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1399

A PARLIAMENTARY REVOLUTION

287

should have thought it necessary to allude to this story, if such was really his meaning, shows the hold which the idea of hereditary succession had taken on the minds of Englishmen. In no other way could he claim hereditary right as a descendant of Henry III. Richard had selected as his heir Roger Mortimer, the son of the daughter of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the next son of Edward III., after the Black Prince, who lived to be old enough to have children. Roger Mortimer, indeed, had recently been killed in Ireland, but he had left a boy, Edmund Mortimer, who, on hereditary principles, was heir to the kingdom, unless the doctrine announced by Edward III. that a claim to the crown descended through females was to be set aside. In fact the real importance of the change of kings lay not in what Henry said, but in what he avoided saying. It was a reversion to the old right of election, and to the precedent set in the deposition of Edward II. Henry tacitly announced that in critical times, when the wearer of the crown was hopelessly incompetent, the nation, represented by Parliament, might step in and change the order of succession. The question at issue was not merely a personal one between Richard and Henry. It was

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a question between hereditary succession leading to despotism on the one side, and to parliamentary choice, perhaps to anarchy, on the other. That there were dangers attending the latter solution of the constitutional problem would not be long in appearing.

Books recommended for further study of Part III.

GREEN, J. R. History of the English People. Vol. i. pp. 189-520. STUBBS, W. (Bishop of Oxford). Constitutional History of England. Vol. i. chap. xii. sections 151-155; vol. ii. chaps. ix. and x.

The Early Plantagenets, 129-276.

NORGATE, Miss K.

MICHELET, J.

England under the Angevin Kings. Vol. ii. p. 390. History of France (Middle Ages). Translated by G. H. Smith. LONGMAN, W. The History of the Life and Times of Edward III.

GAIRDNER, James. The Houses of Lancaster and York, pp. 1–64.

ROGERS, James E. Thorold. A History of Agriculture and Prices in England. Vols. i. and ii.

CUNNINGHAM, W. Growth of English Industry and Commerce in the Early and Middle Ages, pp. 172-365.

WAKEMAN, H. O. and HASSALL, A. (Editors). Essays Introductory to the Study of English Constitutional History.

ASHLEY, W. J. An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory. Vol. i.

JUSSERAND, J. J. English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages. Translated by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Miss).

BROWNE, M.

JESSOPP, A., Dr.

Chaucer's England.

OMAN, C. W. C.

The Coming of the Friars, and other Historic Essays.
The Art of War in the Middle Ages.

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1. Henry's First Difficulties. 1399-1400.-Henry IV. fully understood that his only chance of maintaining himself on the throne was to rule with due consideration for the wishes of Parliament. His main difficulty, like that of his predecessor, was that the great lords preferred to hold their own against him individually with the help of their armies of retainers, instead of exercising political power in Parliament. In his first Parliament an angry brawl arose. The lords who in the last reign had taken the side of Gloucester flung their gloves on the floor of the House as a challenge to those who had supported Richard when he compassed Gloucester's death; and though Henry succeeded in keeping the peace for the time, a rebellion broke out early in 1400 in the name of Richard. Henry, like the kings before him, found his support against the turbulent nobles in the townsmen and the yeomen, and he was thus able to suppress the rebellion. Some of the noblemen who were caught by the excited defenders of the throne were butchered without mercy and without law.

U

290

HENRY IV.

1399-1400

[graphic]

Henry IV. and his queen, Joan of Navarre: from. their tomb in Canterbury
Cathedral,

1400

A CONSERVATIVE ALLIANCE

291

2. Death of Richard II. 1400. A few weeks after the suppression of this conspiracy it was rumoured that Richard had died in prison at Pontefract. According to Henry's account of the matter he had voluntarily starved himself to death. Few, however, doubted that he had been put to death by Henry's orders. To prove the untruth of this story, Henry had the body brought to St. Paul's, where he showed to the people only the face of the corpse, as if this could be any evidence whatever. After Richard's death, if hereditary succession had been regarded, the person having a claim to

the crown in prefer-
ence to Henry was
the young Edmund
Mortimer, Earl of
March, the descen-
dant of Lionel, Duke
of Clarence (see p.
287). Henry there-
fore took care to
keep the boy under
custody during the
whole of his reign.
3. Henry IV. and

the Church.-Be-
sides seeking the
support of the com-
monalty,

[graphic]

Henry

sought the support of the Church. Since the rise of the friars at the beginning of the thirteenth cen

Royal arms as borne by Henry IV. after about 1408, and by successive sovereigns down to 1603.

tury (see p. 191) the Church had produced no new orders of monks or friars. In the thirteenth and fourteenth she produced the schoolmen, a succession of great thinkers who systematised her moral and religious teaching. Imagining that she had no more to learn, she now attempted to strengthen herself by persecuting those who disbelieved her teaching, and after the suppression of the revolt of the peasants, made common cause with the landlords, who feared pecuniary loss from the emancipation of the villeins. This conservative alliance against social and religious change was the more easily made because many of the bishops were now members of

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