may perhaps be described as a "New" monarch born before his time. He
had some of the notions which the Tudors subsequently developed with
success; but he had none of their power and self-control, and he was
faced from his accession by a band of insubordinate uncles. Moreover,
it needed the Wars of the Roses finally to convince the country of the
meaning of the independence of the peerage. Richard fell a victim to
his own impatience and their turbulence. Henry IV came to the throne as
the king of the peers, and hardly maintained his uneasy crown against
their rival ambitions. The Commons, by constitutional reform, reduced
almost to insignificance a sovereignty which the Lords could not
overthrow by rebellion; and by insisting that the king should "live of
his own," without taxing the country, deprived him of the means of
orderly government. Their ideal constitution approached so nearly to
anarchy that it is impossible not to suspect collusion between them and
the Lords. The church alone could Henry placate by passing his statute
for burning heretics.

Henry V took refuge from this domestic imbroglio in a spirited foreign
policy, and put forward a claim more hollow than Edward III's to the
throne of France. There were temptations in the hopeless condition of
French affairs which no one but a statesman could have resisted; Henry,
a brilliant soldier and a bigoted churchman, was anything but a
statesman; and the value of his churchmanship may be gauged from the
fact that he assumed the insolence of a crusader against a nation more
catholic than his own. He won a deplorably splendid victory at
Agincourt, married the French king's daughter, and was crowned king of
France. Then he died in 1422, leaving a son nine months old, with
nothing but success in the impossible task of subduing France to save
the Lancastrian dynasty from the nemesis of vaulting ambition abroad
and problems shelved at home.