Dr. Morton was actually present at Tewkesbury. If young Edward was murdered he must have known it. Yet in a work prepared for the express purpose of enumerating the alleged crimes of Richard he said {192} nothing. He had no scruples. He repeats all he can think of, with the object of heaping opprobrium on Richard's memory. But there is not a hint about assassinating Edward of Lancaster. Morton's silence, under these circumstances, amounts to a proof that the story was a fabrication of later times. André, Rous, and Morton wrote before Polydore Virgil, and when the Italian's calumny had not yet been invented. It cannot be that Virgil found out what the less vigilant André, Rous, and Morton overlooked. If anyone knew all the details of the battle of Tewkesbury at first hand, it was Morton. He was there. His silence explodes the fable. It also convicts Polydore Virgil of having fabricated an exceptionally foul slander, with a rank scent of its Borgian origin:-- 'Virgilii duo sunt: alter Maro: tu Polydore Alter: Tu Mendax: ille Poeta fuit.'[21] Unless the testimony of those who were absent, and for the most part unborn, is to be preferred to that of eye-witnesses, and that of future generations to contemporaries, the fable of young Edward's murder ought never again to find a place in serious history. [Sidenote: Death of Henry VI] The charge against the Duke of Gloucester that he murdered Henry VI. is an insinuation rather than an accusation. None of his traducers state it as a fact. One says 'as men constantly say,' another, 'it was the continual report,' another, 'as many believe.' We must, therefore, first treat this alleged 'continual {193} report' as a rumour only, and judge of it from probabilities. We are asked to believe that young Richard, a boy of eighteen, who had just won great military renown, arrived at the Tower in the evening of one day with orders to proceed on active service very early the next morning; that, although fully occupied with preparations for his departure, he found time to induce Lord Rivers, the Constable of the Tower, and his political enemy, to deliver up charge to him in order that he might assassinate a defenceless and feeble invalid with his own hand, a deed which might just as well have been perpetrated by any hired jailer; that it was done without his brother Edward's knowledge, and that, although the deed must have been done with the knowledge of Lord Rivers and his officials, of Henry's ten servants and three readers, yet there was never any certainty about the matter. Rivers, be it remembered, was not Richard's friend. This grossly improbable rumour bears the evidence of its origin clearly marked. It was put forward in the reign and in the interests of Henry VII. It was a rumour manufactured by his paid writers and their followers. We can examine the process.