Cottstilntioual History.
[chap.
Changein
the position
of the Com*
ɪnons.
,Woτking8 of
modem life
in the
fifteenth
century.
Plan of the
chapter.
of the commons : the third estate now crushed, now flattered ;
now consolidated, now divided; now encouraged, now repressed ;
but escaping the internecine enmities that destroy the baronage,
learning wisdom by their mistakes and gaining freedom when
it is rid of their leadership ; rising by its own growing strength
from the prostration in which it has lain, with the other two
estates, at the feet of the Tudors, all the stronger because it
has itself only to rely upon and has springs of independence
in itself, which are not in either clergy or baronage ;—the
estate of the commons is prepared to enter on the inheritance,
towards which the two elder estates have led it on. The crisis
to which these changes tend is to determine in that struggle
between the crown and the commons which the last two cen-
turies have decided.
The causes which worked these changes begin from the
opening of the sixteenth century to display themselves upon
a lighter and broader stage, in more direct and evident con-
nexion with their greater results. But they had been working
long and deeply in the fifteenth century; and our task, one
object of which is to trace the continuity of national life
through this age of obscurity and disturbance, necessarily
includes some examination into their action, into the relations
of church and state, of the crown and the three estates, the
balance of forces in the corporate body, and the growth in
the several estates by which that balance was made to vary
without breaking up the unity or destroying the identity of
the whole. Having traced this working up to the time at
which the new struggles of constitutional life begin, the point
at which modern and medieval history seem to divide, we shall
have accomplished, or done our best to accomplish, the promise
of our title, and have told the origin and development of the
Constitutional History of England.
Parliamentary institutions during the fourteenth century are
the main if not the sole subject of Constitutional History.
From this point, at which parliamentary institutions seem to
have, to a great extent, moulded themselves, and parliamentary
ideas have ripened, we shall have to recur to our earlier plan,
Plan of the Chapter.
XVIII-]
and endeavour to trace more generally the workings of national
ɪife that gave substance and reality to those forms, that lay
quiet under them when they seemed to be dormant, and that
fought in them when the time came for it to arise and go down
to the battle.
300. The object of the present chapter will be to trace the riot of the
history of internal politics in England from the accession of
JIenry IV to the fall of Richard III : not that the period
possesses a distinct political plot corresponding with its drama
0f dynastic history, but that from its close begins the more
prominent action of the new influences that colour later his-
tory. A more distinct political plot, a more definite constitu-
tional peɪiod, would be found by extending the scope of the
chapter to the beginning of the assumed dictatorship of
Henry VIIL But to attempt that would be to trench upon
the domain of later history, which must be written or read
from a new standing-point. The battle of Bosworth field is
the last act of a long tragedy or series of tragedies, a trilogy
of unequal interest and varied proportions, the unity of which
lies in the struggle of the great houses for the crown. The
embers of the strife are not indeed extinguished then, but they
survive only in the region of personal enmities and political
cruelties. The strife of York and Lancaster is then allayed ;
the particular forces that have roused the national energies
have exhausted themselves. From that point new agencies
begin to work, the origin of which we may trace, but the
growth and mature action of which must be left to other
hands.
The history of the three Lancastrian reigns has a double importance
interest ; it contains not only the foundation, consolidation, Lancastrian
and destruction of a fabric of dynastic power, but, parallel
with it,rthe trial and failure of a great constitutional experi-
ment ; a premature testing of the strength of the parliamentary
system. The system does not indeed break under the strain,
but it bends and warps so as to show itself unequal to the
burden ; and, instead of arbitrating between the other forces
°f the time, the parliamentary constitution finds itself either