by Jones, Nigel
Our only detailed guide as to what happened next is Richard’s earliest biographer Sir Thomas More, writing in the reign of Henry VIII. More has been damned by Ricardians for writing a piece of mendacious ‘Tudor propaganda’ as the new dynasty clearly had an interest in blackening their predecessor’s name and heaping all possible crimes on Richard’s head. The inconvenient fact remains, however, that More was informed by surviving eye witnesses from Richard’s reign, principally his old employer John Morton, a cardinal and Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been in the Council Chamber when Hastings was dragged to his death and had himself been confined in the Tower on Richard’s orders. A hostile witness certainly, but a witness nonetheless.
Other contemporary chronicles – Mancini, Fabyan, the Great Chronicle, the Croyland Chronicle and Polydore Vergil – all bear out More’s account. And – literally the killer fact – Sir Thomas’s version of how the princes met their death was confirmed over a century after More’s own execution on 6 July 1535 (ironically the anniversary of Richard’s coronation) following his own confinement in the Tower, when in 1674 the skeletons of two boys of the princes’ ages when they vanished were discovered – in the exact place and manner that More had described. Given all this, together with Richard’s proven paranoid character, his carefully calculated coup, and his ruthless destruction of all those who stood in his way, one would have to be very naive indeed not to believe that he ordered the snuffing out of the princes’ lives. Almost all serious modern historians who have studied the facts – principally Michael Hicks, A. J. Pollard, Alison Weir and Desmond Seward – have reached the same conclusion: that Richard was guilty of ordering the boys’ deaths just as More wrote, and as Shakespeare – admittedly with suitable theatrical embroidery – dramatised.
The dethroned King Edward knew very well what fate lay in store at the hands of his implacable uncle. Told that he was no longer king, and that Richard had taken his throne, More tells us that Edward ‘was sore abashed, began to sigh, and said, “Alas, I would my uncle would let me have my life yet, though I lose my Kingdom.”’ Though the young Duke of York was apparently a bright, healthy and spirited boy, his elder brother was in a pitiful state of physical prostration as well as mental agony. An examination of his presumed skull in the 1930s showed advanced tooth decay which had spread to both jawbones, had become the bone disease osteomyelitis, and must have caused the prince severe pain to add to his mental woes.
Chronic toothache was probably the reason that a royal physician, Dr John Argentine, a friend and informant of Dominic Mancini, was summoned to the Tower to treat Edward. Dr Argentine, the last person apart from their one remaining attendant, the aptly named ‘Black Will’ Slaughter, and their killers, to see the princes alive, told Mancini that he had found his patient listless and depressed. He added that Edward was going to confession (probably in the White Tower’s St John’s Chapel) and doing constant penance ‘because he believed that death was facing him’. More adds the telling detail that the prince’s depression was so deep that he had ceased to wash and take care of himself. He knew his death was fast approaching.
When Richard departed on his royal progress on 20 July he left London, and the Tower, secure in the hands of his loyal henchmen. The newly appointed Lord High Constable – Buckingham – was in overall military command of the capital, while the lieutenant of the Tower itself was Lord Howard. Howard’s subordinate – the man charged with the custody of the princes – was the new constable, Sir Robert Brackenbury, a trusted northern retainer of Richard’s, who took up his duties on 17 July. Within a month of Brackenbury’s appointment, as the king moved west along the Thames Valley and into the Midlands, Richard sent one of his servants, John Green, to the Tower. Green found Brackenbury at his devotions in St John’s Chapel. So urgent was the message that Green was bearing that he interrupted the constable’s prayers. He told Brackenbury that Richard wanted the princes dead, and asked him to carry out the distasteful duty of killing them.
Brackenbury refused outright, telling Green that he would take no part ‘in so mean and bestial a deed’. Richard was furious when Green brought back Brackenbury’s negative reply. He received Green in intimate circumstances suiting the unsavoury mission – seated on his close stool at Warwick Castle – and angrily demanded, in an echo of his ancestor Henry II calling for Thomas Becket’s head, ‘Ah, whom shall a man trust? Those that I have brought up myself fail me, and at my commandment will do nothing for me.’ Richard decided that someone more ruthless than Brackenbury was needed. He turned to Sir James Tyrell, his Keeper of Horse.
Tyrell, a fervent Yorkist, had been knighted for his valour at the battle of Tewkesbury and had been Richard’s faithful man ever since. He had already carried out at least two dirty jobs for his master. He had lured the Dowager Duchess of Warwick out of sanctuary and escorted her to Richard’s castle at Middleham where she had spent the rest of her life in captivity while Richard stole her vast estates. More recently, he had arrested and guarded Archbishop Rotherham in the Tower on the day of Hastings’ execution. Now he was asked to undertake a still more dubious mission in the fortress. It is a macabre coincidence, but nonetheless highly symbolic, that Tyrell shares his surname with the last man accused of killing an English king – Sir Walter Tyrell, the suspected slayer of William Rufus in the New Forest in 1100.
According to More, Richard was so eager for the deed to be done that he went straight from his stool to awaken Tyrell in the middle of the night. Sleepily, Tyrell agreed to take the job, and recruited two hit men to carry out the gruesome task. One was an experienced professional assassin named Miles Forest, ‘a fellow’, says More, ‘flushed in murder beforetime’. The other was John Dighton, one of Tyrell’s own burly ostlers, ‘a big, broad, strong, square knave’. In August or September, pretending to buy cloth in the capital, Tyrell and his hit men went to London. At the Tower, they persuaded the frightened Brackenbury to turn a blind eye to what was afoot, give them the keys to the Tower for one night, and make sure that the sentries guarding the princes were otherwise engaged. This alone suggests Richard’s involvement, since only he or Buckingham would have had the authority to order the guards’ removal – and contrary to the efforts of some Ricardians to brand the duke as the killer, Buckingham was absent in Wales, and beginning to regret his support for Richard.
Sometime in September, the killers entered the White Tower at night and stole into the room where the princes slept. Here, says More:
They suddenly lapped them up among the [bed]clothes – so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the featherbed and pillows hard into their mouths, that within a while, smothered and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls into the joys of Heaven, leaving to the tormentors their bodies dead in the bed.
More’s vivid description of the murder is borne out by the earlier Great Chronicle which reports, ‘Some said they were murdered atween two feather mattresses.’ When the two killers were satisfied that their victims’ lives were extinct, More goes on:
[They] laid their bodies naked out upon the bed and fetched Sir James [Tyrell] to see them. Who, upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at the stairfoot, meetly deep in the ground under a great pile of stones.
Let us fast-forward almost two centuries to 1674, and the remarkable discovery of the mortal remains of the two boys murdered that night. After centuries of neglect, the royal palace in the Tower had fallen into a dangerous state of decay, and in the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, gave orders for this old relic of royal extravagance to be pulled down. The demolition was started but was still incomplete at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.
In July 1664, Charles got around to ordering the final destruction of the remaining ruins – including a turret on the south wall of the White Tower which had once enclosed a privy staircase leading into St John’s Chapel, reserved for the use of monarchs. Workmen removed the turret and then started to demolish t
he staircase inside. Burrowing into the rubble around the stair’s foundations, some ten feet below ground level, they made a startling discovery: a wooden chest containing two skeletons. The bones were clearly those of children. The taller skeleton, lying on its back, was four foot ten inches tall; the smaller, lying face down on top, was four foot six and a half inches. Those who found them had no doubt that they were looking at the remains of the missing princes.
One anonymous witness wrote, ‘This day I … saw working men dig out of a stairway in the White Tower the bones of those two Princes who were foully murdered by Richard III. They were small bones of lads in their teens and there were pieces of rag and velvet about them.’ The bones were examined by Charles’s physician and some distinguished antiquaries. All agreed that they were indeed those of the princes. The bones were placed in a stone coffin and left on display near the builders’ rubbish heap. During this period, souvenir hunters made off with some of them, including tiny finger bones. Other bones made their way, via the collector Elias Ashmole, to his Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, whence they subsequently disappeared. To camouflage these thefts, animal bones were apparently added to the skeletons.
Finally, after four years of this degradation, Charles bestirred himself to give his ancestors a decent burial. In 1678 the bones were taken from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, where they were interred in a tomb urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren, with a Latin inscription identifying them as the lost princes. Fast-forwarding again to 1933, after pressure from Ricardian revisionists who refused to accept their hero’s guilt, the abbey authorities agreed to exhume the bones and subject them to a contemporary forensic examination by two experts. Dr Lawrence Tanner combined the roles of physician with that of keeper of Westminster’s ancient monuments; and Professor W. Wright was president of the Royal Anatomical Society.
After separating the animal bones from the human remains, they found that the bones were those of two slim young males. The bigger skeleton was that of a youth of twelve to thirteen years old (Edward was two months short of his thirteenth birthday when he vanished in September 1483), and the smaller of between nine and eleven (Richard was ten). In other words, the skeletons were exactly the same age as the boys had been when they disappeared in the Tower – a crushing rebuff to theorists who argued that they had survived there into the reign of Henry VII. The jaw of the bigger skeleton showed evidence of deep-seated dental disease, possibly osteomyelitis, which would have produced pain as well as lassitude and depression – exactly fitting Edward’s pitiful state as described by Argentine and Mancini. A red mark on the skull of the older skeleton was thought by the two experts to be a bloodstain caused by ruptured blood vessels consistent with death by stifling. The wisps of velvet that clung to the bones were another clue to the identity of the skeletons, since the material had only been invented in Renaissance Italy in the fourteenth century and was so expensive that it was reserved for royalty and nobility. Tanner and Wright concluded that there were too many coincidences between the forensic evidence and the known facts about the princes for there to be any doubt as to their identity. Despite the earnest efforts of the Ricardian revisionists the mystery of the princes in the Tower was a mystery no more.
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Paradoxically, Richard’s murder of the princes sealed his own fate. Even in the blood-soaked fifteenth century, the merciless slaughter of such ‘inocent babes’ caused shock, outrage and disgust. Popular feeling hardened against the usurper king and helped fuel the rebellion by the Duke of Buckingham – previously Richard’s closest companion in crime – which broke out soon after the disappearence of the princes. The revolt united the growing number of anti-Ricardians, ranging from Buckingham’s own powerful affinity to loyal Yorkists and their former Lancastrian enemies who had never reconciled themselves to Yorkist rule, and now looked to the only surviving Lancastrian claimant to the throne (albeit a very distant one) – the exiled Henry Tudor.
Tudor was the only son of Margaret Beaufort, a sprig of that extensive family descended from Edward III via John of Gaunt and his last wife Katherine Swynford. Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who died before his birth, was the half-brother of Henry VI on his mother’s side, and one of the two sons of Owen Tudor by Catherine de Valois. Henry Tudor had been born to his thirteen-year-old mother on 28 January 1457, two years after the first battle of St Albans had started the Wars of the Roses which he was destined to bring to a close. His birthplace was Pembroke Castle in Wales, homeland of his Tudor forebears. His youth and early manhood was a long story of insecurity, flight, exile and hair’s breadth escapes from the bloody fate the accident of his birth had almost guaranteed.
Only with his uncle Henry VI’s brief restoration to the throne in 1470 had Tudor got his first taste of a royal court. It is said that on catching sight of his tall and youthful namesake nephew, the simpleton king had cried, ‘Truly this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.’ However apocryphal, this prophecy of the coming House of Tudor did indeed come to pass.
After Edward IV regained his throne in 1471, Henry Tudor’s uncle Jasper took the boy with him back into exile in Celtic Brittany where, following the death of Edward, Prince of Wales, at Tewkesbury Henry became the forlorn last hope of the Lancastrian cause. It was, therefore, in Henry’s name that Buckingham raised the standard of revolt against Richard in 1483. The revolt was nipped in the bud by Richard III’s spy system – and swamped by a nationwide storm and floods. Caught in open country by the deluge, the rebel army melted away and Buckingham himself was beheaded at Salisbury. Henry Tudor – with the luck that attended him throughout his life – narrowly escaped a similar fate. He had sailed from Brittany with a tiny fleet only to be caught in the Channel by the storm. Limping into a West Country port with just two ships, he found the harbour surrounded by Richard’s troops. His life until then had taught Henry the habit of caution, and he sent a boat to shore to discover the allegiances of the soldiers, who shouted that they were Buckingham’s men. Fortunately Henry’s suspicions got the better of his ambition, and, ever mistrustful, he sailed back to Brittany. He would live to fight another day.
The story of Henry Wyatt, a Kentish gentleman and loyal Lancastrian who had supported Buckingham’s rebellion, is one of the most extraordinary even in the Tower’s over-eventful history, and illustrates the way that the fortress could encompass bewildering switches in fortune, with a tortured prisoner returning to the grim walls later in pomp and glory – and sometimes vice versa. The Wyatts, like other Tudor dynasties – the Dudleys, the Seymours and the Howards, not to mention the Tudors themselves – were to be closely – too closely – associated with the Tower in its bloodiest period over three generations.
Henry Wyatt was born in 1460, and was only twenty-three when he came out for Henry Tudor in Buckingham’s rebellion. Confined in the Tower, he was racked in the sadistic King Richard’s presence. As he lay agonising, his limbs stretched taut, Richard demanded:
‘Wyatt, why art thou such a fool? Henry of Richmond is a beggarly pretender; forsake him and become mine. Thou servest him for moonshine on water.’
When such entreaties had no effect on the stubborn Lancastrian, King Richard, in a rage, had Wyatt:
confined in a low and narrow cell, where he had not clothes sufficient to warm him and was a-hungered. A cat came into the cell, he caressed her for company, laid her in his bosom and won her love. And so she came to him every day and brought him a pigeon when she could catch one.
Wyatt, according to this charming family legend, persuaded his gaoler to cook the pigeons – a diet which kept him alive during the two long years of his imprisonment. When, in August 1485, Henry Tudor triumphantly rode into London after slaying Richard at Bosworth, one of his first acts was to free the faithful Wyatt. His loyalty was amply rewarded. Wyatt prospered mightily under the Tudors, and was created a Knight of the Bath at the traditional eve-of-coronation ceremony at the Tower when Henry VIII came t
o the throne – and eventually rose to be the king’s treasurer. Wyatt was evidently a financial wizard, since Henry VII – notoriously mean himself – made him both custodian of his Crown jewels and keeper of the Royal Mint at the Tower, in which office Wyatt oversaw an entire recoinage of the realm.
Wyatt acquired Allington Castle in Kent and rebuilt it on Tudor lines before dying at the advanced sixteenth-century age of eighty. The grandeur and comfort of his old age were a very long way from his starved youth in the Tower. His son and heir, the poet Thomas Wyatt, had less happy associations with the fortress. A confidant and possible lover of Queen Anne Boleyn, he was imprisoned in the Tower and saw the unhappy queen walking to her execution from his cell window, commemorating the event in mournful verse. He was fortunate to escape the same fate himself. Thomas Wyatt’s son, Thomas the younger, was not so lucky.
Thomas junior’s first brush with the Tower was relatively innocuous: he was briefly confined there with his bosom friend Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, after a drunken escapade in which the aristocratic blades had amused themselves by breaking the windows of sleeping Londoners. In 1554, however, he was back – this time having led a full-scale rebellion in his traditionally restive native county of Kent. The revolt was aimed against Mary Tudor’s coming marriage to King Philip II of Spain. Wyatt, having accompanied his father on a diplomatic mission to Spain, had a horror of the Inquisition and the merciless methods of Spanish Catholicism. Soon after his revolt was crushed he was led out of his cell to Tower Hill and executed. Three successive generations of the same family suffering in the Tower is an unenviable record – equalled, but not surpassed, by the Dudley family.