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The Last of the Barons

By EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON (LORD LYTTON) Condensation by PROF. WILLIAM FENWICK HARRIS LISTEN to an English nobleman paint a picture of the rise in his country of that trading bourgeoisie which is so much in the talk of to-day. The leaders in the strife are Edward the Fourth, traderking, and Richard Nevil, Earl of Warwick, King-maker and "Last of the Barons." Around them cluster the lives of many others in the great struggle. The scene is set for the battle of Barnet, April 14, 1471, in the Wars of the Roses. "Raw, cold, and dismal dawned the morning of the fourteenth of April, the Easter Sabbath. In the fortunes of that day were involved those of all the persons who hitherto, in the course of this narrative, may have seemed to move in separate orbits from the fiery star of Warwick. Now, in this crowning hour, the vast and gigantic destiny of the great earl comprehended all upon which its darkness or its light had fallen: not only the luxurious Edward, the perjured Clarence, the haughty Margaret, her gallant son, the gentle Anne, the remorseful Isabel, the dark guile of Gloucester, the rising fortunes of gifted Hastings--but on the hazard of that day rested the hopes of Hilyard, and the interests of the trader Alwyn, and the permanence of that frank, chivalric, hardy, still half-Norman race, of which Nicholas Alwyn and his Saxon class were the rival antagonistic principle, and Marmaduke Nevil the ordinary type. Dragged inexorably into the whirlpool of that mighty fate were even the very lives of the simple scholar, Adam Warner, of his obscure and devoted child, Sibyll. Here, into this gory ocean, all scattered rivulets and streams had hastened to merge at last. "But grander and more awful than all individual interests were those assigned to the fortunes of this battle, so memorable in the English annals--the ruin or triumph of a dynasty; the fall of that warlike baronage of which Richard Nevil was the personification, the crowning flower, the greatest representative and the last--associated with memories of turbulence and excess, it is true, but with the proudest and grandest achievements in our early history; with all such liberty as had been yet achieved since the Norman Conquest; with all such glory as had made the island famous--here with Runnymede, and there with Cressy; the rise of a crafty, plotting, imperious Despotism, based upon the growing sympathy of craftsmen and traders, and ripening on the one hand to the Tudor tyranny, the Republican reaction under the Stuarts, the slavery and the Civil War, but on the other hand to the concentration of all the vigor and life of genius into a single and strong government, the graces, the arts, the letters of a polished court, the freedom, the energy, the resources of a commercial population destined to rise above the tyranny at which it had first connived and give to the emancipated Saxons the markets of the world. Upon the victory of that day these contending interests, this vast alternative in the future, swayed and trembled." Despite the stilted language of another day and the portly size of the volume, The Last of the Barons is read to-day because the characters who play so large a part in one of the great human struggles toward liberty are all human beings and not mere puppets. The story is one of intrigue and of battle, centering nominally in the Wars of the Roses and the struggles of the two great houses of York and Lancaster; yet the interest is far larger than a mere dynastic one; the rise of the middle class to power at the expense of the baronial, the growth of a national spirit in place of mere individual loyalty to a feudal chieftain, is the important thing in this manifestation of class-consciousness, the plain people uniting with the trading townsmen against the nobles.