several had recently been elevated to the peerage. During the
following century the ranks of the nobility were largely
recruited from among the gentry. The constitution of the House of
Commons tended greatly to promote the salutary intermixture of
classes. The knight of the shire was the connecting link between
the baron and the shopkeeper. On the same benches on which sate
the goldsmiths, drapers, and grocers, who had been returned to
parliament by the commercial towns, sate also members who, in any
other country, would have been called noblemen, hereditary lords
of manors, entitled to hold courts and to bear coat armour, and
able to trace back an honourable descent through many
generations. Some of them were younger sons and brothers of
lords. Others could boast of even royal blood. At length the
eldest son of an Earl of Bedford, called in courtesy by the
second title of his father, offered himself as candidate for a
seat in the House of Commons, and his example was followed by
others. Seated in that house, the heirs of the great peers
naturally became as zealous for its privileges as any of the
humble burgesses with whom they were mingled. Thus our democracy
was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and our
aristocracy the most democratic in the world; a peculiarity which
has lasted down to the present day, and which has produced many
important moral and political effects.

The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his
grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the
Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degree explain the
difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the
men and women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power
during a period of a hundred and twenty years, always with