The funeral for Shakespeare's greatest villain is fast approaching. But did he really kill the princes in the Tower?
How bad a guy was Richard III?
By Dominic Selwood
18 Feb 2015
The Telegraph
57 Comments
The car park where Richard's body was found (under the R) lies on the site where the friary once stood, and experts have long suspected the church may have been nearby Photo: Alamy
Late Tudor England was a lethal environment for the politically unwary, with errors of judgment frequently resulting in a one-way trip to Tyburn. Fortunately, Shakespeare knew the rules of the game well. When he brought out Richard III in 1592, he was keenly aware that his arch villain was not some random monarch from a bygone age — Richard was the last Plantagenet king of England, whose throne Henry Tudor (Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch) had seized in battle at Bosworth Field a century earlier.
For obvious reasons, the Tudors were a little sensitive when it came to Richard. Their preferred line was that he was depravity incarnate, which ensured everyone could remain grateful to Henry Tudor for having prised him off the throne.
Naturally, there were plenty of Tudor writers willing to cooperate. Take the chronicler John Rous (c. 1420–92) who swiftly stopped praising Richard as a “good Lord” when Henry VII was crowned, and instead recalled how Richard had taken two years to gestate before eventually being born with teeth, long hair to his shoulders, and a hunchback. Sir Thomas More, Raphael Holinshed, and others carried on in much the same vein. But it was Shakespeare who created the Richard that would become burned into our collective memory — “the son of Hell”, a monomaniac murderous psychotic who “know'st no law of God nor man”.
Laurence Olivier as Shakespeare's villainous Richard (1955)
However, among the many bloody deeds Shakespeare laid at Richard’s door — some genuine, many not — the most notorious is undoubtedly the murder of the two young “Princes in the Tower”. (Actually, “princes” is a bit of an understatement. One of them was the reigning king of England, Edward V.)
So, when the mitred clerics solemnly pray over Richard III’s mangled skull and bones in Leicester on 25 March, will the nation be reinterring a much maligned and worthy king, or a monstrous tyrant guilty of infanticide and regicide?
The facts are straightforward.
King Edward IV — Richard’s older brother — died unexpectedly at Windsor on 9 April 1483. Edward IV’s eldest son was Edward Prince of Wales, and over a decade earlier the lords had pledged him their allegiance as the next lawful sovereign.
Unfortunately, when Edward IV died, his heir was only 12, which triggered the provision in Edward IV’s will that Richard should govern as Lord Protector until the young prince reached his majority at 14. However, Edward IV’s widow, Queen Elizabeth — from the increasingly powerful Woodville family — had other plans, and arranged for her son swiftly to be proclaimed as Edward V, with the coronation set for 4 May.
Richard viewed the move as tantamount to squeezing him out to ensure the young king was surrounded by Woodvilles. Richard was not having any of it. Although he openly swore allegiance to the new Edward V, he unexpectedly seized the King at Stony Stratford in early May, arrested some of his Woodville advisers as a warning shot to the Queen, and brought the boy under escort to London.
Richard swiftly settled Edward into the Tower of London — a royal palace as well as a prison — and moved the coronation back to 22 June. He then openly assumed the role of Lord Protector, and started running the country in the name of King Edward V.
Painting of the Princes in the Tower by Paul Delaroche (1831). What happened to Edward V and his younger brother after they mysteriously disappeared remains a mystery to this day
Then, on 13 June, he made more arrests and summarily executed the prominent courtier Lord Hastings, accusing him of plotting treason. The real reason is more likely to have been that Hastings was an ally of Queen Elizabeth and one of Edward V’s strongest supporters.
Three days later, Richard’s men persuaded Queen Elizabeth (who had taken sanctuary at Westminster Abbey) to hand over the young King’s nine-year-old brother, Richard Duke of York, who was also given rooms at the Tower so that, Elizabeth was told, he could participate in his brother’s coronation.
With the first and second in line to the throne now firmly under his sole control, Richard mounted his coup d’état, postponing Edward’s coronation until 9 November, before putting it about that all Edward IV’s 10 children from Queen Elizabeth were illegitimate because Edward IV had previously been engaged.
Having widely published these damaging allegations, on 25 June Richard executed the two leading Woodvilles he had arrested at Stony Stratford in early May, and on 26 June he climbed onto the King’s Bench in Westminster and declared himself King Richard III. His formal coronation was held on 6 July.
It had all happened so fast that no one had time to mount any meaningful opposition.
Richard promptly embarked on a victory tour of his new realm, but towards the end of July he received news of a botched attempt to rescue the young brothers from the Tower. It was almost certainly an attempt by Edward V’s supporters to reinstate him as king, but it was equally likely the incident that sealed the boys’ gruesome fate, as no more was ever again seen or heard of either of them. They simply disappeared from history.
Contemporaries rapidly concluded that the pair were dead, as within three months opposition to Richard had coalesced around Henry Tudor, a freebooting outsider with a flimsy and tortuous claim to the throne (whose mother, alarmingly, bore him aged 13). This support for Henry would have made no sense if people believed Edward V was still alive.
Centuries later, on 17 July 1674, an elm box was discovered in the Tower, buried beneath 10 feet of rubbish under a staircase leading to the chapel of the White Tower. Inside it were two children’s skeletons. Excitement mounted, as the location broadly corresponded with where Sir Thomas More had reported that, years earlier, Sir James Tyrell, a retainer of Richard’s, had confessed that the murdered boys had first been buried.
The grisly find was made known to King Charles II, who ordered the bones reburied at Westminster Abbey in a tomb designed by Wren and inscribed to the memory of the “unhappy” King Edward V and Richard Duke of York. The urn was opened in 1933 and the bones were confirmed to be those of children, but all more recent requests for scientific or DNA tests on them have been refused.
So, assuming the boys were murdered — which historians do, as does the virtually contemporary Crowland Chronicle of 1486 — the key question remains unanswered after 532 years: was Richard behind the dreadful killings, or did the Tudors pin them on him for propaganda?
Richard III is to have "an effective state funeral" when he is reinterred at Leicester Cathedral on 25th March
Cui bono? is still the starting point for murder investigators the world over, and the main beneficiary of the princes’ permanent exit from the succession in 1483 was undoubtedly Richard. Not only did he have the strongest motive, but he also had the boys under his absolute control, along with a proven disregard for their entitlements and well-being. He also never made any attempt to explain publicly where they were, or what had happened to them while under his “protection”.
Over the years, other culprits have been put forward. The most interesting is Sir James Tyrell, who was identified as the murderer by Polydore Vergil, Henry VII’s historian. Later, Sir Thomas More went further, writing that shortly before Tyrell’s execution in 1502, Tyrell confessed to murdering the children on Richard’s orders. However, no evidence of Tyrell’s supposed confession has ever been found — and More’s account was written long after Tyrell’s death, from a Tudor perspective, and with obvious embellishments.
Another suspect is Henry Stafford Duke of Buckingham, who is blamed in a document of 1512 now in the College of Arms. The general assumption is that if it was him, he also was following Richard’s orders.
A third potential culprit is Henry VII, who some more recent writers have suggested may have ordered the killings after he was crowned in 1485 in an attempt to extinguish all rival Plantagenet claims.
However, it is significant that none of these people faced accusations at the time, whereas there was a good deal of rumour floating about, at home and abroad, pointing at Richard.
For example, Richard was publicly denounced as the murderer at the Estates General in France as early as January 1484.
Moreover, in 1934 a book came to light written by the Italian Dominic Mancini. He had been in England at the time, noting down the gossip and conversations he overheard. He recorded that there was much talk of the princes having been done away with while under Richard’s protection, and even before Richard officially usurped the throne. He also preserved the damning detail that John Argentine, the princes’ physician in the Tower, said that at this time the young Edward V anticipated his impending murder daily with confession and penance.
As a final piece of evidence, Queen Elizabeth and her daughters only left the safety of sanctuary in Westminster Abbey after extracting an oath from Richard that he would not harm the girls — a clear indication that the queen feared violence from Richard against her children. In the end, she had a degree of revenge when she married her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, to King Henry VII less than five months after his men had slain Richard at Bosworth.
A memorial stone in Leicester Cathedral
So, as the nation prepares to rebury Richard, the princes’ killings remain unsolved, and speculation about the murderer’s identity will no doubt enjoy a revival as the media focuses its attention on the colourful royal pomp and pageantry that will unfold next month in Leicester.
There are those who point to Richard’s well-attested piety, and conclude that he simply would not have done it. Others say that if he was responsible, it was done out of a sense of duty, as he feared that the kingdom’s dangerous instability would be exacerbated by an immature child king advised by the equally inexperienced Woodvilles.
Given modern scholarship, it is unarguable that Tudor writers — including Shakespeare — turned Richard into a political parody: a theatrical sociopath drunk on power and death. Much of it is blatant fabrication. He did not murder Henry VI (Edward IV did) or his son, Edward of Westminster. He was not involved in the execution of his own brother, George Duke of Clarence (although it probably WAS carried out by drowning him in a butt of Malmsey wine). He did not kill his wife’s first husband, or end up poisoning her in order to marry again. But in the matter of the murdered Princes in the Tower, one cannot imagine there would be many lawyers lining up to argue Richard’s defence on a no-win no-fee basis.
How bad a guy was Richard III? - Telegraph
How bad a guy was Richard III?
By Dominic Selwood
18 Feb 2015
The Telegraph
The car park where Richard's body was found (under the R) lies on the site where the friary once stood, and experts have long suspected the church may have been nearby Photo: Alamy
Late Tudor England was a lethal environment for the politically unwary, with errors of judgment frequently resulting in a one-way trip to Tyburn. Fortunately, Shakespeare knew the rules of the game well. When he brought out Richard III in 1592, he was keenly aware that his arch villain was not some random monarch from a bygone age — Richard was the last Plantagenet king of England, whose throne Henry Tudor (Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch) had seized in battle at Bosworth Field a century earlier.
For obvious reasons, the Tudors were a little sensitive when it came to Richard. Their preferred line was that he was depravity incarnate, which ensured everyone could remain grateful to Henry Tudor for having prised him off the throne.
Naturally, there were plenty of Tudor writers willing to cooperate. Take the chronicler John Rous (c. 1420–92) who swiftly stopped praising Richard as a “good Lord” when Henry VII was crowned, and instead recalled how Richard had taken two years to gestate before eventually being born with teeth, long hair to his shoulders, and a hunchback. Sir Thomas More, Raphael Holinshed, and others carried on in much the same vein. But it was Shakespeare who created the Richard that would become burned into our collective memory — “the son of Hell”, a monomaniac murderous psychotic who “know'st no law of God nor man”.
Laurence Olivier as Shakespeare's villainous Richard (1955)
However, among the many bloody deeds Shakespeare laid at Richard’s door — some genuine, many not — the most notorious is undoubtedly the murder of the two young “Princes in the Tower”. (Actually, “princes” is a bit of an understatement. One of them was the reigning king of England, Edward V.)
So, when the mitred clerics solemnly pray over Richard III’s mangled skull and bones in Leicester on 25 March, will the nation be reinterring a much maligned and worthy king, or a monstrous tyrant guilty of infanticide and regicide?
The facts are straightforward.
King Edward IV — Richard’s older brother — died unexpectedly at Windsor on 9 April 1483. Edward IV’s eldest son was Edward Prince of Wales, and over a decade earlier the lords had pledged him their allegiance as the next lawful sovereign.
Unfortunately, when Edward IV died, his heir was only 12, which triggered the provision in Edward IV’s will that Richard should govern as Lord Protector until the young prince reached his majority at 14. However, Edward IV’s widow, Queen Elizabeth — from the increasingly powerful Woodville family — had other plans, and arranged for her son swiftly to be proclaimed as Edward V, with the coronation set for 4 May.
Richard viewed the move as tantamount to squeezing him out to ensure the young king was surrounded by Woodvilles. Richard was not having any of it. Although he openly swore allegiance to the new Edward V, he unexpectedly seized the King at Stony Stratford in early May, arrested some of his Woodville advisers as a warning shot to the Queen, and brought the boy under escort to London.
Richard swiftly settled Edward into the Tower of London — a royal palace as well as a prison — and moved the coronation back to 22 June. He then openly assumed the role of Lord Protector, and started running the country in the name of King Edward V.
Painting of the Princes in the Tower by Paul Delaroche (1831). What happened to Edward V and his younger brother after they mysteriously disappeared remains a mystery to this day
Then, on 13 June, he made more arrests and summarily executed the prominent courtier Lord Hastings, accusing him of plotting treason. The real reason is more likely to have been that Hastings was an ally of Queen Elizabeth and one of Edward V’s strongest supporters.
Three days later, Richard’s men persuaded Queen Elizabeth (who had taken sanctuary at Westminster Abbey) to hand over the young King’s nine-year-old brother, Richard Duke of York, who was also given rooms at the Tower so that, Elizabeth was told, he could participate in his brother’s coronation.
With the first and second in line to the throne now firmly under his sole control, Richard mounted his coup d’état, postponing Edward’s coronation until 9 November, before putting it about that all Edward IV’s 10 children from Queen Elizabeth were illegitimate because Edward IV had previously been engaged.
Having widely published these damaging allegations, on 25 June Richard executed the two leading Woodvilles he had arrested at Stony Stratford in early May, and on 26 June he climbed onto the King’s Bench in Westminster and declared himself King Richard III. His formal coronation was held on 6 July.
It had all happened so fast that no one had time to mount any meaningful opposition.
Richard promptly embarked on a victory tour of his new realm, but towards the end of July he received news of a botched attempt to rescue the young brothers from the Tower. It was almost certainly an attempt by Edward V’s supporters to reinstate him as king, but it was equally likely the incident that sealed the boys’ gruesome fate, as no more was ever again seen or heard of either of them. They simply disappeared from history.
Contemporaries rapidly concluded that the pair were dead, as within three months opposition to Richard had coalesced around Henry Tudor, a freebooting outsider with a flimsy and tortuous claim to the throne (whose mother, alarmingly, bore him aged 13). This support for Henry would have made no sense if people believed Edward V was still alive.
Centuries later, on 17 July 1674, an elm box was discovered in the Tower, buried beneath 10 feet of rubbish under a staircase leading to the chapel of the White Tower. Inside it were two children’s skeletons. Excitement mounted, as the location broadly corresponded with where Sir Thomas More had reported that, years earlier, Sir James Tyrell, a retainer of Richard’s, had confessed that the murdered boys had first been buried.
The grisly find was made known to King Charles II, who ordered the bones reburied at Westminster Abbey in a tomb designed by Wren and inscribed to the memory of the “unhappy” King Edward V and Richard Duke of York. The urn was opened in 1933 and the bones were confirmed to be those of children, but all more recent requests for scientific or DNA tests on them have been refused.
So, assuming the boys were murdered — which historians do, as does the virtually contemporary Crowland Chronicle of 1486 — the key question remains unanswered after 532 years: was Richard behind the dreadful killings, or did the Tudors pin them on him for propaganda?
Richard III is to have "an effective state funeral" when he is reinterred at Leicester Cathedral on 25th March
Cui bono? is still the starting point for murder investigators the world over, and the main beneficiary of the princes’ permanent exit from the succession in 1483 was undoubtedly Richard. Not only did he have the strongest motive, but he also had the boys under his absolute control, along with a proven disregard for their entitlements and well-being. He also never made any attempt to explain publicly where they were, or what had happened to them while under his “protection”.
Over the years, other culprits have been put forward. The most interesting is Sir James Tyrell, who was identified as the murderer by Polydore Vergil, Henry VII’s historian. Later, Sir Thomas More went further, writing that shortly before Tyrell’s execution in 1502, Tyrell confessed to murdering the children on Richard’s orders. However, no evidence of Tyrell’s supposed confession has ever been found — and More’s account was written long after Tyrell’s death, from a Tudor perspective, and with obvious embellishments.
Another suspect is Henry Stafford Duke of Buckingham, who is blamed in a document of 1512 now in the College of Arms. The general assumption is that if it was him, he also was following Richard’s orders.
A third potential culprit is Henry VII, who some more recent writers have suggested may have ordered the killings after he was crowned in 1485 in an attempt to extinguish all rival Plantagenet claims.
However, it is significant that none of these people faced accusations at the time, whereas there was a good deal of rumour floating about, at home and abroad, pointing at Richard.
For example, Richard was publicly denounced as the murderer at the Estates General in France as early as January 1484.
Moreover, in 1934 a book came to light written by the Italian Dominic Mancini. He had been in England at the time, noting down the gossip and conversations he overheard. He recorded that there was much talk of the princes having been done away with while under Richard’s protection, and even before Richard officially usurped the throne. He also preserved the damning detail that John Argentine, the princes’ physician in the Tower, said that at this time the young Edward V anticipated his impending murder daily with confession and penance.
As a final piece of evidence, Queen Elizabeth and her daughters only left the safety of sanctuary in Westminster Abbey after extracting an oath from Richard that he would not harm the girls — a clear indication that the queen feared violence from Richard against her children. In the end, she had a degree of revenge when she married her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, to King Henry VII less than five months after his men had slain Richard at Bosworth.
A memorial stone in Leicester Cathedral
So, as the nation prepares to rebury Richard, the princes’ killings remain unsolved, and speculation about the murderer’s identity will no doubt enjoy a revival as the media focuses its attention on the colourful royal pomp and pageantry that will unfold next month in Leicester.
There are those who point to Richard’s well-attested piety, and conclude that he simply would not have done it. Others say that if he was responsible, it was done out of a sense of duty, as he feared that the kingdom’s dangerous instability would be exacerbated by an immature child king advised by the equally inexperienced Woodvilles.
Given modern scholarship, it is unarguable that Tudor writers — including Shakespeare — turned Richard into a political parody: a theatrical sociopath drunk on power and death. Much of it is blatant fabrication. He did not murder Henry VI (Edward IV did) or his son, Edward of Westminster. He was not involved in the execution of his own brother, George Duke of Clarence (although it probably WAS carried out by drowning him in a butt of Malmsey wine). He did not kill his wife’s first husband, or end up poisoning her in order to marry again. But in the matter of the murdered Princes in the Tower, one cannot imagine there would be many lawyers lining up to argue Richard’s defence on a no-win no-fee basis.
How bad a guy was Richard III? - Telegraph
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