Great was the confluence and resort to the city of Winchester, it being noised abroad as though the king would distinguish the affray by his presence; wondrous the stir and bustle of the soldiers, guards, and attendants, with hordes of idlers and hangers-on, from the vast array of knights and nobles, who came either to see or to share in the approaching trial.  The splendid banners, the heraldic pomp and barbaric grandeur of their retinues, augmenting with every fresh arrival, made the streets one ever-moving pageant for many days before the conflict began.  Isabella had full leisure to observe, from her own lattice, the gay and costly garniture, and the glittering appointments of the warriors, with the pageants and puerile diversions suited to the taste and capacity of the ignorant crowds by which they were followed.  The king’s mummers were arrived, together with many other marvels in the shape of puppet-shows and “motions” enacting the “old vice;” Jonas and the whale, Nineveh, the Creation, and a thousand unintelligible but equally gratifying and instructive devices; one of which, we are told, was “four giants, a unicorn, a camel, an ass, a dragon, a hobby-horse, and sixteen naked boys!”

The crowds attracted by these spectacles were immense, and the city nigh choked with the torrents that set in from every quarter.

From the windows of the houses, where lodged the knights appointed to the encounter, hung their several coats, richly emblazoned, rousing forth many a shout and hurrah, as one and another symbol was recognised to be the badge of some favourite chief; but more than all, was the young Stanley’s escutcheon favoured by the fickle breath of popular opinion, which made it needful that a double guard should be mounted near his dwelling,—­a precaution, moreover, rendered needful by the many tumults among the different partisans and retainers, not always ending without bloodshed.  The arrival of the king, however, soon changed the current of the wondering multitude.  Edward was now in his sixty-fourth year, and the fiftieth of his reign.  Though the decline of his life did not correspond with the splendid and noisy scenes which had illustrated the earlier periods of his history, yet he still manifested the same restless and undaunted spirit, ever considered as the prevailing attribute of his character.  Towards the close of his career he had the mortification to endure the loss of his foreign possessions, having been baffled in every attempt to defend them.  He felt, too, the decay of his authority at home, from the inconstancy and discontents of his subjects.  Though his earlier years had been spent amid the din and tumult of war and the business of the camp, yet was he, at this period, almost wholly given up to pleasure and the grossest of sensual indulgences.  Alice Pierce, to whom he was immoderately attached, had gained an ascendancy over him so dangerous that the parliament remonstrated, with a courage and firmness worthy of a more enlightened era, and in the end he was obliged to remove her from court.  Sometimes the spirit of his youth awoke; the glory of past ages was stirred up within him; and, like the aged war-horse neighing to the shrill note of the trumpet, he greeted the approaching tournament with something of his wonted ardour,—­though now but an expiring flash, brightening a moment ere it was extinguished.