and vindictiveness could palliate, closed the long contest¹.
The crown was left for the successful invader to claim on a
shadowy title, and to secure by a marriage of convenience. By
a strange coincidence the heir of the Beauforts was to be
wedded to the heiress of the houses of York and Clarence;
the grandson of Queen Katharine to the granddaughter of the
duchess Jacquetta. The result reveals at once the permanence
of the old family jealousies, and the gulf in which all the
intervening representatives of the house of Plantagenet had
been submerged.

With the battle of Bosworth the medieval history of England
is understood to end. It is not, however, the distinct end of
an old period, so much as the distinct beginning of a new one.
The old dividing influences subsist for half a century longer,
but the newer and more lasting consolidating influences come
from this time to the front of the stage. The student of con-
stitutional history need not go twice over the same ground ;
he may be content to wait for the complete wearing out of the
old forms, whilst he takes up the quest of the new, and dwells
more steadily on the more permanent and vital elements that
underlie them both.

363. Any attempt to balance or to contrast the constitu-
tional claims and position of the houses of Lancaster and York,
is embarrassed by the complications of moral, legal, and per-
sonal questions which intrude at every point. The most earnest
supporter of the constitutional right of the Lancastrian kings
cannot deny the utter incompetency of Henry VI ; the most
ardent champion of the divine right of hereditary succession
must allow that the rule of Edward IV and Richard III was
unconstitutional, arbitrary, and sanguinary. Henry VI was
not deposed for incompetency ; and the unconstitutional rule
of the house of York was but a minor cause of its difficulties
and final fall. England learned a lesson from both, and owes
a sort of debt to both : the rule of the house of Lancaster
proved that the nation was not ready for the efficient use of
the liberties it had won, and that of the house of York proved

¹ Cont. CroyI. pp. 573, 574-

XVIII.]

that the nation was too full grown to be fettered again with
the bonds from which it had escaped. The circumstances too
by which the legal position of the two dynasties was determined,
have points of likeness and unlikeness which have struck and
continue to strike the readers of history in different ways. It
may fairly be asked what there was in the usurpation of
Edward IV that made it differ in kind from the usurpation
of Henry IV ; whether the misgovernment of Bichard II and
the misgovernment of Henry VI differed in nature or only in
degree ; what force the legal weakness of the Lancastrian title
gave to the allegation of its incompetency, to what extent
the dynastic position of the house of York may be made to
palliate the charges of cruelty and tyranny from which it
cannot be cleared.

Such questions will be answered differently by men who
approach the subject from different points. The survey which
has been taken of the events of the period in the present
chapter, rapid and brief as it appears, renders it unnecessary
to recapitulate here the particulars from which the general
impression must either way be drawn. The student who Constitn-
approaches the story from the point of view at which these racter of
pages have been written, will recognise the constitutional claim caster rule,
of the house of Lancaster, as based on a solemn national act,
strengthened by the adherence of three generations to a con-
stitutional form of government, and not forfeited by any distinct
breach of the understanding upon which Henry IV originally
received the crown. He will recognise in the successful claim The Yorkist
of the house of York a retrogressive step, which was made ^usurpatlon,
possible by the weakness of Henry VI, but could be justified
constitutionally only by a theory of succession which neither
on the principles of law nor on the precedents of history could
be consistently maintained.

But he may accept these conclusions generally without
shutting his eyes to the reality of the difficulties which from
almost every side beset the subject—difficulties which were
recognised by the wisest men of the time, and knots which
could be untied only by the sword. There are personal ques-

TOb. ɪɪɪ.                      к

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