the king’s person was found by many examples to be by no means sacred: “Strike the lords and spare the commons” was the cry that went up in the chase of the bloody battles of the Roses. The unsuccessful politician did not retire to the ease and pleasure of a country house, flavoured with a little literary labour and apologetics for his past mistakes, but paid with his head, or the torment of his body, 82 for his miscalculations as to possible majorities.
Furthermore, the very roughness and adventure of life of those days made people less sensitive to bodily pain than they are now. Their nerves were not so high-strung as ours are, so that the apprehension of torture or death did not weigh heavily upon them. Of this history affords abundant evidence. Death, moreover, to them seemed but a temporary interruption of the course of their life. Men in those days really conceived of the icontinuity of life as a simple and absolute fact. The belief in a future state had not as yet become a mere vague and metaphorical expression, as it is to-day, when no one attempts even in thought to realise it for himself; it was as real