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Title: The Last Of The Barons, Complete

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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THE LAST OF THE BARONS

by Edward Bulwer Lytton




DEDICATORY EPISTLE.

I dedicate to you, my indulgent Critic and long-tried Friend, the work
which owes its origin to your suggestion. Long since, you urged me to
attempt a fiction which might borrow its characters from our own
Records, and serve to illustrate some of those truths which History is
too often compelled to leave to the Tale-teller, the Dramatist, and
the Poet.  Unquestionably, Fiction, when aspiring to something higher
than mere romance, does not pervert, but elucidate Facts.  He who
employs it worthily must, like a biographer, study the time and the
characters he selects, with a minute and earnest diligence which the
general historian, whose range extends over centuries, can scarcely be
expected to bestow upon the things and the men of a single epoch.  His
descriptions should fill up with colour and detail the cold outlines
of the rapid chronicler; and in spite of all that has been argued by
pseudo-critics, the very fancy which urged and animated his theme
should necessarily tend to increase the reader's practical and
familiar acquaintance with the habits, the motives, and the modes of
thought which constitute the true idiosyncrasy of an age.  More than
all, to Fiction is permitted that liberal use of Analogical Hypothesis
which is denied to History, and which, if sobered by research, and
enlightened by that knowledge of mankind (without which Fiction can
neither harm nor profit, for it becomes unreadable), tends to clear up
much that were otherwise obscure, and to solve the disputes and
difficulties of contradictory evidence by the philosophy of the human
heart.

My own impression of the greatness of the labour to which you invited
me made me the more diffident of success, inasmuch as the field of
English historical fiction had been so amply cultivated, not only by
the most brilliant of our many glorious Novelists, but by later
writers of high and merited reputation.  But however the annals of our
History have been exhausted by the industry of romance, the subject
you finally pressed on my choice is unquestionably one which, whether
in the delineation of character, the expression of passion, or the
suggestion of historical truths, can hardly fail to direct the
Novelist to paths wholly untrodden by his predecessors in the Land of
Fiction.

Encouraged by you, I commenced my task; encouraged by you, I venture,
on concluding it, to believe that, despite the partial adoption of
that established compromise between the modern and the elder diction,
which Sir Walter Scott so artistically improved from the more rugged
phraseology employed by Strutt, and which later writers have perhaps
somewhat overhackneyed, I may yet have avoided all material trespass
upon ground which others have already redeemed from the waste.
Whatever the produce of the soil I have selected, I claim, at least,
to have cleared it with my own labour, and ploughed it with my own
heifer.

The reign of Edward IV. is in itself suggestive of new considerations
and unexhausted interest to those who accurately regard it.  Then
commenced the policy consummated by Henry VII.; then were broken up
the great elements of the old feudal order; a new Nobility was called
into power, to aid the growing Middle Class in its struggles with the
ancient; and in the fate of the hero of the age, Richard Nevile, Earl
of Warwick, popularly called the King-maker, "the greatest as well as
the last of those mighty Barons who formerly overawed the Crown,"
[Hume adds, "and rendered the people incapable of civil government,"--
a sentence which, perhaps, judges too hastily the whole question at
issue in our earlier history, between the jealousy of the barons and
the authority of the king.] was involved the very principle of our
existing civilization.  It adds to the wide scope of Fiction, which
ever loves to explore the twilight, that, as Hume has truly observed,
"No part of English history since the Conquest is so obscure, so
uncertain, so little authentic or consistent, as that of the Wars
between the two Roses."  It adds also to the importance of that
conjectural research in which Fiction may be made so interesting and
so useful, that "this profound darkness falls upon us just on the eve
of the restoration of letters;" [Hume] while amidst the gloom, we
perceive the movement of those great and heroic passions in which
Fiction finds delineations everlastingly new, and are brought in
contact with characters sufficiently familiar for interest,
sufficiently remote for adaptation to romance, and above all, so
frequently obscured by contradictory evidence, that we lend ourselves
willingly to any one who seeks to help our judgment of the individual
by tests taken from the general knowledge of mankind.

Round the great image of the "Last of the Barons" group Edward the
Fourth, at once frank and false; the brilliant but ominous boyhood of
Richard the Third; the accomplished Hastings, "a good knight and
gentle, but somewhat dissolute of living;" [Chronicle of Edward V., in
Stowe] the vehement and fiery Margaret of Anjou; the meek image of her
"holy Henry," and the pale shadow of their son.  There may we see,
also, the gorgeous Prelate, refining in policy and wile, as the
enthusiasm and energy which had formerly upheld the Ancient Church
pass into the stern and persecuted votaries of the New; we behold, in
that social transition, the sober Trader--outgrowing the prejudices of
the rude retainer or rustic franklin, from whom he is sprung--
recognizing sagaciously, and supporting sturdily, the sectarian
interests of his order, and preparing the way for the mighty Middle
Class, in which our Modern Civilization, with its faults and its
merits, has established its stronghold; while, in contrast to the
measured and thoughtful notions of liberty which prudent Commerce
entertains, we are reminded of the political fanaticism of the secret
Lollard,--of the jacquerie of the turbulent mob-leader; and perceive,
amidst the various tyrannies of the time, and often partially allied
with the warlike seignorie, [For it is noticeable that in nearly all
the popular risings--that of Cade, of Robin of Redesdale, and
afterwards of that which Perkin Warbeck made subservient to his
extraordinary enterprise--the proclamations of the rebels always
announced, among their popular grievances, the depression of the
ancient nobles and the elevation of new men.]--ever jealous against
all kingly despotism,--the restless and ignorant movement of a
democratic principle, ultimately suppressed, though not destroyed,
under the Tudors, by the strong union of a Middle Class, anxious for
security and order, with an Executive Authority determined upon
absolute sway.

Nor should we obtain a complete and comprehensive view of that most
interesting Period of Transition, unless we saw something of the
influence which the sombre and sinister wisdom of Italian policy began
to exercise over the councils of the great,--a policy of refined
stratagem, of complicated intrigue, of systematic falsehood, of
ruthless, but secret violence; a policy which actuated the fell
statecraft of Louis XI.; which darkened, whenever he paused to think
and to scheme, the gaudy and jovial character of Edward IV.; which
appeared in its fullest combination of profound guile and resolute
will in Richard III.; and, softened down into more plausible and
specious purpose by the unimpassioned sagacity of Henry VII., finally
attained the object which justified all its villanies to the princes
of its native land,--namely, the tranquillity of a settled State, and
the establishment of a civilized but imperious despotism.

Again, in that twilight time, upon which was dawning the great
invention that gave to Letters and to Science the precision and
durability of the printed page, it is interesting to conjecture what
would have been the fate of any scientific achievement for which the
world was less prepared.  The reception of printing into England
chanced just at the happy period when Scholarship and Literature were
favoured by the great.  The princes of York, with the exception of
Edward IV. himself, who had, however, the grace to lament his own want
of learning, and the taste to appreciate it in others, were highly
educated.  The Lords Rivers and Hastings [The erudite Lord Worcester
had been one of Caxton's warmest patrons, but that nobleman was no
more at the time in which printing is said to have been actually
introduced into England.] were accomplished in all the "witte and
lere" of their age.  Princes and peers vied with each other in their
patronage of Caxton, and Richard III., during his brief reign, spared
no pains to circulate to the utmost the invention destined to transmit
his own memory to the hatred and the horror of all succeeding time.
But when we look around us, we see, in contrast to the gracious and
fostering reception of the mere mechanism by which science is made
manifest, the utmost intolerance to science itself.  The mathematics
in especial are deemed the very cabala of the black art.  Accusations
of witchcraft were never more abundant; and yet, strange to say, those
who openly professed to practise the unhallowed science, [Nigromancy,
or Sorcery, even took its place amongst the regular callings.  Thus,
"Thomas Vandyke, late of Cambridge," is styled (Rolls Parl. 6, p. 273)
Nigromancer as his profession.--Sharon Turner, "History of England,"
vol iv. p. 6.  Burke, "History of Richard III."] and contrived to make
their deceptions profitable to some unworthy political purpose, appear
to have enjoyed safety, and sometimes even honour, while those who,
occupied with some practical, useful, and noble pursuits
uncomprehended by prince or people, denied their sorcery were
despatched without mercy.  The mathematician and astronomer
Bolingbroke (the greatest clerk of his age) is hanged and quartered as
a wizard, while not only impunity but reverence seems to have awaited
a certain Friar Bungey, for having raised mists and vapours, which
greatly befriended Edward IV. at the battle of Barnet.

Our knowledge of the intellectual spirit of the age, therefore, only
becomes perfect when we contrast the success of the Impostor with the
fate of the true Genius.  And as the prejudices of the populace ran
high against all mechanical contrivances for altering the settled
conditions of labour, [Even in the article of bonnets and hats, it
appears that certain wicked falling mills were deemed worthy of a
special anathema in the reign of Edward IV. These engines are accused
of having sought, "by subtle imagination," the destruction of the
original makers of hats and bonnets" by man's strength,--that is, with
hands and feet; "and an act of parliament was passed (22d of Edward
IV.) to put down the fabrication of the said hats and bonnets by
mechanical contrivance.] so probably, in the very instinct and destiny
of Genius which ever drive it to a war with popular prejudice, it
would be towards such contrivances that a man of great ingenuity and
intellect, if studying the physical sciences, would direct his
ambition.

Whether the author, in the invention he has assigned to his
philosopher (Adam Warner), has too boldly assumed the possibility of a
conception so much in advance of the time, they who have examined such
of the works of Roger Bacon as are yet given to the world can best
decide; but the assumption in itself belongs strictly to the most
acknowledged prerogatives of Fiction; and the true and important
question will obviously be, not whether Adam Warner could have
constructed his model, but whether, having so constructed it, the fate
that befell him was probable and natural.

Such characters as I have here alluded to seemed, then, to me, in
meditating the treatment of the high and brilliant subject which your
eloquence animated me to attempt, the proper Representatives of the
multiform Truths which the time of Warwick the King-maker affords to
our interests and suggests for our instruction; and I can only wish
that the powers of the author were worthier of the theme.

It is necessary that I now state briefly the foundation of the
Historical portions of this narrative.  The charming and popular
"History of Hume," which, however, in its treatment of the reign of
Edward IV. is more than ordinarily incorrect, has probably left upon
the minds of many of my readers, who may not have directed their
attention to more recent and accurate researches into that obscure
period, an erroneous impression of the causes which led to the breach
between Edward IV. and his great kinsman and subject, the Earl of
Warwick.  The general notion is probably still strong that it was the
marriage of the young king to Elizabeth Gray, during Warwick's
negotiations in France for the alliance of Bona of Savoy (sister-in-
law to Louis XI.), which exasperated the fiery earl, and induced his
union with the House of Lancaster.  All our more recent historians
have justly rejected this groundless fable, which even Hume (his
extreme penetration supplying the defects of his superficial research)
admits with reserve.  ["There may even some doubt arise with regard to
the proposal of marriage made to Bona of Savoy," etc.--HUME, note to
p. 222, vol. iii. edit. 1825.]  A short summary of the reasons for
this rejection is given by Dr. Lingard, and annexed below.  ["Many
writers tell us that the enmity of Warwick arose from his
disappointment caused by Edward's clandestine marriage with Elizabeth.
If we may believe them, the earl was at the very time in France
negotiating on the part of the king a marriage with Bona of Savoy,
sister to the Queen of France; and having succeeded in his mission,
brought back with him the Count of Dampmartin as ambassador from
Louis.  To me the whole story appears a fiction.  1. It is not to be
found in the more ancient historians.  2. Warwick was not at the time
in France.  On the 20th of April, ten days before the marriage, he was
employed in negotiating a truce with the French envoys in London (Rym.
xi. 521), and on the 26th of May, about three weeks after it, was
appointed to treat of another truce with the King of Scots (Rym. xi.
424).  3. Nor could he bring Dampmartin with him to England; for that
nobleman was committed a prisoner to the Bastile in September, 1463,
and remained there till May, 1465 (Monstrel. iii. 97, 109).  Three
contemporary and well-informed writers, the two continuators of the
History of Croyland and Wyrcester, attribute his discontent to the
marriages and honours granted to the Wydeviles, and the marriage of
the princess Margaret with the Duke of Burgundy."--LINGARD, vol. iii.
c. 24, pp. 5, 19, 4to ed.]  And, indeed, it is a matter of wonder that
so many of our chroniclers could have gravely admitted a legend
contradicted by all the subsequent conduct of Warwick himself; for we
find the earl specially doing honour to the publication of Edward's
marriage, standing godfather to his first-born (the Princess
Elizabeth), employed as ambassador or acting as minister, and fighting
for Edward, and against the Lancastrians, during the five years that
elapsed between the coronation of Elizabeth and Warwick's rebellion.

The real causes of this memorable quarrel, in which Warwick acquired
his title of King-maker, appear to have been these.

It is probable enough, as Sharon Turner suggests, [Sharon Turner:
History of England, vol. iii. p. 269.] that Warwick was disappointed
that, since Edward chose a subject for his wife, he neglected the more
suitable marriage he might have formed with the earl's eldest
daughter; and it is impossible but that the earl should have been
greatly chafed, in common with all his order, by the promotion of the
queen's relations, [W. Wyr. 506, 7.  Croyl. 542.] new men and apostate
Lancastrians.  But it is clear that these causes for discontent never
weakened his zeal for Edward till the year 1467, when we chance upon
the true origin of the romance concerning Bona of Savoy, and the first
open dissension between Edward and the earl.

In that year Warwick went to France, to conclude an alliance with
Louis XI., and to secure the hand of one of the French princes [Which
of the princes this was does not appear, and can scarcely be
conjectured.  The "Pictorial History of England" (Book v. 102) in a
tone of easy decision says "it was one of the sons of Louis XI."  But
Louis had no living sons at all at the time.  The Dauphin was not born
till three years afterwards.  The most probable person was the Duke of
Guienne, Louis's brother.] for Margaret, sister to Edward IV.; during
this period, Edward received the bastard brother of Charles, Count of
Charolois, afterwards Duke of Burgundy, and arranged a marriage
between Margaret and the count.

Warwick's embassy was thus dishonoured, and the dishonour was
aggravated by personal enmity to the bridegroom Edward had preferred.
[The Croyland Historian, who, as far as his brief and meagre record
extends, is the best authority for the time of Edward IV., very
decidedly states the Burgundian alliance to be the original cause of
Warwick's displeasure, rather than the king's marriage with Elizabeth:
"Upon which (the marriage of Margaret with Charolois) Richard Nevile,
Earl of Warwick, who had for so many years taken party with the French
against the Burgundians, conceived great indignation; and I hold this
to be the truer cause of his resentment than the king's marriage with
Elizabeth, for he had rather have procured a husband for the aforesaid
princess Margaret in the kingdom of France."  The Croyland Historian
also speaks emphatically of the strong animosity existing between
Charolois and Warwick.--Cont. Croyl. 551.]  The earl retired in
disgust to his castle.  But Warwick's nature, which Hume has happily
described as one of "undesigning frankness and openness," [Hume,
"Henry VI.," vol. iii. p. 172, edit. 1825.] does not seem to have long
harboured this resentment.  By the intercession of the Archbishop of
York and others, a reconciliation was effected, and the next year,
1468, we find Warwick again in favour, and even so far forgetting his
own former cause of complaint as to accompany the procession in honour
of Margaret's nuptials with his private foe.  [Lingard.]  In the
following year, however, arose the second dissension between the king
and his minister,--namely, in the king's refusal to sanction the
marriage of his brother Clarence with the earl's daughter Isabel,--a
refusal which was attended with a resolute opposition that must
greatly have galled the pride of the earl, since Edward even went so
far as to solicit the Pope to refuse his sanction, on the ground of
relationship.  [Carte.  Wm. Wyr.]  The Pope, nevertheless, grants the
dispensation, and the marriage takes place at Calais.  A popular
rebellion then breaks out in England.  Some of Warwick's kinsmen--
those, however, belonging to the branch of the Nevile family that had
always been Lancastrians, and at variance with the earl's party--are
found at its head.  The king, who is in imminent danger, writes a
supplicating letter to Warwick to come to his aid.  ["Paston Letters,"
cxcviii. vol. ii., Knight's ed.  See Lingard, c. 24, for the true date
of Edward's letters to Warwick, Clarence, and the Archbishop of York.]
The earl again forgets former causes for resentment, hastens from
Calais, rescues the king, and quells the rebellion by the influence of
his popular name.

We next find Edward at Warwick's castle of Middleham, where, according
to some historians, he is forcibly detained,--an assertion treated by
others as a contemptible invention.  This question will be examined in
the course of this work; [See Note II.] but whatever the true
construction of the story, we find that Warwick and the king are still
on such friendly terms, that the earl marches in person against a
rebellion on the borders, obtains a signal victory, and that the rebel
leader (the earl's own kinsman) is beheaded by Edward at York.  We
find that, immediately after this supposed detention, Edward speaks of
Warwick and his brothers "as his best friends;" ["Paston Letters,"
cciv. vol. ii., Knight's ed.  The date of this letter, which puzzled
the worthy annotator, is clearly to be referred to Edward's return
from York, after his visit to Middleham in 1469.  No mention is
therein made by the gossiping contemporary of any rumour that Edward
had suffered imprisonment.  He enters the city in state, as having
returned safe and victorious from a formidable rebellion.  The letter
goes on to say: "The king himself hath (that is, holds) good language
of the Lords Clarence, of Warwick, etc., saying 'they be his best
friends.'"  Would he say this if just escaped from a prison?  Sir John
Paston, the writer of the letter, adds, it is true, "But his household
men have (hold) other language." very probably, for the household men
were the court creatures always at variance with Warwick, and held, no
doubt, the same language they had been in the habit of holding
before.] that he betroths his eldest daughter to Warwick's nephew, the
male heir of the family.  And then suddenly, only three months
afterwards (in February, 1470), and without any clear and apparent
cause, we find Warwick in open rebellion, animated by a deadly hatred
to the king, refusing, from first to last, all overtures of
conciliation; and so determined is his vengeance, that he bows a
pride, hitherto morbidly susceptible, to the vehement insolence of
Margaret of Anjou, and forms the closest alliance with the Lancastrian
party, in the destruction of which his whole life had previously been
employed.

Here, then, where History leaves us in the dark, where our curiosity
is the most excited, Fiction gropes amidst the ancient chronicles, and
seeks to detect and to guess the truth.  And then Fiction, accustomed
to deal with the human heart, seizes upon the paramount importance of
a Fact which the modern historian has been contented to place amongst
dubious and collateral causes of dissension.  We find it broadly and
strongly stated by Hall and others, that Edward had coarsely attempted
the virtue of one of the earl's female relations.  "And farther it
erreth not from the truth," says Hall,  "that the king did attempt a
thing once in the earl's house, which was much against the earl's
honesty; but whether it was the daughter or the niece," adds the
chronicler, "was not, for both their honours, openly known; but surely
such a thing WAS attempted by King Edward," etc.

Any one at all familiar with Hall (and, indeed, with all our principal
chroniclers, except Fabyan), will not expect any accurate precision as
to the date he assigns for the outrage.  He awards to it, therefore,
the same date he erroneously gives to Warwick's other grudges (namely,
a period brought some years lower by all judicious historians) a date
at which Warwick was still Edward's fastest friend.

Once grant the probability of this insult to the earl (the probability
is conceded at once by the more recent historians, and received
without scruple as a fact by Rapia, Habington, and Carte), and the
whole obscurity which involves this memorable quarrel vanishes at
once.  Here was, indeed, a wrong never to be forgiven, and yet never
to be proclaimed.  As Hall implies, the honour of the earl was
implicated in hushing the scandal, and the honour of Edward in
concealing the offence.  That if ever the insult were attempted, it
must have been just previous to the earl's declared hostility is
clear.  Offences of that kind hurry men to immediate action at the
first, or else, if they stoop to dissimulation the more effectually to
avenge afterwards, the outbreak bides its seasonable time.  But the
time selected by the earl for his outbreak was the very worst he could
have chosen, and attests the influence of a sudden passion,--a new and
uncalculated cause of resentment.  He had no forces collected; he had
not even sounded his own brother-in-law, Lord Stanley (since he was
uncertain of his intentions); while, but a few months before, had he
felt any desire to dethrone the king, he could either have suffered
him to be crushed by the popular rebellion the earl himself had
quelled, or have disposed of his person as he pleased when a guest at
his own castle of Middleham.  His evident want of all preparation and
forethought--a want which drove into rapid and compulsory flight from
England the baron to whose banner, a few months afterwards, flocked
sixty thousand men--proves that the cause of his alienation was fresh
and recent.

If, then, the cause we have referred to, as mentioned by Hall and
others, seems the most probable we can find (no other cause for such
abrupt hostility being discernible), the date for it must be placed
where it is in this work,--namely, just prior to the earl's revolt.
The next question is, who could have been the lady thus offended,
whether a niece or daughter.  Scarcely a niece, for Warwick had one
married brother, Lord Montagu, and several sisters; but the sisters
were married to lords who remained friendly to Edward, [Except the
sisters married to Lord Fitzhugh and Lord Oxford.  But though
Fitzhugh, or rather his son, broke into rebellion, it was for some
cause in which Warwick did not sympathize, for by Warwick himself was
that rebellion put down; nor could the aggrieved lady have been a
daughter of Lord Oxford, for he was a stanch, though not avowed,
Lancastrian, and seems to have carefully kept aloof from the court.]
and Montagu seems to have had no daughter out of childhood, [Montagu's
wife could have been little more than thirty at the time of his death.
She married again, and had a family by her second husband.] while that
nobleman himself did not share Warwick's rebellion at the first, but
continued to enjoy the confidence of Edward.  We cannot reasonably,
then, conceive the uncle to have been so much more revengeful than the
parents,--the legitimate guardians of the honour of a daughter.  It
is, therefore, more probable that the insulted maiden should have been
one of Lord Warwick's daughters; and this is the general belief.
Carte plainly declares it was Isabel.  But Isabel it could hardly have
been.  She was then married to Edward's brother, the Duke of Clarence,
and within a month of her confinement.  The earl had only one other
daughter, Anne, then in the flower of her youth; and though Isabel
appears to have possessed a more striking character of beauty, Anne
must have had no inconsiderable charms to have won the love of the
Lancastrian Prince Edward, and to have inspired a tender and human
affection in Richard Duke of Gloucester.  [Not only does Majerus, the
Flemish annalist, speak of Richard's early affection to Anne, but
Richard's pertinacity in marrying her, at a time when her family was
crushed and fallen, seems to sanction the assertion.  True, that
Richard received with her a considerable portion of the estates of her
parents.  But both Anne herself and her parents were attainted, and
the whole property at the disposal of the Crown.  Richard at that time
had conferred the most important services on Edward.  He had remained
faithful to him during the rebellion of Clarence; he had been the hero
of the day both at Barnet and Tewksbury.  His reputation was then
exceedingly high, and if he had demanded, as a legitimate reward, the
lands of Middleham, without the bride, Edward could not well have
refused them.  He certainly had a much better claim than the only
other competitor for the confiscated estates,--namely, the perjured
and despicable Clarence.  For Anne's reluctance to marry Richard, and
the disguise she assumed, see Miss Strickland's "Life of Anne of
Warwick."  For the honour of Anne, rather than of Richard, to whose
memory one crime more or less matters but little, it may here be
observed that so far from there being any ground to suppose that
Gloucester was an accomplice in the assassination of the young prince
Edward of Lancaster, there is some ground to believe that that prince
was not assassinated at all, but died (as we would fain hope the
grandson of Henry V. did die) fighting manfully in the field.--
"Harleian Manuscripts;" Stowe, "Chronicle of Tewksbury;" Sharon
Turner, vol. iii. p. 335.]  It is also noticeable, that when, not as
Shakspeare represents, but after long solicitation, and apparently by
positive coercion, Anne formed her second marriage, she seems to have
been kept carefully by Richard from his gay brother's court, and
rarely, if ever, to have appeared in London till Edward was no more.

That considerable obscurity should always rest upon the facts
connected with Edward's meditated crime,--that they should never be
published amongst the grievances of the haughty rebel is natural from
the very dignity of the parties, and the character of the offence;
that in such obscurity sober History should not venture too far on the
hypothesis suggested by the chronicler, is right and laudable.  But
probably it will be conceded by all, that here Fiction finds its
lawful province, and that it may reasonably help, by no improbable nor
groundless conjecture, to render connected and clear the most broken
and the darkest fragments of our annals.

I have judged it better partially to forestall the interest of the
reader in my narrative, by stating thus openly what he may expect,
than to encounter the far less favourable impression (if he had been
hitherto a believer in the old romance of Bona of Savoy), [I say the
old romance of Bona of Savoy, so far as Edward's rejection of her hand
for that of Elizabeth Gray is stated to have made the cause of his
quarrel with Warwick.  But I do not deny the possibility that such a
marriage had been contemplated and advised by Warwick, though he
neither sought to negotiate it, nor was wronged by Edward's preference
of his fair subject.] that the author was taking an unwarrantable
liberty with the real facts, when, in truth, it is upon the real
facts, as far as they can be ascertained, that the author has built
his tale, and his boldest inventions are but deductions from the
amplest evidence he could collect.  Nay, he even ventures to believe,
that whoever hereafter shall write the history of Edward IV. will not
disdain to avail himself of some suggestions scattered throughout
these volumes, and tending to throw new light upon the events of that
intricate but important period.

It is probable that this work will prove more popular in its nature
than my last fiction of "Zanoni," which could only be relished by
those interested in the examinations of the various problems in human
life which it attempts to solve.  But both fictions, however different
and distinct their treatment, are constructed on those principles of
art to which, in all my later works, however imperfect my success, I
have sought at least steadily to adhere.

To my mind, a writer should sit down to compose a fiction as a painter
prepares to compose a picture.  His first care should be the
conception of a whole as lofty as his intellect can grasp, as
harmonious and complete as his art can accomplish; his second care,
the character of the interest which the details are intended to
sustain.

It is when we compare works of imagination in writing with works of
imagination on the canvas, that we can best form a critical idea of
the different schools which exist in each; for common both to the
author and the painter are those styles which we call the Familiar,
the Picturesque, and the Intellectual.  By recurring to this
comparison we can, without much difficulty, classify works of Fiction
in their proper order, and estimate the rank they should severally
hold.  The Intellectual will probably never be the most widely popular
for the moment.  He who prefers to study in this school must be
prepared for much depreciation, for its greatest excellences, even if
he achieve them, are not the most obvious to the many.  In discussing,
for instance, a modern work, we hear it praised, perhaps, for some
striking passage, some prominent character; but when do we ever hear
any comment on its harmony of construction, on its fulness of design,
on its ideal character,--on its essentials, in short, as a work of
art?  What we hear most valued in the picture, we often find the most
neglected in the book,--namely, the composition; and this, simply
because in England painting is recognized as an art, and estimated
according to definite theories; but in literature we judge from a
taste never formed, from a thousand prejudices and ignorant
predilections.  We do not yet comprehend that the author is an artist,
and that the true rules of art by which he should be tested are
precise and immutable.  Hence the singular and fantastic caprices of
the popular opinion,--its exaggerations of praise or censure, its
passion and reaction.  At one while, its solemn contempt for
Wordsworth; at another, its absurd idolatry.  At one while we are
stunned by the noisy celebrity of Byron, at another we are calmly told
that he can scarcely be called a poet.  Each of these variations in
the public is implicitly followed by the vulgar criticism; and as a
few years back our journals vied with each other in ridiculing
Wordsworth for the faults which he did not possess, they vie now with
each other in eulogiums upon the merits which he has never displayed.

These violent fluctuations betray both a public and a criticism
utterly unschooled in the elementary principles of literary art, and
entitle the humblest author to dispute the censure of the hour, while
they ought to render the greatest suspicious of its praise.

It is, then, in conformity, not with any presumptuous conviction of
his own superiority, but with his common experience and common-sense,
that every author who addresses an English audience in serious earnest
is permitted to feel that his final sentence rests not with the jury
before which he is first heard.  The literary history of the day
consists of a series of judgments set aside.

But this uncertainty must more essentially betide every student,
however lowly, in the school I have called the Intellectual, which
must ever be more or less at variance with the popular canons.  It is
its hard necessity to vex and disturb the lazy quietude of vulgar
taste; for unless it did so, it could neither elevate nor move.  He
who resigns the Dutch art for the Italian must continue through the
dark to explore the principles upon which he founds his design, to
which he adapts his execution; in hope or in despondence still
faithful to the theory which cares less for the amount of interest
created than for the sources from which the interest is to be drawn;
seeking in action the movement of the grander passions or the subtler
springs of conduct, seeking in repose the colouring of intellectual
beauty.

The Low and the High of Art are not very readily comprehended.  They
depend not upon the worldly degree or the physical condition of the
characters delineated; they depend entirely upon the quality of the
emotion which the characters are intended to excite,--namely, whether
of sympathy for something low, or of admiration for something high.
There is nothing high in a boor's head by Teniers, there is nothing
low in a boor's head by Guido.  What makes the difference between the
two?  The absence or presence of the Ideal!  But every one can judge
of the merit of the first, for it is of the Familiar school; it
requires a connoisseur to see the merit of the last, for it is of the
Intellectual.

I have the less scrupled to leave these remarks to cavil or to
sarcasm, because this fiction is probably the last with which I shall
trespass upon the Public, and I am desirous that it shall contain, at
least, my avowal of the principles upon which it and its later
predecessors have been composed.  You know well, however others may
dispute the fact, the earnestness with which those principles have
been meditated and pursued,--with high desire, if but with poor
results.

It is a pleasure to feel that the aim, which I value more than the
success, is comprehended by one whose exquisite taste as a critic is
only impaired by that far rarer quality,--the disposition to over-
estimate the person you profess to esteem!  Adieu, my sincere and
valued friend; and accept, as a mute token of gratitude and regard,
these flowers gathered in the Garden where we have so often roved
together.                            E. L. B.

  LONDON, January, 1843.


PREFACE TO THE LAST OF THE BARONS

This was the first attempt of the author in Historical Romance upon
English ground.  Nor would he have risked the disadvantage of
comparison with the genius of Sir Walter Scott, had he not believed
that that great writer and his numerous imitators had left altogether
unoccupied the peculiar field in Historical Romance which the Author
has here sought to bring into cultivation.  In "The Last of the
Barons," as in "Harold," the aim has been to illustrate the actual
history of the period, and to bring into fuller display than general
History itself has done the characters of the principal personages of
the time, the motives by which they were probably actuated, the state
of parties, the condition of the people, and the great social
interests which were involved in what, regarded imperfectly, appear
but the feuds of rival factions.

"The Last of the Barons" has been by many esteemed the best of the
Author's romances; and perhaps in the portraiture of actual character,
and the grouping of the various interests and agencies of the time, it
may have produced effects which render it more vigorous and lifelike
than any of the other attempts in romance by the same hand.

It will be observed that the purely imaginary characters introduced
are very few; and, however prominent they may appear, still, in order
not to interfere with the genuine passions and events of history, they
are represented as the passive sufferers, not the active agents, of
the real events.  Of these imaginary characters, the most successful
is Adam Warner, the philosopher in advance of his age; indeed, as an
ideal portrait, I look upon it as the most original in conception, and
the most finished in execution, of any to be found in my numerous
prose works, "Zanoni" alone excepted.

For the rest, I venture to think that the general reader will obtain
from these pages a better notion of the important age, characterized
by the decline of the feudal system, and immediately preceding that
great change in society which we usually date from the accession of
Henry VII., than he could otherwise gather, without wading through a
vast mass of neglected chronicles and antiquarian dissertations.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

 BOOK I

 THE ADVENTURES OF MASTER MARMADUKE NEVILE

  CHAPTER

      I  The Pastime-ground of old Cockaigne
     II  The Broken Gittern
    III  The Trader and the Gentle; or, the Changing Generation
     IV  Ill fares the Country Mouse in the Traps of Town
      V  Weal to the Idler, Woe to the Workman
     VI  Master Marmaduke Nevile fears for the Spiritual Weal of his
         Host and Hostess
    VII  There is a Rod for the Back of every Fool who would be Wiser
         than his Generation

 BOOK II

 THE KING'S COURT

  CHAPTER

      I  Earl Warwick the King-maker
     II  King Edward the Fourth
    III  The Antechamber

 BOOK III

 IN WHICH THE HISTORY PASSES FROM THE KING'S COURT TO THE STUDENT'S
   CELL, AND RELATES THE PERILS THAT BEFELL A PHILOSOPHER FOR
   MEDDLING WITH THE AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD

  CHAPTER

      I  The Solitary Sage and the Solitary Maid
     II  Master Adam Warner grows a Miser, and behaves Shamefully
    III  A Strange Visitor--All Ages of the World breed World-
           Betters
     IV  Lord Hastings
      V  Master Adam Warner and King Henry the Sixth
     VI  How, on leaving King Log, Foolish Wisdom runs a-muck on
           King Stork
    VII  My Lady Duchess's Opinion of the Utility of Master Warner's
           Invention, and her esteem for its Explosion
   VIII  The Old Woman talks of Sorrows, the Young Woman dreams
           of Love; the Courtier flies from Present Power to
           Remembrances of Past Hopes, and the World-Bettered opens
           Utopia, with a View of the Gibbet for the Silly Sage he
           has seduced into his Schemes,--so, ever and evermore,
           runs the World away
     IX  How the Destructive Organ of Prince Richard promises Goodly
           Development

 BOOK IV

 INTRIGUES OF THE COURT OF EDWARD IV

  CHAPTER

      I  Margaret of Anjou
     II  In which are laid Open to the Reader the Character of Edward
           the Fourth and that of his Court, with the Machinations of
           the Woodvilles against the Earl of Warwick
    III  Wherein Master Nicholas Alwyn visits the Court, and there
           learns Matter of which the Acute Reader will judge for
           himself
     IV  Exhibiting the Benefits which Royal Patronage confers on
           Genius,--also the Early Loves of the Lord Hastings; with
           other Matters Edifying and Delectable
      V  The Woodville Intrigue prospers--Montagu confers with
           Hastings, visits the Archbishop of York, and is met on the
           Road by a strange Personage
     VI  The Arrival of the Count de la Roche, and the various
           Excitement produced on many Personages by that Event
    VII  The Renowned Combat between Sir Anthony Woodville and the
           Bastard of Burgundy
   VIII  How the Bastard of Burgundy prospered more in his Policy than
           With the Pole-axe--and how King Edward holds his Summer
           Chase in the Fair Groves of Shene
     IX  The Great Actor returns to fill the Stage
      X  How the Great Lords come to the King-maker, and with what
           Proffers

 BOOK V

 THE LAST OF THE BARONS IN HIS FATHERS HALLS

  CHAPTER

      I  Rural England in the Middle Ages--Noble Visitors seek the
           Castle
         Of Middleham
     II  Councils and Musings
    III  The Sisters
     IV  The Destrier

 BOOK VI

 WHEREIN ARE OPENED SOME GLIMPSES OF THE FATE BELOW THAT ATTENDS THOSE
   WHO ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS, AND THOSE WHO DESIRE TO MAKE OTHERS
   BETTER.  LOVE, DEMAGOGY, AND SCIENCE ALL EQUALLY OFF-SPRING OF THE
   SAME PROLIFIC DELUSION,--NAMELY, THAT MEAN SOULS (THE EARTH'S
   MAJORITY) ARE WORTH THE HOPE AND THE AGONY OF NOBLE SOULS, THE
   EVERLASTING SUFFERING AND ASPIRING FEW.

  CHAPTER
      I  New Dissentions
     II  The Would-be Improvers of Jove's Football, Earth--The Sad
           Father and the Sad Child--The Fair Rivals
    III  Wherein the Demagogue seeks the Courtier
     IV  Sibyll
      V  Katherine
     VI  Joy for Adam, and Hope for Sibyll--and Popular Friar Bungey!
    VII  A Love Scene

 BOOK VII

 THE POPULAR REBELLION

  CHAPTER

      I  The White Lion of March shakes his Mane
     II  The Camp at Olney
    III  The Camp of the Rebels
     IV  The Norman Earl and the Saxon Demagogue confer
      V  What Faith Edward IV purposeth to keep with Earl and People
     VI  What befalls King Edward on his Escape from Olney
    VII  How King Edward arrives at the Castle of Middleham
   VIII  The Ancients rightly gave to the Goddess of Eloquence a Crown
     IX  Wedded Confidence and Love--the Earl and the Prelate--the
           Prelate and the King--Schemes--Wiles--and the Birth of a
           Dark Thought destined to eclipse a Sun

 BOOK VIII

 IN WHICH THE LAST LINK BETWEEN KING-MAKER AND KING SNAPS ASUNDER

  CHAPTER

      I  The Lady Anne visits the Court
     II  The Sleeping Innocence--the Wakeful Crime
    III  New Dangers to the House of York--and the King's Heart
           allies itself with Rebellion against the King's Throne
     IV  The Foster-brothers
      V  The Lover and the Gallant--Woman's Choice
     VI  Warwick returns-appeases a Discontented Prince-and confers
           with a Revengeful Conspirator
    VII  The Fear and the Flight
   VIII  The Group round the Death-bed of the Lancastrian Widow

 BOOK IX.

 THE WANDERERS AND THE EXILES

  CHAPTER

      I  How the Great Baron becomes as Great a Rebel
     II  Many Things briefly told
    III  The Plot of the Hostelry--the Maid and the Scholar in
           their Home
     IV  The World's Justice, and the Wisdom of our Ancestors
      V  The Fugitives are captured--the Tymbesteres reappear--
           Moonlight on the Revel of the Living--Moonlight on the
           Slumber of the Dead

     VI  The Subtle Craft of Richard of Gloucester
    VII  Warwick and his Family in Exile
   VIII  How the Heir of Lancaster meets the King-maker
     IX  The Interview of Earl Warwick and Queen Margaret
      X  Love and Marriage--Doubts of Conscience--Domestic Jealousy--
           and Household Treason

 BOOK X.

 THE RETURN OF THE KING-MAKER

  CHAPTER

      I  The Maid's Hope, the Courtier's Love, and the Sage's Comfort
     II  The Man awakes in the Sage, and the She-wolf again hath
           tracked the Lamb
    III  Virtuous Resolves submitted to the Test of Vanity and the
           World
     IV  The Strife which Sibyll had courted, between Katherine and
           herself, commences in Serious Earnest
      V  The Meeting of Hastings and Katherine
     VI  Hastings learns what has befallen Sibyll, repairs to the
           King, and encounters an old Rival
    VII  The Landing of Lord Warwick, and the Events that ensue
           thereon
   VIII  What befell Adam Warner and Sibyll when made subject to the
           Great Friar Bungey
     IX  The Deliberations of Mayor and Council, while Lord Warwick
           marches upon London
      X  The Triumphal Entry of the Earl--the Royal Captive in the
           Tower--the Meeting between King-maker and King
     XI  The Tower in Commotion

 BOOK XI

 THE NEW POSITION OF THE KING-MAKER

  CHAPTER

      I  Wherein Master Adam Warner is notably commended and
           advanced--and Greatness says to Wisdom, "Thy Destiny
           be mine, Amen"
     II  The Prosperity of the Outer Show--the Cares of the Inner Man
    III  Further Views into the Heart of Man, and the Conditions
           of Power
     IV  The Return of Edward of York
      V  The Progress of the Plantagenet
     VI  Lord Warwick, with the Foe in the field and the Traitor at
           The Hearth

 BOOK XII

 THE BATTLE OF BARNET

  CHAPTER

      I  A King in his City hopes to recover his Realm--A Woman in
           her Chamber fears to forfeit her own
     II  Sharp is the Kiss of the Falcon's Bear
    III  A Pause
  IV-VI  The Battle
    VII  The last Pilgrims in the long Procession to the Common Bourne





BOOK I.

THE ADVENTURES OF MASTER MARMADUKE NEVILE.




CHAPTER I.

THE PASTIME-GROUND OF OLD COCKAIGNE.

Westward, beyond the still pleasant, but even then no longer solitary,
hamlet of Charing, a broad space, broken here and there by scattered
houses and venerable pollards, in the early spring of 1467, presented
the rural scene for the sports and pastimes of the inhabitants of
Westminster and London.  Scarcely need we say that open spaces for the
popular games and diversions were then numerous in the suburbs of the
metropolis,--grateful to some the fresh pools of Islington; to others,
the grass-bare fields of Finsbury; to all, the hedgeless plains of
vast Mile-end.  But the site to which we are now summoned was a new
and maiden holiday-ground, lately bestowed upon the townsfolk of
Westminster by the powerful Earl of Warwick.

Raised by a verdant slope above the low, marsh-grown soil of
Westminster, the ground communicated to the left with the Brook-
fields, through which stole the peaceful Ty-bourne, and commanded
prospects, on all sides fair, and on each side varied.  Behind, rose
the twin green hills of Hampstead and Highgate, with the upland park
and chase of Marybone,--its stately manor-house half hid in woods.  In
front might be seen the Convent of the Lepers, dedicated to Saint
James, now a palace; then to the left, York House, [The residence of
the Archbishops of York] now Whitehall; farther on, the spires of
Westminster Abbey and the gloomy tower of the Sanctuary; next, the
Palace, with its bulwark and vawmure, soaring from the river; while
eastward, and nearer to the scene, stretched the long, bush-grown
passage of the Strand, picturesquely varied with bridges, and flanked
to the right by the embattled halls of feudal nobles, or the inns of
the no less powerful prelates; while sombre and huge amidst hall and
inn, loomed the gigantic ruins of the Savoy, demolished in the
insurrection of Wat Tyler.  Farther on, and farther yet, the eye
wandered over tower and gate, and arch and spire, with frequent
glimpses of the broad sunlit river, and the opposite shore crowned by
the palace of Lambeth, and the Church of St. Mary Overies, till the
indistinct cluster of battlements around the Fortress-Palatine bounded
the curious gaze.  As whatever is new is for a while popular, so to
this pastime-ground, on the day we treat of, flocked, not only the
idlers of Westminster, but the lordly dwellers of Ludgate and the
Flete, and the wealthy citizens of tumultuous Chepe.

The ground was well suited to the purpose to which it was devoted.
About the outskirts, indeed, there were swamps and fish-pools; but a
considerable plot towards the centre presented a level sward, already
worn bare and brown by the feet of the multitude.  From this, towards
the left, extended alleys, some recently planted, intended to afford,
in summer, cool and shady places for the favourite game of bowls;
while scattered clumps, chiefly of old pollards, to the right broke
the space agreeably enough into detached portions, each of which
afforded its separate pastime or diversion.  Around were ranged many
carts, or wagons; horses of all sorts and value were led to and fro,
while their owners were at sport.  Tents, awnings, hostelries,
temporary buildings, stages for showmen and jugglers, abounded, and
gave the scene the appearance of a fair; but what particularly now
demands our attention was a broad plot in the ground, dedicated to the
noble diversion of archery.  The reigning House of York owed much of
its military success to the superiority of the bowmen under its
banners, and the Londoners themselves were jealous of their reputation
in this martial accomplishment.  For the last fifty years,
notwithstanding the warlike nature of the times, the practice of the
bow, in the intervals of peace, had been more neglected than seemed
wise to the rulers.  Both the king and his loyal city had of late
taken much pains to enforce the due exercise of "Goddes instrumente,"
[So called emphatically by Bishop Latimer, in his celebrated Sixth
Sermon.] upon which an edict had declared that "the liberties and
honour of England principally rested!"

And numerous now was the attendance, not only of the citizens, the
burghers, and the idle populace, but of the gallant nobles who
surrounded the court of Edward IV., then in the prime of his youth,--
the handsomest, the gayest, and the bravest prince in Christendom.

The royal tournaments (which were, however, waning from their ancient
lustre to kindle afresh, and to expire in the reigns of the succeeding
Tudors), restricted to the amusements of knight and noble, no doubt
presented more of pomp and splendour than the motley and mixed
assembly of all ranks that now grouped around the competitors for the
silver arrow, or listened to the itinerant jongleur, dissour, or
minstrel, or, seated under the stunted shade of the old trees,
indulged, with eager looks and hands often wandering to their dagger-
hilts, in the absorbing passion of the dice; but no later and earlier
scenes of revelry ever, perhaps, exhibited that heartiness of
enjoyment, that universal holiday, which attended this mixture of
every class, that established a rude equality for the hour between the
knight and the retainer, the burgess and the courtier.

The revolution that placed Edward IV. upon the throne had, in fact,
been a popular one.  Not only had the valour and moderation of his
father, Richard, Duke of York, bequeathed a heritage of affection to
his brave and accomplished son; not only were the most beloved of the
great barons the leaders of his party; but the king himself, partly
from inclination, partly from policy, spared no pains to win the good
graces of that slowly rising, but even then important part of the
population,--the Middle Class.  He was the first king who descended,
without loss of dignity and respect, from the society of his peers and
princes, to join familiarly in the feasts and diversions of the
merchant and the trader.  The lord mayor and council of London were
admitted, on more than one solemn occasion, into the deliberations of
the court; and Edward had not long since, on the coronation of his
queen, much to the discontent of certain of his barons, conferred the
Knighthood of the hath upon four of the citizens.  On the other hand,
though Edward's gallantries--the only vice which tended to diminish
his popularity with the sober burgesses--were little worthy of his
station, his frank, joyous familiarity with his inferiors was not
debased by the buffooneries that had led to the reverses and the awful
fate of two of his royal predecessors.  There must have been a popular
principle, indeed, as well as a popular fancy, involved in the steady
and ardent adherence which the population of London in particular, and
most of the great cities, exhibited to the person and the cause of
Edward IV. There was a feeling that his reign was an advance in
civilization upon the monastic virtues of Henry VI., and the stern
ferocity which accompanied the great qualities of "The Foreign Woman,"
as the people styled and regarded Henry's consort, Margaret of Anjou.
While thus the gifts, the courtesy, and the policy of the young
sovereign made him popular with the middle classes, he owed the
allegiance of the more powerful barons and the favour of the rural
population to a man who stood colossal amidst the iron images of the
Age,--the greatest and the last of the old Norman chivalry, kinglier
in pride, in state, in possessions, and in renown than the king
himself, Richard Nevile, Earl of Salisbury and Warwick.

This princely personage, in the full vigour of his age, possessed all
the attributes that endear the noble to the commons.  His valour in
the field was accompanied with a generosity rare in the captains of
the time.  He valued himself on sharing the perils and the hardships
of his meanest soldier.  His haughtiness to the great was not
incompatible with frank affability to the lowly.  His wealth was
enormous, but it was equalled by his magnificence, and rendered
popular by his lavish hospitality.  No less than thirty thousand
persons are said to have feasted daily at the open tables with which
he allured to his countless castles the strong hands and grateful
hearts of a martial and unsettled population.  More haughty than
ambitious, he was feared because he avenged all affront; and yet not
envied, because he seemed above all favour.

The holiday on the archery-ground was more than usually gay, for the
rumour had spread from the court to the city that Edward was about to
increase his power abroad, and to repair what he had lost in the eyes
of Europe through his marriage with Elizabeth Gray, by allying his
sister Margaret with the brother of Louis XI., and that no less a
person than the Earl of Warwick had been the day before selected as
ambassador on the important occasion.

Various opinions were entertained upon the preference given to France
in this alliance over the rival candidate for the hand of the
princess,--namely, the Count de Charolois, afterwards Charles the
Bold, Duke of Burgundy.

"By 'r Lady," said a stout citizen about the age of fifty, "but I am
not over pleased with this French marriage-making!  I would liefer the
stout earl were going to France with bows and bills than sarcenets and
satins.  What will become of our trade with Flanders,--answer me that,
Master Stokton?  The House of York is a good House, and the king is a
good king, but trade is trade.  Every man must draw water to his own
mill."

"Hush, Master Heyford!" said a small lean man in a light-gray surcoat.
"The king loves not talk about what the king does.  'T is ill jesting
with lions.  Remember William Walker, hanged for saying his son should
be heir to the crown."

"Troth," answered Master Heyford, nothing daunted, for he belonged to
one of the most powerful corporations of London,--it was but a scurvy
Pepperer [old name for Grocer] who made that joke; but a joke from a
worshipful goldsmith, who has moneys and influence, and a fair wife of
his own, whom the king himself has been pleased to commend, is another
guess sort of matter.  But here is my grave-visaged headman, who
always contrives to pick up the last gossip astir, and has a deep eye
into millstones.  Why, ho, there! Alwyn--I say, Nicholas Alwyn!--who
would have thought to see thee with that bow, a good half-ell taller
than thyself?  Methought thou wert too sober and studious for such
man-at-arms sort of devilry."

"An' it please you, Master Heyford," answered the person thus
addressed,--a young man, pale and lean, though sinewy and large-boned,
with a countenance of great intelligence, but a slow and somewhat
formal manner of speech, and a strong provincial accent,--"an' it
please you, King Edward's edict ordains every Englishman to have a bow
of his own height; and he who neglects the shaft on a holiday
forfeiteth one halfpenny and some honour.  For the rest, methinks that
the citizens of London will become of more worth and potency every
year; and it shall not be my fault if I do not, though but a humble
headman to your worshipful mastership, help to make them so."

"Why, that's well said, lad; but if the Londoners prosper, it is
because they have nobles in their gipsires, [a kind of pouch worn at
the girdle] not bows in their hands."

"Thinkest thou then, Master Heyford, that any king at a pinch would
leave them the gipsire, if they could not protect it with the bow?
That Age may have gold, let not Youth despise iron."

"Body o' me!" cried Master Heyford, "but thou hadst better curb in thy
tongue.  Though I have my jest,--as a rich man and a corpulent,--a lad
who has his way to make good should be silent and--But he's gone."

"Where hooked you up that young jack fish?" said Master Stokton, the
thin mercer, who had reminded the goldsmith of the fate of the grocer.

"Why, he was meant for the cowl, but his mother, a widow, at his own
wish, let him make choice of the flat cap.  He was the best 'prentice
ever I had.  By the blood of Saint Thomas, he will push his way in
good time; he has a head, Master Stokton,--a head, and an ear; and a
great big pair of eyes always looking out for something to his proper
advantage."

In the mean while, the goldsmith's headman had walked leisurely up to
the archery-ground; and even in his gait and walk, as he thus repaired
to a pastime, there was something steady, staid, and business-like.

The youths of his class and calling were at that day very different
from their equals in this.  Many of them the sons of provincial
retainers, some even of franklins and gentlemen, their childhood had
made them familiar with the splendour and the sports of knighthood;
they had learned to wrestle, to cudgel, to pitch the bar or the quoit,
to draw the bow, and to practise the sword and buckler, before
transplanted from the village green to the city stall.  And even then,
the constant broils and wars of the time, the example of their
betters, the holiday spectacle of mimic strife, and, above all, the
powerful and corporate association they formed amongst themselves,
tended to make them as wild, as jovial, and as dissolute a set of
young fellows as their posterity are now sober, careful, and discreet.
And as Nicholas Alwyn, with a slight inclination of his head, passed
by, two or three loud, swaggering, bold-looking groups of apprentices
--their shaggy hair streaming over their shoulders, their caps on one
side, their short cloaks of blue torn or patched, though still
passably new, their bludgeons under their arms, and their whole
appearance and manner not very dissimilar from the German collegians
in the last century--notably contrasted Alwyn's prim dress, his
precise walk, and the feline care with which he stepped aside from any
patches of mire that might sully the soles of his square-toed shoes.

The idle apprentices winked and whispered, and lolled out their
tongues at him as he passed.  "Oh, but that must be as good as a May-
Fair day,--sober Nick Alwyn's maiden flight of the shaft!  Hollo,
puissant archer, take care of the goslings yonder!  Look this way when
thou pull'st, and then woe to the other side!"  Venting these and many
similar specimens of the humour of Cockaigne, the apprentices,
however, followed their quondam colleague, and elbowed their way into
the crowd gathered around the competitors at the butt; and it was at
this spot, commanding a view of the whole space, that the spectator
might well have formed some notion of the vast following of the House
of Nevile.  For everywhere along the front lines, everywhere in the
scattered groups, might be seen, glistening in the sunlight, the
armourial badges of that mighty family.  The Pied Bull, which was the
proper cognizance [Pied Bull the cognizance, the Dun Bull's head the
crest] of the Neviles, was principally borne by the numerous kinsmen
of Earl Warwick, who rejoiced in the Nevile name.  The Lord Montagu,
Warwick's brother, to whom the king had granted the forfeit title and
estates of the earls of Northumberland, distinguished his own
retainers, however, by the special request of the ancient Montagus.--a
Gryphon issuant from a ducal crown.  But far more numerous than Bull
or Gryphon (numerous as either seemed) were the badges worn by those
who ranked themselves among the peculiar followers of the great Earl
of Warwick.  The cognizance of the Bear and Ragged Staff, which he
assumed in right of the Beauchamps, whom he represented through his
wife, the heiress of the lords of Warwick, was worn in the hats of the
more gentle and well-born clansmen and followers, while the Ragged
Staff alone was worked front and back on the scarlet jackets of his
more humble and personal retainers.  It was a matter of popular notice
and admiration that in those who wore these badges, as in the wearers
of the hat and staff of the ancient Spartans, might be traced a grave
loftiness of bearing, as if they belonged to another caste, another
race, than the herd of men.  Near the place where the rivals for the
silver arrow were collected, a lordly party had reined in their
palfreys, and conversed with each other, as the judges of the field
were marshalling the competitors.

"Who," said one of these gallants, "who is that comely young fellow
just below us, with the Nevile cognizance of the Bull on his hat?  He
has the air of one I should know."

"I never saw him before, my Lord of Northumberland," answered one of
the gentlemen thus addressed; "but, pardieu, he who knows all the
Neviles by eye must know half England."  The Lord Montagu--for though
at that moment invested with the titles of the Percy, by that name
Earl Warwick's brother is known to history, and by that, his rightful
name, he shall therefore be designated in these pages--the Lord
Montagu smiled graciously at this remark, and a murmur through the
crowd announced that the competition for the silver arrow was about to
commence.  The butts, formed of turf, with a small white mark fastened
to the centre by a very minute peg, were placed apart, one at each
end, at the distance of eleven score yards.  At the extremity where
the shooting commenced, the crowd assembled, taking care to keep clear
from the opposite butt, as the warning word of "Fast" was thundered
forth; but eager was the general murmur, and many were the wagers
given and accepted, as some well-known archer tried his chance.  Near
the butt that now formed the target, stood the marker with his white
wand; and the rapidity with which archer after archer discharged his
shaft, and then, if it missed, hurried across the ground to pick it up
(for arrows were dear enough not to be lightly lost), amidst the jeers
and laughter of the bystanders, was highly animated and diverting.  As
yet, however, no marksman had hit the white, though many had gone
close to it, when Nicholas Alwyn stepped forward; and there was
something so unwarlike in his whole air, so prim in his gait, so
careful in his deliberate survey of the shaft and his precise
adjustment of the leathern gauntlet that protected the arm from the
painful twang of the string, that a general burst of laughter from the
bystanders attested their anticipation of a signal failure.

"'Fore Heaven!" said Montagu, "he handles his bow an' it were a yard-
measure.  One would think he were about to bargain for the bow-string,
he eyes it so closely."

"And now," said Nicholas, slowly adjusting the arrow, "a shot for the
honour of old Westmoreland!"  And as he spoke, the arrow sprang
gallantly forth, and quivered in the very heart of the white.  There
was a general movement of surprise among the spectators, as the marker
thrice shook his wand over his head.  But Alwyn, as indifferent to
their respect as he had been to their ridicule, turned round and said,
with a significant glance at the silent nobles, "We springals of
London can take care of our own, if need be."

"These fellows wax insolent.  Our good king spoils them," said
Montagu, with a curl of his lip.  "I wish some young squire of gentle
blood would not disdain a shot for the Nevile against the craftsman.
How say you, fair sir?"  And with a princely courtesy of mien and
smile, Lord Montagu turned to the young man he had noticed as wearing
the cognizance of the First House in England.  The bow was not the
customary weapon of the well-born; but still, in youth, its exercise
formed one of the accomplishments of the future knight; and even
princes did not disdain, on a popular holiday, to match a shaft
against the yeoman's cloth-yard.  [At a later period, Henry VIII. was
a match for the best bowman in his kingdom.  His accomplishment was
hereditary, and distinguished alike his wise father and his pious
son.]  The young man thus addressed, and whose honest, open, handsome,
hardy face augured a frank and fearless nature, bowed his head in
silence, and then slowly advancing to the umpires, craved permission
to essay his skill, and to borrow the loan of a shaft and bow.  Leave
given and the weapons lent, as the young gentleman took his stand, his
comely person, his dress, of a better quality than that of the
competitors hitherto, and, above all, the Nevile badge worked in
silver on his hat, diverted the general attention from Nicholas Alwyn.
A mob is usually inclined to aristocratic predilections, and a murmur
of goodwill and expectation greeted him, when he put aside the
gauntlet offered to him, and said, "In my youth I was taught so to
brace the bow that the string should not touch the arm; and though
eleven score yards be but a boy's distance, a good archer will lay his
body into his bow ["My father taught me to lay my body in my bow,"
etc., said Latimer, in his well-known sermon before Edward VI.,--1549.
The bishop also herein observes that "it is best to give the bow so
much bending that the string need never touch the arm.  This," he
adds, "is practised by many good archers with whom I am acquainted."]
as much as if he were to hit the blanc four hundred yards away."

"A tall fellow this!" said Montagu; "and one I wot from the North," as
the young gallant fitted the shaft to the bow.  And graceful and
artistic was the attitude he assumed,--the head slightly inclined, the
feet firmly planted, the left a little in advance, and the stretched
sinews of the bow-hand alone evincing that into that grasp was pressed
the whole strength of the easy and careless frame.  The public
expectation was not disappointed,--the youth performed the feat
considered of all the most dexterous; his arrow, disdaining the white
mark, struck the small peg which fastened it to the butts, and which
seemed literally invisible to the bystanders.

"Holy Saint Dunstan! there's but one man who can beat me in that sort
that I know of," muttered Nicholas, "and I little expected to see him
take a bite out of his own hip."  With that he approached his
successful rival.

"Well, Master Marmaduke," said he, "it is many a year since you showed
me that trick at your father, Sir Guy's--God rest him!  But I scarce
take it kind in you to beat your own countryman!"

"Beshrew me!" cried the youth, and his cheerful features brightened
into hearty and cordial pleasure, "but if I see in thee, as it seems
to me, my old friend and foster-brother, Nick Alwyn, this is the
happiest hour I have known for many a day.  But stand back and let me
look at thee, man.  Thou! thou a tame London trader!  Ha! ha! is it
possible?"

"Hout, Master Marmaduke," answered Nicholas, "every crow thinks his
own baird bonniest, as they say in the North.  We will talk of this
anon an' thou wilt honour me.  I suspect the archery is over now.  Few
will think to mend that shot."

And here, indeed, the umpires advanced, and their chief--an old
mercer, who had once borne arms, and indeed been a volunteer at the
battle of Towton--declared that the contest was over,--"unless," he
added, in the spirit of a lingering fellow-feeling with the Londoner,
"this young fellow, whom I hope to see an alderman one of these days,
will demand another shot, for as yet there hath been but one prick
each at the butts."

"Nay, master," returned Alwyn, "I have met with my betters,--and,
after all," he added indifferently, "the silver arrow, though a pretty
bauble enough, is over light in its weight."

"Worshipful sir," said the young Nevile, with equal generosity, "I
cannot accept the prize for a mere trick of the craft,--the blanc was
already disposed of by Master Alwyn's arrow.  Moreover; the contest
was intended for the Londoners, and I am but an interloper, beholden
to their courtesy for a practice of skill, and even the loan of a bow;
wherefore the silver arrow be given to Nicholas Alwyn."

"That may not be, gentle sir," said the umpire, extending the prize.
"Sith Alwyn vails of himself, it is thine, by might and by right."

The Lord Montagu had not been inattentive to this dialogue, and he now
said, in a loud tone that silenced the crowd, "Young Badgeman, thy
gallantry pleases me no less than thy skill.  Take the arrow, for thou
hast won it; but as thou seemest a new comer, it is right thou
shouldst pay thy tax upon entry,--this be my task.  Come hither, I
pray thee, good sir," and the nobleman graciously beckoned to the
mercer; "be these five nobles the prize of whatever Londoner shall
acquit himself best in the bold English combat of quarter-staff, and
the prize be given in this young archer's name.  Thy name, youth?"

"Marmaduke Nevile, good my lord."

Montagu smiled, and the umpire withdrew to make the announcement to
the bystanders.  The proclamation was received with a shout that
traversed from group to group and line to line, more hearty from the
love and honour attached to the name of Nevile than even from a sense
of the gracious generosity of Earl Warwick's brother.  One man alone,
a sturdy, well-knit fellow, in a franklin's Lincoln broadcloth, and
with a hood half-drawn over his features, did not join the popular
applause.  "These Yorkists," he muttered, "know well how to fool the
people."

Meanwhile the young Nevile still stood by the gilded stirrup of the
great noble who had thus honoured him, and contemplated him with that
respect and interest which a youth's ambition ever feels for those who
have won a name.

The Lord Montagu bore a very different character from his puissant
brother.  Though so skilful a captain that he had never been known to
lose a battle, his fame as a warrior was, strange to say, below that
of the great earl, whose prodigious strength had accomplished those
personal feats that dazzled the populace, and revived the legendary
renown of the earlier Norman knighthood.  The caution and wariness,
indeed, which Montagu displayed in battle probably caused his success
as a general, and the injustice done to him (at least by the vulgar)
as a soldier.  Rarely had Lord Montagu, though his courage was
indisputable, been known to mix personally in the affray.  Like the
captains of modern times, he contented himself with directing the
manoeuvres of his men, and hence preserved that inestimable advantage
of coolness and calculation, which was not always characteristic of
the eager hardihood of his brother.  The character of Montagu differed
yet more from that of the earl in peace than in war.  He was supposed
to excel in all those supple arts of the courtier which Warwick
neglected or despised; and if the last was on great occasions the
adviser, the other in ordinary life was the companion of his
sovereign.  Warwick owed his popularity to his own large, open,
daring, and lavish nature.  The subtler Montagu sought to win, by care
and pains, what the other obtained without an effort.  He attended the
various holiday meetings of the citizens, where Warwick was rarely
seen.  He was smooth-spoken and courteous to his equals, and generally
affable, though with constraint, to his inferiors.  He was a close
observer, and not without that genius for intrigue, which in rude ages
passes for the talent of a statesman.  And yet in that thorough
knowledge of the habits and tastes of the great mass, which gives
wisdom to a ruler, he was far inferior to the earl.  In common with
his brother, he was gifted with the majesty of mien which imposes on
the eye; and his port and countenance were such as became the prodigal
expense of velvet, minever, gold, and jewels, by which the gorgeous
magnates of the day communicated to their appearance the arrogant
splendour of their power.

"Young gentleman," said the earl, after eying with some attention the
comely archer, "I am pleased that you bear the name of Nevile.
Vouchsafe to inform me to what scion of our House we are this day
indebted for the credit with which you have upborne its cognizance?"

"I fear," answered the youth, with a slight but not ungraceful
hesitation, "that my lord of Montagu and Northumberland will hardly
forgive the presumption with which I have intruded upon this assembly
a name borne by nobles so illustrious, especially if it belong to
those less fortunate branches of his family which have taken a
different side from himself in the late unhappy commotions.  My father
was Sir Guy Nevile, of Arsdale, in Westmoreland."

Lord Montagu's lip lost its gracious smile; he glanced quickly at the
courtiers round him, and said gravely, "I grieve to hear it.  Had I
known this, certes my gipsire had still been five nobles the richer.
It becomes not one fresh from the favour of King Edward IV. to show
countenance to the son of a man, kinsman though he was, who bore arms
for the usurpers of Lancaster.  I pray thee, sir, to doff, henceforth,
a badge dedicated only to the service of Royal York.  No more, young
man; we may not listen to the son of Sir Guy Nevile.--Sirs, shall we
ride to see how the Londoners thrive at quarter-staff?"

With that, Montagu, deigning no further regard at Nevile, wheeled his,
palfrey towards a distant part of the ground, to which the multitude
was already pressing its turbulent and noisy way.

"Thou art hard on thy namesake, fair my lord," said a young noble, in
whose dark-auburn hair, aquiline, haughty features, spare but powerful
frame, and inexpressible air of authority and command, were found all
the attributes of the purest and eldest Norman race,--the Patricians
of the World.

"Dear Raoul de Fulke," returned Montagu, coldly, "when thou hast
reached my age of thirty and four, thou wilt learn that no man's
fortune casts so broad a shadow as to shelter from the storm the
victims of a fallen cause."

"Not so would say thy bold brother," answered Raoul de Fulke, with a
slight curl of his proud lip.  "And I hold, with him, that no king is
so sacred that we should render to his resentments our own kith and
kin.  God's wot, whosoever wears the badge and springs from the stem
of Raoul de Fulke shall never find me question over much whether his
father fought for York or Lancaster."

"Hush, rash babbler!" said Montagu, laughing gently; "what would King
Edward say if this speech reached his ears?  Our friend," added the
courtier, turning to the rest, "in vain would bar the tide of change;
and in this our New England, begirt with new men and new fashions,
affect the feudal baronage of the worn-out Norman.  But thou art a
gallant knight, De Fulke, though a poor courtier."

"The saints keep me so!" returned De Fulke.  "From overgluttony, from
over wine-bibbing, from cringing to a king's leman, from quaking at a
king's frown, from unbonneting to a greasy mob, from marrying an old
crone for vile gold, may the saints ever keep Raoul de Fulke and his
sons!  Amen!"  This speech, in which every sentence struck its
stinging satire into one or other of the listeners, was succeeded by
an awkward silence, which Montagu was the first to break.

"Pardieu!" he said, "when did Lord Hastings leave us, and what fair
face can have lured the truant?"

"He left us suddenly on the archery-ground," answered the young
Lovell.  "But as well might we track the breeze to the rose as Lord
William's sigh to maid or matron."

While thus conversed the cavaliers, and their plumes waved, and their
mantles glittered along the broken ground, Marmaduke Nevile's eye
pursued the horsemen with all that bitter feeling of wounded pride and
impotent resentment with which Youth regards the first insult it
receives from Power.




CHAPTER II.

THE BROKEN GITTERN.

Rousing himself from his indignant revery, Marmaduke Nevile followed
one of the smaller streams into which the crowd divided itself on
dispersing from the archery-ground, and soon found himself in a part
of the holiday scene appropriated to diversions less manly, but no
less characteristic of the period than those of the staff and arrow.
Beneath an awning, under which an itinerant landlord dispensed cakes
and ale, the humorous Bourdour (the most vulgar degree of minstrel, or
rather tale-teller) collected his clownish audience; while seated by
themselves--apart, but within hearing--two harpers, in the king's
livery, consoled each other for the popularity of their ribald rival,
by wise reflections on the base nature of common folk.  Farther on,
Marmaduke started to behold what seemed to him the heads of giants at
least six yards high; but on a nearer approach these formidable
apparitions resolved themselves to a company of dancers upon stilts.
There, one joculator exhibited the antics of his well-tutored ape;
there, another eclipsed the attractions of the baboon by a marvellous
horse that beat a tabor with his forefeet; there, the more sombre
Tregetour, before a table raised upon a lofty stage, promised to cut
off and refix the head of a sad-faced little boy, who in the mean time
was preparing his mortal frame for the operation by apparently larding
himself with sharp knives and bodkins.  Each of these wonder-dealers
found his separate group of admirers, and great was the delight and
loud the laughter in the pastime-ground of old Cockaigne.

While Marmaduke, bewildered by this various bustle, stared around him,
his eye was caught by a young maiden, in evident distress, struggling
in vain to extricate herself from a troop of timbrel-girls, or
tymbesteres (as they were popularly called), who surrounded her with
mocking gestures, striking their instruments to drown her
remonstrances, and dancing about her in a ring at every effort towards
escape.  The girl was modestly attired as one of the humbler ranks,
and her wimple in much concealed her countenance; but there was,
despite her strange and undignified situation and evident alarm, a
sort of quiet, earnest self-possession,--an effort to hide her terror,
and to appeal to the better and more womanly feelings of her
persecutors.  In the intervals of silence from the clamour, her voice,
though low, clear, well-tuned, and impressive, forcibly arrested the
attention of young Nevile; for at that day, even more than this
(sufficiently apparent as it now is), there was a marked distinction
in the intonation, the accent, the modulation of voice, between the
better bred and better educated and the inferior classes.  But this
difference, so ill according with her dress and position, only served
to heighten more the bold insolence of the musical Bacchantes, who,
indeed, in the eyes of the sober, formed the most immoral nuisance
attendant on the sports of the time, and whose hardy license and
peculiar sisterhood might tempt the antiquary to search for their
origin amongst the relics of ancient Paganism.  And now, to increase
the girl's distress, some half-score of dissolute apprentices and
journeymen suddenly broke into the ring of the Maenads, and were
accosting her with yet more alarming insults, when Marmaduke, pushing
them aside, strode to her assistance.  "How now, ye lewd varlets! ye
make me blush for my countrymen in the face of day!  Are these the
sports of merry England,--these your manly contests,--to strive which
can best affront a poor maid?  Out on ye, cullions and bezonians!
Cling to me, gentle donzel, and fear not.  Whither shall I lead thee?"
The apprentices were not, however, so easily daunted.  Two of them
approached to the rescue, flourishing their bludgeons about their
heads with formidable gestures.  "Ho, ho!" cried one, "what right hast
thou to step between the hunters and the doe?  The young quean is too
much honoured by a kiss from a bold 'prentice of London."

Marmaduke stepped back, and drew the small dagger which then formed
the only habitual weapon of a gentleman.  [Swords were not worn, in
peace, at that period.]  This movement, discomposing his mantle,
brought the silver arrow he had won (which was placed in his girdle)
in full view of the assailants.  At the same time they caught sight of
the badge on his hat.  These intimidated their ardour more than the
drawn poniard.

"A Nevile!" said one, retreating.  "And the jolly marksman who beat
Nick Alwyn," said the other, lowering his bludgeon, and doffing his
cap.  "Gentle sir, forgive us, we knew not your quality.  But as for
the girl--your gallantry misleads you."

"The Wizard's daughter! ha, ha! the Imp of Darkness!" screeched the
timbrel-girls, tossing up their instruments, and catching them again
on the points of their fingers.  "She has enchanted him with her
glamour.  Foul is fair!  Foul fair thee, young springal, if thou go to
the nets.  Shadow and goblin to goblin and shadow!  Flesh and blood to
blood and flesh!"--and dancing round him, with wanton looks and bare
arms, and gossamer robes that brushed him as they circled, they
chanted,--

    "Come, kiss me, my darling,
       Warm kisses I trade for;
     Wine, music, and kisses
       What else was life made for?"

With some difficulty, and with a disgust which was not altogether
without a superstitious fear of the strange words and the outlandish
appearance of these loathsome Delilahs, Marmaduke broke from the ring
with his new charge; and in a few moments the Nevile and the maiden
found themselves, unmolested and unpursued, in a deserted quarter of
the ground; but still the scream of the timbrel-girls, as they
hurried, wheeling and dancing, into the distance, was borne ominously
to the young man's ear.  "Ha, ha! the witch and her lover!  Foul is
fair! foul is fair!  Shadow to goblin, goblin to shadow,--and the
devil will have his own!"

"And what mischance, my poor girl," asked the Nevile, soothingly,
"brought thee into such evil company?"

"I know not, fair sir," said the girl, slowly recovering her self;
"but my father is poor, and I had heard that on these holiday
occasions one who had some slight skill on the gittern might win a few
groats from the courtesy of the bystanders.  So I stole out with my
serving-woman, and had already got more than I dared hope, when those
wicked timbrel-players came round me, and accused me of taking the
money from them.  And then they called an officer of the ground, who
asked me my name and holding; so when I answered, they called my
father a wizard, and the man broke my poor gittern,--see!"--and she
held it up, with innocent sorrow in her eyes, yet a half-smile on her
lips,--"and they soon drove poor old Madge from my side, and I knew no
more till you, worshipful sir, took pity on me."

"But why," asked the Nevile, "did they give to your father so unholy a
name?"

"Alas, sir! he is a great scholar, who has spent his means in studying
what he says will one day be of good to the people."

"Humph!" said Marmaduke, who had all the superstitions of his time,
who looked upon a scholar, unless in the Church, with mingled awe and
abhorrence, and who, therefore, was but ill-satisfied with the girl's
artless answer,

"Humph! your father--but--" checking what he was about, perhaps
harshly, to say, as he caught the bright eyes and arch, intelligent
face lifted to his own--"but it is hard to punish the child for the
father's errors."

"Errors, sir!" repeated the damsel, proudly, and with a slight disdain
in her face and voice.  "But yes, wisdom is ever, perhaps, the saddest
error!"

This remark was of an order superior in intellect to those which had
preceded it: it contrasted with the sternness of experience the
simplicity of the child; and of such contrasts, indeed, was that
character made up.  For with a sweet, an infantine change of tone and
countenance, she added, after a short pause, "They took the money!
The gittern--see, they left that, when they had made it useless."

"I cannot mend the gittern, but I can refill the gipsire," said
Marmaduke.

The girl coloured deeply.  "Nay, sir, to earn is not to beg."
Marmaduke did not heed this answer; for as they were now passing by
the stunted trees, under which sat several revellers, who looked up at
him from their cups and tankards, some with sneering, some with grave
looks, he began, more seriously than in his kindly impulse he had
hitherto done, to consider the appearance it must have to be thus seen
walking in public with a girl of inferior degree, and perhaps doubtful
repute.  Even in our own day such an exhibition would be, to say the
least, suspicious; and in that day, when ranks and classes were
divided with iron demarcations, a young gallant, whose dress bespoke
him of gentle quality, with one of opposite sex, and belonging to the
humbler orders, in broad day too, was far more open to censure.  The
blood mounted to his brow, and halting abruptly, he said, in a dry and
altered voice: "My good damsel, you are now, I think, out of danger;
it would ill beseem you, so young and so comely, to go farther with
one not old enough to be your protector; so, in God's name, depart
quickly, and remember me when you buy your new gittern, poor child!"
So saying, he attempted to place a piece of money in her hand.  She
put it back, and the coin fell on the ground.  "Nay, this is foolish,"
said he.

"Alas, sir!" said the girl, gravely, "I see well that you are ashamed
of your goodness.  But my father begs not.  And once--but that matters
not."

"Once what?" persisted Marmaduke, interested in her manner, in spite
of himself.

"Once," said the girl, drawing herself up, and with an expression that
altered the whole character of her face--"the beggar ate at my
father's gate.  He is a born gentleman and a knight's son."

"And what reduced him thus?"

"I have said," answered the girl, simply, yet with the same half-scorn
on her lip that it had before betrayed; "he is a scholar, and thought
more of others than himself."

"I never saw any good come to a gentleman from those accursed books,"
said the Nevile,--"fit only for monks and shavelings.  But still, for
your father's sake, though I am ashamed of the poorness of the gift--"

"No; God be with you, sir, and reward you."  She stopped short, drew
her wimple round her face, and was gone.  Nevile felt an uncomfortable
sensation of remorse and disapproval at having suffered her to quit
him while there was yet any chance of molestation or annoyance, and
his eye followed her till a group of trees veiled her from his view.

The young maiden slackened her pace as she found herself alone under
the leafless boughs of the dreary pollards,--a desolate spot, made
melancholy by dull swamps, half overgrown with rank verdure, through
which forced its clogged way the shallow brook that now gives its name
(though its waves are seen no more) to one of the main streets in the
most polished quarters of the metropolis.  Upon a mound formed by the
gnarled roots of the dwarfed and gnome-like oak, she sat down and
wept.  In our earlier years, most of us may remember that there was
one day which made an epoch in life,--that day that separated
Childhood from Youth; for that day seems not to come gradually, but to
be a sudden crisis, an abrupt revelation.  The buds of the heart open
to close no more.  Such a day was this in that girl's fate.  But the
day was not yet gone!  That morning, when she dressed for her
enterprise of filial love, perhaps for the first time Sibyll Warner
felt that she was fair--who shall say whether some innocent, natural
vanity had not blended with the deep, devoted earnestness, which saw
no shame in the act by which the child could aid the father?  Perhaps
she might have smiled to listen to old Madge's praises of her winsome
face, old Madge's predictions that the face and the gittern would not
lack admirers on the gay ground; perhaps some indistinct, vague
forethoughts of the Future to which the sex will deem itself to be
born might have caused the cheek--no, not to blush, but to take a
rosier hue, and the pulse to beat quicker, she knew not why.  At all
events, to that ground went the young Sibyll, cheerful, and almost
happy, in her inexperience of actual life, and sure, at least, that
youth and innocence sufficed to protect from insult.  And now she sat
down under the leafless tree to weep; and in those bitter tears,
childhood itself was laved from her soul forever.

"What ailest thou, maiden?" asked a deep voice; and she felt a hand
laid lightly on her shoulder.  She looked up in terror and confusion,
but it was no form or face to inspire alarm that met her eye.  It was
a cavalier, holding by the rein a horse richly caparisoned; and though
his dress was plainer and less exaggerated than that usually worn by
men of rank, its materials were those which the sumptuary laws
(constantly broken, indeed, as such laws ever must be) confined to
nobles.  Though his surcoat was but of cloth, and the colour dark and
sober, it was woven in foreign looms,--an unpatriotic luxury, above
the degree of knight,--and edged deep with the costliest sables.  The
hilt of the dagger, suspended round his breast, was but of ivory,
curiously wrought, but the scabbard was sown with large pearls.  For
the rest, the stranger was of ordinary stature, well knit and active
rather than powerful, and of that age (about thirty-five) which may be
called the second prime of man.  His face was far less handsome than
Marmaduke Nevile's, but infinitely more expressive, both of
intelligence and command,--the features straight and sharp, the
complexion clear and pale, and under the bright gray eyes a dark shade
spoke either of dissipation or of thought.

"What ailest thou, maiden,--weepest thou some faithless lover?  Tush!
love renews itself in youth, as flower succeeds flower in spring."

Sibyll made no reply; she rose and moved a few paces, then arrested
her steps, and looked around her.  She had lost all clew to her way
homeward, and she saw with horror, in the distance, the hateful
timbrel-girls, followed by the rabble, and weaving their strange
dances towards the spot.

"Dost thou fear me, child?  There is no cause," said the stranger,
following her.  "Again I say, What ailest thou?"  This time his voice
was that of command, and the poor girl involuntarily obeyed it.  She
related her misfortunes, her persecution by the tymbesteres, her
escape,--thanks to the Nevile's courtesy,--her separation from her
attendant, and her uncertainty as to the way she should pursue.

The nobleman listened with interest: he was a man sated and wearied by
pleasure and the world, and the evident innocence of Sibyll was a
novelty to his experience, while the contrast between her language and
her dress moved his curiosity.  "And," said he, "thy protector left
thee, his work half done; fie on his chivalry!  But I, donzel, wear
the spurs of knighthood, and to succour the distressed is a duty my
oath will not let me swerve from.  I will guide thee home, for I know
well all the purlieus of this evil den of London.  Thou hast but to
name the suburb in which thy father dwells."

Sibyll involuntarily raised her wimple, lifted her beautiful eyes to
the stranger, in bewildered gratitude and surprise.  Her childhood had
passed in a court, her eye, accustomed to rank, at once perceived the
high degree of the speaker.  The contrast between this unexpected and
delicate gallantry and the condescending tone and abrupt desertion of
Marmaduke affected her again to tears.

"Ah, worshipful sir!" she said falteringly, "what can reward thee for
this unlooked-for goodness?"

"One innocent smile, sweet virgin!--for such I'll be sworn thou art."

He did not offer her his hand, but hanging the gold-enamelled rein
over his arm, walked by her side; and a few words sufficing for his
guidance, led her across the ground, through the very midst of the
throng.  He felt none of the young shame, the ingenious scruples of
Marmaduke, at the gaze he encountered, thus companioned.  But Sibyll
noted that ever and anon bonnet and cap were raised as they passed
along, and the respectful murmur of the vulgar, who had so lately
jeered her anguish, taught her the immeasurable distance in men's
esteem between poverty shielded by virtue, and poverty protected by
power.

But suddenly a gaudy tinsel group broke through the crowd, and
wheeling round their path, the foremost of them daringly approached
the nobleman, and looking full into his disdainful face, exclaimed,
"Tradest thou, too, for kisses?  Ha, ha! life is short,--the witch is
outwitched by thee!  But witchcraft and death go together, as
peradventure thou mayest learn at the last, sleek wooer."  Then
darting off, and heading her painted, tawdry throng, the timbrel-girl
sprang into the crowd and vanished.

This incident produced no effect upon the strong and cynical intellect
of the stranger.  Without allusion to it, he continued to converse
with his young companion, and artfully to draw out her own singular
but energetic and gifted mind.  He grew more than interested,--he was
both touched and surprised.  His manner became yet more respectful,
his voice more subdued and soft.

On what hazards turns our fate!  On that day, a little, and Sibyll's
pure but sensitive heart had, perhaps, been given to the young Nevile.
He had defended and saved her; he was fairer than the stranger, he was
more of her own years and nearer to her in station; but in showing
himself ashamed to be seen with her, he had galled her heart, and
moved the bitter tears of her pride.  What had the stranger done?
Nothing but reconciled the wounded delicacy to itself; and suddenly he
became to her one ever to be remembered, wondered at,--perhaps more.
They reached an obscure suburb, and parted at the threshold of a
large, gloomy, ruinous house, which Sibyll indicated as her father's
home.

The girl lingered before the porch; and the stranger gazed, with the
passionless admiration which some fair object of art produces on one
who has refined his taste, but who has survived enthusiasm, upon the
downcast cheek that blushed beneath his gaze.  "Farewell!" he said;
and the girl looked up wistfully.  He might, without vanity, have
supposed that look to imply what the lip did not dare to say,--"And
shall we meet no more?"

But he turned away, with formal though courteous salutation; and as he
remounted his steed, and rode slowly towards the interior of the city,
he muttered to himself, with a melancholy smile upon his lips, "Now
might the grown infant make to himself a new toy; but an innocent
heart is a brittle thing, and one false vow can break it.  Pretty
maiden!  I like thee well eno' not to love thee.  So, as my young
Scotch minstrel sings and plays,--

    'Christ keep these birdis bright in bowers,
     Sic peril lies in paramours!'"

[A Scotch poet, in Lord Hailes's Collection, has the following lines
in the very pretty poem called "Peril in Paramours:"--

    "Wherefore I pray, in termys short,
     Christ keep these birdis bright in bowers,
     Fra false lovers and their disport,
     Sic peril lies in paramours."]

We must now return to Marmaduke.  On leaving Sibyll, and retracing his
steps towards the more crowded quarter of the space, he was agreeably
surprised by encountering Nicholas Alwyn, escorted in triumph by a
legion of roaring apprentices from the victory he had just obtained
over six competitors at the quarter-staff.

When the cortege came up to Marmaduke, Nicholas halted, and fronting
his attendants, said, with the same cold and formal stiffness that had
characterized him from the beginning, "I thank you, lads, for your
kindness.  It is your own triumph.  All I cared for was to show that
you London boys are able to keep up your credit in these days, when
there's little luck in a yard-measure, if the same hand cannot bend a
bow, or handle cold steel.  But the less we think of the strife when
we are in the stall, the better for our pouches.  And so I hope we
shall hear no more about it, until I get a ware of my own, when the
more of ye that like to talk of such matters the better ye will be
welcome,--always provided ye be civil customers, who pay on the nail,
for as the saw saith, 'Ell and tell makes the crypt swell.' For the
rest, thanks are due to this brave gentleman, Marmaduke Nevile, who,
though the son of a knight-banneret who never furnished less to the
battle-field than fifty men-at-arms, has condescended to take part and
parcel in the sports of us peaceful London traders; and if ever you
can do him a kind turn--for turn and turn is fair play--why, you will,
I answer for it.  And so one cheer for old London, and another for
Marmaduke Nevile.  Here goes!  Hurrah, my lads!"  And with this pithy
address Nicholas Alwyn took off his cap and gave the signal for the
shouts, which, being duly performed, he bowed stiffly to his
companions, who departed with a hearty laugh, and coming to the side
of Nevile, the two walked on to a neighbouring booth, where, under a
rude awning, and over a flagon of clary, they were soon immersed in
the confidential communications each had to give and receive.




CHAPTER III.

THE TRADER AND THE GENTLE; OR, THE CHANGING GENERATION.

"No, my dear foster-brother," said the Nevile, "I do not yet
comprehend the choice you have made.  You were reared and brought up
with such careful book-lere, not only to read and to write--the which,
save the mark!  I hold to be labour eno'--but chop Latin and logic and
theology with Saint Aristotle (is not that his hard name?) into the
bargain, and all because you had an uncle of high note in Holy Church.
I cannot say I would be a shaveling myself; but surely a monk with the
hope of preferment is a nobler calling to a lad of spirit and ambition
than to stand out at a door and cry, 'Buy, buy,' 'What d'ye lack?' to
spend youth as a Flat-cap, and drone out manhood in measuring cloth,
hammering metals, or weighing out spices?"

"Fair and softly, Master Marmaduke," said Alwyn, "you will understand
me better anon.  My uncle, the sub-prior, died,--some say of
austerities, others of ale,--that matters not; he was a learned man
and a cunning.  'Nephew Nicholas,' said he on his death-bed, 'think
twice before you tie yourself up to the cloister; it's ill leaping
nowadays in a sackcloth bag.  If a pious man be moved to the cowl by
holy devotion, there is nothing to be said on the subject; but if he
take to the Church as a calling, and wish to march ahead like his
fellows, these times show him a prettier path to distinction.  The
nobles begin to get the best things for themselves; and a learned
monk, if he is the son of a yeoman, cannot hope, without a specialty
of grace, to become abbot or bishop.  The king, whoever he be, must be
so drained by his wars, that he has little land or gold to bestow on
his favourites; but his gentry turn an eye to the temporalities of the
Church, and the Church and the king wish to strengthen themselves by
the gentry.  This is not all; there are free opinions afloat.  The
House of Lancaster has lost ground, by its persecutions and burnings.
Men dare not openly resist, but they treasure up recollections of a
fried grandfather, or a roasted cousin,--recollections which have done
much damage to the Henries, and will shake Holy Church itself one of
these days.  The Lollards lie hid, but Lollardism will never die.
There is a new class rising amain, where a little learning goes a
great way, if mixed with spirit and sense.  Thou likest broad pieces
and a creditable name,--go to London and be a trader.  London begins
to decide who shall wear the crown, and the traders to decide what
king London shall befriend.  Wherefore, cut thy trace from the
cloister, and take thy road to the shop.' The next day my uncle gave
up the ghost.--They had better clary than this at the convent, I must
own; but every stone has its flaw."

"Yet," said Marmaduke, "if you took distaste to the cowl, from reasons
that I pretend not to judge of, but which seem to my poor head very
bad ones, seeing that the Church is as mighty as ever, and King Edward
is no friend to the Lollards, and that your uncle himself was at least
a sub-prior--"

"Had he been son to a baron, he had been a cardinal," interrupted
Nicholas, "for his head was the longest that ever came out of the
north country.  But go on; you would say my father was a sturdy
yeoman, and I might have followed his calling?"

"You hit the mark, Master Nicholas."

"Hout, man.  I crave pardon of your rank, Master Nevile.  But a yeoman
is born a yeoman, and he dies a yeoman--I think it better to die Lord
Mayor of London; and so I craved my mother's blessing and leave, and a
part of the old hyde has been sold to pay for the first step to the
red gown, which I need not say must be that of the Flat-cap.  I have
already taken my degrees, and no longer wear blue.  I am headman to my
master, and my master will be sheriff of London."

"It is a pity," said the Nevile, shaking his head; "you were ever a
tall, brave lad, and would have made a very pretty soldier."

"Thank you, Master Marmaduke, but I leave cut and thrust to the
gentles.  I have seen eno' of the life of a retainer.  He goes out on
foot with his shield and his sword, or his bow and his quiver, while
Sir Knight sits on horseback, armed from the crown to the toe, and the
arrow slants off from rider and horse, as a stone from a tree.  If the
retainer is not sliced and carved into mincemeat, he comes home to a
heap of ashes, and a handful of acres, harried and rivelled into a
common; Sir Knight thanks him for his valour, but he does not build up
his house; Sir Knight gets a grant from the king, or an heiress for
his son, and Hob Yeoman turns gisarme and bill into ploughshares.
Tut, tut, there's no liberty, no safety, no getting on, for a man who
has no right to the gold spurs, but in the guild of his fellows; and
London is the place for a born Saxon like Nicholas Alwyn."

As the young aspirant thus uttered the sentiments, which though others
might not so plainly avow and shrewdly enforce them, tended towards
that slow revolution, which, under all the stormy events that the
superficial record we call HISTORY alone deigns to enumerate, was
working that great change in the thoughts and habits of the people,
--that impulsion of the provincial citywards, that gradual formation
of a class between knight and vassal,--which became first
constitutionally visible and distinct in the reign of Henry VII.,
Marmaduke Nevile, inly half-regretting and half-despising the
reasonings of his foster-brother, was playing with his dagger, and
glancing at his silver arrow.

"Yet you could still have eno' of the tall yeoman and the stout
retainer about you to try for this bauble, and to break half a dozen
thick heads with your quarter-staff!"

"True," said Nicholas; "you must recollect we are only, as yet,
between the skin and the selle,--half-trader, half-retainer.  The old
leaven will out,--'Eith to learn the cat to the kirn,' as they say in
the North.  But that's not all; a man, to get on, must win respect
from those who are to jostle him hereafter, and it's good policy to
show those roystering youngsters that Nick Alwyn, stiff and steady
though he be, has the old English metal in him, if it comes to a
pinch; it's a lesson to yon lords too, save your quality, if they ever
wish to ride roughshod over our guilds and companies.  But eno' of
me.--Drawer, another stoup of the clary--Now, gentle sir, may I make
bold to ask news of yourself?  I saw, though I spake not before of it,
that my Lord Montagu showed a cold face to his kinsman.  I know
something of these great men, though I be but a small one,--a dog is
no bad guide in the city he trots through."

"My dear foster-brother," said the Nevile, "you had ever more brains
than myself, as is meet that you should have, since you lay by the
steel casque,--which, I take it, is meant as a substitute for us
gentlemen and soldiers who have not so many brains to spare; and I
will willingly profit by your counsels.  You must know," he said,
drawing nearer to the table, and his frank, hardy face assuming a more
earnest expression, "that though my father, Sir Guy, at the
instigation of his chief, the Earl of Westmoreland, and of the Lord
Nevile, bore arms at the first for King Henry--"

"Hush! hush! for Henry of Windsor!"

"Henry of Windsor!--so be it! yet being connected, like the nobles I
have spoken of, with the blood of Warwick and Salisbury, it was ever
with doubt and misgiving, and rather in the hope of ultimate
compromise between both parties (which the Duke of York's moderation
rendered probable) than of the extermination of either.  But when, at
the battle of York, Margaret of Anjou and her generals stained their
victory by cruelties which could not fail to close the door on all
conciliation; when the infant son of the duke himself was murdered,
though a prisoner, in cold blood; when my father's kinsman, the Earl
of Salisbury, was beheaded without trial; when the head of the brave
and good duke, who had fallen in the field, was, against all knightly
and king-like generosity, mockingly exposed, like a dishonoured
robber, on the gates of York, my father, shocked and revolted,
withdrew at once from the army, and slacked not bit or spur till he
found himself in his hall at Arsdale.  His death, caused partly by his
travail and vexation of spirit, together with his timely withdrawal
from the enemy, preserved his name from the attainder passed on the
Lords Westmoreland and Nevile; and my eldest brother, Sir John,
accepted the king's proffer of pardon, took the oaths of allegiance to
Edward, and lives safe, if obscure, in his father's halls.  Thou
knowest, my friend, that a younger brother has but small honour at
home.  Peradventure, in calmer times, I might have bowed my pride to
my calling, hunted my brother's dogs, flown his hawks, rented his
keeper's lodge, and gone to my grave contented.  But to a young man,
who from his childhood had heard the stirring talk of knights and
captains, who had seen valour and fortune make the way to distinction,
and whose ears of late had been filled by the tales of wandering
minstrels and dissours, with all the gay wonders of Edward's court,
such a life soon grew distasteful.  My father, on his death-bed (like
thy uncle, the sub-prior), encouraged me little to follow his own
footsteps.  'I see,' said he, 'that King Henry is too soft to rule his
barons, and Margaret too fierce to conciliate the commons; the only
hope of peace is in the settlement of the House of York.  Wherefore,
let not thy father's errors stand in the way of thy advancement;' and
therewith he made his confessor--for he was no penman himself, the
worthy old knight!--indite a letter to his great kinsman, the Earl of
Warwick, commending me to his protection.  He signed his mark, and set
his seal to this missive, which I now have at mine hostelrie, and died
the same day.  My brother judged me too young then to quit his roof;
and condemned me to bear his humours till, at the age of twenty-three,
I could bear no more!  So having sold him my scant share in the
heritage, and turned, like thee, bad land into good nobles, I joined a
party of horse in their journey to London, and arrived yesterday at
Master Sackbut's hostelrie in Eastchepe.  I went this morning to my
Lord of Warwick; but he was gone to the king's, and hearing of the
merry-makings here, I came hither for kill-time.  A chance word of my
Lord of Montagu--whom Saint Dunstan confound!--made me conceit that a
feat of skill with the cloth-yard might not ill preface my letter to
the great earl.  But, pardie! it seems I reckoned without my host, and
in seeking to make my fortunes too rashly, I have helped to mar them."
Wherewith he related the particulars of his interview with Montagu.

Nicholas Alwyn listened to him with friendly and thoughtful interest,
and, when he had done, spoke thus,--

"The Earl of Warwick is a generous man, and though hot, bears little
malice, except against those whom he deems misthink or insult him; he
is proud of being looked up to as a protector, especially by those of
his own kith and name.  Your father's letter will touch the right
string, and you cannot do better than deliver it with a plain story.
A young partisan like thee is not to be despised.  Thou must trust to
Lord Warwick to set matters right with his brother; and now, before I
say further, let me ask thee, plainly, and without offence, Dost thou
so love the House of York that no chance could ever make thee turn
sword against it?  Answer as I ask,--under thy breath; those drawers
are parlous spies!"

And here, in justice to Marmaduke Nevile and to his betters, it is
necessary to preface his reply by some brief remarks, to which we must
crave the earnest attention of the reader.  What we call PATRIOTISM,
in the high and catholic acceptation of the word, was little if at all
understood in days when passion, pride, and interest were motives
little softened by reflection and education, and softened still less
by the fusion of classes that characterized the small States of old,
and marks the civilization of a modern age.  Though the right by
descent of the House of York, if genealogy alone were consulted, was
indisputably prior to that of Lancaster, yet the long exercise of
power in the latter House, the genius of the Fourth Henry, and the
victories of the Fifth, would no doubt have completely superseded the
obsolete claims of the Yorkists, had Henry VI. possessed any of the
qualities necessary for the time.  As it was, men had got puzzled by
genealogies and cavils; the sanctity attached to the king's name was
weakened by his doubtful right to his throne, and the Wars of the
rival Roses were at last (with two exceptions, presently to be noted)
the mere contests of exasperated factions, in which public
considerations were scarcely even made the blind to individual
interest, prejudice, or passion.

Thus, instances of desertion, from the one to the other party, even by
the highest nobles, and on the very eve of battle, had grown so common
that little if any disgrace was attached to them; and any knight or
captain held an affront to himself an amply sufficient cause for the
transfer of his allegiance.  It would be obviously absurd to expect in
any of the actors of that age the more elevated doctrines of party
faith and public honour, which clearer notions of national morality,
and the salutary exercise of a large general opinion, free from the
passions of single individuals, have brought into practice in our more
enlightened days.  The individual feelings of the individual MAN,
strong in himself, became his guide, and he was free in much from the
regular and thoughtful virtues, as well as from the mean and plausible
vices, of those who act only in bodies and corporations.  The two
exceptions to this idiosyncrasy of motive and conduct were, first, in
the general disposition of the rising middle class, especially in
London, to connect great political interests with the more popular
House of York.  The commons in parliament had acted in opposition to
Henry the Sixth, as the laws they wrung from him tended to show, and
it was a popular and trading party that came, as it were, into power
under King Edward.  It is true that Edward was sufficiently arbitrary
in himself; but a popular party will stretch as much as its
antagonists in favour of despotism,--exercised, on its enemies.  And
Edward did his best to consult the interests of commerce, though the
prejudices of the merchants interpreted those interests in a way
opposite to that in which political economy now understands them.  The
second exception to the mere hostilities of individual chiefs and
feudal factions has, not less than the former, been too much
overlooked by historians.  But this was a still more powerful element
in the success of the House of York.  The hostility against the Roman
Church and the tenets of the Lollards were shared by an immense part
of the population.  In the previous century an ancient writer computes
that one half the population were Lollards; and though the sect were
diminished and silenced by fear, they still ceased not to exist, and
their doctrines not only shook the Church under Henry VIII., but
destroyed the throne by the strong arm of their children, the
Puritans, under Charles I.  It was impossible that these men should
not have felt the deepest resentment at the fierce and steadfast
persecution they endured under the House of Lancaster; and without
pausing to consider how far they would benefit under the dynasty of
York, they had all those motives of revenge which are mistaken so
often for the counsels of policy, to rally round any standard raised
against their oppressors.  These two great exceptions to merely
selfish policy, which it remains for the historian clearly and at
length to enforce, these: and these alone will always, to a sagacious
observer, elevate the Wars of the Roses above those bloody contests
for badges which we are at first sight tempted to regard them.  But
these deeper motives animated very little the nobles and the knightly
gentry; [Amongst many instances of the self-seeking of the time, not
the least striking is the subservience of John Mowbray, the great Duke
of Norfolk, to his old political enemy, the Earl of Oxford, the moment
the last comes into power, during the brief restoration of Henry VI.
John Paston, whose family had been sufficiently harassed by this great
duke, says, with some glee, "The Duke and Duchess (of Norfolk) sue to
him (Lord Oxford) as humbly as ever I did to them."--Paston Letters,
cccii.] and with them the governing principles were, as we have just
said, interest, ambition, and the zeal for the honour and advancement
of Houses and chiefs.

"Truly," said Marmaduke, after a short and rather embarrassed pause,
"I am little beholden as yet to the House of York.  There where I see
a noble benefactor, or a brave and wise leader, shall I think my sword
and heart may best proffer allegiance."

"Wisely said," returned Alwyn, with a slight but half sarcastic smile;
"I asked thee the question because--draw closer--there are wise men in
our city who think the ties between Warwick and the king less strong
than a ship's cable; and if thou attachest thyself to Warwick, he will
be better pleased, it may be, with talk of devotion to himself than
professions of exclusive loyalty to King Edward.  He who has little
silver in his pouch must have the more silk on his tongue.  A word to
a Westmoreland or a Yorkshire man is as good as a sermon to men not
born so far north.  One word more, and I have done.  Thou art kind and
affable and gentle, my dear foster-brother, but it will not do for
thee to be seen again with the goldsmith's headman.  If thou wantest
me, send for me at nightfall; I shall be found at Master Heyford's, in
the Chepe.  And if," added Nicholas, with a prudent reminiscence,
"thou succeedest at court, and canst recommend my master,--there is no
better goldsmith,--it may serve me when I set up for myself, which I
look to do shortly."

"But to send for thee, my own foster-brother, at nightfall, as if I
were ashamed!"

"Hout, Master Marmaduke, if thou wert not ashamed of me, I should be
ashamed to be seen with a gay springal like thee.  Why, they would say
in the Chepe that Nick Alwyn was going to ruin.  No, no.  Birds of a
feather must keep shy of those that moult other colours; and so, my
dear young master, this is my last shake of the hand.  But hold: dost
thou know thy way back?"

"Oh, yes,--never fear!" answered Marmaduke; "though I see not why so
far, at least, we may not be companions."

"No, better as it is; after this day's work they will gossip about
both of us, and we shall meet many who know my long visage on the way
back.  God keep thee; avise me how thou prosperest."

So saying, Nicholas Alwyn walked off, too delicate to propose to pay
his share of the reckoning with a superior; but when he had gone a few
paces he turned back, and accosting the Nevile, as the latter was
rebuckling his mantle, said,--

"I have been thinking, Master Nevile, that these gold nobles, which it
has been my luck to bear off, would be more useful in thy gipsire than
mine.  I have sure gains and small expenses; but a gentleman gains
nothing, and his hand must be ever in his pouch, so--"

"Foster-brother," said Marmaduke, haughtily, "a gentleman never
borrows,--except of the Jews, and with due interest. Moreover, I too
have my calling; and as thy stall to thee, so to me my good sword.
Saints keep thee!  Be sure I will serve thee when I can."

"The devil's in these young strips of the herald's tree," muttered
Alwyn, as he strode off; "as if it were dishonest to borrow a broad
piece without cutting a throat for it!  Howbeit, money is a prolific
mother: and here is eno' to buy me a gold chain against I am alderman
of London.  Hout, thus goes the world,--the knight's baubles become
the alderman's badges--so much the better!"




CHAPTER IV.

ILL FARES THE COUNTRY MOUSE IN THE TRAPS OF TOWN.

We trust we shall not be deemed discourteous, either, on the one hand,
to those who value themselves on their powers of reflection, or, on
the other, to those who lay claim to what, in modern phrenological
jargon, is called the Organ of Locality, when we venture to surmise
that the two are rarely found in combination; nay, that it seems to us
a very evident truism, that in proportion to the general activity of
the intellect upon subjects of pith and weight, the mind will be
indifferent to those minute external objects by which a less
contemplative understanding will note, and map out, and impress upon
the memory, the chart of the road its owner has once taken.  Master
Marmaduke Nevile, a hardy and acute forester from childhood, possessed
to perfection the useful faculty of looking well and closely before
him as he walked the earth; and ordinarily, therefore, the path he had
once taken, however intricate and obscure, he was tolerably sure to
retrace with accuracy, even at no inconsiderable distance of time,--
the outward senses of men are usually thus alert and attentive in the
savage or the semi-civilized state.  He had not, therefore, over-
valued his general acuteness in the note and memory of localities,
when he boasted of his power to refind his way to his hostelrie
without the guidance of Alwyn.  But it so happened that the events of
this day, so memorable to him, withdrew his attention from external
objects, to concentrate it within.  And in marvelling and musing over
the new course upon which his destiny had entered, he forgot to take
heed of that which his feet should pursue; so that, after wandering
unconsciously onward for some time, he suddenly halted in perplexity
and amaze to find himself entangled in a labyrinth of scattered
suburbs, presenting features wholly different from the road that had
conducted him to the archery-ground in the forenoon.  The darkness of
the night had set in; but it was relieved by a somewhat faint and
mist-clad moon, and some few and scattered stars, over which rolled,
fleetly, thick clouds, portending rain.  No lamps at that time cheered
the steps of the belated wanderer; the houses were shut up, and their
inmates, for the most part, already retired to rest, and the suburbs
did not rejoice, as the city, in the round of the watchman with his
drowsy call to the inhabitants, "Hang out your lights!"  The
passengers, who at first, in various small groups and parties, had
enlivened the stranger's way, seemed to him, unconscious as he was of
the lapse of time, to have suddenly vanished from the thoroughfares;
and he found himself alone in places thoroughly unknown to him, waking
to the displeasing recollection that the approaches to the city were
said to be beset by brawlers and ruffians of desperate characters,
whom the cessation of the civil wars had flung loose upon the skirts
of society, to maintain themselves by deeds of rapine and plunder.  As
might naturally be expected, most of these had belonged to the
defeated party, who had no claim to the good offices or charity of
those in power.  And although some of the Neviles had sided with the
Lancastrians, yet the badge worn by Marmaduke was considered a pledge
of devotion to the reigning House, and added a new danger to those
which beset his path.  Conscious of this--for he now called to mind
the admonitions of his host in parting from the hostelrie--he deemed
it but discreet to draw the hood of his mantle over the silver
ornament; and while thus occupied, he heard not a step emerging from a
lane at his rear, when suddenly a heavy hand was placed on his
shoulder.  He started, turned, and before him stood a man, whose
aspect and dress betokened little to lessen the alarm of the
uncourteous salutation.  Marmaduke's dagger was bare on the instant.

"And what wouldst thou with me?" he asked.

"Thy purse and thy dagger!" answered the stranger.

"Come and take them," said the Nevile, unconscious that he uttered a
reply famous in classic history, as he sprang backward a step or so,
and threw himself into an attitude of defence.  The stranger slowly
raised a rude kind of mace, or rather club, with a ball of iron at the
end, garnished with long spikes, as he replied, "Art thou mad eno' to
fight for such trifles?"

"Art thou in the habit of meeting one Englishman who yields his goods
without a blow to another?" retorted Marmaduke.  "Go to! thy club does
not daunt me."  The stranger warily drew back a step, and applied a
whistle to his mouth.  The Nevile sprang at him, but the stranger
warded off the thrust of the poniard with a light flourish of his
heavy weapon; and had not the youth drawn back on the instant, it had
been good-night and a long day to Marmaduke Nevile.  Even as it was,
his heart beat quick, as the whirl of the huge weapon sent the air
like a strong wind against his face.  Ere he had time to renew his
attack, he was suddenly seized from behind, and found himself
struggling in the arms of two men.  From these he broke, and his
dagger glanced harmless against the tough jerkin of his first
assailant.  The next moment his right arm fell to his side, useless
and deeply gashed.  A heavy blow on the head--the moon, the stars
reeled in his eyes--and then darkness,--he knew no more.  His
assailants very deliberately proceeded to rifle the inanimate body,
when one of them, perceiving the silver badge, exclaimed, with an
oath, "One of the rampant Neviles!  This cock at least shall crow no
more."  And laying the young man's head across his lap, while he
stretched back the throat with one hand, with the other he drew forth
a long sharp knife, like those used by huntsmen in despatching the
hart.  Suddenly, and in the very moment when the blade was about to
inflict the fatal gash, his hand was forcibly arrested, and a man, who
had silently and unnoticed joined the ruffians, said in a stern
whisper, "Rise and depart from thy brotherhood forever.  We admit no
murderer."

The ruffian looked up in bewilderment.  "Robin--captain--thou here!"
he said falteringly.

"I must needs be everywhere, I see, if I would keep such fellows as
thou and these from the gallows.  What is this?--a silver arrow--the
young archer--Um."

"A Nevile!" growled the would-be murderer.

"And for that very reason his life should be safe.  Knowest thou not
that Richard of Warwick, the great Nevile, ever spares the commons?
Begone! I say."  The captain's low voice grew terrible as he uttered
the last words.  The savage rose, and without a word stalked away.

"Look you, my masters," said Robin, turning to the rest, "soldiers
must plunder a hostile country.  While York is on the throne, England
is a hostile country to us Lancastrians.  Rob, then, rifle, if ye
will; but he who takes life shall lose it.  Ye know me!" The robbers
looked down, silent and abashed.  Robin bent a moment over the youth.
"He will live," he muttered.  "So! he already begins to awaken.  One
of these houses will give him shelter.  Off, fellows, and take care of
your necks!"

When Marmaduke, a few minutes after this colloquy, began to revive, it
was with a sensation of dizziness, pain, and extreme cold.  He strove
to lift himself from the ground, and at length succeeded.  He was
alone; the place where he had lain was damp and red with stiffening
blood.  He tottered on for several paces, and perceived from a
lattice, at a little distance, a light still burning.  Now reeling,
now falling, he still dragged on his limbs as the instinct attracted
him to that sign of refuge.  He gained the doorway of a detached and
gloomy house, and sank on the stone before it to cry aloud; but his
voice soon sank into deep groans, and once more, as his efforts
increased the rapid gush of the blood, became insensible.  The man
styled Robin, who had so opportunely saved his life, now approached
from the shadow of a wall, beneath which he had watched Marmaduke's
movements.  He neared the door of the house, and cried, in a sharp,
clear voice, "Open, for the love of Christ!"

A head was now thrust from the lattice, the light vanished; a minute
more, the door opened; and Robin, as if satisfied, drew hastily back,
and vanished, saying to himself, as he strode along, "A young man's
life must needs be dear to him; yet had the lad been a lord, methinks
I should have cared little to have saved for the people one tyrant
more."

After a long interval, Marmaduke again recovered, and his eyes turned
with pain from the glare of a light held to his face.

"He wakes, Father,--he will live!" cried a sweet voice.  "Ay, he will
live, child!" answered a deeper tone; and the young man muttered to
himself, half audibly, as in a dream, "Holy Mother be blessed! it is
sweet to live."  The room in which the sufferer lay rather exhibited
the remains of better fortunes than testified to the solid means of
the present possessor.  The ceiling was high and groined, and some
tints of faded but once gaudy painting blazoned its compartments and
hanging pendants.  The walls had been rudely painted (for arras [Mr.
Hallam ("History of the Middle Ages," chap. ix. part 2) implies a
doubt whether great houses were furnished with hangings so soon as the
reign of Edward IV.; but there is abundant evidence to satisfy our
learned historian upon that head.  The Narrative of the "Lord of
Grauthuse," edited by Sir F. Madden, specifies the hangings of cloth
of gold in the apartments in which that lord was received by Edward
IV.; also the hangings of white silk and linen in the chamber
appropriated to himself at Windsor.  But long before this period (to
say nothing of the Bayeux Tapestry),--namely, in the reign of Edward
III. (in 1344),--a writ was issued to inquire into the mystery of
working tapestry; and in 1398 Mr. Britton observes that the celebrated
arras hangings at Warwick Castle are mentioned.  (See Britton's
"Dictionary of Architecture and Archaelogy," art. "Tapestry.")] then
was rare, even among the wealthiest); but the colours were half
obliterated by time and damp.  The bedstead on which the wounded man
reclined was curiously carved, with a figure of the Virgin at the
head, and adorned with draperies, in which were wrought huge figures
from scriptural subjects, but in the dress of the date of Richard
II.,--Solomon in pointed upturned shoes, and Goliath, in the armour of
a crusader, frowning grimly upon the sufferer.  By the bedside stood a
personage, who, in reality, was but little past the middle age, but
whose pale visage, intersected with deep furrows, whose long beard and
hair, partially gray, gave him the appearance of advanced age:
nevertheless there was something peculiarly striking in the aspect of
the man.  His forehead was singularly high and massive; but the back
of the head was disproportionately small, as if the intellect too much
preponderated over all the animal qualities for strength in character
and success in life.  The eyes were soft, dark, and brilliant, but
dreamlike and vague; the features in youth must have been regular and
beautiful, but their contour was now sharpened by the hollowness of
the cheeks and temples.  The form, in the upper part, was nobly
shaped, sufficiently muscular, if not powerful, and with the long
throat and falling shoulders which always gives something of grace and
dignity to the carriage; but it was prematurely bent, and the lower
limbs were thin and weak, as is common with men who have sparely used
them; they seemed disproportioned to that broad chest, and still more
to that magnificent and spacious brow.  The dress of this personage
corresponded with the aspect of his abode.  The materials were those
worn by the gentry, but they were old, threadbare, and discoloured
with innumerable spots and stains.  His hands were small and delicate,
with large blue veins, that spoke of relaxed fibres; but their natural
whiteness was smudged with smoke-stains, and his beard--a masculine
ornament utterly out of fashion among the younger race in King
Edward's reign, but when worn by the elder gentry carefully trimmed
and perfumed--was dishevelled into all the spiral and tangled curls
displayed in the sculptured head of some old Grecian sage or poet.

On the other side of the bed knelt a young girl of about sixteen, with
a face exquisitely lovely in its delicacy and expression.  She seemed
about the middle stature, and her arms and neck, as displayed by the
close-fitting vest, had already the smooth and rounded contour of
dawning womanhood, while the face had still the softness, innocence,
and inexpressible bloom of a child.  There was a strong likeness
between her and her father (for such the relationship, despite the
difference of sex and years),--the same beautiful form of lip and
brow, the same rare colour of the eyes, dark-blue, with black fringing
lashes; and perhaps the common expression, at that moment, of gentle
pity and benevolent anxiety contributed to render the resemblance
stronger.

"Father, he sinks again!" said the girl.

"Sibyll," answered the man, putting his finger upon a line in a
manuscript book that he held, "the authority saith, that a patient so
contused should lose blood, and then the arm must be tightly bandaged.
Verily we lack the wherewithal."

"Not so, Father!" said the girl, and blushing, she turned aside, and
took off the partelet of lawn, upon which holiday finery her young
eyes perhaps that morning had turned with pleasure, and white as snow
was the neck which was thus displayed; "this will suffice to bind his
arm."

"But the book," said the father, in great perplexity--"the book
telleth us not how the lancet should be applied.  It is easy to say,
'Do this and do that;' but to do it once, it should have been done
before.  This is not among my experiments."

Luckily, perhaps, for Marmaduke, at this moment there entered an old
woman, the solitary servant of the house, whose life, in those warlike
times, had made her pretty well acquainted with the simpler modes of
dealing with a wounded arm and a broken head.  She treated with great
disdain the learned authority referred to by her master; she bound the
arm, plastered the head, and taking upon herself the responsibility to
promise a rapid cure, insisted upon the retirement of father and
child, and took her solitary watch beside the bed.

"If it had been any other mechanism than that of the vile human body!"
muttered the philosopher, as if apologizing to himself; and with that
he recovered his self-complacency and looked round him proudly.




CHAPTER V.

WEAL TO THE IDLER, WOE TO THE WORKMAN.

As Providence tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, so it possibly might
conform the heads of that day to a thickness suitable for the blows
and knocks to which they were variously subjected; yet it was not
without considerable effort and much struggling that Marmaduke's
senses recovered the shock received, less by his flesh-wound and the
loss of blood, than a blow on the seat of reason that might have
despatched a passable ox of these degenerate days.  Nature, to say
nothing of Madge's leechcraft, ultimately triumphed, and Marmaduke
woke one morning in full possession of such understanding as Nature
had endowed him with.  He was then alone, and it was with much simple
surprise that he turned his large hazel eyes from corner to corner of
the unfamiliar room.  He began to retrace and weave together sundry
disordered and vague reminiscences: he commenced with the
commencement, and clearly satisfied himself that he had been
grievously wounded and sorely bruised; he then recalled the solitary
light at the high lattice, and his memory found itself at the porch of
the large, lonely, ruinous old house; then all became a bewildered and
feverish dream.  He caught at the vision of an old man with a long
beard, whom he associated, displeasingly, with recollections of pain;
he glanced off to a fair face, with eyes that looked tender pity
whenever he writhed or groaned under the tortures that, no doubt, that
old accursed carle had inflicted upon him.  But even this face did not
dwell with pleasure in his memory,--it woke up confused and labouring
associations of something weird and witchlike, of sorceresses and
tymbesteres, of wild warnings screeched in his ear, of incantations
and devilries and doom.  Impatient of these musings, he sought to leap
from his bed, and was amazed that the leap subsided into a tottering
crawl.  He found an ewer and basin, and his ablutions refreshed and
invigorated him.  He searched for his raiment, and discovered it all
except the mantle, dagger, hat, and girdle; and while looking for
these, his eye fell on an old tarnished steel mirror.  He started as
if he had seen his ghost; was it possible that his hardy face could
have waned into that pale and almost femininely delicate visage?  With
the pride (call it not coxcombry) that then made the care of person
the distinction of gentle birth, he strove to reduce into order the
tangled locks of the long hair, of which a considerable portion above
a part that seemed peculiarly sensitive to the touch had been
mercilessly clipped; and as he had just completed this task, with
little satisfaction and much inward chafing at the lack of all
befitting essences and perfumes, the door gently opened, and the fair
face he had dreamed of appeared at the aperture.

The girl uttered a cry of astonishment and alarm at seeing the patient
thus arrayed and convalescent, and would suddenly have retreated; but
the Nevile advanced, and courteously taking her hand--

"Fair maiden," said he, "if, as I trow, I owe to thy cares my tending
and cure--nay, it may be a life hitherto of little worth, save to
myself--do not fly from my thanks.  May Our Lady of Walsingham bless
and reward thee!"

"Sir," answered Sibyll, gently withdrawing her hands from his clasp,
"our poor cares have been a slight return for thy generous protection
to myself."

"To thee! ah, forgive me--how could I be so dull?  I remember thy face
now; and, perchance, I deserve the disaster I met with in leaving thee
so discourteously.  My heart smote me for it as my light footfall
passed from thy side."

A slight blush, succeeded by a thoughtful smile--the smile of one who
recalls and caresses some not displeasing remembrance--passed over
Sibyll's charming countenance, as the sufferer said this with
something of the grace of a well-born man, whose boyhood had been
taught to serve God and the Ladies.

There was a short pause before she answered, looking down, "Nay, sir,
I was sufficiently beholden to you; and for the rest, all molestation
was over.  But I will now call your nurse--for it is to our servant,
not us, that your thanks are due--to see to your state, and administer
the proper medicaments."

"Truly, fair damsel, it is not precisely medicaments that I hunger and
thirst for; and if your hospitality could spare me from the larder a
manchet, or a corner of a pasty, and from the cellar a stoup of wine
or a cup of ale, methinks it would tend more to restore me than those
potions which are so strange to my taste that they rather offend than
tempt it; and, pardie, it seemeth to my poor senses as if I had not
broken bread for a week!"

"I am glad to hear you of such good cheer," answered Sibyll; "wait but
a moment or so, till I consult your physician."

And, so saying, she closed the door, slowly descended the steps, and
pursued her way into what seemed more like a vault than a habitable
room, where she found the single servant of the household.  Time,
which makes changes so fantastic in the dress of the better classes,
has a greater respect for the costume of the humbler; and though the
garments were of a very coarse sort of serge, there was not so great a
difference, in point of comfort and sufficiency, as might be supposed,
between the dress of old Madge and that of some primitive servant in
the North during the last century.  The old woman's face was thin and
pinched; but its sharp expression brightened into a smile as she
caught sight, through the damps and darkness, of the gracious form of
her young mistress.  "Ah, Madge," said Sibyll, with a sigh, "it is a
sad thing to be poor!"

"For such as thou, Mistress Sibyll, it is indeed.  It does not matter
for the like of us.  But it goes to my old heart when I see you shut
up here, or worse, going out in that old courtpie and wimple,--you, a
knight's grandchild; you, who have played round a queen's knees, and
who might have been so well-to-do, an' my master had thought a little
more of the gear of this world.  But patience is a good palfrey, and
will carry us a long day.  And when the master has done what he looks
for, why, the king--sith we must so call the new man on the throne--
will be sure to reward him; but, sweetheart, tarry not here; it's an
ill air for your young lips to drink in.  What brings you to old
Madge?"

"The stranger is recovered, and--"

"Ay, I warrant me, I have cured worse than he.  He must have a
spoonful of broth,--I have not forgot it.  You see I wanted no dinner
myself--what is dinner to old folks!--so I e'en put it all in the pot
for him.  The broth will be brave and strong."

"My poor Madge, God requite you for what you suffer for us!  But he
has asked"--here was another sigh, and a downcast look that did not
dare to face the consternation of Madge, as she repeated, with a half-
smile--"he has asked--for meat, and a stoup of wine, Madge!"

"Eh, sirs!  And where is he to get them?  Not that it will be bad for
the lad, either.  Wine!  There's Master Sancroft of the Oak will not
trust us a penny, the seely hilding, and--"

"Oh, Madge, I forgot!--we can still sell the gittern for something.
Get on your wimple, Madge--quick,--while I go for it."

"Why, Mistress Sibyll, that's your only pleasure when you sit all
alone, the long summer days."

"It will be more pleasure to remember that it supplied the wants of my
father's guest," said Sibyll; and retracing the way up the stairs, she
returned with the broken instrument, and despatched Madge with it,
laden with instructions that the wine should be of the best. She then
once more mounted the rugged steps, and halting a moment at
Marmaduke's door, as she heard his feeble step walking impatiently to
and fro, she ascended higher, where the flight, winding up a square,
dilapidated turret, became rougher, narrower, and darker, and opened
the door of her father's retreat.

It was a room so bare of ornament and furniture that it seemed merely
wrought out of the mingled rubble and rough stones which composed the
walls of the mansion, and was lighted towards the street by a narrow
slit, glazed, it is true,--which all the windows of the house were
not,--but the sun scarcely pierced the dull panes and the deep walls
in which they were sunk.  The room contained a strong furnace and a
rude laboratory.  There were several strange-looking mechanical
contrivances scattered about, several manuscripts upon some oaken
shelves, and a large pannier of wood and charcoal in the corner.  In
that poverty-stricken house, the money spent on fuel alone, in the
height of summer, would have comfortably maintained the inmates; but
neither Sibyll nor Madge ever thought to murmur at this waste,
dedicated to what had become the vital want of a man who drew air in a
world of his own.  This was the first thing to be provided for; and
Science was of more imperative necessity than even Hunger.

Adam Warner was indeed a creature of remarkable genius,--and genius,
in an age where it is not appreciated, is the greatest curse the iron
Fates can inflict on man.  If not wholly without the fond fancies
which led the wisdom of the darker ages to the philosopher's stone and
the elixir, he had been deterred from the chase of a chimera by want
of means to pursue it! for it required the resources or the patronage
of a prince or noble to obtain the costly ingredients consumed in the
alchemist's crucible.  In early life, therefore, and while yet in
possession of a competence derived from a line of distinguished and
knightly ancestors, Adam Warner had devoted himself to the surer and
less costly study of the mathematics, which then had begun to attract
the attention of the learned, but which was still looked upon by the
vulgar as a branch of the black art.  This pursuit had opened to him
the insight into discoveries equally useful and sublime.  They
necessitated a still more various knowledge; and in an age when there
was no division of labour and rare and precarious communication among
students, it became necessary for each discoverer to acquire
sufficient science for his own collateral experiments.

In applying mathematics to the practical purposes of life, in
recognizing its mighty utilities to commerce and civilization, Adam
Warner was driven to conjoin with it, not only an extensive knowledge
of languages, but many of the rudest tasks of the mechanist's art; and
chemistry was, in some of his researches, summoned to his aid.  By
degrees, the tyranny that a man's genius exercises over his life,
abstracted him from all external objects.  He had loved his wife
tenderly, but his rapid waste of his fortune in the purchase of
instruments and books, then enormously dear, and the neglect of all
things not centred in the hope to be the benefactor of the world, had
ruined her health and broken her heart.  Happily Warner perceived not
her decay till just before her death; happily he never conceived its
cause, for her soul was wrapped in his.  She revered, and loved, and
never upbraided him.  Her heart was the martyr to his mind.  Had she
foreseen the future destinies of her daughter, it might have been
otherwise.  She could have remonstrated with the father, though not
with the husband.  But, fortunately, as it seemed to her, she (a
Frenchwoman by birth) had passed her youth in the service of Margaret
of Anjou, and that haughty queen, who was equally warm to friends and
inexorable to enemies, had, on her attendant's marriage, promised to
ensure the fortunes of her offspring.  Sibyll at the age of nine--
between seven and eight years before the date the story enters on, and
two years prior to the fatal field of Towton, which gave to Edward the
throne of England--had been admitted among the young girls whom the
custom of the day ranked amidst the attendants of the queen; and in
the interval that elapsed before Margaret was obliged to dismiss her
to her home, her mother died.  She died without foreseeing the
reverses that were to ensue, in the hope that her child, at least, was
nobly provided for, and not without the belief (for there is so much
faith in love!) that her husband's researches, which in his youth had
won favour of the Protector Duke of Gloucester, the most enlightened
prince of his time, would be crowned at last with the rewards and
favours of his king.  That precise period was, indeed, the fairest
that had yet dawned upon the philosopher.  Henry VI., slowly
recovering from one of those attacks which passed for imbecility, had
condescended to amuse himself with various conversations with Warner,
urged to it first by representations of the unholy nature of the
student's pursuits; and, having satisfied his mind of his learned
subject's orthodoxy, the poor monarch had taken a sort of interest,
not so much, perhaps, in the objects of Warner's occupations, as in
that complete absorption from actual life which characterized the
subject, and gave him in this a melancholy resemblance to the king.
While the House of Lancaster was on the throne, the wife felt that her
husband's pursuits would be respected, and his harmless life safe from
the fierce prejudices of the people; and the good queen would not
suffer him to starve, when the last mark was expended in devices how
to benefit his country:--and in these hopes the woman died!

A year afterwards, all at court was in disorder,--armed men supplied
the service of young girls, and Sibyll, with a purse of broad pieces,
soon converted into manuscripts, was sent back to her father's
desolate home.  There had she grown a flower amidst ruins, with no
companion of her own age, and left to bear, as her sweet and
affectionate nature well did, the contrast between the luxuries of a
court and the penury of a hearth which, year after year, hunger and
want came more and more sensibly to invade.

Sibyll had been taught, even as a child, some accomplishments little
vouchsafed then to either sex,--she could read and write; and Margaret
had not so wholly lost, in the sterner North, all reminiscence of the
accomplishments that graced her father's court as to neglect the
education of those brought up in her household.  Much attention was
given to music, for it soothed the dark hours of King Henry; the
blazoning of missals or the lives of saints, with the labours of the
loom, were also among the resources of Sibyll's girlhood, and by these
last she had, from time to time, served to assist the maintenance of
the little family of which, child though she was, she became the
actual head.  But latterly--that is, for the last few weeks--even
these sources failed her; for as more peaceful times allowed her
neighbours to interest themselves in the affairs of others, the dark
reports against Warner had revived.  His name became a by-word of
horror; the lonely light at the lattice burning till midnight, against
all the early usages and habits of the day; the dark smoke of the
furnace, constant in summer as in winter, scandalized the religion of
the place far and near.  And finding, to their great dissatisfaction,
that the king's government and the Church interfered not for their
protection, and unable themselves to volunteer any charges against the
recluse (for the cows in the neighbourhood remained provokingly
healthy), they came suddenly, and, as it were by one of those common
sympathies which in all times the huge persecutor we call the PUBLIC
manifests when a victim is to be crushed, to the pious resolution of
starving where they could not burn.  Why buy the quaint devilries of
the wizard's daughter?--no luck could come of it.  A missal blazoned
by such hands, an embroidery worked at such a loom, was like the
Lord's Prayer read backwards.  And one morning, when poor Sibyll stole
out as usual to vend a month's labour, she was driven from door to
door with oaths and curses.

Though Sibyll's heart was gentle, she was not without a certain
strength of mind.  She had much of the patient devotion of her mother,
much of the quiet fortitude of her father's nature.  If not
comprehending to the full the loftiness of Warner's pursuits, she
still anticipated from them an ultimate success which reconciled her
to all temporary sacrifices.  The violent prejudices, the ignorant
cruelty, thus brought to bear against existence itself, filled her
with sadness, it is true, but not unmixed with that contempt for her
persecutors, which, even in the meekest tempers, takes the sting from
despair.  But hunger pressed.  Her father was nearing the goal of his
discoveries, and in a moment of that pride which in its very contempt
for appearances braves them all, Sibyll had stolen out to the pastime-
ground,--with what result has been seen already.  Having thus
accounted for the penury of the mansion, we return to its owner.

Warner was contemplating with evident complacency and delight the
model of a machine which had occupied him for many years, and which he
imagined he was now rapidly bringing to perfection.  His hands and
face were grimed with the smoke of his forge, and his hair and beard,
neglected as usual, looked parched and dried up, as if with the
constant fever that burned within.

"Yes, yes!" he muttered, "how they will bless me for this!  What Roger
Bacon only suggested I shall accomplish!  How it will change the face
of the globe!  What wealth it will bestow on ages yet unborn!"

"My father," said the gentle voice of Sibyll, "my poor father, thou
hast not tasted bread to-day."

Warner turned, and his face relaxed into a tender expression as he saw
his daughter.

"My child," he said, pointing to his model, "the time comes when it
will live!  Patience! patience!"

"And who would not have patience with thee, and for thee, Father?"
said Sibyll, with enthusiasm speaking on every feature.  "What is the
valour of knight and soldier--dull statues of steel--to thine?  Thou,
with thy naked breast, confronting all dangers,--sharper than the
lance and glaive, and all--"

"All to make England great!"

"Alas! what hath England merited from men like thee?  The people, more
savage than their rulers, clamour for the stake, the gibbet, and the
dungeon, for all who strive to make them wiser.  Remember the death of
Bolingbroke, [A mathematician accused as an accomplice, in sorcery, of
Eleanor Cobham, wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and hanged upon
that charge.  His contemporary (William Wyrcestre) highly extols his
learning.]--a wizard, because, O Father!--because his pursuits were
thine!"

Adam, startled by this burst, looked at his daughter with more
attention than he usually evinced to any living thing.  "Child," he
said at length, shaking his head in grave reproof, "let me not say to
thee, 'O thou of little faith!'  There were no heroes were there no
martyrs!"

"Do not frown on me, Father," said Sibyll, sadly; "let the world
frown,--not thou!  Yes, thou art right.  Thou must triumph at last."
And suddenly, her whole countenance changing into a soft and caressing
endearment, she added, "But now come, Father.  Thou hast laboured well
for this morning.  We shall have a little feast for thee in a few
minutes.  And the stranger is recovered, thanks to our leechcraft.  He
is impatient to see and thank thee."

"Well, well, I come, Sibyll," said the student, with a regretful,
lingering look at his model, and a sigh to be disturbed from its
contemplation; and he slowly quitted the room with Sibyll.

"But not, dear sir and father, not thus--not quite thus--vill you go
to the stranger, well-born like yourself?  Oh, no! your Sibyll is
proud, you know,--proud of her father."  So saying, she clung to him
fondly, and drew him mechanically, for he had sunk into a revery, and
heeded her not, into an adjoining chamber, in which he slept.  The
comforts even of the gentry, of men with the acres that Adam had sold,
were then few and scanty.  The nobles and the wealthy merchants,
indeed, boasted many luxuries that excelled in gaud and pomp those of
their equals now.  But the class of the gentry who had very little
money at command were contented with hardships from which a menial of
this day would revolt.  What they could spend in luxury was usually
consumed in dress and the table they were obliged to keep.  These were
the essentials of dignity.  Of furniture there was a woful stint.  In
many houses, even of knights, an edifice large enough to occupy a
quadrangle was composed more of offices than chambers inhabited by the
owners; rarely boasting more than three beds, which were bequeathed in
wills as articles of great value.  The reader must, therefore, not be
surprised that Warner's abode contained but one bed, properly so
called, and that was now devoted to Nevile.  The couch which served
the philosopher for bed was a wretched pallet, stretched on the floor,
stuffed with straw,--with rough say, or serge, and an old cloak for
the coverings.  His daughter's, in a room below, was little better.
The walls were bare; the whole house boasted but one chair, which was
in Marmaduke's chamber; stools or settles of rude oak elsewhere
supplied their place.  There was no chimney except in Nevile's room,
and in that appropriated to the forge.

To this chamber, then, resembling a dungeon in appearance, Sibyll drew
the student, and here, from an old worm-eaten chest, she carefully
extracted a gown of brown velvet, which his father, Sir Armine, had
bequeathed to him by will,--faded, it is true, but still such as the
low-born wore not, [By the sumptuary laws only a knight was entitled
to wear velvet.] trimmed with fur, and clasped with a brooch of gold.
And then she held the ewer and basin to him, while, with the docility
of a child, he washed the smoke-soil from his hands and face.  It was
touching to see in this, as in all else, the reverse of their natural
position,--the child tending and heeding and protecting, as it were,
the father; and that not from his deficiency, but his greatness; not
because he was below the vulgar intelligences of life, but above them.
And certainly, when, his patriarchal hair and beard smoothed into
order, and his velvet gown flowing in majestic folds around a figure
tall and commanding, Sibyll followed her father into Marmaduke's
chamber, she might well have been proud of his appearance; and she
felt the innocent vanity of her sex and age in noticing the half-start
of surprise with which Marmaduke regarded his host, and the tone of
respect in which he proffered him his salutations and thanks.  Even
his manner altered to Sibyll; it grew less frank and affable, more
courtly and reserved: and when Madge came to announce that the
refection was served, it was with a blush of shame, perhaps, at his
treatment of the poor gittern-player on the pastime-ground, that the
Nevile extended his left hand, for his right was still not at his
command, to lead the damsel to the hall.

This room, which was divided from the entrance by a screen, and,
except a small closet that adjoined it, was the only sitting-room in a
day when, as now on the Continent, no shame was attached to receiving
visitors in sleeping apartments, was long and low; an old and very
narrow table, that might have feasted thirty persons, stretched across
a dais raised upon a stone floor; there was no rere-dosse, or
fireplace, which does not seem at that day to have been an absolute
necessity in the houses of the metropolis and its suburbs, its place
being supplied by a movable brazier.  Three oak stools were placed in
state at the board, and to one of these Marmaduke, in a silence
unusual to him, conducted the fair Sibyll.

"You will forgive our lack of provisions," said Warner, relapsing into
the courteous fashions of his elder days, which the unwonted spectacle
of a cold capon, a pasty, and a flask of wine brought to his mind by a
train of ideas that actively glided by the intervening circumstances,
which ought to have filled him with astonishment at the sight, "for my
Sibyll is but a young housewife, and I am a simple scholar, of few
wants."

"Verily," answered Marmaduke, finding his tongue as he attacked the
pasty, "I see nothing that the most dainty need complain of; fair
Mistress Sibyll, your dainty lips will not, I trow, refuse me the
waisall.  [I.e. waissail or wassal; the spelling of the time is
adopted in the text.]  To you also, worshipful sir!  Gramercy! it
seems that there is nothing which better stirs a man's appetite than a
sick bed.  And, speaking thereof, deign to inform me, kind sir, how
long I have been indebted to your hospitality.  Of a surety, this
pasty hath an excellent flavour, and if not venison, is something
better.  But to return, it mazes me much to think what time hath
passed since my encounter with the robbers."

"They were robbers, then, who so cruelly assailed thee?" observed
Sibyll.

"Have I not said so--surely, who else?  And, as I was remarking to
your worshipful father, whether this mischance happened hours, days,
months, or years ago, beshrew me if I can venture the smallest guess."

Master Warner smiled, and observing that some reply was expected from
him, said, "Why, indeed, young sir, I fear I am almost as oblivious as
yourself.  It was not yesterday that you arrived, nor the day before,
nor--Sibyll, my child, how long is it since this gentleman hath been
our guest?"

"This is the fifth day," answered Sibyll.

"So long! and I like a senseless log by the wayside, when others are
pushing on, bit and spur, to the great road.  I pray you, sir, tell me
the news of the morning.  The Lord Warwick is still in London, the
court still at the Tower?"

Poor Adam, whose heart was with his model, and who had now satisfied
his temperate wants, looked somewhat bewildered and perplexed by this
question.  "The king, save his honoured head," said he, inclining his
own, "is, I fear me, always at the Tower, since his unhappy detention,
but he minds it not, sir,--he heeds it not; his soul is not on this
side Paradise."

Sibyll uttered a faint exclamation of fear at this dangerous
indiscretion of her father's absence of mind; and drawing closer to
Nevile, she put her hand with touching confidence on his arm, and
whispered, "You will not repeat this, Sir! my father lives only in his
studies, and he has never known but one king!"

Marmaduke turned his bold face to the maid, and pointed to the salt-
cellar, as he answered in the same tone, "Does the brave man betray
his host?"

There was a moment's silence.  Marmaduke rose.  "I fear," said he,
"that I must now leave you; and while it is yet broad noon, I must
indeed be blind if I again miss my way."

This speech suddenly recalled Adam from his meditations; for whenever
his kindly and simple benevolence was touched, even his mathematics
and his model were forgotten.  "No, young sir," said he, "you must not
quit us yet; your danger is not over.  Exercise may bring fever.
Celsus recommends quiet.  You must consent to tarry with us a day or
two more."

"Can you tell me," said the Nevile, hesitatingly, "what distance it is
to the Temple-gate, or the nearest wharf on the river?"

"Two miles, at the least," answered Sibyll.

"Two miles!--and now I mind me, I have not the accoutrements that
beseem me.  Those hildings have stolen my mantle (which, I perceive,
by the way, is but a rustic garment, now laid aside for the super-
tunic), and my hat and dague, nor have they left even a half groat to
supply their place.  Verily, therefore, since ye permit me to burden
your hospitality longer, I will not say ye nay, provided you,
worshipful sir, will suffer one of your people to step to the house of
one Master Heyford, goldsmith, in the Chepe, and crave one Nicholas
Alwyn, his freedman, to visit me.  I can commission him touching my
goods left at mine hostelrie, and learn some other things which it
behooves me to know."

"Assuredly.  Sibyll, tell Simon or Jonas to put himself under our
guest's order."

Simon or Jonas!  The poor Adam absolutely forgot that Simon and Jonas
had quitted the house these six years!  How could he look on the
capon, the wine, and the velvet gown trimmed with fur, and not fancy
himself back in the heyday of his wealth?

Sibyll half smiled and half sighed, as she withdrew to consult with
her sole counsellor, Madge, how the guest's orders were to be obeyed,
and how, alas! the board was to be replenished for the evening meal.
But in both these troubles she was more fortunate than she
anticipated.  Madge had sold the broken gittern, for musical
instruments were then, comparatively speaking, dear (and this had been
a queen's gift), for sufficient to provide decently for some days;
and, elated herself with the prospect of so much good cheer, she
readily consented to be the messenger to Nicholas Alwyn.  When with a
light step and a lighter heart Sibyll tripped back to the hall, she
was scarcely surprised to find the guest alone.  Her father, after her
departure, had begun to evince much restless perturbation.  He
answered Marmaduke's queries but by abstracted and desultory
monosyllables; and seeing his guest at length engaged in contemplating
some old pieces of armour hung upon the walls, he stole stealthily and
furtively away, and halted not till once more before his beloved
model.

Unaware of his departure, Marmaduke, whose back was turned to him,
was, as he fondly imagined, enlightening his host with much soldier-
like learning as to the old helmets and weapons that graced the hall.
"Certes, my host," said he, musingly, "that sort of casque, which has
not, I opine, been worn this century, had its merits; the vizor is
less open to the arrows.  But as for these chain suits, they suited
only--I venture, with due deference, to declare--the Wars of the
Crusades, where the enemy fought chiefly with dart and scymetar.  They
would be but a sorry defence against the mace and battle-axe;
nevertheless, they were light for man and horse, and in some service,
especially against foot, might be revived with advantage.  Think you
not so?"

He turned, and saw the arch face of Sibyll.

"I crave pardon for my blindness, gentle damsel," said he, in some
confusion, "but your father was here anon."

"His mornings are so devoted to labour," answered Sibyll, "that he
entreats you to pardon his discourtesy.  Meanwhile if you would wish
to breathe the air, we have a small garden in the rear;" and so
saying, she led the way into the small withdrawing-room, or rather
closet, which was her own favourite chamber, and which communicated,
by another door, with a broad, neglected grassplot, surrounded by high
walls, having a raised terrace in front, divided by a low stone Gothic
palisade from the green sward.

On the palisade sat droopingly, and half asleep, a solitary peacock;
but when Sibyll and the stranger appeared at the door, he woke up
suddenly, descended from his height, and with a vanity not wholly
unlike his young mistress's wish to make the best possible display in
the eyes of a guest, spread his plumes broadly in the sun.  Sibyll
threw him some bread, which she had taken from the table for that
purpose; but the proud bird, however hungry, disdained to eat, till he
had thoroughly satisfied himself that his glories had been
sufficiently observed.

"Poor proud one," said Sibyll, half to herself, "thy plumage lasts
with thee through all changes."

"Like the name of a brave knight," said Marmaduke, who overheard her.

"Thou thinkest of the career of arms."

"Surely,--I am a Nevile!"

"Is there no fame to be won but that of a warrior?"

"Not that I weet of, or heed for, Mistress Sibyll."

"Thinkest thou it were nothing to be a minstrel, who gave delight; a
scholar, who dispelled darkness?"

"For the scholar?  Certes, I respect holy Mother Church, which they
tell me alone produces that kind of wonder with full safety to the
soul, and that only in the higher prelates and dignitaries.  For the
minstrel, I love him, I would fight for him, I would give him at need
the last penny in my gipsire; but it is better to do deeds than to
sing them."

Sibyll smiled, and the smile perplexed and half displeased the young
adventurer.  But the fire of the young man had its charm.

By degrees, as they walked to and fro the neglected terrace, their
talk flowed free and familiar; for Marmaduke, like most young men full
of himself, was joyous with the happy egotism of a frank and careless
nature.  He told his young confidante of a day his birth, his history,
his hopes, and fears; and in return he learned, in answer to the
questions he addressed to her, so much, at least, of her past and
present life, as the reverses of her father, occasioned by costly
studies, her own brief sojourn at the court of Margaret, and the
solitude, if not the struggles, in which her youth was consumed.  It
would have been a sweet and grateful sight to some kindly bystander to
hear these pleasant communications between two young persons so
unfriended, and to imagine that hearts thus opened to each other might
unite in one.  But Sibyll, though she listened to him with interest,
and found a certain sympathy in his aspirations, was ever and anon
secretly comparing him to one, the charm of whose voice still lingered
in her ears; and her intellect, cultivated and acute, detected in
Marmaduke deficient education, and that limited experience which is
the folly and the happiness of the young.

On the other hand, whatever admiration Nevile might conceive was
strangely mixed with surprise, and, it might almost be said, with
fear.  This girl, with her wise converse and her child's face, was a
character so thoroughly new to him.  Her language was superior to what
he had ever heard, the words more choice, the current more flowing:
was that to be attributed to her court-training or her learned
parentage?

"Your father, fair mistress," said he, rousing himself in one of the
pauses of their conversation--"your father, then, is a mighty scholar,
and I suppose knows Latin like English?"

"Why, a hedge-priest pretends to know Latin," said Sibyll, smiling;
"my father is one of the six men living who have learned the Greek and
the Hebrew."

"Gramercy!" cried Marmaduke, crossing himself.  "That is awsome
indeed!  He has taught you his lere in the tongues?"

"Nay, I know but my own and the French; my mother was a native of
France."

"The Holy Mother be praised!" said Marmaduke, breathing more freely;
"for French I have heard my father and uncle say is a language fit for
gentles and knights, specially those who come, like the Neviles, from
Norman stock.  This Margaret of Anjou--didst thou love her well,
Mistress Sibyll?"

"Nay," answered Sibyll, "Margaret commanded awe, but she scarcely
permitted love from an inferior: and though gracious and well-governed
when she so pleased, it was but to those whom she wished to win.  She
cared not for the heart, if the hand or the brain could not assist
her.  But, poor queen, who could blame her for this?--her nature was
turned from its milk; and, when, more lately, I have heard how many
she trusted most have turned against her, I rebuked myself that--"

"Thou wert not by her side?" added the Nevile, observing her pause,
and with the generous thought of a gentleman and a soldier.

"Nay, I meant not that so expressly, Master Nevile, but rather that I
had ever murmured at her haste and shrewdness of mood.  By her side,
said you?--alas! I have a nearer duty at home; my father is all in
this world to me!  Thou knowest not, Master Nevile, how it flatters
the weak to think there is some one they can protect.  But eno' of
myself.  Thou wilt go to the stout earl, thou wilt pass to the court,
thou wilt win the gold spurs, and thou wilt fight with the strong
hand, and leave others to cozen with the keen head."

"She is telling my fortune!" muttered Marmaduke, crossing himself
again.  "The gold spurs--I thank thee, Mistress Sibyll!--will it be on
the battle-field that I shall be knighted, and by whose hand?"

Sibyll glanced her bright eye at the questioner, and seeing his
wistful face, laughed outright.

"What, thinkest thou, Master Nevile, I can read thee all riddles
without my sieve and my shears?"

"They are essentials, then, Mistress Sibyll?" said the Nevile, with
blunt simplicity.  "I thought ye more learned damozels might tell by
the palm, or the--why dost thou laugh at me?"

"Nay," answered Sibyll, composing herself.  "It is my right to be
angered.  Sith thou wouldst take me to be a witch, all that I can tell
thee of thy future" (she added touchingly) "is from that which I have
seen of thy past. Thou hast a brave heart, and a gentle; thou hast a
frank tongue, and a courteous; and these qualities make men honoured
and loved,--except they have the gifts which turn all into gall, and
bring oppression for honour, and hate for love."

"And those gifts, gentle Sibyll?"

"Are my father's," answered the girl, with another and a sadder change
in her expressive countenance.  And the conversation flagged till
Marmaduke, feeling more weakened by his loss of blood than he had
conceived it possible, retired to his chamber to repose himself.




CHAPTER VI.

MASTER MARMADUKE NEVILE FEARS FOR THE SPIRITUAL WEAL OF HIS HOST AND
HOSTESS.

Before the hour of supper, which was served at six o'clock, Nicholas
Alwyn arrived at the house indicated to him by Madge.  Marmaduke,
after a sound sleep, which was little flattering to Sibyll's
attractions, had descended to the hall in search of the maiden and his
host, and finding no one, had sauntered in extreme weariness and
impatience into the little withdrawing-closet, where as it was now
dusk, burned a single candle in a melancholy and rustic sconce;
standing by the door that opened on the garden, he amused himself with
watching the peacock, when his friend, following Madge into the
chamber, tapped him on the shoulder.

"Well, Master Nevile.  Ha! by Saint Thomas, what has chanced to thee?
Thine arm swathed up, thy locks shorn, thy face blanched!  My honoured
foster-brother, thy Westmoreland blood seems over-hot for Cockaigne!"

"If so, there are plenty in this city of cut-throats to let out the
surplusage," returned Marmaduke; and he briefly related his adventure
to Nicholas.

When he had done, the kind trader reproached himself for having
suffered Marmaduke to find his way alone.  "The suburbs abound with
these miscreants," said he; "and there is more danger in a night walk
near London than in the loneliest glens of green Sherwood--more shame
to the city!  An' I be Lord Mayor one of these days, I will look to it
better.  But our civil wars make men hold human life very cheap, and
there's parlous little care from the great of the blood and limbs of
the wayfarers.  But war makes thieves--and peace hangs them!  Only
wait till I manage affairs!"

"Many thanks to thee, Nicholas," returned the Nevile; "but foul befall
me if ever I seek protection from sheriff or mayor!  A man who cannot
keep his own life with his own right hand merits well to hap-lose it;
and I, for one, shall think ill of the day when an Englishman looks
more to the laws than his good arm for his safety; but, letting this
pass, I beseech thee to avise me if my Lord Warwick be still in the
city?"

"Yes, marry, I know that by the hostelries, which swarm with his
badges, and the oxen, that go in scores to the shambles!  It is a
shame to the Estate to see one subject so great, and it bodes no good
to our peace.  The earl is preparing the most magnificent embassage
that ever crossed the salt seas--I would it were not to the French,
for our interests lie contrary; but thou hast some days yet to rest
here and grow stout, for I would not have thee present thyself with a
visage of chalk to a man who values his kind mainly by their thews and
their sinews.  Moreover, thou shouldst send for the tailor, and get
thee trimmed to the mark.  It would be a long step in thy path to
promotion, an' the earl would take thee in his train; and the gaudier
thy plumes, why, the better chance for thy flight.  Wherefore, since
thou sayest they are thus friendly to thee under this roof, bide yet a
while peacefully; I will send thee the mercer, and the clothier, and
the tailor, to divert thy impatience.  And as these fellows are
greedy, my gentle and dear Master Nevile, may I ask, without offence,
how thou art provided?"

"Nay, nay, I have moneys at the hostelrie, an' thou wilt send me my
mails.  For the rest, I like thy advice, and will take it."

"Good!" answered Nicholas.  "Hem! thou seemest to have got into a poor
house,--a decayed gentleman, I wot, by the slovenly ruin!"

"I would that were the worst," replied Marmaduke, solemnly, and under
his breath; and therewith he repeated to Nicholas the adventure on the
pastime-ground, the warnings of the timbrel-girls, and the "awsome"
learning and strange pursuits of his host. As for Sibyll, he was
evidently inclined to attribute to glamour the reluctant admiration
with which she had inspired him.  "For," said he, "though I deny not
that the maid is passing fair, there be many with rosier cheeks, and
taller by this hand!"

Nicholas listened, at first, with the peculiar expression of shrewd
sarcasm which mainly characterized his intelligent face, but his
attention grew more earnest before Marmaduke had concluded.

"In regard to the maiden," said he, smiling and shaking his head, "it
is not always the handsomest that win us the most,--while fair Meg
went a maying, black Meg got to church; and I give thee more
reasonable warning than thy timbrel-girls, when, in spite of thy cold
language, I bid thee take care of thyself against her attractions;
for, verily, my dear foster-brother, thou must mend and not mar thy
fortune, by thy love matters; and keep thy heart whole for some fair
one with marks in her gipsire, whom the earl may find out for thee.
Love and raw pease are two ill things in the porridge-pot.  But the
father!--I mind me now that I have heard of his name, through my
friend Master Caxton, the mercer, as one of prodigious skill in the
mathematics.  I should like much to see him, and, with thy leave (an'
he ask me), will tarry to supper.  But what are these?"--and Nicholas
took up one of the illuminated manuscripts which Sibyll had prepared
for sale.  "By the blood! this is couthly and marvellously blazoned."

The book was still in his hands when Sibyll entered.  Nicholas stared
at her, as he bowed with a stiff and ungraceful embarrassment, which
often at first did injustice to his bold, clear intellect, and his
perfect self-possession in matters of trade or importance.

"The first woman face," muttered Nicholas to himself, "I ever saw that
had the sense of a man's.  And, by the rood, what a smile!"

"Is this thy friend, Master Nevile?" said Sibyll, with a glance at the
goldsmith.  "He is welcome.  But is it fair and courteous, Master
Nelwyn--"

"Alwyn, an' it please you, fair mistress.  A humble name, but good
Saxon,--which, I take it, Nelwyn is not," interrupted Nicholas.

"Master Alwyn, forgive me; but can I forgive thee so readily for thy
espial of my handiwork, without license or leave?"

"Yours, comely mistress!" exclaimed Nicholas, opening his eyes, and
unheeding the gay rebuke--"why, this is a master-hand.  My Lord
Scales--nay, the Earl of Worcester himself--hath scarce a finer in all
his amassment."

"Well, I forgive thy fault for thy flattery; and I pray thee, in my
father's name, to stay and sup with thy friend."  Nicholas bowed low,
and still riveted his eyes on the book with such open admiration, that
Marmaduke thought it right to excuse his abstraction; but there was
something in that admiration which raised the spirits of Sibyll, which
gave her hope when hope was well-nigh gone; and she became so
vivacious, so debonair, so charming, in the flow of a gayety natural
to her, and very uncommon with English maidens, but which she took
partly, perhaps, from her French blood, and partly from the example of
girls and maidens of French extraction in Margaret's court, that
Nicholas Alwyn thought he had never seen any one so irresistible.
Madge had now served the evening meal, put in her head to announce it,
and Sibyll withdrew to summon her father.

"I trust he will not tarry too long, for I am sharp set!" muttered
Marmaduke.  "What thinkest thou of the damozel?" "Marry," answered
Alwyn, thoughtfully, "I pity and marvel at her.  There is eno' in her
to furnish forth twenty court beauties.  But what good can so much wit
and cunning do to an honest maiden?"

"That is exactly my own thought," said Marmaduke; and both the young
men sunk into silence, till Sibyll re-entered with her father.

To the surprise of Marmaduke, Nicholas Alwyn, whose less gallant
manner he was inclined to ridicule, soon contrived to rouse their host
from his lethargy, and to absorb all the notice of Sibyll; and the
surprise was increased, when he saw that his friend appeared not
unfamiliar with those abstruse and mystical sciences in which Adam was
engaged.

"What!" said Adam, "you know, then, my deft and worthy friend Master
Caxton!  He hath seen notable things abroad--"

"Which, he more than hints," said Nicholas, "will lower the value of
those manuscripts this fair damozel has so couthly enriched; and that
he hopes, ere long, to show the Englishers how to make fifty, a
hundred,--nay even five hundred exemplars of the choicest book, in a
much shorter time than a scribe would take in writing out two or three
score pages in a single copy."

"Verily," said Marmaduke, with a smile of compassion, "the poor man
must be somewhat demented; for I opine that the value of such
curiosities must be in their rarity; and who would care for a book, if
five hundred others had precisely the same?--allowing always, good
Nicholas, for thy friend's vaunting and over-crowing.  Five hundred!
By'r Lady, there would be scarcely five hundred fools in merry England
to waste good nobles on spoilt rags, specially while bows and mail are
so dear."

"Young gentleman," said Adam, rebukingly, "meseemeth that thou
wrongest our age and country, to the which, if we have but peace and
freedom, I trust the birth of great discoveries is ordained.  Certes,
Master Alwyn," he added, turning to the goldsmith, "this achievement
maybe readily performed, and hath existed, I heard an ingenious
Fleming say years ago, for many ages amongst a strange people [Query,
the Chinese?] known to the Venetians!  But dost thou think there is
much appetite among those who govern the State to lend encouragement
to such matters?"

"My master serves my Lord Hastings, the king's chamberlain, and my
lord has often been pleased to converse with me, so that I venture to
say, from my knowledge of his affection to all excellent craft and
lere, that whatever will tend to make men wiser will have his
countenance and favour with the king."

"That is it, that is it!" exclaimed Adam, rubbing his hands.  "My
invention shall not die!"

"And that invention--"

"Is one that will multiply exemplars of books without hands; works of
craft without 'prentice or journeyman; will move wagons and litters
without horses; will direct ships without sails; will--But, alack! it
is not yet complete, and, for want of means, it never may be."

Sibyll still kept her animated countenance fixed on Alwyn, whose
intelligence she had already detected, and was charmed with the
profound attention with which he listened.  But her eye glancing from
his sharp features to the handsome, honest face of the Nevile, the
contrast was so forcible, that she could not restrain her laughter,
though, the moment after, a keen pang shot through her heart.  The
worthy Marmaduke had been in the act of conveying his cup to his lips;
the cup stood arrested midway, his jaws dropped, his eyes opened to
their widest extent, an expression of the most evident consternation
and dismay spoke in every feature; and when he heard the merry laugh
of Sibyll, he pushed his stool from her as far as he well could, and
surveyed her with a look of mingled fear and pity.

"Alas! thou art sure my poor father is a wizard now?"

"Pardie!" answered the Nevile.  "Hath he not said so?  Hath he not
spoken of wagons without horses, ships without sails?  And is not all
this what every dissour and jongleur tells us of in his stories of
Merlin?  Gentle maiden," he added earnestly, drawing nearer to her,
and whispering in a voice of much simple pathos, "thou art young, and
I owe thee much.  Take care of thyself.  Such wonders and derring-do
are too solemn for laughter."

"Ah," answered Sibyll, rising, "I fear they are.  How can I expect the
people to be wiser than thou, or their hard natures kinder in their
judgment than thy kind heart?" Her low and melancholy voice went to
the heart thus appealed to.  Marmaduke also rose, and followed her
into the parlour, or withdrawing-closet, while Adam and the goldsmith
continued to converse (though Alwyn's eye followed the young hostess),
the former appearing perfectly unconscious of the secession of his
other listeners.  But Alwyn's attention occasionally wandered, and he
soon contrived to draw his host into the parlour.

When Nicholas rose, at last, to depart, he beckoned Sibyll aside.
"Fair mistress," said he, with some awkward hesitation, "forgive a
plain, blunt tongue; but ye of the better birth are not always above
aid, even from such as I am.  If you would sell these blazoned
manuscripts, I can not only obtain you a noble purchaser in my Lord
Scales, or in my Lord Hastings, an equally ripe scholar, but it may be
the means of my procuring a suitable patron for your father; and, in
these times, the scholar must creep under the knight's manteline."

"Master Alwyn," said Sibyll, suppressing her tears, "it was for my
father's sake that these labours were wrought.  We are poor and
friendless.  Take the manuscripts, and sell them as thou wilt, and God
and Saint Mary requite thee!"

"Your father is a great man," said Alwyn, after a pause.

"But were he to walk the streets, they would stone him," replied
Sibyll, with a quiet bitterness.

Here the Nevile, carefully shunning the magician, who, in the nervous
excitement produced by the conversation of a mind less uncongenial
than he had encountered for many years, seemed about to address him--
here, I say, the Nevile chimed in, "Hast thou no weapon but thy
bludgeon?  Dear foster-brother, I fear for thy safety."

"Nay, robbers rarely attack us mechanical folk; and I know my way
better than thou.  I shall find a boat near York House; so pleasant
night and quick cure to thee, honoured foster-brother.  I will send
the tailor and other craftsmen to-morrow."

"And at the same time," whispered Marmaduke, accompanying his friend
to the door, "send me a breviary, just to patter an ave or so.  This
gray-haired carle puts my heart in a tremble.  Moreover, buy me a
gittern--a brave one--for the damozel.  She is too proud to take
money, and, 'fore Heaven, I have small doubts the old wizard could
turn my hose into nobles an' he had a mind for such gear.  Wagons
without horses, ships without sails, quotha!"

As soon as Alwyn had departed, Madge appeared with the final
refreshment, called "the Wines," consisting of spiced hippocras and
confections, of the former of which the Nevile partook in solemn
silence.




CHAPTER VII.

THERE IS A ROD FOR THE BACK OF EVERY FOOL WHO WOULD BE WISER THAN HIS
GENERATION.

The next morning, when Marmaduke descended to the hall, Madge,
accosting him on the threshold, informed him that Mistress Sibyll was
unwell, and kept her chamber, and that Master Warner was never visible
much before noon.  He was, therefore, prayed to take his meal alone.
"Alone" was a word peculiarly unwelcome to Marmaduke Nevile, who was
an animal thoroughly social and gregarious.  He managed, therefore, to
detain the old servant, who, besides the liking a skilful leech
naturally takes to a thriving patient, had enough of her sex about her
to be pleased with a comely face and a frank, good-humoured voice.
Moreover, Marmaduke, wishing to satisfy his curiosity, turned the
conversation upon Warner and Sibyll, a theme upon which the old woman
was well disposed to be garrulous.  He soon learned the poverty of the
mansion and the sacrifice of the gittern; and his generosity and
compassion were busily engaged in devising some means to requite the
hospitality he had received, without wounding the pride of his host,
when the arrival of his mails, together with the visits of the tailor
and mercer, sent to him by Alwyn, diverted his thoughts into a new
channel.

Between the comparative merits of gowns and surcoats, broad-toed shoes
and pointed, some time was disposed of with much cheerfulness and
edification; but when his visitors had retired, the benevolent mind of
the young guest again recurred to the penury of his host. Placing his
marks before him on the table in the little withdrawing parlour, he
began counting them over, and putting aside the sum he meditated
devoting to Warner's relief.  "But how," he muttered, "how to get him
to take the gold.  I know, by myself, what a gentleman and a knight's
son must feel at the proffer of alms--pardie!  I would as lief Alwyn
had struck me as offered me his gipsire,--the ill-mannered,
affectionate fellow!  I must think--I must think--"

And while still thinking, the door softly opened, and Warner himself,
in a high state of abstraction and revery, stalked noiselessly into
the room, on his way to the garden, in which, when musing over some
new spring for his invention, he was wont to peripatize.  The sight of
the gold on the table struck full on the philosopher's eyes, and waked
him at once from his revery.  That gold--oh, what precious
instruments, what learned manuscripts it could purchase!  That gold,
it was the breath of life to his model!  He walked deliberately up to
the table, and laid his hand upon one of the little heaps.  Marmaduke
drew back his stool, and stared at him with open mouth.

"Young man, what wantest thou with all this gold?" said Adam, in a
petulant, reproachful tone.  "Put it up! put it up!  Never let the
poor see gold; it tempts them, sir,--it tempts them."  And so saying,
the student abruptly turned away his eyes, and moved towards the
garden.  Marmaduke rose and put himself in Adam's way.  "Honoured
sir," said the young man, "you say justly what want I with all this
gold?  The only gold a young man should covet is eno' to suffice for
the knight's spurs to his heels.  If, without offence, you would--that
is--ahem!--I mean,--Gramercy!  I shall never say it, but I believe my
father owed your father four marks, and he bade me repay them.  Here,
sir!"  He held out the glittering coins; the philosopher's hand closed
on them as the fish's maw closes on the bait.  Adam burst into a
laugh, that sounded strangely weird and unearthly upon Marmaduke's
startled ear.

"All this for me!" he exclaimed.  "For me!  No, no, no! for me, for
IT--I take it--I take it, sir!  I will pay it back with large usury.
Come to me this day year, when this world will be a new world, and
Adam Warner will be--ha! ha!  Kind Heaven, I thank thee!"  Suddenly
turning away, the philosopher strode through the hall, opened the
front door, and escaped into the street.

"By'r Lady," said Marmaduke, slowly recovering his surprise, "I need
not have been so much at a loss; the old gentleman takes to my gold as
kindly as if it were mother's milk.  'Fore Heaven, mine host's laugh
is a ghastly thing!"  So soliloquizing, he prudently put up the rest
of his money, and locked his mails.

As time went on, the young man became exceedingly weary of his own
company.  Sibyll still withheld her appearance; the gloom of the old
hall, the uncultivated sadness of the lonely garden, preyed upon his
spirits.  At length, impatient to get a view of the world without, he
mounted a high stool in the hall, and so contrived to enjoy the
prospect which the unglazed wicker lattice, deep set in the wall,
afforded.  But the scene without was little more animated than that
within,--all was so deserted in the neighbourhood,--the shops mean and
scattered, the thoroughfare almost desolate.  At last he heard a
shout, or rather hoot, at a distance; and, turning his attention
whence it proceeded, he beheld a figure emerge from an alley opposite
the casement, with a sack under one arm, and several books heaped
under the other.  At his heels followed a train of ragged boys,
shouting and hallooing, "The wizard! the wizard!--Ah!  Bah!  The old
devil's kin!"  At this cry the dull neighbourhood seemed suddenly to
burst forth into life.  From the casements and thresholds of every
house curious faces emerged, and many voices of men and women joined,
in deeper bass, with the shrill tenor of the choral urchins, "The
wizard! the wizard! out at daylight!"  The person thus stigmatized, as
he approached the house, turned his face with an expression of wistful
perplexity from side to side.  His lips moved convulsively, and his
face was very pale, but he spoke not.  And now, the children, seeing
him near his refuge, became more outrageous.  They placed themselves
menacingly before him, they pulled his robe, they even struck at him;
and one, bolder than the rest, jumped up, and plucked his beard.  At
this last insult, Adam Warner, for it was he, broke silence; but such
was the sweetness of his disposition, that it was rather with pity
than reproof in his voice, that he said,--

"Fie, little one!  I fear me thine own age will have small honour if
thou thus mockest mature years in me."

This gentleness only served to increase the audacity of his
persecutors, who now, momently augmenting, presented a formidable
obstacle to further progress.  Perceiving that he could not advance
without offensive measures on his own part, the poor scholar halted;
and looking at the crowd with mild dignity, he asked, "What means
this, my children?  How have I injured you?"

"The wizard! the wizard!" was the only answer he received.  Adam
shrugged his shoulders, and strode on with so sudden a step, that one
of the smaller children, a curly-headed laughing rogue, of about eight
years old, was thrown down at his feet, and the rest gave way.  But
the poor man, seeing one of his foes thus fallen, instead of pursuing
his victory, again paused, and forgetful of the precious burdens he
carried, let drop the sack and books, and took up the child in his
arms.  On seeing their companion in the embrace of the wizard, a
simultaneous cry of horror broke from the assemblage, "He is going to
curse poor Tim!"

"My child!  my boy!" shrieked a woman, from one of the casements; "let
go my child!"

On his part, the boy kicked and shrieked lustily, as Adam, bending his
noble face tenderly over him, said, "Thou art not hurt, child.  Poor
boy! thinkest thou I would harm thee?"  While he spoke a storm of
missiles--mud,  dirt,  sticks, bricks, stones--from the enemy, that
had now fallen back in the rear, burst upon him.  A stone struck him
on the shoulder.  Then his face changed; an angry gleam shot from his
deep, calm eyes; he put down the child, and, turning steadily to the
grown people at the windows, said, "Ye train your children ill;"
picked up his sack and books, sighed, as he saw the latter stained by
the mire, which he wiped with his long sleeve, and too proud to show
fear, slowly made for his door.  Fortunately Sibyll had heard the
clamour, and was ready to admit her father, and close the door upon
the rush which instantaneously followed his escape.  The baffled rout
set up a yell of wrath, and the boys were now joined by several foes
more formidable from the adjacent houses; assured in their own minds
that some terrible execration had been pronounced upon the limbs and
body of Master Tim, who still continued bellowing and howling,
probably from the excitement of finding himself raised to the dignity
of a martyr, the pious neighbours poured forth, with oaths and curses,
and such weapons as they could seize in haste, to storm the wizard's
fortress.

From his casement Marmaduke Nevile had espied all that had hitherto
passed, and though indignant at the brutality of the persecutors, he
had thought it by no means unnatural.  "If men, gentlemen born, will
read uncanny books, and resolve to be wizards, why, they must reap
what they sow," was the logical reflection that passed through the
mind of that ingenuous youth; but when he now perceived the arrival of
more important allies, when stones began to fly through the wicker
lattice, when threats of setting fire to the house and burning the
sorcerer who muttered spells over innocent little boys were heard,
seriously increasing in depth and loudness, Marmaduke felt his
chivalry called forth, and with some difficulty opening the rusty
wicket in the casement, he exclaimed: "Shame on you, my countrymen,
for thus disturbing in broad day a peaceful habitation!  Ye call mine
host a wizard.  Thus much say I on his behalf: I was robbed and
wounded a few nights since in your neighbourhood, and in this house
alone I found shelter and healing."

The unexpected sight of the fair young face of Marmaduke Nevile, and
the healthful sound of his clear ringing voice, produced a momentary
effect on the besiegers, when one of them, a sturdy baker, cried out,
"Heed him not,--he is a goblin.  Those devil-mongers can bake ye a
dozen such every moment, as deftly as I can draw loaves from the
oven!"

This speech turned the tide, and at that instant a savage-looking man,
the father of the aggrieved boy, followed by his wife, gesticulating
and weeping, ran from his house, waving a torch in his right hand, his
arm bare to the shoulder; and the cry of "Fire the door!" was
universal.

In fact, the danger now grew imminent: several of the party were
already piling straw and fagots against the threshold, and Marmaduke
began to think the only chance of life to his host and Sibyll was in
flight by some back way, when he beheld a man, clad somewhat in the
fashion of a country yeoman, a formidable knotted club in his hand,
pushing his way, with Herculean shoulders, through the crowd; and
stationing himself before the threshold and brandishing aloft his
formidable weapon, he exclaimed, "What!  In the devil's name, do you
mean to get yourselves all hanged for riot?  Do you think that King
Edward is as soft a man as King Henry was, and that he will suffer any
one but himself to set fire to people's houses in this way?  I dare
say you are all right enough in the main, but by the blood of Saint
Thomas, I will brain the first man who advances a step,--by way of
preserving the necks of the rest!"

"A Robin! a Robin!" cried several of the mob.  "It is our good friend
Robin.  Harken to Robin.  He is always right."

"Ay, that I am!" quoth the defender; "you know that well enough.  If I
had my way, the world should be turned upside down, but what the poor
folk should get nearer to the sun!  But what I say is this, never go
against law, while the law is too strong.  And it were a sad thing to
see fifty fine fellows trussed up for burning an old wizard.  So, be
off with you, and let us, at least all that can afford it, make for
Master Sancroft's hostelrie and talk soberly over our ale.  For
little, I trow, will ye work now your blood's up."

This address was received with a shout of approbation.  The father of
the injured child set his broad foot on his torch, the baker chucked
up his white cap, the ragged boys yelled out, "A Robin! a Robin!" and
in less than two minutes the place was as empty as it had been before
the appearance of the scholar.  Marmaduke, who, though so ignorant of
books, was acute and penetrating in all matters of action, could not
help admiring the address and dexterity of the club-bearer; and the
danger being now over, withdrew from the casement, in search of the
inmates of the house.  Ascending the stairs, he found on the landing-
place, near his room, and by the embrasure of a huge casement which
jutted from the wall, Adam and his daughter.  Adam was leaning against
the wall, with his arms folded, and Sibyll, hanging upon him, was
uttering the softest and most soothing words of comfort her tenderness
could suggest.

"My child," said the old man, shaking his head sadly, "I shall never
again have heart for these studies,--never!  A king's anger I could
brave, a priest's malice I could pity; but to find the very children,
the young race for whose sake I have made thee and myself paupers, to
find them thus--thus--"  He stopped, for his voice failed him, and the
tears rolled down his cheeks.

"Come and speak comfort to my father, Master Nevile," exclaimed
Sibyll; "come and tell him that whoever is above the herd, whether
knight or scholar, must learn to despise the hootings that follow
Merit.  Father, Father, they threw mud and stones at thy king as he
passed through the streets of London.  Thou art not the only one whom
this base world misjudges."

"Worthy mine host!" said Marmaduke, thus appealed to, "Algates, it
were not speaking truth to tell thee that I think a gentleman of birth
and quality should walk the thoroughfares with a bundle of books under
his arm; yet as for the raptril vulgar, the hildings and cullions who
hiss one day what they applaud the next, I hold it the duty of every
Christian and well-born man to regard them as the dirt on the
crossings.  Brave soldiers term it no disgrace to receive a blow from
a base hind.  An' it had been knights and gentles who had insulted
thee, thou mightest have cause for shame.  But a mob of lewd
rascallions and squalling infants--bah! verily, it is mere matter for
scorn and laughter."

These philosophical propositions and distinctions did not seem to have
their due effect upon Adam.  He smiled, however, gently upon his
guest, and with a blush over his pale face, said, "I am rightly
chastised, good young man; mean was I, methinks, and sordid to take
from thee thy good gold.  But thou knowest not what fever burns in the
brain of a man who feels that, had he wealth, his knowledge could do
great things,--such things!--I thought to repay thee well.  Now the
frenzy is gone, and I, who an hour ago esteemed myself a puissant
sage, sink in mine own conceit to a miserable blinded fool.  Child, I
am very weak; I will lay me down and rest."

So saying, the poor philosopher went his way to his chamber, leaning
on his daughter's arm.

In a few minutes Sibyll rejoined Marmaduke, who had returned to the
hall, and informed him that her father had lain down a while to
compose himself.

"It is a hard fate, sir," said the girl, with a faint smile,--"a hard
fate, to be banned and accursed by the world, only because one has
sought to be wiser than the world is."

"Douce maiden," returned the Nevile, "it is happy for thee that thy
sex forbids thee to follow thy father's footsteps, or I should say his
hard fate were thy fair warning."

Sibyll smiled faintly, and after a pause, said, with a deep blush,--

"You have been generous to my father; do not misjudge him.  He would
give his last groat to a starving beggar.  But when his passion of
scholar and inventor masters him, thou mightest think him worse than
miser.  It is an overnoble yearning that ofttimes makes him mean."

"Nay," answered Marmaduke, touched by the heavy sigh and swimming eyes
with which the last words were spoken; "I have heard Nick Alwyn's
uncle, who was a learned monk, declare that he could not constrain
himself to pray to be delivered from temptation, seeing that he might
thereby lose an occasion for filching some notable book!  For the
rest," he added, "you forget how much I owe to Master Warner's
hospitality."

He took her hand with a frank and brotherly gallantry as he spoke; but
the touch of that small, soft hand, freely and innocently resigned to
him, sent a thrill to his heart--and again the face of Sibyll seemed
to him wondrous fair.

There was a long silence, which Sibyll was the first to break.  She
turned the conversation once more upon Marmaduke's views in life.  It
had been easy for a deeper observer than he was to see that, under all
that young girl's simplicity and sweetness, there lurked something of
dangerous ambition.  She loved to recall the court-life her childhood
had known, though her youth had resigned it with apparent
cheerfulness.  Like many who are poor and fallen, Sibyll built herself
a sad consolation out of her pride; she never forgot that she was
well-born.  But Marmaduke, in what was ambition, saw but interest in
himself, and his heart beat more quickly as he bent his eyes upon that
downcast, thoughtful, earnest countenance.

After an hour thus passed, Sibyll left the guest, and remounted to her
father's chamber.  She found Adam pacing the narrow floor, and
muttering to himself.  He turned abruptly as she entered, and said,
"Come hither, child; I took four marks from that young man, for I
wanted books and instruments, and there are two left; see, take them
back to him."

"My father, he will not receive them.  Fear not, thou shalt repay him
some day."

"Take them, I say, and if the young man says thee nay, why, buy
thyself gauds and gear, or let us eat, and drink, and laugh.  What
else is life made for?  Ha, ha!  Laugh, child, laugh!"

There was something strangely pathetic in this outburst, this terrible
mirth, born of profound dejection.  Alas for this guileless, simple
creature, who had clutched at gold with a huckster's eagerness! who,
forgetting the wants of his own child, had employed it upon the
service of an Abstract Thought, and whom the scorn of his kind now
pierced through all the folds of his close-webbed philosophy and self
forgetful genius.  Awful is the duel between MAN and THE AGE in which
he lives!  For the gain of posterity, Adam Warner had martyrized
existence,--and the children pelted him as he passed the streets!
Sibyll burst into tears.

"No, my father, no," she sobbed, pushing back the money into his
hands.  "Let us both starve rather than you should despond.  God and
man will bring you justice yet."

"Ah," said the baffled enthusiast, "my whole mind is one sore now!  I
feel as if I could love man no more.  Go, and leave me.  Go, I say!"
and the poor student, usually so mild and gall-less, stamped his foot
in impotent rage.  Sibyll, weeping as if her heart would break, left
him.

Then Adam Warner again paced to and fro restlessly, and again muttered
to himself for several minutes.  At last he approached his Model,--the
model of a mighty and stupendous invention, the fruit of no chimerical
and visionary science; a great Promethean THING, that, once matured,
would divide the Old World from the New, enter into all operations of
Labour, animate all the future affairs, colour all the practical
doctrines of active men.  He paused before it, and addressed it as if
it heard and understood him: "My hair was dark, and my tread was firm,
when, one night, a THOUGHT passed into my soul,--a thought to make
Matter the gigantic slave of Mind.  Out of this thought, thou, not yet
born after five-and-twenty years of travail, wert conceived.  My
coffers were then full, and my name was honoured; and the rich
respected and the poor loved me.  Art thou a devil, that has tempted
me to ruin, or a god, that has lifted me above the earth?  I am old
before my time, my hair is blanched, my frame is bowed, my wealth is
gone, my name is sullied.  And all, dumb idol of Iron and the Element,
all for thee!  I had a wife whom I adored; she died,--I forgot her
loss in the hope of thy life.  I have a child still--God and our Lady
forgive me! she is less dear to me than thou hast been.  And now"--the
old man ceased abruptly, and folding his arms, looked at the deaf iron
sternly, as on a human foe.  By his side was a huge hammer, employed
in the toils of his forge; suddenly he seized and swung it aloft.  One
blow, and the labour of years was shattered into pieces!  One blow!--
But the heart failed him, and the hammer fell heavily to the ground.

"Ay!" he muttered, "true, true! if thou, who hast destroyed all else,
wert destroyed too, what were left me?  Is it a crime to murder Alan?
--a greater crime to murder Thought, which is the life of all men!
Come, I forgive thee!"

And all that day and all that night the Enthusiast laboured in his
chamber, and the next day the remembrance of the hooting, the pelting,
the mob, was gone,--clean gone from his breast. The Model began to
move, life hovered over its wheels; and the Martyr of Science had
forgotten the very world for which he, groaning and rejoicing, toiled!




CHAPTER VIII.

MASTER MARMADUKE NEVILE MAKES LOVE, AND IS FRIGHTENED.

For two or three days Marmaduke and Sibyll were necessarily brought
much together.  Such familiarity of intercourse was peculiarly rare in
that time, when, except perhaps in the dissolute court of Edward IV.,
the virgins of gentle birth mixed sparingly, and with great reserve,
amongst those of opposite sex.  Marmaduke, rapidly recovering from the
effect of his wounds, and without other resource than Sibyll's society
in the solitude of his confinement, was not proof against the
temptation which one so young and so sweetly winning brought to his
fancy or his senses.  The poor Sibyll--she was no faultless paragon,--
she was a rare and singular mixture of many opposite qualities in
heart and in intellect!  She was one moment infantine in simplicity
and gay playfulness; the next a shade passed over her bright face, and
she uttered some sentence of that bitter and chilling wisdom, which
the sense of persecution, the cruelty of the world, had already taught
her.  She was, indeed, at that age when the Child and the Woman are
struggling against each other.  Her character was not yet formed,--a
little happiness would have ripened it at once into the richest bloom
of goodness.  But sorrow, that ever sharpens the intellect, might only
serve to sour the heart.  Her mind was so innately chaste and pure,
that she knew not the nature of the admiration she excited; but the
admiration pleased her as it pleases some young child; she was vain
then, but it was an infant's vanity, not a woman's.  And thus, from
innocence itself, there was a fearlessness, a freedom, a something
endearing and familiar in her manner, which might have turned a wiser
head than Marmaduke Nevile's.  And this the more, because, while
liking her young guest, confiding in him, raised in her own esteem by
his gallantry, enjoying that intercourse of youth with youth so
unfamiliar to her, and surrendering herself the more to its charm from
the joy that animated her spirits, in seeing that her father had
forgotten his humiliation, and returned to his wonted labours,--she
yet knew not for the handsome Nevile one sentiment that approached to
love.  Her mind was so superior to his own, that she felt almost as if
older in years, and in their talk her rosy lips preached to him in
grave advice.

On the landing, by Marmaduke's chamber, there was a large oriel
casement jutting from the wall.  It was only glazed at the upper part,
and that most imperfectly, the lower part being closed at night or in
inclement weather with rude shutters.  The recess formed by this
comfortless casement answered, therefore, the purpose of a balcony; it
commanded a full view of the vicinity without, and gave to those who
might be passing by the power also of indulging their own curiosity by
a view of the interior.

Whenever he lost sight of Sibyll, and had grown weary of the peacock,
this spot was Marmaduke's favourite haunt.  It diverted him, poor
youth, to look out of the window upon the livelier world beyond.  The
place, it is true, was ordinarily deserted, but still the spires and
turrets of London were always discernible,--and they were something.

Accordingly, in this embrasure stood Marmaduke, when one morning,
Sibyll, coming from her father's room, joined him.

"And what, Master Nevile," said Sibyll, with a malicious yet charming
smile, "what claimed thy meditations?  Some misgiving as to the
trimming of thy tunic, or the length of thy shoon?"

"Nay," returned Marmaduke, gravely, "such thoughts, though not without
their importance in the mind of a gentleman, who would not that his
ignorance of court delicacies should commit him to the japes of his
equals, were not at that moment uppermost. I was thinking--"

"Of those mastiffs, quarrelling for a bone.  Avow it."

"By our Lady, I saw them not, but now I look, they are brave dogs.
Ha! seest thou how gallantly each fronts the other, the hair
bristling, the eyes fixed, the tail on end, the fangs glistening?  Now
the lesser one moves slowly round and round the bigger, who, mind you,
Mistress Sibyll, is no dullard, but moves, too, quick as thought, not
to be taken unawares.  Ha! that is a brave spring!  Heigh, dogs,
Neigh! a good sight!--it makes the blood warm!  The little one hath
him by the throat!"

"Alack," said Sibyll, turning away her eyes, "can you find pleasure in
seeing two poor brutes mangle each other for a bone?"

"By Saint Dunstan! doth it matter what may be the cause of quarrel, so
long as dog or man bears himself bravely, with a due sense of honour
and derring-do?  See! the big one is up again.  Ah, foul fall the
butcher, who drives them away!  Those seely mechanics know not the
joyaunce of fair fighting to gentle and to hound.  For a hound, mark
you, hath nothing mechanical in his nature.  He is a gentleman all
over,--brave against equal and stranger, forbearing to the small and
defenceless, true in poverty and need where he loveth, stern and
ruthless where he hateth, and despising thieves, hildings, and the
vulgar as much as e'er a gold spur in King Edward's court!  Oh,
certes, your best gentleman is the best hound!"

"You moralize to-day; and I know not how to gainsay you," returned
Sibyll, as the dogs, reluctantly beaten off, retired each from each,
snarling and reluctant, while a small black cur, that had hitherto sat
unobserved at the door of a small hostelrie, now coolly approached and
dragged off the bone of contention.  "But what sayst thou now?  See!
see! the patient mongrel carries off the bone from the gentleman-
hounds.  Is that the way of the world?"

"Pardie! it is a naught world, if so, and much changed from the time
of our fathers, the Normans.  But these Saxons are getting uppermost
again, and the yard measure, I fear me, is more potent in these
holiday times than the mace or the battle-axe."  The Nevile paused,
sighed, and changed the subject: "This house of thine must have been a
stately pile in its day.  I see but one side of the quadrangle is
left, though it be easy to trace where the other three have stood."

"And you may see their stones and their fittings in the butcher's and
baker's stalls over the way," replied Sibyll.

"Ay!" said the Nevile, "the parings of the gentry begin to be the
wealth of the varlets."

"Little ought we to pine at that," returned Sibyll, "if the varlets
were but gentle with our poverty; but they loathe the humbled fortunes
on which they rise, and while slaves to the rich, are tyrants to the
poor."

This was said so sadly, that the Nevile felt his eyes overflow; and
the humble dress of the girl, the melancholy ridges which evinced the
site of a noble house, now shrunk into a dismal ruin, the remembrance
of the pastime-ground, the insults of the crowd, and the broken
gittern, all conspired to move his compassion, and to give force to
yet more tender emotions.

"Ah," he said suddenly, and with a quick faint blush over his handsome
and manly countenance,--"ah, fair maid--fair Sibyll--God grant that I
may win something of gold and fortune amidst yonder towers, on which
the sun shines so cheerly.  God grant it, not for my sake,--not for
mine; but that I may have something besides a true heart and a
stainless name to lay at thy feet.  Oh,  Sibyll!  By this hand, by my
father's soul, I love thee, Sibyll!  Have I not said it before?  Well,
hear me now,--I love thee!"

As he spoke, he clasped her hand in his own, and she suffered it for
one instant to rest in his.  Then withdrawing it, and meeting his
enamoured eyes with a strange sadness in her own darker, deeper, and
more intelligent orbs, she said,--

"I thank thee,--thank thee for the honour of such kind thoughts; and
frankly I answer, as thou hast frankly spoken.  It was sweet to me,
who have known little in life not hard and bitter,--sweet to wish I
had a brother like thee, and, as a brother, I can love and pray for
thee.  But ask not more, Marmaduke.  I have aims in life which forbid
all other love."

"Art thou too aspiring for one who has his spurs to win?"

"Not so; but listen.  My mother's lessons and my own heart have made
my poor father the first end and object of all things on earth to me.
I live to protect him, work for him, honour him; and for the rest, I
have thoughts thou canst not know, an ambition thou canst not feel.
Nay," she added, with that delightful smile which chased away the
graver thought which had before saddened her aspect, "what would thy
sober friend Master Alwyn say to thee, if he heard thou hadst courted
the wizard's daughter?"

"By my faith," exclaimed Marmaduke, "thou art a very April,--smiles
and clouds in a breath!  If what thou despisest in me be my want of
bookcraft, and such like, by my halidame I will turn scholar for thy
sake; and--"

Here, as he had again taken Sibyll's hand, with the passionate ardour
of his bold nature, not to be lightly daunted by a maiden's first
"No," a sudden shrill, wild burst of laughter, accompanied with a
gusty fit of unmelodious music from the street below, made both maiden
and youth start, and turn their eyes; there, weaving their immodest
dance, tawdry in their tinsel attire, their naked arms glancing above
their heads, as they waved on high their instruments, went the
timbrel-girls.

"Ha, ha!" cried their leader, "see the gallant and the witch-leman!
The glamour has done its work!  Foul is fair! foul is fair! and the
devil will have his own!"

But these creatures, whose bold license the ancient chronicler
records, were rarely seen alone.  They haunted parties of pomp and
pleasure; they linked together the extremes of life,--the grotesque
Chorus that introduced the terrible truth of foul vice and abandoned
wretchedness in the midst of the world's holiday and pageant.  So now,
as they wheeled into the silent, squalid street, they heralded a
goodly company of dames and cavaliers on horseback, who were passing
through the neighbouring plains into the park of Marybone to enjoy the
sport of falconry.  The splendid dresses of this procession, and the
grave and measured dignity with which it swept along, contrasted
forcibly with the wild movements and disorderly mirth of the timbrel-
players.  These last darted round and round the riders, holding out
their instruments for largess, and retorting, with laugh and gibe, the
disdainful look or sharp rebuke with which their salutations were
mostly received.

Suddenly, as the company, two by two, paced up the street, Sibyll
uttered a faint exclamation, and strove to snatch her hand from the
Nevile's grasp.  Her eye rested upon one of the horsemen, who rode
last, and who seemed in earnest conversation with a dame, who, though
scarcely in her first youth, excelled all her fair companions in
beauty of face and grace of horsemanship, as well as in the costly
equipments of the white barb that caracoled beneath her easy hand.  At
the same moment the horseman looked up and gazed steadily at Sibyll,
whose countenance grew pale, and flushed, in a breath.  His eye then
glanced rapidly at Marmaduke; a half-smile passed his pale, firm lips;
he slightly raised the plumed cap from his brow, inclined gravely to
Sibyll, and, turning once more to his companion, appeared to answer
some question she addressed to him as to the object of his salutation,
for her look, which was proud, keen, and lofty, was raised to Sibyll,
and then dropped somewhat disdainfully, as she listened to the words
addressed her by the cavalier.

The lynx eyes of the tymbesteres had seen the recognition; and their
leader, laying her bold hand on the embossed bridle of the horseman,
exclaimed, in a voice shrill and loud enough to be heard in the
balcony above, "Largess! noble lord, largess! for the sake of the lady
thou lovest best!"

The fair equestrian turned away her head at these words; the nobleman
watched her a moment, and dropped some coins into the timbrel.

"Ha, ha!" cried the tymbestere, pointing her long arm to Sibyll, and
springing towards the balcony,--

                "The cushat would mate
                 Above her state,
     And she flutters her wings round the falcon's beak;
                 But death to the dove
                 Is the falcon's love!
     Oh, sharp is the kiss of the falcon's beak!"

Before this rude song was ended, Sibyll had vanished from the place;
the cavalcade had disappeared.  The timbrel-players, without deigning
to notice Marmaduke, darted elsewhere to ply their discordant trade,
and the Nevile, crossing himself devoutly, muttered, "Jesu defend us!
Those she Will-o'-the-wisps are eno' to scare all the blood out of
one's body.  What--a murrain on them!--do they portend, flitting round
and round, and skirting off, as if the devil's broomstick was behind
them!  By the Mass! they have frighted away the damozel, and I am not
sorry for it.  They have left me small heart for the part of Sir
Launval."

His meditations were broken off by the sudden sight of Nicholas Alwyn,
mounted on a small palfrey, and followed by a sturdy groom on
horseback, leading a steed handsomely caparisoned.  In another moment,
Marmaduke had descended, opened the door, and drawn Alwyn into the
hall.




CHAPTER IX.

MASTER MARMADUKE NEVILE LEAVES THE WIZARD'S HOUSE FOR THE GREAT WORLD.

"Right glad am I," said Nicholas, "to see you so stout and hearty, for
I am the bearer of good news.  Though I have been away, I have not
forgotten you; and it so chanced that I went yesterday to attend my
Lord of Warwick with some nowches [buckles and other ornaments] and
knackeries, that he takes out as gifts and exemplars of English work.
They were indifferently well wrought, specially a chevesail, of which
the--"

"Spare me the fashion of thy mechanicals, and come to the point,"
interrupted Marmaduke, impatiently.

"Pardon me, Master Nevile.  I interrupt thee not when thou talkest of
bassinets and hauberks,--every cobbler to his last. But, as thou
sayest, to the point: the stout earl, while scanning my workmanship,
for in much the chevesail was mine, was pleased to speak graciously of
my skill with the bow, of which he had heard; and he then turned to
thyself, of whom my Lord Montagu had already made disparaging mention.
When I told the earl somewhat more about thy qualities and disposings,
and when I spoke of thy desire to serve him, and the letter of which
thou art the bearer, his black brows smoothed mighty graciously, and
he bade me tell thee to come to him this afternoon, and he would judge
of thee with his own eyes and ears.  Wherefore I have ordered the
craftsman to have all thy gauds and gear ready at thine hostelrie, and
I have engaged thee henchmen and horses for thy fitting appearance.
Be quick: time and the great wait for no man.  So take whatever thou
needest for present want from thy mails, and I will send a porter for
the rest ere sunset."

"But the gittern for the damozel?"

"I have provided that for thee, as is meet."  And Nicholas, stepping
back, eased the groom of a case which contained a gittern, whose
workmanship and ornaments delighted the Nevile.

"It is of my lord the young Duke of Gloucester's own musical-vendor;
and the duke, though a lad yet, is a notable judge of all appertaining
to the gentle craft.  [For Richard III.'s love of music, and patronage
of musicians and minstrels, see the discriminating character of that
prince in Sharon Turner's "History of England," vol. IV. p. 66.]  So
despatch, and away!"

Marmaduke retired to his chamber, and Nicholas, after a moment spent
in silent thought, searched the room for the hand-bell, which then
made the mode of communication between the master and domestics.  Not
finding this necessary luxury, he contrived at last to make Madge hear
his voice from her subterranean retreat; and on her arrival, sent her
in quest of Sibyll.

The answer he received was, that Mistress Sibyll was ill, and unable
to see him.  Alwyn looked disconcerted at this intelligence, but,
drawing from his girdle a small gipsire, richly broidered, he prayed
Madge to deliver it to her young mistress, and inform her that it was
the fruit of the commission with which she had honoured him.

"It is passing strange," said he, pacing the hall alone,--"passing
strange, that the poor child should have taken such hold on me.  After
all, she would be a bad wife for a plain man like me.  Tush! that is
the trader's thought all over.  Have I brought no fresher feeling out
of my fair village-green?  Would it not be sweet to work for her, and
rise in life, with her by my side?  And these girls of the city, so
prim and so brainless!--as well marry a painted puppet.  Sibyll!  Am I
dement?  Stark wode?  What have I to do with girls and marriage?
Humph!  I marvel what Marmaduke still thinks of her,--and she of him."

While Alwyn thus soliloquized, the Nevile having hastily arranged his
dress, and laden himself with the moneys his mails contained, summoned
old Madge to receive his largess, and to conduct him to Warner's
chamber, in order to proffer his farewell.

With somewhat of a timid step he followed the old woman (who kept
muttering thanks and benedicites as she eyed the coin in her palm) up
the ragged stairs, and for the first time knocked at the door of the
student's sanctuary.  No answer came.  "Eh, sir! you must enter," said
Madge; "an' you fired a bombard under his ear he would not heed you."
So, suiting the action to the word, she threw open the door, and
closed it behind him, as Marmaduke entered.

The room was filled with smoke, through which mirky atmosphere the
clear red light of the burning charcoal peered out steadily like a
Cyclop's eye.  A small, but heaving, regular, labouring, continuous
sound, as of a fairy hammer, smote the young man's ear.  But as his
gaze, accustoming itself to the atmosphere, searched around, he could
not perceive what was its cause.  Adam Warner was standing in the
middle of the room, his arms folded, and contemplating something at a
little distance, which Marmaduke could not accurately distinguish.
The youth took courage, and approached.  "Honoured mine host," said
he, "I thank thee for hospitality and kindness, I crave pardon for
disturbing thee in thy incanta--ehem!--thy--thy studies, and I come to
bid thee farewell."

Adam turned round with a puzzled, absent air, as if scarcely
recognizing his guest; at length, as his recollection slowly came back
to him, he smiled graciously, and said: "Good youth, thou art richly
welcome to what little it was in my power to do for thee.
Peradventure a time may come when they who seek the roof of Adam
Warner may find less homely cheer, a less rugged habitation,--for look
you!" he exclaimed suddenly, with a burst of irrepressible enthusiasm
--and laying his hand on Nevile's arm, as, through all the smoke and
grime that obscured his face, flashed the ardent soul of the
triumphant Inventor,--"look you! since you have been in this house,
one of my great objects is well-nigh matured,--achieved.  Come
hither," and he dragged the wondering Marmaduke to his model, or
Eureka, as Adam had fondly named his contrivance.  The Nevile then
perceived that it was from the interior of this machine that the sound
which had startled him arose; to his eye the THING was uncouth and
hideous; from the jaws of an iron serpent, that, wreathing round it,
rose on high with erect crest, gushed a rapid volume of black smoke,
and a damp spray fell around.  A column of iron in the centre kept in
perpetual and regular motion, rising and sinking successively, as the
whole mechanism within seemed alive with noise and action.

"The Syracusan asked an inch of earth, beyond the earth, to move the
earth," said Adam; "I stand in the world, and lo! with this engine the
world shall one day be moved."

"Holy Mother!" faltered Marmaduke; "I pray thee, dread sir, to ponder
well ere thou attemptest any such sports with the habitation in which
every woman's son is so concerned.  Bethink thee, that if in moving
the world thou shouldst make any mistake, it would--"

"Now stand there and attend," interrupted Adam, who had not heard one
word of this judicious exhortation.

"Pardon me, terrible sir!" exclaimed Marmaduke, in great trepidation,
and retreating rapidly to the door; "but I have heard that the fiends
are mighty malignant to all lookers-on not initiated."

While he spoke, fast gushed the smoke, heavily heaved the fairy
hammers, up and down, down and up, sank or rose the column, with its
sullen sound.  The young man's heart sank to the soles of his feet.

"Indeed and in truth," he stammered out, "I am but a dolt in these
matters; I wish thee all success compatible with the weal of a
Christian, and bid thee, in sad humility, good day:" and he added, in
a whisper--"the Lord's forgiveness!  Amen!"

Marmaduke then fairly rushed through the open door, and hurried out of
the chamber as fast as possible.

He breathed more freely as he descended the stairs.  "Before I would
call that gray carle my father, or his child my wife, may I feel all
the hammers of the elves and sprites he keeps tortured within that
ugly little prison-house playing a death's march on my body!  Holy
Saint Dunstan, the timbrel-girls came in time!  They say these wizards
always have fair daughters, and their love can be no blessing!"

As he thus muttered, the door of Sibyll's chamber opened, and she
stood before him at the threshold.  Her countenance was very pale, and
bore evidence of weeping.  There was a silence on both sides, which
the girl was the first to break.

"So, Madge tells me thou art about to leave us?"

"Yes, gentle maiden!  I--I--that is, my Lord of Warwick has summoned
me.  I wish and pray for all blessings on thee! and--and--if ever it
be mine to serve or aid thee, it will be--that is--verily, my tongue
falters, but my heart--that is--fare thee well, maiden!  Would thou
hadst a less wise father; and so may the saints (Saint Anthony
especially, whom the Evil One was parlous afraid of) guard and keep
thee!"

With this strange and incoherent address, Marmaduke left the maiden
standing by the threshold of her miserable chamber.  Hurrying into the
hall, he summoned Alwyn from his meditations, and, giving the gittern
to Madge, with an injunction to render it to her mistress, with his
greeting and service, he vaulted lightly on his steed; the steady and
more sober Alwyn mounted his palfrey with slow care and due caution.
As the air of spring waved the fair locks of the young cavalier, as
the good horse caracoled under his lithesome weight, his natural
temper of mind, hardy, healthful, joyous, and world-awake, returned to
him.  The image of Sibyll and her strange father fled from his
thoughts like sickly dreams.





BOOK II.

THE KING'S COURT.




CHAPTER I.

EARL WARWICK THE KING-MAKER.

The young men entered the Strand, which, thanks to the profits of a
toll-bar, was a passable road for equestrians, studded towards the
river, as we have before observed, with stately and half-fortified
mansions; while on the opposite side, here and there, were straggling
houses of a humbler kind,--the mediaeval villas of merchant and trader
(for, from the earliest period since the Conquest, the Londoners had
delight in such retreats), surrounded with blossoming orchards, [On
all sides, without the suburbs, are the citizens' gardens and
orchards, etc.--FITZSTEPHEN.] and adorned in front with the fleur-de-
lis, emblem of the vain victories of renowned Agincourt.  But by far
the greater portion of the road northward stretched, unbuilt upon,
towards a fair chain of fields and meadows, refreshed by many brooks,
"turning water-mills with a pleasant noise."  High rose, on the
thoroughfare, the famous Cross, at which "the Judges Itinerant whilome
sate, without London."  [Stowe.]  There, hallowed and solitary, stood
the inn for the penitent pilgrims, who sought "the murmuring runnels"
of St. Clement's healing well; for in this neighbourhood, even from
the age of the Roman, springs of crystal wave and salubrious virtue
received the homage of credulous disease.  Through the gloomy arches
of the Temple Gate and Lud, our horsemen wound their way, and finally
arrived in safety at Marmaduke's hostelrie in the East Chepe.  Here
Marmaduke found the decorators of his comely person already assembled.
The simpler yet more manly fashions he had taken from the provinces
were now exchanged for an attire worthy the kinsman of the great
minister of a court unparalleled, since the reign of William the Red
King, for extravagant gorgeousness of dress.  His corset was of the
finest cloth, sown with seed pearls; above it the lawn shirt, worn
without collar, partially appeared, fringed with gold; over this was
loosely hung a super-tunic of crimson sarcenet, slashed and pounced
with a profusion of fringes.  His velvet cap, turned up at the sides,
extended in a point far over the forehead.  His hose--under which
appellation is to be understood what serves us of the modern day both
for stockings and pantaloons--were of white cloth; and his shoes, very
narrow, were curiously carved into chequer work at the instep, and
tied with bobbins of gold thread, turning up like skates at the
extremity, three inches in length.  His dagger was suspended by a
slight silver-gilt chain, and his girdle contained a large gipsire, or
pouch, of embossed leather, richly gilt.

And this dress, marvellous as it seemed to the Nevile, the tailor
gravely assured him was far under the mark of the highest fashion, and
that an' the noble youth had been a knight, the shoes would have
stretched at least three inches farther over the natural length of the
feet, the placard have shone with jewels, and the tunic luxuriated in
flowers of damacene.  Even as it was, however, Marmaduke felt a
natural diffidence of his habiliments, which cost him a round third of
his whole capital; and no bride ever unveiled herself with more
shamefaced bashfulness than did Marmaduke Nevile experience when he
remounted his horse, and, taking leave of his foster-brother, bent his
way to Warwick Lane, where the earl lodged.

The narrow streets were, however, crowded with equestrians whose dress
eclipsed his own, some bending their way to the Tower, some to the
palaces of the Flete.  Carriages there were none, and only twice he
encountered the huge litters, in which some aged prelate or some high-
born dame veiled greatness from the day.  But the frequent vistas to
the river gave glimpses of the gay boats and barges that crowded the
Thames, which was then the principal thoroughfare for every class, but
more especially the noble.  The ways were fortunately dry and clean
for London, though occasionally deep holes and furrows in the road
menaced perils to the unwary horseman.  The streets themselves might
well disappoint in splendour the stranger's eye; for although, viewed
at a distance, ancient London was incalculably more picturesque and
stately than the modern, yet when fairly in its tortuous labyrinths,
it seemed to those who had improved the taste by travel the meanest
and the mirkiest capital of Christendom.  The streets were
marvellously narrow, the upper stories, chiefly of wood, projecting
far over the lower, which were formed of mud and plaster.  The shops
were pitiful booths, and the 'prentices standing at the entrance bare-
headed and cap in hand, and lining the passages, as the old French
writer avers, comme idoles, [Perlin] kept up an eternal din with their
clamorous invitations, often varied by pert witticisms on some
churlish passenger, or loud vituperations of each other.  The whole
ancient family of the London criers were in full bay.  Scarcely had
Marmaduke's ears recovered the shock of "Hot peascods,--all hot!" than
they were saluted with "Mackerel!" "Sheep's feet! hot sheep's feet!"
At the smaller taverns stood the inviting vociferaters of "Cock-pie,"
"Ribs of beef,--hot beef!" while, blended with these multi-toned
discords, whined the vielle, or primitive hurdy-gurdy, screamed the
pipe, twanged the harp, from every quarter where the thirsty paused to
drink, or the idler stood to gape.  [See Lydgate: London Lyckpenny.]

Through this Babel Marmaduke at last slowly wound his way, and arrived
before the mighty mansion in which the chief baron of England held his
state.

As he dismounted and resigned his steed to the servitor hired for him
by Alwyn, Marmaduke paused a moment, struck by the disparity, common
as it was to eyes more accustomed to the metropolis, between the
stately edifice and the sordid neighbourhood.  He had not noticed this
so much when he had repaired to the earl's house on his first arrival
in London, for his thoughts then had been too much bewildered by the
general bustle and novelty of the scene; but now it seemed to him that
he better comprehended the homage accorded to a great noble in
surveying, at a glance, the immeasurable eminence to which he was
elevated above his fellow-men by wealth and rank.

Far on either side of the wings of the earl's abode stretched, in
numerous deformity, sheds rather than houses, of broken plaster and
crazy timbers.  But here and there were open places of public
reception, crowded with the lower followers of the puissant chief; and
the eye rested on many idle groups of sturdy swash-bucklers, some
half-clad in armour, some in rude jerkins of leather, before the doors
of these resorts,--as others, like bees about a hive, swarmed in and
out with a perpetual hum.

The exterior of Warwick House was of a gray but dingy stone, and
presented a half-fortified and formidable appearance.  The windows, or
rather loop-holes, towards the street were few, and strongly barred.
The black and massive arch of the gateway yawned between two huge
square towers; and from a yet higher but slender tower on the inner
side, the flag gave the "White Bear and Ragged Staff" to the smoky
air.  Still, under the portal as he entered, hung the grate of the
portcullis, and the square court which he saw before him swarmed with
the more immediate retainers of the earl, in scarlet jackets, wrought
with their chieftain's cognizance.  A man of gigantic girth and
stature, who officiated as porter, leaning against the wall under the
arch, now emerged from the shadow, and with sufficient civility
demanded the young visitor's name and business.  On hearing the
former, he bowed low as he doffed his hat, and conducted Marmaduke
through the first quadrangle.  The two sides to the right and left
were devoted to the offices and rooms of retainers, of whom no less
than six hundred, not to speak of the domestic and more orderly
retinue, attested the state of the Last of the English Barons on his
visits to the capital.  Far from being then, as now, the object of the
great to thrust all that belongs to the service of the house out of
sight, it was their pride to strike awe into the visitor by the extent
of accommodation afforded to their followers: some seated on benches
of stone ranged along the walls; some grouped in the centre of the
court; some lying at length upon the two oblong patches of what had
been turf, till worn away by frequent feet,--this domestic army filled
the young Nevile with an admiration far greater than the gay satins of
the knights and nobles who had gathered round the lord of Montagu and
Northumberland at the pastime-ground.

This assemblage, however, were evidently under a rude discipline of
their own.  They were neither noisy nor drunk.  They made way with
surly obeisance as the cavalier passed, and closing on his track like
some horde of wild cattle, gazed after him with earnest silence, and
then turned once more to their indolent whispers with each other.

And now Nevile entered the last side of the quadrangle.  The huge
hall, divided from the passage by a screen of stone fretwork, so fine
as to attest the hand of some architect in the reign of Henry III.,
stretched to his right; and so vast, in truth, it was, that though
more than fifty persons were variously engaged therein, their number
was lost in the immense space.  Of these, at one end of the longer and
lower table beneath the dais, some squires of good dress and mien were
engaged at chess or dice; others were conferring in the gloomy
embrasures of the casements; some walking to and fro, others gathered
round the shovel-board.  At the entrance of this hall the porter left
Marmaduke, after exchanging a whisper with a gentleman whose dress
eclipsed the Nevile's in splendour; and this latter personage, who,
though of high birth, did not disdain to perform the office of
chamberlain, or usher, to the king-like earl, advanced to Marmaduke
with a smile, and said,--

"My lord expects you, sir, and has appointed this time to receive you,
that you may not be held back from his presence by the crowds that
crave audience in the forenoon.  Please to follow me!"  This said, the
gentleman slowly preceded the visitor, now and then stopping to
exchange a friendly word with the various parties he passed in his
progress; for the urbanity which Warwick possessed himself, his policy
inculcated as a duty on all who served him.  A small door at the other
extremity of the hall admitted into an anteroom, in which some half
score pages, the sons of knights and barons, were gathered round an
old warrior, placed at their head as a sort of tutor, to instruct them
in all knightly accomplishments; and beckoning forth one of these
youths from the ring, the earl's chamberlain said, with a profound
reverence, "Will you be pleased, my young lord, to conduct your
cousin, Master Marmaduke Nevile, to the earl's presence?"  The young
gentleman eyed Marmaduke with a supercilious glance.

"Marry!" said he, pertly, "if a man born in the North were to feed all
his cousins, he would soon have a tail as long as my uncle, the stout
earl's.  Come, sir cousin, this way."  And without tarrying even to
give Nevile information of the name and quality of his new-found
relation,--who was no less than Lord Montagu's son, the sole male heir
to the honours of that mighty family, though now learning the
apprenticeship of chivalry amongst his uncle's pages,--the boy passed
before Marmaduke with a saunter, that, had they been in plain
Westmoreland, might have cost him a cuff from the stout hand of the
indignant elder cousin.  He raised the tapestry at one end of the
room, and ascending a short flight of broad stairs, knocked gently on
the panels of an arched door sunk deep in the walls.

"Enter!" said a clear, loud voice, and the next moment Marmaduke was
in the presence of the King-maker.

He heard his guide pronounce his name, and saw him smile maliciously
at the momentary embarrassment the young man displayed, as the boy
passed by Marmaduke, and vanished.  The Earl of Warwick was seated
near a door that opened upon an inner court, or rather garden, which
gave communication to the river.  The chamber was painted in the style
of Henry III., with huge figures representing the battle of Hastings,
or rather, for there were many separate pieces, the conquest of Saxon
England.  Over each head, to enlighten the ignorant, the artist had
taken the precaution to insert a label, which told the name and the
subject.  The ceiling was groined, vaulted, and emblazoned with the
richest gilding and colours.  The chimneypiece (a modern ornament)
rose to the roof, and represented in bold reliefs, gilt and decorated,
the signing of Magna Charta.  The floor was strewed thick with dried
rushes and odorous herbs; the furniture was scanty, but rich.  The
low-backed chairs, of which there were but four, carved in ebony, had
cushions of velvet with fringes of massive gold; a small cupboard, or
beaufet, covered with carpetz de cuir (carpets of gilt and painted
leather), of great price, held various quaint and curious ornaments of
plate inwrought with precious stones; and beside this--a singular
contrast--on a plain Gothic table lay the helmet, the gauntlets, and
the battle-axe of the master.  Warwick himself, seated before a large,
cumbrous desk, was writing,--but slowly and with pain,--and he lifted
his finger as the Nevile approached, in token of his wish to conclude
a task probably little congenial to his tastes.  But Marmaduke was
grateful for the moments afforded him to recover his self-possession,
and to examine his kinsman.

The earl was in the lusty vigour of his age.  His hair, of the deepest
black, was worn short, as if in disdain of the effeminate fashions of
the day; and fretted bare from the temples by the constant and early
friction of his helmet, gave to a forehead naturally lofty yet more
majestic appearance of expanse and height.  His complexion, though
dark and sunburned, glowed with rich health.  The beard was closely
shaven, and left in all its remarkable beauty the contour of the oval
face and strong jaw,--strong as if clasped in iron.  The features were
marked and aquiline, as was common to those of Norman blood.  The form
spare, but of prodigious width and depth of chest, the more apparent
from the fashion of the short surcoat, which was thrown back, and left
in broad expanse a placard, not of holiday velvet and satins, but of
steel polished as a mirror, and inlaid with gold.  And now as,
concluding his task, the earl rose and motioned Marmaduke to a stool
by his side, his great stature, which, from the length of his limbs,
was not so observable when he sat, actually startled his guest. Tall
as Marmaduke was himself, the earl towered [The faded portrait of
Richard Nevile, Earl of Warwick, in the Rous Roll, preserved at the
Herald's College, does justice, at least, to the height and majesty of
his stature.  The portrait of Edward IV. is the only one in that long
series which at all rivals the stately proportions of the King-maker.]
above him,--with his high, majestic, smooth, unwrinkled forehead,--
like some Paladin of the rhyme of poet or romancer; and, perhaps, not
only in this masculine advantage, but in the rare and harmonious
combination of colossal strength with graceful lightness, a more
splendid union of all the outward qualities we are inclined to give to
the heroes of old never dazzled the eye or impressed the fancy.  But
even this effect of mere person was subordinate to that which this
eminent nobleman created--upon his inferiors, at least--by a manner so
void of all arrogance, yet of all condescension, so simple, open,
cordial, and hero-like, that Marmaduke Nevile, peculiarly alive to
external impressions, and subdued and fascinated by the earl's first
word, and that word was "Welcome!" dropped on his knee, and kissing
the hand extended to him, said, "Noble kinsman, in thy service and for
thy sake let me live and die!"  Had the young man been prepared by the
subtlest master of courtcraft for this interview, so important to his
fortunes, he could not have advanced a hundredth part so far with the
great earl as he did by that sudden, frank burst of genuine emotion;
for Warwick was extremely sensitive to the admiration he excited,--
vain or proud of it, it matters not which; grateful as a child for
love, and inexorable as a woman for slight or insult: in rude ages,
one sex has often the qualities of the other.

"Thou hast thy father's warm heart and hasty thought, Marmaduke," said
Warwick, raising him; "and now he is gone where, we trust, brave men,
shrived of their sins, look down upon us, who should be thy friend but
Richard Nevile?  So--so--yes, let me look at thee.  Ha! stout Guy's
honest face, every line of it: but to the girls, perhaps, comelier,
for wanting a scar or two.  Never blush,--thou shalt win the scars
yet.  So thou hast a letter from thy father?"

"It is here, noble lord."

"And why," said the earl, cutting the silk with his dagger--"why hast
thou so long hung back from presenting it?  But I need not ask thee.
These uncivil times have made kith and kin doubt worse of each other
than thy delay did of me.  Sir Guy's mark, sure eno'!  Brave old man!
I loved him the better for that, like me, the sword was more meet than
the pen for his bold hand."  Here Warwick scanned, with some slowness,
the lines dictated by the dead to the priest; and when he had done, he
laid the letter respectfully on his desk, and bowing his head over it,
muttered to himself,--it might be an Ave for the deceased.  "Well," he
said, reseating himself, and again motioning Marmaduke to follow his
example, "thy father was, in sooth, to blame for the side he took in
the Wars.  What son of the Norman could bow knee or vail plume to that
shadow of a king, Henry of Windsor?  And for his bloody wife--she knew
no more of an Englishman's pith and pride than I know of the rhymes
and roundels of old Rene, her father.  Guy Nevile--good Guy--many a
day in my boyhood did he teach me how to bear my lance at the crest,
and direct my sword at the mail joints.  He was cunning at fence--thy
worshipful father--but I was ever a bad scholar; and my dull arm, to
this day, hopes more from its strength than its craft."

"I have heard it said, noble earl, that the stoutest hand can scarcely
lift your battle-axe."

"Fables! romaunt!"  answered the earl, smiling; "there it lies,--go
and lift it."

Marmaduke went to the table, and, though with some difficulty, raised
and swung this formidable weapon.

"By my halidame, well swung, cousin mine!  Its use depends not on the
strength, but the practice.  Why, look you now, there is the boy
Richard of Gloucester, who comes not up to thy shoulder, and by dint
of custom each day can wield mace or axe with as much ease as a jester
doth his lathesword.  Ah, trust me, Marmaduke, the York House is a
princely one; and if we must have a king, we barons, by stout Saint
George, let no meaner race ever furnish our lieges.  But to thyself,
Marmaduke--what are thy views and thy wishes?"

"To be one of thy following, noble Warwick."

"I thank and accept thee, young Nevile; but thou hast heard that I am
about to leave England, and in the mean time thy youth would run
danger without a guide."  The earl paused a moment, and resumed: "My
brother of Montagu showed thee cold countenance; but a word from me
will win thee his grace and favour.  What sayest thou, wilt thou be
one of his gentlemen?  If so, I will tell thee the qualities a man
must have,--a discreet tongue, a quick eye, the last fashion in hood
and shoe-bobbins, a perfect seat on thy horse, a light touch for the
gittern, a voice for a love-song, and--"

"I have none of these save the horsemanship, gracious my lord; and if
thou wilt not receive me thyself, I will not burden my Lord of Montagu
and Northumberland."

"Hot and quick!  No!  John of Montagu would not suit thee, nor thou
him.  But how to provide for thee till my return I know not."

"Dare I not hope, then, to make one of your embassage, noble earl?"

Warwick bent his brows, and looked at him in surprise.  "Of our
embassage!  Why, thou art haughty, indeed!  Nay, and so a soldier's
son and a Nevile should be!  I blame thee not; but I could not make
thee one of my train, without creating a hundred enemies--to me (but
that's nothing) and to thee, which were much.  Knowest thou not that
there is scarce a gentleman of my train below the state of a peer's
son, and that I have made, by refusals, malcontents eno', as it is?--
Yet, bold! there is my learned brother, the Archbishop of York.
Knowest thou Latin and the schools?"

"'Fore Heaven, my lord," said the Nevile, bluntly, "I see already I
had best go back to green Westmoreland, for I am as unfit for his
grace the archbishop as I am for my Lord Montagu."

"Well, then," said the earl, dryly, "since thou hast not yet station
enough for my train, nor glosing for Northumberland, nor wit and lere
for the archbishop, I suppose, my poor youth, I must e'en make you
only a gentleman about the king!  It is not a post so sure of quick
rising and full gipsires as one about myself or my brethren, but it
will be less envied, and is good for thy first essay.  How goes the
clock?  Oh, here is Nick Alwyn's new horologe.  He tells me that the
English will soon rival the Dutch in these baubles.  [Clockwork
appears to have been introduced into England in the reign of Edward
III., when three Dutch horologers were invited over from Delft.  They
must soon have passed into common use, for Chaucer thus familiarly
speaks of them:--"Full sickerer was his crowing in his loge
                  Than is a clock or any abbey orloge."]
The more the pity!--our red-faced yeomen, alas, are fast sinking into
lank-jawed mechanics!  We shall find the king in his garden within the
next half-hour.  Thou shalt attend me."

Marmaduke expressed, with more feeling than eloquence, the thanks he
owed for an offer that, he was about to say, exceeded his hopes; but
he had already, since his departure from Westmoreland, acquired
sufficient wit to think twice of his words.  And so eagerly, at that
time, did the youth of the nobility contend for the honour of posts
about the person of Warwick, and even of his brothers, and so strong
was the belief that the earl's power to make or to mar fortune was
all-paramount in England, that even a place in the king's household
was considered an inferior appointment to that which made Warwick the
immediate patron and protector.  This was more especially the case
amongst the more haughty and ancient gentry since the favour shown by
Edward to the relations of his wife, and his own indifference to the
rank and birth of his associates.  Warwick had therefore spoken with
truth when he expressed a comparative pity for the youth, whom he
could not better provide for than by a place about the court of his
sovereign!

The earl then drew from Marmaduke some account of his early training,
his dependence on his brother, his adventures at the archery-ground,
his misadventure with the robbers, and even his sojourn with Warner,--
though Marmaduke was discreetly silent as to the very existence of
Sibyll.  The earl, in the mean while, walked to and fro the chamber
with a light, careless stride, every moment pausing to laugh at the
frank simplicity of his kinsman, or to throw in some shrewd remark,
which he cast purposely in the rough Westmoreland dialect; for no man
ever attains to the popularity that rejoiced or accursed the Earl of
Warwick, without a tendency to broad and familiar humour, without a
certain commonplace of character in its shallower and more every-day
properties.  This charm--always great in the great--Warwick possessed
to perfection; and in him--such was his native and unaffected majesty
of bearing, and such the splendour that surrounded his name--it never
seemed coarse or unfamiliar, but "everything he did became him best."
Marmaduke had just brought his narrative to a conclusion, when, after
a slight tap at the door, which Warwick did not hear, two fair young
forms bounded joyously in, and not seeing the stranger, threw
themselves upon Warwick's breast with the caressing familiarity of
infancy.

"Ah, Father," said the elder of these two girls, as Warwick's hand
smoothed her hair fondly, "you promised you would take us in your
barge to see the sports on the river, and now it will be too late."

"Make your peace with your young cousins here," said the earl, turning
to Marmaduke; "you will cost them an hour's joyaunce.  This is my
eldest daughter, Isabel; and this soft-eyed, pale-cheeked damozel--too
loyal for a leaf of the red rose--is the Lady Anne."

The two girls had started from their father's arms at the first
address to Marmaduke, and their countenances had relapsed from their
caressing and childlike expression into all the stately demureness
with which they had been brought up to regard a stranger.  Howbeit,
this reserve, to which he was accustomed, awed Marmaduke less than the
alternate gayety and sadness of the wilder Sibyll, and he addressed
them with all the gallantry to the exercise of which he had been
reared, concluding his compliments with a declaration that he would
rather forego the advantage proffered him by the earl's favour with
the king, than foster one obnoxious and ungracious memory in damozels
so fair and honoured.

A haughty smile flitted for a moment over the proud young face of
Isabel Nevile; but the softer Anne blushed, and drew bashfully behind
her sister.

As yet these girls, born for the highest and fated to the most
wretched fortunes, were in all the bloom of earliest youth; but the
difference between their characters might be already observable in
their mien and countenance.  Isabel; of tall and commanding stature,
had some resemblance to her father, in her aquiline features, rich,
dark hair, and the lustrous brilliancy of her eyes; while Anne, less
striking, yet not less lovely, of smaller size and slighter
proportions, bore in her pale, clear face, her dove-like eyes, and her
gentle brow an expression of yielding meekness not unmixed with
melancholy, which, conjoined with an exquisite symmetry of features,
could not fail of exciting interest where her sister commanded
admiration.  Not a word, however, from either did Marmaduke abstract
in return for his courtesies, nor did either he or the earl seem to
expect it; for the latter, seating himself and drawing Anne on his
knee, while Isabella walked with stately grace towards the table that
bore her father's warlike accoutrements, and played, as it were,
unconsciously with the black plume on his black burgonet, said to
Nevile,

"Well, thou hast seen enough of the Lancastrian raptrils to make thee
true to the Yorkists.  I would I could say as much for the king
himself, who is already crowding the court with that venomous faction,
in honour of Dame Elizabeth Gray, born Mistress Woodville, and now
Queen of England.  Ha, my proud Isabel, thou wouldst have better
filled the throne that thy father built!"

And at these words a proud flash broke from the earl's dark eyes,
betraying even to Marmaduke the secret of perhaps his earliest
alienation from Edward IV.

Isabella pouted her rich lip, but said nothing.  "As for thee, Anne,"
continued the earl, "it is a pity that monks cannot marry,--thou
wouldst have suited some sober priest better than a mailed knight.
'Fore George, I would not ask thee to buckle my baldrick when the war-
steeds were snorting, but I would trust Isabel with the links of my
hauberk."

"Nay, Father," said the low, timid voice of Anne, "if thou wert going
to danger, I could be brave in all that could guard thee!"

"Why, that's my girl! kiss me!  Thou hast a look of thy mother now,--
so thou hast! and I will not chide thee the next time I hear thee
muttering soft treason in pity of Henry of Windsor."

"Is he not to be pitied?--Crown, wife, son, and Earl Warwick's stout
arm lost--lost!"

"No!" said Isabel, suddenly; no, sweet sister Anne, and fie on thee
for the words!  He lost all, because he had neither the hand of a
knight nor the heart of a man!  For the rest--Margaret of Anjou, or
her butchers, beheaded our father's father."

"And may God and Saint George forget me, when I forget those gray and
gory hairs!" exclaimed the earl; and putting away the Lady Anne
somewhat roughly, he made a stride across the room, and stood by his
hearth.  "And yet Edward, the son of Richard of York, who fell by my
father's side--he forgets, he forgives!  And the minions of Rivers the
Lancastrian tread the heels of Richard of Warwick."

At this unexpected turn in the conversation, peculiarly unwelcome, as
it may be supposed, to the son of one who had fought on the
Lancastrian side in the very battle referred to, Marmaduke felt
somewhat uneasy; and turning to the Lady Anne, he said, with the
gravity of wounded pride, "I owe more to my lord, your father, than I
even wist of,--how much he must have overlooked to--"

"Not so!" interrupted Warwick, who overheard him,--"not so; thou
wrongest me!  Thy father was shocked at those butcheries; thy father
recoiled from that accursed standard; thy father was of a stock
ancient and noble as my own!  But, these Woodvilles!--tush! my passion
overmasters me.  We will go to the king,--it is time."

Warwick here rang the hand-bell on his table, and on the entrance of
his attendant gentleman, bade him see that the barge was in readiness;
then beckoning to his kinsman, and with a nod to his daughters, he
caught up his plumed cap, and passed at once into the garden.

"Anne," said Isabel, when the two girls were alone, "thou hast vexed
my father, and what marvel?  If the Lancastrians can be pitied, the
Earl of Warwick must be condemned!"

"Unkind!" said Anne, shedding tears; "I can pity woe and mischance,
without blaming those whose hard duty it might be to achieve them."

"In good sooth cannot I!  Thou wouldst pity and pardon till thou
leftst no distinction between foeman and friend, leife and loathing.
Be it mine, like my great father, to love and to hate!"

"Yet why art thou so attached to the White Rose?" said Anne, stung, if
not to malice, at least to archness.  "Thou knowest my father's
nearest wish was that his eldest daughter might be betrothed to King
Edward.  Dost thou not pay good for evil when thou seest no excellence
out of the House of York?"

"Saucy Anne," answered Isabel, with a half smile, "I am not raught by
thy shafts, for I was a child for the nurses when King Edward sought a
wife for his love.  But were I chafed--as I may be vain enough to know
myself--whom should I blame?--Not the king, but the Lancastrian who
witched him!"

She paused a moment, and, looking away, added in a low tone, "Didst
thou hear, sister Anne, if the Duke of Clarence visited my father the
forenoon?"

"Ah, Isabel, Isabel!"

"Ah, sister Anne, sister Anne!  Wilt thou know all my secrets ere I
know them myself?"--and Isabel, with something of her father's
playfulness, put her hands to Anne's laughing lips.

Meanwhile Warwick, after walking musingly a few moments along the
garden, which was formed by plots of sward, bordered with fruit-trees,
and white rose-trees not yet in blossom, turned to his silent kinsman,
and said, "Forgive me, cousin mine, my mannerless burst against thy
brave father's faction; but when thou hast been a short while at
court, thou wilt see where the sore is.  Certes, I love this king!"
Here his dark face lighted up.  "Love him as a king,--ay, and as a
son!  And who would not love him; brave as his sword, gallant, and
winning, and gracious as the noonday in summer?  Besides, I placed him
on his throne; I honour myself in him!"

The earl's stature dilated as he spoke the last sentence, and his hand
rested on his dagger hilt.  He resumed, with the same daring and
incautious candour that stamped his dauntless, soldier-like nature,
"God hath given me no son.  Isabel of Warwick had been a mate for
William the Norman; and my grandson, if heir to his grandsire's soul,
should have ruled from the throne of England over the realms of
Charlemagne!  But it hath pleased Him whom the Christian knight alone
bows to without shame, to order otherwise.  So be it.  I forgot my
just pretensions,--forgot my blood, and counselled the king to
strengthen his throne with the alliance of Louis XI.  He rejected the
Princess Bona of Savoy, to marry widow Elizabeth Gray; I sorrowed for
his sake, and forgave the slight to my counsels.  At his prayer I
followed the train of his queen, and hushed the proud hearts of our
barons to obeisance.  But since then, this Dame Woodville, whom I
queened, if her husband mated, must dispute this roiaulme with mine
and me,--a Nevile, nowadays, must vail his plume to a Woodville!  And
not the great barons whom it will suit Edward's policy to win from the
Lancastrians--not the Exeters and the Somersets--but the craven
varlets and lackeys and dross of the camp--false alike to Henry and to
Edward--are to be fondled into lordships and dandled into power.
Young man, I am speaking hotly--Richard Nevile never lies nor
conceals; but I am speaking to a kinsman, am I not?  Thou hearest,--
thou wilt not repeat?"

"Sooner would I pluck forth my tongue by the roots."

"Enough!" returned the earl, with a pleased smile.  "When I come from
France, I will speak more to thee.  Meanwhile be courteous to all men,
servile to none.  Now to the king."

So speaking, he shook back his surcoat, drew his cap over his brow,
and passed to the broad stairs, at the foot of which fifty rowers,
with their badges on their shoulders, waited in the huge barge, gilt
richly at prow and stern, and with an awning of silk, wrought with the
earl's arms and cognizance.  As they pushed off, six musicians, placed
towards the helm, began a slow and half Eastern march, which,
doubtless, some crusader of the Temple had brought from the cymbals
and trumps of Palestine.




CHAPTER II.

KING EDWARD THE FOURTH.

The Tower of London, more consecrated to associations of gloom and
blood than those of gayety and splendour, was, nevertheless, during
the reign of Edward IV., the seat of a gallant and gorgeous court.
That king, from the first to the last so dear to the people of London,
made it his principal residence when in his metropolis; and its
ancient halls and towers were then the scene of many a brawl and
galliard.  As Warwick's barge now approached its huge walls, rising
from the river, there was much that might either animate or awe,
according to the mood of the spectator.  The king's barge, with many
lesser craft reserved for the use of the courtiers, gay with awnings
and streamers and painting and gilding, lay below the wharfs, not far
from the gate of St. Thomas, now called the Traitor's Gate.  On the
walk raised above the battlemented wall of the inner ward, not only
paced the sentries, but there dames and knights were inhaling the
noonday breezes, and the gleam of their rich dresses of cloth-of-gold
glanced upon the eye at frequent intervals from tower to tower.  Over
the vast round turret, behind the Traitor's Gate, now called "The
Bloody Tower," floated cheerily in the light wind the royal banner.
Near the Lion's Tower, two or three of the keepers of the menagerie,
in the king's livery, were leading forth, by a strong chain, the huge
white bear that made one of the boasts of the collection, and was an
especial favourite with the king and his brother Richard.  The
sheriffs of London were bound to find this grisly minion his chain and
his cord, when he deigned to amuse himself with bathing or "fishing"
in the river; and several boats, filled with gape-mouthed passengers,
lay near the wharf, to witness the diversions of Bruin.  These folks
set up a loud shout of--"A Warwick! a Warwick!"  "The stout earl, and
God bless him!" as the gorgeous barge shot towards the fortress.  The
earl acknowledged their greeting by vailing his plumed cap; and
passing the keepers with a merry allusion to their care of his own
badge, and a friendly compliment to the grunting bear, he stepped
ashore, followed by his kinsman.  Now, however, he paused a moment;
and a more thoughtful shade passed over his countenance, as, glancing
his eye carelessly aloft towards the standard of King Edward, he
caught sight of the casement in the neighbouring tower, of the very
room in which the sovereign of his youth, Henry the Sixth, was a
prisoner, almost within hearing of the revels of his successor; then,
with a quick stride, he hurried on through the vast court, and,
passing the White Tower, gained the royal lodge.  Here, in the great
hall, he left his companion, amidst a group of squires and gentlemen,
to whom he formally presented the Nevile as his friend and kinsman,
and was ushered by the deputy-chamberlain (with an apology for the
absence of his chief, the Lord Hastings, who had gone abroad to fly
his falcon) into the small garden, where Edward was idling away the
interval between the noon and evening meals,--repasts to which already
the young king inclined with that intemperate zest and ardour which he
carried into all his pleasures, and which finally destroyed the
handsomest person and embruted one of the most vigorous intellects of
the age.

The garden, if bare of flowers, supplied their place by the various
and brilliant-coloured garbs of the living beauties assembled on its
straight walks and smooth sward.  Under one of those graceful
cloisters, which were the taste of the day, and had been recently
built and gayly decorated, the earl was stopped in his path by a group
of ladies playing at closheys (ninepins) of ivory; [Narrative of Louis
of Bruges, Lord Grauthuse.  Edited by Sir F. Madden, "Archaelogia,"
1836.] and one of these fair dames, who excelled the rest in her
skill, had just bowled down the central or crowned pin,--the king of
the closheys.  This lady, no less a person than Elizabeth, the Queen
of England, was then in her thirty-sixth year,--ten years older than
her lord; but the peculiar fairness and delicacy of her complexion
still preserved to her beauty the aspect and bloom of youth.  From a
lofty headgear, embroidered with fleur-de-lis, round which wreathed a
light diadem of pearls, her hair, of the pale yellow considered then
the perfection of beauty, flowed so straight and so shining down her
shoulders, almost to the knees, that it seemed like a mantle of gold.
The baudekin stripes (blue and gold) of her tunic attested her
royalty.  The blue courtpie of satin was bordered with ermine, and the
sleeves, sitting close to an arm of exquisite contour, shone with seed
pearls.  Her features were straight and regular, yet would have been
insipid, but for an expression rather of cunning than intellect; and
the high arch of her eyebrows, with a slight curve downward of a mouth
otherwise beautiful, did not improve the expression, by an addition of
something supercilious and contemptuous, rather than haughty or
majestic.

"My lord of Warwick," said Elizabeth, pointing to the fallen closhey,
"what would my enemies say if they heard I had toppled down the king?"

"They would content themselves with asking which of your Grace's
brothers you would place in his stead," answered the hardy earl,
unable to restrain the sarcasm.

The queen blushed, and glanced round her ladies with an eye which
never looked direct or straight upon its object, but wandered sidelong
with a furtive and stealthy expression, that did much to obtain for
her the popular character of falseness and self-seeking.  Her
displeasure was yet more increased by observing the ill-concealed
smile which the taunt had called forth.

"Nay, my lord," she said, after a short pause, "we value the peace of
our roiaulme too much for so high an ambition.  Were we to make a
brother even the prince of the closheys, we should disappoint the
hopes of a Nevile."

The earl disdained pursuing the war of words, and answering coldly,
"The Neviles are more famous for making ingrates than asking favours.
I leave your Highness to the closheys"--turned away, and strode
towards the king, who, at the opposite end of the garden, was
reclining on a bench beside a lady, in whose ear, to judge by her
downcast and blushing cheek, he was breathing no unwelcome whispers.

"Mort-Dieu!" muttered the earl, who was singularly exempt, himself,
from the amorous follies of the day, and eyed them with so much
contempt that it often obscured his natural downright penetration into
character, and never more than when it led him afterwards to underrate
the talents of Edward IV.,--"Mort-Dieu! if, an hour before the battle
of Towton, some wizard had shown me in his glass this glimpse of the
gardens of the Tower, that giglet for a queen, and that squire of
dames for a king, I had not slain my black destrier (poor Malech!),
that I might conquer or die for Edward Earl of March."

"But see!" said the lady, looking up from the enamoured and conquering
eyes of the king, "art thou not ashamed, my lord?--the grim earl comes
to chide thee for thy faithlessness to thy queen, whom he loves so
well."

"Pasque-Dieu! as my cousin Louis of France says or swears," answered
the king, with an evident petulance in his altered voice, "I would
that Warwick could be only worn with one's armour!  I would as lief
try to kiss through my vizor as hear him talk of glory and Towton, and
King John and poor Edward II., because I am not always in mail.  Go!
leave us, sweet bonnibel! we must brave the bear alone!"  The lady
inclined her head, drew her hood round her face, and striking into the
contrary path from that in which Warwick was slowly striding, gained
the group round the queen, whose apparent freedom from jealousy, the
consequence of cold affections and prudent calculation, made one
principal cause of the empire she held over the powerful mind, but the
indolent temper, of the gay and facile Edward.

The king rose as Warwick now approached him; and the appearance of
these two eminent persons was in singular contrast. Warwick, though
richly and even gorgeously attired,--nay, with all the care which in
that age was considered the imperative duty a man of station and birth
owed to himself,--held in lofty disdain whatever vagary of custom
tended to cripple the movements or womanize the man.  No loose flowing
robes, no shoon half a yard long, no flaunting tawdriness of fringe
and aiglet, characterized the appearance of the baron, who, even in
peace, gave his address a half-martial fashion.

But Edward, who, in common with all the princes of the House of York,
carried dress to a passion, had not only reintroduced many of the most
effeminate modes in vogue under William the Red King, but added to
them whatever could tend to impart an almost oriental character to the
old Norman garb.  His gown (a womanly garment which had greatly
superseded, with men of the highest rank, not only the mantle but the
surcoat) flowed to his heels, trimmed with ermine, and broidered with
large flowers of crimson wrought upon cloth-of-gold.  Over this he
wore a tippet of ermine, and a collar or necklace of uncut jewels set
in filigree gold; the nether limbs were, it is true, clad in the more
manly fashion of tight-fitting hosen, but the folds of the gown, as
the day was somewhat fresh, were drawn around so as to conceal the
only part of the dress which really betokened the male sex.  To add to
this unwarlike attire, Edward's locks of a rich golden colour, and
perfuming the whole air with odours, flowed not in curls, but straight
to his shoulders, and the cheek of the fairest lady in his court might
have seemed less fair beside the dazzling clearness of a complexion at
once radiant with health and delicate with youth.  Yet, in spite of
all this effeminacy, the appearance of Edward IV. was not effeminate.
From this it was preserved, not only by a stature little less
commanding than that of Warwick himself, and of great strength and
breadth of shoulder, but also by features, beautiful indeed, but pre-
eminently masculine,--large and bold in their outline, and evincing by
their expression all the gallantry and daring characteristic of the
hottest soldier, next to Warwick, and without any exception the ablest
captain, of the age.

"And welcome,--a merry welcome, dear Warwick, and cousin mine," said
Edward, as Warwick slightly bent his proud knee to his king; "your
brother, Lord Montagu, has but left us.  Would that our court had the
same, joyaunce for you as for him."

"Dear and honoured my liege," answered Warwick, his brow smoothing at
once,--for his affectionate though hasty and irritable nature was
rarely proof against the kind voice and winning smile of his young
sovereign,--"could I ever serve you at the court as I can with the
people, you would not complain that John of Montagu was a better
courtier than Richard of Warwick.  But each to his calling.  I depart
to-morrow for Calais, and thence to King Louis.  And, surely, never
envoy or delegate had better chance to be welcome than one empowered
to treat of an alliance that will bestow on a prince deserving, I
trust, his fortunes, the sister of the bravest sovereign in Christian
Europe."

"Now, out on thy flattery, my cousin; though I must needs own I
provoked it by my complaint of thy courtiership.  But thou hast
learned only half thy business, good Warwick; and it is well Margaret
did not hear thee.  Is not the prince of France more to be envied for
winning a fair lady than having a fortunate soldier for his brother-
in-law?"

"My liege," replied Warwick, smiling, "thou knowest I am a poor judge
of a lady's fair cheek, though indifferently well skilled as to the
valour of a warrior's stout arm.  Algates, the Lady Margaret is indeed
worthy in her excellent beauties to become the mother of brave men."

"And that is all we can wring from thy stern lip, man of iron?  Well,
that must content us.  But to more serious matters."  And the king,
leaning his hand on the earl's arm, and walking with him slowly to and
fro the terrace, continued: "Knowest thou not, Warwick, that this
French alliance, to which thou hast induced us, displeases sorely our
good traders of London?"

"Mort-Dieu!" returned Warwick, bluntly, "and what business have the
flat-caps with the marriage of a king's sister?  Is it for them to
breathe garlic on the alliances of Bourbons and Plantagenets?  Faugh!
You have spoiled them, good my lord king,--you have spoiled them by
your condescensions.  Henry IV. staled not his majesty to
consultations with the mayor of his city.  Henry V. gave the
knighthood of the hath to the heroes of Agincourt, not to the vendors
of cloth and spices."

"Ah, my poor knights of the Bath!" said Edward, good-humouredly, "wilt
thou never let that sore scar quietly over?  Ownest thou not that the
men had their merits?"

"What the merits were, I weet not," answered the earl,--"unless,
peradventure, their wives were comely and young."

"Thou wrongest me, Warwick," said the king, carelessly; "Dame Cook was
awry, Dame Philips a grandmother, Dame Jocelyn had lost her front
teeth, and Dame Waer saw seven ways at once!  But thou forgettest,
man, the occasion of those honours,--the eve before Elizabeth was
crowned,--and it was policy to make the city of London have a share in
her honours.  As to the rest," pursued the king, earnestly and with
dignity, "I and my House have owed much to London.  When the peers of
England, save thee and thy friends, stood aloof from my cause, London
was ever loyal and true.  Thou seest not, my poor Warwick, that these
burgesses are growing up into power by the decline of the orders above
them.  And if the sword is the monarch's appeal for his right, he must
look to contented and honoured industry for his buckler in peace.
This is policy,--policy, Warwick; and Louis XI. will tell thee the
same truths, harsh though they grate in a warrior's ear."

The earl bowed his haughty head, and answered shortly, but with a
touching grace, "Be it ever thine, noble king, to rule as it likes
thee, and mine to defend with my blood even what I approve not with my
brain!  But if thou doubtest the wisdom of this alliance, it is not
too late yet.  Let me dismiss my following, and cross not the seas.
Unless thy heart is with the marriage, the ties I would form are
threads and cobwebs."

"Nay," returned Edward, irresolutely: "in these great state matters
thy wit is elder than mine; but men do say the Count of Charolois is a
mighty lord; and the alliance with Burgundy will be more profitable to
staple and mart."

"Then, in God's name, so conclude it!" said the earl, hastily, but
with so dark a fire in his eyes that Edward, who was observing him,
changed countenance; "only ask me not, my liege, to advance such a
marriage.  The Count of Charolois knows me as his foe--shame were mine
did I shun to say where I love, where I hate.  That proud dullard once
slighted me when we met at his father's court, and the wish next to my
heart is to pay back my affront with my battle-axe.  Give thy sister
to the heir of Burgundy, and forgive me if I depart to my castle of
Middleham."

Edward, stung by the sharpness of this reply, was about to answer as
became his majesty of king, when Warwick more deliberately resumed:
"Yet think well; Henry of Windsor is thy prisoner, but his cause lives
in Margaret and his son.  There is but one power in Europe that can
threaten thee with aid to the Lancastrians; that power is France.
Make Louis thy friend and ally, and thou givest peace to thy life and
thy lineage; make Louis thy foe, and count on plots and stratagems and
treason, uneasy days and sleepless nights.  Already thou hast lost one
occasion to secure that wiliest and most restless of princes, in
rejecting the hand of the Princess Bona.  Happily, this loss now can
be retrieved.  But alliance with Burgundy is war with France,--war
more deadly because Louis is a man who declares it not; a war carried
on by intrigue and bribe, by spies and minions, till some disaffection
ripens the hour when young Edward of Lancaster shall land on thy
coasts, with the Oriflamme and the Red Rose, with French soldiers and
English malcontents.  Wouldst thou look to Burgundy for help?--
Burgundy will have enough to guard its own frontiers from the gripe of
Louis the Sleepless.  Edward, my king, my pupil in arms, Edward, my
loved, my honoured liege, forgive Richard Nevile his bluntness, and
let not his faults stand in bar of his counsels."

"You are right, as you are ever, safeguard of England, and pillar of
my state," said the king, frankly, and pressing the arm he still held.
"Go to France and settle all as thou wilt."

Warwick bent low and kissed the hand of his sovereign.  "And," said
he, with a slight, but a sad smile, "when I am gone, my liege will not
repent, will not misthink me, will not listen to my foes, nor suffer
merchant and mayor to sigh him back to the mechanics of Flanders?"

"Warwick, thou deemest ill of thy king's kingliness."

"Not of thy kingliness; but that same gracious quality of yielding to
counsel which bows this proud nature to submission often makes me fear
for thy firmness, when thy will is, won through thy heart.  And now,
good my liege, forgive me one sentence more.  Heaven forefend that I
should stand in the way of thy princely favours.  A king's countenance
is a sun that should shine on all.  But bethink thee well, the barons
of England are a stubborn and haughty race; chafe not thy most
puissant peers by too cold a neglect of their past services, and too
lavish a largess to new men."

"Thou aimest at Elizabeth's kin," interrupted Edward, withdrawing his
hand from his minister's arm, "and I tell thee once for all times,
that I would rather sink again to mine earldom of March, with a
subject's right to honour where he loves, than wear crown and wield
sceptre without a king's unquestioned prerogative to ennoble the line
and blood of one he has deemed worthy of his throne.  As for the
barons, with whose wrath thou threatenest me, I banish them not.  If
they go in gloom from my court, why, let them chafe themselves sleek
again."

"King Edward," said Warwick, moodily, "tried services merit not this
contempt.  It is not as the kith of the queen that I regret to see
lands and honours lavished upon men rooted so newly to the soil that
the first blast of the war-trump will scatter their greenness to the
winds; but what sorrows me is to mark those who have fought against
thee preferred to the stout loyalty that braved block and field for
thy cause.  Look round thy court; where are the men of bloody York and
victorious Towton?--unrequited, sullen in their strongholds, begirt
with their yeomen and retainers.  Thou standest--thou, the heir of
York--almost alone (save where the Neviles--whom one day thy court
will seek also to disgrace and discard--vex their old comrades in arms
by their defection)--thou standest almost alone among the favourites
and minions of Lancaster.  Is there no danger in proving to men that
to have served thee is discredit, to have warred against thee is
guerdon and grace?"

"Enough of this, cousin," replied the king, with an effort which
preserved his firmness.  "On this head we cannot agree.  Take what
else thou wilt of royalty,--make treaties and contract marriages,
establish peace or proclaim war; but trench not on my sweetest
prerogative to give and to forgive.  And now, wilt thou tarry and sup
with us?  The ladies grow impatient of a commune that detains from
their eyes the stateliest knight since the Round Table was chopped
into fire-wood."

"No, my liege," said Warwick, whom flattery of this sort rather
angered than soothed, "I have much yet to prepare.  I leave your
Highness to fairer homage and more witching counsels than mine."  So
saying, he kissed the king's hand, and was retiring, when be
remembered his kinsman, whose humble interests in the midst of more
exciting topics he had hitherto forgotten, and added, "May I crave,
since you are so merciful to the Lancastrians, one grace for my
namesake,--a Nevile whose father repented the side he espoused, a son
of Sir Guy of Arsdale?"

"Ah," said the king, smiling maliciously, "it pleaseth us much to find
that it is easier to the warm heart of our cousin Warwick to preach
sententiaries of sternness to his king than to enforce the same by his
own practice!"

"You misthink me, sire.  I ask not that Marmaduke Nevile should
supplant his superiors and elders; I ask not that he should be made
baron and peer; I ask only that, as a young gentleman who hath taken
no part himself in the wars, and whose father repented his error, your
Grace should strengthen your following by an ancient name and a
faithful servant.  But I should have remembered me that his name of
Nevile would have procured him a taunt in the place of advancement."

"Saw man ever so froward a temper?" cried Edward, not without reason.
"Why, Warwick, thou art as shrewish to a jest as a woman to advice.
Thy kinsman's fortunes shall be my care.  Thou sayest thou hast
enemies,--I weet not who they be.  But to show what I think of them, I
make thy namesake and client a gentleman of my chamber.  When Warwick
is false to Edward, let him think that Warwick's kinsman wears a
dagger within reach of the king's heart day and night."

This speech was made with so noble and touching a kindness of voice
and manner, that the earl, thoroughly subdued, looked at his sovereign
with moistened eyes, and only trusting himself to say,--"Edward, thou
art king, knight, gentleman, and soldier; and I verily trow that I
love thee best when my petulant zeal makes me anger thee most,"--
turned away with evident emotion, and passing the queen and her ladies
with a lowlier homage than that with which he had before greeted them,
left the garden.  Edward's eye followed him musingly.  The frank
expression of his face vanished, and with the deep breath of a man who
is throwing a weight from his heart, he muttered,--

"He loves me,--yes; but will suffer no one else to love me!  This must
end some day.  I am weary of the bondage."  And sauntering towards the
ladies, he listened in silence, but not apparently in displeasure, to
his queen's sharp sayings on the imperious mood and irritable temper
of the iron-handed builder of his throne.




CHAPTER III.

THE ANTECHAMBER.

As Warwick passed the door that led from the garden, he brushed by a
young man, the baudekin stripes of whose vest announced his
relationship to the king, and who, though far less majestic than
Edward, possessed sufficient of family likeness to pass for a very
handsome and comely person; but his countenance wanted the open and
fearless expression which gave that of the king so masculine and
heroic a character.  The features were smaller, and less clearly cut,
and to a physiognomical observer there was much that was weak and
irresolute in the light blue eyes and the smiling lips which never
closed firmly over the teeth.  He did not wear the long gown then so
much in vogue, but his light figure was displayed to advantage by a
vest, fitting it exactly, descending half-way down the thigh, and
trimmed at the border and the collar with ermine.  The sleeves of the
doublet were slit, so as to show the white lawn beneath, and adorned
with aiglets and knots of gold.

Over the left arm hung a rich jacket of furs and velvet, something
like that adopted by the modern hussar.  His hat, or cap, was high and
tiara-like, with a single white plume, and the ribbon of the Garter
bound his knee.  Though the dress of this personage was thus far less
effeminate than Edward's, the effect of his appearance was infinitely
more so,--partly, perhaps, from a less muscular frame, and partly from
his extreme youth; for George Duke of Clarence was then, though
initiated not only in the gayeties, but all the intrigues of the
court, only in his eighteenth year.  Laying his hand, every finger of
which sparkled with jewels, on the earl's shoulder--"Hold!" said the
young prince, in a whisper, "a word in thy ear, noble Warwick!"

The earl, who, next to Edward, loved Clarence the most of his princely
House, and who always found the latter as docile as the other (when
humour or affection seized him) was intractable, relaxed into a
familiar smile at the duke's greeting, and suffered the young prince
to draw him aside from the groups of courtiers with whom the chamber
was filled, to the leaning-places (as they were called) of a large
mullion window.  In the mean while, as they thus conferred, the
courtiers interchanged looks, and many an eye of fear and hate was
directed towards the stately form of the earl.  For these courtiers
were composed principally of the kindred or friends of the queen, and
though they dared not openly evince the malice with which they
retorted Warwick's lofty scorn and undisguised resentment at their new
fortunes, they ceased not to hope for his speedy humiliation and
disgrace, reeking little what storm might rend the empire, so that it
uprooted the giant oak, which still in some measure shaded their
sunlight and checked their growth.  True, however, that amongst these
were mingled, though rarely, men of a hardier stamp and nobler birth,
--some few of the veteran friends of the king's great father; and
these, keeping sternly and loftily aloof from the herd, regarded
Warwick with the same almost reverential and yet affectionate
admiration which he inspired amongst the yeomen, peasants, and
mechanics,--for in that growing but quiet struggle of the burgesses,
as it will often happen in more civilized times, the great Aristocracy
and the Populace were much united in affection, though with very
different objects; and the Middle and Trading Class, with whom the
earl's desire for French alliances and disdain of commerce had much
weakened his popularity, alone shared not the enthusiasm of their
countrymen for the lion-hearted minister.

Nevertheless, it must here be owned that the rise of Elizabeth's
kindred introduced a far more intellectual, accomplished, and literary
race into court favour than had for many generations flourished in so
uncongenial a soil: and in this ante-chamber feud, the pride of
education and mind retaliated with juster sarcasm the pride of birth
and sinews.

Amongst those opposed to the earl, and fit in all qualities to be the
head of the new movement,--if the expressive modern word be allowed
us,--stood at that moment in the very centre of the chamber Anthony
Woodville, in right of the rich heiress he had married the Lord
Scales.  As, when some hostile and formidable foe enters the meads
where the flock grazes, the gazing herd gather slowly round their
leader, so grouped the queen's faction slowly, and by degrees, round
this accomplished nobleman, at the prolonged sojourn of Warwick.

"Gramercy!" said the Lord Scales, in a somewhat affected intonation of
voice, "the conjunction of the bear and the young lion is a parlous
omen, for the which I could much desire we had a wise astrologer's
reading."

"It is said," observed one of the courtiers, "that the Duke of
Clarence much affects either the lands or the person of the Lady
Isabel."

"A passably fair damozel," returned Anthony, "though a thought or so
too marked and high in her lineaments, and wholly unlettered, no
doubt; which were a pity, for George of Clarence has some pretty taste
in the arts and poesies.  But as Occleve hath it--

    'Gold, silver, jewel, cloth, beddyng, array,'

would make gentle George amorous of a worse-featured face than high-
nosed Isabel; 'strange to spell or rede,' as I would wager my best
destrier to a tailor's hobby, the damozel surely is."

"Notest thou yon gaudy popinjay?" whispered the Lord of St. John to
one of his Towton comrades, as, leaning against the wall, they
overheard the sarcasms of Anthony, and the laugh of the courtiers, who
glassed their faces and moods to his.  "Is the time so out of joint
that Master Anthony Woodville can vent his scurrile japes on the
heiress of Salisbury and Warwick in the king's chamber?"

"And prate of spelling and reading as if they were the cardinal
virtues?" returned his sullen companion.  "By my halidame, I have two
fair daughters at home who will lack husbands, I trow, for they can
only spin and be chaste,--two maidenly gifts out of bloom with the
White Rose."

In the mean while, unwitting, or contemptuous, of the attention they
excited, Warwick and Clarence continued yet more earnestly to confer.

"No, George, no," said the earl, who, as the descendant of John of
Gaunt, and of kin to the king's blood, maintained, in private, a
father's familiarity with the princes of York, though on state
occasions, and when in the hearing of others, he sedulously marked his
deference for their rank--"no, George, calm and steady thy hot mettle,
for thy brother's and England's sake.  I grieve as much as thou to
hear that the queen does not spare even thee in her froward and
unwomanly peevishness.  But there is a glamour in this, believe me,
that must melt away soon or late, and our kingly Edward recover his
senses."

"Glamour!" said Clarence; "thinkest thou, indeed, that her mother,
Jacquetta, has bewitched the king?  One word of thy belief in such
spells, spread abroad amongst the people, would soon raise the same
storm that blew Eleanor Cobham from Duke Humphrey's bed, along London
streets in her penance-shift."

"Troth," said the earl, indifferently, "I leave such grave questions
as these to prelate and priest; the glamour I spoke of is that of a
fair face over a wanton heart; and Edward is not so steady a lover
that this should never wear out."

"It amates me much, noble cousin, that thou leavest the court in this
juncture.  The queen's heart is with Burgundy, the city's hate is with
France; and when once thou art gone, I fear that the king will be
teased into mating my sister with the Count of Charolois."

"Ho!" exclaimed Warwick, with an oath so loud that it rung through the
chamber, and startled every ear that heard it.  Then, perceiving his
indiscretion, he lowered his tone into a deep and hollow whisper, and
griped the prince's arm almost fiercely as he spoke.

"Could Edward so dishonour my embassy, so palter and juggle with my
faith, so flout me in the eyes of Christendom, I would--I would--" he
paused, and relaxed his hold of the duke, and added, with an altered
voice--"I would leave his wife and his lemans, and yon things of silk,
whom he makes peers (that is easy) but cannot make men, to guard his
throne from the grandson of Henry V.  But thy fears, thy zeal, thy
love for me, dearest prince and cousin, make thee misthink Edward's
kingly honour and knightly faith.  I go with the sure knowledge that
by alliance with France I shut the House of Lancaster from all hope of
this roiaulme."

"Hadst thou not better, at least, see my sister Margaret?  She has a
high spirit, and she thinks thou mightest, at least, woo her assent,
and tell her of the good gifts of her lord to be!"

"Are the daughters of York spoiled to this by the manners and guise of
a court, in which beshrew me if I well know which the woman and whom
the man?  Is it not enough to give peace to broad England, root to her
brother's stem?  Is it not enough to wed the son of a king, the
descendant of Charlemagne and Saint Louis?  Must I go bonnet in hand
and simper forth the sleek personals of the choice of her kith and
House; swear the bridegroom's side-locks are as long as King Edward's,
and that he bows with the grace of Master Anthony Woodville?  Tell her
this thyself, gentle Clarence, if thou wilt: all Warwick could say
would but anger her ear, if she be the maid thou bespeakest her."

The Duke of Clarence hesitated a moment, and then, colouring slightly,
said, "If, then, the daughter's hand be the gift of her kith alone,
shall I have thy favour when the Lady Isabel--"

"George," interrupted Warwick, with a fond and paternal smile, "when
we have made England safe, there is nothing the son of Richard of York
can ask of Warwick in vain.  Alas!" he added mournfully, "thy father
and mine were united in the same murtherous death, and I think they
will smile down on us from their seats in heaven when a happier
generation cements that bloody union with a marriage bond!"

Without waiting for further parlance, the earl turned suddenly away,
threw his cap on his towering head, and strode right through the
centre of the whispering courtiers, who shrunk, louting low, from his
haughty path, to break into a hubbub of angry exclamations or
sarcastic jests at his unmannerly bearing, as his black plume
disappeared in the arch of the vaulted door.

While such the scene in the interior chambers of the palace,
Marmaduke, with the frank simpleness which belonged to his youth and
training, had already won much favour and popularity, and he was
laughing loud with a knot of young men by the shovel-board when
Warwick re-entered.  The earl, though so disliked by the courtiers
more immediately about the person of the king, was still the favourite
of the less elevated knights and gentry who formed the subordinate
household and retainers; and with these, indeed, his manner, so proud
and arrogant to his foes and rivals, relapsed at once into the ease of
the manly and idolized chief.  He was pleased to see the way made by
his young namesake, and lifting his cap, as he nodded to the group and
leaned his arm upon Marmaduke's shoulder, he said, "Thanks, and hearty
thanks, to you, knights and gentles, for your courteous reception of
an old friend's young son.  I have our king's most gracious permission
to see him enrolled one of the court you grace.  Ah, Master Falconer,
and how does thy worthy uncle?--braver knight never trod.  What young
gentleman is yonder?--a new face and a manly one; by your favour,
present him.  The son of a Savile!  Sir, on my return, be not the only
Savile who shuns our table of Warwick Court.  Master Dacres, commend
me to the lady, your mother; she and I have danced many a measure
together in the old time,--we all live again in our children.  Good
den to you, sirs.  Marmaduke, follow me to the office,--you lodge in
the palace.  You are gentleman to the most gracious and, if Warwick
lives, to the most puissant of Europe's sovereigns.  I shall see
Montagu at home; he shall instruct thee in thy duties, and requite
thee for all discourtesies on the archery-ground."





BOOK III.

IN WHICH THE HISTORY PASSES FROM THE KING'S COURT TO THE STUDENT'S
CELL, AND RELATES THE PERILS THAT BEFELL A PHILOSOPHER FOR MEDDLING
WITH THE AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD.




CHAPTER I.

THE SOLITARY SAGE AND THE SOLITARY MAID.

While such the entrance of Marmaduke Nevile into a court, that if far
less intellectual and refined than those of later days, was yet more
calculated to dazzle the fancy, to sharpen the wit, and to charm the
senses,--for round the throne of Edward IV. chivalry was magnificent,
intrigue restless, and pleasure ever on the wing,--Sibyll had ample
leisure in her solitary home to muse over the incidents that had
preceded the departure of the young guest. Though she had rejected
Marmaduke's proffered love, his tone, so suddenly altered, his abrupt,
broken words and confusion, his farewell, so soon succeeding his
passionate declaration, could not fail to wound that pride of woman
which never sleeps till modesty is gone.  But this made the least
cause of the profound humiliation which bowed down her spirit.  The
meaning taunt conveyed in the rhyme of the tymbesteres pierced her to
the quick; the calm, indifferent smile of the stranger, as he regarded
her, the beauty of the dame he attended, woke mingled and contrary
feelings, but those of jealousy were perhaps the keenest: and in the
midst of all she started to ask herself if indeed she had suffered her
vain thoughts to dwell too tenderly upon one from whom the vast
inequalities of human life must divide her evermore.  What to her was
his indifference?  Nothing,--yet had she given worlds to banish that
careless smile from her remembrance.

Shrinking at last from the tyranny of thoughts till of late unknown,
her eye rested upon the gipsire which Alwyn had sent her by the old
servant.  The sight restored to her the holy recollection of her
father, the sweet joy of having ministered to his wants.  She put up
the little treasure, intending to devote it all to Warner; and after
bathing her heavy eyes, that no sorrow of hers might afflict the
student, she passed with a listless step into her father's chamber.

There is, to the quick and mercurial spirits of the young, something
of marvellous and preternatural in that life within life, which the
strong passion of science and genius forms and feeds,--that passion so
much stronger than love, and so much more self-dependent; which asks
no sympathy, leans on no kindred heart; which lives alone in its works
and fancies, like a god amidst his creations.

The philosopher, too, had experienced a great affliction since they
met last. In the pride of his heart he had designed to show Marmaduke
the mystic operations of his model, which had seemed that morning to
open into life; and when the young man was gone, and he made the
experiment alone, alas! he found that new progress but involved him in
new difficulties.  He had gained the first steps in the gigantic
creation of modern days, and he was met by the obstacle that baffled
so long the great modern sage.  There was the cylinder, there the
boiler; yet, work as he would, the steam failed to keep the cylinder
at work.  And now, patiently as the spider re-weaves the broken web,
his untiring ardour was bent upon constructing a new cylinder of other
materials.  "Strange," he said to himself, "that the heat of the mover
aids not the movement;" and so, blundering near the truth, he laboured
on.

Sibyll, meanwhile, seated herself abstractedly on a heap of fagots
piled in the corner, and seemed busy in framing characters on the
dusty floor with the point of her tiny slipper.  So fresh and fair and
young she seemed, in that murky atmosphere, that strange scene, and
beside that worn man, that it might have seemed to a poet as if the
youngest of the Graces were come to visit Mulciber at his forge.

The man pursued his work, the girl renewed her dreams, the dark
evening hour gradually stealing over both.  The silence was unbroken,
for the forge and the model were now at rest, save by the grating of
Adam's file upon the metal, or by some ejaculation of complacency now
and then vented by the enthusiast. So, apart from the many-noised,
gaudy, babbling world without, even in the midst of that bloody,
turbulent, and semi-barbarous time, went on (the one neglected and
unknown, the other loathed and hated) the two movers of the ALL that
continues the airy life of the Beautiful from age to age,--the Woman's
dreaming Fancy and the Man's active Genius.




CHAPTER II.

MASTER ADAM WARNER GROWS A MISER, AND BEHAVES SHAMEFULLY.

For two or three days nothing disturbed the outward monotony of the
recluse's household.  Apparently all had settled back as before the
advent of the young cavalier.  But Sibyll's voice was not heard
singing, as of old, when she passed the stairs to her father's room.
She sat with him in his work no less frequently and regularly than
before; but her childish spirits no longer broke forth in idle talk or
petulant movements, vexing the good man from his absorption and his
toils.  The little cares and anxieties, which had formerly made up so
much of Sibyll's day by forethought of provision for the morrow, were
suspended; for the money transmitted to her by Alwyn in return for the
emblazoned manuscripts was sufficient to supply their modest wants for
months to come.  Adam, more and more engrossed in his labours, did not
appear to perceive the daintier plenty of his board, nor the purchase
of some small comforts unknown for years.  He only said one morning,
"It is strange, girl, that as that gathers in life (and he pointed to
the model), it seems already to provide, to my fantasy, the luxuries
it will one day give to us all in truth.  Methought my very bed last
night seemed wondrous easy, and the coverings were warmer, for I woke
not with the cold."

"Ah," thought the sweet daughter, smiling through moist eyes, "while
my cares can smooth thy barren path through life, why should I cark
and pine?"

Their solitude was now occasionally broken in the evenings by the
visits of Nicholas Alwyn.  The young goldsmith was himself not
ignorant of the simpler mathematics; he had some talent for invention,
and took pleasure in the construction of horologes, though, properly
speaking, not a part of his trade.  His excuse for his visits was the
wish to profit by Warner's mechanical knowledge; but the student was
so rapt in his own pursuits, that he gave but little instruction to
his visitor.  Nevertheless Alwyn was satisfied, for he saw Sibyll.  He
saw her in the most attractive phase of her character,--the loving,
patient, devoted daughter; and the view of her household virtues
affected more and more his honest English heart.  But, ever awkward
and embarrassed, he gave no vent to his feelings.  To Sibyll he spoke
little, and with formal constraint; and the girl, unconscious of her
conquest, was little less indifferent to his visits than her
abstracted father.

But all at once Adam woke to a sense of the change that had taken
place; all at once he caught scent of gold, for his works were brought
to a pause for want of some finer and more costly materials than the
coins in his own possession (the remnant of Marmaduke's gift) enabled
him to purchase.  He had stolen out at dusk, unknown to Sibyll, and
lavished the whole upon the model; but in vain!  The model in itself
was, indeed, completed; his invention had mastered the difficulty that
it had encountered.  But Adam had complicated the contrivance by
adding to it experimental proofs of the agency it was intended to
exercise.  It was necessary in that age, if he were to convince
others, to show more than the principle of his engine,--he must show
also something of its effects; turn a mill without wind or water, or
set in motion some mimic vehicle without other force than that the
contrivance itself supplied.  And here, at every step, new obstacles
arose.  It was the misfortune to science in those days, not only that
all books and mathematical instruments were enormously dear, but that
the students, still struggling into light, through the glorious
delusions of alchemy and mysticism, imagined that, even in simple
practical operations, there were peculiar virtues in virgin gold and
certain precious stones.  A link in the process upon which Adam was
engaged failed him; his ingenuity was baffled, his work stood still;
and in poring again and again over the learned manuscripts--alas! now
lost--in which certain German doctors had sought to explain the
pregnant hints of Roger Bacon, he found it inculcated that the axle of
a certain wheel must be composed of a diamond.  Now, in truth, it so
happened that Adam's contrivance, which (even without the appliances
which were added in illustration of the theory) was infinitely more
complicated than modern research has found necessary, did not even
require the wheel in question, much less the absent diamond; it
happened, also, that his understanding, which, though so obtuse in
common life, was in these matters astonishingly clear, could not trace
any mathematical operations by which the diamond axle would in the
least correct the difficulty that had suddenly started up; and yet the
accursed diamond began to haunt him,--the German authority was so
positive on the point, and that authority had in many respects been
accurate.  Nor was this all,--the diamond was to be no vulgar diamond;
it was to be endowed, by talismanic skill, with certain properties and
virtues; it was to be for a certain number of hours exposed to the
rays of the full moon; it was to be washed in a primitive and wondrous
elixir, the making of which consumed no little of the finest gold.
This diamond was to be to the machine what the soul is to the body,--a
glorious, all-pervading, mysterious principle of activity and life.
Such were the dreams that obscured the cradle of infant science!  And
Adam, with all his reasoning powers, big lore in the hard truths of
mathematics, was but one of the giant children of the dawn.  The
magnificent phrases and solemn promises of the mystic Germans got firm
hold of his fancy.  Night and day, waking or sleeping, the diamond,
basking in the silence of the full moon, sparkled before his eyes.
Meanwhile all was at a stand.  In the very last steps of his discovery
he was arrested.  Then suddenly looking round for vulgar moneys to
purchase the precious gem, and the materials for the soluble elixir,
he saw that MONEY had been at work around him,--that he had been
sleeping softly and faring sumptuously.  He was seized with a divine
rage.  How had Sibyll dared to secrete from him this hoard; how
presumed to waste upon the base body what might have so profited the
eternal mind?  In his relentless ardour, in his sublime devotion and
loyalty to his abstract idea, there was a devouring cruelty, of which
this meek and gentle scholar was wholly unconscious.  The grim iron
model, like a Moloch, ate up all things,--health, life, love; and its
jaws now opened for his child.  He rose from his bed,--it was
daybreak,--he threw on his dressing-robe, he strode into his
daughter's room; the gray twilight came through the comfortless,
curtainless casement, deep sunk into the wall.  Adam did not pause to
notice that the poor child, though she had provoked his anger by
refitting his dismal chamber, had spent nothing in giving a less
rugged frown to her own.

The scanty worm-worn furniture, the wretched pallet, the poor attire
folded decently beside,--nothing save that inexpressible purity and
cleanliness which, in the lowliest hovel, a pure and maiden mind
gathers round it; nothing to distinguish the room of her whose
childhood had passed in courts from the but of the meanest daughter of
drudgery and toil!  No,--he who had lavished the fortunes of his
father and big child into the grave of his idea--no--he saw nothing of
this self-forgetful penury--the diamond danced before him!  He
approached the bed; and oh! the contrast of that dreary room and
peasant pallet to the delicate, pure, enchanting loveliness of the
sleeping inmate.  The scanty covering left partially exposed the snow-
white neck and rounded shoulder; the face was pillowed upon the arm,
in an infantine grace; the face was slightly flushed, and the fresh
red lips parted into a smile,--for in her sleep the virgin dreamed,--a
happy dream!  It was a sight to have touched a father's heart, to have
stopped his footstep, and hushed his breath into prayer.  And call not
Adam hard--unnatural--that he was not then, as men far more harsh than
he--for the father at that moment was not in his breast, the human man
was gone--he himself, like his model, was a machine of iron!--his life
was his one idea!

"Wake, child, wake!" he said, in a loud but hollow voice.  "Where is
the gold thou hast hidden from me?  Wake! confess!"

Roused from her gracious dreams thus savagely, Sibyll started, and saw
the eager, darkened face of her father.  Its expression was peculiar
and undefinable, for it was not threatening, angry, stern; there was a
vacancy in the eyes, a strain in the features, and yet a wild, intense
animation lighting and pervading all,--it was as the face of one
walking in his sleep, and, at the first confusion of waking, Sibyll
thought indeed that such was her father's state.  But the impatience
with which he shook the arm he grasped, and repeated, as he opened
convulsively his other hand, "The gold, Sibyll, the gold!  Why didst
thou hide it from me?" speedily convinced her that her father's mind
was under the influence of the prevailing malady that made all its
weakness and all its strength.

"My poor father!" she said pityingly, "wilt thou not leave thyself the
means whereby to keep strength and health for thine high hopes?  Ah,
Father, thy Sibyll only hoarded her poor gains for thee!"

"The gold!" said Adam, mechanically, but in a softer voice,--"all--all
thou hast!  How didst thou get it,--how?"

"By the labours of these hands.  Ah, do not frown on me!"

"Thou--the child of knightly fathers--thou labour!" said Adam, an
instinct of his former state of gentle-born and high-hearted youth
flashing from his eyes.  "It was wrong in thee!"

"Dost thou not labour too?"

"Ay, but for the world.  Well, the gold!"

Sibyll rose, and modestly throwing over her form the old mantle which
lay on the pallet, passed to a corner of the room, and opening a
chest, took from it the gipsire, and held it out to her father.

"If it please thee, dear and honoured sir, so be it; and Heaven
prosper it in thy hands!"

Before Adam's clutch could close on the gipsire, a rude hand was laid
on his shoulder, the gipsire was snatched from Sibyll, and the gaunt,
half-clad form of old Madge interposed between the two.

"Eh, sir!" she said, in her shrill, cracked tone, "I thought when I
heard your door open, and your step hurrying down, you were after no
good deeds.  Fie, master, fie!  I have clung to you when all reviled,
and when starvation within and foul words without made all my hire;
for I ever thought you a good and mild man, though little better than
stark wode.  But, augh! to rob your child thus, to leave her to starve
and pine!  We old folks are used to it.  Look round, look round!  I
remember this chamber, when ye first came to your father's hall.
Saints of heaven!  There stood the brave bed all rustling with damask
of silk; on those stone walls once hung fine arras of the Flemings,--a
marriage gift to my lady from Queen Margaret, and a mighty show to
see, and good for the soul's comforts, with Bible stories wrought on
it.  Eh, sir! don't you call to mind your namesake, Master Adam, in
his brave scarlet hosen, and Madam Eve, in her bonny blue kirtle and
laced courtpie? and now--now look round, I say, and see what you have
brought your child to!"

"Hush! hush! Madge, bush!" cried Sibyll, while Adam gazed in evident
perturbation and awakening shame at the intruder, turning his eyes
round the room as she spoke, and heaving from time to time short, deep
sighs.

"But I will not hush," pursued the old woman; "I will say my say, for
I love ye both, and I loved my poor mistress who is dead and gone.
Ah, sir, groan! it does you good.  And now when this sweet damsel is
growing up, now when you should think of saving a marriage dower for
her (for no marriage where no pot boils), do you rend from her the
little that she has drudged to gain!--She!  Oh, out on your heart! And
for what,--for what, sir?  For the neighbours to set fire to your
father's house, and the little ones to--"

"Forbear, woman!" cried Adam, in a voice of thunder; "forbear!
Heavens!" And he waved his hand as he spoke, with so unexpected a
majesty that Madge was awed into sudden silence, and, darting a look
of compassion at Sibyll, she hobbled from the room.  Adam stood
motionless an instant; but when he felt his child's soft arms round
his neck, when he heard her voice struggling against tears, praying
him not to heed the foolish words of the old servant,--to take--to
take all, that it would be easy to gain more,--the ice of his
philosophy melted at once; the man broke forth, and, clasping Sibyll
to his heart, and kissing her cheek, her lips, her hands, he faltered
out, "No! no! forgive me! Forgive thy cruel father!  Much thought has
maddened me, I think,--it has indeed!  Poor child, poor Sibyll," and
he stroked her cheek gently, and with a movement of pathetic pity--
"poor child, thou art pale, and so slight and delicate!  And this
chamber--and thy loneliness--and--ah! my life hath been a curse to
thee, yet I meant to bequeath it a boon to all!

"Father, dear father, speak not thus.  You break my heart.  Here,
here, take the gold--or rather, for thou must not venture out to
insult again, let me purchase with it what thou needest. Tell me,
trust me--"

"No!" exclaimed Adam, with that hollow energy by which a man resolves
to impose restraint on himself; "I will not, for all that science ever
achieved,--I will not lay this shame on my soul!  Spend this gold on
thyself, trim this room, buy thee raiment,--all that thou needest,--I
order, I command it!  And hark thee, if thou gettest more, hide it
from me, hide it well; men's desires are foul tempters!  I never knew,
in following wisdom, that I had a vice.  I wake and find myself a
miser and a robber!"

And with these words he fled from the girl's chamber, gained his own,
and locked the door.




CHAPTER III.

A STRANGE VISITOR.--ALL AGES OF THE WORLD BREED WORLD-BETTERS.

Sibyll, whose soft heart bled for her father, and who now reproached
herself for having concealed from him her little hoard, began hastily
to dress that she might seek him out, and soothe the painful feelings
which the honest rudeness of Madge had aroused.  But before her task
was concluded, there pealed a loud knock at the outer door.  She heard
the old housekeeper's quivering voice responding to a loud clear tone;
and presently Madge herself ascended the stairs to Warner's room,
followed by a man whom Sibyll instantly recognized--for he was not one
easily to be forgotten--as their protector from the assault of the
mob.  She drew back hastily as he passed her door, and in some wonder
and alarm awaited the descent of Madge.  That venerable personage
having with some difficulty induced her master to open his door and
admit the stranger, came straight into her young lady's chamber.
"Cheer up, cheer up, sweetheart," said the old woman; "I think better
days will shine soon; for the honest man I have admitted says he is
but come to tell Master Warner something that will redound much to his
profit.  Oh, he is a wonderful fellow, this same Robin!  You saw how
he turned the cullions from burning the old house!"

"What! you know this man, Madge!  What is he, and who?"

Madge looked puzzled.  "That is more than I can say, sweet mistress.
But though he has been but some weeks in the neighbourhood, they all
hold him in high count and esteem.  For why--it is said he is a rich
man and a kind one.  He does a world of good to the poor."

While Sibyll listened to such explanations as Madge could give her,
the stranger, who had carefully closed the door of the student's
chamber, after regarding Adam for a moment with silent but keen
scrutiny, thus began,--

"When last we met, Adam Warner, it was with satchells on our backs.
Look well at me!"

"Troth," answered Adam, languidly, for he was still under the deep
dejection that had followed the scene with Sibyll, "I cannot call you
to mind, nor seems it veritable that our schooldays passed together,
seeing that my hair is gray and men call me old; but thou art in all
the lustihood of this human life."

"Nathless," returned the stranger, "there are but two years or so
between thine age and mine.  When thou wert poring over the crabbed
text, and pattering Latin by the ell, dost thou not remember a lack-
grace good-for-naught, Robert Hilyard, who was always setting the
school in an uproar, and was finally outlawed from that boy-world, as
he hath been since from the man's world, for inciting the weak to
resist the strong?"

"Ah," exclaimed Adam, with a gleam of something like joy on his face,
"art thou indeed that riotous, brawling, fighting, frank-hearted, bold
fellow, Robert Hilyard?  Ha! ha!--those were merry days!  I have known
none like them--"  The old schoolfellows shook hands heartily.

"The world has not fared well with thee in person or pouch, I fear me,
poor Adam," said Hilyard; "thou canst scarcely have passed thy
fiftieth year, and yet thy learned studies have given thee the weight
of sixty; while I, though ever in toil and bustle, often wanting a
meal, and even fearing the halter, am strong and hearty as when I shot
my first fallow buck in the king's forest, and kissed the forester's
pretty daughter.  Yet, methinks, Adam, if what I hear of thy tasks be
true, thou and I have each been working for one end; thou to make the
world other than it is, and I to--"

"What! hast thou, too, taken nourishment from the bitter milk of
Philosophy,--thou, fighting Rob?"

"I know not whether it be called philosophy, but marry, Edward of York
would call it rebellion; they are much the same, for both war against
rules established!" returned Hilyard, with more depth of thought than
his careless manner seemed to promise.  He paused, and laying his
broad brown hand on Warner's shoulder, resumed, "Thou art poor, Adam!"
"Very poor,--very, very!"

"Does thy philosophy disdain gold?"

"What can philosophy achieve without it?  She is a hungry dragon, and
her very food is gold!"

"Wilt thou brave some danger--thou went ever a fearless boy when thy
blood was up, though so meek and gentle--wilt thou brave some danger
for large reward?"

"My life braves the scorn of men, the pinchings of famine, and, it may
be, the stake and the fagot.  Soldiers brave not the dangers that are
braved by a wise man in an unwise age!"

"Gramercy! thou hast a hero's calm aspect while thou speakest, and thy
words move me!  Listen!  Thou wert wont, when Henry of Windsor was
King of England, to visit and confer with him on learned matters.  He
is now a captive in the Tower; but his jailers permit him still to
receive the visits of pious monks and harmless scholars.  I ask thee
to pay him such a visit, and for this office I am empowered, by richer
men than myself, to award thee the guerdon of twenty broad pieces of
gold."

"Twenty!--A mine! a Tmolus!" exclaimed Adam, in uncontrollable glee.
"Twenty!  O true friend, then my work will be born at last!"

"But hear me further, Adam, for I will not deceive thee; the visit
hath its peril!  Thou must first see if the mind of King Henry, for
king he is, though the usurper wear his holy crown, be clear and
healthful.  Thou knowest he is subject to dark moods,--suspension of
man's reason; and if he be, as his friends hope, sane and right-
judging, thou wilt give him certain papers, which, after his hand has
signed them, thou wilt bring back to me.  If in this thou succeedest,
know that thou mayst restore the royalty of Lancaster to the purple
and the throne; that thou wilt have princes and earls for favourers
and protectors to thy learned life; that thy fortunes and fame are
made!  Fail, be discovered,--and Edward of York never spares!--thy
guerdon will be the nearest tree and the strongest rope!"

"Robert," said Adam, who had listened to this address with unusual
attention, "thou dealest with me plainly, and as man should deal with
man.  I know little of stratagem and polity, wars and kings; and save
that King Henry, though passing ignorant in the mathematics, and more
given to alchemists than to solid seekers after truth, was once or
twice gracious to me, I could have no choice, in these four walls,
between an Edward and a Henry on the throne.  But I have a king whose
throne is in mine own breast, and, alack, it taxeth me heavily, and
with sore burdens."

"I comprehend," said the visitor, glancing round the room,--"I
comprehend: thou wantest money for thy books and instruments, and thy
melancholic passion is thy sovereign.  Thou wilt incur the risk?"

"I will," said Adam.  "I would rather seek in the lion's den for what
I lack than do what I well-nigh did this day."

"What crime was that, poor scholar?" said Robin, smiling.

"My child worked for her bread and my luxuries--I would have robbed
her, old schoolfellow.  Ha, ha! what is cord and gibbet to one so
tempted?"

A tear stood in the bright gray eyes of the bluff visitor.  "Ah,
Adam," he said sadly, "only by the candle held in the skeleton hand of
Poverty can man read his own dark heart.  But thou, Workman of
Knowledge, hast the same interest as the poor who dig and delve.
Though strange circumstance hath made me the servant and emissary of
Margaret, think not that I am but the varlet of the great."  Hilyard
paused a moment, and resumed,--

"Thou knowest, peradventure, that my race dates from an elder date
than these Norman nobles, who boast their robber-fathers.  From the
renowned Saxon Thane, who, free of hand and of cheer, won the name of
Hildegardis, [Hildegardis, namely, old German, a person of noble or
generous disposition.  Wotton's "Baronetage," art. Hilyard, or
Hildyard, of Pattrington.] our family took its rise.  But under these
Norman barons we sank with the nation to which we belonged.  Still
were we called gentlemen, and still were dubbed knights.  But as I
grew up to man's estate, I felt myself more Saxon than gentleman, and,
as one of a subject and vassal race, I was a son of the Saxon people.
My father, like thee, was a man of thought and bookcraft.  I dare own
to thee that he was a Lollard; and with the religion of those bold
foes to priest-vice, goes a spirit that asks why the people should be
evermore the spoil and prey of lords and kings.  Early in my youth, my
father, fearing rack and fagot in England, sought refuge in the Hans
town of Lubeck.  There I learned grave truths,--how liberty can be won
and guarded.  Later in life I saw the republics of Italy, and I asked
why they were so glorious in all the arts and craft of civil life,
while the braver men of France and England seemed as savages by the
side of the Florentine burgess, nay, of the Lombard vine-dresser.  I
saw that, even when those republics fell a victim to some tyrant or
podesta, their men still preserved rights and uttered thoughts which
left them more free and more great than the Commons of England after
all their boasted wars.  I came back to my native land and settled in
the North, as my franklin ancestry before me.  The broad lands of my
forefathers had devolved on the elder line, and gave a knight's fee to
Sir Robert Hilyard, who fell afterwards at Towton for the
Lancastrians.  But I had won gold in the far countree, and I took farm
and homestead near Lord Warwick's tower of Middleham.  The feud
between Lancaster and York broke forth; Earl Warwick summoned his
retainers, myself amongst them, since I lived upon his land; I sought
the great earl, and I told him boldly--him whom the Commons deemed a
friend, and a foe to all malfaisance and abuse--I told him that the
war he asked me to join seemed to me but a war of ambitious lords, and
that I saw not how the Commons were to be bettered, let who would be
king.  The earl listened and deigned to reason; and when he saw I was
not convinced, he left me to my will; for he is a noble chief, and I
admired even his angry pride, when he said, 'Let no man fight for
Warwick whose heart beats not in his cause.'  I lived afterwards to
discharge my debt to the proud earl, and show him how even the lion
may be meshed, and how even the mouse may gnaw the net.  But to my own
tragedy.  So I quitted those parts, for I feared my own resolution
near so great a man; I made a new home not far from the city of York.
So, Adam, when all the land around bristled with pike and gisarme, and
while my own cousin and namesake, the head of my House, was winning
laurels and wasting blood--I, thy quarrelsome, fighting friend--lived
at home in peace with my wife and child (for I was now married, and
wife and child were dear to me), and tilled my lands.  But in peace I
was active and astir, for my words inflamed the bosoms of labourers
and peasants, and many of them, benighted as they were, thought with
me.  One day--I was absent from home, selling my grain in the marts of
York--one day there entered the village a young captain, a boy-chief,
Edward Earl of March, beating for recruits.  Dost thou heed me, Adam?
Well, man--well, the peasants stood aloof from tromp and banner, and
they answered, to all the talk of hire and fame, 'Robin Hilyard tells
us we have nothing to gain but blows,--leave us to hew and to delve.'
Oh, Adam, this boy, this chief, the Earl of March, now crowned King
Edward, made but one reply, 'This Robin Hilyard must be a wise man,--
show me his house.'  They pointed out the ricks, the barns, the
homestead, and in five minutes all--all were in flames.  'Tell the
hilding, when he returns, that thus Edward of March, fair to friends
and terrible to foes, rewards the coward who disaffects the men of
Yorkshire to their chief.' And by the blazing rafters, and the pale
faces of the silent crowd, he rode on his way to battle and the
throne!"

Hilyard paused, and the anguish of his countenance was terrible to
behold.

"I returned to find a heap of ashes; I returned to find my wife a
maniac; I returned to find my child--my boy--great God!--he had run to
hide himself, in terror at the torches and the grim men; they had
failed to discover him, till, too late, his shrieks, amidst the
crashing walls, burst on his mother's ear,--and the scorched, mangled,
lifeless corpse lay on that mother's bosom!"

Adam rose; his figure was transformed.  Not the stooping student, but
the knight-descended man, seemed to tower in the murky chamber; his
hand felt at his side, as for a sword; he stifled a curse, and
Hilyard, in that suppressed low voice which evinces a strong mind in
deep emotion, continued his tale.

"Blessed be the Divine Intercessor, the mother of the dead died too!
Behold me, a lonely, ruined, wifeless, childless wretch!  I made all
the world my foe!  The old love of liberty (alone left me) became a
crime; I plunged into the gloom of the forest, a robber-chief,
sparing--no, never-never--never one York captain, one spurred knight,
one belted lord!  But the poor, my Saxon countrymen, they had
suffered, and were safe!

"One dark twilight--thou hast heard the tale, every village minstrel
sets it to his viol--a majestic woman, a hunted fugitive, crossed my
path; she led a boy in her hand, a year or so younger than my murdered
child.  'Friend!' said the woman, fearlessly, 'save the son of your
king; I am Margaret, Queen of England!' I saved them both.  From that
hour the robber-chief, the Lollard's son, became a queen's friend.
Here opened, at least, vengeance against the fell destroyer.  Now see
you why I seek you, why tempt you into danger?  Pause, if you will,
for my passion heats my blood,--and all the kings since Saul, it may
be, are not worth one scholar's life!  And yet," continued Hilyard,
regaining his ordinary calm tone, "and yet, it seemeth to me, as I
said at first, that all who labour have in this a common cause and
interest with the poor.  This woman-king, though bloody man, with his
wine-cups and his harlots, this usurping York--his very existence
flaunts the life of the sons of toil.  In civil war and in broil, in
strife that needs the arms of the people, the people shall get their
own."

"I will go," said Adam, and he advanced to the door.  Hilyard caught
his arm.  "Why, friend, thou hast not even the documents, and how
wouldst thou get access to the prison?  Listen to me; or," added the
conspirator, observing poor Adam's abstracted air, "or let me rather
speak a word to thy fair daughter; women have ready wit, and are the
pioneers to the advance of men!  Adam, Adam! thou art dreaming!"--He
shook the philosopher's arm roughly.

"I heed you," said Warner, meekly.

"The first thing required," renewed Hilyard, "is a permit to see King
Henry.  This is obtained either from the Lord Worcester, governor of
the Tower, a cruel man, who may deny it, or the Lord Hastings,
Edward's chamberlain, a humane and gentle one, who will readily grant
it.  Let not thy daughter know why thou wouldst visit Henry; let her
suppose it is solely to make report of his health to Margaret; let her
not know there is scheming or danger,--so, at least, her ignorance
will secure her safety.  But let her go to the lord chamberlain, and
obtain the order for a learned clerk to visit the learned prisoner--
to--ha! well thought of--this strange machine is, doubtless, the
invention of which thy neighbours speak; this shall make thy excuse;
thou wouldst divert the prisoner with thy mechanical--comprehendest
thou, Adam?"

"Ah, King Henry will see the model, and when he is on the throne--"

"He will protect the scholar!" interrupted Hilyard.  "Good! good!
Wait here; I will confer with thy daughter."  He gently pushed aside
Adam, opened the door, and on descending the stairs, found Sibyll by
the large casement where she had stood with Marmaduke, and heard the
rude stave of the tymbesteres.

The anxiety the visit of Hilyard had occasioned her was at once
allayed, when he informed her that he had been her father's
schoolmate, and desired to become his friend.  And when he drew a
moving picture of the exiled condition of Margaret and the young
prince, and their natural desire to learn tidings of the health of the
deposed king, her gentle heart, forgetting the haughty insolence with
which her royal mistress had often wounded and chilled her childhood,
felt all the generous and compassionate sympathy the conspirator
desired to awaken.  "The occasion," added Hilyard, "for learning the
poor captive's state now offers!  He hath heard of your father's
labours; he desires to learn their nature from his own lips.  He is
allowed to receive, by an order from King Edward's chamberlain, the
visits of those scholars in whose converse he was ever wont to
delight.  Wilt thou so far aid the charitable work as to seek the Lord
Hastings, and crave the necessary license?  Thou seest that thy father
has wayward and abstract moods; he might forget that Henry of Windsor
is no longer king, and might give him that title in speaking to Lord
Hastings,--a slip of the tongue which the law styles treason."

"Certes," said Sibyll, quickly, "if my father would seek the poor
captive, I will be his messenger to my Lord Hastings.  But oh, sir, as
thou hast known my father's boyhood, and as thou hopest for mercy in
the last day, tempt to no danger one so guileless!"

Hilyard winced as he interrupted her hastily,

"There is no danger if thou wilt obtain the license.  I will say
more,--a reward awaits him, that will not only banish his poverty but
save his life."

"His life!"

"Ay! seest thou not, fair mistress, that Adam Warner is dying, not of
the body's hunger, but of the soul's?  He craveth gold, that his toils
may reap their guerdon.  If that gold be denied, his toils will fret
him to the grave!"

"Alas! alas! it is true."

"That gold he shall honourably win!  Nor is this all.  Thou wilt see
the Lord Hastings: he is less learned, perhaps, than Worcester, less
dainty in accomplishments and gifts than Anthony Woodville, but his
mind is profound and vast; all men praise him save the queen's kin.
He loves scholars; he is mild to distress; he laughs at the
superstitions of the vulgar.  Thou wilt see the Lord Hastings, and
thou mayst interest him in thy father's genius and his fate!"

"There is frankness in thy voice, and I will trust thee," answered
Sibyll.  "When shall I seek this lord?"

"This day, if thou wilt.  He lodges at the Tower, and gives access, it
is said, to all who need his offices, or seek succour from his power."

"This day, then, be it!" answered Sibyll, calmly.

Hilyard gazed at her countenance, rendered so noble in its youthful
resignation, in its soft firmness of expression, and muttering,
"Heaven prosper thee, maiden; we shall meet tomorrow," descended the
stairs, and quitted the house.

His heart smote him when he was in the street.  "If evil should come
to this meek scholar, to that poor child's father, it would be a sore
sin to my soul.  But no; I will not think it.  The saints will not
suffer this bloody Edward to triumph long; and in this vast chessboard
of vengeance and great ends, we must move men to and fro, and harden
our natures to the hazard of the game."

Sibyll sought her father; his mind had flown back to the model.  He
was already living in the life that the promised gold would give to
the dumb thought.  True that all the ingenious additions to the
engine--additions that were to convince the reason and startle the
fancy--were not yet complete (for want, of course, of the diamond
bathed in moonbeams); but still there was enough in the inventions
already achieved to excite curiosity and obtain encouragement.  So,
with care and diligence and sanguine hope the philosopher prepared the
grim model for exhibition to a man who had worn a crown, and might
wear again.  But with that innocent and sad cunning which is so common
with enthusiasts of one idea, the sublime dwellers of the narrow
border between madness and inspiration, Adam, amidst his excitement,
contrived to conceal from his daughter all glimpse of the danger he
ran, of the correspondence of which he was to be the medium,--or
rather, may we think that he had forgotten both!  Not the stout
Warwick himself, in the roar of battle, thought so little of peril to
life and limb as that gentle student, in the reveries of his lonely
closet; and therefore, all unsuspicious, and seeing but diversion to
Adam's recent gloom of despair, an opening to all his bright
prospects, Sibyll attired herself in her holiday garments, drew her
wimple closely round her face, and summoning Madge to attend her, bent
her way to the Tower.  Near York House, within view of the Sanctuary
and the Palace of Westminster, they took a boat, and arrived at the
stairs of the Tower.




CHAPTER IV.

LORD HASTINGS.

William Lord Hastings was one of the most remarkable men of the age.
Philip de Comines bears testimony to his high repute for wisdom and
virtue.  Born the son of a knight of ancient lineage but scanty lands,
he had risen, while yet in the prime of life, to a rank and an
influence second, perhaps, only to the House of Nevile.  Like Lord
Montagu, he united in happy combination the talents of a soldier and a
courtier.  But as a statesman, a schemer, a thinker, Montagu, with all
his craft, was inferior to Hastings.  In this, the latter had but two
equals,--namely, George, the youngest of the Nevile brothers,
Archbishop of York; and a boy, whose intellect was not yet fully
developed, but in whom was already apparent to the observant the dawn
of a restless, fearless, calculating, and subtle genius.  That boy,
whom the philosophers of Utrecht had taught to reason, whom the
lessons of Warwick had trained to arms, was Richard, Duke of
Gloucester, famous even now for his skill in the tilt-yard and his
ingenuity in the rhetoric of the schools.

The manners of Lord Hastings had contributed to his fortunes.  Despite
the newness of his honours, even the haughtiest of the ancient nobles
bore him no grudge, for his demeanour was at once modest and manly.
He was peculiarly simple and unostentatious in his habits, and
possessed that nameless charm which makes men popular with the lowly
and welcome to the great.  [On Edward's accession so highly were the
services of Hastings appreciated by the party, that not only the king,
but many of the nobility, contributed to render his wealth equal to
his new station, by grants of lands and moneys.  Several years
afterwards, when he went with Edward into France, no less than two
lords, nine knights, fifty-eight squires, and twenty gentlemen joined
his train.--Dugdale: Baronage, p. 583.  Sharon Turner: History of
England, vol. iii. p. 380.]  But in that day a certain mixture of vice
was necessary to success; and Hastings wounded no self-love by the
assumption of unfashionable purism.  He was regarded with small favour
by the queen, who knew him as the companion of Edward in his
pleasures, and at a later period accused him of enticing her faithless
lord into unworthy affections.  And certain it is, that he was
foremost amongst the courtiers in those adventures which we call the
excesses of gayety and folly, though too often leading to Solomon's
wisdom and his sadness.  But profligacy with Hastings had the excuse
of ardent passions: he had loved deeply, and unhappily, in his earlier
youth, and he gave in to the dissipation of the time with the restless
eagerness common to strong and active natures when the heart is not at
ease; and under all the light fascination of his converse; or the
dissipation of his life, lurked the melancholic temperament of a man
worthy of nobler things.  Nor was the courtly vice of the libertine
the only drawback to the virtuous character assigned to Hastings by
Comines.  His experience of men had taught him something of the
disdain of the cynic, and he scrupled not at serving his pleasures or
his ambition by means which his loftier nature could not excuse to his
clear sense.  [See Comines, book vi., for a curious anecdote of what
Mr. Sharon Turner happily calls "the moral coquetry" of Hastings,--an
anecdote which reveals much of his character.]  Still, however, the
world, which had deteriorated, could not harden him.  Few persons so
able acted so frequently from impulse; the impulses were for the most
part affectionate and generous, but then came the regrets of caution
and experience; and Hastings summoned his intellect to correct the
movement of his heart,--in other words, reflection sought to undo what
impulse had suggested.  Though so successful a gallant, he had not
acquired the ruthless egotism of the sensualist; and his conduct to
women often evinced the weakness of giddy youth rather than the cold
deliberation of profligate manhood.  Thus in his veriest vices there
was a spurious amiability, a seductive charm; while in the graver
affairs of life the intellectual susceptibility of his nature served
but to quicken his penetration and stimulate his energies, and
Hastings might have said, with one of his Italian contemporaries,
"That in subjection to the influences of women he had learned the
government of men."  In a word, his powers to attract, and his
capacities to command, may be guessed by this,--that Lord Hastings was
the only man Richard III. seems to have loved, when Duke of
Gloucester, [Sir Thomas More, "Life of Edward V.," speaks of "the
great love" Richard bore to Hastings.] and the only man he seems to
have feared, when resolved to be King of England.

Hastings was alone in the apartments assigned to him in the Tower,
when his page, with a peculiar smile, announced to him the visit of a
young donzell, who would not impart her business to his attendants.

The accomplished chamberlain looked up somewhat impatiently from the
beautiful manuscripts, enriched with the silver verse of Petrarch,
which lay open on his table, and after muttering to himself, "It is
only Edward to whom the face of a woman never is unwelcome," bade the
page admit the visitor.  The damsel entered, and the door closed upon
her.

"Be not alarmed, maiden," said Hastings, touched by the downcast bend
of the hooded countenance, and the unmistakable and timid modesty of
his visitor's bearing.  "What hast thou to say to me?"

At the sound of his voice, Sibyll Warner started, and uttered a faint
exclamation.  The stranger of the pastime-ground was before her.
Instinctively she drew the wimple yet more closely round her face, and
laid her hand upon the bolt of the door as if in the impulse of
retreat.

The nobleman's curiosity was roused.  He looked again and earnestly on
the form that seemed to shrink from his gaze; then rising slowly, he
advanced, and laid his band on her arm.  "Donzell, I recognize thee,"
he said, in a voice that sounded cold and stern.  "What service
wouldst thou ask me to render thee?  Speak!  Nay!  I pray thee,
speak."

"Indeed, good my lord," said Sibyll, conquering her confusion; and,
lifting her wimple, her dark blue eyes met those bent on her, with
fearless truth and innocence, "I knew not, and you will believe me,--I
knew not till this moment that I had such cause for gratitude to the
Lord Hastings.  I sought you but on the behalf of my father, Master
Adam Warner, who would fain have the permission accorded to other
scholars, to see the Lord Henry of Windsor, who was gracious to him in
other days, and to while the duress of that princely captive with the
show of a quaint instrument he has invented."

"Doubtless," answered Hastings, who deserved his character (rare in
that day) for humanity and mildness--"doubt less it will pleasure me,
nor offend his grace the king, to show all courtesy and indulgence to
the unhappy gentleman and lord, whom the weal of England condemns us
to hold incarcerate.  I have heard of thy father, maiden, an honest
and simple man, in whom we need not fear a conspirator; and of thee,
young mistress, I have heard also, since we parted."

"Of me, noble sir?"

"Of thee," said Hastings, with a smile; and, placing a seat for her,
he took from the table an illuminated manuscript.  "I have to thank
thy friend Master Alwyn for procuring me this treasure!"

"What, my lord!" said Sibyll, and her eyes glistened, were you--you
the--the--"

"The fortunate person whom Alwyn has enriched at so slight a cost?
Yes.  Do not grudge me my good fortune in this.  Thou hast nobler
treasures, methinks, to bestow on another!"

"My good lord!"

"Nay, I must not distress thee.  And the young gentleman has a fair
face; may it bespeak a true heart!"

These words gave Sibyll an emotion of strange delight.  They seemed
spoken sadly, they seemed to betoken a jealous sorrow; they awoke the
strange, wayward woman-feeling, which is pleased at the pain that
betrays the woman's influence: the girl's rosy lips smiled
maliciously.  Hastings watched her, and her face was so radiant with
that rare gleam of secret happiness,--so fresh, so young, so pure, and
withal so arch and captivating, that hackneyed and jaded as he was in
the vulgar pursuit of pleasure, the sight moved better and tenderer
feelings than those of the sensualist. "Yes," he muttered to
himself, "there are some toys it were a sin to sport with and cast
away amidst the broken rubbish of gone passions!"

He turned to the table, and wrote the order of admission to Henry's
prison, and as he gave it to Sibyll, he said, "Thy young gallant, I
see, is at the court now.  It is a perilous ordeal, and especially to
one for whom the name of Nevile opens the road to advancement and
honour.  Men learn betimes in courts to forsake Love for Plutus, and
many a wealthy lord would give his heiress to the poorest gentleman
who claims kindred to the Earl of Salisbury and Warwick."

"May my father's guest so prosper," answered Sibyll, "for he seems of
loyal heart and gentle nature!"

"Thou art unselfish, sweet mistress," said Hastings; and, surprised by
her careless tone, he paused a moment: "or art thou, in truth,
indifferent?  Saw I not thy hand in his, when even those loathly
tymbesteres chanted warning to thee for loving, not above thy merits,
but, alas, it may be, above thy fortunes?"

Sibyll's delight increased.  Oh, then, he had not applied that hateful
warning to himself!  He guessed not her secret.  She blushed, and the
blush was so chaste and maidenly, while the smile that went with it
was so ineffably animated and joyous, that Hastings exclaimed, with
unaffected admiration, "Surely, fair donzell, Petrarch dreamed of
thee, when he spoke of the woman-blush and the angel-smile of Laura.
Woe to the man who would injure thee!  Farewell!  I would not see thee
too often, unless I saw thee ever."

He lifted her hand to his lips with a chivalrous respect as he spoke;
opened the door, and called his page to attend her to the gates.

Sibyll was more flattered by the abrupt dismissal than if he had knelt
to detain her.  How different seemed the world as her light step
wended homeward!




CHAPTER V.

MASTER ADAM WARNER AND KING HENRY THE SIXTH.

The next morning Hilyard revisited Warner with the letters for Henry.
The conspirator made Adam reveal to him the interior mechanism of the
Eureka, to which Adam, who had toiled all night, had appended one of
the most ingenious contrivances he had as yet been enabled (sans the
diamond) to accomplish, for the better display of the agencies which
the engine was designed to achieve.  This contrivance was full of
strange cells and recesses, in one of which the documents were placed.
And there they lay, so well concealed as to puzzle the minutest
search, if not aided by the inventor, or one to whom he had
communicated the secrets of the contrivance.

After repeated warnings and exhortations to discretion, Hilyard then,
whose busy, active mind had made all the necessary arrangements,
summoned a stout-looking fellow, whom he had left below, and with his
aid conveyed the heavy machine across the garden, to a back lane,
where a mule stood ready to receive the burden.

"Suffer this trusty fellow to guide thee, dear Adam; he will take thee
through ways where thy brutal neighbours are not likely to meet and
molest thee.  Call all thy wits to the surface.  Speed and prosper!"

"Fear not," said Adam, disdainfully.  "In the neighbourhood of kings,
science is ever safe.  Bless thee, child," and he laid his hand upon
Sibyll's head, for she had accompanied them thus far in silence, "now
go in."

"I go with thee, Father," said Sibyll, firmly.  "Master Hilyard, it is
best so," she whispered; "what if my father fall into one of his
reveries?"

"You are right: go with him, at least, to the Tower gate.  Hard by is
the house of a noble dame and a worthy, known to our friend Hugh,
where thou mayest wait Master Warner's return.  It will not suit thy
modesty and sex to loiter amongst the pages and soldiery in the yard.
Adam, thy daughter must wend with thee."

Adam had not attended to this colloquy, and mechanically bowing his
head, he set off, and was greatly surprised, on gaining the river-side
(where a boat was found large enough to accommodate not only the human
passengers, but the mule and its burden), to see Sibyll by his side.

The imprisonment of the unfortunate Henry, though guarded with
sufficient rigour against all chances of escape, was not, as the
reader has perceived, at this period embittered by unnecessary
harshness.  His attendants treated him with respect, his table was
supplied more abundantly and daintily than his habitual abstinence
required, and the monks and learned men whom he had favoured, were, we
need not repeat, permitted to enliven his solitude with their grave
converse.

On the other hand, all attempts at correspondence between Margaret or
the exiled Lancastrians and himself had been jealously watched, and
when detected, the emissaries had been punished with relentless
severity.  A man named Hawkins had been racked for attempting to
borrow money for the queen from the great London merchant, Sir Thomas
Cook.  A shoemaker had been tortured to death with red-hot pincers for
abetting her correspondence with her allies.  Various persons had been
racked for similar offences; but the energy of Margaret and the zeal
of her adherents were still unexhausted and unconquered.

Either unconscious or contemptuous of the perils to which he was
subjected, the student, with his silent companions, performed the
voyage, and landed in sight of the Fortress-Palatine.  And now Hugh
stopped before a house of good fashion, knocked at the door, which was
opened by an old servitor, disappeared for a few moments, and
returning, informed Sibyll, in a meaning whisper, that the gentlewoman
within was a good Lancastrian, and prayed the donzell to rest in her
company till Master Warner's return.

Sibyll, accordingly, after pressing her father's hand without fear--
for she had deemed the sole danger Adam risked was from the rabble by
the way--followed Hugh into a fair chamber, strewed with rushes, where
an aged dame, of noble air and aspect, was employed at her broidery
frame.  This gentlewoman, the widow of a nobleman who had fallen in
the service of Henry, received her graciously, and Hugh then retired
to complete his commission.  The student, the mule, the model, and the
porter pursued their way to the entrance of that part of the gloomy
palace inhabited by Henry.  Here they were stopped, and Adam, after
rummaging long in vain for the chamberlain's passport, at last happily
discovered it, pinned to his sleeve, by Sibyll's forethought.  On this
a gentleman was summoned to inspect the order, and in a few moments
Adam was conducted to the presence of the illustrious prisoner.

"And what," said a subaltern officer, lolling by the archway of the
(now styled) "Bloody Tower," hard by the turret devoted to the
prisoner, [The Wakefield Tower] and speaking to Adam's guide, who
still mounted guard by the model,--"what may be the precious burden of
which thou art the convoy?"

"Marry, sir," said Hugh, who spoke in the strong Yorkshire dialect,
which we are obliged to render into intelligible English--"marry, I
weet not,--it is some curious puppet-box, or quiet contrivance, that
Master Warner, whom they say is a very deft and ingenious personage,
is permitted to bring hither for the Lord Henry's diversion."

"A puppet-box!" said the officer, with much animated curiosity.
"'Fore the Mass! that must be a pleasant sight.  Lift the lid,
fellow!"

"Please your honour, I do not dare," returned Hugh,--"I but obey
orders."

"Obey mine, then.  Out of the way," and the officer lifted the lid of
the pannier with the point of his dagger, and peered within.  He drew
back, much disappointed.  "Holy Mother!" said he, "this seemeth more
like an instrument of torture than a juggler's merry device.  It looks
parlous ugly!"

"Hush!" said one of the lazy bystanders, with whom the various
gateways and courts of the Palace-Fortress were crowded, "hush--thy
cap and thy knee, sir!"

The officer started; and, looking round, perceived a young man of low
stature, followed by three or four knights and nobles, slowly
approaching towards the arch, and every cap in the vicinity was off,
and every knee bowed.

The eye of this young man was already bent, with a searching and keen
gaze, upon the motionless mule, standing patiently by the Wakefield
Tower; and turning from the mule to the porter, the latter shrunk, and
grew pale, at that dark, steady, penetrating eye, which seemed to
pierce at once into the secrets and hearts of men.

"Who may this young lord be?" he whispered to the officer.

"Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, man," was the answer.  "Uncover,
varlet!"

"Surely," said the prince, pausing by the gate, "surely this is no
sumpter-mule, bearing provisions to the Lord Henry of Windsor.  It
would be but poor respect to that noble person, whom, alas the day!
his grace the king is unwillingly compelled to guard from the
malicious designs of rebels and mischief-seekers, that one not bearing
the king's livery should attend to any of the needful wants of so
worshipful a lord and guest!"

"My lord," said the officer at the gate, "one Master Adam Warner hath
just, by permission, been conducted to the Lord Henry's presence, and
the beast beareth some strange and grim-looking device for my lord's
diversion."

The singular softness and urbanity which generally characterized the
Duke of Gloucester's tone and bearing at that time,--which in a court
so full of factions and intrigues made him the enemy of none and
seemingly the friend of all, and, conjoined with abilities already
universally acknowledged, had given to his very boyhood a pre-eminence
of grave repute and good opinion, which, indeed, he retained till the
terrible circumstances connected with his accession to the throne,
under the bloody name of Richard the Third, roused all men's hearts
and reasons into the persuasion that what before had seemed virtue was
but dissimulation,--this singular sweetness, we say, of manner and
voice, had in it, nevertheless, something that imposed and thrilled
and awed.  And in truth, in our common and more vulgar intercourse
with life, we must have observed, that where external gentleness of
bearing is accompanied by a repute for iron will, determined
resolution, and a serious, profound, and all-inquiring intellect, it
carries with it a majesty wholly distinct from that charm which is
exercised by one whose mildness of nature corresponds with the outward
humility; and, if it does not convey the notion of falseness, bears
the appearance of that perfect self-possession, that calm repose of
power, which intimidates those it influences far more than the
imperious port and the loud voice.  And they who best knew the duke,
knew also that, despite this general smoothness of mien, his
temperament was naturally irritable, quick, and subject to stormy
gusts of passion, the which defects his admirers praised him for
labouring hard and sedulously to keep in due control.  Still, to a
keen observer, the constitutional tendencies of that nervous
temperament were often visible, even in his blandest moments, even
when his voice was most musical, his smile most gracious.  If
something stung or excited him, an uneasy gnawing of the nether lip, a
fretful playing with his dagger, drawing it up and down from its
sheath, [Pol. Virg. 565] a slight twitching of the muscles of the
face, and a quiver of the eyelid, betokened the efforts he made at
self-command; and now, as his dark eyes rested upon Hugh's pale
countenance, and then glanced upon the impassive mule, dozing quietly
under the weight of poor Adam's model, his hand mechanically sought
his dagger-hilt, and his face took a sinister and sombre expression.

"Thy name, friend?"

"Hugh Withers, please you, my lord duke."

"Um!  North country, by thine accent.  Dost thou serve this Master
Warner?"

"No, my lord, I was only hired with my mule to carry--"

"Ah, true! to carry what thy pannier contains; open it.  Holy Paul! a
strange jonglerie indeed!  This Master Adam Warner,--methinks, I have
heard his name--a learned man--um--let me see his safe conduct.
Right,--it is Lord Hastings's signature."  But still the prince held
the passport, and still suspiciously eyed the Eureka and its
appliances, which, in their complicated and native ugliness of doors,
wheels, pipes, and chimney, were exposed to his view.  At this moment,
one of the attendants of Henry descended the stairs of the Wakefield
Tower, with a request that the model might be carried up to divert the
prisoner.

Richard paused a moment, as the officer hesitatingly watched his
countenance before giving the desired permission.  But the prince,
turning to him, and smoothing his brow, said mildly, "Certes! all that
can divert the Lord Henry must be innocent pastime.  And I am well
pleased that he hath this cheerful mood for recreation.  It gainsayeth
those who would accuse us of rigour in his durance.  Yes, this warrant
is complete and formal;" and the prince returned the passport to the
officer, and walked slowly on through that gloomy arch ever more
associated with Richard of Gloucester's memory, and beneath the very
room in which our belief yet holds that the infant sons of Edward IV.
breathed their last; still, as Gloucester moved, he turned and turned,
and kept his eye furtively fixed upon the porter.

"Lovell," he said to one of the gentlemen who attended him, and who
was among the few admitted to his more peculiar intimacy, "that man is
of the North."

"Well, my lord?"

"The North was always well affected to the Lancastrians.  Master
Warner hath been accused of witchcraft.  Marry, I should like to see
his device--um; Master Catesby, come hither,--approach, sir.  Go back,
and the instant Adam Warner and his contrivance are dismissed, bring
them both to me in the king's chamber.  Thou understandest?  We too
would see his device,--and let neither man nor mechanical, when once
they reappear, out of thine eye's reach.  For divers and subtle are
the contrivances of treasonable men!"

Catesby bowed, and Richard, without speaking further, took his way to
the royal apartments, which lay beyond the White Tower, towards the
river, and are long since demolished.

Meanwhile the porter, with the aid of one of the attendants, had
carried the model into the chamber of the august captive.  Henry,
attired in a loose robe, was pacing the room with a slow step, and his
head sunk on his bosom,--while Adam with much animation was enlarging
on the wonders of the contrivance he was about to show him.  The
chamber was commodious, and furnished with sufficient attention to the
state and dignity of the prisoner; for Edward, though savage and
relentless when his blood was up, never descended into the cool and
continuous cruelty of detail.

The chamber may yet be seen,--its shape a spacious octagon; but the
walls now rude and bare were then painted and blazoned with scenes
from the Old Testament.  The door opened beneath the pointed arch in
the central side (not where it now does), giving entrance from a small
anteroom, in which the visitor now beholds the receptacle for old
rolls and papers.  At the right, on entering, where now, if our memory
mistake not, is placed a press, stood the bed, quaintly carved, and
with hangings of damascene.  At the farther end the deep recess which
faced the ancient door was fitted up as a kind of oratory.  And there
were to be seen, besides the crucifix and the Mass-book, a profusion
of small vessels of gold and crystal, containing the relics, supposed
or real, of saint and martyr, treasures which the deposed king had
collected in his palmier days at a sum that, in the minds of his
followers, had been better bestowed on arms and war-steeds.  A young
man named Allerton--one of the three gentlemen personally attached to
Henry, to whom Edward had permitted general access, and who, in fact,
lodged in other apartments of the Wakefield Tower, and might be said
to share his captivity--was seated before a table, and following the
steps of his musing master, with earnest and watchful eyes.

One of the small spaniels employed in springing game--for Henry,
despite his mildness, had been fond of all the sports of the field--
lay curled round on the floor, but started up, with a shrill bark, at
the entrance of the bearer of the model, while a starling in a cage by
the window, seemingly delighted at the disturbance, flapped his wings,
and screamed out, "Bad men!  Bad world!  Poor Henry!"

The captive paused at that cry, and a sad and patient smile of
inexpressible melancholy and sweetness hovered over his lips.  Henry
still retained much of the personal comeliness he possessed at the
time when Margaret of Anjou, the theme of minstrel and minne singer,
left her native court of poets for the fatal throne of England.  But
beauty, usually so popular and precious a gift to kings, was not in
him of that order which commanded the eye and moved the admiration of
a turbulent people and a haughty chivalry.  The features, if regular,
were small; their expression meek and timid; the form, though tall,
was not firm-knit and muscular; the lower limbs were too thin, the
body had too much flesh, the delicate hands betrayed the sickly
paleness of feeble health; there was a dreamy vagueness in the clear
soft blue eyes, and a listless absence of all energy in the habitual
bend, the slow, heavy, sauntering tread,--all about that benevolent
aspect, that soft voice, that resigned mien, and gentle manner, spoke
the exquisite, unresisting goodness, which provoked the lewd to taunt,
the hardy to despise, the insolent to rebel; for the foes of a king in
stormy times are often less his vices than his virtues.

"And now, good my lord," said Adam, hastening, with eager hands, to
assist the bearer in depositing the model on the table--"now will I
explain to you the contrivance which it hath cost me long years of
patient toil to shape from thought into this iron form."

"But first," said Allerton, "were it not well that these good people
withdrew?  A contriver likes not others to learn his secret ere the
time hath come to reap its profits."

"Surely, surely!" said Adam, and alarmed at the idea thus suggested,
he threw the folds of his gown over the model.

The attendant bowed and retired; Hugh followed him, but not till he
had exchanged a significant look with Allerton.  As soon as the room
was left clear to Adam, the captive, and Master Allerton, the last
rose, and looking hastily round the chamber, approached the
mechanician.  "Quick, sir!" said he, in a whisper, "we are not often
left without witnesses."

"Verily," said Adam, who had now forgotten kings and stratagems, plots
and counterplots, and was all absorbed in his invention, "verily,
young man, hurry not in this fashion,--I am about to begin.  Know, my
lord," and he turned to Henry, who, with an indolent, dreamy gaze,
stood contemplating the Eureka,--"know that more than a hundred years
before the Christian era, one Hero, an Alexandrian, discovered the
force produced by the vapour begot by heat on water.  That this power
was not unknown to the ancient sages, witness the contrivance, not
otherwise to be accounted for, of the heathen oracles; but to our
great countryman and predecessor, Roger Bacon, who first suggested
that vehicles might be drawn without steeds or steers, and ships
might--"

"Marry, sir," interrupted Allerton, with great impatience, "it is not
to prate to us of such trivial fables of Man, or such wanton sports of
the Foul Fiend, that thou hast risked limb and life.  Time is
precious.  I have been prevised that thou hast letters for King Henry;
produce them, quick!"

A deep glow of indignation had overspread the enthusiast's face at the
commencement of this address; but the close reminded him, in truth, of
his errand.

"Hot youth," said he, with dignity, "a future age may judge
differently of what thou deemest trivial fables, and may rate high
this poor invention when the brawls of York and Lancaster are
forgotten."

"Hear him," said Henry, with a soft smile, and laying his hand on the
shoulder of the young man, who was about to utter a passionate and
scornful retort,--"hear him,  sir.  Have I not often and ever said
this same thing to thee?  We children of a day imagine our contests
are the sole things that move the world.  Alack! our fathers thought
the same; and they and their turmoils sleep forgotten!  Nay, Master
Warner,"--for here Adam, poor man, awed by Henry's mildness into shame
at his discourteous vaunting, began to apologize,--"nay, sir, nay--
thou art right to contemn our bloody and futile struggles for a crown
of thorns; for--"

    'Kingdoms are but cares,
       State is devoid of stay
     Riches are ready snares,
       And hasten to decay.'

[Lines ascribed to Henry VI., with commendation "as a prettie verse,"
by Sir John Harrington, in the "Nugae Antiquate."  They are also given,
with little alteration, to the unhappy king by Baldwin, in his tragedy
of "King Henry VI."]

"And yet, sir, believe me, thou hast no cause for vain glory in thine
own craft and labours; for to wit and to lere there are the same
vanity and vexation of spirit as to war and empire.  Only, O would-be
wise man, only when we muse on Heaven do our souls ascend from the
fowler's snare!"

"My saint-like liege," said Allerton, bowing low, and with tears in
his eyes, "thinkest thou not that thy very disdain of thy rights makes
thee more worthy of them?  If not for thine, for thy son's sake,
remember that the usurper sits on the throne of the conqueror of
Agincourt!--Sir Clerk, the letters."

Adam, already anxious to retrieve the error of his first
forgetfulness, here, after a moment's struggle for the necessary
remembrance, drew the papers from the labyrinthine receptacle which
concealed them; and Henry uttered an exclamation of joy as, after
cutting the silk, his eye glanced over the writing--

"My Margaret! my wife!"  Presently he grew pale, and his hands
trembled.  "Saints defend her!  Saints defend her!  She is here,
disguised, in London!"

"Margaret! our hero-queen! the manlike woman!" exclaimed Allerton,
clasping his hands.  "Then be sure that--"  He stopped, and abruptly
taking Adam's arm, drew him aside, while Henry continued to read--
"Master Warner, we may trust thee,--thou art one of us; thou art sent
here, I know; by Robin of Redesdale,--we may trust thee?"

"Young sir," replied the philosopher, gravely, "the fears and hopes of
power are not amidst the uneasier passions of the student's mind.  I
pledged myself but to bear these papers hither, and to return with
what may be sent back."

"But thou didst this for love of the cause, the truth, and the right?"

"I did it partly from Hilyard's tale of wrong, but partly, also, for
the gold," answered Adam, simply; and his noble air, his high brow,
the serene calm of his features, so contrasted with the meanness
implied in the latter words of his confession, that Allerton stared at
him amazed, and without reply.

Meanwhile Henry had concluded the letter, and with a heavy sigh
glanced over the papers that accompanied it.  "Alack! alack! more
turbulence, more danger and disquiet, more of my people's blood!"  He
motioned to the young man, and drawing him to the window, while Adam
returned to his model, put the papers in his hand.  "Allerton," he
said, "thou lovest me, but thou art one of the few in this distraught
land who love also God.  Thou art not one of the warriors, the men of
steel.  Counsel me.  See: Margaret demands my signature to these
papers; the one, empowering and craving the levy of men and arms in
the northern counties; the other, promising free pardon to all who
will desert Edward; the third--it seemeth to me more strange and less
kinglike than the others--undertaking to abolish all the imposts and
all the laws that press upon the commons, and (is this a holy and
pious stipulation?) to inquire into the exactions and persecutions of
the priesthood of our Holy Church!"

"Sire!" said the young man, after he had hastily perused the papers,
"my lady liege showeth good argument for your assent to two, at least,
of these undertakings.  See the names of fifty gentlemen ready to take
arms in your cause if authorized by your royal warrant.  The men of
the North are malcontent with the usurper, but they will not yet stir,
unless at your own command.  Such documents will, of course, be used
with discretion, and not to imperil your Grace's safety."

"My safety!" said Henry, with a flash of his father's hero soul in his
eyes--"of that I think not!  If I have small courage to attack, I have
some fortitude to bear.  But three months after these be signed, how
many brave hearts will be still! how many stout hands be dust!  O
Margaret!  Margaret! why temptest thou?  Wert thou so happy when a
queen?"  The prisoner broke from Allerton's arm, and walked, in great
disorder and irresolution, to and fro the chamber; and strange it was
to see the contrast between himself and Warner,--both in so much
alike, both so purely creatures out of the common world, so gentle,
abstract, so utterly living in the life apart: and now the student so
calm, the prince so disturbed!  The contrast struck Henry himself!  He
paused abruptly, and, folding his arms, contemplated the philosopher,
as, with an affectionate complacency, Adam played and toyed, as it
were, with his beloved model; now opening and shutting again its
doors, now brushing away with his sleeve some particles of dust that
had settled on it, now retiring a few paces to gaze the better on its
stern symmetry.

"Oh, my Allerton!" cried Henry, "behold! the kingdom a man makes out
of his own mind is the only one that it delighteth man to govern!
Behold, he is lord over its springs and movements; its wheels revolve
and stop at his bidding.  Here, here, alone, God never asketh the
ruler, 'Why was the blood of thousands poured forth like water, that a
worm might wear a crown?'"

"Sire," said Allerton, solemnly, "when our Heavenly King appoints his
anointed representative on earth, He gives to that human delegate no
power to resign the ambassade and trust. What suicide is to a man,
abdication is to a king!  How canst thou dispose of thy son's rights?
And what becomes of those rights if thou wilt prefer for him the
exile, for thyself the prison, when one effort may restore a throne!"

Henry seemed struck by a tone of argument that suited both his own
mind and the reasoning of the age.  He gazed a moment on the face of
the young man, muttered to himself, and suddenly moving to the table,
signed the papers, and restored them to Adam, who mechanically
replaced them in their iron hiding-place.

"Now begone, Sir!" whispered Allerton, afraid that Henry's mind might
again change.

"Will not my lord examine the engine?" asked Warner, half-
beseechingly.

"Not to-day!  See, he has already retired to his oratory, he is in
prayer!" and, going to the door, Allerton summoned the attendants in
waiting to carry down the model.

"Well, well, patience, patience! thou shalt have thine audience at
last," muttered Adam, as he retired from the room, his eyes fixed upon
the neglected infant of his brain.




CHAPTER VI.

HOW, ON LEAVING KING LOG, FOOLISH WISDOM RUNS A-MUCK ON KING STORK.

At the outer door of the Tower by which he had entered, the
philosopher was accosted by Catesby,--a man who, in imitation of his
young patron, exhibited the soft and oily manner which concealed
intense ambition and innate ferocity.

"Worshipful my master," said he, bowing low, but with a half sneer on
his lips, "the king and his Highness the Duke of Gloucester have heard
much of your strange skill, and command me to lead you to their
presence.  Follow, sir, and you, my men, convey this quaint
contrivance to the king's apartments."

With this, not waiting for any reply, Catesby strode on.  Hugh's face
fell; he turned very pale, and, imagining himself unobserved, turned
round to slink away.  But Catesby, who seemed to have eyes at the back
of his head, called out, in a mild tone,--

"Good fellow, help to bear the mechanical--you, too, may be needed."

"Cog's wounds!" muttered Hugh, "an' I had but known what it was to set
my foot in a king's palace!  Such walking may do for the silken shoon,
but the hobnail always gets into a hobble."  With that, affecting a
cheerful mien, he helped to replace the model on the mule.

Meanwhile, Adam, elated, poor man! at the flattery of the royal
mandate, persuaded that his fame had reached Edward's ears, and chafed
at the little heed paid by the pious Henry to his great work, stalked
on, his head in the air.  "Verily," mused the student, "King Edward
may have been a cruel youth, and over hasty; it is horrible to think
of Robert Hilyard's calamities!  But men do say he hath an acute and
masterly comprehension.  Doubtless, he will perceive at a glance how
much I can advantage his kingdom."  With this, we grieve to say,
selfish reflection--which, if the thought of his model could have
slept a while, Adam would have blushed to recall, as an affront to
Hilyard's wrongs--the philosopher followed Catesby across the spacious
yard, along a narrow passage, and up a winding turret-stair, to a room
in the third story, which opened at one door into the king's closet,
at the other into the spacious gallery, which was already a feature in
the plan of the more princely houses.  In another minute Adam and his
model were in the presence of the king.  The part of the room in which
Edward sat was distinguished from the rest by a small eastern carpet
on the floor (a luxury more in use in the palaces of that day than it
appears to have been a century later); [see the Narrative of the Lord
Grauthuse, before referred to] a table was set before him, on which
the model was placed.  At his right hand sat Jacquetta, Duchess of
Bedford, the queen's mother; at his left, Prince Richard.  The
duchess, though not without the remains of beauty, had a stern,
haughty, scornful expression in her sharp aquiline features,
compressed lips, and imperious eye.  The paleness of her complexion,
and the careworn, anxious lines of her countenance, were ascribed by
the vulgar to studies of no holy cast. Her reputation for sorcery and
witchcraft was daily increasing, and served well the purpose of the
discontented barons, whom the rise of her children mortified and
enraged.

"Approach, Master--What say you his name is, Richard?"

"Adam Warner," replied the sweet voice of the Duke of Gloucester; "of
excellent skill in the mathematics."

"Approach, sir, and show us the nature of this notable invention."

"I desire nothing better, my lord king," said Adam, boldly; "but first
let me crave a small modicum of fuel.  Fire, which is the life of the
world, as the wise of old held it, is also the soul of this, my
mechanical."

"Peradventure," whispered the duchess, "the wizard desireth to consume
us."

"More likely," replied Richard, in the same undertone, "to consume
whatever of treasonable nature may lurk concealed in his engine."

"True," said Edward, and then, speaking aloud, "Master Warner," he
added, "put thy puppet to its purpose without fire,--we will it."

"It is impossible, my lord," said Adam, with a lofty smile.  "Science
and nature are more powerful than a king's word."

"Do not say that in public, my friend," said Edward, dryly, "or we
must hang thee!  I would not my subjects were told anything so
treasonable.  Howbeit, to give thee no excuse in failure, thou shalt
have what thou needest."

"But surely not in our presence," exclaimed the duchess.  "This may be
a device of the Lancastrians for our perdition."

"As you please, belle mere," said Edward, and he motioned to a
gentleman, who stood a few paces behind his chair, and who, from the
entrance of the mechanician, had seemed to observe him with intense
interest. "Master Nevile, attend this wise man; supply his wants, and
hark, in thy ear, watch well that he abstract nothing from the womb of
his engine; observe what he doeth; be all eyes."  Marmaduke bowed low
to conceal his change of countenance, and, stepping forward, made a
sign to Adam to follow him.

"Go also, Catesby," said Richard to his follower, who had taken his
post near him, "and clear the chamber."

As soon as the three members of the royal family were left alone, the
king, stretching himself, with a slight yawn, observed, "This man
looks not like a conspirator, brother Richard, though his sententiary
as to nature and science lacked loyalty and respect."

"Sire and brother," answered Richard, "great leaders often dupe their
own tools; at least, meseemeth that they would reason well so to do.
Remember, I have told thee that there is strong cause to suppose
Margaret to be in London.  In the suburbs of the city has also
appeared, within the last few weeks, that strange and dangerous
person, whose very objects are a mystery, save that he is our foe,--
Robin of Redesdale.  The men of the North have exhibited a spirit of
insurrection; a man of that country attends this reputed wizard, and
he himself was favoured in past times by Henry of Windsor.  These are
ominous signs when the conjunctions be considered!"

"It is well said; but a fair day for breathing our palfrey is half-
spent!" returned the indolent prince.  "By'r Lady!  I like the fashion
of thy super-tunic well, Richard; but thou hast it too much puffed
over the shoulders."

Richard's dark eye shot fire, and he gnawed his lip as he answered,
"God hath not given to me the fair shape of my kinsmen."

"Thy pardon, dear boy," said Edward, kindly; "yet little needest thou
our broad backs and strong sinews, for thou hast a tongue to charm
women and a wit to command men."

Richard bowed his face, little less beautiful than his brother's,
though wholly different from it in feature, for Edward had the long
oval countenance, the fair hair, the rich colouring, and the large
outline of his mother, the Rose of Raby.  Richard, on the contrary,
had the short face, the dark brown locks, and the pale olive
complexion of his father, whom he alone of the royal brothers
strikingly resembled.  [Pol. Virg. 544.]

The cheeks, too, were somewhat sunken, and already, though scarcely
past childhood, about his lips were seen the lines of thoughtful
manhood.  But then those small features, delicately aquiline, were so
regular; that dark eye was so deep, so fathomless in its bright,
musing intelligence; that quivering lip was at once so beautifully
formed and so expressive of intellectual subtlety and haughty will;
and that pale forehead was so massive, high, and majestic,--that when,
at a later period, the Scottish prelate [Archibald Quhitlaw.--"Faciem
tuam summo imperio principatu dignam inspicit, quam moralis et
heroica, virtus illustrat," etc.--We need scarcely observe that even a
Scotchman would not have risked a public compliment to Richard's face,
if so inappropriate as to seem a sarcasm, especially as the orator
immediately proceeds to notice the shortness of Richard's stature,--a
comment not likely to have been peculiarly acceptable in the Rous
Roll, the portrait of Richard represents him as undersized, but
compactly and strongly built, and without any sign of deformity,
unless the inelegant defect of a short neck can be so called.]
commended Richard's "princely countenance," the compliment was not one
to be disputed, much less contemned.  But now as he rose, obedient to
a whisper from the duchess, and followed her to the window, while
Edward appeared engaged in admiring the shape of his own long,
upturned shoes, those defects in his shape which the popular hatred
and the rise of the House of Tudor exaggerated into the absolute
deformity that the unexamining ignorance of modern days and
Shakspeare's fiery tragedy have fixed into established caricature,
were sufficiently apparent.  Deformed or hunchbacked we need scarcely
say he was not, for no man so disfigured could have possessed that
great personal strength which he invariably exhibited in battle,
despite the comparative slightness of his frame.  He was considerably
below the ordinary height, which the great stature of his brother
rendered yet more disadvantageous by contrast; but his lower limbs
were strong-jointed and muscular.  Though the back was not curved, yet
one shoulder was slightly higher than the other, which was the more
observable from the evident pains that he took to disguise it, and the
gorgeous splendour, savouring of personal coxcombry--from which no
Plantagenet was ever free,--that he exhibited in his dress.  And as,
in a warlike age, the physical conformation of men is always
critically regarded, so this defect and that of his low stature were
not so much redeemed as they would be in our day by the beauty and
intelligence of his face.  Added to this, his neck was short, and a
habit of bending his head on his bosom (arising either from thought,
or the affectation of humility, which was a part of his character)
made it seem shorter still.  But this peculiarity, while taking from
the grace, added to the strength of his frame, which, spare, sinewy,
and compact, showed to an observer that power of endurance, that
combination of solid stubbornness and active energy, which, at the
battle of Barnet, made him no less formidable to encounter than the
ruthless sword of the mighty Edward.

"So, prince," said the duchess, "this new gentleman of the king's is,
it seems, a Nevile.  When will Edward's high spirit cast off that
hateful yoke?"

Richard sighed and shook his head.  The duchess, encouraged by these
signs of sympathy, continued,--

"Your brother Clarence, Prince Richard, despises us, to cringe to the
proud earl.  But you--"

"I am not suitor to the Lady Isabel; Clarence is overlavish, and
Isabel has a fair face and a queenly dowry."

"May I perish," said the duchess, "ere Warwick's daughter wears the
baudekin of royalty, and sits in as high a state as the queen's
mother!  Prince, I would fain confer with thee; we have a project to
abase and banish this hateful lord.  If you but join us, success is
sure; the Count of Charolois--"

"Dear lady," interrupted Richard, with an air of profound humility,
"tell me nothing of plot or project; my years are too few for such
high and subtle policy; and the Lord Warwick hath been a leal friend
to our House of York."

The duchess bit her lip--"Yet I have heard you tell Edward that a
subject can be too powerful?"

"Never, lady! you have never heard me."

"Then Edward has told Elizabeth that you so spoke."

"Ah," said Richard, turning away with a smile, "I see that the king's
conscience hath a discreet keeper.  Pardon me, Edward, now that he
hath sufficiently surveyed his shoon, must marvel at this prolonged
colloquy.  And see, the door opens."

With this, the duke slowly moved to the table, and resumed his seat.

Marmaduke, full of fear for his ancient host, had in vain sought an
opportunity to address a few words of exhortation to him to forbear
all necromancy, and to abstain from all perilous distinctions between
the power of Edward IV. and that of his damnable Nature and Science;
but Catesby watched him with so feline a vigilance, that he was unable
to slip in more than--"Ah, Master Warner, for our blessed Lord's sake,
recollect that rack and cord are more than mere words here!"  To the
which pleasant remark, Adam, then busy in filling his miniature
boiler, only replied by a wistful stare, not in the least recognizing
the Nevile in his fine attire, and the new-fashioned mode of dressing
his long hair.

But Catesby watched in vain for the abstraction of any treasonable
contents in the engine, which the Duke of Gloucester had so shrewdly
suspected.  The truth must be told.  Adam had entirely forgotten that
in the intricacies of his mechanical lurked the papers that might
overthrow a throne!  Magnificent Incarnation was he (in that oblivion)
of Science itself, which cares not a jot for men and nations, in their
ephemeral existences; which only remembers THINGS,--things that endure
for ages; and in its stupendous calculations loses sight of the unit
of a generation!  No, he had thoroughly forgotten Henry, Edward, his
own limbs and life,--not only York and Lancaster, but Adam Warner and
the rack.  Grand in his forgetfulness, he stood before the tiger and
the tiger-cat,--Edward and--Richard,--A Pure Thought, a Man's Soul;
Science fearless in the presence of Cruelty, Tyranny, Craft, and
Power.

In truth, now that Adam was thoroughly in his own sphere, was in the
domain of which he was king, and those beings in velvet and ermine
were but as ignorant savages admitted to the frontier of his realm,
his form seemed to dilate into a majesty the beholders had not before
recognized; and even the lazy Edward muttered involuntarily, "By my
halidame, the man has a noble presence!"

"I am prepared now, sire," said Adam, loftily, "to show to my king and
to this court, that, unnoticed and obscure, in study and retreat,
often live those men whom kings may be proud to call their subjects.
Will it please you, my lords, this way!" and he motioned so
commandingly to the room in which he had left the Eureka, that his
audience rose by a common impulse, and in another minute stood grouped
round the model in the adjoining chamber.  This really wonderful
invention--so wonderful, indeed, that it will surpass the faith of
those who do not pause to consider what vast forestallments of modern
science have been made and lost in the darkness of ages not fitted to
receive them--was, doubtless, in many important details not yet
adapted for the practical uses to which Adam designed its application.
But as a mere model, as a marvellous essay, for the suggestion of
gigantic results, it was, perhaps, to the full as effective as the
ingenuity of a mechanic of our own day could construct.  It is true
that it was crowded with unnecessary cylinders, slides, cocks, and
wheals--hideous and clumsy to the eye--but through this intricacy the
great simple design accomplished its main object.  It contrived to
show what force and skill man can obtain from the alliance of nature;
the more clearly, inasmuch as the mechanism affixed to it, still more
ingenious than itself, was well calculated to illustrate practically
one of the many uses to which the principle was destined to be
applied.

Adam had not yet fathomed the secret by which to supply the miniature
cylinder with sufficient steam for any prolonged effect,--the great
truth of latent heat was unknown to him; but he had contrived to
regulate the supply of water so as to make the engine discharge its
duties sufficiently for the satisfaction of curiosity and the
explanation of its objects.  And now this strange thing of iron was in
full life.  From its serpent chimney issued the thick rapid smoke, and
the groan of its travail was heard within.

"And what propose you to yourself and to the kingdom in all this,
Master Adam?" asked Edward, curiously bending his tall person over the
tortured iron.

"I propose to make Nature the labourer of man," answered Warner.
"When I was a child of some eight years old, I observed that water
swelleth into vapour when fire is applied to it.  Twelve years
afterwards, at the age of twenty, I observed that while undergoing
this change it exerts a mighty mechanical force.  At twenty-five,
constantly musing, I said, 'Why should not that force become subject
to man's art?'  I then began the first rude model, of which this is
the descendant.  I noticed that the vapour so produced is elastic,--
that is, that as it expands, it presses against what opposes it; it
has a force applicable everywhere force is needed by man's labour.
Behold a second agency of gigantic resources!  And then, still
studying this, I perceived that the vapour thus produced can be
reconverted into water, shrinking necessarily, while so retransformed,
from the space it filled as vapour, and leaving that space a vacuum.
But Nature abhors a vacuum; produce a vacuum, and the bodies that
surround rush into it.  Thus, the vapour again, while changing back
into water, becomes also a force,--our agent.  And all the while these
truths were shaping themselves to my mind, I was devising and
improving also the material form by which I might render them useful
to man; so at last, out of these truths, arose this invention!"

"Pardie," said Edward, with the haste natural to royalty, "what in
common there can be between thy jargon of smoke and water and this
huge ugliness of iron passeth all understanding.  But spare us thy
speeches, and on to thy puppet-show."

Adam stared a moment at the king in the surprise that one full of his
subject feels when he sees it impossible to make another understand
it, sighed, shook his head, and prepared to begin.

"Observe," he said, "that there is no juggling, no deceit.  I will
place in this deposit this small lump of brass--would the size of this
toy would admit of larger experiment!  I will then pray ye to note, as
I open door after door, how the metal passes through various changes,
all operated by this one agency of vapour.  Heed and attend.  And if
the crowning work please thee, think, great king, what such an agency
upon the large scale would be to thee; think how it would multiply all
arts and lessen all labour; think that thou hast, in this, achieved
for a whole people the true philosopher's stone.  Now note!"

He placed the rough ore in its receptacle, and suddenly it seemed
seized by a vice within, and vanished.  He proceeded then, while
dexterously attending to the complex movements, to open door after
door, to show the astonished spectators the rapid transitions the
metal underwent, and suddenly, in the midst of his pride, he stopped
short, for, like a lightning-flash, came across his mind the
remembrance of the fatal papers.  Within the next door he was to open,
they lay concealed.  His change of countenance did not escape Richard,
and he noted the door which Adam forbore to open, as the student
hurriedly, and with some presence of mind, passed to the next, in
which the metal was shortly to appear.

"Open this door," said the prince, pointing to the handle.  "No!
forbear!  There is danger! forbear!" exclaimed the mechanician.

"Danger to thine own neck, varlet and impostor!" exclaimed the duke;
and he was about himself to open the door, when suddenly a loud roar,
a terrific explosion was heard.  Alas! Adam Warner had not yet
discovered for his engine what we now call the safety-valve.  The
steam contained in the miniature boiler had acquired an undue
pressure; Adam's attention had been too much engrossed to notice the
signs of the growing increase, and the rest may be easily conceived.
Nothing could equal the stupor and the horror of the spectators at
this explosion, save only the boy-duke, who remained immovable, and
still frowning.  All rushed to the door, huddling one on the other,
scarcely knowing what next was to befall them, but certain that the
wizard was bent upon their destruction.  Edward was the first to
recover himself; and seeing that no lives were lost, his first impulse
was that of ungovernable rage.

"Foul traitor!" he exclaimed, "was it for this that thou hast
pretended to beguile us with thy damnable sorceries?  Seize him!  Away
to the Tower Hill! and let the priest patter an ave while the doomsman
knots the rope."

Not a hand stirred; even Catesby would as lief have touched the king's
lion before meals, as that poor mechanician, standing aghast, and
unheeding all, beside his mutilated engine.

"Master Nevile," said the king, sternly, "dost thou hear us?

"Verily," muttered the Nevile, approaching very slowly, "I knew what
would happen; but to lay hands on my host, an' he were fifty times a
wizard--No!  My liege," he said in a firm tone, but falling on his
knee, and his gallant countenance pale with generous terror, "my
liege, forgive me.  This man succoured me when struck down and wounded
by a Lancastrian ruffian; this man gave me shelter, food, and healing.
Command me not, O gracious my lord, to aid in taking the life of one
to whom I owe my own."

"His life!" exclaimed the Duchess of Bedford,--"the life of this most
illustrious person!  Sire, you do not dream it!"

"Heh! by the saints, what now?" cried the king, whose choler, though
fierce and ruthless, was as short-lived as the passions of the
indolent usually are, and whom the earnest interposition of his
mother-in-law much surprised and diverted.  "If, fair belle-mere, thou
thinkest it so illustrious a deed to frighten us out of our mortal
senses, and narrowly to 'scape sending us across the river like a bevy
of balls from a bombard, there is no disputing of tastes.  Rise up,
Master Nevile, we esteem thee not less for thy boldness; ever be the
host and the benefactor revered by English gentlemen and Christian
youth.  Master Warner may go free."

Here Warner uttered so deep and hollow a groan, that it startled all
present.

"Twenty-five years of labour, and not to have seen this!" he
ejaculated.  "Twenty and five years, and all wasted!  How repair this
disaster?  O fatal day!"

"What says he?  What means he?" said Jacquetta.

"Come home!--home!" said Marmaduke, approaching the philosopher, in
great alarm lest he should once more jeopardize his life.  But Adam,
shaking him off, began eagerly, and with tremulous hands, to examine
the machine, and not perceiving any mode by which to guard in future
against a danger that he saw at once would, if not removed, render his
invention useless, tottered to a chair and covered his face with his
hands.

"He seemeth mightily grieved that our bones are still whole!" muttered
Edward.  "And why, belle-mere mine, wouldst thou protect this pleasant
tregetour?"

"What!" said the duchess, "see you not that a man capable of such
devices must be of doughty service against our foes?"

"Not I.  How?"

"Why, if merely to signify his displeasure at our young Richard's
over-curious meddling, he can cause this strange engine to shake the
walls,--nay, to destroy itself,--think what he might do were his power
and malice at our disposing.  I know something of these nigromancers."

"And would you knew less! for already the commons murmur at your
favour to them.  But be it as you will.  And now--ho, there! let our
steeds be caparisoned."

"You forget, sire," said Richard, who had hitherto silently watched
the various parties, "the object for which we summoned this worthy
man.  Please you now, sir, to open that door."

"No, no!" exclaimed the king, hastily, "I will have no more provoking
the foul fiend; conspirator or not, I have had enough of Master
Warner.  Pah!  My poor placard is turned lampblack.  Sweet mother-in-
law, take him under thy protection; and Richard, come with me."

So saying, the king linked his arm in that of the reluctant
Gloucester, and quitted the room.  The duchess then ordered the rest
also to depart, and was left alone with the crest-fallen philosopher.




CHAPTER VII.

MY LADY DUCHESS'S OPINION OF THE UTILITY OF MASTER WARNER'S INVENTION,
AND HER ESTEEM FOR ITS--EXPLOSION.

Adam, utterly unheeding, or rather deaf to, the discussion that had
taken place, and his narrow escape from cord and gibbet, lifted his
head peevishly from his bosom, as the duchess rested her hand almost
caressingly on his shoulder, and thus addressed him,--

"Most puissant Sir, think not that I am one of those who, in their
ignorance and folly, slight the mysteries of which thou art clearly so
great a master.  When I heard thee speak of subjecting Nature to Man,
I at once comprehended thee, and blushed for the dulness of my
kindred."

"Ah, lady, thou hast studied, then, the mathematics.  Alack! this is a
grievous blow; but it is no inherent fault in the device.  I am
clearly of mind that it can be remedied.  But oh! what time, what
thought, what sleepless nights, what gold will be needed!"

"Give me thy sleepless nights and thy grand thoughts, and thou shalt
not want gold."

"Lady," cried Adam, starting to his feet, "do I hear aright?  Art
thou, in truth, the patron I have so long dreamed of?  Hast thou the
brain and the heart to aid the pursuits of science?"

"Ay! and the power to protect the students!  Sage, I am the Duchess of
Bedford, whom men accuse of witchcraft,--as thee of wizardy.  From the
wife of a private gentleman, I have become the mother of a queen.  I
stand amidst a court full of foes; I desire gold to corrupt, and
wisdom to guard against, and means to destroy them.  And I seek all
these in men like thee!"

Adam turned on her his bewildered eyes, and made no answer.

"They tell me," said the duchess, "that Henry of Windsor employed
learned men to transmute the baser metals into gold.  Wert thou one of
them?"

"No."

"Thou knowest that art?"

"I studied it in my youth, but the ingredients of the crucible were
too costly."

"Thou shalt not lack them with me.  Thou knowest the lore of the
stars, and canst foretell the designs of enemies,--the hour whether to
act or to forbear?"

"Astrology I have studied, but that also was in youth; for there
dwelleth in the pure mathematics that have led me to this invention--"

"Truce with that invention, whatever it be; think of it no more,--it
has served its end in the explosion, which proved thy power of
mischief.  High objects are now before thee.  Wilt thou be of my
household, one of my alchemists and astrologers?  Thou shalt have
leisure, honour, and all the moneys thou canst need."

"Moneys!" said Adam, eagerly, and casting his eyes upon the mangled
model.  "Well, I agree; what you will,--alchemist, astrologist,
wizard,--what you will.  This shall all be repaired,--all; I begin to
see now, all!  I begin to see; yes, if a pipe by which the too-
excessive vapour could--ay, ay!--right, right," and he rubbed his
hands.

Jacquetta was struck with his enthusiasm.  "But surely, Master Warner,
this has some virtue you have not vouchsafed to explain; confide in
me, can it change iron to gold?"

"No; but--"

"Can it predict the future?"

"No; but--"

"Can it prolong life?"

"No; but--"

"Then, in God's name let us waste no more time about it!" said the
duchess, impatiently,--"your art is mine now.  Ho, there!--I will send
my page to conduct thee to thy apartments, and thou shalt lodge next
to Friar Bungey, a man of wondrous lere, Master Warner, and a worthy
confrere in thy researches.  Hast thou any one of kith and kin at home
to whom thou wilt announce thy advancement?"

"Ah, lady!  Heaven forgive me, I have a daughter,--an only child,--my
Sibyll; I cannot leave her alone, and--"

"Well, nothing should distract thy cares from thine art,--she shall be
sent for.  I will rank her amongst my maidens.  Fare-thee-well, Master
Warner!  At night I will send for thee, and appoint the tasks I would
have thee accomplish."

So saying, the duchess quitted the room, and left Adam alone, bending
over his model in deep revery.

From this absorption it was the poor man's fate to be again aroused.

The peculiar character of the boy-prince of Gloucester was that of one
who, having once seized upon an object, never willingly relinquished
it.  First, he crept and slid and coiled round it as the snake.  But
if craft failed, his passion, roused by resistance, sprang at his prey
with a lion's leap: and whoever examines the career of this
extraordinary personage, will perceive, that whatever might be his
habitual hypocrisy, he seemed to lose sight of it wholly when once
resolved upon force.  Then the naked ferocity with which the
destructive propensity swept away the objects in his path becomes
fearfully and startlingly apparent, and offers a strange contrast to
the wily duplicity with which, in calmer moments, he seems to have
sought to coax the victim into his folds.  Firmly convinced that
Adam's engine had been made the medium of dangerous and treasonable
correspondence with the royal prisoner, and of that suspicious,
restless, feverish temperament which never slept when a fear was
wakened, a doubt conceived, he had broke from his brother, whose more
open valour and less unquiet intellect were ever willing to leave the
crown defended but by the gibbet for the detected traitor, the sword
for the declared foe; and obtaining Edward's permission "to inquire
further into these strange matters," he sent at once for the porter
who had conveyed the model to the Tower; but that suspicious
accomplice was gone.  The sound of the explosion of the engine had no
less startled the guard below than the spectators above.  Releasing
their hold of their prisoner, they had some taken fairly to their
heels, others rushed into the palace to learn what mischief had
ensued; and Hugh, with the quick discretion of his north country, had
not lost so favourable an opportunity for escape.  There stood the
dozing mule at the door below, but the guide was vanished.  More
confirmed in his suspicions by this disappearance of Adam's companion,
Richard, giving some preparatory orders to Catesby, turned at once to
the room which still held the philosopher and his device.  He closed
the door on entering, and his brow was dark and sinister as he
approached the musing inmate.  But here we must return to Sibyll.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE OLD WOMAN TALKS OF SORROWS, THE YOUNG WOMAN DREAMS OF LOVE; THE
COURTIER FLIES FROM PRESENT POWER TO REMEMBRANCES OF PAST HOPES, AND
THE WORLD-BETTERED OPENS UTOPIA, WITH A VIEW OF THE GIBBET FOR THE
SILLY SAGE HE HAS SEDUCED INTO HIS SCHEMES,--SO, EVER AND EVERMORE,
RUNS THE WORLD AWAY!

The old lady looked up from her embroidery-frame, as Sibyll sat musing
on a stool before her; she scanned the maiden with a wistful and
somewhat melancholy eye.

"Fair girl," she said, breaking a silence that had lasted for some
moments, "it seems to me that I have seen thy face before.  Wert thou
never in Queen Margaret's court?"

"In childhood, yes, lady."

"Do you not remember me, the dame of Longueville?" Sibyll started in
surprise, and gazed long before she recognized the features of her
hostess; for the dame of Longueville had been still, when Sibyll was a
child at the court, renowned for matronly beauty, and the change was
greater than the lapse of years could account for.  The lady smiled
sadly: "Yes, you marvel to see me thus bent and faded.  Maiden, I lost
my husband at the battle of St. Alban's, and my three sons in the
field of Towton.  My lands and my wealth have been confiscated to
enrich new men; and to one of them--one of the enemies of the only
king whom Alice de Longueville will acknowledge--I owe the food for my
board and the roof for my head.  Do you marvel now that I am so
changed?"

Sibyll rose and kissed the lady's hand, and the tear that sparkled on
its surface was her only answer.

"I learn," said the dame of Longueville, "that your father has an
order from the Lord Hastings to see King Henry.  I trust that he will
rest here as he returns, to tell me how the monarch-saint bears his
afflictions.  But I know: his example should console us all."  She
paused a moment, and resumed, "Sees your father much of the Lord
Hastings?"

"He never saw him that I weet of," answered Sibyll, blushing; "the
order was given, but as of usual form to a learned scholar."

"But given to whom?" persisted the lady.  "To--to me," replied Sibyll,
falteringly.  The dame of Longueville smiled.

"Ah, Hastings could scarcely say no to a prayer from such rosy lips.
But let me not imply aught to disparage his humane and gracious heart.
To Lord Hastings, next to God and his saints, I owe all that is left
to me on earth.  Strange that he is not yet here!  This is the usual
day and hour on which he comes, from pomp and pleasurement, to visit
the lonely widow."  And, pleased to find an attentive listener to her
grateful loquacity, the dame then proceeded, with warm eulogies upon
her protector, to inform Sibyll that her husband had, in the first
outbreak of the Civil War, chanced to capture Hastings, and, moved by
his valour and youth, and some old connections with his father, Sir
Leonard, had favoured his escape from the certain death that awaited
him from the wrath of the relentless Margaret.  After the field of
Towton, Hastings had accepted one of the manors confiscated from the
attainted House of Longueville, solely that he might restore it to the
widow of the fallen lord; and with a chivalrous consideration, not
contented with beneficence, he omitted no occasion to show to the
noblewoman whatever homage and respect might soothe the pride, which,
in the poverty of those who have been great, becomes disease.  The
loyalty of the Lady Longueville was carried to a sentiment most rare
in that day, and rather resembling the devotion inspired by the later
Stuarts.  She made her home within the precincts of the Tower, that,
morning and eve, when Henry opened his lattice to greet the rising and
the setting sun, she might catch a dim and distant glance of the
captive king, or animate, by that sad sight, the hopes and courage of
the Lancastrian emissaries, to whom, fearless of danger, she scrupled
not to give counsel, and, at need, asylum.

While Sibyll, with enchanted sense, was listening to the praise of
Hastings, a low knock at the door was succeeded by the entrance of
that nobleman himself.  Not to Elizabeth, in the alcoves of Shene, or
on the dais of the palace hall, did the graceful courtier bend with
more respectful reverence than to the powerless widow, whose very
bread was his alms; for the true high-breeding of chivalry exists not
without delicacy of feeling, formed originally by warmth of heart; and
though the warmth may lose its glow, the delicacy endures, as the
steel that acquires through heat its polish retains its lustre, even
when the shine but betrays the hardness.

"And how fares my noble lady of Longueville?  But need I ask? for her
cheek still wears the rose of Lancaster.  A companion?  Ha!  Mistress
Warner, I learn now how much pleasure exists in surprise!"

"My young visitor," said the dame, "is but an old friend; she was one
of the child-maidens reared at the court of Queen Margaret."

"In sooth!" exclaimed Hastings; and then, in an altered tone, he
added, "but I should have guessed so much grace had not come all from
Nature.  And your father has gone to see the Lord Henry, and you rest,
here, his return?  Ah, noble lady, may you harbour always such
innocent Lancastrians!"  The fascinations of this eminent person's
voice and manner were such that they soon restored Sibyll, to the ease
she had lost at his sudden entrance.  He conversed gayly with the old
dame upon such matters of court anecdote as in all the changes of
state were still welcome to one so long accustomed to court air; but
from time to time he addressed himself to Sibyll, and provoked replies
which startled herself--for she was not yet well aware of her own
gifts--by their spirit and intelligence.

"You do not tell us," said the Lady Longueville, sarcastically, "of
the happy spousailles of Elizabeth's brother with the Duchess of
Norfolk,--a bachelor of twenty, a bride of some eighty-two.  [The old
chronicler justly calls this a "diabolical marriage."  It greatly
roused the wrath of the nobles and indeed of all honourable men, as a
proof of the shameless avarice of the queen's family.]  Verily, these
alliances are new things in the history of English royalty.  But when
Edward, who, even if not a rightful king, is at least a born
Plantagenet, condescended to marry Mistress Elizabeth, a born
Woodville, scarce of good gentleman's blood, naught else seems strange
enough to provoke marvel."

"As to the last matter," returned Hastings, gravely, "though her grace
the queen be no warm friend to me, I must needs become her champion
and the king's.  The lady who refused the dishonouring suit of the
fairest prince and the boldest knight in the Christian world thereby
made herself worthy of the suit that honoured her; it was not
Elizabeth Woodville alone that won the purple.  On the day she mounted
a throne, the chastity of woman herself was crowned."

"What!" said the Lady Longueville, angrily, "mean you to say that
there is no disgrace in the mal-alliance of kite and falcon, of
Plantagenet and Woodville, of high-born and mud-descended?"

"You forget, lady, that the widow of Henry the Fifth, Catherine of
Valois, a king's daughter, married the Welsh soldier, Owen Tudor; that
all England teems with brave men born from similar spousailles, where
love has levelled all distinctions, and made a purer hearth, and
raised a bolder offspring, than the lukewarm likings of hearts that
beat but for lands and gold.  Wherefore, lady, appeal not to me, a
squire of dames, a believer in the old Parliament of Love; whoever is
fair and chaste, gentle and loving, is, in the eyes of William de
Hastings, the mate and equal of a king!"

Sibyll turned involuntarily as the courtier spoke thus, with animation
in his voice, and fire in his eyes; she turned, and her breath came
quick; she turned, and her look met his, and those words and that look
sank deep into her heart; they called forth brilliant and ambitious
dreams; they rooted the growing love, but they aided to make it holy;
they gave to the delicious fancy what before it had not paused, on its
wing, to sigh for; they gave it that without which all fancy sooner or
later dies; they gave it that which, once received in a noble heart,
is the excuse for untiring faith; they gave it,--HOPE!

"And thou wouldst say," replied the lady of Longueville, with a
meaning smile, still more emphatically--"thou wouldst say that a
youth, brave and well nurtured, ambitious and loving, ought, in the
eyes of rank and pride, to be the mate and equal of--"

"Ah, noble dame," interrupted Hastings, quickly, "I must not prolong
encounter with so sharp a wit.  Let me leave that answer to this fair
maiden, for by rights it is a challenge to her sex, not to mine."

"How say you, then, Mistress Warner?" said the dame.  "Suppose a young
heiress, of the loftiest birth, of the broadest lands, of the
comeliest form--suppose her wooed by a gentleman poor and stationless,
but with a mighty soul, born to achieve greatness, would she lower
herself by hearkening to his suit?"

"A maiden, methinks," answered Sibyll, with reluctant but charming
hesitation, "cannot love truly if she love unworthily; and if she love
worthily, it is not rank nor wealth she loves."

"But her parents, sweet mistress, may deem differently; and should not
her love refuse submission to their tyranny?" asked Hastings.

"Nay, good my lord, nay," returned Sibyll, shaking her head with
thoughtful demureness.  "Surely the wooer, if he love worthily, will
not press her to the curse of a child's disobedience and a parent's
wrath!"

"Shrewdly answered," said the dame of Longueville.  "Then she would
renounce the poor gentleman if the parent ordain her to marry a rich
lord.  Ah, you hesitate, for a woman's ambition is pleased with the
excuse of a child's obedience."

Hastings said this so bitterly that Sibyll could not but perceive that
some personal feeling gave significance to his words.  Yet how could
they be applied to him,--to one now in rank and repute equal to the
highest below the throne?

"If the demoiselle should so choose," said the dame of Longueville,
"it seemeth to me that the rejected suitor might find it facile to
disdain and to forget."

Hastings made no reply; but that remarkable and deep shade of
melancholy which sometimes in his gayest hours startled those who
beheld it, and which had, perhaps, induced many of the prophecies that
circulated as to the untimely and violent death that should close his
bright career, gathered like a cloud over his brow.  At this moment
the door opened gently, and Robert Hilyard stood at the aperture.  He
was clad in the dress of a friar, but the raised cowl showed his
features to the lady of Longueville, to whom alone he was visible; and
those bold features were literally haggard with agitation and alarm.
He lifted his finger to his lips, and motioning the lady to follow
him, closed the door.

The dame of Longueville rose, and praying her visitors to excuse her
absence for a few moments, she left Hastings and Sibyll to themselves.

"Lady," said Hilyard, in a hollow whisper, as soon as the dame
appeared in the low hall, communicating on the one hand with the room
just left, on the other with the street, "I fear all will be detected.
Hush!  Adam and the iron coffer that contains the precious papers have
been conducted to Edward's presence.  A terrible explosion, possibly
connected with the contrivance, caused such confusion among the guards
that Hugh escaped to scare me with his news.  Stationed near the gate
in this disguise, I ventured to enter the courtyard, and saw--saw--the
TORMENTOR! the torturer, the hideous, masked minister of agony, led
towards the chambers in which our hapless messenger is examined by the
ruthless tyrants.  Gloucester, the lynx-eyed mannikin, is there!"

"O Margaret, my queen," exclaimed the lady of Longueville, "the papers
will reveal her whereabout."

"No, she is safe!" returned Hilyard; "but thy poor scholar, I tremble
for him, and for the heads of all whom the papers name."

"What can be done!  Ha!  Lord Hastings is here,--he is ever humane and
pitiful.  Dare we confide in him?"

A bright gleam shot over Hilyard's face.  "Yes, yes; let me confer
with him alone.  I wait him here,--quick!"  The lady hastened back.
Hastings was conversing in a low voice with Sibyll.  The dame of
Longueville whispered in the courtier's ear, drew him into the hall,
and left him alone with the false friar, who had drawn the cowl over
his face.

"Lord Hastings," said Hilyard, speaking rapidly, "you are in danger,
if not of loss of life, of loss of favour.  You gave a passport to one
Warner to see the ex-king Henry.  Warner's simplicity (for he is
innocent) hath been duped,--he is made the bearer of secret
intelligence from the unhappy gentlemen who still cling to the
Lancaster cause.  He is suspected, he is examined; he may be
questioned by the torture.  If the treason be discovered, it was thy
hand that signed the passport; the queen, thou knowest, hates thee,
the Woodvilles thirst for thy downfall.  What handle may this give
them!  Fly! my lord,--fly to the Tower; thou mayst yet be in time; thy
wit can screen all that may otherwise be bare.  Save this poor
scholar, conceal this correspondence.  Hark ye, lord! frown not so
haughtily,--that correspondence names thee as one who hast taken the
gold of Count Charolois, and whom, therefore, King Louis may outbuy.
Look to thyself!"

A slight blush passed over the pale brow of the great statesman, but
he answered with a steady voice, "Friar or layman, I care not which,
the gold of the heir of Burgundy was a gift, not a bribe.  But I need
no threats to save, if not too late, from rack and gibbet the life of
a guiltless man.  I am gone.  Hold! bid the maiden, the scholar's
daughter, follow me to the Tower."




CHAPTER IX.

HOW THE DESTRUCTIVE ORGAN OF PRINCE RICHARD PROMISES GOODLY
DEVELOPMENT.

The Duke of Gloucester approached Adam as he stood gazing on his
model.  "Old man," said the prince, touching him with the point of his
sheathed dagger, "look up and answer.  What converse hast thou held
with Henry of Windsor, and who commissioned thee to visit him in his
confinement?  Speak, and the truth! for by holy Paul, I am one who can
detect a lie, and without that door stands--the Tormentor!"

Upon a pleasing and joyous dream broke these harsh words; for Adam
then was full of the contrivance by which to repair the defect of the
engine, and with this suggestion was blent confusedly the thought that
he was now protected by royalty, that he should have means and leisure
to accomplish his great design, that he should have friends whose
power could obtain its adoption by the king.  He raised his eyes, and
that young dark face frowned upon him,--the child menacing the sage,
brute force in a pigmy shape, having authority of life and death over
the giant strength of genius.  But these words, which recalled Warner
from his existence as philosopher, woke that of the gentle but brave
and honourable man which he was, when reduced to earth.

"Sir," he said gravely, "if I have consented to hold converse with the
unhappy, it was not as the tell-tale and the spier.  I had formal
warrant for my visit, and I was solicited to render it by an early
friend and comrade, who sought to be my benefactor in aiding with gold
my poor studies for the king's people."

"Tut!" said Richard, impatiently, and playing with his dagger hilt;
"thy words, stealthy and evasive, prove thy guilt!  Sure am I that
this iron traitor with its intricate hollows and recesses holds what,
unless confessed, will give thee to the hangman!  Confess all, and
thou art spared."

"If," said Adam, mildly, "your Highness--for though I know not your
quality, I opine that no one less than royal could so menace--if your
Highness imagines that I have been intrusted by a fallen man, wrong me
not by supposing that I could fear death more than dishonour; for
certes!" continued Adam, with innocent pedantry, "to put the case
scholastically, and in the logic familiar, doubtless, to your
Highness, either I have something to confess or I have not; if I have--"

"Hound!" interrupted the prince, stamping his foot, "thinkest thou to
banter me,--see!" As his foot shook the floor, the door opened, and a
man with his arms bare, covered from head to foot in a black gown of
serge, with his features concealed by a hideous mask, stood ominously
at the aperture.

The prince motioned to the torturer (or tormentor, as he was
technically styled) to approach, which he did noiselessly, till he
stood, tall, grim, and lowering, beside Adam, like some silent and
devouring monster by its prey.

"Dost thou repent thy contumacy?  A moment, and I render my
questioning to another!"

"Sir," said Adam, drawing himself up, and with so sudden a change of
mien, that his loftiness almost awed even the dauntless Richard,--
"sir, my fathers feared not death when they did battle for the throne
of England; and why?--because in their loyal valour they placed not
the interests of a mortal man, but the cause of imperishable honour!
And though their son be a poor scholar, and wears not the spurs of
gold; though his frame be weak and his hairs gray, he loveth honour
also well eno' to look without dread on death!"

Fierce and ruthless, when irritated and opposed, as the prince was, he
was still in his first youth,--ambition had here no motive to harden
him into stone.  He was naturally so brave himself that bravery could
not fail to win from him something of respect and sympathy, and he was
taken wholly by surprise in hearing the language of a knight and hero
from one whom he had regarded but as the artful impostor or the
despicable intriguer.

He changed countenance as Warner spoke, and remained a moment silent.
Then as a thought occurred to him, at which his features relaxed into
a half-smile, he beckoned to the tormentor, said a word in his ear,
and the horrible intruder nodded and withdrew.

"Master Warner," then said the prince, in his customary sweet and
gliding tones, "it were a pity that so gallant a gentleman should be
exposed to peril for adhesion to a cause that can never prosper, and
that would be fatal, could it prosper, to our common country.  For
look you, this Margaret, who is now, we believe, in London" (here he
examined Adam's countenance, which evinced surprise), "this Margaret,
who is seeking to rekindle the brand and brennen of civil war, has
already sold for base gold to the enemy of the realm, to Louis XI.,
that very Calais which your fathers, doubtless, lavished their blood
to annex to our possessions.  Shame on the lewd harlot!  What woman so
bloody and so dissolute?  What man so feeble and craven as her lord?"

"Alas! sir," said Adam, "I am unfitted for these high considerations
of state.  I live but for my art, and in it.  And now, behold how my
kingdom is shaken and rent!" he pointed with so touching a smile, and
so simple a sadness, to the broken engine, that Richard was moved.

"Thou lovest this, thy toy?  I can comprehend that love for some dumb
thing that we have toiled for.  Ay!" continued the prince,
thoughtfully,--"ay!  I have noted myself in life that there are
objects, senseless as that mould of iron, which if we labour at them
wind round our hearts as if they were flesh and blood.  So some men
love learning, others glory, others power.  Well, man, thou lovest
that mechanical?  How many years hast thou been about it?"

"From the first to the last, twenty-five years, and it is still
incomplete."

"Um!" said the prince, smiling, "Master Warner, thou hast read of the
judgment of Solomon,--how the wise king discovered the truth by
ordering the child's death?"

"It was indeed," said Adam, unsuspectingly, "a most shrewd suggestion
of native wit and clerkly wisdom."

"Glad am I thou approvest it, Master Warner," said Richard.  And as he
spoke the tormentor reappeared with a smith, armed with the implements
of his trade.

"Good smith, break into pieces this stubborn iron; bare all its
receptacles; leave not one fragment standing on the other!  'Delenda
est tua Carthago,' Master Warner.  There is Latin in answer to thy
logic."

It is impossible to convey any notion of the terror, the rage, the
despair, which seized upon the unhappy sage when these words smote his
ear, and he saw the smith's brawny arms swing on high the ponderous
hammer.  He flung himself between the murderous stroke and his beloved
model.  He embraced the grim iron tightly.  "Kill me!" he exclaimed
sublimely, "kill me!--not my THOUGHT!"

"Solomon was verily and indeed a wise king," said the duke, with a low
inward laugh.  "And now, man, I have thee!  To save thy infant, thine
art's hideous infant, confess the whole!"

It was then that a fierce struggle evidently took place in Adam's
bosom.  It was, perhaps--O reader! thou whom pleasure, love, ambition,
hatred, avarice, in thine and our ordinary existence, tempt--it was,
perhaps, to him the one arch-temptation of a life.  In the changing
countenance, the heaving breast, the trembling lip, the eyes that
closed and opened to close again, as if to shut out the unworthy
weakness,--yea, in the whole physical man,--was seen the crisis of the
moral struggle.  And what, in truth, to him an Edward or a Henry, a
Lancaster or a York?  Nothing.  But still that instinct, that
principle, that conscience, ever strongest in those whose eyes are
accustomed to the search of truth, prevailed.  So he rose suddenly and
quietly, drew himself apart, left his work to the Destroyer, and
said,--

"Prince, thou art a boy!  Let a boy's voice annihilate that which
should have served all time.  Strike!"

Richard motioned; the hammer descended, the engine and its
appurtenances reeled and crashed, the doors flew open, the wheels
rattled, the sparks flew.  And Adam Warner fell to the ground, as if
the blow had broken his own heart.  Little heeding the insensible
victim of his hard and cunning policy, Richard advanced to the
inspection of the interior recesses of the machinery.  But that which
promised Adam's destruction saved him.  The heavy stroke had battered
in the receptacle of the documents, had buried them in the layers of
iron.  The faithful Eureka, even amidst its injuries and wrecks,
preserved the secret of its master.

The prince, with impatient hands, explored all the apertures yet
revealed, and after wasting many minutes in a fruitless search, was
about to bid the smith complete the work of destruction, when the door
suddenly opened and Lord Hastings entered.  His quick eye took in the
whole scene; he arrested the lifted arm of the smith, and passing
deliberately to Gloucester, said, with a profound reverence, but a
half-reproachful smile, "My lord! my lord! your Highness is indeed
severe upon my poor scholar."

"Canst thou answer for thy scholar's loyalty?" said the duke,
gloomily.

Hastings drew the prince aside, and said, in a low tone, "His loyalty!
poor man, I know not; but his guilelessness, surely, yes.  Look you,
sweet prince, I know the interest thou hast in keeping well with the
Earl of Warwick, whom I, in sooth, have slight cause to love.  Thou
hast trusted me with thy young hopes of the Lady Anne; this new Nevile
placed about the king, and whose fortunes Warwick hath made his care,
hath, I have reason to think, some love passages with the scholar's
daughter,--the daughter came to me for the passport.  Shall this
Marmaduke Nevile have it to say to his fair kinswoman, with the
unforgiving malice of a lover's memory, that the princely Gloucester
stooped to be the torturer of yon poor old man?  If there be treason
in the scholar or in yon battered craft-work, leave the search to me!"

The duke raised his dark, penetrating eyes to those of Hastings, which
did not quail; for here world-genius encountered world-genius, and
art, art.

"Thine argument hath more subtlety and circumlocution than suit with
simple truth," said the prince, smiling.  "But it is enough to Richard
that Hastings wills protection even to a spy!"

Hastings kissed the duke's hand in silence, and going to the door, he
disappeared a moment and returned with Sibyll.  As she entered, pale
and trembling, Adam rose, and the girl with a wild cry flew to his
bosom.

"It is a winsome face, Hastings," said the duke, dryly.  "I pity
Master Nevile the lover, and envy my Lord Chamberlain the protector."

Hastings laughed, for he was well pleased that Richard's suspicion
took that turn.

"And now," he said, "I suppose Master Nevile and the Duchess of
Bedford's page may enter.  Your guard stopped them hitherto.  They
come for this gentleman from her highness the queen's mother."

"Enter, Master Nevile, and you, Sir Page.  What is your errand?"

"My lady, the duchess," said the page, "has sent me to conduct Master
Warner to the apartments prepared for him as her special multiplier
and alchemist."

"What!" said the prince, who, unlike the irritable Clarence, made it
his policy to show all decorous homage to the queen's kin, "hath that
illustrious lady taken this gentleman into her service?  Why announced
you not, Master Warner, what at once had saved you from further
questioning?  Lord Hastings, I thank you now for your intercession."

Hastings, in answer, pointed archly at Marmaduke, who was aiding
Sibyll to support her father.  "Do you suspect me still, prince?" he
whispered.

The duke shrugged his shoulders, and Adam, breaking from Marmaduke and
Sibyll, passed with tottering steps to the shattered labour of his
solitary life.  He looked at the ruin with mournful despondence, with
quivering lips.  "Have you done with me?" then he said, bowing his
head lowlily, for his pride was gone; "may we--that is, I and this, my
poor device--withdraw from your palace?  I see we are not fit for
kings!"

"Say not so," said the young duke, gently: "we have now convinced
ourselves of our error, and I crave thy pardon, Master Warner, for my
harsh dealings.  As for this, thy toy, the king's workmen shall set it
right for thee.  Smith, call the fellows yonder, to help bear this
to--"  He paused, and glanced at Hastings.

"To my apartments," said the chamberlain.  "Your Highness may be sure
that I will there inspect it.  Fear not, Master Warner; no further
harm shall chance to thy contrivance."

"Come, sir, forgive me," said the duke.  With gracious affability the
young prince held out his hand, the fingers of which sparkled with
costly gems, to the old man.  The old man bowed as if his beard would
have swept the earth, but he did not touch the hand.  He seemed still
in a state between dream and reason, life and death: he moved not,
spoke not, till the men came to bear the model; and he then followed
it, his arms folded in his gown, till, on entering the court, it was
borne in a contrary direction from his own, to the chamberlain's
apartment; then wistfully pursuing it with his eyes, he uttered such a
sigh as might have come from a resigned father losing the last glimpse
of a beloved son.

Richard hesitated a moment, loth to relinquish his research, and
doubtful whether to follow the Eureka for renewed investigation; but
partly unwilling to compromise his dignity in the eyes of Hastings,
should his suspicions prove unfounded, and partly indisposed to risk
the displeasure of the vindictive Duchess of Bedford by further
molestation of one now under her protection, he reluctantly trusted
all further inquiry to the well-known loyalty of Hastings.  "If
Margaret be in London," he muttered to himself as he turned slowly
away, "now is the time to seize and chain the lioness!  Ho, Catesby,--
hither (a valuable man that Catesby--a lawyer's nurturing with a
bloodhound's nature!)--Catesby, while King Edward rides for pleasure,
let thou and I track the scent of his foes.  If the she-wolf of Anjou
hath ventured hither, she hides in some convent or monastery, be sure.
See to our palfreys, Catesby!  Strange," added the prince, muttering
to himself, "that I am more restless to guard the crown than he who
wears it!  Nay, a crown is a goodly heirloom in a man's family, and a
fair sight to see near--and near--and near--"

The prince abruptly paused, opened and shut his right hand
convulsively, and drew a long sigh.





BOOK IV.

INTRIGUES OF THE COURT OF EDWARD IV.




CHAPTER I.

MARGARET OF ANJOU.

The day after the events recorded in the last section of this
narrative, and about the hour of noon, Robert Hilyard (still in the
reverend disguise in which he had accosted Hastings) bent his way
through the labyrinth of alleys that wound in dingy confusion from the
Chepe towards the river.

The purlieus of the Thames, in that day of ineffective police,
sheltered many who either lived upon plunder, or sought abodes that
proffered, at alarm, the facility of flight.  Here, sauntering in twos
or threes, or lazily reclined by the threshold of plaster huts, might
be seen that refuse population which is the unholy offspring of civil
war,--disbanded soldiers of either Rose, too inured to violence and
strife for peaceful employment, and ready for any enterprise by which
keen steel wins bright gold.  At length our friend stopped before the
gate of a small house, on the very marge of the river, which belonged
to one of the many religious orders then existing; but from its site
and aspect denoted the poverty seldom their characteristic.  Here he
knocked; the door was opened by a lay-brother; a sign and a smile were
interchanged, and the visitor was ushered into a room belonging to the
superior, but given up for the last few days to a foreign priest, to
whom the whole community appeared to consider the reverence of a saint
was due.  And yet this priest, who, seated alone, by a casement which
commanded a partial view of the distant Tower of London, received the
conspirator, was clad in the humblest serge.  His face was smooth and
delicate; and the animation of the aspect, the vehement impatience of
the gesture, evinced little of the holy calm that should belong to
those who have relinquished the affairs of earth for meditation on the
things of heaven.  To this personage the sturdy Hilyard bowed his
manly knees; and casting himself at the priest's feet, his eyes, his
countenance, changed from their customary hardihood and recklessness
into an expression at once of reverence and of pity.

"Well, man--well, friend--good friend, tried and leal friend, speak!
speak!" exclaimed the priest, in an accent that plainly revealed a
foreign birth.

"Oh, gracious lady! all hope is over; I come but to bid you fly.  Adam
Warner was brought before the usurper; he escaped, indeed, the
torture, and was faithful to the trust. But the papers--the secret of
the rising--are in the hands of Hastings."

"How long, O Lord," said Margaret of Anjou, for she it was, under that
reverend disguise, "how long wilt Thou delay the hour of triumph and
revenge?"

The princess as she spoke had suffered her hood to fall back, and her
pale, commanding countenance, so well fitted to express fiery and
terrible emotion, wore that aspect in which many a sentenced man had
read his doom,--an aspect the more fearful, inasmuch as the passion
that pervaded it did not distort the features, but left them locked,
rigid, and marble-like in beauty, as the head of the Medusa.

"The day will dawn at last," said Hilyard; "but the judgments of
Heaven are slow.  We are favoured, at the least, that our secret is
confined to a man more merciful than his tribe."  He then related to
Margaret his interview with Hastings at the house of the Lady
Lougueville, and continued: "This morning, not an hour since, I sought
him (for last evening he did not leave Edward, a council met at the
Tower), and learned that he had detected the documents in the recesses
of Warner's engine.  Knowing from your Highness and your spies that he
had been open to the gifts of Charolois, I spoke to him plainly of the
guerdon that should await his silence.  'Friar,' he answered, 'if in
this court and this world I have found it were a fool's virtue to be
more pure than others, and if I know that I should but provoke the
wrath of those who profit by Burgundian gold, were I alone to disdain
its glitter, I have still eno' of my younger conscience left me not to
make barter of human flesh.  Did I give these papers to King Edward,
the heads of fifty gallant men, whose error is but loyalty to their
ancient sovereign, would glut the doomsman; but,' he continued, 'I am
yet true to my king and his cause; I shall know how to advise Edward
to the frustrating all your schemes.  The districts where you hoped a
rising will be guarded, the men ye count upon will be watched: the
Duke of Gloucester, whose vigilance never sleeps, has learned that the
Lady Margaret is in England, disguised as a priest.  To-morrow all the
religious houses will be searched; if thou knowest where she lies
concealed, bid her lose not an hour to fly.'"

"I Will NOT fly!" exclaimed Margaret; "let Edward, if he dare,
proclaim to my people that their queen is in her city of London.  Let
him send his hirelings to seize her.  Not in this dress shall she be
found.  In robes of state, the sceptre in her hand, shall they drag
the consort of their king to the prison-house of her palace."

"On my knees, great queen, I implore you to be calm; with the loss of
your liberty ends indeed all hope of victory, all chance even of
struggle.  Think not Edward's fears would leave to Margaret the life
that his disdain has spared to your royal spouse.  Between your prison
and your grave, but one secret and bloody step!  Be ruled; no time to
lose!  My trusty Hugh even now waits with his boat below.  Relays of
horses are ready, night and day, to bear you to the coast; while
seeking your restoration, I have never neglected the facilities for
flight.  Pause not, O gracious lady; let not your son say, 'My
mother's passion has lost me the hope of my grandsire's crown.'"

"My boy; my princely boy, my Edward!" exclaimed Margaret, bursting
into tears, all the warrior-queen merged in the remembrance of the
fond mother.  "Ah, faithful friend! he is so gallant and so beautiful!
Oh, he shall reward thee well hereafter!"

"May he live to crush these barons, and raise this people!" said the
demagogue of Redesdale.  "But now, save thyself!"

"But what! is it not possible yet to strike the blow?  Rather let us
spur to the north; rather let us hasten the hour of action, and raise
the Red Rose through the length and breadth of England!"

"Ah, lady, if without warrant from your lord; if without foreign
subsidies; if without having yet ripened the time; if without gold,
without arms, and without one great baron on our side, we forestall a
rising, all that we have gained is lost; and instead of war, you can
scarcely provoke a riot.  But for this accursed alliance of Edward's
daughter with the brother of icy-hearted Louis, our triumph had been
secure.  The French king's gold would have manned a camp, bribed the
discontented lords, and his support have sustained the hopes of the
more leal Lancastrians.  But it is in vain to deny, that if Lord
Warwick win Louis--"

"He will not! he shall not!--Louis, mine own kinsman!" exclaimed
Margaret, in a voice in which the anguish pierced through the louder
tone of resentment and disdain.

"Let us hope that he will not," replied Hilyard, soothingly; some
chance may yet break off these nuptials, and once more give us France
as our firm ally.  But now we must be patient.  Already Edward is fast
wearing away the gloss of his crown; already the great lords desert
his court; already, in the rural provinces, peasant and franklin
complain of the exactions of his minions; already the mighty House of
Nevile frowns sullen on the throne it built.  Another year, and who
knows but the Earl of Warwick,--the beloved and the fearless, whose
statesman-art alone hath severed from you the arms and aid of France,
at whose lifted finger all England would bristle with armed men--may
ride by the side of Margaret through the gates of London?"

"Evil-omened consoler, never!" exclaimed the princess, starting to her
feet, with eyes that literally shot fire.  "Thinkest thou that the
spirit of a queen lies in me so low and crushed, that I, the
descendant of Charlemagne, could forgive the wrongs endured from
Warwick and his father?  But thou, though wise and loyal, art of the
Commons; thou knowest not how they feel through whose veins rolls the
blood of kings!"

A dark and cold shade fell over the bold face of Robin of Redesdale at
these words.

"Ah, lady," he said, with bitterness, "if no misfortune can curb thy
pride, in vain would we rebuild thy throne.  It is these Commons,
Margaret of Anjou--these English Commons--this Saxon People, that can
alone secure to thee the holding of the realm which the right arm
wins.  And, beshrew me, much as I love thy cause, much as thou hast
with thy sorrows and thy princely beauty glamoured and spelled my
heart and my hand,--ay, so that I, the son of a Lollard, forget the
wrongs the Lollards sustained from the House of Lancaster; so that I,
who have seen the glorious fruitage of a Republic, yet labour for
thee, to overshadow the land with the throne of ONE--yet--yet, lady--
yet, if I thought thou wert to be the same Margaret as of old, looking
back to thy dead kings, and contemptuous of thy living people, I would
not bid one mother's son lift lance or bill on thy behalf."

So resolutely did Robin of Redesdale utter these words, that the
queen's haughty eye fell abashed as he spoke; and her craft, or her
intellect, which was keen and prompt where her passions did not deafen
and blind her judgment, instantly returned to her.  Few women equalled
this once idol of knight and minstrel, in the subduing fascination
that she could exert in her happier moments.  Her affability was as
gracious as her wrath was savage; and with a dignified and winning
frankness, she extended her hand to her ally, as she answered, in a
sweet, humble, womanly, and almost penitent voice,--

"O bravest and lealest of friends, forgive thy wretched queen.  Her
troubles distract her brain,--chide her not if they sour her speech.
Saints above! will ye not pardon Margaret if at times her nature be
turned from the mother's milk into streams of gall and bloody purpose,
when ye see, from your homes serene, in what a world of strife and
falsehood her very womanhood hath grown unsexed?" She paused a moment,
and her uplifted eyes shed tears fast and large.  Then, with a sigh,
she turned to Hilyard, and resumed more calmly, "Yes, thou art right,
--adversity hath taught me much.  And though adversity will too often
but feed and not starve our pride, yet thou--thou hast made me know
that there is more of true nobility in the blunt Children of the
People than in many a breast over which flows the kingly robe.
Forgive me, and the daughter of Charlemagne shall yet be a mother to
the Commons, who claim thee as their brother!"

Thoroughly melted, Robin of Redesdale bowed over the hand held to his
lips, and his rough voice trembled as he answered, though that answer
took but the shape of prayer.

"And now," said the princess, smiling, "to make peace lasting between
us, I conquer myself, I yield to thy counsels.  Once more the
fugitive, I abandon the city that contains Henry's unheeded prison.
See, I am ready.  Who will know Margaret in this attire?  Lead on!"

Rejoiced to seize advantage of this altered and submissive mood, Robin
instantly took the way through a narrow passage, to a small door
communicating with the river.  There Hugh was waiting in a small boat,
moored to the damp and discoloured stairs.

Robin, by a gesture, checked the man's impulse to throw himself at the
feet of the pretended priest, and bade him put forth his best speed.
The princess seated herself by the helm, and the little boat cut
rapidly through the noble stream.  Galleys, gay and gilded, with
armorial streamers, and filled with nobles and gallants, passed them,
noisy with mirth or music, on their way.  These the fallen sovereign
heeded not; but, with all her faults, the woman's heart beating in her
bosom--she who in prosperity had so often wrought ruin, and shame, and
woe to her gentle lord; she who had been reckless of her trust as
queen; and incurred grave--but, let us charitably hope, unjust--
suspicion of her faith as wife, still fixed her eyes on the gloomy
tower that contained her captive husband, and felt that she could have
forgotten a while even the loss of power if but permitted to fall on
that plighted heart, and weep over the past with the woe-worn
bridegroom of her youth.




CHAPTER II.

IN WHICH ARE LAID OPEN TO THE READER THE CHARACTER OF EDWARD THE
FOURTH AND THAT OF HIS COURT, WITH THE MACHINATIONS OF THE WOODVILLES
AGAINST THE EARL OF WARWICK.

Scarcely need it be said to those who have looked with some philosophy
upon human life, that the young existence of Master Marmaduke Nevile,
once fairly merged in the great common sea, will rarely reappear
before us individualized and distinct.  The type of the provincial
cadet of the day hastening courtwards to seek his fortune, he becomes
lost amidst the gigantic characters and fervid passions that alone
stand forth in history.  And as, in reading biography, we first take
interest in the individual who narrates, but if his career shall pass
into that broader and more stirring life, in which he mingles with men
who have left a more dazzling memory than his own, we find the
interest change from the narrator to those by whom he is surrounded
and eclipsed,--so, in this record of a time, we scarce follow our
young adventurer into the court of the brilliant Edward ere the scene
itself allures and separates us from our guide; his mission is, as it
were, well-nigh done.  We leave, then, for a while this bold, frank
nature-fresh from the health of the rural life--gradually to improve,
or deprave itself, in the companionship it finds.  The example of the
Lords Hastings, Scales, and Worcester, and the accomplishments of the
two younger Princes of York, especially the Duke of Gloucester, had
diffused among the younger and gayer part of the court that growing
taste for letters which had somewhat slept during the dynasty of the
House of Lancaster; and Marmaduke's mind became aware that learning
was no longer the peculiar distinction of the Church, and that Warwick
was behind his age when he boasted "that the sword was more familiar
to him than the pen."  He had the sagacity to perceive that the
alliance with the great earl did not conduce to his popularity at
court; and even in the king's presence, the courtiers permitted
themselves many taunts and jests at the fiery Warwick, which they
would have bitten out their tongues ere they would have vented before
the earl himself.  But though the Nevile sufficiently controlled his
native candour not to incur unprofitable quarrel by ill-mannered and
unseasonable defence of the hero-baron when sneered at or assailed, he
had enough of the soldier and the man in him not to be tainted by the
envy of the time and place,--not to lose his gratitude to his patron,
nor his respect for the bulwark of the country.  Rather, it may be
said, that Warwick gained in his estimation whenever compared with the
gay and silken personages who avenged themselves by words for his
superiority in deeds.  Not only as a soldier, but as a statesman, the
great and peculiar merits of the earl were visible in all those
measures which emanated solely from himself.  Though so indifferently
educated, his busy, practical career, his affable mixing with all
classes, and his hearty, national sympathies made him so well
acquainted with the interests of his country and the habits of his
countrymen, that he was far more fitted to rule than the scientific
Worcester or the learned Scales.  The Young Duke of Gloucester
presented a marked contrast to the general levity of the court, in
speaking of this powerful nobleman.  He never named him but with
respect, and was pointedly courteous to even the humblest member of
the earl's family.  In this he appeared to advantage by the side of
Clarence, whose weakness of disposition made him take the tone of the
society in which he was thrown, and who, while really loving Warwick,
often smiled at the jests against him,--not, indeed, if uttered by the
queen or her family, of whom he ill concealed his jealousy and hatred.

The whole court was animated and pregnant with a spirit of intrigue,
which the artful cunning of the queen, the astute policy of Jacquetta,
and the animosity of the different factions had fomented to a degree
quite unknown under former reigns.  It was a place in which the wit of
young men grew old rapidly; amidst stratagem, and plot, and ambitious
design, and stealthy overreaching, the boyhood of Richard III.  passed
to its relentless manhood: such is the inevitable fruit of that era in
civilization when a martial aristocracy first begins to merge into a
voluptuous court.

Through this moving and shifting web of ambition and intrigue the
royal Edward moved with a careless grace: simple himself, because his
object was won, and pleasure had supplanted ambition.  His indolent,
joyous temper served to deaden his powerful intellect; or, rather, his
intellect was now lost in the sensual stream through which it flowed.
Ever in pursuit of some new face, his schemes and counterschemes were
limited to cheat a husband or deceive a wife; and dexterous and
successful no doubt they were.  But a vice always more destructive
than the love of women began also to reign over him,--namely, the
intemperance of the table.  The fastidious and graceful epicurism of
the early Normans, inclined to dainties but abhorring excess, and
regarding with astonished disdain the heavy meals and deep draughts of
the Saxon, had long ceased to characterize the offspring of that
noblest of all noble races.  Warwick, whose stately manliness was
disgusted with whatever savoured of effeminacy or debauch, used to
declare that he would rather fight fifty battles for Edward IV. than
once sup with him!  Feasts were prolonged for hours, and the banquets
of this king of the Middle Ages almost resembled those of the later
Roman emperors.  The Lord Montagu did not share the abstemiousness of
his brother of Warwick.  He was, next to Hastings, the king's chosen
and most favourite companion.  He ate almost as much as the king, and
drank very little less.  Of few courtiers could the same be said!
Over the lavish profligacy and excess of the court, however, a veil
dazzling to the young and high-spirited was thrown.  Edward was
thoroughly the cavalier, deeply imbued with the romance of chivalry,
and, while making the absolute woman his plaything, always treated the
ideal woman as a goddess.  A refined gallantry, a deferential courtesy
to dame and demoiselle, united the language of an Amadis with the
licentiousness of a Gaolor; and a far more alluring contrast than the
court of Charles II. presented to the grim Commonwealth seduced the
vulgar in that of this most brave and most beautiful prince, when
compared with the mournful and lugubrious circles in which Henry VI.
had reigned and prayed.  Edward himself, too, it was so impossible to
judge with severe justice, that his extraordinary popularity in
London, where he was daily seen, was never diminished by his faults;
he was so bold in the field, yet so mild in the chamber; when his
passions slept, he was so thoroughly good-natured and social, so kind
to all about his person, so hearty and gladsome in his talk and in his
vices, so magnificent and so generous withal; and, despite his
indolence, his capacities for business were marvellous,--and these
last commanded the reverence of the good Londoners; he often
administered justice himself, like the caliphs of the East, and with
great acuteness and address.  Like most extravagant men, he had a
wholesome touch of avarice.  That contempt for commerce which
characterizes a modern aristocracy was little felt by the nobles of
that day, with the exception of such blunt patricians as Lord Warwick
or Raoul de Fulke.  The great House of De la Pole (Duke of Suffolk),
the heir of which married Edward's sister Elizabeth, had been founded
by a merchant of Hull.  Earls and archbishops scrupled not to derive
revenues from what we should now esteem the literal resources of
trade.  [The Abbot of St. Alban's (temp. Henry III.) was a vendor of
Yarmouth bloaters.  The Cistercian Monks were wool-merchants; and
Macpherson tells us of a couple of Iceland bishops who got a license
from Henry VI. for smuggling. (Matthew Paris.  Macpherson's "Annals of
Commerce," 10.)  As the Whig historians generally have thought fit to
consider the Lancastrian cause the more "liberal" of the two, because
Henry IV. was the popular choice, and, in fact, an elected, not an
hereditary king, so it cannot be too emphatically repeated, that the
accession of Edward IV. was the success of two new and two highly--
popular principles,--the one that of church reform, the other that of
commercial calculation.  All that immense section, almost a majority
of the people, who had been persecuted by the Lancastrian kings as
Lollards, revenged on Henry the aggrieved rights of religious
toleration.  On the other hand, though Henry IV., who was immeasurably
superior to his warlike son in intellect and statesmanship, had
favoured the growing commercial spirit, it had received nothing but
injury under Henry V., and little better than contempt under Henry VI.
The accession of the Yorkists was, then, on two grounds a great
popular movement; and it was followed by a third advantage to the
popular cause,--namely, in the determined desire both of Edward and
Richard III. to destroy the dangerous influence of the old feudal
aristocracy.  To this end Edward laboured in the creation of a court
noblesse; and Richard, with the more dogged resolution that belonged
to him, went at once to the root of the feudal power, in forbidding
the nobles to give badges and liveries (this also was forbidden, it is
true, by the edict of Edward IV. as well as by his predecessors from
the reign of Richard II.; but no king seems to have had the courage to
enforce the prohibition before Richard III.),--in other words, to
appropriate armies under the name of retainers.  Henry VII., in short,
did not originate the policy for which he has monopolized the credit;
he did but steadily follow out the theory of raising the middle class
and humbling the baronial, which the House of York first put into
practice.] shown itself on this point more liberal in its policy, more
free from feudal prejudices, than that of the Plantagenets.  Even
Edward II. was tenacious of the commerce with Genoa, and an
intercourse with the merchant princes of that republic probably served
to associate the pursuits of commerce with the notion of rank and
power.  Edward III. is still called the Father of English Commerce;
but Edward IV. carried the theories of his ancestors into far more
extensive practice, for his own personal profit.  This king, so
indolent in the palace, was literally the most active merchant in the
mart.  He traded largely in ships of his own, freighted with his own
goods; and though, according to sound modern economics, this was
anything but an aid to commerce, seeing that no private merchant could
compete with a royal trader who went out and came in duty-free, yet
certainly the mere companionship and association in risk and gain, and
the common conversation that it made between the affable monarch and
the homeliest trader, served to increase his popularity, and to couple
it with respect for practical sense.  Edward IV. was in all this pre-
eminently THE MAN OF HIS AGE,--not an inch behind it or before!  And,
in addition to this happy position, he was one of those darlings of
Nature, so affluent and blest in gifts of person, mind, and outward
show, that it is only at the distance of posterity we ask why men of
his own age admired the false, the licentious, and the cruel, where
those contemporaries, over-dazzled, saw but the heroic and the joyous,
the young, the beautiful,--the affable to friend, and the terrible to
foe!

It was necessary to say thus much on the commercial tendencies of
Edward, because, at this epoch, they operated greatly, besides other
motives shortly to be made clear, in favour of the plot laid by the
enemies of the Earl of Warwick, to dishonour that powerful minister
and drive him from the councils of the king.

One morning Hastings received a summons to attend Edward, and on
entering the royal chamber, he found already assembled Lord Rivers,
the queen's father, Anthony Woodville, and the Earl of Worcester.

The king seemed thoughtful; he beckoned Hastings to approach, and
placed in his hand a letter, dated from Rouen.  "Read and judge,
Hastings," said Edward.

The letter was from a gentleman in Warwick's train.  It gave a glowing
account of the honours accorded to the earl by Louis XI., greater than
those ever before manifested to a subject, and proceeded thus:--

"But it is just I should apprise you that there be strange rumours as
to the marvellous love that King Louis shows my lord the earl.  He
lodgeth in the next house to him, and hath even had an opening made in
the partition-wall between his own chamber and the earl's.  Men do say
that the king visits him nightly, and there be those who think that so
much stealthy intercourse between an English ambassador and the
kinsman of Margaret of Anjou bodeth small profit to our grace the
king."

"I observe," said Hastings, glancing to the superscription, "that this
letter is addressed to my Lord Rivers.  Can he avouch the fidelity of
his correspondent?"

"Surely, yes," answered Rivers; "it is a gentleman of my own blood."

"Were he not so accredited," returned Hastings, "I should question the
truth of a man who can thus consent to play the spy upon his lord and
superior."

"The public weal justifies all things," said the Earl of Worcester
(who, though by marriage nearly connected to Warwick, eyed his power
with the jealous scorn which the man of book-lore often feels for one
whose talent lies in action),--"so held our masters in all state-
craft, the Greek and Roman."

"Certes," said Sir Anthony Woodville, "it grieveth the pride of an
English knight that we should be beholden for courtesies to the born
foe of England, which I take the Frenchman naturally to be."

"Ah," said Edward, smiling sternly, "I would rather be myself, with
banner and trump, before the walls of Paris, than sending my cousin
the earl to beg the French king's brother to accept my sister as a
bride.  And what is to become of my good merchant-ships if Burgundy
take umbrage and close its ports?"

"Beau sire," said Hastings," thou knowest how little cause I have to
love the Earl of Warwick.  We all here, save your gracious self, bear
the memory of some affront rendered to us by his pride and heat of
mood! but in this council I must cease to be William de Hastings, and
be all and wholly the king's servant.  I say first, then, with
reference to these noble peers, that Warwick's faith to the House of
York is too well proven to become suspected because of the courtesies
of King Louis,--an artful craft, as it clearly seems to me, of the
wily Frenchman, to weaken your throne, by provoking your distrust of
its great supporter.  Fall we not into such a snare!  Moreover, we may
be sure that Warwick cannot be false, if he achieve the object of his
embassy,--namely, detach Louis from the side of Margaret and Lancaster
by close alliance with Edward and York.  Secondly, sire, with regard
to that alliance, which it seems you would repent,--I hold now, as I
have held ever, that it is a master-stroke in policy, and the earl in
this proves his sharp brain worthy his strong arm; for as his highness
the Duke of Gloucester hath now clearly discovered that Margaret of
Anjou has been of late in London, and that treasonable designs were
meditated, though now frustrated, so we may ask why the friends of
Lancaster really stood aloof; why all conspiracy was, and is, in
vain?--Because, sire, of this very alliance with France; because the
gold and subsidies of Louis are not forthcoming; because the
Lancastrians see that if once Lord Warwick win France from the Red
Rose, nothing short of such a miracle as their gaining Warwick instead
can give a hope to their treason.  Your Highness fears the anger of
Burgundy, and the suspension of your trade with the Flemings; but--
forgive me--this is not reasonable.  Burgundy dare not offend England,
matched, as its arms are, with France; the Flemings gain more by you
than you gain by the Flemings, and those interested burghers will not
suffer any prince's quarrel to damage their commerce.  Charolois may
bluster and threat, but the storm will pass, and Burgundy will be
contented, if England remain neutral in the feud with France.  All
these reasons, sire, urge me to support my private foe, the Lord
Warwick, and to pray you to give no ear to the discrediting his Honour
and his embassy."

The profound sagacity of these remarks, the repute of the speaker, and
the well-known grudge between him and Warwick, for reasons hereafter
to be explained, produced a strong effect upon the intellect of
Edward, always vigorous, save when clouded with passion.  But Rivers,
whose malice to the earl was indomitable, coldly recommenced,--

"With submission to the Lord Hastings, sire, whom we know that love
sometimes blinds, and whose allegiance to the earl's fair sister, the
Lady of Bonville, perchance somewhat moves him to forget the day when
Lord Warwick--"

"Cease, my lord," said Hastings, white with suppressed anger; "these
references beseem not the councils of grave men."

"Tut, Hastings," said Edward, laughing merrily, "women mix themselves
up in all things: board or council, bed or battle,--wherever there is
mischief astir, there, be sure, peeps a woman's sly face from her
wimple.  Go on, Rivers."

"Your pardon, my Lord Hastings," said Rivers, "I knew not my thrust
went so home; there is another letter I have not yet laid before the
king."  He drew forth a scroll from his bosom, and read as follows:--

"Yesterday the earl feasted the king, and as, in discharge of mine
office, I carved for my lord, I heard King Louis say, 'Pasque Dieu, my
Lord Warwick, our couriers bring us word that Count Charolois declares
he shall yet wed the Lady Margaret, and that he laughs at your
ambassage.  What if our brother, King Edward, fall back from the
treaty?'  'He durst not!' said the earl."

"Durst not I" exclaimed Edward, starting to his feet, and striking the
table with his clenched hand, "durst not!  Hastings, hear you that?"

Hastings bowed his head in assent.  "Is that all, Lord Rivers?"

"All! and methinks enough."

"Enough, by my halidame!" said Edward, laughing bitterly; "he shall
see what a king dares, when a subject threatens.  Admit the worshipful
the deputies from our city of London,--lord chamberlain, it is thine
office,--they await in the anteroom."

Hastings gravely obeyed, and in crimson gowns, with purple hoods and
gold chains, marshalled into the king's presence a goodly deputation
from the various corporate companies of London.

These personages advanced within a few paces of the dais, and there
halted and knelt, while their spokesman read, on his knees, a long
petition, praying the king to take into his gracious consideration the
state of the trade with the Flemings; and though not absolutely
venturing to name or to deprecate the meditated alliance with France,
beseeching his grace to satisfy them as to certain rumours, already
very prejudicial to their commerce, of the possibility of a breach
with the Duke of Burgundy.  The merchant-king listened with great
attention and affability to this petition; and replied shortly, that
he thanked the deputation for their zeal for the public weal,--that a
king would have enough to do if he contravened every gossip's tale;
but that it was his firm purpose to protect, in all ways, the London
traders, and to maintain the most amicable understanding with the Duke
of Burgundy.

The supplicators then withdrew from the royal presence.

"Note you how gracious the king was to me?" whispered Master Heyford
to one of his brethren; "he looked at me while he answered."

"Coxcomb!" muttered the confidant, "as if I did not catch his eye when
he said, 'Ye are the pillars of the public weal!'  But because Master
Heyford has a handsome wife he thinks he tosseth all London on his own
horns!"

As the citizens were quitting the palace, Lord Rivers joined them.
"You will thank me for suggesting this deputation, worthy sirs," said
he, smiling significantly; "you have timed it well!"--and passing by
them, without further comment, he took the way to the queen's chamber.

Elizabeth was playing with her infant daughter, tossing the child in
the air, and laughing at its riotous laughter.  The stern old Duchess
of Bedford, leaning over the back of the state-chair, looked on with
all a grandmother's pride, and half chanted a nursery rhyme.  It was a
sight fair to see!  Elizabeth never seemed more lovely: her
artificial, dissimulating smile changed into hearty, maternal glee,
her smooth cheek flushed with exercise, a stray ringlet escaping from
the stiff coif!--And, alas, the moment the two ladies caught sight of
Rivers, all the charm was dissolved; the child was hastily put on the
floor; the queen, half ashamed of being natural, even before her
father, smoothed back the rebel lock, and the duchess, breaking off in
the midst of her grandam song, exclaimed,--

"Well, well! how thrives our policy?"

"The king," answered Rivers, "is in the very mood we could desire.  At
the words, 'He durst not!' the Plantagenet sprung up in his breast;
and now, lest he ask to see the rest of the letter, thus I destroy it;
"and flinging the scroll in the blazing hearth, he watched it consume.

"Why this, sir?" said the queen.

"Because, my Elizabeth, the bold words glided off into a decent
gloss,--'He durst not,' said Warwick, 'because what a noble heart
dares least is to belie the plighted word, and what the kind heart
shuns most is to wrong the confiding friend."

"It was fortunate," said the duchess, "that Edward took heat at the
first words, nor stopped, it seems, for the rest!"

"I was prepared, Jacquetta; had he asked to see the rest, I should
have dropped the scroll into the brazier, as containing what I would
not presume to read.  Courage!  Edward has seen the merchants; he has
flouted Hastings,--who would gainsay us.  For the rest, Elizabeth, be
it yours to speak of affronts paid by the earl to your highness; be it
yours, Jacquetta, to rouse Edward's pride by dwelling on Warwick's
overweening power; be it mine to enlist his interest on behalf of his
merchandise; be it Margaret's to move his heart by soft tears for the
bold Charolois; and ere a month be told, Warwick shall find his
embassy a thriftless laughing-stock, and no shade pass between the
House of Woodville and the sun of England."

"I am scarce queen while Warwick is minister," said Elizabeth,
vindictively.  "How he taunted me in the garden, when we met last!"

"But hark you, daughter and lady liege, hark you!  Edward is not
prepared for the decisive stroke.  I have arranged with Anthony, whose
chivalrous follies fit him not for full comprehension of our objects,
how upon fair excuse the heir of Burgundy's brother--the Count de la
Roche--shall visit London; and the count once here, all is ours!
Hush! take up the little one,--Edward comes!"




CHAPTER III.

WHEREIN MASTER NICHOLAS ALWYN VISITS THE COURT, AND THERE LEARNS
MATTER OF WHICH THE ACUTE READER WILL JUDGE FOR HIMSELF.

It was a morning towards the end of May (some little time after
Edward's gracious reception of the London deputies), when Nicholas
Alwyn, accompanied by two servitors armed to the teeth,--for they
carried with them goods of much value, and even in the broad daylight
and amidst the most frequented parts of the city, men still confided
little in the security of the law,--arrived at the Tower, and was
conducted to the presence of the queen.

Elizabeth and her mother were engaged in animated but whispered
conversation when the goldsmith entered; and there was an unusual
gayety in the queen's countenance as she turned to Alwyn and bade him
show her his newest gauds.

While with a curiosity and eagerness that seemed almost childlike
Elizabeth turned over rings, chains, and brooches, scarcely listening
to Alwyn's comments on the lustre of the gems or the quaintness of the
fashion, the duchess disappeared for a moment, and returned with the
Princess Margaret.

This young princess had much of the majestic beauty of her royal
brother; but, instead of the frank, careless expression so fascinating
in Edward, there was, in her full and curved lip and bright large eye,
something at once of haughtiness and passion, which spoke a decision
and vivacity of character beyond her years.

"Choose for thyself, sweetheart and daughter mine," said the duchess,
affectionately placing her hand on Margaret's luxuriant hair, "and let
the noble visitor we await confess that our rose of England outblooms
the world."

The princess coloured with complaisant vanity at these words, and,
drawing near the queen, looked silently at a collar of pearls, which
Elizabeth held.

"If I may adventure so to say," observed Alwyn, "pearls will mightily
beseem her highness's youthful bloom; and lo! here be some adornments
for the bodice or partelet, to sort with the collar; not," added the
goldsmith, bowing low, and looking down,--"not perchance displeasing
to her highness, in that they are wrought in the guise of the fleur de
lis--"

An impatient gesture in the queen, and a sudden cloud over the fair
brow of Margaret, instantly betokened to the shrewd trader that he had
committed some most unwelcome error in this last allusion to the
alliance with King Louis of France, which, according to rumour, the
Earl of Warwick had well-nigh brought to a successful negotiation; and
to convince him yet more of his mistake, the duchess said haughtily,
"Good fellow, be contented to display thy goods, and spare us thy
comments.  As for thy hideous fleur de lis, an' thy master had no
better device, he would not long rest the king's jeweller."

"I have no heart for the pearls," said Margaret, abruptly; "they are
at best pale and sicklied.  What hast thou of bolder ornament and more
dazzling lustrousness?"

"These emeralds, it is said, were once among the jewels of the great
House of Burgundy," observed Nicholas, slowly, and fixing his keen,
sagacious look on the royal purchasers.

"Of Burgundy!" exclaimed the queen.

"It is true," said the Duchess of Bedford, looking at the ornament
with care, and slightly colouring,--for in fact the jewels had been a
present from Philip the Good to the Duke of Bedford, and the
exigencies of the civil wars had led, some time since, first to their
mortgage, or rather pawn, and then to their sale.

The princess passed her arm affectionately round Jacquetta's neck, and
said, "If you leave me my choice, I will have none but these
emeralds."

The two elder ladies exchanged looks and smiles.  "Hast thou
travelled, young man?" asked the duchess.

"Not in foreign parts, gracious lady, but I have lived much with those
who have been great wanderers."

"Ah, and what say they of the ancient friends of mine House, the
princes of Burgundy?"

"Lady, all men agree that a nobler prince and a juster than Duke
Philip never reigned over brave men; and those who have seen the
wisdom of his rule, grieve sorely to think so excellent and mighty a
lord should have trouble brought to his old age by the turbulence of
his son, the Count of Charolois."

Again Margaret's fair brow lowered, and the duchess hastened to
answer, "The disputes between princes, young man, can never be rightly
understood by such as thou and thy friends.  The Count of Charolois is
a noble gentleman; and fire in youth will break out.  Richard the Lion
Hearted of England was not less puissant a king for the troubles he
occasioned to his sire when prince."

Alwyn bit his lip, to restrain a reply that might not have been well
received; and the queen, putting aside the emeralds and a few other
trinkets, said, smilingly, to the duchess, "Shall the king pay for
these, or have thy learned men yet discovered the great secret?"

"Nay, wicked child," said the duchess, "thou lovest to banter me; and
truth to say, more gold has been melted in the crucible than as yet
promises ever to come out of it; but my new alchemist, Master Warner,
seems to have gone nearer to the result than any I have yet known.
Meanwhile, the king's treasurer must, perforce, supply the gear to the
king's sister."

The queen wrote an order on the officer thus referred to, who was no
other than her own father, Lord Rivers; and Alwyn, putting up his
goods, was about to withdraw, when the duchess said carelessly, "Good
youth, the dealings of our merchants are more with Flanders than with
France, is it not so?"

"Surely," said Alwyn; "the Flemings are good traders and honest folk."

"It is well known, I trust, in the city of London, that this new
alliance with France is the work of their favourite, the Lord
Warwick," said the duchess, scornfully; "but whatever the earl does is
right with ye of the hood and cap, even though he were to leave yon
river without one merchant-mast."

"Whatever be our thoughts, puissant lady," said Alwyn, cautiously, "we
give them not vent to the meddling with state affairs."

"Ay," persisted Jacquetta, "thine answer is loyal and discreet.  But
an' the Lord Warwick had sought alliance with the Count of Charolois,
would there have been brighter bonfires than ye will see in
Smithfield, when ye hear that business with the Flemings is
surrendered for fine words from King Louis the Cunning?"

"We trust too much to our king's love for the citizens of London to
fear that surrender, please your Highness," answered Alwyn; "our king
himself is the first of our merchants, and he hath given a gracious
answer to the deputation from our city."

"You speak wisely, sir," said the queen; "and your king will yet
defend you from the plots of your enemies.  You may retire."

Alwyn, glad to be released from questionings but little to his taste,
hastened to depart.  At the gate of the royal lodge, he gave his
caskets to the servitors who attended him, and passing slowly along
the courtyard, thus soliloquized:

"Our neighbours the Scotch say, 'It is good fishing in muddy waters;'
but he who fishes into the secrets of courts must bait with his head.
What mischief doth that crafty queen, the proud duchess, devise?  Um!
They are thinking still to match the young princess with the hot Count
of Charolois.  Better for trade, it is true, to be hand in hand with
the Flemings; but there are two sides to a loaf.  If they play such a
trick on the stout earl, he is not a man to sit down and do nothing.
More food for the ravens, I fear,--more brown bills and bright lances
in the green fields of poor England!--and King Louis is an awful carle
to sow flax in his neighbour's house, when the torches are burning.
Um!  Where is fair Marmaduke.  He looks brave in his gay super-tunic.
Well, sir and foster-brother, how fare you at court?"

"My dear Nicholas, a merry welcome and hearty to your sharp,
thoughtful face.  Ah, man! we shall have a gay time for you venders of
gewgaws.  There are to be revels and jousts, revels in the Tower and
jousts in Smithfield.  We gentles are already hard at practice in the
tilt-yard."

"Sham battles are better than real ones, Master Nevile!  But what is
in the wind?"

"A sail, Nicholas! a sail bound to England!  Know that the Count of
Charolois has permitted Sir Anthony Count de la Roche, his bastard
brother, to come over to London, to cross lances with our own Sir
Anthony Lord Scales.  It is an old challenge, and right royally will
the encounter be held."

"Um!" muttered Alwyn, "this bastard, then, is the carrier pigeon.--
And," said he, aloud, "is it only to exchange hard blows that Sir
Anthony of Burgundy comes over to confer with Sir Anthony of England?
Is there no court rumour of other matters between them?"

"Nay.  What else?  Plague on you craftsmen!  You cannot even
comprehend the pleasure and pastime two knights take in the storm of
the lists!"

"I humbly avow it, Master Nevile.  But it seemeth, indeed, strange to
me that the Count of Charolois should take this very moment to send
envoys of courtesy when so sharp a slight has been put on his pride,
and so dangerous a blow struck at his interests, as the alliance
between the French prince and the Lady Margaret.  Bold Charles has
some cunning, I trow, which your kinsman of Warwick is not here to
detect."

"Tush, man!  Trade, I see, teaches ye all so to cheat and overreach,
that ye suppose a knight's burgonet is as full of tricks and traps as
a citizen's flat-cap.  Would, though, that my kinsman of Warwick were
here," added Marmaduke, in a low whisper, "for the women and the
courtiers are doing their best to belie him."

"Keep thyself clear of them all, Marmaduke," said Alwyn; "for, by the
Lord, I see that the evil days are coming once more, fast and dark,
and men like thee will again have to choose between friend and friend,
kinsman and king.  For my part, I say nothing; for I love not
fighting, unless compelled to it.  But if ever I do fight, it will not
be by thy side, under Warwick's broad flag."

"Eh, man?" interrupted Nevile.

"Nay, nay," continued Nicholas, shaking his head, "I admire the great
earl, and were I lord or gentle, the great earl should be my chief.
But each to his order; and the trader's tree grows not out of a
baron's walking-staff.  King Edward may be a stern ruler, but he is a
friend to the goldsmiths, and has just confirmed our charter.  'Let
every man praise the bridge he goes over,' as the saw saith.  Truce to
this talk, Master Nevile.  I hear that your young hostess--ehem!--
Mistress Sibyll, is greatly marvelled at among the court gallants, is
it so?"

Marmaduke's frank face grew gloomy.  "Alas! dear foster-brother," he
said, dropping the somewhat affected tone in which he had before
spoken, "I must confess to my shame, that I cannot yet get the damsel
out of my thoughts, which is what I consider it a point of manhood and
spirit to achieve."

"How so?"

"Because, when a maiden chooseth steadily to say nay to your wooing,
to follow her heels, and whine and beg, is a dog's duty, not a man's."

"What!" exclaimed Alwyn, in a voice of great eagerness, "mean you to
say that you have wooed Sibyll Warner as your wife?"

"Verily, yes!"

"And failed?"

"And failed."

"Poor Marmaduke!"

"There is no 'poor' in the matter, Nick Alwyn," returned Marmaduke,
sturdily; "if a girl likes me, well; if not, there are too many others
in the wide world for a young fellow to break his heart about one.
Yet," he added, after a short pause, and with a sigh,--"yet, if thou
hast not seen her since she came to the court, thou wilt find her
wondrously changed."

"More's the pity!" said Alwyn, reciprocating his friend's sigh.

"I mean that she seems all the comelier for the court air.  And
beshrew me, I think the Lord Hastings, with his dulcet flatteries,
hath made it a sort of frenzy for all the gallants to flock round
her."

"I should like to see Master Warner again," said Alwyn; "where lodges
he?"

"Yonder, by the little postern, on the third flight of the turret that
flanks the corridor, [This description refers to that part of the
Tower called the King's or Queen's Lodge, and long since destroyed.]
next to Friar Bungey, the magician; but it is broad daylight, and
therefore not so dangerous,--not but thou mayest as well patter an ave
in going up stairs."

"Farewell, Master Nevile," said Alwyn, smiling; "I will seek the
mechanician, and if I find there Mistress Sibyll, what shall I say
from thee?"

"That young bachelors in the reign of Edward IV. will never want fair
feres," answered the Nevile, debonairly smoothing his lawn partelet.




CHAPTER IV.

EXHIBITING THE BENEFITS WHICH ROYAL PATRONAGE CONFERS ON GENIUS,--ALSO
THE EARLY LOVES OF THE LORD HASTINGS; WITH OTHER MATTERS EDIFYING AND
DELECTABLE.

The furnace was still at work, the flame glowed, the bellows heaved;
but these were no longer ministering to the service of a mighty and
practical invention.  The mathematician, the philosopher, had
descended to the alchemist. The nature of the TIME had conquered the
nature of a GENIUS meant to subdue time.  Those studies that had gone
so far to forestall the master-triumph of far later ages were
exchanged for occupations that played with the toys of infant wisdom.
O true Tartarus of Genius, when its energies are misapplied, when the
labour but rolls the stone up the mountain, but pours water upon water
through the sieve!

There is a sanguineness in men of great intellect which often leads
them into follies avoided by the dull.  When Adam Warner saw the ruin
of his contrivance; when be felt that time and toil and money were
necessary to its restoration; and when the gold he lacked was placed
before him as a reward for alchemical labours, he at first turned to
alchemy as he would have turned to the plough,--as he had turned to
conspiracy,--simply as a means to his darling end.  But by rapid
degrees the fascination which all the elder sages experienced in the
grand secret exercised its witchery over his mind.  If Roger Bacon,
though catching the notion of the steam-engine, devoted himself to the
philosopher's stone; if even in so much more enlightened an age Newton
had wasted some precious hours in the transmutation of metals, it was
natural that the solitary sage of the reign of Edward IV. should grow,
for a while at least, wedded to a pursuit which promised results so
august. And the worst of alchemy is, that it always allures on its
victims: one gets so near and so near the object,--it seems that so
small an addition will complete the sum!  So there he was--this great
practical genius--hard at work on turning copper into gold!

"Well, Master Warner," said the young goldsmith, entering the
student's chamber, "methinks you scarcely remember your friend and
visitor, Nicholas Alwyn?"

"Remember, oh, certes! doubtless one of the gentlemen present when
they proposed to put me to the brake.  [the old word for rack]  Please
to stand a little on this side--what is your will?"

"I am not a gentleman, and I should have been loth to stand idly by
when the torture was talked of for a free-born Englishman, let alone a
scholar.  And where is your fair daughter, Master Warner?  I suppose
you see but little of her now she is the great dame's waiting-damsel?"

"And why so, Master Alwyn?" asked a charming voice; and Alwyn for the
first time perceived the young form of Sibyll, by the embrasure of a
window, from which might be seen in the court below a gay group of
lords and courtiers, with the plain, dark dress of Hastings,
contrasting their gaudy surcoats, glittering with cloth-of-gold.
Alwyn's tongue clove to his mouth; all he had to say was forgotten in
a certain bashful and indescribable emotion.

The alchemist had returned to his furnace, and the young man and the
girl were as much alone as if Adam Warner had been in heaven.

"And why should the daughter forsake the sire more in a court, where
love is rare, than in the humbler home, where they may need each other
less?"

"I thank thee for the rebuke, mistress," said Alwyn, delighted with
her speech; "for I should have been sorry to see thy heart spoiled by
the vanities that kill most natures."  Scarcely had he uttered these
words, than they seemed to him overbold and presuming; for his eye now
took in the great change of which Marmaduke had spoken.  Sibyll's
dress beseemed the new rank which she held: the corset, fringed with
gold, and made of the finest thread, showed the exquisite contour of
the throat and neck, whose ivory it concealed.  The kirtle of rich
blue became the fair complexion and dark chestnut hair; and over all
she wore that most graceful robe, called the sasquenice, of which the
old French poet sang,--

    "Car nulie robe n'est si belle
     A dame ne a demoiselle."

This garment, worn over the rest of the dress, had perhaps a classical
origin, and with slight variations may be seen on the Etruscan vases;
it was long and loose, of the whitest and finest linen, with hanging
sleeves, and open at the sides.  But it was not the mere dress that
had embellished the young maiden's form and aspect,--it was rather an
indefinable alteration in the expression and the bearing.  She looked
as if born to the airs of courts; still modest indeed, and simple, but
with a consciousness of dignity, and almost of power; and in fact the
woman had been taught the power that womanhood possesses.  She had
been admired, followed, flattered; she had learned the authority of
beauty.  Her accomplishments, uncommon in that age among her sex, had
aided her charm of person; her natural pride, which, though hitherto
latent, was high and ardent, fed her heart with sweet hopes; a bright
career seemed to extend before her; and, at peace as to her father's
safety, relieved from the drudging cares of poverty, her fancy was
free to follow the phantasms of sanguine youth through the airy land
of dreams.  And therefore it was that the maid was changed!

At the sight of the delicate beauty, the self-possessed expression,
the courtly dress, the noble air of Sibyll, Nicholas Alwyn recoiled
and turned pale; he no longer marvelled at her rejection of Marmaduke,
and he started at the remembrance of the bold thoughts which he had
dared himself to indulge.

The girl smiled at the young man's confusion.

"It is not prosperity that spoils the heart," she said touchingly,
"unless it be mean indeed.  Thou rememberest, Master Alwyn, that when
God tried His saint, it was by adversity and affliction."

"May thy trial in these last be over," answered Alwyn; "but the humble
must console their state by thinking that the great have their trials
too; and, as our homely adage hath it, 'That is not always good in the
maw which is sweet in the mouth.' Thou seest much of my gentle foster-
brother, Mistress Sibyll?"

"But in the court dances, Master Alwyn; for most of the hours in which
my lady duchess needs me not are spent here.  Oh, my father hopes
great things! and now at last fame dawns upon him."

"I rejoice to hear it, mistress; and so, having paid ye both my
homage, I take my leave, praying that I may visit you from time to
time, if it be only to consult this worshipful master touching certain
improvements in the horologe, in which his mathematics can doubtless
instruct me.  Farewell.  I have some jewels to show to the Lady of
Bonville."

"The Lady of Bonville!" repeated Sibyll, changing colour; "she is a
dame of notable loveliness."

"So men say,--and mated to a foolish lord; but scandal, which spares
few, breathes not on her,--rare praise for a court dame.  Few Houses
can have the boast of Lord Warwick's,--'that all the men are without
fear, and all the women without stain.'"

"It is said," observed Sibyll, looking down, "that my Lord Hastings
once much affectioned the Lady Bonville.  Hast thou heard such
gossip?"

"Surely, yes; in the city we hear all the tales of the court; for many
a courtier, following King Edward's exemplar, dines with the citizen
to-day, that he may borrow gold from the citizen to-morrow.  Surely,
yes; and hence, they say, the small love the wise Hastings bears to
the stout earl."

"How runs the tale?  Be seated, Master Alwyn."

"Marry, thus: when William Hastings was but a squire, and much
favoured by Richard, Duke of York, he lifted his eyes to the Lady
Katherine Nevile, sister to the Earl of Warwick, and in beauty and in
dower, as in birth, a mate for a king's son."

"And, doubtless, the Lady Katherine returned his love?"

"So it is said, maiden; and the Earl of Salisbury her father and Lord
Warwick her brother discovered the secret, and swore that no new man
(the stout earl's favourite word of contempt), though he were made a
duke, should give to an upstart posterity the quarterings of Montagu
and Nevile.  Marry, Mistress Sibyll, there is a north country and
pithy proverb, 'Happy is the man whose father went to the devil.' Had
some old Hastings been a robber and extortioner, and left to brave
William the heirship of his wickedness in lordships and lands, Lord
Warwick had not called him 'a new man.' Master Hastings was dragged,
like a serf's son, before the earl on his dais; and be sure he was
rated soundly, for his bold blood was up, and he defied the earl, as a
gentleman born, to single battle.  Then the earl's followers would
have fallen on him; and in those days, under King Henry, he who
bearded a baron in his hall must have a troop at his back, or was like
to have a rope round his neck; but the earl (for the lion is not as
fierce as they paint him) came down from his dais, and said, 'Man, I
like thy spirit, and I myself will dub thee knight that I may pick up
thy glove and give thee battle.'"

"And they fought?  Brave Hastings!"

"No.  For whether the Duke of York forbade it, or whether the Lady
Katherine would not hear of such strife between fere and frere, I know
not; but Duke Richard sent Hastings to Ireland, and, a month after,
the Lady Katherine married Lord Bonville's son and heir,--so, at
least, tell the gossips and sing the ballad-mongers.  Men add that
Lord Hastings still loves the dame, though, certes, he knows how to
console himself."

"Loves her!  Nay, nay,--I trove not," answered Sibyll, in a low voice,
and with a curl of her dewy lip.

At this moment the door opened gently and Lord Hastings himself
entered.  He came in with the familiarity of one accustomed to the
place.

"And how fares the grand secret, Master Warner?  Sweet mistress! thou
seemest lovelier to me in this dark chamber than outshining all in the
galliard.  Ha!  Master Alwyn, I owe thee many thanks for making me
know first the rare arts of this fair emblazoner.  Move me yon stool,
good Alwyn."

As the goldsmith obeyed, he glanced from Hastings to the blushing face
and heaving bosom of Sibyll, and a deep and exquisite pang shot
through his heart.  It was not jealousy alone; it was anxiety,
compassion, terror.  The powerful Hastings, the ambitious lord, the
accomplished libertine--what a fate for poor Sibyll, if for such a man
the cheek blushed and the bosom heaved!

"Well, Master Warner," resumed Hastings, "thou art still silent as to
thy progress."

The philosopher uttered an impatient groan.  "Ah, I comprehend.  The
goldmaker must not speak of his craft before the goldsmith.  Good
Alwyn, thou mayest retire.  All arts have their mysteries."

Alwyn, with a sombre brow, moved to the door.

"In sooth," he said, "I have overtarried, good my lord.  The Lady
Bonville will chide me; for she is of no patient temper."

"Bridle thy tongue, artisan, and begone!" said Hastings, with unusual
haughtiness and petulance.

"I stung him there," muttered Alwyn, as he withdrew.  "Oh, fool that I
was to--nay, I thought it never, I did but dream it.  What wonder we
traders hate these silken lords!  They reap, we sow; they trifle, we
toil; they steal with soft words into the hearts which--Oh, Marmaduke,
thou art right-right!--Stout men sit not down to weep beneath the
willow.  But she--the poor maiden--she looked so haughty and so happy.
This is early May; will she wear that look when the autumn leaves are
strewn?"




CHAPTER V.

THE WOODVILLE INTRIGUE PROSPERS.--MONTAGU CONFERS WITH HASTINGS,
VISITS THE ARCHBISHOP OF YORK, AND IS MET ON THE ROAD BY A STRANGE
PERSONAGE.

And now the one topic at the court of King Edward IV. was the expected
arrival of Anthony of Burgundy, Count de la Roche, bastard brother of
Charolois, afterwards, as Duke of Burgundy, so famous as Charles the
Bold.  Few, indeed, out of the immediate circle of the Duchess of
Bedford's confidants regarded the visit of this illustrious foreigner
as connected with any object beyond the avowed one of chivalrous
encounter with Anthony Woodville, the fulfilment of a challenge given
by the latter two years before, at the time of the queen's coronation.
The origin of this challenge, Anthony Woodville Lord Scales has
himself explained in a letter to the bastard, still extant, and of
which an extract may be seen in the popular and delightful biographies
of Miss Strickland.  [Queens of England, vol. iii. p. 380]  It seems
that, on the Wednesday before Easter Day, 1465, as Sir Anthony was
speaking to his royal sister, "on his knees," all the ladies of the
court gathered round him, and bound to his left knee a band of gold
adorned with stones fashioned into the letters S. S. (souvenance or
remembrance), and to this band was suspended an enamelled "Forget-me-
not."  "And one of the ladies said that 'he ought to take a step
fitting for the times.'"  This step was denoted by a letter on vellum,
bound with a gold thread, placed in his cap; and having obtained the
king's permission to bring the adventure of the flower of souvenance
to a conclusion, the gallant Anthony forwarded the articles and the
enamelled flower to the Bastard of Burgundy, beseeching him to touch
the latter with his knightly hand, in token of his accepting the
challenge.  The Count de la Roche did so, but was not sent by his
brother amongst the knights whom Charolois despatched to England, and
the combat had been suspended to the present time.

But now the intriguing Rivers and his duchess gladly availed
themselves of so fair a pretext for introducing to Edward the able
brother of Warwick's enemy and the French prince's rival, Charles of
Burgundy; and Anthony Woodville, too gentle and knightly a person to
have abetted their cunning projects in any mode less chivalrous,
willingly consented to revive a challenge in honour of the ladies of
England.

The only one amongst the courtiers who seemed dissatisfied with the
meditated visit of the doughty Burgundian champion was the Lord
Montagu.  This penetrating and experienced personage was not to be
duped by an affectation of that chivalry which, however natural at the
court of Edward III., was no longer in unison with the more intriguing
and ambitious times over which presided the luxurious husband of
Elizabeth Woodville.  He had noticed of late, with suspicion, that
Edward had held several councils with the anti-Nevile faction, from
which he himself was excluded.  The king, who heretofore had delighted
in his companionship, had shown him marks of coldness and
estrangement; and there was an exulting malice in the looks of the
Duchess of Bedford, which augured some approaching triumph over the
great family which the Woodvilles so openly laboured to supplant.  One
day, as Marmaduke was loitering in the courtyard of the Tower,
laughing and jesting with his friends, Lord Montagu, issuing from the
king's closet, passed him with a hurried step and a thoughtful brow.
This haughty brother of the Earl of Warwick had so far attended to the
recommendation of the latter, that he had with some courtesy excused
himself to Marmaduke for his language in the archery-ground, and had
subsequently, when seeing him in attendance on the king, honoured him
with a stately nod, or a brief "Good morrow, young kinsman."  But as
his eye now rested on Marmaduke, while the group vailed their bonnets
to the powerful courtier, he called him forth, with a familiar smile
he had never before assumed, and drawing him apart, and leaning on his
shoulder, much to the envy of the standers by, he said caressingly,--

"Dear kinsman Guy--"

"Marmaduke, please you, my lord."

"Dear kinsman Marmaduke, my brother esteems you for your father's
sake.  And, sooth to say, the Neviles are not so numerous in court as
they were.  Business and state matters have made me see too seldom
those whom I would most affect.  Wilt thou ride with me to the More
Park?  I would present thee to my brother the archbishop."

"If the king would graciously hold me excused."

"The king, sir! when I--I forgot," said Montagu, checking himself--
"oh, as to that, the king stirs not out to-day!  He hath with him a
score of tailors and armourers in high council on the coming
festivities.  I will warrant thy release; and here comes Hastings, who
shall confirm it."

"Fair my lord!"--as at that moment Hastings emerged from the little
postern that gave egress from the apartments occupied by the alchemist
of the Duchess of Bedford--"wilt thou be pleased, in thy capacity of
chamberlain, to sanction my cousin in a day's absence?  I would confer
with him on family matters."

"Certes, a small favour to so deserving a youth.  I will see to his
deputy."

"A word with you, Hastings," said Montagu, thoughtfully, and he drew
aside his fellow courtier: "what thinkest thou of this Burgundy
bastard's visit?"

"That it has given a peacock's strut to the popinjay Anthony
Woodville."

"Would that were all!" returned Montagu.  "But the very moment that
Warwick is negotiating with Louis of France, this interchange of
courtesies with Louis's deadly foe, the Count of Charolois, is out of
season."

"Nay, take it not so gravely,--a mere pastime."

"Hastings, thou knowest better.  But thou art no friend of my great
brother."

"Small cause have I to be so," answered Hastings, with a quivering
lip.  "To him and your father I owe as deep a curse as ever fell on
the heart of man.  I have lived to be above even Lord Warwick's
insult.  Yet young, I stand amongst the warriors and peers of England
with a crest as haught and a scutcheon as stainless as the best. I
have drunk deep of the world's pleasures.  I command, as I list, the
world's gaudy pomps, and I tell thee, that all my success in life
countervails not the agony of the hour when all the bloom and
loveliness of the earth faded into winter, and the only woman I ever
loved was sacrificed to her brother's pride."

The large drops stood on the pale brow of the fortunate noble as he
thus spoke, and his hollow voice affected even the worldly Montagu.

"Tush, Hastings!" said Montagu, kindly; "these are but a young man's
idle memories.  Are we not all fated, in our early years, to love in
vain?--even I married not the maiden I thought the fairest, and held
the dearest.  For the rest, bethink thee,--thou wert then but a simple
squire."

"But of as ancient and pure a blood as ever rolled its fiery essence
through a Norman's veins."

"It may be so; but old Houses, when impoverished, are cheaply held.
And thou must confess thou wert then no mate for Katherine.  Now,
indeed, it were different; now a Nevile might be proud to call
Hastings brother."

"I know it," said Hastings, proudly,--"I know it, lord; and why?
Because I have gold, and land, and the king's love, and can say, as
the Centurion, to my fellow-man, 'Do this, and he doeth it;' and yet I
tell thee, Lord Montagu, that I am less worthy now the love of beauty,
the right hand of fellowship from a noble spirit, than I was then,
when--the simple squire--my heart full of truth and loyalty, with lips
that had never lied, with a soul never polluted by unworthy pleasures
or mean intrigues, I felt that Katherine Nevile should never blush to
own her fere and plighted lord in William de Hastings.  Let this pass,
let it pass!  You call me no friend to Warwick.  True! but I am a
friend to the king he has served, and the land of my birth to which he
has given peace; and therefore, not till Warwick desert Edward, not
till he wake the land again to broil and strife, will I mingle in the
plots of those who seek his downfall.  If in my office and stated rank
I am compelled to countenance the pageant of this mock tournament, and
seem to honour the coming of the Count de la Roche, I will at least
stand aloof and free from all attempt to apply a gaudy pageant to a
dangerous policy; and on this pledge, Montagu, I give you my knightly
hand."

"It suffices," answered Montagu, pressing the hand extended to him.
"But the other day I heard the king's dissour tell him a tale of some
tyrant, who silently showed a curious questioner how to govern a land,
by cutting down, with his staff, the heads of the tallest poppies; and
the Duchess of Bedford turned to me, and asked, 'What says a Nevile to
the application?'  'Faith, lady,' said I, 'the Nevile poppies have oak
stems.'  Believe me, Hastings, these Woodvilles may grieve and wrong
and affront Lord Warwick, but woe to all the pigmy goaders when the
lion turns at bay!"

With this solemn menace, Montagu quitted Hastings, and passed on,
leaning upon Marmaduke, and with a gloomy brow.

At the gate of the palace waited the Lord Montagu's palfrey and his
retinue of twenty squires and thirty grooms.  "Mount, Master
Marmaduke, and take thy choice among these steeds, for we shall ride
alone.  There is no Nevile amongst these gentlemen."  Marmaduke
obeyed.  The earl dismissed his retinue, and in little more than ten
minutes,--so different, then, was the extent of the metropolis,--the
noble and the squire were amidst the open fields.

They had gone several miles at a brisk trot before the earl opened his
lips, and then, slackening his pace, he said abruptly, "How dost thou
like the king?  Speak out, youth; there are no eavesdroppers here."

"He is a most gracious master and a most winning gentleman."

"He is both," said Montagu, with a touch of emotion that surprised
Marmaduke; "and no man can come near without loving him.  And yet,
Marmaduke (is that thy name?)--yet whether it be weakness or
falseness, no man can be sure of his king's favour from day to day.
We Neviles must hold fast to each other.  Not a stick should be lost
if the fagot is to remain unbroken.  What say you?" and the earl's
keen eye turned sharply on the young man.

"I say, my lord, that the Earl of Warwick was to me patron, lord, and
father, when I entered yon city a friendless orphan; and that, though
I covet honours, and love pleasure, and would be loth to lift finger
or speak word against King Edward, yet were that princely lord--the
head of mine House--an outcast and a beggar, by his side I would
wander, for his bread I would beg."

"Young man," exclaimed Montagu, "from this hour I admit thee to my
heart!  Give me thy hand.  Beggar and outcast?--No!  If the storm
come, the meaner birds take to shelter, the eagle remains solitary in
heaven!"  So saying, he relapsed into silence, and put spurs to his
steed.  Towards the decline of day they drew near to the favourite
palace of the Archbishop of York.  There the features of the country
presented a more cultivated aspect than it had hitherto worn.  For at
that period the lands of the churchmen were infinitely in advance of
those of the laity in the elementary arts of husbandry, partly because
the ecclesiastic proprietors had greater capital at their command,
partly because their superior learning had taught them to avail
themselves, in some measure, of the instructions of the Latin writers.
Still the prevailing characteristic of the scenery was pasture land,--
immense tracts of common supported flocks of sheep; the fragrance of
new-mown hay breathed sweet from many a sunny field.  In the rear
stretched woods of Druid growth; and in the narrow lanes, that led to
unfrequent farms and homesteads, built almost entirely either of wood
or (more primitive still) of mud and clay, profuse weeds, brambles,
and wild-flowers almost concealed the narrow pathway, never intended
for cart or wagon, and arrested the slow path of the ragged horse
bearing the scanty produce of acres to yard or mill.  But though to
the eye of an economist or philanthropist broad England now, with its
variegated agriculture, its wide roads, its white-walled villas, and
numerous towns, may present a more smiling countenance, to the early
lover of Nature, fresh from the child-like age of poetry and romance,
the rich and lovely verdure which gave to our mother-country the name
of "Green England;" its wild woods and covert alleys, proffering
adventure to fancy; its tranquil heaths, studded with peaceful flocks,
and vocal, from time to time, with the rude scrannel of the shepherd,
--had a charm which we can understand alone by the luxurious reading of
our elder writers.  For the country itself ministered to that mingled
fancy and contemplation which the stirring and ambitious life of towns
and civilization has in much banished from our later literature.

Even the thoughtful Montagu relaxed his brow as he gazed around, and
he said to Marmaduke, in a gentle and subdued voice,--

"Methinks, young cousin, that in such scenes, those silly rhymes
taught us in our childhood of the green woods and the summer cuckoos,
of bold Robin and Maid Marian, ring back in our ears.  Alas that this
fair land should be so often dyed in the blood of her own children!
Here, how the thought shrinks from broils and war,--civil war, war
between brother and brother, son and father!  In the city and the
court, we forget others overmuch, from the too keen memory of
ourselves."

Scarcely had Montagu said these words, before there suddenly emerged
from a bosky lane to the right a man mounted upon a powerful roan
horse.  His dress was that of a substantial franklin; a green surtout
of broadcloth, over a tight vest of the same colour, left, to the
admiration of a soldierly eye, an expanse of chest that might have
vied with the mighty strength of Warwick himself.  A cap, somewhat
like a turban, fell in two ends over the left cheek, till they touched
the shoulder, and the upper part of the visage was concealed by a
half-vizard, not unfrequently worn out of doors with such head-gear,
as a shade from the sun.  Behind this person rode, on a horse equally
powerful, a man of shorter stature, but scarcely less muscular a
frame, clad in a leathern jerkin, curiously fastened with thongs, and
wearing a steel bonnet, projecting far over the face.

The foremost of these strangers, coming thus unawares upon the
courtiers, reined in his steed, and said in a clear, full voice, "Good
evening to you, my masters.  It is not often that these roads witness
riders in silk and pile."

"Friend," quoth the Montagu, "may the peace we enjoy under the White
Rose increase the number of all travellers through our land, whether
in pile or russet!"

"Peace, sir!" returned the horseman, roughly,--"peace is no blessing
to poor men, unless it bring something more than life,--the means to
live in security and ease.  Peace hath done nothing for the poor of
England.  Why, look you towards yon gray tower,--the owner is,
forsooth, gentleman and knight; but yesterday he and his men broke
open a yeoman's house, carried off his wife and daughters to his
tower, and refuseth to surrender them till ransomed by half the year's
produce on the yeoman's farm."

"A caitiff and illegal act," said Montagu.

"Illegal!  But the law will notice it not,--why should it?  Unjust, if
it punish the knight and dare not touch the king's brother!"

"How, sir?"

"I say the king's brother!  Scarcely a month since, twenty-four
persons under George Duke of Clarence entered by force a lady's house,
and seized her jewels and her money, upon some charge, God wot, of
contriving mischief to the boy-duke.  [See for this and other
instances of the prevalent contempt of law in the reign of Edward IV.,
and, indeed, during the fifteenth century, the extracts from the
Parliamentary Rolls, quoted by Sharon Turner, "History of England,"
vol. iii. p. 399.]  Are not the Commons ground by imposts for the
queen's kindred?  Are not the king's officers and purveyors licensed
spoilers and rapiners?  Are not the old chivalry banished for new
upstarts?  And in all this, is peace better than war?"

"Knowest thou not that these words are death, man?"

"Ay, in the city! but in the fields and waste thought is free.  Frown
not, my lord.  Ah, I know you, and the time may come when the baron
will act what the franklin speaks.  What! think you I see not the
signs of the storm?  Are Warwick and Montagu more safe with Edward
than they were with Henry?  Look to thyself!  Charolois will outwit
King Louis, and ere the year be out, the young Margaret of England
will be lady of your brave brother's sternest foe!"

"And who art thou, knave?" cried Montagu, aghast, and laying his
gloved hand on the bold prophet's bridle.

"One who has sworn the fall of the House of York, and may live to
fight, side by side, in that cause with Warwick; for Warwick, whatever
be his faults, has an English heart, and loves the Commons."

Montagu, uttering an exclamation of astonishment, relaxed hold of the
franklin's bridle; and the latter waved his hand, and spurring his
steed across the wild chain of commons, disappeared with his follower.

"A sturdy traitor!" muttered the earl, following him with his eye.
"One of the exiled Lancastrian lords, perchance.  Strange how they
pierce into our secrets!  Heardst thou that fellow, Marmaduke?"

"Only in a few sentences, and those brought my hand to my dagger.  But
as thou madest no sign, I thought his grace the king could not be much
injured by empty words."

"True! and misfortune has ever a shrewish tongue."

"An' it please you, my lord," quoth Marmaduke, "I have seen the man
before, and it seemeth to me that he holds much power over the rascal
rabble."  And here Marmaduke narrated the attack upon Warner's house,
and how it was frustrated by the intercession of Robin of Redesdale.

"Art thou sure it is the same man, for his face was masked?"

"My lord, in the North, as thou knowest, we recognize men by their
forms, not faces,--as in truth we ought, seeing that it is the sinews
and bulk, not the lips and nose, that make a man a useful friend or
dangerous foe."

Montagu smiled at this soldierly simplicity.  "And heard you the name
the raptrils shouted?"

"Robin, my lord.  They cried out 'Robin,' as if it had been a 'Montagu
I or a 'Warwick.'"

"Robin! ah, then I guess the man,--a most perilous and stanch
Lancastrian.  He has more weight with the poor than had Cade the
rebel, and they say Margaret trusts him as much as she does an Exeter
or Somerset.  I marvel that he should show himself so near the gates
of London.  It must be looked to.  But come, cousin.  Our steeds are
breathed,--let us on!"

On arriving at the More, its stately architecture, embellished by the
prelate with a facade of double arches, painted and blazoned somewhat
in the fashion of certain old Italian houses, much dazzled Marmaduke.
And the splendour of the archbishop's retinue--less martial indeed
than Warwick's--was yet more imposing to the common eye.  Every office
that pomp could devise for a king's court was to be found in the
household of this magnificent prelate,--master of the horse and the
hounds, chamberlain, treasurer, pursuivant, herald, seneschal, captain
of the body-guard, etc.,--and all emulously sought for and proudly
held by gentlemen of the first blood and birth.  His mansion was at
once a court for middle life, a school for youth, an asylum for age;
and thither, as to a Medici, fled the letters and the arts.

Through corridor and hall, lined with pages and squires, passed
Montagu and Marmaduke, till they gained a quaint garden, the wonder
and envy of the time, planned by an Italian of Mantua, and perhaps the
stateliest one of the kind existent in England.  Straight walks,
terraces, and fountains, clipped trees, green alleys, and smooth
bowling-greens abounded; but the flowers were few and common: and if
here and there a statue might be found, it possessed none of the art
so admirable in our earliest ecclesiastical architecture, but its
clumsy proportions were made more uncouth by a profusion of barbaric
painting and gilding.  The fountains, however, were especially
curious, diversified, and elaborate: some shot up as pyramids, others
coiled in undulating streams, each jet chasing the other as serpents;
some, again, branched off in the form of trees, while mimic birds,
perched upon leaden boughs, poured water from their bills.  Marmaduke,
much astonished and bewildered, muttered a paternoster in great haste;
and even the clerical rank of the prelate did not preserve him from
the suspicion of magical practices in the youth's mind.

Remote from all his train, in a little arbour overgrown with the
honeysuckle and white rose, a small table before him bearing fruits,
confectionery, and spiced wines (for the prelate was a celebrated
epicure, though still in the glow of youth), they found George Nevile,
reading lazily a Latin manuscript.

"Well, my dear lord and brother," said Montagu, laying his arm on the
prelate's shoulder, "first let me present to thy favour a gallant
youth, Marmaduke Nevile, worthy his name and thy love."

"He is welcome, Montagu, to our poor house," said the archbishop,
rising, and complacently glancing at his palace, splendidly gleaming
through the trellis-work. 'Puer ingenui vultus.'  Thou art acquainted,
doubtless, young sir, with the Humaner Letters?"

"Well-a-day, my lord, my nurturing was somewhat neglected in the
province," said Marmaduke, disconcerted, and deeply blushing, "and
only of late have I deemed the languages fit study for those not
reared for our Mother Church."

"Fie, sir, fie!  Correct that error, I pray thee.  Latin teaches the
courtier how to thrive, the soldier how to manoeuvre, the husbandman
how to sow; and if we churchmen are more cunning, as the profane call
us (and the prelate smiled) than ye of the laity, the Latin must
answer for the sins of our learning."

With this, the archbishop passed his arm affectionately through his
brother's, and said, "Beshrew me, Montagu, thou lookest worn and
weary.  Surely thou lackest food, and supper shall be hastened.  Even
I, who have but slender appetite, grow hungered in these cool gloaming
hours."

"Dismiss my comrade, George,--I would speak to thee," whispered
Montagu.

"Thou knowest not Latin?" said the archbishop, turning with a
compassionate eye to Nevile, whose own eye was amorously fixed on the
delicate confectioneries,--"never too late to learn.  Hold, here is a
grammar of the verbs, that, with mine own hand, I have drawn up for
youth.  Study thine amo and thy moneo, while I confer on Church
matters with giddy Montagu.  I shall expect, ere we sup, that thou
wilt have mastered the first tenses."

"But--"

"Oh, nay, nay; but me no buts.  Thou art too tough, I fear me, for
flagellation, a wondrous improver of tender youth,"--and the prelate
forced his grammar into the reluctant hands of Marmaduke, and
sauntered down one of the solitary alleys with his brother.

Long and earnest was their conference, and at one time keen were their
dispute's.

The archbishop had very little of the energy of Montagu or the
impetuosity of Warwick, but he had far more of what we now call mind,
as distinct from talent, than either; that is, he had not their
capacities for action, but he had a judgment and sagacity that made
him considered a wise and sound adviser: this he owed principally to
the churchman's love of ease, and to his freedom from the wear and
tear of the passions which gnawed the great minister and the aspiring
courtier; his natural intellect was also fostered by much learning.
George Nevile had been reared, by an Italian ecclesiastic, in all the
subtle diplomacy of the Church; and his ambition, despising lay
objects (though he consented to hold the office of chancellor), was
concentrated in that kingdom over kings which had animated the august
dominators of religious Rome.  Though, as we have said, still in that
age when the affections are usually vivid, [He was consecrated Bishop
of Exeter at the age of twenty; at twenty-six he became Archbishop of
York, and was under thirty at the time referred to in the text.]
George Nevile loved no human creature,--not even his brothers; not
even King Edward, who, with all his vices, possessed so eminently the
secret that wins men's hearts.  His early and entire absorption in the
great religious community, which stood apart from the laymen in order
to control them, alienated him from his kind; and his superior
instruction only served to feed him with a calm and icy contempt for
all that prejudice, as he termed it, held dear and precious.  He
despised the knight's wayward honour, the burgher's crafty honesty.
For him no such thing as principle existed; and conscience itself lay
dead in the folds of a fancied exemption from all responsibility to
the dull herd, that were but as wool and meat to the churchman
shepherd.  But withal, if somewhat pedantic, he had in his manner a
suavity and elegance and polish which suited well his high station,
and gave persuasion to his counsels.  In all externals he was as
little like a priest as the high-born prelates of that day usually
were.  In dress he rivalled the fopperies of the Plantagenet brothers;
in the chase he was more ardent than Warwick had been in his earlier
youth; and a dry sarcastic humour, sometimes elevated into wit, gave
liveliness to his sagacious converse.

Montagu desired that the archbishop and himself should demand solemn
audience of Edward, and gravely remonstrate with the king on the
impropriety of receiving the brother of a rival suitor, while Warwick
was negotiating the marriage of Margaret with a prince of France.

"Nay," said the archbishop, with a bland smile, that fretted Montagu
to the quick, "surely even a baron, a knight, a franklin, a poor
priest like myself, would rise against the man who dictated to his
hospitality.  Is a king less irritable than baron, knight, franklin,
and priest,--or rather, being, as it were, per legem, lord of all,
hath he not irritability eno' for all four?  Ay, tut and tush as thou
wilt, John, but thy sense must do justice to my counsel at the last. I
know Edward well; he hath something of mine own idlesse and ease of
temper, but with more of the dozing lion than priests, who have only,
look you, the mildness of the dove.  Prick up his higher spirit, not
by sharp remonstrance, but by seeming trust. Observe to him, with thy
gay, careless laugh--which, methinks, thou hast somewhat lost of late
--that with any other prince Warwick might suspect some snare, some
humiliating overthrow of his embassage, but that all men know how
steadfast in faith and honour is Edward IV."

"Truly," said Montagu, with a forced smile, "you understand mankind;
but yet, bethink you--suppose this fail, and Warwick return to England
to hear that he hath been cajoled and fooled; that the Margaret he had
crossed the seas to affiance to the brother of Louis is betrothed to
Charolois--bethink you, I say, what manner of heart beats under our
brother's mail."

"Impiger, iracundus!" said the archbishop; "a very Achilles, to whom
our English Agamemnon, if he cross him, is a baby.  All this is sad
truth; our parents spoilt him in his childhood, and glory in his
youth, and wealth, power, success, in his manhood.  Ay! if Warwick be
chafed, it will be as the stir of the sea-serpent, which, according to
the Icelanders, moves a world.  Still, the best way to prevent the
danger is to enlist the honour of the king in his behalf,--to show
that our eyes are open, but that we disdain to doubt, and are frank to
confide.  Meanwhile send messages and warnings privately to Warwick."

These reasonings finally prevailed with Montagu, and the brothers
returned with one mind to the house.  Here, as after their ablutions
they sat down to the evening meal, the archbishop remembered poor
Marmaduke, and despatched to him one of his thirty household
chaplains.  Marmaduke was found fast asleep over the second tense of
the verb amo.




CHAPTER VI.

THE ARRIVAL OF THE COUNT DE LA ROCHE, AND THE VARIOUS EXCITEMENT
PRODUCED ON MANY PERSONAGES BY THAT EVENT.

The prudence of the archbishop's counsel was so far made manifest,
that on the next day Montagu found all remonstrance would have been
too late.  The Count de la Roche had already landed, and was on his
way to London.  The citizens, led by Rivers partially to suspect the
object of the visit, were delighted not only by the prospect of a
brilliant pageant, but by the promise such a visit conveyed of a
continued peace with their commercial ally; and the preparations made
by the wealthy merchants increased the bitterness and discontent of
Montagu.  At length, at the head of a gallant and princely retinue,
the Count de la Roche entered London.  Though Hastings made no secret
of his distaste to the Count de la Roche's visit, it became his office
as lord chamberlain to meet the count at Blackwall, and escort him and
his train, in gilded barges, to the palace.

In the great hall of the Tower, in which the story of Antiochus was
painted by the great artists employed under Henry III., and on the
elevation of the dais, behind which, across Gothic columns, stretched
draperies of cloth-of-gold, was placed Edward's chair of state.
Around him were grouped the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, the
Lords Worcester, Montagu, Rivers, D'Eyncourt, St. John, Raoul de
Fulke, and others.  But at the threshold of the chamber stood Anthony
Woodville, the knightly challenger, his knee bound by the ladye-badge
of the S. S., and his fine person clad in white-flowered velvet of
Genoa, adorned with pearls.  Stepping forward, as the count appeared,
the gallant Englishman bent his knee half-way to the ground, and
raising the count's hand to his lips, said in French, "Deign, noble
sir, to accept the gratitude of one who were not worthy of encounter
from so peerless a hand, save by the favour of the ladies of England,
and your own courtesy, which ennobles him whom it stoops to."  So
saying, he led the count towards the king.

De la Roche, an experienced and profound courtier, and justly
deserving Hall's praise as a man of "great witte, courage,
valiantness, and liberalitie," did not affect to conceal the
admiration which the remarkable presence of Edward never failed to
excite; lifting his hand to his eyes, as if to shade them from a
sudden blaze of light, he would have fallen on both knees, but Edward
with quick condescension raised him, and, rising himself, said gayly,--

"Nay, Count de la Roche, brave and puissant chevalier, who hath
crossed the seas in honour of knighthood and the ladies, we would,
indeed, that our roiaulme boasted a lord like thee, from whom we might
ask such homage.  But since thou art not our subject, it consoles us
at least that thou art our guest.  By our halidame, Lord Scales, thou
must look well to thy lance and thy steed's girths, for never, I trow,
hast thou met a champion of goodlier strength and knightlier mettle."

"My lord king," answered the count, "I fear me, indeed, that a knight
like the Sieur Anthony, who fights under the eyes of such a king, will
prove invincible.  Did kings enter the lists with kings, where,
through broad Christendom, find a compeer for your Highness?"

"Your brother, Sir Count, if fame lies not," returned Edward, slightly
laughing, and lightly touching the Bastard's shoulder, "were a fearful
lance to encounter, even though Charlemagne himself were to revive
with his twelve paladins at his back.  Tell us, Sir Count," added the
king, drawing himself up,--"tell us, for we soldiers are curious in
such matters, hath not the Count of Charolois the advantage of all
here in sinews and stature?"

"Sire," returned De la Roche, "my princely brother is indeed mighty
with the brand and battle-axe, but your Grace is taller by half the
head,--and, peradventure, of even a more stalwart build; but that mere
strength in your Highness is not that gift of God which strikes the
beholder most."

Edward smiled good-humouredly at a compliment the truth of which was
too obvious to move much vanity, and said with a royal and knightly
grace, "Our House of York hath been taught, Sir Count, to estimate
men's beauty by men's deeds, and therefore the Count of Charolois hath
long been known to us--who, alas, have seen him not!--as the fairest
gentleman of Europe.  My Lord Scales, we must here publicly crave your
pardon.  Our brother-in-law, Sir Count, would fain have claimed his
right to hold you his guest, and have graced himself by exclusive
service to your person.  We have taken from him his lawful office, for
we kings are jealous, and would not have our subjects more honoured
than ourselves."  Edward turned round to his courtiers as he spoke,
and saw that his last words had called a haughty and angry look to the
watchful countenance of Montagu.  "Lord Hastings," he continued, "to
your keeping, as our representative, we intrust this gentleman.  He
must need refreshment ere we present him to our queen."

The count bowed to the ground, and reverently withdrew from the royal
presence, accompanied by Hastings.  Edward then, singling Anthony
Woodville and Lord Rivers from the group, broke up the audience, and,
followed by those two noblemen, quitted the hall.

Montagu, whose countenance had recovered the dignified and high-born
calm habitual to it, turned to the Duke of Clarence, and observed
indifferently, "The Count de la Roche hath a goodly mien, and a fair
tongue."

"Pest on these Burgundians!" answered Clarence, in an undertone, and
drawing Montagu aside.  "I would wager my best greyhound to a
scullion's cur that our English knights will lower their burgonets."

"Nay, sir, an idle holiday show.  What matters whose lance breaks, or
whose destrier stumbles?"

"Will you not, yourself, cousin Montagu--you who are so peerless in
the joust--take part in the fray?"

"I, your Highness,--I, the brother of the Earl of Warwick, whom this
pageant hath been devised by the Woodvilles to mortify and disparage
in his solemn embassy to Burgundy's mightiest foe!--I!"

"Sooth to say," said the young prince, much embarrassed, "it grieves
me sorely to hear thee speak as if Warwick would be angered at this
pastime.  For, look you, Montagu, I, thinking only of my hate to
Burgundy and my zeal for our English honour, have consented, as high
constable, and despite my grudge to the Woodvilles, to bear the
bassinet of our own champion, and--"

"Saints in heaven!" exclaimed Montagu, with a burst of his fierce
brother's temper, which he immediately checked, and changed into a
tone that concealed, beneath outward respect, the keenest irony, "I
crave your pardon humbly for my vehemence, Prince of Clarence.  I
suddenly remember me that humility is the proper virtue of knighthood.
Your Grace does indeed set a notable example of that virtue to the
peers of England; and my poor brother's infirmity of pride will stand
rebuked for aye, when he hears that George Plantagenet bore the
bassinet of Anthony Woodville."

"But it is for the honour of the ladies," said Clarence, falteringly;
"in honour of the fairest maid of all--the flower of English beauty--
the Lady Isabel--that I--"

"Your Highness will pardon me," interrupted Montagu; "but I do trust
to your esteem for our poor and insulted House of Nevile so far as to
be assured that the name of my niece Isabel will not be submitted to
the ribald comments of a base-born Burgundian."

"Then I will break no lance in the lists!"

"As it likes you, prince," replied Montagu, shortly; and, with a low
bow, he quitted the chamber, and was striding to the outer gate of the
Tower, when a sweet, clear voice behind him called him by his name.
He turned abruptly, to meet the dark eye and all-subduing smile of the
boy-Duke of Gloucester.

"A word with you, Montagu, noblest and most prized, with your princely
brothers, of the champions of our House,--I read your generous
indignation with our poor Clarence.  Ay, sir! ay!--it was a weakness
in him that moved even me.  But you have not now to learn that his
nature, how excellent soever, is somewhat unsteady.  His judgment
alone lacks weight and substance,--ever persuaded against his better
reason by those who approach his infirmer side; but if it be true that
our cousin Warwick intends for him the hand of the peerless Isabel,
wiser heads will guide his course."

"My brother," said Montagu, greatly softened, "is much beholden to
your Highness for a steady countenance and friendship, for which I
also, believe me--and the families of Beauchamp, Montagu, and Nevile--
are duly grateful.  But to speak plainly (which your Grace's youthful
candour, so all-acknowledged, will permit), the kinsmen of the queen
do now so aspire to rule this land, to marry or forbid to marry, not
only our own children, but your illustrious father's, that I foresee
in this visit of the bastard Anthony the most signal disgrace to
Warwick that ever king passed upon ambassador or gentleman.  And this
moves me more!--yea, I vow to Saint George, my patron, it moves me
more--by the thought of danger to your royal House than by the grief
of slight to mine; for Warwick--but you know him."

"Montagu, you must soothe and calm your brother if chafed.  I impose
that task on your love for us.  Alack, would that Edward listened more
to me and less to the queen's kith!  These Woodvilles!--and yet they
may live to move not wrath but pity.  If aught snapped the thread of
Edward's life (Holy Paul forbid!), what would chance to Elizabeth, her
brothers, her children?"

"Her children would mount the throne that our right hands built," said
Montagu, sullenly.

"Ah, think you so?--you rejoice me!  I had feared that the barons
might, that the commons would, that the Church must, pronounce the
unhappy truth, that--but you look amazed, my lord!  Alas, my boyish
years are too garrulous!"

"I catch not your Highness's meaning."

"Pooh, pooh!  By Saint Paul, your seeming dulness proves your loyalty;
but with me, the king's brother, frankness were safe.  Thou knowest
well that the king was betrothed before to the Lady Eleanor Talbot;
that such betrothal, not set aside by the Pope, renders his marriage
with Elizabeth against law; that his children may (would to Heaven it
were not so!) be set aside as bastards, when Edward's life no longer
shields them from the sharp eyes of men."

"Ah," said Montagu, thoughtfully; "and in that case, George of
Clarence would wear the crown, and his children reign in England."

"Our Lord forefend," said Richard, "that I should say that Warwick
thought of this when he deemed George worthy of the hand of Isabel.
Nay, it could not be so; for, however clear the claim, strong and
powerful would be those who would resist it, and Clarence is not, as
you will see, the man who can wrestle boldly,--even for a throne.
Moreover, he is too addicted to wine and pleasure to bid fair to
outlive the king."

Montagu fixed his penetrating eyes on Richard, but dropped them,
abashed, before that steady, deep, unrevealing gaze, which seemed to
pierce into other hearts, and show nothing of the heart within.

"Happy Clarence!" resumed the prince, with a heavy sigh, and after a
brief pause,--"a Nevile's husband and a Warwick's son--what can the
saints do more for men?  You must excuse his errors--all our errors--
to your brother.  You may not know, peradventure, sweet Montagu, how
deep an interest I have in maintaining all amity between Lord Warwick
and the king.  For methinks there is one face fairer than fair
Isabel's, and one man more to be envied than even Clarence.  Fairest
face to me in the wide world is the Lady Anne's! happiest man between
the cradle and the grave is he whom the Lady Anne shall call her lord!
and if I--oh, look you, Montagu, let there be no breach between
Warwick and the king!  Fare you well, dear lord and cousin,--I go to
Baynard's Castle till these feasts are over."

"Does not your Grace," said Montagu, recovering from the surprise into
which one part of Gloucester's address had thrown him--"does not your
Grace--so skilled in lance and horsemanship--preside at the lists?"

"Montagu, I love your brother well enough to displease my king.  The
great earl shall not say, at least, that Richard Plantagenet in his
absence forgot the reverence due to loyalty and merit.  Tell him that;
and if I seem (unlike Clarence) to forbear to confront the queen and
her kindred, it is because you should make no enemies,--not the less
for that should princes forget no friends."

Richard said this with a tone of deep feeling, and, folding his arms
within his furred surcoat, walked slowly on to a small postern
admitting to the river; but there, pausing by a buttress which
concealed him till Montagu had left the yard, instead of descending to
his barge, he turned back into the royal garden.  Here several of the
court of both sexes were assembled, conferring on the event of the
day.  Richard halted at a distance, and contemplated their gay dresses
and animated countenances with something between melancholy and scorn
upon his young brow.  One of the most remarkable social
characteristics of the middle ages is the prematurity at which the
great arrived at manhood, shared in its passions, and indulged its
ambitions.  Among the numerous instances in our own and other
countries that might be selected from history, few are more striking
than that of this Duke of Gloucester, great in camp and in council at
an age when nowadays a youth is scarcely trusted to the discipline of
a college.  The whole of his portentous career was closed, indeed,
before the public life of modern ambition usually commences.  Little
could those accustomed to see on our stage "the elderly ruffian"
[Sharon Turner] our actors represent, imagine that at the opening of
Shakspeare's play of "Richard the Third" the hero was but in his
nineteenth year; but at the still more juvenile age in which he
appears in this our record, Richard of Gloucester was older in
intellect, and almost in experience, than many a wise man at the date
of thirty-three,--the fatal age when his sun set forever on the field
of Bosworth!

The young prince, then, eyed the gaudy, fluttering, babbling
assemblage before him with mingled melancholy and scorn.  Not that he
felt, with the acuteness which belongs to modern sentiment, his bodily
defects amidst that circle of the stately and the fair, for they were
not of a nature to weaken his arm in war or lessen his persuasive
influences in peace.  But it was rather that sadness which so often
comes over an active and ambitious intellect in early youth, when it
pauses to ask, in sorrow and disdain, what its plots and counterplots,
its restlessness and strife, are really worth.  The scene before him
was of pleasure,--but in pleasure neither the youth nor the manhood of
Richard III. was ever pleased; though not absolutely of the rigid
austerity of Amadis or our Saxon Edward, he was comparatively free
from the licentiousness of his times.  His passions were too large for
frivolous excitements.  Already the Italian, or, as it is falsely
called, the Machiavelian policy, was pervading the intellect of
Europe, and the effects of its ruthless, grand, and deliberate
statecraft are visible from the accession of Edward IV. till the close
of Elizabeth's reign.  With this policy, which reconciled itself to
crime as a necessity of wisdom, was often blended a refinement of
character which disdained vulgar vices.  Not skilled alone in those
knightly accomplishments which induced Caxton, with propriety, to
dedicate to Richard "The Book of the Order of Chivalry," the Duke of
Gloucester's more peaceful amusements were borrowed from severer
Graces than those which presided over the tastes of his royal
brothers.  He loved, even to passion, the Arts, Music,--especially of
the more Doric and warlike kind,--Painting and Architecture; he was a
reader of books, as of men,--the books that become princes,--and hence
that superior knowledge of the principles of law and of commerce which
his brief reign evinced.  More like an Italian in all things than the
careless Norman or the simple Saxon, Machiavel might have made of his
character a companion, though a contrast to that of Castruccio
Castrucani.

The crowd murmured and rustled at the distance, and still with folded
arms Richard gazed aloof, when a lady, entering the garden from the
palace, passed by him so hastily that she brushed his surcoat, and,
turning round in surprise, made a low reverence, as she exclaimed,
"Prince Richard! and alone amidst so many!"

"Lady," said the duke, "it was a sudden hope that brought me into this
garden,--and that was the hope to see your fair face shining above the
rest."

"Your Highness jests," returned the lady, though her superb
countenance and haughty carriage evinced no opinion of herself so
humble as her words would imply.

"My Lady of Bonville," said the young duke, laying his hand on her
arm, "mirth is not in my thoughts at this hour."

"I believe your Highness; for the Lord Richard Plantagenet is not one
of the Woodvilles.  The mirth is theirs to-day."

"Let who will have mirth,--it is the breath of a moment.  Mirth cannot
tarnish glory,--the mirror in which the gods are glassed."

"I understand you, my lord," said the proud lady; and her face, before
stern and high, brightened into so lovely a change, so soft and
winning a smile, that Gloucester no longer marvelled that that smile
had rained so large an influence on the fate and heart of his
favourite Hastings.  The beauty of this noble woman was indeed
remarkable in its degree, and peculiar in its character.  She bore a
stronger likeness in feature to the archbishop than to either of her
other brothers; for the prelate had the straight and smooth outline of
the Greeks,--not like Montagu and Warwick, the lordlier and manlier
aquiline of the Norman race,--and his complexion was feminine in its
pale clearness.  But though in this resembling the subtlest of the
brethren, the fair sister shared with Warwick an expression, if
haughty, singularly frank and candid in its imperious majesty; she had
the same splendid and steady brilliancy of eye, the same quick quiver
of the lip, speaking of nervous susceptibility and haste of mood.  The
hateful fashion of that day which pervaded all ranks, from the highest
to the lowest, was the prodigal use of paints and cosmetics, and all
imaginable artificial adjuncts of a spurious beauty.  This extended
often even to the men, and the sturdiest warrior deemed it no shame to
recur to such arts of the toilet as the vainest wanton in our day
would never venture to acknowledge.  But the Lady Bonville, proudly
confident of her beauty, and possessing a purity of mind that revolted
from the littleness of courting admiration, contrasted forcibly in
this the ladies of the court.  Her cheek was of a marble whiteness,
though occasionally a rising flush through the clear, rich,
transparent skin showed that in earlier youth the virgin bloom had not
been absent from the surface.  There was in her features, when they
reposed, somewhat of the trace of suffering,--of a struggle, past it
may be, but still remembered.  But when she spoke, those features
lighted up and undulated in such various and kindling life as to
dazzle, to bewitch, or to awe the beholder, according as the impulse
moulded the expression.  Her dress suited her lofty and spotless
character.  Henry VI. might have contemplated with holy pleasure its
matronly decorum; the jewelled gorget ascended to the rounded and
dimpled chin; the arms were bare only at the wrists, where the blue
veins were seen through a skin of snow; the dark glossy locks, which
her tirewoman boasted, when released, swept the ground, were gathered
into a modest and simple braid, surmounted by the beseeming coronet
that proclaimed her rank.  The Lady Bonville might have stood by the
side of Cornelia, the model of a young and high-born matron, in whose
virtue the honour of man might securely dwell.

"I understand you, my lord," she said, with her bright, thankful
smile; "and as Lord Warwick's sister, I am grateful."

"Your love for the great earl proves you are noble enough to forgive,"
said Richard, meaningly.  "Nay, chide me not with that lofty look; you
know that there are no secrets between Hastings and Gloucester."

"My lord duke, the head of a noble House hath the right to dispose of
the hands of the daughters; I know nothing in Lord Warwick to
forgive."

But she turned her head as she spoke, and a tear for a moment trembled
in that haughty eye.

"Lady," said Richard, moved to admiration, "to you let me confide my
secret.  I would be your nephew.  Boy though I be in years, my heart
beats as loudly as a man's; and that heart beats for Anne."

"The love of Richard Plantagenet honours even Warwick's daughter!"

"Think you so?  Then stand my friend; and, being thus my friend,
intercede with Warwick, if he angers at the silly holiday of this
Woodville pageant."

"Alas, sir! you know that Warwick listens to no interceders between
himself and his passions.  But what then?  Grant him wronged,
aggrieved, trifled with,--what then?  Can he injure the House of
York?"

Richard looked in some surprise at the fair speaker.

"Can he injure the House of York?--Marry, yes," he replied bluntly.

"But for what end?  Whom else should he put upon the throne?"

"What if he forgive the Lancastrians?  What if--"

"Utter not the thought, prince, breathe it not," exclaimed the Lady
Bonville, almost fiercely.  "I love and honour my brave brother,
despite--despite--"  She paused a moment, blushed, and proceeded
rapidly, without concluding the sentence.  "I love him as a woman of
his House must love the hero who forms its proudest boast. But if, for
any personal grudge, any low ambition, any rash humour, the son of my
father Salisbury could forget that Margaret of Anjou placed the gory
head of that old man upon the gates of York, could by word or deed
abet the cause of usurping and bloody Lancaster,--I would--I would--
Out upon my sex!  I could do nought but weep the glory of Nevile and
Monthermer gone forever."

Before Richard could reply, the sound of musical instruments, and a
procession of heralds and pages proceeding from the palace, announced
the approach of Edward.  He caught the hand of the dame of Bonville,
lifted it to his lips, and saying, "May fortune one day permit me to
face as the earl's son the earl's foes," made his graceful reverence,
glided from the garden, gained his barge, and was rowed to the huge
pile of Baynard's Castle, lately reconstructed, but in a gloomy and
barbaric taste, and in which, at that time, he principally resided
with his mother, the once peerless Rose of Raby.

The Lady of Bonville paused a moment, and in that pause her
countenance recovered its composure.  She then passed on, with a
stately step, towards a group of the ladies of the court, and her eye
noted with proud pleasure that the highest names of the English
knighthood and nobility, comprising the numerous connections of her
family, formed a sullen circle apart from the rest, betokening, by
their grave countenances and moody whispers, how sensitively they felt
the slight to Lord Warwick's embassy in the visit of the Count de la
Roche, and how little they were disposed to cringe to the rising sun
of the Woodvilles.  There, collected into a puissance whose discontent
hard sufficed to shake a firmer throne (the young Raoul de Fulke, the
idolater of Warwick, the impersonation in himself of the old Norman
seignorie, in their centre), with folded arms and lowering brows,
stood the earl's kinsmen, the Lords Fitzhugh and Fauconberg: with
them, Thomas Lord Stanley, a prudent noble, who rarely sided with a
malcontent, and the Lord St. John, and the heir of the ancient
Bergavennies, and many another chief, under whose banner marched an
army.  Richard of Gloucester had shown his wit in refusing to mingle
in intrigues which provoked the ire of that martial phalanx.  As the
Lady of Bonville swept by these gentlemen, their murmur of respectful
homage, their profound salutation, and unbonneted heads, contrasted
forcibly with the slight and grave, if not scornful, obeisance they
had just rendered to one of the queen's sisters, who had passed a
moment before in the same direction.  The lady still moved on, and
came suddenly across the path of Hastings, as, in his robes of state,
he issued from the palace.  Their eyes met, and both changed colour.

"So, my lord chamberlain," said the dame, sarcastically, "the Count de
la Roche is, I hear, consigned to your especial charge."

"A charge the chamberlain cannot refuse, and which William Hastings
does not covet."

"A king had never asked Montagu and Warwick to consider amongst their
duties any charge they had deemed dishonouring."

"Dishonouring, Lady Bonville!" exclaimed Hastings, with a bent brow
and a flushed cheek,--"neither Montagu nor Warwick had, with safety,
applied to me the word that has just passed your lips."

"I crave your pardon," answered Katherine, bitterly.  "Mine articles
of faith in men's honour are obsolete or heretical.  I had deemed it
dishonouring in a noble nature to countenance insult to a noble enemy
in his absence.  I had deemed it dishonouring in a brave soldier, a
well-born gentleman (now from his valiantness, merit, and wisdom
become a puissant and dreaded lord), to sink into that lackeydom and
varletaille which falsehood and cringing have stablished in these
walls, and baptized under the name of 'courtiers.'  Better had
Katherine de Bonville esteemed Lord Hastings had he rather fallen
under a king's displeasure than debased his better self to a
Woodville's dastard schemings."

"Lady, you are cruel and unjust, like all your haughty race; and idle
were reply to one who, of all persons, should have judged me better.
For the rest, if this mummery humbles Lord Warwick, gramercy! there is
nothing in my memory that should make my share in it a gall to my
conscience; nor do I owe the Neviles so large a gratitude, that rather
than fret the pile of their pride, I should throw down the scaffolding
on which my fearless step hath clomb to as fair a height, and one
perhaps that may overlook as long a posterity, as the best baron that
ever quartered the Raven Eagle and the Dun Bull.  But," resumed
Hastings, with a withering sarcasm, "doubtless the Lady de Bonville
more admires the happy lord who holds himself, by right of pedigree,
superior to all things that make the statesman wise, the scholar
learned, and the soldier famous.  Way there--back, gentles,"--and
Hastings turned to the crowd behind,--"way there, for my lord of
Harrington and Bonville!"

The bystanders smiled at each other as they obeyed; and a heavy,
shambling, graceless man, dressed in the most exaggerated fopperies of
the day, but with a face which even sickliness, that refines most
faces, could not divest of the most vacant dulness, and a mien and
gait to which no attire could give dignity, passed through the group,
bowing awkwardly to the right and left, and saying, in a thick, husky
voice, "You are too good, sirs,--too good: I must not presume so
overmuch on my seignorie.  The king would keep me,--he would indeed,
sirs; um--um--why, Katherine--dame--thy stiff gorget makes me ashamed
of thee.  Thou wouldst not think, Lord Hastings, that Katherine had a
white skin,--a parlous white skin.  La, you now, fie on these
mufflers!"  The courtiers sneered; Hastings, with a look of malignant
and pitiless triumph, eyed the Lady of Bonville.  For a moment the
colour went and came across her transparent cheek; but the confusion
passed, and returning the insulting gaze of her ancient lover with an
eye of unspeakable majesty, she placed her arm upon her lord's, and
saying calmly, "An English matron cares but to be fair in her
husband's eyes," drew him away; and the words and the manner of the
lady were so dignified and simple, that the courtiers hushed their
laughter, and for the moment the lord of such a woman was not only
envied but respected.

While this scene had passed, the procession preceding Edward had filed
into the garden in long and stately order.  From another entrance
Elizabeth, the Princess Margaret, and the Duchess of Bedford, with
their trains, had already issued, and were now ranged upon a flight of
marble steps, backed by a columned alcove, hung with velvet striped
into the royal baudekin, while the stairs themselves were covered with
leathern carpets, powdered with the white rose and the fleur de lis;
either side lined by the bearers of the many banners of Edward,
displaying the white lion of March, the black bull of Clare, the cross
of Jerusalem, the dragon of Arragon, and the rising sun, which he had
assumed as his peculiar war-badge since the battle of Mortimer's
Cross.  Again, and louder, came the flourish of music; and a murmur
through the crowd, succeeded by deep silence, announced the entrance
of the king.  He appeared, leading by the hand the Count de la Roche,
and followed by the Lords Scales, Rivers, Dorset, and the Duke of
Clarence.  All eyes were bent upon the count, and though seen to
disadvantage by the side of the comeliest and stateliest and most
gorgeously-attired prince in Christendom, his high forehead, bright
sagacious eye, and powerful frame did not disappoint the expectations
founded upon the fame of one equally subtle in council and redoubted
in war.

The royal host and the princely guest made their way where Elizabeth,
blazing in jewels and cloth-of-gold, shone royally, begirt by the
ladies of her brilliant court.  At her right hand stood her mother, at
her left, the Princess Margaret.

"I present to you, my Elizabeth," said Edward, "a princely gentleman,
to whom we nevertheless wish all ill-fortune,--for we cannot desire
that he may subdue our knights, and we would fain hope that he may be
conquered by our ladies."

"The last hope is already fulfilled," said the count, gallantly, as on
his knee he kissed the fair hand extended to him.  Then rising, and
gazing full and even boldly upon the young Princess Margaret, he
added, "I have seen too often the picture of the Lady Margaret not to
be aware that I stand in that illustrious presence."

"Her picture!  Sir Count," said the queen; "we knew not that it had
been ever limned."

"Pardon me, it was done by stealth."

"And where have you seen it?"

"Worn at the heart of my brother the Count of Charolois!" answered De
la Roche, in a whispered tone.

Margaret blushed with evident pride and delight; and the wily envoy,
leaving the impression his words had made to take their due effect,
addressed himself, with all the gay vivacity he possessed, to the fair
queen and her haughty mother.

After a brief time spent in this complimentary converse, the count
then adjourned to inspect the menagerie, of which the king was very
proud.  Edward, offering his hand to his queen, led the way, and the
Duchess of Bedford, directing the count to Margaret by a shrewd and
silent glance of her eye, so far smothered her dislike to Clarence as
to ask his highness to attend herself.

"Ah, lady," whispered the count, as the procession moved along, "what
thrones would not Charolois resign for the hand that his unworthy
envoy is allowed to touch!"

"Sir," said Margaret, demurely looking down, "the Count of Charolois
is a lord who, if report be true, makes war his only mistress."

"Because the only loving mistress his great heart could serve is
denied to his love!  Ah, poor lord and brother, what new reasons for
eternal war to Burgundy, when France, not only his foe, becomes his
rival!"

Margaret sighed, and the count continued till by degrees he warmed the
royal maiden from her reserve; and his eye grew brighter, and a
triumphant smile played about his lips, when, after the visit to the
menagerie, the procession re-entered the palace, and the Lord Hastings
conducted the count to the bath prepared for him, previous to the
crowning banquet of the night.  And far more luxurious and more
splendid than might be deemed by those who read but the general
histories of that sanguinary time, or the inventories of furniture in
the houses even of the great barons, was the accommodation which
Edward afforded to his guest. His apartments and chambers were hung
with white silk and linen, the floors covered with richly-woven
carpets; the counterpane of his bed was cloth-of-gold, trimmed with
ermine; the cupboard shone with vessels of silver and gold; and over
two baths were pitched tents of white cloth of Rennes fringed with
silver.  [See Madden's Narrative of the Lord Grauthuse; Archaelogia,
1830.]

Agreeably to the manners of the time, Lord Hastings assisted to
disrobe the count; and, the more to bear him company, afterwards
undressed himself and bathed in the one bath, while the count
refreshed his limbs in the other.

"Pri'thee," said De la Roche, drawing aside the curtain of his tent,
and putting forth his head--"pri'thee, my Lord Hastings, deign to
instruct my ignorance of a court which I would fain know well, and let
me weet whether the splendour of your king, far exceeding what I was
taught to look for, is derived from his revenue as sovereign of
England, or chief of the House of York?"

"Sir," returned Hastings, gravely, putting out his own head, "it is
Edward's happy fortune to be the wealthiest proprietor in England,
except the Earl of Warwick, and thus he is enabled to indulge a state
which yet oppresses not his people."

"Except the Earl of Warwick!" repeated the count, musingly, as the
fumes of the odours with which the bath was filled rose in a cloud
over his long hair,--"ill would fare that subject, in most lands, who
was as wealthy as his king!  You have heard that Warwick has met King
Louis at Rouen, and that they are inseparable?"

"It becomes an ambassador to win grace of him he is sent to please."

"But none win the grace of Louis whom Louis does not dupe."

"You know not Lord Warwick, Sir Count.  His mind is so strong and so
frank, that it is as hard to deceive him as it is for him to be
deceived."

"Time will show," said the count, pettishly, and he withdrew his head
into the tent.

And now there appeared the attendants, with hippocras, syrups, and
comfits, by way of giving appetite for the supper, so that no further
opportunity for private conversation was left to the two lords.  While
the count was dressing, the Lord Scales entered with a superb gown,
clasped with jewels, and lined with minever, with which Edward had
commissioned him to present the Bastard.  In this robe the Lord Scales
insisted upon enduing his antagonist with his own hands, and the three
knights then repaired to the banquet.  At the king's table no male
personage out of the royal family sat, except Lord Rivers--as
Elizabeth's father--and the Count de la Roche, placed between Margaret
and the Duchess of Bedford.

At another table, the great peers of the realm feasted under the
presidence of Anthony Woodville, while, entirely filling one side of
the hall, the ladies of the court held their "mess" (so-called) apart,
and "great and mighty was the eating thereof!"

The banquet ended, the dance began.  The admirable "featliness" of the
Count de la Roche, in the pavon, with the Lady Margaret, was rivalled
only by the more majestic grace of Edward and the dainty steps of
Anthony Woodville.  But the lightest and happiest heart which beat in
that revel was one in which no scheme and no ambition but those of
love nursed the hope and dreamed the triumph.

Stung by the coldness even more than by the disdain of the Lady
Bonville, and enraged to find that no taunt of his own, however
galling, could ruffle a dignity which was an insult both to memory and
to self-love, Hastings had exerted more than usual, both at the
banquet and in the revel, those general powers of pleasing, which,
even in an age when personal qualifications ranked so high, had yet
made him no less renowned for successes in gallantry than the
beautiful and youthful king.  All about this man witnessed to the
triumph of mind over the obstacles that beset it,--his rise without
envy, his safety amidst foes, the happy ease with which he moved
through the snares and pits of everlasting stratagem and universal
wile!  Him alone the arts of the Woodvilles could not supplant in
Edward's confidence and love; to him alone dark Gloucester bent his
haughty soul; him alone, Warwick, who had rejected his alliance, and
knew the private grudge the rejection bequeathed,--him alone, among
the "new men," Warwick always treated with generous respect, as a wise
patriot and a fearless soldier; and in the more frivolous scenes of
courtly life, the same mind raised one no longer in the bloom of
youth, with no striking advantages of person, and studiously
disdainful of all the fopperies of the time, to an equality with the
youngest, the fairest, the gaudiest courtier, in that rivalship which
has pleasure for its object and love for its reward.  Many a heart
beat quicker as the graceful courtier, with that careless wit which
veiled his profound mournfulness of character, or with that delicate
flattery which his very contempt for human nature had taught him,
moved from dame to donzell; till at length, in the sight and hearing
of the Lady Bonville, as she sat, seemingly heedless of his revenge,
amidst a group of matrons elder than herself, a murmur of admiration
made him turn quickly, and his eye, following the gaze of the
bystanders, rested upon the sweet, animated face of Sibyll, flushed
into rich bloom at the notice it excited.  Then as he approached the
maiden, his quick glance darting to the woman he had first loved told
him that he had at last discovered the secret how to wound.  An
involuntary compression of Katherine's proud lips, a hasty rise and
fall of the stately neck, a restless, indescribable flutter, as it
were, of the whole frame, told the experienced woman-reader of the
signs of jealousy and fear.  And he passed at once to the young
maiden's side.  Alas! what wonder that Sibyll that night surrendered
her heart to the happiest dreams; and finding herself on the floors of
a court, intoxicated by its perfumed air, hearing on all sides the
murmured eulogies which approved and justified the seeming preference
of the powerful noble, what wonder that she thought the humble maiden,
with her dower of radiant youth and exquisite beauty, and the fresh
and countless treasures of virgin love, might be no unworthy mate of
the "new lord"?

It was morning [The hours of our ancestors, on great occasions, were
not always more seasonable than our own.  Froissart speaks of court
balls, in the reign of Richard II., kept up till day.] before the
revel ended;  and when dismissed by the Duchess of Bedford, Sibyll was
left to herself, not even amidst her happy visions did the daughter
forget her office.  She stole into her father's chamber.  He, too, was
astir and up,--at work at the untiring furnace, the damps on his brow,
but all Hope's vigour at his heart.  So while Pleasure feasts, and
Youth revels, and Love deludes itself, and Ambition chases its shadows
(chased itself by Death),--so works the world-changing and world-
despised SCIENCE, the life within life, for all living,--and to all
dead!




CHAPTER VII.

THE RENOWNED COMBAT BETWEEN SIR ANTHONY WOODVILLE AND THE BASTARD OF
BURGUNDY.

And now the day came for the memorable joust between the queen's
brother and the Count de la Roche.  By a chapter solemnly convoked at
St. Paul's, the preliminaries were settled; upon the very timber used
in decking the lists King Edward expended half the yearly revenue
derived from all the forests of his duchy of York.  In the wide space
of Smithfield, destined at a later day to blaze with the fires of
intolerant bigotry, crowded London's holiday population: and yet,
though all the form and parade of chivalry were there; though in the
open balconies never presided a braver king or a comelier queen;
though never a more accomplished chevalier than Sir Anthony Lord of
Scales, nor a more redoubted knight than the brother of Charles the
Bold, met lance to lance,--it was obvious to the elder and more
observant spectators, that the true spirit of the lists was already
fast wearing out from the influences of the age; that the gentleman
was succeeding to the knight, that a more silken and scheming race had
become the heirs of the iron men, who, under Edward III., had realized
the fabled Paladins of Charlemagne and Arthur.  But the actors were
less changed than the spectators,--the Well-born than the People.
Instead of that hearty sympathy in the contest, that awful respect for
the champions, that eager anxiety for the honour of the national
lance, which, a century or more ago, would have moved the throng as
one breast, the comments of the bystanders evinced rather the cynicism
of ridicule, the feeling that the contest was unreal, and that
chivalry was out of place in the practical temper of the times.  On
the great chessboard the pawns were now so marshalled, that the
knight's moves were no longer able to scour the board and hold in
check both castle and king.

"Gramercy," said Master Stokton, who sat in high state as sheriff,
[Fabyan] "this is a sad waste of moneys; and where, after all, is the
glory in two tall fellows, walled a yard thick in armor, poking at
each other with poles of painted wood?"

"Give me a good bull-bait!" said a sturdy butcher, in the crowd below;
"that's more English, I take it, than these fooleries."

Amongst the ring, the bold 'prentices of London, up and away betimes,
had pushed their path into a foremost place, much to the discontent of
the gentry, and with their flat caps, long hair, thick bludgeons, loud
exclamations, and turbulent demeanour, greatly scandalized the formal
heralds.  That, too, was a sign of the times.  Nor less did it show
the growth of commerce, that, on seats very little below the regal
balconies, and far more conspicuous than the places of earls and
barons, sat in state the mayor (that mayor a grocer!) [Sir John
Yonge.--Fabyan] and aldermen of the city.

A murmur, rising gradually into a general shout, evinced the
admiration into which the spectators were surprised, when Anthony
Woodville Lord Scales--his head bare--appeared at the entrance of the
lists,--so bold and so fair was his countenance, so radiant his
armour, and so richly caparisoned his gray steed, in the gorgeous
housings that almost swept the ground; and around him grouped such an
attendance of knights and peers as seldom graced the train of any
subject, with the Duke of Clarence at his right hand, bearing his
bassinet.

But Anthony's pages, supporting his banner, shared at least the
popular admiration with their gallant lord:  they were, according to
the old custom, which probably fell into disuse under the Tudors,
disguised in imitation of the heraldic beasts that typified his
armourial cognizance; [Hence the origin of Supporters] and horrible
and laidly looked they in the guise of griffins, with artful scales of
thin steel painted green, red forked tongues, and griping the banner
in one huge claw, while, much to the marvel of the bystanders, they
contrived to walk very statelily on the other.  "Oh, the brave
monsters!" exclaimed the butcher.  "Cogs bones, this beats all the
rest!"

But when the trumpets of the heralds had ceased, when the words
"Laissez aller!" were pronounced, when the lances were set and the
charge began, this momentary admiration was converted into a cry of
derision, by the sudden restiveness of the Burgundian's horse.  This
animal, of the pure race of Flanders, of a bulk approaching to
clumsiness, of a rich bay, where, indeed, amidst the barding and the
housings, its colour could be discerned, had borne the valiant Bastard
through many a sanguine field, and in the last had received a wound
which had greatly impaired its sight.  And now, whether scared by the
shouting, or terrified by its obscure vision, and the recollection of
its wound when last bestrode by its lord, it halted midway, reared on
end, and, fairly turning round, despite spur and bit, carried back the
Bastard, swearing strange oaths, that grumbled hoarsely through his
vizor, to the very place whence he had started.

The uncourteous mob yelled and shouted and laughed, and wholly
disregarding the lifted wands and drowning the solemn rebukes of the
heralds, they heaped upon the furious Burgundian all the expressions
of ridicule in which the wit of Cockaigne is so immemorially rich.
But the courteous Anthony of England, seeing the strange and
involuntary flight of his redoubted foe, incontinently reined in,
lowered his lance, and made his horse, without turning round, back to
the end of the lists in a series of graceful gambadas and caracoles.
Again the signal was given, and this time the gallant bay did not fail
his rider; ashamed, doubtless, of its late misdemeanour, arching its
head till it almost touched the breast, laying its ears level on the
neck, and with a snort of anger and disdain, the steed of Flanders
rushed to the encounter.  The Bastard's lance shivered fairly against
the small shield of the Englishman; but the Woodville's weapon, more
deftly aimed, struck full on the count's bassinet, and at the same
time the pike projecting from the gray charger's chaffron pierced the
nostrils of the unhappy bay, which rage and shame had blinded more
than ever.  The noble animal, stung by the unexpected pain, and bitted
sharply by the rider, whose seat was sorely shaken by the stroke on
his helmet, reared again, stood an instant perfectly erect, and then
fell backwards, rolling over and over the illustrious burden it had
borne.  Then the debonair Sir Anthony of England, casting down his
lance, drew his sword, and dexterously caused his destrier to curvet
in a close circle round the fallen Bastard, courteously shaking at him
the brandished weapon, but without attempt to strike.

"Ho, marshal!" cried King Edward, "assist to his legs the brave
count."

The marshal hastened to obey.  "Ventrebleu!" quoth the Bastard, when
extricated from the weight of his steed, "I cannot hold by the clouds,
but though my horse failed me, surely I will not fail my companions;"
and as he spoke, he placed himself in so gallant and superb a posture,
that he silenced the inhospitable yell which had rejoiced in the
foreigner's discomfiture.  Then, observing that the gentle Anthony had
dismounted, and was leaning gracefully against his destrier, the
Burgundian called forth,--

"Sir Knight, thou hast conquered the steed, not the rider.  We are now
foot to foot.  The pole-axe, or the sword,--which?  Speak!"

"I pray thee, noble sieur," quoth the Woodville, mildly, "to let the
strife close for this day, and when rest bath--"

"Talk of rest to striplings,--I demand my rights!"

"Heaven forefend," said Anthony Woodville, lifting his hand on high,
"that I, favoured so highly by the fair dames of England, should
demand repose on their behalf.  But bear witness," he said (with the
generosity of the last true chevalier of his age, and lifting his
vizor, so as to be heard by the king, and even through the foremost
ranks of the crowd)--"bear witness, that in this encounter, my cause
hath befriended me, not mine arm.  The Count de la Roche speaketh
truly; and his steed alone be blamed for his mischance."

"It is but a blind beast!" muttered the Burgundian.

"And," added Anthony, bowing towards the tiers rich with the beauty of
the court--"and the count himself assureth me that the blaze of yonder
eyes blinded his goodly steed."  Having delivered himself of this
gallant conceit, so much in accordance with the taste of the day, the
Englishman, approaching the king's balcony, craved permission to
finish the encounter with the axe or brand.

"The former, rather please you, my liege; for the warriors of Burgundy
have ever been deemed unconquered in that martial weapon."

Edward, whose brave blood was up and warm at the clash of steel, bowed
his gracious assent, and two pole-axes were brought into the ring.

The crowd now evinced a more earnest and respectful attention than
they had hitherto shown, for the pole-axe, in such stalwart hands, was
no child's toy.  "Hum," quoth Master Stokton, "there may be some
merriment now,--not like those silly poles!  Your axe lops off a limb
mighty cleanly."  The knights themselves seemed aware of the greater
gravity of the present encounter.  Each looked well to the bracing of
his vizor; and poising their weapons with method and care, they stood
apart some moments, eying each other steadfastly,--as adroit fencers
with the small sword do in our schools at this day.

At length the Burgundian, darting forward, launched a mighty stroke at
the Lord Scales, which, though rapidly parried, broke down the guard,
and descended with such weight on the shoulder that but for the
thrice-proven steel of Milan, the benevolent expectation of Master
Stokton had been happily fulfilled.  Even as it was, the Lord Scales
uttered a slight cry,--which might be either of anger or of pain,--and
lifting his axe with both hands, levelled a blow on the Burgundian's
helmet that well nigh brought him to his knee.  And now for the space
of some ten minutes, the crowd with charmed suspense beheld the almost
breathless rapidity with which stroke on stroke was given and parried;
the axe shifted to and fro, wielded now with both hands, now the left,
now the right, and the combat reeling, as it were, to and fro,--so
that one moment it raged at one extreme of the lists, the next at the
other; and so well inured, from their very infancy, to the weight of
mail were these redoubted champions, that the very wrestlers on the
village green, nay, the naked gladiators of old, might have envied
their lithe agility and supple quickness.

At last, by a most dexterous stroke, Anthony Woodville forced the
point of his axe into the vizor of the Burgundian, and there so firmly
did it stick, that he was enabled to pull his antagonist to and fro at
his will, while the Bastard, rendered as blind as his horse by the
stoppage of the eye-hole, dealt his own blows about at random, and was
placed completely at the mercy of the Englishman.  And gracious as the
gentle Sir Anthony was, he was still so smarting under many a bruise
felt through his dinted mail, that small mercy, perchance, would the
Bastard have found, for the gripe of the Woodville's left hand was on
his foe's throat, and the right seemed about to force the point
deliberately forward into the brain, when Edward, roused from his
delight at that pleasing spectacle by a loud shriek from his sister
Margaret, echoed by the Duchess of Bedford, who was by no means
anxious that her son's axe should be laid at the root of all her
schemes, rose, and crying, "Hold!" with that loud voice which had so
often thrilled a mightier field, cast down his warderer.

Instantly the lists opened; the marshals advanced, severed the
champions, and unbraced the count's helmet.  But the Bastard's martial
spirit, exceedingly dissatisfied at the unfriendly interruption,
rewarded the attention of the marshals by an oath worthy his
relationship to Charles the Bold; and hurrying straight to the king,
his face flushed with wrath and his eyes sparkling with fire,--

"Noble sire and king," he cried, "do me not this wrong!  I am not
overthrown nor scathed nor subdued,--I yield not.  By every knightly
law till one champion yields he can call upon the other to lay on and
do his worst."

Edward paused, much perplexed and surprised at finding his
intercession so displeasing.  He glanced first at the Lord Rivers, who
sat a little below him, and whose cheek grew pale at the prospect of
his son's renewed encounter with one so determined, then at the
immovable aspect of the gentle and apathetic Elizabeth, then at the
agitated countenance of the duchess, then at the imploring eyes of
Margaret, who, with an effort, preserved herself from swooning; and
finally beckoning to him the Duke of Clarence, as high constable, and
the Duke of Norfolk, as earl marshal, he said, "Tarry a moment, Sir
Count, till we take counsel in this grave affair."  The count bowed
sullenly; the spectators maintained an anxious silence; the curtain
before the king's gallery was closed while the council conferred.  At
the end of some three minutes, however, the drapery was drawn aside by
the Duke of Norfolk; and Edward, fixing his bright blue eye upon the
fiery Burgundian, said gravely, "Count de la Roche, your demand is
just. According to the laws of the list, you may fairly claim that the
encounter go on."

"Oh, knightly prince, well said!  My thanks.  We lose time.--Squires,
my bassinet!"

"Yea," renewed Edward, "bring hither the count's bassinet.  By the
laws, the combat may go on at thine asking,--I retract my warderer.
But, Count de la Roche, by those laws you appeal to, the said combat
must go on precisely at the point at which it was broken off.
Wherefore brace on thy bassinet, Count de la Roche; and thou, Anthony
Lord Scales, fix the pike of thine axe, which I now perceive was
inserted exactly where the right eye giveth easy access to the brain,
precisely in the same place.  So renew the contest, and the Lord have
mercy on thy soul, Count de la Roche!"

At this startling sentence, wholly unexpected, and yet wholly
according to those laws of which Edward was so learned a judge, the
Bastard's visage fell.  With open mouth and astounded eyes, he stood
gazing at the king, who, majestically reseating himself, motioned to
the heralds.

"Is that the law, sire?" at length faltered forth the Bastard.

"Can you dispute it?  Can any knight or gentleman gainsay it?"

"Then," quoth the Bastard, gruffly, and throwing his axe to the
ground, "by all the saints in the calendar, I have had enough!  I came
hither to dare all that beseems a chevalier, but to stand still while
Sir Anthony Woodville deliberately pokes out my right eye were a feat
to show that very few brains would follow.  And so, my Lord Scales, I
give thee my right hand, and wish thee joy of thy triumph, and the
golden collar."  [The prize was a collar of gold, enamelled with the
flower of the souvenance.]

"No triumph," replied the Woodville, modestly, "for thou art only, as
brave knights should be, subdued by the charms of the ladies, which no
breast, however valiant, can with impunity dispute."

So saying, the Lord Scales led the count to a seat of honour near the
Lord Rivers; and the actor was contented, perforce, to become a
spectator of the ensuing contests.  These were carried on till late at
noon between the Burgundians and the English, the last maintaining the
superiority of their principal champion; and among those in the melee,
to which squires were admitted, not the least distinguished and
conspicuous was our youthful friend, Master Marmaduke Nevile.




CHAPTER VIII.

HOW THE BASTARD OF BURGUNDY PROSPERED MORE IN HIS POLICY THAN WITH THE
POLE-AXE.-AND HOW KING EDWARD HOLDS HIS SUMMER CHASE IN THE FAIR
GROVES OF SHENE.

It was some days after the celebrated encounter between the Bastard
and Lord Scales, and the court had removed to the Palace of Shene.
The Count de la Roche's favour with the Duchess of Bedford and the
young princess had not rested upon his reputation for skill with the
pole-axe, and it had now increased to a height that might well
recompense the diplomatist for his discomfiture in the lists.

In the mean while, the arts of Warwick's enemies had been attended
with signal success.  The final preparations for the alliance now
virtually concluded with Louis's brother still detained the earl at
Rouen, and fresh accounts of the French king's intimacy with the
ambassador were carefully forwarded to Rivers, and transmitted to
Edward.  Now, we have Edward's own authority for stating that his
first grudge against Warwick originated in this displeasing intimacy,
but the English king was too clear-sighted to interpret such
courtesies into the gloss given them by Rivers.  He did not for a
moment conceive that Lord Warwick was led into any absolute connection
with Louis which could link him to the Lancastrians, for this was
against common-sense; but Edward, with all his good humour, was
implacable and vindictive, and he could not endure the thought that
Warwick should gain the friendship of the man he deemed his foe.
Putting aside his causes of hatred to Louis in the encouragement which
that king had formerly given to the Lancastrian exiles, Edward's pride
as sovereign felt acutely the slighting disdain with which the French
king had hitherto treated his royalty and his birth.  The customary
nickname with which he was maligned in Paris was "the Son of the
Archer," a taunt upon the fair fame of his mother, whom scandal
accused of no rigid fidelity to the Duke of York.  Besides this,
Edward felt somewhat of the jealousy natural to a king, himself so
spirited and able, of the reputation for profound policy and
statecraft which Louis XI. was rapidly widening and increasing
throughout the courts of Europe.  And, what with the resentment and
what with the jealousy, there had sprung up in his warlike heart a
secret desire to advance the claims of England to the throne of
France, and retrieve the conquests won by the Fifth Henry to be lost
under the Sixth.  Possessing these feelings and these views, Edward
necessarily saw in the alliance with Burgundy all that could gratify
both his hate and his ambition.  The Count of Charolois had sworn to
Louis the most deadly enmity, and would have every motive, whether of
vengeance or of interest, to associate himself heart in hand with the
arms of England in any invasion of France; and to these warlike
objects Edward added, as we have so often had cause to remark, the
more peaceful aims and interests of commerce.  And, therefore,
although he could not so far emancipate himself from that influence,
which both awe and gratitude invested in the Earl of Warwick, as to
resist his great minister's embassy to Louis; and though, despite all
these reasons in favour of connection with Burgundy, he could not but
reluctantly allow that Warwick urged those of a still larger and wiser
policy, when showing that the infant dynasty of York could only be
made secure by effectually depriving Margaret of the sole ally that
could venture to assist her cause,--yet no sooner had Warwick fairly
departed than he inly chafed at the concession he had made, and his
mind was open to all the impressions which the earl's enemies sought
to stamp upon it.  As the wisdom of every man, however able, can but
run through those channels which are formed by the soil of the
character, so Edward with all his talents never possessed the prudence
which fear of consequences inspires.  He was so eminently fearless, so
scornful of danger, that he absolutely forgot the arguments on which
the affectionate zeal of Warwick had based the alliance with Louis,--
arguments as to the unceasing peril, whether to his person or his
throne, so long as the unprincipled and plotting genius of the French
king had an interest against both; and thus he became only alive to
the representations of his passions, his pride, and his mercantile
interests.  The Duchess of Bedford, the queen, and all the family of
Woodville, who had but one object at heart,--the downfall of Warwick
and his House,--knew enough of the earl's haughty nature to be aware
that he would throw up the reins of government the moment he knew that
Edward had discredited and dishonoured his embassy; and, despite the
suspicions they sought to instil into their king's mind, they
calculated upon the earl's love and near relationship to Edward, upon
his utter and seemingly irreconcilable breach with the House of
Lancaster, to render his wrath impotent, and to leave him only the
fallen minister, not the mighty rebel.

Edward had been thus easily induced to permit the visit of the Count
de la Roche, although he had by no means then resolved upon the course
he should pursue.  At all events, even if the alliance with Louis was
to take place, the friendship of Burgundy was worth much to maintain.
But De la Roche soon made aware by the Duchess of Bedford of the
ground on which he stood, and instructed by his brother to spare no
pains and to scruple no promise that might serve to alienate Edward
from Louis and win the hand and dower of Margaret, found it a more
facile matter than his most sanguine hopes had deemed to work upon the
passions and the motives which inclined the king to the pretensions of
the heir of Burgundy.  And what more than all else favoured the
envoy's mission was the very circumstance that should most have
defeated it,--namely, the recollection of the Earl of Warwick; for in
the absence of that powerful baron and master-minister, the king had
seemed to breathe more freely.  In his absence, he forgot his power.
The machine of government, to his own surprise, seemed to go on as
well; the Commons were as submissive, the mobs as noisy in their
shouts, as if the earl were by.  There was no longer any one to share
with Edward the joys of popularity, the sweets of power.

Though Edward was not Diogenes, he loved the popular sunshine, and no
Alexander now stood between him and its beams.  Deceived by the
representations of his courtiers, hearing nothing but abuse of Warwick
and sneers at his greatness, he began to think the hour had come when
he might reign alone, and he entered, though tacitly, and not
acknowledging it even to himself, into the very object of the
womankind about him,--namely, the dismissal of his minister.

The natural carelessness and luxurious indolence of Edward's temper
did not however permit him to see all the ingratitude of the course he
was about to adopt.  The egotism a king too often acquires, and no
king so easily as one like Edward IV., not born to a throne, made him
consider that he alone was entitled to the prerogatives of pride.  As
sovereign and as brother, might he not give the hand of Margaret as he
listed?  If Warwick was offended, pest on his disloyalty and
presumption!  And so saying to himself, he dismissed the very thought
of the absent earl, and glided unconsciously down the current of the
hour.  And yet, notwithstanding all these prepossessions and
dispositions, Edward might no doubt have deferred at least the
meditated breach with his great minister until the return of the
latter, and then have acted with the delicacy and precaution that
became a king bound by ties of gratitude and blood to the statesman he
desired to discard, but for a habit,--which, while history mentions,
it seems to forget, in the consequences it ever engenders,--the habit
of intemperance.  Unquestionably to that habit many of the imprudences
and levities of a king possessed of so much ability are to be
ascribed; and over his cups with the wary and watchful De la Roche
Edward had contrived to entangle himself far more than in his cooler
moments he would have been disposed to do.

Having thus admitted our readers into those recesses of that cor
inscrutabile,--the heart of kings,--we summon them to a scene peculiar
to the pastimes of the magnificent Edward.  Amidst the shades of the
vast park, or chase, which then appertained to the Palace of Shene,
the noonday sun shone upon such a spot as Armida might have dressed
for the subdued Rinaldo.  A space had been cleared of trees and
underwood, and made level as a bowling-green.  Around this space the
huge oak and the broad beech were hung with trellis-work, wreathed
with jasmine, honeysuckle, and the white rose, trained in arches.
Ever and anon through these arches extended long alleys, or vistas,
gradually lost in the cool depth of foliage; amidst these alleys and
around this space numberless arbours, quaint with all the flowers then
known in England, were constructed.  In the centre of the sward was a
small artificial lake, long since dried up, and adorned then with a
profusion of fountains, that seemed to scatter coolness around the
glowing air.  Pitched in various and appropriate sites were tents of
silk and the white cloth of Rennes, each tent so placed as to command
one of the alleys; and at the opening of each stood cavalier or dame,
with the bow or crossbow, as it pleased the fancy or suited best the
skill, looking for the quarry, which horn and hound drove fast and
frequent across the alleys.  Such was the luxurious "summer-chase" of
the Sardanapalus of the North.  Nor could any spectacle more
thoroughly represent that poetical yet effeminate taste, which,
borrowed from the Italians, made a short interval between the
chivalric and the modern age.  The exceeding beauty of the day, the
richness of the foliage in the first suns of bright July, the bay of
the dogs, the sound of the mellow horn, the fragrance of the air,
heavy with noontide flowers, the gay tents, the rich dresses and fair
faces and merry laughter of dame and donzell,--combined to take
captive every sense, and to reconcile ambition itself, that eternal
traveller through the future, to the enjoyment of the voluptuous hour.
But there were illustrious exceptions to the contentment of the
general company.

A courier had arrived that morning to apprise Edward of the unexpected
debarkation of the Earl of Warwick, with the Archbishop of Narbonne
and the Bastard of Bourbon,--the ambassadors commissioned by Louis to
settle the preliminaries of the marriage between Margaret and his
brother.  This unwelcome intelligence reached Edward at the very
moment he was sallying from his palace gates to his pleasant pastime.
He took aside Lord Hastings, and communicated the news to his able
favourite.  "Put spurs to thy horse, Hastings, and hie thee fast to
Baynard's Castle.  Bring back Gloucester.  In these difficult matters
that boy's head is better than a council."

"Your Highness," said Hastings, tightening his girdle with one hand,
while with the other he shortened his stirrups, "shall be obeyed.  I
foresaw, sire, that this coming would occasion much that my Lords
Rivers and Worcester have overlooked.  I rejoice that you summon the
Prince Richard, who hath wisely forborne all countenance to the
Burgundian envoy.  But is this all, sire?  Is it not well to assemble
also your trustiest lords and most learned prelates, if not to overawe
Lord Warwick's anger, at least to confer on the fitting excuses to be
made to King Louis's ambassadors?"

"And so lose the fairest day this summer hath bestowed upon us?
Tush!--the more need for pleasaunce to-day since business must come
to-morrow.  Away with you, dear Will!"

Hastings looked grave; but he saw all further remonstrance would be in
vain, and hoping much from the intercession of Gloucester, put spurs
to his steed and vanished.  Edward mused a moment; and Elizabeth, who
knew every expression and change of his countenance, rode from the
circle of her ladies, and approached him timidly.  Casting down her
eyes, which she always affected in speaking to her lord, the queen
said softly,--

"Something hath disturbed my liege and my life's life."

"Marry, yes, sweet Bessee.  Last night, to pleasure thee and thy kin
(and sooth to say, small gratitude ye owe me, for it also pleased
myself), I promised Margaret's hand, through De la Roche, to the heir
of Burgundy."

"O princely heart!" exclaimed Elizabeth, her whole face lighted up
with triumph, "ever seeking to make happy those it cherishes.  But is
it that which disturbs thee, that which thou repentest?"

"No, sweetheart,--no.  Yet had it not been for the strength of the
clary, I should have kept the Bastard longer in suspense.  But what is
done is done.  Let not thy roses wither when thou hearest Warwick is
in England,--nay, nay, child, look not so appalled; thine Edward is no
infant, whom ogre and goblin scare; and"--glancing his eye proudly
round as he spoke, and saw the goodly cavalcade of his peers and
knights, with his body-guard, tall and chosen veterans, filling up the
palace-yard, with the show of casque and pike--"and if the struggle is
to come between Edward of England and his subject, never an hour more
ripe than this; my throne assured, the new nobility I have raised
around it, London true, marrow and heart true, the provinces at peace,
the ships and the steel of Burgundy mine allies!  Let the white Bear
growl as he list, the Lion of March is lord of the forest. And now, my
Bessee," added the king, changing his haughty tone into a gay,
careless laugh, "now let the lion enjoy his chase."

He kissed the gloved hand of his queen, gallantly bending over his
saddle-bow, and the next moment he was by the side of a younger if not
a fairer lady, to whom he was devoting the momentary worship of his
inconstant heart.  Elizabeth's eyes shot an angry gleam as she beheld
her faithless lord thus engaged; but so accustomed to conceal and
control the natural jealousy that it never betrayed itself to the
court or to her husband, she soon composed her countenance to its
ordinary smooth and artificial smile, and rejoining her mother she
revealed what had passed.  The proud and masculine spirit of the
duchess felt only joy at the intelligence.  In the anticipated
humiliation of Warwick, she forgot all cause for fear.  Not so her
husband and son, the Lords Rivers and Scales, to whom the news soon
travelled.

"Anthony," whispered the father, "in this game we have staked our
heads."

"But our right hands can guard them well, sir," answered Anthony; "and
so God and the ladies for our rights!"

Yet this bold reply did not satisfy the more thoughtful judgment of
the lord treasurer, and even the brave Anthony's arrows that day
wandered wide of their quarry.

Amidst this gay scene, then, there were anxious and thoughtful bosoms.
Lord Rivers was silent and abstracted; his son's laugh was hollow and
constrained; the queen, from her pavilion, cast, ever and anon, down
the green alleys more restless and prying looks than the hare or the
deer could call forth; her mother's brow was knit and flushed.  And
keenly were those illustrious persons watched by one deeply interested
in the coming events.  Affecting to discharge the pleasant duty
assigned him by the king, the Lord Montagu glided from tent to tent,
inquiring courteously into the accommodation of each group, lingering,
smiling, complimenting, watching, heeding, studying, those whom he
addressed.  For the first time since the Bastard's visit he had joined
in the diversions in its honour; and yet so well had Montagu played
his part at the court that he did not excite amongst the queen's
relatives any of the hostile feelings entertained towards his brother.
No man, except Hastings, was so "entirely loved" by Edward; and
Montagu, worldly as he was, and indignant against the king as he could
not fail to be, so far repaid the affection, that his chief fear at
that moment sincerely was not for Warwick but Edward.  He alone of
those present was aware of the cause of Warwick's hasty return, for he
had privately despatched to him the news of the Bastard's visit, its
real object, and the inevitable success of the intrigues afloat,
unless the earl could return at once, his mission accomplished, and
the ambassadors of France in his train; and even before the courier
despatched to the king had arrived at Shene, a private hand had
conveyed to Montagu the information that Warwick, justly roused and
alarmed, had left the state procession behind at Dover, and was
hurrying, fast as relays of steeds and his own fiery spirit could bear
him, to the presence of the ungrateful king.

Meanwhile the noon had now declined, the sport relaxed, and the sound
of the trumpet from the king's pavilion proclaimed that the lazy
pastime was to give place to the luxurious banquet.

At this moment, Montagu approached a tent remote from the royal
pavilions, and, as his noiseless footstep crushed the grass, he heard
the sound of voices in which there was little in unison with the
worldly thoughts that filled his breast.

"Nay, sweet mistress, nay," said a young man's voice, earnest with
emotion, "do not misthink me, do not deem me bold and overweening.  I
have sought to smother my love, and to rate it, and bring pride to my
aid, but in vain; and, now, whether you will scorn my suit or not, I
remember, Sibyll--O Sibyll!  I remember the days when we conversed
together; and as a brother, if nothing else--nothing dearer--I pray
you to pause well, and consider what manner of man this Lord Hastings
is said to be!"

"Master Nevile, is this generous?  Why afflict me thus; why couple my
name with so great a lord's?"

"Because--beware--the young gallants already so couple it, and their
prophecies are not to thine honour, Sibyll.  Nay, do not frown on me.
I know thou art fair and winsome, and deftly gifted, and thy father
may, for aught I know, be able to coin thee a queen's dower out of his
awsome engines.  But Hastings will not wed thee, and his wooing,
therefore, but stains thy fair repute; while I--"

"You!" said Montagu, entering suddenly--"you, kinsman, may look to
higher fortunes than the Duchess of Bedford's waiting-damsel can bring
to thy honest love.  How now, mistress, say, wilt thou take this young
gentleman for loving fere and plighted spouse?  If so, he shall give
thee a manor for jointure, and thou shalt wear velvet robe and gold
chain, as a knight's wife."

This unexpected interference, which was perfectly in character with
the great lords, who frequently wooed in very peremptory tones for
their clients and kinsmen, [See, in Miss Strickland's "Life of
Elizabeth Woodville," the curious letters which the Duke of York and
the Earl of Warwick addressed to her, then a simple maiden, in favour
of their protege, Sir R. Johnes.] completed the displeasure which the
blunt Marmaduke had already called forth in Sibyll's gentle but proud
nature.  "Speak, maiden,--ay or no?" continued Montagu, surprised and
angered at the haughty silence of one whom he just knew by sight and
name, though he had never before addressed her.

"No, my lord," answered Sibyll, keeping down her indignation at this
tone, though it burned in her cheek, flashed in her eye, and swelled
in the heave of her breast. "No! and your kinsman might have spared
this affront to one whom--but it matters not."  She swept from the
tent as she said this, and passed up the alley into that of the
queen's mother.

"Best so; thou art too young for marriage, Marmaduke," said Montagu,
coldly.  "We will find thee a richer bride ere long.  There is Mary of
Winstown, the archbishop's ward, with two castles and seven knight's
fees."

"But so marvellously ill-featured, my lord," said poor Marmaduke,
sighing.

Montagu looked at him in surprise.  "Wives, sir," he said, "are not
made to look at,--unless, indeed, they be the wives of other men.  But
dismiss these follies for the nonce.  Back to thy post by the king's
pavilion; and by the way ask Lord Fauconberg and Aymer Nevile, whom
thou wilt pass by yonder arbour, ask them, in my name, to be near the
pavilion while the king banquets.  A word in thine ear,--ere yon sun
gilds the top of those green oaks, the Earl of Warwick will be with
Edward IV.; and come what may, some brave hearts should be by to
welcome him.  Go!"

Without tarrying for an answer, Montagu turned into one of the tents,
wherein Raoul de Fulke and the Lord St. John, heedless of hind and
hart, conferred; and Marmaduke, much bewildered, and bitterly wroth
with Sibyll, went his way.




CHAPTER IX.

THE GREAT ACTOR RETURNS TO FILL THE STAGE.

And now in various groups these summer foresters were at rest in their
afternoon banquet,--some lying on the smooth sward around the lake,
some in the tents, some again in the arbours; here and there the forms
of dame and cavalier might be seen, stealing apart from the rest, and
gliding down the alleys till lost in the shade, for under that reign
gallantry was universal.  Before the king's pavilion a band of those
merry jongleurs, into whom the ancient and honoured minstrels were
fast degenerating, stood waiting for the signal to commence their
sports, and listening to the laughter that came in frequent peals from
the royal tent.  Within feasted Edward, the Count de la Roche, the
Lord Rivers; while in a larger and more splendid pavilion at some
little distance, the queen, her mother, and the great dames of the
court held their own slighter and less noisy repast.

"And here, then," said Edward, as he put his lips to a gold goblet,
wrought with gems, and passed it to Anthony the Bastard,--"here,
count, we take the first wassail to the loves of Charolois and
Margaret!"

The count drained the goblet, and the wine gave him new fire.

"And with those loves, king," said he, "we bind forever Burgundy and
England.  Woe to France!"

"Ay, woe to France!" exclaimed Edward, his face lighting up with that
martial joy which it ever took at the thoughts of war,--"for we will
wrench her lands from this huckster Louis.  By Heaven!  I shall not
rest in peace till York hath regained what Lancaster hath lost! and
out of the parings of the realm which I will add to England thy
brother of Burgundy shall have eno' to change his duke's diadem for a
king's.  How now, Rivers?  Thou gloomest, father mine."

"My liege," said Rivers, wakening himself, "I did but think that if
the Earl of Warwick--"

"Ah, I had forgotten," interrupted Edward; "and, sooth to say, Count
Anthony, I think if the earl were by, he would not much mend our boon-
fellowship!"

"Yet a good subject," said De la Roche, sneeringly, "usually dresses
his face by that of his king."

"A subject!  Ay, but Warwick is much such a subject to England as
William of Normandy or Duke Rollo was to France.  Howbeit, let him
come,--our realm is at peace, we want no more his battle-axe; and in
our new designs on France, thy brother, bold count, is an ally that
might compensate for a greater loss than a sullen minister.  Let him
come!"

As the king spoke, there was heard gently upon the smooth turf the
sound of the hoofs of steeds.  A moment more, and from the outskirts
of the scene of revel, where the king's guards were stationed, there
arose a long, loud shout.  Nearer and nearer came the hoofs of the
steeds; they paused.  Doubtless Richard of Gloucester by that shout!
"The soldiers love that brave boy," said the king.

Marmaduke Nevile, as gentleman in waiting, drew aside the curtain of
the pavilion; and as he uttered a name that paled the cheeks of all
who heard, the Earl of Warwick entered the royal presence.

The earl's dress was disordered and soiled by travel; the black plume
on his cap was broken, and hung darkly over his face; his horseman's
boots, coming half way up the thigh, were sullied with the dust of the
journey; and yet as he entered, before the majesty of his mien, the
grandeur of his stature, suddenly De Roche, Rivers, even the gorgeous
Edward himself, seemed dwarfed into common men!  About the man--his
air, his eye, his form, his attitude--there was THAT which, in the
earlier times, made kings by the acclamation of the crowd,--an
unmistakable sovereignty, as of one whom Nature herself had shaped and
stamped for power and for rule.  All three had risen as he entered;
and to a deep silence succeeded an exclamation from Edward, and then
again all was still.

The earl stood a second or two calmly gazing on the effect he had
produced; and turning his dark eye from one to the other, till it
rested full upon De la Roche, who, after vainly striving not to quail
beneath the gaze, finally smiled with affected disdain, and, resting
his hand on his dagger, sank back into his seat.

"My liege," then said Warwick, doffing his cap, and approaching the
king with slow and grave respect, "I crave pardon for presenting
myself to your Highness thus travel-worn and disordered; but I
announce that news which insures my welcome.  The solemn embassy of
trust committed to me by your Grace has prospered with God's blessing;
and the Fils de Bourbon and the Archbishop of Narbonne are on their
way to your metropolis.  Alliance between the two great monarchies of
Europe is concluded on terms that insure the weal of England and
augment the lustre of your crown.  Your claims on Normandy and Guienne
King Louis consents to submit to the arbitrement of the Roman Pontiff,
[The Pope, moreover, was to be engaged to decide the question within
four years.  A more brilliant treaty for England, Edward's ambassador
could not have effected.] and to pay to your treasury annual tribute;
these advantages, greater than your Highness even empowered me to
demand, thus obtained, the royal brother of your new ally joyfully
awaits the hand of the Lady Margaret."

"Cousin," said Edward, who had thoroughly recovered himself, motioning
the earl to a seat, "you are ever welcome, no matter what your news;
but I marvel much that so deft a statesman should broach these matters
of council in the unseasonable hour and before the gay comrades of a
revel."

"I speak, sire," said Warwick, calmly, though the veins in his
forehead swelled, and his dark countenance was much flushed--"I speak
openly of that which hath been done nobly; and this truth has ceased
to be matter of council, since the meanest citizen who has ears and
eyes ere this must know for what purpose the ambassadors of King Louis
arrive in England with your Highness's representative."

Edward, more embarrassed at this tone than he could have foreseen,
remained silent; but De la Roche, impatient to humble his brother's
foe, and judging it also discreet to arouse the king, said
carelessly,--

"It were a pity, Sir Earl, that the citizens, whom you thus deem privy
to the thoughts of kings, had not prevised the Archbishop of Narbonne
that if he desire to see a fairer show than even the palaces of
Westminster and the Tower, he will hasten back to behold the banners
of Burgundy and England waving from the spires of Notre Dame."

Ere the Bastard had concluded, Rivers, leaning back, whispered the
king, "For Christ's sake, sire, select some fitter scene for what must
follow!  Silence your guest!"

But Edward, on the contrary, pleased to think that De la Roche was
breaking the ice, and hopeful that some burst from Warwick would give
him more excuse than he felt at present for a rupture, said sternly,
"Hush, my lord, and meddle not!"

"Unless I mistake," said Warwick, coldly, "he who now accosts me is
the Count de la Roche,--a foreigner."

"And the brother of the heir of Burgundy," interrupted De la Roche,--
"brother to the betrothed and princely spouse of Margaret of England."

"Doth this man lie, sire?" said Warwick, who had seated himself a
moment, and who now rose again.

The Bastard sprung also to his feet; but Edward, waving him back, and
reassuming the external dignity which rarely forsook him, replied,
"Cousin, thy question lacketh courtesy to our noble guest: since thy
departure, reasons of state, which we will impart to thee at a meeter
season, have changed our purpose, and we will now that our sister
Margaret shall wed with the Count of Charolois."

"And this to me, king!" exclaimed the earl; all his passions at once
released--"this to me!  Nay, frown not, Edward,--I am of the race of
those who, greater than kings, have built thrones and toppled them!  I
tell thee, thou hast misused mine honour, and belied thine own; thou
hast debased thyself in juggling me, delegated as the representative
of thy royalty!--Lord Rivers, stand back,--there are barriers eno'
between truth and a king!"

"By Saint George and my father's head!" cried Edward, with a rage no
less fierce than Warwick's,--"thou abusest, false lord, my mercy and
our kindred blood.  Another word, and thou leavest this pavilion for
the Tower!"

"King," replied Warwick, scornfully, and folding his arms on his broad
breast, "there is not a hair on this head which thy whole house, thy
guards, and thine armies could dare to touch.  ME to the Tower!  Send
me,--and when the third sun reddens the roof of prison-house and
palace, look round broad England, and miss a throne!"

"What, ho there!" exclaimed Edward, stamping his foot; and at that
instant the curtain of the pavilion was hastily torn aside, and
Richard of Gloucester entered, followed by Lord Hastings, the Duke of
Clarence, and Anthony Woodville.

"Ah," continued the king, "ye come in time.  George of Clarence, Lord
High Constable of England, arrest yon haughty man, who dares to menace
his liege and suzerain!"

Gliding between Clarence, who stood dumb and thunder-stricken, and the
Earl of Warwick, Prince Richard said, in a voice which, though even
softer than usual, had in it more command over those who heard than
when it rolled in thunder along the ranks of Barnet or of Bosworth,
"Edward, my brother, remember Towton, and forbear!  Warwick, my
cousin, forget not thy king nor his dead father!"

At these last words the earl's face fell, for to that father he had
sworn to succour and defend the sons; his sense, recovering from his
pride, showed him how much his intemperate anger had thrown away his
advantages in the foul wrong he had sustained from Edward.  Meanwhile
the king himself, with flashing eyes and a crest as high as Warwick's,
was about perhaps to overthrow his throne by the attempt to enforce
his threat, when Anthony Woodville, who followed Clarence, whispered
to him, "Beware, sire! a countless crowd that seem to have followed
the earl's steps have already pierced the chase, and can scarcely be
kept from the spot, so great is their desire to behold him.  Beware!"--
and Richard's quick ear catching these whispered words, the duke
suddenly backed them by again drawing aside the curtain of the tent.
Along the sward, the guard of the king, summoned from their unseen but
neighbouring post within the wood, were drawn up as if to keep back an
immense multitude,--men, women, children, who swayed and rustled and
murmured in the rear.  But no sooner was the curtain drawn aside, and
the guards themselves caught sight of the royal princes and the great
earl towering amidst them, than supposing in their ignorance the scene
thus given to them was intended for their gratification, from that old
soldiery or Towton rose a loud and long "Hurrah!  Warwick and the
king!"--"The king and the stout earl!"  The multitude behind caught
the cry; they rushed forward, mingling with the soldiery, who no
longer sought to keep them back.

"A Warwick! a Warwick!" they shouted.  "God bless the people's
friend!"

Edward, startled and aghast, drew sullenly into the rear of the tent.

De la Roche grew pale; but with the promptness of a practised
statesman, he hastily advanced, and drew the curtain.  "Shall
varlets," he said to Richard, in French, "gloat over the quarrels of
their lords?"

"You are right, Sir Count," murmured Richard, meekly; his purpose was
effected, and leaning on his riding staff, he awaited what was to
ensue.

A softer shade had fallen over the earl's face, at the proof of the
love in which his name was held; it almost seemed to his noble though
haughty and impatient nature, as if the affection of the people had
reconciled him to the ingratitude of the king.  A tear started to his
proud eye; but he twinkled it away, and approaching Edward (who
remained erect, and with all a sovereign's wrath, though silent on his
lip, lowering on his brow), he said, in a tone of suppressed emotion,--

"Sire, it is not for me to crave pardon of living man, but the
grievous affront put upon my state and mine honour hath led my words
to an excess which my heart repents.  I grieve that your Grace's
highness hath chosen this alliance; hereafter you may find at need
what faith is to be placed in Burgundy."

"Darest thou gainsay it?" exclaimed De la Roche.

"Interrupt me not, sir!" continued Warwick, with a disdainful gesture.
"My liege, I lay down mine offices, and I leave it to your Grace to
account as it lists you to the ambassadors of France,--I shall
vindicate myself to their king.  And now, ere I depart for my hall of
Middleham, I alone here, unarmed and unattended, save at least by a
single squire, I, Richard Nevile, say, that if any man, peer or
knight, can be found to execute your Grace's threat, and arrest me, I
will obey your royal pleasure, and attend him to the Tower."
Haughtily he bowed his head as he spoke, and raising it again, gazed
around--"I await  your  Grace's pleasure."

"Begone where thou wilt, earl.  From this day Edward IV. reigns
alone," said the king.  Warwick turned.

"My Lord Scales," said he.  "lift the curtain; nay, sir, it misdemeans
you not.  You are still the son of the Woodville, I still the
descendant of John of Gaunt."

"Not for the dead ancestor, but for the living warrior," said the Lord
Scales, lifting the curtain, and bowing with knightly grace as the
earl passed.  And scarcely was Warwick in the open space than the
crowd fairly broke through all restraint, and the clamour of their joy
filled with its hateful thunders the royal tent.

"Edward," said Richard, whisperingly, and laying his finger on his
brother's arm, "forgive me if I offended; but had you at such a time
resolved on violence--"

"I see it all,--you were right.  But is this to be endured forever?"

"Sire," returned Richard, with his dark smile, "rest calm; for the age
is your best ally, and the age is outgrowing the steel and hauberk.  A
little while, and--"

"And what--"

"And--ah, sire, I will answer that question when our brother George
(mark him!) either refrains from listening, or is married to Isabel
Nevile, and hath quarrel with her father about the dowry.  What, he,
there!--let the jongleurs perform."

"The jongleurs!" exclaimed the king;  "why, Richard, thou hast more
levity than myself!"

"Pardon me!  Let the jongleurs perform, and bid the crowd stay.  It is
by laughing at the mountebanks that your Grace can best lead the
people to forget their Warwick!"




CHAPTER X.

HOW THE GREAT LORDS COME TO THE KING-MAKER, AND WITH WHAT PROFFERS.

Mastering the emotions that swelled within him, Lord Warwick returned
with his wonted cheerful courtesy the welcome of the crowd and the
enthusiastic salutation of the king's guard; but as, at length, he
mounted his steed, and attended but by the squire who had followed him
from Dover, penetrated into the solitudes of the chase, the
recollection of the indignity he had suffered smote his proud heart so
sorely that he groaned aloud.  His squire, fearing the fatigue he had
undergone might have affected even that iron health, rode up at the
sound of the groan, and Warwick's face was hueless as he said, with a
forced smile, "It is nothing, Walter.  But these heats are oppressive,
and we have forgotten our morning draught, friend.  Hark!  I hear the
brawl of a rivulet, and a drink of fresh water were more grateful now
than the daintiest hippocras."  So saying, he flung himself from his
steed; following the sound of the rivulet, he gained its banks, and
after quenching his thirst in the hollow of his hand, laid himself
down upon the long grass, waving coolly over the margin, and fell into
profound thought.  From this revery he was aroused by a quick
footstep, and as he lifted his gloomy gaze, he beheld Marmaduke Nevile
by his side.

"Well, young man," said he, sternly, "with what messages art thou
charged?"

"With none, my lord earl.  I await now no commands but thine."

"Thou knowest not, poor youth, that I can serve thee no more.  Go back
to the court."

"Oh, Warwick," said Marmaduke, with simple eloquence, "send me not
from thy side!  This day I have been rejected by the maid I loved.  I
loved her well, and my heart chafed sorely, and bled within! but now,
methinks, it consoles me to have been so cast off,--to have no faith,
no love, but that which is best of all, to a brave man,--love and
faith for a hero-chief!  Where thy fortunes, there be my humble fate,
--to rise or fall with thee!"

Warwick looked intently upon his young kinsman's face, and said, as to
himself, "Why, this is strange!  I gave no throne to this man, and he
deserts me not!  My friend," he added aloud, "have they told thee
already that I am disgraced?"

"I heard the Lord Scales say to the young Lovell that thou wert
dismissed from all thine offices; and I came hither; for I will serve
no more the king who forgets the arm and heart to which he owes a
kingdom."

"Man, I accept thy loyalty!" exclaimed Warwick, starting to his feet;
"and know that thou hast done more to melt and yet to nerve my spirit
than--But complaints in one are idle, and praise were no reward to
thee."

"But see, my lord, if the first to join thee, I am not the sole one.
See, brave Raoul de Fulke, the Lords of St. John, Bergavenny, and
Fitzhugh, ay, and fifty others of the best blood of England, are on
thy track."

And as he spoke, plumes and tunics were seen gleaming up the forest
path, and in another moment a troop of knights and gentlemen,
comprising the flower of such of the ancient nobility as yet lingered
round the court, came up to Warwick, bareheaded.

"Is it possible," cried Raoul de Fulke, "that we have heard aright,
noble earl?  And has Edward IV. suffered the base Woodvilles to
triumph over the bulwark of his realm?"

"Knights and gentles!" said Warwick, with a bitter smile, "is it so
uncommon a thing that men in peace should leave the battle-axe and
brand to rust?  I am but a useless weapon, to be suspended at rest
amongst the trophies of Towton in my hall of Middleham."

"Return with us," said the Lord of St. John, "and we will make Edward
do thee justice, or, one and all, we will abandon a court where knaves
and varlets have become mightier than English valour and nobler than
Norman birth."

"My friends," said the earl, laying his hand on St. John's shoulder,
"not even in my just wrath will I wrong my king.  He is punished eno'
in the choice he hath made.  Poor Edward and poor England!  What woes
and wars await ye both, from the gold and the craft and the unsparing
hate of Louis XI!  No; if I leave Edward, he hath more need of you.
Of mine own free will I have resigned mine offices."

"Warwick," interrupted Raoul de Fulke, "this deceives us not; and in
disgrace to you the ancient barons of England behold the first blow at
their own state.  We have wrongs we endured in silence while thou wert
the shield and sword of yon merchant-king.  We have seen the ancient
peers of England set aside for men of yesterday; we have seen our
daughters, sisters,--nay, our very mothers, if widowed and dowered,--
forced into disreputable and base wedlock with creatures dressed in
titles, and gilded with wealth stolen from ourselves.  Merchants and
artificers tread upon our knightly heels, and the avarice of trade
eats up our chivalry as a rust. We nobles, in our greater day, have
had the crown at our disposal, and William the Norman dared not think
what Edward Earl of March hath been permitted with impunity to do.
We, Sir Earl--we knights and barons--would a king simple in his
manhood and princely in his truth.  Richard Earl of Warwick, thou art
of royal blood, the descendant of old John of Gaunt.  In thee we
behold the true, the living likeness of the Third Edward, and the
Hero-Prince of Cressy.  Speak but the word, and we make thee king!"

The descendant of the Norman, the representative of the mighty faction
that no English monarch had ever braved in vain, looked round as he
said these last words, and a choral murmur was heard through the whole
of that august nobility, "We make thee king!"

"Richard, descendant of the Plantagenet, [By the female side, through
Joan Beaufort, or Plantagenet, Warwick was third in descent from John
of Gaunt, as Henry VII., through the male line, was fourth in
descent.] speak the word," repeated Raoul de Fulke.

"I speak it not," interrupted Warwick; "nor shalt thou continue, brave
Raoul de Fulke.  What, my lords and gentlemen," he added, drawing
himself up, and with his countenance animated with feelings it is
scarcely possible in our times to sympathize with or make clear--
"what! think you that Ambition limits itself to the narrow circlet of
a crown Greater, and more in the spirit of our mighty fathers, is the
condition of men like us, THE BARONS who make and unmake kings.  What!
who of us would not rather descend from the chiefs of Runnymede than
from the royal craven whom they controlled and chid?  By Heaven, my
lords, Richard Nevile has too proud a soul to be a king!  A king--a
puppet of state and form; a king--a holiday show for the crowd, to
hiss or hurrah, as the humour seizes; a king--a beggar to the nation,
wrangling with his parliament for gold!  A king!--Richard II. was a
king, and Lancaster dethroned him.  Ye would debase me to a Henry of
Lancaster.  Mort Dieu!  I thank ye.  The Commons and the Lords raised
him, forsooth,--for what?  To hold him as the creature they had made,
to rate him, to chafe him, to pry into his very household, and quarrel
with his wife's chamberlains and lavourers.  [Laundresses.  The
parliamentary rolls, in the reign of Henry IV., abound in curious
specimens of the interference of the Commons with the household of
Henry's wife, Queen Joan.]  What! dear Raoul de Fulke, is thy friend
fallen now so low, that he--Earl of Salisbury and of Warwick, chief of
the threefold race of Montagu, Monthermer, and Nevile, lord of a
hundred baronies, leader of sixty thousand followers--is not greater
than Edward of March, to whom we will deign still, with your
permission, to vouchsafe the name and pageant of a king?"

This extraordinary address, strange to say, so thoroughly expressed
the peculiar pride of the old barons, that when it ceased a sound of
admiration and applause circled through that haughty audience, and
Raoul de Fulke, kneeling suddenly, kissed the earl's hand.  "Oh, noble
earl," he said, "ever live as one of us, to maintain our order, and
teach kings and nations what WE are."

"Fear it not, Raoul! fear it not,--we will have our rights yet.
Return, I beseech ye.  Let me feel I have such friends about the king.
Even at Middleham my eye shall watch over our common cause; and till
seven feet of earth suffice him, your brother baron, Richard Nevile,
is not a man whom kings and courts can forget, much less dishonour.
Sirs, our honour is in our bosoms,--and there is the only throne
armies cannot shake, nor cozeners undermine."

With these words he gently waved his hand, motioned to his squire, who
stood out of hearing with the steeds, to approach, and mounting,
gravely rode on.  Ere he had got many paces, he called to Marmaduke,
who was on foot, and bade him follow him to London that night.  "I
have strange tidings to tell the French envoys, and for England's sake
I must soothe their anger, if I can,--then to Middleham."

The nobles returned slowly to the pavilions.  And as they gained the
open space, where the gaudy tents still shone against the setting sun,
they beheld the mob of that day, whom Shakspeare hath painted with
such contempt, gathering, laughing and loud, around the mountebank and
the conjurer, who had already replaced in their thoughts (as
Gloucester had foreseen) the hero-idol of their worship.





BOOK V.




CHAPTER I.

RURAL ENGLAND IN THE MIDDLE AGES--NOBLE VISITORS SEEK THE CASTLE OF
MIDDLEHAM.

Autumn had succeeded to summer, winter to autumn, and the spring of
1468 was green in England, when a gallant cavalcade was seen slowly
winding the ascent of a long and gradual hill, towards the decline of
day.  Different, indeed, from the aspect which that part of the
country now presents was the landscape that lay around them, bathed in
the smiles of the westering sun.  In a valley to the left, a full view
of which the steep road commanded (where now roars the din of trade
through a thousand factories), lay a long, secluded village.  The
houses, if so they might be called, were constructed entirely of wood,
and that of the more perishable kind,--willow, sallow, elm, and plum-
tree.  Not one could boast a chimney; but the smoke from the single
fire in each, after duly darkening the atmosphere within, sent its
surplusage lazily and fitfully through a circular aperture in the
roof.  In fact, there was long in the provinces a prejudice against
chimneys!  The smoke was considered good both for house and owner; the
first it was supposed to season, and the last to guard "from rheums,
catarrhs, and poses."  [So worthy Hollinshed, Book II. c. 22.--"Then
had we none but reredosses, and our heads did never ache.  For as the
smoke, in those days, was supposed to be a sufficient hardening for
the timber of the house, so it was reputed a far better medicine to
keep the goodman and his familie from the quacke, or pose, wherewith
as then very few were oft acquainted."]  Neither did one of these
habitations boast the comfort of a glazed window, the substitute being
lattice, or chequer-work,--even in the house of the franklin, which
rose statelily above the rest, encompassed with barns and outsheds.
And yet greatly should we err did we conceive that these deficiencies
were an index to the general condition of the working class.  Far
better off was the labourer when employed, than now.  Wages were
enormously high, meat extremely low; [See Hallam: Middle Ages, Chap.
xx. Part II.  So also Hollinsbed, Book XI., c. 12, comments on the
amazement of the Spaniards, in Queen Mary's time, when they saw "what
large diet was used in these so homelie cottages," and reports one of
the Spaniards to have said, "These English have their houses of sticks
and dirt, but they fare commonlie so well as the king!"] and our
motherland bountifully maintained her children.

On that greensward, before the village (now foul and reeking with the
squalid population whom commerce rears up,--the victims, as the
movers, of the modern world) were assembled youth and age; for it was
a holiday evening, and the stern Puritan had not yet risen to sour the
face of Mirth.  Well clad in leathern jerkin, or even broadcloth, the
young peasants vied with each other in quoits and wrestling; while the
merry laughter of the girls, in their gay-coloured kirtles and
ribboned hair, rose oft and cheerily to the ears of the cavalcade.
From a gentle eminence beyond the village, and half veiled by trees,
on which the first verdure of spring was budding (where now, around
the gin-shop, gather the fierce and sickly children of toil and of
discontent), rose the venerable walls of a monastery, and the chime of
its heavy bell swung far and sweet over the pastoral landscape.  To
the right of the road (where now stands the sober meeting-house) was
one of those small shrines so frequent in Italy, with an image of the
Virgin gaudily painted, and before it each cavalier in the procession
halted an instant to cross himself and mutter an ave.  Beyond, still
to the right, extended vast chains of woodland, interspersed with
strips of pasture, upon which numerous flocks were grazing, with
horses, as yet unbroken to bit and selle, that neighed and snorted as
they caught scent of their more civilized brethren pacing up the road.

In front of the cavalcade rode two, evidently of superior rank to the
rest,--the one small and slight, with his long hair flowing over his
shoulders; and the other, though still young, many years older, and
indicating his clerical profession by the absence of all love-locks,
compensated by a curled and glossy beard, trimmed with the greatest
care.  But the dress of the ecclesiastic was as little according to
our modern notions of what beseems the Church as can well be
conceived: his tunic and surcoat, of a rich amber, contrasted well
with the clear darkness of his complexion; his piked shoes, or
beakers, as they were called, turned up half-way to the knee; the
buckles of his dress were of gold, inlaid with gems; and the housings
of his horse, which was of great power, were edged with gold fringe.
By the side of his steed walked a tall greyhound, upon which he ever
and anon glanced with affection.  Behind these rode two gentlemen,
whose golden spurs announced knighthood; and then followed a long
train of squires and pages, richly clad and accoutred, bearing
generally the Nevile badge of the Bull; though interspersed amongst
the retinue might be seen the grim Boar's head, which Richard of
Gloucester, in right of his duchy, had assumed as his cognizance.

"Nay, sweet prince," said the ecclesiastic, "I pray thee to consider
that a greyhound is far more of a gentleman than any other of the
canine species.  Mark his stately yet delicate length of limb, his
sleek coat, his keen eye, his haughty neck."

"These are but the externals, my noble friend.  Will the greyhound
attack the lion, as our mastiff doth?  The true character of the
gentleman is to know no fear, and to rush through all danger at the
throat of his foe; wherefore I uphold the dignity of the mastiff above
all his tribe, though others have a daintier hide and a statelier
crest. Enough of such matters, archbishop,--we are nearing Middleham."

"The saints be praised! for I am hungered," observed the archbishop,
piously: "but, sooth to say, my cook at the More far excelleth what we
can hope to find at the board of my brother.  He hath some faults, our
Warwick!  Hasty and careless, he hath not thought eno' of the
blessings he might enjoy, and many a poor abbot hath daintier fare on
his humble table."

"Oh, George Nevile! who that heard thee, when thou talkest of hounds
and interments, [entremets (side dishes)] would recognize the Lord
Chancellor of England,--the most learned dignitary, the most subtle
statesman?"

"And oh, Richard Plantagenet!" retorted the archbishop, dropping the
mincing and affected tone, which he, in common with the coxcombs of
that day, usually assumed, "who that heard thee when thou talkest of
humility and devotion, would recognize the sternest heart and the most
daring ambition God ever gave to prince?"

Richard started at these words, and his eye shot fire as it met the
keen calm glance of the prelate.

"Nay, your Grace wrongs me," he said, gnawing his lip,--"or I should
not say wrongs, but flatters; for sternness and ambition are no vices
in a Nevile's eyes."

"Fairly answered, royal son," said the archbishop, laughing; "but let
us be frank.  Thou hast persuaded me to accompany thee to Lord Warwick
as a mediator; the provinces in the North are disturbed; the intrigues
of Margaret of Anjou are restless; the king reaps what he has sown in
the Court of France, and, as Warwick foretold, the emissaries and gold
of Louis are ever at work against his throne; the great barons are
moody and discontented; and our liege King Edward is at last aware
that, if the Earl of Warwick do not return to his councils, the first
blast of a hostile trumpet may drive him from his throne.  Well, I
attend thee: my fortunes are woven with those of York, and my interest
and my loyalty go hand in hand.  Be equally frank with me.  Hast thou,
Lord Richard, no interest to serve in this mission save that of the
public weal?"

"Thou forgettest that the Lady Isabel is dearly loved by Clarence, and
that I would fain see removed all barrier to his nuptial bliss.  But
yonder rise the towers of Middleham.  Beloved walls, which sheltered
my childhood! and, by holy Paul, a noble pile, which would resist an
army, or hold one."

While thus conversed the prince and the archbishop, the Earl of
Warwick, musing and alone, slowly paced the lofty terrace that crested
the battlements of his outer fortifications.

In vain had that restless and powerful spirit sought content in
retirement.  Trained from his childhood to active life, to move
mankind to and fro at his beck, this single and sudden interval of
repose in the prime of his existence, at the height of his fame,
served but to swell the turbulent and dangerous passions to which all
vent was forbidden.

The statesman of modern days has at least food for intellect in
letters when deprived of action; but with all his talents, and
thoroughly cultivated as his mind was in the camp, the council, and
the state, the great earl cared for nothing in book-lore except some
rude ballad that told of Charlemagne or Rollo.  The sports that had
pleased the leisure of his earlier youth were tedious and flat to one
snatched from so mighty a career.  His hound lay idle at his feet, his
falcon took holiday on the perch, his jester was banished to the
page's table.  Behold the repose of this great unlettered spirit!  But
while his mind was thus debarred from its native sphere, all tended to
pamper Lord Warwick's infirmity of pride.  The ungrateful Edward might
forget him; but the king seemed to stand alone in that oblivion.  The
mightiest peers, the most renowned knights, gathered to his hall.
Middleham,--not Windsor nor Shene nor Westminster nor the Tower--
seemed the COURT OF ENGLAND.  As the Last of the Barons paced his
terrace, far as his eye could reach, his broad domains extended,
studded with villages and towns and castles swarming with his
retainers.  The whole country seemed in mourning for his absence.  The
name of Warwick was in all men's mouths, and not a group gathered in
market-place or hostel but what the minstrel who had some ballad in
praise of the stout earl had a rapt and thrilling audience.

"And is the river of my life," muttered Warwick, "shrunk into this
stagnant pool?  Happy the man who hath never known what it is to taste
of fame,--to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!"

Rapt in this gloomy self-commune, he heard not the light step that
sought his side, till a tender arm was thrown around him, and a face
in which sweet temper and pure thought had preserved to matronly
beauty all the bloom of youth, looked up smilingly to his own.

"My lord, my Richard," said the countess, "why didst thou steal so
churlishly from me?  Hath there, alas! come a time when thou deemest
me unworthy to share thy thoughts, or soothe thy troubles?"

"Fond one! no," said Warwick, drawing the form still light, though
rounded, nearer to his bosom.  "For nineteen years hast thou been to
me a leal and loving wife.  Thou wert a child on our wedding-day,
m'amie, and I but a beardless youth; yet wise enough was I then to
see, at the first glance of thy blue eye, that there was more treasure
in thy heart than in all the lordships thy hand bestowed."

"My Richard!" murmured the countess, and her tears of grateful delight
fell on the hand she kissed.

"Yes, let us recall those early and sweet days," continued Warwick,
with a tenderness of voice and manner that strangers might have
marvelled at, forgetting how tenderness is almost ever a part of such
peculiar manliness of character; "yes, sit we here under this spacious
elm, and think that our youth has come back to us once more.  For
verily, m'amie, nothing in life has ever been so fair to me as those
days when we stood hand in hand on its threshold, and talked, boy-
bridegroom and child-bride as we were, of the morrow that lay beyond."

"Ah, Richard, even in those days thy ambition sometimes vexed my
woman's vanity, and showed me that I could never be all in all to so
large a heart!"

"Ambition!  No, thou mistakest,--Montagu is ambitious, I but proud.
Montagu ever seeks to be higher than he is, I but assert the right to
be what I am and have been; and my pride, sweet wife, is a part of my
love for thee.  It is thy title, Heiress of Warwick, and not my
father's, that I bear; thy badge, and not the Nevile's, which I have
made the symbol of my power.  Shame, indeed, on my knighthood, if the
fairest dame in England could not justify my pride!  Ah, belle amie,
why have we not a son?"

"Peradventure, fair lord," said the countess, with an arch yet half-
melancholy smile, "because that pride, or ambition, name it as thou
wilt, which thou excusest so gallantly, would become too insatiate and
limitless if thou sawest a male heir to thy greatness; and God,
perhaps, warns thee that, spread and increase as thou wilt,--yea,
until half our native country becometh as the manor of one man,--all
must pass from the Beauchamp and the Nevile into new Houses; thy glory
indeed an eternal heirloom, but only to thy land,--thy lordships and
thy wealth melting into the dowry of a daughter."

"At least no king hath daughters so dowried," answered Warwick; "and
though I disdain for myself the hard vassalage of a throne, yet if the
channel of our blood must pass into other streams, into nothing meaner
than the veins of royalty should it merge."  He paused a moment, and
added with a sigh, "Would that Clarence were more worthy Isabel!"

"Nay," said the countess, gently, "he loveth her as she merits.  He is
comely, brave, gracious, and learned."

"A pest upon that learning,--it sicklies and womanizes men's minds!"
exclaimed Warwick, bluntly.  "Perhaps it is his learning that I am to
thank for George of Clarence's fears and doubts and calculations and
scruples.  His brother forbids his marriage with any English donzell,
for Edward dares not specialize what alone he dreads.  His letters
burn with love, and his actions freeze with doubts.  It was not thus I
loved thee, sweetheart.  By all the saints in the calendar, had Henry
V. or the Lion Richard started from the tomb to forbid me thy hand, it
would but have made me a hotter lover!  Howbeit Clarence shall decide
ere the moon wanes, and but for Isabel's tears and thy entreaties, my
father's grandchild should not have waited thus long the coming of so
hesitating a wooer.  But lo, our darlings!  Anne hath thine eyes,
m'amie; and she groweth more into my heart every day, since daily she
more favours thee."

While he thus spoke, the fair sisters came lightly and gayly up the
terrace: the arm of the statelier Isabel was twined round Anne's
slender waist; and as they came forward in that gentle link, with
their lithesome and bounding step, a happier blending of contrasted
beauty was never seen.  The months that had passed since the sisters
were presented first to the reader had little changed the superb and
radiant loveliness of Isabel, but had added surprisingly to the
attractions of Anne.  Her form was more rounded, her bloom more
ripened; and though something of timidity and bashfulness still
lingered about the grace of her movements and the glance of her dove-
like eye, the more earnest thoughts of the awakening woman gave sweet
intelligence to her countenance, and that divinest of all attractions
--the touching and conscious modesty--to the shy but tender smile, and
the blush that so came and went, so went and came, that it stirred the
heart with a sort of delighted pity for one so evidently susceptible
to every emotion of pleasure and of pain.  Life seemed too rough a
thing for so soft a nature, and gazing on her, one sighed to guess her
future.

"And what brings ye hither, young truants?" said the earl, as Anne,
leaving her sister, clung lovingly to his side (for it was ever her
habit to cling to some one), while Isabel kissed her mother's hand,
and then stood before her parents, colouring deeply, and with downcast
eyes.  "What brings ye hither, whom I left so lately deep engaged in
the loom, upon the helmet of Goliath, with my burgonet before you as a
sample?  Wife, you are to blame,--our rooms of state will be arrasless
for the next three generations, if these rosy fingers are suffered
thus to play the idlers."

"My father," whispered Anne, "guests are on their way hither,--a noble
cavalcade; you note them not from this part of the battlements, but
from our turret it was fair to see how their plumes and banners shone
in the setting sun."

"Guests!" echoed the earl; "well, is that so rare an honour that your
hearts should beat like village girls at a holiday?  Ah, Isabel! look
at her blushes.  Is it George of Clarence at last?  Is it?"

"We see the Duke of Gloucester's cognizance," whispered Anne, "and our
own Nevile Bull.  Perchance our cousin George, also, may--"

Here she was interrupted by the sound of the warder's horn, followed a
moment after by the roar of one of the bombards on the keep.

"At least," said Warwick, his face lighting up, "that signal announces
the coming of king's blood.  We must honour it,--for it is our own.
We will go forth and meet our guests--your hand, countess."

And gravely and silently, and in deep but no longer gloomy thought,
Warwick descended from the terrace, followed by the fair sisters; and
who that could have looked upon that princely pair and those lovely
and radiant children, could have foreseen that in that hour, Fate, in
tempting the earl once more to action, was busy on their doom!




CHAPTER II.

COUNCILS AND MUSINGS.

The lamp shone through the lattice of Warwick's chamber at the
unwonted hour of midnight, and the earl was still in deep commune with
his guests.  The archbishop, whom Edward, alarmed by the state of the
country and the disaffection of his barons, had reluctantly
commissioned to mediate with Warwick, was, as we have before said, one
of those men peculiar to the early Church.  There was nothing more in
the title of Archbishop of York than in that of the Bishop of Osnaburg
(borne by the royal son of George III.) [The late Duke of York.] to
prevent him who enjoyed it from leading armies, guiding States, or
indulging pleasure.  But beneath the coxcombry of George Nevile, which
was what he shared most in common with the courtiers of the laity,
there lurked a true ecclesiastic's mind.  He would have made in later
times an admirable Jesuit, and no doubt in his own time a very
brilliant Pope.  His objects in his present mission were clear and
perspicuous; any breach between Warwick and the king must necessarily
weaken his own position, and the power of his House was essential to
all his views.  The object of Gloucester in his intercession was less
defined, but not less personal: in smoothing the way to his brother's
marriage with Isabel, he removed all apparent obstacle to his own with
Anne.  And it is probable that Richard, who, whatever his crimes, was
far from inaccessible to affection, might have really loved his early
playmate, even while his ambition calculated the wealth of the
baronies that would swell the dower of the heiress and gild the barren
coronet of his duchy.  [Majerns, the Flemish chronicler, quoted by
Bucke ("Life of Richard III"), mentions the early attachment of
Richard to Anne.  They were much together, as children, at Middleham.]

"God's truth!" said Warwick, as he lifted his eyes from the scroll in
the king's writing, "ye know well, princely cousin, and thou, my
brother, ye know well how dearly I have loved King Edward; and the
mother's milk overflows my heart when I read these gentle and tender
words which he deigns to bestow upon his servant.  My blood is hasty
and over-hot, but a kind thought from those I love puts out much fire.
Sith he thus beseeches me to return to his councils, I will not be
sullen enough to hold back; but, oh, Prince Richard! is it indeed a
matter past all consideration that your sister, the Lady Margaret,
must wed with the Duke of Burgundy?"

"Warwick," replied the prince, "thou mayest know that I never looked
with favour on that alliance; that when Clarence bore the Bastard's
helmet, I withheld my countenance from the Bastard's presence.  I
incurred Edward's anger by refusing to attend his court while the
Count de la Roche was his guest. And therefore you may trust me when I
say now that Edward, after promises, however rash, most solemn and
binding, is dishonoured forever if he break off the contract.  New
circumstances, too, have arisen, to make what were dishonour danger
also.  By the death of his father, Charolois has succeeded to the Duke
of Burgundy's diadem.  Thou knowest his warlike temper; and though in
a contest popular in England we need fear no foe, yet thou knowest
also that no subsidies could be raised for strife with our most
profitable commercial ally.  Wherefore we earnestly implore thee
magnanimously to forgive the past, accept Edward's assurance of
repentance, and be thy thought--as it has been ever--the weal of our
common country."

"I may add, also," said the archbishop, observing how much Warwick was
touched and softened,--"that in returning to the helm of state, our
gracious king permits me to say, that, save only in the alliance with
Burgundy, which toucheth his plighted word, you have full liberty to
name conditions, and to ask whatever grace or power a monarch can
bestow."

"I name none but my prince's confidence," said Warwick, generously;
"in that, all else is given, and in return for that, I will make the
greatest sacrifice that my nature knoweth, or can conceive,--I will
mortify my familiar demon, I will subdue my PRIDE.  If Edward can
convince me that it is for the good of England that his sister should
wed with mine ancient and bitter foe, I will myself do honour to his
choice.  But of this hereafter.  Enough now that I forget past wrongs
in present favour; and that for peace or war, I return to the side of
that man whom I loved as my son before I served him as my king."

Neither Richard nor the archbishop was prepared for a conciliation so
facile, for neither quite understood that peculiar magnanimity which
often belongs to a vehement and hasty temper, and which is as eager to
forgive as prompt to take offence,--which, ever in extremes, is not
contented with anything short of fiery aggression or trustful
generosity, and where it once passes over an offence, seeks to oblige
the offender.  So, when, after some further conversation on the state
of the country, the earl lighted Gloucester to his chamber, the young
prince said to himself, musingly,--

"Does ambition besot and blind men?  Or can Warwick think that Edward
can ever view him but as one to be destroyed when the hour is ripe?"

Catesby, who was the duke's chamberlain, was in attendance as the
prince unrobed.

"A noble castle this," said the duke, "and one in the midst of a
warlike population,--our own countrymen of York."

"It would be no mean addition to the dowry of the Lady Isabel," said
Catesby, with his bland, false smile.

"Methinks rather that the lordships of Salisbury (and this is the
chief) pass to the Lady Anne," said Richard, musingly.  "No, Edward
were imprudent to suffer this stronghold to fall to the next heir to
his throne.  Marked you the Lady Anne?--her beauty is most excellent."

"Truly, your Highness," answered Catesby, unsuspiciously, "the Lady
Isabel seems to me the taller and the statelier."

"When man's merit and woman's beauty are measured by the ell, Catesby,
Anne will certainly be less fair than Isabel, and Richard a dolt
compared to Clarence.  Open the casement; my dressing-robe; good-night
to you!"




CHAPTER III.

THE SISTERS.

The next morning, at an hour when modern beauty falls into its first
sickly sleep, Isabel and Anne conversed on the same terrace, and near
the same spot, which had witnessed their father's meditations the day
before.  They were seated on a rude bench in an angle of the wall,
flanked by a low, heavy bastion.  And from the parapet their gaze
might have wandered over a goodly sight, for on a broad space, covered
with sand and sawdust, within the vast limits of the castle range, the
numerous knights and youths who sought apprenticeship in arms and
gallantry under the earl were engaged in those martial sports which,
falling elsewhere in disuse, the Last of the Barons kinglily
maintained.  There, boys of fourteen, on their small horses, ran
against each other with blunted lances.  There, those of more advanced
adolescence, each following the other in a circle, rode at the ring;
sometimes (at the word of command from an old knight who had fought at
Agincourt, and was the preceptor in these valiant studies) leaping
from their horses at full speed, and again vaulting into the saddle.
A few grim old warriors sat by to censure or applaud.  Most skilled
among the younger was the son of Lord Montagu; among the maturer, the
name of Marmaduke Nevile was the most often shouted.  If the eye
turned to the left, through the barbican might be seen flocks of
beeves entering to supply the mighty larder; and at a smaller postern,
a dark crowd of mendicant friars, and the more destitute poor, waited
for the daily crumbs from the rich man's table.  What need of a poor-
law then?  The baron and the abbot made the parish!  But not on these
evidences of wealth and state turned the eyes, so familiar to them,
that they woke no vanity, and roused no pride.

With downcast looks and a pouting lip, Isabel listened to the silver
voice of Anne.

"Dear sister, be just to Clarence.  He cannot openly defy his king and
brother.  Believe that he would have accompanied our uncle and cousin
had he not deemed that their meditation would be more welcome, at
least to King Edward, without his presence."

"But not a letter! not a line!"

"Yet when I think of it, Isabel, are we sure that he even knew of the
visit of the archbishop and his brother?"

"How could he fail to know?"

"The Duke of Gloucester last evening told me that the king had sent
him southward."

"Was it about Clarence that the duke whispered to thee so softly by
the oriel window?"

"Surely, yes," said Anne, simply.  "Was not Richard as a brother to us
when we played as children on yon greensward?"

"Never as a brother to me,--never was Richard of Gloucester one whom I
could think of without fear and even loathing," answered Isabel,
quickly.

It was at this turn in the conversation that the noiseless step of
Richard himself neared the spot, and hearing his own name thus
discourteously treated, he paused, screened from their eyes by the
bastion in the angle.

"Nay, nay, sister," said Anne; "what is there in Richard that
misbeseems his princely birth?"

"I know not, but there is no youth in his eye and in his heart.  Even
as a child he had the hard will and the cold craft of gray hairs.
Pray Saint Mary you give me not Gloucester for a brother!"

Anne sighed and smiled.  "Ah, no," she said, after a short pause,
"when thou art Princess of Clarence may I--"

"May thou what?"

"Pray for thee and thine in the house of God!  Ah, thou knowest not,
sweet Isabel, how often at morn and even mine eyes and heart turn to
the spires of yonder convent!"  She rose as she said this, her lip
quivered, and she moved on in the opposite direction to that in which
Richard stood, still unseen, and no longer within his hearing.  Isabel
rose also, and hastening after her, threw her arms round Anne's neck,
and kissed away the tears that stood in those meek eyes.

"My sister, my Anne!  Ah, trust in me, thou hast some secret, I know
it well,--I have long seen it.  Is it possible that thou canst have
placed thy heart, thy pure love--Thou blushest!  Ah, Anne!  Anne! thou
canst not have loved beneath thee?"

"Nay," said Anne, with a spark of her ancestral fire lighting her meek
eyes through its tears, "not beneath me, but above.  What do I say!
Isabel, ask me no more.  Enough that it is a folly, a dream, and that
I could smile with pity at myself to think from what light causes love
and grief can spring."

"Above thee!" repeated Isabel, in amaze; "and who in England is above
the daughter of Earl Warwick?  Not Richard of Gloucester?  If so,
pardon my foolish tongue."

"No, not Richard,--though I feel kindly towards him, and his sweet
voice soothes me when I listen,--not Richard.  Ask no more."

"Oh, Anne, speak, speak!--we are not both so wretched?  Thou lovest
not Clarence?  It is--it must be!"

"Canst thou think me so false and treacherous,--a heart pledged to
thee?  Clarence!  Oh, no!"

"But who then--who then?" said Isabel, still suspiciously.  "Nay, if
thou wilt not speak, blame thyself if I must still wrong thee."

Thus appealed to, and wounded to the quick by Isabel's tone and eye,
Anne at last with a strong effort suppressed her tears, and, taking
her sister's hand, said in a voice of touching solemnity, "Promise,
then, that the secret shall be ever holy; and, since I know that it
will move thine anger--perhaps thy scorn--strive to forget what I will
confess to thee."

Isabel for answer pressed her lips on the hand she held; and the
sisters, turning under the shadow of a long row of venerable oaks,
placed themselves on a little mound, fragrant with the violets of
spring.  A different part of the landscape beyond was now brought in
view; calmly slept in the valley the roofs of the subject town of
Middleham, calmly flowed through the pastures the noiseless waves of
Ure.  Leaning on Isabel's bosom, Anne thus spake, "Call to mind, sweet
sister, that short breathing-time in the horrors of the Civil War,
when a brief peace was made between our father and Queen Margaret.  We
were left in the palace--mere children that we were--to play with the
young prince, and the children in Margaret's train."

"I remember."

"And I was unwell and timid, and kept aloof from the sports with a
girl of my own years, whom I think--see how faithful my memory!--they
called Sibyll; and Prince Edward, Henry's son, stealing from the rest,
sought me out; and we sat together, or walked together alone, apart
from all, that day and the few days we were his mother's guests.  Oh,
if you could have seen him and heard him then,--so beautiful, so
gentle, so wise beyond his years, and yet so sweetly sad; and when we
parted, he bade me ever love him, and placed his ring on my finger,
and wept,--as we kissed each other, as children will."

"Children! ye were infants!" exclaimed Isabel, whose wonder seemed
increased by this simple tale.

"Infant though I was, I felt as if my heart would break when I left
him; and then the wars ensued; and do you not remember how ill I was,
and like to die, when our House triumphed, and the prince and heir of
Lancaster was driven into friendless exile?  From that hour my fate
was fixed.  Smile if you please at such infant folly, but children
often feel more deeply than later years can weet of."

"My sister, this is indeed a wilful invention of sorrow for thine own
scourge.  Why, ere this, believe me, the boy-prince hath forgotten thy
very name."

"Not so, Isabel," said Anne, colouring, and quickly, "and perchance,
did all rest here, I might have outgrown my weakness.  But last year,
when we were at Rouen with my father--"

"Well?"

"One evening on entering my chamber, I found a packet,--how left I
know not, but the French king and his suite, thou rememberest, made
our house almost their home,--and in this packet was a picture, and on
its back these words, Forget not the exile who remembers thee!"

"And that picture was Prince Edward's?"

Anne blushed, and her bosom heaved beneath the slender and high-laced
gorget.  After a pause, looking round her, she drew forth a small
miniature, which lay on the heart that beat thus sadly, and placed it
in her sister's hands.

"You see I deceive you not, Isabel.  And is not this a fair excuse
for--"

She stopped short, her modest nature shrinking from comment upon the
mere beauty that might have won the heart.  And fair indeed was the
face upon which Isabel gazed admiringly, in spite of the stiff and
rude art of the limner; full of the fire and energy which
characterized the countenance of the mother, but with a tinge of the
same profound and inexpressible melancholy that gave its charm to the
pensive features of Henry VI.,--a face, indeed, to fascinate a young
eye, even if not associated with such remembrances of romance and
pity.

Without saying a word, Isabel gave back the picture; but she pressed
the hand that took it, and Anne was contented to interpret the silence
into sympathy.

"And now you know why I have so often incurred your anger by
compassion for the adherents of Lancaster; and for this, also, Richard
of Gloucester hath been endeared to me,--for fierce and stern as he
may be called, he hath ever been gentle in his mediation for that
unhappy House."

"Because it is his policy to be well with all parties.  My poor Anne,
I cannot bid you hope; and yet, should I ever wed with Clarence, it
may be possible--that--that--but you in turn will chide me for
ambition."

"How?"

"Clarence is heir to the throne of England, for King Edward has no
male children; and the hour may arrive when the son of Henry of
Windsor may return to his native land, not as sovereign, but as Duke
of Lancaster, and thy hand may reconcile him to the loss of a crown."

"Would love reconcile thee to such a loss, proud Isabel?" said Anne,
shaking her head, and smiling mournfully.

"No," answered Isabel, emphatically.

"And are men less haught than we?" said Anne.  "Ah, I know not if I
could love him so well could he resign his rights, or even could he
regain them.  It is his position that gives him a holiness in my eyes.
And this love, that must be hopeless, is half pity and half respect."

At this moment a loud shout arose from the youths in the yard, or
sporting-ground, below, and the sisters, startled, and looking up, saw
that the sound was occasioned by the sight of the young Duke of
Gloucester, who was standing on the parapet near the bench the
demoiselles had quitted, and who acknowledged the greeting by a wave
of his plumed cap, and a lowly bend of his head; at the same time the
figures of Warwick and the archbishop, seemingly in earnest
conversation, appeared at the end of the terrace.  The sisters rose
hastily, and would have stolen away, but the archbishop caught a
glimpse of their robes, and called aloud to them.  The reverent
obedience, at that day, of youth to relations left the sisters no
option but to advance towards their uncle, which they did with demure
reluctance.

"Fair brother," said the archbishop, "I would that Gloucester were to
have my stately niece instead of the gaudy Clarence."

"Wherefore?"

"Because he can protect those he loves, and Clarence will ever need a
protector."

"I like George not the less for that," said Warwick, "for I would not
have my son-in-law my master."

"Master!" echoed the archbishop, laughing; "the Soldan of Babylon
himself, were he your son-in-law, would find Lord Warwick a tolerably
stubborn servant!"

"And yet," said Warwick, also laughing, but with a franker tone,
"beshrew me, but much as I approve young Gloucester, and deem him the
hope of the House of York, I never feel sure, when we are of the same
mind, whether I agree with him, or whether he leadeth me.  Ah, George!
Isabel should have wedded the king, and then Edward and I would have
had a sweet mediator in all our quarrels.  But not so hath it been
decreed."

There was a pause.

"Note how Gloucester steals to the side of Anne.  Thou mayst have him
for a son-in-law, though no rival to Clarence.  Montagu hath hinted
that the duke so aspires."

"He has his father's face--well," said the earl, softly.  "But yet,"
he added, in an altered and reflective tone, "the boy is to me a
riddle.  That he will be bold in battle and wise in council I foresee;
but would he had more of a young man's honest follies!  There is a
medium between Edward's wantonness and Richard's sanctimony; and he
who in the heyday of youth's blood scowls alike upon sparkling wine
and smiling woman, may hide in his heart darker and more sinful
fancies.  But fie on me!  I will not wrongfully mistrust his father's
son.  Thou spokest of Montagu; he seems to have been mighty cold to
his brother's wrongs,--ever at the court, ever sleek with Villein and
Woodville."

"But the better to watch thy interests,--I so counselled him."

"A priest's counsel!  Hate frankly or love freely is a knight's and
soldier's motto.  A murrain on all doubledealing!"

The archbishop shrugged his shoulders, and applied to his nostrils a
small pouncet-box of dainty essences.

"Come hither, my haughty Isabel," said the prelate, as the demoiselles
now drew near.  He placed his niece's arm within his own, and took her
aside to talk of Clarence; Richard remained with Anne, and the young
cousins were joined by Warwick.  The earl noted in silence the soft
address of the eloquent prince, and his evident desire to please Anne.
And strange as it may seem, although he had hitherto regarded Richard
with admiration and affection, and although his pride for both
daughters coveted alliances not less than royal, yet, in contemplating
Gloucester for the first time as a probable suitor to his daughter
(and his favourite daughter), the anxiety of a father sharpened his
penetration, and placed the character of Richard before him in a
different point from that in which he had hitherto looked only on the
fearless heart and accomplished wit of his royal godson.




CHAPTER IV.

THE DESTRIER.

It was three days afterwards that the earl, as, according to custom,
Anne knelt to him for his morning blessing in the oratory where the
Christian baron at matins and vespers offered up his simple worship,
drew her forth into the air, and said abruptly,--

"Wouldst thou be happy if Richard of Gloucester were thy betrothed?"

Anne started, and with more vivacity than usually belonged to her,
exclaimed, "Oh, no, my father!"

"This is no maiden's silly coyness, Anne?  It is a plain yea or nay
that I ask from thee!"

"Nay, then," answered Anne, encouraged by her father's tone,--"nay, if
it so please you."

"It doth please me," said the earl, shortly; and after a pause, he
added, "Yes, I am well pleased.  Richard gives promise of an
illustrious manhood; but, Anne, thou growest so like thy mother, that
whenever my pride seeks to see thee great, my heart steps in, and only
prays that it may see thee happy!--so much so, that I would not have
given thee to Clarence, whom it likes me well to view as Isabel's
betrothed, for, to her, greatness and bliss are one; and she is of
firm nature, and can rule in her own house; but thou--where out of
romaunt can I find a lord loving enough for thee, soft child?"

Inexpressibly affected, Anne threw herself on her father's breast and
wept.  He caressed and soothed her fondly; and before her emotion was
well over, Gloucester and Isabel joined them.

"My fair cousin," said the duke, "hath promised to show me thy
renowned steed, Saladin; and since, on quitting thy halls, I go to my
apprenticeship in war on the turbulent Scottish frontier, I would fain
ask thee for a destrier of the same race as that which bears the
thunderbolt of Warwick's wrath through the storm of battle."

"A steed of the race of Saladin," answered the earl, leading the way
to the destrier's stall, apart from all other horses, and rather a
chamber of the castle than a stable, "were indeed a boon worthy a
soldier's gift and a prince's asking.  But, alas! Saladin, like
myself, is sonless,--the last of a long line."

"His father, methinks, fell for us on the field of Towton.  Was it not
so?  I have heard Edward say that when the archers gave way, and the
victory more than wavered, thou, dismounting, didst slay thy steed
with thine own hand, and kissing the cross of thy sword, swore on that
spot to stem the rush of the foe, and win Edward's crown or Warwick's
grave."  ["Every Palm Sunday, the day on which the battle of Towton
was fought, a rough figure, called the Red Horse, on the side of a
hill in Warwickshire, is scoured out.  This is suggested to be done in
commemoration of the horse which the Earl of Warwick slew on that day,
determined to vanquish or die."--Roberts: York and Lancaster, vol. i.
p. 429.]

"It was so; and the shout of my merry men, when they saw me amongst
their ranks on foot--all flight forbid--was Malech's death-dirge.  It
is a wondrous race,--that of Malech and his son Saladin," continued
the earl, smiling.  "When my ancestor, Aymer de Nevile, led his troops
to the Holy Land, under Coeur de Lion, it was his fate to capture a
lady beloved by the mighty Saladin.  Need I say that Aymer, under a
flag of truce, escorted her ransomless, her veil never raised from her
face, to the tent of the Saracen king?  Saladin, too gracious for an
infidel, made him tarry a while, an honoured guest; and Aymer's
chivalry became sorely tried, for the lady he had delivered loved and
tempted him; but the good knight prayed and fasted, and defied Satan
and all his works.  The lady (so runs the legend) grew wroth at the
pious crusader's disdainful coldness; and when Aymer returned to his
comrades, she sent, amidst the gifts of the soldan, two coal-black
steeds, male and mare, over which some foul and weird spells had been
duly muttered.  Their beauty, speed, art, and fierceness were a
marvel.  And Aymer, unsuspecting, prized the boon, and selected the
male destrier for his war-horse.  Great were the feats, in many a
field, which my forefather wrought, bestriding his black charger.  But
one fatal day, on which the sudden war-trump made him forget his
morning ave, the beast had power over the Christian, and bore him,
against bit and spur, into the thickest of the foe.  He did all a
knight can do against many (pardon his descendant's vaunting,--so runs
the tale), and the Christians for a while beheld him solitary in the
melee, mowing down moon and turban.  Then the crowd closed, and the
good knight was lost to sight.  'To the rescue!' cried bold King
Richard, and on rushed the crusaders to Aymer's help; when lo! and
suddenly the ranks severed, and the black steed emerged!  Aymer still
on the selle, but motionless, and his helm battered and plumeless, his
brand broken, his arm drooping.  On came man and horse, on,--charging
on, not against Infidel but Christian.  On dashed the steed, I say,
with fire bursting from eyes and nostrils, and the pike of his
chaffron bent lance-like against the crusaders' van.  The foul fiend
seemed in the destrier's rage and puissance.  He bore right against
Richard's standard-bearer, and down went the lion and the cross.  He
charged the king himself; and Richard, unwilling to harm his own dear
soldier Aymer, halted wondering, till the pike of the destrier pierced
his own charger through the barding, and the king lay rolling in the
dust.  A panic seized the cross-men; they fled, the Saracens pursued,
and still with the Saracens came the black steed and the powerless
rider.  At last, when the crusaders reached the camp, and the flight
ceased, there halted, also, Aymer.  Not a man dared near him.  He
spoke not, none spoke to him, till a holy priest and palmer approached
and sprinkled the good knight and the black barb with holy water, and
exorcised both; the spell broke, and Aymer dropped to the earth.  They
unbraced his helm,--he was cold and stark.  The fierce steed had but
borne a dead man."

"Holy Paul!" cried Gloucester, with seeming sanctimony, though a
covert sneer played round the firm beauty of his pale lips, "a notable
tale, and one that proveth much of Sacred Truth, now lightly heeded.
But, verily, lord earl, I should have little loved a steed with such a
pedigree."

"Hear the rest," said Isabel.  "King Richard ordered the destrier to
be slain forthwith; but the holy palmer who had exorcised it forbade
the sacrifice.  'Mighty shall be the service,' said the reverend man,
'which the posterity of this steed shall render to thy royal race, and
great glory shall they give to the sons of Nevile.  Let the war-horse,
now duly exorcised from infidel spells, live long to bear a Christian
warrior!'"

"And so," quoth the earl, taking up the tale--"so mare and horse were
brought by Aymer's squires to his English hall; and Aymer's son, Sir
Reginald, bore the cross, and bestrode the fatal steed, without fear
and without scathe.  From that hour the House of Nevile rose amain, in
fame and in puissance; and the legend further saith, that the same
palmer encountered Sir Reginald at Joppa, bade him treasure that race
of war-steeds as his dearest heritage, for with that race his own
should flourish and depart; and the sole one of the Infidel's spells
which could not be broken was that which united the gift--generation
after generation, for weal or for woe, for honour or for doom--to the
fate of Aymer and his House.  'And,' added the palmer, 'as with
woman's love and woman's craft was woven the indissoluble charm, so
shall woman, whether in craft or in love, ever shape the fortunes of
thee and thine.'"

"As yet," said the prince, "the prophecy is fulfilled in a golden
sense, for nearly all thy wide baronies, I trow, have come to thee
through the female side.  A woman's hand brought to the Nevile this
castle and its lands; [Middleham Castle was built by Robert Fitz
Ranulph, grandson of Ribald, younger brother of the Earl of Bretagne
and Richmond, nephew to the Conqueror.  The founder's line failed in
male heirs, and the heiress married Robert Nevile, son of Lord Raby.
Warwick's father held the earldom of Salisbury in right of his wife,
the heiress of Thomas de Montacute.] from a woman came the heritage of
Monthermer and Montagu, and Salisbury's famous earldom; and the dower
of thy peerless countess was the broad domains of Beauchamp."

"And a woman's craft, young prince, wrought my king's displeasure!
But enough of these dissour's tales; behold the son of poor Malech,
whom, forgetting all such legends, I slew at Towton.  Ho, Saladin,
greet thy master!"

They stood now in the black steed's stall.--an ample and high-vaulted
space, for halter never insulted the fierce destrier's mighty neck,
which the God of Battles had clothed in thunder.  A marble cistern
contained his limpid drink, and in a gilded manger the finest wheaten
bread was mingled with the oats of Flanders.  On entering, they found
young George, Montagu's son, with two or three boys, playing
familiarly with the noble animal, who had all the affectionate
docility inherited from an Arab origin.  But at the sound of Warwick's
voice, its ears rose, its mane dressed itself, and with a short neigh
it came to his feet, and kneeling down, in slow and stately grace,
licked its master's hand.  So perfect and so matchless a steed never
had knight bestrode!  Its hide without one white hair, and glossy as
the sheenest satin; a lady's tresses were scarcely finer than the hair
of its noble mane; the exceeding smallness of its head, its broad
frontal, the remarkable and almost human intelligence of its eye,
seemed actually to elevate its conformation above that of its species.
Though the race had increased, generation after generation, in size
and strength, Prince Richard still marvelled (when, obedient to a sign
from Warwick, the destrier rose, and leaned its head, with a sort of
melancholy and quiet tenderness, upon the earl's shoulder) that a
horse, less in height and bulk than the ordinary battle-steed, could
bear the vast weight of the giant earl in his ponderous mail.  But his
surprise ceased when the earl pointed out to him the immense strength
of the steed's ample loins, the sinewy cleanness, the iron muscle, of
the stag-like legs, the bull-like breadth of chest, and the swelling
power of the shining neck.

"And after all," added the earl, "both in man and beast, the spirit
and the race, not the stature and the bulk, bring the prize.  Mort
Dieu, Richard! it often shames me of mine own thews and broad breast,
--I had been more vain of laurels had I been shorter by the head!"

"Nevertheless," said young George of Montagu, with a page's pertness,
"I had rather have thine inches than Prince Richard's, and thy broad
breast than his grace's short neck."

The Duke of Gloucester turned as if a snake had stung him.  He gave
but one glance to the speaker, but that glance lived forever in the
boy's remembrance, and the young Montagu turned pale and trembled,
even before he heard the earl's stern rebuke.

"Young magpies chatter, boy,--young eagles in silence measure the
space between the eyry and the sun!"

The boy hung his head, and would have slunk off, but Richard detained
him with a gentle hand.  "My fair young cousin," said he, "thy words
gall no sore, and if ever thou and I charge side by side into the
foeman's ranks, thou shalt comprehend what thy uncle designed to say,
--how, in the hour of strait and need, we measure men's stature not by
the body but the soul!"

"A noble answer," whispered Anne, with something like sisterly
admiration.

"Too noble," said the more ambitious Isabel, in the same voice, "for
Clarence's future wife not to fear Clarence's dauntless brother."

"And so," said the prince, quitting the stall with Warwick, while the
girls still lingered behind, "so Saladin hath no son!  Wherefore?  Can
you mate him with no bride?"

"Faith," answered the earl, "the females of his race sleep in yonder
dell, their burial-place, and the proud beast disdains all meaner
loves.  Nay, were it not so, to continue the breed, if adulterated,
were but to mar it."

"You care little for the legend, meseems."

"Pardieu! at times, yes, over much; but in sober moments I think that
the brave man who does his duty lacks no wizard prophecy to fulfil his
doom; and whether in prayer or in death, in fortune or defeat, his
soul goes straight to God!"

"Umph," said Richard, musingly; and there was a pause.  "Warwick,"
resumed the prince, "doubtless, even on your return to London, the
queen's enmity and her mother's will not cease.  Clarence loves
Isabel, but Clarence knows not how to persuade the king and rule the
king's womankind.  Thou knowest how I have stood aloof from all the
factions of the court.  Unhappily I go to the Borders, and can but
slightly serve thee.  But--"(he stopped short, and sighed heavily).

"Speak on, Prince."

"In a word, then, if I were thy son, Anne's husband, I see--I see--I
see--" (thrice repeated the prince, with a vague dreaminess in his
eye, and stretching forth his hand)--"a future that might defy all
foes, opening to me and thee!"

Warwick hesitated in some embarrassment.

"My gracious and princely cousin," he said at length, "this proffer is
indeed sweet incense to a father's pride.  But pardon me, as yet,
noble Richard, thou art so young that the king and the world would
blame me did I suffer my ambition to listen to such temptation.
Enough, at present, if all disputes between our House and the king can
be smoothed and laid at rest without provoking new ones.  Nay, pardon
me, prince, let this matter cease--at least, till thy return from the
Borders."

"May I take with me hope?"

"Nay," said Warwick, "thou knowest that I am a plain man; to bid thee
hope were to plight my word.  And," he added seriously, "there be
reasons grave and well to be considered why both the daughters of a
subject should not wed with their king's brothers.  Let this cease
now, I pray thee, sweet lord."

Here the demoiselles joined their father, and the conference was over;
but when Richard, an hour after, stood musing alone on the
battlements, he muttered to himself, "Thou art a fool, stout earl, not
to have welcomed the union between thy power and my wit.  Thou goest
to a court where without wit power is nought.  Who may foresee the
future?  Marry, that was a wise ancient fable, that he who seized and
bound Proteus could extract from the changeful god the prophecy of the
days to come.  Yea! the man who can seize Fate can hear its voice
predict to him.  And by my own heart and brain, which never yet
relinquished what affection yearned for, or thought aspired to, I
read, as in a book, Anne, that thou shalt be mine; and that where wave
on yon battlements the ensigns of Beauchamp, Monthermer, and Nevile,
the Boar of Gloucester shall liege it over their broad baronies and
hardy vassals."





BOOK VI

WHEREIN ARE OPENED SOME GLIMPSES OF THE FATE BELOW THAT ATTENDS THOSE
WHO ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS, AND THOSE WHO DESIRE TO MAKE OTHERS
BETTER.  LOVE, DEMAGOGY, AND SCIENCE ALL EQUALLY OFF-SPRING OF THE
SAME PROLIFIC DELUSION,--NAMELY, THAT MEAN SOULS (THE EARTH'S
MAJORITY) ARE WORTH THE HOPE AND THE AGONY OF NOBLE SOULS, THE
EVERLASTING SUFFERING AND ASPIRING FEW.




CHAPTER I.

NEW DISSENSIONS.

We must pass over some months.  Warwick and his family had returned to
London, and the meeting between Edward and the earl had been cordial
and affectionate.  Warwick was reinstated in the offices which gave
him apparently the supreme rule in England.  The Princess Margaret had
left England as the bride of Charles the Bold; and the earl had
attended the procession in honour of her nuptials.  The king,
agreeably with the martial objects he had had long at heart, had then
declared war on Louis XI., and parliament was addressed and troops
were raised for that impolitic purpose.  [Parliamentary Rolls, 623.
The fact in the text has been neglected by most historians.]  To this
war, however, Warwick was inflexibly opposed.  He pointed out the
madness of withdrawing from England all her best-affected chivalry, at
a time when the adherents of Lancaster, still powerful, would require
no happier occasion to raise the Red Rose banner.  He showed how
hollow was the hope of steady aid from the hot but reckless and
unprincipled Duke of Burgundy, and how different now was the condition
of France under a king of consummate sagacity and with an overflowing
treasury to its distracted state in the former conquests of the
English.  This opposition to the king's will gave every opportunity
for Warwick's enemies to renew their old accusation of secret and
treasonable amity with Louis.  Although the proud and hasty earl had
not only forgiven the affront put upon him by Edward, but had sought
to make amends for his own intemperate resentment, by public
attendance on the ceremonials that accompanied the betrothal of the
princess, it was impossible for Edward ever again to love the minister
who had defied his power and menaced his crown.  His humour and his
suspicions broke forth despite the restraint that policy dictated to
him: and in the disputes upon the invasion of France, a second and
more deadly breach between Edward and his minister must have yawned,
had not events suddenly and unexpectedly proved the wisdom of
Warwick's distrust of Burgundy.  Louis XI. bought off the Duke of
Bretagne, patched up a peace with Charles the Bold, and thus
frustrated all the schemes and broke all the alliances of Edward at
the very moment his military preparations were ripe.  [W. Wyr, 518.]

Still the angry feelings that the dispute had occasioned between
Edward and the earl were not removed with the cause; and under
pretence of guarding against hostilities from Louis, the king
requested Warwick to depart to his government of Calais, the most
important and honourable post, it is true, which a subject could then
hold: but Warwick considered the request as a pretext for his removal
from the court.  A yet more irritating and insulting cause of offence
was found in Edward's withholding his consent to Clarence's often-
urged demand for permission to wed with the Lady Isabel.  It is true
that this refusal was accompanied with the most courteous
protestations of respect for the earl, and placed only upon the
general ground of state policy.

"My dear George," Edward would say, "the heiress of Lord Warwick is
certainly no mal-alliance for a king's brother; but the safety of the
throne imperatively demands that my brothers should strengthen my rule
by connections with foreign potentates.  I, it is true, married a
subject, and see all the troubles that have sprung from my boyish
passion!  No, no!  Go to Bretagne.  The duke hath a fair daughter, and
we will make up for any scantiness in the dower.  Weary me no more,
George.  Fiat voluntas mea!"

But the motives assigned were not those which influenced the king's
refusal.  Reasonably enough, he dreaded that the next male heir to his
crown should wed the daughter of the subject who had given that crown,
and might at any time take it away.  He knew Clarence to be giddy,
unprincipled, and vain.  Edward's faith in Warwick was shaken by the
continual and artful representations of the queen and her family.  He
felt that the alliance between Clarence and the earl would be the
union of two interests almost irresistible if once arrayed against his
own.

But Warwick, who penetrated into the true reason for Edward's
obstinacy, was yet more resentful against the reasons than the
obstinacy itself.  The one galled him through his affections, the
other through his pride; and the first were as keen as the last was
morbid.  He was the more chafed, inasmuch as his anxiety of father
became aroused.  Isabel was really attached to Clarence, who, with all
his errors, possessed every superficial attraction that graced his
House,--gallant and handsome, gay and joyous, and with manners that
made him no less popular than Edward himself.

And if Isabel's affections were not deep, disinterested, and tender,
like those of Anne, they were strengthened by a pride which she
inherited from her father, and a vanity which she took from her sex.
It was galling in the extreme to feel that the loves between her and
Clarence were the court gossip, and the king's refusal the court jest.
Her health gave way, and pride and love both gnawed at her heart.

It happened, unfortunately for the king and for Warwick, that
Gloucester, whose premature acuteness and sagacity would have the more
served both, inasmuch as the views he had formed in regard to Anne
would have blended his interest in some degree with that of the Duke
of Clarence, and certainly with the object of conciliation between
Edward and his minister,--it happened, we say, unfortunately, that
Gloucester was still absent with the forces employed on the Scottish
frontier, whither he had repaired on quitting Middleham, and where his
extraordinary military talents found their first brilliant opening;
and he was therefore absent from London during all the disgusts he
might have removed and the intrigues he might have frustrated.

But the interests of the House of Warwick, during the earl's sullen
and indignant sojourn at his government of Calais, were not committed
to unskilful hands; and Montagu and the archbishop were well fitted to
cope with Lord Rivers and the Duchess of Bedford.

Between these able brothers, one day, at the More, an important
conference took place.

"I have sought you," said Montagu, with more than usual care upon his
brow--"I have sought you in consequence of an event that may lead to
issues of no small moment, whether for good or evil.  Clarence has
suddenly left England for Calais."

"I know it, Montagu; the duke confided to me his resolution to
proclaim himself old enough to marry,--and discreet enough to choose
for himself."

"And you approved?"

"Certes; and, sooth to say, I brought him to that modest opinion of
his own capacities.  What is more still, I propose to join him at
Calais."

"George!"

"Look not so scared, O valiant captain, who never lost a battle,--
where the Church meddles, all prospers.  Listen!" And the young
prelate gathered himself up from his listless posture, and spoke with
earnest unction.  "Thou knowest that I do not much busy myself in lay
schemes; when I do, the object must be great.  Now, Montagu, I have of
late narrowly and keenly watched that spidery web which ye call a
court, and I see that the spider will devour the wasp, unless the wasp
boldly break the web,--for woman-craft I call the spider, and soldier-
pride I style the wasp.  To speak plainly, these Woodvilles must be
bravely breasted and determinately abashed.  I do not mean that we can
deal with the king's wife and her family as with any other foes; but
we must convince them that they cannot cope with us, and that their
interests will best consist in acquiescing in that condition of things
which places the rule of England in the hands of the Neviles."

"My own thought, if I saw the way!"

"I see the way in this alliance; the Houses of York and Warwick must
become so indissolubly united, that an attempt to injure the one must
destroy both.  The queen and the Woodvilles plot against us; we must
raise in the king's family a counterpoise to their machinations.  It
brings no scandal on the queen to conspire against Warwick, but it
would ruin her in the eyes of England to conspire against the king's
brother; and Clarence and Warwick must be as one.  This is not all!
If our sole aid was in giddy George, we should but buttress our House
with a weathercock.  This connection is but as a part of the grand
scheme on which I have set my heart,--Clarence shall wed Isabel,
Gloucester wed Anne, and (let thy ambitious heart beat high, Montagu)
the king's eldest daughter shall wed thy son,--the male representative
of our triple honours.  Ah, thine eyes sparkle now!  Thus the whole
royalty of England shall centre in the Houses of Nevile and York; and
the Woodvilles will be caught and hampered in their own meshes, their
resentment impotent; for how can Elizabeth stir against us, if her
daughter be betrothed to the son of Montagu, the nephew of Warwick?
Clarence, beloved by the shallow commons; [Singular as it may seem to
those who know not that popularity is given to the vulgar qualities of
men, and that where a noble nature becomes popular (a rare
occurrence), it is despite the nobleness,--not because of it.
Clarence was a popular idol even to the time of his death.--Croyl.,
562.] Gloucester, adored both by the army and the Church; and Montagu
and Warwick, the two great captains of the age,--is not this a
combination of power that may defy Fate?"

"O George!" said Montagu, admiringly, "what pity that the Church
should spoil such a statesman!"

"Thou art profane, Montagu; the Church spoils no man,--the Church
leads and guides ye all; and, mark, I look farther still.  I would
have intimate league with France; I would strengthen ourselves with
Spain and the German Emperor; I would buy or seduce the votes of the
sacred college; I would have thy poor brother, whom thou so pitiest
because he has no son to marry a king's daughter, no daughter to wed
with a king's son--I would have thy unworthy brother, Montagu, the
father of the whole Christian world, and, from the chair of the
Vatican, watch over the weal of kingdoms.  And now, seest thou why
with to-morrow's sun I depart for Calais, and lend my voice in aid of
Clarence's for the first knot in this complicated bond?"

"But will Warwick consent while the king opposes?  Will his pride--"

"His pride serves us here; for so long as Clarence did not dare to
gainsay the king, Warwick in truth might well disdain to press his
daughter's hand upon living man.  The king opposes, but with what
right?  Warwick's pride will but lead him, if well addressed, to defy
affront and to resist dictation.  Besides, our brother has a woman's
heart for his children; and Isabel's face is pale, and that will plead
more than all my eloquence."

"But can the king forgive your intercession and Warwick's contumacy?"

"Forgive!--the marriage once over, what is left for him to do?  He is
then one with us, and when Gloucester returns all will be smooth
again,--smooth for the second and more important nuptials; and the
second shall preface the third; meanwhile, you return to the court.
To these ceremonials you need be no party: keep but thy handsome son
from breaking his neck in over-riding his hobby, and 'bide thy time!'"

Agreeably with the selfish but sagacious policy thus detailed, the
prelate departed the next day for Calais, where Clarence was already
urging his suit with the ardent impatience of amorous youth.  The
archbishop found, however, that Warwick was more reluctant than he had
anticipated, to suffer his daughter to enter any House without the
consent of its chief; nor would the earl, in all probability, have
acceded to the prayers of the princely suitor, had not Edward, enraged
at the flight of Clarence, and worked upon by the artful queen,
committed the imprudence of writing an intemperate and menacing letter
to the earl, which called up all the passions of the haughty Warwick.

"What!" he exclaimed, "thinks this ungrateful man not only to
dishonour me by his method of marrying his sisters, but will he also
play the tyrant with me in the disposal of mine own daughter!  He
threats! he!--enough.  It is due to me to show that there lives no man
whose threats I have not the heart to defy!"  And the prelate finding
him in this mood had no longer any difficulty in winning his consent.
This ill-omened marriage was, accordingly, celebrated with great and
regal pomp at Calais, and the first object of the archbishop was
attained.

While thus stood affairs between the two great factions of the state,
those discontents which Warwick's presence at court had a while laid
at rest again spread, broad and far, throughout the land.  The luxury
and indolence of Edward's disposition in ordinary times always
surrendered him to the guidance of others.  In the commencement of his
reign he was eminently popular, and his government, though stern,
suited to the times; for then the presiding influence was that of Lord
Warwick.  As the queen's counsels prevailed over the consummate
experience and masculine vigour of the earl, the king's government
lost both popularity and respect, except only in the metropolis; and
if, at the close of his reign, it regained all its earlier favour with
the people, it must be principally ascribed to the genius of Hastings,
then England's most powerful subject, and whose intellect calmly moved
all the springs of action.  But now everywhere the royal authority was
weakened; and while Edward was feasting at Shene and Warwick absent at
Calais, the provinces were exposed to all the abuses which most gall a
population.  The poor complained that undue exactions were made on
them by the hospitals, abbeys, and barons; the Church complained that
the queen's relations had seized and spent Church moneys; the men of
birth and merit complained of the advancement of new men who had done
no service: and all these several discontents fastened themselves upon
the odious Woodvilles, as the cause of all.  The second breach, now
notorious, between the king and the all-beloved Warwick, was a new
aggravation of the popular hatred to the queen's family, and seemed to
give occasion for the malcontents to appear with impunity, at least so
far as the earl was concerned: it was, then, at this critical time
that the circumstances we are about to relate occurred.




CHAPTER II.

THE WOULD-BE IMPROVERS OF JOVE'S FOOTBALL, EARTH.--THE SAD FATHER AND
THE SAD CHILD.--THE FAIR RIVALS.

Adam Warner was at work on his crucible when the servitor commissioned
to attend him opened the chamber door, and a man dressed in the black
gown of a student entered.

He approached the alchemist, and after surveying him for a moment in a
silence that seemed not without contempt, said, "What, Master Warner,
are you so wedded to your new studies that you have not a word to
bestow on an old friend?"

Adam turned, and after peevishly gazing at the intruder a few moments,
his face brightened up into recognition.

"En iterum!" he said.  "Again, bold Robin Hilyard, and in a scholar's
garb!  Ha!  doubtless thou hast learned ere this that peaceful studies
do best insure man's weal below, and art come to labour with me in the
high craft of mind-work!"

"Adam," quoth Hilyard, "ere I answer, tell me this: Thou with thy
science wouldst change the world: art thou a jot nearer to thy end?"

"Well-a-day," said poor Adam, "you know little what I have undergone.
For danger to myself by rack and gibbet I say nought.  Man's body is
fair prey to cruelty, and what a king spares to-day the worm shall
gnaw to-morrow.  But mine invention--my Eureka--look!" and stepping
aside, he lifted a cloth, and exhibited the mangled remains of the
unhappy model.

"I am forbid to restore it," continued Adam, dolefully.  "I must work
day and night to make gold, and the gold comes not; and my only change
of toil is when the queen bids me construct little puppet-boxes for
her children!  How, then, can I change the world?  And thou," he
added, doubtingly and eagerly--"thou, with thy plots and stratagem,
and active demagogy, thinkest thou that thou hast changed the world,
or extracted one drop of evil out of the mixture of gall and hyssop
which man is born to drink?"

Hilyard was silent, and the two world-betterers--the philosopher and
the demagogue--gazed on each other, half in sympathy, half in
contempt.  At last Robin said,--

"Mine old friend, hope sustains us both; and in the wilderness we yet
behold the Pisgah!  But to my business.  Doubtless thou art permitted
to visit Henry in his prison."

"Not so," replied Adam; "and for the rest, since I now eat King
Edward's bread, and enjoy what they call his protection, ill would it
beseem me to lend myself to plots against his throne."

"Ah, man, man, man," exclaimed Hilyard, bitterly, "thou art like all
the rest,--scholar or serf, the same slave; a king's smile bribes thee
from a people's service!"

Before Adam could reply, a panel in the wainscot slid back and the
bald head of a friar peered into the room.  "Son Adam," said the holy
man, "I crave your company an instant, oro vestrem aurem;" and with
this abominable piece of Latinity the friar vanished.

With a resigned and mournful shrug of the shoulders, Adam walked
across the room, when Hilyard, arresting his progress, said, crossing
himself, and in a subdued and fearful whisper, "Is not that Friar
Bungey, the notable magician?"

"Magician or not," answered Warner, with a lip of inexpressible
contempt and a heavy sigh, "God pardon his mother for giving birth to
such a numskull!" and with this pious and charitable ejaculation Adam
disappeared in the adjoining chamber, appropriated to the friar.

"Hum," soliloquized Hilyard, "they say that Friar Bungey is employed
by the witch duchess in everlasting diabolisms against her foes.  A
peep into his den might suffice me for a stirring tale to the people."

No sooner did this daring desire arise than the hardy Robin resolved
to gratify it; and stealing on tiptoe along the wall, he peered
cautiously through the aperture made by the sliding panel.  An
enormous stuffed lizard hung from the ceiling, and various strange
reptiles, dried into mummy, were ranged around, and glared at the spy
with green glass eyes.  A huge book lay open on a tripod stand, and a
caldron seethed over a slow and dull fire.  A sight yet more terrible
presently awaited the rash beholder.

"Adam," said the friar, laying his broad palm on the student's
reluctant shoulders, "inter sapentes."

"Sapientes, brother," groaned Adam.

"That's the old form, Adam," quoth the friar, superciliously,--
"sapentes is the last improvement.  I say, between wise men there is
no envy.  Our noble and puissant patroness, the Duchess of Bedford,
hath committed to me a task that promiseth much profit.  I have worked
at it night and day stotis filibus."

"O man, what lingo speakest thou?--stotis filibus!"

"Tush, if it is not good Latin, it does as well, son Adam.  I say I
have worked at it night and day, and it is now advanced eno' for
experiment.  But thou art going to sleep."

"Despatch! speak out! speak on!" said Adam, desperately,--"what is thy
achievement?"

"See!" answered the friar, majestically; and drawing aside a black
pall, he exhibited to the eyes of Adam, and to the more startled gaze
of Robin Hilyard, a pale, cadaverous, corpse-like image, of pigmy
proportions, but with features moulded into a coarse caricature of the
lordly countenance of the Earl of Warwick.

"There," said the friar, complacently, and rubbing his hands, "that is
no piece of bungling, eh?  As like the stout earl as one pea to
another."

"And for what hast thou kneaded up all this waste of wax?" asked Adam.
"Forsooth, I knew not you had so much of ingenious art; algates, the
toy is somewhat ghastly."

"Ho, ho!" quoth the friar, laughing so as to show a set of jagged,
discoloured fangs from ear to ear, "surely thou, who art so notable a
wizard and scholar, knowest for what purpose we image forth our
enemies.  Whatever the duchess inflicts upon this figure, the Earl of
Warwick, whom it representeth, will feel through his bones and
marrow,--waste wax, waste man!"

"Thou art a devil to do this thing, and a blockhead to think it, O
miserable friar!" exclaimed Adam, roused from all his gentleness.

"Ha!" cried the friar, no less vehemently, and his burly face purple
with passion, "dost thou think to bandy words with me?  Wretch!  I
will set goblins to pinch thee black and blue!  I will drag thee at
night over all the jags of Mount Pepanon, at the tail of a mad
nightmare!  I will put aches in all thy bones, and the blood in thy
veins shall run into sores and blotches.  Am I not Friar Bungey?  And
what art thou?"

At these terrible denunciations, the sturdy Robin, though far less
superstitious than most of his contemporaries, was seized with a
trembling from head to foot; and expecting to see goblins and imps
start forth from the walls, he retired hastily from his hiding-place,
and, without waiting for further commune with Warner, softly opened
the chamber door and stole down the stairs.  Adam, however, bore the
storm unquailingly, and when the holy man paused to take breath, he
said calmly,--

"Verily, if thou canst do these things, there must be secrets in
Nature which I have not yet discovered.  Howbeit, though thou art free
to try all thou canst against me, thy threats make it necessary that
this communication between us should be nailed up, and I shall so
order."

The friar, who was ever in want of Adam's aid, either to construe a
bit of Latin, or to help him in some chemical illusion, by no means
relished this quiet retort; and holding out his huge hand to Adam,
said, with affected cordiality,--

"Pooh! we are brothers, and must not quarrel.  I was over hot, and
thou too provoking; but I honour and love thee, man,--let it pass.  As
for this figure, doubtless we might pink it all over, and the earl be
never the worse.  But if our employers order these things and pay for
them, we cunning men make profit by fools!"

"It is men like thee that bring shame on science," answered Adam,
sternly; "and I will not listen to thee longer."

"Nay, but you must," said the friar, clutching Adam's robe, and
concealing his resentment by an affected grin.  "Thou thinkest me a
mere ignoramus--ha! ha!--I think the same of thee.  Why, man, thou
hast never studied the parts of the human body, 1'11 swear."

"I'm no leech," said Adam.  "Let me go."

"No, not yet.  I will convict thee of ignorance.  Thou dost not even
know where the liver is placed."

"I do," answered Adam, shortly; "but what then?"

"Thou dost?--I deny it.  Here is a pin; stick it into this wax, man,
where thou sayest the liver lies in the human frame."

Adam unsuspiciously obeyed.

"Well! the liver is there, eh?  Ah, but where are the lungs?"

"Why, here."

"And the midriff?"

"Here, certes."

"Right!--thou mayest go now," said the friar, dryly.  Adam disappeared
through the aperture, and closed the panel.

"Now I know where the lungs, midriff, and liver are," said the friar
to himself, "I shall get on famously.  'T is a useful fellow, that, or
I should have had him hanged long ago!"

Adam did not remark on his re-entrance that his visitor, Hilyard, had
disappeared, and the philosopher was soon reimmersed in the fiery
interest of his thankless labours.

It might be an hour afterwards, when, wearied and exhausted by
perpetual hope and perpetual disappointment, he flung himself on his
seat; and that deep sadness, which they who devote themselves in this
noisy world to wisdom and to truth alone can know, suffused his
thoughts, and murmured from his feverish lips.

"Oh, hard condition of my life!" groaned the sage,--"ever to strive,
and never to accomplish.  The sun sets and the sun rises upon my
eternal toils, and my age stands as distant from the goal as stood my
youth!  Fast, fast the mind is wearing out the frame, and my schemes
have but woven the ropes of sand, and my name shall be writ in water.
Golden dreams of my young hope, where are ye?  Methought once, that
could I obtain the grace of royalty, the ear of power, the command of
wealth, my path to glory was made smooth and sure; I should become the
grand inventor of my time and land; I should leave my lore a heritage
and blessing wherever labour works to civilize the round globe.  And
now my lodging is a palace, royalty my patron; they give me gold at my
desire; my wants no longer mar my leisure.  Well, and for what?  On
condition that I forego the sole task for which patronage, wealth, and
leisure were desired!  There stands the broken iron, and there simmers
the ore I am to turn to gold,--the iron worth more than all the gold,
and the gold never to be won!  Poor, I was an inventor, a creator, the
true magician; protected, patronized, enriched, I am but the
alchemist, the bubble, the dupe or duper, the fool's fool.  God, brace
up my limbs!  Let me escape! give me back my old dream, and die at
least, if accomplishing nothing, hoping all!"

He rose as he spoke; he strode across the chamber with majestic step,
with resolve upon his brow.  He stopped short, for a sharp pain shot
across his heart.  Premature age and the disease that labour brings
were at their work of decay within: the mind's excitement gave way to
the body's weakness, and he sank again upon his seat, breathing hard,
gasping, pale, the icy damps upon his brow.  Bubblingly seethed the
molten metals, redly glowed the poisonous charcoal, the air of death
was hot within the chamber where the victim of royal will pandered to
the desire of gold.  Terrible and eternal moral for Wisdom and for
Avarice, for sages and for kings,--ever shall he who would be the
maker of gold breathe the air of death!

"Father," said the low and touching voice of one who had entered
unperceived, and who now threw her arms round Adam's neck, "Father,
thou art ill, and sorely suffering--"

"At heart--yes, Sibyll.  Give me thine arm; let us forth and taste the
fresher air."

It was so seldom that Warner could be induced to quit his chamber,
that these words almost startled Sibyll, and she looked anxiously in
his face, as she wiped the dews from his forehead.

"Yes--air--air!" repeated Adam, rising.

Sibyll placed his bonnet over his silvered locks, drew his gown more
closely round him, and slowly and in silence they left the chamber,
and took their way across the court to the ramparts of the fortress-
palace.

The day was calm and genial, with a low but fresh breeze stirring
gently through the warmth of noon.  The father and child seated
themselves on the parapet, and saw, below, the gay and numerous
vessels that glided over the sparkling river, while the dark walls of
Baynard's Castle, the adjoining bulwark and battlements of Montfichet,
and the tall watch-tower of Warwick's mighty mansion frowned in the
distance against the soft blue sky.  "There," said Adam, quietly, and
pointing to the feudal roofs, "there seems to rise power, and yonder
(glancing to the river), yonder seems to flow Genius!  A century or so
hence the walls shall vanish, but the river shall roll on.  Man makes
the castle, and founds the power,--God forms the river and creates the
Genius.  And yet, Sibyll, there may be streams as broad and stately as
yonder Thames, that flow afar in the waste, never seen, never heard by
man.  What profits the river unmarked; what the genius never to be
known?"

It was not a common thing with Adam Warner to be thus eloquent.
Usually silent and absorbed, it was not his gift to moralize or
declaim.  His soul must be deeply moved before the profound and buried
sentiment within it could escape into words.

Sibyll pressed her father's hand, and, though her own heart was very
heavy, she forced her lips to smile and her voice to soothe.  Adam
interrupted her.

"Child, child, ye women know not what presses darkest and most
bitterly on the minds of men.  You know not what it is to form out of
immaterial things some abstract but glorious object,--to worship, to
serve it, to sacrifice to it, as on an altar, youth, health, hope,
life,--and suddenly in old age to see that the idol was a phantom, a
mockery, a shadow laughing us to scorn, because we have sought to
clasp it."

"Oh, yes, Father, women have known that illusion."

"What!  Do they study?"

"No, Father, but they feel!"

"Feel!  I comprehend thee not."

"As man's genius to him is woman's heart to her," answered Sibyll, her
dark and deep eyes suffused with tears.  "Doth not the heart create,
invent?  Doth it not dream?  Doth it not form its idol out of air?
Goeth it not forth into the future, to prophesy to itself?  And sooner
or later, in age or youth, doth it not wake at last, and see how it
hath wasted its all on follies?  Yes, Father, my heart can answer,
when thy genius would complain."

"Sibyll," said Warner, roused and surprised, and gazing on her
wistfully, "time flies apace.  Till this hour I have thought of thee
but as a child, an infant.  Thy words disturb me now."

"Think not of them, then.  Let me never add one grief to thine."

"Thou art brave and gay in thy silken sheen," said Adam, curiously
stroking down the rich, smooth stuff of Sibyll's tunic; "her grace the
duchess is generous to us.  Thou art surely happy here!"

"Happy!"

"Not happy!" exclaimed Adam, almost joyfully, "wouldst thou that we
were back once more in our desolate, ruined home?"

"Yes, ob, yes!--but rather away, far away, in some quiet village, some
green nook; for the desolate, ruined home was not safe for thine old
age."

"I would we could escape, Sibyll," said Adam, earnestly, in a whisper,
and with a kind of innocent cunning in his eye, "we and the poor
Eureka!  This palace is a prison-house to me.  I will speak to the
Lord Hastings, a man of great excellence, and gentle too.  He is ever
kind to us."

"No, no, Father, not to him," cried Sibyll, turning pale,--"let him
not know a word of what we would propose, nor whither we would fly."

"Child, he loves me, or why does he seek me so often, and sit and talk
not?"

Sibyll pressed her clasped hands tightly to her bosom, but made no
answer; and while she was summoning courage to say something that
seemed to oppress her thoughts with intolerable weight, a footstep
sounded gently near, and the Lady of Bonville (then on a visit to the
queen), unseen and unheard by the two, approached the spot.  She
paused, and gazed at Sibyll, at first haughtily; and then, as the deep
sadness of that young face struck her softer feelings, and the
pathetic picture of father and child, thus alone in their commune,
made its pious and sweet effect, the gaze changed from pride to
compassion, and the lady said courteously,--

"Fair mistress, canst thou prefer this solitary scene to the gay
company about to take the air in her grace's gilded barge?"

Sibyll looked up in surprise, not unmixed with fear.  Never before had
the great lady spoken to her thus gently.  Adam, who seemed for a
while restored to the actual life, saluted Katherine with simple
dignity, and took up the word,--

"Noble lady, whoever thou art, in thine old age, and thine hour of
care, may thy child, like this poor girl, forsake all gayer comrades
for a parent's side!"

The answer touched the Lady of Bonville, and involuntarily she
extended her hand to Sibyll.  With a swelling heart, Sibyll, as proud
as herself, bent silently over that rival's hand.  Katherine's marble
cheek coloured, as she interpreted the girl's silence.

"Gentle sir," she said, after a short pause, "wilt thou permit me a
few words with thy fair daughter?  And if in aught, since thou
speakest of care, Lord Warwick's sister can serve thee, prithee bid
thy young maiden impart it, as to a friend."

"Tell her, then, my Sibyll,--tell Lord Warwick's sister to ask the
king to give back to Adam Warner his poverty, his labour, and his
hope," said the scholar, and his noble head sank gloomily on his
bosom.

The Lady of Bonville, still holding Sibyll's hand, drew her a few
paces up the walk, and then she said suddenly, and with some of that
blunt frankness which belonged to her great brother, "Maiden, can
there be confidence between thee and me?"

"Of what nature, lady?"

Again Katherine blushed, but she felt the small hand she held tremble
in her clasp, and was emboldened,--

"Maiden, thou mayst resent and marvel at my words; but when I had
fewer years than thou, my father said, 'There are many carks in life
which a little truth could end.'  So would I heed his lesson.  William
de Hastings has followed thee with an homage that has broken,
perchance, many as pure a heart,--nay, nay, fair child, hear me on.
Thou hast heard that in youth he wooed Katherine Nevile,--that we
loved, and were severed.  They who see us now marvel whether we hate
or love,--no, not love--that question were an insult to Lord
Bonville's wife!--Ofttimes we seem pitiless to each other,--why?  Lord
Hastings would have wooed me, an English matron, to forget mine honour
and my House's.  He chafes that he moves me not.  I behold him
debasing a great nature to unworthy triflings with man's conscience
and a knight's bright faith.  But mark me!--the heart of Hastings is
everlastingly mine, and mine alone!  What seek I in this confidence?
To warn thee.  Wherefore?  Because for months, amidst all the vices of
this foul court-air, amidst the flatteries of the softest voice that
ever fell upon woman's ear, amidst, peradventure, the pleadings of
thine own young and guileless love, thine innocence is unscathed.  And
therefore Katherine of Bonville may be the friend of Sibyll Warner."

However generous might be the true spirit of these words, it was
impossible that they should not gall and humiliate the young and
flattered beauty to whom they were addressed.  They so wholly
discarded all belief in the affection of Hastings for Sibyll; they so
haughtily arrogated the mastery over his heart; they so plainly
implied that his suit to the poor maiden was but a mockery or
dishonour, that they made even the praise for virtue an affront to the
delicate and chaste ear on which they fell.  And, therefore, the
reader will not be astonished, though the Lady of Bonville certainly
was, when Sibyll, drawing her hand from Katherine's clasp, stopping
short, and calmly folding her arms upon her bosom, said,--

"To what this tends, lady, I know not.  The Lord Hastings is free to
carry his homage where he will.  He has sought me,--not I Lord
Hastings.  And if to-morrow he offered me his hand, I would reject it,
if I were not convinced that the heart--"

"Damsel," interrupted the Lady Bonville, in amazed contempt, "the hand
of Lord Hastings!  Look ye indeed so high, or has he so far paltered
with your credulous youth as to speak to you, the daughter of the
alchemist, of marriage?  If so, poor child, beware!

"I knew not," replied Sibyll, bitterly, "that Sibyll Warner was more
below the state of Lord Hastings than Master Hastings was once below
the state of Lady Katherine Nevile."

"Thou art distraught with thy self-conceit," answered the dame,
scornfully; and, losing all the compassion and friendly interest she
had before felt, "my rede is spoken,--reject it if thou wilt in pride.
Rue thy folly thou wilt in shame!"

She drew her wimple round her face as she said these words, and,
gathering up her long robe, swept slowly on.




CHAPTER III.

WHEREIN THE DEMAGOGUE SEEKS THE COURTIER.

On quitting Adam's chamber, Hilyard paused not till he reached a
stately house, not far from Warwick Lane, which was the residence of
the Lord Montagu.

That nobleman was employed in reading, or rather, in pondering over,
two letters, with which a courier from Calais had just arrived, the
one from the archbishop, the other from Warwick.  In these epistles
were two passages, strangely contradictory in their counsel.  A
sentence in Warwick's letter ran thus:--

"It hath reached me that certain disaffected men meditate a rising
against the king, under pretext of wrongs from the queen's kin.  It is
even said that our kinsmen, Copiers and Fitzhugh, are engaged therein.
Need I caution thee to watch well that they bring our name into no
disgrace or attaint?  We want no aid to right our own wrongs; and if
the misguided men rebel, Warwick will best punish Edward by proving
that he is yet of use."

On the other hand, thus wrote the prelate:--

"The king, wroth with my visit to Calais, has taken from me the
chancellor's seal.  I humbly thank him, and shall sleep the lighter
for the fardel's loss.  Now, mark me, Montagu: our kinsman, Lord
Fitzhugh's son, and young Henry Nevile, aided by old Sir John Copiers,
meditate a fierce and well-timed assault upon the Woodvilles.  Do thou
keep neuter,--neither help nor frustrate it.  Howsoever it end, it
will answer our views, and shake our enemies."

Montagu was yet musing over these tidings, and marvelling that he in
England should know less than his brethren in Calais of events so
important, when his page informed him that a stranger, with urgent
messages from the north country, craved an audience.  Imagining that
these messages would tend to illustrate the communications just
received, he ordered the visitor to be admitted.

He scarcely noticed Hilyard on his entrance, and said abruptly, "Speak
shortly, friend,--I have but little leisure."

"And yet, Lord Montagu, my business may touch thee home."

Montagu, surprised, gazed more attentively on his visitor: "Surely, I
know thy face, friend,--we have met before."

"True; thou wert then on thy way to the More."

"I remember me; and thou then seemedst, from thy bold words, on a
still shorter road to the gallows."

"The tree is not planted," said Robin, carelessly, "that will serve
for my gibbet.  But were there no words uttered by me that thou
couldst not disapprove?  I spoke of lawless disorders, of shameful
malfaisance throughout the land, which the Woodvilles govern under a
lewd tyrant--"

"Traitor, hold!"

"A tyrant," continued Robin, heeding not the interruption nor the
angry gesture of Montagu, "a tyrant who at this moment meditates the
destruction of the House of Nevile.  And not contented with this
world's weapons, palters with the Evil One for the snares and
devilries of witchcraft."

"Hush, man!  Not so loud," said Montagu, in an altered voice.
"Approach nearer,--nearer yet.  They who talk of a crowned king, whose
right hand raises armies, and whose left hand reposes on the block,
should beware how they speak above their breath.  Witchcraft, sayest
thou?  Make thy meaning clear."

Here Robin detailed, with but little exaggeration, the scene he had
witnessed in Friar Bungey's chamber,--the waxen image, the menaces
against the Earl of Warwick, and the words of the friar, naming the
Duchess of Bedford as his employer.  Montagu listened in attentive
silence.  Though not perfectly free from the credulities of the time,
shared even by the courageous heart of Edward and the piercing
intellect of Gloucester, he was yet more alarmed by such proofs of
determined earthly hostility in one so plotting and so near to the
throne as the Duchess of Bedford, than by all the pins and needles
that could be planted into the earl's waxen counterpart.

"A devilish malice, indeed," said he, when Hilyard had concluded; "and
yet this story, if thou wilt adhere to it, may serve us well at need.
I thank thee, trusty friend, for thy confidence, and beseech thee to
come at once with me to the king.  There will I denounce our foe, and,
with thine evidence, we will demand her banishment."

"By your leave, not a step will I budge, my Lord Montagu," quoth
Robin, bluntly,--"I know how these matters are managed at court.  The
king will patch up a peace between the duchess and you, and chop off
my ears and nose as a liar and common scandal-maker.  No, no; denounce
the duchess and all the Woodvilles I will; but it shall not be in the
halls of the Tower, but on the broad plains of Yorkshire, with twenty
thousand men at my back."

"Ha! thou a leader of armies,--and for what end,--to dethrone the
king?"

"That as it may be,--but first for justice to the people; it is the
people's rising that I will head, and not a faction's.  Neither White
Rose nor Red shall be on my banner; but our standard shall be the gory
head of the first oppressor we can place upon a pole."

"What is it the people, as you word it, would demand?"

"I scarce know what we demand as yet,--that must depend upon how we
prosper," returned Hilyard, with a bitter laugh; "but the rising will
have some good, if it shows only to you lords and Normans that a Saxon
people does exist, and will turn when the iron heel is upon its neck.
We are taxed, ground, pillaged, plundered,--sheep, maintained to be
sheared for your peace or butchered for your war.  And now will we
have a petition and a charter of our own, Lord Montagu.  I speak
frankly.  I am in thy power; thou canst arrest me, thou canst strike
off the head of this revolt.  Thou art the king's friend,--wilt thou
do so?  No, thou and thy House have wrongs as well as we, the people.
And a part at least of our demands and our purpose is your own."

"What part, bold man?"

"This: we shall make our first complaint the baneful domination of the
queen's family; and demand the banishment of the Woodvilles, root and
stem."

"Hem!" said Montagu, involuntarily glancing over the archbishop's
letter,--"hem, but without outrage to the king's state and person?"

"Oh, trust me, my lord, the franklin's head contains as much north-
country cunning as the noble's.  They who would speed well must feel
their way cautiously."

"Twenty thousand men--impossible!  Who art thou, to collect and head
them?"

"Plain Robin of Redesdale."

"Ha!" exclaimed Montagu, "is it indeed as I was taught to suspect?
Art thou that bold, strange, mad fellow, whom, by pike and brand--a
soldier's oath--I, a soldier, have often longed to see.  Let me look
at thee.  'Fore Saint George, a tall man, and well knit, with
dareiment on thy brow.  Why, there are as many tales of thee in the
North as of my brother the earl.  Some say thou art a lord of degree
and birth, others that thou art the robber of Hexham to whom Margaret
of Anjou trusted her own life and her son's."

"Whatever they say of me," returned Robin, "they all agree in this,--
that I am a man of honest word and bold deed; that I can stir up the
hearts of men, as the wind stirreth fire; that I came an unknown
stranger into the parts where I abide; and that no peer in this
roiaulme, save Warwick himself, can do more to raise an army or shake
a throne."

"But by what spell?"

"By men's wrongs, lord," answered Robin, in a deep voice; "and now,
ere this moon wanes, Redesdale is a camp!"

"What the immediate cause of complaint?"

"The hospital of St. Leonard's has compelled us unjustly to render
them a thrave of corn."

"Thou art a cunning knave!  Pinch the belly if you would make
Englishmen rise."

"True," said Robin, smiling grimly; "and now--what say you--will you
head us?"

"Head you!  No I"

"Will you betray us?"

"It is not easy to betray twenty thousand men; if ye rise merely to
free yourselves from a corn-tax and England from the Woodvilles, I see
no treason in your revolt."

"I understand you, Lord Montagu," said Robin, with a stern and half-
scornful smile,--"you are not above thriving by our danger; but we
need now no lord and baron,--we will suffice for ourselves.  And the
hour will come, believe me, when Lord Warwick, pursued by the king,
must fly to the Commons.  Think well of these things and this
prophecy, when the news from the North startles Edward of March in the
lap of his harlots."

Without saying another word, he turned and quitted the chamber as
abruptly as he had entered.

Lord Montagu was not, for his age, a bad man; though worldly, subtle,
and designing, with some of the craft of his prelate brother he united
something of the high soul of his brother soldier.  But that age had
not the virtue of later times, and cannot be judged by its standard.
He heard this bold dare-devil menace his country with civil war upon
grounds not plainly stated nor clearly understood,--he aided not, but
he connived: "Twenty thousand men in arms," he muttered to himself,--
"say half-well, ten thousand--not against Edward, but the Woodvilles!
It must bring the king to his senses; must prove to him how odious the
mushroom race of the Woodvilles, and drive him for safety and for
refuge to Montagu and Warwick.  If the knaves presume too far," (and
Montagu smiled), "what are undisciplined multitudes to the eye of a
skilful captain?  Let the storm blow, we will guide the blast. In this
world man must make use of man."




CHAPTER IV.

SIBYLL.

While Montagu in anxious forethought awaited the revolt that Robin of
Redesdale had predicted; while Edward feasted and laughed, merry-made
with his courtiers, and aided the conjugal duties of his good citizens
in London; while the queen and her father, Lord Rivers, more and more
in the absence of Warwick encroached on all the good things power can
bestow and avarice seize; while the Duchess of Bedford and Friar
Bungey toiled hard at the waxen effigies of the great earl, who still
held his royal son-in-law in his court at Calais,--the stream of our
narrative winds from its noisier channels, and lingers, with a quiet
wave, around the temple of a virgin's heart.  Wherefore is Sibyll sad?
Some short month since and we beheld her gay with hope and basking in
the sunny atmosphere of pleasure and of love.  The mind of this girl
was a singular combination of tenderness and pride,--the first wholly
natural, the last the result of circumstance and position.  She was
keenly conscious of her gentle birth and her earlier prospects in the
court of Margaret; and the poverty and distress and solitude in which
she had grown up from the child into the woman had only served to
strengthen what, in her nature, was already strong, and to heighten
whatever was already proud.  Ever in her youngest dreams of the future
ambition had visibly blent itself with the vague ideas of love.  The
imagined wooer was less to be young and fair than renowned and
stately.  She viewed him through the mists of the future, as the
protector of her persecuted father, as the rebuilder of a fallen
House, as the ennobler of a humbled name; and from the moment in which
her girl's heart beat at the voice of Hastings, the ideal of her soul
seemed found.  And when, transplanted to the court, she learned to
judge of her native grace and loveliness by the common admiration they
excited, her hopes grew justified to her inexperienced reason.  Often
and ever the words of Hastings, at the house of Lady Longueville, rang
in her ear, and thrilled through the solitude of night,--"Whoever is
fair and chaste, gentle and loving, is in the eyes of William de
Hastings the mate and equal of a king."  In visits that she had found
opportunity to make to the Lady Longueville, these hopes were duly
fed; for the old Lancastrian detested the Lady Bonville, as Lord
Warwick's sister, and she would have reconciled her pride to view with
complacency his alliance with the alchemist's daughter, if it led to
his estrangement from the memory of his first love; and, therefore,
when her quick eye penetrated the secret of Sibyll's heart, and when
she witnessed--for Hastings often encountered (and seemed to seek the
encounter) the young maid at Lady Longueville's house--the unconcealed
admiration which justified Sibyll in her high-placed affection, she
scrupled not to encourage the blushing girl by predictions in which
she forced her own better judgment to believe.  Nor, when she learned
Sibyll's descent from a family that had once ranked as high as that of
Hastings, would she allow that there was any disparity in the alliance
she foretold.  But more, far more than Lady Longueville's assurances,
did the delicate and unceasing gallantries of Hastings himself flatter
the fond faith of Sibyll.  True, that he spoke not actually of love,
but every look implied, every whisper seemed to betray it.  And to her
he spoke as to an equal, not in birth alone, but in mind; so superior
was she in culture, in natural gifts, and, above all, in that train of
high thought and elevated sentiment, in which genius ever finds a
sympathy, to the court-flutterers of her sex, that Hastings, whether
or not he cherished a warmer feeling, might well take pleasure in her
converse, and feel the lovely infant worthy the wise man's trust. He
spoke to her without reserve of the Lady Bonville, and he spoke with
bitterness.  "I loved her," he said, "as woman is rarely loved.  She
deserted me for another--rather should she have gone to the convent
than the altar; and now, forsooth, she deems she hath the right to
taunt and to rate me, to dictate to me the way I should walk, and to
flaunt the honours I have won."

"May that be no sign of a yet tender interest?" said Sibyll, timidly.

The eyes of Hastings sparkled for a moment, but the gleam vanished.
"Nay, you know her not.  Her heart is marble, as hard and as cold; her
very virtue but the absence of emotion,--I would say, of gentler
emotion; for, pardieu, such emotions as come from ire and pride and
scorn are the daily growth of that stern soil.  Oh, happy was my
escape!  Happy the desertion which my young folly deemed a curse!
No!" he added, with a sarcastic quiver of his lip--"no; what stings
and galls the Lady of Harrington and Bonville, what makes her
countenance change in my presence, and her voice sharpen at my accost,
is plainly this: in wedding her dull lord and rejecting me, Katherine
Nevile deemed she wedded power and rank and station; and now, while we
are both young, how proves her choice?  The Lord of Harrington and
Bonville is so noted a dolt, that even the Neviles cannot help him to
rise,--the meanest office is above his mind's level; and, dragged down
by the heavy clay to which her wings are yoked, Katherine, Lady of
Harrington and Bonville--oh, give her her due titles!--is but a
pageant figure in the court.  If the war-trump blew, his very vassals
would laugh at a Bonville's banner, and beneath the flag of poor
William Hastings would gladly march the best chivalry of the land.
And this it is, I say, that galls her.  For evermore she is driven to
compare the state she holds as the dame of the accepted Bonville with
that she lost as the wife of the disdained Hastings."

And if, in the heat and passion that such words betrayed, Sibyll
sighed to think that something of the old remembrance yet swelled and
burned, they but impressed her more with the value of a heart in which
the characters once writ endured so long, and roused her to a tender
ambition to heal and to console.

Then looking into her own deep soul, Sibyll beheld there a fund of
such generous, pure, and noble affection, such reverence as to the
fame, such love as to the man, that she proudly felt herself worthier
of Hastings than the haughty Katherine.  She entered then, as it were,
the lists with this rival,--a memory rather, so she thought, than a
corporeal being; and her eye grew brighter, her step statelier, in the
excitement of the contest, the anticipation of the triumph.  For what
diamond without its flaw?  What rose without its canker?  And bedded
deep in that exquisite and charming nature lay the dangerous and fatal
weakness which has cursed so many victims, broken so many hearts,--the
vanity of the sex.  We may now readily conceive how little predisposed
was Sibyll to the blunt advances and displeasing warnings of the Lady
Bonville, and the more so from the time in which they chanced.  For
here comes the answer to the question, "Why was Sibyll sad?"

The reader may determine for himself what were the ruling motives of
Lord Hastings in the court he paid to Sibyll.  Whether to pique the
Lady Bonville, and force upon her the jealous pain he restlessly
sought to inflict; whether, from the habit of his careless life,
seeking the pleasure of the moment, with little forethought of the
future, and reconciling itself to much cruelty, by that profound
contempt for human beings, man, and still more for woman, which sad
experience often brings to acute intellect; or whether, from the purer
and holier complacency with which one whose youth has fed upon nobler
aspirations than manhood cares to pursue, suns itself back to
something of its earlier lustre in the presence and the converse of a
young bright soul,--whatever, in brief, the earlier motives of
gallantries to Sibyll, once begun, constantly renewed, by degrees
wilder and warmer and guiltier emotions roused up in the universal and
all-conquering lover the vice of his softer nature.  When calm and
unimpassioned, his conscience had said to him, "Thou shalt spare that
flower."  But when once the passion was roused within him, the purity
of the flower was forgotten in the breath of its voluptuous sweetness.

And but three days before the scene we have described with Katherine,
Sibyll's fabric of hope fell to the dust. For Hastings spoke for the
first time of love, for the first time knelt at her feet, for the
first time, clasping to his heart that virgin hand, poured forth the
protestation and the vow.  And oh! woe--woe! for the first time she
learned how cheaply the great man held the poor maiden's love, how
little he deemed that purity and genius and affection equalled the
possessor of fame and wealth and power; for plainly visible, boldly
shown and spoken, the love that she had foreseen as a glory from the
heaven sought but to humble her to the dust.

The anguish of that moment was unspeakable,--and she spoke it not.
But as she broke from the profaning clasp, as escaping to the
threshold she cast on the unworthy wooer one look of such reproachful
sorrow as told at once all her love and all her horror, the first act
in the eternal tragedy of man's wrong and woman's grief was closed.
And therefore was Sibyll sad!




CHAPTER V.

KATHERINE.

For several days Hastings avoided Sibyll; in truth, he felt remorse
for his design, and in his various, active, and brilliant life he had
not the leisure for obstinate and systematic siege to a single virtue,
nor was he, perhaps, any longer capable of deep and enduring passion;
his heart, like that of many a chevalier in the earlier day, had
lavished itself upon one object, and sullenly, upon regrets and
dreams, and vain anger and idle scorn, it had exhausted those
sentiments which make the sum of true love.  And so, like Petrarch,
whom his taste and fancy worshipped, and many another votary of the
gentil Dieu, while his imagination devoted itself to the chaste and
distant ideal--the spiritual Laura--his senses, ever vagrant and
disengaged, settled without scruple upon the thousand Cynthias of the
minute.  But then those Cynthias were, for the most part, and
especially of late years, easy and light-won nymphs; their coyest were
of another clay from the tender but lofty Sibyll.  And Hastings shrunk
from the cold-blooded and deliberate seduction of one so pure, while
he could not reconcile his mind to contemplate marriage with a girl
who could give nothing to his ambition; and yet it was not in this
last reluctance only his ambition that startled and recoiled.  In that
strange tyranny over his whole soul which Katherine Bonville secretly
exercised, he did not dare to place a new barrier evermore between her
and himself.  The Lord Bonville was of infirm health; he had been more
than once near to death's door; and Hastings, in every succeeding
fancy that beguiled his path, recalled the thrill of his heart when it
had whispered "Katherine, the loved of thy youth, may yet be thine!"
And then that Katherine rose before him, not as she now swept the
earth, with haughty step and frigid eye and disdainful lip, but as--in
all her bloom of maiden beauty, before the temper was soured or the
pride aroused--she had met him in the summer twilight, by the
trysting-tree, broken with him the golden ring of faith, and wept upon
his bosom.

And yet, during his brief and self-inflicted absence from Sibyll, this
wayward and singular personage, who was never weak but to women, and
ever weak to them, felt that she had made herself far dearer to him
than he had at first supposed it possible.  He missed that face, ever,
till the last interview, so confiding in the unconsciously betrayed
affection.  He felt how superior in sweetness and yet in intellect
Sibyll was to Katherine; there was more in common between her mind and
his in all things, save one.  But oh, that one exception!--what a
world lies within it,--the memory of the spring of life!  In fact,
though Hastings knew it not, he was in love with two objects at once;
the one, a chimera, a fancy, an ideal, an Eidolon, under the name of
Katherine; the other, youth and freshness and mind and heart and a
living shape of beauty, under the name of Sibyll.  Often does this
double love happen to men; but when it does, alas for the human
object! for the shadowy and the spiritual one is immortal,--until,
indeed, it be possessed!

It might be, perhaps, with a resolute desire to conquer the new love
and confirm the old that Hastings, one morning, repaired to the house
of the Lady Bonville, for her visit to the court had expired.  It was
a large mansion, without the Lud Gate.

He found the dame in a comely chamber, seated in the sole chair the
room contained, to which was attached a foot-board that served as a
dais, while around her, on low stools, sat some spinning, others
broidering--some ten or twelve young maidens of good family, sent to
receive their nurturing under the high-born Katherine, [And strange as
it may seem to modern notions, the highest lady who received such
pensioners accepted a befitting salary for their board and education.]
while two other and somewhat elder virgins sat a little apart, but
close under the eye of the lady, practising the courtly game of
"prime:" for the diversion of cards was in its zenith of fashion under
Edward IV., and even half a century later was considered one of the
essential accomplishments of a well-educated young lady.  [So the
Princess Margaret, daughter of Henry VIL, at the age of fourteen,
exhibits her skill, in prime or trump, to her betrothed husband, James
IV. of Scotland; so, among the womanly arts of the unhappy Katherine
of Arragon, it is mentioned that she could play at "cards and dyce."
(See Strutt: Games and Pastimes, Hones' edition, p. 327.)  The
legislature was very anxious to keep these games sacred to the
aristocracy, and very wroth with 'prentices and the vulgar for
imitating the ruinous amusements of their betters.]  The exceeding
stiffness, the solemn silence of this female circle, but little
accorded with the mood of the graceful visitor.  The demoiselles
stirred not at his entrance, and Katherine quietly motioned him to a
seat at some distance.

"By your leave, fair lady," said Hastings, "I rebel against so distant
an exile from such sweet company;" and he moved the tabouret close to
the formidable chair of the presiding chieftainess.

Katherine smiled faintly, but not in displeasure.

"So gay a presence," she said, "must, I fear me, a little disturb
these learners."

Hastings glanced at the prim demureness written on each blooming
visage, and replied,--

"You wrong their ardour in such noble studies.  I would wager that
nothing less than my entering your bower on horseback, with helm on
head and lance in rest, could provoke even a smile from one pair of
the twenty rosy lips round which, methinks, I behold Cupido hovering
in vain!"

The baroness bent her stately brows, and the twenty rosy lips were all
tightly pursed up, to prevent the indecorous exhibition which the
wicked courtier had provoked.  But it would not do: one and all the
twenty lips broke into a smile,--but a smile so tortured, constrained,
and nipped in the bud, that it only gave an expression of pain to the
features it was forbidden to enliven.

"And what brings the Lord Hastings hither?" asked the baroness, in a
formal tone.

"Can you never allow for motive the desire of pleasure, fair dame?"

That peculiar and exquisite blush, which at moments changed the whole
physiognomy of Katherine, flitted across her smooth cheek, and
vanished.  She said gravely,--

"So much do I allow it in you, my lord, that hence my question."

"Katherine!" exclaimed Hastings, in a voice of tender reproach, and
attempting to seize her hand, forgetful of all other presence save
that to which the blush, that spoke of old, gave back the ancient
charm.

Katherine cast a hurried and startled glance over the maiden group,
and her eye detected on the automaton faces one common expression of
surprise.  Humbled and deeply displeased, she rose from the awful
chair, and then, as suddenly reseating herself, she said, with a voice
and lip of the most cutting irony, "My lord chamberlain is, it seems,
so habituated to lackey his king amidst the goldsmiths and grocers,
that he forgets the form of language and respect of bearing which a
noblewoman of repute is accustomed to consider seemly."

Hastings bit his lip, and his falcon eye shot indignant fire.

"Pardon, my Lady of Bonville and Harrington, I did indeed forget what
reasons the dame of so wise and so renowned a lord hath to feel pride
in the titles she hath won.  But I see that my visit hath chanced out
of season.  My business, in truth, was rather with my lord, whose
counsel in peace is as famous as his truncheon in war!"

"It is enough," replied Katherine, with a dignity that rebuked the
taunt, "that Lord Bonville has the name of an honest man,--who never
rose at court."

"Woman, without one soft woman-feeling!" muttered Hastings, between
his ground teeth, as he approached the lady and made his profound
obeisance.  The words were intended only for Katherine's ear, and they
reached it.  Her bosom swelled beneath the brocaded gorget, and when
the door closed on Hastings, she pressed her hands convulsively
together, and her dark eyes were raised upward.

"My child, thou art entangling thy skein," said the lady of Bonville,
as she passed one of the maidens, towards the casement, which she
opened,--"the air to-day weighs heavily!"




CHAPTER VI.

JOY FOR ADAM, AND HOPE FOR SIBYLL--AND POPULAR FRIAR BUNGEY!

Leaping on his palfrey, Hastings rode back to the Tower, dismounted at
the gate, passed on to the little postern in the inner court, and
paused not till he was in Warner's room.  "How now, friend Adam?  Thou
art idle."

"Lord Hastings, I am ill."

"And thy child not with thee?"

"She is gone to her grace the duchess, to pray her to grant me leave
to go home, and waste no more life on making gold."

"Home!  Go hence!  We cannot hear it!  The duchess must not grant it.
I will not suffer the king to lose so learned a philosopher."

"Then pray the king to let the philosopher achieve that which is in
the power of labour."  He pointed to the Eureka.  "Let me be heard in
the king's council, and prove to sufficing judges what this iron can
do for England."

"Is that all?  So be it.  I will speak to his highness forthwith.  But
promise that thou wilt think no more of leaving the king's palace."

"Oh, no, no!  If I may enter again into mine own palace, mine own
royalty of craft and hope, the court or the dungeon all one to me!"

"Father," said Sibyll, entering, "be comforted.  The duchess forbids
thy departure, but we will yet flee--"  She stopped short as she saw
Hastings.  He approached her timidly, and with so repentant, so
earnest a respect in his mien and gesture, that she had not the heart
to draw back the fair hand he lifted to his lips.

"No, flee not, sweet donzell; leave not the desert court, without the
flower and the laurel, the beauty and the wisdom, that scent the hour,
and foretype eternity.  I have conferred with thy father,--I will
obtain his prayer from the king.  His mind shall be free to follow its
own impulse, and thou"--he whispered--"pardon--pardon an offence of
too much love.  Never shall it wound again."

Her eyes, swimming with delicious tears, were fixed upon the floor.
Poor child! with so much love, how could she cherish anger?  With so
much purity, how distrust herself?  And while, at least, he spoke, the
dangerous lover was sincere.  So from that hour peace was renewed
between Sibyll and Lord Hastings.--Fatal peace! alas for the girl who
loves--and has no mother!

True to his word, the courtier braved the displeasure of the Duchess
of Bedford, in inducing the king to consider the expediency of
permitting Adam to relinquish alchemy, and repair his model.  Edward
summoned a deputation from the London merchants and traders, before
whom Adam appeared and explained his device.  But these practical men
at first ridiculed the notion as a madman's fancy, and it required all
the art of Hastings to overcome their contempt, and appeal to the
native acuteness of the king.  Edward, however, was only caught by
Adam's incidental allusions to the application of his principle to
ships.  The merchant-king suddenly roused himself to attention, when
it was promised to him that his galleys should cross the seas without
sail, and against wind and tide.

"By Saint George!" said he, then, "let the honest man have his whim.
Mend thy model, and every saint in the calendar speed thee!  Master
Heyford, tell thy comely wife that I and Hastings will sup with her
to-morrow, for her hippocras is a rare dainty.  Good day to you,
worshipful my masters.  Hastings, come hither; enough of these
trifles,--I must confer with thee on matters really pressing,--this
damnable marriage of gentle George's!"

And now Adam Warner was restored to his native element of thought; now
the crucible was at rest, and the Eureka began to rise from its ruins.
He knew not the hate that he had acquired in the permission he had
gained; for the London deputies, on their return home, talked of
nothing else for a whole week but the favour the king had shown to a
strange man, half-maniac, half-conjuror, who had undertaken to devise
a something which would throw all the artisans and journeymen out of
work!  From merchant to mechanic travelled the news, and many an
honest man cursed the great scholar, as he looked at his young
children, and wished to have one good blow at the head that was
hatching such devilish malice against the poor!  The name of Adam
Warner became a byword of scorn and horror.  Nothing less than the
deep ditch and strong walls of the Tower could have saved him from the
popular indignation; and these prejudices were skilfully fed by the
jealous enmity of his fellow-student, the terrible Friar Bungey.  This
man, though in all matters of true learning and science worthy the
utmost contempt Adam could heap upon him, was by no means of
despicable abilities in the arts of imposing upon men.  In his youth
he had been an itinerant mountebank, or, as it was called, tregetour.
He knew well all the curious tricks of juggling that then amazed the
vulgar, and, we fear, are lost to the craft of our modern
necromancers.  He could clothe a wall with seeming vines, that
vanished as you approached; he could conjure up in his quiet cell the
likeness of a castle manned with soldiers, or a forest tenanted by
deer.  [See Chaucer, House of Time, Book III.; also the account given
by Baptista Porta, of his own Magical Delusions, of which an extract
may be seen in the "Curiosities of Literature" Art., Dreams at the
Dawn of Philosophy.]  Besides these illusions, probably produced by
more powerful magic lanterns than are now used, the friar had stumbled
upon the wondrous effects of animal magnetism, which was then
unconsciously practised by the alchemists and cultivators of white or
sacred magic.  He was an adept in the craft of fortune-telling; and
his intimate acquaintance with all noted characters in the metropolis,
their previous history and present circumstances, enabled his natural
shrewdness to hit the mark, at least now and then, in his oracular
predictions.  He had taken, for safety and for bread, the friar's
robes, and had long enjoyed the confidence of the Duchess of Bedford,
the traditional descendant of the serpent-witch, Melusina.  Moreover,
and in this the friar especially valued himself, Bungey had, in the
course of his hardy, vagrant early life, studied, as shepherds and
mariners do now, the signs of the weather; and as weather-glasses were
then unknown, nothing could be more convenient to the royal planners
of a summer chase or a hawking company than the neighbourhood of a
skilful predictor of storm and sunshine.  In fact, there was no part
in the lore of magic which the popular seers found so useful and
studied so much as that which enabled them to prognosticate the
humours of the sky, at a period when the lives of all men were
principally spent in the open air.

The fame of Friar Bungey had travelled much farther than the repute of
Adam Warner: it was known in the distant provinces: and many a
northern peasant grew pale as he related to his gaping listeners the
tales he had heard of the Duchess Jacquetta's dread magician.

And yet, though the friar was an atrocious knave and a ludicrous
impostor, on the whole he was by no means unpopular, especially in the
metropolis, for he was naturally a jolly, social fellow; he often
ventured boldly forth into the different hostelries and reunions of
the populace, and enjoyed the admiration he there excited, and
pocketed the groats he there collected.  He had no pride,--none in the
least, this Friar Bungey!--and was as affable as a magician could be
to the meanest mechanic who crossed his broad horn palm.  A vulgar man
is never unpopular with the vulgar.  Moreover, the friar, who was a
very cunning person, wished to keep well with the mob: he was fond of
his own impudent, cheating, burly carcass, and had the prudence to
foresee that a time might come when his royal patrons might forsake
him, and a mob might be a terrible monster to meet in his path;
therefore he always affected to love the poor, often told their
fortunes gratis, now and then gave them something to drink, and was
esteemed a man exceedingly good-natured, because he did not always
have the devil at his back.

Now Friar Bungey had naturally enough evinced from the first a great
distaste and jealousy of Adam Warner; but occasionally profiting by
the science of the latter, he suffered his resentment to sleep latent
till it was roused into fury by learning the express favour shown to
Adam by the king, and the marvellous results expected from his
contrivance.  His envy, then, forbade all tolerance and mercy; the
world was not large enough to contain two such giants,--Bungey and
Warner, the genius and the quack.  To the best of our experience, the
quacks have the same creed to our own day.  He vowed deep vengeance
upon his associate, and spared no arts to foment the popular hatred
against him.  Friar Bungey would have been a great critic in our day!

But besides his jealousy, the fat friar had another motive for
desiring poor Adam's destruction; he coveted his model!  True, he
despised the model, he jeered the model, he abhorred the model; but,
nevertheless, for the model every string in his bowels fondly yearned.
He believed that if that model were once repaired, and in his
possession, he could do--what he knew not, but certainly all that was
wanting to complete his glory, and to bubble the public.

Unconscious of all that was at work against him, Adam threw his whole
heart and soul into his labour; and happy in his happiness, Sibyll
once more smiled gratefully upon Hastings, from whom the rapture came.




CHAPTER VII.

A LOVE SCENE.

More than ever chafed against Katherine, Hastings surrendered himself
without reserve to the charm he found in the society of Sibyll.  Her
confidence being again restored, again her mind showed itself to
advantage, and the more because her pride was further roused to assert
the equality with rank and gold which she took from nature and from
God.

It so often happens that the first love of woman is accompanied with a
bashful timidity, which overcomes the effort, while it increases the
desire, to shine, that the union of love and timidity has been called
inseparable, in the hackneyed language of every love-tale.  But this
is no invariable rule, as Shakspeare has shown us in the artless
Miranda, in the eloquent Juliet, in the frank and healthful Rosalind;
--and the love of Sibyll was no common girl's spring-fever of sighs and
blushes.  It lay in the mind, the imagination, the intelligence, as
well as in the heart and fancy.  It was a breeze that stirred from the
modest leaves of the rose all their diviner odour.  It was impossible
but what this strong, fresh young nature--with its free gayety when
happy, its earnest pathos when sad, its various faculties of judgment
and sentiment, and covert play of innocent wit--should not contrast
forcibly, in the mind of a man who had the want to be amused and
interested, with the cold pride of Katherine, the dull atmosphere in
which her stiff, unbending virtue breathed unintellectual air, and
still more with the dressed puppets, with painted cheeks and barren
talk, who filled up the common world, under the name of women.

His feelings for Sibyll, therefore, took a more grave and respectful
colour, and his attentions, if gallant ever, were those of a man
wooing one whom he would make his wife, and studying the qualities to
which he was disposed to intrust his happiness; and so pure was
Sibyll's affection, that she could have been contented to have lived
forever thus,--have seen and heard him daily, have talked but the
words of friendship though with the thoughts of love; for some
passions refine themselves through the very fire of the imagination
into which the senses are absorbed, and by the ideal purification
elevated up to spirit.  Rapt in the exquisite happiness she now
enjoyed, Sibyll perceived not, or, if perceiving, scarcely heeded;
that the admirers, who had before fluttered round her, gradually
dropped off; that the ladies of the court, the damsels who shared her
light duties, grew distant and silent at her approach; that strange
looks were bent on her; that sometimes when she and Hastings were seen
together, the stern frowned and the godly crossed themselves.

The popular prejudices had reacted on the court.  The wizard's
daughter was held to share the gifts of her sire, and the fascination
of beauty was imputed to evil spells.  Lord Hastings was regarded--
especially by all the ladies he had once courted and forsaken--as a
man egregiously bewitched!

One day it chanced that Sibyll encountered Hastings in the walk that
girded the ramparts of the Tower.  He was pacing musingly, with folded
arms, when he raised his eyes and beheld her.

"And whither go you thus alone, fair mistress?"

"The duchess bade me seek the queen, who is taking the air yonder.  My
lady has received some tidings she would impart to her highness."

"I was thinking of thee, fair damsel, when thy face brightened on my
musings; and I was comparing thee to others who dwell in the world's
high places, and marvelling at the whims of fortune."

Sibyll smiled faintly, and answered, "Provoke not too much the
aspiring folly of my nature.  Content is better than ambition."

"Thou ownest thy ambition?" asked Hastings, curiously.

"Ah, sir, who hath it not?"

"But for thy sweet sex ambition has so narrow and cribbed a field."

"Not so; for it lives in others.  I would say," continued Sibyll,
colouring, fearful that she had betrayed herself, "for example, that
so long as my father toils for fame, I breathe in his hope, and am
ambitious for his honour."

"And so, if thou wert wedded to one worthy of thee, in his ambition
thou wouldst soar and dare?"

"Perhaps," answered Sibyll, coyly.

"But if thou wert wedded to sorrow and poverty and troublous care,
thine ambition, thus struck dead, would of consequence strike dead thy
love?"

"Nay, noble lord, nay; canst thou so wrong womanhood in me unworthy?
for surely true ambition lives not only in the goods of fortune.  Is
there no nobler ambition than that of the vanity?  Is there no
ambition of the heart,--an ambition to console, to cheer the griefs of
those who love and trust us; an ambition to build a happiness out of
the reach of fate; an ambition to soothe some high soul, in its strife
with a mean world,--to lull to sleep its pain, to smile to serenity
its cares?  Oh, methinks a woman's true ambition would rise the
bravest when, in the very sight of death itself, the voice of him in
whom her glory had dwelt through life should say, 'Thou fearest not to
walk to the grave and to heaven by my side!"'

Sweet and thrilling were the tones in which these words were said,
lofty and solemn the upward and tearful look with which they closed.

And the answer struck home to the native and original heroism of the
listener's nature, before debased into the cynic sourness of worldly
wisdom.  Never had Katherine herself more forcibly recalled to
Hastings the pure and virgin glory of his youth.

"Oh, Sibyll!" he exclaimed passionately, and yielding to the impulse
of the moment,--"oh, that for me, as to me, such high words were said!
Oh, that all the triumphs of a life men call prosperous were excelled
by the one triumph of waking such an ambition in such a heart!"

Sibyll stood before him transformed,--pale, trembling, mute,--and
Hastings, clasping her hand and covering it with kisses, said,--

"Dare I arede thy silence?  Sibyll, thou lovest me--O Sibyll, speak!"

With a convulsive effort, the girl's lips moved, then closed, then
moved again, into low and broken words.

"Why this, why this?  Thou hadst promised not to--not to--"

"Not to insult thee by unworthy vows!  Nor do I.  But as my wife."  He
paused abruptly, alarmed at his own impetuous words, and scared by the
phantom of the world that rose like a bodily thing before the generous
impulse, and grinned in scorn of his folly.

But Sibyll heard only that one holy word of WIFE, and so sudden and so
great was the transport it called forth, that her senses grew faint
and dizzy, and she would have fallen to the earth but for the arms
that circled her, and the breast upon which, now, the virgin might
veil the blush that did not speak of shame.

With various feelings, both were a moment silent.  But oh, that
moment! what centuries of bliss were crowded into it for the nobler
and fairer nature!

At last, gently releasing herself, she put her hands before her eyes,
as if to convince herself she was awake, and then, turning her lovely
face full upon the wooer, Sibyll said ingenuously,--

"Oh, my lord--oh, Hastings! if thy calmer reason repent not these
words, if thou canst approve in me what thou didst admire in Elizabeth
the queen, if thou canst raise one who has no dower but her heart to
the state of thy wife and partner, by this hand, which I place
fearlessly in thine, I pledge thee to such a love as minstrel hath
never sung.  No!" she continued, drawing loftily up her light
stature,--"no, thou shalt not find me unworthy of thy name,--mighty
though it is, mightier though it shall be.  I have a mind that can
share thine objects, I have pride that can exult in thy power, courage
to partake thy dangers, and devotion--" she hesitated, with the most
charming blush--"but of that, sweet lord, thou shalt judge hereafter!
This is my dowry,--it is all!"

"And all I ask or covet," said Hastings.  But his cheek had lost its
first passionate glow.  Lord of many a broad land and barony,
victorious captain in many a foughten field, wise statesman in many a
thoughtful stratagem, high in his king's favour, and linked with a
nation's history,--William de Hastings at that hour was as far below
as earth is to heaven the poor maiden whom he already repented to have
so honoured, and whose sublime answer woke no echo from his heart.

Fortunately, as he deemed it, at that very instant he heard many steps
rapidly approaching, and his own name called aloud by the voice of the
king's body-squire.

"Hark! Edward summons me," he said, with a feeling of reprieve.
"Farewell, dear Sibyll, farewell for a brief while,--we shall meet
anon."

At this time they were standing in that part of the rampart walk which
is now backed by the barracks of a modern soldiery, and before which,
on the other side of the moat, lay a space that had seemed solitary
and deserted; but as Hastings, in speaking his adieu, hurriedly
pressed his lips on Sibyll's forehead, from a tavern without the
fortress, and opposite the spot on which they stood, suddenly sallied
a disorderly troop of half-drunken soldiers, with a gang of the
wretched women that always continue the classic associations of a
false Venus with a brutal Mars; and the last words of Hastings were
scarcely spoken, before a loud laugh startled both himself and Sibyll,
and a shudder came over her when she beheld the tinsel robes of the
tymbesteres glittering in the sun, and heard their leader sing, as she
darted from the arms of a reeling soldier,--

              "Ha! death to the dove
               Is the falcon's love.
     Oh, sharp is the kiss of the falcon's beak!"





BOOK VII.

THE POPULAR REBELLION.




CHAPTER I.

THE WHITE LION OF MARCH SHAKES HIS MANE.

"And what news?" asked Hastings, as he found himself amidst the king's
squires; while yet was heard the laugh of the tymbesteres, and yet
gliding through the trees might be seen the retreating form of Sibyll.

"My lord, the king needs you instantly.  A courier has just arrived
from the North.  The Lords St. John, Rivers, De Fulke, and Scales are
already with his highness."

"Where?"

"In the great council chamber."

To that memorable room [it was from this room that Hastings was
hurried to execution, June 13, 1483] in the White Tower, in which the
visitor, on entrance, is first reminded of the name and fate of
Hastings, strode the unprophetic lord.

He found Edward not reclining on cushions and carpets, not womanlike
in loose robes, not with his lazy smile upon his sleek beauty.  The
king had doffed his gown, and stood erect in the tight tunic, which
gave in full perfection the splendid proportions of a frame
unsurpassed in activity and strength.  Before him, on the long table,
lay two or three open letters, beside the dagger with which Edward had
cut the silk that bound them.  Around him gravely sat Lord Rivers,
Anthony Woodville, Lord St. John, Raoul de Fulke, the young and
valiant D'Eyncourt, and many other of the principal lords.  Hastings
saw at once that something of pith and moment had occurred; and by the
fire in the king's eye, the dilation of his nostril, the cheerful and
almost joyous pride of his mien and brow, the experienced courtier
read the signs of WAR.

"Welcome, brave Hastings," said Edward, in a voice wholly changed from
its wonted soft affectation,--loud, clear, and thrilling as it went
through the marrow and heart of all who heard its stirring and trumpet
accent,--"welcome now to the field as ever to the banquet!  We have
news from the North that bids us brace on the burgonet and buckle-to
the brand,--a revolt that requires a king's arm to quell.  In
Yorkshire fifteen thousand men are in arms, under a leader they call
Robin of Redesdale,--the pretext, a thrave of corn demanded by the
Hospital of St. Leonard's, the true design that of treason to our
realm.  At the same time, we hear from our brother of Gloucester, now
on the Border, that the Scotch have lifted the Lancaster Rose.  There
is peril if these two armies meet.  No time to lose,--they are
saddling our war-steeds; we hasten to the van of our royal force.  We
shall have warm work, my lords.  But who is worthy of a throne that
cannot guard it?"

"This is sad tidings indeed, sire," said Hastings, gravely.

"Sad!  Say it not, Hastings!  War is the chase of kings!  Sir Raoul de
Fulke, why lookest thou so brooding and sorrowful?"

"Sire, I but thought that had Earl Warwick been in England, this--"

"Ha!" interrupted Edward, haughtily and hastily, "and is Warwick the
sun of heaven that no cloud can darken where his face may shine?  The
rebels shall need no foe, my realm no regent, while I, the heir of the
Plantagenets, have the sword for one, the sceptre for the other.  We
depart this evening ere the sun be set."

"My liege," said the Lord St. John, gravely, "on what forces do you
count to meet so formidable an array?"

"All England, Lord of St. John!"

"Alack! my liege, may you not deceive yourself!  But in this crisis it
is right that your leal and trusty subjects should speak out, and
plainly.  It seems that these insurgents clamour not against yourself,
but against the queen's relations,--yes, my Lord Rivers, against you
and your House,--and I fear me that the hearts of England are with
them here."

"It is true, sire," put in Raoul de Fulke, boldly; "and if these--new
men are to head your armies, the warriors of Towton will stand aloof,
--Raoul de Fulke serves no Woodville's banner.  Frown not, Lord de
Scales! it is the griping avarice of you and yours that has brought
this evil on the king.  For you the commons have been pillaged; for
you the daughters of peers have been forced into monstrous marriages,
at war with birth and with nature herself; for you, the princely
Warwick, near to the throne in blood, and front and pillar of our
time-honoured order of seigneur and of knight, has been thrust from
our suzerain's favour.  And if now ye are to march at the van of war,
--you to be avengers of the strife of which ye are the cause,--I say
that the soldiers will lack heart, and the provinces ye pass through
will be the country of a foe!"

"Vain man!" began Anthony Woodville, when Hastings laid his hand on
his arm, while Edward, amazed at this outburst from two of the
supporters on whom he principally counted, had the prudence to
suppress his resentment, and remained silent,--but with the aspect of
one resolved to command obedience, when he once deemed it right to
interfere.

"Hold, Sir Anthony!" said Hastings, who, the moment he found himself
with men, woke to all the manly spirit and profound wisdom that had
rendered his name illustrious--"hold, and let me have the word; my
Lords St. John and De Fulke, your charges are more against me than
against these gentlemen, for I am a new man,--a squire by birth, and
proud to derive mine honours from the same origin as all true
nobility,--I mean the grace of a noble liege and the happy fortune of
a soldier's sword.  It may be" (and here the artful favourite, the
most beloved of the whole court, inclined himself meekly)--"it may be
that I have not borne those honours so mildly as to disarm blame.  In
the war to be, let me atone.  My liege, hear your servant: give me no
command,--let me be a simple soldier, fighting by your side.  My
example who will not follow?--proud to ride but as a man of arms along
the track which the sword of his sovereign shall cut through the ranks
of battle!  Not you, Lord de Scales, redoubtable and invincible with
lance and axe; let us new men soothe envy by our deeds; and you, Lords
St. John and De Fulke, you shall teach us how your fathers led
warriors who did not fight more gallantly than we will.  And when
rebellion is at rest, when we meet again in our suzerain's hall,
accuse us new men, if you can find us faulty, and we will answer you
as we best may."

This address, which could have come from no man with such effect as
from Hastings, touched all present.  And though the Woodvilles, father
and son, saw in it much to gall their pride, and half believed it a
snare for their humiliation, they made no opposition.  Raoul de Fulke,
ever generous as fiery, stretched forth his hand, and said,--

"Lord Hastings, you have spoken well.  Be it as the king wills."

"My lords," returned Edward, gayly, "my will is that ye be friends
while a foe is in the field.  Hasten, then, I beseech you, one and
all, to raise your vassals, and join our standard at Fotheringay.  I
will find ye posts that shall content the bravest."

The king made a sign to break up the conference, and dismissing even
the Woodvilles, was left alone with Hastings.

"Thou hast served me at need, Will;" said the king.  "But I shall
remember" (and his eye flashed a tiger's fire) "the mouthing of those
mock-pieces of the lords at Runnymede.  I am no John, to be bearded by
my vassals.  Enough of them now.  Think you Warwick can have abetted
this revolt?"

"A revolt of peasants and yeomen!  No, sire.  If he did so, farewell
forever to the love the barons bear him."

"Um! and yet Montagu, whom I dismissed ten days since to the Borders,
hearing of disaffection, hath done nought to check it.  But come what
may, his must be a bold lance that shivers against a king's mail.  And
now one kiss of my lady Bessee, one cup of the bright canary, and then
God and Saint George for the White Rose!"




CHAPTER II.

THE CAMP AT OLNEY.

It was some weeks after the citizens of London had seen their gallant
king, at the head of such forces as were collected in haste in the
metropolis, depart from their walls to the encounter of the rebels.
Surprising and disastrous had been the tidings in the interim.  At
first, indeed, there were hopes that the insurrection had been put
down by Montagu, who had defeated the troops of Robin of Redesdale,
near the city of York, and was said to have beheaded their leader.
But the spirit of discontent was only fanned by an adverse wind.  The
popular hatred to the Woodvilles was so great, that in proportion as
Edward advanced to the scene of action, the country rose in arms, as
Raoul de Fulke had predicted.  Leaders of lordly birth now headed the
rebellion; the sons of the Lords Latimer and Fitzhugh (near kinsmen of
the House of Nevile) lent their names to the cause and Sir John
Coniers, an experienced soldier, whose claims had been disregarded by
Edward, gave to the insurgents the aid of a formidable capacity for
war.  In every mouth was the story of the Duchess of Bedford's
witchcraft; and the waxen figure of the earl did more to rouse the
people than perhaps the earl himself could have done in person.  [See
"Parliamentary Rolls," vi. 232, for the accusation of witchcraft, and
the fabrication of a necromantic image of Lord Warwick, circulated
against the Duchess of Bedford.  She herself quotes and complains of
them.]  As yet, however, language of the insurgents was tempered with
all personal respect to the king; they declared in their manifestoes
that they desired only the banishment of the Woodvilles and the recall
of Warwick, whose name they used unscrupulously, and whom they
declared they were on their way to meet.  As soon as it was known that
the kinsmen of the beloved earl were in the revolt, and naturally
supposed that the earl himself must countenance the enterprise, the
tumultuous camp swelled every hour, while knight after knight, veteran
after veteran, abandoned the royal standard.  The Lord d'Eyncourt (one
of the few lords of the highest birth and greatest following over whom
the Neviles had no influence, and who bore the Woodvilles no grudge)
had, in his way to Lincolnshire,--where his personal aid was necessary
to rouse his vassals, infected by the common sedition,--been attacked
and wounded by a body of marauders, and thus Edward's camp lost one of
its greatest leaders.  Fierce dispute broke out in the king's
councils; and when the witch Jacquetta's practices against the earl
travelled from the hostile into the royal camp, Raoul de Fulke, St.
John, and others, seized with pious horror, positively declared they
would throw down their arms and retire to their castles, unless the
Woodvilles were dismissed from the camp and the Earl of Warwick was
recalled to England.  To the first demand the king was constrained to
yield; with the second he temporized.  He marched from Fotheringay to
Newark; but the signs of disaffection, though they could not dismay
him as a soldier, altered his plans as a captain of singular military
acuteness; he fell back on Nottingham, and despatched, with his own
hands, letters to Clarence, the Archbishop of York, and Warwick.  To
the last he wrote touchingly.

"We do not believe" (said the letter) "that ye should be of any such
disposition towards us as the rumour here runneth, considering the
trust and affection we bear you,--and cousin, we think ye shall be to
us welcome."  [Paston Letters, ccxcviii. (Knight's edition), vol. ii.
p. 59.  See also Lingard, vol. iii. p. 522 (4to edition), note 43, for
the proper date to be assigned to Edward's letter to Warwick, etc.]

But ere these letters reached their destination, the crown seemed
well-nigh lost. At Edgecote the Earl of Pembroke was defeated and
slain, and five thousand royalists were left on the field.  Earl
Rivers and his son, Sir John Woodville, [This Sir John Woodville was
the most obnoxious of the queen's brothers, and infamous for the
avarice which had led him to marry the old Duchess of Norfolk, an act
which according to the old laws of chivalry would have disabled him
from entering the lists of knighthood, for the ancient code
disqualified and degraded any knight who should marry any old woman
for her money!  Lord Rivers was the more odious to the people at the
time of the insurrection because, in his capacity of treasurer, he had
lately tampered with the coin and circulation.] who in obedience to
the royal order had retired to the earl's country seat of Grafton,
were taken prisoners, and beheaded by the vengeance of the insurgents.
The same lamentable fate befell the Lord Stafford, on whom Edward
relied as one of his most puissant leaders; and London heard with
dismay that the king, with but a handful of troops, and those lukewarm
and disaffected, was begirt on all sides by hostile and marching
thousands.

From Nottingham, however, Edward made good his retreat to a village
called Olney, which chanced at that time to be partially fortified
with a wall and a strong gate.  Here the rebels pursued him; and
Edward, hearing that Sir Anthony Woodville, who conceived that the
fate of his father and brother cancelled all motive for longer absence
from the contest, was busy in collecting a force in the neighbourhood
of Coventry, while other assistance might be daily expected from
London, strengthened the fortifications as well as the time would
permit, and awaited the assault of the insurgents.

It was at this crisis, and while throughout all England reigned terror
and commotion, that one day, towards the end of July, a small troop of
horsemen were seen riding rapidly towards the neighbourhood of Olney.
As the village came in view of the cavalcade, with the spire of its
church and its gray stone gateway, so also they beheld, on the
pastures that stretched around wide and far, a moving forest of pikes
and plumes.

"Holy Mother!" said one of the foremost riders, "good the knight and
strong man though Edward be, it were sharp work to cut his way from
that hamlet through yonder fields!  Brother, we were more welcome, had
we brought more bills and bows at our backs!"

"Archbishop," answered the stately personage thus addressed, "we bring
what alone raises armies and disbands them,--a NAME that a People
honours!  From the moment the White Bear is seen on yonder archway
side by side with the king's banner, that army will vanish as smoke
before the wind."

"Heaven grant it, Warwick!" said the Duke of Clarence; for though
Edward hath used us sorely, it chafes me as Plantagenet and as prince
to see how peasants and varlets can hem round a king."

"Peasants and varlets are pawns in the chessboard, cousin George,"
said the prelate; "and knight and bishop find them mighty useful when
pushing forward to an attack.  Now knight and bishop appear themselves
and take up the game.  Warwick," added the prelate, in a whisper,
unheard by Clarence, "forget not, while appeasing rebellion, that the
king is in your power."

"For shame, George!  I think not now of the unkind king; I think only
of the brave boy I dandled on my knee, and whose sword I girded on at
Towton.  How his lion heart must chafe, condemned to see a foe whom
his skill as captain tells him it were madness to confront!"

"Ay, Richard Nevile, ay," said the prelate, with a slight sneer, "play
the Paladin, and become the dupe; release the prince, and betray the
people!"

"No!  I can be true to both.  Tush! brother, your craft is slight to
the plain wisdom of bold honesty.  You slacken your steeds, sirs; on!
on! see the march of the rebels!  On, for an Edward and a Warwick!"
and, spurring to full speed, the little company arrived at the gates.
The loud bugle of the new comers was answered by the cheerful note of
the joyous warder, while dark, slow, and solemn over the meadows crept
on the mighty crowd of the rebel army.

"We have forestalled the insurgents!" said the earl, throwing himself
from his black steed.  "Marmaduke Nevile, advance our banner; heralds,
announce the Duke of Clarence, the Archbishop of York, and the Earl of
Salisbury and Warwick."

Through the anxious town, along the crowded walls and housetops, into
the hall of an old mansion (that then adjoined the church), where the
king, in complete armour, stood at bay, with stubborn and disaffected
officers, rolled the thunder cry, "A Warwick! a Warwick! all saved! a
Warwick!"

Sharply, as he heard the clamour, the king turned upon his startled
council.  "Lords and captains!" said he, with that inexpressible
majesty which he could command in his happier hours, "God and our
Patron Saint have sent us at least one man who has the heart to fight
fifty times the odds of yon miscreant rabble, by his king's side, and
for the honour of loyalty and knighthood!"

"And who says, sire," answered Raoul de Fulke, "that we, your lords
and captains, would not risk blood and life for our king and our
knighthood in a just cause?  But we will not butcher our countrymen
for echoing our own complaint, and praying your Grace that a grasping
and ambitious family which you have raised to power may no longer
degrade your nobles and oppress your commons.  We shall see if the
Earl of Warwick blame us or approve."

"And I answer," said Edward, loftily, "that whether Warwick approve or
blame, come as friend or foe, I will sooner ride alone through yonder
archway, and carve out a soldier's grave amongst the ranks of
rebellious war, than be the puppet of my subjects, and serve their
will by compulsion.  Free am I--free ever will I be, while the crown
of the Plantagenet is mine, to raise those whom I love, to defy the
threats of those sworn to obey me.  And were I but Earl of March,
instead of king of England, this hall should have swum with the blood
of those who have insulted the friends of my youth, the wife of my
bosom.  Off, Hastings!--I need no mediator with my servants.  Nor
here, nor anywhere in broad England, have I my equal, and the king
forgives or scorns--construe it as ye will, my lords--what the simple
gentleman would avenge."

It were in vain to describe the sensation that this speech produced.
There is ever something in courage and in will that awes numbers,
though brave themselves.  And what with the unquestioned valour of
Edward; what with the effect of his splendid person, towering above
all present by the head, and moving lightly, with each impulse,
through the mass of a mail that few there could have borne unsinking,
this assertion of absolute power in the midst of mutiny--an army
marching to the gates--imposed an unwilling reverence and sullen
silence mixed with anger, that, while it chafed, admired.  They who in
peace had despised the voluptuous monarch, feasting in his palace, and
reclining on the lap of harlot-beauty, felt that in war all Mars
seemed living in his person.  Then, indeed, he was a king; and had the
foe, now darkening the landscape, been the noblest chivalry of France,
not a man there but had died for a smile from that haughty lip.  But
the barons were knit heart in heart with the popular outbreak, and to
put down the revolt seemed to them but to raise the Woodvilles.  The
silence was still unbroken, save where the persuasive whisper of Lord
Hastings might be faintly heard in remonstrance with the more powerful
or the more stubborn of the chiefs, when the tread of steps resounded
without, and, unarmed, bareheaded, the only form in Christendom
grander and statelier than the king's strode into the hall.

Edward, as yet unaware what course Warwick would pursue, and half
doubtful whether a revolt that had borrowed his name and was led by
his kinsmen might not originate in his consent, surrounded by those to
whom the earl was especially dear, and aware that if Warwick were
against him all was lost, still relaxed not the dignity of his mien;
and leaning on his large two-handed sword, with such inward resolves
as brave kings and gallant gentlemen form, if the worst should befall,
he watched the majestic strides of his great kinsman, and said, as the
earl approached, and the mutinous captains louted low,--

"Cousin, you are welcome! for truly do I know that when you have aught
whereof to complain, you take not the moment of danger and disaster.
And whatever has chanced to alienate your heart from me, the sound of
the rebel's trumpet chases all difference, and marries your faith to
mine."

"Oh, Edward, my king, why did you so misjudge me in the prosperous
hour!" said Warwick, simply, but with affecting earnestness: "since in
the adverse hour you arede me well?"

As he spoke, he bowed his head, and, bending his knee, kissed the hand
held out to him.

Edward's face grew radiant, and, raising the earl, he glanced proudly
at the barons, who stood round, surprised and mute.

"Yes, my lords and sirs, see,--it is not the Earl of Warwick, next to
our royal brethren the nearest subject to the throne, who would desert
me in the day of peril!"

"Nor do we, sire," retorted Raoul de Fulke; "you wrong us before our
mighty comrade if you so misthink us.  We will fight for the king, but
not for the queen's kindred; and this alone brings on us your anger."

"The gates shall be opened to ye.  Go!  Warwick and I are men enough
for the rabble yonder."

The earl's quick eye and profound experience of his time saw at once
the dissension and its causes.  Nor, however generous, was he willing
to forego the present occasion for permanently destroying an influence
which he knew hostile to himself and hurtful to the realm.  His was
not the generosity of a boy, but of a statesman.  Accordingly, as
Raoul de Fulke ceased, he took up the word.

"My liege, we have yet an hour good ere the foe can reach the gates.
Your brother and mine accompany me.  See, they enter!  Please you, a
few minutes to confer with them; and suffer me, meanwhile, to reason
with these noble captains."

Edward paused; but before the open brow of the earl fled whatever
suspicion might have crossed the king's mind.

"Be it so, cousin; but remember this,--to councillors who can menace
me with desertion at such an hour, I concede nothing."

Turning hastily away, he met Clarence and the prelate midway in the
hall, threw his arm caressingly over his brother's shoulder, and,
taking the archbishop by the hand, walked with them towards the
battlements.

"Well, my friends," said Warwick, "and what would you of the king?"

"The dismissal of all the Woodvilles, except the queen; the revocation
of the grants and land accorded to them, to the despoiling the ancient
noble; and, but for your presence, we had demanded your recall."

"And, failing these, what your resolve?"

"To depart, and leave Edward to his fate.  These granted, we doubt
little but that the insurgents will disband.  These not granted, we
but waste our lives against a multitude whose cause we must approve."

"The cause!  But ye know not the real cause," answered Warwick.  "I
know it; for the sons of the North are familiar to me, and their
rising hath deeper meaning than ye deem.  What! have they not decoyed
to their head my kinsmen, the heirs of Latimer and Fitzhugh, and bold
Coniers, whose steel calque should have circled a wiser brain?  Have
they not taken my name as their battle-cry?  And do ye think this
falsehood veils nothing but the simple truth of just complaint?"

"Was their rising, then," asked St. John, in evident surprise, "wholly
unauthorized by you?"

"So help me Heaven! if I would resort to arms to redress a wrong,
think not that I myself would be absent from the field!  No, my lords,
friends, and captains, time presses; a few words must suffice to
explain what as yet may be dark to you.  I have letters from Montagu
and others, which reached me the same day as the king's, and which
clear up the purpose of our misguided countrymen.  Ye know well that
ever in England, but especially since the reign of Edward III.,
strange, wild notions of some kind of liberty other than that we enjoy
have floated loose through the land.  Among the commons, a half-
conscious recollection that the nobles are a different race from
themselves feeds a secret rancour and mislike, which, at any fair
occasion for riot, shows itself bitter and ruthless,--as in the
outbreak of Cade and others.  And if the harvest fail, or a tax gall,
there are never wanting men to turn the popular distress to the ends
of private ambition or state design.  Such a man has been the true
head and front of this commotion."

"Speak you of Robin of Redesdale, now dead?" asked one of the
captains.

"He is not dead.  [The fate of Robin of Redesdale has been as obscure
as most of the incidents in this most perplexed part of English
history.  While some of the chroniclers finish his career according to
the report mentioned in the text, Fabyan not only more charitably
prolongs his life, but rewards him with the king's pardon; and
according to the annals of his ancient and distinguished family (who
will pardon, we trust, a license with one of their ancestry equally
allowed by history and romance), as referred to in Wotton's "English
Baronetage" (Art. "Hilyard"), and which probably rests upon the
authority of the life of Richard III., in Stowe's "Annals," he is
represented as still living in the reign of that king.  But the whole
account of this famous demagogue in Wotton is, it must be owned, full
of historical mistakes.]  Montagu informs me that the report was
false.  He was defeated off York, and retired for some days into the
woods; but it is he who has enticed the sons of Latimer and Fitzhugh
into the revolt, and resigned his own command to the martial cunning
of Sir John Coniers.  This Robin of Redesdale is no common man.  He
hath had a clerkly education, he hath travelled among the Free Towns
of Italy, he hath deep purpose in all he doth; and among his projects
is the destruction of the nobles here, as it was whilome effected in
Florence, the depriving us of all offices and posts, with other
changes, wild to think of and long to name."

"And we would have suffered this man to triumph!" exclaimed De Fulke:
"we have been to blame."

"Under fair pretence he has gathered numbers, and now wields an army.
I have reason to know that, had he succeeded in estranging ye from
Edward, and had the king fallen, dead or alive, into his hands, his
object would have been to restore Henry of Windsor, but on conditions
that would have left king and baron little more than pageants in the
state.  I knew this man years ago.  I have watched him since; and,
strange though it may seem to you, he hath much in him that I admire
as a subject and should fear were I a king.  Brief, thus runs my
counsel: For our sake and the realm's safety, we must see this armed
multitude disbanded; that done, we must see the grievances they with
truth complain of fairly redressed.  Think not, my lords, I avenge my
own wrongs alone, when I go with you in your resolve to banish from
the king's councils the baleful influence of the queen's kin.  Till
that be compassed, no peace for England.  As a leprosy, their avarice
crawls over the nobler parts of the state, and devours while it
sullies.  Leave this to me; and, though we will redress ourselves, let
us now assist our king!"

With one voice the unruly officers clamoured their assent to all the
earl urged, and expressed their readiness to sally at once from the
gates, and attack the rebels.

"But," observed an old veteran, "what are we amongst so many?  Here a
handful--there an army!"

"Fear not, reverend sir," answered Warwick, with an assured smile; "is
not this army in part gathered from my own province of Yorkshire?  Is
it not formed of men who have eaten of my bread and drunk of my cup?
Let me see the man who will discharge one arrow at the walls which
contain Richard Nevile of Warwick.  Now each to your posts,--I to the
king."

Like the pouring of new blood into a decrepit body seemed the arrival,
at that feeble garrison, of the Earl of Warwick.  From despair into
the certainty of triumph leaped every heart.  Already at the sight of
his banner floating by the side of Edward's, the gunner had repaired
to his bombard, the archer had taken up his bow; the village itself,
before disaffected, poured all its scanty population--women, and age,
and children--to the walls.  And when the earl joined the king upon
the ramparts, he found that able general sanguine and elated, and
pointing out to Clarence the natural defences of the place.
Meanwhile, the rebels, no doubt apprised by their scouts of the new
aid, had already halted in their march, and the dark swarm might be
seen indistinctly undulating, as bees ere they settle, amidst the
verdure of the plain.

"Well, cousin," said the king, "have ye brought these Hotspurs to
their allegiance?"

"Sire, yes," said Warwick, gravely; "but we have here no force to
resist yon army."

"Bring you not succours?" said the king, astonished.  "You must have
passed through London.  Have you left no troops upon the road?"

"I had no time, sire; and London is well-nigh palsied with dismay.
Had I waited to collect troops, I might have found a king's head
blackening over those gates."

"Well," returned Edward, carelessly, "few or many, one gentleman is
more worth than a hundred varlets.  'We are eno' for glory,' as Henry
said at Agincourt."

"No, sire; you are too skilful and too wise to believe your boast.
These men we cannot conquer,--we must disperse them."

"By what spell?"

"By their king's word to redress their complaints."

"And banish my queen?"

"Heaven forbid that man should part those whom God has joined,"
returned Warwick.  "Not my lady, your queen, but my lady's kindred."

"Rivers is dead, and gallant John," said Edward, sadly; "is not that
enough for revenge?"

"It is not revenge that we require, but pledges for the land's
safety," answered Warwick.  "And to be plain, without such a promise
these walls may be your tomb."

Edward walked apart, strongly debating within himself.  In his
character were great contrasts: no man was more frank in common, no
man more false when it suited; no man had more levity in wanton love,
or more firm affection for those he once thoroughly took to his heart.
He was the reverse of grateful for service yielded, yet he was warm in
protecting those on whom service was conferred.  He was resolved not
to give up the Woodvilles, and after a short self-commune, he equally
determined not to risk his crown and life by persevering in resistance
to the demand for their downfall.  Inly obstinate, outwardly yielding,
he concealed his falsehood with his usual soldierly grace.

"Warwick," he said, returning to the earl's side, "you cannot advise
me to what is misbeseeming, and therefore in this strait I resign my
conduct to your hands.  I will not unsay to yon mutinous gentlemen
what I have already said; but what you judge it right to promise in my
name to them or to the insurgents, I will not suppose that mime honour
will refuse to concede.  But go not hence, O noblest friend that ever
stood by a king's throne!--go not hence till the grasp of your hand
assures me that all past unkindness is gone and buried; yea, and by
this hand, and while its pressure is warm in mine, bear not too hard
on thy king's affection for his lady's kindred."

"Sire," said Warwick, though his generous nature well-nigh melted into
weakness, and it was with an effort that he adhered to his purpose,--
"sire, if dismissed for a while, they shall not be degraded.  And if
it be, on consideration, wise to recall from the family of Woodville
your grants of lands and lordships, take from your Warwick--who, rich
in his king's love, hath eno' to spare--take the double of what you
would recall.  Oh, be frank with me, be true, be steadfast, Edward,
and dispose of my lands, whenever you would content a favourite."

"Not to impoverish thee, my Warwick," answered Edward, smiling, "did I
call thee to my aid; for the rest, my revenues as Duke of York are at
least mine to bestow.  Go now to the hostile camp,--go as sole
minister and captain-general of this realm; go with all powers and
honours a king can give; and when these districts are at peace, depart
to our Welsh provinces, as chief justiciary of that principality.
Pembroke's mournful death leaves that high post in my gift.  It cannot
add to your greatness, but it proves to England your sovereign's
trust."

"And while that trust is given," said Warwick, with tears in his eyes,
"may Heaven strengthen my arm in battle, and sharpen my brain in
council!  But I play the laggard.  The sun wanes westward; it should
not go down while a hostile army menaces the son of Richard of York."

The earl rode rapidly away, reached the broad space where his
followers still stood, dismounted, but beside their steeds,--

"Trumpets advance, pursuivants and heralds go before!  Marmaduke,
mount!  The rest I need not.  We ride to the insurgent camp."




CHAPTER III.

THE CAMP OF THE REBELS.

The rebels had halted about a mile from the town, and were already
pitching their tents for the night.  It was a tumultuous, clamorous,
but not altogether undisciplined array; for Coniers was a leader of
singular practice in reducing men into the machinery of war, and where
his skill might have failed, the prodigious influence and energy of
Robin of Redesdale ruled the passions and united the discordant
elements.  This last was, indeed, in much worthy the respect in which
Warwick held his name.  In times more ripe for him, he would have been
a mighty demagogue and a successful regenerator.  His birth was known
but to few; his education and imperious temper made him vulgarly
supposed of noble origin; but had he descended from a king's loins,
Robert Hilyard had still been the son of the Saxon people.  Warwick
overrated, perhaps, Hilyard's wisdom; for, despite his Italian
experience, his ideas were far from embracing any clear and definite
system of democracy.  He had much of the frantic levelism and
jacquerie of his age and land, and could probably not have explained
to himself all the changes he desired to effect; but, coupled with his
hatred to the nobles, his deep and passionate sympathy with the poor,
his heated and fanatical chimeras of a republic, half-political and
half-religious, he had, with no uncommon inconsistency, linked the
cause of a dethroned king.  For as the Covenanters linked with the
Stuarts against the succeeding and more tolerant dynasty, never
relinquishing their own anti-monarchic theories; as in our time, the
extreme party on the popular side has leagued with the extreme of the
aristocratic, in order to crush the medium policy, as a common foe,--
so the bold leveller united with his zeal for Margaret the very cause
which the House of Lancaster might be supposed the least to favour.
He expected to obtain from a sovereign dependent upon a popular
reaction for restoration, great popular privileges.  And as the Church
had deserted the Red Rose for the White, he sought to persuade many of
the Lollards, ever ready to show their discontent, that Margaret (in
revenge on the hierarchy) would extend the protection they had never
found in the previous sway of her husband and Henry V.  Possessed of
extraordinary craft, and even cunning in secular intrigues, energetic,
versatile, bold, indefatigable, and, above all, marvellously gifted
with the arts that inflame, stir up, and guide the physical force of
masses, Robert Hilyard had been, indeed, the soul and life of the
present revolt; and his prudent moderation in resigning the nominal
command to those whose military skill and high birth raised a riot
into the dignity of rebellion, had given that consistency and method
to the rising which popular movements never attain without
aristocratic aid.

In the principal tent of the encampment the leaders of the
insurrection were assembled.

There was Sir John Coniers, who had married one of the Neviles, the
daughter of Fauconberg, Lord High Admiral, but who had profited little
by this remote connection with Warwick; for, with all his merit, he
was a greedy, grasping man, and he had angered the hot earl in
pressing his claims too imperiously.  This renowned knight was a tall,
gaunt man, whose iron frame sixty winters had not bowed.  There were
the young heirs of Latimer and Fitzhugh, in gay gilded armour and
scarlet mantelines; and there, in a plain cuirass, trebly welded, and
of immense weight, but the lower limbs left free and unincumbered in
thick leathern hose, stood Robin of Redesdale.  Other captains there
were, whom different motives had led to the common confederacy.  There
might be seen the secret Lollard, hating either Rose, stern and sour,
and acknowledging no leader but Hilyard, whom he knew as a Lollard's
son; there might be seen the ruined spendthrift, discontented with
fortune, and regarding civil war as the cast of a die,--death for the
forfeiture, lordships for the gain; there, the sturdy Saxon squire,
oppressed by the little baron of his province, and rather hopeful to
abase a neighbour than dethrone a king of whom he knew little, and for
whom he cared still less; and there, chiefly distinguished from the
rest by grizzled beard, upturned mustache, erect mien, and grave, not
thoughtful aspect, were the men of a former period,--the soldiers who
had fought against the Maid of Are,--now without place, station, or
hope in peaceful times, already half robbers by profession, and
decoyed to any standard that promised action, pay, or plunder.

The conclave were in high and warm debate.

"If this be true," said Coniers, who stood at the head of the table,
his helmet, axe, truncheon, and a rough map of the walls of Olney
before him--"if this be true, if our scouts are not deceived, if the
Earl of Warwick is in the village, and if his banner float beside King
Edward's,--I say, bluntly, as soldiers should speak, that I have been
deceived and juggled!"

"And by whom, Sir Knight and cousin?" said the heir of Fitzhugh,
reddening.

"By you, young kinsman, and this hot-mouthed dare-devil, Robin of
Redesdale!  Ye assured me, both, that the earl approved the rising;
that he permitted the levying yon troops in his name; that he knew
well the time was come to declare against the Woodvilles, and that no
sooner was an army mustered than he would place himself at its bead;
and I say, if this be not true, you have brought these gray hairs into
dishonour!"

"And what, Sir John Coniers," exclaimed Robin, rudely, "what honour
had your gray hairs till the steel cap covered them?  What honour, I
say, under lewd Edward and his lusty revellers?  You were thrown
aside, like a broken scythe, Sir John Coniers!  You were forsaken in
your rust!  Warwick himself, your wife's great kinsman, could do
nought in your favour!  You stand now, leader of thousands, lord of
life and death, master of Edward and the throne!  We have done this
for you, and you reproach us!"

"And," began the heir of Fitzhugh, encouraged by the boldness of
Hilyard, "we had all reason to believe my noble uncle, the Earl of
Warwick, approved our emprise.  When this brave fellow (pointing to
Robin) came to inform me that, with his own eyes, he had seen the
waxen effigies of my great kinsman, the hellish misdeed of the queen's
witch-dam, I repaired to my Lord Montagu; and though that prudent
courtier refused to declare openly, he let me see that war with the
Woodvilles was not unwelcome to him."

"Yet this same Montagu," observed one of the ringleaders, "when
Hilyard was well-nigh at the gates of York, sallied out and defeated
him, sans ruth, sans ceremony."

"Yes, but he spared my life, and beheaded the dead body of poor Hugh
Withers in my stead: for John Nevile is cunning, and he picks his nuts
from the brennen without lesing his own paw.  It was not the hour for
him to join us, so he beat us civilly, and with discretion.  But what
hath he done since?  He stands aloof while our army swells, while the
bull of the Neviles and the ragged staff of the earl are the ensigns
of our war, and while Edward gnaws out his fierce heart in yon walls
of Olney.  How say ye, then, that Warwick, even if now in person with
the king, is in heart against us?  Nay, he may have entered Olney but
to capture the tyrant."

"If so," said Coniers, "all is as it should be: but if Earl Warwick,
who, though he hath treated me ill, is a stour carle, and to be feared
if not loved, join the king, I break this wand, and ye will seek out
another captain."

"And a captain shall be found!" cried Robin.  "Are we so poor in
valour, that when one man leaves us we are headless and undone?  What
if Warwick so betray us and himself,--he brings no forces.  And never,
by God's blessing, should we separate till we have redressed the
wrongs of our countrymen!"

"Good!" said the Saxon squire, winking, and looking wise,--"not till
we have burned to the ground the Baron of Bullstock's castle!"

"Not," said a Lollard, sternly, "till we have shortened the purple
gown of the churchman; not till abbot and bishop have felt on their
backs the whip wherewith they have scourged the godly believer and the
humble saint."

"Not," added Robin, "till we have assured bread to the poor man, and
the filling of the flesh-pot, and the law to the weak, and the
scaffold to the evil-doer."

"All this is mighty well," said, bluntly, Sir Geoffrey Gates, the
leader of the mercenaries, a skilful soldier, but a predatory and
lawless bravo; "but who is to pay me and my tall fellows?"

At this pertinent question, there was a general hush of displeasure
and disgust.

"For, look you, my masters," continued Sir Geoffrey, "as long as I and
my comrades here believed that the rich earl, who hath half England
for his provant, was at the head or the tail of this matter, we were
contented to wait a while; but devil a groat hath yet gone into my
gipsire; and as for pillage, what is a farm or a homestead? an' it
were a church or a castle there might be pickings."

"There is much plate of silver, and a sack or so of marks and royals,
in the stronghold of the Baron of Bullstock," quoth the Saxon squire,
doggedly hounding on to his revenge.

"You see, my friends," said Coniers, with a smile, and shrugging his
shoulders, "that men cannot gird a kingdom with ropes of sand.
Suppose we conquer and take captive--nay, or slay--King Edward, what
then?"

"The Duke of Clarence, male heir to the throne," said the heir of
Latimer, "is Lord Warwick's son-in-law, and therefore akin to you, Sir
John."

"That is true," observed Coniers, musingly.

"Not ill thought of, sir," said Sir Geoffrey Gates; "and my advice is
to proclaim Clarence king and Warwick lord protector.  We have some
chance of the angels then."

"Besides," said the heir of Fitzhugh, "our purpose once made clear, it
will be hard either for Warwick or Clarence to go against us,--harder
still for the country not to believe them with us.  Bold measures are
our wisest councillors."

"Um!" said the Lollard, "Lord Warwick is a good man, and has never,
though his brother be a bishop, abetted the Church tyrannies.  But as
for George of Clarence--"

"As for Clarence," said Hilyard, who saw with dismay and alarm that
the rebellion he designed to turn at the fitting hour to the service
of Lancaster, might now only help to shift from one shoulder to the
other the hated dynasty of York--"as for Clarence, he hath Edward's
vices without his manhood."  He paused, and seeing that the crisis had
ripened the hour for declaring himself, his bold temper pushed at once
to its object.  "No!" he continued, folding his arms, raising his
head, and comprehending the whole council in his keen and steady
gaze,--"no! lords and gentlemen, since speak I must in this emergency,
hear me calmly.  Nothing has prospered in England since we abandoned
our lawful king.  If we rid ourselves of Edward, let it not be to sink
from a harlot-monger to a drunkard.  In the Tower pines our true lord,
already honoured as a saint.  Hear me, I say,--hear me out!  On the
frontiers an army that keeps Gloucester at bay hath declared for Henry
and Margaret.  Let us, after seizing Olney, march thither at once, and
unite forces.  Margaret is already prepared to embark for England.  I
have friends in London who will attack the Tower, and deliver Henry.
To you, Sir John Coniers, in the queen's name, I promise an earldom
and the garter; to you, the heirs of Latimer and Fitzhugh, the high
posts that beseem your birth; to all of you, knights and captains,
just share and allotment in the confiscated lands of the Woodvilles
and the Yorkists; to you, brethren," and addressing the Lollards, his
voice softened into a meaning accent that, compelled to worship in
secret, they yet understood, "shelter from your foes and mild laws;
and to you, brave soldiers, that pay which a king's coffers alone can
supply.  Wherefore I say, down with all subject-banners! up with the
Red Rose and the Antelope, and long live Henry the Sixth!"

This address, however subtle in its adaptation to the various passions
of those assembled, however aided by the voice, spirit, and energy of
the speaker, took too much by surprise those present to produce at
once its effect.

The Lollards remembered the fires lighted for their martyrs by the
House of Lancaster; and though blindly confident in Hilyard, were not
yet prepared to respond to his call.  The young heir of Fitzhugh, who
had, in truth, but taken arms to avenge the supposed wrongs of
Warwick, whom he idolized, saw no object gained in the rise of
Warwick's enemy, Queen Margaret.  The mercenaries called to mind the
woful state of Henry's exchequer in the former time.  The Saxon squire
muttered to himself, "And what the devil is to become of the castle of
Bullstock?"  But Sir Henry Nevile (Lord Latimer's son), who belonged
to that branch of his House which had espoused the Lancaster cause,
and who was in the secret councils of Hilyard, caught up the cry, and
said, "Hilyard doth not exceed his powers; and he who strikes for the
Red Rose shall carve out his own lordship from the manors of every
Yorkist that he slays."  Sir John Coniers hesitated: poor, long
neglected, ever enterprising and ambitious, he was dazzled by the
proffered bribe; but age is slow to act, and he expressed himself with
the measured caution of gray hairs.

"A king's name," said he, "is a tower of strength, especially when
marching against a king; but this is a matter for general assent and
grave forethought."

Before any other (for ideas did not rush at once to words in those
days) found his tongue, a mighty uproar was heard without.  It did not
syllable itself into distinct sound; it uttered no name; it was such a
shout as numbers alone could raise; and to such a shout would some
martial leader have rejoiced to charge to battle, so full of depth and
fervour, and enthusiasm and good heart, it seemed, leaping from rank
to rank, from breast to breast, from earth to heaven.  With one accord
the startled captains made to the entrance of the tent, and there they
saw, in the broad space before them, inclosed by the tents which were
grouped in a wide semicircle,--for the mass of the hardy rebel army
slept in the open air, and the tents were but for leaders,--they saw,
we say, in that broad space, a multitude kneeling, and in the midst,
upon his good steed Saladin, bending graciously down, the martial
countenance, the lofty stature, of the Earl of Warwick.  Those among
the captains who knew him not personally recognized him by the popular
description,--by the black war-horse, whose legendary fame had been
hymned by every minstrel; by the sensation his appearance had created;
by the armourial insignia of his heralds, grouped behind him, and
whose gorgeous tabards blazed with his cognizance and quarterings in
azure, or, and argent.  The sun was slowly setting, and poured its
rays upon the bare head of the mighty noble, gathering round it in the
hazy atmosphere like a halo.  The homage of the crowd to that single
form, unarmed, and scarce attended, struck a death-knell to the hopes
of Hilyard,--struck awe into all his comrades!  The presence of that
one man seemed to ravish from them, as by magic, a vast army; power,
and state, and command left them suddenly to be absorbed in HIM!
Captains, they were troopless,--the wielder of men's hearts was
amongst them, and from his barb assumed reign, as from his throne!

"Gads my life!" said Coniers, turning to his comrades, "we have now,
with a truth, the earl amongst us; but unless he come to lead us on to
Olney, I would as lief see the king's provost at my shoulder."

"The crowd separates, he rides this way!" said the heir of Fitzhugh.
"Shall we go forth to meet him?"

"Not so!" exclaimed Hilyard, "we are still the leaders of this army;
let him find us deliberating on the siege of Olney!"

"Right!" said Coniers; "and if there come dispute, let not the rabble
hear it."

The captains re-entered the tent, and in grave silence awaited the
earl's coming; nor was this suspense long.  Warwick, leaving the
multitude in the rear, and taking only one of the subaltern officers
in the rebel camp as his guide and usher, arrived at the tent, and was
admitted into the council.

The captains, Hilyard alone excepted, bowed with great reverence as
the earl entered.

"Welcome, puissant sir and illustrious kinsman!" said Coniers, who had
decided on the line to be adopted; "you are come at last to take the
command of the troops raised in your name, and into your hands I
resign this truncheon."

"I accept it, Sir John Coniers," answered Warwick, taking the place of
dignity; "and since you thus constitute me your commander, I proceed
at once to my stern duties.  How happens it, knights and gentlemen,
that in my absence ye have dared to make my name the pretext of
rebellion?  Speak thou, my sister's son!"

"Cousin and lord," said the heir of Fitzhugh, reddening but not
abashed, "we could not believe but what you would smile on those who
have risen to assert your wrongs and defend your life."  And he then
briefly related the tale of the Duchess of Bedford's waxen effigies,
and pointed to Hilyard as the eye-witness.

"And," began Sir Henry Nevile, "you, meanwhile, were banished,
seemingly, from the king's court; the dissensions between you and
Edward sufficiently the land's talk, the king's vices the land's
shame!

"Nor did we act without at least revealing our intentions to my uncle
and your brother, the Lord Montagu," added the heir of Fitzhugh.

"Meanwhile," said Robin of Redesdale, "the commons were oppressed, the
people discontented, the Woodvilles plundering its, and the king
wasting our substance on concubines and minions.  We have had cause
eno' for our rising!" The earl listened to each speaker in stern
silence.

"For all this," he said at last, "you have, without my leave or
sanction, levied armed men in my name, and would have made Richard
Nevile seem to Europe a traitor, without the courage to be a rebel!
Your lives are in my power, and those lives are forfeit to the laws."

"If we have incurred your disfavour from our over-zeal for you," said
the son of Lord Fitzhugh, touchingly, "take our lives, for they are of
little worth."  And the young nobleman unbuckled his sword, and laid
it on the table.

"But," resumed Warwick, not seeming to heed his nephew's humility, "I,
who have ever loved the people of England, and before king and
parliament have ever pleaded their cause,--I, as captain-general and
first officer of these realms, here declare, that whatever motives of
ambition or interest may have misled men of mark and birth, I believe
that the commons at least never rise in arms without some excuse for
their error.  Speak out then, you, their leaders; and, putting aside
all that relates to me as the one man, say what are the grievances of
which the many would complain."

And now there was silence, for the knights and gentlemen knew little
of the complaints of the populace; the Lollards did not dare to expose
their oppressed faith, and the squires and franklins were too
uneducated to detail the grievances they had felt.  But then the
immense superiority of the man of the people at once asserted itself;
and Hilyard, whose eye the earl had hitherto shunned, lifted his deep
voice.  With clear precision, in indignant but not declamatory
eloquence, he painted the disorders of the time,--the insolent
exactions of the hospitals and abbeys, the lawless violence of each
petty baron, the weakness of the royal authority in restraining
oppression, its terrible power in aiding the oppressor.  He
accumulated instance on instance of misrule; he showed the insecurity
of property, the adulteration of the coin, the burden of the imposts;
he spoke of wives and maidens violated, of industry defrauded, of
houses forcibly entered, of barns and granaries despoiled, of the
impunity of all offenders, if high-born, of the punishment of all
complaints, if poor and lowly.  "Tell us not," he said, "that this is
the necessary evil of the times, the hard condition of mankind.  It
was otherwise, Lord Warwick, when Edward first swayed; for you then
made yourself dear to the people by your justice.  Still men talk,
hereabouts, of the golden rule of Earl Warwick; but since you have
been, though great in office, powerless in deed, absent in Calais, or
idle at Middleham, England hath been but the plaything of the
Woodvilles, and the king's ears have been stuffed with flattery as
with wool.  And," continued Hilyard, warming with his subject, and, to
the surprise of the Lollards, entering boldly on their master-
grievance--"and this is not all.  When Edward ascended the throne,
there was, if not justice, at least repose, for the persecuted
believers who hold that God's word was given to man to read, study,
and digest into godly deeds.  I speak plainly.  I speak of that faith
which your great father Salisbury and many of the House of York were
believed to favour,--that faith which is called the Lollard, and the
oppression of which, more than aught else, lost to Lancaster the
hearts of England.  But of late, the Church, assuming the power it
ever grasps the most under the most licentious kings (for the sinner
prince hath ever the tyrant priest!), hath put in vigour old laws for
the wronging man's thought and conscience; [The Lollards had greatly
contributed to seat Edward on the throne; and much of the subsequent
discontent, no doubt, arose from their disappointment, when, as Sharon
Turner well expresses it, "his indolence allied him to the Church,"
and he became "hereticorum severissimus hostis."--CROYL., p. 564.] and
we sit at our doors under the shade, not of the vine-tree, but the
gibbet.  For all these things we have drawn the sword; and if now,
you, taking advantage of the love borne to you by the sons of England,
push that sword back into the sheath, you, generous, great, and
princely though you be, well deserve the fate that I foresee and can
foretell.  Yes!" cried the speaker, extending his arms, and gazing
fixedly on the proud face of the earl, which was not inexpressive of
emotion--"yes!  I see you, having deserted the people, deserted by
them also in your need; I see you, the dupe of an ungrateful king,
stripped of power and honour, an exile and an outlaw; and when you
call in vain upon the people, in whose hearts you now reign, remember,
O fallen star, son of the morning! that in the hour of their might you
struck down the people's right arm, and paralyzed their power.  And
now, if you will, let your friends and England's champions glut the
scaffolds of your woman-king!"

He ceased.  A murmur went round the conclave; every breast breathed
hard, every eye turned to Warwick.  That mighty statesman mastered the
effect which the thrilling voice of the popular pleader produced on
him; but at that moment he had need of all his frank and honourable
loyalty to remind him that he was there but to fulfil a promise and
discharge a trust,--that he was the king's delegate, not the king's
judge.

"You have spoken, bold men," said he, "as, in an hour when the rights
of princes are weighed in one scale, the subject's sword in the other,
I, were I king, would wish free men to speak.  And now you, Robert
Hilyard, and you, gentlemen, hear me, as envoy to King Edward IV.  To
all of you I promise complete amnesty and entire pardon.  His highness
believes you misled, not criminal, and your late deeds will not be
remembered in your future services.  So much for the leaders.  Now for
the commons.  My liege the king is pleased to recall me to the high
powers I once exercised, and to increase rather than to lessen them.
In his name, I pledge myself to full and strict inquiry into all the
grievances Robin of Redesdale hath set forth, with a view to speedy
and complete redress.  Nor is this all.  His highness, laying aside
his purpose of war with France, will have less need of impost on his
subjects, and the burdens and taxes will be reduced.  Lastly, his
grace, ever anxious to content his people, hath most benignly
empowered me to promise that, whether or not ye rightly judge the
queen's kindred, they will no longer have part or weight in the king's
councils.  The Duchess of Bedford, as beseems a lady so sorrowfully
widowed, will retire to her own home; and the Lord Scales will fulfil
a mission to the court of Spain.  Thus, then, assenting to all
reasonable demands, promising to heal all true grievances, proffering
you gracious pardon, I discharge my duty to king and to people.  I
pray that these unhappy sores may be healed evermore, under the
blessing of God and our patron saint; and in the name of Edward IV.,
Lord Suzerain of England and of France, I break up this truncheon and
disband this army!"

Among those present, this moderate and wise address produced a general
sensation of relief; for the earl's disavowal of the revolt took away
all hope of its success.  But the common approbation was not shared by
Hilyard.  He sprang upon the table, and, seizing the broken fragments
of the truncheon, which the earl had snapped as a willow twig,
exclaimed, "And thus, in the name of the people, I seize the command
that ye unworthily resign!  Oh, yes, what fools were yonder drudges of
the hard hand and the grimed brow and the leathern jerkin, to expect
succour from knight and noble!"

So saying, he bounded from the tent, and rushed towards the multitude
at the distance.

"Ye knights and lords, men of blood and birth, were but the tools of a
manlier and wiser Cade!" said Warwick, calmly.  "Follow me."

The earl strode from the tent, sprang upon his steed, and was in the
midst of the troops with his heralds by his side, ere Hilyard had been
enabled to begin the harangue he had intended.  Warwick's trumpets
sounded to silence; and the earl himself, in his loud clear voice,
briefly addressed the immense audience.  Master, scarcely less than
Hilyard, of the popular kind of eloquence, which--short, plain,
generous, and simple--cuts its way at once through the feelings to the
policy, Warwick briefly but forcibly recapitulated to the commons the
promises he had made to the captains; and as soon as they heard of
taxes removed, the coinage reformed, the corn thrave abolished, the
Woodvilles dismissed, and the earl recalled to power, the rebellion
was at an end.  They answered with a joyous shout his order to
disperse and retire to their homes forthwith.  But the indomitable
Hilyard, ascending a small eminence, began his counter-agitation.  The
earl saw his robust form and waving hand, he saw the crowd sway
towards him; and too well acquainted with mankind to suffer his
address, he spurred to the spot, and turning to Marmaduke, said, in a
loud voice, "Marmaduke Nevile, arrest that man in the king's name!"

Marmaduke sprang from his steed, and laid his hand on Hilyard's
shoulder.  Not one of the multitude stirred on behalf of their
demagogue.  As before the sun recede the stars, all lesser lights had
died in the blaze of Warwick's beloved name.  Hilyard griped his
dagger, and struggled an instant; but when he saw the awe and apathy
of the armed mob, a withering expression of disdain passed over his
hardy face.

"Do ye suffer this?" he said.  "Do ye suffer me, who have placed
swords in your hands, to go forth in bonds, and to the death?"

"The stout earl wrongs no man," said a single voice, and the populace
echoed the word.

"Sir, then, I care not for life, since liberty is gone.  I yield
myself your prisoner."

"A horse for my captive!" said Warwick, laughing; "and hear me promise
you, that he shall go unscathed in goods and in limbs.  God wot, when
Warwick and the people meet, no victim should be sacrificed!  Hurrah
for King Edward and fair England!"

He waved his plumed cap as he spoke, and within the walls of Olney was
heard the shout that answered.

Slowly the earl and his scanty troop turned the rein; as he receded,
the multitude broke up rapidly, and when the moon rose, that camp was
a solitude.  [The dispersion of the rebels at Olney is forcibly
narrated by a few sentences, graphic from their brief simplicity, in
the "Pictorial History of England," Book V, p. 104.  "They (Warwick,
etc.) repaired in a very friendly manner to Olney, where they found
Edward in a most unhappy condition; his friends were dead or
scattered, flying for their lives, or hiding themselves in remote
places: the insurgents were almost upon him.  A word from Warwick sent
the insurgents quietly back to the North."]

Such--for our nature is ever grander in the individual than the mass--
such is the power of man above mankind!




CHAPTER IV.

THE NORMAN EARL AND THE SAXON DEMAGOGUE CONFER.

On leaving the camp, Warwick rode in advance of his train, and his
countenance was serious and full of thought.  At length, as a turn in
the road hid the little band from the view of the rebels, the earl
motioned to Marmaduke to advance with his prisoner.  The young Nevile
then fell back, and Robin and Warwick rode breast to breast out of
hearing of the rest.

"Master Hilyard, I am well content that my brother, when you fell into
his hands, spared your life out of gratitude for the favour you once
showed to mine."

"Your noble brother, my lord," answered Robin, dryly, "is, perhaps,
not aware of the service I once rendered you.  Methinks he spared me
rather, because, without me, an enterprise which has shaken the
Woodvilles from their roots around the throne, and given back England
to the Neviles, had been nipped in the bud!--Your brother is a deep
thinker!"

"I grieve to hear thee speak thus of the Lord Montagu.  I know that he
hath wilier devices than become, in my eyes, a well-born knight and a
sincere man; but he loves his king, and his ends are juster than his
means.  Master Hilyard, enough of the past evil.  Some months after
the field of Hexham, I chanced to fall, when alone, amongst a band of
roving and fierce Lancastrian outlaws.  Thou, their leader,
recognizing the crest on my helm, and mindful of some slight
indulgence once shown to thy strange notions of republican liberty,
didst save me from the swords of thy followers: from that time I have
sought in vain to mend thy fortunes.  Thou hast rejected all mine
offers, and I know well that thou hast lent thy service to the fatal
cause of Lancaster.  Many a time I might have given thee to the law;
but gratitude for thy aid in the needful strait, and to speak sooth,
my disdain of all individual efforts to restore a fallen House, made
me turn my eyes from transgressions which, once made known to the
king, had placed thee beyond pardon.  I see now that thou art a man of
head and arm to bring great danger upon nations; and though this time
Warwick bids thee escape and live, if once more thou offend, know me
only as the king's minister.  The debt between us is now cancelled.
Yonder lies the path that conducts to the forest.  Farewell.  Yet
stay!--poverty may have led thee into treason?"

"Poverty," interrupted Hilyard,--"poverty, Lord Warwick, leads men to
sympathize with the poor, and therefore I have done with riches."  He
paused, and his breast heaved.  "Yet," he added sadly, "now that I
have seen the cowardice and ingratitude of men, my calling seems over,
and my spirit crushed."

"Alas!" said Warwick, "whether man be rich or poor, ingratitude is the
vice of men; and you, who have felt it from the mob, menace me with it
from the king.  But each must carve out his own way through this
earth, without over care for applause or blame; and the tomb is the
sole judge of mortal memory."

Robin looked hard at the earl's face, which was dark and gloomy, as he
thus spoke, and approaching nearer, he said, "Lord Warwick, I take
from you liberty and life the more willingly, because a voice I cannot
mistake tells me, and hath long told, that, sooner or later, time will
bind us to each other.  Unlike other nobles, you have owed your power
not so much to lordship, land, and birth, and a king's smile, as to
the love you have nobly won; you alone, true knight and princely
Christian,--you alone, in war, have spared the humble; you alone,
stalwart and resistless champion, have directed your lance against
your equals, and your order hath gone forth to the fierce of heart,
'Never smite the commons!'  In peace, you alone have stood up in your
haughty parliament for just law or for gentle mercy; your castle hath
had a board for the hungry and a shelter for the houseless; your
pride, which hath bearded kings and humbled upstarts, hath never had a
taunt for the lowly; and therefore I--son of the people--in the
people's name, bless you living, and sigh to ask whether a people's
gratitude will mourn you dead!  Beware Edward's false smile, beware
Clarence's fickle faith, beware Gloucester's inscrutable wile!  Mark,
the sun sets!--and while we speak, yon dark cloud gathers over your
plumed head."

He pointed to the heavens as he ceased, and a low roll of gathering
thunder seemed to answer his ominous warning.  Without tarrying for
the earl's answer, Hilyard shook the reins of his steed, and
disappeared in the winding of the lane through which be took his way.




CHAPTER V.

WHAT FAITH EDWARD IV. PURPOSETH TO KEEP WITH EARL AND PEOPLE.

Edward received his triumphant envoy with open arms and profuse
expressions of gratitude.  He exerted himself to the utmost in the
banquet that crowned the day, not only to conciliate the illustrious
new comers, but to remove from the minds of Raoul de Fulke and his
officers all memory of their past disaffection.  No gift is rarer or
more successful in the intrigues of life than that which Edward
eminently possessed,--namely, the hypocrisy of frankness.
Dissimulation is often humble, often polished, often grave, sleek,
smooth, decorous; but it is rarely gay and jovial, a hearty laughter,
a merry, cordial, boon companion.  Such, however, was the felicitous
craft of Edward IV.; and, indeed, his spirits were naturally so high,
his good humour so flowing, that this joyous hypocrisy cost him no
effort.  Elated at the dispersion of his foes, at the prospect of his
return to his ordinary life of pleasure, there was something so kindly
and so winning in his mirth, that he subjugated entirely the fiery
temper of Raoul de Fulke and the steadier suspicions of the more
thoughtful St. John.  Clarence, wholly reconciled to Edward, gazed on
him with eyes swimming with affection, and soon drank himself into
uproarious joviality.  The archbishop, more reserved, still animated
the society by the dry and epigrammatic wit not uncommon to his
learned and subtle mind.  But Warwick in vain endeavoured to shake off
an uneasy, ominous gloom.  He was not satisfied with Edward's
avoidance of discussion upon the grave matters involved in the earl's
promise to the insurgents, and his masculine spirit regarded with some
disdain, and more suspicion, a levity that he considered ill-suited to
the emergence.

The banquet was over, and Edward, having dismissed his other
attendants, was in his chamber with Lord Hastings, whose office always
admitted him to the wardrobe of the king.

Edward's smile had now left his lip; he paced the room with a hasty
stride, and then suddenly opening the casement, pointed to the
landscape without, which lay calm and suffused in moonlight.

"Hastings," said he, abruptly, "a few hours since and the earth grew
spears!  Behold the landscape now!"

"So vanish all the king's enemies!"

"Ay, man, ay,--if at the king's word, or before the king's battle-axe;
but at a subject's command--No, I am not a king while another scatters
armies in my realm at his bare will.  'Fore Heaven, this shall not
last!"

Hastings regarded the countenance of Edward, changed from affable
beauty into terrible fierceness, with reflections suggested by his
profound and mournful wisdom.  "How little a man's virtues profit him
in the eyes of men!" thought he.  "The subject saves the crown, and
the crown's wearer never pardons the presumption!"

"You do not speak, sir!" exclaimed Edward, irritated and impatient.
"Why gaze you thus on me?"

"Beau sire," returned the favourite, calmly, "I was seeking to
discover if your pride spoke, or your nobler nature."

"Tush!" said the king, petulantly, "the noblest part of a king's
nature is his pride as king!" Again he strode the chamber, and again
halted.  "But the earl hath fallen into his own snare,--he hath
promised in my name what I will not perform.  Let the people learn
that their idol hath deceived them.  He asks me to dismiss from the
court the queen's mother and kindred!"

Hastings, who in this went thoroughly with the earl and the popular
feeling, and whose only enemies in England were the Woodvilles,
replied simply,--

"These are cheap terms, sire, for a king's life and the crown of
England."

Edward started, and his eyes flashed that cold, cruel fire, which
makes eyes of a light colouring so far more expressive of terrible
passions than the quicker and warmer heat of dark orbs.  "Think you
so, sir?  By God's blood, he who proffered them shall repent it in
every vein of his body!  Hark ye, William Hastings de Hastings, I know
you to be a deep and ambitious man; but better for you had you covered
that learned brain under the cowl of a mendicant friar than lent one
thought to the counsels of the Earl of Warwick."

Hastings, who felt even to fondness the affection which Edward
generally inspired in those about his person, and who, far from
sympathizing, except in hate of the Woodvilles, with the earl, saw
that beneath that mighty tree no new plants could push into their
fullest foliage, reddened with anger at this imperious menace.

"My liege," said he, with becoming dignity and spirit, "if you can
thus address your most tried confidant and your lealest friend, your
most dangerous enemy is yourself."

"Stay, man," said the king, softening.  "I was over warm, but the wild
beast within me is chafed.  Would Gloucester were here!"

"I can tell you what would be the counsels of that wise young prince,
for I know his mind," answered Hastings.

"Ay, he and you love each other well.  Speak out."

"Prince Richard is a great reader of Italian lere.  He saith that
those small States are treasuries of all experience.  From that lere
Prince Richard would say to you, 'Where a subject is so great as to be
feared, and too much beloved to be destroyed, the king must remember
how Tarpeia was crushed."

"I remember naught of Tarpeia, and I detest parables."

"Tarpeia, sire (it is a story of old Rome), was crushed under the
weight of presents.  Oh, my liege," continued Hastings, warming with
that interest which an able man feels in his own superior art, "were I
king for a year, by the end of it Warwick should be the most unpopular
(and therefore the weakest) lord in England!"

"And how, O wise in thine own conceit?"

"Beau sire," resumed Hastings, not heeding the rebuke--and strangely
enough he proceeded to point out, as the means of destroying the
earl's influence, the very method that the archbishop had detailed to
Montagu as that which would make the influence irresistible and
permanent--"Beau sire," resumed Hastings, "Lord Warwick is beloved by
the people, because they consider him maltreated; he is esteemed by
the people, because they consider him above all bribe; he is venerated
by the people, because they believe that in all their complaints and
struggles he is independent (he alone) of the king.  Instead of love,
I would raise envy; for instead of cold countenance I would heap him
with grace.  Instead of esteem and veneration I would raise suspicion;
for I would so knit him to your House, that he could not stir hand or
foot against you; I would make his heirs your brothers.  The Duke of
Clarence hath married one daughter,--wed the other to Lord Richard.
Betroth your young princess to Montagu's son, the representative of
all the Neviles.  The earl's immense possessions must thus ultimately
pass to your own kindred.  The earl himself will be no longer a power
apart from the throne, but a part of it.  The barons will chafe
against one who half ceases to be of their order, and yet monopolizes
their dignities; the people will no longer see in the earl their
champion, but a king's favourite and deputy.  Neither barons nor
people will flock to his banner."

"All this is well and wise," said Edward, musing; "but meanwhile my
queen's blood?  Am I to reign in a solitude?--for look you, Hastings,
you know well that, uxorious as fools have deemed me, I had purpose
and design in the elevation of new families; I wished to raise a fresh
nobility to counteract the pride of the old, and only upon new nobles
can a new dynasty rely."

"My Lord, I will not anger you again; but still, for a while, the
queen's relations will do well to retire."

"Good night, Hastings," interrupted Edward, abruptly, "my pillow in
this shall be my counsellor."

Whatever the purpose solitude and reflection might ripen in the king's
mind, he was saved from immediate decision by news, the next morning,
of fresh outbreaks.  The commons had risen in Lincolnshire and the
county of Warwick; and Anthony Woodville wrote word that, if the king
would but show himself among the forces he had raised near Coventry,
all the gentry around would rise against the rebellious rabble.
Seizing advantage of these tidings, borne to him by his own couriers,
and eager to escape from the uncertain soldiery quartered at Olney,
Edward, without waiting to consult even with the earl, sprang to
horse, and his trumpets were the first signal of departure that he
deigned to any one.

This want of ceremony displeased the pride of Warwick; but he made no
complaint, and took his place by the king's side, when Edward said
shortly,--

"Dear cousin, this is a time that needs all our energies.  I ride
towards Coventry, to give head and heart to the raw recruits I shall
find there; but I pray you and the archbishop to use all means, in
this immediate district, to raise fresh troops; for at your name armed
men spring up from pasture and glebe, dyke and hedge.  Join what
troops you can collect in three days with mine at Coventry, and, ere
the sickle is in the harvest, England shall be at peace.  God speed
you!  Ho! there, gentlemen, away!--a franc etrier!"

Without pausing for reply,--for he wished to avoid all questioning,
lest Warwick might discover that it was to a Woodville that he was
bound,--the king put spurs to his horse, and, while his men were yet
hurrying to and fro, rode on almost alone, and was a good mile out of
the town before the force led by St. John and Raoul de Fulke, and
followed by Hastings, who held no command, overtook him.

"I misthink the king," said Warwick, gloomily; "but my word is pledged
to the people, and it shall be kept."

"A man's word is best kept when his arm is the strongest," said the
sententious archbishop; "yesterday, you dispersed an army; to-day,
raise one!"

Warwick answered not, but, after a moment's thought, beckoned to
Marmaduke.

"Kinsman," said he, "spur on, with ten of my little company, to join
the king.  Report to me if any of the Woodvilles be in his camp near
Coventry."

"Whither shall I send the report?"

"To my castle of Warwick."

Marmaduke bowed his head, and, accustomed to the brevity of the earl's
speech, proceeded to the task enjoined him.  Warwick next summoned his
second squire.

"My lady and her children," said he, "are on their way to Middleham.
This paper will instruct you of their progress.  Join them with all
the rest of my troop, except my heralds and trumpeters; and say that I
shall meet them ere long at Middleham."

"It is a strange way to raise an army," said the archbishop, dryly,
"to begin by getting rid of all the force one possesses!"

"Brother," answered the earl, "I would fain show my son-in-law, who
may be the father of a line of kings, that a general may be helpless
at the head of thousands, but that a man may stand alone who has the
love of a nation."

"May Clarence profit by the lesson!  Where is he all this while?"

"Abed," said the stout earl, with a slight accent of disdain; and
then, in a softer voice, he added, "youth is ever luxurious.  Better
the slow man than the false one."

Leaving Warwick to discharge the duty enjoined him, we follow the
dissimulating king.




CHAPTER VI.

WHAT BEFALLS KING EDWARD ON HIS ESCAPE FROM OLNEY.

As soon as Edward was out of sight of the spire of Olney, he slackened
his speed, and beckoned Hastings to his side.

"Dear Will," said the king, "I have thought over thy counsel, and will
find the occasion to make experiment thereof.  But, methinks, thou
wilt agree with me that concessions come best from a king who has an
army of his own.  'Fore Heaven, in the camp of a Warwick I have less
power than a lieutenant!  Now mark me.  I go to head some recruits
raised in haste near Coventry.  The scene of contest must be in the
northern counties.  Wilt thou, for love of me, ride night and day,
thorough brake, thorough briar, to Gloucester on the Borders?  Bid him
march, if the Scot will let him, back to York; and if he cannot
himself quit the Borders, let him send what men can be spared under
thy banner.  Failing this, raise through Yorkshire all the men-at-arms
thou canst collect.  But, above all, see Montagu.  Him and his army
secure at all hazards.  If he demur, tell him his son shall marry his
king's daughter, and wear the coronal of a duke.  Ha, ha! a large bait
for so large a fish!  I see this is no casual outbreak, but a general
convulsion of the realm; and the Earl of Warwick must not be the only
man to smile or to frown back the angry elements."

"In this, beau sire," answered Hastings, "you speak as a king and a
warrior should, and I will do my best to assert your royal motto,--
'Modus et ordo.'  If I can but promise that your Highness has for a
while dismissed the Woodville lords, rely upon it that ere two months
I will place under your truncheon an army worthy of the liege lord of
hardy England."

"Go, dear Hastings, I trust all to thee!" answered the king.  The
nobleman kissed his sovereign's extended hand, closed his visor, and,
motioning to his body-squire to follow him, disappeared down a green
lane, avoiding such broader thoroughfares as might bring him in
contact with the officers left at Olney.

In a small village near Coventry Sir Anthony Woodville had collected
about two thousand men, chiefly composed of the tenants and vassals of
the new nobility, who regarded the brilliant Anthony as their head.
The leaders were gallant and ambitious gentlemen, as they who arrive
at fortunes above their birth mostly are; but their vassals were
little to be trusted.  For in that day clanship was still strong, and
these followers had been bred in allegiance to Lancastrian lords,
whose confiscated estates were granted to the Yorkist favourites.  The
shout that welcomed the arrival of the king was therefore feeble and
lukewarm; and, disconcerted by so chilling a reception, he dismounted,
in less elevated spirits than those in which he had left Olney, at the
pavilion of his brother-in-law.

The mourning-dress of Anthony, his countenance saddened by the
barbarous execution of his father and brother, did not tend to cheer
the king.

But Woodville's account of the queen's grief and horror at the
afflictions of her House, and of Jacquetta's indignation at the foul
language which the report of her practices put into the popular mouth,
served to endear to the king's mind the family that he considered
unduly persecuted.  Even in the coldest breasts affection is fanned by
opposition, and the more the queen's kindred were assailed, the more
obstinately Edward clung to them.  By suiting his humour, by winking
at his gallantries, by a submissive sweetness of temper, which soothed
his own hasty moods, and contrasted with the rough pride of Warwick
and the peevish fickleness of Clarence, Elizabeth had completely wound
herself into the king's heart.  And the charming graces, the elegant
accomplishments, of Anthony Woodville were too harmonious with the
character of Edward, who in all--except truth and honour--was the
perfect model of the gay gentilhomme of the time, not to have become
almost a necessary companionship.  Indolent natures may be easily
ruled, but they grow stubborn when their comforts and habits are
interfered with.  And the whole current of Edward's merry, easy life
seemed to him to lose flow and sparkle if the faces he loved best were
banished, or even clouded.

He was yet conversing with Woodville, and yet assuring him that,
however he might temporize, he would never abandon the interests of
his queen's kindred, when a gentleman entered aghast, to report that
the Lords St. John and de Fulke, on hearing that Sir Anthony Woodville
was in command of the forces, had, without even dismounting, left the
camp, and carried with them their retainers, amounting to more than
half of the little troop that rode from Olney.

"Let them go," said Edward, frowning; "a day shall dawn upon their
headless trunks!"

"Oh, my king," said Anthony, now Earl of Rivers,--who, by far the
least selfish of his House, was struck with remorse at the penalty
Edward paid for his love marriage,--"now that your Highness can
relieve me of my command, let me retire from the camp.  I would fain
go a pilgrim to the shrine of Compostella to pray for my father's sins
and my sovereign's weal."

"Let us first see what forces arrive from London," answered the king.
"Richard ere long will be on the march from the frontiers, and
whatever Warwick resolves, Montagu, whose heart I hold in my hand,
will bring his army to my side.  Let us wait."

But the next day brought no reinforcements, nor the next; and the king
retired betimes to his tent, in much irritation and perplexity; when
at the dead of the night he was startled from slumber by the tramp of
horses, the sound of horns, the challenge of the sentinels, and, as he
sprang from his couch, and hurried on his armour in alarm, the Earl of
Warwick abruptly entered.  The earl's face was stern, but calm and
sad; and Edward's brave heart beat loud as he gazed on his formidable
subject.

"King Edward," said Warwick, slowly and mournfully, "you have deceived
me!  I promised to the commons the banishment of the Woodvilles, and
to a Woodville you have flown."

"Your promise was given to rebels, with whom no faith can be held; and
I passed from a den of mutiny to the camp of a loyal soldier."

"We will not now waste words, king," answered Warwick.  "Please you to
mount and ride northward.  The Scotch have gained great advantages on
the marches.  The Duke of Gloucester is driven backwards.  All the
Lancastrians in the North have risen.  Margaret of Anjou is on the
coast of Normandy, [at this time Margaret was at Harfleur--Will. Wyre]
ready to set sail at the first decisive victory of her adherents."

"I am with you," answered Edward; "and I rejoice to think that at last
I may meet a foe.  Hitherto it seems as if I had been chased by
shadows.  Now may I hope to grasp the form and substance of danger and
of battle."

"A steed prepared for your Grace awaits you."

"Whither ride we first?"

"To my castle of Warwick, hard by.  At noon to-morrow all will be
ready for our northward march."

Edward, by this time having armed himself, strode from the tent into
the open air.  The scene was striking: the moon was extremely bright
and the sky serene, but around the tent stood a troop of torch-
bearers, and the red glare shone luridly upon the steel of the serried
horsemen and the banners of the earl, in which the grim white bear was
wrought upon an ebon ground, quartered with the dun bull, and crested
in gold with the eagle of the Monthermers.  Far as the king's eye
could reach, he saw but the spears of Warwick; while a confused hum in
his own encampment told that the troops Anthony Woodville had
collected were not yet marshalled into order.  Edward drew back.

"And the Lord Anthony of Scales and Rivers?" said he, hesitatingly.

"Choose, king, between the Lord Anthony of Scales and Rivers and
Richard Nevile!" answered Warwick, in a stern whisper.

Edward paused, and at that moment Anthony himself emerged from his
tent (which adjoined the king's) in company with the Archbishop of
York, who had rode thither in Warwick's train.

"My liege," said that gallant knight, putting his knee to the ground,
"I have heard from the archbishop the new perils that await your
Highness, and I grieve sorely that, in this strait, your councillors
deem it meet to forbid me the glory of fighting or falling by your
side!  I know too well the unhappy odium attached to my House and name
in the northern parts, to dispute the policy which ordains my absence
from your armies.  Till these feuds are over, I crave your royal leave
to quit England, and perform my pilgrimage to the sainted shrine of
Compostella."

A burning flush passed over the king's face as he raised his brother-
in-law, and clasped him to his bosom.

"Go or stay, as you will, Anthony!" said he; "but let these proud men
know that neither time nor absence can tear you from your king's
heart.  But envy must have its hour Lord Warwick, I attend you; but it
seems rather as your prisoner than your liege."

Warwick made no answer: the king mounted, and waved his hand to
Anthony.  The torches tossed to and fro, the horns sounded, and in a
silence moody and resentful on either part Edward and his terrible
subject rode on to the towers of Warwick.

The next day the king beheld with astonishment the immense force that,
in a time so brief, the earl had collected round his standard.

From his casement, which commanded that lovely slope on which so many
a tourist now gazes with an eye that seeks to call back the stormy and
chivalric past, Edward beheld the earl on his renowned black charger,
reviewing the thousands that, file on file and rank on rank, lifted
pike and lance in the cloudless sun.

"After all," muttered the king, "I can never make a new noble a great
baron!  And if in peace a great baron overshadows the throne, in time
of war a great baron is a throne's bulwark!  Gramercy, I had been mad
to cast away such an army,--an army fit for a king to lead!  They
serve Warwick now; but Warwick is less skilful in the martial art than
I, and soldiers, like hounds, love best the most dexterous huntsman!"




CHAPTER VII.

HOW KING EDWARD ARRIVES AT THE CASTLE OF MIDDLEHAM.

On the ramparts of feudal Middleham, in the same place where Anne had
confessed to Isabel the romance of her childish love, again the
sisters stood, awaiting the coming of their father and the king.  They
had only, with their mother, reached Middleham two days before, and
the preceding night an advanced guard had arrived at the castle to
announce the approach of the earl with his royal comrade and visitor.
From the heights, already they beheld the long array winding in
glorious order towards the mighty pile.

"Look!" exclaimed Isabel, "look! already methinks I see the white
steed of Clarence.  Yes! it is he! it is my George, my husband!  The
banner borne before shows his device."

"Ah, happy Isabel!" said Anne, sighing; "what rapture to await the
coming of him one loves!"

"My sweet Anne," returned Isabel, passing her arm tenderly round her
sister's slender waist, "when thou hast conquered the vain folly of
thy childhood, thou wilt find a Clarence of thine own.  And yet,"
added the young duchess, smiling, "it must be the opposite of a
Clarence to be to thy heart what a Clarence is to mine.  I love
George's gay humour,--thou lovest a melancholy brow.  I love that
charming weakness which supples to my woman will,--thou lovest a proud
nature that may command thine own.  I do not respect George less,
because I know my mind stronger than his own; but thou (like my gentle
mother) wouldst have thy mate lord and chief in all things, and live
from his life as the shadow from the sun.  But where left you our
mother?"

"In the oratory, at prayer."

"She has been sad of late."

"The dark times darken her; and she ever fears the king's falseness or
caprice will stir the earl up to some rash emprise.  My father's
letter, brought last night to her, contains something that made her
couch sleepless."

"Ha!" exclaimed the duchess, eagerly, "my mother confides in thee more
than me.  Saw you the letter?"

"No."

"Edward will make himself unfit to reign," said Isabel, abruptly.
"The barons will call on him to resign; and then--and then, Anne--
sister Anne,--Warwick's daughters cannot be born to be simple
subjects!"

"Isabel, God temper your ambition!  Oh, curb it, crush it down!  Abuse
not your influence with Clarence.  Let not the brother aspire to the
brother's crown."

"Sister, a king's diadem covers all the sins schemed in the head that
wins it!"

As the duchess spoke, her eyes flashed and her form dilated.  Her
beauty seemed almost terrible.

The gentle Anne gazed and shuddered; but ere she found words to
rebuke, the lovely shape of the countess-mother was seen moving slowly
towards them.  She was dressed in her robes of state to receive her
kingly guest; the vest fitting high to the throat, where it joined the
ermine tippet, and thickly sown with jewels; the sleeves tight, with
the second or over sleeves, that, loose and large, hung pendent and
sweeping even to the ground; and the gown, velvet of cramousin,
trimmed with ermine,--made a costume not less graceful than
magnificent, and which, where compressed, set off the exquisite
symmetry of a form still youthful, and where flowing added majesty to
a beauty naturally rather soft and feminine than proud and stately.
As she approached her children, she looked rather like their sister
than their mother, as if Time, at least, shrunk from visiting harshly
one for whom such sorrows were reserved.

The face of the countess was so sad in its aspect of calm and sweet
resignation that even the proud Isabel was touched; and kissing her
mother's hand, she asked if any ill tidings preceded her father's
coming.

"Alas, my Isabel, the times themselves are bad tidings!  Your youth
scarcely remembers the days when brother fought against brother, and
the son's sword rose against the father's breast. But I, recalling
them, tremble to hear the faintest murmur that threatens a civil war."
She paused, and forcing a smile to her lips, added, "Our woman fears
must not, however, sadden our lords with an unwelcome countenance; for
men returning to their hearths have a right to a wife's smile; and so,
Isabel, thou and I, wives both, must forget the morrow in to-day.
Hark! the trumpets sound near and nearer! let us to the hall."

Before, however, they had reached the castle, a shrill blast rang at
the outer gate.  The portcullis was raised; the young Duke of
Clarence, with a bridegroom's impatience, spurred alone through the
gloomy arch, and Isabel, catching sight of his countenance lifted
towards the ramparts, uttered a cry, and waved her hand.  Clarence
beard and saw, leaped from his steed, and had clasped Isabel to his
breast, almost before Anne or the countess had recognized the new
comer.

Isabel, however, always stately, recovered in an instant from the joy
she felt at her lord's return, and gently escaping his embrace, she
glanced with a blush towards the battlements crowded with retainers;
Clarence caught and interpreted the look.

"Well, belle mere," he said, turning to the countess, "and if yon
faithful followers do witness with what glee a fair bride inspires a
returning bridegroom, is there cause for shame in this cheek of
damascene?"

"Is the king still with my father?" asked Isabel, hastily, and
interrupting the countess's reply.

"Surely, yes; and hard at hand.  And pardon me that I forgot, dear
lady, to say that my royal brother has announced his intention of
addressing the principal officers of the army in Middleham Hall.  This
news gave me fair excuse for hastening to you and Isabel."

"All is prepared for his highness," said the countess, "save our own
homage.  We must quicken our steps; come, Anne."  The countess took
the arm of the younger sister, while the duchess made a sign to
Clarence.  He lingered behind, and Isabel, drawing him aside, asked,

"Is my father reconciled to Edward?"

"No,--nor Edward to him."

"Good!  The king has no soldiers of his own amidst yon armed train?"

"Save a few of Anthony Woodville's recruits, none.  Raoul de Fulke and
St. John have retired to their towers in sullen dudgeon.  But have you
no softer questions for my return, bella mia?"

"Pardon me, many--my king."

"King!"

"What other name should the successor of Edward IV. bear?"

"Isabel," said Clarence, in great emotion, "what is it you would tempt
me to?  Edward IV. spares the life of Henry VI., and shall Edward
IV.'s brother conspire against his own?"

"Saints forefend!" exclaimed Isabel; "can you so wrong my honest
meaning?  O George! can you conceive that your wife--Warwick's
daughter--harbours the thought of murder?  No! surely the career
before you seems plain and spotless!  Can Edward reign?  Deserted by
the barons, and wearing away even my father's long-credulous love;
odious! except in luxurious and unwarlike London, to all the commons--
how reign?  What other choice left? none,--save Henry of Lancaster or
George of York."

"Were it so!" said the weak duke; and yet be added falteringly,
"believe me, Warwick meditates no such changes in my favour."

"Time is a rapid ripener," answered Isabel; "but hark! they are
lowering the drawbridge for our guests."




CHAPTER VIII.

THE ANCIENTS RIGHTLY GAVE TO THE GODDESS OF ELOQUENCE A CROWN.

The lady of Warwick stood at the threshold of the porch, which, in the
inner side of the broad quadrangle, admitted to the apartments used by
the family; and, heading the mighty train that, line after line,
emerged through the grim jaws of the arch, came the earl on his black
destrier, and the young king.

Even where she stood, the anxious chatelaine beheld the moody and
gloomy air with which Edward glanced around the strong walls of the
fortress, and up to the battlements that bristled with the pikes and
sallets of armed men, who looked on the pomp below, in the silence of
military discipline.

"Oh, Anne!" she whispered to her youngest daughter, who stood beside
her, "what are women worth in the strife of men?  Would that our
smiles could heal the wounds which a taunt can make in a proud man's
heart!"

Anne, affected and interested by her mother's words, and with a secret
curiosity to gaze upon the man who ruled on the throne of the prince
she loved, came nearer and more in front; and suddenly, as he turned
his head, the king's regard rested upon her intent eyes and blooming
face.

"Who is that fair donzell, cousin of Warwick?" he asked.

"My daughter, sire."

"Ah, your youngest!--I have not seen her since she was a child."

Edward reined in his charger, and the earl threw himself from his
selle, and held the king's stirrup to dismount.  But he did so with a
haughty and unsmiling visage.  "I would be the first, sire," said he,
with a slight emphasis, and as if excusing to himself his
condescension, "to welcome to Middleham the son of Duke Richard."

"And your suzerain, my lord earl," added Edward, with no less proud a
meaning, and leaning his hand lightly on Warwick's shoulder, he
dismounted slowly.  "Rise, lady," he said, raising the countess, who
knelt at the porch, "and you too, fair demoiselle.  Pardieu, we envy
the knee that hath knelt to you."  So saying, with royal graciousness,
he took the countess's hand, and they entered the hall as the
musicians, in the gallery raised above, rolled forth their stormy
welcome.

The archbishop, who had followed close to Warwick and the king,
whispered now to his brother,

"Why would Edward address the captains?"

"I know not."

"He hath made himself familiar with many in the march."

"Familiarity with a steel casque better becomes a king than waisall
with a greasy flat-cap."

"You do not fear lest he seduce from the White Bear its retainers?"

"As well fear that he can call the stars from their courses around the
sun."

While these words were interchanged, the countess conducted the king
to a throne-chair raised upon the dais, by the side of which were
placed two seats of state, and, from the dais, at the same time,
advanced the Duke and Duchess of Clarence.  The king prevented their
kneeling, and kissed Isabel slightly and gravely on the forehead.
"Thus, noble lady, I greet the entrance of the Duchess of Clarence
into the royalty of England."

Without pausing for reply, he passed on and seated himself on the
throne, while Isabel and her husband took possession of the state
chairs on either hand.  At a gesture of the king's the countess and
Anne placed themselves on seats less raised, but still upon the dais.
But now as Edward sat, the hall grew gradually full of lords and
knights who commanded in Warwick's train, while the earl and the
archbishop stood mute in the centre, the one armed cap-a-pie, leaning
on his sword, the other with his arms folded in his long robes.

The king's eye, clear, steady, and majestic, roved round that martial
audience, worthy to be a monarch's war-council, and not one of whom
marched under a monarch's banner!  Their silence, their discipline,
the splendour of their arms, the greater splendour of their noble
names, contrasted painfully with the little mutinous camp of Olney,
and the surly, untried recruits of Anthony Woodville.  But Edward,
whose step, whose form, whose aspect, proclaimed the man conscious of
his rights to be lord of all, betrayed not to those around him the
kingly pride, the lofty grief, that swelled within his heart.  Still
seated, he raised his left hand to command silence; with the right he
replaced his plumed cap upon his brow.

"Lords and gentlemen," he said (arrogating to himself at once, as a
thing of course, that gorgeous following), "we have craved leave of
our host to address to you some words,--words which it pleases a king
to utter, and which may not be harsh to the ears of a loyal subject.
Nor will we, at this great current of unsteady fortune, make excuse,
noble ladies, to you, that we speak of war to knighthood, which is
ever the sworn defender of the daughter and the wife,--the daughters
and the wife of our cousin Warwick have too much of hero-blood in
their blue veins to grow pale at the sight of heroes.  Comrades in
arms! thus far towards our foe upon the frontier we have marched,
without a sword drawn or an arrow launched from an archer's bow.  We
believe that a blessing settles on the head of a true king, and that
the trumpet of a good angel goes before his path, announcing the
victory which awaits him.  Here, in the hall of the Earl of Warwick,
our captain-general, we thank you for your cheerful countenance and
your loyal service; and here, as befits a king, we promise to you
those honours a king alone worthily can bestow."  He paused, and his
keen eye glanced from chief to chief as he resumed: "We are informed
that certain misguided and traitor lords have joined the Rose of
Lancaster.  Whoever so doth is attainted, life and line, evermore!
His lands and dignities are forfeit to enrich and to ennoble the men
who strike for me.  Heaven grant I may have foes eno' to reward all my
friends!  To every baron who owns Edward IV. king (ay, and not king in
name, king in banquet and in bower, but leader and captain in the
war), I trust to give a new barony, to every knight a new knight's
fee, to every yeoman a hyde of land, to every soldier a year's pay.
What more I can do, let it be free for any one to suggest,--for my
domains of York are broad, and my heart is larger still!"

A murmur of applause and reverence went round.  Vowed, as those
warriors were, to the earl, they felt that A MONARCH was amongst them.

"What say you, then?  We are ripe for glory.  Three days will we halt
at Middleham, guest to our noble subject."

"Three days, sire!" repeated Warwick, in a voice of surprise.

"Yes; and this, fair cousin, and ye, lords and gentlemen, is my reason
for the delay.  I have despatched Sir William, Lord de Hastings, to
the Duke of Gloucester, with command to join us here (the archbishop
started, but instantly resumed his earnest, placid aspect); to the
Lord Montagu, Earl of Northumberland, to muster all the vassals of our
shire of York.  As three streams that dash into the ocean, shall our
triple army meet and rush to the war.  Not even, gentlemen, not even
to the great Earl of Warwick will Edward IV. be so beholden for
roiaulme and renown, as to march but a companion to the conquest. If
ye were raised in Warwick's name, not mine,--why, be it so!  I envy
him such friends; but I will have an army of mine own, to show mine
English soldiery how a Plantagenet battles for his crown.  Gentlemen,
ye are dismissed to your repose.  In three days we march! and if any
of you know in these fair realms the man, be he of York or of
Lancaster, more fit to command brave subjects than he who now
addresses you, I say to that man, turn rein, and leave us!  Let
tyrants and cowards enforce reluctant service,--my crown was won by
the hearts of my people!  Girded by those hearts, let me reign, or,
mourned by them, let me fall!  So God and Saint George favour me as I
speak the truth!"

And as the king ceased, he uncovered his head, and kissed the cross of
his sword.  A thrill went through the audience.  Many were there,
disaffected to his person, and whom Warwick's influence alone could
have roused to arms; but at the close of an address spirited and loyal
in itself, and borrowing thousand-fold effect by the voice and mien of
the speaker, no feeling but that of enthusiastic loyalty, of almost
tearful admiration, was left in those steel-clad breasts.

As the king lifted on high the cross of his sword, every blade leaped
from its scabbard, and glittered in the air; and the dusty banners in
the hall waved, as to a mighty blast, when, amidst the rattle of
armour, burst forth the universal cry, "Long live Edward IV.!  Long
live the king!"

The sweet countess, even amidst the excitement, kept her eyes
anxiously fixed on Warwick, whose countenance, however shaded by the
black plumes of his casque, though the visor was raised, revealed
nothing of his mind.  Her daughters were more powerfully affected; for
Isabel's intellect was not so blinded by her ambition but that the
kingliness of Edward forced itself upon her with a might and solemn
weight, which crushed, for the moment, her aspiring hopes.

Was this the man unfit to reign?  This the man voluntarily to resign a
crown?  This the man whom George of Clarence, without fratricide,
could succeed?  No!--there spoke the soul of the First and the Third
Edward!  There shook the mane and there glowed the eye of the
indomitable lion of the august Plantagenets!  And the same conviction,
rousing softer and holier sorrow, sat on the heart of Anne; she saw,
as for the first time, clearly before her the awful foe with whom her
ill-omened and beloved prince had to struggle for his throne.  In
contrast beside that form, in the prime of manly youth--a giant in its
strength, a god in its beauty--rose the delicate shape of the
melancholy boy who, afar in exile, coupled in his dreams, the sceptre
and the bride!  By one of those mysteries which magnetism seeks to
explain, in the strong intensity of her emotions, in the tremor of her
shaken nerves, fear seemed to grow prophetic.  A stream as of blood
rose up from the dizzy floors.  The image of her young prince, bound
and friendless, stood before the throne of that warrior-king.  In the
waving glitter of the countless swords raised on high, she saw the
murderous blade against the boy-heir of Lancaster descend--descend!
Her passion, her terror, at the spectre which fancy thus evoked,
seized and overcame her; and ere the last hurrah sent its hollow echo
to the raftered roof, she sank from her chair to the ground, hueless
and insensible as the dead.

The king had not without design permitted the unwonted presence of the
women in this warlike audience,--partly because he was not unaware of
the ambitious spirit of Isabel, partly because he counted on the
affection shown to his boyhood by the countess, who was said to have
singular influence over her lord, but principally because in such a
presence he trusted to avoid all discussion and all questioning, and
to leave the effect of his eloquence, in which he excelled all his
contemporaries, Gloucester alone excepted, single and unimpaired; and
therefore, as he rose, and returned with a majestic bend the
acclamation of the warriors, his eye now turned towards the chairs
where the ladies sat, and he was the first to perceive the swoon of
the fair Anne.

With the tender grace that always characterized his service to women,
he descended promptly from his throne, and raised the lifeless form in
his stalwart arms; and Anne, as he bent over her, looked so strangely
lovely in her marble stillness, that even in that hour a sudden thrill
shot through a heart always susceptible to beauty as the harp-string
to the breeze.

"It is but the heat, lady," said he, to the alarmed countess, "and let
me hope that interest which my fair kinswoman may take in the fortunes
of Warwick and of York, hitherto linked together--"

"May they ever be so!" said Warwick, who, on seeing his daughter's
state, had advanced hastily to the dais; and, moved by the king's
words, his late speech, the evils that surrounded his throne, the
gentleness shown to the beloved Anne, forgetting resentment and
ceremony alike, he held out his mailed hand.  The king, as he resigned
Anne to her mother's arms, grasped with soldierly frankness, and with
the ready wit of the cold intellect which reigned beneath the warm
manner, the hand thus extended, and holding still that iron gauntlet
in his own ungloved and jewelled fingers, he advanced to the verge of
the dais, to which, in the confusion occasioned by Anne's swoon, the
principal officers had crowded, and cried aloud,--

"Behold!  Warwick and Edward thus hand in hand, as they stood when the
clarions sounded the charge at Towton! and that link what swords
forged on a mortal's anvil can rend or sever?"

In an instant every knee there knelt; and Edward exultingly beheld
that what before had been allegiance to the earl was now only homage
to the king.




CHAPTER IX.

WEDDED CONFIDENCE AND LOVE--THE EARL AND THE PRELATE--THE PRELATE AND
THE KING--SCHEMES--WILES--AND THE BIRTH OF A DARK THOUGHT DESTINED TO
ECLIPSE A SUN.

While, preparatory to the banquet, Edward, as was then the daily
classic custom, relaxed his fatigues, mental or bodily, in the
hospitable bath, the archbishop sought the closet of the earl.

"Brother," said he, throwing himself with some petulance into the only
chair the room, otherwise splendid, contained, "when you left me to
seek Edward in the camp of Anthony Woodville, what was the
understanding between us?"

"I know of none," answered the earl, who having doffed his armour, and
dismissed his squires, leaned thoughtfully against the wall, dressed
for the banquet, with the exception of the short surcoat, which lay
glittering on the tabouret.

"You know of none?  Reflect!  Have you brought hither Edward as a
guest or as a prisoner?"

The earl knit his brows--"A prisoner, archbishop?"

The prelate regarded him with a cold smile.

"Warwick, you, who would deceive no other man, now seek to deceive
yourself."  The earl drew back, and his hardy countenance grew a shade
paler.  The prelate resumed: "You have carried Edward from his camp,
and severed him from his troops; you have placed him in the midst of
your own followers; you have led him, chafing and resentful all the
way, to this impregnable keep; and you now pause, amazed by the
grandeur of your captive,--a man who leads to his home a tiger, a
spider who has entangled a hornet in its web!"

"Nay, reverend brother," said the earl, calmly, "ye churchmen never
know what passes in the hearts of those who feel and do not scheme.
When I learned that the king had fled to the Woodvilles, that he was
bent upon violating the pledge given in his name to the insurgent
commons, I vowed that he should redeem my honour and his own, or that
forever I would quit his service.  And here, within these walls which
sheltered his childhood, I trusted, and trust still, to make one last
appeal to his better reason."

"For all that, men now, and history hereafter, will consider Edward as
your captive."

"To living men my words and deeds can clear themselves; and as for
history, let clerks and scholars fool themselves in the lies of
parchment!  He who has acted history, despises the gownsmen who sit in
cloistered ease, and write about what they know not."  The earl
paused, and then continued: "I confess, however, that I have had a
scheme.  I have wished to convince the king how little his mushroom
lords can bestead him in the storm; and that he holds his crown only
from his barons and his people."

"That is, from the Lord Warwick!"

"Perhaps I am the personation of both seignorie and people; but I
design this solely for his welfare.  Ah, the gallant prince--how well
he bore himself to-day!"

"Ay, when stealing all hearts from thee to him."

"And, Vive Dieu, I never loved him so well as when he did!  Methinks
it was for a day like this that I reared his youth and achieved his
crown.  Oh, priest, priest, thou mistakest me.  I am rash, hot,
haughty, hasty; and I love not to bow my knees to a man because they
call him king, if his life be vicious and his word be false.  But
could Edward be ever as to-day, then indeed should I hail a sovereign
whom a baron may reverence and a soldier serve!"

Before the archbishop could reply, the door gently opened, and the
countess appeared.  Warwick seemed glad of the interruption; he turned
quickly--"And how fares my child?"

"Recovered from her strange swoon, and ready to smile at thy return.
Oh, Warwick, thou art reconciled to the king?"

"That glads thee, sister?" said the archbishop.

"Surely.  Is it not for my lord's honour?"

"May he find it so!" said the prelate, and he left the room.

"My priest-brother is chafed," said the earl, smiling.  "Pity he was
not born a trader, he would have made a shrewd hard bargain.  Verily,
our priests burn the Jews out of envy!  Ah, m'amie, how fair thou art
to-day!  Methinks even Isabel's cheek less blooming."  And the warrior
drew the lady towards him, and smoothed her hair, and tenderly kissed
her brow.  "My letter vexed thee, I know, for thou lovest Edward, and
blamest me not for my love to him.  It is true that he hath paltered
with me, and that I had stern resolves, not against his crown, but to
leave him to his fate, and in these halls to resign my charge.  But
while he spoke, and while he looked, methought I saw his mother's
face, and heard his dear father's tone, and the past rushed over me,
and all wrath was gone.  Sonless myself, why would he not be my son?"
The earl's voice trembled, and the tears stood in his dark eyes.

"Speak thus, dear lord, to Isabel, for I fear her overvaulting spirit--"

"Ah, had Isabel been his wife!" he paused and moved away.  Then, as if
impatient to escape the thoughts that tended to an ungracious
recollection, he added, "And now, sweetheart, these slight fingers
have ofttimes buckled on my mail; let them place on my breast this
badge of St. George's chivalry; and, if angry thoughts return, it
shall remind me that the day on which I wore it first, Richard of York
said to his young Edward, 'Look to that star, boy, if ever, in cloud
and trouble, thou wouldst learn what safety dwells in the heart which
never knew deceit.'"

During the banquet, the king, at whose table sat only the Duke of
Clarence and the earl's family, was gracious as day to all, but
especially to the Lady Anne, attributing her sudden illness to some
cause not unflattering to himself; her beauty, which somewhat
resembled that of the queen, save that it had more advantage of
expression and of youth, was precisely of the character he most
admired.  Even her timidity, and the reserve with which she answered
him, had their charms; for, like many men, themselves of imperious
nature and fiery will, he preferred even imbecility in a woman to
whatever was energetic or determined; and hence perhaps his
indifference to the more dazzling beauty of Isabel.  After the feast,
the numerous demoiselles, high-born and fair, who swelled the more
than regal train of the countess, were assembled in the long gallery,
which was placed in the third story of the castle and served for the
principal state apartment.  The dance began; but Isabel excused
herself from the pavon, and the king led out the reluctant and
melancholy Anne.  The proud Isabel, who had never forgiven Edward's
slight to herself, resented deeply his evident admiration of her
sister, and conversed apart with the archbishop, whose subtle craft
easily drew from her lips confessions of an ambition higher even than
his own.  He neither encouraged nor dissuaded; he thought there were
things more impossible than the accession of Clarence to the throne,
but he was one who never plotted,--save for himself and for the
Church.

As the revel waned, the prelate approached the earl, who, with that
remarkable courtesy which charmed those below his rank and contrasted
with his haughtiness to his peers, had well played amongst his knights
the part of host, and said, in a whisper, "Edward is in a happy mood--
let us lose it not.  Will you trust me to settle all differences ere
he sleep?  Two proud men never can agree without a third of a gentler
temper."

"You are right," said Warwick, smiling; "yet the danger is that I
should rather concede too much than be too stubborn.  But look you,
all I demand is satisfaction to mine own honour and faith to the army
I disbanded in the king's name."

"All!" muttered the archbishop, as he turned away, "but that call is
everything to provoke quarrel for you, and nothing to bring power to
me!"

The earl and the archbishop attended the king to his chamber, and
after Edward was served with the parting refection, or livery, the
earl said, with his most open smile, "Sire, there are yet affairs
between us; whom will you confer with,--me or the archbishop?"

"Oh, the archbishop, by all means, fair cousin," cried Edward, no less
frankly; "for if you and I are left alone, the Saints help both of
us!--when flint and steel meet, fire flies, and the house may burn."

The earl half smiled at the candour, half sighed at the levity, of the
royal answer, and silently left the room.  The king, drawing round him
his loose dressing-robe, threw himself upon the gorgeous coverlid of
the bed, and lying at lazy length, motioned to the prelate to seat
himself at the foot.  The archbishop obeyed.  Edward raised himself on
his elbow, and, by the light of seven gigantic tapers, set in sconces
of massive silver, the priest and the king gravely gazed on each other
without speaking.

At last Edward, bursting into his hale, clear, silvery laugh, said,
"Confess, dear sir and cousin,--confess that we are like two skilful
masters of Italian fence, each fearing to lay himself open by
commencing the attack."

"Certes," quoth the archbishop, "your Grace over-estimates my vanity,
in opining that I deemed myself equal to so grand a duello.  If there
were dispute between us, I should only win by baring my bosom."

The king's bow-like lip curved with a slight sneer, quickly replaced
by a serious and earnest expression.  "Let us leave word-making, and
to the point, George.  Warwick is displeased because I will not
abandon my wife's kindred; you, with more reason, because I have taken
from your hands the chancellor's great seal--"

"For myself, I humbly answer that your Grace errs.  I never coveted
other honours than those of the Church."

"Ay," said Edward, keenly examining the young prelate's smooth face,
"is it so?  Yes, now I begin to comprehend thee.  What offence have I
given to the Church?  Have I suffered the law too much to sleep
against the Lollards.  If so, blame Warwick."

"On the contrary, sire, unlike other priests, I have ever deemed that
persecution heals no schism.  Blow not dying embers.  Rather do I
think of late that too much severity hath helped to aid, by Lollard
bows and pikes, the late rising.  My lady, the queen's mother,
unjustly accused of witchcraft, hath sought to clear herself, and
perhaps too zealously, in exciting your Grace against that invisible
giant yclept heresy."

"Pass on," said Edward.  "It is not then indifference to the ecclesia
that you complain of.  Is it neglect of the ecclesiastic?  Ha, ha! you
and I, though young, know the colours that make up the patchwork
world.  Archbishop, I love an easy life; if your brother and his
friends will but give me that, let them take all else.  Again, I say,
to the point,--I cannot banish my lady's kindred, but I will bind your
House still more to mine.  I have a daughter, failing male issue, the
heiress to my crown.  I will betroth her to your nephew, my beloved
Montagu's son.  They are children yet, but their ages not unsuited.
And when I return to London, young Nevile shall be Duke of Bedford, a
title hitherto reserved to the royal race.  [And indeed there was but
one Yorkist duke then in England out of the royal family,--namely, the
young boy Buckingham, who afterwards vainly sought to bend the Ulysses
bow of Warwick against Richard III.]   Let that be a pledge of peace
between the queen's mother, bearing the same honours, and the House of
Nevile, to which they pass."

The cheek of the archbishop flushed with proud pleasure; he bowed his
head, and Edward, ere he could answer, went on: "Warwick is already so
high that, pardie, I have no other step to give him, save my throne
itself, and, God's truth, I would rather be Lord Warwick than King of
England!  But for you--listen--our only English cardinal is old and
sickly; whenever he pass to Abraham's bosom, who but you should have
the suffrage of the holy college?  Thou knowest that I am somewhat in
the good favour of the sovereign pontiff.  Command me to the utmost.
Now, George, are we friends?"  The archbishop kissed the gracious hand
extended to him, and, surprised to find, as by magic, all his schemes
frustrated by sudden acquiescence in the objects of them all, his
voice faltered with real emotion as he gave vent to his gratitude.
But abruptly he checked himself, his brow lowered, and with a bitter
remembrance of his brother's plain, blunt sense of honour, he said,
"Yet, alas! my liege, in all this there is nought to satisfy our
stubborn host."

"By dear Saint George and my father's head!" exclaimed Edward,
reddening, and starting to his feet, "what would the man have?"

"You know," answered the archbishop, "that Warwick's pride is only
roused when he deems his honour harmed.  Unhappily, as he thinks, by
your Grace's full consent, he pledged himself to the insurgents of
Olney to the honourable dismissal of the lords of the Woodville race.
And unless this be conceded, I fear me that all else he will reject,
and the love between ye can be but hollow!"

Edward took but three strides across the chamber, and then halted
opposite the archbishop, and lay both hands on his shoulders, as,
looking him full in the face, he said, "Answer me frankly, am I a
prisoner in these towers or not?"

"Not, sire."

"You palter with me, priest. I have been led hither against my will.
I am almost without an armed retinue.  I am at the earl's mercy.  This
chamber might be my grave, and this couch my bed of death."

"Holy Mother!  Can you think so of Warwick?  Sire, you freeze my
blood."

"Well, then, if I refuse to satisfy Warwick's pride, and disdain to
give up loyal servants to rebel insolence, what will Warwick do?
Speak out, archbishop."

"I fear me, sire, that he will resign all office, whether of peace or
war.  I fear me that the goodly army now at sleep within and around
these walls will vanish into air, and that your Highness will stand
alone amidst new men, and against the disaffection of the whole land!"

Edward's firm hand trembled.  The prelate continued, with a dry,
caustic smile,--

"Sire, Sir Anthony Woodville, now Lord Rivers, has relieved you of all
embarrassment; no doubt, my Lord Dorset and his kinsmen will be
chevaliers enough to do the same.  The Duchess of Bedford will but
suit the decorous usage to retire a while into privacy, to mourn her
widowhood.  And when a year is told, if these noble persons reappear
at court, your word and the earl's will at least have been kept."

"I understand thee," said the king, half laughing; "but I have my
pride as well as Warwick.  To concede this point is to humble the
conceder."

"I have thought how to soothe all things, and without humbling either
party.  Your Grace's mother is dearly beloved by Warwick and revered
by all.  Since your marriage she hath lived secluded from all state
affairs.  As so nearly akin to Warwick, so deeply interested in your
Grace, she is a fitting mediator in all disputes.  Be they left to her
to arbitrate."

"Ah, cunning prelate, thou knowest how my proud mother hates the
Woodvilles; thou knowest how her judgment will decide."

"Perhaps so; but at least your Grace will be spared all pain and all
abasement."

"Will Warwick consent to this?"

"I trust so."

"Learn, and report to me.  Enough for to-night's conference."  Edward
was left alone, and his mind ran rapidly over the field of action open
to him.

"I have half won the earl's army," he thought; "but it would be to
lose all hold in their hearts again, if they knew that these unhappy
Woodvilles were the cause of a second breach between us.  Certes, the
Lancastrians are making strong head!  Certes, the times must be played
with and appeased!  And yet these poor gentlemen love me after my own
fashion, and not with the bear's hug of that intolerable earl.  How
came the grim man by so fair a daughter?  Sweet Anne!  I caught her
eye often fixed on me, and with a soft fear which my heart beat loud
to read aright.  Verily, this is the fourth week I have passed without
hearing a woman's sigh!  What marvel that so fair a face enamours me!
Would that Warwick made her his ambassador; and yet it were all over
with the Woodvilles if he did!  These men know not how to manage me,
and well-a-day, that task is easy eno' to women!" He laughed gayly to
himself as he thus concluded his soliloquy, and extinguished the
tapers.  But rest did not come to his pillow; and after tossing to and
fro for some time in vain search for sleep, he rose and opened his
casement to cool the air which the tapers had overheated.  In a single
casement, in a broad turret, projecting from an angle in the building,
below the tower in which his chamber was placed, the king saw a
solitary light burning steadily.  A sight so unusual at such an hour
surprised him.  "Peradventure, the wily prelate," thought he.
"Cunning never sleeps."  But a second look showed him the very form
that chased his slumbers.  Beside the casement, which was partially
open, he saw the soft profile of the Lady Anne; it was bent downwards;
and what with the clear moonlight, and the lamp within her chamber, he
could see distinctly that she was weeping.  "Ah, Anne," muttered the
amorous king, "would that I were by to kiss away those tears!"  While
yet the unholy wish murmured on his lips, the lady rose.  The fair
hand, that seemed almost transparent in the moonlight, closed the
casement; and though the light lingered for some minutes ere it left
the dark walls of the castle without other sign of life than the step
of the sentry, Anne was visible no more.

"Madness! madness! madness!" again murmured the king.  "These Neviles
are fatal to me in all ways,--in hatred or in love!"





BOOK VIII.

IN WHICH THE LAST LINK BETWEEN KING-MAKER AND KING SNAPS ASUNDER.




CHAPTER I.

THE LADY ANNE VISITS THE COURT.

It was some weeks after the date of the events last recorded.  The
storm that hung over the destinies of King Edward was dispersed for
the hour, though the scattered clouds still darkened the horizon: the
Earl of Warwick had defeated the Lancastrians on the frontier, [Croyl.
552] and their leader had perished on the scaffold; but Edward's
mighty sword had not shone in the battle.  Chained by an attraction
yet more powerful than slaughter, he had lingered at Middleham, while
Warwick led his army to York; and when the earl arrived at the capital
of Edward's ancestral duchy, he found that the able and active
Hastings--having heard, even before he reached the Duke of
Gloucester's camp, of Edward's apparent seizure by the earl and the
march to Middleham--had deemed it best to halt at York, and to summon
in all haste a council of such of the knights and barons as either
love to the king or envy to Warwick could collect.  The report was
general that Edward was retained against his will at Middleham; and
this rumour Hastings gravely demanded Warwick, on the arrival of the
latter at York, to disprove.  The earl, to clear himself from a
suspicion that impeded all his military movements, despatched Lord
Montagu to Middleham, who returned not only with the king, but the
countess and her daughters, whom Edward, under pretence of proving the
complete amity that existed between Warwick and himself, carried in
his train.  The king's appearance at York reconciled all differences;
but he suffered Warwick to march alone against the enemy, and not till
after the decisive victory, which left his reign for a while without
an open foe, did he return to London.

Thither the earl, by the advice of his friends, also repaired, and in
a council of peers, summoned for the purpose, deigned to refute the
rumours still commonly circulated by his foes, and not disbelieved by
the vulgar, whether of his connivance at the popular rising or his
forcible detention of the king at Middleham.  To this, agreeably to
the counsel of the archbishop, succeeded a solemn interview of the
heads of the Houses of York and Warwick, in which the once fair Rose
of Raby (the king's mother) acted as mediator and arbiter.  The earl's
word to the commons at Olney was ratified.  Edward consented to the
temporary retirement of the Woodvilles, though the gallant Anthony yet
delayed his pilgrimage to Compostella.  The vanity of Clarence was
contented by the government of Ireland, but, under various pretences,
Edward deferred his brother's departure to that important post. A
general amnesty was proclaimed, a parliament summoned for the redress
of popular grievances, and the betrothal of the king's daughter to
Montagu's heir was proclaimed: the latter received the title of Duke
of Bedford; and the whole land rejoiced in the recovered peace of the
realm, the retirement of the Woodvilles, and the reconciliation of the
young king with his all-beloved subject.  Never had the power of the
Neviles seemed so secure; never did the throne of Edward appear so
stable.

It was at this time that the king prevailed upon the earl and his
countess to permit the Lady Anne to accompany the Duchess of Clarence
in a visit to the palace of the Tower.  The queen had submitted so
graciously to the humiliation of her family, that even the haughty
Warwick was touched and softened; and the visit of his daughter at
such a time became a homage to Elizabeth which it suited his chivalry
to render.

The public saw in this visit, which was made with great state and
ceremony, the probability of a new and popular alliance.  The
archbishop had suffered the rumour of Gloucester's attachment to the
Lady Anne to get abroad, and the young prince's return from the North
was anxiously expected by the gossips of the day.

It was on this occasion that Warwick showed his gratitude for
Marmaduke Nevile's devotion.  "My dear and gallant kinsman," he said,
"I forget not that when thou didst leave the king and the court for
the discredited minister and his gloomy hall,--I forget not that thou
didst tell me of love to some fair maiden, which had not prospered
according to thy merits.  At least it shall not be from lack of lands,
or of the gold spur, which allows the wearer to ride by the side of
king or kaisar, that thou canst not choose thy bride as the heart bids
thee.  I pray thee, sweet cousin, to attend my child Anne to the
court, where the king will show thee no ungracious countenance; but it
is just to recompense thee for the loss of thy post in his highness's
chamber.  I hold the king's commission to make knights of such as can
pay the fee, and thy lands shall suffice for the dignity.  Kneel down
and rise up, Sir Marmaduke Nevile, lord of the Manor of Borrodaile,
with its woodlands and its farms, and may God and our Lady render thee
puissant in battle and prosperous in love!"

Accordingly, in his new rank, and entitled to ruffle it with the
bravest, Sir Marmaduke Nevile accompanied the earl and the Lady Anne
to the palace of the Tower.

As Warwick, leaving his daughter amidst the brilliant circle that
surrounded Elizabeth, turned to address the king, he said, with simple
and unaffected nobleness,--

"Ah, my liege, if you needed a hostage of my faith, think that my
heart is here, for verily its best blood were less dear to me than
that slight girl,--the likeness of her mother, when her lips first
felt the touch of mine!"

Edward's bold brow fell, and he blushed as he answered, "My Elizabeth
will hold her as a sister.  But, cousin, part you not now for the
North?"

"By your leave I go first to Warwick."

"Ah, you do not wish to approve of my seeming preparations against
France?"

"Nay, your Highness is not in earnest. I promised the commons that you
would need no supplies for so thriftless a war."

"Thou knowest I mean to fulfil all thy pledges.  But the country so
swarms with disbanded soldiers, that it is politic to hold out to them
a hope of service, and so let the clouds gradually pass away."

"Alack, my liege," said Warwick, gravely, "I suppose that a crown
teaches the brow to scheme; but hearty peace or open war seems ever
the best to me."

Edward smiled, and turned aside.  Warwick glanced at his daughter,
whom Elizabeth flatteringly caressed, stifled a sigh, and the air
seemed lighter to the insects of the court as his proud crest bowed
beneath the doorway, and, with the pomp of his long retinue, he
vanished from the scene.

"And choose, fair Anne," said the queen, "choose from my ladies whom
you will have for your special train.  We would not that your
attendance should be less than royal."

The gentle Anne in vain sought to excuse herself from an honour at
once arrogant and invidious, though too innocent to perceive the
cunning so characteristic of the queen; for, under the guise of a
special compliment, Anne had received the royal request to have her
female attendants chosen from the court, and Elizabeth now desired to
force upon her a selection which could not fail to mortify those not
preferred.  But glancing timidly round the circle, the noble damsel's
eye rested on one fair face, and in that face there was so much that
awoke her own interest, and stirred up a fond and sad remembrance,
that she passed involuntarily to the stranger's side, and artlessly
took her hand.  The high-born maidens, grouped around, glanced at each
other with a sneer, and slunk back.  Even the queen looked surprised;
but recovering herself, inclined her head graciously, and said, "Do we
read your meaning aright, Lady Anne, and would you this gentlewoman,
Mistress Sibyll Warner, as one of your chamber?"

"Sibyll, ah, I knew that my memory failed me not," murmured Anne; and,
after bowing assent to the queen, she said, "Do you not also recall,
fair demoiselle, our meeting, when children long years ago?"

"Well, noble dame," [The title of dame was at that time applied
indiscriminately to ladies whether married or single, if of high
birth.] answered Sibyll.  And as Anne turned, with her air of modest
gentleness, yet of lofty birth and breeding, to explain to the queen
that she had met Sibyll in earlier years, the king approached to
monopolize his guest's voice and ear.  It seemed natural to all
present that Edward should devote peculiar attention to the daughter
of Warwick and the sister of the Duchess of Clarence; and even
Elizabeth suspected no guiltier gallantry in the subdued voice, the
caressing manner, which her handsome lord adopted throughout that day,
even to the close of the nightly revel, towards a demoiselle too high
(it might well appear) for licentious homage.

But Anne herself, though too guileless to suspect the nature of
Edward's courtesy, yet shrank from it in vague terror.  All his
beauty, all his fascination, could not root from her mind the
remembrance of the exiled prince; nay, the brilliancy of his qualities
made her the more averse to him.  It darkened the prospects of Edward
of Lancaster that Edward of York should wear so gracious and so
popular a form.  She hailed with delight the hour when she was
conducted to her chamber, and dismissing gently the pompous retinue
allotted to her, found herself alone with the young maiden whom she
had elected to her special service.

"And you remember me, too, fair Sibyll?" said Anne, with her dulcet
and endearing voice.

"Truly, who would not? for as you, then, noble lady, glided apart from
the other children, hand in hand with the young prince, in whom all
dreamed to see their future king, I heard the universal murmur of--a
false prophecy!"

"Ah! and of what?" asked Anne.

"That in the hand the prince clasped with his small rosy fingers--the
hand of great Warwick's daughter--lay the best defence of his father's
throne."

Anne's breast heaved, and her small foot began to mark strange
characters on the floor.

"So," she said musingly, "so even here, amidst a new court, you forget
not Prince Edward of Lancaster.  Oh, we shall find hours to talk of
the past days.  But how, if your childhood was spent in Margaret's
court, does your youth find a welcome in Elizabeth's?"

"Avarice and power had need of my father's science.  He is a scholar
of good birth, but fallen fortunes, even now, and ever while night
lasts, he is at work.  I belonged to the train of her grace of
Bedford; but when the duchess quitted the court, and the king retained
my father in his own royal service, her highness the queen was pleased
to receive me among her maidens.  Happy that my father's home is
mine!--who else could tend him?"

"Thou art his only child?--he must--love thee dearly?"

"Yet not as I love him; he lives in a life apart from all else that
live.  But after all, peradventure it is sweeter to love than to be
loved."

Anne, whose nature was singularly tender and woman-like, was greatly
affected by this answer.  She drew nearer to Sibyll; she twined her
arm round her slight form, and kissed her forehead.

"Shall I love thee, Sibyll?" she said, with a girl's candid
simplicity, "and wilt thou love me?"

"Ah, lady! there are so many to love thee,--father, mother, sister,--
all the world; the very sun shines more kindly upon the great!"

"Nay!" said Anne, with that jealousy of a claim to suffering to which
the gentler natures are prone, "I may have sorrows from which thou art
free.  I confess to thee, Sibyll, that something I know not how to
explain draws me strangely towards thy sweet face.  Marriage has lost
me my only sister, for since Isabel is wed she is changed to me--would
that her place were supplied by thee!  Shall I steal thee from the
queen when I depart?  Ah, my mother--at least thou wilt love her! for
verily, to love my mother you have but to breathe the same air.  Kiss
me, Sibyll."

Kindness, of late, had been strange to Sibyll, especially from her own
sex, one of her own age; it came like morning upon the folded blossom.
She threw her arms round the new friend that seemed sent to her from
heaven; she kissed Anne's face and hands with grateful tears.

"Ah!" she said at last, when she could command a voice still broken
with emotion--"if I could ever serve--ever repay thee--though those
gracious words were the last thy lips should ever deign to address to
me!"

Anne was delighted; she had never yet found one to protect; she had
never yet found one in whom thoroughly to confide.  Gentle as her
mother was, the distinction between child and parent was, even in the
fond family she belonged to, so great in that day, that she could
never have betrayed to the countess the wild weakness of her young
heart.

The wish to communicate, to reveal, is so natural to extreme youth,
and in Anne that disposition was so increased by a nature at once open
and inclined to lean on others, that she had, as we have seen, sought
a confidante in Isabel; but with her, even at the first, she found but
the half-contemptuous pity of a strong and hard mind; and lately,
since Edward's visit to Middleham, the Duchess of Clarence had been so
rapt in her own imperious egotism and discontented ambition, that the
timid Anne had not even dared to touch, with her, upon those secrets
which it flushed her own bashful cheek to recall.  And this visit to
the court, this new, unfamiliar scene, this estrangement from all the
old accustomed affections, had produced in her that sense of
loneliness which is so irksome, till grave experience of real life
accustoms us to the common lot.  So with the exaggerated and somewhat
morbid sensibility that belonged to her, she turned at once, and by
impulse, to this sudden, yet graceful friendship.  Here was one of her
own age, one who had known sorrow, one whose voice and eyes charmed
her, one who would not chide even folly, one, above all, who had seen
her beloved prince, one associated with her fondest memories, one who
might have a thousand tales to tell of the day when the outlaw boy was
a monarch's heir.  In the childishness of her soft years, she almost
wept at another channel for so much natural tenderness.  It was half
the woman gaining a woman-friend, half the child clinging to a new
playmate.

"Ah, Sibyll," she whispered, "do not leave me to-night; this strange
place daunts me, and the figures on the arras seem so tall and
spectre-like, and they say the old tower is haunted.  Stay, dear
Sibyll!"

And Sibyll stayed.




CHAPTER II.

THE SLEEPING INNOCENCE--THE WAKEFUL CRIME.

While these charming girls thus innocently conferred; while, Anne's
sweet voice running on in her artless fancies, they helped each other
to undress; while hand in hand they knelt in prayer by the crucifix in
the dim recess; while timidly they extinguished the light, and stole
to rest; while, conversing in whispers, growing gradually more faint
and low, they sank into guileless sleep,--the unholy king paced his
solitary chamber, parched with the fever of the sudden and frantic
passion that swept away from a heart in which every impulse was a
giant all the memories of honour, gratitude, and law.

The mechanism of this strong man's nature was that almost unknown to
the modern time; it belonged to those earlier days which furnish to
Greece the terrible legends Ovid has clothed in gloomy fire, which a
similar civilization produced no less in the Middle Ages, whether of
Italy or the North,--that period when crime took a grandeur from its
excess; when power was so great and absolute that its girth burst the
ligaments of conscience; when a despot was but the incarnation of
WILL; when honour was indeed a religion, but its faith was valour, and
it wrote its decalogue with the point of a fearless sword.

The youth of Edward IV. was as the youth of an ancient Titan, of an
Italian Borgia; through its veins the hasty blood rolled as a
devouring flame.  This impetuous and fiery temperament was rendered
yet more fearful by the indulgence of every intemperance; it fed on
wine and lust; its very virtues strengthened its vices,--its courage
stifled every whisper of prudence; its intellect, uninured to all
discipline, taught it to disdain every obstacle to its desires.
Edward could, indeed, as we have seen, be false and crafty, a
temporizer, a dissimulator; but it was only as the tiger creeps,--the
better to spring, undetected, on its prey.  If detected, the cunning
ceased, the daring rose, and the mighty savage had fronted ten
thousand foes, secure in its fangs and talons, its bold heart and its
deadly spring.  Hence, with all Edward's abilities, the astonishing
levities and indiscretions of his younger years.  It almost seemed, as
we have seen him play fast and loose with the might of Warwick, and
with that power, whether of barons or of people, which any other
prince of half his talents would have trembled to arouse against an
unrooted throne,--it almost seemed as if he loved to provoke a danger
for the pleasure it gave the brain to baffle or the hand to crush it.
His whole nature coveting excitement, nothing was left to the
beautiful, the luxurious Edward, already wearied with pomp and
pleasure, but what was unholy and forbidden.  In his court were a
hundred ladies, perhaps not less fair than Anne, at least of a beauty
more commanding the common homage, but these he had only to smile on
with ease to win.  No awful danger, no inexpiable guilt, attended
those vulgar frailties, and therefore they ceased to tempt.  But here
the virgin guest, the daughter of his mightiest subject, the beloved
treasure of the man whose hand had built a throne, whose word had
dispersed an army--here, the more the reason warned, the conscience
started, the more the hell-born passion was aroused.

Like men of his peculiar constitution, Edward was wholly incapable of
pure and steady love.  His affection for his queen the most resembled
that diviner affection; but when analyzed, it was composed of feelings
widely distinct.  From a sudden passion, not otherwise to be
gratified, he had made the rashest sacrifices for an unequal marriage.
His vanity, and something of original magnanimity, despite his vices,
urged him to protect what he himself had raised,--to secure the honour
of the subject who was honoured by the king.  In common with most rude
and powerful natures, he was strongly alive to the affections of a
father, and the faces of his children helped to maintain the influence
of the mother.  But in all this, we need scarcely say that that true
love, which is at once a passion and a devotion, existed not.  Love
with him cared not for the person loved, but solely for its own
gratification; it was desire for possession,--nothing more.  But that
desire was the will of a king who never knew fear or scruple; and,
pampered by eternal indulgence, it was to the feeble lusts of common
men what the storm is to the west wind.  Yet still, as in the solitude
of night he paced his chamber, the shadow of the great crime advancing
upon his soul appalled even that dauntless conscience.  He gasped for
breath; his cheeks flushed crimson, and the next moment grew deadly
pale.  He heard the loud beating of his heart.  He stopped still.  He
flung himself on a seat, and hid his face with his hands; then
starting up, he exclaimed, "No, no!  I cannot shut out that sweet
face, those blue eyes from my gaze.  They haunt me to my destruction
and her own.  Yet why say destruction?  If she love me, who shall know
the deed?  If she love me not, will she dare to reveal her shame?
Shame!--nay, a king's embrace never dishonours.  A king's bastard is a
House's pride.  All is still,--the very moon vanishes from heaven.
The noiseless rushes in the gallery give no echo to the footstep.  Fie
on me!  Can a Plantagenet know fear?"  He allowed himself no further
time to pause; he opened the door gently and stole along the gallery.
He knew well the chamber, for it was appointed by his command, and,
besides the usual door from the corridor, a small closet conducted to
a secret panel behind the arras.  It was the apartment occupied, in
her visits to the court, by the queen's rival, the Lady Elizabeth
Lucy.  He passed into the closet; he lifted the arras; he stood in
that chamber, which gratitude and chivalry and hospitable faith should
have made sacred as a shrine.  And suddenly, as he entered, the moon,
before hid beneath a melancholy cloud, broke forth in awful splendour,
and her light rushed through the casement opposite his eye, and bathed
the room with the beams of a ghostlier day.

The abruptness of the solemn and mournful glory scared him as the
rebuking face of a living thing; a presence as if not of earth seemed
to interpose between the victim and the guilt.  It was, however, but
for a moment that his step halted.  He advanced: he drew aside the
folds of the curtain heavy with tissue of gold, and the sleeping face
of Anne lay hushed before him.  It looked pale in the moonlight, but
ineffably serene, and the smile on its lips seemed still sweeter than
that which it wore awake.  So fixed was his gaze, so ardently did his
whole heart and being feed through his eyes upon that exquisite
picture of innocence and youth, that he did not see for some moments
that the sleeper was not alone.  Suddenly an exclamation rose to his
lips.  He clenched his hand in jealous agony; he approached; he bent
over; he heard the regular breathing which the dreams of guilt never
know; and then, when he saw that pure and interlaced embrace,--the
serene yet somewhat melancholy face of Sibyll, which seemed hueless as
marble in the moonlight, bending partially over that of Anne, as if
even in sleep watchful; both charming forms so linked and woven that
the two seemed as one life, the very breath in each rising and ebbing
with the other; the dark ringlets of Sibyll mingling with the auburn
gold of Anne's luxuriant hair, and the darkness and the gold, tress
within tress, falling impartially over either neck, that gleamed like
ivory beneath that common veil,--when he saw this twofold loveliness,
the sentiment, the conviction of that mysterious defence which exists
in purity, thrilled like ice through his burning veins.  In all his
might of monarch and of man, he felt the awe of that unlooked-for
protection,--maidenhood sheltering maidenhood, innocence guarding
innocence.  The double virtue appalled and baffled him; and that
slight arm which encircled the neck he would have perilled his realm
to clasp, shielded his victim more effectually than the bucklers of
all the warriors that ever gathered round the banner of the lofty
Warwick.  Night and the occasion befriended him; but in vain.  While
Sibyll was there, Anne was saved.  He ground his teeth, and muttered
to himself.  At that moment Anne turned restlessly.  This movement
disturbed the light sleep of her companion.  She spoke half inaudibly,
but the sound was as the hoot of shame in the ear of the guilty king.
He let fall the curtain, and was gone.  And if one who lived
afterwards to hear and to credit the murderous doom which, unless
history lies, closed the male line of Edward, had beheld the king
stealing, felon-like, from the chamber,--his step reeling to and fro
the gallery floors, his face distorted by stormy passion, his lips
white and murmuring, his beauty and his glory dimmed and humbled,--the
spectator might have half believed that while Edward gazed upon those
harmless sleepers, A VISION OF THE TRAGEDY TO COME had stricken down
his thought of guilt, and filled up its place with horror,--a vision
of a sleep as pure, of two forms wrapped in an embrace as fond, of
intruders meditating a crime scarce fouler than his own; and the sins
of the father starting into grim corporeal shapes, to become the
deathsmen of the sons!




CHAPTER III.

NEW DANGERS TO THE HOUSE OF YORK--AND THE KING'S HEART ALLIES ITSELF
WITH REBELLION AGAINST THE KING'S THRONE.

Oh, beautiful is the love of youth to youth, and touching the
tenderness of womanhood to woman; and fair in the eyes of the happy
sun is the waking of holy sleep, and the virgin kiss upon virgin lips
smiling and murmuring the sweet "Good-morrow!"

Anne was the first to wake; and as the bright winter morn, robust with
frosty sunbeams shone cheerily upon Sibyll's face, she was struck with
a beauty she had not sufficiently observed the day before; for in the
sleep of the young the traces of thought and care vanish, the aching
heart is lulled in the body's rest, the hard lines relax into flexile
ease, a softer, warmer bloom steals over the cheek, and, relieved from
the stiff restraints of dress, the rounded limbs repose in a more
alluring grace!  Youth seems younger in its slumber, and beauty more
beautiful, and purity more pure.  Long and dark, the fringe of the
eyelash rested upon the white lids, and the freshness of the parting
pouted lips invited the sister kiss that wakened up the sleeper.

"Ah, lady," said Sibyll, parting her tresses from her dark blue eyes,
"you are here, you are safe!--blessed be the saints and our Lady! for
I had a dream in the night that startled and appalled me."

"And my dreams were all blithe and golden," said Anne.  "What was
thine?"

"Methought you were asleep and in this chamber, and I not by your
side, but watching you at a little distance; and lo! a horrible
serpent glided from yon recess, and, crawling to your pillow, I heard
its hiss, and strove to come to your aid, but in vain; a spell seemed
to chain my limbs.  At last I found voice, I cried aloud, I woke; and
mock me not, but I surely heard a parting footstep, and the low
grating of some sliding door."

"It was the dream's influence, enduring beyond the dream.  I have
often felt it so,--nay, even last night; for I, too, dreamed of
another, dreamed that I stood by the altar with one far away, and when
I woke--for I woke also--it was long before I could believe it was thy
hand I held, and thine arm that embraced me."

The young friends rose, and their toilet was scarcely ended, when
again appeared in the chamber all the stateliness of retinue allotted
to the Lady Anne.  Sibyll turned to depart.  "And whither go you?"
asked Anne.

"To visit my father; it is my first task on rising," returned Sibyll,
in a whisper.

"You must let me visit him, too, at a later hour.  Find me here an
hour before noon, Sibyll."

The early morning was passed by Anne in the queen's company.  The
refection, the embroidery frame, the closheys, filled up the hours.
The Duchess of Clarence had left the palace with her lord to visit the
king's mother at Baynard's Castle; and Anne's timid spirits were
saddened by the strangeness of the faces round her, and Elizabeth's
habitual silence.  There was something in the weak and ill-fated queen
that ever failed to conciliate friends.  Though perpetually striving
to form and create a party, she never succeeded in gaining confidence
or respect.  And no one raised so high was ever left so friendless as
Elizabeth, when, in her awful widowhood, her dowry home became the
sanctuary.  All her power was but the shadow of her husband's royal
sun, and vanished when the orb prematurely set; yet she had all gifts
of person in her favour, and a sleek smoothness of manner that seemed
to the superficial formed to win; but the voice was artificial, and
the eye cold and stealthy.  About her formal precision there was an
eternal consciousness of self, a breathing egotism.  Her laugh was
displeasing,--cynical, not mirthful; she had none of that
forgetfulness of self, that warmth when gay, that earnestness when
sad, which create sympathy.  Her beauty was without loveliness, her
character without charm; every proportion in her form might allure the
sensualist; but there stopped the fascination.  The mind was trivial,
though cunning and dissimulating; and the very evenness of her temper
seemed but the clockwork of a heart insensible to its own movements.
Vain in prosperity, what wonder that she was so abject in misfortune?
What wonder that even while, in later and gloomier years, [Grafton,
806] accusing Richard III. of the murder of her royal sons, and
knowing him, at least, the executioner of her brother and her child by
the bridegroom of her youth, [Anthony Lord Rivers, and Lord Richard
Gray.  Not the least instance of the frivolity of Elizabeth's mind is
to be found in her willingness, after all the woes of her second
widowhood, and when she was not very far short of sixty years old, to
take a third husband, James III., of Scotland,--a marriage prevented
only by the death of the Scotch king.] she consented to send her
daughters to his custody, though subjected to the stain of
illegitimacy, and herself only recognized as the harlot?

The king, meanwhile, had ridden out betimes alone, and no other of the
male sex presumed in his absence to invade the female circle.  It was
with all a girl's fresh delight that Anne escaped at last to her own
chamber, where she found Sibyll; and, with her guidance, she threaded
the gloomy mazes of the Tower.  "Let me see," she whispered, "before
we visit your father, let me see the turret in which the unhappy Henry
is confined."

And Sibyll led her through the arch of that tower, now called "The
Bloody," and showed her the narrow casement deep sunk in the mighty
wall, without which hung the starling in the cage, basking its plumes
in the wintry sun.  Anne gazed with that deep interest and tender
reverence which the parent of the man she loves naturally excites in a
woman; and while thus standing sorrowful and silent, the casement was
unbarred, and she saw the mild face of the human captive; he seemed to
talk to the bird, which, in shrill tones and with clapping wings,
answered his address.  At that time a horn sounded at a little
distance off; a clangour of arms, as the sentries saluted, was heard;
the demoiselles retreated through the arch, and mounted the stair
conducting to the very room, then unoccupied, in which tradition
records the murder of the Third Richard's nephews; and scarcely had
they gained this retreat, ere towards the Bloody Gate, and before the
prison tower, rode the king who had mounted the captive's throne.  His
steed, gaudy with its housing, his splendid dress, the knights and
squires who started forward from every corner to hold his gilded
stirrup, his vigorous youth, so blooming and so radiant,--all
contrasted, with oppressive force, the careworn face that watched him
meekly through the little casement of the Wakefield tower.  Edward's
large, quick blue eye caught sudden sight of the once familiar
features.  He looked up steadily, and his gaze encountered the fallen
king's.  He changed countenance: but with the external chivalry that
made the surface of his hollow though brilliant character, he bowed
low to his saddle-bow as he saw his captive, and removed the plumed
cap from his high brow.

Henry smiled sadly, and shook his reverend head, as if gently to
rebuke the mockery; then he closed the casement; and Edward rode into
the yard.

"How can the king hold here a court and here a prison?  Oh, hard
heart!" murmured Anne, as, when Edward had disappeared, the damsels
bent their way to Adam's chamber.

"Would the Earl Warwick approve thy pity, sweet Lady Anne?" asked
Sibyll.

"My father's heart is too generous to condemn it," returned Anne,
wiping the tears from her eyes; "how often in the knight's galliard
shall I see that face!"

The turret in which Warner's room was placed flanked the wing
inhabited by the royal family and their more distinguished guests
(namely, the palace, properly speaking, as distinct from the
fortress), and communicated with the regal lodge by a long corridor,
raised above cloisters and open to a courtyard.  At one end of this
corridor a door opened upon the passage, in which was situated the
chamber of the Lady Anne; the other extremity communicated with a
rugged stair of stone, conducting to the rooms tenanted by Warner.
Leaving Sibyll to present her learned father to the gentle Anne, we
follow the king into the garden, which he entered on dismounting.  He
found here the Archbishop of York, who had come to the palace in his
barge, and with but a slight retinue, and who was now conversing with
Hastings in earnest whispers.

The king, who seemed thoughtful and fatigued, approached the two, and
said, with a forced smile, "What learned sententiary engages you two
scholars?"

"Your Grace," said the archbishop, "Minerva was not precisely the
goddess most potent over our thoughts at that moment.  I received a
letter last evening from the Duke of Gloucester, and as I know the
love borne by the prince to the Lord Hastings, I inquired of your
chamberlain how far he would have foreguessed the news it announced."

"And what may the tidings be?" asked Edward, absently.

The prelate hesitated.

"Sire," he said gravely, "the familiar confidence with which both your
Highness and the Duke of Gloucester distinguish the chamberlain,
permits me to communicate the purport of the letter in his presence.
The young duke informs me that he hath long conceived an affection
which he would improve into marriage, but before he address either the
demoiselle or her father, he prays me to confer with your Grace, whose
pleasure in this, as in all things, will be his sovereign law."

"Ah, Richard loves me with a truer love than George of Clarence!  But
who can he have seen on the Borders worthy to be a prince's bride?"

"It is no sudden passion, sire, as I before hinted; nay, it has been
for some time sufficiently notorious to his friends and many of the
court; it is an affection for a maiden known to him in childhood,
connected to him by blood,--my niece, Anne Nevile."

As if stung by a scorpion, Edward threw off the prelate's arm, on
which he had been leaning with his usual caressing courtesy.

"This is too much!" said he, quickly, and his face, before somewhat
pale, grew highly flushed.  "Is the whole royalty of England to be one
Nevile?  Have I not sufficiently narrowed the basis of my throne?
Instead of mating my daughter to a foreign power,--to Spain or to
Bretagne,--she is betrothed to young Montagu!  Clarence weds Isabel,
and now Gloucester--no, prelate, I will not consent!"

The archbishop was so little prepared for this burst, that he remained
speechless.  Hastings pressed the king's arm, as if to caution him
against so imprudent a display of resentment; but the king walked on,
not heeding him, and in great disturbance.  Hastings interchanged
looks with the archbishop, and followed his royal master.

"My king," he said, in an earnest whisper, "whatever you decide, do
not again provoke unhappy feuds laid at rest. Already this morning I
sought your chamber, but you were abroad, to say that I have received
intelligence of a fresh rising of the Lancastrians in Lincolnshire,
under Sir Robert Welles, and the warlike knight of Scrivelsby, Sir
Thomas Dymoke.  This is not yet an hour to anger the pride of the
Neviles!"

"O Hastings! Hastings!" said the king, in a tone of passionate
emotion, "there are moments when the human heart cannot dissemble!
Howbeit your advice is wise and honest!  No, we must not anger the
Neviles!"

He turned abruptly; rejoined the archbishop, who stood on the spot on
which the king had left him, his arms folded on his breast, his face
calm, but haughty.

"My most worshipful cousin," said Edward, "forgive the well-known heat
of my hasty moods!  I had hoped that Richard would, by a foreign
alliance, have repaired the occasion of confirming my dynasty abroad,
which Clarence lost. But no matter!  Of these things we will speak
anon.  Say naught to Richard till time ripens maturer resolutions: he
is a youth yet.  What strange tidings are these from Lincolnshire?"

"The house of your purveyor, Sir Robert de Burgh, is burned, his lands
wasted.  The rebels are headed by lords and knights.  Robin of
Redesdale, who, methinks, bears a charmed life, has even ventured to
rouse the disaffected in my brother's very shire of Warwick."

"O Henry," exclaimed the king, casting his eyes towards the turret
that held his captive, "well mightest then call a crown 'a wreath of
thorns!'"

"I have already," said the archbishop, "despatched couriers to my
brother, to recall him from Warwick, whither he went on quitting your
Highness.  I have done more; prompted by a zeal that draws me from the
care of the Church to that of the State, I have summoned the Lords St.
John, De Fulke, and others, to my house of the More,--praying your
Highness to deign to meet them, and well sure that a smile from your
princely lips will regain their hearts and confirm heir allegiance, at
a moment when new perils require all strong arms."

"You have done most wisely.  I will come to your palace,--appoint your
own day."

"It will take some days for the barons to arrive from their castles.
I fear not ere the tenth day from this."

"Ah," said the king, with a vivacity that surprised his listeners,
aware of his usual impetuous energy, "the delay will but befriend us;
as for Warwick, permit me to alter your arrangements; let him employ
the interval, not in London, where he is useless, but in raising men
in the neighbourhood of his castle, and in defeating the treason of
this Redesdale knave.  We will give commission to him and to Clarence
to levy troops; Hastings, see to this forthwith.  Ye say Sir Robert
Welles leads the Lincolnshire varlets; I know the nature of his
father, the Lord Welles,--a fearful and timorous one; I will send for
him, and the father's head shall answer for the son's faith.  Pardon
me, dear cousin, that I leave you to attend these matters.  Prithee
visit our queen, meanwhile, she holds you our guest."

"Nay, your Highness must vouchsafe my excuse; I also have your royal
interests too much at heart to while an hour in my pleasurement.  I
will but see the friends of our House now in London, and then back to
the More, and collect the force of my tenants and retainers."

"Ever right, fair speed to you, cardinal that shall be!  Your arm,
Hastings."

The king and his favourite took their way into the state chambers.

"Abet not Gloucester in this alliance,--abet him not!" said the king,
solemnly.

"Pause, sire!  This alliance gives to Warwick a wise counsellor,
instead of the restless Duke of Clarence.  Reflect what danger may
ensue if an ambitious lord, discontented with your reign, obtains the
hand of the great earl's coheiress, and the half of a hundred baronies
that command an army larger than the crown's."

Though these reasonings at a calmer time might well have had their
effect on Edward, at that moment they were little heeded by his
passions.  He stamped his foot violently on the floor.  "Hastings!" he
exclaimed, "be silent! or--"  He stopped short, mastered his emotion.
"Go, assemble our privy council.  We have graver matters than a boy's
marriage now to think of."

It was in vain that Edward sought to absorb the fire of his nature in
state affairs, in all needful provisions against the impending perils,
in schemes of war and vengeance.  The fatal frenzy that had seized him
haunted him everywhere, by day and by night.  For some days after the
unsuspected visit which he had so criminally stolen to his guest's
chamber, something of knightly honour, of religious scruple, of common
reason,--awakened in him the more by the dangers which had sprung up
and which the Neviles were now actively employed in defeating,--
struggled against his guilty desire, and roused his conscience to a
less feeble resistance than it usually displayed when opposed to
passion; but the society of Anne, into which he was necessarily thrown
so many hours in the day, and those hours chiefly after the
indulgences of the banquet, was more powerful than all the dictates of
a virtue so seldom exercised as to have none of the strength of habit.
And as the time drew near when he must visit the archbishop, head his
army against the rebels (whose force daily increased, despite the
captivity of Lord Welles and Sir Thomas Dymoke, who, on the summons of
the king, had first taken sanctuary, and then yielded their persons on
the promise of pardon and safety), and restore Anne to her mother,--as
this time drew near, his perturbation of mind became visible to the
whole court; but, with the instinct of his native craft, he contrived
to conceal its cause.  For the first time in his life he had no
confidant--he did not dare trust his secret to Hastings.  His heart
gnawed itself.  Neither, though constantly stealing to Anne's side,
could he venture upon language that might startle and enlighten her.
He felt that even those attentions, which on the first evening of her
arrival had been noticed by the courtiers, could not be safely
renewed.  He was grave and constrained, even when by her side, and the
etiquette of the court allowed him no opportunity for unwitnessed
conference.  In this suppressed and unequal struggle with himself the
time passed, till it was now but the day before that fixed for his
visit to the More.  And, as he rose at morning from his restless
couch, the struggle was over, and the soul resolved to dare the crime.
His first thought was to separate Anne from Sibyll.  He affected to
rebuke the queen for giving to his high-born guest an associate below
her dignity, and on whose character, poor girl, rested the imputation
of witchcraft; and when the queen replied that Lady Anne herself had
so chosen, he hit upon the expedient of visiting Warner himself, under
pretence of inspecting his progress,--affected to be struck by the
sickly appearance of the sage, and sending for Sibyll, told her, with
an air of gracious consideration, that her first duty was to attend
her parent; that the queen released her for some days from all court
duties; and that he had given orders to prepare the room adjoining
Master Warner's, and held by Friar Bungey, till that worthy had
retired with his patroness from the court, to which she would for the
present remove.

Sibyll, wondering at this novel mark of consideration in the careless
king, yet imputing it to the high value set on her father's labours,
thanked Edward with simple earnestness, and withdrew.  In the anteroom
she encountered Hastings, on his way to the king.  He started in
surprise, and with a jealous pang:  "What! thou, Sibyll! and from the
king's closet!  What led thee thither?"

"His grace's command."  And too noble for the pleasure of exciting the
distrust that delights frivolous minds as the proof of power, Sibyll
added, "The king has been kindly speaking to me of my father's
health."  The courtier's brow cleared; he mused a moment, and said, in
a whisper, "I beseech thee to meet me an hour hence at the eastern
rampart."

Since the return of Lord Hastings to the palace there had been an
estrangement and distance in his manner, ill suiting one who enjoyed
the rights of an accepted suitor, and wounding alike to Sibyll's
affection and her pride; but her confidence in his love and truth was
entire.  Her admiration for him partook of worship, and she steadily
sought to reason away any causes for alarm by recalling the state
cares which pressed heavily upon him, and whispering to herself that
word of "wife," which, coming in passionate music from those beloved
lips, had thrown a mist over the present, a glory over the future! and
in the king's retention of Adam Warner, despite the Duchess of
Bedford's strenuous desire to carry him off with Friar Bungey, and
restore him to his tasks of alchemist and multiplier, as well as in
her own promotion to the queen's service, Sibyll could not but
recognize the influence of her powerful lover.  His tones now were
tender, though grave and earnest. Surely, in the meeting he asked, all
not comprehended would be explained.  And so, with a light heart, she
passed on.

Hastings sighed as his eye followed her from the room, and thus said
he to himself, "Were I the obscure gentleman I once was, how sweet a
lot would that girl's love choose to me from the urn of fate!  But,
oh! when we taste of power and greatness, and master the world's dark
wisdom, what doth love shrink to?--an hour's bliss and a life's
folly."  His delicate lip curled, and breaking from his soliloquy, he
entered the king's closet.  Edward was resting his face upon the palms
of his hands, and his bright eyes dwelt upon vacant space, till they
kindled into animation as they lighted on his favourite.

"Dear Will," said the king, "knowest thou that men say thou art
bewitched?"

"Beau sire, often have men, when a sweet face hath captured thy great
heart, said the same of thee!"

"It may be so with truth, for verily love is the arch-devil's birth."

The king rose, and strode his chamber with a quick step; at last
pausing,--

"Hastings," he said, "so thou lovest the multiplier's pretty daughter?
She has just left me.  Art thou jealous?"

"Happily your Highness sees no beauty in looks that have the gloss of
the raven, and eyes that have the hue of the violet."

"No, I am a constant man, constant to one idea of beauty in a thousand
forms,--eyes like the summer's light-blue sky, and locks like its
golden sunbeams!  But to set thy mind at rest, Will, know that I have
but compassionated the sickly state of the scholar, whom thou prizest
so highly; and I have placed thy fair Sibyll's chamber near her
father's.  Young Lovell says thou art bent on wedding the wizard's
daughter."

"And if I were, beau sire?"

Edward looked grave.

"If thou wert, my poor Will, thou wouldst lose all the fame for shrewd
wisdom which justifies thy sudden fortunes.  No, no; thou art the
flower and prince of my new seignorie,--thou must mate thyself with a
name and a barony that shall be worthy thy fame and thy prospects.
Love beauty, but marry power, Will.  In vain would thy king draw thee
up, if a despised wife draw thee down!"

Hastings listened with profound attention to these words.  The king
did not wait for his answer, but added laughingly,--

"It is thine own fault, crafty gallant, if thou dost not end all her
spells."

"What ends the spells of youth and beauty, beau sire?"

"Possession!" replied the king, in a hollow and muttered voice.

Hastings was about to answer, when the door opened, and the officer in
waiting announced the Duke of Clarence.  "Ha!" said Edward, "George
comes to importune me for leave to depart to the government of
Ireland, and I have to make him weet that I think my Lord Worcester a
safer viceroy of the two."

"Your Highness will pardon me; but, though I deemed you too generous
in the appointment, it were dangerous now to annul it."

"More dangerous to confirm it.  Elizabeth has caused me to see the
folly of a grant made over the malmsey,--a wine, by the way, in which
poor George swears he would be content to drown himself.  Viceroy of
Ireland!  My father had that government, and once tasting the sweets
of royalty, ceased to be a subject!  No, no, Clarence--"

"Can never meditate treason against a brother's crown.  Has he the wit
or the energy or the genius for so desperate an ambition?"

"No; but he hath the vanity.  And I will wager thee a thousand marks
to a silver penny that my jester shall talk giddie Georgie into
advancing a claim to be soldan of Egypt or Pope of Rome!"




CHAPTER IV.

THE FOSTER-BROTHERS.

Sir Marmaduke Nevile was sunning his bravery in the Tower Green,
amidst the other idlers of the court, proud of the gold chain and the
gold spurs which attested his new rank, and not grieved to have
exchanged the solemn walls of Middleham for the gay delights of the
voluptuous palace, when to his pleasure and surprise, he perceived his
foster-brother enter the gateway; and no sooner had Nicholas entered,
than a bevy of the younger courtiers hastened eagerly towards him.

"Gramercy!" quoth Sir Marmaduke, to one of the bystanders, "what hath
chanced to make Nick Alwyn a man of such note, that so many wings of
satin and pile should flutter round him like sparrows round an owl?--
which, by the Holy Rood, his wise face somewhat resembleth."

"Know you not that Master Alwyn, since he hath commenced trade for
himself, hath acquired already the repute of the couthliest goldsmith
in London?  No dague-hilts, no buckles are to be worn, save those that
he fashions; and--an he live, and the House of York prosper--verily,
Master Alwyn the goldsmith will ere long be the richest and best man
from Mile-end to the Sanctuary."

"Right glad am I to hear it," said honest Marmaduke, heartily; and
approaching Alwyn, he startled the precise trader by a friendly slap
on the shoulder.

"What, man, art thou too proud to remember Marmaduke Nevile?  Come to
my lodgment yonder, and talk of old days over the king's canary."

"I crave your pardon, dear Master Nevile."

"Master--avaunt!  Sir Marmaduke,--knighted by the hand of Lord
Warwick,--Sir Marmaduke Nevile, lord of a manor he hath never yet
seen, sober Alwyn."

Then drawing his foster-brother's arm in his, Marmaduke led him to the
chamber in which he lodged.

The young men spent some minutes in congratulating each other on their
respective advances in life: the gentleman who had attained competence
and station simply by devotion to a powerful patron, the trader who
had already won repute and the prospect of wealth by ingenuity,
application, and toil; and yet, to do justice, as much virtue went to
Marmaduke's loyalty to Warwick as to Alwyn's capacities for making a
fortune.  Mutual compliments over, Alwyn said hesitatingly,--

"And dost thou find Mistress Sibyll more gently disposed to thee than
when thou didst complain to me of her cruelty?"

"Marry, good Nicholas, I will be frank with thee.  When I left the
court to follow Lord Warwick, there were rumours of the gallantries of
Lord Hastings to the girl, which grieved me to the heart.  I spoke to
her thereof bluntly and honourably, and got but high looks and
scornful words in return.  Good fellow, I thank thee for that squeeze
of the hand and that doleful sigh.  In my absence at Middleham, I
strove hard to forget one who cared so little for me.  My dear Alwyn,
those Yorkshire lasses are parlously comely, and mighty douce and
debonaire.  So I stormed cruel Sibyll out of my heart perforce of
numbers."

"And thou lovest her no more?"

"Not I, by this goblet!  On coming back, it is true, I felt pleased to
clank my gold spurs in her presence, and curious to see if my new
fortunes would bring out a smile of approval; and verily, to speak
sooth, the donzell was kind and friendly, and spoke to me so cheerly
of the pleasure she felt in my advancement, that I adventured again a
few words of the old folly.  But my lassie drew up like a princess,
and I am a cured man."

"By your troth?"

"By my troth!"

Alwyn's head sank on his bosom in silent thought.  Sir Marmaduke
emptied his goblet; and really the young knight looked so fair and so
gallant, in his new surcoat of velvet, that it was no marvel if he
should find enough food for consolation in a court where men spent six
hours a day in making love,--nor in vain.

"And what say they still of the Lord Hastings?" asked Alwyn, breaking
silence.  "Nothing, I trow and trust, that arraigns the poor lady's
honour, though much that may scoff at her simple faith in a nature so
vain and fickle.  'The tongue's not steel, yet it cuts,' as the
proverb saith of the slanderer."

"No! scandal spares her virtue as woman, to run down her cunning as
witch!  They say that Hastings hath not prevailed, nor sought to
prevail,--that he is spell-bound.  By Saint Thomas, from a maid of
such character Marmaduke Nevile is happily rescued!"

"Sir Marmaduke," then said Alwyn, in a grave and earnest voice, "it
behooves me, as true friend, though humble, and as honest man, to give
thee my secret, in return for thine own.  I love this girl.  Ay, ay!
thou thinkest that love is a strange word on a craftsman's lips, but
'cold flint hides hot fire.'  I would not have been thy rival, Heaven
forefend! hadst thou still cherished a hope, or if thou now wilt
forbid my aspiring; but if thou wilt not say me nay, I will try my
chance in delivering a pure soul from a crafty wooer."

Marmaduke stared in great surprise at his foster-brother; and though,
no doubt, he spoke truth when he said he was cured of his love for
Sibyll, he yet felt a sort of jealousy at Alwyn's unexpected
confession, and his vanity was hurt at the notion that the plain-
visaged trader should attempt where the handsome gentleman had
failed.--However, his blunt, generous, manly nature after a brief
struggle got the better of these sore feelings; and holding out his
hand to Alwyn, he said, "My dear foster-brother, try the hazard and
cast thy dice, if thou wilt.  Heaven prosper thee, if success be for
thine own good!  But if she be given to witchcraft (plague on thee,
man, sneer not at the word), small comfort to bed and hearth can such
practices bring!"

"Alas!" said Alwyn, "the witchcraft is on the side of Hastings,--the
witchcraft of fame and rank, and a glozing tongue and experienced art.
But she shall not fall, if a true arm can save her; and 'though Hope
be a small child; she can carry a great anchor.'"

These words were said so earnestly, that they opened new light into
Marmaduke's mind; and his native generosity standing in lieu of
intellect, he comprehended sympathetically the noble motives which
actuated the son of commerce.

"My poor Alwyn," he said, "if thou canst save this young maid,--whom
by my troth I loved well, and who tells me yet that she loveth me as a
sister loves,--right glad shall I be.  But thou stakest thy peace of
mind against hers!  Fair luck to thee, say I again,--and if thou wilt
risk thy chance at once (for suspense is love's purgatory), seize the
moment.  I saw Sibyll, just ere we met, pass to the ramparts, alone;
at this sharp season the place is deserted; go."

"I will, this moment!" said Alwyn, rising and turning very pale; but
as he gained the door, he halted--"I had forgot, Master Nevile, that I
bring the king his signet-ring, new set, of the falcon and fetter-
lock."

"They will keep thee three hours in the anteroom.  The Duke of
Clarence is now with the king.  Trust the ring to me, I shall see his
highness ere he dines."

Even in his love, Alwyn had the Saxon's considerations of business; he
hesitated--"May I not endanger thereby the king's favour and loss of
custom?" said the trader.

"Tush, man! little thou knowest King Edward; he cares naught for the
ceremonies: moreover, the Neviles are now all-puissant in favour.  I
am here in attendance on sweet Lady Anne, whom the king loves as a
daughter, though too young for sire to so well-grown a donzell; and a
word from her lip, if need be, will set all as smooth as this gorget
of lawn!"

Thus assured, Alwyn gave the ring to his friend, and took his way at
once to the ramparts.  Marmaduke remained behind to finish the canary
and marvel how so sober a man should form so ardent a passion.  Nor
was he much less surprised to remark that his friend, though still
speaking with a strong provincial accent, and still sowing his
discourse with rustic saws and proverbs, had risen in language and in
manner with the rise of his fortunes.  "An he go on so, and become
lord mayor," muttered Marmaduke, "verily he will half look like a
gentleman!"

To these meditations the young knight was not long left in peace.  A
messenger from Warwick House sought and found him, with the news that
the earl was on his road to London, and wished to see Sir Marmaduke
the moment of his arrival, which was hourly expected.  The young
knight's hardy brain somewhat flustered by the canary, Alwyn's secret,
and this sudden tidings, he hastened to obey his chief's summons, and
forgot, till he gained the earl's mansion, the signet ring intrusted
to him by Alwyn.  "What matters it?" said he then, philosophically,--
"the king hath rings eno' on his fingers not to miss one for an hour
or so, and I dare not send any one else with it.  Marry, I must plunge
my head in cold water, to get rid of the fumes of the wine."




CHAPTER V.

THE LOVER AND THE GALLANT--WOMAN'S CHOICE.

Alwyn bent his way to the ramparts, a part of which then resembled the
boulevards of a French town, having rows of trees, green sward, a
winding walk, and seats placed at frequent intervals for the repose of
the loungers.  During the summer evenings, the place was a favourite
resort of the court idlers; but now, in winter, it was usually
deserted, save by the sentries, placed at distant intervals.  The
trader had not gone far in his quest when he perceived, a few paces
before him, the very man he had most cause to dread; and Lord
Hastings, hearing the sound of a footfall amongst the crisp, faded
leaves that strewed the path, turned abruptly as Alwyn approached his
side.

At the sight of his formidable rival, Alwyn had formed one of those
resolutions which occur only to men of his decided, plain-spoken,
energetic character.  His distinguishing shrewdness and penetration
had given him considerable insight into the nobler as well as the
weaker qualities of Hastings; and his hope in the former influenced
the determination to which he came.  The reflections of Hastings at
that moment were of a nature to augur favourably to the views of the
humbler lover; for, during the stirring scenes in which his late
absence from Sibyll had been passed, Hastings had somewhat recovered
from her influence; and feeling the difficulties of reconciling his
honour and his worldly prospects to further prosecution of the love,
rashly expressed but not deeply felt, he had determined frankly to cut
the Gordian knot he could not solve, and inform Sibyll that marriage
between them was impossible.  With that view he had appointed this
meeting, and his conference with the king but confirmed his intention.
It was in this state of mind that he was thus accosted by Alwyn:--

"My lord, may I make bold to ask for a few moments your charitable
indulgence to words you may deem presumptuous?"

"Be brief, then, Master Alwyn,--I am waited for."

"Alas, my lord!  I can guess by whom,--by the one whom I seek myself,
--by Sibyll Warner."

"How, Sir Goldsmith!" said Hastings, haughtily, "what knowest thou of
my movements, and what care I for thine?"

"Hearken, my Lord Hastings,--hearken!" said Alwyn, repressing his
resentment, and in a voice so earnest that it riveted the entire
attention of the listener--"hearken, and judge not as noble judges
craftsman, but as man should judge man.  As the saw saith, 'We all lie
alike in our graves.'  From the first moment I saw this Sibyll Warner
I loved her.  Yes; smile disdainfully, but listen still.  She was
obscure and in distress.  I loved her not for her fair looks alone; I
loved her for her good gifts, for her patient industry, for her filial
duty, for her struggles to give bread to her father's board.  I did
not say to myself, 'This girl will make a comely fere, a delicate
paramour!'  I said, 'This good daughter will make a wife whom an
honest man may take to his heart and cherish!'"  Poor Alwyn stopped,
with tears in his voice, struggled with his emotions, and pursued: "My
fortunes were more promising than hers; there was no cause why I might
not hope.  True, I had a rival then; young as myself, better born,
comelier; but she loved him not.  I foresaw that his love for her--if
love it were--would cease.  Methought that her mind would understand
mine; as mine--verily I say it--yearned for hers!  I could not look on
the maidens of mine own rank, and who had lived around me, but what--
oh, no, my lord, again I say, not the beauty, but the gifts, the mind,
the heart of Sibyll, threw them all into the shade.  You may think it
strange that I--a plain, steadfast, trading, working, careful man--
should have all these feelings; but I will tell you wherefore such as
I sometimes have them, nurse them, brood on them, more than you lords
and gentlemen, with all your graceful arts in pleasing.  We know no
light loves! no brief distractions to the one arch passion!  We sober
sons of the stall and the ware are no general gallants,--we love
plainly, we love but once, and we love heartily.  But who knows not
the proverb, 'What's a gentleman but his pleasure?'--and what's
pleasure but change?  When Sibyll came to the palace, I soon heard her
name linked with yours; I saw her cheek blush when you spoke.  Well,
well, well! after all, as the old wives tell us, 'Blushing is virtue's
livery.'  I said, 'She is a chaste and high-hearted girl.'  This will
pass, and the time will come when she can compare your love and mine.
Now, my lord, the time has come.  I know that you seek her.  Yea, at
this moment, I know that her heart beats for your footstep.  Say but
one word,--say that you love Sibyll Warner with the thought of wedding
her,--say that, on your honour, noble Hastings, as gentleman and peer,
and I will kneel at your feet, and beg your pardon for my vain
follies, and go back to my ware, and work, and not repine.  Say it!
You are silent?  Then I implore you, still as peer and gentleman, to
let the honest love save the maiden from the wooing that will blight
her peace and blast her name!  And now, Lord Hastings, I wait your
gracious answer."

The sensations experienced by Hastings, as Alwyn thus concluded, were
manifold and complicated; but, at the first, admiration and pity were
the strongest.

"My poor friend," said he, kindly, "if you thus love a demoiselle
deserving all my reverence, your words and your thoughts bespeak you
no unworthy pretender; but take my counsel, good Alwyn.  Come not--
thou from the Chepe--come not to the court for a wife.  Forget this
fantasy."

"My lord, it is impossible!  Forget I cannot, regret I may.

"Thou canst not succeed, man," resumed the nobleman, more coldly, "nor
couldst if William Hastings had never lived.  The eyes of women
accustomed to gaze on the gorgeous externals of the world are blinded
to plain worth like thine.  It might have been different had the
donzell never abided in a palace; but as it is, brave fellow, learn
how these wounds of the heart scar over, and the spot becomes hard and
callous evermore.  What art thou, Master Nicholas Alwyn," continued
Hastings, gloomily, and with a withering smile--"what art thou, to ask
for a bliss denied to me--to all of us,--the bliss of carrying poetry
into life, youth into manhood, by winning--the FIRST LOVED?  But think
not, sir lover, that I say this in jealousy or disparagement.  Look
yonder, by the leafless elm, the white robe of Sibyll Warner.  Go and
plead thy suit."

"Do I understand you, my lord?" said Alwyn, somewhat confused and
perplexed by the tone and the manner Hastings adopted.  "Does report
err, and you do not love this maiden?"

"Fair master," returned Hastings, scornfully, "thou hast no right that
I trow of to pry into my thoughts and secrets; I cannot acknowledge my
judge in thee, good jeweller and goldsmith,--enough, surely, in all
courtesy, that I yield thee the precedence.  Tell thy tale, as
movingly, if thou wilt, as thou hast told it to me; say of me all that
thou fanciest thou hast reason to suspect; and if, Master Alwyn, thou
woo and win the lady, fail not to ask me to thy wedding!"

There was in this speech and the bearing of the speaker that superb
levity, that inexpressible and conscious superiority, that cold,
ironical tranquillity, which awe and humble men more than grave
disdain or imperious passion.  Alwyn ground his teeth as he listened,
and gazed in silent despair and rage upon the calm lord.  Neither of
these men could strictly be called handsome.  Of the two, Alwyn had
the advantage of more youthful prime, of a taller stature, of a more
powerful, though less supple and graceful, frame.  In their very
dress, there was little of that marked distinction between classes
which then usually prevailed, for the dark cloth tunic and surcoat of
Hastings made a costume even simpler than the bright-coloured garb of
the trader, with its broad trimmings of fur, and its aiglettes of
elaborate lace.  Between man and man, then, where was the visible, the
mighty, the insurmountable difference in all that can charm the fancy
and captivate the eye, which, as he gazed, Alwyn confessed to himself
there existed between the two?  Alas! how the distinctions least to be
analyzed are ever the sternest!  What lofty ease in that high-bred
air; what histories of triumph seemed to speak in that quiet eye,
sleeping in its own imperious lustre; what magic of command in that
pale brow; what spells of persuasion in that artful lip!  Alwyn
muttered to himself, bowed his head involuntarily, and passed on at
once from Hastings to Sibyll, who now, at the distance of some yards,
had arrested her steps, in surprise to see the conference between the
nobleman and the burgher.

But as he approached Sibyll, poor Alwyn felt all the firmness and
courage he had exhibited with Hastings melt away.  And the trepidation
which a fearful but deep affection ever occasions in men of his
character, made his movements more than usually constrained and
awkward, as he cowered beneath the looks of the maid he so truly
loved.

"Seekest thou me, Master Alwyn?" asked Sibyll, gently, seeing that,
though he paused by her side, he spoke not.

"I do," returned Alwyn, abruptly, and again he was silent.  At length,
lifting his eyes and looking round him, he saw Hastings at the
distance, leaning against the rampart, with folded arms; and the
contrast of his rival's cold and arrogant indifference, and his own
burning veins and bleeding heart, roused up his manly spirit, and gave
to his tongue the eloquence which emotion gains when it once breaks
the fetters it forges for itself.

"Look, look, Sibyll!" he said, pointing to Hastings "look! that man
you believe loves you.  If so--if he loved thee,--would he stand
yonder--mark him--aloof, contemptuous, careless--while he knew that I
was by your side?"

Sibyll turned upon the goldsmith eyes full of innocent surprise,--eyes
that asked, plainly as eyes could speak, "And wherefore not, Master
Alwyn?"

Alwyn so interpreted the look, and replied, as if she had spoken:
"Because he must know how poor and tame is that feeble fantasy which
alone can come from a soul worn bare with pleasure, to that which I
feel and now own for thee,--the love of youth, born of the heart's
first vigour; because he ought to fear that that love should prevail
with thee; because that love ought to prevail.  Sibyll, between us
there are not imparity and obstacle.  Oh, listen to me,--listen still!
Frown not, turn not away."  And, stung and animated by the sight of
his rival, fired by the excitement of a contest on which the bliss of
his own life and the weal of Sibyll's might depend, his voice was as
the cry of a mortal agony, and affected the girl to the inmost
recesses of her soul.  "Oh, Alwyn, I frown not!" she said sweetly;
"oh, Alwyn, I turn not away!  Woe is me to give pain to so kind and
brave a heart; but--"

"No, speak not yet.  I have studied thee, I have read thee as a
scholar would read a book.  I know thee proud; I know thee aspiring; I
know thou art vain of thy gentle blood, and distasteful of my yeoman's
birth.  There, I am not blind to thy faults, but I love thee despite
them; and to please those faults I have toiled, schemed, dreamed,
risen.  I offer to thee the future with the certainty of a man who can
command it.  Wouldst thou wealth?--be patient (as ambition ever is):
in a few years thou shalt have more gold than the wife of Lord
Hastings can command; thou shalt lodge more statelily, fare more
sumptuously; [This was no vain promise of Master Alwyn.  At that time
a successful trader made a fortune with signal rapidity, and enjoyed
greater luxuries than most of the barons.  All the gold in the country
flowed into the coffers of the London merchants.] thou shalt walk on
cloth-of-gold if thou wilt!  Wouldst thou titles?--I will win them.
Richard de la Pole, who founded the greatest duchy in the realm, was
poorer than I, when he first served in a merchant's ware.  Gold buys
all things now.  Oh, would to Heaven it could but buy me thee!"

"Master Alwyn, it is not gold that buys love.  Be soothed.  What can I
say to thee to soften the harsh word 'Nay'?"

"You reject me, then, and at once?  I ask not your hand now.  I will
wait, tarry, hope,--I care not if for years; wait till I can fulfil
all I promise thee!"

Sibyll, affected to tears, shook her head mournfully; and there was a
long and painful silence.  Never was wooing more strangely
circumstanced than this,--the one lover pleading while the other was
in view; the one, ardent, impassioned, the other, calm and passive;
and the silence of the last, alas! having all the success which the
words of the other lacked.  It might be said that the choice before
Sibyll was a type of the choice ever given, but in vain, to the child
of genius.  Here a secure and peaceful life, an honoured home, a
tranquil lot, free from ideal visions, it is true, but free also from
the doubt and the terror, the storms of passion; there, the fatal
influence of an affection, born of imagination, sinister, equivocal,
ominous, but irresistible.  And the child of genius fulfilled her
destiny!

"Master Alwyn," said Sibyll, rousing herself to the necessary
exertion, "I shall never cease gratefully to recall thy generous
friendship, never cease to pray fervently for thy weal below.  But
forever and forever let this content thee,--I can no more."

Impressed by the grave and solemn tone of Sibyll, Alwyn hushed the
groan that struggled to his lips, and gloomily replied: "I obey you,
fair mistress, and I return to my workday life; but ere I go, I pray
you misthink me not if I say this much: not alone for the bliss of
hoping for a day in which I might call thee mine have I thus
importuned, but, not less--I swear not less--from the soul's desire to
save thee from what I fear will but lead to woe and wayment, to peril
and pain, to weary days and sleepless nights.  'Better a little fire
that warms than a great that burns.'  Dost thou think that Lord
Hastings, the vain, the dissolute--"

"Cease, sir!" said Sibyll, proudly;  "me reprove if thou wilt, but
lower not my esteem for thee by slander against another!"

"What!" said Alwyn, bitterly; "doth even one word of counsel chafe
thee?  I tell thee that if thou dreamest that Lord Hastings loves
Sibyll Warner as man loves the maiden he would wed, thou deceivest
thyself to thine own misery.  If thou wouldst prove it, go to him
now,--go and say, 'Wilt thou give me that home of peace and honour,
that shelter for my father's old age under a son's roof which the
trader I despise proffers me in vain?"

"If it were already proffered me--by him?" said Sibyll, in a low
voice, and blushing deeply.

Alwyn started.  "Then I wronged him; and--and--" he added generously,
though with a faint sickness at his heart, "I can yet be happy in
thinking thou art so.  Farewell, maiden, the saints guard thee from
one memory of regret at what hath passed between us!"

He pulled his bonnet hastily over his brows, and departed with unequal
and rapid strides.  As he passed the spot where Hastings stood leaning
his arm upon the wall, and his face upon his hand, the nobleman looked
up, and said,--

"Well, Sir Goldsmith, own at least that thy trial hath been a fair
one!" Then struck with the anguish written upon Alwyn's face, he
walked up to him, and, with a frank, compassionate impulse, laid his
hand on his shoulder.  "Alwyn," he said, "I have felt what you feel
now; I have survived it, and the world hath not prospered with me
less!  Take with you a compassion that respects, and does not degrade
you."

"Do not deceive her, my lord,--she trusts and loves you!  You never
deceived man,--the wide world says it,--do not deceive woman!  Deeds
kill men, words women!"  Speaking thus simply, Alwyn strode on, and
vanished.

Hastings slowly and silently advanced to Sibyll.  Her rejection of
Alwyn had by no means tended to reconcile him to the marriage he
himself had proffered.  He might well suppose that the girl, even if
unguided by affection, would not hesitate between a mighty nobleman
and an obscure goldsmith.  His pride was sorely wounded that the
latter should have even thought himself the equal of one whom he had
proposed, though but in a passionate impulse, to raise to his own
state.  And yet as he neared Sibyll, and, with a light footstep, she
sprang forward to meet him, her eyes full of sweet joy and confidence,
he shrank from an avowal which must wither up a heart opening thus all
its bloom of youth and love to greet him.

"Ah, fair lord," said the maiden, "was it kindly in thee to permit
poor Alwyn to inflict on me so sharp a pain, and thou to stand calmly
distant?  Sure, alas! that had thy humble rival proffered a crown, it
had been the same to Sibyll!  Oh, how the grief it was mine to cause
grieved me; and yet, through all, I had one selfish, guilty gleam of
pleasure,--to think that I had not been loved so well, if I were all
unworthy the sole love I desire or covet!"

"And yet, Sibyll, this young man can in all, save wealth and a
sounding name, give thee more than I can,--a heart undarkened by moody
memories, a temper unsoured by the world's dread and bitter lore of
man's frailty and earth's sorrow.  Ye are not far separated by
ungenial years, and might glide to a common grave hand in hand; but I,
older in heart than in age, am yet so far thine elder in the last,
that these hairs will be gray, and this form bent, while thy beauty is
in its prime, and--but thou weepest!"

"I weep that thou shouldst bring one thought of time to sadden my
thoughts, which are of eternity.  Love knows no age, it foresees no
grave! its happiness and its trust behold on the earth but one glory,
melting into the hues of heaven, where they who love lastingly pass
calmly on to live forever!  See, I weep not now!"

"And did not this honest burgher," pursued Hastings, softened and
embarrassed, but striving to retain his cruel purpose, "tell thee to
distrust me; tell thee that my vows were false?"

"Methinks, if an angel told me so, I should disbelieve!"

"Why, look thee, Sibyll, suppose his warning true; suppose that at
this hour I sought thee with intent to say that that destiny which
ambition weaves for itself forbade me to fulfil a word hotly spoken;
that I could not wed thee,--should I not seem to thee a false wooer, a
poor trifler with thy earnest heart; and so, couldst thou not recall
the love of him whose truer and worthier homage yet lingers in thine
ear, and with him be happy?"

Sibyll lifted her dark eyes, yet humid, upon the unrevealing face of
the speaker, and gazed on him with wistful and inquiring sadness;
then, shrinking from his side, she crossed her arms meekly on her
bosom, and thus said,--

"If ever, since we parted, one such thought hath glanced across thee--
one thought of repentance at the sacrifice of pride, or the lessening
of power--which (she faltered, broke off the sentence, and resumed)--
in one word, if thou wouldst retract, say it now, and I will not
accuse thy falsehood, but bless thy truth."

"Thou couldst be consoled, then, by thy pride of woman, for the loss
of an unworthy lover?"

"My lord, are these questions fair?"

Hastings was silent.  The gentler part of his nature struggled
severely with the harder.  The pride of Sibyll moved him no less than
her trust; and her love in both was so evident, so deep, so
exquisitely contrasting the cold and frivolous natures amidst which
his lot had fallen, that he recoiled from casting away forever a heart
never to be replaced.  Standing on that bridge of life, with age
before and youth behind, he felt that never again could he be so
loved, or, if so loved by one so worthy of whatever of pure affection,
of young romance, was yet left to his melancholy and lonely soul.

He took her hand, and, as she felt its touch, her firmness forsook
her, her head drooped upon her bosom, and she burst into an agony of
tears.

"Oh, Sibyll, forgive me!  Smile on me again, Sibyll!" exclaimed
Hastings, subdued and melted.  But, alas! the heart once bruised and
galled recovers itself but slowly, and it was many minutes before the
softest words the eloquent lover could shape to sound sufficed to dry
those burning tears, and bring back the enchanting smile,--nay, even
then the smile was forced and joyless.  They walked on for some
moments, both in thought, till Hastings said: "Thou lovest me, Sibyll,
and art worthy of all the love that man can feel for maid; and yet,
canst thou solve me this question, nor chide me that I ask it, Dost
thou not love the world and the world's judgments more than me?  What
is that which women call honour?  What makes them shrink from all love
that takes not the form and circumstance of the world's hollow rites?
Does love cease to be love, unless over its wealth of trust and
emotion the priest mouths his empty blessing?  Thou in thy graceful
pride art angered if I, in wedding thee, should remember the sacrifice
which men like me--I own it fairly--deem as great as man can make; and
yet thou wouldst fly my love if it wooed thee to a sacrifice of thine
own."

Artfully was the question put, and Hastings smiled to himself in
imagining the reply it must bring; and then Sibyll answered, with the
blush which the very subject called forth,

"Alas, my lord, I am but a poor casuist, but I feel that if I asked
thee to forfeit whatever men respect,--honour and repute for valour,
to be traitor and dastard,--thou couldst love me no more; and marvel
you if, when man woos woman to forfeit all that her sex holds
highest,--to be in woman what dastard and traitor is in man,--she
hears her conscience and her God speak in a louder voice than can come
from a human lip?  The goods and pomps of the world we are free to
sacrifice, and true love heeds and counts them not; but true love
cannot sacrifice that which makes up love,--it cannot sacrifice the
right to be loved below; the hope to love on in the realm above; the
power to pray with a pure soul for the happiness it yearns to make;
the blessing to seem ever good and honoured in the eyes of the one by
whom alone it would be judged.  And therefore, sweet lord, true love
never contemplates this sacrifice; and if once it believes itself
truly loved, it trusts with a fearless faith in the love on which it
leans."

"Sibyll, would to Heaven I had seen thee in my youth!  Would to Heaven
I were more worthy of thee!" And in that interview Hastings had no
heart to utter what he had resolved, "Sibyll, I sought thee but to say
Farewell."




CHAPTER VI.

WARWICK RETURNS--APPEASES A DISCONTENTED PRINCE--AND CONFERS WITH A
REVENGEFUL CONSPIRATOR.

It was not till late in the evening that Warwick arrived at his vast
residence in London, where he found not only Marmaduke Nevile ready to
receive him, but a more august expectant, in George Duke of Clarence.
Scarcely had the earl crossed the threshold, when the duke seized his
arm, and leading him into the room that adjoined the hall, said,--

"Verily, Edward is besotted no less than ever by his wife's leech-like
family.  Thou knowest my appointment to the government of Ireland;
Isabel, like myself, cannot endure the subordinate vassalage we must
brook at the court, with the queen's cold looks and sour words.  Thou
knowest, also, with what vain pretexts Edward has put me of; and now,
this very day, he tells me that he hath changed his humour,--that I am
not stern enough for the Irish kernes; that he loves me too well to
banish me, forsooth; and that Worcester, the people's butcher but the
queen's favourite, must have the post so sacredly pledged to me.  I
see in this Elizabeth's crafty malice.  Is this struggle between
king's blood and queen's kith to go on forever?"

"Calm thyself, George; I will confer with the king tomorrow, and hope
to compass thy not too arrogant desire.  Certes, a king's brother is
the fittest vice-king for the turbulent kernes of Ireland, who are
ever flattered into obeisance by ceremony and show.  The government
was pledged to thee--Edward can scarcely be serious.  Moreover,
Worcester, though forsooth a learned man--Mort-Dieu! methinks that
same learning fills the head to drain the heart!--is so abhorred for
his cruelties that his very landing in Ireland will bring a new
rebellion to add to our already festering broils and sores.  Calm
thyself, I say.  Where didst thou leave Isabel?"

"With my mother."

"And Anne?--the queen chills not her young heart with cold grace?"

"Nay, the queen dare not unleash her malice against Edward's will;
and, to do him justice, he hath shown all honour to Lord Warwick's
daughter."

"He is a gallant prince, with all his faults," said the father,
heartily, "and we must bear with him, George; for verily he hath bound
men by a charm to love him.  Stay thou and share my hasty repast, and
over the wine we will talk of thy views.  Spare me now for a moment; I
have to prepare work eno' for a sleepless night.  This Lincolnshire
rebellion promises much trouble.  Lord Willoughby has joined it; more
than twenty thousand men are in arms.  I have already sent to convene
the knights and barons on whom the king can best depend, and must urge
their instant departure for their halls, to raise men and meet the
foe.  While Edward feasts, his minister must toil.  Tarry a while till
I return."  The earl re-entered the hall, and beckoned to Marmaduke,
who stood amongst a group of squires.

"Follow me; I may have work for thee."  Warwick took a taper from one
of the servitors, and led the way to his own more private apartment.
On the landing of the staircase, by a small door, stood his body-
squire--"Is the prisoner within?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Good!"--The earl opened the door by which the squire had mounted
guard, and bade Marmaduke wait without.

The inmate of the chamber, whose dress bore the stains of fresh travel
and hard riding, lifted his face hastily as the earl entered.

"Robin Hilyard," said Warwick, "I have mused much how to reconcile my
service to the king with the gratitude I owe to a man who saved me
from great danger.  In the midst of thy unhappy and rebellious designs
thou wert captured and brought to me; the papers found on thee attest
a Lancastrian revolt, so ripening towards a mighty gathering, and so
formidable from the adherents whom the gold and intrigues of King
Louis have persuaded to risk land and life for the Red Rose, that all
the king's friends can do to save his throne is now needed.  In this
revolt thou hast been the scheming brain, the master hand, the match
to the bombard, the fire brand to the flax.  Thou smilest, man!  Alas!
seest thou not that it is my stern duty to send thee bound hand and
foot before the king's council, for the brake to wring from thee thy
guilty secrets, and the gibbet to close thy days?"

"I am prepared," said Hilyard; "when the bombard explodes, the match
has become useless; when the flame smites the welkin, the firebrand is
consumed!"

"Bold man! what seest thou in this rebellion that can profit thee?"

"I see, looming through the chasms and rents made in the feudal order
by civil war, the giant image of a free people."

"And thou wouldst be a martyr for the multitude, who deserted thee at
Olney?"

"As thou for the king who dishonoured thee at Shene!"

Warwick frowned, and there was a moment's pause; at last, said the
earl: "Look you, Robin, I would fain not have on my hands the blood of
a man who saved my life.  I believe thee, though a fanatic and half
madman,--I believe thee true in word as rash of deed.  Swear to me on
the cross of this dagger that thou wilt lay aside all scheme and plot
for this rebellion, all aid and share in civil broil and dissension,
and thy life and liberty are restored to thee.  In that intent, I have
summoned my own kinsman, Marmaduke Nevile.  He waits without the door;
he shall conduct thee safely to the seashore; thou shalt gain in peace
my government of Calais, and my seneschal there shall find thee all
thou canst need,--meat for thy hunger and moneys for thy pastime.
Accept my mercy, take the oath, and begone."

"My lord," answered Hilyard, much touched and affected, "blame not
thyself if this carcass feed the crows--my blood be on mine own head!
I cannot take this oath; I cannot live in peace; strife and broil are
grown to me food and drink.  Oh, my lord! thou knowest not what dark
and baleful memories made me an agent in God's hand against this
ruthless Edward!" and then passionately, with whitening lips and
convulsive features, Hilyard recounted to the startled Warwick the
same tale which had roused the sympathy of Adam Warner.

The earl, whose affections were so essentially homely and domestic,
was even more shocked than the scholar by the fearful narrative.

"Unhappy man!" he said with moistened eyes, "from the core of my heart
I pity thee.  But thou, the scathed sufferer from civil war, wilt thou
be now its dread reviver?"

"If Edward had wronged thee, great earl, as me, poor franklin, what
would be thine answer?  In vain moralize to him whom the spectre of a
murdered child and the shriek of a maniac wife haunt and hound on to
vengeance!  So send me to rack and halter.  Be there one curse more on
the soul of Edward!"

"Thou shalt not die through my witness," said the earl, abruptly; and
he quitted the chamber.

Securing the door by a heavy bolt on the outside, he gave orders to
his squire to attend to the comforts of the prisoner; and then turning
into his closet with Marmaduke, said: "I sent for thee, young cousin,
with design to commit to thy charge one whose absence from England I
deemed needful--that design I must abandon.  Go back to the palace,
and see, if thou canst, the king before he sleeps; say that this
rising in Lincolnshire is more than a riot,--it is the first burst of
a revolution! that I hold council here to-night, and every shire, ere
the morrow, shall have its appointed captain.  I will see the king at
morning.  Yet stay--gain sight of my child Anne; she will leave the
court to-morrow.  I will come for her; bid her train be prepared; she
and the countess must away to Calais,--England again hath ceased to be
a home for women!  What to do with this poor rebel?" muttered the
earl, when alone; "release him I cannot; slay him I will not.  Hum,
there is space enough in these walls to inclose a captive."




CHAPTER VII.

THE FEAR AND THE FLIGHT.

King Edward feasted high, and Sibyll sat in her father's chamber,--she
silent with thought of love, Adam silent in the toils of science.  The
Eureka was well-nigh finished, rising from its ruins more perfect,
more elaborate, than before.  Maiden and scholar, each seeming near to
the cherished goal,--one to love's genial altar, the other to fame's
lonely shrine.

Evening advanced, night began, night deepened.  King Edward's feast
was over, but still in his perfumed chamber the wine sparkled in the
golden cup.  It was announced to him that Sir Marmaduke Nevile, just
arrived from the earl's house, craved an audience.  The king, pre-
occupied in deep revery, impatiently postponed it till the morrow.

"To-morrow," said the gentleman in attendance, "Sir Marmaduke bids me
say, fearful that the late hour would forbid his audience, that Lord
Warwick himself will visit your Grace.  I fear, sire, that the
disturbances are great indeed, for the squires and gentlemen in Lady
Anne's train have orders to accompany her to Calais to-morrow."

"To-morrow, to-morrow!" repeated the king--"well, sir, you are
dismissed."

The Lady Anne (to whom Sibyll had previously communicated the king's
kindly consideration for Master Warner) had just seen Marmaduke, and
learned the new dangers that awaited the throne and the realm.  The
Lancastrians were then openly in arms for the prince of her love, and
against her mighty father!

The Lady Anne sat a while, sorrowful and musing, and then, before yon
crucifix, the Lady Anne knelt in prayer.  Sir Marmaduke Nevile
descends to the court below, and some three or four busy, curious
gentlemen, not yet a-bed, seize him by the arm, and pray him to say
what storm is in the wind.

The night deepened still.  The wine is drained in King Edward's
goblet; King Edward has left his chamber; and Sibyll, entreating her
father, but in vain, to suspend his toil, has kissed the damps from
his brow, and is about to retire to her neighbouring room.  She has
turned to the threshold, when, hark! a faint--a distant cry, a woman's
shriek, the noise of a clapping door!  The voice--it is the voice of
Anne!  Sibyll passed the threshold, she is in the corridor; the winter
moon shines through the open arches, the air is white and cold with
frost. Suddenly the door at the farther end is thrown wide open, a
form rushes into the corridor, it passes Sibyll, halts, turns round.
"Oh, Sibyll!"  cried the Lady Anne, in a voice wild with horror, "save
me--aid--help!  Merciful Heaven, the king!"

Instinctively, wonderingly, tremblingly, Sibyll drew Anne into the
chamber she had just quitted, and as they gained its shelter, as Anne
sank upon the floor, the gleam of cloth-of-gold flashed through the
dim atmosphere, and Edward, yet in the royal robe in which he had
dazzled all the eyes at his kingly feast, stood within the chamber.
His countenance was agitated with passion, and its clear hues flushed
red with wine.  At his entrance Anne sprang from the floor, and rushed
to Warner, who, in dumb bewilderment, had suspended his task, and
stood before the Eureka, from which steamed and rushed the dark, rapid
smoke, while round and round, labouring and groaning, rolled its fairy
wheels.  [The gentle reader will doubtless bear in mind that Master
Warner's complicated model had but little resemblance to the models of
the steam-engine in our own day, and that it was usually connected
with other contrivances, for the better display of the principle it
was intended to illustrate.]

"Sir," cried Anne, clinging to him convulsively, "you are a father; by
your child's soul, protect Lord Warwick's daughter!"

Roused from his abstraction by this appeal, the poor scholar wound his
arm round the form thus clinging to him, and raising his head with
dignity, replied, "Thy name, youth, and sex protect thee!"

"Unhand that lady, vile sorcerer," exclaimed the king, "I am her
protector.  Come, Anne, sweet Anne, fair lady, thou mistakest,--come!"
he whispered.  "Give not to these low natures matter for guesses that
do but shame thee.  Let thy king and cousin lead thee back to thy
sweet rest."

He sought, though gently, to loosen the arms that wound themselves
round the old man; but Anne, not heeding, not listening, distracted by
a terror that seemed to shake her whole frame and to threaten her very
reason, continued to cry out loudly upon her father's name,--her great
father, wakeful, then, for the baffled ravisher's tottering throne!

Edward had still sufficient possession of his reason to be alarmed
lest some loiterer or sentry in the outer court might hear the cries
which his attempts to soothe but the more provoked.  Grinding his
teeth, and losing patience, he said to Adam, "Thou knowest me,
friend,--I am thy king.  Since the Lady Anne, in her bewilderment,
prefers thine aid to mine, help to bear her back to her apartment; and
thou, young mistress, lend thine arm.  This wizard's den is no fit
chamber for our high-born guest."

"No, no; drive me not hence, Master Warner--that man--that king--give
me not up to his--his--"

"Beware!" exclaimed the king.

It was not till now that Adam's simple mind comprehended the true
cause of Anne's alarm, which Sibyll still conjectured not, but stood
trembling by her friend's side, and close to her father.

"Do not fear, maiden;" said Adam Warner, laying his hand upon the
loosened locks that swept over his bosom, "for though I am old and
feeble, God and his angels are in every spot where virtue trembles and
resists.  My lord king, thy sceptre extends not over a human soul!"

"Dotard, prate not to me!" said Edward, laying his hand on his dagger.
Sibyll saw the movement, and instinctively placed herself between her
father and the king.  That slight form, those pure, steadfast eyes,
those features, noble at once and delicate, recalled to Edward the awe
which had seized him in his first dark design; and again that awe came
over him.  He retreated.

"I mean harm to none," said he, almost submissively; "and if I am so
unhappy as to scare with my presence the Lady Anne, I will retire,
praying you, donzell, to see to her state, and lead her back to her
chamber when it so pleases herself.  Saying this much, I command you,
old man, and you, maiden, to stand back while I but address one
sentence to the Lady Anne."

With these words he gently advanced to Anne, and took her hand; but,
snatching it from him, the poor lady broke from Adam, rushed to the
casement, opened it, and seeing some figures indistinct and distant in
the court below, she called out in a voice of such sharp agony that it
struck remorse and even terror into Edward's soul.

"Alas!" he muttered, "she will not listen to me! her mind is
distraught!  What frenzy has been mine!  Pardon--pardon, Anne,--oh,
pardon!"

Adam Warner laid his hand on the king's arm, and he drew the imperious
despot away as easily as a nurse leads a docile child.

"King!" said the brave old man, "may God pardon thee; for if the last
evil hath been wrought upon this noble lady, David sinned not more
heavily than thou."

"She is pure, inviolate,--I swear it!" said the king, humbly.  "Anne,
only say that I am forgiven."

But Anne spoke not: her eyes were fixed, her lips had fallen; she was
insensible as a corpse,--dumb and frozen with her ineffable dread.
Suddenly steps were heard upon the stairs; the door opened, and
Marmaduke Nevile entered abruptly.

"Surely I heard my lady's voice,--surely!  What marvel this?--the
king!  Pardon, my liege!" and he bent his knee.

The sight of Marmaduke dissolved the spell of awe and repentant
humiliation which had chained a king's dauntless heart.  His wonted
guile returned to him with his self-possession.

"Our wise craftsman's strange and weird invention"--and Edward pointed
to the Eureka--"has scared our fair cousin's senses, as, by sweet
Saint George, it well might!  Go back, Sir Marmaduke, we will leave
Lady Anne for the moment to the care of Mistress Sibyll.  Donzell,
remember my command.  Come, sir"--(and he drew the wondering Marmaduke
from the chamber); but as soon as he had seen the knight descend the
stairs and regain the court, he returned to the room, and in a low,
stern voice, said, "Look you, Master Warner, and you, damsel, if ever
either of ye breathe one word of what has been your dangerous fate to
hear and witness, kings have but one way to punish slanderers, and
silence but one safeguard!--trifle not with death!"

He then closed the door, and resought his own chamber.  The Eastern
spices, which were burned in the sleeping-rooms of the great, still
made the air heavy with their feverish fragrance.  The king seated
himself, and strove to recollect his thoughts, and examine the peril
he had provoked.  The resistance and the terror of Anne had
effectually banished from his heart the guilty passion it had before
harboured; for emotions like his, and in such a nature, are quick of
change.  His prevailing feeling was one of sharp repentance and
reproachful shame.  But as he roused himself from a state of mind
which light characters ever seek to escape, the image of the dark-
browed earl rose before him, and fear succeeded to mortification; but
even this, however well-founded, could not endure long in a
disposition so essentially scornful of all danger.  Before morning the
senses of Anne must return to her.  So gentle a bosom could be surely
reasoned out of resentment, or daunted, at least, from betraying to
her stern father a secret that, if told, would smear the sward of
England with the gore of thousands.  What woman will provoke war and
bloodshed?  And for an evil not wrought, for a purpose not fulfilled?
The king was grateful that his victim had escaped him.  He would see
Anne before the earl could, and appease her anger, obtain her silence!
For Warner and for Sibyll, they would not dare to reveal; and, if they
did, the lips that accuse a king soon belie themselves, while a rack
can torture truth, and the doomsman be the only judge between the
subject and the head that wears a crown.

Thus reasoning with himself, his soul faced the solitude.  Meanwhile
Marmaduke regained the courtyard, where, as we have said, he had been
detained in conferring with some of the gentlemen in the king's
service, who, hearing that he brought important tidings from the earl,
had abstained from rest till they could learn if the progress of the
new rebellion would bring their swords into immediate service.
Marmaduke, pleased to be of importance, had willingly satisfied their
curiosity, as far as he was able, and was just about to retire to his
own chamber, when the cry of Anne had made him enter the postern-door
which led up the stairs to Adam's apartment, and which was fortunately
not locked; and now, on returning, he had again a new curiosity to
allay.  Having briefly said that Master Warner had taken that untoward
hour to frighten the women with a machine that vomited smoke and
howled piteously, Marmaduke dismissed the group to their beds, and was
about to seek his own, when, looking once more towards the casement,
he saw a white hand gleaming in the frosty moonlight, and beckoning to
him.

The knight crossed himself, and reluctantly ascended the stairs, and
re-entered the wizard's den.

The Lady Anne had so far recovered herself, that a kind of unnatural
calm had taken possession of her mind, and changed her ordinary sweet
and tractable nature into one stern, obstinate resolution,--to escape,
if possible, that unholy palace.  And as soon as Marmaduke re-entered,
Anne met him at the threshold, and laying her hand convulsively on his
arm, said, "By the name you bear, by your love to my father, aid me to
quit these walls."

In great astonishment, Marmaduke stared, without reply.  "Do you deny
me, sir?" said Anne, almost sternly.

"Lady and mistress mine," answered Marmaduke, "I am your servant in
all things.  Quit these walls, the palace!--How?--the gates are
closed.  Nay, and what would my lord say, if at night--"

"If at night!" repeated Anne, in a hollow voice; and then pausing,
burst into a terrible laugh.  Recovering herself abruptly, she moved
to the door, "I will go forth alone, and trust in God and Our Lady."

Sibyll sprang forward to arrest her steps, and Marmaduke hastened to
Adam, and whispered, "Poor lady, is her mind unsettled?  Hast thou, in
truth, distracted her with thy spells and glamour?"

"Hush!" answered the old man; and he whispered in Nevile's ear.

Scarcely had the knight caught the words, than his cheek paled, his
eyes flashed fire.  "The great earl's daughter!" he exclaimed.
"Infamy--horror--she is right!"  He broke from the student, approached
Anne, who still struggled with Sibyll, and kneeling before her, said,
in a voice choked with passions at once fierce and tender,--

"Lady, you are right.  Unseemly it may be for one of your quality and
sex to quit this place with me, and alone; but at least I have a man's
heart, a knight's honour.  Trust to me your safety, noble maiden, and
I will cut your way, even through yon foul king's heart, to your great
father's side!"

Anne did not seem quite to understand his words; but she smiled on him
as he knelt, and gave him her hand.  The responsibility he had assumed
quickened all the intellect of the young knight.  As he took and
kissed the hand extended to him, he felt the ring upon his finger,--
the ring intrusted to him by Alwyn, the king's signet-ring, before
which would fly open every gate.  He uttered a joyous exclamation,
loosened his long night-cloak, and praying Anne to envelop her form in
its folds, drew the hood over her head; he was about to lead her forth
when he halted suddenly.

"Alack," said he, turning to Sibyll, "even though we may escape the
Tower, no boatman now can be found on the river.  The way through the
streets is dark and perilous, and beset with midnight ruffians."

"Verily," said Warner, "the danger is past now.  Let the noble
demoiselle rest here till morning.  The king dare not again--"

"Dare not!" interrupted Marmaduke.  "Alas! you little know King
Edward."

At that name Anne shuddered, opened the door, and hurried down the
stairs; Sibyll and Marmaduke followed her.

"Listen, Sir Marmaduke," said Sibyll.  "Close without the Tower is the
house of a noble lady, the dame of Longueville, where Anne may rest in
safety, while you seek Lord Warwick.  I will go with you, if you can
obtain egress for us both."

"Brave damsel!" said Marmaduke, with emotion; "but your own safety--
the king's anger--no--besides a third, your dress not concealed, would
create the warder's suspicion.  Describe the house."

"The third to the left, by the river's side, with an arched porch, and
the fleur-de-lis embossed on the walls."

"It is not so dark but we shall find it.  Fare you well, gentle
mistress."

While they yet spoke, they had both reached the side of Anne.  Sibyll
still persisted in the wish to accompany her friend; but Marmaduke's
representation of the peril to life itself that might befall her
father, if Edward learned she had abetted Anne's escape, finally
prevailed.  The knight and his charge gained the outer gate.

"Haste, haste, Master Warder!" he cried, beating at the door with his
dagger till it opened jealously,--"messages of importance to the Lord
Warwick.  We have the king's signet.  Open!"

The sleepy warder glanced at the ring; the gates were opened; they
were without the fortress, they hurried on.  "Cheer up, noble lady;
you are safe, you shall be avenged!" said Marmaduke, as he felt the
steps of his companion falter.  But the reaction had come.  The effort
Anne had hitherto made was for escape, for liberty; the strength
ceased, the object gained; her head drooped, she muttered a few
incoherent words, and then sense and life left her.  Marmaduke paused
in great perplexity and alarm.  But lo, a light in a house before him!
That house the third to the river,--the only one with the arched porch
described by Sibyll.  He lifted the light and holy burden in his
strong arms, he gained the door; to his astonishment it was open; a
light burned on the stairs; he heard, in the upper room, the sound of
whispered voices, and quick, soft footsteps hurrying to and fro.
Still bearing the insensible form of his companion, he ascended the
staircase, and entered at once upon a chamber, in which, by a dim
lamp, he saw some two or three persons assembled round a bed in the
recess.  A grave man advanced to him, as he paused at the threshold.

"Whom seek you?"

"The Lady Longueville."

"Hush?"

"Who needs me?" said a faint voice, from the curtained recess.

"My name is Nevile," answered Marmaduke, with straightforward brevity.
"Mistress Sibyll Warner told me of this house, where I come for an
hour's shelter to my companion, the Lady Anne, daughter of the Earl of
Warwick."

Marmaduke resigned his charge to an old woman, who was the nurse in
that sick-chamber, and who lifted the hood and chafed the pale, cold
hands of the young maiden; the knight then strode to the recess.  The
Lady of Longueville was on the bed of death--an illness of two days
had brought her to the brink of the grave; but there was in her eye
and countenance a restless and preternatural animation, and her voice
was clear and shrill, as she said,--

"Why does the daughter of Warwick, the Yorkist, seek refuge in the
house of the fallen and childless Lancastrian?"

"Swear by thy hopes in Christ that thou will tend and guard her while
I seek the earl, and I reply."

"Stranger, my name is Longueville, my birth noble,--those pledges of
hospitality and trust are stronger than hollow oaths.  Say on!"

"Because, then," whispered the knight, after waving the bystanders
from the spot, "because the earl's daughter flies dishonour in a
king's palace, and her insulter is the king!"

Before the dying woman could reply, Anne, recovered by the cares of
the experienced nurse, suddenly sprang to the recess, and kneeling by
the bedside, exclaimed wildly,--"Save me! bide me! save me!"

"Go and seek the earl, whose right hand destroyed my house and his
lawful sovereign's throne,--go!  I will live till he arrives!" said
the childless widow, and a wild gleam of triumph shot over her haggard
features.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE GROUP ROUND THE DEATH-BED OF THE LANCASTRIAN WIDOW.

The dawning sun gleamed through gray clouds upon a small troop of men,
armed in haste, who were grouped round a covered litter by the outer
door of the Lady Longueville's house; while in the death-chamber, the
Earl of Warwick, with a face as pale as the dying woman's, stood
beside the bed, Anne calmly leaning on his breast, her eyes closed,
and tears yet moist on her long fringes.

"Ay, ay, ay!" said the Lancastrian noblewoman, "ye men of wrath and
turbulence should reap what ye have sown!  This is the king for whom
ye dethroned the sainted Henry! this the man for whom ye poured forth
the blood of England's best!  Ha!  ha!  Look down from heaven, my
husband, my martyr-sons!  The daughter of your mightiest foe flies to
this lonely hearth,--flies to the death-bed of the powerless woman for
refuge from the foul usurper whom that foe placed upon the throne!"

"Spare me," muttered Warwick, in a low voice, and between his grinded
teeth.  The room had been cleared, and Dr. Godard (the grave man who
had first accosted Marmaduke, and who was the priest summoned to the
dying) alone--save the scarce conscious Anne herself--witnessed the
ghastly and awful conference.

"Hush, daughter," said the man of peace, lifting the solemn crucifix,
--"calm thyself to holier thoughts."

The lady impatiently turned from the priest, and grasping the strong
right arm of Warwick with her shrivelled and trembling fingers,
resumed in a voice that struggled to repress the gasps which broke its
breath,--

"But thou--oh, thou wilt bear this indignity! thou, the chief of
England's barons, wilt see no dishonour in the rank love of the vilest
of England's kings!  Oh, yes, ye Yorkists have the hearts of varlets,
not of men and fathers!"

"By the symbol from which thou turnest, woman!" exclaimed the earl,
giving vent to the fury which the presence of death had before
suppressed, "by Him to whom, morning and night, I have knelt in
grateful blessing for the virtuous life of this beloved child, I will
have such revenge on the recreant whom I kinged, as shall live in the
rolls of England till the trump of the Judgment Angel!"

"Father," said Anne, startled by her father's vehemence from her half-
swoon, half-sleep--"Father, think no more of the past,--take me to my
mother!  I want the clasp of my mother's arms!"

"Leave us,--leave the dying, Sir Earl and son," said Godard.  "I too
am Lancastrian; I too would lay down my life for the holy Henry; but I
shudder, in the hour of death, to hear yon pale lips, that should pray
for pardon, preach to thee of revenge."

"Revenge!" shrieked out the dame of Longueville, as, sinking fast and
fast, she caught the word--"revenge!  Thou hast sworn revenge on
Edward of York, Lord Warwick,--sworn it in the chamber of death, in
the ear of one who will carry that word to the hero-dead of a hundred
battlefields!  Ha! the sun has risen!  Priest--Godard--thine arms--
support--raise--bear me to the casement!  Quick--quick!  I would see
my king once more!  Quick--quick! and then--then--I will hear thee
pray!"

The priest, half chiding, yet half in pity, bore the dying woman to
the casement.  She motioned to him to open it; he obeyed.  The sun,
just above the welkin, shone over the lordly Thames, gilded the gloomy
fortress of the Tower, and glittered upon the window of Henry's
prison.

"There--there!  It is he,--it is my king!  Hither,--lord, rebel earl,
--hither.  Behold your sovereign.  Repent, revenge!"

With her livid and outstretched hand, the Lancastrian pointed to the
huge Wakefield tower.  The earl's dark eye beheld in the dim distance
a pale and reverend countenance, recognized even from afar.  The dying
woman fixed her glazing eyes upon the wronged and mighty baron, and
suddenly her arm fell to her side, the face became set as into stone,
the last breath of life gurgled within, and fled; and still those
glazing eyes were fixed on the earl's hueless face, and still in his
ear, and echoed by a thousand passions in his heart, thrilled the word
which had superseded prayer, and in which the sinner's soul had
flown,--REVENGE!





BOOK IX.

THE WANDERERS AND THE EXILES.




CHAPTER I.

HOW THE GREAT BARON BECOMES AS GREAT A REBEL.

Hilyard was yet asleep in the chamber assigned to him as his prison,
when a rough grasp shook off his slumbers, and he saw the earl before
him, with a countenance so changed from its usual open majesty, so
dark and sombre, that he said involuntarily, "You send me to the
doomsman,--I am ready!"

"Hist, man!  Thou hatest Edward of York?"

"An it were my last word, yes!"

"Give me thy hand--we are friends!  Stare not at me with those eyes of
wonder, ask not the why nor wherefore!  This last night gave Edward a
rebel more in Richard Nevile!  A steed waits thee at my gates; ride
fast to young Sir Robert Welles with this letter.  Bid him not be
dismayed; bid him hold out, for ere many days are past, Lord Warwick,
and it may be also the Duke of Clarence, will join their force with
his.  Mark, I say not that I am for Henry of Lancaster,--I say only
that I am against Edward of York.  Farewell, and when we meet again,
blessed be the arm that first cuts its way to a tyrant's heart!"

Without another word, Warwick left the chamber.  Hilyard at first
could not believe his senses; but as he dressed himself in haste, he
pondered over all those causes of dissension which had long
notoriously subsisted between Edward and the earl, and rejoiced that
the prophecy that he had long so shrewdly hazarded was at last
fulfilled.  Descending the stairs he gained the gate, where Marmaduke
awaited him, while a groom held a stout haquenee (as the common
riding-horse was then called), whose points and breeding promised
speed and endurance.

"Mount, Master Robin," said Marmaduke; "I little thought we should
ever ride as friends together!  Mount!--our way for some miles out of
London is the same.  You go into Lincolnshire, I into the shire of
Hertford."

"And for the same purpose?" asked Hilyard, as he sprang upon his
horse, and the two men rode briskly on.

"Yes!"

"Lord Warwick is changed at last?"

"At last!"

"For long?"

"Till death!"

"Good, I ask no more!"

A sound of hoofs behind made the franklin turn his head, and he saw a
goodly troop, armed to the teeth, emerge from the earl's house and
follow the lead of Marmaduke.  Meanwhile Warwick was closeted with
Montagu.

Worldly as the latter was, and personally attached to Edward, he was
still keenly alive to all that touched the honour of his House; and
his indignation at the deadly insult offered to his niece was even
more loudly expressed than that of the fiery earl.

"To deem," he exclaimed, "to deem Elizabeth Woodville worthy of his
throne, and to see in Anne Nevile the only worthy to be his leman!"

"Ay!" said the earl, with a calmness perfectly terrible, from its
unnatural contrast to his ordinary heat, when but slightly chafed,
"ay! thou sayest it!  But be tranquil; cold,--cold as iron, and as
hard!  We must scheme now, not storm and threaten--I never schemed
before!  You are right,--honesty is a fool's policy!  Would I had
known this but an hour before the news reached me!  I have already
dismissed our friends to their different districts, to support King
Edward's cause--he is still king,--a little while longer king!  Last
night, I dismissed them--last night, at the very hour when--O God,
give me patience!"  He paused, and added in a low voice, "Yet--yet--
how long the moments are how long!  Ere the sun sets, Edward, I trust,
will be in my power!"

"How?"

"He goes, to-day, to the More,--he will not go the less for what hath
chanced; he will trust to the archbishop to make his peace with me,--
churchmen are not fathers!  Marmaduke Nevile hath my orders; a hundred
armed men, who would march against the fiend himself, if I said the
word, will surround the More, and seize the guest!"

"But what then?  Who, if Edward, I dare not say the word--who is to
succeed him?"

"Clarence is the male heir."

"But with what face to the people proclaim--"

"There--there it is!" interrupted Warwick.  "I have thought of that,--
I have thought of all things;  my mind seems to have traversed worlds
since daybreak!  True! all commotion to be successful must have a
cause that men can understand.  Nevertheless, you, Montagu--you have a
smoother tongue than I; go to our friends--to those who hate Edward--
seek them, sound them!"

"And name to them Edward's infamy?"

"'S death, dost thou think it?  Thou, a Monthermer and Montagu:
proclaim to England the foul insult to the hearth of an English
gentleman and peer! feed every ribald Bourdour with song and roundel
of Anne's virgin shame! how King Edward stole to her room at the dead
of night, and wooed and pressed, and swore, and--God of Heaven, that
this hand were on his throat!  No, brother, no! there are some wrongs
we may not tell,--tumours and swellings of the heart which are eased
not till blood can flow!"

During this conference between the brothers, Edward, in his palace,
was seized with consternation and dismay on hearing that the Lady Anne
could not be found in her chamber.  He sent forthwith to summon Adam
Warner to his presence, and learned from the simple sage, who
concealed nothing, the mode in which Anne had fled from the Tower.
The king abruptly dismissed Adam, after a few hearty curses and vague
threats; and awaking to the necessity of inventing some plausible
story, to account to the wonder of the court for the abrupt
disappearance of his guest, he saw that the person who could best
originate and circulate such a tale was the queen; and he sought her
at once, with the resolution to choose his confidant in the connection
most rarely honoured by marital trust in similar offences.  He,
however, so softened his narrative as to leave it but a venial error.
He had been indulging over-freely in the wine-cup, he had walked into
the corridor for the refreshing coolness of the air, he had seen the
figure of a female whom he did not recognize; and a few gallant words,
he scarce remembered what, had been misconstrued.  On perceiving whom
he had thus addressed, he had sought to soothe the anger or alarm of
the Lady Anne; but still mistaking his intention, she had hurried into
Warner's chamber; he had followed her thither, and now she had fled
the palace.  Such was his story, told lightly and laughingly, but
ending with a grave enumeration of the dangers his imprudence had
incurred.

Whatever Elizabeth felt, or however she might interpret the
confession, she acted with her customary discretion; affected, after a
few tender reproaches, to place implicit credit in her lord's account,
and volunteered to prevent all scandal by the probable story that the
earl, being prevented from coming in person for his daughter, as he
had purposed, by fresh news of the rebellion which might call him from
London with the early day, had commissioned his kinsman Marmaduke to
escort her home.  The quick perception of her sex told her that,
whatever license might have terrified Anne into so abrupt a flight,
the haughty earl would shrink no less than Edward himself from making
public an insult which slander could well distort into the dishonour
of his daughter; and that whatever pretext might be invented, Warwick
would not deign to contradict it.  And as, despite Elizabeth's hatred
to the earl, and desire of permanent breach between Edward and his
minister, she could not, as queen, wife, and woman, but be anxious
that some cause more honourable in Edward, and less odious to the
people, should be assigned for quarrel, she earnestly recommended the
king to repair at once to the More, as had been before arranged, and
to spare no pains, disdain no expressions of penitence and
humiliation, to secure the mediation of the archbishop.  His mind
somewhat relieved by this interview and counsel, the king kissed
Elizabeth with affectionate gratitude, and returned to his chamber to
prepare for his departure to the archbishop's palace.  But then,
remembering that Adam and Sibyll possessed his secret, he resolved at
once to banish them from the Tower.  For a moment he thought of the
dungeons of his fortress, of the rope of his doomsman; but his
conscience at that hour was sore and vexed.  His fierceness humbled by
the sense of shame, he shrank from a new crime; and, moreover, his
strong common-sense assured him that the testimony of a shunned and
abhorred wizard ceased to be of weight the moment it was deprived of
the influence it took from the protection of a king.  He gave orders
for a boat to be in readiness by the gate of St. Thomas, again
summoned Adam into his presence, and said briefly, "Master Warner, the
London mechanics cry so loudly against thine invention for lessening
labour and starving the poor, the sailors on the wharfs are so
mutinous at the thought of vessels without rowers, that, as a good
king is bound, I yield to the voice of my people.  Go home, then, at
once; the queen dispenses with thy fair daughter's service, the damsel
accompanies thee.  A boat awaits ye at the stairs; a guard shall
attend ye to your house.  Think what has passed within these walls has
been a dream,--a dream that, if told, is deathful, if concealed and
forgotten hath no portent!"

Without waiting a reply, the king called from the anteroom one of his
gentlemen, and gave him special directions as to the departure and
conduct of the worthy scholar and his gentle daughter.  Edward next
summoned before him the warder of the gate, learned that he alone was
privy to the mode of his guest's flight, and deeming it best to leave
at large no commentator on the tale he had invented, sentenced the
astonished warder to three months' solitary imprisonment,--for
appearing before him with soiled hosen!  An hour afterwards, the king,
with a small though gorgeous retinue, was on his way to the More.

The archbishop had, according to his engagement, assembled in his
palace the more powerful of the discontented seigneurs; and his
eloquence had so worked upon them, that Edward beheld, on entering the
hall, only countenances of cheerful loyalty and respectful welcome.
After the first greetings, the prelate, according to the custom of the
day, conducted Edward into a chamber, that he might refresh himself
with a brief rest and the bath, previous to the banquet.

Edward seized the occasion, and told his tale; but however softened,
enough was left to create the liveliest dismay in his listener.  The
lofty scaffolding of hope upon which the ambitious prelate was to
mount to the papal throne seemed to crumble into the dust. The king
and the earl were equally necessary to the schemes of George Nevile.
He chid the royal layman with more than priestly unction for his
offence; but Edward so humbly confessed his fault, that the prelate at
length relaxed his brow, and promised to convey his penitent
assurances to the earl.

"Not an hour should be lost," he said; the only one who can soothe his
wrath is your Highness's mother, our noble kinswoman.  Permit me to
despatch to her grace a letter, praying her to seek the earl, while I
write by the same courier to himself."

"Be it all as you will," said Edward, doffing his surcoat, and dipping
his hands in a perfumed ewer; "I shall not know rest till I have knelt
to the Lady Anne, and won her pardon."

The prelate retired, and scarcely had he left the room when Sir John
Ratcliffe, [Afterwards Lord Fitzwalter.  See Lingard (note, vol. iii.
p. 507, quarto edition), for the proper date to be assigned to this
royal visit to the More,--a date we have here adopted, not, as Sharon
Turner and others place (namely, upon the authority of Hearne's
Fragm., 302, which subsequent events disprove), after the open
rebellion of Warwick, but just before it; that is, not after Easter,
but before Lent.] one of the king's retinue, and in waiting on his
person, entered the chamber, pale and trembling.

"My liege," he said, in a whisper, "I fear some deadly treason awaits
you.  I have seen, amongst the trees below this tower, the gleam of
steel; I have crept through the foliage, and counted no less than a
hundred armed men,--their leader is Sir Marmaduke Nevile, Earl
Warwick's kinsman!"

"Ha!" muttered the king, and his bold face fell, "comes the earl's
revenge so soon?"

"And," continued Ratcliffe, "I overheard Sir Marmaduke say, 'The door
of the Garden Tower is unguarded,--wait the signal!'  Fly, my liege!
Hark! even now I hear the rattling of arms!"

The king stole to the casement; the day was closing; the foliage grew
thick and dark around the wall; he saw an armed man emerge from the
shade,--a second, and a third.

"You are right, Ratcliffe!  Flight--but how?"

"This way, my liege.  By the passage I entered, a stair winds to a
door on the inner court; there I have already a steed in waiting.
Deign, for precaution, to use my hat and manteline."

The king hastily adopted the suggestion, followed the noiseless steps
of Ratcliffe, gained the door, sprang upon his steed, and dashing
right through a crowd assembled by the gate, galloped alone and fast,
untracked by human enemy, but goaded by the foe that mounts the
rider's steed, over field, over fell, over dyke, through hedge, and in
the dead of night reined in at last before the royal towers of
Windsor.




CHAPTER II.

MANY THINGS BRIEFLY TOLD.

The events that followed the king's escape were rapid and startling.
The barons assembled at the More, enraged at Edward's seeming distrust
of them, separated in loud anger.  The archbishop learned the cause
from one of his servitors, who detected Marmaduke's ambush, but he was
too wary to make known a circumstance suspicious to himself.  He flew
to London, and engaged the mediation of the Duchess of York to assist
his own.  [Lingard.  See for the dates, Fabyan, 657.]

The earl received their joint overtures with stern and ominous
coldness, and abruptly repaired to Warwick, taking with him the Lady
Anne.  There he was joined, the same day, by the Duke and Duchess of
Clarence.

The Lincolnshire rebellion gained head: Edward made a dexterous feint
in calling, by public commission, upon Clarence and Warwick to aid in
dispersing it; if they refused, the odium of first aggression would
seemingly rest with them.  Clarence, more induced by personal ambition
than sympathy with Warwick's wrong, incensed by his brother's recent
slights, looking to Edward's resignation and his own consequent
accession to the throne, and inflamed by the ambition and pride of a
wife whom he at once feared and idolized, went hand in heart with the
earl; but not one lord and captain whom Montagu had sounded lent
favour to the deposition of one brother for the advancement of the
next.  Clarence, though popular, was too young to be respected: many
there were who would rather have supported the earl, if an aspirant to
the throne; but that choice forbidden by the earl himself, there could
be but two parties in England,--the one for Edward IV., the other for
Henry VI.

Lord Montagu had repaired to Warwick Castle to communicate in person
this result of his diplomacy.  The earl, whose manner was completely
changed, no longer frank and hearty, but close and sinister, listened
in gloomy silence.

"And now," said Montagu, with the generous emotion of a man whose
nobler nature was stirred deeply, "if you resolve on war with Edward,
I am willing to renounce my own ambition, the hand of a king's
daughter for my son, so that I may avenge the honour of our common
name.  I confess that I have so loved Edward that I would fain pray
you to pause, did I not distrust myself, lest in such delay his craft
should charm me back to the old affection.  Nathless, to your arm and
your great soul I have owed all, and if you are resolved to strike the
blow, I am ready to share the hazard."

The earl turned away his face, and wrung his brother's hand.

"Our father, methinks, hears thee from the grave!" said he, solemnly,
and there was a long pause.  At length Warwick resumed: "Return to
London; seem to take no share in my actions, whatever they be; if I
fail, why drag thee into my ruin?--and yet, trust me, I am rash and
fierce no more.  He who sets his heart on a great object suddenly
becomes wise.  When a throne is in the dust, when from St. Paul's
Cross a voice goes forth to Carlisle and the Land's End, proclaiming
that the reign of Edward the Fourth is past and gone, then, Montagu, I
claim thy promise of aid and fellowship,--not before!"

Meanwhile, the king, eager to dispel thought in action, rushed in
person against the rebellious forces.  Stung by fear into cruelty, he
beheaded, against all kingly faith, his hostages, Lord Welles and Sir
Thomas Dymoke, summoned Sir Robert Welles, the leader of the revolt,
to surrender; received for answer, that Sir Robert Welles would not
trust the perfidy of the man who had murdered his father!--pushed on
to Erpingham, defeated the rebels in a signal battle, and crowned his
victory by a series of ruthless cruelties, committed to the fierce and
learned Earl of Worcester, "Butcher of England."  [Stowe. "Warkworth
Chronicle"--Cont. Croyl.  Lord Worcester ordered Clapham (a squire to
Lord Warwick) and nineteen others, gentlemen and yeomen, to be
impaled, and from the horror the spectacle inspired, and the universal
odium it attached to Worcester, it is to be feared that the unhappy
men were still sensible to the agony of this infliction, though they
appear first to have been drawn, and partially hanged,--outrage
confined only to the dead bodies of rebels being too common at that
day to have excited the indignation which attended the sentence
Worcester passed on his victims.  It is in vain that some writers
would seek to cleanse the memory of this learned nobleman from the
stain of cruelty by rhetorical remarks on the improbability that a
cultivator of letters should be of a ruthless disposition.  The
general philosophy of this defence is erroneous.  In ignorant ages a
man of superior acquirements is not necessarily made humane by the
cultivation of his intellect, on the contrary, he too often learns to
look upon the uneducated herd as things of another clay.  Of this
truth all history is pregnant,--witness the accomplished tyrants of
Greece, the profound and cruel intellect of the Italian Borgias.
Richard III. and Henry VIII. were both highly educated for their age.
But in the case of Tiptoft, Lord Worcester, the evidence of his
cruelty is no less incontestable than that which proves his learning--
the Croyland historian alone is unimpeachable.  Worcester's popular
name of "the Butcher" is sufficient testimony in itself.  The people
are often mistaken, to be sure, but can scarcely be so upon the one
point, whether a man who has sat in judgment on themselves be merciful
or cruel.]

With the prompt vigour and superb generalship which Edward ever
displayed in war, he then cut his gory way to the force which Clarence
and Warwick (though their hostility was still undeclared) had levied,
with the intent to join the defeated rebels.  He sent his herald,
Garter King-at-arms, to summon the earl and the duke to appear before
him within a certain day.  The time expired; he proclaimed them
traitors, and offered rewards for their apprehension.  [One thousand
pounds in money, or one hundred pounds a year in land; an immense
reward for that day.]

So sudden had been Warwick's defection, so rapid the king's movements,
that the earl had not time to mature his resources, assemble his
vassals, consolidate his schemes.  His very preparations, upon the
night on which Edward had repaid his services by such hideous
ingratitude, had manned the country with armies against himself.  Girt
but with a scanty force collected in haste (and which consisted merely
of his retainers in the single shire of Warwick), the march of Edward
cut him off from the counties in which his name was held most dear, in
which his trumpet could raise up hosts.  He was disappointed in the
aid he had expected from his powerful but self-interested brother-in-
law, Lord Stanley.  Revenge had become more dear to him than life:
life must not be hazarded, lest revenge be lost. On still marched the
king; and the day that his troops entered Exeter, Warwick, the females
of his family, with Clarence, and a small but armed retinue, took ship
from Dartmouth, sailed for Calais (before which town, while at anchor,
Isabel was confined of her first-born).  To the earl's rage and dismay
his deputy Vauclerc fired upon his ships.  Warwick then steered on
towards Normandy, captured some Flemish vessels by the way, in token
of defiance to the earl's old Burgundian foe, and landed at Harfleur,
where he and his companions were received with royal honours by the
Admiral of France, and finally took their way to the court of Louis
XI. at Amboise.

"The danger is past forever!" said King Edward, as the wine sparkled
in his goblet.  "Rebellion hath lost its head,--and now, indeed, and
for the first time, a monarch I reign alone!"  [Before leaving
England, Warwick and Clarence are generally said to have fallen in
with Anthony Woodville and Lord Audley, and ordered them to execution,
from which they were saved by a Dorsetshire gentleman.  Carte, who,
though his history is not without great mistakes, is well worth
reading by those whom the character of Lord Warwick may interest,
says, that the earl had "too much magnanimity to put them to death
immediately, according to the common practice of the times, and only
imprisoned them in the castle of Wardour, from whence they were soon
rescued by John Thornhill, a gentleman of Dorsetshire."  The whole of
this story is, however, absolutely contradicted by the "Warkworth
Chronicle" (p. 9, edited by Mr. Halliwell), according to which
authority Anthony Woodville was at that time commanding a fleet upon
the Channel, which waylaid Warwick on his voyage; but the success
therein attributed to the gallant Anthony, in dispersing or seizing
all the earl's ships, save the one that bore the earl himself and his
family, is proved to be purely fabulous, by the earl's well-attested
capture of the Flemish vessels, as he passed from Calais to the coasts
of Normandy, an exploit he could never have performed with a single
vessel of his own.  It is very probable that the story of Anthony
Woodville's capture and peril at this time originates in a
misadventure many years before, and recorded in the "Paston Letters,"
as well as in the "Chronicles."--In the year 1459, Anthony Woodville
and his father, Lord Rivers (then zealous Lancastrians), really did
fall into the hands of the Earl of March (Edward IV.), Warwick and
Salisbury, and got off with a sound "rating" upon the rude language
which such "knaves' sons" and "little squires" had held to those "who
were of king's blood."]




CHAPTER III.

THE PLOT OF THE HOSTELRY--THE MAID AND THE SCHOLAR IN THEIR HOME.

The country was still disturbed, and the adherents, whether of Henry
or the earl, still rose in many an outbreak, though prevented from
swelling into one common army by the extraordinary vigour not only of
Edward, but of Gloucester and Hastings,--when one morning, just after
the events thus rapidly related, the hostelry of Master Sancroft, in
the suburban parish of Marybone, rejoiced in a motley crowd of
customers and topers.

Some half-score soldiers, returned in triumph from the royal camp, sat
round a table placed agreeably enough in the deep recess made by the
large jutting lattice; with them were mingled about as many women,
strangely and gaudily clad.  These last were all young; one or two,
indeed, little advanced from childhood.  But there was no expression
of youth in their hard, sinister features: coarse paint supplied the
place of bloom; the very youngest had a wrinkle on her brow; their
forms wanted the round and supple grace of early years.  Living
principally in the open air, trained from infancy to feats of
activity, their muscles were sharp and prominent, their aspects had
something of masculine audacity and rudeness; health itself seemed in
them more loathsome than disease.  Upon those faces of bronze, vice
had set its ineffable, unmistaken seal.  To those eyes never had
sprung the tears of compassion or woman's gentle sorrow; on those
brows never had flushed the glow of modest shame: their very voices
half belied their sex,--harsh and deep and hoarse, their laughter loud
and dissonant.  Some amongst them were not destitute of a certain
beauty, but it was a beauty of feature with a common hideousness of
expression,--an expression at once cunning, bold, callous, licentious.
Womanless through the worst vices of woman, passionless through the
premature waste of passion, they stood between the sexes like foul and
monstrous anomalies, made up and fashioned from the rank depravities
of both.  These creatures seemed to have newly arrived from some long
wayfaring; their shoes and the hems of their robes were covered with
dust and mire; their faces were heated, and the veins in their bare,
sinewy, sunburned arms were swollen by fatigue.  Each had beside her
on the floor a timbrel, each wore at her girdle a long knife in its
sheath: well that the sheaths hid the blades, for not one--not even
that which yon cold-eyed child of fifteen wore--but had on its steel
the dark stain of human blood!

The presence of soldiers fresh from the scene of action had naturally
brought into the hostelry several of the idle gossips of the suburb,
and these stood round the table, drinking into their large ears the
boasting narratives of the soldiers.  At a small table, apart from the
revellers, but evidently listening with attention to all the news of
the hour, sat a friar, gravely discussing a mighty tankard of huffcap,
and ever and anon, as he lifted his head for the purpose of drinking,
glancing a wanton eye at one of the tymbesteres.

"But an' you had seen," said a trooper, who was the mouthpiece of his
comrades--"an' you had seen the raptrils run when King Edward himself
led the charge!  Marry, it was like a cat in a rabbit burrow!  Easy to
see, I trow, that Earl Warwick was not amongst them!  His men, at
least, fight like devils!"

"But there was one tall fellow," said a soldier, setting down his
tankard, "who made a good fight and dour, and, but for me and my
comrades, would have cut his way to the king."

"Ay, ay, true; we saved his highness, and ought to have been
knighted,--but there's no gratitude nowadays!"

"And who was this doughty warrior?" asked one of the bystanders, who
secretly favoured the rebellion.

"Why, it was said that he was Robin of Redesdale,--he who fought my
Lord Montagu off York."

"Our Robin!" exclaimed several voices.  "Ay, he was ever a brave
fellow--poor Robin!"

"'Your Robin,' and 'poor Robin,' varlets!" cried the principal
trooper.  "Have a care!  What do ye mean by your Robin?"

"Marry, sir soldier," quoth a butcher, scratching his head, and in a
humble voice, "craving your pardon and the king's, this Master Robin
sojourned a short time in this hamlet, and was a kind neighbour, and
mighty glib of the tongue.  Don't ye mind, neighbours," he added
rapidly, eager to change the conversation, "how he made us leave off
when we were just about burning Adam Warner, the old nigromancer, in
his den yonder?  Who else could have done that?  But an' we had known
Robin had been a rebel to sweet King Edward, we'd have roasted him
along with the wizard!"

One of the timbrel-girls, the leader of the choir, her arm round a
soldier's neck, looked up at the last speech, and her eye followed the
gesture of the butcher, as he pointed through the open lattice to the
sombre, ruinous abode of Adam Warner.

"Was that the house ye would have burned?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes; but Robin told us the king would hang those who took on them the
king's blessed privilege of burning nigromancers; and, sure enough,
old Adam Warner was advanced to be wizard-in-chief to the king's own
highness a week or two afterwards."

The friar had made a slight movement at the name of Warner; he now
pushed his stool nearer to the principal group, and drew his hood
completely over his countenance.

"Yea!" exclaimed the mechanic, whose son had been the innocent cause
of the memorable siege to poor Adam's dilapidated fortress, related in
the first book of this narrative"--yea; and what did he when there?
Did he not devise a horrible engine for the destruction of the poor,--
an engine that was to do all the work in England by the devil's help?
--so that if a gentleman wanted a coat of mail, or a cloth tunic; if
his dame needed a Norwich worsted; if a yeoman lacked a plough or a
wagon, or his good wife a pot or a kettle; they were to go, not to the
armourer, and the draper, and the tailor, and the weaver, and the
wheelwright, and the blacksmith,--but, hey presto!  Master Warner set
his imps a-churning, and turned ye out mail and tunic, worsted and
wagon, kettle and pot, spick and span new, from his brewage of vapour
and sea-coal.  Oh, have I not heard enough of the sorcerer from my
brother, who works in the Chepe for Master Stokton, the mercer!--and
Master Stokton was one of the worshipful deputies to whom the old
nigromancer had the front to boast his devices."

"It is true," said the friar, suddenly.

"Yes, reverend father, it is true," said the mechanic, doffing his
cap, and inclining his swarthy face to this unexpected witness of his
veracity.  A murmur of wrath and hatred was heard amongst the
bystanders.  The soldiers indifferently turned to their female
companions.  There was a brief silence; and, involuntarily, the
gossips stretched over the table to catch sight of the house of so
demoniac an oppressor of the poor.

"See," said the baker, "the smoke still curls from the rooftop!  I
heard he had come back.  Old Madge, his handmaid, has bought cimnel-
cakes of me the last week or so; nothing less than the finest wheat
serves him now, I trow.  However, right's right, and--"

"Come back!" cried the fierce mechanic; "the owl hath kept close in
his roost!  An' it were not for the king's favour, I would soon see
how the wizard liked to have fire and water brought to bear against
himself!"

"Sit down, sweetheart," whispered one of the young tymbesteres to the
last speaker--

    "Come, kiss me, my darling,
       Warm kisses I trade for."

"Avaunt!" quoth the mechanic, gruffly, and shaking off the seductive
arm of the  tymbestere--"avaunt!  I have neither liefe nor halfpence
for thee and thine.  Out on thee!--a child of thy years! a rope's end
to thy back were a friend's best kindness!"

The girl's eyes sparkled, she instinctively put her hand to her knife;
then turning to a soldier by her side, she said, "Hear you that, and
sit still?"

"Thunder and wounds!" growled the soldier thus appealed to, "more
respect to the sex, knave; if I don't break thy fool's costard with my
sword-hilt, it is only because Red Grisell can take care of herself
against twenty such lozels as thou.  These honest girls have been to
the wars with us; King Edward grudges no man his jolly fere.  Speak up
for thyself, Grisell!  How many tall fellows didst thou put out of
their pain after the battle of Losecote?"

"Only five, Hal," replied the cold-eyed girl, and showing her
glittering teeth with the grin of a young tigress; "but one was a
captain.  I shall do better next time; it was my first battle, thou
knowest!"

The more timid of the bystanders exchanged a glance of horror, and
drew back.  The mechanic resumed sullenly,--"I seek no quarrel with
lass or lover.  I am a plain, blunt man, with a wife and children, who
are dear to me; and if I have a grudge to the nigromancer, it is
because he glamoured my poor boy Tim.  See!"--and he caught up a blue-
eyed, handsome boy, who had been clinging to his side, and baring the
child's arm, showed it to the spectators; there was a large scar on
the limb, and it was shrunk and withered.

"It was my own fault," said the little fellow, deprecatingly.  The
affectionate father silenced the sufferer with a cuff on the cheek,
and resumed: "Ye note, neighbours, the day when the foul wizard took
this little one in his arms: well, three weeks afterwards--that very
day three weeks--as he was standing like a lamb by the fire, the good
wife's caldron seethed over, without reason or rhyme, and scalded his
arm till it rivelled up like a leaf in November; and if that is not
glamour, why have we laws against witchcraft?"

"True, true!" groaned the chorus.

The boy, who had borne his father's blow without a murmur, now again
attempted remonstrance.  "The hot water went over the gray cat, too,
but Master Warner never bewitched her, daddy."

"He takes his part!--You hear the daff laddy?  He takes the old
nigromancer's part,--a sure sign of the witchcraft; but I'll leather
it out of thee, I will!" and the mechanic again raised his weighty
arm.  The child did not this time await the blow; he dodged under the
butcher's apron, gained the door, and disappeared.  "And he teaches
our own children to fly in our faces!" said the father, in a kind of
whimper.  The neighbours sighed in commiseration.

"Oh," he exclaimed in a fiercer tone, grinding his teeth, and shaking
his clenched fist towards Adam Warner's melancholy house, "I say
again, if the king did not protect the vile sorcerer, I would free the
land from his devilries ere his black master could come to his help."

"The king cares not a straw for Master Warner or his inventions, my
son," said a rough, loud voice.  All turned, and saw the friar
standing in the midst of the circle.  "Know ye not, my children, that
the king sent the wretch neck and crop out of the palace for having
bewitched the Earl of Warwick and his grace the Lord Clarence, so that
they turned unnaturally against their own kinsman, his highness?  But
'Manus malorum suos bonos breaket,'--that is to say, the fists of
wicked men only whack their own bones.  Ye have all heard tell of
Friar Bungey, my children?"

"Ay, ay!" answered two or three in a breath,--"a wizard, it's true,
and a mighty one; but he never did harm to the poor; though they do
say he made a quaint image of the earl, and--"

"Tut, tut!" interrupted the friar, "all Bungey did was to try to
disenchant the Lord Warwick, whom yon miscreant had spellbound.  Poor
Bungey! he is a friend to the people: and when he found that Master
Adam was making a device for their ruin, he spared no toil, I assure
ye, to frustrate the iniquity.  Oh, how he fasted and watched!  Oh,
how many a time he fought, tooth and nail, with the devil in person,
to get at the infernal invention! for if he had that invention once in
his hands, he could turn it to good account, I can promise ye: and
give ye rain for the green blade and sun for the ripe sheaf.  But the
fiend got the better at first; and King Edward, bewitched himself for
the moment, would have hanged Friar Bungey for crossing old Adam, if
he had not called three times, in a loud voice, 'Presto pepranxenon!'
changed himself into a bird, and flown out of the window.  As soon as
Master Adam Warner found the field clear to himself, he employed his
daughter to bewitch the Lord Hastings; he set brother against brother,
and made the king and Lord George fall to loggerheads; he stirred up
the rebellion; and where he would have stopped the foul fiend only
knows, if your friend Friar Bungey, who, though a wizard as you say,
is only so for your benefit (and a holy priest into the bargain), had
not, by aid of a good spirit, whom he conjured up in the island of
Tartary, disenchanted the king, and made him see in a dream what the
villanous Warner was devising against his crown and his people,--
whereon his highness sent Master Warner and his daughter back to their
roost, and, helped by Friar Bungey, beat his enemies out of the
kingdom.  So, if ye have a mind to save your children from mischief
and malice, ye may set to work with good heart, always provided that
ye touch not old Adam's iron invention.  Woe betide ye, if ye think to
destroy that!  Bring it safe to Friar Bungey, whom ye will find
returned to the palace, and journeyman's wages will be a penny a day
higher for the next ten years to come!"  With these words the friar
threw down his reckoning, and moved majestically to the door.

"An' I might trust you!" said Tim's father, laying hold of the friar's
serge.

"Ye may, ye may!" cried the leader of the tymbesteres, starting up
from the lap of her soldier, "for it is Friar Bungey himself!"

A movement of astonishment and terror was universal.  "Friar Bungey
himself!"  repeated the burly impostor.  "Right, lassie, right; and he
now goes to the palace of the Tower, to mutter good spells in King
Edward's ear,--spells to defeat the malignant ones, and to lower the
price of beer.  Wax wobiscum!"

With that salutation, more benevolent than accurate, the friar
vanished from the room; the chief of the tymbesteres leaped lightly on
the table, put one foot on the soldier's shoulder, and sprang through
the open lattice.  She found the friar in the act of mounting a sturdy
mule, which had been tied to a post by the door.

"Fie, Graul Skellet!  Fie, Graul!" said the conjurer "Respect for my
serge.  We must not be noted together out of door in the daylight.
There's a groat for thee.  Vade, execrabilis,--that is, good-day to
thee, pretty rogue!"

"A word, friar, a word.  Wouldst thou have the old man burned,
drowned, or torn piecemeal?  He hath a daughter too, who once sought
to mar our trade with her gittern; a daughter, then in a kirtle that I
would not have nimmed from a hedge, but whom I last saw in sarcenet
and lawn, with a great lord for her fere."  The tymbestere's eyes
shone with malignant envy, as she added, "Graul Skellet loves not to
see those who have worn worsted and say walk in sarcenet and lawn.
Graul Skellet loves not wenches who have lords for their feres, and
yet who shrink from Graul and her sisters as the sound from the
leper."

"Fegs," answered the friar, impatiently, "I know naught against the
daughter,--a pretty lass, but too high for my kisses.  And as for the
father, I want not the man's life,--that is, not very specially,--but
his model, his mechanical.  He may go free, if that can be compassed;
if not, why, the model at all risks.  Serve me in this."

"And thou wilt teach me the last tricks of the cards, and thy great
art of making phantoms glide by on the wall?"

"Bring the model intact, and I will teach thee more, Graul,--the dead
man's candle, and the charm of the newt; and I'll give thee, to boot,
the Gaul of the parricide that thou hast prayed me so oft for.  Hum!
thou hast a girl in thy troop who hath a blinking eye that well
pleases me; but go now, and obey me.  Work before play, and grace
before pudding!"

The tymbestere nodded, snapped her fingers in the air, and humming no
holy ditty, returned to the house through the doorway.

This short conference betrays to the reader the relations, mutually
advantageous, which subsisted between the conjuror and the
tymbesteres.  Their troop (the mothers, perchance, of the generation
we treat of) had been familiar to the friar in his old capacity of
mountebank, or tregetour, and in his clerical and courtly elevation,
he did not disdain an ancient connection that served him well with the
populace; for these grim children of vice seemed present in every
place, where pastime was gay, or strife was rampant,--in peace, at the
merry-makings and the hostelries; in war, following the camp, and
seen, at night, prowling through the battlefields to dispatch the
wounded and to rifle the slain: in merrymaking, hostelry, or in camp,
they could thus still spread the fame of Friar Bungey, and uphold his
repute both for terrible lore and for hearty love of the commons.

Nor was this all; both tymbesteres and conjuror were fortune-tellers
by profession.  They could interchange the anecdotes each picked up in
their different lines.  The tymbestere could thus learn the secrets of
gentle and courtier, the conjuror those of the artisan and mechanic.

Unconscious of the formidable dispositions of their neighbours, Sibyll
and Warner were inhaling the sweet air of the early spring in their
little garden.  His disgrace had affected the philosopher less than
might be supposed.  True, that the loss of the king's favour was the
deferring indefinitely--perhaps for life--any practical application of
his adored theory; and yet, somehow or other, the theory itself
consoled him.  At the worst, he should find some disciple, some
ingenious student, more fortunate than himself, to whom he could
bequeath the secret, and who, when Adam was in his grave, would teach
the world to revere his name.  Meanwhile, his time was his own; he was
lord of a home, though ruined and desolate; he was free, with his free
thoughts; and therefore, as he paced the narrow garden, his step was
lighter, his mind less absent than when parched with feverish fear and
hope for the immediate practical success of a principle which was to
be tried before the hazardous tribunal of prejudice and ignorance.

"My child," said the sage, "I feel, for the first time for years, the
distinction of the seasons.  I feel that we are walking in the
pleasant spring.  Young days come back to me like dreams; and I could
almost think thy mother were once more by my side!"

Sibyll pressed her father's hand, and a soft but melancholy sigh
stirred her rosy lips.  She, too, felt the balm of the young year; yet
her father's words broke upon sad and anxious musings.  Not to youth
as to age, not to loving fancy as to baffled wisdom, has seclusion
charms that compensate for the passionate and active world!  On coming
back to the old house, on glancing round its mildewed walls,
comfortless and bare, the neglected, weed-grown garden, Sibyll had
shuddered in dismay.  Had her ambition fallen again into its old
abject state?  Were all her hopes to restore her ancestral fortunes,
to vindicate her dear father's fame, shrunk into this slough of actual
poverty,--the butterfly's wings folded back into the chrysalis shroud
of torpor?  The vast disparity between herself and Hastings had not
struck her so forcibly at the court; here, at home, the very walls
proclaimed it.  When Edward had dismissed the unwelcome witnesses of
his attempted crime, he had given orders that they should be conducted
to their house through the most private ways.  He naturally desired to
create no curious comment upon their departure.  Unperceived by their
neighbours, Sibyll and her father had gained access by the garden
gate.  Old Madge received them in dismay; for she had been in the
habit of visiting Sibyll weekly at the palace, and had gained, in the
old familiarity subsisting, then, between maiden and nurse, some
insight into her heart.  She had cherished the fondest hopes for the
fate of her young mistress; and now, to labour and to penury had the
fate returned!  The guard who accompanied them, according to Edward's
orders, left some pieces of gold, which Adam rejected, but Madge
secretly received and judiciously expended.  And this was all their
wealth.  But not of toil nor of penury in themselves thought Sibyll;
she thought but of Hastings,--wildly, passionately, trustfully,
unceasingly, of the absent Hastings.  Oh, he would seek her, he would
come, her reverse would but the more endear her to him!  Hastings came
not.  She soon learned the wherefore.  War threatened the land,--he
was at his post, at the head of armies.

Oh, with what panoply of prayer she sought to shield that beloved
breast!  And now the old man spoke of the blessed spring, the holiday
time of lovers and of love, and the young girl, sighing, said to her
mournful heart, "The world hath its sun,--where is mine?"

The peacock strutted up to his poor protectors, and spread his plumes
to the gilding beams.  And then Sibyll recalled the day when she had
walked in that spot with Marmaduke, and he had talked of his youth,
ambition, and lusty hopes, while, silent and absorbed, she had thought
within herself, "Could the world be open to me as to him,--I too have
ambition, and it should find its goal."  Now what contrast between the
two,--the man enriched and honoured, if to-day in peril or in exile,
to-morrow free to march forward still on his career, the world the
country to him whose heart was bold and whose name was stainless! and
she, the woman, brought back to the prison-home, scorn around her,
impotent to avenge, and forbidden to fly!  Wherefore?--Sibyll felt her
superiority of mind, of thought, of nature,--wherefore the contrast?
The success was that of man, the discomfiture that of woman.  Woe to
the man who precedes his age; but never yet has an age been in which
genius and ambition are safe to woman!

The father and the child turned into their house.  The day was
declining.  Adam mounted to his studious chamber, Sibyll sought the
solitary servant.

"What tidings, oh, what tidings?  The war, you say, is over; the great
earl, his sweet daughter, safe upon the seas, but Hastings--ob,
Hastings! what of him?"

"My bonnibell, my lady-bird, I have none but good tales to tell thee.
I saw and spoke with a soldier who served under Lord Hastings himself;
he is unscathed, he is in London.  But they say that one of his bands
is quartered in the suburb, and that there is a report of a rising in
Hertfordshire."

"When will peace come to England and to me!" sighed Sibyll.




CHAPTER IV.

THE WORLD'S JUSTICE, AND THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS.

The night had now commenced, and Sibyll was still listening--or,
perhaps, listening not--to the soothing babble of the venerable
servant.  They were both seated in the little room that adjoined the
hall, and their only light came through the door opening on the
garden,--a gray, indistinct twilight, relieved by the few earliest
stars.  The peacock, his head under his wing, roosted on the
balustrade, and the song of the nightingale, from amidst one of the
neighbouring copses, which studded the ground towards the chase of
Marybone, came soft and distant on the serene air.  The balm and
freshness of spring were felt in the dews, in the skies, in the sweet
breath of young herb and leaf; through the calm of ever-watchful
nature, it seemed as if you might mark, distinct and visible, minute
after minute, the blessed growth of April into May.

Suddenly Madge uttered a cry of alarm, and pointed towards the
opposite wall.  Sibyll, startled from her revery, looked up, and saw
something dusk and dwarf-like perched upon the crumbling eminence.
Presently this apparition leaped lightly into the garden, and the
alarm of the women was lessened on seeing a young boy creep stealthily
over the grass and approach the open door.

"Hey, child!" said Madge, rising.  "What wantest thou?"

"Hist, gammer, hist!  Ah, the young mistress?  That's well.  Hist!  I
say again."  The boy entered the room.  "I'm in time to save you.  In
half an hour your house will be broken into, perhaps burned.  The boys
are clapping their hands now at the thoughts of the bonfire.  Father
and all the neighbours are getting ready.  Hark! hark!  No, it is only
the wind!  The tymbesteres are to give note.  When you hear their
bells tinkle, the mob will meet.  Run for your lives, you and the old
man, and don't ever say it was poor Tim who told you this, for Father
would beat me to death.  Ye can still get through the garden into the
fields.  Quick!"

"I will go to the master," exclaimed Madge, hurrying from the room.

The child caught Sibyll's cold hand through the dark.  "And I say,
mistress, if his worship is a wizard, don't let him punish Father and
Mother, or poor Tim, or his little sister; though Tim was once
naughty, and hooted Master Warner.  Many, many, many a time and oft
have I seen that kind, mild face in my sleep, just as when it bent
over me, while I kicked and screamed, and the poor gentleman said,
'Thinkest thou I would harm thee?'  But he'll forgive me now, will he
not?  And when I turned the seething water over myself, and they said
it was all along of the wizard, my heart pained more than the arm.
But they whip me, and groan out that the devil is in me, if I don't
say that the kettle upset of itself!  Oh, those tymbesteres!
Mistress, did you ever see them?  They fright me.  If you could hear
how they set on all the neighbours!  And their laugh--it makes the
hair stand on end!  But you will get away, and thank Tim too?  Oh, I
shall laugh then, when they find the old house empty!"

"May our dear Lord bless thee--bless thee, child," sobbed Sibyll,
clasping the boy in her arms, and kissing him, while her tears bathed
his cheeks.

A light gleamed on the threshold; Madge, holding a candle, appeared
with Warner, his hat and cloak thrown on in haste.  "What is this?"
said the poor scholar.  "Can it be true?  Is mankind so cruel?  What
have I done, woe is me! what have I done to deserve this?"

"Come, dear father, quick," said Sibyll, drying her tears, and wakened
by the presence of the old man into energy and courage.  "But put thy
hand on this boy's head, and bless him; for it is he who has, haply,
saved us."

The boy trembled a moment as the long-bearded face turned towards him,
but when he caught and recognized those meek, sweet eyes, his
superstition vanished, and it was but a holy and grateful awe that
thrilled his young blood, as the old man placed both withered hands
over his yellow hair, and murmured,--

"God shield thy youth!  God make thy manhood worthy!  God give thee
children in thine old age with hearts like thine!"  Scarcely had the
prayer ceased when the clash of timbrels, with their jingling bells,
was heard in the street.  Once, twice, again, and a fierce yell closed
in chorus,--caught up and echoed from corner to corner, from house to
house.

"Run! run!" cried the boy, turning white with terror.

"But the Eureka--my hope--my mind's child!" exclaimed Adam, suddenly,
and halting at the door.

"Eh, eh!" said Madge, pushing him forward.  "It is too heavy to move;
thou couldst not lift it.  Think of thine own flesh and blood, of thy
daughter, of her dead mother!  Save her life, if thou carest not for
thine own!"

"Go, Sibyll, go, and thou, Madge; I will stay.  What matters my life,
--it is but the servant of a thought!  Perish master, perish slave!"

"Father, unless you come with me, I stir not.  Fly or perish, your
fate is mine!  Another minute--Oh, Heaven of mercy, that roar again!
We are both lost!"

"Go, sir, go; they care not for your iron,--iron cannot feel.  They
will not touch that!  Have not your daughter's life upon your soul!"

"Sibyll, Sibyll, forgive me!  Come!" said Warner, conscience-stricken
at the appeal.

Madge and the boy ran forwards; the old woman unbarred the garden-
gate; Sibyll and her father went forth; the fields stretched before
them calm and solitary; the boy leaped up, kissed Sibyll's pale cheek,
and then bounded across the grass, and vanished.

"Loiter not, Madge.  Come!" cried Sibyll.

"Nay," said the old woman, shrinking back, "they bear no grudge to me;
I am too old to do aught but burthen ye.  I will stay, and perchance
save the house and the chattels, and poor master's deft contrivance.
Whist! thou knowest his heart would break if none were by to guard
it."

With that the faithful servant thrust the broad pieces that yet
remained of the king's gift into the gipsire Sibyll wore at her
girdle, and then closed and rebarred the door before they could detain
her.

"It is base to leave her," said the scholar-gentleman.

The noble Sibyll could not refute her father.  Afar they heard the
tramping of feet; suddenly, a dark red light shot up into the blue
air, a light from the flame of many torches.

"The wizard, the wizard!  Death to the wizard, who would starve the
poor!" yelled forth, and was echoed by a stern hurrah.

Adam stood motionless, Sibyll by his side.

"The wizard and his daughter!" shrieked a sharp single voice, the
voice of Graul the tymbestere.

Adam turned.  "Fly, my child,--they now threaten thee.  Come, come,
come!" and, taking her by the hand, he hurried her across the fields,
skirting the hedge, their shadows dodging, irregular and quaint, on
the starlit sward.  The father had lost all thought, all care but for
the daughter's life.  They paused at last, out of breath and
exhausted: the sounds at the distance were lulled and hushed.  They
looked towards the direction of the home they had abandoned, expecting
to see the flames destined to consume it reddening the sky; but all
was dark,--or, rather, no light save the holy stars and the rising
moon offended the majestic heaven.

"They cannot harm the poor old woman; she hath no lore.  On her gray
hairs has fallen not the curse of men's hate!" said Warner.

"Right, Father! when they found us flown, doubtless the cruel ones
dispersed.  But they may search yet for thee.  Lean on me, I am strong
and young.  Another effort, and we gain the safe coverts of the
Chase."

While yet the last word hung on her lips, they saw, on the path they
had left, the burst of torch-light, and heard the mob hounding on
their track.  But the thick copses, with their pale green just budding
into life, were at hand.  On they fled.  The deer started from amidst
the entangled fern, but stood and gazed at them without fear; the
playful hares in the green alleys ceased not their nightly sports at
the harmless footsteps; and when at last, in the dense thicket, they
sunk down on the mossy roots of a giant oak, the nightingales overhead
chanted as if in melancholy welcome.  They were saved!

But in their home, fierce fires glared amidst the tossing torch-light;
the crowd, baffled by the strength of the door, scaled the wall, broke
through the lattice-work of the hall window, and streaming through
room after room, roared forth, "Death to the wizard!"  Amidst the
sordid dresses of the men, the soiled and faded tinsel of the
tymbesteres gleamed and sparkled.  It was a scene the she-fiends
revelled in,--dear are outrage and malice, and the excitement of
turbulent passions, and the savage voices of frantic men, and the
thirst of blood to those everlasting furies of a mob, under whatever
name we know them, in whatever time they taint with their presence,--
women in whom womanhood is blasted!

Door after door was burst open with cries of disappointed rage; at
last they ascended the turret-stairs, they found a small door barred
and locked.  Tim's father, a huge axe in his brawny arm, shivered the
panels; the crowd rushed in, and there, seated amongst a strange and
motley litter, they found the devoted Madge.  The poor old woman had
collected into this place, as the stronghold of the mansion, whatever
portable articles seemed to her most precious, either from value or
association.  Sibyll's gittern (Marmaduke's gift) lay amidst a lumber
of tools and implements; a faded robe of her dead mother's, treasured
by Madge and Sibyll both, as a relic of holy love; a few platters and
cups of pewter, the pride of old Madge's heart to keep bright and
clean; odds and ends of old hangings; a battered silver brooch (a
love-gift to Madge herself when she was young),--these, and suchlike
scraps of finery, hoards inestimable to the household memory and
affection, lay confusedly heaped around the huge grim model, before
which, mute and tranquil, sat the brave old woman.

The crowd halted, and stared round in superstitious terror and dumb
marvel.

The leader of the tymbesteres sprang forward.

"Where is thy master, old hag, and where the bonny maid who glamours
lords, and despises us bold lasses?"

"Alack! master and the damsel have gone hours ago!  I am alone in the
house; what's your will?"

"The crone looks parlous witchlike!" said Tim's father; crossing
himself, and somewhat retreating from her gray, unquiet eyes.  And,
indeed, poor Madge, with her wrinkled face, bony form, and high cap,
corresponded far more with the vulgar notions of a dabbler in the
black art than did Adam Warner, with his comely countenance and noble
mien.

"So she doth, indeed, and verily," said a hump-backed tinker; "if we
were to try a dip in the horsepool yonder it could do no harm."

"Away with her, away!" cried several voices at that humane suggestion.

"Nay, nay," quoth the baker, "she is a douce creature after all, and
hath dealt with me many years.  I don't care what becomes of the
wizard,--every one knows," he added with pride, "that I was one of the
first to set fire to his house when Robin gainsayed it! but right's
right--burn the master, not the drudge!"

This intercession might have prevailed, but unhappily, at that moment
Graul Skellet, who had secured two stout fellows to accomplish the
object so desired by Friar Bungey, laid hands on the model, and, at
her shrill command, the men advanced and dislodged it from its place.
At the same tine the other tymbesteres, caught by the sight of things
pleasing to their wonted tastes, threw themselves, one upon the faded
robe Sibyll's mother had worn in her chaste and happy youth; another,
upon poor Madge's silver brooch; a third, upon the gittern.

These various attacks roused up all the spirit and wrath of the old
woman: her cries of distress as she darted from one to the other,
striking to the right and left with her feeble arms, her form
trembling with passion, were at once ludicrous and piteous; and these
were responded to by the shrill exclamations of the fierce
tymbesteres, as they retorted scratch for scratch, and blow for blow.
The spectators grew animated by the sight of actual outrage and
resistance; the humpbacked tinker, whose unwholesome fancy one of the
aggrieved tymbesteres had mightily warmed, hastened to the relief of
his virago; and rendered furious by finding ten nails fastened
suddenly on his face, he struck down the poor creature by a blow that
stunned her, seized her in his arms,--for deformed and weakly as the
tinker was, the old woman, now sense and spirit were gone, was as
light as skin and bone could be,--and followed by half a score of his
comrades, whooping and laughing, bore her down the stairs.  Tim's
father, who, whether from parental affection, or, as is more probable,
from the jealous hatred and prejudice of ignorant industry, was bent
upon Adam's destruction, hallooed on some of his fierce fellows into
the garden, tracked the footsteps of the fugitives by the trampled
grass, and bounded over the wall in fruitless chase.  But on went the
more giddy of the mob, rather in sport than in cruelty, with a chorus
of drunken apprentices and riotous boys, to the spot where the
humpbacked tinker had dragged his passive burden.  The foul green pond
near Master Sancroft's hostel reflected the glare of torches; six of
the tymbesteres, leaping and wheeling, with doggerel song and
discordant music, gave the signal for the ordeal of the witch,--

    "Lake or river, dyke or ditch,
     Water never drowns the witch.
     Witch or wizard would ye know?
     Sink or swim, is ay or no.
     Lift her, swing her, once and twice,
       Lift her, swing her o'er the brim,--
     Lille--lera--twice and thrice
       Ha! ha! mother, sink or swim!"

And while the last line was chanted, amidst the full jollity of
laughter and clamour and clattering timbrels, there was a splash in
the sullen water; the green slough on the surface parted with an
oozing gurgle, and then came a dead silence.

"A murrain on the hag! she does not even struggle!" said, at last, the
hump-backed tinker.

"No,--no! she cares not for water.  Try fire!  Out with her! out!"
cried Red Grisell.

"Aroint her! she is sullen!" said the tinker, as his lean fingers
clutched up the dead body, and let it fall upon the margin.  "Dead!"
said the baker, shuddering; "we have done wrong,--I told ye so!  She
dealt with me many a year.  Poor Madge!  Right's right.  She was no
witch!"

"But that was the only way to try it," said the humpbacked tinker;
"and if she was not a witch, why did she look like one?  I cannot
abide ugly folks!"

The bystanders shook their heads.  But whatever their remorse, it was
diverted by a double sound: first, a loud hurrah from some of the mob
who had loitered for pillage, and who now emerged from Adam's house,
following two men, who, preceded by the terrible Graul, dancing before
them, and tossing aloft her timbrel, bore in triumph the captured
Eureka; and, secondly, the blast of a clarion at the distance, while
up the street marched--horse and foot, with pike and banner--a goodly
troop.  The Lord Hastings in person led a royal force, by a night
march, against a fresh outbreak of the rebels, not ten miles from the
city, under Sir Geoffrey Gates, who had been lately arrested by the
Lord Howard at Southampton, escaped, collected a disorderly body of
such restless men as are always disposed to take part in civil
commotion, and now menaced London itself.  At the sound of the clarion
the valiant mob dispersed in all directions, for even at that day mobs
had an instinct of terror at the approach of the military, and a quick
reaction from outrage to the fear of retaliation.

But, at the sound of martial music, the tymbesteres silenced their own
instruments, and instead of flying, they darted through the crowd,
each to seek the other, and unite as for counsel.  Graul, pointing to
Mr. Sancroft's hostelry, whispered the bearers of the Eureka to seek
refuge there for the present, and to bear their trophy with the dawn
to Friar Bungey at the Tower; and then, gliding nimbly through the
fugitive rioters, sprang into the centre of the circle formed by her
companions.

"Ye scent the coming battle?" said the arch-tymbestere.

"Ay, ay, ay!" answered the sisterhood.

"But we have gone miles since noon,--I am faint and weary!" said one
amongst them.

Red Grisell, the youngest of the band, struck her comrade on the
cheek--"Faint and weary, ronion, with blood and booty in the wind!"

The tymbesteres smiled grimly on their young sister; but the leader
whispered "Hush!" and they stood for a second or two with outstretched
throats, with dilated nostrils, with pent breath, listening to the
clarion and the hoofs and the rattling armour, the human vultures
foretasting their feast of carnage; then, obedient to a sign from
their chieftainess, they crept lightly and rapidly into the mouth of a
neighbouring alley, where they cowered by the squalid huts, concealed.
The troop passed on,--a gallant and serried band, horse and foot,
about fifteen hundred men.  As they filed up the thoroughfare, and the
tramp of the last soldiers fell hollow on the starlit ground, the
tymbesteres stole from their retreat, and, at the distance of some few
hundred yards, followed the procession, with long, silent, stealthy
strides,--as the meaner beasts, in the instinct of hungry cunning,
follow the lion for the garbage of his prey.




CHAPTER V.

THE FUGITIVES ARE CAPTURED--THE TYMBESTERES REAPPEAR--MOONLIGHT ON THE
REVEL OF THE LIVING--MOONLIGHT ON THE SLUMBER OF THE DEAD.

The father and child made their resting-place under the giant oak.
They knew not whither to fly for refuge; the day and the night had
become the same to them,--the night menaced with robbers, the day with
the mob.  If return to their home was forbidden, where in the wide
world a shelter for the would-be world-improver?  Yet they despaired
not, their hearts failed them not.  The majestic splendour of the
night, as it deepened in its solemn calm; as the shadows of the
windless trees fell larger and sharper upon the silvery earth; as the
skies grew mellower and more luminous in the strengthening starlight,
inspired them with the serenity of faith,--for night, to the earnest
soul, opens the Bible of the universe, and on the leaves of Heaven is
written, "God is everywhere."

Their hands were clasped each in each, their pale faces were upturned;
they spoke not, neither were they conscious that they prayed, but
their silence was thought, and the thought was worship.

Amidst the grief and solitude of the pure, there comes, at times, a
strange and rapt serenity,--a sleep-awake,--over which the instinct of
life beyond the grave glides like a noiseless dream; and ever that
heaven that the soul yearns for is coloured by the fancies of the fond
human heart, each fashioning the above from the desires unsatisfied
below.

"There," thought the musing maiden, "cruelty and strife shall cease;
there, vanish the harsh differences of life; there, those whom we have
loved and lost are found, and through the Son, who tasted of mortal
sorrow, we are raised to the home of the Eternal Father!"

"And there," thought the aspiring sage, "the mind, dungeoned and
chained below, rushes free into the realms of space; there, from every
mystery falls the veil; there, the Omniscient smiles on those who,
through the darkness of life, have fed that lamp, the soul; there,
Thought, but the seed on earth, bursts into the flower and ripens to
the fruit!"

And on the several hope of both maid and sage the eyes of the angel
stars smiled with a common promise.

At last, insensibly, and while still musing, so that slumber but
continued the revery into visions, father and daughter slept.

The night passed away; the dawn came slow and gray; the antlers of the
deer stirred above the fern; the song of the nightingale was hushed;
and just as the morning star waned back, while the reddening east
announced the sun, and labour and trouble resumed their realm of day,
a fierce band halted before those sleeping forms.

These men had been Lancastrian soldiers, and, reduced to plunder for a
living, had, under Sir Geoffrey Gates, formed the most stalwart part
of the wild, disorderly force whom Hilyard and Coniers had led to
Olney.  They had heard of the new outbreak, headed by their ancient
captain, Sir Geoffrey (who was supposed to have been instigated to his
revolt by the gold and promises of the Lancastrian chiefs), and were
on their way to join the rebels; but as war for them was but the name
for booty, they felt the wonted instinct of the robber, when they
caught sight of the old man and the fair maid.

Both Adam and his daughter wore, unhappily, the dresses in which they
had left the court, and Sibyll's especially was that which seemed to
betoken a certain rank and station.

"Awake, rouse ye!" said the captain of the band, roughly shaking the
arm which encircled Sibyll's slender waist. Adam started, opened his
eyes, and saw himself begirt by figures in rusty armour, with savage
faces peering under their steel sallets.

"How came you hither?  Yon oak drops strange acorns," quoth the chief.

"Valiant sir," replied Adam, still seated, and drawing his gown
instinctively over Sibyll's face, which nestled on his bosom, in
slumber so deep and heavy, that the gruff voice had not broken it,
"valiant sir! we are forlorn and houseless, an old man and a simple
girl.  Some evil-minded persons invaded our home; we fled in the
night, and--"

"Invaded your house! ha, it is clear," said the chief.  "We know the
rest."

At this moment Sibyll woke, and starting to her feet in astonishment
and terror at the sight on which her eyes opened, her extreme beauty
made a sensible effect upon the bravoes.

"Do not be daunted, young demoiselle," said the captain, with an air
almost respectful; "it is necessary thou and Sir John should follow
us, but we will treat you well, and consult later on the ransom ye
will pay us.  Jock, discharge the young sumpter mule; put its load on
the black one.  We have no better equipment for thee, lady; but the
first haquenee we find shall replace the mule, and meanwhile my knaves
will heap their cloaks for a pillion."

"But what mean you?--you mistake us!" exclaimed Sibyll.  "We are poor;
we cannot ransom ourselves."

"Poor!--tut!" said the captain, pointing significantly to the costly
robe of the maiden--"moreover his worship's wealth is well known.
Mount in haste,--we are pressed."  And without heeding the
expostulations of Sibyll and the poor scholar, the rebel put his troop
into motion, and marched himself at their head, with his lieutenant.

Sibyll found the subalterns sterner than their chief; for as Warner
offered to resist, one of them lifted his gisarme, with a frightful
oath, and Sibyll was the first to persuade her father to submit.  She
mildly, however, rejected the mule, and the two captives walked
together in the midst of the troop.

"Pardie!" said the lieutenant, "I see little help to Sir Geoffrey in
these recruits, captain!"

"Fool!" said the chief, disdainfully, "if the rebellion fail, these
prisoners may save our necks.  Will Somers last night was to break
into the house of Sir John Bourchier, for arms and moneys, of which
the knight hath a goodly store.  Be sure, Sir John slinked off in the
siege, and this is he and his daughter.  Thou knowest he is one of the
greatest knights, and the richest, whom the Yorkists boast of; and we
may name our own price for his ransom."

"But where lodge them while we go to the battle?"

"Ned Porpustone hath a hostelry not far from the camp, and Ned is a
good Lancastrian, and a man to be trusted."

"We have not searched the prisoners," said the lieutenant; "they may
have some gold in their pouches."

"Marry, when Will Somers storms a hive, little time does he leave to
the bees to fly away with much money.  Nathless, thou mayest search
the old knight, but civilly, and with gentle excuses."

"And the damsel?"

"Nay! that were unmannerly, and the milder our conduct, the larger the
ransom,--when we have great folks to deal with."

The lieutenant accordingly fell back to search Adam's gipsire, which
contained only a book and a file, and then rejoined his captain,
without offering molestation to Sibyll.

The mistake made by the bravo was at least so far not wholly
unfortunate that the notion of the high quality of the captives--for
Sir John Bourchier was indeed a person of considerable station and
importance (a notion favoured by the noble appearance of the scholar
and the delicate and highborn air of Sibyll)--procured for them all
the respect compatible with the circumstances.  They had not gone far
before they entered a village, through which the ruffians marched with
the most perfect impunity; for it was a strange feature in those civil
wars that the mass of the population, except in the northern
districts, remained perfectly supine and neutral.  And as the little
band halted at a small inn to drink, the gossips of the village
collected round them, with the same kind of indolent, careless
curiosity which is now evinced in some hamlet at the halt of a stage-
coach.  Here the captain learned, however, some intelligence important
to his objects,--namely, the night march of the troop under Lord
Hastings, and the probability that the conflict was already begun.
"If so," muttered the rebel, "we can see how the tide turns, before we
endanger ourselves; and at the worst, our prisoners will bring
something of prize-money."

While thus soliloquizing, he spied one of those cumbrous vehicles of
the day called whirlicotes [Whirlicotes were in use from a very early
period, but only among the great, till, in the reign of Richard II.,
his queen, Anne, introduced side-saddles, when the whirlicote fell out
of fashion, but might be found at different hostelries on the main
roads for the accommodation of the infirm or aged.] standing in the
yard of the hostelry; and seizing upon it, vi et armis, in spite of
all the cries and protestations of the unhappy landlord, he ordered
his captives to enter, and recommenced his march.

As the band proceeded farther on their way, they were joined by fresh
troops of the same class as themselves, and they pushed on gayly,
till, about the hour of eight, they halted before the hostelry the
captain had spoken of.  It stood a little out of the high road, not
very far from the village of Hadley, and the heath or chase of
Gladsmore, on which was fought, some time afterwards, the battle of
Barnet.  It was a house of good aspect, and considerable size, for it
was much frequented by all caravanserais and travellers from the North
to the metropolis.  The landlord, at heart a stanch Lancastrian, who
had served in the French wars, and contrived, no one knew how, to save
moneys in the course of an adventurous life, gave to his hostelry the
appellation and sign of the Talbot, in memory of the old hero of that
name; and, hiring a tract of land, joined the occupation of a farmer
to the dignity of a host. The house, which was built round a spacious
quadrangle, represented the double character of its owner, one side
being occupied by barns and a considerable range of stabling, while
cows, oxen, and ragged colts grouped amicably together in a space
railed off in the centre of the yard.  At another side ran a large
wooden staircase, with an open gallery, propped on wooden columns,
conducting to numerous chambers, after the fashion of the Tabard in
Southwark, immortalized by Chaucer.  Over the archway, on entrance,
ran a labyrinth of sleeping lofts for foot passengers and muleteers;
and the side facing the entrance was nearly occupied by a vast
kitchen, the common hall, and the bar, with the private parlour of the
host, and two or three chambers in the second story.  The whirlicote
jolted and rattled into the yard.  Sibyll and her father were assisted
out of the vehicle, and, after a few words interchanged with the host,
conducted by Master Porpustone himself up the spacious stairs into a
chamber, well furnished and fresh littered, with repeated assurances
of safety, provided they maintained silence, and attempted no escape.

"Ye are in time," said Ned Porpustone to the captain.  "Lord Hastings
made proclamation at daybreak that he gave the rebels two hours to
disperse."

"Pest!  I like not those proclamations.  And the fellows stood their
ground?"

"No; for Sir Geoffrey, like a wise soldier, mended the ground by
retreating a mile to the left, and placing the wood between the
Yorkists and himself.  Hastings, by this, must have remarshalled his
men.  But to pass the wood is slow work, and Sir Geoffrey's crossbows
are no doubt doing damage in the covert.  Come in, while your fellows
snatch a morsel without; five minutes are not thrown away on filling
their bellies."

"Thanks, Ned, thou art a good fellow; and if all else fail, why, Sir
John's ransom shall pay the reckoning.  Any news of bold Robin?"

"Ay, he has 'scaped with a whole skin, and gone back to the North,"
answered the host, leading the way to his parlour, where a flask of
strong wine and some cold meat awaited his guest. "If Sir Geoffrey
Gates can beat off the York troopers, tell him, from me, not to
venture to London, but to fall back into the marshes.  He will be
welcome there, I foreguess; for every northman is either for Warwick
or for Lancaster, and the two must unite now, I trow."

"But Warwick is flown!" quoth the captain.

"Tush! he has only flown as the falcon flies when he has a heron to
fight with,--wheeling and soaring.  Woe to the heron when the falcon
swoops!  But you drink not!"

"No; I must keep the head cool to-day; for Hastings is a perilous
captain.  Thy fist, friend!  If I fall, I leave you Sir John and his
girl to wipe off old scores; if we beat off the Yorkists I vow to Our
Lady of Walsingham an image of wax of the weight of myself."  The
marauder then started up, and strode to his men, who were snatching a
hasty meal on the space before the hostel.  He paused a moment or so,
while his host whispered,--

"Hastings was here before daybreak: but his men only got the sour
beer; yours fight upon huffcap."

"Up, men! to your pikes!  Dress to the right!" thundered the captain,
with a sufficient pause between each sentence.  "The York lozels have
starved on stale beer,--shall they beat huffcap and Lancaster?  Frisk
and fresh-up with the Antelope banner [The antelope was one of the
Lancastrian badges.  The special cognizance of Henry VI. was two
feathers in saltire.], and long live Henry the Sixth!"

The sound of the shout that answered this harangue shook the thin
walls of the chamber in which the prisoners were confined, and they
heard with joy the departing tramp of the soldiers.  In a short time,
Master Porpustone himself, a corpulent, burly fellow, with a face by
no means unprepossessing, mounted to the chamber, accompanied by a
comely housekeeper, linked to him, as scandal said, by ties less
irksome than Hymen's, and both bearing ample provisions, with rich
pigment and lucid clary [clary was wine clarified], which they spread
with great formality on an oak table before their involuntary guest.

"Eat, your worship, eat!" cried mine host, heartily.  "Eat, lady-
bird,--nothing like eating to kill time and banish care.  Fortune of
war, Sir John,--fortune of war, never be daunted!  Up to-day, down to-
morrow.  Come what may--York or Lancaster--still a rich man always
falls on his legs.  Five hundred or so to the captain; a noble or two,
out of pure generosity, to Ned Porpustone (I scorn extortion), and you
and the fair young dame may breakfast at home to-morrow, unless the
captain or his favourite lieutenant is taken prisoner; and then, you
see, they will buy off their necks by letting you out of the bag.
Eat, I say,--eat!"

"Verily," said Adam, seating himself solemnly, and preparing to obey,
"I confess I'm a hungered, and the pasty hath a savoury odour; but I
pray thee to tell me why I am called Sir John.  Adam is my baptismal
name."

"Ha! ha! good--very good, your honour--to be sure, and your father's
name before you.  We are all sons of Adam, and every son, I trow, has
a just right and a lawful to his father's name."

With that, followed by the housekeeper, the honest landlord, chuckling
heartily, rolled his goodly bulk from the chamber, which he carefully
locked.

"Comprehendest thou yet, Sibyll?"

"Yes, dear sir and father, they mistake us for fugitives of mark and
importance; and when they discover their error, no doubt we shall go
free.  Courage, dear father!"

"Me seemeth," quoth Adam, almost merrily, as the good man filled his
cup from the wine flagon, "me seemeth that, if the mistake could
continue, it would be no weighty misfortune; ha! ha!"  He stopped
abruptly in the unwonted laughter, put down the cup; his face fell.
"Ah, Heaven forgive me!--and the poor Eureka and faithful Madge!"

"Oh, Father! fear not; we are not without protection.  Lord Hastings
is returned to London,--we will seek him; he will make our cruel
neighbours respect thee.  And Madge--poor Madge!--will be so happy at
our return, for they could not harm her,--a woman, old and alone; no,
no, man is not fierce enough for that."

"Let us so pray; but thou eatest not, child."

"Anon, Father, anon; I am sick and weary.  But, nay--nay, I am better
now,--better.  Smile again, Father.  I am hungered, too; yes, indeed
and in sooth, yes.  Ah, sweet Saint Mary, give me life and strength,
and hope and patience, for his dear sake!"

The stirring events which had within the last few weeks diversified
the quiet life of the scholar had somewhat roused him from his wonted
abstraction, and made the actual world a more sensible and living
thing than it had hitherto seemed to his mind; but now, his repast
ended, the quiet of the place (for the inn was silent and almost
deserted) with the fumes of the wine--a luxury he rarely tasted--
operated soothingly upon his thought and fancy, and plunged him into
those reveries, so dear alike to poet and mathematician.  To the
thinker the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which,
like Homer's chain, extend, link after link; from earth to heaven.
The sunny motes, that in a glancing column came through the lattice,
called Warner from the real day,--the day of strife and blood, with
thousands hard by driving each other to the Hades,--and led his
scheming fancy into the ideal and abstract day,--the theory of light
itself; and the theory suggested mechanism, and mechanism called up
the memory of his oracle, old Roger Bacon; and that memory revived the
great friar's hints in the Opus magnus,--hints which outlined the
grand invention of the telescope; and so, as over some dismal
precipice a bird swings itself to and fro upon the airy bough, the
schoolman's mind played with its quivering fancy, and folded its calm
wings above the verge of terror.

Occupied with her own dreams, Sibyll respected those of her father;
and so in silence, not altogether mournful, the morning and the noon
passed, and the sun was sloping westward, when a confused sound below
called Sibyll's gaze to the lattice, which looked over the balustrade
of the staircase into the vast yard.  She saw several armed men, their
harness hewed and battered, quaffing ale or wine in haste, and heard
one of them say to the landlord,--

"All is lost!  Sir Geoffrey Gates still holds out, but it is butcher
work.  The troops of Lord Hastings gather round him as a net round the
fish!"

Hastings!--that name!--he was at hand! he was near! they would be
saved!  Sibyll's heart beat loudly.

"And the captain?" asked Porpustone.

"Alive, when I last saw him; but we must be off.  In another hour all
will be hurry and skurry, flight and chase."  At this moment from one
of the barns there emerged, one by one, the female vultures of the
battle.  The tymbesteres, who had tramped all night to the spot, had
slept off their fatigue during the day, and appeared on the scene as
the neighbouring strife waxed low, and the dead and dying began to
cumber the gory ground.  Graul Skellet, tossing up her timbrel, darted
to the fugitives and grinned a ghastly grin when she heard the news,--
for the tymbesteres were all loyal to a king who loved women, and who
had a wink and a jest for every tramping wench!  The troopers tarried
not, however, for further converse, but, having satisfied their
thirst, hurried and clattered from the yard.  At the sight of the
ominous tymbesteres Sibyll had drawn back, without daring to close the
lattice she had opened; and the women, seating themselves on a bench,
began sleeking their long hair and smoothing their garments from the
scraps of straw and litter which betokened the nature of their
resting-place.

"Ho, girls!" said the fat landlord, "ye will pay me for board and bed,
I trust, by a show of your craft.  I have two right worshipful lodgers
up yonder, whose lattice looks on the yard, and whom ye may serve to
divert."

Sibyll trembled, and crept to her father's side.

"And," continued the landlord, "if they like the clash of your
musicals, it may bring ye a groat or so, to help ye on your journey.
By the way, whither wend ye, wenches?"

"To a bonny, jolly fair," answered the sinister voice of Graul,--

    "Where a mighty SHOWMAN dyes
       The greenery into red;
     Where, presto! at the word
       Lies his Fool without a head;
     Where he gathers in the crowd
       To the trumpet and the drum,
     With a jingle and a tinkle,
       Graul's merry lasses come!"

As the two closing lines were caught by the rest of the tymbesteres,
striking their timbrels, the crew formed themselves into a semicircle,
and commenced their dance.  Their movements, though wanton and
fantastic, were not without a certain wild grace; and the address with
which, from time to time, they cast up their instruments and caught
them in descending, joined to the surprising agility with which, in
the evolutions of the dance, one seemed now to chase, now to fly from,
the other, darting to and fro through the ranks of her companions,
winding and wheeling,--the chain now seemingly broken in disorder, now
united link to link, as the whole force of the instruments clashed in
chorus,--made an exhibition inexpressibly attractive to the vulgar.

The tymbesteres, however, as may well be supposed, failed to draw
Sibyll or Warner to the window; and they exchanged glances of spite
and disappointment.

"Marry," quoth the landlord, after a hearty laugh at the diversion, "I
do wrong to be so gay, when so many good friends perhaps are lying
stark and cold.  But what then?  Life is short,--laugh while we can!"

"Hist!" whispered his housekeeper; "art wode, Ned?  Wouldst thou have
it discovered that thou hast such quality birds in the cage--noble
Yorkists--at the very time when Lord Hastings himself may be riding
this way after the victory?"

"Always right, Meg,--and I'm an ass!" answered the host, in the same
undertone.  "But my good nature will be the death of me some day.
Poor gentlefolks, they must be unked dull, yonder!"

"If the Yorkists come hither,--which we shall soon know by the
scouts,--we must shift Sir John and the damsel to the back of the
house, over thy tap-room."

"Manage it as thou wilt, Meg; but thou seest they keep quiet and snug.
Ho, ho, ho! that tall tymbestere is supple enough to make an owl hold
his sides with laughing.  Ah! hollo, there, tymbesteres, ribaudes,
tramps, the devil's chickens,--down, down!"

The host was too late in his order.  With a sudden spring, Graul, who
had long fixed her eye on the open lattice of the prisoners, had
wreathed herself round one of the pillars that supported the stairs,
swung lightly over the balustrade; and with a faint shriek the
startled Sibyll beheld the tymbestere's hard, fierce eyes, glaring
upon her through the lattice, as her long arm extended the timbrel for
largess.  But no sooner had Sibyll raised her face than she was
recognized.

"Ho, the wizard and the wizard's daughter!  Ho, the girl who glamours
lords, and wears sarcenet and lawn!  Ho, the nigromancer who starves
the poor!"

At the sound of their leader's cry, up sprang, up climbed the hellish
sisters!  One after the other, they darted through the lattice into
the chamber.

"The ronions! the foul fiend has distraught them!" groaned the
landlord, motionless with astonishment; but the more active Meg,
calling to the varlets and scullions, whom the tymbesteres had
collected in the yard, to follow her, bounded up the stairs, unlocked
the door, and arrived in time to throw herself between the captives
and the harpies, whom Sibyll's rich super-tunic and Adam's costly gown
had inflamed into all the rage of appropriation.

"What mean ye, wretches?" cried the bold Meg, purple with anger.  "Do
ye come for this into honest folk's hostelries, to rob their guests in
broad day--noble guests--guests of mark!  Oh, Sir John!  Sir John!
what will ye think of us?"

"Oh, Sir John! Sir John!" groaned the landlord, who had now moved his
slow bulk into the room.  "They shall be scourged, Sir John!  They
shall be put in the stocks, they shall be brent with hot iron, they--"

"Ha, ha!" interrupted the terrible Graul, "guests of mark! noble
guests, trow ye!  Adam Warner, the wizard, and his daughter, whom we
drove last night from their den, as many a time, sisters, and many, we
have driven the rats from charnel and cave."

"Wizard!  Adam!  Blood of my life!" stammered the landlord, "is his
name Adam after all?"

"My name is Adam Warner," said the old man, with dignity, "no wizard--
a humble scholar, and a poor gentleman, who has injured no one.
Wherefore, women--if women ye are--would ye injure mine and me?"

"Faugh, wizard!" returned Graul, folding her arms.  "Didst thou not
send thy spawn, yonder, to spoil our mart with her gittern?  Hast thou
not taught her the spells to win love from the noble and young?  Ho,
how daintily the young witch robes herself!  Ho, laces and satins, and
we shiver with the cold, and parch with the heat--and--doff thy tunic,
minion!"

And Graul's fierce gripe was on the robe, when the landlord interposed
his huge arm, and held her at bay.

"Softly, my sucking dove, softly!  Clear the room and be off!"

"Look to thyself, man.  If thou harbourest a wizard against law,--a
wizard whom King Edward hath given up to the people,--look to thy
barns,--they shall burn; look to thy cattle,--they shall rot; look to
thy secrets,--they shall be told.  Lancastrian, thou shalt hang!  We
go! we go!  We have friends amongst the mailed men of York.  We go,--
we will return!  Woe to thee, if thou harbourest the wizard and the
succuba!"

With that Graul moved slowly to the door.  Host and housekeeper,
varlet, groom, and scullion made way for her in terror; and still, as
she moved, she kept her eyes on Sibyll, till her sisters, following in
successive file, shut out the hideous aspect: and Meg, ordering away
her gaping train, closed the door.

The host and the housekeeper then gazed gravely at each other.  Sibyll
lay in her father's arms breathing hard and convulsively.  The old
man's face bent over her in silence.  Meg drew aside her master.  "You
must rid the house at once of these folks.  I have heard talk of yon
tymbesteres; they are awsome in spite and malice.  Every man to
himself!"

"But the poor old gentleman, so mild, and the maid, so winsome!"

The last remark did not over-please the comely Meg.  She advanced at
once to Adam, and said shortly,--

"Master, whether wizard or not is no affair of a poor landlord, whose
house is open to all; but ye have had food and wine,--please to pay
the reckoning, and God speed ye; ye are free to depart."

"We can pay you, mistress!" exclaimed Sibyll, springing up.  "We have
moneys yet.  Here, here!" and she took from her gipsire the broad
pieces which poor Madge's precaution had placed therein, and which the
bravoes had fortunately spared.

The sight of the gold somewhat softened the housewife.  "Lord Hastings
is known to us," continued Sibyll, perceiving the impression she had
made; "suffer us to rest here till he pass this way, and ye will find
yourselves repaid for the kindness."

"By my troth," said the landlord, "ye are most welcome to all my poor
house containeth; and as for these tymbesteres, I value them not a
straw.  No one can say Ned Porpustone is an ill man or inhospitable.
Whoever can pay reasonably is sure of good wine and civility at the
Talbot."

With these and many similar protestations and assurances, which were
less heartily re-echoed by the housewife, the landlord begged to
conduct them to an apartment not so liable to molestation; and after
having led them down the principal stairs, through the bar, and thence
up a narrow flight of steps, deposited them in a chamber at the back
of the house, and lighted a sconce therein, for it was now near the
twilight.  He then insisted on seeing after their evening meal, and
vanished with his assistant.  The worthy pair were now of the same
mind; for guests known to Lord Hastings it was worth braving the
threats of the tymbesteres; especially since Lord Hastings, it seems,
had just beaten the Lancastrians.

But alas! while the active Meg was busy on the hippocras, and the
worthy landlord was inspecting the savoury operations of the kitchen,
a vast uproar was heard without.  A troop of disorderly Yorkist
soldiers, who had been employed in dispersing the flying rebels,
rushed helter-skelter into the house, and poured into the kitchen,
bearing with them the detested tymbesteres, who had encountered them
on their way.  Among these soldiers were those who had congregated at
Master Sancroft's the day before, and they were well prepared to
support the cause of their griesly paramours.  Lord Hastings himself
had retired for the night to a farmhouse nearer the field of battle
than the hostel; and as in those days discipline was lax enough after
a victory, the soldiers had a right to license.  Master Porpustone
found himself completely at the mercy of these brawling customers, the
more rude and disorderly from the remembrance of the sour beer in the
morning, and Graul Skellet's assurances that Master Porpustone was a
malignant Lancastrian.  They laid hands on all the provisions in the
house, tore the meats from the spit, devouring them half raw; set the
casks running over the floors; and while they swilled and swore, and
filled the place with the uproar of a hell broke loose, Graul Skellet,
whom the lust for the rich garments of Sibyll still fired and stung,
led her followers up the stairs towards the deserted chamber.  Mine
host perceived, but did not dare openly to resist the foray; but as he
was really a good-natured knave, and as, moreover, he feared ill
consequences might ensue if any friends of Lord Hastings were spoiled,
outraged,--nay, peradventure murdered,--in his house, he resolved, at
all events, to assist the escape of his guests.  Seeing the ground
thus clear of the tymbesteres, he therefore stole from the riotous
scene, crept up the back stairs, gained the chamber to which he had so
happily removed his persecuted lodgers, and making them, in a few
words, sensible that he was no longer able to protect them, and that
the tymbesteres were now returned with an armed force to back their
malice, conducted them safely to a wide casement only some three or
four feet from the soil of the solitary garden, and bade them escape
and save themselves.

"The farm," he whispered, "where they say my Lord Hastings is
quartered is scarcely a mile and a half away; pass the garden wicket,
leave Gladsmore Chase to the left hand, take the path to the right,
through the wood, and you will see its roof among the apple-blossoms.
Our Lady protect you, and say a word to my lord on behalf of poor
Ned."

Scarce had he seen his guests descend into the garden before he heard
the yell of the tymbesteres, in the opposite part of the house, as
they ran from room to room after their prey.  He hastened to regain
the kitchen; and presently the tymbesteres, breathless and panting,
rushed in, and demanded their victims.

"Marry," quoth the landlord, with the self-possession of a cunning old
soldier-"think ye I cumbered my house with such cattle after pretty
lasses like you had given me the inkling of what they were?  No wizard
shall fly away with the sign of the Talbot, if I can help it.  They
skulked off I can promise ye, and did not even mount a couple of
broomsticks which I handsomely offered for their ride up to London."

"Thunder and bombards!" cried a trooper, already half-drunk, and
seizing Graul in his iron arms, "put the conjuror out of thine head
now, and buss me, Graul, buss me!"

Then the riot became hideous; the soldiers, following their comrade's
example, embraced the grim glee-women, tearing and hauling them to and
fro, one from the other, round and round, dancing, hallooing,
chanting, howling, by the blaze of a mighty fire,--many a rough face
and hard hand smeared with blood still wet, communicating the stain to
the cheeks and garb of those foul feres, and the whole revel becoming
so unutterably horrible and ghastly, that even the veteran landlord
fled from the spot, trembling and crossing himself.  And so, streaming
athwart the lattice, and silvering over that fearful merry-making,
rose the moon.

But when fatigue and drunkenness had done their work, and the soldiers
fell one over the other upon the floor, the tables, the benches, into
the heavy sleep of riot, Graul suddenly rose from amidst the huddled
bodies, and then, silently as ghouls from a burial-ground, her sisters
emerged also from their resting-places beside the sleepers.  The dying
light of the fire contended but feebly with the livid rays of the
moon, and played fantastically over the gleaming robes of the
tymbesteres.  They stood erect for a moment, listening, Graul with her
finger on her lips; then they glided to the door, opened and reclosed
it, darted across the yard, scaring the beasts that slept there; the
watch-dog barked, but drew back, bristling, and showing his fangs, as
Red Grisell, undaunted, pointed her knife, and Graul flung him a red
peace-sop of meat.  They launched themselves through the open
entrance, gained the space beyond, and scoured away to the
battlefield.

Meanwhile, Sibyll and her father were still under the canopy of
heaven, they had scarcely passed the garden and entered the fields,
when they saw horsemen riding to and fro in all directions.  Sir
Geoffrey Gates, the rebel leader, had escaped; the reward of three
hundred marks was set on his head, and the riders were in search of
the fugitive.  The human form itself had become a terror to the hunted
outcasts; they crept under a thick hedge till the horsemen had
disappeared, and then resumed their way.  They gained the wood; but
there again they halted at the sound of voices, and withdrew
themselves under covert of some entangled and trampled bushes.  This
time it was but a party of peasants, whom curiosity had led to see the
field of battle, and who were now returning home.  Peasants and
soldiers both were human, and therefore to be shunned by those whom
the age itself put out of the pale of law.  At last the party also
left the path free; and now it was full night.  They pursued their
way, they cleared the wood; before them lay the field of battle; and a
deeper silence seemed to fall over the world!  The first stars had
risen, but not yet the moon.  The gleam of armour from prostrate
bodies, which it had mailed in vain, reflected the quiet rays; here
and there flickered watchfires, where sentinels were set, but they
were scattered and remote.  The outcasts paused and shuddered, but
there seemed no holier way for their feet; and the roof of the
farmer's homestead slept on the opposite side of the field, amidst
white orchard blossoms, whitened still more by the stars.  They went
on, hand in hand,--the dead, after all, were less terrible than the
living.  Sometimes a stern, upturned face, distorted by the last
violent agony, the eyes unclosed and glazed, encountered them with its
stony stare; but the weapon was powerless in the stiff hand, the
menace and the insult came not from the hueless lips; persecution
reposed, at last, in the lap of slaughter.  They had gone midway
through the field, when they heard from a spot where the corpses lay
thickest piled, a faint voice calling upon God for pardon; and,
suddenly, it was answered by a tone of fiercer agony,--that did not
pray, but curse.

By a common impulse, the gentle wanderers moved silently to the spot.

The sufferer in prayer was a youth scarcely passed from boyhood: his
helm had been cloven, his head was bare, and his long light hair,
clotted with gore, fell over his shoulders.  Beside him lay a strong-
built, powerful form, which writhed in torture, pierced under the arm
by a Yorkist arrow, and the shaft still projecting from the wound,--
and the man's curse answered the boy's prayer.

"Peace to thy parting soul, brother!" said Warner, bending over the
man.

"Poor sufferer!" said Sibyll to the boy; "cheer thee, we will send
succour; thou mayest live yet!"

"Water! water!--hell and torture!--water, I say!" groaned the man;
"one drop of water!"

It was the captain of the maurauders who had captured the wanderers.

"Thine arm! lift me! move me!  That evil man scares my soul from
heaven!" gasped the boy.

And Adam preached penitence to the one that cursed, and Sibyll knelt
down and prayed with the one that prayed.  And up rose the moon!

Lord Hastings sat with his victorious captains--over mead, morat, and
wine--in the humble hall of the farm.

"So," said he, "we have crushed the last embers of the rebellion!
This Sir Geoffrey Gates is a restless and resolute spirit; pity he
escapes again for further mischief.  But the House of Nevile, that
overshadowed the rising race, hath fallen at last,--a waisall, brave
sirs, to the new men!"

The door was thrown open, and an old soldier entered abruptly.

"My lord! my lord!  Oh, my poor son! he cannot be found!  The women,
who ever follow the march of soldiers, will be on the ground to
despatch the wounded, that they may rifle the corpses!  O God! if my
son, my boy, my only son--"

"I wist not, my brave Mervil, that thou hadst a son in our bands; yet
I know each man by name and sight.  Courage!  Our wounded have been
removed, and sentries are placed to guard the field."

"Sentries!  O my lord, knowest thou not that they wink at the crime
that plunders the dead?  Moreover, these corpse-riflers creep
stealthily and unseen, as the red earth-worms, to the carcass.  Give
me some few of thy men, give me warrant to search the field!  My son,
my boy--not sixteen summers--and his mother!"

The man stopped, and sobbed.

"Willingly!" said the gentle Hastings, "willingly!  And woe to the
sentries if it be as thou sayest!  I will go myself and see!  Torches
there--what ho!--the good captain careth even for his dead!--Thy son!
I marvel I knew him not!  Whom served he under?"

"My lord! my lord! pardon him!  He is but a boy--they misled him! he
fought for the rebels.  He crossed my path to-day, my arm was raised;
we knew each other, and he fled from his father's sword!  Just as the
strife was ended I saw him again, I saw him fall!--Oh, mercy, mercy!
do not let him perish of his wounds or by the rifler's knife, even
though a rebel!"

"Homo sum!" quoth the noble chief; "I am a man; and, even in these
bloody times, Nature commands when she speaks in a father's voice!
Mervil, I marked thee to-day!  Thou art a brave fellow.  I meant thee
advancement; I give thee, instead, thy son's pardon, if he lives; ten
Masses if he died as a soldier's son should die, no matter under what
flag,--antelope or lion, pierced manfully in the breast, his feet to
the foe!  Come, I will search with thee!"

The boy yielded up his soul while Sibyll prayed, and her sweet voice
soothed the last pang; and the man ceased to curse while Adam spoke of
God's power and mercy, and his breath ebbed, gasp upon gasp, away.
While thus detained, the wanderers saw not pale, fleeting figures,
that had glided to the ground, and moved, gleaming, irregular, and
rapid, as marsh-fed vapours, from heap to heap of the slain.  With a
loud, wild cry, the robber Lancastrian half sprung to his feet, in the
paroxysm of the last struggle, and then fell on his face, a corpse!

The cry reached the tymbesteres, and Graul rose from a body from which
she had extracted a few coins smeared with blood, and darted to the
spot; and so, as Adam raised his face from contemplating the dead,
whose last moments he had sought to soothe, the Alecto of the
battlefield stood before him, her knife bare in her gory arm.  Red
Grisell, who had just left (with a spurn of wrath--for the pouch was
empty) the corpse of a soldier, round whose neck she had twined her
hot clasp the day before, sprang towards Sibyll; the rest of the
sisterhood flocked to the place, and laughed in glee as they beheld
their unexpected prey.  The danger was horrible and imminent; no pity
was seen in those savage eyes.  The wanderers prepared for death--
when, suddenly, torches flashed over the ground.  A cry was heard,
"See, the riflers of the dead!"  Armed men bounded forward, and the
startled wretches uttered a shrill, unearthly scream, and fled from
the spot, leaping over the carcasses, and doubling and winding, till
they had vanished into the darkness of the wood.

"Provost!" said a commanding voice, "hang me up those sentinels at
day-break!"

"My son! my boy! speak, Hal,--speak to me.  He is here, he is found!"
exclaimed the old soldier, kneeling beside the corpse at Sibyll's
feet.

"My lord! my beloved! my Hastings!"  And Sibyll fell insensible before
the chief.




CHAPTER VI.

THE SUBTLE CRAFT OF RICHARD OF GLOUCESTER.

It was some weeks after the defeat of Sir Geoffrey Gates, and Edward
was at Shene, with his gay court.  Reclined at length within a
pavilion placed before a cool fountain, in the royal gardens, and
surrounded by his favourites, the king listened indolently to the
music of his minstrels, and sleeked the plumage of his favourite
falcon, perched upon his wrist. And scarcely would it have been
possible to recognize in that lazy voluptuary the dauntless soldier,
before whose lance, as deer before the hound, had so lately fled, at
bloody Erpingham, the chivalry of the Lancastrian Rose; but remote
from the pavilion, and in one of the deserted bowling alleys, Prince
Richard and Lord Montagu walked apart, in earnest conversation.  The
last of these noble personages had remained inactive during these
disturbances, and Edward had not seemed to entertain any suspicion of
his participation in the anger and revenge of Warwick.  The king took
from him, it is true, the lands and earldom of Northumberland, and
restored them to the Percy, but he had accompanied this act with
gracious excuses, alleging the necessity of conciliating the head of
an illustrious House, which had formally entered into allegiance to
the dynasty of York, and bestowed upon his early favourite, in
compensation, the dignity of marquis.  [Montagu said bitterly of this
new dignity, "He takes from me the Earldom and domains of
Northumberland, and makes me a Marquis, with a pie's nest to maintain
it withal."--STOWE: Edward IV.--Warkworth Chronicle.]  The politic
king, in thus depriving Montagu of the wealth and the retainers of the
Percy, reduced him, as a younger brother, to a comparative poverty and
insignificance, which left him dependent on Edward's favour, and
deprived him, as he thought, of the power of active mischief; at the
same time more than ever he insisted on Montagu's society, and
summoning his attendance at the court, kept his movements in watchful
surveillance.

"Nay, my lord," said Richard, pursuing with much unction the
conversation he had commenced, "you wrong me much, Holy Paul be my
witness, if you doubt the deep sorrow I feel at the unhappy events
which have led to the severance of my kinsmen!  England seems to me to
have lost its smile in losing the glory of Earl Warwick's presence,
and Clarence is my brother, and was my friend; and thou knowest,
Montagu, thou knowest, how dear to my heart was the hope to win for my
wife and lady the gentle Anne."

"Prince," said Montagu, abruptly, "though the pride of Warwick and the
honour of our House may have forbidden the public revelation of the
cause which fired my brother to rebellion, thou, at least, art privy
to a secret--"

"Cease!" exclaimed Richard, in great emotion, probably sincere, for
his face grew livid, and its muscles were nervously convulsed.  "I
would not have that remembrance stirred from its dark repose.  I would
fain forget a brother's hasty frenzy, in the belief of his lasting
penitence."  He paused and turned his face, gasped for breath, and
resumed: "The cause justified the father; it had justified me in the
father's cause, had Warwick listened to my suit, and given me the
right to deem insult to his daughter injury to myself."

"And if, my prince," returned Montagu, looking round him, and in a
subdued whisper, "if yet the hand of Lady Anne were pledged to you?"

"Tempt me not, tempt me not!" cried the prince, crossing himself.
Montagu continued,--

"Our cause, I mean Lord Warwick's cause, is not lost, as the king
deems it."

"Proceed," said Richard, casting down his eyes, while his countenance
settled back into its thoughtful calm.

"I mean," renewed Montagu, "that in my brother's flight, his retainers
were taken by surprise.  In vain the king would confiscate his lands,
--he cannot confiscate men's hearts.  If Warwick to-morrow set his
armed heel upon the soil, trowest thou, sagacious and clear-judging
prince, that the strife which would follow would be but another field
of Losecote?   [The battle of Erpingham, so popularly called, in
contempt of the rebel lions runaways.]  Thou hast heard of the honours
with which King Louis has received the earl.  Will that king grudge
him ships and moneys?  And meanwhile, thinkest thou that his favourers
sleep?"

"But if he land, Montagu," said Richard, who seemed to listen with an
attention that awoke all the hopes of Montagu, coveting so powerful an
ally--"if he land, and make open war on Edward--we must say the word
boldly--what intent can he proclaim?  It is not enough to say King
Edward shall not reign; the earl must say also what king England
should elect!"

"Prince," answered Montagu, "before I reply to that question,
vouchsafe to hear my own hearty desire and wish.  Though the king has
deeply wronged my brother, though he has despoiled me of the lands,
which were, peradventure, not too large a reward for twenty victories
in his cause, and restored them to the House that ever ranked amongst
the strongholds of his Lancastrian foe, yet often when I am most
resentful, the memory of my royal seigneur's past love and kindness
comes over me,--above all, the thought of the solemn contract between
his daughter and my son; and I feel (now the first heat of natural
anger at an insult offered to my niece is somewhat cooled) that if
Warwick did land, I could almost forget my brother for my king."

"Almost!" repeated Richard, smiling.

"I am plain with your Highness, and say but what I feel.  I would even
now fain trust that, by your mediation, the king may be persuaded to
make such concessions and excuses as in truth would not misbeseem him,
to the father of Lady Anne, and his own kinsman; and that yet, ere it
be too late, I may be spared the bitter choice between the ties of
blood and my allegiance to the king."

"But failing this hope (which I devoutly share),--and Edward, it must
be owned, could scarcely trust to a letter,--still less to a
messenger, the confession of a crime,--failing this, and your brother
land, and I side with him for love of Anne, pledged to me as a bride,
--what king would he ask England to elect?"

"The Duke of Clarence loves you dearly, Lord Richard," replied
Montagu.  "Knowest thou not how often he hath said, 'By sweet Saint
George, if Gloucester would join me, I would make Edward know we were
all one man's sons, who should be more preferred and promoted than
strangers of his wife's blood?'"  [Hall.]

Richard's countenance for a moment evinced disappointment; but he said
dryly: "Then Warwick would propose that Clarence should be king?--and
the great barons and the honest burghers and the sturdy yeomen would,
you think, not stand aghast at the manifesto which declares, not that
the dynasty of York is corrupt and faulty, but that the younger son
should depose the elder,--that younger son, mark me! not only unknown
in war and green in council, but gay, giddy, vacillating; not subtle
of wit and resolute of deed, as he who so aspires should be!--Montagu,
a vain dream!"--Richard paused and then resumed, in a low tone, as to
himself, "Oh, not so--not so are kings cozened from their thrones! a
pretext must blind men,--say they are illegitimate, say they are too
young, too feeble, too anything, glide into their place, and then, not
war--not war.  You slay them not,--they disappear!"  The duke's face,
as he muttered, took a sinister and a dark expression, his eyes seemed
to gaze on space.  Suddenly recovering himself as from a revery, he
turned, with his wonted sleek and gracious aspect, to the startled
Montagu, and said, "I was but quoting from Italian history, good my
lord,--wise lore, but terrible and murderous.  Return we to the point.
Thou seest Clarence could not reign, and as well," added the prince,
with a slight sigh,--"as well or better (for, without vanity, I have
more of a king's mettle in me), might I--even I--aspire to my
brother's crown!"  Here he paused, and glanced rapidly and keenly at
the marquis; but whether or not in these words he had sought to sound
Montagu, and that glance sufficed to show him it were bootless or
dangerous to speak more plainly, he resumed with an altered voice,
"Enough of this: Warwick will discover the idleness of such design;
and if he land, his trumpets must ring to a more kindling measure.
John Montagu, thinkest thou that Margaret of Anjou and the
Lancastrians will not rather win thy brother to their side?  There is
the true danger to Edward,--none elsewhere."

"And if so?" said Montagu, watching his listener's countenance.
Richard started, and gnawed his lip.  "Mark me," continued the
marquis, "I repeat that I would fain hope yet that Edward may appease
the earl; but if not, and, rather than rest dishonoured and aggrieved,
Warwick link himself with Lancaster, and thou join him as Anne's
betrothed and lord, what matters who the puppet on the throne?--we and
thou shall be the rulers; or, if thou reject," added the marquis,
artfully, as he supposed, exciting the jealousy of the duke, "Henry
has a son--a fair, and they say, a gallant prince--carefully tutored
in the knowledge of our English laws, and who my lord of Oxford,
somewhat in the confidence of the Lancastrians, assures me would
rejoice to forget old feuds, and call Warwick 'father,' and my niece
'Lady and Princess of Wales.'"

With all his dissimulation, Richard could ill conceal the emotions of
fear, of jealousy, of dismay, which these words excited.

"Lord Oxford!" he cried, stamping his foot.  "Ha, John de Vere,
pestilent traitor, plottest thou thus?  But we can yet seize thy
person, and will have thy head."

Alarmed at this burst, and suddenly made aware that he had laid his
breast too bare to the boy, whom he had thought to dazzle and seduce
to his designs, Montagu said falteringly, "But, my lord, our talk is
but in confidence: at your own prayer, with your own plighted word of
prince and of kinsman, that whatever my frankness may utter should not
pass farther.  Take," added the nobleman, with proud dignity--"take my
head rather than Lord Oxford's; for I deserve death, if I reveal to
one who can betray the loose words of another's intimacy and trust!"

"Forgive me, my cousin," said Richard, meekly; "my love to Anne
transported me too far.  Lord Oxford's words, as you report them, had
conjured up a rival, and--but enough of this.  And now," added the
prince, gravely, and with a steadiness of voice and manner that gave a
certain majesty to his small stature, "now as thou hast spoken openly,
openly also will I reply.  I feel the wrong to the Lady Anne as to
myself; deeply, burningly, and lastingly, will it live in my mind; it
may be, sooner or later, to rise to gloomy deeds, even against Edward
and Edward's blood.  But no, I have the king's solemn protestations of
repentance; his guilty passion has burned into ashes, and he now
sighs--gay Edward--for a lighter fere.  I cannot join with Clarence,
less can I join with the Lancastrians.  My birth makes me the prop of
the throne of York,--to guard it as a heritage (who knows?) that may
descend to mine,--nay, to me!  And, mark me well if Warwick attempt a
war of fratricide, he is lost; if, on the other hand, he can submit
himself to the hands of Margaret, stained with his father's gore, the
success of an hour will close in the humiliation of a life.  There is
a third way left, and that way thou hast piously and wisely shown.
Let him, like me, resign revenge, and, not exacting a confession and a
cry of peccavi, which no king, much less King Edward the Plantagenet,
can whimper forth, let him accept such overtures as his liege can
make.  His titles and castles shall be restored, equal possessions to
those thou hast lost assigned to thee, and all my guerdon (if I can so
negotiate) as all my ambition, his daughter's hand.  Muse on this, and
for the peace and weal of the realm so limit all thy schemes, my lord
and cousin!"

With these words the prince pressed the hand of the marquis, and
walked slowly towards the king's pavilion.

"Shame on my ripe manhood and lore of life," muttered Montagu, enraged
against himself, and deeply mortified.  "How sentence by sentence and
step by step yon crafty pigmy led me on, till all our projects, all
our fears and hopes, are revealed to him who but views them as a foe.
Anne betrothed to one who even in fiery youth can thus beguile and
dupe!  Warwick decoyed hither upon fair words, at the will of one whom
Italy (boy, there thou didst forget thy fence of cunning!) has taught
how the great are slain not, but disappear! no, even this defeat
instructs me now.  But right, right! the reign of Clarence is
impossible, and that of Lancaster is ill-omened and portentous; and
after all, my son stands nearer to the throne than any subject, in his
alliance with the Lady Elizabeth.  Would to Heaven the king could yet
--But out on me! this is no hour for musing on mine own aggrandizement;
rather let me fly at once and warn Oxford--imperilled by my
imprudence--against that dark eye which hath set watch upon his life."

At that thought, which showed that Montagu, with all his worldliness,
was not forgetful of one of the first duties of knight and gentleman,
the marquis hastened up the alley, in the opposite direction to that
taken by Gloucester, and soon found himself in the courtyard, where a
goodly company were mounting their haquenees and palfreys, to enjoy a
summer ride through the neighbouring chase.  The cold and half-
slighting salutations of these minions of the hour, which now
mortified the Nevile, despoiled of the possessions that had rewarded
his long and brilliant services, contrasting forcibly the reverential
homage he had formerly enjoyed, stung Montagu to the quick.

"Whither ride you, brother Marquis?" said young Lord Dorset
(Elizabeth's son by her first marriage), as Montagu called to his
single squire, who was in waiting with his horse.  "Some secret
expedition, methinks, for I have known the day when the Lord Montagu
never rode from his king's palace with less than thirty squires."

"Since my Lord Dorset prides himself on his memory," answered the
scornful lord, "he may remember also the day when, if a Nevile mounted
in haste, he bade the first Woodville he saw hold the stirrup."

And regarding "the brother marquis" with a stately eye that silenced
and awed retort, the long-descended Montagu passed the courtiers, and
rode slowly on till out of sight of the palace; he then pushed into a
hand-gallop, and halted not till he had reached London, and gained the
house in which then dwelt the Earl of Oxford, the most powerful of all
the Lancastrian nobles not in exile, and who had hitherto temporized
with the reigning House.

Two days afterwards the news reached Edward that Lord Oxford and
Jasper of Pembroke--uncle to the boy afterwards Henry VII.--had sailed
from England.

The tidings reached the king in his chamber, where he was closeted
with Gloucester.  The conference between them seemed to have been warm
and earnest, for Edward's face was flushed, and Gloucester's brow was
perturbed and sullen.

"Now Heaven be praised!" cried the king, extending to Richard the
letter which communicated the flight of the disaffected lords.  "We
have two enemies the less in our roiaulme, and many a barony the more
to confiscate to our kingly wants.  Ha, ha! these Lancastrians only
serve to enrich us.  Frowning still, Richard? smile, boy!"

"Foi de mon ame, Edward," said Richard, with a bitter energy,
strangely at variance with his usual unctious deference to the king,
"your Highness's gayety is ill-seasoned; you reject all the means to
assure your throne, you rejoice in all the events that imperil it.  I
prayed you to lose not a moment in conciliating, if possible, the
great lord whom you own you have wronged, and you replied that you
would rather lose your crown than win back the arm that gave it you."

"Gave it me! an error, Richard! that crown was at once the heritage of
my own birth and the achievement of my own sword.  But were it as you
say, it is not in a king's nature to bear the presence of a power more
formidable than his own, to submit to a voice that commands rather
than counsels; and the happiest chance that ever befell me is the
exile of this earl.  How, after what hath chanced, can I ever see his
face again without humiliation, or he mine without resentment?"

"So you told me anon, and I answered, if that be so, and your Highness
shrinks from the man you have injured, beware at least that Warwick,
if he may not return as a friend, come not back as an irresistible
foe.  If you will not conciliate, crush!  Hasten by all arts to
separate Clarence from Warwick.  Hasten to prevent the union of the
earl's popularity and Henry's rights.  Keep eye upon all the
Lancastrian lords, and see that none quit the realm where they are
captives, to join a camp where they can rise into leaders.  And at the
very moment I urge you to place strict watch upon Oxford, to send your
swiftest riders to seize Jasper of Pembroke, you laugh with glee to
hear that Oxford and Pembroke are gone to swell the army of your
foes!"

"Better foes out of my realm than in it," answered Edward, dryly.

"My liege, I say no more," and Richard rose.  "I would forestall a
danger; it but remains for me to share it."

The king was touched.  "Tarry yet, Richard," he said; and then, fixing
his brother's eye, he continued, with a half smile and a heightened
colour, "though we knew thee true and leal to us, we yet know also,
Richard, that thou hast personal interest in thy counsels.  Thou
wouldst by one means or another soften or constrain the earl into
giving thee the hand of Anne.  Well, then, grant that Warwick and
Clarence expel King Edward from his throne, they may bring a bride to
console thee for the ruin of a brother."

"Thou hast no right to taunt or to suspect me, my liege," returned
Richard, with a quiver in his lip.  "Thou hast included me in thy
meditated wrong to Warwick; and had that wrong been done--"

"Peradventure it had made thee espouse Warwick's quarrel?"

"Bluntly, yes!" exclaimed Richard, almost fiercely, and playing with
his dagger.  "But" (he added, with a sudden change of voice) "I
understand and know thee better than the earl did or could.  I know
what in thee is but thoughtless impulse, haste of passion, the habit
kings form of forgetting all things save the love or hate, the desire
or anger, of a moment.  Thou hast told me thyself, and with tears, of
thy offence; thou hast pardoned my boy's burst of anger; I have
pardoned thy evil thought; thou hast told me thyself that another face
has succeeded to the brief empire of Anne's blue eye, and hast further
pledged me thy kingly word, that if I can yet compass the hand of a
cousin dear to me from childhood, thou wilt confirm the union."

"It is true," said Edward.  "But if thou wed thy bride, keep her aloof
from the court,--nay, frown not, my boy, I mean simply that I would
not blush before my brother's wife!"

Richard bowed low in order to conceal the expression of his face, and
went on without further notice of the explanation.  "And all this
considered, Edward, I swear by Saint Paul, the holiest saint to
thoughtful men, and by Saint George, the noblest patron to high-born
warriors, that thy crown and thine honour are as dear to me as if they
were mine own.  Whatever sins Richard of Gloucester may live to
harbour and repent, no man shall ever say of him that he was a
recreant to the honour of his country [so Lord Bacon observes of
Richard, with that discrimination, even in the strongest censure, of
which profound judges of mankind are alone capable, that he was "a
king jealous of the honor of the English nation"], or slow to defend
the rights of his ancestors from the treason of a vassal or the sword
of a foreign foe.  Therefore, I say again, if thou reject my honest
counsels; if thou suffer Warwick to unite with Lancaster and France;
if the ships of Louis bear to your shores an enemy, the might of whom
your reckless daring undervalues, foremost in the field in battle,
nearest to your side in exile, shall Richard Plantagenet be found!"
These words, being uttered with sincerity, and conveying a promise
never forfeited, were more impressive than the subtlest eloquence the
wily and accomplished Gloucester ever employed as the cloak to guile,
and they so affected Edward, that he threw his arms around his
brother; and after one of those bursts of emotion which were frequent
in one whose feelings were never deep and lasting, but easily aroused
and warmly spoken, he declared himself really to listen to and adopt
all means which Richard's art could suggest for the better maintenance
of their common weal and interests.

And then, with that wondrous, if somewhat too restless and over-
refining energy which belonged to him, Richard rapidly detailed the
scheme of his profound and dissimulating policy.  His keen and
intuitive insight into human nature had shown him the stern necessity
which, against their very will, must unite Warwick with Margaret of
Anjou.  His conversation with Montagu had left no doubt of that peril
on his penetrating mind.  He foresaw that this union might be made
durable and sacred by the marriage of Anne and Prince Edward; and to
defeat this alliance was his first object, partly through Clarence,
partly through Margaret herself.  A gentlewoman in the Duchess of
Clarence's train had been arrested on the point of embarking to join
her mistress.  Richard had already seen and conferred with this lady,
whose ambition, duplicity, and talent for intrigue were known to him.
Having secured her by promises of the most lavish dignities and
rewards, he proposed that she should be permitted to join the duchess
with secret messages to Isabel and the duke, warning them both that
Warwick and Margaret would forget their past feud in present sympathy,
and that the rebellion against King Edward, instead of placing them on
the throne, would humble them to be subordinates and aliens to the
real profiters, the Lancastrians.  [Comines, 3, c. 5; Hall;
Hollinshed]  He foresaw what effect these warnings would have upon the
vain duke and the ambitious Isabel, whose character was known to him
from childhood.  He startled the king by insisting upon sending, at
the same time, a trusty diplomatist to Margaret of Anjou, proffering
to give the princess Elizabeth (betrothed to Lord Montagu's son) to
the young Prince Edward.  ["Original Letters from Harleian
Manuscripts.  Edited by Sir H. Ellis (second series).]  Thus, if the
king, who had, as yet, no son, were to die, Margaret's son, in right
of his wife, as well as in that of his own descent, would peaceably
ascend the throne.  "Need I say that I mean not this in sad and
serious earnest?" observed Richard, interrupting the astonished king.
"I mean it but to amuse the Anjouite, and to deafen her ears to any
overtures from Warwick.  If she listen, we gain time; that time will
inevitably renew irreconcilable quarrel between herself and the earl.
His hot temper and desire of revenge will not brook delay.  He will
land, unsupported by Margaret and her partisans, and without any fixed
principle of action which can strengthen force by opinion."

"You are right, Richard," said Edward, whose faithless cunning
comprehended the more sagacious policy it could not originate.  "All
be it as you will."

"And in the mean while," added Richard, "watch well, but anger not,
Montagu and the archbishop.  It were dangerous to seem to distrust
them till proof be clear; it were dull to believe them true.  I go at
once to fulfil my task."




CHAPTER VII.

WARWICK AND HIS FAMILY IN EXILE.

We now summon the reader on a longer if less classic journey than from
Thebes to Athens, and waft him on a rapid wing from Shene to Amboise.
We must suppose that the two emissaries of Gloucester have already
arrived at their several destinations,--the lady has reached Isabel,
the envoy Margaret.

In one of the apartments appropriated to the earl in the royal palace,
within the embrasure of a vast Gothic casement, sat Anne of Warwick;
the small wicket in the window was open, and gave a view of a wide and
fair garden, interspersed with thick bosquets and regular alleys, over
which the rich skies of the summer evening, a little before sunset,
cast alternate light and shadow.  Towards this prospect the sweet face
of the Lady Anne was turned musingly.  The riveted eye, the bended
neck, the arms reclining on the knee, the slender fingers interlaced,
--gave to her whole person the character of revery and repose.

In the same chamber were two other ladies; the one was pacing the
floor with slow but uneven steps, with lips moving from time to time,
as if in self-commune, with the brow contracted slightly: her form and
face took also the character of revery, but not of repose.

The third female (the gentle and lovely mother of the other two) was
seated, towards the centre of the room, before a small table, on which
rested one of those religious manuscripts, full of the moralities and
the marvels of cloister sanctity, which made so large a portion of the
literature of the monkish ages.  But her eye rested not on the Gothic
letter and the rich blazon of the holy book.  With all a mother's fear
and all a mother's fondness, it glanced from Isabel to Anne, from Anne
to Isabel, till at length in one of those soft voices, so rarely
heard, which makes even a stranger love the speaker, the fair countess
said,--

"Come hither, my child Isabel; give me thy hand, and whisper me what
hath chafed thee."

"My mother," replied the duchess, "it would become me ill to have a
secret not known to thee, and yet, methinks, it would become me less
to say aught to provoke thine anger!"

"Anger, Isabel!  Who ever knew anger for those they love?"

"Pardon me, my sweet mother," said Isabel, relaxing her haughty brow,
and she approached and kissed her mother's cheek.

The countess drew her gently to a seat by her side.

"And now tell me all,--unless, indeed, thy Clarence hath, in some
lover's hasty mood, vexed thy affection; for of the household secrets
even a mother should not question the true wife."

Isabel paused, and glanced significantly at Anne.

"Nay, see!" said the countess, smiling, though sadly, "she, too, hath
thoughts that she will not tell to me; but they seem not such as
should alarm my fears, as thine do.  For the moment ere I spoke to
thee, thy brow frowned, and her lip smiled.  She hears us not,--speak
on."

"Is it then true, my mother, that Margaret of Anjou is hastening
hither?  And can it be possible that King Louis can persuade my lord
and father to meet, save in the field of battle, the arch-enemy of our
House?"

"Ask the earl thyself, Isabel; Lord Warwick hath no concealment from
his children.  Whatever he doth is ever wisest, best, and
knightliest,--so, at least, may his children always deem!"

Isabel's colour changed and her eye flashed.  But ere she could
answer, the arras was raised, and Lord Warwick entered.  But no longer
did the hero's mien and manner evince that cordial and tender
cheerfulness which, in all the storms of his changeful life, he had
hitherto displayed when coming from power and danger, from council or
from camp, to man's earthly paradise,--a virtuous home.

Gloomy and absorbed, his very dress--which, at that day, the Anglo-
Norman deemed it a sin against self-dignity to neglect--betraying, by
its disorder, that thorough change of the whole mind, that terrible
internal revolution, which is made but in strong natures by the
tyranny of a great care or a great passion, the earl scarcely seemed
to heed his countess, who rose hastily, but stopped in the timid fear
and reverence of love at the sight of his stern aspect; he threw
himself abruptly on a seat, passed his hand over his face, and sighed
heavily.

That sigh dispelled the fear of the wife, and made her alive only to
her privilege of the soother.  She drew near, and placing herself on
the green rushes at his feet, took his hand and kissed it, but did not
speak.

The earl's eyes fell on the lovely face looking up to him through
tears, his brow softened, he drew his hand gently from hers, placed it
on her head, and said in a low voice,--"God and Our Lady bless thee,
sweet wife!"

Then, looking round, he saw Isabel watching him intently; and, rising
at once, he threw his arm round her waist, pressed her to his bosom,
and said, "My daughter, for thee and thine day and night have I
striven and planned in vain.  I cannot reward thy husband as I would;
I cannot give thee, as I had hoped, a throne!"

"What title so dear to Isabel," said the countess, "as that of Lord
Warwick's daughter?"

Isabel remained cold and silent, and returned not the earl's embrace.

Warwick was, happily, too absorbed in his own feelings to notice those
of his child.  Moving away, he continued, as he paced the room (his
habit in emotion, which Isabel, who had many minute external traits in
common with her father, had unconsciously caught from him),--

"Till this morning I hoped still that my name and services, that
Clarence's popular bearing and his birth of Plantagenet, would suffice
to summon the English people round our standard; that the false Edward
would be driven, on our landing, to fly the realm; and that, without
change to the dynasty of York, Clarence, as next male heir, would
ascend the throne.  True, I saw all the obstacles, all the
difficulties,--I was warned of them before I left England; but still I
hoped.  Lord Oxford has arrived, he has just left me.  We have gone
over the chart of the way before us, weighed the worth of every name,
for and against; and, alas! I cannot but allow that all attempt to
place the younger brother on the throne of the elder would but lead to
bootless slaughter and irretrievable defeat."

"Wherefore think you so, my lord?" asked Isabel, in evident
excitement.  "Your own retainers are sixty thousand,--an army larger
than Edward, and all his lords of yesterday, can bring into the
field."

"My child," answered the earl, with that profound knowledge of his
countrymen which he had rather acquired from his English heart than
from any subtlety of intellect, "armies may gain a victory, but they
do not achieve a throne,--unless, at least, they enforce a slavery;
and it is not for me and for Clarence to be the violent conquerors of
our countrymen, but the regenerators of a free realm, corrupted by a
false man's rule."

"And what then," exclaimed Isabel,--"what do you propose, my father?
Can it be possible that you can unite yourself with the abhorred
Lancastrians, with the savage Anjouite, who beheaded my grandsire,
Salisbury?  Well do I remember your own words,--'May God and Saint
George forget me, when I forget those gray and gory hairs!'"

Here Isabel was interrupted by a faint cry from Anne, who, unobserved
by the rest, and hitherto concealed from her father's eye by the deep
embrasure of the window, had risen some moments before, and listened,
with breathless attention, to the conversation between Warwick and the
duchess.

"It is not true, it is not true!" exclaimed Anne, passionately.
"Margaret disowns the inhuman deed."

"Thou art right, Anne," said Warwick; "though I guess not how thou
didst learn the error of a report so popularly believed that till of
late I never questioned its truth.  King Louis assures me solemnly
that that foul act was done by the butcher Clifford, against
Margaret's knowledge, and, when known, to her grief and anger."

"And you, who call Edward false, can believe Louis true?"

"Cease, Isabel, cease!" said the countess.  "Is it thus my child can
address my lord and husband?  Forgive her, beloved Richard."

"Such heat in Clarence's wife misbeseems her not," answered Warwick.
"And I can comprehend and pardon in my haughty Isabel a resentment
which her reason must at last subdue; for think not, Isabel, that it
is without dread struggle and fierce agony that I can contemplate
peace and league with mine ancient foe; but here two duties speak to
me in voices not to be denied: my honour and my hearth, as noble and
as man, demand redress, and the weal and glory of my country demand a
ruler who does not degrade a warrior, nor assail a virgin, nor corrupt
a people by lewd pleasures, nor exhaust a land by grinding imposts;
and that honour shall be vindicated, and that country shall be
righted, no matter at what sacrifice of private grief and pride."

The words and the tone of the earl for a moment awed even Isabel; but
after a pause, she said suddenly, "And for this, then, Clarence hath
joined your quarrel and shared your exile?--for this,--that he may
place the eternal barrier of the Lancastrian line between himself and
the English throne?"

"I would fain hope," answered the earl, calmly, "that Clarence will
view our hard position more charitably than thou.  If he gain not all
that I could desire, should success crown our arms, he will, at least,
gain much; for often and ever did thy husband, Isabel, urge me to
stern measures against Edward, when I soothed him and restrained.
Mort Dieu! how often did he complain of slight and insult from
Elizabeth and her minions, of open affront from Edward, of parsimony
to his wants as prince,--of a life, in short, humbled and made bitter
by all the indignity and the gall which scornful power can inflict on
dependent pride.  If he gain not the throne, he will gain, at least,
the succession in thy right to the baronies of Beauchamp, the mighty
duchy, and the vast heritage of York, the vice-royalty of Ireland.
Never prince of the blood had wealth and honours equal to those that
shall await thy lord.  For the rest, I drew him not into my quarrel;
long before would he have drawn me into his; nor doth it become thee,
Isabel, as child and as sister, to repent, if the husband of my
daughter felt as brave men feel, without calculation of gain and
profit, the insult offered to his lady's House.  But if here I
overgauge his chivalry and love to me and mine, or discontent his
ambition and his hopes, Mort Dieu! we hold him not a captive.  Edward
will hail his overtures of peace; let him make terms with his brother,
and return."

"I will report to him what you say, my lord," said Isabel, with cold
brevity and, bending her haughty head in formal reverence, she
advanced to the door.  Anne sprang forward and caught her hand.

"Oh, Isabel!" she whispered, "in our father's sad and gloomy hour can
you leave him thus?" and the sweet lady burst into tears.

"Anne," retorted Isabel, bitterly, "thy heart is Lancastrian; and
what, peradventure, grieves my father hath but joy for thee."

Anne drew back, pale and trembling, and her sister swept from the
room.

The earl, though he had not overheard the whispered sentences which
passed between his daughters, had watched them closely, and his lip
quivered with emotion as Isabel closed the door.

"Come hither, my Anne," he said tenderly; "thou who hast thy mother's
face, never hast a harsh thought for thy father."

As Anne threw herself on Warwick's breast, he continued, "And how
camest thou to learn that Margaret disowns a deed that, if done by her
command, would render my union with her cause a sacrilegious impiety
to the dead?"

Anne coloured, and nestled her head still closer to her father's
bosom.  Her mother regarded her confusion and her silence with an
anxious eye.

The wing of the palace in which the earl's apartments were situated
was appropriated to himself and household, flanked to the left by an
abutting pile containing state-chambers, never used by the austere and
thrifty Louis, save on great occasions of pomp or revel; and, as we
have before observed, looking on a garden, which was generally
solitary and deserted.  From this garden, while Anne yet strove for
words to answer her father, and the countess yet watched her
embarrassment, suddenly came the soft strain of a Provencal lute;
while a low voice, rich, and modulated at once by a deep feeling and
an exquisite art that would have given effect to even simpler words,
breathed--

    THE LAY OF THE HEIR OF LANCASTER

    "His birthright but a father's name,
       A grandsire's hero-sword,
     He dwelt within the stranger's land,
       The friendless, homeless lord!"

    "Yet one dear hope, too dear to tell,
       Consoled the exiled man;
     The angels have their home in heaven
       And gentle thoughts in Anne."

At that name the voice of the singer trembled, and paused a moment;
the earl, who at first had scarcely listened to what he deemed but the
ill-seasoned gallantry of one of the royal minstrels, started in proud
surprise, and Anne herself, tightening her clasp round her father's
neck, burst into passionate sobs.  The eye of the countess met that of
her lord; but she put her finger to her lips in sign to him to listen.
The song was resumed--

    "Recall the single sunny time,
       In childhood's April weather,
     When he and thou, the boy and girl,
       Roved hand in band together."

    "When round thy young companion knelt
       The princes of the isle;
     And priest and people prayed their God,
       On England's heir to smile."

The earl uttered a half-stifled exclamation, but the minstrel heard
not the interruption, and continued,--

    "Methinks the sun hath never smiled
       Upon the exiled man,
     Like that bright morning when the boy
       Told all his soul to Anne."

    "No; while his birthright but a name,
       A grandsire's hero--sword,
     He would not woo the lofty maid
       To love the banished lord."

    "But when, with clarion, fife, and drum,
       He claims and wins his own;
     When o'er the deluge drifts his ark,
       To rest upon a throne."

    "Then, wilt thou deign to hear the hope
       That blessed the exiled man,
     When pining for his father's crown
       To deck the brows of Anne?"

The song ceased, and there was silence within the chamber, broken but
by Anne's low yet passionate weeping.  The earl gently strove to
disengage her arms from his neck; but she, mistaking his intention,
sank on her knees, and covering her face with her hands, exclaimed,--

"Pardon! pardon! pardon him, if not me!"

"What have I to pardon?  What hast thou concealed from me?  Can I
think that thou hast met, in secret, one who--"

"In secret!  Never, never, Father!  This is the third time only that I
have heard his voice since we have been at Amboise, save when--save
when--"

"Go on."

"Save when King Louis presented him to me in the revel under the name
of the Count de F----, and he asked me if I could forgive his mother
for Lord Clifford's crime."

"It is, then, as the rhyme proclaimed; and it is Edward of Lancaster
who loves and woos the daughter of Lord Warwick!"

Something in her father's voice made Anne remove her hands from her
face, and look up to him with a thrill of timid joy.  Upon his brow,
indeed, frowned no anger, upon his lip smiled no scorn.  At that
moment all his haughty grief at the curse of circumstance which drove
him to his hereditary foe had vanished.  Though Montagu had obtained
from Oxford some glimpse of the desire which the more sagacious and
temperate Lancastrians already entertained for that alliance, and
though Louis had already hinted its expediency to the earl, yet, till
now, Warwick himself had naturally conceived that the prince shared
the enmity of his mother, and that such a union, however politic, was
impossible; but now indeed there burst upon him the full triumph of
revenge and pride.  Edward of York dared to woo Anne to dishonour,
Edward of Lancaster dared not even woo her as his wife till his crown
was won!  To place upon the throne the very daughter the ungrateful
monarch had insulted; to make her he would have humbled not only the
instrument of his fall, but the successor of his purple; to unite in
one glorious strife the wrongs of the man and the pride of the
father,--these were the thoughts that sparkled in the eye of the king-
maker, and flushed with a fierce rapture the dark cheek, already
hollowed by passion and care.  He raised his daughter from the floor,
and placed her in her mother's arms, but still spoke not.

"This, then, was thy secret, Anne," whispered the countess; "and I
half foreguessed it, when, last night, I knelt beside thy couch to
pray, and overheard thee murmur in thy dreams."

"Sweet mother, thou forgivest me; but my father--ah, he speaks not.
One word!  Father, Father, not even his love could console me if I
angered thee!"

The earl, who had remained rooted to the spot, his eyes shining
thoughtfully under his dark brows, and his hand slightly raised, as if
piercing into the future, and mapping out its airy realm, turned
quickly,--

"I go to the heir of Lancaster; if this boy be bold and true, worthy
of England and of thee, we will change the sad ditty of that scrannel
lute into such a storm of trumpets as beseems the triumph of a
conqueror and the marriage of a prince!"




CHAPTER VIII.

HOW THE HEIR OF LANCASTER MEETS THE KING-MAKER.

In truth, the young prince, in obedience to a secret message from the
artful Louis, had repaired to the court of Amboise under the name of
the Count de F----.  The French king had long before made himself
acquainted with Prince Edward's romantic attachment to the earl's
daughter, through the agent employed by Edward to transmit his
portrait to Anne at Rouen; and from him, probably, came to Oxford the
suggestion which that nobleman had hazarded to Montagu; and now that
it became his policy seriously and earnestly to espouse the cause of
his kinswoman Margaret, he saw all the advantage to his cold
statecraft which could be drawn from a boyish love.  Louis had a well-
founded fear of the warlike spirit and military talents of Edward IV.;
and this fear had induced him hitherto to refrain from openly
espousing the cause of the Lancastrians, though it did not prevent his
abetting such seditions and intrigues as could confine the attention
of the martial Plantagenet to the perils of his own realm.  But now
that the breach between Warwick and the king had taken place; now that
the earl could no longer curb the desire of the Yorkist monarch to
advance his hereditary claims to the fairest provinces of France,--
nay, peradventure, to France itself,--while the defection of Lord
Warwick gave to the Lancastrians the first fair hope of success in
urging their own pretensions to the English throne, he bent all the
powers of his intellect and his will towards the restoration of a
natural ally and the downfall of a dangerous foe.  But he knew that
Margaret and her Lancastrian favourers could not of themselves suffice
to achieve a revolution,--that they could only succeed under cover of
the popularity and the power of Warwick, while he perceived all the
art it would require to make Margaret forego her vindictive nature and
long resentment, and to supple the pride of the great earl into
recognizing as a sovereign the woman who had branded him as a traitor.

Long before Lord Oxford's arrival, Louis, with all that address which
belonged to him, had gradually prepared the earl to familiarize
himself to the only alternative before him, save that, indeed, of
powerless sense of wrong and obscure and lasting exile.  The French
king looked with more uneasiness to the scruples of Margaret; and to
remove these, he trusted less to his own skill than to her love for
her only son.

His youth passed principally in Anjou--that court of minstrels--young
Edward's gallant and ardent temper had become deeply imbued with the
southern poetry and romance.  Perhaps the very feud between his House
and Lord Warwick's, though both claimed their common descent from John
of Gaunt, had tended, by the contradictions in the human heart, to
endear to him the recollection of the gentle Anne.  He obeyed with joy
the summons of Louis, repaired to the court, was presented to Anne as
the Count de F----, found himself recognized at the first glance (for
his portrait still lay upon her heart, as his remembrance in its
core), and, twice before the song we have recited, had ventured,
agreeably to the sweet customs of Anjou, to address the lady of his
love under the shade of the starlit summer copses.  But on this last
occasion, he had departed from his former discretion; hitherto he had
selected an hour of deeper night, and ventured but beneath the lattice
of the maiden's chamber when the rest of the palace was hushed in
sleep.  And the fearless declaration of his rank and love now hazarded
was prompted by one who contrived to turn to grave uses the wildest
whim of the minstrel, the most romantic enthusiasm of youth.

Louis had just learned from Oxford the result of his interview with
Warwick.  And about the same time the French king had received a
letter from Margaret, announcing her departure from the castle of
Verdun for Tours, where she prayed him to meet her forthwith, and
stating that she had received from England tidings that might change
all her schemes, and more than ever forbid the possibility of a
reconciliation with the Earl of Warwick.

The king perceived the necessity of calling into immediate effect the
aid on which he had relied, in the presence and passion of the young
prince.  He sought him at once; he found him in a remote part of the
gardens, and overheard him breathing to himself the lay he had just
composed.

"Pasque Dieu!" said the king, laying his hand on the young man's
shoulder, "if thou wilt but repeat that song where and when I bid
thee, I promise that before the month ends Lord Warwick shall pledge
thee his daughter's hand; and before the year is closed thou shalt sit
beside Lord Warwick's daughter in the halls of Westminster."

And the royal troubadour took the counsel of the king.

The song had ceased; the minstrel emerged from the bosquets, and stood
upon the sward, as, from the postern of the palace, walked with a slow
step, a form from which it became him not, as prince or as lover, in
peace or in war, to shrink.  The first stars had now risen; the light,
though serene, was pale and dim.  The two men--the one advancing, the
other motionless--gazed on each other in grave silence.  As Count de
F----, amidst the young nobles in the king's train, the earl had
scarcely noticed the heir of England.  He viewed him now with a
different eye: in secret complacency, for, with a soldier's weakness,
the soldier-baron valued men too much for their outward seeming, he
surveyed a figure already masculine and stalwart, though still in the
graceful symmetry of fair eighteen.

"A youth of a goodly presence," muttered the earl, "with the dignity
that commands in peace, and the sinews that can strive against
hardship and death in war."

He approached, and said calmly: "Sir minstrel, he who woos either fame
or beauty may love the lute, but should wield the sword.  At least, so
methinks had the Fifth Henry said to him who boasts for his heritage
the sword of Agincourt."

"O noble earl!" exclaimed the prince, touched by words far gentler
than he had dared to hope, despite his bold and steadfast mien, and
giving way to frank and graceful emotion, "O noble earl! since thou
knowest me; since my secret is told; since, in that secret, I have
proclaimed a hope as dear to me as a crown and dearer far than life,
can I hope that thy rebuke but veils thy favour, and that, under Lord
Warwick's eye, the grandson of Henry V. shall approve himself worthy
of the blood that kindles in his veins?"

"Fair sir and prince," returned the earl, whose hardy and generous
nature the emotion and fire of Edward warmed and charmed, "there are,
alas! deep memories of blood and wrong--the sad deeds and wrathful
words of party feud and civil war--between thy royal mother and
myself; and though we may unite now against a common foe, much I fear
that the Lady Margaret would brook ill a closer friendship, a nearer
tie, than the exigency of the hour between Richard Nevile and her
son."

"No, Sir Earl, let me hope you misthink her.  Hot and impetuous, but
not mean and treacherous, the moment that she accepts the service of
thine arm she must forget that thou hast been her foe; and if I, as my
father's heir, return to England, it is in the trust that a new era
will commence.  Free from the passionate enmities of either faction,
Yorkist and Lancastrian are but Englishmen to me.  Justice to all who
serve us, pardon for all who have opposed."

The prince paused, and, even in the dim light, his kingly aspect gave
effect to his kingly words.  "And if this resolve be such as you
approve; if you, great earl, be that which even your foes proclaim, a
man whose power depends less on lands and vassals--broad though the
one, and numerous though the other--than on well-known love for
England, her glory and her peace, it rests with you to bury forever in
one grave the feuds of Lancaster and York!  What Yorkist who hath
fought at Towton or St. Albans under Lord Warwick's standard, will
lift sword against the husband of Lord Warwick's daughter?  What
Lancastrian will not forgive a Yorkist, when Lord Warwick, the kinsman
of Duke Richard, becomes father to the Lancastrian heir, and bulwark
to the Lancastrian throne?  O Warwick, if not for my sake, nor for the
sake of full redress against the ingrate whom thou repentest to have
placed on my father's throne, at least for the sake of England, for
the healing of her bleeding wounds, for the union of her divided
people, hear the grandson of Henry V., who sues to thee for thy
daughter's hand!"

The royal wooer bent his knee as he spoke.  The mighty subject saw and
prevented the impulse of the prince who had forgotten himself in the
lover; the hand which he caught he lifted to his lips, and the next
moment, in manly and soldierlike embrace, the prince's young arm was
thrown over the broad shoulder of the king-maker.




CHAPTER IX.

THE INTERVIEW OF EARL WARWICK AND QUEEN MARGARET.

Louis hastened to meet Margaret at Tours; thither came also her father
Rene, her brother John of Calabria, Yolante her sister, and the Count
of Vaudemonte.  The meeting between the queen and Rene was so touching
as to have drawn tears to the hard eyes of Louis XI.; but, that
emotion over, Margaret evinced how little affliction had humbled her
high spirit, or softened her angry passions: she interrupted Louis in
every argument for reconciliation with Warwick.  "Not with honour to
myself and to my son," she exclaimed, "can I pardon that cruel earl,
the main cause of King Henry's downfall! in vain patch up a hollow
peace between us,--a peace of form and parchment!  My spirit never can
be contented with him, ne pardon!"

For several days she maintained a language which betrayed the chief
cause of her own impolitic passions, that had lost her crown.  Showing
to Louis the letter despatched to her, proffering the hand of the Lady
Elizabeth to her son, she asked if that were not a more profitable
party [See, for this curious passage of secret history, Sir H. Ellis's
"Original Letters from the Harleian Manuscripts," second series, vol.
i., letter 42.], and if it were necessary that she should forgive,--
whether it were not more queenly to treat with Edward than with a
twofold rebel?

In fact, the queen would perhaps have fallen into Gloucester's artful
snare, despite all the arguments and even the half-menaces [Louis
would have thrown over Margaret's cause if Warwick had demanded it; he
instructed MM. de Concressault and du Plessis to assure the earl that
he would aid him to the utmost to reconquer England either for the
Queen Margaret or for any one else he chose (on pour qui il voudra):
for that he loved the earl better than Margaret or her son.--BRANTE,
t. ix. 276.] of the more penetrating Louis, but for a counteracting
influence which Richard had not reckoned upon.  Prince Edward, who had
lingered behind Louis, arrived from Amboise, and his persuasions did
more than all the representations of the crafty king.  The queen loved
her son with that intenseness which characterizes the one soft
affection of violent natures.  Never had she yet opposed his most
childish whim, and now he spoke with the eloquence of one who put his
heart and his life's life into his words.  At last, reluctantly, she
consented to an interview with Warwick.  The earl, accompanied by
Oxford, arrived at Tours, and the two nobles were led into the
presence of Margaret by King Louis.

The reader will picture to himself a room darkened by thick curtains
drawn across the casement, for the proud woman wished not the earl to
detect on her face either the ravages of years or the emotions of
offended pride.  In a throne chair, placed on the dais, sat the
motionless queen, her hands clasping, convulsively, the arms of the
fauteuil, her features pale and rigid; and behind the chair leaned the
graceful figure of her son.  The person of the Lancastrian prince was
little less remarkable than that of his hostile namesake, but its
character was distinctly different.  ["According to some of the French
chroniclers, the Prince of Wales, who was one of the handsomest and
most accomplished princes in Europe, was very desirous of becoming the
husband of Anne Nevile," etc.--Miss STRICKLAND: Life of Margaret of
Anjou.]  Spare, like Henry V., almost to the manly defect of leanness,
his proportions were slight to those which gave such portly majesty to
the vast-chested Edward, but they evinced the promise of almost equal
strength,--the muscles hardened to iron by early exercise in arms, the
sap of youth never wasted by riot and debauch.  His short purple
manteline, trimmed with ermine, was embroidered with his grandfather's
favourite device, "the silver swan;" he wore on his breast the badge
of St. George; and the single ostrich plume, which made his cognizance
as Prince of Wales, waved over a fair and ample forehead, on which
were even then traced the lines of musing thought and high design; his
chestnut hair curled close to his noble head; his eye shone dark and
brilliant beneath the deep-set brow, which gives to the human
countenance such expression of energy and intellect,--all about him,
in aspect and mien, seemed to betoken a mind riper than his years, a
masculine simplicity of taste and bearing, the earnest and grave
temperament mostly allied in youth to pure and elevated desires, to an
honourable and chivalric soul.

Below the dais stood some of the tried and gallant gentlemen who had
braved exile, and tasted penury in their devotion to the House of
Lancaster, and who had now flocked once more round their queen, in the
hope of better days.  There were the Dukes of Exeter and Somerset,
their very garments soiled and threadbare,--many a day had those great
lords hungered for the beggar's crust!  [Philip de Comines says he
himself had seen the Dukes of Exeter and Somerset in the Low Countries
in as wretched a plight as common beggars.]  There stood Sir John
Fortescue, the patriarch authority of our laws, who had composed his
famous treatise for the benefit of the young prince, overfond of
exercise with lance and brand, and the recreation of knightly song.
There were Jasper of Pembroke, and Sir Henry Rous, and the Earl of
Devon, and the Knight of Lytton, whose House had followed, from sire
to son, the fortunes of the Lancastrian Rose; [Sir Robert de Lytton
(whose grandfather had been Comptroller to the Household of Henry IV.,
and Agister of the Forests allotted to Queen Joan), was one of the
most powerful knights of the time; and afterwards, according to Perkin
Warbeck, one of the ministers most trusted by Henry VII.  He was lord
of Lytton, in Derbyshire (where his ancestors had been settled since
the Conquest), of Knebworth in Herts (the ancient seat and manor of
Plantagenet de Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk and Earl Marshal), of
Myndelesden and Langley, of Standyarn, Dene, and Brekesborne, in
Northamptonshire, and became in the reign of Henry VII. Privy
Councillor, Uuder-Treasurer, and Keeper of the great Wardrobe.] and,
contrasting the sober garments of the exiles, shone the jewels and
cloth-of-gold that decked the persons of the more prosperous
foreigners, Ferri, Count of Vaudemonte, Margaret's brother, the Duke
of Calabria, and the powerful form of Sir Pierre de Breze, who had
accompanied Margaret in her last disastrous campaigns, with all the
devotion of a chevalier for the lofty lady adored in secret.  [See,
for the chivalrous devotion of this knight (Seneschal of Normandy) to
Margaret, Miss Strickland's Life of that queen.]

When the door opened, and gave to the eyes of those proud exiles the
form of their puissant enemy, they with difficulty suppressed the
murmur of their resentment, and their looks turned with sympathy and
grief to the hueless face of their queen.

The earl himself was troubled; his step was less firm, his crest less
haughty, his eye less serenely steadfast.

But beside him, in a dress more homely than that of the poorest exile
there, and in garb and in aspect, as he lives forever in the
portraiture of Victor Hugo and our own yet greater Scott, moved Louis,
popularly called "The Fell."

"Madame and cousin," said the king, "we present to you the man for
whose haute courage and dread fame we have such love and respect, that
we value him as much as any king, and would do as much for him as for
man living [Ellis: Original Letters, vol. i., letter 42, second
series]; and with my lord of Warwick, see also this noble earl of
Oxford, who, though he may have sided awhile with the enemies of your
Highness, comes now to pray your pardon, and to lay at your feet his
sword."

Lord Oxford (who had ever unwillingly acquiesced in the Yorkist
dynasty), more prompt than Warwick, here threw himself on his knees
before Margaret, and his tears fell on her hand, as he murmured
"Pardon."

"Rise, Sir John de Vere," said the queen, glancing with a flashing eye
from Oxford to Lord Warwick.  "Your pardon is right easy to purchase,
for well I know that you yielded but to the time,--you did not turn
the time against us; you and yours have suffered much for King Henry's
cause.  Rise, Sir Earl."

"And," said a voice, so deep and so solemn, that it hushed the very
breath of those who heard it,--"and has Margaret a pardon also for the
man who did more than all others to dethrone King Henry, and can do
more than all to restore his crown?"

"Ha!" cried' Margaret, rising in her passion, and casting from her the
hand her son had placed upon her shoulder, "ha!  Ownest thou thy
wrongs, proud lord?  Comest thou at last to kneel at Queen Margaret's
feet?  Look round and behold her court,--some half-score brave and
unhappy gentlemen, driven from their hearths and homes, their heritage
the prey of knaves and varlets, their sovereign in a prison, their
sovereign's wife, their sovereign's son, persecuted and hunted from
the soil!  And comest thou now to the forlorn majesty of sorrow to
boast, 'Such deeds were mine?'"

"Mother and lady," began the prince

"Madden me not, my son.  Forgiveness is for the prosperous, not for
adversity and woe."

"Hear me," said the earl,--who, having once bowed his pride to the
interview, had steeled himself against the passion which, in his
heart, he somewhat despised as a mere woman's burst of inconsiderate
fury,--"for I have this right to be heard,--that not one of these
knights, your lealest and noblest friends, can say of me that I ever
stooped to gloss mine acts, or palliate bold deeds with wily words.
Dear to me as comrade in arms, sacred to me as a father's head, was
Richard of York, mine uncle by marriage with Lord Salisbury's sister.
I speak not now of his claims by descent (for those even King Henry
could not deny), but I maintain them, even in your Grace's presence,
to be such as vindicate, from disloyalty and treason, me and the many
true and gallant men who upheld them through danger, by field and
scaffold.  Error, it might be,--but the error of men who believed
themselves the defenders of a just cause.  Nor did I, Queen Margaret,
lend myself wholly to my kinsman's quarrel, nor share one scheme that
went to the dethronement of King Henry, until--pardon, if I speak
bluntly; it is my wont, and would be more so now, but for thy fair
face and woman's form, which awe me more than if confronting the frown
of Coeur de Lion, or the First Great Edward--pardon me, I say, if I
speak bluntly, and aver that I was not King Henry's foe until false
counsellors had planned my destruction, in body and goods, land and
life.  In the midst of peace, at Coventry, my father and myself
scarcely escaped the knife of the murderer.  [See Hall (236), who says
that Margaret had laid a snare for Salisbury and Warwick at Warwick,
and "if they had not suddenly departed, their life's thread had been
broken."]  In the streets of London the very menials and hangmen
employed in the service of your Highness beset me unarmed [Hall,
Fabyan]; a little time after and my name was attainted by an illegal
Parliament.  [Parl. Rolls, 370; W. Wyr. 478.]  And not till after
these things did Richard Duke of York ride to the hall of Westminster,
and lay his hand upon the throne; nor till after these things did I
and my father Salisbury say to each other, 'The time has come when
neither peace nor honour can be found for us under King Henry's
reign.'  Blame me if you will, Queen Margaret; reject me if you need
not my sword; but that which I did in the gone days was such as no
nobleman so outraged and despaired [Warwick's phrase.  See Sir H.
Ellis's "Original Letters," vol. i., second series.] would have
forborne to do,--remembering that England is not the heritage of the
king alone, but that safety and honour, and freedom and justice, are
the rights of his Norman gentlemen and his Saxon people.  And rights
are a mockery and a laughter if they do not justify resistance,
whensoever, and by whomsoever, they are invaded and assailed."

It had been with a violent effort that Margaret had refrained from
interrupting this address, which had, however, produced no
inconsiderable effect upon the knightly listeners around the dais.
And now, as the earl ceased, her indignation was arrested by dismay on
seeing the young prince suddenly leave his post and advance to the
side of Warwick.

"Right well hast thou spoken, noble earl and cousin,--right well,
though right plainly.  And I," added the prince, "saving the presence
of my queen and mother,--I, the representative of my sovereign father,
in his name will pledge thee a king's oblivion and pardon for the
past, if thou on thy side acquit my princely mother of all privity to
the snares against thy life and honour of which thou hast spoken, and
give thy knightly word to be henceforth leal to Lancaster.  Perish all
memories of the past that can make walls between the souls of brave
men."

Till this moment, his arms folded in his gown, his thin, fox-like face
bent to the ground, Louis had listened, silent and undisturbed.  He
now deemed it the moment to second the appeal of the prince.  Passing
his hand hypocritically over his tearless eyes, the king turned to
Margaret and said,--

"Joyful hour! happy union!  May Madame La Vierge and Monseigneur Saint
Martin sanctify and hallow the bond by which alone my beloved
kinswoman can regain her rights and roiaulme.  Amen."

Unheeding this pious ejaculation, her bosom heaving, her eyes
wandering from the earl to Edward, Margaret at last gave vent to her
passion.

"And is it come to this, Prince Edward of Wales, that thy mother's
wrongs are not thine?  Standest thou side by side with my mortal foe,
who, instead of repenting treason, dares but to complain of injury?
Am I fallen so low that my voice to pardon or disdain is counted but
as a sough of idle air!  God of my fathers, hear me!  Willingly from
my heart I tear the last thought and care for the pomps of earth.
Hateful to me a crown for which the wearer must cringe to enemy and
rebel!  Away, Earl Warwick!  Monstrous and unnatural seems it to the
wife of captive Henry to see thee by the side of Henry's son!"

Every eye turned in fear to the aspect of the earl, every ear listened
for the answer which might be expected from his well-known heat and
pride,--an answer to destroy forever the last hope of the Lancastrian
line.  But whether it was the very consciousness of his power to raise
or to crush that fiery speaker, or those feelings natural to brave
men, half of chivalry, half contempt, which kept down the natural
anger by thoughts of the sex and sorrows of the Anjouite, or that the
wonted irascibility of his temper had melted into one steady and
profound passion of revenge against Edward of York, which absorbed all
lesser and more trivial causes of resentment,--the earl's face, though
pale as the dead, was unmoved and calm, and, with a grave and
melancholy smile, he answered,--

"More do I respect thee, O queen, for the hot words which show a truth
rarely heard from royal lips than hadst thou deigned to dissimulate
the forgiveness and kindly charity which sharp remembrance permits
thee not to feel!  No, princely Margaret, not yet can there be frank
amity between thee and me!  Nor do I boast the affection yon gallant
gentlemen have displayed.  Frankly, as thou hast spoken, do I say,
that the wrongs I have suffered from another alone move me to
allegiance to thyself!  Let others serve thee for love of Henry;
reject not my service, given but for revenge on Edward,--as much,
henceforth, am I his foe as formerly his friend and maker!  [Sir H.
Ellis: Original Letters, vol. i., second series.]  And if, hereafter,
on the throne, thou shouldst remember and resent the former wars, at
least thou hast owed me no gratitude, and thou canst not grieve my
heart and seethe my brain, as the man whom I once loved better than a
son!  Thus, from thy presence I depart, chafing not at thy scornful
wrath; mindful, young prince, but of thy just and gentle heart, and
sure, in the calm of my own soul (on which this much, at least, of our
destiny is reflected as on a glass), that when, high lady, thy colder
sense returns to thee, thou wilt see that the league between us must
be made!--that thine ire as woman must fade before thy duties as a
another, thy affection as a wife, and thy paramount and solemn
obligations to the people thou hast ruled as queen!  In the dead of
night thou shalt hear the voice of Henry in his prison asking Margaret
to set him free; the vision of thy son shall rise before thee in his
bloom and promise, to demand why his mother deprives him of a crown;
and crowds of pale peasants, grinded beneath tyrannous exaction, and
despairing fathers mourning for dishonoured children, shall ask the
Christian queen if God will sanction the unreasoning wrath which
rejects the only instrument that can redress her people."

This said, the earl bowed his head and turned; but, at the first sign
of his departure, there was a general movement among the noble
bystanders.  Impressed by the dignity of his bearing, by the greatness
of his power, and by the unquestionable truth that in rejecting him
Margaret cast away the heritage of her son, the exiles, with a common
impulse, threw themselves at the queen's feet, and exclaimed, almost
in the same words,--

"Grace! noble queen!--Grace for the great Lord Warwick!"

"My sister," whispered John of Calabria, "thou art thy son's ruin if
the earl depart!"

"Pasque Dieu!  Vex not my kinswoman,--if she prefer a convent to a
throne, cross not the holy choice!" said the wily Louis, with a
mocking irony on his pinched lips.

The prince alone spoke not, but stood proudly on the same spot, gazing
on the earl, as he slowly moved to the door.

"Oh, Edward! Edward, my son!" exclaimed the unhappy Margaret, "if for
thy sake--for thine--I must make the past a blank, speak thou for me!"

"I have spoken," said the prince, gently, "and thou didst chide me,
noble mother; yet I spoke, methinks, as Henry V. had done, if of a
mighty enemy he had had the power to make a noble friend."

A short, convulsive sob was heard from the throne chair; and as
suddenly as it burst, it ceased.  Queen Margaret rose, not a trace of
that stormy emotion upon the grand and marble beauty of her face.  Her
voice, unnaturally calm, arrested the steps of the departing earl.

"Lord Warwick, defend this boy, restore his rights, release his
sainted father, and for years of anguish and of exile, Margaret of
Anjou forgives the champion of her son!"

In an instant Prince Edward was again by the earl's side; a moment
more, and the earl's proud knee bent in homage to the queen, joyful
tears were in the eyes of her friends and kindred, a triumphant smile
on the lips of Louis, and Margaret's face, terrible in its stony and
locked repose, was raised above, as if asking the All-Merciful pardon
--for the pardon which the human sinner had bestowed!  [Ellis: Original
Letters from the Harleian Manuscripts, letter 42.]




CHAPTER X.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE--DOUBTS OF CONSCIENCE--DOMESTIC JEALOUSY--AND
HOUSEHOLD TREASON.

The events that followed this tempestuous interview were such as the
position of the parties necessarily compelled.  The craft of Louis,
the energy and love of Prince Edward, the representations of all her
kindred and friends, conquered, though not without repeated struggles,
Margaret's repugnance to a nearer union between Warwick and her son.
The earl did not deign to appear personally in this matter.  He left
it, as became him, to Louis and the prince, and finally received from
them the proposals, which ratified the league, and consummated the
schemes of his revenge.

Upon the Very Cross [Miss Strickland observes upon this interview: "It
does not appear that Warwick mentioned the execution of his father,
the Earl of Salisbury, which is almost a confirmation of the
statements of those historians who deny that he was beheaded by
Margaret."] in St. Mary's Church of Angers, Lord Warwick swore without
change to hold the party of King Henry.  Before the same sacred
symbol, King Louis and his brother, Duke of Guienne, robed in canvas,
swore to sustain to their utmost the Earl of Warwick in behalf of King
Henry; and Margaret recorded her oath "to treat the earl as true and
faithful, and never for deeds past to make him any reproach."

Then were signed the articles of marriage between Prince Edward and
the Lady Anne,--the latter to remain with Margaret, but the marriage
not to be consummated "till Lord Warwick had entered England and
regained the realm, or most part, for King Henry,"--a condition which
pleased the earl, who desired to award his beloved daughter no less a
dowry than a crown.

An article far more important than all to the safety of the earl and
to the permanent success of the enterprise, was one that virtually
took from the fierce and unpopular Margaret the reins of government,
by constituting Prince Edward (whose qualities endeared him more and
more to Warwick, and were such as promised to command the respect and
love of the people) sole regent of all the realm, upon attaining his
majority.  For the Duke of Clarence were reserved all the lands and
dignities of the duchy of York, the right to the succession of the
throne to him and his posterity,--failing male heirs to the Prince of
Wales,--with a private pledge of the viceroyalty of Ireland.

Margaret had attached to her consent one condition highly obnoxious to
her high-spirited son, and to which he was only reconciled by the
arguments of Warwick: she stipulated that he should not accompany the
earl to England, nor appear there till his father was proclaimed king.
In this, no doubt, she was guided by maternal fears, and by some
undeclared suspicion, either of the good faith of Warwick, or of his
means to raise a sufficient army to fulfil his promise.  The brave
prince wished to be himself foremost in the battles fought in his
right and for his cause.  But the earl contended, to the surprise and
joy of Margaret, that it best behooved the prince's interests to enter
England without one enemy in the field, leaving others to clear his
path, free himself from all the personal hate of hostile factions, and
without a drop of blood upon the sword of one heralded and announced
as the peace-maker and impartial reconciles of all feuds.  So then
(these high conditions settled), in the presence of the Kings Rene and
Louis, of the Earl and Countess of Warwick, and in solemn state, at
Amboise, Edward of Lancaster plighted his marriage-troth to his
beloved and loving Anne.

It was deep night, and high revel in the Palace of Amboise crowned the
ceremonies of that memorable day.  The Earl of Warwick stood alone in
the same chamber in which he had first discovered the secret of the
young Lancastrian.  From the brilliant company, assembled in the halls
of state, he had stolen unperceived away, for his great heart was full
to overflowing.  The part he had played for many days was over, and
with it the excitement and the fever.  His schemes were crowned,--the
Lancastrians were won to his revenge; the king's heir was the
betrothed of his favourite child; and the hour was visible in the
distance, when, by the retribution most to be desired, the father's
hand should lead that child to the throne of him who would have
degraded her to the dust. If victory awaited his sanguine hopes, as
father to his future queen, the dignity and power of the earl became
greater in the court of Lancaster than, even in his palmiest day,
amidst the minions of ungrateful York; the sire of two lines,--if
Anne's posterity should fail, the crown would pass to the sons of
Isabel,--in either case from him (if successful in his invasion) would
descend the royalty of England.  Ambition, pride, revenge, might well
exult in viewing the future, as mortal wisdom could discern it.  The
House of Nevile never seemed brightened by a more glorious star: and
yet the earl was heavy and sad at heart.  However he had concealed it
from the eyes of others, the haughty ire of Margaret must have galled
him in his deepest soul.  And even as he had that day contemplated the
holy happiness in the face of Anne, a sharp pang had shot through his
breast. Were those the witnesses of fair-omened spousailles?  How
different from the hearty greeting of his warrior-friends was the
measured courtesy of foes who had felt and fled before his sword!  If
aught chanced to him in the hazard of the field, what thought for his
child ever could speak in pity from the hard and scornful eyes of the
imperious Anjouite?

The mist which till then had clouded his mind, or left visible to his
gaze but one stern idea of retribution, melted into air.  He beheld
the fearful crisis to which his life had passed,--he had reached the
eminence to mourn the happy gardens left behind.  Gone, forever gone,
the old endearing friendships, the sweet and manly remembrances of
brave companionship and early love!  Who among those who had
confronted war by his side for the House of York would hasten to clasp
his hand and hail his coming as the captain of hated Lancaster?  True,
could he bow his honour to proclaim the true cause of his desertion,
the heart of every father would beat in sympathy with his; but less
than ever could the tale that vindicated his name be told.  How stoop
to invoke malignant pity to the insult offered to a future queen?
Dark in his grave must rest the secret no words could syllable, save
by such vague and mysterious hint and comment as pass from baseless
gossip into dubious history.  [Hall well explains the mystery which
wrapped the king's insult to a female of the House of Warwick by the
simple sentence, "The certainty was not, for both their honours,
openly known!"]  True, that in his change of party he was not, like
Julian of Spain, an apostate to his native land.  He did not meditate
the subversion of his country by the foreign foe; it was but the
substitution of one English monarch for another,--a virtuous prince
for a false and a sanguinary king.  True, that the change from rose to
rose had been so common amongst the greatest and the bravest, that
even the most rigid could scarcely censure what the age itself had
sanctioned.  But what other man of his stormy day had been so
conspicuous in the downfall of those he was now as conspicuously to
raise?  What other man had Richard of York taken so dearly to his
heart, to what other man had the august father said, "Protect my
sons"?  Before him seemed literally to rise the phantom of that
honoured prince, and with clay-cold lips to ask, "Art thou, of all the
world, the doomsman of my first-born?"  A groan escaped the breast of
the self-tormentor; he fell on his knees and prayed: "Oh, pardon, thou
All-seeing!--plead for me, Divine Mother! if in this I have darkly
erred, taking my heart for my conscience, and mindful only of a
selfish wrong!  Oh, surely, no!  Had Richard of York himself lived to
know what I have suffered from his unworthy son,--causeless insult,
broken faith, public and unabashed dishonour; yea, pardoning, serving,
loving on through all, till, at the last, nothing less than the
foulest taint that can light upon 'scutcheon and name was the cold,
premeditated reward for untired devotion,--surely, surely, Richard
himself had said, 'Thy honour at last forbids all pardon!'"

Then, in that rapidity with which the human heart, once seizing upon
self-excuse, reviews, one after one, the fair apologies, the earl
passed from the injury to himself to the mal-government of his land,
and muttered over the thousand instances of cruelty and misrule which
rose to his remembrance,--forgetting, alas, or steeling himself to the
memory, that till Edward's vices had assailed his own hearth and
honour, he had been contented with lamenting them, he had not ventured
to chastise.  At length, calm and self-acquitted, he rose from his
self-confession, and leaning by the open casement, drank in the
reviving and gentle balm of the summer air.  The state apartments he
had left, formed as we have before observed, an angle to the wing in
which the chamber he had now retired to was placed.  They were
brilliantly illumined, their windows opened to admit the fresh, soft
breeze of night; and he saw, as if by daylight, distinct and gorgeous,
in their gay dresses, the many revellers within.  But one group caught
and riveted his eye.  Close by the centre window he recognized his
gentle Anne, with downcast looks; he almost fancied he saw her blush,
as her young bridegroom, young and beautiful as herself, whispered
love's flatteries in her ear.  He saw farther on, but yet near, his
own sweet countess, and muttered, "After twenty years of marriage, may
Anne be as dear to him as thou art now to me!"  And still he saw, or
deemed he saw, his lady's eye, after resting with tender happiness on
the young pair, rove wistfully around, as if missing and searching for
her partner in her mother's joy.  But what form sweeps by with so
haughty a majesty, then pauses by the betrothed, addresses them not,
but seems to regard them with so fixed a watch?  He knew by her ducal
diadem, by the baudekin colours of her robe, by her unmistakable air
of pride, his daughter Isabel.  He did not distinguish the expression
of her countenance, but an ominous thrill passed through his heart;
for the attitude itself had an expression, and not that of a sister's
sympathy and love.  He turned away his face with an unquiet
recollection of the altered mood of his discontented daughter.  He
looked again: the duchess had passed on, lost amidst the confused
splendour of the revel.  And high and rich swelled the merry music
that invited to the stately pavon.  He gazed still; his lady had left
her place, the lovers too had vanished, and where they stood, stood
now in close conference his ancient enemies, Exeter and Somerset.  The
sudden change from objects of love to those associated with hate had
something which touched one of those superstitions to which, in all
ages, the heart, when deeply stirred, is weakly sensitive.  And again,
forgetful of the revel, the earl turned to the serener landscape of
the grove and the moonlit green sward, and mused and mused, till a
soft arm thrown round him woke his revery.  For this had his lady left
the revel.  Divining, by the instinct born of love, the gloom of her
husband, she had stolen from pomp and pleasure to his side.

"Ah, wherefore wouldst thou rob me," said the countess, "of one hour
of thy presence, since so few hours remain; since, when the sun that
succeeds the morrow's shines upon these walls, the night of thine
absence will have closed upon me?"

"And if that thought of parting, sad to me as thee, suffice not, belle
amie, to dim the revel," answered the earl, "weetest thou not how ill
the grave and solemn thoughts of one who sees before him the emprise
that would change the dynasty of a realm can suit with the careless
dance and the wanton music?  But not at that moment did I think of
those mightier cares; my thoughts were nearer home.  Hast thou noted,
sweet wife, the silent gloom, the clouded brow of Isabel, since she
learned that Anne was to be the bride of the heir of Lancaster?"

The mother suppressed a sigh.  "We must pardon, or glance lightly
over, the mood of one who loves her lord, and mourns for his baffled
hopes!  Well-a-day!  I grieve that she admits not even me to her
confidence.  Ever with the favourite lady who lately joined her
train,--methinks that new friend gives less holy counsel than a
mother!"

"Ha! and yet what counsels can Isabel listen to from a comparative
stranger?  Even if Edward, or rather his cunning Elizabeth, had
suborned this waiting-woman, our daughter never could hearken, even in
an hour of anger, to the message from our dishonourer and our foe."

"Nay, but a flatterer often fosters by praising the erring thought.
Isabel hath something, dear lord, of thy high heart and courage; and
ever from childhood, her vaulting spirit, her very character of
stately beauty, hath given her a conviction of destiny and power
loftier than those reserved for our gentle Anne.  Let us trust to time
and forbearance, and hope that the affection of the generous sister
will subdue the jealousy of the disappointed princess."

"Pray Heaven, indeed, that it so prove!  Isabel's ascendancy over
Clarence is great, and might be dangerous.  Would that she consented
to remain in France with thee and Anne!  Her lord, at least, it seems
I have convinced and satisfied.  Pleased at the vast fortunes before
him, the toys of viceregal power, his lighter nature reconciles itself
to the loss of a crown, which, I fear, it could never have upheld.
For the more I have read his qualities in our household intimacy, the
more it seems that I could scarcely have justified the imposing on
England a king not worthy of so great a people.  He is young yet, but
how different the youth of Lancastrian Edward!  In him what earnest
and manly spirit!  What heaven-born views of the duties of a king!
Oh, if there be a sin in the passion that hath urged me on, let me,
and me alone, atone! and may I be at least the instrument to give to
England a prince whose virtues shall compensate for all!"

While yet the last word trembled upon the earl's lips, a light flashed
along the floors, hitherto illumined but by the stars and the full
moon.  And presently Isabel, in conference with the lady whom her
mother had referred to, passed into the room, on her way to her
private chamber.  The countenance of this female diplomatist, whose
talent for intrigue Philip de Comines [Comines, iii. 5; Hall, Lingard,
Hume, etc.] has commemorated, but whose name, happily for her memory,
history has concealed, was soft and winning in its expression to the
ordinary glance, though the sharpness of the features, the thin
compression of the lips, and the harsh dry redness of the hair
corresponded with the attributes which modern physiognomical science
truly or erringly assigns to a wily and treacherous character.  She
bore a light in her hand, and its rays shone full on the disturbed and
agitated face of the duchess.  Isabel perceived at once the forms of
her parents, and stopped short in some whispered conversation, and
uttered a cry almost of dismay.

"Thou leavest the revel betimes, fair daughter," said the earl,
examining her countenance with an eye somewhat stern.

"My lady," said the confidant, with a lowly reverence, "was anxious
for her babe."

"Thy lady, good waiting-wench," said Warwick, "needs not thy tongue to
address her father.  Pass on."

The gentlewoman bit her lips, but obeyed, and quitted the room.  The
earl approached, and took Isabel's hand,--it was cold as stone.

"My child," said he, tenderly, "thou dost well to retire to rest; of
late thy cheek hath lost its bloom.  But just now, for many causes, I
was wishing thee not to brave our perilous return to England; and now,
I know not whether it would make me the more uneasy, to fear for thy
health if absent or thy safety if with me!"

"My lord," replied Isabel, coldly, "my duty calls me to my husband's
side, and the more, since now it seems he dares the battle but reaps
not its rewards!  Let Edward and Anne rest in safety, Clarence and
Isabel go to achieve the diadem and orb for others!"

"Be not bitter with thy father, girl; be not envious of thy sister!"
said the earl, in grave rebuke; then, softening his tone, he added,
"The women of a noble House should have no ambition of their own,--
their glory and their honour they should leave, unmurmuring, in the
hands of men!  Mourn not if thy sister mounts the throne of him who
would have branded the very name to which thou and she were born!"

"I have made no reproach, my lord.  Forgive me, I pray you, if I now
retire; I am so weary, and would fain have strength and health not to
be a burden to you when you depart."

The duchess bowed with proud submission, and moved on.  "Beware!" said
the earl, in a low voice.

"Beware!--and of what?" said Isabel, startled.

"Of thine own heart, Isabel.  Ay, go to thine infant's couch ere thou
seek thine own, and, before the sleep of innocence, calm thyself back
to womanhood."

The duchess raised her head quickly, but habitual awe of her father
checked the angry answer; and kissing, with formal reverence, the hand
the countess extended to her, she left the room.  She gained the
chamber in which was the cradle of her son, gorgeously canopied with
silks, inwrought with the blazoned arms of royal Clarence;--and beside
the cradle sat the confidant.

The duchess drew aside the drapery, and contemplated the rosy face of
the infant slumberer.

Then, turning to her confidant, she said,--

"Three months since, and I hoped my first-born would be a king!  Away
with those vain mockeries of royal birth!  How suit they the destined
vassal of the abhorred Lancastrian?"

"Sweet lady," said the confidant, "did I not warn thee from the first
that this alliance, to the injury of my lord duke and this dear boy,
was already imminent?  I had hoped thou mightst have prevailed with
the earl!"

"He heeds me not, he cares not for me!" exclaimed Isabel; "his whole
love is for Anne,--Anne, who, without energy and pride, I scarcely
have looked on as my equal!  And now to my younger sister I must bow
my knee, pleased if she deign to bid me hold the skirt of her queenly
robe!  Never,--no, never!"

"Calm thyself; the courier must part this night.  My Lord of Clarence
is already in his chamber; he waits but thine assent to write to
Edward, that he rejects not his loving messages."

The duchess walked to and fro, in great disorder.  "But to be thus
secret and false to my father?"

"Doth be merit that thou shouldst sacrifice thy child to him?
Reflect! the king has no son!  The English barons acknowledge not in
girls a sovereign; [Miss Strickland ("Life of Elizabeth of York")
remarks, "How much Norman prejudice in favour of Salic law had
corrupted the common or constitutional law of England regarding the
succession!"  The remark involves a controversy.] and, with Edward on
the throne, thy son is heir-presumptive.  Little chance that a male
heir shall now be born to Queen Elizabeth, while from Anne and her
bridegroom a long line may spring.  Besides, no matter what parchment
treaties may ordain, how can Clarence and his offspring ever be
regarded by a Lancastrian king but as enemies to feed the prison or
the block, when some false invention gives the seemly pretext for
extirpating the lawful race?"

"Cease, cease, cease!" cried Isabel, in terrible struggles with
herself.

"Lady, the hour presses!  And, reflect, a few lines are but words, to
be confirmed or retracted as occasion suits!  If Lord Warwick succeed,
and King Edward lose his crown, ye can shape as ye best may your
conduct to the time.  But if the earl lose the day, if again he be
driven into exile, a few words now release you and yours from
everlasting banishment; restore your boy to his natural heritage;
deliver you from the insolence of the Anjouite, who, methinks, even
dared this very day to taunt your highness--"

"She did--she did!  Oh that my father had been by to hear!  She bade
me stand aside that Anne might pass,--'not for the younger daughter of
Lord Warwick, but for the lady admitted into the royalty of
Lancaster!'  Elizabeth Woodville, at least, never dared this
insolence!"

"And this Margaret the Duke of Clarence is to place on the throne
which your child yonder might otherwise aspire to mount!"

Isabel clasped her hands in mute passion.

"Hark!" said the confidant, throwing open the door--

And along the corridor came, in measured pomp, a stately procession,
the chamberlain in front, announcing "Her Highness the Princess of
Wales;" and Louis XI., leading the virgin bride (wife but in name and
honour, till her dowry of a kingdom was made secure) to her gentle
rest. The ceremonial pomp, the regal homage that attended the younger
sister thus raised above herself, completed in Isabel's jealous heart
the triumph of the Tempter.  Her face settled into hard resolve, and
she passed at once from the chamber into one near at hand, where the
Duke of Clarence sat alone, the rich wines of the livery, not
untasted, before him, and the ink yet wet upon a scroll he had just
indited.

He turned his irresolute countenance to Isabel as she bent over him
and read the letter.  It was to Edward; and after briefly warning him
of the meditated invasion, significantly added, "and if I may seem to
share this emprise, which, here and alone, I cannot resist, thou shalt
find me still, when the moment comes, thy affectionate brother and
loyal subject."

"Well, Isabel," said the duke, "thou knowest I have delayed this till
the last hour to please thee; for verily, lady mine, thy will is my
sweetest law.  But now, if thy heart misgives thee--"

"It does, it does!" exclaimed the duchess, bursting into tears.

"If thy heart misgives thee," continued Clarence, who with all his
weakness had much of the duplicity of his brothers, "why, let it pass.
Slavery to scornful Margaret, vassalage to thy sister's spouse,
triumph to the House which both thou and I were taught from childhood
to deem accursed,--why, welcome all! so that Isabel does not weep, and
our boy reproach us not in the days to come!"

For all answer, Isabel, who had seized the letter, let it drop on the
table, pushed it, with averted face, towards the duke, and turned back
to the cradle of her child, whom she woke with her sobs, and who
wailed its shrill reply in infant petulance and terror, snatched from
its slumber to the arms of the remorseful mother.

A smile of half contemptuous joy passed over the thin lips of the she-
Judas, and, without speaking, she took her way to Clarence.  He had
sealed and bound his letter, first adding these words, "My lady and
duchess, whatever her kin, has seen this letter, and approves it, for
she is more a friend to York than to the earl, now he has turned
Lancastrian;" and placed it in a small iron coffer.

He gave the coffer, curiously clasped and locked, to the gentlewoman,
with a significant glance--"Be quick, or she repents!  The courier
waits, his steed saddled!  The instant you give it, he departs,--he
hath his permit to pass the gates."

"All is prepared; ere the clock strike, he is on his way."  The
confidant vanished; the duke sank in his chair, and rubbed his hands.

"Oho, father-in-law, thou deemest me too dull for a crown!  I am not
dull enough for thy tool.  I have had the wit, at least, to deceive
thee, and to hide resentment beneath a smiling brow!  Dullard, thou to
believe aught less than the sovereignty of England could have bribed
Clarence to thy cause!"  He turned to the table and complacently
drained his goblet.

Suddenly, haggard and pale as a spectre, Isabel stood before him.

"I was mad--mad, George!  The letter! the letter--it must not go!"

At that moment the clock struck.

"Bel enfant," said the duke, "it is too late!"





BOOK X.

THE RETURN OF THE KING-MAKER.




CHAPTER I.

THE MAID'S HOPE, THE COURTIER'S LOVE, AND THE SAGE'S COMFORT.

Fair are thy fields, O England; fair the rural farm and the orchards
in which the blossoms have ripened into laughing fruits; and fairer
than all, O England, the faces of thy soft-eyed daughters!

From the field where Sibyll and her father had wandered amidst the
dead, the dismal witnesses of war had vanished; and over the green
pastures roved the gentle flocks.  And the farm to which Hastings had
led the wanderers looked upon that peaceful field through its leafy
screen; and there father and daughter had found a home.

It was a lovely summer evening; and Sibyll put aside the broidery
frame, at which, for the last hour, she had not worked, and gliding to
the lattice, looked wistfully along the winding lane.  The room was in
the upper story, and was decorated with a care which the exterior of
the house little promised, and which almost approached to elegance.
The fresh green rushes that strewed the floor were intermingled with
dried wild thyme and other fragrant herbs.  The bare walls were hung
with serge of a bright and cheerful blue; a rich carpet de cuir
covered the oak table, on which lay musical instruments, curiously
inlaid, with a few manuscripts, chiefly of English and Provencal
poetry.  The tabourets were covered with cushions of Norwich worsted,
in gay colours.  All was simple, it is true, yet all betokened a
comfort--ay, a refinement, an evidence of wealth--very rare in the
houses even of the second order of nobility.

As Sibyll gazed, her face suddenly brightened; she uttered a joyous
cry, hurried from the room, descended the stairs, and passed her
father, who was seated without the porch, and seemingly plunged in one
of his most abstracted reveries.  She kissed his brow (he heeded her
not), bounded with a light step over the sward of the orchard, and
pausing by a wicket gate, listened with throbbing heart to the
advancing sound of a horse's hoofs.  Nearer came the sound, and
nearer.  A cavalier appeared in sight, sprang from his saddle, and,
leaving his palfrey to find his way to the well-known stable, sprang
lightly over the little gate.

"And thou hast watched for me, Sibyll?"

The girl blushingly withdrew from the eager embrace, and said
touchingly, "My heart watcheth for thee alway.  Oh, shall I thank or
chide thee for so much care?  Thou wilt see how thy craftsmen have
changed the rugged homestead into the daintiest bower!"

"Alas! my Sibyll! would that it were worthier of thy beauty, and our
mutual troth!  Blessings on thy trust and sweet patience; may the day
soon come when I may lead thee to a nobler home, and hear knight and
baron envy the bride of Hastings!"

"My own lord!" said Sibyll, with grateful tears in confiding eyes;
but, after a pause, she added timidly, "Does the king still bear so
stern a memory against so humble a subject?"

"The king is more wroth than before, since tidings of Lord Warwick's
restless machinations in France have soured his temper.  He cannot
hear thy name without threats against thy father as a secret adherent
of Lancaster, and accuseth thee of witching his chamberlain,--as, in
truth, thou hast. The Duchess of Bedford is more than ever under the
influence of Friar Bungey, to whose spells and charms, and not to our
good swords, she ascribes the marvellous flight of Warwick and the
dispersion of our foes; and the friar, methinks, has fostered and yet
feeds Edward's suspicions of thy harmless father.  The king chides
himself for having suffered poor Warner to depart unscathed, and even
recalls the disastrous adventure of the mechanical, and swears that
from the first thy father was in treasonable conspiracy with Margaret.
Nay, sure I am, that if I dared to wed thee while his anger lasts, he
would condemn thee as a sorceress, and give me up to the secret hate
of my old foes the Woodvilles.  But fie! be not so appalled, my
Sibyll; Edward's passions, though fierce, are changeful, and patience
will reward us both."

"Meanwhile, thou lovest me, Hastings!" said Sibyll, with great
emotion.  "Oh, if thou knewest how I torment myself in thine absence!
I see thee surrounded by the fairest and the loftiest, and say to
myself, 'Is it possible that he can remember me?'  But thou lovest me
still--still--still, and ever!  Dost thou not?"

And Hastings said and swore.

"And the Lady Bonville?" asked Sibyll, trying to smile archly, but
with the faltering tone of jealous fear.

"I have not seen her for months," replied the noble, with a slight
change of countenance.  "She is at one of their western manors.  They
say her lord is sorely ill; and the Lady Bonville is a devout
hypocrite, and plays the tender wife.  But enough of such ancient and
worn-out memories.  Thy father--sorrows he still for his Eureka?  I
can learn no trace of it."

"See," said Sibyll, recalled to her filial love, and pointing to
Warner as they now drew near the house, "see, he shapes another Eureka
from his thoughts!"

"How fares it, dear Warner?" asked the noble, taking the scholar's
hand.

"Ah," cried the student, roused at the sight of his powerful
protector, "bringest thou tidings of IT?  Thy cheerful eye tells me
that--no--no--thy face changes!  They have destroyed it!  Oh, that I
could be young once more!"

"What!" said the world-wise man, astonished.  "If thou hadst another
youth, wouldst thou cherish the same delusion, and go again through a
life of hardship, persecution, and wrong?"

"My noble son," said the philosopher, "for hours when I have felt the
wrong, the persecution, and the hardship, count the days and the
nights when I felt only the hope and the glory and the joy!  God is
kinder to us all than man can know; for man looks only to the sorrow
on the surface, and sees not the consolation in the deeps of the
unwitnessed soul."

Sibyll had left Hastings by her father's side, and tripped lightly to
the farther part of the house, inhabited by the rustic owners who
supplied the homely service, to order the evening banquet,--the happy
banquet; for hunger gives not such flavour to the viand, nor thirst
such sparkle to the wine, as the presence of a beloved guest.

And as the courtier seated himself on the rude settle under the
honeysuckles that wreathed the porch, a delicious calm stole over his
sated mind.  The pure soul of the student, released a while from the
tyranny of an earthly pursuit,--the drudgery of a toil, that however
grand, still but ministered to human and material science,--had found
for its only other element the contemplation of more solemn and
eternal mysteries.  Soaring naturally, as a bird freed from a golden
cage, into the realms of heaven, he began now, with earnest and
spiritual eloquence, to talk of the things and visions lately made
familiar to his thoughts.  Mounting from philosophy to religion, he
indulged in his large ideas upon life and nature: of the stars that
now came forth in heaven; of the laws that gave harmony to the
universe; of the evidence of a God in the mechanism of creation; of
the spark from central divinity, that, kindling in a man's soul, we
call "genius;" of the eternal resurrection of the dead, which makes
the very principle of being, and types, in the leaf and in the atom,
the immortality of the great human race.  He was sublimer, that gray
old man, hunted from the circle of his kind, in his words, than ever
is action in its deeds; for words can fathom truth, and deeds but
blunderingly and lamely seek it.

And the sad and gifted and erring intellect of Hastings, rapt from its
little ambition of the hour, had no answer when his heart asked, "What
can courts and a king's smile give me in exchange for serene
tranquillity and devoted love?"




CHAPTER II.

THE MAN AWAKES IN THE SAGE, AND THE SHE-WOLF AGAIN HATH TRACKED THE
LAMB.

From the night in which Hastings had saved from the knives of the
tymbesteres Sibyll and her father, his honour and chivalry had made
him their protector.  The people of the farm (a widow and her
children, with the peasants in their employ) were kindly and simple
folks.  What safer home for the wanderers than that to which Hastings
had removed them?  The influence of Sibyll over his variable heart or
fancy was renewed.  Again vows were interchanged and faith plighted.
Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, who, however gallant an enemy, was
still more than ever, since Warwick's exile, a formidable one, and who
shared his sister's dislike to Hastings, was naturally at that time in
the fullest favour of King Edward, anxious to atone for the brief
disgrace his brother-in-law had suffered during the later days of
Warwick's administration.  And Hastings, offended by the manners of
the rival favourite, took one of the disgusts so frequent in the life
of a courtier, and, despite his office of chamberlain, absented
himself much from his sovereign's company.  Thus, in the reaction of
his mind, the influence of Sibyll was greater than it otherwise might
have been.  His visits to the farm were regular and frequent.  The
widow believed him nearly related to Sibyll, and suspected Warner to
be some attainted Lancastrian, compelled to hide in secret till his
pardon was obtained; and no scandal was attached to the noble's
visits, nor any surprise evinced at his attentive care for all that
could lend a grace to a temporary refuge unfitting the quality of his
supposed kindred.

And, in her entire confidence and reverential affection, Sibyll's very
pride was rather soothed than wounded by obligations which were but
proofs of love, and to which plighted troth gave her a sweet right.
As for Warner, he had hitherto seemed to regard the great lord's
attentions only as a tribute to his own science, and a testimony of
the interest which a statesman might naturally feel in the invention
of a thing that might benefit the realm.  And Hastings had been
delicate in the pretexts of his visits.  One time he called to relate
the death of poor Madge, though he kindly concealed the manner of it,
which he had discovered, but which opinion, if not law, forbade him to
attempt to punish: drowning was but the orthodox ordeal of a suspected
witch, and it was not without many scruples that the poor woman was
interred in holy ground.  The search for the Eureka was a pretence
that sufficed for countless visits; and then, too, Hastings had
counselled Adam to sell the ruined house, and undertaken the
negotiation; and the new comforts of their present residence, and the
expense of the maintenance, were laid to the account of the sale.
Hastings had begun to consider Adam Warner as utterly blind and
passive to the things that passed under his eyes; and his astonishment
was great when, the morning after the visit we have just recorded,
Adam, suddenly lifting his eyes, and seeing the guest whispering soft
tales in Sibyll's ear, rose abruptly, approached the nobleman, took
him gently by the arm, led him into the garden, and thus addressed
him,--

"Noble lord, you have been tender and generous in our misfortunes.
The poor Eureka is lost to me and the world forever.  God's will be
done!  Methinks Heaven designs thereby to rouse me to the sense of
nearer duties; and I have a daughter whose name I adjure you not to
sully, and whose heart I pray you not to break.  Come hither no more,
my Lord Hastings."

This speech, almost the only one which showed plain sense and judgment
in the affairs of this life that the man of genius had ever uttered,
so confounded Hastings, that he with difficulty recovered himself
enough to say,--

"My poor scholar, what hath so suddenly kindled suspicions which wrong
thy child and me?"

"Last eve, when we sat together, I saw your hand steal into hers, and
suddenly I remembered the day when I was young, and wooed her mother!
And last night I slept not, and sense and memory became active for my
living child, as they were wont to be only for the iron infant of my
mind, and I said to myself, 'Lord Hastings is King Edward's friend;
and King Edward spares not maiden honour.  Lord Hastings is a mighty
peer, and he will not wed the dowerless and worse than nameless girl!'
Be merciful!  Depart, depart!"

"But," exclaimed Hastings, "if I love thy sweet Sibyll in all honesty,
if I have plighted to her my troth--"

"Alas, alas!" groaned Adam.

"If I wait but my king's permission to demand her wedded hand, couldst
thou forbid me the presence of my affianced?"

"She loves thee, then?" said Adam, in a tone of great anguish,--"she
loves thee,--speak!"

"It is my pride to think it."

"Then go,--go at once; come back no more till thou hast wound up thy
courage to brave the sacrifice; no, not till the priest is ready at
the altar, not till the bridegroom can claim the bride.  And as that
time will never come--never--never--leave me to whisper to the
breaking heart, 'Courage; honour and virtue are left thee yet, and thy
mother from heaven looks down on a stainless child!'"

The resuscitation of the dead could scarcely have startled and awed
the courtier more than this abrupt development of life and passion and
energy in a man who had hitherto seemed to sleep in the folds of his
thought, as a chrysalis in its web.  But as we have always seen that
ever, when this strange being woke from his ideal abstraction, he
awoke to honour and courage and truth, so now, whether, as he had
said, the absence of the Eureka left his mind to the sense of
practical duties, or whether their common suffering had more endeared
to him his gentle companion, and affection sharpened reason, Adam
Warner became puissant and majestic in his rights and sanctity of
father,--greater in his homely household character, than when, in his
mania of inventor, and the sublime hunger of aspiring genius, he had
stolen to his daughter's couch, and waked her with the cry of "Gold!"

Before the force and power of Adam's adjuration, his outstretched
hand, the anguish, yet authority, written on his face, all the art and
self-possession of the accomplished lover deserted him, as one spell-
bound.

He was literally without reply; till, suddenly, the sight of Sibyll,
who, surprised by this singular conference, but unsuspecting its
nature, now came from the house, relieved and nerved him; and his
first impulse was then, as ever, worthy and noble, such as showed,
though dimly, how glorious a creature he had been, if cast in a time
and amidst a race which could have fostered the impulse into habit.

"Brave old man!" he said, kissing the hand still raised in command,
"thou hast spoken as beseems thee; and my answer I will tell thy
child."  Then hurrying to the wondering Sibyll, he resumed: "Your
father says well, that not thus, dubious and in secret, should I visit
the home blest by thy beloved presence.  I obey; I leave thee, Sibyll.
I go to my king, as one who hath served him long and truly, and claims
his guerdon,--thee!"

"Oh, my lord!" exclaimed Sibyll, in generous terror, "bethink thee
well; remember what thou saidst but last eve.  This king so fierce, my
name so hated!  No, no! leave me.  Farewell forever, if it be right,
as what thou and my father say must be.  But thy life, thy liberty,
thy welfare,--they are my happiness; thou hast no right to endanger
them!"  And she fell at his knees.  He raised and strained her to his
heart; then resigning her to her father's arms, he said in a voice
choked with emotion,--

"Not as peer and as knight, but as man, I claim my prerogative of home
and hearth.  Let Edward frown, call back his gifts, banish me his
court,--thou art more worth than all!  Look for me, sigh not, weep
not, smile till we meet again!"  He left them with these words,
hastened to the stall where his steed stood, caparisoned it with his
own hands, and rode with the speed of one whom passion spurs and goads
towards the Tower of London.

But as Sibyll started from her father's arms, when she heard the
departing hoofs of her lover's steed,--to listen and to listen for the
last sound that told of him,--a terrible apparition, ever ominous of
woe and horror, met her eye.  On the other side of the orchard fence,
which concealed her figure, but not her well-known face, which peered
above, stood the tymbestere, Graul.  A shriek of terror at this
recognition burst from Sibyll, as she threw herself again upon Adam's
breast; but when he looked round to discover the cause of her alarm,
Graul was gone.




CHAPTER III.

VIRTUOUS RESOLVES SUBMITTED TO THE TEST OF VANITY AND THE WORLD.

On reaching his own house, Hastings learned that the court was still
at Shene.  He waited but till the retinue which his rank required were
equipped and ready, and reached the court, from which of late he had
found so many excuses to absent himself, before night.  Edward was
then at the banquet, and Hastings was too experienced a courtier to
disturb him at such a time.  In a mood unfit for companionship, he
took his way to the apartments usually reserved for him, when a
gentleman met him by the way, and apprised him, with great respect,
that the Lord Scales and Rivers had already appropriated those
apartments to the principal waiting-lady of his countess,--but that
other chambers, if less commodious and spacious, were at his command.

Hastings had not the superb and more than regal pride of Warwick and
Montagu; but this notice sensibly piqued and galled him.

"My apartments as Lord Chamberlain, as one of the captain-generals in
the king's army, given to the waiting-lady of Sir Anthony Woodville's
wife!  At whose orders, sir?"

"Her highness the queen's; pardon me, my lord," and the gentleman,
looking round, and sinking his voice, continued, "pardon me, her
highness added, 'If my Lord Chamberlain returns not ere the week ends,
he may find not only the apartment, but the office, no longer free.'
My lord, we all love you--forgive my zeal, and look well if you would
guard your own."

"Thanks, sir.  Is my lord of Gloucester in the palace?"

"He is,--and in his chamber.  He sits not long at the feast."

"Oblige me by craving his grace's permission to wait on him at
leisure; I attend his answer here."

Leaning against the wall of the corridor, Hastings gave himself up to
other thoughts than those of love.  So strong is habit, so powerful
vanity or ambition, once indulged, that this puny slight made a sudden
revulsion in the mind of the royal favourite; once more the agitated
and brilliant court life stirred and fevered him,--that life, so
wearisome when secure, became sweeter when imperilled.  To counteract
his foes, to humble his rivals, to regain the king's countenance, to
baffle, with the easy art of his skilful intellect, every hostile
stratagem,--such were the ideas that crossed and hurtled themselves,
and Sibyll was forgotten.

The gentleman reappeared.  "Prince Richard besought my lord's presence
with loving welcome;" and to the duke's apartment went Lord Hastings.
Richard, clad in a loose chamber robe, which concealed the defects of
his shape, rose from before a table covered with papers, and embraced
Hastings with cordial affection.

"Never more gladly hail to thee, dear William.  I need thy wise
counsels with the king, and I have glad tidings for thine own ear."

"Pardieu, my prince; the king, methinks, will scarce heed the counsels
of a dead man."

"Dead?"

"Ay.  At court it seems men are dead,--their rooms filled, their
places promised or bestowed,--if they come not, morn and night, to
convince the king that they are alive."  And Hastings, with
constrained gayety, repeated the information he had received.

"What would you, Hastings?" said the duke, shrugging his shoulders,
but with some latent meaning in his tone.  "Lord Rivers were nought in
himself; but his lady is a mighty heiress, [Elizabeth secured to her
brother, Sir Anthony, the greatest heiress in the kingdom, in the
daughter of Lord Scales,--a wife, by the way, who is said to have been
a mere child at the time of the marriage.] and requires state, as she
bestows pomp.  Look round, and tell me what man ever maintained
himself in power without the strong connections, the convenient dower,
the acute, unseen, unsleeping woman-influence of some noble wife?  How
can a poor man defend his repute, his popular name, that airy but all
puissant thing we call dignity or station, against the pricks and
stings of female intrigue and female gossip?  But he marries, and, lo,
a host of fairy champions, who pinch the rival lozels unawares: his
wife hath her army of courtpie and jupon, to array against the dames
of his foes!  Wherefore, my friend, while thou art unwedded, think not
to cope with Lord Rivers, who hath a wife with three sisters, two
aunts, and a score of she-cousins!"

"And if," replied Hastings, more and more unquiet under the duke's
truthful irony,--"if I were now to come to ask the king permission to
wed--"

"If thou wert, and the bride-elect were a lady with power and wealth
and manifold connections, and the practice of a court, thou wouldst be
the mightiest lord in the kingdom since Warwick's exile."

"And if she had but youth, beauty, and virtue?"

"Oh, then, my Lord Hastings, pray thy patron saint for a war,--for in
peace thou wouldst be lost amongst the crowd.  But truce to these
jests; for thou art not the man to prate of youth, virtue, and such
like, in sober earnest, amidst this work-day world, where nothing is
young and nothing virtuous;--and listen to grave matters."

The duke then communicated to Hastings the last tidings received of
the machinations of Warwick.  He was in high spirits; for those last
tidings but reported Margaret's refusal to entertain the proposition
of a nuptial alliance with the earl, though, on the other hand, the
Duke of Burgundy, who was in constant correspondence with his spies,
wrote word that Warwick was collecting provisions, from his own means,
for more than sixty thousand men; and that, with Lancaster or without,
the earl was prepared to match his own family interest against the
armies of Edward.

"And," said Hastings, "if all his family joined with him, what foreign
king could be so formidable an invader?  Maltravers and the Mowbrays,
Fauconberg, Westmoreland, Fitzhugh, Stanley, Bonville, Worcester--"

"But happily," said Gloucester, "the Mowbrays have been allied also to
the queen's sister; Worcester detests Warwick; Stanley always murmurs
against us, a sure sign that he will fight for us; and Bonville--I
have in view a trusty Yorkist to whom the retainers of that House
shall be assigned.  But of that anon.  What I now wish from thy wisdom
is, to aid me in rousing Edward from his lethargy; he laughs at his
danger, and neither communicates with his captains nor mans his
coasts.  His courage makes him a dullard."

After some further talk on these heads, and more detailed account of
the preparations which Gloucester deemed necessary to urge on the
king, the duke, then moving his chair nearer to Hastings, said with a
smile,--

"And now, Hastings, to thyself: it seems that thou hast not heard the
news which reached us four days since.  The Lord Bonville is dead,--
died three months ago at his manor house in Devon.  [To those who have
read the "Paston Letters" it will not seem strange that in that day
the death of a nobleman at his country seat should be so long in
reaching the metropolis,--the ordinary purveyors of communication were
the itinerant attendants of fairs; and a father might be ignorant for
months together of the death of his son.]  Thy Katherine is free, and
in London.  Well, man, where is thy joy?"

"Time is, time was!" said Hastings, gloomily.  "The day has passed
when this news could rejoice me."

"Passed! nay, thy good stars themselves have fought for thee in delay.
Seven goodly manors swell the fair widow's jointure; the noble dowry
she brought returns to her.  Her very daughter will bring thee power.
Young Cecily Bonville [afterwards married to Dorset], the heiress,
Lord Dorset demands in betrothal.  Thy wife will be mother-in-law to
thy queen's son; on the other hand, she is already aunt to the Duchess
of Clarence; and George, be sure, sooner or later, will desert
Warwick, and win his pardon.  Powerful connections, vast possessions,
a lady of immaculate name and surpassing beauty, and thy first love!--
(thy hand trembles!)--thy first love, thy sole love, and thy last!"

"Prince--Prince! forbear!  Even if so--In brief, Katherine loves me
not!"

"Thou mistakest!  I have seen her, and she loves thee not the less
because her virtue so long concealed the love."  Hastings uttered an
exclamation of passionate joy, but again his face darkened.

Gloucester watched him in silence; besides any motive suggested by the
affection he then sincerely bore to Hastings, policy might well
interest the duke in the securing to so loyal a Yorkist the hand and
the wealth of Lord Warwick's sister; but, prudently not pressing the
subject further, he said, in an altered and careless voice, "Pardon me
if I have presumed on matters on which each man judges for himself.
But as, despite all obstacle, one day or other Anne Nevile shall be
mine, it would have delighted me to know a near connection in Lord
Hastings.  And now the hour grows late, I prithee let Edward find thee
in his chamber."

When Hastings attended the king, he at once perceived that Edward's
manner was changed to him.  At first, he attributed the cause to the
ill offices of the queen and her brother; but the king soon betrayed
the true source of his altered humour.

"My lord," he said abruptly, "I am no saint, as thou knowest; but
there are some ties, par amour, which, in my mind, become not knights
and nobles about a king's person."

"My liege, I arede you not."

"Tush, William!" replied the king, more gently, "thou hast more than
once wearied me with application for the pardon of the nigromancer
Warner,--the whole court is scandalized at thy love for his daughter.
Thou hast absented thyself from thine office on poor pretexts!  I know
thee too well not to be aware that love alone can make thee neglect
thy king,--thy time has been spent at the knees or in the arms of this
young sorceress!  One word for all times,--he whom a witch snares
cannot be a king's true servant!  I ask of thee as a right, or as a
grace, see this fair ribaude no more!  What, man, are there not ladies
enough in merry England, that thou shouldst undo thyself for so
unchristian a fere?"

"My king! how can this poor maid have angered thee thus?"

"Knowest thou not"--began the king, sharply, and changing colour as he
eyed his favourite's mournful astonishment,--"ah, well!" he muttered
to himself, "they have been discreet hitherto, but how long will they
be so?  I am in time yet.  It is enough,"--he added, aloud and
gravely--"it is enough that our learned [it will be remembered that
Edward himself was a man of no learning] Bungey holds her father as a
most pestilent wizard, whose spells are muttered for Lancaster and the
rebel Warwick; that the girl hath her father's unholy gifts, and I lay
my command on thee, as liege king, and I pray thee, as loving friend,
to see no more either child or sire!  Let this suffice--and now I will
hear thee on state matters."

Whatever Hastings might feel, he saw that it was no time to venture
remonstrance with the king, and strove to collect his thoughts, and
speak indifferently on the high interests to which Edward invited him;
but he was so distracted and absent that he made but a sorry
counsellor, and the king, taking pity on him, dismissed his
chamberlain for the night.

Sleep came not to the couch of Hastings; his acuteness perceived that
whatever Edward's superstition, and he was a devout believer in
witchcraft, some more worldly motive actuated him in his resentment to
poor Sibyll.  But as we need scarcely say that neither from the
abstracted Warner nor his innocent daughter had Hastings learned the
true cause, he wearied himself with vain conjectures, and knew not
that Edward involuntarily did homage to the superior chivalry of his
gallant favourite, when he dreaded that, above all men, Hastings
should be made aware of the guilty secret which the philosopher and
his child could tell.  If Hastings gave his name and rank to Sibyll,
how powerful a weight would the tale of a witness now so obscure
suddenly acquire!

Turning from the image of Sibyll, thus beset with thoughts of danger,
embarrassment, humiliation, disgrace, ruin, Lord Hastings recalled the
words of Gloucester; and the stately image of Katherine, surrounded
with every memory of early passion, every attribute of present
ambition, rose before him; and he slept at last, to dream not of
Sibyll and the humble orchard, but of Katherine in her maiden bloom,
of the trysting-tree by the halls of Middleham, of the broken ring, of
the rapture and the woe of his youth's first high-placed love.




CHAPTER IV.

THE STRIFE WHICH SIBYLL HAD COURTED, BETWEEN KATHERINE AND HERSELF,
COMMENCES IN SERIOUS EARNEST.

Hastings felt relieved when, the next day, several couriers arrived
with tidings so important as to merge all considerations into those of
state.  A secret messenger from the French court threw Gloucester into
one of those convulsive passions of rage, to which, with all his
intellect and dissimulation, he was sometimes subject, by the news of
Anne's betrothal to Prince Edward; nor did the letter from Clarence to
the king, attesting the success of one of his schemes, comfort Richard
for the failure of the other.  A letter from Burgundy confirmed the
report of the spy, announced Duke Charles's intention of sending a
fleet to prevent Warwick's invasion, and rated King Edward sharply for
his supineness in not preparing suitably against so formidable a foe.
The gay and reckless presumption of Edward, worthier of a knight-
errant than a monarch, laughed at the word invasion.  "Pest on
Burgundy's ships!  I only wish that the earl would land!" [Com, iii.
c. 5] he said to his council.  None echoed the wish!  But later in the
day came a third messenger with information that roused all Edward's
ire; careless of each danger in the distance, he ever sprang into
energy and vengeance when a foe was already in the field.  And the
Lord Fitzhugh (the young nobleman before seen among the rebels at
Olney, and who had now succeeded to the honours of his House) had
suddenly risen in the North, at the head of a formidable rebellion.
No man had so large an experience in the warfare of those districts,
the temper of the people, and the inclinations of the various towns
and lordships as Montagu; he was the natural chief to depute against
the rebels.  Some animated discussion took place as to the dependence
to be placed in the marquis at such a crisis; but while the more wary
held it safer, at all hazards, not to leave him unemployed, and to
command his services in an expedition that would remove him from the
neighbourhood of his brother, should the latter land, as was expected,
on the coast of Norfolk, Edward, with a blindness of conceit that
seems almost incredible, believed firmly in the infatuated loyalty of
the man whom he had slighted and impoverished, and whom, by his offer
of his daughter to the Lancastrian prince, he had yet more recently
cozened and deluded.  Montagu was hastily summoned, and received
orders to march at once to the North, levy forces, and assume their
command.  The marquis obeyed with fewer words than were natural to
him, left the presence, sprang on his horse, and as he rode from the
palace, drew a letter from his bosom.  "Ah, Edward," said he, setting
his teeth, "so, after the solemn betrothal of thy daughter to my son,
thou wouldst have given her to thy Lancastrian enemy.  Coward, to
bribe his peace! recreant, to belie thy word!  I thank thee for this
news, Warwick; for without that injury I feel I could never, when the
hour came, have drawn sword against this faithless man,--especially
for Lancaster.  Ay, tremble, thou who deridest all truth and honour!
He who himself betrays, cannot call vengeance treason!"

Meanwhile, Edward departed, for further preparations, to the Tower of
London.  New evidences of the mine beneath his feet here awaited the
incredulous king.  On the door of St. Paul's, of many of the
metropolitan churches, on the Standard at Chepe, and on London Bridge,
during the past night, had been affixed, none knew by whom, the
celebrated proclamation, signed by Warwick and Clarence (drawn up in
the bold style of the earl), announcing their speedy return,
containing a brief and vigorous description of the misrule of the
realm, and their determination to reform all evils and redress all
wrongs.  [See, for this proclamation, Ellis's "Original Letters," vol.
i., second series, letter 42.]  Though the proclamation named not the
restoration of the Lancastrian line (doubtless from regard for Henry's
safety), all men in the metropolis were already aware of the
formidable league between Margaret and Warwick.  Yet, even still,
Edward smiled in contempt, for he had faith in the letter received
from Clarence, and felt assured that the moment the duke and the earl
landed, the former would betray his companion stealthily to the king;
so, despite all these exciting subjects of grave alarm, the nightly
banquet at the Tower was never merrier and more joyous.  Hastings left
the feast ere it deepened into revel, and, absorbed in various and
profound contemplation, entered his apartment.  He threw himself on a
seat, and leaned his face on his hands.

"Oh, no, no!" he muttered; "now, in the hour when true greatness is
most seen, when prince and peer crowd around me for counsel, when
noble, knight, and squire crave permission to march in the troop of
which Hastings is the leader,--now I feel how impossible, how falsely
fair, the dream that I could forget all--all for a life of obscurity,
for a young girl's love!  Love! as if I had not felt its delusions to
palling! love, as if I could love again: or, if love--alas, it must be
a light reflected but from memory!  And Katherine is free once more!"
His eye fell as he spoke, perhaps in shame and remorse that, feeling
thus now, he had felt so differently when he bade Sibyll smile till
his return!

"It is the air of this accursed court which taints our best resolves!"
he murmured, as an apology for himself; but scarcely was the poor
excuse made, than the murmur broke into an exclamation of surprise and
joy.  A letter lay before him; he recognized the hand of Katherine.
What years had passed since her writing had met his eye, since the
lines that bade him "farewell, and forget!"  Those lines had been
blotted with tears, and these, as he tore open the silk that bound
them--these, the trace of tears, too, was on them!  Yet they were but
few, and in tremulous characters.  They ran thus:--

To-morrow, before noon, the Lord Hastings is prayed to visit one whose
life he hath saddened by the thought and the accusation that she hath
clouded and embittered his.               KATHERINE DE BONVILLE.

Leaving Hastings to such meditations of fear or of hope as these lines
could call forth, we lead the reader to a room not very distant from
his own,--the room of the illustrious Friar Bungey.

The ex-tregetour was standing before the captured Eureka, and gazing
on it with an air of serio-comic despair and rage.  We say the Eureka,
as comprising all the ingenious contrivances towards one single object
invented by its maker, a harmonious compound of many separate details;
but the iron creature no longer deserved that superb appellation, for
its various members were now disjointed and dislocated, and lay pell-
mell in multiform confusion.

By the side of the friar stood a female, enveloped in a long scarlet
mantle, with the hood partially drawn over the face, but still leaving
visible the hard, thin, villanous lips, the stern, sharp chin, and the
jaw resolute and solid as if hewed from stone.

"I tell thee, Graul," said the friar, "that thou hast had far the best
of the bargain.  I have put this diabolical contrivance to all manner
of shapes, and have muttered over it enough Latin to have charmed a
monster into civility.  And the accursed thing, after nearly pinching
off three fingers, and scalding me with seething water, and
spluttering and sputtering enough to have terrified any man but Friar
Bungey out of his skin, is obstinatus ut mulum,--dogged as a mule; and
was absolutely good for nought, till I happily thought of separating
this vessel from all the rest of the gear, and it serves now for the
boiling my eggs!  But by the soul of Father Merlin, whom the saints
assoil, I need not have given myself all this torment for a thing
which, at best, does the work of a farthing pipkin!"

"Quick, master; the hour is late!  I must go while yet the troopers
and couriers and riders, hurrying to and fro, keep the gates from
closing.  What wantest thou with Graul?"

"More reverence, child!" growled the friar.  "What I want of thee is
briefly told, if thou hast the wit to serve me.  This miserable Warner
must himself expound to me the uses and trick of his malignant
contrivance.  Thou must find and bring him hither!"

"And if he will not expound?"

"The deputy governor of the Tower will lend me a stone dungeon, and,
if need be, the use of the brake to unlock the dotard's tongue."

"On what plea?"

"That Adam Warner is a wizard, in the pay of Lord Warwick, whom a more
mighty master like myself alone can duly examine and defeat."

"And if I bring thee the sorcerer, what wilt thou teach me in return?"

"What desirest thou most?"

Graul mused, and said, "There is war in the wind.  Graul follows the
camp, her trooper gets gold and booty.  But the trooper is stronger
than Graul; and when the trooper sleeps it is with his knife by his
side, and his sleep is light and broken, for he has wicked dreams.
Give me a potion to make sleep deep, that his eyes may not open when
Graul filches his gold, and his hand may be too heavy to draw the
knife from its sheath!"

"Immunda, detestabilis! thine own paramour!"

"He hath beat me with his bridle rein, he hath given a silver broad
piece to Grisell; Grisell hath sat on his knee; Graul never pardons!"

The friar, rogue as he was, shuddered.  "I cannot help thee to murder,
I cannot give thee the potion; name some other reward."

"I go--"

"Nay, nay, think, pause."

"I know where Warner is hid.  By this hour to-morrow night, I can
place him in thy power.  Say the word, and pledge me the draught."

"Well, well, mulier abominabilis!--that is, irresistible bonnibell.  I
cannot give thee the potion; but I will teach thee an art which can
make sleep heavier than the anodyne, and which wastes not like the
essence, but strengthens by usage,--an art thou shalt have at thy
fingers' ends, and which often draws from the sleeper the darkest
secrets of his heart."  [We have before said that animal magnetism was
known to Bungey, and familiar to the necromancers, or rather
theurgists, of the Middle Ages.]

"It is magic," said Graul, with joy.

"Ay, magic."

"I will bring thee the wizard.  But listen; he never stirs abroad,
save with his daughter.  I must bring both."

"Nay, I want not the girl."

"But I dare not throttle her, for a great lord loves her, who would
find out the deed and avenge it; and if she be left behind, she will
go to the lord, and the lord will discover what thou hast done with
the wizard, and thou wilt hang!"

"Never say 'Hang' to me, Graul: it is ill-mannered and ominous.  Who
is the lord?"

"Hastings."

"Pest!--and already he hath been searching for the thing yonder; and I
have brooded over it night and day, like a hen over a chalk egg,--only
that the egg does not snap off the hen's claws, as that diabolism
would fain snap off my digits.  But the war will carry Hastings away
in its whirlwind; and, in danger, the duchess is my slave, and will
bear me through all.  So, thou mayst bring the girl; and strangle her
not; for no good ever comes of a murder,--unless, indeed, it be
absolutely necessary!"

"I know the men who will help me, bold ribauds, whom I will guerdon
myself; for I want not thy coins, but thy craft.  When the curfew has
tolled, and the bat hunts the moth, we will bring thee the quarry--"

Graul turned; but as she gained the door, she stopped, and said
abruptly, throwing back her hood,--

"What age dost thou deem me?"

"Marry," quoth the friar, "an' I had not seen thee on thy mother's
knee when she followed my stage of tregetour, I should have guessed
thee for thirty; but thou hast led too jolly a life to look still in
the blossom.  Why speer'st thou the question?"

"Because when trooper and ribaud say to me, 'Graul, thou art too worn
and too old to drink of our cup and sit in the lap, to follow the
young fere to the battle, and weave the blithe dance in the fair,' I
would depart from my sisters, and have a hut of my own, and a black
cat without a white hair, and steal herbs by the new moon, and bones
from the charnel, and curse those whom I hate, and cleave the misty
air on a besom, like Mother Halkin of Edmonton.  Ha, ha! Master, thou
shalt present me then to the Sabbat.  Graul has the mettle for a bonny
witch!"

The tymbestere vanished with a laugh.  The friar muttered a
paternoster for once, perchance, devoutly, and after having again
deliberately scanned the disjecta membra of the Eureka, gravely took
forth a duck's egg from his cupboard, and applied the master-agent of
the machine which Warner hoped was to change the face of the globe to
the only practical utility it possessed to the mountebank's
comprehension.




CHAPTER V.

THE MEETING OF HASTINGS AND KATHERINE.

The next morning, while Edward was engaged in levying from his opulent
citizens all the loans he could extract, knowing that gold is the
sinew of war; while Worcester was manning the fortress of the Tower,
in which the queen, then near her confinement, was to reside during
the campaign; while Gloucester was writing commissions to captains and
barons to raise men; while Sir Anthony Lord Rivers was ordering
improvements in his dainty damasquine armour, and the whole Fortress
Palatine was animated and alive with the stir of the coming strife,--
Lord Hastings escaped from the bustle, and repaired to the house of
Katherine.  With what motive, with what intentions, was not known
clearly to himself,--perhaps, for there was bitterness in his very
love for Katherine, to enjoy the retaliation due to his own wounded
pride, and say to the idol of his youth, as he had said to Gloucester,
"Time is, time was;" perhaps with some remembrance of the faith due to
Sibyll, wakened up the more now that Katherine seemed actually to
escape from the ideal image into the real woman,--to be easily wooed
and won.  But, certainly, Sibyll's cause was not wholly lost, though
greatly shaken and endangered, when Lord Hastings alighted at Lady
Bonville's gate; but his face gradually grew paler, his mien less
assured, as he drew nearer and nearer to the apartment and the
presence of the widowed Katherine.

She was seated alone, and in the same room in which he had last seen
her.  Her deep mourning only served, by contrasting the pale and
exquisite clearness of her complexion, to enhance her beauty.
Hastings bowed low, and seated himself by her side in silence.

The Lady of Bonville eyed him for some moments with an unutterable
expression of melancholy and tenderness.  All her pride seemed to have
gone; the very character of her face was changed: grave severity had
become soft timidity, and stately self-control was broken into the
unmistaken struggle of hope and fear.

"Hastings--William!" she said, in a gentle and low whisper, and at the
sound of that last name from those lips, the noble felt his veins
thrill and his heart throb.  "If," she continued, "the step I have
taken seems to thee unwomanly and too bold, know, at least, what was
my design and my excuse.  There was a time" (and Katherine blushed)
"when, thou knowest well, that, had this hand been mine to bestow, it
would have been his who claimed the half of this ring."  And Katherine
took from a small crystal casket the well-remembered token.

"The broken ring foretold but the broken troth," said Hastings,
averting his face.

"Thy conscience rebukes thy words," replied Katherine, sadly; "I
pledged my faith, if thou couldst win my father's word.  What maid,
and that maid a Nevile, could so forget duty and honour as to pledge
thee more?  We were severed.  Pass--oh, pass over that time!  My
father loved me dearly; but when did pride and ambition ever deign to
take heed of the wild fancies of a girl's heart?  Three suitors,
wealthy lords, whose alliance gave strength to my kindred in the day
when their very lives depended on their swords, were rivals for Earl
Salisbury's daughter.  Earl Salisbury bade his daughter choose.  Thy
great friend and my own kinsman, Duke Richard of York, himself pleaded
for thy rivals.  He proved to me that my disobedience--if, indeed, for
the first time, a child of my House could disobey its chief--would be
an external barrier to thy fortune; that while Salisbury was thy foe,
he himself could not advance thy valiancy and merit; that it was with
me to forward thy ambition, though I could not reward thy love; that
from the hour I was another's, my mighty kinsmen themselves--for they
were generous--would be the first to aid the duke in thy career.
Hastings, even then I would have prayed, at least, to be the bride,
not of man, but God.  But I was trained--as what noble demoiselle is
not?--to submit wholly to a parent's welfare and his will.  As a nun,
I could but pray for the success of my father's cause; as a wife, I
could bring to Salisbury and to York the retainers and strongholds of
a baron.  I obeyed.  Hear me on.  Of the three suitors for my hand,
two were young and gallant,--women deemed them fair and comely; and
had my choice been one of these, thou mightest have deemed that a new
love had chased the old.  Since choice was mine, I chose the man love
could not choose, and took this sad comfort to my heart, 'He, the
forsaken Hastings, will see in my very choice that I was but the slave
of duty, my choice itself my penance.'"

Katherine paused, and tears dropped fast from her eyes.  Hastings held
his hand over his countenance, and only by the heaving of his heart
was his emotion visible.  Katherine resumed:--

"Once wedded, I knew what became a wife.  We met again; and to thy
first disdain and anger (which it had been dishonour in me to soothe
by one word that said, 'The wife remembers the maiden's love'),--to
these, thy first emotions, succeeded the more cruel revenge, which
would have changed sorrow and struggle to remorse and shame.  And
then, then--weak woman that I was!--I wrapped myself in scorn and
pride.  Nay, I felt deep anger--was it unjust?--that thou couldst so
misread and so repay the heart which had nothing left save virtue to
compensate for love.  And yet, yet, often when thou didst deem me most
hard, most proof against memory and feeling--But why relate the trial?
Heaven supported me, and if thou lovest me no longer, thou canst not
despise me."

At these last words Hastings was at her feet, bending over her hand,
and stifled by his emotions.  Katherine gazed at him for a moment
through her own tears, and then resumed:--

"But thou hadst, as man, consolations no woman would desire or covet.
And oh, what grieved me most was, not--no, not the jealous, the
wounded vanity, but it was at least this self-accusation, this
remorse--that--but for one goading remembrance, of love returned and
love forsaken,--thou hadst never so descended from thy younger nature,
never so trifled with the solemn trust of TIME.  Ah, when I have heard
or seen or fancied one fault in thy maturer manhood, unworthy of thy
bright youth, anger of myself has made me bitter and stern to thee;
and if I taunted or chid or vexed thy pride, how little didst thou
know that through the too shrewish humour spoke the too soft
remembrance!  For this--for this; and believing that through all,
alas! my image was not replaced, when my hand was free, I was grateful
that I might still--" (the lady's pale cheek grew brighter than the
rose, her voice faltered, and became low and indistinct)--"I might
still think it mine to atone to thee for the past. And if," she added,
with a sudden and generous energy, "if in this I have bowed my pride,
it is because by pride thou wert wounded; and now, at last, thou hast
a just revenge."

O terrible rival for thee, lost Sibyll!  Was it wonderful that, while
that head drooped upon his breast, while in that enchanted change
which Love the softener makes in lips long scornful, eyes long proud
and cold, he felt that Katherine Nevile--tender, gentle, frank without
boldness, lofty without arrogance--had replaced the austere dame of
Bonville, whom he half hated while he wooed,--oh, was it wonderful
that the soul of Hastings fled back to the old time, forgot the
intervening vows and more chill affections, and repeated only with
passionate lips, "Katherine, loved still, loved ever, mine, mine, at
last!"

Then followed delicious silence, then vows, confessions, questions,
answers,--the thrilling interchange of hearts long divided, and now
rushing into one.  And time rolled on, till Katherine, gently breaking
from her lover, said,--

"And now that thou hast the right to know and guide my projects,
approve, I pray thee, my present purpose.  War awaits thee, and we
must part a while!"  At these words her brow darkened and her lip
quivered.  "Oh, that I should have lived to mourn the day when Lord
Warwick, untrue to Salisbury and to York, joined his arms with
Lancaster and Margaret,--the day when Katherine could blush for the
brother she had deemed the glory of her House!  No, no" (she
continued, as Hastings interrupted her with generous excuses for the
earl, and allusion to the known slights he had received),--"no, no;
make not his cause the worse by telling me that an unworthy pride, the
grudge of some thwart to his policy or power, has made him forget what
was due to the memory of his kinsman York, to the mangled corpse of
his father Salisbury.  Thinkest thou that but for this I could--" She
stopped, but Hastings divined her thought, and guessed that, if
spoken, it had run thus: "That I could, even now, have received the
homage of one who departs to meet, with banner and clarion, my brother
as his foe?"

The lovely sweetness of the late expression had gone from Katherine's
face, and its aspect showed that her high and ancestral spirit had
yielded but to one passion.  She pursued,--

"While this strife lasts, it becomes my widowhood and kindred position
with the earl to retire to the convent my mother founded.  To-morrow I
depart."

"Alas!" said Hastings, "thou speakest of the strife as if but a single
field.  But Warwick returns not to these shores, nor bows himself to
league with Lancaster, for a chance hazardous and desperate, as Edward
too rashly deems it.  It is in vain to deny that the earl is prepared
for a grave and lengthened war, and much I doubt whether Edward can
resist his power; for the idolatry of the very land will swell the
ranks of so dread a rebel.  What if he succeed; what if we be driven
into exile, as Henry's friends before us; what if the king-maker be
the king-dethroner?  Then, Katherine, then once more thou wilt be at
the best of thy hostile kindred, and once more, dowered as thou art,
and thy womanhood still in its richest bloom, thy hand will be lost to
Hastings."

"Nay, if that be all thy fear, take with thee this pledge,--that
Warwick's treason to the House for which my father fell dissolves his
power over one driven to disown him as a brother,--knowing Earl
Salisbury, had he foreseen such disgrace, had disowned him as a son.
And if there be defeat and flight and exile, wherever thou wanderest,
Hastings, shall Katherine be found beside thee.  Fare thee well, and
Our Lady shield thee! may thy lance be victorious against all foes,--
save one.  Thou wilt forbear my--that is, the earl!"  And Katherine,
softened at that thought, sobbed aloud.

"And come triumph or defeat, I have thy pledge?" said Hastings,
soothing her.

"See," said Katherine, taking the broken ring from the casket; "now,
for the first time since I bore the name of Bonville, I lay this relic
on my heart; art thou answered?"




CHAPTER VI.

HASTINGS LEARNS WHAT HAS BEFALLEN SIBYLL, REPAIRS TO THE KING, AND
ENCOUNTERS AN OLD RIVAL.

"It is destiny," said Hastings to himself, when early the next morning
he was on his road to the farm--"it is destiny,--and who can resist
his fate?"

"It is destiny!"--phrase of the weak human heart!  "It is destiny!"
dark apology for every error!  The strong and the virtuous admit no
destiny!  On earth guides conscience, in heaven watches God.  And
destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one, to dethrone
the other!

Hastings spared not his good steed.  With great difficulty had he
snatched a brief respite from imperious business, to accomplish the
last poor duty now left to him to fulfil,--to confront the maid whose
heart he had seduced in vain, and say at length, honestly and firmly,
"I cannot wed thee.  Forget me, and farewell."

Doubtless his learned and ingenious mind conjured up softer words than
these, and more purfled periods wherein to dress the iron truth.  But
in these two sentences the truth lay.  He arrived at the farm, he
entered the house; he felt it as a reprieve that he met not the
bounding step of the welcoming Sibyll.  He sat down in the humble
chamber, and waited a while in patience,--no voice was heard.  The
silence at length surprised and alarmed him.  He proceeded farther.
He was met by the widowed owner of the house, who was weeping; and her
first greeting prepared him for what had chanced.  "Oh, my lord, you
have come to tell me they are safe, they have not fallen into the
hands of their enemies,--the good gentleman, so meek, the poor lady,
so fair!"

Hastings stood aghast; a few sentences more explained all that he
already guessed.  A strange man had arrived the evening before at the
house, praying Adam and his daughter to accompany him to the Lord
Hastings, who had been thrown from his horse, and was now in a cottage
in the neighbouring lane,--not hurt dangerously, but unable to be
removed, and who had urgent matters to communicate.  Not questioning
the truth of this story, Adam and Sibyll had hurried forth, and
returned no more.  Alarmed by their long absence, the widow, who at
first received the message from the stranger, went herself to the
cottage, and found that the story was a fable.  Every search had since
been made for Adam and his daughter, but in vain.  The widow,
confirmed in her previous belief that her lodgers had been attainted
Lancastrians, could but suppose that they had been thus betrayed to
their enemies.  Hastings heard this with a dismay and remorse
impossible to express.  His only conjecture was that the king had
discovered their retreat, and taken this measure to break off the
intercourse he had so sternly denounced.  Full of these ideas, he
hastily remounted, and stopped not till once more at the gates of the
Tower.  Hastening to Edward's closet, the moment he saw the king, he
exclaimed, in great emotion, "My liege, my liege, do not at this hour,
when I have need of my whole energy to serve thee, do not madden my
brain, and palsy my arm.  This old man--the poor maid--Sibyll--
Warner,--speak, my liege--only tell me they are safe; promise me they
shall go free, and I swear to obey thee in all else!  I will thank
thee in the battlefield!"

"Thou art mad, Hastings!" said the king, in great astonishment.
"Hush!" and he glanced significantly at a person who stood before
several heaps of gold, ranged upon a table in the recess of the room.
"See," he whispered, "yonder is the goldsmith, who hath brought me a
loan from himself and his fellows!  Pretty tales for the city thy
folly will send abroad!"

But before Hastings could vent his impatient answer, this person, to
Edward's still greater surprise, had advanced from his place, and
forgetting all ceremony, had seized Hastings by the hem of his
surcoat, exclaiming,--

"My lord, my lord, what new horror is this?  Sibyll!--methought she
was worthless, and had fled to thee!"

"Ten thousand devils!" shouted the king, "am I ever to be tormented by
that damnable wizard and his witch child?  And is it, Sir Peer and Sir
Goldsmith, in your king's closet that ye come, the very eve before he
marches to battle, to speer and glower at each other like two madmen
as ye are?"

Neither peer nor goldsmith gave way, till the courtier, naturally
recovering himself the first, fell on his knee; and said, with firm
though profound respect: "Sire, if poor William Hastings has ever
merited from the king one kindly thought, one generous word, forgive
now whatever may displease thee in his passion or his suit, and tell
him what prison contains those whom it would forever dishonour his
knighthood to know punished and endangered but for his offence."

"My lord," answered the king, softened but still surprised, "think you
seriously that I, who but reluctantly in this lovely month leave my
green lawns of Shene to save a crown, could have been vexing my brain
by stratagems to seize a lass, whom I swear by Saint George I do not
envy thee in the least?  If that does not suffice, incredulous
dullard, why then take my kingly word, never before passed for so
slight an occasion, that I know nothing whatsoever of thy damsel's
whereabout nor her pestilent father's,--where they abode of late,
where they now be; and, what is more, if any man has usurped his
king's right to imprison the king's subjects, find him out, and name
his punishment.  Art thou convinced?"

"I am, my liege," said Hastings.

"But--" began the goldsmith.

"Holloa, you, too, sir!  This is too much!  We have condescended to
answer the man who arms three thousand retainers--"

"And I, please your Highness, bring you the gold to pay them," said
the trader, bluntly.

The king bit his lip, and then burst into his usual merry laugh.

"Thou art in the right, Master Alwyn.  Finish counting the pieces, and
then go and consult with my chamberlain,--he must off with the cock-
crow; but, since ye seem to understand each other, he shall make thee
his lieutenant of search, and I will sign any order he pleases for the
recovery of the lost wisdom and the stolen beauty.  Go and calm
thyself, Hastings."

"I will attend you presently, my lord," said Alwyn, aside, "in your
own apartment."

"Do so," said Hastings; and, grateful for the king's consideration, he
sought his rooms.  There, indeed, Alwyn soon joined him, and learned
from the nobleman what filled him at once with joy and terror.
Knowing that Warner and Sibyll had left the Tower, he had surmised
that the girl's virtue had at last succumbed; and it delighted him to
hear from Lord Hastings, whose word to men was never questionable, the
solemn assurance of her unstained chastity.  But he trembled at this
mysterious disappearance, and knew not to whom to impute the snare,
till the penetration of Hastings suddenly alighted near, at least, to
the clew.  "The Duchess of Bedford," said he, "ever increasing in
superstition as danger increases, may have desired to refind so great
a scholar and reputed an astrologer and magician; if so, all is safe.
On the other hand, her favourite, the friar, ever bore a jealous
grudge to poor Adam, and may have sought to abstract him from her
grace's search; here there may be molestation to Adam, but surely no
danger to Sibyll.  Hark ye, Alwyn, thou lovest the maid more worthily,
and--"  Hastings stopped short; for such is infirm human nature, that,
though he had mentally resigned Sibyll forever, he could not yet
calmly face the thought of resigning her to a rival.  "Thou lovest
her," he renewed, more coldly, "and to thee, therefore, I may safely
trust the search which time and circumstance and a soldier's duty
forbid to me.  And believe--oh, believe that I say not this from a
passion which may move thy jealousy, but rather with a brother's holy
love.  If thou canst but see her safe, and lodged where no danger nor
wrong can find her, thou hast no friend in the wide world whose
service through life thou mayst command like mine."

"My lord," said Alwyn, dryly, "I want no friends!  Young as I am, I
have lived long enough to see that friends follow fortune, but never
make it!  I will find this poor maid and her honoured father, if I
spend my last groat on the search.  Get me but such an order from the
king as may place the law at my control, and awe even her grace of
Bedford,--and I promise the rest!"

Hastings, much relieved, deigned to press the goldsmith's reluctant
hand; and, leaving him alone for a few minutes, returned with a
warrant from the king, which seemed to Alwyn sufficiently precise and
authoritative.  The goldsmith then departed, and first he sought the
friar, but found him not at home.  Bungey had taken with him, as was
his wont, the keys of his mysterious apartment.  Alwyn then hastened
elsewhere, to secure those experienced in such a search, and to head
it in person.  At the Tower, the evening was passed in bustle and
excitement,--the last preparations for departure.  The queen, who was
then far advanced towards her confinement, was, as we before said, to
remain at the Tower, which was now strongly manned.  Roused from her
wonted apathy by the imminent dangers that awaited Edward, the night
was passed by her in tears and prayers, by him in the sound sleep of
confident valour.  The next morning departed for the North the several
leaders,--Gloucester, Rivers, Hastings, and the king.




CHAPTER VII.

THE LANDING OF LORD WARWICK, AND THE EVENTS THAT ENSUE THEREON.

And Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, "prepared such a greate navie
as lightly hath not been seene before gathered in manner of all
nations, which armie laie at the mouth of the Seyne ready to fight
with the Earl of Warwick, when he should set out of his harborowe."
[Hall, p. 282, ed. 1809.]

But the winds fought for the Avenger.  In the night came "a terrible
tempest," which scattered the duke's ships "one from another, so that
two of them were not in compagnie together in one place;" and when the
tempest had done its work, it passed away; and the gales were fair,
and the heaven was clear, when, the next day, the earl "halsed up the
sayles," and came in sight of Dartmouth.

It was not with an army of foreign hirelings that Lord Warwick set
forth on his mighty enterprise.  Scanty indeed were the troops he
brought from France,--for he had learned from England that "men so
much daily and hourely desired and wished so sore his arrival and
return, that almost all men were in harness, looking for his landyng."
[The popular feeling in favour of the earl is described by Hall, with
somewhat more eloquence and vigour than are common with that homely
chronicler: "The absence of the Earle of Warwick made the common
people daily more and more to long and bee desirous to have the sight
of him, and presently to behold his personage.  For they judged that
the sunne was clerely taken from the world when hee was absent.  In
such high estimation amongst the people was his name, that neither no
one manne they had in so much honour, neither no one persone they so
much praised, or to the clouds so highly extolled.  What shall I say?
His only name sounded in every song, in the mouth of the common
people, and his persone [effigies] was represented with great
reverence when publique plaies or open triumphes should bee skewed or
set furthe abrode in the stretes," etc.  This lively passage, if not
too highly coloured, serves to show us the rude saturnalian kind of
liberty that existed, even under a king so vindictive as Edward IV.
Though an individual might be banged for the jest that he would make
his son heir to the crown (namely, the grocer's shop, which bore that
sign), yet no tyranny could deal with the sentiment of the masses.  In
our own day it would be less safe than in that to make public
exhibition "in plaies and triumphes" of sympathy with a man attainted
as a traitor, and in open rebellion to the crown.]  As his ships
neared the coast, and the banner of the Ragged Staff, worked in gold,
shone in the sun, the shores swarmed with armed crowds, not to resist
but to welcome.  From cliff to cliff, wide and far, blazed rejoicing
bonfires; and from cliff to cliff, wide and far, burst the shout,
when, first of all his men, bareheaded, but, save the burgonet, in
complete mail, the popular hero leaped to shore.

"When the earl had taken land, he made a proclamation, in the name of
King Henry VI., upon high paynes commanding and charging all men apt
or able to bear armour, to prepare themselves to fight against Edward,
Duke of York, who had untruly usurped the croune and dignity of this
realm."  [Hall, p. 82.]

And where was Edward?  Afar, following the forces of Fitzhugh and
Robin of Redesdale, who by artful retreat drew him farther and farther
northward, and left all the other quarters of the kingdom free to send
their thousands to the banners of Lancaster and Warwick.  And even as
the news of the earl's landing reached the king, it spread also
through all the towns of the North; and all the towns of the North
were in "a great rore, and made fires, and sang songs, crying, 'King
Henry! King Henry! a Warwicke! a Warwicke!'"  But his warlike and
presumptuous spirit forsook not the chief of that bloody and fatal
race,--the line of the English Pelops,--"bespattered with kindred
gore."  [Aeschylus: Agamemnon]  A messenger from Burgundy was in his
tent when the news reached him.  "Back to the duke!" cried Edward;
"tell him to recollect his navy, guard the sea, scour the streams,
that the earl shall not escape, nor return to France; for the doings
in England, let me alone!  I have ability and puissance to overcome
all enemies and rebels in mine own realm."  [Hall, p. 283.]

And therewith he raised his camp, abandoned the pursuit of Fitzhugh,
summoned Montagu to join him (it being now safer to hold the marquis
near him, and near the axe, if his loyalty became suspected), and
marched on to meet the earl.  Nor did the earl tarry from the
encounter.  His army, swelling as he passed, and as men read his
proclamations to reform all grievances and right all wrongs, he
pressed on to meet the king, while fast and fast upon Edward's rear
came the troops of Fitzhugh and Hilyard, no longer flying but
pursuing.  The king was the more anxious to come up to Warwick,
inasmuch as he relied greatly upon the treachery of Clarence, either
secretly to betray or openly to desert the earl.  And he knew that if
he did the latter on the eve of a battle, it could not fail morally to
weaken Warwick, and dishearten his army by fear that desertion should
prove, as it ever does, the most contagious disease that can afflict a
camp.  It is probable, however, that the enthusiasm which had
surrounded the earl with volunteers so numerous had far exceeded the
anticipations of the inexperienced Clarence, and would have forbid him
that opportunity of betraying the earl.  However this be, the rival
armies drew nearer and nearer.  The king halted in his rapid march at
a small village, and took up his quarters in a fortified house, to
which there was no access but by a single bridge.  [Sharon Turner,
Comines.]  Edward himself retired for a short time to his couch, for
he had need of all his strength in the battle he foresaw; but scarce
had he closed his eyes, when Alexander Carlile [Hearne: Fragment], the
serjeant of the royal minstrels, followed by Hastings and Rivers
(their jealousy laid at rest for a time in the sense of their king's
danger), rushed into his room.

"Arm, sire, arm!--Lord Montagu has thrown off the mask, and rides
through thy troops, shouting 'Long live King Henry!'"

"Ah, traitor!" cried the king, leaping from his bed.  "From Warwick
hate was my due, but not from Montagu!  Rivers, help to buckle on my
mail.  Hastings, post my body-guard at the bridge.  We will sell our
lives dear."

Hastings vanished.  Edward had scarcely hurried on his helm, cuirass,
and greaves, when Gloucester entered, calm in the midst of peril.

"Your enemies are marching to seize you, brother.  Hark! behind you
rings the cry, 'A Fitzhugh! a Robin! death to the tyrant!'  Hark! in
front, 'A Montagu! a Warwick!  Long live King Henry!'  I come to
redeem my word,--to share your exile or your death.  Choose either
while there is yet time.  Thy choice is mine!"

And while he spoke, behind, before, came the various cries nearer and
nearer.  The lion of March was in the toils.

"Now, my two-handed sword!" said Edward.  "Gloucester, in this weapon
learn my choice!"

But now all the principal barons and captains, still true to the king
whose crown was already lost, flocked in a body to the chamber.  They
fell on their knees, and with tears implored him to save himself for a
happier day.

"There is yet time to escape," said D'Eyncourt, "to pass the bridge,
to gain the seaport!  Think not that a soldier's death will be left
thee.  Numbers will suffice to encumber thine arm, to seize thy
person.  Live not to be Warwick's prisoner,--shown as a wild beast in
its cage to the hooting crowd!"

"If not on thyself," exclaimed Rivers, "have pity on these loyal
gentlemen, and for the sake of their lives preserve thine own.  What
is flight?  Warwick fled!"

"True,--and returned!" added Gloucester.  "You are right, my lords.
Come, sire, we must fly.  Our rights fly not with us, but shall fight
for us in absence!"

The calm WILL of this strange and terrible boy had its effect upon
Edward.  He suffered his brother to lead him from the chamber,
grinding his teeth in impotent rage.  He mounted his horse, while
Rivers held the stirrup, and with some six or seven knights and earls
rode to the bridge, already occupied by Hastings and a small but
determined guard.

"Come, Hastings," said the king, with a ghastly smile,--"they tell us
we must fly!"

"True, sire, haste, haste!  I stay but to deceive the enemy by
feigning to defend the pass, and to counsel, as I best may, the
faithful soldiers we leave behind."

"Brave Hastings!" said Gloucester, pressing his hand, "you do well,
and I envy you the glory of this post. Come, sire."

"Ay, ay," said the king, with a sudden and fierce cry, "we go,--but at
least slaughtering as we go.  See! yon rascal troop! ride we through
their midst!  Havock and revenge!"

He set spurs to his steed, galloped over the bridge, and before his
companions could join him, dashed alone into the very centre of the
advanced guard sent to invest the fortress, and while they were yet
shouting, "Where is the tyrant, where is Edward?"

"Here!" answered a voice of thunder,--"here, rebels and faytors, in
your ranks!"

This sudden and appalling reply, even more than the sweep of the
gigantic sword, before which were riven sallet and mail as the
woodman's axe rives the fagot, created amongst the enemy that singular
panic, which in those ages often scattered numbers before the arm and
the name of one.  They recoiled in confusion and dismay.  Many
actually threw down their arms and fled.  Through a path broad and
clear amidst the forest of pikes, Gloucester and the captains followed
the flashing track of the king, over the corpses, headless or
limbless, that he felled as he rode.

Meanwhile, with a truer chivalry, Hastings, taking advantage of the
sortie which confused and delayed the enemy, summoned such of the
loyal as were left in the fortress, advised them, as the only chance
of life, to affect submission to Warwick; but when the time came, to
remember their old allegiance, [Sharon Turner, vol. iii. 280.] and
promising that he would not desert them, save with life, till their
safety was pledged by the foe, reclosed his visor, and rode back to
the front of the bridge.

And now the king and his comrades had cut their way through all
barrier, but the enemy still wavered and lagged, till suddenly the cry
of "Robin of Redesdale!" was heard, and sword in hand, Hilyard,
followed by a troop of horse, dashed to the head of the besiegers,
and, learning the king's escape, rode off in pursuit.  His brief
presence and sharp rebuke reanimated the falterers, and in a few
minutes they gained the bridge.

"Halt, sirs," cried Hastings; "I would offer capitulation to your
leader!  Who is he?"

A knight on horseback advanced from the rest.  Hastings lowered the
point of his sword.

"Sir, we yield this fortress to your hands upon one condition,--our
men yonder are willing to submit, and shout with you for Henry VI.
Pledge me your word that you and your soldiers spare their lives and
do them no wrong, and we depart."

"And if I pledge it not?" said the knight.

"Then for every warrior who guards this bridge count ten dead men
amongst your ranks."

"Do your worst,--our bloods are up!  We want life for life! revenge
for the subjects butchered by your tyrant chief!  Charge! to the
attack! charge! pike and bill!"  The knight spurred on, the
Lancastrians followed, and the knight reeled from his horse into the
moat below, felled by the sword of Hastings.

For several minutes the pass was so gallantly defended that the strife
seemed uncertain, though fearfully unequal, when Lord Montagu himself,
hearing what had befallen, galloped to the spot, threw down his
truncheon, cried "Hold!" and the slaughter ceased.  To this nobleman
Hastings repeated the terms he had proposed.

"And," said Montagu, turning with anger to the Lancastrians, who
formed a detachment of Fitzhugh's force--"can Englishmen insist upon
butchering Englishmen?  Rather thank we Lord Hastings that he would
spare good King Henry so many subjects' lives!  The terms are granted,
my lord; and your own life also, and those of your friends around you,
vainly brave in a wrong cause.  Depart!"

"Ah, Montagu," said Hastings, touched, and in a whisper, "what pity
that so gallant a gentleman should leave a rebel's blot upon his
scutcheon!"

"When chiefs and suzerains are false and perjured, Lord Hastings,"
answered Montagu, "to obey them is not loyalty, but serfdom; and
revolt is not disloyalty, but a freeman's duty.  One day thou mayst
know that truth, but too late."  [It was in the midst of his own
conspiracy against Richard of Gloucester that the head of Lord
Hastings fell.]

Hastings made no reply, waved his hand to his fellow-defenders of the
bridge, and, followed by them, went slowly and deliberately on, till
clear of the murmuring and sullen foe; then putting spurs to their
steeds, these faithful warriors rode fast to rejoin their king;
overtook Hilyard on the way, and after a fierce skirmish, a blow from
Hastings unhorsed and unhelmed the stalwart Robin, and left him so
stunned as to check further pursuit.  They at last reached the king,
and gaining, with him and his party, the town of Lynn, happily found
one English and two Dutch vessels on the point of sailing.  Without
other raiment than the mail they wore, without money, the men a few
hours before hailed as sovereign or as peers fled from their native
land as outcasts and paupers.  New dangers beset them on the sea: the
ships of the Easterlings, at war both with France and England, bore
down upon their vessels.  At the risk of drowning they ran ashore near
Alcmaer.  The large ships of the Easterlings followed as far as the
low water would permit, "intendeing at the fludde to have obtained
their prey."  [Hall.]  In this extremity, the lord of the province
(Louis of Grauthuse) came aboard their vessels, protected the
fugitives from the Easterlings, conducted them to the Hague, and
apprised the Duke of Burgundy how his brother-in-law had lost his
throne.  Then were verified Lord Warwick's predictions of the faith of
Burgundy!  The duke for whose alliance Edward had dishonoured the man
to whom he owed his crown, so feared the victorious earl, that "he had
rather have heard of King Edward's death than of his discomfiture;"
[Hall, p. 279] and his first thought was to send an embassy to the
king-maker, praying the amity and alliance of the restored dynasty.




CHAPTER VIII.

WHAT BEFELL ADAM WARNER AND SIBYLL WHEN MADE SUBJECT TO THE GREAT
FRIAR BUNGEY.

We must now return to the Tower of London,--not, indeed, to its lordly
halls and gilded chambers, but to the room of Friar Bungey.  We must
go back somewhat in time; and on the day following the departure of
the king and his lords, conjure up in that strangely furnished
apartment the form of the burly friar, standing before the
disorganized Eureka, with Adam Warner by his side.

Graul, as we have seen, had kept her word, and Sibyll and her father,
having fallen into the snare, were suddenly gagged, bound, led through
by-paths to a solitary hut, where a covered wagon was in waiting, and
finally, at nightfall, conducted to the Tower.  The friar, whom his
own repute, jolly affability, and favour with the Duchess of Bedford
made a considerable person with the authorities of the place, had
already obtained from the deputy-governor an order to lodge two
persons, whom his zeal for the king sought to convict of necromantic
practices in favour of the rebellion, in the cells set apart for such
unhappy captives.  Thither the prisoners were conducted.  The friar
did not object to their allocation in contiguous cells; and the jailer
deemed him mighty kind and charitable, when he ordered that they might
be well served and fed till their examination.

He did not venture, however, to summon his captives till the departure
of the king, when the Tower was in fact at the disposition of his
powerful patroness, and when he thought he might stretch his authority
as far as he pleased, unquestioned and unchid.

Now, therefore, on the day succeeding Edward's departure, Adam Warner
was brought from his cell, and led to the chamber where the triumphant
friar received him in majestic state.  The moment Warner entered, he
caught sight of the chaos to which his Eureka was resolved, and
uttering a cry of mingled grief and joy, sprang forward to greet his
profaned treasure.  The friar motioned away the jailer (whispering him
to wait without), and they were left alone.  Bungey listened with
curious and puzzled attention to poor Adam's broken interjections of
lamentation and anger, and at last, clapping him roughly on the back,
said,--

"Thou knowest the secret of this magical and ugly device: but in thy
hands it leads only to ruin and perdition.  Tell me that secret, and
in my hands it shall turn to honour and profit.  Porkey verbey! I am a
man of few words.  Do this, and thou shalt go free with thy daughter,
and I will protect thee, and give thee moneys, and my fatherly
blessing; refuse to do it, and thou shalt go from thy snug cell into a
black dungeon full of newts and rats, where thou shalt rot till thy
nails are like birds' talons, and thy skin shrivelled up into mummy,
and covered with hair like Nebuchadnezzar!"

"Miserable varlet!  Give thee my secret, give thee my fame, my life!
Never!  I scorn and spit at thy malice!"

The friar's face grew convulsed with rage.  "Wretch!" he roared forth,
"darest thou unslip thy hound-like malignity upon great Bungey?
Knowest thou not that he could bid the walls open and close upon thee;
that he could set yon serpents to coil round thy limbs, and yon lizard
to gnaw out thine entrails?  Despise not my mercy, and descend to
plain sense.  What good didst thou ever reap from thy engine?  Why
shouldst thou lose liberty--nay, life--if I will, for a thing that has
cursed thee with man's horror and hate?"

"Art thou Christian and friar to ask me why?  Were not Christians
themselves hunted by wild beasts, and burned at the stake, and boiled
in the caldron for their belief?  Knave, whatever is holiest men ever
persecute.  Read thy Bible!"

"Read the Bible!" exclaimed Bungey, in pious horror at such a
proposition.  "Ah, blasphemer, now I have thee!  Thou art a heretic
and Lollard.  Hollo, there!"

The friar stamped his foot, the door opened; but to his astonishment
and dismay appeared, not the grim jailer, but the Duchess of Bedford
herself, preceded by Nicholas Alwyn.  "I told your Grace truly--see,
lady!" cried the goldsmith.  "Vile impostor, where hast thou hidden
this wise man's daughter?"

The friar turned his dull, bead-like eyes in vacant consternation from
Nicholas to Adam, from Adam to the duchess.  "Sir friar," said
Jacquetta, mildly--for she wished to conciliate the rival seers--"what
means this over-zealous violation of law?  Is it true, as Master Alwyn
affirms, that thou hast stolen away and seducted this venerable sage
and his daughter,--a maid I deemed worthy of a post in my own
household?"

"Daughter and lady," said the friar, sullenly, "this ill faytor, I
have reason to know, has been practising spells for Lord Warwick and
the enemy.  I did but summon him hither that my art might undo his
charms; and as for his daughter, it seemed more merciful to let her
attend him than to leave her alone and unfriended; specially," added
the friar with a grin, "since the poor lord she hath witched is gone
to the wars."

"It is true, then, wretch, that thou or thy caitiffs have dared to lay
hands on a maiden of birth and blood!" exclaimed Alwyn.  "Tremble!--
see, here, the warrant signed by the king, offering a reward for thy
detection, empowering me to give thee up to the laws.  By Saint
Dunstan, but for thy friar's frock, thou shouldst hang!"

"Tut, tut, Master Goldsmith," said the duchess, haughtily, "lower thy
tone.  This holy man is under my protection, and his fault was but
over-zeal.  What were this sage's devices and spells?"

"Marry," said the friar, "that is what your Grace just hindereth my
knowing.  But he cannot deny that he is a pestilent astrologer, and
sends word to the rebels what hours are lucky or fatal for battle and
assault."

"Ha!" said the duchess, "he is an astrologer! true, and came nearer to
the alchemist's truth than any multiplier that ever served me!  My own
astrologer is just dead,--why died he at such a time?  Peace, peace!
be there peace between two so learned men.  Forgive thy brother,
Master Warner!"  Adam had hitherto disdained all participation in this
dialogue.  In fact, he had returned to the Eureka, and was silently
examining if any loss of the vital parts had occurred in its
melancholy dismemberment.  But now he turned round and said, "Lady,
leave the lore of the stars to their great Maker.  I forgive this man,
and thank your Grace for your justice.  I claim these poor fragments,
and crave your leave to suffer me to depart with my device and my
child."

"No, no!" said the duchess, seizing his hand.  "Hist! whatever Lord
Warwick paid thee, I will double.  No time now for alchemy; but for
the horoscope, it is the veriest season.  I name thee my special
astrologer."

"Accept, accept," whispered Alwyn; "for your daughter's sake--for your
own--nay, for the Eureka's!"

Adam bowed his head, and groaned forth, "But I go not hence--no, not a
foot--unless this goes with me.  Cruel wretch, how he hath deformed
it!"

"And now," cried Alwyn, eagerly, "this wronged and unhappy maiden?"

"Go! be it thine to release and bring her to our presence, good
Alwyn," said the duchess; "she shall lodge with her father, and
receive all honour.  Follow me, Master Warner."

No sooner, however, did the friar perceive that Alwyn had gone in
search of the jailer, than he arrested the steps of the duchess, and
said, with the air of a much-injured man,--

"May it please your Grace to remember that unless the greater magician
have all power and aid in thwarting the lesser, the lesser can
prevail; and therefore, if your Grace finds, when too late, that Lord
Warwick's or Lord Fitzhugh's arms prosper, that woe and disaster
befall the king, say not it was the fault of Friar Bungey!  Such
things may be.  Nathless I shall still sweat and watch and toil; and
if, despite your unhappy favour and encouragement to this hostile
sorcerer, the king should beat his enemies, why, then, Friar Bungey is
not so powerless as your Grace holds him.  I have said--Porkey
verbey!--Figilabo et conabo--et perspirabo--et hungerabo--pro vos et
vestros, Amen!"

The duchess was struck by this eloquent appeal; but more and more
convinced of the dread science of Adam by the evident apprehensions of
the redoubted Bungey, and firmly persuaded that she could bribe or
induce the former to turn a science that would otherwise be hostile
into salutary account, she contented herself with a few words of
conciliation and compliment, and summoning the attendants who had
followed her, bade them take up the various members of the Eureka (for
Adam clearly demonstrated that he would not depart without them) and
conducted the philosopher to a lofty chamber, fitted up for the
defunct astrologer.

Hither, in a short time, Alwyn had the happiness of leading Sibyll,
and witnessing the delighted reunion of the child and father.  And
then, after he had learned the brief details of their abduction, he
related how, baffled in all attempt to trace their clew, he had
convinced himself that either the duchess or Bungey was the author of
the snare, returned to the Tower, shown the king's warrant, learned
that an old man and a young female had indeed been admitted into the
fortress, and hurried at once to the duchess, who, surprised at his
narration and complaint, and anxious to regain the services of Warner,
had accompanied him at once to the friar.

"And though," added the goldsmith, "I could indeed procure you
lodgings more welcome to ye elsewhere, yet it is well to win the
friendship of the duchess, and royalty is ever an ill foe.  How came
ye to quit the palace?"

Sibyll changed countenance, and her father answered gravely, "We
incurred the king's displeasure, and the excuse was the popular hatred
of me and the Eureka."

"Heaven made the people, and the devil makes three-fourths of what is
popular!" bluntly said the man of the middle class, ever against both
extremes.

"And how," asked Sibyll, "how, honoured and true friend, didst thou
obtain the king's warrant, and learn the snare into which we had
fallen?"

This time it was Alwyn who changed countenance.  He mused a moment,
and then frankly answering, "Thou must thank Lord Hastings," gave the
explanation already known to the reader.

But the grateful tears this relation called forth from Sibyll, her
clasped hands, her evident emotion of delight and love, so pained poor
Alwyn, that he rose abruptly and took his leave.

And now the Eureka was a luxury as peremptorily forbid to the
astrologer as it had been to the alchemist!  Again the true science
was despised, and the false cultivated and honoured.  Condemned to
calculations which no man (however wise) in that age held altogether
delusive, and which yet Adam Warner studied with very qualified
belief, it happened by some of those coincidences, which have from
time to time appeared to confirm the credulous in judicial astrology,
that Adam's predictions became fulfilled.  The duchess was prepared
for the first tidings that Edward's foes fled before him.  She was
next prepared for the very day in which Warwick landed; and then her
respect for the astrologer became strangely mingled with suspicion and
terror, when she found that he proceeded to foretell but ominous and
evil events; and when at last, still in corroboration of the unhappily
too faithful horoscope, came the news of the king's flight, and the
earl's march upon London, she fled to Friar Bungey in dismay.  And
Friar Bungey said,--

"Did I not warn you, daughter?  Had you suffered me to--"

"True, true!" interrupted the duchess.  "Now take, hang, rack, drown,
or burn your horrible rival, if you will, but undo the charm, and save
us from the earl!"

The friar's eyes twinkled, but to the first thought of spite and
vengeance succeeded another: if he who had made the famous waxen
effigies of the Earl of Warwick were now to be found guilty of some
atrocious and positive violence upon Master Adam Warner, might not the
earl be glad of so good an excuse to put an end to Himself?

"Daughter," said the friar, at that reflection, and shaking his head
mysteriously and sadly, "daughter, it is too late."

The duchess in great despair flew to the queen.  Hitherto she had
concealed from her royal daughter the employment she had given to
Adam; for Elizabeth, who had herself suffered from the popular belief
in Jacquetta's sorceries, had of late earnestly besought her to lay
aside all practices that could be called into question.  Now, however,
when she confessed to the agitated and distracted queen the retaining
of Adam Warner, and his fatal predictions, Elizabeth, who, from
discretion and pride, had carefully hidden from her mother (too
vehement to keep a secret) that offence in the king, the memory of
which had made Warner peculiarly obnoxious to him, exclaimed,--

"Unhappy mother, thou hast employed the very man my fated husband
would the most carefully have banished from the palace, the very man
who could blast his name."

The duchess was aghast and thunderstricken.

"If ever I forsake Friar Bungey again!" she muttered; "OH, THE GREAT
MAN!"

But events which demand a detailed recital now rapidly pressing on,
gave the duchess not even the time to seek further explanation of
Elizabeth's words, much less to determine the doubt that rose in her
enlightened mind whether Adam's spells might not be yet unravelled by
the timely execution of the sorcerer!




CHAPTER IX.

THE DELIBERATIONS OF MAYOR AND COUNCIL, WHILE LORD WARWICK MARCHES
UPON LONDON.

It was a clear and bright day in the first week of October, 1470, when
the various scouts employed by the mayor and council of London came
back to the Guild, at which that worshipful corporation were
assembled,--their steeds blown and jaded, themselves panting and
breathless,--to announce the rapid march of the Earl of Warwick.  The
lord mayor of that year, Richard Lee, grocer and citizen, sat in the
venerable hall in a huge leather chair, over which a pall of velvet
had been thrown in haste, clad in his robes of state, and surrounded
by his aldermen and the magnates of the city.  To the personal love
which the greater part of the body bore to the young and courteous
king was added the terror which the corporation justly entertained of
the Lancastrian faction.  They remembered the dreadful excesses which
Margaret had permitted to her army in the year 1461,--what time, to
use the expression of the old historian, "the wealth of London looked
pale;" and how grudgingly she had been restrained from condemning her
revolted metropolis to the horrors of sack and pillage.  And the
bearing of this august representation of the trade and power of London
was not, at the first, unworthy of the high influence it had obtained.
The agitation and disorder of the hour had introduced into the
assembly several of the more active and accredited citizens not of
right belonging to it; but they sat, in silent discipline and order,
on long benches beyond the table crowded by the corporate officers.
Foremost among these, and remarkable by the firmness and intelligence
of his countenance, and the earnest self-possession with which he
listened to his seniors, was Nicholas Alwyn, summoned to the council
from his great influence with the apprentices and younger freemen of
the city.

As the last scout announced his news and was gravely dismissed, the
lord mayor rose; and being, perhaps, a better educated man than many
of the haughtiest barons, and having more at stake than most of them,
his manner and language had a dignity and earnestness which might have
reflected honour on the higher court of parliament.

"Brethren and citizens," he said, with the decided brevity of one who
felt it no time for many words, "in two hours we shall hear the
clarions of Lord Warwick at our gates; in two hours we shall be
summoned to give entrance to an army assembled in the name of King
Henry.  I have done my duty,--I have manned the walls, I have
marshalled what soldiers we can command, I have sent to the deputy-
governor of the Tower--"

"And what answer gives he, my lord mayor?" interrupted Humfrey
Heyford.

"None to depend upon.  He answers that Edward IV., in abdicating the
kingdom, has left him no power to resist; and that between force and
force, king and king, might makes right."

A deep breath, like a groan, went through the assembly.

Up rose Master John Stokton, the mercer.  He rose, trembling from limb
to limb.

"Worshipful my lord mayor," said he, "it seems to me that our first
duty is to look to our own selves!"

Despite the gravity of the emergence, a laugh burst forth, and was at
once silenced at this frank avowal.

"Yes," continued the mercer, turning round, and striking the table
with his fist, in the action of a nervous man--"yes; for King Edward
has set us the example.  A stout and a dauntless champion, whose whole
youth has been war, King Edward has fled from the kingdom.  King
Edward takes care of himself,--it is our duty to do the same!"

Strange though it may seem, this homely selfishness went at once
through the assembly like a flash of conviction.  There was a burst of
applause, and, as it ceased, the sullen explosion of a bombard (or
cannon) from the city wall announced that the warder had caught the
first glimpse of the approaching army.

Master Stokton started as if the shot had gone near to himself, and
dropped at once into his seat, ejaculating, "The Lord have mercy upon
us!" There was a pause of a moment, and then several of the
corporation rose simultaneously.  The mayor, preserving his dignity,
fixed on the sheriff.

"Few words, my lord, and I have done," said Richard Gardyner--"there
is no fighting without men.  The troops at the Tower are not to be
counted on.  The populace are all with Lord Warwick, even though he
brought the devil at his back.  If you hold out, look to rape and
plunder before sunset to-morrow.  If ye yield, go forth in a body, and
the earl is not the man to suffer one Englishman to be injured in life
or health who once trusts to his good faith.  My say is said."

"Worshipful my lord," said a thin, cadaverous alderman, who rose next,
"this is a judgment of the Lord and His saints.  The Lollards and
heretics have been too much suffered to run at large, and the wrath of
Heaven is upon us."

An impatient murmuring attested the unwillingness of the larger part
of the audience to listen further; but an approving buzz from the
elder citizens announced that the fanaticism was not without its
favourers.  Thus stimulated and encouraged, the orator continued; and
concluded an harangue, interrupted more stormily than all that had
preceded, by an exhortation to leave the city to its fate, and to
march in a body to the New Prison, draw forth five suspected Lollards,
and burn them at Smithfield, in order to appease the Almighty and
divert the tempest!

This subject of controversy once started might have delayed the
audience till the ragged staves of the Warwickers drove them forth
from their hall, but for the sagacity and promptitude of the mayor.

"Brethren," he said, "it matters not to me whether the counsel
suggested be good or bad, in the main; but this have I heard,--there
is small safety in death-bed repentance.  It is too late now to do,
through fear of the devil, what we omitted to do through zeal for the
Church.  The sole question is, 'Fight or make terms.'  Ye say we lack
men; verily, yes, while no leaders are found!  Walworth, my
predecessor, saved London from Wat Tyler.  Men were wanting then till
the mayor and his fellow-citizens marched forth to Mile End.  It may
be the same now.  Agree to fight, and we'll try it.  What say you,
Nicholas Alwyn?--you know the temper of our young men."

Thus called upon, Alwyn rose, and such was the good name he had
already acquired, that every murmur hushed into eager silence.

"My lord mayor," he said, "there is a proverb in my country which
says, 'Fish swim best that's bred in the sea;' which means, I take it,
that men do best what they are trained for!  Lord Warwick and his men
are trained for fighting.  Few of the fish about London Bridge are
bred in that sea.  Cry, 'London to the rescue!'--put on hauberk and
helm, and you will have crowns enough to crack around you.  What
follows?--Master Stokton hath said it: pillage and rape for the city,
gibbet and cord for mayor and aldermen.  Do I say this, loving the
House of Lancaster?  No; as Heaven shall judge me, I think that the
policy King Edward hath chosen, and which costs him his crown to-day,
ought to make the House of York dear to burgess and trader.  He hath
sought to break up the iron rule of the great barons,--and never peace
to England till that be done.  He has failed; but for a day.  He has
yielded for a time; so must we.  'There's a time to squint, and a time
to look even.'  I advise that we march out to the earl, that we make
honourable terms for the city, that we take advantage of one faction
to gain what we have not gained with the other; that we fight for our
profit, not with swords, where we shall be worsted, but in council and
parliament, by speech and petition.  New power is ever gentle and
douce.  What matters to us York or Lancaster?--all we want is good
laws.  Get the best we can from Lancaster, and when King Edward
returns, as return he will, let him bid higher than Henry for our
love.  Worshipful my lords and brethren, while barons and knaves go to
loggerheads, honest men get their own.  Time grows under us like
grass.  York and Lancaster may pull down each other,--and what is
left?  Why, three things that thrive in all weather,--London,
industry; and the people!  We have fallen on a rough time.  Well, what
says the proverb?  'Boil stones in butter, and you may sup the broth.'
I have done."

This characteristic harangue, which was fortunate enough to accord
with the selfishness of each one, and yet give the manly excuse of
sound sense and wise policy to all, was the more decisive in its
effect, inasmuch as the young Alwyn, from his own determined courage,
and his avowed distaste to the Lancaster faction, had been expected to
favour warlike counsels.  The mayor himself, who was faithfully and
personally attached to Edward, with a deep sigh gave way to the
feeling of the assembly.  And the resolution being once come to, Henry
Lee was the first to give it whatever advantage could be derived from
prompt and speedy action.

"Go we forth at once," said he,--"go, as becomes us, in our robes of
state, and with the insignia of the city.  Never be it said that the
guardians of the city of London could neither defend with spirit, nor
make terms with honour.  We give entrance to Lord Warwick.  Well,
then, it must be our own free act.  Come!  Officers of our court,
advance."

"Stay a bit, stay a bit," whispered Stokton, digging sharp claws into
Alwyn's arm; "let them go first,--a word with you, cunning Nick,--a
word."

Master Stokton, despite the tremor of his nerves, was a man of such
wealth and substance, that Alwyn might well take the request, thus
familiarly made, as a compliment not to be received discourteously;
moreover, he had his own reasons for hanging back from a procession
which his rank in the city did not require him to join.

While, therefore, the mayor and the other dignitaries left the hall
with as much state and order as if not going to meet an invading army,
but to join a holiday festival, Nicholas and Stokton lingered behind.

"Master Alwyn," said Stokton, then, with a sly wink of his eye, "you
have this day done yourself great credit; you will rise, I have my eye
on you!  I have a daughter, I have a daughter!  Aha! a lad like you
may come to great things!"

"I am much bounden to you, Master Stokton," returned Alwyn, somewhat
abstractedly; "but what's your will?"

"My will!--hum, I say, Nicholas, what's your advice?  Quite right not
to go to blows.  Odds costards! that mayor is a very tiger!  But don't
you think it would be wiser not to join this procession?  Edward IV.,
an' he ever come back, has a long memory.  He deals at my ware, too,--
a good customer at a mercer's; and, Lord! how much money he owes the
city!--hum!--I would not seem ungrateful."

"But if you go not out with the rest, there be other mercers who will
have King Henry's countenance and favour; and it is easy to see that a
new court will make vast consumption in mercery."

Master Stokton looked puzzled.

"That were a hugeous pity, good Nicholas; and, certes, there is Wat
Smith, in Eastgate, who would cheat that good King Henry, poor man!
which were a shame to the city; but, on the other hand, the Yorkists
mostly pay on the nail (except King Edward, God save him!), and the
Lancastrians are as poor as mice.  Moreover, King Henry is a meek man,
and does not avenge; King Edward, a hot and a stern man, and may call
it treason to go with the Red Rose!  I wish I knew how to decide!  I
have a daughter, an only daughter,--a buxom lass, and well dowered.  I
would I had a sharp son-in-law to advise me!"

"Master Stokton, in one word, then, he never goes far wrong who can
run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.  Good-day to you, I have
business elsewhere."

So saying, Nicholas rather hastily shook off the mercer's quivering
fingers, and hastened out of the hall.

"Verily," murmured the disconsolate Stokton, "run with the hare,
quotha!--that is, go with King Edward; but hunt with the hounds,--that
is, go with King Henry.  Odds costards; it's not so easily done by a
plain man not bred in the North.  I'd best go--home, and do nothing!"

With that, musing and bewildered, the poor man sneaked out, and was
soon lost amidst the murmuring, gathering, and swaying crowds, many
amongst which were as much perplexed as himself.

In the mean while, with his cloak muffled carefully round his face,
and with a long, stealthy, gliding stride, Alwyn made his way through
the streets, gained the river, entered a boat in waiting for him, and
arrived at last at the palace of the Tower.




CHAPTER X.

THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY OF THE EARL--THE ROYAL CAPTIVE IN THE TOWER--THE
MEETING BETWEEN KING-MAKER AND KING.

All in the chambers of the metropolitan fortress exhibited the
greatest confusion and dismay.  The sentinels, it is true, were still
at their posts, men-at-arms at the outworks, the bombards were loaded,
the flag of Edward IV. still waved aloft from the battlements; but the
officers of the fortress and the captains of its soldiery were, some
assembled in the old hall, pale with fear, and wrangling with each
other; some had fled, none knew whither; some had gone avowedly and
openly to join the invading army.

Through this tumultuous and feeble force, Nicholas Alwyn was conducted
by a single faithful servitor of the queen's (by whom he was
expected); and one glance of his quick eye, as he passed along,
convinced him of the justice of his counsels.  He arrived at last, by
a long and winding stair, at one of the loftiest chambers, in one of
the loftiest towers, usually appropriated to the subordinate officers
of the household.

And there, standing by the open casement, commanding some extended
view of the noisy and crowded scene beyond, both on stream and land,
he saw the queen of the fugitive monarch.  By her side was the Lady
Scrope, her most familiar friend and confidant, her three infant
children, Elizabeth, Mary, and Cicely, grouped round her knees,
playing with each other, and unconscious of the terrors of the times;
and apart from the rest stood the Duchess of Bedford, conferring
eagerly with Friar Bungey, whom she had summoned in haste, to know if
his art could not yet prevail over enemies merely mortal.

The servitor announced Alwyn, and retired; the queen turned--"What
news, Master Alwyn?  Quick!  What tidings from the lord mayor?"

"Gracious my queen and lady," said Alwyn, falling on his knees, "you
have but one course to pursue.  Below yon casement lies your barge, to
the right see the round gray tower of Westminster Sanctuary; you have
time yet, and but time!"

The old Duchess of Bedford turned her sharp, bright, gray eyes from
the pale and trembling friar to the goldsmith, but was silent.  The
queen stood aghast. "Mean you," she faltered, at last, "that the city
of London forsakes the king?  Shame on the cravens!"

"Not cravens, my lady and queen," said Alwyn, rising.  "He must have
iron nails that scratches a bear,--and the white bear above all.  The
king has fled, the barons have fled, the soldiers have fled, the
captains have fled,--the citizens of London alone fly not; but there
is nothing save life and property left to guard."

"Is this thy boasted influence with the commons and youths of the
city?"

"My humble influence, may it please your Grace (I say it now openly,
and I will say it a year hence, when King Edward will hold his court
in these halls once again), my influence, such as it is, has been used
to save lives which resistance would waste in vain.  Alack, alack!
'No gaping against an oven,' gracious lady!  Your barge is below.
Again I say there is yet time,--when the bell tolls the next hour that
time will be past!"

"Then Jesu defend these children!" said Elizabeth, bending over her
infants, and weeping bitterly; "I will go!"

"Hold!" said the Duchess of Bedford, "men desert us, but do the
spirits also forsake us?--Speak, friar! canst thou yet do aught for
us?--and if not, thinkest thou it is the right hour to yield and fly?"

"Daughter," said the friar, whose terror might have moved pity, "as I
said before, thank yourself.  This Warner, this--in short, the lesser
magician hath been aided and cockered to countervail the greater, as I
forewarned.  Fly! run! fly!  Verily and indeed it is the prosperest of
all times to save ourselves; and the stars and the book and my
familiar all call out, 'Off and away!'"

"'Fore heaven!" exclaimed Alwyn, who had hitherto been dumb with
astonishment at this singular interlude, "sith he who hath shipped the
devil must make the best of him, thou art for once an honest man and a
wise counsellor.  Hark! the second gun!  The earl is at the gates of
the city!"

The queen lingered no longer; she caught her youngest child in her
arms; the Lady Scrope followed with the two others.  "Come, follow,
quick, Master Alwyn," said the duchess, who, now that she was
compelled to abandon the world of prediction and soothsaying, became
thoroughly the sagacious, plotting, ready woman of this life; "come,
your face and name will be of service to us, an' we meet with
obstruction."

Before Alwyn could reply, the door was thrown abruptly open, and
several of the officers of the household rushed pell-mell into the
royal presence.

"Gracious queen!" cried many voices at once, each with a different
sentence of fear and warning, "fly!  We cannot depend on the soldiers;
the populace are up,--they shout for King Henry; Dr. Godard is
preaching against you at St. Paul's Cross; Sir Geoffrey Gates has come
out of the sanctuary, and with him all the miscreants and outlaws; the
mayor is now with the rebels!  Fly! the sanctuary, the sanctuary!"

"And who amongst you is of highest rank?" asked the duchess, calmly;
for Elizabeth, completely overwhelmed, seemed incapable of speech or
movement.

"I, Giles de Malvoisin, knight banneret," said an old warrior armed
cap-a-pie, who had fought in France under the hero Talbot.

"Then, sir," said the duchess, with majesty, "to your hands I confide
the eldest daughter of your king.  Lead on!--we follow you.
Elizabeth, lean on me."

With this, supporting Elizabeth, and leading her second grandchild,
the duchess left the chamber.

The friar followed amidst the crowd, for well he knew that if the
soldiers of Warwick once caught hold of him, he had fared about as
happily as the fox amidst the dogs; and Alwyn, forgotten in the
general confusion, hastened to Adam's chamber.

The old man, blessing any cause that induced his patroness to dispense
with his astrological labours and restored him to the care of his
Eureka, was calmly and quietly employed in repairing the mischief
effected by the bungling friar; and Sibyll, who at the first alarm had
flown to his retreat, joyfully hailed the entrance of the friendly
goldsmith.

Alwyn was indeed perplexed what to advise, for the principal sanctuary
would, no doubt, be crowded by ruffians of the worst character; and
the better lodgments which that place, a little town in itself, [the
Sanctuary of Westminster was fortified] contained, be already
preoccupied by the Yorkists of rank; and the smaller sanctuaries were
still more liable to the same objection.  Moreover, if Adam should be
recognized by any of the rabble that would meet them by the way, his
fate, by the summary malice of a mob, was certain.  After all, the
Tower would be free from the populace; and as soon as, by a few rapid
questions, Alwyn learned from Sibyll that she had reason to hope her
father would find protection with Lord Warwick, and called to mind
that Marmaduke Nevile was necessarily in the earl's train, he advised
them to remain quiet and concealed in their apartments, and promised
to see and provide for them the moment the Tower was yielded up to the
new government.

The counsel suited both Sibyll and Warner.  Indeed, the philosopher
could not very easily have been induced to separate himself again from
the beloved Eureka; and Sibyll was more occupied at that hour with
thoughts and prayers for the beloved Hastings,--afar, a wanderer and
an exile,--than with the turbulent events amidst which her lot was
cast.

In the storms of a revolution which convulsed a kingdom and hurled to
the dust a throne, Love saw but a single object, Science but its
tranquil toil.  Beyond the realm of men lies ever with its joy and
sorrow, its vicissitude and change, the domain of the human heart.  In
the revolution, the toy of the scholar was restored to him; in the
revolution, the maiden mourned her lover.  In the movement of the
mass, each unit hath its separate passion.  The blast that rocks the
trees shakes a different world in every leaf.




CHAPTER XI.

THE TOWER IN COMMOTION.

On quitting the Tower, Alwyn regained the boat, and took his way to
the city; and here, whatever credit that worthy and excellent
personage may lose in certain eyes, his historian is bound to confess
that his anxiety for Sibyll did not entirely distract his attention
from interest or ambition.  To become the head of his class, to rise
to the first honours of his beloved city of London, had become to
Nicholas Alwyn a hope and aspiration which made as much a part of his
being as glory to a warrior, power to a king, a Eureka to a scholar;
and, though more mechanically than with any sordid calculation or
self-seeking, Nicholas Alwyn repaired to his ware in the Chepe.  The
streets, when he landed, already presented a different appearance from
the disorder and tumult noticeable when he had before passed them.
The citizens now had decided what course to adopt; and though the
shops, or rather booths, were carefully closed, streamers of silk,
cloth of arras and gold, were hung from the upper casements; the
balconies were crowded with holiday gazers; the fickle populace (the
same herd that had hooted the meek Henry when led to the Tower) were
now shouting, "A Warwick!" "A Clarence!" and pouring throng after
throng, to gaze upon the army, which, with the mayor and aldermen, had
already entered the city.  Having seen to the security of his costly
goods, and praised his apprentices duly for their care of his
interests, and their abstinence from joining the crowd, Nicholas then
repaired to the upper story of his house, and set forth from his
casements and balcony the richest stuffs he possessed.  However, there
was his own shrewd, sarcastic smile on his firm lips, as he said to
his apprentices, "When these are done with, lay them carefully by
against Edward of York's re-entry."

Meanwhile, preceded by trumpets, drums, and heralds, the Earl of
Warwick and his royal son-in-law rode into the shouting city.  Behind
came the litter of the Duchess of Clarence, attended by the Earl of
Oxford, Lord Fitzhugh, the Lords Stanley and Shrewsbury, Sir Robert de
Lytton, and a princely cortege of knights, squires, and nobles; while,
file upon file, rank upon rank, followed the long march of the
unresisted armament.

Warwick, clad in complete armour of Milan steel,--save the helmet,
which was borne behind him by his squire,--mounted on his own noble
Saladin, preserved upon a countenance so well suited to command the
admiration of a populace the same character as heretofore of manly
majesty and lofty frankness.  But to a nearer and more searching gaze
than was likely to be bent upon him in such an hour, the dark, deep
traces of care, anxiety, and passion might have been detected in the
lines which now thickly intersected the forehead, once so smooth and
furrowless; and his kingly eye, not looking, as of old, right forward
as he moved, cast unquiet, searching glances about him and around, as
he bowed his bare head from side to side of the welcoming thousands.

A far greater change, to outward appearance, was visible in the fair
young face of the Duke of Clarence.  His complexion, usually sanguine
and blooming, like his elder brother's, was now little less pale than
that of Richard.  A sullen, moody, discontented expression, which not
all the heartiness of the greetings he received could dispel,
contrasted forcibly with the good-humoured, laughing recklessness,
which had once drawn a "God bless him!" from all on whom rested his
light-blue joyous eye.  He was unarmed, save by a corselet richly
embossed with gold.  His short manteline of crimson velvet, his hosen
of white cloth laced with gold, and his low horseman's boots of
Spanish leather curiously carved and broidered, with long golden
spurs; his plumed and jewelled cap; his white charger with housings
enriched with pearls and blazing with cloth-of-gold; his broad collar
of precious stones, with the order of St. George; his general's
truncheon raised aloft, and his Plantagenet banner borne by the herald
over his royal head, caught the eyes of the crowd only the more to
rivet them on an aspect ill fitting the triumph of a bloodless
victory.  At his left hand, where the breadth of the streets
permitted, rode Henry Lee, the mayor, uttering no word, unless
appealed to, and then answering but with chilling reverence and dry
monosyllables.

A narrow winding in the streets, which left Warwick and Clarence alone
side by side, gave the former the opportunity he had desired.

"How, prince and son," he said in a hollow whisper, "is it with this
brow of care that thou saddenest our conquest, and enterest the
capital we gain without a blow?"

"By Saint George!" answered Clarence, sullenly, and in the same tone,
"thinkest thou it chafes not the son of Richard of York, after such
toils and bloodshed, to minister to the dethronement of his kin and
the restoration of the foe of his race?"

"Thou shouldst have thought of that before," returned Warwick, but
with sadness and pity in the reproach.

"Ay, before Edward of Lancaster was made my lord and brother,"
retorted Clarence, bitterly.

"Hush!" said the earl, "and calm thy brow.  Not thus didst thou speak
at Amboise; either thou wert then less frank or more generous.  But
regrets are vain: we have raised the whirlwind, and must rule it."

And with that, in the action of a man who would escape his own
thoughts, Warwick made his black steed demivolte; and the crowd
shouted again the louder at the earl's gallant horsemanship, and
Clarence's dazzling collar of jewels.

While thus the procession of the victors, the nominal object of all
this mighty and sudden revolution--of this stir and uproar, of these
shining arms and flaunting banners, of this heaven or hell in the deep
passions of men--still remained in his prison-chamber of the Tower, a
true type of the thing factions contend for; absent, insignificant,
unheeded, and, save by a few of the leaders and fanatical priests,
absolutely forgotten!

To this solitary chamber we are now transported; yet solitary is a
word of doubtful propriety; for though the royal captive was alone, so
far as the human species make up a man's companionship and solace,
though the faithful gentlemen, Manning, Bedle, and Allerton, had, on
the news of Warwick's landing, been thrust from his chamber, and were
now in the ranks of his new and strange defenders, yet power and
jealousy had not left his captivity all forsaken.  There was still the
starling in its cage, and the fat, asthmatic spaniel still wagged its
tail at the sound of its master's voice, or the rustle of his long
gown.  And still from the ivory crucifix gleamed the sad and holy face
of the God, present alway, and who, by faith and patience, linketh
evermore grief to joy,--but earth to heaven.

The august prisoner had not been so utterly cut off from all knowledge
of the outer life as to be ignorant of some unwonted and important
stir in the fortress and the city.  The squire who had brought him his
morning meal had been so agitated as to excite the captive's
attention, and had then owned that the Earl of Warwick had proclaimed
Henry king, and was on his march to London.  But neither the squire
nor any of the officers of the Tower dared release the illustrious
captive, or even remove him as yet to the state apartments vacated by
Elizabeth.  They knew not what might be the pleasure of the stout earl
or the Duke of Clarence, and feared over-officiousness might be their
worst crime.  But naturally imagining that Henry's first command, at
the new position of things, might be for liberty, and perplexed
whether to yield or refuse, they absented themselves from his summons,
and left the whole tower in which he was placed actually deserted.

From his casement the king could see, however, the commotion, and the
crowds upon the wharf and river, with the gleam of arms and banners;
and hear the sounds of "A Warwick!" "A Clarence!"  "Long live good
Henry VI.!"  A strange combination of names, which disturbed and
amazed him much!  But by degrees the unwonted excitement of perplexity
and surprise settled back into the calm serenity of his most gentle
mind and temper.  That trust in an all-directing Providence, to which
he had schooled himself, had (if we may so say with reverence) driven
his beautiful soul into the opposite error, so fatal to the affairs of
life,--the error that deadens and benumbs the energy of free will and
the noble alertness of active duty.  Why strain and strive for the
things of this world?  God would order all for the best.  Alas! God
hath placed us in this world, each, from king to peasant, with nerves
and hearts and blood and passions to struggle with our kind; and, no
matter how heavenly the goal, to labour with the million in the race!

"Forsooth," murmured the king, as, his hands clasped behind him, he
paced slowly to and fro the floor, "this ill world seemeth but a
feather, blown about by the winds, and never to be at rest. Hark!
Warwick and King Henry,--the lion and the lamb!  Alack, and we are
fallen on no Paradise, where such union were not a miracle!  Foolish
bird!"--and with a pitying smile upon that face whose holy sweetness
might have disarmed a fiend, he paused before the cage and
contemplated his fellow-captive--"foolish bird, the uneasiness and
turmoil without have reached even to thee.  Thou beatest thy wings
against the wires, thou turnest thy bright eyes to mine restlessly.
Why?  Pantest thou to be free,  silly one, that the hawk may swoop on
its defenceless prey?  Better, perhaps, the cage for thee, and the
prison for thy master.  Well, out if thou wilt!  Here at least thou
art safe!" and opening the cage, the starling flew to his bosom, and
nestled there, with its small clear voice mimicking the human sound,--

"Poor Henry, poor Henry!  Wicked men, poor Henry!"

The king bowed his meek head over his favourite, and the fat spaniel,
jealous of the monopolized caress, came waddling towards its master,
with a fond whine, and looked up at him with eyes that expressed more
of faith and love than Edward of York, the ever wooing and ever wooed,
had read in the gaze of woman.

With those companions, and with thoughts growing more and more
composed and rapt from all that had roused and vexed his interest in
the forenoon, Henry remained till the hour had long passed for his
evening meal.  Surprised at last by a negligence which (to do his
jailers justice) had never before occurred, and finding no response to
his hand-bell, no attendant in the anteroom, the outer doors locked as
usual, but the sentinel's tread in the court below hushed and still, a
cold thrill for a moment shot through his blood.--"Was he left for
hunger to do its silent work?"  Slowly he bent his way from the outer
rooms back to his chamber; and, as he passed the casement again, he
heard, though far in the distance, through the dim air of the
deepening twilight, the cry of "Long live King Henry!"

This devotion without, this neglect within, was a wondrous contrast!
Meanwhile the spaniel, with that instinct of fidelity which divines
the wants of the master, had moved snuffling and smelling round and
round the chambers, till it stopped and scratched at a cupboard in the
anteroom, and then with a joyful bark flew back to the king, and
taking the hem of his gown between its teeth, led him towards the spot
it had discovered; and there, in truth, a few of those small cakes,
usually served up for the night's livery, had been carelessly left.
They sufficed for the day's food, and the king, the dog, and the
starling shared them peacefully together.  This done, Henry carefully
replaced his bird in its cage, bade the dog creep to the hearth and
lie still; passed on to his little oratory, with the relics of cross
and saint strewed around the solemn image,--and in prayer forgot the
world!  Meanwhile darkness set in: the streets had grown deserted,
save where in some nooks and by-lanes gathered groups of the soldiery;
but for the most part the discipline in which Warwick held his army
had dismissed those stern loiterers to the various quarters provided
for them, and little remained to remind the peaceful citizens that a
throne had been uprooted, and a revolution consummated, that eventful
day.

It was at this time that a tall man, closely wrapped in his large
horseman's cloak, passed alone through the streets and gained the
Tower.  At the sound of his voice by the great gate, the sentinel
started in alarm; a few moments more, and all left to guard the
fortress were gathered round him.  From these he singled out one of
the squires who usually attended Henry, and bade him light his steps
to the king's chamber.  As in that chamber Henry rose from his knees,
he saw the broad red light of a torch flickering under the chinks of
the threshold; he heard the slow tread of approaching footsteps; the
spaniel uttered a low growl, its eyes sparkling; the door opened, and
the torch borne behind by the squire, and raised aloft so that its
glare threw a broad light over the whole chamber, brought into full
view the dark and haughty countenance of the Earl of Warwick.

The squire, at a gesture from the earl, lighted the sconces on the
wall, the tapers on the table, and quickly vanished.  King-maker and
king were alone!  At the first sight of Warwick, Henry had turned
pale, and receded a few paces, with one hand uplifted in adjuration or
command, while with the other he veiled his eyes,--whether that this
startled movement came from the weakness of bodily nerves, much
shattered by sickness and confinement, or from the sudden emotions
called forth by the aspect of one who had wrought him calamities so
dire.  But the craven's terror in the presence of a living foe was,
with all his meekness, all his holy abhorrence of wrath and warfare,
as unknown to that royal heart as to the high blood of his hero-sire.
And so, after a brief pause, and a thought that took the shape of
prayer, not for safety from peril, but for grace to forgive the past,
Henry VI. advanced to Warwick, who still stood dumb by the threshold,
combating with his own mingled and turbulent emotions of pride and
shame, and said, in a voice majestic even from its very mildness,--

"What tale of new woe and evil hath the Earl of Salisbury and Warwick
come to announce to the poor captive who was once a king?"

"Forgive me!  Forgiveness, Henry, my lord,--forgiveness!" exclaimed
Warwick, falling on his knee.  The meek reproach; the touching words;
the mien and visage altered, since last beheld, from manhood into age;
the gray hairs and bended form of the king, went at once to that proud
heart; and as the earl bent over the wan, thin hand resigned to his
lips, a tear upon its surface out-sparkled all the jewels that it
wore.

"Yet no," continued the earl (impatient, as proud men are, to hurry
from repentance to atonement, for the one is of humiliation and the
other of pride),--"yet no, my liege, not now do I crave thy pardon.
No; but when begirt, in the halls of thine ancestors, with the peers
of England, the victorious banner of Saint George waving above the
throne which thy servant hath rebuilt,--then, when the trumpets are
sounding thy rights without the answer of a foe; then, when from shore
to shore of fair England the shout of thy people echoes to the vault
of heaven,--then will Warwick kneel again to King Henry, and sue for
the pardon he hath not ignobly won!

"Alack, sir," said the king, with accents of mournful yet half-
reproving kindness, "it was not amidst trump and banners that the Son
of God set mankind the exemplar and pattern of charity to foes.  When
thy hand struck the spurs from my heel, when thou didst parade me
through the booting crowd to this solitary cell, then, Warwick, I
forgave thee, and prayed to Heaven for pardon for thee, if thou didst
wrong me,--for myself, if a king's fault had deserved a subject's
harshness.  Rise, Sir Earl; our God is a jealous God, and the attitude
of worship is for Him alone."

Warwick rose from his knee; and the king, perceiving and
compassionating the struggle which shook the strong man's breast, laid
his hand on the earl's shoulder, and said, "Peace be with thee!--thou
hast done me no real harm.  I have been as happy in these walls as in
the green parks of Windsor; happier than in the halls of state or in
the midst of wrangling armies.  What tidings now?"

"My liege, is it possible that you know not that Edward is a fugitive
and a beggar, and that Heaven hath permitted me to avenge at once your
injuries and my own?  This day, without a blow, I have regained your
city of London; its streets are manned with my army.  From the council
of peers and warriors and prelates assembled at my house, I have
stolen hither alone and in secret, that I might be the first to hail
your Grace's restoration to the throne of Henry V."

The king's face so little changed at this intelligence, that its calm
sadness almost enraged the impetuous Warwick, and with difficulty he
restrained from giving utterance to the thought, "He is not worthy of
a throne who cares so little to possess it!"

"Well-a-day!" said Henry, sighing, "Heaven then hath sore trials yet
in store for mine old age!  Tray, Tray!" and stooping, he gently
patted his dog, who kept watch at his feet, still glaring suspiciously
at Warwick, "we are both too old for the chase now!--Will you be
seated, my lord?"

"Trust me," said the earl, as he obeyed the command, having first set
chair and footstool for the king, who listened to him with downcast
eyes and his head drooping on his bosom--"trust me, your later days,
my liege, will be free from the storms of your youth.  All chance of
Edward's hostility is expired.  Your alliance, though I seem boastful
so to speak,--your alliance with one in whom the people can confide
for some skill in war, and some more profound experience of the habits
and tempers of your subjects than your former councillors could
possess, will leave your honoured leisure free for the holy
meditations it affects; and your glory, as your safety, shall be the
care of men who can awe this rebellious world."

"Alliance!" said the king, who had caught but that one word; "of what
speakest thou, Sir Earl?"

"These missives will explain all, my liege; this letter from my lady
the Queen Margaret, and this from your gracious son, the Prince of
Wales."

"Edward! my Edward!" exclaimed the king, with a father's burst of
emotion.  "Thou hast seen him, then,--bears he his health well, is he
of cheer and heart?"

"He is strong and fair, and full of promise, and brave as his
grandsire's sword."

"And knows he--knows he well--that we all are the potter's clay in the
hands of God?"

"My liege," said Warwick, embarrassed, "he has as much devotion as
befits a Christian knight and a goodly prince."

"Ah," sighed the king, "ye men of arms have strange thoughts on these
matters;" and cutting the silk of the letters, he turned from the
warrior.  Shading his face with his hand, the earl darted his keen
glance on the features of the king, as, drawing near to the table, the
latter read the communications which announced his new connection with
his ancient foe.

But Henry was at first so affected by the sight of Margaret's well-
known hand, that he thrice put down her letter and wiped the moisture
from his eyes.

"My poor Margaret, how thou hast suffered!" he murmured; "these very
characters are less firm and bold than they were.  Well, well!" and at
last he betook himself resolutely to the task.  Once or twice his
countenance changed, and he uttered an exclamation of surprise.  But
the proposition of a marriage between Prince Edward and the Lady Anne
did not revolt his forgiving mind, as it had the haughty and stern
temper of his consort.  And when he had concluded his son's epistle,
full of the ardour of his love and the spirit of his youth, the king
passed his left hand over his brow, and then extending his right to
Warwick, said, in accents which trembled with emotion, "Serve my son,
since he is thine, too; give peace to this distracted kingdom, repair
my errors, press not hard upon those who contend against us, and Jesu
and His saints will bless this bond!"

The earl's object, perhaps, in seeking a meeting with Henry so private
and unwitnessed, had been that none, not even his brother, might
hearken to the reproaches he anticipated to receive, or say hereafter
that he heard Warwick, returned as victor and avenger to his native
land, descend, in the hour of triumph, to extenuation and excuse.  So
affronted, imperilled, or to use his own strong word, "so despaired,"
had he been in the former rule of Henry, that his intellect, which,
however vigorous in his calmer moods, was liable to be obscured and
dulled by his passions, had half confounded the gentle king with his
ferocious wife and stern councillors, and he had thought he never
could have humbled himself to the man, even so far as knighthood's
submission to Margaret's sex had allowed him to the woman.  But the
sweetness of Henry's manners and disposition, the saint-like dignity
which he had manifested throughout this painful interview, and the
touching grace and trustful generosity of his last words,--words which
consummated the earl's large projects of ambition and revenge,--had
that effect upon Warwick which the preaching of some holy man,
dwelling upon the patient sanctity of the Saviour, had of old on a
grim Crusader, all incapable himself of practising such meek
excellence, and yet all moved and penetrated by its loveliness in
another; and, like such Crusader, the representation of all mildest
and most forgiving singularly stirred up in the warrior's mind images
precisely the reverse,--images of armed valour and stern vindication,
as if where the Cross was planted sprang from the earth the standard
and the war-horse!

"Perish your foes!  May war and storm scatter them as the chaff!  My
liege, my royal master," continued the earl, in a deep, low, faltering
voice, "why knew I not thy holy and princely heart before?  Why stood
so many between Warwick's devotion and a king so worthy to command it?
How poor, beside thy great-hearted fortitude and thy Christian
heroism, seems the savage valour of false Edward!  Shame upon one who
can betray the trust thou hast placed in him!  Never will I!--Never!
I swear it!  No! though all England desert thee, I will stand alone
with my breast of mail before thy throne!  Oh, would that my triumph
had been less peaceful and less bloodless! would that a hundred
battlefields were yet left to prove how deeply--deeply in his heart of
hearts--Warwick feels the forgiveness of his king!"

"Not so, not so, not so! not battlefields, Warwick!" said Henry.  "Ask
not to serve the king by shedding one subject's blood."

"Your pious will be obeyed!" replied Warwick.  "We will see if mercy
can effect in others what thy pardon effects in me.  And now, my
liege, no longer must these walls confine thee.  The chambers of the
palace await their sovereign.  What ho, there!" and going to the door
he threw it open, and agreeably to the orders he had given below, all
the officers left in the fortress stood crowded together in the small
anteroom, bareheaded, with tapers in their hands, to conduct the
monarch to the halls of his conquered foe.

At the sudden sight of the earl, these men, struck involuntarily and
at once by the grandeur of his person and his animated aspect, burst
forth with the rude retainer's cry, "A Warwick! a Warwick!"

"Silence!" thundered the earl's deep voice.  "Who names the subject in
the sovereign's presence?  Behold your king!"  The men, abashed by the
reproof, bowed their heads and sank on their knees, as Warwick took a
taper from the table, to lead the way from the prison.

Then Henry turned slowly, and gazed with a lingering eye upon the
walls which even sorrow and solitude had endeared.  The little
oratory, the crucifix, the relics, the embers burning low on the
hearth, the rude time-piece,--all took to his thoughtful eye an almost
human aspect of melancholy and omen; and the bird, roused, whether by
the glare of the lights, or the recent shout of the men, opened its
bright eyes, and fluttering restlessly to and fro, shrilled out its
favourite sentence, "Poor Henry! poor Henry!--wicked men!--who would
be a king?"

"Thou hearest it, Warwick?" said Henry, shaking his head.

"Could an eagle speak, it would have another cry than the starling,"
returned the earl, with a proud smile.

"Why, look you," said the king, once more releasing the bird, which
settled on his wrist, "the eagle had broken his heart in the narrow
cage, the eagle had been no comforter for a captive; it is these
gentler ones that love and soothe us best in our adversities.  Tray,
Tray, fawn not now, sirrah, or I shall think thou hast been false in
thy fondness heretofore!  Cousin, I attend you."

And with his bird on his wrist, his dog at his heels, Henry VI.
followed the earl to the illuminated hall of Edward, where the table
was spread for the royal repast, and where his old friends, Manning,
Bedle, and Allerton, stood weeping for joy; while from the gallery
raised aloft, the musicians gave forth the rough and stirring melody
which had gradually fallen out of usage, but which was once the
Norman's national air, and which the warlike Margaret of Anjou had
retaught her minstrels,--"THE BATTLE HYMN OF ROLLO."





BOOK XI.

THE NEW POSITION OF THE KING-MAKER




CHAPTER I.

WHEREIN MASTER ADAM WARNER IS NOTABLY COMMENDED AND ADVANCED--AND
GREATNESS SAYS TO WISDOM, "THY DESTINY BE MINE, AMEN."

The Chronicles inform us, that two or three days after the entrance of
Warwick and Clarence,--namely, on the 6th of October,--those two
leaders, accompanied by the Lords Shrewsbury, Stanley, and a numerous
and noble train, visited the Tower in formal state, and escorted the
king, robed in blue velvet, the crown on his head, to public
thanksgivings at St. Paul's, and thence to the Bishop's Palace, [not
to the Palace at Westminster, as some historians, preferring the
French to the English authorities, have asserted,--that palace was out
of repair] where he continued chiefly to reside.

The proclamation that announced the change of dynasty was received
with apparent acquiescence through the length and breadth of the
kingdom, and the restoration of the Lancastrian line seemed yet the
more firm and solid by the magnanimous forbearance of Warwick and his
councils.  Not one execution that could be termed the act of a private
revenge stained with blood the second reign of the peaceful Henry.
One only head fell on the scaffold,--that of the Earl of Worcester.
[Lord Warwick himself did not sit in judgment on Worcester.  He was
tried and condemned by Lord Oxford.  Though some old offences in his
Irish government were alleged against him, the cruelties which
rendered him so odious were of recent date.  He had (as we before took
occasion to relate) impaled twenty persons after Warwick's flight into
France.  The "Warkworth Chronicle" says, "He was ever afterwardes
greatly behated among the people for this disordynate dethe that he
used, contrary to the laws of the lande."]  This solitary execution,
which was regarded by all classes as a due concession to justice, only
yet more illustrated the general mildness of the new rule.

It was in the earliest days of this sudden restoration that Alwyn
found the occasion to serve his friends in the Tower.  Warwick was
eager to conciliate all the citizens, who, whether frankly or
grudgingly, had supported his cause; and, amongst these, he was soon
informed of the part taken in the Guildhall by the rising goldsmith.
He sent for Alwyn to his house in Warwick-lane, and after
complimenting him on his advance in life and repute, since Nicholas
had waited on him with baubles for his embassy to France, he offered
him the special rank of goldsmith to the king.

The wary, yet honest, trader paused a moment in some embarrassment
before he answered,--

"My good lord, you are noble and gracious eno' to understand and
forgive me when I say that I have had, in the upstart of my fortunes,
the countenance of the late King Edward and his queen; and though the
public weal made me advise my fellow-citizens not to resist your
entry, I would not, at least, have it said that my desertion had
benefited my private fortunes."

Warwick coloured, and his lip curled.  "Tush, man, assume not virtues
which do not exist amongst the sons of trade, nor, much I trow,
amongst the sons of Adam.  I read thy mind.  Thou thinkest it unsafe
openly to commit thyself to the new state.  Fear not,--we are firm."

"Nay, my lord," returned Alwyn, "it is not so.  But there are many
better citizens than I, who remember that the Yorkists were ever
friends to commerce.  And you will find that only by great tenderness
to our crafts you can win the heart of London, though you have passed
its gates."

"I shall be just to all men," answered the earl, dryly; "but if the
flat-caps are false, there are eno' of bonnets of steel to watch over
the Red Rose!"

"You are said, my lord," returned Alwyn, bluntly, "to love the barons,
the knights, the gentry, the yeomen, and the peasants, but to despise
the traders,--I fear me that report in this is true."

"I love not the trader spirit, man,--the spirit that cheats, and
cringes, and haggles, and splits straws for pence, and roasts eggs by
other men's blazing rafters.  Edward of York, forsooth, was a great
trader!  It was a sorry hour for England when such as ye, Nick Alwyn,
left your green villages for loom and booth.  But thus far have I
spoken to you as a brave fellow, and of the north countree.  I have no
time to waste on words.  Wilt thou accept mine offer, or name another
boon in my power?  The man who hath served me wrongs me,--till I have
served him again!"

"My lord, yes; I will name such a boon,--safety, and, if you will,
some grace and honour, to a learned scholar now in the Tower, one Adam
Warner, whom--"

"Now in the Tower!  Adam Warner!  And wanting a friend, I no more an
exile!  That is my affair, not thine.  Grace, honour,--ay, to his
heart's content.  And his noble daughter?  Mort Dieu! she shall choose
her bridegroom among the best of England.  Is she, too, in the
fortress?"

"Yes," said Alwyn, briefly, not liking the last part of the earl's
speech.

The earl rang the bell on his table.  "Send hither Sir Marmaduke
Nevile."

Alwyn saw his former rival enter, and heard the earl commission him to
accompany, with a fitting train, his own litter to the Tower.  "And
you, Alwyn, go with your foster-brother, and pray Master Warner and
his daughter to be my guests for their own pleasure.  Come hither, my
rude Northman,--come.  I see I shall have many secret foes in this
city: wilt not thou at least be Warwick's open friend?"

Alwyn found it hard to resist the charm of the earl's manner and
voice; but, convinced in his own mind that the age was against
Warwick, and that commerce and London would be little advantaged by
the earl's rule, the trading spirit prevailed in his breast.

"Gracious my lord," he said, bending his knee in no servile homage,
"he who befriends my order, commands me."

The proud noble bit his lip, and with a silent wave of his hand
dismissed the foster-brothers.

"Thou art but a churl at best, Nick," said Marmaduke, as the door
closed on the young men.  "Many a baron would have sold his father's
hall for such words from the earl's lip."

"Let barons sell their free conduct for fair words.  I keep myself
unshackled to join that cause which best fills the market and reforms
the law.  But tell me, I pray thee, Sir Knight, what makes Warner and
his daughter so dear to your lord?"

"What! know you not?--and has she not told you?--Ah, what was I about
to say?"

"Can there be a secret between the earl and the scholar?" asked Alwyn,
in wonder.

"If there be, it is our place to respect it," returned the Nevile,
adjusting his manteline; "and now we must command the litter."

In spite of all the more urgent and harassing affairs that pressed
upon him, the earl found an early time to attend to his guests.  His
welcome to Sibyll was more than courteous,--it was paternal.  As she
approached him, timidly and with a downcast eye, he advanced, placed
his hand upon her head,--

"The Holy Mother ever have thee in her charge, child!--This is a
father's kiss, young mistress," added the earl, pressing his lips to
her forehead; "and in this kiss, remember that I pledge to thee care
for thy fortunes, honour for thy name, my heart to do thee service, my
arm to shield from wrong!  Brave scholar, thy lot has become
interwoven with my own.  Prosperous is now my destiny,--my destiny be
thine!  Amen!"

He turned then to Warner, and without further reference to a past
which so galled his proud spirit, he made the scholar explain to him
the nature of his labours.  In the mind of every man who has passed
much of his life in successful action, there is a certain, if we may
so say, untaught mathesis,--but especially among those who have been
bred to the art of war.  A great soldier is a great mechanic, a great
mathematician, though he may know it not; and Warwick, therefore,
better than many a scholar comprehended the principle upon which Adam
founded his experiments.  But though he caught also a glimpse of the
vast results which such experiments in themselves were calculated to
effect, his strong common-sense perceived yet more clearly that the
time was not ripe for such startling inventions.

"My friend," he said, "I comprehend thee passably.  It is clear to me,
that if thou canst succeed in making the elements do the work of man
with equal precision, but with far greater force and rapidity, thou
must multiply eventually, and, by multiplying, cheapen, all the
products of industry; that thou must give to this country the market
of the world; and that thine would be the true alchemy that turneth
all to gold."

"Mighty intellect, thou graspest the truth!" exclaimed Adam.

"But," pursued the earl, with a mixture of prejudice and judgment,
"grant thee success to the full, and thou wouldst turn this bold land
of yeomanry and manhood into one community of griping traders and
sickly artisans.  Mort Dieu! we are over-commerced as it is,--the bow
is already deserted for the ell-measure.  The town populations are
ever the most worthless in war.  England is begirt with mailed foes;
and if by one process she were to accumulate treasure and lose
soldiers, she would but tempt invasion and emasculate defenders.
Verily, I avise and implore thee to turn thy wit and scholarship to a
manlier occupation!"

"My life knows no other object; kill my labour and thou destroyest
me," said Adam, in a voice of gloomy despair.  Alas, it seemed that,
whatever the changes of power, no change could better the hopes of
science in an age of iron!  Warwick was moved.  "Well," he said, after
a pause, "be happy in thine own way.  I will do my best at least to
protect thee.  To-morrow resume thy labours; but this day, at least,
thou must feast with me."

And at his banquet that day, among the knights and barons, and the
abbots and the warriors, Adam sat on the dais near the earl, and
Sibyll at "the mess" of the ladies of the Duchess of Clarence.  And
ere the feast broke up, Warwick thus addressed his company:--

"My friends, though I, and most of us reared in the lap of war, have
little other clerkship than sufficed our bold fathers before us, yet
in the free towns of Italy and the Rhine,--yea, and in France, under
her politic king,--we may see that a day is dawning wherein new
knowledge will teach many marvels to our wiser sons.  Wherefore it is
good that a State should foster men who devote laborious nights and
weary days to the advancement of arts and letters, for the glory of
our common land.  A worthy gentleman, now at this board, hath deeply
meditated contrivances which may make our English artisans excel the
Flemish loons, who now fatten upon our industry to the impoverishment
of the realm.  And, above all, he also purposes to complete an
invention which may render our ship-craft the most notable in Europe.
Of this I say no more at present; but I commend our guest, Master Adam
Warner, to your good service, and pray you especially, worshipful sirs
of the Church now present, to shield his good name from that charge
which most paineth and endangereth honest men.  For ye wot well that
the commons, from ignorance, would impute all to witchcraft that
passeth their understanding.  Not," added the earl, crossing himself,
"that witchcraft does not horribly infect the land, and hath been
largely practised by Jacquetta of Bedford, and her confederates,
Bungey and others.  But our cause needeth no such aid; and all that
Master Warner purposes is in behalf of the people, and in conformity
with Holy Church.  So this wassail to his health and House."

This characteristic address being received with respect, though with
less applause than usually greeted the speeches of the great earl,
Warwick added, in a softer and more earnest tone, "And in the fair
demoiselle, his daughter, I pray you to acknowledge the dear friend of
my beloved lady and child, Anne, Princess of Wales; and for the sake
of her highness and in her name, I arrogate to myself a share with
Master Warner in this young donzell's guardianship and charge.  Know
ye, my gallant gentles and fair squires, that he who can succeed in
achieving, either by leal love or by bold deeds, as best befit a
wooer, the grace of my young ward, shall claim from my hands a
knight's fee, with as much of my best land as a bull's hide can cover;
and when heaven shall grant safe passage to the Princess Anne and her
noble spouse, we will hold at Smithfield a tourney in honor of Saint
George and our ladies, wherein, pardie, I myself would be sorely
tempted to provoke my jealous countess, and break a lance for the fame
of the demoiselle whose fair face is married to a noble heart."

That evening, in the galliard, many an admiring eye turned to Sibyll,
and many a young gallant, recalling the earl's words, sighed to win
her grace.  There had been a time when such honour and such homage
would have, indeed, been welcome; but now ONE saw them not, and they
were valueless.  All that, in her earlier girlhood, Sibyll's ambition
had coveted, when musing on the brilliant world, seemed now well-nigh
fulfilled,--her father protected by the first noble of the land, and
that not with the degrading condescension of the Duchess of Bedford,
but as Power alone should protect Genius, honoured while it honours;
her gentle birth recognized; her position elevated; fair fortunes
smiling after such rude trials; and all won without servility or
abasement.  But her ambition having once exhausted itself in a diviner
passion, all excitement seemed poor and spiritless compared to the
lonely waiting at the humble farm for the voice and step of Hastings.
Nay, but for her father's sake, she could almost have loathed the
pleasure and the pomp, and the admiration and the homage, which seemed
to insult the reverses of the wandering exile.

The earl had designed to place Sibyll among Isabel's ladies, but the
haughty air of the duchess chilled the poor girl; and pleading the
excuse that her father's health required her constant attendance, she
prayed permission to rest with Warner wherever he might be lodged.
Adam himself, now that the Duchess of Bedford and Friar Bungey were no
longer in the Tower, entreated permission to return to the place where
he had worked the most successfully upon the beloved Eureka; and, as
the Tower seemed a safer residence than any private home could be,
from popular prejudice and assault, Warwick kindly offered apartments,
far more commodious than they had yet occupied, to be appropriated to
the father and daughter.  Several attendants were assigned to them,
and never was man of letters or science more honoured now than the
poor scholar who, till then, had been so persecuted and despised.

Who shall tell Adam's serene delight?  Alchemy and astrology at rest,
no imperious duchess, no hateful Bungey, his free mind left to its
congenial labours!  And Sibyll, when they met, strove to wear a
cheerful brow, praying him only never to speak to her of Hastings.
The good old man, relapsing into his wonted mechanical existence,
hoped she had forgotten a girl's evanescent fancy.

But the peculiar distinction showed by the earl to Warner confirmed
the reports circulated by Bungey,--"that he was, indeed, a fearful
nigromancer, who had much helped the earl in his emprise."  The earl's
address to his guests in behalf both of Warner and Sibyll, the high
state accorded to the student, reached even the Sanctuary; for the
fugitives there easily contrived to learn all the gossip of the city.
Judge of the effect the tale produced upon the envious Bungey! judge
of the representations it enabled him to make to the credulous
duchess!  It was clear now to Jacquetta as the sun in noonday that
Warwick rewarded the evil-predicting astrologer for much dark and
secret service, which Bungey, had she listened to him, might have
frustrated; and she promised the friar that, if ever again she had the
power, Warner and the Eureka should be placed at his sole mercy and
discretion.

The friar himself, however, growing very weary of the dulness of the
Sanctuary, and covetous of the advantages enjoyed by Adam, began to
meditate acquiescence in the fashion of the day, and a transfer of his
allegiance to the party in power.  Emboldened by the clemency of the
victors, learning that no rewards for his own apprehension had been
offered, hoping that the stout earl would forget or forgive the old
offence of the waxen effigies, and aware of the comparative security
his friar's gown and cowl afforded him, he resolved one day to venture
forth from his retreat.  He even flattered himself that he could
cajole Adam--whom he really believed the possessor of some high and
weird secrets, but whom otherwise he despised as a very weak creature
--into forgiving his past brutalities, and soliciting the earl to take
him into favour.

At dusk, then, and by the aid of one of the subalterns of the Tower,
whom he had formerly made his friend, the friar got admittance into
Warner's chamber.  Now it so chanced that Adam, having his own
superstitions, had lately taken it into his head that all the various
disasters which had befallen the Eureka, together with all the little
blemishes and defects that yet marred its construction, were owing to
the want of the diamond bathed in the mystic moonbeams, which his
German authority had long so emphatically prescribed; and now that a
monthly stipend far exceeding his wants was at his disposal, and that
it became him to do all possible honour to the earl's patronage, he
resolved that the diamond should be no longer absent from the
operations it was to influence.  He obtained one of passable size and
sparkle, exposed it the due number of nights to the new moon, and had
already prepared its place in the Eureka, and was contemplating it
with solemn joy, when Bungey entered.

"Mighty brother," said the friar, bowing to the ground, "be merciful
as thou art strong!  Verily thou hast proved thyself the magician, and
I but a poor wretch in comparison,--for lo! thou art rich and
honoured, and I poor and proscribed.  Deign to forgive thine enemy,
and take him as thy slave by right of conquest. Oh, Cogsbones! oh,
Gemini! what a jewel thou hast got!"

"Depart! thou disturbest me," said Adam, oblivious, in his absorption,
of the exact reasons for his repugnance, but feeling indistinctly that
something very loathsome and hateful was at his elbow; and, as he
spoke, he fitted the diamond into its socket.

"What! a jewel, a diamond--in the--in the--in the--MECHANICAL!"
faltered the friar, in profound astonishment, his mouth watering at
the sight.  If the Eureka were to be envied before, how much more
enviable now.  "If ever I get thee again, O ugly talisman," he
muttered to himself, "I shall know where to look for something better
than a pot to boil eggs."

"Depart, I say!" repeated Adam, turning round at last, and shuddering
as he now clearly recognized the friar, and recalled his malignity.
"Darest thou molest me still?"

The friar abjectly fell on his knees, and, after a long exordium of
penitent excuses, entreated the scholar to intercede in his favour
with the earl.

"I want not all thy honours and advancement, great Adam, I want only
to serve thee, trim thy furnace, and hand thee thy tools, and work out
my apprenticeship under thee, master.  As for the earl, he will listen
to thee, I know, if thou tellest him that I had the trust of his foe,
the duchess; that I can give him all her closest secrets; that I--"

"Avaunt!  Thou art worse than I deemed thee, wretch!  Cruel and
ignorant I knew thee,--and now mean and perfidious!  I work with thee!
I commend to the earl a living disgrace to the name of scholar!
Never!  If thou wantest bread and alms, those I can give, as a
Christian gives to want; but trust and honour, and learned repute and
noble toils, those are not for the impostor and the traitor.  There,
there, there!"  And he ran to the closet, took out a handful of small
coins, thrust them into the friar's hands, and, pushing him to the
door, called to the servants to see his visitor to the gates.  The
friar turned round with a scowl.  He did not dare to utter a threat,
but he vowed a vow in his soul, and went his way.

It chanced, some days after this, that Adam, in one of his musing
rambles about the precincts of the Tower, which (since it was not then
inhabited as a palace) was all free to his rare and desultory
wanderings, came by some workmen employed in repairing a bombard; and
as whatever was of mechanical art always woke his interest, he paused,
and pointed out to them a very simple improvement which would
necessarily tend to make the balls go farther and more direct to their
object.  The principal workman, struck with his remarks, ran to one of
the officers of the Tower; the officer came to listen to the learned
man, and then went to the earl of Warwick to declare that Master
Warner had the most wonderful comprehension of military mechanism.
The earl sent for Warner, seized at once upon the very simple truth he
suggested as to the proper width of the bore, and holding him in
higher esteem than he had ever done before, placed some new cannon he
was constructing under his superintendence.  As this care occupied but
little of his time, Warner was glad to show gratitude to the earl,
looking upon the destructive engines as mechanical contrivances, and
wholly unconscious of the new terror he gave to his name.

Soon did the indignant and conscience-stricken Duchess of Bedford
hear, in the Sanctuary, that the fell wizard she had saved from the
clutches of Bungey was preparing the most dreadful, infallible, and
murtherous instruments of war against the possible return of her son-
in-law!

Leaving Adam to his dreams, and his toils, and his horrible
reputation, we return to the world upon the surface,--the Life of
Action.




CHAPTER II.

THE PROSPERITY OF THE OUTER SHOW--THE CARES OF THE INNER MAN.

The position of the king-maker was, to a superficial observer, such as
might gratify to the utmost the ambition and the pride of man.  He had
driven from the land one of the most gorgeous princes and one of the
boldest warriors that ever sat upon a throne.  He had changed a
dynasty without a blow.  In the alliances of his daughters, whatever
chanced, it seemed certain that by one or the other his posterity
would be the kings of England.

The easiness of his victory appeared to prove of itself that the
hearts of the people were with him; and the parliament that he
hastened to summon confirmed by law the revolution achieved by a
bloodless sword.  [Lingard, Hume, etc.]

Nor was there aught abroad which menaced disturbance to the peace at
home.  Letters from the Countess of Warwick and Lady Anne announced
their triumphant entry at Paris, where Margaret of Anjou was received
with honours never before rendered but to a queen of France.

A solemn embassy, meanwhile, was preparing to proceed from Paris to
London to congratulate Henry, and establish a permanent treaty of
peace and commerce, [Rymer, xi., 682-690] while Charles of Burgundy
himself (the only ally left to Edward) supplicated for the continuance
of amicable relations with England, stating that they were formed with
the country, not with any special person who might wear the crown;
[Hume, Comines] and forbade his subjects by proclamation to join any
enterprise for the recovery of his throne which Edward might attempt.

The conduct of Warwick, whom the parliament had declared, conjointly
with Clarence, protector of the realm during the minority of the
Prince of Wales, was worthy of the triumph he had obtained.  He
exhibited now a greater genius for government than he had yet
displayed; for all his passions were nerved to the utmost, to
consummate his victory and sharpen his faculties.  He united mildness
towards the defeated faction with a firmness which repelled all
attempt at insurrection.  [Habington.]

In contrast to the splendour that surrounded his daughter Anne, all
accounts spoke of the humiliation to which Charles subjected the
exiled king; and in the Sanctuary, amidst homicides and felons, the
wife of the earl's defeated foe gave birth to a male child, baptized
and christened (says the chronicler) "as the son of a common man."
For the Avenger and his children were regal authority and gorgeous
pomp, for the fugitive and his offspring were the bread of the exile,
or the refuge of the outlaw.

But still the earl's prosperity was hollow, the statue of brass stood
on limbs of clay.  The position of a man with the name of subject, but
the authority of king, was an unpopular anomaly in England.  In the
principal trading-towns had been long growing up that animosity
towards the aristocracy of which Henry VII. availed himself to raise a
despotism (and which, even in our day, causes the main disputes of
faction); but the recent revolution was one in which the towns had had
no share.  It was a revolution made by the representative of the
barons and his followers.  It was connected with no advancement of the
middle class; it seemed to the men of commerce but the violence of a
turbulent and disappointed nobility.  The very name given to Warwick's
supporters was unpopular in the towns.  They were not called the
Lancastrians, or the friends of King Henry,--they were styled then,
and still are so, by the old chronicler, "The Lord's Party."  Most of
whatever was still feudal--the haughtiest of the magnates, the rudest
of the yeomanry, the most warlike of the knights--gave to Warwick the
sanction of their allegiance; and this sanction was displeasing to the
intelligence of the towns.

Classes in all times have a keen instinct of their own class-
interests.  The revolution which the earl had effected was the triumph
of aristocracy; its natural results would tend to strengthen certainly
the moral, and probably the constitutional, power already possessed by
that martial order.  The new parliament was their creature, Henry VI.
was a cipher, his son a boy with unknown character, and according to
vulgar scandal, of doubtful legitimacy, seemingly bound hand and foot
in the trammels of the archbaron's mighty House; the earl himself had
never scrupled to evince a distaste to the change in society which was
slowly converting an agricultural into a trading population.

It may be observed, too, that a middle class as rarely unites itself
with the idols of the populace as with the chiefs of a seignorie.
The brute attachment of the peasants and the mobs to the gorgeous and
lavish earl seemed to the burgesses the sign of a barbaric clanship,
opposed to that advance in civilization towards which they half
unconsciously struggled.

And here we must rapidly glance at what, as far as a statesman may
foresee, would have been the probable result of Warwick's ascendancy,
if durable and effectual.  If attached, by prejudice and birth, to the
aristocracy, he was yet by reputation and habit attached also to the
popular party,--that party more popular than the middle class,--the
majority, the masses.  His whole life had been one struggle against
despotism in the crown.  Though far from entertaining such schemes as
in similar circumstances might have occurred to the deep sagacity of
an Italian patrician for the interest of his order, no doubt his
policy would have tended to this one aim,--the limitation of the
monarchy by the strength of an aristocracy endeared to the
agricultural population, owing to that population its own powers of
defence, with the wants and grievances of that population thoroughly
familiar, and willing to satisfy the one and redress the other: in
short, the great baron would have secured and promoted liberty
according to the notions of a seigneur and a Norman, by making the
king but the first nobleman of the realm.  Had the policy lasted long
enough to succeed, the subsequent despotism, which changed a limited
into an absolute monarchy under the Tudors, would have been prevented,
with all the sanguinary reaction in which the Stuarts were the
sufferers.  The earl's family, and his own "large father-like heart,"
had ever been opposed to religious persecution; and timely toleration
to the Lollards might have prevented the long-delayed revenge of their
posterity, the Puritans.  Gradually, perhaps, might the system he
represented (of the whole consequences of which he was unconscious)
have changed monarchic into aristocratic government, resting, however,
upon broad and popular institutions; but no doubt, also, the middle,
or rather the commercial class, with all the blessings that attend
their power, would have risen much more slowly than when made as they
were already, partially under Edward IV., and more systematically
under Henry VIL, the instrument for destroying feudal aristocracy, and
thereby establishing for a long and fearful interval the arbitrary
rule of the single tyrant.  Warwick's dislike to the commercial biases
of Edward was, in fact, not a patrician prejudice alone.  It required
no great sagacity to perceive that Edward had designed to raise up a
class that, though powerful when employed against the barons, would
long be impotent against the encroachments of the crown; and the earl
viewed that class not only as foes to his own order, but as tools for
the destruction of the ancient liberties.

Without presuming to decide which policy, upon the whole, would have
been the happier for England,--the one that based a despotism on the
middle class, or the one that founded an aristocracy upon popular
affection,--it was clear to the more enlightened burgesses of the
great towns, that between Edward of York and the Earl of Warwick a
vast principle was at stake, and the commercial king seemed to them a
more natural ally than the feudal baron; and equally clear it is to
us, now, that the true spirit of the age fought for the false Edward,
and against the honest earl.

Warwick did not, however, apprehend any serious results from the
passive distaste of the trading towns.  His martial spirit led him to
despise the least martial part of the population.  He knew that the
towns would not rise in arms so long as their charters were respected;
and that slow, undermining hostility which exists only in opinion, his
intellect, so vigorous in immediate dangers, was not far-sighted
enough to comprehend.  More direct cause for apprehension would there
have been to a suspicious mind in the demeanour of the earl's
colleague in the Protectorate,--the Duke of Clarence.  It was
obviously Warwick's policy to satisfy this weak but ambitious person.
The duke was, as before agreed, declared heir to the vast possessions
of the House of York.  He was invested with the Lieutenancy of
Ireland, but delayed his departure to his government till the arrival
of the Prince of Wales.  The personal honours accorded him in the mean
while were those due to a sovereign; but still the duke's brow was
moody, though, if the earl noticed it, Clarence rallied into seeming
cheerfulness, and reiterated pledges of faith and friendship.

The manner of Isabel to her father was varying and uncertain: at one
time hard and cold; at another, as if in the reaction of secret
remorse, she would throw herself into his arms, and pray him,
weepingly, to forgive her wayward humours.  But the curse of the
earl's position was that which he had foreseen before quitting
Amboise, and which, more or less, attends upon those who from whatever
cause suddenly desert the party with which all their associations,
whether of fame or friendship, have been interwoven.  His vengeance
against one had comprehended many still dear to him.  He was not only
separated from his old companions in arms, but he had driven their
most eminent into exile.  He stood alone amongst men whom the habits
of an active life had indissolubly connected, in his mind, with
recollections of wrath and wrong.  Amidst that princely company which
begirt him, he hailed no familiar face.  Even many of those who most
detested Edward (or rather the Woodvilles) recoiled from so startling
a desertion to the Lancastrian foe.  It was a heavy blow to a heart
already bruised and sore, when the fiery Raoul de Fulke, who had so
idolized Warwick, that, despite his own high lineage, he had worn his
badge upon his breast, sought him at the dead of night, and thus
said,--

"Lord of Salisbury and Warwick, I once offered to serve thee as a
vassal, if thou wouldst wrestle with lewd Edward for the crown which
only a manly brow should wear; and hadst thou now returned, as Henry
of Lancaster returned of old, to gripe the sceptre of the Norman with
a conqueror's hand, I had been the first to cry, 'Long live King
Richard, namesake and emulator of Coeur de Lion!'  But to place upon
the throne yon monk-puppet, and to call on brave hearts to worship a
patterer of aves and a counter of beads; to fix the succession of
England in the adulterous offspring of Margaret, the butcher-harlot
[One of the greatest obstacles to the cause of the Red Rose was the
popular belief that the young prince was not Henry's son.  Had that
belief not been widely spread and firmly maintained, the lords who
arbitrated between Henry VI. and Richard Duke of York, in October,
1460, could scarcely have come to the resolution to set aside the
Prince of Wales altogether, to accord Henry the crown for his life,
and declare the Duke of York his heir.  Ten years previously (in
November, 1450), before the young prince was born or thought of, and
the proposition was really just and reasonable, it was moved in the
House of Commons to declare Richard Duke of York next heir to Henry;
which, at least, by birthright, he certainly was; but the motion met
with little favour and the mover was sent to the Tower.]; to give the
power of the realm to the men against whom thou thyself hast often led
me to strive with lance and battle-axe, is to open a path which leads
but to dishonour, and thither Raoul de Fulke follows not even the
steps of the Lord of Warwick.  Interrupt me not! speak not!  As thou
to Edward, so I now to thee, forswear allegiance, and I bid thee
farewell forever!"

"I pardon thee," answered Warwick; "and if ever thou art wronged as I
have been, thy heart will avenge me.  Go!"  But when this haughty
visitor was gone, the earl covered his face with his hands, and
groaned aloud.  A defection perhaps even more severely felt came next.
Katherine de Bonville had been the earl's favourite sister; he wrote
to her at the convent to which she had retired, praying her
affectionately to come to London, "and cheer his vexed spirit, and
learn the true cause, not to be told by letter, which had moved him to
things once farthest from his thought."  The messenger came back, the
letter unopened; for Katherine had left the convent, and fled into
Burgundy, distrustful, as it seemed to Warwick, of her own brother.
The nature of this lion-hearted man was, as we have seen, singularly
kindly, frank, and affectionate; and now in the most critical, the
most anxious, the most tortured period of his life, confidence and
affection were forbidden to him.  What had he not given for one hour
of the soothing company of his wife, the only being in the world to
whom his pride could have communicated the grief of his heart, or the
doubts of his conscience!  Alas! never on earth should he hear that
soft voice again!  Anne, too, the gentle, childlike Anne, was afar;
but she was happy,--a basker in the brief sunshine, and blind to the
darkening clouds.  His elder child, with her changeful moods, added
but to his disquiet and unhappiness.  Next to Edward, Warwick of all
the House of York had loved Clarence, though a closer and more
domestic intimacy had weakened the affection by lessening the esteem.
But looking further into the future, he now saw in this alliance the
seeds of many a rankling sorrow.  The nearer Anne and her spouse to
power and fame, the more bitter the jealousy of Clarence and his wife.
Thus, in the very connections which seemed most to strengthen his
House, lay all which must destroy the hallowed unity and peace of
family and home.

The Archbishop of York had prudently taken no part whatever in the
measures that had changed the dynasty.  He came now to reap the
fruits; did homage to Henry VI., received the Chancellor's seals, and
recommenced intrigues for the Cardinal's hat.  But between the bold
warrior and the wily priest there could be but little of the
endearment of brotherly confidence and love.  With Montagu alone could
the earl confer in cordiality and unreserve; and their similar
position, and certain points of agreement in their characters, now
more clearly brought out and manifest, served to make their friendship
for each other firmer and more tender, in the estrangement of all
other ties, than ever it had been before.  But the marquis was soon
compelled to depart from London, to his post as warden of the northern
marches; for Warwick had not the rash presumption of Edward, and
neglected no precaution against the return of the dethroned king.

So there, alone, in pomp and in power, vengeance consummated, ambition
gratified, but love denied; with an aching heart and a fearless front;
amidst old foes made prosperous, and old friends alienated and ruined,
stood the king-maker! and, day by day, the untimely streaks of gray
showed more and more amidst the raven curls of the strong man.




CHAPTER III.

FURTHER VIEWS INTO THE HEART OF MAN, AND THE CONDITIONS OF POWER.

But woe to any man who is called to power with exaggerated
expectations of his ability to do good!  Woe to the man whom the
populace have esteemed a popular champion, and who is suddenly made
the guardian of law!  The Commons of England had not bewailed the
exile of the good earl simply for love of his groaning table and
admiration of his huge battle-axe,--it was not merely either in pity,
or from fame, that his "name had sounded in every song," and that, to
use the strong expression of the chronicler, the people "judged that
the sun was clearly taken from the world when he was absent."

They knew him as one who had ever sought to correct the abuses of
power, to repair the wrongs of the poor; who even in war had forbidden
his knights to slay the common men.  He was regarded, therefore, as a
reformer; and wonderful indeed were the things, proportioned to his
fame and his popularity, which he was expected to accomplish; and his
thorough knowledge of the English character, and experience of every
class,--especially the lowest as the highest,--conjoined with the
vigour of his robust understanding, unquestionably enabled him from
the very first to put a stop to the lawless violences which had
disgraced the rule of Edward.  The infamous spoliations of the royal
purveyors ceased; the robber-like excesses of the ruder barons and
gentry were severely punished; the country felt that a strong hand
held the reins of power.  But what is justice when men ask miracles?
The peasant and mechanic were astonished that wages were not doubled,
that bread was not to be had for asking, that the disparities of life
remained the same,--the rich still rich, the poor still poor.  In the
first days of the revolution, Sir Geoffrey Gates, the freebooter,
little comprehending the earl's merciful policy, and anxious naturally
to turn a victory into its accustomed fruit of rapine and pillage,
placed himself at the head of an armed mob, marched from Kent to the
suburbs of London, and, joined by some of the miscreants from the
different Sanctuaries, burned and pillaged, ravished and slew.  The
earl quelled this insurrection with spirit and ease; [Hall, Habington]
and great was the praise he received thereby.  But all-pervading is
the sympathy the poor feel for the poor.  And when even the refuse of
the populace once felt the sword of Warwick, some portion of the
popular enthusiasm must have silently deserted him.

Robert Hilyard, who had borne so large a share in the restoration of
the Lancastrians, now fixed his home in the metropolis; and anxious as
ever to turn the current to the popular profit, he saw with rage and
disappointment that as yet no party but the nobles had really
triumphed.  He had longed to achieve a revolution that might be called
the People's; and he had abetted one that was called "the Lord's
doing."  The affection he had felt for Warwick arose principally from
his regarding him as an instrument to prepare society for the more
democratic changes he panted to effect; and, lo! he himself had been
the instrument to strengthen the aristocracy.  Society resettled after
the storm, the noble retained his armies, the demagogue had lost his
mobs!  Although through England were scattered the principles which
were ultimately to destroy feudalism, to humble the fierce barons into
silken lords, to reform the Church, to ripen into a commonwealth
through the representative system,--the principles were but in the
germ; and when Hilyard mingled with the traders or the artisans of
London, and sought to form a party which might comprehend something of
steady policy and definite object, he found himself regarded as a
visionary fanatic by some, as a dangerous dare-devil by the rest.
Strange to say, Warwick was the only man who listened to him with
attention; the man behind the age and the man before the age ever have
some inch of ground in common both desired to increase liberty; both
honestly and ardently loved the masses; but each in the spirit of his
order,--Warwick defended freedom as against the throne, Hilyard as
against the barons.  Still, notwithstanding their differences, each
was so convinced of the integrity of the other,--that it wanted only
a foe in the field to unite them as before.  The natural ally of the
popular baron was the leader of the populace.

Some minor, but still serious, griefs added to the embarrassment of
the earl's position.  Margaret's jealousy had bound him to defer all
rewards to lords and others, and encumbered with a provisional council
all great acts of government, all grants of offices, lands, or
benefits.  [Sharon Turner]  And who knows not the expectations of men
after a successful revolution?  The royal exchequer was so empty that
even the ordinary household was suspended; [See Ellis: Original
Letters from Harleian Manuscripts, second series, vol. i., letter 42.]
and as ready money was then prodigiously scarce, the mighty revenues
of Warwick barely sufficed to pay the expenses of the expedition
which, at his own cost, had restored the Lancastrian line.  Hard
position, both to generosity and to prudence, to put off and apologize
to just claims and valiant service!

With intense, wearying, tortured anxiety, did the earl await the
coming of Margaret and her son.  The conditions imposed on him in
their absence crippled all his resources.  Several even of the
Lancastrian nobles held aloof, while they saw no authority but
Warwick's.  Above all, he relied upon the effect that the young Prince
of Wales's presence, his beauty, his graciousness, his frank spirit--
mild as his fathers, bold as his grandsire's--would create upon all
that inert and neutral mass of the public, the affection of which,
once gained, makes the solid strength of a government.  The very
appearance of that prince would at once dispel the slander on his
birth.  His resemblance to his heroic grandfather would suffice to win
him all the hearts by which, in absence, he was regarded as a
stranger, a dubious alien.  How often did the earl groan forth, "If
the prince were but here, all were won!"  Henry was worse than a
cipher,--he was an eternal embarrassment.  His good intentions, his
scrupulous piety, made him ever ready to interfere.  The Church had
got hold of him already, and prompted him to issue proclamations
against the disguised Lollards, which would have lost him at one
stroke half his subjects.  This Warwick prevented, to the great
discontent of the honest prince.  The moment required all the prestige
that an imposing presence and a splendid court could bestow.  And
Henry, glad of the poverty of his exchequer, deemed it a sin to make a
parade of earthly glory.  "Heaven will punish me again," said he,
meekly, "if, just delivered from a dungeon, I gild my unworthy self
with all the vanities of perishable power."

There was not a department which the chill of this poor king's virtue
did not somewhat benumb.  The gay youths, who had revelled in the
alluring court of Edward IV., heard, with disdainful mockery, the
grave lectures of Henry on the length of their lovelocks and the
beakers of their shoes.  The brave warriors presented to him for
praise were entertained with homilies on the guilt of war.  Even poor
Adam was molested and invaded by Henry's pious apprehensions that he
was seeking, by vain knowledge, to be superior to the will of
Providence.

Yet, albeit perpetually irritating and chafing the impetuous spirit of
the earl, the earl, strange to say, loved the king more and more.
This perfect innocence, this absence from guile and self-seeking, in
the midst of an age never excelled for fraud, falsehood, and selfish
simulation, moved Warwick's admiration as well as pity.  Whatever
contrasted Edward IV. had a charm for him.  He schooled his hot
temper, and softened his deep voice, in that holy presence; and the
intimate persuasion of the hollowness of all worldly greatness, which
worldly greatness itself had forced upon the earl's mind, made
something congenial between the meek saint and the fiery warrior.  For
the hundredth time groaned Warwick, as he quitted Henry's presence,--

"Would that my gallant son-in-law were come!  His spirit will soon
learn how to govern; then Warwick may be needed no more!  I am weary,
sore weary of the task of ruling men!"

"Holy Saint Thomas!" bluntly exclaimed Marmaduke, to whom these sad
words were said,--"whenever you visit the king you come back--pardon
me, my lord--half unmanned.  He would make a monk of you!"

"Ah," said Warwick, thoughtfully, "there have been greater marvels
than that.  Our boldest fathers often died the meekest shavelings.
An' I had ruled this realm as long as Henry,--nay, an' this same life
I lead now were to continue two years, with its broil and fever,--I
could well conceive the sweetness of the cloister and repose.  How
sets the wind?  Against them still! against them still! I cannot bear
this suspense!"

The winds had ever seemed malignant to Margaret of Anjou, but never
more than now.  So long a continuance of stormy and adverse weather
was never known in the memory of man; and we believe that it has
scarcely its parallel in history.

The earl's promise to restore King Henry was fulfilled in October.
From November to the following April, Margaret, with the young and
royal pair, and the Countess of Warwick, lay at the seaside, waiting
for a wind.  [Fabyan, 502.]  Thrice, in defiance of all warnings from
the mariners of Harfleur, did she put to sea, and thrice was she
driven back on the coast of Normandy, her ships much damaged.  Her
friends protested that this malice of the elements was caused by
sorcery, [Hall, Warkworth Chronicle]--a belief which gained ground in
England, exhilarated the Duchess of Bedford, and gave new fame to
Bungey, who arrogated all the merit, and whose weather wisdom, indeed,
had here borne out his predictions.  Many besought Margaret not to
tempt Providence, not to trust the sea; but the queen was firm to her
purpose, and her son laughed at omens,--yet still the vessels could
only leave the harbour to be driven back upon the land.

Day after day the first question of Warwick, when the sun rose, was,
"How sets the wind?"  Night after night, ere he retired to rest, "Ill
sets the wind!" sighed the earl.  The gales that forbade the coming of
the royal party sped to the unwilling lingerers courier after courier,
envoy after envoy; and at length Warwick, unable to bear the sickening
suspense at distance, went himself to Dover [Hall], and from its white
cliffs looked, hour by hour, for the sails which were to bear
"Lancaster and its fortunes."  The actual watch grew more intolerable
than the distant expectation, and the earl sorrowfully departed to his
castle of Warwick, at which Isabel and Clarence then were.  Alas!
where the old smile of home?




CHAPTER IV.

THE RETURN OF EDWARD OF YORK.

And the winds still blew, and the storm was on the tide, and Margaret
came not when, in the gusty month of March, the fishermen of the
Humber beheld a single ship, without flag or pennon, and sorely
stripped and rivelled by adverse blasts, gallantly struggling towards
the shore.  The vessel was not of English build, and resembled in its
bulk and fashion those employed by the Easterlings in their trade,
half merchantman, half war-ship.

The villagers of Ravenspur,--the creek of which the vessel now rapidly
made to,--imagining that it was some trading craft in distress,
grouped round the banks, and some put out their boats: But the vessel
held on its way, and, as the water was swelled by the tide, and
unusually deep, silently cast anchor close ashore, a quarter of a mile
from the crowd.

The first who leaped on land was a knight of lofty stature, and in
complete armour richly inlaid with gold arabesques.  To him succeeded
another, also in mail, and, though well guilt and fair proportioned,
of less imposing presence.  And then, one by one, the womb of the dark
ship gave forth a number of armed soldiers, infinitely larger than it
could have been supposed to contain, till the knight who first landed
stood the centre of a group of five hundred men.  Then were lowered
from the vessel, barbed and caparisoned, some five score horses; and,
finally, the sailors and rowers, armed but with steel caps and short
swords, came on shore, till not a man was left on board.

"Now praise," said the chief knight, "to God and Saint George that we
have escaped the water! and not with invisible winds but with bodily
foes must our war be waged."

"Beau sire," cried one knight, who had debarked immediately after the
speaker, and who seemed, from his bearing and equipment, of higher
rank than those that followed, "beau sire, this is a slight army to
reconquer a king's realm!  Pray Heaven that our bold companions have
also escaped the deep!"

"Why, verily, we are not eno' at the best, to spare one man," said the
chief knight, gayly, "but, lo! we are not without welcomers."  And he
pointed to the crowd of villagers who now slowly neared the warlike
group, but halting at a little distance, continued to gaze at them in
some anxiety and alarm.

"Ho there! good fellows!" cried the leader, striding towards the
throng, "what name give you to this village?"

"Ravenspur, please your worship," answered one of the peasants.

"Ravenspur, hear you that, lords and friends?  Accept the omen!  On
this spot landed from exile Henry of Bolingbroke, known afterwards in
our annals as King Henry IV.!  Bare is the soil of corn and of trees,
--it disdains meaner fruit; it grows kings!  Hark!"  The sound of a
bugle was heard at a little distance, and in a few moments a troop of
about a hundred men were seen rising above an undulation in the
ground, and as the two bands recognized each other, a shout of joy was
given and returned.

As this new reinforcement advanced, the peasantry and fishermen,
attracted by curiosity and encouraged by the peaceable demeanour of
the debarkers, drew nearer, and mingled with the first comers.

"What manner of men be ye, and what want ye?" asked one of the
bystanders, who seemed of better nurturing than the rest, and who,
indeed, was a small franklin.

No answer was returned by those he more immediately addressed; but the
chief knight heard the question, and suddenly unbuckling his helmet,
and giving it to one of those beside him, he turned to the crowd a
countenance of singular beauty at once animated and majestic, and said
in a loud voice, "We are Englishmen, like you, and we come here to
claim our rights.  Ye seem tall fellows and honest.--Standard bearer,
unfurl our flag!"  And as the ensign suddenly displayed the device of
a sun in a field azure, the chief continued, "March under this banner,
and for every day ye serve, ye shall have a month's hire."

"Marry!" quoth the franklin, with a suspicious, sinister look, "these
be big words.  And who are you, Sir Knight, who would levy men in King
Henry's kingdom?"

"Your knees, fellows!" cried the second knight.  "Behold your true
liege and suzerain, Edward IV.!  Long live King Edward!"

The soldiers caught up the cry, and it was re-echoed lustily by the
smaller detachment that now reached the spot; but no answer came from
the crowd.  They looked at each other in dismay, and retreated rapidly
from their place amongst the troops.  In fact, the whole of the
neighbouring district was devoted to Warwick, and many of the
peasantry about had joined the former rising under Sir John Coniers.
The franklin alone retreated not with the rest; he was a bluff, plain,
bold fellow, with good English blood in his veins.  And when the shout
ceased, he said shortly, "We hereabouts know no king but King Henry.
We fear you would impose upon us.  We cannot believe that a great lord
like him you call Edward IV. would land with a handful of men to
encounter the armies of Lord Warwick.  We forewarn you to get into
your ship and go back as fast as ye came, for the stomach of England
is sick of brawls and blows; and what ye devise is treason!"

Forth from the new detachment stepped a youth of small stature, not in
armour, and with many a weather-stain on his gorgeous dress.  He laid
his hand upon the franklin's shoulder.  "Honest and plain-dealing
fellow," said he, "you are right: pardon the foolish outburst of these
brave men, who cannot forget as yet that their chief has worn the
crown.  We come back not to disturb this realm, nor to effect aught
against King Henry, whom the saints have favoured.  No, by Saint Paul,
we come but back to claim our lands unjustly forfeit.  My noble
brother here is not king of England, since the people will it not, but
he is Duke of York, and he will be contented if assured of the style
and lands our father left him.  For me, called Richard of Gloucester,
I ask nothing but leave to spend my manhood where I have spent my
youth, under the eyes of my renowned godfather, Richard Nevile, Earl
of Warwick.  So report of us.  Whither leads yon road?"

"To York," said the franklin, softened, despite his judgment, by the
irresistible suavity of the voice that addressed him.

"Thither will we go, my lord duke and brother, with your leave," said
Prince Richard, "peaceably and as petitioners.  God save ye, friends
and countrymen, pray for us, that King Henry and the parliament may do
us justice.  We are not over rich now, but better times may come.
Largess!" and filling both hands with coins from his gipsire, he
tossed the bounty among the peasants.

"Mille tonnere! What means he with this humble talk of King Henry and
the parliament?" whispered Edward to the Lord Say, while the crowd
scrambled for the largess, and Richard smilingly mingled amongst them,
and conferred with the franklin.

"Let him alone, I pray you, my liege; I guess his wise design.  And
now for our ships.  What orders for the master?"

"For the other vessels, let them sail or anchor as they list. But for
the bark that has borne Edward king of England to the land of his
ancestors there is no return!"

The royal adventurer then beckoned the Flemish master of the ship,
who, with every sailor aboard, had debarked, and the loose dresses of
the mariners made a strong contrast to the mail of the warriors with
whom they mingled.

"Friend," said Edward, in French, "thou hast said that thou wilt share
my fortunes, and that thy good fellows are no less free of courage and
leal in trust."

"It is so, sire.  Not a man who has gazed on thy face, and heard thy
voice, but longs to serve one on whose brow Nature has written king."

"And trust me," said Edward, "no prince of my blood shall be dearer to
me than you and yours, my friends in danger and in need.  And sith it
be so, the ship that hath borne such hearts and such hopes should, in
sooth, know no meaner freight.  Is all prepared?"

"Yes, sire, as you ordered.  The train is laid for the brennen."

"Up, then, with the fiery signal, and let it tell, from cliff to
cliff, from town to town, that Edward the Plantagenet, once returned
to England, leaves it but for the grave!"

The master bowed, and smiled grimly.  The sailors, who had been
prepared for the burning, arranged before between the master and the
prince, and whose careless hearts Edward had thoroughly won to his
person and his cause, followed the former towards the ship, and stood
silently grouped around the shore.  The soldiers, less informed, gazed
idly on, and Richard now regained Edward's side.

"Reflect," he said, as he drew him apart, "that, when on this spot
landed Henry of Bolingbroke, he gave not out that he was marching to
the throne of Richard II.  He professed but to claim his duchy,--and
men were influenced by justice, till they became agents of ambition.
This be your policy; with two thousand men you are but Duke of York;
with ten thousand men you are King of England!  In passing hither, I
met with many, and sounding the temper of the district, I find it not
ripe to share your hazard.  The world soon ripens when it hath to hail
success!"

"O young boy's smooth face!  O old man's deep brain!" said Edward,
admiringly, "what a king hadst thou made!"  A sudden flush passed over
the prince's pale cheek, and, ere it died away, a flaming torch was
hurled aloft in the air; it fell whirling into the ship--a moment, and
a loud crash; a moment, and a mighty blaze!  Up sprung from the deck,
along the sails, the sheeted fire,--

    "A giant beard of flame."  [Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 314]

It reddened the coast, the skies, from far and near; it glowed on the
faces and the steel of the scanty army; it was seen, miles away, by
the warders of many a castle manned with the troops of Lancaster; it
brought the steed from the stall, the courier to the selle; it sped,
as of old the beacon fire that announced to Clytemnestra the return of
the Argive king.  From post to post rode the fiery news, till it
reached Lord Warwick in his hall, King Henry in his palace, Elizabeth
in her sanctuary.  The iron step of the dauntless Edward was once more
pressed upon the soil of England.




CHAPTER V.

THE PROGRESS OF THE PLANTAGENET.

A few words suffice to explain the formidable arrival we have just
announced.  Though the Duke of Burgundy had by public proclamation
forbidden his subjects to aid the exiled Edward, yet, whether moved by
the entreaties of his wife, or wearied by the remonstrances of his
brother-in-law, he at length privately gave the dethroned monarch
fifty thousand florins to find troops for himself, and secretly hired
Flemish and Dutch vessels to convey him to England.  [Comines, Hall,
Lingard, S. Turner]  But so small was the force to which the bold
Edward trusted his fortunes, that it almost seemed as if Burgundy sent
him forth to his destruction.  He sailed from the coast of Zealand;
the winds, if less unmanageable than those that blew off the seaport
where Margaret and her armament awaited a favouring breeze, were still
adverse.  Scared from the coast of Norfolk by the vigilance of Warwick
and Oxford, who had filled that district with armed men, storm and
tempest drove him at last to Humber Head, where we have seen him land,
and whence we pursue his steps.

The little band set out upon its march, and halted for the night at a
small village two miles inland.  Some of the men were then sent out on
horseback for news of the other vessels, that bore the remnant of the
invading force.  These had, fortunately, effected a landing in various
places; and, before daybreak, Anthony Woodville, and the rest of the
troops, had joined the leader of an enterprise that seemed but the
rashness of despair, for its utmost force, including the few sailors
allured to the adventurer's standard, was about two thousand men.
[Fifteen hundred, according to the Croyland historian.]  Close and
anxious was the consultation then held.  Each of the several
detachments reported alike of the sullen indifference of the
population, which each had sought to excite in favour of Edward.
Light riders [Hall] were despatched in various directions, still
further to sound the neighbourhood.  All returned ere noon, some
bruised and maltreated by the stones and staves of the rustics, and
not a voice had been heard to echo the cry, "Long live King Edward!"
The profound sagacity of Gloucester's guileful counsel was then
unanimously recognized.  Richard despatched a secret letter to
Clarence; and it was resolved immediately to proceed to York, and to
publish everywhere along the road that the fugitive had returned but
to claim his private heritage, and remonstrate with the parliament
which had awarded the duchy of York to Clarence, his younger brother.

"Such a power," saith the Chronicle, "hath justice ever among men,
that all, moved by mercy or compassion, began either to favour or not
to resist him."  And so, wearing the Lancastrian Prince of Wales's
cognizance of the ostrich feather, crying out as they marched, "Long
live King Henry!" the hardy liars, four days after their debarkation,
arrived at the gates of York.

Here, not till after much delay and negotiation, Edward was admitted
only as Duke of York, and upon condition that he would swear to be a
faithful and loyal servant to King Henry; and at the gate by which he
was to enter, Edward actually took that oath, "a priest being by to
say Mass in the Mass tyme, receiving the body of our blessed Saviour!"
[Hall.]

Edward tarried not long in York; be pushed forward.  Two great nobles
guarded those districts,--Montagu and the Earl of Northumberland, to
whom Edward had restored his lands and titles, and who, on condition
of retaining them, had re-entered the service of Lancaster.  This
last, a true server of the times, who had sided with all parties, now
judged it discreet to remain neutral.  [This is the most favourable
interpretation of his conduct: according to some he was in
correspondence with Edward, who showed his letters.]  But Edward must
pass within a few miles of Pontefract castle, where Montagu lay with a
force that could destroy him at a blow.  Edward was prepared for the
assault, but trusted to deceive the marquis, as he had deceived the
citizens of York,--the more for the strong personal love Montagu had
ever shown him.  If not, he was prepared equally to die in the field
rather than eat again the bitter bread of the exile.  But to his
inconceivable joy and astonishment, Montagu, like Northumberland, lay
idle and supine.  Edward and his little troop threaded safely the
formidable pass.  Alas! Montagu had that day received a formal order
from the Duke of Clarence, as co-protector of the realm, [Our
historians have puzzled their brains in ingenious conjectures of the
cause of Montagu's fatal supineness at this juncture, and have passed
over the only probable solution of the mystery, which is to be found
simply enough stated thus in Stowe's Chronicle: "The Marquess
Montacute would have fought with King Edward, but that he had received
letters from the Duke of Clarence that he should not fight till hee
came."  This explanation is borne out by the Warkworth Chronicler and
others, who, in an evident mistake of the person addressed, state that
Clarence wrote word to Warwick not to fight till he came.  Clarence
could not have written so to Warwick, who, according to all
authorities, was mustering his troops near London, and not in the way
to fight Edward; nor could Clarence have had authority to issue such
commands to his colleague, nor would his colleague have attended to
them, since we have the amplest testimony that Warwick was urging all
his captains to attack Edward at once.  The duke's order was,
therefore, clearly addressed to Montagu.] to suffer Edward to march
on, provided his force was small, and he had taken the oaths to Henry,
and assumed but the title of Duke of York,--"for your brother the earl
hath had compunctious visitings, and would fain forgive what hath
passed, for my father's sake, and unite all factions by Edward's
voluntary abdication of the throne; at all hazards, I am on my way
northward, and you will not fight till I come."  The marquis,--who
knew the conscientious doubts which Warwick had entertained in his
darker hours, who had no right to disobey the co-protector, who knew
no reason to suspect Lord Warwick's son-in-law, and who, moreover, was
by no means anxious to be, himself, the executioner of Edward, whom he
had once so truly loved,--though a little marvelling at Warwick's
softness, yet did not discredit the letter, and the less regarded the
free passage he left to the returned exiles, from contempt for the
smallness of their numbers, and his persuasion that if the earl saw
fit to alter his counsels, Edward was still more in his power the
farther he advanced amidst a hostile population, and towards the
armies which the Lords Exeter and Oxford were already mustering.

But that free passage was everything to Edward!  It made men think
that Montagu, as well as Northumberland, favoured his enterprise; that
the hazard was less rash and hopeless than it had seemed; that Edward
counted upon finding his most powerful allies among those falsely
supposed to be his enemies.  The popularity Edward had artfully
acquired amongst the captains of Warwick's own troops, on the march to
Middleham, now bestead him.  Many of them were knights and gentlemen
residing in the very districts through which he passed.  They did not
join him, but they did not oppose.  Then rapidly flocked to "the Sun
of York," first the adventurers and condottieri who in civil war adopt
any side for pay; next came the disappointed, the ambitious, and the
needy.  The hesitating began to resolve, the neutral to take a part.
From the state of petitioners supplicating a pardon, every league the
Yorkists marched advanced them to the dignity of assertors of a cause.
Doncaster first, then Nottingham, then Leicester,--true to the town
spirit we have before described,--opened their gates to the trader
prince.

Oxford and Exeter reached Newark with their force.  Edward marched on
them at once.  Deceived as to his numbers, they took panic and fled.
When once the foe flies, friends ever start up from the very earth!
Hereditary partisans--gentlemen, knights, and nobles--now flocked fast
round the adventurer.  Then came Lovell and Cromwell and D'Eyncourt,
ever true to York; and Stanley, never true to any cause.  Then came
the brave knights Parr and Norris and De Burgh; and no less than three
thousand retainers belonging to Lord Hastings--the new man--obeyed the
summons of his couriers and joined their chief at Leicester.

Edward of March, who had landed at Ravenspur with a handful of
brigands, now saw a king's army under his banner.  [The perplexity and
confusion which involve the annals of this period may be guessed by
this,--that two historians, eminent for research (Lingard and Sharon
Turner), differ so widely as to the numbers who had now joined Edward,
that Lingard asserts that at Nottingham he was at the head of fifty or
sixty thousand men; and Turner gives him, at the most, between six and
seven thousand.  The latter seems nearer to the truth.  We must here
regret that Turner's partiality to the House of York induces him to
slur over Edward's detestable perjury at York, and to accumulate all
rhetorical arts to command admiration for his progress,--to the
prejudice of the salutary moral horror we ought to feel for the
atrocious perfidy and violation of oath to which he owed the first
impunity that secured the after triumph.]  Then the audacious perjurer
threw away the mask; then, forth went--not the prayer of the attainted
Duke of York--but the proclamation of the indignant king.  England now
beheld two sovereigns, equal in their armies.  It was no longer a
rebellion to be crushed; it was a dynasty to be decided.




CHAPTER VI.

LORD WARWICK, WITH THE FOE IN THE FIELD AND THE TRAITOR AT THE HEARTH.

Every precaution which human wisdom could foresee had Lord Warwick
taken to guard against invasion, or to crush it at the onset.  [Hall.]
All the coasts on which it was most probable Edward would land had
been strongly guarded.  And if the Humber had been left without
regular troops, it was because prudence might calculate that the very
spot where Edward did land was the very last he would have selected,--
unless guided by fate to his destruction,--in the midst of an
unfriendly population, and in face of the armies of Northumberland and
of Montagu.  The moment the earl heard of Edward's reception at York,
--far from the weakness which the false Clarence (already in
correspondence with Gloucester) imputed to him,--he despatched to
Montagu, by Marmaduke Nevile, peremptory orders to intercept Edward's
path, and give him battle before he could advance farther towards the
centre of the island.  We shall explain presently why this messenger
did not reach the marquis.  But Clarence was some hours before him in
his intelligence and his measures.

When the earl next heard that Edward had passed Pontefract with
impunity, and had reached Doncaster, he flew first to London, to
arrange for its defence; consigned the care of Henry to the Archbishop
of York, mustered a force already quartered in the neighbourhood of
the metropolis, and then marched rapidly back towards Coventry, where
he had left Clarence with seven thousand men; while he despatched new
messengers to Montagu and Northumberland, severely rebuking the former
for his supineness, and ordering him to march in all haste to attack
Edward in the rear.  The earl's activity, promptitude, all-provident
generalship, form a mournful contrast to the errors, the
pusillanimity, and the treachery of others, which hitherto, as we have
seen, made all his wisest schemes abortive.  Despite Clarence's
sullenness, Warwick had discovered no reason, as yet, to doubt his
good faith.  The oath he had taken--not only to Henry in London, but
to Warwick at Amboise--had been the strongest which can bind man to
man.  If the duke had not gained all he had hoped, he had still much
to lose and much to dread by desertion to Edward.  He had been the
loudest in bold assertions when he heard of the invasion; and above
all, Isabel, whose influence over Clarence at that time the earl
overrated, had, at the tidings of so imminent a danger to her father,
forgot all her displeasure and recovered all her tenderness.

During Warwick's brief absence, Isabel had indeed exerted her utmost
power to repair her former wrongs, and induce Clarence to be faithful
to his oath.  Although her inconsistency and irresolution had much
weakened her influence with the duke, for natures like his are
governed but by the ascendancy of a steady and tranquil will, yet
still she so far prevailed, that the duke had despatched to Richard a
secret courier, informing him that he had finally resolved not to
desert his father-in-law.

This letter reached Gloucester as the invaders were on their march to
Coventry, before the strong walls of which the Duke of Clarence lay
encamped.  Richard, after some intent and silent reflection, beckoned
to him his familiar Catesby.

"Marmaduke Nevile, whom our scouts seized on his way to Pontefract, is
safe, and in the rear?"

"Yes, my lord; prisoners but encumber us; shall I give orders to the
provost to end his captivity?"

"Ever ready, Catesby!" said the duke, with a fell smile.  "No; hark
ye, Clarence vacillates.  If he hold firm to Warwick, and the two
forces fight honestly against us, we are lost; on the other hand, if
Clarence join us, his defection will bring not only the men he
commands, all of whom are the retainers of the York lands and duchy,
and therefore free from peculiar bias to the earl, and easily lured
back to their proper chief; but it will set an example that will
create such distrust and panic amongst the enemy, and give such hope
of fresh desertions to our own men, as will open to us the keys of the
metropolis.  But Clarence, I say, vacillates; look you, here is his
letter from Amboise to King Edward; see, his duchess, Warwick's very
daughter, approves the promise it contains!  If this letter reach
Warwick, and Clarence knows it is in his hand, George will have no
option but to join us.  He will never dare to face the earl, his
pledge to Edward once revealed--"

"Most true; a very legal subtlety, my lord," said the lawyer Catesby,
admiringly.

"You can serve us in this.  Fall back; join Sir Marmaduke; affect to
sympathize with him; affect to side with the earl; affect to make
terms for Warwick's amity and favour; affect to betray us; affect to
have stolen this letter.  Give it to young Nevile, artfully effect his
escape, as if against our knowledge, and commend him to lose not an
hour--a moment--in gaining the earl, and giving him so important a
forewarning of the meditated treason of his son-in-law."

"I will do all,--I comprehend; but how will the duke learn in time
that the letter is on its way to Warwick?"

"I will seek the duke in his own tent."

"And how shall I effect Sir Marmaduke's escape?"

"Send hither the officer who guards the prisoner; I will give him
orders to obey thee in all things."

The invaders marched on.  The earl, meanwhile, had reached Warwick,
hastened thence to throw himself into the stronger fortifications of
the neighbouring Coventry, without the walls of which Clarence was
still encamped; Edward advanced on the town of Warwick thus vacated;
and Richard, at night, rode along to the camp of Clarence.  [Hall, and
others.]

The next day, the earl was employed in giving orders to his
lieutenants to march forth, join the troops of his son-in-law, who
were a mile from the walls, and advance upon Edward, who had that
morning quitted Warwick town, when suddenly Sir Marmaduke Nevile
rushed into his presence, and, faltering out, "Beware, beware!" placed
in his hands the fatal letter which Clarence had despatched from
Amboise.

Never did blow more ruthless fall upon man's heart!  Clarence's
perfidy--that might be disdained; but the closing lines, which
revealed a daughter's treachery--words cannot express the father's
anguish.

The letter dropped from his hand, a stupor seized his senses, and, ere
yet recovered, pale men hurried into his presence to relate how,
amidst joyous trumpets and streaming banners, Richard of Gloucester
had led the Duke of Clarence to the brotherly embrace of Edward.
[Hall.  The chronicler adds: "It was no marvell that the Duke of
Clarence with so small persuasion and less exhorting turned from the
Earl of Warwick's party, for, as you have heard before, this
marchandise was laboured, conducted, and concluded by a damsell, when
the duke was in the French court, to the earl's utter confusion."
Hume makes a notable mistake in deferring the date of Clarence's
desertion to the battle of Barnet.]

Breaking from these messengers of evil news, that could not now
surprise, the earl strode on, alone, to his daughter's chamber.

He placed the letter in her hands, and folding his arms said, "What
sayest thou of this, Isabel of Clarence?"  The terror, the shame, the
remorse, that seized upon the wretched lady, the death-like lips, the
suppressed shriek, the momentary torpor, succeeded by the impulse
which made her fall at her father's feet and clasp his knees,--told
the earl, if he had before doubted, that the letter lied not; that
Isabel had known and sanctioned its contents.

He gazed on her (as she grovelled at his feet) with a look that her
eyes did well to shun.

"Curse me not! curse me not!" cried Isabel, awed by his very silence.
"It was but a brief frenzy.  Evil counsel, evil passion!  I was
maddened that my boy had lost a crown.  I repented, I repented!
Clarence shall yet be true.  He hath promised it, vowed it to me; hath
written to Gloucester to retract all,--to--"

"Woman! Clarence is in Edward's camp!"

Isabel started to her feet, and uttered a shriek so wild and
despairing, that at least it gave to her father's lacerated heart the
miserable solace of believing the last treason had not been shared.  A
softer expression--one of pity, if not of pardon--stole over his dark
face.

"I curse thee not," he said; "I rebuke thee not.  Thy sin hath its own
penance.  Ill omen broods on the hearth of the household traitor!
Never more shalt thou see holy love in a husband's smile.  His kiss
shall have the taint of Judas.  From his arms thou shalt start with
horror, as from those of thy wronged father's betrayer,--perchance his
deathsman!  Ill omen broods on the cradle of the child for whom a
mother's ambition was but a daughter's perfidy.  Woe to thee, wife and
mother!  Even my forgiveness cannot avert thy doom!"

"Kill me! kill me!" exclaimed Isabel, springing towards him; but
seeing his face averted, his arms folded on his breast,--that noble
breast, never again her shelter,--she fell lifeless on the floor.  [As
our narrative does not embrace the future fate of the Duchess of
Clarence, the reader will pardon us if we remind him that her first-
born (who bore his illustrious grandfather's title of Earl of Warwick)
was cast into prison on the accession of Henry VII., and afterwards
beheaded by that king.  By birth, he was the rightful heir to the
throne.  The ill-fated Isabel died young (five years after the date at
which our tale has arrived).  One of her female attendants was tried
and executed on the charge of having poisoned her.  Clarence lost no
time in seeking to supply her place.  He solicited the hand of Mary of
Burgundy, sole daughter and heir of Charles the Bold.  Edward's
jealousy and fear forbade him to listen to an alliance that might, as
Lingard observes, enable Clarence "to employ the power of Burgundy to
win the crown of England;" and hence arose those dissensions which
ended in the secret murder of the perjured duke.]

The earl looked round, to see that none were by to witness his
weakness, took her gently in his arms, laid her on her couch, and,
bending over her a moment, prayed to God to pardon her.

He then hastily left the room, ordered her handmaids and her litter,
and while she was yet unconscious, the gates of the town opened, and
forth through the arch went the closed and curtained vehicle which
bore the ill-fated duchess to the new home her husband had made with
her father's foe!  The earl watched it from the casement of his tower,
and said to himself,--

"I had been unmanned, had I known her within the same walls.  Now
forever I dismiss her memory and her crime.  Treachery hath done its
worst, and my soul is proof against all storms!"

At night came messengers from Clarence and Edward, who had returned to
Warwick town, with offers of pardon to the earl, with promises of
favour, power, and grace.  To Edward the earl deigned no answer; to
the messenger of Clarence he gave this: "Tell thy master I had liefer
be always like myself than like a false and a perjured duke, and that
I am determined never to leave the war till I have lost mine own life,
or utterly extinguished and put down my foes."  [Hall.]

After this terrible defection, neither his remaining forces, nor the
panic amongst them which the duke's desertion had occasioned, nor the
mighty interests involved in the success of his arms, nor the
irretrievable advantage which even an engagement of equivocal result
with the earl in person would give to Edward, justified Warwick in
gratifying the anticipations of the enemy,--that his valour and wrath
would urge him into immediate and imprudent battle.

Edward, after the vain bravado of marching up to the walls of
Coventry, moved on towards London.  Thither the earl sent Marmaduke,
enjoining the Archbishop of York and the lord mayor but to hold out
the city for three days, and he would come to their aid with such a
force as would insure lasting triumph.  For, indeed, already were
hurrying to his banner Montagu, burning to retrieve his error, Oxford
and Exeter, recovered from, and chafing at, their past alarm.  Thither
his nephew, Fitzhugh, led the earl's own clansmen of Middleham;
thither were spurring Somerset from the west, [Most historians state
that Somerset was then in London; but Sharon Turner quotes "Harleian
Manuscripts," 38, to show that he had left the metropolis "to raise an
army from the western counties," and ranks him amongst the generals at
the battle of Barnet.] and Sir Thomas Dymoke from Lincolnshire, and
the Knight of Lytton, with his hardy retainers, from the Peak.  Bold
Hilyard waited not far from London, with a host of mingled yeomen and
bravos, reduced, as before, to discipline under his own sturdy
energies and the military craft of Sir John Coniers.  If London would
but hold out till these forces could unite, Edward's destruction was
still inevitable.





BOOK XII.

THE BATTLE OF BARNET.




CHAPTER I.

A KING IN HIS CITY HOPES TO RECOVER HIS REALM--A WOMAN IN HER CHAMBER
FEARS TO FORFEIT HER OWN.

Edward and his army reached St. Alban's.  Great commotion, great joy,
were in the Sanctuary of Westminster!  The Jerusalem Chamber, therein,
was made the high council-hall of the friends of York.  Great
commotion, great terror, were in the city of London.  Timid Master
Stokton had been elected mayor; horribly frightened either to side
with an Edward or a Henry, timid Master Stokton feigned or fell ill.
Sir Thomas Cook, a wealthy and influential citizen, and a member of
the House of Commons, had been appointed deputy in his stead.  Sir
Thomas Cook took fright also, and ran away.  [Fabyan.]  The power of
the city thus fell into the hands of Ureswick, the Recorder, a zealous
Yorkist.  Great commotion, great scorn, were in the breasts of the
populace, as the Archbishop of York, hoping thereby to rekindle their
loyalty, placed King Henry on horseback, and paraded him through the
streets from Chepeside to Walbrook, from Walbrook to St. Paul's; for
the news of Edward's arrival, and the sudden agitation and excitement
it produced on his enfeebled frame, had brought upon the poor king one
of the epileptic attacks to which he had been subject from childhood,
and which made the cause of his frequent imbecility; and, just
recovered from such a fit,--his eyes vacant, his face haggard, his
head drooping,--the spectacle of such an antagonist to the vigorous
Edward moved only pity in the few and ridicule in the many.  Two
thousand Yorkist gentlemen were in the various Sanctuaries; aided and
headed by the Earl of Essex, they came forth armed and clamorous,
scouring the streets, and shouting, "King Edward!" with impunity.
Edward's popularity in London was heightened amongst the merchants by
prudent reminiscences of the vast debts he had incurred, which his
victory only could ever enable him to repay to his good citizens.
[Comines.]  The women, always, in such a movement, active partisans,
and useful, deserted their hearths to canvass all strong arms and
stout hearts for the handsome woman-lover.  [Comines.]  The Yorkist
Archbishop of Canterbury did his best with the ecclesiastics, the
Yorkist Recorder his best with the flat-caps.  Alwyn, true to his
anti-feudal principles, animated all the young freemen to support the
merchant-king, the favourer of commerce, the man of his age!  The city
authorities began to yield to their own and the general metropolitan
predilections.  But still the Archbishop of York had six thousand
soldiers at his disposal, and London could be yet saved to Warwick, if
the prelate acted with energy and zeal and good faith.  That such was
his first intention is clear, from his appeal to the public loyalty in
King Henry's procession; but when he perceived how little effect that
pageant had produced; when, on re-entering the Bishop of London's
palace, he saw before him the guileless, helpless puppet of contending
factions, gasping for breath, scarcely able to articulate, the
heartless prelate turned away, with a muttered ejaculation of
contempt.

"Clarence had not deserted," said he to himself, "unless he saw
greater profit with King Edward!"  And then he began to commune with
himself, and to commune with his brother-prelate of Canterbury; and in
the midst of all this commune arrived Catesby, charged with messages
to the archbishop from Edward,--messages full of promise and affection
on the one hand, of menace and revenge upon the other.  Brief:
Warwick's cup of bitterness had not yet been filled; that night the
archbishop and the mayor of London met, and the Tower was surrendered
to Edward's friends.  The next day Edward and his army entered, amidst
the shouts of the populace; rode to St. Paul's, where the archbishop
[Sharon Turner.  It is a comfort to think that this archbishop was,
two years afterwards, first robbed, and then imprisoned, by Edward
IV.; nor did he recover his liberty till a few weeks before his death,
in 1476 (five years subsequently to the battle of Barnet).] met him,
leading Henry by the hand, again a captive; thence Edward proceeded to
Westminster Abbey, and, fresh from his atrocious perjury at York,
offered thanksgiving for its success.  The Sanctuary yielded up its
royal fugitives, and, in joy and in pomp, Edward led his wife and her
new-born babe, with Jacquetta and his elder children, to Baynard's
Castle.

The next morning (the third day), true to his promise, Warwick marched
towards London with the mighty armament he had now collected.  Treason
had done its worst,--the metropolis was surrendered, and King Henry in
the Tower.

"These things considered," says the Chronicler, "the earl saw that all
calculations of necessity were brought to this end,--that they must
now be committed to the hazard and chance of one battle."  [Hall.]  He
halted, therefore, at St. Alban's, to rest his troops; and marching
thence towards Barnet, pitched his tents on the upland ground, then
called the Heath or Chase of Gladsmoor, and waited the coming foe.

Nor did Edward linger long from that stern meeting.  Entering London
on the 11th of April, he prepared to quit it on the 13th.  Besides the
force he had brought with him, he had now recruits in his partisans
from the Sanctuaries and other hiding-places in the metropolis, while
London furnished him, from her high-spirited youths, a gallant troop
of bow and bill men, whom Alwyn had enlisted, and to whom Edward
willingly appointed, as captain, Alwyn himself,--who had atoned for
his submission to Henry's restoration by such signal activity on
behalf of the young king, whom he associated with the interests of his
class, and the weal of the great commercial city, which some years
afterwards rewarded his affection by electing him to her chief
magistracy.  [Nicholas Alwyn, the representative of that generation
which aided the commercial and anti-feudal policy of Edward IV. and
Richard III., and welcomed its consummation under their Tudor
successor, rose to be Lord Mayor of London in the fifteenth year of
the reign of Henry VII.--FABYAN.]

It was on that very day, the 13th of April, some hours before the
departure of the York army, that Lord Hastings entered the Tower, to
give orders relative to the removal of the unhappy Henry, whom Edward
had resolved to take with him on his march.

And as he had so ordered and was about to return, Alwyn, emerging from
one of the interior courts, approached him in much agitation, and said
thus: "Pardon me, my lord, if in so grave an hour I recall your
attention to one you may haply have forgotten."

"Ah, the poor maiden; but you told me, in the hurried words that we
have already interchanged, that she was safe and well."

"Safe, my lord,--not well.  Oh, hear me.  I depart to battle for your
cause and your king's.  A gentleman in your train has advised me that
you are married to a noble dame in the foreign land.  If so, this girl
whom I have loved so long and truly may yet forget you, may yet be
mine.  Oh, give me that hope to make me a braver soldier."

"But," said Hastings, embarrassed, and with a changing countenance,
"but time presses, and I know not where the demoiselle--"

"She is here," interrupted Alwyn; "here, within these walls, in yonder
courtyard.  I have just left her.  You, whom she loves, forgot her!
I, whom she disdains, remembered.  I went to see to her safety, to
counsel her to rest here for the present, whatever betides; and at
every word I said, she broke in upon me with but one name,--that name
was thine!  And when stung, and in the impulse of the moment, I
exclaimed, 'He deserves not this devotion.  They tell me, Sibyll, that
Lord Hastings has found a wife in exile.'  Oh, that look! that cry!
they haunt me still.  'Prove it, prove it, Alwyn,' she cried.  'And--'
I interrupted, 'and thou couldst yet, for thy father's sake, be true
wife to me?'"

"Her answer, Alwyn?"

"It was this, 'For my father's sake only, then, could I live on; and--'
her sobs stopped her speech, till she cried again, 'I believe it not!
thou hast deceived me.  Only from his lips will I hear the sentence.'
Go to her, manfully and frankly, as becomes you, high lord,--go!  It
Is but a single sentence thou hast to say, and thy heart will be the
lighter, and thine arm the stronger for those honest words."

Hastings pulled his cap over his brow, and stood a moment as if in
reflection; he then said, "Show me the way; thou art right.  It is due
to her and to thee; and as by this hour to-morrow my soul may stand
before the Judgment-seat, that poor child's pardon may take one sin
from the large account."




CHAPTER II.

SHARP IS THE KISS OF THE FALCON'S BEAR.

Hastings stood in the presence of the girl to whom he had pledged his
truth.  They were alone; but in the next chamber might be heard the
peculiar sound made by the mechanism of the Eureka.  Happy and
lifeless mechanism, which moves, and toils, and strives on, to change
the destiny of millions, but hath neither ear nor eye, nor sense nor
heart,--the avenues of pain to man!  She had--yes, literally--she had
recognized her lover's step upon the stair, she had awakened at once
from that dull and icy lethargy with which the words of Alwyn had
chained life and soul.  She sprang forward as Hastings entered; she
threw herself in delirious joy upon his bosom.  "Thou art come, thou
art!  It is not true, not true.  Heaven bless thee! thou art come!"
But sudden as the movement was the recoil.  Drawing herself back, she
gazed steadily on his face, and said, "Lord Hastings, they tell me thy
hand is another's.  Is it true?"

"Hear me!" answered the nobleman.  "When first I--"

"O God! O God! he answers not, he falters!  Speak!  Is it true?"

"It is true.  I am wedded to another."

Sibyll did not fall to the ground, nor faint, nor give vent to noisy
passion.  But the rich colour, which before had been varying and
fitful, deserted her cheek, and left it of an ashen whiteness; the
lips, too, grew tightly compressed, and her small fingers, interlaced,
were clasped with strained and convulsive energy, so that the
quivering of the very arms was perceptible.  In all else she seemed
composed, as she said, "I thank you, my lord, for the simple truth; no
more is needed.  Heaven bless you and yours!  Farewell!"

"Stay! you shall--you must hear me on.  Thou knowest how dearly in
youth I loved Katherine Nevile.  In manhood the memory of that love
haunted me, but beneath thy sweet smile I deemed it at last effaced; I
left thee to seek the king, and demand his assent to our union.  I
speak not of obstacles that then arose; in the midst of them I learned
Katherine was lone and widowed,--was free.  At her own summons I
sought her presence, and learned that she had loved me ever,--loved me
still.  The intoxication of my early dream returned; reverse and exile
followed close; Katherine left her state, her fortunes, her native
land, and followed the banished man; and so memory and gratitude and
destiny concurred, and the mistress of my youth became my wife.  None
other could have replaced thy image; none other have made me forget
the faith I pledged thee.  The thought of thee has still pursued me,--
will pursue me to the last. I dare not say now that I love thee still,
but yet--"  He paused, but rapidly resumed, "Enough, enough! dear art
thou to me, and honoured,--dearer, more honoured than a sister.  Thank
Heaven, at least, and thine own virtue, my falsehood leaves thee pure
and stainless.  Thy hand may yet bless a worthier man.  If our cause
triumphs, thy fortunes, thy father's fate, shall be my fondest care.
Never, never will my sleep be sweet, and my conscience laid to rest,
till I hear thee say, as honoured wife--perchance, as blessed and
blessing mother--'False one, I am happy!'"

A cold smile, at these last words, flitted over the girl's face,--the
smile of a broken heart; but it vanished, and with that strange
mixture of sweetness and pride,--mild and forgiving, yet still
spirited and firm,--which belonged to her character, she nerved
herself to the last and saddest effort to preserve dignity and conceal
despair.  "Farther words, my lord, are idle; I am rightly punished for
a proud folly.  Let not woman love above her state.  Think no more of
my destiny."

"No, no," interrupted the remorseful lord, "thy destiny must haunt me
till thou hast chosen one with a better right to protect thee."

At the repetition of that implied desire to transfer her also to
another, a noble indignation came to mar the calm for which she had
hitherto not vainly struggled.  "Oh, man!" she exclaimed, with
passion, "does thy deceit give me the right to deceive another?  I--I
wed!--I--I--vow at the altar--a love dead, dead forever--dead as my
own heart!  Why dost thou mock me with the hollow phrase, 'Thou art
pure and stainless?'  Is the virginity of the soul still left?  Do the
tears I have shed for thee; doth the thrill of my heart when I heard
thy voice; doth the plighted kiss that burns, burns now into my brow,
and on my lips,--do these, these leave me free to carry to a new
affection the cinders and ashes of a soul thou hast ravaged and
deflowered?  Oh, coarse and rude belief of men, that naught is lost if
the mere form be pure!  The freshness of the first feelings, the bloom
of the sinless thought, the sigh, the blush of the devotion--never,
never felt but once! these, these make the true dower a maiden should
bring to the hearth to which she comes as wife.  Oh, taunt!  Oh,
insult! to speak to me of happiness, of the altar!  Thou never
knewest, lord, how I really loved thee!"  And for the first time, a
violent gush of tears came to relieve her heart.

Hastings was almost equally overcome.  Well experienced as he was in
those partings when maids reproach and gallants pray for pardon, but
still sigh, "Farewell,"--he had now no words to answer that burst of
uncontrollable agony; and he felt at once humbled and relieved, when
Sibyll again, with one of those struggles which exhaust years of life,
and almost leave us callous to all after-trial, pressed back the
scalding tears, and said, with unnatural sweetness: "Pardon me, my
lord, I meant not to reproach; the words escaped me,--think of them no
more.  I would fain, at least, part from you now as I had once hoped
to part from you at the last hour of life,--without one memory of
bitterness and anger, so that my conscience, whatever its other
griefs, might say, 'My lips never belied my heart, my words never
pained him!'  And now then, Lord Hastings, in all charity, we part.
Farewell forever, and forever!  Thou hast wedded one who loves thee,
doubtless, as tenderly as I had done.  Ah, cherish that affection!
There are times even in thy career when a little love is sweeter than
much fame.  If thou thinkest I have aught to pardon thee, now with my
whole heart I pray, as while life is mine that prayer shall be
murmured, 'Heaven forgive this man, as I do!  Heaven make his home the
home of peace, and breathe into those now near and dear to him, the
love and the faith that I once--'"  She stopped, for the words choked
her, and, hiding her face, held out her hand, in sign of charity and
of farewell.

"Ah, if I dared pray like thee," murmured Hastings, pressing his lips
upon that burning hand, "how should I weary Heaven to repair, by
countless blessings, the wrong which I have done thee!  And Heaven
will--oh, it surely will!"  He pressed the hand to his heart, dropped
it, and was gone.

In the courtyard he was accosted by Alwyn--

"Thou hast been frank, my lord?"

"I have."

"And she bears it, and--"

"See how she forgives, and how I suffer!" said Hastings, turning his
face towards his rival; and Alwyn saw that the tears were rolling down
his cheeks--"Question me no more."  There was a long silence.  They
quitted the precincts of the Tower, and were at the river-side.
Hastings, waving his hand to Alwyn, was about to enter the boat which
was to bear him to the war council assembled at Baynard's Castle, when
the trader stopped him, and said anxiously,--

"Think you not, for the present, the Tower is the safest asylum for
Sibyll and her father?  If we fail and Warwick returns, they are
protected by the earl; if we triumph, thou wilt insure their safety
from all foes?"

"Surely; in either case, their present home is the most secure."

The two men then parted.  And not long afterwards, Hastings, who led
the on-guard, was on his way towards Barnet; with him also went the
foot volunteers under Alwyn.  The army of York was on its march.
Gloucester, to whose vigilance and energy were left the final
preparations, was necessarily the last of the generals to quit the
city.  And suddenly, while his steed was at the gate of Baynard's
Castle, he entered, armed cap-a-pie, into the chamber where the
Duchess of Bedford sat with her grandchildren.

"Madame," said he, "I have a grace to demand from you, which will,
methinks, not be displeasing.  My lieutenants report to me that an
alarm has spread amongst my men,--a religious horror of some fearful
bombards and guns which have been devised by a sorcerer in Lord
Warwick's pay.  Your famous Friar Bungey has been piously amongst
them, promising, however, that the mists which now creep over the
earth shall last through the night and the early morrow; and if he
deceive us not, we may post our men so as to elude the hostile
artillery.  But, sith the friar is so noted and influential, and sith
there is a strong fancy that the winds which have driven back Margaret
obeyed his charm, the soldiers clamour out for him to attend us, and,
on the very field itself, counteract the spells of the Lancastrian
nigromancer.  The good friar, more accustomed to fight with fiends
than men, is daunted, and resists.  As much may depend on his showing
us good will, and making our fellows suppose we have the best of the
witchcraft, I pray you to command his attendance, and cheer up his
courage.  He waits without."

"A most notable, a most wise advice, beloved Richard!" cried the
duchess.  "Friar Bungey is, indeed, a potent man.  I will win him at
once to your will;" and the duchess hurried from the room.

The friar's bodily fears, quieted at last by assurances that he should
be posted in a place of perfect safety during the battle, and his
avarice excited by promises of the amplest rewards, he consented to
accompany the troops, upon one stipulation,--namely, that the
atrocious wizard, who had so often baffled his best spells,--the very
wizard who had superintended the accursed bombards, and predicted
Edward's previous defeat and flight (together with the diabolical
invention, in which all the malice and strength of his sorcery were
centred),--might, according to Jacquetta's former promise, be
delivered forthwith to his mercy, and accompany him to the very spot
where he was to dispel and counteract the Lancastrian nigromancer's
enchantments.  The duchess, too glad to purchase the friar's
acquiescence on such cheap terms, and to whose superstitious horror
for Adam's lore in the black art was now added a purely political
motive for desiring him to be made away with,--inasmuch as in the
Sanctuary she had at last extorted from Elizabeth the dark secret
which might make him a very dangerous witness against the interests
and honour of Edward,--readily and joyfully consented to this
proposition.

A strong guard was at once despatched to the Tower with the friar
himself, followed by a covered wagon, which was to serve for
conveyance to Bungey and his victim.

In the mean while, Sibyll, after remaining for some time in the
chamber which Hastings had abandoned to her solitary woe, had passed
to the room in which her father held mute commune with his Eureka.

The machine was now thoroughly completed,--improved and perfected, to
the utmost art the inventor ever could attain.  Thinking that the
prejudice against it might have arisen from its uncouth appearance,
the poor philosopher had sought now to give it a gracious and imposing
appearance.  He had painted and gilt it with his own hands; it looked
bright and gaudy in its gay hues; its outward form was worthy of the
precious and propitious jewel which lay hidden in its centre.

"See, child, see!" said Adam; "is it not beautiful and comely?"

"My dear father, yes!" answered the poor girl, as still she sought to
smile; then, after a short silence, she continued, "Father, of late,
methinks, I have too much forgotten thee; pardon me, if so.
Henceforth, I have no care in life but thee; henceforth let me ever,
when thou toilest, come and sit by thy side.  I would not be alone,--I
dare not!  Father, Father!  God shield thy harmless life!  I have
nothing to love under heaven but thee!"

The good man turned wistfully, and raised, with tremulous hands, the
sad face that had pressed itself on his bosom.  Gazing thereon
mournfully, he said, "Some new grief hath chanced to thee, my child.
Methought I heard another voice besides thine in yonder room.  Ah, has
Lord Hastings--"

"Father, spare me!  Thou wert too right; thou didst judge too wisely.
Lord Hastings is wedded to another!  But see, I can smile still, I am
calm.  My heart will not break so long as it hath thee to love and
pray for!"

She wound her arms round him as she spoke, and he roused himself from
his world out of earth again.  Though he could bring no comfort, there
was something, at least, to the forlorn one, in his words of love, in
his tears of pity.

They sat down together, side by side, as the evening darkened,--the
Eureka forgotten in the hour of its perfection!  They noted not the
torches which flashed below, reddened at intervals the walls of their
chamber, and gave a glow to the gay gilding and bright hues of the
gaudy model.  Yet those torches flickered round the litter that was to
convey Henry the Peaceful to the battlefield, which was to decide the
dynasty of his realm!  The torches vanished, and forth from the dark
fortress went the captive king.

Night succeeded to eve, when again the red glare shot upward on the
Eureka, playing with fantastic smile on its quaint aspect.  Steps and
voices, and the clatter of arms, sounded in the yard, on the stairs,
in the adjoining chamber; and suddenly the door was flung open, and,
followed by some half score soldiers, strode in the terrible friar.

"Aha, Master Adam! who is the greater nigromancer now?  Seize him!
Away!  And help you, Master Sergeant, to bear this piece of the foul
fiend's cunning devising.  Ho, ho! see you how it is tricked out and
furbished up,--all for the battle, I warrant ye!"

The soldiers had already seized upon Adam, who, stupefied by
astonishment rather than fear, uttered no sound, and attempted no
struggle.  But it was in vain they sought to tear from him Sibyll's
clinging and protecting arms.  A supernatural strength, inspired by a
kind of superstition that no harm could chance to him while she was
by, animated her slight form; and fierce though the soldiers were,
they shrunk from actual and brutal violence to one thus young and
fair.  Those small hands clung so firmly, that it seemed that nothing
but the edge of the sword could sever the child's clasp from the
father's neck.

"Harm him not, harm him at your peril, friar!" she cried, with
flashing eyes.  "Tear him from me, and if King Edward win the day,
Lord Hastings shall have thy life; if Lord Warwick, thy days are
numbered, too.  Beware, and avaunt!"

The friar was startled.  He had forgotten Lord Hastings in the zest of
his revenge.  He feared that, if Sibyll were left behind, the tale she
might tell would indeed bring on him a powerful foe in the daughter's
lover; on the other hand, should Lord Warwick get the better, what
vengeance would await her appeal to the great protector of her father!
He resolved, therefore, on the instant, to take Sibyll as well as her
father; and if the fortune of the day allowed him to rid himself of
Warner, a good occasion might equally occur to dispose forever of the
testimony of Sibyll.  He had already formed a cunning calculation in
desiring Warner's company; for while, should Edward triumph, the
sacrifice of the hated Warner was resolved upon, yet, should the earl
get the better, he could make a merit to Warner that he (the friar)
had not only spared, but saved, his life, in making him his companion.
It was in harmony with this double policy that the friar mildly
answered to Sibyll,--

"Tusk, my daughter!  Perhaps if your father be true to King Edward,
and aid my skill instead of obstructing it, he may be none the worse
for the journey he must take; and if thou likest to go with him,
there's room in the vehicle, and the more the merrier.  Harm them not,
soldiers; no doubt they will follow quietly."

As he said this, the men, after first crossing themselves, had already
hoisted up the Eureka; and when Adam saw it borne from the room, he
instinctively followed the bearers.  Sibyll, relieved by the thought
that, for weal or for woe, she should, at least, share her father's
fate, and scarce foreboding much positive danger from the party which
contained Hastings and Alwyn, attempted no further remonstrance.

The Eureka was placed in the enormous vehicle,--it served as a barrier
between the friar and his prisoners.

The friar himself, as soon as the wagon was in motion, addressed
himself civilly enough to his fellow-travellers, and assured them
there was nothing to fear, unless Adam thought fit to disturb his
incantations.  The captives answered not his address, but nestled
close to each other, interchanging, at intervals, words of comfort,
and recoiling as far as possible from the ex-tregetour, who, having
taken with him a more congenial companion in the shape of a great
leathern bottle, finally sunk into the silent and complacent doze
which usually rewards the libations to the Bromian god.

The vehicle, with many other baggage-wagons in the rear of the army in
that memorable night-march, moved mournfully on; the night continued
wrapped in fog and mist, agreeably to the weatherwise predictions of
the friar.  The rumbling groan of the vehicle, the tramp of the
soldiers, the dull rattle of their arms, with now and then the neigh
of some knight's steed in the distance, were the only sounds that
broke the silence, till once, as they neared their destination, Sibyll
started from her father's bosom, and shudderingly thought she
recognized the hoarse chant and the tinkling bells of the ominous
tymbesteres.




CHAPTER III.

A PAUSE.

In the profound darkness of the night and the thick fog, Edward had
stationed his men at a venture upon the heath at Gladsmoor, [Edward
"had the greater number of men."--HALL, p. 296.] and hastily environed
the camp with palisades and trenches.  He had intended to have rested
immediately in front of the foe, but, in the darkness, mistook the
extent of the hostile line; and his men were ranged only opposite to
the left side of the earl's force (towards Hadley), leaving the right
unopposed.  Most fortunate for Edward was this mistake; for Warwick's
artillery, and the new and deadly bombards he had constructed, were
placed on the right of the earl's army; and the provident earl,
naturally supposing Edward's left was there opposed to him, ordered
his gunners to cannonade all night.  Edward, "as the flashes of the
guns illumined by fits the gloom of midnight, saw the advantage of his
unintentional error; and to prevent Warwick from discovering it,
reiterated his orders for the most profound silence."  [Sharon
Turner.]  Thus even his very blunders favoured Edward more than the
wisest precautions had served his fated foe.

Raw, cold, and dismal dawned the morning of the fourteenth of April,
the Easter Sabbath.  In the fortunes of that day were involved those
of all the persons who hitherto, in the course of this narrative, may
have seemed to move in separate orbits from the fiery star of Warwick.
Now, in this crowning hour, the vast and gigantic destiny of the great
earl comprehended all upon which its darkness or its light had fallen:
not only the luxurious Edward, the perjured Clarence, the haughty
Margaret, her gallant son, the gentle Anne, the remorseful Isabel, the
dark guile of Gloucester, the rising fortunes of the gifted Hastings,
--but on the hazard of that die rested the hopes of Hilyard, and the
interests of the trader Alwyn, and the permanence of that frank,
chivalric, hardy, still half Norman race, of which Nicholas Alwyn and
his Saxon class were the rival antagonistic principle, and Marmaduke
Nevile the ordinary type.  Dragged inexorably into the whirlpool of
that mighty fate were even the very lives of the simple Scholar, of
his obscure and devoted child.  Here, into this gory ocean, all
scattered rivulets and streams had hastened to merge at last.

But grander and more awful than all individual interests were those
assigned to the fortunes of this battle, so memorable in the English
annals,--the ruin or triumph of a dynasty; the fall of that warlike
baronage, of which Richard Nevile was the personation, the crowning
flower, the greatest representative and the last,--associated with
memories of turbulence and excess, it is true, but with the proudest
and grandest achievements in our early history; with all such liberty
as had been yet achieved since the Norman Conquest; with all such
glory as had made the island famous,--here with Runnymede, and there
with Cressy; the rise of a crafty, plotting, imperious Despotism,
based upon the growing sympathy of craftsmen and traders, and ripening
on the one hand to the Tudor tyranny, the Republican reaction under
the Stuarts, the slavery, and the civil war, but on the other hand to
the concentration of all the vigour and life of genius into a single
and strong government, the graces, the arts, the letters of a polished
court, the freedom, the energy, the resources of a commercial
population destined to rise above the tyranny at which it had first
connived, and give to the emancipated Saxon the markets of the world.
Upon the victory of that day all these contending interests, this vast
alternative in the future, swayed and trembled.  Out, then, upon that
vulgar craving of those who comprehend neither the vast truths of life
nor the grandeur of ideal art, and who ask from poet or narrator the
poor and petty morality of "Poetical Justice,"--a justice existing not
in our work-day world; a justice existing not in the sombre page of
history; a justice existing not in the loftier conceptions of men
whose genius has grappled with the enigmas which art and poetry only
can foreshadow and divine,--unknown to us in the street and the
market, unknown to us on the scaffold of the patriot or amidst the
flames of the martyr, unknown to us in the Lear and the Hamlet, in the
Agamemnon and the Prometheus.  Millions upon millions, ages upon ages,
are entered but as items in the vast account in which the recording
angel sums up the unerring justice of God to man.

Raw, cold, and dismal dawned the morning of the fourteenth of April.
And on that very day Margaret and her son, and the wife and daughter
of Lord Warwick, landed, at last, on the shores of England.  [Margaret
landed at Weymouth; Lady Warwick, at Portsmouth.]  Come they for joy
or for woe, for victory or despair?  The issue of this day's fight on
the heath of Gladsmoor will decide.  Prank thy halls, O Westminster,
for the triumph of the Lancastrian king,--or open thou, O Grave, to
receive the saint-like Henry and his noble son.  The king-maker goes
before ye, saint-like father and noble son, to prepare your thrones
amongst the living or your mansions amongst the dead!




CHAPTER IV.

THE BATTLE.

Raw, cold, and dismal dawned the morning of the fourteenth of April.
The heavy mist still covered both armies, but their hum and stir was
already heard through the gloaming,--the neighing of steeds, and the
clangour of mail.  Occasionally a movement of either force made dim
forms, seeming gigantic through the vapour, indistinctly visible to
the antagonistic army; and there was something ghastly and unearthlike
in these ominous shapes, suddenly seen, and suddenly vanishing, amidst
the sullen atmosphere.  By this time, Warwick had discovered the
mistake of his gunners; for, to the right of the earl, the silence of
the Yorkists was still unbroken, while abruptly, from the thick gloom
to the left, broke the hoarse mutter and low growl of the awakening
war.  Not a moment was lost by the earl in repairing the error of the
night: his artillery wheeled rapidly from the right wing, and, sudden
as a storm of lightning, the fire from the cannon flashed through the
dun and heavy vapour, and, not far from the very spot where Hastings
was marshalling the wing intrusted to his command, made a deep chasm
in the serried ranks.  Death had begun his feast!

At that moment, however, from the centre of the Yorkist army, arose,
scarcely drowned by the explosion, that deep-toned shout of
enthusiasm, which he who has once heard it, coming, as it were, from
the one heart of an armed multitude, will ever recall as the most
kindling and glorious sound which ever quickened the pulse and
thrilled the blood,--for along that part of the army now rode King
Edward.  His mail was polished as a mirror, but otherwise unadorned,
resembling that which now invests his effigies at the Tower, [The suit
of armour, however, which the visitor to the Royal Armoury is expected
to believe King Edward could have worn, is infinitely too small for
such credulity.  Edward's height was six feet two inches.] and the
housings of his steed were spangled with silver suns, for the silver
sun was the cognizance on all his banners.  His head was bare, and
through the hazy atmosphere the gold of his rich locks seemed
literally to shine.  Followed by his body squire, with his helm and
lance, and the lords in his immediate staff, his truncheon in his
hand, he passed slowly along the steady line, till, halting where he
deemed his voice could be farthest heard, he reined in, and lifting
his hand, the shout of the soldiery was hushed; though still, while he
spoke, from Warwick's archers came the arrowy shower, and still the
gloom was pierced and the hush interrupted by the flash and the roar
of the bombards.

"Englishmen and friends," said the martial chief, "to bold deeds go
but few words.  Before you is the foe!  From Ravenspur to London I
have marched, treason flying from my sword, loyalty gathering to my
standard.  With but two thousand men, on the fourteenth of March, I
entered England; on the fourteenth of April, fifty thousand is my
muster roll.  Who shall say, then, that I am not king, when one month
mans a monarch's army from his subjects' love?  And well know ye, now,
that my cause is yours and England's!  Those against us are men who
would rule in despite of law,--barons whom I gorged with favours, and
who would reduce this fair realm of King, Lords, and Commons to be the
appanage and property of one man's measureless ambition,--the park,
forsooth, the homestead to Lord Warwick's private house!  Ye gentlemen
and knights of England, let them and their rabble prosper, and your
properties will be despoiled, your lives insecure, all law struck
dead.  What differs Richard of Warwick from Jack Cade, save that if
his name is nobler, so is his treason greater?  Commoners and soldiers
of England, freemen, however humble, what do these rebel lords (who
would rule in the name of Lancaster) desire?  To reduce you to
villeins and to bondsmen, as your forefathers were to them.  Ye owe
freedom from the barons to the just laws of my sires, your kings.
Gentlemen and knights, commoners and soldiers, Edward IV. upon his
throne will not profit by a victory more than you.  This is no war of
dainty chivalry,--it is a war of true men against false.  No quarter!
Spare not either knight or hilding.  Warwick, forsooth, will not smite
the Commons.  Truly not,--the rabble are his friends!  I say to you--"
and Edward, pausing in the excitement and sanguinary fury of his tiger
nature,--the soldiers, heated like himself to the thirst of blood, saw
his eyes sparkle, and his teeth gnash, as he added in a deeper and
lower, but not less audible voice, "I say to you, SLAY ALL!  [Hall.]
What heel spares the viper's brood?"

"We will! we will!" was the horrid answer, which came hissing and
muttered forth from morion and cap of steel.

"Hark! to their bombards!" resumed Edward.  "The enemy would fight
from afar, for they excel us in their archers and gunners.  Upon them,
then, hand to hand, and man to man!  Advance banners, sound trumpets!
Sir Oliver, my bassinet!  Soldiers, if my standard falls, look for the
plume upon your king's helmet!  Charge!"

Then, with a shout wilder and louder than before, on through the hail
of the arrows, on through the glare of the bombards, rather with a
rush than in a march, advanced Edward's centre against the array of
Somerset; but from a part of the encampment where the circumvallation
seemed strongest, a small body of men moved not with the general body.

To the left of the churchyard of Hadley, at this day, the visitor may
notice a low wall; on the other side of that wall is a garden, then
but a rude eminence on Gladsmoor Heath.  On that spot a troop in
complete armour, upon destriers pawing impatiently, surrounded a man
upon a sorry palfrey, and in a gown of blue,--the colour of royalty
and of servitude; that man was Henry the Sixth.  In the same space
stood Friar Bungey, his foot on the Eureka, muttering incantations,
that the mists he had foretold, [Lest the reader should suppose that
the importance of Friar Bungey upon this bloody day has been
exaggerated by the narrator, we must cite the testimony of sober
Allerman Fabyan: "Of the mists and other impediments which fell upon
the lords' party, by reason of the incantations wrought by Friar
Bungey, as the fame went, me list not to write."] and which had
protected the Yorkists from the midnight guns, might yet last, to the
confusion of the foe.  And near him, under a gaunt, leafless tree, a
rope round his neck, was Adam Warner, Sibyl still faithful to his
side, nor shuddering at the arrows and the guns, her whole fear
concentrated upon the sole life for which her own was prized.  Upon
this eminence, then, these lookers-on stood aloof.  And the meek ears
of Henry heard through the fog the inexplicable, sullen, jarring
clash,--steel had met steel.

"Holy Father!" exclaimed the kingly saint, "and this is the Easter
Sabbath, Thy most solemn day of peace!"

"Be silent," thundered the friar; "thou disturbest my spells.
Barabbarara, Santhinoa, Foggibus increscebo, confusio inimicis,
Garabbora, vapor et mistes!"

We must now rapidly survey the dispositions of the army under Warwick.
In the right wing, the command was entrusted to the Earl of Oxford and
the Marquis of Montagu.  The former, who led the cavalry of that
division, was stationed in the van; the latter, according to his usual
habit--surrounded by a strong body-guard of knights and a prodigious
number of squires as aides-de-camp--remained at the rear, and directed
thence by his orders the general movement.  In this wing the greater
number were Lancastrian, jealous of Warwick, and only consenting to
the generalship of Montagu because shared by their favourite hero,
Oxford.  In the mid-space lay the chief strength of the bowmen, with a
goodly number of pikes and bills, under the Duke of Somerset; and this
division also was principally Lancastrian, and shared the jealousy of
Oxford's soldiery.  The left wing, composed for the most part of
Warwick's yeomanry and retainers, was commanded by the Duke of Exeter,
conjointly with the earl himself.  Both armies kept a considerable
body in reserve, and Warwick, besides this resource, had selected from
his own retainers a band of picked archers, whom he had skilfully
placed in the outskirts of a wood that then stretched from Wrotham
Park to the column that now commemorates the battle of Barnet, on the
high northern road.  He had guarded these last-mentioned archers
(where exposed in front to Edward's horsemen) by strong tall
barricades, leaving only such an opening as would allow one horseman
at a time to pass, and defending by a formidable line of pikes this
narrow opening left for communication, and to admit to a place of
refuge in case of need.  These dispositions made, and ere yet Edward
had advanced on Somerset, the earl rode to the front of the wing under
his special command, and, agreeably to the custom of the time,
observed by his royal foe, harangued the troops.  Here were placed
those who loved him as a father, and venerated him as something
superior to mortal man; here the retainers who had grown up with him
from his childhood, who had followed him to his first fields of war,
who had lived under the shelter of his many castles, and fed, in that
rude equality of a more primeval age which he loved still to maintain,
at his lavish board.  And now Lord Warwick's coal-black steed halted,
motionless in the van.  His squire behind bore his helmet,
overshadowed by the eagle of Monthermer, the outstretched wings of
which spread wide into sable plumes; and as the earl's noble face
turned full and calm upon the bristling lines, there arose not the
vulgar uproar that greeted the aspect of the young Edward.  By one of
those strange sympathies which pass through multitudes, and seize them
with a common feeling, the whole body of those adoring vassals became
suddenly aware of the change which a year had made in the face of
their chief and father.  They saw the gray flakes in his Jove-like
curls, the furrows in that lofty brow, the hollows in that bronzed and
manly visage, which had seemed to their rude admiration to wear the
stamp of the twofold Divinity,--Beneficence and Valour.  A thrill of
tenderness and awe shot through the veins of every one, tears of
devotion rushed into many a hardy eye.  No! there was not the ruthless
captain addressing his hireling butchers; it was the chief and father
rallying gratitude and love and reverence to the crisis of his stormy
fate.

"My friends, my followers, and my children," said the earl, "the field
we have entered is one from which there is no retreat; here must your
leader conquer or here die.  It is not a parchment pedigree, it is not
a name derived from the ashes of dead men, that make the only charter
of a king.  We Englishmen were but slaves, if, in giving crown and
sceptre to a mortal like ourselves, we asked not in return the kingly
virtues.  Beset of old by evil counsellors, the reign of Henry VI. was
obscured, and the weal of the realm endangered.  Mine own wrongs
seemed to me great, but the disasters of my country not less.  I
deemed that in the race of York, England would know a wiser and
happier rule.  What was, in this, mine error, ye partly know.  A
prince dissolved in luxurious vices, a nobility degraded by minions
and blood-suckers, a people plundered by purveyors, and a land
disturbed by brawl and riot.  But ye know not all: God makes man's
hearth man's altar: our hearths were polluted, our wives and daughters
were viewed as harlots, and lechery ruled the realm.  A king's word
should be fast as the pillars of the world.  What man ever trusted
Edward and was not deceived?  Even now the unknightly liar stands in
arms with the weight of perjury on his soul.  In his father's town of
York, ye know that he took, three short weeks since, solemn oath of
fealty to King Henry.  And now King Henry is his captive, and King
Henry's holy crown upon his traitor's head.  'Traitors' calls he Us?
What name, then, rank enough for him?  Edward gave the promise of a
brave man, and I served him.  He proved a base, a false, a licentious,
and a cruel king, and I forsook him; may all free hearts in all free
lands so serve kings when they become tyrants!  Ye fight against a
cruel and atrocious usurper, whose bold hand cannot sanctify a black
heart; ye fight not only for King Henry, the meek and the godly,--ye
fight not for him alone, but for his young and princely son, the
grandchild of Henry of Agincourt, who, old men tell me, has that
hero's face, and who, I know, has that hero's frank and royal and
noble soul; ye fight for the freedom of your land, for the honour of
your women, for what is better than any king's cause,--for justice and
mercy, for truth and manhood's virtues against corruption in the laws,
slaughter by the scaffold, falsehood in a ruler's lips, and shameless
harlotry in the councils of ruthless power.  The order I have ever
given in war I give now; we war against the leaders of evil, not
against the hapless tools; we war against our oppressors, not against
our misguided brethren.  Strike down every plumed crest, but when the
strife is over, spare every common man!  Hark! while I speak, I hear
the march of your foe!  Up standards!--blow trumpets!  And now, as I
brace my bassinet, may God grant us all a glorious victory, or a
glorious grave!  On, my merry men! show these London loons the stout
hearts of Warwickshire and Yorkshire.  On, my merry men!  A Warwick! A
Warwick!"

As he ended, he swung lightly over his head the terrible battle-axe
which had smitten down, as the grass before the reaper, the chivalry
of many a field; and ere the last blast of the trumpets died, the
troops of Warwick and of Gloucester met, and mingled hand to hand.

Although the earl had, on discovering the position of the enemy, moved
some of his artillery from his right wing, yet there still lay the
great number and strength of his force.  And there, therefore,
Montagu, rolling troop on troop to the aid of Oxford, pressed so
overpoweringly upon the soldiers under Hastings, that the battle very
soon wore a most unfavourable aspect for the Yorkists.  It seemed,
indeed, that the success which had always hitherto attended the
military movements of Montagu was destined for a crowning triumph.
Stationed, as we have said, in the rear, with his light-armed squires,
upon fleet steeds, around him, he moved the springs of the battle with
the calm sagacity which at that moment no chief in either army
possessed.  Hastings was thoroughly outflanked, and though his men
fought with great valour, they could not resist the weight of superior
numbers.

In the midst of the carnage in the centre, Edward reined in his steed
as he heard the cry of victory in the gale.

"By Heaven!" he exclaimed, "our men at the left are cravens! they fly!
they fly!--Ride to Lord Hastings, Sir Humphrey Bourchier, bid him
defile hither what men are left him; and now, ere our fellows are well
aware what hath chanced yonder, charge we, knights and gentlemen, on,
on!--break Somerset's line; on, on, to the heart of the rebel earl!"

Then, visor closed, lance in rest, Edward and his cavalry dashed
through the archers and billmen of Somerset; clad in complete mail,
impervious to the weapons of the infantry, they slaughtered as they
rode, and their way was marked by corpses and streams of blood.
Fiercest and fellest of all was Edward himself; when his lance
shivered, and he drew his knotty mace from its sling by his saddlebow,
woe to all who attempted to stop his path.  Vain alike steel helmet or
leathern cap, jerkin or coat of mail.  In vain Somerset threw himself
into the melee.  The instant Edward and his cavalry had made a path
through the lines for his foot-soldiery, the fortunes of the day were
half retrieved.  It was no rapid passage, pierced and reclosed, that
he desired to effect,--it was the wedge in the oak of war.  There,
rooted in the very midst of Somerset's troops, doubling on each side,
passing on but to return again, where helm could be crashed and man
overthrown, the mighty strength of Edward widened the breach more and
more, till faster and faster poured in his bands, and the centre of
Warwick's army seemed to reel and whirl round the broadening gap
through its ranks, as the waves round some chasm in a maelstrom.

But in the interval, the hard-pressed troops commanded by Hastings
were scattered and dispersed; driven from the field, they fled in
numbers through the town of Barnet; many halted not till they reached
London, where they spread the news of the earl's victory and Edward's
ruin.  [Sharon Turner.]

Through the mist, Friar Bungey discerned the fugitive Yorkists under
Hastings, and heard their cries of despair; through the mist, Sibyll
saw, close beneath the intrenchments which protected the space on
which they stood, an armed horseman with the well-known crest of
Hastings on his helmet, and, with lifted visor, calling his men to the
return, in the loud voice of rage and scorn.  And then she herself
sprang forwards, and forgetting his past cruelty in his present
danger, cried his name,--weak cry, lost in the roar of war!  But the
friar, now fearing he had taken the wrong side, began to turn from his
spells, to address the most abject apologies to Adam, to assure him
that he would have been slaughtered at the Tower but for the friar's
interruption; and that the rope round his neck was but an
insignificant ceremony due to the prejudices of the soldiers.  "Alas,
Great Man," he concluded, "I see still that thou art mightier than I
am; thy charms, though silent, are more potent than mine, though my
lungs crack beneath them!  Confusio Inimicis Taralorolu, I mean no
harm to the earl.  Garrabora, mistes et nubes!--Lord, what will become
of me!"

Meanwhile, Hastings--with a small body of horse, who being composed of
knights and squires, specially singled out for the sword, fought with
the pride of disdainful gentlemen, and the fury of desperate soldiers
--finding it impossible to lure back the fugitives, hewed their own way
through Oxford's ranks to the centre, where they brought fresh aid to
the terrible arm of Edward.




CHAPTER V.

THE BATTLE.

The mist still continued so thick that Montagu was unable to discern
the general prospects of the field; but, calm and resolute in his
post, amidst the arrows which whirled round him, and often struck,
blunted, against his Milan mail, the marquis received the reports of
his aides-de-camp (may that modern word be pardoned?) as one after one
they emerged through the fog to his side.

"Well," he said, as one of these messengers now spurred to the spot,
"we have beaten off Hastings and his hirelings; but I see not 'the
Silver Star' of Lord Oxford's banner."  [The Silver Star of the De
Veres had its origin in a tradition that one of their ancestors, when
fighting in the Holy Land, saw a falling star descend upon his shield.
Fatal to men nobler even than the De Veres was that silver falling
star.]

"Lord Oxford, my lord, has followed the enemy he routed to the
farthest verge of the heath."

"Saints help us!  Is Oxford thus headstrong?  He will ruin all if he
be decoyed from the field!  Ride back, sir!  Yet hold!"--as another of
the aides-de-camp appeared.  "What news from Lord Warwick's wing?"

"Sore beset, bold marquis.  Gloucester's line seems countless; it
already outflanks the earl.  The duke himself seems inspired by hell!
Twice has his slight arm braved even the earl's battle-axe, which
spared the boy but smote to the dust his comrades!"

"Well, and what of the centre, sir?" as a third form now arrived.

"There rages Edward in person.  He hath pierced into the midst.  But
Somerset still holds on gallantly!"  Montagu turned to the first aide-
de-camp.

"Ride, sir!  Quick!  This to Oxford--No pursuit!  Bid him haste, with
all his men, to the left wing, and smite Gloucester in the rear.
Ride, ride, for life and victory!  If he come but in time the day is
ours!"  [Fabyan.]

The aide-de-camp darted off, and the mist swallowed up horse and
horseman.

"Sound trumpets to the return!" said the marquis.  Then, after a
moment's musing, "Though Oxford hath drawn off our main force of
cavalry, we have still some stout lances left; and Warwick must be
strengthened.  On to the earl!  Laissez aller!  A Montagu! a Montagu!"
And lance in rest, the marquis and the knights immediately around him,
and hitherto not personally engaged, descended the hillock at a
hand-gallop, and were met by a troop outnumbering their own, and
commanded by the Lords D'Eyncourt and Say.

At this time Warwick was indeed in the same danger that had routed the
troops of Hastings; for, by a similar position, the strength of the
hostile numbers being arrayed with Gloucester, the duke's troops had
almost entirely surrounded him [Sharon Turner]; and Gloucester himself
wondrously approved the trust that had consigned to his stripling arm
the flower of the Yorkist army.  Through the mists the blood-red
manteline he wore over his mail, the grinning teeth of the boar's head
which crested his helmet, flashed and gleamed wherever his presence
was most needed to encourage the flagging or spur on the fierce.  And
there seemed to both armies something ghastly and preternatural in the
savage strength of this small slight figure thus startlingly
caparisoned, and which was heard evermore uttering its sharp war-cry,
"Gloucester to the onslaught!  Down with the rebels, down!"

Nor did this daring personage disdain, in the midst of his fury, to
increase the effect of valour by the art of a brain that never ceased
to scheme on the follies of mankind.  "See, see!" he cried, as he shot
meteor-like from rank to rank, "see, these are no natural vapours!
Yonder the mighty friar, who delayed the sails of Margaret, chants his
spells to the Powers that ride the gale.  Fear not the bombards,--
their enchanted balls swerve from the brave!  The dark legions of Air
fight for us!  For the hour is come when the fiend shall rend his
prey!"  And fiendlike seemed the form thus screeching forth its
predictions from under the grim head-gear; and then darting and
disappearing amidst the sea of pikes, cleaving its path of blood!

But still the untiring might of Warwick defied the press of numbers
that swept round him tide upon tide.  Through the mist, his black
armour, black plume, black steed, gloomed forth like one thundercloud
in the midst of a dismal heaven.  The noble charger bore along that
mighty rider, animating, guiding all, with as much ease and lightness
as the racer bears its puny weight; the steed itself was scarce less
terrible to encounter than the sweep of the rider's axe.  Protected
from arrow and lance by a coat of steel, the long chaffron, or pike,
which projected from its barbed frontal dropped with gore as it
scoured along.  No line of men, however serried, could resist the
charge of that horse and horseman.  And vain even Gloucester's
dauntless presence and thrilling battle-cry, when the stout earl was
seen looming through the vapour, and his cheerful shout was heard, "My
merry men, fight on!"

For a third time, Gloucester, spurring forth from his recoiling and
shrinking followers, bending low over his saddle-bow, covered by his
shield, and with the tenth lance (his favourite weapon, because the
one in which skill best supplied strength) he had borne that day,
launched himself upon the vast bulk of his tremendous foe.  With that
dogged energy, that rapid calculation, which made the basis of his
character, and which ever clove through all obstacles at the one that,
if destroyed, destroyed the rest,--in that, his first great battle, as
in his last at Bosworth, he singled out the leader, and rushed upon
the giant as the mastiff on the horns and dewlap of the bull.
Warwick, in the broad space which his arm had made around him in the
carnage, reined in as he saw the foe and recognized the grisly
cognizance and scarlet mantle of his godson.  And even in that moment,
with all his heated blood and his remembered wrong and his imminent
peril, his generous and lion heart felt a glow of admiration at the
valour of the boy he had trained to arms,--of the son of the beloved
York.  "His father little thought," muttered the earl, "that that arm
should win glory against his old friend's life!"  And as the half-
uttered word died on his lips, the well-poised lance of Gloucester
struck full upon his bassinet, and, despite the earl's horsemanship
and his strength, made him reel in his saddle, while the prince shot
by, and suddenly wheeling round, cast away the shivered lance, and
assailed him sword in hand.

"Back, Richard! boy, back!" said the earl, in a voice that sounded
hollow through his helmet; "it is not against thee that my wrongs call
for blood,--pass on!"

"Not so, Lord Warwick," answered Richard, in a sobered and almost
solemn voice, dropping for the moment the point of his sword, and
raising his visor, that he might be the better heard,--"on the field
of battle all memories sweet in peace must die!  Saint Paul be my
judge, that even in this hour I love you well; but I love renown and
glory more.  On the edge of my sword sit power and royalty, and what
high souls prize most,--ambition; these would nerve me against my own
brother's breast, were that breast my barrier to an illustrious
future.  Thou hast given thy daughter to another!  I smite the father
to regain my bride.  Lay on, and spare not!--for he who hates thee
most would prove not so fell a foe as the man who sees his fortunes
made or marred, his love crushed or yet crowned, as this day's battle
closes in triumph or defeat.  REBEL, DEFEND THYSELF!"

No time was left for further speech; for as Richard's sword descended,
two of Gloucester's followers, Parr and Milwater by name, dashed from
the halting lines at the distance, and bore down to their young
prince's aid.  At the same moment, Sir Marmaduke Nevile and the Lord
Fitzhugh spurred from the opposite line; and thus encouraged, the band
on either side came boldly forward, and the melee grew fierce and
general.  But still Richard's sword singled out the earl, and still
the earl, parrying his blows, dealt his own upon meaner heads.
Crushed by one sweep of the axe fell Milwater to the earth; down, as
again it swung on high, fell Sir Humphrey Bourchier, who had just
arrived to Gloucester with messages from Edward, never uttered in the
world below.  Before Marmaduke's lance fell Sir Thomas Parr; and these
three corpses making a barrier between Gloucester and the earl, the
duke turned fiercely upon Marmaduke, while the earl, wheeling round,
charged into the midst of the hostile line, which scattered to the
right and left.

"On! my merry men, on!" rang once more through the heavy air.  "They
give way, the London tailors,--on!" and on dashed, with their joyous
cry, the merry men of Yorkshire and Warwick, the warrior yeomen!
Separated thus from his great foe, Gloucester, after unhorsing
Marmaduke, galloped off to sustain that part of his following which
began to waver and retreat before the rush of Warwick and his
chivalry.

This, in truth, was the regiment recruited from the loyalty of London;
and little accustomed, we trow, were the worthy heroes of Cockaigne to
the discipline of arms, nor trained to that stubborn resistance which
makes, under skilful leaders, the English peasants the most enduring
soldiery that the world has known since the day when the Roman
sentinel perished amidst the falling columns and lava floods [at
Pompeii], rather than, though society itself dissolved, forsake his
post unbidden.  "Saint Thomas defend us!" muttered a worthy tailor,
who in the flush of his valour, when safe in the Chepe, had consented
to bear the rank of lieutenant; "it is not reasonable to expect men of
pith and substance to be crushed into jellies and carved into
subtleties by horse-hoofs and pole-axes.  Right about face!  Fly!"--
and throwing down his sword and shield, the lieutenant fairly took to
his heels as he saw the charging column, headed by the raven steed of
Warwick, come giant-like through the fog.  The terror of one man is
contagious, and the Londoners actually turned their backs, when
Nicholas Alwyn cried, in his shrill voice and northern accent, "Out on
you!  What will the girls say of us in East-gate and the Chepe?
Hurrah for the bold hearts of London!  Round me, stout 'prentices! let
the boys shame the men!  This shaft for Cockaigne!"  And as the troop
turned irresolute, and Alwyn's arrow left his bow, they saw a horseman
by the side of Warwick reel in his saddle and fall at once to the
earth; and so great evidently was the rank of the fallen man that even
Warwick reined in, and the charge halted midway in its career.  It was
no less a person than the Duke of Exeter whom Alwyn's shaft had
disabled for the field.  This incident, coupled with the hearty
address of the stout goldsmith, served to reanimate the flaggers, and
Gloucester, by a circuitous route, reaching their line a moment after,
they dressed their ranks, and a flight of arrows followed their loud
"Hurrah for London Town!"

But the charge of Warwick had only halted, and (while the wounded
Exeter was borne back by his squires to the rear) it dashed into the
midst of the Londoners, threw their whole line into confusion, and
drove them, despite all the efforts of Gloucester, far back along the
plain.  This well-timed exploit served to extricate the earl from the
main danger of his position; and, hastening to improve his advantage,
he sent forthwith to command the reserved forces under Lord St. John,
the Knight of Lytton, Sir John Coniers, Dymoke, and Robert Hilyard, to
bear down to his aid.

At this time Edward had succeeded, after a most stubborn fight, in
effecting a terrible breach through Somerset's wing; and the fog
continued still so dense and mirk, that his foe itself--for Somerset
had prudently drawn back to re-form his disordered squadron--seemed
vanished from the field.  Halting now, as through the dim atmosphere
came from different quarters the many battle-cries of that feudal-day,
by which alone he could well estimate the strength or weakness of
those in the distance, his calmer genius as a general cooled, for a
time, his individual ferocity of knight and soldier.  He took his
helmet from his brow to listen with greater certainty; and the lords
and riders round him were well content to take breath and pause from
the weary slaughter.

The cry of "Gloucester to the onslaught!" was heard no more.  Feebler
and feebler, scatteringly as it were, and here and there, the note had
changed into "Gloucester to the rescue!"

Farther off rose, mingled and blent together, the opposing shouts, "A
Montagu! a Montagu!  Strike for D'Eyncourt and King Edward!"--"A Say!
A Say!"

"Ha!" said Edward, thoughtfully, "bold Gloucester fails, Montagu is
bearing on to Warwick's aid, Say and D'Eyncourt stop his path.  Our
doom looks dark!  Ride, Hastings,--ride; retrieve thy laurels, and
bring up the reserve under Clarence.  But hark ye, leave not his
side,--he may desert again!  Ho! ho!  Again, 'Gloucester to the
rescue!'  Ah, how lustily sounds the cry of 'Warwick!'  By the flaming
sword of Saint Michael, we will slacken that haughty shout, or be
evermore dumb ourself, ere the day be an hour nearer to the eternal
judgment!"

Deliberately Edward rebraced his helm, and settled himself in his
saddle, and with his knights riding close each to each, that they
might not lose themselves in the darkness, regained his infantry, and
led them on to the quarter where the war now raged fiercest, round the
black steed of Warwick and the blood-red manteline of the fiery
Richard.




CHAPTER VI.

THE BATTLE.

It was now scarcely eight in the morning, though the battle had
endured three hours; and, as yet, victory so inclined to the earl that
nought but some dire mischance could turn the scale.  Montagu had cut
his way to Warwick; Somerset had re-established his array.  The fresh
vigour brought by the earl's reserve had well-nigh completed his
advantage over Gloucester's wing.  The new infantry under Hilyard, the
unexhausted riders under Sir John Coniers and his knightly compeers,
were dealing fearful havoc, as they cleared the plain; and Gloucester,
fighting inch by inch, no longer outnumbering but outnumbered, was
driven nearer and nearer towards the town, when suddenly a pale,
sickly, and ghostlike ray of sunshine, rather resembling the watery
gleam of a waning moon than the radiance of the Lord of Light, broke
through the mists, and showed to the earl's eager troops the banner
and badges of a new array hurrying to the spot.  "Behold," cried the
young Lord Fitzhugh, "the standard and the badge of the Usurper,--a
silver sun!  Edward himself is delivered into our hands!  Upon them,
bill and pike, lance and brand, shaft and bolt!  Upon them, and crown
the day!"

The same fatal error was shared by Hilyard, as he caught sight of the
advancing troop, with their silvery cognizance.  He gave the word, and
every arrow left its string.  At the same moment, as both horse and
foot assailed the fancied foe, the momentary beam vanished from the
heaven, the two forces mingled in the sullen mists, when, after a
brief conflict, a sudden and horrible cry of "Treason! Treason!"
resounded from either band.  The shining star of Oxford, returning
from the pursuit, had been mistaken for Edward's cognizance of the
sun.  [Cont. Croyl., 555; Fabyan, Habington, Hume, S. Turner.]  Friend
was slaughtering friend, and when the error was detected, each
believed the other had deserted to the foe.  In vain, here Montagu and
Warwick, and there Oxford and his captains, sought to dispel the
confusion, and unite those whose blood had been fired against each
other.  While yet in doubt, confusion, and dismay, rushed full into
the centre Edward of York himself, with his knights and riders; and
his tossing banners, scarcely even yet distinguished from Oxford's
starry ensigns, added to the general incertitude and panic.  Loud in
the midst rose Edward's trumpet voice, while through the midst, like
one crest of foam upon a roaring sea, danced his plume of snow.  Hark!
again, again--near and nearer--the tramp of steeds, the clash of
steel, the whiz and hiss of arrows, the shout of "Hastings to the
onslaught!"  Fresh, and panting for glory and for blood, came on King
Edward's large reserve; from all the scattered parts of the field
spurred the Yorkist knights, where the uproar, so much mightier than
before, told them that the crisis of the war was come.  Thither, as
vultures to the carcass, they flocked and wheeled; thither D'Eyncourt
and Lovell, and Cromwell's bloody sword, and Say's knotted mace; and
thither, again rallying his late half-beaten myrmidons, the grim
Gloucester, his helmet bruised and dinted, but the boar's teeth still
gnashing wrath and horror from the grisly crest. But direst and most
hateful of all in the eyes of the yet undaunted earl, thither, plainly
visible, riding scarcely a yard before him, with the cognizance of
Clare wrought on his gay mantle, and in all the pomp and bravery of a
holiday suit, came the perjured Clarence.  Conflict now it could
scarce be called: as well might the Dane have rolled back the sea from
his footstool, as Warwick and his disordered troop (often and aye,
dazzled here by Oxford's star, there by Edward's sun, dealing random
blows against each other) have resisted the general whirl and torrent
of the surrounding foe.  To add to the rout, Somerset and the on-guard
of his wing had been marching towards the earl at the very time that
the cry of "treason" had struck their ears, and Edward's charge was
made; these men, nearly all Lancastrians, and ever doubting Montagu,
if not Warwick, with the example of Clarence and the Archbishop of
York fresh before them, lost heart at once,--Somerset himself headed
the flight of his force.

"All is lost!" said Montagu, as side by side with Warwick the brothers
fronted the foe, and for one moment stayed the rush.

"Not yet," returned the earl; "a band of my northern archers still
guard yon wood; I know them,--they will fight to the last gasp!
Thither, then, with what men we may.  You so marshal our soldiers, and
I will make good the retreat.  Where is Sir Marmaduke Nevile?"

"Here!"

"Horsed again, young cousin!  I give thee a perilous commission.  Take
the path down the hill; the mists thicken in the hollows, and may hide
thee.  Overtake Somerset; he hath fled westward, and tell him, from
me, if he can yet rally but one troop of horse--but one--and charge
Edward suddenly in the rear, he will yet redeem all.  If he refuse,
the ruin of his king and the slaughter of the brave men he deserts be
on his head!  Swift, a tout bride, Marmaduke.  Yet one word," added
the earl, in a whisper,--"if you fail with Somerset, come not back,
make to the Sanctuary.  You are too young to die, cousin!  Away! keep
to the hollows of the chase."

As the knight vanished, Warwick turned to his comrades "Bold nephew
Fitzhugh, and ye brave riders round me,--so we are fifty knights!
Haste thou, Montagu, to the wood! the wood!"

So noble in that hero age was the Individual MAN, even amidst the
multitudes massed by war, that history vies with romance in showing
how far a single sword could redress the scale of war.  While Montagu,
with rapid dexterity, and a voice yet promising victory, drew back the
remnant of the lines, and in serried order retreated to the outskirts
of the wood, Warwick and his band of knights protected the movement
from the countless horsemen who darted forth from Edward's swarming
and momently thickening ranks.  Now dividing and charging singly, now
rejoining, and breast to breast, they served to divert and perplex and
harass the eager enemy.  And never in all his wars, in all the former
might of his indomitable arm, had Warwick so excelled the martial
chivalry of his age, as in that eventful and crowning hour.  Thrice
almost alone he penetrated into the very centre of Edward's body-
guard, literally felling to the earth all before him.  Then perished
by his battle-axe Lord Cromwell and the redoubted Lord of Say; then,
no longer sparing even the old affection, Gloucester was hurled to the
ground.  The last time he penetrated even to Edward himself, smiting
down the king's standard-bearer, unhorsing Hastings, who threw himself
on his path; and Edward, setting his teeth in stern joy as he saw him,
rose in his stirrups, and for a moment the mace of the king, the axe
of the earl, met as thunder encounters thunder; but then a hundred
knights rushed into the rescue, and robbed the baffled avenger of his
prey.  Thus charging and retreating, driving back with each charge
farther and farther the mighty multitude hounding on to the lion's
death, this great chief and his devoted knights, though terribly
reduced in number, succeeded at last in covering Montagu's skilful
retreat; and when they gained the outskirts of the wood, and dashed
through the narrow opening between the barricades, the Yorkshire
archers approved their lord's trust, and, shouting, as to a marriage
feast, hailed his coming.

But few, alas! of his fellow-horsemen had survived that marvellous
enterprise of valour and despair.  Of the fifty knights who had shared
its perils, eleven only gained the wood; and, though in this number
the most eminent (save Sir John Coniers, either slain or fled) might
be found, their horses, more exposed than themselves, were for the
most part wounded and unfit for further service.  At this time the sun
again, and suddenly as before, broke forth,--not now with a feeble
glimmer, but a broad and almost a cheerful beam, which sufficed to
give a fuller view than the day had yet afforded of the state and
prospects of the field.

To the right and to the left, what remained of the cavalry of Warwick
were seen flying fast,--gone the lances of Oxford, the bills of
Somerset.  Exeter, pierced by the shaft of Alwyn, was lying cold and
insensible, remote from the contest, and deserted even by his squires.

In front of the archers and such men as Montagu had saved from the
sword, halted the immense and murmuring multitude of Edward, their
thousand banners glittering in the sudden sun; for, as Edward beheld
the last wrecks of his foe, stationed near the covert, his desire of
consummating victory and revenge made him cautious, and, fearing an
ambush, he had abruptly halted.

When the scanty followers of the earl thus beheld the immense force
arrayed for their destruction, and saw the extent of their danger, and
their loss,--here the handful, there the multitude,--a simultaneous
exclamation of terror and dismay broke from their ranks.

"Children!" cried Warwick, "droop not!  Henry at Agincourt had worse
odds than we!"

But the murmur among the archers, the lealest part of the earl's
retainers, continued, till there stepped forth their captain, a gray
old man, but still sinewy and unbent, the iron relic of a hundred
battles.

"Back to your men, Mark Forester!" said the earl, sternly.

The old man obeyed not.  He came on to Warwick, and fell on his knees
beside his stirrup.

"Fly, my lord! escape is possible for you and your riders.  Fly
through the wood, we will screen your path with our bodies.  Your
children, father of your followers, your children of Middleham, ask no
better fate than to die for you!  Is it not so?" and the old man,
rising, turned to those in hearing.  They answered by a general
acclamation.

"Mark Forester speaks well," said Montagu.  "On yon depends the last
hope of Lancaster.  We may yet join Oxford and Somerset!  This way
through the wood,--come!" and he laid his hand on the earl's rein.

"Knights and sirs," said the earl, dismounting, and partially raising
his visor as he turned to the horsemen, "let those who will, fly with
Lord Montagu!  Let those who, in a just cause, never despair of
victory, nor, even at the worst, fear to face their Maker, fresh from
the glorious death of heroes, dismount with me!"  Every knight sprang
from his steed, Montagu the first. "Comrades!" continued the earl,
then addressing the retainers, "when the children fight for a father's
honour, the father flies not from the peril into which he has drawn
the children.  What to me were life, stained by the blood of mine own
beloved retainers, basely deserted by their chief?  Edward has
proclaimed that he will spare none.  Fool! he gives us, then, the
superhuman mightiness of despair!  To your bows!--one shaft--if it
pierce the joints of the tyrant's mail--one shaft may scatter yon army
to the winds!  Sir Marmaduke has gone to rally noble Somerset and his
riders; if we make good our defence one little hour, the foe may be
yet smitten in the rear, and the day retrieved!  Courage and heart
then!"  Here the earl lifted his visor to the farthest bar, and showed
his cheerful face--"Is this the face of a man who thinks all hope is
gone?"

In this interval, the sudden sunshine revealed to King Henry, where he
stood, the dispersion of his friends.  To the rear of the palisades,
which protected the spot where he was placed, already grouped "the
lookers-on and no fighters," as the chronicler [Fabyan] words it, who,
as the guns slackened, ventured forth to learn the news, and who now,
filling the churchyard of Hadley, strove hard to catch a peep of Henry
the saint, or of Bungey the sorcerer.  Mingled with these gleamed the
robes of the tymbesteres, pressing nearer and nearer to the barriers,
as wolves, in the instinct of blood, come nearer and nearer round the
circling watch-fire of some northern travellers.  At this time the
friar, turning to one of the guards who stood near him, said, "The
mists are needed no more now; King Edward hath got the day, eh?"

"Certes, great master," quoth the guard, "nothing now lacks to the
king's triumph except the death of the earl."

"Infamous nigromancer, hear that!" cried Bungey to Adam.  "What now
avail thy bombards and thy talisman!  Hark yet--tell me the secret of
the last,--of the damnable engine under my feet, and I may spare thy
life."

Adam shrugged his shoulders in impatient disdain.  "Unless I gave thee
my science, my secret were profitless to thee.  Villain and numskull,
do thy worst."

The friar made a sign to a soldier who stood behind Adam, and the
soldier silently drew the end of the rope which girded the scholar's
neck round a bough of the leafless tree.  "Hold!" whispered the friar,
"not till I give the word.  The earl may recover himself yet," he
added to himself; and therewith he began once more to vociferate his
incantations.  Meanwhile the eyes of Sibyll had turned for a moment
from her father; for the burst of sunshine, lighting up the valley
below, had suddenly given to her eyes, in the distance, the gable-ends
of the old farmhouse, with the wintry orchard,--no longer, alas!
smiling with starry blossoms.  Far remote from the battlefield was
that abode of peace,--that once happy home, where she had watched the
coming of the false one!

Loftier and holier were the thoughts of the fated king.  He had turned
his face from the field, and his eyes were fixed upon the tower of the
church behind.  And while he so gazed, the knoll from the belfry began
solemnly to chime.  It was now near the hour of the Sabbath prayers,
and amidst horror and carnage, still the holy custom was not
suspended.

"Hark!" said the king, mournfully, "that chime summons many a soul to
God!"

While thus the scene on the eminence of Hadley, Edward, surrounded by
Hastings, Gloucester, and his principal captains, took advantage of
the unexpected sunshine to scan the foe and its position, with the eye
of his intuitive genius for all that can slaughter man.  "This day,"
he said, "brings no victory, assures no crown, if Warwick escape
alive.  To you, Lovell and Ratcliffe, I intrust two hundred knights,--
your sole care the head of the rebel earl!"

"And Montagu?" said Ratcliffe.

"Montagu?  Nay, poor Montagu, I loved him as well once as my own
mother's son; and Montagu," he muttered to himself, "I never wronged,
and therefore him I can forgive.  Spare the marquis.--I mislike that
wood; they must have more force within than that handful on the skirts
betrays.  Come hither, D'Eyncourt."

And a few minutes afterwards, Warwick and his men saw two parties of
horse leave the main body, one for the right hand, one the left,
followed by long detachments of pikes, which they protected; and then
the central array marched slowly and steadily on towards the scanty
foe.  The design was obvious,--to surround on all sides the enemy,
driven to its last desperate bay.  But Montagu and his brother had not
been idle in the breathing-pause; they had planted the greater portion
of the archers skilfully among the trees.  They had placed their
pikemen on the verge of the barricades made by sharp stakes and fallen
timber, and where their rampart was unguarded by the pass which had
been left free for the horsemen, Hilyard and his stoutest fellows took
their post, filling the gap with breasts of iron.

And now, as with horns and clarions, with a sea of plumes and spears
and pennons, the multitudinous deathsmen came on, Warwick, towering in
the front, not one feather on his eagle crest despoiled or shorn,
stood, dismounted, his visor still raised, by his renowned steed.
Some of the men had by Warwick's order removed the mail from the
destrier's breast; and the noble animal, relieved from the weight,
seemed as unexhausted as its rider; save where the champed foam had
bespecked its glossy hide, not a hair was turned; and the on-guard of
the Yorkists heard its fiery snort as they moved slowly on.  This
figure of horse and horseman stood prominently forth amidst the little
band.  And Lovell, riding by Ratcliffe's side, whispered, "Beshrew me,
I would rather King Edward had asked for mine own head than that
gallant earl's!"

"Tush, youth," said the inexorable Ratcliffe, "I care not of what
steps the ladder of mine ambition may be made!"

While they were thus speaking, Warwick, turning to Montagu and his
knights, said,--

"Our sole hope is in the courage of our men.  And, as at Towton, when
I gave the throne to yon false man, I slew, with my own hand, my noble
Malech, to show that on that spot I would win or die, and by that
sacrifice so fired the soldiers, that we turned the day, so now--oh,
gentlemen, in another hour ye would jeer me, for my hand fails: this
hand that the poor beast hath so often fed from!  Saladin, last of thy
race, serve me now in death as in life.  Not for my sake, oh noblest
steed that ever bore a knight,--not for mine this offering!"

He kissed the destrier on his frontal, and Saladin, as if conscious of
the coming blow, bent his proud crest humbly, and licked his lord's
steel-clad hand.  So associated together had been horse and horseman,
that had it been a human sacrifice, the bystanders could not have been
more moved.  And when, covering the charger's eyes with one hand, the
earl's dagger descended, bright and rapid, a groan went through the
ranks.  But the effect was unspeakable!  The men knew at once that to
them, and them alone, their lord intrusted his fortunes and his life;
they were nerved to more than mortal daring.  No escape for Warwick--
why, then, in Warwick's person they lived and died!  Upon foe as upon
friend, the sacrifice produced all that could tend to strengthen the
last refuge of despair.  Even Edward, where he rode in the van, beheld
and knew the meaning of the deed.  Victorious Towton rushed back upon
his memory with a thrill of strange terror and remorse.

"He will die as he has lived," said Gloucester, with admiration.  "If
I live for such a field, God grant me such a death!"

As the words left the duke's lips, and Warwick, one foot on his dumb
friend's corpse, gave the mandate, a murderous discharge from the
archers in the covert rattled against the line of the Yorkists, and
the foe, still advancing, stepped over a hundred corpses to the
conflict.  Despite the vast preponderance of numbers, the skill of
Warwick's archers, the strength of his position, the obstacle to the
cavalry made by the barricades, rendered the attack perilous in the
extreme.

But the orders of Edward were prompt and vigorous.  He cared not for
the waste of life, and as one rank fell, another rushed on.  High
before the barricades stood Montagu, Warwick, and the rest of that
indomitable chivalry, the flower of the ancient Norman heroism.  As
idly beat the waves upon a rock as the ranks of Edward upon that
serried front of steel.  The sun still shone in heaven, and still
Edward's conquest was unassured.  Nay, if Marmaduke could yet bring
back the troops of Somerset upon the rear of the foe, Montagu and the
earl felt that the victory might be for them.  And often the earl
paused, to hearken for the cry of "Somerset" on the gale, and often
Montagu raised his visor to look for the banners and the spears of the
Lancastrian duke.  And ever, as the earl listened and Montagu scanned
the field, larger and larger seemed to spread the armament of Edward.
The regiment which boasted the stubborn energy of Alwyn was now in
movement, and, encouraged by the young Saxon's hardihood, the
Londoners marched on, unawed by the massacre of their predecessors.
But Alwyn, avoiding the quarter defended by the knights, defiled a
little towards the left, where his quick eye, inured to the northern
fogs, had detected the weakness of the barricade in the spot where
Hilyard was stationed; and this pass Alwyn (discarding the bow)
resolved to attempt at the point of the pike, the weapon answering to
our modern bayonet.  The first rush which he headed was so impetuous
as to effect an entry.  The weight of the numbers behind urged on the
foremost, and Hilyard had not sufficient space for the sweep of the
two-handed sword which had done good work that day.  While here the
conflict became fierce and doubtful, the right wing led by D'Eyncourt
had pierced the wood, and, surprised to discover no ambush, fell upon
the archers in the rear.  The scene was now inexpressibly terrific;
cries and groans, and the ineffable roar and yell of human passion,
resounded demonlike through the shade of the leafless trees.  And at
this moment, the provident and rapid generalship of Edward had moved
up one of his heavy bombards.  Warwick and Montagu and most of the
knights were called from the barricades to aid the archers thus
assailed behind; but an instant before that defence was shattered into
air by the explosion of the bombard.  In another minute horse and foot
rushed through the opening.  And amidst all the din was heard the
voice of Edward, "Strike, and spare not; we win the day!"  "We win the
day! victory! victory!" repeated the troops behind.  Rank caught the
sound from rank, and file from file; it reached the captive Henry, and
he paused in prayer; it reached the ruthless friar, and he gave the
sign to the hireling at his shoulder; it reached the priest as he
entered, unmoved, the church of Hadley.  And the bell, changing its
note into a quicker and sweeter chime, invited the living to prepare
for death, and the soul to rise above the cruelty and the falsehood,
and the pleasure and the pomp, and the wisdom and the glory of the
world!  And suddenly, as the chime ceased, there was heard, from the
eminence hard by, a shriek of agony,--a female shriek,--drowned by the
roar of a bombard in the field below.

On pressed the Yorkists through the pass forced by Alwyn.  "Yield
thee, stout fellow," said the bold trader to Hilyard, whose dogged
energy, resembling his own, moved his admiration, and in whom, by the
accent in which Robin called his men, he recognized a north-
countryman; "yield, and I will see that thou goest safe in life and
limb.  Look round, ye are beaten."

"Fool!" answered Hilyard, setting his teeth, "the People are never
beaten!"  And as the words left his lips, the shot from the recharged
bombard shattered him piecemeal.

"On for London and the crown!" cried Alwyn,--"the citizens are the
People!"

At this time, through the general crowd of the Yorkists, Ratcliffe and
Lovell, at the head of their appointed knights, galloped forward to
accomplish their crowning mission.

Behind the column which still commemorates "the great battle" of that
day, stretches now a trilateral patch of pasture-land, which faces a
small house.  At that time this space was rough forest-ground, and
where now, in the hedge, rise two small trees, types of the diminutive
offspring of our niggard and ignoble civilization, rose then two huge
oaks, coeval with the warriors of the Norman Conquest. They grew close
together; yet, though their roots interlaced, though their branches
mingled, one had not taken nourishment from the other.  They stood,
equal in height and grandeur, the twin giants of the wood.  Before
these trees, whose ample trunks protected them from the falchions in
the rear, Warwick and Montagu took their last post. In front rose,
literally, mounds of the slain, whether of foe or friend; for round
the two brothers to the last had gathered the brunt of war, and they
towered now, almost solitary in valour's sublime despair, amidst the
wrecks of battle and against the irresistible march of fate.  As side
by side they had gained this spot, and the vulgar assailants drew
back, leaving the bodies of the dead their last defence from death,
they turned their visors to each other, as for one latest farewell on
earth.

"Forgive me, Richard," said Montagu,--"forgive me thy death; had I not
so blindly believed in Clarence's fatal order, the savage Edward had
never passed alive through the pass of Pontefract."

"Blame not thyself," replied Warwick.  "We are but the instruments of
a wiser Will.  God assoil thee, brother mine.  We leave this world to
tyranny and vice.  Christ receive our souls!"

For a moment their hands clasped, and then all was grim silence.

Wide and far, behind and before, in the gleam of the sun, stretched
the victorious armament, and that breathing-pause sufficed to show the
grandeur of their resistance,--the grandest of all spectacles, even in
its hopeless extremity,--the defiance of brave hearts to the brute
force of the many.  Where they stood they were visible to thousands,
but not a man stirred against them.  The memory of Warwick's past
achievements, the consciousness of his feats that day, all the
splendour of his fortunes and his name, made the mean fear to strike,
and the brave ashamed to murder!  The gallant D'Eyncourt sprang from
his steed, and advanced to the spot.  His followers did the same.

"Yield, my lords, yield!  Ye have done all that men could do!"

"Yield, Montagu," whispered Warwick.  "Edward can harm not thee.  Life
has sweets; so they say, at least."

"Not with power and glory gone.--We yield not, Sir Knight," answered
the marquis, in a calm tone.

"Then die, and make room for the new men whom ye so have scorned!"
exclaimed a fierce voice; and Ratcliffe, who had neared the spot,
dismounted and hallooed on his bloodhounds.

Seven points might the shadow have traversed on the dial, and, before
Warwick's axe and Montagu's sword, seven souls had gone to judgment.
In that brief crisis, amidst the general torpor and stupefaction and
awe of the bystanders, round one little spot centred still a war.

But numbers rushed on numbers, as the fury of conflict urged on the
lukewarm.  Montagu was beaten to his knee, Warwick covered him with
his body; a hundred axes resounded on the earl's stooping casque, a
hundred blades gleamed round the joints of his harness.  A
simultaneous cry was heard; over the mounds of the slain, through the
press into the shadow of the oaks, dashed Gloucester's charger.  The
conflict had ceased, the executioners stood mute in a half-circle.
Side by side, axe and sword still griped in their iron hands, lay
Montagu and Warwick.

The young duke, his visor raised, contemplated the fallen foes in
silence.  Then dismounting, he unbraced with his own hand the earl's
helmet.  Revived for a moment by the air, the hero's eyes unclosed,
his lips moved, he raised, with a feeble effort, the gory battle-axe,
and the armed crowd recoiled in terror.  But the earl's soul, dimly
conscious, and about to part, had escaped from that scene of strife,
its later thoughts of wrath and vengeance, to more gentle memories, to
such memories as fade the last from true and manly hearts!

"Wife! child!" murmured the earl, indistinctly.  "Anne! Anne! Dear
ones, God comfort ye!"  And with these words the breath went, the head
fell heavily on its mother earth, the face set, calm and undistorted,
as the face of a soldier should be, when a brave death has been worthy
of a brave life.

"So," muttered the dark and musing Gloucester, unconscious of the
throng, "so perishes the Race of Iron.  Low lies the last baron who
could control the throne and command the people.  The Age of Force
expires with knighthood and deeds of arms.  And over this dead great
man I see the New Cycle dawn.  Happy, henceforth, he who can plot and
scheme, and fawn and smile!"  Waking with a start from his revery, the
splendid dissimulator said, as in sad reproof, "Ye have been over
hasty, knights and gentlemen.  The House of York is mighty enough to
have spared such noble foes.  Sound trumpets!  Fall in file!  Way,
there,--way!  King Edward comes.  Long live the king!"




CHAPTER VII.

THE LAST PILGRIMS IN THE LONG PROCESSION TO THE COMMON BOURNE.

The king and his royal brothers, immediately after the victory, rode
back to London to announce their triumph.  The foot-soldiers still
stayed behind to recruit themselves after the sore fatigue.  And
towards the eminence by Hadley church, the peasants and villagers of
the district had pressed in awe and in wonder; for on that spot had
Henry (now sadly led back to a prison, never again to unclose to his
living form) stood to watch the destruction of the host gathered in
his name; and to that spot the corpses of Warwick and Montagu were
removed, while a bier was prepared to convey their remains to London;
[The bodies of Montagu and the earl were exhibited bareheaded at St.
Paul's church for three days, "that no pretence of their being alive
might stir up any rebellion afterwards; . . . they were then carried
down to the Priory of Bisham, in Berkshire, where among their
ancestors by the mother's side (the Earls of Salisbury), the two
unquiet brothers rest in one tomb. . . .  The large river of their
blood, divided now into many streams, runs so small, they are hardly
observed as they flow by."  (Habington's "Life of Edward IV.," one of
the most eloquent compositions in the language, though incorrect as a
history).--"Sic transit gloria mundi."] and on that spot had the
renowned friar conjured the mists, exorcised the enchanted guns, and
defeated the horrible machinations of the Lancastrian wizard.

And towards the spot, and through the crowd, a young Yorkist captain
passed with a prisoner he had captured, and whom he was leading to the
tent of the Lord Hastings, the only one of the commanders from whom
mercy might be hoped, and who had tarried behind the king and his
royal brothers to make preparations for the removal of the mighty
dead.

"Keep close to me, Sir Marmaduke," said the Yorkist; we must look to
Hastings to appease the king: and, if he hope not to win your pardon,
he may, at least, after such a victory, aid one foe to fly."

"Care not for me, Alwyn," said the knight; "when Somerset was deaf
save to his own fears, I came back to die by my chieftain's side,
alas, too late! too late!  Better now death than life!  What kin,
kith, ambition, love, were to other men was Lord Warwick's smile to
me!"

Alwyn kindly respected his prisoner's honest emotion, and took
advantage of it to lead him away from the spot where he saw knights
and warriors thickest grouped, in soldier-like awe and sadness, round
the Hero-Brothers.  He pushed through a humbler crowd of peasants and
citizens, and women with babes at their breast; and suddenly saw a
troop of timbrel-women dancing round a leafless tree, and chanting
some wild but mirthful and joyous doggerel.

"What obscene and ill-seasoned revelry is this?" said the trader to a
gaping yeoman.

"They are but dancing, poor girls, round the wicked wizard whom Friar
Bungey caused to be strangled, and his witch daughter."

A chill foreboding seized upon Alwyn: he darted forward, scattering
peasant and tymbestere with his yet bloody sword.  His feet stumbled
against some broken fragments; it was the poor Eureka, shattered, at
last, for the sake of the diamond!  Valueless to the great friar,
since the science of the owner could not pass to his executioner,--
valueless the mechanism and the invention, the labour and the genius;
but the superstition and the folly and the delusion had their value,
and the impostor who destroyed the engine clutched the jewel!

From the leafless tree was suspended the dead body of a man; beneath,
lay a female, dead too; but whether by the hand of man or the mercy of
Heaven, there was no sign to tell.  Scholar and Child, Knowledge and
Innocence, alike were cold; the grim Age had devoured them, as it
devours ever those before, as behind, its march, and confounds, in one
common doom, the too guileless and the too wise!

"Why crowd ye thus, knaves?" said a commanding voice.

"Ha, Lord Hastings! approach! behold!" exclaimed Alwyn.

"Ha, ha!" shouted Graul, as she led her sisters from the spot,
wheeling, and screaming, and tossing up their timbrels, "ha! the witch
and her lover!  Ha, ha!  Foul is fair!  Ha, ha!  Witchcraft and death
go together, as thou mayest learn at the last, sleek wooer."

And, peradventure, when, long years afterwards, accusations of
witchcraft, wantonness, and treason resounded in the ears of Hastings,
and, at the signal of Gloucester, rushed in the armed doomsman, those
ominous words echoed back upon his soul!

At that very hour the gates of the Tower were thrown open to the
multitude.  Fresh from his victory, Edward and his brothers had gone
to render thanksgivings at St. Paul's (they were devout, those three
Plantagenets!), thence to Baynard's Castle, to escort the queen and
her children once more to the Tower.  And, now, the sound of trumpets
stilled the joyous uproar of the multitude, for in the balcony of the
casement that looked towards the chapel the herald had just announced
that King Edward would show himself to the people.  On every inch of
the courtyard, climbing up wall and palisade, soldier, citizen, thief,
harlot, age, childhood, all the various conditions and epochs of
multiform life, swayed, clung, murmured, moved, jostled, trampled,--
the beings of the little hour!

High from the battlements against the weltering beam floated Edward's
conquering flag,--a sun shining to the sun.  Again, and a third time,
rang the trumpets, and on the balcony, his crown upon his head, but
his form still sheathed in armour, stood the king.  What mattered to
the crowd his falseness and his perfidy, his licentiousness and
cruelty?  All vices ever vanish in success!  Hurrah for King Edward!
THE MAN OF THE AGE suited the age, had valour for its war and cunning
for its peace, and the sympathy of the age was with him!  So there
stood the king; at his right hand, Elizabeth, with her infant boy (the
heir of England) in her arms, the proud face of the duchess seen over
the queen's shoulder.  By Elizabeth's side was the Duke of Gloucester,
leaning on his sword, and at the left of Edward, the perjured Clarence
bowed his fair head to the joyous throng!  At the sight of the
victorious king, of the lovely queen, and, above all, of the young
male heir, who promised length of days to the line of York, the crowd
burst forth with a hearty cry, "Long live the king and the king's
son!"  Mechanically Elizabeth turned her moistened eyes from Edward to
Edward's brother, and suddenly, as with a mother's prophetic instinct,
clasped her infant closer to her bosom, when she caught the glittering
and fatal eye of Richard, Duke of Gloucester (York's young hero of the
day, Warwick's grim avenger in the future), fixed upon that harmless
life, destined to interpose a feeble obstacle between the ambition of
a ruthless intellect and the heritage of the English throne!




NOTES.

I.

The badge of the Bear and Ragged Staff was so celebrated in the
fifteenth century, that the following extract from a letter addressed
by Mr. Courthope, Rouge Croix, to the author, will no doubt interest
the reader, and the author is happy in the opportunity afforded of
expressing his acknowledgments for the courteous attention with which
Mr. Courthope has honoured his inquiries:--

"COLLEGE OF ARMS.
"As regards the badge of Richard Nevile, Earl of Warwick,--namely, the
Bear and Staff,--I agree with you, certainly, as to the probability of
his having sometimes used the whole badge, and sometimes the Staff
only, which accords precisely with the way in which the Bear and Staff
are set forth in the Rous Roll to the early earls (Warwick) before the
Conquest.  We there find them figured with the Staff upon their
shields and the Bear at their feet, and the Staff alone is introduced
as a quartering upon their shields.

"The story of the origin of these badges is as follows:

"Arth, or Arthgal, is reputed to have been the first Earl of Warwick,
and being one of the knights of King Arthur's Round Table, it behooved
him to have a cognizance; and Arth or Narth signifying in British the
same as Ursus in Latin, he took the Bear for such cognizance.  His
successor, Morvidus, Earl of Warwick, in single combat, overcame a
mighty giant (who had encountered him with a tree pulled up from the
root, the boughs of which had been torn from it), and in token of his
success assumed the Ragged Staff.  You will thus see that the origins
of the two were different, which would render the bearing of them
separately not unlikely, and you will likewise infer that both came
through the Beauchamps.  I do not find the Ragged Staff ever
attributed to the Neviles before the match with Beauchamp.

"As regards the crest or cognizance of Nevile, the Pied Bull has been
the cognizance of that family from a very early time, and the Bull's
head, its crest, and both the one and the other may have been used by
the king-maker, and by his brother, the Marquis Montagu; the said Bull
appears at the feet of Richard Nevile in the Rous Roll, accompanied by
the Eagle of Monthermer; the crests on either side of him are those of
Montagu and Nevile.  Besides these two crests, both of which the
Marquis Montagu may have used, he certainly did use the Gryphon,
issuant out of a ducal coronet, as this appears alone for his crest,
on his garter plate, as a crest for Montagu, he having given the arms
of that family precedence over his paternal coat of Nevile; the king-
maker, likewise, upon his seal, gives the precedence to Montagu and
Monthermer, and they alone appear upon his shield."

II.

Hume, Rapin, and Carte, all dismiss the story of Edward's actual
imprisonment at Middleham, while Lingard, Sharon Turner, and others,
adopt it implicitly.  And yet, though Lingard has successfully
grappled with some of Hume's objections, he has left others wholly
unanswered.  Hume states that no such fact is mentioned in Edward's
subsequent proclamation against Clarence and Warwick.  Lingard
answers, after correcting an immaterial error in Hume's dates, "that
the proclamation ought not to have mentioned it, because it was
confined to the enumeration of offences only committed after the
general amnesty in 1469;" and then, surely with some inconsistency,
quotes the attainder of Clarence many years afterwards, in which the
king enumerates it among his offences, "as jeopardyng the king's royal
estate, person, and life, in strait warde, putting him thereby from
all his libertye after procuring great commotions."  But it is clear
that if the amnesty hindered Edward from charging Warwick with this
imprisonment only one year after it was granted, it would, a fortiori,
hinder him from charging Clarence with it nine years after.  Most
probable is it that this article of accusation does not refer to any
imprisonment, real or supposed, at Middleham, in 1469, but to
Clarence's invasion of England in 1470, when Edward's state, person,
and life were jeopardized by his narrow escape from the fortified
house, where he might fairly be called "in straite warde;" especially
as the words, "after procuring great commotions," could not apply to
the date of the supposed detention in Middleham, when, instead of
procuring commotions, Clarence had helped Warwick to allay them, but
do properly apply to his subsequent rebellion in 1470.  Finally,
Edward's charges against his brother, as Lingard himself has observed
elsewhere, are not proofs, and that king never scrupled at any
falsehood to serve his turn.  Nothing, in short, can be more improbable
than this tale of Edward's captivity,--there was no object in it.  At
the very time it is said to have taken place, Warwick is absolutely
engaged in warfare against the king's foes.  The moment Edward leaves
Middleham, instead of escaping to London, he goes carelessly and
openly to York, to judge and execute the very captain of the rebels
whom Warwick has subdued, and in the very midst of Warwick's armies!
Far from appearing to harbour the natural resentment so vindictive a
king must have felt (had so great an indignity been offered to him),
almost immediately after he leaves York, he takes the Nevile family
into greater power than ever, confers new dignities upon Warwick, and
betroths his eldest daughter to Warwick's nephew.  On the whole, then,
perhaps some such view of the king's visit to Middleham which has been
taken in this narrative, may be considered not the least probable
compromise of the disputed and contradictory evidence on the subject.


THE END.





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