find him alive in the Tower.(33) I mention that as a bare
possibility--but we may be very sure that if he did find Edward
alive there, he would not have notified his existence, to acquit
Richard and hazard his own crown. The circumstances of the murder
were evidently false, and invented by Henry to discredit Perkin; and
the time of the murder is absolutely a fiction, for it appears by
the roll of parliament which bastardized Edward the Fifth, that he
was then alive, which was seven months after the time assigned by
More for his murder, if Richard spared him seven months, what could
suggest a reason for his murder afterwards? To take him off then was
strengthening the plan of the earl of Richmond, who aimed at the
crown by marrying Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward the Fourth.
As the house of York never rose again, as the reverse of Richard's
fortune deprived him of any friend, and as no contemporaries but
Fabian and the author of the Chronicle have written a word on that
period, and they, too slightly to inform us, it is impossible to
know whether Richard ever took any steps to refute the calumny. But
we do know that Fabian only mentions the deaths of the princes as
reports, which is proof that Richard never declared their deaths, or
the death of either, as he would probably have done if he had
removed them for his own security. The confessions of Sir Thomas
More and lord Bacon that many doubted of the murder, amount to a
violent presumption that they were not murdered: and to a proof that
their deaths were never declared. No man has ever doubted that
Edward the Second, Richard the Second, and Henry the Sixth perished
at the times that were given out. Nor Henry the Fourth, nor Edward
the Fourth thought it would much help their titles to leave it
doubtful whether their competitors existed or not. Observe too, that
the chronicle of Croyland, after relating Richard's second
coronation at York, says, it was advised by some in the sanctuary at