passed, for my father's sake, and unite all factions by Edward's
voluntary abdication of the throne; at all hazards, I am on my way
northward, and you will not fight till I come." The marquis,--who
knew the conscientious doubts which Warwick had entertained in his
darker hours, who had no right to disobey the co-protector, who knew
no reason to suspect Lord Warwick's son-in-law, and who, moreover, was
by no means anxious to be, himself, the executioner of Edward, whom he
had once so truly loved,--though a little marvelling at Warwick's
softness, yet did not discredit the letter, and the less regarded the
free passage he left to the returned exiles, from contempt for the
smallness of their numbers, and his persuasion that if the earl saw
fit to alter his counsels, Edward was still more in his power the
farther he advanced amidst a hostile population, and towards the
armies which the Lords Exeter and Oxford were already mustering.

But that free passage was everything to Edward! It made men think
that Montagu, as well as Northumberland, favoured his enterprise; that
the hazard was less rash and hopeless than it had seemed; that Edward
counted upon finding his most powerful allies among those falsely
supposed to be his enemies. The popularity Edward had artfully
acquired amongst the captains of Warwick's own troops, on the march to
Middleham, now bestead him. Many of them were knights and gentlemen
residing in the very districts through which he passed. They did not
join him, but they did not oppose. Then rapidly flocked to "the Sun
of York," first the adventurers and condottieri who in civil war adopt
any side for pay; next came the disappointed, the ambitious, and the
needy. The hesitating began to resolve, the neutral to take a part.
From the state of petitioners supplicating a pardon, every league the
Yorkists marched advanced them to the dignity of assertors of a cause.
Doncaster first, then Nottingham, then Leicester,--true to the town