. . .Shakespeare's use of anachronisms in the history plays must be seen as a self-conscious choice, a deliberate use of a method that distinguished the poet from the historiographer and formed the subject of acrimonious debate. Moreover, it was a method that did not go unnoticed among some, at least, in Shakespeare’s original audience. On the day before their unsuccessful uprising against Queen Elizabeth, followers of the Earl of Essex sponsored a performance of Richard II, apparently hoping that the play would incite its audience to join their rebellion. A tiny anachronism, not likely to attract attention in a modern theater, occurs in Act 2, scene 1, when one of the fourteenth-century conspirators against King Richard charges that the king has used benevolences to extort money from his subjects. Shakespeare may have known that Richard II never used the forced loans called benevolences; for Holinshed, his source for most of the history plays, states that benevolence were introduced by Edward IV, who reigned late in the following century, and the authorities in Elizabeth's English certainly knew that Richard II never used benevolences because this very anachronism—present not only in Shakespeare's play but also in a seditious Life of Henry VIII by Sir John Hayward—was cited at the trial of Essex as evidence that "the times of Elizabeth rather than those of Richard II were in question."