LECTURE IX.*

The Wars of the Roses.

Closing scenes of the Plantagenet dynasty-Want of interest in the War of the Roses-The question of genealogy-No actuating principle in the contest-Its obscurity-A series of bloody battles— Saintly character of the king-His solitary sadness-Loss of the French conquests-The Duke of Suffolk-Popular tumult-Jack Cade-The Temple Garden-Richard of York and Somerset-The battle of St. Albans-The Earl of Warwick, the king-maker— Henry's captivity-The Parliament-Margaret of Anjou-Her character-King René-Injustice of English writers to her memoryThe battle of Wakefield-Two crowned Kings of England-The slaughter at Towton-Tewksbury-The queen-Sir Walter Scott's tribute to her-Political effects of the civil war-Death struggle of the military power of the nobles-The last of the barons-CliffordNo feud among the people or vassals-The separation of the church from the conflict-Education-The foundation of Eton.

THE first part of the reign of Henry of Windsor being connected with the close of the war against France, I was tempted, in the last lecture, to digress in some measure into French history, partly because one could hardly help expatiating on the splendid and sad story of that Christian heroine, the Maid of Orleans, and partly because I would fain escape, at least for a little while, from the unpromising and unsatisfactory subject

*February 22d, 1847.

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that must be encountered now-I mean the history of that hateful civil feud between the families of York and Lancaster, which has nothing attractive in it save its pretty symbolical title of the "War of the Roses." The subject which I have now to treat of is the civil war between the two branches of the Plantagenet family, from the origin of their contention down to the defeat and death of Richard the Third at the battle of Bosworth Field, when the body of that last of the Yorkists was stripped and thrown across a horse's back, like a slaughtered wild beast, besmeared with blood and dirt, and thus carried to an unhonoured burial at Leicester. So it was, that, after more than three centuries of majestic rule and after fourteen reigns, the dominion of the Plantagenet dynasty in England, the Saxon and the Norman race combined, passed away forever.

Taken in its fullest extent, down to the battle of Bosworth Field, this civil war occupied a period of thirty years, embracing what one of the old English chroniclers. has entitled "the troublous season of King Henry the Sixth, the prosperous reign of King Edward the Fourth, the pitiful life of King Edward the Fifth, and the tragical doings of King Richard the Third." A struggle so protracted and so sanguinary as it was has not been without permanent political consequences, which I will endeavour to indicate in the course of this lecture; but, however important were these remote results in the national progress of England, they do not give an interest to the story of the struggle itself. If the War of the Roses be considered by itself-separated, on the one hand, from the earlier events, with which it is morally connected by retribution for ancestral guilt, and, on the other hand,

from the later times, in which unlooked-for consequences are seen—there cannot, I think, be found an era of history more unsatisfactory. It is scarcely possible, it seems to me, to awaken in our minds any strong feeling on either side of this domestic warfare by the statement of the respective claims of the two parties. The particulars of the genealogical question are no sooner received into the mind than they are very apt to escape out of the memory. It is enough, however, to remember, for the purpose of understanding the issue, that both parties trace their claims back to a common ancestor, Edward the Third. There being no descendants from either the first or second son of that sovereign, the controversy lay between the posterity of the third and fourth sons. The three Lancastrian kings, being descended from the fourth son, had occupied the throne for more than half a century, to the exclusion of the lineage of the third, to whom the rights of the Duke of Clarence had descended in due course of inheritance.

Now, a judgment on the respective merits of the Yorkist and Lancastrian claims can only be formed after determining whether the law of the English monarchy, is indefeasible, unalterable, hereditary right, or whether the rule of succession may undergo a change by the action of Parliament, as the great national council. Historians, accordingly, are found with York or Lancaster predilections and prejudices, as they respectively incline to the theory of the absolute, hereditary right of the monarch, or to that of the supremacy of the Parliament. But, whatever be the merits of this question, they are not of such a nature as to inspire us with an interest in the

war, for the sake of any principle involved in it. And this is so, not because the modern mind, or our republican minds, prevent our entering into the spirit of this ancient commotion of the monarchy, but because the parties to the war do not appear themselves to have felt the respective principles as great actuating impulses. There is a great deal to show that the war was a contest of passion far more than of principle. The theoretical cause of the war was perhaps the least efficient, and is quite inadequate to explain such vindictive and incessant and protracted warfare.. Had not other causes co-operated, blood never would have been shed so freely and fearfully; and it would, I believe, be as reasonable to say, that the two parties fought because the Yorkists wore the white rose, and the Lancastrians the red, as to ascribe the war wholly to the question of genealogical right. The Yorkists were not warring in support of the principle of indefeasible succession, nor were the Lancastrians warring for the principle of the constitutional authority of parliamentary establishment. If they had been, however we might incline to one principle or the other, we might gain an interest in a contest, in which we could contemplate and admire men laying down their lives for a principle. This war, in which Englishmen were slaughtering Englishmen, was the most destructive that England had ever been engaged in; this fraternal ferocity was the cause of the loss of more lives than all the wars with Wales, Scotland, and France; and the difficulty is to discover the real motives to such a series of cruelties and carnage. Full as history is, from ancient years down to the present day, of wars, wicked from the frivolity or the insanity of the occasion

of them-ready as nations have been to plunge into hostilities-it still is incredible that the war of York and Lancaster was waged only on such a point of controversy as the real issue between the two contending parties. The only cause assigned is inadequate to give an interest to the struggle; and no other cause, that I am aware of, has been discovered, which would better attract the mind to the study of it.

Besides the absence of intrinsic interest in the subject, a most vexatious obscurity envelops the whole period of this civil war. It is very true, as has been said, that "The peculiar hardship in explaining the transactions of those days is, that we do not know what we have to explain, or whether we have any thing to explain at all. We have to solve a theorem without a proposition." We have, indeed, a considerable number of facts distinctly ascertained, but often utterly inexplicable; we know their dates, too, so that we can follow them in order of time; but, as to the sequence, the connection of one with the other, it is utter darkness. One can make his way through this region of history, only as a man travels along an unknown road in a dark and stormy night. There comes a flash of light, giving a lurid and momentary conception of what is near; and, confiding in the knowledge thus gained, you venture onward in the dark; till again you are startled by another flash, that shows how, in a little distance, all your expectations of what lay before you are illusive, and that every thing around you is totally different from what it was just now :

"The road is black before your eyes,

Glimmering faintly where it lies;