King Henry V. restored Hotspur’s son, the second Earl, to his family honours, and the Percies were staunch Lancastrians during the Wars of the Roses which followed, the third Earl and three of his brothers losing their lives in the cause.  The fifth Earl was a gorgeous person whose magnificence equalled, almost, that of royalty.  Henry Percy, the sixth Earl of Northumberland, loved Ann Boleyn, and was her accepted suitor before King Henry VIII. unfortunately discovered the lady’s charm, and interfered in a highhanded “bluff King Hal” fashion, and young Percy lost his prospective bride.  He had no son, although married later to the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, and his nephew, Thomas Percy, became the seventh Earl.

Thereafter, a succession of plots and counterplots—­the Rising of the North, the plots to liberate Mary Queen of Scots, and the Gunpowder Plot—­each claimed a Percy among their adherents.  On this account the eighth and ninth Earls spent many years in the Tower, but the tenth Earl, Algernon, fought for King Charles in the Civil War, the male line of the Percy-Louvain house ending with Josceline, the eleventh Earl.  The heiress to the vast Percy estates married the Duke of Somerset; and her grand-daughter married a Yorkshire knight, Sir Hugh Smithson, who in 1766 was created the first Duke of Northumberland and Earl Percy, and it is their descendants who now represent the famous old house.

At various points in the town are memorials of the constant wars between Percies and Scots in which so many Percies spent the greater part of their lives.  At the side of the broad shady road called Rotten Row, leading from the West Lodge to Bailiffgate, a tablet of stone marks the spot where William the Lion of Scotland was captured as we have already seen, in 1174, by Odinel de Umfraville and his friends; and there are many others of similar interest.

Within the park, approached by the gate at the foot of Canongate, is the fine gateway which is all that is left of Alnwick Abbey.  No more peaceful spot could have been found than this, on the level greensward, surrounded by fine trees which shelter it on all sides save one, and near the brink of the little Aln, whose banks are thickly covered with wild flowers, while the steep slope on the opposite side of the river is overhung with shady woods.  The extent of the parks may be judged from the fact that the enclosing wall is about five miles long.  At the foot of Bailiffgate, on the edge of a steep ridge above the descent to Canongate and the banks of the river, the ancient parish church, dedicated to St. Mary and St. Michael stands in a commanding position.  The present building dates from the fourteenth century, and occupies the site of an earlier one, whose few remaining stones have been built into the present structure.  Two other reminders of long-past days are to be found in Alnwick; one is the large stone in the Market Place to which the bull ring used to be fixed in the days when bull-baiting and bear-baiting took place; and the other, a relic of days still further back in the distant years, is the sounding of the Curfew Bell, which is still rung here every evening at eight o’clock.  Altogether there is the quaintest and most unexpected mingling of the ancient and modern in the little feudal town.