The Princes in the Tower, page 11
And after, that the bodies of these two children, as the opinion ran, were both closed in a great heavy chest, and by the means of one that was secret with the protector, they were put in a ship going to Flanders; and, when the ship was in the black deeps, this man threw both those dead bodies, so closed in the chest, over the hatches into the sea; and yet none of the mariners, no none in the ship, save only the said man, knew what things it was that was there so enclosed. Which saying divers men conjectured to be true, because that the bones of the said children could never be found buried, neither in the Tower nor in no other place.
Another opinion there is, that they which had the charge to put them to death, caused one to cry suddenly, ‘Treason, treason’. Wherewith the children being afeared, desired to know what was best for them to do. And then they bad them hide themselves in a great chest, that no man should find them, and if anybody came into the chamber they would say they were not there. And according as they counselled them, they crept both into the chest, which, anon after, they locked. And then anon they buried that chest in a great pit under a stair, which they before had made therefore, and anon cast earth thereon, and so buried them quick. Which chest was after cast into the black deeps, as is before said.
Then, the 20th day of June [recte 26th], the said protector took upon him as king of the realm, proclaiming himself King Richard III.
Immediately after his coronation, the grudge, as well of the lords as of the commons, greatly increased against him [King Richard], because the common fame went that he had secretly murdered the two sons of his brother, King Edward IV in the Tower of London.100
This is an important account as it represents the first time that several narratives are ascribed to the disappearance and widely published in England. Both boys were put to death by Richard as Protector, ‘as it was said’ by the ‘council’ of the Duke of Buckingham (not by Buckingham himself, compare Commynes’ and the London citizen’s notes). Following this, Richard proclaimed himself king. Edward V had been smothered and Richard of York’s throat cut by unnamed men. The following day, the bodies were to be shown to Richard or the men undertaking the task would also be killed. The bodies were then put in a great chest, placed on a boat to Flanders and thrown into the River Thames in an area on the estuary known as the ‘black deeps’. One man undertook this task and none aboard the ship were aware of what was taking place.
Another scenario describes both boys placed alive in the great chest, which is locked and buried in a great pit under a stair (in the Tower). The pit had been specifically made for this task. The chest was then exhumed, taken on the ship to Flanders and thrown into the river at black deeps. Significantly, Rastell adds, ‘Which saying divers men conjectured to be true, because that the bones of the said children could never be found buried, neither in the Tower nor in no other place.’ The timeline for this account of the boys’ murder is on or around 26 June when Gloucester accepted the throne.
After 1521
The next mention, in the Middleton Collection at Nottingham University, appears in a list of kings similar to the Anlaby Cartulary (see below). Handwritten notes on the folio can be dated to sometime after 1521. It states, ‘Edward the fifth reigned as a child from the aforesaid 9th day of April until the 25th day of June, whereupon the following day he was slain and his body submersed underwater.’101 This seems to follow Rastell for Edward V’s death on 26 June and the body being cast into the ‘black deeps’.
1530
The next mention appears in the Anlaby Cartulary. This includes a list of monarchs, their length of reign and dates of death. Edward V is recorded as reigning for two months and eight days;102 his death is given as 22 June.103 Edward’s entry was included sometime during the Tudor period, following the death of Henry VII in 1509.104 It states, ‘The death of Edward vth on 22nd June, reigned 2 months and 8 days but was not crowned, slain and no one knows where he was buried.’105
1532
Our next account occurs in the records of the Armourers and Braziers Company in London. It relates, ‘After Edward IV reigned Prince Edward V from the 9th day of April to the 22nd day of June privately destroyed and lie buried in the tower of London.’106 This again offers a date of death of 22 June 1483 and a second mention of burial location in the Tower of London (see 1508, Pynson, p. 93).
1534
Our next commentator is Polydore Vergil. Vergil was an Italian cleric, writer and author and came to reside in London around 1502. Vergil became friends with Thomas More and Erasmus, among others. Encouraged by Henry VII, the Italian began a complete history of England (his Anglica Historia) in around 1506–07. The first unpublished manuscript covered events to 1513 and was completed in that year. Later, it was published in revised form in 1534 at Basel.107 Vergil states:
Henry VII’s historian, Polydore Vergil (c. 1470–1555).
For when Richard heard that the constable [of the Tower] was delaying the execution of his command, he immediately gave to another, namely Sir James Tyrell, the task of swiftly despatching his nephews. Obliged to execute these orders, Tyrell left York for London and at once had the boys put to death. Thus perished Prince Edward alongside his brother Richard. But what manner of death the poor innocents met is not known for certain.108
Later, in his 1534 edition, Vergil observed that long after Richard’s reign there remained ‘those among the common people’ who suspected that Edward IV’s sons were still living in secret (see also the 1546/55 editions).
This is the first account to state that the boys were put to death while King Richard was at York (Richard left York on 20 September 1483). The perpetrator was Sir James Tyrell.
1543
In this year a new literary style of writing about history emerged, complete with imagined scenes and dialogue. The Chronicle of John Hardyng (1378–1465) was published by Richard Grafton with an unattributed continuation which comprised a narrative on Richard III in English taken from Thomas More’s unpublished proto-drama on the subject.109 More had been executed seven years earlier by Henry VIII, on the fifty-second anniversary of King Richard’s coronation (6 July 1535).
More’s nephew, William Rastell (also a publisher), later discovered another version of the same untitled, unfinished narrative among his uncle’s papers which he published in 1557, entitling it The History of King Richard the Third and claiming it as the authentic version. The contents are essentially the same, but Rastell’s version is more commonly known and is quoted here. Rastell believed More wrote it in 1513 when he was one of the under-sheriffs of London, but in fact it has survived in various versions, with internal indications revealing that he continued working on them to a much later date. More was a humanist writer, lawyer and politician, holding the post of Lord Chancellor three years prior to his execution. He had been a page in the household of Dr John Morton (d. 1500), Henry VII’s advisor and chief administrator.110
More writes that at Gloucester on royal progress (2 August 1483), King Richard sends a John Green, whom he specially trusts, to kill the princes, but Sir Robert Brackenbury, Constable of the Tower, refuses to allow it to take place. Green returns to King Richard, who is now at Warwick (8–13 August 1483). A page tells Richard that a certain James Tyrell will undertake the deed. Richard doesn’t know the man111 but rises from the draught (privy/toilet) to engage him in the task.
Tyrell arrives at the Tower and delivers a letter to Brackenbury commanding him to give the keys of the Tower to Tyrell for one night. Brackenbury does so and leaves. Edward and Richard are ‘shut up’ in the Tower with all servants removed other than a Black Will, or William Slaughter. The murder now takes place:
Sir James Tyrell devised that they should be murdered in their beds, to the execution whereof he appointed Miles Forest … a fellow fleshed in murder before time. To him he joined one John Dighton, his own horse-keeper, a big, broad, square, strong knave. Then, all the other being removed from them, this Miles Forest and John Dighton about midnight … came into the chamber and suddenly lapped them up among the clothes – so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the featherbed and pillows hard into their mouths, that within a while, smored [smothered] and stifled their breath falling, they gave up to God their innocent souls … and long after lying still … they laid their bodies naked out upon the bed and fetched Sir James to see them. Which, upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at the stair foot, meetly deep in the ground, under a great heap of stones.
Then rode Sir James in great haste to King Richard and showed him all the manner of the murder, who gave him great thanks and, as some say, there made him a knight.112 But he allowed not, as I have heard, the burying in so vile a corner, saying that he would have them buried in a better place because they were a king’s sons. Lo the honourable courage of a king! Whereupon they say that a priest of Sir Robert Brackenbury took up the bodies again and secretly interred them in such place as, by the occasion of his death which only knew it, could never since come to light. Very truth it is and well known that at such time as Sir James Tyrell was in the Tower for treason … both Dighton and he were examined and confessed to the murder in manner above written, but wither the bodies were removed they could nothing tell. And thus shut up in prison, and privily slain and murdered; their bodies shut up and cast God wot where …
Prior to this, More had added, ‘… that some remain yet in doubt whether they were in his [Richard’s] days destroyed or no’.113
More’s narrative offers the first literary account from an English author, including a number of new names: Green, Slaughter, Forest and Dighton (see Chapter 17). Significantly, he includes the only account of a confession by the alleged perpetrator, Sir James Tyrell, which More says he made in 1502 at his execution (see Chapter 8).
1546
Polydore Vergil reprinted his Anglica Historia with a slightly stronger variation to the 1534 text about the survival of the princes, a variation which was also included in his best-known 1555 reprint at the time of his death, ‘A report prevailed among the common people that the sons of Edward the king had migrated to some part of the earth in secret, and there were still surviving’.114
1548 and 1550
Following Grafton’s publication of the new literary-style narrative (More’s account), his Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (by Edward Hall) followed More’s account.
1551
In Holland, the Dutch chronicler, Jan Reygersbergh, wrote:
In the same year King Edward the fourth, with this name king of England died. And he left two sons and one daughter behind. And these rightful heirs were expelled from England.115
1577 and 1587
In England, Hall’s work (as above) was followed by Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (‘Holinshed’s Chronicles’) which again borrowed heavily from More. Uniquely, Holinshed’s narrative included a public declaration of innocence made by King Richard at the time of his Parliament (23 January–20 February 1484), ‘For what with purging and declaring his innocence concerning the murder of his nephews toward the world, and what with cost to obtain the love and favour of the communality (which outwardly glossed, and openly dissembled with him) …’116
As the Queen Mother left sanctuary on 1 March 1484, the timing of the declaration may be significant. It is not known why Holinshed is the only Tudor chronicler to record the declaration.
In 1592, historian John Stow in his Annales of England, accepted More’s account of murder by Tyrell (see 1611, p. 104, John Speed). In 1592–93, Holinshed was the principal source material for a new play by William Shakespeare: The Tragedie of King Richard the Third.117
The Tudor Dynasty Continued: Summary
During this period, Edward V’s death is recorded in some unofficial accounts as being 22 June 1483. Towards the middle of the Tudor era, John Rastell (More’s brother-in-law) published the English account of the disappearance of the princes – as murder on 26 June 1483. Following More’s execution, this was built on by William Rastell (More’s nephew), who published the best-known narrative of King Richard’s reign, discovered among More’s papers and given the title The History of King Richard the Third. This was extensively ‘borrowed’ by Hall and Holinshed and was eventually taken up by William Shakespeare as the basis of a play about King Richard.
More’s account became embellished in the retelling, but in his original he recorded that doubts about the princes’ deaths existed in King Richard’s time. He locates the deaths of both princes at on or around 8–13 August 1483, when Richard was at Warwick. During the Tudor period (after 1485), the government failed to publish or proclaim any statement accounting for the disappearance of the princes.
In 1534, 1546 and 1555 (during the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary I), Vergil has the deaths take place when King Richard was in York (September 1483). He also recorded a common report of survival, where Edward V and Richard of York had travelled in secret to a foreign land, although this did not appear in his original text of 1513. In 1551, this narrative seemed to be supported by a Dutch chronicler who recorded the children of Edward IV (two sons and a daughter) were ‘expelled from England’. In 1557, Holinshed recorded a public declaration of innocence made by King Richard in 1484. In 1592–93, Shakespeare based his play on More’s narrative.
1603 Onwards – The Post-Tudor Period
The demise of the Tudor dynasty is an important point in the enquiry. Did the story change, or new information come to light?
1611
In this year, historian John Speed published The Historie of Great Britaine and Bertram Fields writes:
According to the seventeenth-century historian John Speed, his fellow historian John Stow, who adopted More’s account in his Annals, published in 1592, maintained orally on a number of occasions that the princes had not been murdered at all, but were living incognito beyond the sea.118
1616
Essayist, courtier and MP Sir William Cornwallis published The Encomium of Richard III in 1616. This considered what was known about Richard and the princes and ‘sought to demonstrate that a proposition generally accepted as true, was in fact, false’.119 A pamphlet by John Morton was still in circulation in the 1590s and early 1600s, which Cornwallis believed to have been the basis for More’s account.120 Cornwallis’ intellectual exercise added no new information regarding the disappearance, other than the existence of Morton’s pamphlet (with More and Morton critiqued).121
1619
Sir George Buc held the office of Master of the Revels to James I of England. His ancestors were retainers of the Howard family. His great-grandfather, Sir John Buck, fought for King Richard at Bosworth and was executed at Leicester. An antiquarian and historian, Buc examined all records and documents (and consulted the families of those involved in Richard’s reign). He completed his defence of Richard, The History of King Richard the Third, in 1619. Buc also believed that More’s account stemmed from an original work by Morton.122 In considering the contradictory nature of More’s work, Buc found no evidence for Tyrell’s confession. After recording the various allegations of murder, Buc summarised:
Thus the murder is reported by some of the accusers, but some others vary from them and say that these young princes were embarked in a ship at Tower wharf, and that they were conveyed from hence into the seas, and so cast into the deeps and drowned. But some others say that they were not drowned, but were set safe on shore beyond the seas.
Buc added, ‘For some say that they were shipped alive and conveyed over the seas. Here you see that it was held and believed that they were living after the death of King Richard.’123
1622
Sir Francis Bacon, former Lord Chancellor of England, published his History of the Reign of Henry the Seventh. In late 1485, as King Henry prevaricated over his promise to marry Elizabeth of York who, if legitimated, would have a greater claim to the throne, Bacon agreed with Vergil that there were doubts as to the demise of the princes:
… even at that time secret rumours and whisperings – which afterwards gathered strength and turned to great troubles – that the two young sons of King Edward the Fourth, or one of them, which were said to be destroyed in the Tower, were not indeed murdered but conveyed secretly away, and were yet living: which if it had been true, had prevented the title [coronation] of the Lady Elizabeth.124
1674
In 1674, bones were discovered at the Tower of London and said by the government of Charles II to be the princes. They were placed in an urn in Westminster Abbey and identified as such. In 1933, the contents of the urn were examined (see Chapter 9).
1768
In this year, Sir Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, antiquarian, art historian and Whig politician, published Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard the Third. Walpole was the youngest son of the British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Historic Doubts included a critical factual analysis of the fate of the princes, with specific reference to More’s account. After presenting the Wardrobe Account for the clothing for ‘the Lord Edward’ as evidence that Edward V was alive at the time of King Richard’s coronation (and possibly present at the ceremony),125 Walpole stated:
… for it appears by the roll of parliament, which bastardised Edward the Fifth, that he was then alive, which was seven months after the time assigned by More for his murder. If Richard spared him seven months, what could suggest a reason for the murder afterwards? To take him off then was strengthening the plan of the earl of Richmond [Henry Tudor].126
