Page:The fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.djvu/57

Rh was resolved that a general pardon should be proclaimed to the insurgents. No exceptions were to be made; those persons then in the very act of setting up his adversary were included; for as, by the second decree, that the real earl of Warwick should be shown publicly in London, the deception would become manifest; if indeed they were deceived, it was thought more politic to reclaim them by clemency, than by severe measures to drive them to despair.

The third and last enactment was levelled against the queen dowager. Many of the council were astonished to hear it proposed, that she should forfeit all her goods and lands, and be confined for life in a convent, for having consented to the marriage of her daughter and Richard the Third, while the ready acquiescence of the king and his chief advisers made them perceive that this measure was no new resolve. These three decrees passed, the council separated, and Henry returned to Westminster, accompanied by Sir William Stanley. To him he spoke openly of the treason of the queen: he even ventured to say, that he was sure that some mystery lurked beneath; he commissioned Stanley, therefore, to notify the order of council to her majesty; but at the same time to show her, that disclosure, and reliance on the king, would obtain her pardon. Sir William Stanley was a courtier in the best sense of the term; a man of gentle manners; desirous of doing right, easily excited to compassion, but ambitious and timid; one in truth than whom none could be more dangerous; for his desire to please those immediately before him, led him to assume every appearance of sincerity, and perpetually to sacrifice the absent to the present.

Elizabeth heard, with utter dismay, the sentence passed against her;—courage was restored only when she found that her freedom could be purchased by the confession of her son's existence, and place of abode. She repelled Stanley's solicitations with disdain; answered his entreaties with an appeal to his own feelings, of how far, if such a secret existed, it were possible that she, a mother, should intrust it to the false and cruel king. Stanley speedily found his whole battery of persuasion exhausted; he withdrew in some wonder as to what the real state of things might be, and full of the deepest compassion. She had indeed scarcely veiled the truth to him; for, calling to mind the fate of the wretched Margaret of Anjou, she asked him, whether, like her, she should expose the young orphan York to the fate of the Lancastrian Prince Edward. But Stanley shrunk from being privy to such disclosures, and hastily withdrew.

Henry had not exhausted all his hopes: glad as he was to wreak his vengeance on the queen, and to secure her possessions to himself, he was not so blind as not to see that the knowledge