Agreeably to the custom of the period, the king and the earl addressed their adherents, each asserting the justice of his cause--Edward denouncing the patrician hero as rebel and traitor; while Warwick branded his royal adversary as usurper and tyrant. This ceremony over, the hostile armies joined battle. At first fortune with fickle smile favored the Lancastrians. The error made by the Yorkists in taking up their position on the previous evening now caused them serious inconvenience. In fact, the Lancastrian right wing, composed of horsemen, so overlapped the king's troops opposed to them that Oxford and Montagu were enabled to crush Hastings as in a serpent's fold. The Yorkist left wing was completely discomfited; and many of the men spurred out of the fog, escaped from the field, dashed through Barnet, galloped along the high north road to London, and excused their flight by reporting that the earl had won the day. The conclusion at which the fugitives had arrived was quite premature. Indeed, could these doughty champions of the White Rose have seen what was passing in other parts of the field, they would probably have postponed their ride to the capital. Fearful difficulties encompassed the right wing of the Lancastrian army. Gloucester was proving how formidable a war-chief a Plantagenet could be even in his teens, and enacting his part with such skill and courage as would have done credit to warriors who had led the Yorkists to victory at Towton and Northampton. With an eye that few things escaped, the boy-duke availed himself of the advantage which Montagu and Oxford had turned to such account in their struggle with Hastings; and, urging on the assault with characteristic ferocity, he succeeded in placing his adversaries in the unfortunate predicament to which the left wing of the Yorkists had already been reduced. At the same time, the Lancastrians opposed to Gloucester were dispirited by the fall of Exeter, who sunk to the ground wounded with an arrow; and so dense continued the fog over Gladsmuir Heath that they were not even consoled with the knowledge of Oxford's signal success. Edward, however, early became aware that his left wing had been destroyed, and charged the Lancastrian centre with such vigor as threw Somerset's ranks into confusion. The ignorance of the Lancastrians as to the success of their right wing, was not the only disadvantage they suffered from the fog. The soldiers considered the dense watery vapors not as ordinary exhalations, but as supernatural means used by Friar Bungey to aid the Yorkist cause; and, from the beginning, the gloom had been decidedly favorable to Edward's operations. Ere the battle long continued, the fog did better service to the king than could have been rendered to him by hundreds of knights.