years of a war that was as unjust as it was unfortunate had both soured and demoralised the nation. ... When the final catastrophe came and the fights of Formigny [or Fourmigny] and Chatillon [Castillon] ended the chapter of our disasters, the nation began to cast about for a scapegoat on whom to lay the burden of its failures. ... At first the unfortunate Suffolk and Somerset had the responsibility laid upon them. A little later the outcry became more bold and fixed upon the Lancastrian dynasty itself as being to blame not only for disaster abroad, but for want of governance at home. If King Henry had understood the charge, and possessed the wit to answer it, he might fairly have replied that his subjects must fit the burden upon their own backs, not upon his. The war had been weakly conducted, it was true; but weakly because the men and money for it were grudged. ... At home, the bulwarks of social order seemed crumbling away. Private wars, riot, open highway robbery, murder, abduction, armed resistance to the law, prevailed on a scale that had been unknown since the troublous times of Edward II.--we might almost say since the evil days of Stephen. But it was not the Crown alone that should have been blamed for the state of the realm. The nation had chosen to impose over-stringent constitutional checks on the kingly power before it was ripe for self-government, and the Lancastrian house sat on the throne because it had agreed to submit to those checks. If the result of the experiment was disastrous, both parties to the contract had to bear their share of the responsibility. But a nation seldom allows that it has been wrong; and Henry of Windsor had to serve as a scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the realm, because Henry of Bolingbroke had committed his descendants to the unhappy compact. Want of a strong central government was undoubtedly the complaint under which England was labouring in the middle of the 15th century, and all the grievances against which outcry was made were but symptoms of one latent disease. ... All these public troubles would have been of comparatively small importance if the heart of the nation had been sound. The phenomenon which makes the time so depressing is the terrible decay in private morals since the previous century. ... There is no class or caste in England which comes well out of the scrutiny. The Church, which had served as the conscience of the nation in better times, had become dead to spiritual things. It no longer produced either men of saintly life or learned theologians or patriotic statesmen. ... The baronage of England had often been unruly, but it had never before developed the two vices which distinguished it in the times of the Two Roses--a taste for indiscriminate bloodshed and a turn for political apostacy. ... Twenty years spent in contact with