[102.3] The character given of the Duke of Somerset by the contemporary historian Basin is on the whole favourable, and may be supposed to be impartial. He describes him as handsome in person, gentle and urbane in manner, and well inclined towards justice; but all these graces were marred by an insatiable avarice which would not let him rest content with the immense wealth he had inherited from Cardinal Beaufort; and by continually coveting the riches of others he brought ruin on himself. Basin, i. 193.
[103.1] Printed in this Introduction for the first time from the original in the Cottonian MS., Vesp. C. xiv. f. 40. The first paragraph of this document is quoted by Stowe in his Chronicle, p. 397, and the charges are referred by him to the thirty-third year of the king’s reign, i.e. the latter part of A.D. 1454, which is certainly erroneous. The date which he intended, indeed, was the latter part of the year 1453, when the Duke of Somerset was arrested and sent to the Tower; but this date also is quite impossible.
[106.1] MS. mutilated.
[106.2] A line seems here to be cut off in the MS. at the bottom of the leaf.
[107.1] Charles, afterwards Charles the Bold, son of Philip the Good, who was at this time Duke of Burgundy.
[108.1] Letter 121.
[109.1] Capgrave de Illust. Henricis, 135.
[109.2] The Henry Grace Dieu of Henry VIII.’s time is, however, better known by its popular epithet of the Great Harry.
[110.1] The Earl of Shrewsbury, as already mentioned, had been given up to the French in 1449 as a hostage for the delivery of certain towns in Normandy. It is said that he only recovered his liberty on taking oath never to bear arms again against the French, but that on visiting Rome in the year of Jubilee, 1450, he obtained an absolution from this engagement.—Æneæ Sylvii Opera, 441.
The gift had been left with the under sheriff
text unchanged: expected form “under-sheriff”