Edward V. was between twelve and thirteen when he came to the throne. His reign, which lasted from the 9th of April to the 26th of June, was entirely occupied by a short and not very intelligible revolution, which terminated in the accession of his uncle, Richard of Gloucester. On the death of Edward IV., the state of parties was rather complicated. In the period of success which followed his restoration in 1471, he had collected round him counsellors from all parties, although chiefly inclined to the new nobility. His friends were thus divided into three sections—the Queen and her family, the most prominent members of which were Anthony, Lord Rivers; Grey, Earl of Dorset; his brother Sir Richard Grey, and Lord Lisle, who seem to have worked in unison with the Chancellor, Cardinal Rotheram, Archbishop of York, and Morton, Bishop of Ely: there were, secondly, the new nobility, of whom Hastings and Stanley were the representatives: and, thirdly, a certain number of the older nobles led by Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and Sir John Howard. The two latter sections were full of jealousy of the Queen’s party, in which feeling Richard joined. But his real connection was with Buckingham and the old nobles. His first step was, by a union of the other two parties, to overthrow the influence of the Queen. This he immediately proceeded to do.
As the young King was being brought to London for his coronation, under the care of Rivers and Grey, to whom his education had been intrusted, and under whose charge he had lived at Ludlow, Richard and Buckingham, with 900 men, appeared upon their line of march at Northampton. Rivers and Grey, conscious of the advantage which the appearance of the King in London would give them, were unwilling to come to an open quarrel, and sent Edward forward to Stony Stratford, while they went to pay their respects to Gloucester, who had taken the oath of allegiance, and hitherto put on all the appearance of loyalty. The two Lords were taken prisoners at Northampton, and Richard and Buckingham suddenly advancing to Stratford, by the rapidity of their movements dispersed 2000 men who accompanied Edward, and took possession of him. The news spread dismay in London. The Queen, her son Richard and her daughters, with Lord Lisle and the other Grey, took sanctuary at Westminster; while Hastings calmed men’s minds by assuring them of Richard’s loyalty, that he had only withdrawn the King from the pernicious influence of his relations, and that he would speedily appear with him to crown him. Upon Richard’s appearance, therefore, everything at first went on in the regular order.
According to precedent, Richard was appointed Protector or President of the Council. With the exception of the removal of Rotheram, and the appointment of Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, in his place, no important changes were made, and the Parliament was summoned, and the coronation appointed for midsummer.
Having thus vanquished one party, Richard determined to get rid of his other rivals also, and to rest exclusively upon Buckingham and the old nobles. The coronation was settled for the 22nd of June, when suddenly Richard despatched a messenger, Sir Richard Ratcliffe, to the North, where he was much beloved, bidding the people hasten to his aid, as the Queen was aiming at the life of himself and Buckingham. There is no proof of any such conspiracy. But the quarrel between the two sections of the Council is marked by the fact that they met apart, Hastings and his followers at St. Paul’s, Richard, Buckingham, and their friends, at Crosby Place. They were however all joined on the 13th of June in the Tower, when Richard suddenly appeared with angry and suspicious countenance, charged the Queen and Jane Shore, the King’s mistress, who now lived with Hastings, with aiming at his life by sorcery, in proof of which he exhibited one of his arms, which was smaller than the other, and included Hastings in the charge. At a given signal armed men entered the chamber, and Hastings, Stanley, and the Bishops of York and Ely, were apprehended. Hastings was beheaded without trial on the spot.
This coup d’état was immediately followed up. The people were summoned to the Tower, where Buckingham and Richard appeared in rusty armour, as though in their extreme necessity they had taken it from the armoury. Jane Shore was compelled to do penance through the streets of London. The Queen was persuaded by the Archbishop of Canterbury to surrender the young Prince Richard. And news arrived that, both in the North and in Wales, the people had risen for Richard. At the same time Grey and Rivers, hitherto kept prisoners in Northampton, were beheaded. It only remained for Richard to find some pretext for assuming the crown. He felt the necessity of forestalling the coronation, which would probably have withdrawn from him the protectorate, and have brought a commission of regency into power. On the very day that the coronation was to have been held, Dr. Shaw, brother of the Mayor of London, was put up to preach at Paul’s Cross. He took for his text, “The imperfect branches shall be broken off, their fruit unprofitable,”[100] and proceeded to expatiate upon the lax life of the late King; and moreover, to renew the charge which Clarence had once made, that that King was himself illegitimate. As for the present Princes, he asserted that they too were bastards. According to him, before Edward’s marriage with Elizabeth Woodville, he had been engaged to Lady Eleanor Talbot; by the laws of the Church, therefore, his subsequent marriage was void, and the King and his brothers illegitimate. He drew attention to the want of resemblance between Richard of York and Edward IV., and the close likeness which existed, on the other hand, between Richard and the Protector. At this moment the Protector made his appearance, expecting that the crowd would cry, “Long live, King Richard!” But the charges were too new and surprising; he was received in perfect silence. The failure of this attempt induced him to repeat it; and two days after, Buckingham came to Guildhall, and there addressed the people in a similar strain. He was determined to take no refusal, and upon a few cries of approbation, commanded the people to follow him to Baynard’s Castle, where Richard then was. The Parliament was just assembling, a number of Lords and representatives from the Commons joined the crowd, and enabled him with some show of truth to draw up a petition called “The choice and prayer of the Lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons of England,” in which, after recapitulating his story, he requested Richard to accept the crown. After some show of resistance, Richard accepted the petition, and took solemn possession of the throne at Westminster Abbey on the 26th. That this choice was by no means unanimous is plain from the order issued, commanding the inhabitants of London to keep within their houses after ten o’clock, and forbidding the wearing of arms.
Having once secured the throne, the object of Richard seems to have been to heal, as far as possible, the wounds that the war had made. John Lord Howard was the one of his followers whose reward was the most striking. His mother having been a Mowbray, he was made Duke of Norfolk and hereditary Marshal of England. The prisoners the King had taken, in company with Hastings, were released, and with strange and rash magnanimity, Stanley was given the office of Constable of England, while Morton of Ely, an old Lancastrian, whose influence he seems to have underrated, was sent to reside in a castle in the West of England. He even caused the body of Henry VI. to be removed from Chertsey Abbey to Windsor, as though the breach between the families was healed. The King was crowned in London, and then proceeded to make a progress through England. He had every reason to think his position was a good one. The people everywhere received him with a fair show of good-will. In York, where he was a second time crowned, his reception was enthusiastic. His foreign relations were also promising. It is true that the recognition of France was somewhat brief and grudging; but with the young Philip of Burgundy there was an amicable correspondence; while Queen Isabella of Castile congratulated him heartily on having removed the stain of his brother’s degrading marriage, and desired a close alliance with him against France, the chief reason perhaps of her show of affection.
But, though all at first seemed so promising, Richard soon learnt that it was not for him to pass unopposed into the position of a peaceful governor of a united England. The injury he had done the memory of his late brother, the cold-heartedness with which he had pushed aside the nephew of whom he was the guardian, and who with his brother was kept in secret confinement in the Tower, revived the old affection with which the South of England had regarded Edward IV. Moreover, the Queen’s party was not destroyed, while Richard’s own generosity had left at liberty supporters of the old state of affairs. Consequently the whole South of England, from Kent to Devonshire, showed signs of an intended insurrection.
It was just at this moment, and perhaps in the hope of removing those around whom disaffection might centre, that the King caused the report to be spread that the young Princes had disappeared from the Tower. It is needless to enter into a discussion as to their fate. The picturesque story which represents them as smothered beneath their bedclothes is the creation of the next age. Indeed, the popular view of the events of this reign and of the character of Richard is derived almost wholly from Sir Thomas More’s life of him. All that contemporary writers mention is that the Princes disappeared, and were probably killed. Comines, the French historian, an excellent observer, says simply that Richard had the Princes killed in the Tower. And the fact that all those who had the charge of them, even down to Forest, the warden, were rewarded, makes it almost impossible that this should not have been the case.
The effect was not what Richard expected. The friends of his late brother and of the Queen became still more anxious to preserve the old stock, and, probably at the suggestion of Morton, a Lancastrian who had found favour in Richard’s sight, the project of a marriage between Edward’s daughter Elizabeth and the young Richmond began to be discussed. The conspiracy soon proved to be very widespread, and it must have been a terrible surprise to Richard to hear that his chief friend and accomplice, Buckingham, had declared for the house of Lancaster. That nobleman’s motives are not clear, but he probably found that the party of the old nobility, of which he was the leader, was no better off under Richard than it had been under Edward. Like other men of a tyrannical turn of mind, Richard had found his chief support in obsequious followers, and Ratcliffe, Catesby, and Lovel were his real advisers and friends. The Duke, therefore, an unprincipled and very ambitious man, thought he saw his advantage in becoming a principal agent in the restoration of the exiled house. It is probable, also, that the influence and skill of Morton, with whom he had been in communication, may have had something to do with it.
News was also brought to Richard that the young Richmond, who after Tewkesbury had fled with his uncle to Brittany, and had there become the centre of the Lancastrian party, was meditating a descent on England. Richard displayed his usual energy. He called on the men of York, on whom he could rely, to meet him at Leicester; hastily wrote to the Archbishop of York to send him the Great Seal, an unconstitutional act which Russell did not resist; put a price on the head of Buckingham; and appointed, as though sure of victory, a vice-constable to superintend any summary executions that might be necessary. Meanwhile, Kent, Surrey, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Devon had risen, and Grey, Lord Dorset, had declared for Henry Tudor in Exeter. It was the intention of Buckingham, who was in Wales, to form a junction with the Southern leaders. For this purpose it was necessary to cross the Severn. But Sir Humphrey Stafford had broken the bridges, the floods were out, and the river impassable. His Welsh followers deserted, and Buckingham was obliged to fly. He sought a refuge with a dependant of his own in Shropshire, of the name of Banister, by whom he was betrayed. After vain entreaties for a personal interview with Richard, and for a legal trial, he was summarily executed. Richmond’s part of the conspiracy had been an equal failure. His fleet had been scattered by a storm. He himself reached Plymouth, but the news of the failure of Buckingham, and the appearance of the King in the South, before whose approach all the gatherings of the rebels dissolved, induced him to return to Brittany.
Again undisputed master of England, Richard summoned a Parliament to meet him in January. As was usual when one party was predominant, it proved to be devoted to the Government. Richard’s special favourite, Catesby, was chosen for speaker, and all Richard’s claims to the throne were declared to be just. Nor was this all: the oath of allegiance was demanded from all the adult population of England; and a huge bill of attainder and confiscation, mentioning more than 500 names, was passed. As the King was allowed to regrant the confiscated property, he was enabled to fill the southern counties with northern proprietors devoted to his cause; while with questionable wisdom, as it afterwards appeared, he sought to purchase the fidelity of the Stanleys, by giving to Lord Stanley, her present husband, the property of the Countess Margaret of Richmond, who was included in the bill of attainder.
But though defeated in his first efforts, her son, Henry Tudor, continued his preparations abroad. It was in vain that Richard, by promising Francis of Brittany his assistance against France, and by bribing the all-powerful minister Pierre Landais, succeeded in procuring Henry’s dismissal from Brittany. He fled to the Court of Charles VIII. of France, where he was well received, and where the Lancastrian exiles gathered round him. Richard felt that all his efforts were necessary to oppose this Prince. He collected troops, demanded ships from the Cinque Ports, attempted a reconciliation with the Queen Dowager, by allowing her with her daughters to leave the sanctuary at Westminster, and contemplated a marriage between his own son Edward and her eldest daughter Elizabeth, a marriage which would have been the death blow to the Lancastrian party. He succeeded moreover in procuring a three years’ truce with Scotland, and the promise of a marriage between the Duke of Rothesay, the heir to the Scotch crown, and his niece.[101] The most important part of his plan was frustrated by the untimely death of his son, which plunged him in the deepest grief. But he strove to supply his place by nominating his nephew John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln, his heir.
Meanwhile the feeling of uneasiness increased. Lancastrian emissaries moved to and fro through the country. Clifford and some others of them were apprehended and put to death. But the evil was too great to admit of a speedy remedy. Libels were freely scattered through the country; among others the well-known couplet, “The rat, the cat, and Lovel the dog, rule all England under the Hog,” a plain allusion to his chief friends, Ratcliffe, Catesby and Lovel. William Collingbourne, its author, was captured and put to death. But libels increased in number, especially when there seemed to be grounds for asserting that, though his wife was still living, he was himself thinking of a subsequent marriage with the Princess Elizabeth of York. The opportune illness and death of his wife, and, it may be, the love[102] felt for him by the Princess, added such an air of truth to the story, that, at the instigation of his best friends, he was induced to make a public contradiction of it before the Common Council in London. His finances, too, were in disorder. Free-handed and ostentatious, he had speedily spent the wealth which his brother’s avarice had accumulated; and though he had himself caused a bill to be passed to put an end to benevolences, he was reduced to have recourse to that illegal method of taxation which the people in bitter jest termed the raising of malevolences.
He was however prepared, when Richmond, supported by the French, made his second attempt upon England. But unfortunately for Richard, treason was at work among his own followers, and the Stanleys, without principle, without gratitude, and with a constant eye to their own aggrandizement, were in secret alliance with their young kinsman the Lancastrian Prince. At length the invasion came. The place of landing, which had been kept a profound secret, was Milford Haven: for the Tudor thought it prudent to enlist the national prejudices of the Welsh in his favour. The Leopard of England and the Dragon of Wales floated side by the side on his standards. He advanced in safety to Shropshire; and the Welsh leaders joined him, as well as the Talbots of Shrewsbury. Richard had assembled his forces in the centre of England. Northumberland brought him troops from the North, Howard from the South, Brackenbury from London, Norfolk from the East. But it was very doubtful what part the Stanleys would take; and it was through the county where they were powerful, both as proprietors and as the King’s governors, that Richmond had to pass. Lord Stanley demanded leave to go to his county; but the King, whose suspicions had been raised, insisted on his leaving his son Lord Strange as a hostage. Pleading illness, Lord Stanley had refused to join Richard, and with 5000 men retired before the invader, whom his brother Sir William had now openly joined. In August the armies approached one another in the neighbourhood of Atherstone. Richard then threw aside all doubts. He ordered Lord Strange to be beheaded, and felt that the struggle must be a final one. Lord Strange’s keepers, however, thought it well to await the issue of the battle before carrying out the command: and in the middle of the struggle, Lord Stanley, who, afraid for his son’s life, had kept aloof with his troops, suddenly joined Richmond. This turned the fortunes of the day; and in spite of the greatest personal bravery, Richard’s army was completely beaten, and himself killed.
His character has been the subject of much discussion, nor is this strange. Had he lived in times of greater security, he would have been an able and admirable governor. Several of the enactments of his reign attest his wisdom and his love of justice. He recognized the evil of benevolences, and forbad them, although necessity drove him to have recourse to them. His efforts were much directed to the re-establishment of justice, to support which he had caused a bill to be passed, to secure the respectability of jurymen, by forbidding any but freeholders to the amount of 40s. from serving in that capacity. He restrained the lawlessness of the barons by the suppression of liveries; and while promising to uphold the liberties of the Church, had shown that he would not allow any interference with the civil power. He had also fostered the trade of England by opening fresh markets for English wool both in Spain and in Iceland. His personal character, too, was attractive. With beautiful though peculiar features, he was liberal and at times forgiving to the verge of folly. He had pardoned and extended constant favour to the wives and families of his political victims. In spite of his strange charge of adultery against her, he had been always a dutiful and affectionate son to his mother. The gentle side of his disposition is perhaps shown by his passionate love of music. But the troublous times in which he lived called out all his worst characteristics; and for political ends he had shown himself scheming, cold, and cruel; while the tyrannical temperament, which could brook no opposition, hurried him into deeds of violence which were the proximate cause of his downfall.
It is necessary, as the border-land is thus reached between modern civilization and that of the middle ages, to say a few words on the political condition of the nation, which allowed of the establishment of the personal monarchy of the Tudors, and of the social state of the people from which modern forms of civilization were to spring.
During the earlier part of the Lancastrian rule, Parliament, and especially the House of Commons, had apparently continued to rise in power. The Constitutional growth of the fourteenth century had been continued. The Commons had secured the unquestioned right of originating money bills, not to be altered by the House of Lords, nor discussed in the presence of the King. They had secured the right not only of recommending in petitions, but also of joining as an equal estate of the realm in the passing of laws. They had succeeded during the reign of Henry VI. in preventing any changes in the form of their petitions (which had not unfrequently been introduced when, after the session, the petition was enrolled), by bringing in complete Statutes, called Bills, to be rejected or accepted as a whole, instead of their old petitions. They had, in several instances, practised unquestioned the right of impeachment, and claimed, with some degree of success, the freedom of their members from arrest, even during the recess of Parliament. But in spite of this apparent advance, the real power of the Parliament before the close of the Wars of the Roses had almost disappeared. A statute in the eighth year of Henry VI. limited the franchise, with regard to the election of knights of the shire, to freeholders of lands or tenements to the value of forty shillings. This at once gave an aristocratic tone to the House. In addition to this it had become the fashion both of the nobility and of the Crown to tamper with the elections. With the new restricted franchise, the power of local magnates in the county elections was predominant, while, as regards the boroughs, the sheriffs exercised a power of summoning burgesses from such towns only as they pleased, and it was not difficult for the Crown or ruling party to bring the sheriffs under their influence. While the House of Commons thus lost its independence, the old Upper House had been virtually destroyed, and the new nobility was by its very nature dependent on the Crown. Another most important element of freedom had likewise disappeared. The great Churchmen, to whom the liberties of England owe so much, had been victorious over their enemies the Lollards. In the struggle they had lost their sympathy with the people. Their desire for the spiritual welfare of the country had shrivelled to a selfish eagerness for the preservation of orthodoxy. They had been drawn into closer communication with Rome, and had begun to share its interests. Cardinal Beaufort, in spite of all opposition, had succeeded in retaining his Roman rank, and it had become habitual that the Archbishop of Canterbury at least should bear the title of Cardinal. Wealthy, worldly and self-seeking, the leaders of the clergy were inclined to devote themselves to political life; and, conscious of the alienation of the lower orders, and fearing for their property, which had already excited the envy of the laity, and which, while confiscation was reducing the nobles to beggary, had remained almost untouched, they sought employment and safety in becoming the devoted servants of the King.
At the same time that the practical efficiency of the Parliament had been decreasing, the power of the King’s Council had been on the increase. The limits of its rights, springing as it did from the Concilium Ordinarium of the Plantagenet kings, had always been questionable, and its encroachments, in meddling with the petitions of the Lower House, and in issuing ordinances without the consent of Parliament, which had yet the authority of temporary laws, had been constantly objected to by the Commons. The long minority of Henry VI., during which the chief direction of the Government had been almost unavoidably in the hands of the Council, had tended greatly to increase its power.
Nevertheless, though constitutional growth had been checked, and the Commons had politically lost ground, the Wars of the Roses did not produce that complete exhaustion and depopulation of the country which might have been expected. The population appears to have been little, if at all, decreased, the number of inhabitants was still between three and four millions. In fact, it must be remembered that the broken hostilities of these wars did not on the whole amount to much more than three years of actual warfare; that the armies were in the field only for short consecutive periods, were usually few in number, and composed of untrained men, who returned, immediately their short service was over, to the cultivation of the fields. Thus the destruction and turbulence seemed to pass over the head of the great bulk of the population. Nor is this all. During the whole continuance of the war, the ordinary apparatus of justice was uninterrupted; courts were held, and judges went their circuit as usual. Indeed, it would seem to have been a period of unusual litigation, attended no doubt often with violence. For as property rapidly changed hands the titles to it became insecure, and the process therefore by which a title was questioned was frequently the violent dispossession of the present holder. But still it was to the courts of law that the ultimate appeal was made. Again, although the loss of France and the exclusive attention to home politics greatly diminished the national strength upon the sea, trade does not appear to have been seriously damaged. At all events, it was so kept alive, that upon the establishment of peace it revived with fresh vigour; and we are told that Edward IV. himself engaged in the pursuit. This trait is characteristic not only of the man but of the time. The pursuit of trade had risen greatly in estimation; great traders had become nobles, and Suffolk, the prime minister, was an example of the height to which such families might rise. From the decay of noble families, and other more permanent causes, land had been necessarily brought into the market. Wealthy traders had purchased it, set up for landowners, and aimed at the dignity of knighthood. At the same time, the secondary gentry of the country, taking advantage of the decline of the nobility, found means in the midst of the disturbances to increase their property and influence. In spite therefore of the apparent insignificance of Parliament, the middle classes were in a vigorous and improving condition.
Lower down in the social scale the case was somewhat different. Serfdom had indeed almost disappeared, and existed only here and there in isolated cases. Free labour for wages had become general, and land was largely held by payment of money rents. Thus far there was improvement. But the change from slavery to personal freedom is always purchased at a somewhat heavy price—that price is the existence of poverty; it is no longer incumbent on employers to look after the wellbeing of free labourers; in time of want they are thrown upon their own resources. The new possessors of the soil too were inclined to work it to better profit than their predecessors had done; grazing became more common and employment proportionately scarcer. The unemployed labourer had two courses open to him: he might betake himself to the towns, or join the ranks of the rapidly increasing class of beggars. He there found himself in company of numbers of idle and needy men who took advantage of the disturbed state of the country. Discharged soldiers and sailors, and vagabonds who called themselves travelling scholars, were so plentiful, that as there was as yet no poor law in existence, stringent enactments were made against them. The number of those punished for crimes of lawlessness and violence was enormous. Fortescue describes with pride how the poor Englishman, seeing others possess what he wanted, would never scruple to take it by violence rather than be without it. Those of the unemployed labourers who preferred to seek the towns went to increase the crowd of journeymen, whose position could not have been very enviable. For the guild system was breaking down and giving place to the more modern arrangements of unlimited competition. The craft guilds, which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had triumphed over the merchant guilds and aristocratic citizens of the towns, had speedily begun to deteriorate. The object for which they were founded was to secure for all members of the craft a fair chance of livelihood, without the danger of destructive competition. This object implied that the guild was co-extensive with the trade, and that its members were themselves craftsmen, carrying on their work with their own hands, with the assistance of apprentices. But a crowd of enfranchised villeins and unemployed labourers had gathered in the towns, and formed a class of journeymen or day-labourers, and the guild, originally a corporation of working men, changed gradually into an exclusive body of capitalists. Moreover, even within their own limits, their principles had failed as early as the reign of Edward III. We hear, for instance, of certain pepperers, who, separating themselves from their guild, became grocers [grossers] or general dealers. In other words, as individuals accumulated capital, they refused to have their enterprise limited by the guild laws; and thus setting up as independent capitalists, began to introduce the same relations between employer and employed which exist at present. Under these circumstances the unincorporated journeymen found the restrictions of the guild an obstacle in the way of advance, and were exposed to all the evils of an eager competition.
While thus the political position of the different orders was giving room for a temporary establishment of almost absolute monarchy, but at the same time allowing the formation of that middle class which was to overthrow it, and while the exclusive system of the middle ages was giving way to the modern relations of labour, the new culture, the existence of which more than anything else separates the middle ages from modern times, was beginning to make its way. As the leader in this direction Humphrey of Gloucester may be mentioned. In spite of his turbulent and disorderly character, he was a sincere lover of literature. He was in communication with several of the greater Italian scholars. More than one classical translation was dedicated to him. He carried his love of inquiry so far that he is believed to have dabbled in magical arts; and it is generally reported that his books, which he left to Oxford, were the nucleus of the present great library there. He did not stand alone in his literary tastes. Tiptoft the Earl of Worcester was likewise impregnated with Italian learning, and, among the newer nobles, Lord Rivers gave distinguished patronage to the art of printing, which Caxton introduced into England in the year 1469. Altogether, it would seem that among the upper classes the rudiments of learning were beginning to be widely spread, and that the laity were gradually becoming sufficiently cultivated to rival the Churchmen, and to take their proper part in the government of the country. It may be observed as an indication of this that Henry VI.’s reign was marked by the foundation of Eton, and that several considerable colleges were founded both in Oxford and Cambridge during the century. It is probable that these were chiefly intended as defences for orthodoxy, the teaching being as yet confined to the worst form of scholasticism.
It is strange, immediately after the great civil war, and before the outbreak of nautical energy under the reign of Queen Elizabeth, to meet with constant complaints of the degeneracy of the English as soldiers. But it seems as if changes in the military system, and the love of money and luxury which accompanied the Renaissance, were really producing their effects. Archery was giving way to the use of gunpowder; and we meet with statutes fixing the price of bows, and enacting general practice of archery, which clearly show that the use of the national weapon had to be artificially fostered. There was considerable difficulty in collecting a sufficiency of troops before the Battle of Bosworth, and Caxton writes to Richard III. a deplorable account of the decay of knighthood, to be cured, as he thinks, by the reintroduction of tournaments and the perusal of chivalrous romances. A change in warfare was, in fact, going on in Europe, which called into existence abroad standing armies, and the effect of which was felt in England, though circumstances postponed the establishment of a regular army some time longer. It was thus amid the general weakness in all classes except the Crown, and during the development of great social changes, that the Tudor sovereigns found it possible to establish that peculiar personal monarchy which occupies the transition period between mediæval and modern times, and under the shadow of which the various classes regained strength for the subsequent re-establishment of the Constitution.
Oxford & Cambridge.