EXPULSION OF THE ENGLISH FROM FRANCE (1451). CHARLES (VII.) had hitherto made no demonstrations against Aquitaine. The English appeared now to limit their hopes in the north to Normandy and Calais. The Duke of York, the son of the beheaded Richard, Earl of Cambridge, united in his person, after the extinction of the Mortimers, the hereditary pretensions of the house of Clarence. On the death of the Duke of Bedford, the king appointed his formidable kinsman, York, to the regency of France, perhaps for the purpose of giving the appearance of a unanimous contest of all English parties for national honor to the struggle still vainly maintained in France. The French offered to cede Normandy and Guienne as fiefs of the crown of France; but the arrogance of the victors was not yet tamed. Thirteen years, however, after the evacuation of Paris, Normandy, which the Plantagenets had never ceased to look on as their patrimony, was wrested from them; and, two years later, even the Gascon and Pyrenean provinces, alien from Paris by language, and united to it by no habits of common obedience, were reduced under the sway of the house of Valois. The people of Guienne showed a desire of obtaining English succour. Talbot, the most renowned of Henry's captains, and perhaps the only laurelled head remaining of those from whom the glory of Agincourt had been derived, was sent to Bordeaux to their assistance in the eightieth year of his age. A gleam of fame seemed to light up the brow of the aged hero; but though deserted by his ancient fortune as a commander, he died at the battle of Chatillon like a brave soldier.

Thus closed the last efforts of the Plantagenets to reestablish themselves in France, a contest which had lasted for a century; and with it happily ended all English projects of territorial aggrandisement on the continent of Europe, the success of which must have thrown a power

into the hands of English monarchs altogether irreconcilable with that liberty which is the peculiar and characteristic glory of England, the source of her greatness, the school of her virtues, and the nursery of her genius.

A historian who rests for a short space between the conclusion of the Plantagenet wars in France, and the commencement of the wars between the two branches of that family in England, may naturally look around him, reviewing some of the more important events which had passed, and casting his eye onward to the then unmarked preparations for the mighty changes which were to affect the mutual relations of states, modify their internal rule and condition, and produce an influence on the character and lot of the European and even of the human race. A very few particulars only can be selected as specimens from so vast a

mass.

The foundations of the political system of the European commonwealth were now laid. A glance over the map of Europe as it existed in 1453 will satisfy an observer that the territories of the different nations were then fast approaching the shape and extent which they retain at this day. The English islanders had only one town on the continent remaining in their hands. The Moors of Spain were on the eve of being reduced under Christian authority. Italy had, indeed, lost her liberty, but had as yet escaped the ignominy of a foreign yoke. Muscovy was emerging from the long domination of the Tâtars. Venice, Hungary, and Poland, three states now placed under foreign masters, then guarded the eastern frontier of Christendom against the Ottoman barbarians, whom the absence of foresight, and mutual confidence, and a disregard for the general safety and honor which disgraced western governments, had just suffered to master Constantinople and to subjugate the Eastern Christians. France had consolidated the greater part of her central and commanding territories. In the transfer of the Netherlands to the house of Austria originated the French

jealousy of that power, then rising into importance in southeastern Germany. The empire was daily becoming a looser confederacy under a nominal ruler whose small remains of authority every day contributed to lessen.

The internal, or constitutional, history of the European nations threatened in almost every continental country the establishment of absolute monarchy, from which the free and generous spirit of the northern barbarians did not protect their degenerate posterity. In the Netherlands, an ancient gentry, and burghers enriched by traffic, held their still limited princes in check. In Switzerland, the patricians of a few towns, together with the gallant peasantry of the Alpine valleys, escaped a master. But parliaments and diets, states-general and cortes, were gradually disappearing from view, or reduced from august assemblies to insignificant formalities; and Europe seemed on the eve of exhibiting nothing to the disgusted eye but the dead uniformity of imbecile despotism, dissolute courts, and cruelly oppressed nations.

In the mean time the almost unobserved advancement and diffusion of knowledge were preparing the way for discoveries, of which the full results will be contemplated only by unborn ages. The mariner's compass had conducted the Portuguese to distant points on the coast of Africa, and was about to lead them through the unploughed ocean to the famous regions of the East. Civilised men, hitherto cooped up on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, now visited the whole of their subject planet, and became its more undisputed sovereigns. The man was then born, who, with two undecked boats and one frail sloop, containing with difficulty a hundred and twenty persons, dared to stretch across an untraversed ocean, which had hitherto bounded the imaginations as well as the enterprises of men; and who, instead of that India renowned in legend of which he was in quest, laid open a new world, in the hands of the European race, one day to produce governments, laws,

manners, modes of civilisation, and states of society, almost as different from those of ancient Europe as its native plants and animals. Who could then, who can even now, foresee all the prodigious effects of these discoveries on the fortunes of mankind? Mackintosh.

THE WARS OF THE ROSES (1455-1485).

THE subject which I have now to treat of is the civil wars 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 unhonored 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 for ever.

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 my remarks. But, however important were these remote results in the national progress, they do not give any 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 war 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 an 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.

Besides the absence of intrinsic interest in the subject, a most vexatious obscurity envelopes 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 anything to explain at all. We have to solve a theorem without a proposition." We have, indeed,