The Last Plantagenet

by Thomas B. Costain

  This act was to prove one of Henry’s major mistakes in the matter of the charge of murder against Richard. For the second time the book was being thrown at the dead king. There was a long list of generalizations. He was charged with “unnatural, mischievous and great perjuries, treasons, homicides and murders, in shedding of infant blood, with many other wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and men and in special our said sovereign lord—–” No specific misdeeds were enumerated and no direct reference was made to the murder of the princes. Now Henry’s claim to the throne was so extremely weak that he had to depend on proving the unfitness of the dead king. Why then this most inexplicable omission? The death of the princes was the trump of trumps, the thunderbolt of retribution, the voice in the clouds crying vengeance. Only because of it could Henry claim justification for overthrowing Richard and retrieving the crown from among the bramble bushes to set it upon his own brow.

  Only two possible reasons can be found for the lack of use in evidence of this black deed. First, the princes may still have been alive. Second, Henry had been in possession of the Tower for months and may have had reasons for not wanting an investigation.

  A complete silence fell over the fate of the two unfortunate youths and this continued for a long time. Was it any wonder that people began to have doubts of Richard’s guilt and that some of them were led to believe in the impostures of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck?

  There was one precedent for this curious silence, the fact that the truth about Richard II’s death was never allowed to come out. But there was a difference in the two cases. Henry IV, who succeeded Richard II, had been directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of his cousin and so had every reason to spread the pall of official silence over the grave of his predecessor. On the other hand the murder of the princes was charged against the dead Richard and there were good reasons for spreading the story over all of Christendom. Why then should the newly seated Henry refuse to fulfill his duty as monarch to bring out the facts and punish the guilty aides in the dark crime?

  It would have been an easy matter to get at the truth. A double murder could not be committed in the Tower without some officials knowing of it, and without whispers spreading in the dark corridors which the guards patrolled. If the officers of the Tower had been questioned, the truth would soon have been arrived at.

  Moreover it is not in the nature of criminals to keep still tongues. The hand of justice has always depended on the indiscretions of the guilty. One of the fine fellows who participated would have dropped a casual word somewhere, to a wife, to a walking mort (a woman of the streets), to a gossip in a tavern.

  But Henry did nothing about it.

  CHAPTER IX

  The Murder of the Princes

  1

  SIR James Tyrell came of a family with strong Yorkist sympathies and he had been knighted after the victory at Tewkesbury. When Henry VII succeeded to the throne, however, the perhaps nimble-witted Tyrell managed to insinuate himself into his favor. He was given some properties and posts of importance. His most notable post was that of lieutenant of the castle of Guisnes in France and there he remained for the largest part of Henry’s reign, which may indicate a desire on the king’s part to keep him employed outside the kingdom. Tyrell had been born at Gipping in Suffolk and seems to have entertained a liking and respect for Edmund de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk. At least, when the latter fled from England he was received by Tyrell, and still later Tyrell was induced by a trick to surrender the castle to Suffolk. This was too much for the king to swallow and so Tyrell was made the victim of another trick which took him aboard a ship in Calais harbor. The captain upped sails at once and in the briefest possible time Tyrell found himself a prisoner in the Tower, charged with treason.

  He was found guilty and was led out to Tower Hill. There he saw before him the most terrifying of sights—a black block so small that it seemed impossible for anyone to lay his neck upon it, and a masked executioner standing beside it and holding a curved ax on which the warm May sunshine glinted brightly.

  At practically the same moment a priest named Dighton, who had been examined during the hearing, was released through the main gate and made off so promptly that he never again came into notice.

  There was intense excitement in London when criers proclaimed the execution of Tyrell and declared him to have confessed the killing of the two princes under orders from Richard. As this was happening in the year of our Lord, 1502, there was nation-wide speculation on many points. How had the deed been committed? Why had the punishment of the murderer been delayed for nineteen years? The answers were to be found in the confession which Tyrell had made and in which his confederate Dighton had shared. But that most important paper, strange to relate, was never produced. Some historians say it was not preserved but others are convinced that it never existed, that Tyrell was convicted on the treason charge and made no confession at all.

  2

  The story of the murders which came to be accepted as more or less official did not come out until much later. In 1534 Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia was published in Italy and contained some details. The Latin version of the History, generally credited to Archbishop Morton, had appeared earlier but it was not until 1557 that a relation of the then deceased Sir Thomas More discovered the unfinished English translation in his handwriting and had it published. It is the version of the murders as given in the Morton-More book that has been accepted and has been followed by most historians.

  Let us pause here to give consideration to a fantastic point in this connection. Tyrell’s confession was given before his death in 1502. Whether Morton or More wrote the Latin version of the History, it has been universally conceded that Morton supplied all the material, More having been a boy of seven when the Battle of Bosworth was fought. But Morton died in 1500! How could he have had all the intimate details which are contained in the History?

  “I shall rehearse you the dolorous end of these babes,” begins the narrative which Morton was in some miraculous way able to recite. It occurred, it seems, soon after Richard’s coronation. “Whereupon he sent one John Green, whom he specially trusted, unto Sir Robert Brakenbury, constable of the Tower, with a letter and credence also, that the same Sir Robert should in any wise put the two children to death.”

  At the outset, therefore, we are offered something which cannot be believed. Richard was shrewd and intelligent. Would he be indiscreet enough to commit his guilty purpose to writing and then entrust the delivery of the incriminating document to a servant as obscure as “one John Green?”

  The man Green rejoined his master at Warwick with the report that the constable had refused to act as instructed.

  “Whereupon he took such displeasure and thought, that the same night,” continues the History, “he said unto a secret page of his, ‘Ah, whom shall a man trust? Those that I have brought up myself, those that I had went would most surely serve me, even those fail me, and at my commandment will do nothing for me.’ ‘Sir,’ quod 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 by this Sir James Tyrell, which was a man of right goodly personage, and for nature’s gifts worthy to have served a much better prince.… The man had a high heart, and sore longed upward, not rising yet so fast as he had hoped, being hindered and kept under by the means of Sir Richard Ratcliffe and Sir William Catesby … Which thing this page well had marked and known.”

  This secret page seems to have been one of the furtive and unscrupulous underlings who are found at all courts, who poke long noses into things and gather up whispers and lies to be used to base purposes. Would Richard have been so absurdly unwise as to confide in an instrument of this slimy type and to put into the fellow’s knowledge a secret which might rock his throne? Ah, well, let us on with the story.

  “For upon this page’s words King Richard arose (for this communication had he, sitting at the dr
aught,* a convenient carpet for such a counsel)”—really, Sir Thomas!—“and came out into the pallet chamber, on which he found in bed Sir James and Sir Thomas Tyrell … Then said the king merrily to them, ‘What! sirs, be ye in bed so soon?’ And calling up Sir James, brake to him secretly his mind in this mischievous matter. In which he found him nothing strange.”

  Does it seem that the History shows moderation here in not going further, perhaps in having Richard discuss the matter with the court jester or comment merrily to his barber on the sharpness of his blade and the use it could be put to in cutting youthful throats?

  Richard, therefore, sent Sir James Tyrell, with a signed warrant—another damning piece of evidence casually supplied—to Brackenbury to deliver up the prison to him for one night. This was done and Tyrell’s groom named Dighton (but who, as we know, was not a groom but a priest) was admitted to the chamber where the two boys slept. The princes were in the charge of a man named Will Slaughter (how felicitous that might have seemed to the wicked uncle), who was called Black Will. It is not clear whether Black Will was in the chamber at the time but another man was with Dighton, one Miles Forrest, “a fellow flesh-bred in murder beforetime.” Dighton and Forrest then smothered the sleeping princes under pillows. Tyrell inspected the bodies and ordered them buried at the foot of the staircase.

  “Then rode Sir James in great haste to king Richard, and showed him all the manner of the murther, who gave him great thanks.… But he 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.” It seems then that Brackenbury had a priest “who took the bodies and secretly interred them in such a place as, by the occasion of his death, who only knew it, the very place could never yet be very well known.”

  A word of comment seems needed here. Murders can be committed successfully sometimes, but the disposal of the body is always a difficult matter. It can be taken out and buried in a back yard or it can be carried away in a wagon and thrown into a body of water, although both methods lead almost inevitably to detection. It can be disposed of by fire although some of the bones will remain in the ashes. One killer in a well-known piece of fiction got rid of the body of his victim by cooking it and eating it!

  But now we have a priest with not one body but two to be disposed of, in a closely guarded prison, swarming at all times with armed men as well as gaolers. With no one to assist him, he dug up the bodies from their first burial place and then transferred them, still by his own unaided efforts, to a more fitting grave. No one saw him, not a whisper about him began to circulate in that warren of halls. He told no one where the bodies had been buried. And then, most conveniently, he died. The term convenient is used because the writers of the History needed a reason for the spot to remain a complete mystery. And so to the dramatis personae add the Unnamed Priest, who is projected into the story with the same high disdain for probabilities and the sense of things which mark all the other inventions. There has never been a figure in the annals of crime to equal this priest. Move over, Father Brown.*

  To sum it up, this is the testimony which history has used to fix the black mark of guilt on Richard Plantagenet. This was the manner in which the murders were conceived, this the way in which they were carried out by the tools of the king. Look back over the list of those who played parts in this secret job of conspiracy and murder: the man Green, Sir Robert Brackenbury, the secret page, Sir James Tyrell, the man Dighton, Black Will Slaughter, Miles Forrest, the Unnamed Priest. Eight, exactly the number of the villagers who rode on one horse to Widdicombe Fair, Uncle Tom Cobley and All. The list of the guilty could be sung to the same air, even if it does make a much less credible tale.

  What kind of naïve simpleton did they think this Richard Plantagenet to be? It is hard to believe that this shoddy evidence is still found in many histories, almost word for word.

  3

  The Wars of the Roses could be called the Wars of No Quarter. There is always a special ferocity in civil conflict, but the wearers of the Red and the Snow Roses were particularly revengeful. Margaret of Anjou is given credit for introducing much of the acrimony, but Edward IV, that handsome gladiatorial figure, carried it on by wholesale decapitations after the battles he won. Richard was as ambitious as any member of his family and did not scruple to use the sharp medicine of the headsman’s ax in disposing of those who leagued against him. But a similar course, which won admiration for Edward because he succeeded with it, was condemned in the case of the younger and less spectacular brother because he failed. Enmity was built up against him.

  It is unfortunate that no other way to fight out the indictment of Richard has been found save in the Court of the Printed Word, with historians, writers, and editors to act in all capacities, as witnesses, as counsel, as pleaders, and, finally, as judges. What would the outcome be if the case could be introduced into court today with the modern conception of evidence to be applied? One thing can be set down as certain, that the prosecuting attorney would spend horrified hours over the History and in the end would almost certainly decide not to put it in as evidence, knowing only too well how the defense attorneys would tear it to rags and tatters.

  What a day it would be in court if the central figures in this bizarre case could be summoned from the shades to take their turns on the stand and face a grueling examination and cross-examination: Richard himself, and Queen Anne and her mother, who elected voluntarily to live with them through the last years of her own life, Edward IV, Clarence, Henry VII, Tyrell, Jane Shore, Brackenbury, the secret page who whispered his suggestions in the royal privy, the unnamed priest who delved like a mole in the darkness of the Tower to raise unaided the bodies of the two princes and bury them in a more fitting part of that great prison, Black Will Slaughter, and, of course, the star witness, Morton of the Fork, who died two years before the arrest of Tyrell “broke” the case but whose prophetic sense enabled him to put down in black and white before his death the whole story to which Tyrell is said to have confessed before he was rushed to the block. From such a hearing would emerge, surely, inevitably, the whole truth.

  * A medieval term for the privy.

  * Father Brown is the priest with the parasol who finds the solution in all the mystery stories of G. K. Chesterton.

  CHAPTER X

  The Great Impersonations

  1

  THE princes were murdered, either by Richard or by some agency after his death. They could not have died natural deaths because that would have been recorded and there would never have been any mystery about it.

  The question of Richard’s possible participation has now been rather thoroughly discussed. But what of Henry and the chance that he ordered the killings?

  What was he doing during the ninety-eight days which elapsed between his arrival in London after Bosworth and the meeting in the House when he promised the members to marry the princess Elizabeth? He seems to have found it hard to make up his mind. Could it have been that he realized the need to remove the stain of illegitimacy from his bride’s name but feared to take a step which would clear the two princes of the same stigma? If they were still alive, this would be a hard decision for the careful Henry to make. The two boys would then have become a greater danger to him than they could ever have been to Richard. And this must be kept in mind: that during those ninety-eight days the Tower was filled with the officers and guards of Henry’s choosing.

  This is not intended as a charge against Henry and is put forward as no more than a possibility. The air has been filled with the possibilities brewed up against Richard, so why not let Henry taste some of the same medicine?

  No clear and convincing solution can now be reached as to how, when, and where the princes died. But there came about a rather curious series of events which seem to tie together, to hint at a determined and cunning mind at work and a subtle hand moving under the surface. Henry married the princess Elizabeth on January 18, 1486. On June 16 of that yea
r Sir James Tyrell was granted what was called “a general pardon.” There was nothing unusual about this. It seems to have been the rule for men to seek such a clearance on leaving office. But one month later, on July 16, this was repeated. What need was there for a repetition within such a brief period? Had something occurred between the two dates which made it necessary for Tyrell’s record to receive a second official scrubbing?

  The following year Henry paid a visit one day to the administrative offices at Westminster. The officials had learned already to study his moods and to act in accordance. If money had to be spent, the king would be silent and unapproachable. But on the occasion in question, Henry was smiling. There was a trace of warmth in his pale eyes and certainly there was eagerness in the way he settled down before his writing table. He proceeded then to sign papers which granted to his beautiful young wife, Elizabeth, the lordships and manors of Waltham Magna, Badewe, Mashbury, Dunmow, Lighe, and Farnham. Being the kind of man he was, this amounted to taking these extensive landholdings into his own possession.

  The important point about the transaction, however, was that all these properties belonged to Elizabeth’s mother, the dowager queen. It was clear that she had fallen into the bad graces of the king. Had something happened to open a breach between them? Had she shown, for instance, an undue inquisitiveness in any matters? The way he treated her for the rest of her life seems to indicate that he felt the need to keep her in seclusion.