was a tumultuous, clamorous, but
not altogether undisciplined array; for Coniers was a leader of singular
practice in reducing men into the machinery of war, and where his skill
might have failed, the prodigious influence and energy of Robin of
Redesdale ruled the passions and united the discordant elements. This
last was, indeed, in much worthy the respect in which Warwick held his
name. In times more ripe for him, he would have been a mighty demagogue
and a successful regenerator. His birth was known but to few; his
education and imperious temper made him vulgarly supposed of noble
origin; but had he descended from a king's loins, Robert Hilyard had
still been the son of the Saxon people. Warwick overrated, perhaps,
Hilyard's wisdom; for, despite his Italian experience, his ideas were
far from embracing any clear and definite system of democracy. He had
much of the frantic levelism and jacquerie of his age and land, and
could probably not have explained to himself all the changes he desired
to effect; but, coupled with his hatred to the nobles, his deep and
passionate sympathy with the poor, his heated and fanatical chimeras of
a republic, half-political and half-religious, he had, with no uncommon
inconsistency, linked the cause of a dethroned king. For as the
Covenanters linked with the Stuarts against the succeeding and more
tolerant dynasty, never relinquishing their own anti-monarchic theories;
as in our time, the extreme party on the popular side has leagued with
the extreme of the aristocratic, in order to crush the medium policy,
as a common foe,--so the bold leveller united with his zeal for Margaret
the very cause which the House of Lancaster might be supposed the least
to favour. He expected to obtain from a sovereign dependent upon a
popular reaction for restoration, great popular privileges. And as the
Church had deserted the Red Rose for the White, he sought to persuade
many of the Lollards, ever ready to show their discontent, that Margaret
(in revenge on the hierarchy) would extend the protection they had never
found in the previous sway of her husband and Henry V. Possessed of
extraordinary craft, and even cunning in secular intrigues, energetic,
versatile, bold, indefatigable, and, above all, marvellously gifted with
the arts that inflame, stir up, and guide the physical force of masses,
Robert Hilyard had been, indeed, the soul and life of the present
revolt; and his prudent moderation in resigning t