disposed people of their leaders, or of those to whom they would
naturally look for lead and direction. The axe was kept continually
striking upon noble necks, and the cord was as continually stretched by
ignoble bodies, because the King was bent upon making insurrection a
failing business at the best. Men and women, patrician and plebeian,
might play at rebellion, if they liked it, but they should be made to
find that they were playing the losing game.

Now, this succession-question theory has the merit of meeting the very
difficulty that besets us when we study the history of Henry's reign,
and it is justified by many things that belong to English history for a
period of more than two centuries,--that is to say, from the deposition
of Richard II., in 1399, to the death of Elizabeth, in 1603. It is a
strangely suggestive satire on the alleged excellence of hereditary
monarchy as a mode of government that promotes the existence of order
beyond any other, that England should not have been free from trouble
for two hundred years, because her people could not agree upon the
question of the right to the crown, and so long as that question was
left unsettled, there could be no such thing as permanent peace for
the castle or the cottage or the city. Town and country, citizen,
baron, and peasant, were alike dependent upon the ambition of aspiring
princes and king-makers for the condition of their existence. The folly
of Richard II. enabled Henry of Bolingbroke to convert his ducal
coronet into a royal crown, and to bring about that object which his
father, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, seems to have ever had at
heart. Henry IV. was a usurper, in spite of his Parliamentary title,
according to all ideas of hereditary right; for, failing heirs of the
body to Richard II., the crown belonged to the House of Mortimer, in
virtue of the descent of its chief from the Duke of Clarence, third
son of Edward III, the Duke of Lancaster being fourth son of that