or despair to which
these unhappy people were wrought up, that the phrensy gained the softer
sex; and there were seen in their ranks, says the chronicler, "many
desperate women that gave the adventure of their lives, and fought right
stoutly." After a sharp action in which about three hundred were left
dead on the field, victory at length declared for the queen's troops;
and Leonard Dacre, who had bravely sustained, notwithstanding the
deformity of his person, the part of soldier as well as general, seeing
that all was lost, turned his horse's head and rode off full speed for
Scotland, whence he passed into Flanders and took up at Lovain his
melancholy abode.

The treason of this unfortunate gentleman was, it must be confessed,
both notorious and heinous; and had he been intercepted in making his
escape, no blame could have attached to Elizabeth in exacting the full
penalty of his offence. But when, five-and-twenty years after this time,
we find his aged mother at court "an earnest suitor" for the pardon of
her two sons[70]; obtaining, probably by costly bribes, a promise of
admission to the queen's presence, and at length gaining nothing
more,--it is impossible not to blame or lament that relentless severity
of temper which rendered Elizabeth so much a stranger to the fairest
attribute of sovereign power. The case of Francis Dacre indeed was one
which ought to have appealed to her sense of justice rather than to her
feelings of mercy. This gentleman, after the expatriation and attainder
of his elder brother, had prosecuted at law the claims to the honors and
lands of the barony of Gilsland which had thus devolved upon him; but
being baffled in all his appeals to the equity of the courts, he had
withdrawn in disgust to Flanders, and on this account suffered a
sentence of outlawry. He lived and died in exile, leaving a son, named
Ranulph, heir only to poverty and misfortunes, to noble blood, and to
rights which he was destitute of the power of rendering available. Lord
Dacre of the south, as he was usually called, settled on this poor man,
his very distant relation, a small annuity; and on his death the
following lord Dacre, becoming the heir male of the family, received by
way of compromise from the Howards no less than thirteen manors which
they had enjoyed to the prejudice of Leonard Dacre, of his brother and
of his nephew.

[Note 70: Letter of R. Whyte in "Sidney Papers."]

On the suppression of this second risin