ortunes of that day were involved those of all
the persons who hitherto, in the course of this narrative, may have
seemed to move in separate orbits from the fiery star of Warwick. Now,
in this crowning hour, the vast and gigantic destiny of the great earl
comprehended all upon which its darkness or its light had fallen: not
only the luxurious Edward, the perjured Clarence, the haughty Margaret,
her gallant son, the gentle Anne, the remorseful Isabel, the dark guile
of Gloucester, the rising fortunes of the gifted Hastings,--but on the
hazard of that die rested the hopes of Hilyard, and the interests of the
trader Alwyn, and the permanence of that frank, chivalric, hardy, still
half Norman race, of which Nicholas Alwyn and his Saxon class were the
rival antagonistic principle, and Marmaduke Nevile the ordinary type.
Dragged inexorably into the whirlpool of that mighty fate were even
the very lives of the simple Scholar, of his obscure and devoted child.
Here, into this gory ocean, all scattered rivulets and streams had
hastened to merge at last.

But grander and more awful than all individual interests were those
assigned to the fortunes of this battle, so memorable in the English
annals,--the ruin or triumph of a dynasty; the fall of that warlike
baronage, of which Richard Nevile was the personation, the crowning
flower, the greatest representative and the last,--associated with
memories of turbulence and excess, it is true, but with the proudest and
grandest achievements in our early history; with all such liberty as had
been yet achieved since the Norman Conquest; with all such glory as had
made the island famous,--here with Runnymede, and there with Cressy; the
rise of a crafty, plotting, imperious Despotism, based upon the growing
sympathy of craftsmen and traders, and ripening on the one hand to the
Tudor tyranny, the Republican reaction under the Stuarts, the slavery,
and the civil war, but on the other hand to the concentration of all
the vigour and life of genius into a single and strong government, the
graces, the arts, the letters of a polished court, the freedom, the
energy, the resources of a commercial population destined to rise above
the tyranny at which it had first connived, and give to the emancipated
Saxon the markets of the world. Upon the victory of that day all these
contending interests, this vast alternative in the future, swayed and
trembled. Out, then, upon that vulgar craving of those who comp