Princes in the Tower (22 page)

All of this evidence is circumstantial, but it reflects the weight of public opinion at the time. For the best evidence, that of actual witnesses, we must turn to Sir Thomas More's biography of Richard III, spurned by most revisionists and some serious historians but now, in the light of recent discoveries and study, beginning to be respected once more as a key source for the death of the Princes, and with good reason. More's book contains the earliest account of the murder. He supplies numerous details that are nowhere else recorded, saying: 'I shall rehearse you the dolorous end of these babes, not after every way that I have heard, but after that way that I have heard by such men and such means as me thinketh it were hard but it should be true.' He tells us he got his information from 'them that knew much and had little cause to lie'.

It seems highly likely that More's account came very near to the truth. He himself believed it to be true, and he had plenty of means of searching out and verifying the facts, having been moved to do so by the realisation that the deaths of the Princes had 'so far come into question that some remain yet in doubt whether they were in Richard Ill's time destroyed or no'.

We should now pause to consider why the account of the murder given by Sir Thomas More, on which the reconstruction of the events in the previous chapter is based, should be accepted as an authentic record of the facts. More himself claims to have relied greatly upon the confession said to have been made in 1502 by Sir James Tyrell, the man allegedly chosen by Richard III to arrange the murders. This confession was never published but there are good grounds for believing it to be genuine, which will be discussed in Chapter Twenty. More, however, almost certainly used other, equally important sources. One was John Dighton, an associate of Tyrell's and, according to Francis Bacon, 'the principle means of divulging the tradition'. More knew of Dighton's whereabouts at the time he was writing because he states he was still alive and 'in good possibility to be hanged', and we may therefore suppose that he had contacted him and obtained information from him. But More had other, perhaps better, links with those who were in a position to know about the Princes' fate.

At New Year 1505, More dedicated his first book, his
Life of John Picus,
to his 'right entirely beloved sister in Christ', Joyeuce Lee or Leigh, a Poor Clare nun and the sister of his friend Edward Lee. More had been friendly with the Lee family, prosperous London grocers, for some years, and often visited Joyeuce after she became a nun at the Minoresses' convent in Aldgate, which stood outside the City wall and opposite the Tower of London. Here she lived in 'the great house within the close' with a group of well-born ladies who, for reasons of their own, had chosen to retire behind convent walls. Between them, these ladies could have imparted a great deal of information about the Princes in the Tower.

One was Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Brackenbury, Constable of the Tower at the time of the Princes' disappearance. Sir Robert had been killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, and in 1504-5 Elizabeth was living in penury at the Minories. With her lodged Mary Tyrell, a sister or cousin of Sir James Tyrell, and Mary's aunt, Anne Montgomery, whose husband Thomas had been an executor of Edward IV's will and an adherent of Richard III. Finally there was Elizabeth Mowbray (nee Talbot), Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, a relative of Eleanor Butler, and mother-in-law of Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the Princes; she had retired to this house at the beginning of Henry VII's reign and later invited the other ladies to join her. She, above all, would have had a keen curiosity about the fate of her son-in-law. It is inconceivable that the Princes' disappearance would not have been discussed by this group of ladies, who all had good reason to know something about it, and even more inconceivable that More, on his visits, did not obtain information from them. Indeed, the possession of such unique information may have been what inspired him to write his book and so put an end to the rumours then in circulation.

Sir Thomas did more than any other writer, except Shakespeare, to publicise the 'Black Legend' of Richard III. Erasmus tells us that More particularly loathed tyranny, and it may be that he wrote his biography primarily as a moral tale to illustrate the nature and consequences of tyranny. Certainly he himself believed Richard to be guilty of many crimes, though he did try to be fair to him, praising his courage and his qualities as a military leader. And while his descriptions of Richard's deformities are exaggerated, they were drawn from earlier sources and used by More, in the fashion of his time, as outward manifestations of villainy to underline the moral thrust of his work.

As has been demonstrated to striking effect, More's account fits in almost perfectly with the known facts of the Princes' disappearance and the events of late summer 1483. Croyland informs us that the sons of Edward IV remained in the Tower under guard while events such as the coronation, the progress and Edward of Middleham's investiture as Prince of Wales on 8th September were taking place. He does not refer to them being alive after this date, which is probably significant. Croyland speaks with the authority of one who knows what is going on; as an historian he was a man of caution, and therefore it is likely that his information is trustworthy.

John Rous, however, implies that the Princes were already dead by the time of Richard's usurpation, saying 'he ascended the throne of the slaughtered children, whose protector he was himself. Elsewhere, he says of Richard that, as Duke of Gloucester, he 'received his lord, Edward V, with embraces and kisses, yet within about three months he killed him, together with his brother'. This would place the murder before the end of July, and neither date ties in with the evidence of Croyland, More and Vergil. Nor, by the same token can we trust the evidence of Molinet, who states that the Princes were murdered five weeks after they entered the Tower. As York joined his brother there on 16th June, this would argue a date in late July, which is not borne out by the other evidence.

We do not know when Richard III first conceived the idea of murdering his nephews. There is no evidence that his decision to do so was made before Edward V's accession. The idea was probably born after Richard realised that his power might not last beyond the coronation, which was in May 1483. He had probably made up his mind by the time he was plotting against Hastings, for it is known that he had already decided to move York from sanctuary to the Tower. The transfer of both princes to high-security quarters, and the removal of their servants, were arguably the first premeditated steps towards actually carrying out the deed, an event that must have, of necessity, to await a propitious moment. This would preferably be when the furore over Richard's accession had died a natural death and he himself was away on progress.

What probably spurred Richard III into actually committing the murder was news of the conspiracies to restore Edward V, proof enough that the deposed king posed the deadliest of all the threats to Richard's security. Fortunately for Richard, that former king, a helpless child, was in his power.

It has often been suggested that either Buckingham or Norfolk were somehow involved in the murder of the Princes. The case against Buckingham will be examined in the next chapter, where it will be shown to be unsubstantiated. Norfolk, meanwhile, stood to lose his dukedom if ever Edward V was restored to power, but there is, however, no evidence to support the theory that Norfolk was Richard's accomplice.

Nor is there any evidence to substantiate the claim, made by Sir George Buck and based on information in 'an old manuscript book which I have seen', that 'Dr Morton and a certain Countess, contriving the death of Edward V and others, resolved it by poison'. This countess was presumably Morton's friend and confidante, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, but she would not have been able to gain access to the Tower. Morton himself was a prisoner of the Duke of Buckingham at Brecknock Castle at the relevant time. Apart from the practical difficulties involved, there is no contemporary evidence of any such plot.

Some revisionists, among them Mr Jack Leslau and the late Audrey Williamson, have claimed that the Princes were not murdered in the Tower in 1483 but were secretly moved by the King to a safe haven in the country in order to confound future conspirators. Rumours that they were still alive were current for years after their disappearance, and Vergil records a popular theory that they had been spirited abroad. Such theories are easily understood, given that the alternative was too dreadful to contemplate: even in that violent age, child murder attracted the deepest revulsion, and still, today, we look for evidence that would reassure us it never took place. Alas, there is none. When the Princes were alive people knew of their existence and referred to it. After the late summer of 1483 -- silence. Had they survived they would have left traces. There are none anywhere.

Some revisionists, notably Sir Clements Markham and Jeremy Potter, have asserted that, when Richard III established a household at Sheriff Hutton Castle, Yorkshire, in 1484 for his nephew John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln and newly-appointed President of the Council of the North, the Princes were still alive and were secretly moved there. This assertion rests on the evidence of two warrants in Harleian MS. 433 in the British Library. One, dated 23rd July, 1484, refers to Lincoln and Lord Morley being at breakfast with each other and 'the children together' at another breakfast. The second, dated 9th March, 1485, is a warrant to Henry Davy to deliver two doublets of silk, one jacket of silk, one gown, two shirts and two bonnets to 'the Lord Bastard', a title used for the deposed Edward V in the
Wardrobe Accounts.
Elsewhere in official documents the former King is called 'Edward Bastard'.

There were royal children at Sheriff Hutton: the King had sent young Warwick there and probably his sister Margaret also. It is possible that the four younger daughters of Edward IV were at some time in residence too, as well as the King's bastard son, John of Gloucester -- to whom the second warrant most probably refers. John was not a lord in the official sense, but as the King's natural son he was styled as such out of courtesy. There is nothing to suggest that the Princes were ever at Sheriff Hutton. If they had been, many people would have known about it.

An intriguing theory about the Princes' survival has been put forward by Mr Jack Leslau, an amateur historian from London. He contends that the Princes were given new identities in 1485 after a secret agreement between Henry VII and Elizabeth Wydville, Henry agreeing to spare them and marry their sister in return for Elizabeth's consent to their 'disappearance'. Mr Leslau contends that Edward V is to be identified with Sir Edward Guildford, son of Sir Richard Guildford, Comptroller of the Royal Household and, later, Marshal of Calais; Sir Edward's only child Jane became the wife of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and Lord Protector of England during the minority of Edward VI. Sir Richard Guildford was a prominent courtier, whose father had been comptroller of Edward IV's household. His first wife was Anne, daughter and heiress of John Pimpe of Kent, and by her he had two sons and four daughters, of whom Edward was not the eldest. Sir Richard married secondly, in the reign of Henry VII, Joan, sister of Sir Nicholas Vaux, who bore him another son Henry between 1478 and 1489. The sheer practical difficulties of Mr Leslau's theory defy belief: Sir Richard was well-known at court. How he managed to explain the sudden acquisition in 1485-6 of a teenaged 'son' to his friends and acquaintances is baffling. More to the point, in 1485-6 there would have been many in Guildford's circle who would have recognised Edward V. He could not have 'disappeared' by this route.

Mr Leslau has also claimed to have identified Richard, Duke of York, in one Dr John Clement, who was a notable scholar and protégé of Sir Thomas More. He became President of the Royal College of Physicians and died in 1571. Clement probably came from a Yorkshire family and, according to Nicholas Harpsfield, More's mid sixteenth-century biographer, was 'brought up in Sir Thomas's house. The said Clement was taken by More from Paul's School in London and hath since proved a very excellent, good physician, and is singularly seen [i.e. proficient] in the Greek tongue.' Harpsfield tells how More wrote of him, 'being yet a child', to Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist, saying: 'My wife greets you, and also Clement, who makes such daily progress in Latin and Greek that I entertain no small hope that he will be an ornament to his country and to letters.' Harpsfield also refers to 'this young Clement'. More himself calls Clement 'my pupil servant', and a woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein, dated 1518, shows Clement as a youth coming to serve More and two of his friends with wine. In 1526 Clement married Margaret Gigs, More's foster daughter, who was born around 1508. Clement had been her tutor before their marriage, and she too became a noted Greek scholar and evinced a keen interest in medicine.

However, Mr Leslau claims that John Clement was actually Richard, Duke of York, who was older than More by some four or five years. Thus, although Clement was still a schoolboy when More took him into his household, we are asked to believe that More wrote as he did to Erasmus of a man over forty. All the evidence offered above shows that Clement was considerably younger than his patron and was born much later than 1473. It is of course possible that he was fifty-three when he married Margaret Gigs, and ninety-eight when he died, but it is unlikely, and it is impossible to reconcile the chronology of his early life with that of York.

Mr Leslau appears to rest his case on two apparently significant pieces of evidence. The first is that there is no documentation extant for the early lives of Guildford and Clement. Mr Leslau sees this as ominous, but in fact it is unusual to find detailed evidence of the early lives of even royal persons of this period. Many children died young; in aristocratic pedigrees birthdates for eldest sons are more often than not calculated from the date of their parents' marriage (if known), because their actual birthdates are rarely recorded. That of Sir Edward Guildford, a younger son, would be very difficult to determine today with exactitude. And Clement, who was of comparatively lowly birth, would have spent his early years in virtual obscurity.