Tales From the Tower of London

by Donnelly, Mark P.

  If this evidence was available to Henry VII, it would have provided the ‘smoking gun’ he needed to prove Richard III a child murderer and a usurper. Why did he not use this evidence? There are two possible explanations: (1) he knew it was not true – and we will come back to this possibility later – and (2) he did not know of Tyrell’s confession. Why? Because More invented it years later to vilify Richard?

  Sir Thomas More is unquestionably one of the most respected men of the Tudor period, but he was, at least at this time, doggedly devoted to Henry VIII and happy to go to any lengths to slander the Yorkists. Certainly, it was More who first transformed Richard from the physically attractive little man we met earlier into the deformed creature we meet in Shakespeare. More described Richard as ‘little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard favoured of visage. . . . He was malicious, wrathful and envious, from before his birth [and] ever forward.’

  At this period, physical deformities were still believed to be a sign of spiritual corruption, and making Richard physically repugnant would have indicated that he was also morally bankrupt. It was almost certainly from More’s malign description that Shakespeare created the psychotic monstrosity who appears in his 1593 play, A Tragical History of Richard III. And, as he was writing for another Tudor, Queen Elizabeth, there would have been good reason for the Bard to paint Richard as unpleasantly as possible.

  Just as there were people during Richard’s lifetime who never believed his complicity in the boys’ murder, there were also those in the years after his death who defended him. The first accounts protesting his innocence appeared in 1603, immediately after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the last of the Tudor line. By 1684, the ‘Rehabilitate Richard’ movement moved into full swing when William Winstanley wrote of him, ‘this worthy prince [hath] been blasted by malicious traducers, who like Shakespeare in his play of him, render him dreadfully black in his actions, a monster of nature rather than a man of admirable parts’.

  But by Winstanley’s time the case against Richard had already taken a turn for the worse. In 1674, nearly two centuries after the disappearance of the princes, workmen were making renovations to the old Royal Apartments near the White Tower. Buried beneath the foundation of a disused staircase they discovered the skeletons of two children. According to the observations made at the scene by John Knight, Principal Surgeon to Charles II, ‘about Ten Feet in the ground were found the Bones of Two Striplings in (as it seem’d) a Wooden Chest, which upon the survey were found proportional to the Ages of those Two Brothers . . . about Thirteen and Eleven Years’.

  These were not the first bones of children found buried in the Tower, but they were the only ones corresponding to the approximate ages of the two princes and, to make the case all the more compelling, they had been buried together. Convinced these were the remains of the princes, King Charles commissioned his Surveyor General of Works, Sir Christopher Wren, to design an urn of white marble in which the bones could be placed and moved to Westminster Abbey where, ironically, it was installed in the Chapel of Henry VII. On the urn is engraved an epitaph stating that within are the remains of the lost princes who were murdered in the Tower of London.

  There the bones rested until 1933 when the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey granted permission for the urn to be opened and the bones examined. The examination was only marginally more conclusive than the one made when the bones were discovered more than 250 years earlier. It was simply assumed they were male, and at the time there was no test to accurately determine how old the bones actually were. Consequently, they were replaced in the urn. Even if this is accepted as true, we are still left with the mystery of who, exactly, ordered the boys’ death. There are four possible suspects:

  Richard III. Let’s assume for the moment that Richard ordered the murder of his nephews. Why did he never deny the rumours? It would have been easy enough, and far more politically advantageous, to say the boys had simply sickened and died. It was a common enough explanation for an untimely death during the Middle Ages. Having said this, he could have displayed the bodies in public and quashed the rumour mill that was slowly destroying his reputation. It had worked for his elder brother, King Edward IV, when he ordered the murder of his predecessor Henry VI – surely it would have worked for Richard. But the nagging question remains: did Richard have any reason to order their murders?

  The Yorkist faction had already accepted that the boys were illegitimate and urged Richard to accept the throne, so neither of the boys presented any political threat to his claim to the throne. Richard was lovingly devoted to his brother, the boys’ father, Edward IV. Would he have killed his nephews out of simple spite?

  There were at least nine other legitimate, Yorkist claimants to the crown besides the boys, and three of these were male. One, the young Earl of Warwick (son of Richard’s late brother the Duke of Clarence), was proclaimed heir to the throne by Richard himself. Beyond public rumour, there is no contemporary accusation that Richard was complicit in their death. The boys’ mother, Queen Elizabeth, obviously did not believe Richard was guilty. If she had, would she have sent her daughters to live with him at court?

  So, if Richard did not kill the boys, who did? There are three other likely candidates.

  Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham’s position in Richard’s administration is unclear, at best. He apparently came very late as a supporter of Richard, not appearing in the records prior to the incident at Stony Stratford. By all accounts, Buckingham was excessively proud, ambitious and ruthless; the type of man who would do anything to advance himself. If supporting Richard was politically advantageous, fine; if betraying him was more advantageous, that was fine too.

  What motive would Buckingham have for murdering the boys? He was a prince of the royal blood and a descendant of Edward III’s youngest son. Could he have had designs on the crown himself? If so, what better way to topple Richard than murder his nephews and let the fall-out undermine Richard’s reputation. Could this have been the impetus for Buckingham’s ill-fated attempt to overthrow Richard in the late summer of 1483?

  There is also the possibility that Buckingham was working in league with Henry Tudor and his mother, Margaret Beaufort. Acting as their henchman, he might have ordered the boys’ death in the hope it would make Richard so vulnerable that he could be dethroned. Again, Buckingham’s revolt could have been an attempt to pave the way for Henry.

  Having been forced into a dire marriage with a Woodville woman when little more than a child, Buckingham had no love for the Woodville clan. This animosity worsened when vast tracts of the land he owned in Wales were denied to him by the Woodville family’s powerful influence in that area. If he did develop a loathing of the Woodvilles, who better to take it out on than Woodville children? Killing an enemy’s child had already become a tragic part of the Wars of the Roses scenario and the boys were, after all, as much Woodvilles as they were Yorks.

  Could it be that Buckingham’s and Richard’s shared hatred of the Woodvilles led the duke to do something dangerously stupid? Might he have murdered the boys on his own initiative in the belief that it would please Richard? If Richard was appalled by the news and threatened to strip Buckingham of his titles and possibly send him to trial, might this have been enough to trigger Buckingham’s revolt? If these were his motives, did he have the means and opportunity? Yes. In his capacity as Constable of England, Buckingham would have had ready access to the Tower at any time.

  If we assume that the last reported sighting of the boys took place shortly after Richard’s coronation, that must mean that they disappeared from sight while Richard himself was on progress. Whether Buckingham was with Richard at this time is open to question. If he did not accompany the royal party, he was in London and therefore near the Tower. Even if he was with Richard during the week generally accepted as the time the boys disappeared, 7–14 August, the party was only in Reading and therefore well within a hard day
’s ride of London. Of course, all evidence against Buckingham is speculative. And if we assume the boys were not dead by 2 November 1483, Buckingham could not have been directly involved in their deaths. For 2 November was the day Buckingham himself was executed.

  There is, however, one more intriguing scenario in which Buckingham stands large. Might he have discovered that Richard had ordered the death of the boys and this alone was enough to mount a revolt – with or without the support of the Lancastrians – designed to overthrow Richard?

  Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby. Finding someone to accuse Margaret Beaufort of almost any crime against the House of York hardly requires the services of a Sherlock Holmes. Margaret was a Stanley. Her husband was the same Lord Stanley thrown into jail by Richard after the council meeting on 20 June, and the same Lord Stanley who betrayed his king at the Battle of Bosworth. How does this implicate her directly in a plot against Richard or his nephews? Lady Margaret Beaufort was not only a Stanley, she was also Henry Tudor’s mother. It was Richard and his brother who had driven her son into exile in 1471 after the Battle of Tewkesbury and her only goal in life was to see her son back in England and on the throne.

  Certainly, descriptions of Lady Beaufort meet the profile of a scheming, spiteful matriarch. In his 1646 five-volume Life of Richard III, Sir George Buck claimed to have found evidence against Margaret Beaufort in ‘an old manuscript that I have seen’. According to Buck, ‘Doctor Morton and a certain Countess, contriv[ed] the death of Edward V and others, resolv[ing] it by poison.’ Dr Morton is the same Bishop Morton who was arrested at the same council meeting as Lord Stanley. There is no doubt that Morton and the Stanleys would have been in close contact, as they were among the leading Lancastrians in Richard’s court. Buck also suggests that because he was a ‘closet Lancastrian’ Morton served as a go-between for the Stanleys and Buckingham himself – further strengthening the case against Buckingham.

  If Margaret Beaufort was already neck-deep in a Lancastrian plot against Richard, and desperate to have her son on the throne, how great a step would it have been to arrange – possibly through Buckingham – to have the boys murdered?

  Henry Tudor (Henry VII). If Richard III had no legitimate reason for killing his nephews, Henry Tudor had nothing but reasons for wanting them dead. Obviously, his primary goal was getting Richard out of the way, but any remaining Yorkist heirs were bound to impede his claim on the throne. Following the Battle of Bosworth he arrested, and later executed, Richard’s hand-picked successor, the Earl of Warwick. Henry took measures to seek out and arrest every Yorkist claimant to the throne, keeping them in close confinement until he could do away with them with the least possible scandal. He even moved against the boys’ mother, Queen Elizabeth, by shipping her off to a convent barely two years after his ascension to the throne.

  Why, in light of his endless accusations against Richard, did Henry never mention the death of the boys, even after Sir James Tyrell’s supposed confession? Could it be that Henry knew the truth of the matter and took pains that it remained as quiet as possible? Assuming that Tyrell did confess to the murders as Sir Thomas More claimed, there is another intriguing possibility that bears examining. Could it be that the confession was intended as a smoke-screen to hide the boys’ actual fate and prevent Henry from tracking them down?

  There is circumstantial evidence dating from shortly after the boy’s disappearance that they ‘were not indeed murdered but conveyed secretly away, and were yet living’. Contemporary with this rumour is a story, which says, in part, ‘that the princes and their mother Elizabeth Woodville lived in the hall by permission of their uncle’. The ‘hall’ in question is supposedly Gipping Hall near Stowmarket, Suffolk, which at the time was the home of James Tyrell. If this is true, it must have taken place after Elizabeth left the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey and placed her daughters in the custody of Richard. Certainly if she knew her sons were alive it would go a long way to explaining why she trusted Richard with her daughters.

  Adding some credence to the claim that Tyrell was harbouring the boys is an interesting item found in the docket book of Richard’s Privy Seal dated 1484. The entry refers to the fact that, acting on behalf of the king, Tyrell was sent ‘over the sea into the parts of Flanders for diverse matters concerning greatly Ourselves . . .’. The ‘ourselves’ alluded to must certainly have meant Richard. Is it possible that Tyrell was escorting the boys to the safety of the continent or making arrangements for them to go later? If Richard was already in fear for his throne, he might have wanted the boys well out of the way for their own safety. If Henry Tudor, the Woodvilles and the Lancastrian party managed to unseat him, nowhere in England would be safe enough for the boys. Tyrell’s trip might also explain why Elizabeth Woodville went to stay with them at Gipping Hall. If they were being spirited out of the country, it might have been her last chance to see them. Adding some weight to this strange tale are two bizarre uprisings that took place during Henry Tudor’s reign. Even if Henry VII was never certain about the boys’ fate, the uprisings frightened him enough to take them both very seriously.

  Less than two years after Henry came to the throne a boy in his early teens appeared in Dublin claiming to be the Earl of Warwick. Clearly, since Warwick was imprisoned in the Tower, the boy was not who he claimed to be, but so many people believed the rumours that Warwick had escaped that it was an easy claim to make. The boy must have been relatively convincing, he even fooled Henry VI’s widow, Margaret of Anjou. He fooled a lot of others too, because in May 1487, he was crowned King Edward VI by the Irish (who hated Henry VII and were anxious to find a way to unseat him).

  Since Henry had the real Warwick behind bars he knew the boy in Ireland was an impostor. To prove this to the public he even had Warwick hauled out of the Tower and paraded through the streets of London all the way to St Paul’s Cathedral. Why then did he simultaneously use this occasion to lock his mother-in-law Elizabeth Woodville (he had married one of the three daughters she had entrusted to Richard when she came out of sanctuary) in a convent and confiscate all her belongings?

  In 1487, Margaret of Burgundy (the same Margaret of Burgundy who had sent a cask of wine to the real Warwick whom she knew to be locked in the Tower) backed the pretender, with an army of Irish and German mercenaries. With this support, the supposed Earl of Warwick promptly challenged the English. At the Battle of Stoke, in June of that year, the rebels were defeated and their young king taken prisoner. Now identified as ‘Lambert Simnel’ the boy was no longer the twelve- or thirteen-year-old described earlier, but only about ten years old. After deciding his enemies had used the boy as a dupe, Henry graciously took pity on him and put him to work in the royal kitchens where he is recorded to have died in about 1525.

  Now here are the problems with the story. If Margaret of Burgundy, and presumably Margaret of Anjou, both knew the real Warwick was being held in the Tower, why did they identify the boy as Warwick? Why was Henry so quick to cloister Elizabeth Woodville when word of the pretender reached him, even though he had the real Warwick under lock and key? How did the twelve- or thirteen-year-old who was crowned king in Dublin turn out to be a ten-year-old boy named Lambert Simnel?

  Could it be that the boy claiming to be the Earl of Warwick was actually Prince Richard, the younger of the two missing princes? If so, why would he pretend to be his own cousin (Warwick) rather than admit to his identity? Possibly because it provided him some protection and possibly because Warwick had been named Richard III’s official heir while Prince Richard and his brother Edward V had been declared bastards and denied the right of accession. Did Henry Tudor lock up his mother-in-law to prevent her from recognising her own son? Did the Irish rebels make a last-minute substitution to keep the real Prince Richard from falling into Henry Tudor’s hands? There is one last point worth considering. No one who threatened Henry VII, even from afar or in the minutest way, managed to escape the most severe punishment. Why then, did he allow Lambert Simnel
to live out his life as a royal retainer?

  In 1491, only four years after the curious incident of Lambert Simnel, an almost identical incident occurred in almost the same way. A boy named Perkin Warbeck appeared in Cork, Ireland, claiming to be none other than the Earl of Warwick. Then, inexplicably, he changed his story claiming to be Prince Richard of York, the younger of the two brothers. To prove his identity, the ‘prince’ travelled around Europe visiting his supposed relatives. He was fêted by Charles VIII of France and, as the other Prince Richard before him, identified by Margaret of Burgundy. Many others who had known the young princes also identified him.

  By the time Warbeck returned to Ireland in 1493 he declared himself ready to claim his inheritance. He attempted to invade England through Scotland in 1495 with the help of James IV, who was also convinced of his identity. The invasion failed, so he tried again in 1496 and again in 1497. If the first two attempts failed to get off the ground, the third went disastrously wrong. In October 1497 the ‘prince’ was taken prisoner by the king’s soldiers at the Battle of Taunton and brought before Henry VII to explain himself. The boy now admitted that he was not Prince Richard, but only Perkin ‘Warbeque’, the son of an illiterate boatman from Tournai, Flanders. How much of the story Henry believed we will never know, but where he had shown uncharacteristic leniency to Lambert Simnel, he had Warbeck thrown into the Tower. In the cell next to him was none other than the real Earl of Warwick.