Norfolk. My lord, the enemy is passed the marsh: K. Rich. A thousand hearts are great within my bosom : Scene Fifth. [Exeunt. BOSWORTH BATTLE-FIELD. ALARUMS. EXCURSIONS. BOTH ARMIES DIS- TOGETHER FROM THE CROWD, WHICH MOVES OFF, BUT Rescue, my Catesby. lord of Norfolk, rescue, rescue! The king enacts more wonders than a man, Daring [Exeunt Norfolk and Catesby. [Enter King Richard and Catesby. K. Rich. A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! Catesby. Fly! Fly! My lord, I'll help you to a horse! K. Rich. Slave, I have set my life upon a cast, [Exit Catesby. I think there be six Richmonds in the field, | Exit. [Richard's and Richmond's forces enter, fighting. RICHARD III. APPENDIX. HE story of this tragedy is supposed to begin three months after the battle of Tewksbury,-fought on May 4th, 1471,-in which the House of York, crushingly and finally, defeated the House of Lancaster, and substantially ended the Wars of the Roses. It terminates with the battle of Bosworth Field, fought on August 22d, 1485. The period covered is, accordingly, fourteen years. Shakespeare, however, seems to have designed that the historical incidents which he has illustrated should be viewed in a compressed group, and that the action should be confined within brief limits, possibly within those of a single summer. It was in August, 1471, according to his own showing, that Gloster wooed and won the mournful Lady Anne. The murder of Clarence did not occur till 1478, and King Edward IV. did not die till April 9th, 1483. Yet Shakespeare has made these events closely sequent upon each other. Edward V. — with his uncle, Gloster, as Protector-reigned from April 9th to June 22d, 1483. Richard III. and Queen Anne were crowned in London, at Westminster Abbey, on June 26th of that year. Hastings, at the Tower, and Rivers, Grey and Vaughan, at Pomfret Castle, had already suffered death, by Richard's command, on June 13th. The Princes were then lodged in the Tower, and it is not credible that the usurper spared them long. These events were arranged to the poet's hand. But it was not till more than two years later that, in his defeat and violent death, the justice which Shakespeare so speedily brings in was dealt upon the hellish tyrant. Most of the difficulties in the way of a perfect unity, however, are overcome, when we assign all these occurrences to the last year of Richard's life. The great artist has, in fact, epitomized the experience of an epoch, and unfolded the motives and conduct of a whole lifetime, in a work of action which can be practically illustrated within three hours. It is an admitted rule of dramatic art that ideal works should be interpreted according to the light which they themselves afford, and not by the light of the facts which may happen to stand behind them. "Richard III." is ideal as well as historical, and, accordingly, while suitable regard is paid to its element of fact, it ought to be viewed, not as history alone, but as history transfigured and made poetic. The principal historic facts, though, are interesting and illuminative, and brief comment on the several persons of the tragedy may usefully reproduce those facts in this place. Queen Elizabeth is the wife, afterwards the widow, of King Edward IV. Her maiden name was Elizabeth Woodville, or Wydevil. She was the daughter of Sir Richard Wydevil, and was first married to Sir John Grey, of Groby, a Lancastrian, who fell at the battle of St. Albans, in 1455. She was considerably older than King Edward IV., and she had been nine years a widow when, in 1464, she became his wife. She was a woman of great beauty. After she became queen her kindred were invested with rank and titles. The Earl Rivers, of this tragedy, Anthony Woodville- one of the most learned and accomplished men of his time -was her brother; and Lord Grey and the Marquis of Dorset were her sons, by her first husband. She had, by King Edward IV., three children, Elizabeth, Edward and Richard. The sons are the princes whom Gloster caused to be murdered in the Tower. The daughter, Elizabeth, became, in 1486, the wife of Henry, Earl of Richmond, then King Henry VII. The Duchess of York is the mother of Edward, Gloster and Clarence. Queen Margaret is the widow of King Henry VI. She was a woman of great ability, and of a formidable, war-like character. She defeated in battle Gloster's father, the Duke of York, and caused his head, surmounted with a paper crown, to be affixed to York battlements. She was captured by King Edward IV. soon after the battle of Tewksbury, was held in captivity five years, and was then ransomed by King Louis XI. of France. She died in Anjou, in 1482. She is the Cassandra of this tragedy; and it may truly be said there is not in all literature a fiercer strain of invective than that which Shakespeare has put into the mouth of this queen. Lady Anne is, first, the widow of Edward, Prince of Wales,- son of King Henry VI. and Queen Margaret,- who was murdered, after the battle of Tewksbury, by Gloster, Clarence, Hastings and Grey. She was the second daughter of Richard Neville, the great Earl of Warwick, - surnamed "the King-maker." She became the wife of Gloster, and she died in 1485. It was said that she died of grief at the death of her only child, a youth of 12 years, the son and heir of Richard III. It was also said that she was poisoned by her husband. Her grave is in Westminster Abbey, close by the gate of entrance to the chapel of Henry VII. The inscription on the stone that covers it has long since been worn away. Henry VI. figures as a character in Cibber's version of "Richard III." the scene of his death being taken from the third part of Shake speare's [reputed] tragedy, which bears that monarch's name,—but not in the original. He was the predecessor of Edward IV. upon the English throne. He founded King's College, at Cambridge, and the famous Eton College, near Windsor. He seems to have been an exceptionally good and gentle person. He was, accordingly, deposed; and, subsequently, in 1471, he was murdered, in the Tower. This act of butchery is ascribed to Gloster, of whom King Edward so significantly remarks, "He's sudden, if a thing comes in his head." The place of the murder, an oratory in the Tower of London, is still indicated, though with the accents of doubt. Edward IV. came to the throne of England in 1461, at the age of 20. He was one of the handsomest, most luxurious, and most licentious kings of whom history preserves the record. He died in 1483, in the forty-second year of his age and the twenty-third of his reign. He was buried at Windsor, and near to his royal dust was laid the mangled body of the learned, gallant, and brilliant Lord Hastings. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who succeeded to Richard as King Henry VII., was, on the father's side, a descendant from Owen Tudor, and Queen Katharine, widow of Henry V.; and, on the mother's side, a descendant, by an illegitimate branch,- afterwards, however, legally declared legitimate,- from John of Gaunt, the fourth child of Edward III. His character was haughty, peremptory, austere and avaricious. He accumulated great wealth. He allowed the decapitation, for alleged treason, of Sir William Stanley, who had, probably, been the saviour of his life, when personally set upon by Richard at Bosworth Field. He disliked his wife, Elizabeth of York, and they led an unhappy life. He died of a consumption, in his palace at Richmond. His tomb is in his own beautiful chapel, in Westminster Abbey. The best title to the English Crown, during the Wars of the Roses, undoubtedly inhered in the House of York. Henry IV., who deposed his cousin, Richard II., was a usurper; and it was he who thus caused the subsequent mischief. When Richard II., "hacked to death" or starved at Pomfret Castle, had ceased to live, the crown should have passed to the line of Clarence, the third child of Edward III., and not, as in fact it did, to the line of his fourth child, John of Gaunt. The cause of the Lancastrians, however, finally prevailed, in the success of the founder of the House of Tudor, and his marriage with the last heir of the House of York. The badge of Lancaster was the red rose; the badge of York was the white rose. These emblems, intertwined, appear upon the cover of this book. |