In this Supplementary episode, Matthew Lewis talks about the survival of the Princes in the Tower.
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 a particular interest in the Wars of the Roses period. His first novel, Loyalty, was born of the joining of those passions.
You can learn more about him here:
Matthew’s blog
Amazon author page
Get his book The Survival of the Princes in Tower now.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Transcript: Matthew Lewis on The Survival of the Princes in the Tower
Hello, My name is Matthew Lewis. I’m delighted to be here today at the Tudor Summit. Now the confession before we start. I’m a Ricardian. So what am I doing here at the Tudor Summit? Well there’s only one topic for me to be here to talk about and that’s the Princes in the Tower. Specifically, the survival of the Princes in the Tower.
So here are the boys that were talking about. These are the sons of King Edward IV. Edward V, who at his father’s death in April 1483 was at age twelve, and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York who was age nine. They’re called The Princes in the Tower because these boys are believed to have disappeared from the Tower of London.
The fact that they were there in the beginning is not too surprising. The Tower of London was a traditional place for the monarch to prepare for his coronation. When Edward V arrived in London he was installed at the Bishop of London’s palace and later moved to the Tower of London so that he could prepare for his coronation, which would never take place.
The Tower of London didn’t quite possess the same dark and bloody reputation that it was to acquire on the Tudors during the medieval period. It was a royal palace. It was a royal armory. It was used as a prison as well, but it was a busy, working royal palace.
Prime Suspect – Richard III
The prime suspects in the assumed murder of the Princes in the Tower has always been their uncle King Richard III who took the throne after Edward V. That has been fair enough, he has to be the prime suspect. We can describe him with the motive, the means, and the opportunity that any murder inquiry might look for.
In terms of his motive – the boys were a potential threat to him. Yes, they’ve been declared illegitimate but that illegitimacy could be overturned as easily as it had been put in place. He had the means – he was the King. He was the most powerful man in the country. He only have to give the order. He only have to say the word and it would be done.
He had the opportunity – the boys were under his protection. They were in his care. They were his responsibility. We have reports from the continents that tells us that Richard killed the Princes in the Tower. We have a report from the Spanish Ambassador Diego de Valera. In 1486 he told his masters that it was well-known that Richard III had killed his nephews. Yet it wasn’t well-known at all. We have an even early report to the French parliament in 1484, which explains that Richard III had killed his nephews and taken the throne.
Foreign Agendas
How could the foreign commentators be more certain than the people of England were? The likely answer is that they weren’t. The Spanish in 1486 had their own agenda. They were looking for an alliance with Henry VII’s new Tudor England that would result in the marriage alliance between Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon.
Even in 1484, the French who didn’t really need an excuse to be at the English during this period, had their own succession crisis going on. Louis XI had died not long after Edward IV. He had left a minor King behind him, Charles VIII. The Duke of Orléans was threatening Charles VIII’s throne. This warning was probably meant to say “We shouldn’t be like the English. We shouldn’t risk this. We should support our minor king.”
So the agenda for these reports is clear to see. We have contemporary reports from within England as well. John Rous, the Warwickshire antiquarian tells us that Richard III murdered his nephews, but he wrote this in 1486. During Richard III’s lifetime, Rous has …few to praise of the King.
After the Battle of Bosworth, he found himself scouring around England, collecting his manuscripts and re-writing them to give Richard a darker reputation as an evil tyrant. We can see rumors reaching as far as Bristol, perhaps carried by merchants heading to the ports, that the boys had been put to silence. That it may not necessarily mean death, and it certainly doesn’t mention Richard III being involved. So there are contemporary reports that’s pointing finger at least nominally at Richard III for the act.
Richard III’s Motive
My main issue amongst others with the guilt of Richard III has always lined in his motive. If Richard killed the boys then it would just stop them being a threat to his throne. But it would only stop being a threat to his throne if he publicized the fact that they were dead. He needed everyone to know that they were dead and no longer available to threaten him.
He could have claimed it was natural causes. He could have claimed someone else had killed them. It didn’t even really matter whether the people believed him as long as they knew that they were dead. During this period bodies were frequently displayed after their death to prove that the person was dead. It happened to Henry VI as well.
So why would Richard remain silent? If he killed the boys and remained silent on the issue, it meant that he killed them for nothing. It served no purpose.
Other Suspects
Before we leave the notion of the boys being murdered in 1483, there are other suspects that we can discuss. Most prominently Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham. We have contemporary sources that’s pointing finger at the of Duke of Buckingham almost as often as we see it pointed at Richard III. There are suggestions that he plotted to kill the Princes himself. There are suggestions that he had vowed that Richard III had done it. All we can really say for sure is that no one seems to have known exactly what had happened.
We can give Henry Stafford the means, the motive, and the opportunity. In terms of his motive, in 1483 he was looking to put a Henry on the throne. Whether that was Henry Tudor whose invasion he supports in 1483 or that he indeed planned to place himself on the throne in the end, is not clear. But certainly, he had a motive for wanting the heirs of the throne out of the way.
He had the means – he was the second most powerful man in England at this point. He was second only in authority to Richard. He could give the word, even as much better as Richard could. He had the opportunity – for example we know that Buckingham stayed behind in London after Richard departed on his northern progress after his coronation in 1483.
At this point, I also like to mischievously throw Margaret Beaufort amongst the list of suspects. Not because I believe she killed the Princes in the Tower. Indeed I’m here to argue that they weren’t killed at all. But because I don’t think she can be dismissed as a potential suspect quite as easily as some people would like to think.
If we look simply at the motive, the means, and the opportunity, her motive was plain. She wanted to put her son Henry on the throne. I’ve seen the argument that she needed to kill many other Yorkist heirs before she can achieve this, but that ignores the fact that Henry Tudor led an invasion in England in October 1483 with the express intention of putting him on the throne. We’re told by the Chronicler that this was done with the mere rumor that the Princes in the Tower were dead.
So Margaret didn’t need to kill this whole swathe of Yorkist heir at all. In fact, she didn’t even need to kill the Princes in the Tower. The rumor that they were dead was enough to see her son invading in October 1483 trying to take Richard’s throne. We can give her the means – she was highly favored during 1483. She had carried Queen Anne’s train that of the coronation.
Her husband Thomas Stanley was also highly favored and was prominently involved in the coronation. Both were in London during this period and could have gained access to a royal palace if they wish to. Her opportunity also lies in the fact that we can place her in London during this period just like thousands and thousands and thousands of other people.
So do I think those remains in an urn in the Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey belonged to the Princes in the Tower? No, I don’t. The examination that was undertaken in the 1930’s was incomplete. It didn’t date the skeletons. It could go back to Anglo-Saxon times. It could even go back to Roman times.
There have been buildings on that site for thousands of years. It couldn’t age the skeletons accurately. Those congenital bone defects, which we now know affects the aging process far more than they knew in the 1930’s. They couldn’t even sex the skeletons. We don’t know whether this were boys or girls or one boy and one girl. Let alone how they were related to each other.
There’s too many questions to say that those bones belong to the Princes in the Tower. So I have often wondered, what if they survived? What if they didn’t die at all in 1483? Now I see we don’t have any concrete evidence of this but I would like to liken their existence to a black hole.
We can’t see them, we can’t see the black hole but we can see the gravitational effects that it has on those around them. The people that would have cared about them, and be affected by their continued existence. Perhaps the most prominent of this would have been Elizabeth Woodville, their mother.
In this instance, it’s possibly striking that in 1484 in March, she releases her daughters from sanctuary in Westminster Abbey into the care of Richard III. Is this really the actions of a mother with a man who she believes has murdered his sons? We know Elizabeth would find Richard capable of killing her children. He’d ordered the execution of one of her sons from her first marriage, Richard Grey.
But he was a grown man, and there are aspects of treason possibly involved in his execution and it’s very different to two boys being secretly murdered in the Tower of London. In March, Richard had seen off the October 1483 rebellion. His Parliament has sat in February. His title has been legally declared. The illegitimacy of the Princes of the Tower has been legally confirmed. Maybe he was just then in the position to go to Elizabeth Woodville with proof that her boys were safe and well and alive. Perhaps even enough for her to have the chance to see them during his reign.
Lambert Simnel
What I would really like to talk about today are the two pretenders who worried Henry VII the most during his reign. The first of those was Lambert Simnel. The official story tells us that he was a boy from Oxford, plucked by a priest and taken to an island, trained to impersonate Edward, Earl of Warwick, who was a prisoner of Henry VII in the Tower of London during this period. Then invaded as the head of the Yorkist army which was defeated at the Battle of Stoke field.
When Lambert was captured and placed in the royal kitchen as an act of mercy for his innocence in the whole affair. The whole business has been given the air of ridicule by the fact that they work with a prisoner in the Tower of London. He has poor tags and paraded around London, so how could he have possibly been on an island?
I’d like to suggest now that the Lambert Simnel affair was never in an attempt to place Edward, Earl of Warwick on the throne or to use an impostor to pretend to be him. I’d like to suggest that the Simnel affair was in an attempt to place Edward V back on the throne of England. No, obviously again, we have no concrete evidence of this, but I think it’s enough to suggest that this was a potential revolt in favor of Edward V.
Polydore Vergil one of the official Tudor sources who wrote of the behest of Henry VII, tells us of this period, that it was about the boy who was an adolescent. Now, in Polydore Vergil’s original Latin manuscript, he described the boy as an “adolescent”. That word was later changed before it’s published in the 1530’s to a “boy” to suggest that he was someone younger.
The parliamentary of John de la Pole described the boy as ten, which is hardly an adolescent. Edward Earl of Warwick in the Tower of London was 12 at this time, again hardly an adolescent. If Edward V was still alive he would have been 16 in 1487 and that would have made him viably an adolescent. Perhaps Polydore Vergil was describing Edward V as an adolescent and was forced to changed his story to make it a boy for a more correct age for the official version.
Polydore Vergil also described this as an attempt to restore the boy to his throne. Yet Edward, Earl of Warwick had never been King of England so he couldn’t be restored to the throne at all. The only person capable of being restored to the throne in 1487 was Edward V.
The corroboration for this is the account provided by Bernard Andre, again another official Tudor source. The blind, poet priest who was tutor to Prince Arthur. Andre tells of this event that on an island a boy emerged who claimed to be the son of Edward IV and he was crowned King Edward in Dublin. A son of Edward IV named Edward can only be Edward V. A coronation in Dublin might fit that detail too. The coronation would be the only part missing from Edward V’s previous stint as King. He’d been proclaimed King but never crowned.
Perhaps the coronation was meant to correct that. Andre also tells us that Henry sent a flurry of messengers backwards and forwards to Ireland trying to ascertain he was involved in his conspiracy and exactly what was going on. Eventually, a herald who Andre frustratingly doesn’t name, came forward and said he could identify the sons of Edward IV if this was really one of them. It’s been suggested that this herald was Roger Machado who had served Edward IV, and served Richard III, and served Henry VII with distinction as a diplomat and a herald.
Interestingly, Roger Machado if it was him, lived inside Compton and kept a house there so that could explain where the surname for this boy eventually came from. Bernard Andre tells us that whoever this herald was, he traveled over to Ireland and when he came back, Andre tells us that he was unable to tell Henry VII that this boy wasn’t a real son of Edward IV.
They’d blamed the fact that he’d been well taught and too well-schooled to impersonate him, yet this herald had claimed that he knew the boy and could physically identify him. Yet on his return, he said that he couldn’t deny that the boy was who he claimed to be. If we accept for a moment the possibility that the Lambert Simnel affair was a plot in favor of Edward V, it helps to make sense of other events which otherwise don’t quite add up.
Elizabeth Woodville
In early 1487 Elizabeth Woodville, the mother of the Princes in the Tower was deprived of all of her lands and properties and she retired to Bermondsey Abbey, where she spent the rest of her life. The official version of this according to Vergil was that Henry VII suddenly become so outraged that on March 1484 handing of her daughters that he felt compelled to deprive Elizabeth Woodville of everything.
It’s possible it was a financial motive behind it. Henry wasn’t well-off at the time and Elizabeth had a dower which Henry may have wished to pass on to his own wife, Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter. Yet, it is also being suggested that Elizabeth was deprived of her properties because she was implicated in the Lambert Simnel affair and if it was her plotting favor of Edward V, then that’s highly likely. She’s unlikely to have been involved in the plot to favor Edward, Earl of Warwick. She had nothing to gain by placing him on the throne, indeed she was implicated in his father’s execution.
The only thing that placed her in a better position than she currently was with her daughter as the Queen Consort on the throne was if one of her sons was on the throne, Edward V or Richard, Duke of York. This would also make sense with the fact that Thomas Grey, Elizabeth Woodville’s oldest son from her first marriage was thrown into the Tower of London at the time for no obvious reason. And was apparently told that if he was really loyal to Henry VII then he wouldn’t mind spending time in prison to prove it. Was this because the Woodville faction was likely to be involved in an uprising in favor of Edward V?
John de la Pole
Another person’s action to consider in this affair is John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln. John was the oldest nephew of Edward IV and Richard III. He was the son of their daughter Elizabeth, the Duchess of Suffolk. During Richard III’s reign, John de la Pole had been widely considered his heir presumptive after the death of Richard’s own son. John had his own claim to the Yorkist crown.
Why did he overlook this? Why was he willing to set that aside? Why did no one wish to follow a grown man? Instead, they favor the young boy who was a prisoner in the Tower of London. The only person who had a legitimate better claim to the Yorkist crown in 1487 than John de la Pole would have been Edward V or Richard, Duke of York.
Is it possible that John de la Pole has overlooked his own claim in favor of his cousin King Edward V? It is also interesting to note that the records of the Parliament that was held in 1487 were completely and utterly destroyed under the orders of Henry VII. Perhaps they said something there that he didn’t wish to see on the light of day.
We actually have no record in a contemporary hand or in a King’s hand of the regnal number used by this King from Dublin. There’s a later record that appears in books in which the letter sent to the city is entered under the heading that it was received from King Edward V. Yet we know that was the official Tudor story later on. In the letter itself, the boy didn’t use a regnal number to identify himself.
Perhaps the Parliament in Ireland is far more explicit in describing him as King Edward V, restored to his throne at the age of an adolescent, as all the other Tudor sources have suggested.
Perkin Warbeck
The second pretender who used to worry Henry VII far more deeply and for far longer was Perkin Warbeck. Here the official story is not dissimilar. He was a boy from nowhere, he was a lad from Tournai. He was plucked, and trained to impersonate Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower.
He was later captured. He confessed to his imposture, and spent a small time at Henry’s court and was sent to prison before eventually being executed in 1499 after being caught trying to escape the Tower of London. Was Perkin genuine? Was he the real Richard, Duke of York?
I think that’s entirely possible on the evidence that we have. The first thing we can consider is the sketch that was made of Perkin during his time in Burgundy, and the similarities to his father Edward IV. Obviously, if you’re sketching Perkin Warbeck, you want him to look like Edward IV because you’re claiming his son.
This was a boy who went on to be seen around the courts of Europe by heads of states and by Englishmen around the continent who were involved in the conspiracy. No one ever said that he didn’t look like the sketch, that he didn’t look like Edward IV. The sketch marks his hair with the note “blond” which suggest that it meant to be blond in the final portrait. In his confession, Perkin Warbeck would claim that his mother was a lady of Portuguese extraction, and once that might not make blond hair entirely impossible, it would seem to make it somewhat unlikely.
The other thing to consider on the sketch is the possible mark around the left eye that we can see. We know a fault in the eye was a Plantagenet trait. We know that Henry III and Edward I both had drooping eyelids. What Perkin Warbeck would claim all the way through his imposture that he had three physical signs that would identify him to anyone that knew the real Richard Duke of York.
Frustratingly, we don’t know exactly what these signs were. They were never documented. But when he was captured, Henry VII never either proved that Perkin didn’t have the marks that Richard, Duke of York had, or proved that Richard, Duke of York never had the marks that Perkin was showing. He had access to the Prince’s sister trying to find this out.
Was this mark on the left eye, one of the marks that Perkin claimed would prove that he was the real Richard, Duke of York? If it was, it may make sense of something later on in the story. Perkin had gotten support from heads of states all around Europe.
Charles VIII, unsurprisingly was willing to cause trouble for the English. Henry VII mounted the fast invasion in France that secured Charles’s promise to cease support in Perkin and to expel him from his territories.
King James IV of Scotland equally would have loved to be the cause of problems for the English. Yet he supported Perkin, provided him with a noble wife, and never once denied him when he failed in his invasions in England.
Margaret the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, perhaps again no surprise in her support for Perkin. She was the sister of Edward IV and of Richard III. She hated Henry VII and she dedicated her life to replacing the Yorkist heirs on the throne. Yet if it was her intention, why would she take a boy from nowhere, and pretend that he was a Yorkist heir when she had nephews that were available to be used in a plot?
Maximilian I was perhaps the most prominent in his support for Perkin Warbeck throughout this period. Maximilian never once denied Perkin even after his capture and even after he confessed of his imposture. Maximilian does refer to him as Richard, Duke of York and tried to get Henry VII to treat him fairly.
Sir William Stanley
Perhaps the highest profile casualty of the conspiracy in England was Sir William Stanley. He was the younger brother of Thomas, Lord Stanley who by now was Earl of Derby. It was William’s intervention to the Battle of Bosworth that had won the day for Henry Tudor. William had been close to Edward IV and was a servant of Henry VII. He was at the center of Tudor politics.
When Robert Clifford who would be trumpeting the fact that he was certain Perkin Warbeck was the real Richard, Duke of York all around the continent, returned to England with his tail between his legs, he appeared before Henry begging for pardon. He offered Henry a list of all the conspirators within England. William Stanley was in the room when his own name was read amongst those and perhaps shocked and concerned to hear it read out.
Stanley was arrested and in line with all the other events surrounding this, we have no record of William Stanley’s state trials amongst the papers and records of all the state trials in England. The only record we have from Tudor sources and commentators who tell us that William Stanley did not deny any part of the conspiracy.
He admitted that he sent letters backwards and forwards to Robert Clifford. He admitted that he spoken to other conspirators too. He also didn’t deny that he once said that he would never take the arms against this boy if it would turn out to be the real son of King Edward IV.
That must at least tell us that someone as close to the center of Tudor politics as William Stanley couldn’t be certain the Princes in the Tower had actually died in 1483 or at any point after that. He acknowledge the possibility that at least one of them was still alive.
After Perkin was captured, he signed a confession. Although I would suggest that perhaps this confession was prepared for him and that he was forced to sign it under torture. There was part of it that simply don’t make too much sense. They don’t add up.
For example, in one part he talks about when he arrives in Ireland and people identify him as potentially being the Earl of Warwick or Richard, Duke of York. He denies all of this but he was eventually bullied into impersonating Richard, Duke of York.
He then claims that as a boy from Tournai, in his mid to late teens, he was forced to learn English. He went on to learn it so well that during his time across Europe and meeting Englishmen, no one ever questioned his command of the English language or his accent. It seems a bit ludicrous that he could be forced to learn it that well.
If we returned for a moment to that fault in the left eye, it’s striking that Bernard Andre in his account of the affair tells us that when Perkin was captured he was brought before Henry while still in the South West. But he only appeared to the King after the King’s servant had beaten him black and blue. It’s possible here that there were efforts to obscure that Plantagenet looks or even to obscure the marks on his left eye that let everybody know that he definitely was Richard, Duke of York.
The beatings appeared to have continued. We have one herald account which describes him as having a lack of luster in his eye and being ugly. We have the Spanish Ambassador de Puebla who had an audience with Perkin on several occasions describing him in one of the later meetings as a “desfigurada”. This is translated as “changed” but more accurately means “disfigured.” I would suggest that perhaps the beatings particularly to Perkin’s face have continued after he’d arrived in London and therefore to obscure his features so that no one could tell he may well be the real Richard, Duke of York.
Perkin Warbeck was executed in 1499 along with Edward, Earl of Warwick. When both were entangled in a plot to escape from the Tower of London. It’s widely believed that the Spanish had insisted on Edward, Earl of Warwick’s execution before Catherine of Aragon would arrived in England. So the risk of the Yorkist heirs would be out of the way.
Perkin then becomes a victim of the desires to be rid of Edward, Earl of Warwick. It’s perhaps convenient to get rid of another pain at the same time. But what if it was actually the other way around? What if Perkin Warbeck was the real Duke of York and was the one that the Spanish were insistent to get out of the way? Then, Edward Earl of Warwick was a side effect or a casualty of that affair? Or what if the Spanish has insisted that both of them had to be killed because they were both legitimate Yorkist heirs?
In this regard, it’s interesting that the Spanish private, secret government paperwork at this period is written in a code. It has been decoded and broken so we can see what they wrote. Once you might think ambassadors and public letters would have agendas of what they say. These were very private letters that were not meant to see the light of day. These were meant for Kings and Queens and their ministers.
It’s striking that when the code was found there was a section within it, that says that lists the members of the royal houses of Europe and the Pope, and it specifically says in the introduction that if you’re looking for someone who isn’t a member of the royal family then look elsewhere because they won’t be listed here.
The code that was used to describe Perkin Warbeck throughout the 1490’s in all of the secret and coded paper work was put in this section and the name given was Richard, Duke of York. So throughout the 1490’s the Spanish consistently referred to Perkin Warbeck as the real Richard, Duke of York, a member of the royal house of England. Did they know that he was genuine? Or at least suspect that he could well be genuine?
This might explain their need to be rid of him before Catherine of Aragon arrived in England. Now as I said in the beginning, there is no concrete evidence for all of this, but I think there’s lot to suggest that there is more to the story than we often believed.
My latest book the Survival of the Princes in the Tower goes into a lot more detail about all of this events. It looks into the contemporary events during 1483, 1484, and 1485 that the boys were still alive. That they weren’t killed by their Uncle Richard. It looks at the possibilities that they were Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck or possibly even other figures. There were several theories of how they might have survived into the Tudor period and they were all examined in this book.
Thank you very much for listening to this talk. I hope you enjoyed it, and thank you for having me here at the Tudor Summit.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
