266 Broughton Gifford. 
five Duchesses: we see the great houses of Gifford, Audley, Le Strange, and 
Talbot, ever foremost in place and honour, the flower of English chivalry. We 
ean do more. We can say that, with one lamentable exception as lamentably 
avenged, all our, lords were on the side of constitutional freedom and national 
progress. They forwarded the good cause, each according to the manner of his 
day. The Giffords, the Audleys, and the Talbots, by union with their peers, 
like-minded members with them of the great council; and by armed resistance 
to greedy foreigners, ministerial favourites, and royal exactions in violation of 
the Great Charter. To stigmatise all feudal lords as oppressors of the people, 
is a mistake. The people, as a political body did not exist, till evoked from 
their low estate, and encouraged to take their stand by the side of the barons 
in the common contest with the Crown. Our feudal lords were the originators 
of popular rights, the founders and sustainers of their country’s reputation at 
home and abroad, the promoters of national interests, the natural leaders of a 
free people, from which they sprang, and among whom all the lower branches 
of their families still remained. Our later untitled lords represent another 
phase of English society. The parish is but the kingdom in miniature. Strange 
names appear in palace and hall. The great feudal houses vanished in the 
wars of the Roses. The policy on both sides, followed by none more merci- 
lessly than by Edward IV., was that of Tarquinius: swmma papaverum capita 
decutere. The lords perished in the field or on the scaffold: their families were 
impoverished: their estates changed hands. ‘New men’ arose out of those very 
classes, which had been politically created by the nobles for their own purposes, 
and, as it now turned out, for their own supplanting. Wool merchants, clothiers, 
traders, and farmers, bought up the baronial halls and acres, Such were our 
more recent lords, the Mays, the Longes, and the Hortons. ‘They found the 
country in an anomalous condition. The ruler was despotic, the ruled were 
free, The Tudors understood the position: like skillful mariners they put the 
ship before the wind, and rode on the top wave of popular opinion. The Stuarts 
attempted to put the ship about; a most delicate operation with a high sea run- 
ning, and not within their seamanship. The conflict between prerogative and 
privilege began. Our new lords embarked heartily in ‘‘the good old cause,” 
older than they thought, for it was the cause of the barons before them. They 
prosecuted it after much the same fashion, by petitions in Parliament, by in- 
sisting on the postponement of supplies to grievances, by sufferings in purse and 
person, and, when their ancient rights and liberties were no otherwise to be 
vindicated, by an appeal to the sword, which alone could then decide the right. 
