Winston Churchill On King Richard III

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Birth of Britain (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.; 1956), p. 500.

‘At Bosworth [Field] the Wars of the Roses reached their final milestone.

In the next century the subjects of the Tudors liked to consider that the Middle Ages had come to a close in 1485, and that a new age had dawned with the accession of Henry Tudor.

Modern historians prefer to point out that there are no sharp dividing lines in this period of our history, and that Henry VII carried on and consolidated much of the work of the Yorkist kings.

Certainly the prolongation of strife, waste, and insecurity in the fifteenth century had aroused in all classes an overpowering desire for strong, ordered government.

The Parliamentary conception which had prevailed under the house of Lancaster had gained many frontiers of constitutional rights.

These were now to pass into long abeyance.

Not until the seventeenth century were the old maxims, “Grievances before supply,” “Responsibility of Ministers in accordance with the public will,” “The Crown the servant and not the master of the State,” brought again into the light, and, as it happened, the glare of a new day.

The stir of the Renaissance, the storm of the Reformation, hurled their new problems on the bewildered but also reinspired mortals of the new age upon which England entered under the guidance of the wise, sad, careful monarch who inaugurated the Tudor dictatorship as King Henry VII.’

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