continues Henry’s biographer, “both out of magnanimitie” (a most proper picture of so mean a prince) “and likewise out of wisdom, thinking that if he suffered death he would be forgotten too soon; but being kept alive, he would be a continual spectacle, and a kind of remedy against the like inchantments of people in time to come.”  What! do lawful princes live in dread of a possibility of phantoms!(37) Oh! no; but Henry knew what he had to fear; and he hoped by keeping up the memory of Simnel’s imposture, to discredit the true duke of York, as another puppet, when ever he should really appear.

(36) The earl of Lincoln assuredly did not mean to blacken his uncle Richard by whom he had been declared heir to the crown.  One should therefore be glad to know what account he gave of the escape of the young duke of York.  Is it probable that the Earl of Lincoln gave out, that the elder had been murdered?  It is more reasonable to suppose, that the earl asserted that the child had been conveyed away by means of the queen dowager or some other friend; and before I conclude this examination, that I think will appear most probably to have been the case.

(37) Henry had so great a distrust of his right to the crown in that in his second year he obtained a bull from pope Innocent to qualify the privilege of sanctuaries, in which was this remarkable clause, “That if any took sancturie for case of treason, the king might appoint him keepers to look to him in sanctuarie.”  Lord Bacon, p. 39.

That appearance did not happen till some years afterwards, and in Henry’s eleventh year.  Lord Bacon has taken infinite pains to prove a second imposture; and yet owns, “that the king’s manner of shewing things by pieces and by darke lights, hath so muffled it, that it hath left it almost a mysterie to this day.”  What has he left a mystery? and what did he try to muffle?  Not the imposture, but the truth.  Had so politic a man any interest to leave the matter doubtful?  Did he try to leave it so?  On the contrary, his diligence to detect the imposture was prodigious.  Did he publish his narrative to obscure or elucidate the transaction?  Was it his matter to muffle any point that he could clear up, especially when it behoved him to have it cleared?  When Lambert Simnel first personated the earl of Warwick, did not Henry exhibit that poor prince one Sunday throughout all the principal streets of London?  Was he not conducted to Paul’s cross, and openly examined by the nobility? “which did in effect marre the pageant in Ireland.”  Was not Lambert himself taken into Henry’s service, and kept in his court for the same purpose?  In short, what did Henry ever muffle and disguise but the truth? and why was his whole conduct so different in the cases of Lambert and Perkin, if their cases were not totally different?  No doubt remains in the former; the gross falshoods and contradictions in which Henry’s account of the latter is involved, make it evident that he himself could never detect the imposture of the latter, if it was one.  Dates, which every historian has neglected, again come to our aid, and cannot be controverted.