patience and dissimulation were perfect. Little by little, as he gradually felt his way to his purpose, the old symptoms of evil reappeared, and the relations of the King and those against whom he was secretly plotting became more unfriendly. Buying off some and intimidating others into ignominious subserviency, he broke up the old party which had so long, beneficially in one respect, but in another unwisely and unnecessarily shackled him, and then he executed his long-deferred vengeance with a fierceness and unrelenting energy equal to the long delay. He had forgiven nothing, and finding the nation willing to stand by a stunned and passive spectator, he set no limits either to his vengeance or to his arbitrary exercise of power. The fiercer part of his character had now the entire ascendant; with his long self-restraint disappeared apparently his former judgment. He ceased to think of and provide against the future-he lived only in the present. He was no longer the mere elegant patron of literature, the appreciator of Chaucer and Gower, the handsome and accomplished master and companion of a De Vere and a De la Pole,-he was the blind despot, insulting every national feeling, rousing every personal resentment, and destroying every substantial support to his throne. The reaction from tutelage had been too great, the suspense of the long-coveted revenge had been too long for not merely his moderation, but his common sense. His mind seems

to have given way under the trial and the consummation. His energy degenerated into mere violence; injustice at first indulged in through revenge became habitual with him; favouritism and misgovernment, once scarcely more than symbols of self-assertion, became his settled policy; and at last the man who in former years had seemed to handle Henry of Bolingbroke as a mere instrument of his designs, lost at the critical moment all presence of mind and all decision, and became a panic-stricken and helpless prisoner in his cousin's hands-lending himself with a now hopelessly ignominious humility to the ceremonial of his own deposition and the elevation of the triumphant House of Lancaster.

156

HENRY THE FOURTH.

THE accession of the House of Lancaster to the Throne of England ushers in a new epoch in the history of that country, to which the reign of Richard the Second forms a sort of introduction. Out of the chaos of personal ambitions and class aspirations and prejudices which constituted the main features of the latter reign was gradually evolved during the fifteenth century that type of society which was to be subjected to the great Religious and Political experiments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Everybody must feel that while there is considerable similarity between some of the great questions which interested and agitated the public mind during the latter part of the reign of Edward the Third, and that of Richard the Second, and those with which the Tudor period was mainly occupied, there is also an essential difference in the character of the society to which these questions were addressed. The period on which we are now entering ought to supply the history of this transition, and explain the recurrence of the same

The

problems under such very different conditions of solution; but unhappily there is no period of our national history of which we know so little from authentic and reliable sources of information, and which has called forth so little discriminating industry on the part of competent students. obscurity and uncertainty which attach to the events, naturally also affect to a corresponding extent our knowledge of the characters of the sovereigns who occupied the throne during that period, and I may therefore at once say that the Estimates of them which I venture to put forth are given with greater reserve and hesitation than any preceding ones, and must be received only as the best that I am able to form under very disadvantageous circumstances.

The Fifteenth Century, while it was really the workshop in which the great revolutions of the succeeding centuries were gradually being prepared, was in itself to the outward eye only a confused collection of imperfect and abortive essays of workmanship-the first attempts to realise the great ideas to which the preceding century had given birth. Full of interest so far as concerns the subjectmatter of the day, it is also full of seemingly wasted efforts, and purposes distracted or postponed at the very moment of their proximate fulfilment. And as with the Age, so with the Leaders of the Age. There are plenty of men of ability, but there are few really great careers, if greatness is to be estimated

by permanently great achievements. Nor do the Kings escape from this common imputation of fruitlessness. The ablest and greatest seem to have palpably mistaken their appropriate career, or to have wilfully stopped short in it, the one really feeble sovereign among them is the only complete character, and his completeness fitted him only for an entirely different position.

Henry of Bolingbroke, as he was called, from the place of his birth, had very little in common with his predecessor except in the power of concealing his thoughts, and the patience to await opportunities. But what in Richard was a constrained and unnatural state of mind, which eventually destroyed the balance of his understanding altogether, seems to have been in Henry the natural growth of his temperament. Of all his predecessors he most resembled in several points of character the founder of the Plantagenet dynasty. He might, perhaps, be called a reproduction of Henry the Second, without the intensity of subdued passion which marked that King, but without also the elevation and breadth of mind which (after all his faults) recommend his namesake to our sympathy. Both kings acted always on deliberate and preconceived plans; neither of them seems to have had great originality of mind, yet each studied deeply mankind and events, and each in his degree profited by his study largely. Both were studious, and both were fond of consider