Having mentioned John Rous, it is necessary I should say something more of him, as he lived in Richard’s time, and even wrote his reign; and yet I have omitted him in the list of contemporary writers.  The truth is, he was pointed out to me after the preceding sheets were finished; and upon inspection I found him too despicable and lying an author, even among monkish authors, to venture to quote him, but for two facts; for the one of which as he was an eye-witness, and for the other, as it was of publick notoriety, he is competent authority.

The first is his description of the person of Richard; the second, relating to the young earl of Warwick, I have recorded in its place.

This John Rous, so early as in the reign of Edward the Fourth, had retired to the hermitage of Guy’s Cliff, where he was a chantry priest, and where he spent the remaining part of his life in what he called studying and writing antiquities.  Amongst other works, most of which are not unfortunately lost, he composed a history of the kings of England.  It Begins with the creation, and is compiled indiscriminately from the Bible and from monastic writers.  Moses, he tells us, does not mention all the cities founded before the deluge, but Barnard de Breydenback, dean of Mayence, does.  With the same taste he acquaints us, that, though the book of Genesis says nothing of the matter, Giraldus Cambrensis writes, that Caphera or Cesara, Noah’s niece, being apprehensive of the deluge, set out for Ireland, where, with three men and fifty women, she arrived safe with one ship, the rest perishing in the general destruction.

A history, so happily begun, never falls off:  prophecies, omens, judgements, and religious foundations compose the bulk of the book.  The lives and actions of our monarchs, and the great events of their reigns, seemed to the author to deserve little place in a history of England.  The lives of Henry the Sixth and Edward the Fourth, though the author lived under both, take up but two pages in octavo, and that of Richard the Third, three.  We may judge how qualified such an author was to clear up a period so obscure, or what secrets could come to his knowledge at Guy’s Cliff:  accordingly he retails all the vulgar reports of the times; as that Richard poisoned his wife, and put his nephews to death, though he owns few knew in what manner; but as he lays the scene of their deaths before Richard’s assumption of the crown, it is plain he was the worst informed of all.  To Richard he ascribes the death of Henry the Sixth; and adds, that many persons believed he executed the murder with his own hands:  but he records another circumstance that alone must weaken all suspicion of Richard’s guilt in that transaction.  Richard not only caused the body to be removed from Chertsey, and solemnly interred at Windsor, but it was publickly exposed, and, if we will believe the monk, was found almost entire, and emitted a gracious perfume, though no care had been taken to embalm it.