spirit we have before described,--opened their gates to the trader
prince.

Oxford and Exeter reached Newark with their force. Edward marched on
them at once. Deceived as to his numbers, they took panic and fled.
When once the foe flies, friends ever start up from the very earth!
Hereditary partisans--gentlemen, knights, and nobles--now flocked fast
round the adventurer. Then came Lovell and Cromwell and D'Eyncourt,
ever true to York; and Stanley, never true to any cause. Then came
the brave knights Parr and Norris and De Burgh; and no less than three
thousand retainers belonging to Lord Hastings--the new man--obeyed the
summons of his couriers and joined their chief at Leicester.

Edward of March, who had landed at Ravenspur with a handful of
brigands, now saw a king's army under his banner. [The perplexity and
confusion which involve the annals of this period may be guessed by
this,--that two historians, eminent for research (Lingard and Sharon
Turner), differ so widely as to the numbers who had now joined Edward,
that Lingard asserts that at Nottingham he was at the head of fifty or
sixty thousand men; and Turner gives him, at the most, between six and
seven thousand. The latter seems nearer to the truth. We must here
regret that Turner's partiality to the House of York induces him to
slur over Edward's detestable perjury at York, and to accumulate all
rhetorical arts to command admiration for his progress,--to the
prejudice of the salutary moral horror we ought to feel for the
atrocious perfidy and violation of oath to which he owed the first
impunity that secured the after triumph.] Then the audacious perjurer
threw away the mask; then, forth went--not the prayer of the attainted
Duke of York--but the proclamation of the indignant king. England now
beheld two sovereigns, equal in their armies. It was no longer a