But there was another boy in the field, the young duke of York, aged nineteen, to take up his father’s work and avenge his father’s death. This boy threw himself into London, closed it against Margaret, cut off her supplies, and just fifteen days after the victory of Wakefield it was responded to by cries of “Long live King Edward!” which hailed young York’s accession to the throne as Edward IV. The fatal battle of Touton followed the same month—a remarkable tragedy by itself. It was fought in the midst of a furious snow storm, which blinded the Lancastrian archers. Here Warwick is pictured as redeeming the day by dismounting and stabbing his horse, to demonstrate the impossibility of retreat to his retainers; drawing his sword and kissing the cross on its hilt he cried: “I live or die here. Let those who will turn back, and God receive the souls of all who fall with me.” The battle lasted all day; the slaughter of the defeated Lancastrians all the next day—for Edward had proclaimed no quarter. Such was the spirit that had now infected both sides in this fratricidal strife.
First to Scotland, and then to France, Margaret and her precious charge went, imploring aid. But chivalry was now on its last legs. However, she did get a small force from Louis of France, on promising to give up to him Calais when she should regain England, and with this she landed in Northumberland in October, 1462; but the elements again fought against her; a sudden storm shipwrecked the expedition and the royal party barely escaped in a small boat to Berwick, Scotland. Months of suffering, wandering and hiding followed. A single herring makes a meal for the royal family! She is set upon by a band of robbers in a wood and makes her escape while they are fighting over her jewels; she is lost in the forest, into whose depths she has fled blindly, and is suddenly stopped by another robber, sword in hand, to whom Margaret resolutely says, “My friend, protect the son of your king!” The supposed robber is a Lancastrian noble in hiding like herself and he shelters the royal guests for some days in a secret cave, where he has his retreat. Again they are arrested with a faithful knight and put on board a small vessel, to be conveyed to England; but the knight, his servant and the prince rise en route and overcome their captors, and they make their way to Flanders. Meantime, King Henry, who has become separated from them, and for months wanders and hides like them, is betrayed by a monk into Edward’s hands and conveyed to the Tower, every indignity being heaped upon him (1465). He never after emerged alive, save once—when Warwick, in revolt, drove Edward IV. out of the kingdom and paraded London with the poor captive, hailing him Henry VI. restored.
A complete history of this most varied and tragic period would include all the ups and downs of Edward IV.; the glory, decline and fall of Warwick, “the Last of the Barons,” and a volume of stormy, bloody incidents. This crisis is the dividing ridge between the areas of mediævalism and of modern times. Feudalism disappeared and the commercial system took its place. The fittest survived, the weaker system went down and buried poor Margaret’s fortunes in the debris. Her figure and Warwick’s, strangely enough, together stand relieved in the lurid lights that accompany the crash.
That closing scene was the most strange and tragic of all. “The King-Maker” has quarreled with the king whom he made Edward IV., and under the sting of that licentious prince’s plot to corrupt the virtue of Warwick’s favorite daughter, Anne Neville (afterward wife of Richard III.), the father has hastened to France and offered to Margaret the King-Maker’s sword to make the young Edward of Lancaster king of England. After long delays, again buffeted by conspiring waves, Warwick, Margaret, and Edward (now a soldierly youth of eighteen), land in England, but separately. Her ill-fortune follows her to the last, and their divided forces are cut off in detail by Henry’s army. The battle of Barnet, where “the Last of the Barons” falls, is lost because of a fog in which his troops destroy each other by mistake. Then in a few days Margaret is hemmed in with her little army against the river Severn, and the last act of the tragedy is enacted at Tewksbury. When all is lost, the woman in the heroic queen asserts itself in a swoon, and her son is captured fighting fiercely to cover the escape of the mother who had fought so fiercely and so many times to cover his. The young prince is brought bound into King Henry’s tent, and the contending cousins stand face to face—the representatives of the expiring Past and the living Future.
“What brings you to England?” sternly demands the king.
“I came to seek my father’s crown and mine own inheritance,” replies the undaunted representative of the older England.
For answer the king strikes the manacled youth in the face with his steel gauntlet. Yes, there can be no mistaking it. Chivalry is dead! The Duke of Clarence and the Duke of Gloucester draw and bravely cut down the prisoner, and the last hope of Lancaster’s royal line is dead upon the ground. Richard II. is avenged, and one more tragedy is added to the fearful chronicle of royal crimes.
One day in May, 1471, the pale, meek face of Henry VI. looked down from a grated window in the tower upon a street pageant which his wife graced as a captive in the train of the victorious Edward IV. Then a few days later that same face, just as calm but paler, was exhibited in St. Paul’s. The Yorkists said he died of grief. The Tudor historians placed his death, with the invented hump, on the back of Richard III., and the genius of Shakspere riveted them there and a fearful load of other sins on top of them. So closed the usurping line of Lancaster at the hands of the usurpers of York.
Margaret was soon ransomed by the king of France, and returned to her father in Anjou. Miss Strickland says: “Margaret had lost her beauty with excessive weeping: a dry leprosy transformed this princess, who had been the fairest in the world, into a spectacle of horror.” She died in 1483, aged fifty-one years, into which had been compressed an age of tragedy and sorrow. Three hundred years later, another unhappy sovereign, Maria Louisa, Napoleon’s empress, possessed Margaret’s breviary, in which there was a sentence in Margaret’s hand that told the moral of her life:
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
END OF “PICTURES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY.”