ster,
there was a touch about him which makes him truly the last of the
mediaeval kings. It is expressed in the one word which he cried aloud as
he struck down foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth--treason.
For him, as for the first Norman kings, treason was the same as
treachery; and in this case at least it was the same as treachery. When
his nobles deserted him before the battle, he did not regard it as a new
political combination, but as the sin of false friends and faithless
servants. Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, he
challenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of
Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply. The
modern world had begun. The call echoed unanswered down the ages; for
since that day no English king has fought after that fashion. Having
slain many, he was himself slain and his diminished force destroyed. So
ended the war of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful of all the
usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight from nowhere,
found the crown of England under a bush of thorn.

XI

THE REBELLION OF THE RICH

Sir Thomas More, apart from any arguments about the more mystical meshes
in which he was ultimately caught and killed, will be hailed by all as a
hero of the New Learning; that great dawn of a more rational daylight
which for so many made mediaevalism seem a mere darkness. Whatever we
think of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will be no dispute
about his appreciation of the Renascence. He was above all things a
Humanist and a very human one. He was even in many ways very modern,
which some rather erroneously suppose to be the same as being human; he
was also humane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal, or
rather perhaps a fanciful social system, with something of the ingenuity
of Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially with much more than the flippancy
attributed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not fair to charge the Utopian
notions upon his morality; but their subjects and suggestions mark what
(for want of a better word) we can only call his modernism. Thus the
immortality of animals is the sort of transcendentalism which savours of
evolution; and the grosser jest about the preliminaries of marriage
might be taken quite seriously by the students of Eugenics. He suggested
a sort of pacifism--though the Utopians had a quaint way of achieving
it. In short, while he was, with his friend E