elm at Cambridge, in whose shadow flashed the sword of Washington as he stood at the head of the yeomen who were to bring to grief, in the eighteenth century, prerogative and privilege. Why not stand with similar reverence before "London Stone," built into the church foundation there in Cannon Street, which tradition says was touched by the sword of Jack Cade? He, too, stood at the head of an army of yeomen, like Washington's host, hard of hand from the flail and the plough-handle, beaten by the weather as they wrested from the earth their food and raiment. Indeed, the lineal forefathers of Washington's men at Cambridge were, to some extent, those very men of Cade.1 The cause in the two cases was substantially the same. Each leader was a strict conservative, striving to vindicate from encroachment immemorial rights, upon which those high in place had laid sacrilegious hands. To one the fates were kind, and his name is among those most honored of men. The other failed; he was hunted to his death, and upon his grave has been heaped little but contumely. The fulness of time has come; the people, in whose behalf these leaders strove, has become supreme. Will not the people accord to the victims something of the honor which it has bestowed upon the victors?

During the Wars of the Roses the Lancastrian power went down, while the House of York, in the person of Edward IV, in 1461, attained the The Wars of throne. Though the great nobles and their retainers were largely cut off in the bloody

the Roses.

1 This was especially the case, perhaps, as regards the men from Middlesex Co., Mass.; Concord, for instance, was peopled by descendants of yeomen of Kent.

battles, the nation at large suffered surprisingly little, undergoing slight disturbance, enjoying, indeed, a certain amount of prosperity even while the armies clashed. Naturally, the power of Parliament in these years rapidly died down. While the Lords were to such an extent destroyed, the Commons, through causes which have been detailed, became obsequious. The more the upper middle class stood out as gentry, and after the wide disappearance of the high nobility became an important body, the greater became the separation between the upper middle class and the orders below them. Parliament had become mainly the representative of the gentry. The lower mass, deeply estranged by the injustice and contempt visited upon them, were more disposed to trust the King than those who had thrust them down. It is easy to see why there was no murmuring when Edward IV, neglecting almost entirely the ancient ceremonies of election and recognition, claimed to be the rightful King solely as the heir of Richard II. It was, says Stubbs, a complete legitimist restoration, the proceeding presenting the strongest possible contrast to that at the accession of Henry IV, two generations before. Edward went on as he began; parliamentary action was suspended for years together, and during the whole reign, for the first time in English history, there was no single enactment for increasing the security or liberty of the subject. Richard III, sustained by no proper title, catching at every straw to keep himself afloat in his ill-gotten dignity, sought a recognition from Parliament and from the citizens of London, but it was a farcical travesty of the solemn and venerable form of election.

the Tudors.

With the old Baronage destroyed and the political strength of the Commons so far gone in decay, the strength of the Crown at the end of the Accession of fifteenth century was nearly doubled, a change so marked as to be little short of a revolution. At the very hour when Anglo-Saxon freedom seemed about to be irrecoverably lost, certain Bristol ships piloted by Venetian sailors, the Cabots, father and son, touched, first of civilized men, the shores of a vast continent to the west. In that continent, for the first time, freedom was to have its full recognition and development; largely through influences going back from that continent, freedom for the motherland also was, after centuries of doubt, to be fully secured; for the mother-land and also for mighty Anglo-Saxon peoples in the ends of the earth.

Great increase

of the Crown.

Elizabeth, 1558.

WE have reached now the period of the Tudors. When Henry VII acceded to the throne, in 1485, but twenty-nine Lords were left as a remof the power nant of the old nobility; a continual humiliation of the weakened Baronage was a main object of his policy, which he had no difficulty in following out. The growth of the royal authority became with Henry VIII portentous, a sudden acceleration taking place in consequence of the extinction of still another power, which heretofore had done much to keep it in check. In our narrative, it has been made apparent that in the Lancastrian epoch and the years just preceding, the champions of freedom were in the main the knights-of-the-shire. Still earlier the Barons, in the time of Magna Charta and the reform of Simon de Montfort, by wresting from nascent despotism a portion of the nation's rights, improperly alienated, gave the popular leaders the vantage-ground without which they would have failed of opportunity. In a time yet earlier, it was the Church that had stood foremost in the contest for liberty, its policy during the early Middle Ages,

against the violence of William Rufus, the confused lawlessness of the reign of Stephen, the cunning of Henry I, constituting one long protest against the predominance of mere brute strength. It was due to Langton and the ecclesiastics mainly, indeed, that the Great Charter contained so many popular features, though the Barons then were coming into the foreground. In fact, until the period we have now reached, though less prominent, perhaps, in the later centuries than the earlier, the Church is to be found at the right hand of every influence that tended to thwart oppression. It upheld the effort of the martyr of Evesham, whom it was almost ready to canonize; in the person of the humble priest, John Ball, it was at the side of Wat Tyler; in Wickliffe and his followers, who, however unorthodox, were, nevertheless, cowled and tonsured priests, it stimulated powerfully the impulses toward freedom which throbbed in the hearts of the people. As the Baronage had become impotent, so the Church was now to be stricken down.

Reformation.

Henry VIII divorced England from Rome, destroying, as he did so, the monastic system and appropriating one-third of the revenues of the Effect of the Church. He constructed a new nobility, composed largely of new men whom he enriched from the spoils of the Church, who naturally were most obsequious, disposed to defend to the last the order of things to which they owed place and pelf. He obtained a lex regia to make him supreme lawgiver; and though he was politic as to interfering with Parliament, he contrived to bring it about, that

1 Stubbs: Constitutional History, III, p. 592.