sequestrated. Next year did little or nothing for him. King Edward the Third, bound hand and foot by beautiful Alice Perrers, forgot in his dotage, or could not aid in his feebleness, the genius that had created the noble turrets of Windsor. Winchester's name was specially excepted among the pardons granted in 1377, the year of Edward's jubilee. In this dark hour his brother clergy, met in convocation, lifted so bold a voice in his behalf that his revenues were restored to him, and all penalties were remitted. But the case had cost him ten thousand marksa heavy punishment in itself.

During the reign of Richard the Second, Wykeham took a leading part in politics, and brought to a successful end his great educational projects. New College at Oxford was finished in 1386; Winchester School, in 1393. In the Council of Regency appointed by Parliament at Gloucester's instance in 1386, to control the government of Richard, he was included as one of the king's friends. Wykeham seems never to have lost the respect and confidence of his sovereign, who, three years later, forced on him the acceptance of the Great Seal. His second tenure of the chancellorship ended in 1391, when he seems to have retired from the stir of public life to the quiet of his episcopal palace, where he varied the routine of duty with the oversight of the masons and sculptors who were busied in rebuilding his cathedral. But his life wore quietly away in the performance of his sacred duties. He died in 1404 at South Waltham, having reached the age of eighty years, and having seen four kings on the English throne.

Wykeham, outliving both Chaucer and Wyclif, whom no doubt he knew well, formed a link between the Angevin kings and the House of Lancaster. His architecture founded his fortunes; but his rectitude, his knowledge of humanity, his talents for public work, and his steady industry contributed to build upon that foundation a fame which entitles him to an honourable place among illustrious Englishmen.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE PERCIES AND GLENDOWER.

Henry the Fourth-Border wars-Owen Glendower-The Percies- Battle of Shrewsbury-Old Percy-Prince Hal-Death of Owen.

THE

*

HE brave grandson of Edward the Third, who had already won laurels on many fields in Prussia and elsewhere, and who had visited the far East in search of adventure, now sat on the throne, by the will of Parliament alone. The rightful heir was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, the great-grandson of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, elder brother of John of Gaunt. His father, Roger, had been declared heir-presumptive by Richard in 1385; but Roger was killed in Ireland the year before Richard's deposition, and Parliament passed over his son, then a boy of ten, on account of his youth.

In con

Though Henry shut up the young Earl of March and his sisters in Windsor Castle, his throne was by no means secure. The kings of France and Scotland refused to acknowledge him, and allowed their ships to ravage the English coasts. sequence of repeated invasions by the Scots, who were encouraged by France, Henry soon found himself in- 1401 volved in a Scottish war. He marched to the Firth of Forth, and burned Leith; but he accomplished nothing else. Famine drove him back across the Border. The slopes of the Cheviots and the basins of Annan, Tweed, and Tyne were indeed

* See Genealogical Table, p. 254.

at this time always running with blood. Only a dozen years before (in 1388), Sir Henry Percy, better known as Hotspur, having lost his pennon in a skirmish with Douglas at Newcastle, flung his men with a sudden surprise upon the Scots encamped at Otterburn.* The battle of Chevy Chase raged under the harvest moon. The Douglas fell, pierced with three spears; but his victorious countrymen carried off the English leader a captive to Scotland. Such raids and such fights occurred continually. Now, when Henry withdrew from the fruitless. war, the Percies kept up the hereditary feud, aided by an injured Scottish nobleman, the Earl of March.† The allies overthrew the Scots at Nesbit Moor. A little later (Sept. 14,

1402), a still more decisive battle was won by the allied 1402 forces of March and the Percies at Homildon Hill in Northumberland. Foolishly the Scots stood, like deer in a park, on the sides of the hill, while the English archers, standing below, discharged flights of arrows at the living targets.

While war thus desolated the Border counties, its flames had also burst out in Wales with a violence which nothing could abate. Owen Glendower (or Glyndwr) kindled the war, and maintained it with little interruption until his death. see who this Welshman was.

Let us

Born in Merionethshire about 1349, and descended through his mother from Llewelyn, the last native Prince of Wales, Owen Glendower received a good education, studied in London, and ultimately became shield-bearer to Richard the Second. When that monarch lost his throne, Glendower retired to his little estate in Wales; but not to rest. He had a powerful neighbour, an Anglo-Norman noble, Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who cast covetous eyes on a part of his inheritance. Grey seized the

Otterburn Ward lies in Northumberland, on the Reed, twenty miles west by north of Hexham.

† A Scottish Earl of March. Not Edmund Mortimer.

Homildon or Humbleton Hill is about a mile from the market-town of Wooler in Northumberland. Nesbit Moor lies about four miles north of the same town.

In vain Owen appealed

land when Henry seized the throne. to the Parliament for redress. His suit being dismissed, he became furious. The malicious conduct of Grey in keeping back the writ which summoned Owen to follow the banner of King Henry into Scotland, led to an open rupture. Grey's land and the town of Ruthyn* were naturally the first points of attack. The Welsh harps rang boldly out in praise of Owen, a lineal descendant of their native kings. Claiming for him magical gifts and direct intercourse with the world of spirits, they added awe to admiration in the regard with which the simple minds of the Welsh peasantry had invested their hero. He rapidly became invincible. In vain Henry invaded Wales three times. Glendower and the mountains proved too strong for the levies of the midland meadows. Choosing, now Plinlimmon, now Snowdon, for his base of operations, the Welsh chieftain spread the ravages of war all round these giant cones of rock. The English universities were emptied of their Welsh students, the English farms of their Welsh servants; for a tide had set in which bore the mountaineers back from every quarter to the blue hills they loved.

1402

A prisoner whom Owen took at Pilleth Hill† caused his sphere of operations to widen. This was Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle of that young Earl of March who came in before Henry as the lineal heir to the English throne. Mortimer's friends wanted to ransom him from Glendower. The king, mindful of his relationship to a rival, refused to permit this. The refusal galled the proud spirit of Percy, whose wife was Mortimer's sister. The Percies had other causes of complaint. Henry had deprived them of the ransom of their Scottish prisoners, and he owed them a large sum of money, which he was unable, or unwilling, to repay. The Percies then drew the

*

Ruthyn or Ruthin, a borough in Denbighshire, stands on a hill above the Clwyd, eight miles south-east of Denbigh.

† Pilleth Hill is near Knyghton in Radnorshire, which lies upon the Teme.

sword against the king whose battles they had just been fighting. The four English leaders of the great plot then formed---Hotspur, his father the Earl of Northumberland, his uncle the Earl of Worcester, and his friend Scrope, Archbishop of York -added to their number the valiant Welshman, Owen Glendower, won over by his captive Mortimer, and the Scottish Earl of Douglas, bribed by a release without ransom.

July 21, 1403

men.

Douglas marched his vassals across the Border; Worcester brought archers from Cheshire; and with the aid of these Hotspur, his father being sick, led an army towards North Wales in the hope of meeting the levies of Glendower. But Henry, with great military skill and promptitude, intercepted the march at Shrewsbury,* placing himself between the Northerners and their Welsh allies. A battle ensued, each army amounting to about fourteen thousand With a shout of "Esperance, Percy," replied to on the royal side with "St. George for us," Hotspur and Douglas led a glittering wave of steel in full charge on the army of the king. The line yielded to the flood, but closing instantly behind, pent it up as with a parapet of stone. Arrows rained upon the huddled mass, thus cut off from their friends; and in three hours the rebels were annihilated: the shaft had beaten the lance. An arrow pierced Hotspur's brain; Worcester, taken prisoner, had his head cut off without delay; and Douglas remained in close but kindly custody.

The short career of the other conspirators may be summed up in a few words. Scrope, having joined old Percy in a renewal of the civil war two years after the battle of Shrewsbury, fell into the hands of the king, and, in spite of the mitre that he wore, lost his head on the block. England had never before seen a prelate die by the axe of the public headsman ; and popular superstition ascribed the so-called leprosy which

* Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire, lies on the Severn, not far from the middle of the shire. The battle was fought about three miles from the town.