WHO KILLED THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER? (REDUX)
A live online event this week looks again at the evidence for the Middle Ages' most notorious murder
My friend, sometime colleague and permanent alter-ego Dan Snow has been in the Antarctic recently. (As you may have seen in the news, he has been with the expedition that located Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship Endurance, which sank in 1915.)
But in Dan’s absence, his History Hit empire marches on. This week they’re putting on a live event reviewing the evidence for the fate of the Princes in the Tower, who were murdered (Or were they? Yes they were) in 1483.
The History Hit team have asked me to let you know that tickets for the event are available here. It’s on Wednesday at 19.00GMT/15.00EST.
Anyway, this got me wondering exactly what I had written about Richard III and the Princes when I published my book The Hollow Crown (aka The Wars of the Roses). So I dug the book out and had a look. Below is what I made of it then. I think I still stand by all of this today.
Do you have a pet theory about the Princes? What do you think it would take for the Crown to permit DNA testing on the remains in the urn in Westminster Abbey? Let me know in the comments.
The last recorded sightings of the Princes in the Tower were in the late summer and early autumn of 1483, in the month that followed their uncle’s seizure of the crown. Following [Lord] Hastings’s murder, all the regular servants who had been on hand for Edward V and his brother Richard were removed from the boys’ presence; they were paid their last wage on July 9. It was reported in London’s Great Chronicle that they were spotted ‘playing and shooting in the garden of the Tower’, perhaps as late as September 29. But Dominic Mancini wrote that the princes ‘were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether.’
Edward V was twelve and he had been well educated. He presumably knew enough either of English history or of human nature – or both – to anticipate his fate. Deposed kings did not live. ‘The physician Argentine, the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed, reported that the young king, like a victim prepared for a sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.’ Indeed it was. By the time the summer’s blaze had ceased to bake the whitewashed walls of the Tower of London, Edward, who, ‘had such dignity in his whole person, and in his face such charm’ had vanished, along with his little brother. ‘I have seen many men burst into tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after his removal from men’s sight,’ wrote Mancini. By November 1483 the assumption driving English politics was that the ‘Princes in the Tower’ (as they are now popularly known) would never be seen alive again.
We still do not know for certain how the boys died. In later years rumours would hold that they had been smothered with a feather-bed, or drowned in a butt of Malmesy, or poisoned – but these were no more than rumours. It is possible that bones and teeth discovered roughly buried in a wooden box beneath the chapel stairs in the White Tower at the Tower of London belonged to the Princes, but these have not been tested adequately enough to say for certain. All we can be sure of is that the boys were first disinherited, then deprived of their liberty and servants, then disappeared, presumed dead by contemporaries across Europe. And the person who benefited most from their disappearance was Richard III.
From The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones (Faber, 2014), aka The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones (Viking, 2014)
I thought it was extremely unlikely those bones were even from the same period as when the princes were in the Tower?
Anyway, the most likely explanation is that Richard was responsible for the death of the boys. After all, boys grow up to men, who would claim the throne or at the very least become the rallying point of revolt against Richard (and his then-living son and heir). For his own and his son's protection, the princes needed to disappear for good.
In my view . Yes Richard III did have a lot to benefit from it but he was not the only one. He had already bastardized them and locked them away. What harm could they have done .they were no longer in the line of succession?
I don't have an opinion I can really stand by on any of the top 3 suspects as all are plausible. For all we know they could have died from neglect or poor food or sickness and someone spread a rumour and when dicky found out they were dead hurriedly buried them so as not to be judged upon the level of care he may or may not have supplied to his nephews.