The Survival of the
Princes in the Tower:
Murder, Mystery and
Myth
By Matthew
Lewis
The murder of the
Princes in the Tower is the most famous cold case in British history.
Traditionally considered victims of a ruthless uncle, there are other suspects
too often and too easily discounted.
There may be no definitive answer, but by delving into the context of their
disappearance and the characters of the suspects
Matthew Lewis examines the motives and opportunities afresh as well as asking a
crucial but often overlooked question: what if there was no murder? What if
Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York survived their uncle’s reign and
even that of their brother-in-law Henry VII? There are glimpses of their
possible survival and compelling evidence to give weight to those glimpses, which is considered alongside the
possibility of their deaths to provide a rounded and complete assessment of the
most fascinating mystery in history.
Excerpt
The
lack of direct action from Margaret’s pretender does not mean that concern in
England was not reaching a thinly veiled peak. On
20 July 1493, Henry VII wrote a letter recorded in Ellis’s Original Letters Vol
I to Sir Gilbert Talbot and expressly blamed Margaret for instigating the
problems he now faced and tried to dismiss her prince as a ‘boy’, but it also
ordered Talbot to be ‘ready to come upon a day’s warning for to do us service
of war’ against the threatened invasion of ‘certain aliens, captains of strange
nations’. It was all very well for Henry to call this pretender
a mere ‘boy’, but Richard, Duke of York would have been nineteen years old by
this point, an age at which his father was leading armies and devouring
enemies, not only at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross but at the cataclysmic
Battle of Towton, the largest battle fought on English soil, which Edward IV
won to cement his own position on the throne. Henry would have been
all too aware of this so his flippant disregard can only have been a blustering
front.
Ellis’s Original Letters
Vol II
offers further illumination of the concern Henry felt, but needed
desperately to hide. This document is a set of instructions given to Clarenceux
King of Arms for an embassy to Charles VIII in France. The current holder of
the office of Clarenceux King of Arms on 10 August 1494, when these papers were
signed by Henry VII at Sheen Palace, was Roger Machado, who had been appointed
to the role on 24 January that year. Roger
Machado was of Portuguese extraction, which may be important to the tale, and
had served Edward IV as Leicester Herald and appears, during the early part of
1485, to have undertaken several journeys on behalf of Thomas Grey, Marquis of
Dorset, which may have been in relation to Henry Tudor, then in exile and
planning his attack, or might equally have related to one or more of Thomas’s
half-brothers, the Princes in the Tower, in hiding abroad.
In
this instance, Henry VII’s instructions remain in full. The first part of the
instructions order Machado to let Charles
VIII know that his emissary, Messire George le Grec, had been afflicted by gout
on his way to England but that Charles’ messages had been received from an
esquire, Thomyn le Fevre, who had travelled in le Grec’s stead. Henry wished
Charles to know that he had received the news that an embassy from Charles to
Maximilian had returned to Paris with confirmation that the Holy Roman Emperor
meant to do all in his power to assist Margaret’s pretender and that Maximilian
had travelled to Flanders to help champion that cause.
Charles appears to have sent Henry an offer of assistance, despite his own
efforts to raise an army to assault Naples. France would lay the fleets of
Brittany and Normandy at Henry’s disposal on the sole condition that he met the
costs of running them whilst they served
him and Charles, in line with his agreement at the Peace of Étaples, had
ordered that none of his subjects should join or aid the pretender’s efforts.
Henry thanked Charles for this offer, but
said that he would not need to avail himself of it because the ‘garçon’ was of
so little importance that Henry was not at all concerned by him. This, of
course, was not true, as the king’s letter to Gilbert Talbot attests. Henry,
though, needed to maintain a calm appearance above the surface as his legs beat
furiously below the water, against a strengthening tide.
Links for Purchase
Matthew
Lewis
Matthew
Lewis was born and grew up in the West Midlands. Having obtained a law degree,
he currently lives in the beautiful Shropshire countryside with his wife and
children. History and writing have always been a passion of Matthew's, with particular interest in the Wars of the Roses
period. His first novel, Loyalty, was born of the joining of those passions.
Matthew
loves to hear from readers, you can find him…
Congratulations on your new release!
ReplyDeleteI will certainly be checking out this book.
ReplyDelete