Again, that a mere page should have selected as chief butcher a nobleman high in office, knighted long before this in Scotland, and that this same Sir Edward Tyrrel should have been continued in office around the mother of the murdered princes, and honored year after year with high office by Henry VII., and actually made confidential governor of Guisnes, and royal commissioner for a treaty with France, seems perfectly incredible. All of Shakspeare's representation of this most slandered courtier is, indeed, utterly false; while Bacon's repetition of the principal charges only shows how impossible it is to recover a reputation that has once been lost, and how careless history has been in repeating calumnies that have once found circulation. Bayley's history of the Tower proves that what has been popularly christened the Bloody Tower could never have been the scene of the supposed murder; that no bones were found under any staircase there; so that this pretended confirmation of the murder in the time of Charles II., on which many writers have relied, vanishes into the stuff which dreams are made of. And yet by this charge which the antiquarian Stowe declared was 'never proved by any credible witness,' which Grafton, Hall, and Holinshead agreed could never be certainly known; which Bacon declared that King Henry in vain endeavored to substantiate, a brave and politic monarch lost his crown, life, and historic fame! Nay, it is a curious fact that Richard could not safely contradict the report of the princes' deaths when it broke out with the outbreak of civil war, because it would have been furnishing to the rebellion a justifying cause and a royal head, instead of a milksop whom he despised and felt certain to overthrow.