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The Last of the Barons: Warwick

The great earl, who had made Edward the Fourth king, found himself for very personal reasons trying to unseat that prince and to put in his place another Edward, of the house of Lancaster, heir to Henry the Sixth, whom Edward of York was holding a prisoner in the Tower. Yet Warwick's path was not an easy one; while his younger daughter was married to Edward of Lancaster, his other daughter, Isabel, was the wife of the king's younger brother Clarence, who was as yet the male heir to the throne. However things might go, a Warwick might some day sit upon the throne of England--if one did not take thought of the possibilities that lay hidden behind the inscrutable smile of the king's youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. But Warwick was at heart fighting the battle of aristocracy, while the king was with the current which was converting an agricultural into a trading population. With Warwick was his powerful fighting brother, Montagu; with him--or against him, who could tell?--was his other brother, the facile archbishop who aspired to be pope, whose mansion was at once a school for youth, a court for middle life, an asylum for age, whither as to a Medici fled the letters and the arts. In the end Warwick found himself in open battle against the king he had placed upon the throne. The impetuous and fiery temperament of Edward the Fourth was rendered yet more fearful by the indulgence of every intemperance. His very virtues strengthened his vices; his courage stifled every whisper. It almost seemed as if he loved to provoke a danger for the pleasure it gave his brain to baffle or his hand to crush it. And yet he had a shrewd policy which perhaps drew him knowingly into the quarrel with Warwick, which merely his evil passions seemed to provoke. "I wish to raise a fresh nobility," he said, "to counteract the pride of the old; only upon new nobles can a new dynasty rely." This was the Yorkist principle of humbling the baronial and raising the middle class. It was easy of execution at a period when a martial aristocracy was beginning to merge into a voluptuous court.