If the earlier biographical notices that we possess regarding the nobility of Great Britain were as minute on their private as on their martial and political lives, we might probably have to record many more notices in regard to their bodily maladies of an import similar to the following:—The youngest son of Robert Blanchmains, Earl of Leicester, was himself a leper, and in the reign of Richard II. founded a leper hospital, dedicated to St. Leonard, on the north part of the town of Leicester.[229] The royal families of England and Scotland did not always remain exempt from the suspicion, at least, and accusation of leprosy, if not from the actual attack of the disease. Henry III. courted Margaret, Princess of Scotland, and the sister of Malcolm IV. The royal lady preferred the brave Hubert de Burgh, the minister of the English king. Hubert’s enemies afterwards alleged to King Henry, that he (Hubert) had dissuaded the Scottish princess from accepting the hand of the English monarch, by telling her “that Henry was a squint-eyed fool, a lewd man, a _leper_, deceitful, perjured, more faint-hearted than a woman, and utterly unfit for the company of any fair and noble lady.”—(Articles of Impeachment, as given by Speed.)[230] In reference to this unfounded accusation, I may state that Ryland mentions it as a local tradition that the leper-house of Waterford in Ireland was founded by King John (the father of Henry III.) in consequence of his son’s being affected at Lismore with an eruption that was supposed to be leprosy.[231] But even supposing the tradition correct, it could scarcely have been Henry the eldest legitimate son of John, since, at the date of his father’s expedition into Ireland, 1209 and 1210, Henry was a child of only five or six years of age, and in all probability did not accompany his royal sire. Different historians have alleged that Henry IV. was affected with leprosy in the latter part of his life. The immediate cause of his death seems to have been epilepsy, terminating, after a time, in an apoplectic attack; and some authors aver strongly that this was his only disease. Thus, in his Chronicles of England,[232] the celebrated old printer, Grafton, upholds that Henry was carried off by “a sore and sudaine disease called an apoplexie.” Hall, an author somewhat anterior in date, stoutly maintains this same view, for the king’s disease, as he observes, “was no lepry striken by the hand of God, as folish friers before declared, for then he neither would for shame nor for debility enterprize (as he did), so greate a journey as into Jewrie (Jerusalem), in his own persone, but he was taken with a sore apoplexye.”[233] Hollinshed,[234] quoting implicitly this account from “Maister Hall,” gravely adds, and he “had none other greefe nor maladie.” The dogmatic authority of Hall on this, as on other points, is not to be over much relied upon.