After Towton peace prevailed south of the Tyne and east of the Severn, for it was only in Northumberland and in Wales that the survivors of the Lancastrian faction succeeded in keeping the war alive. King Edward, as indolent and pleasure-loving in times of ease as he was active and ruthless in times of stress and battle, set himself to enjoy life, handing over the suppression of the rebels to his ambitious and untiring cousin Richard of Warwick. The annals of the few contemporary chroniclers are so entirely devoted to the bickerings in the extreme north and west, that it is necessary to insist on the fact that from 1461 onwards the civil war was purely local, and nine-tenths of the realm enjoyed what passed for peace in the 15th century. The campaigns of 1462-63-64, though full of incident and bloodshed, were not of first-rate political importance. The cause of Lancaster had been lost at Towton, and all that Queen Margaret succeeded in accomplishing was to keep Northumberland in revolt, mainly by means of French and Scottish succours. Her last English partisans, attainted men who had lost their lands and lived with the shadow of the axe ever before them, fought bitterly enough. But the obstinate and hard-handed Warwick beat them down again and again, and the old Lancastrian party was almost exterminated when the last of its chiefs went to the block in the series of wholesale executions that followed the battle of Hexham (May 15, 1464). A year later Henry VI. himself fell into the hands of his enemies, as he lurked in Lancashire, and with his consignment to the Tower the dynastic question seemed finally solved in favour of the house of York. Richard Neville, earl of Warwick.