Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 40.djvu/297

 (18 June), and seemed to be really reconciled. But, taking advantage of the easy, unsuspicious nature of the king, he was plotting in the utmost secrecy. A Lancastrian movement fomented by him was checked by arrests and executions in the autumn and winter of 1468, though his share in it was not suspected. The secret of his plans for his own restoration to power was better kept. He arranged for a northern rising as soon as he should have made sure of Clarence. But so well did he dissemble that Edward in the spring of 1469 allowed him to take up his residence, with his wife and daughters, at Calais, whose captaincy he had for some years discharged by deputy. To further throw dust in the eyes of the king, he paid friendly visits to the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy at St. Omer and Aire (, i. 169;, v. 578). Jean de Wavrin the historian, whom he had promised to supply with materials for his history, visited Calais at the beginning of July, but found Warwick too busy to perform his promise. In June the king was drawn northwards by alarming movements in Yorkshire. At first he would not connect them with the Nevilles, for there were two independent risings, which the reports seem to have confused, one of which, that of Robin of Holderness, took up the Percy grievances, and was suppressed by Montagu himself, the de facto Earl of Northumberland.

But presently, no doubt, Edward heard that the leaders who had raised the standard of Robin of Redesdale were all relatives and connections of Warwick—his nephew, Sir Henry Fitzhugh, son of Lord Fitzhugh of Ravensworth, near Richmond; his cousin, Sir Henry Neville, son of George, lord Latimer of Danby, in Cleveland; and Sir John Conyers of Hornby Castle, near Richmond, who had married a daughter of William Neville, lord Fauconberg [q. v.] The news that Clarence and the archbishop had joined Warwick in Calais (early in July) at last opened the king's eyes, and he summoned them to come to him at once in ‘usual peaceable wise’ (Paston Letters, ii. 353). But two days later (11 July) the marriage of Clarence to Isabel, for which Pope Paul II had now granted a dispensation, was performed by the archbishop at Calais (, v. 579;, p. 6; , i. 307). The three confederates at once put forth a manifesto, announcing that they were coming to present to the king certain ‘reasonable and profitable articles of petition,’ and calling upon all ‘true subjects’ to join them, defensibly arrayed. The articles, which were already in the hands of Robin of Redesdale's followers, and purported to be complaints delivered to the confederates by men ‘of diverse parties,’ repeated with little modification the stock complaints of ‘lack of governance’ and ‘great impositions and inordinate charges’ which Warwick had so often joined in bringing against the Lancastrian regime (, pp. 46–51).

The real grievance that the king had estranged the ‘great lords of his blood’ for the Wydevilles and other ‘seducious persones,’ mentioned by name, pervaded the whole document, which contained a threatening reminder of the fate of Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI. It breathes the spirit of a Thomas of Lancaster or Richard of Gloucester. The authors of this thoroughly baronial document crossed to Sandwich on Sunday, 16 July, and, gathering forces among the friendly Kentishmen, hastened on to London, and then into the Midlands, to meet Robin of Redesdale and the Yorkshire insurgents who were in full march southwards, and had cut off Edward from the forces which the new Earls of Pembroke and Devon were bringing up from Wales. Warwick did not come up in time to assist the northerners in their battle with Pembroke at Edgecote, six miles north-east of Banbury, on 26 July; but the forces whose unexpected appearance crying ‘A Warwick, a Warwick!’ robbed the Welshmen of a victory may have been Warwick's vanguard (Chron. of White Rose, p. 24; but cf., pp. 273–4, and , p. 187). Warwick, who met the victors at Northampton, showed no mercy to the men who had ousted him from the king's favour (, p. 584). Pembroke and his brother were executed two days after the battle at Northampton [see, d. 1469], and a fortnight later (12 Aug.) Rivers and his son, Sir John Wydeville, who had been taken in South Wales, were beheaded at Kenilworth (, p. 7; Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, p. 183). The king was found, deserted by his followers, near Coventry by Archbishop Neville, and taken, first to Coventry, and then to the earl's town of Warwick. But about the third week in August Warwick thought it prudent—perhaps influenced by news that London, at the instance of the Duke of Burgundy, had declared its loyalty to Edward (, p. 586)—to remove his prisoner to his own family stronghold at Middleham, in Wensleydale (, ii. 343). On 17 Aug. he was made to confer most of the offices Pembroke had held in South Wales upon the earl.

But the Yorkshiremen outside Warwick's own followers had risen to drive the Wydevilles from power, not to make the king captive. When the Lancastrians, eager to turn