Not that Richard of York began with any certain idea of kingship, though his son, afterwards to be Edward IV., was less scrupulous. After the first battle of St. Albans,[8] matters went quite mildly to begin with. Henry VI. was made prisoner, but was treated with courtesy, and but for his determined queen, whose influence on his weak character was as that of Jezebel on Ahab, the end of his reign may yet have been peace. She was naturally despotic, and a conspiracy to seize the Yorkist leaders drove them again into open revolt, and gave them a victory at Blackheath in 1459, but much panic and some treachery led to the dispersion of the Yorkist soldiery at Ludlow the next month; to be followed in February 1460 by a complete victory at Northampton, in which Richard’s son Edward, Earl of March, with Warwick the Kingmaker, led the hosts of the White Rose, and Henry became a prisoner once more. This led to a second temporary compromise, whereby the Yorkists were promised the succession on the death of King Henry. But it availed little. The war-spirit and the blood feud were aroused. Wakefield Green witnessed the defeat and death of Richard of York, and the cruel murder of his twelve-years old son, Edmund of Rutland, by Lord Clifford. The cruelties of the Lancastrian party, the systematic pillaging which their soldiery--recruited often from the ruder North--so often indulged in, alienated the sympathy of the London men; while the more commercial spirit of Edward of York also tended to strengthen the party of the White Rose, to keep alive and embitter the strife, and postpone the long-looked-for peace. The country had practically subdivided itself into geographical as well as political factions. The North and Midlands sympathised with Henry, who had there the support of the landowners, the nobles, and their retainers; the south more or less with Edward, with whom the great towns, such as London, Bristol, and Norwich sided. Hence, after the latter had been proclaimed king, there was still a powerful army of some sixty thousand Lancastrians at York that had to be dealt with. And dealt with it was, by the new king and Warwick his Kingmaker, who at Towton won one of the most decisive and bloody battles during the struggle, and drove Margaret first to Scotland, and then to exile. Much as her character may be disliked,--and she was after all only a type of the imperious feudal “divinely-appointed” ruler,--her dauntless energy and courage cannot but meet with sympathy. So exile meant with her but _reculer pour sauter le mieux_, and in France such poor supplies as she could raise enabled her to make one despairing effort for her son’s sake, and she landed in Northumberland in 1462; but nothing came of it except dispersion again and despair. Unhappy queen! unhappy more by her own faults than aught else. The legal claim of her branch to the kingdom was never seriously contested. Her method of asserting that claim _was_