CONTEMPORARY HISTORY.—­It will be remembered that this was the stormy period of the Wars of the Roses.  The long and troubled reign of Henry VI. closed in sorrow in 1471.  The titular crown of France had been easily taken from him by Charles VII. and Joan of Arc; and although Richard of York, the great-grandson of Edward III., had failed in his attempts upon the English throne, yet his son Edward, afterward the Fourth, was successful.  Then came the patricide of Clarence, the accession and cruelties of Richard III., the battle of Bosworth, and, at length, the union of the two houses in the persons of Henry VII. (Henry Tudor of Lancaster) and Elizabeth of York.  Thus the strife of the succession was settled, and the realm had rest to reorganize and start anew in its historic career.

The weakening of the aristocracy by war and by execution gave to the crown a power before unknown, and made it a fearful coigne of vantage for Henry VIII., whose accession was in 1509.  People and parliament were alike subservient, and gave their consent to the unjust edicts and arbitrary cruelties of this terrible tyrant.

In his reign the old English quarrel between Church and State—­which during the civil war had lain dormant—­again rose, and was brought to a final issue.  It is not unusual to hear that the English Reformation grew out of the ambition of a libidinous monarch.  This is a coincidence rather than a cause.  His lust and his marriages would have occurred had there been no question of Pope or Church; conversely, had there been a continent king upon the throne, the great political and religious events would have happened in almost the same order and manner.  That “knock of a king” and “incurable wound” prophesied by Piers Plowman were to come.  Henry only seized the opportunity afforded by his ungodly passions as the best pretext, where there were many, for setting the Pope at defiance; and the spirit of reformation so early displayed, and awhile dormant from circumstances, and now strengthened by the voice of Luther, burst forth in England.  There was little demur to the suppression of the monasteries; the tomb of St. Thomas a Becket was desecrated amidst the insulting mummeries of the multitude; and if Henry still burned Lutherans—­because he could not forget that he had in earlier days denounced Luther—­if he still maintained the six bloody articles[22]—­his reforming spirit is shown in the execution of Fisher and More, by the anathema which he drew upon himself from the Pope, and by Henry’s retaliation upon the friends and kinsmen of Cardinal Pole, the papal legate.

Having thus briefly glanced at the history, we return to the literary products, all of which reflect more or less of the historic age, and by their paucity and poverty indicate the existence of the causes so unfavorable to literary effort.  This statement will be partially understood when we mention, as the principal names of this period, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, and Sir Thomas More, men whose works are scarcely known to the ordinary reader, and which are yet the best of the time.