them under the narrow staircase that led to their chamber. That by Richard's command, the chaplain of the Tower, who died soon afterwards, removed their bodies and reinterred them under the stairs of the Tower Chapel, in the spot where, in Charles II.'s reign, the remains of two boys, which corresponded with the ages of young Edward and Richard, were found. The Protector may have given the order for their second interment from superstition or from a desire to conceal the place of their burial, or from a mixture of both motives. When Henry VII., on the attempt of Perkin Warbeck on the crown, investigated the question of the supposed murder, Tyrrell, who beyond all doubt had been commissioned by Richard to destroy the princes, and Tyrrell's only surviving accomplice, Deighton, spoke positively to having murdered the boys, but could not discover the remains of their victims in the spot in which they professed to have buried them. But it must be remembered that Tyrrell had the keys of the Tower for one night only, and might well have been ignorant of any subsequent interment. Shakespeare indeed makes Tyrrell say to Richard:

"The chaplain of the Tower has buried them,

But where I know not."

But it is hardly probable that Tyrrell, after the murderous act, would have handed over the bodies

to the priest without himself superintending the burial. The lines of Shakespeare seem to me to represent a confusion between the first and second burials, of the latter of which probably a vague rumour only had stolen abroad. Again, it would not have been difficult for Henry VII. to have caused supposititious remains to have been placed in some likely spot in the Tower, and the fact that he never professed to have found the bodies seems to me to prove the honesty of his investigation into a question so momentous to his sovereignty. Richard's At least, it seems clear that Richard fully believed his his nephews to have been murdered according to nephews his bloody orders. When all England was ringing murdered. with the rumours of

"The most arch deed of piteous massacre

Which ever yet this land was guilty of,"

he never produced either of the hapless boys, or
even countenanced the notion that either of them
was living. Would he not, had he thought it
possible for him, have adapted the words which
Shakespeare puts into the mouth of King John in
a similar conjunction?

"Does Arthur live! O'haste thee to the peers;
Throw this report on their incensed rage,

And make them tame to their obedience."

And I believe, and for the honour of England rejoice to believe, that the conviction that Richard

belief that

were

This mur- had been guilty of this foul crime was the chief chief cause cause of the overthrow of his throne.

der the

of

Richard's

The

language of the old chronicler, Grafton, seems to overthrow. me to depict truly the feelings of the nation when the hideous tale got abroad :—

account of its effect.

66

Grafton's 'King Richard, by his abominable and mischievous act, thinking himself well relieved both of fear and thought, would not have it kept counsel, but within a few days caused it to run in a common rumour that the two children were suddenly dead, and to this intent, as it is to be deemed, that now none heir male being alive of King Edward's body lawfully begotten, the people would be content with the more patient heart and quiet mind to obey him and suffer his rule and governance; but when the fame of this detestable fact was revealed and divulged through the whole realm, there fell generally such a dolor and inward sorrow into the hearts of all the people, that, all fear of his cruelty set aside, they, in every town, street, and place, openly wept and piteously sobbed. And when their sorrow was somewhat mitigate, their inward grudge could not refrain but cry out in places, public, and also private, furiously saying, 'What creature of all creatures is so malicious and so obstinate an enemy either to God, or to the Christian religion, or to human nature, which would not have abhorred, or at the least abstained, from so miserable a murder of

so execrable a tyranny. To murder a man is much odious, to kill a woman is in manner unnatural, but to slay and destroy innocent babes and young infants the whole world abhorreth, and the blood from the earth crieth for vengeance to almighty God.'

"For assuredly, after the death of Edward's children, when any blustering wind, perilous thunder, or terrible tempest chanced or were apparently like to happen, suddenly the people, having in their fresh memory the mischievous act of their king and prince, would openly speak and cry that God did take vengeance and punish the poor English men for the crime and offence of their ungracious king, whom they blamed, accursed, and wished to have extreme torture."

blunder.

In an earlier age Richard, on his brother's Richard's death, might, and probably would, have been duly crime a called to the throne, as John was, to the exclusion of the lineal heir. But he seized the crown, and repeated and exaggerated the crime of John in an age less tolerant of such iniquity. Yet the man had splendid gifts, sufficient to have made him a great English king, had he come to the throne by honourable means. During his short reign he displayed enlarged ideas of the kingly office. But in his furious unprincipled haste to secure the throne which he had seized, he had been hurried into the commission of a crime of

the foulest dye. We must rejoice that, to adopt without approving Talleyrand's cynical epigram on the murder of the Duke of Enghien by Napoleon I., this act of Richard's proved “worse than a crime-a blunder."

The report of the murder of the helpless boys revolted every man in England, however inured to the horrors of the recent civil wars. It did more, it made every mother, every woman in the land, his deadly enemy. In ordinary circumstances women are inclined by the timidity natural to their sex to acquiesce in the established order of government. But when the feeling of motherhood, happily for mankind one of the strongest in human nature, is outraged, they display a sublime indifference to consequences which puts to shame the normal courage of men. They who, on any other occasion, would have hung upon their husbands, lovers, or brothers, dissuading them from an uncertain conflict, were now the first to bid them go forth and combat the murderer of innocent boys.

Richard had been able to wade through slaughter to a throne," but he was not permitted to occupy it in peace. The bulk of the nation was, I believe, determined not to leave the crown A champion on that murderous head. But before a throne, of England which was certain to be desperately defended by a prince of Richard's unquestionable courage, could be assailed with any reasonable prospect of

to be found.