Okay, I just watched this special. Lucy at the end decides that RIII dun it, based on the following-
Thomas More wore a hair shirt, thus he must have been pretty honest.
Two, a letter was found that More met a man who was apparently one of the sons of Miles Forrest. Thus thereby, he got the info that Forrest, Dighton and Tyrrell were the killers first hand.
Umm, no, Lucy, Even assuming More wasnt lying his ass off to please his tudor masters. More never met with any of the killers. He didnt get any of the info first hand. he couldnt have,. He was only a small boy during 1485, he was living in a monastery when Tyrrell was executed, and also More never claims to have met any of the killers. Yes, More seemingly met one of the sons of Forrest, but there is no indication More interviewed him, nor did More claim to. But the son was not a witness. He could only say what others told him. So, that is not evidence.
Also oddly, the two sons of the supposed regicide Forrest were given plum positions in the court of HVIII. Hmm. Why?
Now, I am not saying the RIII was innocent. The Daughter of Time is a great book, I agree, but it doesnt solve the crime either.
Er, can we have some context here, please, for someone who hasn’t watched it?
(Also, some people might not know Lucy Worsley, a BBC documentary presenter who specialises in historical royal stories, and often likes to dress up in fancy outfits of the time).
Ultimately, you pays your money and you takes your choice.
It’s a fascinating case - there’s a reason we’re still discussing it 500+ years after - but when you come down to it, there’s only so much there. All the participants are long since dead, as is everyone who knew them, the primary evidence is extremely scanty and we’re left with secondary and tertiary sources, with all that implies about hearsay, bias, partiality and interpretation.
For what it’s worth, Richard has to be the prime suspect, simply because he was the guy with motive and opportunity, both to commit the crime and to cover it up. Yes, it was a politically stupid thing to do, but there’s little actual evidence that Richard had much political nous. If you ditch Shakespeare’s picture of the brilliant scheming villain always three moves ahead of everyone else, and substitute a man with a military background and not much court experience, stumbling through the political thickets hoping that one more bold stroke will see him loose, his actions become much more understandable.
I dunno; I can’t escape the fact that Richard, as far as he knew, in 1483, could reign for 40 years. Someone was bound to ask about the boys. You didn’t have to be a brilliant strategist to lay the princes’ bodies in state, and claim they died of a fever. It’s not like Jack Klugman was lurking around, ready to blow him out of the water.
It’s too bad there’s a general policy about not disinterring royals (cause while finding what you want to find, you might find something no one wants to know), because re-examining the bodies buried as the princes now would be revealing. They could be matched to the body recently ID’d as Richard, and if they had the same Y-chromosome, then we’d be pretty certain who they were; but more than that-- people know a lot more about aging skeletons-- deciding whether they were 10 & 12, or closer to 12 & 14, would pretty much settle things.
Have not watched said special but the above makes no sense whatsoever. It’s not possible to deduce honesty from exhibitions of piety. And even if he wasn’t wearing it as an exhibition, maybe he was wearing it to punish himself for being dishonest.
What they have are not “bodies of the princes that were buried” they have some bones that were discovered hundreds of years later, buried in the Tower under some stairs or something, that were then placed in a tomb and labeled as the Princes’ remains, because they appeared to be the bones of two people about the right age.
There was something I saw on YouTube I think, that showed a (recent?) discovery of the will of the wife of someone involved that mentioned an artifact that she could only have in her possession if her husband had stolen it off the older prince (as the Crown Prince, it was a chain of office or of state). They didn’t have the actual chain, just a description of it.
As for Lucy Worsley, she is in my opinion a popularizer who is not very particular about chains of evidence or logic to reach her sensationalist conclusions.
Yeah, yeah. “Bodies” is faster to type than “some bones that were discovered hundreds of years later, buried in the Tower under some stairs or something.” But I’m assuming that the bones were naturally defleshed, and not boiled, nor anything, any you could still extract DNA, and make pretty good judgments regarding “Oh, this left femur belonged to the younger one, and this to the older one.”
From what I understand, no other children were in the towers to be the skeletons under the stairs, and the box the bones were in had velvet on it, which put a lower limit on the year the box could have been buried (velvet hadn’t been around that long, I guess), so there just aren’t that many solutions to “who are the bones in the box”?
Don’t know if you’re aware, but for the counter-argument you can check out The Princes In The Tower by Philippa Langley (Yes, that Philippa Langley - the one who actually found Richard III.) As you may imagine, she has a more positive view of Rich. It’s an interesting enough watch.
I’ve seen and enjoyed that. Have not seen the Lucy Worsley show that is the subject of the thread, but have seen others of her shows, and not thrilled by them.
The two bodies were wrapped in velvet, which didn’t exist in England until the rule of Edward IV. So we know it can’t be before then. And in the years afterwards, only two people of that age were prisoners in the tower – the princes.
Note the bodies were pre-pubescent, an important clue to the timing.
Richard had every reason to kill the princes – it would have destroyed any opposition. He was fighting against the Woodville faction; with the princes dead, they had no claim. The Woodville faction are an essential part of the political situation when Richard seized power and anything that doesn’t mention them is fatally flawed.
Henry Tudor was just an exiled pretender with no support, and was technically not the Lancaster heir. If he had killed the princes after defeating Richard, Prince Edward would not have been pre-pubescent.
If Richard’s son Edward hadn’t died, Richard would have had a long reign. But the lack of an heir (and Richard’s ham-handed suggestion of marrying his niece Catherine*) gave Henry an opening. Note that Henry had the Yorkist pretender in the Tower of London when he took over, but didn’t kill him until the King of Spain insisted several years later.
But it all boils down to Occam’s Razor. The simplest answer is the Richard had the princes killed (he was present the night Henry VI was murdered, so it’s not out of character).
Did they really have to be murdered? I imagine the Princes got sick and died giving Richard an “Ah $#!↑” moment. And like a lot of people he made a bad situation worse, probably because he thought he’d be (justifiably) blamed.
As for context, the political situation at the time was, to put it mildly, dicey. Edward IV had emerged victorious from the Wars of the Roses, but had pretty much exhausted himself in the process and spent the remainder of his reign in a relative stupor. Meanwhile, his wife’s family (the Woodvilles, as greedy a bunch of freeloaders as ever freeloaded) spent their time enriching themselves and ingratiating themselves with the future Edward V. This made them perhaps the most hated family in the country, at least among the more established aristocracy.
E-IV’s will named his brother Richard as E-V’s guardian. When E-IV died, instead of notifying Richard, the Woodvilles made a mad dash for London so that E-V could be crowned before he could intervene, Richard, perhaps fearing another civil war if the Woodvilles became the power behind the throne, intercepted them and took the princes into his custody; many of the Woodvilles then bolted for the Continent.
At this point things get a bit murky. There had been allegations floating around that E-IV had “espoused” another woman — which at the time was regarded as tantamount to marriage — before he married Elizabeth Woodville. Whether or not that was true (and it can be argued both ways until the cows come home and go out again), it cast a shadow over the marriage and the princes’ legitimacy. Combined with the hatred of the Woodvilles, this made things so unstable that Richard, always taking into account the ambition inherent in a Plantagenet, may have felt that an adult hand was needed on the throne. What happened to the princes will probably never be known for certain, but it should be noted that Henry Tudor had at least as much motivation for doing them in as Richard.
As for More, while he is (rightly or wrongly) esteemed as a man of impeccable integrity, he likely learned much of what he “knew” about Richard when a page in the household of Archbishop Morton, who had been implicated in the plan to expedite E-V’s coronation. He escaped to France, where he joined up with Henry Tudor and became one of Richard’s strongest antagonists. Not exactly the most unbiased chronicler. More’s history made its way into Shakespeare, and the rest is … well, you know.
(BTW, Morton is considered the inventor of Morton’s fork, an ingenious if ethically dubious method of extracting money from the aristocracy. If he did indeed invent it, it’s an insight into his mind.)
Tell that to the show, not me. Yes, that makes little sense to me, but Lucy visited the shrine where the Hair shirt is displayed and spoke to the pries about it.
Four unidentified bodies have been found which are considered possibly connected with the events of this period: two at the Tower of London and two in Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.
also from other source-
In 2023, archaeologists discovered the skeletons of a woman and child in the Tower of London’s chapel. The skeletons are likely from commoners who lived and worked in the Tower.
“Modern analysis of the flawed 1933 investigation suggests that it’s highly unlikely the remains are those of the sons of King Edward IV but if we are to be the seekers of truth, it’s time to question the stories surrounding them, so that we can move our knowledge forward.
This was not the first time bones speculated to be the Princes had been discovered at the Tower. Reports suggest that the bones of a child had been found in a ‘high desolate turrett’ at the Tower, presumed to be one of the Princes, in 1623. Then in the early 1600s, two skeletons were reportedly discovered in a bricked-up room near the King’s Lodgings at the Tower.
I have ordered the book, thank you.
I cant find any source that confirms this.
The Tower at that time wasnt a prison, it was a royal castle, lots of people lived there. Lucy herself makes that very point.
Sure, but that assumes the remains are the prices, and also assumes the 1933 examination had any scientific validity- and even the Lucy W special debunks that idea. It was clear from the start that the examination was made on the assumption that the remains were the Princes.
Not for RIII, no, but certainly for HVII. Mind you for Richard they would be inconvenient. For Henry a disaster.
And of course calling the older prince Edward V is also Tudor propaganda. He was never crowned, never ruled, never reigned. If he was King, then we have to include Lady Jane also.
He was a known philanderer, so the claim was believable. Mind you, believable does not mean true.
My hazy recollection of her hypothesis is that the princes ended up in the Low Countries and that each died on British soil as the notional head of (separate) invasions/insurrections.
She showed some actual film of him meeting Houdini. Talks about how Houdini denounced him.
And a short bit about his having a spiritualist try and contact his dead son.
Mostly she said it was just sad, lots of English were doing it after the war.
And no Fairies at all.
I like that story about him. It shows he was able to suspend his logic and think those pictures were real Fairies. It’s a window in to his personality.
So this article is I think discussing the letter referred to in the OP, and features an interview with the academic who discovered the letter:
It’s not overwhelming evidence In itself, but no one is claiming it is. It’s just a bit more circumstantial evidence to add to the pile. And it definitely makes Mote’s account more reliable (it doesn’t make it completely rock solid, but by giving details of his sources it makes it less likely to be cooked up from whole cloth as Tudor propaganda)
We now have new evidence that Richard III murdered the princes in the tower
That seems to say it is. No, all that was shown is that More met a man who had the same name- a very common name- as one of the sons of one of the claimed killers.
It was then a matter of identifying Edward Forest, who appears as a servant of Henry VIII, and linking him as being plausibly the Edward who is that son of Miles Forest. Edward had a brother who was called Miles.
Why would HVIII choose a son of a regicide for a honored member of his court? (I sure as fuck wouldnt) Also Miles Forrest spelled his name with two Rs, but that doesnt mean a whole lot. . I read a stat saying there were over a hundred families with the name Forest living in London.
Oh, it isnt cooked up whole cloth. They tortured Tyrell, got a “confession” and executed him. Of course a confession under torture will tell you whatever you want to know. More likely heard of the “confession”.
The men who led the torture fed Tyrell what they wanted him to confess to- and of course he did.