BY WILBUR CORTEZ ABBOTT Professor of History, Sheffield Scientific School Yale University ROCHESTER, NEW YORK 1910 Copyright, 1910, by Edward Wheelock GENESEE PRESS ROCHESTER, N.Y. GENESEE PRESS ROCHESTER, N.Y....

The story which follows is, without doubt, one of the most curious and extraordinary in English history. It is, in fact, so remarkable that it seems necessary to begin by assuring the cautious reader that it is true. Much as it may resemble at times that species of literature known in England as the shilling shocker and in America as the dime novel, its material is drawn, not from the perfervid imagination of the author, but from sources whose very nature would seem to repudiate romance. The dul

The story here told has been related elsewhere though not in such detail nor, so far as I am aware, from precisely this point of view. Apart from the accounts in encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries, of which by far the best for its day is the Biographia Brittanica , the most accessible source of information is the article on Blood in the Dictionary of National Biography and the fullest details are to be found in W. Hepworth Dixon's Her Majesty's Tower , VOL. IV , pp. 119, and in a note (