The Killer of the Princes in the Tower: A New Suspect Revealed

By M. J. Trow

A new investigation into the most infamous crime of the Middle Ages: the supposed murders of Edward V and his brother Richard of York in the 15th century.

The disappearance of two boys during the summer of 1483 has never been satisfactorily explained. They were Edward, Prince of Wales, nearly thirteen at the time, and his brother, Richard of York, nearly ten. With their father, Edward IV, dying suddenly at forty, both boys had been catapulted into the spotlight of fifteenth-century politics, which was at once bloody and unpredictable.

Over the past 500 years, three men in particular have been accused of the boys’ murders—Richard of Gloucester; Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond; and Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. Thanks to the work of the hack “historians” who wrote for Henry VII, the first Tudor, generations grew up believing that the boys were murdered and that the guilty party was their wicked uncle, Richard, who crowned himself King of England in July 1483, at which time the boys were effectively prisoners in the Tower of London.

After that, there was no further sign of them.

This book takes a different approach, the first to follow this particular line of enquiry. It is written as a police procedural, weighing up the historical evidence without being shackled to a particular “camp.” The supposition has always been made that the boys were murdered for political reasons. But what if that is incorrect? What if they died for other reasons entirely? What if their killer had nothing to gain politically from their deaths at all?

And, even more fascinatingly, what if the princes in the Tower were not the only victims?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526784087

M. J. Trow

M.J. Trow was educated as a military historian at King’s College, London and is probably best known today for his true crime and crime fiction works. He has always been fascinated by Richard III and, following on from Richard III in the North, also by Pen and Sword, has hopefully finally scotched the rumour that Richard III killed the princes in the Tower. He divides his time between homes in the Isle of Wight and the Land of the Prince Bishops.

Book preview

Prologue

The Coldest of Cold Cases

Over the last few years, umpteen television crime fiction series, American and British, have become obsessed with the reopening of cold cases. There is a curious pleasure in winding things up, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s; above all, in finding answers. In actual cold cases, the result is often far less satisfactory. The American factual series Cold Justice scores a success if the local District Attorney agrees to look at a case again, but much more rarely do we have a murder conviction or a killer who confesses. What the Americans call ‘closure’ is a relative term. There is a vague belief, not shared by the majority of police forces on either side of the Atlantic, that if a murder case is not ‘solved’ and a suspect charged within days of the event, it is unlikely ever to be. That said, forensic science is improving daily and clues considered unimportant at the time take on a new significance. Yes, memories fade, uncertainties increase and humans, at once the best and the worst eyewitnesses, are notoriously unreliable when it comes to accuracy.

The supposed murders of Edward V and his brother Richard of York, the ‘princes in the Tower’ may have happened nearly five and a half centuries ago. No bodies positively identified as the princes were ever found, despite the myth of their tomb in Westminster Abbey. Everyone connected with their disappearance has been dead for 500 years. Accounts of the time – the rough equivalent of witness statements to the police today – are vague, contradictory and would be dismissed now as hearsay. Later accounts, those of the Tudor hacks employed to legitimise an illegitimate line, are impossibly biased and point to the guilt of one man – Richard of Gloucester, who became Richard III in July 1483.

Only slowly, over the centuries, did later generations look again at the most infamous crime of the Middle Ages and raise doubts and questions. George Buck in the seventeenth century, Horace Walpole in the eighteenth, Caroline Halsted in the nineteenth, went into print to defend Richard. As key pieces of evidence turned up – Titulus Regius, Richard’s parliamentary right to rule; Dominic Mancini’s Occupation of the Throne of England by Richard III – it was possible to add detail to the vague notions. Two armed camps have developed: the traditionalists or anti-Ricardians who believe, in essence, the fiction of Thomas More from 1513 and William Shakespeare from the 1590s that Richard had the boys killed; and the Ricardians, defenders of the maligned king, many of whom tend to point the finger of guilt in the boys’ murder at Richard’s nemesis, the first Tudor, Henry VII.

It is scarcely conceivable to imagine such a crime today. The murders of two children would probably be linked, in an age more prurient than the fifteenth century, with a sex crime. No one has ever suggested this in the context of the princes; because of their exalted rank and position as sons of a king (Edward IV) their removal from the royal scene and their subsequent deaths, had to be political. I believe that this is not the case and once we disassemble the politics, we can see the crime in a very different context. If British royal children disappeared today, the media frenzy would be intolerable. There were no newspapers in the fifteenth century. The most we have is a scattering of private correspondence, for example the Paston and Cely letters. We have official documents that shed virtually no light on murky events like murder. We have chronicles, ‘histories’ both official and unofficial, often compiled by churchmen, miles from the action and written years afterwards.

There was no police force, no structure to investigate the boys’ disappearance. There was no forensic science, so that even had the boys’ bodies been found, the cause of death could not definitely have been ascertained, still less who was guilty of the murder.

What this book sets out to do is to think outside the box. For many years now, I have been writing true crime books, but my background and instincts are those of the historian. We cannot turn the clock back. Certain avenues – such as modern DNA testing on the ‘Westminster bones’ – are closed to us for reasons that make little sense. Other avenues were never open in the first place. Murder cases are rarely open and shut. Few murders happen in broad daylight in the glare of witnesses; and when they do, as in the assassination of John Kennedy on a Friday afternoon in Dealy Plaza, Dallas, we still cannot agree on exactly what happened. So what we have, at best, in the deaths of the princes, is circumstantial evidence – disappointing to aficionados of crime fiction, but such evidence has hanged men and women.

And the evidence that I have uncovered at least merits a closer look at one person of interest. Whether the court of history will judge him guilty, we shall have to wait and see.

Part 1

THE CRIME

Chapter 1

The Tragedy of King Richard III

Richard III is the first of Shakespeare’s plays that has a central character who is also a Machiavellian villain. Probably written in plague-ridden London in 1592, it owes more than a nod to Christopher Marlowe, the university wit who was already the ‘muse’s darling’ in the capital when Shakespeare arrived from Warwickshire. The character of Richard, a vicious bit-player in Shakespeare’s earlier Henry VI , is deliciously evil, enjoying his asides to the audience and twisting his fellow players around his little finger. Only the women are wary of him, ‘venomous toad’ that he is, although one of them, Anne Neville, falls for his oily charms anyway and marries him, even though, in the Shakespeare version, he has personally murdered her first husband, Edward, Prince of Wales and her father-in-law, Henry VI.

In what is Shakespeare’s longest play apart from Hamlet, Richard sheds no tears at all at the untimely death of his older brother Edward and then proceeds to murder his way to the throne, notching up a hefty eleven victims on the way.

We shall look at the huge influence of Shakespeare’s play on the matter of the princes later, but suffice it to say at this stage that, in essence, Shakespeare’s is the version that most people know and generally still believe. In Act III Sc. I, the sons of Edward IV are sent to the Tower to prepare for Edward V’s coronation.

‘I shall not sleep quiet at the Tower,’ Richard of York, the younger boy, says.

‘Why,’ asks Richard of Gloucester, the boys’ protector, ‘what should you fear?’

‘Marry,’ says little York, ‘my uncle Clarence’s angry ghost; My grandam told me he was murder’d there.’

In Shakespeare’s version, George, Duke of Clarence was arrested by Edward IV in a plot contrived by Richard of Gloucester. His murder, by drowning in a vat of Malmsey wine, was ordered by Richard. While Gloucester rushes around London winning friends and influencing people, he also carries out a coup d’état, that removes a potential opponent, William, Lord Hastings, and has him executed for treason on Tower Green. The citizens of London, stirred up by Richard’s confederate, Harry, Duke of Buckingham, and desperate to avoid the political chaos of a boy king (Edward V) offer the crown to Gloucester, who humbly accepts.

To generations of playgoers, the speed of Richard’s dastardly deeds merely underlines his evil. In reality, five years separated the execution of Clarence, not on Richard’s orders but those of the king, and the Hastings coup.

After his coronation ceremony, the new king, now Richard III, calls a hanger-on to him. ‘Is thy name Tyrell?’

‘James Tyrell, and your most obedient subject.’

‘Art thou indeed?’ Richard is sounding the man out.

‘Prove me, my gracious sovereign.’

In the fifteenth century, the king was far and away the most powerful man in the country. Men like Tyrell had to take such opportunities when they could.

‘Darest thou resolve to kill a friend of mine?’ Richard asks.

‘Aye, my lord, but I had rather kill two enemies.’

Richard cannot believe his luck. ‘Why, there thou hast it; two deep enemies, foes to my rest and my sweet sleep’s disturbers are they that I would have thee deal upon. Tyrell, I mean those bastards in the Tower.’

Parliament had already declared the boys, indeed all the children of Edward IV, illegitimate and therefore unfit to rule, but that was not enough for Richard. Tyrell was game. ‘Let me have open means to come to them and soon I’ll rid you from the fear of them.’

Richard is delighted. ‘Thou singst sweet music. Hark, come hither, Tyrell. Go, by this token [he gives him a ring with the royal signet], rise and lend thine ear.’

In the stage directions, the murderous king whispers. In what is still the best-known version, Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film, he clasps a velvet cushion over Tyrell’s mouth, at once threatening him and hinting at the murder method he might use. ‘There is no more but so; say it is done and I will love thee and prefer thee too.’

In the fifteenth century, preferment meant titles and lands, the hallmarks of success.

‘Tis done, my gracious Lord.’

‘Shall we hear from thee, Tyrell, ere we sleep?’ the king asks.

‘Ye shall, my Lord,’ the hit man promises.

We do not see the murder of the princes in the Shakespeare version, perhaps because such a topic was not considered suitable for the mixed social audiences who attended the play. There is in fact a version of the story earlier than Shakespeare’s that is almost forgotten today. Anonymous and again based on the ‘histories’ of the chroniclers Edward Hall and Ralph Holinshed, The True Tragedy of Richard III was listed at Stationers Hall in June 1594 but was almost certainly performed earlier, perhaps at the time of the Armada invasion scare of 1588. The Queen’s Majesty’s Players put it on and in this version, the princes die on stage. Perhaps the audiences were sufficiently revolted by this that Shakespeare made his version softer. The villains in The True Tragedy spend half a scene debating how best to carry out the deed. Pistols would not have been available in Richard’s day (the handguns of Bosworth were much bigger, battlefield weapons), but throat-slitting was an option, as was grabbing the boys by their heels and smashing them against a wall! In the Shakespeare version there is no such debate and we hear about the murder in Tyrell’s soliloquy:

‘The tyrannous and bloody deed is done,

The most arch act of piteous massacre

That ever yet this land was guilty of.

Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn

To do this ruthless piece of butchery,

Although they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs,

Melting with tenderness and kind compassion

Wept like two children in their deaths’ sad stories.

Lo, thus, quoth Dighton, lay those tender babes.

Thus, thus, quoth Forrest, "girdling one another

Within their innocent alabaster arms;

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,

Which in their summer beauty kiss’d each other.

A book of prayers on their pillow lay,

Which once, quoth Forrest, almost changed my mind;

But O! The devil" – there the villain stopp’d,

Whilst Dighton thus told on; "We smothered

The most replenished sweet work of nature,

That from the prime creation e’er she framed."

Thus both are gone with conscience and remorse,

They could not speak; and so I left them both

To bring this tidings to the bloody king.’

Neatly, as in all Shakespeare’s plays, Richard turns up at that very moment.

‘Kind Tyrell, am I happy in thy news?’

‘If to have done the thing you gave in charge beget your happiness, be happy then, for it is done, my lord.’

Richard wants confirmation. ‘But didst thou see them dead?’

‘I did, my lord,’ Tyrell assures him.

‘And buried, gentle Tyrell?’

‘The chaplain of the Tower hath buried them,’ Tyrell says, ‘But how or in what place I do not know.’

Richard promises to grant Tyrell his wishes by way of recompense and outlines to us, the audience, how his cunning plans are coming together:

‘The son of Clarence have I pent up close;

His daughter meanly have I matched in marriage.

The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham’s bosom.’

All is well for him. His throne is far from safe, but the greatest threats have gone. The murder of the princes is ‘the most arch act of piteous massacre’ that England has ever seen (which is a rather grandiose statement!) and even hardened thugs like Forest and Dighton cried when they told the tale.

But where did that tale come from? The true genius of William Shakespeare is that he recognized brilliance in other writers and stole from them shamelessly. There were no laws of libel as we know them in Shakespeare’s day and copyright issues barely existed. Shakespeare got much of his ‘history’ from Tudor apologists like Edward Hall and Ralph Holinshed. The story of the princes’ murder, he lifted, sometimes verbatim, from Thomas More.

As Jeremy Potter, a former chairman of the Richard III Society, wrote, ‘Shakespeare may be fiction, it is argued, but More is fact.’ More’s History of King Richard III was written both in English and Latin, the language of scholars and the law, probably in 1513. William Rastill, More’s nephew, wrote, by way of explanation in his edition of 1557, that it was:

‘unfinished, written by Master Thomas More, then one of the undersheriffs of London … which work has been before this time printed in Harding’s Chronicle and in Hall’s Chronicle, but very much corrupt in places, sometimes having less and sometimes having more and altered in words and whole sentences; much varying from the copy of his own hand, by which this is printed.’

Although Rastill assures us that his version is the correct original, the reference to copying and alteration should make us wary. Can we trust the Undersheriff’s nephew?

Harding’s Chronicle was published in 1543 and Hall’s fifteen years later. It was Hall who provided Shakespeare with his source material. The fact that More himself never attempted to publish his Richard III and the fact that he left it unfinished has raised many questions about his motivation for writing it in the first place. He takes the story from the death of Edward IV in April 1483, with some asides to explain the background to the Yorkist Plantagenet regime, up to the failure of the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion in October of the same year. As a lawyer who seriously toyed with a career in the Church, More is fascinated by legalistic angles and goes off at a tangent sometimes. For example, in the case of Queen Elizabeth Woodville releasing her younger son Richard of York from sanctuary in Westminster to his uncle Gloucester’s clutches in the Tower, he spends eight pages debating the rights and wrongs of sanctuary. He also spends four pages on Jane Shore (actually Elizabeth), the wife of a London merchant. She was consecutively the mistress of Edward IV, William, Lord Hastings and the Marquess of Dorset. Richard forced her to do public penance for her harlotry, walking the streets of London with a lighted taper, but released her so that she could marry her lawyer! It is just feasible that More met Jane Shore and was possibly captivated by the grand old dame she had probably become; it is difficult to explain his four pages otherwise.

In the debate between Plantagenet and Tudor and the newer one between Ricardians and anti-Ricardians, there is never any doubt about whose side More is on. Even though, as a member of parliament, he showed considerable independence – and guts – by clashing with Henry VII over taxation; and even though his links to Henry VIII cost him his life in 1535, when he refused to back the king’s stance over religion, More bought into all the malicious gossip he had heard as a teenager in the household of one of Richard’s staunchest enemies, John Morton, Bishop of Ely (later Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury). Morton was one of those arrested in the Hastings coup of 13 June 1483. Subsequently imprisoned in the Tower, he was released into the custody of Harry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham and plotted with him and Margaret Beaufort to install the exiled Henry Tudor as king. It was under him that this most vicious of self-serving churchmen prospered. More wrote:

‘Richard, the third son [of Richard of York and Cecily Neville] was in wit and courage equal with either of them [his older brothers Edward and George, Duke of Clarence] in body and prowess far under them both; little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favoured of visage … He was malicious, wrathful, envious, and from afore his birth ever forward. It is for truth reported that the Duchess, his mother, had so much ado in her travail that she could not be delivered of him uncut; and that he came into the world with the feet forward, as men be born outward, and (as the fame runs) also not untoothed … No evil captain was he in the war, as to which his disposition was more meetly than in peace. Sundry victories had he, and sometimes overthrows, but never in default of his own person … he was close and secret, a deep dissimuler [dissembler] lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill; disputatious and cruel, not for evil will always, but after for ambition and either for the surety or increase of his estate. Friend and foe was much what indifferent; where his advantage grew, he spared no man death whose life withstood his purpose.’

To that end, More says, Richard personally murdered Henry VI, a prisoner in the Tower in 1471. He had a hand in the death of his own brother Clarence seven years later and even encouraged his other brother, Edward, in the life of gluttony and excess which purportedly killed him in April 1483.

‘The dolorous end of those babes’, the princes in the Tower, is dealt with in four and a half pages (half of the space devoted to sanctuary and not much more than that dedicated to a self-serving prostitute), but it remains the longest and most detailed account of their murder. Soon after his coronation on 6 July 1483, Richard of Gloucester, now Richard III, his wife Anne and a large number of nobles and clerics, went on a routine royal progress beginning in London and culminating in York, which had been more or less Richard’s capital in his capacity as Lord of the North. In fact, it is likely that he intended to return to London and was at Nottingham, on his way south, when he heard of the outbreak of what would develop into Buckingham’s rebellion. More claims that it was while the king was at Gloucester, on his way north at the end of July, that he became increasingly worried about the continued existence of his nephews in the Tower and decided to do something about it. He sent John Green, who is elsewhere described as ‘an old [loyal] servant’ with a letter to Robert Brackenbury, Constable of the Tower, with instructions that he should ‘put the two children to death’.

Brackenbury was an adherent of Richard from the North, acting as Constable of Barnard Castle in County Durham and holding estates at Selaby nearby. He was also a man of scruples and when Green found him, he was at prayer, perhaps in the chapel of St John in the White Tower. The Constable told the king’s messenger that he would die rather than kill the princes. Back rode Green with Brackenbury’s message and found Richard, who had by now moved on to Warwick, the great Neville castle over the Avon that had been his wife’s childhood home.

‘Ah,’ says More’s Richard to a page standing nearby, ‘whom shall a man trust?’ The page has an answer. Outside Richard’s solar door, sleeping on a pallet hoping for the king to notice them and give them a job (it was the Tudor and indeed Stuart way to advancement) were the Tyrell brothers, James and Thomas. More describes James as ‘a man of right goodly personage and for nature’s gifts worthy to have served a much better prince … The man had a high heart and sore longed upward’, but he had been kept down by two men whom More – and most Tudor apologists – saw almost as pantomime villains: Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby.

The conversation with the page (who seems to have been exceptionally loyal and discreet) took place with Richard ‘sitting at the draught’ (i.e. the toilet) ‘a convenient carpet for such a council’. In Medieval castles like Warwick, the toilets were called garderobes and were stone chutes that took the waste down the exterior of the walls, usually right into the moat. The king raised the tricky issue of the princes with James, ‘this mischievous matter, in which he found him nothing strange’. In other words, Tyrell was happy to go along with it. Accordingly, Richard sent Tyrell, with yet another letter, to tell Brackenbury to hand over the Tower keys to him for one night, no questions asked.

According to More, the princes’ servants were removed from them except one with the unlikely name of William Slaughter, ‘Black Will’. Edward seems to have become depressed – ‘the Prince never tied his points, nor ought rought of himself, but with that young babe his brother lingered in thought and heaviness till this traitorous death delivered them of that wretchedness.’

Tyrell was the orchestrator, but not the killer himself. Four servants, presumably including Slaughter, still attended the boys and we are told the names of the two who murdered them; ‘Miles Forest … a fellow fleshed in murder before time’ and ‘John Dighton, his own horsekeeper, a big, broad, square, strong knave’. These two:

‘about midnight [we have no actual date] – the sely [innocent] children lying in their beds – came into the chamber and suddenly lapped them up among the clothes; so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the featherbed and pillows hard to their mouths, that, within a while, smored [smothered] and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls into the joys of heaven, leaving to their tormentors their bodies dead in the bed.’

The murderers then went to Tyrell, presumably waiting nearby, and he saw their bodies ‘naked out upon the bed’. On his instructions, Forest and Dighton buried the boys ‘meetly [suitably] deep in the ground, under a great heap of stones’.

Tyrell then rode to Richard, still on his progress, and put the anxious king’s mind to rest. The princes were dead. His worries were over. ‘Lo,’ writes More sarcastically, ‘the honourable courage of a king!’ Richard was unhappy with the crude burial place, however, ‘because they were a king’s sons’, so an anonymous priest of Brackenbury’s disinterred them and buried them elsewhere, ‘in such place as, by the occasion of his death who only knew it, could never since come to light’.

In case anyone doubted the veracity of More’s story, littered with phrases like ‘very truth is it and well known’, he adds that Tyrell and Dighton were themselves sent to the Tower for treason against Henry VII. This was in 1502 and before Tyrell was executed, he confessed to the murders, as did Dighton, ‘but whither the [boys’] bodies were removed they could nothing tell’.

More tells us, like all good television documentaries do today, what happened to the main protagonists