Chapter XXXIII: Appendix: F

A LEGEND OF GLOUCESTER'S DEATH

Amongst seventeenth-century chroniclers there are many accounts as to the way in which Gloucester was murdered, the most popular of which, perhaps, is the one that he was smothered to death between two pillows. A contemporary Frenchman gives a different version, which has an extraordinary resemblance to the stories which surround the death of George, Duke of Clarence, in 1478. This occurs in a rhymed account by George Chastellain of the unusual and interesting events which happened in his days and runs as follows:

'Par fortune semestre
Veis à l'oeil viviment
Le Grant duc de Glocestre
Meurdrir piteusement;
En vin plain une cuve
Failloit qu'estranglé fust
Cuidant par celle estuve
Que la morte n'y parust.'

(Introduction to Georges Chastellain, _Chronique_ (ed. Buchon), p. xlviii). The rhyming chronicle in which this is found is not extant in manuscript, but in a printed form bearing the date 1528; and appended to it a continuation by Jacques Le Bouvier. Chastellain died at least three years before Clarence, so that he could not have borrowed the idea from the latter event. Nevertheless, it seems too obvious that the circumstances of the two deaths have been confused with one another to lightly dismiss its possibility. Bouvier mentions the death of Clarence and the well-known legend, putting it quaintly as follows:

'Le roi le fist noyer
Dedans mallevisee
Pours le moins ennuyer.'

(Introduction to Georges Chastellain, _Chronique_ (ed. Buchon), p. liii), but none the less he may have interpolated the passage about Gloucester into his predecessor's poem.

The theory of drowning, however, finds some support from an English authority. In a popular poem called 'The Dyrge of the Commons of Kent,' sung by the rebellious followers of Jack Cade in 1450, the following passage occurs:

'Arrys up Thorp and Cantelowe, stand ye together
And synge _dies illa dies ire_,
Pulford and Hanley that drownyd ye Duke of Glocestar
As two traitors shall synge _ardentes anime_.'

(_Three Fifteenth-century Chronicles_, Camden Series p. 103.) It is possible that from these two legends we can get an indication of what nature Humphrey's end really was. The story of Clarence's drowning can have no share in suggesting the earlier poem of Jack Cade's followers, and here may be the solution of the problem which has puzzled modern historians. It must be remembered, however, that in another work, already cited in the text, Chastellain gives the more usual story of Gloucester's murder, when he describes his death to a red-hot spit thrust into his body. (Chastellain, _OEuvres_, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, vii. 87.) In both cases, however, he lays stress on the fact that the manner of death was devised so as to prevent the appearance of murder.