Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1105 page)

Tyler was killed and the revolt was put down,
not without a good deal of hanging. When that was over, men’s eyes began to open to the fact that new conditions of life had begun.
“Villeinage” was dead; the only labourers left were
free
labourers, who naturally would bargain for the highest wages they could get.
Also, much land had ceased to be ploughed and had gone back into pasture for sheep;
for wool increased in value every year, and sheep need few hands to guard them.

But for the rest of his reign the King was either chafing against his uncles and their friends, or else planning schemes of vengeance against them. In 1397, after long waiting,
he struck swiftly at the leaders of the barons,
killing his uncle Thomas and banishing his cousin Henry of Lancaster (son of John of
Gaunt, Edward Ill’s third son). Then he got
Parliament to pass certain acts which gave him almost absolute power, and all sober men,
who reverenced both the Crown and the “Constitution” (which, roughly speaking, means government through Parliament), stood aghast at this.

In 1399 Henry of Lancaster returned, accused
Richard of misgovernment, deposed him, and perhaps had him murdered. He then took the crown, and for fourteen years tried to ruleEngland as King Henry IV, but without much success. The very barons who had aided him to usurp the throne said he did not reward them enough; they rose against him and a sort of civil war began in 1403 and smouldered on for three or four years. Henry was not a bad fellow personally; he was devoted to the Church,
and the Church supported him; so did the House of Commons, which got much power in his reign. But to keep order, the first task of a
King, was too hard a task for him. He died in 1413. His son Henry V, equally devoted to the Church, was a much stronger and cleverer man; there was no civil war in his short reign.
But this was mainly because he put all his energies into renewing the war with France.

This really was wicked: whatever right
Edward III might have had to the French crown, Henry Y could have none, for he was not the best living heir of Edward III. The
Earl of March was the best living heir of
Edward III, for he was descended from Edward’s
second
son, King Henry V only from his
third;
but March had been quietly shoved aside when Henry IV seized the English crown.
However, France was in a worse condition than England: her King Charles VI was mad,
and her great nobles were tearing each other and their beautiful country to pieces. Henry

V saw his opportunity and used it without mercy or remorse. He probably thought that such a war would at least draw away all the baronial rowdies and their followers from
England, and it did. Henry set about the business of making war in the most practical manner. We owe him one great blessing: he was the first King since the Conquest who began to build a
Royal
fleet, as distinguished from the fleet of the Cinque Ports (which he also kept going); he was the first to use guns on a large scale, both on his ships and with his land army. Guns and gunpowder had been known before the middle of the fourteenth century, but so far had been little used. Their use explains Henry’s success in his sieges in
France, for with big guns you can batter down stone walls pretty quickly, whereas Edward
III had spent eight months over the taking of
Calais, which he only won by starving it out.

The French towns defended themselves gallantly, but before his death Henry had managed to conquer all Normandy, and had even reached the River Loire. But his great feat was the glorious Battle of Agincourt, won against enormous odds in 1415. Finally in
1420 he got hold of the poor, mad Charles VI,
entered Paris with him and compelled him to conclude the Treaty of Troyes, by which he,

Henry, should succeed to the French crown and marry the French Princess Katharine.
Then, in the flower of his age, and leaving to an infant of nine months old the succession to both crowns, he died in 1422.

There was one good “King’s uncle,” John,
Duke of Bedford, who did his best to keep these two crowns on his nephew’s head; but there were other uncles and cousins who were not so good. Little Henry VI grew up into a gentle, pious, tender-hearted man, who hated war, hated wicked courtiers, loved only learning and learned men, founded the greatest school in the world (Eton), and shut his eyes to the fact that England was getting utterly out of hand. Bedford just managed to hold down Northern France (which had always hated the Treaty of 1420) until his own death in 1425; after that all Frenchmen rallied to their natural King, Charles VII. The noble
French “Maid of God,” Joan of Arc, came to lead her people and inspired them with the belief that God would fight for them if they would fight bravely for their country. She was just a peasant-girl of no education, but of beautiful life and well able to stand hardship;
she believed that the Saints appeared to her and urged her to deliver France. The French soldiers came to believe it too, and she led them

to battle dressed in full armour and riding astride of a white horse. She allowed no bad language to be used in the army: “If you must swear, Marshal,” she said to one of the proudest
French nobles, “you may swear by your stick,
but by nothing else.” The English caught her and burned her as a witch, but she lives in the hearts of all good Frenchmen (and Englishmen) as a saint and a heroine until this day. Step by step the English were driven back till all Normandy, all Aquitaine were lost,
and in 1453 nothing remained to us but Calais.

King Henry YI was not sorry; by this time he knew how wicked his father’s attack upon
France had been. But the fighting instinct of
Englishmen was desperately sore; defeat after such victories seemed unbearable. And, while the barons’ quarrels round the King’s tottering throne became shriller and shriller, there were but too many men in England ready to fight somebody, they did not much care whom so long as there was plunder at the end. Henry’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, a fiery, cruel woman,
ignored her gentle husband and governed in his name. She had already made herself the partisan of one of the two baronial factions,
and had struck down the King’s uncle, the
Duke of Gloucester. Her favourite minister,
the Duke of Suffolk, was actually caught andbeheaded by common sailors on board a King’s ship as he was flying to France. What should we say if a lot of British sailors now caught and beheaded Mr. Asquith on board the
Dreadnought?
In the same year, 1450, there was a fearful insurrection in Kent, led by a scamp called Jack Cade, who marched into
London and beheaded several more of the King’s ministers. Law and order were utterly at an end.

The Duke of York, who was now the best living heir of Edward III, at length took up the cudgels against the House of Lancaster. |
There was civil war for some six years (1455- |
61), and battle after battle. The horror of it all had driven the good King, on two occasions, out of his mind. It was
called
the war of the House of York against the House of
Lancaster, of the “White Rose” against the i
“Red Rose”; really, it was the war of some i dozen savage barons on one side against another I
dozen on the other. Each of them had a little army of archers and spearmen; each had perhaps the grudges of a century to pay off upon some rival. The war hardly affected the towns at all, and stopped trade very little,
and even the country districts, except in the j actual presence of the armies, seem to have suffered little. The growth of wool, at any

rate, and with it the increase of riches, went on as fast as ever. “The King ought to put a
sheep
instead of a
ship
on his coins,” was a common saying of the day. Of course the coasts were utterly undefended, and pirates of all sorts had a happy time in the Channel.

If any line of division can be discovered in the country we may say roughly that the North and West were Lancastrian, the South and
East (then the richest counties) Yorkist. At last Henry VI was deposed, Queen Margaret took flight and Edward, Duke of York, became
King as Edward IV. He was a thoroughly bad man, being cruel, vindictive and, except in warfare, lazy. But Margaret had been vindictive too, and, as regards cruelty, there was little to choose between the parties; after every battle the leaders of the vanquished side were put to death almost as a matter of course.

But, just as Henry IV had quarrelled with the barons who had crowned him, so did Edward
IV quarrel with his “Kingmaker” and best friend, the Earl of Warwick. Warwick thereupon deposed Edward and took poor Henry
VI, who had been an ill-used prisoner in the
Tower of London, and put him back on the throne again. It was only a six months’ restoration (1470 — 1), for Edward returned, slew

Warwick in battle, slew Henry’s only son after the battle, slew all the Lancastrian leaders he could catch, and finally had King Henry murdered in the Tower. After this he “reigned more fiercely than before”; he struck down his own brother George, Duke of Clarence; he employed spies, tortured his prisoners, and hardly called Parliament at all; he took what taxes he pleased from the rich. But he kept order very little better than Henry VI had done.
Once he thought he would play the part of a “fine old English King,” so he led a great army across to France in 1475, but there allowed himself to be bribed by the cunning
Louis XI to go home again without firing a shot. At his death in 1483 his brother, the hunchback Richard, seized the crown, and murdered Edward’s two sons (Edward V and
Richard, Duke of York) in the Tower. Richard
III was a fierce, vigorous villain, and had, in two years and a half, succeeded in murdering a good many nobles, both of the Lancastrian and Yorkist parties.

Finally, all the sober English leaders who still kept their heads began to send secret messages to a famous exiled gentleman, Henry Tudor,
Earl of Richmond, who was descended through his mother from the House of Lancaster, begging him to come over from France and upsetthe tyrant. He was to marry Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth, and thus to unite the red and white roses. Henry landed in South
Wales with a very small army, which increased as he marched eastward. He met King
Richard, defeated and slew him at Bos worth in Leicestershire, 1485. Then he advanced to London and was received with joy and relief as King Henry VII.

Apart from the politics and wars of this dreary period there are one or two things to be noticed of much greater interest for us. Every age is only preparation for the next, and the seeds of many of the great “awakenings” of the sixteenth century were sowed in the fifteenth.

First, of the religious awakening. We had long been accustomed to growl at the riches of the Church, but, till the end of Edward Ill’s reign, no one had questioned its spiritual powers. No one had doubted that priests could really pardon sin. Men hated the Pope,
but no one had yet doubted that he was the
“Head of the Church” any more than they had doubted that every priest performed a miracle every time he consecrated the Holy Sacrament.
Few had even questioned that by payment of money to Rome you could buy salvation. But the popes, when they got back to Rome in 1415after the great “Schism,” were little more than Italian bishops, mainly occupied with wars against their neighbours. No doubt their bark was still terrible, but what about their bite? Had they, people wondered, any teeth left to bite with?

At the end of Edward Ill’s reign the great
English scholar, John Wyclif, began to ask questions about all these things, and to argue that the favourite doctrines of the Roman
Church were all comparatively new, that they were not part of Christ’s teaching, and could not be found in the Bible at all. He published an English translation of the Bible; hitherto men had only a Latin version of it, and the
Church did not encourage laymen to read it.
He also founded an order of “poor priests,”
who were to go about preaching simple
Christianity.

The English bishops were absolutely terrified,
and the monks, abbots, and friars more terrified still. These had long known what greedy eyes laymen cast on their vast wealth. Wyclif,
said the great churchmen, was a “heretic,”
and ought to be burned alive (he died in his bed all safe in 1384). In the reigns of Henry
IV and Henry V the clergy persuaded Parliament to make laws saying that heretics
should
be burned alive, and many of Wyclif’sfollowers, during the next hundred and twenty years, were actually so burned. The Church nicknamed them “Lollards,” or babblers.

The “State,” as represented by the King and Parliament, somewhat unwillingly supported the churchmen in this matter; yet on the whole the State considered that these
Lollards were raising dreadful questions, and it would be better to crush them and not allow them the safety-valve of talking. The Church sat on the safety-valve as long as it could; but the steam of free thought was bubbling underneath, and, once it had gathered head enough,
would blow those that sat on the safety-valve sky-high into little tiny pieces. When Lollardy bursts forth again in the reign of Henry
VIII it will be called by the better name of
4 4 Protestantism.’’