Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:
The English Reformation was not merely a religious event; it was also a social one. While the spiritual mould of the Middle Ages was shattered, a corresponding revolution, no less complete and no less far-reaching, occurred in the structure of secular life and the seat of power. The knights and ecclesiastics who had ruled for ages vanished away, and their place was taken by a new class of persons, neither chivalrous nor holy, into whose competent and vigorous hands the reins, and the sweets, of government were gathered. This remarkable aristocracy, which had been created by the cunning of Henry VIII, overwhelmed at last the power that had given it being. The figure on the throne became a shadow, while the Russells, the Cavendishes, the Cecils, ruled over England in supreme solidity. For many generations they were England; and it i's difficult to imagine an England without them, even today.
The change came quickly---it was completed during the reign of Elizabeth. The rebellion of the Northern Earls in 1569 was the last great effort of the old dispensation to escape its doom. It failed; the wretched Duke of Norfolk-the feeble Howard who had dreamt of marrying Mary Queen of Scots-was beheaded; and the new social system was finally secure. Yet the spirit of the ancient feudalism was not quite exhausted. Once more, before the reign was over, it flamed up, embodied in a single individual-Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. The flame was gloriousradiant with the colours of antique knighthood and the flashing gallantries of the past; but no substance fed it; flaring wildly, it tossed to and fro in the wind; it was suddenly put out. In the history of Essex., so perplexed in its issues, so desperate in its perturbations, so dreadful in its conclusion, the spectral agony of an abolished world is discernible through the tragic lineaments of a personal disaster.
His father., who had been created Earl of Essex by Elizabeth, was descended from all the great houses of medieval England. The Earl of Huntingdon, the Marquis of Dorset, the Lord Ferrers-Bohuns, Bourchiers, Rivers, Plantagenets-they crowded into his pedigree. One of his ancestresses, Eleanor de Bohun, was the sister of Mary, wife of Henry IV; another., Anne Woodville, was the sister of Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV; through Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the family traced its descent from Edward III. The first Earl had been a man of dreams-virtuous and unfortunate.
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