THE unfortunate Margaret of Anjou, after her defeat at Northampton, had fled to Durham and escaped into Scotland; where her great affability, insinuation, and address, gained her many friends – and her promises and caresses affected all who approached her. Compassion to majesty in distress allured many to her standard, and, in a short time, she collected an army of twenty thousand strong. /

This was little expected by the Yorkists, and the nation still continued its round of expensive pleasures, though engaged in a war with France, and scarce secure from dissensions at home; while Edward was giving way to the vilifying vice of intoxication, and sinking himself to contempt and ridicule, with Lovelace, his darling associate; a man of noble family, eminent abilities, but of the loosest morals, and most famed for the quantity of wine he could drink at a banquet. He it was, who drew the Duke of Clarence into the fatal snare, which he might be literally said to plunge in, to the day of his death; for he would so intoxicate his prince with malmsey madeira, that he knew not, in those moments of madness, what he said or did; and, in one of those periods of subverted reason, he signed his own death-warrant, by consenting to head a / rebellion against his brother, though he loved him with truest fraternal affection, and had no recollection the next day of the dreadful transaction.

Lovelace, however, who was a disgrace, in some respects, to his noble family, stimulated Edward to drink to excess, and led him into every haunt of vice; and he might, with truth, he said, by his ill example and precepts, at the time the princes were in their nonage, to have corrupted the morals of them all, and to have sown those seeds of vice in their minds, which promised no fruit of perfection in maturity.