he House of
Neville, Lords Falconberg, Abergavenny, and Latimer. The vast power which
such an accumulation of wealth and honours placed at the Earl's disposal
was wielded with consummate ability. In outer seeming Warwick was the very
type of the feudal baron. He could raise armies at his call from his own
earldoms. Six hundred liveried retainers followed him to Parliament.
Thousands of dependants feasted in his courtyard. But few men were really
further from the feudal ideal. Active and ruthless warrior as he was, his
enemies denied to the Earl the gift of personal daring. In war he showed
himself more general than soldier, and in spite of a series of victories
his genius was not so much military as diplomatic. A Burgundian chronicler
who knew him well describes him as the craftiest man of his day, "le plus
soubtil homme de son vivant." Secret, patient, without faith or loyalty,
ruthless, unscrupulous, what Warwick excelled in was intrigue, treachery,
the contrivance of plots, and sudden desertions.

His temper brought out in terrible relief the moral disorganization of the
time. The old order of the world was passing away. Since the fall of the
Roman Empire civil society had been held together by the power of the
given word, by the "fealty" and "loyalty" that bound vassal to lord and
lord to king. A common faith in its possession of supernatural truths and
supernatural powers had bound men together in the religious society which
knew itself as the Church. But the spell of religious belief was now
broken and the feudal conception of society was passing away. On the other
hand the individual sense of personal duty, the political consciousness of
each citizen that national order and national welfare are essential to his
own well-being, had not yet come. The bonds which had held the world
together through so many ages loosened and broke only to leave man face to
face with his own selfishness. The motives that sway and ennoble the
common conduct of men were powerless over the ruling classes. Pope and
king, bishop and noble, vied with each other in greed, in self-seeking, in
lust, in faithlessness, in a pitiless cruelty. It is this moral
degradation that flings so dark a shade over the Wars of the Roses. From
no period in our annals do we turn with such weariness and disgust. Their
savage battles, their ruthless executions, their shameless treasons, seem
all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the ends for which men