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fraternal amity was concluded and proclaimed," which was the ruin of Warwick, and of the House of Lancaster. Ten years before these events, in the Parliament held in this same city of Coventry-a city which had received great benefits from Henry VI.-York, and Salisbury, and Warwick had been attainted. And now Warwick held the city for him who had in that same city denounced him as a traitor. With store of ordnance, and warlike equipments, had the great Captain lain in this city for a few weeks; and he was honoured as one greater than either of the rival Kings-one who could bestow a crown and who could take a crown away; and he sate in state in the old halls of Coventry, and prayers went up for his cause in its many churches, and the proud city's municipal officers were as his servants. He marched out of the city with his forces, after Palm Sunday; and on Easter-day the quarrel between him and the perjured Clarence and the luxurious Edward was settled for ever upon Barnet Field:

"Thus yields the cedar to the axe's edge,

Whose arms gave shelter to the princely eagle;
Under whose shade the ramping lion slept;

Whose top-branch overpeer'd Jove's spreading tree,
And kept low shrubs from winter's powerful wind." *

The Battle of Barnet was fought on the 14th of April, 1471. Sir John Paston, a stout Lancastrian, writes to his mother from London on the 18th of April" As for other tidings, it is understood here that the Queen Margaret is verily landed, and her son, in the west country, and I trow that as to-morrow, or else the next day, the King Edward will depart from hence to her ward to drive her out again."+ Sir John Paston, himself in danger of his head, seems to hint that the landing of Queen Margaret will again change the aspect of things. In sixteen days the Battle of Tewksbury was fought. This is the great crowning event of the terrible struggle of sixteen years; and the scenes at Tewksbury are amongst the most spirited of these dramatic pictures. We may readily believe that Shakspere had looked upon the "fair park adjoining to the town," where the Duke of Somerset "pitched his field, against the will and consent of many other captains which would that he should have drawn aside;" and that he had also thought of the unhappy end of the gallant Prince Edward, as he stood in "the church of the Monastery of Black Monks in Tewksbury," where "his body was homely interred with the other simple corses."

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There were twelve years of peace between the Battle of Tewksbury and the death of Edward IV. Then came the history which Hall entitles, The Pitiful Life of King Edward the Fifth,' and 'The Tragical Doings of King Richard the Third.' The last play of the series which belongs to the wars of the Roses is unquestionably written altogether with a more matured power than those which preceded it; yet the links which connect it with the other three plays of the series are so unbroken, the treatment of character is so consistent, and the poetical conception of the whole so uniform, that, whatever amount of criticism may be yet in store to show that our view is incorrect, we now confidently speak of them all as the plays of Shakspere, and of Shakspere alone. Matured, especially in its wonderful exhibition of character, as the Richard III. is, we cannot doubt that the subject was very early familiar to the young poet's mind. The Battle of Bosworth Field was the great event of his own locality, which for a century had fixed the government of England. The course of the Reformation, and especially the dissolution of the Monasteries, had produced great social changes, which were in operation at the time in which William Shakspere was born; whose effects, for good and for evil, he must have seen working around him, as he grew from year to year in knowledge and experience. But those events were too recent, and indeed of too delicate a nature, to assume the poetical aspect in his mind. They abided still in the region of prejudice and controversy. It was dangerous to speak of the great religious divisions of the kingdom with a tolerant impartiality. History could scarcely deal with these opinions in a spirit of justice. Poetry, thus, which has regard to what is permanent and universal, has passed by these matters, important as they are. But the great event which placed the Tudor family on the throne, and gave England a stable government, however occasionally distracted by civil and religious division, was an event which would seize fast upon such a mind as that of William Shakspere. His ancestor, there can be little doubt, had been an adherent of the Earl of Richmond. For his faithful services to the conqueror at Bosworth he was rewarded, as we are assured, by lands in Warwickshire. That field of Bosworth would therefore have to him a family as well as a local interest. Burton, the historian of Leicestershire, who was born about ten years after William Shakspere, tells us "that his great-great-grandfather, John Hardwick, of Lindley, near Bosworth, a man of very short stature, but active and courageous, tendered his service to Henry, with some troops of horse, the night he lay at Atherston, became his guide to the field, advised him in the attack, and how to profit by the sun and by the wind."† Burton further says, writing in 1622, that the inhabitants living around the plain called Bosworth Field, more properly the plain of Sutton, "have many occurrences and passages yet fresh in memory, by reason that some persons thereabout, which saw the battle fought, were living within less than forty years, of which persons myself have seen some, and have

See our Essay on the Three Parts of King Henry VI., and King Richard III.'
+ Hutton's Bosworth Field.'

heard of their disclosures, though related by the second hand." This "living within less than forty years" would take us back to about the period which we are now viewing in relation to the life of Shakspere. But certainly there is something over-marvellous in Burton's story, to enable us to think that William Shakspere, even as a very young boy, could have conversed with "some persons thereabout" who had seen a battle fought in 1485. That, as Burton more reasonably of himself says, he might have "heard their discourses at secondhand" is probable enough. Bosworth Field is about thirty miles from Stratford. Burton says that the plain derives its name from Bosworth, “not that this battle was fought at this place (it being fought in a large, flat plain, and spacious ground, three miles distant from this town, between the towns of Shenton, Sutton, Dadlington, and Stoke); but for that this town was the most worthy town of note near adjacent, and was therefore called Bosworth Field. That this battle was fought in this plain appeareth by many remarkable places: By a little mount cast up, where the common report is, that at the first beginning of the battle Henry Earl of Richmond made his parænetical oration to his army; by divers pieces of armour, weapons, and other warlike accoutrements, and by many arrowheads here found, whereof, about twenty years since, at the enclosure of the lordship of Stoke, great store were digged up, of which some I have now (1622) in my custody, being of a long, large, and big proportion, far greater than any now in use; as also by relation of the inhabitants, who have many occurrences and passages yet fresh in memory." Burton goes on to tell two stories connected with the eventful battle. The one was the vision of King Richard, of "divers fearful ghosts running about him, not suffering him to take any rest, still crying 'Revenge.'" Hall relates the tradition thus:-"The fame went that he had the same night a dreadful and a terrible dream, for it seemed to him, being asleep, that he saw divers images like terrible devils, not suffering him to take any quiet or rest.” Burton says, previous to his description of the dream, "The vision is reported to be in this manner." And certainly his account of the fearful ghosts "still crying Revenge" is essentially different from that of the chronicler. Shakspere has followed the more poetical account of the old local historian; which, however, could not have been known to him:

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Did Shakspere obtain his notion from the same source as Burton—from “relation of the inhabitants who have many occurrences and passages yet fresh in memory"? The topographer has another story, not quite so poetical, which the dramatist does not touch: "It was foretold, that if ever King Richard did come to meet his adversary in a place that was compassed with towns whose termination was in ton (what number is adjacent may, by the map, be per

* From Burton's Manuscripts, quoted by Mr. Nicholls.

ceived), that there he should come to great distress; or else, upon the same occasion, did happen to lodge at a place beginning and ending with the same syllable of An (as this of Anbian), that there he should lose his life, to expiate that wicked murder of his late wife Anne, daughter and coheir of Richard Neville Earl of Salisbury and Warwick." This is essentially a local tradition. The prediction and the vision were in all likelihood rife in Sutton, and Shenton, and Sibson, and Coton, and Dadlington, and Stapleton, and Atherston, in the days of Shakspere's boyhood. Anbian, or Ambiam, a small wood, is in the centre of the plain called Bosworth Field. Tradition has pointed out a hillock where Richard harangued his army; and also a little spring, called King Richard's Well. Dr. Parr, about forty years ago, found out a well " in dirty, mossy ground," in the midst of this plain; and then a Latin inscription was to be set up to enlighten the peasantry of the district, and to preserve the memory of the spot for all time. Two words about the well in Shakspere would have given it a better immortality.

King Henry is crowned upon the Field of Bosworth. According to the Chronicler, Lord Stanley "took the crown of King Richard, which was found amongst the spoil in the field, and set it on the Earl's head, as though he had been elected king by the voice of the people, as in ancient times past in divers realms it hath been accustomed." Then, "the same night in the evening King Henry with great pomp came to the town of Leicester," where he rested two days. "In the mean season the dead corpse of King Richard was as shamefully carried to the town of Leicester, as he gorgeously the day before with pomp and pride departed out of the said town."

Years roll on. There was another conqueror, not by arms but by peaceful intellect, who had once moved through the land in "pomp and pride," but who came to Leicester in humility and heaviness of heart. The victim of a shifting policy and of his own ambition, Wolsey, found a grave at Leicester scarcely more honourable than that of Richard:

"At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester,
Lodg'd in the abbey; where the reverend abbot,
With all his convent, honourably receiv'd him;
To whom he gave these words:-' O, father abbot,
An old man, broken with the storms of state,
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;
Give him a little earth for charity!'

So went to bed: where eagerly his sickness
Pursued him still; and three nights after this,
About the hour of eight, (which he himself
Foretold should be his last,) full of repentance,
Continual meditations, tears, and sorrows,

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