mon Pleas, and Sir William Gascoign, the Chief Justice of the King's Bench, the tradition as running in favour of the latter was, as far as we now know, committed to writing at an earlier period than as it ran in favour of Markham; and not only was the tradition then arrested, but the story was published to the world by a writer of reputation, Sir Thomas Elyot, who in his book entitled The Governour, first published in 1534, relates the story at great length, with all particulars, as an authentic and indisputable fact. Any earlier authority has not been found; nor is any record of the event known to exist. Indeed the latter is not to be expected. But the testimony of Sir Thomas Elyot is express, and he lived within a century of the time when the event occurred. It is not to be supposed that he would have related such a story if he had not received it by some tradition or information which appeared to him credible.

Shakespeare follows Sir Thomas Elyot in making Sir William Gascoign the hero of the story, and the claims of Sir John Markham are scarcely heard of. A later Justice of the King's Bench, Sir Thomas Denison, directed in his will that he should be interred in the church of Harewood, in Yorkshire, at the foot of Sir William Gascoign, whose monument is there, in testimony of his admiration of this his intrepid conduct.

It is not however necessary to defend every particular charge brought against the Prince of Wales in order to support the representation which Shakespeare and the chroniclers have concurred in making of his wild and dissolute behaviour in his youth, when not occupied in affairs of state. The particular charges are of importance only as shewing that there are certain special charges against him concurrent with the general description of his behaviour in the chronicles; the main point being that chroniclers highly deserving of credit

have given the representation of the prince's conduct which we behold vividly pourtrayed in the scenes of the dramatist, that they are supported by certain special charges of greater or less authenticity, and that there is no sufficient counterevidence from chronicle or record. So that here Shakespeare may stand not only as the unrivalled painter of life and manners as presented in a body of low and gay companions surrounding a wild and dissolute prince, but as having given authentic truths of history, the just impression of the life and conduct of his hero.

In the Variorum Edition there is much annotation, the purpose of which is to shew that Shakespeare is in error in representing Sir William Gascoign as being the Chief Justice at the time of the death of King Henry the Fourth, and of the All sudden change in the disposition and habits of his son. this ought to be expunged without remorse and without delay. The discovery in Fuller that Sir William Gascoign died in the fourteenth year of King Henry the Fourth, which leads astray Sir John Hawkins, Mr. Steevens, Mr. Malone, and even Mr. Luders, from whose critical skill in history better information might have been expected, was the discovery only of that in which Fuller had been misinformed. Fuller names his authority in the margin, Richard Gascoign, a very respectable name no doubt, and on the first view the best authority that could be produced, as he was a very eminent collector of historical remains, and left an ample genealogy of his family, of which the judge was so distinguished an ornament. Richard Gascoign lived while the monument of the judge in the church of Harewood was in better preservation than it now is, when the inscription is entirely gone. He read it thus: Hic jacet Willielmus Gascoign nuper Capitalis Justiciar. in Banco Henrici nuper Regis Angliæ; et Elizabetha uxor ejus; qui quidem Willielmus obiit die dominicâ

XVII die Decembr. anno dom. M.CCCC.XII." What could appear more decisive than this? And so persuaded was Gascoign of this being the true period of his ancestor's decease that when he found in the Register of the See of York a copy of the judge's will dated on the Friday next after the feast of Saint Lucy the Virgin, 1419, that is, on the 15th day of December, two days before the day of the month on which he is stated on his monument to have died, he entered on the margin of the York Registry a memorandum to the effect that there must be some mistake in the date of the will, 1419 for 1412. But it was he himself who was mistaken. He had read м.cccc.XII. when he ought to have read M.CCCC. XIX., a slight difference when we remember how the x was formed. The inscription when he saw it must have been greatly decayed; for several years before when the Heralds visited Yorkshire, in 1584, they were unable to read it. One copy of their notes from the church of Harewood has no more of the inscription on the judge's tomb than to the name of the month, December, in which he died; * while another has the date M.CCCC.XII., but with points under the XII to indicate that this part of the date was uncertain.† Dugdale in his beautiful manuscript, the Monumenta Eboracensia, in the library of the College of Arms, has the inscription M.CCCC.XIX.,-the true date, as is manifest from the date of the will, its place in the Registry at York, and the circumstance that the 17th day of December fell upon a Sunday in that year, and did not fall upon a Sunday in M.CCCC.XII.

The will of the judge was published for the first time in 1836, by the Surtees Society, in their very curious volume entitled Testamenta Eboracensia. Mr. Tyler has availed

* Harl. 1420, f. 244 b.

+ Harl. 1394, f. 330.

himself of the assistance which the will affords in determining the question of the time of the judge's death, but he takes no notice of the differing reports of the testimony afforded by the monument. Nor has he traced the misapprehension on this point which has infected the writings of so many critics and historians to its source, though it is one of the most remarkable instances how a mistake, slight, excusable, and, as it appears, trivial, may become considerable, may raise doubts about the most authentic statements, may bring the characters of the most excellent writers into suspicion, and may for a long tract of time pollute the stream of history. Richard Gascoign had mistaken an old text x for an i, an easy mistake in a mouldering inscription. Hence the suspicions and doubts respecting one of the finest scenes of Shakespeare, and hence the world of commentatorship with which the scene is burdened. Hence too the errors of so many critics in history.

Having ventured so far to transgress the rule which I have laid down for the limitation of the province of legitimate criticism on the historical dramas, I shall venture one step further, and introduce a notice of what were the real movements of the king a little before and a little after the battle of Shrewsbury, from an original, unknown, and very authentic source of information, and the rather because questions have been raised on this point, and not determined very conclusively. It will be long before the slow evolution of the information now buried in the mass of our national records will lay before historians that exact and precise information without which it is manifest that history must be, more or less, a romance.

On July 4, 1403, the king left London on his northern march, and was that night at Waltham: he passed through

Hertford, Hitchin, Newenham, Higham, Harborough, Leicester, and on the 12th arrived at Nottingham. It seems to have been when at Nottingham that he received intelligence of the designs of the Percies, for, instead of proceeding northward, he turned his course on the 13th to Derby, where he staid two nights, going on the 15th to Burton-upon-Trent. On the next morning he issued the writ published in the Fœdera, commanding various sheriffs to array the lieges, having received information that Sir Henry Percy had risen and associated himself with the rebels of Wales. He then proceeded to Lichfield, where he remained till the 19th. On that day he removed to the Abbey of Saint Thomas, and on the 20th arrived at Shrewsbury.

He was there on the 21st, 22d, and the morning of the 23d, during which time the battle was fought. He slept at the Abbey of Lilleshull on the 23d, and from thence he proceeded to Stafford, and on the next day to Lichfield. He remained there till the 28th, when he resumed his northern march, going to Burton and Nottingham, whence, passing through Mansfield, Blyth, and Doncaster, he arrived at Pontefract on the 3d of August. He left it on the 7th, on which day he was at Tadcaster, and on the 8th at York.

Again he changed his purpose of marching northward. On August 13th he returned to Pontefract, which place he left on the 16th, passing through Doncaster, Worksop, Nottingham, Leicester, Lutterworth, and Daventry, and arriving at Woodstock on the 23d.

On the 30th he began his march towards the borders of Wales. He was at Worcester from the 2d to the 10th of September, and at Hereford from the 11th to the 23d. He then entered Wales.

I find in the same record which gives us this precise ac