received a confirmation of his title from Henry the Seventh, no
doubt the poor young lady would have been sacrificed to that
interest. But Dugdale seems to think she died before the nuptuals
were consummated "whether this marriage took effect or not I cannot
say; for sure it is that she died in her tender years."(58)
Drake(59) affirms, that Richard knighted at York a natural son called
Richard of Gloucester, and supposes it to be the same person of whom
Peck has preserved so extraordinary an account.(60) But never was a
supposition worse grounded. The relation given by the latter 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