Altogether, the ruin of the house of York, if we may credit Commines, was the eventual result of the fatal compromise made in the campaign of 1475, and of
the enervating and corrupting influences exercised by the French pensions which were then accepted by king Edward and his ministers. Thenceforward, any hope of recovering the English provinces of France was indefinitely deferred; the very echoes of those martial glories which had once made the English name so dreadful in that country were allowed to die away; the dreams of conquest were dissipated; and the hands of Englishmen again turned to internecine contests, which resulted in the total destruction of the royal house of Plantagenet, and the ruin of a large proportion of the ancient nobility.
The Boke of Noblesse, after the total failure of those more generous sentiments and aspirations which it was intended to propagate, at once became, what it is now, a mere mirror of by-gone days; and, considering these circumstances, we cannot be surprised that it was never again transcribed, nor found its way to the press.
It is with regret that I relinquish to some future more fortunate inquirer the discovery of the author of this composition. The manuscript from which it is printed is certainly not his autograph original; for its great inaccuracy occasionally renders the meaning almost unintelligible. And yet the corrections and insertions, which I have indicated as coming à secundâ manu, would seem to belong to the author.
I have already, in the first page of this Introduction, intimated the possibility of the work having been composed in the lifetime of sir John Fastolfe, and merely re-edited, if we may use the term, upon occasion of the projected invasion of France in 1475. There are three circumstances which decidedly connect the book with some dependent of sir John Fastolfe:—
1. That the writer quotes sir John as "mine autour," or informant, in pp. [16] and [64], as well as tells other anecdotes which were probably received from his relation.
2. His having access to sir John's papers or books of account (p. [68]); and
3. There being still preserved in the volume, bound up with its fly-leaves, the two letters, probably both addressed to Fastolfe, and one of them certainly so, which are printed hereafter, as an Appendix to these remarks.
Sir John Fastolfe is not commemorated as having been a patron of literature. In the inventory of his property which is printed in the twentieth volume of the Archæologia, no books occur except a few missals, &c. belonging to his chapel. Though William of Worcestre, now famous for his historical collections, (which have been edited by Hearne, Nasmith, and Dallaway,) was Fastolfe's secretary, he was kept in a subordinate position, and valued for his merely clerical,
not his literary, services. Sir John Fastolfe's passion was the acquisition of property; whilst William of Worcestre, on his part, followed (as far as he could) the bent of his own taste, and not that of his master; being (as his comrade Henry Windsore declared) as glad to obtain a good book of French or of Poetry as his master Fastolfe was to purchase a fair manor.[[72]]