The Princes in the Tower, page 47
12 Horrox, ODNB. Notes
13 Ibid., Tyrell was in dispute with his brother-in-law, Arundel, over his wife’s right to these lands. In 1469, he had married Anne, daughter and heir of John Arundel of Lanherne, Cornwall, by his first wife Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas, Lord Morley. Tyrell had been made Knight of the Shire in 1478. For children, see note 10.
14 In 1488, Tyrell’s office of Sheriff of Glamorgan was returned.
15 Thanks to Marie Barnfield (Walsh), Richard III Discussion Archive (2007), for this possibility: www.richardiii.org.uk/topic/9114/Tyrell%27s+two+Pardons. For Giles and Christopher Wellesbourne, see W.E. Hampton, ‘Opposition to Henry Tudor after Bosworth’, Crown & People, p. 174.
16 Campbell, Vol. 1, pp. 460, 503. Tyrell’s first pardon is sandwiched between John Smyth and William Welles of Warwick, both indicted for involvement in the Stafford brothers’ uprising in the West Country and Worcester as Lovell headed to Yorkshire (TNA, KB9/127 m.9, KB 9/138 m.4, KB 9/127 m.9, KB9/127 m.10). Thanks to Marie Barnfield for sources (see note 15). Following Bosworth, Lovell and the Staffords had taken sanctuary in St John’s Abbey, Colchester, not far from Tyrell’s home at Gipping, Suffolk. The second pardon, end-dated 12 July, names Tyrell first in a long list of those from Guînes Castle and garrison, including John Bonyngton, William Bondeman, William Rose, John Lichfield, John Thirlewal the elder (of York), fourteen yeomen and eight soldiers (Campbell, pp. 503–05). As Tyrell remained in post, his pardons may have been to assure the new king of his loyalty.
17 Rot. Parl., Vol. 6 (1472–1504), p. 545 – he was attainted during Henry VII’s Parliament of late 1503 to 1 April 1504. Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, is named first in the attainder, with William Courtney (d. 1511), heir of the Earl of Devon, and William Pole and Richard Pole of Wingfield, Suffolk. James Tyrell is named fourth in a list including eleven further names, and reads, ‘with diverse other evil disposed persons, falsely and traitorously imagining and conspiring the death and destruction of the King our Sovereign Lord, and the subversion of this his Realm, and for which false and traitorous purpose, divers of them were and be before divers of the King’s Commissioners of Oyer determiner in several Shires within this Realm, severally convicted and attainted of high Treason’. A second list of those attainted for high treason includes the late Lord Audley and Edward, Earl of Warwick, with Sir James and a further thirty-seven names.
18 CPR 1494–1509, pp. 506–07. Tyrell’s reversal reads, ‘the said James having been convicted in Guildhall London … of diverse offences committed 1 July 14 Henry VII [1499], and at other times, and afterwards beheaded’. For Tyrell’s son, Thomas (1475–1551), ‘the said Thomas having been convicted in the white hall within the king’s palace at Westminster … of treason committed in December, January, February and March, 17 Henry VII [1502]’. There is no doubt that Sir James’ trial had been a show trial. He was arraigned before every leading member of Henry VII’s court and its nobility, including the Mayor of London, John Shaa. Of interest to the project is that they were led by Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, Thomas, Marquess of Dorset, Henry, Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, among others.
19 See Arthur Kincaid’s seminal paper setting out the proto-drama concept, ‘The Dramatic Structure of Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Rice University, Houston, Texas) Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring 1972, pp. 223–42. Thanks to Annette Carson.
20 Sewell, pp. 146–47, for Grafton’s imprisonment in 1537 for the notoriety of his work. Sewell notes remarks by Henry Ellis (editor of Vergil and several sixteenth-century ‘chronicles’) about Grafton’s two different editions of Hardyng’s Chronicle, both printed in January 1453 and ‘differing in almost every page’. Rastell, in the preface to the 1557 edition of More: ‘Which worke hath bene before this time printed … very much corrupte in many places’ (Early Historians, p. 198).
21 Early Historians, Appendix, pp. 198–219, for Hanham’s detailed account of the many versions of More’s Richard III. See also Kendall, p. 421, and C.S.L. Davies, p. 243 for publication in 1557.
22 Early Historians, Appendix, pp. 198–219. Also, for example, Wilkinson, pp. 113–28, and More, pp. xv–xvi.
23 Sewell, pp. 156–59. Also for example, Early Historians, p. 201, and Wilkinson, pp. 116–21.
24 For example, Jürgen Meyer, ‘An Unthinkable History of King Richard III: Thomas More’s Fragment and his Answer to Lucian’s Tyrannicide’, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 109, 2014, pp. 629–39.
25 More, p. 85.
26 Ibid., p. 88.
27 Ibid., p. 89.
28 Ibid., p. 84.
29 Hampton, Crown & People, Appendix I, p. 209 n. 39, from Sewell, pp. 172–76.
30 Hampton, p. 209 n. 40, from James Gairdner (ed.), Memorials of Henry VII (1858), p. xxxvi.
31 GC, p. 237.
32 Extracts from Volume 2 of Vergil’s original manuscript have been printed in two separate publications: folios 214v–235 in Vergil-1; and subsequent folios in Vergil-2, pp. 2–146.
33 Vergil-1, p. 18.
34 Vergil-2, p. 13.
35 Ibid., p. 15 for ‘restore’; Latin restituendo, p. 14.
36 Ibid., p. 67.
37 Ibid., pp. 69–71.
38 Ibid., p. 87 ‘restored’; Latin restitueretur, p. 86.
39 Ibid., p. 127.
40 Trans. by Caroline Halsted, Richard III (1844), Vol. 2, pp. 180–81 n. 3. Halsted notes that Sir Francis Bacon recorded the same reports (see note 46). Thanks to Annette Carson.
41 Buc, pp. 120–22 for Morton as ‘the chief instigator and prime submover of all these treasonous detractions and the ringleader of these detractors and vitilitigators of King Richard’. See Chapter 5, note 111, for Morton as More’s source.
42 Following Henry VII’s accession, John Morton was made Lord Chancellor in March 1486. On 6 October 1486, he was made Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1493, following Henry’s innumerable appeals to Rome, Morton was made Cardinal by Pope Innocent VIII. He died of the plague at Knole House, Kent, on 15 September 1500. He was buried at Canterbury Cathedral, although his grave is believed to be empty. Stoneyhurst College in Lancashire holds a skull said to be Morton’s (Isolde Martyn, ‘How Posterity Beheaded Morton: The Case of the Missing Head’, Ricardian, Vol. 9, No. 118, September 1992, pp. 311–14). For a recent examination of the skull, see Martyn, ‘Cardinal Morton’s Skull’, Bulletin, December 2015, pp. 59–62.
43 Buc, p. 165.
44 For several individuals called John Green, see Hampton, ‘Sir James Tyrell’, Crown & People, pp. 210–11.
45 Buc, p. 167.
46 Bacon, Henry the Seventh, (Lockyer, ed.) p. 40. When discussing the first days of Henry VII’s reign and his claim to the throne by conquest, rather than descent of blood or Act of Parliament, Bacon records, ‘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’.
47 For the possibility that Thomas More may have encountered the sons of Miles Forest in the course of royal business, see Tim Thornton, ‘More on a Murder: The Deaths of the “Princes in the Tower”, and Historiographical Implications for the Regimes of Henry VII and Henry VIII’, JHA, 28 December 2020, pp. 1–22. For an analysis of whether this had implications for More’s assertion that Richard III murdered the sons of Edward IV, see Matthew Lewis, ‘The More I Read’ in ‘Matt’s History Blog’: mattlewisauthor.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/the-more-i-read/ (accessed 7.2.2021). See also Joanna Laynesmith, ‘Miles Forest and the Princes in the Tower’, Bulletin, June 2021, pp. 22–23; Bulletin, September 2021, pp. 29–30 (Thornton), and p. 3 (Philippa Langley).
48 For searches for the remains of the boys at the Tower of London, see Buc, p. 139: ‘there was much and diligent search made for their bodies at the Tower. And all these places were opened and digged where it was said or supposed their bodies were laid. But they could never be found by any search.’ John Rastell also recorded searches, see The Pastime of People, Or, The Chronicles of Divers Realms, and Most Especially of the Realm of England 1529 (ed. Dibdin, 1811), p. 293: ‘because the bones of the said children could never be found buried, neither in the Tower nor in no other place’.
49 Bacon, pp. 138–39. See p. 211 for nobles arrested with Tyrell on suspicion of treasonous association with pretender Edmund de la Pole; see also Vergil-2, p. 125.
50 Coronation, p. 176.
51 Ibid., p. 178.
52 Ibid., p. 82.
53 Buc, pp. xxxix, liv–lv. For the letter from Elizabeth of York to John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, see pp. c–civ, 191, 333–34. For the old manuscript book, see p. 163: ‘For I have read in an old manuscript book it was held for certain that Dr Morton and a certain countess, conspiring the deaths of the sons of King Edward and some other, resolved that these treacheries should be executed by poison and by sorcery.’ Following the execution of John Buck [sic] after the Battle of Bosworth, the Buck family was taken into the care and protection of the Howard family (p. xvii). Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey (later 5th Duke of Norfolk) was Sir George Buc’s patron to whom Buc’s History was dedicated (p. 3). Buc requested his protection so that none might take offence at his History (p. 4). For sources including the Earl of Oxford, John, Baron Lumley, and Baron Darcy, etc., see pp. cxliv–v. For Henry Howard (in 1583) expressing the Howard family’s ‘strong sympathy and sense of gratitude, baffled by what had been written about Richard III by the “authorities”’, see p. cxxvii. For Buc’s use of the Crowland Chronicle manuscript, Tower Records, College of Arms, Parliament Rolls and memorials, etc., see p. cxl. For all Buc’s sources, see pp. cxx–cxliv.
54 Op. cit., p. 139. For a commentary on Bacon’s supposed royal source, see Susan Leas, ‘As the King Gave Out’, Ricardian, Vol. 4, 1977, pp. 2–4. For a John Dighton, priest, see Chapter 17.
55 For how the TV documentary came about, see Philippa Langley, ‘The Tyrell Confession’, Bulletin, June 2021, p. 49, www.revealingrichardiii.com/tyrellsconfession.html.
56 CPR 1494–1509, pp. 506–07, for Tyrell’s trial. Also see notes 17 and 18.
57 For more, see Annette Carson, ‘After 500 years of controversy we may finally have solved the mystery of the Princes in the Tower!’, tinyurl.com/47pxaf3f
58 For Tyrell’s commissions for Edward IV, see CPR 1467–77, pp. 492, 606.
59 Halsted, Vol. 2, p. 187 n. 3., from P. Vergilii, Anglicæ Historiæ libri XXVI (1534), p. 569. Thanks to Marie Barnfield.
60 Among differing translations, the Halsted rendering is preferable for the more accurate translation of migrasse as ‘migrated’ in the active voice, rather than ‘had been conveyed’, which assumes agency by some unnamed person. Thanks to Annette Carson for clarifying variations in Vergil’s editions and thanks to Christopher Tinmouth for transcriptions/research.
61 James Gairdner, Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII (1863), Vol. II, pp. 335–36, ‘XVII: Fines Levied on Warbeck’s Adherents’.
62 Hampton, Crown & People, pp. 204–05. Thanks to John Dike of Coldridge Research Group and for copy of Speke’s will. Also see p. 214 for James Haute’s support of Richard III. Haute was a former Esquire of the Body to Edward IV and a close relation of the Woodvilles and several rebels in the October 1483 uprising.
63 Wroe, p. 177.
64 Sir Frederick Madden, Documents Relating to Perkin Warbeck, with Remarks on his History (1837), p. 25. See also Archaeologia, Vol. 27, 1838, p. 178. Taken from a detailed written report to Henry VII from Frenchman Bernard de Vignolles, dated Rouen, 14 March 1495 (New Style 1496): ‘the said Prior of St John has been two or three times, once a twelve-month, to the house of Sir Thomas Tirel … and among other things the Prior began to speak how King Edward had formerly been in the said house, to which the said Sir Thomas replied, that it was true, and that the King had formerly made good cheer there, and that he hoped, by God’s will, that the son of the said Edward should make the like cheer there … and during the above discourse the said Bernard and Sir John Thonge [Thweng?] were present.’
65 Horrox, ODNB, Tyrell family.
66 Wroe, pp. 177–78, 185, 228.
67 ODNB, ibid.
68 Audrey Williamson, The Mystery of the Princes (1978), p. 91: ‘that the princes and their mother Elizabeth Woodville lived in the hall by permission of the uncle’, a tradition going back ‘well before the eighteenth century and was handed down from generation to generation’ – revealed to Williamson in 1973 by a relative of the Tyrells, Kathleen Margaret Drewe.
69 Maligned King, p. 183.
70 Harley 433, Vol. 2, p. 187. See note 2.
71 Sewell, p. 179.
72 For Tyrell’s children, see note 10.
73 Davies, p. 242; Matthew Lewis, The Survival of the Princes in the Tower (2017), pp. 29–31 (and see pp. 29–30 for transcript of Rastell), revealingrichardiii.com/tyrells-confession.html.
74 Sewell, p. 152; Rastell, Pastime, pp. 293–94, 297: ‘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.’ Tyrell is not mentioned in Rastell’s account of any reign, including Richard III’s (pp. 297–99), although he erroneously gives the name ‘Sir Thomas Tyrell’ (p. 274) to Sir Thomas Kyriell, who was famously executed after 2nd St Albans (1461).
9. Windsor Coffins and a Westminster Urn
1 Henry Emlyn, St George’s Chapel E.16/9, SAL (1790); Royal Funerals (burial of George) pp. 47–57, Mary, pp. 58–65.
2 Without title ‘Duke of Bedford’, see Royal Funerals, p. 48.
3 Edward Legge, Dean of Windsor (1805–16), ‘Arrangements for installation of Prince of Wales’ (SGC X.23). Timeline: Kate McQuillian, Archivist & Chapter Librarian, St George’s Chapel (18.10.2021).
4 Art Ramirez, TMPP Research Report, 24.2.16.
5 Eileen Bates: sparkypus.com/2020/08/03/those-mysterious-childrens-coffinsin-edward-ivs-vault/.
6 1790 report: ‘This vault escaped the examination of the paviours.’ Thanks to Kate McQuillian, St George’s Chapel, as above.
7 A.J. Hibbard, An Account of Richard … & Order of the Garter.
8 Hibbard, ibid., p. 21. Edward V’s stall was reassigned to Henry’s heir, Prince Arthur. Richard, Duke of York’s was reassigned to Sir William Stanley.
9 Maligned King, pp. 208–11. See also Lawrence E. Tanner & William Wright, ‘Recent Investigations regarding the Fate of the Princes in the Tower’, Archaeologia, 1935, Vol. 84, pp. 1–26, (pp. 10–11). For the new open area, see note 26.
10 As propaganda to shore up Charles II’s reign when he was labelled a tyrant for the revenge killings of his father’s executioners, or as potential hoax, see Richard Unwin, Westminster Bones: The Real Mystery of the Princes in the Tower (2015).
11 Given by Tanner & Wright, p. 12, as the time needed to make the urn, but four years is an inordinate time, particularly for royal architect Sir Christopher Wren.
12 ‘Analysis of Bones Discovered in London in the Mid-C17th and Exhumed in the Early C20th for Investigation – Summary of a Modern Analysis’ by George Maat (14 June 2018).
13 Theya Molleson, ‘Anne Mowbray and the Princes in the Tower: A Study in Identity’, London Archaeologist, Vol. 5, No. 10, 1987, pp. 258–62, suggests (pp. 259–60) a dental link between the elder skull in the urn (which she assumed belonged to Edward V) and Lady Anne Mowbray (wife of the younger prince, related to them in the third and fourth degrees) through hypodontia – congenitally missing teeth. Suggested by Tanner & Wright, hypodontia had already been discounted in 1965 by leading orthodontist Martin Rushton. See ‘The Teeth of Anne Mowbray’, British Dental Journal, Vol. 119, 1965, p. 35 (and note 14). Following the discovery of Richard III, this dental connection was also disproved by Ashdown-Hill (see note 15).
14 P.W. Hammond and W.J. White, ‘The Sons of Edward IV: A Re-Examination of the Evidence on Their Deaths and on The Bones in Westminster Abbey’, Richard III: Loyalty, Lordship and Law (1986), pp. 121–70 (see note 18), quoted orthodontist Martin Rushton in ruling out significant hypodontia (p. 125); he also commented on the size of the crown on the lower permanent canine of the younger skull (p. 122), and the development of the elder remains, offering the possibility, in both cases, of them being female.
15 Mythology, ‘Hypodontia?’, pp. 187–93, 289 n. 4.
16 Glen Moran, ‘The Search for the MtDNA of the Princes’, Bulletin, December 2018, pp. 41–44.
17 Sue Black and Lucina Hackman, ‘Views on previous publications relating to the ‘Princes in the Tower’, The Missing Princes Project (11.11.2021).
18 Wright, despite claiming it was a blood stain, conceded an inability to prove it was even human blood (op. cit., p. 18 n. 2). Hammond & White, ‘Sons of Edward IV’, p. 128: ‘Here, with the cause of death … Wright far exceeded the bounds of what was permissible.’ Bill White (d. 2010) was a leading osteologist and founder member of the British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology.
19 Geoffrey Parnell, ‘The Roman and Medieval Defences and Later Development of the Inmost Ward, Tower of London: Excavations 1955–77’, Transactions of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, Vol. 36, 1985, pp. 1–80.
20 For example, W.J. White, ‘Research Notes and Queries’, ‘The Examination of Skeletal Remains: Henry VI and the ‘Princes’, Ricardian, Vol. 6, No. 80, March 1983, pp. 159–61.
