common cause against the third as their own interests from time to time persuaded them. Then followed the long- agony of the wars of the Roses, and when they were ended a vastly different state of affairs had developed itself. The baronage had almost burnt itself out; not only had it lost its greatest men, but constant battles, defeats, attainders, exiles, and executions had utterly extinguished some of its most powerful families; above all, it had lost its character, and with it its power of revival.[1] The great barons, demoralised by the French wars, had become marauders and mercenaries on a grand scale, more greedy of wealth than of honour, more anxious to increase their own possessions than to do justice or defend right, whether their own or other people's.
The fortunes of the Church, as the subject with which I am more immediately concerned, require more minute examination. Its condition underwent great variation during the long period before us. Its power was somewhat diminished by the end of it, and was soon to undergo a vastly greater diminution; but its decline was not steady or regular, and it is far from being an easy matter to trace the vicissitudes which it underwent, since not only did it ally itself, as we have said, now with one and now with another of the contending parties in the State and outside of it, but it was all the time more or less divided against itself, although its divisions could often suddenly heal up for the purpose of presenting a solid front to a common enemy. It had also always a foreign element in its composition, arising from its intimate relations with the Papacy, the number of foreign ecclesiastics in official positions in England, and from the constitution of the
- ↑ Green, vol. ii. pp. 15-16.
