Seven English Cities eBook

No wonder the earl led a rising against his liege, who had first mercifully meant to imprison him for life, and then more mercifully pardoned him.  But there seems to have been fighting up and down the centuries from the beginning, in York, interspersed with praying and wedding and feasting.  After the citizens drove out Conqueror William’s garrison, and Earl Waltheof provided against the Normans’ return by standing at the castle gate and chopping their heads off with his battle-axe as they came forth, William efficaciously devastated the city and the country as far as Durham.  His son William gave it a church, and that “worthy peer,” King Stephen, a hospital.  In his time the archbishop and barons of York beat the Scotch hard by, and the next Scotch king had to do homage to Henry II. at York for his kingdom.  Henry III. married his sister at York to one Scotch king and his daughter to that king’s successor.  Edward I. and his queen Eleanor honored with their presence the translation of St. William’s bones to the Minster; Edward II.

retreated from his defeat at Bannockburn to York, and Edward III. was often there for a king’s varied occasions of fighting and feasting.  Weak Henry VI. and his wilful Margaret, after their defeat at Towton by Edward IV., escaped from the city just in time, and Edward entered York under his own father’s head on Micklegate Bar.  Richard III. was welcomed there before his rout and death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens.  Henry VII. wedded Elizabeth, the “White Rose of York,” and afterward visited her city; Mary, Queen of Scots, was once in hiding there, and her uncouth son stayed two nights in York on his way to be crowned James I. in London.  His son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touched many for the king’s evil; later, he was there again, but could not cure the sort of king’s evil which raged past all magic in the defeat of his followers at Marston Moor by Cromwell.  The city yielded to the Puritans, whose temperament had already rather characterized it.  James II., as Duke of York, made it his brief sojourn; “proud Cumberland,” returning from Culloden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the city and received its freedom for destroying the last hope of the Stuarts; perhaps the twenty-two rebels who were then put to death in York were executed in the very square where those wicked men thought I was wanting to play the horses.  The reigning family has paid divers visits to the ancient metropolis, which was the capital of Britain before London was heard of.  The old prophecy of her ultimate primacy must make time if it is to fulfil itself and increase York’s seventy-two thousand beyond London’s six million.

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