his ardent temper, had carried all his armies to a great
distance, and had employed them in wars on the frontiers of Germany, and
against the duke of Lorraine: and though he came in person to Edward, and
endeavored to apologize for this breach of treaty, there was no prospect
that they would be able this campaign to make a conjunction with the
English. This circumstance gave great disgust to the king, and inclined
him to hearken to those advances which Lewis continually made him for an
accommodation.
That monarch, more swayed by political views than by the point of honor,
deemed no submissions too mean which might free him from enemies who had
proved so formidable to his predecessors, and who, united to so many other
enemies, might still shake the well-established government of France. It
appears from Comines, that discipline was at this time very imperfect
among the English; and that their civil wars, though long continued, yet,
being always decided by hasty battles, had still left them ignorant of the
improvements which the military art was beginning to receive upon the
continent.[**]
But as Lewis was sensible that the warlike genius of the people would soon
render them excellent soldiers, he was far from despising them for their
present want of experience; and he employed all his art to detach them
from the alliance of Burgundy. When Edward sent him a herald to claim the
crown of France, and to carry him a defiance in case of refusal, so far
from answering to [*] this bravado in like haughty terms, he replied with
great temper, and even made the herald a considerable present:[**] he took
afterwards an opportunity of sending a herald to the English camp; and
having given him directions to apply to the Lords Stanley and Howard, who,
he heard, were friends to peace, he desired the good offices of these
noblemen in promoting an accommodation with their master.[***] As Edward
was now fallen into like dispositions, a truce was soon concluded on terms
more advantageous than honorable to Lewis. He stipulated to pay Edward
immediately seventy-five thousand crowns, on condition that he should
withdraw his army from France, and promised to pay him fifty thousand
crowns a year during their joint lives: it was added, that the dauphin,
when of age, should marry Edward’s eldest daughter.[****] In order to
ratify this treaty, the two monarchs agreed to have a personal interview;
and for that purpose suitable preparations were made at Pecquigni, near
Amiens. A close rail was drawn across a bridge in that place, with no
larger intervals than would allow the arm to pass; a precaution against a
similar accident to that which befell the duke of Burgundy in his
conference with the dauphin at Montereau. Edward and Lewis came to the
opposite sides; conferred privately together; and having confirmed their
friendship, and interchanged many mutual civilities, they soon after
parted.[*****]
Lewis was anxious not only to gain the king’s friendship but also that of
the nation, and of all the considerable persons in the English court. He
bestowed pensions, to the amount of sixteen thousand crowns a year, on
several of the kings, favorites; on Lord Hastings two thousand crowns; on
Lora Howard and others in proportion; and these great ministers were not
ashamed thus to receive wages from a foreign prince. As the two armies,
after the conclusion of the truce remained some time in the neighborhood
of each other, the English were not only admitted freely into Amiens,
where Lewis resided, but had also their charges defrayed, and had wine and
victuals furnished them in every inn, without any payment being demanded.
They flocked thither in such multitude that once above nine thousand of
them were in the town, and they might have made themselves masters of the
king’s person; but Lewis, concluding from their jovial and dissolute
manner of living, that they had no bad intentions, was careful not to
betray the least sign of fear or jealousy. And when Edward, informed of
this disorder, desired him to shut the gates against them, he replied,
that he would never agree to exclude the English from the place where he
resided; but that Edward, if he pleased, might recall them, and place his
own officers at the gates of Amiens to prevent their returning.[*]
Lewis’s desire of confirming a mutual amity with England, engaged him even
to make imprudent advances, which it cost him afterwards some pains to
evade. In the conference at Pecquigni he had said to Edward, that he
wished to have a visit from him at Paris; that he would there endeavor to
amuse him with the ladies; and that, in case any offences were then
committed, he would assign him the cardinal of Bourbon for confessor, who,
from fellow-feeling, would not be over and above severe in the penances
which he would enjoin. This hint made deeper impression than Lewis
intended. Lord Howard, who accompanied him back to Amiens, told him in
confidence that, if he were so disposed it would not be impossible to
persuade Edward to take a journey with him to Paris, where they might make
merry together. Lewis pretended at first not to hear the offer; but on
Howard’s repeating it, he expressed his concern that his wars with the
duke of Burgundy would not permit him to attend his royal guest, and do
him the honors he intended “Edward,” said he privately to Comines, “is a
very handsome and a very amorous prince: some lady at Paris may like him
as well as he shall do her; and may invite him to return in another
manner. It is better that the sea be between us.”[**]
This treaty did very little honor to either of these monarchs: it
discovered the imprudence of Edward, who had taken his measures so ill
with his allies, as to be obliged, after such an expensive armament, to
return without making any acquisitions adequate to it: it showed the want
of dignity in Lewis who, rather than run the hazard of a battle, agreed to
subject his kingdom to a tribute, and thus acknowledge the superiority of
a neighboring prince possessed of less power and territory than himself.
But as Lewis made interest the sole test of honor, he thought that all the
advantages of the treaty were on his side, and that he had overreached
Edward, by sending him out of France on such easy terms. For this reason
he was very solicitous to conceal his triumph; and he strictly enjoined
his courtiers never to show the English the least sign of mockery or
derision. But he did not himself very carefully observe so prudent a rule:
he could not forbear, one day, in the joy of his heart, throwing out some
raillery on the easy simplicity of Edward and his council; when he
perceived that he was overheard by a Gascon, who had settled in England.
He was immediately sensible of his indiscretion; sent a message to the
gentleman; and offered him some advantages in his own country, as engaged
him to remain in France. “It is but just,” said he, “that I pay the
penalty of my talkativeness.”[*]
The most honorable part of Lewis’s treaty with Edward was the stipulation
for the liberty of Queen Margaret, who, though after the death of her
husband and son she could no longer be formidable to government, was still
detained in custody by Edward. Lewis paid fifty thousand crowns for her
ransom; and that princess, who had been so active on the stage of the
world, and who had experienced such a variety of fortune, passed the
remainder of her days in tranquility and privacy, till the year 1482, when
she died; an admirable princess, but more illustrious by her undaunted
spirit in adversity, than by her moderation in prosperity. She seems
neither to have enjoyed the virtues, nor been subject to the weaknesses,
of her sex; and was as much tainted with the ferocity as endowed with the
courage of that barbarous age in which she lived.
Though Edward had so little reason to be satisfied with the conduct of the
duke of Burgundy, he reserved to that prince a power of acceding to the
treaty of Pecquigni: but Charles, when the offer was made him, haughtily
replied, that he was able to support himself without the assistance of
England, and that he would make no peace with Lewis till three months
after Edward’s return into his own country. This prince possessed all the
ambition and courage of a conqueror; but being defective in policy and
prudence, qualities no less essential, he was unfortunate in all his
enterprises; and perished at last in battle against the Swiss;[*] a people
whom he despised, and who, though brave and free, had hitherto been in a
manner overlooked in the general system of Europe. This event, which
happened in the year 1477, produced a great alteration in the views of all
the princes, and was attended with consequences which were felt for many
generations. Charles left only one daughter, Mary, by his first wife; and
this princess, being heir of his opulent and extensive dominions, was
courted by all the potentates of Christendom, who contended for the
possession of so rich a prize. Lewis, the head of her family, might, by a
proper application, have obtained this match for the dauphin, and have
thereby united to the crown of France all the provinces of the Low
Countries, together with Burgundy, Artois, and Picardy; which would at
once have rendered his kingdom an overmate for all its neighbors. But a
man wholly interested is as rare as one entirely endowed with the opposite
quality; and Lewis, though impregnable to all the sentiments of generosity
and friendship, was, on this occasion, carried from the road of true
policy by the passions of animosity and revenge. He had imbibed so deep a
hatred to the house of Burgundy, that he rather chose to subdue the
princess by arms, than unite her to his family by marriage: he conquered
the duchy of Burgundy and that part of Picardy which had been ceded to
Philip the Good by the treaty of Arras: but he thereby forced the states
of the Netherlands to bestow their sovereign in marriage on Maximilian of
Austria, son of the emperor Frederick, from whom they looked for
protection in their present distresses: and by these means, France lost
the opportunity, which she never could recall, of making that important
acquisition of power and territory.
During this interesting crisis, Edward was no less defective in policy,
and was no less actuated by private passions, unworthy of a sovereign and
a statesman. Jealousy of his brother Clarence had caused him to neglect
the advances which were made of marrying that prince, now a widower, to
the heiress of Burgundy;[**] and he sent her proposals of espousing
Anthony, earl of Rivers, brother to his queen, who still retained an
entire ascendant over him.
But the match was rejected with disdain;[*] and Edward, resenting this
treatment of his brother-in-law, permitted France to proceed without
interruption in her conquests over his defenceless ally. Any pretence
sufficed him for abandoning himself entirely to indolence and pleasure,
which were now become his ruling passions. The only object which divided
his attention was the improving of the public revenue, which had been
dilapidated by the necessities or negligence of his predecessors; and some
of his expedients for that purpose, though unknown to us, were deemed,
during the time, oppressive to the people.[**] The detail of private
wrongs naturally escapes the notice of history; but an act of tyranny of
which Edward was guilty in his own family, has been taken notice of by all
writers, and has met with general and deserved censure.
The duke of Clarence, by all his services in deserting Warwick, had never
been able to regain the king’s friendship, which he had forfeited by his
former confederacy with that nobleman. He was still regarded at court as a
man of a dangerous and a fickle character; and the imprudent openness and
violence of his temper, though it rendered him much less dangerous, tended
extremely to multiply his enemies, and to incense them against him. Among
others, he had had the misfortune to give displeasure to the queen
herself, as well as to his brother, the duke of Glocester, a prince of the
deepest policy, of the most unrelenting ambition, and the least scrupulous
in the means which he employed for the attainment or his ends. A
combination between these potent adversaries being secretly formed against
Clarence, it was determined to begin by attacking his friends; in hopes
that, if he patiently endured this injury, his pusillanimity would
dishonor him in the eyes of the public; if he made resistance, and
expressed resentment, his passion would betray him into measures which
might give them advantages against him. The king, hunting one day in the
park of Thomas Burdet, of Arrow, in Warwickshire, had killed a white buck,
which was a great favorite of the owner; and Burdet, vexed at the loss,
broke into a passion, and wished the horns of the deer in the belly of the
person who had advised the king to commit that insult upon him. This
natural expression of resentment, which would have been overlooked or
forgotten had it fallen from any other person, was rendered criminal and
capital in that gentleman, by the friendship in which he had the
misfortune to live with the duke of Clarence; he was tried for his life;
the judges and jury were found servile enough to condemn him and he was
publicly beheaded at Tyburn for this pretended offence.[*] About the same
time, one John Stacey, an ecclesiastic, much connected with the duke as
well as with Burdet, was exposed to a like iniquitous and barbarous
prosecution. This clergyman, being more learned in mathematics and
astronomy than was usual in that age, lay under the imputation of
necromancy with the ignorant vulgar; and the court laid hold of this
popular rumor to effect his destruction. He was brought to his trial for
that imaginary crime; many of the greatest peers countenanced the
prosecution by their presence; he was condemned, put to the torture, and
executed.[**]
The duke of Clarence was alarmed when he found these acts of tyranny
exercised on all around him: he reflected on the fate of the good duke of
Glocester, in the last reign, who, after seeing the most infamous
pretences employed for the destruction of his nearest connections, at last
fell himself a victim to the vengeance of his enemies. But Clarence,
instead of securing his own life against the present danger by silence and
reserve, was open and loud in justifying the innocence of his friends, and
in exclaiming against the iniquity of their prosecutors.
1478.
The king, highly offended with his freedom, or using that pretence against
him, committed him to the Tower,[***] summoned a parliament, and tried him
for his life before the house of peers, the supreme tribunal of the
nation.
The duke was accused of arraigning public justice, by maintaining the
innocence of men who had been condemned in courts of judicature, and or
inveighing against the iniquity of the king, who had given orders for
their prosecution.[****]
Many rash expressions were imputed to him, and some, too, reflecting on
Edward’s legitimacy; but he was not accused of any overt act of treason;
and even the truth of these speeches may be doubted of, since the liberty
of judgment was taken from the court, by the king’s appearing personally
as his brother’s accuser,[*] and pleading the cause against him. But a
sentence of condemnation, even when this extraordinary circumstance had
not place, was a necessary consequence, in those times, of any prosecution
by the court or the prevailing party; and the duke of Clarence was
pronounced guilty by the peers. The house of commons were no less slavish
and unjust: they both petitioned for the execution of the duke, and
afterwards passed a bill of attainder against him.[**] The measures of the
parliament, during that age, furnish us with examples of a strange
contrast of freedom and servility: they scruple to grant, and sometimes
refuse, to the king the smallest supplies, the most necessary for the
support of government, even the most necessary for the maintenance of
wars, for which the nation, as well as the parliament itself, expressed
great fondness: but they never scruple to concur in the most flagrant act
of injustice or tyranny which falls on any individual, however
distinguished by birth or merit. These maxims, so ungenerous, so opposite
to all principles of good government, so contrary to the practice of
present parliaments, are very remarkable in all the transactions of the
English history for more than a century after the period in which we are
now engaged.
The only favor which the king granted his brother after his condemnation,
was to leave him the choice of his death; and he was privately drowned in
a butt of malmsey in the Tower; a whimsical choice, which implies that he
had an extraordinary passion for that liquor. The duke left two children
by the elder daughter of the earl of Warwick; a son, created an earl by
his grandfather’s title, and a daughter, afterwards countess of Salisbury.
Both this prince and princess were also unfortunate in their end, and died
a violent death; a fate which, for many years, attended almost all the
descendants of the royal blood in England. There prevails a report, that a
chief source of the violent prosecution of the duke of Clarence, whose
name was George, was a current prophecy, that the king’s son should be
murdered by one, the initial letter of whose name was G.[***] It is not
impossible but, in those ignorant times, such a silly reason might have
some influence; but it is more probable that the whole story is the
invention of a subsequent period, and founded on the murder of these
children by the duke of Glocester. Comines remarks, that at that time the
English never were without some superstitious prophecy or other, by which
they accounted for every event.
All the glories of Edward’s reign terminated with the civil wars, where
his laurels, too, were extremely sullied with blood, violence, and
cruelty. His spirit seems afterwards to have been sunk in indolence and
pleasure, or his measures were frustrated by imprudence and the want of
foresight. There was no object on which he was more intent than to have
all his daughters settled by splendid marriages, though most of these
princesses were yet in their infancy, and though the completion of his
views, it was obvious, must depend on numberless accidents, which were
impossible to be foreseen or prevented. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth,
was contracted to the dauphin; his second, Cicely, to the eldest son of
James III., king of Scotland; his third, Anne, to Philip, only son of
Maximilian and the duchess of Burgundy; his fourth, Catharine, to John,
son and heir to Ferdinand, king of Arragon, and Isabella, queen of
Castile.[*] None of these projected marriages took place; and the king
himself saw in his lifetime the rupture of the first, that with the
dauphin, for which he had always discovered a peculiar fondness. Lewis,
who paid no regard to treaties or engagements, found his advantage in
contracting the dauphin to the princess Margaret, daughter of Maximilian,
and the king, notwithstanding his indolence, prepared to revenge the
indignity.
1482.
The French monarch, eminent for prudence as well as perfidy, endeavored to
guard against the blow; and by a proper distribution of presents in the
court of Scotland, he incited James to make war upon England. This prince,
who lived on bad terms with his own nobility, and whose force was very
unequal to the enterprise, levied an army; but when he was ready to enter
England, the barons, conspiring against his favorites, put them to death
without trial; and the army presently disbanded. The duke of Glocester,
attended by the duke of Albany, James’s brother, who had been banished his
country, entered Scotland at the head of an army, took Berwick, and
obliged the Scots to accept of a peace, by which they resigned that
fortress to Edward. This success imboldened the king to think more
seriously of a French war; but while he was making preparations for that
enterprise, he was seized with a distemper, of which he expired in the
forty-second year of his age, and the twenty-third of his reign; a prince
more splendid and showy than either prudent or virtuous; brave, though
cruel; addicted to pleasure, though capable of activity in great
emergencies; and less fitted to prevent ills by wise precautions, than to
remedy them, after they took place, by his vigor and enterprise. Besides
five daughters, this king left two sons; Edward, prince of Wales, his
successor, then in his thirteenth year and Richard, duke of York, in his
ninth.
CHAPTER XXIII.
EDWARD V. AND RICHARD III.
1483.
During the latter years of Edward IV., the nation having in a great
measure forgotten the bloody feuds between the two roses, and peaceably
acquiescing in the established government, was agitated only by some court
intrigues, which, being restrained by the authority of the king, seemed
nowise to endanger the public tranquillity. These intrigues arose from the
perpetual rivalship between two parties; one consisting of the queen and
her relations, particularly the earl of Rivers, her brother, and the
marquis of Dorset, her son; the other composed of the ancient nobility,
who envied the sudden growth and unlimited credit of that aspiring
family.[*]
At the head of this latter party was the duke of Buckingham, a man of very
noble birth, of ample possessions, of great alliances, of shining parts;
who, though he had married the queen’s sister, was too haughty to act in
subserviency to her inclinations, and aimed rather at maintaining an
independent influence and authority. Lord Hastings, the chamberlain, was
another leader of the same party; and as this nobleman had, by his bravery
and activity, as well as by his approved fidelity, acquired the confidence
and favor of his master, he had been able, though with some difficulty, to
support himself against the credit of the queen. The lords Howard and
Stanley maintained a connection with these two noblemen, and brought a
considerable accession of influence and reputation to their party. All the
other barons, who had no particular dependence on the queen, adhered to
the same interest; and the people in general, from their natural envy
against the prevailing power, bore great favor to the cause of these
noblemen.
But Edward knew that, though he himself had been able to overawe those
rival factions, many disorders might arise from their contests during the
minority of his son; and he therefore took care, in his last illness, to
summon together several of the leaders on both sides, and by composing
their ancient quarrels, to provide, as far as possible, for the future
tranquillity of the government. After expressing his intentions, that his
brother, the duke of Glocester, then absent in the north, should be
intrusted with the regency, he recommended to them peace and unanimity
during the tender years of his son; represented to them the dangers which
must attend the continuance of their animosities; and engaged them to
embrace each other with all the appearance of the most cordial
reconciliation. But this temporary or feigned agreement lasted no longer
than the king’s life; he had no sooner expired, than the jealousies of the
parties broke out afresh; and each of them applied, by separate messages,
to the duke of Glocester, and endeavored to acquire his favor and
friendship.
This prince, during his brother’s reign, had endeavored to live on good
terms with both parties; and his high birth, his extensive abilities, and
his great services, had enabled him to support himself without falling
into a dependence on either. But the new situation of affairs, when the
supreme power was devolved upon him, immediately changed his measures; and
he secretly determined to preserve no longer that neutrality which he had
hitherto maintained. His exorbitant ambition, unrestrained by any
principle either of justice or humanity; made him carry his views to the
possession of the crown itself; and as this object could not be attained
without the ruin of the queen and her family, he fell, without hesitation,
into concert with the opposite party. But being sensible that the most
profound dissimulation was requisite for effecting his criminal purposes,
he redoubled his professions of zeal and attachment to that princess; and
he gained such credit with her as to influence her conduct in a point
which, as it was of the utmost importance, was violently disputed between
the opposite factions.
The young king, at the time of his father’s death, resided in the Castle
of Ludlow, on the borders of Wales; whither he had been sent, that the
influence of his presence might overawe the Welsh, and restore the
tranquillity of that country, which had been disturbed by some late
commotions. His person was committed to the care of his uncle, the earl of
Rivers, the most accomplished nobleman in England, who, having united an
uncommon taste for literature[*] to great abilities in business and valor
in the field was entitled by his talents, still more than by nearness of
blood, to direct the education of the young monarch. The queen, anxious to
preserve that ascendant over her son which she had long maintained over
her husband, wrote to the earl of Rivers, that he should levy a body of
forces, in order to escort the king to London, to protect him during his
coronation, and to keep him from falling into the hands of their
enemies.[**] The opposite faction, sensible that Edward was now of an age
when great advantages could be made of his name and countenance, and was
approaching to the age when he would be legally entitled to exert in
person his authority, foresaw that the tendency of this measure was to
perpetuate their subjection under their rivals; and they vehemently
opposed a resolution which they represented as the signal for renewing a
civil war in the kingdom. Lord Hastings threatened to depart instantly to
his government of Calais:[**] the other nobles seemed resolute to oppose
force by force: and as the duke of Glocester, on pretence of pacifying the
quarrel, had declared against all appearance of an armed power, which
might be dangerous, and was nowise necessary; the queen, trusting to the
sincerity of his friendship, and overawed by so violent an opposition,
recalled her orders to her brother, and desired him to bring up no greater
retinue than should be necessary to support the state and dignity of the
young sovereign.[***]
The duke of Glocester, meanwhile, set out from York, attended by a
numerous train of the northern gentry. When he reached Northampton, he was
joined by the duke of Buckingham, who was also attended by a splendid
retinue; and as he heard that the king was hourly expected on that road,
he resolved to await his arrival, under color of conducting him thence in
person to London. The earl of Rivers, apprehensive that the place would be
too narrow to contain so many attendants, sent his pupil forward by
another road to Stony Stratford; and came himself to Northampton, in order
to apologize for this measure, and to pay his respects to the duke of
Glocester. He was received with the greatest appearance of cordiality: he
passed the evening an an amicable manner with Glocester and Buckingham: he
proceeded on the road with them next day to join the king: but as he was
entering Stony Stratford, he was arrested by orders from the duke of
Glocester:[*] Sir Richard Gray, one of the queen’s sons, was at the same
time put under a guard, together with Sir Thomas Vaughan, who possessed a
considerable office in the king’s household; and all the prisoners were
instantly conducted to Pomfret. Glocester approached the young prince with
the greatest demonstrations of respect; and endeavored to satisfy him with
regard to the violence committed on his uncle and brother: but Edward,
much attached to these near relations, by whom he had been tenderly
educated, was not such a master of dissimulation as to conceal his
displeasure.[**]
The people, however, were extremely rejoiced at this revolution; and the
duke was received in London with the loudest acclamations: but the queen
no sooner received intelligence of her brother’s imprisonment, than she
foresaw that Glocester’s violence would not stop there, and that her own
ruin, if not that of all her children, was finally determined. She
therefore fled into the sanctuary of Westminster, attended by the marquis
of Dorset; and she carried thither the five princesses, together with the
duke of York.[***]
She trusted that the ecclesiastical privileges, which had formerly, during
the total ruin of her husband and family, given her protection against the
fury of the Lancastrian faction, would not now be violated by her
brother-in-law, while her son was on the throne; and she resolved to await
there the return of better fortune. But Glocester, anxious to have the
duke of York in his power, proposed to take him by force from the
sanctuary; and he represented to the privy council both the indignity put
upon the government by the queen’s ill-grounded apprehensions, and the
necessity of the young prince’s appearance at the ensuing coronation of
his brother. It was further urged, that ecclesiastical privileges were
originally intended only to give protection to unhappy men persecuted for
their debts or crimes; and were entirely useless to a person who, by
reason of his tender age, could lie under the burden of neither, and who,
for the same reason, was utterly incapable of claiming security from any
sanctuary. But the two archbishops, Cardinal Bourchier, the primate, and
Rotherhand, archbishop of York, protesting against the sacrilege of this
measure, it was agreed that they should first endeavor to bring the queen
to compliance by persuasion, before any violence should be employed
against her. These prelates were persons of known integrity and honor; and
being themselves entirely persuaded of the duke’s good intentions, they
employed every argument, accompanied with earnest entreaties,
exhortations, and assurances, to bring her over to the same opinion. She
long continued obstinate, and insisted that the duke of York, by living in
the sanctuary, was not only secure himself, but gave security to the king,
whose life no one would dare to attempt while his successor and avenger
remained in safety. But finding that none supported her in these
sentiments, and that force, in case of refusal, was threatened by the
council, she at last complied, and produced her son to the two prelates.
She was here on a sudden struck with a kind of presage of his future fate:
she tenderly embraced him; she bedewed him with her tears; and bidding him
an eternal adieu, delivered him, with many expressions of regret and
reluctance, into their custody.[*]
The duke of Glocester, being the nearest male of the royal family capable
of exercising the government, seemed entitled, by the customs of the
realm, to the office of protector; and the council, not waiting for the
consent of parliament, made no scruple of investing him with that high
dignity.[**]
The general prejudice entertained by the nobility against the queen and
her kindred, occasioned this precipitation and irregularity; and no one
foresaw any danger to the succession, much less to the lives of the young
princes, from a measure so obvious and so natural. Besides that the duke
had hitherto been able to cover, by the most profound dissimulation, his
fierce and savage nature, the numerous issue of Edward, together with the
two children of Clarence, seemed to be an eternal obstacle to his
ambition; and it appeared equally impracticable for him to destroy so many
persons possessed of a preferable title, and imprudent to exclude them.
But a man who had abandoned all principles of honor and humanity, was soon
carried by his predominant passion beyond the reach of fear or precaution;
and Glocester, having so far succeeded in his views, no longer hesitated
in removing the other obstructions which lay between him and the throne.
The death of the earl of Rivers, and of the other prisoners detained in
Pomfret, was first determined; and he easily obtained the consent of the
duke of Buckingham, as well as of Lord Hastings, to this violent and
sanguinary measure. However easy it was, in those times, to procure a
sentence against the most innocent person, it appeared still more easy to
despatch an enemy without any trial or form of process; and orders were
accordingly issued to Sir Richard Ratcliffe, a proper instrument in the
hands of this tyrant, to cut off the heads of the prisoners. The protector
then assailed the fidelity of Buckingham by all the arguments capable of
swaying a vicious mind, which knew no motive of action but interest and
ambition. He represented that the execution of persons so nearly related
to the king, whom that prince so openly professed to love, and whose fate
he so much resented, would never pass unpunished; and all the actors in
that scene were bound in prudence to prevent the effects of his future
vengeance: that it would be impossible to keep the queen forever at a
distance from her son, and equally impossible to prevent her from
instilling into his tender mind the thoughts of retaliating, by like
executions, the sanguinary insults committed on her family: that the only
method of obviating these mischiefs was to put the sceptre in the hands of
a man of whose friendship the duke might be assured, and whose years and
experience taught him to pay respect to merit and to the rights of ancient
nobility: and that the same necessity which had carried them so far in
resisting the usurpation of these intruders, must justify them in
attempting further innovations, and in making, by national consent, a new
settlement of the succession. To these reasons he added the offers of
great private advantages to the duke of Buckingham; and he easily obtained
from him a promise of supporting him in all his enterprises.
The duke of Glocester, knowing the importance of gaining Lord Hastings,
sounded at a distance his sentiments, by means of Catesby, a lawyer, who
lived in great intimacy with that nobleman; but found him impregnable in
his allegiance and fidelity to the children of Edward, who had ever
honored him with his friendship.[*] He saw, therefore, that there were no
longer any measures to be kept with him; and he determined to ruin utterly
the man whom he despaired of engaging to concur in his usurpation. On the
very day when Rivers, Gray, and Vaughan were executed, or rather murdered,
at Poinfret by the advice of Hastings, the protector summoned a council in
the Tower; whither that nobleman, suspecting no design against him,
repaired without hesitation.
The duke of Glocester was capable of committing the most bloody and
treacherous murders with the utmost coolness and indifference. On taking
his place at the council-table, he appeared in the easiest and most jovial
humor imaginable. He seemed to indulge himself in familiar conversation
with the counsellors, before they should enter on business, and having
paid some compliments to Morton, bishop of Ely, on the good and early
strawberries which he raised in his garden at Holborn, he begged the favor
of having a dish of them, which that prelate immediately despatched a
servant to bring to him. The protector then left the council, as if called
away by some other business; but soon after returning with an angry and
inflamed countenance, he asked them, what punishment those deserved that
had plotted against his life, who was so nearly related to the king, and
was intrusted with the administration of government. Hastings replied,
that they merited the punishment of traitors. “These traitors,” cried the
protector, “are the sorceress, my brother’s wife, and Jane Shore, his
mistress, with others their associates: see to what a condition they have
reduced me by their incantations and witchcraft:” upon which he laid bare
his arm, all shrivelled and decayed. But the counsellors, who knew that
this infirmity had attended him from his birth, looked on each other with
amazement; and, above all, Lord Hastings, who, as he had since Edward’s
death engaged in an intrigue with Jane Shore,[*] 20 was naturally anxious
concerning the issue of these extraordinary proceedings.
“Certainly, my lord,” said he, “if they be guilty of these crimes, they
deserve the severest punishment.” “And do you reply to me,” exclaimed the
protector, “with your ifs and your ands? You are the chief abettor of that
witch, Shore: you are yourself a traitor; and I swear by St. Paul, that I
will not dine before your head be brought me,” He struck the table with
his hand: armed men rushed in at the signal: the counsellors were thrown
into the utmost consternation: and one of the guards, as if by accident or
mistake, aimed a blow with a pole-axe at Lord Stanley, who, aware of the
danger, slunk under the table; and though he saved his life, he received a
severe wound in the head, in the protector’s presence. Hastings was
seized, was hurried away, and instantly beheaded on a timber-log, which
lay in the court of the Tower.[*] Two hours after, a proclamation, well
penned, and fairly written, was read to the citizens of London,
enumerating his offenses, and apologizing to them, from the suddenness of
the discovery, for the sudden execution of that nobleman, who was very
popular among them; but the saying of a merchant was much talked of on the
occasion, who remarked, that the proclamation was certainly drawn by the
spirit of prophecy.[**]
Lord Stanley, the archbishop of York, the bishop of Ely, and other
counsellors, were committed prisoners in different chambers of the Tower;
and the protector, in order to carry on the farce of his accusations,
ordered the goods of Jane Shore to be seized; and he summoned her to
answer before the council for sorcery and witchcraft. But as no proofs,
which could be received even in that ignorant age, were produced against
her, he directed her to be tried in the spiritual court for her adulteries
and lewdness; and she did penance in a white sheet in St. Paul’s, before
the whole people. This lady was born of reputable parents in London, was
well educated, and married to a substantial citizen; but unhappily views
of interest, more than the maid’s inclinations, had been consulted in the
match, and her mind, though framed for virtue, had proved unable to resist
the allurements of Edward, who solicited her favors. But while seduced
from her duty by this gay and amorous monarch, she still made herself
respectable by her other virtues; and the ascendant which her charms and
vivacity long maintained over him, was all employed in acts of beneficence
and humanity. She was still forward to oppose calumny, to protect the
oppressed, to relieve the indigent; and her good offices, the genuine
dictates of her heart, never waited the solicitation of presents, or the
hopes of reciprocal services. But she lived not only to feel the
bitterness of shame imposed on her by this tyrant, but to experience, in
old age and poverty, the ingratitude of those courtiers who had long
solicited her friendship, and been protected by her credit. No one, among
the great multitudes whom she had obliged, had the humanity to bring her
consolation or relief; she languished out her life in solitude and
indigence; and amidst a court inured to the most atrocious crimes, the
frail ties of this woman justified all violations of friendship towards
her, and all neglect of former obligations.
These acts of violence, exercised against all the nearest connections of
the late king, prognosticated the severest fate to his defenceless
children; and after the murder of Hastings, the protector no longer made a
secret of his intentions to usurp the crown. The licentious life of
Edward, who was not restrained in his pleasures either by honor or
prudence, afforded a pretence for declaring his marriage with the queen
invalid, and all his posterity illegitimate. It was asserted that, before
espousing the lady Elizabeth Gray, he had paid court to the lady Eleanor
Talbot, daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury; and being repulsed by the
virtue of that lady, he was obliged, ere he could gratify his desires, to
consent to a private marriage, without any witnesses, by Stillington,
bishop of Bath, who afterwards divulged the secret.[*]
It was also maintained that the act of attainder passed against the duke
of Clarence, had virtually incapacitated his children from succeeding to
the crown; and these two families being set aside, the protector remained
the only true and legitimate heir of the house of York. But as it would be
difficult, if not impossible, to prove the preceding marriage of the late
king, and as the rule which excludes the heirs of an attainted blood from
private successions was never extended to the crown, the protector
resolved to make use of another plea, still more shameful and scandalous.
His partisans were taught to maintain, that both Edward IV. and the duke
of Clarence were illegitimate; that the duchess of York had received
different lovers into her bed, who were the fathers of these children,
that, their resemblance to those gallants was a sufficient proof of their
spurious birth; and that the duke of Glocester alone, of all her sons,
appeared by his features and countenance to be the true offspring of the
duke of York. Nothing can be imagined more impudent than this assertion,
which threw so foul an imputation on his own mother, a princess of
irreproachable virtue, and then alive; yet the place chosen for first
promulgating it was the pulpit, before a large congregation, and in the
protector’s presence. Dr. Shaw was appointed to preach in St. Paul’s; and
having chosen this passage for his text “Bastards lips shall not thrive,”
he enlarged on all the topics which could discredit the birth of Edward
IV., the duke of Clarence, and of all their children. He then broke out in
a panegyric on the duke of Glocester; and exclaimed, “Behold this
excellent prince, the express image of his noble father, the genuine
descendant of the house of York; bearing no less in the virtues of his
mind than in the features of his countenance the character of the gallant
Richard, once your hero and favorite: he alone is entitled to your
allegiance: he must deliver you from the dominion of all intruders: he
alone can restore the lost glory and honor of the nation.” It was
previously concerted, that as the doctor should pronounce these words, the
duke of Glocester should enter the church; and it was expected that the
audience would cry out, “God save King Richard;” which would immediately
have been laid hold of as a popular consent, and interpreted to be the
voice of the nation; but by a ridiculous mistake, worthy of the whole
scene, the duke did not appear till after this exclamation was already
recited by the preacher. The doctor was therefore obliged to repeat his
rhetorical figure out of its proper place: the audience, less from the
absurd conduct of the discourse than from their detestation of these
proceedings, kept a profound silence: and the protector and his preacher
were equally abashed at the ill success of their stratagem.
But the duke was too far advanced to recede from his criminal and
ambitious purpose. A new expedient was tried to work on the people. The
mayor, who was brother to Dr. Shaw, and entirely in the protector’s
interests, called an assembly of the citizens; where the duke of
Buckingham, who possessed some talents for eloquence, harangued them on
the protector’s title to the crown, and displayed those numerous virtues
of which he pretended that prince was possessed. He next asked them
whether they would have the duke for king; and then stopped, in
expectation of hearing the cry, “God save King Richard.” He was surprised
to observe them silent; and turning about to the mayor, asked him the
reason. The mayor replied, that perhaps they did not understand him.
Buckingham then repeated his discourse with some variation. enforced the
same topics, asked the same question, and was received with the same
silence. “I now see the cause,” said the mayor; “the citizens are not
accustomed to be harangued by any but their recorder; and know not how to
answer a person of your grace’s quality.” The recorder, Fitz-Williams, was
then commanded to repeat the substance of the duke’s speech; but the man,
who was averse to the office, took care, throughout his whole discourse,
to have it understood that he spoke nothing of himself, and that he only
conveyed to them the sense of the duke of Buckingham. Still the audience
kept a profound silence. “This is wonderful obstinacy,” cried the duke:
“express your meaning, my friends, one way or other: when we apply to you
on this occasion, it is merely from the regard which we bear to you. The
lords and commons have sufficient authority, without your consent, to
appoint a king: but I require you here to declare, in plain terms, whether
or not you will have the duke of Glocester for your sovereign.” After all
these efforts, some of the meanest apprentices, incited by the protector’s
and Buckingham’s servants, raised a feeble cry, “God save King
Richard:”[*] the sentiments of the nation were now sufficiently declared:
the voice of the people was the voice of God: and Buckingham, with the
mayor, hastened to Baynard’s Castle, where the protector then resided,
that they might make him a tender of the crown.
When Richard was told that a great multitude was in the court, he refused
to appear to them, and pretended to be apprehensive for his personal
safety; a circumstance taken notice of by Buckingham, who observed to the
citizens that the prince was ignorant of the whole design. At last he was
persuaded to step forth, but he still kept at some distance; and he asked
the meaning of their intrusion and importunity. Buckingham told him that
the nation was resolved to have him for king: the protector declared his
purpose of maintaining his loyalty to the present sovereign, and exhorted
them to adhere to the same resolution. He was told that the people had
determined to have another prince; and if he rejected their unanimous
voice, they must look out for one who would be more compliant. This
argument was too powerful to be resisted: he was prevailed on to accept of
the crown: and he thenceforth acted as legitimate and rightful sovereign.
This ridiculous force was soon after followed by a scene truly tragical;
the murder of the two young princes. Richard gave orders to Sir Robert
Brakenbury, constable of the Tower, to put his nephews to death; but this
gentleman, who had sentiments of honor, refused to have any hand in the
infamous office. The tyrant then sent for Sir James Tyrrel, who promised
obedience: and he ordered Brakenbury to resign to this gentleman the keys
and government of the Tower for one night. Tyrre, choosing three
associates, Slater, Dighton, and Forest, came in the night-time to the
door of the chamber where the princes were lodged; and sending in the
assassins he bade them execute their commission, while he himself staid
without. They found the young princes in bed, and fallen into a profound
sleep. After suffocating them with the bolster and pillows, they showed
their naked bodies to Tyrrel, who ordered them to be buried at the foot of
the stairs, deep in the ground, under a heap of stones.[*] These
circumstances were all confessed by the actors in the following reign; and
they were never punished for the crime; probably because Henry, whose
maxims of government were extremely arbitrary, desired to establish it as
a principle, that the commands of the reigning sovereign ought to justify
every enormity in those who paid obedience to them. But there is one
circumstance not so easy to be accounted for: it is pretended that
Richard, displeased with the indecent manner of burying his nephews, whom
he had murdered, gave his chaplain orders to dig up the bodies, and to
inter them in consecrated ground; and as the man died soon after, the
place of their burial remained unknown, and the bodies could never be
found by any search which Henry could make for them. Yet in the reign of
Charles II., when there was occasion to remove some stones and to dig in
the very spot which was mentioned as the place of their first interment,
the bones of two persons were there found, which by their size exactly
corresponded to the age of Edward and his brother: they were concluded
with certainty to be the remains of those princes, and were interred under
a marble monument by orders of King Charles.[**] Perhaps Richard’s
chaplain had died before he found an opportunity of executing his master’s
commands; and the bodies being supposed to be already removed, a diligent
search was not made for them by Henry in the place where they had been
buried.
CHAPTER XXIII.
RICHARD III.
1483.
The first acts of Richard’s administration were to bestow rewards on those
who had assisted him in usurping the crown, and to gain by favors those
who, he thought, were best able to support his future government. Thomas
Lord Howard was created duke of Norfolk; Sir Thomas Howard, his son, earl
of Surrey; Lord Lovel, a viscount by the same name; even Lord Stanley was
set at liberty, and made steward of the household. This nobleman had
become obnoxious by his first opposition to Richard’s views, and also by
his marrying the countess dowager of Richmond, heir of the Somerset
family; but sensible of the necessity of submitting to the present
government, he feigned such zeal for Richard’s service, that he was
received into favor, and even found means to be intrusted with the most
important commands by that politic and jealous tyrant.
But the person who, both from the greatness of his services and the power
and splendor of his family, was best entitled to favors under the new
government, was the duke of Buckingham; and Richard seemed determined to
spare no pains or bounty in securing him to his interests. Buckingham was
descended from a daughter of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Glocester, uncle
to Richard II.; and by this pedigree he not only was allied to the royal
family, but had claims for dignities as well as estates of a very
extensive nature. The duke of Glocester, and Henry, earl of Derby,
afterwards Henry IV. had married the two daughters and coheirs of Bohun,
earl of Hereford, one of the greatest of the ancient barons, whose immense
property came thus to be divided into two shares. One was inherited by the
family of Buckingham; the other was united to the crown by the house of
Lancaster, and, after the attainder of that royal line, was seized, as
legally devolved to them, by the sovereigns of the house of York. The duke
of Buckingham laid hold of the present opportunity, and claimed the
restitution of that portion of the Hereford estate which had escheated to
the crown, as well as of the great office of constable, which had long
continued by inheritance in his ancestors of that family. Richard readily
complied with these demands, which were probably the price stipulated to
Buckingham for his assistance in promoting the usurpation. That nobleman
was invested with the office of constable; he received a grant of the
estate of Hereford;[*] many other dignities and honors were conferred upon
him; and the king thought himself sure of preserving the fidelity of a man
whose interests seemed so closely connected with those of the present
government.
But it was impossible that friendship could long remain inviolate between
two men of such corrupt minds as Richard and the duke of Buckingham.
Historians ascribe their first rupture to the king’s refusal of making
restitution of the Hereford estate; but it is certain from records, that
he passed a grant for that purpose, and that the full demands of
Buckingham were satisfied in this particular. Perhaps Richard was soon
sensible of the danger which might ensue from conferring such an immense
property on a man of so turbulent a disposition, and afterwards raised
difficulties about the execution of his own grant: perhaps he refused some
other demands of Buckingham, whom he found it impossible to gratify for
his past services: perhaps he resolved, according to the usual maxim of
politicians, to seize the first opportunity of ruining this powerful
subject, who had been the principal instrument of his own elevation; and
the discovery of this intention begat the first discontent in the duke of
Buckingham. However this may be, it is certain that the duke, soon after
Richard’s accession, began to form a conspiracy against the government,
and attempted to overthrow that usurpation which he himself had so
zealously contributed to establish.
Never was there in any country a usurpation more flagrant than that of
Richard, or more repugnant to every principle of justice and public
interest. His claim was entirely founded on impudent allegations, never
attempted to be proved; some of them incapable of proof, and all of their
implying scandalous reflections on his own family, and on the persons with
whom he was the most nearly connected. His title was never acknowledged by
any national assembly, scarcely even by the lowest populace to whom he
appealed; and it had become prevalent merely for want of some person of
distinction, who might stand forth against him, and give a voice to those
sentiments of general detestation which arose in every bosom. Were men
disposed to pardon these violations of public right, the sense of private
and domestic duty, which is not to be effaced in the most barbarous times,
must have, begotten an abhorrence against him; and have represented the
murder of the young and innocent princes, his nephews, with whose
protection he had been intrusted, in the most odious colors imaginable. To
endure such a bloody usurper seemed to draw disgrace upon the nation, and
to be attended with immediate danger to every individual who was
distinguished by birth, merit, or services. Such was become the general
voice of the people; all parties were united in the same sentiments; and
the Lancastrians, so long oppressed, and of late so much discredited, felt
their blasted hopes again revive, and anxiously expected the consequences
of these extraordinary events. The duke of Buckingham, whose family had
been devoted to that interest, and who, by his mother, a daughter of
Edmund, duke of Somerset, was allied to the house of Lancaster, was easily
induced to espouse the cause of this party, and to endeavor the restoring
of it to its ancient superiority. Morton, bishop of Ely, a zealous
Lancastrian, whom the king had imprisoned, and had afterwards committed to
the custody of Buckingham, encouraged these sentiments; and by his
exhortations the duke cast his eye towards the young earl of Richmond, as
the only person who could free the nation from the tyranny of the present
usurper.[*]
Henry, earl of Richmond, was at this time detained in a kind of honorable
custody by the duke of Brittany; and his descent, which seemed to give him
some pretensions to the crown, had been a great object of jealousy both in
the late and in the present reign. John, the first duke of Somerset who
was grandson of John of Gaunt, by a spurious branch but legitimated by act
of parliament, had left only one daughter, Margaret; and his younger
brother, Edmund, had succeeded him in his titles, and in a considerable
part of his fortune. Margaret had espoused Edmund, earl of Richmond, half
brother of Henry VI., and son of Sir Owen Tudor and Catharine of France,
relict of Henry V., and she bore him only one son, who received the name
of Henry, and who, after his father’s death, inherited the honors and
fortune of Richmond. His mother, being a widow, had espoused in second
marriage Sir Henry Stafford, uncle to Buckingham, and after the death of
that gentleman, had married Lord Stanley; but had no children by either of
these husbands; and her son Henry was thus, in the event of her death, the
sole heir of all her fortunes. But this was not the most considerable
advantage which he had reason to expect from her succession: he would
represent the elder branch of the house of Somerset; he would inherit all
the title of that family to the crown; and though its claim, while any
legitimate branch subsisted of the house of Lancaster, had always been
much disregarded, the zeal of faction, after the death of Henry VI., and
the murder of Prince Edward, immediately conferred a weight and
consideration upon it.
Edward IV., finding that all the Lancastrians had turned their attention
towards the young earl of Richmond as the object of their hopes, thought
him also worthy of his attention; and pursued him into his retreat in
Brittany, whither his uncle, the earl of Pembroke, had carried him, after
the battle of Tewkesbury, so fatal to his party. He applied to Francis
II., duke of Brittany, who was his ally; a weak, but a good prince; and
urged him to deliver up this fugitive, who might be the source of future
disturbances in England; but the duke, averse to so dishonorable a
proposal, would only consent that, for the security of Edward, the young
nobleman should be detained in custody; and he received an annual pension
from England for the safe keeping or the subsistence of his prisoner. But
towards the end of Edward’s reign, when the kingdom was menaced with a war
both from France and Scotland, the anxieties of the English court with
regard to Henry were much increased; and Edward made a new proposal to the
duke, which covered, under the fairest appearances, the most bloody and
treacherous intentions. He pretended that he was desirous of gaining his
enemy, and of uniting him to his own family by a marriage with his
daughter Elizabeth; and he solicited to have him sent over to England, in
order to execute a scheme which would redound so much to his advantage.
These pretences, seconded, as is supposed, by bribes to Peter Landais, a
corrupt minister, by whom the duke was entirely governed, gained credit
with the court of Brittany: Henry was delivered into the hands of the
English agents, he was ready to embark; when a suspicion of Edward’s real
design was suggested to the duke, who recalled his orders, and thus saved
the unhappy youth from the imminent danger which hung over him.
These symptoms of continued jealousy in the reigning family of England,
both seemed to give some authority to Henry’s pretensions, and made him
the object of general favor and compassion, on account of the dangers and
persecutions to which he was exposed. The universal detestation of
Richard’s conduct turned still more the attention of the nation towards
Henry; and as all the descendants of the house of York were either women
or minors, he seemed to be the only person from whom the nation could
expect the expulsion of the odious and bloody tyrant. But notwithstanding
these circumstances, which were so favorable to him, Buckingham and the
bishop of Ely well knew that there would still be many obstacles in his
way to the throne; and that, though the nation had been much divided
between Henry VI. and the duke of York, while present possession and
hereditary right stood in opposition to each other, yet as soon as these
titles were united in Edward IV., the bulk of the people had come over to
the reigning family; and the Lancastrians had extremely decayed, both in
numbers and in authority. It was therefore suggested by Morton, and
readily assented to by the duke, that the only means of overturning the
present usurpation, was to unite the opposite factions, by contracting a
marriage between the earl of Richmond and the princess Elizabeth, eldest
daughter of King Edward, and thereby blending together the opposite
pretensions of their families, which had so long been the source of public
disorders and convulsions. They were sensible, that the people were
extremely desirous of repose after so many bloody and destructive
commotions; that both Yorkists and Lancastrians, who now lay equally under
oppression, would embrace this scheme with ardor; and that the prospect of
reconciling the two parties, which was in itself so desirable an end,
would, when added to the general hatred against the present government,
render their cause absolutely invincible. In consequence of these views,
the prelate, by means of Reginald Bray, steward to the countess of Rich-*
*mond, first opened the project of such a union to that lady; and the plan
appeared so advantageous for her son, and at the same time so likely to
succeed, that it admitted not of the least hesitation. Dr. Lewis, a Welsh
physician, who had access to the queen dowager in her sanctuary, carried
the proposals to her, and found that revenge for the murder of her brother
and of her three sons, apprehensions for her surviving family, and
indignation against her confinement, easily overcame all her prejudices
against the house of Lancaster, and procured her approbation of a
marriage, to which the age and birth, as well as the present situation of
the parties, seemed so naturally to invite them. She secretly borrowed a
sum of money in the city, sent it over to the earl of Richmond, required
his oath to celebrate the marriage as soon as he should arrive in England,
advised him to levy as many foreign forces as possible, and promised to
join him on his first appearance, with all the friends and partisans of
her family.
The plan being thus laid upon the solid foundations of good sense and
sound policy, it was secretly communicated to the principal persons of
both parties in all the counties of England; and a wonderful alacrity
appeared in every order of men to forward its success and completion. But
it was impossible that so extensive a conspiracy could be conducted in so
secret a manner, as entirely to escape the jealous and vigilant eye of
Richard; and he soon received intelligence, that his enemies, headed by
the duke of Buckingham, were forming some design against his authority. He
immediately put himself in a posture of defence, by levying troops in the
north; and he summoned the duke to appear at court, in such terms as
seemed to promise him a renewal of their former amity. But that nobleman,
well acquainted with the barbarity and treachery of Richard, replied only
by taking arms in Wales, and giving the signal to his accomplices for a
general insurrection in all parts of England. But at that very time there
happened to fall such heavy rains, so incessant and continued, as exceeded
any known in the memory of man; and the Severn, with the other rivers in
that neighborhood, swelled to a height which rendered them impassable, and
prevented Buckingham from marching into the heart of England to join his
associates. The Welshmen, partly moved by superstition at this
extraordinary event, partly distressed by famine in their camp, fell off
from him; and Buckingham, finding himself deserted by his followers, put
on a disguise, and took shelter in the house of Banister, an old servant
of his family. But being detected in his retreat, he was brought to the
king at Salisbury; and was instantly executed, according to the summary
method practised in that age.[*] The other conspirators, who took arms in
four different places, at Exeter, at Salisbury, it Newbury, and at
Maidstone, hearing of the duke of Buckingham’s misfortunes, despaired of
success, and immediately dispersed themselves.
The marquis of Dorset and the bishop of Ely made their escape beyond sea;
many others were equally fortunate; several fell into Richard’s hands, of
whom he made some examples. His executions seem not to have been
remarkably severe; though we are told of one gentleman, William
Colingbourne, who suffered under color of this rebellion, but in reality
for a distich of quibbling verses which he had composed against Richard
and his ministers.[*]
The earl of Richmond, in concert with his friends, had set sail from St.
Malo’s, carrying on board a body of five thousand men, levied in foreign
parts; but his fleet being at first driven back by a storm, he appeared
not on the coast of England till after the dispersion of all his friends;
and he found himself obliged to return to the court of Brittany.
1484.
The king, every where triumphant, and fortified by this unsuccessful
attempt to dethrone him, ventured at last to summon a parliament; a
measure which his crimes and flagrant usurpation had induced him hitherto
to decline. Though it was natural that the parliament, in a contest of
national parties, should always adhere to the victor, he seems to have
apprehended, lest his title, founded on no principle, and supported by no
party, might be rejected by that assembly. But his enemies being now at
his feet, the parliament had no choice left but to recognize his
authority, and acknowledge his right to the crown. His only son, Edward,
then a youth of twelve years of age, was created prince of Wales: the
duties of tonnage and poundage were granted to the king for life; and
Richard, in order to reconcile the nation to his government, passed some
popular laws, particularly one alluding to the names of Ratcliffe and
Catesby; and to Richard’s arms, which were a boar, against the late
practice of extorting money on pretence of benevolence.
All the other measures of the king tended to the same object. Sensible
that the only circumstance which could give him security, was to gain the
confidence of the Yorkists, he paid court to the queen dowager with such
art and address, made such earnest protestations of his sincere good-will
and friendship, that this princess, tired of confinement, and despairing
of any success from her former projects, ventured to leave her sanctuary,
and to put herself and her daughters into the hands of the tyrant. But he
soon carried further his views for the establishment of his throne. He had
married Anne, the second daughter of the earl of Warwick, and widow of
Edward, prince of Wales, whom Richard himself had murdered; but this
princess having born him but one son, who died about this time, he
considered her as an invincible obstacle to the settlement of his fortune,
and he was believed to have carried her off by poison; a crime for which
the public could not be supposed to have any solid proof, but which the
usual tenor of his conduct made it reasonable to suspect. He now thought
it in his power to remove the chief perils which threatened his
government. The earl of Richmond, he knew, could never be formidable but
from his projected marriage with the princess Elizabeth, the true heir of
the crown; and he therefore intended, by means of a papal dispensation, to
espouse, himself, this princess, and thus to unite in his own family their
contending titles. The queen dowager, eager to recover her lost authority,
neither scrupled this alliance, which was very unusual in England, and was
regarded as incestuous, nor felt any horror at marrying her daughter to
the murderer of her three sons and of her brother: she even joined so
farther interests with those of the usurper, that she wrote to all her
partisans, and among the rest to her son, the marquis of Dorset, desiring
them to withdraw from the earl of Richmond; an injury which the earl could
never afterwards forgive: the court of Rome was applied to for a
dispensation: Richard thought that he could easily defend himself during
the interval, till it arrived; and he had afterwards the agreeable
prospect of a full and secure settlement. He flattered himself that the
English nation, seeing all danger removed of a disputed succession, would
then acquiesce under the dominion of a prince who was of mature years, of
great abilities, and of a genius qualified for government; and that they
would forgive him all the crimes which he had committed in paving his way
to the throne.
But the crimes of Richard were so horrid and so shocking to humanity, that
the natural sentiments of men, without any political or public views, were
sufficient to render his government unstable; and every person of probity
and honor was earnest to prevent the sceptre from being any longer
polluted by that bloody and faithless hand which held it. All the exiles
flocked to the earl of Richmond in Brittany, and exhorted him to hasten
his attempt for a new invasion, and to prevent the marriage of the
princess Elizabeth, which must prove fatal to all his hopes. The earl,
sensible of the urgent necessity, but dreading the treachery of Peter
Landais, who had entered into a negotiation with Richard for betraying
him, was obliged to attend only to his present safety; and he made his
escape to the court of France. The ministers of Charles VIII., who had now
succeeded to the throne after the death of his father, Lewis, gave him
countenance and protection; and being desirous of raising disturbance to
Richard, they secretly encouraged the earl in the levies which he made for
the support of his enterprise upon England. The earl of Oxford, whom
Richard’s suspicions had thrown into confinement, having made his escape,
here joined Henry; and inflamed his ardor for the attempt, by a favorable
account which he brought of the dispositions of the English nation, and
their universal hatred of Richard’s crimes and usurpation.
1485.
The earl of Richmond set sail from Harfleur, in Normandy, with a small
army of about two thousand men; and after a navigation of six days, he
arrived at Milford Haven, in Wales, where he landed without opposition. He
directed his course to that part of the kingdom, in hopes that the Welsh,
who regarded him as their countryman, and who had been already
prepossessed in favor of his cause by means of the duke of Buckingham,
would join his standard, and enable him to make head against the
established government. Richard, who knew not in what quarter he might
expect the invader, had taken post at Nottingham, in the centre of the
kingdom; and having given commissions to different persons in the several
counties, whom he empowered to oppose his enemy, he purposed in person to
fly, on the first alarm, to the place exposed to danger. Sir Rice ap
Thomas and Sir Walter Herbert were intrusted with his authority in Wales;
but the former immediately deserted to Henry; the second made but feeble
opposition to him; and the earl, advancing towards Shrewsbury, received
every day some reënforcement from his partisans. Sir Gilbert Talbot joined
him with all the vassals and retainers of the family of Shrewsbury: Sir
Thomas Bourchier and Sir Walter Hungerford brought their friends to share
his fortunes; and the appearance of men of distinction in his camp made
already his cause wear a favorable aspect.
But the danger to which Richard was chiefly exposed, proceeded not so much
from the zeal of his open enemies, as from the infidelity of his pretended
friends. Scarce any nobleman of distinction was sincerely attached to his
cause, except the duke of Norfolk; and all those who feigned the most
loyalty were only watching for an opportunity to betray and desert him.
But the persons of whom he entertained the greatest suspicion, were Lord
Stanley and his brother Sir William, whose connections with the family of
Richmond, notwithstanding their professions of attachment to his person,
were never entirely forgotten or overlooked by him. When he empowered Lord
Stanley to levy forces, he still retained his eldest son, Lord Strange, as
a pledge for his fidelity; and that nobleman was, on this account, obliged
to employ great caution and reserve in his proceedings. He raised a
powerful body of his friends and retainers in Cheshire and Lancashire, but
without openly declaring himself: and though Henry had received secret
assurances of his friendly intentions, the armies on both sides knew not
what to infer from his equivocal behavior. The two rivals at last
approached each other, at Bosworth near Leicester; Henry at the head of
six thousand men, Richard with an army of above double the number; and a
decisive action was every hour expected between them. Stanley, who
commanded above seven thousand men, took care to post himself at
Atherstone, not far from the hostile camps; and he made such a disposition
as enabled him on occasion to join either party. Richard had too much
sagacity not to discover his intentions from these movements; but he kept
the secret from his own men for fear of discouraging them: he took not
immediate revenge on Stanley’s son, as some of his courtiers advised him;
because he hoped that so valuable a pledge would induce the father to
prolong still further his ambiguous conduct: and he hastened to decide by
arms the quarrel with his competitor; being certain that a victory over
the earl of Richmond would enable him to take simple revenge on all his
enemies, open and concealed.
The van of Richmond’s army, consisting of archers, was commanded by the
earl of Oxford: Sir Gilbert Talbot led the right wing; Sir John Savage the
left: the earl himself, accompanied by his uncle the earl of Pembroke,
placed himself in the main body. Richard also took post in his main body,
and intrusted the command of his van to the duke of Norfolk: as his wings
were never engaged, we have not learned the names of the several
commanders. Soon after the battle began, Lord Stanley, whose conduct in
this whole affair discovers great precaution and abilities, appeared in
the field, and declared for the earl of Richmond. This measure, which was
unexpected to the men, though not to their leaders, had a proportional
effect on both armies: it inspired unusual courage into Henry’s soldiers;
it threw Richard’s into dismay and confusion. The intrepid tyrant,
sensible of his desperate situation, cast his eye around the field, and
descrying his rival at no great distance, he drove against him with fury,
in hopes that either Henry’s death or his own would decide the victory
between them. He killed with his own hands Sir William Brandon,
standard-bearer to the earl: he dismounted Sir John Cheyney: he was now
within reach of Richmond himself, who declined not the combat, when Sir
William Stanley, breaking in with his troops, surrounded Richard, who,
fighting bravely to the last moment, was overwhelmed by numbers, and
perished by a fate too mild and honorable for his multiplied and
detestable enormities. His men every where sought for safety by flight.
There fell in this battle about four thousand of the vanquished; and among
these the duke of Norfolk, Lord Ferrars of Chartley, Sir Richard
Ratcliffe, Sir Robert Piercy, and Sir Robert Brackenbury. The loss was
inconsiderable on the side of the victors. Sir William Catesby, a great
instrument of Richard’s crimes, was taken, and soon after beheaded, with
some others, at Leicester. The body of Richard was found in the field,
covered with dead enemies, and all besmeared with blood: it was thrown
carelessly across a horse; was carried to Leicester amidst the shouts of
the insulting spectators; and was interred in the Gray Friars’ church of
that place.
The historians who favor Richard (for even this tyrant has met with
partisans among the later writers) maintain, that he was well qualified
for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no
crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown:
but this is a poor apology, when it is confessed, that he was ready to
commit the most horrid crimes which appeared necessary for that purpose;
and it is certain, that all his courage and capacity, qualities in which
he really seems not to have been deficient, would never have made
compensation to the people for the danger of the precedent, and for the
contagious example of vice and murder exalted upon the throne. This prince
was of a small stature, humpbacked, and had a harsh, disagreeable
countenance; so that his body was in every particular no less deformed
than his mind.
Thus have we pursued the history of England through a series of many
barbarous ages, till we have at last reached the dawn of civility and
science, and have the prospect, both of greater certainty in our
historical narrations, and of being able to present to the reader a
spectacle more worthy of his attention. The want of certainty, however,
and of circumstances, is not unlike to be complained of throughout every
period of this long narration. This island possesses many ancient
historians of good credit, as well as many historical monuments; and it is
rare, that the annals of so uncultivated a people as were the English, as
well as the other European nations after the decline of Roman learning,
have been transmitted to posterity so complete, and with so little mixture
of falsehood and of fable. This advantage we owe entirely to the clergy of
the church of Rome; who, founding their authority on their superior
knowledge, preserved the precious literature of antiquity from a total
extinction;[*] 21 and, under shelter of their numerous privileges
and immunities, acquired a security by means of the superstition, which
they would in vain have claimed from the justice and humanity of those
turbulent and licentious ages.
Nor is the spectacle altogether unentertaining and uninstructive, which
the history of those times presents to us. The view of human manners, in
all their variety of appearances, is both profitable and agreeable; and if
the aspect in some periods seem horrid and deformed, we may thence learn
to cherish with the greater anxiety that science and civility, which has
so close a connection with virtue and humanity, and which, as it is a
sovereign antidote against superstition, is also the most effectual remedy
against vice and disorders of every kind.
The rise, progress, perfection, and decline of art and science, are
curious objects of contemplation, and intimately connected with a
narration of civil transactions. The events of no particular period can be
fully accounted for, but by considering the degrees of advancement which
men have reached in those particulars.
Those who cast their eye on the general revolutions of society, will find
that, as almost all improvements of the human mind had reached nearly to
their state of perfection about the age of Augustus, there was a sensible
decline from that point or period; and men thenceforth relapsed gradually
into ignorance and barbarism. The unlimited extent of the Roman empire,
and the consequent despotism of its monarchs, extinguished all emulation,
debased the generous spirits of men, and depressed that noble flame by
which all the refined arts must be cherished and enlivened. The military
government, which soon succeeded, rendered even the lives and properties
of men insecure and precarious; and proved destructive to those vulgar and
more necessary arts of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; and, in
the end, to the military art and genius itself, by which alone the immense
fabric of the empire could be supported. The irruption of the barbarous
nations which soon followed, overwhelmed all human knowledge, which was
already far in its decline; and men sunk every age deeper into ignorance,
stupidity, and superstition; till the light of ancient science and history
had very nearly suffered a total extinction in all the European nations.
But there is a point of depression, as well as of exaltation, from which
human affairs naturally return in a contrary direction, and beyond which
they seldom pass either in their advancement or decline. The period in
which the people of Christendom were the lowest sunk in ignorance, and
consequently in disorders of every kind, may justly be fixed at the
eleventh century, about the age of William the Conqueror; and from that
era the sun of science, beginning to reascend, threw out many gleams of
light, which preceded the full morning when letters were revived in the
fifteenth century. The Danes and other northern people, who had so long
infested all the coasts, and even the island parts of Europe, by their
depredations, having now learned the arts of tillage and agriculture,
found a certain subsistence at home, and were no longer tempted to desert
their industry, in order to seek a precarious livelihood by rapine and by
the plunder of their neighbors. The feudal governments also, among the
more southern nations, were reduced to a kind of system; and though that
strange species of civil polity was ill fitted to insure either liberty or
tranquillity, it was preferable to the universal license and disorder
which had every where preceded it. But perhaps there was no event which
tended further to the improvement of the age, than one which has not been
much remarked, the accidental finding of a copy of Justinian’s Pandects,
about the year 1130, in the town of Amalfi, in Italy.
The ecclesiastics, who had leisure, and some inclination to study,
immediately adopted with zeal this excellent system of jurisprudence, and
spread the knowledge of it throughout every part of Europe. Besides the
intrinsic merit of the performance, it was recommended to them by its
original connection with the imperial city of Rome, which, being the seat
of their religion, seemed to acquire a new lustre and authority by the
diffusion of its laws over the western world. In less than ten years after
the discovery of the Pandects, Vacarius, under the protection of Theobald,
archbishop of Canterbury, read public lectures of civil law in the
university of Oxford; and the clergy every where, by their example as well
as exhortation, were the means of diffusing the highest esteem for this
new science. That order of men, having large possessions to defend, was in
a manner necessitated to turn their studies towards the law; and their
properties being often endangered by the violence of the princes and
barons, it became their interest to enforce the observance of general and
equitable rules, from which alone they could receive protection. As they
possessed all the knowledge of the age, and were alone acquainted with the
habits of thinking, the practice as well as science of the law fell mostly
into their hands: and though the close connection which, without any
necessity, they formed between the canon and civil law, begat a jealousy
in the laity of England, and prevented the Roman jurisprudence from
becoming the municipal law of the country, as was the case in many states
of Europe, a great part of it was secretly transferred into the practice
of the courts of justice, and the imitation of their neighbors made the
English gradually endeavor to raise their own law from its original state
of rudeness and imperfection.
It is easy to see what advantages Europe must have reaped by its
inheriting at once from the ancients so complete an art, which was also so
necessary for giving security to all other arts, and which by refining,
and still more by bestowing solidity on the judgment, served as a model to
further improvements. The sensible utility of the Roman law, both to
public and private interest, recommended the study of it, at a time when
the more exalted and speculative sciences carried no charms with them; and
thus the last branch of ancient literature which remained uncorrupted, was
happily the first transmitted to the modern world. For it is remarkable,
that in the decline of Roman learning, when the philosophers were
universally infected with superstition and sophistry, and the poets and
historians with barbarism, the lawyers, who in other countries are seldom
models of science or politeness, were yet able, by the constant study and
close imitation of their predecessors, to maintain the same good sense in
their decisions and reasonings, and the same purity in their language and
expression.
What bestowed an additional merit on the civil law, was the extreme
imperfection of that jurisprudence which preceded it among all the
European nations, especially among the Saxons or ancient English. The
absurdities which prevailed at that time in the administration of justice,
may be conceived from the authentic monuments which remain of the ancient
Saxon laws; where a pecuniary commutation was received for every crime,
where stated prices were fixed for men’s lives and members, where private
revenges were authorized for all injuries, where the use of the ordeal,
corsnet, and afterwards of the duel, was the received method of proof, and
where the judges were rustic freeholders, assembled of a sudden, and
deciding a cause from one debate or altercation of the parties. Such a
state of society was very little advanced beyond the rude state of nature:
violence universally prevailed, instead of general and equitable maxims:
the pretended liberty of the times was only an incapacity of submitting to
government: and men, not protected by law in their lives and properties,
sought shelter, by their personal servitude and attachments, under some
powerful chieftain, or by voluntary combinations.
The gradual progress of improvement raised the Europeans somewhat above
this uncultivated state; and affairs, in this island particularly, took
early a turn which was more favorable to justice and to liberty. Civil
employments and occupations soon became honorable among the English: the
situation of that people rendered not the perpetual attention to wars so
necessary as among their neighbors, and all regard was not confined to the
military profession: the gentry, and even the nobility, began to deem an
acquaintance with the law a necessary part of education: they were less
diverted than afterwards from studies of this kind by other sciences; and
in the age of Henry VI., as we are told by Fortescue, there were in the
inns of court about two thousand students, most of them men of honorable
birth, who gave application to this branch of civil knowledge: a
circumstance which proves, that a considerable progress was already made
in the science of government, and which prognosticated a still greater.
One chief advantage which resulted from the introduction and progress of
the arts, was the introduction and progress of freedom; and this
consequence affected men both in their personal and civil capacities.
If we consider the ancient state of Europe, we shall find, that the far
greater part of the society were every where bereaved of their personal
liberty, and lived entirely at the will of their masters. Every one that
was not noble, was a slave: the peasants were sold along with the land:
the few inhabitants of cities were not in a better condition: even the
gentry themselves were subjected to a long train of subordination under
the greater barons or chief vassals of the crown; who, though seemingly
placed in a high state of splendor, yet, having but a slender protection
from law, were exposed to every tempest of the state, and, by the
precarious condition in which they lived, paid dearly for the power of
oppressing and tyrannizing over their inferiors. The first incident which
broke in upon this violent system of government, was the practice, begun
in Italy, and imitated in France, of erecting communities and
corporations, endowed with privileges and a separate municipal government,
which gave them protection against the tyranny of the barons, and which
the prince himself deemed it prudent to respect.[*]
The relaxation of the feudal tenures, and an execution somewhat stricter
of the public law, bestowed an independence on vassals which was unknown
to their forefathers. And even the peasants themselves, though later than
other orders of the state, made their escape from those bonds of villenage
or slavery in which they had formerly been retained.
It may appear strange that the progress of the arts, which seems, among
the Greeks and Romans, to have daily increased the number of slaves,
should, in later times, have proved so general a source of liberty; but
this difference in the events proceeded from a great difference in the
circumstances which attended those institutions. The ancient barons,
obliged to maintain themselves continually in a military posture, and
little emulous of elegance or splendor, employed not their villains as
domestic servants, much less as manufacturers; but composed their retinue
of freemen, whose military spirit rendered the chieftain formidable to his
neighbors, and who were ready to attend him in every warlike enterprise.
The villains were entirely occupied in the cultivation of their master’s
land, and paid their rents either in corn and cattle, and other produce of
the farm, or in servile offices, which they performed about the baron’s
family, and upon the farms which he retained in his own possession. In
proportion as agriculture improved and money increased, it was found that
these services, though extremely burdensome to the villain, were of little
advantage to the master; and that the produce of a large estate could be
much more conveniently disposed of by the peasants themselves, who raised
it, than by the landlord or his bailiff, who were formerly accustomed to
receive it. A commutation was therefore made of rents for services, and of
money-rents for those in kind; and as men, in a subsequent age, discovered
that farms were better cultivated where the farmer enjoyed a security in
his possession, the practice of granting leases to the peasant began to
prevail, which entirely broke the bonds of servitude, already much relaxed
from the former practices. After this manner villenage went gradually into
disuse throughout the more civilized parts of Europe: the interest of the
master, as well as that of the slave, concurred in this alteration. The
latest laws which we find in England for enforcing or regulating this
species of servitude, were enacted in the reign of Henry VII. And though
the ancient statutes on this subject remain still unrepealed by
parliament, it appears that before the end of Elizabeth, the distinction
of villain and freeman was totally, though insensibly abolished, and that
no person remained in the state, to whom the former laws could be applied.
Thus personal freedom became almost general in Europe; an advantage which
paved the way for the increase of political or civil liberty, and which,
even where it was not attended with this salutary effect, served to give
the members of the community some of the most considerable advantages of
it.
The constitution of the English government, ever since the invasion of
this island by the Saxons, may boast of this pre-eminence, that in no age
the will of the monarch was ever entirely absolute and uncontrolled; but
in other respects the balance of power has extremely shifted among the
several orders of the state; and this fabric has experienced the same
mutability that has attended all human institutions.
The ancient Saxons, like the other German nations, where each individual
was inured to arms, and where the independence of men was secured by a
great equality of possessions, seem to have admitted a considerable
mixture of democracy into their form of government, and to have been one
of the freest nations of which there remains any account in the records of
history. After this tribe was settled in England, especially after the
dissolution of the heptarchy, the great extent of the kingdom produced a
great inequality in property; and the balance seems to have inclined to
the side of aristocracy. The Norman conquest threw more authority into the
hands of the sovereign, which, however, admitted of great control; though
derived less from the general forms of the constitution, which were
inaccurate and irregular, than from the independent power enjoyed by each
baron in his particular district or province. The establishment of the
Great Charter exalted still higher the aristocracy, imposed regular limits
on royal power, and gradually introduced some mixture of democracy into
the constitution. But even during this period, from the accession of
Edward I. to the death of Richard III., the condition of the commons was
nowise eligible: a kind of Polish aristocracy prevailed; and though the
kings were limited, the people were as yet far from being free. It
required the authority almost absolute of the sovereigns, which took place
in the subsequent period, to pull down those disorderly and licentious
tyrants, who were equally averse from peace and from freedom, and to
establish that regular execution of the laws, which, in a following age,
enabled the people to erect a regular and equitable plan of liberty. In
each of these successive alterations, the only rule of government which is
intelligible, or carries any authority with it, is the established
practice of the age, and the maxims of administration which are at that
time prevalent and universally assented to. Those who, from a pretended
respect to antiquity, appeal at every turn to an original plan of the
constitution, only cover their turbulent spirit and their private ambition
under the appearance of venerable forms; and whatever period they pitch on
for their model, they may still be carried back to a more ancient period,
where they will find the measures of power entirely different, and where
every circumstance, by reason of the greater barbarity of the times, will
appear still less worthy of imitation. Above all, a civilized nation like
the English, who have happily established the most perfect and most
accurate system of liberty that was ever found compatible with government,
ought to be cautious in appealing to the practice of their ancestors, or
regarding the maxims of uncultivated ages as certain rules for their
present conduct. An acquaintance with the ancient periods of their
government is chiefly useful, by instructing them to cherish their
present constitution, from a comparison or contrast with the condition of
those distant times. And it is also curious, by showing them the
remote, and commonly faint and disfigured originals of the most finished
and most noble institutions, and by instructing them in the great mixture
of accident, which commonly concurs with a small ingredient of wisdom and
foresight, in erecting the complicated fabric of the most perfect
government.
NOTES.
1 (return)
[ NOTE A, p. 86. Rymer, vol.
ii. p. 26, 845. There cannot be the least question, that the homage
usually paid by the kings of Scotland was not for their crown, but for
some other territory. The only question remains, what that territory was.
It was not always for the earldom of Huntingdon, nor the honor of Penryth;
because we find it sometimes done at a time when these possessions were
not in the hands of the kings of Scotland. It is probable that the homage
was performed in general terms, without any particular specification of
territory; and this inaccuracy had proceeded either from some dispute
between the two kings about the territory and some opposite claims, which
were compromised by the general homage, or from the simplicity of the age,
which employed few words in every transaction. To prove this, we need but
look into the letter of King Richard, where he resigns the homage of
Scotland, reserving the usual homage. His words are, “Sæpedictus W. Rex
ligius homo noster deveniat de omnibus terris de quibus antecessores sui
antecessorum nostrorum ligii homines fuerunt, et nobis atque hæredibus
nostris fidelitatem jurarunt.” Rymer, vol. i. p. 65. These general terms
were probably copied from the usual form of the homage itself.
It is no proof that the kings of Scotland possessed no lands or baronies
in England, because we cannot find them in the imperfect histories and
records of that age. For instance, it clearly appears from another passage
of this very letter of Richard, that the Scottish king held lands both in
the county of Huntingdon and elsewhere in England; though the earldom of
Huntingdon itself was then in the person of his brother David; and we know
at present of no other baronies which William held. It cannot be expected
that we should now be able to specify all his fees which he either
possessed or claimed in England; when it is probable that the two monarchs
themselves and their ministers would at that very time have differed in
the list: the Scottish king might possess some to which his right was
disputed; he might claim others which he did not possess; and neither of
the two kings was willing to resign his pretensions by a particular
enumeration.
A late author of great industry and learning, but
full of prejudices, and of no penetration, Mr. Carte, has taken advantage
of the undefined terms of the Scotch homage, and has pretended that it was
done for Lothian and Galloway: that is, all the territories of the country
now called Scotland, lying south of the Clyde and Forth. But to refute
this pretension at once, we need only consider, that if these territories
were held in fee of the English kings, there would, by the nature of the
feudal law as established in England, have been continual appeals from
them to the courts of the lord paramount; contrary to all the histories
and records of that age. We find that, as soon as Edward really
established his superiority, appeals immediately commenced from all parts
of Scotland: and that king, in his writ to the king’s bench, considers
them as a necessary consequence of the feudal tenure. Such large
territories also would have supplied a considerable part of the English
armies, which never could have escaped all the historians. Not to mention
that there is not any instance of a Scotch prisoner of war being tried as
a rebel, in the frequent hostilities between the kingdoms, where the
Scottish armies were chiefly filled from the southern counties.
Mr. Carte’s notion with regard to Galloway, which comprehends, in the
language of that age, or rather in that of the preceding, most of the
south-west counties of Scotland; his notion, I say, rests on so slight a
foundation, that it scarcely merits being refuted. He will have it, (and
merely because he will have it,) that the Cumberland, yielded by King
Edmund to Malcolm I., meant not only the county in England of that name,
but all the territory northwards to the Clyde. But the case of Lothian
deserves some more consideration.
It is certain that, in very
ancient language, Scotland means only the country north of the Friths of
Clyde and Forth. I shall not make a parade of literature to prove it;
because I do not find that this point is disputed by the Scots themselves.
The southern country was divided into Galloway and Lothian; and the latter
comprehended all the south-east counties. This territory was certainly a
part of the ancient kingdom of Northumberland, and was entirely peopled by
Saxons, who afterwards received a great mixture of Danes among them. It
appears from all the English histories, that the whole kingdom of
Northumberland paid very little obedience to the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, who
governed after the dissolution of the heptarchy; and the northern and
remote parts of it seem to have fallen into a kind of anarchy, sometimes
pillaged by the Danes, sometimes joining them in their ravages upon other
parts of England. The kings of Scotland, lying nearer them, took at last
possession of the country, which had scarcely any government; and we are
told by Matthew of Westminster, (p. 193,) that King Edgar made a grant of
the territory to Kenneth III.; that is, he resigned claims which he could
not make effectual, without bestowing on them more trouble and expense
than they were worth: for these are the only grants of provinces made by
kings; and so ambitious and active a prince as Edgar would never have made
presents of any other kind. Though Matthew of Westminster’s authority may
appear small with regard to so remote a transaction, yet we may admit it
in this case, because Ordericus Vitalis, a good authority, tells us, (p.
701,) that Malcolm acknowledged to William Rufus, that the Conqueror had
confirmed to him the former grant of Lothian. But it follows not, because
Edgar made this species of grant to Kenneth, that therefore he exacted
homage for that territory. Homage, and all the rites of the feudal law,
were very little known among the Saxons; and we may also suppose, that the
gla’n of Edgar was so antiquated and weak, that, in resigning it, he made
no very valuable concession, and Kenneth might well refuse to hold, by so
precarious a tenure, a territory which he at present held by the sword. In
short, no author says he did homage for it.
The only color
indeed of authority for Mr. Carte’s notion is, that Matthew Fans, who
wrote in the reign of Henry III., before Edward’s claim of superiority was
heard of, says that Alexander III. did homage to Henry III. “pro Laudiano
et aliis terris.” See p.555. This word seems naturally to be interpreted
Lothian. But, in the first place, Matthew Paris’s testimony, though
considerable, will not outweigh that of all the other historians, who say
that the Scotch homage was always done for lands in England. Secondly, if
the Scotch homage was done in general terms, (as has been already proved,)
it is no wonder that historians should differ in their account of the
object of it, since it is probable the parties themselves were not fully
agreed. Thirdly, there is reason to think that Laudianum in Matthew Paris
does not mean the Lothians, now in Scotland. There appears to have been a
territory which anciently bore that or a similar name in the north of
England. For (1.) the Saxon Chronicle (p.197) says, that Malcolm Kenmure
met William Rufus in Lodene, in England. (2.) It is agreed by all
historians, that Henry II. only reconquered from Scotland the northern
counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland. See Newbriggs,
p.383. Wykes, p.30. Hemingford, p.492, Yet the same country is called by
other historians Loidis, comitatus Lodonensis, or some such name. See M.
Paris, p.68. M. Westi p.247. Annal. Wayerl. p.159, and Diceto, p.531. (3.)
This last-mentioned author, when he speaks of Lothian in Scotland, calls
it Loheneis, (p.574,) though he had called the English territory Loidis.
I thought this long note necessary in order to correct Mr.
Carte’s mistake, an author whose diligence and industry has given light to
many passages of the more ancient English history.]
2 (return)
[ NOTE B, p.86. Rymer, vol.
ii. p.543. It is remarkable that the English chancellor spoke to the
Scotch parliament in the French tongue. This was also the language
commonly made use of by all parties on that occasion. I bid, passim. Some
of the most considerable among the Scotch, as well as almost all the
English barons, were of French origin: they valued themselves upon it; and
pretended to despise the language and manners of the island. It is
difficult to account for the settlement of so many French families in
Scotland; the Bruces, Baliols, St. Glairs, Montgomeries, Somervilles,
Gordons, Frasers, Cummins; Colvilles, Umfrevilles, Mowbrays, Hays, Maules,
who were not supported there, as in England, by the power of the sword.
But the superiority of the smallest civility and knowledge over total
ignorance and barbarism, is prodigious.]
3 (return)
[ NOTE C, p.91. See Rymer,
vol. ii. p.533, where Edward writes to the king’s bench to receive appeals
from Scotland. He knew the practice to be new and unusual; yet he
establishes it as an infallible consequence cf his superiority. We learn
also from the same collection, (p. 603,) that immediately upon receiving
the homage, he changed the style of his address to the Scotch king, whom
he now calk “dilecto et fideli,” instead of “fratri dilecto et fideli,”
the appellation which he had always before used to him. See p. 109, 124,
168, 280, 1064. This is a certain proof that he himself was not deceived,
as was scarcely indeed possible, but that he was conscious of his
usurpation. Yet he solemnly swore afterwards to the justice of his
pretensions, when he defended them before Pope Boniface.]
4 (return)
[ NOTE D, p. 104. Throughout
the reign of Edward I., the assent of the commons is not once expressed in
any of the enacting clauses; nor in the reigns ensuing, till the 9 Edward
III., nor in any of the enacting clauses of 16 Richard II. Nay, even so
low as Henry VI., from the beginning till the eighth of his reign, the
assent of the commons is not once expressed in any enacting clause. See
preface to Ruffhead’s edit, of the Statutes, p. 7. If it should be
asserted, that the commons had really given their assent to these
statutes, though they are not expressly mentioned, this very omission,
proceeding, if you will, from carelessness, is a proof how little they
were respected. The commons were so little accustomed to transact public
business, that they had no speaker till after the parliament 6 Edward III.
See Prynne’s preface to Cotton’s Abridg.: not till the first of Richard
II. in the opinion of most antiquaries. The commons were very unwilling to
meddle in any state affairs, and commonly either referred themselves to
the lords, or desired a select committee of that house to assist them, as
appears from Cotton. 5 Edw. III. n. 5; 15 Edw. III. a. 17; 21 Edw. III. n.
5; 47 Edw. III. n. 5; 50 Edw. III. n. 10; 51 Edw. III. n. 18; 1 Rich. II.
n. 12; 2 Rich. II. n. 12; 5 Rich. II. n 14; 2 parl. 6 Rich. II. n. 14;
parl. 2, 6 Rich. II. n. 8, etc.]
5 (return)
[ NOTE E, p. 105. It was very
agreeable to the maxims of all the feudal governments, that every order of
the state should give their consent to the acts which more immediately
concerned them; and as the notion of a political system was not then so
well understood, the other orders of the state were often not consulted on
these occasions. In this reign, even the merchants, though no public body,
granted the king impositions on merchandise, because the first payments
came out of their pockets. They did the same in the reign of Edward III.;
but the commons had then observed that the people paid these duties,
though the merchants advanced them; and they therefore remonstrated
against this practice. Cotton’s Abridg. p. 39. The taxes imposed by the
knights on the counties were always lighter than those which the burgesses
laid on the boroughs; a presumption, that in voting those taxes the
knights and burgesses did not form the same house. See Chancellor West’s
Inquiry into the Manner of creating Peers, p. 8. But there are so many
proofs, that those two orders of representative were long separate, that
it is needless to insist on them. Mr. Carte, who had carefully consulted
the rolls of parliament, affirms, that they never appear to have been
united till the sixteenth of Edward III. See Hist. vol. ii. p,451. But it
is certain that this union was not even then final: in 1372, the burgesses
acted by themselves, and voted a tax after the knights were dismissed. See
Tyrrel, Hist, vol. iii. p. 754, from Rot. Claus. 46 Edward III. n. 9. In
1376, they were the knights alone who passed a vote for the removal of
Alice Pierce from the king’s person, if we may credit Walsingham, p. 189.
There is an instance of a like kind in the reign of Richard II. Cotton,
p.193. The different taxes voted by those two branches of the lower house,
naturally kept them separate; but as their petitions had mostly the same
object, namely, the redress of grievances, and the support of law and
justice both against the crown and the barons, this cause as naturally
united them, and was the reason why they at last joined in one house for
the despatch of business. The barons had few petitions. Their privileges
were of more ancient date. Grievances seldom affected them: they were
themselves the chief oppressors. In 1333, the knights by themselves
concurred with the bishops and barons in advising the king to stay his
journey into Ireland. Here was a petition which regarded a matter of
state, and was supposed to be above the capacity of the burgesses. The
knights, therefore, acted apart in this petition. See Cotton, Abridg. p.
13. Chief baron Gilbert thinks, that the reason why taxes always began
with the commons or burgesses was, that they were limited by the
instructions of their boroughs. See Hist, of the Exchequer, p. 37.]
6 (return)
[ NOTE F, p. 105. The chief
argument from ancient authority, for the opinion that the representatives
of boroughs preceded the forty-ninth of Henry in., is the famous petition
of the borough of St. Albans, first taken notice of by Selden, and then by
Petyt, Brady, Tyrrel, and others. In this petition, presented to the
parliament in the reign of Edward II., take town of St. Albans asserts,
that though they held “in capite” of the crown, and owed only, for all
other service, their attendance in parliament, yet the sheriff had omitted
them in his writs; whereas, both in the reign of the king’s father, and
all his predecessors, they had always sent members. Now, say the defenders
of this opinion, if the commencement of the house of commons were in Henry
III.’ reign, this expression could not have been used. But Hadox, in his
History of the Exchequer, (p. 522, 523, 524,) has endeavored, and with
great reason, to destroy the authority of this petition for the purpose
alleged. He asserts, first, that there was no such tenure in England is
that of holding by attendance in parliament, instead of all other service.
Secondly, that the borough of St. Albans never held of take crown at all,
but was always demesne land of the abbot. It is no wonder, therefore, that
a petition which advances two falsehoods, should contain one historical
mistake, which indeed amounts only to an inaccurate and exaggerated
expression; no strange matter in ignorant burgesses of that age.
Accordingly, St. Albans continued still to belong to the abbot. It never
held of the crown, call after the dissolution of the monasteries. But the
assurance of these petition *ers is remarkable. They wanted to shake off
the authority of their abbot, and to hold of the king; but were unwilling
to pay any services even to the crown; upon which they framed this idle
petition, which later writers have made the foundation of so many
inferences and conclusions. From the tenor of the petition it appears,
that there was a close connection between holding of the crown and being
represented in parliament. The latter had scarcely ever place without the
former; yet we learn from Tyrell’s Append. vol. iv. that there were some
instances to the contrary. It is not improbable that Edward followed the
roll of the earl of Leicester, who had summoned, without distinction, all
the considerable boroughs of the kingdom; among which there might be some
few that did not hold of the crown. Edward also found it necessary to
impose taxes on all the boroughs in the kingdom, without distinction. This
was a good expedient for augmenting his revenue. We are not to imagine,
because the house of commons have since become of great importance, that
the first summoning of them would form any remarkable and striking epoch,
and be generally known to the people even seventy or eighty years after.
So ignorant were the generality of men in that age, that country burgesses
would readily imagine an innovation, seemingly so little material, to have
existed from time immemorial, because it was beyond their own memory, and
perhaps that of their fathers. Even the parliament in the reign of Henry
V. say, that Ireland had, from the beginning of time, been subject to the
crown of England. (See Brady.) And surely if any thing interests the
people above all others, it is war and conquests, with their dates and
circumstances]
7 (return)
[ NOTE G, p. 233. This story
of the six burgesses of Calais, like all other extraordinary stories, is
somewhat to be suspected; and so much the more as Avesbury, (p. 167,) who
is particular in his narration of the surrender of Calais, says nothing of
it; and, on the contrary, extols in general the king’s generosity and
lenity to the inhabitants. The numberless mistakes of Froissard,
proceeding either from negligence, credulity, or love of the marvellous,
invalidate very much his testimony, even though he was a contemporary, and
though his history was dedicated to Queen Philippa herself. It is a
mistake to imagine, that the patrons of dedications read the books, much
less vouch for all the contents of them. It is not a slight testimony that
should make us give credit to a story so dishonorable to Edward,
especially after that proof of his humanity, in allowing a free passage to
all the women, children, and infirm people, at the beginning of the siege:
at least, it is scarcely to be believed, that, if the story has any
foundation, he seriously meant to execute his menaces against the six
townsmen of Calais.]
8 (return)
[ NOTE H, p. 236. There was a
singular instance, About this time, of the prevalence of chivalry and
gallantry in the nations of Europe. A solemn duel of thirty knights
against thirty was fought between Bembrwigh, as Englishman, and
Beaumanoir, a Breton, of the party of Charles of Blois, The knights of the
two nations came into the field; and before the combat began, Beaumanoir
called out, that it would be seen that day who had the fairest mistresses.
After a bloody combat, the Bretons prevailed; and gained for their prize,
full liberty to boast of their mistresses’ beauty. It is remarkable, that
two such famous generals as Sir Robert Knolles and Sir Hugh Calverley drew
their swords in this ridiculous contest. See Pere Daniel, vol. ii. p.536,
537, etc. The women not only instigated the champions to those rough, if
not bloody frays of tournament, but also frequented the tournaments during
all the reign of Edward, whose spirit of gallantry encouraged this
practice. See Knyghton, p. 2597.]
9 (return)
[ NOTE I, p. 253. This is a
prodigious sum, and probably near the half of what the king received from
the parliament during the whole course of his reign. It must be remarked,
that a tenth and fifteenth (which was always thought a high grant) were,
in the eighth year of this reign, fixed at about twenty-nine thousand
pounds; there were said to be near thirty thousand sacks of wool exported
every year. A sack of wool was at a medium sold for five pounds. Upon
these suppositions it would be easy to compute all the parliamentary
grants, taking the list as they stand in Tyrrel, vol. iii. p. 780; though
somewhat must still be left to conjecture. This king levied more money on
his subjects than any of his predecessors; and the parliament frequently
complain of the poverty of the people, and the oppressions under which
they labored. But it is to be remarked, that a third of the French king’s
ransom was yet unpaid when war broke out anew between the two crowns. His
son chose rather to employ his money in combating the English, than in
enriching them. See Rymer, vol. viii. p. 315.]
11 (return)
[ NOTE K, p. 281. In the
fifth year of the king, the commons complained of the government about the
king’s person, his court, the excessive number of his servants, of the
abuses in the chancery, king’s bench, common pleas, exchequer, and of
grievous oppressions in the country, by the great multitudes of
maintainers of quarrels, (men linked in confederacies together,) who
behaved themselves like kings in the country, so as there was very little
law or right, and of other things which they said were the cause of the
late commotions under Wat Tyler. Parl. Hist. vol. i. p. 365. This
irregular government, which no king and no house of commons had been able
to remedy, was the source of the licentiousness of the great, and
turbulency of the people, as well as tyranny of the princes. If subjects
would enjoy liberty, and kings security, the laws must be executed.
In the ninth of this reign, also the commons discovered an accuracy and a
jealousy of liberty, which we should little expect in those rude times.
“It was agreed by parliament,” says Cotton, (p.309), “that the subsidy of
wools, woolfels, and skins, granted to the king until the time of
midsummer then ensuing, should cease from the same time unto the feast of
St. Peter ‘ad vincula’ for that thereby the king should be interrupted for
claiming such grant as due.” See also Cotton, p. 198.]
12 (return)
[ NOTE L, p. 290. Knyghton,
p. 2715, etc. The same author (p. 2680) tells us, that the king, in return
to the message, said, that he would not for their desire remove the
meanest scullion from his kitchen. This author also tells us, that the
king said to the commissioners, when they harangued him, that he saw his
subjects were rebellious, and his best way would be to call in the king of
France to his aid. But it is plain that all these speeches were either
intended by Knyghton merely as an ornament to his history, or are false.
For (1.) when the five lords accuse the king’s ministers in the next
parliament, and impute to them every rash action of the king, they speak
nothing of these replies, which are so obnoxious, were so recent, and are
pretended to have been so public. (2.) The king, so far from having any
connections at that time with France, was threatened with a dangerous
invasion from that kingdom. This story seems to have been taken from the
reproaches afterwards thrown out against him, and to have been transferred
by the historian to this time, to which they cannot be applied.]
13 (return)
[ NOTE M, p. 295. We must
except the twelfth article, which accuses Brembre of having cut off the
heads of twenty-two prisoners confined for felony or debt, without warrant
or process of law; but as it is not conceivable what interest Brembre
could have to treat these felons and debtors in such a manner, we may
presume that the fact is either false or misrepresented. It was in these
men’s power to say any thing against the persons accused. No defence or
apology was admitted; all was lawless will and pleasure.
They
are also accused of designs to murder the lords; but these accusations
either are general, or destroy one another. Sometimes, as in article
fifteenth, they intend to murder them by means of the mayor and city of
London; sometimes, as in article twenty-eighth, by trial and false
inquests; sometimes, as in article twenty-eighth, by means of the king of
France, who was to receive Calais for his pains.]
14 (return)
[ NOTE N, p. 296. In
general, the parliament, in those days, never paid a proper regard to
Edward’s statute of treasons, though one of the most advantageous laws for
the subject that has ever been enacted. In the seventeenth of the king,
the dukes of Lancaster and Glocester complain to Richard, that Sir Thomas
Talbot, with others of his adherents conspired the death of the said dukes
in divers parts of Cheshire, as the same was confessed and well known; and
praying that the parliament may judge of the fault. Whereupon the king and
the lords in the parliament judged the same fact to be open and high
treason; and hereupon they award two writs, the one to the sheriff of
York, and the other to the sheriffs of Derby, to take the body of the said
Sir Thomas, returnable in the king’s bench in the month of Easter then
ensuing. And open proclamation was made in Westminster Hall, that upon the
sheriffs return, and at the next coming in of the said Sir Thomas, the
said Thomas should be convicted of treason, and incur the loss and pain of
the same; and all such as should receive him after the proclamation should
incur the same loss and pain. Cotton, p. 354. It is to be observed, that
this extraordinary judgment was passed in a time of tranquillity. Though
the statute itself of Edward III. reserves a power to the parliament to
declare any new species of treason, it is not to be supposed that this
power was reserved to the house of lords alone, or that men were to be
judged by a law “ex post facto.” At least, if such be the meaning of the
clause, it may be affirmed, that men were at that time very ignorant of
the first principles of law and justice.]
15 (return)
[ NOTE O, p. 301. In the
preceding parliament, the commons had shown a disposition very complaisant
to the king; yet there happened an incident in their proceedings which is
curious, and shows us the state of the house during that period. The
members were either country gentlemen or merchants, who were assembled for
a few days, and were entirely unacquainted with business; so that it was
easy to lead them astray, and draw them into votes and resolutions very
different from their intention. Some petitions concerning the state of the
nation were voted: in which, among other things, the house recommended
frugality to the king; and for that purpose desired that the court should
not be so much frequented as formerly by bishops and ladies. The king was
displeased with this freedom; the commons very humbly craved pardon. He
was not satisfied unless they would name the mover of the petitions. It
happened to be one Haxey, whom the parliament, in order to make atonement,
condemned for this offence to die the death of a traitor. But the king, at
the desire of the archbishop of Canterbury and the prelates, pardoned him.
When a parliament in those times, not agitated by any faction, and being
at entire freedom, could be guilty of such monstrous extravagance, it is
easy to judge what might be expected from them in more trying situations.
See Cotton’s Abridg. p. 361, 362.]
16 (return)
[ NOTE P, p. 312. To show
how little credit is to be given to this charge against Richard, we may
observe, that a law in the 13th Edward III. had been enacted against the
continuance of sheriffs for more than one year. But the inconvenience of
changes having afterwards appeared, from experience, the commons, in the
twentieth of this king, applied; by petition, that the sheriffs might be
continued; though that petition had not been enacted into a statute, by
reason of other disagreeable circumstances which attended it. See Cotton,
p. 361. It was certainly a very moderate exercise of the dispensing power
in the king to continue the sheriffs, after he found that that practice
would be acceptable to his subjects, and had been applied for by one house
of parliament; yet is this made an article of charge against him by the
present parliament. See article 18. Walsingham, speaking of a period early
in Richard’s minority, says, “But what do acts of parliament signify,
when, after they are made, they take no effect, since the king, by the
advice of the privy council, takes upon him to alter, or wholly set aside,
all those things which by general consent had been ordained in
parliament?” If Richard, therefore, exercised the dispensing power, he was
warranted by the examples of his uncles and grandfather, and indeed of all
his predecessors from the time of Henry III., inclusive.]
17 (return)
[ NOTE Q, p. 318. The
following passage in Cotton’s Abridgment (p. 196) shows a strange
prejudice against the church and churchmen. “The commons afterwards coming
into the parliament, and making their protestation, showed, that for want
of good redress about the king’s person in his household, in all his
courts, touching maintainers in every county, and purveyors, the commons
were daily pilled, and nothing defended against the enemy, and that it
should shortly deprive the king and undo the state. Wherefore in the same
government they entirely require redress. Whereupon the king appointed
sundry bishops, lords, and nobles, to sit in privy council about these
matters; who, since that they must begin at the head, and go at the
request of the commons, they, in the presence of the king, charged his
confessor not to come into the court but upon the four principal
festivals.” We should little expect that a popish privy council, in order
to preserve the king’s morals, should order his confessor to be kept at a
distance from him. This incident happened in the minority of Richard. As
the popes had for a long time resided at Avignon, and the majority of the
sacred college were Frenchmen, this circumstance naturally increased the
aversion of the nation to the papal power; but the prejudice against the
English clergy cannot be accounted for from that cause.]
18 (return)
[ NOTE R, p. 450. That we
may judge how arbitrary a court that of the constable of England was, we
may peruse the patent granted to the earl of Rivers in this reign, as it
is to be found in Spellman’s Glossary in verb. Constabularius: as also
more fully in Rymer, vol. xi. p. 581. Here is a clause of it: “Et ulterius
de uberiori gratia nostra eidem comiti de Rivers plenam potestatem damus
ad cognoscendum et procedendum, in omnibus et singulis causis et negotiis,
de et super crimine lesse majestatis, seu super occasione eseterisque
causis quibuscunque per præfatum comitem de Rivers, ut constabularium
Angliæ——quæ in curia constabularii Angliæ ab antique, viz,
tempore dicti domini Gtilielmi Conquætoris, sen aliquo tempore citra,
tractari, audiri examinari, aut decidi consueverant, aut jure debuerant
aut clebeni, causasque et negotia prædicta cum omnibus et singulis
emergentibus, incidentibus et connexis, audiendum, examinandum, et fine
debito terminandum, etiam summarie et de plano, sine strepitu et figura
justitiæ, sola facti veritate inspecta, ac etiam manu regia, si
opportunum visum fuerit eidem comiti de Rivers, vices nostras,
appellatione remots.” The office of constable was perpetual in the
monarchy; its jurisdiction was not limited to times of war, as appears
from this patent, and as we learn from Spellman; yet its authority was in
direct contradiction to Magna Charta; and it is evident, that no regular
liberty could subsist with it. It involved a full dictatorial power,
continually subsisting in the state. The only check on the crown, besides
the want of force to support all its prerogatives, was, that the office of
constable was commonly either hereditary or during life, and the person
invested with it was, for that reason, not so proper an instrument of
arbitrary power in the king. Accordingly the office was suppressed by
Henry VIII., the most arbitrary of all the English princes. The practice,
however, of exercising martial law still subsisted; and was not abolished
till the Petition of Right under Charles I. This was the epoch of true
liberty, confirmed by the restoration, and enlarged and secured by the
revolution.]
19 (return)
[ NOTE S, p. 459. We shall
give an instance. Almost all the historians, even Coraines, and the
continuator of the Annals of Croyland, assert that Edward was about this
time taken prisoner by Clarence and Warwick, and was committed to the
custody of the archbishop of York, brother to the earl; but being allowed
to take the diversion of hunting by this prelate, he made his escape, and
afterwards chased the rebels out of the kingdom. But that all the story is
false, appears from Rymer, where we find that the king, throughout all
this period, continually exercised his authority, and never was
interrupted in his government. On the 7th of March, 1470, he gives a
commission of array to Clarence, whom he then imagined a good subject; and
on the 23d of the same month, we find him issuing an order for
apprehending him, Besides, in the king’s manifesto against the duke and
earl, (Claus. 10. Edward IV. m. 7, 8,) where he enumerates all their
treasons, he mentions no such fact; he does not so much as accuse them of
exciting young Welles’s rebellion; he only says, that they exhorted him to
continue in his rebellion. We may judge how smaller facts will be
misrepresented by historians, who can in the most material transactions
mistake so grossly. There may even some doubt arise with regard to the
proposal of marriage made to Bona of Savoy; though almost all the
historians concur in it, and the fact be very likely in itself; for there
are no traces in Rymer of any such embassy of Warwick’s to France. The
chief certainty in this and the preceding reign arises either from public
records, or from the notice taken of certain passages by the French
historians. On the contrary, for some centuries after the conquest, the
French history is not complete without the assistance of English authors.
We may conjecture, that the reason of the scarcity of historians during
this period, was the destruction of the convents, which ensued so soon
after. Copies of the more recent historians not being yet sufficiently
dispersed, those histories hare perished.]
20 (return)
[ NOTE T, p. 490. Sir
Thomas More, who has been followed, or rather transcribed, by all the
historians of this short reign, says, that Jane Shore had fallen into
connections with Lord Hastings; and this account agrees best with the
course of the events; but in a proclamation of Richard’s, to be found in
Rymer, vol. xii. p. 204, the marquis of Dorset is reproached with these
connections. This reproach, however, might have been invented by Richard,
or founded only on popular rumor; and is not sufficient to overbalance the
authority of Sir Thomas More. The proclamation is remarkable for the
hypocritical purity of manners affected by Richard. This bloody and
treacherous tyrant upbraids the marquis and others with their gallantries
and intrigues as the most terrible enormities.]
21 (return)
[ NOTE U, p., 507. Every
one that has perused the ancient monkish writers know that, however
barbarous their own style, they are full of allusions to the Latin
classics, especially the poets. There seems also in those middle ages to
have remained many ancient books that are now lost. Maimesbury, who
flourished in the reign of Henry I. and King Stephen, quotes Livy’s
description of Caesar’s passage over the Rubicon. Fitz-Stephen, who lived
in the reign of Henry II., alludes to a passage in the larger history of
Sallust. In the collection of letters which passes under the name of
Thomas a Becket, we see how familiar all the ancient history and ancient
books were to the more ingenious and more dignified churchmen of that
time, and consequently how much that order of men must have surpassed all
the other members of the society. That prelate and his friends call each
other philosophers in all the course of their correspondence, and consider
the rest of the world as sunk in total ignorance and barbarism.]
END OF VOL. Ib.