persecute the Lollards; and commerce and the arts, unobstructed by any intermeddling, were left to their natural development. The marked increase of commerce, the sudden growth of learning, advances made in the useful arts, and the earliest great endowments for the foundation of grammar-schools and places of popular education, are thus the incidents which also signalise the time, when the chiefs of the great families, ejected finally from those provinces of France which had fed their appetites for plunder and power, were impelled to that conflict with each other, on their own soil, of which all the sufferings and all the retribution were to fall upon themselves alone. For though this was a strife which lasted incessantly for thirty years, though twelve great pitched battles were fought in it, though eighty princes of the blood were slain, it raged only on the surface of the land, and the peaceful current beneath was free to run on as before. The desolation of the bloody conflict never actually reached the heart of the towns, except in awakening such instincts of danger as are the primary sources of safety. Hence, on the one hand, for precaution and defence, guilds, commercial brotherhoods, and municipal safeguards silently arose, to grow more hardy and to flourish; while, on the other, ancient baronies, all-powerful families, names that had overawed the crown and overshadowed the people, sank in the conflict, never to rise again. The storm that swept the lofty, spared the low. It was the beginning of a vast social change, now accomplished apparently without the aid of those whom principally it was to affect; and not limited to England. Over the whole continent of Europe its manifestations might be seen. The system of the Middle Ages was everywhere breaking up. The sway of a feudal chiefdom, in all modifications of its form still fitful and turbulent, was ending; and there was rising, to take its place, a predominance of monarchy in personal attributes, a calm concentrated individual cunning, or as it was called in after years, when it had lost all the subtle qualities that justified

the name, a Kingcraft. The tres magi of kings, renowned for possession of this sovereign craft, have been celebrated by Lord Bacon. Louis XI had arisen in France, and Ferdinand in Spain; yet the lesson for which Machiavelli waited was incomplete, until Henry Tudor took possession of the English throne.

Though the last living representative of the house of Lancaster, he was not its legitimate heir; but from his marriage with the heiress of the house of York, he derived a strong title. His own dissatisfaction with it nevertheless, and his uneasy desire to surround it with other guarantees, are among the indications of a state of feeling in England at the time which distinguishes the position of Henry VII from that of the other magi. The act of settlement passed by the two Houses upon his accession, taking great pains to avoid either the assertion or contradiction of any pretensions of lineal descent, had created strictly a parliamentary title; but he afterwards obtained a rescript from Pope Innocent III, setting forth all the other conditions on which he desired it to be known that the crown of England also belonged to him. It was his, according to this document, by right of war, by notorious and indisputable hereditary succession, by the wish and election of all the prelates, nobles, and commons of the realm, and by the act of the three estates in Parliament assembled; but nevertheless, to put an end to the bloody wars caused by the rival claims of the house of York, and at the urgent request of the three estates, he had consented to marry the eldest daughter and true heir of Edward IV: and now, therefore, the supreme Pontiff, being called to confirm the dispensation necessary to such marriage, declared the meaning of the act of settlement passed by Parliament to be, that Henry's issue, whether by Elizabeth, or, in case of her death, by any subsequent marriage, were to inherit the throne. More remarkable than the rescript itself, however, were the means taken to carry it directly to the classes it was meant to address. It is the first similar document of

which we have any evidence that it was translated into English and circulated in a popular form throughout England. A broadside containing it, printed by Caxton, was discovered ten years ago.

Such indications may at least satisfy us that Henry Tudor would not very gravely have resented the description which has been given of him by Lord Bolingbroke, as a creature of the people raised to the throne to cut up the roots of faction, to restore public tranquillity, and to establish a legal government on the ruins of tyranny. The same writer, however, who doubts if he succeeded in this design, is undoubtedly wrong when he supposes that he failed in establishing what by all the customs of historical courtesy must be called a legal government. It is not of course to be disguised that in spite of many great principles asserted in it, and advantages achieved, his reign was not in its immediate course favourable to liberty. But the fact, as little to be questioned, that during its continuance risings in the Commonalty were far more frequent than remonstrances in the Commons, and that upon questions where the people proved most stubborn, parliament generally was most compliant, sufficiently shews that the defection did not so much lie with the people themselves, as with their proper leaders in the State. It was nevertheless the peculiarity of Henry's despotism, as distinguished from that of his more violent predecessors, that he bottomed it strongly on the precedents and language of law, screening the violation of liberty by artful employment of its forms; and though this may have made the despotism more odious while it lasted, it established more certainly a limit to its duration. Relatively to what is called the State, circumstances had thrown an overbalance of power into the hands of Henry; but to the mass of the people, these very circumstances rendered him unconsciously the instrument of great social and political change. The position he occupies in history, and the rights he exercised, began and ended with his race.

Of the shattered aristocracy of England only twentynine representatives presented themselves when Henry called his first Parliament, and several of these were recent creations. Doubtless it was well, for the ultimate advance of liberty, that the old feudal power had thus been so completely subdued, and the way by such means prepared for the decisive struggle with the Stuarts; but for the immediate progress of liberty, it was certainly less beneficial. The House of Commons, suddenly wanting in an old and habitual support, was too ready an instrument for the mere use and convenience of the King; and in such circumstances to avail themselves of every attainable advantage, and turn it to the best account, in each case holding it for religion that craft might supersede force, constituted the very art and genius of the tres magi. But though such circumstances worked well for the Mage upon the English throne, he did not, with all his craft, penetrate influences around him that were less obvious; nor suspect that, by a purely selfish legislation, he might yet be advancing higher hopes and more comprehensive designs. Surrounded, and no longer assailable, by the impoverished and broken power of the past, he was unconscious of a more formidable power which was silently and insensibly replacing it. He thought only of himself and his succession. When, by the statute enlarging and extending the old Consilium Regis, and creating the Star Chamber, he raised the judicial authority of the King in Council to a height at which the fiercest of his Norman predecessors would not have dared to aim, he did it to support the throne. That a rallying cry against the Star Chamber might one day bear the throne into dust, was not to him within the sphere of possibility. What was near him, in short, he never mistook or marred, and no man so clearly saw what would help or might obstruct himself. As Lord Bacon says, he went substantially to his own business, and, to the extent of not suffering any little envies or any great passions to stand in its way, he was a practical and sagacious statesman. But he was not a

great king, though he might be called an able, a crafty, and a prudent one.

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So much, even in the midst of eulogy that might itself have preserved his name, would seem to be admitted by his incomparable biographer. "His wisdom," says Lord Bacon, "by often evading from perils, was turned rather "into a dexterity to deliver himself from dangers when "they pressed him, than into a providence to prevent and remove them afar off. And even in nature, the "sight of his mind was like some sights of eyes; rather "strong at hand, than to carry afar off. For his wit "increased upon the occasion; and so much the more, if "the occasion were sharpened by danger." It will be a sufficient comment on these pregnant sentences merely to enumerate his leading acts of sovereignty. Heresy he thought dangerous; and he burnt more followers of Wycliffe than any since the first Lancastrian king. Winner of a successful stake in battle, he knew the chances of war to be dangerous; and he favoured strenuously the arts of peace. Served by men whom his death or discomfiture might suddenly attaint with rebellion, he thought it dangerous to leave those friends without security against the possible vengeance of future faction; and he passed the law which made possession of the throne the subject's obligation to allegiance, and justified resistance to all who should dispute it. Incessant suits for alienated lands he thought dangerous, in a country torn with revolutionary quarrel ; and his famous statute of fines barred, after certain conditions, all claims of ancient heritage. But not to him, therefore, belongs any part of the glory of those greater results which flowed indirectly from these measures of precaution. It was with no intended help from him that the Wycliffe heresy struck deeper root; that more eager welcome was given to the studies which in England marked the revival of learning; that the civil duties of allegiance were placed on a just foundation; and that the feudal restrictions of landed property were finally broken.

VOL. I.

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