To do that office of thine own good-will, As to York, he is probably wrong; but Northumberland was one of the commissioners to whom the resignation was made. Richard appears to have been quite humbled and reduced to despair, so as to justify the picture of imbecility which Shakspeare has drawn; and, though we do not find him pressed, as in the play, to confess all the crimes enumerated in the charge, he was made to acknowledge, in the instrument of resignation, that he had been "insufficient and unable, and also unprofitable, and for his open deserts was not unworthy to be put down.”* Whatever may have been the recklessness of Richard's character while in prosperity, Shakspeare is borne out by his authorities in representing him as humble and submissive from the time in which he came within the power of his rival. His humility, however, according to the report which one of his followers gives of his exclamations, did not amount to religious resignation. He thus addresses his absent queen : My sweetest heart, my sister! I bid you adieu. I have never deserved of my sister to be so basely ruined! If it be Thy pleasure I should die, oh, Lord, vouchsafe * Hol., 863. to guide my soul to heaven, for I can neither escape nor fly. Alas! my father-in-law of France! I shall never see you more. I leave your daughter among these false, and wicked, and faithless people, I am almost in despair. She was my joyous delight; may you take vengeance for me! the matter concerns you. I have neither vessels, nor men, nor money now to send you; but I leave it to you; it is now too late. O why did we trust Northumberland, who hath delivered us to these wolves? We are all dead men, for they have no pity. May Heaven confound both their souls and their bodies !"* His alternation of resoluteness and despair, when communing with his friends, is natural, and quite consistent with his lonely deportment in the presence of his imperious kinsman. The whole of the deposition scene was omitted in the play as printed in the reign of Elizabeth.† Is this circumstance connected with the case of Sir Gilly Meyrick? Shakspeare nowhere notices Richard's devotion to France. Historians tell us that Gloucester's opposition to the peace between his nephew and Charles the Sixth, cemented by the premature marriage with the Princess Isabella, was among the causes of Richard's enmity to his uncle. Yet the * Arch., xx. 150, 367. † Act v., Sc. 1. ‡ Lingard, iv. 234. Hol. 775. Turner, ii. 333. Turner, ii. 308, from Froissart. French king had honourably entertained Bolingbroke in exile, and would have married him to the Duke of Berri's daughter, if Richard had not interfered, according to the allusion in 66 'Nor the prevention of poor Bolingbroke, About his marriage."* Richard's lamentations over his queen are trans- The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne,- It is too little, helping him to all ; And he shall think that thou, which know'st the way To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again, Being ne'er so little urged, another way *Act ii., Sc. 1. + See Bosw., 131-2. Arch., xx. 117-8. § I have not ascertained the date of Richard's removal to Pomfret. To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne. That fear to hate; and hate turns one or both But the passage to which Johnson objects is not appropriately designated as "childish prattle;" if it were so, it would not be much out of place, considering the age of the queen. It is one of those absurd conceits in which our poet indulges too often, without reference to the individual into whose mouth he puts them. Malone truly observes that the first wife of the Duke of York,* mother of Aumerle, had died some years before the deposition of Richard. To her, therefore, York could not address his description of the progress of Richard and Bolingbroke; which, however, is in substance very like that which the state of his feelings would prompt him to give. It is hardly possible to praise this passage too highly. The whole was probably suggested by a passage in the contemporary manuscript, extracted by Stow,† which describes the worthless beasts upon which Richard and his faithful friend, Salisbury, were placed in the progress from Flint to Chester. * Isabel of Castile died in 1394. Bosw., 146. Sandford, 378. I know not at what period he married his second wife. † P. 322. "The duke, with a high, sharp voice, bade bring forth the king's horses, and then two little worthless nags, not worth forty francs, were brought forth; the king was set on one, and the Earl of Salisbury on the other; and then the duke brought the king from Flint to Chester, where he was delivered to the Duke of Gloucester's son, and to the Earl of Arundale's son,-that loved him but a little (for he had put their fathers to death),— who led him straight to the castle.”* "York. The Duke, great Bolingbroke, Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed, Which his aspiring rider seem'd to know, With slow but stately pace kept on his course, So many greedy looks of young and old := Duchess. Alas, poor Richard! where rides he the while? York. As in a theatre, the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, * Stow, 322. |