Somerset, on seeing the ruin his rashness had brought on his friends, fled from the scene of carnage. The duke ought not, perhaps, to have avoided the destruction to which he had allured so many brave men. The chief of the Beauforts, however, had no ambition to die like the great earl whom he had deserted at Barnet, nor to fall on the field to which he had challenged his hereditary foe. It is wonderful, indeed, that a man who had known little of life save its miseries should have cared to survive such a defeat; but Somerset, whatever his other qualities, had none of that spirit which, at Bannockburn, prompted Argentine to exclaim, "'Tis not my wont to fly!" At Hexham and at Barnet, Somerset's principal exploits had consisted of availing himself of the speed of his horse to escape the foe; and at Tewkesbury he rushed cravenly from the field, on which, a few hours earlier, he had boastfully declared that he would abide such fortune as GOD should send. The Prior of St. John, Sir Gervase Clifton, Sir Thomas Tresham, and a number of knights and esquires likewise sought safety in flight. The Prince of Wales had hitherto fought with courage; and there is some reason to believe that he fell fighting manfully on the field where so much blood was shed to vindicate his claims to the crown of England. Poets, novelists, and historians have, however, told a different tale, and produced an impression that, when the heir of Lancaster found himself abandoned by Somerset, and perceived the fortune of the day decidedly adverse to the Red Rose, he followed the multitude, who, shrinking from the charge of Edward on his berry-brown steed, and of Gloucester with his boar's-head crest, fled confusedly toward the town. But, however that may have been, all the warriors of the Red Rose did not fly. Destruction, indeed, awaited every man who stood his ground; but even the certainty of death can not daunt those who are inspired by honor. Knights and nobles, after fighting with courage, fell with disdainful pride, and hundreds upon hundreds of the Lancastrians of inferior rank lost their lives in the cause for which, at the summons of their chiefs, they had taken up arms. There fell the Earl of Devon; and John Beaufort, the brother of Somerset, and, save the duke, the last male heir of the house of Beaufort; and Sir John Delves, the chief of a family long settled at Doddington, in the County Palatine of Chester; and Sir William Fielding, whose descendants, in the time of the Stuarts, became Earls of Denbigh; and Sir Edmund Hampden, one of that ancient race which had flourished in the eleventh century, and which, in the sixteenth, produced the renowned leader of the Long Parliament.