censured the king and the earl for feasting in London while the northern fortresses were falling back into the hands of the Lancastrians (Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, p. 176). It was certainly imprudent of Warwick to leave Bamborough in charge of the Lancastrian deserter Sir Ralph Percy, and to offend the local Sir Ralph Grey of Heton by giving the captaincy of Alnwick to Sir John Ashley. On the news of the loss of these two fortresses Montagu at once went north (1 June), and, being presently joined by Warwick, they relieved Norham (July), which was besieged by Margaret and De Brezé (Gregory, p. 220). The other fortresses still held out, but Margaret was at the end of her resources, and hastily withdrew to Flanders (ib.) Warwick went south without recovering the castles, perhaps hoping for a peaceful settlement from the truce with Louis XI, which his brother the chancellor negotiated in October. The Scots soon made overtures for peace, and Warwick, Montagu, and the chancellor were commissioned to hold a conference at York with Scottish ambassadors (Fœdera, xi. 514–15). Warwick was detained in London by negotiations with ambassadors from France and Burgundy, and, though he reached York by 5 May, his brother Montagu had the sole honour of giving the quietus to the northern Lancastrians at Hedgeley Moor and Hexham. In June the two brothers reduced the three outstanding strongholds (Warkworth, p. 36; Worcester, p. 782). All England, except an isolated handful of men in Harlech Castle, had now submitted to Edward, and foreign powers had ceased to look askance upon him. For this he had to thank Warwick and the Nevilles.
But Edward was already drifting away from his chief supporters. His secret marriage with Elizabeth Wydeville, daughter of Lord Rivers, in May, which was probably dictated by infatuated passion, disgusted Warwick. He despised Rivers and his family as upstarts, though curiously enough he had twelve years before interested himself in the suit of a young knight, Sir Hugh Johns, for the hand of this very Elizabeth Wydeville (Strickland, Queens of England, i. 318). They were Lancastrians too, and had not forgotten the imprisonment and ‘rating’ they had received at Warwick's hands in 1460 (Paston Letters, i. 506). But, worst of all, the marriage shattered to pieces his laborious foreign combinations. Warwick had at first thought of a Burgundian match for Edward; but the support which Margaret had found in France, coupled perhaps with a mutual antipathy between him and Charles, the heir of Burgundy, made him welcome the offer which Louis XI, scenting danger from Burgundy and his other great feudatories, made early in this very year of the hand of his sister-in-law, Bona of Savoy (Chastellain, iv. 155, 494; Basin, ii. 94; Ramsay, ii. 307). Warwick was to have met Louis and the proposed bride in July, but the renewed outbreak in the north caused a postponement until October, and before that Edward had publicly announced his marriage. It was unpopular in the country, but Warwick dissembled his irritation, and helped to lead Elizabeth into the chapel of Reading Abbey on her public presentation (29 Sept.) as queen (Worcester, p. 783). George Neville's translation to the archbishopric of York two days before seemed to be a pledge that Edward had no thought of shaking himself free of the Nevilles. But Warwick can hardly have been mistaken in ascribing the shower of honours and rich marriages poured upon the queen's kinsmen as a deliberate attempt to create a court party, and get rid of the oppressive ascendency of the Nevilles. The ‘diabolic marriage’ of his septuagenarian aunt Catherine, duchess dowager of Norfolk, to John Wydeville, who was hardly one-fourth her age, and the bestowal on Lord Herbert of the barony of Dunster, to which Warwick had a claim as representing the Montagus, were galling to him personally, and seemed to point to deliberate intention (ib. pp. 783–5).
Warwick avoided the signal triumph of the Wydevilles, exemplified at the coronation of the queen in May 1465, by crossing the Channel on a foreign mission (cf. Wavrin, v. 463; RAMSAY, ii. 314). He succeeded in withdrawing Louis's active support from Margaret, by binding England to neutrality between the French king and his rebellious magnates. Returning home in time to meet, at Islington, King Henry, who had been captured in Lancashire, he conducted him in bonds to the Tower (cf. Worcester, p. 786). In February next year he stood godfather for Queen Elizabeth's first child. But new Wydeville marriages and fresh honours for Rivers, who was made an earl, and replaced Warwick's uncle by marriage, Lord Mountjoy, as treasurer, widened the growing breach (ib.) Warwick was still busy with foreign negotiations, but had to carry out a policy which was not his own. He had preferred a French to a Burgundian alliance, because Charolais, who must soon become Duke of Burgundy, seemed more wedded to the Lancastrian cause than Louis (Commines, iii. 201). He continued his opposition even when Charolais changed his front, and in March 1466
