The Last of the Barons — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (reading an ebook .TXT) 📖

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