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92 on the part of Charles to Estaples. They soon returned, bringing the rough draft of a treaty, by which peace and amity were to be maintained betwixt the two sovereigns during their lives, and a year afterwards. Even this Henry affected to decline, and only consented to give way at the earnest entreaty of his already-mentioned four-and-twenty officers.

After having thus assumed all this pretence to exonerate himself from censure, Henry signed a peace on the following terms:—Charles was to retain Brittany for ever, and he was to pay Henry 620,000 crowns in gold for the money advanced by Henry on account of Brittany and his present expenses, and 125,000 crowns in gold as arrears of the pension paid to Edward IV. by Louis XI. He was also to continue this pension of 25,000 crowns to Henry and his heirs. The whole amount which Henry sacked was 745,000 crowns, equal to £400,000 of our present money. The members of his council, who openly acted the part of petitioners of this peace, are said not only to have been instructed by Henry to perform this obnoxious duty, but to have been gained by the bribes of the French king, who was anxious to make short work of it, that he might proceed on an expedition which he had set his mind upon against Naples. They went about declaring that it was the most glorious peace that any king of England ever made with France, and that if Henry's subjects presumed to censure it, they were ready to take all the blame upon themselves.

Having used all these precautions to ward off the reproaches of his subjects, Henry ratified the peace on the 6th of November, and led back his army to England. There, though he had the money safely in his chests, the disappointment and indignation of the people were extreme, and tended to diminish his sordid satisfaction. The people protested that he had been trading on the honour of the nation, and had sold its interests and reputation for his own vile gain, and his enemies did not neglect to avail themselves of his unpopularity. During the past year, a young man had landed in Cork, of a singularly fascinating exterior and insinuating address. He represented himself to be no other than the Duke of York, the younger of the two princes who were supposed to have been murdered in the Tower. He was a fine young man, apparently exactly of the age of the Duke of York, and bearing a striking likeness to Edward IV. "Such a mercurial," says Bacon, "as the like hath seldom been known; and he had such a crafty and bewitching fashion, both to move pity and induce belief, as was like a kind of fascination or enchantment." If he were an impostor, he was so admirably qualified to act his part that he might scorn created for the purpose; and so well did he act it, that it remains a moot point to the present day whether he were the true prince or not. For our own part, we can have little doubt as to the matter. It was the age of impostors. Lambert Simnel had been only recently played off, and that but clumsily. He had been originally designed to support this character; but had, for reasons best known to the conspirators, been made to assume that of the Earl of Warwick. As we have surmised, probably as the queen-dowager was concerned in it, that plot had not meant to do more than alarm Henry, and induce him to act more favourably towards the queen and the party of York. Transparent as was the delusion, it had actually shaken Henry on his throne, and led to a sanguinary conflict. This plot, more adapted to the increased resentment of the Yorkists, appeared to have a deeper and deadlier aim. The queen-dowager did not appear in it; and it therefore struck more ruthlessly at the very existence of the king and his whole line. It was in the highest degree-artful in its construction, and widely supported by high and influential men. It had in it all the marks of proceeding from that manufactory of treason against Henry—the Court of the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy. This princess, the sister of Edward IV., with all her virtues, was a deadly enemy of Henry Tudor. She hated him as the overturner of her own family; she hated him still more intensely for his insult to her house in his treatment of the queen and her mother, and his settled repugnance to the whole party of York. There can be little doubt, therefore, that this scheme, as well as that of Simnel, was concocted at her Court. That the present pretender could not possibly be the real Duke of York is sufficiently clear to our minds for these two reasons:—When Richard III. determined to murder the two princes, it was to exterminate the male offspring of Edward IV., and it is not likely that he would have suffered one of the two to escape. Had he done so, he had better have done nothing; for to stain his hands, in the blood of the older would have been utterly useless while the younger remained. If the Duke of York, therefore, had really escaped, we do not believe that he would have murdered the Prince of Wales. So long as the Duke of York was with his mother in the sanctuary, she, and every one, felt that the Prince of Wales was safe, even in the Tower. But once in the Tower together, their doom was sealed.

The only possibility of escape must have been in the fact of the hired assassins turning pitiful, and allowing the intended victims to escape. But would they murder one and save the other? Such a thing is contrary to nature. If they resolved to spare one they would spare both. But the discovery of the bones of the two boys long afterwards, buried precisely where it might be expected that they lay, in one coffin or chest, and tallying in every circumstance of age and relative size, sufficiently proves that they spared neither. Henry himself, as we shall see, was anxious to discover these remains, as a positive evidence of the actual death of both the boys, but could not. That discovery was reserved to a much later period, and was the result of accident, rendering the result the more conclusive, as there could then be no suspicion even that Henry had these skeletons first buried and then found. The whole of the evidence compels us to regard the present pretended Duke of York as thoroughly an impostor as Simnel himself. What would appear to have been the real story of this remarkable pretender, so far as we can gather from the records of the time, is this:—

Margaret, the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy, having played off Lambert Simnel, devised this scheme, or was supplied with it by the Yorkist refugees at her Court, who had immediate and constant communion with the heads of the York faction in England. A young man was industriously sought after who should well represent the Duke of York, though she knew him to be dead. Such a youth was found in the son, or reputed son, of one John Osbeck,