placed in
Westminster Abbey to commemorate his victories. The silver head was
presently stolen, and the loss is typical of all that he had struggled for.
His son, Henry VI, was but the shadow of a king, a puppet in the hands of
powerful nobles, who seized the power of England and turned it to self-
destruction. Meanwhile all his foreign possessions were won back by the
French under the magic leadership of Joan of Arc. Cade's Rebellion (1450)
and the bloody Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) are names to show how the
energy of England was violently destroying itself, like a great engine that
has lost its balance wheel. The frightful reign of Richard III followed,
which had, however, this redeeming quality, that it marked the end of civil
wars and the self-destruction of feudalism, and made possible a new growth
of English national sentiment under the popular Tudors.

In the long reign of Henry VIII the changes are less violent, but have more
purpose and significance. His age is marked by a steady increase in the
national power at home and abroad, by the entrance of the Reformation "by a
side door," and by the final separation of England from all ecclesiastical
bondage in Parliament's famous Act of Supremacy. In previous reigns
chivalry and the old feudal system had practically been banished; now
monasticism, the third mediaeval institution with its mixed evil and good,
received its death-blow in the wholesale suppression of the monasteries and
the removal of abbots from the House of Lords. Notwithstanding the evil
character of the king and the hypocrisy of proclaiming such a creature the
head of any church or the defender of any faith, we acquiesce silently in
Stubb's declaration[105] that "the world owes some of its greatest debts to
men from whose memory the world recoils."

While England during this period was in constant political strife, yet
rising slowly, like the spiral flight of an eagle, to heights of national
greatness, intellectually it moved forward with bewildering rapidity.
Printing was brought to England by Caxton (_c_. 1476), and for the first
time in history it was possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole
nation. Schools and universities were established in place of the old
monasteries; Greek ideas and Greek culture came to England in the
Renaissance, and man's spiritual freedom was proclaimed in the Reformation.
The great names of the period are numerous and significant, but literature
is strangely