The Princes in the Tower

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Would love to have UK posters respond, but happy to hear from anyone.

As far as I can tell, the last time the skeletons that were buried as the princes were disinterred for examination was in 1933, and there was no knowledge of DNA then.

I always wondered if there would be another disinterment in the light of DNA, but as it never happened, I assumed it was because at least one other body would need to be disinterred as well-- Edward IV, probably for a Y-chromosome match.

But when Richard III’s skeleton was discovered under the parking lot, I thought maybe this would be an opportunity to disinter the supposed princes and compare them to a relative who would share their Y-chromosome, and not have to disinter anyone else, because Richard was already on the exam table.

Identifying the skeletons as male children of the York line would pretty much identify them as the princes-- especially if they had an avuncular relationship to Richard III-- because no other children are missing.

Aside from clearing up that point, though, it might be possible to settle the question of who was responsible for their deaths by determining how old they were when they died. If they appeared to be 9 & 12, then they died before Henry Tudor was in England, and he is very doubtfully involved. But if they died at 11 & 14, it is unlikely Richard III was the instigator-- if they were older than that, it is impossible Richard was involved.

I know it is difficult to pinpoint a skeleton’s exact age, but they have two of them, so between them, one can more easily arrive at a year.

I also realize there are other skeletons in contention for the title, and the spot in Westminster, but they could be tested if the Y-chromosomes on the first two failed to match.

Is there some reason that the UK government chooses to remain in epistemic inconclusion about this? Because one of its former kings is likely to have been involved, and it is better not to know which? some other reason? Is having a “tomb of the unknown prince” desirable, because other royals are missing, albeit mostly before the conqueror?

Thinking about this now because Audible recently had for sale a “Complete Alan Grant” for a single credit and I bought it. I’ve read all the books, but it’s nice to hear them once more, especially since I was in high school when I read them. Just finished listening to The Daughter of Time.

Now listening to The Singing Sands. Wondering if that one may have been inspired by the Somerton Man-- that decades-old unsolved mystery was actually solved a couple of years ago.

2

You would likely be interested by the documentary The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence.

Trailer:

Yep, it’s Philippa Langley again (she who was the driving force behind the finding of Richard III’s body under a Leicester car park). This time she’s arguing that the skeletons are not those of the missing princes. It was produced for Channel 4 in the UK and broadcast a couple of months ago, but I assume it can be streamed in other countries.

If I remember correctly, the reason the skeletons have not been DNA tested is because the late queen refused to permit it (or at least, was emphatically against it). I don’t remember exactly why - might have been specifically the (re-)exhumation that she was unhappy about.

Langley has her views, but it was an interesting watch.

j

3

She is quite possible correct. But I do not think the Prices survived, Henry7 was very very good at killing off every possible claimant to the throne.

4

Her argument (which she does back with evidence) is that (from memory, here) they fled the country, survived to adulthood and were both killed as a consequence of returning to Britain and attempting to gain the crown. (That’s two completely separate attempts - one per prince, obviously.)

At the end of the documentary I was left thinking, that’s all very well but it’ll take DNA testing to convince me one way or the other.

j

ETA: to give Langley her due, she does have an impressive track record of being right.

5

True.

6

Me too-- but I have resolved not to make a priori judgments ever since Gary Condit didn’t kill Chandra Levy. Won’t be shocked either way.

7

It was broadcast on PBS a few months ago as part of the Secrets of the Dead documentary series.

8

I wonder what kinds of attempts these could have been, to have disappeared so thoroughly from all historical accounts. Or is she arguing that activities that are already known about historically would compass these attempts, did we but realize it?

The princes (or perhaps better referred to as the rightful king and the prince his brother) were born in 1471 and 1474 or so. While Henry VII was king, they would have ranged in age from about 11 and 14 to about 35 and 38, and when Henry VIII was crowned, they would have been about 38 and 35. We might expect, then, that their attempts to reclaim the throne would have happened during Henry VII’s reign, when they would have been young men.

9

To be precise, her argument was that Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck claimed to be the princes, that various foreign rulers supported them and that they (separately) took part in rebellions against Henry VII. But those facts have always been very well-known. The new documents just add some further details without changing those overall facts.

The issue is not just about the ‘Princes in the Tower’. There seems to be a general policy against the DNA testing of burials in any of the ‘royal peculiars’. The late Queen’s reluctance to give permission in such cases may have something to do with the fact that she herself is now one of those burials.

10

Again, from memory, the first attempt was the older prince who was killed in a well-known insurrection (there were parties with an interest in getting the prince on the crown, who were happy to support the prince in battle).

The younger prince (Langley argues) was captured in a similar known insurrection, held in effectively an open prison arrangement until he started associating with the wrong people and was executed at the behest of the king.

I hope I have that right - if I’m misremembering I apologize. I’m afraid I have a poor grasp of history.

j

ETA - I see I have been ninja’d. Thank you for the detail I was missing, @APB !

11

Oh, yeah-- I guess even though identifying bodies of murder victims would seem to be an obvious exception, going around testing bodies of hereditary monarchs for DNA would essentially test them all for paternity, and there’s maybe a lot there we don’t want to know-- maybe even some maternity called into question.

12

It is also that the Church of England is very reluctant as a matter of general policy to permit exhumations in any of its other churches as well. Curiosity about possible murder cases from half a millennium ago wouldn’t even come close to qualifying as a permissible exception.

13

Indeed. There’s another Channel 4 documentary from years ago making hay with the allegation (from the time, if memory serves) that Edward IV was himself not the son of York (I can’t remember if that was the reason why Richard had the boys declared illegitimate) - and that the “true” line descends from Edward’s (and Richard’s) brother George Clarence, to some bemused bloke in Australia.

14

It’s not so much that it’s a murder case-- it’s an accusation of the worst kind against a reigning king; you’d think there’d be some interest in clearing his name, since on the balance of the evidence, it’s a baseless accusation.

The boys, and all of Edward IV’s children with Elizabeth Woodville, were declared illegitimate when a priest, or bishop, I forget which, named Stillington, testified that before the Woodville marriage, he had married Edward to a woman named Eleanor Butler-- deceased at the time of the testimony, but much alive at the time of the Woodville marriage. The children of Edward IV & Elizabeth Woodville (which included the princes in the tower, as well as the wife of Henry Tudor) were all declared illegitimate by an act of parliament called Titulus Regis, that also made Richard, Duke of Gloucester, into Richard III. George was dead, Edward IV was dead, and George’s children were barred by their father’s attainder.

The “Edward IV was illegitimate” comes from a posthumous story that Richard influenced a priest or bishop to preach a sermon alleging that Richard only was his mother’s son by his father, the Duke of York, and that both Edward IV and George were sons of another man. Given that Richard was living with his mother at the time this was supposed to have happened, it seems unlikely-- I mean, that Richard III instigated it. I suppose it could have happened for some other reason than to shore up Richard’s claim, but I can’t think what.

15

Here’s a brief timeline of Stillington’s career, with a more narrative form below:

Pre-1465: Archdeacon of Taunton and Berkshire
1460-1467: Keeper of the Privy Seal
1466: Consecrated as Bishop of Bath and Wells
1467: Appointed Lord Chancellor (a secular position of considerable power)
1470: Booted from Lord Chancellor position by Henry VI
1471: Restored as Lord Chancellor by Edward IV
1473: Fired from Lord Chancellor post by Edward IV
1478: Imprisoned by Edward IV for a few weeks, possibly for egging Edward’s brother George into rebellion with the marriage story
1483: Member of boy-king Edward V’s council
1483: Allegedly spread the marriage story to the Duke of Gloucester, who ousted Edward V to become Richard III
1485: Imprisoned by Henry VII after Richard III’s defeat
1487: Imprisoned again for involvement in a plot to place an impostor on the throne

Busy guy.

Robert Stillington was Bishop of Bath and Wells, but he was also appointed Lord Chancellor under Edward IV. He got the boot when Henry VI was restored to the throne in 1470, then was reappointed when Edward IV retook the throne in 1471. However, he was dismissed from the post in 1473 and thereafter seems to have associated with Edward IV’s not-exactly-beloved brother George; he was imprisoned in 1478, possibly for telling George that Edward had precontracted for marriage with his mistress, Eleanor Talbot, which would give George a basis for staking a claim to the throne. George, who had sort of gone off the rails after the death of his wife, engaged in a rather flailing opposition to Edward IV and was executed for treason in 1478.

After the death of Edward IV, Stillington somehow managed to become a member of boy-king Edward V’s council; the memoirs of French diplomat Philippe de Commines indicate that he (referred to as “Stillington”, “Bishop of Bath”, and “that bad bishop” in the memoirs) spun the same tale about the illegitimacy of Edward IV’s marriage, this time to Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Richard took the throne as Richard III at least partly on the back of this accusation.

When Henry VII took down Richard III in 1485, Stillington was imprisoned again…but he was released in time to throw his lot in with Yorkist rebels trying to place Lambert Simnel on the throne. The common-born Simnel was groomed by a priest, Richard Simon, as an impostor meant to pose as the Earl of Warwick, the younger of the Princes in the Tower, to claim the throne. The rebellion was crushed, and Stillington was eventually imprisoned again. (The 10-year-old Simnel, BTW, was pardoned by Henry VII and given a job in the royal kitchens, which may be the most decent thing done by anyone involved in the whole mess.)

My cynical take is that he got fired from a cushy job in the Court, decided to stir up trouble for his ex-boss, and spent the rest of his life trying to play kingmaker and secure another position of power. Whether there was any truth to his allegations, I don’t know, but the details of them seem to have shifted as he shopped the story around, which makes me suspicious.

16

The younger prince was the Duke of York-- I think the Earl of Warwick was George’s son, and there had been an attainder against him for no reason other than his father’s crimes, and Richard III expressed the intention to lift it, but I don’t know whether he got around to it.

An imposter called Perkin Warbeck posed as the younger prince at some point, and there was someone who posed as Warwick, but I have no idea who Simnel actually posed as.

Apparently parliament believed Stillington’s story, because they passed an act called Titulus Regis that made Richard, Duke of Gloucester King Richard III, based on the illegitimacy of the children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. Maybe parliament didn’t like the idea of a minor king, and was happy to have an excuse to substitute Richard, who was not only an adult, but a proven quantity, as he’d been governing the north of England for a long time, and very well. And he was the boy king’s protector anyway. He was going to be functioning as king for several years.

But while I’m willing to believe that some members thought that, many thought it only secondarily; choosing a king in the middle ages was a religious duty-- if you got it wrong, you contradicted the all-mighty. I’m hard-pressed to believe that most of the members supporting Titulus Regis didn’t think they had the facts right.

Which doesn’t mean the story was right, but I have to think it was at least plausible-- Eleanor Butler, Edward’s first wife according to the act, was a demonstrably real person, for example.

17

Thanks for the correction; I think I lost track in the midst of the plotting. Having the kid pose as the younger prince, Richard, was Simon’s original plan. He switched to presenting him as an escaped Warwick after hearing rumors that the real Warwick had died in the Tower.

Parliament may well have believed Stillington’s story, and I don’t know (or really care) enough to take any position on whether the core of the story was true or not. I’m just noting that the pattern of Stillington’s behavior is consistent with him cynically using the story to try to regain a powerful secular position.

18

The two skeletons were prepubescent, which can be determined by the bones alone. But you can’t determine the sex of a prepubescent skeleton, so it’s possible they were female.

However, the skeletons were found wrapped in velvet. Velvet showed up in England during the reign of Edward IV, so it couldn’t have been earlier than that.

So the skeletons have to be dated between that time and the time they were originally discovered. Only two prepubescent children were in the tower during that time frame: the two princes.

The political situation gives Richard III a strong motive for killing the princes: it destroyed the Woodville faction claim on the crown. Henry IV had no motive - he claimed the crown by role of conquest, not by blood - and he had the next in line in the Tower for years (he had him executed when the king of Spain insisted so Catherine of Aragon could marry Arthur.

19

Was he the infamous baby eating bishop of bath and wells?

20

There was no reason for Richard to hide their deaths, though. In fact, having them known to be dead was to his advantage. Laying them in state for public mourning is what Richard would have done.

Henry Tudor, if he wanted to shift the blame to Richard, and concoct a story that the boys were missing and had probably been killed by Richard’s order early in his reign needed their bodies to be mysteriously gone. He couldn’t lay them in state and claim he’d found them dead, because that made no sense. Why would Richard take the time to arrange a hit as he was preparing for the battle of his life?