Six years after the publication of the first Quarto of _Bussy D'Ambois_ Chapman issued a sequel, _The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois_, which, as we learn from the title-page, had been "often presented at the private Playhouse in the White-Fryers." But in the interval he had written two other plays based on recent French history, _Byrons Conspiracie_ and _The Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron_, and in certain aspects _The Revenge_ is more closely related to these immediate forerunners than to the piece of which it is the titular successor. The discovery which I recently was fortunate enough to make of a common immediate source of the two Byron plays and of _The Revenge_ accentuates the connection between them, and at the same time throws fresh light on the problem of the _provenance_ of the second D'Ambois drama.
In his scholarly monograph _Quellen Studien zu den Dramen George Chapmans, Massingers, und Fords_ (1897), E. Koeppel showed that the three connected plays were based upon materials taken from Jean de Serres's _Inventaire Général de l'Histoire de France_ (1603), Pierre Matthieu's _Histoire de France durant Sept Années de Paix du Regne de Henri IV_ (1605), and P. V. Cayet's _Chronologie Septénaire de l'Histoire de la Paix entre les Roys de France et d'Espagne_ (1605). The picture suggested by Koeppel's treatise was of Chapman collating a number of contemporary French historical works, and choosing from each of them such portions as suited his dramatic purposes. But this conception, as I have shown in the _Athenæum_ for Jan. 10, 1903, p. 51, must now be abandoned. Chapman did not go to the French originals at all, but to a more easily accessible source, wherein the task of selection and rearrangement had already been in large measure performed. In 1607 the printer, George Eld, published a handsome folio, of which the British Museum possesses a fine copy (c. 66, b. 14), originally the property of Prince Henry, eldest son of James I. Its title is: "_A General Inventorie of the Historie of France, from the beginning of that Monarchie, unto the Treatie of Vervins, in the Yeare 1598. Written by Jhon de Serres. And continued unto these Times, out of the best Authors which have written of that Subiect. Translated out of French into English by Edward Grimeston, Gentleman._" This work, the popularity of which is attested by the publication of a second, enlarged, edition in 1611, was the direct source of the "Byron" plays, and of _The Revenge_.