If then Warwick was once in his life driven into treachery and bloodthirsty revenge, we must set against his crime his fifteen long years of honest and consistent service to the cause he had made his own, and remember how dire was the provocation which drove him to betray it. Counting his evil deeds of 1469-70 at their worst, he will still compare not unfavourably with any other of the leading Englishmen of his time. Even in that demoralised age his sturdy figure stands out in not unattractive colours. Born in a happier generation, his industry and perseverance, his courage and courtesy, his liberal hand and generous heart, might have made him not only the idol of his followers, but the bulwark of the commonwealth. Cast into the godless times of the Wars of the Roses, he was doomed to spend in the cause of a faction the abilities that were meant to benefit a whole nation; the selfishness, the cruelty, the political immorality of the age, left their mark on his character; his long and honourable career was at last stained by treason, and his roll of successes terminated by a crushing defeat. Even after his death his misfortune has not ended. Popular history has given him a scanty record merely as the Kingmaker or the Last of the Barons, as a selfish intriguer or a turbulent feudal chief; and for four hundred and ten years he has lacked even the doubtful honour of a biography.
FOOTNOTES
[20] The Yorkist author of the Arrival of King Edward says that his patron had only nine thousand men. But we can account for many more. Edward landed with two thousand; at least six hundred joined at Nottingham, at least three thousand at Leicester; Clarence brought seven thousand, Essex and the other Bourchiers seven thousand more. This makes nineteen thousand six hundred, and many more must have joined in small parties. On the other side Warwick had at Coventry six thousand men; Oxford met him with four thousand, Montagu with three thousand, Somerset with seven thousand, and he too must have drawn in many small, unrecorded reinforcements. The Yorkists called his army thirty thousand strong—probably overstating it by a few thousands. Their own must have been much the same.
[21] Compare this with an incident at Waterloo. Ziethen's Prussian corps, coming upon the field to the left rear of the English line, took the brigade of the Prince of Saxe-Weimar for French owing to a similarity in uniform, attacked them, and slew many ere the mistake was discovered.
[22] There seems no valid reason for accepting Warkworth's theory that Montagu was actually deserting to King Edward. But there is every sign that the Lancastrians imagined that he was doing so. If he had wished to betray his brother, he could have done it much better at an earlier hour in the battle.
THE END
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