meanly-clad Ferdinand of Aragon.
But Edward's work was the same as theirs and it was done as completely.
While jesting with aldermen, or dallying with mistresses, or idling over
new pages from the printing press at Westminster, Edward was silently
laying the foundations of an absolute rule.

The very faults of his nature helped him to success. His pleasure-loving
and self-indulgent temper needed the pressure of emergency, of actual
danger, to flash out into action. Men like Commines who saw him only in
moments of security and indolence scorned Edward as dull, sensual, easy to
be led and gulled by keener wits. It was in the hour of need and despair
that his genius showed itself, cool, rapid, subtle, utterly fearless,
moving straight to its aim through clouds of treachery and intrigue, and
striking hard when its aim was reached. But even in his idler hours his
purpose never wavered. His indolence and gaiety were in fact mere veils
thrown over a will of steel. From the first his aim was to free the Crown
from the control of the baronage. He made no secret of his hostility to
the nobles. At Towton as in all his after battles he bade his followers
slay knight and baron, but spare the commons. In his earliest Parliament,
that of 1461, he renewed the statutes against giving of liveries, and
though this enactment proved as fruitless as its predecessors to reduce
the households of the baronage it marked Edward's resolve to adhere to the
invariable policy of the Crown in striving for their reduction. But
efforts like these, though they indicated the young king's policy, could
produce little effect so long as the mightiest of the barons overawed the
throne. Yet even a king as bold as Edward might well have shrunk from a
struggle with Warwick. The Earl was all-powerful in the state; the
military resources of the realm were in his hands. As Captain of Calais he
was master of the one disciplined force at the disposal of the Crown, and
as admiral he controlled the royal fleet. The strength he drew from his
wide possessions, from his vast wealth (for his official revenues alone
were estimated at eighty thousand crowns a year), from his warlike renown
and his wide kinship, was backed by his personal popularity. Above all the
Yorkist party, bound to Warwick by a long series of victories, looked on
him rather than on the young and untried king as its head.

[Sidenote: Lewis the Eleventh]

The policy of Warwick pointed to a close allian