While Edward is in exile; and Elizabeth Woodville in the sanctuary; and Warwick holding the reins of power; and Margaret of Anjou and her son on the Continent; we may refer with brevity to the melancholy fate of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, celebrated on the same page of history as "the Butcher" and as "the paragon of learning and the patron of Caxton"--the most accomplished among the nobility of his age, and, at the same time, the only man "who, during the Yorkist domination, had committed such excesses as to merit the punishment of death at the Lancastrian restoration." Though not of high patrician rank like the Nevilles or the De Veres, Worcester had claims to considerable respect in an ancestral point of view. One of the family of Tiptoft, after fighting in the Barons' Wars against Simon de Montfort, accompanied the victor of Evesham when that great prince fared forth to the Holy Land to signalize his prowess against the enemies of his religion; and the descendants of the crusader made their name known to fame in those wars which our Plantagenet kings carried on in Scotland and in France. Early in the fifteenth century, Lord Tiptoft, the chief of the race, espoused the sister and co-heir of Edward Charlton, Lord Powis; and, about the year 1427, their son, John Tiptoft, first saw the light at Everton, in the shire of Cambridge. The heir of the Tiptofts was educated at Baliol College, Oxford; and at that ancient seat of learning pursued his studies with such energy and enthusiasm as raised the admiration of his contemporaries, and laid the foundation of the fame which he has enjoyed with posterity. When in his teens, he became, by his father's death, one of the barons of England, and, some time later, in 1449, he found himself elevated, by Henry of Windsor, to the earldom of Worcester. He had enjoyed this new dignity for six years, and reached the age of twenty-eight, when blood was first shed at St. Albans in the Wars of the Roses. Worcester was a man of action as well as a scholar. When, therefore, war commenced, he was, doubtless, looked upon by both parties as a desirable partisan. The accomplished earl, however, appears to have been in no haste to risk his head and his baronies in the quarrel either of York or Lancaster. At first, he hesitated, wavered, and refrained from committing himself as to the merits of the controversy, and, finally, instead of plucking either "the pale or the purple rose," avoided the hazard of making a choice by leaving the country and repairing to the Holy Land.