the utter ruin of the House of York. The royal treasury was not
only relieved from the drain which had left the crown at the mercy of the
Third Estate; it was filled as it had never been filled before by the
forfeitures and confiscations of the civil war. In the one bill of
attainder which followed Towton twelve great nobles and more than a
hundred knights and squires were stripped of their estates to the king's
profit. Nearly a fifth of the land is said to have passed into the royal
possession at one period or other of the civil strife. Edward the Fourth
and Henry the Seventh not only possessed a power untrammelled by the
difficulties which had beset the Crown since the days of Edward the First,
but they were masters of a wealth such as the Crown had never known since
the days of Henry the Second.

[Sidenote: Its New Policy]

Throughout their reigns these kings showed a firm resolve to shun the two
rocks on which the monarchy had been so nearly wrecked. No policy was too
inglorious that enabled them to avoid the need of war. The inheritance of
a warlike policy, the consciousness of great military abilities, the cry
of his own people for a renewal of the struggle, failed to lure Edward
from his system of peace. Henry clung to peace in spite of the threatening
growth of the French monarchy: he refused to be drawn into any serious war
even by its acquisition of Britanny and of a coast-line that ran unbroken
along the Channel. Nor was any expedient too degrading if it swelled the
royal hoard. Edward by a single stroke, the grant of the customs to the
king for life, secured a source of revenue which went far to relieve the
Crown from its dependence on Parliament. He stooped to add to the gold
which his confiscations amassed by trading on a vast scale; his ships,
freighted with tin, wool, and cloth, made the name of the merchant-king
famous in the ports of Italy and Greece. Henry was as adroit and as
shameless a financier as his predecessor. He was his own treasurer, he
kept his own accounts, he ticked off with his own hand the compositions he
levied on the western shires for their abortive revolts.

[Sidenote: Suspension of Parliamentary life]

With peace and a full treasury the need for calling Parliament together
was removed. The collapse of the Houses was in itself a revolution. Up to
this moment they had played a more and more prominent part in the
government of the realm. The progress made under the earlier Plan