The battle of Hastings, and the events which followed it, not only placed a Duke of Normandy on the English throne, but gave up the whole population of England to the tyranny of the Norman race.  The subjugation of a nation has seldom, even in Asia, been more complete.  During the century and a half which followed the Conquest, there is, to speak strictly, no English history.  Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in uniting all France under their government, it is probable that England would never have had an independent existence.  England owes her escape from dependence on French thought and customs to separation from Normandy, an event which her historians have generally represented as disastrous.  The talents and even the virtues of her first six French kings were a curse to her.  The follies and vices of the seventh, King John, were her salvation.  He was driven from Normandy, and in England the two races were drawn together, both being alike aggrieved by the tyranny of a bad king.  From that moment the prospects brightened, and here commences the history of the English nation.

In no country has the enmity of race been carried further than in England.  In no country has that enmity been more completely effaced.  Early in the fourteenth century the amalgamation of the races was all but complete:  and it was soon made manifest that a people inferior to none existing in the world has been formed by the mixture of three branches of the great Teutonic family with each other, and with the aboriginal Britons.  A period of more than a hundred years followed, during which the chief object of the English was, by force of arms, to establish a great empire on the Continent.  The effect of the successes of Edward III. and Henry V. was to make France for a time a province of England.  A French king was brought prisoner to London; an English king was crowned at Paris.

The arts of peace were not neglected by our fathers during that period.  English thinkers aspired to know, or dared to doubt, where bigots had been content to wonder and to believe.  The same age which produced the Black Prince and Derby, Chandos and Hawkwood, produced also Geoffrey Chaucer and John Wycliffe.  In so splendid and imperial a manner did the English people, properly so called, first take place among the nations of the world.  But the spirit of the French people was at last aroused, and after many desperate struggles and with many bitter regrets, our ancestors gave up the contest.

The First Civil War

Cooped up once more within the limits of the island, the warlike people employed in civil strife those arms which had been the terror of Europe.  Two aristocratic factions, headed by two branches of the royal family, engaged in the long and fierce struggle known as the Wars of the White and Red Roses.  It was at length universally acknowledged that the claims of all the contending Plantagenets were united in the House of Tudor.