The long-sought pretext for getting rid of Tyrrel was found in 1502. The usurper dreaded the Earl of Suffolk, King Richard's nephew, as a claimant to the throne. He heard that Tyrrel had favoured the escape of the ill-fated young prince to Germany. Henry would be terrified at the idea of Tyrrel taking the side of another claimant, and publicly denouncing his misdeeds. {273} He ordered the arrest of his accomplice, but Tyrrel refused to surrender the castle of Guisnes. He was besieged by the whole garrison of Calais. Henry then ordered Dr. Fox, the Bishop of Winchester and Lord Privy Seal, one of his most intimate associates, to send a promise under the privy seal, to the effect that Tyrrel should come and go in security if he would confer with Sir Thomas Lovell, Henry's Chancellor of the Exchequer, on board a ship at Calais. Tyrrel should have known his master by this time. But even he had not gauged the full depth of Tudor perfidy. He was deceived by the 'pulchris verbis' of Bishop Fox.[45] When he came on board he was told that he would be pitched overboard unless he sent a token to his son to deliver up the castle. The token was sent, and the King's promise under his privy seal was broken. Tyrrel was safely locked up in a dungeon of the Tower and beheaded without trial and in great haste on May 6, 1502. At length Henry could breathe freely. Green and Tyrrel were dead. Slater does not appear again, so it {274} may be assumed that he also had been got rid of. Only Dighton remained. He had to reside at Calais on the proceeds of his sinecure in Lincolnshire, and to be useful as a false witness. We know from Rastell and Grafton that he did live and die at Calais. The identity of names suggests the probability that he was a brother or son of the John Dighton who was Bailiff of Ayton Manor. The story told in the publications of Grafton and Rastell was generally accepted as true; although, even after the lapse of so many years, there must have been many old people who knew it to be false. These people had the choice between silence and ruin. As they died off, the belief in the story became more and more universal. This fable, appearing first in Grafton, was the final touch to the hideous and grotesque caricature which was portrayed by the Tudor historians and dramatised by Shakespeare. The history of its reception in all its absurd and improbable details, of the ineradicable prejudice which could keep it alive for four centuries, and long after sound methods of criticism had begun to be applied to other historical questions, forms a curious chapter in the record of human credulity. [Sidenote: Death of the Earl of Warwick]