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.

Richard duke of York was born in 1474. Perkin Warbeck was not heard
of before 1495, when duke Richard would have been Twenty-one.
Margaret of York, duchess dowager of Burgundy, and sister of Edward
the Fourth, is said by lord Bacon to have been the Juno who
persecuted the pious Aeneas, Henry, and set up this phantom against
him. She it was, say the historians, and says Lord Bacon, p, 115,
"who informed Perkin of all the circumstances and particulars that
concerned the person of Richard duke of York, which he was to act,
describing unto him the personages, lineaments, and features of the
king and queen, his pretended parents, and of his brother and
sisters, and divers others that were nearest him in his childhood;
together with all passages, some secret, some common that were fit
for a child's memory, until the death of king Edward. Then she added