The History of England from the Accession of James II
Author | : Thomas Babington Macaulay |
Publisher | : General Books |
Total Pages | : 372 |
Release | : 2012-01 |
ISBN-10 | : 145891982X |
ISBN-13 | : 9781458919823 |
Rating | : 4/5 (823 Downloads) |
Download or read book The History of England from the Accession of James II written by Thomas Babington Macaulay and published by General Books. This book was released on 2012-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: great lords, unable to gratify their tastes by plundering the French, were eager to plunder each other The realm to which they were now confined would not, in the phrase of Comines, the most judicious observer of that time, suffice for them all. Two aristocratical factions, headed by two branches of the royal family, engaged in a long and fierce struggle for supremacy. As the animosity of those factions did not really arise from the dispute about the succession, it lasted long after all ground of dispute about the succession was removed. The party of the Eed Eose survived the last prince who claimed the crown in right of Henry the Fourth. The party of the White Eose survived the marriage of Eichmond and Elizabeth. Left without chiefs who had any decent show of right, the adherents of Lancaster rallied round a line of bastards, and the adherents of York set up a succession of impostors. When, at length, many aspiring nobles had perished on the field of battle or by the hands of the executioner, when many illustrious houses had disappeared for ever from history, when those great families which remained had been exhausted and sobered by calamities, it was universally acknowledged that the claims of all the contending Plantagenets were united in the house of Tudor. Meanwhile a change was proceeding infinitely more Extinction of momentous than the acquisition or loss of Tiiimage. anv provincej than the rise or fall of any dynasty. Slavery and the evils by which slavery is everywhere accompanied were fast disappearing. It is remarkable that the two greatest and most salutary social revolutions which have taken place in England, that revolution which, in the thirteenth century, put an end to the tyranny of nation over nation, and that revolution which, a few generations later, put ...