for we know not what reason.  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 Tirrel 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 the Seventh, 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 (25)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 even thought of till eleven years afterwards, on the appearance of Perkin Warbeck.  Tirrel is not named in the act of attainder to which I have had recourse; and such omissions cannot but induce us to surmise that Henry had never been certain of the deaths of the princes, nor ever interested himself to prove that both were dead, till he had great reason to believe that one of them was alive.  Let me add, that if the confessions of Dighton and Tirrel were true, Sir Thomas More had no occasion to recur to the information of his unknown credible informers.  If those confessions were not true, his informers were not credible.

(24) It appears by Hall, that Sir James Tirrel had even enjoyed the favor of Henry; for Tirrel is named as captain of Guards in a list of valiant officers that were sent by Henry, in his fifth year, on an expedition into Flanders.  Does this look as if Tirrel was so much as suspected of the murder.  And who can believe his pretended confession afterwards?  Sir James was not executed till Henry’s seventeenth year, on suspicion of treason, which suspicion arose on the flight of the earl of Suffolk.  Vide Hall’s Chronicle, fol. 18 & 55.

(25) There is a heap of general accusations alledged to have been committed by Richard against Henry, in particular of his having shed infant’s blood.  Was this sufficient specification of the murder of a king?  Is it not rather a base way of insinuating a slander, of which no proof could be given?  Was not it consonant to all Henry’s policy of involving every thing in obscure and general terms?

Having thus disproved the account of the murder, let us now examine whether we can be sure that the murder was committed.

Of all men it was most incumbent on cardinal Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury, to ascertain the fact.  To him had the queen entrusted her younger son, and the prelate had pledged himself for his security—­unless every step of this history is involved in falshood.  Yet what was the behaviour of the archbishop?  He appears not to have made the least inquiry into the reports of the murder of both children; nay, not even after Richard’s death:  on the contrary,