THE
CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY
OF
BRITISH WORTHIES.
VOLUME I.
LONDON:
CHARLES KNIGHT & CO., LUDGATE STREET.
1845.
LONDON: WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET.
CONTENTS.
| Page | |
| HENRY II. | 5 |
| ROGER BACON | 38 |
| EDWARD III. | 58 |
| WICLIFFE | 94 |
| CHAUCER | 120 |
| WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM | 145 |
CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY
OF
BRITISH WORTHIES.
Among the histories of eminent kings, that of our Henry II. is one ofthe most remarkable both in its beginning and its end, both in thecharacter of the man and in his fortunes; and, mostly tragic as theannals of human ambition are, there are few such histories thatexemplify more impressively the instability and vanity of all earthlygreatness.
Nature and fortune joined to make him great. The son of Matilda,daughter of the English king Henry I., he was through that descent,after the death of his grandfather, the undoubted male representative of William[Pg 6] the Conqueror, the founder of the reigning English dynasty, andas such the legitimate heir, at least after his mother, both of thecrown of England and of the dukedom of Normandy, the older acquisitionof his heroic race. His grandmother, the wife of Henry I., was Matilda,daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, herself the daughter of Edwardthe Outlaw, in the veins of whose descendants now flowed the main streamof the blood of Egbert and Alfred and the old Saxon royal line. Hisfather, whom his mother had married in 1127, two years after the deathof her first husband, the Emperor Henry V., by whom she had no issue,was Geoffrey Earl of Anjou, surnamed Plantagenet, from his assuming ashis ensign, and wearing on the crest of his helmet, a sprig of broom (inFrench plante genêt); whose father, Earl Fulk, had immediately beforethis marriage resigned to him all his French possessions and honours,upon being himself elected to the throne of Jerusalem, in whi