e was an enemy. However, it has proved an advantage to
us now, for it has enabled great numbers to escape who might otherwise
have been followed and cut down. I was very fortunate. I had left my
horse at a little farmhouse two miles in the rear of our camp, and in
the fog had but small hope of finding it; but soon after leaving the
battlefield, I came upon a rustic hurrying in the same direction as
myself, and upon questioning him it turned out that he was a hand on
the very farm at which I had left the horse. He had, with two or three
others, stolen out after midnight to see the battle, and was now making
his way home again, having seen indeed but little, but having learned
from fugitives that we had been defeated. He guided me to the farmhouse,
which otherwise I should assuredly never have reached. His master was
favourable to our party, and let the man take one of the cart horses, on
which he rode as my guide until he had placed me upon the high road to
St. Albans, and I was then able to gallop on at full speed."

"And Warwick and his brother Montague are both killed?"

"Both. The great Earl will make and unmake no more kings. He has been a
curse to England, with his boundless ambition, his vast possessions, and
his readiness to change sides and to embroil the country in civil war
for purely personal ends. The great nobles are a curse to the
country, wife. They are, it is true, a check upon kingly ill doing and
oppression; but were they, with their great arrays of retainers and
feudal followers, out of the way, methinks that the citizens and yeomen
would be able to hold their own against any king."

"Was the battle a hard fought one?"

"I know but little of what passed, except near the standard of Warwick
himself. There the fighting was fierce indeed, for it was against the
Earl that the king finally directed his chief onslaught. Doubtless he
was actuated both by a deep personal resentment against the Earl for the
part he had played and the humiliation he had inflicted upon him, and
also by the knowledge that a defeat of Warwick personally would be the
heaviest blow that he could inflict upon the cause of Lancaster."

"Then do you think the cause is lost?"

"I say not that. Pembroke has a strong force in Wales, and if the West
rises, and Queen Margaret on landing can join him, we may yet prevail;
but I fear that the news of the field of Barnet will deter many from
joining us. Men may risk lands and lives for a c