Author: Will Durant
Category: Nonfiction
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He leaves his books gratefully to his foster-father; and as a parting gift to his old mother he composes for her a humble ballad to the Virgin. He asks mercy of all but those who imprisoned him: of monks and nuns, mummers and chanters, lackeys and gallants, “wantons who all their charms display... brawlers and jugglers and tumblers gay, clowns with their apes and carpets spread .... gentle and simple, living and dead—I cry folk mercy, one and all.”29 So
Here is ended (both great and small)
Poor Villon’s Testament! When he is dead,
Come, I pray you, to his funeral,
Whilst the bell tinkles overhead ...
Prince, that art gentle as a yearling gled,
Hear what he did with his latest sigh;
He drank a long draught of the vine-juice red.
Whenas he felt his end draw nigh.30
Despite these wills and farewells, he could not so soon turn down the cup of life. In 1462 he went back to Guillaume de Villon and the cloisters, and his mother rejoiced. But the law had not forgotten him. The College of Navarre had him arrested, and consented to his liberation only on condition that he repay it his share of the loot of six years back—forty crowns a year for three years. On the night of his release he had the ill luck to be with two of his old crime mates when they started a drunken brawl in which a priest was stabbed. Apparently Villon had no blame in the matter; he withdrew to his room, and prayed for peace. Nevertheless he was again arrested; he was tortured by having water forced down his throat to the bursting point; and then, to his astonishment, he was condemned to be hanged. For several weeks he lay in close confinement, hoping and despairing. And now, expecting death for himself and his companions, he indited a pitiful farewell to the world.
Men, brother men, that after us yet live,
Let not your hearts too hard against us be;
For if some pity of us poor men ye give,
The sooner God shall take of you pity.
Here are we five or six strung up, you see,
And here the flesh, that all too well was fed,
Bit by bit eaten and rotten, rent and shred,
And we the bones grow dust and ash withal;
Let no man laugh at us discomforted,
But pray to God that He forgive us all . .
The rain has washed and laundered us all five,
And the sun dried and blackened; yea, perdie,
Ravens and pies with beaks that rend and rive
Have dug our eyes out, and plucked off for fee
Our beards and eyebrows; never we are free,
Not once, to rest; but here and there still sped,
Drive at its wild will by the wind’s change led,
More pecked of birds than fruits on garden wall;
Men, for God’s love, let no gibe here be said,
But pray to God that He forgive us all.31
Not yet quite hopeless, Villon persuaded his jailer to take a message to his foster-father, and to convey to the court of the Parlement an appeal from a sentence so clearly unjust. Guillaume de Villon, who could forgive seventy times seven, once more interceded for the poet, who must have had some virtues to be so undiscourageably loved. On January 3, 1463, the court, say its record, “ordered that... the sentence preceding be annulled, and—having regard to the bad character of the said Villon—that he be banished for ten years from the town .... and viscounty of Paris.”32 François thanked the court in a joyful ballad, and asked for three days’ grace to “provide for my journey and bid my folk adieu.” It was granted, and presumably he now saw his foster-father and his mother for the last time. He packed his bundle, grasped the bottle of wine and the purse that good Guillaume gave him, received the old man’s benediction, and marched out of Paris and history. We hear nothing of him more.
He was a thief, but a melodious thief, and the world has need of melody. He could be brutally coarse, as in the Ballade de la Grosse Margot, and he flung obscene epithets at women who fell short of his desires, and he was impishly frank in anatomical details. All this we can forgive for the sins that were committed against his sins, and the ever resurgent tenderness of his spirit, and the wistful music of his verse. He paid the penalty for wnat ne was, and left us only the reward.
CHAPTER V
England in the Fifteenth Century
1399–1509
I. KINGS
HENRY IV, having reached the throne, found himself challenged by revolt. In Wales Owain Glyn Dwr overthrew the English domination for a moment (1401–08), but the future Henry V, now Prince of Wales, overcame him with dashing strategy; and Owen Glendower, after leading a hunted life for eight years in Welsh fastnesses and crags, died a few hours after receiving full pardon from his gallant conqueror. Synchronizing his rebellion with Glendower’s, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, led some nobles of the north into an uprising against a king unable to keep all the promises he had made to them for their aid in deposing Richard II. The Earl’s reckless son Harry “Hotspur” (unwarrantably lovable in Shakespeare) led a hesitant and inadequate force against the King at Shrewsbury (1403); there the youth died in foolish heroism, Henry IV fought manfully in the front ranks, and his gay wastrel son, “Prince Hal,” displayed the bravery that would win Agincourt and France. These and other troubles left Henry little time or zest for statesmanship; his revenues limped behind his expenditures; he quarreled tactlessly with Parliament, and ended his reign amid fiscal chaos and the personal tribulations of leprosy, prolapse of the rectum, and venereal disease.1 “He departed to God,” says Holinshed, “in the year of his age forty-six... in great perplexity and little pleasure.”2
In tradition and Shakespeare Henry V had lived a free and frolicsome youth, and had even conspired to seize the throne from a father incapacitated by illness but tenacious of power. Contemporary chroniclers merely hint at his revels, but assure us that after his accession “he was changed into another man, studying to be honest, grave, and modest.”3 He who had romped with topers and tarts now dedicated himself to leading a united Christendom against the advancing Turks—adding, however, that he must first conquer France. He accomplished his proximate aim with astonishing speed, and for a precarious moment an English king sat on the throne of France. German princes sent him homage, and thought of making him emperor.4 He rivaled Caesar briefly in the planning of campaigns, the provisioning of his armies, the affection of his troops, and in exposing himself in all battles and weathers.
Suddenly, still a youth of thirty-five, he died of fever at Bois-de-Vincennes (1422).
His death saved France, and almost ruined England. His popularity might have persuaded the taxpayers to rescue the government from bankruptcy; but his son Henry VI was, at accession, only nine months old, and a disgraceful sequence of corrupt regents and inept generals sank the treasury into irredeemable debt. The new ruler never rose to royal stature; he was a delicate and studious neurasthenic who loved religion and books, and shuddered at the thought of war; the English mourned that they had lost a king and won a saint. In 1452, imitating Charles VI of France, Henry VI went mad. A year later his ministers signed a peace acknowledging England’s defeat in the Hundred Years’ War.
Richard, Duke of York, governed for two years as Protector; in a cloudylucid interval Henry dismissed him (1454); the angry Duke claimed the throne through descent from Edward III; he branded the Lancastrian kings as usurpers, and joined Salisbury, Warwick, and other barons in those Wars of the Roses—Lancastrian red and Yorkist white—which through thirty-one years (1454–85) pitted noble against noble in the indefatigable suicide of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, and left England impoverished and desolate. Soldiers demobilized by unwonted peace, and loath to resume the chores of peasantry, enlisted on either side, plundered the villages and towns, and murdered without qualm all who stood in their way. The Duke of York was killed in battle at Goldsmith’s Wakefield (1460), but his son Edward, Earl of March, carried on the war remorselessly, slaughtering all captives, with or without pedigree; w
hile Margaret of Anjou, the virile queen of the gentle Henry, led the Lancastrian resistance with unblushing ferocity. March won at Towton (1461), ended the Lancastrian dynasty, and became, as Edward IV, the first Yorkist king.
But the man who really ruled England for the next six years was Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Head of a rich and numerous clan, possessed of a dominating and yet engaging personality, as subtle in statesmanship as he was brilliant in war, “Warwick the Kingmaker” had fathered the victory at Towton, and had raised Edward to the throne. The King, resting from strife, dedicated himself to women, while Warwick governed so well that all England south of the Tyne and east of the Severn (for Margaret was still fighting) honored him as in all but name the king. When Edward rebelled against the reality and turned against him, Warwick joined Margaret, drove Edward from England, restored Henry VI to nominal power (1470), and ruled again. But Edward organized an army with Burgundian aid, crossed to Hull, defeated and slew Warwick at Barnet, defeated Margaret at Tewkesbury (1471), had Henry VI murdered in the tower, and lived happily ever afterward.
He was still only thirty-one. Comines describes him as “one of the handsomest men of his age,” who “took no delight in anything but ladies, dancing, entertainment, and the chase.”5 He replenished his treasury by confiscating the estates of the Nevilles, and by accepting from Louis XI, as bribes to peace, 125,000 crowns and a promise of 50,000 more per year.6 So eased, he could ignore a Parliament whose only use to him would have been to vote him funds. Feeling himself secure, he surrendered himself again to luxury and indolence, wore himself out lovingly, grew fat and jolly, and died at forty-one in the amplitude of his person and his power (1483).
He left two sons: the twelve-year-old Edward V, and Richard, Duke of York, aged nine. Their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had for the past six years served the state as chief minister, and with such industry, piety, and skill that when he made himself regent England accepted him without protest, despite his “ill-featured limbs, crooked back, hard-favored visage, and left shoulder much higher than his right.”7 Whether through the intoxication of power, or a just suspicion of conspiracies to unseat him, Richard imprisoned several notables, and executed one. On July 6, 1483, he had himself crowned as Richard III, and on July 15 the two young princes were murdered in the Tower—no one knows by whom. Once again the nobility rose in revolt, this time led by Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. When their modest forces met the King’s far larger army on Bosworth Field (1485), most of Richard’s soldiers refused to fight; and—lacking both a kingdom and a horse—he died in a desperate charge. The Yorkist dynasty ended; the Earl of Richmond, as Henry VII, began the Tudor line that would close with Elizabeth.
Under the blows of necessity Henry developed the virtues and vices that seemed to him demanded by his place. Holbein pictured him in a Whitehall fresco: tall, slender, beardless, pensive, humane, hardly revealing the subtle, secret calculation, the cold, stern pride, the flexible but patiently obdurate will that brought England from its destitute disintegration under the sixth Henry to its wealth and concentrated power under the eighth. He loved “the felicity of full coffers,” says Bacon,8 because he knew their persuasiveness in politics. He taxed the nation ingeniously, bled the rich with “benevolences” or forced gifts, made avid use of fines to feed his treasury and discourage crime, and winked as judges fitted the fine not to the offense but to the purse. He was the first English king since 1216 who kept his expenses within his income, and his charities and generosities mitigated his parsimony. He devoted himself conscientiously to administration, and skimped his pleasures to complete his toil. His life was darkened with perennial suspicion, not without cause; he trusted no one, concealed his purposes, and by fair means or dubious he achieved his ends. He established the Court of Star Chamber to try, in secret sessions, obstreperous nobles too powerful to fear local judges or juries; and year by year he brought the ruined aristocracy and the frightened prelacy into subordination to the monarchy. Strong individuals resented the decline of liberty and the desuetude of Parliament; but peasants forgave much in a king who disciplined their lords, and manufacturers and merchants thanked him for his wise promotion of industry and trade. He had found an England in feudal anarchy, a government too poor and disreputable to win obedience or loyalty; he left to Henry VIII a state respected, orderly, solvent, united, and at peace.
II. THE GROWTH OF ENGLISH WEALTH
Apparently nothing had been gained by the Great Revolt of 1381. Many servile dues were still exacted, and as late as 1537 the House of Lords rejected a bill for the final manumission of all serfs.9 The enclosure of “commons” was accelerated; thousands of displaced serfs became propertyless proletarians in the towns; the sheep, said Thomas More, were eating up the peasantry.10 In some ways the movement was good: lands approaching exhaustion were renitrogenated by the grazing sheep, and by 1500 only 1 per cent of the population were serfs. A class of yeomen grew, tilling their own land, and gradually giving to the English commoner the sturdy independent character that would later forge the Commonwealth and build an unwritten constitution of unprecedented liberty.
Feudalism became unprofitable as industry and commerce spread into a national and money economy bound up with foreign trade. When the serf produced for his lord he had scant motive for expansion or enterprise; when the free peasant and the merchant could sell their product in the open market the lust for gain quickened the economic pulse of the nation; the villages sent more food to the towns, the towns produced more goods to pay for it, and the exchange of surpluses overflowed the old municipal limits and guild restrictions to cover England and reach out beyond the sea.
Some guilds became “merchant companies,” licensed by the King to sell English products abroad. Whereas in the fourteenth century most English trade had been carried in Italian vessels, the British now built their own ships, and sent them into the North Sea, the coastal Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. The Genoese and Hanseatic merchants resented these newcomers, and fought them with embargoes and piracy; but Henry VII, convinced that the development of England required foreign trade, took English shipping under governmental protection, and arranged with other nations commercial agreements that established maritime order and peace. By 1500 the “merchant adventurers” of England ruled the trade of the North Sea. With an eye to commerce with China and Japan, the farseeing King commissioner] the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, then living in Bristol as John Cabot, to seek a northern passage across the Atlantic (1497). Cabot had to be content with discovering Newfoundland and, in a second voyage (1498), exploring the coast from Labrador to Delaware; he died in that year, and his son Sebastian passed into the service of Spain. Probably neither the sailor nor his King realized that these expeditions inaugurated British imperialism, and opened to English trade and colonists a region that would in time be England’s strength and salvation.
Meanwhile protective tariffs nourished national industry; economic order reduced the rate of interest sometimes to as low as 5 per cent; and governmental decrees rigorously regulated wages and the conditions of labor. A statute of Henry VII (1495) ruled
that every artificer and labourer be at his work, between the midst of the month of March and the midst of the month of September, before five o’clock in the morning, and that he have but half an hour for his breakfast, and an hour and a half for his [midday] dinner, at such time as he hath season for sleep... and that he depart not from work... till between seven and eight of the clock in the evening.... And that from the midst of September to the midst of March every artificer and labourer be at their work in the springing of the day, and depart not till night.... and that they sleep not by day.11
However, the worker rested and drank on Sundays, and on twenty-four additional holidays in the year. “Fair prices” were set by the state for many commodities, and we hear of arrests for exceeding these figures. Real wages, in relation to prices, were apparently higher in the late fifteenth century than in the early nineteenth.12
The revolts of English labor in this age stressed political rights as well as economic wrongs. Semi-communistic propaganda continued in almost every year, and workingmen were repeatedly reminded that “you be made of the same mold and metal that the gentles be made of; why then should they sport and play, and you labor and toil?—why should they have so much of the prosperity and treasure of this world, and ye so little?”13 Riots against enclosures of common lands were numerous, and there were periodic conflicts between merchants and artisans; but we hear too of agitations for municipal democracy, for the representation of labor in Parliament, and for a reduction of taxes.14
In June 1450, a large and disciplined force of peasants and town laborers marched upon London and camped at Blackheath. Their leader, Jack Cade, presented their grievances in an orderly document. “All the common people, what for taxes and tallages and other oppressions, might not live by their handiwork and husbandry.” 15 The Statute of Labourers should be repealed, and a new ministry should be formed. The government accused Cade of advocating communism.* 16 The troops of Henry VI, and the retainers of certain nobles, met the rebel army at Sevenoaks (June 18, 1450) To the surprise of all, the rebels won, and poured into London. To appease them the King’s Council ordered the arrest of Lord Saye and William Crowmer, officials especially hated for their exactions and tyranny. On July 4 they were surrendered to the mob that besieged the Tower; they were tried by the rebels, refused to plead, and were beheaded. According to Holinshed the two heads were raised on pikes and carried through the streets in joyous procession; every now and then their mouths were knocked together in a bloody kiss.17 The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Winchester negotiated a peace, granting some demands and offering amnesty. The rebels agreed and dispersed. Jack Cade, however, attacked the castle of Queens-borough in Sheppey; the government outlawed him, and on July 12 he was mortally wounded while resisting arrest. Eight accomplices were condemned to death; the rest were pardoned by the King, “to the great rejoicing of all his subjects.”18