to him, exclaimed,--

"Unhappy mother, thou hast employed the very man my fated husband would
the most carefully have banished from the palace, the very man who could
blast his name."

The duchess was aghast and thunderstricken.

"If ever I forsake Friar Bungey again!" she muttered; "OH, THE GREAT
MAN!"

But events which demand a detailed recital now rapidly pressing on, gave
the duchess not even the time to seek further explanation of Elizabeth's
words, much less to determine the doubt that rose in her enlightened
mind whether Adam's spells might not be yet unravelled by the timely
execution of the sorcerer!

CHAPTER IX. THE DELIBERATIONS OF MAYOR AND COUNCIL, WHILE LORD WARWICK
MARCHES UPON LONDON.

It was a clear and bright day in the first week of October, 1470, when
the various scouts employed by the mayor and council of London came
back to the Guild, at which that worshipful corporation were
assembled,--their steeds blown and jaded, themselves panting and
breathless,--to announce the rapid march of the Earl of Warwick. The
lord mayor of that year, Richard Lee, grocer and citizen, sat in the
venerable hall in a huge leather chair, over which a pall of velvet had
been thrown in haste, clad in his robes of state, and surrounded by his
aldermen and the magnates of the city. To the personal love which the
greater part of the body bore to the young and courteous king was added
the terror which the corporation justly entertained of the Lancastrian
faction. They remembered the dreadful excesses which Margaret had
permitted to her army in the year 1461,--what time, to use the
expression of the old historian, "the wealth of London looked pale;"
and how grudgingly she had been restrained from condemning her revolted
metropolis to the horrors of sack and pillage. And the bearing of this
august representation of the trade and power of London was not, at the
first, unworthy of the high influence it had obtained. The agitation
and disorder of the hour had introduced into the assembly several of the
more active and accredited citizens not of right belonging to it; but
they sat, in silent discipline and order, on long benches beyond the
table crowded by the corporate officers. Foremost among these, and
remarkable by the firmness and intelligence of his countenance, and
the earnest self-possession with which he listened to his seniors, was
Nicholas Alwyn, summoned to the council from his great influence with
the appr