Plantagenet dynasty

“ Discontent of the people.
"See," said they, "what we come to by allowing a line of usurpers to reign. These Henrys of Lancaster are all descended from a younger son, while the heirs of the older are living, and have a right to the throne. Richard Plantagenet is the true and proper heir. He is a man of energy. Let us make him king." ”

“ It is not merely that, just as the great but personal plan of the Conqueror collapsed after all into the chaos of the Stephen transition, so the great but personal plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into the chaos of the Barons' Wars. When all allowance is made for constitutional fictions and afterthoughts, it does seem likely that here for the first time some moral strength deserted the monarchy. ”

“ He was the first English Prince who showed what it was to be a true gentleman. He was the first, but he was not the last. We have seen how, when he died, Englishmen thought that all their hopes had died with him. But we know that it was not so; we know that the life of a great nation is not bound up in the life of a single man; we know that the valour and the courtesy and the chivalry of England are not buried in the grave of the Plantagenet Prince. ”

“ The White Horse had stolen away whatever other relics of gentility Mr. Plantagenet possessed, and had reduced him in his latter days to the miserable ruin of what was once a man, and even a man of letters.
It was a sad history, and, alas! a very common one. Thirty years before, when Edmund Plan tagenet, not yet a believer in his own real or pretended royal descent, went up to London from Yorkshire to seek his fortune in literature, he was one of the handsomest and most popular young men in his own society. His name alone succeeded in attracting attention; we are not all of us Plantagenets. ”

“ When Plantagenet was but ten years old his mother died, and her last request to the father of her boy, founded on a deep knowledge of the world, was, that her son might be educated far from the court, nor be drawn from the occupations and happier scenes of private life, to become a hanger-on of princes and nobles. There was a man, a gentleman and a knight, who had been a partizan of the White Rose, and who had fought and bled for it in various battles between the duke of York and Henry the Sixth. ”

“ KING EDWARD.
Edward Plantagenet, in the name of God,
As with this armour I impale thy breast,
So be thy noble unrelenting heart
Walled in with flint of matchless fortitude,
That never base affections enter there:
Fight and be valiant, conquer where thou comest!
Now follow, Lords, and do him honor to.
DARBY.
Edward Plantagenet, prince of Wales,
As I do set this helmet on thy head,
Wherewith the chamber of thy brain is fenst,
So may thy temples, with Bellona’s hand,
Be still adorned with laurel victory:
Fight and be valiant, conquer where thou comest! ”

“ For the Great Plantagenet Delusion which Edmund Plantagenet had started, and only half or a quarter believed in himself, became to his children from youth upward, and especially to Maud and Dick, a sort of family religion. It was a theory on which they based almost everything that was best and truest within them; a moral power for good, urging them always on to do credit to the great House from which they firmly and unquestioningly believed themselves to be sprung. ”

“ On 12 May 1519 he and his wife had livery of the lands of Edward Grey, viscount Lisle, his wife's brother John and his daughter, the Countess of Devon, having both died without issue. This grant was confirmed on 28 Feb. 1522. Plantagenet accompanied Henry VIII to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and to the meeting with Charles V. In a household list of 1521 he is named as one of the carvers who shall serve the king in his privy chamber. ”

“ Nor, so far, was public order in any danger from the utmost freedom of [Pg 20] speech; for the House of Plantagenet was still so popular, that, had the reigning sovereign deliberately gone among his subjects in disguise, to learn what they thought of him, he would probably have heard nothing more offensive to his ear than complaints as to the rapacity of the royal purveyors. ”

“ WARWICK The bloody parliament shall this be call'd,
Unless Plantagenet, Duke of York, be king,
And bashful Henry deposed, whose cowardice
Hath made us by-words to our enemies.
YORK Then leave me not, my lords; be resolute;
I mean to take possession of my right.
WARWICK Neither the king, nor he that loves him best,
The proudest he that holds up Lancaster,
Dares stir a wing, if Warwick shake his bells.
I'll plant Plantagenet, root him up who dares:
Resolve thee, Richard; claim the English crown. ”

“ And a short season after this, the king and the duke travelled lovingly together to Oxenford, where the earls and barons, by the king's commandment, did swear fealty to the duke, saving the king's honour, so long as he lived; and the Plantagenet did pledge himself to behave to Stephen of Blois as a duteous and affectionate son, and to grant to him, all the days of his life, the name and seat of the kingly pre-eminence. ”

“ The great and rapid increase of power thus attained by Henry Plantagenet necessarily excited the hopes of his mother, and of her adherents in England, who were gratified by the prospect of renewing the contest with Stephen in favour of a young prince whose gallantry and abilities offered the best prospect of success. ”

“ Dick shook his head with a terrible, a despondent shake. He knew when he was beaten.
'Oh no,' he answered aloud, though he could hardly frame the words. 'I know what I say. I've found out all about this Richard Plantagenet, Maud. He was the ancestor of the other people—the false Plantagenets, don't you know, the Sheffield family who left the money. He never was a true Plantagenet in any way at all. It was only a nickname. He acted the parts of the Plantagenet kings, one after the other, in a masque or pageant, and was known from that time by pure fun as Richard Plantagenet. ”

“ He is also called “le bel” or “the handsome,” and received the surname of Plantagenet from the habit which he is said to have had of wearing in his cap a sprig of broom (genêt) . In 1127 he was made a knight, and on the 2nd of June 1129 married Matilda, daughter of Henry I. of England, and widow of the emperor Henry V. Some months afterwards he succeeded to his father, who gave up the countship when he definitively went to the kingdom of Jerusalem. The years of his government were spent in subduing the Angevin barons and in conquering Normandy (see Anjou) . ”

“ When they were told that, by the English law, the crown, at the moment of a demise, must descend to the next heir, they answered that, by the English law, a living man could have no heir. When they were told that there was no precedent for declaring the throne vacant, they produced from among the records in the Tower a roll of parchment, near three hundred years old, on which, in quaint characters and barbarous Latin, it was recorded that the Estates of the Realm had declared vacant the throne of a perfidious and tyrannical Plantagenet. ”

“ Now, in the time when King Richard lived, people thought a great deal more of kings who fought and conquered large kingdoms, than of those who tried to make their own people happy at home in a small kingdom. And so it was in England. People really began to forget all the good their late wise king, Henry Plantagenet, had done, and to like Richard Plantagenet better, because he told them he would go to war, and do great feats of arms at a great distance, and that he would not only make his own name famous, but that their dear England should be heard of all over the world ”

“ Plantagenet to her annual garden-party. Chiddingwickians pointed out the head of the house to strangers, and observed with pardonable possessive pride: 'That's our poor old dancing-master; he's a Plantagenet born, and some people say if it hadn't been for those unfortunate Wars of the Roses he'd have been King of England. But now he holds classes at the White Horse Assembly Rooms.'
Much more then had Mr. Wells special reason to be proud of his own personal relations with the heir of the house, the final inheritor of so much shadowy and hypothetical splendour. ”

“ The reputation the English warrior youths had gained forbade inglorious ease, even had they not aspired with their whole hearts for renown; yet Plantagenet looked forward with reluctance to the leading forth his brave, dear cousin to new dangers; divided between pride in his valour, satisfaction at his thus being schooled to arms, and terror from the perils to which he would be exposed in a war, on the side of the enemy, of despair and fury—his thoughtful eyes rested on the young prince's glowing cheek, his unsullied youth ”

“ There is absolutely no necessity to seek in such trivial causes the explanation of a great movement, really inevitable, the antecedents of which were deeply 59rooted in the past. The very success of Henry Plantagenet in performing the great task of restoring order in England, for effecting which special powers had been allowed to him, made the continuance of these powers to his successors unnecessary. From the day of Henry’s death, if not earlier, forces were at work which only required to be combined in order to control the licence of the Crown. ”

“ According to some authorities, the Prince thought of seizing the crown, on the ground that it belonged to him in right of his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet, who was unquestionably the legitimate heir. Henry VIII. himself, who would have made a splendid tyrant over a son who should have readied to man's estate,—an absolute model in that way to all after-sovereigns,—was denied by fortune an opportunity to round and perfect his character as a domestic despot. Only one of his legitimate sons lived even to boyhood, Edward VI., and Henry died when the heir-apparent was in his tenth year. ”

“ In her jewelled left hand she holds a sprig of honeysuckle, or it may have been the intention of the artist to represent the broom flower, the French genet (Planta Genesta) , the badge and origin of the name Plantagenet. This portrait represents Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, the daughter of the murdered Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV.; her mother was a daughter of the great Earl of Warwick, the King-maker. ”

“ Edward Plantagenet, fourth duke of York, eldest son of the last, prosecuted his father’s pretensions, and defeated the earl of Pembroke, half brother to Henry VI., at Mortimer’s Cross, in Herefordshire. Shortly afterwards, queen Margaret advanced upon London, and gained a victory over the Yorkists under the earl of Warwick, at the second battle of St. Alban’s, and, at the same time, regained possession of the person of her weak husband. ”

“ Louis VII., who came to the throne in 1137, acquired momentarily the great duchy of Aquitaine, or Guienne, by his marriage with Eleanor, who inherited it; but he divorced her, and she married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II., King of England, being at the same time Duke of Normandy, by inheritance from his mother, and succeeding his father in Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Eleanor having carried to him the great Aquitanian domain of her family, he was sovereign of a larger part of modern France than owned allegiance to the French king. ”

“ Plantagenet had vacated. It was a terrible fate, but he saw no way out of it. At one deadly blow all his hopes for the future were dashed utterly to the ground. Much as he hated to think it, he saw at once it was now his imperative duty to go down from Oxford. He must do something-without delay to earn a livelihood somehow for his mother and sisters. He couldn't go on living there in comparative luxury while the rest of his family starved, or declined on the tender mercies of the Chiddingwick workhouse. ”

“ Henry Plantagenet God has led hither by the hand to punish the sins of this realm, and to reign in it like a true king. Henry Plantagenet will cast out the Valois from the throne they have defiled, as Darius cast out Belshazzar, for such is the desire and the intent of God. But to you comes Alain the harper, not as a conqueror but as a suppliant,—Alain who has loved you whole-heartedly these two years past, and who now kneels before you entreating grace. ”

“ The historian who rests for a little space between the termination of the Plantagenet wars in France and the commencement of the civil wars of 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 preparations for the mighty changes which were to produce an influence on the character and lot of the human race. A very few particulars only can be selected as specimens from so vast a mass. ”

“ Edmund Plantagenet, the forest-bred son of Richard the Third, the late companion of the illustrious Lincoln and gallant Lovel, lay long insensible on the field of battle, surrounded by the dead—he awoke from his swoon to the consciousness that they lay strewed around him dead, whom he had worshipped as heroes, loved as friends. Life became a thankless boon ”

“ Plantagenet as they sat at supper that, if he burst in upon the White Horse as the first bearer of such novel and important gossip—how his son Richard was shortly going to enter as an undergraduate at Durham College, Oxford—not only would he gain for himself great honour and glory, but also some sympathizing friend, proud to possess the privilege of acquaintance with so distinguished a family, would doubtless mark his sense of the dignity of the occasion by offering its head the trifling hospitality of a brandy-and-soda. ”