“SIR (quoth his page) there lieth one on your pallet without,* that I dare well say, to do your grace pleasure, the thing were right hard that he would refuse.” Meaning this by Sir James Tyrrell. Wherefore on the morrow he sent him to Brackenbury with a letter, by which he was commanded to deliver Sir James all the keys of the Tower for one night.
Sir James Tyrrell devised, that they should be murdered in their beds. To the execution whereof, he appointed Miles Forrest, a fellow fleshed* in murder beforetime. To him he joined one John Dighton his own horse-keeper, a big, broad, square, and strong knave.* Then all the other being removed from them, this Miles Forrest, and John Dighton, about midnight came into the chamber, and suddenly lapping them up among the clothes, so to bewrapped them and entangled them, that within a while, smothered and stifled, they gave up to God their innocent souls into the joys of heaven, leaving to the tormentors their bodies dead in the bed.*
Abridged, spelling modernised
‘On your pallet without’: Thomas More (who is writing this account) drily informs us that the conversation took place while Richard was answering a call of nature, ‘a convenient carpet for such a council.’ James had turned in on the King’s pallet as space was at a premium: Richard’s court was on the road, riding to Gloucester.
The verb ‘flesh’ here means ‘initiated into’.
‘Knave’ could be used in the sense of ‘rogue’, but it originally meant simply a serving boy.
Though it is broadly accepted by many historians, More’s account contains several discrepancies and embellishments, and even apparent tongue-in-cheek colour, such as naming an accomplice as ‘Will Slaughter.’ More, at this time an undersheriff of the City of London, early in the reign of Henry VIII, may have been contributing to Tudor propaganda (Henry’s father Henry Tudor took Richard’s crown in 1485) but the man who would soon write the topsy-turvy satire ‘Utopia’ might equally well have been sending such propaganda up, or more likely still, indulging in a little of each.