Page:The Queens of England.djvu/272

 z$2 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. in their power to diminish it. In 1468 Warwick was accused, on the hearsay evidence of a mean person, of favoring the party of Margaret of Anjou, and commissioners were sent to examine the earl at Middleham, where he was then residing. The charge was proved to be wholly unfounded, but the insult was too great to be overlooked by a man whose pride and high sense of honor rendered him peculiarly sensitive to aught that impugned either. The unpopularity of the Woodvilles, to whom this insult was attributed, created such general sym- pathy in favor of Warwick, that the king, alarmed for the possible result, went in person to Nottingham, attended by a guard of two hundred gentlemen, and effected a reconcilia- tion between the Archbishop of York and the Earl of Rivers, father of the queen, which a little later led to the archbishop's making peace between his brother, the Earl of Warwick, and Lord Herbert (brother-in-law to the queen), and the Lords Stafford and Audley. But though apparently reconciled, Warwick could not forget the injury he had received, nor could those who had inflicted it forgive the humiliation of being defeated in their attempt to destroy him. The king's brother, the Duke of Clarence, was no less indisposed towards the queen's relations, on whom he saw all court favors lavished, while he was treated with indifference, if not with slight. Warwick, aware of this, and desirous, for his ow T n safety, of making a party against his enemies, offered the hand of his fair daughter Isabella to Clarence, who gladly accepted the proposal, which secured him not only a beautiful woman, but one of the highest family and greatest fortune in the king- dom. Ill could Warwick brook the dissatisfaction betrayed by the king when intelligence of the proposed marriage reached him, but still less could he pardon the efforts made by Edward to prevent the pope from granting a dispensation for the union, rendered necessary by the consanguinity of the parties. Paul the Third, then on the papal throne, granted the dispensation in spite of all the attempts of Edward to dissuade him from it, and on the nth of July, 1469, the Duke of Clarence married Isabella, in the church of Notre Dame at Calais, of which place her father, the Earl of Warwick, was governor. The partiality of the king for the queen's relations, and the desire to advance their interests, continued unimpaired, and perpetually involved him in trouble. When the Duke of Clar-