the Easter Sabbath. In the fortunes of that day were involved those
of all the persons who hitherto, in the course of this narrative, may
have seemed to move in separate orbits from the fiery star of Warwick.
Now, in this crowning hour, the vast and gigantic destiny of the great
earl comprehended all upon which its darkness or its light had fallen:
not only the luxurious Edward, the perjured Clarence, the haughty
Margaret, her gallant son, the gentle Anne, the remorseful Isabel, the
dark guile of Gloucester, the rising fortunes of the gifted Hastings,
--but on the hazard of that die rested the hopes of Hilyard, and the
interests of the trader Alwyn, and the permanence of that frank,
chivalric, hardy, still half Norman race, of which Nicholas Alwyn and
his Saxon class were the rival antagonistic principle, and Marmaduke
Nevile the ordinary type. Dragged inexorably into the whirlpool of
that mighty fate were even the very lives of the simple Scholar, of
his obscure and devoted child. Here, into this gory ocean, all
scattered rivulets and streams had hastened to merge at last.

But grander and more awful than all individual interests were those
assigned to the fortunes of this battle, so memorable in the English
annals,--the ruin or triumph of a dynasty; the fall of that warlike
baronage, of which Richard Nevile was the personation, the crowning
flower, the greatest representative and the last,--associated with
memories of turbulence and excess, it is true, but with the proudest
and grandest achievements in our early history; with all such liberty
as had been yet achieved since the Norman Conquest; with all such
glory as had made the island famous,--here with Runnymede, and there
with Cressy; the rise of a crafty, plotting, imperious Despotism,
based upon the growing sympathy of craftsmen and traders, and ripening
on the one hand to the Tudor tyranny, the Republican reaction under
the Stuarts, the slavery, and the civil war, but on the other hand to