the benefit of Henry? These were points which, like the fate of the young princes in the Tower, he chose to wrap in discreet silence. But the first question he seems to have answered in his own favour. For Richard himself, Howard duke of Norfolk, Lord Lovel, and some others, are attainted (p. 276) for "traiterously intending, compassing, and imagining" the death of Henry; of course before or at the battle of Bosworth; and while his right, unsupported by possession, could have rested only on an hereditary title which it was an insult to the nation to prefer. These monstrous proceedings explain the necessity of that conservative statute to which I have already alluded, which passed in the eleventh year of his reign, and afforded as much security for men following the plain line of rallying round the standard of their country as mere law can offer. There is some extraordinary reasoning upon this act in Carte's History (vol. ii. p. 844), for the purpose of proving that the adherents of George II. would not be protected by it on the restoration of the true blood. [456] Difference of Absolute and Limited Monarchy, p. 83. [457] Rot. Parl. vol. vi. p. 241. [458] 1 R. III. c. 2. [459] The long-debated question as to the murder of Edward and his brother seems to me more probably solved on the common supposition that it was really perpetrated by the orders of Richard, than on that of Walpole, Carte, Henry, and Laing, who maintain that the duke of York, at least, was in some way released from the Tower, and reappeared as Perkin Warbeck. But a very strong conviction either way is not readily attainable. NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII. (PART III.) NOTE I. Page 5.