d itself from
generation to generation. Every family was in blood feud with its
neighbour; and children, as they grew to manhood, inherited the duty of
revenging their fathers' deaths.

No effort of imagination can reproduce to us the state of this country in
the fatal years which intervened between the first rising of the Duke of
York and the battle of Bosworth; and experience too truly convinced Henry
VII. that the war had ceased only from general exhaustion, and not because
there was no will to continue it. The first Tudor breathed an atmosphere of
suspended insurrection, and only when we remember the probable effect upon
his mind of the constant dread of an explosion, can we excuse or
understand, in a prince not generally cruel, the execution of the Earl of
Warwick. The danger of a bloody revolution may present an act of arbitrary
or cowardly tyranny in the light of a public duty.

Fifty years of settled government, however, had not been without their
effects. The country had collected itself; the feuds of the families had
been chastened, if they had not been subdued; while the increase of wealth
and material prosperity had brought out into obvious prominence those
advantages of peace which a hot-spirited people, antecedent to experience,
had not anticipated, and had not been able to appreciate. They were better
fed, better cared for, more justly governed than they had ever been before;
and though abundance of unruly tempers remained, yet the wiser portion of
the nation, looking back from their new vantage-ground, were able to
recognise the past in its true hatefulness. Thenceforward a war of
succession was the predominating terror with English statesmen, and the
safe establishment of the reigning family bore a degree of importance which
it is possible that their fears exaggerated, yet which in fact was the
determining principle of their action.

It was therefore with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII.
perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born
dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth, as if
his family were under a blight. When the queen had advanced to an age which
precluded hope of further offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm
girl, the unpromising prospect became yet more alarming. The life of the
Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was weak from her childhood.
If she lived, her accession would be a temptation to insurre