Author’s Inspiration ~ Matthew Lewis #history #Medieval #Plantagenet @MattLewisAuthor

It is with the greatest of pleasure that I welcome back historian, Matthew Lewis. Matthew is going to tell us all about his inspiration behind his Amazon bestselling book...


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.

Author's Inspiration

The fate of the sons of King Edward IV, remembered as The Princes in the Tower, is one of the most enduring, fascinating and divisive mysteries in all of history. This book seeks to return to the original, contemporary source material, to try and strip away centuries of myth building and confusion. I was intrigued to find out how much of the story we think we know can be substantiated by contemporary evidence.

The book requires an open mind from the reader, not least because, as the title suggests, the real question I wanted to try and answer was whether we could be certain that there was any murder at all in 1483. Most people assume that there was two murders and the only real argument is over who ordered the boy’s deaths. For many, there is little need to look beyond their uncle, King Richard III. Others have identified potential culprits in Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, in Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, a theory made popular by Philippa Gregory, or other contemporaries with something to gain.

Each of the candidates accused of the murders has always been problematical to me. The Wars of the Roses has always fascinated me and as a Ricardian, the latter stages hold a particular draw. Add in the mystery of the disappearance of two young princes and I’ve been hooked for years. The traditional story and its variants were never really satisfying. Take Richard III. If he killed his nephews, it was to prevent them from threatening him. In order to bring the threat to an end, everyone had to be made aware that they were dead. To kill them and keep it a secret served no purpose at all. He could have blamed someone else or even claimed they had died of natural causes. It wasn’t really important that everyone believed him, only that everyone knew the princes were dead and could no longer be a threat to him. If Buckingham did it, with or without Richard’s approval, Richard had the perfect opportunity to blame him in October when Buckingham was executed for rebelling. If Margaret Beaufort was behind the deaths, it seems unlikely her son would have been so threatened by pretenders during his reign.

Reading the original material, it very quickly becomes clear that any certainty about the fate of the Princes in the Tower is a much later development. No contemporary could explain definitively what had happened. There were rumours circulating, but they offered different stories of precisely how the boys were killed and by who. Most writers provided more than one potential fate, emphasising the uncertainty that held sway for decades afterwards. The story begins to take a firmer shape with Vergil and More, writing in the following century and both with agendas that impact the reliability of their testimony. After that, writers needed to add another twist or layer of menace to the story to keep it fresh for new readers. Edward Hall exaggerated More’s story went on to become a source for William Shakespeare’s final nail in Richard’s coffin.

What I found was incredibly surprising and made the project well worthwhile. There are snippets during Richard III’s reign that hint at the boys’ continued survival. It is perhaps unsurprising that real, firm evidence from Richard’s reign is lacking. Henry VII had been able to win the throne in no small part because of his promise to marry the princes’ sister Elizabeth. In order to do so, he had to undo the illegitimacy of all of Edward IV’s children which Richard III had enacted in Parliament. We know that Henry had that statute removed from the rolls unread, which in itself is odd. An act repealed by Parliament would usually be read in the House first, but Titulus Regius was not read and Henry ordered all copies returned and destroyed on pain of imprisonment. Given that Henry had, in legitimising his intended wife, he had also legitimised her brothers, their claim to the throne would have become far better, and far more popular, than Henry’s own. Any evidence that they had survived Richard’s reign would have been on Henry’s hitlist every bit as much as Titulus Regius.

I liken the fate of the Princes in the Tower to a black hole. There is no visible evidence of their fate but what we can look for is a gravitational effect on those around them. The two most famous pretenders who threatened Henry VII’s throne then take on a new level of interest. Lambert Simnel has long been believed to have impersonated Edward, Earl of Warwick, but this is far from certain. Why was Elizabeth Woodville stripped of her property and income at the time this threat emerged? Why was the princes’ half-brother Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset thrown into the Tower at the same time? What interest would they have in Warwick replacing Elizabeth of York on the throne? Why did Henry VII’s court poet, Prince Arthur’s tutor Bernard Andre write that the boy in Ireland claimed to be a son of Edward IV named Edward? That can only be Edward V. Perkin Warbeck provides similar intriguing questions. How did he speak perfect English if he was a Flemish lad forced to learn English in his late teens? Why did the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian and the Scottish King James IV never abandon Perkin, even when there was no political gain to continuing to offer him support?

The fate of the Princes in the Tower remains a mystery. The bones currently resting in an urn in Westminster Abbey are unlikely to be theirs, but like everything else about this story, nothing can be proven. Stripping away centuries of myth and received wisdom is an incredibly valuable and revealing exercise. Although this book can’t pretend to provide definitive answers to a mystery that had defied resolution for half a millennium, I think there is plenty for an open-minded reader to think about. Instead of trying to work out who murdered the Princes in the Tower in 1483, perhaps we should give more serious consideration to whether there was a murder at all.

Links for Purchase

Amazon  Book Depository

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…

Matt’s History Blog ~ Hopefully interesting snippets and thoughts

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New Release ~ The Survival of the Princes in the Tower: Murder, Mystery and Myth #BestSeller #history @MattLewisAuthor

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

Amazon  Book Depository

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…

Matt’s History Blog ~ Hopefully interesting snippets and thoughts

Facebook  Twitter

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