alue has been accumulated by Strype in
his collections, which commence at this period.

CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF YORK
1461-1485

[Sidenote: English freedom]

With the victory of Towton the war of the succession came practically to
an end. Though Margaret still struggled on the northern border and the
treachery of Warwick for a while drove the new king from his realm, this
gleam of returning fortune only brought a more fatal ruin on the House of
Lancaster and seated the House of York more firmly on the throne. But the
Wars of the Roses did far more than ruin one royal house or set up
another. They found England, in the words of Commines, "among all the
world's lordships of which I have knowledge, that where the public weal is
best ordered, and where least violence reigns over the people." An English
king--the shrewd observer noticed--"can undertake no enterprise of account
without assembling his Parliament, which is a thing most wise and holy,
and therefore are these kings stronger and better served" than the
despotic sovereigns of the Continent. The English kingship, as a judge,
Sir John Fortescue, could boast when writing at this time, was not an
absolute but a limited monarchy; the land was not a land where the will of
the prince was itself the law, but where the prince could neither make
laws nor impose taxes save by his subjects' consent. At no time had
Parliament played so constant and prominent a part in the government of
the realm. At no time had the principles of constitutional liberty seemed
so thoroughly understood and so dear to the people at large. The long
Parliamentary contest between the Crown and the two Houses since the days
of Edward the First had firmly established the great securities of
national liberty--the right of freedom from arbitrary taxation, from
arbitrary legislation, from arbitrary imprisonment, and the responsibility
of even the highest servants of the Crown to Parliament and to the law.

[Sidenote: Results of the Wars of the Roses]

But with the close of the struggle for the succession this liberty wholly
disappeared. If the Wars of the Roses failed in utterly destroying English
freedom, they succeeded in arresting its progress for more than a hundred
years. With them we enter on an epoch of constitutional retrogression in
which the slow work of the age that went before it was rapidly undone.
From the accession of Edward the Fourth Parliamentary life was almost
suspende