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Such a man has been the true head and front of this commotion." "Speak you of Robin of Redesdale, now dead?" asked one of the captains. He was defeated off York, and retired for some days into the woods; but it is he who has enticed the sons of Latimer and Fitzhugh into the revolt, and resigned his own command to the martial cunning of Sir John Coniers. This Robin of Redesdale is no common man.
Thus modified, it passed the house of lords, with the assent of several bishops, in spite of the implacable opposition of Lords Eldon and Redesdale, and the Duke of Cumberland. But the declaration was amended by the addition of the words "upon the true faith of a Christian," which incidentally continued the statutable exclusion of Jews.
It was a tumultuous, clamorous, but not altogether undisciplined array; for Coniers was a leader of singular practice in reducing men into the machinery of war, and where his skill might have failed, the prodigious influence and energy of Robin of Redesdale ruled the passions and united the discordant elements. This last was, indeed, in much worthy the respect in which Warwick held his name.
A quick-tempered, revengeful lot were the men of those Border clans. On the Northumberland side the quarrels were as frequent as they were amongst those hot-headed Scots Kers and Scotts, Elliots and Turnbulls and Croziers. In the sixteenth century one of the most powerful of the clans in the wild Northumbrian country was that of the Reeds of Redesdale.
At first, indeed, there were hopes that the insurrection had been put down by Montagu, who had defeated the troops of Robin of Redesdale, near the city of York, and was said to have beheaded their leader. But the spirit of discontent was only fanned by an adverse wind.
While Montagu in anxious forethought awaited the revolt that Robin of Redesdale had predicted; while Edward feasted and laughed, merry-made with his courtiers, and aided the conjugal duties of his good citizens in London; while the queen and her father, Lord Rivers, more and more in the absence of Warwick encroached on all the good things power can bestow and avarice seize; while the Duchess of Bedford and Friar Bungey toiled hard at the waxen effigies of the great earl, who still held his royal son-in-law in his court at Calais, the stream of our narrative winds from its noisier channels, and lingers, with a quiet wave, around the temple of a virgin's heart.
The fox that barks from the bracken on the hillside at early morning, the grouse that crows from the heather, the owl that hoots from the fir woods at night, to those did the ghost of Percival Reed act as keeper. By day he roosted, like a bat or a night bird, on some tree in a lonely wood. By night he kept his special part of the marches. Still the Keeper of Redesdale was Percival Reed.
To a conscientious judge, like Judge Pitman, "the investigation of a mass of tangled facts and conflicting testimony" cannot but be wearisome, as he says it is; and, in many cases, the sense of responsibility "cannot but be oppressive;" but he has so often repeated a dictum of Lord Redesdale that he must be presumed to have found solace in it "it is more important that an end be put to litigation, than that justice should be done in every case."
So resolutely did Robin of Redesdale utter these words, that the queen's haughty eye fell abashed as he spoke; and her craft, or her intellect, which was keen and prompt where her passions did not deafen and blind her judgment, instantly returned to her. Few women equalled this once idol of knight and minstrel, in the subduing fascination that she could exert in her happier moments.
Cobbett, who had now become celebrated for his political works, particularly his Weekly Political Register, had about this time began to write very freely in the cause of Liberty. Being a most powerful writer, he had attacked with great success the tyrannical measures of the Irish Government, and he was, therefore, prosecuted for a libel upon the Earl of Hardwicke, Lord Redesdale, Mr.
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