Henry III. appears to have managed to live without quarrelling with his children; but then he was a poor creature, and even was so unkingly, and so little like what a Plantagenet should have been, that he actually disliked war!  He might with absolute propriety have worn the lowly broom-corn from which his family-name was taken, while it was a sweeping satire on almost all others who bore it.  His heir, Edward I., was a king of “high stomach,” and as a prince he stood stoutly by his father in the baronial wars.  He, too, though the father of sixteen children, dispensed with family dissensions, thus showing that “The more, the merrier,” is a true saying.  Edward II. came to grief from having a bad wife, Isabella of France, who made use of his son against him.  That son was Edward III., who became king in his father’s lifetime, and whose marriage with Philippa of Hainault is one of the best-known facts of history, not only because it was an uncommonly happy marriage, but that it had remarkable consequences.  This royal couple got along very happily with their children; but the ambition of their fourth son, the Duke of Lancaster, troubled the last days of the King, and prepared the way for great woes in the next century.  The King was governed by Lancaster, and the Black Prince, who was then in a dying state, was at the head of what would now be called the Opposition, as if he foresaw what evils his brother’s ambition would be the means of bringing upon his son.

Richard II., son of the Black Prince, had no children, though he was twice married.  He was dethroned, the rebels being headed by his cousin, Henry of Lancaster, who became Henry IV.  Thus was brought about that change in the course of descent which John of Gaunt seems to have aimed at, but which he died just too soon to see effected.  It was a violent change, and one which had its origin in a family quarrel, added to political dissatisfaction.  Had the revolutionist wished merely to set aside a bad king, they would have called the House of Mortimer to the throne, the chief member of that House being the next heir, as descended from the Duke of Clarence, elder brother of the Duke of Lancaster; but more was meant than a political revolution, and so the line of Clarence was passed over, and its right to the crown treated with neglect, to be brought forward in bloody fashion in after-days.  In fact, the Englishmen who made Henry of Lancaster king prepared the way for that long and terrible struggle which took place in the fifteenth century, and which was, its consequences as well as its course considered, the greatest civil war that has ever afflicted Christendom.  The movement that led to the elevation of Henry of Holingbroke to the throne, though not precisely a palace-revolution, resembles a revolution of that kind more than anything else with which it can be compared; and it was as emphatic a departure from the principle of hereditary right as can be found in history.  So much was this the case, that liberals in polities