that the queen was incurably ill.  The Chronicle says, she died of a languishing distemper.  Did that look like poison?  It is scarce necessary to say that a dispensation from the pope was in that age held so clear a solution of all obstacles to the marriage of near relations, and was so easily to be obtained or purchased by a great prince, that Richard would not have been thought by his contemporaries to have incurred any guilt, even if he had proposed to wed his neice, which however is far from being clear to have been his intention.

The behaviour of the queen dowager must also be noticed.  She was stripped by her son-in-law Henry of all her possessions, and confined to a monastery, for delivering up her daughters to Richard.  Historians too are lavish in their censures on her for consenting to bestow her daughter on the murderer of her sons and brother.  But if the murder of her sons, is, as we have seen, most uncertain, this solemn charge falls to the ground:  and for the deaths of her brothers and lord Richard Grey, one of her elder sons, it has already appeared that she imputed them to Hastings.  It is much more likely that Richard convinced her he had not murdered her sons, than that she delivered up her daughters to him believing it.  The rigour exercised on her by Henry the Seventh on her countenancing Lambert Simnel, evidently set up to try the temper of the nation in favour of some prince of the house of York, is a violent presumption that the queen dowager believed her second son living:  and notwithstanding all the endeavours of Henry to discredit Perkin Warbeck, it will remain highly probable that many more who ought to know the truth, believed so likewise; and that fact I shall examine next.

It was in the second year of Henry the Seventh that Lambert Simnel appeared.  This youth first personated Richard duke of York, then Edward earl of Warwick; and was undoubtedly an impostor.  Lord Bacon owns that it was whispered every-where, that at least one of the children of Edward the Fourth was living.  Such whispers prove two things; one, that the murder was very uncertain:  the second, that it would have been very dangerous to disprove the murder; Henry being at least as much interested as Richard had been to have the children dead.  Richard had set them aside as bastards, and thence had a title to the crown; but Henry was himself the issue of a bastard line, and had no title at all.  Faction had set him on the throne, and his match with the supposed heiress of York induced the nation to wink at the defect in his own blood.  The children of Clarence and of the duchess of Suffolk were living; so was the young duke of Buckingham, legitimately sprung from the youngest son of Edward the Third; whereas Henry came of the spurious stock of John of Gaunt, Lambert Simnel appeared before Henry had had time to disgust the nation, as he did afterwards, by his tyranny, cruelty, and exactions.  But what was most remarkable, the queen dowager tampered