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anonymous treatise the author claimed that the birth was a sign of
God's anger with England. As Wyatt lived in Kent until 1623, it is
possible that he heard about the child.25
In his discussion of Anne's extra finger, which he reduced to
an extra nail, he gave contradictory statements. First, he said it
was so small that the "workmaster" had left it there "as an occasion
of greater grace to her hand". Then he tried to dismiss it by
saying that it was usually hidden by the "tip" of another finger so
that there was less "blemish". Later, he pointed out that Henry had
been attracted to her by "her matchless perfections", but in an
attempt to reinforce his observations about her honour Wyatt also
claimed that she had been careful to let the king see her extra
nail. That Wyatt dwelled on this imperfection more than the others
can be interpreted as a sign of his own understandable anxiety about
it.26 Almost certainly he was so personally repelled by the mere
thought of this deformity he never suspected that Sander was capable
of clothing Anne with totally imaginary features in order to paint
vividly for his readers a picture of her evil nature. Undoubtedly,
when Wyatt quizzed some ladies with knowledge about her appearance,
they responded that they had never seen a sixth finger or wen. It
is significant that he failed to credit them, as he did for other
information, with describing her moles and extra fingernail.
Surely, in a misguided effort to transform her alleged deformities
into normal growths, he personally chose to reduce her extra finger
to a nail in the mistaken belief that she might ordinarily have been
able to conceal it.
Neither she nor anyone else so active and so visible at court
could have kept an extra nail hidden. Far from being a retiring,
quiet personality, she generated excitement and interest everywhere
she went, even among people who were hostile. Observers noted that
she played cards, sewed exquisitely, loved to dance, played the lute
well, was involved in political scheming, and went horseback riding,
25 Indeed, evidence does exist that one entire anecdote may have
been a complete fabrication. In order to set the stage for Anne to
be able to show Henry her extra fingernail in a discrete setting,
Wyatt had her playing cards with Catharine of Aragon. A
contemporary of Catharine's, however, in a versified account of her
life, said that she never played cards. See William Forrest, The
History of Grisild the Second, ed. W.D. Macray, London, 1875, 28.
Garrett Mattingly (in Catherine of Aragon, Boston, 1941, 260)
included only one reference to the queen's playing cards, and his
source was this Wyatt anecdote (Strange Newes Out of Kent, London:
T. Creed f. W. Barley, 1609). For more information about George
Wyatt and his manuscripts, see D.M. Loades, ed., The Papers of
George Wyatt, Esquire, Camden Society, 4th series, vol. 5, London,
1968, 5-18.
26 George Wyatt, op.cit., 424, 428, and 437.
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32 For his badge see Ross, 138 and St. Thomas More, The History of
King Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems,
ed. Richard S. Sylvester, New Haven, 1976, cover; Russell,
Witchcraft (as in note 19), 54 note 58, 114, 163, 237, and 242; some
stories were associated with the birth of pigs: A Certaine Relation
of the Hogfaced Gentlewoman (London: J. Okes sold by F. Grove,
1640), which argued that her mother had been bewitched during her
pregnancy; William Fulwood, The Shape of ii Monsters (London: J.
Aide, 1562); Lawrence Price, A Monstrous Shape, or a Shapeless
Monster (London: M. Flesher f. T. Lambert, 1639).
33 The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood now First Collected With
Illustrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author in Six Volumes,London,
1874, reprinted 1964, I, 177; see also Albert M. Stevens, The
Nursery Rhyme: Remnant of Popular Protest, Lawrence, kansas, 1968,
reprinted 1974, 71 and Mary M.D. McElroy, Literary Patronage of
Margaret Beaufort and Henry V H : A Study of Renaissance Propaganda
(1483-1509), PhJJ. Dissertation, University of Texas, 1964, 168 note
39. Because McElroy believed that Collingbourne was the author of
Heywood's octave, she interpreted this reference to the boar to mean
that Richard was actually hunchedback. The last four lines are as
follows:
Both flower and bud will be confound
Till King of beasts the swine be crowned.
And then the Dog, the Cat, and Rat
Shall in his trough feed and be fat.
147
34 McElroy, ibid., 112-128 and 168 note 39; for information about
Richard's activities in Wales, see Gwen Waters, Richard III, Wales
and the Charter to Llandovery, The Ricardian 7, 1985, 46-55.
35 York Records: Extracts from the Municipal Records of the City of
York, 1941, II, 72-73 in Alison Hanham, Richard III and His Early
Historians, 1483-1535, Oxford, 1975, 63 (hereafter, Hanham).
36 Russell, Lucifer, 67; Friedman, 61; See also Barbara A. Woods,
The Devil in Dog Form, Berkeley, 1959, 1-14; McElroy, 112-128 and
168 note 39.
37 Ross, xxii and 139 believed he had seen Richard.
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149
40 Hanham, 122 note 4 and 123. The left and right sides were
written in later, possibly in a second hand. The highlighting is
mine.
41 George B. Churchill, Richard the Third up To Shakespeare,
Palestra 10,1900, 51-52. In the seventeenth century George Buck
apparently invented a Latin oration given by a Scots ambassador to
Richard in 1484. In it he had the diplomat quote a poem praising
"the most renowned Prince of the Thebeans", which Buck translated as
follows: "So great a Soul, Such Strength of Mind. Sage Nature ne'r
to a less Body joyn'd". This statement surely does not mean that
Richard was short but that his divine qualities were not usually
present in human form. See White Kennett, A Complete History of
England, 2nd edn., London, 1719, I, 572-573.
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minor demons.42
Modern histories of Richard have not sufficiently recognized
that a crooked or hunched back is a symptom of one kind of dwarfism.
By referring only to "uneven shoulders", Rous refrained from
blatantly characterizing Queen Elizabeth of York's uncle as a dwarf
in a work written for her husband to read. Surely, the calling of
his wife's blood uncle a fairy demon would have offended Henry VII
about as much as calling him a Jew. Besides not wanting others to
believe that he had married into a family with demons, the king
would have objected to the epithet for two reasons. First, Rous'
contemporaries often confused the elfish spirits with pygmies of the
East, whom ancient writers described as subhuman beings with long
hair. As late as 1699 an English scholar wrote a tract to explain
that he had proved scientifically that they were subhuman.43
Secondly, the mythical fairy demon and the pygmy were usually
associated with real dwarfs, some of whom were kept at royal courts
as pets. There was, moreover, a noble contemporary of Richard who
may well have suffered from dwarfism. Scholars have variously
described Jeanne, the daughter of Louis XI of France, as deformed,
misshapen, and hunchedback. Her story is instructive as to the
treatment of a member of the royalty with such an affliction. In
1476 her father forced the young duke of Orleans (the future Louis
XII) to marry her in the belief that she would not be able to have
children and that her barrenness would extinguish the duke's line.
Reportedly, Orleans' mother, Maria of Cleves, "almost fainted from
horror" when she learned the identity of her young son's bride.
After their marriage, the duke dutifully visited his wife in her
house at Lignieres twice a year but refused to talk to or look at
her. Upon his succession to the throne, the couple was divorced and
she willingly retired to a nunnery.44
At the time Rous described Richard's features, the drama of
the French royal family formed a vivid example of contemporary
attitudes toward human deformities. He seems to have gone as far as
possible toward identifying Richard as a dwarf in the account, given
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(45 cont.) rumour and the passage of time. See also Denys Hay, The
Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, AJ). 1485-1537, Camden Series,
vol. 74, London, 1950, xiv-xix; for the epitaph, see Political Poems
and Songs Relating to English History Composed During the Period
from the Accession of Edward I H to that of Richard H I , ed. Thomas
Wright, London, 1861, II, 256-257.
46 St Thomas More, Richard III, 8, 50, and 95; the highlighting in
the quotation is mine. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Richard
The Third, I,ii,103; I,iii,246; V,iii,157; I,iii,228. See also
Jeremy Potter, More about More, The Ricardian 7, 1985, 66-73.
47 John Stowe quoted in White Kennett (as in note 41) I, 548.
48 For the seventeenth-century studies, see Kendall, 506-507 and
Ross, xliii-xlix.
153
Retha M. Warnicke
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona
49 William H. Snyder, The Crown and the Tower, The Legend of Richard
III, Richard III Society, Inc., 1981, 30-38; Kendall, 177 and 537
note 26. The shoulder theory inspired a medical study; see Philip
Rhodes, The Physical Deformity of Richard III, British Medical
Journal 2, 1977, 1, 650-1, 652, cited by Ross, 139 note 38.