rowned sacramental man of the Middle Ages.'

From this period Chesterton tells us that a rather strange thing
happened--men began to fight for the crown. The Wars of the Roses was
the result. The English rose was then the symbol of party, as ever since
it has been the symbol of an English summer.

Chesterton makes no attempt to follow the difficult path that the Wars
of the Roses travel, from the military standpoint, nor the adventures
that followed the king-maker Warwick and the warlike widow of Henry V,
one Margaret. There was, so he says, a moral difference in this conflict
that took the name of a Rose to fight for a Crown. 'Lancaster stood, as
a whole, for the new notion of a king propped by parliaments and
powerful bishops; and York, on the whole, for the remains of the older
idea of a king who permits nothing to come between him and his people.
This is everything of permanent political interest that could be traced
by counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury.'

The time when the Middle Ages was drawing near to the Tudors is
interesting, because of the riddle of Richard III. Chesterton's
description of this strange king is full of fascination if also it is
full of truth: 'He was not an ogre shedding rivers of blood, yet a
crimson cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory. Whether or not he was
a good man, he was apparently a good king, and even a popular one. He
anticipated the Renaissance in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music,
and he seems to have held to the old paths of religion and charity.'

He was indeed, as Chesterton says, the last of the mediaeval kings, and
he died hard; his blood flowed over an England that did not know what
loyalty was, a country that had nobles who would fly from their king on
the first sign of danger; the Last Post of the old kings was sounding,
and Richard answered its challenge. His description of this remarkable
king is perhaps the best thing in the book, and is certainly far better
than the ordinary history that attempts to give the character of a king
in a couple of lines.

With the end of the mediaeval kings we pass to a period that is none
other than the Renaissance, one of the most important epochs in English
history, 'that great dawn of a more rational daylight which for so many
made mediaevalism seem a mere darkness.'

The character of Henry VIII is one that is a veritable battleground. He
is attacked because he found a variety of wives plea