(6) Fabian.

(7) It should be remarked too, that the duke of Gloucester is positively said to be celebrating his brother’s obsequies there.  It not only strikes off part of the term by allowing the necessary time for the news of king Edward’s death to reach York, and for the preparation to be made there to solemnize a funeral for him; but this very circumstance takes off from the probability of Richard having as yett laid any plan for dispossessing his nephew.  Would he have loitered at York at such a crisis, if he had intended to step into the throne?

But whether the circumstances are true, or whether artfully imagined, it is certain that the king, with a small force, arrived at Northampton, and thence proceeded to Stony Stratford.  Earl Rivers remained at Northampton, where he was cajoled by the two dukes till the time of rest, when the gates of the inn were suddenly locked, and the earl made prisoner.  Early in the morning the two dukes hastened to Stony Stratford, where, in the king’s presence, they picked a quarrel with his other half-brother, the lord Richard Grey, accusing him, the marquis Dorset, and their uncle Rivers, of ambitious and hostile designs, to which ends the marquis had entered the Tower, taken treasure thence, and sent a force to sea.

“These things,” says Sir Thomas, “the dukes knew, were done for good and necessary purposes, and by appointment of the council; but somewhat they must say,” &c.  As Sir Thomas has not been pleased to specify those purposes, and as in those times at least privy counsellors were exceedingly complaisant to the ruling powers, he must allow us to doubt whether the purposes of the queen’s relations were quite so innocent as he would make us believe; and whether the princes of the blood and the antient nobility had not some reasons to be jealous that the queen was usurping more power than the laws had given her.  The catastrophe of her whole family so truly deserves commiseration, that we are apt to shut our eyes to all her weakness and ill-judged policy; and yet at every step we find how much she contributed to draw ruin on their heads and her own, by the confession even of her apologists.  The Duke of Gloucester was the first prince of the blood, the constitution pointed him out as regent; no will, no disposition of the late king was even alleged to bar his pretensions; he had served the state with bravery, success, and fidelity; and the queen herself, who had been insulted by Clarence, had had no cause to complain of Gloucester.  Yet all her conduct intimated designs of governing by force in the name of her son.(8) If these facts are impartially stated, and grounded on the confession of those who inveigh most bitterly against Richard’s memory, let us allow that at least thus far he acted as most princes would have done in his situation, in a lawless and barbarous age, and rather instigated by others, than from any before-conceived ambition and system.  If the journeys of Percival are true, Buckingham was the devil that tempted Richard; and if Richard still wanted instigation, then it must follow, that he had not murdered Henry the Sixth, his son, and Clarence, to pave his own way to the crown.  If this fine story of Buckingham and Percival is not true, what becomes of Sir Thomas More’s credit, on which the whole fabric leans?