but it suddenly changed, and blew the snow right into their faces.  This was bad enough, but it was not the worst, for the snow slackened their bow-strings, causing their arrows to fall short of the Yorkists, who took them from the ground, and sent them back with fatal effect.  The Lancastrian leaders then sought closer conflict, but the Yorkists had already achieved those advantages which, under a good general, are sure to prepare the way to victory.  It was as if the snow had resolved to give success to the pale rose.  That which Edward had won he was resolved to increase, and his dispositions were of the highest military excellence; but it is asserted that he would have been beaten, because of the superiority of the enemy in men, but for the coming up, at the eleventh hour, of the Duke of Norfolk, who was the Joseph Johnston of 1461, doing for Edward what the Secessionist Johnston did for Beauregard in 1861.  The Lancastrians then gave way, and retreated, at first in orderly fashion, but finally falling into a panic, when they were cut down by thousands.  They lost twenty-eight thousand men, and the Yorkists eight thousand.  This was a fine piece of work for the beginning of Passion-Week, bloody laurels gained in civil conflict being substituted for palm-branches!  No such battle was ever fought by Englishmen in foreign lands.  This was the day when

  “Wharfe ran red with slaughter,
  Gathering in its guilty flood
  The carnage, and the ill-spilt blood
  That forty thousand lives could yield. 
  Crecy was to this but sport,
  Poitiers but a pageant vain,
  And the work of Agincourt
  Only like a tournament. 
  Half the blood which there was spent
  Had sufficed to win again
  Anjou and ill-yielded Maine,
  Normandy and Aquitaine.”

Edward IV., it should seem, was especially favored by the powers of the air; for, if he owed victory at Towton to wind and snow, he owed it to a mist at Barnet.  This last action was fought on the 14th of April, 1471, and the prevalence of the mist, which was very thick, enabled Edward so to order his military work as to counterbalance the enemy’s superiority in numbers.  The mist was attributed to the arts of Friar Bungay, a famous and most rascally “nigromancer.”  The mistake made by Warwick’s men, when they thought Oxford’s cognizance, a star paled with rays, was that of Edward, which was a sun in full glory, (the White Rose en soleil,) and so assailed their own friends, and created a panic, was in part attributable to the mist, which prevented them from seeing clearly; and this mistake was the immediate occasion of the overthrow of the army of the Red Rose.  That Edward was enabled to fight the Battle of Barnet with any hope of success was also owing to the weather.  Margaret of Anjou had assembled a force in France, Louis XI. supporting her cause, and this force was ready to sail in February, and by its presence in England victory would unquestionably have been secured