A Knight of the White Cross | Page 9

believing that he was an enemy. However, it has proved an advantage
to us now, for it has enabled great numbers to escape who might

otherwise have been followed and cut down. I was very fortunate. I had
left my horse at a little farmhouse two miles in the rear of our camp,
and in the fog had but small hope of finding it; but soon after leaving
the battlefield, I came upon a rustic hurrying in the same direction as
myself, and upon questioning him it turned out that he was a hand on
the very farm at which I had left the horse. He had, with two or three
others, stolen out after midnight to see the battle, and was now making
his way home again, having seen indeed but little, but having learned
from fugitives that we had been defeated. He guided me to the
farmhouse, which otherwise I should assuredly never have reached. His
master was favourable to our party, and let the man take one of the cart
horses, on which he rode as my guide until he had placed me upon the
high road to St. Albans, and I was then able to gallop on at full speed."
"And Warwick and his brother Montague are both killed?"
"Both. The great Earl will make and unmake no more kings. He has
been a curse to England, with his boundless ambition, his vast
possessions, and his readiness to change sides and to embroil the
country in civil war for purely personal ends. The great nobles are a
curse to the country, wife. They are, it is true, a check upon kingly ill
doing and oppression; but were they, with their great arrays of retainers
and feudal followers, out of the way, methinks that the citizens and
yeomen would be able to hold their own against any king."
"Was the battle a hard fought one?"
"I know but little of what passed, except near the standard of Warwick
himself. There the fighting was fierce indeed, for it was against the Earl
that the king finally directed his chief onslaught. Doubtless he was
actuated both by a deep personal resentment against the Earl for the
part he had played and the humiliation he had inflicted upon him, and
also by the knowledge that a defeat of Warwick personally would be
the heaviest blow that he could inflict upon the cause of Lancaster."
"Then do you think the cause is lost?"
"I say not that. Pembroke has a strong force in Wales, and if the West

rises, and Queen Margaret on landing can join him, we may yet prevail;
but I fear that the news of the field of Barnet will deter many from
joining us. Men may risk lands and lives for a cause which seems to
offer a fair prospect of success, but they can hardly be blamed for
holding back when they see that the chances are all against them.
Moreover, as a Frenchwoman, it cannot be denied that Margaret has
never been popular in England, and her arrival here, aided by French
gold and surrounded by Frenchmen, will tell against her with the
country people. I went as far as I could on the day before I left
Amboise, urging her on no account to come hither until matters were
settled. It would have been infinitely better had the young prince come
alone, and landed in the West without a single follower. The people
would have admired his trust in them, and would, I am sure, have
gathered strongly round his banner. However, we must still hope for
the best. Fortune was against us today: it may be with us next time we
give battle. And with parties so equally divided throughout the country
a signal victory would bring such vast numbers to our banners that
Edward would again find it necessary to cross the seas."
CHAPTER II
THE BATTLE OF TEWKESBURY
Riding fast, Sir Thomas Tresham crossed the Thames at Reading
before any news of the battle of Barnet had arrived there. On the third
day after leaving St. Albans he reached Westbury, and there heard that
the news had been received of the queen's landing at Plymouth on the
very day on which her friends had been defeated at Barnet, and that she
had already been joined by the Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Devon,
and others, and that Exeter had been named as the point of rendezvous
for her friends. As the Lancastrians were in the majority in Wiltshire
and Somerset, there was no longer any fear of arrest by partisans of
York, and after resting for a day Sir Thomas Tresham rode quietly on
to Exeter, where the queen had already arrived.
The battle of Barnet had not, in reality, greatly weakened