f John Ball was a Reformer, Latimer was not a Reformer.
But though the new heresies did not even hint at the beginning of
English Protestantism, they did, perhaps, hint at the end of English
Catholicism. Cobham did not light a candle to be handed on to
Nonconformist chapels; but Arundel did light a torch, and put it to his
own church. Such real unpopularity as did in time attach to the old
religious system, and which afterwards became a true national tradition
against Mary, was doubtless started by the diseased energy of these
fifteenth-century bishops. Persecution can be a philosophy, and a
defensible philosophy, but with some of these men persecution was rather
a perversion. Across the channel, one of them was presiding at the trial
of Joan of Arc.

But this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in all the epoch
that follows the fall of Richard II., and especially in those feuds that
found so ironic an imagery in English roses--and thorns. The
foreshortening of such a backward glance as this book can alone claim to
be, forbids any entrance into the military mazes of the wars of York and
Lancaster, or any attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries and
revenges which filled the lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and the warlike
widow of Henry V. The rivals were not, indeed, as is sometimes
exaggeratively implied, fighting for nothing, or even (like the lion and
the unicorn) merely fighting for the crown. The shadow of a moral
difference can still be traced even in that stormy twilight of a heroic
time. But when we have said that Lancaster stood, on the whole, for the
new notion of a king propped by parliaments and powerful bishops, and
York, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea of a king who
permits nothing to come between him and his people, we have said
everything of permanent political interest that could be traced by
counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury. But
this truth, that there was something which can only vaguely be called
Tory about the Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a
justifiable romance to the last and most remarkable figure of the
fighting House of York, with whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended.

If we desire at all to catch the strange colours of the sunset of the
Middle Ages, to see what had changed yet not wholly killed chivalry,
there is no better study than the riddle of Richard III. Of course,
scarcely a line of him was like the caricat