The Survival of the Princes in the Tower E-Book

Matthew Lewis

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 590

Beschreibung

The murder of the Princes in the Tower is the most famous cold case in British history. Traditionally considered victims of their ruthless uncle, there are other suspects too often and too easily discounted. There may be no definitive answer, but by delving into the context of their disappearance and the characters of the suspects, Matthew Lewis examines the motives and opportunities afresh, as well as asking a crucial but often overlooked question: what if there was no murder? What if Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, survived their uncle's reign and even that of their brother-in-law Henry VII? In this new and updated edition, compelling evidence is presented to suggest the Princes survived, which is considered alongside the possibility of their deaths to provide a rounded and complete assessment of the most fascinating mystery in history.

Leseprobe

For Devon and AriaMy partners in crimeThe truth will always be more powerful than a lie

First published 2017

This new and revised edition first published 2023

The History Press

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Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

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© Matthew Lewis, 2017, 2018, 2023

The right of Matthew Lewis to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75098 528 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1 To Construct a Murder

2 Deconstructing the Myth

3 The Black Hole Effect

4 Colchester’s Secrets

5 The First Pretender

6 A King in Dublin

7 Richard of England

8 A Prince Among Kings

9 A New Believer

10 The Wrong Place at the Right Time

11 The Secret Princes

12 To the Victor, the History

Notes

Bibliography, Resources and Further Reading

INTRODUCTION

The antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion is not assurance of its truth.

Pierre Bayle, Philosopher1

For over 500 years, one unsolved murder mystery has exerted an unrelenting and undiminishing grip on the imaginations of people around the world. It is as hotly debated on social media today as it might have been in the bawdy, rush-strewn taverns of England at the end of the fifteenth century. In the fragile, superheated politics of the early Tudor years, it was a hot coal that might burn down the new regime. Foreign rulers at least feigned a deep interest and concern, though each had their own priorities at heart and motives that cannot be ignored behind their words and actions.

This book does not seek to solve a mystery that has evaded any definitive resolution for five centuries. No smoking gun has yet been unearthed and what evidence is available is, almost without exception, circumstantial and open to the broadest interpretations. Work continues in various quarters, not least in private family libraries in England and on the Continent, to uncover something more substantial. The purpose of this book is not to provide a definitive answer to a question that still defies answering, but to look beyond the traditional argument centred around who killed the Princes in the Tower in the summer of 1483 to ask a different question and to see where that inquiry leads.

Rumours and reports sprang up early in the reign of their uncle, King Richard III, that the Princes in the Tower, King Edward V and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, had been put to death, though even in the very eye of the storm, the method and the perpetrator were not clearly known. Men of power in England and abroad did not know what had happened and that is telling and worthy of note. King Richard lay dead on the field of the Battle of Bosworth just two years later, yet his sudden, probably unexpected departure from the pinnacle of government did not allow the truth to become known. If men were afraid to let slip what they knew in 1483, by the end of 1485 it would have been valuable information that would help shore up the burgeoning Tudor government. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, by then King Henry VII, had promised to marry a sister of the Princes, Elizabeth of York, but to do so he had to reverse the Act of Parliament that had made all the siblings illegitimate. He thereby handed a far better, and probably more popular, right to the throne to Edward V. It is striking that this information was not forthcoming; no definite proof was provided as the new king took up the reins of government, or at least none that was made public, and the matter was left open, gaping and just asking for trouble, which was not slow to come.

During the sixteenth century, the story of their murders began to solidify, but remained amazingly variable until Shakespeare’s masterpiece The Tragedie of Richard the Third, written in the early 1590s. The play is a brilliant study of the anti-hero. The greatest tragedy of all is that for centuries it became accepted as the true history of King Richard III. An overwhelming majority believe that they know Richard was an evil monster who murdered the Duke of Somerset, Edward of Westminster, son of Henry VI, Henry VI himself, Richard’s brother George and his own wife Anne, with his nephews the Princes in the Tower being the worst of a raft of dastardly deeds. Richard was 2½ years old when Somerset was killed at the First Battle of St Albans in 1455. Reports place him away from the fighting chasing another section of the army at Tewkesbury when Edward of Westminster was slain. Edward IV ordered the death of their brother George for a string of offences. Anne died of what is believed to have been tuberculosis. Yet these charges have stuck fast. The death of Henry VI is less clear and Richard may well have been involved as Constable of England, but it would not have been without the instruction of Edward IV. The death of his nephews will be explored in the pages that follow, but the popular consciousness finds Richard guilty of all these crimes despite the flaws in the charges, just as he is found guilty of cowardice at the Battle of Bosworth for calling ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.’ That last charge still has traction despite being diametrically opposed to the text of the play, in which Richard demands a fresh horse to return to the fighting to look for Henry Tudor. It comes too in spite of every hostile source crediting him with the brave death of a warrior.

King Richard III found defenders almost as quickly as he was condemned, with Sir George Buc completing his sympathetic The History of the Life and Reigne of Richard the Third in 1619.2 In 1791, Jane Austen wrote in her The History of England From the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st that ‘I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man’.3 Today, the Richard III Society promotes the study of this contentious king’s era to better understand the issues swirling around him. A simple tweet on the subject is almost guaranteed to draw passionate responses at both extremes of any argument about him. The deaths of the Princes in the Tower have long been the heaviest millstone around the neck of Richard’s reputation. It is hard to pinpoint precisely why it remains so high in the public consciousness. There are perhaps two reasons. The first is that it is a case of murdered children, innocents given in sacrifice to a political end that causes revulsion in people now as it would have in 1483. The second is simply that it is a mystery and a mystery, particularly a murder mystery, as fiction book sales will attest, appeals to something deep within human beings.

The prevailing belief has always been that Richard III ordered the murder of his nephews, whether as part of a long and devious plot to take the crown or as a panicked reaction to the chaotic events of the spring of 1483. There have always been theories that it was done at the instigation of someone else, from Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham to Henry VII or his mother. Few subscribe to the theory that they survived. This book will seek to explore that possibility more fully. The early Tudor government was perilously insecure, suffering pretenders who challenged its authority in various guises. Under the second Tudor king, the famous Henry VIII, it became intensely paranoid, lashing out in all directions in fear for its future. The actions of foreign powers might be written off as political machinations aimed at destabilising the Tudor family, but should not be ignored completely, particularly those documents that were never intended for public consumption. Ambassadors might gild the lily, kings, queens, dukes and duchesses might have their own agenda for making statements, but words written to be secret have no cause to lie.

Single stories of these pretenders might seek to suggest that they were or were not who they claimed to be depending on the writer’s conclusion. At some point, it is important to stop looking at pieces of a jigsaw puzzle individually and try to see the whole picture. England was undergoing a period of radical upheaval that tried to disguise itself as sure-footed continuity. Events and relationships on the Continent evolved, sometimes bumping into English politics. It is time the jigsaw puzzle pieces were arranged to tell the whole story.

For years, the argument has been about who killed the Princes in the Tower. At the end of the fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth, a different question was asked to which this book seeks to return.

Were the Princes in the Tower murdered at all?

1

TO CONSTRUCT A MURDER

And therefore since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

The Tragedy of Richard III, William Shakespeare, Act I, Scene 11

As Shakespeare’s villain hobbles around the stage drawing his audience into his horrible conspiracies, we find ourselves liking this funny, irreverent man despite the evil he tells us he will do. There are strong reasons to believe that Shakespeare was writing about Robert Cecil, the son of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Robert had kyphosis – in Shakespeare’s unkind terminology a ‘bunchback’ – unlike Richard’s scoliosis, a curvature of the spine believed to have been barely visible beneath clothing. When Shakespeare was writing, the Cecil father and son held the reins of Elizabeth I’s government. As staunch Protestants, they were trying to organise a Stuart succession. Shakespeare had many Catholic patrons and it has been suggested that he himself remained a secret Catholic all his life. It seems entirely possible that Elizabethan audiences would have understood that they were looking at Robert Cecil, scheming and plotting and getting away with it. Taken out of context over following centuries, it somehow became accepted as a work of biography rather than drama. It was fact rather than fiction, a damning account of an historical figure rather than a sly modern political commentary.

Shakespeare accused King Richard III of a myriad of crimes, most of which it can be demonstrated were not perpetrated by him, if any crime was indeed committed. Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset at St Albans on 22 May 1455, when Richard was just 2½ years old. Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales and heir to Henry VI, was killed on the battlefield at Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471. Henry VI was probably put to death when the Yorkists retook the throne in 1471 shortly after the Battle of Tewkesbury. Although there is no real evidence of his involvement, it seems possible that, as Constable of England, Richard might have been involved, though the order would undoubtedly have come directly from King Edward IV. It was perhaps unpleasant, but nevertheless an execution ordered by the king like so many before and after. George, Duke of Clarence, the older brother closest in age to Richard III, was executed for treason following a trial in Parliament. Though hardly impartial, it was nevertheless legal and, it can be argued, well deserved following a list of betrayals. There were reportedly rumours circulating that Richard meant to harm his wife, enough at least to cause two of his closest advisors to counsel him to publicly deny the stories along with the other rumour that he planned to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York. It is far more likely though that Anne Neville was taken by consumption, or tuberculosis as it is better known today, just as her sister Isabel, wife to George, had been. In none of these cases is there any evidence that a crime was committed, yet Richard stands in the court of public opinion convicted and condemned as Shakespeare’s accidental villain.

The one act that would truly condemn Richard was the murder of two young children, his own nephews, who were in his care. Edward V was born on 2 November 1470 in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. His father, King Edward IV, had briefly lost his throne and been forced into exile in Burgundy with his brother Richard, then Duke of Gloucester, amongst other loyal men. Edward won back his throne and made it to London after the Battle of Barnet in April 1471, before leaving again to finish the Lancastrian cause at the Battle of Tewkesbury in May. By the time the king met his first son and was reunited with his wife and three daughters as they emerged from sanctuary, the baby was already 6 months old. On 26 June 1471, the tiny boy was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester by his father, a grant that was confirmed in Parliament on 6 October 1472 when Prince Edward was established, as the Parliament Rolls record it, in ‘the name, style, title, rank, dignity and honour of prince and earl of the same’.2 In 1473, Edward IV established the Council of Wales and the Marches, based at Ludlow on the Welsh border. It was nominally headed by Prince Edward, who was approaching 3 years old. The care of the young prince was entrusted to Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, the queen’s brother and a noted scholar who was an early Renaissance man before such a thing became fashionable. It was here, far from London, that little Edward was to spend the majority of the next decade, learning the craft of ruling in a miniature kingdom with a court of his own, building networks and cultivating the craft of using connections to rule effectively.

Richard of Shrewsbury, the second son born to Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, joined a burgeoning family of one brother, four sisters and two half-brothers on 17 August 1473. He was, as the toponym given to him suggests, born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Unlike his older brother, Richard was kept within the royal nursery and spent the following decade of almost unbroken peace in England in the various lavish royal palaces along the Thames in and around London. Richard was given the previously primary family title of his father, Duke of York, initiating the tradition that the second son of a monarch will usually hold this title. One of the few occasions when these two royal brothers came together was the marriage of Richard of Shrewsbury to Anne Mowbray on 15 January 1478 when the little prince was just 4 years old. Anne, who was 5 years old, was a ward of Edward IV and the pair were married because Anne brought into royal hands a vast inheritance. On their union, which was celebrated with full ceremonial, possibly to the bewilderment of the two infants at the centre of the event, Richard became Duke of Norfolk, Earl of Nottingham, Earl Warenne, Earl Marshal, Lord Mowbray, Lord Seagrave and Lord Gower as well as acquiring the rights to swathes of land in the east. Edward IV used Parliament to rather dubiously alter the laws of inheritance in this particular case so that if Anne died, Richard retained full rights to her lands and titles rather than them reverting to a Mowbray heir. In 1481, at the age of 8, Anne did pass away.

The differences in the upbringings enjoyed by these two boys until 1483 are stark and important. It is easy to characterise the Princes in the Tower as one unit, clinging together in fear for their lives as Victorian portraits present them. In fact, they would have been virtual strangers. Their prolonged separation would also have had another impact on this story. Richard of Shrewsbury would have been a very visible presence in London. Many of those working in the palaces as well as men of the government would have regularly encountered the young boy, watched him grow and change, perhaps even have spoken to him frequently. In short, Richard would have been well known to the men and women of Edward’s court, to servants and to foreign dignitaries and ambassadors visiting England. In contrast, Prince Edward spent the vast majority of his time at Ludlow, visiting London only infrequently for major state occasions such as his little brother’s wedding. As he approached his teens, few at court would have seen much of him and his appearance, personality and mannerisms would have been all but unknown to them. So, in 1483, we in fact see two boys who shared the royal blood in their veins and possibly a fear and lack of comprehension of what was happening, but who were virtual strangers to each other. They were thrust together and then lost from men’s sight, their fates treated as one and tragic, but it is to be remembered that they were not the same. Their upbringings had been very different and at a long distance from each other. For the purposes of the events that followed, it is crucial that Richard was a recognisable boy in London and Edward a virtual stranger.

A detailed analysis of the spring and summer of 1483 is beyond the scope of this book, but an outline of the events leading up to the day when the two boys were placed in the Tower of London together may be helpful. King Edward IV died on 9 April 1483, a few weeks short of his forty-first birthday. His death was entirely unexpected. Edward remains the tallest monarch in English history, at 6ft 4in, and held a fearsome martial reputation in his younger years, never having been defeated on the field of battle. Although Edward’s waistline may have spread and his interest in pursuits beyond those he found pleasurable may have diminished, his death was still a shock. The traditional story is that Edward caught a chill whilst fishing and the infection quickly took hold and killed him. There have been much later rumours that his wife, Elizabeth Woodville, had him poisoned. There is no evidence for this, and certainly if the queen did take this course, it backfired spectacularly.

More than the unexpected suddenness of the king’s death, the age of his heir was a cause for concern. Prince Edward was 12, still a minor. The king would have been only too aware that minorities had ended in disaster for Richard II and Henry VI. He knew too that there would be a bitter struggle to fill the vacuum he was about to create. The king was an immensely likeable and affable man so that he, personally, was the glue that kept his court and the country together. Such adhesion to him was needed because there was bitter division within his walls. The main factions revolved around the Woodville family, led by Edward’s stepson Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, and around Lord Hastings, probably Edward’s oldest and closest friend. Dorset and Hastings had conceived a deep hatred for each other that the king’s presence kept a lid on, but which would threaten the fragile position of his minor heir should that lid be removed by the king’s death. Edward reportedly added a late codicil to his will to resolve this perceived threat, though no copy of the device survives. Falling back on provisions made for the minority of Henry VI, he created his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Lord Protector of the Realm, a position their father had held twice during Henry VI’s periods of incapacity, and which was a curiously English invention.

Richard was 30 years old, a decade younger than his brother, but had effectively ruled the north for over ten years. Like his nephew the prince, Richard was perhaps less well-known in the capital because of his long and distant separation, but he was nevertheless a truly national figure who had become a prominent bulwark of his brother’s rule. The position of Lord Protector of the Realm formed part of a separation of power during a minority. This tripartite solution was created after the death of Henry V and was not quite what the warrior-king had himself instructed should happen. Nevertheless, the care of the person of the young king and provision for his education was to be given to one person. Government was carried out by the Council. The Lord Protector of the Realm was given full military authority to deal with both foreign and domestic threats to the kingdom, though the Lord Protector was usually to hold a senior position within the governing Council too. Thus, in 1422, the infant King Henry VI was placed under the care and tutelage of Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter and then Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, amongst others. The king’s uncle Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester was made Lord Protector of the Realm (though he was required to relinquish this post to his older brother John, Duke of Bedford whenever he returned to England from his position as Regent of France, which otherwise kept him out of England) and the Council governed in the king’s name, with Humphrey as a senior member.

This situation was, apparently, to be replicated in 1483. Earl Rivers, the queen’s brother, already had responsibility for the care and education of Prince Edward, under instructions strictly laid down by the king, and there is no sign that this position was meant to change. Richard was appointed Lord Protector of the Realm, having proven himself militarily capable in Scotland the previous year. It is important to note that the dying king saw a Lord Protector as a necessity. Doubtless he meant Richard to be a senior presence on the Council. However, King Louis XI of France had recently reneged on the 1475 Treaty of Picquigny and was showing signs of aggression, coupled with the similar and linked threat from Scotland that had seen Richard dispatched there in 1482. If the Hundred Years’ War was to be reignited, England needed a leader. Finally, the Council would govern. As the senior adult male of the blood royal as well as Lord Protector, Richard, Duke of Gloucester was the natural choice as a prominent figure within the Council.

There is no record that the queen informed her brother-in-law, then in his northern heartlands, that the king had died. Sources are unanimous that Lord Hastings wrote to warn Richard that her Woodville family were planning a coup. The Marquis of Dorset, Hastings’ bitter enemy, was reportedly bragging in Council that the Woodvilles could and would rule without Richard.3 The idea was mooted of having Prince Edward crowned swiftly and proclaimed of age to govern, bypassing a Protectorate and maintaining the Woodville family’s influence at the centre of power which they clearly felt was coming under threat. Even before Richard left the north, battle lines were being drawn in London. Nevertheless, Richard ordered a funeral mass for his brother in York at which he caused all the northern nobility present to swear fealty to the new King Edward V. After this, he set out to meet his nephew on the road to London. Edward V did not leave Ludlow until 24 April, having celebrated St George’s Day the previous day, and met his uncle Richard at Stony Stratford. The uncle and nephew would have been virtual strangers to each other and if Richard was suspicious of the Woodvilles, his concern was surely heightened when Earl Rivers overshot their agreed meeting place. Edward was installed at Stony Stratford, or perhaps more likely the Woodville manor of Grafton, 10 miles closer to London, before Rivers went back to meet Richard in Northampton. Richard’s reaction was harsh and decisive. He took Earl Rivers and others of the new king’s household into custody and sent them to his castles in the north before taking control of his nephew and continuing slowly to London.

The Woodville plan had been to crown Edward on 4 May 1483, but instead he only arrived in the capital on that date. Edward was installed at the Bishop of London’s Palace and Richard again caused oaths of allegiance to be sworn to the new king. Preparations continued for the rule of Edward V, with the coronation planned for 22 June, coins minted and proclamations issued in the new king’s name. Over the following weeks, the situation changed for reasons beyond the scope of this story and which remain deeply contentious. Edward V was moved to the Tower of London, then a royal palace yet to acquire its bloody reputation as a grim prison roughly equivalent to death row. Elizabeth Woodville had taken her other son Richard, along with her daughters and her oldest son the Marquis of Dorset, into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. Richard applied pressure to the queen until the 9-year-old Duke of York was given into the care of the Archbishop of Canterbury and sent to join his 12-year-old brother at the Tower. There was little that caused much concern to this point. The Woodville family were generally unpopular and few were mourning their loss of power.

On 13 June, Richard had Lord Hastings summarily executed on a charge of treason during a Council meeting. Bishop Morton and Archbishop Rotherham were also arrested. On 25 June, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, the dowager queen’s brother and the king’s uncle who had effectively brought the boy up, was executed at Pontefract Castle along with Richard Grey, the younger brother of the Marquis of Dorset, and Thomas Vaughan, Edward V’s Chamberlain. On 22 June, rather than seeing Edward V crowned, London heard a sermon preached declaring that the marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville was bigamous. That made all the children of that union illegitimate and incapable of inheriting the throne. The story may have originated from Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells and was not entirely new, having probably formed part of the downfall of George, Duke of Clarence in 1477–78. Those who had been summoned to London for the session of Parliament that had now been cancelled heard the evidence and subsequently petitioned Richard to take the crown as the only legitimate male heir of Richard, Duke of York. The petition was not presented by Parliament, which was not in session, but was later included in the business of Richard’s only Parliament in 1484 as the Act of Titulus Regius.4 The text details the illegitimacy of Edward IV’s children as well as heavily criticising the late king’s reign. It reminds readers that the son of Richard’s older brother George, Duke of Clarence, the 8-year-old Edward, Earl of Warwick, was excluded by his father’s attainder and concludes that Richard is the rightful heir. Accepting the request, Richard III was crowned in Westminster Abbey alongside his wife Anne Neville on 6 July 1483.

Soon after Richard’s coronation, the sons of Edward IV in the Tower became a focus of attention. They had been moved from the Royal Apartments. There is nothing necessarily sinister in this. Those apartments were traditionally required for a monarch’s preparation for coronation, so Richard and Anne needed them. They were probably initially moved to the Garden Tower near the outer curtain wall. Stories developed that the boys had been consigned to a dank cell in the Tower and as they were seen less and less, rumours sprang up about what had happened to them just as tabloids might speculate today. Just two years later, Richard III’s reign ended with his defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth. History has long remembered that Richard had his nephews killed and many historians reach the same conclusion. It is possible to chart the development of this conclusion through the contemporary, near contemporary and later sources.

The following chapter will examine the reliability of the materials that contribute to what is known of the suspected murder of the Princes in the Tower. For now the story will simply be laid out and traced as far back as possible to contemporary accounts. William Shakespeare’s story of the murder of the Princes in the Tower has become an accepted, authoritative piece of historiography. Shakespeare drew heavily on existing stories inspired by Sir Thomas More’s almost equally famous account The History of King Richard the Third, which provides great dramatic detail of the events of 1483.5 Sir Thomas wrote of Richard’s increasing distress at the threat his nephews posed to his reign and his decision whilst on progress to rid himself of them. Richard despatches a page to take an instruction to Sir Robert Brackenbury, Constable of the Tower of London, to have the deed done but Sir Robert refuses. The page returns with the news, which is broken to the king while he sits on the privy. Despairing of his servants, Richard laments ‘Ah, whom shall a man trust?’ before the page suggests Sir James Tyrell, who is just outside.6 Richard hands the task to Tyrell who sets out for London, where he engages two ruffians Miles Forest and John Dighton. The two men smother the princes with pillows before showing Sir James that the deed is done. Tyrell then rides back to the king to report his success. Richard asks where his nephews were buried and is told they lie beneath a staircase. A pang of guilt causes Richard to order them dug up and placed somewhere more fitting, a task duly undertaken by a priest who dies without revealing the final location of the bodies. Sir Thomas informs his reader that he has strong sources for his detail, writing ‘Very truth is it, and well known, that at such time as Sir James Tyrell was in the Tower – for treason committed against the most famous prince, King Henry the Seventh – both Dighton and he were examined and confessed the murder in manner above written, but to where the bodies were removed, they could nothing tell.’7 Tyrell’s involvement is given an air of authenticity by the fact that he was sent from York to London at the beginning of September 1483. He retrieved clothes and wall hangings for the investiture of Richard’s son, Edward, as Prince of Wales on 8 September.8

The account written by Polydore Vergil, an Italian engaged by Henry VII to prepare a history of England for the first Tudor king, bears a striking similarity to More’s account. Begun a few years earlier, the two men probably had access to the same sources, materials and even people who had lived through the events of 1483. Vergil relates that Richard:

set out for York, travelling via Gloucester, where on arrival he stayed for several days. During the course of his stay his mind was exceedingly disturbed by the consciousness of so many crimes, and he greatly feared for himself, thinking that, since he had seized the kingdom by force, he would never be safe from attack while any male offspring of his brother Edward remained alive. In the end, to appease the savagery of his tormented mind against his blood-line, he piled crime upon crime. He sent letter to the constable of the Tower of London ordering him to dispatch the sons of his brother Edward by some discreet means.9

The similarity to More continues as Vergil recounts that:

when Richard heard that the constable was delaying the execution of his command, he immediately gave to another, namely Sir James Tyrrell, the task of swiftly dispatching his nephews. Obliged to execute those orders, Tyrrell left York for London and at once had the boys put to death. Thus perished Prince Edward alongside his brother Richard. But what manner of death the poor innocents met is not known for certain.10

Vergil does not provide as much detail on the murder as More, though he wrote after Tyrell’s execution too.

These two accounts, built upon by Shakespeare, have become the pillars of the belief in the murder of the Princes in the Tower in 1483, though both Vergil and More were writing decades after the events they described. There are, however, more contemporary sources that offer the same conclusion. During the early years of King Henry VII’s reign the story of the death of the sons of Edward IV was being spread widely. On the Continent, Phillipe de Commynes wrote his Memoires between 1490 and 1498. A Burgundian who later transferred to the French court, de Commynes, had met several of the prominent protagonists of the Wars of the Roses, including Edward IV, though he had never travelled to England. His account of the matter perfunctorily notes that Richard III ‘murdered his two nephews and made himself king’.11 Casper Weinrich of Danzig, who wrote his chronicle in Germany before 1496, recorded of 1483 that ‘later this summer Richard, the King’s brother, had himself put in power and crowned in England and he had his brother’s children killed’.12

As early as March 1486 a Spanish ambassador to England, Diego de Valera, wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that ‘it is sufficiently well known to your royal majesty that this Richard killed two innocent nephews of his to whom the realm belonged after his brother’s life’.13 He states quite clearly that the murder had been committed, that it had been ordered by Richard and that the fact was well known. Even earlier than de Valera’s despatch was a report by Guillaume de Rochefort to the French Estates General that King Edward’s ‘children, already big and courageous, have been slaughtered with impunity, and their murderer, with the support of the people, has received the crown’.14 So, it seems, both official accounts and those of private citizens on the Continent were fairly confident that both Princes were dead and that their uncle, King Richard III, had been behind their deaths.

There is damning contemporary evidence available from within England too. Early in the reign of Henry VII, the Warwickshire antiquarian and biographer of the Earls of Warwick John Rous wrote ‘the usurper King Richard III then ascended the throne of the slaughtered children’.15 Robert Ricart, the Recorder of Bristol, wrote in his entry for the year ending 15 September 1483 (though it is unclear precisely when it was written) ‘in this year the two sons of King Edward were put to silence in the Tower of London’,16 though the entry does not identify Richard III as the instigator of the murders. The uncertainty regarding the boys’ killer is also reflected in a fragment amongst the Ashmolean Collection which states Richard killed the princes ‘at the prompting of the Duke of Buckingham as it is said’.17 This position is supported by a snippet in Historical Notes of a London Citizen, which records that the Princes ‘wer put to deyth in the Tower of London be the vise of the duke of Buckingham’.18 The precise meaning of the word ‘vise’ is open to interpretation, possibly referring to the duke’s advice, so that Richard was counselled to do the deed by Buckingham, or meaning the device of the duke, so that he was the prime mover in the affair. The Great Chronicle of London notes during the entry for the mayoral terms covering the end of 1483 and into 1484 that ‘all the wyntyr season’, ‘the land was in good Quyet, but after Estryn [Easter] there was much whysperyng among the people that the King had put the childryn of Kyng Edward to deth’.19 This returns to a definitive statement that Richard III was behind the deaths. The oddity of this reference is the placing of the murders after Easter, which must have meant Easter 1484. That would place it months later than is usually assumed.

One of the most important and most poorly interpreted sources for the events of the spring and early summer of 1483 is the account of Dominic Mancini. An Italian who visited London, leaving in July 1483, he wrote his account at the request of his patron before the end of the year. Frequently entitled The Usurpation of Richard III, it is an invaluable eyewitness account of the critical weeks of 1483, which will be more closely examined in the next chapter.20 Mancini recalled that after the execution of Lord Hastings on 13 June, ‘all the servants who had served the young king were barred from access to him. He and his brother were conducted back into the more inward apartments of the Tower itself, and day by day came to be observed more rarely through the lattices and windows, up to the point that they completely ceased to be visible.’21 The familiar attendants of Edward V were apparently dismissed, and the boys were withdrawn into the ‘Tower proper’, which most likely refers to the White Tower. Added to the arrests at Stony Stratford, this isolated the child king and his brother from possible help.

Amongst Mancini’s sources was Dr John Argentine, a physician who attended Edward V and later the first Tudor Prince of Wales, Arthur. Mancini wrote that ‘The physician Argentine, who was the last of the attendants employed by the young king, reported that, like a victim prepared for sacrifice, he sought remission of sins by daily confession and penitence, because he reckoned that his death was imminent.’22 This testimony has been used to suggest that Edward feared his death was imminent at the hands of his uncle, who was taking his throne from him too. Mancini also recorded on the subject of Edward V that ‘I have seen several men break out in tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after he was removed from men’s sight, and now there was suspicion that he had been taken by death. Whether, however, he has been taken by death, and by what manner of death, so far I have not at all ascertained.’23 Although Mancini could offer no means of their death and did not directly accuse Richard III, he nevertheless asserts that men were weeping for the fate of the boys even prior to Mancini’s departure from England before the end of July and that there was a strong belief they had already been killed.

It is perhaps surprising how little firm evidence remains of the fate of the Princes in the Tower. There are a handful of snippets from England and from the Continent that appear to offer a clear indication of their fate. They died in the summer of 1483. They were killed at the instruction of Richard III, perhaps in collusion with or at the suggestion of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. These snippets were the seeds from which the more detailed accounts of Vergil and More took root and began to grow. Shakespeare’s play is the final blooming of the story and for centuries after, Richard has stood condemned of the murders of his two young nephews, convicted in the courts of public opinion and by the majority of historians. There are strong reasons to believe that it is true; the long-held belief is not simply based on a few flimsy pieces of evidence and a dramatic story.

A criminal investigation will always look for three key elements; motive, means and opportunity. Richard III ticks all three. The second two are easily established. As king, with the boys under his control, Richard had both means and opportunity aplenty. The boys were within walls that Richard controlled, surrounded by men that obeyed the new king having been stripped of those who might have been loyal to them. Assuming that Richard could find someone willing to carry out the deed, which many might do for the rewards such a service would surely bring, means and opportunity lay wide open to him. For traditionalists, motive is equally easily established. Richard could never be secure on his throne while his nephews lived. The frequent claim that Richard murdered his nephews to gain the throne is a misrepresentation of the timeline. Richard was already king before his nephews are believed to have been murdered. That is not to say they were not a threat. Although they had been declared legally illegitimate, an Act of Parliament could overturn that status as easily as it had marked them.

Amongst a set of Historical Notes compiled by a London citizen is a reference to ‘a resistance made in the parlement tyme’,24 which is presumed to mean during late June and early July 1483 when Parliament was not in session, but when members of the Three Estates gathered in London had offered Richard the crown. The frustratingly cryptic reference speaks of four servants of the king who were ‘hangyd at The Towur Hill’25 but gives no detail of their crime. It is not even clear whether the king these four served was Edward IV, Edward V or Richard III, but it does make it clear that there was at least one small pocket of unrest in London that led to four executions. If these were servants of Edward V who resisted either his deposition or their removal from his service, it might have caused Richard to assess whether he could permit such a threat to persist. On 29 July 1483, Richard wrote to his Chancellor Bishop John Russell regarding ‘certaine personnes’ implicated in an ‘enterprise’ now ‘in warde’.26 It is unclear whether this is the same small group referred to by the Historical Notes or a different incident. Although it confirms that all was not well, the men were at least in custody. Russell was instructed to issue commissions ‘to sitte upon thaym and to proceed to the due execucion of our lawes in that behalve’. The matter is made more intriguing by Richard’s instruction that Russell should consult with ‘our counsaill’,27 suggesting that it was of enough import to require the Council’s attention, but not the king’s. The king was writing from Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire, the family seat of his close friend Francis, Lord Lovell. Following his coronation on 6 July, Richard and his queen, Anne, had set off on a royal progress, reaching Reading on 21 July, visiting Oxford for three days from 24 July, moving to Woodstock on 27 July and then to Minster Lovell on 29 July. Had an attempt been made to free the boys after Richard left the capital? Perhaps news of the death of the princes had arrived and Richard was either genuinely shocked or ordering an investigation to cover his own instruction to do away with them. This ‘enterprise’ may also have been completely unrelated to the king’s nephews and the vagaries of both pieces of evidence only serve to highlight the problems of seeking the truth of the events of 1483.

With motive, means and opportunity established, in the eyes of many beyond a reasonable doubt, the jury of historical opinion has long returned a guilty verdict. Richard had the most to gain by their deaths because it was the only way to secure his crown. They vanished whilst under his protection without explanation. If Richard III had ruled longer, he might have been able to reveal the truth but he was killed on 22 August 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth. Whatever else history has painted Richard III as, even his harshest critics did not deny his bravery on the battlefield at the end. Polydore Vergil, writing for Henry VII, explained that ‘kyng Richard alone, was killyd fyghting manfully in the thickkest presse of his enemyes’.28 The hostile account of John Rous conceded that ‘he most valiantly defended himself as a noble knight to his last breath’.29 The Crowland Chronicler, no fan of the king, noted ‘while fighting, and not in the act of flight, the said king Richard was pierced with numerous deadly wounds, and fell in the field like a brave and most valiant prince.’30 Richard had been beloved in the north and when news of his defeat arrived there the York Register recorded ‘He was piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.’31

Did Richard’s secret die with him? He cannot have been the only one who knew what happened to the Princes in the Tower but Brackenbury, the Duke of Norfolk, Richard Ratcliffe and many of those closest to the king died with him on Bosworth Field. Sir William Catesby was executed in Leicester a few days after the battle. The core of Ricardian support was destroyed in one morning and anyone else who knew the regime’s secrets might have been too frightened to share what they knew. It is easy to see how the story of Richard killing his nephews had taken hold. Shakespeare presented the deed as fact and it added the final pinnacle of drama to his play, but it built upon a story that had been growing throughout the century that was closing with the play. Sir Thomas More is perhaps the second most famous architect of Richard’s evil reputation but Polydore Vergil presented a similar story and there is contemporary and near contemporary evidence that appears to support the charges. The guilt of Richard III is a construct that has endured for over five centuries and continues to defy revisionist attempts to topple it. It is closely guarded by a traditional interpretation of events that resists reassessment. Having examined the construction of this accepted truth, the remainder of this book relies on being able to at least breach the walls of the construct, if not tear it down.

So, how certain are we, really, that Richard III killed his nephews?

2

DECONSTRUCTING THE MYTH

… some others vary from them and say that these young princes were embarked in a ship at Tower wharf, and that they were conveyed from hence into the seas, and so cast into the deeps and drowned. But some others say that they were not drowned, but were set safe on shore beyond the seas.

Sir George Buc, The History of King Richard III1

The most striking thing about the solid edifice of the story of Richard III’s guilt in the murder of his nephews is the shaky foundations on which it is built. William Shakespeare was writing a dramatic spectacle so had no desire to leave the matter ambiguous – he needed his audience to see Richard commit the ultimate evil act. However, one step back to the Tudor antiquaries and the foundations of Richard’s reputation reveals a less certain attitude. The earlier account of Sir Thomas More, begun around 1513, is equally unequivocal in accusing Richard of ordering this heinous act, but accepting More’s book at face value ignores several very important facts that should warn us against such blind reliance.

Just as it is possible to interpret Shakespeare’s Richard III as a political commentary on the events in England at the end of sixteenth century, so Thomas More’s writing should be read in a wider context than simple history as we may expect it to be written today. More’s other great work, Utopia, is far from a literal piece. It is an allegory, a vehicle for the discussion of a perfect society, which appears to consist of a world without private property that promotes religious freedom, euthanasia, divorce and married clergy, concepts that More demonstrably did not believe in. Sir Thomas was born in London in 1478, the son of a successful lawyer. He spent the years between the ages of 8 and 14 years old in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor to Henry VII. Morton had been the implacable enemy of Richard III and a key architect of Henry VII’s propulsion to the throne and it seems likely that More gleaned much about the old king from his mentor. The first moment in which Thomas came to prominence was in 1504 as a 26-year-old Member of Parliament. Trained as a lawyer, More made so eloquent a speech in Parliament against a tax of three-fifteenths requested by King Henry VII that the grant was reduced by around two-thirds. The idealistic lawyer’s victory saw his father imprisoned in the Tower and forced to pay a hefty fine for no obvious offence but his son’s open opposition to the Tudor government. If Thomas learned a lesson from this episode it was surely that such flagrant criticism was to be avoided.

Allegory was a literary style popular in Ancient Rome and used by writers such as Plato and Livy. The Cambridge Dictionary defines allegory as ‘a story, play, poem, picture, or other work in which the characters and events represent particular qualities or ideas that relate to morals, religion, or politics’.2 Joseph M. Levine has written that ‘For the humanist rhetorician, it was poetry and history along with oratory that furnished the models for expression and the fund of examples that constituted political wisdom’.3 As a Renaissance man, Sir Thomas would have been interested in Roman classicism. Allegory allowed a writer to direct criticism and comment at the establishment of the day in an indirect way that could always be denied. The device can be seen in More’s Utopia and other famous works over following centuries such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Its use in other places by More should offer a note of caution when reading his account as literal history. It is important to also consider that More never completed his History of King Richard III. Just after detailing the murder of the Princes, More set down his pen and never returned to the work. When he started writing in 1513 he was serving as Undersheriff of London but was about to embark on a career in royal service as a close friend to Henry VIII that perhaps precluded even allegorical criticism of the government. Why snipe at it in writing when he could try to change the system from its very heart? That may, at least, have been the idealistic notion. We only know of More’s version of the events of 1483 because his nephew, William Rastell, edited and completed the story, publishing it in 1557, over twenty years after More’s execution. There was even a Continuation written by Richard Grafton, the Tudor antiquary, which continued More’s story to Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth. It is unclear how much Rastell changed More’s manuscript and he is a man we shall return to shortly.

What if, rather than ceasing his account because he was embarking on a career in service to Henry VIII, More had other reasons for stopping his writing? It is entirely possible that the research More carried out, including interviewing those alive in 1483, quickly uncovered the gaping holes in the monstrous version of the old king handed him by Archbishop Morton. This may have mattered less when the work is read as allegory, since in that case Richard III becomes a vehicle for the lessons of the work. It is concerned with the dangers of tyranny and perhaps aimed at the new, young King Henry VIII. Amongst that king’s first acts was the executions of Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley essentially for doing as they had been told by his father, Henry VII. There are clues that we are not meant to take More’s work literally. The very first line of the book is an error. ‘King Edward of that name the Fourth, after he had lived fifty and three years, seven months, and six days, and thereof reigned two and twenty years, one month, and eight days, died at Westminster the ninth day of April’.4 Edward IV in fact died nineteen days short of his forty-first birthday.

A traditional interpretation would suggest that this would have been fact-checked later and corrected, but this comes from the same readers who seek to rely utterly on More’s account of the murder of the Princes. Would such a fastidious investigator really have guessed so precisely at an age? Might More not have added an ‘about’ to mitigate his possible error? One explanation is that More offered an immediate signpost to a knowledgeable reader that what followed was not a literal truth, but an allegorical, metaphorical exercise. It is perhaps interesting that Henry VII also died in April, in 1509 at the age of 52 after twenty-four years as king, coming far closer to More’s description than Edward IV does. Was Henry VII meant to be seen in Edward IV? Might the promising young king, Edward V, have been the Henry VIII England expected after the dark final years of his father’s rule? If so, then was the tyrant Richard III, who murdered the promising prince, the reality of Henry VIII’s rule, smothering hope of better days? The political point More was trying to make was surely the reason he abandoned his work, which was finished and published by his nephew decades later.

It is not necessary to rely entirely on setting aside More’s account as fiction with a hidden purpose in order to doubt the traditional story of the murder of the Princes in the Tower. One key feature of More’s version is his assertion that:

Very truth is it, and well known, that at such time as Sir James Tyrell was in the Tower – for treason committed against the most famous prince, King Henry the Seventh – both Dighton and he were examined and confessed the murder in manner above written, but to where the bodies were removed, they could nothing tell.5

Sir James was indeed arrested in 1501 and executed in 1502 for treason. He had assisted Edmund de la Pole, a nephew of Richard III, in his escape from England and through Calais to the Continent. Tyrell was not arrested for anything in relation the Princes in the Tower. There is no record of a confession nor even that he was questioned on the matter nearly twenty years after the event. It is interesting too that More also wrote that ‘Miles Forest at Saint Martin’s piecemeal rotted away; Dighton, indeed, walks on alive in good possibility to be hanged before he die; but Sir James Tyrell died at Tower Hill, beheaded for treason’. Yes, that’s right. More claims that John Dighton confessed to the act of killing Edward V and Richard, Duke of York alongside Tyrell and that, although Tyrell was executed, Dighton walked free and was still at liberty a decade later when More began writing. The traditional approach requires us to believe in a confession of which More’s assertion that it existed is the only evidence. Further, we must believe that one of those who committed not only the double murder but a regicide too was allowed to walk free after his confession. It would be remarkable indeed if the Tudor government had mislaid such a critical document to their security after more than a decade of threats. It is more remarkable still if Henry VII had allowed a killer of a king and a duke to walk free. It is almost unthinkable that Henry’s queen, Elizabeth of York, would not have wanted justice for the man who smothered her brothers to death.

The other key element of More’s story is the burial of the bodies of the Princes. More wrote that following the murder by Forest and Dighton, ‘they laid their bodies naked out upon the bed and fetched Sir James to see them. Who, upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at the stair-foot, meetly deep in the ground under a great heap of stones.’6 Crucially, More continues that when Tyrell reported what had been done to a grateful Richard, the king ‘allowed not, as I have heard, the burying in so vile a corner, saying that he would have them buried in a better place because they were a King’s sons’ so that ‘they say that a priest of Sir Robert Brackenbury took up the bodies again and secretly buried them in a place that only he knew and that, by the occasion of his death, could never since come to light.’7 More claims that his story comes directly from Tyrell and Dighton’s confessions, which he says are ‘well known’, yet the details of the burial are couched in terms of ‘as I have heard’ and ‘they say’. It is given an air of oral tradition, the reliability of which More cannot be certain of. Nor is he willing to commit to his own story, yet the two positions appear mutually exclusive; either the detail came from a confession, or it is a story that More has heard from others. It surely cannot be both. This is not the only doubt cast by Tudor sources.

John Rastell, the father of William Rastell, More’s nephew who published his uncle’s work posthumously, published his own chronicle in 1529 entitled The Pastymes of the People. In this, he, in similar fashion to More, lays out the fate of the Princes in the Tower. Rastell’s story is that:

… the lord protector by the council of the duke of Buckingham as it was said, caused this young king and his brother to be conveyed to ward, which were never after seen but there put to death.

But of the manner of the death of this young king and of his brother, there were divers opinions. But the most common opinion was that they were smothered between two feather beds and that in the doing the younger brother escaped from under the featherbeds and crept under the bedstead, and there lay naked a while, till that they had smothered the young king, so that he was surely dead. And after this one of them took his brother from under the bedstead and held his face down to the ground with his one hand, and with the other hand cut his throat … with a dagger. It is a miracle that any man could have so hard a heart to do so cruel a deed, save only that necessity compelled them, for they were charged by the duke the protector, that if they showed not to him the bodies of both those children dead on the morrow after they were so commanded, that then they themselves should be put to death. Wherefore they that were so commanded to do it, were compelled to fulfil the protector’s will.

And after that the bodies of these two children as the opinion ran, were both closed in a great heavy chest, and by the means of one that was secret with the protector, they were put in a ship going to Flanders, and when the ship was in the black deeps, this man threw both those dead bodies so closed in the chest over the hatches into the sea, and yet none of the mariners, no none in the ship, save one the said man knew what things it was that was there so enclosed. Which saying divers men conjectured to be true, because that the bones of the said children could never be found buried, neither in the Tower nor in no other place.8

This version is perhaps not so distant from More’s, yet it nevertheless differs, not least in the fate of the bodies of the dead princes. Rastell’s Pastymes was published some fifteen years after More began his work, yet Rastell appears to