Who Killed the Princes in the Tower? – A Medieval Whodunit

This post is a review and summary of Phillipa Langley’s recent scholarly book, The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (The History Press, 488p, 2023. ISBN 978 1 80399 542 7).

Langley is an enthusiastic amateur historian and prominent member of the Richard III Society.  In 2012, this enabled her to persuade the Leicester City Council to allow her to excavate below one of their car parks, resulting in the discovery of the 527-year-old remains of King Richard III of England. In 2015, Langley set up the crowd-funded Princes in the Tower Project to seek new evidence on the fate of Edward IV’s two young sons Edward V and Richard of York, traditionally thought to have been murdered by Richard III. Realizing that English archives had already been exhaustively searched by generations of historians, she and her team sought new original documents in Europe – documents immune to Tudor censorship.  The book tells her results in the form of a Police Cold Case Investigation, making use of all available evidence, including explosive new documents that the Project Team have discovered in the Netherlands.  The book is a well written and fascinating read that I strongly recommend.

I summarize Langley’s narrative below. It is a complex tale not helped by the limited stock of Christian names (Henry, Edward, Richard) used by the extended Plantagenet family. I retell it as a continuous narrative, avoiding discussion on possible alternative explanations and confining non-essential detail and commentary to footnotes. My own brief comments are bracketed.

THE BACK STORY

The story begins more than 80 years before the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower.

In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke, heir to the Earldom of Lancaster, deposed and murdered (he was starved to death) his cousin – Yorkist King Richard II - and had himself crowned Henry IV. Richard was a tyrant whose death was little regretted at the time, but the murder split the ruling Plantagenet family into two warring factions that came to be known as the House of York and the House of Lancaster.  As the symbol of York was a white rose and that of Lancaster a red, the resulting almost 90 years of on and off civil war came to be known as the Wars of the Roses. It was a deadly family feud between cousins.

Father and son, Henry V and Henry VI followed Henry IV in a succession of uneasy Lancastrian reigns.

In 1461 at the Battle of Towton, and again in 1471 at the Battle of Tewkesbury, the young, handsome and energetic Edward Duke of York defeated the Lancastrian forces of his hopeless and hapless cousin Henry VI, enabling Edward of York to seize the throne as Edward IV. Henry VI was imprisoned in the Tower where he died a few months later: from “melancholia” according to Edward, but many later historians believe Henry was starved to death as a tit-for-tat for the fate of Edward’s great-grandfather Richard II.

THE PLOT

Edward IV reigned competently for 12 years and died unexpectedly April 1483. He was survived, inter alia, by his Queen Elizabeth Woodville, daughter Elizabeth of York (aged 17), sons Edward Prince of Wales (12) and Richard Duke of York (9). Young Edward was immediately proclaimed as Edward V. Paternal Uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester [1] became the Protector of his nephews and assumed the role of Regent until young Edward came of age. In May he moved the boys to the Tower of London – a secure royal residence as well as a prison – for their protection, pending Edward V’s Coronation, which was arranged for November of that year.

But the late king’s death had released a skeleton from his cupboard.  Within a few weeks, Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells [2], came forward with explosive testimony to the effect that, many years prior to Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, he had officiated at a secret but legal marriage contract between Edward (then Duke of York) and Lady Eleanor Talbot, the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Throughout his life, Henry IV had been a noted libertine with many acknowledged bastards, so the claim that he had a few more unacknowledged ones was easy to believe. Other members of the clergy backed up Stillington’s claim.

Richard of Gloucester acted swiftly with characteristic decisiveness. In July 1483 he declared his nephews illegitimate and had himself crowned Richard III at Westminster Abbey. But the constitutional crisis did not go away, so Richard convened a sitting of Parliament to examine the truth of the bishop’s claim. (In 1483 this should not have been too difficult. Although Lady Eleanor was dead, then, as now, legal marriage – especially of nobility – required witnesses and written records). Parliament concluded that Edward IV’s 1464 marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was bigamous: the children of that union therefore illegitimate. Thus, Richard of Gloucester was the legitimate rightful King. This was made into Law in February 1484 by an Act of Parliament called Titulus Regulus. (But it should be noted that, two years later, the same Parliament re-legitimized Henry IV’s family at the request of Henry VII – see below – so one cannot assume that they were ever independent judges on the matter).

Richard’s reign was brief. He was hacked to death in August 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, leading his army against a Lancastrian force led by Henry Tudor.

Henry who?

Henry was the grandson of a marriage between Catherine de Valois, the widow of Henry V, and one of her servants, an obscure Welshman called Owain Tudor. Henry Tudor’s father (Edmund Tudor) was thus King Henry VI’s half-brother, making (according to Phillipa Langley) Henry himself around No 36 in line to the English throne. Henry’s dynastic claim to the throne was therefore weak, but by right of conquest he declared himself Henry VII, cunningly dating the start of his reign from the day before the Battle of Bosworth, thus making all who fought against him at the battle traitors to the crown.

But back to the young sons of Edward IV, last seen by an independent observer happily playing in the Tower gardens in July 1483, and never seen in public again. The fate of the princes has become a 500-year-old mystery. A Medieval cold case.

Were they -

A     Murdered by order of their Unspeakable Uncle (Richard, eager to remove all threats to his crown)? In 1483, Richard had abundant motive and opportunity. People who support this scenario are known as Henricians (as in – Henry VII was innocent of their murders). or..

B     Murdered by order of the Wicked Welshman (Henry, eager to protect his usurping dynasty in the face of at least 35 living Plantagenets with better claims)? Henry had abundant motive and opportunity when he gained control of the Tower in 1485 (or if not then, after the rebellions of 1487 and 1490).

People who support this scenario are known as Ricardians (as in, Richard III was innocent). or..

C. Neither of the above.

THE PLOT THICKENS

At Bosworth Field in 1485, Henry had won a battle and killed a reigning King, but he had not yet won the War. In the febrile atmosphere after the battle, Henry had to act immediately to shore up his self-declared reign. If King Edward IV’s sons were alive, questions as to heir legitimacy notwithstanding, his hold on kingship might be short lived. He sent emissaries to scour the northern centers of Yorkist power in search of the boys, while at the same time workmen were set to searching every nook and cranny of the Tower of London, excavating cellar floors and grounds, in search of recent burials. Henry issued this Proclamation, saying:

“.. if there were a claimant to the crown by descent from the King Edward, He was to show himself; and He (Henry) would help him to get crowned”. (Henry VII, August 1485)

(As Henry had already declared himself King, the sincerity of this statement is questionable).

Henry’s ruse (if ruse it was) failed to flush the boys out. No one came forward. The search (apparently) failed to find them, either dead or alive. Henry then declared them dead at the hands of Richard III (it is possible that is what he believed at the time). That left the boys cousin, the 12-year-old Edward, Earl of Warwick (the son of Edward IV’s long dead brother, the Duke of Clarence), as the legitimate heir to the throne. Henry had just accused Richard III of murdering the Princes in the Tower, so he could hardly do the same to Edward of Warwick, not straight away at any rate. So, he locked him in the Tower, pending a more suitable moment for his disposal (see below).

Henry wished to marry the Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York as this would strengthen his reign by a union of the Houses of Lancaster and York. He could not do this while Elizabeth was still officially illegitimate, so Henry’s next steps were to persuade Parliament to re-legitimize all Edward IV’s children by Elizabeth Woodville, gather up and destroy all copies of the earlier disinheriting Act Titulus Regulus [3], and (an obvious and necessary step) arrest Bishop Stillington for perjury. That done, Henry married Elizabeth: she became the mother of Henry VIII.

Thus, the Tudor fix was in. Richard III had ordered the deaths of the legitimate heirs to the throne because Henry Tudor said so. Publicly gainsaying this was treason. All evidence to the contrary was systematically destroyed.

Twenty years later, two historians writing in the reign of Henry VIII – Polydore Vergil in 1513 and Thomas More in 1519 – sexed-up the Tudor narrative of the events of 1483-85 with added drama and evidence-free detail. During the reign of Elizabeth I, these histories were used by William Shakespeare as the basis for his play Richard III. In Shakespeare’s version, Richard as not just a ruthless opportunist (undoubtedly true) but a physically and mentally deformed psychopath to boot (but Richard got all the best lines).

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

This is the area where the 2019-2022 discoveries of Phillipa Langley’s team offer dramatic new information and lead to a plausible revision of traditional (i.e. Tudor) history of the time.

With his 1485 declaration that Edward IV’s sons were dead, Henry had backed himself into a corner. If anyone subsequently came forward claiming to be Edward V or Richard of York, his only option would be to declare them imposters.

And that is exactly what happened in the bizarre events that followed in the years 1487 and 1490-95.

1. The “Lambert Simnel” Rebellion.

In 1487, 16-year-old Edward V (or someone purporting to be him) appeared at the Netherlands court of his aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy [4]. History records nothing of where Edward had been or what he had been doing during his four missing years. His aunt and leading Yorkist nobles recognised him as the son of Edward IV and assembled a formidable army – 8000 strong – made up of mercenary German heavy infantry (landsknechts), Irish light infantry (kerns) and English troops supplied by Yorkist Lords. The Princes in the Tower Project unearthed a 1487 receipt from a French arms manufacturer recording supply of weapons to Margaret of Burgundy for the use of “Margaret’s nephew, son of King Edward“.

In 1487, Edward led [5] this army against Henry Tudor, only to be defeated (and most likely killed there and buried in a common grave [6]) at the closely fought Battle of Stoke [7].

Henry declared that the failed rebellion was not led by Edward V, but by an imposter called Lambert Simnel. He further claimed that Simnel was impersonating, not Edward V, but Edward Earl of Warwick. To “prove” this, in a piece of theatre, Henry produced a youth captured at the battle called Lambert Simnel – the son of an Oxford organ-grinder (or, in other accounts: a joiner, a tailor, a baker or a shoemaker’s son). The real Earl of Warwick was then taken from the Tower where he had been languishing and paraded through the streets of London. There was an obvious flaw in Henry’s story: why would thousands of Yorkist supporters have acclaimed a low-born youth as the Earl of Warwick when it was widely known that the real Earl of Warwick was locked in the Tower? The “Edward” cheered for by Yorkists at the Battle of Stoke could only have been someone they believed to be Edward V. Henry’s version was a crock, as almost all at the time must have known. But, in a repressive regime, speaking Truth to Power is Treason, and people sensibly held their tongues. Lambert Simnel (a convenient nonentity) was then magnanimously forgiven by Henry and set to work in his kitchen. (Faced with a choice between certain execution or a secure job for life in the royal household, Lambert would not have hesitated to go along with this charade).

(As a bonus for Henry, the young Earl of Warwick could now be safely beheaded. He was the fourth victim of Henry’s dynastic cleansing operation, but very far from the last. The relentless Tudor pogrom to hunt down and eliminate all members of the English aristocracy with even a trace of Plantagenet blood lasted for 50 years. The last victim was the aged Margaret De La Pole (daughter of the Duke of Clarence, sister to Edward Earl of Warwick), beheaded on the orders of Henry VIII in 1541. The French Ambassador, who witnessed the beheading, wrote of an incompetent executioner raining 11 blows on the old lady’s head and shoulders before he was able to remove her head).

2. The “Perkin Warbeck” Rebellion.

In 1490, 16-year-old Richard of York appeared in the Netherlands and met his aunt, Margaret of Burgundy. She had not seen him for nine years but was in no doubt who he was. As she wrote (in Latin) to her cousin Queen Isabella of Spain:

“I recognised him easily as if I had just seen him yesterday or the day before…and that was not by one or two general signs, but by so many visible and specific signs that hardly one person in ten hundred thousand (a million) might be found who would have marks of the same kind.” (Margaret of Burgundy, 1493).

At the likely instigation of his aunt, and remembering the lies told by Henry at the time of his brother Edward’s rebellion three years before, Richard wrote a detailed account of his movements during his missing years. Dutch researcher Nathalie Bliekendaal, a member of the Princes in the Tower Project, located a copy of this document in a dusty Dutch archive. The copy is a handwritten translation into Old Dutch from a lost French original and has been dated (on linguistic and handwriting evidence) to around 1500. In it, Richard tells how, in July or August 1483, he and his brother Edward were separated and never saw each other again. Richard was then taken from the Tower in disguise and transported to France by two trusted retainers of John Howard (the Duke of Norfolk), and Viscount Francis Lovell, both loyal subjects of Richard III [8]. In the care of these men, Richard stayed in France for a few years. Fearing recognition by agents of Henry Tudor, now actively searching for him again after the Battle of Stoke, he fled to Spain, and thence to Portugal. When he reached his majority, and knowing he was the rightful King Richard IV of England, Richard made his way to Burgundy to make himself known to his aunt Margaret and claim his inheritance.

Besides his aunt, Richard was accepted as Richard IV of England by Phillip I (Duke of Burgundy), Maximilian I, (the Holy Roman Emperor), Albert III (King of Germany) and James IV (King of Scotland). With the support of these monarchs in finance, manpower and shipping, Richard raised an army and, over a 3-year period, attempted several invasions of England: first from Ireland, then from Scotland and finally from Cornwall. But English support for the Yorkist cause was waning as Yorkist numbers and enthusiasm had been shredded by ten years of lost battles and judicial executions. Lacking substantial English support, all Richard’s attempts failed, and he was finally captured by Henry VII’s forces in 1495. Under torture, Richard signed a prepared statement saying that he was Perkin Warbeck, the son of a boatman from Tournai in France, who had been recruited and schooled in his deception by Margaret of York. The “confession” did not save him. In 1499 Richard was beheaded at the Tower of London under the name of Perkin Warbeck (or, in other accounts, Piers Osbeck). Thus passed the last Plantagenet King of England – a dynasty which had ruled England since Henry II, 231 years before.

THE URN IN THE ABBEY

In a niche at the back of the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey, behind the tombs of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, is a marble urn which, according to the Latin legend on the plinth, holds the bones of Edward V and Richard Duke of York. Click for a sharper image. Photo by author.

In 1674, workmen demolishing an external staircase near the SE corner of the White Tower discovered human bones at a depth of 10 feet. They tossed them onto a pile of building rubble. When Charles II heard of the discovery, he ordered they be retrieved and examined by his personal physician, Dr John White. White determined that the remains were of two young boys whom he identified as Edward V and his brother Richard Duke of York. Both Dr White and King Charles were influenced by Sir Thomas More’s 1519 account that the Princes had been buried “beneath a staircase”, although they chose to ignore More’s added detail that the corpses were soon after exhumed and reburied “elsewhere”. On the King’s orders, the bones were placed in a marble urn and displayed in Westminster Abbey above an inscription identifying them as the remains of the Princes in the Tower, suffocated to death on the orders of their “perfidious” uncle, Richard III. There it remains to this day, and thousands of visitors daily pass before it.

The urn was opened in 1933, and its contents examined by two anatomists, I.E. Tanner and W.J. Whyte. From the start, Tanner and Whyte never seriously thought to question that they were dealing with the remains of the Princes in the Tower. They took a detailed measurements, X-rays and numerous B&W photographs. Their conclusion was much the same as that of Dr White 260 years before: the urn contained the jumbled and incomplete bones of two young boys, one aged around 8 years, the other around 12.

Church authorities will not allow another opening of the urn. The Princes in the Tower Project commissioned a leading Dutch forensic pathologist, Professor George Maat, to re-examine the data, X-rays and photographs published by the 1933 team. According to Professor Maat’s 2019 Report, the urn contains the bones of two humans, but possibly three, with age ranges of 9-15 and 8-12 years. However, Maat found no evidence for the sex of the remains, no evidence for cause of death, no evidence for or against consanguinity, and no evidence for how long they had been in the ground prior to discovery in 1674.

So, good candidates for the Princes in the Tower? Perhaps, but there are other possibilities.

The Tower of London was built by William the Conqueror in 1077 on the site of a Roman fort which was itself built on the site of an Iron Age fort and settlement. In 1950, very close to the place and at the same depth as the 1674 discovery, the complete skeleton of a 13–16-year-old boy was excavated. The skeleton still available and has recently been dated by the Carbon¹⁴ isotopic method to around 3000 years old.

Until and unless it is possible to re-examine the remains in the Westminster Urn with modern techniques of DNA analysis and C¹⁴ dating, their significance is unknown. If such results were to indicate they are exactly what the legend below the Urn says they are, then the fate of the Princes in the Tower will be solved, although questions as to how, why, when (to the nearest year) and by whom, they were killed would still remain open.

But until then, we are back to square one. Which leads me to some …

FINAL THOUGHTS

The tale is a classic whodunit, but as a real-life case, there is no truth reveal by the great detective in the final chapter.

People, events, and dates in Phillipa Langley’s book are based on contemporary documents that are widely accepted as factual. Many of these documents are new discoveries by the Princes in the Tower project.

Motivations, and reconstructions of events not recorded, follow “balance of probability” arguments rather than the tougher criteria of “beyond all reasonable doubt”. With the winnowing of evidence through the passage of time and the passage through the hands of early Tudor monarchs, this is probably the best that can ever be achieved.

Probability arguments ultimately boil down to personal opinion and can always be contested. As Sigmund Freud wrote: “…one has always to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.”  

For me, Phillipa Langley’s account of the period offers a more believable history than the carefully crafted Tudor version that is still, by and large, accepted by mainstream historians.

After reading the book I have become a convinced Ricardian. Richard III was a ruthless opportunist, swift to dispose of his political enemies, but Langley’s evidence suggests that he had compassion for the innocent young sons of his brother.