beheaded, against all kingly faith, his hostages, Lord Welles and Sir
Thomas Dymoke, summoned Sir Robert Welles, the leader of the revolt,
to surrender; received for answer, that Sir Robert Welles would not
trust the perfidy of the man who had murdered his father!--pushed on
to Erpingham, defeated the rebels in a signal battle, and crowned his
victory by a series of ruthless cruelties, committed to the fierce and
learned Earl of Worcester, "Butcher of England." [Stowe. "Warkworth
Chronicle"--Cont. Croyl. Lord Worcester ordered Clapham (a squire to
Lord Warwick) and nineteen others, gentlemen and yeomen, to be
impaled, and from the horror the spectacle inspired, and the universal
odium it attached to Worcester, it is to be feared that the unhappy
men were still sensible to the agony of this infliction, though they
appear first to have been drawn, and partially hanged,--outrage
confined only to the dead bodies of rebels being too common at that
day to have excited the indignation which attended the sentence
Worcester passed on his victims. It is in vain that some writers
would seek to cleanse the memory of this learned nobleman from the
stain of cruelty by rhetorical remarks on the improbability that a
cultivator of letters should be of a ruthless disposition. The
general philosophy of this defence is erroneous. In ignorant ages a
man of superior acquirements is not necessarily made humane by the
cultivation of his intellect, on the contrary, he too often learns to
look upon the uneducated herd as things of another clay. Of this
truth all history is pregnant,--witness the accomplished tyrants of
Greece, the profound and cruel intellect of the Italian Borgias.
Richard III. and Henry VIII. were both highly educated for their age.
But in the case of Tiptoft, Lord Worcester, the evidence of his
cruelty is no less incontestable than that which proves his learning--
the Croyland historian alone is unimpeachable. Worcester's popular
name of "the Butcher" is sufficient testimony in itself. The people