Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/341

Rh THE FRENCH WARS.] ENGLAND 321 &amp;lt;ign of fenry I. sses in ince. 8 Of ni ne. w re- ions tween glaml i ance according to the provisions of the treaty, to the crown of France. His two kingdoms were intrusted to the regency of his two paternal uncles, England to Humfrey duke of Gloucester, and France to John, the great duke of Bed ford. The babe was king at Rouen and Paris, and either king or sovereign lord at Bourdeaux ; l but in the inter mediate land he had a rival in a third uncle, his mother s brother, Charles VII. A time of thirty years follows, in which the English were gradually driven out of France and Aquitaine, till nothing was left of the old heritage except the Norman islands, and nothing was left of the new conquests except Calais and its small territory. Even after Henry was dead, the great regent was far stronger than the French claimant ; but several causes, one after the other, joined to break the English power on the continent. The mainstay of Eng land was the Burgunuian alliance. This was first put in jeopardy by the marriage of Duke Humfrey, the regent of England, with Jacqueline, countess of Holland and Hainault, and his attempt to get possession of her dominions. Then, in 1429, came the wonderful career of the Maid, Joan of Arc. She raised the siege of Orleans ; she led Charles to be crowned at Kheims, a ceremony which gave him a certain advantage over his uncrowned rival. Her intervention turned the tide for awhile on the French side; but Charles seemed quite unable to press his advantage, and he did absolutely nothing for the deliverance of the Maid when in 1430 she was taken prisoner, and was the next year burned as a heretic and sorceress. Meanwhile Henry was crowned in England in 1429 and in Paris in 1431. In the next year the death of the duchess of Bedford, sister of the duke of Burgundy, broke the tie between her husband and her brother. At last, in 1435, at the peace of Arras, Philip altogether forsook the English alliance. Almost at the same moment the duke of Bedford died, and from this time the English power in France gradually fell back. Paris was lost in 1436. Presently comes a time of truces and negotiations ; and in 1445, on the king s marriage with Margaret of Anjou, Maine and Anjou were surrendered. In 1449 Rouen was lost, and the second French conquest of Xormandy was completed in the next year. In 1451 the French conquered all that was left to England in the south, Bourdeaux being the last town to hold out. But here the tide once more changed for a moment. The Aquitanian cities found that they had gained nothing by their transfer to the nearer instead of the more distant master. In 1453 John Talbot, the great earl of Shrews bury, came with an English force, and was welcomed as a deliverer. He was slain at Castillon in July; Bourdeaux was again taken by the French in October, and the tie of three hundred years which united Eng land and Aquitaine was broken for ever. Less striking in the history of the world, the French conquest of Aquitaine is, in the history of Western Europe, almost as marked an epoch as the Turkish conquest of Constanti nople which happened nearly at the same moment. Two great questions were decided by it. The Norman Conquest first made England a continental power; the succession of the Angevins greatly increased her continental position. That position now wholly passed away. England is now again shut up within her own four seas. From this time she constantly takes a part in continental affairs ; but she holds no continental possessions save such outlying posts as Calais, Boulogne, Dunkirk, or Gibraltar. Calais she kept for another century, partly no doubt because the 1 After the peace of Bretigny, Edward III. changed his style of Duke of Aquitaine to Lord. He was &quot; Dominus Hihcrnire et Aqui- tanise. &quot; When he again took up the title of King of France, it might have been doubted whether Aquitaine remained a di.stinct sovereign lordship or was merged in the kingdom. cessions made by France to Burgundy at Arras cut off Calais from the French territory, and made Burgundy the one continental neighbour of England. Again, the French French conquest of Aquitaiue is no less an epoch in the history of conquest France itself. It completed the formation of France in the f Aqut &quot; modern sense. Ever since the twelfth century, the French kings had been striving after dominion south of the Loire, that is, after the union of Southern with Northern Gaul. They gained their point for a moment by the marriage of Lewis and Eleanor. They gained it again for a moment by the surrender of Aquitaine to Philip the Fair. They now gained it for ever. The whole relations between England and France were now changed. There were to be many later wars between the two kingdoms, and for a while the old claims of England were always remembered and were now and then asserted. But any serious hope of an English conquest of France, or even of an English con quest of Normandy or Aquitaine, passed away when Bour deaux opened its gates to the French in 1453. From that day the modern relations between England and France begin. The period of the Hundred Years War was the time in which what we may call the growth of England came to an end. The nation in its later shape was fully formed at the end of the thirteenth century. The great lines of its later law and. constitution have been already drawn. Dur ing the following period law and constitution have to take their perfect shape at home, and the nation, now fully formed, has to take its final position among the powers of Europe. During this time England and the English people became essentially all that they have been ever since. The changes in later times have been great and important ; but they have been changes of detail. In the thirteenth century it was still by no means clear what was to be the final shape of English institutions, what was to be the final position of the English people at home and abroad. In the fifteenth century all this had been fixed. The con stitution, the laws, the language, the national character, of Englishmen had all taken a shape from which in their main points they were never again to change. The island realm, with the character of islanders impressed upon its people, with its political constitution and its social state differing from that of any other European nation, was by the end of this period fully formed. When we have reached the end of this period, we know what England is. The personal character of the nation is now fixed. Up to this time the history of the nation has been the record of its growth ; our study has had somewhat of a physical character. From this time our study is rather bio graphical ; our history ceases to be the record of the growth of a nation ; it becomes the record of the acts of a nation after it has taken its final shape. In a specially constitutional aspect, the reign of Edward III., the central time of the period with which we are dealing, is hardly less important than the reign of Edward I. But its importance is of a different kind. The earlier reign fixed the constitution of parliament ; it decreed that in an English parliament certain elements should always be present. It laid down as a matter of broad principle what the essential powers of parliament were. In the later reign, the essential elements of parlia ment finally arrange themselves in their several places and relations to one another. The powers, rights, and privileges of each element in the state, and the exact manner of exercising them, were now fixed and defined. The Commons are now fully established as an essential element in parliament. It is further established that prelates, earls, and barons are to form one body, that knights, citizens, and burgesses are to form another. That is to say, as the attempt to make the clergy act as a YIIT. - 1 41 Internal growth of Eng land. Consti tutional aspect of Edward III. s reign.