304 The Period of Constitution Making
great change except some recovery of Council control by
the king; but with the rise of the Earl of Stiff oik and the
king's marriage to Margaret of Anjou, whose arrogance
and lack of knowledge of the English government were
disastrous factors in the case of a king weak and periodical-
ly insane, the Council rapidly declined. It was no longer
consulted on high questions of policy, and had only the
pettier matters of administration to attend to; parlia-
mentary control was at an end, and those features for
which Parliament was responsible in the preceding period
were passing away. Cade's rebellion in 1450 was a move-
ment largely political, and a prominent demand was for
reform in the Council; we hear, as of old, of "evil coun-
sellors5' and the neglect of great lords. The masterful
lords or prelates who controlled the king now, or who
later upon occasion controlled even the Yorkist kings,
were not doing it as members of a recognised and regulated
organ of government. There were efforts at reform in
the years following, but they were unsuccessful, and by
1453, the year of the final debacle in France, the Council
had reached a state of great weakness. There was some
revival during the two following years while the Duke of
York was in power, but the Wars of the Roses were at hand
and "manifestly the real issues of the time were passing
from the control of parliaments and councils into the
fields of battle," and in the late years of the reign the
Council almost ceased to exist.
There was no important recovery tinder the Yorkists.
Council and Parliament suffered together, as was bound
to be the case with legitimist sovereigns who at the same
time were not statesmen and had no important programme
or constructive policy. The Council continued to func-
tion in a small administrative way and was of considerable
size, but its judicial work was almost nil. There was
some renewal of activity in the latter field under Richard
IIL, and then the unhappy period was at an end, for-
tunately a period so short that the memory of the Lan-
castrian Council remained, In Fortescue's Governance