off some horse-loads of valuable things, and yet left a considerable number of valuables scattered about the floor. As for Mrs. Clark herself, who was very fat, she endeavoured to cry out for help, upon which her maid thrust her fingers down her throat and choked her^ for which fact she was burnt, and the seven men who were her accomplices were hanged at Leicester, some time in 1613."
There are several mistakes in this account, as will appear, but the only material one to notice at present is that the trial took place in 1605 and the sentence was executed soon after, and not in 1613. It appears that soon after the circumstances of the murder had been published abroad, with the romantic story of hidden treasure, a bedstead was being exhibited at Leicester, either at the Blue Boar Inn, or elsewhere, which purported to be the one in which the treasure had been found, and in which King Richard had slept. It did not however figure at the trial, in the course of which nothing whatever was said about King Richard's treasure. But, after the trial, the fame of the bedstead became firmly established, and endured for many generations. Henry Peacham, who afterwards became famous as the author of "The Complete Gentleman," wrote some barbarous hexameters which were prefixed to Tom Coryat's "Crudities," first published in 1611, and in the course of these verses he referred to various sights and exhibitions of his time that might be seen for a penny, including —
" Drakes ship at Detford, King Richards bed-sted i' Leyster,
The White Hall Whale-bones, the silver Bason i' Chester."
In the latter half of the 18th century this bedstead was still regarded as one of the wonders of Leicester. When Samuel Ireland, the father of the Shakesperian forger, visited the town, in the course of an artistic and literary tour, about 1790, he proceeded at once to make enquiries about the "two curious remains" which the town of Leicester boasted, and "which must be admitted to have reference to his (Shakespeare's) works: the house and bed in which Richard the Third slept the night before the battle of Bosworth, or rather Sutton, Field." He was shown over the house, "which is still," he wrote, "in good
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