Tyrrel, choosing three associates, Slater, Dighton, and Forest, came in the night-time to the door of the chamber where the princes were lodged, and, sending in the assassins, he bade them execute their commission, while he himself stayed without.

Armed with this document he took possession of the place, and proceeded to the work of death by the instrumentality of Miles Forest, one of the four jailers in whose custody the princes were, and John Dighton, his own groom.

For besides Tyrell, Dighton, and Forest, the chief actors, there were Brackenbury, Green the page, one Black Will, or Will Slaughter, who guarded the princes, and the priest who buried them, all fully aware of the circumstances of the crime.

Tyrell and Dighton were the only persons said to have been examined; and though we are told that they both confessed, yet there is a circumstance that makes the confession look exceedingly suspicious.

Tyrell was detained in prison, and afterward executed, for a totally different offence; while, as Bacon tells us, "John Dighton, who it seemeth spake best for the King, was forthwith set at liberty."

Dighton and Tyrell agreed both in a tale, as the King gave out.

His authority was evidently the alleged confession of Tyrell and Dighton, obtained second-hand.

With regard to the confessions of Tyrell and Dighton, Bacon has certainly spoken without warrant in stating that they were examined at the time of Warbeck's appearance.

To Dighton was granted the office of bailiff of Ayton in Staffordshire.

There were but four persons that could speak upon knowledge to the murder of the Duke of YorkSir James Tyrell, the employed man from King Richard; John Dighton and Miles Forest, his servants, the two butchers or tormentors; and the priest of the Tower, that buried them.

Of which four, Miles Forest and the priest were dead, and there remained alive only Sir James Tyrell and John Dighton.

But John Dighton, who, it seemeth, spake best for the King, was forthwith set at liberty, and was the principal means of divulging this tradition.

Associated with their supposed arrival and sojourn on the coast of what is now New England, about A.D. 1000, the "Round Tower" or "Old Stone Mill" at Newport, R.I., the mysterious inscription on the "Dighton Rock" in Massachusetts, and the "Skeleton in Armor" dug up at Fall River, Mass., and made the subject of a ballad by Longfellow, have figured prominently in the discussion of this pre-Columbian discovery.

There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.

Bancroft's opinion on the Dighton Rook inscriptionSkroellings not in New EnglandMr.

Bancroft's opinion on the Dighton Rock inscriptionSkroellings not in New EnglandMr.

This Society shows us how the art of engraving may be brought in as an auxiliary to antiquarian letters; but it certainly undervalues American sagacity if it conjectures that such researches and speculations as those of Mr. Magnusen, on the Dighton Rock, and what it is fashionable now-a-days to call the NEWPORT RUIN, can satisfy the purposes of a sound investigation of the Anti-Columbian period of American history.

I wrote an article for Dr. Absalom Peter's Magazine, expressing my dissent from the very fanciful explanations of the Dighton Rock characters, as given by Mr. Magrusen in the first volume of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquarians, published at Copenhagen.

All they say about the Dighton Rock is, I think, the sublime of humbuggery.

One clipped an ear, another smeared the wool (or drew it over the eyes) and a third, as was the case with Friend Stephen Dighton, the quaker, put on an entire covering, so that his sheep might be known by their outward symbols, far as they could be seen.

[Illustration: From a photograph by Dighton's Art Studio, Cheltenham.

They are undoubtedly the descendants of the Northmen who built the old mill at Newport and sculptured the Dighton Rock.