Whiting & Co. first edition - 1888
In his Preface, Hodgetts refers to the memory of a old book which I was wont to pore over in my father's library some fifty odd years ago. It had no author's name, and professed to be the autobiography of a legitimate son of Richard III, born long before his parent's rise. The book had a strange fascination for me, and the events it related were so impressed upon my mind that they have formed, as it were, the skeleton of my story. The book he recalls was William Heseltine's The Last of the Plantagenets 1829 (see my previous Blog on 10th December 2023). Hodgetts makes two further points. Heseltine's story was told in the first person, which is now abandoned as there was the difficulty of describing scenery and other things in the archaic language of the unknown author. Secondly, he has modelled the language upon that of Sir Thomas More, to whose life of Richard the Third I owe many useful hints...
Hodgetts also makes it very clear in the Preface what his opinion of Richard III is. We have always received our pictures of Richard the Third from partisans of the opposite faction. Shakespeare wrote to please a Tudor, as did More, and both of them have done their best to leave us an almost impossible picture of one of the bravest of England's monarchs, one of the wisest of her generals, and one of the most far-sighted of her statesmen...of the charges brought against him, many have been proved to be gratuitous inventions, and many others have shown to be impossible. Thus, the evidence of the murder of his nephews has been proved to be unworthy of credit. Richard himself suggests the Duke of York has gone to Burgundy, while poor half-witted little Edward wanders about at large. Later in the novel, it is stated that Perkin Warbeck is, in fact, the younger prince Richard of York. The author also has Buckingham swear Richard was at Brecknock when King Henry VI was killed in the Tower. Hodgetts does admit Richard has a deformity - Richard was a dandy in his way, and had invented this queer padded doublet to hide or counterbalance his deformity... as for Tudor, avarice, hard-dealing, carking cares had made him an old man by 1487. The knowledge that he had no right whatever to the crown made him suspicious. He felt that he was hated, and punished men all round for hating him...the crowned miser...there was a greedy, restless look about the eye that told of miser thrift, of hoarded gold, of meanness, subterfuge, and wrong
This Richard Plantagenet goes by the name of Richard Trevor. We first meet him at a monastic school in Faversham Abbey, Kent, a uncommon youth, good-hearted but impetuous. He is collected by Sir Guy de Mowbray to meet his unknown father in Leicestershire. The scene where the younger Richard meets his father, none other than King Richard III, prior to the Battle of Bosworth is possibly the best done in the novel. Not far behind is the meeting with Lord Lovel, hiding in a riverside cave after the Battle of East Stoke two years later. The vegetation seemed to be arrested as in fear, or as if crushed and broken down by giant feet in times before the Flood. The shore was slimy. and the footing insecure. Richard helps him journey to Minster Lovel in Oxford, where they enter a far larger and superior underground chamber than has been described by any other author. There is another interesting scene in the old Yorkist Inn at Leicester, where the young Earl of Warwick, disguised as a girl, helps to hoodwink the Lancastrian side to allow Richard to escape, with the gold from the late King Richard's bed.
There are several serious factual errors in Hodgetts' story. He seemingly has the Duke of Buckingham still alive in 1485 and postdating Richard III's son Edward's death - the former recounts seeing the youthful Edward, poor, pale child, lie dead upon his bier. He has Richard aged not quite forty in 1485, when he was just thirty-two. Twice Hodgetts states that Richard fought at the Battle of Towton in 1461 - when he was but eight years old. Richard was at Nottingham when Tudor landed at Milford Haven, not at Crosbie House in London as this author maintains. Francis Lovel is described as a tall, gaunt man of sixty years and more, when he was but thirty-one in 1487. Minster Lovel was not a ruined abbey.
The most irritating aspect of Hodgetts' tale was the insertion of a fictitious Fleming, Dousterfeldt (is he modelled on another exceedingly irritating rogue, Walter Scott's Dousterswivel in The Antiquary?), who keeps popping up throughout the book until young Richard, in a prison at Sheen Palace by the orders of Tudor, escapes due to an outbreak of fire and pushes the Fleming to an awful death amongst the flames below. Dousterfeldt's only master and mistress is money. We read of him working with Buckingham, King Richard, Henry Tudor and others - almost like a triple or quadruple agent. He turns up at the most unlikely places, just at the right time - stretching one's disbelief at the repetitive coincidences.
This time Richard Plantagenet ends up working for William Caxton and Wynkin de Worde at Westminster, thanks to his earlier work in Faversham cloister. He visits Minster Lovel again some years later to find the dead Lovel, still sitting at a table, to recover the deceased's hidden gold and to close up the entrance to the underground chamber. The years rolled on and, in 1495, Caxton gives Richard books to take to the Abbess of the Austin Nuns at Dartford in Kent. Only then (unlike in Heseltine's account) does he meet the Lady Bride (or Bridget) Plantagenet - a lady of surpassing beauty and of great tenderness of character... She recognizes him as a fellow Plantagenet and they reminiscence. Lady Bridget told him many things about his father, and how she knew for certain that Perkin Warbeck was the Duke of York...she further told him how she had seen Edward called the Fifth alive and well after King Richard's death. Moreover, she gives Richard a Bible translated into English and speaks approvingly of Wycliffe. Five more years go by, and news of Lady Bridget's death reached Richard. Again time rolled on. Finally we read that it was none other than Richard who set up the print at Wittenburg for Tyndale's New Testament.
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