The Story of Mankind [106]
successors of the House of Anjou and Plantagenet regarded
England as their true home. To them the island was merely a
part of their great inheritance on the continent--a sort of
colony inhabited by rather backward people upon whom they
forced their own language and civilisation. Gradually however
the ``colony'' of England gained upon the ``Mother
country'' of Normandy. At the same time the Kings of
France were trying desperately to get rid of the powerful Norman-
English neighbours who were in truth no more than disobedient
servants of the French crown. After a century of war
fare the French people, under the leadership of a young girl by
the name of Joan of Arc, drove the ``foreigners'' from their
soil. Joan herself, taken a prisoner at the battle of Compiegne
in the year 1430 and sold by her Burgundian captors to the
English soldiers, was burned as a witch. But the English
never gained foothold upon the continent and their Kings were
at last able to devote all their time to their British possessions.
As the feudal nobility of the island had been engaged in one of
those strange feuds which were as common in the middle ages
as measles and small-pox, and as the greater part of the old
landed proprietors had been killed during these so-called Wars
of the Roses, it was quite easy for the Kings to increase their
royal power. And by the end of the fifteenth century, England
was a strongly centralised country, ruled by Henry VII
of the House of Tudor, whose famous Court of Justice, the
``Star Chamber'' of terrible memory, suppressed all attempts
on the part of the surviving nobles to regain their old influence
upon the government of the country with the utmost severity.
In the year 1509 Henry VII was succeeded by his son
Henry VIII, and from that moment on the history of England
gained a new importance for the country ceased to be a
mediaeval island and became a modern state.
Henry had no deep interest in religion. He gladly used a
private disagreement with the Pope about one of his many
divorces to declare himself independent of Rome and make
the church of England the first of those ``nationalistic churches''
in which the worldly ruler also acts as the spiritual head of his
subjects. This peaceful reformation of 1034 not only gave
the house of Tudor the support of the English clergy, who
for a long time had been exposed to the violent attacks of many
Lutheran propagandists, but it also increased the Royal power
through the confiscation of the former possessions of the
monasteries. At the same time it made Henry popular with the
merchants and tradespeople, who as the proud and prosperous
inhabitants of an island which was separated from the rest of
Europe by a wide and deep channel, had a great dislike for
everything ``foreign'' and did not want an Italian bishop to rule
their honest British souls.
In 1517 Henry died. He left the throne to his small son,
aged ten. The guardians of the child, favoring the modern
Lutheran doctrines, did their best to help the cause of Protestantism.
But the boy died before he was sixteen, and was succeeded
by his sister Mary, the wife of Philip II of Spain, who
burned the bishops of the new ``national church'' and in other
ways followed the example of her royal Spanish husband
Fortunately she died, in the year 1558, and was succeeded
by Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn,
the second of his six wives, whom he had decapitated when she
no longer pleased him. Elizabeth, who had spent some time in
prison, and who had been released only at the request of the
Holy Roman Emperor, was a most cordial enemy of everything
Catholic and Spanish. She shared her father's indifference
in the matter of religion but she inherited his ability as a
very shrewd judge of character, and spent the forty-five years
of her reign in strengthening the power of the dynasty and in
increasing the revenue