of York, and was born at Fotheringay castle on the 2d of October, 1452. On the defeat and death of his father at the battle of Wakefield Green in 1460, Richard and his brother George were sent by their mother to the protection of Philip, duke of Burgundy, where they remained until shortly afterwards their eldest brother, Edward IV., came into the possession of the English crown. Returning to Britain, Richard was created Duke of Gloucester, and appointed to the office of lord high admiral. In 1471 he held a command in his brother's army at the battle of Barnet, and also aided in achieving the conclusive victory of Tewkesbury. In 1478 he contrived to remove his brother George, duke of Clarence, who now alone stood between his ambitious desires and the throne. When the decease of Edward IV. occurred in April, 1483, Richard was commanding the army of the borders, and immediately started for London, cloaking his designs under the pretence of zeal for the cause of his young nephew, to whom, as Edward V., he summoned at York the country gentry to swear allegiance. But the mask was not long worn. On his way to the capital he had held deep counsel with his confidential adherents, and the necessary plans had been laid for his elevation to the royal dignity. Arrived in London, he assumed the title of lord protector, and took up his residence at Crosby Place in the city, where his plot was at length matured. The citizens of the metropolis were treated to harangues, in which the present and the late king were stigmatized as illegitimate; some of the individuals most opposed to the protector's scheme were, on various pretexts, condemned to the scaffold; and the result of all was that on the 23d of June the duke of Buckingham, the lord mayor, and a number of other persons, proceeded to the place where Richard then resided, and solemnly offered him the crown of England in the name of the three estates of the realm. Richard pretended to hesitate, but in the end gave way; and on the 26th day of the month he was formally declared king in Westminster hall. For a while, strange as it may appear, his usurpation was received with at least external favour by the majority of the people. But the murder in the Tower of his royal nephews, whose deliverance from the captivity to which he had consigned them was already meditated by their adherents, diffused general horror through the minds of men, and a strong party was formed in favour of Henry, earl of Richmond, heir to the house of Lancaster. An ill-timed insurrection in his behalf drew down Richard's vengeance; but the latter was gradually deserted by the far larger proportion of his followers. At length, on the 7th of August, 1485, Richmond landed at Milford Haven with an army of three thousand Normans; and being generally welcomed and aided by the English, he achieved complete success at the famous battle of Bosworth, which closed the wars of the Roses, and where Richard, having encountered the invader, was deprived simultaneously of his life and his throne. This was on the 21st August, 1485. There is much uncertainty as to the leading events of Richard's reign, and even as to his real character. That his supposed personal deformities have been grossly exaggerated, there appears little doubt; and no small evidence, indeed, exists to prove that instead of being the monster of ugliness he is generally represented, he was as handsome in features as his brother Edward IV. From various circumstances it seems perfectly possible that his moral character may have been, at least in certain cases, similarly misrepresented and caricatured.—J. J.
RICHARD, Archbishop of Armagh, flourished in the fourteenth century. His family name was Fitz-Ralph. He is supposed to have been a native of Devonshire, though Stevens affirms that he was born at Dundalk in Ireland. He was educated at Oxford, partly at University, partly at Balliol college, and in 1333 was commissary-general of the university. During his residence at Oxford, he exposed with great severity the superstition, avarice, and licentious lives of the mendicant friars. After holding in succession the offices of chancellor of the church of Lincoln, archdeacon of Chester, and dean of Lichfield, he was in 1347 advanced to the archbishopric of Armagh. He was summoned to appear before Innocent VI. at Avignon, to answer for his attacks on the friars; and though he defended himself with great ability and resolution, the pontiff decided against him. He died at Avignon in 1360, not without suspicion of poison. He published a volume of sermons, and a work entitled "Defensio Curatorum adversus Fratres Mendicantes," Paris, 1496. Fox affirms that the Bible was translated into Irish by this learned and zealous prelate. Several fragments of the translation were preserved down to Usher's day.—J. T.
RICHARD de Bury, Chancellor of England and Bishop of Durham, but better known as the author of the "Philo-Biblon," was the son of Sir Richard de Angerville, and born in 1281 at or near Bury St. Edmund's in Suffolk, the town from which he derived his surname. Educated under an uncle, John de Willoughby, at Bury, he was sent to Oxford, where he distinguished himself by his zeal for study and purity of morals. On leaving Oxford, he entered as a monk the convent of Durham, which he quitted to become tutor to Prince Edward, afterwards Edward III. For his successful discharge of his new duties, he received the treasurership of Guienne, where he was established when Queen Isabella and her son, his pupil, went to France in 1325. For the aid, pecuniary and other, which he gave them, he was persecuted by the emissaries of the De Spencers, and had to fly and conceal himself in Paris. He was rewarded on Edward's accession to the throne. He received several ecclesiastical preferments, and then and afterwards was employed on various continental missions; in that of 1331 to the pope at Avignon, he formed an intimacy with Petrarch. In 1333 he was consecrated bishop of Durham; in 1334 he was appointed chancellor, an office which he retained only some nine months. Throughout his life, he was an indefatigable purchaser and collector of books, employing much of his money and of the influence of his position to collect what became the largest library in Europe. Richard de Bury is the earliest of English bibliomaniacs. His enthusiastic love of books, his efforts to acquire more, and the details of the arrangements of the earliest lending library in England, which he formed at Oxford, are recorded in his little Latin treatise, a very curious and interesting work, the "Philo-Biblon," first printed at Cologne in 1473. There is an English translation, London, 1832, and a French one, with a careful edition of the original text, Paris, 1850. Richard de Bury bequeathed his books to Durham, now King's college, Oxford, thus founding the first public library formed in that university. He was a student, as well as a collector of books; a generous patron, bountiful to the poor; in all respects an excellent and exemplary man. "The memory of few names," says Mr. Foss in his accurate memoir of the author of the "Philo-Biblon" (Lives of the Judges), "and of none in that age, is more endeared than that of Richard de Bury." He died on the 24th of April, 1345, at his palace of Auckland, and was buried in the cathedral of Durham.—F. E.
RICHARD of Cirencester, a monkish historian and topographer, is supposed to have been a native of Cirencester, but very little else is even conjectured respecting his early biography. In 1350 he entered the Benedictine monastery of St. Peter's, Westminster, and from his study of British and Saxon history, is said to have been designated "the historiographer." He died about 1402. He wrote a work, "Historia ab Hengista ad Annum 1348," of which the first part is preserved in the public library at Cambridge, while the second is supposed to be in the library of the Royal Society. Whitaker, the historian of Manchester, examined the manuscript at Cambridge, and thus expressed his disappointment:—"The learned scholar and the deep antiquarian I found sunk into an ignorant novice; sometimes the copier of Huntingdon, but generally the transcriber of Geoffrey." This verdict on an undisputed work of Richard of Cirencester throws additional doubt on the genuineness of the "De Situ Britanniæ," first published as his by Stukeley, from a transcript of a MS., said to have been discovered by Dr. Bertram at Copenhagen, where he was professor of English at the Royal naval academy. An English translation of the "De Situ" was published in London in 1809, edited by Mr. Hatchard, with an account of Richard, and is published among the Six Old English Chronicles of Bohn's Antiquarian Library, 1848. The most interesting section of the work is an itinerary of Britain, which Richard is represented to say was "collected from certain fragments left by a Roman general. The order is changed in some instances, according to Ptolemy and others." The work would be very valuable if its genuineness were assured.—F. E.
RICHARD PLANTAGENET, Earl of Cornwall, and titular king of the Romans and emperor of Germany, was the second son of John, king of England, and was born in 1208. The earldom of Cornwall, which had been escheated to the crown, was granted to him by his brother, Henry III., in 1226, and he was sent over to France along with the earl of Salisbury to resist
