ISSN:
0080-4401
Source:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Topics:
History
Notes:
The story of the imprisonment of Prince Henry of Monmouth by Chief-Justice Gascoign, for insulting him in court, is one with which Shakespeare has long made the whole civilised world familiar, and his dramatic representation of that supposed event had been accepted by Rapin, and after him by Hume and other professed historians, not merely as in the main true, but as an incident in an abandoned course of life during his youth before he became king, when Mr. Tyler undertook the task of vindicating the memory of the Prince from the load of calumny under which it had long laboured, and in his life of the Prince, published in 1830, asserted that ‘never did a young man receive from his contemporaries more unequivocal testimony of the practical exercise in his person of propriety, modesty, and perseverance than Henry of Monmouth did before he became king,’ but of his alleged contempt of court he says little. On the other hand, Miss Strickland, a.popular biographer, and Lord Campbell, a distinguished judge as well as biographer, both writing several years after the publication of Mr. Tyler's work, with the contents of which they describe themselves as acquainted, revive and insist upon as true the representation of the Prince as having in early life associated himself with buffoons and criminals, and the story of his misconduct in a court of justice and consequent imprisonment as the natural outcome of such a course of life. Moreover Miss Strickland professes to refer to previous writers as authorities for all her statements.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3677842
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