"What, will the aspiring blood of Lancaster

Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted.
See how my sword weeps for the poor King's death!
O, may such purple tears be alway shed

From those that wish the downfall of our house!"

He sheathed his sword and went away to greet King Edward with the news and swell the triumph which now filled the adherents of the House of York. The streets of London soon became brilliant with the flags and gay processions of the victorious Yorkists, and in his palace King Edward greeted the men who had fought so valiantly to secure his crown. Always a lover of pleasure he rejoiced to think that the long years of strife and bloodshed were now ended, and seated upon his throne, with Queen Elizabeth his wife and young Edward his son beside him, he dreamed of peace and stately ceremonies. As the babe was lifted up to receive the caresses of his uncles Clarence and Gloucester, King Edward said:

"And now what rests but that we spend the time
With stately triumphs, mirthful comic shows,
Such as befit the pleasure of the court?

Sound drums and trumpets! farewell sour annoy!
For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy."

Richard of Gloucester bent over the innocent babe and pressed his lips upon his white forehead. His face was hidden, but a cruel smile wreathed his lips, and as he turned away, he muttered with deadly meaning:

་ And, that I love the tree from whence thou sprang'st Witness the loving kiss I give the fruit.

To say the truth, so Judas kiss'd his Master,

And cried all hail!' when as he meant all harm.”

King Richard the Third

P

ROMINENT among the stately figures which stood around Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, in the stormy days of the great civil strife in England, was his son, in later days known as Richard, Duke of Gloucester. His outward form, slight, uncouth, and misshapen, enshrined a spirit of wild fierce intensity, a mind of marvellous intellectual brilliancy, and a courage which was indomitable. In him all the inherited qualities of four centuries of warrior ancestors seemed to find their embodiment. He was destined to be the last of the Plantagenet Kings, and represented them completely in the worst and hardest side of their character.

ness.

Feudalism in many ways had produced a line of nobles and followers whose first and chiefest thought was strife and bloodshed. Power had degenerated into tyranny and self-seeking, hardihood into brutality and callousSide by side with much that was intellectual, graceful, and artistic, there was an element of savagery, so that the statesman and courtier who could found a college and endow a school of pious learning could also torture his prisoners and slaughter his enemies with unbridled ferocity.

For many years a fierce civil strife raged over England. Men on both sides had followed, on the path of blood, their own selfish ends, and cruelty, pillage, murder, and

devastation had swept like a tempest over the land. One after another great figures arose, and were flung aside by the ruthless hand of treachery and war, wounded, broken, and destroyed. Black-faced Clifford, who took young Rutland upon his saddlebow and stabbed him savagely; knightly Warwick, who fell, beside his own slaughtered steed, the mark of many vengeful blows; Prince Edward, slain before his mother's eyes by the ruthless weapons of the Yorkist princes; Suffolk, executed by the rough justice of a ranger of the seas; King Henry, stabbed treacherously in the fortress of the Tower, almost within sight of his own palace at Westminster; all these were examples of the spirit which had been engendered by the times, and with these nobles thousands of the commoners of England had suffered and died.

The slight, misshapen figure which held the spirit of Richard of Gloucester was, nevertheless, the strongest of all the hard types which had been forged in the hot furnace of war and beaten out upon the anvil of civil commotion. His brother Edward was easily led, and too fond of pleasure. Clarence had conscience and a certain gentleness of spirit, but Richard was the embodiment and incarnation of the spirit of the Wars of the Roses, in all its fierceness, unscrupulousness and selfishness; and when he rose to the highest position in the realm, above men and society, maker of the laws and able to bend them to his purposes, he showed himself to be something almost beyond humanity, as a protagonist of Evil against Good.

Richard III. in his strength is unapproachable in invincible wickedness, brutal callousness, fiendish humour, boundless ambition, and in a hypocrisy that never

seemed to fail for a subterfuge, and a determination that nothing could shake.

As a King of England it is unfortunate for Richard that the portrait which will live for ever in the eyes of men is that one which was drawn by the hand of the dramatist rather than that which lies buried in the dusty histories of the records of England, but it can be said with fairness that the public records of his reign exhibit the historical King Richard in a very different light. His succession to the throne was certainly acceptable to the bulk of the nation; his parliamentary skill was undoubted; his vigilance against the foes of England unsleeping; his benevolence and faithfulness to friends and servants of a high character; the story of his assassinations is not supported by conclusive evidence; and his public efficiency was perhaps greater than that of any of his predecessors. He was vigilant in the defence and improvements of our shores, and it was in his reign that, for the first time, the statutes of Parliament were drawn up in the English language.

It is, however, with the sinister figure of Richard as drawn by the dramatist that the play of Richard III. has to do. In this the King is described as having a withered distorted body, hunch-backed and deformed. He halted upon one thigh, and one arm was shrunk like a blasted sapling. He said that he was born with teeth, and came into the world so ill-made up that dogs barked at him as he limped by them. Nature rebelled when he first saw the light. The owl shrieked at his birth, the night-crow cried, dogs howled, hideous tempests shook down trees, the ravens and carrion birds croaked in dismal chorus, as though foreboding disaster to the

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world. His own mother said, and no words could be more suggestive nor more full of sorrow:

"Thou camest on earth to make the earth my hell.
A grievous burthen was thy birth to me ;
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy ;

Thy schooldays frightful, desperate, wild, and furious,
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous,
Thy age confirm'd, proud, subtle, bloody, treacherous ;
More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred:
What comfortable hour canst thou name,

That ever graced me in thy company.”

And when Richard frowned and smiled she went on to do that which a mother's heart would ever shrink from, namely to curse him at a time when she knew she would never see him again.

"Either thou wilt die, by God's just ordinance,
Ere from this war thou turn a conqueror,
Or I with grief and extreme age shall perish
And never look upon thy face again.
Therefore take with thee my most heavy curse ;
Which, in the day of battle, tire thee more
Than all the complete armour that thou wear'st!
My prayers on the adverse party fight;
And there the little souls of Edward's children
Whisper the spirits of thine enemies,

And promise them success and victory.

Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end;

Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend.”

When Richard marched off to meet his enemies on his last field of battle he was dowered with his mother's curse.