That evening, after dark, the queen, her five daughters, and Richard, duke of York, stole out of the palace of Westminster into the shelter of the abbot's house, which fortunately lay within the sanctuary precincts. All night long the dwelling, usually so quiet, was a scene of bustle and confusion, for every moment servants were arriving from the palace at Westminster bearing with them great chests full of jewels, clothes, hangings, and carpets. The princesses, who were for the most part young children, were running about, excitedly ordering the arrangement of their own possessions, while Richard the 'married man,' had quietly fallen asleep in a corner on a heap of wall-hangings that happened to have been set down there. So it was that the archbishop and lord chancellor, who arrived long after midnight to deliver up the Great Seal to the queen, in trust for Edward V., found her alone, seated on a heap of rushes in the old stone hall, 'desolate and dismayed,' as the chronicler tells us. The archbishop tried to cheer her with kind words and promises of a fair future, but the queen had suffered too much in the past to pay much heed to him. 'Desolate' she was indeed, and 'dismayed' she well might be, and in his heart the archbishop knew it, and he sighed as he looked at her hopeless face set in the tight widow's bands, while her hair, still long and golden in spite of her fifty years, made patches of brightness over her sombre black clothes. Yet he could not leave her without making one more effort to rouse her from her sad state, so again he spoke, though the poor woman scarcely seemed to know that he was in the room at all. 'Madam, be of good comfort. If they crown any other king than your eldest son whom they have with them, we will, on the morrow, crown his brother whom you have with you here. And here is the Great Seal, which in like wise as your noble husband gave it to me, so I deliver it to you for the use of your son.' Having done his mission, the archbishop departed to his own house close to the Abbey. The May dawn was already breaking, and as he looked on the river he saw the shore thronged with boats full of Gloucester's men, ready to pounce on the queen did she but leave the sanctuary by a foot. 'Poor thing! poor thing!' murmured the archbishop, as he gazed, 'it is an ill life she has before her. I doubt what will come of it.' Still, unhappy though they were, the royal family were at first far better off in the abbot's house than they had been thirteen years before in the fortress itself. The rooms were more numerous and better furnished, and it was summer, and the flowers in the garden were springing up, and the air began to be sweet with early roses. Up and down the green paths paced Elizabeth and her sister Cicely, talking over the events of the last month, and of all that had happened since the death of their father.