ENGLAND
616
ENGLAND
its name gained a foothold on the island. Before 600 A. D., Saxons and Angles had made settlements as far north as the Forth, and the many princedoms had merged into the two rival powers, Northumbria and K@nt, while a third, destined to devour the other two, was Wessex to the south. Long before England became one nation, its people w@re united by belonging to a single Christian church. The marriage of the king of Kent with a Prankish princess gave an opportunity for Augustine and his fellow-missionaries to land in 596; and the marriage of a Kentish princess with Edwin of Northumbria carried Christianity from Canterbury to York. In 802 Egbert, who had learned at the court of Charlemagne how to conquer, became king of Wessex, and brought all England under his power as far north as the Dee. The Danes, as robbers, then as settlers and lastly as conquerors, harried the Saxons for 200 years after the death of Egbert. Alfred, fey surrendering the north and east1 of England to be held as vassals of the Saxon king, secured the supremacy of Wessex. The reign of Edgar the Peaceful and the government of his great minister, Dunstan, closed the period of Saxon greatness. By 1012 the Danes had triumphed, and Sweyn, the leader of the invaders, was in fact king ©f England. Under his son, Canute, England was in some respects the head of a Scandinavian empire. But his two sons were weak, and with the aid of Godwin, the powerful earl of Wessex, Edward the Confessor re-established the Saxon line. On the death of Edward, Godwin's son Harold was recognized as the ablest man in the kingdom, and was chosen king. His banished brother, Tostig, was defeated at Stamford Bridge, but three days later Harold was himself defeated and slain in the battle of Senlac, near Hastings, by William the Conqueror, Oct. 14, 1066. With William began England's connection with the continent and the bringing in of feudalism. The Norman kings, when their time was not taken up by foreign wars, were occupied by strengthening against the nobles and the church the powerful monarchy founded by William.
Though the enormous power wielded by the Norman line was of great use to the nation in checking the barons, who were the oppressors of the serfs, its evils were seen when it came into the hands of boastful, tyrannical and weak King John. Disgraced in the eyes of all England by his allowing himself to be stripped of all his French possessions and by being excommunicated and deposed by the pope, the mobility appeared as the true leaders of the nation and wrung from the humbled king that great charter which secured the foundations of the future liberty of England. To make the charter a reality and secure
the orderly growth of these liberties was the work of the great King Edward I. The attempt of Henry III to disregard Magna Charta caused the successful rebellion headed by Simon de Montfort. But in the reign of Edward I a parliament assembled (1295), and the principle that where all were concerned all should have a voice was acknowledged. Great powers were Jeft to the king, but Parliament was armed with the right to tax, and steadily increased its grip on affairs till, at the close of Edward Ill's reign, it could impeach the ministry. Richard II's unwise claim to the sole power of the crown brought on the revolution that closed the struggle, and Henry IV came to the throne as the choice of Parliament, while the council named by Parliament became, in fact, a body of national ministers. Edward I died before he had finished the conquest of Scotland, and his weaker son, Edward II, had been badly defeated by the Scots at Bannockburn. Edward Ill's attempts to make himself king of France were mere raids of no lasting value, except so far as the life of the peasant-soldier helped to free the lower orders from serfdom. The French wars of Henry V were much more successful than those of Edward III, and the union of the two kingdoms seemed to be promised when the great king died. The manhood of Henry VI ushered in the Wars of the Roses between the two branches of the Plantagenets, the houses of Lancaster and York. The Yorkists won, and the powerful and despotic Edward IV ruled with a strong hand, and Parliament in his reign had little power. But his successor, Richard III, made himself hated by all classes of the people, and the battle of Bosworth put on the throne Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, who acknowledged that he was king by the will of the people. In Henry VIII determination to have his own will was blended with a real desire for the well-being of his people. Driven by his passion for Anne Boleyn, Henry demanded a divorce from his Spanish wife, and the opposition of the pope brought to a crisis in England the Reformation, which had been smouldering since the days of Wiclif. But Henry's zeal as a reformer overshot the mark, and it was with a general feeling in her favor that Mary, the champion of the old faith, ascended the throne. Unfortunately, she allied herself too closely to Spain, and it seemed likely that England might become a Spanish dependency. So when Elizabeth came to the throne, Protestantism and national independence were linked together as one cause; and she, as well as Mary, was at first supported by the bulk of the nation. Her great minister, Lord William Cecil, played such an able part that, without openly defying the great Catholic powers, she came to be looked to at home and abroad as the
