Does this sound right?

This is a passage from Reid's book on the Council of the North--

[p 56

ý

The Yorkists, on the contrary, finding that Parliament would not give
them immediate possession of the Crown, asserted the principle of
legitimacy and denied the right of Parliament to alter the succession.
Attacking the authority of Parliament, they had to seek the support of the
unenfranchised classes; so that their own needs made them the champions of
the common people. At the same time, their sympathy with the culture of
the Renaissance brought them into touch with the ever-growing number of
merchants, scholars and lawyers who were impatient to cast off the bonds of
outworn custom. To all of these it was clear that the land was suffering
from lack of governance; and what they sought was a king strong enough to
govern, one who could protect the poor and weak against the rich and
powerful, and by the reasonable exercise of his perogative would remedy the
lawýs deficiencies and injustices.

So far as the South was concerned, it was easy for the Yorkists to do
what was expected of them; because there they found a large and wealthy
middle class, economically independent of the great landowners, which
preferred order to liberty, and good government to self-government. For
without commerce and industry there can be no middle class; without order
there can be no commercial and industrial expansion; and without a strong
government there can be no order. North of the Trent, however, where towns
were few and small, the middle-class was poor and insignificant.
Practically, there were only two classes, the lord and the commons; the
social organisation was wholly rural; and poverty secured the economic
dependence of gentle and simple alike on a few great lords. As there was
little in common between the Yorkists with their



[p 57

legitimist theory of monarchy and their absolutist tendency in government,
and the Lancastrian gentry with their aristocratic ideals of an elective
kingship and self-government, the former could win the North only by
gaining the support of the unenfranchised masses.


A J