Lord Richard, Sir Thomas Vaughan, and Sir Richard Hawte, were arrested, and with Lord Rivers sent prisoners to Pomfret, while the dukes conducted the king by easy stages to London.

The queen, hearing what had happened took sanctuary at Westminster, with her other son the duke of York, and the princesses her daughters.  Rotheram, archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor, repaired to her with the great seal, and endeavoured to comfort her dismay with the friendly message he had received from Hastings, who was with the confederate lords on the road.  “A woe worth him!” quoth the queen, “for it is he that goeth about to destroy me and my blood!” Not a word is said of her suspecting the duke of Gloucester.  The archbishop seems to have been the first who entertained any suspicion; and yet, if all that our historian says of him is true, Rotheram was far from being a shrewd man:  witness the indiscreet answer which he is said to have made on this occasion.  “Madam,” quoth he, “be of good comfort, and assure you, if they crown any other king than your son whom they now have we shall on the morrow crown his brother, whom you have here with you.”  Did the silly prelate think that it would be much consolation to a mother, whose eldest son might be murthered, that her younger son would be crowned in prison, or was she to be satisfied with seeing one son entitled to the crown, and the other enjoying it nominally?

He then delivered the seal to the queen, and as lightly sent for it back immediately after.

The dukes continued their march, declaring they were bringing the king to his coronation, Hastings, who seems to have preceded them, endeavoured to pacify the apprehensions which had been raised in the people, acquainting them that the arrested lords had been imprisoned for plotting against the dukes of Gloucester and Buckingham.  As both those princes were of the blood royal,(9) this accusation was not ill founded, it having evidently been the intention, as I have shewn, to bar them from any share in the administration, to which, by the custom of the realm, they were intitled.  So much depends on this foundation, that I shall be excused from enforcing it.  The queen’s party were the aggressors; and though that alone would not justify all the following excesses, yet we must not judge of those times by the present.  Neither the crown nor the great men were restrained by sober established forms and proceedings as they are at present; and from the death of Edward the Third, force alone had dictated.  Henry the Fourth had stepped into the throne contrary to all justice.  A title so defective had opened a door to attempts as violent; and the various innovations introduced in the latter years of Henry the Sixth had annihilated all ideas of order.  Richard duke of York had been declared successor to the crown during the life of Henry and of his son prince Edward, and, as appears by the Parliamentary History, though not noticed by our careless historians