Page:Comic History of England.djvu/189

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DISORDER STILL THE POPULAR FAD.
185

two sons of Edward IV., so as to settle this gay young pretender; but he did not succeed in finding the remains, though they were afterwards discovered under the staircase of the White Tower, and buried in Westminster Abbey, where the floor is now paved with epitaphs, and where economy and grief are better combined, perhaps, than elsewhere in the world, the floor and tombstone being happily united, thus, as it were, killing two birds with one stone.

But how sad it is to-day to contemplate the situation occupied by Henry, forced thus to rummage the kingdom for the dust of two murdered princes, that he might, by unearthing a most wicked crime, prevent the success of a young pretender, and yet fearing to do so lest he might call the attention of the police to the royal record of homicide, regicide, fratricide, and germicide!

Most cruel of all this sad history, perhaps, was the execution of Stanley, the king's best friend in the past, who had saved his life in battle and crowned him at Bosworth. In an unguarded moment he had said that were he sure the young man was as he claimed. King Edward's son, he—Stanley—would not fight against him. For this purely unpartisan remark he yielded up his noble life in 1495.

Warbeck for some time went about trying to organize cheap insurrections, with poor success