by Ann Wroe
Certainly Buckingham’s mixed political emotions, seeking power both for Richard and for himself, could cast him either as the murderer of the boys or their protector. It was a case of which role would advance him more. In the autumn of 1483 he was associated with a rash of rebellions in the south and west that were intended, it appeared, to set the princes free. Two months or so later the rebels switched their efforts to an attempt to install Henry Tudor, since news had come that the boys were dead. Whatever his aims, Buckingham seemed to know what their condition was. At first, they were alive; by the end of the year, they were somehow removed from the picture.
Yet there was no firm evidence that they were dead, as there is still none now. Two centuries later, when the bones of two children were dug up in the Tower, they were generally accepted as those of the princes, but forensic tests were not conclusive. At the time, there was no proof of death at all; only strong suspicions. The appointment, for example, of a new master-mason and master-joiner ‘at the king’s command’ at the Tower in July 1483 may have implied new men to make coffins and holes in walls, or nothing of the kind. In the same month, Richard III sent out a warrant to try ‘certain persons of such as of late had taken upon them the fact of an enterprise, as we doubt not you have heard’. This cryptic conspiracy may have had to do with trying to free the princes, or not at all. People of that time, too, were careful not to leave paper trails. The reappointment of Robert Brackenbury as constable of the Tower for life in March 1484, ‘considering his good and loyal service to us before this time, and for certain other considerations especially moving us’, perhaps raised eyebrows then, as it does now. Richard himself never produced the boys, the easiest way to refute the rumours. Instead, he railed against ‘false and contrived inventions’.
This may well have been bluster. Alternatively, it may suggest that he had done something else with the boys, short of killing them, that he was unable to explain. Niclas von Popplau, a Silesian visitor who met Richard in 1484, heard the rumour that he had killed the princes, but added: ‘Many people say – and I agree with them – that they are still alive and kept in a very dark cellar.’ In the same year, Brampton received his large and unspecified rewards from the king. In January 1485, James Tyrell, a royal officer, was listed for a payment of ‘as many sacks of wool as shall amount to the sum of £3,000 sterling . . . to sell for his use and profit’, apparently in thanks for services in Flanders ‘for divers matters concerning greatly the king’s weal’. They must have concerned it very greatly; the sum was enormous. Yet the idea that Richard would store up trouble for himself by keeping potential rivals alive seemed, and seems, extraordinary.
The notion that the boys still lived was therefore a minority opinion. Yet the hope flickered. A certain optimism could surface in the bleakest circumstances. In 1471, after the Earl of Warwick had been killed at the battle of Barnet, ambassadors were reporting that the rumours of his death were untrue and that, on the contrary, he was in some secret place waiting for his wounds to heal. Richard II, murdered in 1399, was supposed to have escaped to Scotland, and poor Edward II, sodomised with a burning poker, to a monastery in Italy. In secret places, those who had been marked to die rested and drew breath. Even Charlemagne’s horse Bayard, thrown into the Meuse with a millstone round his neck, escaped to go on running, his pale mane flickering, through the woods of the Ardennes.
Polydore Vergil said it was fairly common report that the princes had gone to ‘some secret land’ and survived there. As the shock of Gloucester’s takeover subsided, it was possible to hope that the worst act of violence had somehow been avoided. In 1484, Elizabeth Woodville reached an accommodation with the king. This suggested to some that he could not have killed her sons, but that on the contrary Elizabeth knew that one was alive, or both were. The princes had perhaps been smuggled out of the Tower and shipped across the sea, as Gloucester himself and his brother George, at much the same ages, had been sent to Utrecht for safety by their mother in 1461. Alternatively, they had been taken to some northern castle and then, after Richard’s defeat at Bosworth, had fled to Europe with other political refugees. Perhaps their Woodville relations had rescued them. Thomas More remarked that Elizabeth Woodville, in sanctuary, was desperate to try to smuggle her younger son abroad but had no time to arrange a time, place or people to help. Precisely for this reason, Richard had surrounded the sanctuary with armed troops on land and boats on the river, to prevent a prince escaping.
Yet, unlike the murders, the flight of the princes did not seem to be pictured in any detail at the time. When, in 1490, rumours spread in London that the younger boy had turned up in Flanders, the whispers were not followed by speculation as to how he had arrived there. He was simply there, as if by magic. Somehow, too, his brother Edward, always less resilient and shadowed by death, had dropped away. The young man who eventually reappeared as Richard claimed that his escape had been singular in every sense. Edward had been killed in the Tower but, by a miracle, he himself had survived. Sometimes a human agent was posited; often it was the simple work of divine power, ‘God’s might’, as he put it in 1496. In the same document he described how, God touching him again, he had ‘graciously escaped & overpassed as well by land as by sea’ all the traps that Henry Tudor had laid for him. When standards were raised in Richard’s name in the West Country in 1497, they showed a small boy escaping by himself: from the tomb and from the jaws of a wolf, marvellously spirited away.
It seems true to say that his survival and revival were neither widely believed in nor hoped for. The English did not mythologise this missing prince as they had mythologised Arthur, rex quondam rexque futurus, the once and future king. He was not expected to rise again from the misty Isle of Apples, the grey-eyed boy who pulled the sword fiercely and lightly from the impossible stone. Nor, like Frederick Barbarossa, was he supposed to slumber in some hidden place until his people needed him. In certain half-wild pockets of England there was a tendency to dream this way, and in 1499 Henry’s astrologer, William Parron, mocked those who believed that Richard of York had returned: they were like the Cornishmen waiting for King Arthur, he said, or like the Flemings who believed that Charles the Bold was still alive, though his head had been shattered in the snow at Nancy more than twenty years before. Such dreams were not general. They were for the credulous only: people who believed in things never known, corpses rising again or their dead ash, blown in the wind, somehow assuming a prince’s shape.
Nevertheless, when Richard reappeared, as some believed, prognostications came with him. Bernard André claimed that false prophecies about him were scattered far and wide by charlatans, blinding simple minds; illusions spread by devils, Vergil thought. In 1493 a priest who was expert in prophecies, Thomas Ward, joined the resurrected prince at his court in Malines. Presumably, Ward wrote verses predicting glory and kingship for him. Well past the end of the new Richard’s brief career the priest continued to write more, slipping him a book in prison to encourage him in dreaming.
None of those prophecies has survived, but undoubtedly some were plays on the heraldic devices of the little prince: the falcon in the fetterlock (the fetterlock snapped apart, the falcon flying) or the White Rose of York blossoming again, while the Tudor dragon slunk bleeding away. Stray Yorkist sayings that had applied to his father were probably recycled. Several such prophecies mentioned an alliance with the Scots against the ‘sinful’ English, which Richard was to seek. Another, called ‘The Lily, the Lion and the Son of Man’, had the Yorkist hope allied with an emperor against the French. Again, the resurrected Richard was to tread that path, as though the prophecies themselves shaped the way he went.
Yet his name was not ideally suited to the prophecies of his house. The Yorkist hero, ‘the true heir, God’s chosen’, was almost always called Edward, pitted against an accursed Henry, Henricus maledictus, who had usurped the throne. The third Richard had not been meant to reign, and the second Richard, a poor substitute for Edward his father, had always seemed
weak and ambiguous in prophecy, symbolised by an ass. The forecasts may have shifted, therefore, away from Richard’s name and towards his resurrection. In some prognostications a dead man ‘that no man saw born, nor no man shall see buried’ was supposed to appear, disappear for a while ‘where no man shall find him’ and then emerge ‘to execute judgment in his father’s house’. In another version, he had been twice buried and would reappear, to reign gloriously, after seven kings had brought England to destruction. The colour of this prophecy was clearly Yorkist, but it was vague enough to be reworked for any circumstance: a king exiled, a king killed, the second coming of Christ.
It was vague enough, too, to apply to a wandering and characterless child whose only fame was to have cheated death. For Richard, like his brother, was less a king-in-waiting than a lost boy. Both were innocentes, pure beings who had left no mark on the earth. That same wistfulness coloured a semi-prophecy given by Molinet, probably based on his own sighting of Richard Plantagenet in Malines in 1493:
J’ay vu filz d’Angleterre
Richard d’Yorc nommé,
Qu l’on disoit en terre
Estainct et consommé,
Endurer grant souffrance;
Et, par nobles exploitz,
Vivre en bonne esperance
D’estre roy des Angloys.
I saw a son of England called Richard of York, who they said was dead and eaten up in the earth, endure great sufferings; and, by noble deeds, live in good hope that he would be king of the English.
It was not the English who hoped he would be their king. It was Richard himself; and though there was a measure of confidence and even triumph over the rumours of death and the ‘great sufferings’, the next stage was tentative. He hoped they would accept him. He lived in that hope. But the ‘noble exploits’ were part of the future dreaming, the feats that would draw attention to himself, and he had not yet performed them. For those who believed, he would restore the House of York and, with it, just laws and good governance in England. But Molinet’s verse gave no tantalising detail of the sort that prognostications usually contained: the king actually seated on the throne, his sceptre extended over the waters, his enemies trampled, the biblical peace of lions and lambs lying down together in the flower-enamelled grass.
Molinet had touched on a truth. The English did not hold Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, in their hopes or imaginations. He had made no impression on them: no deeds of arms, no laws, no exercise of political skill, no public appearances to speak of. Mancini had described Londoners weeping for Edward, not for him. In most minds, he was an unformed child whose reappearance on the scene – if he could possibly reappear, shaking out of his hair the dust and worms of death – would mean only the return of faction and disorder. The imagining of Richard of York, the perfect prince, had been the project of a small circle only. It was a circle even more ardent, but almost as small, that took on the project of imagining him again.
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Who reconstructed him? According to the official confession of 1497, two men in particular. One was John Atwater, a merchant who was twice mayor of Cork; the other was John Taylor the elder, a former servant of Edward IV’s brother George, Duke of Clarence. Taylor is difficult to disentangle from his son John Taylor the younger, a minor court official for Edward IV, former hosier and, for four years, controller of customs for all the main ports of the West Country. Presumably they worked together much of the time. At several points of the story a Taylor hovers in the background, though Atwater was the more consistent and more committed friend.
Henry VII himself blamed both men, though not equally, for helping to set up his tormentor. When Atwater was captured in 1499 the king described him, in a letter to Louis XII of France, as ‘the first mover and the half-inventor’, le premier motif et inventeur de meitie, of the imposture. Geronymo Zurita, a late-sixteenth-century chronicler of Aragon, said Atwater accepted and confessed it as he died: he was el primer inventor de la representacion. Wherever the confession went, the story spread: a big role for the sometime mayor of a small town in a country that was, in every sense, off the edge of Europe.
Yet Henry, in his punctilious way, had called Atwater only the ‘half-inventor’. There were others to blame. When Taylor the elder was captured in France, also in 1499, the Milanese ambassador reported – probably deriving it from Henry – that Taylor was the man who had suggested taking the feigned boy to Ireland ‘when he first declared himself the son of King Edward’. The ambassador added that he thought the king would rather have Taylor in his hands than 100,000 crowns, for to track him down, when the conspiracy had long since collapsed, would prove that Henry never forgot and never gave up. In the end, however, he did not execute Taylor, preferring to imprison him and pardoning his son. The confession made him a bystander in Cork, not one of those who actively accosted the boy. In the king’s mind, the blame for setting Richard Plantagenet in motion did not lie with Taylor as much as with Atwater; and it did not lie with Atwater, in its origins, as much as with someone else entirely.
The motives of Atwater would have been uncomplicated. He was a merchant, a local worthy and an instinctive Yorkist. Taylor the elder, too, was described as ‘a creature of King Edward’s’, a fanatical Yorkist who would favour any sprig of the White Rose. But his preference, as it happened, was not for Richard, Duke of York. As one of Clarence’s servants his first loyalty was to Clarence’s son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, who had been kept in royal custody since the execution or murder of his father in 1478, and who was now in Henry’s ward in the Tower. Taylor had been involved very early in conspiracies about Edward. According to Clarence’s attainder for treason, the duke had wanted ‘to cause a strange Child to be brought into his Castle of Warwick, and there to have be [sic] put and kept in likeness of his Son and Heir’, while his real son was sent ‘into Ireland, or into Flanders, out of this Land, whereby he might have gotten him assistance and favour against our . . . Sovereign Lord’. Taylor was sent to get little Edward, then aged about two, to convey him out of the country, but failed in his errand. There was no further word of the ‘strange Child’, or of where Clarence had hoped to find him. But it was another instance of a vogue for smuggling innocents abroad, where they might grow until they were dangerous.
Taylor seemed to be forgiven his part in this ‘false and untrue entente’. By late 1478 Edward IV had made him a forester and bailiff on the Clarence lands in Worcestershire. His son was employed at court as a yeoman of the chamber and then, in 1481, appointed to the post of surveyor of customs and subsidies in the ports of Poole, Exeter, Dartmouth, Plymouth, Fowey and Bridgewater. The job was an important one, carrying the power to examine all port records and seize ships and their cargoes. By 1482, Taylor the younger was also keeper of the seals of the subsidies and ulnages of cloth in Devon and Cornwall, and in 1485 his father was made keeper for life of the king’s park of Morelwood in Gloucestershire.
This, however, was the apogee of the Taylors’ official favour. Sometime after the Yorkist debacle at Bosworth, both were replaced in their jobs, Taylor the younger within four months. His replacement, James Boneython, was explicitly rewarded for services to Henry in Brittany in the years when he had waited to invade. Sidelined by new loyalists, under a cloud for incompetence, Taylor seemed to linger in England nonetheless, and in 1489 was granted a general pardon for reasons unspecified. His father, however, had already fled to Rouen in Normandy. There, in Edward IV’s birthplace, Taylor the elder was plotting again to put Edward, Earl of Warwick on the throne of England. His ambitions were enormous for the sort of man he was: an ex-servant, ex-bailiff, now expatriate. But in the hope that politics might blow his way again, he had also made his services available to the King of France. If Charles VIII wanted to make trouble for Henry, Taylor was there in Warwick’s cause.
Edward, Earl of Warwick was a figure almost as shadowy as Richard, Duke of York. He was a year and a half younger, born in February 1475, and had lost his mother even earlier tha
n he had lost his father. His lands were managed for him, by Taylor the elder among others, and his only legal personality was that of an incapable child. Since much of his life had been spent in confinement, he was unknown to the English at large. Before Bosworth, he was at Sheriff Hutton castle in Yorkshire. After it, for a short strange spell, he was with other ‘young lords’ and ladies, including Edward IV’s daughters, in the care of Henry’s mother, before Henry moved him to lonely residence in state apartments in the Tower. He seemed seldom properly involved at court, or in the company of other children. Although Edward IV had taken some responsibility for him after the death of his father, no trace survives of him in the Wardrobe accounts of 1480 except a payment for five different pairs of shoes, double- and single-soled: signs of a boy who was growing fast, like a straggling plant, though hardly ever exposed to the light of day.
In 1484, after the death of his own son, Richard III had for a time named Warwick as his heir. In 1485, certain grants of offices suggested that he had changed his mind to John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln, another of his nephews. There was said to be something not quite right with Warwick, some feebleness of mind. Vergil famously remarked that he could not discern a goose from a capon. The young man who emerged in reported conversations in 1499 – rare sightings in an almost unrecorded life – was naïve, querulous and childlike, always needing to have things explained to him and doing nothing on his own initiative. At one point, a short sword was put into his hand; he accepted it as though he had no notion of its purpose. Conspiracies to make him king were concocted in his presence, and he let them proliferate with barely a word. A dangerous stranger was introduced to him; almost at once Warwick shook his hand, calling him ‘my special friend’. It was not surprising that Richard III should have decided that this poor simple creature could not be King of England.