Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third

Excerpt: ...earl of Warwick in company with Richard at Warwick the year before on the progress to York, which shows that the king treated his nephew with kindness, and did not confine him till the plots of his enemies thickening, Richard found it necessary to secure such as had any pretensions to the crown. This will account for his preferring the earl of Lincoln, who, being his sister's son, could have no prior claim before himself. The more generous behaviour of Richard to the same young prince (Warwick) ought to be applied to the case of Edward the Fifth, if no proof exists of the murder. But what suspicious words are those of Sir Thomas More, quoted above, and unobserved by all our historians. "Some remained long in doubt," says he, "whether they (the children) were in his (Richard's) days destroyed or no." If they were not destroyed in his days, in whose days were they murdered? Who will tell me that Henry the Seventh did not find, the eldest at least, prisoner in the Tower; and if he did, what was there in Henry's nature or character to prevent our surmizes going farther. And here let me lament that two of the greatest men in our annals have prostituted their admirable pens, the one to blacken a great prince, the other to varnish a pitiful tyrant. I mean the two (29) chancellors, Sir Thomas More and lord Bacon. The most senseless stories of the mob are converted to history by the former; the latter is still more culpable; he has held up to the admiration of posterity, and what is worse, to the imitation of succeeding princes, a man whose nearest approach to wisdom was mean cunning; and has raised into a legislator, a sanguinary, sordid, and trembling usurper. Henry was a tyrannic husband, and ungrateful master; he cheated as well as oppressed his subjects,(30) bartered the honour of the nation for foreign gold, and cut off every branch of the royal family, to ensure possession to his no title. Had he had any title, he could claim it but from his mother,...