This ridiculous farce was soon after followed by a scene truly tragical—­the murder of the two young princes.  Richard gave orders to Sir Robert Brakenbury, constable of the Tower, to put his nephews to death, but this gentleman, who had sentiments of honor, refused to have any hand in the infamous office.  The tyrant then sent for Sir James Tyrrel, who promised obedience; and he ordered Brakenbury to resign to this gentleman the keys and government of the Tower for one night.  Tyrrel, choosing three associates, Slater, Dighton, and Forest, came in the night-time to the door of the chamber where the princes were lodged, and, sending in the assassins, he bade them execute their commission, while he himself stayed without.  They found the young princes in bed and fallen into a profound sleep.  After suffocating them with the bolster and pillows, they showed their naked bodies to Tyrrel, who ordered them to be buried at the foot of the stairs, deep in the ground, under a heap of stones, 1483.

These circumstances were all confessed by the actors in the following reign; they were never punished for the crime, probably because Henry, whose maxims of government were extremely arbitrary, desired to establish it as a principle that the commands of the reigning sovereign ought to justify every enormity in those who paid obedience to them.  But there is one circumstance not so easy to be accounted for:  it is pretended that Richard, displeased with the indecent manner of burying his nephews, whom he had murdered, gave his chaplain orders to dig up the bodies, and to inter them in consecrated ground; and as the man died soon after, the place of their burial remained unknown, and the bodies could never be found by any search which Henry could make for them.  Yet in the reign of Charles II, when there was occasion to remove some stones and to dig in the very spot which was mentioned as the place of their first interment, the bones of two persons were there found, which by their size exactly corresponded to the age of Edward and his brother.  They were concluded with certainty to be the remains of those princes, and were interred under a marble monument by orders of King Charles.

The first acts of Richard’s administration were to bestow rewards on those who had assisted him in usurping the crown, and to gain by favors those who, he thought, were best able to support his future government.

But the person who, both from the greatness of his services and the power and splendor of his family, was best entitled to favors under the new government, was the Duke of Buckingham, and Richard seemed determined to spare no pains or bounty in securing him to his interests.  But it was impossible that friendship could long remain inviolate between two men of such corrupt minds as Richard and the Duke of Buckingham.  The Duke, soon after Richard’s accession, began to form a conspiracy against the government, and attempted to overthrow that usurpation which he himself had