Read "The Last of the Barons, Book X" by Edward Bulwer-lytton online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was a clear and bright day in the first week of October, 1470, when the various scouts employed by the mayor and council of London came back to the Guild, at which that worshipful corporation were assembled, -- their steeds blown and jaded, themselves panting and breathless, -- to announce the rapid march of the Earl of Warwick. The lord mayor of that year, Richard Lee, grocer and citizen, sat in the venerable hall in a huge leather chair, over which a pall of velvet had been thrown in haste, clad in his robes of state, and surrounded by his aldermen and the magnates of the city. To the personal love which the greater part of the body bore to the young and courteous king was added the terror which the corporation justly entertained of the Lancastrian faction.
They remembered the dreadful excesses which Margaret had permitted to her army in the year 1461, -- what time, to use the expression of the old historian, "the wealth of London looked pale; " and how grudgingly she had been restrained from condemning her revolted metropolis to the horrors of sack and pillage. And the bearing of this august representation of the trade and power of London was not, at the first, unworthy of the high influence it had obtained. The agitation and disorder of the hour had introduced into the assembly several of the more active and accredited citizens not of right belonging to it; but they sat, in silent discipline and order, on long benches beyond the table crowded by the corporate officers.