“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?”