Thus by the Rout of Ludford all the work of Blore Heath and St. Albans was entirely undone.
The adventures of Warwick after the army of York broke up have luckily been preserved to us in some detail. He and his father, together with the Duke and his two sons Edward and Edmund, fled southwards together with a few score of horse, hotly pursued by Sir Andrew Trollope and his men. So close was the chase that John and Thomas Neville, who lingered behind their brother and father--both having been wounded at Blore Heath--were taken prisoners. Presently the party was forced to break up by the imminence of their peril. The Duke of York and his second son Edmund turned off into Wales, with the design of taking ship for Ireland. Salisbury, Warwick, and Edward Plantagenet, the young Earl of March, York's eldest son and Salisbury's god-child and nephew, accompanied by Sir John Dynham and only two persons more, fled across Herefordshire by cross-roads, avoiding the towns, and then by a hazardous journey through Gloucestershire and Somersetshire reached the coast of Devon, apparently somewhere near Barnstaple. There the fugitives turned into a fishing village, where Sir John Dynham bought for two hundred and twenty-two nobles--the sum of the party's resources--a one-masted fishing-smack. He gave out that he was bound for Bristol, and hired a master and four hands to navigate the little vessel.
When they had got well out from land Warwick asked the master if he knew the seas of Cornwall and the English Channel. The man answered that he was quite ignorant of them, and had never rounded the Land's End. "Then all that company was much cast down: but the Earl seeing that his father and the rest were sad, said to them that by the favour of God and St. George he would himself steer them to a safe port. And he stripped to his doublet, and took the helm himself, and had the sail hoisted, and turned the ship's bows westward," much to the disgust, we doubt not, of the master and his four hands, who had not counted on such a voyage when they hired themselves to sail to Bristol town.
It was not for nothing that Warwick had ranged the Channel for two years. He now proved that he was a competent seaman, by navigating the little vessel down the Bristol Channel, round the Land's End, and across to Guernsey. Here they were eight days wind-bound, but putting forth on the ninth ran safely up the Channel and came ashore at Calais on November 3rd, just twenty days after the rout of Ludford. Counting the crew, they had been eleven souls in the vessel.