; but it is asserted that he
would have been beaten, because of the superiority of the enemy in men,
but for the coming up, at the eleventh hour, of the Duke of Norfolk, who
was the Joseph Johnston of 1461, doing for Edward what the Secessionist
Johnston did for Beauregard in 1861. The Lancastrians then gave way,
and retreated, at first in orderly fashion, but finally falling into
a panic, when they were cut down by thousands. They lost twenty-eight
thousand men, and the Yorkists eight thousand. This was a fine piece of
work for the beginning of Passion-Week, bloody laurels gained in civil
conflict being substituted for palm-branches! No such battle was ever
fought by Englishmen in foreign lands. This was the day when

"Wharfe ran red with slaughter,
Gathering in its guilty flood
The carnage, and the ill-spilt blood
That forty thousand lives could yield.
Crecy was to this but sport,
Poitiers but a pageant vain,
And the work of Agincourt
Only like a tournament.
Half the blood which there was spent
Had sufficed to win again
Anjou and ill-yielded Maine,
Normandy and Aquitaine."

Edward IV., it should seem, was especially favored by the powers of the
air; for, if he owed victory at Towton to wind and snow, he owed it to a
mist at Barnet. This last action was fought on the 14th of April, 1471,
and the prevalence of the mist, which was very thick, enabled Edward so
to order his military work as to counterbalance the enemy's superiority
in numbers. The mist was attributed to the arts of Friar Bungay, a
famous and most rascally "nigromancer." The mistake made by Warwick's
men, when they thought Oxford's cognizance, a star paled with rays,
was that of Edward, which was a sun in full glory, (the White Rose _en
soleil,_) and so assailed their own friends, and created a panic, was in
part attributable to the mist, which prevented them from seeing clearly;
and this mistake was the immediate occasion of the overthrow of the army
of the Red Rose. That Edward was enabled to fight the Battle of Barnet
with any hope of success was also owing to the weather. Margaret of
Anjou had assembled a force in France, Louis XI. supporting her cause,
and this force was ready to sail in February, and by its presence
in England victory would unquestionably have been secured for the
Lancastrians. But the elements opposed themselves to her purpose with so
much pertinacity and consistency that it is not strange that men shou