Red and White: A Tale of the Wars of the Roses

by Emily Sarah Holt

"Perhaps it were hardly so small as to need the same," was Maurice's dry answer.

"Nay, fair Uncle William, but I cry you mercy!" broke in Margery. "It seems me you be but half-hearted toward our good King. Surely his, and none other, is the cause of right and justice."

"Gramercy, Madge! I am well assured I never said they lay with that rebel," returned her uncle, laughing.

"Methinks," said Maurice quietly, "that King David was the wisest, which committed his cause unto God. Never, truly, had king so clear and perfect title as he. But we find not that he laid siege to King Saul, in order to come by it the sooner."

"Dear heart! prithee go tell that to the Queen," said William, still laughing. "Such reasoning were right after the King's heart."

"The Queen fights not for herself," responded Maurice. "It is easier to trust our own lot in God's hands, than the lot of them we love most. But mind ye not, Will and Ida, what our Philip were wont to say—'They that God keepeth be the best kept'?"

William made no reply. He was silenced by the allusion to the dead brother, on whom the Carews looked much as those around them did upon the saints.

The interval between the battles of St. Albans and Wakefield—five years and a half—had changed most of the dramatis personæ, but had not in any degree altered the sanguinary character of the struggle. Richard Duke of York was gone—killed at Wakefield: Suffolk was gone, a victim to popular fury. King Henry and Queen Marguerite were still the prominent figures on the Lancastrian side, joined now by their son Prince Edward. On the York side were the three sons of Duke Richard,—Edward, George, and Richard, whose ages when the story opens were twenty-eight, nineteen, and seventeen. Which of these three young men possessed the worst character it is difficult to judge, though that evil eminence is popularly assigned to Richard. Edward was an incorrigible libertine; not a bad organiser, nor devoid of personal bravery, though it usually appeared by fits and starts. He could do a generous action, but he was irremediably lazy, and far weaker in character than either of his brothers. One redeeming point he had—his personal love for his blood relations. But it was not pure love, for much selfishness was mixed with it. Perhaps really the worst of the three was George, for he was not merely an ingrained self-seeker, but also false to the heart's core. No atom of trust could ever be placed in him. The most solemn oath taken to-day was no guarantee whatever against his breaking through every engagement to-morrow. The Dutchman's maxim, "Every man for mineself," was the motto of George's life. Each of the brothers spent his life in sowing seeds of misery, and in each case the grain came to perfection: though most of the harvest of George and Richard was reaped by themselves, while Edward's was left for his innocent sons to gather.

It may reasonably be asked why Warwick is counted among the Lancastrians, when to a great extent Edward owed his throne to him, and he had been a consistent Yorkist for years. It is because, at the period when the story opens, Warwick thought proper so to account himself. King Henry, never able to see through a schemer or a traitor, had complacently welcomed him back to his allegiance: Queen Marguerite, who saw through him to the furthest inch, and held him in unmitigated abhorrence, felt that he was necessary at this moment to her husband's cause, and locking her own feelings hard within her, allowed it to be supposed that she was able to trust him, and kept sharp watch over every movement.

It has already been said that the decision for peace or war was not left in the hands of King Henry. The woman who sat by his side on the throne was no longer the timid, lonely dove of their early married life. Marguerite of Anjou was now a woman of middle age, and a mother whose very soul was wrapped around that bright-haired boy who alone shared her heart with his father. Could she but have looked forward a few years, and have seen that for that darling son war meant an early and bloody end, she might have been more ready to acquiesce in King Henry's preference for an obscure but peaceful life. What she saw was something very different. How was she to know that the golden vision which rose so radiantly before her entranced eyes was but a mirage of the desert, and that the silver stream which seemed to spread so invitingly before her would only mock her parched lips with burning sand?