Richard III framed?

I just finished Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. She lays out a case for Richard’s innocence in the death of his nephews as well as a case for Henry VII’s guilt. She also ruminates on the many histories (especialty schoolbooks and other popular histories) that repeat the accusations against Richard despite sometimes acknowledging that the scenario doesn’t make sense.

Is there evidence for Richard’s guilt that she does not present in the book or is any of the evidence she presents wrong?

Do most historians still believe he was guilty?

Do most popular histories such as the school books say that he was guilty?

I’m something of a Ricardian – my earliest ancestor may well have been the son of his illegitimate son. But the evidence is mixed. First, the only two sources that are reasonably contemporary are (1) an account by Sir Thomas More based on information from his tutor/guardian, Bishop Morton of Ely, who plays a minor but significant role in the culminating events of the Plantagenets and the Tudor takeover, and (2) a chronicle by Polydore Vergil, who was a diplomat accredited to England at the time. Both authors were strongly influenced by Henry VII’s need to claim legitimacy and to besmirch his predecessor’s reputation.

Most historians go with the flow, and report the tradition as it stands. The most damning evidence is the turn of attitude against Richard in the latter part of his two-year reign; he’d been considered almost the ideal medieval leader during his brother’s long reign, loyal to Edward and wise and judicious in dealing with great and small alike. But suddenly people in all walks of life are turning against him.

Sir Hugh Walpole (son of the first British Prime Minister) wrote the first good account to attempt to exculpate Richard, and there are quite a number of excellent books that take the same view. There’s a fair amount of circumstantial evidence, as you know, that points to either Henry VII or the Duke of Buckingham as the culprit, probably the former.

Best answer is, most people assume that Richard did the dirty deed, but there is no clear proof either way.

Most of the evidence points toward Richard killing the princes (probably not personally, but having a subordinate doing the deed).

Thomas Moore’s account is a key piece of evidence. Biased or not, it told where the bodies were buried – literally. When fixing the Tower during the reign of Charles II, long after Moore wrote his account, two corpses were found in the spot that Moore’s account indicated (Moore’s account – which involved the statement of someone who was involved, indicated the corpses were thrown in a stairwell. The eyewitness said that later they were moved, but he was not present to witness that, and may only have been repeating rumor).

The two corpses were pre-pubescent children; there was no way to tell if they were male or female. The corpses were also dressed in velvet. This is important, for two reasons: Moore’s account indicated that the two boys wrapped themself in velvet robes when they were awakened and taken to be killed and, more importantly, velvet did not exist in England until the reign of Edward IV, setting the earliest possible date for the corpses. In the years from the introduction of velvet to the discovery of the corpses, only two pre-pubescent children vanished from the Tower – the two princes.

The state of the corpses also indicates Henry VII wasn’t involved. Henry didn’t become king until 1485; if Richard killed the princes, it would have been in the summer of 1483. Edward V was 12 or 13 in 1483. If he had survived Richard’s reign and had been murdered by Henry, he would have reached puberty and could have been identified as a male. (A DNA test would have proved it, but the last exhumation was in the 1930s, and there hasn’t been approval for another one to settle the issue.)

Henry had no reason to kill the princes if they lived. He did not claim the throne by right of blood; he claimed it by right of conquest. The fact that an heir might live had no relevance to his claim. In addition, Henry happened to have the rightful heir (assuming the princes were dead) in the tower when he took power. He just left the poor boy to rot in the tower (he eventually had him killed on the insistance of the king of Spain as a condition of his son Arthur marrying Catherine of Aragon, but was content otherwise to let him live).

At the same time, the princes were a major threat to Richard. He tried very hard to prove his claim via right of blood, so much so that he tried to claim that the princes were illigitimate because their father, Edward, was not legitimate. (Edward was Richard’s brother. Richard’s mother, who was still alive at the time, was not happy her son was calling her a whore, and Richard dropped the allegation).

Richard’s major opposition in the early days of his reign was the Woodville faction – friends and relatives of Edward’s widow. The Woodvilles were not royal; their sole claim to the throne was through the princes. By killing them, Richard immediately eliminated any source of opposition. (Henry didn’t count – he was just an obscure relative at the time.)

Other evidence that Richard was involved: In July of 1483, Richard stopped paying the princes’ jailer (a good sign that there would be no one alive that needed to be jailed).

Also, the Tower in the time was public grounds. People visited. And in the early weeks of the princes’ imprisonment, witnesses saw them, first exercising outside, then in the window of their cells. However, there is no account of the princes ever being seen alive later than August of 1483.

Ultimately, the evidence points very strongly in Richard’s direction. Alison Weir’s The Princes in the Tower does a masterful job of discussing the issue (she was the one who pointed out the issue with the velvet).

There is one huge problem with Tey’s argument - for all her assertions about getting to the truth, she ended up fingering the wrong person.

Very few informed Ricardians now believe that Henry VII did it. Their preferred candidate is the Duke of Buckingham. The reason for this shift in opinion has been the realisation on all sides of the argument that the Princes were almost certainly dead well before 1485. This means that the future Henry VII could not have done it, as he was then still in exile on the Continent.

This is just one way in which The Daughter of Time now looks very dated. It has, in a sense, been a victim of its own success. Its enduring popularity has been the single biggest factor in the growth of the Richard III Society which has, to its credit, used its wealth to sponsor much new research by professional historians on Richard and his reign. Even more commendably, the Richard III Society has done so whether or not that research has fitted its own, very explicit agenda. Taken together with all the excellent research that professional historians were doing anyway, this has meant that lots of new details have emerged from the archives over the past fifty years.

What, however, has not emerged is the smoking gun (or bloodstained pillow). It is still the case that no one really knows what happened. Any theories can only be circumstantial. And it is the weight of that circumstantial evidence which means that most professional historians who study late fifteenth century England still think that Richard is by far the most likely candidate. The two boys were his political prisoners when they disappeared and, given the controversial circumstances surrounding his own accession, it would have been astonishingly inept of him not to have taken steps to get rid of them. The Ricardian case for Buckingham looks like special pleading merely to exonerate Richard.

To say that professional historians think this just because they want to ‘go with the flow’ is grossly insulting. They, of all people, don’t need to be told that works such as More’s and Vergil’s are biased. Those who think that academic historians mindlessly follow such sources might be surprised just how nuanced current approaches to early-sixteenth-century source-criticism can be.

Weir’s Princes in the Tower, which RealityChuck has already recommended, is a good popular critique of the pro-Ricardian case to counterbalance Tey. Charles Ross’s heavyweight Richard III, which even many Ricardians acknowledge is still the definitive academic biography (despite the fact that it argues that Richard did do it after all), is still in print.

Polycarp, RealityChuck and APB

Thanks for your excellent answers. I am going to check out the Princes in the Tower.