It was also a tacit assertion of the death of the last Duke of York in the Tower and of the imposture of Perkin Warbeck, now pretending to the title.
[Footnote 38: See the present writer in _D.N.B._, xlvi., 271.] [Footnote 39: An exception was made in the case of the late Duke of Edinburgh.

It was designed if Henry VIII.

had a second son, to make him Duke of York (_L.

and P._, vii., 1364).] But thoughts of the coercion of Ireland and conciliation of Yorkists were as yet far from the mind of the child, round whose person these measures were made to centre.

Precocious he must have been, if the phenomenal development of brow and the curiously mature expression attributed to him in his portrait[40] are any indication of his intellectual powers at the age at which he is represented.