526 Constitutional History. [chap.
Personal rather than loved ; Edward II, alone among the race, was
popularity . o
Ofthjkin2S. despised as well as hated. With Edward III the tide turned;
he came to the crown young, and gained sympathy in his early
troubles ; he took pains to court the nation, and in his hot
years he was a favourite ; but, after the war and the plague,
he fell into the background, and the nation was tired of him
before he died. Richard possessed early, and early forfeited,
the people’s love ; he deserved it perhaps as little as he de-
served their later hatred. Henry IV, as a subject, had been
the national champion, and he began to reign with some hold
on the people’s heart ; but the misery of broken health, an
uneasy conscience, and many public troubles, threw him early
into a gloomy shadowy life of which his people knew little.
Henry V was, as he deserved to be, the darling of the nation ;
Henry VI was too young at his accession to call forth any
personal interest, and during his whole reign he failed to
acquire any hold on the nation at large ; they were tired of
him before they came to know him, and when they knew him
they knew his unfitness to rule. Edward IV, like Henry IV,
came a favourite to the throne ; but unlike Henry, without
deserving love, he retained popularity all his life. Richard III
had, as duke of Gloucester, been loved and honoured ; he for-
feited love, honour and trust, when he supplanted his nephew,
and he perished before his ability and patriotism, if he had any,
could recover the ground that he had lost.
Crowthofa 457. Notwithstanding this series of failures, we can trace
sentiment of . λi. _ 1 ι ι ∙ 1 . . . _
loyalty. a growing feeling oɪ attachment to the king as king, which
may be supposed to form an essential characteristic of the
virtue of loyalty. Loyalty is a virtuous habit or sentiment
of a very composite character ; a habit of strong and faithful
attachment to a person, not so much by reason of his personal
character as of his official position. There is a love which
the good son feels for the most brutal or indifferent father ;
national loyalty has an analogous feeling for a bad or indifferent
king ; it is not the same feeling, but somewhat parallel. Such
loyalty gives far more than it receives ; the root of the good is
in the loyal people, not in tl`e sovereign, who may or may not
XXi.] Sentiment of Loyalty. 527
deserve it ; there is a feeling too of proprietorship : 1 he is no
great hero but he is our king.’ Some historical training must Ib causes,
have prepared a nation to conceive such an idea. The name of
king cannot have been synonymous with oppression ; loyalty
itself, in its very name, recalls the notion of trust in law, and
observance of law; and the race which calls it forth, as well as
the nation that feels it, must have been on the whole a law-
abiding race and nation. It gathers into itself all that is
admirable and loveable in the character of the ruler, and the
virtues of the good king unquestionably contribute to strengthen
the habit of loyalty to all kings. Onee aroused, it is strongly
attracted by misfortune ; hence kings have often learned the
blessings of it too late. Richard II after his death became
t God’s true knight ’ whom the wicked ones slew1, and Henry
VI became a saint in the eyes of the men whom he had signally
failed to govern2. Yet the growth of loyalty in this period Slowness of
was slow if it was steady. The Plantagenet history can show lte growth,
no such instances of enthusiastic devotion as lighted up the
dark days of the Stewarts. Edmund of Kent sacrificed himself
for Edward II ; and the friends of Richard II perished in a
vain attempt to restore him ; Margaret of Anjou found a way
to rouse in favour of Henry and her son a desperate resistance
to the supplanting dynasty ; but none of these is an instance of
true loyalty unmingled with fear or personal aims. The growth Enuncla-
of the doctrine that expresses the real feeling is traceable principle'6
rather in such utterances ^as that of the chancellor in 1410,
when he quotes from the pseudo-Aristotle the saying, that the
true safety of the realm is to have the entire and cordial love of
the people, and to guard for them their laws and rights’.
Thus the growth of loyalty was slow ; the feudal feeling how far en.
intercepted a good deal of it ; the medieval church scarcely Uwywelnd
recognised it as a virtue apart from the more general virtues clergy'
of fidelity and honour, and, by the ease with which it acquiesced
in a change of ruler, exemplified another sort of loyalty of
which the king de facto claimed a greater share than the king
1 Political Songs, ii. 267. 2 See above, p. 134.
3 See above, p. 246.