In Henry VII’s time Brackenbury was dead, and so it is said was the priest; Forest, too, had ended his days miserably in a sanctuary.  But it does not appear what had become of either Green or the page.  Tyrell and Dighton were the only persons said to have been examined; and though we are told that they both confessed, yet there is a circumstance that makes the confession look exceedingly suspicious.  Tyrell was detained in prison, and afterward executed, for a totally different offence; while, as Bacon tells us, “John Dighton, who it seemeth spake best for the King, was forthwith set at liberty.”  Taking Bacon’s view of the circumstances of the disclosure as if it were infallible, the sceptics here find matter of very grave suspicion.  “In truth,” says Walpole, “every step of this pretended discovery, as it stands in Lord Bacon, warns us to give no heed to it.  Dighton and Tyrell agreed both in a tale, as the King gave out.  Their confession, therefore, was not publicly made; and as Sir James Tyrell, too, was suffered to live, but was shut up in the Tower and put to death afterward for we know not what treason, what can we believe but that Dighton was some low mercenary wretch, hired to assume the guilt of a crime he had not committed, and that Sir James Tyrell never did, never would, confess what he had not done, and was therefore put out of the way on a fictitious imputation?  It must be observed, too, that no inquiry was made into the murder on the accession of Henry VII—­the natural time for it, when the passions of men were heated, and when the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Lovel, Catesby, Ratcliffe, and the real abettors or accomplices of Richard were attainted and executed.  No mention of such a murder was made in the very act of parliament that attainted Richard himself and which would have been the most heinous aggravation of his crimes.  And no prosecution of the supposed assassins was ever thought of till eleven years afterward, on the appearance of Perkin Warbeck.”  Such are the striking arguments by which it has been sought to cast a doubt upon the murder, and particularly More’s account of it.

To all which it may be replied, in the first place, that it is by no means necessary to suppose More’s narrative, though it appeared to him the most credible account he had heard, absolutely correct in all its details, especially in those which he mentions as mere reports.  His authority was evidently the alleged confession of Tyrell and Dighton, obtained second-hand.  This, though true in the main, may not have been absolutely correct, even as it was first delivered, and may have been somewhat less accurate as it was reported to Sir Thomas, who perhaps added from hearsay a few errors of his own, like that about Sir James Tyrell’s knighthood.