The history of
England from the Norman invasion encapsulates all the major
trends of the times.
Politically, the Norman kings and their heirs
are the primary locus in European history where feudalism
is converted into a working model of a centralized monarchy.
The history of England all throughout the Middle Ages is one,
long, almost uninterrupted set of conflicts engendered by
the attempt to convert feudalism into monarchy. On the one
hand are attempts to consolidate the power of the monarch
over the power of feudatories; on the other hand is the resistance
to monarchical aggrandizement and the subsequent assertion
of privileges by feudatories over the monarch. The high point
of monarchical power was attained during the reign of Edward
I (1272-1307); the low points of monarchical power were scattered
all throughout medieval English history: the reigns of John,
Edward II, and Richard II being the bleakest.
From a cultural standpoint, the history of
England involved a gradual absorption into a larger, European
culture. While Anglo-Saxons had been fairly insular and unique
culturally and politically, medieval England came increasingly
dominated by continental culture. By the time of Chaucer and
Richard II in the late fourteenth century, when England emerges
as a major cultural force in Europe, very few indigenous Anglo-Saxon
cultural practices remained in the "high" culture
of England. The German language of England, Anglo-Saxon, still
remained in some of its most essential aspects, but for the
most part, the language of England, Middle English, had more
in common with continental languages, particularly French.
This cultural transformation occurred from the top down, so
to speak. The Normans brought with them Norman culture, institutions,
and social practices, but did not largely impose these on
the native Anglo-Saxon populations. Beginning in the 13th
century, however, almost all educated people in England had
learned Norman, French, and Latin cultural models—only
a few eccentrics still attached themselves to Anglo-Saxon
cultural practices.
The Norman Kings William and the Norman kings who followed
him had as their principle objective the breaking of the power
of the Anglo-Saxon earls and the importation of Norman feudalism.
They had, however, to make one important modification to feudalism—the
overlord would be the king rather than a duke. They followed
the same model that had been developed in Normandy—the
king owned the land under him either directly or indirectly.
Land was enfeoffed, that is, granted as a "fief,"
to individual tenants who collected the revenues from this
land. In exchange, the tenants-in-chief (called "barons")
entered into certain obligations with the overlord—these
included revenues and a certain amount of military forces.
This system had a complicated set of "privileges":
on the one hand, the tenants-in-chief enjoyed a certain autonomy
in the administration of lands and its revenue—this
included rights of inheritance, that is, a feudatory was granted
to a family rather than to an individual. On the other hand,
the monarch directly or indirectly owned the land so had a
certain claim to the revenues, the land, its inheritability,
and to the services and obligations of its tenants.
The challenge to the Norman kings was to
convert this system into a working monarchy. In order to maintain
centralized authority over the more or less independent tenants,
William retained as monarch the right to collect taxes, coin
money, and to oversee the administration of justice. But William
did not have a wealth of professional administrators—since
Anglo-Saxon England largely consisted of a series of independent
earldoms, there were very few people capable of carrying out
the centralized functions he needed. Power, then, slowly devolved
to the barons he had created.
It fell to Henry I (1100-1135), William's
successor, to create a professional class of administrators
for the crown. The only real administrators that William had
relied on were the individuals filling the Anglo-Saxon office
of sheriff who served as the local representative of the king.
Henry I, however, turned his court into an administrative
bureaucracy by creating special offices. These court offices
would each serve a limited and specialized set of functions
so that the office-holders would themselve become efficient
administrators in that one area. Most significantly, one of
these specialized offices was the Exchequer, which oversaw
the acquisition and dispersal of revenues for the crown.
Henry II In the development of the English monarchy, the most
dramatic events occurred during the reign of Henry II (1154-1189),
the grandson of Henry I. The monarchy had fallen on troubled
times, enduring a civil war and contrary claims to the throne.
When Henry II came to the throne, he instituted a series of
measures designed to consolidate power around the king. The
most significant of these measures was the narrowing of privileges
granted to the church and to the clergy. While William and
Henry I had managed to gain privileges from the nobility,
the church still remained relatively autonomous.
Henry's problem with the Roman church was
that it existed outside of the legal system that the English
monarchs were trying to impose across England. When a member
of the clergy committed a crime, that criminal fell under
the jurisdiction of the church rather than the king. The criminal
would be tried in an ecclesiastical ("church") court
using canon law of the Roman church, rather than tried in
a manorial or state court using the king's laws. The ecclesiastical
judicial system of the Roman church was by and large highly
corrupt (as its remnants in the present day still are)—even
the most heinous crimes, such as murder, resulted in minor
penalties imposed by the church court.
This not only rankled the king, it threatened
the social order and the peace that the king was trying to
establish by centralizing the judicial system. Henry's biggest
fight, then, was with the church. Henry tried to limit the
church courts in 1164 by allowing the church courts to try
a clerical criminal but demanding that the criminal be sentenced
in a royal court. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket,
refused to yield—he would later be assassinated by four
of Henry's knights.
Despite his failure to bring the church under
a centralized judiciary, Henry was one of the most successful
kings in European medieval history to consolidate monarchical
power and develop the institution of monarchical government.
He greatly expanded the role of the judiciary in the life
of the English. In particular, he charged the sheriff of each
region to call before itinerant judges any local person that
he pleased in order to question them before the judge. The
sheriff would ask these people if they knew of any crimes
that had occurred since the last visit of the judge. This
practice would eventually evolve into the judicial practice
we know as the grand jury. He also introduced the original
form of jury trials. In Henry's time, jury trials were only
applied to civil cases involving property. When someone made
a complaint of dispossession, the sheriff was empowered to
bring before the judge twelve men who were familiar with the
case. These men would then tell the judge what they knew of
the case and would give their opinion as to the truth of the
complaint or the defense. This twelve man testimonial would
eventually develop into the civil and criminal jury trial.
These were significant innovations in many
ways. First, they equalized the law in a profound way. People
with little power could make complaints against more powerful
people and prevail—this made the judicial something
that people supported and sought after. In addition, the use
of the twelve men expanded participation in the judiciary
and in government to more than just the monarch, his ministers,
and the powerful barons. Government was now partly in the
hands of common people—thus would begin a growing interest
among more and more classes in the conduct of government.
Finally, Henry's innovations created a more or less independent
bureaucracy that, in the hands of a well-trained administrative
staff, could run the central government no matter who was
king.
And that's what happened when Henry II died.
He was succeeded by his son, Richard I (1189-1199), who, because
of his interest in the Crusades, spent all of six months in
England during his ten year reign. Even in his absence, the
government ran efficiently. In fact, it got even more efficient
as the administrative beauracracy was able to develop without
the interference of the king.
Magna Carta It was during the reign of Richard's successor,
John (1199-1214), that the steady development of monarchical
authority was partly checked. As with his predecessors, John
ruled not only England as a monarch, but he also ruled much
of France as a vassal of the French king. This rankled the
French kings all during the reigns of the early Norman kings.
By 1204, the French king, Philip Augustus, retook for France
the lands that John ruled in Normandy. In Philip Augustus,
John faced one of the most capable military and administrative
kings in French history—he was dealt defeat after defeat
in his attempt to first defend and then regain his lands.
Fed up with his war in France, John's nobles
resented the power of the king to raise money for what they
felt was a losing war. In the famous Magna Carta of 1215,
they forced the king to sign a charter that renounced much
of his power. The Magna Carta was not really a document about
rights, it was a document about limiting monarchical government
and the power of the king. First and foremost, it revoked
the right of the king to raise revenues independently—in
order to raise revenues, the king first had to obtain permission
from his vassals. The document also limited the power of the
king's judges arbitrarily to try and sentence free men; all
free men could only be tried and sentenced by their equals.
Finally, it created a council of vassals that could approve
or disapprove of the king's revenue raising; this council
would eventually develop into the Parliament. The great experiment
with monarchy in Europe was entering a new phase—the
first involved the creation of monarchical power and the institutions
to run it; the second phased involved the creation of institutions
to check and limit the growing power of the monarch. Everything
was in place now for the subsequent history of government
in Europe.
Edward I The most powerful king in medieval English history
was Edward I (1272-1307), an aggressive, warrior king that
not only consolidated power in England but through wars of
conquest became the first king of all of Britain, albeit briefly.
Of all the medieval monarchs in Europe, Edward
was perhaps the most brilliant at consolidating power. The
institution he invented to achieve this end was Parliament,
or "Talking." The purpose of Parliament was to gather
all the major vassals of the king in one place, explain to
them the reasons for collecting taxes, get their approval,
and then discuss methods of collection. While this may seem
to be an expansion of the role of the barons in government,
it was actually the opposite. The entire purpose of the development
of Parliament was efficiency , the rapid generation of consensus
among the nobility, none of whom really were in a position
to challenge the king. Eventually, however, after the reign
of Edward, the Parliament would develop as a powerful check
on the monarch's power—this was not Edward's intention
or practice.
Edward's Parliament included more than nobility—he
had the genius to include knights and other commoners to represent
local counties at the Parliament. These commoners probably
had no role at all in the Parliament, but the practice was
enormously effective as propaganda. Local commoners were not
only presented with an awe-inspiring theater of power at the
court, but they also were being given propaganda and reasons
for taxation on themselves and the people they represented.
Commoners would eventually become an integral part of Parliament
and develop their own independence from the nobility in Parliament—suffice
it to say here, though, that the inclusion of commoners was
part of the trend of increasing participation in the monarchical
and local government by more people begun by the earliest
Norman kings.
Edward made the most determined assault on
baronial power among all the English kings. He instituted
a series of proceedings called quo warranto proceedings ("by
what warrant")—these proceedings would systematically
question by what warrant nobles had certain privileges and
rights from the king. If there was no warrant for these privileges,
they were revoked and granted to the monarch. The result was
a massive consolidation of power in the king's hands. Among
other innovations was Edward's practice of issuing statutes,
which were pieces of public legislation arbitrarily imposed
on the entire kingdom by the will of the king.
Edward needed an efficient system for raising
revenues for his constant warfare. On the continent he fought
against the French king for Gascony, a territory under his
control that had been seized by the French king. It was a
useless war fought from 1294-1303 that simply resulted in
Gascony being returned to Edward as a vassal. His most significant
wars, however, were against Wales and Scotland. Both of these
Celtic countries were independent of England—Wales was
a principality ruled by the Prince of Wales and Scotland was
a monarchy. However, in both Wales and Scotland a substantial
number of the nobility were Anglo-Norman rather than Welsh
or Scottish. While they were nominally under the Prince of
Wales or the Scottish king, most of them had closer cultural
ties with England and the Normans. It was with their help
that he conquered Wales and brought it under his control.
It was a different set-up than the English feudal system—Wales
was a system of more or less independent lordships that were
vassals of the king.
Scotland, however, was a much more difficult
matter. When the Scottish king, Alexander III, died in 1290
without an heir, two nobles stepped forward to claim the throne:
John Balliol and Robert Bruce, both Anglo-Norman lords in
Scotland. The Scots turned to Edward to resolve the dispute,
which he agreed to do if the disputer were settled using English
and if he was made regent of Scotland until a decision was
made. So, without shedding any blood, Edward became the overlord
of Scotland. When the English finally declared John Balliol
king, many of the Scottish nobles preferred being under Edward.
When Balliol, however, allied with the French, Edward invaded
and conquered Scotland in 1296. But Scotland was to hard to
hold—two major rebellions, one led by William Wallace
and the second by Robert Bruce, the grandson of the Bruce
that claimed the throne, temporarily expelled Edward from
Scotland.
The 1300's The history of the monarchy after Edward I involved
the steady dissolution of monarchical power at the hands of
restive nobility. England suffered many major shocks throughout
this century: the Black Death, wars with France, and Peasant
revolts. By 1400, England had developed its own unique system
of government through checks on the monarch's power and the
further development of judiciary practices.
Edward I was succeeded by his son, Edward
II (1307-1330), who on account of his arbitrary government
and his favoring of often corrupt councilors, inspired a major
revolt by the nobility. The reign of Edward III (1330-1377)
was largely occupied with fighting in France to regain possessions
seized by the French king—these series of skirmishes,
which lasted until 1453 were known as the Hundred Years War.
The end result of would be the permanent expulsion of English
power from the continent.
Life changed dramatically after the advent
of the Black Death in 1349, to say the least. For England
and the rest of Europe, the Death meant a startling decrease
in labor and a subsequent rise in the value of labor. In the
early years, a substantial amount of wealth was redistributed
from the nobility downwards—most importantly, the value
of labor inspired people to uproot themselves and relocate.
The social consequences would be tremendous and begin to produce
a "commoner" culture of remarkable resiliency and
diffusion all throughout England. This commoner culture would
produce a body of literature and music as well as a sensibility
that would eventually diffuse into court and higher culture.
The first major English literary figure, Geoffrey Chaucer,
would in part draw on models and sensibilities of this lower
culture.
Most importantly, the Black Death changed
the economy of England. Throughout the entire period of Norman
rule, the economy centered entirely on agriculture with some
export of raw materials, such as wool. Agriculture was dominated
by the landed nobility who collected rents from tenants lower
on the hierarchy. The entire structure was built on the shoulders
of the villein who received the smallest share of arable land.
The villein was tied to the land that he farmed, which was
often barely enough to provide for his family's survival.
He paid a certain amount of his crop as rent but he also paid
in labor. He was forced to work a certain amount of time on
the lands of the nobility who collected all the revenues from
these lands. This was a phenomenally lucrative system for
the landholders but was a desperate and torturous existence
for villein.
With the Death, however, landholders found
themselves desperately short of villeins to work their lands.
In addition, the shortage of labor induced many villeins to
run away and look for more gainful employment on other lands
as wage laborers or to seek work in the cities. Even though
it was a serious crime to run away (the villeins were in effect
slaves), the prospect of a more secure life was inducement
enough. With the loss of villeins, the landholders had to
resort to wage labor, which was considerably more expensive,
particularly in the light of falling food prices because of
lowered demand! The landholders solved the problem in two
ways: the first was by converting their lands to rented lands.
By 1500, almost no landholders were using their own lands
but had rented them all out. The second and most innovative
approach was to stop growing crops but instead use the land
to graze sheep for wool—this practice was called "enclosure"
since the land would be enclosed to keep the sheep in. Enclosure
turned out to be an even more lucrative use of the land and
all throughout the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
massive amounts of land were converted from agriculture to
sheep-raising.
The phenomenal increase in wool production
made England one of the centers of European commerce. But
the English soon turned from exporting raw wool to exporting
finished cloth. Why, after all, collect money from exporting
wool only to have to pay it out again for the finished cloth?
By the end of the fifteenth century, England had become the
major manufacturing commercial power of Europe primarily because
of the growth of the cloth industry. The conversion of the
English economy to a commercial and manufacturing economy
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contributed to the
growth of a new commoner class, what we would call the middle
class. These commoners sometimes attained incredible wealth
not only through trade and manufacturing, but often as renters
on agricultural land.
The reign of Richard II (1377-1399), who
came to the throne as a boy, was marked by arbitrary use of
power and extreme efforts of the nobility to check the power
of the king. So troubled was the reign, that Richard was the
first king to be deposed by a rebellion, that of Henry Bolingbroke,
who usurped the throne to become Henry IV.
It was during the later years of Edward III
and the reign of Richard II that England emerged as potent
cultural force in Europe. Some Anglo-Saxon practices still
hung on, such as the writing of alliterative poetry, that
is, poetry whose meter is marked by alliteration or the use
of identical consonants to begin words. On the whole, however,
England developed a distinct culture using French and classical
models as well as a new, growing commoner culture. Combined
with both of these was a new and innovative anti-clericalism
that gaine dramatic cultural force in the latter part of the
fourteenth century.
The Roman church had never truly brought
about ecclesiastical unity in Europe. In the early period,
several different practices and theologies vied with one another,
the most significant being the conflict between the Celtic
and the continental churches. Moreover, the eastern European
areas never fell under Roman control—a separate church,
the church of Byzantium, exercised spiritual and political
authority over these Christians.
The Roman church in the West was a powerful
medium through which a common European culture was forged
and was instrumental in bringing first Anglo-Saxon and then
Anglo-Norman culture into the European mainstream. But the
Roman church was also hopelessly corrupt. It was largely run
according to the social models of Europe—the hierarchy
of the church mirrored the hierarchy of society. In fact,
the top of the church hierarchy was drawn almost entirely
from European nobles. The church concentrated its energies
on the top of the hierarchy and on the various monasteries,
which for all practical purposes were the equivalent of noble
estates and practiced the same kind of slave labor—the
use of villeins to farm monastic lands—that the English
manors used. Almost no resources were devoted to the village,
the town, and the commoner. Clergy at this level were desperately
poor and lived a hand-to-mouth existence selling prayers and
other sacraments.
It was inevitable that the hierarchy and
wealth of the church, its manifest meddling in commerce and
politics, its cruel disdain for the lowest levels of society,
and the added insult of the relative immunity of clergy from
criminal prosecution, would all eventually produce strong
reactions against the church and the clergy—this anti-clerical
feeling during the Middle Ages reached its height in England.
The reaction to the church ranged from aggressive
denunciations of the entire institution to stinging critiques
of church clergy that still upheld the legitimacy of the church
itself.
The most famous and important of the anti-clerical
agitators was John Wycliff who originally began his career
as a doctor of divinity at Oxford in the 1360's and speculated
on such abstruse questions as the nature of universals. He
soon, however, developed strong critiques of the church and
eventually assumed in the late 1370's a revolutionary stance
towards the church. He rejected all church hierarchy and declared
that the Christian consisted of the people who had faith but
did not consist of the church hierarchy (this would eventually
become the "priesthood of all believers" in Martin
Luther). He rejected transsubstantiation as a legitimate doctrine
(the idea that the bread and wine of the Eucharist actually
change into the body and blood of Christ), arguing that there
is no Scriptural authority for this. He also argued that the
Bible should be translated into vernacular languages, that
it does no good to read from the Bible in a language that
most Christians can't understand. To this end, he produced
the first English Bible. These and other heretical doctrines
landed him in a world of trouble, but he was protected by
powerful nobles who used them for their own political ends.
His most revolutionary idea, however, lost him the protection
of even the nobility. He argued that all human authority comes
from God's grace alone. This doctrine of "authority through
grace" allowed him to argue that no corrupt official
or authority should be obeyed. If a priest, bishop, or pope
were corrupt, parishioners were justified in opposing any
authority exercised by that church official—the judgement
of such corruption lay with the conscience of the believer.
This was not only a radical challenge to the church, it also
quickly became a radical challenge to secular authority as
well.
Wycliff's radical ideas led to a distinct
anti-clerical movement in England: Lollardry. Lollard ideas
in part impelled the Peasant's Rebellion of 1381 and would
surface in the remainder of the century. While Lollardry was
effectively stamped out in the early 1400's, it re-emerged
with a vengeance when Protestantism was introduced into England
in the 1510's. Lollard ideas, however, did diffuse across
the continent and many of the theological and social ideas
of the Protestant Reformation are traceable back to the hapless
Lollards.
The most important thing about Lollardry
and the general anti-clericalism of the fourteenth century
is that it founded a new culture deliberately resistant to
the dominant, homogenizing culture of the church. This new
anti-clerical culture led a number of theologians, writers,
and poets in England to begin to speculate about the nature
of society, government, economics and human institutions and
to forge radically new ideas on all these fronts. Any speculation
about the legitimacy of political power would have landed
the writer in serious trouble; church government, however,
was relatively open to criticism and it was here that the
critical tradition in European political theory developed,
and in no place in Europe did it develop as strongly as it
did in medieval England. The anti-clerical culture was not
so much a theological or even a doctrinal culture—it
was a moral and political culture in part forged out of the
increasing role that all individuals were playing in English
government. Anti-clerical culture manifested itself in religious
works, such as Piers Plowman written by a desperately poor
cleric named William Langland, in mystical literature such
as The Book of Margery Kempe , and in an entire corpus of
secular literature and practices.
No individual better represents this new
cultural fusion of European, commoner, and anti-clerical culture
than Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400). His earliest writings imported
Italian and French models into English literature, but his
greatest work was The Canterbury Tales , which fused a number
of cultural forms and anti-clerical criticism in a series
of stories narrated by a cross-section of English culture.
The emergence of Chaucer as a major literary
figure points to another vital change in English culture in
the fourteenth century: the emergence of English as an official
and a literary language. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
the language of government was primarily French in spoken
language and Latin in written language. The literary language
of early Norman England was Norman French—a number of
the earliest masterpieces of English literature are in actuality
French. In the fourteenth century, however, English became
the spoken language of government and in part replaced Latin
as the official written language. Literature in English began
to thrive from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards
and culminated in the career of Chaucer and Wycliff's translation
of the Bible. By 1400, English had become the language of
England.
This English, however, was substantially
different from the English spoken before the Norman invasion.
The English of the Anglo-Saxon period, called "Old English,"
was completely a Germanic language that had more in common
with the Germanic languages spoken on the continent than it
had with modern English. The Norman invasion, however, introduced
a long period in which Norman French and Anglo-Saxon existed
side-by-side. The result was a curious mix of the two languages,
in fact, almost a lingua franca, that produced the English
of the fourteenth century. This was an English that used many
Germanic forms but was dominated by French words and a French
world view.
The Lancasters When Henry Bolingbroke deposed Richard II,
he declared himself king of England as Henry IV on a very
tenuous claim to the throne. This was a radical departure
in English history that would determine historical practices
for the next hundred years and beyond. Because Henry had provided
the precedent for deposing a king, it soon became evident
that the monarchy could be claimed through any vague connection
if the claimant had sufficient arms to enforce the claim.
The history of the fifteenth century is one long, dismal history
of the problems created by Henry's usurpation.
The problems began immediately. Henry spent
most of his reign putting down a rebellion first by a Welsh
nobleman, Owen Glyndwr, and then later by powerful English
magnates.
His son, however, who reigned as Henry V
(1413-1422), was determined to regain English rights of the
French areas of Normandy and Gascon. To this end, he launched
an invasion of France which soon gained him all the territory
the English had lost in these areas. He was helped by two
major accidents. The first was an all-out schism in French
government between the Duke of Burgundy and son of the King,
Charles VI. Both claimed the throne and Henry took advantage
of this division. The second accident was the use of longbow
archers against the French forces that were primarily cavalry
and infantry. Because the longbow archers could fire from
a distance and rearm themselves quickly after releasing a
volley, the French forces fell quickly.
At the end of his conquests, Henry extorted
two things from Charles VI: he was married to Charles' daughter
Catherine and the French king ceded the throne upon his death
to the child of Henry and Catherine. When Henry V died of
an illness in 1322 at the age of 35, their nine-month old
child, Henry VI, became the first and only king of both England
and France.
The invasions of Henry and the steady loss
of French territories under Henry VI comprise what historians
call the Hundred Years War. The English held on to their possessions
until 1429 when, under the inspired leadership of a teenage
girl, Joan of Arc, the French rallied against the English
and their Burgundian allies. When the Duke of Burgund reallied
himself with the French, the tide of battle turned distinctively
against the English. Henry V had the benefit of a politically
divided France; the English now faced a rival, French claimant
to the throne—the Dauphin, the son of Charles VI—backed
by a unified France. By 1453, the English were permanently
kicked out of France except for the town of Calais.
Henry VI was the youngest man to become king
of England and reigned an immensely long time. His reign,
however, was generally marked by his non-presence as a king
since he despised warfare and had no interest in government.
The government instead fell to his magnates and to his wife,
Margaret of Anjou. This began a period of severe rivalries
between magnates that would eventually erupt into the Wars
of the Roses.
The Wars of the Roses The "Wars of the Roses" is
somewhat of a misnomer. The name refers to the symbols used
to represent the two major factions—the Yorks represented
themselves with the symbol of the white rose and the Tudors
represented themselves with a red rose. It wasn't until the
end of the struggle, however, that the Tudors adopted the
red rose to distinguish themselves from the Yorks. Nor were
these really wars, but rather a series of small, albeit decisive,
skirmishes between various magnates.
The issue, of course, owed its origins to
Henry Bolingbroke's usurpation of the crown. There were several
nobles and families who had better claims to the throne and
Henry had introduced the dangerous precedent that the crown
belonged to whoever could seize it.
The non-presence of Henry VI as a king was
even more decisive. Since the government fell to a clique
of nobles surrounding Margaret of Anjou, those nobles who
felt left out were bitter and rebellious. The one having the
greatest cause for bitterness was Richard, Duke of York. It
was not just simply that Richard had a better claim to the
throne, it was that Henry VI had proven himself useless as
a king. When Henry VI went mad in 1453, Richard managed to
get himself declared the Protector of the Realm—in executive
functions, he was the equivalent of the king. He then surrounded
the monarch's government with fellow Yorkists and allies and
he arrested the major figures in Henry's court. After the
king regained his sanity, the first major battle occurred
between Richard and these rival court governors. This first
battle, fought at Saint Albans, is traditionally reckoned
as the start of the Wars of the Roses.
By 1460, however, Richard controlled the
government and, in an incredibly audacious move, declared
himself to be king of England since Henry was both unfit and
was the descendant of a usurper. The nobility, however, backed
off of this proposal and promised Richard the crown after
the death of Henry. But Henry didn't die soon enough—when
Richard died, the succession fell to his son, Edward IV.
Edward IV (1461-1483) did what Richard couldn't
do: he deposed Henry and assumed the throne of England. He
could never really consolidate his rule, however, and faced
intense and aggressive restiveness from his brother, George,
the Duke of Clarence and slightly less resistance from his
other brother, Richard, the Duke of Gloucester. In 1471, Margaret
of Anjou and Henry VI landed with an invasion force and temporarily
retook the crown for a couple months. This was soon overcome
by Edward and Henry died in prison, old, mad, and broken.
On the death of Edward in 1483, the succession
fell to his son, Edward V. But Edward V was only twelve years
old, so the Protectorate fell to his uncle, Richard, Duke
of Gloucester. Richard, following the traditions set down
by Henry IV, Richard, Duke of York, his father, and his brother
Edward, seized the throne rapidly and efficiently. He imprisoned
the two sons of Edward and may even have had them executed
(it is more likely that Henry Tudor executed them). The throne
was usurped yet again in less than a hundred years.
By all accounts, Richard III was an extremely
effective administrator, militarily brilliant, and of immense
physical courage. His assumption of the crown, however, was
challenged immediately from several sides. His two year reign
consisted entirely of fighting rebellions, including an early,
indirect rebellion to put Henry Tudor on the throne. When
this rebellion failed, Henry Tudor took matters into his own
hands and directly confronted Richard. Henry had only the
most tenuous claim to the throne and the Tudor monarchs would
spend the next hundred years propagandizing that tenuous claim.
The last fight of this rebellion, at Bosworth in 1485, resulted
in the death of Richard. A new usurper, Henry Tudor took the
throne as Henry VII just as Europe was entering the modern
period.
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