Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Richard declared himself Lord Protector and Chief Councillor. As the senior member of the Yorkist family it was natural that he should act as regent to the young king during his minority, so even that declaration need not be interpreted as sinister. Then Richard took an extraordinary step. At a meeting of the Royal Council in the Tower on 13 June 1483, Lord Hastings was arrested for treason. He was known anti-Ricardian. A few minutes later, he was executed by beheading outside. Three other alleged conspirators, Lord Rivers, Richard Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan, where executed elsewhere.

  After removing all possible opposition at court, Richard had a statement read out, declaring that he was the rightful king, that his brother the late King Edward IV had been illegitimate and that therefore the two princes must be excluded from the line of succession. The declaration was startling for many reasons; Richard was not just barring his nephew from the line of succession, but denouncing his elder brother as illegitimate as well – the brother he had served with unswerving loyalty.

  A few days afterwards some evidence was produced, probably by Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, to show that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been bigamous, and therefore all their children were bastards anyway. The bishop’s information was a bombshell. It was all too believable that Edward IV was a bigamist. He was a great womanizer, like his father, and he later conducted a high-profile affair with Jane Shore. Stillington alleged that Edward had been secretly married to Lady Eleanor Talbot in 1461, and since Lady Eleanor was still alive when Edward married Elizabeth Woodville in 1464 that second marriage, to the mother of the two princes, was bigamous and invalid. Lady Eleanor withdrew to die in a convent in 1468.

  Stillington’s breathtaking allegation helped Richard III, but it was to get him into serious trouble two years later when Henry VII came to the throne. Henry needed to reverse the charge of bigamy because it made his own wife, Elizabeth of York, illegitimate and therefore weakened his own claim to the throne. Stillington found himself imprisoned for embarrassing the unexpected new Tudor king and queen in 1485. Not surprisingly, he espoused the cause of Lambert Simnel in 1487, but when that failed he found himself accused of high treason. Most surprisingly of all, Stillington died a natural death at Windsor in 1491.

  If Edward’s two sons were illegitimate, as Bishop Stillington’s evidence showed, they could have no right to the throne. The children of George, Duke of Clarence, Richard’s older brother, had lost their right to a place in the line of succession on account of their father’s treason. That left Richard himself as the clear heir. He was crowned King Richard III at Westminster Abbey on 6 July 1483.

  The two princes were seen a few more times in the Tower shortly after that, then never again. According to the Great Chronicle of London, the boys were seen several times in the summer of 1483, shooting and playing in the Tower garden. According to another account, by the French spy Dominic Mancini, they were seen less and less frequently that summer, at windows and behind bars, ‘till at length they ceased to appear altogether.’ The two accounts contradict one another and it is not possible to be sure what happened. It is usually assumed that the boys were murdered that autumn in the Tower, in secret, much as Shakespeare portrays it, but it is possible that something altogether different happened.

  Certainly the boys were fully and completely in the power of their uncle Richard, the aspiring new king, and it is important to explore what sort of man he was. The main difficulty is that most of what we think about him comes to us by way of Shakespeare’s play. Playwrights taking historical subjects often bend history to make a better play, and Shakespeare certainly ‘improved’ the case against Richard. The historical Richard, as opposed to the character in the play, was born on 2 October 1452 at Fotheringhay Castle near Peterborough. As far as the outside world was concerned, he was the fourth son of Richard, Duke of York, who himself had a strong claim to the throne of Henry VI, and his wife, Cecily Neville. Within the family it was an open but unspoken secret that his older brother Edward was illegitimate; his low-key christening ceremony was an admission that his birth was not altogether welcomed. Once that older brother became king, as Edward IV, it became a very dangerous secret.

  During the turbulent period of the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkists were sometimes in great danger. In February 1461, their mother sent the nine year old Richard and his brother George overseas, to Utrecht, for safety. It was thought to be too dangerous for them to remain in England. The political situation was constantly changing; they were brought back a month later and at the coronation of Edward IV, Richard was created duke of Gloucester.

  Richard’s father was killed when Richard was still a boy, and after that he was taken into the care of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’. Warwick was strongly implicated in turning Henry VI off the throne and replacing him with Richard’s oldest brother (or rather half-brother) Edward, as Edward IV, and therefore indirectly responsible for making Richard king, too.

  Richard started to become a player of consequence in 1469, when at the age of seventeen he supported his brother Edward against Warwick, shared his exile and took part in his triumphant return. He fought loyally and effectively on his family’s behalf, the Yorkist cause, in battle after battle in the Wars of the Roses.

  During his brother’s reign, Richard worked with steadfast loyalty, using his great skills as a military commander to support his half-brother the king, and was rewarded with huge estates in the north of England and the title Duke of Gloucester. He thus became the richest and most powerful nobleman in England. The other surviving brother, George, Duke of Clarence, was by contrast disloyal to Edward IV, who had him executed for treason. Shakespeare has Richard responsible for murdering Clarence, but the truth is that Edward had him executed in secret; the drowning in a butt of Malmsey was true, but it was Clarence’s requested mode of despatch. Richard had nothing to do with it. It is possible that George tried to use his knowledge of Edward’s illegitimacy as a justification for leading a full-scale revolt in an attempt to supplant him. Edward saw him as too dangerous and had him removed. Richard, meanwhile, showed patience. He played a more intelligent game, showing his older half-brother nothing but loyalty.

  After the Battle of Tewkesbury, which the Yorkists won, Richard married Prince Edward’s widow, Anne Neville. It was Richard and his brother George who in cold blood stabbed Prince Edward to death after the battle. Richard was also in the Tower of London shortly afterwards, on the night of 21 May 1471, when Henry VI was murdered, and may have been responsible for that assassination too. Oddly, Shakespeare does not use that fact, when making Richard a regicide would have made his anti-hero an even more spectacular villain.

  With that CV, Richard III was certainly capable of killing to maintain his position, but his family loyalties were intense and strong, and from that point of view it seems unlikely that he would have murdered his nephews. There is also the hint that history was repeating itself. As a nine-year-old politically significant and vulnerable young aristocrat, he was ‘disappeared’, secretly spirited out of the country for his own safety by a close relative. Did he perhaps do the same for his nine- and twelve-year-old nephews? Did he perhaps not have them murdered at all, but arrange their disappearance overseas?

  If they had disappeared but survived, it would not have been in the Tudors’ interests for them to reappear. Richard III’s reign was short – a mere two years – and he was replaced at the Battle of Bosworth by the usurper Henry VII. Henry had even less title to the throne of England than Richard, and therefore had an even more powerful motive for removing the two princes than Richard. Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was a great schemer on her son’s behalf. When she heard of the reported death of the two princes, she was delighted because she supposed ‘that the deed would without doubt prove for the profit of the commonwealth.’ If it was known that the princes were alive during the Plantagenet-Tudor regime change, they would have been a focus for rebellion
. The Crowland Chronicle says that it suited the Tudors to spread the rumour ‘that King Edward’s sons, by some unknown manner of violent destruction, had met their fate.’ In other words, it was actually said at the time that Henry Tudor and his supporters wanted the two princes to be dead, whether their fate was known or not. While the possibility that one or both of them were alive, Henry was not safe on his throne, simply because their right to it was stronger than his. For this reason, Henry Tudor (and his dynasty) promoted the idea that the two boys had died in the Tower – and at the hands of Henry’s predecessor.

  If the princes were murdered in the Tower, they could have been killed at the orders of Richard III or Henry VII. Confirmation of their murder seemed to emerge during building work in the seventeenth century. Two small skeletons were found under a stone staircase and it was assumed that these must be the remains of the murdered Edward V and his younger brother. The bones were found in a complex of buildings running along the southern side of the White Tower, and later demolished; the site has been cleared.

  Sir Thomas More gives the most detailed account of the alleged murder, and he says that the bodies were removed from the place where they were initially buried ‘at the stair foot’ to a better (ie more dignified) site by a priest of Sir Robert Brackenbury, who then died taking the secret with him. But the position of the skeletons found in 1674 was ‘at the stair foot’, where they should no longer have been, which throws doubt on the rest of More’s account, if indeed the remains belonged to the two princes in the first place.

  When the bones were subjected to forensic examination in 1933, the results were inconclusive. The skeletons seemed to be closer together in age than the two princes were, and there was a strong chance that they belonged to two girls. In 1933, there was no chance of radiocarbon dating the bones – the technique had not been invented – and a firm date might have helped to resolve the issue.

  The problem becomes even more complicated by the earlier discovery, in 1603, of another pair of skeletons, which were also at the time assumed to be the remains of Edward V and his brother. The 1603 bones were found in the substantial fore-building that then stood in front of the south-west corner of the White Tower, not far from the two skeletons that were to be found in 1674. Obviously all four skeletons could not be authentic, and maybe none of them were.

  Given the absence of bodies and the absence of any credible evidence of murder, it remains a possibility that the two princes were not murdered on Richard III’s orders. It is at least equally likely that Richard III did not kill his nephews but instead sent them abroad. He himself had needed to withdraw to Flanders as a boy, his flight arranged by his mother, and with that experience behind him he may well have sent the boys overseas to the care of his sister, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, who held her own independent court at Malines. It is likely that for a time the boys lived quietly with their mother at Gipping Hall near Stowmarket, which was also the home of the Tyrell family. Tyrell is named by Shakespeare as one of the princes’ murderers, but he was in fact Richard’s ‘knight of the body’, his secret agent.

  Tyrell might well have been entrusted with looking after the princes for a time, while arrangements for shipping them across to the continent were made. That is the tradition in Sir James Tyrell’s family. The princes lived at Gipping Hall ‘by permission of their uncle’, Richard III. There were, moreover, widespread rumours circulating in 1486, following Richard III’s death at the Battle of Bosworth, that the princes had not been murdered, but were still alive. There are even documents dated 1484 among the Harleian Manuscripts which may tell us of the arrangements that were made for the secret transfer of the boys overseas. There is a tantalizing entry late in 1484 which refers to a journey made by Sir James Tyrell ‘over the Sea into Flanders for divers matters greatly concerning our well-being.’

  Although it is generally assumed that Perkin Warbeck (a pretender to the English throne) was an impostor, it is just possible that he really was, as he claimed, Richard, Duke of York. He may have been lodged with the Werbecque family of Tournai. What happened to the elder brother is less clear, and although chroniclers are able to say where Richard/Perkin went they seem to be unable to follow Edward. One chronicler actually says, ‘I find no mention of the elder brother being in Flanders, but very frequent mention of his younger brother being there.’

  There was a great deal of confusion over the identity of Lambert Simnel, the pretender who appeared in 1486. Four of the early chroniclers gave conflicting accounts of his claim. One said he was the genuine Earl of Warwick, son of George, Duke of Clarence; another said he claimed to be Edward V but was an impostor; another said he was an impostor claiming to be the Earl of Warwick; another said he first claimed to be the Duke of York and then changed his claim to Warwick. It has even been suggested that the original claimant (whoever he was and whatever he claimed to be) was killed in the Battle of Stoke in June 1487, when his army of supporters was annihilated, and that the Lambert Simnel who was afterwards treated as the claimant was a substitute. He must rank as one of the strangest figures in history: someone pretending to be another person who was pretending to be someone else.

  The identity of Perkin Warbeck is a shade clearer though still uncertain. He looked strikingly similar to Edward IV, Edward V’s father, spoke flawless English, carried himself in a princely manner. It was at the time, and still is, very hard to believe that he was the son of a Tournai boatman. After close questioning he was acknowledged by Margaret of Burgundy as her nephew and was acknowledged as the Duke of York by many other people too. It was only after he fell into the clutches of Henry VII that his fate was sealed. Henry VII eventually had him executed.

  If the two pretenders were not Edward V and his brother Prince Richard, it is difficult to see what else might have happened to them other than an untimely death. If they were murdered, they might have been murdered at the orders of Richard III or Henry VII. When they were murdered, by whom and at whose orders is still entirely unknown, though it has usually been assumed that Richard III was responsible for ordering their murder. Richard was only in power for two years, and Henry VII, who would equally have wanted rival claimants out of the way, was around for much longer. Indeed Henry VII and Henry VIII systematically and ruthlessly weeded out aristocrats with any significant Plantagenet connections, simply to ensure the supremacy of their own dynasty. Within that culture, eliminating the sons of Edward IV would have been inevitable.

  Shakespeare has conditioned us to believe that Richard III was evil, but he, Shakespeare, had little choice but to be a mouthpiece for Tudor propaganda. His play Richard III is in effect a justification for Henry VII’s usurpation of the English throne; but Henry VII’s claim to the throne, his pedigree, was not as strong as Richard’s, as he himself must have known. Shakespeare blames Richard for the murder of his innocent brother, George, Duke of Clarence, but history records a very different story. Clarence did indeed plot against Edward IV and it was Edward himself who had him executed, and privately rather than secretly, in the Tower.

  Some have excused the alleged murder of the two princes on the grounds that England needed to be governed by a man. There were, however, precedents for boy-kings – Richard II and Henry VI had been boy-kings – and they had regents or protectors to rule for them until they were old enough to rule for themselves. A well-established mechanism existed to get round the problem, as Richard III himself clearly understood. As for Bishop Stillington’s accusation that Prince Edward, the boy-king, had no right to the throne: that turns out to have been doubly true. Edward IV was a bigamist, so his sons by his invalid second marriage to Elizabeth Woodville were both illegitimate. As illegitimate offspring they could not succeed to the throne.

  Edward IV was himself illegitimate. His mother was Cecily, Duchess of York, but she conceived Edward on about 28 July 1441 while her husband the duke was away on campaign (14 July–21 August) and she was having an affair with an archer called Blaybourne. It was matter of general co
mment that Richard (Richard III) and George (Duke of Clarence) were men of slight build, like their natural father the duke of York, but Edward (Edward IV) was huge. He was six foot four inches tall, the same build as his natural father, Blaybourne. It was an open secret. The French king Louis XI, laughed, ‘He is not Edward IV! Everyone knows his name is Blaybourne!’

  Richard III would certainly have known that his older ‘brother’ was an illegitimate half-brother, but kept quiet about it for safety’s sake while his brother was alive. Once Edward IV was dead, it was a different matter. Then it was safe for him to expose the double illegitimacy of Edward’s sons. Given his long and impeccable record of intense family loyalty down to that moment in 1483, Richard may even have seen it as his painful duty to bring out the skeletons in the family cupboard and try to purify the dynastic bloodline; he may have seen it as his patriotic duty to the integrity of the crown. What we see here is a very different Richard III from the crook-backed villain of Shakespeare’s play, and someone really rather unlikely to have killed his nephews.

  PART TWO: Unsolved Crimes of the Early Modern Period (1500–1800)

  The Suspicious Death of Amy Robsart

  The scene of Amy Robsart’s death was Cumnor Hall or Cumnor Place in Oxfordshire. In 1560 Cumnor Hall was a modest low-built house arranged round a quadrangle. It had been the sanatorium of the monks of Abingdon Abbey but after the suppression of the monasteries the property had been occupied by a royal physician called Dr Owen and then, from 1558, by Antony Forster, Treasurer of the Household of Robert Dudley, later to become Earl of Leicester.