Death of Chaucer
      Henry IV chosen by Parliament| (Dante’s Divina Commedia,
                                   | c. 1310; Petrarch’s
                                   | sonnets and poems, 1325-1374;
                                   | Boccaccio’s tales, c.
                                   | 1350.)
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CHAPTER V

THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING (1400-1550)

I. HISTORY OF THE PERIOD

POLITICAL CHANGES.  The century and a half following the death of Chaucer (1400-1550) is the most volcanic period of English history.  The land is swept by vast changes, inseparable from the rapid accumulation of national power; but since power is the most dangerous of gifts until men have learned to control it, these changes seem at first to have no specific aim or direction.  Henry V—­whose erratic yet vigorous life, as depicted by Shakespeare, was typical of the life of his times—­first let Europe feel the might of the new national spirit.  To divert that growing and unruly spirit from rebellion at home, Henry led his army abroad, in the apparently impossible attempt to gain for himself three things:  a French wife, a French revenue, and the French crown itself.  The battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415, and five years later, by the Treaty of Troyes, France acknowledged his right to all his outrageous demands.

The uselessness of the terrific struggle on French soil is shown by the rapidity with which all its results were swept away.  When Henry died in 1422, leaving his son heir to the crowns of France and England, a magnificent recumbent statue with head of pure silver was placed in Westminster Abbey to commemorate his victories.  The silver head was presently stolen, and the loss is typical of all that he had struggled for.  His son, Henry VI, was but the shadow of a king, a puppet in the hands of powerful nobles, who seized the power of England and turned it to self-destruction.  Meanwhile all his foreign possessions were won back by the French under the magic leadership of Joan of Arc.  Cade’s Rebellion (1450) and the bloody Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) are names to show how the energy of England was violently destroying itself, like a great engine that has lost its balance wheel.  The frightful reign of Richard III followed, which had, however, this redeeming quality, that it marked the end of civil wars and the self-destruction of feudalism, and made possible a new growth of English national sentiment under the popular Tudors.