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THE HISTORY

OF

HENRY THE FIFTH.

INTRODUCTION.

"And nothing can we call our own but death:
For heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings."

FROM THE CRUSADES TO THE DEATH OF RICHARD THE SECOND.

THE martial spirit which arrived at system and ripeness during the Crusades, did not decline when they ceased; it only developed through other channels. It harmonized too nearly with the natural passions of the rude ages, to cease with the temporary cause which had elicited its organized display. The wars of the Crusades, at first regarded as an end, to accomplish which the military spirit was combined, became the means by which it continued to be, for centuries after, the ruling fact in events. Indeed, before those wars arose, the genius of the English people had been to a degree centred in the pursuit of military enterprise. The security of communities, alike from foreign and from internal dissension, had been protected rather by physical force than by the arts of diplomacy, the supremacy of law, and the moral influence of civil authority. If a feudal baron

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were aggrieved by his neighbor, his source of redress lay in the number and courage of his vassals. If, in a more serious dispute, he came into conflict with the sovereign, he resorted to confederated rebellion, not to patient remonstrance. This state of things was produced by the small civilization of the age, the rivalries of rude factions, the weakness of kings, and because a resort to physical force is, in such an age, the normal mode of asserting rights and enforcing the individual will. The result was, that when foreign war did not impel to a united state, calamities far worse than foreign war befell the community. The history of England, therefore, for centuries after the Crusades, is an almost uninterrupted and deplorable chronicle of domestic calamity, in which the unbridled passions of revenge, cruelty, conquest, and assassination held high reign throughout the land. Illustrious generals, who returned to glad ovations from scenes of distant victory, directed their swords, not yet cleansed of the blood of the common enemy, against those with whom they had fought side by side, against the sovereigns who had showered upon them the highest honors; nay, against their own kindred—their brothers, sons, and fathers. The natural affections became callous, under the bitter dominion of selfish ambition. Patriotism, no less natural as an instinctive virtue, than necessary as the first law of public safety, lay dormant in times of nominal peace, and was awakened to a morbid height by the prospect of foreign acquisition. It was less humiliating to murder a parent than to sacrifice a coronet. It was nobler to seize a castle than to respect the weakness of women. It was more disgraceful to abandon a traitor friend than to depose a rightful king. It was

less honorable to disobey the code of chivalry than to reduce political order to anarchy. To such a social system the Crusades came as fire to powder. They organized, intensified, made permanent the spirit of war. They opened the floodgates which had pent up the restless aspirations of warriors in a geographical limit, and caused the flood to pour unchecked over an unbounded tract. So powerful was the impetus thus given, that, after two centuries had passed, the most honorable and brilliant field to which the ambition of the English youth could be directed, was still the field of martial glory. The transient motive passed away; the permanent passion remained; and its vital principle, chivalry, finds for its best features a sympathy to-day in every civilized community. Around the thrones of the royal Lancasters were grouped earls and barons, who were proud of their descent from the most gallant and fearless of races. Their ancestors had followed the Lion-Heart to the East; they had endured hardship in a thousand forms, as they traversed endless wastes and among fierce nations; they had mounted, with the dauntless Godfrey, to the desperate charge from the valley of Jehoshaphat; they had been buried beneath the embattled towers, which, falling, had proclaimed the conquest of Jerusalem; they had returned to pour into eager ears the inspiring tales of Christian valor, and to awaken to a burning vivacity the warlike ardor of their descendants. Not only nobles, who had, in the presence of a savage foe, achieved titles or enhanced the lustre of houses already illustrious-all classes of men imparted, each to his own circle, some of the infectious enthusiasm with which they themselves were thoroughly imbued. The common soldiers, scattered

to all parts of the kingdom, kept every fireside aglow with moving tales of conflict, destitution, and victory, and retired with ill grace from the scenes of romance and adventure to the pursuits of honest and peaceful labor. All alike were become restless, independent of civil restraint, ready to quicken dissension, and bold to defy, with equal celerity, King, Parliament, and peasant. This tendency, no longer stimulated and satiated by the sacred cause, served to localize war; to produce sensitiveness to offence, uneasiness of control, quickness to resentment, pertinacity and defiance in quarrel; a readiness to insist, in matters of little moment, on the distinctions of rank-to rival, to depose, to annihilate an enemy, and to push and exalt self into his vacant place.

For many generations, therefore, we are shocked by intestine conflict-unnatural, perpetual, and most relentless; sometimes rising to the terrible dignity of civil war, anon sweeping away a dynasty; oftener the feudal array of baron against baron, or of rebellious vassals against a feudal tyrant. King John, while the memory of the Crusades was still quick in the popular brain, yielded less to the assertion of a broader liberty, than to the passing dominion of feudal rebellion and a united resistance to royal power. It is doubtful whether John, however bad, would, a century earlier or a century later, have incurred the ignominy of Runnymede. It is doubtful whether any king, however wise, would at that time have escaped his degradation. The spirit of war led up the barons to put their audacious hands upon the throne itself. In that purpose a unit, they had no sooner put the Crown beneath their feet, than they returned to their local rivalries-to their primeval

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