owns had had no share.
It was a revolution made by the representative of the barons and his
followers. It was connected with no advancement of the middle class;
it seemed to the men of commerce but the violence of a turbulent and
disappointed nobility. The very name given to Warwick's supporters was
unpopular in the towns. They were not called the Lancastrians, or the
friends of King Henry,--they were styled then, and still are so, by
the old chronicler, "The Lord's Party." Most of whatever was still
feudal--the haughtiest of the magnates, the rudest of the yeomanry,
the most warlike of the knights--gave to Warwick the sanction of their
allegiance; and this sanction was displeasing to the intelligence of the
towns.

Classes in all times have a keen instinct of their own class-interests.
The revolution which the earl had effected was the triumph of
aristocracy; its natural results would tend to strengthen certainly the
moral, and probably the constitutional, power already possessed by that
martial order. The new parliament was their creature, Henry VI. was a
cipher, his son a boy with unknown character, and according to vulgar
scandal, of doubtful legitimacy, seemingly bound hand and foot in the
trammels of the archbaron's mighty House; the earl himself had never
scrupled to evince a distaste to the change in society which was slowly
converting an agricultural into a trading population.

It may be observed, too, that a middle class as rarely unites itself
with the idols of the populace as with the chiefs of a seignorie. The
brute attachment of the peasants and the mobs to the gorgeous and lavish
earl seemed to the burgesses the sign of a barbaric clanship, opposed
to that advance in civilization towards which they half unconsciously
struggled.

And here we must rapidly glance at what, as far as a statesman may
foresee, would have been the probable result of Warwick's ascendancy,
if durable and effectual. If attached, by prejudice and birth, to the
aristocracy, he was yet by reputation and habit attached also to the
popular party,--that party more popular than the middle class,--the
majority, the masses. His whole life had been one struggle against
despotism in the crown. Though far from entertaining such schemes as
in similar circumstances might have occurred to the deep sagacity of
an Italian patrician for the interest of his order, no doubt his policy
would have tended to this one aim,--the limitation of the monarch