The Princes in the Tower Part II

 

Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham

The plausibility of Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, Richard's right-hand man, as a suspect depends on the princes having already been dead by the time Stafford was executed in November 1483. It has been suggested that Buckingham had several potential motives. As a descendant of Edward III, through Thomas of Woodstock, 1st Duke of Gloucester, on his father's side, as well as through John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, through John Beaufort, on his mother's side, Buckingham may have hoped to accede to the throne himself in due course; alternatively, he may have been acting on behalf of a third party.

Some, notably Paul Murray Kendall, regard Buckingham as the likeliest suspect: his execution, after he had rebelled against Richard in October 1483, might signify that he and the king had fallen out; Weir takes this as a sign that Richard had murdered the princes without Buckingham's knowledge and Buckingham had been shocked by it. A contemporary Portuguese document suggests Buckingham as the guilty party, stating "... and after the passing away of King Edward in the year of 83, another one of his brothers, the Duke of Gloucester, had in his power the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, the young sons of the said king and his brother, and turned them to the Duke of Buckingham, under whose custody the said Princes were starved to death". A document dated some decades after the disappearance was found within the archives of the College of Arms in London in 1980; this stated that the murder "be the vise of the Duke of Buckingham". This led Michael Bennett to suggest that possibly some of Richard's prominent supporters, Buckingham and James Tyrrell, murdered the princes on their own initiative without waiting for Richard's orders. Bennett noted in support of this theory: "After the King's departure, Buckingham was in effective command in the capital, and it is known that when the two men met a month later there was an unholy row between them."

Buckingham is the only person to be named as responsible in a contemporary chronicle other than Richard himself. However, for two reasons, he is unlikely to have acted alone. First of all, if he were guilty of acting without Richard's orders, it is extremely surprising that Richard did not lay the blame for the princes' murder on Buckingham after Buckingham was disgraced and executed, especially as Richard could potentially have cleared his own name by doing so. Secondly, he would likely have required Richard's help to gain access to the princes, under close guard in the Tower of London, although Kendall argued as Constable of England, he might have been exempt from this ruling. As a result, although it is extremely possible that he was implicated in the decision to murder them, the hypothesis that he acted without Richard's knowledge is not widely accepted by historians. While Jeremy Potter suggested that Richard would have kept silent had Buckingham been guilty because nobody would have believed Richard was not party to the crime, he further notes that "Historians are agreed that Buckingham would never have dared to act without Richard's complicity, or at least, connivance". However, Potter also hypothesized that perhaps Buckingham was fantasizing about seizing the crown himself at this point and saw the murder of the princes as a first step to achieving this goal. This theory formed the basis of Sharon Penman's historical novel, The Sunne in Splendor.

Henry VII

Henry VII (Henry Tudor), following his seizure of the crown, executed some of the rival claimants to the throne. John of Gloucester, illegitimate son of Richard III, is said by some sources to have been one of those executed. Henry was out of the country between the princes' disappearance and August 1485; thus, his only opportunity to murder them would have been after his accession in 1485. Pollard suggests Henry (or those acting on his orders) is "the only plausible alternative to Richard III".

The year after becoming king, Henry married the princes' eldest sister, Elizabeth of York, to reinforce his claim to the throne. Not wanting the legitimacy of his wife or her claim as heir of Edward IV called into question, before the marriage, he had repealed the Titulus Regius, which had previously declared the princes (and Elizabeth) illegitimate. Markham (1906) suggested that the princes were executed under Henry's orders between 16 June and 16 July 1486, claiming that it was only after this date that orders went out to circulate the story that Richard had killed the princes; this claim has been disproven. Markham also suggested that the princes' mother, Elizabeth Woodville, knew that this story was false, and that this was the motivation behind Henry's decision, in February 1487, to confiscate all of her lands and possessions, and have her confined to Bermondsey Abbey, "where she died six years afterwards". However, Arlene Okerlund suggests that her retirement to the abbey was her own decision, while Michael Bennett and Timothy Elston suggest the move was precautionary, precipitated by Lambert Simnel's claim to be her son Richard. Pollard calls Markham's theory "highly speculative" and states that Henry's silence over the princes was more likely "political calculation than personal guilt". Henry was also never accused of the murder by any contemporary, not even by his enemies, which he likely would have been had contemporaries thought there was any possibility of his guilt. Jeremy Potter, at the time he wrote Chairman of the Richard III Society, noted, "With Henry, as with Richard, there is no real evidence and one must suspect that if he had killed the princes himself he would quickly have produced the corpses and some ingeniously appropriate story implicating Richard." Further, Raphael Holinshed reported in 1577 that Richard "purged and declared his innocence" regarding "the murther of his nephews towards the world", indicating that the boys did indeed meet their end during Richard's days. It is also unlikely that the princes would have been kept alive in secret by Richard for two years after their last sighting while rumors of his responsibility for their murder circulated.

Other suspects

Some scholars have accused John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, Margaret Beaufort (Henry VII's mother), or Jane Shore (Edward IV's mistress). The Beaufort theory was supported by Philippa Gregory in a 2013 BBC documentary series, The Real White Queen and her Rivals. However, it has been sustained only by speculation about a possible motive, rather than evidence. Pollard has commented regarding such theories: "None deserve serious consideration. The problem with all these accusations is that they beg the question of access to the Tower without Richard's knowledge and overlook the fact that Richard was responsible for the safekeeping of his nephews".

Survival theories

Historian David Baldwin suggests that Henry VII's reticence on the subject may have been because at least one of the princes was still alive; he considers that Richard is more likely to have survived, with Edward dying of a malady. Baldwin argues that it is "impossible" that no one knew what happened to the Princes after they entered the Tower; he believes Richard III and Henry VII, leading courtiers, and their mother would all have known the boys' whereabouts and welfare. Baldwin argues that had this been the case, Henry VII would have had the choice of keeping quiet about the survival of Richard, or having him executed, and concluded, "He [Henry] would have been happy to let people think the boys had been murdered, but not to speculate when or by whose hand."

During the reign of Henry VII, two individuals claimed to be the princes who had somehow escaped death. Lambert Simnel was crowned as "King Edward" in Dublin, with his supporters naming him as Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick. Perkin Warbeck later claimed to be Richard, appearing in Ireland and calling himself King Richard IV. Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, formally recognized Warbeck as Richard. Margaret, Richard III's sister, an unrelenting opponent of Henry VII, had previously recognized Simnel as Warwick. Warbeck was also accepted as Richard by James IV of Scotland. After a failed attempt to invade England, he was captured. He retracted his claims, was imprisoned, and later executed. Many modern historians believe he was an imposter whose supporters accepted his claim for political reasons.

The fact that two persons claimed to be Richard led the 18th-century writer Horace Walpole to argue that Richard had in fact escaped death, and that Warbeck genuinely was Richard, a view also supported by the Scottish historian Malcolm Laing. Walpole, however, later retracted his views and stated that he now believed the princes to have been murdered by Richard III to secure his hold on the crown. In more recent times, the theory that Warbeck was Richard has been endorsed by Annette Carson, a freelance writer with a "lifelong interest" in Richard III. She suggested that Richard smuggled the princes abroad to the custody of their aunt, the Duchess of Burgundy, and they were raised there under false identities. Baldwin suggested that by having removed them from sight to prevent them from being a focus for opposition, he was then unable to bring them back to court to scotch rumors of their murder without once again having them become a threat. This theory has also been endorsed by Philippa Langley, known for the discovery of Richard III's body in 2012, who claims that contemporary documents show the two princes were alive and in contact with royals on the European continent as late as 1493, and suggests that the youths known to history as Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck were genuinely the Earl of Warwick and Richard, Duke of York. One of the sources is a statement (dated 1493) purported to have been written by Richard, describing his escape and flight to Europe, which has been independently authenticated as a late 15th-century document; another is a document claiming that Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, had identified a man as Prince Richard by examining three birthmarks on his body.

In 2021, researchers from the "Missing Princes Project" claimed to have found evidence that Edward had lived out his days in the rural Devon village of Coldridge. They have linked the 13-year-old prince with a man named John Evans, who arrived in the village around 1484, and was immediately given an official position and the title of Lord of the Manor. Researcher John Dike noted Yorkist symbols and stained-glass windows depicting Edward V in a Coldridge chapel commissioned by Evans and built around 1511, unusual for the location.

Other findings of the five-year investigation by The Missing Princes Project research initiative, suggesting the Princes' survival following the reign of Richard III (i.e., after 22 August 1485), were published in 2023 in Philippa Langley's book The Princes in the Tower: Solving History's Greatest Cold Case. New archival discoveries had been made for both sons of Edward IV: Edward V, in an accounting receipt for King Maximilian I dated 16 December 1487 in the archive in Lille, France, discovered by project member Albert Jan de Rooij. The accounting receipt confirmed that weapons (400 pikes) purchased by Maximilian on behalf of Margaret of Burgundy for the Yorkist invasion of June 1487 were on behalf of a son of Edward IV. Langley claims that some details of the receipt confirm that the son in question was Edward V.

These discoveries were presented as evidence in the UK on Channel 4 in an original 1-hour 45-minute "Factual Special" documentary, The Princes in the Tower (18 November 2023, Brinkworth Productions, Dir: Janice Sutherland). The documentary was also broadcast by SBS in Australia (19 November 2023) and PBS in America (22 November 2023) as part of their Secrets of the Dead series. The program followed criminal barrister Rob Rinder as he investigated new evidence from Langley's research initiative.

Impact

The political reality of the disappearance of the princes, whatever happened to them, is that they were believed to have been murdered, and Richard was blamed for their murders. Even if he had not been directly responsible for their deaths, the fact that he had deposed them and kept them under tight guard made him responsible for their welfare in the eyes of contemporaries, and the belief that they had been murdered made him guilty. As Baldwin noted in support of his conclusion that Richard would not have murdered the princes, "It seems incredible Richard ever supposed killing his nephews would help secure his position or make him more acceptable to his subjects." An initial uprising in September 1483, aimed at deposing Richard and restoring Edward V to the throne, was not stopped by rumors of Edward's murder. Instead, the rebels rallied around Henry Tudor as a potential alternative candidate; Horrox says Tudor was "an inconceivable choice if Edward V and his brother were thought to be still available".

Anthony Cheetham, who considered Richard likely to have had the princes murdered, commented that it was "a colossal blunder. Nothing else could have prompted the deflated Woodvilles to hitch themselves to Henry Tudor's bandwagon." The fact that the majority of the rebels were wealthy and powerful southern noblemen, loyal to Edward IV, suggests a degree of revulsion against Richard's usurpation of the throne: their willingness to fight on under an implausible alternative candidate suggests that they regarded anyone as preferable to Richard as King due to his usurpation and the murder of his nephews. Bennett suggested that perhaps those who had initially supported Richard in his seizure of power may have felt complicit in the crime, which he thought "might explain the bitterness of the subsequent recriminations against him". Hicks speculated that these men may have been "appalled by the character of the regime...shocked by Richard's crimes". Their defection severely weakened Richard, who had to impose his supporters among the northern lords as officeholders in the southern counties to maintain order, in itself a very unpopular act that further damaged his reputation. In Pollard's words, "the belief that he had murdered his nephews seriously handicapped Richard's efforts to secure himself on the throne he had usurped".

In popular culture

The mystery of the Princes in the Tower has spawned best-selling novels such as Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and four novels in Philippa Gregory's Cousins' War series, and continues to attract the attention of historians and novelists.

Literature

Fiction

C. Lysah – The Little Princes in the Tower (1892)

Elaine M. Alphin – Tournament of Time (1994)

Sonya Hartnett – Princes (1997)

Valerie Anand – Crown of Roses (1989)

Margaret Campbell Barnes – The Tudor Rose (1953)

Emma Darwin – A Secret Alchemy (2009)

John M. Ford – The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History (1983)

Elizabeth George – "I, Richard" (short story) (2002)

Philippa Gregory

The White Queen (2009)

The Red Queen (2010)

The Kingmaker's Daughter (2012)

The White Princess (2013)

Margaret Peterson Haddix

Found (2008)

Sent (2009)

Rosemary Hawley Jarman – "We Speak No Treason" (1971)

Sharon Kay Penman – The Sunne in Splendor (1982)

Elizabeth Peters – The Murders of Richard III (1974)

Anne Easter Smith

A Rose for the Crown (2008)

The Daughter of York (2008)

The King's Grace (2009)

Royal Mistress (2013)

Jason Charles – The Claws of Time (2017)

William Shakespeare – Richard III (circa 1595)

Josephine Tey – The Daughter of Time (1951)

George R. R. Martin – A Clash of Kings (1998), where the bodies of two young boys, thought to be princes, are found hanged and burned. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels are inspired in part by the Wars of the Roses.

Jodi Taylor – Plan for the Worst (2020)

Non-fiction

Horace Walpole – Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III (1768)

Markham, Clements (1906). Richard III: His Life and Character.

Audrey Williamson – The Mystery of the Princes (1978)

Giles St. Aubyn – The Year of Three Kings, 1483 (Atheneum, 1983)

A. J. Pollard – Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (1991)

Alison Weir – The Princes in the Tower (1992)

Bert Fields – Royal Blood: Richard III and the mystery of the princes (HarperCollins, 1998) (ISBN 0-06-039269-X)

Josephine Wilkinson – The Princes in the Tower (2013)

John Ashdown-Hill – The Mythology of the "Princes in the Tower" (2018)

Nathen Amin – Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders; Simnel, Warbeck and Warwick (2020)

Philippa Langley – The Princes in the Tower: Solving History's Greatest Cold Case (The History Press, 2023)

Television

The first series of the British sitcom Blackadder is set in a comic alternative history where the Princes in the Tower survived and grew to adulthood. Prince Richard, the father of the main protagonist Edmund Plantagenet, assumed the throne as Richard IV following the accidental death of Richard III after a Yorkist victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field. There is no explanation of what became of Edward V. According to the show, Henry VII assumed power after the finale and erased Richard IV's reign from history, along with ruining the reputation of Richard III.

An episode of the Canadian children's documentary series Mystery Hunters is dedicated to the unsolved case of the missing princes.

In 1984, Channel 4 broadcast a four-hour "trial" of Richard III on the charge of murdering the princes. The presiding judge was Lord Elwyn-Jones, and the barristers were recruited from the Queen's Counsel but had to remain anonymous. Expert witnesses included David Starkey. The jury was composed of ordinary citizens. The burden of proof was left to the prosecution. The jury found in favor of the defendant.

In 2005, Channel 4 and RDF Media produced a drama entitled Princes in the Tower about the interrogation of Perkin Warbeck, in which Warbeck almost convinces Henry VII that he really is Richard, Duke of York. The real Princes are shown by Margaret Beaufort to be still alive, but insane after many years imprisoned in chains in a cell.

The Black Butler anime episode "His Butler, in an Isolated Castle" features the ghosts of the two young princes.

The 2013 BBC One 10-part TV series The White Queen is an adaptation of Philippa Gregory's novels The White Queen (2009), The Red Queen (2010), and The Kingmaker's Daughter (2012).

The 2017 Starz miniseries The White Princess is an adaptation of Philippa Gregory's novel of the same name, which speculates on the fate of Prince Richard.

In 2023, Robert Rinder and Philippa Langley presented a Channel 4 program, The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence.

Further reading

Thornton, Tim. "More on a Murder: The Deaths of the 'Princes in the Tower', and Historiographical Implications for the Regimes of Henry VII and Henry VIII". History 106.369 (2021): 4–25. Online

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_in_the_Tower