Sunday, April 6, 2008

116 years


of making fortunes, plunder, misery, abject poverty, and so on.  Starting with Edward III, carried on through the Black Prince, England, a poor, sparsely inhabited country, systematically plundered and made miserable one of untold riches.  In this context Henry V had a bit of Bush in him, an unshakable belief in his own calling to arms, a pronounced piety, and the continuance of the bankrupting of the English state in order to pay for the war.  Something I didn't know, from Mr. Seward, is that the 7 years after Henry's death from that most military of causes (dysentery) were the most successful years for the English in France.  This mostly due to his brother, the Duke of Bedford (shown left here)

Without the Hundred Years War, perhaps the Wars of the Roses would have been avoided. Did the fall of Lancastrian France presage the eventual fall of the House of Lancaster?  Also, an internecine strife extant between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs was in the mix.  Of course a series of events such as the Wars of the Roses doesn't happen in isolation.  Of course, in a general sense, nothing happens in isolation.

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