CHAPTER XXI

ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND BURGUNDY

After the Hundred Years' War had been in progress less than a quarter of a century, it seemed as if Edward III. had won all that he could possibly claim--peace and sovereignty over all the outlying parts of his dominion at home, and over more than he had set out to gain on the Continent. But the war was renewed by the action of Edward's vassal lords in France, only nine years later, and before his death, which happened in 1377, scarce a possession on the Continent was left to England except the city of Calais and a narrow strip of coast south of Bordeaux, in Guienne. Even at sea the French fleet, now aided by the Spanish since the interference by the Black Prince with the affairs of Spain--see p. 180--was completely victorious and made raids on the south coast of England. At the end of the fourteenth century it was on the terms that England should hold these fragments, and these only, of her once great territory on the Continent, that a treaty was made with France by Richard II., Edward's successor on the English throne.

The cost and miseries incurred in England by those unsuccessful wars in France led to serious riots against the Government. It was then that Wat Tyler led his force of Kentish rebels to London, where only the courage of the king, a boy of fourteen, and the resistance of the militia of the town saved the city from the mob.

{197}

Twice towards the end of the century Richard, now the French treaty was arranged, found time to visit Ireland and claim the homage of the chiefs of the Irish clans, and it was while he was in Ireland, on the second of these expeditions, that his enemy, Henry, Earl of Bolingbroke, whom he had banished, came back to England and was joined by great forces in the country which had by now become disgusted with Richard's tyranny. For though Richard had shown extraordinary courage and manly wisdom as a boy, his later acts raise a doubt whether he was quite sane. In the last year of the century, 1399, Henry came to the throne as Henry IV.

[Sidenote: Henry IV]

It was a troublous succession. There was discontent and active rebellion of both lords and commons in England itself. Wales rose in arms against the king and was followed by Scotland. France threatened to renew the war. Gradually the king gained the victory over each of these various forces opposed to him. Wales and Scotland were subdued by arms. Against Scotland he had the help of the great Earl of Northumberland and his son famous in story as "Hotspur." Very shortly afterwards the power of Northumberland was brought into opposition to the king, but was overthrown in that battle which settled the Welsh trouble and, as Shakespeare relates to us, gave Henry, the king's son--soon to be Henry V.--the chance of distinguishing himself by killing "Hotspur" in single combat, and thus proving that he was made for better things than to be the boon companion of the drunken old knight Falstaff.

But with his own commons Henry IV. was able to make terms only by giving up a serious piece of what had been the royal privilege before. He agreed that the taxes raised to meet the expenses of the war should be received and paid out again by a committee appointed by the Parliament, and no longer by an {198} official appointed by the king. The difference was of much importance for the liberties of the English subject.

As for the threat of war from France, that threat died away for the moment in consequence of an event which had a large effect on the course of the story during most of the fifteenth century. This event was the rise of the Duke of Burgundy to a power almost as great as that of the King of France himself, the Duke's feudal overlord.

Burgundy had for very many years been the name of a territory varying in extent, sometimes including portions of the present Italy and Switzerland, and always some of the most fertile and beautiful country in Europe. Towards the end of the fourteenth century it gained greatly in wealth and territory by uniting with itself the province of Flanders. This union came about through the marriage of the heiress of the Count of Flanders with a Duke of Burgundy. The province of Flanders included, as we have seen, semi-independent and wealthy cities such as Bruges and Ghent. Its addition to the dukedom of Burgundy made that chief vassal fully equal in possession of territory and resources with his overlord, the King of France. The story of the next many years in Europe is largely the story of the struggle between this great vassal and his lord. Possibly it was a struggle which saved our England, for England was very wearied and weakened by foreign war; she was full of discontent at home; her fleet had been beaten and broken up. If her old enemy of France had been able to attack her with any united force at this moment, it would have been hard for her to make head against it.

The threat of Burgundy gave the French king business to attend to nearer home. Unfortunately it also gave England an easy opportunity of vexing her ancient enemy by lending her aid to the Duke.

{199}

[Sidenote: Agincourt]

Henry V., the Prince Hal of Shakespeare's dramas, developed from a foolish prince into a wise king, but he was not wise enough to resist the temptation, given him by the rivalry between the French king and the powerful Duke, to regain what England once held on the Continent. He was wise enough, however, to conduct his campaign in a different manner from that in which former leaders of English armies in France had waged war. The Black Prince and others had marched, conquering and raiding, into the country, with very little apparent plan. Henry V.'s first enterprise was indeed rather of the same kind, and nearly ended in a disastrous failure. But he turned the threatened disaster into a resounding victory in the battle of Agincourt. The chivalry of France was caught up in marshy ground, and the archers of England shot them down. It was a repetition of Crécy and of Poitiers. The slaughter of Frenchmen of distinction and high birth was very great, and this wonderful victory made the English soldier a terror in France for years to come.

But the danger, from which only a wonderful victory could have rescued him, seems to have taught Henry a lesson. In his next campaign he set to work in a methodical way to conquer Normandy, making the country safe behind him as he progressed. It was a slower way than that of the Black Prince, but far more sure.

The French king was kept busy by Burgundy. He could send no help to his vassal of Normandy, and the whole of Normandy fell into Henry's hand. The Burgundians meantime had captured Paris; and now a desperate deed of treachery was done by the heir to the French throne. The actual King of France was insane, and incapable of taking any part in the government.

To break, as he thought, the Burgundian power, {200} the Dauphin, that is, the eldest son of the king, murdered the Duke of Burgundy even as the latter knelt before him to do homage. The Duke's purpose in doing this homage was to unite the forces of Burgundy and France against the growing power of Henry. After this desperate deed the Burgundians deemed it their best course to make terms with Henry, and the terms they made were that he should marry the daughter of the mad King of France and should be placed, with the help of Burgundy, on the French throne as soon as the mad king died--excluding the Dauphin from the succession.

They were terms which committed Henry to a constant war with the Dauphin's forces. In this he was consistently successful; but the project formed by his treaty with the Burgundians was broken by his early death. Henry VI., his son and successor as King of England, was then two years old.

The English regent, who had charge of the kingdom while Henry VI. was under full age, carried on the war in France against the party of the Dauphin. And it was waged with steady success, so that the Dauphin, now come to the throne as Charles VII., was on the point of giving up all as lost, when the tide of England's victory was checked and then turned back by one of the most wonderful persons whom we meet in the whole course of the story--Joan of Arc.

This peasant girl, becoming prophetess, led the soldiers of France to victory and inspired them with the belief that heaven was on their side. From that moment the tide turned and all went in France's favour. The "Maid of Orleans," Joan herself, was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, and to our shame was burnt by the English as a heretic. But the French successes continued, none the less; the Burgundians wavered and went over to the King of France again; and precisely in the middle year of {201} the fifteenth century, 1450, the English lost Normandy and all their hold on Northern France.

Three years later that strip of Guienne, the coast line from Bordeaux southward, went the same way, and England was left with not a foot of French soil except the town of Calais.

And now it would seem as if England might at length hope to settle her own troubles within her island boundaries. If that was a hope which any men of that day entertained it was grievously disappointed, for she was just about to enter on those terrible years of civil war between the two great dukedoms of York and Lancaster, each claiming the throne, which went on during nearly all the latter half of the century. For their badge and emblem the Yorkists had a white rose and the Lancastrians a red, and from these roses those dreadful wars are known as the Wars of the Roses.

[Sidenote: Wars of the Roses]

The English people had naturally been bitterly disappointed by the final result of the French war. England continued under the practical governance of the regents even after the king had come of age, and their rule caused great dissatisfaction. A dangerous mob under one Jack Cade got the better of the king's troops and held the city of London for two days. But his mob was undisciplined, and when the citizens took arms in their own defence the rebellion was soon put down. It was a sign, however, of the general discontent that the rebellion could have even such success as this.

What helped to make the Wars of the Roses so prolonged and so bitter was that the claim of each of the rivals was so nearly equal. In an outlined story, such as this that I am trying to tell, there is no place for the details of the claims of each; but we may note that the claim as to the strict right of succession was complicated by the claim put forward by the York {202} party that they stood for the national welfare against the bad government of the Lancastrian king and his regents. The Lancastrians posed as pure loyalists, affirming that they stood for the legitimate rights of succession to the throne. Certainly the evils of their government were obvious to all men. They had lost France; England was without a fleet to protect her shores, and the French landed and raided; the oversea trade of England with the Continent was nearly ruined. Victory went now to one and now to another of the evenly balanced forces, and with each successive victory the vengeance taken by the victors, in retaliation for what their side had suffered when it was defeated, became more and more sanguinary. In one of the battles, that fought at Towton in 1461, which was a great Yorkist victory, the statement that more than 36,000 men were killed seems to be generally accepted, though it is scarcely credible when we consider the small population of England at this time. More than three-quarters of the loss was suffered by the Lancastrians. Moreover, of twelve of what are regarded as the great battles of these wars, it is notable that the Yorkists won nine and the Lancastrians only three; yet the final battle, that of Bosworth Field, the battle which "counted" above all the others, was won by the Lancastrians, and its result was to place Henry VII. on the throne. Bosworth and 1485 are usually named as the place and date of the last battle in the long drawn-out Wars of the Roses, but in fact the struggle was maintained till within three years of the end of the century, and the really last battle was fought, again to a Lancastrian victory, at Blackheath in 1497.

[Sidenote: Use of firearms]

In the beginning of the wars the unfortunate Henry VI. was twice taken prisoner. King Edward IV. then comes to the throne. Henry is released, regains the throne and Edward flees abroad. He gets {203} the help of the Duke of Burgundy, and with a force of Burgundian soldiers returns and dethrones Henry. We may note that these Burgundians were armed with what were called arquebuses, firing gunpowder, ignited by a match. The arquebuses were made somewhat after the pattern of the crossbow, but of course without the bow, and with a barrel in place of the open trough for the bolt. It was not the first time of the use of firearms in England, but there seem to have been more soldiers thus armed, in the battle which brought Edward to the throne again, than ever before.

These Wars of the Roses, though they were waged for long, and though the vengeance taken by the successive victors was heavy, seem to have interfered surprisingly little with the agriculture and not greatly with the commerce of the country. Although the victors' vengeance was dire, it was directed mainly against the chiefs of the conquered side. It did not fall on the rank and file. Population, in spite of the war, increased both in town and country, and in rural districts the tenant farmer more and more took the place of the villein. The result was that when Edward IV. had firmly established himself on the throne he found himself very largely free of that menace from the great barons which had been a check on the authority of the kings before him and had won privileges and charters from them. Many of the great men had been killed in battle or in the executions which followed a victory.

Therefore, had Edward so pleased, he might, as it seems, have been a king almost as autocratic as any of the Tudors who followed him after the brief reign of Richard III. Before the Tudor family succeeded the Plantagenets, more battles were to be fought and the nobility were still further to be weakened. But Edward was strong enough over them. He, {204} fortunately for England, cared for prosperity rather than for glory. He not only encouraged commerce, but was something of a merchant on his own account, owning trading vessels and making much money by the venture. The weaving trade, under him, extended in England and its great centre at Coventry was established.

He did indeed send an army to the Continent, to aid Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who was his brother-in-law, against Louis XI. of France, but even this turned into a financial venture, for he allowed Louis to bribe him out and took his army home again.

And here we touch a point, in the relations between Burgundy and France, which is the point on which the final result of these relations turned. The result was that France, under Louis XI., gained a complete victory and that he became really sovereign over the land in which the sovereignty of the French kings had been disputed very long and very hardly. But the point on which the relations turned towards that result is indicated by the very title given to Charles of Burgundy, "the Bold," while the extraordinary character of the King of France is hinted by the means he employed to get rid of Edward and the English army. He made appeal to the chief desire of Edward's heart, the love of money. Louis is known in history as perhaps the master diplomat and schemer of all the many that its pages show us. He was a master in detecting and in playing upon the weaknesses of men's characters. So he played on Edward's avarice.

Against this cunning and scheming, for which the king had a genius, his great vassal had perhaps in excess that quality of boldness which his title implies. He was over-venturesome and hasty, and Louis waited and schemed, like a spider in the web's centre, and finally sucked the blood of the buzzing impetuous fly.

[Sidenote: The first Tudor king]

The claims of the first Tudor king to the throne of {205} England will be seen to be none too sound, if looked at critically. Largely it was Henry's own ability that enabled him to establish himself and to make a final end of the opposition and rebellions after he had been for twelve years king. It was an ability and strength of purpose characteristic of all his successors until the throne of England passed from the Tudors to the Scottish Stuarts. Yet always the despotism of the English kings differed from that of the French kings in this important point: that whereas the French kings had their foot on the necks of both barons and commons, in England even those who were most autocratic over their nobility always kept a wary eye on their commons, and not even Mary in her zeal for the Roman Catholic religion dared to go too far in opposition to the feeling of the country.

{206}