CHAPTER III.
A PAUSE.
In the profound darkness of the night and the thick fog, Edward had
stationed his men at a venture upon the heath at Gladsmoor, [Edward
"had the greater number of men."--HALL, p. 296.] and hastily environed
the camp with palisades and trenches. He had intended to have rested
immediately in front of the foe, but, in the darkness, mistook the
extent of the hostile line; and his men were ranged only opposite to
the left side of the earl's force (towards Hadley), leaving the right
unopposed. Most fortunate for Edward was this mistake; for Warwick's
artillery, and the new and deadly bombards he had constructed, were
placed on the right of the earl's army; and the provident earl,
naturally supposing Edward's left was there opposed to him, ordered
his gunners to cannonade all night. Edward, "as the flashes of the
guns illumined by fits the gloom of midnight, saw the advantage of his
unintentional error; and to prevent Warwick from discovering it,
reiterated his orders for the most profound silence." [Sharon
Turner.] Thus even his very blunders favoured Edward more than the
wisest precautions had served his fated foe.
Raw, cold, and dismal dawned the morning of the fourteenth of April,
the Easter Sabbath. In the fortunes of that day were involved those
of all the persons who hitherto, in the course of this narrative, may
have seemed to move in separate orbits from the fiery star of Warwick.
Now, in this crowning hour, the vast and gigantic destiny of the great
earl comprehended all upon which its darkness or its light had fallen:
not only the luxurious Edward, the perjured Clarence, the haughty
Margaret, her gallant son, the gentle Anne, the remorseful Isabel, the
dark guile of Gloucester, the rising fortunes of the gifted Hastings,
--but on the hazard of that die rested the hopes of Hilyard, and the
interests of the trader Alwyn, and the permanence of that frank,
chivalric, hardy, still half Norman race, of which Nicholas Alwyn and
his Saxon class were the rival antagonistic principle, and Marmaduke
Nevile the ordinary type. Dragged inexorably into the whirlpool of
that mighty fate were even the very lives of the simple Scholar, of
his obscure and devoted child. Here, into this gory ocean, all
scattered rivulets and streams had hastened to merge at last.
But grander and more awful than all individual interests were those
assigned to the fortunes of this battle, so memorable in the English
annals,--the ruin or triumph of a dynasty; the fall of that warlike
baronage, of which Richard Nevile was the personation, the crowning
flower, the greatest representative and the last,--associated with
memories of turbulence and excess, it is true, but with the proudest
and grandest achievements in our early history; with all such liberty
as had been yet achieved since the Norman Conquest; with all such
glory as had made the island famous,--here with Runnymede, and there
with Cressy; the rise of a crafty, plotting, imperious Despotism,
based upon the growing sympathy of craftsmen and traders, and ripening
on the one hand to the Tudor tyranny, the Republican reaction under
the Stuarts, the slavery, and the civil war, but on the other hand to
the concentration of all the vigour and life of genius into a single
and strong government, the graces, the arts, the letters of a polished
court, the freedom, the energy, the resources of a commercial
population destined to rise above the tyranny at which it had first
connived, and give to the emancipated Saxon the markets of the world.
Upon the victory of that day all these contending interests, this vast
alternative in the future, swayed and trembled. Out, then, upon that
vulgar craving of those who comprehend neither the vast truths of life
nor the grandeur of ideal art, and who ask from poet or narrator the
poor and petty morality of "Poetical Justice,"--a justice existing not
in our work-day world; a justice existing not in the sombre page of
history; a justice existing not in the loftier conceptions of men
whose genius has grappled with the enigmas which art and poetry only
can foreshadow and divine,--unknown to us in the street and the
market, unknown to us on the scaffold of the patriot or amidst the
flames of the martyr, unknown to us in the Lear and the Hamlet, in the
Agamemnon and the Prometheus. Millions upon millions, ages upon ages,
are entered but as items in the vast account in which the recording
angel sums up the unerring justice of God to man.
Raw, cold, and dismal dawned the morning of the fourteenth of April.
And on that very day Margaret and her son, and the wife and daughter
of Lord Warwick, landed, at last, on the shores of England. [Margaret
landed at Weymouth; Lady Warwick, at Portsmouth.] Come they for joy
or for woe, for victory or despair? The issue of this day's fight on
the heath of Gladsmoor will decide. Prank thy halls, O Westminster,
for the triumph of the Lancastrian king,--or open thou, O Grave, to
receive the saint-like Henry and his noble son. The king-maker goes
before ye, saint-like father and noble son, to prepare your thrones
amongst the living or your mansions amongst the dead!
