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Updated: July 1, 2025
"Bluewater, I shall be compelled to change ships with you, in order to get rid of the old stand-by's of the Plantagenets! They stick to me like leeches; and have got to be so familiar, that they criticise all my orders, and don't more than half obey them, in the bargain."
Such was the last crusader whom the annals of chivalry were to know; the man who had humbled the crescent as it had not been humbled since the days of the Tancreds, the Baldwins, the Plantagenets yet, after all, what was this brilliant adventurer when weighed against the tranquil Christian champion whom he was to meet face to face? The contrast was striking between the real and the romantic hero.
There were in our capital rich traders, who were not liverymen. Towns shrank into villages. Villages swelled into cities larger than the London of the Plantagenets. Unhappily while the natural growth of society went on, the artificial polity continued unchanged. The ancient form of the representation remained; and precisely because the form remained, the spirit departed.
A fortieth cousin, or the king, take this estate before yourself, though you are directly descended from all the old Wychecombes of the times of the Plantagenets!" "Such is the common law, Sir Gervaise. Were I Sir Wycherly's half-brother, or a son by a second wife of our common father, I could not take from him, although that common father had earned the estate by his own hands, or services."
Fuller wrote in his "Worthies," that "some who justly hold the surnames of Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plantagenets, are hid in the heap of common men."
This event facilitated an important change in our polity, a change which, it is true, could not have been long delayed, but which would not have been easily accomplished except at a moment of extreme danger. The time had at length arrived at which it was necessary to make a legal distinction between the soldier and the citizen. Under the Plantagenets and the Tudors there had been no standing army.
The sun of the Plantagenets went down, leaving the country weak and impoverished, from a contest in which the barons sought to establish their own power, to the detriment alike of the Crown and the FREEMEN. The latter might have exclaimed: "Till half a patriot, half a coward, grown, We fly from meaner tyrants to the throne."
James also assisted Perkin, his new brother-in-law, in an invasion of England, which failed, after which the pretender gave himself up. He was hanged amid great applause at Tyburn, and the Earl of Warwick, with whom he had planned to escape, was beheaded at Tower Hill. Thus, in 1499, perished the last of the Plantagenets of the male kind.
The Plantagenets and the Tudors had, it is true, occasionally supplied a deficiency in their revenue by a benevolence or a forced loan: but these expedients were always of a temporary nature. To meet the regular charge of a long war by regular taxation, imposed without the consent of the Estates of the realm, was a course which Henry the Eighth himself would not have dared to take.
It is, however, certain that the rights of individuals were often violated by the Plantagenets, and that the injured parties were often unable to obtain redress. According to law no Englishman could be arrested or detained in confinement merely by the mandate of the sovereign. In fact, persons obnoxious to the government were frequently imprisoned without any other authority than a royal order.
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