"If we use the name of the New Monarchy to express the character of the English sovereignty from the time of Edward IV. to the time of Elizabeth, it is because the character of the monarchy during this period was something wholly new in our history. There is no kind of sibilantly between the kingship of the Old English, of the Norman, the Angevin, or the Plantagenet sovereigns, and the kingship of the Tudors. ... What the Great Rebellion in its final result actually did was to wipe away every trace of the New Monarchy, and to take up again the thread of our political development just where it had been snapped by the Wars of the Roses. ... The founder of the New Monarchy was Edward IV. ... While jesting with aldermen, or dallying with his mistresses, or idling over the new pages from the printing press [Caxton's] at Westminster, Edward was silently laying the foundations of an absolute rule which Henry VII. did little more than develop and consolidate. The almost total discontinuance of Parliamentary life was in itself a revolution. Up to this moment the two Houses had played a part which became more and more prominent in the government of the realm. ... Under Henry VI. an important step in constitutional progress had been made by abandoning the old form of presenting the requests of the Parliament in the form of petitions which were subsequently moulded into statutes by the Royal Councils; the statute itself, in its final form, was now presented for the royal assent, and the Crown was deprived of its former privilege of modifying it. Not only does this progress cease, but the legislative activity of Parliament itself comes abruptly to an end. ... The necessity for summoning the two Houses had, in fact, been removed by the enormous tide of wealth which the confiscation of the civil war poured into the royal treasury. ... It was said that nearly a fifth of the land had passed into the royal possession at one period or another of the civil war. Edward added to his resources by trading on a vast scale. ... The enterprises he had planned against France ... enabled Edward not only to increase his hoard, but to deal a deadly blow at liberty. Setting aside the usage of loans sanctioned by the authority of Parliament, Edward called before him the merchants of the city and requested from each a present or benevolence in proportion to the need. Their compliance with his prayer was probably aided by his popularity with the merchant class; but the system of benevolence was soon to be developed into the forced loans of Wolsey and the ship-money of Charles I." _J. R. Green, Short History of the English People, chapter 6, section 3._ ALSO IN: _W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chapter 18, section 696._ ENGLAND: A. D. 1474. Treaty with the Hanseatic League.