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My Lord of Gloucester, I have conceived to my great heaviness that you should have received by divers reports that I should have purposed and imagined against your person, honour, and estate, in divers manners, for the which you have taken against me great displeasure. Sir, I take God to witness that what reports soever have been made unto you of me, peradventure by such as have not had great affection unto me- -God forgive them-I never imagined nor purposed thing that might be hindering or prejudice to your person, honour, or estate, and for so much I pray you that you will be unto me good lord, from this time forth, for by my will I gave you never other occasion, nor purpose not to do hereafter, through God's grace." And then Gloucester was to say—

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"Beal* uncle, since you so declare you such a man as you say, I am right glad that it is so, and for such I take you."

And the arbitrators added

"Also we award, ordain, and decree, that, in token and proof of full and sad love and affection, to be had and kept betwixt my said Lords of Gloucester and of Winchester in manner abovesaid, each of them take other by the hand.”

And they did so.

The fourth scene of the second act professes to

* This is the word in the printed roll. It stands, I believe, for Bel or Beau.

give us the origin of the Red and White Roses, as the symbols of the houses of York and Lancaster. The scene is laid in the Temple Gardens, where Richard Plantagenet (son and heir of the Earl of Cambridge, the conspirator against Henry the Fifth) appears to have had an argument with Somerset upon a topic which is not explained, but which appears to have been a point of law. York appeals to the company: Suffolk* answers

"Faith, I have been a truant in the law,

And never yet could frame my will to it;
And, therefore, frame the law unto my will."

And Warwick says

"But in these nice sharp quillets of the law,

Good faith, I am no wiser than a daw."

Not able to get any opinion upon this point of law, Plantagenet invites those of his companions who think him in the right to gather a white rose, while those of the contrary opinion pluck a red one. Suffolk chooses a red rose, Warwick and Vernon+ the white; as does an anonymous "lawyer," who says, addressing Somerset

* William de la Pole, fourth earl of that name.

+ I presume that the person intended is Sir Richard Vernon, Speaker of the House of Commons in the Leicester parliament, ancestor of Lord Vernon. One of the same name, perhaps the same person, is mentioned by Holinshed as a warrior. Collins, vii. 400.

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The argument you held was wrong in you."

In the course of the discussion, which is conducted in the bad language too common in Shakspeare, and very characteristic of this play, Plantagenet is represented as a man of low degree, because his father was attainted. He answers in terms not very explanatory—

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My father was attached, not attainted;

Condemn'd to die for treason, but no traitor."

Yet, notwithstanding these expressions, and though Somerset was of the Lancastrian stock, I do not imagine, nor has it, so far as I know, ever been said, that this dispute, if it occurred anywhere but in the imagination of the poet, had any reference to the succession to the crown.

If we are to presume that this scene occurred (as it does in the play) immediately before the death of Mortimer, Richard was then about fifteen years old, and his rival, whom he calls young Somerset, and a peevish boy, must have been much older, having been a distinguished warrior in the time of Henry the Fifth. And at the time of this supposed rencounter with York he was a prisoner in France.* The Somerset of whom I have spoken

* Contin. Croyl., 518, where it is said that he returned in 1434 from a captivity of fifteen years.

Easter 1425

we

hitherto is John Beaufort, who is said to have killed himself in 1443.*

"Mortimer" is now introduced† a prisoner in the Tower. It is presumed that the person intended is Edmund, last Earl of March, and ShaksHa!6. 3 year of peare was led by Holinshed into the mistake of Henry V. five making him a prisoner. He had, on the contrary, been favoured by Henry the Fifth, and, though he was so far implicated in the treason of Cambridge, Scrope, and Grey, noticed in the last chapter, as to have received a pardon from the king, he was summoned as one of the judges to whom the cases of Cambridge and Scrope (being peers) were referred; and there is no notice of his being again under suspicion, or out of favour, in the last reign or in the present. He died, in the year 1424 or 1425, not in the Tower, but in Ireland.

There is another mistake in making him an old man; he died at the age of twenty-four, or thereabouts.

Richard Plantagenet, his nephew, is (in the play)

* Contin. Croyl., 519. Holinshed says that he died about 1432, and that it was his brother Edmund who was the Duke of York's rival; but the inquisitio post mortem fixes John's See Note‡ p. 233 death in 1444. It would seem that York had a quarrel with

the two brothers successively.

† Act ii., Sc. 5.

§ Nicolas's Agincourt, p. 40.

‡ P. 144.

sent for by him just before his death, when he tells

the dying man that—

"This day, in argument upon a case,

Some words there grew 'twixt Somerset and me;
Among which terms he used his lavish tongue,
And did upbraid me with my father's death."

In answer to his inquiries, Mortimer tells him that his father, Cambridge, had been beheaded for the same cause which imprisoned Mortimer himself, having "levied an army" to recover his right to the crown. No part of this is true, except that Cambridge, in the concern which he had in the illadvised plot against Henry the Fifth, probably had the claims of his brother-in-law in view. These claims are stated correctly—

For by my mother I derived am

From Lionel Duke of Clarence,* the third son

To King Edward the Third, whereas he [Henry the
Fifth]

From John of Gaunt doth bring his pedigree,
Being but fourth of that heroic line."

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* The Earl of Cambridge, second son of Edmund Langley, Duke of York, the fifth son of Edward the Third, married Mortimer's sister; and this Richard was their son.

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