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).

“…one has always to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth, and the truth not always probable.” -Sigmund Freud.  

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 excavation below one of their car parks, resulting in the discovery of the 527-year-old remains of King Richard III. 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. 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 her team have discovered in the Netherlands, France and Germany.  The book is a well written and a 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: Elizabeth, Margaret, Eleanor, Catherine) used by the extended Plantagenet family. I retell the story as a continuous linear narrative, separating my own commentary within italicized brackets and putting non-essential detail into footnotes.

THE BACK STORY

The story begins more than 80 years before the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower. As Langley treats this prequel relatively briefly, much of this less controversial section is taken from “The Plantagenets” – a popular recent book by main-stream historian Dan Snow.

In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Lancaster, deposed and murdered (according to Snow 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 (Snow), 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.

Henry V succeeded his father. He became a powerful monarch and military leader who successfully renewed the Plantagenet claim to the throne of France at the Battle of Agincourt (1415). But Henry V died relatively young, leaving his 9-month-old son – another Henry – to succeed him. Henry VI grew up to be a simpleton with severe mental problems who, although by all contemporary accounts amiable, pious and peace-loving, had little interest in governing and was easily led by whoever happened to closest to him at the time. As Dan Snow neatly put it: “Henry VI reigned, but he never ruled”.

(Henry VI would have made an ideal monarch for the House of Windsor, but for the 15th century House of Lancaster, and for England as a whole, his accession was unmitigated disaster. As Dan Snow points out, Henry’s character – or rather lack of it – was the single most important cause of the decades of chaos, civil war and death that were to follow).

In 1461 at the epic Battle of Towton, and again in 1471 at the Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, the young, handsome and energetic Edward Duke of York defeated the Lancastrian forces fighting in the name of his hopeless and hapless cousin Henry VI. These battles enabled Edward to first seize and then retain the throne as Edward IV. After Tewkesbury, Henry VI was imprisoned in the Tower where he died a few months later: from “melancholia” according to Edward, but most later historians believe Henry was murdered on the orders of Edward to prevent him from becoming a figurehead for future Lancastrian rebellions.

THE PLOT

After Tewkesbury, Edward reigned competently for 12 years over a peaceful England, ably and loyally supported by his younger brother Richard of Gloucester. Edward IV died unexpectedly of natural causes in April 1483 at the age of 41. He was survived, inter alia, by his wife Elizabeth (born into the Lancastrian Woodville family, a widow of John Grey), his daughter Elizabeth of York (aged 17) and his sons Edward Prince of Wales (12) and Richard Duke of York (9). The young Edward was immediately acclaimed as King Edward V and his younger brother Richard as his heir. Their paternal Uncle Richard [1] was named in Edward IV’s will as the Protector of his sons until they came of age. In May 1483, Richard removed the boys from the control of their mother Elizabeth and the extended Woodville family, who had planned to become Regents. He housed the boys in the Tower of London – the traditional residence of a monarch awaiting coronation. Arrangements were made for their coronation later that year.

Events now moved fast. The late king’s death had released a skeleton from his cupboard.  In the early summer of 1483, Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells [2], contacted Richard of Gloucester with explosive testimony to the effect that in 1464, prior to Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Grey (nee Woodville), he had officiated (or merely witnessed?) at a secret “pre-contract” of marriage  between Edward (then Duke of York) and Eleanor Butler (a widow, nee Eleanor Talbot), daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Edward’s later marriage to Elizabeth Grey was bigamous and all the children of that marriage therefore illegitimate. Throughout his life, Henry IV had been a noted libertine. He had many acknowledged bastards, so the claim that he had a few more unacknowledged ones was for many easy to believe.

(The principal, but not the only, source for this story is the Memoirs of French diplomat Philippe de Commynes. But de Commynes was not in England at that time, and it is hard to know from where he got his information. Was he merely quoting malicious gossip picked up in the saloons of the French Court?).

On receipt of this information, Richard of Gloucester acted swiftly and with characteristic decisiveness. In July 1483 he declared his nephews illegitimate and had himself crowned at Westminster Abbey as King Richard III. The ceremony was attended by the Dowager Queen Eizabeth (now apparently reconciled to King Richard), daughter Elizabeth of York (who carried the train) and the powerful northern Baron Thomas Stanley (who carried the mace).

(Stanley will have an important part to play later in this drama, as we shall see).

But the constitutional crisis did not go away, so Richard convened a sitting of Parliament to examine the truth of the cleric’s claims. In 1483, this should not have been too difficult. Although Lady Eleanor Butler was deceased, then, as now, marriage and marriage contracts – especially of nobility – required witnesses and written records, presumably easily found at that time.

Parliament concluded that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Grey was indeed bigamous: the children of that union were therefore illegitimate. Thus, Richard of Gloucester was the legitimate and rightful King. This conclusion was made into Law in February 1484 by an Act of Parliament called Titulus Regius.

“King Edward was and stood married and troth-plighted to one Dame Eleanor Butler, with whom the same King Edward had made a pre-contract of matrimony long before the said feigned marriage with the said Elizabeth Grey.” (Titulus Regius, February 1484)

(But it should be noted that, two years later, the same Parliament re-legitimized Edward IV’s family at the request of the usurper Henry Tudor ((see below)). It would be unsafe to assume that they were ever truly independent judges on the matter).

Richard’s reign was brief. He was hacked to death in August 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, bravely but recklessly leading his army from the front against a Lancastrian force led by Henry Tudor. Richard’s death, and the subsequent switching of sides by his key ally Lord Thomas Stanley, brought the battle to a rapid conclusion in favour of Henry.

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 Henry VI’s half-brother. Henry Tudor’s mother, Elizabeth Beaufort (a pregnant twelve-year-old (!!) at the time of her husband Edmund’s death) was a great-great-granddaughter of Edward III, albeit through an illegitimate female line. Elizabeth subsequently married Lord Thomas Stanley (at the Battle of Bosworth, Stanley was thus Henry’s stepfather, which probably explains a lot).

By 15th century dynastic rules (according to Phillipa Langley) there were at least three dozen living Plantagenets with better claims to the throne than Henry Tudor.  Henry’s dynastic claim thus ranged from tenuous to non-existent (another phrase I borrow from Dan Snow), 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, the Princes in the Tower and the subject of Philipa Langley’s book.

The boys were last seen by an independent observer happily playing at archery in the Tower gardens in July 1483. They were never seen in public again. The fate of the two boys has become an endlessly argued 500-year-old mystery.

Were they -

A     Murdered by order of their Unspeakable Uncle Richard, eager to remove all threats to his crown?

In 1483, Richard had control of the boys and possessed obvious motive, means and opportunity. People who support this scenario are known as Henricians (as in – Henry VII was innocent of their murders). This became the Tudor explanation and is still accepted today as probable Truth by most mainstream historians, including Dan Snow.

B     Murdered by order of the Wicked Welshman Henry.

If the young Princes were still alive when Henry gained control of England in 1485, then Henry had exactly the same motive, means and opportunity for their secret murder as Richard. Indeed, his motive, if anything, was stronger. If Henry had found only the boy’s bodies, he would surely have displayed their corpses publicly as a means of positively establishing Richard’s guilt.

C.     Still alive when Henry became King, but living anonymously abroad in the care of Yorkist sympathizers – beyond the ken and beyond the reach of Henry.

It is this third option that that Phillipa Langley seeks to prove in her book. Read on…

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 still alive, questions as to heir legitimacy notwithstanding, his hold on kingship might be short lived. Phillipa Langley quotes contemporary documentary evidence that in August 1485 Henry dispatched 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. Around the same time, Henry issued a 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 assumed the princes dead at the hands of Richard III, and although at that time he made no direct accusation (that came later), 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 younger brother, George Duke of Clarence – as the legitimate heir to the throne. Henry’s throne was still insecure. He did not want to risk the odium that would result from murdering the innocent Earl of Warwick. Not straight away at any rate. He locked the lad in the Tower, pending a more suitable moment for him to order Edward of Warwick’s disposal (he only had to wait a few years, as we shall see).

Henry wished to marry 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 Regius [3], and (an obvious and necessary step) arrest Bishop Stillington for perjury. That done, Henry married Elizabeth. She became the mother of next Tudor king Henry VIII and the founder of the Tudor dynasty.

(Henry was now a winner, and winners get to write the history. Over years the Tudor narrative was carefully crafted. That narrative went like this: Richard of Gloucester ordered the deaths of Edward IVs young sons, the legitimate heirs to the throne. To support this narrative all evidence to the contrary, including all copies of Titulus Regius, were systematically destroyed.)

Twenty or more years later, two Tudor historians during the reign of Henry VIII – Polydore Vergil (Henry VII’s paid historian) in 1513 and Thomas More around 1520 – sexed-up the Tudor narrative of the events of 1483-85 with added melodrama 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.

(For centuries ham actors have reveled in playing the monster that Shakespeare created as they clump round the stage declaiming with straw-filled hump, clubbed foot and withered arm).

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 legitimizing of Edward IVs family, and his assumption that Edward’s sons must be dead, Henry had backed himself into a corner. He was taking a chance here: if either Edward V or Richard of York were to reappear, Henry’s only choices would be to resign his throne in their favour, or declare them imposters.

And that is exactly what Phillipa Langley argues happened in the in the series of bizarre events that followed in the years 1487 and 1490-95.)

1. The “Lambert Simnel” Rebellion.

In 1487, then 16-year-old Edward V (or someone purporting to be him) appeared at the Netherlands court of his paternal aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, who had known him well as a child [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, 8000-strong, army 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 the purchase of 400 pikes by Margaret of Burgundy for the use of “Margaret’s nephew, son of King Edward“. There can be thus no doubt – despite Henry Tudor’s later disinformation (see below) – the rebellion was carried out in the name of Edward V.

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 led by a low-born imposter claiming to be Edward Earl of Warwick (a nephew of Edward IV). To “prove” this, in a piece of theatre, Henry produced a youth (possibly captured at the battle) called Lambert Simnel – the son of an Oxford organ maker or, in other accounts: a joiner, a tailor, a baker or a shoemaker’s son (i.e. any occupation suitably base and contemptible). The real Earl of Warwick was taken from the Tower where he had been languishing and paraded through the streets of London. 

(In a repressive regime, speaking Truth to Power is Treason. In the 15th century that often meant being hung, drawn and quartered: sensible people held their tongues. After his public display, Simnel was 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, Simnel would not have hesitated to go along with this charade).

As a bonus for Henry, he now had an acceptable excuse to behead the innocent Earl of Warwick, who became the fourth Plantagenet victim of Henry Tudor’s dynastic cleansing operation. But he was 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 continued under Henry VIII and lasted for 50 years. The final victim was the aged Margaret De La Pole ((niece of Edward IV and younger sister of 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 successfully hack off her head.

2. The “Perkin Warbeck” Rebellion.

Around 1490, 16-year-old Richard of York (or someone purporting to be him) 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 unsuccessful 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 by independent experts (on linguistic, handwriting and paper evidence) to late the 15th Century. 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 forced “confession” did not save him. In 1499, Richard was hung (beheading, being considered more merciful, was reserved for nobility) at the Tower and buried under the name of Perkin Warbeck. 

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 3 meters. They tossed them onto a pile of building rubble. When Charles II heard of the discovery, he ordered the bones retrieved and had them 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. In this identification, Dr White and King Charles were heavily 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 a plinth 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 (see photo above).

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.

The crown (i.e. Queen Elizabeth II – Charles III has yet to be asked) 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 1674.

So, good candidates for the Princes in the Tower? Perhaps, but there are other equally strong 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. Early in the 20th century, 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 1000 BC.

Until and unless it is possible to re-examine the bones in the Westminster Urn with modern techniques of DNA analysis and C¹⁴ dating, their true significance is unknown. If such results were to indicate they are exactly who the legend below the Urn says they are, then the ultimate resting place of the Princes in the Tower will be solved, although questions as to how, why, when (to the nearest 10 years or so) and by whom, they were killed would still remain open.

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 can be no truth reveal by the great detective in the final chapter.

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

The truth of these documents, the motivations of their writers 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. For an alternative opinion to Phillipa Langley’s, based on much the same documents but a different assessment of probabilities, you should read the 2024 review of Langley’s book by historian Chris Phillip HERE.

And always remember the wise words about probability by Sigmund Freud in the quote at the head of this essay.

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.

Richard III was a decisive and ruthless opportunist, swift to dispose of his political enemies, but Langley presents plausible evidence that he had compassion for the innocent young sons of his elder brother.

After reading her book I have become a Ricardian. But I could be wrong.

Richard III. England’s most maligned king?

(Original portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Public open-source image)

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