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During the later middle ages, the English were notorious across
Europe as rebels against royal authority and killers of their own
kings. Their reputation was deserved. Between 1215 and 1485, depositions
were attempted against eight of the twelve kings who ruled (or,
in the case of the uncrowned Edward V, should have ruled) England.
Six of these eight attempted depositions were successful; only those
against John and Henry IV failed, narrowly in both cases. Four of
the six deposed kings were murdered outright, and a fifth died in
battle against a rebel army. Even kings who did not suffer formal
attempts at deposition faced significant challenges to their authority:
Henry III between 1258 and 1267, Edward I in 1297, and Henry V in
1414. Indeed, between 1215 and 1485, Edward III was the only king
of England who did not face the threat of an armed rebellion directed
against him. Historians have not
neglected these rebellions. But by and large, they have been more
interested in investigating the specific causes and contexts of
each individual rebellion than in analyzing rebellion itself as
a general (and generalizable) feature of late medieval English
political life. Claire Valente proposes to redress this balance
and, by so doing, "to reintegrate public law and political principle
. . . with the study of political action and social
realities" (9). Valente takes seriously the intellectual and ideological
presumptions that legitimated the exercise of violence against
kings, emphasizing not only the right of feudal defiance (diffidatio)
by an aggrieved vassal against his lord, but also customary and
Roman law distinctions between kingship and tyranny. Nor were
these rebellions merely, or even primarily, personal. Rather,
Valente argues, rebellion in the thirteenth century was political
in the broadest sense: an accepted and acknowledged way of compelling
a king to reform his kingdom when all other efforts to effect
such reforms had failed. Only as a last resort, however, were
rebels entitled to move violently against the king himself—and
even then, rebellion was regarded as legitimate (and hence capable
of drawing wide popular support) only when the reforms the rebels
demanded were seen to reflect a broad concern for the common good
of the realm.
During the fourteenth century,
however, the patterns of rebellion that arose out of these shared
understandings broke down, first in the 1320s during the troubled
reign of King Edward II, and then between 1386 and 1399, in the
events that led from the Lords Appellant to the deposition and
murder of Richard II. Fourteenth-century rebels moved more quickly
from dissent to violence than their thirteenth-century predecessors
had done; the causes for which they fought were more often personal
and financial than political and judicial; and as a result, fourteenth-century
rebellions drew their supporters from a narrower, less broadly
representative segment of political society. After 1405, this
entire tradition of legitimized, reform-driven rebellion came
to an end. The Wars of the Roses, in Valente's view, looked nothing
like the revolts that led to Magna Carta, the Provisions of Westminster,
or the Confirmation of the Charters in 1297.
Valente is not the first to contrast
the "good rebellions" of the thirteenth century with the "bad
rebellions" that came after them. Bishop William Stubbs (not quoted
by Valente, but whose ghost stalks her pages), noted the same
contrast in his Constitutional History of England more
than a century ago. Describing the transition from the thirteenth
to the fourteenth century, Stubbs wrote: "We pass from the age
of heroism to the age of chivalry, from a century ennobled by
devotion and self-sacrifice to one in which the gloss of superficial
refinement fails to hide the reality of heartless selfishness
and moral degradation—an age of luxury and cruelty. This
age [the fourteenth century] has its struggles, but they are contests
of personal and family faction, not of great causes; it has its
great constitutional results, but they seem to emerge from a confused
mass of unconscious agencies rather than from the direct action
of great lawgivers or from the victory of acknowledged principles.
. . . It was a period of private and political faction,
of foreign wars, of treason laws and judicial murders, of social
rebellion, of religious division, and it ends with a revolution
which seems to be only the determination of one bloody quarrel
and the beginning of another" (3rd ed., vol. 2, 1887, 319–20).
Specialists will find much to
quarrel with in the details of Valente's argument; historians
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular are likely
to feel that their chosen period has been roughly handled. But
Valente's insistence that historians need to take seriously the
ideological underpinnings of rebellion in later medieval England
deserves our respect. Behind the actions of these late medieval
rebels, historians will no doubt continue to reveal that predictable
mixture of personal pique, pure selfishness, and unconstrained
ambition that has characterized the human condition in every age.
But it is good to be reminded that personal pique and political
principle can reside together in the human heart; and that when
rebels took the field against their monarchs, they did so with
some awareness of the larger significance of their actions.
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