gave the duchess not even the time to seek further explanation of
Elizabeth's words, much less to determine the doubt that rose in her
enlightened mind whether Adam's spells might not be yet unravelled by
the timely execution of the sorcerer!




CHAPTER IX.

THE DELIBERATIONS OF MAYOR AND COUNCIL, WHILE LORD WARWICK MARCHES
UPON LONDON.

It was a clear and bright day in the first week of October, 1470, when
the various scouts employed by the mayor and council of London came
back to the Guild, at which that worshipful corporation were
assembled,--their steeds blown and jaded, themselves panting and
breathless,--to announce the rapid march of the Earl of Warwick. The
lord mayor of that year, Richard Lee, grocer and citizen, sat in the
venerable hall in a huge leather chair, over which a pall of velvet
had been thrown in haste, clad in his robes of state, and surrounded
by his aldermen and the magnates of the city. To the personal love
which the greater part of the body bore to the young and courteous
king was added the terror which the corporation justly entertained of
the Lancastrian faction. They remembered the dreadful excesses which
Margaret had permitted to her army in the year 1461,--what time, to
use the expression of the old historian, "the wealth of London looked
pale;" and how grudgingly she had been restrained from condemning her
revolted metropolis to the horrors of sack and pillage. And the
bearing of this august representation of the trade and power of London