PREFACE

Summary

THIS work was first published about twenty years ago and, though it passed through two editions, has now been long out of print. Further study has in the mean time suggested some corrections and additions, not merely to the history of Richard III., but still more to the Chapter on Perkin Warbeck at the end, which is now very considerably enlarged, with details hitherto unknown derived from foreign publications.

The portrait of Perkin Warbeck inserted at page 282 is a photograph obtained through the kindness of Mr Cust, the Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery, of a drawing preserved in the town library at Arras. It was quite unknown to me till very lately that any likeness of the pretender ever existed. This drawing is contained in a MS. volume along with a considerable number of other pencil and chalk portraits by a sixteenth century artist, evidently taken, like this, from painted originals. With just a few exceptions at the end of the list, which are portraits of classical or other celebrities, the subjects are all distinguished persons of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the name of each is written underneath his likeness, generally in a hand contemporary with the work, but apparently not in that of the artist himself, who, in the present instance, has written over the drawing particulars of colour, dress and other details in the original picture which he copied.