witchcraft; and the waxen figure of the earl did more to rouse the
people than perhaps the earl himself could have done in person. [See
"Parliamentary Rolls," vi. 232, for the accusation of witchcraft, and
the fabrication of a necromantic image of Lord Warwick, circulated
against the Duchess of Bedford. She herself quotes and complains of
them.] As yet, however, language of the insurgents was tempered with
all personal respect to the king; they declared in their manifestoes
that they desired only the banishment of the Woodvilles and the recall
of Warwick, whose name they used unscrupulously, and whom they
declared they were on their way to meet. As soon as it was known that
the kinsmen of the beloved earl were in the revolt, and naturally
supposed that the earl himself must countenance the enterprise, the
tumultuous camp swelled every hour, while knight after knight, veteran
after veteran, abandoned the royal standard. The Lord d'Eyncourt (one
of the few lords of the highest birth and greatest following over whom
the Neviles had no influence, and who bore the Woodvilles no grudge)
had, in his way to Lincolnshire,--where his personal aid was necessary
to rouse his vassals, infected by the common sedition,--been attacked
and wounded by a body of marauders, and thus Edward's camp lost one of
its greatest leaders. Fierce dispute broke out in the king's
councils; and when the witch Jacquetta's practices against the earl
travelled from the hostile into the royal camp, Raoul de Fulke, St.
John, and others, seized with pious horror, positively declared they
would throw down their arms and retire to their castles, unless the
Woodvilles were dismissed from the camp and the Earl of Warwick was
recalled to England. To the first demand the king was constrained to
yield; with the second he temporized. He marched from Fotheringay to
Newark; but the signs of disaffection, though they could not dismay
him as a soldier, altered his plans as a captain of singular military
acuteness; he fell back on Nottingham, and despatched, with his own