then the sworn ally of Richard of Gloucester, took occasion in the Privy Council to attack her place of refuge. "There were two chief plague-spots in London,' he snarled: 'one at the elbows of the city (Westminster), the other in the very bowels thereof (St. Martin's le Grand). These places were the refuge of theeves, mirtherers, and malitious, heynous traytors! nay,' he added, 'men's wives ran hither with their husbands' plate, and say they dare not abide their husbands for beating,' with more to the same effect. Had not Elizabeth yielded, Westminster might have witnessed a violation as affecting as that of Canterbury." Sec. 312. 313. 314. 315. CHAPTER XXIV. "KING RICHARD THE THIRD." Richard's crimes prompted by his isolation Acquittal of the accused. Accessory before the fact. 316. Avouch. 317. Disputing with Lunatic. 318. Clothing villany with "holy writ." 319. Warrant no protection against murder. 327. Levitical Law against niece marrying uncle. 330. Corrupted Justice. 331. Swords as Laws, under Richard's reign. Sec. 312. Richard's crimes prompted by his isolation.I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's "Glo. majesty, To entertain these fair well-spoken days,- And hate the idle pleasures of these days." In looking for the psychological reason for his very pronounced criminal appetite and the marked cruelty in his make-up, the criminologist can but look to the natural. isolation which Richard's deformity forced upon him, as the genesis for his criminal course. This bodily defect must have been construed by the Poet as the reason for his criminality, for he again and again presents it, as the reason for his extreme sensitiveness. Such deformity would naturally lead to so many humiliations, in a proud sensitive nature, as to make of him a lonely, revengeful creature, with his hand raised against all the world. Of this bodily defect, as a basis for his criminality, the criminal expert, Goll, in contemplating the character of Richard, observes: "One only feels duties, as such, to one's own community. The soldier feels no duties to the enemy, the European feels himself released from all duties of civilization, when he is called to action, among savage tribes. And to Richard everybody else is an enemy, a foreigner, with whom he has no connection, to whose race he does not belong. Because he stands alone, every man's hand, has, from the first day, been lifted against him, therefore his hand, too, is lifted against every man, against all these hated, well-made people, who together form one community, opposed to him alone. He is at war with them all. And in war, war's deeds are done."2 'King Richard III, Act I, Scene I. 2 Goll's Criminal Types in Shakespeare, pp. 197, 198. In making love to Lady Anne, Richard taunts himself with his isolation: "I no friends to back my suit withal, But the plain devil and dissembling looks." (Act I, Scene II.) Richard thus moralizes, after the determination to put his wife to death, in King Richard III: "K. Rich. .. Uncertain way of gain: But I am in so far in blood, that sin will pluck Sec. 312a. Ordeal of the bier. "Lady Anne. . . . O gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry's wounds Open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh."" When Gloster here is made to interrupt the funeral procession of Henry VI, Lady Anne, as if familiar with the old law of ordeal, known as the ordeal of the bier, exclaims to the bystanders that the guilty presence of the murderer has made the wounds of the deceased to open and cry out against him. For centuries murderers were tried by ordeal, and the tests of the red-hot iron, for the patricians, and of the hot water, for the rustics and common people, were among the most reliable methods in use for determining their guilt or innocence. By the ordeal of the bier, here referred to, the suspected murderer was required to approach and touch the body of the murdered person, when it was supposed, if he was guilty, to bleed afresh, or to foam at the mouth, or give other evidences of the presence of the murderer.2 This proceeding, which obtained for centuries in the English law, was finally abolished in the year 1219, by the Council of Henry III, after which it was used again only in the trial of witches and sorcerers, because of the supposed absence of direct evidence against them.3 "The ordeal of the bier was exemplified in the current literature of the age of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, for the histories of that king report that when he met the funeral procession of his father, Henry II, at Fontev 1 Richard III, Act I, Scene II. 2 Lea, "Superstition and Force" (3rd ed.), pp. 315, 323; White's "Legal Antiquities;" Pattetta, Ordalie; 1 Reeve's History English Law, 203; Herbert's Antiquities (1804), p. 146; Leges Athelstane; 1 Pollock & Maitland's History English Law, 152; II Idem., 599, 650; Leg. Henrici, I, cap. lxv. II Pollock & Maitland's History English Law, pp. 599, 650. raud, the blood spurted from the nose of the deceased, because of the treason and rebellion of which his son had been guilty. "Shakespeare utilizes this story of Richard Coeur-deLion, in the funeral scene in Richard III.* "The circumstances and conditions under which ordeal was employed, in the trial of the various felonies known to the early Saxon laws, varies, necessarily, with the customs and legislation of the different rulers, and sometimes we find that the right of selection obtained, between this and other modes of compurgation, or between the different forms of ordeal."'5 "White's "Legal Antiquities," p. 166. "Ante idem., 168; II Comti, polc. cap. xxx, xii; L. Henrici, I. cap. ixv, sec. 3. "In Sir Walter Scott's 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border' we also find reference to this ordeal of the bier, when, in the ballad of Earl Richard, this author established the innocence of the maid, by this test: 'Put na the wite on me,' she said; 'It was my may Katherine.' Then they hae cut baith fern and thorn, To burn that maiden in. It wadna take upon her cheik, Nor yet upon her chin; Nor yet upon her yellow hair, To cleanse that deadly sin. The maiden touched that clay-cauld corpse, A drap it never bled; The ladye laid her hand on him, And soon the ground was red." And thus Scott uses the ordeal of the bier to establish that the accuser was herself the guilty person, and the Bard of Avon and the Elder Edda utilize this ordeal and that of the boiling water, to demonstrate the infallibility of this Divine Test, when applied, to ascertain the guilt or innocence of one accused of such crimes as may legitimately be the subject of this character of proceeding, known to the ancient law as one of the Judgments of God." White's "Legal Antiquities," pp. 166, 167. |