pitching their tents for the night. It 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