Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/102

 And this is said of a man who truly or falsely has been accused of some of the most frightful crimes in all history. Besides the grossness of manners, amounting to filthiness, that lies on the surface, there is an ominous cloud made up in part of frightful crimes distinctly traced out, and in part of crimes still more frightful, remaining in shadow, which imparts to that court, and in some degree to that time, a strange, repulsive, pestilential air and aspect, hardly belonging in an equal degree to any other period of modern history. The wars of the Roses and the Tudor tyranny that followed and completely destroyed the warlike Anglo-Norman nobility rendered this possible, and permitted the protracted existence of a King on the throne of England, of whom the barons of the iron hand and the iron time would have made very short work.