monarch. Henry IV. felt the force of the objection that existed to his
title, and he sought to evade it by pretending to found his claim to
the crown on descent from Edmund of Lancaster, whom he assumed to have
been the _elder_ brother of Edward I.; but no weight was attached
to this plea by his contemporaries, who saw in him a monarch created
by conquest and by Parliamentary action. The struggle that then began
endured until both Plantagenets and Tudors had become extinct, and
the English crown had passed to the House of Stuart, in the person of
James I., who was descended in the female line from the Duke of
Clarence, through Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV., and
wife of Henry VII. Intrigues, insurrections, executions, and finally
great civil wars, grew out of the usurpation of the throne by the line
of Lancaster. We find the War of the Roses spoken of by nearly all
writers on it as beginning in 1455, when the first battle of St. Albans
was fought, but in fact the contest of which that war was but the
extreme utterance began nearly sixty years earlier than the day of the
Battle of St. Albans, its commencement dating from the time that Henry
IV. became King. A variety of circumstances prevented it from assuming
its severest development until long after all the actors in its early
stages had gone to their graves. Henry IV. was a man of superior
ability, which enabled him, though not without struggling hard for it,
to triumph over all his enemies; and his early death prevented a
renewal of the wars that had been waged against him. His son, the
overrated Henry V., who was far inferior to his father as a statesman,
entered upon a war with France, and so distracted English attention
from English affairs; and had he lived to complete his successes, all
objection to his title would have disappeared. Indeed, England herself
would have disappeared as a nation, becoming a mere French province, a
dependency of the House of Plantagenet reigning at Paris. But the
victor of Agincourt, like all the sovereigns of his line, died young,