Buckingham* and Stanley;† to whose compliments the queen thus replies:

"The Countess Richmond, good my Lord of Stanley,

To your good prayer will scarcely say Amen : Yet, Stanley, notwithstanding she's your wife, And loves not me, be you, good lord, assured, I hate not you for her proud arrogance." I do not know of any ground for the queen's imputation of peculiar hostility to the Countess of Richmond, other than her connexion with the house of Lancaster. She was the daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and wife, first of Edmund, Earl of Richmond, then of Sir Henry Stafford, § and now of Lord Stanley.

Gloucester enters, in company with Hastings and Dorset, and breaks forth against the queen's relatives :

They do me wrong, and I will not endure it.
Who are they that complain unto the king,
That I, forsooth, am stern, and love them not?
By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly,

* Henry Stafford, son of him who was killed at Northampton, see p. 6.

+ Thomas Stanley, second Lord Stanley, afterwards Earl of Derby; lineal ancestor of the present earl. Collins, iii. 58. See vol. i. p. 231.

§ Of the family of the Duke of Buckingham.

|| Thomas Grey, the queen's son by her first husband. He was Lord Ferrers, of Groby, by inheritance, and created Marquis of Dorset by Edward IV. Banks, ii. 191; iii. 258.

That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours.
Because I cannot flatter, and speak fair,
Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.

Cannot a plain man live and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abused,
By silken, sly, insinuating jacks?"

It may be doubted, whether this pretension to a rugged manner, and an inaptitude to the arts of cajolery, is quite consistent with the wooing of the Princess Anne, which has been described.

More's narrative ascribes to Richard the arts of dissimulation :—

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He was malicious, wrathful, and envious............... Free was he called of dispense, and somewhat above his power liberal; with large gifts he gat him unsteadfast friendship, for which he was fain to pill and spoil in other places, and get him steadfast hatred. He was close and secret, a deep dissembler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill, despicious and cruel, not for evil will alway, but ofter for ambition, and either the surety or increase of his estate."*

Richard now throws off all restraint, and scolds at the Widvilles and the queen herself, laying par

* Hol., 362.

ticular stress upon her causing the imprisonment of Clarence, and upon the advancement of her relatives.

And,

"The world is grown so bad,

That wrens may prey where eagles dare not perch.
Since every jack became a gentleman,

There's many a noble person made a jack."

"the nobility

Held in contempt; while great promotions
Are daily given, to ennoble those,

That scarce, some two days since, were worth a noble.”

After more of this, the queen, who always preserves her "formal countenance," and is never made to scold, addresses him,

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My lord of Gloucester, I have too long borne
Your blunt upbraidings, and your bitter scoffs :

By Heaven, I will acquaint his majesty*

Of these gross taunts I often have endured.
I had rather be a country servant-maid,
Than a great queen with this condition,
To be so baited, scorn'd, and stormed at.
Small joy I have in being England's queen."

Queen Margaret now enters, and vituperates the whole party in a characteristic style. Commen

I believe that this is an anachronism, and that Henry VIII. was the first of our kings who assumed majesty.

tators have noticed the absurdity of introducing this personage, who had at no time been at large in Edward's court, and was now in France. I agree with Steevens, that "the merits of this scene are insufficient to excuse its improbability; Margaret, bullying the court of England in a royal palace, is a circumstance as absurd, as the courtship of Gloucester in a public street.”*

In the conclusion of this scene, Richard again soliloquises upon his own enormities, especially his hypocrisy :

"I do beweep to many simple gulls,

Namely, to Stanley, Hastings, Buckingham;
And tell them, 'tis the queen and her allies
That stir the king against the duke my brother.
Now, they believe it, and withal whet me
To be revenged on Rivers, Vaughan, and Grey:
But then I sigh, and with a piece of scripture
Tell them, that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol'n forth of holy writ,

And seem a saint when most I play the devil."

We come now to the death of Clarence, which is perpetrated, in the play, by two murderers hired by Gloucester, who produce a commission, from the king it is to be presumed, commanding the

* Bosw., 42.

† Act i. Sc. 4.

keeper to deliver the duke into their hands. They talk of drowning him in the butt of malmsey, but this ingenious notion is not acted upon; he is stabbed by one of the ruffians.

This is one of the cases in which Shakspeare has gone beyond his authorities, in order to blacken Richard. Not a word is said by Holinshed or More of Richard's participation in the murder.

"About this season, through great mishap, the spark of privy malice was newly kindled between the king and the Duke of Clarence, insomuch that when one of the duke's servants was suddenly accused (I cannot say whether of truth, or untruly suspected by the duke's enemies) of poisoning, sorcery, or enchantment, and thereof condemned and put to execution for the same, the duke, which might not suffer the wrongful condemnation of his man (as he in his conscience judged), nor yet to forbear to murmur and reprove the doing thereof, moved the king with his daily exclamation to take such displeasure with him, that finally the duke was cast into the Tower, and therewith adjudged for a traitor, and privily drowned in a butt of malmsey, the eleventh of March, in the beginning of the seventeenth year of the king's reign. Some have reported, that the cause of this nobleman's death rose of a foolish prophecy; which was, that after King Edward one should reign, whose first letter of his name should be a G. Others

alleged that the cause of his death was, that the duke