History of Europe

The Princes of the Tower of London (article by Matthew Lewis)

Blog readers know that I don't usually do translations of other blog posts or articles or historical posts. I prefer to write my posts with my own words and personal contributions and from different sources.

Today I am going to throw an exception for the first time. Mattthew Lewis is a well-known author of both fiction and essays on medieval England in general and the Wars of the Roses and the York branch of the Plantagenet dynasty in particular. He has recently written a book on the enigma of the fate of the princes of the Tower of London ( Survival of the Princes in the Tower:Murder, Mystery and Myth ), the sons of King Edward IV who were in the Tower of London during the reign of Richard III and whose fate he never knew. An enigma that continues to captivate the English more than five hundred years later and to which I dedicated the blog entry entitled Did Richard III assassinate the princes of the Tower of London? For those unfamiliar with the story, I recommend reading that entry first to get into the picture.

This is a topic that fascinates me and one that I will write my own article about when I read Matthew Lewis's book. In the meantime, and given that on the occasion of the publication of his book, the author has written contributions to several English historical blogs on the subject, I contacted him and he kindly authorized me to translate one of them. This is the one posted on the On the Tudor Trail blog.

Without further ado, I leave you with the translation of the article.


One ​​of the main reasons that led me to write a book called The Survival of the Princes of the Tower of London it's just that none of the names on the list of usual suspects in his murder have ever completely satisfied me. The disappearance of the children of Edward IV remains one of the most striking mysteries of all time and continues to cause a heated debate that provokes passionate reactions in supporters of both theories, largely because there is no definitive and conclusive proof. to clarify what their fate was, creating a breeding ground to comment on the subject vehemently.

My main problem lies with the traditionally held culprit, King Richard III, and concerns the two key gaps in the accusation against him. If the boys were indeed murdered, Ricardo remains the prime suspect in any investigation. The first problem with accepting that Richard III murdered his nephews to avoid the threat they posed to his reign is his passivity towards other of his nieces and nephews. If he decided to act against Edward IV's sons to secure his position on the throne, why didn't he also take care of Edward IV's daughters and the sons of his other elder brother, George? Clarence? It is true that they represented less of a threat than the princes of the Tower, but in October 1483 Henry Tudor had invaded the country with the intention of marrying one of the daughters of Edward IV to cement his own claim to the throne, so weeks later After the disappearance of the princes of the Tower, her sisters became a clear threat to Ricardo. There were also George of Clarence's children, Edward Earl of Warwick and Margaret (later Countess of Salisbury); especially the first, who could wield a right to the throne through the line of male descent in preference to that of King Richard. It is true that his father's death sentence had removed him from the line of succession, but parliament could easily overturn this provision. All of Richard's nieces and nephews were alive when he began to reign, why not the princes of the Tower?

The roadblock I've always stumbled over is simple but defies explanation. If Ricardo killed his nephews, it was to prevent them from becoming a threat. They would only cease to be so if it became public and beyond any doubt that they were dead. But Ricardo never made it known that they had died. As implausible as the explanation had been, he could have argued that it had been due to illness or that someone had murdered them. It did not matter if people believed the alleged cause or not, the essential thing was that they assume that the children of Eduardo IV had died.

After the October 1483 rebellion, Richard had the perfect scapegoat in the Duke of Buckingham Henry Stafford. He could have accused the smug and ambitious duke of killing the boys and getting the message across that they were dead. By keeping silent about his fate, Richard also prolonged the threat they represented, as was shown by the problem that for his successor Henry VII the claimants to the throne that arose during his reign represented. For Ricardo, killing his nephews and keeping it a secret simply did not make sense and contradicts the fact that he would have been the target of his death.

Theories that point to other suspects in the death of the princes do not have much credibility either. Most of them are used above all to end up ruling out these suspects and thus confirm that it had to be Ricardo who did it. The Duke of Buckingham is the usual number two on the list. He had been repeatedly excluded from his circle of power by Edward IV but quickly allied himself with Richard III in the spring of 1483, becoming a key figure in the events that took place when they both arrived in London and which culminated in Richard's proclamation as king for parliament. A few months later, Buckingham was involved in the unsuccessful October Rebellion and was executed. Contemporary authors and authors from the time immediately after the events point out that rumors indicated that Buckingham had participated in the death of the princes to clear the way for his own claim to the throne. But there are also those who argue that the reason why he rebelled against Ricardo was his indignation at knowing that the king had killed his nephews. While Buckingham had the means to kill the princes if he wanted to, this theory is unsound. If he had, the most logical thing is that when Ricardo tried, convicted and executed him for rebelling against him, he would have accused him of the murder to exculpate himself and put an end to the threat that the boys posed by making it clear that they had died. But he did not and kept silent on the matter.

Suspicion about Margaret Beaufort is one of the most controversial theories about the fate of princes. Many describe them simply as ridiculous, although there is no clear evidence to exonerate her. While the October 1483 rebellion was initially intended to restore the eldest of the Tower princes to the throne, it soon turned into an attempt to place the crown on the head of Henry Tudor, Margaret Beaufort's son. It is clear that Margaret had a vested interest in furthering her son's cause and possibly clearing her path to the throne. The fact that she was under house arrest is often argued for Margaret's innocence, but this came only after the October rebellion, when her involvement in it became apparent. In fact, when Richard was crowned in July of that year, Margaret held a place of honor in the queen's court, ahead of even the king's sister. She and her husband Lord Stanley held a prominent place in Richard's circle of power and had easy access to the Tower of London, which was then a bustling royal residence rather than a gloomy dungeon. Despite the fact that her involvement in the October events is widely documented, there are those who continue to deny that the mother of Ricardo's successor took part in them. Margaret is undoubtedly the architect of the Tudor dynasty and I maintain that the possibility of her involvement in the fate of the princes cannot be dismissed out of hand.

To include Henry Tudor among the suspects we have to start from the bottom line and accept that the princes were alive and well on August 22, 1485, when Henry became king after his victory over Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth. Before this, Henry was out of the country and his only agent in England was his mother Margaret Beaufort. If the princes had survived the reign of Richard III they would have been a serious problem for his successor. His cause had relied heavily on former supporters of Edward IV, and for this Henry's betrothal to Elizabeth of York (daughter of Edward IV and sister of the princes of the Tower) had been essential. Many considered that she had more right to the throne than Henry Tudor, but Richard III had declared Elizabeth, like her siblings, as an illegitimate daughter, which meant that she lost her right to the throne. To marry her and uphold her own right, Henry had to re-declare Isabel as her legitimate daughter; but this implied that he too declared himself legitimate to the princes of the Tower, which would place them with a better founded and more popularly supported aspiration. If Henry had located them alive in August 1485 he would have been hard pressed to respect this aspiration. My real problem with the theory that Henry Tudor murdered the princes to avoid this situation is that he and Elizabeth enjoyed a marriage traditionally described as happy and loving, which would have been unlikely if Elizabeth suspected or knew that her husband ( or her mother-in-law, for that matter) would have murdered her brothers.

Concern over who killed the princes has long overshadowed serious consideration of the possibility that they might have survived. Just as rumors about Richard III and the Duke of Buckingham proliferated in contemporary and immediately subsequent sources, so did those that pointed to the survival of the young. Accepting at least the theoretical possibility that this was the case would help to understand some subsequent events that would otherwise be incomprehensible. Why has no one, from Henry VII to the princes' own mother Elizabeth Woodville, ever denounced Richard III for having murdered them? Why did Elizabeth Woodville and her son Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, come under suspicion in 1487 leading to the confiscation of some of their property and their imprisonment? Why was Henry VII so obsessed with Perkin Warbeck for so long until his lame confession after his capture and widely documented torture of him? Why was Perkin's face repeatedly beaten to disfigure his features both before his arrival in London and during his time as a prisoner there? Jack Leslau's theories have fascinated me for years, so one wonders if one or both of the princes could have been alive during the reign of Henry VII.

For some the guilt of Richard III and the death of the princes is a comfortable theory. It is something that has always been taken for granted. All I ask is that readers of the book put aside five hundred years of learned prejudices and platitudes and examine the evidence with an open mind. We only assume that we know that Richard III did it because we have been told that this was the truth. As the philosopher Pierre Bayle points out:"the antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion does not guarantee its veracity."