(51) In the prints, the single head is most exactly copied from the drawing, which is unfinished.  In the double plate, the reduced likeness of the king could not be so perfectly preserved.

My other authority is John Rous, the antiquary of Warwickshire, who saw Richard at Warwick in the interval of his two coronations, and who describes him thus:  “Parvae staturae erat, curtam habens faciem, inaequales humeros, dexter superior, sinisterque inferior.”  What feature in this portrait gives any idea of a monster?  Or who can believe that an eyewitness, and so minute a painter, would have mentioned nothing but the inequality of shoulders, if Richard’s form had been a compound of ugliness?  Could a Yorkist have drawn a less disgusting representation?  And yet Rous was a vehement Lancastrian; and the moment he ceased to have truth before his eyes, gave in to all the virulence and forgeries of his party, telling us in another place, “that Richard remained two years in his mother’s womb, and came forth at last with teeth, and hair on his shoulders.”  I leave it to the learned in the profession to decide whether women can go two years with their burden, and produce a living infant; but that this long pregnancy did not prevent the duchess, his mother, from bearing afterwards, I can prove; and could we recover the register of the births of her children, I should not be surprised to find, that, as she was a very fruitful woman, there was not above a year between the birth of Richard and his preceding brother Thomas.(52) However, an ancient bard,(53) who wrote after Richard was born and during the life of his father, tells us,

Richard liveth yit, but the last of all
 Was Ursula, to him whom God list call.

(52) The author I am going to quote, gives us the order in which the duchess Cecily’s children were horn thus; Ann duchess of Exeter, Henry, Edward the Fourth Edmund earl of Rutland, Elizabeth duchess of Suffolk, Margaret duchess of Burgundy, William, John, George duke of Clarence, Thomas, Richard the Third, and Ursula.  Cox, Im his History of Ireland, says, that Clarence was born in 1451.  Buck computed Richard the Third to have fallen at the age of thirty four or five; but, by Cox’s account, he could not be more than thirty two.  Still this makes it provable, that their mother bore them and their intervening brother Thomas as soon as she well could one after another.

(53) See Vincent’s Errors in Brooks’s Heraldry, p. 623.

Be it as it will, this foolish tale, with the circumstances of his being born with hair and teeth, was coined to intimate how careful Providence was, when it formed a tyrant, to give due warning of what was to be expected.  And yet these portents were far from prognosticating a tyrant; for this plain reason, that all other tyrants have been born without these prognostics.  Does it require more time to ripen a foetus, that is, to prove a destroyer, than it takes to form an Aristides?  Are there outward and visible signs of a bloody nature?  Who was handsomer than Alexander, Augustus, or Louis the Fourteenth? and yet who ever commanded the spilling of more human blood.