celebrated on the same day and the figure of John in his usual hermit's dress, carrying a lamb, recalls the shepherds, whose visit after the birth of Christ was often combined in the same scene as the visit of the Magi or three kings. That two of the presenting saints are kings may also evoke a contemporary story that Richard's birth in Bordeaux in France was attended by the Kings of Castile, Navarre, and Portugal. John the Baptist was Richard's patron saint, and Saint Edward and Saint Edmund had both been English kings. Richard had a special devotion to Edmund, who with St. George is one of the patron saints of England. The diptych also serves as a family portrait of Richard's family and immediate antecedents. There is a strong resemblance between the three saints, and it has been suggested they represent not just Saints Edmund, Edward the Confessor, and John the Baptist, but also either Edward III (Richard's immediate predecessor) with his sons Edward the Black Prince (Richard's father) and John of Gaunt (Richard's uncle, and a powerful figure during Richard's youth); or, alternatively, the Black Prince doubled with the Baptist (the Black Prince, like John the Baptist, was never a king, and the Baptist takes the most paternal role in the scene), Edward III doubled with the Confessor, and Edward III's father Edward II doubled with Edmund the Martyr (like Edmund, Edward II was a murdered king; Richard revered Edward, and tried to have him canonised in 1395). The Virgin Mary is considered to represent Richard's mother, Joan of Kent, and the infant Jesus to be Edward of Angoulême, Richard's older brother who died in childhood. The date of the Wilton Diptych has been the subject of considerable controversy among art historians. The National Gallery follow a broad current consensus in dating the painting to the last five years of Richard's reign, but dates between 1377 and about 1413 have been proposed. Richard was born in 1367, and the portrait seems to be of a younger man than the twenty-eight-year-old he was in 1395. It has been suggested that the eleven angels each represent a year of his age at the start of his actual reign, which began in 1377, when he gave eleven of the coins called angels to "Our Lady of the Pew" at Westminster Abbey. The painting would then have been made more than fifteen