20 SCENE I. "And there, at Venice, gave His body to that pleasant country's earth.” THE remains of Thomas Mowbray were interred in St. Mark's Church, in Venice, A.D. 1399; but his ashes were removed to England in 1533. The slab which originally covered these remains at the latter end of the seventeenth century stood under the gallery of the ducal palace; and the arms of Thomas Mowbray being very

elaborately engraved upon it, the stone was described, by an Italian writer in 1682, as a Venetian hieroglyphic. By the indefatigable inquiries of Mr. Rawdon Brown, an English gentleman residing in Venice, this most curious monument was traced, in 1839, to the possession of a stonemason; and it has been sent to England, and is now safe in the custody of Mr. Howard, of Corby.

After the interview between Richard and Bolingbroke, the author of the Metrical History' thus proceeds: "The said Duke Henry called aloud with a stern and savage voice, Bring out the king's horses,' and then they brought him two little horses that were not worth forty francs. The king mounted one, and the Earl of Salisbury the other." Henry, with his captives, set out from Flint, and proceeded to Chester, where they stayed three days. The duke then dismissed many of his followers, saying that thirty or forty thousand men would be sufficient to take the king to London. At Lichfield, the unhappy Richard attempted to escape by night, letting himself down into a garden through a window of his tower. The French knight goes on to record that a deputation arrived from London, to request Henry, on the part of the commons, to cut off the king's head; to which Henry replied, "Fair Sirs, it would be a very great disgrace to us for ever if we should thus put him to death; but we will bring him to London, and there he shall be judged by the Parliament." Proceeding by Coventry, Daventry, Northampton, Dun

"

six miles of London. Here the cavalcade was met by the Mayor, accompanied by a very great number of the Commons. "They paid much greater respect," says the writer, "to Duke Henry than to the king, shouting with a loud and fearful voice, 'Long live the Duke of Lancaster.'' Richard was taken, according to this relation, to Westminster. Henry, who entered the city at the hour of vespers, "alighted at St. Paul's, and went all armed before the High Altar to make his orisons. He returned by the tomb of his father, which is very nigh to the said altar, and there he wept very much, for he had never seen it since his father had been laid there." The personal narrative of the French knight here closes; the remainder of his narrative being given on the faith of another person, a clerk. From Westminster Richard was removed to the Tower. The Parliament, which began on the 13th September, drew up thirtythree "Articles objected to King Richard, whereby he was counted worthy to be deposed from his principality."

The scene of fiery contention in Westminster Hall, with which this Act opens, follows the chroniclers very literally. Shakspere has, however, placed this remarkable exhibition of vindictive charges and recriminations before the deposition of Richard. It took place after Henry's coronation. The protest of the Bishop of Carlisle, whom Holinshed calls "a bold bishop and a faithful,” also, according to most authorities, followed the deposition. It is stated to have been made on a request from the Commons

that Richard might have "judgment decreed against him, so as the realm were not troubled by him." There is considerable doubt whether this speech was delivered at all. It does not appear that Richard made his resignation in Parliament, but that Northumberland and other peers, prelates, and knights, with justices and notaries, attended the captive on the 29th September, 1399, in the chief chamber of the king's lodging in the Tower, where he read aloud and subscribed the scroll of resignation, saying that, if it were in his power, he would that the Duke of Lancaster there present should be his successor. These instruments were read to the Parliament the day following. So Holinshed relates the story. Froissart, however, details the ceremonies of the surrender with more minuteness: "On a day the Duke of Lancaster, accompanied with lords, dukes, prelates, earls, barons, and knights, and of the notablest men of London, and of other good towns, rode to the Tower, and there alighted. Then King Richard was brought into the hall, appareled

like a king in his robes of state, his sceptre in his hand, and his crown on his head; then he stood up alone, not holden nor stayed by no man, and said aloud: 'I have been King of England, Duke of Aquitaine, and lord of Ireland, about twenty-one years, which signiory, royalty, sceptre, crown, and heritage I clearly resign here to my cousin Henry of Lancaster; and I desire him here, in this open presence, in entering of the same possession, to take this sceptre:' and so delivered it to the duke, who took it." There can be no doubt that this apparently willing resignation, which his enemies said was made even with a merry countenance, was extorted from Richard by the fear of death. Northumberland openly proclaimed this when he rebelled against Henry. In a very curious manuscript in the library of the king of France, from which copious extracts are given in Mr. Webb's notes to the Metrical History,' there is a detailed account of a meeting between Richard and Bolingbroke in the Tower, at which York and Aumerle were present,-where the

king, in a most violent rage, says, "I am king, and will still continue king, in spite of all my enemies." Shakspere has most skilfully portrayed this natural struggle of the will of the unhappy man, against the necessity by which he was overwhelmed. The deposition scene shows us, as faithfully as the glass which the poet introduces exhibits the person of the king, -the vacillations of a nature irresolute and yielding, but clinging to the phantom of power when the substance had passed away. There can be no doubt that Shakspere's portrait of Richard II. is as historically true as it is poetically just.

The chroniclers have shown us the fierce, and, as we should call them in modern times, the brutal contests of the peers in the first Parliament of Henry IV. But we have had lately opened to us a most curious record of the days of Richard, which shows us a Parliament that more nearly approaches to our notions of an assembly of men called together for the public good, but not forgetting their private interests in their peaceful moods; and deporting themselves as men do who have mighty questions to deliberate upon, but who bring to that deliberation the sloth, the petty feelings, and the other individual characteristics that remind us that

great legislators are sometimes small men. The Camden Society, which is doing for literature the very reverse of what the Roxburgh Club did-which is making unpublished and rare Tracts accessible to all men, instead of gaining a petty reputation by rendering scarce things known, and then causing them to be scarcer,-has published an Alliterative Poem on the Deposition of King Richard II.' This most curious production is printed from a manuscript in the Public Library at Cambridge. There seems to be no doubt that the poem was written about the time when Richard fell into the hands of his enemies :-the first lines represent the author as being informed that "Henri was entrid on the est half" of the kingdom, while Richard "werrid be west on the wilde Yrisshe." The author of the poem appears to have been a partisan of Bolingbroke ;-the transcriber was of the opposite faction;-and to this circumstance we owe the loss of the more important part of the original composition;-for he broke off abruptly in the description of Richard's servile Parliament,-the Parliament that, giving a colour to his exactions and despotic exercise of authority, led to the great revolution which ended in his deposition. Of this famous Parliament, the following is

"And somme slombrid and slepte, and said but a lite; And somme mafflid with the mouth, and nyst what they ment;

And somme had hire, and held ther-with evere,

And wolde no fforther a ffoot, ffor ffer of her maistris;
And some were so soleyne, and sad of her wittis,
That er they come to the clos a-combred they were,
That thei the conclucioun than constrewe ne couthe
No burne of the benche, of borowe nother ellis,
So blynde and so ballid and bare was the reson;
And some were so ffers at the ffrist come,

That they bente on a bouet, and bare a topte saile
A-ffor the wynde ffresshely, to make a good ffare."

"And some slumbered and slept, and said but a little; and some stammered with the mouth, and knew not what they meant; and some were paid, and held to that, and would no further a-foot for fear of their masters; and some were so sullen and grave in their wits, that before they came to the close they were so much encumbered, that their conclusions could be construed by no baron of the bench, nor by no one else of the borough, so blind, and so bald, and so bare was their reason. And some were so fierce at the first coming, that they were bent on a bout, and bare a topsail afore the