Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/349

Rh BEGINNING Of THE TUDOKS.] ENGLAND 329 Ireland. There the rule of the elder duke of York had been popular, and the Yorkist party had always been the stronger. A claimant appeared, one Lambert Simnel, who professed to be Edward earl of Warwick, son of George duke of Clarence, the male representative of the house of York. Edward was indeed alive in the Tower, and was shown in public to prove the imposture. Yet Simnel was crowned in Ireland, and was presently supported by John earl of Lincoln, who had been himself declared heir presump tive under Richard. The impostor and his partisans landed in England, and were overthrown at Stoke-upon-Trent. In 1492 another and irore dangerous claimant, who professed to be Richard duke of York, the son of Edward IV., and whose real name was understood to be Perkin Warbeck, appeared also in Ireland. His cause was taken up by more than one foreign potentate, by James IV., king of Scots, and by Margaret, the duchess dowager of Burgundy, who, if he was what he pretended to be, was his own aunt. He made more than one attempt at invasion, some of them in company with the king of Scots. Meanwhile, early in 1497, the men of Cornwall rose and marched as far as Blackheath, close to London. There they were defeated ; bat when, a few months later, Perkin landed in Cornwall, he found enough support there to besiege Exeter. But he shrank from a battle with the royal army he submitted to the king, and was put to death in the next year, 1499. Immediately afterwards followed the beheading of Edward of Warwick. From this time, for the last ten years of his reign, Henry reigned in safety. The wars with France still lingered on, and in 1492 Henry had actually undertaken the siege of Boulogne. The enterprise was however ended by a treaty of peace. After Henry s throne was secured by the deaths of Perkin and of Edward of Warwick, his European position speedily rose. In 1501 Katharine of Aragon was married to Arthur, and, on his death in the next year, she was contracted to his younger brother Henry. Earlier in this year, 1502, a treaty of peace was concluded with Scotland, which was followed in 1503 by the marriage of James king of Scots and Henry s elder daughter Margaret, This marks an aera in the relations between England and Scotland. Up to this time, ever since the enterprise of Edward Balliol, there had been constant warfare, interrupted only by truces. Now, for the first time, a peace, strictly so called, was concluded. All claims either to the crown of Scotland or to a superiority over it on the part of England must be looked on as being finally given up. There was still more than one war between England and Scotland before the union of the crowns ; but the state of constant warfare broken only by truces now comes to an end. In 1509 Henry VII. died. His eldest surviving son, Henry VIII., who now united the claims of York and Lancaster, succeeded without a breath of opposition. He was the first king since Richard II. who reigned by an undisputed title; and he was, strangely enough, the last king who was formally elected in ancient fashion in the ceremony of his coronation. With him, rather than with his father, a new period opens ; or, more accurately still, the new period opens with the second period of Henry VII. s reign, after all opposition to his title had passed away. When the first Tudor king felt himself safe, the Tudor despotism began. Under the second Tudor king that despotism allied itself with ecclesiastical change, and the sixteenth century put on its most characteristic aspect. It was during this period that England came within the range of those general causes of change which were now beginning to affect all Europe. The revival of learning, as it is called, was now spreading from Italy into other lands. The three great inventions which in the course of the fifteenth century affected the general state of mankind, gun- Causes of powder, printing, and the compass, began in the course of chan ge in the second half of that century to do their work on England ^- IH&amp;gt; also. The Wars of the Roses differ widely, in their military effect on character, from the civil wars of earlier times. The personal England. displays of chivalry in the field, as well as the older style of fortification, both became useless before the new engines of destruction. But, above all things, it was during this time that, in most parts of Europe, the chief steps were taken towards that general overthrow of ancient liberties which reached its highest growth in the sixteenth century. Europe was massing itself into a system of powers, greater in extent and smaller in number, than heretofore. The masters of these powers were learning a more subtle policy in foreign affairs than those who went before them, and they were beginning to rest their trust at home on standing armies. We have reached the time of Lewis XI. and of Ferdinand of Aragon. While France had grown by the annexation of nearly all its vassal states, and of some states which were not its vassals, the new power of Spain was growing up, to develop in the next period into the gigantic dominion of the house of Austria. Italy, with the mass of its small common wealths grouped together among a few larger states, some princely, some republican, becomes during this age the battlefield of the rival powers. This new state of things was not without its influence on England, though our insular position saved us from being so completely carried away as the continental nations. The power of the crown Growth grew to a pitch which was altogether unknown at any earlier of the time except under the Conqueror and his immediate succes- royal sors. Parliaments become more servile; sometimes they are dispensed with altogether. Arbitrary acts on the part of the crown are perhaps not more common than in earlier times ; but they take a new character. When law is generally weak and is easily broken, the king s breaches of the law do not seem very different from breaches of the law on the part of other men. When the king has become powerful enough to enforce the law on other men, but fails to observe the law in his own acts, the fault is of another kind. It is no longer general lawlessness, but deliberate arbitrary rule. It was to this state of things that England was tending Character during the whole of this time. The stir of civil war of the alternated with the repose of despotism. It might almost ^ a c be said that the two went on side by side ; for the Wars of the Roses were not a period of anarchy like the wars of Stephen and Matilda. The crown was fought for by con tending princes at the head of great armies ; but there was little or nothing of the wasting local and personal warfare of the earlier time. Except where the actual strife was waging, things went on much as usual. The king in possession was obeyed wherever his enemies were not in military occupation. After each revolution a parliament was ready to approve the change, to acknowledge the con queror, to regulate the succession according to his pleasure, and commonly to attaint the defeated prince and his supporters. It marks that the age of revolution was drawing to an end when the famous statute of Henry VII. declared that no man would be called in question for adhering to a king in possession, be his title good or bad. The care taken by every claimant of the crown to obtain a parliamentary acknowledgment of his right was at once a homage paid to the formal authority of parliaments and a heavy blow struck at their moral weight. The parlia- Parlia ments of this time were fast losing the spirit of the elder ments parliaments. The number of the temporal lords was lessened by battles, executions, and banishments. The spiritual lords had become more thoroughly servants of the crown than at any time since the twelfth century. The lower house had also undergone a change. In one sense VIII. 42