s in Ireland and
Calais; and in the midsummer of 1460 the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick,
with Richard's son Edward, the young Earl of March, again landed in Kent.
Backed by a general rising of the county they entered London amidst the
acclamations of its citizens. The royal army was defeated in a hard-fought
action at Northampton in July. Margaret fled to Scotland, and Henry was
left a prisoner in the hands of the Duke of York.

[Sidenote: Richard claims the crown]

The position of York as heir-presumptive to the crown by his descent from
Edmund of Langley had ceased with the birth of a son to Henry the Sixth:
but the victory of Northampton no sooner raised him to the supreme control
of affairs than he ventured to assert the far more dangerous claims which
he had secretly cherished as the representative of Lionel of Clarence, and
to their consciousness of which was owing the hostility of Henry and his
queen. Such a claim was in direct opposition to that power of the two
Houses whose growth had been the work of the past hundred years. There was
no constitutional ground for any limitation of the right of Parliament to
set aside an elder branch in favour of a younger, and in the Parliamentary
Act which placed the House of Lancaster on the throne the claim of the
House of Mortimer had been deliberately set aside. Possession, too, told
against the Yorkist pretensions. To modern minds the best reply to
Richard's claim lay in the words used at a later time by Henry himself.
"My father was King; his father also was King; I myself have worn the
crown forty years from my cradle: you have all sworn fealty to me as your
sovereign, and your fathers have done the like to mine. How then can my
right be disputed?" Long and undisturbed possession as well as a
distinctly legal title by free vote of Parliament was in favour of the
House of Lancaster. But the persecution of the Lollards, the interference
with elections, the odium of the war, the shame of the long misgovernment,
told fatally against the weak and imbecile king whose reign had been a
long battle of contending factions. That the misrule had been serious was
shown by the attitude of the commercial class. It was the rising of Kent,
the great manufacturing district of the realm, which brought about the
victory of Northampton. Throughout the struggle which followed London and
the great merchant towns were steady for the House of York. Zeal for the
Lancastrian cause was found on