Part 3 (1/2)

Scottish liberties were not so sacrificed by this conquest as had been the Irish. The Scots would not be slaves, nor would they stay conquered without many a struggle.

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Robert Bruce led a great rebellion, which extended into the succeeding reign, and Bruce's name was covered with glory by his great victory at Bannockburn (1314).

We need not linger over the twenty years during which Edward II., by his private infamies, so exasperated his wife and son that they brought about his deposition, which was followed soon after by his murder; and then by a disgraceful regency, during which the Queen's favorite, Mortimer, was virtually king. But King Edward III. commenced to rule with a strong hand. As soon as he was eighteen years old he summoned the Parliament. Mortimer was hanged at Tyburn, and his queen-mother was immured for life.

We have turned our backs upon Old England. The England of a representative Parliament and a House of Commons, of ideals derived from a wider knowledge, the England of a Westminster Abbey, and gunpowder, and cloth-weaving, is the England we all know to-day.

Vicious kings and greed of territory, and l.u.s.t of power, will keep the road from being a smooth one, {57} but it leads direct to the England of Edward VII.; and 1906 was roughly outlined in 1327, when Edward III.

grasped the helm with the decision of a master.

After completing the subjection of Scotland he invaded France,--the pretext of resisting her designs upon the Netherlands, being merely a cover for his own thirst for territory and conquest. The victory over the French at Crecy, 1346, (and later of Poitiers,) covered the warlike king and his son, Edward the ”Black Prince,” with imperishable renown.

Small cannon were first used at that battle. The knights and the archers laughed at the little toy, but found it useful in frightening the enemies' horses.

Edward III. covered England with a mantle of military glory, for which she had to pay dearly later. He elevated the kings.h.i.+p to a more dazzling height, for which there have also been some expensive reckonings since. He introduced a new and higher dignity into n.o.bility by the t.i.tle of Duke, which he bestowed upon his sons; the great landholders or barons, having until that time const.i.tuted a body in which all were peers. {58} He has been the idol of heroic England.

But he awoke the dream of French conquest, and bequeathed to his successors a fatal war, which lasted for 100 years.

The ”Black Prince” died, and the ”Black Death,” a fearful pestilence, desolated a land already decimated by protracted wars. The valiant old King, after a life of brilliant triumphs, carried a sad and broken heart to the grave, and Richard II., son of the heroic Prince Edward, was king.

This last of the Plantagenets had need of great strength and wisdom to cope with the forces stirring at that time in his kingdom, and was singularly deficient in both. The costly conquests of his grandfather, were a troublesome legacy to his feeble grandson. Enormous taxes unjustly levied to pay for past glories, do not improve the temper of a people. A s.h.i.+fting of the burden from one cla.s.s to another arrayed all in antagonisms against each other, and finally, when the burden fell upon the lowest order, as it is apt to do, it rose in fierce rebellion under the leaders.h.i.+p of Wat Tyler, a blacksmith (1381).

Concessions were granted and quiet {59} restored, but the people had learned a new way of throwing off injustice. There began to be a new sentiment in the air. Men were asking why the few should dress in velvet and the many in rags. It was the first English revolt against the tyranny of wealth, when people were heard on the streets singing the couplet--

”When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?”

As in the times of the early Saxon kings, the cause breeding destruction was the widening distance between the king and the people.

In those earlier times the people unresistingly lapsed into decadence, but the Anglo-Saxon had learned much since then, and it was not so safe to degrade him and trample on his rights.

Then, too, John Wickliffe had been telling some very plain truths to the people about the Church of Rome, and there was developing a sentiment which made Pope and Clergy tremble. There was a spirit of inquiry, having its centre at Oxford, looking into the t.i.tle-deeds of the great ecclesiastical {60} despotism. Wickliffe heretically claimed that the Bible was the one ground of faith, and he added to his heresy by translating that Book into simple Saxon English, that men might learn for themselves what was Christ's message to man.

Luther's protest in the 16th Century was but the echo of Wickliffe's in the 14th,--against the tyranny of a Church from which all spiritual life had departed, and which in its decay tightened its grasp upon the very things which its founder put ”behind Him” in the temptation on the mountain, and aimed at becoming a temporal despotism.

Closely intermingled with these struggles was going on another, un.o.bserved at the time. Three languages held sway in England--Latin in the Church, French in polite society, and English among the people.

Chaucer's genius selected the language of the people for its expression, as also of course, did Wickliffe in his translation of the Bible. French and Latin were dethroned, and the ”King's English”

became the language of the literature and speech of the English nation.

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He would have been a wise and great King who could have comprehended and controlled all the various forces at work at this time. Richard II. was neither. This seething, tumbling ma.s.s of popular discontents was besides only the groundwork for the personal strifes and ambitions which raged about the throne. The wretched King, embroiled with every cla.s.s and every party, was p.r.o.nounced by Parliament unfit to reign, the same body which deposed him, giving the crown to his cousin Henry of Lancaster (1399), and the reign of the Plantagenets was ended.

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CHAPTER V

The new king did not inherit the throne; he was _elected_ to it. He was an arbitrary creation of Parliament. The Duke of Lancaster, Henry's father (John of Gaunt), was only a younger son of Edward III.