instead of king of England, this hall should have swum with the blood
of those who have insulted the friends of my youth, the wife of my
bosom. Off, Hastings!--I need no mediator with my servants. Nor
here, nor anywhere in broad England, have I my equal, and the king
forgives or scorns--construe it as ye will, my lords--what the simple
gentleman would avenge."

It were in vain to describe the sensation that this speech produced.
There is ever something in courage and in will that awes numbers,
though brave themselves. And what with the unquestioned valour of
Edward; what with the effect of his splendid person, towering above
all present by the head, and moving lightly, with each impulse,
through the mass of a mail that few there could have borne unsinking,
this assertion of absolute power in the midst of mutiny--an army
marching to the gates--imposed an unwilling reverence and sullen
silence mixed with anger, that, while it chafed, admired. They who in
peace had despised the voluptuous monarch, feasting in his palace, and
reclining on the lap of harlot-beauty, felt that in war all Mars
seemed living in his person. Then, indeed, he was a king; and had the
foe, now darkening the landscape, been the noblest chivalry of France,
not a man there but had died for a smile from that haughty lip. But
the barons were knit heart in heart with the popular outbreak, and to
put down the revolt seemed to them but to raise the Woodvilles. The
silence was still unbroken, save where the persuasive whisper of Lord
Hastings might be faintly heard in remonstrance with the more powerful
or the more stubborn of the chiefs, when the tread of steps resounded
without, and, unarmed, bareheaded, the only form in Christendom
grander and statelier than the king's strode into the hall.

Edward, as yet unaware what course Warwick would pursue, and half