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Read Chaucer, and you find his mental outlook is that of a child of seven. In the days of the Plantagenets grown men and women enjoyed stories of a crude simplicity that now only appeals to children. The human race is always progressing in great successive waves of civilization; after each wave breaks, a time of barbarism prevails, till man is again educated to a higher growth.
Yet the prediction would have been true; and they would have perceived that it was not altogether absurd, if they had considered that the country was then raising every year a sum which would have purchased the fee- simple of the revenue of the Plantagenets, ten times what supported the Government of Elizabeth, three times what, in the time of Cromwell, had been thought intolerably oppressive.
He, too, was a great warrior, whose deeds of prowess aroused as much enthusiasm among the Mongols as those of Coeur de Lion evoked in the days of the Plantagenets. The struggle with the Kins was rendered more bitter by the execution of several Mongols of importance, who happened to fall into the hands of the Kins.
Beginning as a contest between two rival branches of the Plantagenets for the kingship, these wars remained aristocratic throughout. That is to say, the common people took little interest in them, while the nobles, espousing sides, fought savagely and murderously, giving one another no quarter, sparing the lesser folk, but executing as traitors their prisoners of rank.
His people, ever so far back, had been Beltons of Belton. They told him that his family could be traced back to very early days before the Plantagenets, as he believed, though on this point of the subject he was very hazy in his information and he liked the idea of being the man by whom the family should be reconstructed in its glory.
It was under these circumstances that the Plantagenets became leaders in society, and added their valuable real estate in France to the English dominions. In 1154, Henry Plantagenet was thus the most powerful monarch in Europe, and by wedding his son Geoffrey to the daughter of the Duke of Brittany, soon scooped in that valuable property also.
The getting up of the "Field of the Cloth of Gold" created some murmurs among the English nobility, many of whom were injured by the expensive tastes of Wolsey. Among these was the Duke of Buckingham, hereditary high constable of England, and connected with the royal house of the Plantagenets. Henry, from motives of jealousy, both on account of his birth and fortune, had long singled him out as his victim. He was, also, obnoxious to Wolsey, since he would not flatter his pride, and he had, moreover, insulted him. It is very easy for a king to find a pretence for committing a crime; and Buckingham was arrested, tried, and executed, for making traitorous prophecies. His real crime was in being more powerful than it suited the policy of the king. With the death of Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, in 1521, commenced the bloody cruelty of Henry
Familiar scenes came back before her. Here was the nursery, there her mother's room, in another place the library. There, too, was the great hall up stairs, with pictures on each side of ancestors who went back to the days of the Plantagenets.
At first they had been inconsiderable, both in numbers and in weight; but before the war had lasted two years they became, not indeed the largest, but the most powerful faction in the country. Some of the old parliamentary leaders had been removed by death; and others had forfeited the public confidence. Pym had been borne, with princely honours, to a grave among the Plantagenets.
The stormy and troublous reigns of the Plantagenets make this a matter of no difficulty. Running his finger down the long list of rebellions and commotions, he finds that early in 1322 England was convulsed by the insurrection of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the king's near relation, supported by many powerful noblemen.
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