ueen; and that Richard feared that alliance, is plain from his
sending her to the castle of Sheriff-Hutton on the landing of
Richmond.

(34) "Per haec festa natalia choreis aut tripudiis, variisque
mutatoriis vestium Annae reginae atque dominae Elizabeth,
primogenitae defuncti regis, eisdem colore & forma distributis
nimis intentum est: dictumque a multis est, ipsum regem aut
expectata morte reginae aut per divortium, matrimonio cum dicta
Elizabeth contrahendo mentem omnibus modis applicare," p. 572. If
Richard projected this match at Christmas, he was not likely to let
these intentions be perceived so early, nor to wait till March, if
he did not know that the queen was incurably ill. The Chronicle
says, she died of a languishing distemper. Did that look like
poison? It is scarce necessary to say that a dispensation from the
pope was in that age held so clear a solution of all obstacles to
the marriage of near relations, and was so easily to be obtained or
purchased by a great prince, that Richard would not have been
thought by his contemporaries to have incurred any guilt, even if he
had proposed to wed his neice, which however is far from being clear
to have been his intention.

The behaviour of the queen dowager must also be noticed. She was
stripped by her son-in-law Henry of all her possessions, and
confined to a monastery, for delivering up her daughters to Richard.
Historians too are lavish in their censures on her for consenting to
bestow her daughter on the murderer of her sons and brother. But if
the murder of her sons, is, as we have seen, most uncertain, this
solemn charge falls to the ground: and for the deaths of her
brothers and lord Richard Grey, one of her elder sons, it has
already appeared that she imputed them to Hastings. It is much more
likely that Richard convinced her he had not murdered her sons, than
that she delivered up her daughters to him believing it. The rigour
exercised on her by Henry the Seventh on her countenancing Lambert
Simnel, evidently set up to try the temper of the nation in favour
of some prince of the house of York, is a violent presumption
that the queen dowager believed her second son living: and
notwithstanding all the endeavours of Henry to discredit Perkin
Warbeck, it will remain highly probable that many more who ought to
know the truth, believed so likewise; and that fact I shall examine
next.

It was in the second year of Henry the Seventh that Lambert Simnel
ap