was the great war-cry of Richard;-but the universal humorist lets down the dignity of the champion in a moment, by an association with the hostess's sign. The author of Waverley' employs this device precisely with the same poetical effect, when Callum Beg compares Waverley with his target to "the bra' Highlander tat 's painted on the board afore the mickle change-house they ca' Luckie Middlemass's. -We give a serious portrait of St. George, from an old illumination, that the painters may go right, in future, who desire to make the saint "Sit on his horseback at mine hostess' door." 4 SCENE II.- -"And, like a jolly troop of huntsmen, come Our lusty English, all with purpled hands." The old English custom of the principal men of the hunt ". taking assay of the deer" furnished this image, and the correspondent one in 'Julius Cæsar :' "Pardon me, Julius: here wast thou bay'd, brave hart; Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand, Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy lethe." Old Turberville gives us the details of this custom: "Our order is, that the prince, or chief, if so please them, do alight, and take assay of the deer, with a sharp knife, the which is done in this manner :-the deer being laid upon his back, the prince, chief, or such as they do appoint, comes to it, and the chief huntsman, kneeling if it be to a prince, doth hold the deer by the fore-foot, while the prince, or chief, do cut a slit drawn along the brisket of the deer." It would not be easy to effect this operation without the "purpled hands," and Johnson's suggestion that it was "one of the savage practices of the chase for all to stain their hands in the blood of the deer, as a trophy," is uncalled for. 5 SCENE II." The mutines of Jerusalem." The union of the various factions in Jerusalem, when besieged by Titus, is here alluded to. Malone gives a particular passage from the Latter Times of the Jews' Commonwealth,' translated from the Hebrew of Joseph Ben Gorion, which he thinks suggested the passage to our poet. 6 SCENE II." She is sad and passionate at your highness' tent." The following representation of tents is from illuminations in Royal MS. 16, G. 6, 'L'Histoire des Roys de France.' THE events of nearly two years are crowded into the rapid movements of this act. And yet, except in one circumstance, the general historical truth is to be found in the poet. That circumstance is the bringing of Austria upon the scene, with the assertion that "Richard, that robb'd the lion of his heart, Leopold, the brutal and crafty gaoler of the Lion-heart, died some five years before Richard fell by a wound from a cross-bow, before the castle of the Viscount Lymoges; one of his vassals in Limousin "An arblaster with a quarrel him shot, As he about the castell went to spie."* In the third act Constance exclaims, "O, Lymoges, O, Austria," making the two enemies of Richard as one. In the old play of 'King John' we have the same confusion of dates and persons; for there "the Bastard chaseth Lymoges the Austrich duke, and maketh him leave the lyon's skin." It was unquestionably a principle with Shakspere not to disturb the conventional opinions of his audience by greatly changing the plots with which they were familiar. He knew full well, from his chronicles, that the injuries which Austria had heaped upon Richard could no longer be revenged by Richard's son,-and that the quarrel of Faulconbridge was with a meaner enemy, the Viscount Lymoges. But he adopted the conduct of the story in the old play; for he would have lost much by sacrificing the "lion's skin" of the subtle Duke to an historical fact with which his audience was not familiar. We have adverted to this principle more at length in the Introductory Notice. *Hardyng's Chronicle. With the exception, then, of this positive violation of accuracy, we have, in this act, a vivid dramatic picture of the general aspect of affairs in the contest between John and Philip. We have not, indeed, the exhibition of the slow course of those perpetually shifting manoeuvres which marked the policy of the wily King of France towards the unhappy boy whom he one day protected and another day abandoned; we have the fair promises kept and broken in the space of a few hours. Let us, however, very briefly trace the real course of events. Philip of France had been twenty years upon the throne when John leapt into the dominion of Richard, to whom he had been a rebel and a traitor, when the hero of the Holy Land was waging the mistaken fight of chivalry and of Christendom. Philip was one of the most remarkable examples that history presents of the constant opposition that is carried on, and for the most part successfully, of cunning against force. Surrounded as Philip was by turbulent allies and fierce enemies, he perpetually reminds us, in his windings and doublings, of his even more crafty successor, Louis XI. Arthur was a puppet in the hands of Philip, to be set up or knocked down as Philip desired to bully or to cajole John out of the territories of the house of Anjou. In the possession of Arthur's person he had a hostage whom he might put forward as an ally, or degrade as a prisoner ;— and, in the same spirit, when he seized upon a fortress in the name of Arthur, he demolished it, that he might lose no opportunity of destroying a barrier to the extension of his own frontier. The peace which Shakspere represents, and correctly, as being established by the marriage of Blanch and Lewis, was one of several truces and treaties of amity that took place in the two or three first years of John's reign. The treaty of the 22nd May, in the year 1200, between these two kings, agreed that, with the exception of Blanch's dowry, John should remain in possession of all the dominions of his brother Richard;-for Arthur was to hold even his own Brittany as a vassal of John. It is affirmed that by a secret article of this treaty Philip was to inherit the continental dominions thus confirmed to John, if he, John, died without children. At the time of the treaty of 1200, Constance, the mother of Arthur, was alive. As we have said, she was reigning Duchess of Brittany, in her own right. If we may judge of her character from the chroniclers, she was weak and selfish-deserting the bed of her second husband, and marrying the Lord Guy de Touars, at a time when the fortune, and perhaps the life, of her son, by Geffrey, depended upon the singleness of her affection for him. But it is exceedingly difficult to speak upon these points; and there is, at any rate, little doubt that her second husband treated her with neglect and cruelty. The surpassing beauty of the maternal love of the Constance of Shakspere will, it is probable, destroy all other associations with the character of Constance. We have no record that Constance was not a most devoted mother to her eldest born; and in that age, when divorces were as common amongst the royal and the noble as other breaches of faith, we are not entitled to believe that her third marriage was incompatible with her passionate love for the heir of so many hopes,--her heartbreaking devotion to her betrayed and forsaken son,—and her natural belief that "Since the birth of Cain, the first male child, To him that did but yesterday suspire, There was not such a gracious creature born." The fate of Constance was not altogether inconsistent with Shakspere's delineation of the heartbroken mother. She died in 1201. But Arthur was not then John's captive, although all his high hopes were limited to Brittany. The treaty of marriage between Lewis and Blanch is thus described by Holinshed : "So King John returned back (from York) and sailed again into Normandy, VOL. IV. U because the variance still depended between him and the King of France. Finally, upon the Ascension-day in this second year of his reign, they came eftsoons to a communication betwixt the towns of Vernon and Lisle Dandelie, where, finally, they concluded an agreement, with a marriage to be had betwixt Lewis, the son of King Philip, and the lady Blanch, daughter to Alfonso King of Castile, the eighth of that name, and niece to King John by his sister Eleanor." The terms of the treaty are, in several respects, accurately described by Shakspere-the dowry of thirty thousand marks-the resignation by John of certain possessions—the retention of Angiers—and the bestowal of Brittany and the earldom of Richmond upon Arthur.-John, however, retained much of what the poet has recited as being abandoned by him. "The lady Blanch" was not personally consenting to this treaty, for it was stipulated that "the foresaid Blanch should be conveyed into France to her husband with all speed." ACT III. SCENE I.—The same. The French King's Tent. Enter CONSTANCE, ARTHUR, and SALISBURY. Const. Gone to be married! gone to swear a peace ! Oppress'd with wrongs, and therefore full of fears; A woman, naturally born to fears; And though thou now confess thou didst but jest Sal. As true, as, I believe, you think them false |