Sir Thomas More, writing twenty-eight years after Richard’s death, tells the story of the crime, and there is no good reason to dispute its substantial accuracy. He tells us that the king plotted the death of the young princes while making a holiday progress through the country. From Gloucester he dispatched one of his pages to Sir Robert Brackenbury, the governor of the Tower, commanding him to make away with the lads quietly and speedily. Brackenbury indignantly refused the office of assassin, but a more facile tool was found in Sir James Tyrell, who had already stained his hands in secret crime. The princes were confined in the Portcullis Tower, under the constant supervision of four keepers, their personal attendant being a fellow known as Black Will or Will Slaughter. Richard roused Tyrell from his bed at midnight, and sent him to the Tower with an order commanding Brackenbury to give up the keys of the fortress. “Then,” says Sir Thomas More, “Sir James Tyrell desired that the princes should be murdered in bed, to the execution whereof he appropriated Miles Forest, one of their keepers, a fellow flesh-bred in murder, and to him joined John Dighton, his own horse-keeper, a big, broad, square knave. The young king had certainly a clear apprehension of his fate, for he was heard sighingly to say, ‘I would mine uncle would let me have my life, though he taketh my crown.’ After which time the prince never tied his points nor anything attended to himself, but that young babe, his brother, lingered in thought and heaviness till the traitorous deed delivered them from their wretchedness. “All their other attendants being removed from them, and the harmless children in bed, these men came into their chamber, and suddenly lapping them in the clothes smothered and stifled them till thoroughly dead. Then laying out their bodies on the bed, they fetched Sir James to see them, who caused the murderers to bury them at the stairfoot, deep in the ground, under a heap of stones. Then rode Sir James in great haste to King Richard, and showed him the manner of the murder, who gave him great thanks.” More than two centuries later the skeletons of two young lads were found under a staircase leading to the chapel in the White Tower. In all probability they were the mortal remains of the unhappy princes. On the eve of the battle which resulted in the overthrow and death of the murderer king, Shakespeare depicts him as visited by the ghosts of the many whom he has foully slain. The spirits of the murdered boys appear hand in hand:— “Dream on thy cousins smothered in the Tower: Let us be lead within thy breast, Richard, And weigh thee down to ruin, shame, and death. Thy nephews’ souls bid thee despair and die!” And thus do they hearten the avenger, whose forces are even now marshalled on Bosworth Field:—