Birthplace of Coverdale.

Can you inform me of the birthplace of Miles Coverdale?

W.C.

["Bishop Myles Coverdale is supposed to have been born in the year of our Lord 1488, in the district of Coverdale, in the parish of Coverham, near Middleham, in the North Riding of Yorkshire; and it is the opinion of the learned historian of Richmondshire, that it is an assumed, and not a family name.”  These are the words of the Rev. Geo. Pearson, B.D., the very competent editor of the works of Bishop Coverdale, published by the Parker Society.  His reference is to Whitaker’s Hist. of Richmondshire, vol. i. p. 17.]

Caraccioli—­Author of Life of Lord Clive.

In reply to K.’s query in No. 7., I have to inform him that “Charles Caraccioli, Gent.” called himself “the Master of the Grammar School at Arundel,” and in 1766 published a very indifferent History of the Antiquities of Arundel; and deprecating censure, he says in his preface, “as he (the author) was educated and till within these few years has lived abroad, totally unconversant with the English tongue, he flatters himself that the inaccuracies so frequently interspersed through the whole, will be observed with some grains of allowance.”  His Life of Lord Clive was a bookseller’s compilation.

WM. DURRANT COOPER.

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QUERIES.

LOVE, THE KING’S FOOL OF THAT NAME.

In Rawlinson’s Manuscripts in the Bodleian (c. 258.), which I take to have been written either in, or very soon after, the reign of Henry VIII., there is a poem thus entitled:—­

  “THE EPITAPHE OF LOVE, THE KYNGE’S FOOLE.”

Can any of your readers furnish me with information regarding him?  He was clearly a man worthy of notice, but although I have looked through as many volumes of that period, and afterwards, as I could procure, I do not recollect meeting with any other mention of him.  Skelton, who must have been his contemporary, is silent regarding him; and John Heywood, who was also living at the same time, makes no allusion to him that I have been able to discover.  Heywood wrote the “Play of Love,” but it has nothing to do with the “King’s fool.”

The epitaph in question is much in Heywood’s humorous and satirical style:  it is written in the English ballad-metre, and consists of seven seven-line stanzas, each stanza, as was not unusual with Heywood, ending with the same, or nearly the same, line.  It commences thus: 

  “O Love, Love! on thy sowle God have mercye;
  For as Peter is princeps Apostolorum,
  So to the[e] may be sayd clerlye,
  Of all foolys that ever was stultus stultorum. 
  Sure thy sowle is in regna polorum,
    By reason of reason thou haddest none;
    Yet all foolys be nott dead, though thou be gone.”

In the next stanza we are told, that Love often made the King and Queen merry with “many good pastimes;” and in the third, that he was “shaped and borne of very nature” for a fool.  The fourth stanza, which mentions Erasmus and Luther, is the following:—­