ENGLAND 



2921 



ENGLAND 



agrarian rising like that of Wat 

 Tyler, but was, primarily at least, 

 a popular protest against the un- 

 popular government. The strife of 

 the factions in high places issued 

 in the War of the Roses. 



From 1455 to 1460 war and truce 

 between the parties alternated. It 

 was not until 1460 that Richard 

 startled his own supporters by as- 

 serting his own claim to the crown, 

 a claim modified into demand for 

 recognition as the heir, although 

 King Henry had a young son. 

 Richard was killed at the battle of 

 Wakefield, but his son Edward, 

 supported by Warwick, proclaimed 

 himself king, shattered the Lan- 

 castrian army at Tow ton in 1461, 

 and maintained himself on the 

 throne till his death in 1483. 



During the first ten years of his 

 reign there were repeated Lan- 

 castrian insurrections ; the defec- 

 tion of Warwick actually drove 

 Edward IV in flight from the coun- 

 try in 1470 ; but, returning in the 

 next year, he crushed Warwick 

 and the Lancastrians at the battles 

 of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and 

 for the rest of his reign ruled with- 

 out fear of any rivals. 



On Edward's death his brother, 

 Richard of Gloucester, after an in- 

 terval of a few weeks usurped the 

 throne of his young nephew 

 Edward V, who was shortly after- 

 wards murdered in the Tower with 

 his brother. The usurper instituted 

 a reign of terror so intolerable that 

 after two years Henry Tudor, earl 

 of Richmond, a descendant of John 

 of Gaunt, though by an illegiti- 

 mate line, and the acknowledged 

 head of the Lancastrian party, was 

 able to return to England from the 

 exile into which he had retired, to 

 slay Richard III at the battle of 

 Bosworth, and to claim the crown, 

 a title acknowledged by the par- 

 liament which he summoned. 

 The Reign of Henry VII 



During 25 years the power of the 

 sword had decided who was to be 

 king in England ; parliaments had 

 been summoned, but were at- 

 tended only by partisans of the 

 dominant faction. Each side had 

 attainted of treason all the leaders 

 on the other side, put them to 

 death when it could lay hands on 

 them, and redistributed their es- 

 tates. The old families were almost 

 blotted out, and the new genera- 

 tion of nobles bore names which 

 had hardly been heard of fifty years 

 before. It was the business of 

 Henry VII (1485-1509) to restore 

 peaceful and orderly government, 

 commercial prosperity, and re- 

 forms, at least of law. The claws of 

 rebellion were clipped and the royal 

 treasury was simultaneously filled 

 by the systematic process of fines 



and confiscations, drastically ap- 

 plied wherever an excuse could be 

 found. Parliament was habitually 

 summoned and treated as the king's 

 responsible partner in all his acts. 



Foreign policy was directed 

 to the development of commerce 

 and the acquisition of indemnities 

 for campaigns on which nothing 

 had been spent ; commerce itself, on 

 the other hand, was applied as a 

 weapon for making the rulers of 

 France and Burgundy compliant. 

 The king ruled always by forms of 

 law ; taxation and legislation were 

 the province of parliament, though 

 a skilful king rarely failed to pro- 

 cure from parliament the powers 

 or the money which he required. 

 Rebellions raised on behalf of pre- 

 tended members of the house of 

 York, Lambert Simnel and Perkin 

 Warbeck, were suppressed. Henry's 

 marriage to Elizabeth of York 

 put the title of his son to the suc- 

 cession beyond question ; the mar- 

 riage of his daughter Margaret to 

 James IV, king of Scotland, in 

 1503, placed a Stuart on the Eng- 

 lish throne as the legitimate 

 monarch a hundred years later. 

 When Henry died in 1509 the 

 house of Tudor was firmly estab- 

 lished on the English throne, and 

 the crown with a full treasury en- 

 joyed an almost unprecedented 

 power. 



The Discovery of America 

 The reign of Henry VII fell upon 

 that period of transition when the 

 medieval world was passing into 

 the modern. In 1477 the first 

 printing press had been set up in 

 England. The intellectual move- 

 ment long active in Italy reached 

 England and awakened a new spirit 

 of criticism. Columbus discovered 

 the West Indies, the Cabots from 

 Bristol reached Labrador, the 

 Portuguese sailed across the In- 

 dian Ocean to India. Europe was 

 emerging into a new state system. 

 With Henry VII dawns the con- 

 ception of international relations 

 as being concerned with the pre- 

 servation of a balance of power 

 among the great states. In the 

 reign of Henry VIII (1509-47) 

 Cardinal Wolsey stands out as the 

 diplomatist who made it his aim 

 to hold the balance between the 

 king of France and the king of 

 Spain, who was at the same time 

 lord of the Netherlands and Ger- 

 man emperor Charles V. 



But Henry's international ac- 

 tivities were merely an episode. 

 The great feature of the reign was 

 the ecclesiastical revolution which 

 fixed the grip of the state irresist- 

 ibly upon the church, annexing 

 the greater part of its wealth, 

 and repudiated the authority of 

 the papacy. The instrument of 



the revolution, the artificer who 

 designed its methods, was Thomas 

 Cromwell, who, after Wolsey's fall 

 in 1529, won Henry's confidence 

 and retained it till 1540, when he 

 had completed the work, not only 

 of subordinating the church to the 

 crown, but of obtaining for the 

 crown by strictly legal parlia- 

 mentary process such a latitude of 

 power as it had never before pos- 



Edward VI and Mary 



When Henry initiated the 

 ecclesiastical revolution with the 

 primary object of getting rid of his 

 wife in order to marry another, he 

 took the nation into partnership 

 and secured parliamentary sanc- 

 tion for everything he did. He, 

 however, procured from it first a 

 weapon for silencing all external 

 opposition in the Treasons Act of 

 1534, and then a virtually abso- 

 lute authority for himself, though 

 not for his successors, by the Royal 

 Proclamations Act of 1539. Henry- 

 left one young son, whose legiti- 

 macy was indisputable, and two 

 older daughters by mothers whose 

 marriages with him had both been 

 pronounced invalid, though before 

 his death it had been formally laid 

 down that the right of succession 

 remained to both children. 



While Edward VI was king 

 (1547-53) the government was in 

 the hands of a council controlled 

 first by Edward's uncle, the pro- 

 tector Somerset, and then by John 

 Dudley, earl of Warwick, best 

 known as duke of Northumberland. 



Henry's extravagance had de- 

 pleted the treasury ; he had sup- 

 pressed the monasteries, the only 

 institutions in the country which 

 were officially concerned with the 

 relief of poverty. For more than 

 half a century the peasantry had 

 been ousted from the land, and 

 distress and suffering were wide- 

 spread. 



Both Somerset and Northumber- 

 land, from conviction or from 

 policy, actively fostered the re- 

 ligious reformation, and carried out 

 the protestantising of the Church 

 with gross and unseemly violence, 

 though without extreme persecu- 

 tion. The accession, however, of 

 Mary in 1553 was followed by an 

 extreme reaction with the sanction 

 of parliament under which some 

 300 persons, including five bishops, 

 were burnt at the stake. The effect 

 of the persecution was not the sup- 

 pression of heresy, but the develop- 

 ment in the popular mind of an in- 

 tense hostility to Romanism. The 

 general impoverishment and the 

 miserable misgovernment during 

 the two reigns of Edward VI and 

 Mary brought England to such 

 low estate that she was unable to 



