38

CHAP.

I.

EISTOftY OF ENGLAND,

grandee was not inclined to insult a class into which liis ownchildren must descend.

After the wars of York and Lancaster, the links whichconnected the nobility and the commonalty became closerand more numerous than ever. The extent of the destructionwhich had fallen on the old aristocracy may be inferred froma single circumstance. In the year 1451 Henry the Sixthsummoned fifty-three temporal Lords to parliament. Thetemporal Lords summoned by Henry the Seventh to the par-liament of 1485 were only twenty-nine, and of these twenty-nine several had recently been elevated to the peerage.During the following century the ranks of the nobility werelargely recruited from among the gentry. The constitutionof the House of Commons tended greatly to promote thesalutary intermixture of classes. The knight of the shire wasthe 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 thecommercial towns, sate also members who, in any othercountry, would have been called noblemen, hereditary lordsof manors, entitled to hold courts and to bear coat armour,and able to trace back an honourable descent through manygenerations. Some of them were younger sons and brothersof great lords. Others could boast even of royal blood. Atlength the eldest son of an Earl of Bedford, called in cour-tesy by the second title of his fiither, offered himself as can-didate for a seat in the House of Commons, and his examplewas followed by others. Seated in that house, the heirs ofthe grandees of the realm naturally became as zealous forits privileges as any of the humble burgesses with whom theywere mingled. Thus our democracy was, from an earlyperiod, the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the mostdemocratic in the world; a peculiarity which has lasted down