peace of Amiens (Rymer, xii. 16). In 1480, feeling the effects of age, he appointed as his suffragan William Westkarre, titular bishop of Sidon. In 1483, after the death of Edward IV, he was again called on to take part in public affairs in a way that must have been much to his own discomfort. He went at the head of a deputation from the council to the queen-dowager in sanctuary at Westminster, and persuaded her to deliver up her second son Richard, duke of York, to the keeping of his uncle, the protector, to keep company with his brother, Edward V, then holding state as sovereign in the Tower. The cardinal pledged his own honour so strongly for the young duke's security that the queen at last consented. Within three weeks of the time that he thus pledged himself for the good faith of the protector he was called on to officiate at the coronation of Richard III!
That he should have thus lent himself as an instrument to the usurper must appear all the more melancholy when we consider that in 1471 he had taken the lead among the peers of England (as being the first subject in the realm) in swearing allegiance to Edward, prince of Wales, as heir to the throne (Parl. Rolls, vi. 234). But perhaps we may overestimate the weakness involved in such conduct, not considering the specious plea on which young Edward's title was set aside, and the winning acts and plausible manners which for the moment had made Richard highly popular. The murder of the princes had not yet taken place, and the attendance of noblemen at Richard's coronation was as full as it ever had been on any similar occasion. After the murder a very different state of feeling arose in the nation, and the cardinal, who had pledged his word for the safety of the princes, could not but have shared that feeling strongly. How far he entered into the conspiracies against Richard III we do not know, but doubtless he was one of those who rejoiced most sincerely in the triumph of Henry VII at Bosworth. Within little more than two months of that victory he crowned the new king at Westminster.
One further act of great solemnity it was left for him to accomplish, and it formed the fitting close to the career of a great peacemaker. On 18 Jan. 1486 he married Henry VII to Elizabeth of York, thus joining the red rose and the white and taking away all occasion for a renewal of civil war. He died at Knowle on 6 April following, and was buried in his own cathedral.
[W. Wyrcester; Contin. Hist. de Epp. Wygorn., and Hist. Eliensis in Wharton's Anglia Sacra; Nicolas's Privy Council Proceedings, vol. vi.; An English Chronicle, ed. Davies (Camden Society); Registrum Johannis Whethamstede (Rolls ed.); Hearne's Fragment, Fleetwood, and Warkworth (three authorities which may be conveniently consulted together in one volume, though very ill edited, entitled 'Chronicles of the White Rose'); Paston Letters; Polydore Vergil; Hall; Pii Secundi Commentarii a Gobellino compositi, 161 (ed. 1584); Rolls of Parliament; More's Hist. of Richard III; Loci e Libro Veritatum (Grascoigne), ed. Rogers; Babington's Introduction to Pecock's Repressor; Brown's Venetian Calendar, i. 90, 91. A valuable modern life of Bourchier will be found in Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. v.]
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BOURCHIER, THOMAS (d. 1586?), was a friar of the Observant order of the Franciscans. He was probably educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, but there is no record of his having graduated in that university. When Queen Mary attempted to re-establish the friars in England, Bourchier became a member of the new convent at Greenwich; but at that queen's death he left the country. After spending some years in Paris, where the theological faculty of the Sorbonne conferred on him the degree of doctor, he travelled to Rome. He at first joined the convent of the Reformed Franciscans at the church of S. Maria di Ara Coeli, and subsequently became penitentiary in the church of S. Giovanni in Laterano, where John Pits, his biographer, speaks of having sometimes seen him.
He wrote several books, but the only one that survives is the 'Historia Ecclesiastica de Martyrio Fratrum Ordinis Divi Francisci dictorum de Observantia, qui partim in Anglia sub Henrico octavo Rege, partim in Belgio sub Principe Auriaco, partim et in Hybernia tempore Elizabethæ regnantis Reginæ, idque ab anno 1536 usque ad hunc nostrum præsentem annum 1582, passi sunt.' The preface is dated from Paris, 'ex conventu nostro,' 1 Jan. 1582. The book was very popular among catholics, and other editions were brought out at Ingolstadt in 1583 and 1584, Paris in 1586, and at Cologne in 1628. Another of his works was a treatise entitled 'Oratio doctissima et efficacissima ad Franciscum Gonzagam totius ordinis ministrum generalem pro pace et disciplina regulari Magni Conventus Parisiensis instituenda,' Paris, 1582. This was published under the name of Thomas Lancton, or Lacton, which appears to have been an alias of Bourchier.
Wadding, the historian of the Franciscans, calls him, in his supplementary volume, 'Thomas Bourchier Gallice, Lacton vero Anglice, et Latinis Lanius, vel Lanio, Italis autem Beccaro' (an alternative form of
