The great struggle between the Red and White Roses was now in its birth-throes. The Duke of York had been expelled from the regency; thirsting for revenge, he levied an army in the north and marched to St. Albans, where he found the King's forces encamped in the town, which was assaulted with great fury. The battle lasted but one short hour, but it was disastrous to the cause of Henry; five thousand of his troops were left dead upon the field, among the slain being the Dukes of Somerset and Buckingham, the Earls of Northumberland and Stafford, and Lord Clifford, while the King himself, who during the fight had been wounded in the neck by an arrow, was made prisoner. The blood shed at St Albans on that fatal 22nd of May, 1455, was the first that flowed in the bitter contest which came to an end only when thirty years had come and gone, when thirteen pitched battles had been fought, and the victory on Bosworth Field had been achieved--a strife so deadly that, as Michael Drayton tells us, the ties of blood and kindred were forgotten, and the nearest relations fought on opposite sides-- Then Dutton Dutton kills, a Done doth kill a Done; A Booth a Booth, and Leigh by Leigh is overthrown; A Venables against a Venables doth stand; A Troutbeck fighteth with a Troutbeck hand to hand; There Molineux doth make a Molineux to die; And Egerton the strength of Egerton doth try. Peter Legh doubtless rejoiced in the Yorkist victory at St. Albans, but the warning which Henry VI. addressed to him the year before had deterred him from bearing any part in it, and he appears to have acted with equal prudence four years later, when the reconciliation between the Duke of York and Queen Margaret--the "dissimulated unity and concord," as the city chronicler called it--came to an end and civil war broke out afresh. In that year (1459) the Yorkist forces were once more marshalled against those of the King. The Earl of Salisbury raised the standard of the White Rose, and with an army of 5,000 men marched through Cheshire into Staffordshire, almost within sight of Lyme, and then by way of Congleton and Newcastle-under-Lyme to Drayton. Before he could join the Duke he was overtaken by Lord Audley at the head of a superior force of Lancastrians, and on the 23rd September the battle of Blore-heath, where the head of the house of Stanley amused both sides with promises of support without venturing to strike a blow for either, was fought. The struggle was long and sanguinary, but victory again declared in favour of the Yorkists, Henry's adherents leaving 2,400 dead upon the field, many of whom were from Lancashire and Cheshire, among them being the brother of Peter Legh's first wife, Sir Richard Molineux, who fell fighting in the cause to which Peter Legh was in his heart opposed. At Northampton in July of the following year the fortunes of the Yorkists were again in the ascendant, and we read that Queen Margaret and her son, who had sought safety in flight, had