Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/163

 in full in the ‘Rolls of Parliament’ (iii. 378–9) from an original sealed copy, but an examination of the roll of the actual proceedings shows that the exculpatory clauses and the final appeal were omitted, and the date of Rickhill's interview carefully suppressed. All who were not in the secret would suppose it to have taken place between 17 Aug., the date of his commission, and 25 Aug., which had been given out as the day of Gloucester's death. There were obvious reasons for not disclosing the fact that he had been alive little more than a week before parliament met. Why the murder—for the hypothesis of a natural death is practically excluded—was left to the eleventh hour we can only conjecture. Perhaps Nottingham shrank from the deed (Eulogium, iii. 373), perhaps Gloucester refused to make his confession earlier. The mutilated confession was published in every county in England. In the first parliament of Henry IV a certain John Halle, a former servant of Nottingham, swore that Gloucester, under orders from the king, had been smothered beneath a feather-bed in a house at Calais, called the Prince's Inn, by William Serle, a servant of Richard's chamber, and several esquires and valets of the Earls of Nottingham and Rutland in the month of September 1397 (Rot. Parl. iii. 452). Halle, who had kept the door, was executed, and, though he was not publicly examined, there seems no strong reason to doubt the main features of his story. Serle, on falling into Henry's hands in 1404, suffered the same fate. In France Gloucester was thought to have been strangled (, ii. 552; ).

Richard ordered Nottingham on 14 Oct. to deliver the body to Richard Maudeleyn, to be given by him to the widow for burial in Westminster Abbey (Fœdera, viii. 20, 21). But on the 31st of the same month he commanded her to take it to the priory of Bermondsey instead (ib. viii. 24). Froissart, who has been followed by Dugdale and later writers, says that he was buried in Pleshey church (which he had collegiated and endowed under a license obtained in 1393); but Adam of Usk (p. 38) expressly states that Richard buried him in Westminster Abbey, but in the south of the church (in the chapel of St. Edmund), quite away from the royal burial-place. It was removed to the chapel of the kings near the shrine of St. Edward, the spot he had selected in his lifetime, by Henry IV in 1399 (cf. Royal Wills, p. 177). His elaborate brass, in which there were some twenty figures, is engraved in Sandford (p. 227), but nothing save the matrices now remains.

Gloucester's proud, fierce, and intolerant nature, which provoked the lasting and fatal resentment of his nephew, may be read in the portrait (from Cott. MS. Nero, D. vii) engraved in Doyle's ‘Official Baronage.’ It bears no resemblance to the alleged portrait engraved in Grose's ‘Antiquarian Repertory’ (ii. 209). He composed about 1390 ‘L'Ordonnance d'Angleterre pour le Camp à l'outrance, ou gaige de bataille’ (Chronique de la Traison, p. 132 n.; Antiquarian Repertory, ii. 210–19). A finely illuminated vellum copy of Wyclif's earlier version of his translation of the Bible—now in the British Museum—was once Gloucester's property; his armorial shield appears in the border of the first page.

By his wife Eleanor Bohun he had one son and three or four daughters. His only son, Humphrey, born about 1381, was taken to Ireland by Richard in 1399, and, on the news of Bolingbroke's landing, confined with his son (afterwards Henry V) in Trim Castle. Recalled by Henry IV immediately after, he died on the road, some said by shipwreck, others more probably of the plague in Anglesey (, p. 28;, Collectanea, iii. 384; cf. Archæologia, xx. 173). He was buried at Walden Abbey in Essex. Three of his sisters were named respectively Anne, Joan, and Isabel. A fourth, Philippa, who died young, is mentioned by Sandford. Anne (1380?–1438) married, first, in 1392, Thomas, third earl of Stafford, but he dying in that year, she became in 1398 the wife of his brother Edmund, fifth earl of Stafford, by whom she was mother of Humphrey Stafford, first duke of Buckingham [q. v.]; on his death she took a third husband (1404), William Bourchier, count of Eu, to whom she bore Henry, earl of Essex, Archbishop Bourchier, and two other sons; she died on 16 Oct. 1438 (Royal Wills, p. 278). Joan (d. 1400) was betrothed to Gilbert, lord Talbot, elder brother of the first Earl of Shrewsbury, but she died unmarried on 16 Aug. 1400 (, i. 172; cf., p. 234). Isabel (b. 1384) became a nun in the Minories outside Aldgate, London.

Gloucester's widow made her will at Pleshey on 9 Aug. 1399, and died of grief at the loss of her son, it is said, at the Minories on 3 Oct. following (Royal Wills, p. 177; Annales, p. 321). She lies buried close to the first resting-place of her husband in the abbey under a fine brass, which is engraved by Sandford (p. 230). He is no doubt mistaken in asserting that she died in the abbey of Barking, where she became a nun.

[Rotuli Parliamentorum; Issues of the Exchequer, ed. Devon; Calendar of Patent Rolls,