ould inherit.[106] Although the descent in the female line was
not formally denied, no female sovereign had ever, in fact, sat upon the
throne.[107] Even Henry VII. refused to strengthen his title by advancing
the claims of his wife: and the uncertainty of the laws of marriage, and
the innumerable refinements of the Romish canon law, which affected the
legitimacy of children,[108] furnished, in connection with the further
ambiguities of clerical dispensations, perpetual pretexts, whenever
pretexts were needed, for a breach of allegiance. So long, indeed, as the
character of the nation remained essentially military, it could as little
tolerate an incapable king as an army in a dangerous campaign can bear with
an inefficient commander; and whatever might be the theory of the title,
when the sceptre was held by the infirm hand of an Edward II., a Richard
II., or a Henry VI., the difficulty resolved itself by force, and it was
wrenched by a stronger arm from a grasp too feeble to retain it. The
consent of the nation was avowed, even in the authoritative language of a
statute,[109] as essential to the legitimacy of a sovereign's title; and
Sir Thomas More, on examination by the Solicitor-General, declared as his
opinion that parliament had power to depose kings if it so pleased.[110] So
many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned fearful episodes in
English history; the most fearful of them, which had traced its character
in blood in the private records of every English family, having been the
long struggle of the preceding century, from which the nation was still
suffering, and had but recovered sufficiently to be conscious of what it
had endured. It had decimated itself for a question which involved no
principle and led to no result, and perhaps the history of the world may be
searched in vain for any parallel to a quarrel at once so desperate and so
unmeaning.

This very unmeaning character of the dispute increased the difficulty of
ending it. In wars of conquest or of principle, when something definite is
at stake, the victory is either won, or it is lost; the conduct of
individual men, at all events, is overruled by considerations external to
themselves which admit of being weighed and calculated. In a war of
succession, where the great families were divided in their allegiance, and
supported the rival claimants in evenly balanced numbers, the inveteracy of
the conflict increased with its duration, and propagate