300 Broughton Gifford. 
grandfather, Edward II. This objection induced him to revert to 
his former settlement in the general issue, whether male or female, 
of his sons, still passing over his daughters. Lord Audley is said 
to have been one of the advisers of this last change in 1406. He 
died three years afterwards. 
We next come to James Tuchet, 12th Lord Audley. He saw 
much service in the foreign wars of Henry V. and Henry VL., but 
was no match in a civil contest for the equal bravery and superior 
tactics of Richard Neville Earl of Salisbury, at Bloreheath. As 
two, out of the three lords then holding the manor of Broughton, 
fell in that engagement, I may perhaps be allowed a few words in 
illustration of it. 
An appeal to the sword was at that time inevitable. The first 
blood had already been shed at St. Albans. The contest had 
already begun. Ere its end, 80 years had passed, eight battles 
been fought, eighty Princes of the blood slain, every male of two 
generations of the houses of Somerset and Warwick fallen in 
the field or on the scaffold, the ancient nobility of England well 
nigh exterminated! As Kent was the county of the Yorkists, so 
Cheshire was the stronghold of the house of Lancaster. Queen 
Margaret had been visiting Lord Audley at Heleigh, and was still 
in the neighbourhood, animating her followers by distributing 
among them the badge of the young Prince, the device of the 
white swan,? and inviting them to assemble in arms at Leicester. 
Nor were the Yorkists idle. The Duke was on the borders of 
Wales, and the Earl of Salisbury, his father-in-law, was mustering 
his forces in the North, while his brother-in-law, Warwick, was at 
Calais, collecting under his banner the veterans who had served in 
Normandy and Guienne. The old Earl of Salisbury was the first 
The nobility, not the people. Philip de Comines says of these wars, that in 
them ‘‘the English desolated their own country, as cruelly as a former genera- 
tion had wasted France.” But he must be considered a better authority for 
Continental than English events. The policy of both parties seems to have been to 
destroy the leaders, but simply disperse the people. No one carried this policy 
against the aristocracy, to a more merciless extent than Edward IV. The lands 
were not wasted by either party; not by the victors, because they had them, 
not by the conquered, because they hoped to have them. 
2 Still the crest of the Audley arms. 
