of himself, was, that he never saw the king till the night before the battle of Bosworth:  and that the king had not then acknowledged, but intended to acknowledge him, if victorious.  The deep privacy in which this person had lived, demonstrates how severely the persecution had raged against all that were connected with Richard, and how little truth was to be expected from the writers on the other side.  Nor could Peck’s Richard Plantagenet be the same person with Richard of Gloucester, for the former was never known till he discovered himself to Sir Thomas More; and Hall says king Richard’s natural son was in the hands of Henry the Seventh.  Buck says, that Richard made his son Richard of Gloucester, captain of Calais; but it appears from Rymer’s Foedera, that Richard’s natural son, who was captain of Calais, was called John.  None of these accounts accord with Peck’s; nor, for want of knowing his mother, can we guess why king Richard was more secret on the birth of this son (if Peck’s Richard Plantagenet was truly so) than on those of his other natural children.  Perhaps the truest remark that can be made on this whole story is, that the avidity with which our historians swallowed one gross ill-concocted legend, prevented them from desiring or daring to sift a single part of it.  If crumbs of truth are mingled with it, at least they are now undistinguishable in such a mass of error and improbability.

(58) Baronage, p. 258.

(58) In his History of York.

(59) See his Desiderata Curiosae.

It is evident from the conduct of Shakespeare, that the house of Tudor retained all their Lancastrian prejudices, even in the reign of queen Elizabeth.  In his play of Richard the Third, he seems to deduce the woes of the house of York from the curses which queen Margaret had vented against them; and he could not give that weight to her curses, without supposing a right in her to utter them.  This, indeed is the authority which I do not pretend to combat.  Shakespeare’s immortal scenes will exist, when such poor arguments as mine are forgotten.  Richard at least will be tried and executed on the stage, when his defence remains on some obscure shelf of a library.  But while these pages may excite the curiosity of a day, it may not be unentertaining to observe, that there is another of Shakespeare’s plays, that may be ranked among the historic, though not one of his numerous critics and commentators have discovered the drift of it; I mean The Winter Evening’s Tale, which was certainly intended (in compliment to queen Elizabeth) as an indirect apology for her mother Anne Boleyn.  The address of the poet appears no where to more advantage.  The subject was too delicate to be exhibited on the stage without a veil; and it was too recent, and touched the queen too nearly, for the bard to have ventured so home an allusion on any other ground than compliment.  The unreasonable jealousy of Leontes, and his violent conduct in consequence, form a true portrait of Henry the Eighth, who generally made the law the engine of his boisterous passions.  Not only the general plan of the story is most applicable but several passages are so marked, that they touch the real history nearer than the fable.  Hermione on her trial says,