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Updated: July 1, 2025
'Tis curious to reflect, that at the vast baronial feasts, in the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors, where we read of such onslaught of beeves, muttons, hogs, fowl and fish, the courtly knights and beauteous dames had no other vegetable save bread not even a potato! Von Os. "They carved at the meal with their gloves of steel, And drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd." Dov.
She had been great under the Plantagenets and Tudors: she was again great under the princes who reigned after the Revolution: but, under the Kings of the House of Stuart, she was a blank in the map of Europe. She had lost one class of energies, and had not yet acquired another. That species of force, which, in the fourteenth century had enabled her to humble France and Spain, had ceased to exist.
This lady had inherited, in no common degree, the fierce nature of the Plantagenets; born to command, she had rallied round her the Courtenays, the Nevilles, and all the powerful kindred of Richard the King Maker, her grandfather.
Progressing, rapidly under the Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, and in the time of the Plantagenets, they were in the fifteenth century a great and wealthy people, illustrious for their commercial transactions, dealing in every species of commodity, visited by merchants from every part of Europe, and envied by the most flourishing communities, such as the trading oligarchies of Italy.
Among other things I remember, that in the course of conversation, while tendering some civilities to Auguste, the use of his riding horses, his cabriolet, or his services in showing him some of the lions of London, he observed that Monsieur de Chatenoeuf must not consider such an offer impertinent on his part, since he believed, if our genealogy were properly traced, some sort of cousinship could be established; as more than one of the De Chavannes had intermarried in old times with the Chatenoeufs of Gascony, when both the families, like their native provinces, had been acting in alliance with the English Plantagenets, against the French kings of the house of Valois.
The wealth of the great goldsmiths of the Royal Exchange would have become as insecure as that of a Jew under the Plantagenets, as that of a Christian under a Turkish Pasha. Rich men would have tried to invest their acquisitions in some form in which they could lie closely hidden and could be speedily removed.
He spoke with the air of an archaeological Hercules, to whom difficulties were nothing. It seemed as if he would have been quite ready to "go in" for some sidereal branch of the Plantagenets, or the female descendants of the Hardicanute family, if George Sheldon had suggested that the intestate's next of kin was to be found there. "Mat Haygarth, by all means," he said.
The aristocracy of England formed the constitution of the Plantagenets; the Wars of the Roses destroyed that aristocracy, and the despotism of the Tudors succeeded. Renovated by more than a century of peace and the spoils of the Papacy, the aristocracy of England attacked the first Stuarts, who succeeded to a despotism which they did not create.
As in the days of the Plantagenets the country had not the advantage of possessing a Board of Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, nor, indeed, any office in which the records of the ships built, altered, rebuilt, or pulled to pieces were kept, or, indeed, any naval records whatever, we are without the means of ascertaining what special improvements were introduced either in shipbuilding or in the fitting or manning of ships during each particular reign.
Though the Liberi Homines or FREEMEN were, as a class, overborne in this struggle, and reduced to vassalage, yet their descendants were able, under the leadership of Cromwell, to regain some of the rights and influence of which they had been despoiled under the Plantagenets.
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