YMMV, but I can accept Thomas More’s indictment of Richard III. More knew Forest’s son, and was in Calais where the elderly Dighton lived. What he couldn’t prove was that Tyrell acted on the orders of Richard, or, as Phillipa Gregory has him do in her popular historical fiction, act on his own initiative. But still: cui bono?
More was certainly personally ambitious and a viscous SOB about it to boot. But he wasn’t simply a Tudor propagandist. He was an idealistic killer like Robespierre, not an opportunistic one like Beria. committing the mortal sin of bearing false witness was outside the limits of everything he did elsewhere, in his other writings or actions. And ultimately he did prefer to lose his life rather than commit the mortal sin of heresy. Calumny would have been just as bad in his view.
So I don’t really get the controversy (I mean I do, I see the attraction of redeeming Richard III, but the facts just don’t support it). Not only did he have means, motive and opportunity. It would have been stupid for him to do anything else. The theory proposed in that Channel 4 doc, where they escaped to france and then returned under false names* is particularly implausible to me, but it shows why he had to kill them once he has seized power.
As long as they were alive they were always going to be source of opposition to his power and potential usurpers (I mean they were the rightful hiers, so even calling the potential usurpers was a stretch). As for the idea they died of natural causes (simultaneously!), and were quietly buried, that makes zero sense. There was no reason not to loudly bury them publicly with lots of pomp. Even if people didn’t believe the whole “natural causes” thing, it would have made clear that they were in fact dead and ruled out a usurper pretending to be them. (Something that did in fact happen, though after Richard III died). Similarly the idea that Richard kept them alive during his reign but Henry Tudor has them killed. That would be the stupidest of all worlds for Richard. All the disadvantage of having people say he killed them but still have them hanging around as potential usurpers.
And then finally there is the fact that the accounts of the murder are not as unreliable as the ricardians would have you believe, they include contemporary and close to contemporary accounts. I mean the fact that the contemporary French Court was using the dead princes as a cautionary example of what can happen to child monarchs is pretty damning to me.
*- seriously what possible reason would they have for false names!?! Their identity as the princes was the only thing they had going for them. WTF would they go by false names!!!
I watched the show on PBS. The whole thing is way out of my wheelhouse, but I seem to recall not being to impressed with some of the claims being made.
But hey, PBS doesn’t have commercials! So it was easily the best thing on that night!
You have no way of knowing what Richard “would have done.” That is pure baseless speculation.
This is pure speculation; you have no idea whether he would have done that or not.
But we know that Henry let the next Yorkist claiment live when he took over. If he killed the princes, why did he let him live?
Second, Henry claimed rule by conquest, not rule by blood. He was not part of the Lancastrian bloodline (he descended from Catherine, spouse of Henry V - the actual claiment by blood was John II of Portugal, a direct descendant of John of Gaunt, founder of the Lancastrian line) and ruled because he beat Richard.
Third, the princes vanished in 1483. Henry was not a factor at that point and people accepted Richard as King. It changed in 1484, when Richard’s son Edward died. Then, in 1585, Richard’s wife died. These allowed Henry to gain power by promising to marry Elizabeth, uniting the houses of York and Lancaster. (Richard seemed to hint he would marry Elizabeth, his niece; it created such an uproar that he denied it).
But when the princes vanished (and were probably murdered) Bosworth Field was two years in the future. Richard could not have been preparing for it.
Except that story predates Henry’s rise to power. It’s not Tudor propaganda it was first recorded years prior to bosworth field. One of the more telling cases of that, to me, was the way the story was used in the French Court, not as way of taking a dig at Richard’s regime (which was still in power at the time), but as a cautionary example where it was taken as a given that the reason for their disappearance was Richard had killed them. As in “if we aren’t careful about the minority of Charles VIII he could end up murdered before he reaches adulthood just like Edward V’s kids were”.
I didn’t really want to debate this topic-- just wondered why, in the light of a lot of new science, the bones buried as the princes had never been disinterred and re-examined, and I guess the answer is I’m thinking with American sensibilities in even asking the question.