“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.