He had accordingly ordered Sir John Norris, who commanded on the outside of the town near the road which the Spaniards must traverse, to place an ambuscade in his way.  Sir John, always ready for adventurous enterprises, took a body of two hundred cavalry, all picked men, and ordered Sir William Stanley, with three hundred pikemen, to follow.  A much stronger force of infantry was held in reserve and readiness, but it was not thought that it would be required.  The ambuscade was successfully placed, before the dawn of Thursday morning, in the neighbourhood of Warnsfeld church.  On the other hand, the Earl of Leicester himself, anxious as to the result, came across the river just at daybreak.  He was accompanied by the chief gentlemen in his camp, who could never be restrained when blows were passing current.

The business that morning was a commonplace and practical though an important, one—­to “impeach” a convoy of wheat and barley, butter, cheese, and beef—­but the names of those noble and knightly volunteers, familiar throughout Christendom, sound like the roll-call for some chivalrous tournament.  There were Essex and Audley, Stanley, Pelham, Russell, both the Sidneys, all the Norrises, men whose valour had been. proved on many a hard-fought battle-field.  There, too, was the famous hero of British ballad whose name was so often to ring on the plains of the Netherlands—­

                   “The brave Lord Willoughby,
                    Of courage fierce and fell,
                    Who would not give one inch of way
                    For all the devils in hell.”

Twenty such volunteers as these sat on horseback that morning around the stately Earl of Leicester.  It seemed an incredible extravagance to send a handful of such heroes against an army.

But the English commander-in-chief had been listening to the insidious tongue of Roland York—­that bold, plausible, unscrupulous partisan, already twice a renegade, of whom more was ere long to be heard in the Netherlands and England.  Of the man’s courage there could be no doubt, and he was about to fight that morning in the front rank at the head of his company.  But he had, for some mysterious reason, been bent upon persuading the Earl that the Spaniards were no match for Englishmen at a hand-to-hand contest.  When they could ride freely up and down, he said, and use their lances as they liked, they were formidable.  But the English were stronger men, better riders, better mounted, and better armed.  The Spaniards hated helmets and proof armour, while the English trooper, in casque, cuirass, and greaves, was a living fortress impregnable to Spanish or Italian light horsemen.  And Leicester seemed almost convinced by his reasoning.

It was five o’clock of a chill autumn morning.  It was time for day to break, but the fog was so thick that a man at the distance of five yards was quite invisible.  The creaking of waggon-wheels and the measured tramp of soldiers soon became faintly audible however to Sir John Norris and his five hundred as they sat there in the mist.  Presently came galloping forward in hot haste those nobles and gentlemen, with their esquires, fifty men in all—­Sidney, Willoughby, and the rest—­whom Leicester had no longer been able to restrain from taking part in the adventure.