Richard II was not the man to deal with these over-mighty subjects. He 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. Step by step the curse of war came home to roost. Henry V's abler but less brilliant brother, Bedford, stemmed till his death the rising tide of English faction and French patriotism. Then the expulsion of the English from France began, and a long tale of failure discredited the government. The nation had spirit enough to resent defeat, but not the means to avoid it; and strife between the peace party and the war party in the government resolved itself into a faction fight between Lancastrians and Yorkists. The consequent impotence of the government provoked a bastard feudal anarchy, maintained by hirelings instead of liegemen. Local factions fought with no respect for the law, which was administered, if at all, in the interests of one or other of the great factions at court; and these two great factions fostered and organized local parties till the strife between them grew into the Wars of the Roses.