himself, anxious as to
the result, came across the river just at daybreak. He was accompanied by
the chief gentlemen in his camp, who could never be restrained when blows
were passing current.

The business that morning was a commonplace and practical though an
important, one--to "impeach" a convoy of wheat and barley, butter,
cheese, and beef--but the names of those noble and knightly volunteers,
familiar throughout Christendom, sound like the roll-call for some
chivalrous tournament. There were Essex and Audley, Stanley, Pelham,
Russell, both the Sidneys, all the Norrises, men whose valour had been.
proved on many a hard-fought battle-field. There, too, was the famous
hero of British ballad whose name was so often to ring on the plains of
the Netherlands--

"The brave Lord Willoughby,
Of courage fierce and fell,
Who would not give one inch of way
For all the devils in hell."

Twenty such volunteers as these sat on horseback that morning around the
stately Earl of Leicester. It seemed an incredible extravagance to send a
handful of such heroes against an army.

But the English commander-in-chief had been listening to the insidious
tongue of Roland York--that bold, plausible, unscrupulous partisan,
already twice a renegade, of whom more was ere long to be heard in the
Netherlands and England. Of the man's courage there could be no doubt,
and he was about to fight that morning in the front rank at the head of
his company. But he had, for some mysterious reason, been bent upon
persuading the Earl that the Spaniards were no match for Englishmen at a
hand-to-hand contest. When they could ride freely up and down, he said,
and use their lances as they liked, they were formidable. But the English
were stronger men, better riders, better mounted, and better armed. The
Spaniards hated helmets and proof armour, while the English trooper, in
casque, cuirass, and greaves, was a living fortress impregnable to
Spanish or Italian light horsemen. And Leicester seemed almost convinced
by his reasoning.

It was five o'clock of a chill autumn morning. It was time for day to
break, but the fog was so thick that a man at the distance of five yards
was quite invisible. The creaking of waggon-wheels and the measured tramp
of soldiers soon became faintly audible however to Sir John Norris and
his five hundred as they sat there in the mist. Presently came galloping
forward in hot haste those noble