The Story of Britain Read online

  Then they heard the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. Iron boots scraped on stone. A key grated in the lock. When the door was kicked open, the glow of torches seemed blinding after the pitch darkness of the cell. Edward had to shield his eyes with one hand.

  “Uncle?” he said.

  But it wasn’t his uncle Richard. A group of soldiers stood in the doorway, holding drawn swords.

  Outside the Tower, a boatman was rowing his boat towards London Bridge that night. The massive shape of the Tower loomed out of the darkness on his right-hand side. Suddenly he heard a scream. It was so faint that it might have been one of the river birds, but something about it made him stop rowing. A moment later, there was a second scream. The boatman stood up, staring wildly into the darkness, but he heard no other noise.

  And no one else in London heard a thing.

  Richard’s Downfall

  SOON after that, the princes’ uncle Richard declared himself King Richard III. But most people spat on the ground when they heard his name.

  “Murderer!” they hissed. “What happened to the princes in the Tower?”

  Meanwhile, the last of the Lancastrians gathered to fight back. Their leader was a Welshman called Henry Tudor. He was descended from Edward III through his mother, but on his father’s side he came from Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudor and the old kings of Wales. Henry gathered his army in France, then landed in Wales, at Milford Haven. Welsh soldiers and English lords hurried to join him. Henry marched east into England, and the Wars of the Roses began again.

  Henry’s army met Richard’s at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire. Richard’s army was smaller than usual, because not even the Yorkists wanted to help a man who had killed his own nephews. Before the battle began, he was told even more of his soldiers were deserting. But at least Richard was no coward. He gathered his last supporters, charged Henry Tudor’s army, and was killed in the thick of the fighting.

  Henry Tudor marched on to London, where he was crowned King Henry VII. To finish the Wars of the Roses once and for all, he married Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York. So the families of York and Lancaster were united, and Henry VII took as his emblem a rose coloured both red and white.

  At last England and Wales were at peace, under a family of Welsh kings – the Tudors.

  The End of the Middle Ages

  ENGLAND had been ruined by the Wars of the Roses, so Henry VII’s first task was to make the country rich again. Fortunately there was still plenty of wool to sell. All over the Cotswolds and East Anglia, sheep dotted the fields. And, just as before, the money that wool merchants made was spent on fantastic new manor houses and churches. Indeed, the churches of Henry VII’s reign were the most magnificent yet, with windows so big that their insides were bathed in light, stone vaults so delicate that they looked like trees arching overhead, and soaring towers that could be seen for miles across the fields.

  But the buildings of Henry’s reign were the last to be built in the Gothic style. For while he was king, great changes took place in the world. The time we call the Middle Ages finally came to an end.

  Sailors in Cornwall and Ireland used to stare westwards towards the Atlantic Ocean, sure that the ocean went on for ever and Ireland was the edge of the world. But not long after Henry VII became king of England, a rumour went round that there was another country beyond the ocean, one no one had heard of before.

  It was found by an Italian sea captain called Christopher Columbus. In 1492 the king of Spain paid Columbus to take three ships and sail west as far as he could. A year later he returned to say he had discovered a new land. He called it America.

  Columbus wasn’t expecting to find America. When he set off, he thought he was going to arrive in India. Most people understood that the earth was round, like a very large ball. That meant that if you went west you’d end up in the east, Columbus said. He hadn’t realized that before you got to India, you reached America first. The world was much bigger than anyone thought.

  People shook their heads when they heard about America. What else could they discover that no one knew about? More new lands? More ways around the world?

  All through the Middle Ages, people believed that nothing ever changed.

  “Peasants obey knights,” said knights as they sat in their manor houses. “Knights obey lords. Lords obey kings.”

  “The world is God’s,” said monks, rising for their morning prayers. “God made it. God decides what happens in it.”

  “Nothing changes,” said scholars surrounded by their dusty books. “Things have always been the same.”

  That wasn’t true, of course. Once, things had been very different. There had been a province called Britannia, and a great city called Rome, with an empire that covered half of Europe. In Northumbria people could still see the wall the Romans had left behind. In Italy ruins of Roman villas and temples were scattered across the landscape.

  People started wondering what life had been like for the Romans. They began reading books the Romans had left behind. And they discovered that things hadn’t always been the way they were in the Middle Ages. People hadn’t always lived in castles. They hadn’t always worn armour and fought. They hadn’t always gone to church.

  In that case, people thought, why couldn’t they change things now?

  So the rich started to build villas instead of castles. Sculptors copied Roman sculpture. Philosophers read books in Latin and Greek. Scholars called this shift the rebirth of ancient learning. In French the word for rebirth is renaissance, and that is what we still call the change that took place at the end of the Middle Ages. King Henry’s eldest son, Arthur, learned Latin and Greek so that he could read ancient books. Desiderius Erasmus, the most famous thinker of the age, came to England to spread new ideas.

  Those new ideas would not have spread very fast, however, if it wasn’t for a new invention that was made not long before America was discovered. It was even more important than the compass or the gun. Some think it the most important machine ever invented – the printing press.

  The first printer in Britain was called William Caxton. He had learned his skill in Europe, and his shop was in an alley near Westminster Abbey. When Caxton’s neighbours heard strange noises coming from the shop, they asked what he did there. Caxton told them he made books. The neighbours had never heard of books being made in a shop. Books were made by monks or scribes, who copied them out word by word, taking months to finish each volume. Caxton told them he had just made two hundred copies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in a week. They didn’t believe him, so he showed them one of the copies. The pages weren’t covered with handwriting, like in an old-style book. Instead words were stamped crisply on the page, so clear that anyone could read them.

  Caxton invited them into his shop to see how he did it. Hunched over a table, he took up little pieces of metal with tweezers, one by one, and dropped them into a wooden frame. When the frame was full, he stepped back so they could see.

  One of the neighbours, who knew how to read, pushed forward to look at the frame. “It’s backwards!” he declared.

  Caxton just smiled. He dipped a roller in sticky ink and rolled it over the frame. Then he laid a sheet of paper on the frame and pressed down hard. When he peeled it off and held it up to them, it was covered in words – the right way round.

  As they watched, he laid another sheet of paper on the frame, then another. In half an hour he made ten perfect copies of the same page – a job that would have taken a scribe all day. Looking around Caxton’s shop, the neighbours saw stacks of frames, piles of paper and cases of half-bound books. When they bent to look at the titles, they saw that Caxton was making books of all kinds – prayer books, law books, storybooks, books of poetry. Books, they suddenly realized, no longer needed to be rare and secret – and nor did the ideas they contained. If books could be printed quickly, the words in them could be copied again and again, shared, passed from hand to hand and passed on again until everyone had read
them.

  And when that happened, the world really would begin to change…

  TIMELINE

  1069 The harrying of the north – William the Conqueror puts down Saxon rebellions in the north of England.

  1085 William orders a book listing all the land and property in England – Domesday Book.

  1087 After William dies, his son William Rufus becomes king of England.

  1093–97 Donald Ban seizes the Scottish throne. Civil war in Scotland. His nephews Duncan, Edgar, Alexander and David throw him out with Norman help.

  1099 Crusaders capture Jerusalem from the Muslims.

  1100 William Rufus is killed in a hunting accident, and Henry I becomes king.

  1120 Henry’s son drowns in the disaster of the White Ship. Now his daughter, Matilda, will be queen of England.

  1135–54 Civil wars in England between Matilda and her cousin Stephen, who seizes the throne. In the end they agree that when Stephen dies, Matilda’s son will be King Henry II.

  1157 Owain of Gwynedd and Malcolm IV of Scotland accept Henry as overlord.

  1168 Strongbow’s soldiers invade Ireland, invited by Dermot Mac Murrough, king of Leinster.

  1170 Henry’s knights murder Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury.

  1171 Henry II conquers Ireland.

  1180s A new kind of architecture with pointed arches arrives in Britain. – Gothic.

  1187 Saladin, sultan of Egypt, captures Jerusalem from the Christians.

  1189–99 Richard the Lionheart becomes king and sets off on crusade to win Jerusalem back. While he is away, his brother Prince John governs England. The people start to tell stories of Robin Hood. When Richard is killed, John becomes king.

  1215 John’s barons force him to agree to Magna Carta. When he dies, next year, his son becomes Henry III.

  1258 The barons agree the Provisions of Oxford, saying Henry should rule according to Magna Carta.

  1258–67 While Henry and his barons are quarrelling, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd frees Wales.

  1264 Simon de Montfort defeats Henry.

  1265 Simon de Montfort calls Parliament after beating Henry at the Battle of Lewes. But Henry’s son, Edward, defeats and kills him.

  1272 Edward I becomes king of England.

  1276–84 Edward conquers Wales. He passes the Statute of Rhuddlan to make Wales part of England.

  1290 All Jews are expelled from England.

  1292 The Scots ask Edward to settle the Great Cause – who should be king of Scotland. He chooses John Balliol; but when Balliol stops obeying him, he takes over most of Scotland.

  1297 William Wallace fights back and beats the English at Stirling Bridge.

  1305 William Wallace is defeated and killed.

  1306 Robert Bruce, the new king of Scotland, is defeated and goes into hiding.

  1307 Edward dies and his son becomes Edward II. The next year he marries Isabella, the She-Wolf of France.

  1312 The Ordainers, barons opposed to Edward, kill his favourite, Piers Gaveston.

  1314 Robert Bruce defeats the English at the battle of Bannockburn.

  1320 Scottish barons write the Declaration of Arbroath, proclaiming Scottish freedom.

  1327 Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, murder Edward and rule England in the name of Isabella’s son, Edward III.

  1330 Edward III takes power himself, and kills Mortimer.

  1337 Edward III attacks France, starting the Hundred Years War.

  1346 The English and Welsh beat the French at the Battle of Crécy.

  1348 The Black Death kills millions of people all over Europe.

  1356 The Black Prince captures the king of France at the Battle of Poitiers.

  1376 The Good Parliament stops the king taxing people too much. Death of the Black Prince. The next year, Edward III dies and Richard II becomes king at the age of ten.

  1381 Wat Tyler leads the Peasants’ Revolt.

  1380s Chaucer writes The Canterbury Tales.

  1380s John Wyclif and the Lollards challenge the pope.

  1399 Henry Bolingbroke kills Richard and becomes Henry IV.

  1403–08 The rebellion of the Percys, earls of Northumberland. Henry Percy – Hotspur – is killed in 1403.

  1404 Owain Glyn Dwr captures Harlech Castle. The English don’t win it back for five years.

  1413 Henry dies, and his son becomes Henry V. Two years later he attacks France and starts the Hundred Years War again.

  1415 The English win the Battle of Agincourt, their greatest victory of the war.

  1422 Henry V dies and his son becomes Henry VI.

  1453 The English lose everything in France except Calais. The Hundred Years War is over.

  1455 The start of the Wars of the Roses, between Henry of Lancaster (Henry VI) and Richard of York.

  1461 Richard of York’s son defeats the Lancastrians and becomes Edward IV.

  1470 Warwick the Kingmaker, who has changed sides, beats Edward, and Henry VI becomes king again.

  1471 Edward returns, beats Warwick and kills Henry VI.

  1476 William Caxton sets up the first printing press in Britain.

  1483 Edward dies. His sons are sent to the Tower of London by their uncle Richard, who becomes Richard III.

  1485 Henry Tudor, last of the Lancastrians, invades England and kills Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

  1492 Christopher Columbus discovers America.

  Henry VII

  ALTHOUGH Henry Tudor brought peace to England and Wales, some people hated the idea that a mere Welsh lord should be king of England, so they kept searching for claimants who had a better right to the throne than Henry. Once, a priest called Richard Symonds announced that he had found Edward IV’s nephew. He took him to Ireland, proclaimed him King Edward VI, then invaded Lancashire with a small army. As it happened, Edward IV’s real nephew was in London, so Henry could prove it was a trick. The impostor was actually a boy called Lambert Simnel, and after defeating the rebels Henry had him brought to his palace and put to work in the royal kitchens.

  Next, a rumour arrived from Burgundy, in France, that one of the princes in the Tower had actually escaped and was still alive. He arrived in Ireland calling himself King Richard IV, then landed in Cornwall and gathered an army. But he ran away when the king’s army approached, and was revealed as another impostor, whose real name was Perkin Warbeck. Henry had him taken to the Tower and executed.

  Other claimants followed. Henry dealt with each one as best he could and tried to concentrate on his main task – to make England rich again.

  For the other kings in Europe were getting much richer. Spain was becoming the most powerful nation in the world. A Spanish princess married the son of the emperor who ruled Austria, Belgium and Holland, so their son, the emperor Charles V, governed half of Europe. Then the Spanish conquered America, ending the ancient empires of the Incas and Aztecs, and seized its gold and silver mines. After that, galleons laden with treasure sailed across the ocean to make the king of Spain even richer.

  France was wealthy too. Its glamorous young king, Francis I, loved Renaissance ideas, and persuaded Leonardo da Vinci, the most famous artist in the world, to work in France. Instead of old-fashioned castles he built Renaissance palaces decorated with paintings and sculptures.

  The world was changing and Europe’s kings were becoming more powerful. Barons no longer dared challenge them, because kings had cannon that could batter down the walls of their castles. Ordinary lords couldn’t afford guns, but kings collected as many as they could, and their armies became stronger and stronger. Compared with Spain and France, it looked as if the kingdoms of England and Scotland might get left behind. That was why Henry Tudor worked so hard at his accounts and spent so long in meetings with his bankers. He was determined to save all he could and make England rich again.

  But the kings of Scotland were more interested in spending money than saving it. And their ambition eventually drove their kingdom to disaster.

  James IV o
f Scotland

  THE kings of Scotland came from a family called Stewart, who had taken over when Robert Bruce’s son died without any children. The Stewarts were determined to make Scotland as famous as any country in Europe.

  King James II made Scotland powerful by collecting guns, buying hundreds of them. He died when a gun blew up as he practised firing it. His grandson James IV was even more ambitious. He wanted to be admired as much as Henry VIII, the handsome young king of England who was crowned after Henry VII died.

  First James hired architects and sculptors to make Stirling Castle as magnificent as the Renaissance palaces Francis I was building in France.

  “Scotland won’t be left behind!” he told his courtiers proudly.

  Then he built Scotland a navy. He ordered two huge new ships, the Margaret and the Great Michael. Most ships in those days were quite small, but the Margaret and Great Michael were like floating castles, with towering masts and sides bristling with guns. They were far bigger than any of the king of England’s ships. James IV had the first proper navy in Britain.

  All this time, Scotland and England went on quarrelling as much as ever, even though James married Henry VII’s daughter Margaret. When Henry VIII and Francis I began to argue, the French easily persuaded James to declare war on England. After all, the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France had bound the two nations together for centuries.

  James forgot that, from the French point of view, the Auld Alliance was just a useful way to get England attacked from behind. He forgot that Scotland was a small country, and a poor one, and thought only of the power and glory he could win by beating the English. Proudly he led his army, with its great collection of guns, into Northumberland.

  But then it began to rain. The roads became muddy, and the guns were too heavy to drag through the mud, so the Scots had to leave most of them behind. James took up a position at a hill called Flodden, but the English marched round to attack him from the side, and when the battle began, it was the English cannon that roared the loudest. James ordered the Scots to charge again and again, but the English guns kept firing until the whole battlefield was covered with smoke.