—4

Pll have this crown of mine cut from my shoulders

Before L'l sce the crown so foul misplaced.(Richard III. III. 2.) He will stand to voung Edward:

That TIl give my voice on Richard's side,

To bar my master's heirs in true descent,

God knows, I will not do it, to the death.(Ibid.) Hastings speaks so frankly because he does not know that Catesby, whom he thinks most sincerely attached to himself, is a spy, and going to betray him to Richard, and that his life is in danger. So he does not follow the advice of Stanley, who, during night, sent him a warning to be off if life was dear to him, and on the next morning gladly follows the invitation to the meeting at the Tower because he thinks himself on best terms with the protector. At the Tower a council is held concerning the imminent coronation. The Lord Protector, too, comes to it, and seems in high spirits. But after having absented himself for some time he enters again, looking very serious and gloomy. After a moment'’s silence he asks:

I pray you all, tell me what they deserve

That do conspire my death with devilish plots

Of damned witchcraft; and that have prevail'd

Upon my body with their hellisn charms?(bid.) Hastings is at once ready to say that those persons deserve death, but when Richard accuses of these crimes his own sister-in-law, the queen, and Jane Shore(who, however, was not Hastings' concubine, but Dorset's) and when Hastings seems to doubt this statement saying: if they have done this deed, my noble Lord... Richard gets into an awful passion crying:

If? thou protector of this damned strumpet

Tall'st thou to me of ifs?— Thou art a traitor.—

Off with his head.(Lbid.) And that very moment armed men enter the room, and, seizing Hastings, lead him into the yard where his head is cut off upon a log lying there. It is hardly possible to think that Hastings was executed only upon so frivolous a ground as the one given by Shakespeare, and it is not unlikely that there was indeed a conspiracy in which Hastings, bishop Morton and others were implicated(Pauli, Aufsätze), but which bishop Morton passed over with silence. Perhaps, too, it was all the doing of that man Catesby who, in order to enrich himself, calumniated his bene- factor, and brought his head upon the block. That an indictment of Lord Hastings was ready immediately after the execution may perhaps be explained so: Hastings execution had indeed been decided upon before, then it was put off, but was carried out at last when Richard got new proofs of his guilt. To lessen somewhat the impression of this hurried execution, Richard thought it necessary to send for the mayor of London in order to explain the urgency of the measure taken. When the mayor arrived at the Tower he found Richard and Buckingham in rusty armors as if they had put them on in all haste, and he was told that Hastings had plotted against their lives, and that but the extreme danger in which they were forced them to decide on immediate exe- cution which, however, but for overzealous friends would have taken place after their interview with the Lord Mayor. They easily succeed in convincing the mayor of the urgency of Lord Hastings' execution.