t,--some half-score brave and unhappy
gentlemen, driven from their hearths and homes, their heritage the prey
of knaves and varlets, their sovereign in a prison, their sovereign's
wife, their sovereign's son, persecuted and hunted from the soil! And
comest thou now to the forlorn majesty of sorrow to boast, 'Such deeds
were mine?'"

"Mother and lady," began the prince

"Madden me not, my son. Forgiveness is for the prosperous, not for
adversity and woe."

"Hear me," said the earl,--who, having once bowed his pride to the
interview, had steeled himself against the passion which, in his
heart, he somewhat despised as a mere woman's burst of inconsiderate
fury,--"for I have this right to be heard,--that not one of these
knights, your lealest and noblest friends, can say of me that I ever
stooped to gloss mine acts, or palliate bold deeds with wily words. Dear
to me as comrade in arms, sacred to me as a father's head, was Richard
of York, mine uncle by marriage with Lord Salisbury's sister. I speak
not now of his claims by descent (for those even King Henry could not
deny), but I maintain them, even in your Grace's presence, to be such as
vindicate, from disloyalty and treason, me and the many true and gallant
men who upheld them through danger, by field and scaffold. Error, it
might be,--but the error of men who believed themselves the defenders
of a just cause. Nor did I, Queen Margaret, lend myself wholly to my
kinsman's quarrel, nor share one scheme that went to the dethronement of
King Henry, until--pardon, if I speak bluntly; it is my wont, and would
be more so now, but for thy fair face and woman's form, which awe me
more than if confronting the frown of Coeur de Lion, or the First Great
Edward--pardon me, I say, if I speak bluntly, and aver that I was not
King Henry's foe until false counsellors had planned my destruction, in
body and goods, land and life. In the midst of peace, at Coventry, my
father and myself scarcely escaped the knife of the murderer. [See Hall
(236), who says that Margaret had laid a snare for Salisbury and Warwick
at Warwick, and "if they had not suddenly departed, their life's thread
had been broken."] In the streets of London the very menials and
hangmen employed in the service of your Highness beset me unarmed [Hall,
Fabyan]; a little time after and my name was attainted by an illegal
Parliament. [Parl. Rolls, 370; W. Wyr. 478.] And not till after these
things did Richard Duke of York ri