ays, DeVeres, nay, kinsmen
of the House of Plantagenet, with no higher addition than that of
Esquire, and with no civil privileges beyond those enjoyed by every
farmer and shopkeeper. There was therefore here no line like that which
in some other countries divided the patrician from the plebeian. The
yeoman was not inclined to murmur at dignities to which his own children
might rise. The grandee was not inclined to insult a class into which
his own children must descend.

After the wars of York and Lancaster, the links which connected the
nobility and commonalty became closer and more numerous than ever. The
extent of destruction which had fallen on the old aristocracy may be
inferred from a single circumstance. In the year 1451 Henry the Sixth
summoned fifty-three temporal Lords to parliament. The temporal Lords
summoned by Henry the Seventh to the parliament of 1485 were only
twenty-nine, and of these several had recently been elevated to the
peerage. During the following century the ranks of the nobility were
largely recruited from among the gentry. The constitution of the House
of Commons tended greatly to promote the salutary intermixture of
classes. The knight of the shire was the connecting link between
the baron and the shopkeeper. On the same benches on which sate the
goldsmiths, drapers, and grocers, who had been returned to parliament by
the commercial towns, sate also members who, in any other country, would
have been called noblemen, hereditary lords of manors, entitled to hold
courts and to bear coat armour, and able to trace back an honourable
descent through many generations. Some of them were younger sons and
brothers of lords. Others could boast of even royal blood. At length the
eldest son of an Earl of Bedford, called in courtesy by the second title
of his father, offered himself as candidate for a seat in the House of
Commons, and his example was followed by others. Seated in that house,
the heirs of the great peers naturally became as zealous for its
privileges as any of the humble burgesses with whom they were mingled.
Thus our democracy was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and
our aristocracy the most democratic in the world; a peculiarity
which has lasted down to the present day, and which has produced many
important moral and political effects.

The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his
grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the
Plantagenet