Now the number of Saxe-Normans riding out to meet and greet the Welshmen is declared to have not exceeded nine.  So much pretends to be historic, in opposition to the poetic version.  They would, we may be sure, have made it a point of honour to meet and greet their invading guests in precisely similar numbers a larger would have overshot the mark of courtesy; and doubtless a smaller have fallen deplorably short of it.  Therefore, an acquaintance with her chivalrous, if less impulsive, countrymen compels to the dismissing of the Dame’s ballad authorities.  She has every right to quote them for her own good pleasure, and may create in others an enjoyment of what has been called ‘the Mackrell fry.’

Her notion of a ballad is, that it grows like mushrooms from a scuffle of feet on grass overnight, and is a sort of forest mother of the pied infant reared and trimmed by historians to show the world its fatherly antecedent steps.  The hand of Rose Mackrell is at least suggested in more than one of the ballads.  Here the Welsh irruption is a Chevy Chase; next we have the countess for a disputed Helen.

The lady’s lord is not a shining figure.  How can an undecided one be a dispenser of light?  Poetry could never allow him to say with her: 

                   ’Where’er I go I make a name,
                    And leave a song to follow.’

Yet he was the master of her fortunes at the time; all the material power was his.  Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the fact) denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the position between the driven and the driver.  Poetry, however erratic, is less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History.  The Muse of History has neither the same divination of the intrinsic nor the devotion to it, though truly, she has possession of all the positive matter and holds us faster by the crediting senses.

Nine English cavaliers, then, left London early on a January or February morning in a Southerly direction, bearing East; and they were the Earl of Fleetwood’s intimates, of the half-dependent order; so we may suppose them to have gone at his bidding.  That they met the procession of the Welsh, and claimed to take charge of the countess’s carriage, near the Kentish border-line, is an assertion supported by testimony fairly acceptable.

Intelligence of the advancing party had reached the earl by courier, from the date of the first gathering on the bridge of Pont-y-pridd; and from Gloucester, along to the Thames at Reading; thence away to the Mole, from Mickleham, where the Surrey chalk runs its final turfy spine North-eastward to the slope upon Kentish soil.

Greatly to the astonishment of the Welsh cavaliers, a mounted footman, clad in the green and scarlet facings of Lord Fleetwood’s livery, rode up to them a mile outside the principal towns and named the inn where the earl had ordered preparations for the reception of them.  England’s hospitality was offered on a princely scale.  Cleverer fencing could not be.