Page:The fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.djvu/21

Rh young prince in a castle in Yorkshire. The earl of Lincoln, then seven and twenty years of age, was next named. He remonstrated vrith his uncle privately; but fear of dividing the House of York against itself, and a disdain to make common cause with the dowager queen's relations, made him outwardly submit; but his plan was formed, and secretly all his efforts tended towards the restoring the children of Edward to their paternal rights.

The boys were sickly. Edward the Fifth, irritated by the extinction of the hopes which the intrigues of his mother had kept alive in his breast, wasted by imprisonment in the Tower, and brooking with untamed pride the change from a regal to a private station, pined and died. Richard, duke of York, was between ten and eleven; a sprightly, ingenuous boy, whose lively spirit wore out his frame, and this, added to confinement and attention to his dying brother, brought him also near the grave. It was on the death of Edward, that the earl of Lincoln visited the Tower, and saw young Richard. The accounts given by the attendants of his more than a child's devotion to his brother, his replies full of sportive fancy, his beauty, though his cheek was faded and his person grown thin, moved the generous noble to deep compassion. He ventured, under the strong influence of this feeling, to remonstrate warmly with his royal uncle, reproaching him with needless cruelty, and telhng him how in fact, though not in appearance, he was the murderer of his nephews, and would be so held by all mankind. Richard's ambition was satisfied by the success of his measures to obtain the crown; but his fears were awake. The duke of Buckingham was in arms against him—the queen and her surviving relatives were perpetually employed in exciting discontents in the kingdom. Richard feared that if they obtained the person of his nephew, he would be turned into an engine for his overthrow; while to obtain possession of him was the constant aim of their endeavours. He earnestly desired to reconcile himself to the queen, and to draw her from the sanctuary in which she had immured herself—she refused all his offers, unless her son was first placed in her hands.

His head, ripe with state plots, now conceived a scheme. He consented that Lincoln should take the duke of York under his charge, if he would first engage to keep his removal from the Tower, and even his existence, a secret from his enemies. Lincoln made the required promise; the young prince was conveyed to a country seat belonging to the earl, and Richard, in furtherance of his plan, caused a rumour to go abroad that he also was dead. No one knew with whom this report originated. When, to assure themselves, various nobles visited the Tower,