“Your pardon, my Lord Hastings,” said Lord Rivers, “there is another letter I have not yet laid before the king.”  He drew forth a scroll and read from it as follows.

“Yesterday the earl feasted the king, and as, in discharge of mine office, I carved for my lord, I heard King Louis say, ’Pasque Dieu, my Lord Warwick, our couriers bring us word that Count de Charolais declares he shall yet wed the Lady Margaret, and that he laughs at your embassage.  What if our brother King Edward fall back from the treaty?’ ‘He durst not,’ said the earl.”

“‘Durst not!’” exclaimed Edward, starting to his feet, and striking the table with his clenched hand. “‘Durst not!’ Hastings, heard you that?”

Hastings bowed his head in assent.

“Is that all, Lord Rivers?”

“All!  And, methinks, enough!”

“Enough, by my halidame!” said Edward, laughing bitterly.  “He shall see what a king dares when a subject threatens.”

Lord Rivers had not read the whole of the letter.  The sentence read:  “He durst not, because what a noble heart dares least is to belie the plighted word, and what the kind heart shuns most is to wrong the confiding friend.”

When Warwick returned, with the object of his mission achieved, it was to find Margaret of England the betrothed of the Count de Charolais, and his embassy dishonoured.  He retired in anger and grief to his castle of Middleham, and though the king declared that “Edward IV. reigns alone,” most of the great barons forsook him to rally round their leader in his retirement.

III.—­The Scholar and his Daughter

Sybill Warner had been at court in the train of Margaret of Anjou.  Her father, Adam Warner, was a poor scholar, with his heart set upon the completion of an invention which should inaugurate the age of steam.  They lived together in an old house, with but one aged serving-woman.  Even necessaries were sacrificed that the model of the invention might be fed.  Then one day there came to Adam Warner an old schoolfellow, Robert Hilyard, who had thrown in his lot with the Lancastrians, and become an agent of the vengeful Margaret.  Hilyard told so moving a tale of his wrongs at the hands of Edward that the old man consented to aid him in a scheme for communicating with the imprisoned Henry.

Henry was still permitted to see visitors, and Hilyard’s proposal was that Warner should seek permission to exhibit his model, in the mechanism of which were to be hidden certain treasonable papers for Henry to sign.

As we have seen, from Hastings’ remark to the king, the plot failed.  Hilyard escaped, to stir up the peasantry, who knew him as Robin of Redesdale.  Warner’s fate was inclusion in the number of astrologers and alchemists retained by the Duchess of Bedford, who also gave a place amongst her maidens to Sybill, to whom Hastings had proffered his devoted attachment, though he was already bound by ties of policy and early love to Margaret de Bonville.