beyed the summons of
his couriers and joined their chief at Leicester.

Edward of March, who had landed at Ravenspur with a handful of brigands,
now saw a king's army under his banner. [The perplexity and confusion
which involve the annals of this period may be guessed by this,--that
two historians, eminent for research (Lingard and Sharon Turner), differ
so widely as to the numbers who had now joined Edward, that Lingard
asserts that at Nottingham he was at the head of fifty or sixty thousand
men; and Turner gives him, at the most, between six and seven thousand.
The latter seems nearer to the truth. We must here regret that Turner's
partiality to the House of York induces him to slur over Edward's
detestable perjury at York, and to accumulate all rhetorical arts to
command admiration for his progress,--to the prejudice of the salutary
moral horror we ought to feel for the atrocious perfidy and violation
of oath to which he owed the first impunity that secured the after
triumph.] Then the audacious perjurer threw away the mask; then, forth
went--not the prayer of the attainted Duke of York--but the proclamation
of the indignant king. England now beheld two sovereigns, equal in their
armies. It was no longer a rebellion to be crushed; it was a dynasty to
be decided.

CHAPTER VI. LORD WARWICK, WITH THE FOE IN THE FIELD AND THE TRAITOR AT
THE HEARTH.

Every precaution which human wisdom could foresee had Lord Warwick taken
to guard against invasion, or to crush it at the onset. [Hall.] All the
coasts on which it was most probable Edward would land had been strongly
guarded. And if the Humber had been left without regular troops, it was
because prudence might calculate that the very spot where Edward did
land was the very last he would have selected,--unless guided by fate to
his destruction,--in the midst of an unfriendly population, and in face
of the armies of Northumberland and of Montagu. The moment the earl
heard of Edward's reception at York,--far from the weakness which the
false Clarence (already in correspondence with Gloucester) imputed to
him,--he despatched to Montagu, by Marmaduke Nevile, peremptory orders
to intercept Edward's path, and give him battle before he could advance
farther towards the centre of the island. We shall explain presently why
this messenger did not reach the marquis. But Clarence was some hours
before him in his intelligence and his measures.

When the earl next heard that Edw