Princes in the Tower remains one of the most enduring and controversial mysteries in English history. In this episode, we explore the case with historian Nathen Amin, featured in the Channel 4 documentary The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence. Nathen examines newly uncovered records and reconsiders long-accepted accounts, offering a fresh perspective on what may have happened to Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York. Whether you’re a Richard III skeptic or supporter, this conversation sheds new light on a centuries-old disappearance that continues to fascinate and divide.
Rough transcript of Unlock ‘The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence’ | Full Discussion with Historian Nathen Amin
Heather: This episode is the first half of an author chat we did with Nathen Amin. Nathen Amin is a writer, author who’s written several books on Henry Tudor, the House of Beaufort, Henry VIII, and the Tudor Pretenders, Tudor Wales, he’s an amazing historian. He was featured in the recent Channel 4 documentary on the new evidence around the Princes in the Tower. He was part of that that show.
And he’s here to talk about his reading of the evidence and what he thinks about the Princes in the tower. So this is actually the first half of the talk. So thank you to Nathen Amin for coming to the channel. You should definitely buy his books. Check out his books. NathenAmin.com.
I first found Nathen when I was planning the 2017 Tudor Summit, six and a half, almost seven years ago now. And somebody said, you’ve gotta talk to this historian, Nathen Amin. He’s got some new research out on the Beauforts. I was like, “Ooh, I wanna know about that.” And so I met him and he’s just such a lovely person. That Tudor Summit then turned into Tudorcon, so Nathen Amin has been part of it from the start.
Nathen, I’m so glad you’re here. You have written some fantastic books specifically on the pretenders, Tudor Wales and the Beaufort family. Your books are fantastic and you’ve been doing things with me and the Tudorcon and this whole world for a while and I’ve watched you get huge and blow up and it’s just really exciting.
Nathen: Yeah. No problems. Thank you for having me. I think you probably were one of the first people to give me a platform, so I’m always gonna come back to you. Don’t worry.
Heather: So what do you think about this? What’s your response? You were on the documentary. They didn’t give you quite as much face time as I would’ve liked—
Nathen: There seems to be quite a bit of a misunderstanding, I think, amongst some people how documentaries seem to work. So I have tried to do some polls recently to try and give some detail, but we filmed for about 6/7 hours in total. I spent the entire day with the crew and with Rob, in the UK, he’s a celebrity, so that in itself was quite intimidating. He’s my mother’s favorite. My mother’s got bit of a crush on him.
Oh. But I was it was a very big day to meet Dan and be introduced to him. But you spend that much time with somebody, you very quickly build up a really close rapport. Especially when the majority of the day was just me and him walking and talking. Not, not camera, just for so on, and you’re almost, you’re talking to each other.
So on camera it looks like you’re engaged in historical debate, but really you’re just talking to each other as how are you doing? How’s your family? And things like that. So we built up a really good rapport and we did film for about six hours based on everything to do with this case.
Now I did end up with just the one minute and 30 seconds in the documentary. The director did mention that, a lot of what I said had been pulled. That simply is I mean it’s gonna be for two reasons and it’s not really it’s not any various reasons. It’s just that a lot of what I said would’ve unpicked the narrative that documentary trying to go to.
And secondly, there just isn’t enough time to put everyone in. You always film hours worth of material on these documentaries for hopefully a minute, even sometimes you don’t even get in the documentary. I’ve got no issues with what happened. Yeah. It wasn’t my documentary. It wasn’t my narrative to tell.
Heather: All right, so we got that out. What did you think about it? What do you want to tell me? Give me your spiel now.
Nathen: First and foremost, we have to admit that whatever one thinks of Philippa Langley, and a lot of people do have strong opinions of. She’s got her pursuit to exonerate Richard III, which she passionately follows. You cannot ignore her.
Philippa is a big name and a big person in this world. I personally think that she has commendable focus and she’s definitely leaving behind a legacy that most of us would love. On a personal note, I really enjoy her company. I think that’s quite important to get across.
Not many people, not many mainstream historians will agree with me yet, and they certainly haven’t this week. I think it’s important that the study of Richard III and perhaps the revisionist angle, which, I’m on record, I don’t really agree with, I don’t really agree with some of the findings, but I think it is important that they definitely do deserve perhaps a seat at the mainstream table.
Shakespeare, definitely Shakespeare. Shakespeare might have been a monster, but Richard III definitely is not the monster that Shakespeare has written him out to be. Thomas More has a hugely flawed account of him. I don’t think it’s a problem that we now have the odd Ricardian leaning book podcast documentary available.
It can’t all just be a traditional narrative of which I am one. So I think that’s important that to have these documentary. A lot of people criticized it, they destroyed it online and so on. But it wasn’t that long ago that in this country, at least, that Lucy Worsley had a Prince in the Tower documentary that was very much following quite a flawed version of the traditional story.
So she just now equaling up the narrative. So I think it’s good that they’ve done this documentary. It’s good they’ve done this book, which I’ve got to the end. Do I agree with the conclusions? Do I agree with the findings? No surprise, but no, I don’t, but it’s not, I don’t understand why it’s a problem that we’ve got this theories and this version of history thrown into the mix, right?
It’s gotta be expected from their point of view as well. This is gonna be critiqued and has been critiqued quite harshly in many cases. I’ll probably do a book review at some point, so I might throw my thoughts into the mix, but it’s interesting. Anything Prince in the tower that reaches this wide of an audience is brilliant.
In the UK, this documentary got viewed by 1.3 million people. It’s insane that we’ve got a documentary that’s reached that much, that obviously. I don’t think perhaps it’s had the reactions the Ricardians would’ve liked but it’s definitely done wonders for me and my history and my book sales. I’ve gotta be pleased about that. So Go on Philippa.
Heather: Yeah, there’s all opinions, not all, but lots of opinions start out unpopular and you have those discussions and you know a lot. It’s not necessarily all on this side, and it’s not necessarily all Richard III was not a monster.
And he did a lot of really good governance that we were finding out about now, thanks to people like her and Matt and all of that. So there you go. But let’s just talk really quickly about the what you’re talking about this traditional view.
For people who don’t know the traditional view – Richard killed the princes.
Nathen: Yeah, 9th of April 1483. Edward IV dies, he leaves behind two children. Richard III takes custody of the children and suddenly he declared that the children were illegitimate. They’ve been deposed. Richard III takes the crown for himself. Some would say he was offered the crown. The great division in this period. But then by the end of that summer, the princes are placed in the Tower of London and they have disappeared.
Traditional narrative is that they were murdered at the behest of their Uncle Richard and buried beneath the stairway in the Tower of London. Now, that is the hardcore traditional story, and many of us veer off from. Not basic. I don’t think they were buried in the stairwell. I think they were killed and I do think they were thrown in the Thames.
Other people think they weren’t killed at all, or perhaps they were killed by Henry VII, the Duke of Buckingham—
Heather:
—or Margaret Beaufort, she’s also gets thrown in there as well.
Nathen:
I purposely did not mention her name. But yeah, so that is the basic gist of the traditional narrative. And it’s a very compelling argument. Thrown them in the tower and they’ve disappeared.
Heather: And at the time people were wondering what happened to them, right? So if he knew what had happened to them or if he knew that they were alive, one would think he would bring them out and say, they’re here. You can stop talking about what happened to them, because they’re right here.
Nathen: Yeah, so it’s very interesting. So there’s arguments from like a Ricardian viewpoint that Richard III did not display the boys because he’d let them slip away abroad to live out their times or to come back as the pretenders.
Traditionalists would say that the reason he didn’t display the boys is because he’d killed them and therefore he couldn’t display them. Going back to the Ricardian side, surely if you kill the previous king, the whole point is you display it to stop any rebellions. Myself, I believe they were killed during the reign of Richard III, but I believe that they were thrown into the Thames.
So obviously if they’re in the Thames, you can’t take that back. You can’t say. Let’s display the boys. The fact that Richard didn’t display the boys is ultimately what caused them a lot of problems, and it is what caused his downfall.
Henry VII, when he becomes king, he learns a valid lesson there. He does take Edward, Earl of Warwick into custody, but he keeps him, or when a rebellion kicks off later down the line, he’s able to display Edward deal of war to try and take a lot of esteem out of the rebellion.
I personally just think that Richard couldn’t display the boys because they were at the bottom of the river somewhere.
Heather: Why do you think that?
Nathen: I’ll tell you why I think that it’s because I’ve watched so many mafia movies. It’s the obvious thing to do. If you kill somebody, you don’t hang on to the bodies, you don’t bury them in your back garden. You get rid of them.
Now the historical source I have that suggests, a Welsh chronicle was written about 50 years later. So already some people would be saying 50 years later, that’s not near contemporary. Hey, we take what we can get in this period.
But this Welsh chronicle does account for that the boys were put into a chest. They were taken out to a part of the Thames Estuary called the Black Deep which is just where the river starts to meet the ocean. They were thrown overboard and nobody, apart from the guy in charge of that chest knew what was the cargo taken.
It just makes so much sense. Again, look at the modern mafia. They’d bury people in lakes in Nevada and so on. That is exactly what you’re going do and answers why nobody has ever produced any bodies.
I know we have the urns— I find that theory completely discredited. I think it’s so unlikely the bones in the urn are the boys. And I think if we ever do get DNA testing and science is able to actually do this testing, it’s gonna show very quickly that they’re not the boys, but you’re not burying them 10 feet deep in the town of London. It’s quite an absurd, non-realistic theory for me.
Heather: Interesting. Okay, so I know you have your stuff you wanna talk about, but I wanna also ask you about going through the different documents that they lay out in the documentary and what you think of them as sources.
My thing is I was watching it, I just kept thinking yeah, maybe that is from the time period, maybe that is. That maybe it does refer to Richard, the Duke of York, but of course, because he was pretending to be, he’s not gonna then sign it Perkin Warbeck. So the fact that it signed Richard, like that doesn’t tell me any that’s part of the conspiracy.
So I don’t know I wonder what your take on all of these different receipts and the different, the four, I think there were four documents that they lay out. And we can start with the receipt for the mercenaries to be given and then some of the other things later, but overall, what do you think about these things?
Nathen: Dr. Helen Carr did a really good tweet last week where she said something like one of the hardest jobs as a historian is to be aware of your own bias when dealing with evidence. And the first person you need to critique is yourself.
Philippa and the Richard III society, they are obviously not perhaps dealing well with their own bias. They have gone into wanting to find the evidence they’ve gone into wanting to find answers.
But on the other side, I’m a natural skeptic so I’m also dealing with my bias. Anything they presented, I don’t want to believe it. Or somebody is skeptical. So we have deal with all of that, first of all.
I think the Missing Princes Project, I’ve said that they spent seven years of this investigation doing intelligence gathering, and they have now proven that the sons of Edward IV, the princes in the Tower, have survived the reign of Richard III. That is a big, bold statement, and I don’t think it does stand up to scrutiny. My own bias, et cetera, not to stand it.
Yeah, you mentioned that document that’s signed by Richard of York, Richard of England. First and foremost, so I think there were a couple of documents at play. One, we’ve got what they call the Gelderland Document. It is a witness statement that’s presented to show as proof of life that Perkin Warbeck was in fact, Richard of York.
And that’s because this a four page document. Basically a biography. It’s detailing what happened to him, and there is some glaring issues with that. First of all, if you’re telling a lie, if you are being an imposter, if you’re telling a story, you are gonna leave behind a paper trail and you are gonna try and explain exactly why you are this person.
If this is Perkin Warbeck and he’s being asked by his aunt and his supporters in Burgundy to write down his life story, he’s not gonna sign it Perkin, Richard of England aka Perkin, he’s gonna stick to this story. It’s a difficult one because I think this document was rediscovered by a lady called Nathalie Nijman-Bliekendaal.
I’ve met Nathalie, she’s part of the Dutch Research Group, and she’s a fantastic woman who has most of my respect. She’s one of the stars of this process. She’s been working really hard to get and hold these documents, so the document itself is fantastic. It really is, and I was amazed to actually see it on parchment, on screen.
But this isn’t new information. The fact that there’s a document given, a biography of somebody in the name Richard of England, we already knew that because at the same time period, we have already the Dendermonde Letter, which I’ve written about extensively in my book, which came out a couple of years ago. It’s just a biography.
Now, this new letter, the Gelderland document is a little bit more detailed and it has a few more names which is definitely interesting ’cause now we can go down and try and look. To find out who some of these people are involved in it. But at the end of the day, it still isn’t proof of life that Richard of England, Richard of York, was signing this letter.
It’s just that we know that somebody who wanted us to believe they were, that person has signed that letter. The fact you have a letter that says Richard of England, which they’re passing off as Proof of Life.
In 1991, Diana Kleyn wrote a book literally called Richard of England with a signature on the front of the book. So again, it’s not new information. It’s definitely not proof of life. We have to question the story told anyway by Perkin Warbeck/Richard in the story.
Why was he allowed to leave the Tower of London? Why would Richard III let his nephews leave the Tower of London from a security perspective? That makes no sense. ’cause then he wouldn’t be able to control the boys. He wouldn’t be able to prevent them from becoming a focus of rebellion or present them when accusations grew louder.
You keep hold of them and chuck them in the tower until the end of their lives It’s fascinating. There’s new evidence that gives us the names involved, Lord John Howard, Henry Percy and Thomas Percy. But by the time this document is written in 1493, all are dead conveniently so. They can’t be questioned.
Similar to the people involved in the famous “pre-contract story” that says that their father was married before he married their mother. All the people involved in that were conveniently dead.
But more importantly for me, the story is that Perkin Warbeck/ Richard claims in this document that they were taken out of the town of London and sent to France to live. Now, why the hell would Richard III send two of his nephews to his enemy to live amongst his enemy when they were already plotting to send another pretender back named Henry Tudor?
If the French know that they have two Yorkist princes living amongst them, they wouldn’t have sent Henry Tudor across the water to invade. They would’ve gone “Let’s just use the real princes.” So I think that document which is issued with the claim of it being decisive evidence, is not decisive at all. We just know somebody signed the letter called Richard of England.
Heather: Yeah. So one thing that I just came into my head, like a Ricardian might say he’d already made them illegitimate so he didn’t necessarily need to kill them. So that’s why maybe he would let them go. How would you answer that?
Nathen: Very simply, when you’re made illegitimate, it’s just a piece of paper. It means nothing. It could be reversed by any parliament. During the 15th century, we had Henry IV, Edward IV, Henry VI the second time around, and Henry VII all become kings while subject to a parliamentary attainder.
They simply became kings and then reversed documents and obviously as shown look how easy Henry VII ultimately reversed the princes illegitimacy. That is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. They were, regardless of whether he made them illegitimate or not, they were always gonna be a threat to Richard III, and it’s one of the things I hate the most. This discussion is that they were not a threat because of this illegitimacy. It’s nonsense.
Heather:
Elizabeth I was illegitimate. Mary I was illegitimate.
Nathen:
Oh, there we go. Yeah. But I never say that because they’re going past my time. But yeah, exactly. It doesn’t matter, basically.
Heather: Yeah. Okay. I just wanted to put that out there ’cause I could imagine somebody saying that in their head.
And then there was this receipt that was another piece of evidence that was given. And that then leads into the coronation in Dublin, which I was really confused about because I thought Lambert Simnel was pretending to be Edward VI and that’s like why Henry brought him.
I’m really like confused about that whole timeline because they seem to make it seem as if it was Edward the Prince. And I thought it was Edward, Earl of Warwick. Yeah. Can you set me straight on that?
Nathen: I’ll try to. Okay, so first of all, let’s look at this Proof of Life that has been discovered. They call it the Lille Receipt. It’s basically an incredible find by Albert Jan de Rooij from the Dutch Research Group.
It’s exactly what it’s called. It’s a receipt found in Lille dated to I think December 1487. It’s a payment for 400 pikes to be provided for the invasion of Margaret of York’s nephew. And in the receipt that nephew is called the son of King Edward. Now, that would suggest it is Edward, the missing Prince in the Tower.
I believe this document is completely authentic. I believe it’s not a for ending of the kind. And it’s hugely compelling. If you take this document by itself, you’re gonna go that’s surely proof of life that Edward V was living four years after he disappeared.
But first of all, there’s evidence during this time of pretenders, of claimants of the throne being misidentified to make them seem more important. In 1484, Henry Tudor was in France and he was trying to become the King of England. The French wanted to make his claim look more important and better than it was, so they started calling him the son of Henry.
Now Henry Tudor was the nephew, the half-nephew of Henry VI, and he had no blood relation, blood claim through Henry VI. But the French wanted to call him a son of Henry VI ’cause that would make the French give more money and more military to them. But it’s absurd, it’s nonsense. And everybody knew Henry Tudor is not the son of Henry VI.
So they very quickly dropped it. It was ridiculous. Could something similar have been happening? There is clearly an imposter or somebody in Burgundy at this time wanting to invade England or his supporters are putting him forward invading England, would it have been better for them to have called him Edward V, the son of King Edward, rather than one of his other nephew?
So I think the little receipt is brilliant. It’s compelling, but it could be explained away very simply. Now, the major reason it can be explained away is because of the context of this period. Which brings us round to why you are confused about what’s taking place in Dublin.
So the Lambert Simnel affair, the Lambert Simnel invasion, the judicial story, which I still think stands, is that Henry VII has a legitimate Yorkish prince in the Tower, Earl of Warwick, a cousin of the Princes in the Tower.
Now in 1486, there is a small rebellion against Henry VII led by the Stafford brothers, and they are going around waving the Warwick family banner. And they’re chanting Warwick in the streets, but nobody joins them. Nobody’s interested. They haven’t got a leader, they haven’t got a figurehead Warwick in the Tower of London. The rebellion fell apart.
A couple months later in 1487, there are now rumors that this conspiracy started up again. That there are people attacking some of Henry VII’s men. Servants in the streets caught shouting out the name Warwick, Warwick, Warwick! And now after a hundred years that this conspiracy actually does have a boy at the head of it who’s claiming to be the Earl of Warwick. So that’s that.
First of all, we have evidence during the time of how potent the Warwick name was. The conspiracy now leaves Oxford and it crosses over to Ireland and Dublin, specifically. Why Dublin? The Earl of Warwick’s father, the Duke of Clarence, the idiot allegedly got drowned in some wine, he was born in Dublin.
So when a rebellion as a conspiracy turns up in Dublin, and they say to the Irish, we have the son of your Clarence. He has the real claim to the English throne. the real. The Irish very quickly go, we’re all in. We’re gonna go crown him. Of course, we love Warwick. We love Clarence. We’re gonna take down the English King.
Going back to London, Henry VII parades the real Warwick around London. He goes around to all of his men. He takes him to St. Paul’s Cathedral and he goes, behold, this is Warwick. So the conspiracy falls apart in England straight away, but it doesn’t in Ireland.
So a few things at play here. Why the hell is Henry VII parading the real Warwick? If we’re now supposed to believe that this imposter boy was not pretending to be Edward of Warwick, he actually was Edward the V.
That doesn’t make any sense ’cause why parade Warwick? Why do we have English sources at the time and Flemish sources abroad all saying that this conspiracy was in the name of a son of Clarence. Why do we have no other evidence whatsoever apart from this receipt to show that this conspiracy was in the name of Edward V, not Edward of Warwick.
And finally we’re asked, why would the Irish crown a boy at Ireland, which is surely a great crime against their religion to crown an imposter? Not if they generally believed that they did have a real prince amongst them. Of course they would do everything by the religious rituals of the day.
I just, there’s too much context around this time that this was all a conspiracy in favor of Edward of Warwick and not Edward V. The receipt has its worth a little bit and does give this theory more legs but it’s definitely not proof of life. It’s definitely not compelling, decisive evidence that settles the case. Nowhere near.
Heather: Also, could it have been a typo? Like I’m thinking who wrote this? It’s an accountant, it’s a person in accounts, maybe. I could imagine them sitting there at their desk with their pen or their scroll obviously, and being told, okay, write this receipt out for this and it’s for this, and Okay, I’ll write a receipt. And not even necessarily knowing, is that a thing that could have happened?
Nathen: Yeah. I don’t see why, very famously Margaret Beaufort when recording the date of birth of one of her grandchildren the future Henry VIII of in her book of hours, she got the year date wrong.
These people get things wrong and they don’t have tip backs, they don’t have erasers. It’s a lot more difficult for them to erase it. It could just be a misunderstanding. It could be what I said earlier that they were actually trying to bolster the imposter’s claim by saying he was Edward V.
We simply don’t know, which means it’s not proof of life. It means it’s not decisive if all of these things can be explained away. I think for this theory, it takes a lot of faith to believe that Edward V survived 1483.
He existed for a couple of years abroad. He managed to go to Ireland in 1487. He invaded England at roughly around 16 years old at this point. And then we’re asked to believe that he fought at the Battle of Oakfield in 1487 against Henry Tudor’s army.
And one of two things seemed to have happened according to the theory. One, he was killed and then replaced with a little imposter boy who is taken to London and we are told this is Lambert Simnel, now go and work in the royal kitchens.
Or he was allowed to live out his days in Somerset as a chap called John Evans which is one of the other latest theories of his survival. They’re asking us to believe a lot there. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t potentially have happened, but surely the most obvious thing that happened is the traditional story, which is there was an imposter boy created to pretend to be the Earl of Warwick who was in the Tower of London and was real York heir.
Heather: I just wonder, can you tell me why you think this moves people so much, so long after the amount of years. The emotion that people have invested in this, why do you think that is?
Nathen: Nobody wants to believe that children were murdered. Obviously the whole Richard III thing is very emotive. First and foremost, I think that Richard III, Ricardans, et cetera, has been driven mainly by people being attracted to an underdog of history.
Which is ironic because the real Richard III was anything but an underdog during the time. But, people have their interest in Richard III for their own reasons, and obviously it extends to the case of Princes in the Tower. It’s a who done it, it’s a murder mystery. It’s the greatest mystery we have. It’s up there with Jack Ripper, JFK, etc.
It’s a royal conspiracy, who done it. Involving children, it’s always going to move people, it’s always gonna attract people with theories. In modern times in Britain, we did have the disappearance of a little girl called Madeleine McCann and to this day, we don’t know what happened to her.
There’s still a lot of theories, a lot of research, fake sightings and false sightings regarding t he little girl. We simply don’t know what happened to her. It’s a bit of a cold case itself. This is just adding all of the elements of history, emotion.
It’s never gonna be solved. Regardless of what we wanna call this latest revelation, it’s not ever gonna be solved which is only gonna ever fuel the discussion. It’s why we’re talking about it now.
Heather: For sure. Okay, so you have a really great book on the Tudor Pretenders, all of your books are great, but where else can people read your books? Tell me, plug your books.
Nathen: Plug my books. Okay. Currently, I think Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders is the book that’s at the moment getting bit of the attention. I do know for the American listeners, it’s on the Barnes and Noble website, so I think it can be delivered within America.
Heather: —And it’s on Amazon.
Nathen: And it’s on amazon. Bookshop.org. And it has a be a bit of a stock issue at the moment. So if you look at Amazon and it’s not there, please don’t give up. Please do go to an alternative website and continue your pursuit of my what did you call it? Wonderful book.
And like I said, my book has caught a lot of interest at the moment because my job in that book is not to tell you if Warbeck and Simnel are real or not. I have my own opinions and I put across the case but it’s not my job to really tell you who they were in this book. It is to tell you what happened.
It is a tale from 1483 to the end of Henry VII’s life. It features invasions, conspiracies, murder, heartbreak. It’s got everything. ’cause a hell of a lot of things happened during that 20-year period. And it’s just a fascinating story. There were invasions, there were battles. It features the whole Margaret of York and Warbeck over in Austria trying to get the support of Maximillian and so on.
I’m trying to picture it at the moment, you should definitely read Philippa Langley’s book. I think it’s an admirable read. I’m definitely impressed by how methodical it is and the chronological layering out of sources.
As a study guide, her book is invaluable. To understand your own argument, you have to read widely and scrutinize accounts that hold a positive view. So I’m saying at the moment, by all means, everyone should read Philippa Langley’s book. You should also read my book. If you are anti-Ricardian read Philipppa’s Langley’s book. If you are anti-traditional narrative, read my book, read them both.
They’re gonna compliment each other greatly. And for that matter, Matthew Lewis’s book The Survival of the Princes in the Tower or in fact all of the books about the Princes in the Tower, you’ve got to read them all. You can’t just read one book and think that’s done. Read widely, confront your bias, expand your knowledge, and hopefully I’ll make some money to feed my cats.
Heather: Yeah, you got it. All right. We have one chat here by Mary. Hi Mary. She said, “Nathen, I read both of your books. They were great. Any new book in the future?”
Nathen: Yeah. I finished my next book which at the moment might be my last book, I’m in a semi-retirement at the moment. I’ve run out of things to write about. It’s called Son of Prophecy: The Rise of Henry Tudor. It will, again cover the Princes of the Tower. It’s basically a 300-year epic covering the Welsh Tudor family’s rise, from being Welsh rebels to English kings. If you like my House of Beaufort book, it’s same deal but just the other side of the family tree.
And I think it’s good. Awesome. It’s covering Owen Tudor, the Welsh man who got a Queen, Jasper Tudor, Wars of the Roses, Henry Tudor’s time in France in exile and how the hell did he become King of England. Yeah I think it’s gonna be a good one. In theory, all three of my books will then end up as being a bit of an unofficial trilogy. I’ve got the Beaufort family, I’ve got the Welsh Tudors, and then I’ve got Henry VII’s reign in the middle.
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).
