INTR OD UC TOR Y. 2$ 



habitual indolence and great licentiousness. He was entirely 

 surprised by the revolt and insurrection which Warwick fo- 

 mented. It is not easy to reconcile the temporary supineness 

 of Edward at this crisis with the reputation which later writers 

 give him, of being a suspicious tyrant, who made all his 

 servants act as spies on each other. His indolence and good- 

 nature led him to lavish favours on his wife's relatives, his 

 negligence induced him to wink at the insolence and false- 

 hood of Warwick. So at last the persons whom he trusted 

 with the nonage of his sons, gave the occasion for the palace 

 revolution, which put Richard on the throne. 



The circumstances of that revolution are nearly as obscure 

 as the fate of the princes. Morton, the Lancastrian partisan, 

 whom Edward had pardoned and had raised from one post 

 to the other, deserted to Richmond, and Richard, whose trust 

 was in a Stanley, and who seems to have been surprised at 

 Bosworth, perished in battle. Nothing seems to indicate more 

 completely how weary the country was of the rivalry between 

 royal princes and their partisans among the nobility than the 

 poor following which Richard and Richmond had at Bosworth, 

 except it be the general acquiescence in the government of 

 Henry Tudor, whose reign was the meanest, but whose times 

 were on the whole the most prosperous in our annals. There 

 was plenty of occasion for Chancellor Morton's fork, for the 

 opulence of the English was progressive and solid in Henry 

 Tudor's time. 



Henry has been credited with the establishment of three 

 important changes in the administration of law and the theory 

 of the constitution. I refer to the statute of liveries, to the 

 statute which freed the subject from the penalties of treason 

 when his offence was allegiance to a de facto sovereign, and to 

 the reconstruction of the Star Chamber. It is obvious that each 

 of these novelties was intended to secure the position of a 

 monarch, whose title to the throne on any of those principles 

 which had divided the people for a century was untenable, and 

 that none of them was more than a protest. For the statute of 



