He was accompanied by the chief gentlemen in his camp, who could never be restrained when blows were passing current.
The business that morning was a commonplace and practical though an important, one--to "impeach" a convoy of wheat and barley, butter, cheese, and beef--but the names of those noble and knightly volunteers, familiar throughout Christendom, sound like the roll-call for some chivalrous tournament.

There were Essex and Audley, Stanley, Pelham, Russell, both the Sidneys, all the Norrises, men whose valour had been.
proved on many a hard-fought battle-field.

There, too, was the famous hero of British ballad whose name was so often to ring on the plains of the Netherlands-- "The brave Lord Willoughby, Of courage fierce and fell, Who would not give one inch of way For all the devils in hell." Twenty such volunteers as these sat on horseback that morning around the stately Earl of Leicester.

It seemed an incredible extravagance to send a handful of such heroes against an army.
But the English commander-in-chief had been listening to the insidious tongue of Roland York--that bold, plausible, unscrupulous partisan, already twice a renegade, of whom more was ere long to be heard in the Netherlands and England.

Of the man's courage there could be no doubt, and he was about to fight that morning in the front rank at the head of his company.